Virginia might be for lovers, but more recently, it’s for data centers. The state has more data centers than anywhere in the world, and companies are pushing to build more of them, including around some of the most hallowed ground in the country: the Manassas National Battlefield Park. 

“The amount of surface land that is being displaced by data centers and everything that goes with that, I don’t think people understand what’s really happening,” says Elena Schlossberg, a leading activist against data center development in Northern Virginia. “There’s NIMBY and there’s NOTE, and NOTE is ‘not over there, either.’”

This week on Reveal, we look into our AI future and the local machinations that are pitting neighbor against neighbor. And we listen in as our “tech lords” talk about the future they are planning for us, whether we want it or not.

Wheelchair user Julia Feinberg, who has spinal muscular atrophy, is very aware that she will need more assistance as she ages in Oakland. She lives independently thanks to the 600 hours of help she gets each month to have someone assist with daily tasks, like getting out of bed, grocery shopping, and preparing meals.

If Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) gets his way, Feinberg risks losing the care that allows her to live an independent life. In-home support services, known in California as IHSS, is a program that pays home aides or loved ones to help people with disabilities with daily tasks. Active since 1983, the program is funded by federal and state Medicaid funds. In practice, it’s a win-win for consumers and governments: disabled people get to live in their communities at a fraction of the price it would cost for the state to house them in nursing homes or hospitals. As of March 2026, there were over 900,000 disabled people and aging adults who are authorized to receive home care through the program.

California’s disabled people are now caught in the middle of what is essentially a schoolyard fight between Newsom and Donald Trump. As Newsom continues to cast himself as Trump’s most formidable Democratic opponent, as of Wednesday, Trump’s federal government is threatening to withhold over a billion dollars worth of Medicaid reimbursements amid baseless claims of fraud. Newsom’s proposed solution puts hundreds of thousands of disabled people at risk of losing access to the country’s largest and most accessible in-home support program.

Newsom wants to change how the program is funded. Under his proposed plan, first introduced in January, if someone like Feinberg needs an increase in hours for the support they need, the county would have to cover more of the cost. Many counties can’t afford the cost. Newsom also proposes cutting a backup provider program, which could leave disabled people in peril if their home aid gets sick.

Every state in America is scrambling to figure out how they are going to address draconian Medicaid cuts passed by Republicans at the federal level last year. It doesn’t help that home and community-based services are optional across the country under Medicaid, leaving the over 8 million disabled people and older adults currently benefiting from the program across the United States in a dangerous bind (all states offer some form of Medicaid home care).

Newsom has tried to cast himself as one of Trump’s biggest foils. “People are rolling over,” Newsom said at the World Economic Forum in January about leaders acquiescing to Trump. “I should have brought a bunch of kneepads for all the world leaders.”

But advocates say that far from being a hero, Newsom is still part of the problem.

“There is a difference between what [Newsom] is trying to project as the resistance or the antidote to Trump and the modern agenda, versus what’s in his [proposed] state budget,” Feinberg, who volunteers with LTSS4ALL Coalition, told me. “It’s really scary to know that as I age…and my needs increase, my hours will not with it.”

Trump himself, surprisingly, has not spent time much publicly complaining about home and community-based services. That would be up to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS head Dr. Mehmet Oz, who claim, without evidence, that the program is rife with fraud.

“This rhetoric is not just harmful and problematic, it’s also dangerous and could lead to impacts for programs that absolutely need public funding,” Lindsay Imai Hong, the California director of Hand in Hand: The Domestic Employers Network, told me. “We’ve seen in Minneapolis with raids on Somali-run child care centers, and also was used back in the 90s to dismantle our public welfare program.” 

Time is running out. Democrats in California’s State Senate and Assembly are in budget negotiations with Newsom. State Senate Democrats unveiled a plan strongly opposing cuts to IHSS in mid-April. In a revised budget in mid-May, Newsom did not budge on IHSS changes. They have until the end of June to reach an agreement.

In a statement to me, California Senate President Monique Límon said that “limiting IHSS would likely force low-income seniors into more expensive housing situations” and overall, the IHSS program is “ethical, dignified, and more cost-effective option for seniors, people with disabilities, and caregivers.”

California’s program is in Trump’s crosshairs because it’s one of the most accessible in the country. Over half a million people are on home and community-based services waiting lists across the United States, according to research from KFF, though there is no wait list in California.

Sabrina Epstein, a policy analyst at Disability Rights California, pointed to the absence of a waiting list for people who qualify. “[IHSS] offers a lot of flexibility regarding who you can hire to be your caregiver, including family caregivers or caregivers from an agency,” said Epstein, “and it serves people of all ages in California, which is a really incredible benefit.” 

The program in itself is not perfect—consumers often do not get the number of hours they actually need, and workers, who are directly paid by the government, are underpaid. Patrice Strahan is paid around 31 hours a week to help clients, including an aging Black woman with cerebral palsy and, unofficially for, her adult disabled son. In Alameda County where Strahan works, IHSS workers make $21.60 an hour. Strahan finds joy in this care work and feels grateful for her job and the connections she has with the people she assists. If her clients have to go to the emergency room, Strahan will work overtime–and without pay. 

“It’s four in the morning. I’m not on the clock anymore,” Strahan told me. “[Emergencies] happen frequently enough that it’s a regular expectation of the job.” 

Strahan also told me that it frustrates her how much disabled people, especially low-income disabled people, are expected to settle. “They are kind of conditioned to accept crumbs,” Strahan told me. 

Even though Newsom himself was vocally against federal Medicaid cuts last year, calling them “cruel, costly, and a significant encroachment on states’ rights”, his proposed changes threaten to become a political liability, according to Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College, who told me that Newsom “would have to defend his record” on this topic if he runs for President.

Newsom, however, has not been scot-free when it comes to attacking IHSS. Last year, he proposed devastating cuts to the program, such as limiting the hours IHSS providers could work, which was halted. California, under a Newsom proposal, restricted certain immigrants from being able to get Medicaid, which means that they cannot qualify for IHSS. 

Several sources I spoke with find it absurd that California has not already created a source of more revenue for Medicaid. Californians are currently debating a wealth tax, known as the Billionaire’s Tax, which could be one potential solution, to the Medicaid funding crisis, but Newsom has notably spoken against it, labeling it a fear of his and saying he has “warned against it.” Meanwhile, Newsom’s potential successor, billionaire Tom Steyer, has spoken in favor of a wealth tax). 

Other blue states are exploring different solutions. In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer proposed raising taxes for digital ads, nicotine products, and gambling to raise more funds for Medicaid.

“We hear that California has one of the five largest economies in the whole world,” Strahan told me. “There’s just no way that this state truly lacks the revenue to ensure that the needs of the most vulnerable Californians are met.” 

Now, California disability and care advocates are fighting in Sacramento and across the state. Feinberg would truly wish to be doing something else with her time. “I’m just exhausted having to fight every year,” Feinberg said.

Have you been struggling to get your hands on affordable World Cup tickets? Well, Donald Trump’s business partners have an “extraordinary” offer for you!

The president’s $TRUMP meme coin has been floundering for months, tumbling from a stratospherically absurd price of $74 per coin shortly before Inauguration Day to around $2.25 on Friday. To drum up interest in this crypto asset, Trump last month attended an exclusive gala at Mar-a-Lago for the top coin holders. But that didn’t seem to help much.

Now, Trump’s meme coin business partners are back with what appears to a new plan to lure investors: a chance to win box seats at the World Cup final in July. Or, as the meme coin’s official website eloquently puts it: “This Summer, Top Members Earn an Extraordinary 3-Day VIP Experience with a Private Luxury Suite at the World Football 2026 Final Game.”

Earlier this month, the coin’s website, which is run by Trump associate Bill Zanker, announced the creation of a special club for coin holders that would offer perks, including exclusive access to then-unnamed sporting events. Now the first details have been posted—the 19 highest ranking club members will be invited to attend a three-day party for the World Cup final. The precise rules for determining rankings are unclear but seem to include some combination of the number of coins investors own and the amount of time over which they’ve owned them.

Perks will include access to a swanky stadium suite, three nights at the St. Regis hotel, chauffeured rides to the stadium, an invitation to a gala, an “elite” afterparty, and “exclusive World Cup nightclub access.” The apparently AI-generated illustration on the website shows a generic stadium, with guests dining and facing away from the game. One figure is wearing a red hat that says “$TRUMP” instead of “MAKE AMERICAN GREAT AGAIN”—a not especially subtle clue about where the Trump presidency is heading.

Neither FIFA nor the club’s organizers responded to a request for comment on what exactly the “World Cup nightclub” is, or if the gala and afterparty are FIFA events. The site’s fine print does make clear that the World Cup and FIFA are not affiliated or connected in any way to the $TRUMP coin promotion. But on some levels, it’s a perfect match. The World Cup has already been harshly criticized for focusing its ticket sales on lavish hospitality packages. Trump has developed a close relationship with FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, who created a “peace prize” to award to Trump.

On Stubhub, the cheapest nosebleed seats for the final are currently going for around $8,700. So, as swanky and elite as the Trump Coin Club’s offerings aim to be, the plunging price of $TRUMP could perhaps turn it into an unexpectedly affordable way to get into the big game.

It’s planting season, and 70 percent of American farmers can’t afford enough fertilizer to plant all their crops. About a third of the planet’s nitrogen fertilizer, the most widely used in global agriculture, must pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Thanks to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran, that waterway is essentially still closed to most ships. 

It’s been described as a “slow-moving food crisis”: when farmers can’t buy fertilizer, they don’t plant as much, and months on, that shows up in scarcer, pricier food. United Nations estimates that 45 million people worldwide could go hungry thanks to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Though the situation is not quite as dire in the US, American farmers are feeling the squeeze, too: fertilizer prices are changing by the minute, soybean farmers are still facing export tariffs, and diesel costs are up, too. 

In an Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee hearing Tuesday, Arkansas Republican Sen. John Boozman proclaimed that “food security is national security.” But the hearing offered few governmental solutions to the fertilizer shortage—particularly not ending the war. 

Trent Kubik, president of the South Dakota Corn Grower’s Association, told the committee he’s had a hard season on his farm. “We expected our costs were going to be higher than normal, as we’d be purchasing [fertilizer] closer to peak demand season,” he said, but with the war on Iran, they’re “nearly doubling.” 

He’s not the only one. In the first quarter of 2026, 86 American farms have already filed for Chapter 12 bankruptcy. And while farmers suffer under the Hormuz blockade, fertilizer producers’ revenues continue to increase. 

“The fertilizer industry is one of the most heavily consolidated industries,” Omanjana Goswami of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who studies agricultural policy, told Mother Jones. “At the same time that these companies are making billions of dollars in profits over the years, farmers have seen profit margins go down drastically because of the higher cost of fertilizer.”

Four major manufacturers control nearly the entire US fertilizer market—and they’ve increased nitrogen fertilizer prices 28 percent since the war on Iran began in February, according to recent University of Illinois data.

Meanwhile, farmers are scrambling, planting less food, and switching to less fertilizer-thirsty crops. “About 4 million acres of corn [in the US] have been switched over to soybean, just to make up for the fact that fertilizer availability was much less this spring,” Goswami said. 

“That’s the thing that we feel the worst about,” Kubik, the corn farmer, said. “During the last 75 days, a lot of money was being made–but it wasn’t by farmers.” 

“Farmers get thrown head first into a crisis every time global supply chains are hit,” Goswami said. That reoccurring crisis—which also happened when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—is the product of an unsustainable agricultural model that requires massive amounts of fertilizer to be shipped from overseas. Some experts suggest that even if the war on Iran ends tomorrow, high fertilizer prices will persist through at least 2027.

The Iran war fertilizer shock, Goswami added, will likely impact wheat in particular. 

Combined with some bad weather earlier this spring and an unrelenting drought in the plains states, the war is making this the worst year for wheat yields in decades. Most wheat grown in the US (unlike, say, corn or soy) is destined for consumption by humans, which means there’s a good chance we’ll see that price shock in the bread aisle later this year.

Meanwhile, beyond some efforts at mandating greater price transparency from fertilizer manufacturers, farmers haven’t been offered any real relief.

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), at Tuesday’s hearing, was indignant. “Between the war in Iran, spiking fuel and fertilizer prices, and illegal trade wars, increasing the cost of equipment, and limiting market access, it’s no wonder that farmers in Georgia I talked to say that they can’t take much more,” he said at this week’s hearing. “Fertilizer prices are increasing. Diesel costs have increased by over $2 a gallon compared to this time last year and there’s no end in sight. At this point, the best-case scenario for farmers is the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.”

It was open, he pointed out, before the war started.

A popular social media conspiracy theory about a recent cluster of hantavirus cases claims that the word “hanta” means “scam,” “fraud,” or “nonsense” in “Hebrew slang.” That’s more or less where the theory ends and dark suggestion takes over. One is meant to conclude that the supposed Hebrew origins of the word mean that the hantavirus—a well-documented illness with outbreaks that go back several decades—is somehow a scam, perpetrated by either the Israeli government or some other undefined group of Jewish people. 

None of this is true. Even the root linguistic claim is completely wrong: the word “hantavirus” comes from the Hantaan River in Korea, where the prototype virus was first identified. Nor is hantavirus, which is typically spread by close contact with infected rodents or their urine, saliva, or feces, a new illness: the virus was isolated in 1978 and cultivated in labs as far back as 1981. In New Mexico, hantavirus cases virtually occur annually; last year, Santa Fe resident Betsy Arakawa, the wife of actor Gene Hackman, died from the illness. 

Yet in the past two weeks, the “Hebrew” claim has spread wildly across Instagram, Threads, TikTok, X, and YouTube, through a fusillade of virtually identical posts, mostly shared by people who are neither public figures nor widely followed. The way the false notion has spread is an excellent demonstration not only of how a conspiracy theory is created and reinforced in real time, but of the ways tech platforms are either unable or unwilling to take action against coded hateful claims. 

Almost all of the social media posts making these claims follow the same format, whether presented in screenshots or a video: the words “I wonder what Hanta means in Hebrew” appear, followed by an image of a Google search for the term, with the company’s AI Overview summary at the top, which claims: “In Hebrew slang, hanta (חַנְטָה) means nonsense, a lie, a scam, or something completely fake. It is often used colloquially as the equivalent of “that’s bullshit” or “a load of garbage.” As citations, Google’s AI overview links to an answer from Grok, X’s in-house AI chatbot, and to a Reddit thread that’s since been deleted. A virtually identical AI summary also currently appears on Instagram when a user searches for the phrase “What does Hanta mean in Hebrew.” 

The rumors spread so widely on X that they, as Snopes pointed out, became a trending topic on the platform. Many of the posts had impressive reach, considering the posters’ stature. One of the most successful versions on Instagram, from a New Age influencer calling herself Divinely Sierra, has garnered over two million views. (In a comment added a day after she made the video, Sierra added, “I can’t stress enough about how this post is not a dig at Jews… This post is specifically talking about how this reality and everything we see come from the world stage is scripted.”) Another version on Instagram is approaching 200,000 views, posted by a small-scale hunting and masculinity influencer whose previous videos often didn’t crack 500 views. To drive the point home, his video includes audio from the Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila.”

Interestingly, the claims have spread widely even as very few recognizable public figures have engaged. Shock jocks Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew discussed the claim in a video that’s still up on YouTube but was removed by TikTok the day I contacted the company for comment. JP Sears, a far-right comedian, has posted versions of the claim on both X and Facebook—but at just over 200,000 views apiece, he’s done scarcely better than that hunting influencer.  

Like false claims about the Talmud that circulated among some of the internet’s most unpleasant masculinity influencers in the summer of 2024, the hantavirus claims also rely on flatly wrong facts about Hebrew. Dr. Ghil’ad Zuckermann, a linguist and language revivalist, suggested to me that the claim is “based on confusing the Korean potamonym (river name) ‘hanta’ with khárta (חרטא), a common Israeli slangism meaning ‘bullshit, nonsense.’” (The Hebrew letters that make the N and R sounds, he points out, are “similar graphically.”) 

Zuckermann says that another Israeli slang term, khantarísh (חנטריש) means “nonsense, worthless person, bullshitter.” “Theoretically, this term could be clipped (shortened) to khánta,” he says. 

But, he adds, “I personally know hundreds of thousands speakers of the Israeli language and have never heard any of them saying khánta, whereas khárta is common.”

A TikTok spokesperson told me the company’s “Community Guidelines” disallow “misinformation that could cause significant harm to individuals or society,” including “harmful conspiracy theories, and other false information related to public safety or crises—when such content may lead to violence or cause public panic.” The spokesperson also told me that when users search for the word “hantavirus” on TikTok, they’ll now first see a link to a Mayo Clinic page.

While the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment, under Elon Musk, X maintains nominal policies against “hateful conduct.” Experts have found what one study called a “consistent spike” in hate speech after Musk bought the company in 2022. In an agreement with British regulators announced Friday, the company pledged to take stronger action against both hateful content and accounts linked to terrorist groups.

YouTube—where the claims are present, but not as prevalent—has policies that forbid “certain types of misleading or deceptive content with serious risk of egregious harm,” which the hantavirus claims don’t clearly fall into. A Meta spokesperson, meanwhile, told me that the company is “reviewing the content in question and will take action against anything that violates our policies.” 

But like the videos spreading false claims themselves, the spokesperson added, the responses are also expected to come from users.

“As we announced in March 2025, Meta has rolled out a Community Notes feature that lets people add more context to Facebook, Instagram and Threads posts that are potentially misleading or confusing,” they told me. “Meta has always been clear that we don’t think we should be the arbiters of truth, and our approach has long been to surface information that people find helpful in deciding what to read, trust or share.”

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

The Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, who owns stock in oil companies, may be violating court ethics codes by participating in certain cases that could benefit Big Oil, government watchdog groups say.

In a Thursday letter, a coalition of watchdog organizations called on the Senate judiciary committee to investigate Alito, the sole Supreme Court justice with holdings in energy companies.

“His irregular recusal practice in oil and gas industry-related cases is undermining public confidence in the impartiality of the Court,” says the letter, signed by green groups including League of Conservation Voters and Center for Biological Diversity, as well as progressive accountability watchdogs the Revolving Door Project and True North Research.

The high court in February agreed to take up a case brought by the oil majors Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil—the first time the court agreed to weigh in on such a challenge. The companies asked the justices to find that federal law prevents subnational governments from filing lawsuits against oil and gas companies for the climate-warming effects of their products.

The court did not say which justices supported weighing in on the petition. Alito did not recuse himself, the letter notes. “No judge on any court, including the high court, should be allowed to hear cases where he or she have a financial stake in those cases,” said Lisa Graves, a former senior justice department official who now directs True North Research.

In 2023, Alito recused himself from considering a petition brought by the same companies in the same lawsuit. That request, which would have required approval from four judges, was denied.

The justice’s most recent financial disclosure, which was filed last August and covers 2024, showed holdings in individual stock worth between $60,007 and $245,000 in ConocoPhillips, Phillips66, and five other oil and energy companies. Alito also has up to $100,000 invested in a Vanguard fund in which ExxonMobil is the third-largest holding, the letter says.

“These holdings alone should compel Justice Alito to recuse himself from the Boulder case and the parallel state climate deception cases,” the groups say, referring to lawsuits brought by more than 70 state and local governments accusing oil companies of misleading the public about their role in the climate crisis.

It is not clear if Alito has sold his stock in oil and gas companies since filing his last financial disclosure. The Guardian has contacted the Supreme Court and Alito for comment.

Justices will be required to report on their 2026 holdings next year; by then, the court may have already ruled on the Suncor case, Graves said.

The groups say Alito has another “apparent conflict of interest”—his relationship with the Republican billionaire donor Paul Singer. Singer founded and runs the hedge fund Elliott Investment Management, which owns more than 52 million shares of Suncor that are worth more than $2.3 billion.

ProPublica reported in June 2023 that Alito failed to officially disclose that he took a private jet ride to Alaska for a 2008 fishing trip paid for by Singer. Alito defended the trip in the Wall Street Journal, saying ethics rules didn’t require him to disclose that he took the trip and that he had no duty to recuse himself from any cases involving Singer discussed in the reporting. He wrote: “ProPublica suggests that my failure to recuse in these cases created an appearance of impropriety, but that is incorrect.”

Thursday’s letter from the watchdog groups says: “Alito’s decision to reverse course and participate in granting the companies’ most recent petition—when a finding in favor of the companies could directly and indirectly benefit both himself and his billionaire friend—is an indefensible breach of ethical boundaries.”

In 2023, the Supreme Court adopted its first-ever formal ethics code—a response to pressure over a slew of scandals focused on some of its senior right-wing justices. It says justices should recuse themselves from cases where their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” but allows the justices to make that decision themselves.

The code has been widely derided as toothless by experts due to its lack of an enforcement mechanism. Unlike standards for other federal judges, it also allows justices to stay on cases if their vote is necessary to resolve the case.

“It’s possible that Alito is using that rationale, [arguing] he’s needed to resolve the matter of the Suncor case,” said Graves. “It’s really outrageous. The highest court in the country…should have the highest standards, not the lowest ones.”

This year, the court also rolled out new software to scan challengers’ filings to identify potential conflicts of interest which might require justices to recuse themselves from cases. Parties before the court must list stock-ticker symbols for companies involved in cases to allow the new software to help identify conflicts.

But the outcome of each climate accountability lawsuit targeting Big Oil could affect the entire industry, said Hannah Story Brown, deputy research director at Revolving Door Project. That means holdings in any oil companies should disqualify justices from weighing in on any of the lawsuits, she said.

“A blanket refusal is the only consistently ethical option for Alito when faced with any of these parallel cases,” Brown said.

On March 21, 2025, Allison Posner received a “Reduction in Force” notice informing her that her position as chief of external relations at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman was being abolished. Her termination was the result of the “dissolution” of the watchdog office, which handled complaints about conditions and treatment in detention facilities. She was among some 110 full-time OIDO staff who were put on a 60-day administrative leave. “You will be separated from DHS at the close of business on May 23, 2025,” the letter stated.

Posner, a one-time immigration attorney, had joined DHS during the Obama years to work in the ombudsman’s office for US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency in charge of visas, work authorizations, and other immigration benefits. Then, in 2019, Congress established another office to carry out independent and neutral oversight of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities and investigate potential misconduct and detainees’ rights violations. Posner was tasked with helping set up this new detention watchdog.

OIDO was supposed to be separate from ICE and CBP while still answering directly to the Homeland Security secretary. It was also designed to complement the oversight work of other department bodies, such as the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) and the Office of Inspector General. Crucially, the office placed on-site inspectors and case managers inside detention centers where they could hear complaints directly from detainees and more immediately address their grievances.

“We went into facilities, talked to people, and solved their individual problems,” Posner said. “For the first time, it wasn’t that people in detention would file a complaint by mailing off a form to Washington. They would simply look for someone from our team who was visiting their facility every week or every other week and just talk to a person in real life.”

But after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, Posner witnessed his administration gut the detention ombudsman’s office she had played a role in getting off the ground. It all culminated in this month’s announcement, first reported by the HuffPost, that OIDO was being shut down. The dismantling of the watchdog office creates a void in independent detention oversight at a moment when it’s needed the most, former employees and advocates say. “We were getting to a place where we were doing it well,” Posner said, “but now there’s no one doing it at all, and that’s the part that’s particularly heartbreaking.”

The stated mission of the ombudsman office was to ensure that the conditions for detained immigrants were humane. To that end, case managers stationed across the country conducted announced and unannounced visits to more than 100 detention centers, including those run by private companies and owned by state and local governments. The office also published inspection reports with recommendations to improve detention conditions in specific facilities and flagged broader systemic trends like medical understaffing at the border.

Lately, Posner said, DHS hadn’t allowed them to publish their most recent annual report on the website. “We didn’t publish anything else,” she said. “I think we had a couple of other inspection reports that we ended up just sitting on.” The last available report posted on the website is from 2024, and OIDO’s webpage advising relatives of detainees and advocates on how to request assistance has been archived.

The detention ombudsman wasn’t the only DHS oversight office affected by the March 2025 reduction in force. Most of the 150 full-time employees with CRCL and the 44 who worked at the USCIS ombudsman’s arm were also put on administrative leave, according to an April 2025 complaint filed by the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center and other advocacy groups challenging the closure of the oversight offices as “arbitrary and capricious.” The complaint claims their elimination violated the statutes mandating their existence and funding. (CRCL and the USCIS ombudsman were established by the Homeland Security Act of 2002.)

The number of complaints the detention ombudsman office received plummeted in the months after March 2025, which a government official attributed to the absence of case managers in the detention centers, according to a Washington Office on Latin America report about the dismantling of DHS’s internal oversight. Detainees also reported that information on how to file complaints with the watchdog offices had been removed from their facilities.

Tricia McLaughlin, then a DHS spokesperson, said at the time that the watchdog offices “obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles” and “often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.” OIDO, she added, “misused taxpayer funds by facilitating complaints that encourage illegal immigration.” In an April 2025 letter to ex-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, dozens of members of Congress expressed outrage at the closure of the watchdog offices, saying it placed “vulnerable populations at even greater risk of abuse.”

In May 2025, a federal judge in Washington, DC, ordered the government to post public notices stating that the offices remained operational. But by early 2026, OIDO had been stripped down to just a handful of employees, according to a court declaration by the acting deputy immigration detention ombudsman, who framed the downsizing not as a fatal blow to the office but as a “realignment.” In 2025, OIDO had a $28-million budget—a small fraction of DHS’s ballooning resources boosted by an injection of $170 billion from the Big Beautiful Bill. The department’s budget request for the 2026 fiscal year accounted for no additional funding for the watchdog office, stating that “OIDO has been eliminated in its entirety.”

“The office of the ombudsman was already decimated in early 2025 when the Trump administration fired almost all of the staff,” Michelle Brané, who served as the ombudsman in 2024, said. “But it is particularly concerning that there is now no pretense at all, and there is no mechanism for people to have very serious concerns about conditions of custody addressed.”

It wasn’t easy for people who had been detained by the federal government, and their families and supporters, to trust that an office within that same government would address their problems. But over time, the complaints coming in started to mount. Some were about relatively small problems, like a broken soda vending machine. Others had to do with medical neglect or abuse. In the fiscal year 2024, OIDO received 11,384 complaints, according to an unpublished annual report to Congress. The number of complaints that reached the office over five years added up to 26,846. The most common issues were related to inadequate medical care, contact and communication, and facility environment.

News of OIDO’s shutdown broke on the same day as the Washington Post published an investigation based on internal ICE records that revealed 780 use-of-force incidents in detention facilities during the first year of the second Trump term. It also comes at a time when immigrant deaths in ICE custody have reached a record high; 49 people have died in detention since January 2025. As many as 29 just in this fiscal year. In January, the detained population peaked at 73,000, but it has since diminished to about 60,000, according to the most recent data from ICE.

Former employees I talked to wondered if some of these deaths could have been prevented if the office hadn’t been decimated. “Any death in immigration detention custody is a death too many,” Brané said. “I would like to believe that our attention to a lot of these medical issues kept that number lower than it might have been otherwise.” OIDO’s system wasn’t perfect, she noted, and could have used more independence and enforcement authority. Nonetheless, the now-defunct office played a critical role in providing immediate responses to complaints ranging from insufficient food to a detainee’s inability to secure a medical appointment.

David Gersten, who worked at DHS for almost 20 years and recently served as acting immigration detention ombudsman, praised on LinkedIn the watchdog’s case management embedded model as a “new approach” to federal oversight. “I visited around a hundred ICE and CBP facilities over four years and know OIDO helped ICE and CBP reduce costs and improve efficiency while ensuring safe and secure conditions for detainees,” he wrote in a post. In 2023, then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recognized the office with an innovation award.

Last week, DHS blamed the end of the detention watchdog on Congress, saying in a statement to NPR that it had shut down because of a funding lapse. But the legislation to fund the department and end the government shutdown didn’t mandate the closure of the office. “There’s plenty of money lying around for DHS to accomplish its statutory functions,” said Anthony Enriquez, an attorney with the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center leading the case against the government. “They’re using the fact that Congress didn’t give even more money as a pretext to accomplish the goal they always had from the beginning, shut these offices down without congressional approval.”

Posner agreed. “It feels like it’s all very intentional to make people absolutely miserable while they’re detained,” she said, calling it “an utter disregard for safety and just humane treatment.”

Cars and trucks pass by. Some slow down and hastily take a quick photo or video of local law enforcement and ICE agents making the arrest. The scene disappears in their rearview mirror as they drive on. The arrests are fast. Within minutes, the person operating the vehicle is no longer there, snatched and torn away from one life and forcibly transported into another that will never be the same. And, within minutes, the nameless and often faceless agents in the unmarked SUV’s and trucks apprehending them on highways and roads across Oklahoma disappear as well. 

A white Ford Transit work van sits abandoned on the side of a street in the north suburbs of Oklahoma City. Work tools remain in the storage area in the back. A work order lies on the passenger seat. Take-out food rests on the dashboard. On the south side of the city, a maroon Ford Fusion is left stranded in the grass off Interstate 44. Construction gloves, a camouflage jacket, yellow safety vest, a cooler and a thermos with an Arkansas Razorbacks logo remain inside the car. 

In a state where all seventy-seven counties voted to support Trump and his anti-immigrant policies in 2024, state and local law enforcement have signed on as important allies in the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Over thirty state and local law enforcement agencies in Oklahoma now have 287(g) agreements with ICE, which effectively deputize them to ICE. This includes the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, with over 700 state troopers who are now empowered to make immigration arrests. Recently released data shows that more than 1,300 people were arrested by ICE in Oklahoma in the first two and a half months of 2026.

“Just because we don’t see the things that we’re seeing out of Minneapolis, doesn’t mean people aren’t being detained,” an Oklahoma City-based immigration lawyer said to me. “It doesn’t mean that people aren’t being taken and disappeared…because that is happening in Oklahoma.”

Years of criminal justice reform have left the state, several counties and towns, as well as the profit-driven private prison industry hungry to fill empty bed spaces or to explore new sources of revenue. Incarcerating and exploiting immigrants for ICE has proven to be an opportunistic and lucrative alternative. Jails in Kay, Logan, Grady, Blaine and Tulsa counties now detain immigrants for ICE. Cimarron Correctional Facility outside the town of Cushing operated by the private prison company CoreCivic, currently detains 600 immigrants per day.

And in late 2025, CoreCivic, DHS/ICE and the Oklahoma Department of Corrections cut a deal to repurpose and reopen Diamondback Correctional Facility, in Watonga, as an ICE detention center. The 2,000-bed prison in rural northern Oklahoma sat empty for ten years. Reopening Diamondback is expected to generate combined annual revenues of over $100 million for CoreCivic, the state, the county, and the city of Watonga, population some 2,500.    

Attorneys, activists, churches, and community groups and organizers are responding with new strategies to serve and protect their communities. High school students—many from immigrant families—courageously walked out of class in protest of ICE activity and the racism and intolerance driving immigration policy.

Yet here in Oklahoma, ICE’s public elusiveness is also a menacing reminder of its presence everywhere. For individuals, mixed-status households and communities in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and smaller towns, the fear and anxiety of knowing but not seeing is often paralyzing.

The front doors at the ICE office on Sovereign Row in Oklahoma City close behind a Venezuelan man as he dutifully enters and presents himself for his scheduled check in with ICE. His friends sit in the car and cry when he never returns.

A Honda Civic sits in the parking lot of an apartment complex. The driver’s side window is shattered. A white plastic laundry basket remains in the front seat filled with clean clothes. Cars and trucks continue to pass by the white Ford Transit and the maroon Ford Focus. The day continues. Time moves on, yet inside that abandoned car or truck or van, time stands still. A worker doesn’t show up to the worksite or the office.  A seat in a classroom is suddenly empty. A husband or wife, mother or father, brother or sister doesn’t return to their home in Oklahoma ever again. A life is violently suspended and replaced with absence and grief. 

Detention

Grady County Jail, in Chickasha, Oklahoma is one of more than thirty counties, local law enforcement agencies and state agencies in Oklahoma with agreements to detain immigrants or perform immigration enforcement duties for ICE through an agreement with the US Marshals Service. In 2019, a 13,000-square-foot addition to the jail was completed, adding some 200 beds.

Diamondback Correctional Facility, in Watonga is operated by the private prison company CoreCivic, formerly CCA (Corrections Corporation of America); it opened in 1998 and held federal prisoners until it was closed in 2010, sitting empty for almost fifteen years.

In late 2025, the facility reopened as an immigration detention center. CoreCivic said in October that it expects to earn $100 million annually from Diamondback once the facility is fully activated. The Oklahoma Department of Corrections receives an ‘administrative fee’ of $833,333 each month to monitor CoreCivic’s compliance and perform other administrative functions related to the facility.

Watonga

Watonga City Manager Leroy Alsup explains how revenue from Diamondback could be utilized by the town: “It could be put into an equipment fund…being a small town, we’ve got a lot of dated equipment that could stand to be updated…Most municipalities have a lot of water and sewer lines that are aged and need to be replaced. When we apply for grants to update and replace water and sewer lines, we’ll have more funding for matching funds to get that. There’s a variety of ways that additional funding can help us. It’s just too early to show that impact yet, but the potential is there.”

Watonga Senior Center plays a vital role in Watonga, offering exercise classes, inexpensive meals, social events, and serving as a meeting place for the Kiwanis Club. I spoke to four of the women working there: they’ve noticed the increased traffic at Diamondback.

“We don’t get a whole lot of information about who all is out there and how many. If you drive by there, it’s packed with vehicles, though. Big vans, which I assume are bringing in people,” one of the women says.

Jim owns a paint and body shop in Watonga. Regarding the reopening of Diamondback Correctional Facility for the detention of immigrants for ICE, Jim says it will profit CoreCivic, but is skeptical that it will do much for Watonga.

“I really don’t see much of a benefit…I don’t know where they will bring in the workers from. Out of this county or what, but you would think there would be some that live here that might work there. It might bring a few jobs.”

Impact

After ICE arrested the driver of a nondescript sedan, the car was left on the side of the road. Several sets of chopsticks and air filter cartridges for a work mask were left on the floor. Construction gloves, a camouflage jacket, a yellow safety vest and a small cooler remained on the passenger seat. A yellow work helmet and some personal belongings remained in the back seat.

Federico, 39, was born in Mexico, but Oklahoma has been his home for over twenty-two years. He is married and has two children who are US citizens. In November 2025 he traveled on a bus with other musicians to perform a concert in Midland, Texas. In the city of Anson, Texas, local law enforcement asked to see the status of everyone on the bus. He spent the next six weeks detained by ICE. Eventually he was released on bond but was required to wear a GPS ankle monitor. Federico was one of more than 42,000 people ICE had shackled with GPS ankle monitors across the country as of February 2026.

“I live with this fear that I’m always being monitored,” he explained to me. “It’s very complicated to have this thing on your leg when you’re going to sleep or during your routine in life every day. I’m always afraid of damaging it, bumping it on the edge of the table. I don’t want them to think I’m trying to damage it or trying to be free of it. Your life can’t go back to being normal. Nothing is back to normal. Having this monitor on my leg, it is a reminder that they have a hold on me by the foot. It’s them telling you that you’re not free.”

Several hundred students walked out of classes at Santa Fe South High School in Oklahoma City on February 18, protesting against ICE and immigration enforcement threatening their community.

“We deserve to be heard. We deserve to be seen as people. We are not animals to be deported,” one student demonstrator said.

On February 22, 2026, a young man from Honduras spent the morning washing his clothes at a nearby coin laundromat. ICE arrested him when he returned home to his apartment.

“They pulled up three deep and surrounded him. They blocked him in first,” a neighbor who witnessed the arrest said. “I saw one of them pull out their gun and broke the front driver’s side window. They jacked him out and treated him like a fucking animal. It was disgusting. They pulled him out, took his phone from his hand and just threw him on the ground. Then they just threw him in the car and took off with him. They didn’t say nothing else.”

Witnesses say the ICE arrest was quick, no more than a few minutes. A bottle of Centrum multivitamins remained in the cupholder between the seats. A laundry basket filled with unfolded clothes rested on the passenger seat.

Bureaucracy

The David L. Moss Justice Center is the site of the Tulsa County Jail. According to the most recent data released by ICE, each day, the facility is jailing an average of 33 immigrants for the agency, who on average stay five days before they are moved to other detention centers in Oklahoma, Texas, or elsewhere in the country. More than three out of four people detained by ICE here have no criminal record.

Of the thirty immigration-related bills filed by state legislators, most did not progress, including a bill prohibiting NGOs from providing assistance to undocumented people and asylum seekers, another mandating all law enforcement agencies in Oklahoma to enter into 287(g) agreements with ICE, and a law denying US citizenship to children born in Oklahoma to parents who are not US citizens or legal residents.

State Sen. Michael Brooks, Democrat of Oklahoma City, sits in his office at the Oklahoma State Capitol. A lawyer by profession, he specializes in immigration law and is the author of Senate Bill 1470, which proposed access for state-level elected officials or religious leaders to enter and inspect privately owned correctional facilities, including immigration detention centers.

“There were at least three private prisons in Oklahoma that were either being used for other purposes or were vacant…If we’re going to allow these private prisons to come to the state of Oklahoma, I think it’s reasonable that state elected officials would be able to go and inspect them,” he said to me. Though it received strong support, the bill failed to advance.

Pushback

Staff of the Spero Project assist a woman who has called into a rapid response hotline about her son, who was recently pulled over by local law enforcement while on his way to work, transferred into ICE custody, and placed in detention. She calls to try and find out where he is.

After searches through several online sources and phone calls, they locate the young man at Cimarron Correctional Facility in Cushing, Oklahoma. An hour later, a different woman calls the hotline to ask how she and her partner can self-deport.

Since October 2025, in partnership with a group called Critical Response Network Oklahoma, community volunteers and staff meet two days a week at an undisclosed location to operate the phone hotline.

“Any amount of information,” a hotline volunteer says, “even it it’s bad, helps them deal with the chaos” and lack of information. “When we’re able to find someone in the system and tell them where, and kind of explain what might happen—it’s terrible, but I think, especially the wives, that helps them kind of have something to deal with.

“They may not at that moment of crisis think of the questions to ask, but I think we generally tell them, this is where he is, this is what might happen, this is probably what the timeline will be. I think, in the midst of the chaos and tragedy, that little bit of information helps.”

“For somebody who doesn’t know where the person is, it’s really hard to find out. And the uncertainty creates a lot more stress and a lot more sadness to the family members,” the volunteer says. “It’s like, ‘I don’t know where he’s at. I don’t know where he is.’”

Elsewhere in Oklahoma City, vulnerable families and individuals attend free legal clinics where volunteers and immigration lawyers assist with powers of attorney, standby guardianship, community resources, and free legal consultations.

“We’re losing really, really wonderful people to this craziness,” says a member of Latitude Legal and Community Response Network, which organizes the clinic. “We’re losing community members. And what I think people are really beginning to understand is that we are in proximity with so many people that maybe have unstable legal status, and you would never know it.

“The way things have changed in policy over the past year and two months, it is making things increasingly difficult to stay in status. This argument of ‘come the right way’—well, they did come the right way, and those pathways are narrowing on them. We’ve changed the rules on them mid-game.”

Fear of ICE forces Maria, 30, to rely on friends, family, and volunteers, for rides to work and essential shopping.

“When President Trump came into office, everything changed overnight,” she said from the passenger’s seat during one ride. “Right now, you can’t go out without having constant fear that you’re going to get pulled over, or ICE is going to grab you. You almost don’t have a life, because you have to go to work, you have to go out to get groceries, but you’re going and looking in the rearview mirror to see if anybody’s there.

“Before you leave the store, you’re looking around to see if there’s a patrol out there waiting for you. It’s just being afraid for yourself, but also everybody around you. I’ve always been an independent woman, and I do my own thing and take care of my own life. It’s really hard to depend on other people to help me do things that I could do before.”

Reverend Kara Farrow of the Fellowship Lutheran Church in Tulsa leads a prayer at a know-your-rights and rapid response training in March, held by the state’s ACLU chapter and Community Response Network Oklahoma, a community defense organization.

“Within the last two weeks, about twenty members of the congregation have received letters,” Farrow says, demanding their presence at ICE offices in Oklahoma City, Dallas, or Houston. “Last Wednesday, the man that serves as the assisting minister was detained in Cushing. And there are just appointments upon appointments upon appointments coming up. What is heartbreaking is that as much as we’ve tried, they’re taking them anyway. I just found out that another person who was detained two weeks ago is being sent back to Venezuela. And so it’s just week after week.”

Greg Constantine produced this work as part of the 2026 Bertha Challenge Fellowship.

The Supreme Court has rejected a federal appeals court’s attempt to end telemedicine and mail-order abortions, hitting pause on a fast-moving case that threatened to decimate access to abortion pills nationwide.

The one-paragraph SCOTUS order, issued late Thursday afternoon, means that for the foreseeable future, the abortion pill mifepristone can continue to be prescribed via telehealth and sent through the mail, even to patients living in states where abortion is banned.

“The number one message that we want to get across is that telehealth care is still available across the country,” said Lizzy Hinkley, legal director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine.

Abortion patients, providers, and advocates have been in turmoil since May 1, when the far-right Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order suspending FDA rules that allowed online dispensing of mifepristone. That order was stayed by Justice Samuel Alito for 10 days while the Supreme Court struggled to decide how to proceed in a potentially monumental—and politically explosive—case.

Since the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, more than a dozen Republican-dominated legislatures have enacted laws that severely restrict or ban abortion within their borders. But over the past four years, the number of abortions has risen nationwide, including in states where abortion is almost entirely illegal. 

Abortion foes blame Obama- and Biden-era FDA rule changes expanding access to mifepristone, one of two drugs used in the standard abortion-pill regimen, including a 2023 rule that eliminated a requirement for in-person dispensing. Now, almost two-thirds of abortions in the US happen with abortion pills, and nearly 30 percent occur by telemedicine.

Louisiana sued the FDA last fall, arguing that the 2023 rule change was arbitrary, capricious, and “avowedly political”—not based on sound science, the suit claimed, but on Democrats’ determination to negate the Supreme Court’s intent in Dobbs to return abortion policy to the states.

The FDA argued that the lawsuit would disrupt its own, ongoing review of mifepristone’s safety, announced last fall. Mifepristone’s manufacturers, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro Inc., warned of the potentially dire consequences of allowing states to upend drug regulations put in place years or even decades ago.

On Thursday, Alito—the arch-conservative who authored the Dobbs decision—was one of two justices who wrote in favor of letting the Fifth Circuit’s order go into effect. That would have cut off the supply of mail-order mifepristone to states like Louisiana, where telehealth providers are sending nearly 1,000 packages of abortion pills every month.

Alito blasted his fellow justices’ decision to pause the Fifth Circuit order as “unreasoned” and “remarkable.” He also ranted about blue-state shield laws, which provide the legal protections that make it possible for telehealth providers to care for patients in states where abortion is restricted or banned. Such laws, he said, are “a scheme” to thwart states like Louisiana, which has some of the toughest anti-abortion restrictions in the country.

In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas brought up the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era federal criminal statute that conservatives argue remains the law of the land. If enforced, it would amount to a national abortion ban.

Comstock “bans using ‘the mails’ to ship any ‘drug . . . for producing abortion,’” Thomas wrote, and suggested that Danco and GenBioPro are engaged in a “criminal enterprise.” He said the drug companies—which appealed the Fifth Circuit ruling to SCOTUS—”cannot be irreparably harmed by [an] order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes.”

Abortion advocates expressed relief that the other justices—including several who have repeatedly ruled against abortion rights—did not let the Fifth Circuit ruling take effect. “Even this conservative Supreme Court is not willing to endorse anti-abortion extremists’ latest desperate attempt to deprive women of needed healthcare,” Hinkley said. She called the case “a deliberate effort to disrupt access to telemedicine abortion across the country and cause undue confusion among patients and providers.”

“The ban on mifepristone through telemedicine was never about safety,” said Dr. Angel Foster, a telemedicine provider and co-founder of The Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, or The MAP. “It was about controlling people’s bodies and lives.”

But the reprieve is only temporary, she added. “Lawmakers have made it clear they are desperate to block access to medication abortion by any means necessary.”

Something big happened in Virginia last month that you probably missed.

On April 13, Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a bill making Virginia the 18th state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

That’s an agreement among states to elect the president by the popular vote rather than the Electoral College. 

The compact goes into effect when enough states sign onto it and reach a total of 270 electoral votes—the number needed to elect the president.

With Virginia’s support, states in the compact now have 222 electoral votes. 

And the results of the midterms could push the popular vote effort over the top.

If Democrats take control of state governments in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, or Arizona, and legislatures in those states adopt the compact, that would put it over 270. 

That means there’s actually a chance the president could be elected by the popular vote in 2028 instead of the fundamentally undemocratic Electoral College.

Watch our new video to learn more about how consequential this would be.