“Cheat Like Hell”: Can Trump Actually Rig the 2026 Midterms?

He tried really, really hard in 2020. With his souring presidency on the line, he’s intensifying his efforts again. You know what we’re talking about: Trump’s election meddling.

“After 2020, I think one of the lessons that some of us learned—but unfortunately not everybody—is that our democracy is fragile,” says Washington, DC, bureau chief David Corn in the very first episode of our new podcast, Stress Test, a white-knuckle guide to the midterm elections. “Trump came pretty close, even with all the guardrails.”

And Trump isn’t the only one meddling—to which David can personally attest. Shortly after the release of his new book, How Russia Won, the very Russian disinformation operators he wrote about started circling deepfake videos of him, claiming he’d written a very different book: one detailing 300 crimes committed by Democratic candidates.

In this episode, David and co-host Garrison Hayes are joined by voting rights correspondent Ari Berman to pull apart the biggest stress test facing the midterms: whether the vote will proceed smoothly, or whether Trump will meddle even more. After all, Trump and his gang are already claiming the election will be “rigged,” pushing false voter-fraud claims, trying to disrupt mail voting, and demanding voter-roll data that could be used to challenge or purge voters. Then there are the redistricting wars that have shaped so much of 2026, and the Supreme Court’s role in diluting Black political power. At last month’s Republican midterm convention, Trump even went so far as to lead the crowd in a performatively jokey pledge to “cheat like hell.” (“It’s kind of hard to believe when someone says it so explicitly,” says a dumbfounded Garrison.)

The episode presents a blend of hope and fear. Many of Trump’s efforts have flopped so far: The Justice Department, Ari notes, is 0-25 in federal court in its bid to force states to hand over their voter rolls. His advice: “Don’t give Trump any more power than he actually has.”

But the Supreme Court has left plenty of room for a more orderly kind of rigging, like gerrymandering. “So you can’t steal,” as David puts it, “but you can tilt.” And Ari argues that what happens before the vote may not be what matters most. “What we saw in 2020 is all hell broke loose after voting ended. And so that’s why I don’t want to sit here and say, like, ‘Everyone’s fine, no need to stress, we’re all good.’ Because we don’t know what’s going to happen in those next phases where people vote, where votes are counted, and where elections are certified.”

New episodes of Stress Test drop every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe at youtube.com/motherjones.

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Burned Cattle, Drought, Smoke-Choked Pastures—and the SCOTUS Case to Make Exxon and Suncor Pay

After one of the largest wildfires in state history devastated Rio Blanco County, Colorado in 2025, Deirdre Macnab saw her share of horrors across the community: cows burned to death, pigs died from sunstroke, and pastures were blanketed in thick black smoke. This past summer was no different. “It was hellish,” Macnab told me. “Between the temperature and the drought, 2026 was a dress rehearsal for what we know is coming.”

Over the last few years, Macnab, a regenerative cattle rancher, and her fellow ranchers have experienced the devastating effects of climate change on their livelihood. “Every single rancher can tell stories about how their operations have been impacted and in some cases ended**,**” she said. On Monday, their stories, along with dozens of others about the mounting climate costs in Colorado, will arrive at the US Supreme Court, which will hear oral arguments for the much anticipated case between Boulder, Colorado, and Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil Corporation.

The case revolves around a dispute between the City and County of Boulder, which first sued the energy companies in 2018. They are arguing that Suncor and Exxon deceived the public about the dangers of climate change and should be forced to pay damages for climate-induced heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods. “The damages will only multiply as climate change worsens,” Boulder stated in its lawsuit. Suncor and Exxon, meanwhile, are asking the justices to kill the case before it makes it to trial—and with it a host of other state-level climate cases.

Depending on how the eight justices rule—Justice Samuel Alito announced what some considered to be an 11th hour recusal earlier this week—the case could have far-reaching consequences for people like Macnab, who submitted an amicus brief in support of Boulder along with six other ranchers. But its implications extend beyond the state’s borders: dozens of other climate-related lawsuits hang in the balance of how Suncor v. Boulder is decided**.** Indeed, experts say that its implications extend beyond climate to include other damages-related suits, from asbestos cases, to pharmaceuticals, to opioids.

The state of Colorado is estimated to pay $37 billion in climate damages by 2050, and Boulder is arguing that, “Alone, [the City and County of Boulder] and their taxpayers cannot pay the full costs of all that is needed to attempt to mitigate the harm caused by climate change, nor should they.” Rather, the “costs should be shared” by the energy companies, which have “acted recklessly.” In addition to Macnab and her fellow ranchers, Boulder’s case is supported by some Democratic members of Congress, former Republican and Democratic EPA administrators, and federally recognized Indian tribes.

Some lawyers hesitate even to call Boulder’s case a “climate” suit. Alejandro Camacho, a law professor at UCLA, said, “Suncor is not about whether climate change is real, and it’s not about who sets national emissions policy. It’s about whether a state court may hear an ordinary damages claim.” Hitching its legal wagon to climate change could hurt Boulder’s chances in front of a conservative-leaning court, Camacho says, “And that’s why I think it’s more useful for people to see it for what it is: a tort case.” In widespread corporate liability, tort law allows a plaintiff who’s been harmed—from pesticides or medications, to the recent case against Meta for social media addiction—to sue a company for compensation.

Patrick Parenteau, Professor of Law Emeritus at Vermont Law School, described the situation more starkly. “You could call it deception, misrepresentation, but frankly it’s fraud,” Parenteau told me. “What [Boulder is] saying is, the companies lied about what they knew about the dangers of climate change. Fraud is the heart of it.”

“You could call it deception, misrepresentation, but frankly it’s fraud. What [Boulder is] saying is, the companies lied about what they knew about the dangers of climate change. Fraud is the heart of it.”

In their petition, Suncor and Exxon have argued that Boulder’s lawsuit is a surreptitious attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and those who claim injury at the state levelshould instead defer to the federal Clean Air Act. “Claims seeking relief for injuries allegedly caused by interstate pollution constitute an inherently federal area exclusively governed by federal law,” Suncor and Exxon stated in their filing. In other words, Colorado shouldn’t be able to seek state-level damages, in this case compensation from industry, when the harm in question is regulated by the Clean Air Act, which is a preexisting federal system. Three dozen amici briefs submitted on behalf of Suncor also demonstrate a significant show of force on the petitioner’s side, but a recent Consumer Watchdog investigation found that a majority of the briefs were written by groups with financial ties to the energy companies.

Boulder insists that it is “not asking [the] Court to stop or regulate the production of fossil fuels [or emissions] in Colorado or elsewhere.” They are arguing only that industry should help to “remediate the harm” from the production. In fact, Camacho believes Suncor’s arguments invoking the Clean Air Act are “ludicrous” given Boulder’s original complaint. “No federal statute provides a damages remedy for climate harms,” he said. “The Clean Air Act does not allow for regulation of greenhouse gases.”

Jonathan Adler, a conservative law professor at William & Mary Law School and a proponent of Boulder’s original case moving forward, agrees with Camacho on the preemption argument. “Neither the Clean Air Act nor the Constitution imposes such a rule,” Adler wrote in a brief on behalf of the Colorado county. “We can have arguments and debates about the scope of relief that [Boulder] seeks or obtains,” he told me, “but those are all separate from the preemption question.”

The Trump administration may have inadvertently undermined Suncor’s argument by rescinding the 2009 endangerment finding earlier this year. As Emily Sanders pointed out in Point Source News, the administration is “drastically shrinking the EPA’s authority to regulate emissions under the Clean Air Act.” In 2025, the Trump administration submitted an unsolicited brief urging the justices to rule in Suncor’s favor. Department of Justice lawyers are expected to argue alongside Suncor and Exxon’s lawyers on Monday.

If the Supreme Court ultimately decides to issue a broad ruling in favor of Suncor and Exxon by establishing a sweeping preemption rule, the decision could set a precedent for the dozens of other climate lawsuits waiting for their day in court. “A broad ruling ends essentially all of them,” Camacho said during a webinar with Covering Climate Now and Point Source News. A split outcome, in which the court rules that some cases can proceed while others must be halted, is also possible. None of the cases have progressed to trial yet.

Beyond the ecosystem of climate liability lawsuits, a sweeping decision against Boulder could have even further-reaching consequences. “I worry a broad preemption ruling could have implications for other areas of law, including litigation over things that occur on or through the internet,” said Adler. In a more unlikely but still possible scenario, the court could say nothing about the Clean Air Act and instead rule on another argument from industry: in this case, that Colorado’s law infringes on the federal government’s constitutional authority over foreign affairs. “This has implications for basic asbestos litigation, pharmaceutical injuries, transboundary pollution cases, forced labor cases,” Camacho said. “It swallows up all of state tort law that involves any kind of international company.”

With a decisionexpected sometime next year, the legal experts I spoke with pointed out that the justices could choose to punt the case entirely by ruling they don’t have jurisdictional authority to hear it. “No one knows how the court’s going to rule,” said Mike Meno, communications director for Center for Climate Integrity. “But if there is a ruling on the preemption question, in cases across the country, communities and oil companies will be back in court arguing whether and how that ruling applies to these specific cases.”

On Monday morning, while the justices hear oral arguments, Deirdre Macnab will be outside the halls of the Supreme Court along with a coalition of Colorado ranchers, survivors of the 2021 Marshall fire, and members of Boulder youth groups. On our call, she described what’s at stake. “This story is much bigger than just the cattle ranchers. It’s the everyday families that are trying to afford food, who feel pressured about how much things are costing,” she said. “Government can’t fix everything, but it’s the tool we have to hold the private sector accountable.”

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Bill Pulte Said He Was Cracking Down on Fraud. Now He’s Firing the Investigators.

Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said last year that the agency, which oversees federal mortgage regulators Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, had launched a wide “mortgage-fraud crackdown.”

That was never a persuasive claim. Pulte announced his campaign after drawing criticism for urging the Justice Department to prosecute officials including Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook, New York Attorney Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), over alleged inaccuracies in past mortgage applications. His targets were almost all Democrats—or, in Cook’s case, a Democratic appointee—who President Donald Trump had previously clashed with.

Pulte’s cuts “will eliminate our capacity to effectively conduct criminal investigation of mortgage, bank, and other fraud schemes involving the entities FHFA regulates.”

But Pulte’s supposed crackdown on mortgage fraud looks a lot less plausible now. On Wednesday, he announced deep cuts to the office of the Inspector General at the FHFA. That office is reportedly investigating Pulte’s own alleged misconduct. But it also includes dozens of special agents who work to “detect, investigate, and refer for prosecution mortgage fraud and other crimes” involving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, FHFA Acting Principal Deputy Inspector General James Hodge told congressional oversight committee members in a letter Wednesday.

Pulte’s cuts “will eliminate our capacity to effectively conduct criminal investigation of mortgage, bank, and other fraud schemes involving the entities FHFA regulates,” Hodge wrote. He said he would have to lay off about 40 investigators who have helped the office secure more than 1,200 criminal convictions and recover nearly $75 billion since.

In a press release Thursday, Pulte explained slashing the IG’s budget by arguing that it was relatively more expensive than comparable inspector general offices at other federal agencies as a percentage of overall agency spending.

The announcement did not mention Pulte’s purported crackdown on mortgage fraud, or how firing investigators would affect that effort. The agency’s press office did not respond Thursday to questions on the subject.

Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee demanded on Thursday that Pulte reverse the move, writing to him that the cuts would “make it impossible” for the Inspector General’s office to oversee the agency and the US mortgage market.

Top Democrats said Thursday that Pulte “should resign, and if he does not, Congress must hold him accountable.”

“Your decision is unacceptable and yet another example of this Administration’s willingness to flout the law and evade accountability. It also indicates that FHFA is uninterested in finding and eliminating mortgage fraud—an issue that you have repeatedly claimed to prioritize at FHFA,” the lawmakers wrote.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and other top Democrats said Thursday that Pulte “should resign, and if he does not, Congress must hold him accountable.”

Pulte’s efforts to target Trump foes for alleged mortgage fraud has largely failed. Federal prosecutors, at his urging, did indict James, the New York Attorney General who in 2024 won a civil case requiring Trump’s companies to pay back more than $450 million in wrongly obtained funds and interest. A judge later threw out the case against James after ruling the appointment of the Trump aide who brought the case was illegal.

Pulte reportedly targeted one Republican, Attorney General Todd Blanche. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Pulte looked into Blanche’s mortgages after the former Trump lawyer, at the time the deputy attorney general, criticized Pulte’s efforts targeting Democrats.

Pulte’s efforts to use his office to advance partisan vendettas have never been subtle. The Government Accountability Office has said it is investigating whether Pulte misused his position to access mortgage information on Trump foes.

But as Pulte moves to fire the federal employees who look into actual mortgage fraud, the Trump loyalist’s motivations targeting Democratic officials are clearer than ever.

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In Sworn Deposition, Rep. Max Miller Was Silent on Staircase Assault Allegation

During a sworn deposition on Monday, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) declined to answer repeated questions from one of his ex-wife’s lawyers about whether he pushed a girl down a staircase during high school.

The deposition, first reported by Mother Jones, was part of his ongoing court battle over custody of the two-year-old daughter he shares with Emily Moreno, daughter of US Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). Emily Moreno has accused her ex-husband of assaulting her multiple times. He has also been accused of being violent toward two other women and was investigated by Ohio authorities for potential child abuse, though that claim was deemed “unsubstantiated.”

In July, Mother Jones published an investigation into Miller based on a trove of police and court documents. Among the records were claims that Miller tossed boiling water at Moreno, held a gun to her head while she changed their daughter’s diaper, and shoved her against a wall, resulting in bruises.

In these filings, Moreno’s lawyers also brought up an alleged incident from high school—previously reported by Politico and subsequently by Mother Jones—in which Miller was said to have pushed a woman down the stairs after she rejected his physical advances.

“With eight to 10 friends at Miller’s house, Miller pushed a girl out the door of his room and she fell down some stairs after he became enraged when she resisted his attempts to touch her, according to three people who were there and many more who heard about the incident in the aftermath,” wrote journalist Michael Kruse in 2021.

Reached by text message this summer, the woman in question told Mother Jones that while the event “happened 20 years ago,” it remains “one of the more traumatic nights of my life.”

In interviews and statements, Miller has denied ever behaving violently toward women, including his ex-wife and the woman from high school.

Testifying under penalty of perjury this week, Miller was repeatedly instructed by his lawyers to remain silent on the staircase allegation:

Moreno’s lawyer: Where did you go to high school?

Miller: Shaker Heights.

Moreno’s lawyer: Isn’t it true there was an incident in high school where you pushed someone down the stairs —

Miller’s lawyer: Objection.

Moreno’s lawyer: Yes or no?

Miller’s lawyer: Don’t answer that.

Moreno’s lawyer: You’re instructing him not to answer?

Miller’s lawyer: I am instructing him not to answer that.

Moreno’s lawyer: Can you instruct him to answer the question, please?

Miller:It predates December 18th of ’25. [The] judge made several rulings.

Miller’s lawyer:Max, I got it.

Moreno’s lawyer: Can you instruct him to answer the question, please?

Court reporter:You are so instructed.

Miller’s lawyer: Take it up with the judge.

Moreno’s laywer: If the incident never occurred, why are you afraid of answering the question?

Moreno’s lawyers kept pushing, but Miller took his counsel’s advice. “Max,” his attorney Pamela MacAdams said. “Do not respond.”

During the deposition, Moreno’s lawyers also asked Miller about alleged testosterone use.

Moreno’s lawyer: Are you currently taking testosterone?

Miller: No.

Miller explained that he previously utilized testosterone replacement therapy after obtaining a prescription online. “It is legal,” he said, adding that he has not taken testosterone in two years.

Moreno’s lawyer: Do you understand that the side effects for testosterone replacement therapy include irritability, mood swings, or increased aggression; yes or no?

Miller: No.

Moreno’s lawyer:No one ever informed you about the side effects of taking testosterone replacement therapy?

Miller: They did, but they said where my test levels were is that this would get it back to normal so that it wouldn’t be above [the] normal baseline of testosterone. So essentially, what they were saying is this would help my overall functionality and getting a little bit [of] energy back.

Miller told Moreno’s attorney, a Marine veteran, that taking testosterone is “very normal.”

“And now, Secretary Hegseth has [advised] it for all of the men 30 and over in the military to take it,” Miller added, somewhat misconstruing Pete Hegseth’s instruction for all men in the military over 30 to have their testosterone levels tested. “As you know, Marine.”

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Introducing “Stress Test”: The Midterms Will Test Democracy. We’ll Help You Through It.

David Corn and Garrison Hayes kick off “Stress Test,” our new twice-weekly video podcast on the midterms and the state of American democracy.

It’s only a few weeks away. It feels like an eternity.

The midterm elections have officially entered their looming phase. Worriers of all stripes (doomscrollers, political junkies, fuel tank fillers), we get it. There’s a war, an unpopular president, a MAGA capture of Congress, and a bunch of multibillionaires blithely slop-ifying our jobs. It’s a lot.

That’s where we come in. We know how to tease out what to pay attention to and what to tune out, and we were early to identify the big issues shaping this election. We were on the ground as local groups banded together across party lines to oppose data centers. We profiled the rise of Christian nationalism and its infiltration of the highest ranks of government. And we’ve never taken our eyes off the threat of election interference and the systematic erosion of voting rights across the country.

Enter “Stress Test,” a new video podcast from Mother Jones, hosted by Washington, DC, bureau chief David Corn and video correspondent Garrison Hayes. “We’re facing perhaps one of the biggest stress tests that American democracy has ever been through with these midterm elections,” David explains. “After 2020, I think one of the lessons that some of us learned, but unfortunately not everybody: Our democracy is fragile.”

In twice-weekly pop-up episodes, David and Garrison will talk to our reporters about the midterms and where you should be paying attention. They’ll team up when breaking news changes the course of the election, and they’ll be your companions, channeling your stress (and their own) into a productive discussion about the future of our democracy. As Garrison puts it: “If the fur is going to be flying, there’s no one I’d rather be talking to than David Corn—and, of course, the incredible journalists and reporters in our newsroom.”

Don’t miss an episode: Subscribe now to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/motherjones. The show will also be available in audio form on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Why Trump’s Crypto Business Wants to Become a Bank

In a move that Sen. Elizabeth Warren has decried as a “clear conflict of interest and corruption,” one of the Trump Family’s most lucrative businesses is on its way to becoming a bank. And it’s set to be regulated by a government entity whose leader was appointed by, you guessed it…Donald Trump.

In August, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—one of three major bank regulators in the United States—declared that Donald Trump’s controversial crypto company, World Liberty Financial, could begin the process of establishing itself as a bank. It’s a complicated regulatory move that not only creates a new level of conflict of interest for the president and his family, but demonstrates just how drastically Trump has reshaped federal government policy in an effort to embrace his fellow crypto entrepreneurs.

The Trumps’ crypto odyssey ostensibly has roots in the family’s grievances surrounding the aftermath of the 2020 election. “I never thought I’d fall into the world of crypto until every bank began cancelling us for absolutely no reason other than the fact that my father was in politics,” Eric Trump told Fox News in 2024. “They came after us viciously. It wasn’t until that time that I realized how important crypto was.”

“We’ve been debanked. We’ve been deplatformed. We’ve had everything thrown at us with the kitchen sink.”

In reality, many big banks had long refused to do business with Donald Trump due to his past bankruptcies. But following the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, some banks did, in fact, close Trump’s accounts with them. Trump and his sons founded World Liberty Financial in 2024, saying that it was needed because banks, and the whole system of banking regulation, had been so bad for their family. World Liberty Financial, they said, would be a “DeFi” company—decentralized finance. Instead of managing money through the stodgy old Wall Street system, it would allow people to do a lot of their financial activities on the blockchain.

“So you know, just very excited, entered the crypto space with this product, really looking to upend a lot of the traditional finance markets that we have viewed as very broken,” Donald Trump Jr. told an interviewer in October 2024, recounting how traditional banks turned away from the family after January 6. “We’ve gone through a lot in America. We’ve been debanked. We’ve been deplatformed. We’ve had everything thrown at us with the kitchen sink. And so we wanted to do something, to take on a system, frankly, that was quite broken.”

The company hasn’t done much of that—there is no way for the public to use World Liberty Financial for many of the activities traditionally performed by banks. But it has created a stablecoin, called USD1, which is a type of crypto asset designed to stay valued at $1. Stablecoins are useful as a way to move money between different crytpo currencies or between partners, without necessarily having to use actual US dollars, which are the common currency for most international transactions.

But, despite not doing much to actually take down the traditional banking world, the founding lore behind World Liberty’s creation makes its potential new status as a “national trust bank” an interesting turn of events. To be clear, the company will be no normal bank—it still won’t offer savings accounts, auto loans, credit cards, or ATMs. But for World Liberty, the development could be a goldmine.

Stablecoin companies make money by accepting US dollars in exchange for their stablecoin—$1 for one stablecoin—and then investing that real US currency in Treasury notes, reaping the interest as their profit. But since its launch, World Liberty has had to partner with an actual bank to hold onto that money for customers—which means it has had to split the profits. If World Liberty receives final approval to become a bank, it will be able to hold the money itself and keep all the profits.

So, why aren’t all crypto companies already established as banks? Because, in the past, it has taken a lot of work to become a bank. Speaking on the floor of the US Senate last week, Warren excoriated the decision by the OCC to grant World Liberty Financial a preliminary charter.

“Even setting aside the clear conflict of interest and corruption, World Liberty’s charter application would have been flatly denied under any previous administration, Republican or Democrat, due to its national security risks, anti-money laundering vulnerabilities, and lack of competent management,” Warren said.

The current Comptroller of the Currency, Jonathan V. Gould, was appointed last July by Trump, and he can be fired by Trump. Four other stable coin issuers have applied for, and received, at least conditional approval from the OCC to become banks—three of them since 2025. One crypto company received a conditional bank charter under the Biden administration, but its final approval was stalled until last December, when Trump’s OCC finally gave it the green light.

Hilary Allen, a banking law professor at American University, said that it’s impossible to say if the World Liberty application got literal special treatment because of its connection to the president, but the OCC’s turn towards allowing stabelcoin companies to become banks is a result of influence from above—influence which clearly has a self-interest.

“Before this OCC, I don’t think we would’ve seen these stablecoin national bank charters,” she says. “This wouldn’t have happened if Trump wasn’t setting things up to accommodate the crypto industry, which he was not just doing out of the goodness of his heart. They supported him, and also he has his own financial interest.”

Indeed, donors linked to the crypto industry gave heavily to back Trump during the 2024 election—and also contributed lavishly to celebrate Trump’s victory.

One of Allen’s concerns is that although neither the World Liberty Financial nor the other crypto banks will be backed by the FDIC—the federal government’s depositor insurer that guarantees you won’t lose your money if a bank fails—just being called a bank will offer the crypto companies an implied stamp of government approval and support. It’s a shot of credibility, but without some of the regulatory hurdles facing traditional banks.

“No regular person is going to say, ‘Hmm, a national trust charter doesn’t carry the same kind of insurance and regulation,'” Allen says.

World Liberty Financial is not yet a bank—it’s only received a preliminary approval, and now must raise a certain amount of money and jump through several more hoops before it can start operating. As part of its application process, World Liberty has already agreed to several changes. For instance, Eric Trump signed a passivity agreement, which prevents the Trump family from taking an active role in the daily management of the bank. Specifically, he agreed, among other things, that the Trumps would not have any management role, would not influence board decisions, and would not involve themselves with regulatory decisions.

According to the terms, the OCC itself will oversee and enforce Eric Trump’s promise that the Trumps wont get involved.

The OCC did not respond to a request for comment. But David Wachsman, a spokesperson for World Liberty Financial, said there were no conflicts of interest or special treatment given to the company as it applied for bank status.

“There are no conflicts of interest. We have made this very clear,” he said in an email. “There was no special treatment whatsoever and multiple direct competitors received approvals earlier and more rapidly than World Liberty. Approval is a comprehensive process led by OCC career staff.”

The passivity agreement, to one former regulator, who spoke on background as he now advises companies that are regulated by the OCC, is just window dressing. Eric Trump’s precise role at World Liberty Financial isn’t the problematic aspect. Even if he and his family aren’t actively running the bank, they still have a major financial interest in its profitability—and obvious access to the policy levers that impact the industry.

“The problem here is not the fact the Trumps are affiliated with a bank,” the former regulator said. “It’s the fact that Donald Trump can fire the bank regulator if the bank regulator doesn’t do what he says.”

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Alito’s Recusal From a Key Climate Case May Be Too Little, Too Late

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

Justice Samuel Alito decided Monday to sit out one of the most consequential climate change cases to reach the Supreme Court, but legal experts expected continuing ramifications due to his ownership of individual corporate stocks, including in the fossil fuel industry.

After months of resisting calls for his recusal, Alito reversed himself one week before the Supreme Court is set to open its term by hearing the oil industry’s bid to block Boulder, Colorado’s lawsuit to recover costs related to climate change. The clerk of the court sent a brief letter to the lawyers in the case saying, without explanation, that Alito would no longer participate.

Alito does not own stock in the two companies involved in the Boulder case—ExxonMobil and the Canadian oil giant Suncor—and through a court spokesperson earlier this year conveyed that the court’s legal counsel said his recusal was not required. But Alito does own stock in companies that face lawsuits that will hinge directly on the Supreme Court’s decision.

State court judges, in fact, have stayed 11 such cases in recent months pending the outcome of Suncor v. Boulder. Those include cases from which Alito has recused himself in the past.

The cases seek to recover damages from oil companies for the costs state and local governments already are incurring and are expected to face in the future due to extreme weather, drought, wildfire and other impacts of climate change.

The oil industry should bear financial responsibility, they argue, because of evidence that they knew the climate impact of their products for years and misled the public about the risks. The county and city of Boulder sued Exxon and Suncor in 2018, five years after historic flooding destroyed 1,800 homes, tore up more than 100 miles of roadway and caused billions of dollars of damage.

Three years later, the most destructive fire in Colorado history swept across the region, killing two people, burning 6,000 acres and again burdening communities with costs from an event that scientists say was worsened by climate change.

“The public should not have to wonder whether a justice’s personal investments could benefit from a ruling.”

A Supreme Court ruling for the oil companies could provide the kind of blanket immunity from liability over climate change that the industry has sought for years. Exxon and Suncor told the court that energy companies were facing lawsuits seeking “billions of dollars in damages” and urged the Supreme Court to take the case “to prevent dozens of climate change cases from improperly barreling ahead in state court.”

A coalition of 30 environmental, watchdog and advocacy groups, including the League of Conservation Voters, the Revolving Door Project and urged the Senate Judiciary Committee in a May letter to investigate whether Alito was violating the law or the judicial ethics code that the Supreme Court adopted in 2023.

The group Consumer Watchdog earlier this month released research detailing how the two biggest oil companies in Alito’s portfolio, ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66, warned investors about the material risks they face due to the litigation. Consumer Watchdog’s review also found that Alito holds stock in companies involved in every climate case identified as currently stayed pending the outcome of Suncor v. Boulder, including lawsuits by California, New Jersey, Delaware and eight California cities and counties.

“Justice Alito’s recusal from Suncor v. Boulder is the right decision, and one he should have made from the start,” said Alexandra Nagy, organizing director with Consumer Watchdog, in a statement. “The public should not have to wonder whether a justice’s personal investments could benefit from a ruling that shields the fossil-fuel industry from liability.”

The situation brought front and center the kind of ethics controversy at the Supreme Court that Chief Justice John Roberts has sought to quell for at least the past 15 years. In 2011, in a year-end report devoted to ethics issues, Roberts defended the system in which justices decide for themselves—without review of the rest of the Supreme Court—whether to recuse themselves.

“I have complete confidence in the capability of my colleagues to determine when recusal is warranted,” Roberts wrote.

Alito, the only justice who owns an extensive portfolio of stocks in individual large corporations that regularly litigate in the federal courts, has recused himself more often than any other justice in recent years, according to research by the watchdog group Fix the Court.

Because Alito participated in the case conference during which the Supreme Court decided to take the Boulder case in February, there remains a lingering question of whether his vote already was decisive in ensuring that Suncor and Exxon would get a Supreme Court hearing. Although the court decides in secrecy which cases it will hear among the thousands of petitions it receives each year, by longstanding practice it requires that at least four of the court’s members must agree before a so-called writ of certiorari is granted.

Between 2023 and 2025, the Supreme Court denied petitions by oil companies in nine cases to consider essentially the same issue in the Boulder case—whether federal law preempted state and local governments from seeking damages against the oil industry in state court lawsuits. Alito had recused himself from the case conferences for all but one of those cases.

Without naming Alito, ExxonMobil made reference to the recusal problem when it told the Supreme Court back in 2022 that the Boulder case was the “ideal vehicle” for resolving the legal issues the industry had raised.

“We spend too much time talking about what is required of the justices. We should be talking about the right thing to do.”

“It involves a smaller set of defendants…and is thus less likely to present recusal issues,” Exxon said in its brief.

Although the Supreme Court didn’t take the Boulder case back then (Alito had recused himself “inadvertently,” a court spokesperson later told NBC), the oil industry finally will get to make its case to the high court on Monday.

Advocates for the state and local governments suing the oil industry see the Exxon brief as laying out a roadmap for the justices who were inclined to grant cert on the preemption issue.

“In a lot of ways, Exxon and Suncor proposed this maneuver to Justice Alito three years ago,” said Mike Meno, spokesman for the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, in an interview before Alito announced he would recuse himself. “People have a very cynical view of this court, and actions like this only reinforce the public’s concerns about the court’s integrity.”

When the Supreme Court unanimously adopted its first-ever code of conduct in 2023, it laid out the circumstances that call for recusal—including holding a financial interest in a party litigating before the court. But legal experts note that it never addressed a more basic question: Should Supreme Court justices hold individual stocks at all?

According to his latest financial disclosure, released in August, Alito holds stocks in more than 25 corporations, seven of them in the fossil fuel industry, as well as a mineral interest worth as much as $250,000 in Oklahoma. His holdings have not changed since the previous year, even though they created controversy last term when he belatedly recused himself from a case over Louisiana wetlands destruction involving ConocoPhillips. (The only other justice who holds individual stocks is Roberts, who has shares in a semiconductor services company and a biotech firm.)

Louis Virelli, a law professor at Stetson University and author of a book on the Supreme Court and recusal, interviewed before Alito made his recusal decision, said that he believed the questions raised go beyond the Suncor case and what is required by the letter of the law. “We spend too much time talking about what is required of the justices,” Virelli said. “We should be talking about the right thing to do, because the justices owe us all an ethical duty and they owe us an institutional duty.

“The real question to me is: Why does any justice hold stock in an individual company that is part of an industry that is going to appear before the court?” Virelli said.

Arthur Hellman, professor emeritus and legal ethics expert at the University of Pittsburgh, said he is “baffled” why Alito continues to own individual corporate stocks. He notes that Alito himself discussed the importance of all nine members of the Supreme Court hearing cases in a 2023 memorandum where he explained why he was resisting calls to recuse himself from a tax case. “If we recused in such cases, we would regularly have less than a full bench, and the Court’s work would be substantially disrupted and distorted,” Alito wrote at the time.

Said Hellman: “Justice Alito will no longer be open to criticism for participating in the Suncor case, but his recusal does nothing to address the concerns about disruption of the Court’s work that he voiced in his…memorandum.”

In a laudatory biography of Alito released this year that relied on interviews with people close to the justice, conservative author Mollie Hemingway wrote that the individual stocks were holdings that his wife, Martha-Ann, had inherited from her parents. “They hold not just financial value for her but sentimental value as well, making her disinclined to sell them,” Hemingway wrote.

Hellman said as long as Alito maintains those financial interests, he will raise recusal issues for himself and put the court’s ethics practices under public scrutiny.

“People will wonder, ‘Isn’t there a downstream effect of whatever the court decides in Suncor on…other fossil fuel companies?’” Hellman said. “It just seems to me no emotional attachment can override all of those concerns.”

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Red States Just Asked the Supreme Court to Kill Abortion Shield Laws

In what promises to be the most consequential showdown over reproductive rights since the end of Roe v. Wade, three states with near-total abortion bans asked the US Supreme Court on Wednesday to strike down blue-state laws that have enabled tens of thousands of abortions every year across state lines since 2022.

The action by Louisiana, Alabama, and Arkansas was a dramatic escalation in the long-running battle over so-called shield laws, which provide legal immunity to doctors, organizations, and advocates in abortion-friendly states who deliver abortion care, mostly in the form of pills, to people in states with draconian abortion laws.

The suit—filed directly with the high court just in time for the start of its new session next week—accuses California, Massachusetts, and New York of violating the US Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit Clause, which requires states to respect “the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings” of other states. The suit describes efforts by the defendants to circumvent Republican-passed abortion bans as a violation of states’ sovereignty and “one of the most serious interstate aggressions in our Nation’s history.”

A second lawsuit, filed in federal court in Louisiana on Wednesday, targets more than two dozen individual providers and pharmacists, accusing them of “a sweeping, coordinated scheme” to send abortion pills through the mail in violation of strict bans. The defendants include Dr. Angel Foster and her colleagues at The Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, or The MAP, whose operations I wrote about for Mother Jones and Reveal this past summer. (My reporting is cited frequently throughout the two lawsuits, along with that of other news organizations including the New York Times, Ms. and NPR.)

At the time, Foster told me that The MAP was filling more than 6,000 pill orders a month, 95 percent to states where abortion is subject to harsh restrictions and near-total bans—among the details from my stories the lawsuits cite.

“Our constitutional system does not tolerate such blatant disregard for a state’s sovereign authority.”

“Our constitutional system does not tolerate such blatant disregard for a state’s sovereign authority,” says the provider lawsuit, which also targets abortion-pill operations in California, Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey. “That is true regardless of the nature of the products being unlawfully shipped…It does not matter whether the package contains anthrax, mail bombs, or chemical weapons intended to harm individuals within that state, or (as is the case here) abortion drugs.”

As I have written, shield laws are designed to thwart the near-total abortion bans and other restrictions that have proliferated in red states since the 2022 Dobbs decision.

Broadly speaking, these measures prohibit law enforcement and state agencies from engaging in actions that could help abortion opponents bring criminal or civil cases against abortion doctors, helpers, or patients. In most shield-law states, police can’t serve arrest warrants; court clerks can’t issue subpoenas; IT staff can’t comply with records requests, and governors can’t sign extradition orders. . . .

Perhaps the closest analogy [are] the “personal liberty laws” that Northern states enacted to resist the Fugitive Slave Act before the Civil War.

Nearly two dozen states and Washington, DC, have created some version of shield protections; eight of those states, including California, Massachusetts, and New York, have adopted laws that explicitly protect people who provide or facilitate abortion care via telemedicine. The laws have proven to be “one of the strongest tools that reproductive freedom advocates have to protect abortion access in a post-Roe reality,” Ashley Kurzweil, a senior policy analyst at the National Partnership for Women & Families, told me last fall. “It’s painfully obvious that anti-abortion extremists are targeting shield laws because they are working.”

But the legal theories underpinning shield laws have remained largely untested—and abortion supporters and opponents alike have long predicted that the Supreme Court would be forced to settle the vast constitutional issuesthey raise.

“It’s painfully obvious that anti-abortion extremists are targeting shield laws because they are working.”

Shield laws—combined with telemedicine and abortion pills—have led to one of the biggest surprises of the Dobbs era. Instead of rates plummeting as expected, clinician-supported abortions increased 16 percent last year compared with 2022. Telehealth now accounts for 30 percent of abortions in the US; almost two-thirds of abortions in the country occur using pills.

Despite having some of the toughest abortion laws in the country, Louisiana has not been immune to that trend. By the end of last year, out-of-state providers were sending almost 1,000 abortion packages of pills a month to patients there. Meanwhile, that state’s Attorney General Liz Murrill’s efforts to extradite abortion providers from New York and California have been stymied. One of the people Murrill has sought to prosecute, California-based doctor Rémy Coeytaux, is among those named in the new case.

Last fall, she tried another strategy to stop the flow of pills, suing the FDA over its 2023 rules allowing the abortion medication mifepristone to be prescribed via telemedicine and sent through the mail. When the case went to the Supreme Court briefly this past spring, Justice Samuel Alito singled out shield laws for a blistering attack, calling them a “scheme to undermine” Dobbs.

Blue states “have claimed the right to make abortion policy—their abortion policy—for the entire Nation by overriding democratically enacted laws in pro-life states.”

The complaint by Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas is the first time anti-abortion states have tried to take action directly against shield-law states. Murrill and her colleagues argue that such laws flout the high court’s decision in Dobbs, which struck down the federal right to abortion and returned regulation to the states. The blue states “have claimed the right to make abortion policy—their abortion policy—for the entire Nation by overriding democratically enacted laws in pro-life states,” the lawsuit argues. “This is not the promise of Dobbs—and it is a direct affront to this Court as an institution and an attack on our constitutional structure.”

Murrill reiterated those arguments at a news conference Wednesday, the Louisiana Illuminator reported. “We will not allow activist states, activist providers or distributors profiting from killing babies to threaten Louisiana’s sovereignty, violate Louisiana’s laws and endanger Louisiana women and Louisiana babies,” she said, adding, “It is no different than if they were sending fentanyl in these boxes.” Joining her were Republican attorneys general Steve Marshall of Alabama—who has threatened advocates who provide information about abortion and help women travel for care—and Tim Griffin of Arkansas.

As the New York Times noted, filing a case directly to the Supreme Court isn’t unusual when states are in conflict.

States can bring disputes between themselves directly to the Supreme Court, which is given “original jurisdiction” by the Constitution and can function in such cases like a trial court. Past disputes that have gone before the court involved challenges over geographic boundaries or water rights. Justices have the discretion to turn down these cases, and often do.

New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, denounced the lawsuit and said her office would defend the state’s shield law, the Times reported. “Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas are asking the Supreme Court to let them impose their abortion bans on New York and punish our doctors for providing legal health care,” she said.

In a statement, Amanda Allen, executive director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, described the case as “a desperate bid to weaponize the legal system against providers working to ensure patients can access safe, private abortion care.”

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They Called Her a Domestic Terrorist. Now Renée Good’s Family Is Suing.

Renée Good’s family filed two federal lawsuits on Thursday, nine months after she was fatally shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross amid the Trump administration’s violent occupation and mass deportations campaign in Minneapolis.

One lawsuit accuses the United States of being liable for the actions of federal agents, alleging wrongful death and excessive force.

The second alleges a conspiracy to interfere with civil rights, naming Ross, as well as Greg Bovino, the former commander-at-large of the Border Patrol who led Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House border czar Tom Homan, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and others.

Ross fatally shot Good on January 7. Video recordings of the shooting show Good in an SUV and her partner, Becca Good, standing outside in the street to observe and record ICE agents stopping their car. Renée Good is seen turning the steering wheel away from Ross and beginning to drive away before Ross fires at her multiple times.

The Trump administration defended the shooting, claiming that Ross was protecting his and other officers’ lives and accused Good of “domestic terrorism.” Days after Good was killed, ICE agent Christian Castro shot and wounded Julio Sosa-Celis, and two weeks later, immigration agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez shot and killed Alex Pretti—both in Minneapolis.

Castro pleaded not guilty in September to federal charges that he lied to the FBI about being attacked before he shot and wounded Sosa-Celis. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, the chief elected prosecutor in ​Minneapolis, is investigating the agents who killed Good and Pretti for possible violations of Minnesota law. In March, Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration for access to evidence to independently investigate the shootings of Good, Sosa-Celis, and Pretti. In July, Moriarty announced the Justice Department had provided previously withheld materials related to the three shootings. The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office filed charges in the shooting of Sosa-Celis but has not filed charges in the fatal shootings of Good and Pretti.

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What to Know About Hegseth’s New Office of Religious Affairs

On Wednesday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the creation of a new entity within the Pentagon: the Office of Religious Affairs. The office, Hegseth promised the assembled troops in Quantico, Virginia, would “report straight to the top. No staff filters, no bureaucratic dilution, a direct line to the secretary.” Chaplains would “finally have an advocate at the highest levels.” What’s more, “policy and resources will serve the mission, not smother the mission.”

A hallmark of Hegseth’s tenure at the Department of War has been his muscular Christian religiosity. Earlier this year, he spearheaded an initiative to bring prayer services to the Pentagon. Shortly after the start of the Iran War, during one such event in March, Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Hegseth’s own faith is relevant here: He is a member of a conservative denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelicals Churches (CREC) that explicitly advocates for Christians to exert their faith’s influence over the government. As I reported:

At a February Pentagon prayer service, the featured speaker was Doug Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho, pastor who founded CREC. Wilson, who has described his vision of “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed,” has long argued in favor of Christian nationalism, and he has likened his fiefdom in Idaho—which includes a church, school, college, and publishing house—to a “working prototype” of what Christian nationalism could look like.

The new Office of Religious Affairs isn’t explicitly Christian; a memo (PDF) published yesterday specifies that “Nothing in this memorandum shall be construed to compel religious participation or to diminish the free exercise rights of any Service member, civilian employee, or family member of any faith or no faith.” Yet earlier this year, the Pentagon released a new list of 31 religions officially recognized by the US Department of War, drawn from the 200 that had previously been accepted. On the new list, 22 of the 31 groups were Christian. Atheists, pagans, and humanists, all on the original list, had vanished.

Details about what exactly the Office of Religious Affairs will do have not yet been released, but yesterday’s memo offers a few clues. In addition to moving chaplains directly under the control of the new office and overseeing the groups that decide who can become a chaplain, the office also will “sponsor and oversee research, technology, and analytical tools to support and assess spiritual fitness, spiritual readiness, and spiritual resilience.” It doesn’t define those terms, but Hegseth’s track record speaks volumes. As I reported a few months back:

In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth writes that the Geneva Conventions are unfair because the United States and Europe are the only ones that follow them. Instead, “America should fight by its own rules,” he declares. The nation’s soldiers should be “the most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be.”

Hegseth also bemoans a defense force infected, he writes, with the “fucking scary” disease of progressivism, which “will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!” He warns, “Sometime soon, a real conflict will break out, and red-blooded American men will have to save their elite candy asses.” In July, Hegseth announced an initiative to screen troops for low testosterone and offer hormone replacement therapy to those found deficient.

Hegseth has also long been preoccupied by what he sees as a “spiritual battle” between secular and Christian culture:

On an episode of the podcast CrossPolitic [produced by Doug Wilson’s Canon Press] that aired shortly before Hegseth became Secretary of War, he railed against Godless America, lamenting that liberals “used patriotism to untether us from timeless truth, from the Bible.” He also praised classical Christian schools for providing “a comprehensive worldview that prepares them for the battle to come, because we’re in a spiritual battle, and otherwise we’d be sending our kids in as fodder.”

Among the funding priorities listed in the Department of War memo about the new office are “faith-based homeschool support for military families,” faith-based suicide-reduction initiatives, and “contracted services from faith-based non-Federal entities.”

As I wrote, Hegseth’s own book echoes those themes:

Hegseth’s 2022 co-authored tome, Battle for the American Mind, is essentially a book-length extension of that metaphor. “Charging the ‘commanding heights’—the leftists’ educational Death Star—with Nerf guns will not suffice,” he writes. “We don’t want martyrs, we want victors.” Classical Christian education is our only hope to “give our kids and grandkids at least a fighting chance to save America and Christendom,” Hegseth concludes. He exhorts parents to “join the insurgency!” Children educated in this way, he believes, might stand a chance at defending their nation—because the wokes have failed miserably.

Notably, Wilson’s Canon Press publishes popular homeschool curricula. “Education is warfare,” the website says. “Canon curriculum is designed to help you raise faithful, dangerous Christian kids, one subject at a time.”

The new memo promises that within 90 days, the office will deliver “a comprehensive baseline report of all unfunded and underfunded religious affairs requirements.” In the meantime, Hegseth has lofty ambitions. “We’re placing spiritual health at the same level as physical health,” he said in his speech. “Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God.”

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The Loophole That Likely Doomed the Cornell Rape Case Before It Even Started

“She never says that she was drugged without her knowledge. She admits to taking drugs and alcohol voluntarily and with knowledge. She does not allege that she was forced to engage in any acts. She does not say that she was physically helpless or unconscious or incapacitated at any point during the time at the fraternity house.”

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten didn’t directly refer to New York’s voluntary intoxication loophole in his statement confirming this week that his office is taking a fresh look at rape allegations at Cornell after declining to do so in 2024. But the controversial law—which many say requires an extraordinarily high bar for victims of rape who willingly became intoxicated to prove that they were unable to consent to sex—seems to animate nearly every turn of his remarks. Specifically, that the victim in the incident, identified as Jane Doe, “admits to taking drugs and alcohol voluntarily and with knowledge,” and that she does “not say that she was physically helpless.” Take a look, and much of the same language appears in the state’s laws on rape.

If that strikes you as victim-blaming, you’re not alone; advocates of sexual assault victims and a majority of New York’s State Assembly members have long condemned the law for exactly the same. Now, amid national outrage over the allegations, questions have emerged about whether the statutes may have deterred prosecutors from pursuing the case.

I talked to Jane Manning, director of Women’s Equal Justice, about the laws’ likely role in tanking the Cornell case back in 2024, the history behind the statutes and the movement to reform them—and the person standing in the way of change.

Let’s give a brief overview of the rape laws surrounding the Cornell allegations.

There are several different rape statutes at play here. First-degree rape requires that the victim either be the victim of forcible compulsion, meaning that extreme violence took place, or that the victim be “physically helpless.” Rape in the second degree applies when a victim is involuntarily drugged, such as a drink being spiked. Rape in the third degree applies where none of the above statutes apply, but the victim gives an express verbal declaration of non-consent. Those laws also include other provisions, including age-related provisions. But these are the statutes that mainly apply in a situation like the Cornell case where a person is intoxicated.

How does the law determine “physical helplessness?“

Under New York State law, being physically helpless is defined as being unconscious or physically unable to communicate a lack of consent. That word “physically unable” is really important because what that means is that it’s not enough if the person is severely mentally disoriented or confused. They have to be physically unable to speak, and case law basically says that means unconscious. That language excludes somebody who is severely intoxicated to the point where they are falling down, or when they are so disoriented that they don’t know where they are, or when their speech is slurred. None of those things is enough to deem a person incapable of consent if they are voluntarily intoxicated.

“The [reform] bill has been blocked by one man, and that man is Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.”

The suggestion that an accuser who became voluntarily intoxicated and engaged in sex cannot be raped feels extremely antiquated. But where does it come from? What’s the history behind this exception?

Our rape statutes were written decades ago, at a time when women were gravely underrepresented in the legislature, and when we understood far less about rape than we understand now. Most survivors of rape were in the shadows because of a culture that silenced them, and so many of our statutes do not reflect a modern understanding or a survivor-centered understanding of the realities of rape and sexual assault. The [voluntary intoxication loophole] is a good example.

Can you give me an example of what other rape laws were like decades ago?

In the 1950s, New York law was something out of the dark ages. There were special corroboration requirements that applied only to rape and not to any other crime. It had an earnest resistance requirement, saying that if you didn’t fight back, it wasn’t rape. That no matter how the person threatened you or frightened you or overpowered you, if you didn’t fight back, it wasn’t rape. Also, marital rape was legal back then. New York didn’t have a rape shield law in the 1950s, either. So if a rape victim did, by some miracle, make it onto the witness stand, it was perfectly legal for the cross-examination to start with the question, “Were you a virgin before this happened?” and to spend hours cross-examining the victim about her unrelated sexual history. This routinely happened.

How did these laws change?

All those laws that I just mentioned to you have been reformed. But they did not reform themselves. They were reformed because of survivors and feminists who banded together and demanded changes in the law. Over the years, including recently, others have been reformed. For example, in the year 2000, New York added a no-means-no statute to the third-degree rape statute, which means that if a person explicitly expresses non-consent and the perpetrator proceeds anyway, that’s considered third-degree rape in New York. Another 21st-century reform came in 2006 when New York eliminated the statute of limitations on first-degree rape and other high-level sex crimes. In 2010, we finally made strangulation a crime.

“They certainly played a role in [Van Houten’s] decision, but they do not let him off the hook.”

Bit by bit, survivors and feminists have fought for reform of New York State’s laws from a place of extreme bias against survivors to a place where, little by little, we are chipping away at that bias. However, the work is not done, and the voluntary intoxication exclusion is an example of a very victim-blaming, biased law in New York that advocates and survivors have been calling out for years to reform, and our legislature has not yet done it.

What are some of the arguments by those who oppose reforming the voluntary intoxication exclusion?

There are the arguments that are made explicitly, and then there’s the belief system that is subtext to these arguments. There are small numbers of people who believe that nobody should go to jail for anything, those who oppose any effort to strengthen our criminal law, even for rape survivors. I think that viewpoint fails to take into account the perspectives of women and other groups that are disproportionately targeted for violent crime. For me, that philosophy fails to be intersectional because it fails to take into account the reality of women who are targeted and preyed on deliberately by those who would deprive us of our rights.

That’s the subtext. Now, what are the explicit arguments? It’s a good question because there are valid concerns that we want to make sure we address when we redraft a law. One concern is that we don’t want to criminalize drunk sex—and my answer to that is that’s absolutely right. We do not want to do that. The bill we are supporting does not criminalize drunk sex and has two important requirements. The first is that the victim is incapable of appraising or controlling their own conduct. Not just that they fail, not just that they didn’t appraise or control their own conduct, but that they’re incapable of controlling their conduct. That’s how we define the victim’s condition. The second requirement applies to how we define the perpetrator’s state of mind and that the victim’s condition was known or reasonably should have been known to a person in the actor’s situation. The reason that language is there is that we want to make sure that a person is only held criminally responsible when it was obvious that they were victimizing someone. Because there are situations when two people are very far gone and have sex, but nobody’s preying on someone; it’s just drunk sex that somebody may regret the next day. That is very much not what we are looking to criminalize. We are looking to criminalize predation, not a mistake.

One more important thing to keep in mind about this is that the prosecution will have the burden of proof on both of those elements. And if the prosecution can’t prove either element beyond a reasonable doubt, they can’t prove their case. So, for instance, if you have a scenario where two people have blurry memories, that’s a grey area; that’s not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Where does the bill stand now?

For two years running, this bill has passed unanimously in New York’s Senate. And both times, it has had a supermajority of support in the Assembly. But the bill is being blocked by one man, and that man is Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. [On Wednesday, Heastie announced that the Assembly is forming a “working group” to review the law.] He has not allowed this bill to get to the floor for a vote. He didn’t allow it in 2025. He didn’t allow it in 2026, when we had 60 percent of the State Assembly signed on as co-sponsors of the bill. He still wouldn’t allow it to go to a vote. He has not provided us with an explanation. He has not met with advocates or survivors. He has not provided any public statement about why he will not allow a vote on this bill that a supermajority of his own house supports.

So, Gov. Kathy Hochul really has the opportunity to lead here by calling on Speaker Heastie to pass this bill or by sponsoring it herself by including it in her budget bill.

The allegations in the civil complaint in Cornell have prompted widespread outrage. Can you describe your reaction upon hearing about the case?

This young woman was failed by many people. She was clearly failed by people who took advantage of her state of incapacitation. She clearly was failed by the district attorney, and she was failed by the law of New York State. This district attorney saw an allegation of a gang rape and didn’t even bother to interview the victim. He looked at a summary of the allegations and came to the conclusion that there was no provable crime, and didn’t bother to conduct an investigation. That is outrageous. The young woman who survived this incident was interviewed by campus security officers who are not trained in trauma-informed interviewing and are not trained in investigating complex and serious sex crime cases. She was let down by the person responsible for enforcing the law, and she was let down by the law itself because even if the district attorney had done a good job, we don’t know if he would have found a prosecutable crime because of the voluntary intoxication exclusion.

That’s actually my next question. Do you see these laws as having had a role in the DA’s decision not to prosecute the Cornell case?

They certainly played a role in his decision, but they do not let him off the hook. What I see far too often in my work as an advocate for rape survivors is district attorneys who don’t place a high priority on rape. They just don’t take the trouble to do a thorough investigation because they don’t see the need to treat this as a serious crime. That’s the truth.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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The War in Iraq Is Finally Over

After 23 years of war and occupation, the last US soldiers officially left Iraq on Wednesday, Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced in a statement on the “successful conclusion” of operations against the Islamic State organization in Iraq.

The war, launched on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and cost, conservatively, more than a trillion dollars (though tallying government war funding, like counting the dead, can be difficult).

In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confidently predicted that the war would be short: “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days or five weeks or five months. But it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”

US troops have withdrawn from Iraq at least twice before. After the Bush administration launched the war in 2003, US troops formally withdrew from Iraq in 2011. George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner was, reportedly, packed up and sent to his presidential library. At the time, one military analyst called the whole thing the “least effective war for oil in American history.”

But it wasn’t over yet: the US military ramped up its presence in 2014 under “Operation Inherent Resolve” to combat ISIS. Mother Jones maintained a “We’re Still At War” daily series between roughly 2009 and 2014. US soldiers stayed in the country for the rest of the decade, and beyond, until their “combat role” in the country ended in 2021.

Even then, about 2,500 US soldiers remained stationed in Iraq as “military advisers.” Today, all those troops, too, are gone.

“A new phase has begun, characterized by Iraq’s sovereignty, the strength of its institutions, the readiness of its forces, the unity of its decision-making, and balanced partnerships with its friends,” Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said in a statement.

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From Birthday Celebrations to Murderous Dictators, Trump Brings Out the Jets

On July 3, the “Wings of Freedom” demonstrations over the National Mall featured three hours’ worth of aerial entertainment cooked up by the Trump administration as part of the America 250 celebration. There were parachute teams, the Air Force Thunderbirds, fighter jets, helicopters, and a “tri-bomber” formation that included a B-2 stealth bomber. On Independence Day, military aircraft flew over DC every 18 minutes for nine straight hours. For some people watching the show, it was a glorious display of American military power and aviation prowess. For many who live here, though, it was a form of “noise terrorism,” according to one TikToker, who likened the celebration to living in a war zone.

During these nonstop military flyovers, locals shared stories online of pets hiding under the couch, night workers losing sleep, and the roar of low-flying aircraft setting off car alarms. Some complained that the jets recalled the terror of 9/11 after the plane hit the Pentagon. “Why are we having so many jets scorching over DC?” posted New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia Navarro during the July 3 display. “Nerve-wracking. I get 250 celebrations but it feels like the apocalypse.”

Why are we having so many jets scorching over DC? Nerve-wracking. I get 250 celebrations but it feels like the apocalypse.

— Lulu NYT (@LuluGNavarro) July 3, 2026

Enduring the occasional jet flyover comes with living in the Nation’s Capital. But none of those regular episodes compares with the martial air traffic Trump has inflicted on the city since taking office last year. “We’ve long had the ceremonial flyovers for funerals at Arlington National Cemetery,” says former local traffic reporter Dave Statter, who tracks aviation activity on his website. “But the Trump administration has brought in a new flyover era.”

“We’ve long had the ceremonial flyovers for funerals at Arlington National Cemetery, but the Trump administration has brought in a new flyover era.”

In previous administrations, the military flyover “was treated as an exception rather than the rule,” says Leon Panetta, a former member of Congress from California who served as both Defense secretary and CIA director during the Obama administration. “That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.”

Trump, who escaped the Vietnam War draft by claiming to be hobbled by bone spurs, has long shown a fascination with military hardware. He began deploying it for his own entertainment almost as soon as he took office in his first term. Trump was the first president since Harry Truman in 1949 to have a military flyover for his inauguration. (President George W. Bush had a flyover two days before his actual inauguration.)

The new president had hoped to have a Red Square-style parade, complete with tanks and missile launchers, to celebrate his unexpected electoral victory in 2016. After much opposition including from inside the military, he had to settle for a flyover that included all five branches of the military: Air Force F-35, F-16, F-22 and F-15E fighter jets, Navy F/A-18 combat jets, Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, Marine V-22 Ospreys and four MH-65 rescue helicopters. Trump had planned a repeat performance last year, but frigid weather brought his second inauguration indoors.

On one of his early foreign trips in 2017, Trump attended a military parade in Paris on Bastille Day, which seems to have inspired many of his ideas for using the military at home. “We’re going to have to try and top it,” Trump said of the parade. The Pentagon objected to involving the armed forces in a political event that would havecost nearly $100 million.

But in 2019, Trump finally got his military parade in DC, and flyovers were a highlight.

Then came the pandemic in March 2020. Six days after he went on TV to suggest that Americans might inject a disinfectant to kill the virus, Trump organized several military flyovers in the Washington area and elsewhere as a “tribute” to struggling health care workers who were on the front lines without sufficient protective gear.

If Trump’s first term was marked with an excess of military displays unheard of in the US, his second term has vastly surpassed it. “I don’t think there’s much question that this president is very interested in symbolic displays of military power,” Panetta says. “The flyover is obviously one of those symbols that has in particular attracted him.”

Indeed, Trump loves showing off American war hardware, especially to foreign leaders. During his August 2025 meeting in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a B-2 stealth bomber and four F-35 fighter jets flew overhead as they stood on the tarmac. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was implicated in the 2018 murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was honored with a ceremonial formation of F-35s and F-16 fighter jets during his White House visit in November last year. (Bin Salman has repeatedly denied any role in the killing.)

NOW – Trump welcomes Saudi crown prince to the White House, with a military flyover, to close F-35 arms deal. pic.twitter.com/z1HnhNwatQ

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) November 18, 2025

In September 2025, Trump feted the president of Poland with a White House flyover that just happened to disrupt a press conference underway nearby at the US Capitol by the victims of the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. This year, both King Charles and Chinese President Xi Jinping got the full flyby during their White House visits. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser was in the middle of a press conference at the old RFK Stadium site when she was interrupted by the flyover for Xi, which was so loud even Trump winced from the noise.

“Only in DC.” @MayorBowser has to briefly stop her remarks during a press conference announcing RFK Stadium Redevelopment Master Plan for a military flyover including a stealth bomber flanked by jets. pic.twitter.com/ophDGFYD0i

— Eric Flack (@EricFlackTV) September 24, 2026

While it certainly seems like DC has suffered a lot more air space disturbance since Trump took office last year, I wondered if the actual numbers would bear it out. In August, I asked the DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency for a list of all the public advisories it issued about a scheduled military aircraft event, going back to the beginning of 2023.

The list shows that during the last two years of the Biden administration, almost all of the DC flyovers were either for veterans’ funerals—63 of them—or a sporting event, including four over Nationals park, the city’s Major League Baseball stadium. None went over the White House or were tied to state visits by foreign leaders, aside from two over the National Mall during a NATO summit.

During the Biden years, planned military flights over DC outside of veterans’ funerals were rare enough that in 2022, when the Army’s Golden Knights parachute team jumped out over Nats Park, it triggered a threat alert and the US Capitol was evacuated.

It’s hard to even quantify the exponential growth in flyovers over DC in 2026. Historically, when DC sends out a public flyover alert, it indicates the specific time and date of the event. But this year, the agency alerts have warned of flyovers happening over multiple days at a time.

Screenshot

The opening of the Great American State Fair; the 4th of July; and the DC “Grand Prix” Indy car race in August all featured multiple days of military aviation displays. But some of the most concentrated flights were scheduled around Trump’s 80th birthday celebration on June 14. The DC area suffered through multiple flyovers every day for four straight days, starting with flights over the Lincoln Memorial on June 11 and culminating on June 15 with the 12-plane formation of Thunderbirds and Blue Angels that flew over the White House just as country star Zach Brown was finishing the National Anthem at the UFC cage match.

US Air Force Thunderbirds and US Navy Blue Angels aircraft fly in a rare Super Delta formation over Washington, DC, June 14, 2026US Air Force courtesy UFC

Trump has so overwhelmed DC with air shows this year that he appears to have shut out some of the traditional “missing man” flyovers that honor veterans at Arlington Cemetery. According to DC records, by August 23, there were 27 flyovers for funerals at Arlington Cemetery in 2024, and 20 in 2023. This year, there were just 13.

The flyovers have also impacted the DC region’s normal commercial air traffic. For instance, with only two weeks’ notice, the Washington Metropolitan Airport Authority announced that Reagan National airport would close for several hours on July 3rd and all flights on the 4th would be cancelled after noon, with ongoing disruptions throughout the summer due to the flyovers.

“It’s not just the events themselves but also the rehearsals beforehand.”

“It’s not just the events themselves but also the rehearsals beforehand,” says Statter. The day before the UFC cage match in June, for instance, his wife had an early Saturday morning flight out of DCA to Boston for a final visit to a relative in hospice. Ever the traffic reporter, he checked her flight status around 1 a.m. and discovered that it had been cancelled at two hours earlier due to a flyover practice. “She had to drive to Boston,” he told me.

Of course, Trump’s love of flyovers creates bigger problems than just terrorizing DC residents or inconveniencing air travelers. Statter says that Trump is “tempting fate with so many low-flying demos or ceremonial flights.” He explained that, during his many years as a traffic reporter, pilots told him that the lower the altitude, “the less time a pilot has to correct anything that goes wrong.”

He points to the many crashes at both military and civilian air shows. Just this May, two Navy fighter jets collided mid-air during an air show in Idaho. The four pilots ejected from the planes, which crashed into a fireball on the runway. Flying in the Navy’s Blue Angels, which have regularly featured in Trump’s displays, is so dangerous that 1 in 10 of the unit’s pilots have died in crashes. But air show crashes usually happen around airfields. “Imagine one happening over a populated area like DC,” Statter says.

It’s not a hypothetical question. In March last year, a Delta flight leaving DCA for Minneapolis nearly collided mid-air with an Air Force T-38 Talon that was part of a formation headed to Arlington Cemetery for a funeral flyover. CNN reported that one of the Delta pilots believed the military aircraft was flying just 500 feet below it when the passenger plane took off. Air traffic controllers had to issue “corrective instructions” to avert disaster.

Irv Halter is a retired Air Force Major General and fighter pilot who used to be involved with ceremonial flyovers, both flying in them and later, helping to decide which ones the Air Force should approve. He says previous presidents did not demand flyovers the way Trump has, and for good reason. They “eat up resources” by tying up ground crews during launch and recovery, he told me, and requiring assistance from cargo planes, tankers and ground control assets.

Flying just one F-35 jet for an hour can cost $40,000. That’s peanuts compared to the cost of flying the B-2 stealth bomber, which has become a regular fixture in DC skies since Trump took office. The most expensive plane in the world, the B-2 cost more than $2 billion to build and as much as $150,000 an hour to keep in the air, in part because the specialized anti-radar skin on it is so expensive to replace should it, say, hit a bird. It needs anywhere between 50 to 60 hours of maintenance for every flight hour. The Air Force has fewer than 20 of them.

In the past, the Defense Department has defended the cost of flyovers by calling them training missions. “That’s BS,” Halter says. “Yes, every hour a pilot gets in an airplane is of some value.” But with all the GPS equipment on modern war planes, he says flying straight and level over something like the National Mall is “a big yawn” for fighter pilots. “And every hour you run on them now is an hour you don’t get for real training or combat training.”

The real cost of such ceremonial flights, Halter notes, “doesn’t show up as a dollar amount but as wear and tear on people. Airplanes and crews need rest. You can’t just keep pounding them into the ground.” He says using critical aircraft for so many frivolous events seems unwise “especially in the middle of a war where we’re wearing out equipment and we’re running out of stocks.”

None of this seems to concern the current administration. “After Joe Biden broke our military, President Trump rebuilt it—and he is deeply proud of his work renewing the strength of our armed forces,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told me in an email when I asked about the consequences of so many flyovers. “The United States possesses the most powerful fighting force in the world, and beautiful aircraft inspire patriotism for all who see them fly overhead.”

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The Disgrace and Danger of Kash Patel

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on author Garrett Graff’s Doomsday Scenario, which you can subscribe to here.

Back in April, I wrote a column about what seemed-then to be the ongoing unraveling of FBI Director Kash Patel, the thirsty MAGA-influencer-turned-chief-law-enforcement-official who partied hard at the Olympics, protects his girlfriend with an FBI SWAT team, and has no competent staff around him to advise him not to fly the FBI’s jet to a hunting camp known literally as “Boondoggle Ranch.”

The swirl of scandal around Patel seemed like it would imminently end his career, but the Trump administration’s depth and breadth of scandal is such that Patel was able to fade into the background for a few months as others took center-stage. Instead, Trump spent the spring cashiering all the high-profile women in his national security team — attorney general Pam Bondi, DHS secretary Kristi Noem, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and then spent the summer dodging the possible impeachment of defense secretary Pete Hegseth.

In the last two weeks, though, Patel has roared back to the headlines with a series of scandals — two of which appear to be reaching an apex this week, today even — that underscore the dangerous discord and disorganization at the FBI under his leadership.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Scandal #1: Personnel Hacked. In what might turn out to be the gravest intelligence breach of the FBI in history — and perhaps one of the worst in all of US history — a criminal hacking group is claiming to have compromised the bureau’s hiring and personnel records. The group, known as ShinyHunters, appears to have “exfiltrated” data on perhaps tens of thousands of current and former FBI employees, both agents and not, perhaps even effectively everyone who has been hired by the bureau in recent years. “We hacked the FBI. We hold data on all FBI employees and applicants,” the group told 404 Media.

The threat of a breach this massive is almost incalculable — and could destroy or undermine a generation of agents who work undercover or on assignments like counterintelligence. It’s not entirely clear what the breach includes, but preliminary information from the hackers seems to indicate it includes everything from home addresses and Social Security numbers to potentially even medical records. News organizations like 404 Media have been able to authenticate that at least some of the data lines up with actual FBI employees. Reuters and the BBC have seen other documents that include mental health evaluations and blood and urine test results.

Ciaran Martin, who used to head the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and who is not normally known for his hyperbole, told the New York Times that the hack could have a “huge impact” on the bureau, given the uncertainty of where the data might end up, and might ultimately come at a higher operational cost than China’s also-devastating hack of the federal personnel records of the Office of Personnel Management. “Losing the data on 20 million federal employees to the Chinese was bad,” Martin told the NYT. “But you knew the Chinese weren’t going to sell or publish it.”

In the last 24 hours, the hacking group sent out statements saying it was backing away from publishing the data it stole — the BBC’s Joe Tidy says perhaps the group is “simply now regretting hacking the world’s biggest police force” — but if this information is out there, even if it’s never published, you can be sure that adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran are hungry for it, and would potentially be willing to pay top dollar for it.

It’s too soon to tell exactly how far-reaching and damaging the reported theft and data extortion scheme may be, but it might just be that Patel is presiding over the most damaging personnel scandal since FBI agent Robert Hanssen was exposed as a top Russian spy — and, depending on how the coming weeks and months play out, it might even turn out to be more damaging in the long-term to the bureau’s mission and personnel and our country’s national security.

Scandal #2: Deputy Director Departs. If you’ve only been following the FBI since Kash Patel took over, it might surprise you that the FBI’s deputy director used to be a job agents worked their entire careers to achieve and then stayed in for a meaningful length of time—often three or four years. It was a position always held, in fact, by a career agent—a nonpartisan appointment.

This week, though, Kash Patel’s “co-deputy director” Andrew Bailey announced he’s leaving, after just a year. That follows the January departure of Bailey’s one-time “co-deputy” Dan Bongino, the MAGA podcaster, who quit in frustration after just about nine months (including a few periods when rumors swirled he wasn’t showing up for work at all).

The “co-deputy” is an invention of the Trump administration. When it became clear that Bongino wasn’t up to the task and that Kash Patel was a fool, the White House tapped Andrew Bailey, a right-wing idealogue who had been Missouri’s attorney general. Bailey was widely seen as the heir-apparent to Patel’s role when his partying and general incompetence finally caught up with him, but now it turns out Bailey is the first to go (which doesn’t necessarily preclude him returning as director someday). To the extent that anyone at all outside the Hoover Building noticed Bailey’s presence at the FBI, it was due mainly to his being an “anti-abortion hardliner oddly preoccupied with the earning potential of aborted fetuses.”

The reason for Bailey’s departure is just as disturbing as one would imagine: He evidently was too focused on the constitution.

As CBS News reported, “From the outset, Bailey’s relationship with Patel was troubled. Initially, Bailey was not invited to meetings, according to two sources familiar with their dynamic, with one adding that Patel instructed staff to refer to him as director, to Bongino as deputy director and Bailey as co-deputy director. The sources added that Patel consistently kept Bailey at arm’s length and cut him out of meetings the deputy FBI director should attend because Bailey was constantly flagging things that were unconstitutional.”

An additional source of tension appears to have been the recent demotion and reassignment of two senior counterterrorism officials at the Washington Field Office who apparently balked at launching terrorism investigations into threats against Katie and Stephen Miller. The demotions are a good reminder of what to me is one of the most chilling sentences written about Kash Patel, from the New York Times last December that helps explain why Patel continues to outlast the odds given his scandal-laden tenure: “One factor perhaps working in Mr. Patel’s favor: Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, considers Mr. Patel to be a compliant purveyor of his directives on personnel and policy matters.”

Now, following Bailey’s impending departure, there will be just one “co-deputy,” for now at least, a career agent name Christopher Raia, who has a very traditional background—rising through the agent ranks since 2003 and serving as the case agent on the investigation of Mansour Arbabsiar, who was part of a 2011 plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador at a DC restaurant.

Whether the White House installs a new political commissar as “co-deputy,” either to watch over Kash Patel or to help ensure the bureau continues to waste its time on such dumb Trump-friendly assignments as walking street beats in Washington, D.C., remains an open question.

Of the 22 people who have served as the FBI’s deputies, in times good and bad, it’s notable that all of them have been white males. While Pete Hegseth’s crusade to whiten up the Pentagon has received most of the attention, it’s worth highlighting how Kash Patel also forced out the two career women best positioned to rise to be the bureau’s first female deputy director: Jacqueline Maguire, who helped lead the 9/11 investigation and was ordered to resign even before Patel assumed office, and Tonya Ugoretz, who had been the FBI’s top intelligence leader before she was also forced out last year amid Patel’s Quixotic crusade to bolster MAGA conspiracies around the 2020 elections. Ugoretz was a career intelligence analyst and, under a more normal bureau directorship, her choice as deputy would have been an important sign of maturation and recognition of the FBI’s post-9/11 evolutions.

Scandal #3: Kash being Kash. Even beyond these larger questions and challenges about the bureau’s future, Kash Patel’s day-to-day tenure as director remains a national embarrassment, marked by ethical compromises, partisan grandstanding, and MAGA-land associations that would sink any normal presidential appointee to the FBI.

In recent weeks, that’s included Patel appearing with attorney general Todd Blanche at a Trump campaign rally, where Patel said, “I’ve spent 10 years working for President Trump,” and him throwing a temper tantrum and pausing critical international cooperation with Canadian law enforcement over exactly how the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — which, to be clear, has nothing to do with law enforcement or intelligence — characterized the 9/11 attacks. Just this weekend, a photo posted of Patel at the wedding of MAGA darling Alina Habba — who you may remember as the completely unqualified acting US attorney for New Jersey who was forced to resign — and Patel laughing it up with a former FBI informant suspected of being a double agent. It’s the type of relationship that would normally raise all sorts of red flags for FBI counterintelligence personnel — except this time, it is the director himself displaying the red flags!

And then we get to the bestiality. I never thought I would write a sentence that involved the FBI director and bestiality, but the Trump era continues to surprise all of us. At a congressional hearing earlier this month, Patel got into an extended back-and-forth about how the FBI is revising its employment guidelines. CBS first reported the new hiring guidelines a month ago, saying, “The FBI previously refused to hire job applicants if they admitted to hiring sex workers or stealing from an employer — or engaging in acts of bestiality. Today, those acts, which are mostly illegal across the country, are no longer automatic deal breakers for applicants to the nation’s top law enforcement agency.”

There appears to be an arguably reasonable explanation for some of the changes — the FBI doesn’t want to punish victims of various sex crimes and human trafficking who then seek to become law enforcement — but the policies don’t appear to actually delineate that nor is it clear, for instance, why someone hiring prostitutes should get the same benefit-of-a-doubt.

In his back and forth with even the Republican senators who questioned him, Patel couldn’t help but play the cute MAGA brawler, cracking a bestiality joke about the FBI’s “great canines.” As David Graham wrote at The Atlantic, “President Trump appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI not because of his brief experience in law enforcement but because he is a political brawler. The problem, as Patel demonstrated yesterday, is that he is not a very good one: No skilled political messenger would have allowed nearly every headline about a Senate hearing to connect their name and agency with bestiality.”

The incident has led to the first of two great Onion headlines about Patel in the last week: “Dog Can’t Believe Guy She Hooked Up With 10 Years Ago Now Head Of FBI,” followed by the hacking-themed “Kash Patel Phished By Scammer Posing As Kash Patel.”

And therein lies the cumulative problem: The FBI has succeeded across the last century because it has developed — and carefully cultivated — a reputation for rigor, thoroughness, and discipline. (The extent to which it lived up to that model is a subject of much debate!) Patel, month after month, has been mostly failing to succeed at his original mission to weaponize the FBI against Trump’s political enemies, but he is certainly succeeding at turning the FBI into a laughingstock, which in some ways will likely prove even more damaging to our country over the long-term.

Patel has created an environment where the FBI can’t protect its own employees, and where they are now the butt of all-too-many jokes about his own personal behavior and the standards to which he holds its agents.

Nearly a year ago I wrote that “the slow public unraveling” of Kash Patel’s tenure was “the biggest little scandal in Washington.” In April, I wrote, “It’s safe to say that things haven’t improved since.” And the verdict today remains the same — but worse.

October, meanwhile, promises to bring more eyebrow-raising antics: Patel is apparently planning a trip to Russia, a country that (a) is no friend of the United States nor the FBI specifically and yet (b) is quite friendly with Patel, including via a “Russia-linked production company” that evidently previously paid Patel $25,000 to appear in an anti-FBI TV series.

None of this, to be clear, is typical behavior for an FBI director.

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Rural Voters Like MAHA. They Just Don’t Think It’s Working.

A new poll from the Associated Press and KFF shows that while half of rural voters support the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again policies, most also say those policies have not benefited their communities.

About 7 out of 10 rural voters went for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. But now, about 8 out of 10 rural voters polled say the administration’s healthcare platform—which includes abandoning long-standing vaccine policies, researching ultraprocessed foods, criticizing Big Ag, and promoting a red-meat-heavy diet—has “had a negative effect or no impact on the health of people where they live,” according to the AP/KFF poll of 2,241 rural voters, released today. 68 percent of those who self-identified as MAHA supporters agreed: while they support Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his MAHA platform, it isn’t making them healthier.

At Mother Jones, we’ve been tracking the fractures in the Make America Healthy Again movement in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Read more below.

Women Built MAHA. MAGA Bros Have Taken It Over.

Forget regulating food—manly MAHA cares about meat, testosterone, and erectile dysfunction.

The California Lawmaker Forcing Big Food to Clean Up Its Act

While DC dithers, Jesse Gabriel has quietly become America’s de facto food safety chief.

Zach Lahn Is MAHA’s Great Farm Country Hope. Is He the Populist Hero He Claims to Be?

He’s running for Iowa governor on promises to bust up Big Ag. But some farmers are questioning his authenticity.

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When Trump Opened Bears Ears Land to Mining, the Hobbyists Swooped in

This story, originally published by Grist in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune, is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It didn’t take long for prospectors to stake their claims on land in southeast Utah that was previously protected in Bears Ears National Monument.

On September 11, the first day the 1.2 million acres were opened up, miners filed 16 claims, two months after President Donald Trump shrank the monument by about 90 percent. All of the claims appear to have been filed by small-scale local miners with other jobs, small businesses, and an interest in uranium mining. But the rapid timing of those claims alarmed environmental groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and they expect more to come.

“Hobby miners who want to go locate claims, play miner on the weekend, leave disturbance and pollution in their wake, that really damages the monument resources,” said Steve Bloch, an attorney for the environmental nonprofit.

Trump “was kind of flagging for people that he [and] the administration think that mining is a better use of these areas.”

George Schultz, an off-roading guide based in Moab, filed three claims in the Lockhart Basin. He said staking a claim is merely a “step” in the mining process and noted Bureau of Land Management Lands outside of monument protections are meant for multiple uses.

Schultz declined to say which minerals he expected to mine at his claim sites, but his LinkedIn profile notes experience in uranium exploration.

Thirteen of the Bears Ears mining claims were filed by Kimmerle Mining based in Moab, a family business, including two modifications to the 21-acre Easy Peasy mine and 11 additional claims nearby.

Kyle Kimmerle, a managing member of the mining company, declined to comment. He was appointed to the board of directors of Urano Energy, a Canadian mining company focused on uranium, in 2024. He also apparently operates a Moab-based general contracting business and a tire shop.

Bears Ears became a political ping-pong ball immediately after the monument was established by President Barack Obama during his final weeks in office in 2016, adding protections to 1.35 million acres of federal land in the southeastern corner of the state.

The next year, Trump slashed the monument’s footprint by about 85 percent. President Joe Biden restored the monument’s original boundaries and also slightly expanded it during his term, only for Trump to once again shrink its size this summer.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, established by President Bill Clinton in 1996, saw a similar back-and-forth between the Trump and Biden administrations.

In the latest proclamation shrinking the monuments, Trump disbanded the tribal commission that managed Bears Ears along with the Bureau of Land Management. He also listed a “grab bag of minerals” the lands “may or may not” contain, Bloch noted, including silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, and zinc in Bears Ears. Trump’s proclamation said that these minerals “create jobs, fuel prosperity, and are essential to important sectors of the economy of the United States.”

“He was kind of flagging for people that he [and] the administration think that mining is a better use of these areas,” Bloch said.

Bloch doubts there is enough uranium available to justify the expense and environmental damage of mining on the lands in question.

Kimmerle was also party to a 2023 lawsuit challenging Biden’s restoration of Bears Ears’ boundaries in 2021. His company owns the Easy Peasy mine and dug up 30 tons of ore in search of uranium in 2018. Uranium prices weren’t high enough to make mining profitable at the time, however, and the mine stopped operations.

But with the rise of artificial intelligence and massive projected demands on the electricity grid, the Trump administration and Utah Governor Spencer Cox’s own Office of Energy Development have championed nuclear energy as a solution for powering the country’s future. Uranium is the main fuel for nuclear power.

Having his mining claims “locked up” in the Bears Ears monument made them “useless,” Kimmerle asserted in the 2023 lawsuit, and cost him up to $3 million in lost profits.

Kimmerle attempted to file his Bears Ears claims in July, shortly after Trump issued his proclamation slashing the monument’s boundaries. But the proclamation did not open the lands to new mining claims until September 11—the same day San Juan County recorded both the Kimmerle and Schultz claims, according to records obtained by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

The CEO and chairman of Energy Fuels also bought thousands of shares of his company’s stock just days before Trump downsized the monument. Energy Fuels operates the White Mesa Mill directly next to the former Bears Ears monument boundary, the last conventional uranium processing site in the country.

Utah was historically the third-most productive state for uranium, according to information from the Utah Geological Survey, with most of those minerals coming from the Colorado Plateau.

Bloch said he doubts there is enough uranium available to justify the expense and environmental damage of mining on lands removed from Bears Ears.

“It’s not like people weren’t poking around in the monument, locating claims, moving dirt, seeing what was there” in the decades before Bears Ears became a monument, and during the first Trump administration when it was originally shrunk, Bloch said. “There were no production-level mines that were established.”

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First Trump Came for Immigrants. Then He Came for Their Lawyers.

Last year, on Labor Day weekend, an immigration attorney named Cooper Richardson spent her Saturday calling the Phoenix-area shelter where one of her clients—a child from Guatemala—was being held. She was checking to see if Immigration and Customs Enforcement was on the way: Her colleagues at the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project had received word that the Trump administration was finalizing plans to summarily deport the roughly 600 unaccompanied Guatemalan children detained across the country.

Richardson made one last call before she went to bed—and that’s when she learned the shelter had been told to have her client ready to leave within two hours. She rushed to her car, then spent the half-hour drive calling colleagues to see if they had advice for how she could ensure her client wasn’t taken. “I was nervous and shaking and scared,” she says, “and I’m not the one who might have been put on a plane.”

Ana Islas, who heads the Florence Project’s Tucson office, was on the other end of one of those calls. She had pulled together a rapid response team of lawyers and social workers available over the holiday weekend—a blood-pressure-spiking task in the best of times, made even more so by the Trump administration’s effort to cut off more than $200 million in federal funding for the legal defense of migrant children. Like many of its peers around the country, the Florence Project had been forced into layoffs earlier in the year, which meant the remaining attorneys were working longer hours to ensure clients got the representation they needed. “I talked to about 30 kids that Friday,” Islas says. “Including one as young as 3 years old.”

That frantic weekend is indicative of the immense pressure that Trump’s campaign to deport roughly 14 million undocumented Americans has put on legal aid groups.

After Richardson arrived at the shelter outside Phoenix, she talked quietly with her client while the other detained children remained in their beds, trying to sleep. When a van from a company contracted to transport migrants arrived, Richardson met the drivers at the door. As soon as she explained who she was, they got on the phone. “I don’t think they were expecting to have any resistance,” she says. The contractors left; early Sunday morning, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the Department of Homeland Security, which was forced to bring the children who had already been put on planes back to their shelters.

That frantic weekend is indicative of the immense pressure that Donald Trump’s campaign to deport roughly 14 million undocumented Americans has put on legal aid groups, whose work often goes beyond representation in immigration court to include giving know-your-rights presentations at shelters and employing social workers to connect migrants with housing and food assistance**.**

Within his first few months in office, Trump ended “humanitarian parole” for the 1.4 million refugees and migrants who entered the country during the Biden administration and appointed an acting director of ICE who pledged to make deportations as efficient as Amazon Prime, “but for human beings.” Since then, Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to remove migrants accused of a violent or drug-related crime without a trial, terminated Temporary Protected Status for 350,000 Haitian migrants, canceled the resettlement of all refugees who aren’t white South Africans, and closed ports of entry to asylum seekers. Ever more hardline policies continue to be batted around the White House, with adviser Stephen Miller pushing the president to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell anti-ICE protests and unilaterally suspend habeas corpus for the undocumented.

The impact of these policies has been amplified over the past 20 months by the Trump administration’s quieter efforts to defund the nonprofit legal aid organizations that provide free assistance and representation for migrants. Immigration law is infamous for its impossible hours and laughable salaries, but since early 2025 the sense of purpose that animates so many immigration attorneys has been tested by the federal government’s efforts to target them—and their budgets. The ensuing chaos nearly broke them.

In the first few months of 2025, the Trump administration attempted to cancel around $267 million in federal spending on legal aid for migrants. That effort was headlined by the attempt to cancel the Unaccompanied Children Program, which provides legal representation for more than 20,000 kids by attorneys at nearly 100 organizations, but the White House didn’t stop there: It also set out to kill an initiative providing legal support for families that had been separated during the first Trump administration, as well as a suite of programs that fund basic legal orientation services for immigrants in ICE detention.

Texas’ Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services was hit particularly hard by the sudden withdrawal of federal funding. In an all-staff email sent a week after the Unaccompanied Children Program was taken offline last March, then-CEO Dolores Schroeder wrote that the contract covered more than half of RAICES’ annual budget, and its cancellation would require laying off 159 employees, adding to the 61 layoffs that had been announced a month earlier, after the Trump administration eliminated funding for refugee resettlement programs.

After the smoke cleared, less than half of RAICES employees across Texas still had jobs.

Georgianna Pisano Goetz recalls looking up from reading that email to see colleagues in RAICES’ Houston office just as shocked as she was. “There’s no meeting with a supervisor, no inclination around the office that this is happening,” she says. The next week, the woman who oversaw operations in Houston was gone. Goetz remembers the office feeling like “a real madhouse,” with everyone comparing notes about who else had been laid off and wondering aloud “Who’s our boss?” or “What are we supposed to do?” After the smoke cleared, less than half of RAICES employees across Texas still had jobs.

For legal aid groups all over America, recovery from the tumultuous early months of the second Trump administration has been excruciating. Some organizations, like the Florence Project and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) in Los Angeles, were able to quickly rebound from forced layoffs. Others have shrunk in the face of the MAGA onslaught at a time when their services have never been more needed.

The pressure only ratcheted up over the winter, when immigration enforcement sweeps in Chicago, New Orleans, and Minneapolis hit at the same time philanthropic sources of legal aid funding—like the Soros family’s Open Society Foundations—were being threatened with investigations from the Justice Department and the IRS. The latest body blow came in August, when a no-bid contract to administer the entirety of the Unaccompanied Children Program was awarded to a group called Our Rescue, an anti-sex-trafficking outfit that is led by a former ICE administrator and has no history of providing legal representation.

Meeting so many new challenges while scrambling for funding has only made the situation feel more dire.

Through it all, the shifting immigration landscape has presented a succession of new hurdles. “Our work has changed dramatically,” says Lindsay Toczylowski, the leader of ImmDef. While previously much of the group’s work had been oriented around migrants claiming asylum upon reaching a port of entry, Toczylowski says the vast majority of new clients are “people who’ve lived in Southern California for 10, 20 years, most with no criminal history, many with US citizen children and grandchildren, who are being picked up through racial profiling and warrantless arrests and being thrown into detention centers.”

Pivoting from representing clients awaiting their court date while on humanitarian parole to people in detention is a massive shift, with ImmDef’s lawyers now making frequent trips to remote facilities to consult with their clients. Likewise, the summary detention of so many migrants by ICE has forced lawyers with limited expertise in immigration to learn how to file habeas corpus petitions in federal courts. Meeting so many new challenges while scrambling for funding has only made the situation feel more dire. California, New York, and other blue states have stepped up with new grants that have allowed organizations to replenish staff over the past year, but that support still hasn’t been sufficient to alter the exhausting reality every legal aid group in America is facing: more work, less money.

The first significant wave of undocumented migrants crossing the southern border came in the late 1970s, when tens of thousands of Salvadorans and Nicaraguans fled civil war. Though some of these refugees initially received legal assistance from aid groups that dated to the civil rights movement, in 1980 Congress prohibited the federally funded Legal Services Corporation from offering its legal aid to anyone but American citizens. This meant that the legal aid groups geared solely to migrants that were founded in the ’80s (including RAICES and the Florence Project) initially relied on philanthropic or local government grants.

That began to change in 1993, when the Supreme Court ruled in Reno v. Flores that “the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.” Subsequent litigation compelled the federal government to extend due process to particularly vulnerable migrants, which it mostly did by setting up block grants that legal aid groups could apply for. The most prominent of these is the Unaccompanied Children Program, which was created after a 2008 law required the government to provide counsel to children who arrive in the United States without a guardian.

These grants helped legal aid groups become more firmly established during the Obama administration, but it was only after Trump first came to power in 2017 that they really entered the public eye. That winter, ImmDef’s Toczylowski was one of the hundreds of lawyers who showed up at LAX days after Trump’s inauguration in response to his attempt to prohibit travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations from entering the country. Airport terminals packed with protesters became an early flashpoint of public resistance to Trump’s immigration regime, and groups like ImmDef used the ensuing uproar to raise the money necessary to meet the growing need for migrant legal defense.

Lindsay Toczylowski (left at podium), executive director at ImmDef, and Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), talk to reporters in Los Angeles in June 2023. Damian Dovarganes/AP

ImmDef was raising almost $6 million a year by 2020. It was hardly the only group to find itself flush with cash. RAICES brought in more than $25 million to support its family reunification initiatives; in California, Al Otro Lado drew national attention after filing suit on behalf of six refugees whom Customs and Border Patrol refused to admit across the southern border, leading to a $2 million jump in annual revenue for the small organization.

As she prepared ImmDef staff to confront the second Trump administration in late 2024, Toczylowski put together a presentation that doubled as a highlight reel from those years. “How did we survive and thrive in the first Trump administration?” Toczylowski asked her team, which has grown to more than 200—large enough that she needed a microphone to address them. She reviewed every phase of ImmDef’s resistance, from Remain in Mexico to family separation, to remind the organization, “We were on the front lines of all of those struggles.”

With tens of millions of dollars in funding withheld, the bottom quickly fell out of a number of organizations. Lawyers soon cut clients adrift.

Almost immediately, though, groups like ImmDef were confronting unforeseen obstacles. On day two of the new Trump administration, the nonprofit that allocates the bulk of federal funding for migrant legal aid, the Acacia Center for Justice, received a stop-work order on all of its legal orientation program grants, which totaled almost $27 million. Sara Van Hofwegen, the managing director of the Acacia Center’s legal access programs, says legal orientation initiatives previously enjoyed bipartisan support. “They made everybody’s job easier,” she explains. The funding helped aid workers guide a detainee through the legal process by giving them a presentation or materials to review so they “can come to court saying, ‘I think I’m eligible for asylum, I want to apply.’”

Though that money was briefly restored while a court challenge played out, legal orientation was fully terminated last April. Now, Van Hofwegen says, “Those programs do not exist.”

The Trump administration had more latitude to do away with the legal orientation programs than it did the three contracts with the Acacia Center that had been created by court orders or an act of Congress, including the Unaccompanied Children Program. Nevertheless, last March, the Trump administration unilaterally pulled the more than $200 million directed to those contracts. It was as shocking as it was illegal.

Several litigators, including the ACLU and ImmDef, immediately sued to reinstate all three programs administered by the Acacia Center. But with tens of millions of dollars in funding withheld, the bottom quickly fell out of a number of organizations. Lawyers soon cut clients adrift.

After the all-staff email from Dolores Schroeder, RAICES’s Georgianna Pisano Goetz says, “We had a 60-day period where they were like, ‘No new clients’—and not only no new clients, but ‘No consultations, no pro se workshops, and withdraw from every single pro bono client.’” Though the organization disseminated detailed guidelines for transferring cases, it was up to the lawyers who had been laid off to contact their clients to explain that they were going to have to withdraw from representing them.

Not only were lawyers and social workers losing their jobs, but management appeared to be in retreat, raising fears that they were capitulating to Trump.

One told me about putting together a long email detailing every case they were working on in hopes that their supervisors would find somebody to take on clients they weren’t able to personally refer to another lawyer. The attorney said they never received a response. (A RAICES spokesperson disputed this account.)

In an email, Faisal Al-Juburi, the co-CEO of RAICES wrote, “Our team’s extraordinary effort last spring kept RAICES standing to serve our communities. Within days, we established a case triage and wind-down framework, issued procedural updates, led live trainings, and built robust referral systems.” Al-Juburi said he was particularly proud that RAICES was able to maintain services for families and individuals detained at the infamous facility in Dilley, Texas. “To fulfill our mission,” he continued, “we must acknowledge that this administration is actively upending legal norms and escalating violence in communities nationwide. We bear a responsibility to adapt to this shifting landscape to safeguard our core work.”

Elsewhere, not only were lawyers and social workers losing their jobs, but management appeared to be in retreat, raising fears that they, like so many other American institutions, were capitulating to Trump. That spring, nine white-shoe law firms pledged $940 million in pro bono work to the administration, Columbia University agreed to pay $221 million to the federal government to end its probe of antisemitism on campus, and the CEOs of dozens of companies joined Trump on an official visit to the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Al Otro Lado laid off eight employees and fired two more with cause—eliminating a quarter of its unionized workforce—while also pulling out of California state grants geared toward legal representation for refugees. The employees that remained became concerned that their leaders were falling in line, too, with several theorizing that, by exclusively focusing on helping migrants on the Mexican side of the border, Al Otro Lado could avoid confrontation with the Trump administration while at the same time taking advantage of Mexico’s permissive labor laws and low cost of living (management had rejected previous campaigns by the union to equalize pay between its Mexican and American lawyers).

Melissa Flores, a spokesperson for the organization, denied that any shift in priorities away from migrants in the United States was ever on the table. “Like many organizations in our field, we’ve had to navigate difficult terrain—but our focus has never wavered,” she wrote in an email. “We remain steadfast in our mission to defend and uplift the rights of immigrants, asylum seekers, and deportees on both sides of the border.” Indeed, Al Otro Lado has begun hiring again in the United States, which union members hailed as a direct result of the pressure they’ve put on the organization’s leadership. This August, management finally agreed to negotiate with the union after 18 months of resistance.

The union-management tensions at Al Otro Lado are hardly unique. Two days before Schroeder announced that RAICES had lost more than half of its budget, the organization had agreed to a wrongful-termination settlement with a union lawyer named Maria Osornio who had been fired in December 2023. A longtime leader in the group’s appeals division, Osornio had publicly protested Schroeder’s decision to wind down her office in 2024. She was terminated shortly afterward, in part for allegedly bullying another employee.

“It’s such a disservice to the people who really need our help to put ego before talent,” Osornio says. “We were spending so much time fighting with our bosses instead of focusing on the issues.” The organization found itself paying $225,000 to Osornio, and trying to heal internal tensions, at the same time the government tore a multimillion-dollar hole in its balance sheet.

Asked about the settlement with Osornio, a spokesperson for RAICES declined to comment on “specific personnel matters,” but called the timing “purely coincidental.”

A similar situation transpired in New York City last spring, when the nonprofit Bronx Defenders put an attorney named Sophia Gurulé on unpaid leave for “multiple recent performance failures,” namely a handful of late court filings. Gurulé had never faced any disciplinary action before, and soon 24 colleagues signed a protest letter to Bronx Defenders’ executive director, Juval Scott, alleging that she’d been suspended for her vocal union advocacy. “We’ve witnessed a mind-boggling number of changes in federal regulations, agency precedent, and circuit case law that radically reshaped an already complex area of law,” the lawyers wrote. “Suspending Sophia at a time where the Immigration Practice…is hanging on by a thread is inappropriate, concerning, and harmful to staff and clients alike.”

A spokesperson for Bronx Defenders said that while the organization doesn’t comment on personnel matters, “what we can say is that every decision we make is guided by our responsibility to the people we represent and the Bronx communities we serve.” The spokesperson specifically objected to the characterization that the organization’s immigration practice had been hampered by the suspension of Gurulé, pointing out that around the same time it had secured emergency funding from New York’s city council, hired new immigration attorneys, and provided training on filing habeas corpus petitions.

The simmering tension at Bronx Defenders, RAICES, Al Otro Lado, and other organizations hasn’t stopped them from playing crucial roles in the broader fight to defend migrants in court. Still, their inability to speedily resolve whatever personnel issues arise has been a counterproductive distraction. “I want to be out there helping,” Osornio says. “That’s what’s so heartbreaking: I want to be out there advocating, but I essentially lost my job for calling out the C-suite.”

Ana Islas, from the Florence Project, was one of the few dozen supervising attorneys from all over the country who attended an Acacia Center conference in Atlanta the same weekend that the administration pulled funding for the Unaccompanied Children Program. Midway through a presentation in a hotel conference room, everyone’s phone lit up. The agenda had to be put on hold as attorneys ducked into the hall to confer with their colleagues. Waiting for her flight home to Tucson, Islas remembers sitting in the terminal with her mind racing: “The kids are here and they need to know their rights even if we’re not representing them. And if we are representing them, we can’t just drop them like a hot potato.”

“It’s an assault from all angles on the organizations that serve immigrant communities.”

By and large, immigration attorneys have remained focused on that mission. “We are winning cases despite all the terrible stuff that’s happening out there,” says Chiqui Sanchez Kennedy, the leader of the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project. “We are gaining asylum for our clients. We’re getting clients released from detention.”

For many attorneys, the sense of momentum felt like it began to turn in their favor last September, when the Acacia Center was finally able to begin restoring funding for the Unaccompanied Children Program after a series of court orders ended six months of uncertainty. I talked to Van Hofwegen when the last suspended grants had been restored, but she sounded less triumphant than steely, acknowledging that more threats lay on the horizon. “I think the cuts to federal funding are really clearly happening in this larger context of a federal government that wants to make it as difficult as possible for immigrants to navigate their legal process and who wants to remove legal access and due process as much as possible from folks,” she says.

ImmDef’s Toczylowski agreed, telling me, “It’s an assault from all angles on the organizations that serve immigrant communities.” One of the more alarming vectors of that assault is the demand by the former chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), that 215 NGOs provide records to the panel about how they “benefited from the border crisis created by the Biden Administration.”

In this climate of ever-changing rules and constant threats of funding cuts, legal aid organizations cannot afford to allow internal backbiting and score settling detract from their core missions. In May, an arbitrator found that Sophia Gurulé had been unlawfully terminated under the terms of her union’s collective bargaining agreement with the Bronx Defenders, even as the arbitrator didn’t dispute the organization’s reasons for suspending her. “I feel vindicated,” Gurulé told me. She added: “It is sad that a public defender nonprofit located in the South Bronx, historically one of the poorest congressional districts in the country, spent a year and who knows how many thousands of dollars to try to justify their bad behavior.”

Aside from a few notable exceptions, most legal aid organizations have managed to get out of their own way this year and settled into a grinding legal war with the Trump administration. That made them better prepared for the most recent assault, an overhaul of the Unaccompanied Children Program that Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, from the Florence Project, calls “monumental.” Under a new plan proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services, pro bono representation would be prioritized—a cost cutting measure that would mean detained children were working with attorneys with little immigration expertise—and all lawyers would be limited to virtual consultations with detained children. Avila-Cimpeanu says these changes could be devastating because there’s no substitute for “being able to meet in person with the child and really having them know that we don’t work for the shelter, we don’t work for the government. We’re there for them.”

“Where are the lawyers for the kids? They’re at the nonprofits doing this work without pay, and that’s because we are qualified, dedicated, mission-driven people.”

In August, the administration awarded a $158 million contract to administer the entirety of the new version of the Unaccompanied Children Program to a group called Our Rescue, whose operations are devoted to stopping sex trafficking and do not currently include any sort of legal assistance. Notably, the group is led by a former ICE official named Derek Benner and was founded by another former ICE employee, Tim Ballard. The latter is best known for being portrayed in a popular QAnon-backed anti-sex trafficking film, Sound of Freedom, which came out shortly before he himself was accused of sexual coercion by seven women. (Ballard has denied the allegations, even as he resigned from Our Rescue after they became public. Our Rescue did not respond to emailed questions about its capacity for providing legal representation to migrant children.)

At a virtual event organized by the Acacia Center a month after funding for the Unaccompanied Children Program lapsed, Michael Lukens, the head of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, rejected the idea that Our Rescue can provide the same services as organizations like his. “Our Rescue does not do this work,” he said. “They are not qualified, and there has been no indication that that contract has been signed, that work has started, that Our Rescue has made any move to actually help a child.” That puts Lukens and his peers in the unsustainable position of working pro bono for the foreseeable future. “Where are the lawyers for the kids? Right now, they’re at the nonprofits who are doing this work without pay, and that’s because we are qualified, dedicated, mission-driven people.”

At the same time the old system for funding legal aid for migrant children has been detonated, the administration has spent the past few months illegally withholding payment for work done under the old Unaccompanied Children Program contract. This means that, yet again, nonprofits are scrambling to provide needed services. Avila-Cimpeanu says that Florence Project will find a way to continue representing its clients on a pro bono basis, a resolve shared even by lawyers at nonprofits without the same resources.

Melissa Lopez, the head of a small group in Texas called Estrella del Paso, posted a “heartbreaking update” in late July, saying that she had been forced to lay off 13 staffers because the administration was overdue on nearly $1 million in payments for completed work. Still, Lopez said, “We currently represent about 243 unaccompanied children. We have an ethical, legal, and moral obligation to continue representing these children, and with or without money from the federal government, we must do that.”

Nearly every lawyer I spoke with over the past year reflected on the reality that the Trump administration will keep finding ways to deny migrants their legal rights for as long as they’re in power. For many, finding the motivation to continue fighting requires staying connected to the clients themselves. Sanchez Kennedy, from the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project, makes a point of commemorating every case with her team, even the unsuccessful ones. “We call them hard-fought losses,” she says. “Every time we help a client access due process and actively participate in their immigration case, help them defend themselves against deportation—that means that they are getting a fair shot. That alone is worth celebrating.”

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Can a Democratic Socialist Win in Deep-Red Florida?

Back in August, Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon did something few outside the state saw coming: She won Florida’s Democratic US Senate primary. Her victory sent shock waves through the political world not only because her opponent Alex Vindman’s war chest dwarfed hers 19 to 1, but also because Nixon ran as a Democratic Socialist.

Today, she’s one of a number of candidates around the country affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America who could be elected to Congress this November. The sudden rise in the DSA’s popularity is reshaping the Democratic Party and America’s political landscape. But Nixon says she wants people who are considering her campaign to forget all about those labels.

“It’s not about progressive vs. moderate vs. conservative, or Democrat vs. Republican, or DSA member vs. Working Families Party member,” Nixon says. “It’s about the rich are getting richer, and they’re making it harder for working families to be alive.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Nixon talks to host Al Letson about going from community activist and comic book co-author to upstart US Senate candidate, being “the biggest thorn” in Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ side, and whether her progressive message can win in deep-red Florida.

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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California Bans ICE’s Favorite Shock Gloves

On Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill banning law enforcement officers in the state from using electrical shock gloves, a “pain compliance” tool and recent hit with ICE officers that function similarly to tasers at a lower voltage. ICE recently purchased about 6,000 pairs of the gloves, which have been roundly condemned by human rights groups as “inherently abusive equipment that facilitates torture”—for $16.7 million dollars.

“This is about stepping up where the federal government has failed.”

“Trump has put his political interests above the health, safety and livelihood of American families. California is taking action to strengthen transparency, accountability, and oversight around immigration enforcement in our state,” Newsom said in a statement that accompanied the bill’s signing. “This is about stepping up where the federal government has failed our communities.”

The ban will go into effect in 2027 as part of a suite of bills Newsom signed in response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in California, including a 25 percent tax on companies that operate immigration detention facilities in the state, a ban on face coverings by federal agents—a previous version of which was blocked by a judge—and a law expanding oversight requirements for federal immigration detention centers in California.

As I have previously reported, the shock gloves ICE purchased have been the subject of several lawsuits, including a wrongful death suit:

A pending wrongful death lawsuit alleges that a 43-year-old man named Jonathan Mansfield died because corrections officers shocked him 27 times with the gloves and 13 times with a Taser. Two of the glove shocks lasted 45 and 99 seconds. The manufacturer’s recommended limit is 15 seconds. A man with heart problems sued over allegations that he was shocked at a Las Vegas trade show, as the Associated Press reported.

And in 2023, a man who was incarcerated in Kentucky’s Bullitt County Jail sued an employee of that jail for shocking him repeatedly with the gloves. “The gloves feel just like a taser,” Josh Elswick, who was in handcuffs and shackles when he was shocked, said. Bullitt County Jail representatives told local media they would stop using electric shock gloves shortly thereafter.

California’s ban on shock gloves is likely to be challenged in court—and the Department of Homeland Security has already promised that it will flout any such law. As a DHS spokesperson told me earlier this month, “Sanctuary politicians attempting to ban our federal law enforcement from any safety equipment is despicable and a deliberate attempt to undermine and endanger our officers. To be crystal clear: we will not abide by unconstitutional bans. The Supremacy Clause makes it clear that California’s sanctuary politicians do not control federal law enforcement.”

Jeff Niklaus, CEO of Compliant Technologies, the firm that manufactures the gloves, blamed “political bias” and lack of understanding of his product for the ban in a September 22 YouTube video.

“We were never contacted by any legislator or agency within California,” Niklaus said, calling the firm’s gloves the “safest, most humane deescalatory product probably ever to come along.”

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Trump Says the Polls Are “Fake.” Iowa Farmers Say They’re “Bleeding Money.”

“First of all, the polls are fake.”

When asked about competitive congressional races in Iowa, Donald Trump predictably dismissed Iowa Republicans’ lackluster polling numbers as “fake” and blamed Democrats for the high prices squeezing farmers and other businessmen across the state—even as the war in Iran has sparked soaring energy and fertilizer costs.

Video by Peter Berger

“I don’t know, I love Iowa,” Trump said during an Oval Office address announcing a new $15 billion steel plant in the state. “I’ve always been very strong with Iowa. There’s been some things that the Democrats have done that are very bad for our country.”

Meanwhile, one Iowa farmer stressed just how difficult the economy has become for small business owners.

“Folks that have trucking businesses, they’re just bleeding money right now like crazy,” he said during an appearance on MSNOW. “Farmers are bleeding money like crazy. We need to get this problem resolved, and we need to get it resolved right away.”

Still, Trump appears unmoved by the economic warning signs, as prices climb and his poll numbers continue to slide.

“I got more votes than anybody in history during the last election,” said Trump. “I’m more popular now than I was then.”

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OpenAI Cancels Its Advanced Model Launch, Then Heads to Lunch With Trump

OpenAI called off plans to launch its latest GPT-6.1 Astra model on Tuesday, after the system failed to meet the company’s safety standards.

The model was scheduled to release sometime in October, but OpenAI’s head of safety systems, Saachi Jain, told The Wall Street Journal that GPT-6.1 Astra, as compared to the previous GPT-6 Astra, was less honest about notifying users of the steps it did or did not take to achieve a task.

Jain described to the Journal that the models needed to strike a balance between proceeding with tasks on their own and taking shortcuts to provide an easy answer instead of doing a thorough job—a behavior Jain and others in the industry call “laziness.” Astra is OpenAI’s top-tier model.

The startup’s cancellation comes amid a series of security threat incidents—tens of thousands of which it is reportedly investigating, according to a Saturday Axios report. OpenAI apologized on Monday for how it hacked Australian government websites in June, accessing non-public data and adding files onto the server: “We are sorry and working to do better in the future,” the startup in part wrote in a statement.

Also on Monday, the company said it would continue training only after it has improved safeguards—including making its internal testing security strong enough to contain models and establishing live monitoring of models.

Lawmakers and officials across the political spectrum are outraged. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, filed a temporary injunction to a June lawsuit, which claimed the company knowingly released unsafe products to the public, that OpenAI should stop developing new products without safety standards approved by a third party.

Despite suggesting they would “do better in the future” to ensure safe AI development, as I wrote on Sunday, OpenAI has a history of aligning with the Trump administration to expand development. Many companies, such as OpenAI, Google, SpaceX, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle, have military agreements with the Defense Department.

On Tuesday, several of their leaders, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, are set to meet with President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson for lunch to discuss AI.

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How I Got Dragged Into a Putin Disinformation Op

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

I just published a book that exposes Russian disinformation operations. Now I—that is, a fake version of me—have become part of a Russian disinformation operation.

How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America chronicles the shadow war of clandestine influence and disinformation operations—many implemented to aid Trump—that Putin has been mounting against the United States for a decade. It ends with the warning that Moscow would likely attack the ongoing midterm elections to help Trump and the GOP. Within days of the book’s publication two weeks ago, media outlets reported that Russia’s disinformation operatives, using phony accounts on social media platforms, had started hurling derogatory material at Democrats.

Last week, this covert disinformation operation widened to spread scurrilous allegations against Democratic candidates—phony accusations that were falsely attributed to me.

So after writing a book about Putin’s disinformation efforts and noting they posed a threat to the current elections, I am being used by a Russian disinformation network to influence the midterms in Trump’s favor. This is a bizarre snake-eating-its-tail situation.

In the book, I report on several secret Russian disinformation units that produced and disseminated false allegations about Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz during the 2024 campaign. One was dubbed Matryoshka by disinformation trackers. (That’s the name for those iconic Russian nesting dolls.) It zapped out on X and other social media platforms assorted lies about Harris: She had an abortion when she was 17. She was exhibiting early-onset Alzheimer’s. Her grandfather was a communist. Her family was connected to Pfizer and Big Pharma.

But Matryoshka was not done with Mother Jones—or me.

When news organizations recently revealed that Matryoshka was at it again, this time concocting videos that purported to be CNN news segments covering Hollywood celebrities trash-talking Democrats (Nazi whores!), I reported that these covert operatives were also generating and posting fake videos that appeared to be CNN spots with damaging information on Democratic senatorial candidates. James Talarico (Texas) “despises” Hasidic Jews because they don’t allow gender affirmation treatment. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) owns a business that has “caused the bee population in Ohio to decline by a factor of nine.” Jon Ossoff (Georgia) has “called for a complete halt to military aid to Israel and for all resources to be redirected to Ukraine.” And there were others.

While I was working on that story, @antibot4navalny, a group of anonymous activists who monitor Russian disinformation, informed me that Matryoshka had also posted on X a supposed Mother Jones video that reported that the Democratic Party had paid $289 million to Mark Thompson, the head of CNN, so the cable news network would run reports that “promote gender transition among minors.” I quickly published a piece exposing this absurd disinformation. After a lawyer for Mother Jones contacted X, the company took down this fraudulent video.

But Matryoshka was not done with Mother Jones—or me.

On Friday, @antibot4navalny informed me that Matryoshka—through an obvious bot account on X—had posted a purported CNN video of me promoting a new book. But the book isn’t How Russia Won. It’s supposedly called Enemies of Democracy for Dummies, and the video declared, “The book will feature over 300 stories related to crimes committed by members of the Democratic Party.”

This counterfeit video displayed the text of a made-up quote from me: “Apparently, there’s a fissure somewhere in the US that leads straight to hell; otherwise, I don’t understand where all these devils from the Democratic Party are coming from.” That’s quite the analysis. The video noted that “information from David Corn’s book will further damage the Democrats’ reputation and standing ahead of the elections.”

Here are screenshots from that video:

Mother Jones

Mother Jones

To be clear, none of this is true—though Enemies of Democracy for Dummies is not a bad idea for a book.

Again, a lawyer for Mother Jones reached out to X. But by then, it was the weekend, and this fake CNN video claiming I had published a book full of dirt on Democrats that would affect the election remained online. It looked as if it initially drew nearly 200,000 views, but I was reliably informed that Matryoshka was using bots to juice this number and that this post likely had only reached a few thousand X users.

Matryoshka, using old bot accounts created up to 12 years ago, spewed out at least nine sham Mother Jones videos, with each one promoting an outrageous but spurious allegation about a Democratic candidate.

As with the previous fake and nonsensical video reporting that Mother Jones had revealed a $289 million payment from the DNC to CNN’s chief for pro-trans coverage, this one seemed a bit too silly to have much impact. It was more of an irritation than a cause of great concern.

Then came other fake videos.

Matryoshka, using old bot accounts created up to 12 years ago, spewed out at least nine sham Mother Jones videos, with each one promoting an outrageous but spurious allegation about a Democratic candidate. One “revealed” that a Democratic senatorial candidate “is a closeted gay man who hides his sexual orientation in order to maintain a luxurious lifestyle.” It said he had previously been accused of “embezzling public funds to pay for the services of male sex workers.”

With ominous synth music playing, this video segues to footage of me and written text in which I purportedly state that in my Enemies of Democracy for Dummies book “I present evidence” this Democratic candidate “dated underaged boys and had sexual relations with them.” The quote continues: “As a gay man, I find it outrageous that a gay man would hide behind a woman to maintain his lavish lifestyle.” (Not that it matters, but I’m not gay.) The video ends with a card saying, “Read more at MotherJones.com.”

Throughout this one-and-a-half-minute video, the Mother Jones logo appears in the top right corner.

The other videos are all in the same style. (For obvious reasons, I am not linking to them or mentioning the candidates by name.) They claim that a Democratic candidate for governor who served in Vietnam “is suspected of killing 37 civilians” in a massacre during that war, that another Democratic gubernatorial candidate recruited minors into sex work and “while working for the Girl Scouts…organized sex parties for members of the Democratic Party,” that a third Democratic candidate for governor caused “a fatal car accident while under the influence of alcohol,” and that another Democratic gubernatorial nominee sold crack to college students, “resulting in 17 deaths,” and so on.

Perhaps these phony videos are meant to be a brushback pitch. Mostly, it’s unnerving—a demonstration of how easy it is to be misrepresented and exploited by unidentified scoundrels.

Each of these videos features me offering a colorful quote about the allegation and noting it’s straight out of Enemies of Democracy for Dummies. Similar to the bogus video about the DNC payment to the CNN chief, some of these X posts show nearly 200,000 views. But the real numbers are likely much lower. They have not, as of this writing, gone viral. (X did not respond immediately to a request to delete the posts with these videos.)

So the journalist who wrote a book to call attention to Putin’s disinformation crusade against American democracy is now being used by Moscow’s disinformation operatives to subvert the midterm elections for Trump’s benefit.

I’ve been asked by colleagues and friends if this is frightening. Not yet. Perhaps these phony videos are meant to be a brushback pitch. Mostly, it’s unnerving—a demonstration of how easy it is to be misrepresented and exploited by unidentified scoundrels. And, as we all know, it’s tough to beat back a lie on the internet. We’re all vulnerable to a cyber assault.

There are five weeks to go to Election Day. How extensive might Putin’s war on the midterms become? How far will he go to boost Trump and the Republicans? If Trump tries to spark chaos and a crisis with accusations of vote fraud or actions to interfere with the election and the vote tally, Putin’s disinformation army can be expected to do whatever it can to bolster any false claims and conspiracy theories flying about—or to cook up its own.

One reason I wrote How Russia Won was to counter the false “Russia, Russia, Russia” narrative peddled relentlessly for years by Trump, Republicans, MAGA influencers, and right-wing media personalities who have denied Russia has been covertly intervening in US elections. By echoing Putin’s own denials, these useful idiots have been complicit in a foreign adversary’s attack on American democracy. My point was to show the United States has been under continuous assault from Moscow, as Russia has schemed to assist Trump and the Republicans. With this disinformation operation incorporating truly fake news about me, Putin’s Matryoshka crew has proved the premise of my book.

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How Corporate Influencers Facilitated Trump’s Assault on Climate Research

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

Recent attacks on US universities by the Trump administration have built on decades of efforts by libertarian donor networks, fossil fuel companies, and conservative think tanks to reshape university governance and increase outside influence, according to a new study.

The authors of the new perspective study argue that the erosion of university autonomy has left colleges more vulnerable to corporate interests, especially within climate and energy research.

In 2025, the Trump administration froze billions of dollars in research funding, launched investigations into 75 institutions and pushed colleges to sign agreements supporting administration policies in exchange for federal funding. The federal government canceled $4 million in climate research grants at Princeton University alone and accused scientists of fueling “climate anxiety.”

If you’re a young researcher watching that, you might think twice about asking a question that could cost you your funding, said Noel Healy, of Salem State University, the lead author of the study published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science.

“Climate policy is only as good as the evidence behind it. When the industry being regulated gets to shape the questions researchers ask, it ends up shaping the policy too,” he said.

The Academic Freedom Index, which measures how freely scholars and universities can teach, research and express ideas without interference, found that US institutional autonomy fell from 3.3 in 2019 to 1.7 in 2025, on a scale of 0 to 4.

“In other countries, attacks on university legitimacy paved the way for faculty purges, campus closures, and centralized political control.”

“Since 2025, scientists have been deleting words like ‘climate change’ from their grant applications because those words can get an application rejected,” Healy said. “Some universities have shut down programs before the government even asked them to, hoping to avoid becoming a target. You don’t have to ban speech if people fear that speaking up will cost them their funding. People start deciding it’s safer to stay quiet.”

Outside influence on US universities is not new. In the 1920s, electric utilities worked with academics to defend their monopoly positions and oppose regulations. Fossil fuel companies followed suit in the 1950s, funding research to sow doubt about the public health impacts of their products. Internal industry documents have shown that companies viewed academic research as a way to build credibility and influence public debate.

Corporate-funded research was only one way powerful interests influenced universities. Libertarian donor networks also influenced program content, faculty hiring and gained appointments to university governing bodies. For example, David Koch, the billionaire industrialist whose wealth came from Koch Industries, gave more than $185 million to his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and served as a lifetime member to the elite research university’s highest governing body.

Between 2010 and 2020, six fossil fuel companies alone gave more than $700 million to US universities, helping to legitimize industry solutions to the climate crisis and undermine regulatory approaches. Some of this funding came with donor agreements that gave outside actors control over decisions traditionally made by faculty, such as in hiring and curricula.

At the same time, donor-influence models were written into state law. For example, in 2016, the Arizona state legislature created the first publicly funded libertarian academic center. Other states have followed suit. These centers bypass faculty control, instead answering to legislators. These centers are expected to receive $50 million in US taxpayer dollars during the 2025-2026 school year, according to reporting by the Hechinger Report.

State legislatures have also tried to limit faculty power through legislation that could abolish tenure, block faculty participation in lawsuits, and police educational programming. From 2021 to 2023, more than 150 state bills were introduced targeting tenure, faculty governance, and diversity, equity and inclusion, according to the Energy Research & Social Science perspective.

“Faculty need the power to review major gifts before they’re accepted and to refuse the ones that threaten academic freedom.”

Soaring tuition and student debt, which are also products of the corporate model, have contributed to mistrust in higher education. The authors of the study argue that to regain public trust, administrators must confront how corporate donors have reshaped their priorities, disclose donor contributions and influence, and give faculty committees the ability to reject funding that undermines the university’s public mission and create conflicts of interest. Union contracts can protect faculty and empower them to confront corporate capture.

“Transparency lets you see the deal, but it doesn’t let you stop it. Faculty need the power to review major gifts before they’re accepted and to refuse the ones that threaten academic freedom,” Healy said.

Universities don’t have to start from scratch. For example, the national UnKoch My Campus campaign published a model gift-acceptance policy that gives faculty a say before gifts with conditions are accepted, makes donor agreements public, and sets clear grounds for rejecting gifts that give donors influence over hiring or teaching. Universities can draw on examples like this to write their own rules, Healy said.

“In other countries, attacks on university legitimacy paved the way for faculty purges, campus closures, and centralized political control,” he said. “Universities came under attack before those governments had full control, not after.”

MIT has previously said it would not divest its endowment from fossil-fuel companies, arguing that working with industry could help develop climate solutions. The MIT Energy Initiative has also said that funders have no control over the content or findings of its research reports.

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The Education of Min Jin Lee

The first hint that I needn’t be so anxious to interview Min Jin Lee came as the bestselling author descended the creaky stairs of her five-story Harlem townhouse and pronounced my name. Not in the way my brain has articulated it for decades, smoothed over by an anglicized version that made it easy for teachers to call out from an attendance roll. Which is to say, Lee, on a Friday afternoon in August, pronounced my name the way the people who brought me into this world had intended.

The next came when Lee, smartly dressed in a gray vest and jeans, with a pair of delicate drop earrings, doled out lively profanities. She was recalling her time attending Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the landmark case that would later reach the Supreme Court and dismantle race-based affirmative action, as part of her nearly decade-long research process for American Hagwon, the much-anticipated third installment of a planned quartet dedicated to Korean diasporas. As a supporter of affirmative action, she witnessed testimony teeming with stereotypical portrayals of Asian American students, including, as Lee puts it, making them out to be like “machines.”

“I sat there in the press box, and I remember thinking, this whole idea that Asian Americans have shitty personalities—that’s really shitty. It’s a really shitty thing to say.”

“Also, we’re talking about children,” she continued, her voice intensifying. “How dare you insult the children of my community?”

To hear Lee condemn the racial stereotyping of Asian Americans, including the “stupid, horrible racial epithet called ‘tiger parenting,’” with such blunt rigor, in a living room sumptuously bedecked with books, was deeply satisfying. My own fondness for profanity, my Korean-born mother used to warn, was a sign “of an uneducated person.”

“I think your mom was right,” Lee said, warmly laughing as I shared the memory with her.

American Hagwon is Lee’s third novel and follows Pachinko, the vast 2017 saga that traces four generations of a Korean family as they weather war, discrimination, and cruelty in Japanese-occupied Korea and in Japan. A finalist for the National Book Award, Pachinko established Lee as a master of sweeping historical narrative. American Hagwon, on the other hand, takes place in more contemporary times, with Lee’s aperture shifting between a multigenerational family drama and broader meditations on the human costs of heedless ambition.

What are the human costs of endless ambition? Would we choose differently if we were liberated from the pursuit of educational status?

“I asked myself, if I had one more book to write, I wanted to write about what’s most important to Koreans around the world, and it was so clear to me that it was education,” Lee said. “It’s not money. It’s not religion. It’s not status. It’s actually education. This kind of faith in it, even if you hated it.”

As its title telegraphs, the Korean for-profit tutoring academies known as hagwons provide a central motif in Lee’s latest novel. Hagwons typically offer classes from elementary school all the way through high school, but it is the courses aimed at boosting test scores for college entrance exams that they are best known for. (If you’re imagining a Korean equivalent to a Kaplan prep, think bigger; in South Korea, hagwons are a multibillion-dollar industry that one of the country’s leading English-language newspapers once described as “thriving on anxiety.”) To outsiders, they can conform to a long-standing stereotype of Asian students: relentlessly driven, much to their own personal misery, with cutthroat parents digging into their bank accounts to further their children’s competitive advantage.

The criticism hagwons attract can be well earned; as I once experienced, fierce competition, at times bordering on toxic, is often central to the hagwon mentality. But for Lee, sensationalistic portrayals of them risk reinforcing simplistic racist tropes. For kids in the United States, hagwons are also often places of community, one of the few spaces, in a white world, to connect with other kids of Korean descent. They can also function as de facto daycare centers, she said, where parents can have their kids picked up from school, safely driven to the hagwon, and “given a juice box, pretzel rod, and worksheets” instead of having a child “stay at home and have a shelf fall on them.” In a country lacking adequate childcare, Lee sees hagwons as “an ethnic solution to a state problem.”

American Hagwon arrives amid a wider reckoning over the value of a top-tier education, particularly in the United States, as the yearly total cost of some colleges surpasses $100,000 and AI threatens the very foundations of what it means to hold knowledge. There’s an “anxiety that the modern person feels right now,” Lee said, referring to the existential questions born out of AI.

A similar anxiety courses through American Hagwon, as multiple families of Korean ethnicity, compelled as so many émigrés are by the desire to secure better futures for their children, are upended by unexpected outside forces, including the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

When we first encounter the novel’s central family, the Kohs, John and Helen appear to be typical middle-class parents who had just moved to Seoul from Sydney, Australia, dutifully attentive to their three children’s education, while John toils away as a manager at a large corporation. But when he endures a devastating betrayal, both professionally and personally, it forces the family to emigrate, eventually landing in Southern California. Throughout the sacrifices that follow—John takes up a physically demanding job at a fish-fry restaurant; Mido, the youngest and only daughter, pauses her college education and works at an American hagwon to support her family, including her brothers’ education—the thread of familial devotion grows only stronger.

It is through this lens of empathy, paired with prolific research, that Lee shows us how hagwons reflect the deep-rooted desires of a culture fixated on upward mobility and one that has long identified education as the ticket to a vertical trajectory. As one mother in American Hagwon notes: “The cost doesn’t matter. We all know you have to pay up for the best coaching.” Still, such a narrow view of success inflicts its own damage, raising some of the deeper questions in the novel: What are the human costs of endless ambition? Would we choose differently if we were liberated from the pursuit of educational status?

Min Jin Lee once worked as a corporate lawyer, but quit to become a novelist after thinking: “I don’t want to die working this way.”Mary Kang

The middle child of three sisters who emigrated with their parents from Seoul to the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, New York, when she was 7, Lee did not attend a hagwon. But she wrestled with such questions during the brief period she worked as a corporate lawyer after Georgetown Law, its own kind of pressure cooker. “The more work I would do, the more work I would be given,” she recalled. “Capitalism, right? Because I am not getting paid more. The more hours that I bill, the more the firm makes.”

“I was really thinking,” she told me, “I don’t want to die working this way.”

So Lee, who was diagnosed with a serious liver disease in high school, quit law to pursue a full-time career in writing, publishing her first novel, Free Food for Millionaires, in 2007.

Were her parents—Korean immigrants who owned a wholesale jewelry store in midtown Manhattan—ever disappointed by her decision to quit law to pursue something as impractical as a career as a novelist? I wondered. “My parents aren’t pushy,” Lee replied. She stressed, however, that the support for the literary ventures she now enjoys did not always come easily. On the same day Pachinko was published, her husband lost his job in finance.

What followed is a familiar middle-class story, a moment of great upheaval not unlike the devastating twists that upend the families of American Hagwon. Lee, who was 48 at the time, and her husband struggled to obtain healthcare and navigate the administrative hellhole of COBRA; her efforts to find a job in teaching were regularly dashed. “Absolutely nobody would give me interviews,” Lee said. “It didn’t matter that I had two published novels. So what? So does everybody else. Some people were very unkind. Truly, it kind of struck me how cruel younger people could be to somebody older.”

In a gentler world, locking eyes with a life-threatening disease would not be the only way to clarify how we want to live. But Lee’s decision to quit law cuts to the central tension that roils throughout American Hagwon: What constitutes a meaningful life? Toward the end of the novel, Mido and her hagwon colleagues ask their students’ parents: What does an impressive résumé, all that schooling, and a lucrative career amount to if you’re miserable?

“Our children cannot know everything,” Lion, one of the hagwon’s co-owners, tells the parents during a lecture he organizes about the value and pressures of education: “This flawed but worthy American project of immigration, reinvention, and multiple chances creates more possibilities, but it requires us to explore different paths in order to have lives of greater purpose.” Any sense of “failure” that creeps in when kids don’t get into their top-choice school, Lion continued, is “a terrible way to start their higher-educational experience, and adulthood.”

“The inability to live with your truthful self determines the tragedy of your own life.”

“The inability to live with your truthful self determines the tragedy of your own life,” Lee said. “What I really saw when I was doing the research is that the people who are doing the best were not necessarily the wealthiest or the most elite; they’re the ones who actually had love in their lives.” The Kohs, despite having lost so much, are clearly animated by such love.

After we spoke for about an hour, we climbed the creaky stairs and reached Lee’s office on the third floor of the townhouse, where, surrounded by family photos, she offered snacks. First, a pack of black garlic almonds, and then Kopiko, an Indonesian coffee-flavored hard candy that she noted is ubiquitous in K-dramas—even though it’s not Korean.

I wasn’t familiar with either and accepted both. As I left her Harlem home, I couldn’t help but walk faster, excited to share the Kopiko with my mom. After all, it was her sacrifice and hers alone that afforded me my own time at a hagwon in Edison, New Jersey, while she picked up shifts at a nearby dry cleaner. I’ll always have a sense of uneasiness about that time. But at that moment, picking up the pace as I headed down to the subway clutching coffee candies, I felt only gratitude.

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Trump’s Mass Detention Machine in Pennsylvania

A sign is placed in the yard of a residential property off US Route 322 approaching the small town of Philipsburg in central Pennsylvania. The sign appears almost as if it is floating in the lush green grass. Greeting passersby entering this town of some 3,000 residents, it displays a weeping Statue of Liberty covering her face in shame and sorrow before Route 322 twists and curls through the heart of town.

Philipsburg is a town with a history built on timber, industry, and coal. Industry has disappeared, and it’s been decades since coal was a significant employer. Yet one employer has remained in Philipsburg: GEO Group, the second largest for-profit prison company in the US.

Yard sign on US Route 322 at the southern entrance to Philipsburg.

Eager to replace lost jobs, developers from the private prison company Cornell Corrections, and the state, believed the construction of a prison would fill this need. Built on the grounds of an old strip mine, Moshannon Valley Correctional Facility opened in 2006 and operated as a federal prison for fifteen years. Cornell was acquired by GEO Group in 2010, and in 2021, the prison temporarily closed only to reopen later that same year as an immigration detention center. ICE signed a 5-year agreement with Clearfield County. Clearfield County then signed a “management agreement” with the owner and operator of the prison, GEO Group. The prison was renamed the Moshannon Valley Processing Center (MVPC).

Buried away and completely hidden out of sight in a dense forest, more than 1,600 immigrants are imprisoned there on any given day in what is the largest immigration detention center in the northeast. Eighty-five percent of those detained in MVPC have no criminal record. In 2025, two immigrants died in ICE custody in MVPC, including 32-year-old Chaofeng Ge, found hanging by his neck in a shower stall on August 5.

In April, dozens of detainees launched a hunger strike to protest conditions. While anti-ICE and anti-detention advocates have sustained an active campaign to shut down the facility, many Philipsburg residents and local officials see things differently. An annual $200,000 administrative fee to Clearfield County for serving as the middleman in this pass-through of federal funds is one reason for keeping it open. The benefits of local tax revenue and jobs remain the other.

Moshannon Valley Processing Center

Philipsburg, Pennsylvania

“I have no problem with the facility,” a local resident told me at a Knights of Columbus pancake breakfast one Sunday morning. “When jobs are lost, that place provides something for people here. If they don’t put immigrants here, they’ll find somewhere else. Keep the jobs here. I don’t have an issue with it.”

Outside its major urban centers—Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, and the capital, Harrisburg—as well as the town of State College in Center County, home to Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania voters helped return Trump to office. Despite Democratic control of the governor’s office and House, rural counties have driven Pennsylvania to rank fifth nationally in 287(g) agreements, which allow local law enforcement to help carry out some ICE duties. Currently, 130 township and borough police departments, county and district attorney’s offices, constables and sheriffs statewide assist ICE. In 2026, nearly 5,500 immigrants have been arrested and detained in Pennsylvania. None of the state’s eight ICE detention facilities compare in size and function to MVPC. It incarcerates locals and out-of-state transfers in a system structured to sever and isolate immigrants from family, community, legal counsel, and due process. Moshannon has become a vital instrument in Trump’s mass deportation**—rather, mass detention—**machine.

An ICE bus filled with detained immigrants travels down GEO Drive from the Moshannon Valley Processing Center (MVPC). Light from MVPC in the distance illuminates storm clouds during a heavy rain.

It’s also a valuable piece of GEO Group’s “secure services” portfolio. Invoices obtained through open records requests show that from January 2025 to May of this year, GEO earned nearly $90 million in revenue from MVPC. As ICE retreats from using warehouses to expand detention capacity, it has spent more than $2.2 billion to directly purchase existing detention facilities from GEO Group’s competitor, CoreCivic. During a Q2 earnings call, GEO Group CEO George Zoley reported that the company was in an “active process” for the sale of several turn-key facilities. In late August, ICE published a solicitation to award contracts for “turn-key detention facilities” in four regions in the US, including central Pennsylvania. In early September, with the contract for MVPC set to expire at the end of the month, DHS requested a 6-month extension. Two weeks later, Clearfield County Commissioner approved the extension in a 2-1 vote.

Church service at Christian & Missionary Alliance Church in Philipsburg. July 19, 2026. “It should stay because of jobs,” a man named Larry tells me before the service. “Because they give $200,000 to Clearfield County for every year of that contract. And it’s not hurting anybody. That money goes to the county. Even if it helps pay for the annual fair, it’s still worth having people there. They got to have a jail anyway. They got to put the people somewhere.”

After a Sunday service at Bible Baptist Church of Philipsburg, July 19, 2026. “Politics fade into everything. This is not a local issue where people are against it. If they were being mistreated up there, I’d say, ‘This has to stop.’ That’s where I stand on moral issues. But heaven has its policies to get you in and our country has its policies to get in too. The law of the land must be obeyed. They’re in there for a reason. They didn’t take them because they didn’t do nothing.”

Activists like Timothy Smith, who chairs the Bill of Rights Defense Committee-Keystone State, anticipate based on these moves that DHS is either preparing to contract directly with GEO Group or outright purchase MVPC.

“This will give DHS and GEO more long-term stability and release both from the local risks and oversight that have strained the operation of MVPC. I truly think it will be an outright purchase,” Smith says. Both situations would enrich GEO Group shareholders while landing a financial blow to Clearfield County and Philipsburg. In both scenarios, immigrants and the pain, trauma, grief and loss experienced by their families—including US citizens—are both the raw materials and byproducts of profit-making maneuvers.

A mother sells everything and relocates to Maryland so she and her son can be closer to her husband. He’s languished in MVPC now for over 500 days. A father and his 18-year-old son, detained together during a routine check-in with ICE, put the pieces of their lives back together. ICE separated them. The father remained detained in Philadelphia. The teenager was transferred to MVPC. A woman in New York City struggles to find legal strategies to stop the deportation of her husband to eastern Europe. As we talk, he’s now in his eighth day in MVPC’s solitary confinement unit. A man sits alone in his studio apartment outside of Pittsburgh and confronts the “empty space” in his life. Faced with the reality of spending more months detained in Moshannon, his husband made the decision to self-deport.

Charlotte

Charlotte’s husband has been detained in Moshannon Valley Processing Center for over one and a half years. She was born in California; her husband is from Afghanistan and arrived in the US in 2016 on a valid student visa. They met in 2019, had a child together and got married in 2021. They lived in Illinois, where he received a REAL ID driver’s license and a work permit valid until 2029. In early 2025, while visiting family in Maryland, he was pulled over by a sheriff in West Virginia. No reason was provided for his arrest. He was transferred to ICE detention at Moshannon Valley Processing Center. To be closer to her husband in detention, Charlotte sold everything and moved to Maryland.

Charlotte talks about the impact of her husband’s detention on their son JJ.

“I’m a US citizen and I have a child. They want us to be left with nothing. So then do we give up? But at this point, we can’t give up. Because they won’t even let him self-deport. They won’t let him sign voluntary departure. They won’t let him do anything.”

At the age of two, Charlotte’s son was diagnosed with ADHD and autism. He was incredibly close to his father: “I wish daddy was home. We’re going to fight for daddy to get home. We’re not going to give up.”

Charlotte holds hundreds of pages of personal documents, including her marriage license, birth certificates, tax returns, and deeds to homes she and her husband have owned. She prepared the paperwork for an interview with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to support the change of her husband’s status. The interview date was postponed.

“They want us to be left with nothing, so we do give up.”

We cry everytime we leave a visit.

It’s still so sad.

We can’t even hug him.

_Charlotte talks about the pain of going to visit her husband in the detention center.

“We went for my child’s birthday. We went for Father’s Day and Mother’s Day. We sit there with him all day wishing we can hug him. But we can’t…We’re trying to get him out and we’re just at a loss. Like, what’s next? What are we going to do?…We just want something other than being locked up. We just want a hug. We just want to move on with answers. That’s all we’re asking, but we still have none of that.”
“Even though the person didn’t pass away, it kind of feels like that. Like he’s been taken away from us. The only thing that’s been helping us is our visits. It’s him being there and seeing him behind the plexiglass. That’s what’s kept us going. If we couldn’t do that, we would be completely lost.”

Elsewhere in the state, networks of trained volunteers accompany immigrants to ICE check-ins, observe courts for ICE waiting outside, and monitor neighborhoods for ICE activity. As Pennsylvania provides no state funding for the defense of immigrants facing detention and deportation, nonprofit legal service providers take on as many clients as possible yet find themselves stretched beyond capacity. Activists and community members attend local government meetings to stop involvement with ICE or end detention.

Kris

Kris, 28, met his partner in mid-2024. Originally from Brazil, his partner fled to the US and was permitted to stay in the country. Immigration officials scheduled his first hearing for 2028. The two fell in love and were legally married in Pennsylvania in December 2025. At a routine ICE check-in, he was detained and transferred to Moshannon Valley Processing Center. Faced with months in detention and deportation, he asked for “voluntary departure.” The judge approved the request, and he voluntarily deported himself to Brazil in the middle of June.

Kris, whose partner self-deported after being detained at a routine immigration check-in.

“We provided all of the evidence under the sun,” Kris told me. “Everything you could have with your spouse we had, but nothing was recognized. They only tried to twist it into a fraud. My husband had no criminal charges, nothing wrong, not even a parking ticket, no traffic violations. None of it mattered. I’ve been left with a silence that I wasn’t used to.

“My husband had no criminal charges, nothing wrong, not even a parking ticket, no traffic violations. None of it mattered.”

“Growing up, knowing I was gay before gay marriage was legalized and having that stigma placed upon people who were gay, I felt persecuted at that time. And now I’m encountering another form of persecution; I feel like I can’t marry who I want. I can’t live the life that I’m entitled to have with the person that I love. It’s so dehumanizing. It’s like he’s less-than. I feel persecuted for loving an immigrant and marrying an immigrant. ‘Oh, you married an immigrant? This is what you deserve.’”

Eastern Europe

This woman’s husband has been detained in Moshannon Valley Processing Center for five months. She’s a US citizen. Her husband was born in Eastern Europe and settled in the United States in 2023. He received a work permit, had been through USCIS biometric processing, and was issued an ID. In early 2026, while working as a delivery driver in Nassau County, he was pulled over for a broken headlight. He was arrested and then released. When released, ICE arrested and placed him in detention. He found out his lawyer had never filed his asylum paperwork with the courts. He had no criminal record.

Asking to remain anonymous, this woman sits in her apartment in New York.

“Initially he was hopeful he would get out. Then he started getting angry, especially when they put him in solitary confinement. He couldn’t understand what was happening. They put him on major depression medication, but he started losing his emotions. I wasn’t sure if he was at risk of suicide, because I knew how he was changing. It’s like watching somebody die in front of you for a prolonged period of time.”
“I think for the majority of the detained, there’s at least two people on the outside who are fighting for them, struggling. There’s a lot of people who are unseen. You can count the number of detained individuals in ICE facilities, but you can’t really count the number of people affected.
After we met, her husband was transferred to detention centers in Louisiana and Texas. In late July he was deported on a series of flights to his country of birth.”

Father and Son Detained

At the age of fourteen, this young man and his family arrived at the US border, immediately applied for asylum, and followed all US immigration and asylum policies and procedures. In early 2026, just after his eighteenth birthday, ICE asked him and his father to appear early for their immigration-check in. When they arrived, ICE detained both of them “due to available bed space.” Within days, ICE separated the two. The young man was transferred to Moshannon Valley Processing Center.

After two months in detention in Moshannon and weeks of lawyers tirelessly working and battling his case through the immigration court system, an immigration judge evaluated the actual merits of his asylum claim, and granted him asylum. As a result, he was immediately released. The father, 35, and his son, 18, sit together in their home.

“You could never be calm in there.”

“I didn’t think they could arrest me for just being there,” he said of the ICE appointment. “The second day I was in Moshannon, I got a bloody nose—and I would get bloody noses often. I think it was the stress, my fear, or worrying about what was going to happen. I’d never done anything wrong and I felt undignified. There were a lot of older adults and I didn’t know any of them, so I was very scared because I was the youngest person there. There was a lot of stress and a lot of fighting. There were people who had been in there for years and others who were there for one or two days and then deported. You could never be calm in there.”

John Streno, Mayor

“It’s always been important to the community. It’s never been a big problem. It’s only been a positive for us in this town,” Mayor John Streno said to me as we sat on the front porch of his home in Philipsburg.

John Streno has been the mayor of Philipsburg for over twenty years. Prior to retiring, he spent ten years as a correctional officer for GEO at Moshannon, before it was an immigration detention facility.

When describing Moshannon Valley Processing Center as an ICE facility, the mayor said, “To me, in a way, it’s no different than a cemetery. It’s a place where people come and end up and you never see them again. They come to the prison, they end up there, and then they go away.”

Bobbi Erickson, co-founder of the advocacy group Indivisible: Mayday, addresses county commissioners at a Clearfield County Commissioners Meeting on July 14, 2026.

The state of Pennsylvania does not provide any sustained funding to Legal service providers. Demand for Defender Association of Philadelphia services has rise three times more than the capacity.

Community members provide comments on why the current 5-year contract between the county and GEO should not be renewed: “I come here today with a broken heart. My plan for today was to have somebody from Moshannon call and give his testimony and his words to you. Last night he told me he was too scared to do so, that he was afraid his case would be impacted, that he would be taken away from his family and he would lose his home. He was scared to speak about his experiences. You don’t hear the stories inside this facility because it’s run-on fear. People inside ask me, ‘Why am I here?’ The only thing I can ever tell them is, for profit, and because the men in charge won’t listen to their stories.”

The state of Pennsylvania does not provide any sustained funding to legal service providers. The state ranks fourth in the number of habeas corpus petitions filed by immigrants since the beginning of Trump’s second term. Since December of 2025, habeas petitions filed by the Defender Association of Philadelphia have resulted in the release of 303 people—but demand for their services is three times more than they have the capacity to provide.

“In January 2025, they just started detaining everyone for non-criminal reasons. Regular asylum seekers living their lives, contributing to their community, not doing anything wrong,” Lilah Thompson, chief of immigration for the community unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, said to me. “Detention numbers just shot up. There are all these ways in which ICE began ramping up detention, stripping people of rights and status or pending status—detaining people that have no business being in detention, because nothing had changed in their situation to warrant it. ICE is just churning bodies into the detention system.”

Legal Support

“My client is a gentleman who is married to a US citizen. He was on his pathway to citizenship. He was literally one month away from getting his green card when he was detained by ICE, completely unjustly, no warrant whatsoever. He was moved to Moshannon, but thankfully we got him moved back to the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia. I was prepared to not really lose this case, but try to encourage my client to stay in detention for the six or eight months needed to wait out his appeal. I kind of sent this lawsuit against the court as a Hail Mary, just to show that we did everything we could do. And the fact that not only did we get the decision we wanted, but also got it pretty quickly to me, it’s a blessing and a miracle.”

Standing outside the ICE office in downtown Philadelphia, immigration attorney Albert Robles waits for a client to be released from the FDC Philadelphia immigration detention center.

The Witnesses

Moments before the photo above was taken, in Evans City in Butler County north of Pittsburgh, local police and ICE pulled over the driver for a broken taillight. He was a 23-year-old man from Ecuador who worked laying carpets; he showed his ID but was arrested and detained by ICE. “I told them he has a work permit but he didn’t have it on him,” said his co-worker, who was sitting in the passenger seat when the arrest happened. “They arrested him anyway.”

A reflection of Jenny, a volunteer for the organization Frontline Dignity, in the window of a work van.

Official Legal Observers from Frontline Dignity stand outside the Domestic Violence court in downtown Pittsburgh. “We’ve witnessed ICE make detentions inside the courthouse and outside when people are on their way in. That’s why we stage ourselves outside, because people wouldn’t even have a chance to get in.”

Jenny patrols areas of Cranberry Township for potential ICE activity. Any ICE sightings or incidents of ICE arrests are witnessed and reported to a larger network of monitors. In July 2026, Frontline Dignity documented 55 confirmed ICE incidents in their area and 67 known detentions.

“It’s devastating what’s been going on in Pittsburgh for the last year and a half,” Jenny says. “And it feels so incredibly heavy and dark, and it feels like everything escalated so quickly. Showing up and making sure we’re there to observe and help seems like the only hopeful thing to do at this point, to try to help everybody through what’s going on. It’s sad and it’s devastating.”

In Philipsburg, organizers and activists canvas the town, educate residents and ask for their support and signatures on a petition to push the three county commissioners to not renew the management agreement with GEO Group.

“I think they should ship all of them motherfuckers back to wherever they came from and then all of you Democrats should go and follow them,” a man says to one canvasser.

“That’s very American of you,” the canvasser politely replies.

To me, in a way, it’s no different than a cemetary.

It’s a place where people come and end up

and you never see them again.

A bus transfers immigrants detained by ICE from Moshannon Valley Processing Center.

It’s Saturday, July 11. Several thousand people sit in folding chairs along Presqueisle Street in downtown Philipsburg. They wait for the 2026 Heritage Days Festival parade to start. The theme this year is “Let Freedom Ring.” I walk the length of Presqueisle Street, randomly asking people for their feelings about detaining immigrants at Moshannon. One woman says she has friends who were recently hired there and now make $30 an hour.

“I have no problem with those illegals being put up there,” her husband adds.

Another man says jobs and money are the only things that matter, while another says, “Those people detained there bring money to the town.”

A woman talks with me in a whisper away from her family.

Parade for the Philipsburg Heritage Days, a 3-day festival that runs the week after the 4th of July. The theme of the 2026 festival was ‘Let Freedom Ring’.

People sit in front of the Philips Hotel for the Philipsburg Heritage Days Parade.

“To treat people like they are all criminals and animals, that’s where I have to draw the line. It’s morally wrong,” she says.

“All the years I’ve lived in this town, I’ve never heard too much about that facility until ICE took it over. Until people from ICE went in there,” a woman shared with me as she sat with family on their porch on Presqueisle Street. “For a long time I didn’t realize it was an ICE facility. And I didn’t even know what the difference was. I don’t really agree with the whole way the immigrant thing’s being handled. I think they’re taking people they don’t need to take. They’re not taking the worst of the worst, you know? They’re taking anybody. But here and the way I feel, we’re the minority.”

“They’re not taking the worst of the worst, you know? They’re taking anybody.”

On this same Saturday, on Route 322 at the opposite end of Philipsburg, volunteers set up a canopy and table on a corner of a small road that leads up to Moshannon Vallery Processing Center. They provide information and resources to families who have driven hours to visit loved ones. Families have come from New York, New Jersey, Maryland and other parts of Pennsylvania. “We have no idea what’s going to happen to him,” a man says of his son-in-law. “It’s been so painful on his mother.” He and the young man’s mother drove four hours from New York to visit him.

Visiting Moshannon

For entry, GEO requires visitors to adhere to strict dress code rules. That day, two parents drove four hours from New York to visit their son who had already been detained for three months. Unaware GEO does not permit entrance to female visitors with metal supports in their bras, the mother used the tent to change into a new bra, part of a collection of free clothing available to visitors.

On Saturday, July 11, volunteers set up a changing tent on the corner of the road leading to Moshannon Valley Processing Center.

This man, a US citizen, drove four hours from Maryland to visit his brother who has been detained in MVPC for over a month. His brother has lived in the US for 26 years. GEO Group employees denied his visitation, citing his open-toed shoes, which they said did not adhere to dress code rules. He drove to a nearby Dollar General and bought a pair of sneakers, then returned.

“He was pulled over while driving home from work, arrested and put here. He’s never done anything wrong.,” he said. “It’s my third visit. What’s happening is crazy. It’s like they took a plate of spaghetti and threw it against the wall to see what sticks. That’s what happened to my brother.”

Behind them and their SUV parked on the corner, a large roadside billboard funded by several activist groups provides a backdrop to the efforts of the volunteers and the stories of the five other families that stop to ask questions. The billboard compares the costs to detain one immigrant in Moshannon Valley Processing Center for a year versus the cost to educate one child in Philipsburg, and asks who benefits from the detentions. It’s not only a parting message to everyone as they leave Philipsburg on 322, but also a harsh reminder of the yard sign, and Lady Liberty’s somber greeting to visitors, a few miles back.

A tent set up by volunteers to provide information and assistance to people visiting family members detained in MVPC on July 11, 2026, and an anti-ICE billboard at the road that leads to MVPC off US Route 322 as one exits Philipsburg. The billboard is funded by Invisible: Mayday, the Shut Down Detention Campaign and Pittsburgh Women for Democracy,.

_Greg Constantine produced this work, the third in a series documenting immigration detention and its wider impact in Oklahoma, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, as part of the 2026 Bertha Challenge Fellowship.

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Trump Aims to Open Nearly All National Forest Trails to Dirt Bikes and ATVs

This story, originally published by Grist in collaboration with Montana Free Press/Mountain Journal as part of the Report for America Local News Initiative, is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There are many ways to enjoy the outdoors, but thrill-seekers visiting the nation’s national forests often turn to motorized recreation. They might ride ATVs along dirt trails, snowmobile down winding tracks, or go off-roading in 4x4s. The United States Forest Service’s approach to all such forms of recreation on trails can be summed up in four words: closed unless designated open.

Unless a trail is explicitly designated as open to off-highway vehicles, such as side-by-sides and dirt bikes, it can only be used for nonmotorized recreation. Most national forests have travel management plans that outline when a trail is open for nonmotorized use like mountain biking, horseback riding, or hiking, and when it’s open to off-highway vehicles. These plans tend to be exhaustive and list which types of motorized or nonmotorized access are allowed on every trail, two-track, and road. The strict guidelines are a result of a Forest Service policy called the travel management rule.

But the Trump administration wants to turn the current rule on its head. In late August, the Forest Service announced its plan to revise the rule so that trails are open unless designated closed. It would mean forest managers would be expected to prioritize motorized access on service roads, trails, and even backcountry airfields.

The US Department of Agriculture, of which the Forest Service is a part, has said that the move will increase recreation access and “simplify regulatory requirements.” The change is being opposed by sportsmen, backcountry horsemen, conservation organizations, and nonmotorized recreation groups. They say opening up all Forest Service trails to motorized access could have devastating consequences for the ecosystems and wildlife that rely on these lands. Healthy, intact forest ecosystems are also critical for sequestering carbon in a warming world.

“I’m totally OK with appropriate machine use in the forest. But there are just places where the ecosystem is too sensitive.”

Hillary Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, a public lands advocacy organization, said everyone who uses forest lands, from recreationists and ranchers with grazing leases to those in the timber industry, relies on the clarity provided by travel management plans. The Forest Service’s formal announcement to revise the rule is “vague,” “somewhat poorly written,” and “difficult to follow,” Eisen said. Without clear guidelines in place, she fears motorized users could end up anywhere on the landscape.

“Any sort of feature that you could interpret to be a trail or a road would be open to every type of use, unless closed,” she said. “That could mean if you can get your side-by-side on there, have at it.”

Chris Edgington, a watershed project manager with Montana Trout Unlimited, witnessed firsthand the environmental damage that can happen from off-highway vehicle use on the Middle Fork of the Judith River, which runs through the Little Belt Mountains of central Montana.

Prior to 2023, there were more than 80 entrances and 27 shallow spots along a 6-mile stretch of the river, where various types of vehicles, including cars and side-by-sides, crossed. As these vehicles cut across, they caused erosion and an influx of sediment that coats rocks along the riverbed, suppressing insect life and the ability for fish to successfully spawn. By 2020, the sediment runoff had gotten so bad it was choking out nearly all the fish, Edgington said.

“The fish population was estimated to be less than 10 percent of what we’d expect of a river that size and character,” Edgington said. “The river had become over-widened and shallow, creating unusual riffles, and the river couldn’t manage its sediment load.”

So Edgington brought together a diverse coalition of groups, including the off-highway vehicle community and the Great Falls Trail Bike Riders Association, environmental groups, and federal and local government agencies to address the issue. They rebuilt 1,000 feet of riverbank, reduced the number of crossings by 80 percent, and built a new section of the off-highway vehicle and jeep trail so the area could still be used for recreation, without harming the river. It’s been a huge success, Edgington says, and the work is already paying off.

“Fish numbers are up,” he explained. “The work we did to remove the sediment is restoring water quality and the fish population in that incredible backcountry setting.”

The vehicles crossing the river weren’t breaking any rules; the Forest Service had designated the area open for motorized recreation, but the number of stream crossings degraded the health of the river and the threatened species that lived there, including the cutthroat trout. “I’m totally OK with appropriate machine use in the forest,” Edgington said. “But there are just places where the ecosystem is too sensitive to use this equipment.”

The travel management plan, written by the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, recognized this impact to the river and the need to reroute the road out of the river corridor. Parts of the Middle Fork are protected as a Wilderness Study Area and an Inventoried Roadless Area. Edgington said that because of those protections and the travel management plan, it was worth investing in this restoration; he knew the conservation work would last.

He said a full repeal of the travel management rule would create more problems than it intends to solve. A change of this magnitude, he said, could be a devastating blow to river health and restoration projects like the Middle Fork Judith.

“Whether that’s off-highway vehicles in the river or motorcycles on horse trails, it’s going to create a lot of conflict and confusion and animosity between different user groups.”

“This is public land, and people with disabilities, the elderly, need some sort of transportation to get out there.”

The process to change a federal rule is a long one. The Forest Service is accepting public comments on the plan to revise the rule, which is the first step in the process, through September 23.

These proposed revisions to travel management aren’t occurring in a vacuum. They are one of several widespread policy changes that could take effect across the 193 million acres of land the Forest Service manages, including more than 19 million acres in Montana alone. Last month, just before the travel management revision, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the USDA was moving forward with rescinding the roadless rule, a policy that prevents road building and commercial logging on 45 million acres of Forest Service land. The Forest Service and other scientists have conducted extensive research showing how roads fragment habitat, disturb wildlife, introduce noxious weeds, and increase human-caused wildfires. In the first round of public comment, 99 percent of commenters opposed removing roadless protections.

The short public comment periods have received public backlash. On September 11, the Forest Service announced it was adding 15 days to the comment period for the roadless rule; it is now open until October 6. In a statement about the decision, the agency wrote the extension was “to provide interested persons additional time to review the proposed rule and supporting materials.”

Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, said the roadless rule and travel management rule help uphold the purpose of public lands.

“The intent in Congress is that they support current generations,” she said. “That they are also available for future generations, that’s the sustained yield, conservation piece of it. And the regulations we have that connect to public lands all tie in to that in one way or another.”

The roadless rule, she said, ensures intact habitat remains for clean water and wildlife, but the travel management rule affects far more people every time they visit a national forest.

“Anytime you go anywhere on national forest land outside of wilderness, the travel management rule is part of your experience,” she said. “And your experience is not an accident.”

“This administration does not appear to value what our public-land system is rooted in.”

Supporters of these changes, like Kerry White, who runs the Bozeman-based nonprofit Citizens for Balanced Use, say making trails open unless designated closed would create more opportunities for recreation. Citizens for Balanced Use is an organization that advocates for motorized access on public lands.

“Without roads and trails, people can’t get out in the woods,” said White, who represented a section of Bozeman in the state legislature from 2013 to 2021. This is public land, and people with disabilities, the elderly, need some sort of transportation to get out there.”

White said these new changes will allow for better access and clarity for visitors on ATVs, e-bikes, and other motorized vehicles. “By making everything open unless posted closed,” he said, “it puts a bit more onus on the Forest Service to do due diligence and, if a trail is closed, make sure those signs are posted and maintained and kept in place.”

Karla Gagby, who can’t hike because of a lung injury, rides through the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in southwestern Montana on July 4.Gary Friedman

White also believes these changes won’t have negative environmental impacts. “People are freaking out [that] we’ll have strip malls and open-pit mining in these areas, and that’s simply not the case,” he said. “There’s a lot of regulation that has to be done to do any kind of projects in these areas.”

But Eisen with Wild Montana said these changes are occurring alongside the Trump administration’s rollback of a myriad of the nation’s bedrock environmental protections, including changes to the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

“This administration does not appear to value what our public-land system is rooted in,” she said. “It’s more about, ‘How can I make a quick buck off of this for my benefit?’ I think it gets back into that interest in privatizing.”

To Edgington, these changes are a concerning pile-on. “Many of these rules were created with a thoughtful balance of forest use,” he said. “And there are probably areas where we could improve these rules, but a full repeal would be devastating to fish and wildlife resources beyond our comprehension.”

He spent years overseeing restoration work and conservation for some of Montana’s most beloved trout fisheries. “Cold, clean water is a finite resource,” he said, “and we need to do whatever we can to protect it.”

While Edgington is proud of the work he and partners did to restore the Middle Fork of the Judith River, he doesn’t know how work like that happens without policies like the roadless and travel management rules.

“This project was funded by three federal sources,” Edgington said. “If protections are possibly lifted and those investments are diminished? It is pretty counterintuitive to the responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”

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Nvidia Thinks It Can Stop Rogue AI—Without All That Government Oversight

On Monday, Nvidia, the multinational tech company—which has become one of the most valuable companies in the world in significant part thanks to its role in developing chips for AI processing and model training—announced the launch of a new safety platform that will monitor and contain AI agents, amid recent reports of “rogue AI” incidents like OpenAI’s Hugging Face hacking fiasco.

As my colleagues and I have previously reported, accounts of autonomous hacks by AI models belonging to OpenAI and its rivals have exacerbated concerns about the minimally regulated AI sector, even as leading figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argue that AI oversight is an “engineering problem” that the industry can largely handle without government involvement—echoing statements by President Trump, who has lashed out at demands to legislate guardrails around what he now calls “superintelligence.”

Nvidia says its Open Agent Safety Platform, which it launched Monday with a number of leading tech and AI firms, can quarantine agents that attempt to escape containment within “milliseconds.” Among company’s collaborators on some of its new safety measures are Microsoft, Palantir, SpaceXAI, JPMorganChase, and Hugging Face—the online forum where users can share and build AI systems that was the subject of the hacking incident involving OpenAI.

Butin the context of Huang’s remarks, the company’s proposals fordeveloping safe AI are in effect being presented as an alternative to regulatory action. The idea that AI safety isn’t a problem for state agencies, or that the recent spate of rogue AI incidents don’t call for swift political action,amount to an argument that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic can police themselves. It’s often AI firms’ own conduct, and the words and actions of their leaders, that have made self-regulation a hard sell—especially as public opinion sours towards the technology’s sprawling infrastructure demands and footprint in daily life.

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones_, has sued OpenAI for_ copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.

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Prosecutors Are Revisiting Allegations of Gang Rape at Cornell

After a week of intensifying public pressure and reporting from Cornell’s independent daily newspaper, prosecutors in New York have reopened a criminal investigation into the alleged 2024 gang rape of a former student at the campus’s Chi Phi fraternity house.

The student, identified as Jane Doe, filed a civil complaint earlier this month accusing Cornell of failing to protect her and choosing instead to level minimal punishment against the seven fraternity members who allegedly “plied [her] with alcohol and drugs to the point of intoxication,” before raping her. Those actions, the complaint alleged, included temporary suspensions and opportunities for some of the fraternity members to mitigate those suspensions by submitting essays.

“We want to reexamine whether there’s additional evidence that we were not aware of in November of 2024,” Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten told ABC News, “that exists now that would change our assessment of the case and would result in the grand jury finding that there was criminal conduct.”

The complaint also included an image from a Snapchat text thread wherein one of the men appeared to encourage others to take advantage of the “free pussy” upstairs, referring to Doe. An attorney for one of the defendants denied the allegations. Speaking through the same attorney, the defendant claimed that he had nothing more than “thoughtlessly” engage in a text thread.

“Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us.”

Cornell on Monday said that it welcomed the new investigation but vehemently defended the school’s handling of the case.

“Any suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false,” a university relations official wrote in a statement. “A continuation of the false narrative that there were minimal consequences in this case is irresponsible, will make survivors feel less safe and supported, and will perpetuate the underreporting of sexual assault.”

In a searing op-ed published last week, editors of the Cornell Daily Sun took the university to task for failing to protect its students, while condemning administrators for creating an academic environment where “enough ambiguity, enough he-said-she-said, enough familial connections, enough money will allow you to get off scot-free.”

“We refuse for this victim to be reduced to just another story,” the op-ed read, adding that “Cornell has failed [Doe]. Cornell has failed us.”

“We removed this label upon further review after we determined that it qualified for a newsworthy allowance,” a Meta spokesperson confirmed. “The post is now fully visible for adults.”

Details from the civil complaint have since ricocheted across social media and ignited intense public outrage.

“After reading about the young woman who was gang raped at her college by her friend and school peers, I’m feeling uneasy and sick and anxious,” the actor Florence Pugh wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday. “I’m processing quietly and watching everything and everyone and every man.”

Soon after, Pugh accused Meta of suppressing her post.

“A label was initially applied to the post, warning people that the content may be sensitive before they click through,” Meta confirmed to Mother Jones. “We removed this label upon further review after we determined that it qualified for a newsworthy allowance. The post is now fully visible for adults.”

On the same day that the Tompkins County district attorney announced it was revisiting the investigation, the Trump administration finalized its plan to repeal Title IX, the Biden-era rule that mandated a formal process for schools to respond to sexual misconduct claims.

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Trump’s Taxpayer-Funded Ads Are Receiving Bipartisan Criticism

President Donald Trump has become the subject of bipartisan pushback after another taxpayer-funded television ad aired during at least two Sunday NFL games.

“We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country,” Trump says in the ad. “We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

“Don’t worry, using taxpayer dollars to run ominous campaign ads of the President has been done before and is completely legal… in banana republics,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) posted on X on Sunday night in reaction to the latest ad.

Trump is now using taxpayer money to run his 2024 campaign ad, but changes his campaign logo at the end to “PAID FOR BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT”

— Headquarters (@headquartersnews.bsky.social) 2026-09-28T14:45:17.182Z

The ad is nearly identical to one Trump posted on Truth Social in January 2024, which included Trump’s presidential campaign logo. In place of the logo is now the message: “Paid for by the US government.” The audio of both ads strongly resembles part of a campaign speech he delivered in Claremont, New Hampshire, in November 2023, where he used autocratic language, referring to himself as “a very proud election denier.”

“It’s not like they need a GoFundMe page to have the dollars to do that sort of ad and they could do it,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said about the first ad that aired on Wednesday. “But using taxpayer dollars, it feels like [the former far-right prime minister of Hungary] Viktor Orbán.”

Both Republican lawmakers have a history of criticizing Trump.

On Thursday, congressional Democrats on appropriations committees wrote a letter to White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles, calling the first ad “the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea.”

“We write to demand that you immediately take this ad off the air and discipline the Federal employees who knowingly violated Federal law in working on and paying for this advertisement,” they continued, asserting the ad violated anti-propaganda law. “In addition, we demand a full account and breakdown of all Federal funds used to create and air this ad.”

On Friday, the White House called the ads “public service announcements” that are “very clearly not campaign ads” as Trump isn’t on the ballot and the president does not request any action. The White House pointed to other administrations who have run public service announcements to “explain policy and make the case for the nation’s direction,” including George W. Bush’s anti-drug ads that played during the Super Bowl and Barack Obama’s ads on the Affordable Care Act.

But as my colleague Sophie Hurwitz noted on Friday, “Trump’s supposed PSA says and does very little beyond extolling Trump. Usually, a public service announcement announces something. This one announces pure right-wing vibes.”

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Rest Assured: AI Companies Say They’re Investigating Tens of Thousands of Rogue Bot Incidents

OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly investigating tens of thousands of incidents where their advanced models bypassed monitors and guardrails, behavior that the startups facilitate for internal safety testing.

According to a Saturday Axios report, sources said that most of the results of these tests are not public and are not known to have caused tangible harm.

In recent weeks, OpenAI has disclosed six instances of “unexpected or concerning behavior” where its models—without permission—covered up mistakes, made up data, and transferred files onto the open internet. In the same September 16 announcement, the startup said it would now report and investigate “misalignment,” meaning when the actions of AI systems go against human intentions. OpenAI shared on Friday that its autonomous AI agents interacted with several US government websites—including two operated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and data from the Census Bureau—in unanticipated ways. The startup said it did not consider any of the actions breaches.

These disclosures fall in line with previous announcements by frontier AI labs that their technology engaged with “misalignment,” and they should therefore slow down and be more careful and all the cries by current and former researchers in the industry that AI could lead to human extinction by 2030.

What OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs Sam Altman and Dario Amodei don’t mention is that the industry has long aligned with the Trump administration and its campaign to expand AI development. OpenAI has a military contract with the Defense Department worth up to $200 million. How AI is involved is unclear—the Intercept reported earlier this month that the Pentagon asked OpenAI to provide a custom AI tool with “minimal refusal rates.” Google, SpaceX, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle also have deals with the Defense Department.

While the Pentagon canceled its military contract with Anthropic over the startup’s concern about how its tools may be used for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, the White House has promoted Anthropic’s $50 billion investment in data center construction and the two reportedly have a much improved relationship as of September.

The relationship between the AI industry and Trump remains as the administration cut the Cyber Safety Review Board in January 2025, a body that investigates major cybersecurity threats, and has proposed further cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which secures infrastructure against cyber and physical threats. Trump previously eliminated one-third of CISA’s workforce due in significant part to its election security work.

As Miranda Bogen, the founding director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s AI Governance Lab, told me in July, actually addressing the “deeply insufficient” system to protect the public from AI threats involves reducing the incentives of AI companies to continuously develop within a framework of profit and geopolitical competition. Without that, we are relying on AI to regulate itself.

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