The Oklahoma Communities Gutted by ICE

Cars and trucks pass by. Some slow down and hastily take a quick photo or video of local law enforcement and ICE agents making the arrest. The scene disappears in their rearview mirror as they drive on. The arrests are fast. Within minutes, the person operating the vehicle is no longer there, snatched and torn away from one life and forcibly transported into another that will never be the same. And, within minutes, the nameless and often faceless agents in the unmarked SUV’s and trucks apprehending them on highways and roads across Oklahoma disappear as well.

A white Ford Transit work van sits abandoned on the side of a street in the north suburbs of Oklahoma City. Work tools remain in the storage area in the back. A work order lies on the passenger seat. Take-out food rests on the dashboard. On the south side of the city, a maroon Ford Fusion is left stranded in the grass off Interstate 44. Construction gloves, a camouflage jacket, yellow safety vest, a cooler and a thermos with an Arkansas Razorbacks logo remain inside the car.

ICE stopped and arrested the man driving this small work truck the morning of February 20, 2026.

In a state where all seventy-seven counties voted to support Trump and his anti-immigrant policies in 2024, state and local law enforcement have signed on as important allies in the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Over thirty state and local law enforcement agencies in Oklahoma now have 287(g) agreements with ICE, which effectively deputize them to ICE. This includes the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, with over 700 state troopers who are now empoweredto make immigration arrests. Recently released data shows that more than 1,300 people were arrested by ICE in Oklahoma in the first two and a half months of 2026.

“Just because we don’t see the things that we’re seeing out of Minneapolis, doesn’t mean people aren’t being detained,” an Oklahoma City-based immigration lawyer said to me. “It doesn’t mean that people aren’t being taken and disappeared…because that is happening in Oklahoma.”

A prison bus passes through a residential neighborhood in Cushing, Oklahoma, transferring people detained by ICE from the local Cimarron Correctional Facility to other detention centers. A resident of the area said, “Big buses and vans, they come by here all the time, day and night.”

Years of criminal justice reform have left the state, several counties and towns, as well as the profit-driven private prison industry hungry to fill empty bed spaces or to explore new sources of revenue. Incarcerating and exploiting immigrants for ICE has proven to be an opportunistic and lucrative alternative. Jails in Kay, Logan, Grady, Blaine and Tulsa counties now detain immigrants for ICE. Cimarron Correctional Facility outside the town of Cushing operated by the private prison company CoreCivic, currently detains 600 immigrants per day.

And in late 2025, CoreCivic, DHS/ICE and the Oklahoma Department of Corrections cut a deal to repurpose and reopen Diamondback Correctional Facility, in Watonga, as an ICE detention center. The 2,000-bed prison in rural northern Oklahoma sat empty for ten years. Reopening Diamondback is expected to generate combined annual revenues of over $100 million for CoreCivic, the state, the county, and the city of Watonga, population some 2,500.

“We’re losing really, really wonderful people to this craziness.”

Attorneys, activists, churches, and community groups and organizers are respondingwith new strategies to serve and protect their communities. High school students—many from immigrant families—courageously walked out of class in protest of ICE activity and the racism and intolerance driving immigration policy.

Yet here in Oklahoma, ICE’s public elusiveness is also a menacing reminder of its presence everywhere. For individuals, mixed-status households and communities in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and smaller towns, the fear and anxiety of knowing but not seeing is often paralyzing.

The front doors at the ICE office on Sovereign Row in Oklahoma City close behind a Venezuelan man as he dutifully enters and presents himself for his scheduled check in with ICE. His friends sit in the car and cry when he never returns.

A Honda Civic sits in the parking lot of an apartment complex. The driver’s side window is shattered. A white plastic laundry basket remains in the front seat filled with clean clothes. Cars and trucks continue to pass by the white Ford Transit and the maroon Ford Focus. The day continues. Time moves on, yet inside that abandoned car or truck or van, time stands still. A worker doesn’t show up to the worksite or the office. A seat in a classroom is suddenly empty. A husband or wife, mother or father, brother or sister doesn’t return to their home in Oklahoma ever again. A life is violently suspended and replaced with absence and grief.

Detention

Grady County Jail reflected in the window of a local restaurant.

Grady County Jail, in Chickasha, Oklahoma is one of more than thirty counties, local law enforcement agencies and state agencies in Oklahoma with agreements to detain immigrants or perform immigration enforcement duties for ICE through an agreement with the US Marshals Service. In 2019, a 13,000-square-foot addition to the jail was completed, adding some 200 beds.

Diamondback detention facility.

Diamondback Correctional Facility, in Watonga is operated by the private prison company CoreCivic, formerly CCA (Corrections Corporation of America); it opened in 1998 and held federal prisoners until it was closed in 2010, sittingempty for almost fifteen years.

In late 2025, the facility reopened as an immigration detention center. CoreCivic said in October that it expects to earn $100 million annually from Diamondback once the facility isfully activated. The Oklahoma Department of Corrections receives an ‘administrative fee’ of $833,333 each month to monitor CoreCivic’s compliance and perform other administrative functions related to the facility.

Watonga

Watonga, Oklahoma

Watonga City Manager Leroy Alsup explains howrevenue from Diamondback could be utilized by the town: “It could be put into an equipment fund…being a small town, we’ve got a lot of dated equipment that could stand to be updated…Most municipalities have a lot of water and sewer lines that are aged and need to be replaced. When we apply for grants to update and replace water and sewer lines, we’ll have more funding for matching funds to get that. There’s a variety of ways that additional funding can help us. It’s just too early to show that impact yet, but the potential is there.”

Watonga Senior Center.

Watonga Senior Center plays a vital role in Watonga, offering exercise classes, inexpensive meals, social events, and serving as a meeting place for the Kiwanis Club. I spoke to four of the women working there: they’ve noticed the increased traffic at Diamondback.

“We don’t get a whole lot of information about who all is out there and how many. If you drive by there, it’s packed with vehicles, though. Big vans, which I assume are bringing in people,” one of the women says.

A collage of old Watonga High School yearbook photos dating back to the 1950s covers the wall of a local restaurant, the Eagle’s Nest.

Jim, long time resident of Watonga.

Jim owns a paint and body shop in Watonga. Regarding the reopening of Diamondback Correctional Facility for the detention of immigrants for ICE, Jim says it will profit CoreCivic, but is skeptical that it will do much for Watonga.

“I really don’t see much of a benefit…I don’t know where they will bring in the workers from. Out of this county or what, but you would think there would be some that live here that might work there. It might bring a few jobs.”

Mural in downtown Watonga.

A bus operated by Transcor America, LLC travels down a rural road from Cimarron Correctional Facility, which is operated by the private prison company, CoreCivic. Transcor America is a subsidiary of CoreCivic.

Impact

ICE arrested the driver of this car the morning of February 24, 2026.

After ICE arrested the driver of a nondescript sedan, the car was left on the side of the road. Several sets of chopsticks and air filter cartridges for a work mask were left on the floor. Construction gloves, a camouflage jacket, a yellow safety vest and a small cooler remained on the passenger seat. A yellow work helmet and some personal belongings remained in the back seat.

Federico has lived in Oklahoma for over 22 years. Released by ICE, he is required to wear an ankle monitor.

Federico, 39, was born in Mexico, but Oklahoma has been his home for over twenty-two years. He is married and has two children who are US citizens. In November 2025 he traveled on a bus with other musicians to perform a concert in Midland, Texas. In the city of Anson, Texas,local law enforcement asked to see the status of everyone on the bus. He spent the next six weeks detained by ICE. Eventually he was released on bond but was required to wear a GPS ankle monitor. Federico was one of more than 42,000 people ICE had shackled with GPS ankle monitors across the country as of February 2026.

“Having this monitor on my leg is a reminder that they have a hold on me by the foot. It’s them telling you that you’re not free.”

“I live with this fear that I’m always being monitored,” he explained to me. “It’s very complicated to have this thing on your leg when you’re going to sleep or during your routine in life every day. I’m always afraid of damaging it, bumping it on the edge of the table. I don’t want them to think I’m trying to damage it or trying to be free of it. Your life can’t go back to being normal. Nothing is back to normal. Having this monitor on my leg, it is a reminder that they have a hold on me by the foot. It’s them telling you that you’re not free.”

Students walk out at Santa Fe South High School in Oklahoma City.

Several hundred students walked out of classes at Santa Fe South High School in Oklahoma City on February 18, protestingagainst ICE and immigration enforcement threatening their community.

“We deserve to be heard. We deserve to be seen as people. We are not animals to be deported,” one student demonstrator said.

Inside an abandoned car of a Honduran man detained by ICE.

On February 22, 2026, a young man from Honduras spent the morning washing his clothes at a nearby coin laundromat. ICE arrested him when he returned home to his apartment.

“They pulled up three deep and surrounded him. They blocked him in first,” a neighbor who witnessed the arrest said. “I saw one of them pull out their gun and broke the front driver’s side window. They jacked him out and treated him like a fuckinganimal. It was disgusting. They pulled him out, took his phone from his hand and just threw him on the ground. Then they just threw him in the car and took off with him. They didn’t say nothing else.”

Witnesses say the ICE arrest was quick, no more than a few minutes. A bottle of Centrum multivitamins remained in the cupholder between the seats. A laundry basket filled with unfolded clothes rested on the passenger seat.

Bureaucracy

David L. Moss Justice Center

The David L. Moss Justice Center is the site of the Tulsa County Jail. According to the most recent data released by ICE, each day, the facility is jailing an average of 33 immigrants for the agency, who on average stay five days before they are moved to other detention centers in Oklahoma, Texas, or elsewhere in the country. More than three out of four people detained by ICE here have no criminal record.

The state Senate Judiciary Committee meets on February 25, 2026, at the Oklahoma State Capitol.

Of the thirty immigration-related bills filed by state legislators, most did not progress, including a bill prohibiting NGOs from providing assistance to undocumented people and asylum seekers, anothermandating all law enforcement agencies in Oklahoma to enter into287(g) agreements with ICE, and a law denying US citizenship to children born in Oklahoma to parents who are not US citizens or legal residents.

State Sen. Michael Brooks in his office at the Oklahoma State Capitol.

State Sen. Michael Brooks, DemocratofOklahoma City, sits in his office at the Oklahoma State Capitol. A lawyer by profession, he specializes in immigration law and is the author of Senate Bill 1470, which proposed access for state-level elected officials or religious leaders to enter and inspect privately owned correctional facilities, including immigration detention centers.

“There were at least three private prisons in Oklahoma that were either being used for other purposes or were vacant…If we’re going to allow these private prisons to come to the state of Oklahoma, I think it’s reasonable that state elected officials would be able to go and inspect them,” he said to me. Though it received strong support, the bill failed to advance.

Pushback

Staff members of the Spero Project.

Staff of the Spero Project assist a woman who has called into a rapid response hotline about her son, who was recently pulled over by local law enforcement while on his way to work, transferred into ICE custody, and placed in detention. She calls to try and find out where he is.

After searches through several online sources and phone calls, they locate the young man at Cimarron Correctional Facility in Cushing, Oklahoma. An hour later, a different woman calls the hotline to ask how she and her partner can self-deport.

Since October 2025, in partnership with a group calledCritical Response Network Oklahoma, community volunteers and staff meet two days a week at an undisclosed location to operate the phone hotline.

“Any amount of information,” a hotline volunteer says, “even it it’s bad, helps them deal with the chaos” and lack of information. “When we’re able to find someone in the system and tell them where, and kind of explain what might happen—it’s terrible, but I think, especially the wives, that helps them kind of have something to deal with.

“They may not at that moment of crisis think of the questions to ask, but I think we generally tell them, this is where he is, this is what might happen, this is probably what the timeline will be. I think, in the midst of the chaos and tragedy, that little bit of information helps.”

“For somebody who doesn’t know where the person is, it’s really hard to find out. And the uncertainty creates a lot more stress and a lot more sadness to the family members,” the volunteer says. “It’s like, ‘I don’t know where he’s at. I don’t know where he is.’”

A free legal clinic in Oklahoma City offers assistance on immigration issues.

Elsewhere in Oklahoma City, vulnerable families and individuals attend free legal clinics where volunteers and immigration lawyers assist with powers of attorney, standby guardianship, community resources, and free legal consultations.

“We’re losing really, really wonderful people to this craziness,” says a member of Latitude Legal and Community Response Network, which organizes the clinic. “We’re losing community members. And what I think people are really beginning to understand is that we are in proximity with so many people that maybe have unstable legal status, and you would never know it.

“The way things have changed in policy over the past year and two months, it is making things increasingly difficult to stay in status. This argument of ‘come the right way’—well, they did come the right way, and those pathways are narrowing on them. We’ve changed the rules on them mid-game.”

Maria, 30, has to rely on friends, family, and volunteers, for rides to work and essential shopping.

Fear of ICE forces Maria, 30, to rely on friends, family, and volunteers, for rides to work and essential shopping.

“When President Trump came into office, everything changed overnight,” she said from the passenger’s seat during one ride. “Right now, you can’t go out without having constant fear that you’re going to get pulled over, or ICE is going to grab you. You almost don’t have a life, because you have to go to work, you have to go out to get groceries, but you’re going and looking in the rearview mirror to see if anybody’s there.

“Before you leave the store, you’re looking around to see if there’s a patrol out there waiting for you. It’s just being afraid for yourself, but also everybody around you. I’ve always been an independent woman, and I do my own thing and take care of my own life. It’s really hard to depend on other people to help me do things that I could do before.”

Rev. Kara Farrow leads a prayer at an event led by ACLU of Oklahoma and a community defense group.

Reverend Kara Farrow of the Fellowship Lutheran Church in Tulsa leads a prayer at a know-your-rights and rapid response training in March, held by the state’s ACLU chapter and Community Response Network Oklahoma, a community defense organization.

“Within the last two weeks, about twenty members of the congregation have received letters,” Farrow says, demanding their presence at ICE offices in Oklahoma City, Dallas, or Houston. “Last Wednesday, the man that serves as the assisting minister was detained in Cushing. And there are just appointments upon appointments upon appointments coming up. What is heartbreaking is that as much as we’ve tried, they’re taking them anyway. I just found out that another person who was detained two weeks ago is being sent back to Venezuela. And so it’s just week after week.”

Johnny, 53, kneels on the sidewalk at the corner of 23rd Street and May Avenue in central Oklahoma City. He was part of a small group that gathered in February to protest the Trump administration and ICE raids in the city and around the country.

Greg Constantine produced this work as part of the 2026 Bertha Challenge Fellowship.

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The Supreme Court Just Hit Pause on an Abortion Pill Showdown

The Supreme Court has rejected a federal appeals court’s attempt to end telemedicine and mail-order abortions, hitting pause on a fast-moving case that threatened to decimate access to abortion pills nationwide.

The one-paragraph SCOTUS order, issued late Thursday afternoon, means that for the foreseeable future, the abortion pill mifepristone can continue to be prescribed via telehealth and sent through the mail, even to patients living in states where abortion is banned.

Abortion patients, providers, and advocates have been in turmoil since May 1, when the far-right Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order suspending FDA rules that allowed online dispensing of mifepristone. That order was stayed by Justice Samuel Alito for 10 days while the Supreme Court struggled to decide how to proceed in a potentially monumental—and politically explosive—case.

Since the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, more than a dozen Republican-dominated legislatures have enacted laws that severely restrict or ban abortion within their borders. But over the past four years, the number of abortions has risen nationwide, including in states where abortion is almost entirely illegal.

Abortion foes blame Obama- and Biden-era FDA rule changes expanding access to mifepristone, one of two drugs used in the standard abortion-pill regimen, including a 2023 rule that eliminated a requirement for in-person dispensing. Now, almost two-thirds of abortions in the US happen with abortion pills, and nearly 30 percent occur by telemedicine.

Louisiana sued the FDA last fall, arguing that the 2023 rule change was arbitrary, capricious, and “avowedly political”—not based on sound science, the state claimed, but on Democrats’ determination to negate the Supreme Court’s intent in Dobbs to return abortion policy to the states.

The FDA had argued that the lawsuot would disrupt its own, ongoing review of mifepristone’s safety, announced last fall. Mifepristone’s manufacturers, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro Inc., warned of the potentially dire consequences of allowing states to upend drug regulations put in place years or even decades ago.

On Thursday, Alito—the arch-conservative who authored the Dobbs decision—was one of two justices who wrote in favor of letting the Fifth Circuit’s order go into effect. That would have cut off the supply of mail-order mifepristone to states like Louisiana, where telehealth providers are sending nearly 1,000 packages of abortion pills every month.

“Even this conservative Supreme Court is not willing to endorse anti-abortion extremists’ latest desperate attempt to deprive women of needed healthcare.”

Alito blasted his fellow justices’ decision to pause the Fifth Circuit order as “unreasoned” and “remarkable.” He also ranted about blue-state shield laws, which provide the legal protections that make it possible for telehealth providers to care for patients in states where abortion is restricted or banned. Such laws, he said, are “a scheme” to thwart states like Louisiana, which has some of the toughest anti-abortion restrictions in the country.

In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas brought up the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era federal criminal statute that conservatives argue remains the law of the land. If enforced, it would amount to a national abortion ban.

Comstock “bans using ‘the mails’ to ship any ‘drug . . . for producing abortion,’” Thomas wrote, and suggested that Danco and GenBioPro are engaged in a “criminal enterprise.” He said the drug companies—which appealed the Fifth Circuit ruling to SCOTUS—”cannot be irreparably harmed by [an] order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes.”

Abortion advocates expressed relief that the other justices—including several who have repeatedly ruled against abortion rights—did not let the Fifth Circuit ruling take effect. “Even this conservative Supreme Court is not willing to endorse anti-abortion extremists’ latest desperate attempt to deprive women of needed healthcare,” said Lizzy Hinkley, legal director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine. She called the case “a deliberate effort to disrupt access to telemedicine abortion across the country and cause undue confusion among patients and providers.”

“The ban on mifepristone through telemedicine was never about safety,” said Dr. Angel Foster, a telemedicine provider and co-founder of The Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, or The MAP. “It was about controlling people’s bodies and lives.”

But the reprieve is only temporary, she added. “Lawmakers have made it clear they are desperate to block access to medication abortion by any means necessary.”

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Why the Next President Could Finally Be Elected by the Popular Vote

Something big happened in Virginia last month that you probably missed.

On April 13, Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a bill making Virginia the 18th state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

That’s an agreement among states to elect the president by the popular vote rather than the Electoral College.

The compact goes into effect when enough states sign onto it and reach a total of 270 electoral votes—the number needed to elect the president.

With Virginia’s support, states in the compact now have 222 electoral votes.

And the results of the midterms could push the popular vote effort over the top.

If Democrats take control of state governments in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, or Arizona, and legislatures in those states adopt the compact, that would put it over 270.

That means there’s actually a chance the president could be elected by the popular vote in 2028 instead of the fundamentally undemocratic Electoral College.

Watch our new video to learn more about how consequential this would be.

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Sam Altman Is Taking a Lot of Punches on the Witness Stand

Can you trust Sam Altman?

That was one of the central themes at the high-profile trial between the OpenAI CEO and Elon Musk in California this week, as Musk’s lawyers peppered Altman with questions on his work relationships, including his temporary ouster from OpenAI three years ago by a mistrustful board of directors. Steven Molo, Musk’s top litigator, referred to testimony from executives like former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, who said Altman had a habit of “creating chaos” by “saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person.”

Molo also cited an April New Yorker investigation in which a wide array of sources close to Altman described him as someone with an unrelenting drive for power.

Distraught text messages from Altman to Murati pleading for his job in 2023 raised parallels with how Altman’s team framed Musk’s explosive exit from OpenAI in 2018, after the Tesla head lost a reported power struggle for control of the company. Altman’s lawyers framed Musk’s 2024 suit againstOpenAI and its leadership as simple retaliation, unmotivated by any actual concern about OpenAI’s original, feel-good nonprofit mission to advance AI in a manner “to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”

Musk’s argument is that OpenAI abandoned its values for profits and should therefore return $150 billion to its nonprofit arm—but for Musk, the trial doesn’t particularly seem to revolve around the facts of the case.

The wins, such as they are, come in the form of peeling back the tireless hours of public relations strategizing and mythologizing to make OpenAI and Altman look ridiculous. Musk’s lawyers’ examination of Altman seems intended to extract as many unconvincing responses of “I don’t recall” and “I can’t say how other people think” as possible. (Honestly, just getting these guys to talk in environments they don’t have full control over does most of the job.) Molo’s questioning often devolved into pettiness:

Molo: “Are you completely trustworthy?”

Altman: “I believe so.”

Molo: “You don’t know whether you’re completely trustworthy?”

Altman: “I’ll just amend my answer to yes.”

The public doesn’t need to think Musk is right; they only need to think Altman lies a lot.

A lot of the work has already been done for Musk. According to a national NBC News survey from March, 57 percent of registered voters said the risks of AI outweigh its benefits. Sam Altman is one of the most prominent faces of the industry, and there were two separate attacks on Altman’s home in the span of three days last month.

So as closing arguments wrap up and jury deliberations begin next week, the result of the lawsuit may not even matter. The damage is already underway.

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Trump Taps Former Private Prison Exec to Run ICE

David Venturella, who spent more than a decade as an executive at the private-prison behemoth GEO Group, will be the next acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday. Venturella will oversee Donald Trump’s mass deportation operations—and the country’s rapidly expanding immigration detention system.

Venturella will begin leading the agency when current Acting Director Todd Lyons steps down May 31. (ICE has had a series of acting directors since 2017, meaning none of them have been confirmed by the Senate.)

This has been a banner year for GEO Group, the largest private prison contractor incarcerating immigrants in the US: ICE is its single largest client.

“Last year was the most successful period for new business wins in our company’s history, and we expect 2026 to be a very active year as well,” said GEO Group CEO George Zoley on a May 6 earnings call touting “new growth opportunities” the firm “captured in 2025 and are normalizing in 2026.”

ICE contracts drove a year in which GEO made “up to approximately $520 million in new incremental annual revenues…the largest amount of new business” the company has ever drawn in a single year, Zoley said on that call.

And with Venturella leading ICE, those contracts could get even bigger. GEO Group, Zoley said, has 6,000 “idle high-security beds that remain available.” If the company is able to fill those beds with detained immigrants, that alone “could generate in excess of $300 million in annual revenues.”

It’s not unusual for the Trump administration to hire from GEO Group’s talent bench. “Border Czar” Tom Homan—a longtime friend of Venturella’s—also contracted for GEO Group. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi worked as a lobbyist for the prison contractor.

And the pipeline goes in the other direction, too: at least six former ICE officials who left government over the past decade ended up working at GEO Group, as the Washington Post reported.

“If there was ever a classic example of the revolving door phenomena, it’s David Venturella,” who “has gone from high ranking positions at ICE to GEO Group to ICE once again,” said Silky Shah, of the nonprofit Detention Watch Network, in a statement. “Like Tom Homan, Venturella’s intimate knowledge of ICE will likely yield another spike of ICE detention facility openings in the coming months as the agency operates with impunity and unprecedented funding.”

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Trump’s Deceitful Medicaid Fraud Campaign Comes to California

The Trump administration is withholding $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursement payments to California after officials alleged that the state failed to prosecute fraud in its own Medicaid program.

“There are California taxpayers and American taxpayers who are being defrauded because California isn’t taking its program seriously,” JD Vance, vice president and designated “fraud czar” said in his Wednesday announcement. “Fraudsters have actually encouraged false prescriptions and false administration of medications.”

Vance did not provide evidence of Medicaid fraud, though he did attack home care, also known as home and community-based services. Since 1983, qualifying disabled people and aging adults on Medicaid have been able to get services at home, allowing them to live outside of nursing homes and institutional settings.An essential part of the disability rights movement is for disabled people to be able to live in their communities.

“It provides everything from assistance with bathing, preparing meals, dressing, getting in and out of bed, shopping and even house cleaning, chores, laundry, etc,” Lindsay Imai Hong, the California Director of Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Network, told Mother Jones. “It’s enabled so many Californians to be able to get the support they need to live in their homes and also with their families.”

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, claimed California must explain hundreds of millions of dollars in billing and in-homeservices related to coverage for undocumented immigrants. But undocumented immigrants do not have access to Medicaid.

On Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office posted on X that the growth of home healthcare placements saves taxpayer money as it keeps “more people OUT of far more expensive nursing homes.” Disability and care advocates are currently trying to mitigate cuts to Medicaid-funded home care in California, which Newsom attempted to do previously even before Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill passed.

Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, posted on X on Wednesday that the Trump administration was targeting California “solely for political reasons.”

United Domestic Workers executive director Doug Moore also labeled the attack as politically motivated in a press release. “The real scandal is the carelessness with which politicians disregard our community members in order to line the pockets of their billionaire friends,” he said. “Last year, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress gave away $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires, by cutting vital social service programs like Medicaid and SNAP.”

In his announcement, Vance also threatened to halt federal funding to all states who don’t sufficiently go after Medicaid fraud. The Trump administration’s decision in California draws parallels to its suspension of more than $250 million in Medicaid funds from Minnesota based on fraud claims targeting Somali communities that led to unsubstantiated, right-wing conspiracy theories.

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Interior Secretary Claims Ignorance of Trump’s July 4 “Vanity Projects”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has taken a lead role in promoting President Donald Trump’s particular plans to mark America’s 250th anniversary. That includes helping fund Freedom250, an opaque, public-private partnership set up within Burgum’s department.

But how Freedom250 came about apparently is a mystery to the secretary—or so he said in congressional testimony on Wednesday.

Critics contend that the Trump administration is breaking laws, and dodging congressional oversight, by diverting funds appropriated for America250, a nonprofit organization set up by Congress to organize the country’s semiquincentennial, to Freedom250, a limited liability corporation that launched in December under the National Park Foundation, a nonprofit partner of the National Park Service, a federal agency that is part of the Interior Department.

At a House Natural Resources Committee hearing Wednesday on Interior’s budget request, Colorado Rep. Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the panel, pressed Burgum, with little success, for information on the decision-making behind Freedom250.

Burgum said he did not order anyone at Interior to set up the group.

“Do you know who did?” Huffman asked. “Who made that decision? Who ordered it?”

“I’m not aware of the final decision maker on Freedom250,” Burgum said.

Their exchange highlights the secrecy and resistance to congressional oversight that the Trump administration seeks, even as it celebrates the birthday of a country that has traditionally celebrated divided government and a constitution that gives Congress control over federal spending.

Unlike America250, Freedom250 is not legally required to hold bipartisan events. Nor is it informing lawmakers how it spends funds. And the group this year has taken over planning for high-profile, notably Trumpy events that the administration says are connected to the anniversary, including an all-day prayer festival on the National Mall on Sunday, which administration officials say will celebrate “Christian values”; an MMA fight the president plans to hold at the White House on his birthday; and an IndyCar race around the Mall in August.

Even as Trump encourages corporations, many seeking presidential support for their priorities, to fund Freedom250, Interior is also reportedly steering taxpayer funds to the group. Freedom250 has refused to detail its finances, as has Interior.

Burgum appeared before the Congress to defend a budget request that includes deep cuts to most of his department, including the National Park Service. But he is also seeking $10 billion for a general fund the administration says will pay for beautification of federal land around Washington in connection with the 250th anniversary.

Burgum has said those funds do not cover a 250-foot arch Trump wants to construct by the Potomac River. Nor do they include the $1 billion the administration wants to spend for work including the ballroom Trump hopes construct after tearing down the White House’s East Wing.

But Democrats on Wednesday repeatedly referred to the $10 billion as a “slush fund” that the department would use to support “vanity projects” touted by the president.

In connection with the 250th anniversary plans, Interior has awarded lucrative contracts to contractors reportedly favored by Trump to repair foundation and other landscaping features in Washington. The New York Times has reported that the department has repeatedly used an “urgency” exception—typically justified by life-threatening emergencies like natural disasters—to sidestep federal procurement rules that require competitive bidding~~.~~ The administration says the exception is necessary to fulfill Trump’s wish to complete the work by July 4.

As the administration races to do so, costs appear to be increasing fast. A push to upgrade the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on the National Mall by July 4, which Trump has claimed would cost $1.8 million, is now slated to cost more than $13 million, the Times reported. That project has drawn a lawsuit, and mockery, in part over images showing that contractors painted the base of the pool blue.

Burgum on Wednesday disputed some of lawmakers’ characterizations, even denying that contractors are painting the landmark.

“There is no painting going on on the reflecting pool,” he said. “It’s not paint. It’s a liner.”

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Should Trump Get $10 Billion in Apology Money? Mike Johnson Hasn’t Thought About It.

Apparently House Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t believe that Congress needs any oversight of President Trump’s actions.

During a Tuesday press conference honoring law enforcement officers as part of Police Week, Johnson dismissed a question about the Justice Department potentially settling Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service—essentially the federal government handing a $10 billion ransom in taxpayer dollars directly to the president.

“One of the things that is not in my purview is the Department of Justice, okay?” Johnson said, asked whether a settlement with Trump by an agency he runs represents a conflict of interest. “I haven’t thought about that or read into it.”

“Go ask the executive branch about it, alright?” Johnson concluded, before reminding everyone to celebrate Police Week.

Q: Do you think the DOJ ought to settle the president's $10b lawsuit? Is there a conflict of interest?MIKE JOHNSON: Um. One of the things that is not in my purview is the DOJ, ok? I haven't thought about that or read into it. I got enough to say grace over every day. Go ask the executive branch.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-05-13T14:49:06.161Z

The speaker’s response was yet another instance of his perennial shrugging off oflegislative responsibility to appease Trump. Johnson had a key role in passing cuts to essential health and food assistance programs—in large part due to accusations of “fraud and abuse”—but appears more than willing to let Trump raid government coffers on a multibillion-dollar scale.

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The President May Settle His Own Lawsuit With Your Money

The DOJ is considering settling Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, which could send about $10 billion taxpayer dollars directly into the President’s pockets, the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing three sources familiar with the matter.

In January, Trump and two of his sons sued the IRS, alleging that it failed to stop the unauthorized release of his tax documents by a government contractor who shared them with news outlets.

Trump oversees the IRS, the agency he is suing. (This, the Times delicately pointed out, raises some questions as to the validity of the lawsuit: “For a lawsuit to be valid, the two parties must actually be on opposite sides, otherwise the judge can throw out the case.”) The conflicts of interest don’t end there: the DOJ is led by the President’s former personal criminal defense lawyer.

If a settlement is reached, it could make it much harder for Trump’s finances to be investigated in the future: beyond the $10 billion taxpayer-fleecing operation, one of the settlement terms under review would require the IRS to drop any and all audits of Trump, his family, and his businesses.

Last month, Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill to prevent the President, the Vice President, and their families from collecting settlement money from the government. “While American families are getting flattened by skyrocketing costs, Donald Trump is trying to snatch up billions of taxpayer dollars to line his own pockets and settle personal scores,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) wrote.

And this isn’t the first time Trump has tried to use the Justice Department to profit. In October of 2025, he was reportedly seeking $230 million in damages from the Justice Department over the time federal agents seized classified documents he’d unlawfully brought to Mar-a-Lago and an earlier probe into his campaign’s ties to Russia.

“It’s awfully strange,” Trump said at the time, “To make a decision where I’m paying myself.”

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How Redistricting Is Upending America’s Midterms

Voters are heading to the polls for this year’s midterms, but the electoral maps are shifting under their feet in real time. Last month, the Supreme Court narrowed a provision in the Voting Rights Act that allowed states to consider race when redrawing maps. That decision set off a mad scramble by GOP state legislatures to alter their maps ahead of November’s elections, a move that could disenfranchise Black voters. It’s also supercharged a redistricting fight that began when President Donald Trump urged states to change their maps to mitigate possible losses in Congress.

Mother Jones national correspondent Tim Murphy describes the redistricting happening in Southern states as “a historic reversal of what the Voting Rights Act brought” and could lead to “homogenous white delegations to the South.”

Until recently, Democrats felt optimistic about their chances of taking back not only the House, but possibly the Senate. But they were dealt a major blow last week when their own redistricting efforts in Virginia were struck down by the state Supreme Court. Similarly, the US Supreme Court paved the way earlier this week for Alabama to revert to an electoral map with a single majority-Black district.

On this week’s More To The Story, Murphy and host Al Letson try to make sense of this unprecedented midterm season, gauge the Democrats’ chances of taking back Congress, and examine how Trump’s threats to the electoral system could play out in November.

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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Trump’s Golden Dome Would Cost $1.2 Trillion

Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense dream might seem like something out of science fiction, but it would cost real dollars, the Congressional Budget Office says—about $1.2 trillion over the next 20 years, according to a report the federal agency released today.

Trump has held the idea dear since his 2024 campaign, when he made “A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY” to “PREVENT WORLD WAR III” one of his 20 core campaign promises. Later, he rebranded it as the “Golden Dome,” and about a dozen major American weapons manufacturers (and over 2,300 smaller companies) started to compete for the privilege of building a massive interceptor-missile system in the skies over the United States.

As I reported in 2024 and again in 2025, scientists have a lot of questions about how this will work. It would nominally be modeled after Israel’s Iron Dome system, which is designed to protect a very small geographic area (something the US does not have) from improvised missiles launched from within 40 miles (which is also not happening here).

Given those constraints, the administration quickly moved to include satellite-based missile interceptors on their vision board. Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein admitted to the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee in April that this Star Wars–esque setup might not be cost-effective, either.

Trump estimated last May that his Golden Dome would cost around $175 billion and be deployable by the end of his term in 2029. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, however, says that estimate was off by approximately one trillion, seventy-four billion dollars.

Even at that staggering cost—almost the entire proposed Pentagon budget this year—the system still wouldn’t block all missiles, the CBO wrote in their report. “The system could be overwhelmed by a full-scale attack mounted by a peer or near-peer adversary,” they said.

“It would not be an impenetrable shield or be able to fully counter a large attack of the sort that Russia or China might be able to launch,” the CBO wrote. “As a result, the strategic consequences of deploying an NMD system with the capacity considered here are unclear.”

Even if the Golden Dome never intercepts a single missile, companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Anduril are likely to profit: they’re among 12 companies that have already been awarded $3.2 billion in Golden Dome contracts.

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Marty Makary Wasn’t Anti-Abortion or Pro-Vape Enough for Trump

President Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration commissioner Marty Makary resigned on Tuesday following political battles over health policy that angered anti-abortion activists and industry executives.

Makary, who led the agency in charge of promoting public health through regulating food safety, medications, tobacco, vaccines, and more, stepped down after Trump pushed him to approve fruit-flavored vapes earlier this month. According to the Wall Street Journal, advisers told the president that flavored vaping was important to young MAGA voters. Makary resisted the idea, but last Friday, the FDA adopted a new policy that opens the door for tobacco and vape companies to sell the e-cigarettes anyway.

Makary also faced criticism from anti-abortion groups who demanded the FDA reverse their approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, which is used in most abortions, to be given out without requiring an in-person visit. A federal court ordered a nationwide in-person requirement earlier this month, and the Supreme Court is still reviewing the decision. Last week, it temporarily reinstated mifepristone access through telemedicine and mail.

This latest resignation opens up another hole in the Trump administration, which has not yet appointed a permanent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director and a surgeon general to Robert F. Kennedy’s health department. Trump has also axed other key officeholders for failing to do his bidding, like former attorney general Pam Bondi and former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem.

Trump confirmed Makary’s exit on Tuesday afternoon ahead of his trip to China to speak with President Xi Jinping. “He was having some difficulty. He’s a great doctor. He’s going to go on and do well,” Trump told reporters. “Everybody wants that job.”

Makary was perhaps an attractive FDA commissioner candidate to Trump due in part to his anti-abortion views and promise to quickly transform policy. As Julianne McShane wrote for Mother Jones when Makary was confirmed last March, the FDA commissioner has spread misinformation, including telling ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that fetuses feel pain in utero several weeks before science indicates.

This was not enough for Trump and his far right supporters.

Kyle Diamantas, a deputy commissioner within the FDA, will become the acting head of the federal agency, according to Politico, which first reported Makary’s resignation. Whether Diamantas—or whoever is confirmed next—follows the Trump administration’s lead remains to be seen.

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Trump Thought He’d Escaped the Abortion Trap

By all accounts, President Donald Trump really, really did not want abortion to become a major issue this election year. But here we are, six months before the midterms, and abortion pills are back at the Supreme Court, as the state of Louisiana and abortion drug manufacturers ask to fast-track oral arguments in what is shaping up to be a blockbuster case. Conservatives are invoking the Comstock Act. And Trump’s Food and Drug Administration has been AWOL, while its top official has been forced to resign.

The swift escalation of the showdown between Louisiana and the FDA over telemedicine abortion highlights just how little control Trump has over the abortion issue—both in terms of the timeline and the outcome. Meanwhile, the case is sparking confusion, uncertainty, and dread among patients, providers, and advocates across the US.

Just to recap how we got to this point. On May 1, the right-wing Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, siding with Louisiana, issued a nationwide order suspending FDA rules that allow the abortion drug mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth and dispensed through the mail. A few days later, Justice Samuel Alito temporarily paused the order, and on Monday, he extended his stay until May 14.

The decision to take a few more days suggests that the full court is struggling to figure out its next steps in a case that could upend abortion access throughout the US—and possibly much sooner than many SCOTUS-watchers had thought likely.

All last week, justices were blasted with amicus briefs from parties with keen and conflicting interests in the outcome. Former FDA officials warned about the dire consequences of allowing states to upend drug regulations put in place years or even decades ago. Doctors and reproductive health advocates pointed to the mass of research from around the world showing that abortion pills are safe and effective, including via telemedicine.

“There’s a really long list of briefs, but nothing from the federal government. And in a case challenging the FDA’s authority, that’s remarkable.”

Conservatives, meanwhile, repeatedly brought up the Comstock Act, a 150-year-old anti-obscenity statute that hasn’t been enforced for decades. Named for the 19th-century anti-vice crusader who championed it, Comstock made it a federal crime to mail or ship “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion.” Reviving the law could end legal access to most abortions nationwide and possibly threaten other reproductive health care, such as IUDs.

In its own brief to SCOTUS, Louisiana offered an audacious option: If justices don’t allow the Fifth Circuit suspension of mail-order mifepristone to take effect, they should put the case on the 2025-2026 docket and schedule oral arguments ASAP, so that a final decision could be made as soon as the end of June or the first days of July. Drug makers GenBioPro and Danco Laboratories also suggested the court should consider taking the full case on an expedited schedule. The current term already includes such hugely consequential issues such as birthright citizenship and Temporary Protected Status for asylum seekers.

The one interested party that did not weigh in was the agency that Louisiana sued in the first place: the FDA. Even though the Fifth Circuit’s order was directed at the federal drug agency, GenBioPro and Danco filed emergency appeals asking the Supreme Court to pause the order.

As of Tuesday, the FDA remained radio silent. “There’s a really long list of briefs, but nothing from the federal government on this,” says Naomi Cahn, a law professor at the University of Virginia. “And in a case that’s challenging the agency’s authority, that’s remarkable.”

Abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, sees the FDA’s failure to speak up as yet more evidence that the Trump administration has backed itself into a very uncomfortable corner, caught between voters who overwhelmingly support reproductive rights and abortion opponents who are furious the president hasn’t worked harder on their behalf. “It’s clear,” she says, “that the Trump administration still doesn’t know what to do about this issue politically.”

The anti-abortion movement expected that when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, abortions would plummet across much of the US. The opposite has happened: In the four years since the Dobbs decision, the number of abortions has risen nationwide, including in states where abortion is almost entirely banned.

As abortion opponents have strategized to stop the flow of pills, they have focused much of their energy on attacking Obama- and Biden-era FDA rule changes for mifepristone, one of two drugs that make up the gold-standard abortion-pill regimen. Approved by the FDA in 2000, mifepristone was subject to extremely strict rules and placed in a program—known as Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS—normally reserved for the most dangerous drugs. Starting in 2016, some of those rules were relaxed, including a requirement for in-person prescribing and dispensing in 2023. Now, almost two-thirds of abortions in the US happen with abortion pills, and nearly 30 percent occur by telemedicine.

The first sweeping assault on the FDA rules, in a 2022 case that also originated in the Fifth Circuit, ended when the Supreme Court ultimately held that the plaintiffs—anti-abortion doctors and medical organizations—didn’t have standing to sue. But the justices made no determination on the underlying issue—the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone—and left the door open to other plaintiffs who might have standing.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill tried her luck with a narrower lawsuit last fall, arguing that the Biden administration’s decision to permanently ditch the in-person dispensing requirement was “arbitrary,” “capricious,” and “avowedly political.” It was not based on sound science, she argued, but on the Democrats’ determination to thwart the effects of the Dobbs decision that handed abortion policy to the states. Murrill claimed that the telemedicine rule interfered with Louisiana’s right to regulate abortion as it sees fit, while making it too easy for women to be tricked or coerced into having abortions they don’t want.

The FDA responded, not by defending the 2023 rules, but by pointing to its own ongoing review of mifepristone’s safety, which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and then-FDA commissioner Marty Makary announced last fall. At the time, Kennedy and Makary cited the Biden administration’s purported “lack of adequate consideration” before making the 2023 rules change; they also cited “recent safety concerns”—such as supposedly high rates of abortion pill complications—raised by the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center in a study that has been widely debunked as junk science. In its court filings, the FDA argued that Louisiana’s lawsuit threatened to “short-circuit the agency’s orderly review” and should be put on hold. It also argued that Louisiana didn’t have standing to sue.

But the FDA study has been widely seen as a delaying tactic by a president reluctant to take a stand on abortion that might alienate voters. Trump has blamed many of his past political setbacks on abortion, and in his second term has avoided sweeping actions that would put the issue on the political front burner. For example, in defiance of the hopes of many conservatives, his Justice Department has declined to enforce the Comstock Act. His failure to take meaningful action to stop the flow of pills in the US has infuriated anti-abortion leaders. “Trump is the problem,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the influential president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Wall Street Journal last week. “The president is the problem.”

“They’ve been under a lot of pressure—threading this needle of defending the agency’s past actions [on mifepristone], while a lot of people within the Republican Party are upset about them.”

In the Louisiana case, the anti-abortion ideologues on the Fifth Circuit did what Trump officials have not. Using the FDA’s sham mifepristone review, and citing the statements by Kennedy and Makary about the Biden FDA’s “lack of adequate consideration,” they have set up the circumstances to potentially gut access to abortion pills. “You have the FDA conceding that there’s a question about whether they did this properly [on mifepristone],” says Sonia Suter, a law professor at George Washington University. “That only heightens the Fifth Circuit’s belief that the FDA had no authority to [get rid of the in-person dispensing rule] in the first place.”

The FDA’s silence at the Supreme Court may well be construed to further bolster Louisiana’s case, Ziegler says. Louisiana is arguing that the FDA’s actions—or lack thereof—show that the agency agrees that the 2023 rules change was problematic. “The court could easily use the FDA’s silence the way Louisiana is using it.”

But Makary’s resignation, or perhaps firing, on Tuesday—which abortion opponents and others have been pushing for some time—also highlights the agency’s wider “disarray,” says Drexel University law professor David Cohen. “They’ve been under a lot of pressure—threading this needle of defending the agency’s past actions [on mifepristone], while a lot of people within the Republican Party are upset about them.” Given the politics and the chaos, he says, “I wasn’t surprised they didn’t file anything.”

The central question raised by Alito’s extension of his stay against the Fifth Circuit is, why? “The court seems to be really struggling,” Suter says, “not so much with the legal questions, but with how what they do is going to affect the integrity of the court.” Battered by reporting about the court’s shadow docket, she says, justices “may be worried about looking like they’re rushing too much” to resolve the kinds of hugely consequential issues that the FDA case raises—not just about abortion, but also about the rights of states to second-guess federal drug regulation.

Yet Louisiana and mifepristone manufacturers have all indicated that they want SCOTUS to take the case on its merits, perhaps on an expedited schedule during the current term. “Basically, they’ve said, We know what the district court is going to ultimately rule,” Suter says. “We know what the Fifth Circuit is going to ultimately rule…Why wait?”

If the Supreme Court does take the case, conservative groups have made clear they plan to use the opportunity to push the justices on the Comstock Act. At least two justices—Alito and Clarence Thomas—have signaled they think the long-defunct statute remains the law of the land.

In one amicus brief filed last week, more than 100 Republican members of Congress accused the Biden-era FDA of flouting Comstock when it ended the in-person dispensing requirement. “The FDA cannot purport to authorize conduct criminalized under federal law,” the brief contends. “[T]hat would exceed its constitutional authority.”

The far-right nonprofit Advancing American Freedom, writing for dozens of other groups, argues that by failing to comply with Comstock, “the FDA has directly harmed Louisiana and undermined the exercise of its authority to prohibit abortion drugs.”

Louisiana made similar arguments when it first sued the FDA last fall. But generally, Comstock has remained very much a background issue. The conservative briefs are aimed at “injecting” it back into the case, says Amanda Barrow, senior staff attorney at the UCLA Law Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. “It’s just an extremely anti-democratic argument,” she says. Reviving Comstock would give abortion opponents “a no-exceptions nationwide abortion ban that they could never convince modern voters to enact.”

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New York Hospital Faces Criminal Subpoena in Texas Over Trans Youth Care

The Trump administration has sent subpoenas to dozens of hospitals across the nation over the past year, demanding access to information about children receiving gender-affirming care and the doctors treating them.

Those efforts have mostly failed. At least eight separate Trump administration administrativesubpoenas, which would force hospitals to release trans kids’ medical records, have been thrown out. Another massive slate of DOJ subpoenas against California hospitals was dropped in January.

Now, the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas is trying a new tactic: Its prosecutors sent out a grand jury subpoena to NYU Langone Hospital seeking confidential information about patients under age 18, according to a statement released by the hospital May 11. As S. Baum of the newsletter Erin In The Morning wrote, this means the federal government is pursuing a criminal case:

[T]his is a dire escalation…this round of subpoenas entails a criminal case, meaning providers or hospital officials face risk of arrest and jail time. It does not appear to target parents of trans kids or trans patients. News of the subpoena also means the federal government has assembled a grand jury, an important step towards criminal proceedings.

“We understand that these developments may be concerning to our patients, providers, and others,” the hospital told its patients. “Please know that NYU Langone takes the privacy of your protected health information very seriously and we are evaluating our response to the subpoena.”

Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, called the subpoena “a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate medical providers based on the this administration’s ideological opposition to transgender people and to this healthcare.”

Since prior attempts to pressure hospitals into handing over patient information have been unsuccessful, Minter said, the Department of Justice is now trying to get that same information by pursuing federal criminal charges. And by doing so in Texas, he added, they’re attempting “to find a jurisdiction that would would likely be sympathetic to the administration’s goals.”

“It’s just an egregious abuse of federal power,” Minter said. “This is mafia-type behavior.”

This isn’t the first time NYU Langone has been targeted for its work with transgender patients. It’s the latest in a long back-and-forth between the hospital, its patients, and various government bodies. January 2025, the hospital stopped accepting new patients into its Transgender Youth Health Program following a Trump executive order which attempted to prohibit federally funded hospitals from providing gender-affirming care to minors. They were met with protests at the time. Then, just over a year later, the hospital announced it was ending that program altogether “due to the current regulatory environment,” and were met with more protests from trans kids and their families, many of whom scrambled to find care elsewhere.

In early March, New York Attorney General Letitia James ordered the hospital to resume care. On March 18, then-Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche sent a letter to James demanding that the hospital not reinstate trans youth care. Meanwhile, trans community advocates in New York have pressed the hospital, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, to do more to protect gender-affirming care for all New Yorkers.

In New York, patients and doctors are theoretically protected by a state-level “Shield Law,” which is designed to protect those seeking or providing gender-affirming or abortion-related healthcare from out-of-state retaliation. “New York has strong protections in place to protect the privacy of patient records,” a spokesperson for the New York Attorney General’s office told Mother Jones. “Every health care institution in New York should seek to protect both patients and providers.” New York’s shield law applies to criminal investigations, not just civil ones; many other state-level shield laws do not.

And there is little case law indicating how such protective legislation would hold up in the face of federal investigations—and this particular investigation is coming from a court with a track record of repeatedly ruling that trans people are not protected by federal anti-discrimination law. “This could turn out to be a very important battleground,” Minter said.

More than 40 hospitals nationwide have terminated some form of gender-affirming care since Trump took office.

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In Approving Alabama Gerrymander, the Roberts Court Shows Its Naked Political Bias

In a stunning act of political partisanship, the Roberts Court on Monday night discarded its own precedents to green-light a last-ditch effort by Alabama to use a gerrymandered congressional map for the 2026 midterms. The move, which comes less than two weeks after the court destroyed the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, will reduce Black representation.

Monday’s 6-3 order, divided along partisan lines, shows how Republican-controlled states can use the high court’s April 29 Callais decision as carte-blanche to shut Black representatives out of Congress. In Alabama’s case, precedent, court doctrine, and a damning lower-court ruling stood in the way of the state throwing out its current map containing two majority-Black congressional districts represented by Democrats. Monday night’s decision of the Republican-appointed justices to toss all that aside shows how the court has not only unleashed a new wave of racial and partisan gerrymandering, but is sweeping away any obstacles so that Republicans nab as many seats as possible this November—enough to potentially prevent Democrats from retaking the House.

“There’s something bizarre going on with the court making choices that seem to very heavily benefit one party.”

Since the 2020 census, the Republican-controlled Alabama legislature has been pushing for a map that would give Black voters, who comprise 27 percent of the state’s population, the ability to elect their candidate of choice in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts. But after Callais, Republican leaders of the state legislature have gone further and vowed to eliminate both of the state’s majority-Black districts, which would mean that the state that gave rise to the civil rights movement and was the home of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, the Birmingham church bombing, and Bloody Sunday in Selma would have no Black representation in Congress. The court’s Monday intervention puts the 6-1 map into effect, but leaves open the door for the legislature to attempt a 7-0 map, if not in time for this year’s elections, then in plenty of time for 2028.

Just last week, Chief Justice John Roberts gave a speech where he insisted the justices were not “political actors,” but the court’s last-minute intervention in favor of Alabama violates every norm the court claims to follow. “The rank disrespect of the Chief Justice coming out and warning people that they shouldn’t assume that the court is partisan tests basic credulity,” says Kareem Crayton, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “I don’t think you have to have a law degree to recognize that there’s something bizarre going on with the court making choices that seem to very heavily benefit one party.”

Part of what makes Monday’s order effectively instituting Alabama’s preferred map so brazen is that the court had already rejected it—twice. Just three years ago, the court tossed an Alabama map with one Black majority district in Allen v. Milligan, ordering Alabama to create a second majority-Black district. It then reaffirmed Allen in the run-up to the 2024 election when Alabama Republicans attempted to evade the court’s order. After the Supreme Court’s intervention, a three-judge panel sitting in a federal court in Alabama found in 2025 that the state’s new map not only violated the Voting Rights Act, but was also shaped by intentional racial discrimination, which violates the Constitution.

In last month’s Callais decision, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the court had “not overruled” Allen, even though it had clearly sapped the decision of any meaning. For example, in Allen, the court affirmed its long-held methodology for evaluating vote dilution claims under the VRA, as well as Congress’ power under the 15th Amendment to prohibit discriminatory effects in redistricting. Callais discarded both of those promises. But overturning a decision with still-fresh ink on a highly political issue reeks of partisanship, so Alito crafted his opinion to give the majority plausible deniability that its sweeping ruling was anything but a mere tweak to current law.

Monday’s order puts the lie to Alito’s claim that Callais is a mere “update” that left Allen undisturbed. “Callais also insisted that this Court’s prior decision in Allen remains good law,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent to Monday’s order. “These cases are, of course, Allen. So if Allen is good law anywhere, then it must be good law here.”

But Allen wasn’t the only decision the majority discarded Monday night. Just as galling, the order discarded that three-judge panel decision finding that Alabama had engaged in intentional racial discrimination when it refused to create a second majority-Black district in 2023. Instead of drawing a new majority-Black district following the Supreme Court’s Milligan ruling, the state legislature drew a seat that was only 40 percent Black and would have been easily carried by Trump. “We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature—faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a remedial plan that provides an additional opportunity district—responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district,” the court wrote.

Alito’s opinion in Callais claimed that the Voting Rights Act and 15th Amendment still prohibit intentional discrimination in voting—in fact, Callais is silent on the type of 14th Amendment constitutional violation that the district court found in Alabama. Undeterred, the majority threw out the district court’s meticulous, 268-page opinion that had found deliberate discrimination against Black voters in Monday’s one-paragraph order without any basis for doing so in Callais.

“The worst version of naked partisanship.”

“Nothing in the District Court’s Fourteenth Amendment analysis is affected by this Court’s opinion in Callais,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “It said not a word about the standard for Fourteenth Amendment intentional-discrimination claims like the one that the District Court decided.”

“This is a pretty disrespectful end to a long case that produced a lot of evidence showing Alabama’s commitment not to abide by the terms of the Voting Rights Act,” Crayton said.

The use of Callais to wipe out a ruling on something Callais did not touch is particularly egregious. “There may be serious arguments for the Supreme Court to revisit the Alabama trial court’s decision as a normal appeal, via the regular appellate process,” Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Law School, wrote to Mother Jones shortly before the court released its Alabama order. “But an emergency order here with a drive-by ruling on an argument that wasn’t at issue in Callais would be the worst version of naked partisanship.” That’s exactly what happened.

As Levitt pointed out, the court’s method for tossing the finding of intentional discrimination—a single, unreasoned paragraph on the court’s emergency docket—is a middle finger to the hard work of the district court. It’s just one of many such recent examples, where the court majority weaponizes the oft-called shadow docket to vacate lower-court findings it dislikes. “Factual findings like discriminatory intent are reviewed for clear error, meaning that if a district court’s factual determination is ‘plausible’ in light of the full record,’ then that determination ‘must govern,'” Sotomayor reminded her colleagues Monday. But that was just another rule her colleagues threw aside.

It may seem like the GOP’s post-Callais push for districts is coming rather late in the year. Indeed, in Monday night’s decision unleashing Alabama Republicans, the court’s GOP appointees didn’t just wantonly discard precedent in Allen and Callais. There is also the so-called “Purcell principle,” which the justices have often invoked to urge lower courts not to intervene in voting-related disputes in the middle of an election season for fear of causing voter confusion. In December, the Supreme Court reinstated a Texas gerrymander that a lower court found had discriminated against Black and Hispanic voters. They argued that it was too close to the election to stop it, even though the lower court decision was issued when the primary was 15 weeks away.

But on Monday they sided with Alabama just one week before the state’s primary, after mail voting had already begun. That’s the second time in recent days that the court has violated this norm to help Republicans. In Callais, they struck down the creation of a second-majority Black district in Louisiana just three weeks before the state’s primary, when mail voting was already underway, and 42,000 voters had cast ballots. Moreover, instead of waiting roughly thirty days to certify its decision, as is standard practice, the Court put Callais into effect immediately, which gave a green-light to Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s effort to suspend the state’s House primary to give the legislature time to eliminate one or both of the state’s majority-Black districts.

The Callais decision has triggered a frantic rush by Southern states to undo decades of progress for Black voters and could ultimately lead to the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction. In a matter of days last week, Tennessee eliminated its lone majority-Black district. Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi are set to follow suit.

Republicans have regained a sizable advantage in the gerrymandering war started by Trump because of the Supreme Court’s decision to release the Callais opinion in the heat of the midterms. It’s clear that the court’s conservative justices have not had any second thoughts about what they’ve unleashed. The Republican appointees may claim to be apolitical, but they keep putting their foot on the gas to accelerate their party’s advantage, destroying whatever credibility the court still maintained in the process.

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Trump Broke His Own Record—For Economic Disapproval

A new CNN poll on Tuesday found that 70 percent of Americans disapprove of how President Donald Trump is handling the economy.

Notably, Trump never reached a 50 percent disapproval rate over the economy during the entire duration of his first term, according to CNN. The Tuesday poll found that 77 percent of respondents—including a majority of Republicans—said that the president’s policies have increased the cost of living in their community.

The poll was conducted by Social Science Research Solutions, a survey and market research firm, and measured a random sample of 1,499 adults from April 30 through May 4.

Trump's disapproval rating on the economy has hit a whopping 70% in the new @cnn poll.

It never even reached 50% in his first term. pic.twitter.com/wuouabqyyu

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) May 12, 2026

The economy and cost of living, clearly, is an important issue: 55 percent reported it as their most important concern. This share is more than double any other problem, with the state of democracy being the second issue at 19 percent.

Thus, to develop policies that materially benefit Americans, numerous surveys suggest that government officials should concentrate on affordability. But, according to Tuesday’s CNN poll, the public is roughly evenly divided on which political party would better handle the economy.

Three-quarter said the US economy unjustly favors the desires of the elite. Conversely, nearly half of respondents said the government provides relief to too many people “who don’t deserve it”—almost 10 percentage points more than people who said the government is not helping enough people.

But there may be opportunity for Democrats in the lead-up to the midterms. If the votes really count, of course.

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Recent Close Calls for Michigan’s Dams Are a Warning to America

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

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in northern Michigan.

Flooding across northern Michigan last month pushed rivers to record levels, testing the limits of the state’s aging dams so severely that officials in one city nearly ordered evacuations as water threatened to spill over the top of a key barrier—a close call that highlights the growing risk that intensifying storms pose to similar infrastructure around the country.

Nationwide, the average dam is 64 years old and most were built for rainfall patterns that no longer reflect today’s changing climate. Thousands are classified as high hazard, meaning their failure could result in the loss of life. Dam safety experts say inspections are uneven and improvements often underfunded.

About 18 percent of the roughly 92,000 dams in the United States are considered high-hazard.

More than half of Michigan’s dams are beyond their 50-year design life, and the risks became clear as snowmelt and weeks of heavy rain swelled rivers. Rising water came within 5 inches of flowing over Cheboygan Dam in Cheboygan, a city of about 4,700 people, on April 16. In Bellaire, officials deployed about 1,000 sandbags to shore up a century-old dam.

“This needs to be considered not the worst we can experience. This needs to be considered as typical of the future,” said Richard Rood, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan who studies climate change.

There are about 92,000 dams in the United States. About 18 percent are considered high-hazard. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates repairing all of these aging structures will cost more than $165 billion. In Michigan, that estimate is $1 billion.

Communities facing these risks are left with difficult choices. Given the cost of repairing and upgrading dams to withstand stronger storms, removing them is often cheaper. That can reduce long-term risk and restore rivers to a more natural state. But it often faces resistance from property owners and communities with economies built around the reservoirs those dams created.

As floodwaters recede across Michigan, local leaders, dam safety advocates, and experts are renewing calls to bolster safety regulations and deal with aging dams.

Bob Stuber, executive director of the Michigan Hydro Relicensing Commission, considers the April flooding a wake-up call and believes the solution is clear: upgrades where feasible and removal where it makes sense. “I think every opportunity we have to remove an aging dam, we should take advantage of it because it’s not going to get better,” he said. “It’s just going to get worse.”

Officials in Traverse City came to that conclusion in 2024 and removed the Union Street Dam along the Boardman-Ottaway River as part of a decades-long restoration project that includes FishPass, which will allow key species to pass while blocking harmful invaders like sea lamprey. Engineers said that removal and upgrade most likely reduced flooding impacts when waters surged to near-record levels last month, falling just short of a 500-year flood.

Many communities are reluctant to give up the lakes and waterfronts dams create: “There’s this emotional attachment.”

“Upstream would have been under 2 more feet of water, which would have been quite devastating,” said Daniel Zielinski, a principal engineer for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. “We actually had a really great stress test of the system. It functioned really well.”

Removals are increasing across the country, according to data from American Rivers. Since 2000, more dams have come down than gone up, and that pace is accelerating as aging infrastructure, safety concerns, and environmental benefits reshape how communities weigh their value.

In northern Michigan, conservation groups like Huron Pines help dam owners make that decision. It has managed nine removals in the last 13 years and has seen growing interest after the recent flooding, said Josh Leisen, a senior project manager for the organization. Removal reconnects river ecosystems and eliminates the need for expensive upkeep of aging structures, he said.

“There are costs associated with repair and there are risks associated with having a dam,” Leisen said. “Even if it seems to be in good condition, you get extreme weather events like we just had.”

Removing dams is not always straightforward. Beyond the technical challenges, many communities are reluctant to give up the lakes and waterfronts those structures create. “There’s this emotional attachment to that impoundment,” said Daniel Brown, a climate resilience strategist at the Michigan-based Huron River Watershed Council.

In other cases, dismantling isn’t practical. Some dams provide electricity or drinking water, linking them to local economies and infrastructure. Removal “is not really something that’s on the table because they are connected in this very practical way,” Brown said.

Still, Brown said, there are limits to how much aging structures can be adapted to a warming world. “[A dam] is this very long-term, huge, expensive infrastructure that you’ve put on the landscape that’s going to stay there. And that is not how climate change or nature or rivers behave,” Brown said.

Dismantling dams, like upgrading them, can come with steep costs. The Boardman-Ottaway River project—which removed three dams in the largest removal effort in state history—cost $25 million. Huron Pines is managing the removal of Sanback Dam in Rose City next month, at an estimated cost of $4 million.

Half of the expense is funded through a grant program from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, launched in response to the 2020 Edenville Dam failure which overwhelmed the downstream Sanford Dam. The twin catastrophes forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 residents, destroyed thousands of homes, and flooded ecosystems in a disaster that investigators later found was avoidable. The $44 million state program funded several dam removals, upgrades, and engineering studies before it ended last year.

Federal funding is available through programs administered by agencies such as FEMA or U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But those resources fall short of the estimated $165.2 billion needed to address the issue, and some are at risk of elimination.

State governments regulate roughly 70 percent of the dams in the United States, with the federal government regulating hydropower dams and providing funding and guidance. This means inspection standards, regulations, enforcement, and resources can vary widely.

In Michigan, about 1,000 dams fall under state oversight, while 99 hydroelectric dams are overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The remaining 1,500 are smaller barriers that don’t fit the criteria for state regulation, according to the Michigan Dam Inventory.

[Dams] are either going to have to be removed or reengineered. Or they’re going to become a set of slowly unfolding failures.”

Now, state officials are renewing calls for more money and stronger regulations. “Dam safety may be an issue that isn’t partisan,” said Phil Roos, director of EGLE.

Proposed state legislation would bolster inspection rules, address private ownership, update design standards, and create more funding opportunities for upgrades or removals. “It’s so important to our state that we can come together, and whether it’s passing the legislation that was proposed, or improving procedures, or ultimately funding,” Roos said.

Michigan state Senator John Damoose has expressed concern about private dam ownership since the close call at Cheboygan Dam, which is under both state and private control. About 75 percent of the dams Michigan regulates are privately owned.

“Somebody made a point, ‘Well, we can’t have private companies owning these things.’ I tend to believe in private ownership but they might be right,” Damooose said during a Traverse City roundtable discussion on dam safety.

It’s not just a Michigan issue. Most dams in the United States are privately owned, meaning responsibility for maintenance, upkeep, and potential failure falls on individuals, not governmental agencies, according to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials.

Climate change is expected to bring more frequent and intense storms. As the world warms, the atmosphere holds more moisture, fueling more intense precipitation, according to Rood at the University of Michigan.

Recent flooding “has shown an incredible vulnerability,” he said. “[Dams] are either going to have to be removed or reengineered. Or they’re going to become a set of slowly unfolding failures.”

Luke Trumble, chief of dam safety for Michigan, said the state is already dealing with conditions that many dams were never designed to withstand. “It’s a little bit of a misconception that if we fix the dam issue, there’ll be no more flooding,” he said. “There’s still going to be flooding on rivers whenever we get rain like this, or rain on snow.

“What we can do with dam safety legislation is help ensure that flooding is not made worse by a dam failure,” Trumble said.

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Trump’s Energy Secretary: “I Can’t Predict the Price of Energy”

President Donald Trump’s energy secretary shrugged when asked on Sunday whether gas prices could rise to $5 per gallon and offered no clear plan to address the affordability predicament the administration has forced upon Americans.

“I can’t predict the price of energy in the short term or even the medium term,” Chris Wright told Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. And regarding potential solutions, he said, “we are constantly looking for different ideas.”

As Welker pointed out, in March, Wright said that it was “very possible” that gas prices would drop below $3 a gallon before the summer. He also told CNN’s Jake Tapper in April that “prices have likely peaked and they’ll start going down.”

According to the US Energy Information Administration, the price of regular gas in the US has increased more than 40 cents per gallon since Wright’s April statement.

So now Wright is backtracking his predictions, instead claiming during his Sunday interview that the US is in a “tremendous position,” as it is “by far the largest producer of oil” and “by far the world’s largest producer of natural gas.”

“Gasoline and diesel prices are up, and they’ll remain up while this conflict is in place,” Wright said, but after the war, “they’ll come back down lower than they were before.”

Wright’s claims come as the US and Iran remain locked in negotiations over a new ceasefire proposal. According to a Sunday report from the Associated Press, Iran wants to end the war on all fronts—including Israel’s strikes on Lebanon—and secure safe shipping in the region amid a US blockade of their ports. Iran’s leadership said it would discuss the latest US proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and scale back its nuclear program at a later time.

In other words, it does not look like the war will end any time soon. And even if transit through the Strait of Hormuz resumes to pre-war levels, it will take months to get oil and gas flowing due to the devastating strikes across the region.

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HHS Celebrates Mother’s Day With Pro-Life Pregnancy Advice

On Mother’s Day, the US Department of Health and Human Services launched a website that promotes pro-life pregnancy centers for new and expecting mothers.

The federal government’s newsite, Moms.gov, “offers guidance and information to support the health and well-being of mothers and their families,” according to a Sunday press release by HHS. The website also prominently features a link to find local pregnancy centers at Option Line. The pregnancy help contact center attempts to dissuade people from considering abortion, including by advising them to ask about the risk of physical harm from the procedure and by urging them to remember “it’s OK to change your mind.”

Decades of scientific research demonstrate that abortion is a safe way to end a pregnancy.

In addition to pregnancy centers, Moms.gov includes resources for nutritional guidance and links to set up $1,000 “Trump accounts” for children—allamid widespread cuts by Republicans to family support.

“Moms.gov delivers critical tools and support to help parents foster healthy pregnancies, strengthen young families, and create brighter futures for their children,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said in the press release. This is how you Make America Healthy Again.”

Option Line’s locator tool provides a list of their “participating pregnancy centers” that offer “peer counseling and accurate information about all pregnancy options.” Many of the facilities that Option Line recommends are crisis pregnancy centers, according to Crisis Pregnancy Center Map, a national directory led by Drs. Andrea Swartzendruber and Danielle Lambert, two professors from the University of Georgia’s College of Public Health.

Crisis pregnancy centers portray themselves as legitimate reproductive health care clinics but instead attempt to deter people from accessing abortion care and even some contraceptive options, according to the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists.

“As part of a pro-life, pro-family administration, HHS is committed to delivering critical tools to help parents foster healthy pregnancies, strengthen young families, and create brighter futures for their children,” HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard told Mother Jones on Sunday regardingthe agency’s promotion of Option Line. “The pregnancy centers and Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) [which receive federal funding to provide primary care for underserved communities] listed on the website provide supportive services to expecting mothers.”

As my colleague Julia Métraux wrote last month, HHS has long pushed these crisis pregnancy centers, directly giving at least $34 million to 16 facilities between 2018 and 2024. In April, the Trump administration proposed plans to dismantle its Title X family planning program, switching from promoting contraception use andinstead urging providers to concentrate on “optimal health (defined as physical, mental, and social wellbeing), not just medical intervention.”

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Legislators Denounce “Appalling and Horrific Treatment” of Mothers in Immigrant Detention

As Mother’s Day approaches, a group of senators are raising the alarm about the “appalling and horrific treatment” of pregnant and nursing people in immigration detention. On Thursday, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Mazie K. Hirono (D-Hawaii), and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) wrote to Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin demanding information about the treatment of this vulnerable group, and urging the agency to release pregnant women from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.

“There are virtually no legal safeguards for pregnant women in federal custody.”

Their letter comes on the heels of new legislation introduced this week by Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) that would establish care standards for federally incarcerated pregnant people—including those jailed in ICE and Customs and Border Protection facilities. The bill builds on one that the House already passed in 2022, which only applied to those in Bureau of Prison’s custody.

It’s hard to know how many pregnant people are in federal custody, and what percentage of those are immigrants. In 2023, more than 700 incarcerated mothers gave birth in prison, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Between January 1, 2025, and February 16, 2026, 363 pregnant, postpartum and nursing immigrants were deported, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Sixteen miscarriages were recorded during those six weeks. As of March, there were an estimated 126 pregnant women still being held in detention, according to the senators’ letter.

The care those who are pregnant in detention receive—or don’t receive—varies widely depending on the state they’re in, or even the individual facility. Federal guidelines are sparse: There are no federal rules on prenatal nutrition for incarcerated mothers, and some facilities still reportedly shackle pregnant inmates, even around their bellies. Some mothers are separated from their newborns only moments after birth. These practices can put mothers’ lives in danger, and can lead to miscarriages, psychological, and physical trauma.

Kamlager-Dove’s Pregnant Women In Custody Act would mandate adequate prenatal healthcare in federal prisons, jails, and ICE detention centers. It would prohibit the use of shackles during labor, and improve health-related data collection in federal facilities.

“It’s unacceptable that there are virtually no legal safeguards for pregnant women in federal custody, and this bill aims to right that wrong by ensuring healthier, safer futures for mothers and babies,” Rep. Kamlager-Dove wrote in a statement.

The senators who wrote to Secretary Mullin about the issue also wrote to two private contractors—Acquisition Logistics, LLC and Amentum Services, Inc.—which contracted with DHS to operate Camp East Montana, an ICE detention facility in El Paso, Texas. As the New York Times reported in March, there is no doctor onsite at that facility, yet pregnant women are held there. “When one experienced vaginal bleeding and requested medical care she was reportedly given only water, prenatal vitamins, and a temperature check,” the senators wrote.

“We write today with deep concern about the callous indifference with which this Administration appears to be mistreating this extremely vulnerable population,” they wrote in their letter to Mullin, adding: “We urge you to immediately resume the commonsense practice of presumption of release of pregnant women from ICE custody.”

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How Prescribed Burns Can Help Save Taxpayers Billions

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

For decades, the US Forest Service has actively managed public lands to reduce wildfire risks by clearing underbrush and trees, or employing prescribed burns—something Indigenous nations have practiced for centuries. Scientists have generally lauded the ecological benefits of what is also known as “fuel treatment.” Now, they say there’s another reason to support this approach: It saves money.

According to a study published today in the journal Science, every dollar that the agency spent on such tactics avoided $3.73 in smoke, property, and emissions harm. “A lot of people have suggested that there could be potential economic benefits,” said Frederik Strabo, the lead author of the paper and an economist with University of California, Davis. “But it’s been a pretty understudied area.”

The study analyzed high-resolution data from 285 wildfires across 11 Western states between 2017 and 2023 that burned through areas where the Forest Service had reduced the fuel load. On average, the treatments decreased the total area burned by 36 percent and cut the amount of land burned at moderate to high severity by 26 percent. Researchers then modeled the economic benefits of those reductions.

The paper estimated that fuel treatments prevented $1.4 billion in health and workforce productivity losses tied to wildfire smoke, $895 million in structural damage, and $503 million in carbon dioxide emissions. Overall, that amounted to an average savings of about $3.73 for every dollar the government spent. The research also found that larger treatments—those covering more than 2,400 acres—were the most cost effective.

This research “provides further evidence that the administration’s current policy of full suppression in Western wildfire situations is misguided.”

“It’s a significant number, but when you compare it to the total cost of wildfires it’s small,” caveated Strabo, noting that the cost of the worst disasters can reach hundreds of billions of dollars. But he also said the boon could be even greater than calculated. The research didn’t, for example, examine any savings or benefits for the multibillion dollar outdoor recreation industry. “We’re only capturing a specific subset of benefits.”

Morgan Varner, the director of fire research at the conservation nonprofit Tall Timbers, called the work “the missing link for a lot of fuels treatment research,” and said that data like this can be extremely helpful in guiding decision-makers. “Studies like this round out the story and provide more evidence for the benefits of these treatments.”

David Calkin, who until last year was a Forest Service research scientist, also applauded the analysis, calling it “novel.” But he does not find the math entirely convincing, and questions the notion that such an intangible public good can, or should, be assigned a monetary worth. “A lot of the values of fuel management are non-market,” said Calkin, who wasn’t involved in the study. Ecological benefits, for instance, can be hard to quantify, as can things like public recreation access.

“I’m not trying to reduce the importance of fuel management and the value of it. It’s just highly uncertain,” he said. “I worry about trying to monetize the value of treatments on public lands.”

One issue Calkin notes is that such work on federal lands may not significantly mitigate the costliest fires, which ignite near communities and destroy homes and buildings. “The best way to protect a structure is at the structure itself,” he explained. That means the study could be overestimating the amount of property damage that clearing and prescribed burns avoid.

Strabo disagrees, saying that an unpublished portion of the analysis found that fires that interacted with fuel treatments accounted for a disproportionately large share of structure losses and suppression costs. “That suggests [those fires] were often among the more economically consequential wildfires,” he said, pointing to the 2021 Caldor Fire near Lake Tahoe as an example. “The fire still caused substantial damages, but treatments helped prevent it from becoming even more catastrophic.”

One thing the paper explicitly didn’t account for was the smoke and carbon dioxide emissions that intentional fires produce. “We’re finding that’s not a nontrivial amount in our research,” said Mark Kreider, a Forest Service researcher. Because wildfire is unpredictable, he explained, you inherently have to treat more of the landscape than will actually encounter flames. How to best factor those emissions in is part of Kreider’s ongoing work, but he says it could potentially even flip an analysis like the one in Strabo’s paper. Still, he said, that doesn’t undermine the core point that fuel treatments are effective.

“It’s very clear,” he said, “that on the whole they are very beneficial.”

Not everyone supports such tactics. Critics argue they can harm ecosystems, disproportionately target larger trees, and open forests to logging under the guise of fire prevention. Some opponents also contend that this approach is less effective against extreme fires, while others question whether public funds would be better spent hardening homes and communities.

The federal government’s approach to forest management has shifted since President Donald Trump returned to office. In 2022, the Forest Service released a 10-year wildfire plan that increased forest management and prescribed burns. The Trump administration, which has announced plans to radically remake the agency, has placed greater emphasis on fighting wildfires than preventing them. According the Forest Service, in 2025, the agency reduced vegetation on about 1 million fewer acres than in 2024.

A Forest Service spokesperson attributed most of that decline to elevated wildfire activity in the Southeast. The agency also called 2025 “one the most successful wildfire years in recent history.” But critics worry it is moving away from proactive forest management.

“The takeaway that I really got from this article was that it provides further evidence that the administration’s current policy of full suppression in Western wildfire situations is misguided,” said Heather Stricker, a climate and lands analyst with the Sierra Club. While that approach might sound protective, she said a large body of research shows that it can often backfire. “This paper reiterated a lot of that previous research, but then took it a step further to quantify the cost savings.”

The Trump administration has also announced plans to increase logging on federal lands. This has added to longstanding fears from environmental groups that instead of thoughtful, well-managed fuel treatment, the government could resort to clear-cutting. Even the paper notes this resistance. “Public pressure and risk aversion,” it reads, “skew wildfire management resources toward fire suppression rather than prevention.”

Strabo is hopeful that by adding to the range of evidence supporting forest management, his paper could help guide policymakers. “We could have these economic and ecological benefits if we scaled it up,” he said. “It’s a critically underfunded public good.”

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Polymarket’s Hot New Bet: Hantavirus

Over the past four days, bettors on the prediction platform Polymarket have wagered nearly $3 million on whether we’ll see a hantavirus pandemic this year. A cluster of cases of a particularly deadly strain of the virus erupted on a cruise ship last month, killing three people out of eight suspected cases linked to the vessel. Though the news has stoked fears, the World Health Organization currently classifies the risk of a full-blown pandemic as low.

But Polymarket users are spending big across several hantavirus-related propositions—including whether a vaccine will be developed this year and whether or not officials will tie the cruise ship outbreak to a “lab leak.” Polymarket declined to comment on hantavirus betting.

“I want to be unequivocal here. This is not the start of a Covid pandemic,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, director of epidemic and pandemic management at the WHO, at a Thursday press conference. “This is not Covid, this is not influenza. It spreads very, very differently.”

Because outbreaks of this hantavirus strain have occurred before, infectious disease experts already know that the virus requires close contact to spread between people, and a person with the virus is only infectious for about a day. Just as those metrics allow public health officials to calibrate their response, they also inform how some online gamblers are placing their money.

Online gambling has been on the rise since sports betting was legalized by the Supreme Court in 2018, but the Covid pandemic gave it a huge boost. In 2020, sports betting revenues jumped up 69 percent over the previous year, though not too many sports events were happening.

But there were other bets to be placed, like how many people would die from Covid-19, a topic some people wagered on as early as April 2020. At the time, those bets were illegal, the subjects of online betting being more strictly regulated. But a 2024 court ruling took the rails off of websites known as prediction markets. Now, on mega-platforms like Polymarket and Kashi, users can bet on almost anything—including public health crises.

“Anybody who’s betting on a viral spread, I’m going to…guess that they have an addiction problem when it comes to gambling,” says John W. Ayers, a public health professor at University of California, San Diego. “If someone is very addicted to gambling, they’re more likely to find themselves interacting with these more fringe things you could possibly bet on.”

For several years, public health experts have been concerned that gambling addictions are on the rise, though the exact numbers are hard to pin down. A study Ayers led that came out last year found that Google searches seeking help for gambling addiction jumped 23 percent nationwide since the legalization of sports betting. Other researchers estimate about 10 percent of men ages 18 to 30 have a problematic relationship to gambling.

Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket grow based on use, helping the range of niche bets to multiply—and since taking off during the Covid pandemic, the prediction-market industry has multiplied in size many times. By 2030, it’s been estimated, prediction markets could grow to $1 trillion in annual trading volume.

That gambling is a public health issue in itself, Ayers says. Gambling addiction is correlated with other forms of addiction that are significant sources of premature deaths in the US. Financial stress isn’t great for your health, either.

“Culturally, it’s normalized, and now we give it this veneer of, ‘Oh, it’s not gambling. It’s a prediction market.’ Doesn’t matter,” Ayers says. “The harm still exists. Call it a prediction market or a sports book, you’re still losing money, and the house always wins on these bets.”

Unlike many other forms of addiction, gambling problems can often be invisible before someone hits rock bottom, especially now that most of these transactions are happening in an app. It is possible to regulate prediction markets and place barriers on addictive behaviors—some countries place limits on how many bets a person can take, restrict the use of credit cards, or institute mandatory rest periods between bets—but right now, the US more or less doesn’t. Instead, we bet on everything: viruses included.

“The fact that people will gamble on these things indicates to me the larger societal problem—everything becomes an opportunity for monetization,” Ayers says.

Or as Donald Trump put it earlier this year, “the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino…it is what it is.”

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Stop the Steal Never Stopped

When the FBI showed up at a warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize hundreds of boxes of 2020 election records this past January, County Commissioner Dana Barrett thought it looked less like a criminal investigation and more like political theater.

It’s been more than five years since the election, the results already had been investigated multiple times, and the ballots had been counted, recounted, and recounted again.

The lie that the 2020 election was stolen has persisted. And the “Stop the Steal” movement’s most ardent believers now hold unprecedented positions of power, including on the once-sleepy State Election Board in the important swing state of Georgia. A lawyer known for his willingness to take on long-shot election cases has gone from a little-known private practice attorney to a role in the White House, overseeing the country’s election integrity effort—despite being sanctioned by a court for making “unequivocally false” assertions around voting. And everyday members of the movement are trying to change what they fervently believe is a broken system—at the risk of actually breaking it in the process.

This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Abby Vesoulis and Reveal’s Najib Aminy examine how the long shadow of doubt over the 2020 elections is being weaponized and what it means ahead of the 2026 midterms.

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“It’s Life Alert or Rent”: Montana Trailer Park Tenants Are on Rent Strike

35-year-old Benjamin Moore has lived in Mountain Meadows Mobile Home Park, outside Bozeman, Montana, since he was 17. This month, for the first time, he’s withholding his rent.

On May 1, Moore received a rent bill for $947, up 11 percent from the month before, and the second hike in nine months—the product of the park’s sale to an undisclosed buyer.

Moore hung a sign on his trailer that says “RENT STRIKE.” He and his neighbors in Mountain Meadows and nearby King Arthur Park, organized with the citywide group Bozeman Tenants United, are collectively withholding over $50,000 a month from their landlord.

Historically, trailer parks have been a relatively affordable housing option—a third of trailer park residents in America live below the poverty line. But on average, their cost of living has risen 45 percent over the past decade. But by unionizing, the Bozeman trailer park tenants believe they might be able to fight the most recent rent hike—especially given the state of their housing.

For years, tenants say, the maintenance hasn’t been attended to: tree limbs hang perilously over trailers, and water shutoffs are a regular occurrence. “I cannot recall a time in the past 20 years where we had three straight months of water and power working all day, every day,” Moore said.

Shauna Thompson, another resident, calls the water “atrocious…like a Milky Way, like you’re drinking skim milk. It’s very nasty and turned off all the time, without any notice.” And tenants allege that they’ve experienced retribution for maintenance requests, punitive eviction attempts, and unsafe conditions.

Members of Bozeman Tenants United, including Benjamin Moore and Shauna Thompson, rip up their rent increase notices. Jered McCafferty

“It’s really hard on people here,” Moore said. Some residents are “already paying their entire Social Security check for rent. It’s a very poor neighborhood. We’ve got old folks. We’ve got young families. We’ve got working-class people who can’t afford anything else.”

For the past four decades, a group called Oakland Properties has owned both trailer parks. When they learned about the sale, tenants were scared that their parks would be bulldozed, or that their rent would be increased even further, forcing them to move.

The tenants attempted to buy the parks themselves, but were decisively outbid. The winning bidder demanded an NDA. The transaction should be finalized next month, park owner Gary Oakland said, but residents still don’t know who’s going to own the land they live on.

This month’s rent hike, Oakland acknowledged, was “part and parcel” of the sale. But for tenants, it’s a catastrophe. On top of the $947 lot rent—more than double the national average—many residents also pay off home loans on their trailers, as well as insurance and utilities costs.

Oakland calls claims of broken utilities “nonsense”: “If it was such a bad place to live, why would the homes be selling for such high dollars?” he said. The rent strike, Oakland points out, is “just a group of people not paying their rent.”

Some people are rationing their medication to make ends meet, Moore said. “There’s one person who canceled Life Alert. It’s either Life Alert or rent, and if you don’t pay rent, they evict you and throw you in the streets.”

Many of the tenants of King Arthur and Mountain Meadows parks rely on a fixed income to pay their rent.Jered McCafferty

Tenant organizers across the nation have found a foothold in recent years organizing against individual landlords, and Bozeman’s tenant union, situated in one of the fastest-growing communities in the state, is no exception. Tenant unions from Los Angeles to Kansas City to New York have organized to win rent freezes, maintenance, and security in their homes.

Mobile home parks—increasingly private-equity-owned and uniquely at-risk in the face of climate disasters—are organizing, too: a group of trailer park residents in Columbia, Missouri, unionized in February. In Montana, as Rebecca Burns recently wrote for In These Times, mobile homes were already once a site of tenant organizing: buoyed by the state’s miners unions, the first Bozeman-area mobile home tenants’ union won an agreement with their landlord in 1978.

Oakland says park residents “have been terrorized by the union,” and plans to evict the strikers. The strikers say they’ve retained a lawyer and will fight to stay in their homes.

“I wish none of this was happening,” Moore said. “Your utilities should work. Your place should be safe. You should be able to get in and out of it. These are the absolute basics, and they just haven’t kept them up. And if you call them on it, they threaten you.”

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“Counterterrorism” Now Officially Means Targeting Trans People

On Wednesday, the White House released a new “United States Counterterrorism Strategy,” the first such directive since a 2021 Biden-era memo emphasizing the need to combat white supremacist violence, which has now been scrubbed from the White House website.

Wednesday’s document, masterminded by White House “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka, does not mention far-right violence at all. It identifies “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as a security threat of equal severity to “Legacy Islamist Terrorists” and “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs.” The administration will now apparently “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

In a bizarre but familiar turn, the document also blames transgender people for the shooting of Charlie Kirk. “Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”

The Heritage Foundation has also worked to connect being trans with terrorism, campaigning for the FBI to designate trans advocacy as violent extremism.

Gorka told reporters at a press conference Wednesday that the administration would “crush” any threat, “whether it is the cartels, the jihadists or violent left-wing extremists like antifa—and like the transgender killers, the nonbinary, the left-wing radicals who killed my friend, Charlie Kirk, we will take them on, head on.”

In 2023, Trump claimed falsely that there had been an “incredible rise” in the number of transgender shooters, claims that now resurface whenever shootings occur.

But the document reads less like a plan than a list of targets. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the House Committee on Homeland Security’s ranking Democrat, noted in a press release that the document left out the far right—the group most likely to commit violent acts against civilians on US soil—“despite years of data proving that right-wing extremism has presented the most persistent and deadly threats to Americans for decades.”

Instead, Thompson said, the White House had produced “a document full of fake administration counterterrorism ‘achievements,’ including mass deportations and more than 40 unauthorized and deadly military strikes on vessels in the Western Hemisphere. There are zero strategic objectives, lines of effort, or agency assignments.”

Counterterrorism itself is a politicized term that came into common use following the September 11 attacks and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It formed part of the language of the policing apparatus that targeted Muslim and Arab Americans and legitimized surveillance of those communities as “terrorist threats.” That same language is now being applied to transgender people. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has called Kirk’s death a “domestic 9/11.” The Heritage Foundation, too, has done its best to connect being transgender with the idea of terrorism, campaigning last year for the FBI to designate trans advocacy as violent extremism.

“We will…identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally,” the document says.

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Republicans Don’t Need to Win Elections Anymore. They Just Need Their Judges.

The redistricting news for Democrats has gone from bad to worse.

A week after the US Supreme Court effectively destroyed the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to Southern states invalidating majority-Black districts across the South, the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday overturned a redistricting referendum approved by voters last month that was expected to net Democrats four new US House seats.

These two decisions by conservative-dominated courts now put Democrats at a significant disadvantage in the gerrymandering arms race launched by Donald Trump last summer when he ordered Texas to gerrymander five new Republican seats.

With the passage of the Virginia map, Democrats had mostly succeeded in reaching a draw with Republicans in the redistricting wars. But with the Virginia map overturned and Southern states—including Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina—rushing to pass new maps before the midterms, Democrats could face a four to five-seat disadvantage heading into November, according to Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report. While that is not insurmountable in a wave election—and Democrats could still pick up two seats in Virginia under the existing map—it gives Democrats little margin for error in the effort to take back the House.

In the 4-3 decision, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the April referendum violated the state Constitution because amendments must be passed twice by the legislature, with an election in between. The first time they passed it was after early voting started, so it doesn’t count. “This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote,” the court wrote, “and nullifies its legal efficacy.”

In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Cleo Powell wrote that the majority had “broadened the meaning of the word ‘election,’ as used in the Virginia Constitution, to include the early voting period. This is in direct conflict with how both Virginia and federal law define an election.”

The decision effectively tosses out three million votes cast in the referendum on a legal technicality. It’s worth noting that voters in red states have not been able to weigh in on any of the mid-decade gerrymanders passed by their legislatures. And while those states have different laws than Virginia, voters in Florida and Ohio did pass prohibitions on gerrymandering that their legislatures flagrantly ignored—but conservative-dominated state supreme courts in those states are unlikely to void the new maps.

It’s impossible to ignore the national context: It appears that Democrats are bound by one set of rules while Republicans play by another, and Republican-appointed judges have repeatedly put their collective thumb on the scale of elections to make sure their party prevails.

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They Were Held in Cages in the Florida Sun. Now “Alligator Alcatraz” May Finally Be Shutting Down.

The notorious Florida immigrant detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” may be winding down operations soon, Gov. Ron DeSantis acknowledged on Thursday. His remarks came just hours after the New York Times reported that federal and state officials are in preliminary discussions about the facility’s closure.

The DeSantis administration erected the makeshift detention camp in the Everglades last summer when the Department of Homeland Security needed more detention space to house immigrants pending their deportations. “This is going to be a force multiplier, and we’re really happy to be working with the federal government to satisfy President Trump’s mandate,” DeSantis said last summer. The detention facility has become a symbol of the Trump administration’s relentless crackdown on immigrants.

At a press conference in Lakeland, Florida, DeSantis said that Alligator Alcatraz has held nearly 22,000 immigrants who were eventually deported. “I have no doubt that that has made the state of Florida safer,” he said. “We stepped up when no other state stepped up to help in a very big way.” He added that Alligator Alcatraz was always meant to be a temporary facility, “If we shut the lights on it tomorrow, we will be able to say it served its purpose.”

“We stepped up when no other state stepped up to help in a very big way…If we shut the lights on it tomorrow, we will be able to say it served its purpose.”

Over the last year, the center has come under fire both for its living conditions**,** its environmental impact on the Everglades, and that it was located on sacred tribal land. As I reported in April:

Thousands of people have been detained there despite ongoing reports of mosquito infestations, flooding, poor medical care, lackluster food, and limited water access. Last month, two US senators said they launched an investigation into reported abuses, including the use of “the box,” in which detainees were allegedly shackled and held in small cages in direct sunlight for hours at a time. (A spokesperson for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Alligator Alcatraz, told me recently that the allegations were “false.”) In recent weeks, the center landed in the spotlight once again after attorneys representing immigrants held there told a judge that guards had assaulted and pepper-sprayed detainees who protested after the phones were shut off, less than a week after a federal judge ordered legal access should be expanded at the facility.

Alligator Alcatraz has also been at the center of a few lawsuits, including one filed by environmentalist groups who argued that construction had proceeded without an environmental review or opportunity for public comment, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Florida and Trump officials argued that NEPA is restricted to federal agencies, and that the facility was operated and funded by the state, which has spent at least $390 million to run it. Last month, an appeals court ruled that the center can remain open:

The three-judge panel heard oral arguments in the case on April 7 and released a 38-page ruling late Tuesday afternoon. In the 2–1 decision, judges concluded that the environmentalists failed to prove Alligator Alcatraz was under federal control. Florida also hasn’t received any federal funding (though it is in the process of requesting reimbursement). “Federal authority is, at most, indirect: it is involved in the construction only insofar as it sets the terms for which the facility may be used for detention of aliens, but Florida officials dedicated its land to that use,” wrote Chief Judge William Pryor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, in the majority opinion.

Judge Nancy Abudu, a Biden appointee, wrote in her dissent that immigration is ultimately a federal obligation and the majority’s ruling is “just plain wrong.” “So long as Florida remains a willing participant in the federal government’s immigration detention scheme, it subjects itself to the federal government’s substantial control over the parties’ joint efforts,” she wrote.

It’s unclear when Alligator Alcatraz will close. As of this week, detainees were still being held there. Immigrant advocates and attorneys, however, were cautiously optimistic this week. Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, who has opposed the camp, said its closure is “long overdue,” she wrote on X. “For months, thousands have been detained there in inhumane conditions without meaningful due process–while wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. It is time for dignity & accountability to be restored.”

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Blame John Roberts for Destroying the Voting Rights Act

The recent Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais , which effectively killed the last remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was authored by Justice Samuel Alito. But it represents the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts. The Roberts Court has now gutted the Voting Rights Act on three different occasions, and Roberts wrote or joined every one of those opinions. And that’s not an accident. Roberts has been trying to kill the Voting Rights Act for more than 40 years, and it looks like he’s finally succeeded.

Watch our new video to understand how Roberts has steadily worked to destroy the Voting Rights Act and what can be done to fight back.

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With Tesla Big Rigs Rolling Out, California Can Breathe Easier

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

Back in 2017, Tesla promised to bring an all-electric semitruck to market that would have a longer range and lower cost than its competitors. Then, the trucking industry waited—and waited. The initial production target of 2019 came and went, as did each newly announced date over the next three years.

But in 2022, Tesla finally unveiled its Tesla Semi and started to get pilot versions on the road for testing. The Class 8 battery-electric truck hit performance targets well beyond what Daimler, Volvo, Kenworth, Peterbilt, and other companies were delivering with their all-electric models. As of April 29, Tesla says it has finally started high-volume Semi production at its factory in Sparks, Nevada.

Now, the Semi’s combination of mileage and price appears set to transform an industry hungry for an affordable way to move freight without burning diesel—especially in California, the country’s top market for electric trucks.

“Heavy-duty trucks emit more than half the transportation sector’s harmful air pollution.”

So says Ray Minjares, heavy-duty vehicles program director at the International Council on Clean Transportation. The nonprofit research group has been tracking applications from truck purchasers seeking vouchers under California’s Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project (HVIP), the country’s biggest state-administered program to incentivize the shift to heavy-duty clean vehicles.

Of the 1,067 requests for vouchers submitted during the latest application window, which launched in December 2025, 965 were for Tesla Semis, he said. That’s far more applications than for any other model of truck, he added—and more than the total number of HVIP applications for all heavy-duty trucks since 2021.

And if all those Tesla Semis are actually delivered by the end of this year, that could make up about a third of heavy-duty truck sales in the state, Minjares said. That’s far above the 10 percent target for zero-emissions Class 8 vehicles set under California’s Advanced Clean Trucks regulation, he noted.

This would be an important environmental accomplishment. Heavy-duty trucks emit more than half the transportation sector’s harmful air pollution, with disproportionate health impacts for lower-income areas and communities of color.

“The Tesla Semi is twice the range, and half the charging time, of trucks from traditional manufacturers.”

It would be even more striking given that the Republicans in Congress passed legislation last year nullifying California’s power to set its own emissions reduction standards for trucks and cars under the federal Clean Air Act, he said. The Trump administration has also moved to weaken national fuel economy standards and claw back federal funds for electric trucks and EV charging.

Considering the policy headwinds, ​“states that have severe air quality challenges and climate goals need to find alternative pathways to enable this transition,” Minjares said. And one of the most important ways to do that is ​“putting downward pressure on the price that fleets are paying for the vehicles.”

The median price for a Tesla Semi capable of driving about 500 miles on a single charge is just under $300,000, according to HVIP data. That’s about $138,000 to $224,000 less than competing Class 8 battery-electric vehicles with roughly half the range, he said.

And while Tesla has tested the patience of buyers with its delays, the early models it put on the road got high marks from trucking companies and drivers.

In 2023, during three weeks of test-drives hosted by the nonprofit research group North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE), Tesla Semis that beverage giant PepsiCo tried out hit 384 miles on a single charge. One truck traveled 1,076 miles in a single 24-hour period with multiple partial recharges using Tesla’s 750-kilowatt Supercharger. In another NACFE test-drive in 2025, a Tesla Semi operated by freight company Saia consistently traveled 465 miles on a single charge while operating two shifts per day, said Mike Roeth, NACFE’s executive director.

As of today, Tesla has boosted the range of its Semi to up to 350 miles for the standard model and up to 500 miles for the long-range model. It has also launched its Megacharger, capable of delivering up to 1.2 megawatts of power—enough to replenish about 60 percent of a Semi battery in 30 minutes—available both for truck depots and at an expanding set of public charging sites.

“The Tesla Semi is twice the range, and half the charging time, of trucks from traditional manufacturers,” Roeth said. ​“And early data is showing it’s a third less expensive to purchase.”

These are all appealing characteristics to Jennie Abarca, founder and CEO of King Fio Trucking in Long Beach, California. She already has 11 electric trucks in her 35-truck fleet serving the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, including models from Volvo, a major manufacturer, and Nikola, a startup that went bankrupt last year.

“Both trucks have been exceptional,” she said. ​“But now you have something like the Tesla coming in: 500-mile range, 30-minute recharge, and $150,000 less than the current option out there—wow.”

Abarca has applied to secure HVIP vouchers for 20 Tesla Semis, with each voucher providing a $120,000 discount to the up-front cost of a truck. Additional incentives available from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles and from utility Southern California Edison for drayage trucks, which carry cargo from ports to inland warehouses, can further reduce that cost by up to 90 percent.

“I can go to San Diego and back. I can be competitive with diesel in other areas where I couldn’t compete before.”

Buyers must still pay sales and excise taxes on the full sticker price of the vehicle and cover registration fees. But with the full stack of incentives, the cost of a Tesla Semi ​“will look more like a really nice used diesel [truck], which is what I would normally buy,” Abarca said.

And once it’s on the road, an electric truck is less expensive to fuel and maintain, she said. These operating advantages, along with lowered electric drivetrain and battery costs, are expected to bring electric trucks into parity with diesel vehicles in terms of total cost of ownership within the next five to 10 years, according to research from the International Council on Clean Transportation, NACFE, and other groups.

To be clear, ​“I can’t buy these trucks without incentives,” Abarca said. ​“The trucking industry has been in a hole since the end of 2022” due to the supply chain disruptions and inflationary pressures of the Covid pandemic, she said. ​“And I don’t have investors. I only have the profits I make from my business.”

Rudy Diaz, owner of Long Beach–based trucking firm Hight Logistics, also said he wouldn’t have been able to buy the 25 electric trucks in his 75-vehicle fleet without incentives.

But he believes that electric vehicles are the future of the industry—if they can come down in price and weight and their range can be increased between charges. That’s why he’s applied for HVIP vouchers for 15 Tesla Semis and plans to install several Megachargers at his Long Beach depot.

The Volvo and BYD trucks he now operates are capable of making it from ports to the complex of distribution warehouses in the Inland Empire region of Southern California and back on a single charge, ​“and not necessarily run out of battery,” he said. ​“But to do that, you’re going to have to have downtime for charging.”

With the Tesla Semi’s 500 miles of range, he notes, ​“I can go to San Diego and back. I can be competitive with diesel in other areas where I couldn’t compete before.”

Such flexibility is what could make the Tesla Semi launch ​“the kind of thing that truly catalyzes change,” said John Verdon, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Nevoya, a startup that owns and deploys electric trucks carrying freight in California, Arizona, and Texas for large corporations and third-party logistics operators.

Nevoya has been operating five preproduction Tesla Semis in California as part of its fleet of about 50 electric trucks, Verdon said. Most of the company’s routes are between the ports of LA and Long Beach and the Inland Empire. But its Tesla trucks are able to make longer runs from Southern California to the Central Valley and San Francisco Bay Area, he said.

Extended range isn’t just about longer hauls, though, he said—it’s about getting the most value out of vehicles whose higher up-front costs can be more than counterbalanced by lower operating costs, as long as they’re being used as often as possible. ​“We’re no longer bound by the notion that we have a vehicle that’s superexpensive, has limited range, and inadequate spots for them to charge.”

It’s too soon to tell how the Tesla Semi might push its competitors to improve the range or pricing of their electric trucks. But as Minjares noted, legacy truck manufacturers face a structural challenge in competing against their all-electric rival, with relatively low volumes of electric vehicles being built on production lines designed to support both internal combustion and battery-electric models.

“Legacy manufacturers are stuck between multiple technologies, weighing them down with development and production costs,” he said. ​“But Tesla has bet on one technology, giving the company greater focus and discipline.”

Tesla will face tough competition from Chinese EV manufacturers, including Windrose, which already has trucks on US highways.

Whether the trucking industry has the buying appetite to make that bet pay off is another question. Roeth noted that Tesla has stated its Nevada factory is capable of producing about 50,000 Semis per year. For context, there are only about 2,000 electric heavy-duty trucks on US roads today, according to International Council on Clean Transportation data. In fact, 50,000 vehicles would constitute roughly a quarter of the total annual US market for heavy-duty diesel-fueled trucks.

“Tesla has two things it has to do: Convince customers to buy electric, and convince customers to buy its electric,” Roeth said.

While the Tesla Semi has already established its clear performance and price advantages, it has yet to demonstrate the ​“reliability and durability” of its technology ​“at 500,000 miles, at 750,000 miles, at 1 million miles,” he said.

Tesla won’t hit its full Semi production capacity right away, according to Minjares. It’s also likely to seek out markets outside the US. It will face tough competition from leading Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers that now dominate the industry, as well as new entrants like Windrose, which last month sold its first electric truck in the US at a price comparable to the Tesla Semi’s.

But Minjares believes these kinds of competitive pressures are what’s needed to make other manufacturers stop fighting state clean-trucking policies and start embracing innovation. “This transition was never going to be sustainable if the underlying economics were not favorable,” he said. ​“The challenge on the policy side has brought that into clearer focus.”

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Mr. Wonderful’s Utah Data Center Will Be More Than Twice as Big as Manhattan

Kevin O’Leary is best known as “Mr. Wonderful” on Shark Tank, or maybe as the bad guy from Marty Supreme. On Shark Tank, he invests in—or crushes the spirits of—small business owners. He describes himself as an “investor, chef, sommelier, collector, photographer, and musician.” But he might soon be able to add “AI infrastructure kingpin” to that list of titles, as he pushes forward with a massive data center project in northern Utah.

Other celebrities have dabbled in AI. Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures put $30 million into OpenAI, an investment that’s now worth over a billion dollars. Ben Affleck’s AI post-production company InterPositive was recently acquired by Netflix for about $600 million.

Others have simply cut advertisements for AI companies, like Ryan Reynolds’ OpenAI/Mint Mobile TV spot two years ago. But O’Leary stands out for his evident commitment to the game of bringing star appeal to the decidedly unsexy subject of hyperscale computing infrastructure.

He’s the primary investor backing a giant data center project called Stratos in Utah. Stratos, which would be about two-and-a-half times the size of Manhattan, would be 100-percent powered by gas generators, one of the developers told the Salt Lake Tribune. This single project could increase Utah’s net greenhouse gas emissions by up to 50 percent, one University of Utah professor estimated. It’s backed by Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, which has granted the project significant tax breaks.

On Shark Tank, O’Leary once said, “The market has spoken, and it’s basically telling you people hate this product.” He said this regarding a line of toddler pants with built-in squeakers in the knees. While the market, such as it is, may be more excited about data centers than noisy pants, there are certainly plenty of locals in Utah who seem to hate O’Leary’s new product.

I’m the only developer of data centers on earth that graduated from environmental studies. I'm pretty aware of what these concerns are. They are around air, water use, heat, noise pollution. So sustainability is at the heart of what we do in terms of all these proposals. We… pic.twitter.com/Qvob70uEmh

— Kevin O'Leary aka Mr. Wonderful (@kevinolearytv) May 5, 2026

Hundreds of people came out to protest O’Leary’s plan Monday evening at a meeting of the commissioners of Box Elder County, where the data center will be located. They were not allowed to speak, instead forced to hold signs in the back of the room as the county commissioners approved a permit for the billion-dollar data center. Roughly 3,700 additional people have filed protests asking the Utah Division of Water Rights to reject the data center’s permit. O’Leary claimed after the meeting that the protesters were “professionals” bused in from out of state.

“I’m the only developer of data centers on earth that graduated from environmental studies,” O’Leary said in a video posted to X. “We think over 90% of the protesters are actually not people who live in Utah…I don’t think it’s going to work out for them.”

This isn’t O’Leary’s only AI-oriented investment. He’s also backing Bitzero, a company that produces “data centers for a greener, more sustainable world.” (His non-AI investments include a cat DNA testing company and a company that mails you potatoes as a gag gift.) Another data center campus O’Leary is backing, in Canada, has been stalled for the past year.

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