Mother Jones

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

Federal Judge Kathleen Cardone granted a preliminary injunction Friday to halt construction on the border wall in Texas’ expansive Big Bend sector, including the national and state parks.

Cardone read a brief order from the bench after hearing more than four hours of testimony from conservation groups and residents of the Big Bend region, known internationally for its dark night skies, abundant biodiversity and rugged river canyons. 

Cardone said that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in at least one of their claims and to suffer irreparable harm if construction continues. Her ruling stops border barrier construction in the entire Big Bend sector—which spans more than 500 miles across West Texas—until the federal government complies with all applicable laws. 

An analyst testified that the Big Bend sector is a “distant last place” in unauthorized border crossings, contrary to the government’s claims.

The ruling applies to all of Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, and the border along the Rio Grande in the rest of the sector. The injunction will remain in place while the court considers the lawsuit, which was filed in April.

Plaintiffs and their supporters embraced and wept outside the federal courtroom in El Paso Friday afternoon following the ruling. Many had traveled hundreds of miles from Big Bend communities, including Terlingua and Marfa, to attend. 

The Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Ruidosa Church, and Danny Miller Jr., a river guide, sued the US Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Markwayne Mullin for waiving dozens of laws to fast-track the border wall through the Big Bend region. The Texas Civil Rights Project and the Center for Biological Diversity are representing the plaintiffs. 

The federal waivers cover the entire Big Bend region. This had allowed construction to proceed without following the National Environmental Policy Act, the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act and many other laws. Under the injunction, the effect of the waivers is stayed.

Customs and Border Protection has changed its plans for border barrier construction in the Big Bend region numerous times since February. The federal government currently plans to build vehicle barriers and access roads within the state and national parks. A 30-foot steel wall is planned for private land in Big Bend outside the parks. 

One plaintiff, a river guide, called the construction a “visible scar that will never go away.”

In mid-August, advocates documented excavators and bulldozers clearing land within Big Bend National Park. Customs and Border Protection then issued a construction pause in the park on August 17. That pause lifted this week. Construction recently began on a new 30-foot steel wall in Hudspeth County, east of El Paso.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs called eight people to testify Friday. Their arguments centered on the lack of evidence that the Big Bend sector is an area of “high illegal entry,” as stated in the federal waivers. They argued that the plaintiffs were already suffering and will continue to suffer harm if border wall construction continues.

Adam Isaacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, presented data showing the Big Bend sector is a “distant last place” in unauthorized border crossings compared to the nine sectors that make up the US border with Mexico. The plaintiffs’ attorneys explained that they requested granular data about how many people are detained in Big Bend National Park, as opposed to the vast area that makes up the rest of the sector, and the federal government never supplied that information.

Miller, the river guide, said his business depends on access to the Rio Grande and explained how property he owns along the river will be irrevocably damaged if the wall is built. 

He described border wall construction as a “visible scar that will never go away.” Miller and several other individuals giving testimony broke down in tears when asked how a border wall could change their relationship to the Rio Grande.

Department of Justice attorneys presented few counterarguments and did not present any witnesses. The White House referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We stand by our assessment and remain confident in our legal authorities to secure the border while preserving the unique landscape of the Big Bend region,” a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said. “We are working with the Department of Justice on next steps.”

Last month, I wrote about a DHS Office of Inspector General report that revealed alarming conditions inside Alligator Alcatraz, an immigrant detention center opened last summer in the Everglades that held up to 1,500 people. Among the worst violations was the use of metal cages as “calming areas” where detainees were often held, the report stated. As Corene Kendrick, deputy director at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told me then, the report “reaffirms the cruelty of Alligator Alcatraz.”

Alligator Alcatraz is now closed. But buried deep within the DHS report was a warning about possible similar conditions at the other state-operated immigrant detention center in Florida: the Baker Correctional Institution in northern Florida, nicknamed by Gov. Ron DeSantis as “Deportation Depot.” The inspectors pointed to the concerns raised in the report, and concluded “ICE’s level of oversight and responsibility for immigration detention remain consequential… Baker has not been internally inspected by ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight, nor was it scheduled for inspection in FY 2026 or FY 2027.”

For months, Alligator Alcatraz captured the public’s attention, and it’s easy to understand why. Its name, a punchline for jokes within MAGA circles, was unusual. And its optics—with detainees living in fenced areas within large white tents on a little-used airfield in the middle of the Everglades—were vivid and controversial, including a visit by Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and then- DHS secretary Kristi Noem. Because of its proximity to Miami, a melting pot of immigrants, families whose loved ones were detained there could attend and speak out at vigils outside the center’s entrance.  

But shortly after Florida officials opened the Everglades center, they also began operations at the Baker Correctional Institution. Originally a state prison that closed in 2021, the facility is remote and surrounded by forest land. It’s located on a two-lane highway and Jacksonville, which is the closest metro area, is nearly 50 miles away. As of last month, approximately 1,000 detainees were living there; some are elderly, others are legal DACA recipients, and many have pending asylum claims. They are from countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, and Russia. With the closure of Alligator Alcatraz, those who have been detained and their families, not to mention human rights organizations, are sounding bells about conditions inside the center.

Every month, members of the Micah Solidarity Project, a group of Floridians from different Christian denominations advocating for immigrant rights in northeast Florida, gather on the edge of US Highway 90, next to the facility. The gatherings sometimes attract up to 100 people from all over Florida, including Gainesville, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, and Tampa. They hold a procession, walking up to the point where the Baker cell blocks are located. They pass around a speakerphone, hoping that those detained inside can hear their prayers and worship music in Spanish.

Clara Sowers, one of the organizers, said their gatherings have also attracted the attention of the center, which is run by the GEO Group and a few other contractors. At one of their larger gatherings in April, the demonstrators saw drones flying over them, and a few sheriff’s office cars circling nearby. That afternoon, they heard a faint whistle coming from the prison. Clara’s husband, she recalls, whistled back. “All of a sudden, the entire prison erupted in whistles and cheers,” she told me. “They were so excited to see other humans.”

Sowers, a Cuban American from Jacksonville, has recently been in touch with eight Baker detainees. She’s heard of at least two men suffering seizures. She has seen how Alligator Alcatraz had consistently remained in the news as lawmakers, advocates, and detainees’ loved ones called attention to the camp month after month until its closure this summer. She grew up in Miami and thinks a big part of the coverage was the city’s proximity to the Everglades camp. Many Miami families had loved ones sent there. For detainees at Baker, the level of outrage has been less because it’s in a remote area of the state, with fewer immigrant communities in the surrounding cities. “Because they’re not seeing their family members being detained and missing at the table, they’re just not affected by it,” Sowers told me. “Even when they hear about it, it sounds far away, as far away as Ukraine or the Gaza Strip.”

“Because they’re not seeing their family members being detained and missing at the table, they’re just not affected by it. Even when they hear about it, it sounds far away, as far away as Ukraine or the Gaza Strip.”

In the last few weeks, I’ve spoken to eight people—including current detainees, former detainees who were either deported or released, as well as their loved ones—about life inside the Baker facility. They all described the same conditions, including detainees who report delays in medical care, and describe living in cramped dormitories lined with 50 bunk beds for 100 men, small portions of food, and stifling heat due to malfunctioning A/C units and broken windows. “We are practically living in our boxers,” one Venezuelan currently at Baker told me over the phone. “The heat is unbearable.”

The ACLU is also investigating and exploring litigation against the state and the contractors running the facility, said Amy Godshall, a Florida-based attorney for the legal nonprofit. Notably, detainees have reported many of the same obstacles for obtaining legal access that others faced at Alligator Alcatraz, such as delays in scheduling attorney calls, prison staff failing to take detainees to their court appointments, and mail from their attorneys getting lost. 

“A lot of what’s happening here is very similar to what was happening in the Everglades facility,” Godshall said. “They don’t have a commissary set up, so that people can’t buy extra food and are just starving with the insufficient food they’re given.” She added that families had no options for visiting. In the end, she noted, “The facility is designed to torture people and push them to their breaking point so that they will self-deport.” When I reached out to ICE with questions about the Baker center, a spokesperson referred me to the state of Florida. Officials from the Governor’s Office and the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Baker, did not respond to my requests for comment.

Among those with whom I spoke was Jose Andres Urbina, a Venezuelan who arrived at the US-Mexico border in 2022 to seek political asylum. As he awaited the decision on his case, Urbina lived in St. John’s County on the east coast of Florida, where he worked in construction and as an Uber driver. He had a driver’s license, a work permit, and paid federal taxes, he told me. On May 9, 2026, he was parked outside a rock music festival, waiting for potential clients, when a state highway trooper asked for his ID. He then told him that he had a pending immigration hold and arrested him. “That’s when the torture and the tragedy began,” he told me in Spanish. Over the next several days, he was transferred through several county jails before his family could track him down. “I was basically kidnapped,” he said.

“The facility is designed to torture people and push them to their breaking point so that they will self-deport.”

Urbina ended up at Baker, where he remained until requesting voluntary departure and being deported back to Venezuela in September. What most troubled him during his time there was the inconsistent meal times. Breakfast, which often was two spoonfuls of scrambled eggs, some bacon, unflavored oatmeal, and fruit cocktail, was served somewhere between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. Lunch was usually a sandwich and Lays chips, followed by dinner, which tended to be the better meal of the three. Lunch would sometimes be served at 11 a.m., and dinner at 6 p.m. The men would sneak out leftovers in their pants or socks to eat later in their cells. The portions were so small, Urbina lost 40 pounds during his four months at Baker. Now, he is with his wife, who was also in Florida but chose to move back home to be with him. 

I also spoke to Esther, whose boyfriend is currently detained at Baker. We’re not using her full name, given her immigration status. In 15-minute phone calls over the last six months, she has heard the details of her boyfriend’s detention experience. He recently developed white patches on his skin and hasn’t been able to get medical care. He tells her he drinks lots of water before and after meals so that he stays full longer. Many detainees are on edge, so he tries to avoid other people and plays solitaire to pass the time. “Sometimes, they barely have energy to move,” Esther told me. ICE officers have repeatedly offered him the option of voluntary departure, but he has consistently refused. “He wants to wait here,” Esther said, “and see what happens.”

As long as the Baker facility is open, the Micah Solidarity Project will continue to gather outside its walls. “We’re going back until we’re not needed anymore. This is solidarity,” Sowers said. “Part of that is showing up consistently. Part of that is letting them know they’re not alone.”

Like many conservative evangelical pastors with whom I had worked for almost four decades, Rev. David Corbett is a mild-mannered, white-haired, avuncular 75-year-old who carries a handgun on his belt and quotes liberally from the King James Version of the Bible. A former lobster fisherman, he’s had two key vocations throughout his long ministry career: preaching on Sundays and spending the rest of the week in various law enforcement roles—from serving as a local beat cop to teaching criminal justice at the fundamentalist Pensacola Christian College in Florida. 

Corbett has served in several Maine churches, but his current congregation is the Oak Ridge Bible Church in Biddeford, a mostly unknown hamlet only 18 miles from Portland and 11 miles from Kennebunkport. I say “mostly  unknown,” because on July 13, 2026, it commanded headlines when ICE agents killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant with a work permit and pending asylum application hearing who was in his car at the corner of Hill and Pool Streets.  After mistakenly stopping the 25-year-old food delivery worker, ICE agents shot into his vehicle. 

Rev. Corbett has a lot to say about that incident, especially because he is running as the Republican Party candidate for York County sheriff.  He’s been critical of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for not sharing details of an internal investigation that was ostensibly conducted by ICE Acting Director David Venturella. “We need to have transparency,” he said. “But if they’re not being transparent, you have to ask the question, why?” 

Nevertheless, should he win his election, Corbett intends to work with DHS and have all his officers deputized as ICE agents so that they can help federal agents with arrests and detentions, part of a national program known as 287(g). For him, some blame for Durán’s death rests with his state’s Democratic majorities because of their opposition to local law enforcement helping ICE. In a YouTube video addressing the deadly episode, Corbett argues, “The policies of the Democrats brought us down this path to where a person got killed.” The ultimate responsibility for all the problems around immigration, he says, rests with former President Joe Biden for not adequately defending US borders. 

Not all Maine clergy agree with Corbett. About 6 miles from Corbett’s church is the historic Saco & Biddeford Unitarian Universalist Church, a congregation that does not follow a specific creed or doctrine but is a diverse community with shared values and a commitment to spirituality and social justice. Founded in 1827, the church is now led by the Reverend Dr. Lori Whittemore. A clinically trained, board-certified interfaith chaplain specializing in mass-casualty response, she had previously organized and led Spiritual Care Services of Maine, a nonprofit organization for people in crisis, including those affected by a mass shooting in 2023 that left 18 dead and 13 wounded in the city of Lewiston. 

As soon as she heard the news of Durán’s death, which occurred only a short distance from her church, Whittemore recruited local volunteer clergy and nearby professional chaplains to provide solace and spiritual care to immigrants, anti-ICE demonstrators, and the scores of people who flocked to the improvised memorial at the spot where Durán was killed.

Rev. Lori Whittemore, minister at the Unitarian Universalist church of Saco & Biddeford.Courtesy of Rob Schenck

I met with Corbett and Whittemore during an unexpected trip to Maine in July. Originally, I planned to go to Houston following the July 7 ICE shooting and killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old construction business owner who had lived in the United States for 35 years. Traveling with his crew, he was on his way to a job site, when ICE agents shot him in the abdomen. His killing sparked protests in the community, including by clergy, who had staged similar prayer vigils and protests after the increasing numbers of these kinds of tragedies.

One of them was in January in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after Renée Good was killed by immigration agents, and the community rose in protest. I responded to the call for clerics across faith traditions to appear and demonstrate. While I was there, Alex Pretti was gunned down by federal agents as he shielded a woman from their assault. Kneeling in prayer at the site where Alex bled out, I resolved that each time such federally sanctioned violence against immigrants and their allies erupted, I’d join other clergy who were similarly outraged by the unwarranted violence. As I wrote following my time in Minnesota:

I had participated in more than my share of protests, and many of them, over decades, when I helped lead an extreme wing of the conservative religiopolitical movement. I blockaded abortion clinics, demonstrated in pro-life marches, and held press conferences after Supreme Court decisions that cut to the heart of the conservative agenda–gay marriage, for instance. Obviously, this Call to Minneapolis was very different, and I answered because, for the last twelve years, I have been trying to make amends for having played such a significant role as an evangelical Christian minister in the aggressive push to transform the United States into a “Christian nation.” I helped lay the groundwork for Donald Trump’s presidency and the imposition of Christian Nationalism as America’s officially privileged and highly destructive religion. I was dead wrong in doing so.

I am committed now to “put the same level of energy and commitment into causes aligned with the teachings of mercy, tolerance, and love that first drew me to evangelical Christianity.” I saw Minneapolis as such a cause, as was Texas. And, as it turned out, Maine.

As I was firming up my plans to travel to Texas, the news broke of Durán’s fatal shooting, so I went to Portland instead. But this time, with a different sense of my mission. I planned to meet with church leaders from across the ideological spectrum to learn more about what they thought had happened. How did their perspectives differ?  How were they, and their congregations, dealing with ICE and its brutality? I also thought that showing up when his death was so recent, especially in my capacity as bishop of the Methodist Evangelical Church, a conservative denomination, might offer support to fellow evangelical leaders needing further reinforcement. It may be difficult to imagine that this reprehensible abuse of power is not contrary to our most cherished beliefs as Christians, but as we have seen for decades, for many, it isn’t.

What I found during my time there and a few weeks later when I attended a gathering of progressive clergy, was that quietly and then more assertively, there are signs of a renewal of progressive religious activism that seemed to have completely disappeared during the Trump years—and even before. Maine, for example, has consistently been rated among the most secular states, with many existing churches declining in membership and even closing. Until recently, any engaged and vibrant church life had generally favored Trump-friendly rural congregations north of Augusta.

But after this killing, I wondered whether what I saw in Portland, Biddeford, and other points in the more populated and politically purple south indicated a kind of spiritual awakening on the left. Could it be that, amid all the horrors of the Trump administration’s cruel policies regarding migrants, theologically liberal and socially progressive faiths may at last have discovered the energy and visibility that they have lacked for many years? An energy and visibility that religious conservatives have long claimed as exclusively their own.

What I became aware of only after my visit was that the glimmerings of a progressive political revival that I saw in Maine are also reflected in this year’s midterm elections. A surprising number of ministers and religious professionals are running as Democrats this year. Religion News Service estimates, “At least 12 pastors, seminarians and former clergy have run for federal office as Democrats this year,” in contrast to only seven evangelical pastors who are running as Republicans. Among the Democrats, perhaps the most prominent is Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico, who is running a surprisingly strong campaign against Ken Paxton for a Texas Senate seat. But there’s also Methodist minister Adam Hamilton in Kansas, who has paused his preaching as a senior pastor at the Church of the Resurrection, which is the largest United Methodist Congregation in the US.

Of course, in important ways, this is nothing new. Religious progressives have long been engines of positive social change. From the abolitionist Quakers of the 18th century to the social gospel movement in the late 19th century to the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the mid- to late-20th century, Christian ethics were applied to pressing social problems such as poverty, labor exploitation, and racial injustice. During these periods of high visibility, strategic organizing, and great orators, progressive religion enjoyed enormous institutional prosperity, cultural popularity, and political influence. 

But beginning in the 1970s, as the religious right gained prominence in the public arena and some of the greatest assaults on Christian values of empathy, charity, and tolerance in generations were being perpetrated by a series of administrations that claimed religious primacy, the religious left grew quieter. Aside from a relatively short reaction following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, progressive church leaders nearly disappeared by the end of the first Trump administration, eclipsed by the power of evangelical Christian leaders who had aligned themselves with the Republican Party and, perforce, with Donald Trump. 

But I am realizing that powerful as the opinions of a Rev. Corbett have been in defining what it has meant to be a religious conservative leader, their power may be starting to fade. And the gospel of mercy preached by Rev. Whittemore and other progressive religious figures may be experiencing a renaissance. Writing for Religion News Service in March of this year, Reverend Dr. Paul Raushenbush of the Interfaith Alliance observed that the rising voices of progressive Christians reflect actual US religious demographics. “According [to] the Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute, the majority of Christians actually support LGBTQ+ equality and abortion rights,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, PRRI’s most recent survey shows that only a third of Americans sympathize with Christian nationalism, and two-thirds of Americans are skeptical or outright reject the ideas and goals of Christian Nationalists.” 

Raushenbush, a great-grandson of an early progressive theologian and architect of the early 20th-century Social Gospel movement, is among a growing chorus of prominent progressive Christian leaders in the United States. They include Bishop William Barber of the Moral Mondays movement, although others such as Dr. Diana Butler Bass, a public theologian and expert on American Protestantism and spiritual life, and evangelical pastor Doug Pagitt, co-founder of Vote Common Good, which works to move conservative Christians away from Republican fealty represent a new generation. When I went to Maine, what I found appeared to be a microcosm of a tectonic shift, one in which neo-progressivism is gaining prominence in the religious landscape once dominated by the right.

Residents of Saco and Biddeford attending one of many prayer vigils held in remembrance of Durán and led by the progressive church leaders seen in the other photos. This one is at Mechanics Park, not far from where he was killed. Courtesy of Lori Whittemore

But first, what is happening in Maine requires some context.

While the United States as a whole ranks among the most religious countries compared with others of similar size and wealth, the Pew Research Center’s 2024 Religious Landscape Study indicates 39 percent of Mainers identify as religiously unaffiliated, just 16 percent of adults attend religious services weekly, and under a quarter say religion is very important to them. The Reverend Sara Ewing-Merrill, of the Hope Gateway Church in Portland, calls herself the “instigator” of the Greater Portland Multifaith Organizing Group, a collective of diverse spiritual communities tackling systemic inequities. She explained, “Until recently, most Mainers, who are statistically overwhelmingly nonreligious, were suspicious of religious leaders,” adding that they saw clergy like her “as an irrelevant and even a harmful and judgmental influence in the community.” For many, she said, religion is only a source of divisiveness, exclusion, and manipulation.

“Satan fights for every inch of territory Christ’s people seek to claim.” 

Meanwhile, conservative religious leaders also have long complained about a stubborn rejection of their message. Maine-born theologian and former professor at Midwestern Baptist Seminary, Owen Strachan, even singled out his home state, declaring it to be a place where “Satan fights for every inch of territory Christ’s people seek to claim.” 

On May 15, 2026, one of the larger evangelical churches in the Portland area sponsored a Turning Point USA “Make Heaven Crowded” evangelistic event. Calvary Chapel Greater Portland rented a venue with a capacity of more than 3,000, but only several hundred people showed up, far fewer than the thousands who had attended the same event in other cities across the country.

That is not to say that the religious left fared any better. In Portland, a simultaneous gathering dubbed “Love Is The Point” was designed as a direct, inclusive alternative to the Turning Point USA event. Promotional materials described it as being pro-trans and queer rights, as well as “pro-immigrant, pro-wealth equality, pro-women’s rights, and anti-white christian (sic) nationalism,” among other ideological descriptors. The program featured local musicians, spoken-word blessings, interfaith worship, and fundraising efforts for communities that organizers felt were targeted by right-wing religious ideologies. More than two dozen congregations co-sponsored the event, yet only 350 people participated. Still, Rev. Devin Green, one of the event organizers who helps Rev. Ewing-Merrill with the Multifaith Organizing Group, emphasized that it was a great success because liberal and progressive groups have been very slow to turn out at all for such events in the past.

Liberal church leaders have long worried about the perception that the church and its clergy are irrelevant, and haven’t wanted to exacerbate that tension by being too bold in their words around public controversies. But during our long conversation in the sanctuary of her church, she explained that there has been a significant change: “People are seeing that we have a unique role, which is needed.” Later, in an email, she described hearing from several people in the community who did not consider themselves a part of any faith tradition. “They are grateful for the space I hold along with clergy colleagues on street corners and for what we share at the mic at protests, vigils, and press conferences,” she wrote. “During those times, they departed from whatever tradition they happened to be part of and focused instead on the shared experience of despair and hope that we are all carrying. We speak not just from a Christian understanding of hope, but a universal human perspective on hope.”

Rev. Whittemore of the Unitarian Universalist Church has noticed more people attending worship and anticipates this will continue. When she has been out in the community, during some demonstrations, people have described feeling the need to return to church for some spiritual centering. She assures them that the particular spiritual tradition doesn’t matter; what’s most important is to “find a community because if nothing else, it will be a comfort,” she has advised. “It will be all the things that we need right now for staying hopeful and not being separated, but being together.”

“I’ve had folks say to me some version of ‘If I’d known people of faith actually stood for things like justice and equality and stood against racism, xenophobia, and fascism, maybe I’d go to church once in a while!’”

Statistical data have been slow to show any change in church attendance in Maine. Still, the most reliable source, published by the Association of Religion Data Archives, was last updated in 2020—and a lot has happened during those intervening years. Since the 2024 presidential election, two other Portland-based Unitarian congregations have seen significant growth, and it has only accelerated since the ICE surge in January of this year, particularly after the deadly episode in Biddeford. Rev. Jane Field, executive director of the Maine Council of Churches, who connected me to some of the most prominent clergy in the state, told me, “People are pleasantly surprised to see clergy on the front lines, speaking out against authoritarianism, and putting themselves squarely in the corner of our immigrant neighbors.” She noted that until recently, there was the assumption that to be involved with a church community inevitably implied support for the Trump administration, Christian nationalism, and ICE.  “I’ve had folks say to me some version of ‘If I’d known people of faith actually stood for things like justice and equality and stood against racism, xenophobia, and fascism, maybe I’d go to church once in a while!’”

Memorial volunteer Michelle’s tattoo of her mother’s rosary.Courtesy of Rob Schenck

Maine is home to a growing foreign-born population of approximately 66,000 residents, accounting for roughly 4.7 percent of the state’s total population. Unlike in many parts of the country, the Hispanic immigrant population is among the smallest, far outpaced by Asians, who account for 25 percent of immigrants, followed by Europeans at approximately 24 percent. There is also a rapidly growing African immigrant community in the state, now about 20 percent of the population. 

This past January, as Gregory Bovino, who was then “Commander-at-Large of the US Border Patrol,” launched his grotesquely high-profile and deadly campaign against immigrants and their allies in Minneapolis, its much less visible complement was underway in Maine. Under the cruel moniker “Operation Catch of the Day,” a deliberate play on the state’s iconic seafood and commercial fishing industry, an undisclosed number of agents surged into the predominantly blue southern part of the state, as opposed to the more rural and sparsely populated northern red counties. In the first seven days of this operation, the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition’s ICE hotline logged hundreds of sightings of federal agents. Even after the surge ended, with with DHS reporting more than 200 arrests, ICE’s ongoing presence in the state had increased by at least 44 percent.

Maine’s most visible and vibrant churches tend to be evangelical, and, as Rev. Scott Terry of the Maine Gospel Alliance, representing scores of conservative congregations throughout the state, put it to me, they “are conservative with their personal responsibility, with their religious viewpoints, and their political viewpoints.” Those same churches have largely remained silent about ICE operations. As Terry explained, this could be a simple lack of imagination; there just aren’t very many immigrants in the parts of the state where evangelicals tend to live, so the local community has little exposure to them. Still, he went on to concede that nor did those congregations consider the plight of immigrants to be important. 

The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, a component of NIH, monitors the percentage of foreign-born residents by county in each state, and shows that these populations range from 1.5 percent to 4.1 percent in northern counties with the highest numbers of evangelical congregations. Many of these immigrants are religious conservatives, and they often form their own congregations. My experience over more than four decades of evangelical leadership, including on the national level, leads me to believe that the majority white congregations likely at least know of these immigrant co-religionists, if not to engage with them in various ways. 

In contrast to the evangelical disinterest or apathy around ICE, both the surge and Durán’s killing have sparked formidable, highly visible opposition from progressive church leaders, Islamic clerics, Jewish rabbis, Quaker ministers, and Buddhist practitioners. Groups such as Multifaith Justice Maine, which seeks to unify religious communities across differences to advance social justice causes, and the aforementioned Greater Portland Multifaith Organizing Group, which stages local public events, have mobilized scores of lay and ordained participants to advocate for immigrants in visible and less-visible ways.

Clergy and community volunteers regularly stand watch outside local businesses, such as the American Roots apparel factory in Westbrook, where a significant portion of the staff are asylum seekers or legal green card holders living in fear. Clerics will line up shoulder to shoulder as “human shields” during employee shift changes. Dressed in yarmulkes, prayer shawls, and clergy stoles, they sing hymns and read scripture to block the line of sight and act as a physical buffer between workers and DHS or ICE agents waiting outside.

During January’s ICE surge, the Maine Council of Churches and other groups spearheaded an effort to pressure Republican Senator Susan Collins to vote no on a bill funding ICE’s continued operations. Filling the hallway outside Collins’ office in Portland, several clergy members who refused to obey police orders to disperse were taken into custody. Collins eventually voted for the measure anyway, but her office did not press charges against the protesting clergy, leading to the case being dismissed. 

Progressive and mainline liberal church groups are also using the courts to defend immigrants’ human and constitutional rights. Congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Churches in America, a progressive denomination, are plaintiffs in a regional New England lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security seeking to stop the administration from carrying out immigration enforcement at houses of worship.

There’s a quieter side to all of this, as well. Rev. Whittemore took me on a tour of her church’s commercial-style kitchen, where parishioners prepare bagged meals and other household necessities to deliver to the homes of vulnerable immigrant families, some of whom—whether or not they have legal status—are afraid to go to a grocery store or pharmacy for fear ICE will take them into custody. When the surge began in January, other congregations organized rides to and from schools and work, medical appointments, and even arranged to accompany immigrants to mandatory immigration court hearings.

All that I had seen and learned during my time in Maine came vividly into focus on my last day there, as I joined Rev. Whittemore at the site of Durán’s brutal slaying, where ICE had rammed his car. Rev. Whittemore offered me a regulation black chaplain cap, and I engaged in quiet, brief pastoral-style conversations with several of a dozen or so members of the community who had come out to refresh the drooping flowers, remove weather-beaten paper signs, and sweep up debris on the sidewalk and roadway.

Rev. Whittemore, in her capacity as chaplain at the improvised memorial where Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero died.Courtesy of Rob Schenck Rev. Whittemore converses with visitors and volunteers who gathered to mourn in Biddeford, Maine.Courtesy of Rob Schenck

At one point, an angry young shirtless white male drove by in a pickup truck, gunned his engine, raised a middle finger, and shouted, “Go home, f*gg*ts! We don’t need his kind here!” At that moment, Rev. Whittemore took charge. With a controlled deep breath and a serene look on her face, she made caring eye contact with each of us and demonstrated what her chaplaincy was all about: setting the frame for inner peace, self-control, and love of neighbor. Later, she led the group in a spiritual exercise that included breathing, silence, and a spoken meditation. It’s what we evangelicals call, “Havin’ church outside of church.”

As I resumed my cleaning tasks along with the others, I noticed a classic steepled white clapboard church building immediately across the street. A colorful banner above the double-entry doors read, “With God…”

All Things Are Possible

EXPECT GREAT THINGS”

Underneath it was the name of the church: Victory Chapel Independent Holiness Pentecostal—just the kind of church I used to make rounds preaching in as an itinerant conservative evangelist for nearly four decades. I asked the volunteers if anyone was familiar with the congregation, as most were from the immediate neighborhood. Nearly all of them shook their heads no. One woman named Michelle said, “Funny, I only live over there,” pointing to a nearby row of modest homes, caddy-corner from where we were standing. “I never even noticed that church there.” 

In the distant past, evangelicals were known for their care of the poor, the forgotten, and the despised, but no longer. Today, we are presumed to be callous toward the needy, indifferent toward the marginalized, and contemptuous of the despised.

Now, here I was with a collection of good-hearted, mostly irreligious souls, laboring in the hot sun to afford some dignity to a young man most of them didn’t know. I thought of the many churches like the one across the street that I had kept company with for so long, whose preachers would have classified the people around me as lost, deceived, or maybe even wicked hellbound sinners.

Earlier that day, I had met the conservative Rev. Terry in his library-like church study, arrayed with the dour portraits of evangelical patriarchs Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards. I described to him some of Rev. Whittemore’s work in Biddeford. “I think that caring for people, the way the Unitarian Universalist wants to, is noble,” he allowed, before referring to the vast gulf that exists between them. “But it’s not the Gospel. And I believe the church is commissioned to proclaim the Gospel to save people from their sins.” 

“I think that caring for people, the way the Unitarian Universalist wants to, is noble. But it’s not the Gospel. And I believe the church is commissioned to proclaim the Gospel to save people from their sins.” 

I once agreed with him, believing that my principal task was to convert sinners so they could be assured of spending eternity with God when they died. Too much concern for their earthly needs was a distraction from that paramount mission. I also told believers that their good works would never get them to heaven, so they should concentrate on winning souls rather than practicing charity. Evangelicals do give generously to churches, but the vast majority of those donations go to maintaining their own church buildings, staff, religious programming, evangelistic and missionary work. For many evangelical churches and clergy, this results in our ignoring people’s real felt needs.

Yet, as I saw it in Maine and in Minneapolis, Rev. Whittemore and the crew of volunteers were doing just what I believe Jesus would have been doing at a memorial for a young father unjustly killed by imperial guards: honoring the victim, consoling those in trauma and grief, and seeking ways to care for their temporal needs.

Progressive clergy stage one of their weekly public prayer vigils in Biddeford’s Mechanics Park to memorialize Durán, who was killed nearby, as well as other victims of ICE violence.Courtesy of Rob Schenck

Why did it take so long, and demand this measure of human suffering, for progressive church leaders to be seen and heard, and for their churches to start growing again? I put that question to several liberal colleagues at the recent annual Wild Goose Festival, an outdoor camping event that’s been described as a Christian Woodstock meets South by Southwest. It drew about 2000 clergy, artists, musicians, community organizers, and social justice activists over the Labor Day weekend in Harmony, North Carolina. 

The Reverend Jennifer Butler is executive director of Faith in Democracy, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that builds coalitions of faith and faith-adjacent communities to resist the religious right, confront nationalism, and defend democracy. A graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, she is a Presbyterian minister who has been a progressive since joining the Peace Corps in 1989. She later lobbied for women’s rights and against the Iraq war at the UN, worked for the Presbyterian Peacemaking Office in New York, and wrote a book warning of the new right’s global reach.

Butler believes the recent emergence of progressive church leaders, like those in Maine, is inextricably connected to politics. She offered a brief history lesson, explaining how, in the 1970s, Democratic party split from progressive religion as part of its commitment to its separation of church and state, interpreting this to mean that religious voices did not belong in the conversation about public policy. Meanwhile the Moral Majority was ascendant and as “the Christian right began to dominate the public square, the Party and the Progressive Movement grew wary of religion. Rather than seeing good religion as the answer to bad religion, they insisted on legal strategies and messaging around the separation of church and state.” The result? Those who were part of a progressive religious, social gospel movement “lost the ability to speak to highly religious Americans that we needed to get behind our policy issues.” 

It was Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff, John Podesta, that Rev. Butler credits with reversing this trend. An observant Catholic, he founded the Center for American Progress in 2003, which in turn funded Faith in Public Life, a project aimed at building a coordinated voice for the religious left. Before this liberal religious resurgence, Butler said even her own clergy colleagues warned her not to bring theology into her public advocacy, “but some of my secular, feminist colleagues came to me, and were like, ‘We never knew what to make of you, but thank God you’re saying what you’re saying!’” 

The Reverend Dr. Russell Meyer, a Lutheran pastor and head of the Florida Council of Churches, told me that, beginning more than ten years ago, he and other ecumenical leaders were active in calling for school boards to direct customized resources for students who face the biggest barriers—such as those with disabilities, facing language learning challenges, and those from low-income families. “We’d go to school board meetings with lots of speakers. We were controlling the agenda. And we were successful.” In comparison to the amount of attention groups like the conservative Moms for Liberty, religiously progressive public advocates received very little attention. “I would have conversations with reporters, and I’d say, ‘Look, you got a whole section devoted to sports. There are more people in churches on Sundays than there are in stadiums. And there’s more money being put into offering plates than there are in beer sales at games, but you’re not reporting on that.” 

“I call it the great reshuffling. They were able to choose a congregation or faith community that better aligned with their values.”

The Reverend Dr. Lori Walke, who is 42 and describes herself as an “elder millennial,” is pastor of the Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City, which has grown by at least 40 new members each year since 2021. Walke said that she and her congregation are unapologetically progressive. “We are working for abortion access, immigration justice, and are practicing full affirmation and inclusion of LGBTQ plus folks,” she said. “If you Google ‘gay church, Oklahoma,’ Mayflower will come up.’” 

As far back as 2014, when a lower court ruling legalized same-sex marriage in Oklahoma, a year before the US Supreme Court declared it a constitutional right, Walke’s church became what she refers to as “a marriage equality mecca for the Midwest. Texas, Arkansas, everyone was coming to Oklahoma because it was legal.” She said she performed 14 weddings on the first day the County Clerk issued licenses for same-sex couples. By the time the Supreme Court issued its Obergefell v. Hodges opinion, guaranteeing the right for gay couples throughout the country to marry, on June 26, 2015, Walke said she had solemnized more than 100 such marriages. 

Walke said her church has seen spikes in attendance, involvement, and membership after they responded with special programs to the SCOTUS decisions in Obergefell and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe. v. Wade, or state and federal elections. The church has even hosted Planned Parenthood trainings for clinic defense and escort accompaniment. 

Attracting newcomer during times of social upheaval and tension is less challenging than retaining them after the crisis has passed. “For a while there,” she said, “it seemed our back door was as wide open as our front door.” She examined the problem as part of her doctoral research project at Emory University in 2020. “For Gen Xers, millennials, and younger generations, there is no obligation to join a group or organization that does not share your values,” Walke explained. While older Americans, such as Boomers, may have at one time felt obligated to stick with their family’s church, without reference to if they were comfortable with its principles and practices, after the COVID pandemic, when some churches suspended meeting in person, or streamed their services online, it allowed even the most dedicated members to explore both their faith and other churches that may more closely reflect those beliefs. “I call it the great reshuffling,” she told me, “they were able to choose a congregation or faith community that better aligned with their values.”

Walke tried to help people anchor their social and political commitments to their religious convictions. Disconnecting enduring Christian values from partisanship requires that progressives must become more visible since, she noted, conservatives enjoy “a smorgasbord of options, but for folks who are more progressive, do those places even exist?”

“Our focus is not on an afterlife, but on the only world we know. We are partnering with God and God’s salvific work in the here and now.”

One factor that has acted as a dividing line between churches that are thriving and those that are fading is the difference between those that are “performative”—in which members of the congregation are effectively a relatively passive audience—and those that are participatory, like hers and the ones that I saw in Maine. “Our focus is not on an afterlife, but on the only world we know,” she told me. “We are partnering with God and God’s salvific work in the here and now.”

The practical expression of religious life is what first drew me to evangelicalism more than 50 years ago. An early influence was The Cross and the Switchblade, which recounted how David Wilkerson left his comfortable church to minister to gang members and addicts in Brooklyn. Inspired, I joined his network of residential treatment centers and later launched mobile homeless shelters in my home city of Buffalo, New York, and mobile medical clinics in Mexico City and Cairo.

My focus on meeting “real felt needs” was eventually eclipsed by my becoming fully engaged in culture war combat, with the same Moral Majority so disparaged by the people I have gotten to know. Evangelical orthodoxy was weaponized, replacing compassion for the poor with rigid loyalty tests on abortion, sexuality, gender, and political affiliation. This shift has proved catastrophic, driving young people and longtime congregants away in droves due to intense politicization. While preparing for ministry, a popular adage was, “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” I view this not as Rev. Terry of Maine Gospel Alliance does, a contradiction to the gospel, but as the fulfillment of the Christian mandate to love our neighbors by actively ensuring their basic needs are met.

The Pentecostal church across the street from the memorial site.Courtesy of Rob Schenck

Back in Maine, my last conversation at Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero’s memorial was with Michelle, the woman I had asked about the evangelical church across the street. I remarked on the beautiful, tattooed image of a blue-and-pink rosary, a stringed loop of beads used in Catholic prayer rituals, on the inside of her left forearm. “Oh, that was my mom’s rosary,” she said, stroking it with great affection. “I just loved her so deeply, and she loved her rosary. So, after she passed, I gave it to my tattooist and said, ‘Put it right there, so I can lay it across my heart and remember her.’” Then, her face hardened and her voice became angry. “But I’ve had it with religion. I left the church. Do you know that during Covid, I couldn’t even get a priest to come and give my dying mother last rites? They just wouldn’t do it.”

At that moment, I was no longer part of the crew who was working with her, but a minister with whom she shared her pain and anger. The first person I knew of who died of Covid, I told her, was a Franciscan Friar. Brother John Sebastian Laird-Hammond lived in a monastery near my home in Washington, DC, where he ministered to the poor and marginalized. She picked up on his middle name, Sebastian, and his hyphenated last name, “like Johan,” she said, surprised at what felt like an important coincidence. I shared my impressions of all the good work I had seen the clergy doing for immigrants like Johan over the last several days, and she interrupted me, smiling, “And there’s this one,” pointing enthusiastically to Rev. Whittemore.

“You know, Chaplain,” Michelle said, planting the broom she had been using to make her point. “I should get my ass back into church. This has gotten me thinking differently about it.” Smiling back, I gave her my card and offered to make some recommendations.

Big Tech is back on the big screen—but its bosses might not be thrilled.

This fall, Hollywood will release four movies on tech executives: Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, on CEO Sam Altman’s tumultuous time as the head of OpenAI; Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, on the investigation into Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissing its platforms’ negative impacts on young users and inciting violence and hate speech; the all-encompassing Musk, by documentarian Alex Gibney, on the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s family life, corporate controversies, and engagement in right-wing politics; and You Can See Everything, an unsettling documentary in which directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim follow Elizabeth Holmes, who invited them to film her in the weeks before she began serving her federal prison sentence for defrauding investors at the now-defunct health tech company Theranos.

If the 2010s brought the first major wave of examining Silicon Valley leaders, such as relatively human depictions of Zuckerberg with The Social Network and multiple movies on longtime Apple CEO Steve Jobs—they largely paint pictures of difficult, ambitious individuals who may have burned a few bridges to achieve the remarkable—this recent group represents an opportunity, as I wrote in September, to rethink that perspective. 

Since the 2010s, public opinion about Big Tech companies has tanked. My colleagues and I have extensively covered the increasingly apparent harms that tech CEOs have overseen, including using AI in wars overseas and the continuing development of a mass surveillance state at home. 

In a July poll reported by Axios, about seven in ten Americans said they believe tech companies and their CEOs hold too much power. 

On Politico’s Decoded podcast this week, Altman asserted that “the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this [AI] technology” as people will do “tremendously—orders of magnitude more—good stuff than bad stuff” with it.

Early reports around Artificial, directed by Challengers’ Luca Guadagnino, starring Andrew Garfield as Altman, and covering his firing and reinstatement as OpenAI CEO in under a week in 2023, suggest that the film will have a more critical view on the executive—the Altman of Artificial says “yes” to everyone, Vulture wrote in a piece interviewing Guadagnino on Friday.

“The narcissist has the ability to understand the terrain and adapt to it, shape-shift,” Guadagnino told Vulture—which he sees as having larger ramifications: “People that have a lot of power should be very much aware that you must be responsible for the community.”

“I think anyone who takes on that level of responsibility for a company or a technology that you know is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity [must have] a certain ability to dissociate,” Garfield told Esquire in August.

Amazon MGM Studios dropped the movie in June, shortly after Amazon announced a $50 billion investment into OpenAI. Big Tech and the wealthy elite are now more closely tied to culture, art, and media. In a Vanity Fair cover story released Monday, Altman said that he did not speak to anyone at Amazon about Artificial and that, based on the movie trailer, he didn’t feel the filmmakers were “going for accuracy.” 

“Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse,” Garfield says in that trailer. “And we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world.”

Artificial, which independent film company Neon acquired later that month, premieres Monday at the New York Film Festival.

You might have seen the viral campaign ad. Last month, Rep. María Elvira Salazar—a Miami Republican endorsed by Donald Trump—launched a TV commercial criticizing the president’s mass-deportation campaign. “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” she warned, speaking directly into the camera. “Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy. The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

Salazar’s ad was one of the most public signs of the brewing anger in Florida over Trump’s draconian deportation policies. Her “district is among those with the highest percentage of Latino voters in the US,” notes Mother Jones’ Laura Morel, “and many experts view this race as a test of how far Trump’s popularity has cratered with the Latino community.”

So what’s causing the backlash in the Sunshine State? In late August, journalist Amanda Moore traveled traveled to southwest Florida—a couple hours from Salazar’s district—to report on a surge of ICE and Border Patrol agents in the area. What she found was less dramatic than the heavily militarized immigration operations the Trump administration has carried out in Minnesota, Illinois, and elsewhere in the country. But the consequences have been every bit as devastating.

In contrast to the message in Salazar’s recent ad, Republican officials across Florida have cooperated closely with Trump’s deportation campaign. As Moore notes in a new video for Mother Jones, this cooperation has helped ICE arrest hundreds of people in Florida per day. Give it a watch.

With the help of Republican officials, ICE has quietly arrested hundreds of people in Florida per day. Video by Amanda Moore, produced by Anna Yeo

In remarks delivered before a MAHA audience at the Waldorf Astoria in D.C. last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proclaimed the changes he’s wrought to HHS are permanent, and praised his allies in the movement for helping to make them happen. 

“Even if I got hit by a truck tonight,” he told the room, “HHS will never go back to what it was before.”

Kennedy’s presence was part of the MAHA Summit, a daylong event, wherein Kennedy also reportedly told an audience that AI is “better informed” than doctors. 

His remarks at the private reception on Monday were relayed later in the week by Claire Dooley, a filmmaker who’s worked on several anti-vaccine movies, including one produced by Children’s Health Defense, the organization Kennedy used to lead. Dooley wrote about the private reception for The MAHA Report, a Substack maintained by the nonprofit MAHA Action, Inc. While the organization is nominally independent, it has primarily served this year to cheerlead Kennedy’s sweeping changes at HHS.

As Dooley wrote, Kennedy used the occasion to praise the room and the broader MAHA movement, telling them, “We’re about to have our day in the sunshine.” MAHA Action proudly circulated a video clip of Kennedy’s remarks boasting that HHS has been permanently changed: 

The changes Kennedy was was referring to at HHS have been, by most people’s metrics, devastating. According to a June New York Times report, Kennedy has shown “minimal engagement” with most of what HHS—the federal government’s largest department—actually does, and instead focused on promoting an inverted food pyramid heavy on animal fats and trying to overhaul federal vaccine policy to fit his anti-vaccine views. The CDC has reportedly lost nearly a third of its staff and is struggling to fulfill its basic mission. Several important bodies including the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the US Preventive Services Task Force are in limbo after Kennedy’s efforts to gut them and replace them with his ideological fellow travelers have been met by controversy and court challenges. The Preventative Services Task Force, which helps decide which preventative tests will be covered by insurance, has not met in more than a year. ACIP, which helps develop federal vaccine recommendations, is also in legal limbo, leaving other non-governmental health organizations to advise physicians on this year’s COVID shots, among other things. 

Kennedy’s boasts last week are part of a recent victory lap; last month he was also the keynote speaker at Children’s Health Defense’s DC conference. There, he told the room that the anti-vaccine movement has “a friend at the White House.”

Kennedy’s drive to damage U.S. vaccine infrastructure is broadly unpopular. Recent polling shows that six in 10 voters disapprove of his work as HHS secretary. Outside of parties with his friends, Kennedy has sought to downplay his vaccine agenda; as The New York Times disclosed earlier this year, in the lead-up to the midterms, he planned to deemphasize vaccines and spend more time talking about healthy eating. Since that reporting, in a rather queasy irony, the nation has been struck with a wave of serious food-borne illness—with part of the blame going to decreased FDA inspections under RFK Jr.

After a historic setback in 2024, the Democratic rebrand appears to be working out.

No, seriously—the rebrand is that they’re all filming themselves working out. In late September, Manny Rutinel, a Democrat challenging Rep. Gabe Evans in Colorado, posted a video of himself doing bicep curls while blaring “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath. The week before that, a very energized Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed was in Washington, DC, challenging JD Vance to a squat-off. Before that, it was Indiana secretary of state candidate Birch Evans Bayh IV—please, call him Beau—airing an ad in which he racked weights and bench-pressed while lamenting that “most politicians are weak.”

Video by Peter Berger

You could keep going back, if you wanted—to Cait Conley, running against Rep. Mike Lawler in New York’s Hudson Valley, flipping over a tire while shouting “let’s fucking go”; to the former Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner, swinging a kettlebell in his backyard; to former Rep. Colin Allred, recording his denunciation of James Talarico before the Texas Senate primary with steam coming off his head after a garage workout; to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, talking to TMZ about the workout video he posted after a visit to the US Naval Academy.

Some of these antics are just a reflection of these candidates’ personalities. Allred, for instance, is a former NFL linebacker. Pumping iron is a thing El-Sayed likes to do (and do and do), and he’s worked it into his campaign as a way to connect with people and reach new audiences. There is often an explicit contrast to bad conservative messaging in this glut of videos—Rutinel, like fellow Coloradan Rep. Jason Crow before him, was making light of Pete Hegseth’s poor form and transparent insecurity, just as Gavin Newsom—who has not posted a workout video—was making light of RFK Jr.’s shirtless workout with Kid Rock in a TikTok of his own.

But if you’ll excuse me for overexamining things for a minute, I think there’s also something more subtle (well, not that subtle) at work here. After the 2024 election, a common shorthand for what had gone wrong with the Democratic Party was that people perceived Democrats as—in the words of one focus group and many, many talk-show interviews—“weak and woke.” (There were infinite corollaries to this, including Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s suggestion that the party lacked “alpha energy,” Sen. Ruben Gallego’s assertion that voters thought they were “wussy,” and Newsom’s belief that “we’ve appeared weak and meek.”)

The “woke” part has probably consumed the most oxygen and engendered the most debate within the party. It has also been addressed, in a variety of ways, in a frenzy of TV ads and ill-advised Reels. But the “weak” part is straightforward: The solution is to not be weak. It’s to be strong, to stand up for yourself, to speak plainly, and when possible—and this really gets to the root of where things went wrong—not to be an octogenarian who walks at a shuffle and speaks at a whisper while voters go mad over inflation. There are many ways of doing that, but as a practical matter, if you want to show you have energy and can do real-person things and dispel misconceptions about Democrats Like You, well, you can always just try picking up something really heavy.

Political messaging can be alarmingly reductive sometimes. Candidates and consultants are borrowing things they’ve seen or used before. Why did candidates start filming themselves driving through their hometowns, eyes curiously off the road, talking about the values that forged them and the neighbors who were left behind? Who was the first elected official to stand in front of a bunch of televisions blaring attack ads and say, very solemnly, “you’ve seen the ads”?

All of these workout videos call to mind another campaign trope. One of the hottest campaign trends to emerge in the Obama years was filming yourself shooting stuff. It was a conservative-coded but not exclusively Republican genre. In fact, it may have even worked best when it was Democrats doing it—cutting against type, while demonstrating that they weren’t like all the rest. Former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin famously filmed himself shooting “the cap-and-trade bill” during his first election. When he ran for a final term in 2018, he shot his opponent’s lawsuit to gut the Affordable Care Act. (Kind of the full Joe Manchin experience, to be honest.) When Seth Bodnar, the independent running for Senate in Montana, recently filmed himself shooting a Flock camera, he was following in the footsteps of former Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who strapped “REAL ID cards” to clay pigeons 18 years earlier.

Even as the polls predict a big year for Democrats, the party’s national reputation is still underwater. There’s dissatisfaction with party leaders, and big fights still to come on foreign policy, on Big Tech, and on health care. Turning things around will be a heavy lift. But that might be one thing they’re getting used to.

For several days this spring, trapped inside a Texas immigration detention center, Luis made frantic phone calls, one after the other, to everyone he could think of.

Could anyone help him find his 11-year-old son?

He’d last seen Andrés, a sensitive boy who likes to draw and paint, at an ICE holding facility near Camp East Montana, the sprawling detention center on a military base in El Paso where Luis now found himself.

Luis and Andrés had come to the United States from Venezuela in 2023. They were taken into custody together this past April after Luis, a construction worker, was arrested by federal agents outside his home. For hours, he and Andrés sat alone in a cell that felt to them like a dungeon. Around midnight, ICE officers showed up and ordered the boy to come with them.

No, Luis had pleaded. Andrés was just a kid—he needed his dad. But the officers seemed unmoved, he said, slipping on gloves and tugging on the boy’s arms as father and son clung to one another. Luis recalled that the officers promised Andrés would be in touch with him, so he let go and watched them take him away.

The administration’s goal in detaining these children, a former ORR official says , is “to make sure no one ever sends their kids to the US again.”

Three days had since gone by without a word, and Luis was in a state of panic. Neither he nor his family on the outside—Andrés’ mother and stepmom—could get any information on the child’s whereabouts. Worse, there was no sign of Andrés in ICE’s online detainee locator. Where had they taken him?

“Since he was little he’s been with me,” Luis told us later from detention, his voice filled with anguish. (Luis and Andrés are pseudonyms, and other family members’ names were changed to protect their privacy. Some attorneys who spoke with us also requested anonymity, in order to describe cases without exposing their clients.)

The Camp East Montana immigrant detention center, a series of hardened tents, is located at an Army base on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas.Morgan Lee/AP

Finally, after about five days, Luis learned that ICE had transferred Andrés to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that cares for “unaccompanied” migrant children. Federal law defines unaccompanied minors as kids younger than 18 with no lawful immigration status and no parent or guardian in the United States available to care for them.

In the past, most unaccompanied minors in ORR custody were children who had recently crossed the US-Mexico border by themselves—not kids who arrived with a parent and had been living in the country for years. Andrés was never unaccompanied, but ICE confusingly labeled him that way. As a result, Luis learned, ORR would place him in temporary foster care with another Texas family.

Andrés felt betrayed, as a lawyer who later took his case recalled to us. “He was saying, ‘The government lied to me. I asked them to be with my dad, and they took us to a place, and we were separated.’”

Luis, stuck in detention, could not believe it. “You tricked me!” he thought angrily of ICE.

“You kidnapped my son.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because something similar happened during the first Trump administration. In 2018, under the so-called zero tolerance policy, immigration agents tore families apart as they crossed the US-Mexico border, detaining parents and transferring their children to ORR custody. One of ORR’s responsibilities is to place unaccompanied kids in shelters, group homes, or foster care until they can be released to sponsors, who are often relatives. Historically, these arrangements were never intended for children who arrived with parents, but Trump’s advisers wagered that separating families would deter new migrants from making the trip. The zero-tolerance policy made national headlines and was denounced on both sides of the political aisle as inhumane, and a federal court eventually ruled it illegal.

Yet now, eight years later, the Trump administration is again separating families, except this time it’s doing so more quietly, and away from the border: Federal agents have picked up hundreds of immigrant children in the interior of the country and sent them to ORR, a vast departure from prior administrations, when interior referrals to the agency were rare. Anywhere from 500 to more than 700 of these kids, according to sources familiar with the cases, had previously crossed the border alone and spent time in ORR custody, but were living with their sponsors when ICE returned them to the agency. These “re-referrals” are the subject of lawsuits and investigations.

But there’s another group of kids that has received less attention—kids like Andrés who were sent to ORR even though they were never unaccompanied. It’s unclear how many children fall into this category, because ORR doesn’t systematically track them, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ignored our questions about them. But a source with knowledge of federal immigration data told us they now make up a “huge chunk” of ORR’s caseload.

We spoke with more than a dozen attorneys for this story who confirmed this trend, and were alarmed by it. “It’s confusing why those kids are being deemed unaccompanied,” says Diane de Gramont, also with the National Center for Youth Law, who recently raised this concern in court.

“We’re talking about kids who have a mom, a dad, and siblings who want them to be living with them,” says Jessica Richardson, an attorney who works with The Door, a New York nonprofit that helps detained minors. “They don’t want them to be in the shelter, and there’s absolutely no reason why they can’t go home to their families.”

Children wait outside of an immigration court at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty

It’s “family separation,” says Becky Wolozin, another attorney from the National Center for Youth Law, who notes that some of the children are as young as 8.

The administration is, in effect, creating unaccompanied minors. “They’re kidnapping people’s kids and keeping them in government custody,” says Jen Smyers, who served as ORR’s deputy director during the Biden administration. And why? It’s part of a “longer-term vision,” she suspects, “to make sure no one ever sends their kids to the US again.” And, other attorneys add, to deport those already here.

Andrés had been separated from his dad for days and was trying to be brave when an ORR social worker handed him the phone. It was his stepmom, Mariana.

She’d been searching for the 11-year-old all week, worried sick, when the agency finally let her know his whereabouts. “How are you?” she asked Andrés in the recorded call, which we translated from Spanish. “How are they treating you? Have you eaten?”

“It’s a particularly heartbreaking conversation,” says Michelle Brané, a renowned immigration expert who tried to help the family locate Andrés, “more for what he doesn’t say than for what he does.”

Andrés didn’t tell Mariana he was scared, for example. And he didn’t ask the kinds of questions one might expect, like “Where’s Dad?” or “What’s going on?” He didn’t talk much at all beyond reassuring her, that yes, he was behaving, and yes, they gave him food, and he had showered. When she asked if he had been crying, he said no.

“I feel imprisoned and very closed in here,” said a 16-year-old girl in ORR custody in Texas. “We cannot touch each other, we cannot hug, we cannot share food.”

“You’ll be with us soon,” she told him.

“He’s in survival mode,” says Brané, “a sweet little 11-year-old’s voice saying he’s strong and he’ll do what they tell him.”

Mariana wondered why Andrés hadn’t called sooner, and he said he wanted to, but they wouldn’t per let him. “They told you that?” she asked. He confirmed it, without specifying whom he was referring to. He did have one question: Could he see his baby brother? Mariana switched to a video call and pointed the camera toward the baby. “He doesn’t recognize me,” Andrés said quietly.

Andrés had met Mariana after he and his dad came to the United States and settled in El Paso. She was a recent immigrant from Colombia and had started dating Luis, who’d fled Venezuela, she said, because he supported the political opposition and faced threats. Luis was one of more than 600,000 Venezuelans with Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian designation for people whose countries the government deems too dangerous to return to. (Andrés’ mom lives in Colombia.) Luis found a construction job, and he and Mariana had a baby in 2025. But that fall, the Supreme Court let President Trump revoke TPS for Venezuelans.

Luis and Andrés were at home the afternoon they were arrested. The boy was playing outside with friends, and Luis was just heading out to give an estimate on a construction job when SUVs blocked him in the driveway. Mariana walked out to see what was happening and saw masked ICE agents with guns.

She demanded a warrant, but the officers would not show her one. Luis had missed an immigration court hearing, they claimed, an allegation the family denies. Then, she recalls, an officer looked at Andrés and the baby in her arms, and asked whether Luis was their dad. When she said yes, the officers said they couldn’t take an infant born in the United States. But they loaded Andrés into a vehicle with his father as Luis cried for help.

And then they drove away.

Andrés and Luis were arrested together, but Trump’s ICE agents often deem children unaccompanied after encountering them alone in the community. In one case in Texas, a 15-year-old boy with an intellectual disability wandered away from his mom’s fruit stand to find a bathroom. When he didn’t return, she searched for him all over before reporting him missing. Authorities found him the next day but didn’t realize he was the same boy and failed to locate a legal guardian. They contacted ICE, which sent him to ORR. He stayed in the agency’s care for 48 days, even as his mother pleaded for his release, and even after he developed appendicitis and was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery.

Some kids are sent to ORR simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was true for a 13-year-old girl in Pennsylvania who, after law enforcement encountered her at the scene of someone else’s arrest, was placed in ORR custody in New York and Texas for more than a year, even though she’d been living with her family when she was detained, according to an attorney who worked on the case.

Many others have been sent back to ORR after being accused of a minor crime like shoplifting, smoking, or fishing without a license. “If the child were a US citizen,” says Jennifer Vanegas, an attorney at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, “the police would call the kid’s parents and send them home.”

DHS lists these petty infractions as reasons to re-refer children to ORR, but the justification is often pretextual, according to another source with knowledge of the cases. Charges are usually dismissed once the child is transferred to a shelter. “You could see a pattern: They were trying to find literally any basis to force an encounter with the child, seemingly fabricate or exaggerate the encounter, use that as the basis to take them into DHS custody, refer them to ORR, and then dismiss that charge,” the source noted. (DHS directed all questions involving ORR to Health and Human Services.)

ICE has been arresting guardians who show up to complete sponsorship requirements: “They are using the children as bait.”

As in Andrés’ case, parents aren’t always notified promptly that their child was transferred to ORR. An Ecuadorian father in Minneapolis “was horribly distraught” after his teenager didn’t come home in January, according to his attorney, Claire Glenn. The teen had called to tell his dad he was being arrested by ICE, but the agency claimed it didn’t know where he was. “I did not know whether ICE was lying or mistaken, or whether I had a very different case on my hand of a child that had been abducted by people who were impersonating ICE and perhaps were trafficking children,” Glenn says. She asked an investigator to locate the kid. It turned out he’d been sent to an ORR shelter in Michigan, even though he, like Andrés, came to the United States with his dad and was never unaccompanied.

In another case, a teen told ICE officers he lived with his dad down the block, but that his dad was deaf. They didn’t try to contact the father before sending his kid to ORR, according to an advocate. “There is a parent down the road, waiting for their child to come home,” says Kara Finck, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was speaking about such cases in general. “To think that simply because your child is an immigrant, they can be declared unaccompanied and not returned to your care is a real assault on the very basic principles and tenets of family autonomy.”

Kids will say, “‘I told them my dad was at work a mile away or my mom was at home,” but the officers “don’t care,” former ORR deputy director Smyers told us.

When authorities do reach out, it can come with a risk. Last year, Mileidy Yamaly Contreras Flores got a call from the police department in Chelsea, Massachusetts. It was her 15-year-old son, who had immigrated with her from Honduras in 2019. He’d been in a fight and gotten arrested, and he needed an adult to pick him up at the station. Her husband went—and was detained by ICE after he arrived, according to a subsequent lawsuit. The teen was then sent to ORR in another state. By the time the suit was filed, he had been separated from his family for nearly seven months.

ICE initially sent Andrés out of state, too; he stayed in several hotel rooms in Arizona, according to a legal filing, before officers brought him back to Texas. It was determined he would live with a foster family but spend his days at an ORR shelter and attend school there.

Mariana could not understand why the government labeled her stepson unaccompanied. “The child was never alone,” she said.

Attorney and former Georgia state representative Stacey Abrams speaks at a vigil near the US Capitol calling for an end to ICE child and family detention.Leigh Vogel/Free Famlies Coalition/Getty

DHS wouldn’t answer questions about how it makes such determinations or decides to separate immigrant parents and children instead of keeping them together in family detention. Asked about claims that the administration is “kidnapping” immigrant children, a spokesperson insisted: “ICE does not separate families.”

ORR said Andrés would remain in its care while officials carried out “the family reunification process,” but that process dragged on. In May, Andrés’ lawyer Kristin Etter asked a federal court to order his release, arguing that he was unlawfully detained. “[He] should not have been designated as an unaccompanied child because he was encountered together with his father and his stepmother,” she wrote in the petition. Family separation was unnecessary, Etter argued.

The boy and his family waited for the court to weigh in.

There are fewer unaccompanied minors in federal custody now than in the past. That’s largely because not as many kids have been entering the United States by themselves. ORR received just 3,500 referrals from July 2025 through May 2026, according to a source familiar with the data. But a record number of these children are being referred by ICE, an agency that in the past hasn’t sent many kids to ORR, at least compared with US Customs and Border Protection. As a result, the share of referrals from the nation’s interior, rather than the border—kids like Andrés who are already settled into American life—has increased dramatically.

Jonathan White, who managed ORR’s unaccompanied children program in 2017, says interior referrals represented between 3 and 5 percent of total referrals to the agency during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration. They were also “very rare” under Biden, Smyers says. But from July 2025 through May 2026, interior referrals were about 20 percent of the total, according to the source familiar with the data. Many of the attorneys we interviewed believe the shift from border to interior referrals has only grown more pronounced since then, and that interior referrals now make up about half of all new ORR cases.

This change matters enormously, advocates say, because the government’s shelter system wasn’t designed for children who are already settled in the United States. ORR staffers, too, are concerned, according to a source with knowledge of the situation: “I think most people agree that it’s only hurting kids and hurting families and not at all part of ORR’s central mission.”

Although federal law requires that minors be placed in the “least restrictive setting possible,” ORR’s shelters often have a carceral feel. The kids have to wear approved clothing, any valuables they have are confiscated, and they are allowed to eat and shower only at designated times. “I feel imprisoned and very closed in here,” a 16-year-old girl being held in a Texas ORR shelter said in a sworn legal declaration. “We cannot touch each other, we cannot hug, we cannot share food.”

“We’re putting them in prisons, essentially,” says attorney Richardson.

A young person who just crossed the border alone benefits from a bed and the chance to see a doctor, Smyers told us, but the “Americanized” immigrant kids experience a kind of culture shock when they’re detained. Instead of studying algebra or world history, as they would at their regular school, they might have to sit through ORR lessons on how to tell time, or how to name fruits and vegetables in English.

Children are also being held in custody longer. The average stay in ORR has increased from about one month under President Biden to roughly six months under Trump, according to the agency’s own data, and some kids are locked up for more than a year. ORR shelters are not equipped for long-term care, Smyers says, and children are struggling with their mental health. Suicidal ideation and behavioral problems are increasingly common, according to Smyers, attorneys who represent kids in ORR care, and other sources familiar with the agency’s work.

It is “the same routine every day,” says Alexa Sendukas, a Texas attorney who represents unaccompanied children. It’s “incredibly stressful and confusing, especially for the little ones. They don’t understand why they can’t get out.”

Attorneys blame Trump’s policy changes for the longer stays. Relatives can apply to sponsor the kids and bring them home, but the administration has made the application process more arduous, narrowing the types of accepted identification and proof-of-address documents, and requiring potential sponsors to attend in-person appointments. When children are re-referred, ORR requires their old sponsors—who were previously vetted and approved—to jump through these hoops too.

In a statement, ORR said the changes are intended to ensure that children are not placed with criminals. The Biden administration, “prioritized speed over safety,” a spokesperson said, resulting in “children being released to sponsors who abused, assaulted, or trafficked them.” DHS sent us a list of unnamed sponsors who it claimed had been arrested for domestic violence and other crimes. ORR is being “careful, not slow, because children’s lives are at stake,” the spokesperson added.

While some cases do raise legitimate welfare concerns, parents and guardians say the administration is depriving other children of homes that are perfectly safe.

Lawyers representing four children in shelters in Texas and New York who’d been re-referred to ORR sued the administration in February—the kids had been languishing in the agency’s care while their families tried, without success, to get them out. “These children have been forced to spend extremely long periods of time away from their family, friends, school, and community without justification,” their complaint reads.

It can be dangerous for guardians to try to get their children back. ORR shares information with ICE, which has arrested people who show up to complete fingerprinting and other sponsorship requirements. “They are using the children as bait,” Sendukas says. Fear can deter relatives from stepping up. The Acacia Center for Justice reported last year that releases from ORR to sponsors were “as low as they could possibly be.”

The new restrictions have “basically brought the entire [unaccompanied children] program to a halt,” says a source familiar with the situation. “Because sponsors can’t come forward, kids have nowhere else to go.” ORR, the source added, has become a “de-facto arm of DHS to facilitate their enforcement and detention mission.”

There’s a reason Congress placed ORR within HHS and not DHS. Namely, lawmakers didn’t think the agency overseeing the care of immigrant children should be the same one that handles enforcement and deportations. But those lines are now blurred.

Today, the administration offers teens it deems unaccompanied a payment of $2,500 or more if they’ll agree to leave the United States. Children also are given a handout that threatens lengthy detention and criminal prosecution of noncitizen parents should they take their case to court, as they are legally entitled to do. “You will be detained,” the memo promises, “for a prolonged period of time.”

The administration, Smyers says, is “scaring kids as a way to circumvent the law.”

Portions of a document the Trump administration gives some “unaccompanied” children.National Immigrant Justice Center court declaration

“They are putting in place all of these different pressure points to force kids out of this country without due process and without any protections,” concurs Melissa Adamson, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law.

All this appears to be part of a broader crackdown on immigrant children. Last year, the government tried to fly dozens of Guatemalan children from ORR shelters out of the country in the middle of the night, but a court intervened. ProPublica reported that unaccompanied minors have been detained and removed from the United States at three times the rate they were during Trump’s first term.

A federal judge found that even if Andrés wasn’t unaccompanied when ICE separated him from his dad and stepmom, he was unaccompanied now.

Making matters worse, immigrant children are contending with an acute shortage in legal representation. The administration recently ended a long-standing contract with an experienced nonprofit network that represented unaccompanied minors in court, handing the job instead to an organization founded by a former ICE agent. Increasingly, young children have been appearing before immigration judges without a lawyer.

“Donald Trump and his accomplices have directed every element of the federal government towards meeting their deportation quota, even if that means tearing families apart and traumatizing children,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the committee with jurisdiction over ORR, whose office is preparing a report about children in the agency’s care, told us in a statement. “Just like Trump’s first term, the cruelty is the point. The individuals responsible for flouting federal laws and harming children in the process will be held to account.”

In court last month, a Justice Department attorney said ORR has a responsibility to accept referrals from other federal agencies that have deemed a child unaccompanied. That determination, by definition, “means that the child has no parent available to provide care or custody in the United States,” the attorney said. 

But ORR officials don’t always agree with those assessments. Angie Salazar, the agency’s acting director, who came to ORR from ICE, has on occasion objected to classifying minors with a parent in the community as unaccompanied, according to a source familiar with internal deliberations. In a few cases, she has intervened personally, the source claimed, and demanded the child be released to their parent. But, Smyers points out, when there’s a disagreement, “unfortunately DHS normally wins.” (ORR and Salazar didn’t respond to a request for comment on this.)

A protester at Manhattan Civic Center, where federal agents detained immigration court respondents, displays a copy of the drawing made by a child held with her family in Dilley Detention Facility in Texas.Gina M. Randazzo/ZUMA

Andrés’ father was released from detention on bond a few months after his arrest. He would soon have to return to Venezuela. But Andrés remained stuck in foster care and was struggling. At one point, ORR caseworkers told the family he was unable to sleep, and screaming for his parents at night; a doctor suggested medication to help him rest, but Luis and Mariana didn’t want to approve pharmaceuticals because of his young age.

The caseworkers also told Mariana that Andrés had been acting out. Another boy who lived with the foster family complained that he wanted to be left alone, but that Andrés, lonely and looking for a friend, kept trying to hug him. “My son is suffering,” Luis told us. “He’s small. He needs his father.”

While Luis was still in detention, Andrés had called and “started crying, saying that he didn’t want to be there anymore, that he wanted to be with us already,” Mariana said. She’d tried to become his sponsor but couldn’t meet ORR’s new requirements because she lacked a taxpayer ID number, so she withdrew her application.

Eventually, Andrés took what seemed like the only route left: He asked an immigration judge to let him go back to Venezuela and be reunited with his biological mom, who said she could meet him at the airport. The judge granted him voluntary departure in July.

This didn’t mean he was free to leave ORR care right away. There had been earthquakes in Venezuela. It might take weeks or months to arrange his travel, and who would watch him in the meantime? A federal judge found that even if he wasn’t unaccompanied when ICE separated him from his dad and stepmom, he was unaccompanied now. He “does not have a parent or legal guardian in the United States who ‘is available to provide care and physical custody,’” the judge wrote in an order dismissing Andrés’ petition to leave foster care. “[W]ithout a sponsor, he cannot be released.”

And so, Andrés waited, counting the days until he could board a flight to Venezuela and be with a parent again. Finally, in August, more than three months after his apprehension, he was allowed to travel.

But when the plane landed in Barcelona, Venezuela, Andrés’ mother was nowhere to be found. The US government hadn’t told the family what time, or even what day, he would arrive. “We just had to give her our best guess,” says Etter, Andrés’ attorney.

After all the fanfare around vetting sponsors, supposedly for the safety of the children, no one in the administration had bothered to make sure an adult would be present to receive Andrés on the other end. He ended up waiting on the side of the road outside the airport until later that night, when Etter was able to help his mom locate him.

“They literally were gonna fly an 11-year-old boy by himself and just dump him in Venezuela,” she says. “They don’t really care who the kids are going home to, or what they’re going home to, just as long as they’re going home.”

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

As free and abundant as sunlight may be, harnessing its power remains stubbornly difficult for homeowners. While the cost of solar energy has plummeted more than 90 percent in the last decade, panels remain a significant investment. And it’s not as easy as just slapping panels on a roof, as your home may need electrical upgrades too.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Countries like Germany have encouraged the proliferation of balcony solar, also known as plug-in solar: smaller, cheaper arrays that hook into a home’s electrical outlets. This offsets some of a residence’s energy use, saving users hundreds of dollars a year, and opens up solar energy to renters with balconies or backyards. As a bonus, the less power homes have to draw from the grid, the less stress they put on the system, especially during heat waves when everyone is running energy-hungry air conditioners.

This past Wednesday, California officially got in on the balcony-solar action as Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill allowing residents of the nation’s most populous state to adopt the technology. It joins a handful of states, like Utah and Maine, in seeing the potential of the technology to generate clean electricity and save residents money as energy costs rise.

“It’s really ideal to use renewable electricity exactly where it’s generated.”

“This technology is very important and very powerful,” state Senator Scott Wiener, who authored the legislation, said during a press conference Thursday. “And what this bill does is eliminate the massive barrier to people using plug-in solar, which is that you’d have to go and negotiate an interconnection agreement with PG&E or the other utility.”

The proliferation of plug-in solar marks a fundamental shift in how the electrical grid operates. Historically, utilities have generated electricity by burning fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. When demand rose, like when people returned home at the end of the day and switched on appliances, they’d just ramp up production. This kept the system in a sort of equilibrium, a constant balance of supply and demand.

That, though, doesn’t quite work the same with renewables like wind and solar. If demand is holding steady and the sun is setting, a utility isn’t generating as much electricity with its panels. Same with wind, if the skies suddenly calm. So in addition to building out wind and solar farms, utilities are deploying huge batteries to save that energy for later use. This creates a more flexible grid that can still hum with electricity when things are dark or calm.

This transformation is turning you, the consumer, into a more active participant in the grid. For years now, homes with solar have sent excess energy back to the grid. While plug-in solar might generate a fraction of what you’d get from a roof covered in panels, it can still help make the grid more flexible. Instead of feeding the system, it reduces the amount of electricity drawn from the grid. Scaled across a whole city, these small reductions can add up, offsetting some of the growth in demand from things like AI data centers and electrification. (Think induction stoves needing electricity instead of natural gas, and EVs charging instead of burning fuel.) 

“This is one of the most immediate, concrete, tangible, real, and affordable things that we can do to start to get control of our high energy costs, but also save our planet,” Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president for California at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, said during the press conference. “So it’s really a twofer.”

Basically, plug-in solar could help reduce congestion in the system at peak times—when it’s hot out and everyone’s running their AC, there’s also plenty of sun to strike the panels. It’s turning homes and apartments into a distributed network of tiny power plants. “It’s really ideal to use renewable electricity exactly where it’s generated,” said Amanda Smith, a senior scientist focusing on the built environment at Project Drawdown, a climate solutions nonprofit. 

This increased interactivity in the grid comes as utility bills continue to skyrocket. Basic plug-in solar systems will set you back a few hundred dollars, and you can potentially make back that money with energy savings in around four years. (The higher the energy costs in your state, the quicker you’d get that return on your investment.) Still, for a lot of households, that’s a major investment, so ideally a state also provides rebates for people to adopt the technology. 

With California now aboard the plug-in solar train, your state may well follow. “The big reason this is a big deal really is because it’s the most affordable way for people to actually participate with solar PV,” Smith said. “Whatever happens in California is going to influence, I think, a lot of other future state markets. So it’s going to be a key one to watch.”

For several days this spring, trapped inside a Texas immigration detention center, Luis made frantic phone calls, one after the other, to everyone he could think of.

Could anyone help him find his 11-year-old son?

He’d last seen Andrés, a sensitive boy who likes to draw and paint, at an ICE holding facility near Camp East Montana, the sprawling detention center on a military base in El Paso where Luis now found himself.

Luis and Andrés had come to the United States from Venezuela in 2023. They were taken into custody together this past April after Luis, a construction worker, was arrested by federal agents outside his home. For hours, he and Andrés sat alone in a cell that felt to them like a dungeon. Around midnight, ICE officers showed up and ordered the boy to come with them.

No, Luis had pleaded. Andrés was just a kid—he needed his dad. But the officers seemed unmoved, he said, slipping on gloves and tugging on the boy’s arms as father and son clung to one another. Luis recalled that the officers promised Andrés would be in touch with him, so he let go and watched them take him away.

The administration’s goal in detaining these children, a former ORR official says , is “to make sure no one ever sends their kids to the US again.”

Three days had since gone by without a word, and Luis was in a state of panic. Neither he nor his family on the outside—Andrés’ mother and stepmom—could get any information on the child’s whereabouts. Worse, there was no sign of Andrés in ICE’s online detainee locator. Where had they taken him?

“Since he was little he’s been with me,” Luis told us later from detention, his voice filled with anguish. (Luis and Andrés are pseudonyms, and other family members’ names were changed to protect their privacy. Some attorneys who spoke with us also requested anonymity, in order to describe cases without exposing their clients.)

The Camp East Montana immigrant detention center, a series of hardened tents, is located at an Army base on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas.Morgan Lee/AP

Finally, after about five days, Luis learned that ICE had transferred Andrés to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that cares for “unaccompanied” migrant children. Federal law defines unaccompanied minors as kids younger than 18 with no lawful immigration status and no parent or guardian in the United States available to care for them.

In the past, most unaccompanied minors in ORR custody were children who had recently crossed the US-Mexico border by themselves—not kids who arrived with a parent and had been living in the country for years. Andrés was never unaccompanied, but ICE confusingly labeled him that way. As a result, Luis learned, ORR would place him in temporary foster care with another Texas family.

Andrés felt betrayed, as a lawyer who later took his case recalled to us. “He was saying, ‘The government lied to me. I asked them to be with my dad, and they took us to a place, and we were separated.’”

Luis, stuck in detention, could not believe it. “You tricked me!” he thought angrily of ICE.

“You kidnapped my son.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because something similar happened during the first Trump administration. In 2018, under the so-called zero tolerance policy, immigration agents tore families apart as they crossed the US-Mexico border, detaining parents and transferring their children to ORR custody. One of ORR’s responsibilities is to place unaccompanied kids in shelters, group homes, or foster care until they can be released to sponsors, who are often relatives. Historically, these arrangements were never intended for children who arrived with parents, but Trump’s advisers wagered that separating families would deter new migrants from making the trip. The zero-tolerance policy made national headlines and was denounced on both sides of the political aisle as inhumane, and a federal court eventually ruled it illegal.

Yet now, eight years later, the Trump administration is again separating families, except this time it’s doing so more quietly, and away from the border: Federal agents have picked up hundreds of immigrant children in the interior of the country and sent them to ORR, a vast departure from prior administrations, when interior referrals to the agency were rare. Anywhere from 500 to more than 700 of these kids, according to sources familiar with the cases, had previously crossed the border alone and spent time in ORR custody, but were living with their sponsors when ICE returned them to the agency. These “re-referrals” are the subject of lawsuits and investigations.

But there’s another group of kids that has received less attention—kids like Andrés who were sent to ORR even though they were never unaccompanied. It’s unclear how many children fall into this category, because ORR doesn’t systematically track them, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ignored our questions about them. But a source with knowledge of federal immigration data told us they now make up a “huge chunk” of ORR’s caseload.

We spoke with more than a dozen attorneys for this story who confirmed this trend, and were alarmed by it. “It’s confusing why those kids are being deemed unaccompanied,” says Diane de Gramont, also with the National Center for Youth Law, who recently raised this concern in court.

“We’re talking about kids who have a mom, a dad, and siblings who want them to be living with them,” says Jessica Richardson, an attorney who works with The Door, a New York nonprofit that helps detained minors. “They don’t want them to be in the shelter, and there’s absolutely no reason why they can’t go home to their families.”

Children wait outside of an immigration court at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty

It’s “family separation,” says Becky Wolozin, another attorney from the National Center for Youth Law, who notes that some of the children are as young as 8.

The administration is, in effect, creating unaccompanied minors. “They’re kidnapping people’s kids and keeping them in government custody,” says Jen Smyers, who served as ORR’s deputy director during the Biden administration. And why? It’s part of a “longer-term vision,” she suspects, “to make sure no one ever sends their kids to the US again.” And, other attorneys add, to deport those already here.

Andrés had been separated from his dad for days and was trying to be brave when an ORR social worker handed him the phone. It was his stepmom, Mariana.

She’d been searching for the 11-year-old all week, worried sick, when the agency finally let her know his whereabouts. “How are you?” she asked Andrés in the recorded call, which we translated from Spanish. “How are they treating you? Have you eaten?”

“It’s a particularly heartbreaking conversation,” says Michelle Brané, a renowned immigration expert who tried to help the family locate Andrés, “more for what he doesn’t say than for what he does.”

Andrés didn’t tell Mariana he was scared, for example. And he didn’t ask the kinds of questions one might expect, like “Where’s Dad?” or “What’s going on?” He didn’t talk much at all beyond reassuring her, that yes, he was behaving, and yes, they gave him food, and he had showered. When she asked if he had been crying, he said no.

“I feel imprisoned and very closed in here,” said a 16-year-old girl in ORR custody in Texas. “We cannot touch each other, we cannot hug, we cannot share food.”

“You’ll be with us soon,” she told him.

“He’s in survival mode,” says Brané, “a sweet little 11-year-old’s voice saying he’s strong and he’ll do what they tell him.”

Mariana wondered why Andrés hadn’t called sooner, and he said he wanted to, but they wouldn’t per let him. “They told you that?” she asked. He confirmed it, without specifying whom he was referring to. He did have one question: Could he see his baby brother? Mariana switched to a video call and pointed the camera toward the baby. “He doesn’t recognize me,” Andrés said quietly.

Andrés had met Mariana after he and his dad came to the United States and settled in El Paso. She was a recent immigrant from Colombia and had started dating Luis, who’d fled Venezuela, she said, because he supported the political opposition and faced threats. Luis was one of more than 600,000 Venezuelans with Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian designation for people whose countries the government deems too dangerous to return to. (Andrés’ mom lives in Colombia.) Luis found a construction job, and he and Mariana had a baby in 2025. But that fall, the Supreme Court let President Trump revoke TPS for Venezuelans.

Luis and Andrés were at home the afternoon they were arrested. The boy was playing outside with friends, and Luis was just heading out to give an estimate on a construction job when SUVs blocked him in the driveway. Mariana walked out to see what was happening and saw masked ICE agents with guns.

She demanded a warrant, but the officers would not show her one. Luis had missed an immigration court hearing, they claimed, an allegation the family denies. Then, she recalls, an officer looked at Andrés and the baby in her arms, and asked whether Luis was their dad. When she said yes, the officers said they couldn’t take an infant born in the United States. But they loaded Andrés into a vehicle with his father as Luis cried for help.

And then they drove away.

Andrés and Luis were arrested together, but Trump’s ICE agents often deem children unaccompanied after encountering them alone in the community. In one case in Texas, a 15-year-old boy with an intellectual disability wandered away from his mom’s fruit stand to find a bathroom. When he didn’t return, she searched for him all over before reporting him missing. Authorities found him the next day but didn’t realize he was the same boy and failed to locate a legal guardian. They contacted ICE, which sent him to ORR. He stayed in the agency’s care for 48 days, even as his mother pleaded for his release, and even after he developed appendicitis and was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery.

Some kids are sent to ORR simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was true for a 13-year-old girl in Pennsylvania who, after law enforcement encountered her at the scene of someone else’s arrest, was placed in ORR custody in New York and Texas for more than a year, even though she’d been living with her family when she was detained, according to an attorney who worked on the case.

Many others have been sent back to ORR after being accused of a minor crime like shoplifting, smoking, or fishing without a license. “If the child were a US citizen,” says Jennifer Vanegas, an attorney at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, “the police would call the kid’s parents and send them home.”

DHS lists these petty infractions as reasons to re-refer children to ORR, but the justification is often pretextual, according to another source with knowledge of the cases. Charges are usually dismissed once the child is transferred to a shelter. “You could see a pattern: They were trying to find literally any basis to force an encounter with the child, seemingly fabricate or exaggerate the encounter, use that as the basis to take them into DHS custody, refer them to ORR, and then dismiss that charge,” the source noted. (DHS directed all questions involving ORR to Health and Human Services.)

ICE has been arresting guardians who show up to complete sponsorship requirements: “They are using the children as bait.”

As in Andrés’ case, parents aren’t always notified promptly that their child was transferred to ORR. An Ecuadorian father in Minneapolis “was horribly distraught” after his teenager didn’t come home in January, according to his attorney, Claire Glenn. The teen had called to tell his dad he was being arrested by ICE, but the agency claimed it didn’t know where he was. “I did not know whether ICE was lying or mistaken, or whether I had a very different case on my hand of a child that had been abducted by people who were impersonating ICE and perhaps were trafficking children,” Glenn says. She asked an investigator to locate the kid. It turned out he’d been sent to an ORR shelter in Michigan, even though he, like Andrés, came to the United States with his dad and was never unaccompanied.

In another case, a teen told ICE officers he lived with his dad down the block, but that his dad was deaf. They didn’t try to contact the father before sending his kid to ORR, according to an advocate. “There is a parent down the road, waiting for their child to come home,” says Kara Finck, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was speaking about such cases in general. “To think that simply because your child is an immigrant, they can be declared unaccompanied and not returned to your care is a real assault on the very basic principles and tenets of family autonomy.”

Kids will say, “‘I told them my dad was at work a mile away or my mom was at home,” but the officers “don’t care,” former ORR deputy director Smyers told us.

When authorities do reach out, it can come with a risk. Last year, Mileidy Yamaly Contreras Flores got a call from the police department in Chelsea, Massachusetts. It was her 15-year-old son, who had immigrated with her from Honduras in 2019. He’d been in a fight and gotten arrested, and he needed an adult to pick him up at the station. Her husband went—and was detained by ICE after he arrived, according to a subsequent lawsuit. The teen was then sent to ORR in another state. By the time the suit was filed, he had been separated from his family for nearly seven months.

ICE initially sent Andrés out of state, too; he stayed in several hotel rooms in Arizona, according to a legal filing, before officers brought him back to Texas. It was determined he would live with a foster family but spend his days at an ORR shelter and attend school there.

Mariana could not understand why the government labeled her stepson unaccompanied. “The child was never alone,” she said.

Attorney and former Georgia state representative Stacey Abrams speaks at a vigil near the US Capitol calling for an end to ICE child and family detention.Leigh Vogel/Free Famlies Coalition/Getty

DHS wouldn’t answer questions about how it makes such determinations or decides to separate immigrant parents and children instead of keeping them together in family detention. Asked about claims that the administration is “kidnapping” immigrant children, a spokesperson insisted: “ICE does not separate families.”

ORR said Andrés would remain in its care while officials carried out “the family reunification process,” but that process dragged on. In May, Andrés’ lawyer Kristin Etter asked a federal court to order his release, arguing that he was unlawfully detained. “[He] should not have been designated as an unaccompanied child because he was encountered together with his father and his stepmother,” she wrote in the petition. Family separation was unnecessary, Etter argued.

The boy and his family waited for the court to weigh in.

There are fewer unaccompanied minors in federal custody now than in the past. That’s largely because not as many kids have been entering the United States by themselves. ORR received just 3,500 referrals from July 2025 through May 2026, according to a source familiar with the data. But a record number of these children are being referred by ICE, an agency that in the past hasn’t sent many kids to ORR, at least compared with US Customs and Border Protection. As a result, the share of referrals from the nation’s interior, rather than the border—kids like Andrés who are already settled into American life—has increased dramatically.

Jonathan White, who managed ORR’s unaccompanied children program in 2017, says interior referrals represented between 3 and 5 percent of total referrals to the agency during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration. They were also “very rare” under Biden, Smyers says. But from July 2025 through May 2026, interior referrals were about 20 percent of the total, according to the source familiar with the data. Many of the attorneys we interviewed believe the shift from border to interior referrals has only grown more pronounced since then, and that interior referrals now make up about half of all new ORR cases.

This change matters enormously, advocates say, because the government’s shelter system wasn’t designed for children who are already settled in the United States. ORR staffers, too, are concerned, according to a source with knowledge of the situation: “I think most people agree that it’s only hurting kids and hurting families and not at all part of ORR’s central mission.”

Although federal law requires that minors be placed in the “least restrictive setting possible,” ORR’s shelters often have a carceral feel. The kids have to wear approved clothing, any valuables they have are confiscated, and they are allowed to eat and shower only at designated times. “I feel imprisoned and very closed in here,” a 16-year-old girl being held in a Texas ORR shelter said in a sworn legal declaration. “We cannot touch each other, we cannot hug, we cannot share food.”

“We’re putting them in prisons, essentially,” says attorney Richardson.

A young person who just crossed the border alone benefits from a bed and the chance to see a doctor, Smyers told us, but the “Americanized” immigrant kids experience a kind of culture shock when they’re detained. Instead of studying algebra or world history, as they would at their regular school, they might have to sit through ORR lessons on how to tell time, or how to name fruits and vegetables in English.

Children are also being held in custody longer. The average stay in ORR has increased from about one month under President Biden to roughly six months under Trump, according to the agency’s own data, and some kids are locked up for more than a year. ORR shelters are not equipped for long-term care, Smyers says, and children are struggling with their mental health. Suicidal ideation and behavioral problems are increasingly common, according to Smyers, attorneys who represent kids in ORR care, and other sources familiar with the agency’s work.

It is “the same routine every day,” says Alexa Sendukas, a Texas attorney who represents unaccompanied children. It’s “incredibly stressful and confusing, especially for the little ones. They don’t understand why they can’t get out.”

Attorneys blame Trump’s policy changes for the longer stays. Relatives can apply to sponsor the kids and bring them home, but the administration has made the application process more arduous, narrowing the types of accepted identification and proof-of-address documents, and requiring potential sponsors to attend in-person appointments. When children are re-referred, ORR requires their old sponsors—who were previously vetted and approved—to jump through these hoops too.

In a statement, ORR said the changes are intended to ensure that children are not placed with criminals. The Biden administration, “prioritized speed over safety,” a spokesperson said, resulting in “children being released to sponsors who abused, assaulted, or trafficked them.” DHS sent us a list of unnamed sponsors who it claimed had been arrested for domestic violence and other crimes. ORR is being “careful, not slow, because children’s lives are at stake,” the spokesperson added.

While some cases do raise legitimate welfare concerns, parents and guardians say the administration is depriving other children of homes that are perfectly safe.

Lawyers representing four children in shelters in Texas and New York who’d been re-referred to ORR sued the administration in February—the kids had been languishing in the agency’s care while their families tried, without success, to get them out. “These children have been forced to spend extremely long periods of time away from their family, friends, school, and community without justification,” their complaint reads.

It can be dangerous for guardians to try to get their children back. ORR shares information with ICE, which has arrested people who show up to complete fingerprinting and other sponsorship requirements. “They are using the children as bait,” Sendukas says. Fear can deter relatives from stepping up. The Acacia Center for Justice reported last year that releases from ORR to sponsors were “as low as they could possibly be.”

The new restrictions have “basically brought the entire [unaccompanied children] program to a halt,” says a source familiar with the situation. “Because sponsors can’t come forward, kids have nowhere else to go.” ORR, the source added, has become a “de-facto arm of DHS to facilitate their enforcement and detention mission.”

There’s a reason Congress placed ORR within HHS and not DHS. Namely, lawmakers didn’t think the agency overseeing the care of immigrant children should be the same one that handles enforcement and deportations. But those lines are now blurred.

Today, the administration offers teens it deems unaccompanied a payment of $2,500 or more if they’ll agree to leave the United States. Children also are given a handout that threatens lengthy detention and criminal prosecution of noncitizen parents should they take their case to court, as they are legally entitled to do. “You will be detained,” the memo promises, “for a prolonged period of time.”

The administration, Smyers says, is “scaring kids as a way to circumvent the law.”

Portions of a document the Trump administration gives some “unaccompanied” children.National Immigrant Justice Center court declaration

“They are putting in place all of these different pressure points to force kids out of this country without due process and without any protections,” concurs Melissa Adamson, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law.

All this appears to be part of a broader crackdown on immigrant children. Last year, the government tried to fly dozens of Guatemalan children from ORR shelters out of the country in the middle of the night, but a court intervened. ProPublica reported that unaccompanied minors have been detained and removed from the United States at three times the rate they were during Trump’s first term.

A federal judge found that even if Andrés wasn’t unaccompanied when ICE separated him from his dad and stepmom, he was unaccompanied now.

Making matters worse, immigrant children are contending with an acute shortage in legal representation. The administration recently ended a long-standing contract with an experienced nonprofit network that represented unaccompanied minors in court, handing the job instead to an organization founded by a former ICE agent. Increasingly, young children have been appearing before immigration judges without a lawyer.

“Donald Trump and his accomplices have directed every element of the federal government towards meeting their deportation quota, even if that means tearing families apart and traumatizing children,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the committee with jurisdiction over ORR, whose office is preparing a report about children in the agency’s care, told us in a statement. “Just like Trump’s first term, the cruelty is the point. The individuals responsible for flouting federal laws and harming children in the process will be held to account.”

In court last month, a Justice Department attorney said ORR has a responsibility to accept referrals from other federal agencies that have deemed a child unaccompanied. That determination, by definition, “means that the child has no parent available to provide care or custody in the United States,” the attorney said. 

But ORR officials don’t always agree with those assessments. Angie Salazar, the agency’s acting director, who came to ORR from ICE, has on occasion objected to classifying minors with a parent in the community as unaccompanied, according to a source familiar with internal deliberations. In a few cases, she has intervened personally, the source claimed, and demanded the child be released to their parent. But, Smyers points out, when there’s a disagreement, “unfortunately DHS normally wins.” (ORR and Salazar didn’t respond to a request for comment on this.)

A protester at Manhattan Civic Center, where federal agents detained immigration court respondents, displays a copy of the drawing made by a child held with her family in Dilley Detention Facility in Texas.Gina M. Randazzo/ZUMA

Andrés’ father was released from detention on bond a few months after his arrest. He would soon have to return to Venezuela. But Andrés remained stuck in foster care and was struggling. At one point, ORR caseworkers told the family he was unable to sleep, and screaming for his parents at night; a doctor suggested medication to help him rest, but Luis and Mariana didn’t want to approve pharmaceuticals because of his young age.

The caseworkers also told Mariana that Andrés had been acting out. Another boy who lived with the foster family complained that he wanted to be left alone, but that Andrés, lonely and looking for a friend, kept trying to hug him. “My son is suffering,” Luis told us. “He’s small. He needs his father.”

While Luis was still in detention, Andrés had called and “started crying, saying that he didn’t want to be there anymore, that he wanted to be with us already,” Mariana said. She’d tried to become his sponsor but couldn’t meet ORR’s new requirements because she lacked a taxpayer ID number, so she withdrew her application.

Eventually, Andrés took what seemed like the only route left: He asked an immigration judge to let him go back to Venezuela and be reunited with his biological mom, who said she could meet him at the airport. The judge granted him voluntary departure in July.

This didn’t mean he was free to leave ORR care right away. There had been earthquakes in Venezuela. It might take weeks or months to arrange his travel, and who would watch him in the meantime? A federal judge found that even if he wasn’t unaccompanied when ICE separated him from his dad and stepmom, he was unaccompanied now. He “does not have a parent or legal guardian in the United States who ‘is available to provide care and physical custody,’” the judge wrote in an order dismissing Andrés’ petition to leave foster care. “[W]ithout a sponsor, he cannot be released.”

And so, Andrés waited, counting the days until he could board a flight to Venezuela and be with a parent again. Finally, in August, more than three months after his apprehension, he was allowed to travel.

But when the plane landed in Barcelona, Venezuela, Andrés’ mother was nowhere to be found. The US government hadn’t told the family what time, or even what day, he would arrive. “We just had to give her our best guess,” says Etter, Andrés’ attorney.

After all the fanfare around vetting sponsors, supposedly for the safety of the children, no one in the administration had bothered to make sure an adult would be present to receive Andrés on the other end. He ended up waiting on the side of the road outside the airport until later that night, when Etter was able to help his mom locate him.

“They literally were gonna fly an 11-year-old boy by himself and just dump him in Venezuela,” she says. “They don’t really care who the kids are going home to, or what they’re going home to, just as long as they’re going home.”

Reports out of the Irkutsk region of Russia reveal a potential public health crisis developing in the area, after a lab accident released a “particularly dangerous infection” to a researcher, who later passed away.

Twenty-eight-year-old Darya Shipilovia, a lab technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, died two days after she was hospitalized, following exposure to a “pneumonia of unknown etiology,” according to Rospotrebnadzor, a federal agency that oversees health and safety. The virus in question has been said to be the deadly but treatable pneumonic plague.

BREAKING:

5 hospitals have been closed for quarantines in Siberia due to a possible plague outbreak.

The 28-year-old lab technician Darya Shipilova, died yesterday after breaking a test tube with live Yersinia pestis the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute on September 25th while… pic.twitter.com/N6tKLRyAJ5

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 4, 2026

The Russian government has not released an official announcement of the patient’s death, according to the independent news organization Meduza:

Governor Igor Kobzev said the regional government had convened a special meeting of the regional commission on sanitation and epidemic prevention. The meeting was called in response to information “about a suspected case of a particularly dangerous infection in a resident of the region.”

He did not specify the infection. Anna Popova, Russia’s chief sanitary officer, traveled to attend the meeting. According to Kobzev, Russia’s public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, is taking “a full range of epidemic-control measures.” People who had been in contact with the patient were “placed under medical observation.” They have no signs of illness.

According to several outlets, hospitals are under quarantine, with the number of shutdowns ranging from three to five. Reports from independent news sources such as The Moscow Times say that nearly 200 workers have been placed under observation.

BREAKING: Plague outbreak expands, Russia BSL-3 lab accident – FIVE hospitals now quarantined

The plague outbreak in Siberia, Russia has expanded w/5 hospitals now under QUARANTINE: Irkutsk Hospitals No. 1, No.3, No.10, Ivano-Matreninskaya Children's Hospital, and an… pic.twitter.com/DhPkS2ILiW

— Annie Jacobsen (@AnnieJacobsen) October 4, 2026

Dominic Hauschild, the defense correspondent of Britain’s The Sunday Times noted that establishing any of the facts about the situation has proved to be difficult because of the Russian government’s “secrecy.” But, he added, “There are fears this could be another Wuhan situation.”

This is a developing story.

On Saturday, President Donald Trump hosted a campaign rally for Ohio senatorial and gubernatorial candidates, John Husted and Vivek Ramaswamy. As part of his campaign to revive GOP turnout and avoid what is widely predicted to be a Democratic sweep, he appeared in Ohio following weekend visits to Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama. With his signature lack of subtlety, he encouraged the state’s voters to head to the polls.

“Just get out and vote,” Trump told a crowd that barely filled a high school gymnasium in the city of Vandalia. “If you do that, we’re going to win, and we’re going to win big. And we’re going to shove it up their ass.” Ohio, a state that Trump has won three times, has become a battleground for the same reasons that the GOP is predicting a bleak forecast in this year’s midterms: skyrocketing gas prices, bipartisan disdain for data centers, high costs for food and utilities, and Trump’s unpopular war with Iran.

All of this was highlighted during last night‘s rally, starting with the venue. Less than a week earlier, a nearby factory had laid off 1,400 workers in the community. Meanwhile, Trump swore that the state’s fledgling economy would be saved by AI data centers.

“There’s so much money to be made for Ohio. You can’t just turn them off. They’ll go to China,” Trump said. As my colleague Anna Merlan has reported, the Trump administration has made support for artificial intelligence a hallmark of its platform, tying the unregulated use of this technology not only to economic prosperity, but also, weirdly enough, masculinity. Merlan writes:

It’s now increasingly obvious that Trump and his administration view AI technology as something akin to a large, dangerous dog that only a masculine owner can control. Trump has repeatedly called warnings that AI could harm human beings “a hoax,” writing on TruthSocial that the “only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” 

But despite Trump’s insistence that all criticism of AI and data centers is fake news, the polls make it clear that people are not buying what the he is selling—and this has been true in Ohio, Florida, and many other states. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz reported, data center opposition is proving to be a winning strategy for both Republicans and Democrats alike. Meanwhile, Husted, who’s been branded the “face of data centers” by Brown, has faced bipartisan backlash for his support of these tech developers. Recently, Senate Democrats shut down Husted’s bill aiming to prevent data centers from causing potential utility bill spikes, calling the legislation “toothless.”

According to a poll conducted by USA Today, former senator Sherrod Brown is currently leading with 47 percent of voters’ support, compared to Husted’s 44 percent. Democratic candidate Amy Acton is also pulling ahead of her opponent, with a nine-point difference in favorability over Ramaswamy, according to a poll from Suffolk University.

Trump’s 93-minute speech reportedly did little to address people’s concerns with data centers and made no mention of the recent layoffs or rising grocery and gas prices. But he did make sure to get potshots in on Husted’s opponent, praising the Republican’s athletic prowess and dunking on Brown’s alleged lack thereof.

“That guy can’t tie his shoes,” said Trump.

Since the rally, both Ramaswamy and Husted have tweeted very little about the president’s appearance, with Husted instead opting to shoutout his University of Dayton college football teammate, John Gruden, who resigned as a coach to the Las Vegas Raiders after emails of his containing racist and misogynistic language were leaked to the public. Ramaswamy, on the other hand, did post a video of himself nodding along approvingly as Trump called Acton “a radical left lunatic pretending to be a moderate.”

We beat Kamala Harris in Ohio in ‘24 and we’re going to beat the Kamala Harris of Ohio in ‘26. pic.twitter.com/YerPACs735

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) October 4, 2026

This rally is just one of a thirty-two-stop campaign tour that’s supposed to resuscitate the Republican Party’s waning political support, with Trump planning to travel to 17 states—even once reliably red ones like South Carolina—before November 3rd.

NEW — President Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune are both planning visits to South Carolina as the Senate race draws increased attention, per @nytimes.

Annie Andrews (D) has outraised and outspent Sen. Darline Graham in a state Trump carried by more than 17 points.

— VoteHub (@VoteHub) October 4, 2026

This article is a partnership with Agência Pública.

In May, now-presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of former Brazilian far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, shared on his social media a “leaked” trailer for an upcoming biopic about his father. The “most anticipated movie of the year,” Flávio said then, would depict the story of a “true hero.” In the trailer, which had a “disclosure prohibited” watermark, a wig-wearing Jim Caviezel—the American Hollywood actor perhaps most famous for his role as Jesus in Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ—plays Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year prison sentence under house arrest for a failed coup attempt after his 2022 electoral defeat. 

Director Cyrus Nowrasteh described Dark Horse as a “tense political thriller about power, media, and faith under fire.” The movie’s trailer, which centers on Bolsonaro’s first presidential run and rise to power in 2018, frames the ex-president as “the voice of the people” and a leader who “fought the system” that tried to silence him. It includes a dramatic reenactment of his stabbing during the campaign. “IF YOU CARE ABOUT OUR ELECTIONS,” Caviezel, who is also known for the more recent Sound of Freedom, posted on Instagram earlier this year, “watch my newest film coming out September 11, 2026!” 

The production company behind the movie advertised it on X. “A trailer that circulated online was enough to put the Dark Horse at the center of discussions for months,” says the post in Portuguese. “Now, anticipation continues to grow for one of the most awaited international productions inspired by events that marked Brazil.”

Um trailer que circulou na internet foi suficiente para colocar The Dark Horse no centro das discussões por meses.

Agora, a expectativa continua crescendo para uma das produções internacionais mais aguardadas inspiradas em acontecimentos que marcaram o Brasil.

#DarkHorse pic.twitter.com/3y6E422qpL

— GO UP ENTERTAINMENT (@GOUPEntertainme) June 16, 2026

That September 11 date went by and the movie, which was shot in English, has yet to be released in Brazil; it won’t come out before the first round in a nail-biting presidential race set for Sunday, October 4. These federal elections, which include congressional and gubernatorial races alongside the presidential contest, have been dogged by accusations of meddling by the Trump administration, prompting incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to send a clear message to the US leader: “Brazil does not fit in anyone’s backyard.” While Dark Horse has not featured as a centerpiece in that conversation, it has certainly had its own share of controversy even before hitting the big screen.

The Brazil-US joint production has become the subject of an ongoing investigation that has sent shockwaves through the presidential campaign of one of the main candidates in a high-stakes, knife-edge election. Brazilian authorities are actively looking into the financing of the movie by a now-disgraced businessman accused of leading one of the biggest bank frauds in the country’s history. That financial scandal involves banker Daniel Vorcaro, former owner of the liquidated Banco Master, who is jailed for alleged fraud in a complex billion-dollar scheme involving worthless credit portfolios. The imbroglio has rocked the 214-million-people nation and thrown the Brazilian Supreme Court into an unprecedented institutional crisis, ensnaring justices, including Alexandre de Moraes—a polarizing figure credited by some with having stopped Bolsonaro’s coup plot and vilified by others for judicial overreach—and high-profile politicians and public officials with alleged ties to Vorcaro.

Among them is Brazilian senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who is cited in the investigation by Brazil’s federal police into the financing of the movie for “possible participation” in alleged crimes involving “money laundering, illicit capital flight, corruption, and other related offenses.” Last May, the Intercept Brasil exposed audio recordings and messages exchanged between Flávio and Vorcaro in which the senator asks the banker for money to fund Dark Horse. Documents from the federal police indicate Flávio was a “direct interlocutor” in negotiating with Vorcaro about the financing of the movie production. 

The bombshell reporting revealed that Flávio, the primary opponent facing off against Lula, who’s vying for re-election, negotiated a $24-million-dollar investment from Vorcaro. At the time, documents obtained by the Intercept Brasil showed that Vorcaro had made payments for the movie adding up to at least $10.6 million, between February and May 2025; the total has since climbed to $12.3 million, according to the federal police.

In a voice message to Vorcaro from September 2025, Flávio pressed the banker on pending payments, stressing the importance of getting the movie across the finish line. “Imagine us defaulting on Jim Caviezel, on Cyrus [Nowrasteh], these guys, man, hugely renowned in American and global cinema. Man, that would be really bad,” Flávio said in the audio, a transcription of which is cited in the federal police’s inquiry. He added: “Now that we’re in the final stretch, we can’t slip up, we can’t fail to honor the commitments here, because otherwise we lose everything.”

The Bolsonaro camp had high hopes for Dark Horse, originally projected for release three weeks before election day. “We’ll touch the hearts of a lot of people,” congressman Mário Frias, who was involved in the development of the project and is also named in the investigation, told Vorcaro, “and it will be very important for our country.” Ahead of the election, Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential hopeful, has found himself having to provide explanations. He has dismissed the payments from Vorcaro as “private sponsorship” for a private project, underscoring that no public funds were used in the movie, and denied any wrongdoing.

Unsealed court documents state that payment transfers for Dark Horse were made via an intermediary company and processed through the Texas-based Havengate Development Fund managed by a Brazilian lawyer close to Flávio’s brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who is self-exiled in the United States since last year following a lawmaker’s request for him to be investigated for allegedly lobbying against Brazil’s national interests. This June, Eduardo, who was stripped of his congressional seat for being absent, was convicted of “coercion” for attempting to secure interference from the Trump administration on Brazil’s internal affairs; he sought to persuade them to impose tariffs on Brazil and sanctions on Brazilian justices to help his father’s case. 

Investigators looking into the origins of the money and its destination have raised the “hypothesis” that Eduardo, who lives in Texas, “directed the management of resources on foreign soil.” They also are investigating whether funds from Havengate may have been used to cover Eduardo’s living expenses, according to multiple reports by Brazilian media outlets. Flávio has maintained that all the resources allocated to the fund went towards the movie production.

On X, Eduardo has denied receiving money from the Texas fund, saying his immigration status wouldn’t have allowed it. (He has recently obtained a green card.) “During my immigration process,” he said, “I explained to the American authorities the whole origin of my assets and I didn’t have any problems.” He added that “all the investments were made in the US because the production was American, with American actors.”

Agência Pública, Brazil’s largest nonprofit newsroom, recently reported on Eduardo’s lavish lifestyle; he resides in a luxury home in Southlake, owns a $43,800 SUV, and travels frequently—20 times in 18 months—including to attend a gala at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, watch a World Cup match in Miami, and surf in Abu Dhabi. Eduardo has previously explained his financial circumstances by saying he lives off of “passive income.”

The former lawmaker denied having any management role in Dark Horse, but a production contract signed in 2024 and obtained by the Intercept Brasil mentioned the ex-congressman as an executive producer in the movie. In response to the article, Eduardo said that he had signed a contract when the project was still in the early stages and invested $50,000 to get a Hollywood director attached to the movie, but he was later repaid and left the project once other investors were secured. Agência Pública contacted Eduardo’s press team but didn’t hear back before publication.

Go UP Entertainment, the US-based production company behind Dark Horse, is led by Karina Ferreira da Gama and Michael Brian Davis. (Ferreira da Gama and an NGO she directs are the target of a separate inquiry into whether public money was used to finance the movie.) According to an audit commissioned by Go UP, production costs in Brazil were $3.73 million. Costs in the United States amounted to $9.66 million—or more than 70 percent of the movie’s roughly $13-million reported spending. The expenses in the United States, according to the audit, included soft production, pre-production, project development, filming, and post-production. On LinkedIn, a production manager who worked on the movie described it as “the largest-budget feature filmed entirely in Brazil.” 

”It’s not a film that will be nominated for an Oscar. It won’t be in contention for a nomination, but it has that Hollywood seal of quality.” 

The movie’s reported expenses have raised eyebrows among industry insiders, who have compared the numbers to those of an Oscar-worthy production. The company spent $2,000 on a rental wig for Caviezel and about $135,000 in hotel accommodation for the star and his agent and security, based on bank statements and invoices provided to the federal police. ”It’s not a film that will be nominated for an Oscar,” Wilson Feitosa, director of the company responsible for the distribution of Dark Horse, told O Globo newspaper. “It won’t be in contention for a nomination, but it has that Hollywood seal of quality.” 

The federal police noted that, even accounting for “complex variables” in estimating the costs of film productions, there was an “apparent mismatch between the projected cost of the production of Dark Horse and the parameters usually practiced in the Brazilian audiovisual market,” saying it warranted further investigation into the “effective allocation of resources” and the purpose of the operation.

Registered in Florida since 2021, Go UP Entertainment listed, until recently, its place of business as Davis’ home address in Raleigh, North Carolina. In June 2026, the address was changed to a commercial location in the same city. The company’s website only mentions an address in Westlake Village, California. A google search for that address leads to another production company, Damascus Road Productions, focused on “family and faith content.” (Ryan O’Quinn, the president of Damascus Road Productions, has promoted Dark Horse on his social media and is listed on the movie’s IMDb page as a producer. He didn’t respond to an email with questions or return a voicemail message.)

“Go UP Entertainment hereby clarifies that it conducts its business activities and the production of the film Dark Horse in a documented and transparent manner and in compliance with its contractual obligations,” the company said in a statement to the Brazilian magazine Piauí. In an email, Davis declined an interview for this article, saying “we will not provide comments on confidential budgets, private agreements and contracts, or unrelated business matters.”

Go UP’s website, which appears to have been revamped this year, states that the company “was born from the union of two creative forces: Go 7 and UP Tone.” Go 7 seems to be a reference to a different company operated by Davis’ co-partner Ferreira da Gama in Brazil. Go 7, which has reportedly never released a movie or TV production in the country, has its registration status with Ancine—the Brazilian regulatory film agency—listed as “irregular.” (Go UP Entertainment’s status is “regular” and Ancine granted Dark Horse a foreign work registration.)

Uptone Pictures is a self-described “independent film production company” in North Carolina that names the Dark Horse producer, Davis, as founder and executive producer. The movie releases featured on Go UP’s page appear to be examples of Uptone’s previous work. Among them are the 2014 A Long Way Off, a modern-day retelling of the prodigal son parable; Paul’s Promise from 2022, a Christian drama about a “firefighter-turned-pastor” produced and starred by O’Quinn; and the Brazilian-American Destiny Road, based on a book by a televangelist. Uptone Pictures lists Dark Horse as one of its credited productions. On Facebook, the company calls itself “your fixer in Brazil.” 

Davis has Brazilian citizenship and lived in Brazil in the 1980s, where he learned Portuguese and became a São Paulo soccer team fan, before moving to the United States, according to the BBC News Brasil. Besides Go UP Entertainment and Uptone Pictures, he’s linked to several other entertainment businesses in North Carolina, some of which have been dissolved over the years.

Davis has reportedly said that, on the advice of lawyers, he won’t hand over Go UP’s company documents without a judicial order in the United States. The producer wrote in an email to his business partner included in the investigation that “requests from Brazilian authorities involving documents or data under American jurisdiction must be formalized exclusively through the competent diplomatic and international legal cooperation channels.”

Mother Jones emailed Davis a number of questions about his partnership with Ferreira da Gama, the founding of Go UP Entertainment in 2021, and the company’s office addresses. We also asked him for details about the production and budget of Dark Horse, the company’s audit and expenses in the United States, as well as his reason to refuse a federal police’s request for evidence. Finally, the email included questions about Davis’ business history.

In a note, Davis replied that “given Mother Jones’ far-left editorial orientation and the framing of several of your questions, we do not have confidence that our participation would result in a fair and balanced account of Dark Horse.” He wrote that the “inquiry takes a broad, scattershot approach combining questions about the film with historical business affiliations, registered addresses, and other companies.” Davis also said, “several questions” contained “assumptions, speculations, or characterizations that we do not accept,” but didn’t explain what those were.

Meanwhile, select audiences in the United States have already had a sneak peek of Dark Horse. Back in June, Eduardo attended the first public screening of the movie at the Fraud Fighter Summit in Las Vegas. Speaking at a panel, Eduardo suggested the biopic could have a similar enduring impact to Terminator 2. “This movie,” he said, “is going to be a nightmare for the Left.”

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

Of all the epithets hurled at Donald Trump since he became US president, perhaps the most unusual was delivered last month—that he is, in fact, some sort of environmentalist.

Trump is the “greatest gift” to the environmental movement, argued Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, due to the fallout from the US-Israel war on Iran.

“He’s woken the world up to how vulnerable we are to petro-dictatorships, how vulnerable we are to disruptions in the Middle East,” Newsom told The Guardian during Climate Week in New York. “This war has completely gutted any sort of romantic notions of energy security and it’s compelled folks to think differently. It’s accelerating investments and clean energy and renewables.”

If Trump has been an accidental environmentalist, it’s been in the international sphere. The Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil and gas exports usually flow, is now starting to open up but has been routinely snarled since the Iran War began in February, causing the cost of these fossil fuels to soar around the world.

Countries reacted by scrambling to cut their oil and gas use while turning to cleaner forms of energy such as solar and wind (although there’s also been a small rise in coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels).

The overall consequence has been a positive one for our shared climate, with global fossil fuel emissions set to drop by 0.5 percent this year due to the crisis, Carbon Brief has estimated. The peak in oil consumption may have been sped up enough to arrive this year, rather than the previous estimate of 2029, according to the International Energy Agency.

By launching the war, Trump is set to achieve something only dreamed about by climate advocates and not seen outside global economic crashes or the Covid pandemic—an annual reduction in the emissions that are overheating our planet. The president’s imposition of tariffs and importation of foreign ground beef, meanwhile, may also end up hurting the US cattle industry, another major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

“All of the oil that is produced will be burned… The people who predict that there will be a reduction in [greenhouse emissions] are simply lying or blind.”

“It’s a curious thing to say, but I believe it,” Newsom, a potential contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, said of Trump as a sort of unintentional biophile. “This moment will mark how we can’t go back to our original form.”

Yet the idea of Trump as an environmentalist, even an accidental one, can still appear faintly absurd. His administration has eviscerated pollution limits on cars, trucks and power plants, funnelled taxpayer cash and favors to the fossil fuel industry, and set about unilaterally cancelling renewable energy projects.

Trump, who has never by available evidence ever set a Florsheimed foot in any of the US’s national parks, has called environmentalists “terrorists,” the climate crisis “a hoax,” and has slashed conservation rules to the extent you can now kill a protected species as long as it wasn’t provably intentional.

Perhaps tellingly, when asked during the 2024 election campaign about his environmental credentials, Trump cited his Florida golf course getting awards for “the way I built it, for the water, the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water.”

Critics say this record overshadows any embrace of clean energy by other countries spooked by an oil price that has hovered about $100 a barrel for months but should, at some point in the interminable Iran conflict, drop well below this. The impetus for quitting fossil fuels could wither when it does so.

“Trump’s illegal attack on Iran may hasten clean energy in some countries, but he has gutted green tech in the United States and set us back decades,” said Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University who said Newsom was guilty of “tunnel vision” in his framing of Trump. “The notion that he is an accidental environmentalist is wishful thinking.”

The conflict may have rocked the oil and gas industry but it has also enriched it, netting eight of the largest companies more than $90 billion in just the first three months of the war, with even pro-oil Trump complaining that the major fossil fuel firms are “making too much money.”

There is little sign Big Oil fears a looming obsolescence when this bonanza ends. Last month, Exxon forecast that while the world will reduce its emissions, it will still use 105 million barrels of oil a day in 2050, up from 100 million barrels last year. Two-thirds of the global energy mix will stubbornly remain composed of oil, gas, and coal at the midpoint of the century, the oil company estimated.

“All of the oil that is produced will be burned—if they produce more, more will be used,” said Juan Carlos Navarro, environment minister of Panama. “The people who predict that there will be a reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases are simply lying or blind.”

The only hope is that the world “can cap consumption and production at levels similar to the ones we have right now,” Navarro added, citing the enormous energy demand of artificial intelligence datacenters, which are largely being run on gas-fired power.

However, climate advocates maintain the Iran conflict will accelerate trends that are already swinging behind clean energy. Investment in renewables globally is now double that of fossil fuels, almost all new power being added to grids comes from clean sources and last year one in four cars sold was electric.

“I don’t think the world is just going to go back to business-as-usual demand of fossil fuels once this crisis ends.”

Unlike previous oil shocks, the world now has a viable alternative to fossil fuels, even if it’s unclear how lasting an impact Trump’s military and trade actions will have in pushing countries towards them. “There is one thing that all these events are making clear,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission said in April. “We are paying a very high price for our over-dependency on fossil fuels.”

Countries from the UK to India to Thailand have sought to speed up the transition to renewables as the price of fossil fuel dependency has spiraled, saving billions. Electric vehicle sales have surged, although not in the US. Trump has urged other countries to reject the “scam” of clean energy but the market is increasingly favoring cheap wind, solar and batteries that have plummeted in cost in recent years, including in the US.

“Demand has massively spiked for solar and for battery storage,” said Sonia Dunlop, chief executive of the Global Solar Council. “We’re seeing that all over the world—the Philippines, across Europe, across south-east Asia, Australia and beyond.”

“This Iran crisis, which was, in effect, started by President Trump, has led to a massive surge in demand for our technology…but actually it’s just building on a trend that was already there,” she added.

Political and business leaders can mull the fact that the wind does not funnel through the strait of Hormuz and the sun doesn’t only shine on a foreign autocrat’s lands. The Iran war may not prove a fatal blow to fossil fuels, but it has starkly highlighted their inherent volatility.

The case for renewables has become obvious at a grassroots level in developing countries, too, where rooftops increasingly glitter with cheap Chinese-made solar panels that are helping negate soaring power bills.

“The price of solar has come down so quickly that there are now 100,000 solar panels installed every day in Africa,” Al Gore, the former US vice-president, said last month. “In parts of Pakistan, a common bride’s dowry is now three panels and an inverter, instead of 10 or 12 goats. It’s beginning to kick into gear.”

This momentum won’t stop once the conflict around the Persian Gulf ends, Dunlop insisted. “I don’t think the world is just going to go back to business-as-usual demand of fossil fuels once this crisis ends,” she said. “Once someone decides to step off the fossil fuel rollercoaster, they’re off it.”

So does all this, then, make Trump an environmentalist? “I wouldn’t say that,” Dunlop demurred. “He certainly has his own ideas.”

CNN published an investigation earlier this week detailing how an investment fund operated by Jared Kushner, who has acted as a key Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiator and leader on Trump’s Gaza “Board of Peace,” also holds the largest stake in an Israeli financial institution that backs arms manufacturers involved in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza—one of many financial entanglements author Casey Michel highlighted in a Mother Jones cover story in July.

In a rare move, Kushner took to social media Friday to characterize CNN’s reporting as “deeply misleading.”

CNN published a deeply misleading story and headline suggesting that my diplomatic work in the Middle East somehow benefited investments in Israeli defense companies.

But CNN’s own reporting says otherwise. Buried behind a paywall, it acknowledges: “CNN found no indication that… pic.twitter.com/iCowrE9N84

— Jared Kushner (@jaredkushner) October 2, 2026

The CNN reporters did acknowledge that they “found no indication that Kushner’s actions as a diplomat” directly affected his investment portfolio. But they laid out how Kushner’s private equity company ended up with a 7.4 percent stake in an Israeli firm linked to nine different weapons contractors.

Kushner’s company, Affinity Partners, doubled its stake in the firm, Phoenix Financial, last year—just before Donald Trump returned to office. As Michel wrote for Mother Jones, “Phoenix is a bulwark for Israeli expansion in the Palestinian territories and Syria, enabling more building, construction, and imperialism.”

CNN’s report digs into the details of Phoenix’s investments in Israeli weapons-makers. Most notably, Phoenix has hundreds of millions of dollars in Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest military equipment provider, known for unmanned aerial vehicles that are deployed extensively for surveillance and bombardment in Gaza. Phoenix also, according to CNN, has holdings in Israeli jet-engine maker Bet Shemesh, drone-camera maker Next Vision, munitions company Reshef Technologies, and Boeing, which supplies Israel’s military with F-15s and bunker-buster bombs.

In his post, Kushner protested, “Phoenix is not a defense company. It is one of Israel’s largest publicly traded financial institutions, highly regulated and managing approximately $220 billion across thousands of investments.”

Nonetheless, Phoenix manages large investments in weapons companies close to the conflict, even as Kushner touts a $2.4 billion dollar “recovery plan” for Gaza geared toward turning the area into a tourist hub. Israel continues to bomb Gaza—despite having agreed to a ceasefire 11 months ago—killing more than 1,300 people since that agreement was signed.

Kushner has responded to past reporting on his conflicts of interest by saying, essentially, that putting himself in a position to make money off his diplomatic work doesn’t count as a conflict of interest unless he actually makes money. But while serving as a diplomat, he has indeed been making money; in September 2025, Forbes declared Kushner a billionaire, noting that his fortune had grown by about $100 million from a year earlier.

Israel represents just one of Kushner’s numerous global conflicts of interest. While engaged in attempts to negotiate peace with Iran, he was also soliciting investments from officials of Persian Gulf states with a stake in the outcome. Kushner was also tapped to negotiate an end to Russia’s war with Ukraine, despite his ties to prominent Russian officials. And as the lead story in today’s New York Times revealed, the Trump administration’s talks with Russia about ending the war in Ukraine now involve “a multibillion-dollar oil deal that would benefit Middle Eastern business executives with ties to the two main U.S. negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.”

In 2025, CBS’ “60 Minutes” asked Kushner and Witkoff, his fellow “special envoy,” whether their “billions and billions of dollars worth of business” deals with the Gulf States, some of which they’d negotiated while brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Qatar, might constitute conflicts of interest. Kushner seemed to think he was in the clear.

“We’re here to do good,” Kushner responded. “These are impossible tasks.” He stated that he would not be personally involved in deciding who does business in Gaza after the ceasefire deal is signed. “What people call conflicts of interest,” Kushner said, “Steve and I call experience.”

Over the past six months, Americans have become increasingly aware of automated license plate readers, used by almost 80 percent of American police departments to trace vehicles and their drivers without the hassle of a warrant. ALPRs perch on power poles and stoplights, quietly encroaching on the most sacred silo of American life—the car. People are pissed.

Like the slew of data centers cropping up across the country, the cameras have inspired fierce bipartisan backlash. As ALPRs proliferate, communities have pressured local lawmakers to rein them in, leading municipalities and counties nationwide to cancel contracts, remove the cameras, or ban them altogether.

Now, a surprising cross-section of candidates—local, national, liberal, conservative—are putting Flock at the heart of their campaigns. With 2026’s midterm elections fast approaching, both Republicans and Democrats in battleground states like Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are wooing voters by promising to place guardrails on unregulated surveillance technologies. Politicians of all stripes suddenly seem to think that they need to get Flock out of here.

“Flock has become a four-letter word.”

ALPR systems like Flock use algorithmically powered cameras to compile searchable databases of the license plate numbers, time, location, make, model, and color of passing cars. Flock CEO Garret Langley claimed in March that his company’s cameras, which make up about 80 percent of the total mapped ALPR cameras in the US, “solved” one million crimes in 2025. (The available evidence doesn’t back up Langley’s numbers.)

Although police can, for example, use Flock cameras to try to track down a missing person or stolen car, reports also abound of cops using ALPRs to stalk their exes, track an abortion-seeker across state lines, and provide information to ICE. The lack of strict standards around their use—and concerns over the erosion of privacy and civil liberties—have become a major concern across party lines as communities debate if, and how, the tech should be used. 

A September survey of more than 1,400 adults by the nonprofit National Policing Institute found that public approval of ALPRs depended on the justification: 80 percent approved of their use to find missing children or investigate violent crimes, but about three-fourths disagreed with using the cameras for immigration enforcement or “routine traffic or parking enforcement.” More than half said their support for the systems would increase if their department “adopted safeguards” against abuse. 

A Flock Safety license plate reader camera along a roadway in Washington, D.C., September 12, 2026.Matt Kaminsky/ZUMA

With a month to go until a slew of intensely contested elections and public concern over Flock and its competitors only growing, congressional candidates and sitting legislators across the political spectrum are calling to rework the patchwork regulatory system that governs the cameras’ use. And while Flock’s public relations efforts seem to be ramping up, they have brought few politicians to their side on either the right or the left. (A notable exception: Donald Trump, who has said “I like them” with regard to the cameras.)

While ALPRs have been around since the 1990s, 90 percent of people didn’t know whether their local police department used the technology in 2018, according to one poll; the new wave of public awareness and controversy around Flock and similar cameras has left politicians scrambling to catch up.

“Most jurisdictions don’t have clear regulation around the use of ALPRs,” said Clare Garvie, deputy director of technology law and policy at New York University’s Policing Project. That provides an opening to politicians willing to promise regulation, outright bans, or just constraints on who gets to use them. 

Today, there are more than 120,000 ALPR cameras across the country. 100 percent of police departments serving more than one million residents use them, according to Bureau of Justice statistics, as do 90 percent of sheriffs’ offices with 500 or more sworn deputies. But that tide could be shifting: in the past year alone, more than 50 municipalities have cut ties with Flock and other ALPR vendors, according to the advocacy group DeFlock.

“There’s been a widespread lack of transparency around where these tools are implemented, how widespread they are, how many actual cameras there are, [and] how long the data is kept,” Garvie added.

“We see widespread opposition to this and frustration on the part of communities that they were never informed; they were never involved in this decision to use the technology in the first place.”

On September 23, a Senate committee led by Republican Josh Hawley of Missouri and Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois—both of whom have staked out positions as anti-surveillance crusaders—held a hearing on ALPR reform. They invited representatives from Flock, Axon, Motorola, and Verkada—but none of them showed.

“We’ve got to find a way to protect and enforce the Bill of Rights and the basic personal liberties of every law-abiding citizen in this country, no matter what the technology is,” Hawley said at the time. A week later, the Missouri Republican announced plans to introduce the Stop Flock Act, which would prevent local governments from selling or sharing vehicle data with non-governmental third parties, limit data retention to ten days in most cases, and impose other restrictions on the cameras’ use.

In fact, at least four different bills were introduced in Congress in September alone that would limit ALPR use. By October 2, the text of yet another bill—this time from Democrats Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jeff Merkley—was announced. 

And after November’s elections, a new bipartisan batch of legislators could help push federal regulations on ALPRs forward.

Angie Nixon, Florida’s Democratic Senate nominee, has made “protect[ing] privacy and end[ing] mass surveillance” a core component of her campaign for a hotly contested election. Nixon proposes “federal standards,” requiring law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant before accessing ALPR data, imposing a mandatory data deletion period, and mandating community consent at the local level before ALPR contracts are signed or renewed, among other things. 

“I know folks are saying, ‘We’ve got to keep crime from happening,’” Nixon said in an interview with Mother Jones. “The way you keep crime from happening is by addressing the root cause of crime, which is oftentimes people not having access to quality, good-paying jobs or access to healthcare, just the most basic needs.”

There’s little research on the effectiveness of ALPR systems at deterring or investigating crimes. For one thing, they often misidentify vehicles—which can lead to devastating consequences, as in the case of Lindsey Isaacs, a Florida woman wrongfully jailed for 13 days on triple homicide charges after a Flock camera incorrectly flagged her Dodge Durango as the vehicle involved in a fatal hit-and-run.

Even Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose policy positions couldn’t be further from Nixon’s, wants to tamp down on ALPRs: In early September, he banned the cameras on state highways. 

Nixon isn’t the only candidate campaigning on Flock. Another progressive Senate candidate fighting for a battleground seat, Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, has also raised alarms about ALPRs. In late August, El-Sayed released a video about Flock and his Republican opponent Mike Rogers’ alleged links to the booming surveillance state. 

Does it ever feel like you're in a cage being watched?

Well, you are. By Flock cameras, thanks to Mike Rogers. pic.twitter.com/6H2DfN1l5j

— Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (@AbdulElSayed) August 19, 2026

While Rogers and El-Sayed have little in common on most issues, they’re now trying to outflank each other on Flock as communities across Michigan voice ire towards the cameras.

“Abdul has heard concerns about Flock cameras from voters in every corner of the state,” campaign spokesperson Cole Wozniak said in an email. “In the United States Senate, he will fight to both keep communities safe while protecting our fundamental rights to privacy.”

A spokesperson for Rogers’ campaign, asked about the candidate’s views on Flock by Fox News Digital, said he “vehemently opposes unchecked use of Flock cameras to track law-abiding citizens,” adding that “Security and liberty aren’t enemies. Good government protects both.” 

Independent congressional candidates in both Montana and Tennessee even shot Flock cameras (or dummy Flock cameras) with guns to make their case against the technology. Gubernatorial candidates of both major parties in Iowa, Texas, Florida, and Arizona have all made abolishing or limiting ALPR use part of their platforms in recent weeks. 

Both candidates for the governor’s office in Iowa, Democrat Rob Sand and Republican Zach Lahn, for example, have said they would sign state-level ALPR regulations. Lahn is more absolutist: the cameras constitute “an unbelievable Fourth Amendment violation,” he said in August. Sand, a former prosecutor, has centered his platform more on local control of ALPRs, without condemning the technology or any specific company. 

Even leaders not currently on the campaign trail, like moderate Republican Sen. Dan Laughlin in Pennsylvania, have proposed banning Flock and similar ALPR cameras, signaling that the technology could remain a bipartisan issue in years to come—or that they fear it’s already a wedge issue for their colleagues.

“Public safety is a responsibility we all take seriously,” Laughlin said in a public statement. “But it should not require building a surveillance network capable of tracking the daily movements of millions of innocent individuals.”

“I think Flock is standing in for [ALPR] technology more broadly,” said NYU’s Garvie. “We see widespread opposition to this and frustration on the part of communities that they were never informed, they were never involved in this decision to use the technology in the first place.”

As one Arizona sheriff said at Hawley’s Senate hearing, “Flock has become a four-letter word.”

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

During the Sand Creek Fire, which has burned since the start of August in southwestern Montana, difficult terrain and fire-weakened trees posed hazards to crews searching for areas still smoldering on steep slopes after the blaze passed. So instead of relying only on firefighters to find hidden embers, fire managers used unmanned aircraft to seek out heat sources. 

The operation is part of a broader technological shift underway in wildfire response. The US Forest Service is evaluating firefighting robots on the ground, and researchers are exploring how artificial intelligence could help predict where wildfires will ignite and how quickly fires will spread. Federal agencies already use drones to map fires, detect hotspots and ignite prescribed burns, and are testing their capability to drop firefighting foam and water on blazes. 

“Drones are now a critical tool in federal wildfire response, providing real-time infrared imagery to map fire perimeters, detect hotspots, and monitor dangerous or inaccessible terrain, which helps firefighters make safer, faster tactical decisions,” said Meredith Hollowell, a Forest Service press officer, in a statement to Inside Climate News.

The Federal Aviation Administration said drones provide real-time situational awareness by detecting hotspots, mapping fire perimeters and aiding firefighter efforts in dangerous  environments.  

But drones are no longer being used just to watch fires from above.

During aerial ignition operations in which fire managers intentionally burn vegetation to expand control lines or remove fuels before the main fire reaches them, unmanned aircraft can reduce the exposure of pilots or firefighters to some high-risk conditions, Hollowell said. 

The technology has become established enough that federal agencies now have specific positions for UAS pilots, managers, module leaders and data specialists, as well as procedures for ordering drone resources for wildfire incidents.

The Forest Service is also testing autonomous ground vehicles that could carry equipment and supplies into areas where conventional vehicles or manual transport may be difficult or unsafe. In June, the agency and its partners tested robotic vehicles on rough terrain in Georgia that was designed to replicate conditions encountered during wildfire operations.

The vehicles were expected to carry payloads of up to 800 pounds, including firehose packs, heavy hand tools, water containers, and medical supplies. Evaluators tested their ability to navigate rocky roads, uneven ground, and slopes while carrying operational loads.

While the technology is not yet ready for routine wildfire operations, Charlie Gray, a Forest Service district fire management officer, said it shows promise for reducing firefighters’ exposure to risk while getting equipment and supplies to the fireline.

Hollowell said the Forest Service expects advances in AI-enabled unmanned aerial systems, combined with improved fire-behavior models and data from satellites, cameras and weather models to revolutionize wildfire detection and tracking, suppression efficiency and firefighter safety. 

Researchers are already examining the potential advantages of combining drones with artificial intelligence. 

Phinehas Lampman, a researcher at the University of Idaho, developed a system using thermal-infrared images collected by drones and machine-learning models to analyze fire behavior and predict a fire’s rate of spread. Lampman spent seven years working on engine and hotshot crews for the Clearwater-Potlatch Timber Protective Association and the Forest Service before turning to research, according to his University of Idaho bio. 

Lampman’s  study, published in May in the International Journal of Wildland Fire, focused on three measures of fire behavior: rate of spread, fireline intensity, and radiative power. Researchers repeatedly flew a drone equipped with a thermal-infrared sensor over a prescribed grassland fire and used the imagery to generate high-resolution measurements of those characteristics. 

Lampman and his colleagues used the drone-collected data to train machine learning models to predict how quickly the fire would spread. The models performed well in making short-term predictions during the experiment, the researchers reported. Drones that can collect observations directly from a fire for machine-learning systems to analyze for their predictions of what the blaze may do next could be a valuable addition to incident commanders’ toolbox. 

Fire managers currently make decisions using multiple sources of information, including weather reports, maps, observations from firefighters and aerial information from airplanes and helicopters. 

“Most incident commanders in the field rely on their vast experience to assess and ultimately predict wildfire movement,” Lampman said in an August article published by the University of Idaho. 

But while conventional aircraft can provide critical information, they cannot operate in all conditions. 

“Sometimes those aerial assets are grounded, or the visibility is really poor,” Lampman said. “But drones can usually still fly and gather information.” 

That could make drones useful not only as another set of eyes over a fire, but also as a data source  for models designed to estimate fire behavior. 

Lampman’s research remains a proof of concept, and no AI system yet exists that fire managers can rely on to accurately predict a wildfire’s movement. But federal fire officials are already looking toward a future in which drones, artificial intelligence, and other technologies could work together to give firefighters more information while reducing their exposure to dangerous situations. 

“Looking ahead, advances in AI-enabled UAV systems, improved fire-behavior modeling, and expanded use of decision-support tools, along with satellite, camera, and weather-model integration, are expected to enhance early detection, tracking, suppression efficiency, and firefighter safety,” said Hollowell, at the US Forest Service. 

Researchers are also exploring how drone-collected data could improve models of wildfire smoke and its potential effects on people downwind.

“UAS provide critical access to researchers who are expanding our understanding of the relationships between fire behavior and smoke emissions in real time,” Leda Kobziar, a professor of wildland fire science at the University of Idaho and a co-author of the study, said in an email to Inside Climate News. “These relationships are key to building and improving models (including AI models) that can help us predict what types of smoke-borne microbes and concentrations of smoke we would expect people downwind to be exposed to.”

Daniel Ellsberg’s ninth and final book, Truth and Consequence, was published this spring, three years after his passing, and this is a fitting moment—a time of political upheaval much like the one in which Ellsberg first made his mark—to commemorate this remarkable and neglected American hero. 

The book is a collection of reflections and reminiscences lovingly assembled by Daniel’s son Michael Ellsberg and longtime aide Jan R. Thomas. Much of it pivots off his signature role in the 1971 leak of what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the US war in Vietnam that he had helped write as a RAND Corp. analyst. 

The Pentagon Papers were a searing 20-year record of governmental incompetence and duplicity, and thanks to the ensuing Supreme Court battle between The New York Times and the Nixon Administration, their publication is remembered as a dazzling triumph of an independent press. But as the new book shows, Ellsberg was always much more than a Vietnam-era renegade. He also used his stature as an analyst and activist—he estimated he was arrested some 90 times—to call attention to the plight of the whistleblower and the looming menace of nuclear war, both immensely worthy causes that we have largely consigned to the outback of our national conscience. 

I got to know Ellsberg in the Teens, toward the end of his life, when I became dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. I was surprised to discover that, although he lived not two miles from campus, this key figure in a defining moment of US journalism history had no relation to our program or anyone else’s, near as I could tell. I still don’t know why that was, but he accepted my invitation to join the school’s advisory board and, even better, stepped up in successive years as a keynote speaker at our orientations for incoming master’s students. 

At a time of unrelenting attacks on media independence by the federal government, the Pentagon Papers affair is a powerful reminder of what the press uniquely can do.

There, he shone. He was already well into his 80s, slender and straight-backed, and wearing a dark suit and tie—a rarity on the Berkeley campus. He spoke softly, without notes, recalling with precision events and names our students had no prayer of recognizing: Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, the Tet Offensive. Yet our students were riveted. Instead of heading for the exits when Ellsberg was done, they stayed behind to ask questions, and listened as he remembered. 

He steered well away from claims that his Pentagon Papers leak hastened the end of the war, although that was a refrain in some of the obituaries that followed his death in 2023. Ellsberg never believed any such thing. The papers reflected a historical record that ended nearly three years before they were leaked. They didn’t cover the subsequent and no less disgraceful management, by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, of a war that wouldn’t end for nearly four more years. The students were drawn, I believe, not by proximity to somebody who’d made journalism history, but to what they perceived as a man of humility and moral courage.

Ellsberg’s explanations for his actions were always somber and self-effacing. He’d decided to leak the Pentagon’s mortifying secrets to follow the example of Bay Area antiwar activist Randy Kehler, who’d told Ellsberg he was going to prison rather than cooperate with the draft. That Ellsberg’s unprecedented disclosures prompted clandestine measures by the White House—which included creating the infamous “Plumbers Unit” that spawned the failed Watergate break-in and fatally undermined the Nixon Presidency—was a consequence he neither sought nor anticipated, and he never accepted credit for bringing Nixon down.

As he told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! in 2019, “My message to [young people] is: Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait until the bombs are actually falling or thousands more have died before you do what I wish I’d done years earlier, in ’64, or even ’61 on the nuclear issue, and that is reveal…the dangerous truths that are being withheld by the government at whatever cost to yourself, whatever risk that may take. Consider doing that because a world’s worth of lives may be at stake.”

Ellsberg and his friend and Pentagon Papers codefendant, Anthony Russo, take questions outside the federal building in Los Angeles, January 1973.Anonymous/AP

The self-portrait that emerges from the essays and reflections in Truth and Consequence is of a man both brilliant and haunted. His parents, ethnically Eastern European Jews, became what he described as “fanatical Christian Scientists”—Ellsberg never saw a doctor until he went to boarding school at the age of 12. He was a gifted musician, and his mother steered him with an obsessively heavy hand toward a life she imagined for him as a concert pianist. From an early age she kept him home from school so he could devote his afternoons to practice, four to six hours a day, eight hours on Saturdays. 

That was his routine for a decade until, at age 15, he performed Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with musicians hired for the occasion from the Detroit Symphony. His mother then moved him to a more demanding and knowledgeable music teacher who, after an introductory lesson and what seemed to be a careful inventory of his background, musical knowledge and performing skills, declared that Ellsberg had great talent but no future as a professional pianist.

It was a heartbreaking verdict for his mother but an emancipatory moment for him. He carried on playing for the new teacher, but his mother was devastated. Two months later, she and Ellsberg’s young sister were killed in a car crash, and his father, who was driving, was seriously hurt. After that, apart from a music theory class in college, Ellsberg didn’t touch the piano again for 25 years. 

In The New York Times’ retelling of the story, Ellsberg is denied agency: It was “How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers.”

He returns often to the legacy of his abandoned musical path, not with regret at having disappointed his mother but in wonderment at her coercive powers, which trapped him in a decade of servitude to her dream. He was shamed by his compliance, a prelude to the eager obedience he would observe later in his career among people of dazzling intellectual capacity who nonetheless enthusiastically carried out policies they recognized were murderous, futile, and morally indefensible.

Ellsberg graduated from Detroit’s prestigious Cranbrook School and majored in economics at Harvard before joining the Marines, where he served for three years, was commissioned a lieutenant, and rose to command a rifle company. After a year in England at Cambridge University, he returned to Harvard and finished his PhD in economics, distinguishing himself in the arcane field of game theory with a breakthrough concept now known as the Ellsberg Paradox, which describes the inclination of people to avoid choices whose odds of success are ambiguous. 

I had never heard of the paradox until Ellsberg mentioned it in passing one day, noting that it was considered enough of a conceptual innovation to be the subject of scholarly conferences. Still, his work and notable Harvard national security connections brought him to the attention of the influential think tank known as the RAND Corp., where he started as a summer consultant in 1958, soon after the Soviet sputnik launches triggered a panic over the intensifying nuclear rivalry and the incoherence of the strategic doctrine of deterrence. 

Ellsberg divided his intellectual efforts for RAND, the Pentagon, and the State Department over much of the next decade between nuclear strategy and the deepening disaster in Vietnam. (Much of the latter is recounted in his riveting 2002 book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.)

At a time when the news media’s independence and civic value are under unrelenting assault by the federal government, the Pentagon Papers affair is a powerful reminder of what the press uniquely can do. It was an instance of unquestionable public illumination that exposed the lethal deceptions of a generation of top leaders, exposure that no institution of civil society other than the press could ever have delivered. True, the news media claim an undeservedly heroic role in engineering the disclosures that were actually driven by Ellsberg and his helpmates, but in the final analysis the media did come through—in all, 19 newspapers published material Ellsberg originated, even while a criminal prosecution seemed inescapable. 

It’s chilling to wonder now—when most of those newspapers have withered or died in the drought of the digital age, whistleblowers serve years behind bars (Ellsberg spent not a single night in jail), and the Trump administration has unleashed regulatory and commercial pressure on news media for ideological sins far less egregious than frontal defiance over an ongoing war—whether the Pentagon Papers would have ever seen the light of day. 

John Kerry, then head of Vietnam Veterans against the War, exchanges a handshake with Ellsberg.Ken Feil/The Washington Post/Getty

Even if today’s New York Times still found the courage to publish, the likelihood of finding another 18 news organizations to join in is far from certain. And with Trump and his minions suing CBS and its compliant parent company over the editing of a political rival’s TV interview, routinely threatening to revoke broadcast licenses over comments that displease him, demanding the dismissal of on-air talent he deems insufficiently supportive, ousting news outlets he doesn’t like from the Pentagon and White House, and using investigative resources to undermine the business fundamentals of media owners, the range of reprisals that would undoubtedly be used to punish resistance on a Pentagon Papers scale is almost unimaginable.

Getting the story out wasn’t easy even back then, and the treatment Ellsberg endured from his supposed allies was far from gentle. In a 2015 interview, Neil Sheehan, lead writer on The New York Times’ Pentagon Papers coverage, described how the papers came to be published, a story Sheehan embargoed until after he died. It was impossible to discern from his remembrance how hard Ellsberg had worked over the previous two years to find a way to make the papers public, first laboriously photocopying the thousands of pages and then appealing repeatedly to a roster of antiwar senators in hopes of getting the material entered into the Congressional Record. Finally, in frustration, he approached Sheehan, a Times stalwart whom he knew in Vietnam, and to whom he had leaked stories previously.

But in The Times’ retelling, Ellsberg is denied agency: It was “How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers,” which were framed as a “blockbuster scoop” and “arguably the greatest journalistic catch of a generation.” 

In fact, Ellsberg had invited Sheehan to review and take notes from his copy of the papers but refused to give him a copy until he had assurances that The Times intended to use them fully. Sheehan ignored those conditions and surreptitiously made his own photocopies with the help of his wife, New Yorker writer Susan Sheehan. Times staffers worked on those copies for weeks, and Sheehan lied repeatedly about the paper’s plans, leaving Ellsberg and his wife, Patricia, to scramble on the eve of publication to hide boxes of incriminating documents. 

The Supreme Court’s June 1971 ruling in New York Time v. United States blocked the Nixon administration’s attempt to halt publication of the papers but did nothing to prevent Ellsberg and his co-defendant, Anthony Russo, from being tried for violating secrecy laws—a prosecution that was thrown out only after the court learned of the White House Plumbers’ burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. During the two-year prosecution process Ellsberg and Russo got no financial support from the media they had helped. 

Ellsberg in 1990 at an anti-War Demonstration on the Boston Common.Kenneth Martin/ZUMA

Ellsberg was always puzzled by the ambivalence, even hostility, that news outlets characteristically show toward their gutsiest and most determined sources. One of his admirers, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who had turned over extremely newsworthy material to The Times and other news organizations in 2010, was thanked with an especially venomous New York Times Magazine cover story, authored by the paper’s own executive editor, Bill Keller, describing Assange, among other things, as petulant, ill-tempered, and foul-smelling. I once asked Ellsberg why the media often treats whistleblowers so harshly.

“They don’t trust us,” he said. 

Still, others have followed Ellsberg’s example in exposing unwarranted secrecy, and many suffered consequences incomparably worse than he did. Assange was pursued by US law enforcement and intelligence agencies for 14 years, enduring various forms of confinement before his case was essentially discarded and he was repatriated to Australia; his source, Chelsea Manning, served seven years in prison, including a year in solitary, before her 35-year sentence was commuted, and later served yet another year for refusing to testify against Assange. Yet it is almost invariably the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg that these and other whistleblowers point to when they explain and justify what motivated them. A global consciousness about high-level deception and the duty of citizens to expose it claims Ellsberg as its historical and moral forebear. 

Regarding nuclear weapons, “we’re in a more dangerous situation than any time in my lifetime,” Ellsberg told The Times two months before his death.

When it comes to whistleblowing, Ellsberg’s legacy flourishes. But the second focus of his career-long engagement remains orphaned. It wasn’t Vietnam, he wants us to understand, that accounted for his most consuming fears.

In his 2017 book, The Doomsday Machine, Ellsberg says that between fall 1969 and August 1970 he had photocopied the entire top-secret contents of his safe at RAND, perhaps 15,000 pages, of which the Pentagon Papers constituted only 7,000. Most of the documents he was risking his career to expose consisted of notes and documents involving what he believed was the greatest threat to humanity, nuclear weapons, the prospects for their use, and, most harrowing, the government’s ramshackle and entirely inadequate measures to prevent their unintended use. 

Some of that purloined material aligned with things he’d witnessed as a RAND employee during the early 1960s, inspecting nuclear weapons at US Air Force forward operating bases in the Northern Pacific. That firsthand reporting, his basis for The Doomsday Machine, was decades old by the time the book was published, but the details were enthralling and pertinent, and the likelihood that nuclear war could be unleashed at a preposterously low level of command authority remained terrifyingly plausible. The estimates Ellsberg coaxed from the heads of US military officers as a 30-year-old analyst during the Kennedy administration pegged the expected death toll from America’s Single Integrated Operational Plan for General Nuclear War at more than 600 million people in the Soviet Union, China, and Europe. That excluded the incalculable harm to the United States, and the global nuclear winter that might well follow. 

The fundamental strategic conundrum Ellsberg addressed was unchanged in 2017 and is sullenly unchanged now: Nuclear weapons are unimaginably lethal and inherently, irremediably unsafe. The logic of deterrence requires a certainty that anyone who uses them in a military confrontation will themselves be destroyed. But deterrence could be assured only if America’s weapons are sure to be launched while the capability to use them remains—that is, when an enemy attack is believed, not proven, imminent.

The possibility of a catastrophic error is inescapable. It was narrowly averted during the 1962 Cuban missile, Ellsberg noted in Doomsday Machine, only thanks to a single, hesitant Soviet submarine skipper who did not launch a nuclear-tipped torpedo he had been authorized to use. The hair-trigger possibility of preemptive first use is inextricable from the guaranteed destruction that deterrence rests upon.

Like Marlon Brando’s rogue colonel in Apocalypse Now, Ellsberg “was being groomed for one of the top spots in the corporation.”

When Ellsberg copied those 15,000 pages of top-secret RAND documents in late 1969 and early 1970, his initial priority was to publicize those pertaining to the nuclear program. Antiwar activist Kehler, whose draft resistance had inspired Ellsberg, told him he believed there were few new revelations in the Vietnam War materials, whereas the documents regarding the nation’s shocking lack of nuclear safeguards were new and harrowing. Still, Ellsberg calculated that the Pentagon Papers would have the most immediate impact—“It’s where the bombs are falling right now,” he recalls saying.

So, he entrusted the notes and documents on strategic weapons controls to his brother, with the expectation that he would make them public after the Pentagon Papers leak ran its course. Ultimately, through a series of mishaps, the RAND nuclear weapons files were lost or destroyed. It was only after what Ellsberg deemed largely equivalent material was declassified that he finally was able to write the book.  

Ellsberg, who authored a memo outlining the alleged US introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan in the 1960s, at the start of a June 1981 news conference in Tokyo. Ellsberg was invited by the General Council of Trade Unions (Sohyo), a key Japanese anti-nuclear group. Katsumi Kasahara/AP

Nuclear weapons are once again the ghost at the banquet. They are mentioned repeatedly  in connection with Ukraine, when the possibility was raised that Russia would move so-called tactical weapons to Belarus as a warning to NATO, and with Taiwan, around the decades-old question of whether the United States would stand by its willingness to use nukes to deter a Chinese invasion. Also the Middle East, where, for the second time this century, the US has gone to war using fears of weapons of mass destruction—most recently Iran’s nuclear program—as a rationale. And the United States has embarked on an unparalleled $1.7 trillion reconstruction of its aging nuclear arsenal, a vast project undertaken before a mostly slumbering media and a wholly ignorant public, with no national debate of any kind.

“We’re in a more dangerous situation than any time in my lifetime,” Ellsberg told The New York Times two months before he died. The doomsday clock maintained by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—the group created by Alfred Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and the founding wizards of the atomic age—that indicates the likelihood of nuclear war now stands at 85 seconds to midnight (detonation), the closest it has been since the clock debuted in 1947.

In short, Ellsberg’s inability to rein in humanity’s gravest threat became an abiding source of disappointment. But the darkness at the heart of his conclusions in Truth and Consequence has less to do with policy than with people—with the endless corruptibility of the elite class of disciplined, loyal, and committed professionals he trained alongside, collaborated with, and then, for much of his life, fought against. 

It’s important to remember that Ellsberg was, early in his professional life, close to the pinnacle of national power, a man with the ear of the country’s top officials. Like Kurtz, the Special Forces colonel who went rogue in Apocalypse Now, “he was being groomed for one of the top spots in the corporation.” But then he watched his peers stumble and fall. He witnessed their failure to meet the moral challenges before them, to wrongly trust their own consciences as sources of principled authority as opposed to their corrupted reflections of the dubious missions they were rewarded to pursue—their failure to put their souls ahead of their careers.

“Do not give decent, well-intentioned humans at the apex of large, hierarchical organizations instruments of mass destruction that may be wielded as solutions to narrow, parochial, egotistical, short-run problems, which challenge their perceived success or position of control,” Ellsberg pleads in the conclusion of his final published work. “These men are all too likely to discover, in such circumstances of duress, that the long-run strategic interests of their nation and humanity demand and compel their use of all instruments at their command.” 

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage at the United Nations last month, diplomats streamed for the exits. Three years after October 7, when much of the Western world rallied behind Israel in the wake of Hamas’ attack, the political ground has shifted.

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Some of the biggest changes are happening here in the US. Two years ago, Abbas Alawieh helped lead the Uncommitted movement, pressuring Democrats over Gaza. Now he’s running for Michigan state Senate, and Kamala Harris is calling him. Elsewhere in Michigan, AIPAC and its allies spent close to $30 million backing Abdul El-Sayed’s opponent in the Democratic Senate primary. El-Sayed won anyway.

For some voters, the prominence of Israel itself is striking.

“I don’t know why Israel has become the pivotal point,” said Mimi Price-Miletic, a  Democratic voter in Michigan. “There are so many issues in this country that we should be dealing with, and you’re worried about what’s happening, like, millions of miles away?”

And the divide crosses party lines. Younger Republicans are questioning US support for Israel, even as party leaders advance deeper defense cooperation. Meanwhile, AIPAC faces new challenges to its influence, as younger Jewish political groups, like J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace, offer sharply different visions for what should come next.

This week on Reveal, reporter Najib Aminy follows the new fault lines forming around the US–Israel relationship and asks: As the old political consensus is tested, who gets to shape what replaces it?

On Thursday, a group of men dressed like extras from Les Misérables erected a giant statue outside Elon Musk’s company town of Starbase, Texas: a 50-foot bronze rendition of the Titan Prometheus. Building a godlike figure in honor of the world’s richest man reportedly cost the sculptors, of the French outfit Atelier Missor, $1 million of their own funds.

The statue of Prometheus is finally finished.

It was cast in Paris, crossed the Atlantic, and was assembled at Starbase. It took us 100 days to go from nothing to this.

People of the West, we have lived through an era devoid of dreams, devoid of destiny.

But the time has come… pic.twitter.com/JkQbTGV1My

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) October 2, 2026

Atelier Missor, active since 2021, describes itself on X as a “classical foundry in Paris, on its way to building a new Rome.” Its founder, Missor Movahed Ghaleh Nouri, has claimed he was drawn to pursue classical sculpture after receiving a vision of Napoleon I while wandering the Place Vendôme in Paris. His staff wear identical tan suspenders, billowy shirts, and unkempt facial hair, and—per previous versions of their website—spent much of the first half of the 2020s producing bronze and clay busts of such figures as (of course) Napoleon, Nietzsche, and Jordan Peterson.

In a now-deleted mission statement, Mohaved appears to allude to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests as one of the reasons he started his foundry.

“I was shocked to see ignorant people tearing down statues,” he wrote. “These fools who weren’t even in the same league as those they were trying to destroy. These ungrateful people who had never done anything in their lives.”

Across their social media channels, the foundry now posts about bringing back the West and bemoans modern artistic sensibilities. “Make art so epic it will raise the birthrate,” they say. Nor have they forgotten their particular commitment to white, European manhood.

For one statue destroyed, we will craft ten more. https://t.co/SZN6ELrwfe

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) March 18, 2026

After first arriving in the United States last year with help from the Peter Thiel–linked 1517 venture capital fund, the men of Atelier Missor wasted no time ingratiating themselves with the American right. They welded an 11-foot bronze George Washington for Trump’s “Freedom 250” celebrations. (They also, judging by their posts, appear to have acquired cowboy hats.)

“You cannot just imagine a view of the world and impose it,” Mohaved reportedly said in June of 2025. “You have to submit to the dream that unites us—the dream of Western civilization.”

To that end, his foundry has spent the past year flirting hard with Elon Musk.

Dear @elonmusk

We want to build a statue of Prometheus in titanium and offer it to Starbase — a gift from the people, in gratitude for pushing humanity forward.

Let's make Starbase the most spectacular city, as it will be depicted as a true milestone in history books. pic.twitter.com/jtRnDjIi3j

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) June 18, 2025

But the statue—which now hoists its torch into the sky and teeters, plinthless, on the ground—is not on Starbase property. Nor is it made of titanium, as its sculptors initially planned. Instead, it sits by the side of a Texas road about ten miles away.

Nonetheless, the hollow, welded-together Prometheus went up overnight on Wednesday. Neither SpaceX nor Atelier Missor immediately responded to a request for comment.

Rewarding their months of desperate posting—and real, actual statue construction—Atelier Missor recieved curt recognition from their idol on October 1st.

“Nice work,” Elon posted.