Political News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moshannon Valley Processing Center Philipsburg, Pennsylvania

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

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

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

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

Church service at Christian & Missionary Alliance Church in Philipsburg. July 19, 2026. “It should stay because of jobs,” a man named Larry tells me before the service. “Because they give $200,000 to Clearfield County for every year of that contract. And it’s not hurting anybody. That money goes to the county. Even if it helps pay for the annual fair, it’s still worth having people there. They got to have a jail anyway. They got to put the people somewhere.” After a Sunday service at Bible Baptist Church of Philipsburg, July 19, 2026. “Politics fade into everything. This is not a local issue where people are against it. If they were being mistreated up there, I’d say, ‘This has to stop.’ That’s where I stand on moral issues. But heaven has its policies to get you in and our country has its policies to get in too. The law of the land must be obeyed. They’re in there for a reason. They didn’t take them because they didn’t do nothing.”

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

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

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

Charlotte

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

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

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

At the age of two, Charlotte’s son was diagnosed with ADHD and autism. He was incredibly close to his father: “I wish daddy was home. We’re going to fight for daddy to get home. We’re not going to give up.” Charlotte holds hundreds of pages of personal documents, including her marriage license, birth certificates, tax returns, and deeds to homes she and her husband have owned. She prepared the paperwork for an interview with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to support the change of her husband’s status. The interview date was postponed.

“They want us to be left with nothing, so we do give up.”
We cry everytime we leave a visit.
It’s still so sad.
We can’t even hug him.

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

“We went for my child’s birthday. We went for Father’s Day and Mother’s Day. We sit there with him all day wishing we can hug him. But we can’t…We’re trying to get him out and we’re just at a loss. Like, what’s next? What are we going to do?…We just want something other than being locked up. We just want a hug. We just want to move on with answers. That’s all we’re asking, but we still have none of that.”

“Even though the person didn’t pass away, it kind of feels like that. Like he’s been taken away from us. The only thing that’s been helping us is our visits. It’s him being there and seeing him behind the plexiglass. That’s what’s kept us going. If we couldn’t do that, we would be completely lost.”

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

Kris

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

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

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

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

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

Eastern Europe

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

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

“Initially he was hopeful he would get out. Then he started getting angry, especially when they put him in solitary confinement. He couldn’t understand what was happening. They put him on major depression medication, but he started losing his emotions. I wasn’t sure if he was at risk of suicide, because I knew how he was changing. It’s like watching somebody die in front of you for a prolonged period of time.”

“I think for the majority of the detained, there’s at least two people on the outside who are fighting for them, struggling. There’s a lot of people who are unseen. You can count the number of detained individuals in ICE facilities, but you can’t really count the number of people affected.

After we met, her husband was transferred to detention centers in Louisiana and Texas. In late July he was deported on a series of flights to his country of birth.”

Father and Son Detained

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

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

“You could never be calm in there.”

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

John Streno, Mayor

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

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

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

Bobbi Erickson, co-founder of the advocacy group Indivisible: Mayday, addresses county commissioners at a Clearfield County Commissioners Meeting on July 14, 2026. The state of Pennsylvania does not provide any sustained funding to Legal service providers. Demand for Defender Association of Philadelphia services has rise three times more than the capacity.

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

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

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

Legal Support

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

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

The Witnesses

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

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

Official Legal Observers from Frontline Dignity stand outside the Domestic Violence court in downtown Pittsburgh. “We’ve witnessed ICE make detentions inside the courthouse and outside when people are on their way in. That’s why we stage ourselves outside, because people wouldn’t even have a chance to get in.” Jenny patrols areas of Cranberry Township for potential ICE activity. Any ICE sightings or incidents of ICE arrests are witnessed and reported to a larger network of monitors. In July 2026, Frontline Dignity documented 55 confirmed ICE incidents in their area and 67 known detentions.

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

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

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

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

To me, in a way, it’s no different than a cemetary.
It’s a place where people come and end up
and you never see them again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visiting Moshannon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republicans leaking about the midterms are growing more alarmed. One GOP operative in Iowa says this: “It feels like it could be a wipeout.” In story after story, Republicans are confiding about their mounting panic. A GOP pollster who privately told donors that the Senate might hold was mocked by Republicans themselves as “delusional.” Meanwhile, over the last few days, Trump has unraveled in a series of panicky Truth Social posts. In one, he ranted at length about how great the economy is and fumed extensively about the media’s refusal to recognize it. He even ordered Americans to “VOTE FOR REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES.” In several other posts, he raged at the media for reporting “Fake Polls” while not reporting all the fabulous economic news. We talked to Melissa Toufanian, managing director at the progressive firm Navigator Research, which has done interesting polling on Trump supporters who now regret their vote. She explains what’s really happening with voters in red states with big races, what focus groups reveal about how Trump-backing constituencies see him now, and why politicians from both parties should listen carefully to what voters are really telling them. Listen to this episode here.

Mike Fragoso bills himself as the former legal counsel to former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, so you’d think he’d be smart. Well, you’d be wrong. “What I have heard from professionals explaining why we have so many competitive races in red states boils down to R voters thinking of the president’s antics, ‘it’s not funny anymore…

Source

A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Republicans lie to themselves as polls predict midterm devastation…

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Bailey, the co-deputy director at the FBI, is out the door. And yes, this is a story of how the administration is in comical disarray, but it is so, so much stupider than that, because of course it is. A little over a year ago, your tax dollars went to work double-time to hire Bailey, the one-time Missouri attorney general and extreme fan of President Donald Trump, the latter being the…

Source

Republicans are facing an imminent blue wave this November, and it seems like their secret weapon is … Nicki Minaj? The MAGA-adored rapper appeared on Fox News over the weekend, urging people to “vote red.” “We need you guys involved. We need you guys involved more than ever before. This is your country, this is your world,” she told President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump…

Source

As the Trump administration plays tough about a migrant caravan purportedly heading toward the U.S.-Mexico border, former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene exposed the truth: The GOP frequently uses these stories to rile up voters before elections. On Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security posted a montage of former Philadelphia Eagles safety Brian Dawkins tackling other players in…

Source

Donald Trump’s response to the ongoing Rwanda-Congo conflict involved deflecting to the Ebola virus before shutting down the line of questioning entirely.

The question came from White House correspondent Hariana Verás, the first African journalist accredited to the White House.

“She loves Africa, she always asks about Africa. She never talks about any other place,” Trump said before hearing Verás’s question. “Good job. Go ahead.”

“You, among many other administrations … you are the only one who started to do something to end the 30-year war in the [Democratic Republic of Congo],” said Verás, referring to the peace agreement Trump brokered between the presidents of the DRC and Rwanda at the White House last December and again in March.

The fighting has continued since then as most of the peace deal remains unimplemented. Meanwhile, more than seven million people have been displaced as a result of the worsening conflict, according to the Center on Foreign Relations.

“Rwanda is still violating,” Verás continued, probing if Trump intended to do anything about the shattered arrangement.

“Yeah, we’re going to stop it, if there is a violation we know about it,” Trump shrugged. “We ended the war with Congo and Rwanda and they both signed it and both agreed so, well look, I just heard about it a little while ago, if there’s a problem we’ll stop it.”

But Verás wasn’t satisfied by the president’s response.

“Mr. President, I just came from the DRC. I was there a month ago. I witnessed, again, Rwanda still killing a lot of Congolese,” Verás pressed.

“And you witnessed that?” Trump asked.

“Yes, Mr. President,” Verás continued. “And I have evidence.”

That apparently inspired Trump to switch gears.

“How is Ebola going?” Trump retorted, bringing up the regional viral crisis aggravated by federal cuts to USAID earlier this year.

“Oh, Ebola is under control,” Verás said. “I spoke with the director of the World Health Organization at the [United Nations] and he said it is under control. But still the country needs some help to fight Ebola. But still, the biggest problem is the war.”

“I’ll make sure it works out,” Trump mumbled. “That’s what I do. I make sure things work out.”

Then he pivoted to the next reporter.

Now, how do you feel, @HarianaVeras? 🤣🤣

Don’t you see how ridiculous you look? Tshisekedi’s money won’t make you relevant or get you heard.
——-

Hariana Verás: Rwanda is still killing people in Congo.

Trump: How is Ebola going?

Hariana Verás: Ebola’s under control…..I… pic.twitter.com/8wp1Elb56h

— Fabrice Rugumire (@FabRugumire) September 28, 2026

It seems like the fact that things are getting hella dire for the GOP’s midterm election prospects may just have broken through the fog of war. Or, because we’re talking about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, it’s more like it broke through the fog of nicotine pouches, cheap whiskey, and testosterone injections. Hegseth faced his fears by filming a video, one where he is exceedingly shiny…

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton seems to think that letting a child predator out of jail after just two months is something to brag about.

Paxton’s remarks came at a United States Hispanic Business Council forum in Fort Worth on Monday.

“The criticism has been that I let a child predator out [after serving] one day,” Paxton said. “Well guess what? They served 60 days. It wasn’t what we wanted, but we did not control the situation. We did our best.”

That is not what you want to hear from a state attorney general running for Senate.

Ken Paxton: The criticism has been that I let a child predator out after one day. Well guess what? They served 60 days. pic.twitter.com/KVZZpCrI4c

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) September 28, 2026

The embattled attorney general is referring to the sweetheart deal his prosecutors offered to Adam Hoffman, a Texas man charged with repeatedly molesting a young boy, earlier this year. The deal would have allowed Hoffman to serve just one day in prison for the crime he pleaded guilty to, and allowed him to avoid signing up for the sex offender registry—a move that was widely criticized. The judge in the case was appalled by the deal. “One day. Seriously? Somebody has to sell me on the wisdom of it,” said Judge Roy Sparkman, who insisted on the 60-day sentence.

Paxton’s most recent comment comes just a little over one month before what many expect to be an extremely close midterm election against Democratic candidate James Talarico.

“Omg he is STILL lying. Paxton’s office originally tried to get ONE day, the judge rejected it and bumped it to 60, but even then, Adam Hoffman was released early only served 30 days. For child rape. And Paxton’s office didn’t even put the bare minimum requirement for him to register as a sex offender in the deal,” wrote Sara McGee, a Democratic nominee for the Texas House of Representatives. “A completely corrupt failure at every level.”

President Trump’s move last week to cancel close to $1 billion of funds already appropriated by Congress is getting zero pushback from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

On Monday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune declined to push back on the “pocket rescission” of $810 million passed by Congress for education and health programs, telling Punchbowl News’s Andrew Desiderio that “it’s something I’m sure will be litigated.”

Thune’s comments came after fellow Republican Senator Susan Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement Friday that the move came without warning and that she would address “these illegal actions” with her colleagues.

“Not only is the delay itself an impoundment that was not reported to Congress, but also it is a usurpation of Congress’s appropriations powers,” Collins said. “[The Office of Management and Budget] is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding.”

Asked about Collins’s statement, Thune repliedt, “As an appropriator she feels strongly that these are decisions made by appropriators and that the administration doesn’t have this authority.”

“Whether you agree in substance or not with what they did, you can argue that they be good stewards, and some of these things may be things many of us agree with, but the process by which they did it is gonna be, I assume, subject to a lot of discussion and probably some litigation,” Thune added.

The OMB said the funds being slashed were “the most harmful government spending.” Most of the cancelled funds came from the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which helps refugees and unaccompanied immigrant minors. The Trump administration claims the funds are no longer necessary.

But other spending was also clawed back, including for health research, an education program for immigrant students, a minority entrepreneurship initiative, housing counseling services, and more.

Trump decided to cancel the funds without giving Congress enough time to respond with legislation or reallocation. The end of the fiscal year is in less than one week, and the House is out of session until after November’s midterm elections.

Constitutionally, the power of levying taxes and appropriating federal funds is supposed to lie with Congress. In theory, the president can send a request to the legislature to cancel funds that they disagree with, but with 45 days notice to allow Congress to respond. Trump’s rescission did not follow those rules, and is likely violating the Constitution. But even when Trump usurps their constitutionally enshrined powers, Republicans in Congress lack the spine to challenge him.

“This is theft from the American people, plain and simple,” Senator Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the appropriations committee, said in a statement. “These are funds Congress has delivered on a bipartisan basis and should be helping people—not cut off by a president more focused on building a ballroom than investing in families. Every Republican who voted for these bills should be furious because [OMB Director Russell Vought] is saying their votes don’t count.”

We’ve reached the point of the midterm election cycle where Republicans are throwing spaghetti at the wall with their attack ads, in hopes that something, anything, will turn around their increasingly grim odds at holding on to their congressional majorities. The bigoted anti-trans ads they are blanketing the airwaves with have fallen flat, as voters are much more concerned with the state of…

Source

Fox News caught up with Donald Trump after his President’s Cup golf tournament, where he explained that everything’s great—and anything that isn’t great is Ukraine’s fault. “The big problem is the refineries in Russia are being blown up,” Trump said of skyrocketing diesel costs. “This isn’t really a Middle Eastern problem. This is more of a Russia problem that Ukraine and Russia are going at…

Source

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito recused himself Monday from a major climate change case coming up on the court’s docket.

Alito’s decision was revealed via a letter issued to the lawyers involved in Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, which pits ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy against the commissioners of Boulder County, Colorado as the two oil companies attempt to throw out a county lawsuit seeking climate-change related damages.

“Justice Alito has determined that he will not continue to participate in this case,” read a letter written by court clerk Scott Harris.

The letter did not elaborate as to why Alito decided to remove himself from the October 5 hearing, though he had faced mounting pressure from progressive groups such as Consumer Watchdog to step down from the case due to his personal investments in oil companies. Alito does not hold stocks in either ExxonMobil or Suncor Energy, but instead has investments in ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66, which are involved in similar lawsuits around the country and are likely to be affected by the Supreme Court’s eventual decision in Suncor.

The decision is a remarkable aboutface for the conservative justice, who previously told NBC News (via a court spokesperson) that he saw no need to withdraw himself from the legal proceedings.

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

Alito’s recusal, however, will force the nation’s highest judiciary into an eight-person bench, raising the possibility of a 4-4 split on the matter.

Alito is the only justice in the court with a wide stock portfolio, according to a Bloomberg report published earlier this month. Either Alito or his wife owns tens of thousands of stock positions in dozens of individual companies, making him a standout on the bench. The only other member managing individual stocks is Chief Justice John Roberts, who has maintained investments in just two companies (Lam Research Corporation and Thermo Fisher Scientific).

In a legal petition to the Supreme Court, attorneys for Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil argued that state law does not preempt federal law on issues related to greenhouse gas emissions, and that states do not have the constitutional right to seek relief for “injuries allegedly caused by pollution emanating from outside the State.”

But this preemption case is not like others that the court has recently heard, in no small part due to the Trump administration’s decision to pare back the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency.

“One argument on the other side is that allowing states to regulate greenhouse gas emissions is inconsistent with the objectives of federal law,” penned Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of University of California, Berkeley’s School of Law, in a piece last week for SCOTUSBlog. “But as the county commissioners of Boulder County and the city of Boulder argue in their brief, the EPA recently has denied that it has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.”

“As they say: There is no explanation ‘how the Court can hold that the Clean Air Act preempts claims indirectly relating to greenhouse-gas emissions when EPA maintains that the Act does not allow it to directly regulate some (perhaps any) greenhouse-gas emissions.’”

This story has been updated.