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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Wait, Senate GOP wants to give Trump how much for his dumb ballroom?

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Drug dealers can thank President Donald Trump for getting law enforcement off their backs. A new analysis by Reuters reveals that his decision to redirect resources toward executing his anti-immigrant policies in Minnesota lowered federal law enforcement’s ability to tackle real crime. Between January and the end of April, there were only eight people charged with gun or drug offenses by…

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Average Americans are being hammered by rising gas prices thanks to oil shortages sparked by President Donald Trump’s war in Iran. Yet while you suffer that pain at the pump, the oil companies are laughing all the way to the bank—raking in billions in profits due to the surge in the price of oil. On Thursday, oil giant Shell reported nearly $7 billion in profit in the first quarter of the…

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Just a week after the Supreme Court effectively destroyed the key remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee on Thursday is set to become the first Southern state to pass a new redistricting map eliminating a majority-Black district.

The hastily drawn map abolishes the state’s last Democratic district by splitting the city of Memphis, which is more than 60 percent Black, into three districts: all of them predominantly white Republican held seats that stretch hundreds of miles deep into rural areas, effectively silencing the state’s largest Black community. (Memphis has had its own congressional district since 1923.) The map also divided the city of Nashville—which had already been spliced apart during the last redistricting cycle to pick up another GOP seat—into five districts to further dilute the power of minority voters.

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The result is both practical and symbolic. It means the place where Martin Luther King Jr. waged his last civil rights campaign and was ultimately assassinated will have no districts in which Black citizens can elect their preferred candidates. Contemporary civil rights leaders, including King’s son, likened it to the return of Jim Crow.

“Do not dismantle the only Congressional district that provides Black voters in Memphis a fair opportunity to have a voice in our democracy.”

“Do not dismantle the only Congressional district that provides Black voters in Memphis a fair opportunity to have a voice in our democracy,” Martin Luther King III wrote to Tennessee legislators. “Do not take this nation back to the days of Jim Crow.”

Tennessee is not alone. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down a second-majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, at least four other Southern states—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—are considering passing new redistricting maps before the midterms. This could eliminate anywhere from four to six majority-Black districts represented by Democrats, and significantly hinder Democratic chances of taking back the US House. Voting rights advocates warned that the Louisiana v. Callais decision could lead to the largest drop in Black representation in the South since the end of Reconstruction. The targeting of Black voters is occurring with alarming speed in the wake of the ruling.

“This isn’t coincidental or accidental,” Democratic State Rep. Justin Pearson, who is challenging incumbent Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen in the Memphis-based 9th congressional district, told my colleague Garrison Hayes. “They’re coming for Black political power in Tennessee, and Mississippi, and Alabama, and Louisiana. We’re seeing the greatest purge of Black power since the era of Reconstruction.”

The conservative majority on the Roberts court has completely overruled its own precedents to engineer this outcome. For years, the court has held that states should not change voting laws in the middle of an election year to avoid voter confusion, based on the so-called Purcell principle, a 2006 Supreme Court case decided on the shadow docket. In December, the Supreme Court reinstated a Texas gerrymander that a lower court found had discriminated against Black and Hispanic voters. They argued that it was too close to the election to stop it, even though the primary was 15 weeks away.

But in the Louisiana case, they struck down the creation of a second-majority Black district just three weeks before the state’s primary, when mail voting had already begun, and 42,000 voters had cast ballots. Moreover, instead of waiting roughly thirty days to certify its decision as is standard practice, the Court put the Callais decision into effect immediately, which buoyed Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s effort to suspend the state’s House primary to give the legislature time to eliminate one or both of the state’s majority-Black districts.

During oral arguments in the Callais case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Louisiana Solicitor General Ben Aguinaga what would happen if the Court invalidated majority-minority districts and whether “the results would be terrible?” Aguinaga dismissed the concern as “a lot of sky-is-falling rhetoric from the other side in this case.”

Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, however, predicted that the outcome would be “pretty catastrophic,” since virtually all Black officeholders in the South are elected from majority-Black districts.

Nelson has been proven correct. The Callais decision has been catastrophic in substance and timing. The Court not only dismantled the country’s most important civil rights law, but put its thumb on the scale of the 2026 elections, giving Southern states just enough time to redraw their maps before the midterms. Speaking on Wednesday in Pennsylvania, Chief Justice John Roberts claimed it was wrong to view the justices as “political actors.” But in effect, the conservative justices have turbocharged Trump’s gerrymandering arms race.

Nothing is new and history repeats. When the Supreme Court delivered a death blow to the 1965 Voting Rights Act last month, endangering the project of multiracial democracy that flowed from the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s, it did so by using many of the same logical—and illogical—devices the high court deployed to help end the first Reconstruction. From the late 19th century, the Roberts Court borrowed the false naïveté and judicial supremacy that define some of that era’s darkest opinions. 

There are obvious echoes between Louisiana v. Callais, in which Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion finished off the VRA, and the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson decision, in which the court blessed Jim Crow. The Roberts Court is in many respects a neoconfederate court, and it repeatedly applies the tactics and ideas of the 1880s and 1890s court, whose members likewise could not abide a robust vision of equality.

The majority blinded itself to reality.

In the 1896 case, the Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law separating white and Black rail passengers was constitutional, affirming the principle of separate-but-equal. Plessy would eventually be overruled by Brown v. Board of Education and other 1950s cases that found separate-but-equal to be inherently unequal. Whereas the court, and the country, came to understand that separate was not equal, the Plessy majority found the railcar segregation mandate to be a race-neutral law that applied fairly to both white and Black people. Plessy rejected the “assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” as Justice Henry Brown wrote for the 7-1 majority. “If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

With these words, the majority blinded itself to the reality that, in a white supremacist society, separation would obviously be unequal, and confer a badge of inferiority upon the people forcibly segregated. Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter, pointed out the fallacy of assuming Louisiana’s law was innocent. “The real meaning of such legislation” is that the “colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in the public coaches occupied by white citizens,” Harlan wrote in his famous dissent. Though this was patently clear, the majority would not admit it.

Instead, the Plessy majority somehow ascribed reasonable motives to the rail car law, finding them in line with the “established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort and the preservation of the public peace and good order.” Further, the opinion noted the court must be deferential to the legislature’s reasons for passing the law.

More than a century later, Louisiana enacted a different law, a new congressional map that gave the state’s Black residents a majority in just one of six districts, even though the state’s population is a third Black. Under the decades-old understanding of the VRA, multiple courts ordered Louisiana to draw a second Black-majority district to afford Black people the same opportunity to elect representatives of their choice as everyone else. Louisiana complied, only to be sued by non-Black plaintiffs who argued that the map discriminated against them. In Louisiana v. Callais, the high court’s Republican-appointed majority agreed, striking down the map and making enforcement of the VRA in redistricting virtually impossible. The expected effect will be the largest drop in Black and brown representation in Congress, state, and local government since the end of Reconstruction.

Like the Plessy court, the Roberts Court in Callais creates a list of kosher, race-neutral criteria that can legally animate new political maps and must be left to the state’s discretion. The VRA “does not intrude on States’ prerogative to draw districts based on nonracial factors” including “traditional districting factors such as ‘compactness, contiguity,’ ‘maintaining the integrity of political subdivisions, preserving the core of existing districts,’ and protecting incumbents,” Alito wrote in Callais. To this list he added, crucially, partisan motivations: “In considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim.”

Just as Plessy denied the discriminatory reality of segregation and instead found it to be a reasonable policy, Callais ignores the inseparability of race and party affiliation, asserting that partisan gerrymandering is race-neutral when it is demonstrably not. As Jamal Greene of Columbia Law School says, there’s a “kind of narrow thinking that doesn’t notice obvious social context” in both decisions.

In Callais, “Alito says, ‘Well, you can separate out political effects from racial effects,’ when it’s obvious it’s not just an arbitrary fact which candidates and which political parties Black Americans in the deep South support,” Green continued. “That’s not an exogenous fact unrelated to politics or history. The idea that you can say that those are separate is a kind of naïveté that one could easily accuse the Plessy majority of as well.” 

The Roberts Court has justified a jurisprudence prohibiting race-conscious policies enacted to create equality.

Instead of acknowledging the real world, Alito demands there be evidence of intentional discrimination in order to trigger a violation of the VRA. The law, he writes, “imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race” as opposed to their party affiliation or other race neutral criteria.

It’s unclear what evidence might meet Alitio’s high bar for “a strong inference” of race-based gerrymandering. Just two days before the court handed down its Callais decision, it reversed a district court finding that Texas had enacted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander despite a lot of evidence. “What the court has said now is, ‘Show us the N-word, show us the swastika,'” says Georgetown law professor Michele Goodwin. “Basically, you’ve got to be using racial epithets before the court is willing to see that there is any intentionality of racial discrimination.” That would have been an impossible standard even for the Plessy court.

Both Plessy and Callais share a stunted understanding of what the Reconstruction Amendments require. To put a stop to Reconstruction and institute the discriminatory systems of Jim Crow, the Supreme Court chose to view the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments in the narrowest sense possible. To the Plessy court, a purportedly race-neutral law did not run afoul of these Reconstruction Amendments, even if its effect was gross discrimination. Likewise, the Callais decision threw out Congress’ mandate that discriminatory effects are enough to enforce the VRA, and instead mandated there must be a finding of discriminatory intent.  

In this way, Harlan’s canonical dissent in Plessy could, in many parts, apply to Callais too. In his view, a law doesn’t fulfill the Constitution’s obligations to equality if its effects are discriminatory. Quoting a previous decision, Harlan insisted that the Reconstruction Amendments did not just require civil rights on paper but created an affirmative mandate of equality: “‘The words of the amendment, it is true, are prohibitory, but they contain a necessary implication of a positive immunity, or right… exemption from legal discriminations, implying inferiority in civil society, Lessening the security of their enjoyment of the rights which others enjoy, and discriminations which are steps towards reducing them to the condition of a subject race.’”

Contrary to this view, the six GOP appointees on today’s court contend that if a law is race-neutral on its face, its effects are immaterial. Ironically, they claim Harlan’s dissent in Plessy as justification. In the most famous line, Harlan wrote that “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” From this sentence, the Roberts Court has justified a jurisprudence that prohibits race-conscious policies enacted to create equality, taking the mandate to color-blindness to apply only to the text of the law—even when doing so perpetuates the very segregated, caste system that Harlan opposed. 

Harlan, of course, was not arguing for a context-blind, effects-blind reading of the Constitution. As Greene points out, Harlan’s use of the term “color-blind” itself took context into account. “The reason he chose to use the term color-blind rather than discriminate is because he was facing a majority opinion that said that recognizing color is not the same thing as discriminating,” Greene explains. “He’s responding to that by saying, ‘Look at the world that we live in. Of course recognizing color is the same thing as discriminating.’” Look around, Harlan urged. But the majority, then and today, refuse to.

Callais isn’t the first time the Roberts’ Court has decided to stick to the appearance of race neutrality over laws that aim to remedy the effects of segregation. Just five years after Roberts’ confirmation, Greene noted in a 2011 law review article that the blinders used in Plessy were already back on. “We might reasonably imagine an imperative for judges to look beyond the formalism of the Separate Car Act and to consider equality as a substantive guarantee, but that imperative, if it once existed, has been disavowed by the modern Court,” Greene wrote. “One cannot establish an equal protection violation solely by demonstrating that a statute has the effect of entrenching racial inequality, and a statute that formally recognizes race but does so in the spirit of dismantling a racial caste system is presumptively unconstitutional.” Since that time, the court has doubled down on banning remedial race conscious programs while invoking Harlan’s color-blind language. 

Plessy also isn’t the only shameful chapter in Supreme Court history that Callais mimics. To Greene, the more apt comparison is actually to the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, in which the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited barring Black people from such places as hotels, railroads, and theaters. But the Supreme Court—with Harlan again alone in dissent—ruled that the 13th and 14th Amendments were too limited to create a right for Black people to enter these spaces. 

Today’s court eerily echoes the 19th century.

To critics who see the current Supreme Court draining Congress of its authority, Callais is a banner example. Congress passed the VRA under its 15th Amendment authority to remedy discrimination in voting after activists marched and died to show the nation the brutal racism they were up against. When the Supreme Court tried to impose an intent test onto the VRA in a 1980 decision, Congress responded by amending the law to mandate an effects test. (Notably, Roberts fought against the effects test from his then-perch as a Justice Department lawyer.) Congress reauthorized this version of the VRA as recently as 2006, which was signed by George W. Bush. In response to this popular legislation, the Supreme Court stepped in with a judicial veto.

“It’s just a hyper judicial supremacist intervention,” says Greene, hearkening back to “the worst historical example” of judicial supremacy, the Civil Rights Cases. In the 1870s, Greene explains, opening public accommodations to Black people is “a major, major demand of Black Americans,” and one that is then “favored by large majorities in both houses of Congress, is favored by President Grant, is understood by everyone at the time to be necessary to equal citizenship for Black Americans.” Into this consensus rides the court with its Civil Rights Cases decision to strike down Congress’ project with an “egregious power grab.” (Not for nothing, the Roberts Court has also chipped away at the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s requirement that private businesses not discriminate.)

The Roberts Court’s proclivities eerily echo the Civil Rights Cases in other ways, too. In Callais and other decisions eroding the VRA and affirmative action, various contemporary conservative justices have opined that “things have changed dramatically” and that race-conscious laws cannot “extend indefinitely into the future.” (In Roberts’ first decision attacking the VRA, in 2013, he not only declared that racism was sufficiently over but boldly lifted an argument—without attribution—from the infamous Dred Scott decision.) In 1883, the high court similarly held it had simply had enough with civil rights laws and they couldn’t possibly go on forever. “When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws,” their ruling in the Civil Rights Cases declared. 

Harlan’s response applies as much to that decision as to Callais: “What the nation, through Congress, has sought to accomplish in reference to [Black people] is what had already been done in every State of the Union for the white race—to secure and protect rights belonging to them as freemen and citizens, nothing more.” 

The Supreme Court’s holdings in the Civil Rights Cases, Plessy, and others like them from the era entrenched white supremacist laws and practices for decades. But the justices of that time did not have the final say. The Roberts Court, likewise, need not have the final say, if Americans strongly object. The Supreme Court is our least democratic branch, but it still bends to the people. 

Don’t hurt yourself patting yourself on the back there, buddy. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is in the middle of a media blitz pimping his children’s book about the Declaration of Independence, and he’s using the opportunity to burnish his credentials as a brave, independent truth-teller. LOL. LMAO even. Gorsuch is very proud that he displayed an extremely mild case of spine…

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By Duaa Eldeib for ProPublica They entered the world the way babies should, with piercing cries announcing their arrival. They passed their newborn screening tests. Some made it to their 2-week wellness visits without concern. Then, without warning, their systems began to shut down. A 7-week-old boy in Maryland developed sudden seizures. An 11-pound girl in Alabama stopped breathing…

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Medication abortion is back at the US Supreme Court—which is exactly where abortion opponents want it. Last week, in a late Friday afternoon move guaranteed to stoke maximum confusion and panic, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a Food and Drug Administration rule allowing telemedicine prescription of mifepristone, one of two drugs that make up the gold-standard abortion-pill regimen. On Monday morning, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito put that ruling on pause until May 11. 

But even as abortion advocates expressed relief that telemedicine abortions can continue for a few more days, the order by Alito—the same ultraconservative who wrote the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022—was at best a reprieve. At some point soon, the court’s right-wing supermajority could drastically curtail or cut off access by mail to an extremely safe and effective drug that has been used by hundreds of thousands of women a year since Dobbs, including in states where abortion is banned. Almost two-thirds of abortions in the US now happen with pills, and nearly 30 percent occur by telemedicine.

Abortion activists have been watching the attacks on mifepristone for a long time, and are prepared with a backup: misoprostol, the second drug in the gold-standard regimen. Developed in the 1970s to protect the stomach lining against ulcers, misoprostol also causes muscles in some parts of the body to contract. “In the uterus,” says Caitlin Gerdts, vice president for research at Ibis Reproductive Health, a nonprofit hub for abortion research around the globe, “what that means is cramping and then expulsion of what’s inside.” While misoprostol works exceedingly well in combination with mifepristone, it is also a highly effective abortion drug on its own. And abortion isn’t the half of it: “Misoprostol has a remarkable range of uses in the reproductive context,” Gerdts says, including induction of labor, miscarriage management, and treatment of postpartum hemorrhage. 

Misosprostol is much easier to obtain than mifepristone—in many countries, it’s available over the counter—making it the go-to method of terminating pregnancies in parts of the world where abortion is highly restricted and resources are scarce. If mifepristone is curtailed in the US, misoprostol-only abortions will likely become much more common here as well. Foreseeing that possibility, abortion opponents in Louisiana passed a law in 2024 reclassifying both drugs as dangerous controlled substances. Other states are expected to do something similar.

Meanwhile, abortion advocates are scrambling to switch to a misoprostol-only regimen if necessary, educating patients about what to expect (the side effects may be harsher), and strengthening legal networks, medical hotlines, and community support systems so that women don’t put themselves at unnecessary risk. Winning over medical providers unfamiliar with the drug is critical. “Despite the fact that very good evidence exists for misoprostol’s effectiveness,” Gerdts says, “it’s really hard for clinicians to know what to believe or how to interpret it.”

Amid an increasingly hostile research environment, Ibis has launched US clinical trials comparing the two-drug regimen with misoprostol alone—the first such head-to-head study in the world. To learn more about the study and what may lie ahead for the misoprostol-only regime, I reached out to Gerdts, an epidemiologist by training, at her office in Oakland, California. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did misoprostol become widely used as an abortion pill? It started in Latin America in the 1980s.

The origin story of misoprostol as an abortifacient is one of community need and innovation and discovery. It starts with pregnant people in Brazil reading the warning label for Cytotec, the brand name of misoprostol, which was available as an ulcer drug in a lot of pharmacies in Latin America. The label suggested that this was a medication that might cause a miscarriage. At the time, and still to this day, abortion was highly restricted in Brazil and across much of the region. So people started using misoprostol to terminate their pregnancies. They would end up having something that looked very much like a miscarriage, with bleeding but far fewer infections. 

Soon, feminist activists started hearing about this, and the use of misoprostol as an abortifacient spread quickly across Latin America. Meanwhile, researchers started to document what was happening in emergency rooms. They found a real shift from the kinds of life-threatening complications that were so common [from illegal abortions]—perforated uteruses, septic infections, horrible injuries from ingesting toxic substances. 

Given the high rates of maternal mortality from unsafe abortion around the world, that must have gotten a lot of people’s attention.

When you look at data on maternal mortality and morbidity in the region from the 1980s through the late 1990s, the trends are dramatic. You see a precipitous decline in maternal mortality and in the severity of [maternal complications] that is likely attributable to the rise in use of misoprostol for abortion. 

“The origin story of misoprostol as an abortifacient is one of community need and innovation and discovery. “

Western medicine and researchers started to realize that misoprostol was an interesting and exciting innovation that could be potentially used in clinical [obstetric] practice. And so different clinical trials started. People started testing different dosages, regimens, routes of administration, timing between doses, and so forth, trying to figure out what is the most effective protocol for the use of misoprostol as an abortifacient. 

But it is critical to remember that the first evidence about misoprostol as an abortion medication was based on the experiences of pregnant people themselves, generated within communities and spread by feminist activists. Then, as medication abortion became a part of standard clinical practice, the medical establishment claimed control and began to delegitimize the practice of self-managed abortion.

At almost the same time that women in Latin America were figuring out this new use for an ulcer medication, researchers in France were developing a drug that was intended to be an abortifacient—mifepristone, then known as RU-486, which the FDA approved in 2000. How does mifepristone work? And how did it come to be used with misoprostol?

Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone, which is necessary for a pregnancy to continue. It halts the growth of the pregnancy, thins the uterine lining, and loosens the pregnancy, causing it to detach from the uterus. But then the pregnancy tissue still needs to get out. When mifepristone was tested on its own, it wasn’t particularly effective. Although some people do have abortions with mifepristone alone, it’s not something you can rely on.

What misoprostol does is it contracts and expels. It squeezes the uterus and pushes things out. Researchers discovered that the two drugs, in combination, are incredibly effective. But misoprostol is the workhorse. Misoprostol is the original abortifacient medication. 

The FDA approved misoprostol in 1988 as an ulcer medication. Is misoprostol-only abortion legal under FDA regulations? 

 All of the uses for misoprostol that we talked about [in the reproductive health context] are off-label uses. This is not just a misoprostol thing. Across medicine, drugs get used off-label for many, many indications. It’s an incredibly costly process to [get FDA approval for a new indication], so off-label use of medications is extremely common and supported by evidence. 

Misoprostol is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines for a number of indications, including postpartum hemorrhage, miscarriage, and abortion. It’s totally fine for US clinicians to prescribe off-label use of misoprostol for abortion. And importantly, the FDA doesn’t regulate misoprostol for abortion in the way that it regulates mifepristone. Mifepristone falls under the FDA’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy program, which places major restrictions on who can prescribe it and how it can be dispensed. Historically, there was an in-person dispensing requirement, which the Biden administration got rid of during the pandemic. That’s the rule change that allowed for telemedicine prescribing and is at the center of the case now at the Supreme Court. Under the FDA rules, providers who do prescribe mifepristone have to sign up on a list that is publicly available. 

But misoprostol has none of those restrictions. It’s an ulcer medication. Anybody who can prescribe medications can prescribe misoprostol, except in Louisiana.  The Society of Family Planning and the National Abortion Federation both have a sample protocol for misoprostol-only abortion to help clinicians prescribe. 

But from a clinician’s perspective, in a very litigious society, there are lots of reasons to have concerns. I totally get that.

One of those concerns is research suggesting that the misoprostol-only abortion regimen is much less effective than the two-drug combo. But a lot of that bad rap seems to come from its origins as something that women figured out how to use on their own, without doctors and governments telling them it was OK. 

The early research on misoprostol-only abortion was trial and error, because the drug was not created to be an abortifacient. The clinical trials were not aimed at that or at any of the other obstetric or gynecologic indications—this drug was for treating ulcers. 

It was only after we realized the profound implications of this medication that there started to be trials for postpartum hemorrhage, for induction of labor, and for abortion. As researchers built that evidence base, you can see the effectiveness of the drug getting higher, not because there’s a change in the pharmacokinetics of misoprostol but because we were figuring out what was going to work and what the best protocol was going to be. For people through 12 weeks’ gestation, the regimen currently recommended by the WHO is three to four 800-microgram doses taken three hours apart. It’s most effective if it is dissolved under the tongue or buccally—in the cavity between the cheek and the gum—or taken vaginally.  

However, the early trials are still in the published literature. A systematic review in 2019 found that the misoprostol-only regimen was 78 percent effective—meaning women had complete abortions without procedural intervention—versus 95 to 98 percent effectiveness for mifepristone and misoprostol combined. But that analysis included extremely outdated regimens that we would never use now. In 2024, we did another review of the literature in the New England Journal of Medicine that only included studies that use the currently recommended regimen. Those newer studies show that the effectiveness of misoprostol alone for abortions is much closer to 90 percent—and in some studies, it’s 100 percent. 

In another recent study, you partnered with “accompaniment groups”—networks of mostly women who help other women gain access to abortion meds, educate them about what to expect, and then support them while they take the pills and afterwards. These networks are highly organized and have become very common in some parts of the world. In the US, we call them community support networks or abortion doulas. 

In the SAFE Study, we recruited more than 1,000 people who had called accompaniment groups in Argentina and Nigeria for help getting abortion pills, then compared their experiences of the two regimens. We found that self-managed abortion with accompaniment group support was no less effective than clinician-managed abortion. When the study was published, the main findings were, perhaps, less surprising to the [reproductive health] field than the fact that we had almost 100 percent effectiveness for misoprostol-only abortion. For the two-drug regimen, it was around 94 percent. Those numbers blew everyone’s minds except for our partners, who have been using misoprostol-only for decades and know that it is safe and incredibly effective. The SAFE study confirmed the need to take another look at misoprostol only, not just as a second-tier abortion medication regimen, but as an important tool in the abortion toolkit. It is the workhorse globally.

Misoprostol-only abortion also has a reputation as being no fun for patients, with symptoms like nausea, diarrhea, and serious cramping. What is the experience typically of people who have a miso-only abortion versus the two-drug combo? 

The honest answer is that we don’t know, because we do not have head-to-head data. The fact is, medication abortion may not be a particularly pleasant process, no matter how you go through it. When you have a medication abortion with mifepristone, you also use misoprostol, so you can also experience nausea and vomiting and all of those symptoms. 

I think the outdated data has helped reinforce this bias against misoprostol as being unpleasant. Clinicians start thinking, “Oh, misoprostol isn’t good. It’s so much harder [for patients], it’s a much worse experience.” One potential issue is that if you tell people who are having misoprostol-only abortions that they’re going to have a really painful, horrible, terrible experience, they may be unnecessarily concerned about what is going to happen, and may be more inclined to seek care that could potentially place them at increased risk for criminalization.

In the SAFE study, people reported really good abortion experiences with both regimens. Of course, they are supported by accompaniment groups who know and trust misoprostol and are counseling people on the full experience. So their understanding of what to expect is probably different from a clinician who’s never prescribed misoprostol before and has concerns.

How essential is that kind of help—maybe from a friend or an abortion doula—to having a safe, effective, good abortion using misoprostol only?

From a safety perspective, people do not, technically speaking, need to have someone with them as they go through this process. However, people have a range of emotional needs and logistical needs. People should have what they want and what they need. So for some people, doing it on their own with the internet and not having to tell anybody is exactly what they want. For other people, having somebody on the phone who they can reach out to at any point for reassurance is exactly what they want. Some people want to go into an office and have their doctor explain it to them. Some want to have a procedural abortion. All of those are valid options. 

“The important thing is, you don’t need a doctor or a nurse to do this safely, but you do need accurate information about what to expect.”

What is so clearly demonstrated by all of the research on accompaniment networks and abortion access globally is that virtually none of these people have any clinical training whatsoever. They have training in the medication protocols, and they know how to counsel people about what to expect. The important thing is, you don’t need a doctor or a nurse to do this safely, but you do need accurate information about what to expect.

Now you and your colleagues are conducting a new clinical trial in the US, funded by private donors, that is aimed at answering a lot of the lingering questions. 

The MORE Study is a multi-site clinical trial in the US to directly compare the effectiveness of the currently recommended misoprostol-only regimen to the combined mifepristone-misoprostol regimen. It is an incredible opportunity to study both regimens and document people’s experiences with bleeding, cramping, and nausea; their needs for care; different gestational stages—everything you can think of. We will have an immensely rich data set to be able to finally compare the two regimens head-to-head. We are actively recruiting participants across four to five brick-and-mortar sites. It’s an enormous undertaking. We’re really excited about it.

In this increasingly constrained legal environment, we need better information for prescribers and for people seeking abortions. We need people’s own words, data, and experiences to be able to finally say, here’s how the two regimens are different, here’s what to expect. 

That’s something I’ve been hearing from more and more abortion advocates: It’s really important to keep patients out of the ER if they don’t actually need to be there, because that’s where they are most likely to be criminalized. 

We need to document these experiences so that clinicians and counselors and doulas and support people can make sure that people who are having misoprostol-only abortions—and mifepristone-misoprostol abortions—have the best information that they possibly can. 

Misoprostol is an incredibly important tool in our toolbox. Especially for folks in states where abortion is banned, it’s important that they understand the realm of normal, so that they do not seek medically unnecessary care—and if they need to seek care, they’re doing so in a way that is not putting them at legal risk.

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

In February, the United States Department of Agriculture announced two proposed changes to federal rules governing the rate of production in meat processing plants—a move advocates say would endanger workers, public health, and the environment. One proposed amendment would raise the maximum line speeds in poultry slaughter from 140 birds per minute to 175 for chicken and from 55 birds per minute to 60 for turkey. For swine slaughter, the agency is proposing there be no cap on line speed at all. 

Last week, the public comment period for the proposed amendments came to a close. If finalized, these changes would “lower production costs and create greater stability in our food system” as well as help “keep groceries more affordable,” said Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins back in February.

The proposals are in line with other Trump administration policies that encourage higher meat consumption among Americans—like the revised food pyramid with its emphasis on eating more protein. But despite the promise of lower costs and higher efficiency, experts say these proposed rollbacks pose more risks than benefits to the public. 

“This is doubling down on an already broken and polluting food system,” said Dani Replogle, staff attorney at Food & Water Watch, an environmental nonprofit that submitted public comments against the proposed rules. 

“The potential for injury to these workers, it’s just something people can’t deny.”

The USDA will need time to review the tens of thousands of comments submitted, but the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), a union that represents workers along the food supply chain, estimates that over 22,000 comments oppose the poultry rule, along with over 20,000 oppose the pork rule. 

The union—which successfully sued and blocked the USDA from enacting a similar change to swine line speeds in 2021—stresses that increasing line speeds in meat processing will result in more injuries for workers. While various parts of the line in these facilities are automated, the beginning of the line—where animals are corralled into the plants—is notoriously backbreaking and dangerous work. For chickens, workers who hang the birds by their feet often end up covered in fecal matter; in swine slaughterhouses, workers on the “kill floor” move pigs into stunning chambers. In both scenarios, unlike climate-controlled segments of the line, workers are exposed to the elements and face heat stress on very hot days. 

Further down the line, workers handle knives and often labor shoulder-to-shoulder. They make repetitive motions for hours at a time, making the same cuts over and over to process hundreds or thousands of birds and swine. This workforce already runs the risk of developing carpal tunnel syndrome and enduring lacerations and amputations. Research has shown injury rates go up when line speeds increase.

The USDA contests this finding. In its proposed rule for poultry slaughter, the USDA states that a study funded by the agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service determined that increased line speeds during the evisceration segment of the line—where internal organs are removed from dead animals—“are not associated” with a higher risk of musculoskeletal disorder. The study’s authors, however, have since said that the proposed rule “fundamentally misunderstands and mischaracterizes the scope and results” of their research. 

“The potential for injury to these workers, it’s just something people can’t deny,” said Mark Lauritsen, who leads UFCW’s food processing, packaging, and manufacturing division. “Quite honestly, line speeds are too fast now.”

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson from the USDA said, “Decades of data prove that plants can run at higher speeds while maintaining process control and meeting every federal food safety standard.” They also added that federal inspectors in meat processing plants are still able to slow lines down if they discover a problem. 

Ultimately, the spokesperson said, “The USDA’s legal authority is strictly limited to ensuring food safety and process control; we do not have the power to regulate piece rates or how private companies manage their staff.” (Piece rate refers to the number of items—such as whole birds or parts—handled by a worker per minute.)

When it comes to meat processing, going faster “is not good for the environment either,” said Lauritsen. 

Packages of chicken at a supermarket in Texas.Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty via Grist

Slaughterhouses are incredibly water-intensive operations, due in part to the need to regularly spray down these facilities in order to maintain sanitary conditions while processing animals. In turn, they also produce a lot of waste—in the form of, yes, contaminated water, but also blood, guts, and fecal matter from animal carcasses. Both labor and environmental advocates argue that increasing the line speeds in slaughterhouses will necessarily increase the amount of water used and the amount of waste discharged into local ecosystems. 

In written comments submitted to the USDA, the Center for Biological Diversity stated: “Increasing line speed slaughter rates will increase slaughter capacity […] and lead to further damage to the environment, wildlife, animal welfare, worker safety, and public health (including food safety).” 

Replogle, the attorney at Food & Water Watch, also believes that if slaughterhouses go faster, then factory farms will decide to raise more animals. These farms, known as confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, are “another gigantic source of water pollution in particular and nitrate pollution,” said Replogle, as well as greenhouse gas emissions. Across the US, CAFOs are also linked to higher levels of air pollution in uninsured and Latino communities. 

“The line speed issue is not about selling more chicken or pork, but being able to exploit workers.”

In its proposed rule for poultry slaughter, the USDA states that increasing line speeds “would not affect consumer demand for the establishments’ products,” and that only “expected sales of poultry products […] would determine production levels in establishments.” But demand for meat in the US is already quite high, with most Americans eating more than 1.5 times the daily protein requirement. 

It’s also unclear that increasing line speeds would actually lower the price of chicken and pork at the grocery store. Agricultural economist David Ortega, a professor at Michigan State University, said increasing slaughter capacity would only result in lower poultry and pork prices at the grocery store if slaughterhouses pass on their savings “through the supply chain.” That outcome, Ortega said, would run counter to the slaughterhouses’ economic incentives. 

For some workers, the proposition of increased line speeds has already been made real. Magaly Licolli is a labor organizer based in Springdale, Arkansas, where Tyson Foods, the largest US meat corporation, is headquartered. She said that poultry workers in Northwest Arkansas, at companies she did not name, say they have already been told to work faster. “We had a meeting with workers from different companies. And all of them stated that the line speed had increased,” said Licolli. 

The USDA spokesperson said, “The safety and well-being of the workforce are essential to a stable food supply; however, worker safety is overseen by the Department of Labor, not USDA. The law is very clear on this.” They also added that meat processing plants have long been able to receive line speed waivers, which allow the facilities to operate at higher speeds—and that this may explain what workers are reporting to Licolli.

Debbie Berkowitz, a worker safety and health expert at Georgetown University, argued that increasing line speeds ultimately puts profits above all else. “I think the line speed issue is not about selling more chicken or pork, but being able to exploit workers and get them to work even harder and faster. That is how the companies save money,” said Berkowitz. In cases like this, Berkowitz argues that workers and the environment are treated as expendable. “It’s just churning through workers,” she said. In other words: “Exploitation 101.”

On the morning of May 2, Leonardo Garcia Venegas was driving home from a convenience store run in Silverhill, Alabama, when he noticed an unmarked vehicle following him. As he parked the truck outside his home, immigration officers approached him and tried to open the driver’s door. In a declaration submitted as part of a civil lawsuit, Garcia Venegas said the agents pulled him out of the car and onto the ground, and shackled his arms and legs. Garcia Venegas estimates seven or eight law enforcement personnel, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and local police—most of whom wore plain clothes and tactical vests—surrounded him. They asked him no questions.

Garcia Venegas, a 26-year-old Florida-born US citizen, said he tried to show his Alabama STAR ID as proof of status, but the agents ignored him. They put him in the back seat of one of their vehicles, questioned him about his place of birth, and searched his wallet. He offered to provide his American passport, which was inside the house, but the agents refused. Several minutes later, they released him, but not before having dogs sniff the truck for drugs, according to the declaration. Garcia Venegas said the officers told him he had been stopped because the car he was driving was registered in the name of his brother, who is undocumented. (ICE didn’t respond to a request for comment before publication.)

This wasn’t the first time ICE agents stopped and held Garcia Venegas. In fact, Saturday’s encounter marked the third such incident, according to court filings. Garcia Venegas, whose parents are originally from Mexico, had twice before been detained after ICE raided construction sites where he was working, and twice before he was let go after proving his American citizenship. This third detention, Garcia Venegas wrote in his statement, had caused him emotional distress and anxiety. “I live in constant fear that I will be subjected to further baseless detentions just for going about my daily life,” he said, adding, “I only wish to live my life in peace.”

In the Trump era, the privilege of American citizenship hasn’t been enough to protect people from getting caught in the crosshairs of immigration enforcement. Although the frequency of Garcia Venegas’ wrongful detentions sets him apart, he’s far from an outlier. In fact, Garcia Venegas is one of at least 170 US citizens who have been held by immigration agents in the first nine months of the second Trump presidency, according to a review of cases by ProPublica from last year. And last September, he sued the federal government over his arbitrary detentions.

“Leo is just a normal everyday guy who is trying to go about his life quietly and peacefully,” said Jared McClain, an attorney with the Institute for Justice representing Garcia Venegas. “He just wants to go to work and earn an honest living, and the way that the administration is handling immigration enforcement means that he can no longer do that freely.”

The first incident took place in May 2025, when Homeland Security Investigations officers stormed a private site in Foley where Garcia Venegas was working with a crew laying concrete foundations for new homes. The complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Alabama claims the agents targeted the Latino workers, including Garcia Venegas’ brother, who was pushed to the ground. Garcia Venegas started recording the interaction on his phone.

“I felt dreadful after my detention—not only because it happened once but because I knew it could happen again. I was afraid to return to work.”

The video he shot shows an immigration agent warning him, “You’re making this more complicated than you want to.” The man then appears to grab Garcia Venegas, who says, “Don’t touch me!” and offers to show his papers. He is then forced to the ground, where he repeatedly states that he’s a citizen. Garcia Venegas said the officers dismissed his ID as fake and held him for over an hour. “I felt dreadful after my detention—not only because it happened once but because I knew it could happen again,” he wrote. “I was afraid to return to work.”

Leo Garcia Venegas was even accused of obstructing agents – after the video of his first detainment at an Alabama construction site went viralA DHS spokesperson later said he “physically got in between agents” and his brother, whose arrest he was filming.Watch for yourself:

— Nicole Foy (@nicolefoy.bsky.social) 2025-10-18T14:35:29.580Z

In a declaration, an acting assistant special agent in charge of HSI’s Mobile, Alabama office, said Garcia Venegas was handcuffed for about 18 minutes. On social media, the Department of Homeland Security accused Garcia Venegas of attempting to “obstruct and prevent the lawful arrest of an illegal alien” and refusing to “comply with numerous verbal commands.” DHS also called the raid a “targeted worksite operation.”

Garcia Venegas took two weeks off from work following the May arrest. Not long after he returned, he was working at a partially built residential development when immigration officers approached him to check his immigration status. Again, Garcia Venegas showed them his REAL ID, but was told the document could be fake. The agents held him for about 30 minutes before releasing him alongside other workers with lawful status who had also been detained, according to the September complaint.

Garcia Venegas’s lawsuit charges DHS with carrying out policies that allow immigration officers to raid private construction sites without a warrant, detain workers without “reasonable suspicion” that they lack status, and hold them despite evidence of their citizenship or lawful presence. “Immigration officers, wielding an overly broad grant of authority but no warrant, raided the private construction sites where Leo was working and rounded up all the workers who looked Latino—even citizens, like Leo, who had done nothing wrong,” the complaint, which seeks compensatory damages, states.

In October, Garcia Venega’s legal team filed motions for a preliminary injunction and class certification, claiming the federal government is violating American citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights. Without the intervention of the court, the motion argues, “countless innocent people risk being seized in lawless
construction site raids.” The government has moved to dismiss the claims. At a hearing on Wednesday, a federal judge didn’t issue a final decision on the motions, saying he needed to consider whether the court had jurisdiction over the matter.

“It’s got to be difficult to live in a place where you can’t go about your everyday life,” McClain said, “you can’t go to work, you can’t go to the store and come home without being put in leg shackles and forced to prove, once again, that you have a right to be here.”

FB Director Kash Patel is gonna get to the bottom of things, you guys. No, he’s not going to investigate any actual crimes. Why would you think that? Silly goose. Rather, he’s springing into action to harass anyone who dared suggest that he is the drunk incompetent unqualified glob of resentments he so clearly is. The Trump administration has really given up the pretense of being a…

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On Wednesday, FBI agents reportedly raided the office and business of state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, the Virginia legislator and prominent leader of the state’s recent redistricting effort that won Democrats four more likely seats in the House of Representatives. 

The senator’s office and cannabis dispensary, located on the same block, were swarmed by armed agents, decked out in camouflage tactical gear, with an armored vehicle on the scene, as they handcuffed and detained several men who were inside the dispensary. Agents carried out several boxes from the senator’s office. And, of course, MAGA’s favorite network, Fox News, was there to break the story.

Local ABC affiliate WSET cited undisclosed sources in claiming that the raid was part of an ongoing bribery and corruption investigation against Lucas initiated under the Biden administration, but several Virginia legislators have expressed skepticism about the political motivations behind the raid. 

“I am deeply concerned by today’s FBI raid,” said state legislator Don Scott, the speaker of Virginia’s House of Delegates, in a statement. “Given the politicization of this administration—an FBI led by Kash Patel and a Justice Department run by President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney—I think people should take this with a grain of salt and allow the facts to come out before jumping to conclusions.”

Scott added, “At this point, we simply do not know what this ultimately means. Right now, there is far more theatrics and speculation than actual information available to the public.”

That is, it’s still not clear whether the investigation has produced credible evidence of wrongdoing by anyone, let alone Lucas herself. But Trump’s FBI has given us little reason to believe it is operating in good faith or is choosing its targets without regard for the president’s political whims. 

Since his return to office, Trump has not hesitated to use the Department of Justice as a judicial cudgel against his critics, with Black women in positions of power facing the brunt. Last year, New York Attorney General Letitia James, the woman at the helm of the successful 2022 civil fraud lawsuit against Trump, was indicted by a federal jury on charges of mortgage fraud. The case against her was eventually tossed out, with grand juries shutting down two attempts by the DOJ to reindict James later in the year.

In August, Donald Trump attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, accusing her of criminal mortgage fraud directly on Truth Social. Cook’s alleged fraud wasn’t just a likely clerical error, it was one that Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency head Bill Pulte also made—which didn’t stop Pulte from saying he believes Cook will be indicted “no matter what” in a recent interview.

And in June of last year, Rep. LaMonica McIver was charged with forcibly impeding and interfering with federal officers after protesting at an ICE facility in her state. The charges, which carry a maximum of seventeen years in prison, have been denounced by her team as politically motivated. 

Don’t get me wrong: The current administration has cracked down on several of the president’s white and male political enemies (just look at James Comey). And so little is known about this case that we have no way of knowing if there’s sufficient evidence that Sen. Lucas has committed any kind of crime.

But it’s important to call out Trump, who’s always worn his misogynoir on his sleeve, and his administration’s blatant and disproportionate targeting of the Black women who speak out against him.

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