Andrew Tate’s Defense Is Pure A.I. Slop
Andrew Tate’s lawyer is spamming X with absurd AI-generated images in a last ditch effort to convince the public of the alleged pimp, sex trafficker, and rapist’s innocence.
Joe McBride, a defense attorney who has represented multiple January 6 insurrectionists, has posted multiple fake pictures of Andrew and Tristan Tate—who are currently in Miami awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom—in prison. They wear orange prison jumpsuits and are often residing in comically disgusting conditions.
“The conditions Andrew and Tristan Tate are being held in are a disgrace. Small filthy cell. Cockroaches. Shower water to drink. No chair. Lights they cannot control. Food that makes Taco Bell look like a Michelin restaurant. Beds too small for men who are 6’3” and 6’5”,” McBride wrote in one post. “Three days outside since the day they were locked up. This is not punishment after conviction. It is illegal punishment that violates their constitutional and human rights.”
Prosecutors have contested McBride’s description of conditions, writing that “while FDC Miami is not a Marriott, the Tates’ conditions of confinement are reasonable, constitutional and within BOP’s discretion.”
The conditions Andrew and Tristan Tate are being held in are a disgrace.
Small filthy cell.
Cockroaches.
Shower water to drink.
No chair.
Lights they cannot control.
Food that makes Taco Bell look like a Michelin restaurant.
Beds too small for men who are 6’3” and 6’5”.
Three… pic.twitter.com/gVZC0zwyI6
Another depicts the brothers in those same orange jumpsuits, meditating while sitting in the lotus position.
BREAKING: The Court has granted our motion. Andrew and Tristan Tate's bail hearing is now set for Thursday, August 27th.
We are pleased with the Order of the Court.
The government filed a brief loaded with new accusations, then opposed giving us the time to answer them. The… pic.twitter.com/TlCAO7VF2Q
And perhaps the strangest one shows McBride and the Tate brothers sitting in some dingy room surrounded by Elon Musk, George Washington, Joe Rogan, and John F. Kennedy, among others. The words “sovereignty,” “masculinity,” “conquer,” “manosphere,” and “power” are on the walls.
“THE MANOSPHERE BUILT WESTERN SOCIETY. MEN ARE THE WARRIORS, THE FATHERS, THE PRIESTS, THE PRESIDENTS, THE GENERALS, THE BUILDERS. EVERY WAR FOUGHT AND EVERY CATHEDRAL RAISED WAS THE WORK OF A MAN,” McBride wrote in all caps last week. “THE RECORD IS NOT IN DISPUTE. TESTOSTERONE IS NECESSARY. LONG LIVE MEN.”
McBride told Mother Jones’s Anna Merlan that the AI-generated images were actually all part of his plan.
“Strategically, a picture is worth 1,000 words,” he said—a claim that could only be taken seriously if those pictures didn’t look extremely stupid and fake.
McBride is rallying and having Tate supporters do pushups outside of the Miami Detention Center because he’s trying to cast the brothers as these independent free thinkers who are victims of a politically biased UK government. In reality they are glorified internet pimps who have been hit with seven rape charges, three counts of sex trafficking, three counts of assault with bodily harm, and 19 charges for child and extreme pornography—absolutely abhorrent accusations.
And Tate wasn’t just some ambiguously right wing, manpsphere poster. He literally ran an online course to “free the modern man from socially induced incarceration” and get followers to recruit women into their “sexual slavery” schemes to obtain their Ph.D.—“Pimping Hoes Degree.” It cost $8,000 per year.
“You have to fuck them, and they have to love you. It’s essential to the business,” Tate said in one of the courses. “You have to be militant with your fucking pimping.”
“Bang out the machete, boom in her face, then grip her up by the neck,” he said in another clip. “The machete’s on the floor, her panties are all wet, and you go fuck her. That’s how it goes. Slap, slap, grab, choke. Shut up, bitch. Sex.”
The brothers have a pretrial hearing on August 27.
THE MANOSPHERE BUILT WESTERN SOCIETY.
MEN ARE THE WARRIORS, THE FATHERS, THE PRIESTS, THE PRESIDENTS, THE GENERALS, THE BUILDERS.
EVERY WAR FOUGHT AND EVERY CATHEDRAL RAISED WAS THE WORK OF A MAN.
THE RECORD IS NOT IN DISPUTE.
TESTOSTERONE IS NECESSARY.
LONG LIVE MEN. pic.twitter.com/8R8MPow84W
Trump Treasury Is Deleting an Anti-Corruption Database
Donald Trump’s Treasury Department doesn’t want law enforcement to be able to “follow the money.”
The Treasury Department announced Friday that it would destroy the government’s registry on shell-company ownership, a database law enforcement uses to investigate money laundering and corruption, The Bulwark reported.
In addition to scaling back requirements for shell companies to submit basic information to the federal government, the new rule will also destroy all the data it has already collected.
The Corporate Transparency Act, passed in the final days of Trump’s first administration, legally requires the Treasury Department to maintain this registry. Trump had previously exempted domestic companies and U.S. citizens—99 percent of the entities previously required to report—from data collection under the CTA. The Treasury Department’s latest move has made that decision permanent.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is already selling the decision as a favor to small businesses.
“Today’s action is a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a statement. “President Trump promised to cut red tape, and this final rule delivers. Treasury is eliminating a burdensome reporting requirement for millions of law-abiding business owners without compromising our national security.”
Before the CTA was passed, the United States stood at the center of the world of offshore finance, being the primary location where narco-traffickers, arms dealers, and others chose to wash their illicit money clean. Now, Trump wants to bring all that back.
Trump isn’t alone in delivering a massive gift to grifters, cartels, and kleptocrats. Republicans are in on it, too. In April, Trump’s allies on the House Financial Services committee pushed through a measure that would repeal the requirement that U.S. shells divulge their true owners. In May, Senate Republicans introduced similar legislation, aiming to attach it to the broader defense bill set to be passed later this year. Neither bill has passed a full vote.
Since reentering office, Trump has only made it harder for law enforcement to crack down on certain financial crimes. In addition to eliminating the task forces on kleptocrats, pausing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and gutting the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the president has also pardoned dozens of white collar criminals.
GOP House goon says Congress isn’t ‘looking out for the rich’
On Thursday, a House Republican actually said that the GOP-controlled Congress is not doing enough to help the rich. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) made the comment at an event in Michigan in which Republican lawmakers—including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise—were trying to defend the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.” GOP leaders hoped the law would help them in the midterms, but it is actually…
Tech bro is watching you
A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Trump team rolls out creepy scheme to get your private medical data…
Luigi Mangione pleads guilty to federal charges in killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO
Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty on Friday to federal stalking charges in the 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Mangione, 28, entered the plea at a hastily scheduled hearing in Manhattan federal court, resolving one of two cases against him in connection with Thompson’s death. With this guilty plea, his lawyers could seek to have the state case thrown out on double jeopardy…
Fish Are a Big Deal in This Senate Race
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Inside Washington
Mary Peltola is putting the “fish” back in kitchen table issues
Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola has a campaign slogan you don’t hear in other states: “Fish, Family, and Freedom.” The last two aren’t surprising. But “fish”?
Other Senate candidates this year are focusing on gas prices or health care costs. But to Peltola and many other Alaskans, fish are a crucial and overlooked policy issue touching everything from affordability to labor to the role of money in politics. Ahead of the primary on Tuesday, August 18, she’s been traveling around the state making her case. The top four candidates in the nonpartisan ranked-choice voting primary will advance to the November general election. Peltola is all but guaranteed to advance to the general.
Peltola’s main opponent is Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan, who is seeking a third term. Peltola faces an uphill battle in the red state, which hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1964. But Peltola, who represented the state as its single Congressperson from 2022 to 2025, has outperformed other Alaskan Democrats—in 2024, she lost reelection to the House by fewer than three points, while President Donald Trump won the state by 13 points.
Recent polls show a competitive race. An early August Alaska Survey Research poll showed Peltola with 50.8 percent compared to Sullivan’s 49.2 percent in the final round of ranked-choice. A late June poll from The New York Times and Siena University has Sullivan with a two point lead in the initial round of ranked-choice, with five percent of respondents undecided. Both the Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball classify the race as a toss-up.
Peltola’s fish policy isn’t just about fish, her campaign says, but also the role of corporate spending in politics, Alaska Native sovereignty, and everyday bread-and-butter (fish-and-butter?) issues.
“As someone who grew up salmon fishing on the Kuskokwim River with my father, I know firsthand that fish is more than food—it’s central to Alaskans’ way of life,” Peltola said in a statement. “That’s why I will fight tooth and nail to restore our fisheries to abundance, and that means doing whatever it takes to ban factory trawling and reduce bycatch, deliver relief for Alaska fishermen and communities that are suffering the fallout of fishery collapse, and save our fish. I will stand up to anyone—including the factory trawling lobby and Lower 48 special interests—to fix the rigged system in D.C. and put Alaska first.”
Trawling—using nets pulled through the water to catch fish—is common in Alaska’s fisheries, but can have devastating consequences for the marine ecosystem. In 2026 so far, trawlers have caught nearly 22,000 Chinook salmon by accident in their nets—a side effect known as bycatch. Alaskans are two years into a seven-year fishing moratorium in the Yukon River to protect the fish population. Indigenous subsistence fishers say the ban harms their way of life, while large-scale trawling continues. A majority of likely Alaska voters support a ban on trawling and believe fishing should be limited to rural residents when the salmon population is low, according to a 2025 survey conducted by Data for Progress.
“Alaska is actually well known for having some of the best managed fisheries,” said Liz Nussbaumer, a program officer in the Seafood, Public Health, and Food Systems Project at Johns Hopkins University. Despite that, she said, Peltola’s proposed fisheries policies are welcomed by many, particularly in the deregulatory environment of the Trump administration.
Nussbaumer pointed to Peltola’s plans for fishery disaster funding (which helps keep fisheries stable after a natural or man-made disaster), a fish by-product economy (using fish waste produce for things like pet food and pharmaceuticals), and new monitoring technology to stop bycatch as the most innovative proposals on her platform. “It’s been a blind spot for fisheries and aquatic food systems, where terrestrial [agriculture] typically has had a lot of these protections, but fisheries have not, and especially smaller scale operations, these producers can be living paycheck to paycheck,” Nussbaumer said about disaster funding for fisheries.
Sullivan, meanwhile, has received nearly $280,000 from the trawling industry. One of his largest contributors is Trident Seafoods, which has a history of environmental violations. In 2011, the Department of Justice announced that the company would pay $2.5 million to resolve Clean Water Act violations. In 2018, Trident Seafoods was fined $300,000 for underwater piles of fish by-product near its processing facilities. This June, Sullivan introduced a bill to reduce bycatch, but experts say it was similar to a bill Peltola introduced during her time in the House, which Sullivan did not support.
Peltola’s plan to create a fish by-product economy could help reduce the waste created and dumped by companies like Trident Seafoods. But she also sees this waste as part of a larger story. “Whether it’s bycatch or broken promises from D.C. insiders, Alaskans can’t stand waste, fraud, or abuse,” her website reads. She’s called for 12-year term limits on members of Congress, overturning Citizens United, and banning lawmakers from trading stocks. It’s not directly about salmon. But it’s part of the same story that Peltola is hoping will resonate with voters.
—Emma Janssen
Outside Washington
Republican House Representative John James, currently competing against Democratic nominee and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in the race to replace Governor Gretchen Whitmer, has chosen his running mate, and it’s looking like he opted for an attack dog: State Representative Jay DeBoyer. DeBoyer was one of the Republicans spearheading Michigan House’s lawsuit against Benson last year to force the release of training materials for election officials—information that Benson claimed, if publicized, “would enable someone to interfere with the chain of custody of ballots, tamper with election equipment, or impersonate a clerk on Election Day.” DeBoyer also led an effort to hold her in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena over this. Additionally, The Detroit Free Press’s Clara Hendrickson reports, “during a fiery exchange in a June 2025 committee hearing, he zeroed in on her violation of the state’s campaign law when she held a launch event for her campaign for governor in the building that houses her department’s offices.”
DeBoyer’s statement accompanying James’s announcement naming him to the lieutenant governor spot, Bridge Michigan reports, said that “Michiganders face a clear choice between socialism and a bold new direction rooted in freedom, opportunity, and prosperity.” Given that Benson is pretty moderate, this “socialism” reference may indicate that DeBoyer will try to use Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (who also does not identify as a socialist, but is considerably more progressive than Benson) to argue that all Democrats are radicals.
—Heather Souvaine Horn
The Ideas Factory
A new report from State Futures, a nonprofit focused on state policy in response to “federal authoritarian overreach,” paints a vivid picture of life in the Trump era: So far in 2026, the report finds, lawmakers have introduced 242 bills in 32 states to try to protect residents in response to the administration’s immigration policies. Of these, 53 have passed. Two, notably, have been vetoed—one by Virginia Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger, who said banning ICE from courthouses, schools, and hospitals “would effectively require security guards and, in some cases, local law enforcement be placed in the untenable position of choosing between violating state law or federal law.” The other veto came from Democratic Governor of Colorado Jared Polis, who said a bill allowing people to sue ICE agents for violating their rights contained overly narrow language.
The Open Markets Institute files an amicus brief in a case currently before the Tenth Circuit, “urging the court to reverse a lower court decision that shielded a no-hire agreement between grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons from antitrust liability.… Open Markets argues that the agreement deprived workers of one of their most important sources of leverage during a strike: the ability to seek employment with a competing unionized employer.”
Data for Progress released a new poll finding that “voters think they are more likely to become homeless than a millionaire or billionaire, and reject the idea that billionaires obtain their wealth through innovation and hard work, instead seeing them as exploitative and a sign of a dysfunctional, anti-working-class economy.” There’s impressive cross-party agreement on that: Not just 67 percent of Democrats, but 65 percent of Republicans say they’re more likely to become homeless than become a billionaire—interestingly, only 54 percent of independents or third-party respondents agree with that. They’re more likely than either Democrats or Republicans to say they “don’t know” or are “more likely to become a billionaire.”
—Heather Souvaine Horn
In Closing
Good Week: David Crowley
In a matter of days, Crowley went from trailing Francesca Hong in the polls by 18 points to narrowly beating her in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor.
Bad Week: Pollsters
Maybe voters really believed Hong wanted to cancel Thanksgiving. Maybe Crowley dropping out of the race then reentering it, or Mandela Barnes’s sudden exit in late July, scrambled things so badly that no survey stood a chance. But coming hard on the heels of Abdul El-Sayed’s much-closer-than-expected victory in Michigan, Midwest pollsters have been the target of a lot of quips this week.
Political Trivia Question of the Day
Who was the first ever Black Cabinet secretary? That’s a pretty tough one, so partial credit for naming the president who appointed him.
(Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)
Why Don’t Leftie Candidates Do Better Among Working-Class Voters?
The question has popped up frequently in this election cycle. Even in the wins notched by left-leaning and socialist candidates, those candidates appear to have fared comparatively poorly among voters of the actual working class.
There aren’t exit polls in primaries, so we don’t know how voters without a college education—the typical proxy for working-class—cast their ballots. But we can still tell a lot from geography: Cities are liberal and on average more educated, rural areas the opposite; some counties are dominated by universities or colleges; and finally, we know the demographics of the bellwether swing counties in every state. So in the Michigan Democratic senatorial primary, Abdul El-Sayed did best in urban and diverse Grand Rapids (Kent County) and where the University of Michigan is (Washtenaw). Haley Stevens won Detroit, where she did a better job of connecting to Black voters, and she tended to win the rural counties. In the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial, David Crowley won Milwaukee and most of the rural counties, while Francesca Hong took the counties with universities and colleges.
Critics of the left like to sneer about this, saying it exposes a hypocrisy at the core of the current left resurgence—namely, that these candidates who claim to speak for the proletariat are doing a pretty lousy job of winning their votes. They’re obviously not wrong, factually. But I think they’re wrong, or mostly wrong, about why.
These critics tend to argue that these results prove that the new populist politics doesn’t appeal to actual working-class people, who are, in the critics’ telling, more moderate in their politics. Therefore the right way to appeal to these people is with sensible, moderate positions. They also often point out with no small amount of schadenfreude that the inability of people like El-Sayed and Hong—this was also true, according to the polls, of Maine’s Graham Platner, the Hotchkiss oysterman—to win working-class voters is proof of what out-of-touch elitists they really are.
Leftists shouldn’t delude themselves: There is some truth to the second point. There’s a long, long history here. In 1848, there were revolutions across Europe as citizens finally became restive enough about all those inbred monarchies to demand change. Initially, students and workers in Vienna, Prague, and other cities marched side by side. Before too long, however, divisions began to emerge. The students wanted things like political rights. The workers just wanted better factory conditions and more bread. Things didn’t end well in most places—like Paris, for example, where Napoleon’s nephew seized power and held it for more than two decades until he started a dumb war and the radical Paris Commune took over.
Today, we see the split in, say, certain aspects of the platform of the national Democratic Socialists of America. A national DSA co-chair has recently done two hugely embarrassing interviews, one with Fox News and the other with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, in which she touted prison abolition and border elimination and so on (and incredibly had no idea at what rate she would tax rich people). These are, to be sure, not ideas working-class people would get behind. They’re purely campus-left positions that aren’t going to get you very far in electoral politics.
The local DSA chapters, in contrast, are far more pragmatic. They emphasize housing and health care and economic things that actually matter in people’s lives. The difference between the more ideological national DSA and the more grounded local chapters was well and knowledgeably laid out by Nathan Newman in
a Substack post in early July.
But even that isn’t really the main reason why progressive candidates have trouble getting working-class votes. The main reason, in my view, is this.
Non-college working-class voters are more skeptical than more educated voters are. I say that not to praise or damn one group or the other. It’s just, I think, the reality. It stems from the fact, more glaringly true in this country with each successive generation, that for the educated class, things like opportunity and advancement and the confidence that one’s children will live better lives are far more real than they are for working-class people. Working-class people’s lives in these last couple of decades have just gotten much harder, inching ever closer to the precipice of job loss, default, indignity. Working-class people live in regular if not constant fear of these things. Educated people, in an economy that leans more and more toward rewarding them, do not.
Therefore, educated voters and non-college voters hear politicians’ promises through very different ears. To educated voters, big promises about government improving people’s lives sound great, or at least plausible. To non-college voters, those promises sound like just more empty talk. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that to non-college voters, the bigger the promise, the phonier it sounds. They hear promises about free health care for all, and they think yeah, right, that’s never gonna happen in this country. Their experience has taught them not to believe, and for the most part, you can’t blame them.
It’s true that it’s not fair that social democrats—and again, most of these candidates are really social democrats, not democratic socialists—should pay the electoral price for this. After all, it wasn’t they who’ve been screwing over the working class for four decades. But they’re stuck with the reality that the screwing has made working-class people extremely suspicious of those promising them big things.
So what’s the solution? Well, the only real solution is to win office in sufficient numbers to deliver on the promises to the point that working people do see genuine improvement in their material conditions. But that’s going to take a lot of time. A decade, maybe more.
In the meantime, I think the best progressive candidates can do is first and obviously, stay away from topics like prison abolition; but second and more importantly, really just explain things to working-class voters in a way that understands and assumes their skepticism. Aspirational rhetoric appeals to educated voters. To non-college voters, it just sounds like more fluff. Tell them, specifically and concretely, why their rent keeps going up, who’s doing it to them, and how you’re going to go after the people doing it. And explain clearly and specifically how your Republican opponent is on the side of the rent-raisers. Dot-connecting of that sort seems to me more likely to win working-class votes than lofty rhetoric and big promises.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.The Bipartisan Backlash to Trump’s Bulldozing of a Texas Landmark
Politicians from both parties are crossing the aisle to voice their opposition to President Trump’s bulldozing of Big Bend National Park to make way for more wall along the southern border.
Big Bend is a sprawling, 800,000 acre park within Texas’s Rio Grande Valley that’s been frequented by hikers and campers since it opened in 1944. The park is so beautiful and so significant that even the most pro-border conservatives are setting aside their views to defend it.
“I believe in border security 100%,” Terrell County Republican Sheriff and former Border Patrol agent Thaddeus Cleveland said to Fox San Antonio. “Believe in even installation of barriers where they’re needed. But I can tell you that specific area ... even just what they’ve done, unnecessary.”
The Trump administration has been bulldozing to place 17 miles barriers, surveillance, and sensors along the mouth of the Santa Elena Canyon. The plan was initially “a bold line of wall structure along the floodplain of most of the Rio Grande in the high desert region of Far West Texas,” as laid out in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. But that was shelved after local protest.
BREAKING: DHS IS BULLDOZING THE MOUTH OF SANTA ELENA CANYON.
DHS waived every single environmental law, now they’re butchering the most iconic part of Texas’ crown jewel national park. All happening the day after a massive protest right here and on the morning CNN left. This is… pic.twitter.com/GEc5YQEDxK
Another thing both Democrats and Republicans agree on is that Big Bend’s mountains already function as a natural deterrent for migrants.
“My constituents believe that the 1,000-foot riverbank cliffs and remote Big Bend terrain offers its own source of deterrence for any illegal migrants crossing into the United States,” Republican Senator John Cornyn wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin last week. “Many residents that live and work around the parks are also concerned that a physical wall, which would be accompanied by lighting systems, access roads, and maintenance corridors, would (1) ruin the beauty, landscape, and wildlife of the park, (2) threaten culturally significant Native American sites, (3) disrupt wildlife migration, (4) limit access to the Rio Grande River, and (5) significantly harm the local economy as tourism is a major economic driver for the region.”
“God already built a wall through Big Bend — it’s called the Chisos Mountains,” Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico added. “We don’t need to give billions of our tax dollars to out of state vendors. We don’t need to desecrate this sacred land. We don’t need this useless, disgraceful, corrupt Big Bend border wall.”
“We have an obligation to secure our border, but Big Bend’s rugged, unforgiving terrain already serves as a natural, God-given barrier that deters illegal crossings. The border crossing data already confirms this,” Texas Representative Drew Darby said. “The federal government has immediate access to smart barrier technologies that increase interdiction rates without bulldozing through Texas’ most scenic and irreplaceable landscapes. DHS can and should use these alternative methods and stop the bulldozing now.”
Republicans still seems to have a (Theodore) Rooseveltian sense of justice when it comes to National Parks and lands, which might cause problems for President Trump as he continues to attack America’s defining landscapes, removing protections from over 86 million acres of public lands to free it up for drilling and wall-building.
Trump Temporarily Drops Reflecting Pool to Freak Out Over New Vandals
Donald Trump is once again freaking out about vandals at a national monument. Here’s why you shouldn’t take his outrage seriously.
The president took to Truth Social Friday morning to rave about an incident at the World War II Memorial, which had been covered in red and green graffiti and soapy bubbles.
“Our beautiful World War II Memorial was just hit by Spray Painting Vandals,” Trump wrote. “THERE CAN BE NO GREATER INSULT TO THOSE AMERICAN HEROES WHO DIED IN WORLD WAR II. First the Reflecting Pool, now this. We are on their trail! Where do these animals come from???”
Beneath the memorial’s arch, red graffiti spelled out the message “Clean hands dirty $,” and the memorial’s fountains were also filled with soapy bubbles.
Shortly after Trump’s post, U.S. Attorney Jeannine Pirro announced that one alleged vandal was already in custody, and included photographs of the suspect.
The Friends of the National World War II Memorial said it was “deeply disturbed by the reported vandalism,” and the Interior Department called the incident an “utter disgrace.”
While the recent vandalism is blatantly disrespectful to the memorial’s honorees and their families, Trump’s outrage is entirely disingenuous.
If anyone started a trend of “vandalism,” it was Trump and his hand-picked federal contractors. Not only were they responsible for the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, but they left the monument drained and surrounded by chain-link fences. Trump’s federal contractors were also also responsible for cracking the fountain at the German-American Friendship Garden. Where is the president’s outrage about that?
Still, the president has used stories about alleged vandalism to stir up a frenzy of public outrage in order to antagonize his critics and increase surveillance in Washington, D.C. Notably, this high-profile vandalism has taken place more than a year after deploying the National Guard to literally clean up the nation’s capital.
If Trump wants to get personally involved in protecting America’s landmarks, maybe he should turn his attention to the bulldozers at Big Bend National Park—instead, he’s annoyed about graffiti.
Top Trump Priority Gets Surge of Support … From Dead People
President Donald Trump’s plan for moving Americans’ retirement investments into cryptocurrency and private equity got a boost of support—from dead people.
The Department of Labor received public comments on the plan to fulfill Trump’s executive order pushing for the financial changes, and close to 12,000 of the comments, all in support, show signs of being fabricated, with several being attributed to people who aren’t alive. These comments don’t include email addresses, the commenter’s city and state, or signatures, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
Bloomberg attempted to contact some of supporters on the list, many of whom had unique names identifiable through public records, and found people who say they never made the comments attributed to them, or were dead. One comment made in May and attributed to Danna Oderman was clearly fake, her son Heath Oderman told Bloomberg, not only because she died in December, but because “the language is nothing she would ever have used while on this Earth.”
Another May submission shows Lyngrid Rawlings supporting the president’s plan, but the educator and U.S. Foreign Service officer died in 2024, her daughter Lauren said to the publication.
“It’s deeply disrespectful and dishonoring,” Lauren said. “Her life was about service, and to have her name misused in this way is the antithesis of everything she lived for.”
Living people also had comments falsely attributed to them, including Karl Gilberson, a retired Massachusetts professor, who said to Bloomberg that “those don’t reflect my sentiments, at all.”
All of these comments followed just five templates and were submitted from April 29 to May 5. The names differed, but line breaks, length, and punctuation were all identical, according to Bloomberg’s findings. They also happen to make up the vast majority of supportive comments. In contrast, almost all 30,000 comments opposing the measure were spread out throughout the nine-week comment period and included differing language, email addresses, and signatures, as well as cities and states.
The plan was submitted as a draft rule to the Employee Benefits Security Administration on March 31, and has support from the private equity industry as well as other private sector industries. It seems that some entity or person who really wants American retirement accounts diversified into the private sector decided to manufacture support. The Trump administration considers the measure a top priority, with acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling telling senators in July that “this is how President Trump is going to make America wealthy again.”
But, they don’t seem that concerned about fake comments. The Department of Labor’s “focus when reviewing a comment is on the substance of the comment and not on the identity of the commenter or the number of commenters making the same point,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg.
August 14: Trump blows through billions … and more!
6 minutes agoWalter EinenkelThe GOP message on affordability? “trans stuff and allowing men in women’s sports.” Copy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 7 minutes agoWalter Einenkel“He’s a marginally failed real estate developer with multiple bankruptcies…” Sen. Mark Kelly has a message for warmongering Trump. Copy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 8 minutes agoEvan…
Yet another Trump fan has a FAFO moment
Sometimes, MAGA voters actually do learn. Take Randy, who has undergone quite the evolution on his Facebook page. (Please don’t pile on with comments on his page.) Back in 2024, in between photos of him hunting, the Arkansas resident was posting stuff like this: Or this nugget, in September 2023: So, you know, a typical red-state deplorable. And come hell or…
Trump Orders Navy to Spend Billions of Dollars Undoing Years of Work
President Donald Trump is about to waste billions of dollars to put old-fashioned technology on aircraft carriers.
Trump signed a memorandum Thursday directing the U.S. Navy to start installing old-fashioned steam catapults on its aircraft carriers, instead of electromagnetic launchers, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal.
The memo directs the Navy to redesign the Doris Miller, the newest Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier, and all remaining ships. The first three ships, the Ford, John F. Kennedy, and Enterprise, will keep their electromagnetic system.
Trump has been ranting about “goddamn steam” catapults since 2017, suggesting that the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System doesn’t work, while providing no evidence to support that claim. In January 2024, Trump baselessly claimed that magnets stop working when placed in water, and therefore were a stupid thing to put on a boat. In October 2025, he said he just loved the sight of “that beautiful steam pouring off the deck.”
As recently as last month, Trump called the electromagnetic launchers “not nearly as good, too complex.”
In reality, the Navy says that the electromagnetic launchers have allowed their Ford-class carriers to launch and recover aircraft at a higher rate than previous classes of ships. Additionally, the maintenance on steam catapults is considered labor intensive and costly, compared to newer models.
Trump’s long-standing grudge against electromagnetic launchers seems to stem from his frustration about the production of the USS Gerald R. Ford, which cost roughly $13 billion to make and experienced delays and cost overruns. There’s no reason to think its launchers don’t work, however.
In a statement, the White House said that steam catapults were more “resilient and robust,” and that the move would reactivate parts of the maritime industrial base that are “easier to scale.”
Trump has long pushed for this senseless redesign, but top Navy officials and industry leaders have resisted the move to tear out such a complex system integral to the design of the Ford class. Bryan Clark, a naval expert with the Hudson Institute, told the Journal that replacing the electromagnetic launchers with steam catapults would likely cost billions of dollars.
Trump is not an expert in military asset design—but that hasn’t stopped him from inserting himself in their development.
Top cardiologist puts Trump’s iffy health under the microscope
A high-profile heart doctor is raising concerns about the White House’s failure to fully disclose President Donald Trump’s health issues, and Trump’s team is lashing out in response instead of leveling with the public. Dr. Jonathan Reiner made his case in an op-ed published in the New York Times on Thursday. Reiner is a professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University and…
Trump Sec. Flails When Fox News Wrecks Key Claim About Hormuz Strait
Fox News is not buying the Trump administration’s claims that the U.S. controls the Strait of Hormuz instead of Iran.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright spoke to the network’s Bret Baier Thursday evening, and didn’t have a good answer when Baier asked him about the strait.
“Mr. Secretary, you can concede, can’t you, that the U.S. doesn’t have total control over the Strait of Hormuz?” Baier asked.
“Look, Iran is attempting to hold the world economy hostage and to terrorize their neighbors. They built up a giant arsenal. So are they causing difficulties in the region? Absolutely. But they have a losing strategy. At the end, that will lead to the collapse of this regime in Iran as their economy gets strangled,” Wright responded. “But are they causing some difficulties for their neighbors and the world economy? Absolutely. But their ability to cause difficulties are declining. Our ability to escort and bring products out of that region is growing. They have sort of one card and it’s shrinking in size.”
“That does not sound like total control,” Baier said.
Baier: Mr. Secretary, you can concede, can't you, that the U.S. doesn't have total control over the strait of hormuz?
Wright: Are they causing some difficulties for their neighbors and the world economy? Absolutely. But their ability to cause difficulties are declining.
Baier:… pic.twitter.com/iGBClwkNZx
At one point in the interview, Baier played a clip from November where Wright claimed energy prices would plummet. He then showed the secretary that energy costs were much higher now. Wright ignored Baier’s comparison, claiming that costs were down.
Bret Baier plays Wright a clip of himself from November 2025 saying there will be a downward trend in energy prices. Baier then shows Wright the current figures detailing the rise in energy prices. Wright responds by saying things are going in the right direction. 😬 pic.twitter.com/SILt2IwrGv
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 13, 2026If Fox News is skeptical and willing to call out a Trump administration official, that suggests that the continued Iran war and its negative effects on the global economy are too big to ignore for conservatives. For months, gas prices have stayed high, and talks between Iran and the U.S. have yo-yoed between a peace deal and Donald Trump threatening to escalate the war, but pulling back at the last minute and raising concerns that he is manipulating markets.
If no deal is reached by November, the midterms will not go well for Trump and Republicans, and Democrats could retake Congress. They’d have the ability to end the conflict with a war powers resolution and investigate Trump’s market manipulation, as well as his mishandling of the battle with Iran.
Years after he quit smoking, a lung cancer scan saved his life
By Paula Span for KFF Dennis Schmidt started smoking as a teenager, when that was so unexceptional that his Catholic high school designated outdoor “senior smoking quarters,” where students in their final year could take cigarette breaks. He smoked a pack of menthols daily for nearly 40 years. As a registered nurse at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and a former Air…
Hair, apparent
A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | Trump’s new ‘do raises hairy questions about his health…
Scientists Have Created a New Category of Heat Waves: “Snow Eaters”
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Matthew LaPlante doesn’t have to go to a lab to see his research in action. On some mornings, he can just look out his own window in the mountains high above Salt Lake City. After a warm night when the temperature stays above freezing, he’ll wake up and see that the snow level has dropped by inches, revealing more of the aspens he taps for syrup.
“It feels like a monster came and just in the middle of the night, took a bite out of a snowpack,” said LaPlante, a journalist and climate scientist at Utah State University.
So it’s fitting that scientists have started calling these kinds of heat waves, marked by unusually high temperatures in the spring and early summer, “snow eaters.”
LaPlante was part of a recent study, published in the journal Science Advances, that attempted, for the first time, to identify what conditions exactly make for a “snow eater.” Compared to normal warm spells or heat waves, the researchers determined that these events happen when temperatures stay above freezing through both day and night for multiple days, typically three to five. These events can roughly double the rate at which snow melts, causing flooding and making it challenging to manage water resources.
“Snow eaters” appear to be occurring earlier in the year and becoming more widespread in the Western United States as the climate warms. Since the 1850s, the study found, the area affected by snow eaters has increased by an average of about 40,000 square miles per century, and the first snow eater of the season has been arriving about one month earlier per century.
“Water that would otherwise be stored as snow comes out early, and then we have to deal with it as a hazard instead of a resource.”
The term “snow eater” has a murky history. By at least the 1880s, people in the West were talking about “snow-eating” chinooks, warm mountain winds that make snow disappear quickly. More recently, the phrase “snow-eater heat wave” first made headlines in March, when an early heat wave enveloped much of the West, quickly wiping away snowpack in the Colorado Rockies and California’s Sierra Nevada. The scientists hope the catchy, evocative term can help draw more attention to this type of heat wave, since there’s still a lot to learn. The study only looked at the Western US, but snow eater heat waves almost assuredly occur elsewhere, LaPlante said.
Solar radiation is a major, but sometimes overlooked, driver of snowmelt, said Noah Molotch, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the new study. When it interacts with heat waves, those impacts are amplified. As snow crystals warm up, they lose some of their structure and light-reflecting abilities, causing snowpacks to absorb more sunlight and melt faster. “It’s a little bit of a—no pun intended—a snowball effect,” he said.
Much of the Western U.S. saw record-low snowpack this spring. What was really unusual about it, Molotch said, was how widespread it was. Colorado received less precipitation than normal this winter, while California got lots of precipitation, but in the form of rain instead of snow. But across the region, “the one thing in common was above-average air temperatures,” Molotch said.
These conditions have likely helped fuel exceptionally severe wildfires in the West, from Utah to Spokane, Washington, where hundreds of homes burned earlier this month. “Drought stress for mountain forests around the Western US is heavily dictated by the snow that accumulates each winter and then melts through the spring and summer,” Molotch said. “There is a direct connection there in terms of the water availability and drought stress that can provide one of the important ingredients for increases in wildfire intensity and frequency.”
Source: Emma Tyrrell/CU Boulder/National Interagency Fire CenterSachi Kitajima Mulkey/Grist
If scientists are able to better predict what will happen to snowpack, it could help water managers plan for what’s coming. Early or rapid snowmelt poses problems for managing water resources in the West, where snowpack serves as a key source of fresh water in the drier summer months. “Water that would otherwise be stored as snow comes out early, and then we have to deal with it as a hazard instead of a resource at our reservoirs and along the rivers and streams,” said Ben Hatchett, a co-author on the study and a scientist at Colorado State University’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere.
Snow-eater heat waves also may pose risks to skiers, hikers, and anyone else on or near mountains. They could be linked to hazards such as avalanches, glacial collapses, and permafrost melt, Hatchett said, though scientists are still investigating those connections. He lives in the Sierra Nevada, and he’s noticed one tangible change over his lifetime: The soundscape has changed.
“At night, it used to be quiet,” he said. “And now it’s not quiet, because everything’s melting all the time.”
The Tate Brothers’ Lawyer Is on an Aggressive, AI-Riddled Quest to Win Their Release
It seems extremely unlikely that accused rapists and sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate will be released from Miami’s federal detention center, where they’re being held. For one thing, the brothers are awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom to face sprawling charges related to sex trafficking, rape, assault, and indecent images of a child, and the Trump administration has declined to step in. For another, as government prosecutors laid out in a filing opposing pre-trial release earlier this week, there is something of a flight risk, given that Andrew Tate previously used an alter-ego Twitter account to brag about being, in his words, “above the law” and “hard to kill,” as well as having of four or five passports and nine drivers’ licenses in several names. “I have had warrants out for my arrest and travelled freely,” @OfWudan, an account linked to Tate, tweeted in 2019. “I am smarter than you. I am Steven Seagal. I am above the law.” (Tristan Tate, according to the prosecutors’ filing, is similarly alleged by UK authorities to have a Mexican passport bearing his photo and date of birth, but with the name “Vladimir Scorpius,” a James Bond villain.)
The mountain impeding the Tates’ pretrial release, then, is extremely high, but Joseph McBride is determined to climb it. McBride, a New York attorney representing both brothers, has launched an aggressive, quixotic, and highly public quest to free the Tates and promote a positive image of the two men. He’s using several tools to do so, including podcasting (both on his own, entitled Judgment Day, and through appearances on others’ shows), intense media engagement, a rally outside the jail, verbose tweeting, and, most unusually of all, a flood of AI-generated images released on X and Instagram.
The conditions Andrew and Tristan Tate are being held in are a disgrace.
Small filthy cell.
Cockroaches.
Shower water to drink.
No chair.
Lights they cannot control.
Food that makes Taco Bell look like a Michelin restaurant.
Beds too small for men who are 6’3” and 6’5”.
Three… pic.twitter.com/gVZC0zwyI6
The faked images typically show the Tates manfully bearing their suffering in the clink: meditating in orange jumpsuits together atop a bunk, for instance, or dually staring at the viewer from inside a filthy cell. He also shared a striking image of the Tates sitting around a table with prominent men from across the historical spectrum—from Joe Rogan back through George Washington, with his tricorn hat looming oddly behind his head—accompanied by a lengthy caption on the importance of masculinity. It begins with a claim that the “manosphere built Western society.”
McBride, who previously represented a series of January 6 defendants, describes himself on social media as a “traditional Catholic Warrior” and a “Defender of American Patriots, The Constitution, and Andrew & Tristan Tate.” (Besides the extradition case, he’s also representing the Tates in a Florida defamation lawsuit they are waging against one of their accusers.) McBride has cast the cases against the brothers as an attack by “the system”—a term that the Tates also use—due to their purported advocacy for men.
“His message is male empowerment,” McBride tweeted in May, referring to Andrew Tate. “The system cannot control strong men. That is why he is public enemy number one. Escape the Matrix.” This week, McBride told podcaster Michael Malice that he fears the Tates will be “Epsteined” in jail, by which he meant murdered.
“Strategically, a picture is worth 1,000 words,” claims the Tates’ lawyer.
In an email, McBride told me the allegations in the government’s filing opposing the Tates’ release are false. “On Monday, the government filed a brief that drips with falsehood from every page. Our reply will be filed on or before August 21, and it will answer that brief lie by lie and line by line, on paper, with documents,” he wrote. “Every claim in the government’s filing,” he added, “will be tested against the record.”
McBride was less eager to discuss the AI images of the Tates he’s been posting—there have been at least nine since July—and declined to disclose what image generating tool was used to construct the memes. “This is my favorite question,” he told me. “Two men who are convicted of nothing, on any continent, in any court, are sitting in solitary confinement at the request of a foreign government that has not even filed its extradition papers, and Mother Jones wants to know what software their lawyer uses to make pictures. You found the scandal, Ms. Merlan. It is not the unconvicted men in the SHU. It is the memes. When you are ready to ask a question about the Constitution, you know how to find me.”
I did not ask a question about the Constitution—I couldn’t think of a relevant one at the moment—but in a followup email, McBride clarified that the AI-generated images are part of his overall plan to represent the Tates. “Strategically, a picture is worth 1,000 words,” he told me.
McBride outside Miami’s federal courthouse in July.Joe Raedle/Getty
McBride also said that despite the previous tweets from the @OfWudan account, Andrew Tate does not consider himself to be above the law. “No one is above the law, and no one is beneath its protection,” he wrote. “Andrew Tate is convicted of nothing and charged with no American crime. The government is quoting tweets in a federal court filing. That tells you everything you need to know about the strength of its case.”
The Tates are, as New Yorker reporter Heidi Blake laid out in a lengthy June investigation, intensely politically connected, with fans in Trump’s administration and family, including Donald Trump Jr. and Barron Trump. Blake’s piece describes McBride himself as “a star in MAGA circles, dining at Mar-a-Lago and befriending Donald Trump, Jr.” (The two were photographed together at a 2022 New York Young Republican Club gala.)
Yet those political connections haven’t served them particularly well lately; in his emails, McBride decried the “gutless pussies” in Congress, as he put it, who have privately voiced fandom for the Tates but haven’t spoken up in their defense.
“Many members of Congress have, at different places and times, privately expressed their disapproval of the allegations against Andrew and Tristan Tate,” McBride wrote. “They have also asked for social media advice, messages for their kids, and have asked to take photos with the brothers. Andrew and Tristan give of their time freely. There was never an ask or expectation of anything in return. I am simply voicing my displeasure with their predictable silence regarding speaking out against injustice during times where courage is needed.”
For now, the Tates remain in the Miami facility’s special housing unit, separate from the general population. Andrew’s X account continues to proclaim the brothers’ innocence and protest their jail conditions. Neither McBride nor anyone else connected with the Tates have disclosed how he’s tweeting from jail, or who else may be posting on his behalf. The government, meanwhile, has said in their filings that the Tates are being held in the SHU for their own protection, that conditions at the jail are reasonable, and that the brothers have been accorded things other SHU inmates are not, including joint meetings with their lawyers and access to the commissary. To drive the point home, the prosecutors included a receipt detailing the brothers’ purchases of ramen, coffee, Doritos, and Twix.
A hearing on their pretrial release motion is scheduled for August 27.
A Young Immigrant’s Deportation Nightmare
The plane was stuck on the tarmac of a Louisiana airport, but Yurin Quiroa Ralda, 21, was not particularly eager to take off. He was being deported, based in part on misinterpreted records. And not to his birthplace, Guatemala, but to Ecuador, where he’d never even been.
That alone was a nightmare, but Yurin’s situation was even more frustrating: After he’d crossed the US-Mexico border alone at age 16, the US government told him that if he waited patiently, he could apply for a green card because he had Special Immigrant Juvenile status, a classification reserved for kids who were abused, abandoned, or neglected by a parent. Congress created SIJ status in 1990, to give these kids a pathway to legal permanent residency so they wouldn’t have to go back to families that harmed them. Yurin, whose dad had abandoned him before he was born, had followed the rules and waited—and he’d recently became eligible to apply for a green card. Yet here he was on a plane bound for Ecuador.
A judge in a similar case cited the administration’s “reprehensible act of unimaginable cruelty,” noting, “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”
Thousands of kids with SIJ status live in the United States, though many have grown into young adults. Like Yurin, whom I wasn’t able to interview directly for this story, they’ve spent years on waitlists because the government has a cap on visas that it can issue each year. While they waited, the Biden administration gave them deferred action, a designation that temporarily shields a person from deportation and allows them to work. But despite this safeguard, President Trump’s immigration officers detained about 400 people with SIJ status and deported 132 of them during his first year back in office, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data shared with Congress.
These kids were told, “‘You should stay here; here’s your protection,” says Molly Huffaker, an attorney who represents Yurin at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. “All they’ve gotten is a broken promise,” adds Ellie Norton, an attorney at the National Immigration Project who focuses on SIJ cases.
The Trump administration officially ended Biden’s policy for SIJ youth in June 2025, saying it would no longer offer deferred action to people on the government waitlists. A court blocked that move on the grounds that DHS hadn’t jumped through the necessary bureaucratic hoops. The administration tried again in April (a lawsuit against its second attempt is ongoing), emphasizing that the restrictions would only apply to new cases, and that people who already had deferred action, like Yurin, could keep their status.
Yet Trump’s immigration officers are detaining those young men and women anyway, says Rachel Davidson, who directs the End SIJS Backlog Coalition at the National Immigration Project, which helped file the aforementioned lawsuit. “If the courts are going to impede [DHS] on a systemic level from terminating the policy writ large,” she told me, “then what they’re doing is going after young people individually, one by one.”
Yurin’s nightmare began last November, when local law enforcement pulled over his cousin for speeding in West Virginia. Yurin, a passenger, had an immigration background that should have helped him: He’d gotten SIJ status because his dad had abandoned him and his mom in Guatemala, leaving them financially insecure and facing eviction. He had to drop out of school at age 12 to work construction. He arrived in the United States in 2021, fleeing gang violence and seeking asylum. Most recently, he’d lived in Michigan with relatives and in Maryland, taking English classes and dreaming of becoming a mechanic.
The cops called ICE, which shipped him to a detention center in Pennsylvania hundreds of miles away. For months, he was trapped in bureaucratic hell: The legal status he’d obtained seemed meaningless, and deferred action wasn’t enough to get him out of detention. And though there was good news on the horizon—he would become eligible to apply for a green card in March, after years of waiting—a judge ordered him deported in February.
When his attorneys pushed back, the judge said—confusingly—that he couldn’t budge because Yurin had a criminal record. Three years earlier, when he was 18, he’d gotten into a car accident while driving his cousin’s kids to school and wound up with a misdemeanor. He’d allegedly rear-ended someone and then run a stop sign, whereupon another car hit him, injuring the kids. His relatively minor offense—a moving violation resulting in physical injury—didn’t affect his SIJ status, according to his attorneys.
But immigration officials were now claiming he had four assault charges from the same year. Yurin insisted he had no idea what they were talking about. His attorney, Molly Huffaker, reached out to the relevant police department for clarification and requested records of the alleged incident, but nobody responded.
I recently obtained those records, along with records from the county sheriff and local prosecutors. It’s now clear that federal officials either mischaracterized or misunderstood the situation, or that they had bad documentation. On August 12, 2023, the same day they claimed four assault charges were filed against him, Yurin had reported to the jail for booking on four initial charges related to the car accident. None of them involved assault, and he was never charged with assault in the police records I obtained. In other words, Yurin was being blamed for a crime that never happened.
“It’s devastating that that mischaracterization may be the only reason he was detained and deported,” his attorney Huffaker told me after I showed her the records. She says a witness at the scene of his arrest in West Virginia overheard the officers say they were specifically detaining Yurin for his “assault record.”
In April, stuck in detention with his deportation looming, Yurin filed a habeas corpus petition arguing that his incarceration was unlawful because he had deferred action. The court dismissed his petition on a technicality—federal law says that anyone with a final deportation order is subject to mandatory detention for 90 days, and he was still within that 90-day window; he could resubmit his petition when the window ended June 11.
If only.
Less than a week before June 11, the administration terminated Yurin’s deferred action. This was always a possibility. Deferred action is a temporary protection and the government has discretion to end it on a case by case basis, typically if a person’s circumstances change significantly and they’re no longer eligible for SIJ. But the timing, so long after his alleged criminal offenses and his arrest by ICE, and just days before he could refile his habeas petition, seemed suspicious.
Yurin’s attorneys accused the administration of retaliating against him for pursuing habeas claims, in violation of his First Amendment rights as well as his Fifth Amendment right to due process. Its actions in this case were hardly a one-off, according to the National Immigration Project: “It’s an unwritten practice,” says attorney Norton.
In March, a federal judge in New York slammed the administration for doing something similar to Garcia Lanza, a 24-year-old from Honduras who came to the country at age 9, graduated magna cum laude from the New York City College of Technology, and had no criminal record. US District Judge Gary Brown described the termination of Lanza’s deferred action as “seemingly retaliatory”: It appeared the government was trying to “rationalize his illegal arrest and detention,” he wrote, calling the termination a “reprehensible act of unimaginable cruelty.”
“He cannot understand why the same government that once granted him protection is now trying to send him to a foreign country.”
“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” the judge wrote. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.” He reinstated Lanza’s deferred action.
That precedent might have helped Yurin. Unfortunately, the jurist overseeing his case in Louisiana, US District Judge Jerry Edwards Jr., paid more attention to a less favorable ruling in Tennessee that essentially says people don’t have due process rights when it comes to discretionary benefits like deferred action. On that basis, Edwards declined to reinstate Yurin’s deferred action, writing that the government “owed him no notice or opportunity to be heard before terminating it.”
“It’s so sad and problematic,” attorney Norton says of the ruling. These young immigrants “followed all the rules and did everything right—they were on the path to lawful status, and the government promised them that unlike when they were let down by their parents, someone was going to protect them and cared about what was best for them. It’s difficult for them to be in detention and not understand what they did wrong and what they did to deserve that.”
DHS defended its decision. “Special Immigrant Juvenile classification or providing a path to a Green Card does NOT confer lawful status,” a department spokesperson told me. “This is standard procedure and there is nothing retaliatory about enforcing the nation’s immigration laws. Yurin was afforded due process before the Executive Office for Immigration Review.”
The DHS spokesperson emphasized Yurin’s alleged assault history. When I showed them the records indicating that the assault never happened, they declined to comment other than referring me to the local police department and adding that Yurin would have been eligible for deportation anyway. The spokesperson also said that “hundreds of suspected and confirmed adult gang members” were let into the country under the SIJ program, and that the program is “infected with fraud and abuses.” A DHS report last year made similar claims and accused people of lying to receive the status.
Before his deportation, Yurin’s attorneys begged the court to reconsider. The judge had opted to send him to Ecuador because his asylum application said Guatemala was too dangerous. The attorneys pointed out that he had no status in Ecuador, had never been there, and knew nobody. “He cannot understand why the same government that once granted him protection,” they had written earlier, “is now trying to send him to a foreign country.”
The judge held firm, and on June 11, seven months after he was detained, Yurin boarded the plane in Louisiana. It was not what he wanted, but he figured at least his bureaucratic hell might finally be over.
Or not.
As he waited for the plane to take off, an officer approached and told him to get up. He would not be going to Ecuador after all. (Huffaker, his attorney, isn’t sure why, but notes that sending someone to a country where they have no history is more difficult and requires certain paperwork.)
Yurin called his cousins the next day to let them know he was still in the United States. Then the family lost touch with him. Huffaker reached out to all the government contacts she could think of to ask where he was.
Almost a week later, he called his cousins again—from Guatemala.
Soon after, ICE reached out to Huffaker with an offer: The agency admitted that Guatemala was not listed on Yurin’s official removal order; he should not have been sent there. So if he wanted, they would bring him back to the United States.
But there was a caveat: If Yurin agreed to return, the agency said, they would keep him in detention until they found a way to deport him again. The nightmare would continue.
Huffaker hasn’t had the opportunity to relay the offer, in any case. She hasn’t been able to reach Yurin since he was shipped back to Guatemala.