One Congresswoman’s Scary Yearlong Fight for Justice After Standing Up to ICE

It’s been just over a year since Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), a sitting member of Congress, showed up to Delaney Hall, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, to do her job.

Members of Congress have the statutory right to conduct unannounced oversight visits at ICE detention centers across the country, and McIver had done it before.

But this time was different.

Things turned chaotic. ICE flooded the facility with agents. The mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, was arrested. And McIver, a first-term Congresswoman, left that day, about to face two federal felony counts and a misdemeanor, for “forcibly impeded and interfered with federal officers,” according to the charges.

For the past year, McIver, who has pleaded not guilty, has been fighting the case, running to keep her seat in Congress, and making the argument that this isn’t really about her. For McIver, it’s about whether Congress can do its job in the Trump era.

“Honestly, it’s been extremely difficult,” McIver told me in this wide-ranging interview. “I think some days I’m still looking back, like, is this really happening? Because it’s truly unbelievable. I never thought I would get to Congress and have to be dealing with something like this, or being targeted in this way or fashion.”

McIver just revealed in an interview with People magazine that she is facing these charges while she is pregnant with her second child.

“This is really America, and it saddens me that this is happening,” she told me. “It definitely feels like I’m on the island alone, for sure, and that’s why I continue to talk about this case and explain that it’s bigger than just LaMonica McIver.”

Just ahead of the one-year anniversary of the events of that day, I sat down with Rep. McIver to talk about what happened, what went wrong, and why the Trump administration just won’t let up.

Watch the interview in full here:

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Trump Tried to Build Australia’s Tallest Tower. It Didn’t Happen.

Donald Trump has had an amazing run of success as an international businessman since becoming president for a second time. He’s made billions in crypto, traded stocks successfully, and unveiled new locations for an array of Trump-branded real estate projects—from Riyadh to Australia.

Still, not all those Trump-branded projects are winners. Take that Australia deal. Back in February, Eric Trump proudly announced a plan to build the tallest building in Australia on the continent’s sunny Gold Coast. But the whole thing got off to an inauspicious start when the Trumps’ local partner, a developer named David Young, tried to build some buzz for the project. In a statement, he reassured Australians that the new Trump Tower wouldn’t be as bad as they might imagine.

“Firstly, the file footage that Australians see, of Trump hotels and resorts with gaudy gold-plated bathrooms fixtures, mirrors and heavy chandeliers, is old footage from the 1980s and 90s,” Young said at the time. “The modern Trump package is high-end design and fit outs, with a premium feel. It’s tasteful and expensive – when you walk into a modern Trump property, the impression is ‘quality’ and ’boutique.’”

And that was, more or less, the last anyone heard of that project.

Until now. It’s official demise was confirmed last Tuesday. Young told Australian media that it was Trump’s toxic brand, in particular his war against Iran—which had kicked off five days after the project was first announced—that did the plan in.

“Let’s just say that with the Iran war and everything else, the Trump brand was increasingly toxic in Australia,” Young said.

For their part, the Trumps said it was Young’s fault.

“While we were very excited about the opportunity to bring a world-class development to the Gold Coast, the project was dependent on our licensing partner meeting certain obligations. Unfortunately, those obligations were not fulfilled,” a Trump Organization spokeswoman told Australian outlets. Young denied he hadn’t met any obligations.

In between the project’s announcement and cancellation, Australian media reported that Young had several previous bankruptcies and, in the 1990s, had been charged with hacking. The hacking charges were ultimately dismissed.

The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment for more clarification on why the project fell apart or if another Australian deal is in the works.

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Trump Just Gave Himself a $1.8 Billion Slush Fund to Reward His Friends

President Donald Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service on Monday in exchange for a settlement deal to launch a $1.8 billion fund to pay claims made by his friends for purported unfair prosecution.

“The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in his department’s Monday press release, announcing “The Anti-Weaponization Fund.” “As part of this settlement, we are setting up a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.”

“The Fund will consist of a Commission of five members appointed by the Attorney General. One Member will be chosen in consultation with congressional leadership,” the Justice Department’s press release states. “The President can remove any member, but a replacement must be chosen the same way as the replaced member was selected.”

According to the Justice Department, “on a quarterly basis, the Fund shall send a report to the Attorney General outlining who has received relief and what form of relief was awarded.” If Blanche’s previous decisions to protect Trump and go after his alleged enemies are anything to go by, there will therefore be little to no oversight beyond Trump loyalists.

The president has long claimed that he and his allies have been targeted by the Biden administration—including, as Mother Jones’ Michael Mechanic pointed out on Saturday, defendants who were charged for involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Trump, his two eldest sons, and the Trump Organization filed the $10 billion lawsuit this past January after IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn leaked the president’s tax returns to ProPublica and the New York Times.

In a Monday amicus brief shared with MS NOW, House Democrats said Trump’s lawsuit “undermine[d] the Constitution” and the potential “Truth and Justice Commission” was a “slush fund.”

“Never in the history of the United States has a sitting President sought a monetary settlement from the government he leads—let alone sought many billions of dollars in taxpayer funds,” the Democrats wrote, arguing that Trump was “filing a collusive lawsuit only to immediately dismiss it in order to produce a collusive settlement.”

And this is a pattern. Just think about the ABC lawsuit, where the process of the Trump administration’s pressure and subsequent settlement resulted in a form of extortion. As for the IRS settlement, the president now has a $1.8 billion compensation fund to support future attacks against anyone who opposes him.

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Trump Cuts to Weather Data May Make Forecasts Less Reliable, Experts Warn

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

As the United States prepares for hurricane season and a summer of record-breaking heat, experts fear the Trump administration’s cuts to climate and weather data programming could make the federal government’s weather forecasts less reliable when they are needed most.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) late last year launched a suite of artificial intelligence-powered global weather forecast models which it said would improve “speed, efficiency, and accuracy.” In March, an agency official said those models are being trained with centuries of weather data.

Artificial intelligence is a valuable tool for weather prediction, but only when it is well-trained with ample data, said Monica Medina, who served as NOAA’s principal deputy undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere from 2009 to 2012.

Under Trump, climate and weather data collection has declined, said Medina. This year, the Trump administration proposed a modest budget increase for the National Weather Service, but a 40 percent cut to NOAA overall.

“We absolutely need AI to help us crunch the data faster and to make sense of more and more data that we can collect,” said Medina, who under Joe Biden also served as assistant secretary of state for oceans. “But right now, what we’re doing is cutting back the data collection…we’re going in the wrong direction.”

Crucially, when it comes to predicting extreme weather events, new models still “underperform.”

In an emailed comment, Erica Grow Cei, a National Weather Service spokesperson said: “Despite the misinformation circulating about missing weather and climate data, there is, in fact, a wealth of weather data collected each day, from satellites in space, to a network of weather balloons, to buoys in the ocean, and land-based sensors.”

But widespread reports show staffing cuts have forced NOAA’s National Weather Service to scale back satellites and balloon launches, key parts of the country’s data collection system. And shrunk climate programs threaten ocean buoy networks and other observation systems, experts say. Research into effects of the climate crisis on Earth’s systems is also being slashed, along with funding for researchers who analyze data and identify new sources.

“Weather times time equals climate,” said Craig McLean, NOAA’s former acting chief scientist and head of NOAA Research. “Cutting climate research impacts the skill of our weather forecast, and it arrests our advancement of weather forecasts.”

Those impediments are coming as the US is preparing for more extreme weather. A “super El Niño” is expected to spike temperatures, smash heat records nationwide and may boost hurricane activity in some regions.

Noaa will issue its outlook for the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season on Thursday. For decades, scientists used traditional physics-based models to predict future weather conditions, using complex mathematical equations to simulate the dynamics at work in the atmosphere. New AI-based models instead identify patterns in decades of historical data to forecast weather outcomes.

That new technology uses less computing power than traditional models—which must run thousands of mathematical equations to work—and has been found to outperform traditional models for some aspects of weather forecasting. But it also seems to have major shortcomings, experts have found.

Crucially, when it comes to predicting extreme weather events, new models still “underperform,” according to an April study published in Science Advances. Because their forecasts are based on past weather events, the authors found, they seem to have trouble simulating the record-breaking weather events that are becoming increasingly common amid the climate crisis, instead tending to predict weather more similar to historical events.

It’s kind of a snowball effect. You need accurate data for inputs for our forecast models, but we’re running on less data currently with this current administration.”

Traditional physics-based models don’t have this problem, because they assess and predict the weather outcomes that certain physical conditions yield.

“They don’t really care if there’s a different situation than we’ve seen before, because they can understand based on a rules-based [analysis] what will happen tomorrow,” said Sebastian Engelke, a professor at the University of Geneva who co-authored the study.

Chris Gloninger, a forensic meteorologist who in 2023 received death threats after speaking about the climate crisis on television, likened the problems with AI-powered models to the ways other kinds of infrastructure struggles to manage a world experiencing global warming.

“You have infrastructure systems in this country that are built on having a steady or static climate, and we know that that’s not the case as extremes are increasing,” he said.

Like stormwater systems that were not designed to keep up with climate-fueled heavy rainfall events or roads that were not designed to withstand climate-fueled extreme heat, “the AI weather models were trained on a climate that no longer exists,” Gloninger said.

This problem already has real world implications, said Gloninger, noting that conventional models outperformed AI-based ones when forecasting a historic February 2026 blizzard in the north-eastern United States.

If the government scales up its reliance on AI-powered models while reducing the amount of data that powers them, that problem could compromise federal forecasts, said Gloninger. “It’s kind of a snowball effect,” he said. “You need accurate data for inputs for our forecast models, but we’re running on less data currently with this current administration.”

Long before Trump re-entered office, the National Weather Service had faced decades of understaffing. Recent cuts have exacerbated the problem, Gloninger said.

NOAA has not wholesale switched to AI forecasting. Instead, it says it is employing more artificial intelligence in its ensemble models, which blend multiple techniques to produce a range of probable outcomes. Cei said NOAA’s new AI-powered model suite is “an addition to our stable of weather models, not a replacement,” adding that it was “built on data” from the agency’s flagship physics-based Global Forecast System model.

But Gloninger said he is still concerned that rolling any AI technology into federal models could raise problems, particularly amid cuts to weather data collection and climate research.

“There could still very much be issues when you have a component of artificial intelligence that isn’t really trained when it comes to extreme weather and climate,” he said.

Neil Jacobs, current Noaa administrator, is “probably one of the preeminent modeling scientists”, said John Sokich, a former director of congressional affairs for the National Weather Service. “I don’t believe he would rush implement something that has not been tested,” said Sokich.

But though Jacobs is “committed to advancing weather forecasting,” Jacobs is also “a Trump appointee who must back the Trump budget or leave his job,” said McLean. The administrator defended Trump’s NOAA cuts at a House environment subcommittee hearing in April, McLean noted.

“I don’t think Dr Jacobs would be in a rush to be replacing capacity with AI that’s not ready yet,” he said. “But at the same time, the man has demonstrated his willingness to be obedient to the president who appointed him [and who is] destroying the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”

Weather forecasts serve “indispensible” practical functions, powering early disaster warnings, enabling safe aviation and shipping, and helping officials optimize sectors of the economy from energy production to agriculture, said Medina. Less accurate forecasting could pose dangers to Americans, she said.

“Weather forecasts are vital to our economy, to our health, and to public safety,” she said.

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Trump Begins Branding America’s 250th Anniversary as a Christian Celebration

Donald Trump’s MAGA-style celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence ramped up Sunday with a federally funded prayer service that organizers said would “rededicate America as One Nation Under God.”

“Rededicate 250,” is one of a series of events that the Trump administration is holding to mark the country’s semiquincentennial on July 4. A UFC fight at the White House planned for Trump’s 80th birthday and an IndyCar race around the National Mall in August seem more the style of the 47th president, who was at his golf club in Virginia, not church, on Sunday. But the prayer event nods to his evangelical supporters by asserting that the United States is a Christian nation.

“We welcome Jesus into this place!” proclaimed one performer on a stage on the National Mall, in the shadow of the Washington Monument.

Speakers at the event**,** which I checked out on Sunday, included House Speaker Mike Johnson, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who controversially used a prayer service to ask God for “overwhelming violence against enemies” in the US war against Iran. Trump also addressed attendees via video.

The religious event drew substantial criticism.

“This outrageous event makes a mockery of a core constitutional tenet of American life, the separation of church and state, essentially promoting a particular flavor of white evangelical protestantism as state-sponsored religion,” Public Citizen Co-President Robert Weissman said in a statement. “This self-proclaimed day of thanksgiving torpedoes the best of American traditions—inclusivity and diversity—and has no place being connected to the U.S. government.”

Counterprotests were organized by Faithful America, a group opposed to Christian nationalism and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which hired a truck with a screen calling to “Celebrate Democracy, Not Theocracy.”

Hundreds of attendees waiting to the enter the event were accosted by a heckler who used a megaphone to accuse them of “supporting a pedophile.” (That was an apparent reference to unsubstantiated accusations about Trump being connected to Jeffrey Epstein.)

Just one of 15 scheduled speakers Sunday, an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi, was not a Christian. (A shabbat service on the Mall the day before appeared aimed at appeasing any concerns among Trump’s Jewish supporters about Sunday’s heavily Protestant focus.)

The gathering was organized by Freedom250, a private group established by the Trump administration that is using a so-far undisclosed amount of federal funding—along with corporate money from sponsors including United Airlines, ExxonMobil, John Deere, Lockheed Martin, MasterCard, Oracle and Palantir—to stage events.

The Trump administration has directed funds to Freedom250 that Congress appropriated to a different group, American250, a statutorily bipartisan group required to detail its spending for lawmakers. The White House appears to have set up Freedom25o to sidestep those requirements.

Around the perimeter of the event religious groups handed out literature, some of it anti-Catholic. Two days after federal officials announced “Operation Summer Surge” would bring thousands of additional troops, ICE agents and other law enforcement to Washington, in part to police anniversary events, there was a heavy presence: National Guard troops, US Marshals agents, and agents from Homeland Security Investigations (part of ICE) milled about.

The administration has awarded lucrative contracts for 250th anniversary celebrations to Event Strategies, a company that organized the rally Trump held on Jan. 6, 2021 that was followed by the attack on the Capitol. (The New York Times has reported Event Strategies has at least $13 million in federal contracts.) Owners of that company, which I reported was paid $688,000 for its work organizing that rally, have denied responsibility for the ensuing riot.

The Interior Department 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. And Interior and other federal agencies have awarded no-bid contracts to firms reportedly favored by Trump to repair various landscaping features, like the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting pool, citing an “urgency” exemption from federal contracting rules due to Trump’s wish for the work to be done by July 4.

Outside Sunday’s event, I checked out a “freedom truck,” one of a fleet of mobile museums offering information the country’s founders, including displays in which founders offer at times like right-leaning takes on US history.) The trucks, which will travel the US for the rest of the year, were created in partnership with right PragerU, which disseminates far right education material. Staffers manning the truck said that they work for Event Strategies.

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GOP Push for $1 Billion to Fund Trump’s Ballroom Hits Roadblock

A GOP bill aiming to use $1 billion of taxpayer money to finance required security for President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom was denied in a Saturday night ruling on technical grounds.

Senate Republicans attempted to include the ballroom project in a budget reconciliation bill—which also includes roughly $38 billion for ICE and $26 billion for US Border Patrol, among other immigration and law enforcement spending—to bypass the 60-vote filibuster threshold and only require a simple majority for passage. But all funding in such bills must be directly related to federal spending and revenue, which prevents “extraneous” provisions under the Byrd Rule.

“A project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees,” said Senate Democrats, after meeting with the chamber’s parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, whose ruling stopped the bill. “As drafted, the provision inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee.”

The GOP appears poised to seek a workaround. Ryan Wrasse, the communications director for Senate Majority Leader John Thune posted on X that the decision is not “abnormal” and that the next step is to, “Redraft. Refine. Resubmit.”

The GOP push to fund the security infrastructure conflicts in its own right with Trump’s stated plans for the construction. Trump has repeatedly said that his ballroom would cost no government funds. “These are all private individuals that put up a lot of money to build the ballroom,” he said last November at the White House. “Not one penny is being used from the federal government.”

Some Republican lawmakers are concerned about apportioning $1 billion for the ballroom. “I think the timing and the optics are really bad,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said last week. “This time last year, roughly, maybe a little bit before, we were all impressed with the fact that this $400 million building was going to be paid for out of the generosity of donors, and now we’re hearing 2½ times that is necessary for some other aspect of the project.”

According to a memo shared with senators and obtained by PBS NewsHour, $220 million would be used to toughen the White House complex, $180 million would be used for visitor screenings, $175 million for training, and an additional $175 million to boost security for those under protection by the Secret Service.

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Sen. Bill Cassidy’s Losing Legacy: He Gave America RFK Jr.

Sen. Bill Cassidy may remember coming in third place, but the American people will be left with his legacy of playing a role in degrading the nation’s health care system.

On Saturday, Cassidy won only roughly 25 percent of the vote for Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary—in a group of candidates led by President Donald Trump’s pick, Julia Letlow—thereby failing to qualify for the runoff in June. Cassidy’s political demise apparently was the first time an elected senator placed third or worse in a primary since 1944.

Cassidy, who practiced as a physician and has said he understands the “absolute scientifically based understanding that vaccines are safe,” provided the deciding vote in favor of advancing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for health secretary in February 2025. “We need a leader at HHS who will guide President Trump’s agenda to Make America Healthy Again,” the longtime GOP senator said during his floor speech explaining his support. “Based on Mr. Kennedy’s assurances on vaccines and his platform to positively influence Americans’ health, it is my consideration that he will get this done.”

RFK Jr. has since launched a war on vaccines, while Cassidy has offered little more than passive criticisms. Trump’s health secretary has alsodismantled huge swaths of his department and replaced them with Trump loyalists. So much for “Mr. Kennedy’s assurances.”

Cassidy has repeatedly refused to acknowledge that he made a mistake by confirming RFK Jr. As Julianne McShane wrote for Mother Jones last November, Cassidy admitted to CNN’s State of the Union host Jake Tapper that the CDC pushing unsubstantiated links between vaccines and autism on its website was problematic, but he downplayed the importance of the site and did not name RFK Jr. as a principal reason for the change in the health department’s direction.

Cassidy was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial over the Jan. 6 insurrection, but since then, he has appeared to mostly bend over backwards to get on the president’s good side. Trump nonetheless attacked him as “disloyal” ahead of Saturday’s vote. Notably, as Mother Jones’ Sophie Hurwitz pointed out, only four members of Congress—out of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021 and the seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict him—won reelection. Cassidy is the latest example of why so many in his party continue to fear crossing Trump.

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Smuggled in Syringes: Inside Nairobi’s Black Market in Giant Harvester Ants

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

In the biblical text Book of Proverbs, King Solomon describes the harvester ant as a model of wisdom and industriousness: “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!”

Almost 3,000 years later, the thriving international parallel market for a distinct species of the ant native to East Africa has been thrust into the global spotlight after a series of convictions in Kenya for ant smuggling.

In the most recent case, Zhang Kequn, a Chinese national, was sentenced to a year in prison and fined 1 million Kenyan shillings (about $7,600) on April 15 after his arrest in March at Jomo Kenyatta international airport, where authorities found more than 2,200 live ants in specialized tubes in his luggage destined for China.

The insects included 1,948 Messor cephalotes, a prized species commonly known as the giant African harvester ant.

The presiding principal magistrate, Irene Gichobi, said a “deterrent sentence” was needed because of rising cases of ant smuggling in Kenya and the ecological impact of the trade.

“They’re like the tigers of the ant world—just rare and beautiful and interesting.”

Kequn’s case was the third such in less than a year in Kenya, pointing to a growing market for ants as exotic pets in Asia and Europe. Ant collectors and hobbyists in these regions pay large sums for the insects, which they put in formicariums, or ant farms, to observe and study their colonies and behaviors.

A study released in 2023 on the biological invasion risk of online ant sales in China found that Messor cephalotes wasthe third most popular species among non-native ants traded in the country over the internet during a six-month period in 2021.

Kequn was charged alongside Charles Mwangi, a Kenyan who allegedly sold him the ants and is out on bail. Prosecutors said Kequn paid 100 Kenyan shillings for each ant.

Live queen garden ants exhibited during the smuggling trial of Zhang Kequn, a Chinese national, and Kenyan citizen Charles Mwangi. Nairobi, Kenya, March 17, 2026.Andrew Kasuku/AP

One giant African harvester queen can fetch more than $300 in exotic pet markets in Europe, Asia and North America, according to Pat Stanchev, the general manager of Best Ants UK, an online store. That is 40 times the Kenyan price.

Last year, a court in Nairobi sentenced two Belgian teenagers to one year in prison, with an option of paying a fine of 1 million shillings, after they were found with about 5,000 live giant African harvester queen ants packed in tubes.

In a related case, a Vietnamese and a Kenyan received the same sentence after being found in possession of about 400 giant African harvester ants packed in syringes and containers.

Reacting to Zhang’s conviction, the Kenya Wildlife Service said: “The case highlights the growing concern over the illegal trade in invertebrates, which, though often overlooked, is increasingly targeted by traffickers due to rising global demand.”

Last year’s cases prompted conservationists to call on parties to the Cites treaty on endangered plants and animals to recognise the international ant pet trade as a conservation and biosecurity issue of global concern.

Messor cephalotes is a species of harvester ant that is native to east Africa. The ant has vibrant red and black colours; is the largest known species of the harvester ant—workers can grow up to 19 mm and queens up to 25 mm (about an inch); and exhibit complex behavior in its foraging and nest building. All these features make it popular among collectors and hobbyists.

“They’re like the tigers of the ant world—just rare and beautiful and interesting,” said Dino Martins, an entomologist.

A queen mates with males then goes on to start a colony of up to hundreds of thousands of her offspring, female workers and soldiers, while continuing to produce eggs her entire life. Colonies can last decades. The ants build and live in large, circular nests and store seeds underground.

“We lose the ants, we lose our cattle and we lose our milk and our butter and our cheese and we lose our wildlife and our tourism.”

Stanchev said giant African harvester ants were a rare and dream species for collectors, who prize them for their “large size, complex colony-building, impressive foraging trails, and polymorphic workers.” He added: “The queen ants are splendid, literally.”

Best Ants UK did not support or engage in wild collection or illegal trade, and all its ants were captive-bred or sourced ethically within UK and EU regulations, said Stanchev.

Martins described giant African harvester ants as a keystone species—one considered essential in holding the ecosystem together—in grasslands and savannahs, playing roles such as collecting the seeds of grasses and dispersing them.

“They’re like the farmers of the grassland, making sure that there’s a lot of diversity of grasses, which is really important [for livestock and wildlife],” he said.

Martins said over-harvesting the ants could cause devastating effects. “We lose the ants, we lose our cattle and we lose our milk and our butter and our cheese and we lose our wildlife and our tourism,” he said.

The places where the ants are moved could be affected, too. The 2023 study said the introduction of ants outside their native ranges could make them invasive “with dire environmental and economic consequences”.

Zhengyang Wang, a conservation biologist and the lead author of the study, said as grain collectors, the giant African harvester ant could impact crop growth in large agricultural fields, such as those in southern Asia or northern US, if introduced because they were non-native.

“In ecological terms, moving species out of their native habitat is almost always a bad idea,” he said.

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Suing His Own IRS? Creating a $1.8 Billion Slush Fund? What the Hell Is Trump Trying to Pull?

Sen. Ron Wyden, longtime Oregon Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Finance Commitee, has never been a fan of President Donald Trump. But I’ve never seen him quite this worked up.

The administration, Wyden declared in a statement on Friday, “is dripping with corruption from top to bottom” and is now plotting “among the most corrupt acts in American political history.”

What we are witnessing, he said, is nothing less “than a shakedown of the American people by a crook president and his crook lawyers…no more valid than if he had sued the White House kitchen for serving him an undercooked steak. Between this and the ballroom and a thousand other acts of corruption, Trump is a parasite on the American republic.”

In case you haven’t been glued to the news, the saga that has Wyden so enraged kicked off in late January, a week into Trump’s second term, when the president, along with his company and sons Eric and Don Jr., filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service seeking “at least $10,000,000,000” in damages.

Ten billion dollars!

Basically, in 2019 and 2020, an IRS contractor named Charles Littlejohn leaked Trump’s and the Trump Organization’s confidential tax returns and related filings to the New York Times, ProPublica, “and other leftist media outlets,” as the lawsuit put it. Admittedly, this was illegal, even though Trump had repeatedly (and falsely) promised to make his tax returns public. In 2024, Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison for his leaks, which included a trove of documents that revealed how little US billionaires pay in tax.

The Trump lawsuit claims that the leaks caused the Trumps and their company “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”

This is corruption of “a different scale,” because Trump “is negotiating a settlement with the government that he runs to take taxpayer money from hardworking folks.”

The reputational claims are notable, coming from a man found guilty or liable in several civil and criminal fraud cases and liable for defamation and sexual abuse. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, was found guilty of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. And of course there’s Trump’s incitement of the violent attempt by his followers on January 6, 2021, to thwart the peaceful transfer of government, for which Trump was impeached though not convicted.

Early in his second term, Trump then pardoned all of the J6ers, dozens of whom, according to the legal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), had been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for unrelated crimes in the wake of January 6, including rape, domestic violence, weapons charges, and possession of child pornography.

Some even reoffended after Trump pardoned them, including a man who had been sentenced to five years in prison for his role in January 6, and this past February pleaded guilty to threatening the life of the US House Minority Leader: “Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC I cannot allow this terrorist to live,” he’d written, according to court filings. “Even if I am hated, he must be eliminated, I will kill him for the future.”

All that aside, the primary legal question in Trump v. IRS is whether a president’s government lawyers can mount a meaningful defense against a president’s personal lawyers—in this case pertaining to the transgressions of that president’s own administration during his first term. The correct answer is: no, of course not.

CREW, along with the nonprofit group Public Citizen, filed a friend of the court brief in the Trump lawsuit, which notes, “The President’s two hats in this litigation—his personal capacity as plaintiff and his role as chief Executive—make it impossible for attorneys in the Department of Justice (DOJ) to fulfill their ethical duties to zealously represent the interests of the defendant agencies against President Trump’s claims.”

The brief urges Kathleen Williams, the federal judge in Florida overseeing the case, to hit pause on the proceedings and “enjoin the parties from terminating the lawsuit through an unconstitutional monetary settlement while the President remains in office.”

Now, as the New York Times first reported last Tuesday, there is talk of just such a settlement. Judge Williams had set a May 20 deadline for the two sides to submit briefs explaining why they should even be considered two sides—a prerequisite for any lawsuit, since one cannot sue oneself. Williams also, the Times noted, appointed six reputable outside lawyers to weigh in on “whether Mr. Trump’s lawsuit is legitimate.”

With seemingly little chance of convincing the skeptical judge, the two sides—which are actually one side—have scrambled to concoct a settlement prior to her deadline. Among the terms initially discussed, the Times noted, was that the IRS might be precluded from auditing the Trumps and their companies in the future.

That would be “unheard of,” says John Koskinen, who served as IRS commissioner under President Barack Obama. “I don’t recall the IRS ever promising a taxpayer that there would be no audits,” he told me. “Audits get settled all the time, but promising no audits simply raises the question of what someone is worried about or trying to hide. This is especially troubling when, as the president acknowledges, the Department of Justice, representing the IRS in the case, works for the president.”

The proposed settlement provides “financial reward for those who attacked American democracy. “

When I spoke with CREW’s president, Donald Sherman, on Friday, he called the lawsuit “a stunningly corrupt attempt for the president to take taxpayer money and put it in his pocket.”

While Trump has done many corrupt things during his second term, Sherman told me, those have mostly involved outsiders buying access and influence—via foreign investments in Trump crypocurrency enterprises, for example, or billionaires shelling out for Trump’s monster ballroom. “He’s sought to get foreign countries to put money in his business. He sought to get American corporations to pay for his pet projects. He sought trademarks and things like that. Not the best—pretty corrupt,” Sherman said.

But this proposal, he added, “is of a different scale and a different order in terms of the corruption involved, because the president is suing the government that he runs, and negotiating a settlement with the government that he runs to take taxpayer money from hardworking folks.”

The story took another turn later on Friday, when ABC Newscame out with new details: Trump would consider dropping the IRS lawsuit and other audacious claims he’d made against the DOJ in 2023 and 2024, seeking $230 million in restitution for what he claimed was malicious prosecution related to Russia’s 2016 influence campaign and the FBI’s August 2022 raid of Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents. “I was damaged very greatly and any money I would get, I would give to charity,” he told the New York Times. (In 2019, a court forced Trump to pay $2 millionand admit to misusing his family’s own charitable funds for political purposes.)

The settlement now under discussion, ABC reported, would entail the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to be overseen by a commission ultimately under Trump’s control. The money wouldn’t go directly to Trump, but rather would be used to compensate people purportedly victimized by the “weaponization” of the DOJ under President Joe Biden.

On Saturday, ABC’s Katherine Faulders wrote on X that she’d been told the commission would be “likely be called ‘The President Donald J. Trump Truth and Justice Commission,’ and the total amount available in the fund will be… $1.776 billion.”

Cute.

There are “major problems with the settlement idea,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. First, it provides “financial reward for those who attacked American democracy. The consequence of not punishing Trump for January 6th is that now he rewards his supporters.”

“It is also,” Moynihan told me, “part of a pattern where Trump is violating the basic separation of powers—[$1.8] billion is a lot of money. There is no way that Congress would approve it. And yet, Trump will simply take these taxpayer resources.”

Using public money to reward the perpetrators of right-wing violence seems potentially far worse, even, than using it to enrich the president.

Can this be stopped? “It’s really up to the court to stop because obviously the majority in Congress has abdicated any responsibility,” CREW’s Sherman said. But if the parties act before the judge rules, things could get tricky. “There’s probably some narrow mechanisms where the court could overturn a settlement,” he added. Barring that, enough Republican lawmakers would have to draw the line—which they have done only very rarely with this president.

And that’s a big problem. We already have seen a great deal of corrupt intent from Trump’s DOJ, both in its actual weaponization against officials Trump despises—like former FBI director James Comey and Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whose term ended on Friday—and in its monetary settlements with Trump’s allies.

In April, for example, Trump’s DOJ agreed to pay a $1.25 million to Trump loyalist Michael Flynn, who in 2017 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI amid the investigation of Russian election interference. (He was pardoned by Trump in November 2020.) His subsequent lawsuit against the DOJ accused federal prosecutors of “improperly and politically targeting General Flynn because of his lawful association” with the Trump campaign. (Flynn may stand to collect even more restitution in a separate case, according to Lawfare.)

Trump’s proposed $1.8 billion fund would lead to more of the same, and could potentially be used to pay off insurrectionists who engaged in violence in support of Trump on January 6—some of whom sued for restitution after he granted them clemency. This “slush fund,” as Rep. Jamie Raskin, a constitutional lawyer, told The New Republic‘s Greg Sargent, would be “a shocking new betrayal of the Constitution” and “an outrageous desecration of congressional power of the purse.”

What’s more, he pointed out, the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the government from assuming any “obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

Even by the standards of the Trump administration, a federal agency funneling cash into the president’s pocket indeed seems stunningly corrupt. Yet using public money to reward the perpetrators of right-wing violence seems potentially far worse—a clear and present danger to the republic.

As Raskin put it to Sargent, ominously, Trump and his lawyers “are figuring out a way to refund the January 6 militia, presumably to get them ready for the next round of battle.”

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Jared Polis Did the Right Thing

On Friday afternoon, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis issued 35 pardons. He also commuted the sentences of nine prisoners, allowing them to be released years before they otherwise would be.

Some of these acts of clemency were deeply controversial. Polis, a Democrat, shortened the sentences of multiple convicted murderers. He is also setting free Brandin Kreuzer, who shot Douglas County Sheriff’s Deputy Todd Tucker in 2008and has served 15 years of a 50-year sentence. “I had numerous surgeries to basically put my arm back together,” Tucker told Denver’s 9News. “I still have lasting nerve damage to this day. My arm is not 100 percent, does not function as it should.” The current county sheriff said in a statement that he was “furious” about Kreuzer’s commutation: “The audacity of Governor Polis to grant clemency to a would-be cop killer on National Peace Officer Memorial Day shows a complete lack of respect for the brave men and women who wear the badge.”

But it’s a different commutation that has sparked furious bipartisan backlash across Colorado. In 2024, Tina Peters—the former Mesa County clerk—was convicted of various crimes for her role in a scheme to illegally breach that county’s election system and in an effort to prove the 2020 race had been stolen from Donald Trump. Peters was originally sentenced to nearly nine years behind bars. On Friday, Polis commuted her sentence to about four-and-a-half years and ordered her paroled next month.

Trump—who for months has been demanding Peters’ release and attempting to punish Colorado for this and other perceived transgressions—immediately celebrated Polis’ decision. But beyond the MAGA faithful, the move is drawing broad outrage. Matt Crane, a Republican who directs the Colorado County Clerks Association, blasted Polis in a press conference, as Colorado Public Radio reported: “When given the opportunity to stand firmly for the rule of law, for the integrity of Colorado elections and for the public servants who defend them, [Polis] chose a different path.” The watchdog group Common Cause Colorado added that “Governor Polis’ decision undermines election security, weakens accountability, and permanently stains his legacy.”

These are reasonable arguments, but personally, I don’t find them compelling. There’s no doubt that Peters is a raging conspiracy theorist who abused her public office and broke the law. But nine years is an awfully long time. She is 70 and has already been in prison for more than a year and a half. A defendant who pleaded guilty to similar charges in the doomed Trump RICO prosecution in Georgia received probation. “The crimes you were convicted of are very serious and you deserve to spend time in prison,” Polis wrote in his commutation letter to Peters. “However, this is an extremely unusual and lengthy sentence for a first time offender who committed nonviolent crimes.”

Why was Peters’ prison sentence so severe? Partly because it was based unconstitutional factors. At sentencing, Judge Matthew Barrett indicated that he was taking into account not just her actions, but her noxious conspiracy theories. Among other things, Barrett accused Peters of peddling “a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.”

“So the damage that is caused and continue[s] to be caused is just as bad, if not worse, than the physical violence that this court sees on an all too regular basis,” Barrett declared. “And it’s particularly damaging when those words come from someone who holds a position of influence like you.”

The key word there is “words.”

Last month, three Colorado appellate judges—all of whom were appointed by Polis’ Democratic predecessor—unanimously threw out Peters’ prison sentence, declaring it a clear violation of her First Amendment free speech rights. They ordered Peters to be resentenced, but Polis intervened before that could happen.

“It is apparent that the [trial] court imposed the lengthy sentence it did because Peters continued to espouse the views that led her to commit these crimes,” the appeals court concluded. “The tenor of the [trial] court’s comments makes clear that it felt the sentence length was necessary, at least in part, to prevent her from continuing to espouse views the court deemed ‘damaging.’”

In other words, Peters should have been sentenced for what she actually did, not the bizarre conspiracy theories she espoused. She can be punished for the crimes she committed in her illegal quest to expose non-existent election fraud. But she can’t be punished for loudly voicing her beliefs.

Publicly, Peters herself now claims to recognize this distinction. In a statement she released after the commutation was announced, she acknowledged that her actions were wrong but said that once released, she planned to “support election integrity” through “legal means.”

Thank you Governor Polis.

I made mistakes, and for those I am sorry. Five years ago I misled the Secretary of State when allowing a person to gain access to county voting equipment. That was wrong. I have learned and grown during my time in prison and going forward I will make…

— Tina Peters Whistleblower of fallen Navy SEAL (@realtinapeters) May 15, 2026

I have no doubt that Peters will continue spreading damaging election conspiracy theories in the years to come. But prison is not the solution to that.

Polis addressed that point in an interview Friday with 9News’ Kyle Clark. “I vehemently disagree with much of what she has to say, certainly her conspiratorial beliefs,” the governor said. But, he added, the proper way to oppose such rhetoric is through public refutation—not to “lock somebody up because they believe something that is…conspiratorial and potentially dangerous.”

“That’s not the country we live in,” Polis said. “I believe in free speech.”

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Ahead of Louisiana Primary, Trump Calls GOP Sen. Cassidy a “Disloyal Disaster”

As voters in Louisiana head to the polls for Saturday’s primary elections, President Donald Trump is doing all he can to ensure that incumbent Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy gets the boot.

Cassidy was one of seven GOP senators who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial after the January 6 insurrection, and the president hasn’t forgotten. Cassidy is facing two primary challengers: State Treasurer John Fleming and Congresswoman Julia Letlow, whom Trump has endorsed. If no candidate receives a majority of the vote Saturday, Louisiana Republicans will head back to the polls on June 27 for a runoff.

“Senator Bill Cassidy is a Disloyal Disaster,” Trump posted on Truth Social Saturday morning. “Now he’s going to get CLOBBERED, hopefully, in today’s BIG election, by two great people!!!”

Beyond voting to convict Trump, Cassidy has clashed with the president over HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccination stance—though he also cast the deciding vote to confirm Kennedy to his position. Cassidy’s capitulation in the confirmation battle doesn’t seem to have helped him much with Trump’s and Kennedy’s loyalists. MAHA PAC, a group associated with Kennedy’s agenda, has spent six figures opposing Cassidy and supporting Letlow. Still, Cassidy outraised both of his challengers by millions of dollars.

Letlow has spent her time in Congress focused on the culture war in education, sponsoring a “Parents Bill Of Rights Act” that would require educators to notify parents if a child requests to use a different name or pronouns in school. It would also allow parents to review all educational materials, such as library books. Despite this, Cassidy’s campaign has spent heavily on ads calling her “Liberal Letlow.”

Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in 2021 and the seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict him, only four have subsequently managed to win reelection. Most retired, lost primaries, or were redistricted out of their seats.

If Trump gets his way, Cassidy will become the next apostate to be ousted. And three days from now, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie—a Republican who didn’t vote to impeach Trump but has opposed him on numerous other issues—will attempt to defend his seat against a Trump-backed challenger, too.

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Trump Meme Coin Contest: Win Exclusive Access to “World Football 2026 Final Game”!

Have you been struggling to get your hands on affordable World Cup tickets? Well, Donald Trump’s business partners have an “extraordinary” offer for you!

The president’s $TRUMP meme coin has been floundering for months, tumbling from a stratospherically absurd price of $74 per coin shortly before Inauguration Day to around $2.25 on Friday. To drum up interest in this crypto asset, Trump last month attended an exclusive gala at Mar-a-Lago for the top coin holders. But that didn’t seem to help much.

Now, Trump’s meme coin business partners are back with what appears to a new plan to lure investors: a chance to win box seats at the World Cup final in July. Or, as the meme coin’s official website eloquently puts it: “This Summer, Top Members Earn an Extraordinary 3-Day VIP Experience with a Private Luxury Suite at the World Football 2026 Final Game.”

Earlier this month, the coin’s website, which is run by Trump associate Bill Zanker, announced the creation of a special club for coin holders that would offer perks, including exclusive access to then-unnamed sporting events. Now the first details have been posted—the 19 highest ranking club members will be invited to attend a three-day party for the World Cup final. The precise rules for determining rankings are unclear but seem to include some combination of the number of coins investors own and the amount of time over which they’ve owned them.

Perks will include access to a swanky stadium suite, three nights at the St. Regis hotel, chauffeured rides to the stadium, an invitation to a gala, an “elite” afterparty, and “exclusive World Cup nightclub access.” The apparently AI-generated illustration on the website shows a generic stadium, with guests dining and facing away from the game. One figure is wearing a red hat that says “$TRUMP” instead of “MAKE AMERICAN GREAT AGAIN”—a not especially subtle clue about where the Trump presidency is heading.

Neither FIFA nor the club’s organizers responded to a request for comment on what exactly the “World Cup nightclub” is, or if the gala and afterparty are FIFA events. The site’s fine print does make clear that the World Cup and FIFA are not affiliated or connected in any way to the $TRUMP coin promotion. But on some levels, it’s a perfect match. The World Cup has already been harshly criticized for focusing its ticket sales on lavish hospitality packages. Trump has developed a close relationship with FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, who created a “peace prize” to award to Trump.

On Stubhub, the cheapest nosebleed seats for the final are currently going for around $8,700. So, as swanky and elite as the Trump Coin Club’s offerings aim to be, the plunging price of $TRUMP could perhaps turn it into an unexpectedly affordable way to get into the big game.

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Farmers Are Collateral Damage in Trump’s Iran War

It’s planting season, and 70 percent of American farmers can’t afford enough fertilizer to plant all their crops. About a third of the planet’s nitrogen fertilizer, the most widely used in global agriculture, must pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Thanks to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran, that waterway is essentially still closed to most ships.

It’s been described as a “slow-moving food crisis”: when farmers can’t buy fertilizer, they don’t plant as much, and months on, that shows up in scarcer, pricier food. United Nations estimates that 45 million people worldwide could go hungry thanks to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Though the situation is not quite as dire in the US, American farmers are feeling the squeeze, too: fertilizer prices are changing by the minute, soybean farmers are still facing export tariffs, and diesel costs are up, too.

In an Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee hearing Tuesday, Arkansas Republican Sen. John Boozman proclaimed that “food security is national security.” But the hearing offered few governmental solutions to the fertilizer shortage—particularly not ending the war.

Trent Kubik, president of the South Dakota Corn Grower’s Association, told the committee he’s had a hard season on his farm. “We expected our costs were going to be higher than normal, as we’d be purchasing [fertilizer] closer to peak demand season,” he said, but with the war on Iran, they’re “nearly doubling.”

He’s not the only one. In the first quarter of 2026, 86 American farms have already filed for Chapter 12 bankruptcy. And while farmers suffer under the Hormuz blockade, fertilizer producers’ revenues continue to increase.

“The fertilizer industry is one of the most heavily consolidated industries,” Omanjana Goswami of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who studies agricultural policy, told Mother Jones. “At the same time that these companies are making billions of dollars in profits over the years, farmers have seen profit margins go down drastically because of the higher cost of fertilizer.”

Four major manufacturers control nearly the entire US fertilizer market—and they’ve increased nitrogen fertilizer prices 28 percent since the war on Iran began in February, according to recent University of Illinois data.

Meanwhile, farmers are scrambling, planting less food, and switching to less fertilizer-thirsty crops. “About 4 million acres of corn [in the US] have been switched over to soybean, just to make up for the fact that fertilizer availability was much less this spring,” Goswami said.

“That’s the thing that we feel the worst about,” Kubik, the corn farmer, said. “During the last 75 days, a lot of money was being made–but it wasn’t by farmers.”

“Farmers get thrown head first into a crisis every time global supply chains are hit,” Goswami said. That reoccurring crisis—which also happened when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—is the product of an unsustainable agricultural model that requires massive amounts of fertilizer to be shipped from overseas. Some experts suggest that even if the war on Iran ends tomorrow, high fertilizer prices will persist through at least 2027.

The Iran war fertilizer shock, Goswami added, will likely impact wheat in particular.

Combined with some bad weather earlier this spring and an unrelenting drought in the plains states, the war is making this the worst year for wheat yields in decades. Most wheat grown in the US (unlike, say, corn or soy) is destined for consumption by humans, which means there’s a good chance we’ll see that price shock in the bread aisle later this year.

Meanwhile, beyond some efforts at mandating greater price transparency from fertilizer manufacturers, farmers haven’t been offered any real relief.

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), at Tuesday’s hearing, was indignant. “Between the war in Iran, spiking fuel and fertilizer prices, and illegal trade wars, increasing the cost of equipment, and limiting market access, it’s no wonder that farmers in Georgia I talked to say that they can’t take much more,” he said at this week’s hearing. “Fertilizer prices are increasing. Diesel costs have increased by over $2 a gallon compared to this time last year and there’s no end in sight. At this point, the best-case scenario for farmers is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.”

It was open, he pointed out, before the war started.

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Antisemitic Hantavirus Conspiracy Theories Are Spreading—and the Platforms Are Hands Off

A popular social media conspiracy theory about a recent cluster of hantavirus cases claims that the word “hanta” means “scam,” “fraud,” or “nonsense” in “Hebrew slang.” That’s more or less where the theory ends and dark suggestion takes over. One is meant to conclude that the supposed Hebrew origins of the word mean that the hantavirus—a well-documented illness with outbreaks that go back several decades—is somehow a scam, perpetrated by either the Israeli government or some other undefined group of Jewish people.

None of this is true. Even the root linguistic claim is completely wrong: the word “hantavirus” comes from the Hantaan River in Korea, where the prototype virus was first identified. Nor is hantavirus, which is typically spread by close contact with infected rodents or their urine, saliva, or feces, a new illness: the virus was isolated in 1978 and cultivated in labs as far back as 1981. In New Mexico, hantavirus cases virtually occur annually; last year, Santa Fe resident Betsy Arakawa, the wife of actor Gene Hackman, died from the illness.

Yet in the past two weeks, the “Hebrew” claim has spread wildly across Instagram, Threads, TikTok, X, and YouTube, through a fusillade of virtually identical posts, mostly shared by people who are neither public figures nor widely followed. The way the false notion has spread is an excellent demonstration not only of how a conspiracy theory is created and reinforced in real time, but of the ways tech platforms are either unable or unwilling to take action against coded hateful claims.

“I can’t stress enough about how this post is not a dig at Jews.”

Almost all of the social media posts making these claims follow the same format, whether presented in screenshots or a video: the words “I wonder what Hanta means in Hebrew” appear, followed by an image of a Google search for the term, with the company’s AI Overview summary at the top, which claims: “In Hebrew slang, hanta (חַנְטָה) means nonsense, a lie, a scam, or something completely fake. It is often used colloquially as the equivalent of “that’s bullshit” or “a load of garbage.” As citations, Google’s AI overview links to an answer from Grok, X’s in-house AI chatbot, and to a Reddit thread that’s since been deleted. A virtually identical AI summary also currently appears on Instagram when a user searches for the phrase “What does Hanta mean in Hebrew.”

The rumors spread so widely on X that they, as Snopes pointed out, became a trending topic on the platform. Many of the posts had impressive reach, considering the posters’ stature. One of the most successful versions on Instagram, from a New Age influencer calling herself Divinely Sierra, has garnered over two million views. (In a comment added a day after she made the video, Sierra added, “I can’t stress enough about how this post is not a dig at Jews… This post is specifically talking about how this reality and everything we see come from the world stage is scripted.”) Another version on Instagram is approaching 200,000 views, posted by a small-scale hunting and masculinity influencer whose previous videos often didn’t crack 500 views. To drive the point home, his video includes audio from the Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila.”

Interestingly, the claims have spread widely even as very few recognizable public figures have engaged. Shock jocks Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew discussed the claim in a video that’s still up on YouTube but was removed by TikTok the day I contacted the company for comment. JP Sears, a far-right comedian, has posted versions of the claim on both X and Facebook—but at just over 200,000 views apiece, he’s done scarcely better than that hunting influencer.

Like false claims about the Talmud that circulated among some of the internet’s most unpleasant masculinity influencers in the summer of 2024, the hantavirus claims also rely on flatly wrong facts about Hebrew. Dr. Ghil’ad Zuckermann, a linguist and language revivalist, suggested to me that the claim is “based on confusing the Korean potamonym (river name) ‘hanta’ with khárta (חרטא), a common Israeli slangism meaning ‘bullshit, nonsense.’” (The Hebrew letters that make the N and R sounds, he points out, are “similar graphically.”)

Zuckermann says that another Israeli slang term, khantarísh (חנטריש) means “nonsense, worthless person, bullshitter.” “Theoretically, this term could be clipped (shortened) to khánta,” he says.

But, he adds, “I personally know hundreds of thousands speakers of the Israeli language and have never heard any of them saying khánta, whereas khárta is common.”

A TikTok spokesperson told me the company’s “Community Guidelines” disallow “misinformation that could cause significant harm to individuals or society,” including “harmful conspiracy theories, and other false information related to public safety or crises—when such content may lead to violence or cause public panic.” The spokesperson also told me that when users search for the word “hantavirus” on TikTok, they’ll now first see a link to a Mayo Clinic page.

While the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment, under Elon Musk, X maintains nominal policies against “hateful conduct.” Experts have found what one study called a “consistent spike” in hate speech after Musk bought the company in 2022. In an agreement with British regulators announced Friday, the company pledged to take stronger action against both hateful content and accounts linked to terrorist groups.

YouTube—where the claims are present, but not as prevalent—has policies that forbid “certain types of misleading or deceptive content with serious risk of egregious harm,” which the hantavirus claims don’t clearly fall into. A Meta spokesperson, meanwhile, told me that the company is “reviewing the content in question and will take action against anything that violates our policies.”

But like the videos spreading false claims themselves, the spokesperson added, the responses are also expected to come from users.

“As we announced in March 2025, Meta has rolled out a Community Notes feature that lets people add more context to Facebook, Instagram and Threads posts that are potentially misleading or confusing,” they told me. “Meta has always been clear that we don’t think we should be the arbiters of truth, and our approach has long been to surface information that people find helpful in deciding what to read, trust or share.”

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Watchdogs Urge Senate to Investigate Samuel Alito’s Oil Stock Conflicts

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

The Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, who owns stock in oil companies, may be violating court ethics codes by participating in certain cases that could benefit Big Oil, government watchdog groups say.

In a Thursday letter, a coalition of watchdog organizations called on the Senate judiciary committee to investigate Alito, the sole Supreme Court justice with holdings in energy companies.

“His irregular recusal practice in oil and gas industry-related cases is undermining public confidence in the impartiality of the Court,” says the letter, signed by green groups including League of Conservation Voters and Center for Biological Diversity, as well as progressive accountability watchdogs the Revolving Door Project and True North Research.

The high court in February agreed to take up a case brought by the oil majors Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil—the first time the court agreed to weigh in on such a challenge. The companies asked the justices to find that federal law prevents subnational governments from filing lawsuits against oil and gas companies for the climate-warming effects of their products.

The court did not say which justices supported weighing in on the petition. Alito did not recuse himself, the letter notes. “No judge on any court, including the high court, should be allowed to hear cases where he or she have a financial stake in those cases,” said Lisa Graves, a former senior justice department official who now directs True North Research.

In 2023, Alito recused himself from considering a petition brought by the same companies in the same lawsuit. That request, which would have required approval from four judges, was denied.

The justice’s most recent financial disclosure, which was filed last August and covers 2024, showed holdings in individual stock worth between $60,007 and $245,000 in ConocoPhillips, Phillips66, and five other oil and energy companies. Alito also has up to $100,000 invested in a Vanguard fund in which ExxonMobil is the third-largest holding, the letter says.

“These holdings alone should compel Justice Alito to recuse himself from the Boulder case and the parallel state climate deception cases,” the groups say, referring to lawsuits brought by more than 70 state and local governments accusing oil companies of misleading the public about their role in the climate crisis.

It is not clear if Alito has sold his stock in oil and gas companies since filing his last financial disclosure. The Guardian has contacted the Supreme Court and Alito for comment.

Justices will be required to report on their 2026 holdings next year; by then, the court may have already ruled on the Suncor case, Graves said.

“It’s really outrageous. The highest court in the country…should have the highest standards, not the lowest.”

The groups say Alito has another “apparent conflict of interest”—his relationship with the Republican billionaire donor Paul Singer. Singer founded and runs the hedge fund Elliott Investment Management, which owns more than 52 million shares of Suncor that are worth more than $2.3 billion.

ProPublica reported in June 2023 that Alito failed to officially disclose that he took a private jet ride to Alaska for a 2008 fishing trip paid for by Singer. Alito defended the trip in the Wall Street Journal, saying ethics rules didn’t require him to disclose that he took the trip and that he had no duty to recuse himself from any cases involving Singer discussed in the reporting. He wrote: “ProPublica suggests that my failure to recuse in these cases created an appearance of impropriety, but that is incorrect.”

Thursday’s letter from the watchdog groups says: “Alito’s decision to reverse course and participate in granting the companies’ most recent petition—when a finding in favor of the companies could directly and indirectly benefit both himself and his billionaire friend—is an indefensible breach of ethical boundaries.”

In 2023, the Supreme Court adopted its first-ever formal ethics code—a response to pressure over a slew of scandals focused on some of its senior right-wing justices. It says justices should recuse themselves from cases where their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” but allows the justices to make that decision themselves.

The code has been widely derided as toothless by experts due to its lack of an enforcement mechanism. Unlike standards for other federal judges, it also allows justices to stay on cases if their vote is necessary to resolve the case.

“It’s possible that Alito is using that rationale, [arguing] he’s needed to resolve the matter of the Suncor case,” said Graves. “It’s really outrageous. The highest court in the country…should have the highest standards, not the lowest ones.”

This year, the court also rolled out new software to scan challengers’ filings to identify potential conflicts of interest which might require justices to recuse themselves from cases. Parties before the court must list stock-ticker symbols for companies involved in cases to allow the new software to help identify conflicts.

But the outcome of each climate accountability lawsuit targeting Big Oil could affect the entire industry, said Hannah Story Brown, deputy research director at Revolving Door Project. That means holdings in any oil companies should disqualify justices from weighing in on any of the lawsuits, she said.

“A blanket refusal is the only consistently ethical option for Alito when faced with any of these parallel cases,” Brown said.

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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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