Mother Jones

Democratic lawmakers are demanding Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer preserve the Women’s Bureau following recent reporting from Mother Jones that the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate the 105-year-old, congressionally mandated office charged with supporting women in the workforce.

On Monday afternoon, 34 members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus sent Chavez-DeRemer a letter demanding the labor secretary “immediately restore the Women’s Bureau to its full function and funding, fulfill the terminated grants, and abandon all efforts to eliminate the Bureau.” The letter cites Mother Jones’ story from earlier this month, which was the first to report that both the White House’s and Department of Labor’s (DOL) budget requests to Congress propose eliminating the Women’s Bureau.

It also cites a Mother Jones story from last month that was one of the first to report that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) killed more than two dozen grants administered by the bureau, many of which were congressionally mandated and aimed to increase women’s representation in trades like construction, manufacturing, and information technology.

“The proposed elimination of the Women’s Bureau and termination of grants that support women in the workforce is a total betrayal of women across the country,” the letter states. The letter is the second the Democratic Women’s Caucus has sent Chavez-DeRemer expressing concerns over the gutting of the Women’s Bureau: They previously wrote to her in April urging her “to preserve current staffing and strengthen the Bureau’s capacity to fulfill its mandate, as Congress intended”—but she never responded, according to several lawmakers involved. (Spokespeople for the Labor Department did not respond to questions from Mother Jones on Monday.)

The Trump administration has already managed to undermine the bureau’s work without eliminating the office entirely. Nine current and former Labor Department staffers previously told me that the bureau has lost about half of its approximately 50-person staff through a combination of buyouts and resignations, and that their work has essentially been at a standstill since Trump resumed office.

In the past, the bureau’s critical work has included regularly researching women’s workforce participation by county, the gender wage gap by race and occupation, and child care prices nationwide; briefing federal lawmakers to help inform policies to support women workers. The bureau’s work helped pass laws, including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The office also hosted in-person training sessions nationwide to help workers learn their rights, and partneredwith other federal agencies to implement programs to support women’s wellbeing and equity at work.

Despite all this, in the budget brief calling for its elimination, the Labor Departmentdismissed the Women’s Bureau as “an ineffective policy office that is a relic of the past.” The current and former DOL staffers previously told me they seethe move as reflective of the Trump administration’s ambitions to drive women out of the workforce and back into their homes to raise children. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), one of the lead authors of the letter, sees the administration’s attack on the bureau as “turning back the clock in ways that are really pretty outrageous,” she told me by phone on Monday. The Women’s Bureau, she added, is “just as important [now] as it ever was.”

Data supports this. The gender wage gap widened for the first time in 20 years following the pandemic, and women’s labor force participation rate has decreased since peaking in the 1990s. Citing these facts, the letter states that the DOL characterization of the bureau as “‘a relic of the past’ is not only incorrect, it is completely ignorant to what the data shows and the struggles of working women everywhere.”

Bonamici, who has advocated for expanding access and affordability to child care, said she has relied on the bureau’s database of prices of childcare by county, which the DOL has said is the most comprehensive database of its kind. “When we have this information, it helps us pass policies,” she said.

Bonamici also pointed to the important work of the Oregon Tradeswomen, a nonprofit organization that has relied on the now-canceled Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grants that the bureau administered to enter the trades. “You can see women getting good jobs to turn their lives around,” she said. “That, to me, is a great use of federal resources.”

Both Bonamici and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), another lead author of the letter, said they want to see their Republican colleagues step up to oppose the efforts to eliminate the bureau. “We need our Republican colleagues to be forceful with the constitutional responsibility that we have to be the lawmakers and to be the overseers,” Houlahan said, adding that she is “enormously disappointed” in her GOP colleagues. “They’re allowing the president to run roughshod over the country.”

But asking them to reverse course to defend the Women’s Bureau could be a tall order. House Republicans unsuccessfully tried to eliminate it for the first time in at least a decade back in 2023. Project 2025, which has proven to be aninstruction manual for how the Trump administration is running the government, alleged the bureau “tends towards a politicized research and engagement agenda that puts predetermined conclusions ahead of empirical study” and said it should “rededicate its research budget towards open inquiry, especially to dissentangle the influences on women’s workforce participation and to understand the true causes of earnings gaps between men and women.”

The DOL admits in its budget brief that department officials aim to work with Congress to repeal the statutes mandating the existence of the Women’s Bureau as well as the WANTO grant program that was already canceled. The Democratic lawmakers say that would be their best shot at fighting to preserve the office, and recruiting their GOP colleagues to join in.

“If they bring a bill forward to eliminate the Women’s Bureau,” Bonamici said, “we will fight it with everything we have.”

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On Saturday, a gunman impersonating a police officer fatally shot Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband at their home, and wounded state Sen. Mark Hortman and his wife at their home. Police finally apprehended the suspected shooter, Vance Boelter, Sunday night after “the largest manhunt in state history,” Brooklyn Park police Chief Mark Bruley said at a press conference that night.

Among the details about the suspect beginning to emerge is that he reportedly attended a bible college that is a stronghold of the New Apostolic Reformation, the charismatic movement that teaches that Christians are called to take over the US government. Founded in 1970, Christ for the Nations Institute, located in Dallas, Texas, boasts having graduated more than 40,000 students from over 170 nations. It is also the alma mater of several leaders of the NAR movement, including at least one who was involved in the lead-up to the Capitol insurrection on January 6.

One notable alumnus of Christ for the Nations is Dutch Sheets, a South Carolina-based preacher and YouTuber who was instrumental in spreading the narrative that the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. As I wrote last year:

Shortly after Trump’s defeat, Sheets became an influential figure in the “Stop the Steal” campaign, leading rallies across the country. He warned that the results of the presidential election were “going to be overturned and President Trump is going to be put back in office for four years.”

And then:

Eight days before the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, a group of apostles held a strategy meeting with Trump and his advisers. In a January 1 blog post, Sheets shared a dream from a prophet named Gina Gholston, in which she described “moving toward the Capitol, not at a full gallop, but at a steady, determined, fast trot. As we began, written in white letters on the ground in front of us were the words, ‘DON’T STOP.’” A year after the insurrection, Sheets recounted a dream in which Trump had told him that he would be a “political martyr” because, he had said, loosely quoting the Bible, “‘God has put the tools in me to tear down, root up, and confront the system.’”

Another “Stop the Steal” leader, Cindy Jacobs, was honored by Christ for the Nations earlier this year. Jacobs, a faith adviser to President Trump, participated in the “Jericho March” of December 2020, when election protesters marched “around the US Capitol, Supreme Court, and Department of Justice seven times praying for the walls of corruption and election fraud to fall down, just as Joshua and the Israelites walked around the walls of corrupt Jericho,” according to a description by the event’s organizers.

Texas pastor and podcaster Joel Webbon, who is part of the Christian nationalist TheoBro movement, has also said he attended Christ for the Nations (though he has since denounced it as “straight up heretical”). Webbon is a particularly outspoken member of the TheoBros movement, as I wrote in another piece last year:

At a recent conference, he registered dismay over immigrants in his community. “It’s like full, straight-up Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool, that my daughter is asking [about and] I’m trying to explain.”

In August, he remarked on his show that “a lot of people are gonna be surprised” when “you’re spending eternity worshipping Christ next to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Jonathan Edwards, and, you know, George Whitefield and Martin Luther King Jr.’s in hell.”

Beyond Boelter, 57, having said he attended Christ for the Nations Institute, little is known about his religious faith. The college did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.

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

Army Sgt. Ayssac Correa had just started his day at the 103rd Quartermaster Company outside of Houston on the morning of March 13 when he got a phone call from his sister-in-law.

She worked at the same company as Correa’s wife and had just pulled into the parking lot to see three ICE agents handcuffing her.

“They’re taking Shirly away!” she told him.

This month, as protesters clash with law enforcement amid immigration raids in Los Angeles, President Donald Trump has ordered 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 active-duty Marines to respond. The move injected the military into the highly contentious debate over immigration. For the tens of thousands of service members whose spouses or parents are undocumented, the issue was already personal, pitting service against citizenship.

In his first week in office, President Trump signed multiple executive orders aimed at reshaping the country’s immigration policy, calling border crossings in recent years an “invasion” and arguing that many undocumented migrants have committed “vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans.”

National Guard soldiers deployed this month to Los Angeles guard ICE agents during an immigration enforcement operation.US Immigration and Customs Enforcement

But Correa and his wife weren’t too worried. After they got married in 2022, the couple had filed paperwork to start Shirly Guardado on the path to citizenship, and Correa assumed that, as an active-duty soldier, his family wouldn’t be impacted.

“Me being in the military—I felt bad that it was happening, because I’m also married to somebody who’s going through the [immigration] process. But I was like, ‘Oh, there’s no way this is going to happen to us,’” he said.

That misconception is common, immigration attorneys and advocates told The War Horse. But in reality, there is no guaranteed path to citizenship for undocumented military family members—and no guaranteed protections against deportation.

“I find it unconscionable that someone could step up to serve, voluntarily, in our military and be willing to sacrifice their life for our country only to have their families torn apart.”

There are no reliable statistics on how many service members marry citizens of other countries, but it’s not uncommon, says Margaret Stock, a leading expert on immigration law and the military. The progressive group Fwd.us has estimated that up to80,000undocumented spouses or parents ofmilitary members are living in the U.S.

“You can imagine what happens when you’re deployed in more than 120 countries around the world,” Stock said.

Service members are often hesitant to speak out about their family members’ immigration status.

“It’s taboo,” says Marino Branes, an immigration attorney and former Marine who first came to the U.S. from Peru without documentation. “It’s not like you’re announcing it to the world.”

But he and other immigration attorneys told The War Horse they are working with active-duty clients who are scrambling to get their spouses or parents paperwork as immigration enforcement actions ramp up, and it becomes clear that military families are not immune.

In April, ICE arrested the Argentinian wife of an active-duty Coast Guardsman after her immigration status was flagged during a routine security screening as the couple moved into Navy base housing in South Florida. Last month, the Australian wife of an Army lieutenant was detained by border officials at an airport in Hawaii during a trip to visit her husband. She was sent back to Australia.

As the debate over illegal immigration roils the country, recent polling from the Pew Research Center shows that about a third of Americans think that all undocumented immigrants living in the country should be deported. Fifty-one percent believe that some undocumented immigrants should be deported, depending on their situation. For instance, nearly all those respondents agree that undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes should be deported. But just 5% think that spouses of American citizens should be.

Lawmakers have reintroduced several bills in Congress that would make it easier for spouses and parents of troops and veterans to get their green card.

“The anxiety of separation during deployment, the uncertainty of potentially serving in a conflict zone—these challenges weren’t just mine. They were my family’s as well,” Rep. Salud Carbajal, a Democrat from California, said at a news conference last month. He came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child and served in the Marine Corps.

“I find it unconscionable that someone could step up to serve, voluntarily, in our military and be willing to sacrifice their life for our country only to have their families torn apart.”

‘I Didn’t Hear From Her for Three Days’

The morning that ICE took Shirly Guardado into custody had started like any other. She and Correa had woken early to prepare their 10-month-old son for the day and then taken him to Guardado’s mother to watch him while they worked—Correa as a logistics specialist, handling the training for part-time Army reservists at his unit, and Guardado as a secretary at an air conditioning manufacturing company.

Guardado had gotten a work permit and an order of supervision from ICE, meaning she needed to check in regularly with immigration officials, after she was apprehended crossing the border about 10 years earlier, her lawyer, Martin Reza, told The War Horse. Her last check-in had been in February, just a month before.

“She reported as normal,” Reza said. “Nothing happened.”

Shirly Guardado with her husband, Sgt. Ayssac Correa, along with her mother and son, the winter before she was deported to Honduras.Photo courtesy of Ayssac Correa

But on that morning in March, Guardado got a strange phone call at work. Some sort of public safety officer had dialed her office and wanted her to come outside to talk. In the parking lot, three men in plain clothes identified themselves as Department of Public Safety officers, Correa told The War Horse. As Shirly approached, they said her car had been involved in an accident. But when she got close, they grabbed her and handcuffed her, telling her they were ICE agents.

That’s when Guardado’s sister-in-law called Correa.

He said the ICE agents refused to tell him where they were taking his wife. By the time he got to her office, they were gone.

“I didn’t hear from her for like three days,” he said. When she was finally able to call him, from an ICE facility in Conroe, Texas, he told her there must have been some mistake.

“They’re gonna realize you got your stuff in order, and they’re gonna let you go,” he told her.

“I kept thinking, ‘Oh, she’s gonna get out tomorrow. She’s gonna get out tomorrow.’ And then that turned into almost three months,” he said.

On May 30, ICE deported her to Honduras. It was her 28th birthday.

Protection Through Military Parole in Place

Correa had met Guardado in a coffee shop in Houston in 2020—“the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” he said. After they got married, Reza helped the couple file paperwork for Correa to sponsor Guardado to get her green card.

“I kept thinking, ‘Oh, she’s gonna get out tomorrow. She’s gonna get out tomorrow.’ And then that turned into almost three months.”

Because Correa was in the military, the couple also put in an application for military parole in place, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services program that can help military and veteran family members temporarily stay in the U.S. legally while they work to get a more permanent status.

The program grew out of the experiences of Yaderlin Hiraldo Jimenez, an undocumented Army wife whose husband, Staff Sgt. Alex Jimenez, went missing in Iraq in 2007 after his unit came under insurgent fire.

Alex Jimenez had petitioned for a green card for his wife before he deployed, but while the Army searched for him, the Department of Homeland Security worked to deport her. After the case gained national attention, the department changed course and allowed her to stay in the U.S. temporarily. She was awarded a green card in July of 2007. Almost a year later, the Army found her husband’s remains.

“After that case, the bureaucracy realized that they could go ahead and do this for everybody,” Stock said. “It would solve a lot of problems for military families, and it would contribute to readiness, and the troops are going to be a lot happier, because there’s a lot of troops that have this problem.”

But not everyone is granted parole, and filing can be complicated. Historically, all of the military branches have offered legal assistance to military family members applying, as long as legal resources were available. But the Coast Guard recently “discontinued” its legal assistance to undocumented Coast Guard family members looking to apply for a military parole in place, a spokesperson said in an email to The War Horse.

In response to follow-up questions, the Coast Guard called it a “pause” that resulted from a “recent review of assistance with immigration services available to dependents.” The War Horse has confirmed multiple examples of Coast Guard families being denied this legal assistance, although USCIS says the program is still active and military families are still eligible to apply. The other military branches say they have not made any changes to the legal immigration assistance they provide military families under the new administration.

But even for families who are able to apply for parole in place, approval isn’t guaranteed. There are certain disqualifying factors, like having a criminal record, and USCIS offices have discretion over granting parole.

“All of these field offices have a captain, a chief there,” says Branes. “They dictate policy there.”

USCIS denied Guardado and Correa’s application for military parole in place. Even though ICE had released her to work in the U.S. with check-ins a decade earlier, and she had no criminal record, she was technically under an expedited deportation order, which USCIS told her was disqualifying. They told her to file her application for military parole in place with ICE instead.

That’s not uncommon, Stock said. “But ICE doesn’t have a program to give parole in place.”

When ICE agents arrested Guardado, Reza said, her request for a military parole in place had been sitting with the agency for over a year with no response.

‘Families Serve Too’

Correa is planning to fly down to Honduras shortly to bring their son, Kylian, to reunite with his mother. He’s put in a request to transfer to Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras in hopes of being stationed closer to them. He said his wife has been bouncing from hotel to hotel since landing in the country. Her brother, who is a legal resident, flew to Honduras to meet her there, since she has no family in the country, having come to the U.S. more than a decade earlier.

He wants to continue serving in the Army, which he joined in 2018. Shortly afterward, he deployed to Syria.

“This is what I want to do,” Correa said. But if his transfer request isn’t approved, he said he won’t renew his enlistment when his contract is up next year. He’s looking at selling all his possessions and moving to Honduras—anything that will make it possible to bring his family together again.

“When my husband was called into active duty and put his life on the line, it didn’t matter if I had documents. I was a military wife. We should be able to get a second chance.”

“You recruit the service member [but] you retain the family,” says Stephanie Torres, who was undocumented when her husband, Sgt. Jorge Torres, who had served in Afghanistan, died in a car crash in 2013. “You retain the family by letting them know, ‘You belong here. You serve too.’”

She and other advocates say that targeting military family members for deportation can harm military readiness by taking away a focus on the mission. Some service members may be scared or unable to enroll their family members for military benefits or support programs.

Today, Torres is working with the group Repatriate Our Patriots, which advocates on behalf of deported veterans, to build up a program to support military and veteran family members who are deported or are facing deportation.

Women being deported board a military flight at Fort Bliss, Texas, in February. Cpl. Adaris Cole/US Army

One of the people she is working with is Alejandra Juarez, who became a face of military family separation during the first Trump administration when she was deported to Mexico as the wife of a decorated combat Marine veteran, leaving behind her husband and two school-age daughters.

In 2021, after multiple lawmakers wrote letters on her behalf, then-President Biden granted her a humanitarian parole to reenter the United States and reunite with her family.

Juarez crossed into the U.S. from Mexico when she was a teenager and said she signed a document she didn’t understand at the time that permanently prevented her from gaining legal status.

Juarez with her family in 2022, following her return to the United States on humanitarian parole. Juarez is second from the right; her husband, Temo Juarez, who served in the Marines, is on the right.Photo courtesy of Alejandra Juarez

“When my husband was called into active duty and put his life on the line, it didn’t matter if I had documents,” she told The War Horse. “I was a military wife.

“We should be able to get a second chance.”

Earlier this month, Juarez’s parole expired, and she has no path to citizenship. She sees the administration ramping up its immigration enforcement and ending many of its parole programs. She doesn’t want to spend money or time on what she assumes will be a dead end.

When her parole expired, she said, her immigration officer extended her a grace period to stay in the United States for one more month, to celebrate her younger daughter’s birthday. She’s turning 16.

Then, on the 4th of July, Juarez must leave the country.

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

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On Monday, the Boston Globe reported that the Senate version of New Hampshire’s two-year budget bill contains language that “would prohibit public entities from supporting any program designed to improve the lives of people with disabilities.” The reason? An attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion by state House and Senate Republicans.

“The Senate’s anti-DEI provisions would prohibit state and local government entities from supporting any program related to efforts to improve ‘demographic outcomes’ for people with physical or mental disabilities,” writes Boston Globe reporter Steven Porter.

Disabled people already face challenges in hiring, both due to biases of companies and some people just needing more assistance. DEI-focused hiring programs and trainings—both for disabled people and people of color—help this problem.

The House version of the bill is also an anti-DEI attack, though it does not specifically go after disability as heavily as the Senate version of the budget. The House bill goes after race-conscious practices in hiring, which still would hurt disabled people of color. Karen Rosenberg, policy director for the Disability Rights Center, told Porter that the bills are “mostly the same, and they’re both terrible.”

As Porter writes, the curtailing of disability programs in the state can also affect disabled children.

Louis Esposito, executive director of ABLE NH, an advocacy group for people impacted by disability, said there have been so many additional pressing concerns—including a disagreement between the House and Senate over a proposed cut to Medicaid provider rates—that the implications of the anti-DEI provisions in the state budget legislation haven’t garnered as much attention as they warrant.

Esposito said the proposals could have far-reaching ramifications in education. If a school offers a training session on neurodiversity, for example, would that be deemed a DEI violation? School leaders who are unsure might avoid such topics, at the expense of equity and inclusion for students with disabilities, he said, especially since the proposals would direct the state’s education commissioner to withhold all public funding from schools deemed noncompliant.

The House and Senate will have to come to an agreement and pass a two-year budget bill before July 1.

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I was told there would be a diamond-encrusted steak.

One hot May morning in Las Vegas, I was wandering through the art gallery section of the cavernous convention hall at The Venetian Resort’s hotel and casino—where 35,000 crypto enthusiasts were gathered for the seventh annual Bitcoin conference—in search of Rare, by artist Maxfield Mellenbruch.

He had supposedly transformed a hunk of meat into “an exquisite combination of platinum and 216 carats of diamonds and rubies,” according to the description on the conference website. “Much like Bitcoin itself, Rare challenges conventional ideas of value, art, and asset.” The piece, which had been appraised for $2.2 million and would be auctioned off during the conference, was nowhere to be found among the portraits of Pepe the Frog and Bitcoin-themed Warhol soup can knock-offs.

The Bitcoin Conference is a platform for experts, investors, and innovators to share knowledge, showcase projects, and network with like-minded individuals.Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu/Getty

Instead, the exhibit that seemed to be commanding the most attention was considerably less dazzling: A dingy gray sweatsuit, a plain white T-shirt neatly folded on top of a mesh bag, and a pair of beat-up sneakers, each framed and mounted on a gallery wall. I assumed these must be some kind of high-concept installation—until I read the text that accompanied them. Not just random laundry, these objéts were Ross Ulbricht’s uniform when he had served 11 years of a life sentence in various prisons for creating the Silk Road, a crypto-fueled drug market on the internet.

For many at the conference, Ulbricht was not a criminal but a visionary victim, indeed almost a Christ-like figure. An early champion of cryptocurrency, he had been maligned, persecuted, and now, thanks to a pardon from President Trump, he had risen triumphant.

And so had the price of Bitcoin. Less than a week before the conference began, it hit an all-time high of just under $112,000, up from about $70,000 a year earlier. Repeatedly, speakers at the conference told the story of crypto’s fall from grace and its astonishing comeback. In his opening address, Grant McCarty, co-president of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, reminisced about the first conference after one of the largest crypto trading platforms, FTX, was revealed in 2022 to be a fraud and the price of Bitcoin had tanked to less than $20,000. “Politicians at the time were calling for federal bans,” he said. “Nightly news insisted that only criminals and bad people were using this technology.” Crypto’s future looked bleak—but McCarty would not be deterred, so he decided to form the Bitcoin Policy Institute. “We started out as a handful of true believers with basically a Google Doc, a prayer, and an absolute conviction that Bitcoin is good for the world,” he said, earnestly enunciating every syllable.

Two years later, their prayers seem to have been answered. Bitcoin’s market cap is now estimated at about $2.1 trillion, the seventh largest asset on Earth, and Bitcoiners at the conference were jubilant. Wearing tracksuits, blazers, and mini-skirts in bright orange, the official color of Bitcoin, their T-shirts said “Our Founding Fathers Wanted Bitcoin” and “Bitcoin Saves.” They played a life-size version of the game Guess Who?, where the people on the cards were crypto celebs. At the marketplace section of the expo hall, they bought (in Bitcoin, of course) a kids’ card game called The Inflation Monster, meant to teach the evils of fiat—crypto enthusiasts’ word for traditional money. They bought underwear and bras emblazoned with the Bitcoin logo and baby onesies with phrases like “Hodl me tight,” a reference to a misspelling of the word “hold” that became a meme about the importance of not selling your Bitcoin. They bought psychedelic artwork that depicted banking regulators as ghoulish figures presiding over a Monopoly board.

And they bought MAGA gear: “Trump 2028” hats, a framed AI-generated portrait of President Trump holding a Bitcoin, a bag of coffee called Bitcoin Blend featuring a picture of, yes, the 47th president of the United States. But Trump hasn’t always been a Bitcoin hero. He dismissed it during his first term—in a 2019 tweet, he called digital currencies “not money” and “based on thin air.” But in the last few years, he has changed his mind, likely prompted by his sons, who have extensive Bitcoin business interests. The real Trump lovefest, I learned, began at the previous year’s conference, where Trump had stopped on the campaign trail to assure this crowd that he intended to become “the crypto president.” He became the first presidential candidate from a major party to accept crypto donations; at the 2024 Bitcoin conference, he promised to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” Shortly before he was inaugurated, he launched his own digital currency, the $TRUMP meme coin, which has earned him an estimated $1 billion. (First Lady Melania Trump wasn’t so lucky—her meme coin, launched shortly after her husband’s, has plummeted in value.) Just a few days into his second term, Trump signed an executive order vowing to explore establishing an American strategic Bitcoin reserve.

A cutout of President Donald Trump holding a Bitcoin is displayed on a group of servers during The Bitcoin Conference. Trump has gone from disparaging the currency to being one of its most powerful champions. Ian Maule/AFP/Getty

Three Bitcoin bills, aimed at establishing a regulatory structure that would legitimize the currency, are currently making their way through Congress; another, the BITCOIN Act, would create the strategic reserve that Trump had promised.

Bitcoin’s redemption story imbued the conference with an energy that I can only describe as quasi-religious. The mood bore a striking resemblance to what I experienced at the prayer rallies and church services I have attended while reporting on Christian nationalism. With the unquestioning intensity of their crypto faith informing every conversation, conference attendees behaved like proselytizers. But instead of Christianity, this was a new American religion, complete with deities (the mysterious Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto), prophets (Trump), and even nearly martyred saints with relics (Ulbricht and his sweat suit).

As with all true believers, the danger of extremism is ever-present. During the conference, I began to see hints that this devotion to digital currency had become an all-consuming obsession— for attendees and the politicians and industry leaders on stage.

The more that others embraced Bitcoin, “the more likely you are to succeed. The more likely they are to succeed. The more likely Bitcoin is to succeed, the more likely the human race is to succeed!”

In his keynote, Michael Saylor, whose cloud-computing company, Strategy, owns nearly 600,000 Bitcoins—approximately worth $60 billion—urged the crowd to “become an evangelist for economic freedom.” Saylor, who has advocated for Bitcoin to be exempt from capital gains tax, said that the more that others embraced Bitcoin, “the more likely you are to succeed. The more likely they are to succeed. The more likely Bitcoin is to succeed, the more likely the human race is to succeed!”

This is when most stories on cryptocurrency attempt to explain it in layman’s terms. It’s a big spreadsheet! It’s a robot bank! It’s digital Pokémon cards!

The good news is that if you don’t completely get it, you don’t have to for this story. All you need to know is this: When crypto fans talk about how Bitcoin (or any other crypto, of which there are many) is going to help you cast off the yoke of extractive big banks, or stick it to woke lenders, or help the underclass build generational wealth, they might earnestly believe those things. But there is a much more basic reason that they want everyone to buy Bitcoin, and it has to do with the basic economic principle of supply and demand. There is a fixed amount of this currency—21 million to be exact—and the more people who have decided that Bitcoin is desirable, the more it’s worth. If you buy Bitcoin, the value of their Bitcoin goes up. *Their investment is predicated on making you buy Bitcoin.*In this way, it’s a little like multi-level marketing, like Avon or Amway. Given those terms, the evangelizing begins to make a lot more sense.

Nearly all the panels reinforced this message. Consider “Marketing Bitcoin to the Masses,” which took place the first afternoon and featured Brian E. De Mint, author of the 2022 book Bitcoin Evangelism: Planting Seeds for the Decentralized Revolution, sharing his strategy for “orange-pilling,” or convincing the uninitiated of Bitcoin’s greatness. He pointed to the early Christians who “spread the religion to people who didn’t believe in a God, and then they spread the religion to the pagan people who believed in a higher power, but perhaps another God.” Extending the metaphor, he described those who were skeptical of all crypto as “atheists,” and those who had accepted crypto but not Bitcoin as pagans.

The list of Bitcoin’s alleged powers is long and weird. The author of a parenting book called I Am Not Your Bruh told me he believed that buying Bitcoin made people better at child-rearing. “When you embrace Bitcoin,” he said, “you can think beyond just yourself and your lifetime—it makes you more inspired to be intentional with your parenting.” In my quest to see the diamond-encrusted steak, I talked to a curator who claimed Bitcoin had liberated artists from rapacious galleries. At one panel, it was revealed that Bitcoin could stop human trafficking; at another, I learned that it could reduce Americans’ reliance on pharma companies and improve our diet. “There’s no point in having long-term regenerative health if you don’t have long-term regenerative wealth,” said an Australian chef influencer, cryptically. Paolo Ardoino, the Italian billionaire CEO of the crypto company Tether explained, “I know that people think about Bitcoin as the digital gold, but I prefer to think in Bitcoin terms. It’s almost like [gold] is the natural Bitcoin.”

“Gold is imperfect,” he said. “Bitcoin is perfect.”

It’s one thing when your libertarian uncle prattles on about the virtues of Bitcoin at Thanksgiving. And believe me, I met your libertarian uncle at this conference, many, many times over. (One of them referred to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is no fan of the currency, as “Lie-awatha.”) But it’s a wholly different experience to hear elected officials and members of America’s first family make those same pitches.

The first day of the conference featured a “Code and Country” program, a celebration of the blossoming relationship between the government and Bitcoin. But in the midst of the euphoria, the conference seemed ambivalent about setting the mood for the day: serious and dignified, or bedazzled orange YOLO? In the biggest room, on the Nakamoto Stage, between speakers, a string quartet clad in concert black solemnly performed a cover of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA,” then the British miniskirt-clad emcee tried to pump up the crowd about the price of Bitcoin. “Do we think we’re gonna hit another all-time high in the next few days?” she bellowed. “A little bit more energy! Do we think we can? Yes, of course we are!” (They didn’t.)

About halfway through the first morning of the conference, Sen. Jim Justice (R-W. Va.) took the stage. Next to him, panting, on a folding chair, was Babydog, a celebrity in her own right. Babydog is his five-year-old English bulldog whose star turn began as a mascot for Justice’s Covid vaccination campaign in 2021 when he was governor of West Virginia. The senator began speaking about Toby and Edith, a fictional couple useful in speeches as a generic stand-in for solid, middle-class Americans. For Bitcoin to truly succeed in America, he said, there needed to be a way for Toby and Edith to use it at Walmart, thereby “saving all kinds of money” and “contributing to all kinds of goodness.” But Toby and Edith wouldn’t do that until they really understood Bitcoin. “When Toby and Edith get it,” he continued, “then everything starts happening at light speed for all of us, all the legislation, everything, in every way!” The crowd murmured approvingly.

I suspect that Toby and Edith’s reluctance to jump on the crypto bandwagon had less to do with their not understanding it and more to do with the many well-publicized scams that have besmirched the industry. A non-exhaustive list of the most egregious: the 2014 OneCoin Ponzi scheme, which defrauded investors of over $4 billion with a fake cryptocurrency; BitConnect, which promised absurd returns via a “trading bot” and collapsed in 2018; a Chinese scam called PlusToken stole more than $2 billion from users. In 2022, the conflagration of the crypto exchange FTX revealed massive fraud and mismanagement by founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who had promised to put billions of his own crypto wealth toward charitable causes but ended up spending investors’ money, bankrupting the company, and being sentenced to 25 years in prison.

So it’s hardly surprising that Congress felt the need to get involved and write up several new crypto bills. Sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans, they aim to fix the scams through clearer regulation. The Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, sponsored by senators including Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) would make crypto subject to regulation by the  Commodity Futures Trading Commission; the Lummis-Gillibrand Responsible Financial Innovation Act would establish new oversight bodies, rein in advertising, and require companies to write contracts in plain language; Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s (D-Mich.) Cryptocurrency Accountability Act would require more transparency in lawmakers’ crypto holdings.  It’s unclear how effective these laws would be. The biggest problem is that they lack provisions that would require customer insurance and real-time audits—meaning consumers aren’t robustly protected and it could take months or even years for regulators to catch on to fraud.

Later, I caught up with Justice as he and Babydog were heading out of the conference hall. I asked him if he was worried that the new bills didn’t offer enough consumer protection. “Everybody’s scared to death and afraid of the dark, and we need to quit being that way,” he said. “Because really and truly, the way the crypto world works, there is such a paper trail, it is unbelievable. So for people to be able to cheat, it’s very difficult to do. I am all in because I think it’s a real opportunity for America!”

“Everybody’s scared to death and afraid of the dark, and we need to quit being that way…I am all in because I think it’s a real opportunity for America!”

Keith Ammon, a Republican state representative in New Hampshire who holds Bitcoin, also told me he thought crypto was good for America. I asked him to help me understand why. “Why is the internet good for America?” he retorted. “Like, it’s a dumb question that you’re asking me. It’s like asking, ‘What are we going to do with the Internet?’” He used the same analogy to explain his opinion on regulations for consumer protection. “When the internet was a thing, Congress didn’t put in a bunch of rules around the internet before it even got started,” he said. “They had, like, 10 years of hands-off. And this is what this industry needs.”

The conference attendees I spoke to also seemed to favor loose regulations. Brian Johnson had traveled nearly 1,800 miles from Huntsville, Alabama, to Las Vegas and was wearing a shirt from last year’s conference that said “FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP.” He said he thought the free market could take care of bad actors by making their companies fail. What about the people who lose money because of scams like FTX? I asked. “It sucks,” he said, shrugging. “You have to just do due diligence and invest and understand the risks.” Tyler Williams, who was from Orange County, California, and was wearing an American flag-themed shorts set, told me he didn’t believe that consumer protections worked, anyway. “If you have actually had a true economic collapse of money, I would be truly concerned if those FDIC protections would ever even be there,” he said.

Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) agreed. During her speech later that day, she praised “the people who will be undaunted by our government’s reluctance to let us think freely and embrace the freedom that technology is going to add” to all of our lives. Lummis has spoken publicly about the fact that she owns Bitcoin but in 2021, she failed to disclose a Bitcoin purchase of as much as $100,000 within the designated reporting timeframe of 45 days, thus breaking a law meant to prevent members of Congress from using their inside knowledge of pending legislation to influence their investments. (Lummis attributed the delay to a clerical error; her office resolved the situation with the Ethics committee.) “You can see it,” she said, her voice breaking. “You can just see what this country can do!”

Ross Ulbricht, founder of The Silk Road, a crypto-fueled drug market on the internet and pardoned from a life sentence by President Donald Trump, speaks at the conference. For many, he is not a pardoned criminal but a visionary victim. Gage Skidmore/Zuma

One of the themes that emerged in my reporting on Christian nationalism was persecution—specifically the idea that Christians were being oppressed and hunted the world over because of their faith in Jesus Christ. Persecution is a powerful narrative because it gives the persecuted group a sense of unity and purpose. Frederick Clarkson, a researcher who has long studied the Christian right at the pro-democracy think tank Political Research Associates, told me that in many charismatic communities, the idea of persecution binds a group together that might not otherwise have much in common. “Once you’ve established that people are in a community together and that there’s some formidable opponent that’s out to get us, and we’re all together,” he said, “an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.”

At the Bitcoin conference, that sense of underdog righteousness was on full display. On the second day of the conference, President Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, spoke on a panel. Its official title was “Bitcoin as a Public Asset: The Rise of New Bitcoin Models,” but the Trump brothers appeared to be more interested in crafting a tale of parallel redemptions, how both their family and the crypto community had triumphed over adversity. Had the Biden administration succeeded in passing anti-crypto legislation, they might not be sitting there today, said another panelist. “We could be in orange for Bitcoin, but it would be an orange jumpsuit!” quipped Don Jr. Audience members hooted appreciatively.

In another panel, Don Jr. told the head of the right-wing social media platform Rumble about how his family had been ostracized by the finance community. “The second we got in the political spectrum, the guy that I could have called two weeks prior in New York and gotten a loan for a building in about five minutes, all of a sudden, that guy wouldn’t even take my calls,” he groused. “We’re getting de-banked, we’re getting de-insured, we’re getting de-everythinged.”

“I always say, ‘the enemy of your enemy is often your friend,’ and that’s what happened between the Trump family and the crypto community.”

It was that treatment, he said, that prompted him to explore the world of cryptocurrency. For the Trump family, the stakes are personal. In addition to Trump’s meme coin, the Trump family owns 60 percent of World Liberty Financial, a digital assets firm that has brought in at least $550 million in crypto sales. Eric serves as chief strategy officer of American Bitcoin, a mining operation. Earlier this year, his family business, the Trump Organization, sued Capital One bank, claiming that the company had closed their accounts as a punishment for Trump’s involvement in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. More likely, it was the fact that in 2022, the Trump Organization committed financial crimes, convicted in 2022 on 17 counts of tax fraud, conspiracy, and falsifying business records.

“I always say, ‘the enemy of your enemy is often your friend,’ and that’s what happened between the Trump family and the crypto community,” said Eric. “And I’m not sure without you we would have won the same way [without you]. I think we would have won, but I’m not sure if we would have won in the same decisive manner.” The crowd erupted in applause.

The themes were the same in the highly anticipated keynote address from Vice President JD Vance. By the time I arrived at the press area, the snaking queue to hear the speech filled two floors of the Venetian’s cavernous conference wing. Someone handed me an orange flier about the “prisoners of war” who were still serving time for crypto-related crimes. Its title read, presumably in a nod to the Old Testament story of Moses, “LET OUR PEOPLE GO!”

Vance began by cheering the end of “four years of mistreatment and outright hostility led by Democrat regulators,” adding, triumphantly, “As you know, there’s new sheriff in town!” He was there at the conference to announce “loud and clear with President Trump, crypto finally has a champion and an ally.”

Vice President JD Vance speaks to the crowd at the conference and preaches that Bitcoin is a force for democracy. Travis P Ball/Sipa USA/AP

Vance, who owns between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of Bitcoin, according to financial disclosures he filed last year, described Bitcoin as a democratizing force. “I believe that America is a place where anyone should be able to make a fortune, no matter where you grew up, what degree you may or may not have,” he said. “In recent years, I’m hard pressed to think of a better place to do so than right here in the digital assets industry.”

Things were less democratic here at the conference where, if you wanted to see what your theoretical American crypto fortune could someday buy, you would have been out of luck. Later that day, I headed back to the gallery area in search of the steak. I flagged down the curator, who told me it was on display in the VIP area, accessible only to holders of $9,499 “Whale Pass.” The conference organizers were trying to figure out how to display it for a few hours for the hoi polloi in the main conference area, but marshaling the necessary security was proving difficult. I had to catch my flight before I ever got to glimpse the diamond-encrusted steak.

Many of the Christian nationalists I’ve met described their effort to spread their religion using metaphors of war: a battle between good and evil, a “spiritual war” against a satanic “enemy.” In the weeks leading up to the Capital insurrection, several prominent pastors used these images in speeches they made about how they believed the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. Clarkson, the religion researcher, has observed that some evangelical Christian leaders use imagery of fighting “to get people psychologically primed,” he told me. “They’re going to be the heroes in the end times army.”

In his speech, Vance joked, “The Secret Service is a little bit nervous, because I told them these Bitcoin guys really like guns,” he said. “But they really like the president, vice President of the United States, too, so I think we’re doing okay.”

But would they always really like him? There are members of the crypto community who believe that only a revolution will truly liberate the masses from the chains of the current financial system. In an eponymous session, panelists debated whether Bitcoiners had become “sycophants of the state;” another described “Bitcoin as a Digital 1776,” with the currency itself as a form of revolution. The moderator, who goes by the name GMoney and is the host of the Bitcoin-focused podcast Rugpull Radio (40,000 listeners per episode on Rumble), said he thought neither party had any business bogging down crypto with cumbersome federal legislation. “Fuck this dick-sucking of the Republican party that’s going on, like this is absurd,” he growled. “We are a powerful political contingency at this point in time. Why the fuck are we on our knees in front of the Republican Party when we should be asking for the opposite?” He had more choice words for the idea of a federal Bitcoin reserve. “You want to put the same fucking retards that destroyed the economic system in charge of a large portion of Bitcoin?” he said. “Like, that’s fucking dumb.”

Toward the end of his speech, Vance told the crowd that as advocates for crypto, they were fighting for the people. “I see crypto as a hedge against one of the most dangerous trends in the digital era,” he said, “elites who, rather than innovate themselves, prefer to simply take over and co-opt cutting-edge technologies to assert their control over other people.” It was a bold statement for a Yale Law grad and Silicon Valley alum who now held the second-highest office in the nation. Did he not worry, I wondered, that the revolution crowd might someday decide he was a member of the elite that needed to be hedged against?

When I got home, I discovered that the steak had been auctioned off for a little more than a quarter of its $2.2 million appraisal. I also watched Ulbricht’s speech, which I missed because I left early. Ulbricht, whose title was listed as “freedom fighter,” recalled a time he had successfully removed seven wasps’ nests from a porch. The wasps’ power, he explained, was in their decentralization, just like Bitcoin, which was distributed instead of residing in a single bank. “We’re not there yet—there is still more freedom to be won,” he said. “I’m talking about freedom beyond what anyone anywhere has ever had. It’s going to be incredible, and it’s going to be worth fighting for.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

I was told there would be a diamond-encrusted steak.

One hot May morning in Las Vegas, I was wandering through the art gallery section of the cavernous convention hall at The Venetian Resort’s hotel and casino—where 35,000 crypto enthusiasts were gathered for the seventh annual Bitcoin conference—in search of Rare, by artist Maxfield Mellenbruch.

He had supposedly transformed a hunk of meat into “an exquisite combination of platinum and 216 carats of diamonds and rubies,” according to the description on the conference website. “Much like Bitcoin itself, Rare challenges conventional ideas of value, art, and asset.” The piece, which had been appraised for $2.2 million and would be auctioned off during the conference, was nowhere to be found among the portraits of Pepe the Frog and Bitcoin-themed Warhol soup can knock-offs.

The Bitcoin Conference is a platform for experts, investors, and innovators to share knowledge, showcase projects, and network with like-minded individuals.Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu/Getty

Instead, the exhibit that seemed to be commanding the most attention was considerably less dazzling: A dingy gray sweatsuit, a plain white T-shirt neatly folded on top of a mesh bag, and a pair of beat-up sneakers, each framed and mounted on a gallery wall. I assumed these must be some kind of high-concept installation—until I read the text that accompanied them. Not just random laundry, these objéts were Ross Ulbricht’s uniform when he had served 11 years of a life sentence in various prisons for creating the Silk Road, a crypto-fueled drug market on the internet.

For many at the conference, Ulbricht was not a criminal but a visionary victim, indeed almost a Christ-like figure. An early champion of cryptocurrency, he had been maligned, persecuted, and now, thanks to a pardon from President Trump, he had risen triumphant.

And so had the price of Bitcoin. Less than a week before the conference began, it hit an all-time high of just under $112,000, up from about $70,000 a year earlier. Repeatedly, speakers at the conference told the story of crypto’s fall from grace and its astonishing comeback. In his opening address, Grant McCarty, co-president of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, reminisced about the first conference after one of the largest crypto trading platforms, FTX, was revealed in 2022 to be a fraud and the price of Bitcoin had tanked to less than $20,000. “Politicians at the time were calling for federal bans,” he said. “Nightly news insisted that only criminals and bad people were using this technology.” Crypto’s future looked bleak—but McCarty would not be deterred, so he decided to form the Bitcoin Policy Institute. “We started out as a handful of true believers with basically a Google Doc, a prayer, and an absolute conviction that Bitcoin is good for the world,” he said, earnestly enunciating every syllable.

Two years later, their prayers seem to have been answered. Bitcoin’s market cap is now estimated at about $2.1 trillion, the seventh largest asset on Earth, and Bitcoiners at the conference were jubilant. Wearing tracksuits, blazers, and mini-skirts in bright orange, the official color of Bitcoin, their T-shirts said “Our Founding Fathers Wanted Bitcoin” and “Bitcoin Saves.” They played a life-size version of the game Guess Who?, where the people on the cards were crypto celebs. At the marketplace section of the expo hall, they bought (in Bitcoin, of course) a kids’ card game called The Inflation Monster, meant to teach the evils of fiat—crypto enthusiasts’ word for traditional money. They bought underwear and bras emblazoned with the Bitcoin logo and baby onesies with phrases like “Hodl me tight,” a reference to a misspelling of the word “hold” that became a meme about the importance of not selling your Bitcoin. They bought psychedelic artwork that depicted banking regulators as ghoulish figures presiding over a Monopoly board.

And they bought MAGA gear: “Trump 2028” hats, a framed AI-generated portrait of President Trump holding a Bitcoin, a bag of coffee called Bitcoin Blend featuring a picture of, yes, the 47th president of the United States. But Trump hasn’t always been a Bitcoin hero. He dismissed it during his first term—in a 2019 tweet, he called digital currencies “not money” and “based on thin air.” But in the last few years, he has changed his mind, likely prompted by his sons, who have extensive Bitcoin business interests. The real Trump lovefest, I learned, began at the previous year’s conference, where Trump had stopped on the campaign trail to assure this crowd that he intended to become “the crypto president.” He became the first presidential candidate from a major party to accept crypto donations; at the 2024 Bitcoin conference, he promised to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” Shortly before he was inaugurated, he launched his own digital currency, the $TRUMP meme coin, which has earned him an estimated $1 billion. (First Lady Melania Trump wasn’t so lucky—her meme coin, launched shortly after her husband’s, has plummeted in value.) Just a few days into his second term, Trump signed an executive order vowing to explore establishing an American strategic Bitcoin reserve.

A cutout of President Donald Trump holding a Bitcoin is displayed on a group of servers during The Bitcoin Conference. Trump has gone from disparaging the currency to being one of its most powerful champions. Ian Maule/AFP/Getty

Three Bitcoin bills, aimed at establishing a regulatory structure that would legitimize the currency, are currently making their way through Congress; another, the BITCOIN Act, would create the strategic reserve that Trump had promised.

Bitcoin’s redemption story imbued the conference with an energy that I can only describe as quasi-religious. The mood bore a striking resemblance to what I experienced at the prayer rallies and church services I have attended while reporting on Christian nationalism. With the unquestioning intensity of their crypto faith informing every conversation, conference attendees behaved like proselytizers. But instead of Christianity, this was a new American religion, complete with deities (the mysterious Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto), prophets (Trump), and even nearly martyred saints with relics (Ulbricht and his sweat suit).

As with all true believers, the danger of extremism is ever-present. During the conference, I began to see hints that this devotion to digital currency had become an all-consuming obsession— for attendees and the politicians and industry leaders on stage.

The more that others embraced Bitcoin, “the more likely you are to succeed. The more likely they are to succeed. The more likely Bitcoin is to succeed, the more likely the human race is to succeed!”

In his keynote, Michael Saylor, whose cloud-computing company, Strategy, owns nearly 600,000 Bitcoins—approximately worth $60 billion—urged the crowd to “become an evangelist for economic freedom.” Saylor, who has advocated for Bitcoin to be exempt from capital gains tax, said that the more that others embraced Bitcoin, “the more likely you are to succeed. The more likely they are to succeed. The more likely Bitcoin is to succeed, the more likely the human race is to succeed!”

This is when most stories on cryptocurrency attempt to explain it in layman’s terms. It’s a big spreadsheet! It’s a robot bank! It’s digital Pokémon cards!

The good news is that if you don’t completely get it, you don’t have to for this story. All you need to know is this: When crypto fans talk about how Bitcoin (or any other crypto, of which there are many) is going to help you cast off the yoke of extractive big banks, or stick it to woke lenders, or help the underclass build generational wealth, they might earnestly believe those things. But there is a much more basic reason that they want everyone to buy Bitcoin, and it has to do with the basic economic principle of supply and demand. There is a fixed amount of this currency—21 million to be exact—and the more people who have decided that Bitcoin is desirable, the more it’s worth. If you buy Bitcoin, the value of their Bitcoin goes up. *Their investment is predicated on making you buy Bitcoin.*In this way, it’s a little like multi-level marketing, like Avon or Amway. Given those terms, the evangelizing begins to make a lot more sense.

Nearly all the panels reinforced this message. Consider “Marketing Bitcoin to the Masses,” which took place the first afternoon and featured Brian E. De Mint, author of the 2022 book Bitcoin Evangelism: Planting Seeds for the Decentralized Revolution, sharing his strategy for “orange-pilling,” or convincing the uninitiated of Bitcoin’s greatness. He pointed to the early Christians who “spread the religion to people who didn’t believe in a God, and then they spread the religion to the pagan people who believed in a higher power, but perhaps another God.” Extending the metaphor, he described those who were skeptical of all crypto as “atheists,” and those who had accepted crypto but not Bitcoin as pagans.

The list of Bitcoin’s alleged powers is long and weird. The author of a parenting book called I Am Not Your Bruh told me he believed that buying Bitcoin made people better at child-rearing. “When you embrace Bitcoin,” he said, “you can think beyond just yourself and your lifetime—it makes you more inspired to be intentional with your parenting.” In my quest to see the diamond-encrusted steak, I talked to a curator who claimed Bitcoin had liberated artists from rapacious galleries. At one panel, it was revealed that Bitcoin could stop human trafficking; at another, I learned that it could reduce Americans’ reliance on pharma companies and improve our diet. “There’s no point in having long-term regenerative health if you don’t have long-term regenerative wealth,” said an Australian chef influencer, cryptically. Paolo Ardoino, the Italian billionaire CEO of the crypto company Tether explained, “I know that people think about Bitcoin as the digital gold, but I prefer to think in Bitcoin terms. It’s almost like [gold] is the natural Bitcoin.”

“Gold is imperfect,” he said. “Bitcoin is perfect.”

It’s one thing when your libertarian uncle prattles on about the virtues of Bitcoin at Thanksgiving. And believe me, I met your libertarian uncle at this conference, many, many times over. (One of them referred to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is no fan of the currency, as “Lie-awatha.”) But it’s a wholly different experience to hear elected officials and members of America’s first family make those same pitches.

The first day of the conference featured a “Code and Country” program, a celebration of the blossoming relationship between the government and Bitcoin. But in the midst of the euphoria, the conference seemed ambivalent about setting the mood for the day: serious and dignified, or bedazzled orange YOLO? In the biggest room, on the Nakamoto Stage, between speakers, a string quartet clad in concert black solemnly performed a cover of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA,” then the British miniskirt-clad emcee tried to pump up the crowd about the price of Bitcoin. “Do we think we’re gonna hit another all-time high in the next few days?” she bellowed. “A little bit more energy! Do we think we can? Yes, of course we are!” (They didn’t.)

About halfway through the first morning of the conference, Sen. Jim Justice (R-W. Va.) took the stage. Next to him, panting, on a folding chair, was Babydog, a celebrity in her own right. Babydog is his five-year-old English bulldog whose star turn began as a mascot for Justice’s Covid vaccination campaign in 2021 when he was governor of West Virginia. The senator began speaking about Toby and Edith, a fictional couple useful in speeches as a generic stand-in for solid, middle-class Americans. For Bitcoin to truly succeed in America, he said, there needed to be a way for Toby and Edith to use it at Walmart, thereby “saving all kinds of money” and “contributing to all kinds of goodness.” But Toby and Edith wouldn’t do that until they really understood Bitcoin. “When Toby and Edith get it,” he continued, “then everything starts happening at light speed for all of us, all the legislation, everything, in every way!” The crowd murmured approvingly.

I suspect that Toby and Edith’s reluctance to jump on the crypto bandwagon had less to do with their not understanding it and more to do with the many well-publicized scams that have besmirched the industry. A non-exhaustive list of the most egregious: the 2014 OneCoin Ponzi scheme, which defrauded investors of over $4 billion with a fake cryptocurrency; BitConnect, which promised absurd returns via a “trading bot” and collapsed in 2018; a Chinese scam called PlusToken stole more than $2 billion from users. In 2022, the conflagration of the crypto exchange FTX revealed massive fraud and mismanagement by founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who had promised to put billions of his own crypto wealth toward charitable causes but ended up spending investors’ money, bankrupting the company, and being sentenced to 25 years in prison.

So it’s hardly surprising that Congress felt the need to get involved and write up several new crypto bills. Sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans, they aim to fix the scams through clearer regulation. The Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, sponsored by senators including Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) would make crypto subject to regulation by the  Commodity Futures Trading Commission; the Lummis-Gillibrand Responsible Financial Innovation Act would establish new oversight bodies, rein in advertising, and require companies to write contracts in plain language; Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s (D-Mich.) Cryptocurrency Accountability Act would require more transparency in lawmakers’ crypto holdings.  It’s unclear how effective these laws would be. The biggest problem is that they lack provisions that would require customer insurance and real-time audits—meaning consumers aren’t robustly protected and it could take months or even years for regulators to catch on to fraud.

Later, I caught up with Justice as he and Babydog were heading out of the conference hall. I asked him if he was worried that the new bills didn’t offer enough consumer protection. “Everybody’s scared to death and afraid of the dark, and we need to quit being that way,” he said. “Because really and truly, the way the crypto world works, there is such a paper trail, it is unbelievable. So for people to be able to cheat, it’s very difficult to do. I am all in because I think it’s a real opportunity for America!”

“Everybody’s scared to death and afraid of the dark, and we need to quit being that way…I am all in because I think it’s a real opportunity for America!”

Keith Ammon, a Republican state representative in New Hampshire who holds Bitcoin, also told me he thought crypto was good for America. I asked him to help me understand why. “Why is the internet good for America?” he retorted. “Like, it’s a dumb question that you’re asking me. It’s like asking, ‘What are we going to do with the Internet?’” He used the same analogy to explain his opinion on regulations for consumer protection. “When the internet was a thing, Congress didn’t put in a bunch of rules around the internet before it even got started,” he said. “They had, like, 10 years of hands-off. And this is what this industry needs.”

The conference attendees I spoke to also seemed to favor loose regulations. Brian Johnson had traveled nearly 1,800 miles from Huntsville, Alabama, to Las Vegas and was wearing a shirt from last year’s conference that said “FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP.” He said he thought the free market could take care of bad actors by making their companies fail. What about the people who lose money because of scams like FTX? I asked. “It sucks,” he said, shrugging. “You have to just do due diligence and invest and understand the risks.” Tyler Williams, who was from Orange County, California, and was wearing an American flag-themed shorts set, told me he didn’t believe that consumer protections worked, anyway. “If you have actually had a true economic collapse of money, I would be truly concerned if those FDIC protections would ever even be there,” he said.

Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming) agreed. During her speech later that day, she praised “the people who will be undaunted by our government’s reluctance to let us think freely and embrace the freedom that technology is going to add” to all of our lives. Lummis has spoken publicly about the fact that she owns Bitcoin but in 2021, she failed to disclose a Bitcoin purchase of as much as $100,000 within the designated reporting timeframe of 45 days, thus breaking a law meant to prevent members of Congress from using their inside knowledge of pending legislation to influence their investments. (Lummis attributed the delay to a clerical error; her office resolved the situation with the Ethics committee.) “You can see it,” she said, her voice breaking. “You can just see what this country can do!”

Ross Ulbricht, founder of The Silk Road, a crypto-fueled drug market on the internet and pardoned from a life sentence by President Donald Trump, speaks at the conference. For many, he is not a pardoned criminal but a visionary victim. Gage Skidmore/Zuma

One of the themes that emerged in my reporting on Christian nationalism was persecution—specifically the idea that Christians were being oppressed and hunted the world over because of their faith in Jesus Christ. Persecution is a powerful narrative because it gives the persecuted group a sense of unity and purpose. Frederick Clarkson, a researcher who has long studied the Christian right at the pro-democracy think tank Political Research Associates, told me that in many charismatic communities, the idea of persecution binds a group together that might not otherwise have much in common. “Once you’ve established that people are in a community together and that there’s some formidable opponent that’s out to get us, and we’re all together,” he said, “an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.”

At the Bitcoin conference, that sense of underdog righteousness was on full display. On the second day of the conference, President Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, spoke on a panel. Its official title was “Bitcoin as a Public Asset: The Rise of New Bitcoin Models,” but the Trump brothers appeared to be more interested in crafting a tale of parallel redemptions, how both their family and the crypto community had triumphed over adversity. Had the Biden administration succeeded in passing anti-crypto legislation, they might not be sitting there today, said another panelist. “We could be in orange for Bitcoin, but it would be an orange jumpsuit!” quipped Don Jr. Audience members hooted appreciatively.

In another panel, Don Jr. told the head of the right-wing social media platform Rumble about how his family had been ostracized by the finance community. “The second we got in the political spectrum, the guy that I could have called two weeks prior in New York and gotten a loan for a building in about five minutes, all of a sudden, that guy wouldn’t even take my calls,” he groused. “We’re getting de-banked, we’re getting de-insured, we’re getting de-everythinged.”

“I always say, ‘the enemy of your enemy is often your friend,’ and that’s what happened between the Trump family and the crypto community.”

It was that treatment, he said, that prompted him to explore the world of cryptocurrency. For the Trump family, the stakes are personal. In addition to Trump’s meme coin, the Trump family owns 60 percent of World Liberty Financial, a digital assets firm that has brought in at least $550 million in crypto sales. Eric serves as chief strategy officer of American Bitcoin, a mining operation. Earlier this year, his family business, the Trump Organization, sued Capital One bank, claiming that the company had closed their accounts as a punishment for Trump’s involvement in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. More likely, it was the fact that in 2022, the Trump Organization committed financial crimes, convicted in 2022 on 17 counts of tax fraud, conspiracy, and falsifying business records.

“I always say, ‘the enemy of your enemy is often your friend,’ and that’s what happened between the Trump family and the crypto community,” said Eric. “And I’m not sure without you we would have won the same way [without you]. I think we would have won, but I’m not sure if we would have won in the same decisive manner.” The crowd erupted in applause.

The themes were the same in the highly anticipated keynote address from Vice President JD Vance. By the time I arrived at the press area, the snaking queue to hear the speech filled two floors of the Venetian’s cavernous conference wing. Someone handed me an orange flier about the “prisoners of war” who were still serving time for crypto-related crimes. Its title read, presumably in a nod to the Old Testament story of Moses, “LET OUR PEOPLE GO!”

Vance began by cheering the end of “four years of mistreatment and outright hostility led by Democrat regulators,” adding, triumphantly, “As you know, there’s new sheriff in town!” He was there at the conference to announce “loud and clear with President Trump, crypto finally has a champion and an ally.”

Vice President JD Vance speaks to the crowd at the conference and preaches that Bitcoin is a force for democracy. Travis P Ball/Sipa USA/AP

Vance, who owns between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of Bitcoin, according to financial disclosures he filed last year, described Bitcoin as a democratizing force. “I believe that America is a place where anyone should be able to make a fortune, no matter where you grew up, what degree you may or may not have,” he said. “In recent years, I’m hard pressed to think of a better place to do so than right here in the digital assets industry.”

Things were less democratic here at the conference where, if you wanted to see what your theoretical American crypto fortune could someday buy, you would have been out of luck. Later that day, I headed back to the gallery area in search of the steak. I flagged down the curator, who told me it was on display in the VIP area, accessible only to holders of $9,499 “Whale Pass.” The conference organizers were trying to figure out how to display it for a few hours for the hoi polloi in the main conference area, but marshaling the necessary security was proving difficult. I had to catch my flight before I ever got to glimpse the diamond-encrusted steak.

Many of the Christian nationalists I’ve met described their effort to spread their religion using metaphors of war: a battle between good and evil, a “spiritual war” against a satanic “enemy.” In the weeks leading up to the Capital insurrection, several prominent pastors used these images in speeches they made about how they believed the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. Clarkson, the religion researcher, has observed that some evangelical Christian leaders use imagery of fighting “to get people psychologically primed,” he told me. “They’re going to be the heroes in the end times army.”

In his speech, Vance joked, “The Secret Service is a little bit nervous, because I told them these Bitcoin guys really like guns,” he said. “But they really like the president, vice President of the United States, too, so I think we’re doing okay.”

But would they always really like him? There are members of the crypto community who believe that only a revolution will truly liberate the masses from the chains of the current financial system. In an eponymous session, panelists debated whether Bitcoiners had become “sycophants of the state;” another described “Bitcoin as a Digital 1776,” with the currency itself as a form of revolution. The moderator, who goes by the name GMoney and is the host of the Bitcoin-focused podcast Rugpull Radio (40,000 listeners per episode on Rumble), said he thought neither party had any business bogging down crypto with cumbersome federal legislation. “Fuck this dick-sucking of the Republican party that’s going on, like this is absurd,” he growled. “We are a powerful political contingency at this point in time. Why the fuck are we on our knees in front of the Republican Party when we should be asking for the opposite?” He had more choice words for the idea of a federal Bitcoin reserve. “You want to put the same fucking retards that destroyed the economic system in charge of a large portion of Bitcoin?” he said. “Like, that’s fucking dumb.”

Toward the end of his speech, Vance told the crowd that as advocates for crypto, they were fighting for the people. “I see crypto as a hedge against one of the most dangerous trends in the digital era,” he said, “elites who, rather than innovate themselves, prefer to simply take over and co-opt cutting-edge technologies to assert their control over other people.” It was a bold statement for a Yale Law grad and Silicon Valley alum who now held the second-highest office in the nation. Did he not worry, I wondered, that the revolution crowd might someday decide he was a member of the elite that needed to be hedged against?

When I got home, I discovered that the steak had been auctioned off for a little more than a quarter of its $2.2 million appraisal. I also watched Ulbricht’s speech, which I missed because I left early. Ulbricht, whose title was listed as “freedom fighter,” recalled a time he had successfully removed seven wasps’ nests from a porch. The wasps’ power, he explained, was in their decentralization, just like Bitcoin, which was distributed instead of residing in a single bank. “We’re not there yet—there is still more freedom to be won,” he said. “I’m talking about freedom beyond what anyone anywhere has ever had. It’s going to be incredible, and it’s going to be worth fighting for.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

The Minnesota shooter who killed a state lawmaker and her husband and wounded another legislator and his wife reportedly had a list containing dozens of other names, including abortion providers and advocates.

Multiple news outlets, including CNN, ABC, and the Minnesota Star Tribune, have reported that the alleged shooter—57-year-old Vance Luther Boelter, who remains at large—left a list of names behind in his car that included abortion providers and advocates and figures with ties to Planned Parenthood, along with Democratic politicians. Rep. Kelly Morrison (D-Minn.), told the Star Tribune that she was on the shooter’s list and that local law enforcement told her to shelter in place on Saturday; a spokesperson for Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) told the New York Times the senator was also on the list.

Much is still unknown about the suspect’s motivations. A longtime friend of Boelter told CNN on Saturday that the allegedshooter was a staunch opponent of abortion rights. On Meet the Press Sunday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said, “There clearly was some through line with abortion because of the groups that were on the list and other things that I’ve heard were in this manifesto.”

A spokesperson for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety told Mother Jones on Sunday that the contents of the list, which he said he had not seen, are “investigative information.” The spokesperson said that anyone who was named on the list will be, or already has been, contacted by law enforcement. The National Abortion Federation (NAF), a professional organization of abortion providers and supporters, said in a statement that it is working with its members in Minnesota “to provide additional security support while the suspect is still at large.” Spokespeople for Planned Parenthood and several Minnesota-based reproductive rights groups did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.

While Boelter’s motives remain unclear, the reports that abortion providers and supporters were named on the list come amid a wave of threats and violence since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. “What we’ve seen since the Dobbsdecision has been a shift, where some of the states that historically have been more protective of abortion are seeing more incidents of harassment and targeting of providers,” the NAF’s Melissa Fowler told my colleague Laura Morel last month. On top of that, in January, President Donald Trump pardoned nearly two dozen people charged with violating the FACE Act, a federal law that prohibits interfering with access to reproductive health clinics. Trump’s DOJ has also said it will limit enforcement of the law going forward, and just last week, House Republicans advanced a bill that seeks to repeal the law entirely.

The anti-abortion group Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life said in a statement posted to X that while the shooter’s motives haven’t yet been established, “his actions are completely antithetical to the mission of MCCL and the pro-life movement.”

The FBI is offering a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to Boelter’s arrest and conviction.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Many Republicans quietly but noticeably skipped Trump’s military-slash-birthday parade on Saturday. According to a survey Politico did earlier this week of 50 congressional Republicans, only seven said they planned to stay in Washington, DC, for the weekend to attend the festivities.

OneRepublican—Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)—was more directabout his opposition to the event. “I just never liked the idea of the parade because I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, and the only parades I can remember are Soviet parades, for the most part, or North Korean parades,” Paul said on Meet the Press Sunday.

“The parades I remember from our history were different,” Paul continued. “We never glorified weapons so much. And I know [Trump] means well. I don’t think he means for any of this to be depicted in another fashion. But I’m just not a big fan. Then there is the cost. I mean, we’re $2 trillion in the hole and just an additional cost like this, I’m not for it.”

Rand Paul: "I've never liked the idea of the parade. I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and the only parades I can remember are Soviet parades for the most part or North Korean parades. The parades I remember from our history were different…we never glorified weapons so… pic.twitter.com/KwhuMlzvuG

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 15, 2025

Indeed, Army officials have estimated the parade would cost between $25 and $45 million, but the final price tag has not yet been publicly confirmed. Videos from the event show Army tanks rolling through the streets as spectators watch from the sidelines and, in some sections, sparsely populated bleachers.

That the libertarian-ish Paul would vocally oppose the parade is not especially shocking. He has been vocal about his opposition to Trump’s tariff policy as well as the current version of the massive budget reconciliation bill Trump is trying to push through Congress, which led to Trump blasting him in a pair of Truth Social posts earlier this month. “Rand votes NO on everything, but never has any practical or constructive ideas,” Trump wrote in one post. “His ideas are actually crazy (losers!).” On Meet the Press Sunday, Paul said he’s “not an absolute no” on the budget bill.

Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

For the fewer than a hundred people that make up the entire population of Port Heiden, Alaska, fishing provides both a paycheck and a full dinner plate. Every summer, residents of the Alutiiq village set out on commercial boats to catch salmon swimming upstream in the nearby rivers of Bristol Bay.

John Christensen, Port Heiden’s tribal president, is currently making preparations for the annual trek. In a week’s time, he and his 17-year-old son will charter Queen Ann, the family’s 32-foot boat, eight hours north to brave some of the planet’s highest tides, extreme weather risks, and other treacherous conditions. The two will keep at it until August, hauling in thousands of pounds of fish each day that they later sell to seafood processing companies. It’s grueling work that burns a considerable amount of costly fossil fuel energy, and there are scarcely any other options.

Because of their location, diesel costs almost four times the national average—the Alaska Native community spent $900,000 on fuel in 2024 alone. Even Port Heiden’s diesel storage tanks are posing challenges. Coastal erosion has created a growing threat of leaks in the structures, which are damaging to the environment and expensive to repair, and forced the tribe to relocate them further inland. On top of it all, of course, diesel generators contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and are notoriously noisy.

“We live on the edge of the world. And it’s just tough.”

“Everything costs more. Electricity goes up, diesel goes up, every year. And wages don’t,” Christensen said. “We live on the edge of the world. And it’s just tough.”

In 2015, the community built a fish processing plant that the tribe collectively owns; they envisioned a scenario in which tribal members would not need to share revenue with processing companies, would bring home considerably more money, and wouldn’t have to spend months at a time away from their families. But the building has remained nonoperational for an entire decade because they simply can’t afford to power it.

Enormous amounts of diesel are needed, says Christensen, to run the filleting and gutting machines, separators and grinders, washing and scaling equipment, and even to store the sheer amount of fish the village catches every summer in freezers and refrigerators. They can already barely scrape together the budget needed to pay for the diesel that powers their boats, institutions, homes, and airport.

The onslaught of energy challenges that Port Heiden is facing, Christensen says, is linked to a corresponding population decline. Their fight for energy independence is a byproduct of colonial policies that have limited the resources and recourse that Alaska Native tribes like theirs have. “Power is 90 percent of the problem,” said Christensen. “Lack of people is the rest. But cheaper power would bring in more people.”

In 2023, Climate United, a national investment fund and coalition, submitted a proposal to participate in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF—a $27 billion investment from the Inflation Reduction Act administered by the Environmental Protection Agency to “mobilize financing and private capital to address the climate crisis.” Last April, the EPA announced it had chosen three organizations to disseminate the program’s funding; $6.97 billion was designated to go to Climate United.

Then, in the course of President Donald Trump’s sweeping federal disinvestment campaign, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was singled out as a poster child for what Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed was “criminal.”

“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” Zeldin said in February. He then endeavored on a crusade to get the money back. As the financial manager for GGRF, Citibank, the country’s third-largest financial institution, got caught in the middle.

“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over.”

The New York Times reported that investigations into Biden officials’ actions in creating the program and disbursing the funds had not found any “meaningful evidence” of criminal wrongdoing.

On March 4, Zeldin announced that the GGRF funding intended to go to Climate United and seven other organizations had been frozen. The following week, Climate United filed a joint lawsuit against the EPA, which they followed with a motion for a temporary restraining order against Zeldin, the EPA, and Citibank from taking actions to implement the termination of the grants. On March 11, the EPA sent Climate United a letter of funding termination. In April, a federal DC district judge ruled that the EPA had terminated the grants unlawfully and blocked the EPA from clawing them back. The Trump administration then appealed the decision.

Climate United is still awaiting the outcome of that appeal. While they do, the $6.97 billion remains inaccessible.

Climate United’s money was intended to support a range of projects from Hawai’i to the East Coast, everything from utility-scale solar to energy-efficient community centers—and a renewable energy initiative in Port Heiden. The coalition had earmarked $6 million for the first round of a pre-development grant program aimed at nearly two dozen Native communities looking to adopt or expand renewable energy power sources.

“We made investments in those communities, and we don’t have the capital to support those projects,” said Climate United’s Chief Community Officer Krystal Langholz.

In response to an inquiry from Grist, an EPA spokesperson noted that “Unlike the Biden-Haris administration, this EPA is committed to being an exceptional steward of taxpayer dollars.” The spokesperson said that Zeldin had terminated $20 billion in grant agreements because of “substantial concerns regarding the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program integrity, the award process, and programmatic waste and abuse, which collectively undermine the fundamental goals and statutory objectives of the award.”

A representative of Citibank declined to comment. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service did not respond to requests for comment.

Long before most others recognized climate change as an urgent existential crisis, the Alutiiq peoples of what is now known as Port Heiden, but was once called Meshik, were forced to relocate because of rising seawater. With its pumice-rich volcanic soils and exposed location on the peninsula that divides Bristol Bay from the Gulf of Alaska, the area is unusually vulnerable to tidal forces that erode land rapidly during storms. Beginning in 1981, disappearing sea ice engulfed buildings and homes.

The community eventually moved their village about a 10-minute drive further inland. No one lives at the old site anymore, but important structures still remain, including a safe harbor for fishing boats.

In a region that’s warming faster than just about any other place on the planet, much of the land is on the precipice of being swallowed by water.

The seas, of course, are still rising, creeping up to steal the land from right below the community’s feet. In a region that’s warming faster than just about any other place on the planet, much of the land is on the precipice of being swallowed by water. From 2017 to 2018, the old site lost between 35 and 65 feet of shoreline, as reported by the Bristol Bay Times. Even the local school situated on the newer site is affected by the shrinking shoreline—the institution and surrounding Alutiiq village increasingly threatened by the encroaching sea.

Before the Trump administration moved to terminate their funding, Christensen’s dream of transitioning the Port Heiden community to renewable sources of energy, consequential for both maintaining its traditional lifestyle and ensuring its future, had briefly seemed within reach. He also saw it as a way to contribute to global solutions to the climate crisis.

“I don’t think [we are] the biggest contributor to global pollution, but if we could do our part and not pollute, maybe we won’t erode as fast,” he said. “I know we’re not very many people, but to us, that’s our community.”

The tribe planned to use a $300,000 grant from Climate United to pay for the topographic and waterway studies needed to design two run-of-the-river hydropower plants. In theory, the systems, which divert a portion of flowing water through turbines, would generate enough clean energy to power the entirety of Port Heiden, including the idle fish-processing facility. The community also envisioned channeling hydropower to run a local greenhouse, where they could expand what crops they raise and the growing season, further boosting local food access and sovereignty.

In even that short period of whiplash—from being awarded the grant to watching it vanish—the village’s needs have become increasingly urgent. Meeting the skyrocketing cost of diesel, according to Christensen, is no longer feasible. The community’s energy crisis and ensuing cost of living struggle have already started prompting an exodus, with the population declining at a rate of little over 3 percent every year—a noticeable loss when the town’s number rarely exceeds a hundred residents to begin with.

“It’s really expensive to live out here. And I don’t plan on moving anytime soon. And my kids, they don’t want to go either. So I have to make it better, make it easier to live here,” Christensen said.

Janine Bloomfield, grants specialist at 10Power, the organization that Port Heiden partnered with to help write their grant application, said they are currently waiting for a decision to be made in the lawsuit “that may lead to the money being unfrozen.” In the interim, she said, recipients have been asked to work with Climate United on paperwork “to be able to react quickly in the event that the funds are released.”

For its part, Climate United is also now exploring other funding strategies. The coalition is rehauling the structure of the money going to Port Heiden and other Native communities. Rather than awarding it as a grant, where recipients would have to pay the costs upfront and be reimbursed later, Climate United will now issue loans to the communities originally selected for the pre-development grants that don’t require upfront costs and will be forgiven upon completion of the agreed-upon deliverables. Their reason for the transition, according to Langholz, was “to increase security, decrease administrative burden on our partners, and create credit-building opportunities while still providing strong programmatic oversight.”

Still, there are downsides to consider with any loan, including being stuck with debt. In many cases, said Chéri Smith, a Mi’Kmaq descendant who founded and leads the nonprofit Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, replacing a federal grant with a loan, even a forgivable one, “adds complexity and risk for Tribal governments.”

Forgivable loans “become a better option” in later stages of development or for income-generating infrastructure, said Smith, who is on the advisory board of Climate United, but are “rarely suitable for common pre-development needs.” That’s because pre-feasibility work, such as Port Heiden’s hydropower project, “is inherently speculative, and Tribes should not be expected to risk even conditional debt to validate whether their own resources can be developed.” This is especially true in Alaska, she added, where costs and logistical challenges are exponentially higher for the 229 federally recognized tribes than in the lower 48, and outcomes much less predictable.

Raina Thiele, Dena’ina Athabascan and Yup’ik, who formerly served in the Biden administration as senior adviser for Alaska affairs to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and former tribal liaison to President Obama, said the lending situation is particularly unique when it comes to Alaska Native communities, because of how Congress historically wrote legislation relating to a land claim settlement which saw tribes deprived of control over resources and land. Because of that, it’s been incredibly difficult for communities to build capacity, she noted, making even a forgivable loan “a bit of a high-risk endeavor.” The question of trust also shows up—the promise of loan forgiveness, in particular, is understandably difficult for communities who have long faced exploitation and discrimination in public and privatized lending programs. “Grant programs are a lot more familiar,” she said.

Even so, the loan from Climate United would only be possible if the court rules in its favor and compels the EPA to release the money. If the court rules against Climate United, Langholz told Grist, the organization could pursue damage claims in another court and may seek philanthropic fundraising to help Port Heiden come up with the $300,000, in addition to the rest of the $6 million promised to the nearly two dozen Native communities originally selected for the grant program.

“These cuts can be a matter of life or death for many of these communities being able to heat their homes.”

“These cuts can be a matter of life or death for many of these communities being able to heat their homes, essentially,” said Thiele.

While many different stakeholders wait to see how the federal funding crisis will play out, Christensen doesn’t know what to make of the proposed grant-to-loan shift for Port Heiden’s hydropower project. The landscape has changed so quickly and drastically, it has, however, prompted him to lose what little faith he had left in federal funding. He has already begun to brainstorm other ways to ditch diesel.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “I’ll find the money if I have to. I’ll win the lottery, and spend the money on cheaper power.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Many thousands of protesters jammed the streets around Manhattan’s Bryant Park on Saturday afternoon, defying the drizzle and chanting “No ICE! No KKK! No fascist USA!” before spilling into an enormous march down Fifth Avenue. New York City’s “No Kings” gathering trumpeted one message above all: Solidarity with immigrants, in the form of a fierce rebuke of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. The march unfolded throughout the afternoon with an attitude of joyful defiance in a festival-like atmosphere featuring clowns, singers, drummers, pets, long-time activists, and protest neophytes.

It was also massive, despite the persistent drizzle. Here's one vantage point on Fifth Ave.

— James West (@jamespwest.bsky.social) 2025-06-14T21:39:58.514Z

When I met Monica Pierce, a 55-year-old from Texas with Colombian heritage, she was standing alone with a sign that simply said “NO,” surrounded by colorful string lights. “This means a lot to me,” she said, gazing out on the crowd. “My mom went through a lot to come here.”

“I just can’t stand by anymore and just kind of like be ignorant. It just wouldn’t be right.”

“Seeing this hatred is just devastating,” she replied when I asked her what worried her about America these days. She is married to an immigrant, she said, and her daughter’s boyfriend is also an immigrant. “America is just becoming so divided and hateful and entrenched in their hate,” she said. Her husband, she told me, doesn’t feel safe to turn up to the protests, so she knows that she must.

Monica Pierce, a 55-year-old from Texas, said she turned up because her husband, an immigrant, cannot.James West/Mother Jones

Alexis Lazo, a 23-year-old musical theater student and actor, was hanging out on scaffolding on the south side of Bryant Park, taking in his first-ever protest. He used to be a self-described “centrist,” but as a child of immigrants himself, he no longer felt as if he could stand on the sidelines. Brandishing a sign that read “No Kings, No Cults, No Orange Tyrant,” he said, “I just can’t stand by anymore and just kind of like be ignorant,” adding, “It just wouldn’t be right.”

“Keep fighting for what is right,” he implored. “Please: Keep informing yourself—and share love, not hate.”

Musical theater student Alexis Lazo was taking in his first anti-Trump protest in Manhattan on Saturday.James West/Mother Jones

Other themes and causes were represented throughout the afternoon. June 14 was also the day early voting began in the city for the mayoral primary, so “Don’t Rank Cuomo!” was a frequent chant from those campaigning against former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is a frontrunner in the race for mayor. Their strategy: urge voters to leave him off the city’s ranked-choice voting ballot entirely. Other signs decried the war in Gaza, threats to students, and, of course, Trump himself.

Kaylyn Gibilterra, a 35-year-old tech worker, used the protest to showcase her insights and fears of Silicon Valley monopolies in the form of four 3D-printed handheld cut-out heads of tech bosses—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and, inevitably, Elon Musk. “It feels very much like we’ve gone back to like a feudalist state regime,” she told me. “My goal is to hold them more accountable and just show that we should talk about the size of these monopolies.”

Kaylyn Gibilterra, a 35-year-old tech worker (center), created four handheld heads of Silicon Valley titans to protest the oligarchic takeover of the government.James West/Mother Jones

“There’s a point in fascist states where people lose their right to think, to protest, to stand up.”

For others, the fight was even bigger. Quinn, a struggling 25-year-old artist who splits his time between New York City and his family home in Connecticut, turned up to champion the cause of non-violent protest and how it can change hearts and minds. He came to the city to find work in the arts, he said, but now this battle to save democracy has become his urgent calling. “As soon as the first person was deported illegally, without due process to a foreign prison, we became fascist,” he said. (Quinn didn’t want to give his last name.) “There’s a point in fascist states where people lose their right to think, to protest, to stand up.”

He stood with his mom on a Fifth Avenue stoop, watching the rain-jacket-clad young and old, Black, brown, and white protesters occasionally breaking into chants, or dancing to “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge booming from speakers. “There’s literally nothing easier than walking down the street with your peers, you know, chanting for your freedom and the freedom of all people,” he said. “That’s why America is great. That’s why America is going to continue to be great, and that’s why we can beat fascism.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

At the “No Kings” protest outside Nassau County’s main courthouse, on New York’s Long Island, as a crowd of perhaps 400 residents rallied against widespread attacks on Americans of all stripes by President Trump’s administration, dozens of protesters wore masks.

Witnessing the use of tear gas in Los Angeles and across the country, people understandably feared the same—especially with the Nassau County Police Department under fire for allegations of brutality and excessive force.

Amid rain, Long Island locals gathered under umbrellas, ponchos, rain coats, and the tall trees on the courthouse lawn in an attempt to stay dry during speeches. The crowd, largely an older demographic, carried posters decrying the administration’s actions and track record.

In this county, even wearing a mask can mean standing up against local government: in August, Nassau County lawmakers passed a bill banning the public wearing masks, making it the first individual county in the country—North Carolina previously passed a statewide mask ban—to do so after the start of the Covid pandemic.

Liam, a protester from Nassau County wearing a white respirator, linked the ban to the heavy police presence at the protest. “I think the mask ban is just a shallow way of trying to prevent people from hiding their identity or discouraging them from protesting,” he said. “I knew I was going to wear a mask, but I understand why someone else might not want to, just because of the fearmongering.”

Local lawmakers who supported the ban assured the public that there would be health exemptions—but as Mother Jones previously reported, the police who are expected to enforce the mask ban received basically no relevant training. Mask bans are poised to help authorities crack down on protestors, an approach the right-wing Manhattan Institute’s model mask ban legislation promotes, and that willfully ignores the continuing use of masks to protect against Covid-19.

“Masks are also a vital tool for medically vulnerable people to safely participate in public life, including protest,” New York Civil Liberties Union senior policy counsel Allie Bohm said to Mother Jones before the protest. “Any ban on masks effectively forces them to choose between their safety and their rights.”

The nonprofit Disability Rights New York brought a class action lawsuit against Nassau County over the mask ban on behalf of two individuals with disabilities, which was dismissed in September by a federal judge. The law makes wearing a mask punishable of a fine up to $1,000 or imprisonment for up to a year. Days before the planned protests, Nassau County police warned a local news station that anyone who, in the department’s view, conducted any illegal activity would be arrested. No one was arrested during Saturday’s protests, despite the criminalization of wearing masks for non-health reasons. Nassau County police on the scene declined to comment.

Kathy Brammer, a social worker based in Oyster Bay, New York, wore a hot pink respirator to the protest. She finds the mask ban to be “silly.”

“I have elderly parents, I have people [in my life] who are immunocompromised,” Brammer said. “The statistics and the science really say that this is what’s going to keep them safe, me safe, and everyone else safe.”

“We’re going to march just like everyone else,” said another masked woman who spoke with Mother Jones.

And as the Trump administration steps up its surveillance dragnet on protestors, immigrants, and anyone else it perceives as opposed to its agenda, masking can protect people from being targeted after protests (ICE seemingly wants to prevent its own officers being identified by wearing masks, too). Brittany, a protester from Nassau County wearing a surgical mask, said, “If ICE is going to wear a mask in their uniform, then I can wear a mask.”

“We’ve seen firsthand, from the government’s relentless efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, how being publicly identified at a protest can cause lasting, life-altering harm,” Bohm added. “Everyone has a constitutional right to speak out.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States Army. In 1916 on that same date, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the day Flag Day, which Congress made an official holiday in 1949. On June 14, 1946, Fred and Mary Anne Trump welcomed the birth of their second son Donald at Jamaica Medical Center in New York. And, on June 14, 2025, President Donald Trump has planned an extravagant and hugely expensive military parade down Constitution Ave. in Washington, DC, to celebrate the 250th birthday of the Army, and coincidentally, his 79th.

But also, on June 14, 2025, approximately 2,000 demonstrations in all fifty states—and some other countries—organized under the theme of “No Kings,” have been organized to protest Trump’s increasingly authoritarian rule. The protests were planned for months, but have gained further urgency over the last week, as the administration deployed the military to Los Angeles to quash generally peaceful protests against aggressive ICE immigration raids.

We will spend the day covering these protests as well as the parade this evening. As our Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery noted:

The "No Kings" organizers say that there are more than 1,800 protests planed for tomorrow.: www.nokings.orgWe'll have journalists at several of them, but you can tag @motherjones.com with your clips and tips.

— Clara Jeffery (@clarajeffery.bsky.social) 2025-06-13T15:42:02.438Z

June 14, 11:15 a.m. ET: Meanwhile, early morning in Los Angeles, where the Trump administration has deployed the Marines.

Cities prepare for ‘No Kings’ rallies as Marines arrive in LA https://t.co/2lDhwKWqBi pic.twitter.com/mQYSQHj2FM

— The Independent (@Independent) June 14, 2025

10:56 a.m. ET: The protests aren’t just in the US. Here are some scenes from abroad.

HAPPENING NOW: The “No Kings” protests have gone worldwide as protesters have gathered in Paris, France for a rally against the corrupt Trump regime (Video: Heidy Torres) pic.twitter.com/SmzCxZO2wi

— Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) June 14, 2025

10:11 a.m. ET: Some advice for protesters.

If you're going to a 'No King's Day' event tomorrow (and you should) please take a minute to familiarize yourself with your rights. pic.twitter.com/li2KDQWW0C

— Senator Heidi Campbell (@Campbell4TN) June 13, 2025

June 13, 1:30 p.m. ET: Dozens of current and former national politicians have taken to X (whose boss still can’t get back in Trump’s graces) to promote Saturday’s nationwide protests.

The most important words of our Constitution are the first three: We the People. We have no Kings here, no monarchs, no slaves and no subjects. We the People. pic.twitter.com/CzhJFrLkd7

— Rep. Jamie Raskin (@RepRaskin) June 12, 2025

Others include former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:

On "No Kings Day," we'll be peacefully demonstrating against a wannabe king and his trampling of our constitutional rights.And as we protest, we build solidarity.From that solidarity, we feel less alone and build courage for the work ahead. pic.twitter.com/LmXAjdsDnK

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) June 13, 2025

June 13, 7:30 a.m. ET: Asked whether Trump would allow protests around his planned military parade to go forward, White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt—calling the inquiry “stupid”—said:

“He supports the First Amendment. He supports the right of Americans to make their voices heard. He does not support violence of any kind. He does not support assaulting law enforcement officers who are simply trying to do their job.”

Trump, a notable instigator and excuser of assaults on law enforcement officers who were just trying to do their job, pardoned masses of January 6 insurrectionists just after his return to office—a slap in the face of multiple Capitol Police officers “grabbed, beaten, tased, all while being called a traitor,” in the words of former Washington, DC, officer Michael Fanone.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Car horns. Tambourines. Trumpets. Call-and-response chants. Wacking a spoon against a metal folding chair. Demonstrators outside Los Angeles-area hotels—where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are believed to be sleeping—are employing creative methods to keep those ICE agents awake. “No sleep for ICE” is the rallying cry, and the medium is noise.

ICE raids targeting Los Angeles County businesses are entering their eighth day, and the Trump administration clearly has been eager to keep tensions high in the area, appealing a federal order to withdraw the National Guard troops that California says were illegally deployed to the city. Protests have continued, too. For the past several nights, demonstrators have gathered outside hotels where they believe ICE agents are staying, almost all of them in small cities within Los Angeles County but outside LA proper, including Glendale, Pasadena, Whittier, Arcadia, and Burbank.

“Everyone just started doing laps while blasting horns so the little fuckers had a terrible sleep.”

KTLA reported that “a large crowd” gathered outside a DoubleTree in Whittier on Wednesday night, while a widely-circulated TikTok video from independent photojournalist Jeremy Lee Quinn shows demonstrators on a sidewalk outside a Hilton Garden Inn in Arcadia. A second TikTok video claims that ICE subsequently left the building. Journalist and filmmaker David Farrier shared footage of a protest outside a Hilton in Glendale, writing, “Everyone just started doing laps while blasting horns so the little fuckers had a terrible sleep.” He added, “And maybe Hilton will think twice about taking these rioting goons in again.” An Instagram video posted by the account All Things Labor shows a person exuberantly playing a trumpet, with text overlaid: “Heard ICE is trying to sleep. Time to pull out the trumpet. No sleep for kidnappers. ”

It was not immediately clear if ICE agents were actually in all of the targeted hotels. None of the hotels named in information circulating on social media responded to requests for comment from Mother Jones. Meanwhile, Los Angeles Magazine reported that hundreds of demonstrators gathered earlier this week in front of Pasadena’s AC Hotel to protest the reported presence of ICE agents there. One Instagram reel from a local musician who attended the event showed demonstrators chasing white cars marked “POLICE” through the hotel’s parking garage, cheering and shouting “Fuera ICE”—”Out ICE”—as they drove away.

“The hotel asked them to leave after we put on pressure,” text on thevideo read, over footage of people in black uniforms wheeling a loaded luggage cart out of the building. An AC Hotel employee speaking anonymously to Los Angeles said that some ICE agents had left “but the tires on their cars had been slashed (which is why they remained parked on the lot’s seventh level hours after checking out of AC Hotel.)”

In one case over the weekend, an elected official confirmed that ICE agents had been spotted at a hotel but evidently had since left. Besides making noise, demonstrators have also left a deluge of one-star Google reviews for the targeted hotels, many of them noting the presence of “rats.”

“Late last night and early this morning, we received several reports of immigration enforcement officers here in several Pasadena hotels,” State Senator Sasha Renee Perez said in a Sunday, June 8 video on Twitter/X. “We know that they actually have checked out of several of those hotels. And in many cases, several hotels have actually asked them to leave.”

There’s no clear timelines on when ICE might withdraw from the city, and the National Guard troops are expected to stay through the weekend. Large rallies are planned across the country, although downtown Los Angeles, choked with National Guard and law enforcement, may not see the same crowds as earlier in the week.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

A massive manhunt is underway in Minnesota, as law enforcement searches for the shooter responsible for the deaths of one state lawmaker and her spouse and the injuries of another lawmaker and his spouse, in what are described as two separate but “targeted shootings.”

In a news conference Saturday morning, Gov. Tim Walz said, “This was an act of targeted political violence.”

BREAKING: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz confirms that both Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot an killed early this morning in a "politically motivated" attack. John Hoffman and his wife are both out of surgery and doctors remain optimistically hopeful for their recovery. pic.twitter.com/nS5elAwoc0

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) June 14, 2025

Democratic state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark have died, the governor confirmed. Meanwhile, Democratic state Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were shot several times and after surgery are reported to be recovering. Walz described himself as being “cautiously optimistic” that they will survive the attacks. Both lawmakers were members of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party.

The identity of the shooter is not known, but authorities are speculating that the person may have been impersonating law enforcement when they appeared at the respective homes, which are located in the Minneapolis suburbs. A shelter-in-place alert has been issued for the community.

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety reported that at approximately 2 a.m. officers appeared at the home of Sen. Hoffman after receiving notice of the shooting. According to the local ABC affiliate KLTV, “When they arrived, they saw an SUV equipped with lights, mimicking a squad vehicle, and were confronted by a man dressed as an officer. DPS reported the man fired at police, who returned fire, before retreating into the home.”

The Minnesota Star Tribune reports:

Authorities investigating the shooting recovered an alleged manifesto.“There was a list of individuals and the individuals that were targeted were on that list,” said Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans.“When we did a search of the vehicle there was a manifesto that identified many lawmakers and other officials, we immediately made alerts to the state, who took action on alerting them and providing security where necessary,” Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley added.

This is a developing story.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Close to four hundred people, many of them wearing plastic gold crowns, assembled in the Hudson Valley town of New Paltz, New York, on Saturday morning for one of the first “No Kings” rallies of the day.

It was a large turnout for the town of roughly 15,000, which is part of a key swing district represented by Democratic Congressman Pat Ryan.

Trump’s shredding of the Constitution and his unprecedented deployment of the National Guard and Marines in response to the protests in Los Angeles were key themes of the rally.

Braving the cold and rain, hundreds appeared to protest.

“We are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution next year,” said Jen Metzger, the county executive of Ulster County, which includes New Paltz. “That was a war against tyranny. We are fighting a war against tyranny again.”

Attendees of the “No Kings” rally in New Paltz.

Democratic State Senator Michelle Hinchey, who represents the area, gave a fiery speech denouncing the militarized response to the LA protests against ICE immigration sweeps in the state and the attack on California Democratic Senator Alex Padilla.

“We are watching history unfold in real-time, when US senators are being thrown to the ground for asking a question,” Hinchey said. “When we are watching the very fabric of our country unravel, this is the moment in history where we will look back on and say where were you when?Where were you when we were watching dictators take over?”

NY State Sen Michelle Hinchey gave powerful speech at No Kings protest in New Paltz today. “When we are watching the very fabric of our country unravel, this is the moment in history where we will look back on and say where were you when? Where were you when we were watching dictators take over?"

— Ari Berman (@ariberman.bsky.social) 2025-06-14T18:04:03.618Z

Ryan, a former Army intelligence officer who is the first West Point graduate to represent the Academy in Congress, sharply criticized Trump’s speech to troops at Fort Bragg this week, where he said he would rename military bases after Confederate generals and announced thatthe military would be used to stop “an invasion” in California.

“Donald Trump has done more damage to our apolitical military just this week than every other President combined,” Ryan wrote on X.

Hinchey called the Hudson Valley “a bellwether” that would be critical to the Democrats’ chances of retaking the US House in 2026. “We will take back our flag,” Hinchey said at the rally, “and show what democracy looks like.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claimed on Wednesday that its plan to eviscerate power plant pollution standards will save the US about $1 billion a year. In reality, though, this represents a starkly uneven trade-off, experts say.

The savings for “Americans” will go entirely to power plant operators who won’t have to cut their pollution, while at the same time, climate and health benefits for all Americans that are 20 times larger in dollar terms will be deleted.

“The massive cost to the public compared to the minuscule benefits is breathtaking,” said Charles Harper, power sector campaigner at green group Evergreen Action. “The costs will be borne by the American people who will breathe dirtier air and those around the world suffering from climate change. The benefits will go to a very small group of donors. Perhaps they should change the name of the agency if they are no longer about protecting the health of Americans.”

“Perhaps they should change the name of the agency if they are no longer about protecting the health of Americans.”

The EPA is proposing to entirely ditch all restrictions on planet-heating emissions coming from US power plants, the second largest source of carbon pollution in the country, while also weakening a separate regulation designed to limit the amount of harmful toxins, such as mercury, seeping from these power plants into Americans’ air, water and soils.

These restrictions were imposed by Joe Biden to “advance the climate change cult” and the “green new scam,” according to Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, at an unveiling of the rollbacks on Wednesday that did not mention any benefit to the environment or public health.

“Together, these rules have been criticized as being designed to regulate coal, oil, and gas out of existence,” said Zeldin, who touted the need for “beautiful clean coal” and for the US to develop artificial intelligence, neither a core EPA responsibility.

In justifying its decision, the EPA has claimed that power plant emissions “do not contribute significantly” to the climate crisis—despite US electricity generation being one of the largest single sources of such pollution in the world—and that the rollbacks will save the country $19 billion over two decades, or about $1.2 billion a year.

However, this “saving” is entirely for the benefit of power plant operators who won’t have to install technology to reduce hazardous pollution, rather than the broader public. The EPA has said overall electricity costs will go down, too, but did not provide a figure on any estimated savings from this.

By contrast, the existing climate rule for power plants, put in place by Biden last year, was previously estimated by the EPA to save the US $370 billion by the 2040s, at about $20 billion a year, via climate and public health benefits. The rule is also expected to slash more than 1 billion tons in carbon emissions and save thousands of lives from reduced air pollution.

Experts said that the vast 20 to one discrepancy in benefits, and who they flow to, represents a damaging favor given to the fossil fuel interests that have strongly backed Trump, at the expense of the American public.

“American families will pay the cost of these rollbacks in higher healthcare bills from emergency room visits, missed work days, and missed school days.”

*“*The only people who benefit from these rollbacks are the biggest emitters of toxic pollution who don’t want to install cleaner technologies,” said Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a group composed of former EPA staff. “American families will pay the cost of these rollbacks in higher healthcare bills from emergency room visits, missed work days, and missed school days. This proposal is scientifically indefensible and represents a complete abdication of EPA’s responsibilities under the Clean Air Act.”

Under Trump, the EPA has set about dismantling an array of clean air and water protections and adopted the president’s agenda of boosting fossil fuel production. The agency argues that casting off such regulations will bolster the economy and save money for households.

“Coal and natural gas power plants are essential sources of base load power that are needed to fuel manufacturing and turn the United States into the artificial intelligence capital of the world,” said an EPA spokesperson. “Regulatory costs are inherently regressive—placing a heavier burden on those who can least afford it. These costs are ultimately borne by consumers in the form of higher utility bills and rolling blackouts.”

But, critics warn that the EPA’s traditional purpose to protect public health and the environment is being rapidly eroded.

“EPA’s proposal to stop regulating emissions of greenhouse gases and mercury from US power plants reflects Trump’s breathtaking willingness to sacrifice public health and progress against climate change in the service of the nation’s worst polluters,” said John Holdren, who served as Barack Obama’s science adviser. “In this and so many other ways, Trump and his enablers are doing their best to drive this country off a cliff.

“American jobs, economic competitiveness, health, environment, national security, and standing in the world are all in peril from Trump’s ignorance and reckless disregard for the public good,” said Holdren, who now co-directs the science, technology, and public policy program at Harvard University’s Belfer Center.The EPA announcement makes good on Trump’s campaign trail promise to “unleash American energy” and open “dozens and dozens” of power plants.

It came as part of Trump’s assault on pollution regulations. Taken together, his administration’s planned environmental rollbacks—including of power plant and tailpipe emission standards and clean energy incentives from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—will result in 22,800 additional pollution-related deaths and a $1.1 trillion reduction in US GDP by 2035, a University of Maryland study published on Thursday found.Julie McNamara, an associate director at the science, climate, and health-focused advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, said Zeldin’s Wednesday proposal was “shameful”.

“There’s no meaningful path to meet US climate goals without addressing carbon emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants—and there’s no meaningful path to meet global climate goals without the United States,” she said.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

Bill Cross pulled his truck to the side of a dusty mountain road and jumped out to scan a stretch of rapids rippling through the hillsides below.

As an expert and a guide, Cross had spent more than 40 years boating the Klamath River, etching its turns, drops, and eddies into his memory. But this run was brand new. On a warm day in mid-May, he would be one of the very first to raft it with high spring flows.

Last year, the final of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River were removed in the largest project of its kind in US history. Forged through the footprint of reservoirs that kept parts of the Klamath submerged for more than a century, the river that straddles the California-Oregon border has since been reborn.

The dam removal marked the end of a decades-long campaign led by the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath tribes, along with a wide range of environmental NGOs and fishing advocacy groups, to convince owner PacifiCorp to let go of the aging infrastructure. The immense undertaking also required buy-in from regulatory agencies, state and local governments, businesses, and the communities that used to live along the shores of the bygone lakes.

As the flows were released and the river found its way back to itself, a new chapter of recovery—complete with new challenges—emerged.

Among the questions still being answered: How best to facilitate recreation and public connection with the Klamath while recovery continues. There are hopes for hiking trails, campgrounds, and picnic spots. A wide range of stakeholders are still busy ironing out the specifics and how best to define the lines between private and public spaces.

It’s a delicate process. Not just the ecology is being restored; the Indigenous people whose ancestors relied on the river for both sustenance and ritual across thousands of years are also renewing their relationships with the land.

More than 2,800 acres, some of which emerged from under the drained reservoirs after the dams came down, will be returned to Shasta Indian Nation, a tribe that was decimated when construction on the dams started in the early 1910s. Ready to be stewards, they are also now navigating their role as landowners in a recreation region.

On May 15, the first opening day for new access sites on the Klamath, visitors got the first real glimpse of the extensive restoration efforts since demolition began in 2023. It also served as an early trial for how the public and an eager commercial rafting community might engage with the river and the landscapes that surround it.

As the sun broke through a week of cloudy weather that morning, rafters readied their gear near an access now bearing the traditional name in the Shasta language, K’účasčas (pronounced Ku-chas-chas).

“If we were here a little over a year ago, we would be standing on the edge of a reservoir.”

“If we were here a little over a year ago, we would be standing on the edge of a reservoir,” said Thomas O’Keefe, the director of policy and science for American Whitewater, as he helped Cross and Michael Parker, a conservation biologist, ready their boat for a stretch of river above where the Iron Gate dam once stood. The Guardian joined them to try the section on opening day.

O’Keefe has played a pivotal role in bridging recreation and restoration on the river. He hopes connecting people to the landscapes will encourage future care for them.

“The vast majority of people want to do the right thing,” O’Keefe said, describing the extreme care taken towards ecologically and culturally sensitive areas. “We want to make sure we can define where that can happen.”

There is still a lot of work left to do. Rustic roads that lead to the river’s edge are minimally paved and laden with potholes. It’s not immediately clear where visitors should park. Finishing touches are still being added on signs and infrastructure – from put-ins to picnic tables – with the completion of five new public recreation sitesplanned for August 1.

And for rafters, of course, the river itself must be relearned. Roughly 45 continuous miles were unleashed between the Keno and Iron Gate dams. Rapids, long-dependent on artificial surges from the hydropower operations, are at last being fueled by natural conditions.

“We are kind of writing the book on it,” said Bart Baldwin, the owner of Noah’s River Adventures, a commercial outfit out of Ashland, Oregon, who has taken guests downriver for decades. While he admits the releases from the dams made for “world-class” rapids, he says the loss has created new opportunities.

“The scenery is stunning and I think it’s going to be special.”

The waters of the Klamath have burst back to life in recent weeks, spurred by melt-off from strong winter storms. The Iron Gate Run bumps and sways through a mix of class II and class III rapids, enough for a fun ride that’s manageable for most experience levels. Upriver, the exciting and challenging K’íka·c’é·ki Canyon run winds through more than 2.5 miles of class IV rapids, beckoning those with more expertise.

As he called out paddling orders to navigate his boat’s small crew through splashy sections, Cross was relieved. In the years before the dams came out, he’d worked to outline the new river and its whitewater potential**,**armed with historical topographic maps, old photos, and bathymetric data that showed depth and underwater terrain. Rooted in science, it requires a bit of guesswork. The volcanic geology here often comes with surprises.

“I spent the first six months sweating bullets watching the water recede and the channel scour and wondering if there was going to be a waterfall I didn’t predict,” he said.

Even with strong flows, there was space to breathe between more challenging sections. There were spots to beach boats for a picnic lunch and places to quietly float through the vibrant scenery.

Vestiges of the recent past are still visible. Gradients of green shroud a scar left by the high-water mark of the reservoir. Columns of dried mud, remnants of the 15m cubic yards of sediment held behind the dams, are clumped along the river’s edge.

But there are also signs of nature’s resilience. Swaying willows stand stalwart from the banks. Behind them, rolling hills splashed with orange and yellow wildflowers and ancient basalt pillars stretch to the horizon. Far from the hum of the highway and roads, the silence here is broken only by the purr of the river as it rolls over rocks, accented with eagle calls or chattering sparrows who have already claimed sites along the water for their nests.

Years before the dams were demolished, as teams of scientists, tribal members, and landscape renovation experts tried to envision how recovery should unfold, there wasn’t a guidebook to go by. There weren’t records for how the heavily degraded ecosystems should look or function.

“Creating the mosaic we are currently seeing out there has been a work of educated estimation,” said Dave Coffman, a director for Resource Environmental Solutions (RES), the ecological recovery company working on the Klamath’s restoration. “There’s nothing in that watershed that hasn’t been touched by some sort of detrimental activity.”

In less than a year’s time a dramatic reversal has taken place. Some spots have bounced back beautifully. Others had to be carefully cultivated to mimic what could have been if the dams never disrupted them. Native seeds were cast across the slopes, some by hand and others from helicopters. Heavy equipment trucked away mounds of earth. Invasive plants were plucked from around the reservoir footprint before they could spread across the barren ground.

“We are giving nature the kickstart to heal itself.”

“We are giving nature the kickstart to heal itself,” said Barry McCovey Jr, the fisheries department director for the Yurok tribe. What he calls “massive scars” left by the dams “aren’t going to heal overnight or in a year or in 10 years”, he added. Giving the large-scale process, time will be important – but a little help can go a long way.

In late November last year, threatened coho salmon were seen in the upper Klamath River basin for the first time in more than 60 years. Other animals are benefiting, too, including north-western pond turtles, freshwater mussels, beavers, and river otters. It took mere months for insects, algae, and microscopic features of a flourishing food web to return and sprout. “It’s amazing to see river bugs in a river,” he said. They are good indicators of water quality and ecosystem health.

It might seem like a happy ending. McCovey Jr said it’s just the beginning. “We are going to have ups and downs and it will take a long time to get to where we want to be,” he said.

Ongoing Yurok projects will focus on making more areas “fish-friendly” and closely monitoring aquatic invertebrates in coordination with the other tribes, researchers, and advocacy organizations, and the Klamath River Renewal Corporation that was created to oversee the project.

There are also far-flung parts of the watershed they are still working to restore. Close to 47,000 acres of ancestral Yurok homelands in the lower Klamath basin will be returned to the tribe this year after being owned and operated for more than a century by the industrial timber industry. Considered the largest land-back conservation deal in California history, the work there will complement and benefit from what’s being done upriver.

Even as recovery on the riverremains perhaps at its most fragile, most people who have been part of this enormous undertaking are looking forward to welcoming the public.

“I think one of the biggest fears of this project is that it wouldn’t work,” Coffman said. “I am excited for more folks to get out here and see what we are capable of.”

The work goes beyond the water line. The lands that hug this river have had their own transformation, along with the people who once called them home.

“People are really focused on dam removal and fish and recreation—and those are all great things—but it is a very personal story for us,” said Sami Jo Difuntorum**,**cultural preservation officer for the Shasta Indian Nation. As the tribe returns to their ancestral lands, they are envisioning ways to introduce themselves to a largely unfamiliar public.

Their story is laced with tragedy, but also resilience. Shasta Indian Nation is not federally recognized, largely because they were massacred in the mid-19th century when gold-seeking settlers poured into the region. Their villages and sacred lands were drowned in the damming of the river. But the people tied to these lands have largely remained close by; many still reside in the county.

As the waters of the reservoirs receded, it revealed a place held at the heart of their culture for thousands of years.

“The return of our land is the most important thing to happen for our people in my lifetime.”

“The return of our land is the most important thing to happen for our people in my lifetime, for the generation before and the generation ahead,” Difuntorum said, standing on a quiet overlook watching the river course through the sacred K’íka·c’é·ki Canyon. This steep basalt chasm was left dewatered while the river was rerouted to the hydroelectric plant.

“There are so many things we are learning, like how to coexist as future landowners with the whitewater community, the local community, the fishermen—and then all the tribes,” she added. “It’s a lot—but it’s all good stuff. It’s huge for our people.”

Looking ahead, plans are being made both for public use and for tribal reconnection. There will be access trails across their lands and efforts to plant traditional medicinal and ceremonial plants. Old buildings that provided electricity from the plant will be converted into an interpretive center. Places have been picked for sweat lodges, an official tribal office, and the area where the first salmon ceremony will be held in more than century. Difuntorum’s grandsons— ages nine and six—will be dancing in that ceremony this year.

For the tribe, reconnecting to the river has provided an opportunity to reconnect to their culture and history.Part of reconnecting comes through reintroducing their language. James Sarmento, a linguist and tribal member, is helping Shasta people learn and use pronunciations for recovered places as they were once known along with the stories of creation tied to them. The public will learn them, too.

“It’s about making a relationship and having conversations with the land,” Sarmento said. “These are landscapes that we are not only working to protect—we are working to speak their names out loud.”

The darker moments in the tribe’s history live on. Remnants of the now-inoperable hydroelectric plant still sit solemnly on the embankment: coils of metal, enormous pipes, nests of wires that connect to nothing. A cave, tucked into the steep slopes among ancient lava fields where 50 or so Shasta people sought refuge in the mid-1800s, still bears the violent marks of a miners’raid that left five people, including women and children dead.

Difuntorum said it used to be hard for her to see it all. “I don’t feel that now,” she said. “Of all the places I have been in the world, this is where I feel the most me— out here at the water.”

Cross, O’Keefe, and Parker pulled up their paddles to ease into the final float of the run, gliding through the channel that once propped up the Iron Gate dam. Overhead, an osprey settled into its nest with a large fish as a throng of small birds scattered into the cloudless sky.

There are sure to be challenges ahead. The climate crisis has deepened droughts and fueled a rise in catastrophic fire as this region grows hotter. Habitat loss and water wars will continue as city sprawl, agriculture, and nature increasingly come into conflict.

For now, though, the river’s recovery is a hopeful sign that a wide range of interests can align to make a positive change, even in a warming world.

“I never thought I would see the run under reservoirs be revealed,” Cross said, smiling as he packed up his boat. As a new chapter begins, the Klamath has already become a story of what’s possible, fulfilling the hopes that the project could inspire others.

And, after decades of advocacy and years of work, “we have salmon and beaver and poppies,” he said. “This river will go on forever.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

On Wednesday, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security shared a propaganda poster on official accounts on X and Instagram. It featured Uncle Sam urging Americans to “Report All Foreign Invaders” by calling the Immigration and Customs Enforcement tipline. The image was first circulated by a white nationalist who has recently defended use of the n-word and shared material from an explicitly neo-Nazi X account, according to a review of social media activity.

“This should inspire you all. I made a digital poster,” a user who posted the n-word wrote on Wednesday. “TODAY OUR EFFORTS ARE COMING OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE!”

The anonymous user who claims to have created the doctored Uncle Sam image goes by the name Mr. Robert on X. The user, who has only about 350 followers on the site and whose bio states “Wake Up White Man,” first shared the image last Friday. It was then circulated by more prominent far-right users before being shared by DHS on Instagram and X, where it has 2.5 million followers. The White House also shared the poster with its 8.7 million followers on Instagram.

Help your country locate and arrest illegal aliens.To report criminal activity, call 866-DHS-2-ICE (866-347-2423). pic.twitter.com/VVy3TjKWhL

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) June 11, 2025

In response to a request for comment, DHS Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin declined to say how the department came across the image but did not deny that the Mr. Robert account created it. Instead, she said the “assertions” raised by Mother Jones were “fundamentally unserious and reflect the completely juvenile state of mainstream journalism.”

Mr. Robert’s extremism is obvious from its recent posts and reposts. On Friday, the user shared a white nationalist post from the “Aryan Defense League,” an openly neo-Nazi account that has frequently praised Adolf Hitler and has suggested that the Holocaust was justified. One day later, Mr. Robert wrote on his own behalf: “N[*****] is an English word used by our forefathers to call out savagery we still see in our American streets today. It’s not spoken in clicks. White Men created the word to call out what threatens his wife and children.”

Thanks to the Trump administration, the Mr. Robert account is now taking an extended victory lap. “This should inspire you all. I made a digital poster,” he wrote on Wednesday. “@whitelandia made some too and printed them out…TODAY OUR EFFORTS ARE COMING OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE!”

The Whitelandia account is transparently pro-Nazi and antisemitic. It has mocked remembrance of the Holocaust, shared a post from the “Aryan Defense League” featuring a Nazi soldier that calls on people to “Embrace your race,” and argued that only three flags should be allowed in the United States: The Stars and Stripes, the Confederate flag, and the Nazi swastika.

How the modified Uncle Sam poster came to the attention of the White House and DHS social media teams is unclear. Last Friday, C. Jay Engel, a right-wing X user, wrote on the platform that the “online right should be taking these old World War II American propaganda posters about buying war bonds and rewrite them with the ICE tip line number.” Mr. Robert replied with the Uncle Sam image. (Engel has since said on X that Mr. Robert created the image.)

In response to a request for comment from Mother Jones about his political views and role in promoting the image from the Mr. Robert account, Engel described himself as “Pat Buchanan conservative.” He added, “Nazism has no relevance to my American political vision. I consider it a wonderful thing that America finally has an administration that echos [sic] the interests and priorities of Heritage Americans.” (Engel has previously said that he is not a Nazi and does not “popularize Nazi ideology.”)

After Mr. Robert replied with the modified Uncle Sam image, Engel and other right-wing users on X shared it with their many followers—one of whom presumably works in the Trump administration or knows someone who does. That is hardly surprising: It has been obvious since the early days of this administration that many government social media accounts are now run by the kinds of trolls who were once confined to sites like 4chan.

On Wednesday, the DHS X account also shared a post from an account named memetic_sisyphus that is popular on the far right. Right-wing writer Nate Hochman, who was fired by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R-Florida) presidential campaign for secretly making video that included a Nazi symbol, appeared to celebrate DHS’ decision to amplify the account. Jack Posobiec, a “good” friend of Vice President JD Vance who has defended Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, did the same.

The people whose post on official government accounts are now amplifying envision an America that is forever dominated by whites—at almost any cost. In another post shared by Mr. Robert last Friday, a Nazi-looking soldier wears a gas mask and shoots off a flamethrower. “Due process is White culture,” the caption read. “It doesnt [sic] apply to nons.”

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As quickly as condemnation poured in over the forcible removal of Sen. Alex Padilla from a Department of Homeland Security press conference on Thursday, the right appeared to identify a different victim.

Kristi Noem, who, in her characteristic makeup and baseball cap, had been delivering a speech defending the president’s deployment of the military in Los Angeles, when Padilla, a Latino man and elected official, started to approach the podium. He is heard, despite what DHS falsely claimed after the incident, stating his identity. Still, at least four men are seen quickly pouncing on Padilla, shoving him out the door, while Noem continued with her prepared remarks.

But to the right, Noem was the wrong party. For them, the incident seems to have transformed her into something of a wounded dove by the incident. “She’s like the most delicate, beautiful, tiny woman,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said during an appearance on Benny Johnson’s podcast. She also took a shot at Padilla’s manhood. “What actual testosterone dude goes in and tries to break Kristi Noem?”

Break Noem? Padilla may have been there to call out cruelty. But the senior senator from California was not there to break anyone. That a woman who sits atop an agency ruthlessly profiling and deporting immigrants, and in some cases, sending them to a Salvadoran gulag with no due process, is suddenly unable to be confronted by an elected official without them being physically assaulted is risible. Yet, Noem’s rise to power has long seemed to rely on this intentional contradiction: perfectly styled hair while deriding caged immigrants in the background; heavily caked makeup while tagging along for made-for-TV immigration raids; tough on crime but “delicate, beautiful, tiny.” As I wrote in a recent piece, it is the push for regressive gender roles by an increasingly fascist administration.

But conservative gender norms have nothing on the glaring racism in the suggestion that Noem, a white woman, is the victim after a Latino man is physically dragged out of a room by multiple Secret Service agents. The pretext of criminality attached to people who are not white pervades this administration. Just this week, Rep. LaMonica McIver, a Black congresswoman from New Jersey, was indicted on charges of impeding and interfering with law enforcement officials after protesting at an ICE facility last month. The charges, which carry a maximum of 17 years in prison, come despite shifting explanations from the Trump administration about what led to McIver’s arrest. McIver has condemned the charges as politically motivated; as the New York Times reported, far-right groups have since targeted McIver with intense racism online.

Both incidents, Noem’s press conference and McIver’s arrest, underscore with acute clarity the racist themes that animate this administration. In these early days of our fascist slide, it is painfully clear who gets to be “delicate, beautiful, and tiny,” and who is seen as a violent threat to law enforcement.

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As Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem talked about the need to apply constitutional rights to all citizens in a Thursday press conference,Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), ostensibly an unannounced guest, approached the podium.

“I’m Sen. Alex Padilla,” he is seen stating. “I have questions for the secretary.”

BREAKING: California Democratic Senator @AlexPadilla4CA just crashed DHS Secretary Noem’s press conference in LA and was forcibly removed. pic.twitter.com/Q2sUWiImAM

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) June 12, 2025

Despite the disclosure that he was a sitting US senator, at least four security members were seen forcibly pushing and dragging Padilla out of the room as he condemned the false narrative that the immigrants targeted in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda are criminals. Noem did not appear to acknowledge Padilla’s presence or his forced removal, while she continued with her speech defending the president’s deployment of the military in Los Angeles. Another video showed officers handcuffing Padilla.

In a statement, DHS falsely accused Padilla of failing to identify himself. (He can be heard in videos that have circulated on social media doing just that.) “Sen. Padilla chose disrespectful political theatre and interrupted a live press conference without identifying himself or having his Senate security pin on as he lunged toward Secretary Noem,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Mother Jones.

“Mr. Padilla was told repeatedly to back away and did not comply with officers’ repeated commands. US Secret Service thought he was an attacker, and officers acted appropriately. Secretary Noem met with Senator Padilla after and held a 15-minute meeting.”

The altercation comes amid a chilling use of law enforcement to arrest Democrats and elected officials peacefully protesting the administration’s immigration crackdown. Just this week, Democratic Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey was indicted on three counts after her protest outside an ICE facility last month. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was also arrested at the same demonstration, but the charges against him were eventually dropped.

The unbridled willingness to punish elected officials, through forceful removal and criminal apprehension, marks a key escalation point in the Trump administration’s embrace of blatantly authoritarian tendencies, as they seek to crush dissent, peaceful or not. And it carries the tacit approval of the president. “If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” Trump said this week in advance of his military-birthday parade in DC this weekend.

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On Monday, as ICE swept Los Angeles with raids in President Donald Trump’s escalating drive for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, a client of the Survivor Justice Center had an appointment for a court hearing.

The purpose was to secure a permanent, five-year restraining order against her abuser, who had already violated a temporary restraining order, according to Carmen McDonald, executive director of the organization, which supports immigrant survivors of domestic violence. The woman had been dealing with extensive physical abuse, McDonald said, which—coupled with her abuser’s violation of a prior order—made getting stronger protection critical.

But on Tuesday, the day after the hearing was to take place, McDonald learned from a staffer that the survivor had not shown up. Based on the woman’s immigration status, prior concerns she had shared with staff, the fact that ICE has been ramping up arrests at courthouses, and the agency’s ongoing raids across LA, McDonald and her staff believe the woman was likely afraid of being detained. As of Thursday, their client remains missing—“likely back with her abuser,” McDonald says. If so, she could be in serious danger: Advocates say survivors wind up at increased risk just after they file for a restraining order or try to leave an abuser.

“She literally had to choose [between] physical harm or potential [ICE] custody,” said McDonald, who added that the survivor had a pathway to citizenship independently from her abuser. McDonald believes that “it’s the fear and the tearing apart of families that kept her in a dangerous situation.”

“She literally had to choose: physical harm or potential [ICE] custody.”

McDonald is one of a half-dozen domestic violence service providers in the LA area who told Mother Jones that the increased presence of ICE over the past week is creating a chilling effect for their organizations and the undocumented survivors they serve. Despite President Donald Trump’s claims he would “protect women,” advocates contend that intense immigration enforcement in LA and elsewhere is putting women and LGBTQ people, who experience the majority of domestic violence, at increased risk by making them less likely to seek help for fear of being detained.

A recent federal policy change allowing immigration enforcement at domestic violence shelters and similar organizations has also created more barriers for undocumented survivors, who advocates say already deal with abusers threatening to report them to ICE or take their children out of the country as means of control.

“When you send enforcement agents into courthouses and you take such broad immigration actions, you’re actually making it less safe for survivors because of this chilling effect,” said Connie Chung Joe, chief executive officer of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California. “Now victims are more scared about getting detained or separated from their children and family, and that becomes scarier than [not] being able to protect themselves against their abusers.”

Local domestic violence advocates say the prospect of ICE appearing at shelters is their worst fear. That has become a more pressing concern since January, when the Trump administration rescinded guidance the Biden administration implemented characterizing domestic violence shelters and victim services centers, among others, as “protected spaces” where immigration enforcement should not take place due to the harm it could inflict on a community. The Trump administration’s updated guidance says ICE officials will make “case-by-case determinations regarding whether, where and when to conduct an immigration enforcement action in or near a protected area.”

According to Cristina Verez, legal and policy director at the immigrants’ rights organization ASISTA, the policy change led to “a flood of concerns and questions about what that meant for [domestic violence] orgs and how they could…protect everyone at those locations.” Several service providers in LA note that many of their staff are also from mixed-status families, making the concerns relevant to both staff and survivors.

“It’s the fear and the tearing apart of families that kept her in a dangerous situation.”

The policy change already appears to be having an impact. On Wednesday, LA city councilor Hugo Soto-Martinez said in a video posted to Instagram that ICE had shown up at a confidential domestic violence shelter, apparently in search of one person who was not present. “How they found out this information, we don’t know,” Soto-Martinez said in the video. (Federal laws protect individual survivors’ confidentiality, and many shelters keep their locations secret.) “These are places where people go and find refuge and try to be safe fleeing violence,” the lawmaker added. (His office did not immediately provide further information on the alleged incident; spokespeople for ICE, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and LA Mayor Karen Bass did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.)

Chung Joe, McDonald, and two other LA service providers say their organizations have seen increases just this past week in survivors calling and asking for advice on how to navigate ICE. “Our clients are calling and scared, asking, ‘Can I go to my doctor’s appointment? Can I go to this Pride event? Can I take my kids to school?’” McDonald said. She added that of the approximately 1,000 survivors her organization serves per year, 70 percent are immigrants and more than half of those are undocumented. Another LA-area service provider who is not being identified for fear of retaliation added: “Domestic violence programs, rape crisis programs, should be safe sanctuaries, and we can’t even guarantee that anymore.”

LA-area service providers said they have ramped up “know your rights” trainings and implemented pandemic-era precautions to avoid potential raids. One LA organization that supports South Asian survivors said that its staff has been working from home since Monday, leaving their in-person office temporarily closed.

Two other organizations located in areas close to raids also reported closing physical spaces where survivors can typically drop in to get resources; one provider said her organization left a note on its door instructing survivors to call their help line for assistance, and started what she calls “difficult conversations” with clients in shelter about how to prepare for the worst-case scenario: line up emergency contacts, gather their documents, and designate someone safe to take care of their kids if they are detained. “We don’t know if we’re sending a client to sit in a lobby to wait for a service, [if] ICE will come in,”the provider said.

Some providers say their clients have also been afraid to appear in-person for courthearings—as McDonald believes her missing client was—and have instead opted for virtual appointments. In California, state courts do not deport undocumented people, who can access domestic violence restraining orders and other family court services regardless of their status. Immigrant survivors of domestic violence and related crimes can also often access pathways to citizenship through special visas. But these protections can feel meaningless for undocumentedsurvivors in light of Trump’s mass deportation efforts coupled with ICE’s increasing presence in and near courthouses. “They can’t afford to be detained and separated from their children or their families, so they’d rather just stay with their abusers,” said Chung Joe.

“If we keep these individuals from walking through the doors to any of these facilities because of fear, then as society, we have failed them.”

Some lawmakers have floated special protections for domestic violence shelters that they say are newly relevant in light of what’s happening in LA. Susan Rubio, a Democratic state senator in California, has put forth a bill that would prohibit immigration enforcement in private sections of shelters for homelessness, human trafficking, and domestic violence, along with rape crisis centers, without a judicial warrant. “If we keep these individuals from walking through the doors to any of these facilities because of fear, then as society, we have failed them,” said Rubio, who is also a survivor of domestic violence. The legislation has passed the Senate and has been referred for committee hearings in the Assembly. Similar legislation was recently proposed in New York and signed into law:%20June%201%2C%202025) in Maryland.

Casey Swegman, director of public policy at Tahirih Justice Center, an organization that serves immigrant survivors, said she is “heartened that states are taking up the mantle,” adding that these bills “empower the staff at those agencies to leverage the law to better implement policies at their shelter.”

At the federal level, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) has reintroduced the WISE Act in this session of Congress, a bill that offers a slate of additional protections for immigrant survivors, including prohibiting protections at domestic violence shelters and similarly sensitive locations. “When ICE shows up at domestic violence shelters or arrests survivors seeking help, it only empowers abusers, who too often use immigration status as a threat to keep people in abusive situations. This also impacts public safety overall by making immigrants fearful of local police and less likely to report abuse,” Jayapal said in a statement provided to Mother Jones.

As promising as those bills may be, advocates say they cannot stem the immediate fear facing undocumented survivors, in LA and across the country. “Our clients are already living in fear,” McDonald, from Survivor Justice Center, points out. “Now, they’re afraid at home and they’re afraid in the community.”

If you or someone you care about is experiencing or at risk of domestic violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by texting “start” to 88788 or calling 800-799-SAFE (7233) or visiting thehotline.org. The Alliance for Immigrant Survivors also offers a list of resources, and the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence maintains a directory of organizations across the state.

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This story was published first byProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up forProPublica*’s Big Story newsletter to receive our biggest stories as soon as they are published.*

In mid-April, President Donald Trump sat down in the Oval Office with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to celebrate a new partnership. They had recently negotiated an extraordinary deal in which El Salvador agreed to incarcerate in a maximum security prison hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants that the Trump administration had labeled as violent criminals, though few had been convicted of such crimes. The US also sent back accused members of the notorious Salvadoran gang MS-13—which both the US and El Salvador have designated as a terrorist organization.

Bukele’s presidency has been defined by his successful crackdown against MS-13. He has jailed tens of thousands of alleged gang members, transforming one of the hemisphere’s most dangerous nations into one of its safest. Although human rights groups have criticized his tactics, Bukele remains extremely popular in El Salvador.

During their meeting at the White House, Trump praised his guest as “one hell of a president.” He shook Bukele’s hand, saying, “We appreciate working with you because you want to stop crime and so do we.”

A long-running US investigation of MS-13 has uncovered evidence at odds with Bukele’s reputation as a crime fighter. The inquiry, which began as an effort to dismantle the gang’s leadership, expanded to focus on whether the Bukele government cut a secret deal with MS-13 in the early years of his presidency.

New reporting on that investigation by ProPublica shows that senior officials in Bukele’s government repeatedly impeded the work of a US task force as it pursued evidence of possible wrongdoing by the Salvadoran president and his inner circle.

Bukele’s allies secretly blocked extraditions of gang leaders whom US agents viewed as potential witnesses to the negotiations and persecuted Salvadoran law enforcement officials who helped the task force, according to exclusive interviews with current and former US and Salvadoran officials, newly obtained internal documents and court records from both countries.

In a previously unreported development, federal agents came to suspect that Bukele and members of his inner circle had diverted US aid funds to the gang as part of the alleged deal to provide it with money and power in exchange for votes and reduced homicide rates. In 2021, agents drew up a request to review US bank accounts held by Salvadoran political figures to look for evidence of money laundering related to the suspected diversion of US funds. The list of names assembled by the agents included Bukele, senior officials and their relatives, according to documents viewed by ProPublica.

“Information obtained through investigation has revealed that the individuals contained within this submission are heavily engaged with MS-13 and are laundering funds from illicit business where MS-13 are involved,” the agents wrote. The people on the list “are also believed to have been funding MS-13 to support political campaigns and MS-13 have received political funds.”

The outcome of the request is not known, but its existence shows that the US investigation had widened to examine suspected corruption at high levels of the Bukele government.

The investigation was led by Joint Task Force Vulcan, a multiagency law enforcement team created at Trump’s request in 2019. Agents found evidence that the Bukele government tried to cover up the pact by preventing the extraditions of gang leaders who faced US charges that include ordering the murders of US citizens and plotting to assassinate an FBI agent.

In addition, US officials helped at least eight of their counterparts in Salvadoran law enforcement flee the country and resettle in the United States or elsewhere because they feared retaliation by their own government, current and former US officials said.

It has been clear from the beginning what Trump wants from El Salvador: an ally who would accept, and even imprison, deportees. Less clear has been what Bukele might want from the United States. In striking the deal with the Salvadoran president, Trump has effectively undercut the Vulcan investigation and shielded Bukele from further scrutiny, current and former US officials said.

Veterans of the Vulcan team are “concerned that all their work, the millions of dollars that were spent, going all over the United States, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, that it will be weakened for political reasons,” said a US official familiar with the investigation.

The task force worked closely with the Salvadoran attorney general’s office, whose prosecutors shared evidence from their own investigation of the gang negotiations and suspected graft in the Bukele government, according to current and former US and Salvadoran officials.

“There was good information on corruption between the gang and the Bukele administration,” Christopher Musto, a former senior official at Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, who worked on Vulcan, said about the Salvadoran investigation. “It was a great case.”

In May 2021, Bukele’s legislative majority in Congress ousted the attorney general and justices of the Supreme Court, which oversees extradition requests. Within seven months, newly installed justices reversed or halted six requests for senior gang leaders wanted in the US, according to interviews and documents.

“Bukele’s people were coming to the Supreme Court and saying under no circumstances are we extraditing the MS-13 leaders,” said the US official familiar with the investigation. “‘Delay, interfere, undermine, do what you have to do.’”

Senior Bukele officials helped an MS-13 leader with a pending extradition order escape from prison, according to court records, US officials and Salvadoran news reports. At least three other top gang leaders were released from Salvadoran custody after the US filed extradition requests for them, according to Justice Department documents.

Published accounts in the United States and El Salvador have reported allegations that Bukele also pushed for the return of MS-13 leaders to prevent them from testifying in US courts about the pact. Despite his government’s refusal to extradite gang bosses to the United States, the Trump administration in March deported one MS-13 leader accused of terrorism. The Justice Department is now seeking to dismiss charges against a second leader, which would allow him to be sent back to El Salvador, according to recent court filings.

The Justice Department declined to comment in response to questions sent by ProPublica. The State Department referred questions to the Justice Department.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to detailed questions.

“President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people and removing dangerous criminals and terrorist illegals who pose a threat to the American public,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson. “We are grateful for President Bukele’s partnership.”

Bukele, the Salvadoran Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Salvadoran Supreme Court did not respond to lists of questions. Bukele has repeatedly denied making any agreement with MS-13. The Trump administration’s deportation of MS-13 members to El Salvador, he said in a post on X, will enable security forces to dismantle the gang.

“This will help us finalize intelligence gathering and go after the last remnants of MS-13, including its former and new members, money, weapons, drugs, hideouts, collaborators, and sponsors,” the post said.

“Just Fear”

Bukele was elected president of El Salvador in February 2019, promising to fight the country’s ingrained political corruption and pervasive gang violence, which he called “one of the greatest challenges” facing the nation.

During his first term, Trump also made MS-13 a high-profile foe, calling it “probably the meanest, worst gang in the world.” In August 2019, Attorney General William P. Barr created the Vulcan task force, teaming federal prosecutors with agents of the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies. The goal: Eradicate MS-13.

For decades, MS-13 has bedeviled law enforcement in the Americas with its vast reach, extreme violence and complex culture. The initials stand for “Mara Salvatrucha.” “Mara” means a swarm, while “salvatrucha” has been said to refer to a clever Salvadoran, according to interviews and an academic study. The number represents the 13th letter of the alphabet, M, in homage to the Mexican Mafia, the powerful Southern California prison gang.

MS-13 emerged in the 1980s in Los Angeles among Salvadoran youths whose families had fled a bloody civil war. The gang expanded throughout the diaspora and, as the US deported planeloads of ex-convicts starting in the 1990s, took root in El Salvador. Although most of the leaders were serving sentences in El Salvador, a jailhouse council of 14 bosses, known as the “Ranfla,” used cellphones to micromanage criminal activities in US cities thousands of miles away.

The gang developed a reputation for torturing, brutalizing and dismembering its victims. Barr has called it “a death cult” in which violence is more important than riches.

“It was like a very violent mom-and-pop operation where the cousins and second cousins all want to be a part of it,” said Carlos Ortiz, who served as the HSI attaché in El Salvador from 2018 to 2024. “Minimal money, compared to others. Even though it’s an organization, a lot of it is just fear. Fear of the high-ranking bosses among the rest of the gang, that’s what drives it.”

Trained with military weapons, MS-13 warred with security forces in El Salvador, took over neighborhoods and generated one of the world’s worst homicide rates, driving an exodus of immigrants reminiscent of the 1980s. The Salvadoran Supreme Court designated the gang as a terrorist organization in 2015.

The Vulcan task force had about 30 members, including prosecutors, agents and analysts. Its director, John J. Durham, was a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York who had spent a decade pursuing MS-13 cliques on Long Island. Members of the task force worked from bases around the country and traveled to Mexico and Central America.

One of the founding investigators, Newark FBI agent Daniel Brunner, spoke fluent Spanish and had worked gangs for seven years. He became a roving specialist providing expertise, communications intelligence and court transcripts, sometimes in person and sometimes from a distance.

“Our idea was that Vulcan was like a SEAL Team 6, going in to help the different districts build cases,” Brunner, who is now retired, said in an interview.

Vulcan built on the longtime US presence and extensive influence in El Salvador, where the embassy has long funded and trained law enforcement agencies. FBI agents and others were embedded as advisers in police anti-gang and homicide units and worked with prosecution teams led by Attorney General Raúl Melara.

The US task force modeled its strategy on the ones used against Mexican cartels and Colombian narcoguerrillas: Break the power of the MS-13 bosses by extraditing them to face trial and prison in the United States.

On Jan. 14, 2021, six days before the end of the Trump administration, Durham and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray joined acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen when he announced “the highest-reaching and most sweeping indictment targeting MS-13 and its command and control structure in US history.”

Prosecutors charged the 14 members of the leadership council with major crimes including conspiracy to support and finance narcoterrorism. For more than two decades, the Ranfla ran a criminal network in the United States, Mexico and Central America that sanctioned the murders of Americans and trafficked drugs and arms, the indictment alleged.

The indictment contained a stunning charge: MS-13 bosses had taken the extraordinary step of giving an order, or “green light,” to assassinate an FBI agent working with local investigators in El Salvador. Embassy officials learned of the threat and evacuated the agent, according to interviews.

It is highly unusual for Latin American criminal groups to target a US agent—they have learned that it invites an overwhelming law enforcement response. The assassination plot was a sign that the US crackdown had rattled the gang chiefs, current and former officials said.

Vulcan on the Hunt

In conversations with American officials as president-elect, Bukele promised cooperation and welcomed their support against gangs and graft, even in his own Nuevas Ideas party, according to current and former US officials.

At a press event about the Vulcan task force in 2020, Trump asserted that in the past El Salvador “did not cooperate with the United States at all,” but now it had become a strong law enforcement partner.

Already, though, there had been news accounts alleging that Bukele had cut deals with gangs when he was mayor of San Salvador. Vulcan investigators quickly found evidence that top aides to the new president were negotiating a new pact with gang chiefs, according to interviews.

For more than a decade, MS-13’s control of the streets had made it a political force. It could deliver votes, ignite mayhem or impose order. A series of politicians had held talks with gang leaders to seek electoral support and reductions in violence in return for improved prison conditions and perks such as prostitutes and big-screen televisions.

The Bukele government adopted a more sophisticated bargaining strategy, according to current and former US and Salvadoran officials. During secret meetings in prisons and other sites, the president’s emissaries offered MS-13 leaders political power and financial incentives if they lowered the homicide rate and marshaled support for the Nuevas Ideas party, according to current and former US and Salvadoran officials and court documents.

The chief negotiator was Carlos Marroquín, a former rap artist and confidant of the president. Bukele had appointed him the director of a new Justice Ministry program known as “Reconstruction of the Social Fabric” that operated in impoverished communities.

Marroquín promised the Ranfla a central role in developing the program, control of neighborhood youth centers, power over urban turf and other financial and political benefits, according to current and former US officials, court documents and Treasury Department sanctions. Informants and communications intercepts indicated that some of the resources going to MS-13 came from US government aid, a violation of US law, according to interviews and documents.

“Money was going from us, from USAID, through to this social fabric group,” a former federal law enforcement official said. “They’re supposed to be building things and getting skills and learning. It was funding the gangs.”

Vulcan also gained information from two highly placed Salvadoran officials involved in the talks with MS-13. The officials provided inside information to US agents about the negotiations, which they said Bukele directed, according to interviews.

The accumulating evidence about the gang pact and the suspected misuse of US funds spurred the task force to broaden its initial focus and target alleged corruption in the Bukele government, current and former US officials said.

In April 2021, federal agents prepared a list of powerful Salvadorans for a financial review by the US Treasury Department. Bukele was one of the 15 names. So were Marroquín; Osiris Luna, the director of the national prison system and another alleged organizer of the gang talks; Martha Carolina Recinos, the president’s chief of staff; and other political figures and their relatives. The request asked the Treasury Department to search for possible illicit transactions in any bank accounts held in the United States by those on the list, according to documents seen by ProPublica.

The Vulcan task force was seeking evidence in US banks of money laundering tied to the diversion of USAID funding through the gang pact, the documents showed. Agents explained that the task force had “uncovered information that MS-13 members are in close contact with politically exposed persons in El Salvador,” referring to prominent government figures.

“The USAID funding is believed to have been laundered by the individuals submitted in this request,” who were suspected of “facilitating, supporting and promoting MS-13 through their official positions,” said the request, which was viewed by ProPublica.

Made under section 314A of the USA Patriot Act, the request for a canvass of US banks requires that investigators show reasonable suspicion rather than probable cause, which is a higher standard. The outcome of the request is unknown. The Treasury Department declined to comment. US prosecutors have not publicly accused Bukele and the others of crimes related to USAID funds.

As US investigators advanced in this political direction, they gained valuable information from the Salvadoran prosecutors who were pressing their own investigation of the gangs and the Bukele administration.

Known in English as Operation Cathedral, their probe was as ambitious and sensitive as the US one. Investigators had documented the secret jailhouse deals with MS-13 and the official attempts to cover them up. They also pursued leads that revealed alleged widespread corruption involving the country’s COVID-19 relief programs, according to current and former US and Salvadoran officials and documents. Political tensions increased as the Salvadoran prosecutors targeted the president’s inner circle and raided government offices, clashing with police who tried to stop them from searching the Health Ministry in one incident.

April 2021 was also when a delegation led by Attorney General Melara came to Washington to meet with leaders of Vulcan and other senior US officials. The prosecutors laid out their case against prominent figures in the Bukele government. The “impressive” presentation, a former US federal law enforcement official said, cited videos, phone intercepts and other evidence showing that Marroquín, prisons director Luna and others had clandestinely arranged for government negotiators and gang leaders to enter and leave prisons, smuggled in phones and destroyed logs of prison visits.

“Melara was very nervous because of the very high level of the people he was investigating,” a former US federal law enforcement official said.

Melara declined to comment, saying he does not discuss his work as attorney general.

Interference

On May 1, 2021—soon after Melara and his team met with US investigators—the Salvadoran Legislature, controlled by Bukele, voted to expel the attorney general and five justices on the Supreme Court.

The purge was a decisive step by Bukele to centralize power. It drew international condemnation. In El Salvador, critics denounced the president’s actions as a “self-coup.” On his Twitter page, Bukele began calling himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”

For Vulcan, the expulsions marked a dramatic shift in its investigation. The Supreme Court justices had signaled their willingness to sign off on some extraditions. Melara had been a helpful ally who reportedly pledged to do “everything necessary” to extradite the Ranfla members, many of whom were in custody in El Salvador. But it soon became clear that the government was no longer interested in handing over senior gang leaders.

“The next prosecutors were not willing to work with us,” said Musto, the former HSI official. “We were not closed out, but all these things that we had in place that we were moving to getting people back here slowed down to a snail’s pace.”

The first clash came over Armando Melgar Diaz, an alleged MS-13 leader who acted as a middleman between gangs in the United States and senior leaders in El Salvador. Melgar, known as “Blue,” had ordered the kidnapping of a family in Oklahoma that owed the gangs $145,000, collected money from a drug ring operating out of restaurants in Maryland and Virginia and was involved with killings in the US, according to an indictment and interviews with US officials. He was the first MS-13 member to be accused under terrorism laws.

The newly constituted Supreme Court voted to approve Melgar’s extradition but then reversed its decision, announcing that the matter needed further study. Later, Bukele’s new attorney general asked for a halt to the extradition. The reason: The United States had failed to guarantee that it would not seek the death penalty or life in prison, sentences not allowed under Salvadoran law.

The rationale made no sense to Vulcan prosecutors. The Justice Department had already promised that it would not pursue such punishments against Melgar, according to records and interviews. US and Salvadoran officials attributed the sudden reversal to fear that Melgar could link Bukele and his government to the pact with MS-13.

“Melgar Diaz was going to be the test case,” Musto said. “It was going to be an easy win for Vulcan.”

Information obtained by US agents included allegations that Bukele’s judicial adviser, Conan Castro-Ramírez, had called one of the new Supreme Court justices and told him to find ways to stop the extradition of Melgar, according to interviews. When the justice objected, saying that the extradition had already been approved, Castro allegedly ordered him to reverse it. “That’s why we put you there,” he said, according to the interviews.

The State Department sanctioned Castro for his role in assisting in the “inappropriate removal” of the Supreme Court justices and the attorney general. Castro did not respond to attempts to contact him.

A Salvadoran court sentenced Melgar to 39 years in prison for conspiracy to commit homicide, among other crimes. He was the first MS-13 leader whose extradition was blocked. Soon after, the US extradition requests for other gang chiefs ran into opposition.

“Bukele and his government are using the entire state apparatus to prevent these people from being extradited,” a person with knowledge of the Salvadoran judicial system said in a recent interview.

Miguel Ángel Flores Durel, a newly appointed Supreme Court justice who reportedly had served as a lawyer for a top MS-13 leader, made sure that the requests were never granted, according to the person with knowledge of El Salvador’s judicial system. Flores instructed colleagues “do not work on extraditions at all,” the person said.

In July 2022, El Salvador agreed to extradite two lower-ranking MS-13 members charged with the murders of Salvadoran immigrants in Long Island in 2016 and 2017 in which victims were butchered with axes and machetes. The Supreme Court also approved the return of Salvadorans not affiliated with the gang who were accused in the US of crimes such as murder.

This was a deliberate strategy, the person said. Flores said that El Salvador needed to continue some extraditions in order to “calm” US officials, who were complaining about the lack of cooperation with Vulcan, the person said. (Flores died in 2023.)

It didn’t work. The extradition of other criminals by the Bukele-aligned Supreme Court only emphasized the lack of cooperation on requests for the senior MS-13 leaders.

“We were never told officially that it wouldn’t happen, but it became impossible,” said Brunner, the former FBI agent.

In October 2022, Bukele’s new attorney general announced that criminals would first have to serve their sentence in El Salvador before being sent to the US—an interpretation of the country’s extradition treaty that differed from the previous Supreme Court.

“We aren’t going to be sending Salvadorans without them first paying for the crimes they have committed” in El Salvador, Rodolfo Delgado said.

Threats and Roadblocks

The Bukele government’s interference with the US investigation went beyond blocking extraditions, US officials said.

Senior Bukele allies also waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the Salvadoran officials who had investigated corruption and assisted the Vulcan task force, according to interviews with current and former US and Salvadoran officials.

The government threatened officials with arrest and sent police patrols to their homes, according to current and former US and Salvadoran officials. At least eight senior Salvadoran law enforcement and judicial officials fled El Salvador for the United States and elsewhere. Vulcan provided them with travel money, language classes, housing and help gaining legal immigration status and finding jobs. In one instance, a US Embassy official escorted a Salvadoran prosecutor out of the country because American officials believed his life was in danger, according to an official familiar with the incident.

The Salvadoran government also weakened special “vetted units” of the police that had worked with the FBI and other US agencies, according to current and former US officials.

Bukele’s allies didn’t stop there. They allegedly helped the escape or release from prison of at least four members of the MS-13 leadership council sought by Vulcan for alleged crimes in the US, according to interviews, court documents and press reports.

Elmer Canales-Rivera, alias “Crook de Hollywood,” was one of the most wanted of the Ranfla members. He had been imprisoned for several murders in El Salvador, including a case in which he reportedly helped suffocate and drown in insecticide a gang member who violated orders. In the United States, prosecutors had accused him of orchestrating murders and kidnapping across the nation for more than 20 years.

In November 2021, Canales escaped from prison. El Faro, a prominent investigative news outlet, and other Salvadoran media published stories that detailed how Marroquín had escorted Canales from the prison. The articles featured taped calls between gang members and a person identified as Marroquín discussing his role in the escape, along with photos of officials apparently attempting to remove jail logs to conceal their presence at the prison.

Canales was caught in Mexico and turned over to US authorities. Currently in prison awaiting trial, he has pleaded not guilty.

Over the next several months, three other MS-13 leaders disappeared from Salvadoran prisons, causing Durham, the head of the task force, to express his concern in a letter to the judge in New York overseeing the cases. At the time the Bukele administration had received extradition requests and Interpol notices, he wrote, the leaders had been in custody. Salvadoran media later reported that the country’s Supreme Court had formally denied the extradition requests for the three men.

The purge of the Supreme Court and prosecutors, the blocked extraditions and the disappearance of the MS-13 gang members marked a significant deterioration in relations between Bukele and the administration of President Joe Biden. Agencies across the government began looking for ways to push El Salvador to cooperate.

Acting US Ambassador Jean Manes announced a “pause” in relations with El Salvador and left the country. A veteran diplomat who had previously served in El Salvador, Manes had pressured Bukele in public and private, criticizing the extradition delays and his increasingly authoritarian rule, according to State Department officials.

“What are we seeing now? It is a decline in democracy,” Manes said shortly before her departure.

In December 2021, the Treasury Department issued sanctions against Bukele aides Luna, Marroquín and Recinos, blocking them from conducting financial transactions in the United States because of alleged corruption. None of them responded to questions sent to a Bukele spokesperson.

Nonetheless, former members of the task force said they felt that the Biden administration treated Vulcan as a lower priority and cut its resources. They said Biden officials saw the task force as a Trump initiative and wanted to focus on other law enforcement targets, such as human trafficking.

“As soon as the Biden administration came in, we were slowed down,” Brunner said. “There was a lot more red tape we had to go through.” Former Biden officials denied this was the case.

Whatever truce had existed between the Salvadoran government and MS-13 collapsed in March 2022. The country descended into chaos. Over one three-day period, some 80 people were killed in gang-related violence.

Bukele reacted forcefully. He declared a nationwide “state of exception” that suspended constitutional protections. Police began rounding up thousands of accused gang members and others. He announced the construction of the megaprison known as CECOT.

The policies proved tremendously popular. Murder rates dropped dramatically, though human rights advocates criticized the loss of civil liberties. Bukele dismissed their complaints.

“Some say we have put thousands in prison, but the reality is that we have set millions free,” he has said, an assertion he repeated to Trump in the Oval Office.

The Turnaround

Despite the harsh treatment of gang members—an estimated 14,500 people are now held in CECOT—one thing did not change: The Bukele government continued to refuse to extradite senior MS-13 leaders to the United States.

The reasons for Bukele’s alleged protection of the gang leadership versus his relentless pursuit of the rank and file are the subject of speculation in both the United States and El Salvador. One possible explanation, according to current and former US and Salvadoran officials: Bukele is aware that Vulcan was gathering evidence that could lead to criminal charges and political damage. The imprisoned leaders are potential witnesses to his alleged deal with MS-13, while El Salvador’s street-level gangsters are not.

In February 2023, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment for another group of leaders, most of whom operated a tier below the Ranfla, relaying its directives to gangsters on the streets. The 13 defendants were accused of terrorism and drug smuggling, among other charges.

The US announced it would “explore options for their extradition with the government of El Salvador.” The Justice Department declined to say whether any such requests had been made.

In filing the charges, prosecutors made their strongest public accusations yet about deals between the Bukele government and the gangs. Without naming the president or his allies, prosecutors alleged that MS-13 leaders agreed to use their vast political influence to turn out votes for candidates belonging to Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party in legislative elections in 2021.

The gang bosses also “agreed to reduce the number of public murders in El Salvador, which politically benefited the government of El Salvador, by creating the perception that the government was reducing the murder rate,” the indictment said.

As part of the arrangement, the senior MS-13 leaders demanded that the Bukele government refuse to extradite them, the indictment said. The alleged condition appears to be in effect. To date, none of the extradition requests for more than a dozen high-ranking gang members has been approved.

In the face of obstacles, Vulcan relied increasingly on the Mexican government for help. During the past four years, Mexican authorities have captured nine of the 27 MS-13 leaders named in the indictments and deported them to the United States, where they were arrested. This year, prosecutors obtained guilty pleas to terrorism charges from two lower-ranking bosses, including one who prosecutors said had helped implement the deal between the Bukele administration and the gang. Sentencing for the men is pending.

Since Trump took office this year, his administration has redirected Vulcan’s mission to also target Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the president has put in the spotlight.

There has been a remarkable recent development related to MS-13, however. After more than five years leading the Vulcan task force, Durham wrote letters asking the judge overseeing the cases to dismiss charges against two gang leaders in US custody, allowing them to be deported to El Salvador. The letters were dated March 11 and April 1, weeks after the Trump administration began negotiating the mass deportation deal with Bukele’s government.

César Humberto López Larios, a member of the Ranfla known as “Greñas,” had his charges dismissed and was returned to El Salvador with more than 250 Venezuelans and Salvadorans sent to CECOT as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation of migrants on March 15. López, identified in media reports, is featured in a slickly produced video posted by Bukele on X, kneeling in the prison, his head shaved. He had pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

Then, in April, Durham asked for the dismissal of terrorism charges against a lower-ranking MS-13 prisoner, Vladimir Antonio Arevalo-Chavez, alias “Vampiro,” according to recently unsealed court records. His defense lawyers are seeking to stall the request to give them time to fight his deportation to El Salvador. He has pleaded not guilty.

Durham acknowledged in his letters to the judge that the evidence against the two men is “strong.” After millions spent on an operation involving investigators and prosecutors from the US., El Salvador and other countries, Vulcan had amassed a trove of evidence aimed at incarcerating the MS-13 leaders who had overseen the killings, rapes and beatings of Americans. Prosecutors told defense attorneys they had more than 92,903 pages of discovery, including 600 pages of transcribed phone intercepts, 21 boxes of documents from prosecutors in El Salvador and 11 gigabytes of audio files.

Durham said prosecutors were dropping their pursuit of the cases “due to geopolitical and national security concerns.”

It was like a reverse extradition. Trump was giving Bukele the kind of high-level criminals that the United States had never received from El Salvador.

During the negotiations over the use of El Salvador’s prison, Trump officials agreed to pay some $6 million to house the deported men and acceded to an additional demand.

Bukele had one specific request, according to Milena Mayorga, his ambassador to the United States.

“I want you to send me the gang leaders who are in the United States,” she quoted Bukele as telling US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

For Bukele, she said in a broadcast interview, it was “a matter of honor.”

Mica Rosenberg contributed reporting, and Doris Burke contributed research.

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In May, the Department of Energy quietly introduced a proposal to eliminate its longstanding requirement that new buildings receiving funds from the agency be accessible to disabled people—a rule in effect across the federal government since 1980, thanks to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.

“Disability rights,” professor Jasmine Harris said, “are not uncontroversial as the Department of Energy claims.”

According to a document published in the Federal Register, the final rule will become effective July 15—unless it receives “significant adverse comments” by Tuesday, a month after the rule was proposed.

“The Department of Energy’s decision to rescind the Section 504 new construction accessibility requirement is a direct attack on disability rights and part of a broader pattern of civil rights rollbacks aligned with Trump-era policies,” said Robyn Powell, an assistant professor specializing in disability law at Stetson University College of Law.

“It is DOE’s policy to give private entities flexibility to comply with the law in the manner they deem most efficient,” part of the public document reads. “One-size-fits-all rules are rarely the best option. Accordingly, DOE finds good reason to eliminate this regulatory provision.”

“By labeling these long-established protections as ‘unnecessary and unduly burdensome,’” Powell said, the Department of Energy “is prioritizing private convenience over the civil rights of disabled people” in its rulemaking. (The agency did not respond to Mother Jones’ questions.)

More than 3,000 comments have been submitted so far, many after the launch of a campaign by the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF). “From our point of view, they cannot lawfully do this, because the regulations were reviewed by Congress,” said Claudia Center, the organization’s legal director. Beyond its mandated inclusion in the Federal Register, Center added, “There was no announcement, no press release that we saw” regarding the proposal—allowing it to largely slip under the radar.

The proposed rule, according to Center, “really just disrupts this whole idea of Section 504, and the regulations—which is that, over time, we’re going to have a more accessible society.” Attacks on Section 504’s disability protections through federal rulemaking are unprecedented, Center said.

Center’s wider concern: DOE’s move could be a blueprint for other Trump administration federal agencies to follow, extending it to a much wider range of buildings and institutions—a kind of trial balloon at a federal agency which draws less public attention, and controversy, than the departments of Health and Human Services and Education, for instance.

“The Department of Energy—not exactly an obvious hot spot for attacks on disability or other civil rights,” said University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Jasmine Harris, who also specializes in disability law. “Anti-civil rights creep often happens away from the main stage, more likely to be under the radar.”

Cuts and opposition to disability rights and protections, Harris said, “such as the statutory requirements to require the new construction and alterations meet accessibility standards to comply with the law, are not uncontroversial, as the Department of Energy claims.”

In fact, Harris noted, this isn’t the agency’s first or only attack on civil rights via federal rulemaking. “The Department of Energy is seeking to eliminate a rule regulating a program that extends loans to minority-owned businesses because it purportedly conflicts with Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a recent Supreme Court decision addressing race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions,” she said.

“If we don’t put a line in the sand here,” Center said, “other agencies will try and do the same thing—and we really need to stop it at the outset.”

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To the untrained eye, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Ice Core Facility in Lakewood, Colorado, doesn’t look like much: a boxy brick building packed with shelves of ice-filled metallic cylinders 10 centimeters in diameter. But to the more than 100 scientists who pull from its frozen records annually, it’s a treasure trove of information on our changing climate.

The facility holds more than 13 miles—200 football field lengths—of tubes of ice collected from Antarctica, Greenland, and other parts of North America. Their contents can date back hundreds of thousands of years, allowing researchers to engage in scientific time travel. Crucially, the ice provides clues as to what’s in store for our climate down the road. But now President Donald Trump’s assault on science has put this invaluable resource at risk.

“If you drill down in an ice sheet, the deeper you go, the older the ice gets,” says Benjamin Riddell-Young, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies methane isotopes. One recent experiment involved analyzing molecules trapped in ancient ice from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide, including cores recovered from around 2 miles underground. “When the snow falls and compresses into ice, it forms these little bubble cavities that trap the air at the time the ice was formed,” he explains.

Those tiny bubble cavities can lead to big discoveries. Researchers have used prehistoric ice samples to determine global temperatures, weather patterns, and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations in the distant past. Ice cores have provided some of the best data for tracking climate change—and the researchers who use the NSF facility have racked up an impressive roster of publications. Just last year, some of them found that atmospheric CO2 is increasing 10 times faster than at any point in the last 50,000 years. In another study, published by the journal Nature in January, Riddell-Young and his former adviser, Ed Brook, a professor of earth, ocean, and atmospheric sciences at Oregon State University, linked increased wildfire activity during the last ice age to abrupt shifts in the prevalence of greenhouse gases.

Riddell-Young and Brook were studying the past, but their knowledge helps researchers better understand the effects of climate change today—including its likely role in the fires that ravaged Los Angeles. “We study the past in part because we want to calibrate climate models that we use for the future,” Brook says.

The urgency of ice-core research has intensified in recent years because, as the planet warms up, the historical record captured in the ice is slowly melting. The miles-deep ice should be safe for another century, but researchers are already finding water when they drill closer to the surface. “We came too late,” Margit Schwikowski, a recently retired professor at Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute, lamented in a report. “We need to speed up to safeguard heritage ice cores.”

Rising temperatures aren’t the only threat. Funding for Riddell-Young and Brook’s study and others like it also comes from the NSF, which keeps the Colorado facility cold and running. In the two months after their Nature study was published, the Trump administration fired 10 percent of the agency’s 1,500-person staff, including several specialists working in Antarctica. Federally funded researchers have lost grants mentioning climate change, leading their peers to remove the phrase from research proposals. But for scientists using the Ice Core Facility and studying the history of global climate, that can be exceedingly difficult.

The Trump administration also has proposed slashing the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, another key funder of climate research, by at least a quarter. Reductions of such magnitude would endanger that agency’s collaborations with universities—including the one where Riddell-Young works.

Geopolitical tensions, too, imperil US involvement in Arctic research. Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, international scientists have been cut off from Russian sections of the Arctic. Trump’s aggression toward Greenland and Canada also poses threats to the reserves. “It makes science diplomacy virtually impossible,” says Klaus Dodds, who studies polar geopolitics at the University of London.

Dodds, who is British, describes the United States as a “premier polar power” because of decades of investment in studying the region. But when asked about the future, his optimism fades: “Unfortunately, it could be imperiled because of these swinging funding cuts.” Oregon State’s Brook concurs. “I fear we’ll lose our competitive edge in science,” he says.

The science world is hedging its bets as US leadership wanes. In 2021, researchers from France, Italy, and Switzerland created the Ice Memory Foundation to collect and save ice cores from locations that are particularly endangered by climate change. Collaborating with 10 nations, the group, which is funded by private philanthropists and governments, collects cores from glaciers at risk of melting and plans to store them deep in the Antarctic Plateau, where temperatures are more stable.

Such efforts are essential, Riddell-Young points out, because “there’s questions that we don’t know we should be asking yet.” And then, “maybe 30 years down the line, we’ll say, ‘If only we had an ice core from this location, we could have answered this, but now that ice core is gone.’”

The administration has continued to chip away at Arctic science, alongside widespread cuts to all US science disciplines.

In April, the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota lost its funding. In early May, NOAA decommissioned its snow and ice data products. A mid-May analysis by the New York Times found that there is an 88 percent monetary reduction in the average grants awarded this year for polar science, as opposed to the average of previous years.

Last month, the Trump administration released its proposed budget, which encourages Congress to slash the NSF by over half, citing “climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences.” While Antarctic infrastructure funding, which maintains the Arctic stations, remains relatively unscathed, 70 percent of the research funding in the Office of Polar Programs is proposed to be cut.

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For the first time in two decades, the Democratic Party has found itself without a clear political leader—or even an obvious frontrunner. Angry and adrift, voters are clashing with politicians over how to fight back.

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They’re also dealing with an uncomfortable new reality: The communities that shifted furthest away from Democrats last fall were the same ones that for years formed the backbone of the party’s coalition—working-class, nonwhite, and immigrant-rich parts of blue cities and states.

Now the battle for the party’s future and reckoning over its recent past is coming to a head in New York City, where support for Democrats has cratered among Latino and Asian voters. In one of the first big tests of the party’s direction after Donald Trump’s reelection, Democrats will choose between radically different options for mayor: a centrist former governor in his 60s who resigned in disgrace, and a millennial democratic socialist whose rise in the polls has shocked the political establishment.

This week, Reveal heads to New York to talk to voters who ditched the Democratic Party in November—and looks at the party’s sometimes bitter fight to win them back.

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