Mother Jones

An ultra-conservative federal judge in Texas has lobbed another hand grenade in his long-running battle to limit access to reproductive healthcare around the country—this time by vacating a privacy rule intended to shield abortion seekers and providers from criminal and civil state investigations.

In a sweeping ruling late Wednesday, US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Amarillo held that the Biden administration’s attempt to protect reproductive health information from disclosure to law enforcement and other authorities was unlawful. In doing so, Kacsmaryk has opened the floodgates for states with bans on abortion and gender-affirming care to investigate patients who obtain treatment out of state, as well as their providers, using those patients’ own private health records.

Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, medical providers, health insurance companies, and other covered entities are allowed—but not required—to release protected health information without patient consent to government authorities for the purposes of a criminal, civil, or administrative investigation. In April 2024, the US Department of Health and Human Services finalized a rule expanding HIPAA privacy protections to bar disclosure of reproductive health information to authorities if the government’s purpose was to investigate patients who sought, or providers who offered, such care.

The new regulation was a direct response to the US Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. HHS defined reproductive health broadly to include not just abortion, but any care related to a person’s reproductive organs, including contraception, miscarriage management, and gender-affirming care. For the first time, the rule also defined “person” under HIPAA to exclude fetuses.

The Biden rule defined reproductive health to include not just abortion, but any care related to a person’s reproductive organs, including contraception, miscarriage management, and gender-affirming care.

HHS set a December deadline for compliance with the new rule. But in October, an Amarillo-area family doctor sued the agency, claiming that the new privacy rule prevented her from reporting child abuse. Dr. Carmen Purl and her lawyers, from the conservative legal behemoth Alliance Defending Freedom, argued that under HIPAA, the Biden administration could not limit states’ authority to investigate child abuse or public health concerns.

But Purl also made it clear that her opposition to the rule was rooted in her feelings about certain forms of reproductive care. “I believe based on both medicine and conscience that elective abortions harm patients’ health and public health,” Purl wrote in a declaration to the court. “I also believe that medical interventions trying to achieve ‘gender transition’ of children, such as cross-sex hormones, are harmful to the child, are never medically necessary, and are a matter of concern for public health.”

To Purl, fetuses are children, and the 2024 rule presented undue harm to them. Kacsmaryk agreed, saying that states are free to define child abuse and public health in whatever manner they deem fit, including if certain health procedures, like abortion or puberty blockers for trans youth, constitute abuse. The decision expanded on Kacsmaryk’s previous, narrow preliminary injunction blocking the Biden rule as applied to Purl; on Wednesday, he declared the rule permanently void throughout the US.

“States like Texas can have their capacious definitions of their own child abuse or public health laws,” Kacsmaryk wrote. HIPAA, he added, “affords HHS no leeway to ‘invalidate or limit’ the ‘authority, power, or procedures’ of those laws by slicing off its favored procedures from a State’s purview.”

The decision came the same day the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.

Kacsmaryk also found that the HHS rule violated federal law and states’ authority when it excluded fetuses from the definition of “person.” “States routinely confer ‘legal status’ on unborn children as it relates to child abuse,” he wrote. The new rule “strips unborn humans of any legal status they had under state laws.”

A longtime opponent of abortion, Kacsmaryk has issued other sweeping decisions targeting access to reproductive health, making his court a favorite venue of anti-abortion groups like Alliance Defending Freedom. In December 2022, he ruled that Title X clinics in Texas cannot offer teens contraceptives or family planning services without parental consent. In 2023, he temporarily nullified the Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of the abortion medication mifepristone before the Supreme Court blocked his ruling.

Vacating the rule “will interfere with the ability of healthcare providers and patients to communicate confidentially and openly about a patient’s health needs.”

When Congress enacted HIPAA during the Clinton administration, it included no provisions to protect patient privacy—instead, it directed HHS to create privacy rules if lawmakers failed to act within three years. HHS did so in 2000, laying the foundation for the protection of sensitive health information as the medical field transitioned to electronic records. Abortion and civil rights organizations see HIPAA as an important backstop to protect patients’ health records from being used to criminalize miscarriages, prosecute doctors in s0-called “shield states” who provide abortion medications to patients in states with bans, and investigate people who help teenagers cross state lines to get the procedure.

Purl’s case is one of at least four challenging the Biden HIPAA rule. Missouri filed suit in January, claiming the rule unlawfully limits its ability to investigate public health concerns and health insurance fraud. The same day, 14 other Republican attorneys general sued to block the rule on similar grounds. Nearly all of the states have enacted total or near-total abortion bans

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wants the courts to go one major step further: In a complaint filed in September, he claims that the original privacy rule HHS created in 2000—the rule that protected patient health information under HIPAA—exceeded the agency’s rulemaking authority and should be thrown out in its entirety. The judge in that case is expected to make a ruling in the coming months**.**

A group of Midwest cities and the health advocacy organization Doctors for America, represented by the legal group Democracy Forward, have attempted to intervene in the lawsuits to defend the Biden rule and HIPAA more broadly, but have been challenged by plaintiffs and HHS. In one pleading, Democracy Forward expressed skepticism that Trump’s HHS would sufficiently defend the Biden rule: “The government’s representation of [our] interests is inadequate,” attorneys wrote.

Alliance Defending Freedom celebrated the Kacsmaryk ruling. “As the court rightly found, doctors and states should be able to protect patients from abuse,” ADF attorney Matt Bowman said in a press release. This unequivocally includes protection from “the harms of abortion” and “dangerous and sterilizing procedures” like gender-affirming medical care, he added.

Maddy Gitomer, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, called Kacsmaryk’s ruling “cruel.” “The 2024 HIPAA Privacy Rule has helped protect pregnant people and health care providers from invasive government intrusion into private medical information,” Gitomer told Mother Jones in a written statement. “Vacating this regulation will be detrimental to the privacy rights of pregnant people across the country, and will interfere with the ability of healthcare providers and patients to communicate confidentially and openly about a patient’s health needs.”

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

The youth activists who put the Green New Deal on the political map are launching a new campaign to “villainize big oil” which will push for the industry to pay for climate action so the costs don’t fall on ordinary people.

Seven years ago, the Sunrise Movement captured headlines when its members stormed then-incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, demanding the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and the creation of good jobs.

The movement helped inspire some of Joe Biden’s green policies. But under Donald Trump, those moves—and other, decades-old environmental regulations—are under siege. A major reason for that, Sunrise says, is the president’s allegiance to oil bosses over ordinary people.

“He takes his orders from big oil billionaires like the ones who funded his campaign,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, co-founder and communications director of the Sunrise Movement.

Now, the Sunrise Movement is calling for polluters to foot the bill for climate action and asking down-ballot candidates to do the same. In the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, the organization will be rallying young people around the country under the banner “End the Oligarchy, Save Our Futures”.

The campaign will kick off with a virtual call on Wednesday night, which will be streamed at nationwide watch parties and feature California representative Ro Khanna and TV star Hannah Einbender. It will attempt to reframe climate action, which powerful conservatives have long aimed to write off as a “culture war” issue despite its material repercussions for ordinary people.

“Climate disasters are devastating working people around the country – destroying homes and pushing people into crushing debt. It’s far past time that big oil be held accountable,” said Khanna.

With the new effort, organizers will try to harness the populist outrage that Sunrise believes helped elect Donald Trump, Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise’s executive director, said.

“What we’re seeing right now around the country is a deep sense that this system isn’t working for us and that it is working for billionaires and rich people,” said Shiney-Ajay. “The polluters pay frame speaks to that idea that some of the richest companies should help clean up the mess they made, while also undermining Trump on something where he polls the lowest, which is on climate issues.”

A focus of the campaign will be passing “climate superfund” bills—which require fossil fuel companies to pay for climate damage—in statehouses across the country. Vermont and New York last year became the first two states to pass such legislation, and California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Oregon are considering similar measures.

“We see this as a 50-state campaign,” said O’Hanlon.

To obtain its endorsement, Sunrise has since its founding required political candidates to eschew money from oil donors. Now, it will also ask those they endorse to support such legislation.

Passing “polluters pay” bills may be a long shot in some states, but Sunrise thinks it has a better chance than other kinds of climate measures, potentially even garnering support from conservatives who are concerned about both corruption and their pocketbooks. The two successful Vermont and New York bills passed with co-sponsorship from Republicans, organizers note.

“We’re bringing this message to the people who liked the call for government efficiency that we’ve seen from Doge and Elon Musk and Trump,” said Ramón Pereira Bonilla, a 24-year-old Sunrise organizer in the flood-prone city of Orlando, Florida. “We’re saying: ‘We want to make the government more efficient for taxpayers, save taxpayers money.’”

In Florida, activists hope to see lawmakers introduce a bill in the fall or next spring, Pereira Bonilla said, adding that canvassing in the state has already suggested interest from conservatives.

In California, where historic fires ravaged Los Angeles earlier this year, advocates are looking to pass a climate superfund proposal before the legislative session ends in September, helping the state pay for infrastructure damage, public health programs, and climate resilience measures, said Nicolas Gardner Serna, 26, of Sunrise’s Los Angeles chapter.

“We’ve known that fossil fuel extraction has caused the climate crisis for decades,” he said. “There is a sustained and powerful effort from the community to hold corporations accountable.”

Laws in Vermont and New York are facing legal challenges from oil interests, and Trump in April issued an order to “stop the enforcement” of climate superfund laws. But Sunrise and other activist groups believe they can still succeed.

“When we organize, we can rewrite the rules and build something more fair, more honest, and more prepared for the future we deserve,” Cassidy DiPaola, communications director of the Make Polluters Pay campaign, said.

Sunrise’s new campaign will also aim to re-energize the youth climate protest movement, which advocates say has lost steam in recent years. To do so, it will hold nationwide “school strikes” like the ones popularized by the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, and will also explore using more disruptive nonviolent tactics than they have previously employed.

The rallies will aim to build momentum and courage in service of a prospective general strike in 2028, as called for by the United Auto Workers president, Shawn Fain. Students helped kick off historical general strikes, such as that in May 1968 in France, Sunrise notes.

In the nearer term, the organization will be looking to next year’s midterm elections as a way to fight back against Trump’s attacks on climate action, pushing candidates to pledge to support ordinary people over corporate interests and stand up to Trump, Shiney-Ajay said.

“We’ll be looking for candidates to talk about climate as the populist, working-class issue that it is,” she said.

The campaign could be a wake-up call for Trump, who not only benefits oil bosses but has also placed them in the White House, said GardnerSerna.

“The billionaires and corporations and fascists from the administration are terrified of communities coming together and standing up for themselves,” he said.

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The Trump administration is shutting down services for LGBTQ youth who call 988, the national suicide hotline.

Since the hotline’s launch in 2022, hotline callers could press 3 to speak with counselors trained to work specifically with LGBTQ youth, who are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers. The service received half a million calls and texts last year; in February, the program received an average of 2,100 contacts per day.

On Tuesday, the Trevor Project, a LGBTQ suicide prevention nonprofit that contracts with Health and Human Services to respond to the calls, received a stop-work order, effective July 17.

A statement from HHS on Tuesday said the hotline will “focus on serving all help seekers” and “no longer silo LGB+ youth services.” Notably, the statement omitted the markers referring to transgender and queer individuals.

“This is a death sentence potentially to thousands of youth across the United States,” said Paolo del Vecchio, former director of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s Office of Recovery. “This is not making America healthy again,” he added. “We’re closing the door on people asking for help who are thinking about taking their lives.”

The closure effectively preempts a similar move proposed in a 2026 budget proposal to eliminate the LGBTQ hotline option, which would have required congressional approval. The proposal prompted outrage among Democratic policymakers.

Adrian Shanker, a senior advisor on LGBTQ policy under the Biden administration, noted that 988’s LGBTQ youth program, which historically had bipartisan support, was created because of the outsized volume of calls the suicide hotline received from such youth. “This is not about politics. It’s not about the political divide on transgender medicine or trans people in the military, or any of the other hot-button political topics,” he said. “This is about suicide prevention and crisis intervention for people living at a higher rate of suicide risk.”

The order came the day before the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Shanker said the timing is likely a coincidence, but still “an insult upon injury” against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s war on transgender rights.

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Law enforcement officials detained New York City comptroller and Democratic mayoral candidate Brad Lander at an immigration court Tuesday as he attempted to escort a man out of the building.

Meg Barnette, Lander’s wife, confirmed the detention in a post shared to her husband’s official account on X.

Tricia McLaughlin, Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary of public affairs, said in a statement Tuesday afternoon that Lander “was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer.” It is still unclear whether Lander will be charged by federal prosecutors. He was released, according to local reporting, in the afternoon.

.@GovKathyHochul says charges against @bradlander have been dropped https://t.co/jO38w6RvwM

— Courtney Gross (@courtneycgross) June 17, 2025

It is one of a number of dramatic moments in which a Democratic official has been detained by federal officers. Five days ago, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) was thrown to the ground and handcuffed after he interrupted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a press conference.

Hi, this is Meg Barnette, Brad's wife.While escorting a defendant out of immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza, Brad was taken by masked agents and detained by ICE.This is still developing, and our team is monitoring the situation closely. pic.twitter.com/jekaDFjsT1

— Brad Lander (@bradlander) June 17, 2025

Video shared on X by Courtney Gross, an investigative reporter at NY1 News, shows Lander and others attempting to escort a man out of the building after his case was reportedly dismissed. The Trump administration, in an attempt to ramp up deportations, has increasingly been dismissing people’s immigration cases then immediately arresting them at immigration courts across the country.

In the video, Lander holds onto the man that agents appear to be trying to arrest and does not let go.

“I will let go when you show me the judicial warrant,” the comptroller says. “Where is it? Where is the warrant?” About 10 seconds later, the agents—some of whom were wearing masks—grab Lander and place him in handcuffs. The other man is placed into an elevator by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

.@bradlander just arrested at immigration court pic.twitter.com/nDqEK1Lzcw

— Courtney Gross (@courtneycgross) June 17, 2025

“I’m not obstructing. I’m standing right here in the hallway,” Lander says as he is being detained. “I asked to see the judicial warrant.” He adds, “You don’t have the authority to arrest US citizens asking for a judicial warrant.” The masked agents then refused to answer questions about where they were taking the comptroller.

Shortly before Lander was detained, a reporter from The City asked him why he was spending the last days of the mayoral primary court-watching. “I don’t think there’s any place that’s more important to be right now than bearing witness and trying to stand up for the rule of law,” Lander told the outlet. That reporter also described hearing an agent say to another, “Do you want to arrest the comptroller?”

Mayoral candidate Brad Lander was cuffed and detained by ICE agents after asking to see a warrant for people who were detained after an immigration hearing. Video from the city comptroller’s press secretary @chloecbristow. She says he’s still being held in 26 Federal Plaza. pic.twitter.com/cW9jIsp35b

— Jeff Coltin (@JCColtin) June 17, 2025

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, wrote on social media that ICE needed only an administrative warrant, not a judicial warrant. “But ICE refuses even to show him that, which is outrageous,” Reichlin-Melnick added. “If they have a warrant, they should show it. If they don’t, they don’t have arrest authority. But him holding on to the guy…could be trouble.”

The Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts have become a flashpoint in the New York City mayoral race. Lander has trailed in third place in recent polls behind former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. Early voting in the primary began Saturday. Earlier this month, Lander observed immigration hearings at a courthouse in Lower Manhattan. The New York Times reported that he had escorted out migrants who seemed to be at risk of detention.

Mamdani, who recently cross-endorsed with Lander, called for the comptroller’s immediate release. “This is fascism and all New Yorkers must speak in one voice,” he said.

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On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved a highly effective, injectable drug to help prevent the transmission of HIV, according to its manufacturer, Gilead Sciences. The drug, lenacapavir, will be sold under the name Yeztugo.

“This is a historic day in the decades-long fight against HIV,” Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day said in a press release. “Yeztugo is one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of our time and offers a very real opportunity to help end the HIV epidemic.”

Indeed, in clinical trials, lenacapavir showed stunning efficacy as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, blocking infection in 100 percent of participants who’d received it in one trial and 99.9 percent in another.

But Yeztugo’s approval also comes at an unfortunate time—amid the Trump administration’s drastic cuts to efforts to fight AIDS across the globe.

That includes, as my colleague Sam Van Pykeren and I reported in March, the gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency tasked with fighting diseases like AIDS worldwide; kneecapping PEPFAR, the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a program that’s saved an estimated 26 million lives since its founding by President George W. Bush in 2003; and shutting down several high-profile HIV prevention studies. Take, for instance, the MATRIX study, halted in response to a January executive order:

One set of trials known as the MATRIX study,a $125 million endeavor funded by USAID, was designed to evaluate new HIV prevention products for women, including a dissolvable vaginal film, a dissolvable vaginal insert, and a vaginal ring meant to prevent pregnancy and HIV transmission. Dr. Catherine Chappell, an assistant professor and OB-GYN at the University of Pittsburgh who helped lead the trial for the vaginal ring, says Trump’s order meant her phase I clinical trial was abruptly ended mid-data collection. “We had participants in South Africa that still had these [placebo] rings in their vaginas,” she says. Chappell worries that dropping the study midway through could have “irreparably damaged” researchers’ relationship with the community. “It is just completely unethical,” she says.

Researchers at USAID had also planned further clinical trials for lenacapavir. “All of that’s just been cut off,” a former USAID analyst told us in March.

In other words, as we argued, the historic arrival of lenavapavir (aka Yeztugo) as a form of PrEP makes now a uniquely bad time to walk away from HIV research and aid:

In short, after decades of research, science delivered the most effective preventative HIV drugs the world has ever seen—and the US is throwing up its hands and abandoning efforts to share them with those most in need. That isn’t just a moral failing, experts say, but also goes against the country’s self-interest. For decades, officials have seen foreign disease prevention as a form of “soft power”—it engenders trust within the global community while ensuring fewer infections both abroad and, ultimately, at home.

As Mitchell Warren, the executive director of the international HIV prevention organization AVAC, told the New York Times on Wednesday, “We’re on the precipice of now being able to deliver the greatest prevention option we’ve had in 44 years of this epidemic. And it’s as if that opportunity is being snatched out of our hands by the policies of the last five months.”

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Tucked into Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” spending bill—which passed in the House last month, and promises major cuts to Medicaid—is a provision to spend $46.5 billion in taxpayer dollars on building his long-promised wall along the US-Mexico border. The White House says that thefunding will provide an additional 701 miles of primary wall and 900 miles of river barriers—but given how the construction of the wall played out in Trump’s first term, those numbers are wildly optimistic.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump promised to build 1000 miles of border wall for $8 to $12 billion—and said Mexico would pay for it. As a first-term president, he asked Congress for $5.7 billion towards the wall; it allocated $1.3 billion in border security funding instead, and Trump ended up invoking emergency powers to transfer funds from elsewhere in government to the project. As reported by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, costs quickly ballooned: by the end of Trump’s first term, only 47 miles of previously unwalledland received new barriers—at a public cost of about $15 billion. An appeals court ruled in October 2020 that Trump’s use of emergency powers to divert billions in military funds to border wall construction was unlawful. Mexico, of course, did not pay for it.

This time, the bill that includes the massive wall spending narrowly passed the House in a 215-214 vote that saw two Republicans join all Democrats in voting no, with three others voting present or missing the vote altogether. Trump’s bill has faced criticism from Republicans, with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) specifically calling for cuts to its border wall spending. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found on Tuesday that the House bill would increase deficits by $2.8 trillion over the next decade.

To balance out the wall funding, other Senate Republicans have called for further cuts to Medicaid—despite the House bill already cutting hundreds of billions in Medicaid funding, which one analysis from the Annals of Internal Medicine found would increase the number of uninsured people by 7.6 million, and the number of annual deaths by more than 16 thousand. The cuts have been condemned by the medical community, including in a recent statement by the American Hospital Association. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) blasted the Senate GOP’s version of the bill, saying that its “cuts to Medicaid are deeper and more devastating than even the Republican House’s disaster of a bill.”An AP-NORC poll released Monday found that the vast majority of Americans do not want to see Medicaid cut, with only 18 percent of US adults saying the program has too much funding.

The bill itself is also unpopular among the American people: A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 53 percent of voters opposed it, with just 27 percent in support and 20 percent not offering an opinion. A Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Tuesday found that 42 percent of Americans were not in favor of the bill, with 23 percent supporting—and that fully 52 percent of Americans are specifically against spending $50 billion to complete the border wall.

But—as with tariffs and attempts to cut agency funding without congressional approval—the administration is evidently willing to put Americans’ concerns aside when spending their money.

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President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday that he does not plan to call Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) in the wake of this weekend’s horrific political violence,in whicha man assassinated a Minnesota lawmaker andher husband and wounded another Democratic state lawmaker and his wife.

“I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out,” Trump said, in response to a question from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins about whether he had called the governor. “I’m not calling. Why would I call him? I could call him, say, ‘Hi. How you doing?’ The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess. So, you know, I could be nice and call, but why waste time?”

COLLINS: Have you called Tim Walz yet?TRUMP: I don't really call him. He appointed this guy to a position. I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I'm not calling him … he's a mess. pic.twitter.com/81o4oSqyR7

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2025

In a statement provided to Mother Jones on Tuesday afternoon, a spokesperson for Walz said the governor “wishes that President Trump would be a President for all Americans, but this tragedy isn’t about Trump or Walz. It’s about the Hortman family, the Hoffman family, and the State of Minnesota, and the Governor remains focused on helping all three heal.” Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Though the remarks were roundly condemned as cruel, for Trump, they were not unusual.As I previously wrote, the president has a long history of making tragedies worse, including by making crude comments and boosting false or disproven conspiracy theories in the aftermath of devastating events. But his latest comments are particularly rich given that, during his Republican National Convention speech last summer, he called for unity:

Just like our ancestors, we must now come together, rise above past differences. Any disagreements have to be put aside, and go forward united as one people, one nation, pledging allegiance to one great, beautiful — I think it’s so beautiful — American flag.

Trump’s refusal to call Walz stands in stark contrast to the Democratic response after the two assassinationattempts against Trump last summer, when Democrats condemned the violence. The Biden campaign also pulled political ads against Trump, with leaders on both sides of the aisle calling for unity. (Though that did not stop some Trump acolytes from baselessly blaming the violence on Democrats.)

While Trump did publicly condemn the violence in Minnesota, writing in a Truth Social post on Saturday, in part, that “Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America,” it is common for presidents to call state leaders following such crises. According to reports, Vice President JD Vance and former President Joe Biden called Walz following the Saturday attacks.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is similarly under fire after posting a series of baseless posts on his personal X account this weekend, blaming the murders on the left. In a since-deleted Sunday post, he wrote, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way.” In another post deleted on Tuesday afternoon, he wrote, “Nightmare on Waltz street,” alongside photos of the alleged shooter. “My guess: He’s not MAGA,” Lee wrote in another post of the suspected shooter, who is a registered Republican, according to public records. (Friends have told reporters the suspected shooter, Vance Boelter, who is now in custody, was, in fact, a supporter of Trump.) But just a few hours later, on his official account, Lee appeared to change his tune: “These hateful attacks have no place in Utah, Minnesota, or anywhere in America. Please join me in condemning this senseless violence, and praying for the victims and their families.”

But for some of his colleagues, it was too late. Sen. Tina Smith told the Washington Post that she sought out Lee at the Senate on Monday to talk to him about his earlier posts, telling the newspaper, “It was a terrible thing to do, and I wanted him to know how I felt about it—how devastating it was to see.” Lee has said Hortman was a personal friend.

The insults and mockery trickled throughout the GOP. Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.) wrote on X, “Good job, stupid,” in response to a post from Walz, and, “You appointed the crazy zealot that murdered her to one of your boards, you clown,” over a post from Walz honoring former state House Speaker Melissa Hortman, who was murdered alongside her husband, Mark. The suspected shooter was reportedly appointed to a 41-member state economic board by a prior Democratic governor in 2016, and later reappointed by Walz; Democratic state Senator John Hoffman, who Boelter allegedly shot alongside Hoffman’s wife, Yvette, reportedly served on the board at the same time as Boelter. (In an earlier post, Van Orden wrote that he condemned “all acts of political violence and intimidation.”)

Spokespeople for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) did not immediately respond to requests for comment about whether they condemn their members’ comments.

Update, June 17: This post was updated to reflect the fact that two of Lee’s three X posts have been deleted as of Tuesday afternoon.

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Of the many events marking the country’s slide to authoritarianism since Donald Trump returned to power, one of the most significant is the president’s unbridled enthusiasm for using the federal government to go after his perceived political enemies. This retribution campaign, though long promised, has proven sweeping and egregious, targeting everyone from law firms that cross him to the highest levels of the Democratic Party. But the administration has been particularly aggressive about wielding it against opponents of Trump’s other signature initiative—his mass-deportation policy. The result: a shocking series of Democratic lawmakers and other public officials who have been detained, arrested, and even prosecuted by the feds. Here’s a timeline.

April 25: Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan

The FBI arrested Dugan for allegedly obstructing federal agents who were detaining an undocumented immigrant. According to federal prosecutors, Dugan allegedly helped the man flee from her courtroom, where he had been previously scheduled to appear, after Dugan was informed that ICE agents were present. She has pleaded not guilty. Her attorneys have decried Dugan’s arrest as “unprecedented” and “entirely unconstitutional.”

May 9: Newark Mayor Ras Baraka

Baraka, who at the time was also New Jersey Democratic primary for governor, was arrested and detained by federal immigration officers in May during a protest and attempted congressional inspectionof an immigration detention center in Newark. The trespassing charge against him was eventually dropped, and Baraka has since sued Alina Habba, the interim US attorney for New Jersey. We recently spoke to Baraka about his arrest:

The irony is that they keep saying that we tried to get arrested. Well, you don’t have to try to get arrested. They were itching to do that from the very sight of me.

These people violated my rights, and, more importantly, they violated the constitution of this country. They think they can do it arbitrarily, and nobody should say anything about it. So I don’t agree with that. I think somebody should say something about it.

May 19: Rep. LaMonica McIver

The New Jersey Democratic congresswoman was subsequently charged in connection with the May 9 incident in Newark. But unlike Baraka, the allegations against her have not been dropped. She was formally indicted last week on charges of impeding and interfering with law enforcement officials during a congressional oversight visit. As I wrote recently, 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.

June 12: Sen. Alex Padilla

In a shocking moment that drew intense criticism, the senior US senator from California was detained after attempting to approach Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a press conference with questions about the administration’s immigration policies. The Department of Homeland Security accused Padilla, a Democrat, of failing to identify himself. But as I wrote, multiple videos showed Padilla doing exactly that before at least four men are seen forcibly pushing Padilla out of the room before handcuffing him. Padilla has not been charged with any crimes.

June 17: Brad Lander

On Tuesday, Lander—one of the major candidates in New York’s Democratic primary for mayor and the city’s current comptroller—was detained by law enforcement officials while attempting to escort a man out of an immigration court building. “I will let go when you show me the judicial warrant,” Lander told the agents while holding on to the man they were apparently arresting. “Where is it? Where is the warrant?”

The Department of Homeland Security quickly accused Lander of “assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer.”

Hi, this is Meg Barnette, Brad's wife.While escorting a defendant out of immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza, Brad was taken by masked agents and detained by ICE.This is still developing, and our team is monitoring the situation closely. pic.twitter.com/jekaDFjsT1

— Brad Lander (@bradlander) June 17, 2025

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Near a cardboard cutout of Daniel Tiger, a small stuffed version of Curious George, and plenty of promotional posters in the PBS Kids office, there sits thick stacks of graduation invitations. Most are accompanied by handwritten letters from students extolling the influence children’s television shows had on their journeys to donning the cap and gown—one fresh grad writes that she plans to become an elementary school teacher thanks to PBS.

Sara DeWitt says that while the office has seen its fair share of letters over her two-plus decades with the network—fielding scores of wedding invitations and even more to birthday parties—it has not received so many graduation announcements until this season.

“The outpouring of support is helping remind us why this work is so important and what an amazing impact it has on lives,” DeWitt, the PBS Kids senior vice president and general manager, says. “We see this outpouring as proof of the thoughtfulness and intentionality of the media we’re creating—and that it works.”

The deluge of encouragement comes amid a flurry of actions from the US Department of Education and the White House moving to pull national funding from the Public Broadcasting Service. Justifying the ordered change, the Trump administration argued that spending public money on media groups like PBS through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is “not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence,” especially considering there are “abundant, diverse, and innovative news options” in today’s media landscape.

The funding cuts would threaten to dismantle public television, long seen as a safe viewing space for children and parents alike.

As PBS leaders fight the loss of funding, they argue that it may not only spell the end of PBS programming like “Arthur,” “Clifford the Big Red Dog” and “The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!”; it could also be detrimental to the foundation of research focused on children’s media.

And when there are more options than ever for children’s entertainment, advocates say that producing research-backed, high-quality, non-commercial options for families—particularly those who live in low-resource areas—has never been so important.

While most parents trust PBS programming—citing it as more trustworthy than any other media source for 22 straight years—many do not know the guardrails put in place to ensure shows are both informative and entertaining, giving the one-two punch necessary for educating children.

“They don’t necessarily understand production, but they sure are appreciative,” says Shelley Pasnik, principal investigator for Ready to Learn programming, a 30-year effort from the federal government that helps to develop educational media. “Once they start to engage and have the space to slow down, they think, ‘There’s a reason I trust the media coming from PBS Kids.’ It’s joyful, and educational, and we’ve heard that in our formal research process.”

Dave Peth, the creator and executive producer of PBS show “Lyla in the Loop,” has worked on other educational media in his 20-plus years in the industry, and he says “no one” deploys the level of rigorous research and testing used in PBS programming.

“Lyla in the Loop,” for example, goes beyond showcasing a family of six living in a Philadelphia-esque city. Peth originally began developing the show in 2015 to focus on computational thinking, which deploys strategic thinking patterns commonly used in engineering and computer science. Nine years later, the show premiered.

“Yes, it does take extra steps to make sure what we’re building is based on solid research on what works in education, but it’s worth it.”

“It’s not uncommon for a PBS broadcast series to take a fairly long time to develop,” he says. “Yes, it does take extra steps to make sure what we’re building is based on solid research on what works in education, but it’s worth it.”

PBS works with advisers—ranging from educational researchers to psychologists—who create a framework of learning goals based on studies and topics that are age-appropriate for children. Producers use those frameworks when creating content for the network—whether it’s a televised show or a game on the PBS Kids app—while ensuring it remains engaging and fun for children. PBS also brings in research evaluators, like Pasnik, who take proposed stories and present them to children, evaluating their comprehension and engagement. Any takeaways and adjustments are made in the final story and applied to future episodes.

There is also a large focus on “child-centered content,” designed specifically for the age of the target audience and how much they can process. For example, most PBS Kids episodes are 11 minutes, accounting for children’s shorter attention spans and how much they can retain in a single sitting.

“PBS allows producers to take the time and do it right; we don’t take shortcuts,” Peth says. “You step back and realize, ‘Yes, we are making a contribution,’ to the media landscape and to kids’ and families’ lives.”

The research is particularly important because, as a public media company, PBS regularly and publicly posts its findings for others to build upon.

Federal funding, like the Ready to Learn grant, accounts for about 15 percent of the PBS total budget, costing each taxpayer roughly $1.40 per year, according to PBS. PBS also receives support from foundations, programming dues—and, as many will recall hearing at the end of each PBS episode, from viewers like you.

The Ready to Learn grant saw its funding from the US Department of Education cut in May, prematurely ending its current five-year run, leaving $23 million untouched and stopping its research work immediately.

If this slashed federal spending leads to programming cuts, proponents of the network say it will be tough to replicate the scale of what PBS produces, along with the decades of research conducted by the corporation and the know-how to deploy it.

“It’s like asking, ‘Don’t you think other universities can do the kind of high-quality research Harvard is doing?’ No, I don’t,” says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a director of Temple University’s Infant and Child Laboratory. “They don’t have the people, the labs, and the sustained support.”

In addition to the research and programming being done at a national level, PBS is also in the unique position of spanning about 330 local stations. Most of those affiliates work directly in their own communities, offering workshops, camps, and other engagement efforts.

“They’re bringing this programming that builds off these characters that children love and relate to, and bringing the learning to them,” says Seeta Pai, vice president of education and children’s media at the PBS Boston-based affiliate GBH. “That’s what these stations are uniquely suited to do; they’re the boots on the ground.”

Those local outreach programs are particularly important in what some call “low-resource” areas, meaning places where children live in lower-income households and have less access to broadband internet or information centers like libraries.

“What’s been found, again and again, is that access to educational content is more predictive for learning, for academic outcomes and social outcomes…the effects are strongest for families that don’t have access to other material resources.”

“I see [PBS programming] as a resource for those that may not have access to other material goods,” says Rachel Barr, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University. “What’s been found, again and again, is that access to educational content is more predictive for learning, for academic outcomes, and social outcomes. And again, the effects are strongest for families that don’t have access to other material resources.”

The studies showcasing the positive effects of PBS on children’s learning seem endless. A 2015 study showed children who watched “Super Why!” had stronger literacy skills. That same year, a study found viewers of “Peg + Cat” had stronger mathematical skills. A 2021 study found “Molly of Denali” had better problem-solving skills. Several researchers that EdSurge interviewed pointed to a study from the University of California, Los Angeles, asking teenagers—the first to have grown up watching “Daniel Tiger”—about the show, with almost all respondents not only remembering it but also specific episodes and lessons learned.

“We hear on social media almost daily about something like that,” Pai says. “There’s the short-term impact with children’s learning but it’s also a benefit to society. Kids who had more early childhood education are likely to do better in school and life; that prevents societal expenses later on down the road, whether it be crime or poverty.”

And with roughly half of U.S. children not attending any formal early childhood education program, the supplement of PBS’ research-backed programming could make a difference for their future academic and social-emotional performance.

For years, PBS supporters have argued that government leaders should consider these stakes before reducing support for public media. Mr. Rogers famously testified to that effect in front of the Senate in 1969.

More recently, in 2023, an appropriations bill proposed eliminating federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Shortly thereafter, the advocacy coalition Protect My Public Media asked local broadcasting stations how they would be affected. Roughly 230 responded, nearly all stating that the loss of federal funding would cause “imminent” cuts to staff and programming. Twenty-six stations confirmed that they would be forced off-air, and 23 more stations would need to reduce their coverage areas.

That threat was eliminated. But now, faced with its current threat, PBS has already started shrinking. GBH, which created PBS standouts like “Arthur” and “Molly in Denali,” laid off some staff earlier this month, while at the national level, PBS furloughed roughly a quarter of its Kids division.

President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for cuts to PBS argues that there is more media than ever to access. Indeed, the YouTube Kids app amassed over 145 million downloads in 2024, and the majority of streaming networks all offer “kids” profiles stuffed with shows like “CoComelon,” “Bluey” and “Ms. Rachel.”

But that embarrassment of riches ironically makes choosing high-quality programs more difficult than ever for families.

“We’re all awash in content possibilities, but much like parents say it’s a full-time job reading emails for children’s schools, it can feel like a job to find content beneficial for kids,” Pasnik says.

Children spend plenty of time on screens regardless of the content, equal to more than two hours of their day on average, according to Common Sense Media, a nonprofit focused on media and its suitability for children. Screen time only increases when accounting for lower-income versus higher-income homes. According to the most recent census from Common Sense Media, children from lower-income households (those earning less than $50,000 a year annually) spend nearly twice as much time with screens compared to those from higher-income households (which make $100,000 or more a year).

Hirsh-Pasek, of Temple University, compares media consumption to a diet: If you cut out nutritious food, children will either turn toward more unhealthy food, like desserts, or eat less in general, akin to going hungry. She views the funding hit against PBS in the same vein.

“It’s creating a digital desert,” Hirsh-Pasek, who also serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says. “Our high-quality programs are the nutritious stuff. There is so much out there that isn’t good for kids. If you take away the stuff that is [good], you’re leaving kids with digital junk food.”

“Our high-quality programs are the nutritious stuff. There is so much out there that isn’t good for kids. If you take away the stuff that is [good], you’re leaving kids with digital junk food.” 

Starting in the 1990s, the Children’s Television Act required broadcast television to air a dedicated amount of educational content and limited advertising during children’s programs. The rise of streaming and online entertainment undermines that guardrail.

“The expansion of the media landscape is a little jarring; we are having kids watch TikTok and Instagram Reels and YouTube videos that don’t have a foundation of research,” says Amaya Garcia, director of preK–12 research and practice at the think tank New America. “Just because you can access it on YouTube for free doesn’t mean that content is high-quality and appropriate.”

Many entertainment options for children claim to be educational and have good intentions but still lack the research-backed methods employed at PBS. Baby Einstein, for example, was regarded as quality programming in the mid-1990s, eventually selling to Disney. However, several studies found that it created no additional benefits, with one even finding it inhibited babies’ language development.

“Researchers can see what children attend to—and they may attend to a lot of things, but they may not learn from it,” Barr, the researcher from Georgetown University, says. “That’s where the PBS grants look at what children are gaining, versus attending. And that’s the difference between a business model and an educational model.”

Garcia has seen the media landscape change even among her three children. With her oldest, born in 2008, “We watched lots of PBS,” she says. She did less of that with her second child. With her third, born in 2019, there was a pivot toward watching shows via the PBS app.

“It’s definitely changed and gotten harder as the kids have grown up, but I also had the foundational experience of looking at media, of what is good and bad,” Garcia says. “The bottom line: We want high-quality public media that’s accessible to kids. Even in light of the evolving media landscape, we still need something parents can trust and rely upon.”

GBH’s Pai believes younger parents especially those who grew up with screens, have less understanding of what makes for high-quality programming.

“As the tsunami of content has increased, there’s also an increased need for media literacy,” she says. “It’s almost like we’re educators making the curriculum in school: There’s a level of expertise that we bring. And the brand equity is so high in terms of trust … but it’s almost like they’re taking it for granted that it’s there.”

Those working on PBS shows or for the PBS corporation were all hesitant to speak about the organization’s fate as the funding fight continues, instead focusing on highlighting the benefits the network can provide for children in the interim.

“I can’t possibly predict what’s going to happen, but what doesn’t change is people’s need for growth, and kids’ need to expand their minds and gain new skills,” says Peth, of “Lyla in the Loop.” “So as long as that very human need exists—producers like me and others, and PBS, are going to continue to make content to serve that need.”

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Retired Brigadier General Greg Smith spent 35 years in the Army National Guard. He’s seen riots. He’s protected political conventions. He led the military’s joint task force in response to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. But he’s never witnessed the US armed forces being used the way they’ve been deployed recently in Los Angeles. “This is madness,” he says of President Donald Trump’s call-up of both the National Guard and the Marines in response to protests over the administration’s immigration raids.

Normally, federal troops are deployed at the request of a governor, often when a state’s resources are overwhelmed with something like mass protests or a natural disaster. But earlier this month, Trump unilaterally federalized 4,000 soldiers from the California National Guard and called in 700 Marines in response to protests opposing raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement—all without the consent of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Smith says it appears there’s little to no communication between local police and those military groups, which could lead to potential conflicts on the ground. But he also sees a larger issue playing out: the president wielding the armed forces for purely political purposes.

“I’m watching the military becoming co-opted by politicians, and where that leads is some really troubling places,” Smith says. “If that happens, the roots of our democracy are in extreme danger.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Smith talks with host Al Letson about the “madness” of federal troops entering LA in response to recent protests, why the Insurrection Act needs reformed, and what he sees as the military being increasingly tasked with enforcing a political agenda rather than defending the Constitution.

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This interview was transcribed and edited for length and clarity.

Al Letson: Right now in Los Angeles, people are protesting ICE detentions and they were met with local police, the Marines and the National Guard. Now, the Guard wasn’t called up by Governor Gavin Newsom, but instead by President Trump. Under what authority did Trump have to order the Guard to become involved and why?

Greg Smith: One of the things that’s not well explained in the media is that the California National Guard, as soon as the president calls it to federal duty, stops becoming the State National Guard. So they are no longer answering to the state of California or its governor. They now have the same status as the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne. They are federal troops at that point. That means that there are a whole lot of things that they can’t do because they are no longer under state control. So the president, under the Insurrection Act, can call up federal forces to protect federal facilities or quell an insurrection or protect citizens whose civil rights are being violated.

President Johnson did this in 1965 in Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators. What President Trump is alleging is that looting and property destruction are violating the civil rights of shop owners. So that’s the authority he’s using. But here’s where it gets a little convoluted. He didn’t use the Insurrection Act. He didn’t say, “I’m calling out the Insurrection Act.” He went to an obscure section of Title X, which governs the armed forces. And if your listeners care, it’s Section 12406, which authorizes the president to call up forces to protect federal facilities and federal personnel. However, the order is supposed to be executed through the state governor. That didn’t happen. And that’s the basis of California’s lawsuit.

So as someone who’s been in the Guard and been a commander in the Guard for many years, now retired, what was your thoughts on watching this LA response and how it was organized?

I’ll tell you my thoughts. My thoughts were, this is madness. Let me use the example of the Boston Marathon bombings. Civil support is a tiered response, leveled response. So when something happens, the local authorities respond. When they’re overwhelmed, they say to the state, “We need help.” When the state resources are overwhelmed, they say to the federal government, “We need help.” That didn’t happen here. The reason that it’s a tiered response, Al, is to achieve something called unity of effort. And I’ll say that again, it’s a military term, but unity of effort basically says everybody is singing from the same hymnal. They’re coordinated, they’re moving together.

There’s also a concept called incident command. And what that is, is when madness is occurring, that there is one element that says, “We are in command here,” and the other elements say, “Okay, what do you need us to do?” During the marathon bombings, Boston Police and the FBI did what was called a unified command. So when I’m pushing forces into the city of Boston, I’m in communication with them. “Where do you need us? What do you need us to do? What resources do you need?” That’s not happening in LA. You’ve got the police and the California Highway Patrol dealing with demonstrations. And oh, by the way, now you’ve got this whole other military group, and there appears to be no communication between the two.

Yeah. It seems like a recipe for disaster.

Yeah.

So the courts have gone back and forth over the legality of Trump calling the troops without Newsom. I just want to dive through that legal stuff again. So we already talked about Title X. What’s Title XXXII?

Title XXXII is federal funding for National Guard soldiers under the governor’s command. So that’s typically how you are paid and how resources are provided for an emergency; a flood, a hurricane, a wildfire. But Title XXXII is gubernatorial command and control. So Title XXXII has really nothing to do with what’s going on in LA right now because Governor Newsom has been really kind of shoved aside.

Yeah. And State Active Duty

So State Active Duty is when, and I worked on the State Active Duty a lot, is when the governor says, “Hey, National Guard…” And remember, the governor is the commander in chief of the National Guard. “Hey, I need you to go sandbag that river. It’s not a federal emergency, but I think it’s pretty darn important from a state side.” So the money’s coming out of the state budget. So to be honest, Al, the State Active Duty Title XXXII provisions are really about who pays the bill

Right. Okay.

Both under the governor’s command and control.

Last technical question. What is the Posse Comitatus Act?

I’ll tell you what it is and then I’ll tell you where it comes from because it has a very interesting origin. Posse Comitatus is a long strictly held concept, which basically says you cannot employ federal troops to conduct law enforcement activities against people within the United States. Posse Comitatus says law enforcement has that responsibility, military does not. Not allowed. The only exception is the Insurrection Act. And that really should only be invoked when there is a civil war. But we’ve seen presidents use that act under less provocation.Posse Comitatus actually comes out of southern states during Reconstruction because they didn’t like union troops stationed in southern states enforcing voting rights. Posse Comitatus comes into the legal framework, I believe, in the 1870s or the 1880s. And it was really a move by the former Confederacy to get union stabilization troops out of the south.

So it was used in the Civil War, but it’s actually a good idea that the government cannot use military against its citizens.

Agreed. It’s a good provision.

So we talked about this a little bit earlier, but can you tell me what is the Insurrection Act? And do you think it should be applied to the protest? I mean, does that act need reform?

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. The Insurrection Act needs reform. So the Insurrection Act, I’m not looking at notes, but I’m going to say it’s been used, oh goodness, probably a dozen times. President Eisenhower used it to desegregate schools in the south. President Bush used it in the Rodney King riots response. But that was at the request of the states, and that was a state governor saying, “Hey, I need help. I need federal troops in here to restore order.” So that was, I would say, an appropriate use, is when the governor says to the president, “Send help.”But what’s an insurrection? The courts have not defined it. And I’m going to go out on a limb and tell you, I sure as heck think that January 6th was an insurrection, but we didn’t have calling out the Insurrection Act then. But the activities, the protests, the level of civil disobedience in Los Angeles, is that an insurrection? I’m not a lawyer, but that doesn’t look like an insurrection to me. The Insurrection Act needs reform, it needs specificity. Congress needs to take that up. And if they won’t, then the Supreme Court needs to rule on what constitutes an insurrection.

So you talked about this a little bit before, but I just want to go a little deeper. While you were in the National Guard, the Boston Marathon bombing happened in 2013. Tell me about that day and the role you played in command.

So the Massachusetts National Guard, probably since the Boston Marathon began, has always secured the route along the 26 miles up to the city of Boston. So I had done that as a young officer. And it’s not tough duty, Al. You are out there very early, but the job consists of, the runners are coming down the route, you are turning to the people behind you in the crowd and saying, “Hey, can you folks step back up on the curb?” And they do. It’s a very simple job. And by two o’clock in the afternoon, life is good.

However, 2013, I’m at the finish line with Staff Sergeant Patrick Smith. I could not call him my driver. He was my guardian angel, my bodyguard, my conscience. So I’m with him. And he’s saying, “Hey, let’s watch more runners.” And I’m saying, “No, no, no, no, no. I got stuff to do. Let’s get back to headquarters.” We were maybe 20 minutes away from the finish line when my Blackberry went off and I remember the voice of Colonel Mark Merlino saying, “Sir, there have been explosions at the finish line. There are multiple fatalities and widespread injuries. What are your orders?” Life changed very quickly.

So that’s why we have training. We were very concerned about something called a Mumbai style attack where the initial explosions are actually a faint to draw responders in, and then the ultimate attack follows afterwards. Some people have criticized me for that. They say, “Well, don’t you feel silly when it turned out to be two people?” No, I don’t feel silly. You always plan for the worst. So that’s how things played out. I will say this, I was unhappy that we were told that we couldn’t be armed, and there were some hard words exchanged about that. We paired National Guard teams with armed Boston policemen because I didn’t like the idea of soldiers being exposed to danger.

Well, fast-forward, when the Tsarnaevs came up out of hiding, we aren’t. We actually didn’t ask at that point. We just said, “If we’re going after armed and dangerous terrorists, we have to arm ourselves.” And so we moved into Watertown and we formed the net around the Tsarnaev apprehension area. I’m very proud of what soldiers did.

In your book, there were times where you talk about Guardsmen being relentlessly taunted for hours on end by protesters. Do you think that a Guard should have weapons at a protest?

So, if I can tell another story.

Yeah, please.

When I was very, very young, I was 24 years old, I was quickly dispatched to a civil disturbance with a force of 40 soldiers, who, by the way, were not the 40 soldiers that I usually commanded. They were the first 40 people to arrive. And somebody said, “Lieutenant Smith, take those 40 people and get over there and secure that state hospital.” The context, which doesn’t really matter, but the legislature had declined to fund the budget. The state workers who manned the hospital had gone on a payless payday and they were angry. And they wanted to shut down the hospital, but there were people in the hospital that were on life support. I’m sure you can understand the crisis now.

Yeah, it’s tense.

So at night, we’re out there trying to hold back these very angry workers who haven’t been paid. Things get worse at night because people have a sense of anonymity. So there was a lot of pushing and shoving. There was a lot of spitting, kicking, those types of things. Soldiers are human, and you can really only take so much of that before you become tense. So at one point, one of the protesters broke through the line and he grabbed me by the shirt and he said, “I want your name. You’re in charge here. I want to know who you are.” I’m 24 years old. I’m an army lieutenant. He’s a drunk, middle-aged guy. I grabbed him by the shoulders and I pushed him back outside the picket line and I said, “I don’t touch you, you don’t touch me.”

What I didn’t realize is that he stumbled and he fell and everybody laughed at him. About 15 minutes later, it’s pitch black. There’s this scuffle. And my guys are taking somebody down to the ground. And the police, we had a couple of policemen with us, are cuffing this guy. And I looked down and I realized it’s the guy who had grabbed my shirt. He had a baseball bat, and he was coming to use my head as a fastball. So let me go five days from there. So the operation goes on. This is in the summer. Five days later, it’s afternoon, and I’m out looking for soldiers on the picket line, because I’m back and forth in the hospital looking at our soldiers who are doing operations like feeding and changing beds. And I can’t find the picket line. It’s gone. There are no protesters, there are no soldiers.And I look behind this bush and everybody is sitting in the grass with a case of Budweiser in the middle of all. And they’re all drinking their beers, having a great time, soldiers, protesters, all together. I’m a lieutenant. I just can’t be drinking on duty. I took two steps forward and I said, “What’s the mission here?” To keep peace. That’s about as peaceful as anything’s going to get.

Absolutely.

So I shut my mouth and I went back to the hospital. But here’s my point. On night one, we would’ve killed each other. On day five, we were drinking beer together. What I learned is, the first mission in crowd control is to de-escalate the situation. You don’t push people down so that other people laugh at them. To try to diffuse the situation. Took me a while to learn that.

Do you think that kind of training is being given to the Guards now as far as to be able to work with protesters? I think that some of our rhetoric, when we talk about these protests, when we talk about these clashes, is that the people that you are up against are like your sworn enemies and not fellow Americans. And I feel like that’s the missing piece on both sides is that we are not looking at each other like we are fellow Americans, that we all have stake in this thing. And people’s first amendment rights should be respected and the give and pull between how that respect is shown. I’m just curious, is anybody being trained in that fashion?

The answer is yes and no. Remember, Al, that as a citizen soldier who’s only available for training for a relatively short period of time, there’s a lot that has to be done. Weapons qualification, physical fitness, nuclear, biological and chemical training, how to wear a gas mask and protect yourself, first aid. I could go on and on and on and on. Some units get very good crowd control training. When National Guardsmen go into a crowd control situation, they’ve got, I want to say, three priorities. One, to secure whatever it is they’re securing. They’re always either securing a building, protecting a group of people, or there’s an objective to be secured.

Two, they are making sure that no one’s rights are being abused. So they are very aware of free speech rights. People can say what they want to say, do what they want to do. The line becomes fuzzy when punches are thrown, kicks are… Where is the line between assault and acting out? And the third thing is safety, to make sure that no one is hurt or killed. So they’re aware of that. I am confident that they know what they’re doing there. In terms of how to do it and whether they’ve been specifically trained on crowd control, maybe, maybe not, and probably not.

Yeah. Which, does that concern you when watching what’s happening in Los Angeles?

So I certainly don’t want to hold myself up as some guru, but in Massachusetts, when we had to put troops into civil support missions, we generally went to military police organizations or air security police. They have some training around this in terms of their basic job training. They also are likely to also be law enforcement personnel. Remember, when you get a Guardsman, you’re getting a soldier and you’re getting some other profession. So mainly military police and air police units are full of cops. So putting them on the street to do crowd control is a good thing. They know how to do that.

I didn’t see any effort in LA for them to recruit military police, mainly because military police will wear an armband that says MP. I didn’t detect any of that. It would’ve been wiser for California to activate their military police units because there’s a much higher level of expertise. And I will also tell you this, we very rarely, almost never put National Guardsmen on the street with long arms. Pistols are what we put them on the street with, because it looks like law enforcement, it’s less intrusive, and it leaves their hands free to do other things.

Did you see Guardsmen with long arms in California?

Yes.

Or at the protests in LA?

Yeah. That’s all they have.

And you think that’s a mistake?

That I do.

Yeah. So my last question to you is, the National Guard has been such a huge part of your life and career. Seeing what’s happening right now, how concerned are you about the Guard being used for political purposes?

Hugely. I mean, I am a citizen soldier. I believe that what makes the United States military unique is that we don’t give up our citizenship. And so therefore, the military needs to be comprised of people who are progressive, conservative, socialist, I don’t know, vegan, carnivores, all sorts of people. And it needs to be that way because we are a pluralistic, expansive society. And the military needs to be able to be an honest broker, a fair-minded force that protects everybody regardless of what their opinions are.

I’m watching the military becoming co-opted by politicians. And where that leads is some really troubling places. Not only are people starting to doubt whether the United States military would protect them because of their political leanings, but now people are becoming nervous that the military may be used to enforce a political agenda. If that happens, Al, the roots of our democracy are in extreme danger. The United States military has always accepted that we work for civilian leadership. We’ve never challenged that. But we’ve also always maintained that while we work for you, you don’t own us. Your party does not own us. There are questions arising about that nowadays, and that makes me fearful.

Well, it feels like that is specifically what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants, is that he wants a military that is completely loyal to not the Constitution, but to President Trump.

I’m very glad that you mentioned that. Commitment to defend the Constitution is the oath we swear over and over and over again. The President is not part of it. Only respecting the fact that he is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces under the Constitution. But we are devoted to the Constitution. So yes, I have concerns.

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The group chat lit up Jonathan Paz’s phone: Another immigration raid was happening a few blocks away. Paz took off running.

He arrived minutes later to a quiet block of auto body warehouses in Waltham, Massachusetts, where SUVs with tinted windows had surrounded a sedan and apprehended the driver, a man in his late 20s. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in a balaclava and tactical vest stood in the street, talking to a 13-year-old boy who had been in the car. As Paz approached, he realized the agent was going through the boy’s phone and asking about his immigration status.

Paz, 31, is the founder of Fuerza, a volunteer group in Waltham that responds to ongoing ICE arrests. On that gray morning in May, he had been in the middle of a neighborhood patrol walk when he got the text messages. He did as he’d trained dozens of volunteers to do: He pulled out his phone and started recording, stayed a few feet from the officers, and addressed the boy. “I was telling him to relax. I was telling him to breathe,” Paz says. “I was telling him his rights—like, don’t say nothing. You’re here. You’re fine with us.”

Within minutes, the agents had driven away with the man, leaving the child alone on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets.

A handful of other volunteers were already on the scene, including Colleen Bradley-MacArthur, a Waltham city councilor, who recorded video as an agent veered his car toward where she stood on the sidewalk before telling her not to interfere.

The operation dispersed as quickly as it escalated. Within minutes, the agents had driven away with the man, leaving the child alone on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. Volunteers walked the boy home—the man who had been detained was his dad’s friend—and suggested a pro bono lawyer who might be able to help the man, who was detained at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility. They logged the incident into the records they’ve been keeping of ICE arrests. A few days later, the event made the national news, thanks to Bradley-MacArthur’s video.

But before any of that, on the sidewalk at the scene of the arrest, Paz pulled the boy aside for a pep talk. Paz knew what it was like to see ICE detain a loved one: When he was 14, his father was deported to Bolivia and his mother followed soon after, leaving Paz and his brother in the care of an aunt. Paz went on to become a Waltham city councilor and mayoral candidate, and he now works at a tech company while spending his free time on Fuerza.

“None of this stuff is okay. I don’t want you to think this is normal,” Paz remembers saying to the boy, “but that doesn’t mean it defines you.”

Paz talks with a Waltham resident to collect information about an ICE arrest that occurred earlier in the day.Sophie Park

Waltham, a city of 66,000 a half hour from Boston, has historically opened its arms to immigrants. A quarter of the population is foreign-born, and a fifth is Latino. A short stretch of a main drag called Moody Street features restaurants with cuisines from a dozen countries.

But lately, Paz says, it feels like his city is under siege. When I joined him on a neighborhood patrol last month, he kept an eye out for the license plates of ICE agents and flagged recent landmarks. “We had someone arrested today, I think, down the street that way,” he said, pointing down a residential block. We walked by the spot where the 13-year-old was left standing on the sidewalk, and the place where, a few days after that, a high school girl recorded officers smashing a van window to arrest a driver as she waited for the school bus.

He nodded to a sedan parked outside a warehouse. “You start picking up on the fact that there are abandoned vehicles because people had a loved one taken,” he says.

At CPAC in February, border czar Tom Homan promised, “I’m coming to Boston. I’m bringing hell with me.”

Fuerza documented more than 50 arrests in Waltham in May—likely far fewer than the actual number. The dramatic escalation wasn’t surprising. At CPAC in February, border czar Tom Homan promised, “I’m coming to Boston. I’m bringing hell with me.” A month later, on a trip to Massachusetts, Homan stopped by a Mexican restaurant on Moody Street for breakfast. No arrests were made that day, but the visit spooked employees.

It felt “like a mobster,” says Bradley-MacArthur, coming “to survey their territory.”

The sweeps in Waltham typify ICE’s crackdown across the country—one that has swept up immigrants at court houses, schools, traffic stops, and workplaces, from day laborers in Los Angeles to construction workers in Tallahassee to coffee farmers in Hawaii. ICE recently announced that federal agents arrested nearly 1,500 people across Massachusetts as part of an enforcement surge in May dubbed Operation Patriot.

Fuerza is one of countless rapid response groups that have sprung up to document arrests and warn other immigrants to stay away. In Waltham, when someone thinks they see ICE activity, they call a volunteer-staffed hotline run by a statewide immigrant rights group called LUCE. Flyers for the hotline are everywhere in Massachusetts, pinned to bulletin boards, taped to lamp posts, posted in the comments sections of neighborhood Facebook groups. The hotline receives as many as 100 calls a day, says volunteer Jaya Savita.

LUCE then alerts Fuerza volunteers, called “verifiers,” who go to the scene of the alleged enforcement. If the officers are indeed with ICE, Fuerza spreads the word to neighbors. Verifiers are trained to document what’s happening without interfering; they practice stepping back at least seven paces, telling officers that they’re going to record what’s going on, and asking the officers what agency they’re with. They also talk directly to those being arrested, informing them that they have the right to remain silent.

“This administration is telling a story that they’re coming after criminals. They’re not telling you that they’re taking small business owners and left a bunch of kids without their dads.”

LUCE was inspired by Siembra NC, a program in North Carolina that pioneered the volunteer-driven ICE hotline model. Siembra, which started during the first Trump presidency, has trained more than 1,200 volunteers outside of North Carolina this year, helping teach groups in Atlanta, Nashville, Phoenix, and California. Each has its own tactics. Some groups arm volunteers with loudspeakers; others do neighborhood patrols with walkie-talkies. Many, like Fuerza, also try to help the families of those who have been detained with referrals to pro bono lawyers, mental health care, and other social services.

“Hundreds and hundreds of people keep showing up to these community watch trainings,” says Marlene Martinez, Siembra’s rapid response manager. The hope, she says, is to change the narrative about ICE arrests. “This administration is telling a story that they’re coming after criminals,” she says. “They’re not telling you that they’re taking small business owners,” she adds, “and left a bunch of kids without their dads.”

Paz writes down information about identifying ICE for an employee at Azteca Market in Waltham.Sophie Park

The recordings serve other purposes, too. Together, they help track trends: In Waltham, the federal agents often drive Dodge Chargers with tinted windows. As is the case elsewhere, many of the arrests are in the early morning or early evening, and the agents wear balaclavas. “That’s the easiest tell,” Paz says. The masked agents are “inside the car just waiting. And it looks really—very creepy.”

The recordings also help cases get media attention. Videos in several immigration arrests that made national headlines—including the arrest of Rosane Ferreira-De Oliveira, a Brazilian mother of three in Worcester, Massachusetts—were taken by local volunteers.

One Fuerza volunteer says she wakes up at five in the morning—“when they do,” referring to ICE officers.

But the ultimate hope is that the recordings help get someone out of detention. At the scene of an arrest, “You’re like, ‘I hope they don’t do anything illegal,’” said one Waltham volunteer, who asked to go by her nickname, Nic. “And part of you is like, ‘Well, I kind of hope they do so that we can use this and get this person out.’”

A white woman who was recently laid off, Nic has turned volunteering with Fuerza into effectively a full-time job in recent weeks, doing dispatch and training other volunteers. She wakes up at five in the morning—“when they do,” she says, referring to ICE officers. Nic had never paid attention to cars, but now, she says, “I’ve learned a whole bunch of car brands.” She was among the many volunteers I spoke to who took pride in the diversity of Fuerza’s more than 120 volunteers, who include retirees, activists, soccer moms, and church groups.

Sometimes, though, the work can feel futile. Siembra co-founder Andrew Willis Garcés says he’s not aware of any recent cases in which someone was released from detention due to footage taken by a volunteer for Siembra or other similar organizations, though such evidence has been used in past cases.

Paz hugs his sister, who happened to drive by, on the street where a 13-year old boy was left after his father’s friend was detained by ICE.Sophie Park

“You get all this information in a video, and it’s like, well, now what?” Nic says. It’s “better than nothing, but like, how much better than nothing?”

Like any mutual aid, the movement is hard to categorize and morphing in real-time. Fuerza recently dispatched volunteers to the local food pantry in case ICE showed up. “Then we realized that the turnout was so low because people are afraid to leave their houses, so we boxed up a bunch of the food and hand-delivered it to their houses,” Bradley-MacArthur says. “We’re building the plane while we’re flying it.”

Three weeks before we spoke, the mother heard from a friend that ICE was looking for her. Ever since, she and the kids had been in hiding.

Just before Memorial Day, I received a call from a Fuerza volunteer who is known for being a connector among Waltham’s Latino community. She asked if she could put me on a three-way-call—a mother Fuerza works with was willing to talk to me. (Both women asked to not be identified.)

The mother, who is undocumented, lives in Waltham with her sons, ages 10 and 14. Years ago, the family immigrated from El Salvador, in part to seek medical care for the 14-year-old, who has a debilitating heart condition. Three weeks before we spoke, the mother heard from a friend that ICE was looking for her. Ever since, she and the kids had been in hiding. They hadn’t left the house, afraid even to take the trash out. The boys had missed weeks of school and doctor’s appointments, living off of food brought by relatives. The mother was trying to pass the time in a way that felt light for the kids, watching Superman and having pajama parties, but she could tell the boys were scared and stir crazy. They longed to go outside, to play in the park.

She prayed that President Trump would soften his heart. No somos criminales, she said in a pleading voice.

When I asked what it was like for her to see videos of ICE arrests on social media, she began to weep. She lives in fear that she’ll be next. Did she have a plan if that happened? I asked. What would happen with the kids? She admitted she didn’t know.

Rosary beads hang from the rearview mirror of a car parked on the street in Waltham. “You start picking up on the fact that there are abandoned vehicles because people had a loved one taken,” Paz said. Sophie Park

At this point, the volunteer apologized to me, saying she needed to stop translating for a moment. In Spanish, she explained to the mother that she works with pro bono attorneys who are helping families plan in case parents are deported. The mother needed an affidavit authorizing another caregiver to take in the kids if she’s detained, and also a form with the kids’ passport information in the event they were sent back to her in El Salvador.

In that moment, the two came up with the plan. If the mother were detained, the kids would go to their grandmother, who lives nearby. The mother relayed the pertinent information—her full name and the names of her kids, their birth dates, their grandmother’s phone number.

“Today’s the first time she’s thinking about this,” the volunteer told me later. “She didn’t have a plan because it’s happened so fast.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Three years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing states to ban abortion, the justices have decided tolet states ban another politically controversial form of health care—this time, gender-affirming medical treatments for minors.

In a major ruling on Wednesday, the Supreme Court uphelda Tennessee law banning transgender kids, but not cisgender kids, from accessing puberty blockers and hormone therapy—regardless of their parents’ support for the treatment. Tennessee’s law is one of 25 state bans on pediatric gender-affirming care passed nationwide since 2021. Nearly all of those laws are currently facing legal challenges by transgender children and their families, and are now expected to be allowed to remain in effect.

The 6-3 decision in United States v. Skrmetti was one of the most anticipated rulings of the year. In their decision today, the justices decided that Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors does not treat people differently based on sex, but rather based on age and the medical reason for treatment. As a result, they ruled, the law only has to meet a low legal standard in order to be considered constitutional.

The “case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound.”

After concluding that the Tennessee law does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, Roberts said that the court was leaving the issue of pediatric gender-affirming care to the states—the same position the court took in the decision overturning Roe v. Wade. “We leave questions regarding its policy to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process.”

The ruling, led by the court’s conservatives, is a major loss for the transgender community at an extremely vulnerable moment. The case is the first Supreme Court ruling on one of the many anti-trans state laws passed in recent years, as powerful religious-right organizations and conservative politicians mounted a coordinated campaign inundating state legislatures with hundreds of bills attacking trans rights of children and adults in schools, sports, and the privacy of doctors’ offices. The attacks have only intensified since President Donald Trump took office in January, and declared that the federal government would recognize only biological sex, not gender identity—forbidding trans people from getting passports that accurately reflect their gender, kicking them out of the military, and ordering supportive teachers to be prosecuted. Another executive order, which has been temporarily blocked by the courts, ordered all federal funding cut off for hospitals and other institutions that provide gender-affirming care to people under 19.

Access to gender-affirming treatments for trans youth is supported by virtually all major US medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association. Such care is only provided with the consent of a parent or guardian, and is much rarer than the media and political attention would suggest: A recent study of 5.1 million privately insured patients found that less than .05 percent of youth ages 8-17 were transgender and received puberty blockers or hormones. Even among trans youth, most did not pursue medical treatment.

The lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s ban was brought by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, an OBGYN treating transgender patients, and three trans teenagers and their families.“I do not want to see her go back to the dark place she was in prior to coming out and receiving the life-saving treatment she needs,” Samantha Williams, the mother of one of the young trans plaintiffs, said of her daughter in a court declaration.

“For so many families, they’ve already experienced the worst nightmare,” Chase Strangio, the ACLU lawyer representing the transgender kids and their families, said in an interview before the ruling. “The healthcare has already been banned in their state. They already have to travel extraordinarily long distances. Many of them are on their third or fourth state and trying to access care. This decision will have a huge impact on how we understand our legal rights and protections moving forward, [but] materially and emotionally for transgender young people and their families, the worst case scenario has already happened.”

“Materially and emotionally for transgender young people and their families, the worst case scenario has already happened.”

The lawsuit asked the justices to decide which legal standard courts should use when evaluating if bans like Tennessee’s are constitutional under the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Under longstanding precedent, courts are required to scrutinize laws more closely if they treat people differently based on sex, race, or other protected characteristics. As I reported last December:

Legally speaking, the main issue in the case boils down to the question of whether bans on gender-affirming care are a form of sex-based discrimination. If they are, then states going forward will have to prove, when challenged, that the bans are “substantially related” to an “important state interest.” That’s a fairly high bar—one that would require judges to weigh the medical and scientific evidence around the prohibited treatments. When trial courts havelooked at that evidence in the past, they’ve overturned the bans, siding with the trans youth and their families.

At oral arguments in December, Tennessee Solicitor General J. Matthew Rice argued that his state’s ban does not treat people differently based on their sex, but rather based on age and medical purpose. On the other side, Biden’s Justice Department argued that the Tennessee law was sex discrimination, and thus had to be scrutinized under the higher bar.

DOJ lawyers point to the text of the law, whichexplicitly says that the state wants to “encourage[e] minors to appreciate their sex” and forbid treatments that might “encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.” The “purpose is to force boys and girls to look and live like boys and girls,” appellate judge Helene White summarized in a dissent from the Sixth Circuit ruling. Under the law, kids can receive puberty blockers and hormone therapy if the medications are provided to help them conform their bodies to their sex assigned at birth, but not if the treatments are provided to help them notconform. “There is no way to determine whether these treatments must be withheld from any particular minor without considering [the minor’s] sex,’” DOJ lawyers argue in their Supreme Court briefing.

When the case first arrived at the district court, the judge applied the higher bar, known as “heightened scrutiny,” and blocked the law from taking effect. But when the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on the case in 2023, it decided that the ban did not discriminate based on sex, and thus only had to meet the low level of scrutiny, which experts describe as a “rubber stamp.”

Today, the Supreme Court court agreed, and rubber-stamped Tennessee’s ban. The decision will likely put an end to similar legal arguments challenging other states’ gender-affirming care bans.

“If a transgender boy seeks testosterone to treat gender dysphoria, SB1 prevents a healthcare provider from administering it to him,” Roberts reasoned in the summary of the majority opinion. “If his biological sex were changed from female to male, SB1 would still not permit him the hormones he seeks because he would lack a qualifying diagnosis. The transgender boy could receive testosterone only if he had a permissible diagnosis (like a congenital defect). And, if he had such a diagnosis, he could obtain the testosterone regardless of his sex or transgender status.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor authored a dissent. “[The Court] authorizes, without second thought, untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them,” she wrote. “Because there is no constitutional justification for that result, I dissent.”

The ruling is not likely to affect current challenges against other anti-trans laws involving bathroom access and sports, according to Strangio.

Yet it is likely to serve as a “green light” to the Trump administration, says Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, to “go ahead, full steam ahead. You can just continue trampling over this community as viciously as you want.”

But Strangio and other LGBTQ-rights litigators aren’t giving up in the fight against gender-affirming care bans. They’ve also raised a separate constitutional argument that the bans violate parents’ rights to direct their children’s medical care. Today’s decision doesn’t touch on that argument—and the Supreme Court could decide to hear it as soon as next year, Strangio says**.**

“We will find ways to keep fighting,” Strangio vowed. “We’ll fight in state court. We’ll lobby Congress. We’ll lobby our state legislatures, and we’ll organize in the streets. As we’ve always done.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

For the first time since 2021—the start of the Biden administration—banks have ramped up their financing of fossil fuel projects, a changing tide that reflects the Trump White House’s close ties to and energetic support for Big Oil. That’s based on the annual Banking on Climate Chaos report, which analyzes the lending patterns of the 65 largest banks in the world, and some 2,730 firms with fossil fuel interests that they’ve lent to.

The report, published today and authored by a group of eight environmental non-profits, found that banks financed oil fields, pipelines, and coal mines to the tune of $869 billion in 2024—up by $162 billion, or almost 25 percent, from 2023. Over the past eight years, the 65 banks profiled in the report financed almost $8 trillion in fossil fuel expansion.

Meanwhile, in 2024, the world passed the much-feared 1.5 degrees Celsius warming target set by the 2015 Paris Accords, which Trump again withdrew the US from almost immediately after returning to office. Experts attribute the increase in many natural disasters to climate change; in the US alone, 27 separate natural disasters in 2024 individually surpassed $1 billion in damages, with a cumulative 568 fatalities and $182.7 billion in costs.

But banks abandoned net-zero and climate-friendly pledges in droves last year, in addition to backing fossil fuels. “This year, banks have shown their true colors,” said Lucie Pinson, one of the co-authors of the report.

With President Trump’s pro-fossil fuel executive orders, even more commercial lenders ditched climate agreements in the first half of 2025. Sierra Club’s Jessye Waxman described the retreat as a “clear capitulation to political pressure.”

Overwhelmingly, the report found, both the banks financing fossil fuels and the companies they financed were US-based. Four of the five top banks investing in fossil fuels were also US-based.

Liquid natural gas is the fastest-growing fossil fuel in the world, and the US is its largest exporter. When calculating the 20-year emissions footprint of both LNG and coal, researchers have found that LNG has a 33 percent larger footprint than coal.

Climate impacts aside, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says that there’s no need for more LNG projects—and that the “glut” of projects will likely lead to higher gas prices for consumers in the long run, in addition to community impacts zeroed in on by the Banking on Climate Chaos report.

In Mozambique, for example, four active LNG projects have forced hundreds of families to relocate, with a Mozambican NGO receiving more than 1,000 complaints about compensation, resettlement, and housing from families forced to relocate. TotalEnergies, one of the project’s owners, helped fund a paramilitary to “ensure the security of Mozambique LNG project activities,” which investigations have found abused and killed residents. Fifteen separate banks finance the four projects, including a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase.

A 2024 report from the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice catalogued parallel harms to US communities near natural gas projects, finding that predominantly low-income communities of color near such developments had higher rates of pollution, emissions, asthma, and cancer.

“Facilities [are] being sited in our most vulnerable communities and placing our most vulnerable populations at risk—while providing the lion’s share of economic benefits to more affluent populations and communities,” said Dr. Robert D. Bullard, the center’s head.

“I dream of a time when we don’t have to produce this report any more,” said Diogo Silva, one of its co-authors and a campaigner with the nonprofit BankTrack, “as we would finally be protecting present and future generations from catastrophic living conditions.”

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

Almost two centuries ago, Native American tribe members sought the protection of Florida’s Everglades during the Seminole wars as they hid from government forces seeking to banish them to Indian territories that later became Oklahoma.

Now, as the Trump administration continues its wholesale slashing of federal funding from conservation projects, the Miccosukee Tribe is stepping up to fulfill what it sees as a “moral obligation” to return the favor.

The tribe is looking to buy and protect environmentally significant lands, including some that once provided refuge, in a groundbreaking partnership agreement with the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation. The corridor is an ambitious project to connect 18 million acres (7.3 million hectares) of state and privately owned wilderness into a contiguous, safe habitat for scores of imperiled and roaming species, including black bears, Key deer, and Florida panthers.

Tribal officials say they will work with the foundation and other partners to “explore the acquisition and stewardship” of land within the corridor considered important to the tribe and its community.

“We have a constitutional duty to conserve our traditional homelands, the lands, and waters which protected and fed our tribe since time immemorial,” said Talbert Cypress, chair of the Miccosukee Tribe headquartered on a 130-square-mile reservation west of Miami.

“[But] we’ve seen some sort of hesitancy a lot of times to commit to projects because of the erratic nature of how the government is deciding to spend their money or allocate money.”

“We have a constitutional duty to conserve our traditional homelands, the lands, and waters which protected and fed our tribe since time immemorial.”

The agreement, announced at a summit of corridor stakeholders in Orlando last week, comes as a study by the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society (NAFWS) found that 60 percent of federally recognized tribes have lost grants or other federal funds, totaling more than $56 million since Donald Trump took office in January.

“These services are part of what we receive in lieu of all of the years of what we gave up, our land, our resources, and sometimes, unfortunately, our culture and language,” Julie Thorstenson, executive director of the NAFWS, told the Wildlife Society last month.

With government funding drying up, and the future of existing federal land stewardship agreements uncertain because of Trump’s sustained onslaught on the National Parks Service, Cypress said tribe leaders had re-evaluated its work with other partners.

“For good reason, my predecessors had more of a standoffish approach. They went through a lot of the areas where they did deal with conservation groups, federal agencies, state agencies, pretty much not including them in conversations, or going back on their word. They just had a very different approach to this sort of thing,” he said.

“My administration has taken more of a collaborative approach. We’re engaging with different organizations not just to build relationships, but fix relationships that may have gone sour in the past, or were just non-existent.”

Cypress said the tribe, which already has collaborative or direct stewardship of almost 3 million acres in the Everglades and Biscayne national parks, and Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, was working to identify and prioritize land within the corridor of historical significance and to “get those conversations going”.

He said:

Financially, the tribe will invest some money, but we’ll also be instrumental in finding investors, partners interested in the same thing, which is to conserve as much of our natural habitat as possible while making room for growth and development.

We’ve shown we can do it in a sustainable way, and our voice can help in shaping the future of Florida as far as development goes because once a lot of the land gets developed we’re not going to get it back.

We need to do it in a way where we benefit not just ourselves in the present, but for generations in the future as well.

The Florida Wildlife Corridor was established in 2021 by lawmakers who approved an initial $400 million for acquisition against a multi-year $2 billion budget for land conservation. About 10 million acres have been preserved, with another 8m considered “opportunity areas” in need of protection, and environmental groups warning large areas could still be lost to development.

The legislature, which is weighing cuts to corridor funding as it attempts to balance state spending, has encouraged commercial investment and partnerships. At last week’s summit, the Disney Conservation Fund announced a $1 million grant for training conservation teams and expanding public access to trails and natural areas.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

Ten years ago this week, Donald Trump rode down an elevator, surrounded by make-believe supporters who had been paid to cheer him, and delivered a rambling speech declaring his candidacy for president. It was dark. The United States, he bellowed, had “become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.” The nation was “getting weaker.” It was no longer great. Its leaders were “stupid,” “losers,” “morally corrupt,” and “selling this country down the drain.” Mexico was sending “rapists” across the border to the United States. Unemployment was 21 percent. (Actually, it was 5.3 percent.) The US nuclear arsenal “doesn’t work.” (It did.) He laid it on thick: “We’ve got nothing…We’re dying…We’re becoming a third-world country…Sadly, the American dream is dead.”

Ever since then, Trump has been running a disinformation campaign of doom and gloom, depicting the United States as a disastrous hellscape—that is, whenever it serves his perverted political purposes. In his first inaugural address, he characterized the nation as being racked with “American carnage.” During the 2020 contest, he accused Joe Biden of plotting with radicals, antifa, and communists to literally destroy America.

His 2024 presidential endeavor was more a propaganda operation than a political campaign. He claimed Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs, Venezuelan criminal migrants had taken control of towns across the Midwest, schools were performing gender transition operations on children without informing parents, and Biden and Vice President Harris were purposefully importing millions of undocumented people (and using a phone app that told cartel heads where to drop off these migrants). He spewed outrageous and outlandish lies to support an unfounded narrative: America was apocalyptic.

Trump is not facing an election now, but he is continuing to use scare tactics to skew reality.

This was both madness and method. The goal of disinformation is to shape perceptions. If Trump could convince voters that they were imperiled by mobs of barbarous pet-eating brown people and that Biden and Harris were in cahoots with savages and marauders, then they’d have little choice but to vote for him. He was selling a fictitious script to incite fear and loathing, believing that would win him support.

Trump is not facing an election now, but he is continuing to use scare tactics to skew reality. Since he returned to the White House, he has cited phony emergencies to abuse presidential power, falsely claiming that the entry of undocumented people into the United States amounts to an invasion waged by a foreign power and that trade deficits threaten the survival of the nation. And in response to the protests in Los Angeles against his cruel mass deportation effort, he has turned his disinformation campaign up to 11.

Trump says these demonstrations—which have been mostly peaceful, with some yielding limited violent actions—are an insurrection. He and his aides have maintained that Los Angeles is under siege by a vast horde of criminal migrants. In front of troops at Fort Bragg, Trump declared that California Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass are “incompetent” and that “they paid troublemakers, agitators, and insurrectionists” to “aid the occupation of the city by criminal invaders.” He has also said the protests have caused “a lot of death.” And that LA would have been “obliterated,” had he not sent in National Guard troops. His top aides have chimed in. Attorney General Pam Bondi exclaimed, “California is burning.” Stephen Miller, Trump’s minister of malice, tweeted, “Los Angeles is occupied territory.”

In Trump’s telling, he’s the strongman rescuing a great American metropolis from annihilation. In reality, he is exacerbating conflict triggered by his own destructive policy.

None of this is remotely true. The inciter-in-chief was lying to the troops. Yet Trump cult propagandists at Fox and other right-wing media outlets have strived to bolster Trump’s deceit with hysterical coverage of the few violent acts that have occurred in a 1-square-mile area of downtown Los Angeles. (The city encompasses 502 square miles.) Yet again, Trump is cynically concocting a bogus and dangerous tale that demonizes Americans for political advantage. In his telling, he’s the strongman rescuing a great American metropolis from annihilation. In reality, he is exacerbating conflict triggered by his own destructive policy.

Countering disinformation is difficult, especially in a time of media fragmentation. Trump’s supporters and Fox viewers tend to believe whatever he says. One photograph of three burning driverless taxis goes a long way with his devotees. Fact-checking and reporting by other media outlets mean little to them. And it is tough to fight disinformation one falsehood at a time. Litigating phony assertions can draw them more attention. By the time you’ve challenged one piece of disinformation, another—or many more—emerges.

A more effective response to disinformation is to characterize specific sources of bad information as untrustworthy and not to be believed. But the media lost this fight with Trump years ago, in the early stages of his political career, when it was largely reluctant to brand him a perpetual liar. Since then, it has been playing catch-up with his never-ending stream of falsehoods and hokum, as the stakes get higher. And into this present crisis, when he is spreading lies to justify using military forces against domestic political opposition.

As Trump turned his last political campaign into a disinformation op, he has done the same with his second presidency. He seeks to convince Americans that both an invasion andan insurrection are underway and that the existence of the nation is at risk—and that he must respond with militaristic and autocratic tactics. (On Thursday, a federal judge in California ruled Trump did not have the legal authority to assume control of California National Guard troops and order them to Los Angeles. Hours later, an appeals court stayed the judge’s order and set a hearing on the matter for June 17.)

Here was a brazen attack on the constitutional order. It was practically a declaration of civil war against the people of LA and California.

This is a perilous moment. It was disturbing to see federal agents on Thursday forcibly remove and assault Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) when he tried to interrupt Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, while she was conducting a press conference in Los Angeles. More troubling was what she said moments before that episode:

We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.

Liberate the city? Engaging in classic red-baiting, Noem was proclaiming that Trump intended to use federalized National Guard troops and Marines to overthrow the elected leaders of Los Angeles and California because he objected to their policies and political stances. The federal government does not have the authority to do this. Here was a brazen attack on the constitutional order. It was practically a declaration of civil war against the people of LA and California. Call it authoritarianism. Call it fascism. It is not American democracy. Ultimately, Trump’s disinformation operation is aimed at undermining, if not crushing, our diverse and messy democracy. He seeks to burn the village so he can seize power to supposedly save it. And the most potent ammunition for his war on America is lies.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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

In the high glare of a summer evening in Fairbanks, Alaska, Ciara Santiago watched the mercury climb. A meteorologist at the National Weather Service office, she had the dubious honor of issuing the state’s first-ever official heat advisory as temperatures were expected to hit the mid-80s.

It’s the kind of bureaucratic alert that rarely makes national headlines. But in a city where permafrost thaw buckles roads, homes lack air conditioning, and the high at this time of year is generally in the low 70s, the warning comes as a sign of rapidly shifting climate. Alaska is warming more than twice as fast as the global average.

“People in [the] Lower 48 might think that’s nothing, but here those temps could feel like 110.”

In Alaska, where hazardous cold is historically more of a concern, weather offices in Fairbanks—just 120 miles south of the Arctic circle as the raven flies—didn’t have the option of issuing heat advisories until the beginning of this month, when it was added to a list of possible public alerts. “It gives us a more direct way of communicating these kinds of hazards when they occur,” Santiago said.

The heat bearing down on Alaska isn’t entirely unprecedented, at least in meteorological terms. On the heels of a cold spring, a dome of high pressure, known as an upper-level ridge, has settled over the Interior, a fairly common pattern that traps warm air. In the state’s central valleys, that can spell high temperatures and dry conditions. Temperatures on Friday reached a high of 82 degrees Fahrenheit. An updated advisory on Sunday warned the hot conditions would last until Tuesday, with “temperatures up to 87F to 89F… Isolated areas up to 90F are possible, especially in the Yukon Flats.”“People in [the] Lower 48 might think that’s nothing, but here those temps could feel like 110,” Santiago said.

With nearly 22 hours of sunlight approaching the solstice, daytime heat accumulates and lingers—not just outside, but indoors. Unlike the Lower 48, most homes in Alaska weren’t built to keep heat out but to keep it in during months of subzero cold. The thick insulation this requires turns houses into ovens during extended periods of hot temperatures. In Europe, where infrastructure is similarly designed for cold climates, a brutal 2003 heat wave exposed the potential risks: It killed 35,000 people.

That’s part of why the state’s new heat advisory matters. It’s not just a weather bulletin. It’s a warning for a state where most people don’t have the coping mechanisms taken for granted elsewhere—shaded porches, central air, even knowing the signs of heatstroke.

The sudden temperature jump also poses its own challenges. “I’m originally from Texas,” Santiago said. “I’m so used to hot summers that in the 50s, I start putting on a jacket. Now living in Alaska, I’m wearing dresses at that temperature.” But it’s not just a matter of clothing: When your body adapts to higher temperatures, the volume of blood expands, allowing your heart to pump more efficiently and reducing heat stress. You begin sweating earlier and produce more sweat per gland. But it generally takes one to two weeks of exposure to adapt, making sudden swings in temperature riskier.

The office Santiago works for, like many National Weather Service offices, has recently lost staff under Trump administration cuts. More than 560 members were laid off across the country, reducing its capacity by about a third, and leaving many stations critically understaffed. As a result, the Fairbanks office that made the state’s first heat warning must now suspend operations overnight. “We’re working to the best of our ability with what we have,” Santiago said.

The early start to summer heat comes after a winter with low snow levels and early melt, raising concerns about fire season. Layoffs have also affected firefighting staff, where both technical expertise and basic manpower are in question. Concerned about federal capacity, California Gov. Newsom launched a firefighter recruitment effort this week, but in Alaska, much of the wildland firefighting force is federal, raising the question of whether those like Santiago who must prepare for threats ahead will have the resources they need.

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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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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From Mother Jones via this RSS feed

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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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

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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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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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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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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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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