Daphy Michel, a 31-year-old Haitian asylum seeker, was found dead of hypothermia at a Pittsburgh bus stop March 2, three days after being released from ICE custody 30 miles from her home. 

This week, the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s office ruled her death a homicide. 

“Ms. Michel was a vulnerable adult, suffering from untreated severe mental health issues and a significant language barrier when she was released from federal custody on February 27,” spokesperson Jim Madalinsky said in a statement. “Based on all available information during the investigation, the pathologist ruled Ms. Michel’s death a homicide.” 

A medical examiner’s homicide declaration, Madalinsky added, is “not to be interpreted as a declaration of criminal guilt.” It simply indicates that “ the death was caused by the actions of another individual.” 

Michel started the asylum process after arriving at the southern border in 2022, Joseph Patrick Murphy, her family’s attorney, told the Associated Press. She was granted humanitarian parole based on urgent need. In the year before her death, she spent six months in Washington County Jail, Murphy said, until a judge said he could not hold her for trial for threatening imaginary people. Then, she was arrested by ICE and taken 30 miles away to Pittsburgh.

“She had mental challenges,” Murphy told Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV on Friday. “She was arrested for at one point screaming at imaginary people, and they knew this. They just dumped her in a bus shelter — language barrier, educational barrier, and psychiatric barrier — and left her to fend for herself. The bus shelter, she never figured out how to leave. She sat there for days, and ultimately froze to death.”

“The ruling by the medical examiner, that is a homicide, means that the death was caused by the action or omission of someone,” Murphy said. “That means there’s some sort of culpability.” DHS, however, denies responsibility: “ICE had NOTHING to do with this woman’s death. She passed away THREE days after ICE encountered her,” they wrote on social media in mid-March. DHS also accused her of “terroristic threats and harassment,” charges which were dismissed in September of 2025.  

Advocates are now calling on ICE to answer for Michel’s death.

“Daphy’s death was preventable and is the result of a violent system that cages people, surveils them, abandons them, dehumanizes them in life, and smears them in death to escape accountability,” said Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa). “She deserved care, shelter, language access, and medical support. ICE and every agency that failed her must answer for this.”

The Trump administration announced last week that they would stop publishing data on the deaths of people recently released from ICE detention. But Michel’s is just one of multiple high-profile cases in which detainees were released and allegedly left to die. 

In late February, Nurul Shah Alam, a blind Rohingya refugee from Burma, was found dead in Buffalo, New York five days after Border Patrol dropped him off on a street corner without notifying his family. His death, too, was ruled a homicide. Like Michel, Alam was disabled; and like Michel, he was jailed for some time before his death. 

“Daphy was a person with a kind heart, who loved her family very much,” Michel’s family wrote in her obituary. “Since she was a child, she showed great respect, courage, and love for everyone. She was always ready to help those who needed her help and her presence brought joy and happiness and light into the lives of all who knew her.”

Under a cloudless sky and the blazing Florida sun, about 25 people gathered on a recent Sunday near the entrance of the Pinellas County jail, posting cardboard signs along the grass announcing that “ICE detains people here.”

Since last year, residents of this county have come here every weekend to protest the sheriff’s office’s ongoing cooperation with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One of them waved an upside-down flag that occasionally billowed as cars zoomed by—some honked approvingly while another driver flicked her off before speeding away. They prayed for detained immigrants and shared the latest developments of immigration enforcement in Florida. During their gathering, a white transport van pulled into the jail’s entrance. 

At the start of his second term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order urging local police to cooperate with ICE under so-called 287(g) agreements, which deputize local police and jails with immigration enforcement powers. Agencies can participate under different models of the program. Police, for example, can enforce immigration law during traffic stops, execute immigration warrants at jails, or interrogate people about their legal status. No state heeded Trump’s initial call with more enthusiasm than Florida. By April 2025, more than half of 287(g) agreements in the US were based in the Sunshine State.

After Texas, Florida has the largest number of agreements nationwide, according to ICE data. Under a law passed by the state’s Republican-led legislature last year, county detention facilities, like the one in Pinellas County, are required to enroll in the 287(g) program. And the law’s language—as many residents, immigrant advocates, and attorneys have pointed out in the last year—doesn’t specify that cities and their police departments must participate in 287(g).

But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration have pressured local officials to sign up. In Fort Myers, for instance, council members received a threatening letter from Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier when their 3-3 deadlock vote prevented the city from entering into an ICE agreement. “This action constitutes a serious and direct violation of Florida Law,” he wrote in the letter. He cited a state law that bans “sanctuary policies.” “Failure to correct the Council’s actions will result in the enforcement of all applicable civil and criminal penalties, including but not limited to being held in contempt, declaratory or injunctive relief, and removal from office by the Governor.” The city council ultimately approved the agreement.

Three months later, the Key West City Commission got the same message after it voted 6-1 to end its agreement. Besides the sanctuary policy ban, Uthmeier also referred to another law that directs police to “use best efforts” in supporting immigration enforcement. “We will not allow this unlawful sanctuary policy in Florida,” Uthmeier wrote on X at the time. “They have a choice: stop impeding law enforcement from enforcing immigration law or face the consequences.” Key West officials quickly reversed course.

Meanwhile, Floridians across the state—including in Miami, Tallahassee, Fort Myers, and Tampa—have called on their elected officials and police chiefs to stand up to DeSantis. They point to a recent court case in which the South Miami mayor asked a judge to clarify if the Florida law applied to cities. During oral arguments, attorneys representing the state acknowledged that South Miami was not violating the law if it declined to participate in 287(g) — as long as the city didn’t vote against an agreement (The issue had not appeared before the South Miami city council for a vote). Dozens of other cities have also not enrolled in the program. 

I watched these tensions play out in Pinellas County, where grassroots organizations and residents have spoken up at city council meetings, protested outside the jail and the sheriff’s office, written letters to their elected officials, organized bus trips to vigils held outside the notorious Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention camp in the Everglades, and prayed for change in places of worship. Local government officials across the state have found themselves facing pressure from all directions. On the one hand, the DeSantis administration has threatened to remove them from office. But on the other hand, constituents who do not want ICE in their backyards have expressed disappointment and anger at their city’s leaders. DeSantis “has made local law enforcement toe the line of the federal government even when local officials know better for their jurisdictions,” said David A. Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, who has studied the impacts of 287(g). “They’re putting officials in an impossible position.”

In Pinellas County, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri also advised police chiefs to sign up, the local outlet Creative Loafing reported. “The new law puts legal obligations on all of us to ensure we do certain things, and the consequences for not doing so include removal from office by the Governor,” he wrote in an email to the chiefs. Gualtieri declined an interview request for this story.

The immigration crackdown in Florida has not been as visible as that in other states such as Minnesota, where ICE raids in public places have fueled massive protests and generated news coverage. “That’s very different from what we’re seeing in Florida,” said Amy Godshall, an immigrants’ rights staff attorney with the ACLU of Florida. “It’s not one big event one day that captures everyone’s attention. It’s smaller-scale immigration enforcement that’s happening across the state every day.” According to state data, 287(g) enforcement has led to more than 13,000 arrests in Florida since August. 

Last summer, several high-profile immigrant arrests—some of which stemmed from traffic stops—led many residents to realize their police departments had a deep connection with immigration enforcement. 

“This is a lot bigger than just ICE,” Leo Gonzalez, co-founder of the advocacy group Tampa Bay Immigrant Solidarity Network, which has collected more than 900 petitions against 287(g), told me last month. “We started looking into these 287(g) agreements, and we realized that they were the biggest funnel that the state has for getting people into immigrant detention.”

One of the attendees of the Pinellas County jail vigil was Courtney Prokopas, a Gulfport resident. She’s the head of the St. Petersburg League of Women Voters Immigration Justice Advocacy Team, which has organized many local efforts to raise awareness about 287(g). About six years ago, she left Chicago to care for her grandmother in Gulfport during the pandemic, and has lived in the tight-knit, charming waterfront city in Pinellas County ever since. When her grandmother died, Courtney and her partner weighed leaving Florida. But when the city was pummeled by multiple hurricanes in 2024, leaving much of the city’s homes with damage and its picturesque waterfront by Boca Ciega Bay underwater, Prokopas was inspired by the way the city’s residents united to rebuild and decided to stay. 

Last year, after Florida enacted several immigration laws in support of Trump’s deportation machine, she learned that Gulfport was participating in the 287(g) program. “I was livid,” she told me last month at a coffee shop on Gulfport’s Beach Boulevard. She had an “End 287(g)” badge pinned onto her New Yorker bag. “What mechanisms were in place to make this happen?”

It wasn’t until January—in the midst of the ICE siege of Minneapolis that left Renée Good and Alex Pretti dead—that other residents began to question the agreement. At a city council meeting, more than 20 people spoke up during public comment, which typically only attracts a few residents, prompting the Gulfport city council to schedule a workshop about its 287(g) agreement.

The following month, Gulfport police chief Mary Farrand gave a presentation to the city council and a crowded room of residents. She signed the 287(g) agreement in February 2025 after consulting with the city manager. In a PowerPoint, she highlighted Key West’s decision to keep its agreement. Farrand pointed out that Florida Statute 908.104 says any law enforcement agency “shall use best efforts to support the enforcement of federal immigration law.” Anyone in violation of this chapter, the statute reads, “may be subject to action by the governor, including potential suspension from office.” It is the same section of law that Uthmeier referenced in his letters to Key West officials.

Gulfport’s police force had conducted no ICE-related arrests since the agreement was signed last year, Farrand said, adding that she’d rather comply with ICE through a 287(g) agreement than experience what Minneapolis residents endured earlier this year. “I don’t want someone coming here and doing it for us,” Farrand said. She did not respond to my requests for an interview.

Several residents spoke up during public comment. “I want to be on the right side of history,” one of them told the council. “Please remember that you were voted in to represent us,” another said.

In her remarks, Gulfport mayor Karen Love pushed back. “When this was signed last February, we did not have the knowledge that we have today,” Love said. “We did not see the traumatizing behavior by ICE in other cities…If I had to take ICE coming into my town versus my police who know us, who care about us, out there every day doing their best to protect us, there’s no question for me I would always choose our local police… they are working very hard to keep us safe.”

“I was not elected to come in here and fight state and national issues,” Love added. She did not respond to my requests for comment. I spoke to Marlene Shaw, the city’s vice mayor, last week, and asked her what it was like to contend with state and federal decisions—in this case, immigration policy—trickling down to the local level. “I feel very strongly in local voices and local choices,” she told me. “It’s very difficult when decisions are made by people that don’t know us and don’t understand us and don’t know what our community wants.”

For Prokopas, keeping Gulfport’s agreement was disappointing. “I don’t have skin in the game, I’m not a council member, I’m not a mayor,” she told me. “But in these small towns where the terms are short, the pay is nothing, if you stuck your neck out for the citizens and made a case, and then DeSantis moved in and removed you from office, the whole town would have your back and vote you right back in. You’d be a folk hero.”

In neighboring St. Petersburg, another waterfront city in Pinellas County, tensions over ICE cooperation were also escalating. Just as in Gulfport, locals lined up to speak at a city council meeting in February against the ICE agreement. Among the speakers was Rev. Andy Oliver from the Allendale United Methodist Church, known for its advocacy work supporting immigrants, the unhoused, and the LGBTQIA community. When I spoke to Oliver last month, he shared many of the same sentiments as Prokopas that elected officials should take action despite the threat to their positions. He sees it as a “moral stand.” “Being removed from office is not the worst thing that can happen, in my opinion,” he said. “These human rights violations are far worse than being removed from office.”

Allendale has also attracted attention for the outspoken messages posted outside the church, which this past year have included “Abolish ICE” and “ICE does harm.” During a recent service in May, Oliver and others spoke of Alligator Alcatraz, cheering on its likely closure and decrying the state’s use of emergency funds allotted for hurricane relief toward the facility’s operations. In his sermon, Oliver described the members of the LGBTQIA community who fought against New York police officers raiding the famous Stonewall Inn nearly 60 years ago. “A brick was what our queer ancestors had in their hands,” he said. “A phone is what we have in our hands now.”

Oliver told them they could call Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez and Senate President Ben Albritton. Screens next to the lectern displayed their phone numbers, and a prompt congregants could leave in a voicemail. “Go ahead. Dial the number. Here’s what you can say,” Oliver told them. The message partially read, “Emergency funds should be used for real emergencies: hurricanes, flooding, public health…Please create clear, enforceable guardrails, so Florida never again turns disaster money into cages for humans.” Around me, as a soft hymn played in the background, people pulled out phones from pockets and purses.

Earlier in the service, a church member, Lynne Hensley, spoke from the lectern, “This evil is not only far away in the Everglades. It is here in our own city, in the choices of our mayor and our police chief, in the ways our city has partnered with ICE.”

Mayor Ken Welch’s office didn’t respond to my requests for an interview, and police chief Anthony Holloway declined to speak to me. Police spokesperson Yolanda Fernandez told me Holloway signed the 287(g) agreement “as required” by Florida Statute 908.104, which reads, “state and local law enforcement agencies and any official responsible for directing or supervising such agency shall use best efforts to support the enforcement of federal immigration law.” According to state data, the agency has had 26 “encounters” with people under 287(g) since August. After any arrest, if police find that someone has an immigration warrant, officers will notify ICE and wait an hour for them to arrive, Fernandez said.

The city council did not vote on the agreement. Richie Floyd, vice chair of the St. Petersburg City Council, said he wishes that the city had never signed it, pointing to the fact that many municipalities in Florida have been able to avoid 287(g). He has attended several meetings organized by the Tampa Bay Immigrant Solidarity Network. “We shouldn’t have anything to do with them,” he said of ICE. “It’s been frustrating to be in my position because I’ve always maintained that any legal path to ending the agreement, I would go down… I’m frustrated that we ever signed the agreement, because there are cities that haven’t signed it, and were not forced to. No one’s been successful in getting out of it yet.”

The 287(g) issue is one of several attempts by the DeSantis administration to thwart the authority of more progressive cities such as St. Petersburg. Floyd noted, “So many things pushed out by the state and the federal government lately have just flown in the face of a lot of people’s values in this city.” A new state law taking effect in January that bans cities from funding or promoting DEI measures could affect St. Petersburg’s support of Pride Month. The city hosts one of the largest Pride parades in the South. Last year, the Florida Department of Transportation forced St. Petersburg and other cities to remove its rainbow and Black History Matters street murals. “I don’t want St. Pete to change at all,” Floyd said. “I think everyone should still be welcome here.”

So far, no Florida cities with a current 287(g) agreement have reversed course. Gonzalez, with the Tampa Bay Immigrant Solidarity Network, acknowledges that it feels as if efforts to end cooperation with ICE have reached a stalemate. He anticipates that the next step will be to ensure candidates running for local offices in Tampa Bay this November consider taking a stand on the 287(g) issue.

As the status quo remains, so do the growing impacts of these policies. In February, the ACLU released a report, “Deputized for Disaster,” that analyzed the impact of 287(g) nationwide. In Florida, researchers found “numerous cases of harassment and profiling of US citizens and noncitizens alike, a climate of extreme fear in communities, and reports of serious civil rights violations,” the report reads. 

“There’s a lot of fear, of course. That is the main thing,” Gonzalez said. He knows of many immigrants, worried of being arrested and detained, who have decided to go back to their home countries. Others have limited their movements, only going out to go to work, buy groceries, and attend church. Many Latino business owners he’s spoken to report fewer customers since last year. “The impact hasn’t really been measured in our state,” he said. “I don’t think there’s an interest for the state to reveal that information.”

I had never heard of Josh Hokit until the other week. But the little I quickly learned about the immigrant-bashing, trans-hating Ultimate Fighting Championship fighter was enough to guess, correctly, that Hokit was the man behind the UFC Freedom 250’s most despicable moment on Sunday.

“Michelle Obama is a man,” Hokit belted out. “Am I right, America?”

The slur, which came during a post-fight interview with Joe Rogan, was met with a mix of cheers and boo’s. Others, like Rogan, seemed taken aback, appearing to wonder: Even for a corruption-soaked night already teeming with vulgarity, did this Hokit guy go too far?

UFC president and CEO Dana White seems to think so. “I’m completely against saying nasty and false things about people’s families,” he has since told Time. But what had White been expecting? Here was a man made notorious through “nasty and false” insults. As Kyle Green, a sociologist who writes on the intersection of sports and politics, told me in advance of Sunday’s spectacle:

There’s also Josh Hokit, who’s going to fight on the [White House card]. People who know him from his days as a college wrestler say he’s just playing a character in the UFC. But when he gets in front of the mic now, he wears an American flag bandana, and he says that he wants to kick Mexicans out of the country, or he’ll say that he wants to beat up transgender people, that Brittney Griner is a man. He’ll say the most offensive things, leaning into the MAGA fan base. Again, I don’t know if he believes it or not. But it doesn’t really matter, right? Because that’s the thing that sells.

It’s the kind of behavior long excused as “smack talk,” fighting words intended to antagonize one’s opponent. But over the past decade, the UFC’s bear-hug embrace of more distinctly hateful rhetoric follows the contours of the broader permission President Trump gave to such language. It also, as Green told me, speaks to the increasing pressures some fighters have to play characters they think will appeal to their fanbases:

Trump has enabled it, and that’s how I think about it outside of the UFC. We see people, whether it’s online or on the street, much more willing to say racist and sexist things. I don’t think he caused it, but I think he’s enabled it. What fighters have to do now, [taunting and smack-talking], is, in part, because the UFC labour model is a really grotesque one, in that fighters are technically independent contractors with very few protections and rights. It’s very different from boxing, where they have the Muhammad Ali Act.

Which isn’t to say that Hokit may not believe the cruelty that animated his slur on Sunday night. Nor is it to solely blame the UFC’s terrible labor rights for incentivizing it. Because to even contemplate Hokit’s motivations is to extend this man unearned, far-too-generous consideration. Hurling a vulgar insult against a Black former first lady during a White House event, ostensibly to honor America’s 250th birthday, is a choice—and Hokit enjoyed making it. Let reminders of it attach itself to every oligarch, Republican, Trump family member, and corporation that went along with this cage fight.

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

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s behemoth company that launches rockets and runs data centers, went public on Friday with a target valuation above $1.75 trillion. The move will make Musk, already the richest man in the world, vastly wealthier.

A public offering will allow SpaceX to raise even more money to fund its AI ambitions, including building more data centers, faster.

But even as Musk and other SpaceX investors see a huge windfall, the community hosting xAI data centers already in operation are demanding accountability from the company’s use of polluting gas turbines and a water-treatment facility put on pause earlier this year.

“We’re the extracted and exploited colony of what is going to be one of the most highly valued entities in the world,” says Justin Pearson, who represents portions of Memphis in the Tennessee House of Representatives. “People are going to die because of this pollution.”

xAI is selling $15 billion per year in compute at its Memphis campuses to Anthropic, another company planning a blockbuster IPO in the coming months. “People don’t matter to SpaceX, or Anthropic, or whoever is building these data centers,” Pearson says.

President Donald Trump has suggested the US government could take a financial stake in frontier AI companies in order to begin “giving back” to the American public. But it’s unclear what form that would take—or if such a move would even happen.

SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment and Anthropic declined to comment, though its head of public policy and Memphis’ mayor have touted the company’s engagement with the city.

xAI’s Colossus 1 campus in Memphis shot to national notoriety in 2024 when community members began sounding the alarm that the company was running natural gas turbines without permits. Regulators said that a loophole in the Clean Air Act allowed xAI to run what appeared to be as many as 35 turbines without a permit for a year. (Last year, local regulators granted xAI a permit to run 15 turbines on the site until 2027.)

Natural gas turbines emit microscopic particles of fine particulate matter, dubbed PM2.5, which is linked to a variety of health issues, including heart attacks, high blood pressure, and premature deaths in people with preexisting conditions. Experts warn that PM2.5 pollution can be harmful even below levels set by regulators.

xAI’s first data center was built in Boxtown, a historically Black neighborhood in Memphis that already has some of the highest asthma rates in the country from legacy industrial pollution.

“All of us who have family in South Memphis, we know somebody who has died as a result of a bronchial ailment, or a random cancer that has no place in our family tree,” says Richard Massey, a community organizer in Memphis.

A group of environmental justice groups, led by the NAACP, filed a lawsuit earlier this year against xAI, alleging that the company installed gas turbines “without an air permit or regard for the health and safety of people living nearby.” Earlier this week, residents of Southaven filed a separate class-action lawsuit against xAI and SpaceX, claiming that construction on the data center was disturbing the community.

The Environmental Protection Agency issued guidance in January that seemed to close the Clean Air Act loophole xAI was using to run its turbines without permits. However, the company had already begun setting up unpermitted turbines in Southaven, Mississippi, to power Colossus 2. As of mid-May, the company had brought in at least 46 unpermitted gas turbines to run on-site, according to emails xAI sent to regulators.

xAI has brought significant tax revenue to the region. Officials have estimated that Shelby County could net up to $28 million in property taxes from xAI’s Tennessee campus this year alone—a big injection to the county budget, which collected just over $800 million in property taxes in 2024. Last year, the city council mandated that 25 percent of xAI’s tax revenue be used to fund projects that enhance the neighborhoods where its data centers are located, including Boxtown.

Residents have been debating a list of projects, including funding for home repair and an environmental dashboard, to use the $3 million collected in 2025. That’s about .001 percent of the $250 billion that xAI was valued at when it was purchased by SpaceX in February in advance of the IPO.

But the revenue from taxes, some residents say, pales in comparison to what’s needed to offset the health impacts of the gas turbines in both Boxtown and Southaven. An initial survey released by two nonprofits earlier this week of air pollution collected from community-run air monitors at three sites throughout southwest Memphis shows that PM2.5 levels were consistently above EPA limits between November 2025 and March of this year.

A separate analysis prepared as part of the NAACP lawsuit found that if the 41 turbines listed on xAI’s permit application to power just the Colossus 2 campus ran continuously, they could possibly cause up to $44 million in health-related damage each year. (While xAI’s Memphis campus does draw some power from the local power grid, it’s not clear how often the company plans to run the gas turbines at either of its sites.)

Community members are also concerned about xAI’s water use. The Colossus 1 facility alone could require more than 5 million gallons a day to cool the computers at peak times. When xAI first came to Memphis, the company said that it would be building a water reuse facility to avoid impacting the aquifer.

xAI broke ground on the site in October. But it abruptly stopped construction in mid-April, just a few months ahead of the IPO, leaving advocates in the dark about the future of the project. “We need to focus on finishing Colossus 2 and ensuring it is extremely stable, then will build the water recycling plant,” Musk said in a tweet in early April.

Earlier this week, Memphis city attorney Tannera Gibson told the City Council in a hearing that conversations with SpaceX about the site were “pretty positive and pretty strong based on recent conversations.” Lawmakers, including some who stated that they have had similar behind-the-scenes conversations with the company, pressed for more information to be made public.

“We’ve all gotten reassurances, but I want to hear those in public for everybody else,” Memphis city council member Jerri Green said at the hearing.

Despite the outcry from the public and the multiple lawsuits it faces, SpaceX has continued adding unpermitted turbines to its data center sites. The company’s IPO revealed that it has committed more than $2.8 billion to buy gas turbines in recent months; while it called water availability a risk factor in its IPO filing documents, it made no mention of the construction of the water-treatment site. The Justice Department, meanwhile, indicated last month that it may intervene on behalf of xAI in the NAACP lawsuit.

Massey says that Musk’s track record of environmental conflicts at other sites he owns, from California to Texas to Germany, means the Memphis community is skeptical of SpaceX, despite the economic benefits the tax revenue and potential water-treatment plant could bring.

“Everywhere [Musk] has gone, it’s been the same result,” he says. “People suffer, especially in marginalized, low-income communities.”

As her older siblings prepare breakfast, 13-year-old Cynthia Perez waits at the kitchen table, not very hungry. “I’m nervous,” she tells her mom’s friend Mariana Blanco, who gently brushes the girl’s long brown hair.

“I know you are, love,” Blanco says. “It’s gonna be okay.”

It’s a March morning in Palm Beach County, Florida, and a big day for the four Perez children: They are missing school and work to testify via video in their mom’s final immigration hearing, where a judge will decide whether she’s coming home or getting deported to Guatemala.

Both their parents have been detained since last fall—their dad at Alligator Alcatraz and then a detention center in Georgia, their mom at a federal facility in Arizona. The kids, all US citizens, have been on their own for months, leaning on Blanco and each other. Fifteen-year-old Romeo Jr. is the stoic one, who dreams of becoming a surgeon. Jessica, 18, the bubbly and creative one, is considering military service after high school. Eliza, 21, is the practical one. After her parents were detained, she dropped out of college, where she’d planned to study computer science, to take over the family landscaping business and pay the rent.

I ask Cynthia about her own personality, and she flashes a grin. The “annoying” one, she tells me. Always joking and teasing her siblings. “I mean, I am the youngest, so I like to play, but now I’m just…I just don’t want to do nothing,” she adds quietly.

“She used to be a lot more talkative,” Eliza tells me. “I feel like we’re all quiet now.”

Cynthia looks uninterestedly at her waffles and strawberries. They’re in the kitchen of the Guatemalan-Maya Center, a nonprofit for immigrants that Blanco helps lead, and soon they’ll be talking with the judge and an attorney from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Blanco quizzes her: “What are you gonna say if they ask you: ‘If your mom gets deported, what are you gonna do?’”

“I’m not sure yet,” Cynthia says, taking a bite of waffle. “Because I’m not ready for a new life in a whole different country.”

Her siblings weigh the question, too—whether they’d choose to stay or go, to finish school here or be with their parents abroad. They lean toward different answers, which is scary to consider. Even this smaller family unit might not last much longer. But at least one good thing will come of this day, Blanco tells them: The unbearable uncertainty will be over. One way or the other, their mom will get out of detention.

They worry about what their parents are experiencing. “Dad says Alcatraz was really cold,” Eliza recalls. “They don’t give you sweaters, blankets. They give you one thin blanket, like a napkin.”

“And he said they were crowded in one room,” adds Jessica.

The talk turns to their mom’s Arizona accommodations. “Whether it’s here with us or over there in Guatemala,” Eliza tells her siblings, “at least she won’t be in that horrible place.”

The Perezes live in Lake Worth Beach, a coastal city about 7 miles from Mar-a-Lago and an hour from Miami. Parents Romeo Sr. and Olga arrived in the United States more than 25 years ago, having immigrated separately as teenagers—her hometown was devastated during the Guatemalan civil war, when the US-backed military massacred the indigenous Maya, including her uncle. She met Romeo, who is also Guatemalan, when she was about 17. He started a landscaping business; she cleaned homes and worked as a Mayan language translator. They raised their four kids in a small lilac-colored house with coconut palms in the front yard.

It was a good life, though the children often worried about their parents’ undocumented status. Several years ago, each family member downloaded an app that let them track one another’s whereabouts. That’s how they knew Romeo Sr. had been detained last September on his way to work—his location icon moved farther than expected, first toward Miami and then, terrifyingly, toward the Everglades. “We didn’t really have a plan,” Jessica, the second oldest, tells me, “but we had one thing: We had to keep my dad’s landscaping company going.”

Weeks later, before sunrise one day during Thanksgiving break, Olga rustled Cynthia awake. She was heading out with Eliza and Romeo Jr. to mow some lawns.

Cynthia, still tired, asked to stay home. Before she knew it, someone else was nudging her back to consciousness. “Come on, you gotta go,” Jessica told her. Cynthia, disoriented, followed her sister outside, where Blanco was waiting. They drove to the nearby house of their aunt, who is sick with cancer. (She asked that her name not be printed.) The girls wondered why they were visiting at such an early hour. When they arrived, Eliza and Romeo Jr. were ­already there, crying.

Eliza broke the news: The Florida Highway Patrol had pulled over the family truck. Olga was now in federal custody, too. ­Jessica fell to the floor, stricken by a panic attack—her mom usually calmed her during such episodes. Blanco scooped ­Cynthia into her arms. “Why is this happening to us?” the girl sobbed.

Later, Cynthia wanted to go home. But Eliza, as the eldest, felt the siblings shouldn’t stay home alone—certainly not that night. They stopped by the house just long enough to fetch clothes, toothbrushes, and other essentials. Cynthia grabbed Pusheen, a cat plushie her dad had given her. “I sprayed my mom’s perfume on it,” she tells me. Romeo Jr., Jessica, and Eliza left the bunkroom they all shared, decorated with Eliza’s manga and K-pop collections, and headed back to their aunt’s. They didn’t know for how long.

A staggering number of parents have been swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. From late January 2025 through early April 2026, more than 146,000 US citizen children had moms or dads detained, the Brookings Institution estimates. That’s about 330 a day. (Based solely on DHS records, the total would be closer to 60,000, according to Brookings researcher Tara Watson, who notes that the agency has done a poor job tracking the data.)

ICE is supposed to ensure that minors aren’t left alone after an arrest. But while reporting this story, I heard about young teens fending for themselves; about a dad who begged in vain for immigration officers to let him call his babysitter; about parents stepping off deportation flights in tears because they didn’t know whether their kids were safe. These are not isolated incidents—similar stories have been documented around the country.

Olga and Romeo, at least, had made a plan. Years earlier, they’d signed legal paperwork that would allow someone else to care for their children if need be, and make decisions about schooling, medical care, and travel. In addition to Olga’s sister, they designated Blanco, a dear friend and the children’s godmother.

Immigrant parents far and wide are doing the same. In Los Angeles, I spoke with an attorney who led “family preparedness” meetings during the massive ICE operation there last year—one such event, hosted by a public school district, drew almost 800 people. At a smaller gathering I attended in San Francisco, organizers encouraged parents to keep their kids’ schools in the loop as to which adults might step in as temporary guardians and cautioned them to maintain good records of key information like their children’s medications and allergies. Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that makes it easier for immigrant parents to designate alternate caregivers.

In the Chicago area, I spoke with a substitute teacher who’d immediately said yes when an undocumented friend asked her to sign paperwork for her sons. Over the past two decades, Florida activist Nora ­Sandigo, a US citizen from Nicaragua, has become a temporary guardian to hundreds of children through a nonprofit she runs for this purpose. “Sometimes children are scared and confused, and it’s a daily job to explain what is happening, why their parents had to leave, that they are safe and cared for,” she says. A few kids have lived with her, but most stay with their relatives; it’s her responsibility to keep them in school, schedule their doctors’ appointments, and help them travel abroad to visit their parents—or join them if desired.

Blanco, a naturalized citizen with a toddler of her own, is 33 years old. She was born in Mexico City and came to South Florida when she was 7. After college she did social work in the ­favelas of Brazil, and then moved to Chicago, where she landed a job with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. She eventually made her way back to South Florida. That’s where she met Olga Perez, who translated for the Guatemalan-Maya Center.

Olga’s kids struggled to cope in the days after her arrest. Romeo Jr. became quieter, not wanting to talk with friends about the family crisis. Jessica couldn’t sleep, and when their mom was ­transferred from Florida to Arizona, she had another panic episode that turned into an asthma attack; she fainted and had to go to the hospital. “It’s really hard to lose a parent,” she tells me.

The kids stayed with their aunt off and on for a while, but they missed their own beds and soon moved back home. Blanco continued to invite them over to her place regularly to spend the night or just to hang out and play with her baby, who helped take their mind off things. She brought them to the movies and the beach, cooked them dinner, and got them ice cream. She’s “a great hugger,” the girls tell me. She’s “always been there for us,” Jessica adds.

“They travel as a family unit,” Blanco says of the kids. “They don’t do anything without the siblings.”

But there were missed milestones: Romeo Jr. was devastated that his mom and dad couldn’t teach him to drive after he got his permit. “I had to tell them over the phone” about the permit, he recalls, “which is hard: It’s a big accomplishment for me, but they’re not there to support me.” They also weren’t around to see ­Jessica off to the JROTC ball or to take her to tour colleges with marine biology ­programs, which she wants to pursue if she doesn’t enlist. Eliza especially missed her parents at her “golden” 21st birthday—February 21. She had wanted a big celebration because she’d never gotten a quinceañera.

Their dad would try to call every morning and remind them to eat breakfast, but “it’s not the same as in person,” Romeo Jr. told me. For Eliza’s birthday, he managed a video call, which felt special, and Olga called in from Arizona, where she’d convened a group of detained women to sing “Happy Birthday” over the phone.

Before 1996, undocumented parents with American children could avoid deportation if they had lived in the country at least seven years and hadn’t committed any crimes. Then, amid a surge of immigration, some lawmakers railed about “anchor babies” giving “amnesty” to their “illegal” parents and Congress passed tougher ­requirements. President Bill Clinton signed the changes into law and ICE began deporting more moms and dads, leaving behind “immigration orphans.”

In subsequent years, the Bush and Obama administrations, too, separated citizen children from immigrant parents. There were millions of mixed-status families, and between 2010 and 2012 the federal government issued more than 200,000 removal orders for parents with US-born children. Research showed, not surprisingly, that these deportations harmed kids’ health and drove thousands into foster care, so Obama’s DHS moved to create some guardrails.

In 2013, Tom Homan, then a top ICE ­official, introduced the Parental Interests Directive, a set of guidelines that would help agents enforce the law without hampering parents’ rights. The next year, on primetime television, Obama announced Deferred Action for Parents of Americans—a sort of sister policy to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the one that temporarily protected people from deportation if they were brought to the United States as children. DAPA would similarly shield parents from deportation if they had citizen kids. “Unless for significant public safety or national security concerns, we wanted to ensure that we’re never separating families,” John Sandweg, then the acting ICE director, told me. “We were trying to focus on people with a criminal history.”

Within days, Texas and 25 other states with Republican governors sued to stop the program, arguing that it violated the Constitution and federal statutes. The case made it to the Supreme Court, which split 4–4. (This was soon after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, when Republicans refused to confirm Obama’s pick for a replacement.) DAPA never went into effect, in any case, and the Trump administration officially rescinded it in 2017.

Homan became acting director of ICE that year. Though he’d introduced the Parental Interests Directive under Obama, he’d long wanted to separate families at the border, a punishment he thought would deter others from coming. Trump adviser Stephen Miller embraced the idea; the resulting “zero tolerance” policy instructed Border Patrol officers to rip kids from their parents’ arms if necessary. It would take years for families to be reunited—some never were. “It was an atrocity,” says Kelly Albinak Kribs, an ­attorney at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. “Parents had no idea where their kids were sent.”

Outrage over the policy was widespread, and a federal court struck it down in 2018. But family separations didn’t end, even under President Joe Biden. The focus and the targets just shifted. More often than not, the Trump administration is now going after families who have lived in the nation’s interior for years, nearly half of whom have kids who are American born and raised. ICE has detained parents of citizen children at twice the rate it did under Biden, and is deporting ­mothers at four times the rate, according to a ProPublica analysis. The vast majority of the parents being removed have no serious criminal record. “The policy is: Detain everybody,” says Sandweg, the Obama-era ICE director.

Crucially, the Trump administration has created its own version of the ­Parental Interests Directive. It’s called the Detained Parents Directive, and as the name change implies, it scraps the Biden-era language about incarcerating parents only in “limited circumstances” and treating them humanely.

Some rules remain, but ICE seems to be ignoring them. For instance, parents are meant to be detained close to where their children live, but moms like Olga Perez are regularly transferred across the country—one study found a twelvefold increase in transfers of noncriminal Latino detainees far from home. It’s all in line with the administration’s eagerness for immigrants to self-deport. “Shuffle flights”—moving a person from one facility to the next in quick succession—are also common and make it harder for detainees to meet with attorneys or make arrangements for their families. “Imagine that you were transferred to four or five different facilities” in as many days, says Zain Lakhani of the Women’s Refugee Commission. “Even if you manage to say, ‘I have children,’ you’re only there for 12 hours before you’re transferred to another facility, and you have to try to find someone who can listen.”

The result: kids left in precarious circumstances. The Guatemalan-Maya Center recently learned of a 13-year-old Florida boy whose parents are in federal custody—he’d been living alone for months. In another case, a middle-school girl moved in with her neighbors after her mom was arrested. Then, after the neighbors’ dad was detained, the girl went to stay with her stepbrother, who had adult male roommates and was gone a week at a time for work. “This kid was by herself,” Blanco says.

“Parents are supposed to have an opportunity to set up an alternate caregiver,” says Rachel Prandini, an attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in California. But ICE officers “are not following their own policies.”

“There’s such utter lawlessness,” adds Heather Perez Arroyo, an immigration attorney in Massachusetts who defends detained parents.

Yet another big change under Trump: Previously, deported parents could decide whether they wanted their kids to join them abroad, and ICE was supposed to facilitate that choice. Now, ICE says it will do so only if “operationally feasible.” Last fall, when observers from the Women’s Refugee Commission and another nonprofit, Physicians for Human Rights, visited Honduras, they met newly deported parents who were inconsolable because they didn’t know where their kids were. “The majority were never asked if they had children at the time they were arrested,” WRC’s Lakhani says. “Even when parents were begging, ‘My children are home alone,’ they were not given opportunities to make arrangements.”

Reuniting families post-deportation can be a logistical nightmare. American kids can’t travel abroad without a passport, and getting one requires both parents’ signatures. “If your child is in the care of your undocumented sister, she can’t get your child a passport,” Lakhani says. And “she can’t get on a plane and fly your child to Honduras—she doesn’t have a [US] passport” either.

The federal government doesn’t bother to track the fates of children whose parents were removed by ICE. Four of the deported women the nonprofit groups interviewed in ­Honduras were mothers of newborns. All of them had their infants taken away.

The sun hasn’t yet risen when I arrive at the Perez family’s home on a spring morning. A rooster crows. It’s a school day and the children are inside getting ready. By now, Romeo Sr. and Olga have been detained for a few months, and although the kids spend the occasional night with their aunt or Blanco, they prefer to be back at home, surrounded by their things and relying on each other.

Around 7:30 a.m., Romeo Jr. comes out to start their black pickup truck, which has a trailer for the landscaping equipment. Then he climbs into the back seat, leaving the front open for Eliza, who will drive him and Jessica to Lake Worth High. (A friend comes for Cynthia later.) As Eliza navigates down A Street toward the school, she multitasks, handing Jessica a pink notebook and asking her to put the address for the day’s first landscaping job into the phone’s GPS.

Eliza turns to me and explains that this is her dad’s truck. There are AC/DC and Metallica stickers on the ceiling, Nirvana on the dash. “He loved rock,” she says. I’m struck by her use of the past tense. She asks Romeo Jr. about one of his after-school clubs and then drops off her siblings before heading out to pick up a female landscaping worker, who hops in the back seat.

Eliza’s life was turned upside down by her parents’ arrests. She’d been doing her prerequisites at Palm Beach State College and hoping to work in tech, but had to drop out to save the business. She taught herself to drive the big truck and trailer and is proud of what she’s accomplished. “Not everyone can do this—step up and do landscaping work in the hot sun, learn how to run these machines. It’s not very common for girls, especially my age,” she tells me. “I really am trying for my family.”

The job is in another city, and traffic is slow. We pass a billboard with Trump’s face on it—Eliza grouses about the road closures whenever he comes to Mar-a-Lago. She coughs; she’s been sick but didn’t want to miss a day of work, especially when her worker already made childcare arrangements. As we drive, the women chat about Olga’s case. DHS is arguing that the Perez kids don’t need their mother, Eliza explains, and that they’re getting by just fine without her. The agency’s attorney tried to stop Eliza from testifying, asserting that because she’s 21, an adult, she isn’t affected by the separation. “Homeland Security was saying that my mom is not important,” she says, and “we can manage by ourselves. No, we can’t! I feel like quitting. I don’t feel like this is my gig, my dream.”

Eliza sighs. “I would rather work in an office or do something else, something for myself,” she says as the truck creeps forward. The one bright spot is how much closer she’s grown to her siblings. Each has adopted a role: “Romeo is like my secretary—he helps me deposit checks, messages the customers. He still doesn’t know how to pay the bills, but he helps me keep money in the accounts.” ­Jessica takes care of Cynthia, who is still young enough that she shared a bedroom with her parents before they were detained. “I never slept alone. Like, I’m scared of the dark,” she told me. Now Cynthia has the top bunk in the bunkroom, and Romeo Jr. has moved into their parents’ room.

The younger siblings recognize ­Eliza’s sacrifices. “She’s really trying to work hard so we can buy the stuff we want, like clothes, school supplies, food,” says Jessica. She likens her sister to “a second mother” who “wants us to be happy, even though she isn’t.”

“She has a lot of pressure on top of her,” Olga told me over the phone from her detention facility.

When Eliza was younger, her dad would sometimes bring her along to help with his weekend work, but she mostly stayed in the truck. “He always was like, ‘You guys are gonna go to school or find a better job,’” Eliza recalls.

So much for that. “I’ve gotten a bit of muscles,” she says as we park near the first job site, a home in a quiet neighborhood with big yards with sprinklers. She pulls on her Converses, pops a cough drop, unloads a mower, and gets to work.

On the morning of Olga’s hearing, we’re back in the Guatemalan-Maya Center’s kitchen. Cynthia’s hair is brushed and braided, but she hasn’t eaten much. Today will be her first time testifying before a judge, though not the first time they’ve gathered for a hearing. Her mom’s case started weeks ago, and they’ve taken several days off school to prepare. Jessica testified last week, as did Eliza, who convinced the judge she deserved to speak despite being 21. Romeo Jr., in dress pants with a thick watch, is preparing to give his own statement. “I want to be a doctor; how am I gonna be a doctor in Guatemala?” one of Blanco’s colleagues coaches him.

Father Frank O’Loughlin, an elderly priest who founded the center decades ago, arrives with teacher Maria de la Guardia. She takes Cynthia’s face tenderly in her hands. “Nothing you say or do will doom your mom,” she tells the girl quietly. “If MAGA wins today, MAGA wins. Hopefully she’s released. But Cynthia, if she’s not, nothing you said or did will make the difference.”

Cynthia tries not to cry.

“If your mom gets deported, we will go visit her,” de la Guardia says.

“I’ve never thought of doing this ever in my life,” Cynthia tells me. “But I guess today’s the date. I’m really nervous and scared.”

Soon, Blanco calls on Cynthia to pray. She sits on a couch next to Jessica and Romeo Jr., who holds his head in his hands. They close their eyes and repeat a prayer after Father Frank. “I want to say thank you to all of you guys,” Eliza says afterward, standing with the priest.

“I hope my mom does get out,” Jessica says. They’ve all heard what things are like at her facility: the awful food and filthy water, the neglectful medical care. Olga has diabetes, and at one point she had to be hospitalized—they handcuffed her to her bed. (“Everybody knows you’re a criminal,” she recalled a guard saying.)

“But if she doesn’t, you know, wherever she is, I hope she’s safe,” Jessica continues, her voice shaky with emotion. “And I just want to thank all of you guys for praying for my dad, too. If I can’t have one parent, I hope to have the other.” She rubs a red rosary in her hands, wipes away a tear.

“Let’s hope you have both, baby,” Blanco says.

At 11:30 a.m., when the hearing is due to start, the children go into a room by themselves with a laptop that will let them talk with the judge. They sit in a row. Cynthia squeezes a green stress toy, and after a few minutes, they pray the rosary aloud. Then they sign the cross and lean forward to rest their elbows on the table and wait.

Minutes pass. Then Blanco comes in with bad news. The hearing has been postponed another week. The children drop their heads. It’s been postponed four times already. One time, the kids sat in front of the computer for hours before the judge notified them. “Another day of work wasted,” Eliza says.

“Another day of school wasted,” Romeo Jr. adds. Jessica begins to cry.

“It’s so disrespectful,” Blanco tells me. “The anxiety leading up to one of the biggest days of your life—and having to do that over and over again, it’s torture. The lack of regard for people in the system is shocking.”

They’d transported Olga for the hearing, and then turned right around and brought her back to detention. “It almost seems,” Blanco says, “like they are trying to wear you out, so you say, ‘Screw this, I’m done with it.’”

Eliza blames herself. She was the one driving when her mom was arrested. The state trooper got behind them, ran their plate, and linked it to her dad, who’d already been detained. “If I would have never gone out that day to work, or if I would have taken a different route…” she laments.

The kids gather again in Blanco’s office. The phone rings—it’s Olga. She’s crying. I can’t do this anymore, she says in Spanish. Cynthia and Eliza cry, too. Blanco kneels on the floor next to them, her hands on their knees. Romeo Jr. squeezes the green stress toy. Jessica tries to rally the troops. “One more week, I promise you, Mami!” she says. She turns to Romeo Jr. “We’re strong,” she adds. They fist-bump.

A week later, the kids will take off from school and work again. They will wait in front of the computer, and the hearing will be postponed—again—a bad dream that won’t end. The siblings know that after everything they’ve been through, despite how close they’ve become, when this nightmare is finally over they may have to say goodbye to each other, too.

“I want to be with my mom,” Cynthia tells me, “but I’m not sure I would move over there. I want to be a veterinarian, and I think the education is not like that over there—like, my grandmas live in the mountains. It’s gonna be so different.”

Jessica, too, is unsure. Romeo Jr. says he wants to stay in the United States for med school so he can become a surgeon.

Eliza, ever the practical one, is thinking she’ll move to Guatemala. “I love my siblings a lot, but I love my mom a lot more,” she’d said during our drive. “I told them, ‘You guys need to have a plan; I won’t be here to take care of you.’”

It’s hard to imagine being separated, and with Olga on the phone they try not to. Jessica sees Cynthia crying and goes to hug her, tells her a joke to cheer her up. She puts an arm around Eliza and grabs Romeo Jr., too. The siblings huddle together and Jessica starts singing. They laugh a little through their tears, trying to forget everything that’s wrong and remind each other what they still have.

Within a few months, both their mom and their dad will be ordered back to Guatemala.

Update, June 14, 6:10 pm: Trump announced Sunday evening that his deal with Iran “is now complete.” The president wrote on Truth Social: “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!“

President Donald Trump is telling reporters that he expects an Iran peace deal to be signed this afternoon, giving him ample time to make it to his UFC fight beneath the White House claw this evening. The war began on February 28, when the US and Israeli militaries launched a series of coordinated strikes against Iran, including the bombardment of a girl’s school, which killed at least 168 children. 

Since then, Trump has announced imminent ceasefires and peace deals many times. Few have held for long. And today, Israel threw a wrench in the latest plans for a ceasefire, by failing to cease fire. Instead of standing down, Israel launched an attack on Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, supposedly in retaliation for drone- and rocket-fire from the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah. The Israeli operation killed at least three people. 

Trump, now, wants reporters to know he’s very, very mad at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “This morning’s attack on Beirut should not have happened, particularly on a special day when we are so close to a Peace Deal with Iran,” he wrote on Truth Social. “This could be the beginning of a long and beautiful peace — Let’s not blow it!” 

Axios reporter Barak Ravid spoke to the president today and learned the following: “President Trump told me: ‘Why did Bibi have to do a fucking attack? I was so pissee [sic] off. I let him know. He has no fucking judgement. I let him know that.’” 

Trump made similar comments to Fox News’ Trey Yingst.

Trump, lately, has been making a habit of not-so-secretly directing profanities at Netanyahu. Earlier this month, Ravid reported that Trump told Netanyahu: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel.”

Having enthusiastically started this disastrous war alongside Israel, Trump now seems frustrated that Netanyahu is making it difficult for him to declare victory and go home. But as president of the United States, Trump actually has the power to change this situation, beyond his latest barrage of expletives and thank yous for your attention to this matter—he’s just choosing not to use that power.

The US is a major funder of Israel, having given the Israeli military well over $300 billion since its 1948 founding. And that material aid to Israel, which allows the country to bomb its neighbors with impunity, shows no sign of slowing. There’s currently a proposal to essentially merge the US and Israeli defense-tech systems in the National Defense Authorization Act making its way through Congress. The proposal, called the “Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” is just one Israel-supporting provision in the NDAA; a cluster of others would provide an additional $850 million in military aid to Netanyahu’s government. Trump has not spoken on any of these measures, which would help fund strikes of the sort Israel just carried out in Beirut. Instead, he’s posting about Netanyahu. 

Performatively angry rhetoric, coupled with total material support, is a familiar tactic. President Joe Biden, too, told reporters he was really, truly, steaming mad at Netanyahu—all while ensuring the flow of weaponry to Israel stayed consistent. He called Netanyahu an “asshole” back in February of 2024, which did nothing to prevent Israel’s mass killing in Gaza. And despite Trump’s erstwhile attempt to brand himself as an antiwar leader, he’s nothing of the sort. Between administrations, the rhetoric stays frustrated—but the unconditional support for Israel’s military stays the same.

While New Yorkers nurse Knicks-championship hangovers in Donald Trump’s hometown, the president is celebrating his 80th birthday tonight by inviting his friends to a party designed to honor himself: a multimillion-dollar cage fight on the White House grounds. The UFC Freedom 250 event is being billed (by its promoters, anyway) as “the most historic sporting event of all time.”

“From the Revolution to the Octagon,” the extravaganza’s Crytpo.com-sponsored website declares, “this historic event will connect fans through cinematic storytelling and unrivaled competition on the world’s greatest proving ground.” According to the Guardian, fighters will earn bonuses to be paid out in a digital asset issued by the Trump family’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial.

Yesterday’s scenes—motocross dirtbikers doing flips against a backdrop of the White House, on a lawn torn up to become a fight stage—were surreal. There were parachute team performances and at least one bald eagle.

One particularly notable aspect of tonight’s fights will be who is in the audience. David Ellison, whose $111 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. merger was approved by Trump’s Justice Department late last week, will be there. The president and top Republican officials are also expected to personally attend, even as Trump attempts to negotiate a long-awaited agreement with Iran.

“We are very close to a Deal that will bring peace to the region, including to Lebanon, and all sides should stand down,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at 10:46 am, as he criticized Israel for striking Lebanon “on a special day when we are so close to a Peace Deal.”

Whatever happens abroad, Trump will spend the evening watching the title fight between Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje. On the off chance that you weren’t invited, it’ll be streamed on Ellison’s Paramount+.

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Across the globe, human activities are changing the way our planet smells. In Egypt, increasing temperatures are shrinking yields of aromatic jasmine flowers; in France, extreme drought has reduced the production of fragrant, night-blooming tuberose, a major ingredient in many perfumes; in Italy, climatic extremes are altering the characteristic floral, citrusy scent of bergamot. 

But anthropogenic factors are also reshaping environmental smellscapes, a word coined in the 1980s to describe the totality of scents in a given geographic area, in ways that are far more subtle—and potentially much more harmful.

While humans largely rely on sight and sound in our interactions with each other and with the world around us, many other creatures rely on smells. Ants, for example, require scents for colony cohesion; turkey vultures let scent guide them to far-away carrion; and male moths use scent to find females hundreds of meters away. “Scent is very important because it mediates so many interactions within an ecosystem,” says James Blande, a chemical ecologist at the University of Eastern Finland. 

These scent-based interactions are crucial for the maintenance of ecosystem services that directly benefit humans, from the bees and moths that pollinate crops to the flies and dung beetles that recycle the nutrients from dead and decomposing matter. Intact channels of scent communication are likely also important for the preservation of biodiversity. For example, many rare orchid species use scent to attract the co-evolved pollinators they need in order to reproduce, and scent helps guide monarch butterflies to the single type of plant on which they lay their eggs.

But just as we are discovering how important these chemical communication channels are to the fabric of the natural world—and the many benefits we reap from it—we are also learning how drastically they can be disrupted by our activities, including climate change and air pollution.

Now, scientists are working to document human-induced changes in smellscapes across the planet—to understand how these changes affect communication between different organisms, and to try to figure out which systems are capable of adaptation and which may be at risk of failure.

Historically, researchers in the field of sensory pollution have been largely focused on noise and light, says Jeff Riffell, a sensory biologist at the University of Washington. Odor pollution, on the other hand, “is really hard to get a handle on because you need these big chemical analysis devices that [cost] hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to characterize it.” Plus, he says, “we’re just not very olfactory.”

Despite these challenges, a growing number of scientists are documenting how humans are changing the chemical signals of plants and animals. For example, researchers have discovered that air pollution degrades many of the volatile organic compounds that make up lavender’s characteristic scent, and increasing temperatures dramatically decrease the floral perfumes released by strawberry plants and wild white petunias. Agricultural chemicals, like fertilizers and fungicides, add additional VOCs to the air in fields and orchards around the world. 

But figuring out how these changes affect communication between organisms— and whether this impairs their ability to pollinate, procreate, or otherwise survive—can be a tricky task, as objective differences in the chemical makeup of a scent don’t always predict differences in how they are perceived. 

To get inside the mind of a pollinator and parse how much a smell has to change before it becomes unrecognizable, researchers often use a simple test called the proboscis extension response—a sort of Pavlov’s dog for bees. While Pavlov taught dogs to associate food with the sound of a bell, triggering them to drool, researchers teach bees to associate particular scents with the taste of sugar. Once they learn the association, the bees stick out their proboscis—the insect equivalent of a tongue.

Using this paradigm, Stony Brook University pollination biologist Jordanna Sprayberry and her colleagues taught bumblebees to recognize a particular floral odor, then tested how three different fungicides affected the bees’ ability to recognize this odor. “We found negative effects of every fungicide we tested,” she says. One fungicide was disruptive at every concentration tested. This could be especially problematic for fruit and vegetable production, since these crops generally require insect pollination and are often heavily treated with fungicides.

A team of researchers in the United Kingdom has also used this type of test to investigate the impact of oxidizing air pollutants—like ozone and nitrate radicals (NO3)—on honeybees’ ability to recognize scents. These pollutants are naturally present in the air at low levels but are dramatically increased by emissions from cars, power plants, and oil and gas production. Instead of just adding new odor molecules on top of an existing scent, oxidizing pollutants react with different components of floral perfumes, degrading their scents.

After researchers taught honeybees to recognize a floral odor blend, they released that scent into a wind tunnel of ozone-polluted air. At six meters from the source, only about 30 percent of bees could still recognize the scent. This kind of pollution could seriously impair honeybees’ ability to find flowers, which is concerning because honeybees are estimated to be responsible for about half of crop pollination worldwide.

While daytime pollinators get the most attention, nocturnal pollinators are also important for crops and wild plant species. To find out if night-time pollination was similarly affected by pollutants, Riffell turned his attention to a fragrant, night-blooming wildflower called the pale evening primrose and its hawkmoth pollinators.

He and his team measured how compounds in the primrose scent changed when exposed to NO3, which increases at night. While some types of odor compounds were relatively resistant to these pollutants, others, like β-Pinene, a woodsy-green scent, and β-Ocimene, which is more floral and herbaceous, began to degrade within seconds.

Next, researchers set up scent traps at their field site in eastern Washington. Over the course of the night, they recorded how often pollinators visited a real flower, a paper cone releasing a simulated floral scent, and a cone releasing floral scent degraded by NO3 exposure. Pollinators stopped by the real flower and the floral-scented cone at similar rates, but the degraded scent received about 70 percent fewer visits. That’s bad news for both players: As natural scents degrade, pollinators may have less access to food while plants may have a lower chance of reproducing.

Using a model of atmospheric conditions that included pollution levels and weather conditions and combining it with data on how quickly oxidizing pollutants can degrade key floral odors, Riffell and his colleagues mapped distances at which a moth would be able to detect a primrose in different locations on Earth. In more heavily polluted regions of the world, the team found, the distance from which a moth can sense a flower has fallen to just a quarter of what it was during preindustrial times. Similar modeling strategies could be used to identify croplands and valuable ecosystems at greatest risk for communication breakdown and the loss of crucial pollination services. 

Much of the work on the ecology of shifting smells has focused on pollination—and with good reason. “When you go to the grocery store in, say, Canada or the United States, almost 70 percent of the food is actually a result of pollination,” says Riffell. The vast majority of wild flowering plants also depend on pollination by insects and other animals. 

But plant-pollinator interaction is just a tiny part of how scents structure our world. How human activities affect other types of chemical messages is largely unexplored, but the few existing studies suggest concerning disruptions. Markus Knaden, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, is exploring how ozone alters chemical communication between insects. “The problem is that [scent] molecules are very sensitive to oxidants,” he says. “Which was not a problem for the last millions of years but is becoming an increasing problem due to us.”

Knaden’s studies revealed that ozone pollution breaks down pheromones, with serious consequences for insects looking to mate. For example, ozone-altered pheromones made male flies less appealing to females of their species and increased male-male courtship behaviors. The mating process leaves insects vulnerable to predation, Knaden says, so if a male wastes time courting other males, he might get eaten before he can reproduce. 

Pheromone breakdown can mess with mating in other ways, too: When Knaden’s team exposed flies to ozone-enriched air, females were much more likely to mate with males of a different species, producing hybrid offspring that were often infertile.

Insect populations are already in decline globally, a phenomenon known to be driven by habitat loss and the widespread use of pesticides, but Knaden says it’s possible that oxidizing pollutants could accelerate this decline. “If you take down the population by 30 percent or 50 percent, it is already harder for [insects] to locate each other,” he says. “But if you then take down their communications channel by oxidizing their pheromones, that might be an additional effect.” 

What does a future of altered smellscapes look like for organisms that rely on scent to communicate?

“Depending on the relationship, some of the plants and animals can handle these changes,” says Shannon Olsson, who runs the Naturalist-Inspired Chemical Ecology lab at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, in India. “We have seen robustness in the system, but we’ve also seen failures in the system.”

Some insects are quick learners: Bumblebees and honeybees can learn attraction to new scents after just a handful of training runs. And while pollinating hoverflies seem to be innately attracted to certain floral scents and colors, Olsson’s research shows that they can also learn to avoid them, demonstrating that some insects are highly adaptable to changes in the environment.

But some insects may not live long enough for meaningful learning to occur. Researchers found that ozone pollution can change the scent of a Mediterranean fig enough that it is no longer attractive to its only pollinator, the fig wasp. In the wild, the wasp lives only about two days—likely not enough time to learn an odor that’s different from the tree that it evolved with over millions of years.

Learning may not help buffer insects against pollution-altered sexual signals, either. “People that work on insect mating and on insect pheromones,” Knudsen says, “usually think that this is a really hard-wired system.” 

The good news, says Riffell, is that air quality regulations implemented in recent decades have had a substantial impact on reducing oxidizing air pollutants. In the US, levels of ozone and nitrogen oxides—which are also harmful to human health—have been falling slowly but steadily since 1980. Even so, many places in the US and Europe still regularly experience unhealthy levels of these pollutants, and ozone exposure is estimated to be increasing globally.

“I am hopeful that things are getting better,” says Riffell. “But I am very mindful that things can change really dramatically and very quickly. We’ve all experienced this—especially in the US, in the last year or two.” To prevent these anthropogenic pollutants from further affecting animal communication systems, he adds, “we need enhanced regulations.”

For agricultural chemicals, like fungicides, Sprayberry says more research is needed to determine when and how much to use them to minimize the loss of crops to disease while also producing the smallest amount of bee-disturbing olfactory pollution. Ultimately, says Olsson, “We have to learn how to coexist in a way that’s minimally destructive to our plants and animals.”

On Friday night, the AI giant Anthropic said that the US government had ordered it to suspend foreign nationals, including employees, from all use of its most advanced products. 

To comply with the Friday directive, the company announced that it disabled access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the latest models of Claude, for all customers. 

Anthropic stated that the government cited national security concerns but did not provide further details. The company says its newest technology has enhanced software engineering and visual understanding compared to previous iterations. But Anthropic has also acknowledged potential concerns, releasing a preview model in April to just a few industry partners to test for capabilities to use it to create hacking tools. Claude Fable 5 is the first publicly available version of the Mythos model, and the company said it has established “guardrails” such as blocking answers to questions on cybersecurity, biology, and chemistry.

The Trump administration barred all federal agencies from using Anthropic products in February. That same day, Trump called Anthropic “a radical left, woke company” amid his feud over it being unwilling to permit the military to use its technology. At the time, CEO Dario Amodei said that the US government’s demands—namely, mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons—would allow it to violate the company’s safeguard policies.

As my colleagues Anna Merlan and Abby Vesoulis pointed out in March, the US military previously used Anthropic’s Claude for “intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios” to prepare for its initial strikes on Iran. 

Anthropic has positioned itself as the ethical AI company, a significant contributor to its rapid ascent to the top of the industry especially as the public has increasingly disapproved of AI development. The company filed for an initial public offering earlier this month, and SpaceX’s success so far since it entered the stock market on Friday—which made founder Elon Musk a trillionaire—could be an encouraging sign for it and its major competitor OpenAI.

Meanwhile, other countries, like China and the United Arab Emirates, are pushing for “sovereign AI,” or in other words, expanding their own AI infrastructure to overcome reliance on nations who have their own data privacy and safeguard rules. 

So despite the Trump administration’s attacks on Anthropic, developers are still raising funds and building at a frantic pace.

On Saturday morning, Kennedy Center officials confirmed that they had removed all signs with President Trump’s name from the building after a federal judge declared the previous day that the signs were unlawful. The officials also stated that they updated their website “to remove all reference to the institution as the ‘Trump Kennedy Center.’”

To justify his takeover of the Kennedy Center, Trump has repeatedly stated that the cultural center was no longer “going to be woke.”

On Friday, another federal judge ordered that the Trump administration must restore exhibits and placards on subjects like climate change, slavery, and civil rights that it had taken down following a March 2025 executive order that deemed them “ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.”

In a preliminary injunction, US District Judge Angel Kelley ruled in favor of scientists, historians, and park conservationists and rangers, stating that the removal established a “dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.” Kelley gave the Trump administration a reinstallation deadline of 21 days, by the 250th anniversary of the US.

The US Department of the Interior said in a statement that “the ruling is from a liberal activist judge” and would evaluate options to appeal the decision while they “celebrate UFC Freedom 250.”

Both orders act as a massive blow to President Trump’s censorship campaign to take control over federal historical sites and cultural institutions. As my colleague Dan Friedman reported in February, the Trump administration’s efforts were shrouded in secrecy—the Interior Department has so far refused to disclose the number of signs and exhibits they are targeting as “non-conformant” with the president and signs were taken down without notice.

And as my colleague Jeffrey Kelly also wrote in February, local residents and government officials of targeted areas have been fighting back against this censorship through protests and even makeshift signs to replace the ones that’d been removed, because despite the administration’s best efforts, “nothing can change what happened at these places, and who it happened to.”