This Man’s Great-Grandfather Made Millions of People Americans

Today, as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over the future of birthright citizenship, the justices kept returning to one name: Wong Kim Ark.

Wong was born around 1870 in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the son of Chinese parents who had settled in the United States. As a young man, he traveled to China, and when he tried to come home, he was stopped at the Port of San Francisco. He was denied entry on the grounds that he wasn’t a US citizen because of his Chinese descent and his parents’ status as non-US citizens.

His community in Chinatown pooled resources and hired lawyers. Their argument was straightforward: Under the 14th Amendment, Wong was a citizen. His parents’ immigration status had nothing to do with it.

In 1898, the Supreme Court agreed. And for over a century since, Wong Kim Ark’s case has served as the definitive interpretation of the 14th Amendment: All children born in the United States are automatically US citizens.

That is, unless President Donald Trump gets his way.

Trump has been targeting birthright citizenship ever since his first term. On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order attempting to restrict it, limiting citizenship to children with at least one parent that is a US citizen or lawful permanent resident. Federal courts have blocked the order at every turn, but the Supreme Court agreed to take up the case, and today they did.

So we sat down with Wong’s great-grandson, Norman Wong, a 76-year-old retired carpenter living outside San Francisco. His family has not only fought for the constitutional right to citizenship, they’re painfully aware of what it looks like when that citizenship, once won, can be used against you.

Like his great-grandfather, Norman, 76, was born in San Francisco. He’s a retired carpenter and still lives in the Bay Area with his wife, Maureen. We met initially over Zoom, where he invited me to the monthly veterans meeting of Cathay Post 384 in San Francisco, the oldest Chinese American post in The American Legion.

He, Maureen, and his sister Sandra were invited by Alicia Ponzio, a Post member, former lieutenant in the United States’ Navy Nurse Corps, and professional figurative sculpture artist. Ponzio, upon learning about the story of Wong through a podcast, became inspired to sculpt a bust of Wong as a young man. At the meeting, she revealed the plaster model seen in the video.

This model she shared with us is one of many renderings made ahead of the final sculpture of Wong Kim Ark, which will be cast in bronze and proposed to stand at his birthplace of the original 751 Sacramento Street in San Francisco.

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Nurul Amin Shah Alam’s Death Was a Homicide

On Wednesday, the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office announced that it ruled the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Blind Rohingya refugee who was left on the freezing streets of Buffalo by Border Patrol officers, a homicide. Neither Shah Alam’s family, who had waited to meet him outside the facility where he was being held, nor his lawyers, who had been attempting to contact him, were notified of his location. Shah Alam spoke very little English.

The Associated Press reported that the medical examiner’s office did not “reach any conclusions about responsibility” for the homicide and that Shah Alam’s death was “caused by complications of a perforated duodenal ulcer, precipitated by hypothermia and dehydration. “

“The designation of homicide does not imply intent to cause harm or death,” Erie County official Mark Poloncarz said at a press conference on Wednesday. “Manner-of-death determinations are neutral, non-legal, and exist for vital statistical purposes only. They do not indicate criminality, which is the purview of the justice system.”

Shah Alam was initially arrested after an incident where he became lost attempting to return home; the Buffalo Police Department approached him as a threat, ostensibly for holding a curtain rod he used as a walking stick. Instead of trying to assist him, officers tased and arrested him. He was incarcerated for a year before his release, when Border Patrol in effect dumped him.

The Department of Homeland Security claimed on X that Shah Alam “showed no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance,” despite being blind and experiencing other health issues. “DHS is lying,” New York Democrat and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded in a quote post.

Poloncarz said that he has spoken to Erie County District Attorney Michael Keane and New York Attorney General Letitia James about the case, and he encouraged questions about criminal investigations to be directed to them.

“I want to express my deepest condolences to the family of Mr. Amin Shah Alam for the death,” Poloncarz also remarked. “It should not have happened. Simple as that. The death was one that we believe could have been prevented.”

James, in a press release, said that her office is continuing to investigate Shah Alam’s death. “Mr. Shah Alam fled genocide to build a life in this country,” James said. “Instead, he was abandoned and left to suffer alone in his final hours.

In a press release, Rep. Tim Kennedy (D-N.Y.), who represents the area in Congress, demanded that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Patrol, cooperate in James’ state-level investigation.

“In light of this determination, DHS must fully cooperate with New York State Attorney General James, and newly-confirmed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin must order an independent and transparent investigation,” he said.

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It Was Another Supremely Humiliating Day for Trump

After oral arguments on Wednesday, the Supreme Court appears likely to strike down President Donald Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to newborns without a citizen or lawful permanent resident parent. A loss for the administration would be a setback to the president’s project of creating a permanent underclass of mostly racial minorities. The centrality of this radical scheme to Trump’s presidency was underscored by his presence in the courtroom, the first time a sitting president attended Supreme Court oral arguments.

Though there is much to be relieved about after hearing skepticism from most of the justices, the very fact that the court is contemplating revising what it means to be an American citizen is chilling. Even if the government loses—and it almost certainly will—Trump will have moved the goalposts about respectable debate and muddied the clear rules that establish a society of equals. Ultimately, the biggest winner may be Chief Justice John Roberts, whose unpopular court would be able to boast that it reaffirmed the promise of birthright citizenship, accruing legitimacy to an institution that has under his leadership wielded its power to erode American democracy.

The case will likely prove to be an example of Trump going too far, even for this court.

The first sentence of the 14th Amendment is clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Drafted by Congress after the Civil War and ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment put an end to the shameful era of inherited status that defined slavery. In its place, not only would formerly enslaved people and their children be citizens, but so too would the children of all immigrants born on US soil. That way, never again would politicians or judges be able to turn a disfavored group into a permanent underclass. The only exceptions were the children of ambassadors, invading armies, and sovereign Indian tribes—because those newborns would not be subject to American laws in the same way that everyone else is.

The arguments against this plain reading of the text and history are bad arguments; they distort the history and misread the precedent to create a nonsensical rule. To defend Trump’s executive order, Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the meaning of the term “jurisdiction” implies an allegiance that can only be obtained through citizenship or permanent residence, what he called domicile. Sauer’s argument also relied on a misreading of a landmark 1898 case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which the Supreme Court affirmed that the 14th Amendment granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States, and that the understood exceptions were the only ones.

Sauer’s argument ran up against the incredulity of many of the justices. When Sauer cited Wong Kim Ark as evidence that the children of undocumented immigrants couldn’t be citizens, Justice Neil Gorsuch cut him off. “I’m not sure how much you want to rely on Wong Kim Ark,” he cooly said. Gorsuch was also skeptical that there was evidence backing Trump in the congressional record of 1866 debates over the Citizenship Clause. “In none of the debates do we have parents discussed,” he said. “We have the child’s citizenship and the focus of the clause is on the child, not on the parents, and you don’t see domicile mentioned in the debates. The absence is striking.”

Sauer’s points were often at odds with each other, and he attempted both to argue he was right about the original purpose of the Citizenship Clause and to raise modern utilitarian reasons that a broad understanding of birthright citizenship is dangerous. “We’re in a new world now, where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who is a US citizen,” Sauer argued. Roberts was unconvinced. “Well, it’s a new world,” he replied. “It’s the same Constitution.”

The only justice who clearly seemed to have bought Sauer’s chaotic and contradictory arguments was Samuel Alito. Justice Alito seemed convinced that the narrow exceptions to birthright citizenship could be widened if the political branches see fit. And he agreed with Sauer that Wong Kim Ark, because the case was about a person whose parents were domiciled when he was born, only affirmed the citizenship of the children of domiciled immigrants. Alito launched multiple lines of questioning with ACLU legal director Cecillia Wang, who argued against the executive order on behalf of a class of children who would be denied citizenship. But he never landed a blow.

In one remarkable exchange, Alito posited that the ruling in Wong Kim Ark might have mentioned the term “domicile” many times because it was trying to differentiate between the children of domiciled and assimilating Chinese immigrants, like Wong Kim Ark’s parents, against the exploited and disfavored Chinese workers building the transcontinental railroad. These laborers “were overwhelmingly men, there wasn’t an indication that they would stay here, they could stay here, they didn’t have permanent homes,” Alito said. “And the opinion is drawing a distinction between those two categories of people who would have been well understood at the time when Wong Kim Ark was decided.”

Wang began to disagree but was interrupted by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who saw an easy explanation for Alito’s question: that the court emphasized the status of Wong Kim Ark’s parents not to restrict birthright citizenship, but to smooth the public’s acceptance of its ruling at a time of intense anti-Chinese sentiment. “One could imagine that it was important, from a standpoint of helping people accept this citizen rule under these circumstances, to emphasize that these particular people in this case were in Justice Alito’s first category,” Jackson suggested.

In a second exchange with Wang, Alito asked whether the child of an Iranian man born in the United States but still a subject of Iran and expected to serve in the Iranian army, would be a US citizen at birth. “Is he not subject to any foreign power?” Alito asked, using language from the 1866 Civil Rights Act, a precursor to the 14th Amendment. The question seemed like a Fox News talking point, and was not difficult for Wang to answer. “That would have meant that the children of Irish, Italian and other immigrants…would not have been citizens either,” she said. “Because, if the only test is whether that US born child is considered a citizen by another country under their jus sanguinis”—inherited citizenship—“laws, then no foreign nationals’ children” would get birthright citizenship. Alito conceded this point, saying that those children could naturalize if and when their parents did. “Well, in all of those cases, the parents could be naturalized, and then the children would be derivatively naturalized when the parents were naturalized.” It was a shocking statement because it was an acknowledgment that birthright citizenship wouldn’t actually exist under Alito’s and the government’s conception of allegiance. Wang, sensing that Alito had just proved her point, didn’t respond, letting Alito’s words hang in the air.

Though it received little attention during oral arguments, one of the reasons Trump is likely to lose is that the effects of a win would be so enormous. Even though the executive order is constructed to apply prospectively to people born after it was issued, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that Trump—or another president, or Congress—could apply it retroactively, putting the citizenship of millions of people in jeopardy. Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked whether the children of people trafficked illegally to the US would be denied citizenship, and Sauer seemed to concede they could be. Sauer also conceded at various points that Congress could adjust the meaning of domicile, and therefore who is eligible for birthright citizenship at a given time. Other times, he seemed to suggest that one could appeal a denial of citizenship to a newborn if the parents intended to stay in the country. Either way, he promised to replace a clear, workable rule with a chaotic and ever-changing definition of citizenship.

The Roberts Court has gone out of its way to greenlight most of Trump’s second term agenda. They have repeatedly rescued his illegal and unconstitutional policies from lower court orders blocking his actions. Only in a small number of cases has the majority contradicted him, including striking down many of Trump’s tariffs. This case will likely prove another example of Trump going too far even for this court. If Trump’s presence on Wednesday was meant to intimidate the justices, this time it didn’t appear to work.

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The Trump Administration is Slashing Food Stamps. Here’s What They’re Buying Instead.

Somewhere, paid for with your tax dollars, are $12,540 worth of three-tiered fruit basket stands. It’s a symptom of a much larger problem.

Buried in the way Congress funds the government is a “use it or lose it” rule that forces federal agencies to spend whatever’s left in their budgets before the fiscal year ends September 30 or hand the excess money back to the Treasury and potentially lose it in the next year’s allocation.

This happens every year, and every administration does this. But last September shattered every previous record, according to a report released in March by Open the Books, a nonpartisan government watchdog that tracks federal spending.

The Defense Department spent $93.4 billion in September, with $50 billion of that spent in the last five working days. To put that in perspective, only nine countries on Earth have an annual military budget that large.

The shopping list included luxury items like $6.9 million for lobster tail, $15.1 million in ribeye steak, and $2 million for Alaskan king crab, as well as musical instruments ($21,750 for a custom handmade Japanese flute), ice cream machines ($124,000), sushi prep tables ($26,000), and $12,540 for three-tiered fruit basket stands. This is the same administration that created DOGE—an entire department whose sole purpose was to eliminate government waste.

The month after the September splurge, the government shutdown left 42 million Americans—1 in 8—briefly cut off from SNAP food assistance. A federal judge eventually ordered benefits restored, but the disruption was immediate and real for millions of families.

And it may get worse. In July, President Donald Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act restructured SNAP with new work and eligibility requirements and shifted part of the cost to states. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates as many as 4 million people could lose their food assistance permanently as a result.

Trump is now pushing to increase next year’s Defense Department budget by 66 percent, to $1.5 trillion, the largest increase since the Korean War.

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No Oil, No Power, No Surgical Gloves: Inside Cuba’s Medical Collapse

As Cuba’s worst economic crisis continues to ravage the country, its approximately 10 million people have endured nationwide blackouts, scarce food, and a pervasive sense of anxiety about their country’s political and economic stability. But no part of the infrastructure has been more affected than the island’s medical care. Once lauded as one of the best health care systems in the world, it has deteriorated in the last decade as many doctors migrated elsewhere, and medical supply shortages have worsened due to failing economic policies. The situation reached a breaking point earlier this year, following the US invasion of Venezuela on January 3, 2026. That’s when the crucial supply of oil to Cuba was cut off, and President Donald Trump threatened other nations with punishing tariffs should they send oil to the island. The US government recently softened its stance, the New York Times reported on Monday, and will decide which oil shipments can arrive in Cuba on a “case-by-case basis.”

The lack of fuel has prompted island-wide power outages that last several hours, sometimes even days. “You cannot damage a state’s economy without affecting its inhabitants,” Cuba’s Health Minister, José Ángel Portal Miranda, told the Associated Press. “This situation could put lives at risk.” A recent New York Times story chronicled the myriad of problems affecting patients and providers: clinics struggling to provide treatments like chemotherapy and dialysis, ambulances left without gas, underweight pregnant mothers, and vaccine delays for tens of thousands of children. Last week, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, called the situation “deeply concerning.” He wrote on X, “Thousands of surgeries have been postponed during the last month, and people needing care, from cancer patients to pregnant women preparing for delivery, have been put at risk due to lack of power to operate medical equipment and cold chain storage for vaccines.”

Economic ties between the US and Cuba are restricted under the decades-old embargo, which began in 1962 under President John F. Kennedy following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. As I reported last month, the embargo severely limits commerce with the island. It does, however, allow for some exceptions, such as humanitarian aid. Since 1994, the Pittsburgh-based nonprofit, Global Links, has shipped medical supplies to Cuba under a partnership with the Pan American Health Organization, the WHO Regional Office for the Americas. For more than three decades, the nonprofit has distributed surplus medical products from the US healthcare system locally and abroad.

I spoke with Global Links executive director Angela Garcia on a Zoom call last week about the organization’s mission to send supplies to Cuba’s medical providers in recent months. Our interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

You last visited Cuba in February. What struck you the most about the country’s ongoing crisis during that trip?

Cuba has one of the fastest aging populations. With migration out of the country, there are a lot of older adults who are living in very challenging situations and now have to cook over charcoal outside due to the power outages. Malnutrition is hitting the oldest population and the very youngest the hardest. And doctors don’t have a lot of choices— triaging surgeries that they’re forced to do because of the shortages and the lack of power, consolidating hospital services, and triaging which patients get the highest level of care. They are being forced to make these types of decisions. More people will die of preventable things there than they would have before. That’s what’s most heartbreaking.

“More people will die of preventable things there than they would have before. That’s what’s most heartbreaking.”

What did you hear from medical providers on the ground about the state of their health care facilities? What resources are most needed?

They’re asking us for things that are so basic, for example, gloves. Best practice is that you use a glove, and then you throw the glove away. They’ve gotten to the point where they’re washing and reusing gloves, which we have seen in many places around the world. It’s not that they don’t know that’s not ideal. It’s the reality of [the fact that] there’s no glove after this, so we’re going to wash and reuse it. It doesn’t have to be this way. These are a series of human-made decisions that put patients in a position where they’re not able to get care, even if it’s known by doctors what the care needs to be. From a humanitarian perspective, this is not like after a hurricane. This is not like a civil war. This doesn’t have to be this way.

I was meeting with a group of hospital directors I’ve worked with for the past couple of years. When I ask them, what are the top three most needed products, they’ll say medical gloves, surgical gloves, sutures, or IV catheters. And I asked, what else besides that? And they said adult diapers. I just didn’t expect that. They said, well, because of the personnel shortages and because of the older population, before we leave at night, we want to make sure they have adult briefs on because if they get up in the middle of the night and slip and fall or have an accident, they have a much more serious health issue. That to me just spoke to the humanity of hospital leadership and top surgeons thinking, how do we minimize a severe situation? How do we do the best we can for our patients, despite the shortages, despite the power outages, despite the personnel shortage? That just sort of hit me.

What is the shipping process like for aid that goes to Cuba, and with all the different needs right now, how do you prioritize what to send?

We ship by the most cost-efficient method, which is the back of a 40-foot semi truck that goes on a container ship. We’ve sent one every time we raise $25,000. So, in the past 12 months, it’s been about every two to three months. We send large quantities of gloves, wound care bandages, gauze, incontinence products, supplies for intubation and delivering babies, and vaccine syringes. We look at how do we decide what we ship when the needs are so big? And we know what those things are. We have to continue to support women having their babies, the surgeries that are being planned, pediatrics, and the older adult population. So that’s what we look at with each container. And then just start on the next one and do the same thing over again.

What challenges has your organization faced in sending supplies due to the ongoing fuel shortage?

The logistics are the biggest challenge. Once you ship a container, it’s just as if you mailed a package. If you mailed it with FedEx or UPS, to actually change the end destination once it’s out there, is not easy—if you can do it at all. With each container that has left since last fall, we’ve had to update the shipping line with the final destination. We’ve had the WHO in Havana tell us, it can’t come into Mariel, it has to go to Santiago. And then one was destined for Santiago, we had to do the reverse, and that adds cost on our end. But if they can’t pull it out when it gets there, there’s no point, right? So there is a congestion that we have to work through on literally, a day-by-day basis to ensure that as the containers are heading down, they get to the port where WHO can get to the container and pull out the supplies, which we’ve never had to do before.

That sounds like so much work. How do you manage to adapt so frequently?

It’s what we’re set up to do. Cubans need us more than ever. They’re communicating what those needs are. People can support what we do, and that, in turn, supports Cubans in their time of need.

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Punished for Protesting, Talking to Press, and Having a Toothache: More Dilley Horror Stories

Last week, Mother Jones published firsthand accounts of children and parents detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the nation’s only family detention center. The stories, which came from sworn oral declarations given to legal aid groups between July 2025 and February of this year, painted a bleak picture of life at the facility: wormy food, dangerously lacking medical and mental health care, water that makes children sick, nearly impossible sleeping conditions, and intimidating treatment by guards.

Now, dozens more sworn declarations included in a recent 361-page court filing reveal new details about life in the facility from January, February, and March of this year.

Detainees repeatedly said that guards threatened or intimidated them for participating in protests or filing grievances, in some cases destroying children’s letters and confiscating their art supplies.

Many of the detainees, whose declarations were translated into English by sworn interpreters, discussed the same issues that we highlighted in our first story. But they also talked about another trend: As media and political scrutiny of Dilley has increased—particularly since the arrival of 5-year-old Liam Ramos in January—so have threats of retribution against those who speak out. Detainees repeatedly said that guards threatened or intimidated them for participating in protests or filing grievances, in some cases destroying children’s letters and confiscating their art supplies. They recounted being hidden away from congressional delegations visiting the facility, or, conversely, receiving special treatment on the days that politicians and lawyers visited.

The Department of Homeland Security and CoreCivic, the private prison company that operates Dilley, have consistently said that the facility is a safe, family-friendly place where detainees have access to high-quality medical care, meals, clean water, and educational opportunities. DHS didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story, but in the past has said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not destroy letters or confiscate art supplies. In an email, CoreCivic said that the facility has been the target of “baseless allegations” that “undermine the public-service centric work” of their staff.

We went through the detainees’ recent declarations and pulled out some particularly telling parts.

On Christmas they treated us so cruelly. They brought an ICE official in a Santa Claus outfit here, but he brought no toys or sweets, and the kids all did not understand why Santa did not bring them anything. Young children went up to hug Santa, but he would push them away. It was so cruel. They clearly did it as a photo opportunity to use us to pretend they were treating us humanely. It left the kids all upset.

—41-year-old mother of a 17-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl , on their 74th day at Dilley (January 14)

The holidays at Dilley were awful. On Christmas, they told us they were going to have a special Christmas event for the children. They said they would put a good movie on, and they even had flyers at the gym about it. They had all the kids come into the gym and sit in the chairs. Then they put on a video clip of the Grinch movie. After a few minutes, someone came in the gym dressed like Santa. The children were excited and started to gather around him. Staff yelled at them all to sit down, and then the Santa just gave the children who were sitting a bag of chips. Then the staff took a picture of the kids with Santa, turned the video on for another few minutes, and told the kids the activity was over. It was humiliating and frustrating to be treated this way; it was worse than doing nothing actually.

—Parent of a 9-year-old girl, on their estimated 113th day at Dilley (January 15)

When we took part in a peaceful protest here, one guard here told us that they were going to charge all of us with crimes for obstructing the law and then separate all the fathers and send them to a prison if we ever did another protest. They also said they were going to use the cameras to identify who was participating in the protests. After hearing these threats, we felt overwhelmed with fear.

—33-year-old father of a four-year-old girl, on their 49th day at Dilley (February 11)

A couple weeks ago, when the congresspeople were here, the staff enclosed us in our room from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. At 12 p.m., they let us go to eat with guards flanking us on both sides to make sure we didn’t talk with the congressmembers.

That day, they passed around a list for people to sign up and talk with the congressmembers. We all wrote our names down, but staff only allowed two people from our hallway to talk with the congressmembers. We think they were punishing the people who were filing the most grievances by preventing them from speaking with them.

On that day, they didn’t even let my three children go outside to get medicine. Instead, they brought the medicine to our room. The nurse who came to our room said that [the] medical wing was closed for the day. She said, “This is the result of you guys for doing protests; this is the punishment…”

A few days ago, the officials here found out that I have spoken with reporters, and the staff have taken reprisal steps against my children and me.

For the past couple of days, my children and I have been locked down in our room. They put us on lockdown after a staff member pushed my daughter and took all of her coloring materials away.

This week, my young daughter wrote “liberty” on a piece of paper. One of the officers found me in the laundry room and told me that I needed to come to the recreation area with that paper. When I went there, a man named Officer __ took the paper and ripped it up. He said you cannot have papers that say this. Then, he threw it away. I told him I did not know that the children were not allowed to express themselves in writing. He told me that our family could have a report made against us for this. So, I apologized.

—31-year-old mother of 7-year-old boy, 9-year-old girl, and 15-year-old girl on their 49th day at Dilley (February 12)

Some families did a protest a few weeks ago. After the protest, the staff started searching our rooms. My 2-year-old had some crayons that another family had given her. CoreCivic staff confiscated her crayons and threw them away. She was crying. They said they were throwing away the crayons for our security and so the children would not write more letters about the conditions at Dilley. They also threw away our Tylenol, Advil, and VapoRub. They probably would have taken my daughter’s letters, too, but I keep them in a folder with all of our legal documents. I keep these documents with me at all times. A picture of two of my daughter’s letters are attached to this statement. They speak for themselves.

In the letter on the left, a 9-year-old writes, “Please help me get out of here. I want to study, I want to be free with my sister,” with the words “freedom” and “help” above her drawing. On the right, she writes, “We’ve been here four months but for me and my sister it seems like a year.”

—34-year-old mother of two kids, ages 9 and 2, who had been at Dilley for more than 125 days (February 12)

I never got to see the little boy, Liam, when he was here, but I saw him on the news. I was happy when he was released, but I couldn’t help but think, “What about the rest of us?”

—33-year-old parent of children ages 14, 11, and 7, on their 53rd day at Dilley (March 11)

My 2-year-old has been having a severe medical issue. She has a swollen gum and an infected tooth, and has a fever anytime she isn’t taking ibuprofen from this infection. This has been going on since we arrived at Dilley, over 20 days ago. The top of her tooth is green at the root. I think the nerve there has been hit or opened…

When Congressmen Castro was here this past Monday, we begged for his help. He tried to advocate for us, Dilley ended up sending us to a hospital 15 minutes away. My husband went with my sick daughter. I had to stay here with my two other daughters.

Unfortunately, the hospital could not help. They just checked her blood pressure. The nurse at a hospital said this is not a dental clinic. They couldn’t help her.

The staff here think and say that I am beating my daughter, and that is why she cries so much. I tried to explain to them the toothache, but they threatened to separate us. They said if she keeps crying, we will take her away from you.

—22-year-old mother of 2-year-old, 1-year-old, and 10-month-old girls, on their 23rd day at Dilley (March 12)

The food here is really bad, but whenever reporters or congresspeople come they give us better food that they would never give us otherwise, like roast chicken, cakes, pizza, and ice cream. But that is just ICE hiding how it is the rest of the time to the outside world…

I have to pay to call my dad. There are times when we have Facetimed my dad and tried to explain what is happening and ICE cut the signal, like when we tried to tell my dad that they had locked us in our rooms because the congresspeople had come. This happened another time when we had a call with a reporter as well. I think they do not want us to share critical things about our experience here and interfere with these calls. The guards also completely change how they act anytime an outside congressperson or reporter comes. The guards start being kind to us and saying, “Hi,” which is something they would never do when they are not being watched…

If I stay in the US, I want to be an advocate for people who are innocent to get out of jail. I want to do whatever I can to make sure that more children do not get brought to places like this, because they are going to suffer.

—13-year-old child on their 86th day at Dilley (March 12)

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As Nuclear Reactors Proliferate, Trump Is Scaling Back Rules That Protect Workers

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

Bradley P. Clawson spent more than three decades handling highly radioactive materials at Idaho National Laboratory, a nuclear energy testing and production hub outside Idaho Falls. His work ranged from shipping and receiving nuclear naval fuels to helping bring hundreds of canisters of leftover fuel to Idaho for storage after the catastrophic Three Mile Island meltdown. He often handled nuclear fuel in “hot cells,” immensely contaminated areas reinforced with thick concrete.

Throughout, Clawson, a member of the United Steelworkers union, leaned on safety standards to argue for extra protections against radiation, including respirators and additional shielding.

But President Donald Trump’s sweeping agenda to expand nuclear energy and modernize nuclear weapons now includes easing the radiation standards that Clawson credits with keeping his exposure as low as possible.

“They’re pulling away from what’s kept us safe all these years,” said Clawson, who retired in 2021 and now serves on the advisory board on radiation and workers under the Centers for Disease Control. He spoke to High Country News in an unofficial personal capacity.

Last May, Trump signed four executive orders aimed at reviving what he called an industry “atrophied” by regulation. The US Department of Energy quickly began stripping away regulations designed to reduce the amount of radiation exposure workers can face at its national laboratories, cleanup sites and energy infrastructure.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licenses and regulates commercial reactors and related infrastructure, is following suit. In response to another executive order that required it undergo “wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance,” the agency recently announced that it’s considering easing long-held standards that limit workers’ and the public’s exposure to radioactivity.

The controversial changes promise to reshape nuclear sites across the nation—especially in the Western US, where nuclear weapons and nuclear energy were born and continue to hold an outsized presence.

And while some hailed the moves as a new dawn for industry, the United Steel Workers union called the directives a “dangerous rewriting of radiation safety rules.”

Forty-one other organizations—community advocates, scientists and doctors—said it amounted to “a deliberate subversion of science and public health in favor of corporate interests,” in a letter of protest to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

An Energy Department spokesperson told HCN that it “is committed to ensuring its radiation protection standards are aligned with Gold Standard Science,” as outlined in another executive order. “DOE is still evaluating what specific changes to these standards are needed,” the statement added.

A spokesperson for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote that the agency was still in the process of amending the framework for radiation protection, adding that “public health and safety will always be our top priority.” A new rule will be released at the end of April.

For decades, radiation protection was based on the hypothesis that even a small amount of radiation carries some risk of harm. The Trump administration now rejects the very basis of this view, which could change how work is performed on dozens of projects in the West.

At Los Alamos National Laboratory, for instance, workers build the nuclear bomb cores or “pits” that will be used to arm the next generation of warheads. Besides the technicians handling plutonium are the pipefitters, ironworkers and carpenters renovating the facility, who are also exposed to at least some radiation. Meanwhile, the federal government has moved to double the facility’s annual output.

“The people not doing the job are the ones calculating the risk.”

More than 50 reactors have been built and operated at the nearly 900-square-mile Idaho National Laboratory since 1951. Another extremely radioactive form of plutonium used to power Mars’ rovers is also produced there, and now, more reactors are slated to be constructed.

Nuclear laboratories, including the Los Alamos and Idaho facilities, send waste, old and new, to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southern New Mexico, the nation’s only long-term repository built for such waste.

At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, nuclear materials are handled for research, while the Hanford Site in Washington, a decommissioned nuclear production complex is undergoing a decades-long remediation effort. Elsewhere, at the Nevada National Security Site, plutonium pits from the current stockpile undergo tests—without nuclear explosions—to ensure their continued usefulness.

Other efforts include a push to power data centers with nuclear reactors on 16 national laboratories in the West. A February announcement said that Energy Department will no longer require environmental assessments in order to build advanced nuclear reactors.

Among the sites that the Nuclear Regulatory agency regulates in the region is the Palo Verde Generating Station, located in Wintersburg, Arizona, one of the nation’s largest, along with other nuclear waste dumps, and shuttered uranium mills.

An overriding priority of the Trump administration has been “to usher in a nuclear renaissance,” a credo that has manifested in the rollbacks. The major regulatory standard now in the crosshairs, called ALARA and short for “as low as reasonably achievable,” has long been central to radiation safety at numerous federal and international agencies.

At its core is the “Linear No-Threshold model,” which holds that no dose of radiation is safe. An agency would set limits on how much radiation exposure workers and the public were permitted. ALARA further required that exposures under that limit be reduced to the lowest amount possible under the circumstances. That could happen in various ways—curbing the amount of time employees worked with radioactive materials, requiring added protective gear, putting lead blankets over highly radioactive equipment to reduce exposures or maintaining greater distances from a radioactive source. For the public, it could mean lowering emissions from facilities below legal thresholds.

Because of the added guardrails, worker exposures have been substantially lower than the Energy Department’s limits, according to a 2025 report from Idaho National Laboratory. Without them, workers could be exposed to up to five times more radiation. The loss of ALARA doesn’t mean workers won’t have any protections at all; instead, experts believe that they may lose those additional layers of safety.

The policy shifts have been made possible by ongoing scientific debate over whether low doses of radiation pose harm. The most comprehensive epidemiological study to date, based on over 300,000 nuclear workers from the US, UK and France, found that cumulative exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation increased the rate of death from certain types of cancer by 50 percent. “These results can help to strengthen radiation protection, especially for low dose exposures,” the authors wrote in 2023.

However, some critics in the field of health physics, which is dedicated to managing radiation safety, say ALARA is subjective and outdated. The Idaho report stated that rescinding ALARA would save money while still protecting workers. Some even argue that ALARA is scientifically unsound, while a small minority of health physicists insist that low levels of radiation are beneficial.

“The people not doing the job are the ones calculating the risk,” said Clawson, who is only too familiar with the back-and-forth. When he started out, ALARA was not a rule at the Energy Department. It was codified in 1993 as part of a suite of worker protections created after the Cold War, when nearly every aspect of the nuclear landscape, including safety culture, came under scrutiny. Proof that the previously accepted practices were unsafe, he added, can be seen in the number of workers currently being compensated by the federal government for illnesses attributed to their exposure.

Clawson acknowledged that complying with ALARA could slow down planning because workers had to carefully consider how to accomplish high-stakes tasks while minimizing risks, especially in hot cells where a person’s exposure could change simply based on where they were standing. The effects of an exposure—potentially compounded by exposures to other toxic chemicals—may not be seen for years, however.

“In the long run it helped us as workers,” Clawson said. “It was keeping us from getting a higher dose.”

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Al Gore: Trump Administration Is the Most Corrupt in History

Few political figures occupy the sort of space in American history that Al Gore does. A longtime Tennessee congressman before becoming vice president, Gore lost the presidency in 2000 to George W. Bush after a highly controversial decision by the Supreme Court. But in the years that followed, Gore didn’t slink into history. Instead, he worked to sound the growing alarm on climate change, most notably with his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which came out 20 years ago. A year later, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Today, he’s still at it and in many ways more adamant than ever that now is the time to act on global warming, especially as the Trump administration rolls back environmental protections and condemns climate science. But he also has more on his mind than the state of the planet, namely the state of democracy and the direction of the country under President Donald Trump.

“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 tells More To The Story’s Al Letson. “It’s shocking to me.”

On this week’s episode, the former vice president admonishes the White House for making an “astonishing mistake” in its attack on Iran, looks back at his groundbreaking climate change documentary, and talks about why he believes political will in America is still a renewable resource.

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

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The “Massive Human Consequences” of Ending Birthright Citizenship

On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14160, denying birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and other parents who are not permanent residents. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over the order’s legality. If Trump prevails, the case will fundamentally change American society.

“This is not an academic exercise,” says Matthew Platkin, the former Democratic attorney general of New Jersey, who led a coalition of states in challenging the executive order last year. “The consequences for the people in this country, for our government, both at the federal and state and local levels, and just for the fabric of this nation, would be extraordinary.”

When Platkin challenged the order the day after Trump signed it, practical concerns were top of mind. There is no workable way that the states could implement this order. Starting from the very first question—Who would be a citizen?—and cascading on down to what benefits states and local governments could provide to which people, the order threatened unmitigated chaos.

A Trump victory would unleash harm, not just on immigrants and their children, but on every American.

“States, I can just tell you, are not in a position to parse through someone’s citizenship status,” explains Platkin. “The initial order gave the federal government a 30 day implementation window. This is the federal government that can’t even get TSA lines working at an airport. They’re going to figure out a new class of citizenship in 30 days?” He added: “There would be really immediate and long term and probably irreversible harms to individuals, babies born here, their families, the services they they get, the quality of their lives, disrupted and impacted in ways that we can’t possibly even fathom right now. No one has ever really thought that the government could do this, and then for them to sort of cavalierly go and do it with no plan: massive human consequences.”

The legal question in the case, Trump v. Barbara, is whether the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship applies to the children of undocumented immigrants and people without green cards. And on that legal and historical question, the near universal consensus is that it clearly does. But much less attention has been paid to the harms that a Trump victory would unleash, not just on immigrants and their children, but on every American.

Amicus briefs submitted to the court highlight how the order would fundamentally alter American society. As states pointed out in their litigation against the order last year, newborns around the country would be denied access to food security and health care. During Trump’s winter crackdown, immigrants in Minnesota had babies at home rather than risk being detained while giving birth in a hospital; it’s not hard to imagine ICE sweeps on maternity wards if the order is upheld. Newborns who are hungry, or suffer from untreated health conditions, or who miss their vaccinations, bear the immediate brunt of this cruelty. But the effects would ripple out.

A brief filed by municipal governments and local elected officials warned of a loss of social cohesion, and an increase in bullying and alienation for a new caste of children who know no other home. Barred from federal public assistance, they will be much less likely to have health insurance and ready access to vaccinations, and more likely to suffer preventable diseases. This will ultimately compromise public health more broadly.

The brief also warns of disaster to local economies if Trump implements the order. City and county governments will pay the price of communities unable to get federal food and health benefits, and their tax base will shrink. Businesses and universities may struggle to attract immigrant employees and students, who may fear that if they have children in the US they will end up second-class citizens in their own country. State coffers would be strained. A brief filed by multiple states points out that “states and their subdivisions would also lose millions in federal funding (often for services they must provide regardless of federal reimbursement) and would incur onerous administrative burdens.”

Citizens and those who should become citizens under the order are also vulnerable. A birth certificate would no longer suffice to prove citizenship, and the children of citizens might never obtain that status if their parents lacked the documents necessary to prove theirs. It’s not clear what documentation would suffice, or how far back the ancestry rabbit hole one would have to journey to prove that they are indeed birthright citizens. Citizens might find it difficult to obtain passports, enroll in school, or obtain food and health care assistance when needed.

The American dream is the idea that in the United States, people’s fate is determined by their own merit, not the status of their parents. But the executive order would create a caste of people who inherit a lesser status from which there could be no escape. “The Order would create a permanent underclass of unauthorized and potentially stateless individuals, perpetuating inequality, legal disabilities, and social and economic disadvantages across successive generations,” reads an amicus brief filed by 19 labor unions that warns of economic risk. Around 255,000 children born in the United States every year will be denied citizenship, according to an estimate by the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State’s Population Research Institute. By 2045, the undocumented population would have swollen by 2.7 million, and by 5.4 million by 2075.

“Immigrants and their U.S.-born children—first-generation U.S. citizens—have been the driver of growth in the American labor force over the past 20 years,” the unions’ brief continues. Rather than contributing to the economy and providing critical services like health care, childcare, and education, “successive generations of children born in the United States will be stripped of U.S. citizenship and be excluded from public life, the formal economy, and the ability to live fully independent, productive lives.”

The US has a demonstrated record of stripping citizenship.

Trump’s executive order purported to restrict birthright citizenship going forward, to all those born 30 days after the date of the order. But multiple briefs warn that this is not binding. After all, it’s just one president’s order. If the court agrees Trump’s 2025 order is constitutional, there would be nothing to stop him or any subsequent president from applying it retroactively, potentially stripping millions of people of citizenship based on their family histories. In this way, the rights and livelihoods of millions of people are at risk. “If, as the Administration argues, the Fourteenth Amendment does not make citizens of certain people, neither this Court nor the Administration has the power to create citizens of children of ineligible foreign nationals simply because they were born before issuance of the Executive Order,” a brief by three constitutional and immigration scholars warns. “In other words, a prospective-only application is not possible.”

The idea might seem far-fetched, but the United States has a demonstrated record of stripping citizenship. As a brief from dozens of nonprofits dedicated to racial justice warned, the government specifically has a “long history of revoking the citizenship of racial minorities and women.” In just one example, after the Supreme Court held in 1923 that South Asians did not qualify as white and were thus incapable of becoming citizens because, at the time, naturalization was limited to Caucasians, the government began stripping citizenship from naturalized South Asian citizens.

The brief also warned that even if the federal government didn’t target anyone for citizenship-stripping, local governments and officials might embark on their own attempts to effectively denaturalize people by removing them from voting rolls and juries. The Trump administration is already encouraging voter roll purges on the false premise that noncitizens are skewing US elections. It’s entirely predictable that state and local officials would attempt to remove voters whom they deem non-citizens according to Trump’s order. This might be encouraged by the practical effect of striking Latinos and other racial minorities who might be expected to vote for Democrats. Jury pools could likewise grow whiter, reinforcing the white supremacy that the 14th Amendment and civil rights laws tried to end.

Supreme Court decisions change the country, but few are remembered for reordering American society. Dred Scott v. Sandford helped precipitate the Civil War by denying citizenship to all Black people; Plessy v. Ferguson blessed Jim Crow, which shaped American society for nearly 100 years; Brown v. Board of Education undid Plessy and transformed the country again. Trump v. Barbara threatens to be the next in this tradition of cases that determine whether or not we live in a multiracial democracy. As former University of Baltimore law professor Garrett Epps warned this week, “reinstating a hereditary, lifelong, inferior status” without political rights or welfare benefits “recreates the conditions for the growth of a racialized slave economy.”

America has been down that road before. No one will escape the consequences if the Supreme Court takes us there again.

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On Trans Day of Visibility, Supreme Court Sides With Conversion Therapy

In an 8-1 decision on Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled against a Colorado law forbidding licensed therapists from trying to change a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity—a practice known as conversion therapy that the medical profession has long since discredited and condemned.

Decades of research show not only that conversion therapy doesn’t work, it puts individuals at higher risk of depression and suicidality. In response to those findings, and a rising tide of acceptance for LGBTQ people since 2012, 23 states have forbidden licensed mental health practitioners from attempting conversion therapy on minors. The decision in the case, known as Chiles v. Salazar, now threatens to overturn those laws nationwide.

The case was brought by a Christian counselor named Kaley Chiles, represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom—the religious-right legal group behind many of the Supreme Court’s recent anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion rulings. Chiles argued that because she practices talk therapy, not the painful aversion therapy widely used in the past, the Colorado law censors her speech and violates the First Amendment.

Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor agreed, joining the court’s conservatives in a majority opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch. “Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety,” Gorsuch wrote. “Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same. But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

“As applied to Ms. Chiles, the State seeks neither to regulate her speech incident to any conduct, nor does it seek to compel disclosure of factual and uncontroversial information,” Gorsuch wrote. “Instead, it seeks to silence a viewpoint she wishes to express.”

In a concurring opinion, Justice Kagan wrote that Colorado’s law could have potentially survived if it regulated the content of a therapist’s speech, but did not draw lines based on the therapist’s viewpoint on matters of sex and gender.

“A law drawing a line based on the ‘ideology’ of the speaker—disadvantaging one view and advantaging another—skews the marketplace of ideas our society depends on to discover truth,” Kagan wrote. The Colorado law, she added, “prevents a therapist from saying she can help a minor change his same-sex orientation, but permits her to say that such a goal is impossible and so she will help him accept his gay identity.” A law banning therapists from affirming trans kids’ gender identity, she added, would also run afoul of the First Amendment.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the sole dissenting judge, wrote that Chiles “does not dispute that conversion therapy can be harmful to minors in certain circumstances” and “does she contest that Colorado has a significant interest in protecting minors from harm.” But, she continued, “Chiles complains nevertheless” because “the particular form of conversion therapy she wants to offer clients utilizes only speech.”

Jackson added that the Colorado law as written did not prohibit Chiles from sharing any views on sexuality, gender identity, or conversion therapy outside of individual talk therapy sessions—like in discussions with patients and their families. The “aim of the statute is not suppressing speech,” she wrote in her dissent. “Talk therapy is a medical treatment. So, why wouldn’t such speech based medical treatments be subject to reasonable state regulation like any other kind of medical care?”

As we’ve reported before, the science on conversion therapy has been considered settled for over a decade:

The science on conversion therapy is unambiguous: it’s both ineffective and dangerous. All the way back in 2009, an American Psychological Association task force issued a landmark report documenting the lack of evidence behind sexual orientation “change efforts,” as scientists refer to them. Since then, APA has only strengthened its stance against both anti-gay and anti-trans conversion efforts. In October 2015, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration published a report concluding that sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts were “coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment.”

Nonetheless, conversion therapists have continued to practice on the fringes of the profession, typically working with conservative religious clients. In recent years they’ve turned their attention on transgender youth, capitalizing on politicized controversy over medical treatments for trans kids, a Mother Jones investigation found in 2024. And they’ve embraced so-called “gender exploratory therapy”—a treatment posed an alternative to gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors in a Health and Human Services report last year.

The justices’ decision on Tuesday fell on Transgender Day of Visibility, created by Rachel Crandall-Crocker over 15 years ago. It’s a day to celebrate transgender people and draw attention to the ongoing challenges the community faces. Being a visible, civically-active trans person in the United States is becoming increasingly more volatile as Republican legislators—local to federal—seek to codify discrimination against trans and gender nonconforming people.

In 2025, according to the independent research organization Trans Legislation Tracker, 1,022 bills that would negatively impact the transgender and gender nonconforming community were considered; 126 passed. In 2026, so far, 747 such bills are under consideration—a number that is expected to grow. These laws target people’s ability to seek out gender affirming healthcare, use the bathroom in public and private buildings, dictate what their personal identification says, serve in the military, and celebrate Pride Month, among other things.

This push is buoyed by President Donald Trump and his administration, who supported the therapist’s position in Tuesday’s Supreme Court case. On day one of his second term, Trump signed an executive order declaring that it would be “the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” requiring agencies to base decisions on an outdated and scientifically inaccurate gender binary and providing a runway for anti-trans attacks across the nation.

Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, who helped lead the effort to pass state laws banning conversion therapy, said in a statement on Tuesday that legal avenues remain to fight back against conversion therapy. “Survivors can still bring malpractice and consumer fraud claims,” he said. “Licensing boards can still discipline providers who engage in unethical or harmful conduct”

“Though today’s ruling is not the outcome we sought, our commitment remains unwavering—as does that of the families, survivors, and advocates who have stood beside us for thirty years,” he added.

The Trevor Project, the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention nonprofit for queer young people, is one of the groups that filed an amicus brief in Chiles v. Salazar in support of upholding nationwide statutes that ward against conversion therapy. It’s CEO, Jaymes Black, called Tuesday’s ruling “a tragic step backward for our country that will put young lives at risk.”

“The Court’s decision today is painful,” Black said in a statement, adding, “but our community has dealt with difficult outcomes time and time again throughout our history. And we will deal with this, too.”

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The Ugly History Behind the Olympics’ New Gender Test

On March 26, the International Olympic Committee announced that all athletes competing in women’s sports will be required to undergo genetic eligibility testing. Claiming to be concerned with “fairness” and “the protection of the female category,” the IOC aims to ban transgender women from future Olympic games by screening for the SRY gene, which is usually found on the Y chromosome. The 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles will be the first games with this policy in effect.

For queer historian and writer Michael Waters, the IOC’s announcement elicited a feeling of déjà vu: The institution has employed similar gender verification rules before—only to abandon them amid public backlash. In his 2024 book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, Waters traces the history of trans athletes in the early 20th century, showing how a World War II–era moral panic around gender expression directly informs today’s anti-trans attacks.

I spoke with Waters about his book, the history of sex testing in international sports, and how the IOC’s latest policy marks a return to a discriminatory model of gender surveillance that draws from a dark eugenic past.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.

Let’s start with the basics: What is the IOC’s new policy on sex testing, and how does it differ from previous approaches?

The IOC’s new policy is resurrecting a policy of genetic testing that actually had been active for a few decades in the 20th century. In the 1960s, when the IOC first introduced genetic testing, it used these things called Barr body tests, which essentially were measuring the presence of XX chromosomes. Anyone without two X chromosomes would have been kicked out of women’s sports.

“These tests that the IOC and a lot of sports federations are now presenting as new, non-invasive, cutting-edge technology—they have literally used these before and found that they were, on one hand, inaccurate in creating these false positives, and on the other hand, just in violation of people’s human rights.”

There actually were some high-profile cases of cis women athletes who had a multiplicity of chromosomes—who did not just have XX—who were pushed out of sports because they failed this gene test. There’s this Polish sprinter named Ewa Kłobukowska in 1967 who had played in elite track and field competition before, and then when the Track and Field Federation implemented the first version of chromosome testing, she failed for vaguely explained reasons. An official said that she had “one chromosome too many,” and then she was banned from sports entirely. After that moment, the IOC stopped releasing and trying to publicize the banning of certain women from sports, but many more probably were kicked out because of failed tests that we just don’t know about.

The version of genetic testing that the IOC implemented in the late 1960s, and that continued on until the end of the 1990s, accrued so much backlash and criticism—from scientists, from athletes, from politicians, and actually the whole government of Norway banned this sort of genetic testing for sports practice—that around 2000 the IOC just got rid of genetic testing policies wholesale.

In the early 2000s, the IOC started to move toward creating some path to participation for trans women athletes. There were a lot of restrictions around how trans women could compete; the earliest rules required people to have gone through some sort of surgery-based medical care. And eventually, in 2021, the IOC kind of just stopped implementing any requirements overall and created this framework that would allow individual sports federations to make their own policies around which women can compete in women’s sports.

So what’s happening here is after this brief period of the IOC saying, “We’re going to leave it up to the individual athletic federations,” now they’re stepping back in and saying, “Okay, here is our policy.” While they’re framing it as this new thing that has risen out of discussion with stakeholders, really this is a direct resurrection of the policy that they had in the ’90s that was widely derided and abandoned.

Did anything in particular happen socially or culturally in the late 1990s that caused the IOC to abandon universal sex testing?

In the early decades, it was the Barr body test that measured XX chromosomes, and eventually, the IOC did actually switch to SRY tests around the mid-’90s. In 1996 at the Atlanta Olympics, there were eight women who originally failed the SRY test, who after further review were all reinstated. So these tests that the IOC and a lot of sports federations are now presenting as new, non-invasive, cutting-edge technology—they have literally used these before and found that they were, on one hand, inaccurate in creating these false positives, and on the other hand, just in violation of people’s human rights.

There are a lot of people assigned female at birth who might have a Y chromosome, or some traces of Y chromosomal DNA, and could actually test positive during the SRY test. Instead of dealing with the complexities of the human body—not to mention gender itself—this is just resurrecting an old-school approach. I think it’s notable that even the scientist who discovered the SRY gene has vocally been talking about why the application of this test in sports doesn’t make sense and is discriminatory.

So we’ve talked about the 1960s to our present day, but your book looks at the history of trans athletes going all the way back to the 1930s. Your research shows how the 1936 Berlin Olympics was a turning point, when the Track and Field Federation—now called World Athletics—implemented the first sex testing policy for women athletes. What happened in 1936, and what was going on in the years leading up to that moment?

It’s important to realize that in the early 20th century, women’s sports were a source of moral and gender panic. The founder of the Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, hated women’s sports—he didn’t think women should compete at all—and the early Olympics had very few sports available to women because of this.

“There was a belief that competitions like track and field would be both detrimental to women’s health, and in some cases even a masculinizing force on them. Butch women were looked upon as suspicious and cast as having an unfair advantage over more ‘petite’ feminine women.”

Actually, the only sports available to women were those like tennis—which at the time were very closely associated with a white, rich, European elite—because so much fearmongering around gender was so racialized. There was a belief that competitions like track and field would be both detrimental to women’s health, and in some cases even a masculinizing force on them. Butch women were looked upon as suspicious and cast as having an unfair advantage over more “petite” feminine women. And so before we’re even talking about gender diverse athletes and intersex athletes and trans women, there’s just this whole panic around cis women athletes and which kinds of cis women are winning in sports competitions.

In late 1935/early 1936, there are a few different things going on. The Nazis are hosting the Berlin Olympics and are applying really significant pressure on the IOC to limit which kinds of athletes can compete. This is mostly racialized—there’s all this discussion around whether or not the Germans would allow Jewish athletes to compete. In the German case, they were banning athletes of color and exacting their eugenics logic onto sports. The Nazis also were really skeptical of butch women and queer women.

Then, two athletes—both of whom had retired but had played in women’s sports—kind of one after another announced that they were transitioning gender and would begin living as men. Their names were Zdeněk Koubek and Mark Weston. Koubek is Czech; Weston is British. Sports officials saw the idea that an athlete could transition gender as a threat to the binary categories they had built. And so there was this high-profile Nazi sports doctor [Wilhelm Knoll] who pushed for sex testing policies after reading about the cases of these athletes transitioning. And again, neither of these two were trying to compete in women’s sports. They were living as men.

But the news of these transitions became wrapped up in the historical panic around butch women in sports and became a reason for the global right, the Nazis in particular, to push forward the first sex-testing policies, which ultimately only the Track and Field Federation passed in August 1936 at the Berlin Olympics.

The other important moment is that in 1936 at the Berlin Olympics, there’s an American sprinter named Helen Stephens who wins a gold medal for the US. And almost immediately after she wins, there are newspaper stories that come out that essentially accuse her of being a man in disguise. And so Helen Stephens is stereotyped as being pretty butch—she has kind of a deep voice, big arms, big legs. And the fact of her being this butch woman who had won this track and field event was treated by certain sports commentators as proof that she was unfairly masculine. So there was a whole news cycle in August 1936 about whether or not Helen Stephens was actually a man. It’s really reminiscent of what happened in 2024 with the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. There was a storyline circulating that this woman who had won gold was not feminine enough, and was therefore a threat to sports. Her story and success became proof of the need for these medical exams in women’s sports.

Why did this Nazi-era approach to sex testing expand from the Track and Field Federation to become broader IOC policy in the 1960s?

The IOC sex testing stuff in the ’60s was really influenced by Cold War tensions. USSR women kept beating American women in sports, and there was all this fearmongering about the perceived butchness of the Soviet athletes and the possibility that the Soviets were sending men in disguise. Those underlying Cold War tensions really expedited the adoption of sex testing across the whole IOC in 1968.

It’s interesting to me that right now the focus is on trans women, but the early cases that your book looks at are trans men, yet the fear that’s undergirding both is the same: This idea of an invasion in the field of women’s sports. Why do you think that’s a consistent throughline? Are the Olympics sex testing men’s sports at all?

No, they’ve never sex-tested men’s sports.

And why do you think that is?

“I think women’s sports always really activated the global right because of what sports success says about women’s independence.”

From the early days of the Olympics there is this deep-seated paranoia about women’s sports and what sports mean for the place of women in society. There have been so many junctures of discomfort with women’s athletics, and specifically what a successful woman athlete means for gender politics and for women’s economic role and physical role and sexual reproductive role. It’s not surprising then that often the actors pushing sex testing policies—kind of at every juncture of the 20th century, up until today—are right-wing actors who themselves also are deeply concerned with pushing forward a conservative idea of gender. I think women’s sports always really activated the global right because of what sports success says about women’s independence.

In the case of the US, we see women’s sports as the starting point of a much larger push to disenfranchise and strip rights away from trans women. A lot of states start by banning trans women and girls from sports, and then go further and take away basic health care rights. The Nazis also focused a lot on women’s sports because of the historical fact that women’s sports had been a site of deep gender anxieties since the Olympics started.

I think what’s interesting about the history of sex testing in the Olympics—and the history of gender medicine more broadly—is that we see people at different points trying to take scientific discoveries and graft them onto a social understanding of sex and gender. Do you have thoughts on how these different scientific frameworks—from hormone testing to chromosome testing—have been used at different points to perform gender surveillance? What do these shifting methods reveal about the broader project of enforcing the gender binary?

I think the history of sex testing is a story of sports officials constantly coming up against the reality that sex is not a binary, and that you actually just can’t neatly cleave people into two categories, even against their will. And what you see throughout the 20th century up until today is that there are all these different scientific levers that officials try to pull.

“Maybe there was a moment in the early 2000s when the Olympics was willing to grapple with the fact that people are complicated and the body is complicated. What we’re seeing is the IOC completely abandoning that potential.”

The first sex tests were just a strip test, where women athletes would have to present doctor’s notes affirming that a doctor had looked at their genitalia and decided that they were in fact women, which was quickly proven to be both not a way to measure sex and also deeply humiliating and discriminatory. So then they embrace chromosome tests, which, similarly, not everyone neatly falls into an XX-XY structure. And so in the early 2000s, you see this shift towards hormones instead as a proxy for sex. But there’s no neat cut off between hormones associated with different genders.

Through all of these efforts, what you see is the fact that sports officials—and really we as a people—just have no clear way of measuring sex in a binary way, because it is simply just not binary. I think maybe there was a moment in the early 2000s when the Olympics was willing to grapple with the fact that people are complicated and the body is complicated, and maybe reconcile with the fact that being inclusive is going to be a process. What we’re seeing is the IOC completely abandoning that potential.

Fundamentally, the issue of trans women and intersex women’s access to sports is a human rights issue. Sports officials historically have used the guise of science as a way to justify often vehemently anti-trans policies. I think that we can and should respond by mentioning some science—and also mentioning the fact that there really is very little evidence around a lot of these scientific claims that the IOC is making—but I think more importantly we should be framing this as a human rights issue. Science does not absolve this issue either way. Really this is about whether states have a right to determine people’s gender for them.

What do you think happens next? And is there anything we can learn from history that could inform resistance to these policies moving forward?

These policies are an outgrowth of a global anti-trans panic, and I think they are becoming part of a right-wing feedback loop where what is happening in certain countries, like the US, is then informing global Olympic policies. You actually see this with the Supreme Court case that bans trans women and girls from sports in America. You saw the Olympics being cited as justification for banning trans women; the Supreme Court justices on the right noted that the Olympics has been moving in this direction and therefore are kind of using what happens on a global level as evidence for their own crackdowns on trans people, particularly trans women.

“This is all a manufactured moral panic, and institutions are just kind of slowly giving into it.”

In the same way, the IOC, I’m sure, is passing this policy in part because the next host of the Olympics is the US, which has banned trans women from competing in its borders. What is happening in the US and the global right is directly impacting what’s happening with the IOC. All of this ignoring the fact that there’s no reason that we’re doing any of this in the first place. This is all a manufactured moral panic, and institutions are just kind of slowly giving into it.

That is the dark read of the situation. On the flip side, these policies are fundamentally arising out of culture and politics, and there’s no reason that they should exist on their own. I think that’s why we saw in the ’90s the IOC abandoned chromosome testing: because there was a groundswell of people who pointed out, rightfully, that it’s a really discriminatory policy that violates women’s human rights in a lot of cases.

I do think ultimately it’s going to take something similar. We have to push for a cultural shift that takes into account bodily diversity and champions trans women’s rights. I also think we’re going to see plenty of different lawsuits being filed by intersex women athletes who are denied the chance to play in the Olympics now. National governments like France also have privacy laws that would really restrict and perhaps just not allow a body like the IOC to require genetic testing. So if more countries pass legislation like that, that would conflict with the IOC policy, and perhaps they would roll it back. But I think fundamentally what we need is cultural change.

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Trump Calls on “God Squad” to Bypass Endangered Species Laws for Offshore Drilling

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

The Trump administration is turning to the nuclear option on endangered-species protections in the name of national security.

A rarely tapped panel nicknamed the “God Squad” will meet Tuesday to discuss whether overriding Endangered Species Act regulations for all federally regulated fossil fuel operations in the Gulf of Mexico is more important than preventing the extinction of several imperiled species. That includes sea turtles and a whale species down to its last 51 individuals.

“This is the antithesis of the way the God committee has worked in the past.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the upcoming Endangered Species Committee meeting last week, with no details on specific projects in the Gulf or the basis for what would constitute an extraordinary action. Only twice in the panel’s nearly half-century has it ever lifted restrictions.

But after the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block the meeting, the Trump administration told the court that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted all federal oil and gas activities in the Gulf exempted “for reasons of national security.”

A federal judge declined Friday to block the meeting.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum speaks during a news conference at the White House on Aug. 11, 2025.Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu/Getty via ICN

“It’s disappointing that the court didn’t immediately stop Hegseth’s reckless power grab, but this is just the first battle in a longer fight to protect the Gulf’s endangered whales and turtles,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.

The situation puts the country in uncharted waters. No administration has ever before requested a national security exemption from endangered-species protections.

It’s a challenging case to make. US oil production is hovering around record highs. Companies working offshore in the Gulf’s federal waters produced 1.9 million barrels of oil per day last year, and that’s with endangered-species protections in place, which require companies to minimize their impact on animals rather than limiting or prohibiting oil and gas operations altogether.

Experts also say it’s doubtful that increasing oil production there would have any immediate benefits to national security.

But it does align with President Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” platform. His administration has called for much more production—especially after gas prices soared since he authorized strikes on Iran in February. The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved a $5 billion deepwater oil drilling project in the Gulf this month.

Though the committee meeting is moving forward, the Trump administration skipped several usual steps in the process, experts say. “It was written to be a rare but necessary emergency escape clause when there was no alternative and human welfare was desperately at issue,” said Zygmunt Plater, a professor at Boston College Law School. “This is not carefully done. This is the antithesis of the way the God committee has worked in the past.”

Plater was lead counsel in a high-profile 1970s lawsuit that gave rise to the creation of the Endangered Species Committee. A dam under construction in Tennessee, his legal team and environmentalists in the area argued, would threaten a tiny endangered fish called the snail darter.

Many saw this “Tellico Dam v. Snail Darter” case as the first real test of the Endangered Species Act’s powers. It eventually reached the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled in favor of the snail darter. Based on the law’s wording, they said, the government must protect an endangered species “whatever the cost.”

This powerful language prompted Congress to pass an amendment in 1978 creating the committee as an extreme measure to override endangered species protections in specific cases with major implications for the US economy and welfare.

The committee is composed of several top officials, including the heads of the Interior Department, the US Department of Agriculture, the Army, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Last time I looked, we weren’t actually running short [on oil] at all.”

Ironically, even this new entity sided with the fish—or, at the very least, against the dam. “They had just figured out…that the cost of the dam was actually greater than the benefits, even putting aside the fish,” said Daniel Farber, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. (Construction was eventually completed anyway after Congress tucked an exemption for it in a budget bill.)

Since then, the God Squad has only been convened a handful of times. Just two exemptions have ever been granted, once for a dam in endangered whooping cranes’ habitat in the Great Plains region and another for proposed federal timber sales in Oregon, which would have affected threatened northern spotted owls. The God Squad voted to permit some of the timber sales, but the agency involved later withdrew its exemption request.

It’s been decades since the committee was last brought together.

The only parties that can request an exemption are federal agencies proposing an action, the governor of the state in which the action is proposed or the entity seeking a permit related to an agency action.

Before that point, as part of the normal endangered-species process for a federal action, government researchers perform rigorous analyses to forecast project impacts, creating what’s called a “biological opinion.” In it, they typically outline mandatory measures that could mitigate threats to endangered species.

In very rare cases, agencies conclude a federal action cannot be conducted without jeopardizing an endangered animal or plant. That’s when the God Squad comes into play.

Similar to a trial, the officials call in a range of experts—from economists to biologists—to testify on the project impacts. By the end, the committee must be able to answer two major questions: Is there a “reasonable and prudent” alternative? If not, do the pros outweigh the cons for the public?

That’s why it’s called the God Squad. There is a very real possibility a species could go extinct if the project moves forward, even if the committee still requires some level of mitigation measures.

The Trump administration said in a court filing this week that it would bypass the evidentiary hearing meant to inform the committee’s decision.

“It’s almost impossible to believe that there would be a project that couldn’t be altered in a way that would allow for the promotion of an endangered or threatened species,” said Rob Verchick, an environmental law expert at Loyola University New Orleans. “One thing I think we do know is that when Congress created this committee, it was seen as being an alternative of very last resort.”

Recent actions suggest the Trump administration doesn’t see it that way.

On Trump’s first day back in office last year, he declared a “National Energy Emergency” and directed the Interior secretary to convene the committee “not less than quarterly” to review applications or “identify obstacles to domestic energy infrastructure specifically deriving from implementation of the [Endangered Species Act] or the Marine Mammal Protection Act.”

While that hasn’t occurred—publicly, at least—the administration is now moving forward with its first God Squad meeting on March 31, which will be livestreamed at 9:30 a.m. Eastern.

The initial announcement of the meeting “seemed a little ridiculous, frankly, because there hadn’t been the proper procedural requirements to allow for a convening,” said Verchick, who served in the EPA during the Obama administration. In an interview before the administration’s court filing raised the specter of national security, he added: “It’s so unusual that they’re not even talking about what the individual project is that they’re concerned about. And then they’re not even talking about the individual animals that are, in theory, posing a barrier to whatever the project is.”

“It’s about power and control. It’s more political than it is energy security.”

Christopher Danley, senior counselor to the Secretary of the Interior, argued in that court filing Wednesday that no exemption application or applicant is necessary due to the national security determination.

Verchick said over email the next day that the section of the law cited in the legal filing “does not relieve Secretary Hegseth from having to issue a valid exemption application.” Instead, it “directs how the Committee must respond upon receiving a valid exemption application that asserts an exemption is necessary for national security.”

He added that the Department of Defense “does not appear to have submitted a valid exemption application or report. There’s no evidence of an application or report at all. If the application exists, it was submitted too late.”

Asked about that, the Defense Department did not respond. The Interior Department also did not answer questions from Inside Climate News.

The sprawling nature of the exemption the agency seems to be seeking for all federal oil and gas activities in the Gulf could make it more difficult to secure, said Farber, the UC Berkeley professor. “That’s sort of characteristic of the administration, you know, go big,” he said. “But on the other hand, it may make it more vulnerable than a more targeted exemption request.”

Even amid the conflict in Iran, it might also be challenging for the federal government to justify why overruling endangered species regulations in the Gulf will support national security, according to Charles McConnell, the executive director for the Center for Carbon Management in Energy at the University of Houston.

“​​If this is simply being looked at as a visceral reaction to the prices at the pump, and people want to see this announcement as something that’s going to make gasoline prices less next week, that’s absurd,” he said. “Last time I looked, we weren’t actually running short [on oil] at all.”

Instead, McConnell thinks this move could be the Trump administration’s way of showing it is “100 percent behind the oil and gas community.”

“It’s about power and control,” he said. “It’s more political than it is energy security.”

The Gulf of Mexico hosts one of the highest concentrations of offshore fossil fuel infrastructure in the world, with about 3,500 oil and gas structures and tens of thousands of inactive wells. Trump is looking to open up oil and gas operations by around 1.27 billion acres of federal waters in the Gulf, off California, and along Alaska’s coast.

“This is not just talking about a whale and the need for fossil fuels. It is just one more act in a political quashing of citizen involvement.”

However, NOAA issued a biological opinion 10 months ago, finding that collisions with oil industry boats in the Gulf of Mexico could jeopardize the continued survival of the endangered Rice’s whale. At night, the whales spend most of their time within 50 feet of the water’s surface.

Some 51 remain, so even the loss of a single whale could have outsized effects on the population.

The analysis also found that noises from oil and gas construction or other activities are “likely to result in chronic stress” for the Rice’s whales and many other species in the area, including endangered sperm whales and five imperiled species of sea turtles.

Another profound—and potentially extinction-level—risk? Oil spills, as evidenced by the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. The largest marine oil spill in US history, the offshore drilling rig explosion killed 11 people directly and dumped more than 210 million gallons into the Gulf.

A Kemp’s ridley turtle is released into the wild at Stewart Beach in May 2015 in Galveston, Texas. Mayra Beltran/Houston Chronicle/Getty via ICN

Sea turtles suffocated under sludge. Poisoned seabirds washed up by the hundreds on Louisiana shores. The spill killed an estimated 20 percent of the Rice’s whale population. Researchers, nonprofits, and local volunteers are still cleaning up the aftermath of the spill in Gulf coastal ecosystems 16 years later.

Now, oil rigs in the region face stricter regulations to ensure their systems are up to date. They are also required to comply with Endangered Species Act requirements to minimize their impacts on vulnerable animals. The latest jeopardy finding for the Rice’s whale says boats should immediately begin using technology to avoid vessel strikes and monitor for the presence of the animal.

But Trump has rolled back many environmental protections he thinks stand in the way of oil. He scrapped drilling prohibitions in ecologically sensitive areas. His offshore fossil fuel expansion plan, the Center for Biological Diversity estimated, could trigger thousands of oil spills across the country, based on average spill rates in recent decades. And his administration rescinded guidance in February for oil and gas vessels to slow down in the western Gulf to avoid hitting whales.

The God Squad could remove other regulations on industry activities. Given that this national security exemption is unprecedented, only time will tell how it plays out, Farber said. But he expects further litigation. The Trump administration has “a real advantage going in, because it’s [claiming] national security, but they’re really pressing that to kind of its far limits,” he said.

Plater said the Endangered Species Act is one of the few laws that allows citizens to increase enforcement through substantive actions. He’s seen this firsthand: The snail darter case that threw the law into the public spotlight decades ago was spurred by an idea from one of his law students for a paper.

In his view, the committee that grew out of that case is for the most part “a very fair, careful bypass” for extreme scenarios.

Now, however, Plater fears it will be “weaponized to roll back citizen enforceable protections for all the endangered and threatened species in the Gulf.”

“This is not just talking about a whale and the need for fossil fuels. It is just one more act in a political quashing of citizen involvement in statutory enforcement and protection of public values,” he said. “Scratch away at almost any environmental controversy, and pretty soon you’re looking at big questions of democratic governance.”

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The Black Veteran Who Desegregated Interstate Buses

In the summer of 1952, 23-year-old Sarah Keys (later Sarah Keys Evans)was making her first trip home from the Army hospital where she worked in Trenton, New Jersey, to North Carolina since joining the Women’s Army Corps the year before. Awoken around midnight, the private first class was ordered to give up her seat to a white Marine. When she refused, Evans was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. She spent the night pacing around a dirty jail cell in her uniform and high-heeled shoes before paying $25 (around $300 in today’s dollars) for her release in the morning. Evans had never even participated in a civil rights protest, but she would spend the next three years—with the support of her father and the trailblazing Black attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree—fighting for transportation equality.

Evans and Roundtree brought her case to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the regulatory agency that oversaw interstate travel at the time. After an initial defeat, Evans’ legal team appealed, using the momentum from the Supreme Court’s recent unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. A year later, in 1955—days before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus in Alabama—the ICC ruled in Evans’ favor, marking the first time that an executive branch institution outside the military rejected the “separate but equal” doctrine of 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson. But it would take several more years of direct action for the federal government to finally enforce the ICC’s decision.

In the early aughts, while researching a book on American women in the military, author Amy Nathan stumbled upon this now little-known piece of civil rights history. Nathan interviewed Evans, self-publishing a children’s book about her two years later. They remained friends and collaborators until Evans passed away in 2023. In 2020, nearly 70 years after Evans’ arrest, Roanoke Rapids installed a series of murals about the veteran’s fight for justice, which Evans told a Time reporter she saw as a tribute to all the overlooked women who “kept the spark going” during the Civil Rights Movement.

“That’s why we decided to write this book, to really place her story within the whole context of the struggle—from the early 1800s onward—to end segregation on public transportation,” Nathan told me about Riding Into History, an account of Evans’ story published by Duke University Press.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the experience of trying to get Sarah Keys’ story out there. I know you first wrote a book about her for younger readers in 2006: what was the process like? What obstacles did you encounter?

Oh, plenty of obstacles. I just thought this was an original story, and it was a really important story. So I naively thought, of course I’d find somebody who wanted to do it. But I have subsequently learned, and I was told this a couple of times by people in publishing, that they only do books for children on people who are household names, and she wasn’t a household name. How do you become a household name if somebody [isn’t] going to write books about you? I had spent two years interviewing her and her family, and they were all excited about the idea [that] this story would finally become better known.

Of course, the reason her story wasn’t as well known as others is that shortly after she won her victory at the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1955, one week after it was announced publicly, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Montgomery bus boycott started, led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his first effort at being a Civil Rights leader. So everything got much more exciting after Sarah Keys Evans’ victory, [which] also was not enforced by the federal government until the Freedom Rides in 1961 caused such a disturbance, such bad publicity for the United States, that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered the federal government to finally enforce the Sarah Keys rule.

What have you heard from people in this process of uplifting the often overlooked stories of women in the Civil Rights movement like Evans and Roundtree?

People seem to be very, very supportive of it, and they all seem very surprised when they hear about it. In the back of the book, in the appendix, I include a list of other people whose stories have been overlooked for a long time. They’re very, very short, just [to] show that it was a lot of people—because, I think, maybe some people think that people of color just sort of submitted to this and [then] the Civil Rights Movement happened, but no. People were protesting about this all along, from the very beginning. More and more books are being written now that tell about these overlooked heroes. It took many foot soldiers, as we say in the book, to win this victory.

What sparked your interest in women’s military history?

When I was in college, that was the start of the women’s movement and the women’s magazines that started coming up. I remember one summer I read a book on women’s history, and I was astonished. I began to become aware that there was this thing called women’s history, and that women really were overlooked. I went to an all-girls’ college, the branch of Harvard that was called Radcliffe, and we actually were pretty badly treated for a while. During the time that I was there, there were no bathrooms in Harvard Yard that we could use. There was no place where we could have lunch, that kind of thing, and so I had a personal experience of being discriminated against as a woman.

Also I, just by chance, came across a book [with] articles about the [American] women pilots of World War II, the WASP pilots. My local public library got me many of the original interviews that these women had done, and put me in touch with some of the WASP women who were still alive, and I began interviewing them. I got really excited about trying to bring history to life in this way, by interviewing people and sharing their personal stories, more than just the bare facts of it.

That book was very well received, so I thought, well, why not write about all the women in the military? Because they’ve been serving ever since the Revolutionary War. I did a lot of research, trying to track down these women, and interviewing many of them, and interviewing many women who were currently serving. This was before this book came out in 2004 and that was before women were really much more integrated into the military. These women also saw themselves as being groundbreakers, and they were really eager to share their stories.

The first chapter of Riding Into History is a deep dive into the legal history behind segregation on public transportation. Something that struck me was how differently the 14th Amendment has been interpreted by different people and government institutions, and how it’s been used to both empower and disenfranchise communities of color.

Yes, indeed. I learned more about that when I was doing [a] book on the Plessy & Ferguson [Initiative]. I learned about this interpretation of the 14th Amendment, the back and forth on that when learning the legal history of that case. It didn’t give Congress specific permission to regulate individual people’s activities. So that’s how the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875 saying, well, the federal government didn’t have any right to regulate individual activities. Only states could do that.

Decades later, in 1946’s Morgan v. Virginia , the NAACP successfully argued that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause extended to regulate, and ban segregation on, interstate travel.

There had to be a uniform rule for all of travel. But because Morgan v. Virginia [only] said that no legislation could do that, bus companies just went and made their own segregation seating rules. The victory that [Evans] scored at the Interstate Commerce Commission, [after] Brown, ruled that neither state laws nor bus company rules could be applied in interstate bus rides or train rides that went from one state to another. From [1841], when Frederick Douglass was first thrown off of a train shortly after he escaped from enslavement in the north, ever since, it’s been back and forth, a seesaw of making a little progress and then slipping backwards. I hope we’re not slipping backwards again.

To that point, what would you say to young readers, and especially young women, who are fighting injustice in a moment where it feels as though our civil rights and liberties are under attack?

It does seem like they are under attack. I would just say that Sarah Keys Evans didn’t give many talks. [What] happened to her on that bus really impacted her for the rest of her life, made her a very cautious person, cautious about what she said in public. But she did give a talk to a high school [around 2019], and in that she said, “You must never stop fighting for your rights, because once you lose them, it’s very hard to get them back.” She said, “Each time you challenge a wrong, that news travels.” That’s what she told the students—and she told them, “I’m glad I didn’t give up. I’m glad I was able to help unlock another door of freedom.” That’s the message that she gave. So I think this is a story that can give people courage to think, well, yes, you can stand up for what’s right and what’s fair.

The middle section of the book focuses a lot on the history of education in the area and Sarah Keys Evans’ father’s efforts to build a school in her hometown. How did you make the decision to emphasize education in the book?

I think because there was such an up and down with education, too, after the Civil War. [Evans’] father went to a vocational school [made popular by Booker T. Washington after the Civil War], but then he heard from a friend of his, who had left Washington, North Carolina, earlier, that there [were] more opportunities [elsewhere, so] he went and lived in Washington, DC for a while, and had a chance to experience a different kind of education at Dunbar High School there, which was one of the first high schools for Black students in the United States. When he came back from having served in the Navy, he had become a Catholic.

[But] there was no Catholic church for Black people or for anybody in Washington, North Carolina. It had been destroyed during the Civil War and had never been rebuilt. A priest from [the] nearby town of New Bern would come periodically and hold mass at a rented room. This book called Washington and the Pamlico reported that [during] one such service in the early 1920s Sarah Keys Evans’ father said, “What can be done for my people?”

That started a whole conversation among the priests in New Bern who were thinking about starting a Black school. He helped find the land that they could use for that, and they started this school there, called the Mother of Mercy School, which taught the strict academic curriculum that was being taught up north and that was being taught in other parochial schools. It provided a sense of insulation from some of the affronts of the Jim Crow environment in that town. And so in a way, I think that gave [Evans] a sense of self confidence and that then carried on when she went into the military.

When desegregation happened and the schools were combined and Black students could go to the regular white high school in Washington, North Carolina, fewer people wanted to enroll in the Mother of Mercy School, and so it closed. A lot of the Black teachers and Black administrators lost their jobs so it’s a complicated story, but I thought it was a good story, because it shows the complexity of this whole topic. It wasn’t just yay, the Civil War ended, now everything was going to be all right. No, that was not what happened. [Or] yay, Brown v. Board of Education happened. [But] that didn’t solve every problem either. And so I think it’s good for people to understand the complexity of these issues and that people have to keep fighting for rights all the way through it, every step of the way.

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Ms. Rachel Is Helping Kids Get Out of ICE Detention—One Video at a Time

“One woman became so sick from eating the food that she began vomiting blood

“My kids are terrified; we are all depressed.”

“I always ask my children for forgiveness for making them suffer through all of this.”

Though the number of families inside Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas has dropped dramatically in recent months, for dozens of children still inside, such brutal conditions remain. Now, at the risk of their stories fading to the background of the Trump administration’s cascading crises, Ms. Rachel, the beloved children’s educator, is calling on the public to fight for their release.

“We have to hold on to hope for families who are locked in Dilley and keep going,” Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Griffin Accurso, told Mother Jones. “I do believe the public outcries and the people who have come together and worked on this long before I have are making a huge difference.”

“I do believe the public outcries and the people who have come together and worked on this long before I have are making a huge difference.”

It’s difficult to overstate Accurso’s influence, both among young children and their parents, many of whom see her as today’s Mister Rogers. Dilley is the new focus of Accurso‘s social media presence, where in recent weeks, she has highlighted the story of Deiver Henao Jimenez, a 9-year-old boy who has been detained with his family, asylum-seekers from Colombia, since early March after a routine immigration appointment in New Mexico.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Deiver told Accurso in a Zoom call she posted to Instagram. He repeatedly described how much he wanted to “go to the spelling bee.”

“It was devastating to hear him talk about just wanting to attend his spelling bee,” Accurso said. “I never thought I’d be on a call with a 9-year-old who was begging me for help to get out of a prison-like detention center. It was devastating and surreal.”

View this post on Instagram

In a surprise move days later, Deiver and his family were released. So, too, was Gael, a 5-year-old nonverbal boy whom Accurso met over video and similarly spotlighted on her Instagram.

“When we started talking about Dilley, Deiver and his mom held each other and started crying…They are an amazing family, and I’m honored to know them.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about what led to their releases. But coming within days of being featured on Accurso’s Instagram, which has over 5 million followers, it’s hard not to connect what had happened withthe power of her advocacy.

“I FaceTimed Deiver on Friday, and I saw a smile that was not present in Dilley,” Accurso said after the boy’s release. “He had just come home from his first day back at school with a huge card the school community had made for him. They missed him so much.”

Accurso reflected on the intensity of the experience of their conversation. “When we started talking about Dilley,” she recalled, “Deiver and his mom held each other and started crying. We know that trauma can have lasting effects on children in immigration centers. They worry and care so much for other families still at Dilley. They are an amazing family, and I’m honored to know them.”

The attention on ICE is a new political focus for Accurso, but it is not the only one. Over the past year, she has used her platform over the past year to call attention to the war in Gaza, where UNICEF reports 64,000 children have either been killed or seriously injured. Some parents have viewed such outspoken advocacy as inappropriate for a children’s educator; last year, the group StopAntisemitism wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding an investigation into whether Accurso had ties to Hamas. But Accurso sees her advocacy as a natural, if not crucial, extension of the same message she imbues her educational videos on YouTube and Netflix: All children deserve to be seen for their humanity.

I asked Accurso about the disconnect she sees between critics of ICE’s detention of children and those who support such a policy.

“I think it’s really important to think of each child in this position as we think of our own children if we are parents, or a child we love, or even ourselves as a child,” she said. “Christianity and the other religions call us to practice the Golden Rule and love our neighbors as ourselves. That means to really put yourself in their shoes and imagine what they are experiencing.”

“I’ve worked with kids across so many communities, and they have beautiful differences, but they are also so similar,” Accurso continued. “They want to play, they want to learn, they care about each other. It devastates me, thinking about them watching us and seeing us not have compassion for each other. We have to do better for kids.”

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Usha Vance Started a Reading Show for Kids Whose Families Haven’t Been Separated

Second Lady Usha Vance is normal and relatable, actually.

Or, at least she said as much on Sunday in an NBC interview promoting her new podcast show Storytime with the Second Lady, where she brings on a guest to read a children’s book.

“It’s a podcast that really is just for children,” Usha Vance explained. “We will have someone come in—a special reader, we’re calling them—read a fun book, have a very short little conversation about things related to the book, maybe about their career.”

Three episodes were released on YouTube Monday morning, with the first show featuring Vance reading The Tale of Peter Rabbit solo and the next two featuring former racing driver Danica Patrick and author and Paralympian Brent Poppen.

“[We] then invite children to pick up books on their own. It’s sort of just an advertisement for reading,” Vance continued.

The second lady’s launch comes as her husband and other officials in the Trump administration terrorize and inflict brutal violence on children and families around the world—the remainder of the discussion hammered home an awkward whitewashing attempt.

Vance’s young children helped make the podcast set, including building a Lego cherry blossom tree and even has a Costco membership! But when NBC News’ Kate Snow asked her simple questions about her politics and thoughts on the Trump administration, the second lady largely shied away from answering. While Vance doesn’t agree with her husband on every issue, she is “not involved in this in any professional sense,” so she can have “open-minded” and “very productive” conversations with him when his work becomes “important personally.”

As much as she tries to present the contrary, she is a person with influence within the Trump administration.

“I do feel very comfortable in that no one has ever asked me to engage in any kind of litmus test on anything,” Vance said when asked about her stark political shift from being registered as a Democrat until at least 2014. “What I’ve found is that I was myself in 2014. I can be myself today. And I feel very comfortable in that world.”

Q: In 2014 you were a registered Democrat. Do you feel fully comfortable in the universe you're in now?

Usha Vance: Sometimes I have thoughts that fit very comfortably into one side or another, sometimes I have views that are idiosyncratic pic.twitter.com/yDThevAr5M

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) March 30, 2026

The second lady is comfortable in a government that’s trying to replace educators with AI robots while it detains and deports young children, reportedly kills over a hundred elementary school students by missile strike, and starves families in Cuba of basic living essentials.

It’s all normal and relatable as long as you don’t ask too many questions.

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You Can’t Judge the Iran War by Its Stats

Last week, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens penned an article that captured the rah-rah-ness of the pro-war crowd and was breathtaking in its short-sighted triumphalism. Headlined “The War Is Going Better Than You Think,” Stephens called for “perspective on the panic over the war in the Middle East” and scolded critics who depict the Iran war as “an unprovoked and unnecessary attack on Iran, launched at Israel’s behest” that is “already a foreign-policy fiasco that has put the global economy at risk without any clear objective or endgame.” Not so, he cried.

His evidence? Comparisons to the past. In 1991, during Operation Desert Storm against Saddam Hussein, the US-led forces lost 75 aircraft. So far not a single piloted plane has been shot down over Iran. At the start of the invasion of Iraq 12 years later, President George W. Bush tried but failed to mount a strike to decapitate Saddam’s regime. This time around, Donald Trump killed Iran’s supreme leader and many high-ranking officials in the initial bombing. And in 2012, when Barack Obama was president, the price of Brent crude oil hit $123 a barrel ($175 in 2026 dollars). So the price of $108 a barrel this past week shouldn’t be such a bother.

Stephens presents a couple of other markers to suggest this war is proceeding just fine, while acknowledging the Trump administration’s “failures in planning, particularly its unwillingness to make a stronger public case for war and get more allies on our side before the campaign began”—which are hardly quibbles. Overall, his advice is to buck up and not be Debbie Downers: “If past generations could see how well this war has gone compared with the ones they were compelled to fight at a frightening cost, they would marvel at their posterity’s comparative good fortune. They would marvel, too, at our inability to appreciate the advantages we now possess.”

Looking at the number of bombs dropped or Iranian leaders killed or the fluctuation in the price of oil is not the best way to evaluate this war—especially in these first weeks of the conflict.

Stephens is grasping at tactical straws. Perhaps the US military is putting its hundreds of billions to effective use in terms of the prosecution of the war, though we probably won’t know for certain until there are after-action reports and investigations (if there are any). We do already know that a missile strike that was attributed to US military forces hit a girls’ school and killed about 175 Iranian civilians, most of them students. But looking at the number of bombs dropped or Iranian leaders killed or the fluctuation in the price of oil is not the best way to evaluate this war—especially in these first weeks of the conflict.

Wars are often not easy to judge because the chaos, conflict, and disruption they trigger will yield consequences that last for years, if not decades. It’s easy to gawk at Pentagon videos of Tomahawks raining “death and destruction from above,” as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth calls it, and hail the war machine. Much tougher is perceiving the ripples. We have no idea where all this violence will lead. It’s theoretically possible we might end up with a less threatening regime in Tehran and more stability in the Middle East, though that does seem close to magical thinking. However, cheerleading the early stats and proclaiming they bode well for the long run seems purposefully naive.

There are other historical comparisons to keep in mind. The first Gulf War, in which President George H.W. Bush led a coalition that booted Saddam’s military out of Kuwait after he invaded his neighbor was considered a military success. Yet as part of that operation, Bush deployed troops to Saudi Arabia to protect the kingdom. That move—infidels on Saudi territory—infuriated Islamic fundamentalists, and it caused one of them to declare a fatwa against the United States. His name was Osama bin Laden.

Bush the Younger’s invasion of Iraq went so well that within six weeks he flew out to an aircraft carrier and declared victory beneath a banner that declared “Mission Accomplished.” The conflict was far from over. It spurred the rise of a civil war within Iraq and an insurgency that destabilized the region. In the fighting and violence that followed, thousands of American troops and about 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed.

In Afghanistan, George W. Bush launched an attack against the Taliban regime on October 7, 2001. About a month later, Kabul fell. The following month, Kandahar, the spiritual home for the Taliban, toppled. A pro-American interim government was put in place. In May 2003, then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proclaimed that combat operations in Afghanistan were “all but concluded.” The war went on for another two decades, cost about $2 trillion, and did not yield success.

No one can say how Trump’s war in Iran will end up. But we already see worrisome consequences.

In March 2011, President Barack Obama mounted military attacks by a NATO-led coalition in Libya. The initial aim was admirable: to prevent Moammar Qaddafi’s forces from waging a massacre in Benghazi. Seven months later, Qaddafi’s regime collapsed. Civil war ensued, resulting in what some have described as a failed state, which has led to instability in North Africa and the rise of extremist groups. In 2016, Obama said, the “worst mistake” of his presidency was “probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.”

In all these instances, everything went well at first. Yet…It’s better if bombs land where they are supposed to and US planes are not blown out of the skies. The general competence of a military can be judged. But that’s a far cry from determining whether a war is working out.

No one can say how Trump’s war in Iran will end up. But we already see worrisome consequences. The conflict has led to Israeli attacks on Lebanon. The Ukrainian war is receiving less attention. (This week Russia, as it prepares a spring offensive, launched one of the four-year-old war’s largest bombardments, hurling 1,000 drones and 34 missiles at Ukraine.) Kim Jong Un has declared that Trump’s war against Iran justifies the expansion of North Korea’s nuclear weapons arsenal. (He has long been more of a nuclear threat than Tehran’s mullahs.) And counterterrorism experts fear a rise in terrorism aimed at American targets.

Meanwhile, the world and the global economy is at the mercy of Trump’s chaos, as each day brings contradictory statements and signs about his intentions and plans (if he has any) on how to end this war. The dislocation caused by the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz—an easily foreseen development that Trump did not foresee—extends far beyond the uptick in the price of crude (which Stephens pooh-poohs). One-third of the world’s helium passes through the Strait. Helium is a critical ingredient in semiconductors—which are in just about everything—and it’s necessary for MRI machines. Cut off the flow of helium, and what won’t be made, what won’t happen, and what harm will be done?

If you let loose the dogs of war, they can run in many different directions. Clearly, Trump is ad hoc-ing this war as it proceeds—which is not reassuring. It’s tough enough to prosecute a war with a plan; leading a war without one is folly. For sure, the US military can be rather successful in killing and annihilating. That might look like winning to some. History tells us otherwise.

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High Tech Experiments Reveal That We’ve Been Farming All Wrong

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

Thousands of years ago, beasts of burden helped make humanity what it is today. When farmers first started putting down roots, they’d plant and tend their crops by hand. With the power of oxen, they could drag plows across their fields before sowing, which boosted soil fertility and eliminated weeds. Today, that job has been made even easier by giant machines that rake the landscape.

Millennia of tilling, though, have come at a cost. While plowing releases nutrients in the short term, it degrades soil fertility in the long term, requiring farmers to load their fields with synthetic fertilizers. (The burst of microbial activity after roiling the ground also chews through accumulated carbon, returning it to the atmosphere as planet-warming greenhouse gas.) In addition, all this cultivation destroys the natural subterranean structures that hold onto water, meaning less is delivered to crops.

Fiber optic cables, of all things, have now exposed just how badly tilling messes with a farm’s ability to retain moisture. Using a technology known as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), scientists analyzed how seismic waves disturbed the cable as they rippled through harrowed fields, compared to adjacent undisturbed plots. This created subtly distinct signals, showing that plowing obliterates the “capillaries” that carry water like tiny interconnected reservoirs.

“It’s kind of counterintuitive, right You’d think that breaking up the ground surface would allow more water to get down into it.”

The findings point to a serious problem with modern agriculture, to be sure, but also to solutions. “Regenerative farming practices based on principles of no-till—combined with cover crops and a diversity of crops—can basically lead to less agrochemical reliance, better soil organic matter contents, comparable yields, [and] lower diesel use,” said David Montgomery, a geomorphologist at the University of Washington and coauthor of a new paper describing the research.

DAS exploits the extreme sensitivity of fiber optic cables, which transmit information as pulses of light. If there’s a disturbance along the path—an earthquake or even someone walking overhead—a tiny bit of light bounces back to the source. With a device called an interrogator, researchers can send pulses along a length of cable and analyze what returns. Because they know the speed of light, they can differentiate a disturbance a mile down the line from one just a few hundred feet away, as the former will take just a tiny bit longer to return. Whereas a traditional seismometer takes readings at a single point, a DAS system turns miles upon miles of fiber optic cable into one continuous sensor.

Luckily enough for these researchers, Harper Adams University in the United Kingdom has run a 20-year outdoor lab where researchers have treated adjacent fields with different levels of tilling. Whereas using DAS to monitor for earthquakes relies on the planet’s deep seismic rumblings, in these fields the researchers laid cable at the surface and listened for what was happening above ground: human activities like cars, but also rain and wind hitting the cable. Basically, it was messier, seismically speaking, than Earth’s more consistent vibrations, but still informative. “A lot of noise for somebody is a signal for others,” said Marine Denolle, an earth scientist at the University of Washington and senior author of the new paper.

The researchers get to work on experimental plots.Marine Denolle/University of Washington

In the end, it was all about speed, aka seismic velocity. If a car drove by, it sent waves across the road, then into the fields. “If the soil has water, the wave will take longer to come to us than if the soil is dry,” Denolle said.

Let’s leave the farm for a second and head to the beach to explain that. Where the ocean laps at the shore, the wet sand is so hard that you can run along it without sinking in and breaking your ankle. The nearby dry sand, on the other hand, is so loose that you might have a hard time trudging through it. “The only difference is the way these capillary forces glue the material together when there’s a sufficient amount of water,” Denolle said. “We do notice that action of stiffening and loosening of the soil, just due to that change.”

Or think of undisturbed soils as a sponge, loaded with lots of pores for water to fill—leave one out on the counter and it hardens and contracts, only to soften and expand when you soak it once more. So on the experimental farm, the tilled soils might have looked like they’d better absorb water, what with their looseness, but the opposite is true.

“It’s kind of counterintuitive, right?” Montgomery said. “You’d think that breaking up the ground surface would allow more water to get down into it. But if you plow it often enough, hard enough, you kind of pulverize it. And it’s all those little worm holes and the bug holes and the root holes that allow water to get down into the soil.”

Why, then, would farmers keep plowing their fields for thousands of years? “Well, farmers don’t like weeds, and so a really good way to get weeds off your field is to plow it,” Montgomery said. “That can provide nutrients to a crop, so you get a little burst of fertility with tillage. But if you do it too often for too long, you wear out the batteries of the soil, in effect.”

That’s why modern farmers add heaps of expensive synthetic fertilizers. Not only do these inputs take a whole lot of energy to produce, contributing to global warming, but they also run off of the land, poisoning waterways. (Nitrogen fertilizer is geopolitically perilous as well: Almost a third of it passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran effectively closed after being attacked by Israel and the United States.) And because water doesn’t soak into tilled soils as well, much of it evaporates before reaching roots.

Together, these trends drive up costs and will only accelerate as climate change exacerbates droughts. Researchers elsewhere in the world might also use DAS to better understand soil conditions on local farms. “I thought it was a neat application on the very small scale, but just showing how DAS can be used to solve these types of problems,” said Jonathan Ajo-Franklin, an applied geophysicist at Rice University, who studies the technology. (Ajo-Franklin wasn’t involved in the paper, but its lead author is a postdoc in his department.)

That solution, Montgomery said, is embracing regenerative agriculture to prioritize soil health, which means reducing physical and chemical disturbances. If a farmer is struggling with weeds, for instance, they can let loose livestock after a harvest, clearing the field for the next crop to get a head start. Or they might add cover crops, which further choke out weeds. Even if, say, an urban farm has to do some tilling, it can return carbon to the ground with compost.

Increasing crop diversity, too, will both recharge the soil (legumes, for example, “fix” their own nitrogen and add it to the earth for other plants to use as fertilizer) and make a field friendlier to beneficial microbes, which help lock carbon in the ground and keep it out of the atmosphere. “There’s all kinds of other reasons we would want to adopt those same suite of practices,” Montgomery said, “from reducing our reliance on agrochemical inputs, increasing on-farm biodiversity, reducing off-farm pollution, building soil organic matter, creating more profitable farms.”

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This Weekend’s No Kings Rallies Were Historically Massive

On Saturday millions of people around the country took part in more than 3,000 No Kings protests opposing the presidency of Donald Trump, whose approval ratings have plummeted to 36 percent, a record low since his return to the White House.

Saturday’s rallies were the third major No Kings protest, with organizers saying that 8 million people took part. That estimate has not been independently verified. But to put this weekend’s anti-Trump protests in perspective: about 300,000 people attended the April 2009 Tea Party protests against the Obama administration that were heralded as a seismic political event.

My Mother Jones colleagues were on the ground yesterday covering the action around the country:

St. Petersburg, Florida

Washington, D.C.

New York City

St. Paul, Minnesota

Oakland, California

Given the immense outpouring, what could these demonstrations mean for future organizing?

According to Payday Report, an outlet that covers labor and union news, Indivisible, one of the lead organizers of the No Kings protests, is backing the May Day Strong coalition, which is calling for “No Work, No School, No Shopping” on May 1.

Leah Greenberg, the co-founder of Indivisible, said, “On May 1, Indivisibles will be joining people across the country with a clear message: we demand a government that invests in our communities, not one that enriches billionaires, fuels endless war, or deploys masked agents to intimidate our neighbors.”

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The Pope’s Sermon This Morning Was a Rebuke of Pete Hegseth

On Sunday, Pope Leo said that God refuses the prayers of leaders who have “hands full of blood,” in what appeared to be a direct rebuke to many Trump administration officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who have invoked religious rhetoric to justify their war with Iran.

“This is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” Leo said to thousands of people attending his Palm Sunday mass at St. Peter’s Square. “He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

The pope has made repeated calls for an immediate ceasefire in Iran and, last Monday, said military airstrikes should be banned.

“Thousands of innocent people have been killed, and many others have been forced to abandon their homes,” Leo said earlier this month. “I renew my prayerful closeness to all those who have lost their loved ones in the attacks that have struck schools, hospitals, and residential areas.”

While the pope’s remarks have not identified anyone specific, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been at the forefront of mingling his Christian faith with his prosecution of the Iran war. On Wednesday, Hegseth prayed at the Pentagon in front of military and civilian workers for US troops to deliver “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

“We ask these things in bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ,” he continued.

Hegseth has been open about his support for a Christian crusade. As my colleague Kiera Butler pointed out when Donald Trump nominated him for secretary of defense in November 2024, Hegseth published a book in 2020 titled American Crusade, which discussed the destruction of Muslim holy sites to reclaim them for Christianity.

Kiera also highlighted Hegseth’s tattoos, including a Jerusalem cross on his chest, which Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, told her is a reference to the Christian crusades. According to Taylor, another Hegseth tattoo of the words “Deus Vult”—Latin for “God wills it”—signifies that “God mandated Crusaders’ violence.”

During his tenure, Hegseth has explicitly injected religion into the Pentagon. According to the Washington Post, he hosts monthly evangelical worship services every month at the Pentagon and has invited clergy members from his Christian denomination to preach at these events.

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These Scientists Tested How Climate Change Affects Wild Meadows—With Alarming Results

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

Every summer, people descend on the wildflower capital of Colorado to see grasslands flush with corn lilies, aspen sunflowers and sub-alpine larkspur. In January 1991, a group of scientists lea by Professor John Harte set up a unique experiment in these Rocky Mountain meadows. It was one of the first (and longest running) to work out how the changing climate would affect an ecosystem.

At the time, it was believed a temperature increase could lead to longer, lusher grasses. But instead of flourishing, the grasses and wildflowers started to disappear, replaced by sage brush. The experimental meadows morphed into a desert-like scrubland. Even the fungi in the soils were transformed by heat.

The Warming Meadow experiment provided a window into the future. These meadows will disappear in the coming decades if warming reaches 2C above preindustrial levels, according to the resulting article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings are alarming, not just for Colorado, but for mountains across the planet as “shrubification” takes over.

Wildflowers in the meadows of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado—as temperatures rise, grasses and wildflowers are replaced by sage brush.Aimee Classen/Handout

The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory is in the former ghost town of Gothic, abandoned after the closure of its silver mines. Over winter, the landscape lies quietly under a bed of snow. In early spring, the only way for researchers to get to experimental sites—at an altitude of 10,000 feet—is by skiing across country.

Electric infrared radiators warmed five experimental plots of 30 square meters year-round. Head-height heaters were on day and night over a patch of meadow, keeping it 2C above normal temperatures with an annual electricity bill of $6,000. They warmed the top six inches of soil. Animals could come and graze and the natural system was preserved as much as possible.

The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado.RMBL

Over 29 years, researchers found that shrubs increased by 150 percent in warmed plots compared with those without warming. The surface of the soil was dried by up to 20 percent, and shallow-rooted plants became stressed. Some wildflowers went extinct in heated plots. “It’s a sign of things to come,” says lead researcher Lara Souza from the University of Oklahoma.

Scientists also noted big changes in the invisible world of soil fungi and microbes. Shrubs and sage brush don’t rely on fungi in the same way as grasses. They found a decline in fungi that help plants acquire nutrients, and an increase in fungi that decompose organic matter. “This highlights that when you have a big change above ground, you’ve likely got a big change below ground,” says Souza. “Turning back is very unlikely.”

“It’s all happening so much faster than the projections would have said.”

Alpine grasslands are often overlooked in terms of their species richness. Europe’s alpine grasslands host 50 percent of European flora on just 3 percent of land. They are home to many plant species found nowhere else on the planet. “They’ve been here for thousands of years,” says Dr Patrick Möhl from Lancaster University who studies pristine alpine grasslands in Austria and their disappearance due to climate breakdown.

“It is very species diverse, we will lose so much of that. It will just be forest, the same kind of forest we have lower down,” he says.

Möhl has observed species of trees—often pine—moving uphill as the climate warms. “It’s a profound change in the ecosystem—the life form is changing, from grassland to a woody ecosystem,” he says.

This is not just being observed in mountain environments.

The expansion of shrub cover is one of the most significant ways Arctic landscapes are changing, with polar “greening” trends even visible on satellites. Increasing summer temperatures are the key driver. Shrub cover expanded by 2.2 percent each decade in the western Canadian Arctic, according to data recorded between 1984 and 2020.

In cold places, plants tend to stay small. Larger plants can get damaged through wind and cold exposure, the weight of snow, or face difficulties growing leaf and stem tissue in a very short growing season. As the climate becomes less cold and less stressful, shrub and tree species can move in.

“Global heating is lifting some of the restrictions to plant growth that were associated with cold conditions in high latitude and high-altitude ecosystems,” says Sarah Dalrymple, a conservation ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University, who has been studying changes in Iceland. “There is a transition from grasslands, or heath, through to shrubs, and eventually through to trees.”

RMBL researchers in a Rocky Mountain meadow.William J Farrell

Grass and soil ecosystems that have been kept in a delicate balance for thousands of years are likely to be irrevocably changed in the coming decades. “Shrubification in itself isn’t necessarily a problem, but the fact we are losing Arctic ecosystems is a problem,” says Dalrymple.

Some people welcome shrubs and trees—they bring shelter for wildlife, livestock and people. “But at a global level, the afforestation of cold environments is worrying because it is associated with permafrost melting and the acceleration of subsequent carbon emissions,” adds Dalrymple.

“It is alarming to see this process of shrubification happening so quickly. The speed of change, and the knock-on impacts on things like the carbon cycle, are really very worrying. It’s not just about whether the individual tree is good or bad.

“What is ‘bad’ is our inability to control our own carbon emissions. Shrubification is a symptom of this, not the cause, and we need to treat it as such.”

The way we manage the planet and where we live is based on the fact we assume that the planet is going to be there for ever, and is going to be unchanged. But these changes are global, not localised to Colorado. “It’s all happening so much faster than the projections would have said,” says Dalrymple.

Souza is still captivated by the insect-rich meadows around the research centre. She has been coming since 2012 and the magic is unchanged.

“It’s like flowers on steroids,” she says. “It’s surreal to me, every time I come.” But this vision is tinged with sadness at what the future might hold. This fragile landscape—like so many across our planet—is on the brink of huge change.

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No Kings Rallygoers in New York Share Their Biggest Fears—and Greatest Hopes

I’ve covered all the No Kings protests in New York City since the start of Trump’s second presidency. What has struck me about all of them is how they fuse people’s fears with their hopes. The fear is what drives people onto the streets: threats to democracy, the war in Iran, attacks on LGBTQ Americans. The hope: each other, the promise of change. So, amid a raucous sea of angry, festive rallygoers along Manhattan’s 7th Avenue on Saturday, I asked people: What is your biggest fear and greatest hope right now?

“I’m here because they’re fucking building concentration camps that they’re locking tens of thousands of people in, and ICE is in our fucking airports,” the artist (and “Mother Jones fan”) Molly Crabapple told me. “Too many people are dying and too many people are in cages.” And while she doesn’t typically think “in hope,” she was inspired by the community. “I know we have each other and I don’t know if that’s enough, but that’s all we have.”

For Matthew Nichols, a 56-year-old arts worker, the greatest fear is November’s midterms — that “there’ll be some significant interference,” he said. “All of these things that seemed farfetched maybe a year ago or two years ago are actually coming to pass.”

Ash, 29, a Mexican agricultural worker, says he fears people being silenced and “losing empathy” but, like others I met, pointed to “all of us,” gesturing around as providing him with hope. “People from all walks of life. Rich people, poor people, white people, black people. Everyone. So, it’s quite powerful.”

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At CPAC, the Shah’s Son Promises to “Make Iran Great Again”

Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose President Donald Trump’s war in Iran. Those numbers go even higher when the prospect of boots on the ground is included. The war has even repelled some of Trump’s biggest supporters in the MAGA world, who thought he was serious when he promised during his 2024 campaign that he wouldn’t engage in foreign wars if elected.

But none of those schisms were on display Saturday at CPAC, the nation’s oldest conservative political convention, when Reza Pahlavi took the stage. The son of the last shah of Iran was given rock star treatment and greeted with roars of approval from an audience filled with Iranian-Americans who back Trump’s attack on Iran.

“Can you imagine Iran going from death to America to God bless America?” he asked the raucous crowd. “Well, I, too can.” He pitched Trump’s war as an opportunity for Iranians to finally throw off 47 years of oppressive theocratic rule, and offered up himself as the chosen one who would lead the country through its transition to freedom.

A button worn by supporters of Reza Pahlavi at CPACStephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

“Unlike the regime that worships death and destruction, the Iranian people celebrate life and liberty,” he said. “That’s why I can imagine an Iran that exports engineers instead of extremists, startups instead of suicide bombers, energy instead of hatred.” With echoes of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” motto, Pahlavi said, “I can imagine in the Middle East where Iran is no longer a source of chaos, but an anchor of stability that does not fear its people, doesn’t threaten its neighbors, doesn’t isolate itself from the world. Imagining this is not difficult, because this is exactly what Iran once was, and what it can be again.”

The moment was surprisingly moving. Hundreds of exiled Iranians, many with children in tow, were clearly longing for Pahlavi to deliver change for the good. Yet the crown prince’s future—as well as exiles who hope to return to Iran—rests almost entirely on Trump, which seems like risky business. After all, Trump has the attention span of a gnat, and already he’s facing a revolt from his own party over the war.

Media stars like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan have been openly breaking with Trump for betraying his campaign promises. At CPAC, where most speakers seemed largely supportive of the war, former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) sounded a discordant note, saying, “A ground invasion of Iran will make our country poorer and less safe. It will mean higher gas prices, higher food prices. And I’m not sure if we would end up killing more terrorists than we would create.”

Some Republicans in Congress like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) have joined with Democrats to try to pass a war powers resolution that would limit the president’s ability to wage war in Iran. Gas prices are skyrocketing as Iran continues to strangle the critical Strait of Hormuz, an outcome that seems to have taken Trump by surprise.

Faced with increasing opposition at home to the war, Trump has suggested that “me and the Ayatollah” might jointly oversee the operation of the strait, a partnership that would seem anathema to Iranian exiles in the US.

At CPAC, Pahlavi seemed to recognize the limits of America’s support for regime change in Iran through military action. “What we ask of America now is simple: Stay the course,” he pleaded. “Pave the way for the Iranian people to finish the job.”

The crown prince framed himself as the leader of an Iranian MAGA movement, and his supporters openly pined for the restoration for the shah. In that sense, they seemed much like American conservatives imagining a better past that never was. After all, Iran wasn’t exactly a model of democracy before the 1979 Iranian revolution. While he may have been a modernizing force, Pahlavi’s father was an authoritarian monarch who oversaw a one-party state that also engaged in torture and human rights abuses. Many of the Iranians I met at CPAC were far too young to remember life under the shah, and they seemed to view pre-revolutionary Iran with sepia tones.

“Iran, as it was before 1979, you know, we had a great country,” Sara Paras told me. “We were progressing. But now with the Ayatollah and Islamic regime, they are just destroying our country.” Paras, 29, is an enthusiastic backer of Pahlavi. “He is the representative of the people of Iran. He wants the same thing that the Iranian people want, too. They want freedom.”

A T-shirt spotted on a supporter of Reza Pahlavi at CPACStephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones

While Pahlavi seems to have a large following of Iranians inside the US, Trump and his aides have reportedly called him the “loser prince” because they don’t believe he has much support inside Iran, a country the suburban Maryland resident hasn’t visited in 50 years. At CPAC, however, Pahlavi pushed back on such criticism. “I have unified a broad coalition of dissidents, republicans, and monarchists, left and right,” he said. “Men and women of all ages, religions, and ethnicities. Even people who were former political opponents have joined the movement to free Iran under my leadership.”

One thing Pahlavi didn’t promise to deliver in Iran: immediate elections—though he has said that those will happen eventually.

“The Iran story is not yet finished,” he said, concluding his speech. “Great civilizations outlast even the most vicious occupiers. With your help and with the courage, sacrifice and heroism of Iran’s greatest youth, our best latest chapter is being written right now. When it is done, a free and democratic Iran will stand alongside the United States as a partner, ally, and a friend. President Trump is making America great again. I intend to make Iran great again.”

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The Signs, the Chants, the Crowds: No Kings Protesters Take Over the Country Again

From hundreds of people standing on the side of a road in St. Petersburg, Florida, to tens of thousands in Manhattan, the third round of No Kings protests has once again brought out people across the country to protest President Donald Trump and his administration. Organizers are expecting several million people to turn out in total.

The flagship event at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul in the afternoon is expected to see around 100,000 people, and there are planned demonstrations in all 50 states. Saturday’s turnout follows two other nationwide events in June and October 2025 from the No Kings coalition, a movement made up of dozens of organizations. The October 18 demonstrations drew millions of Americans to more than 2,700 events, according to organizers.

As the chants, signs, and speeches at Saturday’s events make clear, countless Americas are fed up with federal immigration agents’ violence in American cities, the rising cost of living, the ongoing war against Iran, and the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, one of the main groups behind the nationwide protests, told me in January that this third No Kings mobilization would be “a response to the secret police force that’s terrorizing American communities.” Yet, he continued, “I reserve the right to say that this is in response to whatever more recent atrocity the regime commits. It’s lashing out quite a bit, so we’ll see.”

Here are just some of the scenes from Saturday’s events. This post will be updated as the day goes on.

Minnesota

St. Paul. AP Photo/Joe Scheller

Washington, DC.

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Kentucky

Shelbyville, Kentucky. on Cherry/Getty Images

Michigan

West Bloomfield, Michigan.JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP via Getty

Texas

Houston.Marcus Ingram/Getty Images

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Scientists Just Discovered an Amazing New Superfamily of Creatures Deep in the Ocean

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

Beneath the neon lights of a laser-scanning microscope, newly classified species glow in vivid greens and oranges—a far cry from the pitch-black abyss of their natural ocean floor.

Researchers have identified 24 new deep-sea creatures and a whole new evolutionary branch in the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a wide swath of ocean between Hawaii and Mexico. The findings surface as the Trump administration, via a January mandate from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has fast-tracked permits for deep sea mining in that zone, one of the planet’s richest rare-earth metal regions.

The identification of a new branch of life underscores the stakes of an international regulatory vacuum: Mining might be allowed to occur before scientists even have the chance to name species that call the seabed home.

Tammy Horton, co-author and researcher at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, explained the significance of a new evolutionary branch this way: “If you imagine that on planet Earth, we know about carnivorous mammals, we know that bears exist and we know that the families of cats exist, it would be like finding dogs.”

That superfamily of amphipods that researchers described dwell 13,000 feet down. Compared to their shallow-water relatives—like common sand fleas tucked under seaweed on beaches—these deep-sea species have evolved in darkness for millions of years. The shrimp-like creatures with a unique conical mouth mostly measure around one centimeter.

NOAA is reviewing an application from The Metals Co. to target more than 25,000 square miles of the zone where the new species live for deep-sea mining.

“It was, and it still is, the most exciting thing I’ve had in my career,” said Horton, highlighting how discovering new species in the deep sea is relatively common, but only very rarely a new superfamily. “It just shows you how little we know about what’s in the deep sea.”

The breakthrough was the result of immense scientific collaboration. Horton and co-author Anna Jażdżewska each individually worked on their collections before realizing they’d reached the same conclusions. Merging datasets and bringing together a team of more than a dozen experts accelerated the often years-long taxonomic process into a single week’s workshop.

Researchers immortalized their finds by naming them. Byblis hortonae and Byblisoides jazdzewskae took inspiration from Horton and Jażdżewska, respectively, while Horton bestowed her daughter’s name on the new superfamily: Mirabestia maisie. The names serve a deeper purpose than mere tribute.

Naming species affords them a “passport for living,” said Jażdżewska, professor at the University of Łódź. It allows people and policymakers to think about a species like the living entity it is.

“Until they are properly named for science in this official way, they are not communicable about,” said Horton. “It absolutely gives them a passport to be discussed, to be talked about, to be conserved.”

However, with over 90 percent of species in the CCZ still unnamed, it will likely be difficult for policymakers to know the true impacts of proposed deep-sea mining projects on fauna.

Spanning 1.7 million square miles of the eastern Pacific seabed, the CCZ teems with significant stores of manganese nodules. These potato-sized deposits contain high concentrations of battery-grade metals such as nickel, cobalt and copper.

In January, NOAA finalized changes to the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act that fast-track deep-sea mining projects by allowing companies to apply for a commercial recovery permit at the same time as an exploration license. Previously, companies were required to undertake extensive scientific research prior to receiving an extraction permit.

“This consolidation modernizes the law and supports the America First agenda,” said Neil Jacobs, NOAA’s administrator, in a statement. Earlier this month, NOAA accepted for review an application from The Metals Co. to target over 25,000 square miles of the same zone where the new species live.

Mining exacts an environmental cost. Just two months after commercial machinery plowed the CCZ’s silty seabed in large-scale tests in 2022, species abundance dropped 37 percent and biodiversity fell by almost a third, according to sediment analysis by the UK’s Natural History Museum.

Horton and Jażdżewska plan to keep uncovering the wonders of the deep sea as part of the International Seabed Authority’s Sustainable Seabed Knowledge Initiative to identify 1,000 new species by the end of the decade.

Indeed, while the description of two dozen new species and the discovery of a new superfamily is a monumental leap, researchers know much further identification work lies ahead. Understanding how the animals live, how they reproduce and what they feed on is completely unknown beyond basic inference, said Jażdżewska.

“We’ve just done 24 and that is a drop in the ocean, literally, of how many more we have to describe,” said Horton.

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The Art Trump Doesn’t Want and the Artists Left Behind

Last year, arts organizations and cultural institutions across the US received an alarming message: Their federal grants had been canceled.

The letters said their projects no longer aligned with new federal priorities and that money was being redirected toward the Trump administration’s agenda. The grants had funded museum exhibits, public art programs, historical research, and community arts initiatives.

Angela Sutton and a team of archaeologists were in the middle of excavating a long-forgotten Black neighborhood in Nashville when she got the news: “Just got an email out of the blue saying, ‘Please stop. You’re done.’”

This week on Reveal, reporter Jonathan Jones travels to Nashville and beyond one year after the cancellations to meet the people living with the fallout. From musicians to visual artists, historians, and arts administrators, they’re confronting a new reality: Federal support now depends on the shifting political priorities in Washington. Some organizations are scaling back their work. Others worry artists will censor themselves just to survive. But many are fighting back.

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Watch: Inside the ICE Airport Operation

Like many Americans, Amanda Moore spent a lot of time this week in Houston’s airports. For much of the past year, Moore has reported on the federal law enforcement agencies that President Donald Trump has deployed to cities around the country. So when Trump announced he was sending in ICE to—supposedly—help deal with the hours-long airport security lines caused by the partial government shutdown, she set out to learn what the agents were really up to.

As it turns out, the answer was often: not much. The ICE agents were “sometimes discouraging people from cutting in line, or ushering people up escalators,” Moore reports in a new video for Mother Jones. “Other times, they’re just sitting around chatting with each other.”

Early Friday morning, the Senate voted to restore funding to the Department of Homeland Security, but so far, House Republicans are refusing to go along. Meanwhile, Trump is claiming he will unilaterally pay TSA agents, even without congressional approval. Either way, it’s not clear when or if ICE will be leaving the airports. Some ICE agents in Houston told Moore they don’t expect to depart anytime soon.

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Al Gore’s Rallying Cry Ahead of Saturday’s No Kings Protests

Twenty years after An Inconvenient Truth made a devastating case for climate action, American leadership on the issue has all but vanished. But former Vice President Al Gore, the film’s crusading star, hasn’t given up hope.

In a sit-down interview with Reveal’s Al Letson this week, Gore returned to a familiar theme from across his career in activism: people-powered change. “Sometimes the time frames, the time cycles, take a little bit longer than we’re comfortable with,” he admitted. “But I do believe in the resilience of American democracy, and I say all the time that political will is a renewable resource. It is.”

He cast the interview as a rallying cry ahead of this weekend’s No Kings events—nationwide protests against President Donald Trump’s sweeping consolidation of federal power. His message for those in the MAGA movement who have embraced what Gore has called authoritarianism was blunt: “There is a feeling on the part of some that we do need a king, we do need an autocrat,” he said. “Well, to hell with you, we do not. We’re Americans. And the whole spirit of these demonstrations is to reassert that fact.”

Gore pointed to the historic scale of the protest movement so far, noting that earlier demonstrations drew millions, and predicted an even bigger turnout this weekend. “Everybody’s kind of expecting that it’ll blow the roof off of those numbers,” he said. “I think these things matter.”

“If they think we’re going to put up with this, they think we’re fools,” he added. “You watch and see.”

For more from this interview, including Gore’s scathing assessment of Trump’s strategy in Iran, watch our previous clip below, and stay tuned for more on an upcoming episode of More To The Story with Al Letson. Subscribe here.

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The Incredible Shrinking CPAC

In the days leading up to this week’s opening of CPAC, the nation’s oldest conservative political convention, organizers still seemed to be holding out hope that some brighter MAGA luminary would agree to headline the event. The CPAC app and social media accounts offered a slow drip of news of newly confirmed speakers. There was the HUD secretary, a low-level HHS official, and a Nigerian lawyer who advocates for Christians in his Muslim country. On March 21, CPAC excitedly announced that Todd Chrisley would be joining the lineup.

Who?

You could be forgiven for not knowing about Chrisley. A minor reality TV star, Chrisley was in prison until May last year, serving a 12-year sentence for bank and tax fraud, when President Donald Trump pardoned him. What Chrisley has to offer the CPAC audience is unclear. “To speak on the process of receiving a pardon?” posited one incredulous Facebook commenter responding to the Chrisley announcement.

During the Trump decade, CPAC had been a showcase for the MAGA faithful, and Trump and his family were its biggest stars. Trump himself first appeared at the event in 2011 when he was toying with a presidential run. He hasn’t missed the event in a decade. “Nobody can deny that [CPAC] is the center of political gravity,” CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp told me in 2022.

But the center of gravity has clearly tilted if the modest crowd in the convention hall at the Gaylord Texan resort in Grapevine is any indication. “It’s shitty,” Warner Kimo Sutton told me of the turnout. “Last time this place was packed.” A GOP stalwart who who ran Trump’s 2016 campaign in Hawaii, he was here two years ago, the last time CPAC came to Dallas. He was still hoping more stars would show up. “I’ve heard the widow is coming,” he whispered, saying he had it on good authority that Erika Kirk, the widow of the murdered Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, might be making a surprise appearance.

Whether a late showing by “the widow” is enough to spice up the convention remains to be seen. After all, people book hotels and buy tickets months in advance, often expecting to see Trump and some of his famous children. CPAC doesn’t discourage this view. Trump’s previous appearances feature prominently on the CPAC website. But as of Thursday night, not a single Trump family member was on the 2026 lineup, and Trump has reportedly said he is not coming. (A CPAC intern on Thursday held out hope and told Sutton and me that Trump’s visits are often last-minute affairs.)

Still, CPAC attendees won’t even hear from Trump-adjacent Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former CPAC regular who was exiled to Greece as the US ambassador after Don Jr. ditched her for a younger woman. And the primacy of CPAC as a testing ground for future presidential candidates seems threatened. As of Thursday, not a single 2028 aspirant was scheduled to speak in Grapevine. No Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, no Vice President JD Vance. And Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio was way too busy plotting to overthrow Cuba. The closest he has come to the event was appearing on the big screen in the exhibit hall Thursday morning during a broadcast of the president’s predictably fawning cabinet meeting.

Headlining the annual Ronald Reagan dinner is Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. Currently running for the US Senate, Paxton is an underwhelming candidate to fill a speaking slot once occupied in 1985 by the Gipper himself. Paxton has a long history of scandals, ranging from a 2015 securities fraud indictment to his impeachment in 2023, to his messy divorce that revealed a series of infidelities. Despite Paxton’s popularity among MAGA voters, Trump has thus far declined to endorse him in his primary race against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.

Part of the problem with CPAC this year may be that many of its biggest draws in the past are now part of the government they long railed against. FBI Director Kash Patel, who wrote a whole book about “government gangsters,” is now one of them. Ditto for Pam Bondi, who just last year shared the mainstage with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz but now runs the Justice Department, where she’s under fire from Trump’s own fans for her handling of the Epstein files.

Former White House National Trade Council director Peter Navarro appeared at CPAC in 2024, shortly before heading off to prison for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena. Now pardoned, he has thus far skipped this year’s event, perhaps to better mismanage the president’s trade war—though he did find the time to show up at Politico’s Economy Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday. Those still on the schedule are a sorry lot of wannabes and has-beens. Former Florida representative and catastrophically failed Trump attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz? Check.

What might account for the lackluster affair? Sutton, a three-time delegate to the GOP presidential nominating convention who moved to Texas six years ago, suspects that the war in Iran is likely keeping Trump away. But he also despairs that “there’s a malaise in our party” preventing people from engaging more in this year’s midterms.

Perhaps Americans, even the MAGA faithful, are too pinched by gas prices to shell out for a trip to the resort in Grapevine, where, as Sutton complained, parking costs $29 a day. Maybe a lame duck Trump, whose approval rating has never been lower, has hurt attendance. Or maybe even Republicans have grown weary of an event that has strayed far from its roots as a conservative policy confab and increasingly served as a platform for some of the GOP’s most morally compromised representatives. As conservative radio host Erick Erickson lamented in an X post Wednesday, “’C’ in CPAC is now best represented by the world ‘clown’ than as any semblance of a conservative institution.”

“’C’ in CPAC is now best represented by the world ‘clown’ than as any semblance of a conservative institution.”

It’s also possible, however, that the main problem with CPAC is CPAC itself. The conference has suffered in recent years from competition, most notably from Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s conservative youth group. (T-shirts featuring Kirk as martyr are a hot item in the CPAC exhibit hall.) Turning Point’s national convention in December drew a whopping 30,000 people, which seems about 10 times larger than the occupancy of the Gaylord convention hall.

Even CPAC’s relatively paltry numbers seem padded with enough international visitors to make it a juicy target for ICE Director Tom Homan, who was a featured speaker on Thursday. Chief among these retinues is a huge contingent of conservative South Korean “stop the steal” activists associated with former president Yoon Suk Yeol. Yeol was impeached last year, and in February, he was sentenced to life in prison for starting an insurrection.

But the organization behind CPAC also seems troubled. I’ve been attending CPAC regularly since 2009, mostly when it was held in the DC area. It usually seemed like a decently well-oiled machine. But this year, its Grapevine event feels like it’s coming apart at the seams. Its buggy app wasn’t updated with the schedule until late Wednesday night, and it was clearly being tinkered with all day on Thursday, with headlines for sessions becoming snappier by the hour. A panel originally focused generically on “fraud” was transformed into “Ilhan Omar ‘Family’ Values.”

As of 5:30 pm on Thursday, there was still no public schedule available for Friday or Saturday, and new speakers were still being announced on social media throughout the day. “CPAC is proud to announce that Andrew Giuliani is a confirmed speaker for CPAC USA 2026,” came the news Thursday morning. The son of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is the current White House director of the FIFA World Cup task force. Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen once famously said that the younger Giuliani “may be dumber than Eric Trump,” making the former pro-golfer’s addition to the CPAC agenda a mixed bag.

Thursday’s announcement of the last-minute addition of HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. may help offset some of the disappointment with this year’s CPAC offerings. Even so, it can’t help the convention’s appeal that Schlapp is its MC. In 2024, the CPAC chairman settled a sexual misconduct lawsuit, reportedly for almost $500,000, filed by a man working on Hershel Walker’s 2022 Georgia Senate campaign who had accused Schlapp of groping him in the car.

Nonetheless, Schlapp still plays an outsized role in the convention, which is reflected in his salary. He earned more than $830,000 in tax year 2023, according to the group’s most recent IRS 990 form. Listed as “the Honorable Matt Schlapp” on the CPAC schedule, apparently in reference to his service as George W. Bush’s White House political director, he is the moderator of a disproportionate number of panels, along with his wife, (the Honorable) Mercedes Schlapp, who worked in the first Trump White House.

In fairness, not everyone seems disappointed with the event. I found Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of the Proud Boys, hanging out and watching Matt Gaetz record his OAN show in the CPAC exhibit hall. Tarrio seemed glad to be here and not in prison. In January last year, Trump pardoned him, saving him from a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy related to his involvement in the January 6 riot. He told me he comes to every CPAC and that this one was the same as in 2018, another non-presidential election season.

Tarrio said that a lot of people want to see Trump, and now that Trump doesn’t seem to be coming, they’re not that interested. He said some people at his hotel had cancelled based on the B-list offerings. But he shrugged it off, attributing the turnout to the normal political cycle rather than as a reflection on the current state of MAGA or CPAC itself. After all, he said, “It’s a midterm year.”

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What War in the Middle East Means for the World’s Clean Energy Transition

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

As the deadly war in Iran triggers what the International Energy Agency has described as the worst oil crisis in history, climate advocates are calling for a faster shift away from fossil fuels, but the conflict may also hamper that transition.

US-Israeli strikes on Iran have disrupted supply routes through the strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of global oil flows. The US, Israel and Iran have also all launched strikes on fossil fuel facilities, creating additional market shocks.

Reduced reliance on oil and gas is insulating some regions from the ongoing fuel crisis. “Electricity generated from wind and solar is largely insulated from fossil fuel price volatility—once built, the fuel is free,” said Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy at Oxford University.

But the war is also creating near-term challenges that could slow clean energy growth. Here’s what to know about how the current crisis could shape the expansion of renewable energy.

Clean energy as a shield

Climate advocates are calling for the world to grow its renewable energy capacity to boost energy independence. Former US secretary of state John Kerry this month told the Guardian that oil and gas were a “security challenge,” while the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, last week said that “our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing both the climate and global security.”

Some countries are indeed better positioned to withstand the current fuel crisis because of the growth of clean energy technologies. Spain and Portugal, for instance, have seen electricity prices decline in recent weeks.

“This should be the final wake-up call that there is a better way than continued dependence on fossil fuels.”

Pakistan, too, has seen a surge in the deployment of rooftop solar panels over the past five years, helping the country weather disruptions in the oil and gas market. There, “households and businesses have discovered that rooftop solar coupled with batteries are cheaper than electricity imported from the grid,” Rosenow said.

Electric vehicles have also helped some economies withstand price increases for gasoline, in which crude oil is a key ingredient. Two examples are China, where more than 50 percent of all new cars sold are electric, and Nepal, where that share sits at at 70 percent.

In light of this evidence, countries across the world are being urged to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels. But the Iran war may also make that more difficult.

Challenges for renewables

Though it has re-energized calls for clean technology, the war and resulting supply chain disruptions are also posing problems for the clean energy transition.

Chokepoints in the strait of Hormuz, for instance, are disrupting the transport of metals needed to construct solar panels,such as aluminum. The Middle East also accounts for about 9 percent ​of global aluminum production, and producers in the region have begun to shutter or scale back their operations amid the war.

That could make it difficult to build the new clean power capacity climate advocates are demanding. So could the inflation that the war may spur, particularly because renewable energy projects require significant upfront investment for construction, equipment and installation.

Fossil fuels incentivized

The war and resulting energy shocks have been a boon in the short term for fossil fuels. That includes the dirtiest and most planet-heating energy source: coal.

“Renewables are winners here, but so is coal,” said Ira Joseph, global fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

“War is being used as a false justification for rushed and irresponsible extraction.”

Many Asian countries are heavily reliant on imported liquefied natural gas, much of which passes through the strait of Hormuz. To make up for current shortfalls in LNG supply, countries including India, Thailand and Vietnam are burning more coal to meet energy demand.

And though in 2025 China reduced its coal generation for the first time, disruptions to LNG—particularly after the world’s largest LNG terminal in Qatar was struck by Iranian missiles and drones this month—will probably reverse that trend, said Joseph.

In the short term, disruptions in the oil and gas market are also incentivizing more oil and gas drilling and exploration, as countries scramble to replace disrupted LNG supplies and as higher prices make previously unviable projects profitable.

“High fossil fuel prices generate windfall profits that flow back into exploration, extraction and export infrastructure,” said Rosenow. “We are already seeing this with LNG expansion plans being fast-tracked.”

The US company Venture Global on Monday announced a new five-year contract to supply LNG to Vitol, the world’s largest independent energy trading company. That same day, the Canadian energy company TC Energy said Iran war disruptions were increasing the likelihood that a huge LNG facility export facility will be expanded.

Donald Trump, whose campaign accepted record oil and gas donations and who calls the climate crisis a “hoax” has taken steps to further incentivize oil expansion amid the energy crisis. Most recently, on Monday, the White House said it would pay a French company $1 billion to abandon plans to build offshore windfarms and instead pursue fossil fuel projects.

The risk of this kind of expansion, said Rosenow, was a “carbon lock-in effect” where decision makers keep newly built infrastructure onlinefor decades.

“War is being used as a false justification for rushed and irresponsible extraction. Instead, this should be the final wake-up call that there is a better way than continued dependence on fossil fuels,” said Lauren Pagel, policy director at the environmental non-profit Earthworks. “The decision to double down on fossil fuels doubles down on disaster—for people impacted by pollution, for the climate, and for our global politics.”

Shaping policy

Policy could be shaped to encourage the green transition, with experts proposing a wide variety of schemes.

Rosenow called for governments to reform tax structures. “Right now, electricity bears a disproportionate share of energy taxes in most countries, making it artificially expensive relative to gas,” he said. It’s a widely discussed idea in Europe.

Gregor Semieniuk, a public policy and economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said officials should impose a windfall tax on oil and gas companies amid the war.

“By taxing away excess profit—a windfall from war, rather than business acumen—governments can signal to financial investors and the industry itself that it’s not so extraordinarily profitable, and put less pressure on expanding production,” he said.

Governments could also subsidize materials like aluminum specifically for the buildout of renewables, he said. This could be difficult in the short term, but officials should take the opportunity to engage in “careful study” to see how to do so without “causing undue disruption,” said Semieniuk.

Officials could also work to ensure interest rates don’t go up too high, potentially by imposing strategic short-term price controls, said Semieniuk. But the best thing, he said, would be to end the disruptions outright.

“The most important policy is to end the conflict,” he said.

Pagel said governments should also end fossil fuel subsidies and force polluters to pay for their pollution.

“We need to build in human rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, and environmental responsibility at every step,” she said. “The tools exist. What we need is the will to use them.”

Though the war is creating incentives to boost fossil fuels, doing so would be shortsighted, said Kingsmill Bond, a strategist for the energy thinktank Ember.

“This is the first oil shock in history where oil faces a superior alternative. Solar, wind and EV are cheaper, local, faster to deploy, and huge,” he said. “They were winning even before the crisis, and this just galvanizes change.”

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Reckoning With Cesar Chavez Is Reckoning With America

It’s 6:15 a.m. on Wednesday, March 18, and I’m being driven to Los Angeles International Airport by a loved one. The freeway is congested—traffic unrelenting. I bring out my phone to check my messages and am stunned to discover the New York Times’ investigation into the allegations of sexual abuse by multiple women at the hands of United Farm Workers co-founder Cesar Chavez. I tense up remembering that my loved one has suffered sexual abuse at the hands of family members. I’m reluctant to talk to her about the reporting. “Read it out loud,” she says defiantly.

For the next hour and 15 minutes of LA traffic, I find myself awkwardly reading the shocking report out loud, occasionally pausing so that she can catch her breath. After reading that Chavez raped children, I, too, need to catch my breath.

Pain, anger, and betrayal burn through me as I finish the story. I want to talk through what I’m feeling. Not surprisingly, my loved one processes in silence, not unlike the women Chavez abused.

Cesar Chavez was never a squeaky-clean movement leader. I was once undocumented and I grew up knowing he hated the likes of us (“wetbacks” and “illegals,” he called us). I looked past this because I felt U.S. Latinos needed a Mexican American leader to look up to. But the rape of women and children is not something any of us can look past.

I often speak to high school and college classes, and when I ask young people what they know about Cesar Chavez, some identify him as a labor leader while others think he was a boxer, and a few even think he was a revolutionary akin to Che Guevara. Ironic, if you consider that Che Guevara, much like Chavez, was better at revolutions than he was at governing.

According to Miriam Pawel’s The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement, Chavez’s lack of interest in establishing a well-run union was the main factor in the United Farm Workers weakening over time. Chavez saw how the 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which offered guarantees for union organizing, would shift the core work of the UFW from protest to administration, and he was not interested. Like Guevara, he was more interested in toppling institutions than in governing them.

The way Latino communities are rallying around the women who were raped and abused by Chavez should serve as an example to the nation for how to handle men who commit such crimes.

Records from those early days show that Chavez’s leadership relied on a kind of cultlike group therapy, known as the Game, which he borrowed from Synanon, the notoriously violent and controlling cult of the 1970s. (You can listen to “American Rehab,” our three-part investigation of Synanon and the rehab industry it spawned, here.) As author Jeffrey W. Rubin wrote for Dissent, “Playing the Game, a harsh variant of the encounter group therapies popular in the 1970s, participants ganged up verbally and emotionally against one member, hurling brutal insults and criticisms, ostensibly with the goal of strengthening the group. By mid-1977, the Game was played weekly at La Paz [the UFW headquarters], and almost everyone there joined in, along with union staff from around the state.” This toxic nature of his management led to the exodus to some of the brightest leaders in the movement.

The way the U.S. Latino community is rallying around the women who were raped and abused by Chavez should serve as an example to the nation for how to handle men who commit such crimes. No man is greater than a movement, and I include our founding fathers, who owned slaves, and Donald Trump, who for some ungodly reason continues to protect pedophiles on the Epstein list.

Chavez was a hero to many of us, yet the cruelty of our current president can be found in his cruelty. How he didn’t allow dissent in the ranks. How he demanded absolute loyalty. The way he assumed the movement was him, and vice versa. It is well documented that Chavez insisted on sacrifice and total commitment from the people within the movement. That’s how he kept power, and as we all know, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Mural artist MisterAlek replaces a portrait of Cesar Chavez that he created in 2021 at the Watts/Century Latino Organization, with a portrait of Delores Huerta, in Los Angeles on Friday, March 20, 2026.Christina House/Los Angeles Times/Getty

As we begin to tear down statues of Cesar Chavez in our public squares, let us also tear down the statues of the Confederates who committed treason against our country. Only then can we begin to imagine a better nation. One where our statues, streets, and holidays are equally named after women—the founding mothers, long unsung and forgotten, but always the backbone of every movement.

As we continue to reckon with Chavez’ legacy, we must highlight the survivors, not just the perpetrator. So when it comes to that list of women and girls who process in silence, it’s important we do what my loved one told me to do that Wednesday morning: “Read it out loud.”

Ana Murguia. Debra Rojas. Dolores Huerta. Let’s put their names on some of those streets and squares.

Rafael Agustin, a member of Mother Jones_’ board of directors, was a writer on the award-winning CW show_ Jane the Virgin and is the author of the bestselling memoir Illegally Yours and a producer of the new documentary Los Lobos: Native Sons.

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