Mother Jones

The so-called lame duck session of Congress after November’s midterm elections could be momentous for clean energy, as lawmakers are set to consider a long-sought bipartisan deal to speed permitting of large energy and infrastructure projects.

Clean energy advocates and policy experts view the bill as a rare opportunity to deal with a major clean energy roadblock—long queues for interconnection to the grid. But division emerged immediately among environmental advocates, with some arguing the measure would weaken state and tribal government authority and allow pipelines and other fossil fuel projects to take advantage of a streamlined process.

This tension is not unusual. A version of it happened during debate over what would become the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 under President Joe Biden.

“This bill is a compromise. We believe it is a compromise that will result in a brighter, cleaner, more affordable future.”

“These policy bills have to get 60 Senate votes, so they have to be bipartisan, and so necessarily you’re going to be in a situation [in which there are] things that members like and things they don’t like,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a consulting firm that specializes in federal energy issues. The 60-vote threshold in the Senate is the number needed to overcome either party’s ability to block legislation with a filibuster.

Gramlich considers the bill a big step forward for renewable energy because of technology-neutral provisions that would “enable many tens of gigawatts of clean energy to be connected that otherwise are unable to develop,” he said.

Also supporting the bill is Pete Wyckoff, vice president of policy for Evergreen Action, an environmental advocacy group. He also played a key role in developing the Inflation Reduction Act when he worked for Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn).

“America can’t confront the climate crisis and meet growing energy demand unless we can build clean energy faster—and that means fixing how we permit it,” Wyckoff said in a statement.

An Evergreen spokeswoman specified that Wyckoff and the organization support the parts of the bill that would ease construction of interstate power lines and clean energy projects, but are still reviewing the bill as a whole.

Some of the Senate’s most vocal members on climate change co-wrote the measure. “If we can pass this bill, we will flood the grid with clean, affordable energy and make data centers start paying their fair share,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement. “Like all major pieces of bipartisan legislation, this bill is a compromise. We believe it is a compromise that will result in a brighter, cleaner, more affordable future.”

Whitehouse and the bill’s other co-authors are calling it the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026.

Committee Chair Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), maintained that the bill would continue to protect land, water and wildlife while transforming the nation’s ability to fuel future growth. “For far too long, our broken and outdated federal environmental review and permitting processes have stood in the way of energy reliability, secure jobs, modern infrastructure, and economic growth,” Capito said in a statement. 

After months of working to hammer out their permitting compromise, Capito, Whitehouse and their partners on the deal—Senate Energy Committee leaders Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.)—made clear they had run out of time to get the package to a vote before the midterm election.

That kicks the legislation to the final weeks of the 119th Congress, and possibly—depending on the November results—the last session of unified Republican control.

This creates some political peril for the package, clean energy lobbyist Chris Moyer, founder of Echo Communications Advisors, pointed out in a newsletter to his clients. “The question for the lame duck, especially with House Democrats, is whether we experience a repeat of the familiar cycle,” Moyer wrote. “The party on the verge of taking power holds out until the new Congress to get a ‘better’ bill.”

Moyer noted that Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, expressed exactly this sentiment in a post on X. “We can’t throw states, tribes, impacted communities, and threatened and endangered wildlife under the bus,” said Huffman, who pledged to work for a better bill in the next Congress.

But history has shown lame-duck sessions can forge compromises that wouldn’t be possible in regular sessions of Congress, in part because departing members will not face repercussions from voters. Among the historic environmental measures that passed Congress during lame-duck sessions were the Superfund toxic waste clean-up bill in 1980 and the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970.

The most significant challenge the legislation faces may be securing enough Democratic votes in the Senate in the face of opposition from some environmentalists. Even before the text of the legislation was released, the Western Environmental Law Center released a statement labeling the deal a “five-alarm fire” that would allow artificial intelligence data centers and energy infrastructure to proliferate.

“We think if you can reform that process, if you can provide a level playing field, the economics of clean energy will win out”

Among the changes the legislation would make is limiting state and tribal officials from using their authority under the Clean Water Act to address issues unrelated to direct water pollution; the Trump administration proposed a similar regulatory change earlier this year. 

“The permitting deal is a betrayal of public lands, water and wildlife, and environmental justice values that Westerners depend on for clean air and water, places to hike, hunt, and fish, and the inestimable sense of freedom the West provides us all,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the center.

At the unveiling of the legislation, Heinrich pointed to a provision in the bill that would require AI data centers to fully pay for grid upgrades made to serve them, even as they continue to bear their share of the costs of the rest of the power grid. If passed, it would be the first act of Congress to protect consumers from paying an unfair burden of the energy costs of data center proliferation.

By far, the most consequential provisions in the legislation for clean energy and climate change are those to speed up the process of siting transmission projects and getting clean energy on the grid. The 550-mile SunZia Wind and Transmission project, which came online this year between New Mexico and Arizona, took nearly 18 years to make its way through the permitting process. At that pace, clean energy advocates argue it will be nearly impossible for solar and wind power, as well as emerging low-carbon technologies like enhanced geothermal, to significantly reduce the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels.

New modeling by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, or C2ES, and Greenline Insights indicated that the bill’s reforms would produce enough new clean energy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 9 percent in the four regional power grids they studied. The analysis showed that nationwide, the reforms could also reduce cumulative grid costs by $125 billion and residential electricity bills by $19 billion between 2026 and 2040.

“We think if you can reform that process, if you can provide a level playing field, the economics of clean energy will win out,” said Nat Keohane, president of C2ES. “We’re on the cusp of a moment I think that we and many others have been working toward for years.”

A velvety butterfly called the coastal green hairstreak once peppered the fog-capped hills of San Francisco. But then the city began to build out, and new structures fractured the jewel-toned insect’s native range. The butterflies were scattered into isolated populations, some only a few blocks apart—an astronomical distance for a creature that, over its lifetime, can venture only a few hundred feet or so from the native shrubs it depends on.

In 2007, when the species was nearly gone from San Francisco, a local nonprofit got to work on a simple solution: Create a butterfly highway between some of the scattered populations by adding more of the insect’s host plants. “We planted microhabitats wherever we could get—a swath of a triangle or a long stairway edge,” says Amber Mahlberg, executive director of Nature in the City, the organization leading the project.

It worked. Butterflies from previously isolated populations followed the breadcrumb trail and interbred, boosting their genetic diversity and odds of long-term survival.

Microhabitats like these are good for wildlife like butterflies, and they benefit humans, too: Mounting research shows that small green spaces could improve the health of people who live nearby. “Americans tend to think about [the] nature benefit from the great outdoors, our national parks,” says Kathleen Wolf, a University of Washington social scientist focused on urban greening. However, for both humans and other animals, ease of access tends to trump grandiosity. Over the past decade, scientists have found that when tiny green spaces are scattered across cities, their cumulative effects are greater than the sum of their parts.

Mini-parks can give migrating birds passing through urban areas a place to rest and feed, says Frank La Sorte, a Yale scientist who studies avian ecology and behavior. In a 2023 study, La Sorte found that cities studded with small parks have a greater number of bird species than those with just a few large parks.

As for human benefits, a 2026 study determined that Americans with easier access to parks had lower rates of obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Advocates for mini–green spaces pointed to such correlations in their push for changes in the federal rules for parks funding, though many of the new grants approved in the name of environmental justice were promptly eliminated by the Trump administration, which dismissed them as “DEI.”

Federal and state governments have long prioritized bigger parks, says Will Klein, research director at the nonprofit Trust for Public Land. That can make it tricky to get the necessary funding to build small green spaces in park deserts. So the group developed a new metric to assess a park’s value: the “10-minute walk.”

The idea is that everyone in US cities should be able to stroll from their home to a public green space in 10 minutes or less—which the group estimates is currently not the case for one-third of Americans. More than 300 mayors have embraced the idea, and now almost every major US city has incorporated the “10-minute walk” into its planning criteria, Klein says.

As part of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Congress approved more than $1 billion for urban greening. “All sorts of organizations lined up, scrambled, put in grant proposals, were awarded funds, and were beginning to do the projects,” Wolf recalls.

“The thing with urban parks is that they’re not as isolated as they might appear.”

Just across the bay from San Francisco, home of the successful butterfly highway, the community of North Richmond secured some of those much-needed dollars from another IRA program. During my recent visit, I could see why the community so desperately needed the funds. Amid a dense mix of residential and industrial properties, there were just a few public outdoor spaces. I saw two of them; one was a sports field and the other was called Landfill Loop, a former dump that, as far as I could tell from the prints in the dirt, isn’t frequented by anyone but raccoons.

In December 2024, through the IRA’s Community Change Grants program, North Richmond was promised $19 million to establish new green spaces, among other things, but the vast majority of that money never arrived. North Richmond, along with more than 100 other communities across the country, was left in the lurch.

In July, a judge ordered the Trump administration to pay out the grants, but the funding remains on hold while the administration appeals the ruling. Now, the work of micropark building often falls to nonprofits and volunteers.

That’s not so bad in high-income zip codes—like the ones the green hairstreaks needed to cross—where private resources for neighborhood improvement are often ample. It’s much harder in places like North Richmond, which is ironic, because these poorer communities tend to have plenty of neglected patches that would make for perfect tiny parks. Green spaces can slot into almost any oddly shaped, leftover parcel that no one knows what to do with. As ecologist La Sorte put it, “The thing with urban parks is that they’re not as isolated as they might appear.”

It could be the strip of dirt by some train tracks or a gravel-filled schoolyard or sometimes even guerrilla gardening on abandoned lots—a kind of living patchwork with the potential to transform an entire neighborhood.

A federal immigration agent shot a man in the Bronx on Thursday afternoon, the latest of nearly two dozen such shootings in the past two years. The shooting took place around 4:00 p.m. local time; the victim is conscious and in treatment at an area hospital, according to the New York Police Department. A statement by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani indicated that the man had a five-year-old child in his car.

This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds. We believe the child was physically unharmed.

This is an…

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) October 8, 2026

“This is an unconscionable and incredibly serious situation,” Mamdani said, adding that he has asked to call President Donald Trump, and intends to demand that ICE leave the city of New York. “I will not stand by while ICE agents terrorize our communities,” he added.

Since Trump returned to office, federal agents have shot at more than 21 people as part of the administration’s immigration crackdown, killing six of them. Like today’s shooting, almost all of these cases involved officers firing on someone while they were inside a vehicle.

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed their role in the shooting in a social media post Thursday night that asserted that the victim was a gang member with a criminal record—and blamed “sanctuary politicians” for their own officers shooting someone.

“When dangerous illegal aliens are released back onto the streets by radical sanctuary politicians, our officers are forced to make arrests at large in the community in unpredictable and dangerous environments,” the department posted on X.

Two days before the shooting, as CNN reported, ICE agents nationwide were told to increase arrests by 1,000 more people daily.

By Thursday evening, a crowd of protesters had gathered at the scene, according to local outlet the City Reporter. The man’s car was still smashed in the street.

This is a developing story and may be updated.

“We tamed electricity, invented the light bulb, developed the airplane, harnessed the atom, unleashed the power of personal computers, created the Internet, pioneered superintelligence, and invented almost everything else of genius and great importance anywhere in the world,” President Donald Trump boasted on Thursday. “We will always be on top. There is nobody that can compete with us.” 

The remark came from the White House’s “Science: A New Golden Age” summit, an initiative by the Trump administration to accelerate American scientific research and development with artificial intelligence technology. 

Trump announced that a group of companies—including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Palantir, and Amazon—have committed over $2.4 billion to the Genesis Mission, which advertises itself as uniting Department of Energy labs with “industry, academia, and more to harness AI for breakthroughs in energy dominance, discovery science, and national security.”

The additional investment into the Genesis Mission, which the president launched in a November 2025 executive order, comes as his administration continues to eliminate government funding for critical scientific research, among them, as my colleagues have extensively reported, studies into chronic diseases and climate change. 

Trump also awarded several leaders of those tech companies with the National Medal of Science: Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and semiconductor firm Advanced Micro Devices’ CEO Lisa Su. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Dell CEO Michael Dell were given the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

As CNBC pointed out on Wednesday, each of the medal recipients has contributed financially to Trump or Republican causes. Musk was Trump’s biggest financial supporter, at nearly $300 million, in his 2024 presidential campaign. Nvidia’s Huang donated to help fund the White House ballroom and gave $1 million for Trump’s presidential inauguration ceremony. Microsoft, under Nadella, also contributed $1 million to the inauguration. Dell is a longtime Trump donor who provided $6.25 billion for “Trump Accounts”—$250 seed contributions for 25 million children.

And according to his most recent financial disclosures from September, Trump bought or sold shares in Nvidia, Microsoft, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Tesla, Advanced Micro Devices, and Dell.

Trump, in other words, is replacing established research institutions with the for-profit corporations who have curried favor with him. Whether AI will be able to replace millions of dollars in lost federal research funding at bulwarks like the National Institutes of Health is less clear.

When Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign announced that Barack Obama would join him on the campaign trail later this month, media outlets and prominent online voices quickly sounded the alarm—the Michigan Senate candidate, it turned out, had voiced strong criticisms of the former president. 

On Wednesday, CNN traced El-Sayed’s comments from the time of Obama’s 2012 reelection through the 2020 presidential campaign, zeroing in on a 2012 HuffPost piece where El-Sayed wrote that the former president did not deliver on the promise of “hope and substantial change” during his first term but instead “perpetuated war, violated our civil liberties, deported more people from our shores than any other president before him.” “The list of his failures,” El-Sayed wrote, “goes on.” 

It’s not that people are calling El-Sayed’s criticisms wrong. They’re pointing out that they exist.

NEW: Footage and interviews reviewed by CNN repeatedly show Abdul El-Sayed — who is set to campaign with Barack Obama — calling Obama’s presidency a failure and that the country was no better off after eight years of his presidency. https://t.co/saLMgrldVY

— Andrew Kaczynski (@KFILE) October 7, 2026

In a statement to CNN, El-Sayed praised Obama: “He changed what was possible for someone like me, with a name like mine.” 

“Despite all he did, there remains so much left to do,” he added. “That’s where the next generation, inspired by him and his leadership, picks up.”

The New York Post extended the supposed concerns to other Democrats, pointing again to El-Sayed campaigning with former Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday, despite El-Sayed publicly endorsing the Uncommitted movement in 2024, supporting calls for Democrats to withhold their primary votes from Joe Biden in protest of US military aid to Israel in its ongoing genocide in Gaza. While the movement declined to endorse Harris ahead of the national election—instead urging supporters to “vote against” Trump—El-Sayed actually did endorse her, in a marked break.

El-Sayed, the implication runs, is not such a good friend to his fellow Democrats after all. But intense critiques of Obama are something he has in common with both wings of his party. Countless Democrats and progressives have previously criticized Obama, in private and in public, from the former president’s left and right flanks, and supported him afterward (or, for some of those who actually held national office at the time, during). In party politics, done right, political alliances cut across ideological and policy disagreements. That’s just strategic campaigning—which Obama still plans to do alongside El-Sayed in October.

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

More fire, more ash, more crime, more death. And a globally important ecosystem driven ever more rapidly towards a point of no return. That is the prospect for the Amazon rainforest for at least the next four years if Flávio Bolsonaro holds on to the lead he established this week in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election.

This appears to be of far more concern to the outside world than to voters in Latin America’s biggest, richest, and most biodiverse nation.

The far-right son of the former president and jailed coup-monger Jair Bolsonaro won 47 percent of the vote, putting him in pole position before the October 25 runoff with the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was backed by 44.2 percent.

The result is an unnerving jolt to climate and nature campaigners. Taken out of context, this appears to be a vote against the forest. The current administration of Lula (as the veteran Brazilian president is best known) has reduced deforestation in the Amazon by almost 50 percent.

The wrong outcome would imperil the Amazon, along with all of Brazil’s biomes, its traditional peoples, and the stability of the global climate.

But that success secured little noticeable electoral traction for either Lula or pro-forest candidates in other polls held the same day. The former environment minister Marina Silva lost a bid for the senate and Joenia Wapichana, a former head of Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, Funai, failed to win a seat in the nation’s congress. Out of 57 Indigenous candidates, only two won.

Flávio Bolsonaro is the heir to the political legacy of his father, Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain whose four years in power resulted in a 59.5 percent increase in Amazon deforestation, roughly equivalent to destroying 2 billion trees.

If he wins, Bolsonaro has promised to free his father, who was imprisoned for plotting a military coup and attempting to annihilate democracy in Brazil. He has said that his father could have any position he wants in his administration.

Flávio Bolsonaro has shown that he will be just as willing as his father to dismantle protections for climate and nature and allow illegal miners, loggers, and land grabbers to invade Indigenous territories. As a lawmaker, he backed a 2019 bill to eliminate requirements for landowners in the Amazon to conserve a proportion of native vegetation. In his manifesto, he completely ignored the climate crisis. And he has courted support from some of the most predatory landowners in the rainforest.

An aerial shot of an expanse of water in the Amazon rainforest.Jens BüTtner/dpa/ZUMA

He is also part of a movement—Bolsonarism—that is geared towards maximizing profits for extractive industries regardless of the environmental cost. Take its victorious candidate for the Amazonian state of Pará, Daniel Santos, who was fined $275,000 for deforestating 690 acres of his land without authorization and is now promising to waive such penalties. As a result of Sunday’s election, Bolsonarists now control seven of the nine states in the Brazilian Amazon, and could win an eighth in the runoffs.

Bolsonarist influence in the legislature, which is dominated by agribusiness interests, is also growing. Flávio’s brother, Carlos, and mother-in-law, Michelle, were elected to the senate, while an uncle and brother won seats in the lower house of deputies.

Will Brazil be the next domino to fall to Trumpism and its bonfire approach to nature?

Even before the election, the National Congress had been pushing hard to weaken environmental protections. Now it will be almost impossible to stop, particularly given the current chaos in the supreme court, which has been a partial check on untrammelled expansion by miners, ranchers, and monoculturalists. Against these forces, Lula would struggle to govern even if he wins the runoff.

As a result, it is not just the Amazon that is in peril, but all of Brazil’s biomes, its traditional peoples, and the stability of the global climate. The question now is why voters paid so little heed to these concerns.

That inquest is already under way. Many focus on the influence of social media, which has been used far more effectively by the far right. During the Bolsonaro administration, his sons were part of the “hate cabinet” that spread fear and disinformation via WhatsApp groups and other online channels—Bolsonaro’s second son, Carlos, was indicted by federal police for leading the group. Environmentalists were often the target.

Another factor is the expansion of US-style Pentecostalism, which is steadily supplanting Catholicism across Brazil, particularly in the Amazon. The political and environmental consequences of that religious shift can be seen by comparing the pro-nature treatise of the past two popes with the sermons of many evangelical preachers who encourage followers to seek wealth today as much as, if not more, than following moral creeds to ensure a good afterlife.

Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gives a statement to the press after the results of the first round of the 2026 elections.Rodilei Morais/Fotoarena/ ZUMA

Lula, 80, has been slow to adapt. Although he is arguably the most iconic and successful Latin American politician of the 21st century, his messaging seems less attuned to the people than it was in his heyday. The Workers party has struggled in an era of weaker unions and in some ways been the victim of its own success—with education and social policies that raised millions out of poverty and created greater expectations for consumption and entrepreneurism; and huge subsidies to farmers, who now support the right wing because they chafe at environmental limits.

Tied into those explanations are the geopolitics of the climate and nature crisis, which is exacerbating great power rivalry between the US and China and amplifying extreme ideologies as much as extreme weather. In this light, the Brazil election is just the latest in a broader pattern of the far right taking control to expand extractivism despite growing evidence that the capitalist economy is breaking planetary boundaries.

In the past two years, Donald Trump has ripped apart environmental regulations in the US and treated the rest of the Americas as his sphere of influence. Argentina was already onboard. Venezuela has been invaded for its resources, while in Colombia, Peru, and Chile there has been a sharp shift to the right.

Will Brazil be the next domino to fall to Trumpism and its bonfire approach to nature? The Bolsonaro family certainly hope so. Jair went so far as to salute the US flag. His son Eduardo urged the US to apply tariffs on Brazilian people to “punish” the government for imprisoning his father. The Brazilian intelligence agency has warned that the US was trying to interfere in the election.

That election isn’t over yet. Lula stands a small chance if he can win over the many millions of voters who chose not to mark their ballots for either candidate. But the odds are stacked against him. Most of the eliminated candidates were on the right so their supporters are more likely to switch to Bolsonaro. No first round leader has ever failed to win the runoff of a Brazilian presidential election.

Voters, of course, are allowed to change their minds. Either on October 25 or, constitutionally, in four years’ time. But for how much longer will that be possible? If Bolsonaro wins, it won’t just be Lula that is finished, it could also be the Amazon and democracy itself.

Tim Murphy joins Garrison Hayes to break down the bipartisan revolt against data centers.

America is hopelessly divided along party lines. That’s a stubborn fact, we’re told, and the polling bears it out: Democrats dislike Republicans and Republicans dislike Democrats, in almost precisely the same proportions.

But every election produces surprising coalitions that defy entrenched partisanship. In these midterms, left and right have found something so commonly loathed that politicians across the country are flip-flopping in real time.

Mother Jones has been tracking the backlash to data centers on the ground long before the water-guzzling behemoths became the country’s bête noire. The AI boom, with its insatiable need for computing, has unleashed a power grab by tech billionaires. “Data centers have replaced megayachts as the preferred theater of oligarchic status signaling,” national correspondent Tim Murphy wrote in his big Mother Jones investigation into hyperscale data centers and the communities they land on. “Oligarchy is now more than an idea; it is a place.”

On today’s episode of Stress Test, Tim joins host Garrison Hayes to discuss how data centers—and other AI-boom technologies, like Flock cameras—have upended political fortunes and ripped up the partisan playbook ahead of November’s vote.

“Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it.”

“It’s maybe the single most toxic issue in the midterms this side of, you know, gas prices,” Tim tells Garrison. “It’s like a three-to-one opposition among voters. Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it.”

Take Texas. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott promoted the state as a place where companies could build almost anything. Then rural and suburban communities got the facilities, and the gas plants that power them, in their backyards, along with strained water supplies, pollution, and rising utility bills. “People are complaining about what they have to live next to,” Tim says. “And it just builds and builds and builds.” Under pressure (and running for reelection), Abbott made a stunning reversal, announcing steps that amount to a moratorium. And he’s not the only one feeling the heat.

So what changed? Data centers used to be half the size of an Amazon warehouse; now they’re measured in “multiples of Manhattan,” says Tim, who explains how we got here and what to expect next. He heads back to Texas in the coming weeks, and we’ll follow what he learns right up to Election Day.

For more, read Tim Murphy’s road trip through the towns living in the shadow of the AI boom: “How the American Oligarchy Went Hyperscale,” from our May+June issue.

Subscribe to Stress Test at youtube.com/motherjones, and read the full transcript bellow.

This transcript was generated with automated tools and may contain errors.

Garrison Hayes: Hello, hello, everyone. This is Stress Test from Mother Jones. I’m Garrison Hayes. Welcome to the second episode of this show. If you didn’t catch the first episode, I really think you should go back and listen to it. It was me and David Corn and our colleague Ari Berman, where we talked a little bit about this upcoming election and all of the Trump administration’s efforts to subvert the election, to strike fear into your heart. But this is the thing: If you go back and watch it—or listen—I actually think that we came away from it, at least I did, little less stressed than going into it. We were really able to pull it apart, the efforts that they are making and where they are failing.

It’s a really, really good, informative listen. So make sure you go back and listen to that. It’s just right behind this one in the feed, or you can go check it out on YouTube. Maybe you’re on YouTube, youtube.com/motherjones.

Okay, I am really excited to get into today’s conversation because there are these strange moments in the American political arena where oddly, people across both the left and the right, across the political spectrum, come together in some weird, kind of bizarro-world way. And we’re talking about exactly one of those topics today with data centers and Flock cameras and AI. And so today I am joined by my colleague, Tim Murphy. Tim is a national correspondent here at Mother Jones. I’m so excited to be talking to you, Tim. Thanks for being here.

Tim Murphy: Hey, thanks for having me. This is great.

GH: Tim, I have to tell you, whenever I read your reporting, which is always so smart and so in-depth, I always, like, laugh a little bit. And I don’t know if that’s a bad read, but there’s always, like, a little bit of humor kind of infused into the really often kind of grim things that you cover. You bring a really fresh perspective. Am I misreading that? Are you trying to be funny?

TM: A hundred percent. My entire life I’ve just wanted to be taken seriously, Garrison.

GH: [Laughs.]

TM: No, you know, I mean, I like to try and kind of keep things a little entertaining, you know, when the story kind of calls for it.

GH: I love that. Okay, so we’re bringing you on to talk about the rare bipartisan voter issue that we are seeing this election cycle, specifically data centers. But before we kind of dig into that, I feel like it’s important that we get a better idea, not only of, like, terms, but the way it’s kind of related to the news in general. We’ll get to all of that, but before we get to that, I’d love to hear, like, what’s stressing you out—something that we’re asking all of our guests.

TM: Well, I think probably germane to the topic at hand, I just looked at the calendar ’cause I was planning out, you know, what I have to do over the next, turns out, like, five weeks and realized that there’s absolutely no way that I’m gonna get to every single thing that I need to file. I always think of the election as God’s deadline. Like, there’s no fudging it. Anything that you didn’t finish before the election immediately becomes irrelevant, and so you just have to get it done. So I’m kind of mapping out my caffeine intake and just trying to kinda get through it.

GH: Amazing. Amazing. I mean, you could always do the postelection “Stop the Steal” effort that we saw in 2020. Okay, let’s dig into—

TM: Right, if Mike Pence has the courage.

GH: Yeah, right. Exact. Let’s dig into this. Okay, but everyone’s kind of talking about and certainly hating on data centers right now. But as I understand it, Tim, it wasn’t always this way. What have you seen on the ground and how things have shifted over the last year or so?

TM: It’s one of the more kind of stunning about-faces that I’ve seen in national politics. You know, I was in Texas last year and last summer, and I actually went to the site of one of the largest data centers being built in the world. It’s Sam Altman and Larry Ellison’s Stargate complex in Abilene. This was a project that passed, that was created almost, like, virtually unnoticed when it was first kind of developed. You know, I went and I went back and looked at, like, the community meeting, the various government agencies that approved this thing. Basically nobody showed up. Very little debate about this, and it just kind of went into play. And then Donald Trump talked about it at the White House with Sam Altman and Larry Ellison, and it started to blow up into a bigger thing.

But even as recently as last summer, this was an issue that not even the people talking the loudest about oligarchs, and tech oligarchs specifically, were necessarily, like, beating the drum about. This was something that in fact data center supporters were playing offense on. You had, you know, in the state of Texas, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, proudly an advocate for making Texas the epicenter of the data center boom. You know, people were talking about this as, like, this massive job creation construction strategy. It was kind of the getting in early on the future by—you know, flash forward to where we are now, and I’d say it’s maybe the single most toxic issue in the midterms, like, this side of, you know, gas prices.

It’s like a 3-to-1 opposition among voters. Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it. And candidates who were for them are hastily beating a retreat, like Greg Abbott, and people who didn’t stake out that position are throwing millions of dollars into kind of brutal attack ads on the subject.

GH: What do you think it is that has led to that kind of 180, that big switch? I guess the more specific question is: What seems to be the issue here for voters that’s turning them against data centers?

TM: One of the things with data centers is there’s so many ways that it can kind of reach you, that it can connect to your life. And so I think different people are engaging with it in different ways. Certainly over the last year and a half, AI oligarchs, and data centers as their No. 1 project, have become kind of like one of the main kind of features of the Trump administration. And so a lot of people are just straight up negatively polarized against those.

But if you’re living in a lot of states, you know, the rising utility costs are often associated with data centers. The pollution effects are associated with data centers. A lot of these are being built in rural and exurban areas where people do not expect to have, like, an Air Force engine and a diesel turbine as their neighbors. And they’re really, really, really fired up about that.

These projects are invariably kind of done kind of on the sly. They’re sort of pushed through anonymously. People don’t really know who they’re dealing with. And so it sort of brings all these different kind of things, from affordability to straight-up NIMBY complaints to political distrust, and gives kind of something for everyone. And what they see on the political side is that a lot of people who were supposed to sort of have their back and be their advocate let this happen or openly kind of brought it to pass.

GH: One of the really interesting things about your reporting is that you’ve actually seen data centers—like, a data center—in person. You’ve actually visited one. Many people, I imagine, haven’t been inside of one of these, kind of, these hyperscaler facilities. And so can you tell us what do they look like on the inside? What is it like being inside of one?

TM: I’ve not—I should clarify, I’ve not been inside. I’ve been outside, and like an increasing number of Americans, I’ve been able to kind of go right up to one and just hear what it sounds like. And you know, it really does, it sounds like an aircraft engine. I mean, if you go to one of these big hyperscale sites—so for instance, I went and, you know, drove down a cul-de-sac in Memphis, Tennessee, to see Colossus II, which is one of Elon Musk’s xAI, you know, Grok-powering engines. It’s burning gas on what they say are temporary generators. It’s, you know, pissing off a lot of neighbors, and it’s, you know, officially, like, a US Army contractor.

So these things, I mean, they’re enormous. And here’s, like, one of the main things that’s driving this shift, I think, when we talk about this 180: It’s that 10 years ago, five years ago, the data centers that they were building were, like, maybe half the size of an Amazon warehouse or something like that. They were kind of in the terrestrial building space. Now they’re measuring them out in, like, you know, multiples of Manhattan. Like, these are—they’re absolutely enormous.

And, you know, they’re not just many, many, many, many football fields, but they all come with natural gas power plants, you know, to go with them. They come with maybe solar power plants to go with them, which has also, you know, driven a little bit of unrest in some areas. You know, they require transmission lines, they require kind of a whole rebooting of everything, you know, depending on where you live. And so they’re incredibly intrusive spaces. It’s no longer just your kind of casual neighborhood server farm.

GH: Hmm. Interesting. I want to come back to what you were talking about with Texas. You mentioned Gov. Greg Abbott and his kind of big switch on this. Can you say a little bit more about that? But then also talk about some of the other politicians and efforts happening in the state of Texas.

TM: Yeah, I mean, Texas is a good way of looking at it because for a very long time the pitch for Texas to the rest of the world, and particularly to corporate America, has been that you can come here and build anything and do anything. And we basically don’t care—like, give us some revenues, let us, you know, have a big press conference about it. But you can do carte blanche. They lured, you know, Elon Musk to Texas and basically let him make his own town. Data centers were one feature of that.

So, like, in the Texas Panhandle outside of Amarillo, there’s something called Project Matador, which purports to be one of the world’s largest data centers. It’s complete with, like, a nuclear reactor. They’re gonna call the—final data center is, like, the Donald J. Trump Center for Intelligence or something like that. It’s—the company is called Fermi USA, and one of the guys leading it is Rick Perry. Like, all these things are things that should not go together, but in Texas, they just kind of can, and they’re gonna build this.

You know, we talked about the Stargate project in Abilene. You can go to, like, a town, you know, outside of Dallas, and there’s just, like, seven new data centers outside of town. So it was the face of this giant, giant building boom. And it’s this building boom that, like, has very few parallels in modern history. It’s almost, like, up there, you know, you have to go back to the railroads of the 19th century to find this much investment in a private business, in a private enterprise.

So Texas was the face of this. But you’re doing all this development in rural areas. You’re taking people’s water, you’re taking people’s power, or you’re just building your own, you know, fossil fuel–polluting power plant in their backyard. And you start to get this backlash. People are complaining about what they have to live next to. People are complaining about what’s happening to their water, to their utility bills, and it just builds and builds and builds. And recently Abbott announced a series of steps, like, basically a moratorium, until we can figure out what’s going on. It’s kind of a stunning thing to see from somebody like Greg Abbott, who’s made that his entire M.O.

GH: Yeah, yeah. So now Greg Abbott, governor of Texas, is on the same kind of political, you know, march as the governor of, let’s say, New York or Massachusetts, who are also, you know, leading these moratoriums.

TM: Yeah, it’s that kind of Kathy Hochul–Greg Abbott policy consensus we’ve always talked about.

GH: The one that we’ve always been going for. My question is, like, who is this appealing to? I mean, obviously we know that folks across the political spectrum are against data centers, but are voters actually responding to, say, a Greg Abbott moratorium in a positive way?

TM: Yeah, the jury’s still out. You know, Abbott is in a really surprisingly close race with the Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who has been pushing data centers really hard. I mean, she went out to Project Matador in Amarillo and walked the grounds that it’s going to be on. She went out, you know, to these Dallas suburbs and talked to the people who were organizing against it and really, I think, probably forced Abbott’s hand on this issue, and he’s very belatedly trying to kind of co-opt it and salvage, you know, a five-point win or whatever.

So I think there’s definitely a lot of evidence that it’s working in ways that maybe conventional, like, anti-corporate, anti-billionaire, even anti-tech attacks aren’t working. One of the races that I’ve been looking at, that’s, like, kind of a really funny example of this, is in Ohio. Marcy Kaptur, the Democratic congresswoman who was kind of miraculously held on during the Trump era, she’s in a rematch with the same guy she ran against in 2025. For is former state Rep. Derek Merrin. And in 2024, all the attacks are like, Dirty Derek is in the hands of, you know, big corporate America or whatever, and she won by about 2,300 votes. This year, running against the exact same guy, every single ad is about Data Center Derek. It’s about Dirty Derek, Data Center Derek, and how he sold out Ohioans for $2 billion of incentives for building data centers.

Even when you’re facing the same candidate that you beat last time, it’s a radically new message because data centers have come on and become this huge issue.

GH: Okay, so Dirty Derek—we’re talking about big money and the oligarchs and the folks who are funneling money into their big project with data centers and all of the people who are against it. But we know there’s one person who really marches to the beat of their own drum, for better or for worse. There’s one person who is maintaining that he loves this widely unpopular technology, and that’s President Donald Trump. He called data center opponents backwards and poor, which is a choice. And so Tim, I want you to listen to what he has to say about Flock cameras here.

[Clip plays.]

What do you make of that reaction from the president?

TM: I think he’s sort of starting to slip a little bit in, you know, his finger on the pulse of the American electorate, and Flock cameras are a good example of this in the same way that I think his general approach to the data centers has been. You know, there might be an environment in which there’s a huge anti-crime panic like we’ve had in a few recent election cycles, where suddenly this thing that a lot of police departments are adopting becomes maybe more favorable terrain. But right now people hate Flock cameras, and I think they hate them for some of the related reasons to data centers, right? I mean, it’s kind of this AI-powered, all-seeing thing that we don’t really trust the people who are in charge of it. You know, it seems like it’s often just being deployed as a way of, like, surveilling cops, ex-wives, and things like that.

And one of the things that you’ve seen in a lot of races around the country is candidates literally taking aim at Flock cameras. So, like, there’s a guy, Seth Bodnar, who’s an independent candidate for Senate in Montana, kind of the de facto Democrat, even though there’s a Democrat in the race. And he literally just takes a gun and blows up a Flock camera as a way of signifying, like, well, one, that he’s a gun owner. But two, I’m not gonna have it with this kind of government surveillance state. So Flock cameras have really become such a—in part because they are so pervasive, because they’re kind of everywhere—you know, they’ve become this thing that, you know, people can kind of use as a symbol of what they’re against.

GH: Yeah, you know, we were saying Flock cameras. I think people understand that to mean, like, these kind of surveillance cameras that are often used by local governments. But is there a tidier definition that we should kind of understand Flock to mean? Like, what is a Flock camera?

TM: Yeah, what makes it different from, like, the camera outside your bodega or subway station or whatever is that it’s all tied into a vast national network, and that anybody who has access to this thing can just look up anything happening in this kind of all-seeing eye. I mean, it’s not literally everywhere, but that’s the kind of crux of it. It’s the kind of—it’s what the security camera network looks like in the movie.

And so you’ve seen a lot of pushback. And again, this is something that in a place with sometimes libertarian leanings like Montana, like Texas, where James Talarico has talked a lot about Flock cameras, it’s something that’s a way to kind of—it’s kind of a—not necessarily a crossover issue, but it’s an issue that is not strictly partisan, that people in kind of whatever place on the political spectrum can feel the same way about.

GH: And we’ve been talking a lot about Texas specifically. But to zoom out a bit, is this an issue that is bigger than just that one state?

TM: Yeah, I think so. And I think this is, like, the type of thing that you’re gonna see more and more people talk about because it is such a potent symbol. Because this is a way of connecting, you know, how people feel, you know, to some extent how people feel about policing, but also how people feel about, you know, tech and government. And at a moment where there is this conversation about how much power is being, you know, accumulated in the hands of a few people in government, Flock cameras are kind of a way of really drilling down on that and picking a villain.

GH: Yeah, if I were to kind of maybe give my take here, I think that Flock cameras and data centers are both a part of this kind of anti-establishment, you know, instinct that’s in the American public right now in the electorate. You know, one, it feels as though the United States government and corporations are more or less one and the same, you know, corporate interests. And so people are certainly bucking against the corporate interests and in turn bucking against, you know, our government establishment. That’s my take. Is that the sense you’re getting when you report on this from the ground.

TM: Yeah, and I mean, I think—and you see that in these campaigns, right? Like, the villains have shifted. You know, to take on Data Center Derek for a second, you know, two years ago it was, like, the corporate boardroom kind of rich dudes, and now he’s depicted as a puppet, and it’s, like, a guy in a gray hoodie like Sam Altman holding one thing, and it’s a guy in kind of, like, a black shirt like Mark Zuckerberg, you know, holding the other end of the puppet. I mean, Trump has deliberately kind of fused the highest echelons of Silicon Valley with his administration.

And so people, I think, rightly see kind of pervasive surveillance tech as kind of connected to this broader, unchecked corporate and government power. And I think, you know, there’s like—we’re at a real kind of nadir of trust in politics, like, at the moment, and that’s driven a lot—I think that’s probably driven Trump’s success in a lot of ways, is a bottoming out of trust. But now that’s kind of bottomed out even further, and Trump is sort of one of the people that people distrust even more so. It’s—the corporations he’s allied with are things that people trust. And so, you know, I think people maybe aren’t as worried about the security—the surveillance state maybe when they feel a little bit more trustworthy about the system. But right now people are just done.

GH: Bottomed out even further is so hard to believe. But here we are. So I want to ask about what’s being built down there at the bottom. It feels like the anti–data center coalition could be a new coalition. Should we be stressed out about this coalition? And what do you think this kind of coalition may build?

TM: It’s tough to say. I mean, right now we’re at a moment where just no one has an incentive to take the data center side in public. Even if you are kind of looking at it and saying, well, you know, we gotta build some of these, maybe we can make these different exceptions, nobody really has an incentive to come out and say, like, you guys are going too far, no more moratoriums, things like that, at least not for another five weeks. I’ve only seen one candidate kind of saying, like, vote for me so I can, you know, stop the Democrats from ruining AI. That’s Roger Marshall of Kansas, and he’s probably running one of the worst campaigns of the cycle.

So I think right now a lot of people are kind of saying a lot of the same things. Some of that is just very defensive. Some of that is just to kind of get through the next five weeks so that they can kind of go back to setting AI policy with the Trump administration and Big Tech, you know, kind of on their minds. So I’m not sure a lot of people are mad at the same thing, but I don’t think they’re all mad in the same way. So it’s not necessarily to me a coalition, you know, that can take landowners and ranchers and everything and necessarily, you know, fuse that with, like, a progressive criticism of Big Tech in a way that, like, leads to the sweeping, you know, perfect AI legislation of 2027.

I think what you’re gonna get is a real fight in the next few years about what this, you know, next step is gonna be. I mean, I had a chance to talk with Greg Casar, the congressman from Texas, from Austin, recently about this. And he’s, like, really interesting because when I talked to him last year, AI didn’t come up. Which is not, you know, not a knock on him, but you know, he had other things on his mind. He had immigration on his mind, he had redistricting on his mind. He is in Austin and it just was not, like, something he was banging the drum about. Now he is all in on this stuff. It’s, like, the thing that he wants to talk about is introducing bills on this, he’s talking to everybody about this. He is obsessed with AI right now. So I think there has been a real kind of learning curve for a lot of people over the last year, and that’s really kind of only the beginning right now.

GH: Well, one thing that I’ve seen online as we kind of come to a close here—I’ve seen this conversation online, particularly on Twitter or X. They’re basically saying if you’re anti–data center, you’re anti-masculine, and you’re pro-China. Is there a risk—which I think is the question underneath it—is there a real risk that our, you know, the folks that we’re in competition with—you know, America’s constantly in competition with China over, you know, technological advancement. Is there a risk that if we do continue to fight against data centers as a country, if voters do choose anti–data center candidates, that America may fall behind in the tech, I don’t know, space race of its—if you could even call it that?

TM: Yeah, that’s certainly one of the major arguments that you get from the tech industry. And of course, loaded into that is, like, you know, this idea that we can’t let China have this technology. We need to let Donald Trump have this technology, which doesn’t necessarily track. And I think what you would hear from somebody like Casar is, like, actually, like, you know, again, thinking about this like bioweapons or nuclear weapons at its most extreme lens, like, treaties exist, you know, diplomacy exists. You should be able to kind of work with your competitors to set constraints by which you can compete. And so I think that’s one of the arguments that I think you would hear on the other side of that.

But it’s so interesting that you talk about the Chinese narrative because that’s one of the things that we’ve seen a lot of with the data center opposition, is this accusation from people like, you know, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, Kevin O’Leary, the guy from Fox News or Fox Business, you know, that data center opposition is actually, like, this astroturfed Chinese propaganda psyop. And, like, you hear enough of it that I think some people actually do believe this. I don’t think that they spent enough time in their districts or in these places talking to the people, because it’s just like a—there is just a very inherent organic opposition coming out of there. But that’s certainly the line that you’re hearing a lot.

GH: Wow. Okay. Well, Tim, the good thing is that we have you actually on the ground talking to people, and your reporting is so important. I hear that you’re headed back to Texas for another reporting trip very soon. What kind of stories can you expect to kind of gather while you’re there?

TM: Yeah, Texas has emerged as, you know, one of the, you know, tipping point states for the midterms, right? So I’m gonna be looking at, you know, the Texas Senate race, trying to track down Ken Paxton and James Talarico. And then, you know, I mentioned the governor’s race. This is not a race we expected to be close heading into the cycle. But Gina Hinojosa has run a really impressive campaign and again has really emphasized, you know, data centers and sort of tried to tell this story of a kind of a low-key corruption from the Abbott campaign and—or the Abbott administration, I should say. So I’m gonna be looking at those two top races, but also just kind of broadly taking the temperature of what is kind of the ultimate 2026 battleground.

GH: Well, we will be paying very close attention to your reporting and excited to have you on the show today. For everyone watching, make sure you follow Tim’s great reporting over on MotherJones.com and catch him on our Instagram account as well. Tim Murphy, national correspondent. Thank you so much for being here.

TM: Thanks for having me.

GH: Okay, that’s it for this one. Great conversation with Tim. Again, you can go back and check out my conversation with David Corn and Ari Berman in our last episode. Our great journalism work, like Tim’s reporting and this show, is only possible because of your support. Your views and subscriptions keep us going. So don’t forget to like this video, this piece of content, share it and subscribe to our YouTube channel, and let us know what you think of this episode in the comments down below. Our producers are eager to know your thoughts on this show, Stress Test. We will be back in just a couple of days with another edition of Stress Test from Mother Jones. Thanks for being here.

Martin Soto, a Peruvian man thrown into solitary confinement after organizing a hunger and labor strike inside the notorious for-profit ICE detention facility Delaney Hall, was released from New Jersey’s Elizabeth Detention Center with an ankle monitor Tuesday night.

Soto came to the United States from Peru in 2024 and was pursuing asylum. He was detained by federal agents in February while buying diapers for his two young children. Though he has no criminal record, he spent eight consecutive months in ICE detention, including several months in solitary confinement—retribution, his wife Gabriela said, for his role as an organizer.

Gabriela Soto organized a series of protests outside Delaney Hall in May, as her husband worked to improve conditions inside. On May 22, a group of over 300 detained immigrants, including Martin, announced a two-week hunger and labor strike inside the for-profit detention facility, demanding freedom and due process, as well as a meeting with the governor and an end to coercive pressure to self-deport. The state of New Jersey sued to close Delaney Hall as reports of inedible food, violent guards, and inadequate medical care continued to emerge from the facility. The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, claimed the hunger strike never happened.

By the end of May, Martin Soto was transferred to the nearby Elizabeth Detention Center, where he was held for another four months. “They don’t want him associating with more people because they’re afraid that he might start another hunger and labor strike inside a facility,” Gabriela Soto told journalist Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg in early September. “So they keep him away from life in general.”

In August, Soto began pursuing a U-Visa, a specialized visa “reserved for victims of certain crimes…who are aiding law enforcement investigations.” In September, Gabriela Soto sent a handwritten letter to New Jersey Attorney General Davenport asking Davenport to sign Martin’s U-Visa certification as her office investigates alleged human rights abuses against Soto and others inside Delaney Hall.

“I know that my advocacy, Martin’s bravery, has placed this case in the spotlight & therefore your decisions in this are under that same spotlight,” Gabriela wrote. “But I ask you to please consider providing us with this documentation so we can continue our fight.”

That visa certification was approved this week, according to independent journalist Kevin Ortega-Rojas. Soto’s October 6 release was first reported by Radio Jornalera NJ, a local community radio station. New Jersey Democrats, including Representatives Rob Menendez (D-NJ) and Analilia Mejía (D-NJ), joined the Soto family and about two dozen supporters at the gates of the Elizabeth Detention Center Tuesday night.

In a video posted that evening by Radio Jornalera, Gabriela runs, sobbing, into Martin’s arms.

The Trump administration has quietly announced that its own lawyers will represent unaccompanied migrant children in immigration court, facing off against other administration lawyers who are trying to deport the kids.

Immigration advocates are concerned that the arrangement, announced last week in the Federal Register, could pose a conflict of interest. In the past, unaccompanied minors were represented by a network of independent nonprofits, but the administration ended the contract this year after the network refused to hand over privileged information about its young clients.

“I’m concerned about the lack of independence” of these new government lawyers, says Ana Raquel Devereaux, an attorney at the nonprofit Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, part of the network that lost the contract.

The administration’s new attorneys will be housed in the Department of Health and Human Services, in a section called the Unaccompanied Alien Children Legal Representation Division. HHS did not respond to questions about when they would begin their work.

The federal rules in place to protect immigrant kids from harm and exploitation “rely on experienced legal representatives trained to work with children.”

Unaccompanied minors are granted special protections under federal law because they are so vulnerable after entering the United States without a parent or legal guardian; many of them are very young and could be at risk of trafficking or abuse. The Trafficking Victims Protection and Reauthorization Act requires that they be assigned independent lawyers.

This requirement is particularly important, immigrant advocates point out, because the other arms of immigration court are far from independent: Immigration judges work for the Department of Justice and deportation attorneys work for the Department of Homeland Security. “We already don’t have an independent [immigration] judiciary, and to have the defense side of representation also be within the government makes me feel like it’s all a farce and everybody is working together to get the kids removed,” says Devereaux.

The Federal Register notes that the new division of lawyers will be separate from another division at HHS, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which temporarily houses unaccompanied kids after they cross the border alone until they can be reunited with sponsors, who are often relatives. As my colleague Isabela Dias and I reported last week, ORR has been holding children for significantly longer periods under the Trump administration and is also detaining children who are arguably not even unaccompanied.

In a statement to the Associated Press, HHS said the new lawyers would “give the Department an additional mechanism to provide these children direct legal support while dedicated public servants work around the clock to safely reunify them with their families.” But immigration advocates fear—not without justification—that the administration will instead work to deport the kids. As our earlier piece mentioned, the government tried to fly dozens of Guatemalan children from ORR shelters out of the country in the middle of the night last year, but a court intervened. And 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.

The administration’s plan to represent migrant kids in court was announced after months of upheaval over who should play that role. In August, the longstanding contract with the network of independent legal nonprofits expired. Then, the administration awarded a contract to Burke Law Group, a small Texas firm with far less experience in such matters, but greater ties to Trump: one of Burke’s co-founders served in the first Trump administration and one of its founding partners works for the second.

Facing backlash, Burke Law Group pulled out and the administration instead awarded the contract to Our Rescue, a nonprofit founded by a former ICE agent that had no experience representing immigrant kids in court.

Last month, dozens of federal lawmakers signed a letter expressing concern that the administration would give such an important job to “firms so plainly unqualified for the task.” The Our Rescue deal was put on hold after the nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice filed a bid protest, whereupon the administration awarded another contract to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. But in recent court filings, immigration advocates said USCRI was not representing kids in court, and its lawyers often sat silently as judges considered the children’s cases.

“There are rules in place…to protect children, but those rules rely on experienced legal representatives trained to work with children,” Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, deputy director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, also part of the nonprofit network that lost its contract, said in a press conference last month. “Instead, the administration has chosen to fracture this network of experienced child-centered advocates that existed, with no plan in place to replace it.”

Laura doesn’t know what she’s going to do when her medication runs out. For years, she relied on Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid, to cover the costs of treating her Type 2 diabetes: doctor visits, tests, medication. An undocumented immigrant from Mexico, she benefited from California policies that opened Medi-Cal to all low-income residents, regardless of immigration status.

Last winter, however, she received a notice that her coverage was set to expire and that she would need to renew it. At the time, Laura, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, said she rarely left her home, scared of getting caught up in an immigration enforcement operation. For months, she had missed many of her appointments and sent friends to pick up her prescriptions. 

But she eventually ventured to the enrollment office. There, the person reviewing her renewal application told her that, since some of her family members were paid under the table, they would all have to make and sign attestations of income. Her husband was hesitant, worried by news of Medicaid’s data-sharing agreement with ICE.

“For me it was more about fear,” she said in Spanish. “I didn’t write the letter and I didn’t take it back…We didn’t know if [the news about data sharing] was true or what they could do.”

They decided the risk was too great. The deadline passed. And now Laura cannot get her coverage back. On January 1, California began denying full Medi-Cal benefits to undocumented adults amid a growing budget deficit and federal Medicaid cuts. Now, only those enrolled before 2026 can keep their coverage, as long as they don’t roll off; for Laura, it was too late.

Since the start of the second Trump administration, doctors and policy experts across the country have increasingly warned that immigrants are avoiding medical care as deportation fears weigh heavily on their day-to-day lives. During Minnesota’s Operation Metro Surge last winter, for instance, researchers found that the rate of missed appointments increased by more than 80 percent among Spanish-speaking families. 

Medicaid doesn’t fund full coverage for undocumented immigrants. In fact, this October, it scaled back coverage for many immigrants with legal status who were previously eligible, as provisions of the GOP’s July 2025 budget bill—better known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—kicked in.

But many immigrants are also choosing to drop out of programs that they are still eligible for, including state-funded coverage—even though, as blue states including California, Colorado, and Washington roll back and cap enrollment for these programs due to funding constraints, they might not be able to recover that medical support later on.

“What past research has shown us is that just the chilling effect and the fears and uncertainty around these policies lead many more immigrants to disenroll from coverage than those who are directly impacted,” said Drishti Pillai, director of immigrant health policy at KFF. 

As more federal policies are implemented, such as the new eligibility provisions and changes to the federal public charge rule, which now penalizes some green card applicants if they use non-cash public benefits like Medicaid, —it’s likely that the share of immigrants avoiding healthcare will keep “increasing as time goes on,” Pillai said.

Laura, who is going by a pseudonym in this article, said she was initially reluctant to share her experience for the same reasons she didn’t risk renewing her health insurance benefits. But it was important, she reasoned, to raise awareness of a situation that has also happened to other of her friends and acquaintances.

“I know I’m not the only person who is going through this,” she said.

From May 2025 to March 2026, around 244,000 immigrants disenrolled from California-funded expansion programs meant for low-income residents ineligible for Medicaid due to their legal status. It’s a drastic change from years prior, when enrollment in these programs generally increased each month. 

Despite the fact that people in expansion programs only made up about one in nine of the state’s Medi-Cal enrollees as of May 2025, based on public enrollment data, they accounted for about a third of disenrollments in the state from that month to March 2026, according to Diana Camacho, a senior program officer at the California Health Care Foundation.

California doesn’t keep track of why its residents disenroll from Medi-Cal. Many people, like Laura, simply roll off when they don’t renew their plan before their deadline.

Conversations Camacho has had, however, suggest that “fear and lack of information” are at work. Her team has heard immigrants voice concerns “about immigration enforcement, data sharing, as well as changing public charge rules” in weighing whether to renew—even when, like Laura, they might not be able to reverse their decision.

“A whole generation of children and immigrant families are falling behind in school because of all of this.”

A recent analysis by the Latino Policy and Politics Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, compared data on ICE arrests with Medi-Cal enrollment numbers in state-funded programs. It found that, though enrollment rates in state-funded programs—which are used predominantly by undocumented immigrants—started decreasing after raids began in Los Angeles, the drops went far beyond the number of people arrested during that time.

Many factors “suggest that immigration enforcement has led to what is commonly known as the chilling effect,” said Arturo Vargas Bustamante, the institute’s faculty director of research. About a third of this group’s disenrollments in 2025, his study noted, couldn’t be explained by deportations or by regular enrollment fluctuations. Vargas Bustamante attributes that share of the decline to fear. 

Though Northern California has been spared raids on the scale of Los Angeles or Chicago, Laura and her family have had much to be scared about: Last October, a planned massive ICE deployment was announced, then cancelled in the Bay Area, followed by news of ICE activity in multiple cities across the region and at San Francisco International Airport.

Laura’s biggest worry, she said, is that her family could be separated. Her two children, both US citizens, have told her they don’t want to move to a new country and leave their old lives behind. Though her children are young adults—her son just started college, and her daughter works and lives on her own—they still need her help. Her son is not yet financially independent; her daughter is autistic, so Laura wants to be close by.

Last year, when she still had coverage, “I would tell my doctor that I didn’t know why my glucose levels were rising,” Laura said. “I was working out, I was eating well, but I was stressed. And my stress was because my son was in high school and very worried about me. He would tell me to not go to his school, to not wait for him, and he would get worried. And I was even more worried for him.” 

According to Vargas Bustamante, families like Laura’s, where undocumented parents are a household’s main providers, are among “the most affected” by these chilling effects: they are those for whom fears of family separation carry the most weight.

Even adults with coverage are underusing the health services they have access to, says Alma Santana of Mujeres Unidas y Activas, a nonprofit that supports Latina and indigenous women in Oakland and San Francisco.

“Our members have stopped going to their appointments, from basic ones to primary care visits,” said Santana, who heads the nonprofit’s immigrant rights program. “They’re worried about being detained if they go.” Two women she worked with, who had diabetes and cancer respectively, she said, decided to self-deport to Mexico, worried about interruptions to their medical care if they were detained. 

It’s increasingly difficult for advocates and resource providers to tell immigrants what’s safe. Many of the federal administration’s new immigration policies have been challenged in court, though not always successfully. Sometimes, as with Medicaid’s data sharing agreement with ICE, the way the federal government plans to use the data remains unclear. But groups like Santana’s try to make sure immigrants have as much information as possible to weigh their options. 

A rally outside a hospital in Glendale, California, protesting ICE officials who were guarding a person detained in the building, July 17, 2025.David McNew/Getty

 “There’s a lot of fear, and then there’s people who, at a moment in time, decided not to renew and then later regretted it,” Santana said. 

That impact extends to kids. Over the years, San Francisco pediatrician Raul Gutierrez has built a lot of trust with his patients, many of whom are from Spanish-speaking immigrant families. But since the start of the second Trump presidency, he’s noticed they’re much more reluctant to seek treatment.

“More kids need reminders to come to their visits. Kids are missing their vaccines,” Gutierrez said. “Kids are missing their specialty appointments for things that they need to be evaluated on.” 

One mother asked Gutierrez if it was necessary to take her daughter to the gastroenterologist; the specialist was located in a different city that she didn’t know well. ”She really was struggling with that question of, ‘Do we go and just risk the possibility of being detained?’” he said. 

He has sought workarounds to let those families safely access care, such as phone appointments. But that’s not always possible. Some families, Gutierrez said, wait too long to access care; one family he knows, whose child had a condition that causes fluid accumulation in the brain, waited until their child needed emergency surgery.

Other families, he has noticed, have opted to not renew their children’s Medi-Cal altogether—even though children under 18 in California are still eligible regardless of immigration status. “There’s so many questions that are being asked and so much uncertainty about how that information is being shared,” he said.

Gutierrez worries that these lapses in coverage will leave immigrant children with even more unmet health care needs, including mental health support, which he notes more children now require amid deportation fears.

“I worry that a whole generation of children and immigrant families are afraid to engage in their communities and not take advantage of all the wonderful things that help them thrive and that help them just be children,” he said. “A whole generation of children and immigrant families are falling behind in school because of all of this.”

New state and federal policies could make disenrollments even worse in the coming year, Camacho said, and not just for immigrants. Further restrictions on Medi-Cal will kick in next year that add more eligibility checks and work reporting requirements, creating more barriers for all low-income California residents.

The “public charge” rule, implemented in mid-September, is among the policies that alarms advocates most: immigration officers now consider whether immigrants or their family members use public benefits like Medicaid and SNAP when reviewing applications for permanent residency. 

“It’s hard not to live stressed, thinking about what might happen tomorrow if you go to the store and you don’t come back.”

After Trump first tried to implement a similar rule in 2019—when it was contested in the courts and eventually rescinded by the Biden administration—researchers found that, though the rule did not apply to many of the immigrant groups that qualify for benefits, it had broader impacts on those groups’ willingness to seek support. A 2021 KFF survey, for instance, found that 1 in 4 undocumented Latino adults, and 1 in 10 lawful permanent Latino residents, had decided to opt out of government assistance programs because they worried about its impact on their immigration status or that of a family member. 

“Perhaps it’s going to go away at the end of the Trump administration,” Vargas Bustamante said. A group of 22 states has already filed a lawsuit challenging the rule. But for now, he predicts, it will only “generate bigger and more chilling effects in our communities.”

The last time Laura saw her doctor, she re-filled Laura’s prescriptions and said that they could figure out a way to continue their visits, even though Laura no longer had coverage.  

It wasn’t the first time her doctor had expressed concern. Laura said the doctor had called her multiple times last winter, asking her why she wasn’t showing up to her appointments. Laura would say that she didn’t want to put herself at risk. But what would happen, Laura’s physician asked, if she stopped going to the doctor?

When Laura went to pick up her pills with her new prescription, she learned she’d have to pay out of pocket. She can’t cover that cost regularly—the 53-year-old hasn’t been able to find a consistent source of income since last year, when the woman she regularly cooked and cleaned for told her she could no longer afford to pay for her help due to the Bay Area’s rising cost of living. 

“It’s a very uncertain future,” Laura said. “I don’t know if I’m going to have the same support.”

She is hardly the only one.

“With the messages we’re getting every day, it’s hard to stay calm,” said Santana, of Mujeres Unidas y Activas. “It’s hard not to live stressed, thinking about what might happen tomorrow if you go to the store and you don’t come back.”

If you’ve ever listened to President Trump talk about our elections, you might hear something like this: Voter fraud is rampant. Noncitizens are regularly voting illegally. And our elections are rigged. The president often uses the bully pulpit to repeat these claims despite study after study showing they’re just not true. But it’s not just the president. There are many others at the ground level saying the same things to justify voting restrictions that could disenfranchise legal voters, especially voters of color.

https://play.prx.org/e?ge=prx_149_2598ef8a-3035-444f-945a-faf4b1af96f5&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.revealradio.org%2Frevealpodcast

One of them is J. Christian Adams. An activist and former trial attorney for the US Department of Justice, Adams was named to Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017. Today, he’s the president of Public Interest Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for stricter voter ID laws and sues states and local governments to remove illegal voters from election rolls.

On this week’s “More To The Story,” Adams claims there’s systemic voter fraud in the US before abruptly ending the interview after host Al Letson challenges his assertions. Al then talks with Mother Jones National Voting Rights Correspondent Ari Berman about the lack of evidence from activists like Adams, the claims Adams and PILF have made that noncitizens are illegally voting, and what conservative activists who say election fraud is rampant are really trying to achieve.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

A newly released military study paints a frightening picture of the electric shock gloves ICE recently purchased by the thousands—and which the agency and its acting head David Venturella seem eager to deploy regardless of the potential consequences.

Records unearthed by the watchdog group American Oversight and first shared with the Associated Press show that in one set of trials carried out by the US Army in 2024, the electric shock gloves caused “overwhelmingly immediate” pain to soldiers playing the role of combative inmates in a mock forced cell extraction scenario, who then reported that “just seeing the glove” frightened them into obedience.

GLOVEs, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are taser-like devices that look like standard work gloves, but deliver a painful electric charge when the wearer touches a person’s skin. As I’ve previously reported, they’ve been described as “low optics”—police language for a weapon that causes harm but doesn’t leave marks, making it harder for victims to sue or for public outrage to stem from visible harm.

Two weeks ago, the shock gloves’ manufacturer, Jeff Niklaus, called the devices the “safest, most humane deescalatory product probably ever to come along.”

The Army study found that the gloves caused “intense pain,” but didn’t significantly change the amount of time it took to control a combative prisoner, or transfer someone from one unit to another. In one trial, a participant accidentally turned the shock gloves on; in another, “inmates” were able to fight off “guards” wearing the gloves for longer than they were able to hold off unarmed ones. People with water or oil on their skin felt more pain when shocked, and one participant reported lingering pain for 30 minutes afterward.

Soldiers, once shocked, were terrified to be shocked again. Army investigators reported “fatigue, soreness, and excessive apprehensiveness to being shocked again” in the soldiers playing inmates—and noted that the shock gloves gave a confidence boost to those who were playing guards, especially “smaller or less trained members.” The gloves, the study concluded, should be deployed in military prisons.

In September, ICE finalized its purchase of 6,650 pairs of the shock gloves for $16.7 million from Kentucky-based Compliant Technologies. White House border czar Tom Homan said in August that it could “be a while” before the gloves are in use in the field. But ICE, according to the Associated Press, was already well aware of the Army study when it chose to purchase the gloves.

The world premiere of Artificial, the new movie centered around the rise of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as he led an unstable company down a dangerous path, was packed. The recent wave of high-profile “rogue AI” security incidents, disputes over tech industry-led safeguards and regulation, and continued multibillion-dollar investments to advance development has clearly piqued public interest.

The movie, directed by Challengers filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, contains scenes derived from real reporting on OpenAI and the industry: discussions on ensuring their products “align” with human values while racing competitors such as Google, and undertaking corporate restructuring to draw investment from the likes of Microsoft. It also hinges on wide public sentiment that major tech companies and their leaders hold too much power and developers should pause development of their most advanced models to mitigate risks to humanity. 

The people behind Artificial appear to agree. “The deeper responsibility we all felt is to try to do some interrogation of who we are giving all of our autonomy, power, and data to,” Andrew Garfield, who plays Altman, said on Monday night during the post-screening Q&A at the New York Film Festival, “that felt like the service to the greater thing.” The actor said the filmmakers were adding new scenes while shooting to create a “living document” of how the AI industry was progressing.

The moral center of the film is Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist played by Yura Borisov, who sees in AI technology potential to solve humanity’s problems, but realizes too late that his idealism doesn’t fit within the constraints of the market. A former AI researcher played by Jason Schwartzman, presented as a prophet who sees the future of the tech with clarity, tells Sutskever that it could lead, if not to total human extinction, at least to life under AI subjugation.

But the filmmakers also portray the tech leaders who don’t recognize this—or simply don’t care—as goofy megalomaniacs. While Garfield portrays Altman as constantly dodging confrontation to get people to be as forgiving toward him as possible, he also plays him with a cartoonish quality—with his frantic shifts in posture played as a joke, and the post-production team changing the actor’s brown eyes to a bright, inhuman blue. Even more so for others like Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, whose facial expressions and demeanor seem to lean far more silly than threatening. 

The intermittent comic relief scenes give the movie’s satirical side the energy of Saturday Night Live sketches—the screenwriter, Simon Rich, previously wrote for the comedy show—immediate, but largely short on depth and nuance. The filmmakers could pull their humor, and their wider sense of what’s laughable about these characters, from deeper, and darker, places. (There are vague gestures at a misogynistic Silicon Valley culture, but nothing political or deeply personal.)

With the characters operating more as caricatures, the movie doesn’t meet what Garfield called on Monday “the deeper responsibility” to interrogate the people it depicts or the culture behind them the countless expository conversations on the potential harms of generative AI—between real-life characters who unleashed said harms through global-scale business relationships—don’t feel grounded in any reality. The mentions of existential risks stop at just that: Altman says “Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse.” The only specific harm addressed is AI’s contribution to a person’s suicide.

As I wrote on Monday, it’s good that Hollywood might finally be catching up to tech companies’ negative impacts on our world. Many Silicon Valley films before Artificial did not. But only being able to giggle at our tech overlords is not enough.

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

In the months leading up to Christa Pike’s execution date, she and her legal team made it clear that she, the lone woman on Tennessee’s death row, 50 years old, wasn’t afraid to die. She was terrified of the execution itself. 

“Her greatest fear wasn’t dying,” attorney Stephen Ferrell told USA Today in a press conference. “It was a fear of a prolonged, painful, traumatic death.”

Citing her blood-clotting disorder and a history of difficult blood draws, her attorney argued that there could be problems properly affixing the IV into Pike’s arm and that executing her via lethal injection would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. 

About a month before her execution, her lawyers had pushed for her to be hanged or shot by a firing squad instead. At the eleventh hour, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed her execution, only to have the Supreme Court overrule it. When she finally arrived in the prison’s death chamber, Pike and her lawyer’s concerns would be proven true to a degree they couldn’t have anticipated: she became the first person to survive the administration of a double dose of lethal injection drugs.

What should have been a ten- to twenty-minute process took two hours, according to the Associated Press, and ended with Pike alive but in critical condition. Christa Pike reportedly remains intubated, on a ventilator in a Nashville hospital, receiving life-saving care after being pumped with what should have been two fatal doses of pentobarbital, a barbiturate used by many states for lethal injection. When she arrived at the hospital, Pike’s arms were “swollen, burned and blistered,” according to an emergency filing from her legal team.

There’s still a lot that we don’t know about the actions of prison officials leading up to and during Pike’s execution. Pike’s attorneys believe that a problem with the state’s IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her tissue, instead of her veins.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has halted all executions in the state and ordered an “independent investigation.” The head of Tennessee’s Department of Correction resigned days after Pike’s hospitalization, but defended the execution, saying the state “carried out its responsibilities in accordance with the established protocol.”

Christa Pike’s case, while unusual in many respects, is a perfect encapsulation of the pitfalls of lethal injection as an execution method in the United States. Most people’s understanding of lethal injection—as a humane alternative to more overtly brutal executions of yore—is in stark contrast to the actual barbarism behind the procedure. This misconception is no coincidence: it’s by design. 

Death penalty states are incredibly secretive about every step of the lethal injection process. Why? According to University of Richmond law professor and former prosecutor Corinna Barrett Lain, it’s because lethal injection has the best political optics—as long as people don’t know much about what’s happening behind the scenes.

As Lain wrote in her 2025 book, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection:

Every other execution method—hanging, the electric chair, gas chamber, and firing squad—lays bare the brutality of the state that kills in our name. Lethal injection hides it. With lethal injection, we don’t have to deal with the sight of blood, or the smell of burning flesh, or the sounds of suffering, all potent reminders of what the state is actually doing. Instead, we get to tell ourselves that prisoners are just drifting off into forever-sleep. 

Secrets of the Killing State pulls back the curtain that shrouds lethal injection, revealing how everything from the drug suppliers to the science behind this method of execution is riddled with issues. I reached out to Lain to learn what might have gone wrong in Pike’s execution, and how the problems with lethal injection are not individual but systemic, baked into its very foundation.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your initial reaction to hearing about the failed execution of Christa Pike? 

Yet another botched execution. I had some ideas of how it happened, why it happened, but of course, part of the problem is we don’t have any information. I’ve been studying [lethal injection] for seven years, so hearing about Christa, it’s really sad and frustrating.

“For the first 35 to 40 years, states used a paralytic…that would ensure it would look like putting down a pet.”

You know, in some ways, her case is a paradigm example of both everything that’s wrong with lethal injection and everything that’s wrong with the death penalty. More broadly, it’s an example of what’s wrong with lethal injection.

We now have a growing list of people whose executions are so badly botched that they survived their own execution. But we also know we’ve seen executions that are one hour long, two hours long, three hours long. I’ve seen autopsies with 14, 16, 18 puncture wounds. This is the stuff that’s been happening, but now, finally, it has drawn the public’s attention.

In your book, you spend a good chunk of the beginning pulling back the curtain on the real horrors that come with lethal injection and how execution states have pretty brilliantly rebranded it. Can you describe people’s biggest misconceptions when it comes to the death penalty vs. the actual reality of the procedure?

The public has been told for the last 45 years that lethal injection is akin to putting your beloved pet down, and none of that’s true. The public has been sold a bill of goods, and for the first 35 to 40 years, states used a paralytic as one of the drugs in lethal injection that would ensure it would look like putting down a pet.

The paralytic was also a muscle relaxant, so it relaxed all the muscles in the face, and then it froze them that way. So you’re going to get this nice drifting-off-to-sleep look, no matter what is actually happening, and we know what’s actually happening because now we have hundreds of autopsies that show us that those are violent deaths too.

What happened to Christa Pike was simply the truth breaking through.

That goes perfectly into my next question. Can you talk about why the use of pentobarbital in lethal injections is, for lack of a better word, problematic?

Pentobarbital is the drug that we use in physician-assisted suicide and also in animal euthanasia. So one might think that it is a better drug for lethal injection than the traditional three-drug protocol that states were using all these years.

But what we know from autopsy studies is that the pH of pentobarbital, which is between 10 and 11, is chemically burning the delicate capillaries in the lungs, causing the capillaries to become leaky and the lungs to take on fluid.

This condition is called flash pulmonary edema, and it shows up, depending upon the study, in between 84 percent of all pentobarbital executions.

Flash pulmonary edema happens in seconds when you inject a drug into the veins. It goes first to the heart. Then to the lungs. So, as the body is trying to buffer that difference in the pH so that it can metabolize the drug and use it as an anesthetic, it’s already gone to the lungs, and that happens immediately.

These people are essentially drowning in their own fluids. Some of the cases show acute flash pulmonary edema. It’s also called fulminating pulmonary edema. That’s where the lungs are so congested that the froth—the mixture of air and fluid—actually moves up into the windpipe, into their throats, and they choke on it.

“One of the things [the report] found was executioners, on the eve of an execution, looking in Wikipedia to figure out how much of the drugs to inject.”

One court asked a medical professional on the stand, while explaining pulmonary edema, if the sensation would be one of drowning from within. The court said, “Is this the same sensation as waterboarding?” And the medical professional said yes.

The public has this view of lethal injection as just putting a pet to sleep. In reality, we are actually waterboarding people to death, and I don’t say that to be dramatic. I say that to be clear, honest, and candid about what we’re actually doing.

Before her execution, Pike was issued a stay by an appeals court, which was quickly overruled by the Supreme Court. A throughline throughout Secrets of the Killing State is the role that politics plays in pushing executions forward. Can you describe why—and do you believe that politics played a role in the fast-tracking of Christa Pike’s execution?

Politics played a role in the sense that this “pro-life” Supreme Court is uniquely excited about death and advocates for it. So what happened in Christa Pike’s case is actually not unusual at all.

This is a theme that we saw in the executions from Trump’s first term too, where a court had heard a challenge to the one-drug pentobarbital protocol; the prisoners had presented two weeks’ worth of evidence, thousands of pages and documents, expert testimony, all of that stuff, and the district court issued a preliminary injunction on the execution and said—by the way, to issue a preliminary injunction, you have to make a factual finding, and the court did—that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim.

So stop and think about that. A federal court that heard two weeks’ worth of evidence paused the execution just till they could get to trial. But the standard for that is incredibly high. You have to be able to find that the plaintiffs are probably going to win. They are likely to succeed. So she issues the preliminary injunction, and the Supreme Court lifts it and greenlights the Trump executions. That was the first of, I think it was 13 Trump executions, and it all started with the court lifting a stay on the shadow docket.

It’s incredibly perverse that the court in those Trump executions would lift the stay over executions. Litigation over the very method of execution that they were then subjected to. They made a claim. They said this is unconstitutional. The court said, “You know what? I think you’re probably going to win this. Let’s at least let you get to trial.” And the Supreme Court lifts the stay. They can’t even get to trial, and then they are executed by the very method that they had shown was probably unconstitutional.

It’s pure power. Purely unjudicious.

One large part of the branding for lethal injection is that it’s a “scientific procedure”: “We put down animals all the time, and euthanasia is legal in some countries for humans. Why can we do the same thing here?” But chapters two and three of your book unveil just how much these procedures are not, forgive the pun, “a perfect science.” Can you talk about this? 

We assume it’s science because we know that there is science behind animal euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. But it’s quite telling that in the traditional three-drug protocol that every state used for the first 35 to 40 years of lethal injection—not a single one of those drugs was the drug that we use for animal euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Not one of those drugs.

When the man who invented lethal injection was asked about that—“Hey, how did you come up with the drugs?”—he said, and I quote, “I didn’t do any research.” He just made it up off the top of his head. It’s so fantastical that it would be hard to believe if it weren’t true. But it is true, and it’s not just about what happened in 1977 when lethal injection was invented.

In 2024, Arizona botched three executions in 2022, and the governor put executions on hold and said, we’re going to have an independent investigation. They hired a retired federal judge. The judge looked into it, drafted a report that found all kinds of things. And the governor dismissed him and said, “We’re going to go a different direction.” That’s literally what she told him.

The different direction was having the Department of Corrections do a review of itself, which it then did, and said, “We’re great. Now give us our warrant, and we’re going to start with a volunteer.” So there’s no adversarial process at all. But this made the judge so mad that he actually released his draft report. You can find it on the internet. And one of the things he found was executioners, on the eve of an execution, looking in Wikipedia to figure out how much of the drugs to inject.

“It’s easier for them to argue about secrecy, and to take the hit for secrecy, than for the public to know.”

That’s 2024. This didn’t even make it in the book. They don’t know what they’re doing. The problem with lethal injection, at its core, is that medical scientists are not going to tell states how to do this. They are very much believers in the Hippocratic Oath. They are healers. They’re creating this knowledge for healers, and they are not going to tell you how to kill. So, you’ve got people looking on Wikipedia. The American public hears them saying, “Oh yes, we’re careful. Oh yes, we care. We’re following the protocol.”

And the fact of the matter is, it’s a hot mess that would make any citizen outraged if they knew what was really happening behind this curtain.

Which goes into my next question: the secrecy. One of the biggest realizations that I learned from reading this book was how much secrecy goes into an execution via lethal injection, from who the executioners are, where the drugs were obtained, to even the events happening within the death chamber. 

And this secrecy is by design. Why is this the case? 

My sense is states can’t fix what is broken with lethal injection. They can’t get the drugs because pharmaceutical companies didn’t make medicine for killing. They can’t get the medical professionals they need to competently do these executions. They can’t get access to the veins. The death row population is a geriatric population with notoriously weak veins. These are people with histories of poor health in general, and many of them are former IV drug users. Even Christa Pike- her lawyers were saying she has bad veins.

These are problems inherent in the project of using drugs to kill. So what do you do when you can’t fix the problem? You hide it.

It’s easier for them to argue about secrecy, and to take the hit for secrecy, than for the public to know where they’re actually getting their drugs from, how they’re breaking laws, who they’re using; it’s easier for them to defend secrecy with the state at its most powerful moment than to defend their practices on the merits.

On Monday morning outside the Supreme Court, as Justices heard arguments concerning a landmark climate liability lawsuit, a rally organized by the Center for Climate Integrity and Fossil Free Media drew a crowd of roughly one hundred people. Many carried signs with messages like “Climate Change is No Accident,” “SCOTUS Hands Off Boulder,” and “Warning: Burning Fossil Fuels Can Destroy Civilization.” At several points, The People v. Big Oil gathering chanted “They knew, they lied” in a call-and-response, referencing fossil fuel scientists and executives who knew more than 50 years ago that burning fossil fuels would raise global temperatures, and instead sowed doubt to undermine scientific evidence.

As Louie Delaware, a survivor of the 2021 Marshall Fire told the crowd, “No company or industry should gain an advantage by hiding facts that people need to protect their health, their communities, and their future. The bottom line is that they knew, they lied, and they must be accountable for their actions.” Delaware lost his home along with roughly 50 others on his street when the fire devastated Boulder, Colorado. His family was displaced for more than two and a half years. Other survivors of the Marshall Fire spoke at the rally, as well as survivors of the 2025 Eaton fire in Altadena, California.

Meanwhile, inside the courtroom, the justices heard arguments in Suncor Energy v. Boulder, widely regarded as a seminal case concerning the issue of whether or not local governments can demand damages from fossil fuel companies for their contributions to climate change. The fossil fuel companies are arguing that a state court can’t hold multinational companies accountable for global harm. As I reported last week: 

The case revolves around a dispute between the City and County of Boulder, which first sued the energy companies in 2018. They are arguing that Suncor and Exxon deceived the public about the dangers of climate change and should be forced to pay damages for climate-induced heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods. “The damages will only multiply as climate change worsens,” Boulder stated in its lawsuit. Suncor and Exxon, meanwhile, are asking the justices to kill the case before it makes it to trial—and with it a host of other state-level climate cases.

Depending on how the eight justices rule—Justice Samuel Alito announced what some considered to be an 11th hour recusal earlier this week—the case could have far-reaching consequences for people [in Colorado]. But its implications extend beyond the state’s borders: dozens of other climate-related lawsuits hang in the balance of how Suncor v. Boulder is decided.

“The Eaton Fire took my sister and eighteen other people. My family lost five homes, including my childhood home,” said Zaire Calvin, who lost his sister, Evelyn McClendon to the disaster. “From Altadena to Boulder, we carry different stories. Today, we stand together in one demand: let the evidence be heard. Let responsibility be determined.” California’s own climate liability lawsuit against major oil companies is currently on hold while the Supreme Court weighs in on the Boulder case. 

“From Altadena to Boulder, we carry different stories. Today, we stand together in one demand: let the evidence be heard. Let responsibility be determined.”

Former Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee was also present on Monday outside the courtroom. “The fossil fuel industry malignantly and maliciously lied to the American people, and I’ll be damned if I let them take away an American right to hold industries accountable and have their day in court,” he said. “They knew for decades what the consequences of their products were, and they chose to lie.” In 2021, Inslee signed Washington’s Climate Commitment Act, a market-based cap-and-invest program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and has emerged as a leading voice against industry pushing against sweeping immunity laws against climate liability lawsuits. 

Neighborhood home during the Marshall Fire in Boulder, Colorado on December 30, 2021.

When the speeches ended, I spoke with Deirdre Macnab and Dr. Kathryn Bedell, two regenerative cattle ranchers from Rio Blanco County who had traveled to Washington for the event. After interviewing Macnab last week, I asked her what it felt like to be in front of the Supreme Court. “I’m glad it’s coming to the Supreme Court. Now we need to come together. We can solve this,” she said. “But we’ve got to bring the big boys to the table, and that’s the oil companies.”  

Fellow rancher Bedell echoed her call to action, and underscored the devastating effects of wildfires, drought, and extreme heat. “I think there isn’t anybody here who should be able to deny the impacts of climate change. It’s going to be obvious in our food supply pretty soon if we don’t change,” she told me. “If you can’t grow food, we have to import it, and we won’t have any food security or control over the price. People should be terrified. It terrifies me.” Bedell, a sixth-generation farmer who has been a rancher for over three decades, has been forced to sell her cattle. “I’ve had these same cattle for generations, so I know them all personally. They’re moving to the sale yard on December 19.” 

As oral arguments drew to a close, I spoke with Louie Delaware and another Marshall Fire survivor, Jenny Singer-Rupp. “One of the tenets of a free democracy is ‘the David’ can go after ‘the Goliath’. Everybody deserves their day in court to be able to prove their case,” Delaware told me. He pointed to settlements by the tobacco industries and pharmaceutical companies over opioid addiction, adding, “They’re huge entities, but there are a lot of huge entities that have been taken down in court.” 

Singer-Rupp is simply fighting for her children. “My kids talk to me about climate change and natural disasters, and they’re worried about their future,” she said. “I never thought I’d be standing in front of the Supreme Court. But I’m doing everything I can to protect that future for them.”

A federal court struck down a California rule that required voters to sign and return vote-by-mail ballots on paper, rather than doing so electronically. The ruling in California Council of the Blind v. Weber, announced October 3, is a victory for disabled voters—but it probably won’t change things much until the next election cycle.

Since 2021, California has mailed ballots to all registered voters for all statewide and local elections. Voters with print disabilities—those who are blind or low-vision, or whose physical disabilities prevent them from marking a paper ballot—can request a link to vote electronically. After filling out their ballot on a computer, they must print it, put it in an envelope, seal the envelope, and return it “through non-electronic means.”

This is complicated by the fact that many blind people don’t own printers, because they have no use for them. And that’s only one of the obstacles they might face under the current vote-by-mail rules.

Christopher Gray, a resident of San Francisco County and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, is blind. Under the current system, as he wrote in a 2024 court declaration, he is unable to vote without assistance.

He could theoretically vote using a virtual vote-by-mail ballot, which he can fill out unassisted using his own assistive technology, including a Braille-equipped computer.

But printing the ballot, finding where to sign it, signing it, putting it in an envelope, sealing it, and returning it without assistance is not possible for him. “Because of the lack of an accessible method of returning my ballot by mail, when I vote I must forgo my right to vote confidentially and privately,” Gray wrote.

During the 2022 general elections, Gray ended up paying an assistant to help him fill out his ballot—but in doing so, he was forced to give up that privacy and independence. He also gave up his certainty that his ballot had been submitted at all. “Though I trusted my reader, I could not independently confirm they accurately marked my ballot and mailed it on my behalf,” he said.

The vote-by-mail program, as it stands, discriminates against voters who cannot return their ballots without assistance, he and the other plaintiffs argued. “I want to vote in a private and independent manner just as voters without print disabilities are able to do in my state,” Gray wrote. “I will be able to do so only if alternative accessible options for returning a vote-by-mail ballot are available to me.”

The court ruled that the current vote-by-mail system does exclude some disabled voters, and “denies them meaningful access to the vote by mail program,” as Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim wrote. The court, however, did not specify a resolution. The state of California now has until October 19 to propose a new vote-by-mail protocol, and since California ballots have already been mailed out, any changes made likely will not take effect until the next election cycle.

As Democracy Docket has reported, “32 states allow for electronic absentee ballot return for certain voters, with 13 of these states providing a specific carveout for voters with disabilities.”

Only 17 percent of Americans approve of how President Donald Trump is handling the cost of living, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

This is a record low for both of Trump’s presidential terms—notable as he spent much of his 2024 campaign criticizing Democrats on the issue. About 70 percent, including about half of Republicans, said the president’s cost-of-living policies have been “worse than expected.”

The Associated Press reported that Trump’s economic approval mirrors Biden’s 28 percent in June 2022 during the initial years of the Covid-19 pandemic. A few months later, 55 percent of Americans said that affordability struggles were outside his control. But now, Americans are blaming Trump, with 65 percent reporting that the high cost of living is a result of Trump’s policies. 

The survey was based on 2,140 US adults and was conducted from September 24-28 with a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points. 

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.