Mother Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video by Peter Berger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You kidnapped my son.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then they drove away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You kidnapped my son.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then they drove away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BREAKING:

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

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

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 4, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Annie Jacobsen (@AnnieJacobsen) October 4, 2026

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

This is a developing story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) October 4, 2026

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

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

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

— VoteHub (@VoteHub) October 4, 2026

This article is a partnership with Agência Pública.

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

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

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

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

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

#DarkHorse pic.twitter.com/3y6E422qpL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Jared Kushner (@jaredkushner) October 2, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Flock has become a four-letter word.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They don’t trust us,” he said. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The statue of Prometheus is finally finished.

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

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

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

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) October 2, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) March 18, 2026

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

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

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

Dear @elonmusk

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

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

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) June 18, 2025

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

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

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

“Nice work,” Elon posted.

The Trump administration has spent much of this year rewriting the federal government’s approach to guns. Just last month, the Justice Department concluded that the ban on selling handguns to 18-20-year-olds is unconstitutional and would no longer be criminally enforced.

But amid dozens of changes to federal firearms regulations is one you might have missed. If finalized, it could fundamentally transform the way Americans buy guns.

The ATF’s proposed Non-Over-the-Counter rule would allow gun dealers to conduct many firearms sales entirely remotely, so eligible buyers could verify their identities online and have a gun shipped directly to their home, no in-person interaction required. It’s a move that has even rattled the gun industry’s own leading trade lobby.

Enter the president’s son. Donald Trump Jr. is a shareholder and board member of GrabAGun, a company that bills itself as the “Amazon of Guns” and boasts that it’s “uniquely positioned to capitalize on this potential opportunity.”

Currently, someone who orders a gun online generally must go in person to a federally licensed firearms dealer to verify their identity, undergo a background check, and eventually pick up their gun. Under the ATF’s proposed rule, eligible in-state buyers could verify their identity online, undergo a background check, and have a gun shipped directly to their home, without ever setting foot in a gun store.

The ATF estimates that as many as half of all gun buyers might choose to take advantage of fully remote sales.

GrabAGun has been positioning itself for a future where more gun sales happen this way. As the public face of the company, Trump Jr. has touted the ease of online gun sales “in an age where our right to bear arms is under constant attack from anti-gun politicians and woke corporations.”

“GrabAGun allows you to [buy a gun] the way you’d buy everything else, like you would on Amazon if you’re buying home décor or other goods,” he explained to Bloomberg last July, ahead of the company’s public debut on the New York Stock Exchange.

Donald Trump Jr. holds a shotgun at Tombstone Tactical gun store in Phoenix, Arizona, on October 23, 2024. (Photo by REBECCA NOBLE/AFP via Getty Images)

Months before the ATF unveiled its proposal, GrabAGun had already begun expanding into a new business designed to help firearms manufacturers sell directly to consumers. In January, the company launched PEW Logistics, a subsidiary that provides manufacturers with a “white-label direct-to-consumer fulfillment solution.” Four months later, the ATF announced its proposed rule expanding remote firearms sales.

Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal sounded the alarm about what the company knew, and when—and pressed the Department of Justice on whether Trump Jr.’s business ties influenced the proposed rule. “It appears that GrabAGun had information about the potential change in the regulatory landscape and made a series of business decisions to capitalize on the moment,” they wrote in a July letter to then-acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Trump Jr.’s spokesperson has maintained that the president’s son had “zero involvement in this particular decision.”

“Don is a lifelong businessman and vocal advocate of our Second Amendment rights,” Andrew Surabian said in a statement to Reuters. “He does not interface with the Federal Government as part of his role with any company that he invests in or advises.”

ATF Director Robert Cekada also pushed back on ethical concerns, asserting that the “ATF has had no engagement with any retailer in developing [the rule].” The ATF has framed the Non-Over-the-Counter rule as a way to modernize gun sales and take advantage of technical advances in remote identity verification.

The proposal has drawn alarm from anti-gun-violence advocates and even some members of the gun industry, who say that removing in-person encounters could make it harder to detect suspicious sales and easier for guns to reach the criminal market.

“This allowing of online gun sales is probably the most dangerous action taken by the US government to increase gun violence,” warned Jon Lowy, founder and president of Global Action on Gun Violence and a veteran gun violence prevention attorney.

“A brief video interaction cannot detect if the purchaser is actually an illegal straw purchaser buying for someone else, a gun trafficker just supplying the criminal market, somebody who’s intoxicated, somebody who is on drugs, someone who is clearly mentally unstable and dangerous,” Lowy said. “I really was shocked.”

A promotional poster from the ‘Don’t Lie for the Other Guy’ campaign, a joint initiative of the ATF and the National Shooting Sports Foundation. (atf.gov)

The ATF and the gun industry’s largest trade organization, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), have partnered for more than 25 years on the “Don’t Lie for the Other Guy” campaign, educating dealers on how to identify and prevent straw purchases—when a “straw man” illegally buys a gun for someone else, one of the most common sources of gun trafficking, according to federal data.

Earlier this year, ATF Director Robert Cekada told the Senate Judiciary Committee that federally licensed firearms dealers are “our first line of defense in the fight against firearms trafficking.”

Now, the industry’s own trade group is warning that removing face-to-face encounters could undermine that role.

In August, the NSSF told the ATF that its membership was “overwhelmingly opposed” to the Non-Over-the-Counter rule, citing concerns that remote sales “would be exploited by bad actors to conduct illegal straw purchases.”

“When you have an online background check you lose the emotional point,” Florida gun dealer Marc Bernstein told Spectrum News 13. “A lot of the ways that we stop straw purchases are through conversations and we terminate the sale right away. And it happens pretty frequently.”  Bernstein said that happens at least once a week.

The Non-Over-the-Counter rule is still under review and, if finalized, will likely be challenged in court. It’s unclear if a legal challenge would delay the rollout.

“I’ve spent most of my career trying to stop the flow of crime guns,” said Lowy, the gun control attorney.

“Then this whole other mechanism that makes it completely easy and seems largely untouchable is created—and it looks like there’s virtually nothing you can do about it.”

Last week, The Washington Post reported that David Flippo’s congressional campaign falsely claimed on multiple occasions that the Nevada Republican earned a Bronze Star with valor as an Air Force officer. Flippo’s response was to blame anonymous staffers who he claimed had accidentally conflated two different awards he received for his service in Iraq.  

But there is a major problem with that explanation: For years, Flippo wore a hat that suggested he earned the Bronze Star with valor—the rare award he admits he does not have.

Specifically, as first reported by the conservative outlet Nevada News & Views, Flippo frequently wore a hat that included a Bronze Star with two V-shaped emblems next to it. Pictures of him wearing the hat were included on his campaign website and in posts on its social media feeds. According to veterans, the emblems on the cap bear a striking resemblance to the valor devices—or V devices, as they are known in military circles—used by the US military to show when awards are earned for valor. Lately, he appears to have stopped wearing that version of the cap.

The Bronze Star hangs below a red and blue ribbon. For those who received the award with valor, a small V is normally attached to the ribbon. In Flippo’s case, his hat featured two Vs next to his Bronze Star. (The other V could have been related to the Outstanding Unit Award with valor he received; that award was given to his unit as a whole rather than for individual acts of heroism.)

Part of a photo on Flippo’s campaign website showing two V-shaped emblems next to his Bronze Star.Flippo campaign website

Flippo’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Text messages sent to two numbers listed for Flippo in public records went unanswered. Flippo’s campaign answered some questions from the Nevada Independent for an article published on Friday that covered his military service, but it did not respond to those about the V-shaped symbols he has worn.

Daniel Casentini, a retired Air Force Master Sergeant who was interviewed by Nevada News & Views, told me via email that photos he has reviewed appear to show V devices next to Flippo’s Bronze Star. “I cannot conceive of any explanation for why Flippo would display two V devices unless he was implying he earned a Bronze Star with a V device,” he said.

After reviewing photos of Flippo wearing the hat, a former Army Ranger told me Flippo was “clearly representing” that he was awarded a Bronze Star with valor. “He was publicly knowingly misrepresenting the award he received,” he added in a text message. “He lied.” 

Scott Maryott, a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel who lives in northern Nevada, where he volunteers at the VA and teaches a university course on military history, asked, “Why would you put those Vs that represent valor on your hat in the first place?” He also wanted to know why Flippo no longer appears to be wearing them. “He could say, ‘I made a mistake putting them on my hat,'” Maryott said. “That’s okay. Be honest.”

A photo posted to Flippo’s Instagram account in 2024 featuring the V-shaped emblems.Instagram

The news about Flippo’s Bronze Star comes in the final weeks of a competitive House race in his Reno-based district. In 2024, Trump won the district by 14 points. But Flippo’s many weaknesses as a candidate—including the fact that he moved to Reno only this year—have helped put the seat in play for his Democratic opponent, Teresa Benitez-Thompson, a former state Assembly majority leader. On Wednesday, veterans in Nevada filmed a forthcoming ad AFL-CIO-funded ad criticizing Flippo. As I reported earlier this week, Flippo is also facing questions about the source of the nearly $2.5 million he has reported putting into his 2024 and 2026 congressional campaigns.

Flippo told the Post that he received a standard Bronze Star, as well as the Outstanding Unit Award with valor. Flippo said that his campaign team mistakenly conflated the two awards when it claimed he had a Bronze Star with valor. Rory McShane, the founder of the political consulting firm through which Flippo has routed most of his campaign spending, accused the Post of “trying to fabricate a scandal” based on “an honest mistake that has been apologized for.”

The false claim that Flippo received a Bronze Star with valor, when he actually received a standard Bronze Star, may sound like a minor distinction. In the military community, it is not. “A Bronze Star with a V device indicates you were directly involved in combat, under hostile fire, for the actions the Bronze Star is being awarded for,” Casentini explained. Maryott shared a similar perspective. A standard Bronze Star is “for showing up” and “performing successfully in a combat zone,” he said. “With valor, it’s a far different level.”

During the Iraq war, about 100,000 Bronze Stars were awarded. Only about 1 in 40 came with the additional valor distinction. The former Ranger explained that a Bronze Star with valor is so different from the regular version that it might as well be a different award.

On Friday, the Nevada Independent published the citation for Flippo’s Bronze Star, which was shared with the outlet by a campaign spokesperson. Among other achievements, the citation states that, while in Iraq, Flippo “was the first to promptly respond” to extinguish flames and provide “life saving medical care” to a soldier with severe burns on his body. Maryott said that Flippo clearly deserved a Bronze Star for the conduct described in the citation but not a valor device. 

Flippo was photographed wearing the hat as early as August 2023, when he was running for Congress for the first time. He continued to wear the hat with the apparent V devices until at least June 2026. Recently, Flippo has been photographed multiple times wearing a similar hat that has neither a Bronze Star nor the apparent V devices. 

Maryott said that it is strange for an officer to go out of their way to tout a standard Bronze Star. “If you’re an officer and you served overseas during this operation you probably got a Bronze Star,” said Maryott, who has a Bronze Star of his own. “I would never lead with that.”

President Donald Trump is once again offering “exclusive” access to buyers of his meme coin—this time in the form of an invitation to a dinner with him and three secret “legends” to be named at a later date.

All you have to do is purchase—and then resist the temptation to immediately sell—a lot of $TRUMP. If, come November 12, you’re one of the top 185 holders of the coin, you’ll get to attend the special event later that month at Trump’s golf club in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. The marketing is not subtle, with the coin’s official website promising access to “The Most Exclusive Dinner in the World” and an “evening with 3 Legends and President Donald J. Trump.” In smaller letters, it notes that there will also be a private meet and greet with an unnamed “legend.” Sadly, though, “No attendees will be granted a private meet & greet with the President.”

The top 29 holders of the $TRUMP meme coin will also get to go to a special VIP reception “with your favorite President and one of the Legends.” As an added bonus, the top four holders will get a gold Trump-branded watch. Again, however, it notes that there won’t be any private time with Trump, and no gifts will be accepted. Because, you know, ethics.

The White House referred questions about whether Trump had been involved with planning the dinner or would be paid to attend it to the event’s host, who did not respond to a request for comment. The event was first reported by the Washington Sun.

This isn’t the first gathering of this sort. There have been two previous exclusive events involving the president, one at Mar-a-Lago and another at the same Virginia golf club. The coin’s backers—who have a licensing deal with Trump—have also set up contests with access to swanky hospitality suites at the World Cup and Super Bowl. Another contest currently running offers the winner tickets to the F1 grand prix in Singapore, next weekend.

Other than rewarding people for holding onto the coins, there isn’t really a point to this particular bit of blockchain boosterism. As I wrote in April, shortly after the Mar-a-Lago event:

Donald Trump launched the $TRUMP meme coin (and the associated $MELANIA meme coin) just three days before his second inauguration. The price of the coin immediately rocketed past $74, giving it a total market capitalization of around $15 billion—a rather absurd figure for a brand new digital asset that can’t actually be used for anything. The coin has no inherent value. It has no transactional use. It essentially functions as a digital endorsement of Trump—so perhaps fittingly, it’s price has since fallen even faster than the president’s approval ratings.

Since that high point of $74, the value of the coin dropped drastically and, in recent months, has maintained a steady low price. As of Friday afternoon, it was priced at about $2.00.

When he returned to the White House last year, Trump declared he would be the “crypto president” and would do what he could to advance the blockchain economy. But even many crypto enthusiasts were not particularly happy when he launched the meme coin shortly before inauguration. And it has proved to be a spectacularly bad deal for many investors. According to an analysis from June, more than 1 million investors lost around $3.8 billion, combined, as the coin’s value dropped.

On the other hand, according to Trump’s latest personal financial disclosure, he appears to have earned about $635 million from the arrangement.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox has been making the rounds of national media recently promoting his new book, Off Ramp: How to be a peacemaker in an age of contempt. On Jon Stewart, CNBC, and CNN, Cox drilled down on a theme that brought him into the national spotlight last year after the assassination of conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk in Utah: political depolarization. This was nothing new for Cox, who launched a “disagree better” initiative as the head of the National Governor’s Association in 2023.

While the work has earned him national plaudits and calls to run for president, it hasn’t exactly endeared him to people at home. In Utah, the two-term governor is, in fact, rather polarizing. A new poll released on Tuesday shows that his net approval rating in Utah has fallen 23 points since April.

It’s not hard to see why. He has signed laws supporting extreme Republican gerrymandering and taking fluoride out of the drinking water. This year, he officially declared June as “Fidelity Month,” instead of its more familiar name, Pride Month. He has supported data center construction over the intense objections of Utah residents of all political stripes. And in 2024, the soon-to-be author signed one of the country’s most extreme book banning laws—a decision that’s now coming back to haunt him as he tries to get people to buy his own book.

Since the law’s passage, Utah has now banned 44 books from all of its public school libraries and AP class curricula—everything from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to popular books by Stephen King, Jodi Picoult and Sarah J. Maas. (The full list can be found here.) Some local school districts have banned three times that number, most of them because of LGBTQ-related content or what the book-banners like to call “pornography.” (An example: Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 midlife crisis book Eat Pray Love was challenged in the Davis County school district because, among other things, it “refers to a penis as a banana.” It survived after another reviewer pointed out that the author writes favorably about celibacy.)

I was in Utah when Cox’s book came out and thought I’d try to go see him talk about it while I was there. But the governor wasn’t doing any book events in his own state. I eventually saw him in DC, where he spoke last week at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Since I couldn’t find the governor in Utah, I went to see the legendary Salt Lake City bookstore owner Ken Sanders, proudly displays a sandwich board outside his store announcing, “We Buy Banned Books.” Born in Utah, Sanders has been selling books in the state since 1975, and he’s lived through various waves of state-sponsored censorship. I showed him a copy of Cox’s new book. When he saw the book jacket highlighting Cox’s “dedication to depolarization and a commitment to peacemaking,” he exclaimed, “Oof. That ain’t you, babe.”

“I would have to say he doesn’t understand irony at all, or how would he title his book like that?”

“I would have to say he doesn’t understand irony at all,” Sanders said. “Or how would he title his book like that?”

Sanders isn’t the only Utah resident to notice the contradiction between the subject of Cox’s book and his support for the book banning law. In late April, The King’s English, a venerable independent bookstore in Salt Lake City, announced a promotion of the governor’s book, similar to those it does with other prominent authors. Customers who pre-ordered his book would receive a signed copy as soon as it came out. But the store was forced to cancel the offer in the face of furious outrage from its customers. “The book banner is partnering with a bookstore?” wrote one of hundreds of posters on the Salt Lake City sub-Reddit upset about Cox’s book promotion. “Gross and ill-advised.”

Cal Crosby, co-owner of The King’s English, says that the backlash was worse than when a bomb threat in 2023 forced them to cancel drag queen story time. The bomb threat turned out to have come from somewhere overseas, but the attacks over Cox’s book came from close to home. “It was very personal,” he said, noting that many of the most aggressive critics were among the store’s longtime customers or business connections.

Utah’s book banning law, according to critics, has a sweeping mandate. Here’s how it works: If three school districts, or two districts and five charter schools, ban a book because they decide it meets the state definition of obscenity or “sensitive materials,” the book is automatically removed from every school in the state. A Salt Lake Tribune analysis in May found that almost all of the statewide book bans originated in only two of the state’s 41 school districts.

Of those nine, most of the bans initially originated from just one district: Davis County, a conservative area north of Salt Lake City, where fringe conservatives have taken over the local Republican party. In 2021, after a two-year investigation, the US Department of Justice forced the Davis school district to address widespread racial harassment against Black and Asian-American students. Shortly afterward, a 10-year-old Black girl with autism died by suicide after allegedly suffering from intense bullying in a Davis County school.

Yet Davis County activists are leveraging the book-banning law to dictate what every school in the state is allowed to teach or stock in its library. And once the state bans a book, it can’t be assigned, even for AP classes. And schools must destroy all their copies lest the offending materials make their way into a Little Library or the hands of an unsuspecting youth.

Cox signed the first version of a book banning law in 2022 that allowed individual school districts to ban books. After it passed, a small but motivated army of people aligned with the far-right activist group Moms for Liberty marched into local schools to scan the bookshelves for books they deemed smutty. The law required school districts have committees to review book challenges, and people without children in the district schools were ineligible to challenge reading materials.

But state records showed that those rules have been routinely ignored, according to an investigation by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project. In Washington County in Southern Utah, for instance, most book challenges were made almost entirely by a woman who homeschooled her kids.

In 2024, when the state legislature expanded the law to make it easier to ban books statewide, Utah education advocates and civil liberties groups called on Cox to veto the bill. If enacted, they argued, the law “would encourage individuals to stifle the voices of diverse authors and perspectives, casting a chilling shadow over the sanctity of our First Amendment rights.”

Cox signed it anyway.

“I think calling on people to depolarize and to tone down the rhetoric is a very good thing to do,” says Jessica Horton, co-founder of Let Davis Read, an advocacy group fighting book bans in Davis County. “But as a leader, sometimes you have to stand up to your friends and say, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is not okay.’  And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s always the case with our governor.”

“Calling people to depolarize and to tone down the rhetoric is a very good thing to do. But as a leader, sometimes you have to stand up to your friends and say, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is not okay.’  And unfortunately, I don’t think that’s always the case with our governor.”

When I reached out to Cox’s publisher for a comment on his support for the book banning law, a spokesperson said in an email that the governor had no role in removing books from schools. The spokesperson disputed the idea that Utah was banning books, saying that local leaders and librarians have always chosen age-appropriate books for their schools. “We’re not going to agree on every policy, including which books should be available to children in public schools,” they said. “And refusing to engage with people we disagree with is a big part of how we got to our current political environment.”

Authors whose work has been banned, the estate of Kurt Vonnegut, as well as several students have sued the state over the law. Represented by the ACLU, they have argued that, among other things, it is depriving young people of constitutionally protected literature and personally harming the authors. On September 15, a federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs have standing to sue and the case is moving forward.

Meanwhile, Cox has been promoting his book, and a state literacy effort, as if none of this ever happened. “Civilization cannot continue if we can’t read,” he said at an event in August. He even retweeted a recent Atlantic story heralding the death of literacy, calling it “sobering.”

The Atlantic’s story this week on America becoming a post-literate society is sobering. The statistics are dark. But they are also reversible. I know because I’ve done it. After deleting social media from my phone, I unlocked my focus and started reading recreationally again. https://t.co/YeF57vVujt

— Spencer Cox (@SpencerJCox) July 10, 2026

“With one hand, he is saying, ‘I want children to learn to read.’ With the other hand, he is taking away the books that teens actually want to read,” such as Stephen King novels, notes Susan Heiner, an organizer of Let Utah Read, which has been fighting the book bans. “You get kids and teenagers to read by giving them things that they are interested in.”