Early Saturday morning, a woman whose husband is detained at ICE’s Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, drove nearly two hours to visit him. She was turned away at the gate. 

GEO Group—the multibillion-dollar ICE contractor that runs Delaney Hall—had cancelled family visitation for the day. She sat on a curb, cried, and drove home. Throughout the morning, I saw half-a-dozen women and children arrive: all were told they would not be seeing their loved ones that day.

More than two weeks since detainees began a hunger and labor strike inside Delaney Hall—and their allies outside answered with near-daily protests—it’s still incredibly difficult to find out what’s going on inside the facility. Often, family members find their visits rescheduled or canceled, and journalists have not made it in, either. 

Members of Congress are allowed by law to conduct unannounced oversight visits to ICE facilities like Delaney. But politicians have been turned away, too. New Jersey congresswoman LaMonica McIver is facing assault charges after she was arrested alongside Newark mayor Ras Baraka trying to conduct an oversight visit last year. New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill tried to visit the jail in late May, and was denied.

New Jersey Senator Andy Kim was pepper-sprayed when he tried to enter Delaney Hall last month, and as my colleague Alex Nguyen reported, he was forced to directly call Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for admittance. Kim returned Saturday morning to try again—and this time, he made it inside.

But even Kim wasn’t able to find out much about the conditions there: “They refused to let me talk to any detainees,” he told me as he exited Delaney Hall. 

“They told me that if I were to speak to any detainees, the oversight tour would immediately be cut off and stopped. This is impeding my ability to lawfully do the oversight that I’m legally allowed to do, and I told them I thought this was a deep breach of my responsibilities and what the American people are demanding.” 

What he was able to see was disturbing. 

As Kim walked past the women’s unit, he said, he saw a group of women frantically waving their arms and pointing at someone curled up on a bed in pain. “They’re just frantic and waving and pointing, and I saw the woman curled up on the bed. I asked, ‘What is happening here?’” The guards, Kim said, didn’t answer. (GEO Group and ICE did not respond to requests for comment.)

“They continue to have only one full-time doctor here for hundreds of detainees, many of whom have significant medical concerns,” Kim said. At this point, there are about 600 people jailed in Delaney Hall, a thousand-bed facility which has faced accusations of inadequate medical care, wormy food and abusive guards. 

On his oversight visit, Kim asked the guards why detainees’ video calls are being restricted. “’We’ll get back to you,’” he said the guards replied. He asked after specific detained people, whose families had asked him for help. Again, he said, the guards responded, “’We’ll get back to you.’” 

He asked about one detained woman who has been hospitalized for several weeks. “They aren’t telling her family where she is, which hospital she’s in. They’re saying it’s a security problem,” Kim said. Guards told the family to file a Freedom of Information Act request to find out where she is, he said. “Can you imagine if your loved one was in a hospital and you don’t know what hospital they’re in, and then you’re told to just file some bureaucratic papers, and cross your fingers that they’re going to get back to you?” 

“That’s the stuff that just pisses me off about this.  I was here to get answers for these family members that I talked with earlier today, and I didn’t get them.” 

For over a year, a group of volunteers has operated a “radical hospitality” tent outside Delaney Hall—the same tent where medics cared for Kim after he was pepper-sprayed. 

On most weekends, when hundreds of family members might come to visit their loved ones, it’s bustling: volunteers distribute water and grocery gift cards, and children play on the rocking horse inside the tent to get some respite from the sun. Diapers, a volunteer told me, are often the most asked-for item. 

This Saturday, though, the tent—painstakingly rebuilt after ICE agents reportedly ransacked it days earlier—was nearly empty after visits were cancelled for the day. A few individuals, turned away at Delaney Hall’s gate, stopped for bottled water and directions to the nearest bus stop.

“This is our money going to detain these people, and we’re not getting any answers,” Kim said. “I’m not getting answers on behalf of you, on behalf of other Americans, on behalf of the families of those that are detained. They deserve to have answers, they deserve to have their rights.”

Scott Pelley spent 37 years at CBS News, only to be fired last week after coming into conflict with Free Press founder Bari Weiss, who took control of the network last October. In a New York Times sit-down interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro published Sunday, Pelley said Weiss personally interfered with the network’s coverage of the ICE officer who killed Renée Good in Minneapolis.

Pelley told Garcia-Navarro that, hours before an episode of 60 Minutes on the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti was set to air, Weiss sent an email to his boss asking for changes to the episode. “Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

On June 3, Pelley posted on Instagram that “New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” Now, it’s clear that story was about the ICE agent who killed Renée Good: video of Good’s final moments posted by CBS Evening News does not in fact show her driving toward an officer.

A CBS spokesperson told the New York Times that Weiss’ comments “had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible.”

“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration,” Pelley said. “Constantly looking out for the views of the president.” But that, to him, wasn’t the worst part. “The bigger problem, Lulu, frankly, is not any kind of political influence,” he told Garcia-Navarro. “The problem was the incompetence. You don’t break a deadline. That episode came within 19 minutes of not making it to air.”

CBS has previously pulled 60 Minutes segments, including one in December reporting on the Trump administration deporting people to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison—a key ally of President Donald Trump—installed Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS shortly after buying her website, The Free Press, for a reported $150 million.

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Maxing out at around 200 tons, the blue whale is not only the largest animal on the planet, it is also the largest animal ever to exist. These creatures become so massive by eating a diet comprised almost entirely of krill, the translucent, thumb-sized organisms that thrive in the frigid waters of Antarctica. 

Blue whales are baleen feeders: In place of teeth they have baleen plates, made from keratin, that serve as a sieve. Swimming toward huge concentrations of krill, they open their triple-hinged jaws to gulp in huge volumes of water and prey, then filter out the water. The only baleen whale that almost exclusively eats krill, blues can consume as much as 16 metric tons of the shrimp-like crustaceans in a day.

But this food supply appears to be faltering. Climate change, which is warming the oceans and melting polar ice, is causing large-scale changes in the Southern Ocean krill population, changing their distribution and behavior and in some places contributing to declines of as much as 80 percent. Parts of Antarctica are warming five times faster than the global average. Last fall the British Antarctic Survey warned that “dramatic and extreme changes in Antarctica are happening faster than expected,” and the continent could be approaching a tipping point.  

Now another possible threat to krill populations is worrying researchers and conservationists. The crustacean’s massive concentrations in the Antarctic have attracted supertrawlers from around the world that vacuum up to 1,000 tons of krill a day, then process the animals onboard into krill oil. Rich in omega-3 fatty acids, the oil is used in human nutritional supplements, as food for aquaculture, and in pet food.

Thanks to technology that allows large-scale harvesting, the business began to take off about 15 years ago and is now booming. Last October, Norway began lobbying the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), which manages the krill fishery, to double the allowable take in the Southern Ocean. The krill industry is worth as much as $900 million annually. 

But there is growing alarm among researchers and conservationists about what the harvest could mean for whales, in addition to imperiled seals and penguins. Earlier this year, the European Union passed a resolution calling for a five-year moratorium on all krill fishing in the Southern Ocean as a precaution while more data are gathered. 

“Our calculations suggest an alarming possibility that we might harvest krill to the point where we do real damage to recovering whale populations,” said Matthew Savoca, a whale researcher at Stanford University and the coauthor of a recent study that addressed this issue. 

Nowhere on the planet do krill—considered the most abundant wild animal species in the world, as measured by biomass—occur in higher numbers than in Antarctica. A keystone species in the Southern Ocean ecosystem, krill are an essential food for other baleen whales, seals, penguins, and a variety of birds. Populations of the crustaceans are especially dense in the Scotia Sea, which stretches between the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Orkney Islands; estimates vary widely, but the area may contain as much as half of the global population.

Not surprisingly, this is also a place where whales aggregate. Savoca recently returned from a research trip to Antarctica and said he was bowled over by the number of cetaceans in a small area. “This is Serengeti-migration-level stuff,” he said. “It’s a full-on sensory experience. You are surrounded by blows,” or whales spouting. “You see the blows, hear the blows, and you smell the blows because it’s kind of stinky. It smells like rotting cabbage.”

Such mass whale gatherings are largely the result of an international moratorium on whaling that went into effect in 1986, allowing baleen whales—fin, humpback, sei, minke, and right whales—to stage a remarkable comeback. The super-abundance of krill in the region has also contributed to their climb back to healthy population levels. Blue whales feed here, too, though they remain listed as endangered, with their population 95 percent lower than in pre-whaling days.

Thanks to the growing demand for krill oil spurred by health-conscious consumers, as well as the proliferation of fish farms, supertrawlers as long as football fields now work the same space as krill-eating whales. The trawlers use echo sounders, a type of sonar, and even drones to find massive swarms of krill. Some fishers use fine mesh nets to bring them aboard; Aker Qrill, part of Aker Biomarine, the Norwegian company that takes almost two-thirds of the total Antarctic krill quota of 620,000 tons, uses a method called continuous pumping, in which a hose inserted into a krill swarm vacuums crustaceans onto the deck of the ship for immediate onboard processing.

A number of studies have established that climate change, which is driving a decline in sea ice, is affecting the resilience of krill, which are in some regions in steep decline. “Krill are very reliant on ice,” said Savoca. “When krill are young, they need to hide under the ice from predators, and they eat algae off the underside of the sea ice. And if there is less ice, both in extent and duration, they don’t recruit as well.” 

Whales are difficult to study in the extreme environment of Antarctica, but one recent study showed that the decline in the availability of krill can lead to fewer pregnancies and reduce viability in humpback whales. Other krill-consuming species that are more accessible to researchers have been studied as a proxy. The Antarctic fur seal and the emperor penguin were recently added to the IUCN endangered list because of their falling populations, due in part to a decline in prey driven by climatic changes and to krill shortages. 

This year the limit on krill was reached three months early in the year-round season, in part because the industry has grown and in part because trawlers were not bound by spatial distribution rules and so concentrated their efforts in krill hotspots. This is the first time the quota has been met so early, and it spurred some of the 27 nations in the CCAMLR to call for expanding the limit.

Opponents of expansion argue the CCAMLR is obliged by its bylaws to abide by the precautionary principle, which states that in the absence of definitive science, management should be cautious. But a recent study found that krill fishery managers were not taking into consideration the synergistic effects of krill fishing and rapid climate warming on penguins—factors that researchers say likely affect whales too. 

“Given the existential threat to the Antarctic ecosystem that climate change poses, we should not be adding other risk factors,” said Peter Hammarstedt, the chief campaigns officer for Sea Shepherd Global, which lobbies to end the krill fishery. “We need to remove all other risk factors to create ecological resilience. That’s why it’s troubling the krill fishing is expanding.”

Calls for restrictions on the krill industry are growing louder among scientists, activists, and some politicians. And while the EU’s passage of the resolution calling for a five-year moratorium on krill fishing in the Southern Ocean was a symbolic victory for conservationists—there are no EU countries that fish for krill—an actual ban cannot go into effect without the unanimous approval of the CCAMLR. 

Meanwhile, a battle over the term “sustainable” rages. In 2010 the fishery was first certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), an international nonprofit that monitors and certifies wild fisheries, and it has since been recertified several times, including this year.

Because the requirement that krill fishing be spatially distributed lapsed in 2024, the fishing trawlers concentrated their catch where populations are densest—and where the most whales and other wildlife are present. These are also areas most affected by climate change. Earlier this year, the World Wildlife Fund called on the MSC to remove its sustainable designation. 

“Antarctic krill are the powerhouse of the Southern Ocean,” said Rhona Kent, polar oceans program manager at WWF-UK, “and mismanagement of the krill fishery is having a major negative impact on species which depend on krill,” including whales. To protect those species and their ecosystems, “WWF is calling for an immediate moratorium on krill fishing and a review of the sustainability certification issued by the MSC.” 

For its part, the industry argues that it operates with the best available science in a sustainable manner, taking only 1 percent of the total Antarctic population. “CCAMLR has been trying to move from 620,000 tons to a more science-based quota,” said Pål Skogrand, chief policy officer for Aker Qrill. “And the science says it could definitely be doubled.”

Chile and Argentina, members of the CCAMLR, have repeatedly introduced proposals to establish a Marine Protected Area for portions of the Scotia Sea, including the South Orkney Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula, but there have been years of disagreements over boundaries and restrictions on krill fishing. Again, it takes a unanimous council to pass resolutions, and both China and Russia have opposed this measure. The Norwegians have said they would support an MPA if the overall catch was doubled.

Other groups aren’t waiting for consensus. In April, allies of anti-whaling activist Paul Watson, who founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and now operates the Paul Watson Foundation, steered the foundation’s ship into a krill fishing vessel owned by Aker Qrill. Damage was slight; the company said it is pursuing an investigation.

Sea Shepherd Global, a separate organization, takes scientists and journalists to monitor and raise awareness of the krill fishery; it’s also spearheading a media campaign that asks retailers to stop carrying krill oil supplements in favor of stocking plant-based omega-3s. Hammarstedt says that two large drugstore chains in Germany—a large market for krill oil supplements—and a large chain of stores in the UK that sell nutritional supplements are committed to phasing out krill oil products. Some two-thirds of the value of krill is in oil for supplements, and if they were no longer made, Hammarstedt said, “it would absolutely end this fishery.” 

As the pressure on this industry increases, there remain more questions than answers. “You have a fragile system that is pushed to the brink with climate change,” said Savoca. “Does it make sense to fish for krill and add another threat? And if we do, how can we do it in a way that is smart and cautious?” 

In a perplexing speech Saturday commemorating the World War II D-Day landings in Normandy, France, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called for European leaders to combat what he implied was a second, modern D-Day—in which European countries were being “stormed by different dangerous ideologies” accompanied by “boats and men.”

The original D-Day was the Allied invasion to liberate France from Nazi German domination: the defenders were Hitler’s National Socialists and their army, and the “dangerous ideology” was anti-fascism.

At Normandy in 1944, genocidal far-right extremists “defended” a conquered Europe against a multiracial force fighting for democratic ideas. In 2026, Hegseth’s speech suggested, it was happening again: “When will European capitals do something about that invasion?,” he asked.

Hegseth may have been confused—or, then again, we might be at the stage where our government explicitly aligns us with Nazism. After all, every single refugee we admitted to the US this year was supposedly fleeing anti-white persecution.

Commentators online noted Hegseth’s choice of words: 

While the self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” didn’t explicitly mention what those “dangerous ideologies” were, his past remarks and actions make it fairly clear. Last June, Hegseth ordered American troops to provide security during federal immigration raids in Los Angeles. In January, he thanked ICE for its invasion and occupation of Minnesota—“You are SAVING the country”—and followed the post with a graphic on X, listing three ways to avoid ICE: “don’t be here illegally,” “don’t attack I.C.E. officers,” and “obey federal and state laws.”

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Hegseth has fired or forcibly retired at least 24 generals and senior commanders without providing any merit-based justification provided; roughly 60 percent have been either Black officers or women of any race.

As my colleague Arianna Coghill wrote in September, for Hegseth, “a military with Black leadership, with women in senior roles, and without obstacles to a diverse officer corps is one in which white men have to take orders from the wrong kind.”

Hegseth, Trump, and JD Vance’s obsession with a more racist Europe is having an impact, with explicitly racist parties in multiple European countries touting their ties to the Trump administration and a white nationalist conference in Portugal recently inviting disgraced former Customs and Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino to deliver a prominent address; earlier this week, the European Union advanced a plan to increase deportations and build detention centers abroad—which it calls “return hubs”—in a move with unmistakable echoes of Trump administration policies. 

Every single one of the 599 refugees the US admitted last month was a white South African, according to data the State Department’s Bureau of Population released Friday.

In fact, so was every other refugee admitted this year. Since October 1, 2025, the US has accepted 6,668 refugees. Of those, 6,665 were white South Africans. Three—admitted last November—were from Afghanistan. No other refugees were admitted.

That data is backed up by the US Refugee Admissions Program, a federal public-private interagency collaboration program that works on refugee resettlement.

In October, the Trump administration announced that it would cut the number of refugees admitted per year to the US to 7,500—practically all of whom will be white.

A country that made its name as a haven for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, the United States has long accepted refugees in numbers an order of magnitude greater—and from all over the world. The Trump figures mark a precipitous drop from from fiscal years 2022-2024; under Biden, in keeping with tradition, the annual limit was 125,000.

A presidential memo from September announced Trump’s intentions: that the refugees accepted “shall primarily be among Afrikaners from South Africa” and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.”

The Trump administration sees Afrikaners, an South African ethnic group descended primarily from European settlers, as victims of white “genocide”—a racist conspiracy theory promoted by many on the far right, notably Elon Musk. 

In May, the US increased the number of white South Africans it planned to admit by 10,000, to 17,500, claiming that “unforeseen developments in South Africa created an emergency refugee situation”—including South African immigration officials raiding a US refugee processing center in the country, arresting seven Kenyan nationals whom they alleged were working at the facility illegally. 

A spokesperson for South Africa’s foreign ministry said to the New York Times that same month that “the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy.” And as my colleague Noah Lanard wrote at the time, the White House “has cut off aid to South Africa based on its specious claim about discrimination against white South Africans.”

The State Department said the estimated cost of resettling those additional 10,000 Afrikaner refugees would be $100 million. 

It’s yet another way the US under Trump continues to ostentatiously demonstrate who it deems worthy of aid, and who it does not. 

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

Irrefutable proof of what Spanish researchers and wildlife experts had long suspected, and long feared, finally presented itself in the form of a grainy video that was shot on a minuscule island in the Balearics in April 2024.

Ribboning its way through the turquoise waters that separate the east coast of Ibiza from the islet of Santa Eulària 450 meters away, came a pale and solitary horseshoe whip snake in search of new territory and fresh sustenance.

The arrival of the snake on Santa Eulària, recorded by a local wildlife ranger, confirmed that the insatiable invader from the Spanish mainland—which has almost wiped out Ibiza’s endemic population of dazzlingly colored wall lizards—had opened up a new front.

“There’d been increasing anecdotal evidence from fishermen and tourists who’d seen the snakes swimming, so we’d thought it was happening very often,” said Oriol Lapiedra, a biologist at the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) in Catalonia. “But this was the first proper [evidence] we’d had of a snake swimming from Ibiza to the islet.”

The horseshoe whip snake, a nonvenomous reptile found across southern and eastern Spain, has become an existential threat to the lizards since it began appearing on the island two decades ago.

Its rapid colonization has been attributed to the fashion among wealthy property owners in Ibiza for importing ancient olive trees from mainland Spain to adorn the grounds of their homes. Unbeknown to them, however, the trees—replete with their nooks and hollows—have provided ideal travel berths for hibernating snakes and snake eggs.

Twenty years after it arrived, Hemorrhois hippocrepis is present across at least 90 percent of the island and has developed a taste for the unsuspecting lizards, whose familiar colors and outlines grace much of Ibiza’s tourist tat, from T-shirts and fridge magnets to towels and mugs.

These days, though, items of kitsch lizard merchandise may outnumber the real population. In October 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature moved the Ibiza wall lizard (Podarcis pityusensis) up its extinction red list from “near threatened” to “endangered.”

Treasured and beloved as the lizards are for their aesthetic appeal and tame natures, they are also a keystone species that plays a vital role in maintaining the region’s ecosystems.

“They control insect populations—including agricultural pests—so that all changes when they disappear,” said Lapiedra. “But they also pollinate flowers and disperse seeds.”

What is more, the lizards are something of an evolutionary wonder: Each of the dozens of islands and islets that make up the Pityusic Islands has a different population whose distinct colorations include green, blue, black, brown, gray, and orange.

No one knows how many invasive snakes there are in Ibiza. According to the Balearic regional government, which is working with CREAF and other groups to protect the lizards, more than 3,500 horseshoe whip snakes were captured on the island last year alone, and more than 16,000 have been culled since 2016. Even so, forecasts suggest they will be found across 100 percent of the island by the end of 2027.

On the mainland, the snakes tend to be skinny creatures that seldom exceed lengths of 1.8 meters. But they are thriving to such an extent on Ibiza that specimens have been found that are more than 2 meters long and weigh 2.5 times as much as their peninsular peers. As Lapiedra put it: “We’ve found animals that are as thick as my wrist.”

The biologist and his colleagues, whose research was published recently in the journal Ecology, believe increased competition for food among the snakes on Ibiza may have driven them toward the islets.

While the hope is that dwindling food sources may eventually bring down the number of snakes, the damage has already been done. Researchers observed 72 lizards on Santa Eulària in 2016 and just three in 2023. Today, the unique lizard populations of 10 islets—including Santa Eulària—have become extinct, taking with them thousands of years of unique evolution. Meanwhile, horseshoe whip snakes have been found on Ibiza’s neighboring island of Formentera.

In an effort to safeguard the species, a “Noah’s ark” captive breeding program involving lizards from eight populations was set up at Barcelona zoo last year and is doing well. But the small size of the islets, combined with the voracity of the snakes, leaves little room for optimism and still less for complacency.

Lapiedra likens the situation to that of the Pacific island of Guam, where the arrival of the brown tree snake on US military ships 80 years ago led to the extirpation of 10 of the 12 native forest bird species. “The only difference is that the snakes in Guam aren’t reported to swim,” he added. “So there are islands [around] Guam that still have the species that Guam used to have.”

And yet, as Lapiedra pointed out, all is not lost on Ibiza. In an ironic twist for a species that has been thrust into extinction’s fangs by the human compulsion to order and reorder the landscape, the safest lizard populations in Ibiza are now those in urban areas.

“The lizards are still present in the largest cities in Ibiza and the populations are fine,” he said. “Basically what’s happening is that in the urban areas, the snakes get run over and people there also kill them because they don’t like snakes. So for now, some of these urban areas have good lizard populations.”

But for Lapiedra, his colleagues and people across Ibiza, the rapid disappearance of the lizards is both an ecological and a cultural disaster.

“Each, or most, of the islets have these unique lineages that are being completely lost to science and to humanity right now,” he said. “So this is a tragedy—it’s like a fire in an old church.”

Every week, a group of men in their late 60s meets at the Corner Cafe in Elizabethtown, North Carolina. One important reason for these meetups is to discuss what’s going on in their community. 

Local news has virtually dried up in their rural county, as well as neighboring counties, and some residents say they’re being left in the dark and don’t feel equipped to make informed decisions.

“I’m not gonna vote if I can’t get the information,” says Penny Abernathy.

Like in much of the country, roughly two-thirds of North Carolina’s counties are considered news deserts. And the lack of local journalism isn’t just making it harder for people to stay informed; it’s exacerbating a crisis of trust in the news media. 

This week on Reveal, we partner with the podcast Scene on Radio and its hosts John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika to understand how American journalism got here and what can be done to repair the cracked foundation of the Fourth Estate.

We’re less than a week away from the first match of the FIFA Men’s World Cup, with tensions mounting over the United States’ role as one of the host countries, and it remains to be seen just how the Department of Homeland Security will respond to what it deems threats—or how active ICE will be at the tournament.

On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News that “every single” agency would be on site. “We’re going to have facial recognition, right. If we have people coming in that’s on the terrorist watchlist, we’re going to collapse on them. That’s not going to [just] be ICE, that could be state police that collapse on them. We’re all working together.”

ICE’s facial recognition systems can misidentify people and generate false matches—and the agency reportedly places smartphone-based facial recognition matches ahead of physical evidence including birth certificates.

Perhaps to counter potential criticisms, Mullin stated that ICE will be there “not for immigration, but for terrorist threats” and that “for years, ICE has been around and no one knew who they were.”

Several cities hosting World Cup matches have announced that they would not cooperate with ICE enforcement, including Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Seattle. On Monday, LA County Sheriff Robert Luna claimed that Mullin personally told him that federal agents would not conduct civil immigration enforcement “at any of the games.” But the federal government has increasingly deployed the criminal legal system against people they allege to have violated immigration law, with little regard for their alleged offenses and despite the fact that unauthorized presence in the US is a civil offense, not a criminal one.

Even giving Mullin the benefit of the doubt—which may not be the best move—his statement leaves ample room for loopholes: will it apply between games? To areas outside the stadiums? That uncertainty impacts fans, visitors, families of players, journalists—all of whom face a heightened risk of human rights violations, according to a joint travel advisory issued by more than 120 civil society groups in April. Among the risks listed in their press release:

• Arbitrary denial of entry and risk of arrest, detention and/or deportation
• Expanded restrictions and limitation on travel and entry to the U.S.
• Invasive social media screening and searches of electronic devices
• Violent and unconstitutional immigration enforcement, including racial profiling
• Suppression of speech and protest and increased surveillance
• Cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment – and even death – while in ICE detention or custody

Given that ominous warning—and the Trump administration’s tendency to label political opponents and immigrants of all stripes as “criminal aliens,” “domestic terrorists,” or otherwise dangerous—a secondhand verbal promise that there will be no civil immigration enforcement is not reassuring.

While watching Madonna’s recent Times Square takeover—sponsored by the gay “dating” app Grindr—it struck me. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Something about Madonna’s performance made me immediately think of Nancy Pelosi. (Do with that what you will.) Both women are legendary trailblazers in their own right, foundational to their respective worlds, and yet always in a complicated negotiation with the legacy they’re leaving behind.

From the very start, both women were dismissed by the world around them, eventually defying expectations and a male-driven culture that wished to deem them unworthy. They both found longevity in their worlds due to reinvention, navigating the changing winds of pop culture or political landscapes by having to shape shift in ways their male counterparts never had to.

It’s hard to put my finger on what exactly sparked the comparison—maybe initially, it was the superficial fact of both being women who take up powerful spaces and refuse to let the world tell them they can’t do powerful things. Maybe it’s also that when these women dare to exist in public, we write about it, talk about it, send clips to our group chats about it.

But there was something else too. As Madonna precariously dangled her leg over the edge of a Times Square banister while she promotes Confessions II, the long-awaited follow-up to her 2005 chart-topping Confessions on a Dance Floor, I was hit with a type of exhaustion. It was a feeling I felt when Pelosi was exiting Congress. Madonna and Pelosi, in all their power, once created the winds of culture and politics. Now, it seems, they chase them.

But maybe that’s real legacy. It’s not about newness or the albums or gavels, but the audacity to still be here, unbothered and reveling in knowing you already did it. In a culture terrified of irrelevance, there’s something loudly radical about two women who’ve already proved everything—and know it.

Far-right podcaster Candace Owens made a surprise trip to Russia this week, where she spoke on a panel at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), a Davos-style event meant to build relationships between Russia and other world powers. Owens, who initially claimed that she was only taking a family vacation, used her trip to tweet at length about the country’s beauty, safety, and friendliness to Christians. “The Christian expression and heritage here is unmatched,” she tweeted, alongside photos of Russian Orthodox churches. “Unsurprisingly, they are lying to us about Russia.” 

“I’m starting to understand why the talking heads panic and shout and lie about ‘Russian collusion’ when they learn an American with a platform is traveling here,” Owens added in another tweet. “It’s Plato’s allegory of the cave. It is genuinely shocking how clean, beautiful and ordered this city is. It is so far removed from media depictions.” 

The baldly propagandistic nature of Owens’ trip generated condemnation from an unusual quarter: other MAGA figures, who suddenly found themselves unusually concerned about Kremlin-backed disinformation. 

Glenn Beck, for instance, tweeted that Owens’ trip is “proof that Russia and Alexander Dugin’s massive propaganda operation is working.” (Dugin is a political philosopher and ultra-nationalist figure who is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain” due to his reported influence on the president.) A MAGA podcaster named Matt Tardio responded in agreement: “I’ve respected Glenn Beck for years on his honest reporting. Finally, people are waking up. Russian disinformation has been fooling influential people in the west with one goal, to destroy us from within.” 

“Candace continues lying openly to her audience and they still clap like brainless seals,” declared Jessica Reed Kraus, the MAGA gossip blogger who writes the House Inhabit substack. “Russia is cool guys!” she added, mocking Owens’ fans.

In truth, most of the MAGA media world had very little to say about Owens’ trip. The few people on the right who condemned it notably have longstanding feuds with her, part of a massive, omnidirectional set of beefs and internecine fights that have been dividing the movement for most of Trump’s second presidency. Beck, for instance, has defended Erika Kirk, the widow of slain Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, against attacks from Owens. Other critics of Owens’ travel included her ex-boss Ben Shapiro, who referred to her trip as a “magical propaganda tour.” The two have been enemies for years after Shapiro fired Owens from the Daily Wire in 2024 for her rabidly antisemitic statements.

Laura Loomer, who’s been bitterly feuding with Owens for months, went further. 

“I don’t think conservatives realize how much Russian propaganda we have been fed over the last few years as ‘independent journalism,’” she tweeted during Owens’ visit. “It’s starting to become very clear to me how many people who claimed to be defenders of the West were just saying that to suck in a pro-West audience so they could slowly brainwash them with foreign propaganda until they could convince their viewers to work against the West. Those ‘interviews’ we all defended were not actually interviews. They were psychological operations meant to weaponize political factions in America for the purpose of pushing foreign interests.”

The left, Loomer added in another tweet, “wasn’t entirely wrong when they called some people Russian puppets. Just like the right isn’t wrong when they call some people agents of the Chinese communists and Islamists. Now I’m just wondering how long some of these people I’ve known for years have been activated as foreign agents and who their handlers are.” 

The MAGA movement as a whole has a mixed record on recognizing that disinformation or propaganda exist. Loomer, for instance, often dismissed reports that the Russian government attempted to interfere in U.S. elections as a “hoax.” And Beck had very little to say publicly about the Tenet Media scandal, in which numerous prominent right-wing influencers took money from a company that was secretly receiving financial backing from two people with ties to Russian state media. Lauren Chen, Tenet’s co-founder, had been a freelance contributor to Beck’s BlazeTV, although her contract was terminated after the indictment was released. 

Russia uses the SPIEF as a display of economic might and soft power, mixing speeches from Vladimir Putin with ballet performances. Owens’ participation was first reported on X by national security analyst Ryan Mauro. Amid Russia’s continued attack on Ukraine, Western countries largely shun the event, but the Taliban did make an appearance this year. In a break with recent tradition, a U.S. official also attended: Rodney Mims Cook Jr, the Chairman of the US Commission of Fine Arts, who’s overseeing the construction of Trump’s new White House ballroom. Cook presented images of the ballroom during the panel, where he spoke alongside actor Steven Seagal, a Putin ally.

Owens, a dedicated rage-baiter, clearly understood her visit would generate controversy. “This has been the most triggering trip for the mainstream media,” she declared in an RT interview. “And it has been laughable to see the headlines they are coming up with.”  

“Great news!” she tweeted on Friday morning, celebrating that she’s be attending a second day of the conference. “Thanks to the wall-to-wall western media meltdown about my trip to Russia, their entire nation became aware of my presence here. I have now been cordially invited to hear President Putin speak today at SPIEF. This is why we say there is no such thing as bad press.” 

Owens also sought to leverage the presence of a U.S. official at SPIEF to defend herself from her erstwhile allies’ attacks: “Isn’t it kind of weird how Trump sent an entire delegation, (including the architect building his ‘ballroom’) and yet Zionists never accused any of them of being Russian spies? It’s almost as if the people who refuse to peddle their talking points, get smeared.” 

(Owens often blames Jews or “Zionists” for unconnected world events—for instance blaming the Orthodox Jewish Chabad Lubavitch movement for U.S. involvement in Iran.)

Mitchell Jackson, a publicist for Owens and a slate of other controversial figures, told me that “Candace is not being paid to attend” SPIEF, adding, “Boeing, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley having previously hosted panels at this event, and everyone from Rex Tillerson to Jon Huntsman has spoken at this event.” 

In 2018, Huntsman actually chose to cancel his address, and Tillerson’s appearance was before the United States enforced major economic sanctions against Russia. Today, the State Department advises Americans not to go to the country for any reason.