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.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche gave a press conference on Thursday to tell reporters about 300,000 supposedly “missing” immigrant children. These were unaccompanied minors who’d crossed the border alone during the Biden administration, before being apprehended by the government and then quickly released to sponsors—typically adult relatives.

Mullin and Blanche claimed the Biden administration lost track of these children, and that many ended up with adults who purported to be family but were actually criminals who abused them. “Kids now have been paying for it,” Mullin said. “They have been getting raped over and over and over again because the previous administration chose not to enforce our nation’s laws and protect the most vulnerable.”

The claim that 300,000 unaccompanied minors went missing has already been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked. Still, over the past year, the Trump administration has used this misleading narrative as justification to go out and find these kids. Officials have gotten back in touch with nearly 150,000, whether calling or visiting their homes or encountering them in the community. Hundreds have been re-detained. Their sponsors must then be re-vetted before the kids can be released.

The administration says it’s doing this for the good of the children. “We are going to rescue as many kids as we possibly can,” Mullin said. And it’s true that there have been some horrific cases: The press conference was pegged to the indictment of three people who allegedly lied about their identities to gain custody of minors; a fourth man was sentenced for raping a girl in his care.

But lawyers around the country who work with unaccompanied children paint a remarkably different picture. They tell me that abuse by fake sponsors is relatively rare, and that most sponsors really are who they say they are: family members. The Trump administration, by and large, isn’t saving kids—it’s separating them from loved ones and putting them in detention for months on end.

Unaccompanied minors taken into custody at the end of the Biden administration were held by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for about 37 days on average. Under the Trump administration, the average is about six months, and many children have been detained more than a year. “A majority of the kids in our facilities today have biological parents who want them home, and there’s no reason the government shouldn’t be releasing them,” says Jessica Richardson, an attorney whose nonprofit, The Door, works with detained kids in New York.

“Family separation under the first Trump administration got so much attention, and DHS is doing it again, but with everything else they’re doing it hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves,” says Jen Smyers, who served as ORR’s deputy director under Biden. “DHS is kidnapping people’s kids.”

At the press conference, Angie Salazar, Trump’s acting ORR director, touted more stringent vetting requirements for sponsors—families must jump through many more hoops than before to prove they’re worthy of getting their kids back. The process, Salazar said, “should mirror the standards of the American foster care system,” with “rigorous background checks, vetting of caregivers, financial stability verification, and home visits before a child is turned over.”

Several families are now suing, arguing that the new requirements have led to detention periods that are too lengthy and violate the Flores agreement, a court settlement requiring kids to be released from government care “without unnecessary delay.”

The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act also requires ORR to “promptly” place unaccompanied minors “in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.”

“These children have been forced to spend extremely long periods of time away from their family, friends, school and community without justification,” notes the families’ complaint, which was filed by Democracy Forward and the National Center for Youth Law.

“It is not right that I have to stay here for so long when I have someone to take care of me who knows me and loves me,” a child told the court in another similar lawsuit. “I don’t know if I can tolerate it much longer.”

Under Biden, says Michigan-based attorney Ana Raquel Devereaux, who works with unaccompanied minors, parents could “receive the child in a relatively swift manner. Now, the barriers to sponsor reunification are so significant that, from our perspective, sponsor reunification is essentially nonexistent.”

Acting director Salazar said at the press conference that ORR is “prioritizing child safety over placement speed.”

But is holding kids for months, or even a year or more, really good for them? ORR facilities are often called shelters, but they are “essentially prisons,” says attorney Richardson. “They have specific times they are allowed to shower and use the bathroom. Specific times they are allowed to go to get food.”

Some of the detained kids are having suicidal ideation, depression, and anxiety because of the lengthy detention, or are acting out or running away. “ORR is meant to be a very, very short-term place for unaccompanied children,” notes Smyers, the former ORR official.

Among the plaintiffs is Diego N., a 14-year-old who’d been living with his father in Texas. Since being re-detained, “he has little privacy,” the complaint states. “He misses being able to go outside for fresh air when he wants to and being able to talk to his friends.” Detention has interrupted his schooling—ORR classes are primarily focused on basic language skills: “He is being taught how to name fruits in English when he should be a freshman at his public high school.”

Younger kids are confused about why they’re detained at all, says Alexa Sendukas, an attorney in Texas. “It’s incredibly stressful and confusing, especially for the little ones. They don’t understand why they can’t get out.”

Rather than saving these kids, she says, the administration is using them “as bait.” Last year, ORR began requiring sponsors to attend in-person meetings to verify their identification documents—and sometimes ICE arrests them when they show up. “We’re seeing family members detained,” says Sendukas. (This week, federal agents raided the offices of organizations that provide legal services to unaccompanied minors, to gather more information.)

Kids are so terrified for their parents that some decide not to go through the sponsorship process at all. Mario C., a 17-year-old plaintiff who’s been detained for months, wants to live with his mom, but he’s considering foster care instead because he doesn’t want to risk her arrest. Other kids are so desperate to get out of detention that they self-deport, returning to countries where they haven’t lived in years, even though their parents are in the United States.

Trump officials remember the public outrage that ensued after they split up kids and parents at the border in 2017. Now they’re splitting them up in the interior and holding press conferences about saving missing children to justify it. They want to make their activities more palatable to the public.

But even rebranded, family separation is still just family separation.

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

Last year, Marie Tai needed a better way to keep her condo cool. Her window air-conditioning units were borderline ineffective, even running at full blast. Summers have been getting more intense in Tai’s Boston neighborhood because of a rapidly warming climate, and she had just adopted a 16-year-old cat named Mittens, who was still recovering from being hit by a car.

Tai had already been considering a heat pump, an all-electric appliance that heats and cools spaces and lets homeowners ditch polluting fossil fuels. But three contractors had quoted her prices ranging from about $28,000 to $40,000. Tai, who heads finance and administration at Harvard University’s Project Zero, thought those estimates seemed excessive for her 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom place. So she had hit pause on the project.

But with Mittens’ well-being front of mind, Tai renewed her heat pump search last spring. Through Facebook, she found an opportunity to participate in a program that aggregates demand, organized by Laminar Collective, a local startup that does research on the tech and coordinates installations.

These heat pump group-buy initiatives let installers purchase equipment in bulk and spend less time chasing leads, accruing savings that they can pass on to customers. Tai, tantalized by Laminar’s menu of low prices for a heat-pump setup, decided to give it a shot.

After a representative from the startup visited her home to check what heat pump size and configuration would fit her needs, Tai signed up for a ductless minisplit system for $20,000—thousands less than even her lowest initial quote. She then also took advantage of an additional $8,500 state rebate and eight-year financing with zero percent interest.

The new equipment has been life-changing, Tai said.

She no longer has to buy fuel oil for heating in the winter, and the heat pump is so efficient that last year she saved roughly $1,300 on her energy bills. In contrast to the old, noisy window ACs, the new system’s wall-mounted, air-filtering indoor units ​“are so quiet,” she said. Her allergy symptoms have improved. And Mittens is comfortable and doing well, she noted. ​“I couldn’t be happier.”

Like Tai, homeowners in communities across the US are signing up for an unusual way of buying heat pumps: together. Companies, nonprofits, and local governments are increasingly offering programs that coordinate consumer demand to secure meaningful discounts of around 10 percent to 20 percent, which can translate to roughly $3,000 to $6,000 per installation. It’s like a group buying a pack of muffins at Costco rather than each buying a muffin at Starbucks.

The bulk-buy approach is taking off as the Trump administration demolishes electrification incentives. Last year, the Republican-led Congress eliminated a $2,000 federal tax credit for home heat pumps. Late last month, the administration said that it won’t allow home energy-efficiency rebates to be used by people looking to get off gas.

While heat pumps reduce pollution and typically cut owners’ energy bills, they can be a pricey proposition up front. Whole-home installations typically range from $17,000 to $30,000, depending on the property size, insulation, climate, and many other factors, according to electrification advocacy nonprofit Rewiring America.

“Even though homeowners often save significantly over time, the first quotes can bring real sticker shock,” said Cole Merrick, founder and CEO of VoltHub, an online heat-pump installation marketplace.

VoltHub and heat-pump general contractor Vayu organized a California group-buy program this spring to serve the counties of Los Angeles and Orange and the greater San Francisco Bay Area. They’re offering another one this summer.

Most heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning replacements are emergencies, and these jobs will continue to make up the majority of Vayu’s business, said founder and CEO Shreyas Sudhakar. But for households that can hold off on getting a heat pump installed, group buys are ideal, he noted.

The process entails a waiting period, which can be several weeks to about six months, as the slots fill up and the installer determines the final pricing. The installer then confirms individual quotes with customers—who can decide not to move forward without penalty—and schedules the work.

Heat pump group buys come in different forms. They can be organized at the grassroots level, offered by a contractor, or run by a third party that aggregates demand over a limited time window. Through a competitive bidding process, the third party vets qualified installers and chooses one or more to carry out the jobs.

The collective bargaining approach has succeeded in the past. Nonprofit Solar United Neighbors has led similar group buys for rooftop solar since 2007, helping thousands of households net deals on installations.

Now, the organization is partnering with iChoosr, an international company that helps households electrify, in order to get group deals for heat pumps, too. Using iChoosr’s Switch Together platform, people in select areas can sign up to unlock group discounts for the all-electric appliance, as well as solar and batteries.

Since 2023, more than 5,100 US homeowners have gotten their solar panels or batteries via iChoosr, which earns a fee from participating vetted installers for jobs they get through the platform, said Fred Wu, a director of community engagement for the company.

iChoosr was already running successful bulk-purchasing programs for heat pumps in the UK and the Netherlands, and launched its first offerings in the US last year with Solar United Neighbors. They opened one program in the Colorado Front Range and another in the Washington, DC, area in July, closed those lists in September, and finished up the installations—for about 90 households—by the end of the year.

On the heels of that success, iChoosr reran group buys in both regions this spring. More than 1,000 households have signed up expressing interest so far.

This year, the company will also launch new programs in the metro areas of Houston and Dallas, Chicagoland, and northern Arizona around Flagstaff, partnering with nonprofits and local governments at no cost to them, Wu said.

For contractors, these bulk-buy initiatives are a boon.

They cut down on the installers’ sales and marketing costs, thanks to word of mouth and publicity from third parties like iChoosr. Home electrification contractor Elephant Energy, which is working with iChoosr to deploy the Colorado heat-pump installations, saves about $300 per project, said CEO and co-founder DR Richardson. Elephant has also run its own community bulk buys across its California, Colorado, and Massachusetts markets, he noted.

Group-buy initiatives smooth out demand by allowing for planned installations when business naturally slumps. Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning work is highly seasonal, with most people calling an HVAC technician during the first heat wave or cold snap.

“For a lot of businesses, two months will make up 70 percent to 80 percent of the revenue for the year,” said Sudhakar of Vayu. ​“So to be able to have some guaranteed revenue that is on the books and [can] fill downtime is really valuable.”

But heat pump group-buying programs aren’t ubiquitous yet. Wu of iChoosr recommends that homeowners who are interested but not in a rush contact city and county leaders to let them know that they’d like to get a bulk deal going in their area.

“We’re continuously trying to expand the program,” Wu said. ​“The first thing we need…is a local government that wants to bring this to their constituents.” These partnerships lend credibility and visibility to the group initiatives, since local governments help promote them.

Tai in Boston was grateful to be part of Laminar Collective’s heat-pump bulk buy. It not only helped her save money but also provided her time to get her questions answered without the sales pressure she felt from one-on-one solicitations. ​“It’s empowering,” she said. After she told her neighbor about her experience, they got their heat pump that way, too.

Decades before Covid-19, the AIDS epidemic tore through communities in the US and around the world. It has killed some 40 million people and continues to take lives today. 

But early on, research and public policy focused on AIDS as a gay men’s disease, overlooking other vulnerable groups—including communities of color and women. 

This month marks 45 years since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published its first report about a mysterious illness that would eventually be called AIDS. So we’re bringing back Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows, from reporters Kai Wright and Lizzy Ratner, which chronicles the first years of the HIV epidemic in New York City. 

One of the most influential activists for women with AIDS was Katrina Haslip, a prisoner at a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. In the 1980s, Haslip and other incarcerated women started a support group to educate each other about HIV and AIDS. 

Haslip took her activism beyond prison walls after her release in 1990, even meeting with CDC leaders. One of the main goals was to change the definition of AIDS, which at the time excluded many symptoms that appeared in HIV-positive women. This meant that women with AIDS often did not qualify for government benefits such as Medicaid and disability insurance. 

The podcast series Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows is a co-production of The History Channel and WNYC Studios. 

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in February 2024.

Could you count to a trillion? Oh, hell no.

I just timed myself counting to 100 as fast as I could. It took 38 seconds.

The higher you count, the longer the numbers get, and so the slower the count becomes, but let’s be ridiculously conservative and assume I could maintain that rapid counting pace. Counting to a trillion would then take 380 billion seconds.

That’s 12,050 years.

How high could a person count? Well, for the sake of argument, suppose I commenced counting immediately upon emerging from my mama’s vagina and kept at it for 100 years—before dying abruptly, because I hadn’t eaten, drank, nor slept during those 100 years.

I would have only made it to 8.3 billion.

A trillion is 1,000 billion. It’s an unfathomable number. As the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, if you stack a trillion pennies one atop the other, they’ll stretch to the moon and back—twice.

Back in 2021, I published a book, Jackpot, about runaway wealth in America and its effects on those who come into it, and on society at large. One question that came up a lot was, well, should billionaires exist? Even some of my very wealthy sources felt there should perhaps be some upper limits placed on wealth accumulation.

Should billionaires exist? How quaint. What I can now say with authority is that nobody should have a trillion bucks—ever. It’s entirely absurd. Among the nearly 200 nations on earth, only about 20 have a GDP that big. Simply put, it’s way, way, way too much money for any individual to possess—not to mention that Musk didn’t earn it. We allowed him to accumulate it. That was a choice—a bad one, and also dangerous.

I will elaborate, but first let’s have a little fun.

I did some calculations a while back to demonstrate how egregiously rich the world’s richest guy was—and that was at a time when Musk’s net worth was only $200 billion. Here’s my update:

Suppose we wanted to have a game of Monopoly in which the amount of money each player starts with reflects their relative wealth in real life.

And suppose we want it to be Elon Musk vs. some guy with the average middle-class wealth of $453,300. (Economists define middle class as the 50th through 90th wealth percentiles—the “middle 40″—and this number comes from RealTimeInequality.org.)

So, normally, each player starts a Monopoly game with $1,500. In our rigged version, we want our middle-class player to have at least enough to buy a property or two, so we’ll let him start with $500. How much would Musk then get?

He gets $1.1 billion. (Actually more, since he’s now up to $1.1 trillion, per Forbes, but I’ll stick with $1 trillion for simplicity.)

You couldn’t realistically count that high, either, in your lifetime.

So now we’ve got a problem, because each Monopoly set only comes with $20,580. To play this game requires 53,597 sets, which at today’s low Amazon price of $11.99 will run you $643,162. Our middle-class player couldn’t cover that even if he sold his home and liquidated his other assets.

And also, where would you put the boxes? Each set comes in a box 0.19 cubic feet in volume. All told, they would consume 10,183 cubic feet. Assuming you have standard 9-foot ceilings, they would completely fill a 1,131-square-foot room from floor to ceiling.

Our middle-class player doesn’t have any rooms that big in his house—which he had to sell anyway to cover his half of the cost of the sets.

Suppose you took all Musk’s Monopoly money and spread it out on the ground? Turns out, it would paper over roughly 11 football fields, including the end zones. But as those bills are small and multiple denominations, let’s try this with real-life currency.

If you were to convert Musk’s trillion dollars into $100 bills, we’re talking about 10 billion Franklins. Those bills would paper over 1,112,875,000 square feet—just under 40 square miles—enough to cover Manhattan and then some. Put in World Cup terms, Musk’s wealth would cover 14,480 FIFA-approved soccer pitches with $100 bills. Fields of green, indeed.

Far more important than the physical magnitude of $1 trillion, of course, is the power it musters. With his ridiculous trove, Musk, already unaccountable, becomes even more so. Tax expert Bob Lord—who wrote for Mother Jones in 2024 on the coming of the world’s first trillionaire—had a more recent piece on the rise of American oligarchy and how it has infected our democracy. He wrote:

No person anywhere, in any era, has spent as much to sway election outcomes as Musk, the richest person in history who, according to Open Secrets, shelled out almost $292 million in 2024 helping get Trump and other Republican candidates elected. And that doesn’t count the value of harnessing his X platform to support a twice-impeached, felonious former president who openly promised to make the rich richer—and delivered.

Musk expended 0.1 percent of his wealth in the process and got far more in return. The Trump administration promptly shelved dozens of investigations into Musk’s companies, awarded him billions of dollars in new contracts, and sent his firms’ share prices soaring by placing him in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, an unsanctioned body that succeeded wildly—not in eliminating government fraud and waste as promised, but in gutting and disabling federal agencies, including the ones creating headaches for Musk’s companies. 

Lord details policy choices that have enabled wealth to concentrate in an increasingly small number of hands, culminating in the rise of a hyper-privileged few with the undeserved power to sway public affairs in their interests. This oligarchic class, as Northwestern University scholar Jeffrey Winters demonstrates in a powerful recent book excerpt, is untaxable and untouchable. And none so much as the trillionaire Musk.

The oligarchs, as it were, paid off the government’s keeper, and now Musk has scored the winning goal.

It is, alas, an own-goal for America and her democratic experiment.

When Americans tune into UFC Freedom 250, the series of mixed martial arts fights taking over the White House on President Trump’s 80th birthday this Sunday, one key element of the sport will be missing: female fighters.

To the unfamiliar, that might seem unsurprising given the hypermasculine stereotypes that surround MMA. But as Kyle Green, a sociologist who writes on the intersection of sports and politics, recently told me, UFC cards for major events nearly always feature women. In fact, MMA is one of the rare sports in which women appear on the same cards as men and are not subject to different rules. For example, most sports have separate leagues for women; in boxing, women can only fight for a maximum of ten rounds, whereas men’s matches can generally go up to 12. And for more than a decade, the Ultimate Fighting Championship embraced the tradition, with its CEO Dana White touting the inclusion of women as evidence that the organization offers an “even playing field.”

But flexing such feminist bona fides wasn’t always the case, and White admits as much. “I completely own up to saying women would never fight in the octagon,” he said in 2019, referring to his past, staunch opposition to allowing women to fight in the UFC. “But you’ve got to remember at this time, I was trying to get people to accept the men fighting in the Octagon. It wasn’t allowed on pay-per-view. It wasn’t allowed on TV.”

“The reason that the women’s MMA has taken off and it’s so big is because these women are legit,” White continued. “Really good, very technical, and it’s amazing, and I never saw it coming.”

Yet in the days before the White House spectacle, where a hulking claw-like structure has essentially ripped through the South Lawn, White doesn’t appear to prioritize the female fighters he supposedly admires. In fact, when asked about the absence of women, White told Time that he had tried, but “we couldn’t get it done.” The CEO said that he had initially wanted a fight between Zhang Weili and Mackenzie Dern, but according to White, Weili was taking time off. When reached for comment, she did not respond to Time.

It’s a curious rationale coming from one of the most powerful men in sports, and to believe it is to extend White significant latitude, as it belies multiple realities: the UFC’s Rolodex includes many prominent women, ostensibly making it relatively easy to “get it done.” Not to mention the outsized attention given to arguably more extraneous logistics, such as the bathrooms designed to mimic a stay at the “fucking Four Seasons.”

“When the promotion stages its most politically symbolic event ever, and women vanish from the card, that’s not a glitch,” Jenn McClearen, author of Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC, said. “It tells you whose presence is considered essential to the story being told on that lawn and whose is optional.”

For Julie Kedzie, a retired mixed martial artist and former UFC fighter, shutting women out of the White House reflects White’s inclination to take on platforms that are “politically expedient for him.” That includes his muted response to the sexism that continues to vex the UFC, despite commanding a singular power to shape the opinions of the political right.

“People still say women can’t fight, that they suck, that when women fight is when they go and get a sandwich,” Kedzie said. “It’s a pervasive attitude that can be proven wrong. But White hasn’t put a stop to that, and he holds the court of public opinion. He has such a lock on the media and could change that story himself by saying, ‘Women can fight, shut the fuck up.’ But he hasn’t.”

Consider what happened with Bud Light. In 2023, after igniting conservative ire with its partnership with trans TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney, the beer partnered with the UFC in an apparent effort to win back the right. It was then that Ben Fowlkes, a sports writer and host of the Co-Main Event podcast, said that White carried out an aggressive campaign to rehabilitate Bud Light’s image. “He essentially provided Anheuser Busch the cover they were looking for, with somebody to go over to the right-wing crowd and tell them, ‘Come back over, you can buy Bud Light again, it’s safe.’ And it worked.”

The sidelining of women at UFC Freedom 250 comes as White insists that he and the UFC are apolitical despite their uncannily close ties to Donald Trump. Even the right-wing, anti-trans, anti-immigrant trash talk widely embraced by some of the organization’s most visible fighters can be traced along the contours of Trump’s political rise.

“Before 2016, it was a rarity to ever hear a fighter who had any political opinions or any political awareness,” Fowlkes said. “Every once in a while, you’d get somebody who had strong feelings, and they were almost always Republican—or anarchist.”

“But fighters just loved Trump. It baffled me because these fighters have worked their whole lives to be able to spot a fake tough guy or a bully. And here’s one, but you love him.”

It’s through the lens of an undeniable rightward shift within the UFC and its fanbase that the absence of women fighting on the White House card can be seen as indicative of the conservative gender ideals held by MAGA: hyperfeminine and reinforcing the “norms and differences between femininity and masculinity.” In short: not a fighter. It makes sense, then, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has publicly argued against women in the military, is playing an unusual role in dictating strict physical requirements for military members attending the upcoming White House fight.

The UFC’s defenders are often quick to point to Ronda Rousey, the former UFC champion credited with single-handedly paving the way for women to compete in the UFC, as Exhibit A against such sexist accusations, as well as the MMA’s integrated gender structure.

“It genuinely is remarkable,” McClearen said. “Women in the UFC fight under the same rules, on the same cards, in the same cage as men, and they can headline over men. There’s no asterisk on a women’s fight the way there is in sports where people argue the women’s game is somehow a lesser version.”

But the impetus behind such a progressive structure, McClearen added, was partly business-related.

“The UFC figured out that promoting diverse fighters helps it reach diverse global audiences, so women’s visibility serves the brand,” she said. “Which is empowering and precarious at the same time, because visibility that’s granted for business reasons can be withdrawn for business reasons.”

As for Rousey’s role in reversing White’s fierce resistance to welcoming women in the UFC, Kedzie said, “Her star power was undeniable. She was also a very beautiful woman, and she was going to make [White] a lot of money.”

It isn’t criminal, of course, for the CEO of a major sports organization to prioritize profits. But it’s the nakedly transactional motivations with which White wades into the political that can cause someone to bristle. Take, for instance, White’s “equal playing field” boasts.

“When he says stuff about equality in UFC for men and women, in a sense, yes, it’s true,” Fowlkes said. “But in the sense that they treat them equally badly.”

Kedzie agreed, calling the UFC’s notoriously low fighter pay “poverty wages.”

In one sense, Kedzie said that the absence of women fighting on the South Lawn came as something of a relief. “Not because women can’t be just as fascist as the men,” she said. But ultimately, opting to compete at the White House, with its overwhelming sheen of corruption and disrepute, was a “moral choice.”

“I have absolutely no respect for any fighter that competes on that card,” she noted, “or for anybody who corners somebody who competes on that card.”

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

Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is largely targeting people from the countries most vulnerable to displacement from climate-driven disasters, a Guardian analysis shows.

As the Trump administration pushes policies to boost planet-heating fossil fuels, millions of people are being forced to flee their homelands due to storms, floods, and droughts worsened by the climate crisis.

Of the 39 countries from which the Trump administration has fully or partly restricted entry to the US, 22 are ranked within the most vulnerable quarter of nations in the world to climate impacts, according to a Guardian analysis of data from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, which assesses how prone jurisdictions are to the climate crisis.

“Nearly all of the most vulnerable countries are on a ban or visa pause,” said Danielle Wood, an associate professor at Notre Dame. Immigrants from Chad and Niger, the two most climate-vulnerable countries in the world according to the index, are now fully barred from the US, as are people from Sudan, Somalia, and Sierra Leone—also among the 10 countries most exposed to climate impacts.

Among the most vulnerable half of countries is Honduras, which has seen stronger rainstorms, droughts, floods, and coastal erosion in recent years. When Hurricane Mitch crashed into the country, killing 7,000 people, one affected family surveyed the unsalvageable ruins of their home and realized they had a lifeline—to move to the United States.

Evelyn, who did not want to share her full name, was a teenager when Mitch hit in 1998 and recalls how her relatives in New York City pleaded with her mother to bring her and her sister to the US.

“There were bodies and dead animals floating in the water, the house was messed up, the furniture was all gone—doors, windows gone. It was so, so sad,” said Evelyn. “I got sick because of the mosquitoes too. My uncle and aunt were just like: ‘OK, just bring the kids over here, don’t stay. It’s dangerous.’”

Storms of the deadly ferocity of Mitch are even more likely today because our atmosphere and oceans have rapidly heated up due to the burning of fossil fuels.

Yet Trump’s curbing of immigration and asylum has made it far harder for people like Evelyn to flee to the US. “Every day it’s more barriers,” said Evelyn, who still lives in New York and has two daughters, both studying at university. “It’s sad to know that people will not be able to apply for a status or something to help their situation and also help the people back home.”

The administration has also sought to terminate the temporary protected status (TPS) of people from Honduras and 12 other countries who already reside in the US, with nearly half of these countries ranked by Notre Dame as among the most climate-vulnerable places in the world.

The US Supreme Court is now considering an appeal to the TPS revocation for people hailing from two of the affected countries: Syria and Haiti, which have suffered recent droughts and hurricanes, respectively, as well as violent unrest. Environmental perils in these and other countries have been cited by the federal government when granting TPS status to allow people to remain in the US.

But the current administration’s sweeping bans on entry to the US will “keep the radical Islamic terrorists out of our country” and resolve deficiencies in vetting people, Trump has said. (The State Department was contacted for comment about climate-related immigration.)

Most of the banned countries are at the epicenter of an escalating climate displacement crisis, with the United Nations estimating severe heatwaves, droughts, storms, and floods have uprooted 250 million people globally over the past decade, the equivalent of 70,000 displacements every day.

It’s unknown how many of these people flee over borders, with most migration taking place internally—in 2025, nearly 30 million people were forced by disasters to move within their countries, recent figures show. Wildfires, such as those that incinerated parts of Los Angeles last year, were the largest cause of such displacement.

But experts agree that there is a growing cohort of so-called “climate refugees” fleeing their home countries as the planet continues to dangerously overheat. There are currently no official pathways to do so, however, with neither US law nor the UN’s 1951 refugee convention recognizing environmental disasters as a reason to gain protection in another country.

“People are being displaced by climate change, the number is growing every year and, increasingly, the displacements are permanent,” said Jocelyn Perry, program manager of the climate displacement program at Refugees International. Residents of developing countries now blacklisted by the US struggle to deal with the loss of crops, sea level rise, and other upheavals worsened by global heating, she added.

“A house in Florida may be able to withstand a category four hurricane, but there are people around the world unable to deal with that in any way and they are bearing the brunt of this,” said Perry.

Advocates say that people will typically be displaced by a climate-fueled disaster, which leads to a separate but related misfortune, such as violence, that spurs them to leave their country. War or persecution can, unlike climate change, be used as a reason to claim asylum.

“Climate change is not necessarily the first issue that displaced people raise,” said Perry. “But if, say, a family’s crops fail for three years and they have to move to an urban area and they can’t find work or it’s dangerous there, climate change has played a key role in their movement—even if their asylum claim is because of the violence that follows.”

The US is the world’s largest emitter of planet-heating pollution in history. However, Trump has dismissed any need to act on the climate crisis, which he calls a “hoax” and “bullshit,” and has demanded the world remain wedded to fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has effectively shut down the US refugee program, other than to white South Africans, and dismantled overseas aid that ameliorates the symptoms of a warming world, such as the spread of disease. Cuts to USAID engineered by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, are forecast to result in the deaths of about 4.5 million young children, in places such as sub-Saharan Africa, over the next five years.

“All of these actions will increase displacement, and the Trump administration will try to dissuade people from coming to the US border through cruel and inhumane policies, third-country deportation, and child detention,” said Perry.

“I don’t know if that will deter people if the other option is risking death or injury at home, though, so people will still make that journey,” she added. “We are seeing political decisions in the US and in Europe, too, that will leave more people stuck in vulnerable places and unable to respond. With worsening climate change, this is going to be horrific for the rest of the world.”

The one part of the US immigration apparatus that does factor in the climate crisis is TPS, by which foreign nationals already in the US are granted renewable one- or two-year stays if war or natural disaster hits their homeland.

Syrians were granted TPS in 2024 on the basis, among other things, of falling wheat production and “drought-like conditions” that have plagued the country in recent years. Ethiopia has been hit by severe drought and flooding, displacing more than 4 million people, the country’s TPS status from the same year concluded, while about 350,000 Haitians in the US would risk returning to one of the countries “most affected by extreme weather events,” according to a 2023 determination granting a TPS extension.

The Trump administration has terminated TPS status for a swathe of countries, however, with the courts set to decide on the status of several of these, including the Supreme Court case involving Syria and Haiti. “There are tens of thousands of people who have fled because of natural disasters,” said Geoffrey Pipoly, a lawyer representing six plaintiffs from Haiti, which has been hit by two huge hurricanes since 2016. “Haiti has been smack dab in the middle of this for decades.”

Even those still protected by TPS face uncertainty. A doctor originally from Sudan, who did not want to be named, said he left for the US after drought accelerated conflict in his country, which has been locked in a civil war for the past three years.

“It’s too dry, there’s not enough water, the lands were just left without anyone to cultivate them and millions have fled,” he said. “The conflicts are affected by climate change and the difficulty of people sharing resources in that part of the world. I did not see any hope in things improving.”

Sudan is still on the TPS list but only until October. “It would be very, very tough, very difficult to go back,” said the doctor, who has still not heard whether an application made for a work permit has been successful. “One of the reasons people come to the US is because they think there is a law, everybody is treated equally. But I think this is no longer the case.”

The Supreme Court ruling is expected by late June or early July.

Efforts to update the US immigration system to include consideration of the climate crisis have so far floundered. The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) defines a “refugee” as anyone who is unable to return to their home nation due to a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political viewpoint.

It does not include protections for those displaced by environmental degradation—something researchers and advocates have long said is necessary. In 2021 and 2023, Democratic lawmakers aimed to codify such a change with the Climate Displaced Persons Act, which would amend the INA to provide durable legal status and resettlement support to people forced to relocate to the US due to climate disasters.

“As disasters supercharged by climate change cause disruption and devastation around the world, the Trump administration wants to both destroy programs meant to build more resilient countries and make it impossible for those without recourse to seek refuge in the United States,” said the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, who introduced the proposal both times.

Such legislation is needed now more than ever, Markey said. “Trump’s attacks on foreign aid programs, his disregard of climate science, and his attacks on immigrants all come from the same playbook,” he said.

The bill would also ensure that agencies collect data on climate-related displacement. That could remove a major roadblock to establishing and maintaining protections for those affected, said Hannah Flamm, deputy director of policy at the International Refugee Assistance Program (IRAP).

“There’s vast data globally on internal displacement on account of climate, but there’s virtually no data on international displacement on account of climate,” she said, adding that Markey’s proposal is a “valiant effort.”

“Whether or not it passes, it is critical to mobilize advocacy and to reinforce the need to meet this need,” she said.

Given the current political environment, however, the prospect of a new climate migration framework appears dim. “I wouldn’t say there’s a lot of optimism right now that any change could occur anytime in the near future,” Perry said.

Amid a broader push for mass deportations by the administration, “climate has been put on the back burner to safeguard the very concept of regular migration as a whole,” she added.

A future administration could try to implement a sort of climate visa to the US, but it’s more likely that it would focus on limiting damage around the world that displaces people in the first place, according to Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International.

“If the tide was to turn, it might be more for adaptation funding to help people stay where they are, rather than a new visa,” Schacher said.

“We have our own displacement in the US, too—we aren’t immune from this. Right now the sympathy for immigrants, even people displaced by the worst persecution, is nil. It’s hard to see any sort of expansive opening—up, even if that’s what people need.”

Dharna Noor contributed additional reporting.

Vilès Dorsainvil has thought a lot about desperation recently. Specifically, what desperation forces people to do, and the tragedy it seems to attract. As a Haitian immigrant and the executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, he has seen a desperate community seeking stability in the United States, only to find that the ground has shifted.

Dorsainvil has lived in the US since December 2020, when his mother insisted that he leave Haiti after he began receiving anonymous threats and demands for funds. He landed in Fort Lauderdale with just enough money for his rent and the burden of supporting a family back home. The only person he knew when he reached his destination was his nephew who lived in Springfield, Ohio. Within 72 hours, Dorsainvil went there.

Dorsainvil arrived in Springfield, a small city of about 60,000 residents, an hour west of the state capital, before the Haitian population began to soar. The island country had never recovered from the 7.0-magnitude earthquake in 2010 that devastated it and created the circumstances for subsequent prolonged food insecurity, rising gang violence, and deteriorating access to medical care. When Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, Dorsainvil was relatively settled as a factory worker in Springfield. Given the chaos back home, he applied for and was granted Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian designation that protects people from deportation if their country is deemed unsafe. It meant that as long as the Secretary of Homeland Security renewed Haiti’s TPS, Dorsainvil could live and work in Springfield.

After Moïse’s assassination, more than 100,000 people living in Haiti became eligible for TPS, and eventually about 15,000 Haitians settled in Springfield. They paid taxes, raised their children, started businesses, and worked many jobs that others wouldn’t take. They also became the lightning rods for much of the free-floating anti-migrant sentiment fomented by Trump’s 2024 campaign and, then, his administration.

Soon after baselessly claiming that Haitians were “eating the pets” of Springfield residents during a presidential debate in September 2024, Trump vowed that should he be reelected, he would deport Haitians. That November, Trump won Clark County, of which Springfield is the seat, with nearly two-thirds of the vote. During his second term, he came close to fulfilling his promise when then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem began the process of terminating Temporary Protective Status for countries that came up for review, including Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Haiti. Established by Congress in 1990, TPS grants legal status to people fleeing war, natural disasters, or unrest, and is designated in 6-, 12-, or 18-month increments. Many countries’ designations have been renewed continuously for years, if not decades, because conditions remain unlikely to improve. After Noem announced she wouldn’t renew Haiti’s TPS, Haitians and Springfield itself prepared for ICE to descend soon after the designation was set to expire on February 3, 2026.

But the ICE wave never came. Haitian TPS holders, including Dorsainvil’s younger brother, had sued the administration, and on the eve of Haiti’s TPS expiration, a federal judge postponed it. Since then, more than 330,000 Haitians living in the US with TPS have been in legal limbo as they wait for the Supreme Court to decide whether to allow their protections to expire. State by state, the ramifications quickly appeared. In Ohio, for example, the driver’s licenses of Haitian TPS holders expired in mid-March, and they have been unable to renew them. Until June 5, when a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled against the Trump administration, the federal government also stopped issuing work permits and processing asylum claims from Haiti and 38 other Latin American, Asian, and African countries and Palestine.

“Our immigration system prior to Trump has suffered from really long backlogs for people seeking asylum specifically,” said Emily Brown, director of the Ohio State University law school’s Immigration Clinic, which provides free legal representation to immigrants facing deportation. The sweeping halt of immigration processes only exacerbates that, Brown said, and has also closed a vital path to family reunification. Immigrants who have fled their home countries can petition for immediate family to join them only once they are granted asylum or refugee status. Many immigrants who have been in the US for years, Brown’s clients included, have been stuck on the threshold of approval—some have completed the steps and only need an asylum officer’s sign-off.

As Haitians and TPS holders around the country wait for the Supreme Court’s decision on whether to allow the Trump administration to end their legal status, in Springfield, they’ve retreated into the shadows. Haitians are leaving the city, Dorsainvil says, though it’s been far from a “mass exodus.” Some have attempted to go to Canada, others to Columbus. “I call it, ‘To leave or not to leave,’ because where are you going to go?” Dorsainvil tells me. “If you leave to go somewhere else in the USA, you will still be a target.”

If you aren’t looking for Springfield’s Haitian Support Center, you likely won’t find it. It’s tucked discreetly in the back of a church on the city’s east side, surrounded by single-family homes on one of the city’s main thoroughfares. The sole indicator of the center’s presence is a sign on a locked door bearing its logo and welcoming visitors in English and Haitian Creole. When I arrived on a recent Friday afternoon, just two other people were there. Neither was Dorsainvil.

About 45 minutes later, he arrived and ushered me into a windowless room he shares with a colleague, their desks an arm’s length away from each other. Between two laptops and a desktop, notebooks and files, and more than a dozen yellow sticky notes plastered beside his screens and along his walls, Dorsainvil’s desk is as cluttered as his to-do list. As he answered his ringing phone, I studied the back wall of the office, where a framed print bears a simple inscription: “Piti piti zwazo fè nich li.” It’s a Haitian proverb meaning “little by little, the bird builds its nest.”

As thousands of Haitians flocked to his city, Dorsainvil realized Springfield had no nest, or even a branch to land on. He helped found the Haitian Support Center to serve as a “bridge” between Haitians and legal, financial, and material resources, particularly because immigrants are vulnerable to scams and exploitation.

When we met, he had just returned from a failed attempt to recover a $1,900 security deposit a rental agency was holding for a woman who had moved to New York. She took a Greyhound bus back to Springfield when neither she nor Dorsainvil could reach her property manager. When the pair showed up to the agency’s office that morning, the property manager was nowhere to be found. “Come back Monday,” agency staff told the woman. She boarded a Greyhound back to New York, unable to miss work to wait until Monday. Dorsainvil promised to return to the agency himself.

This same woman, Dorsainvil told me, tried to help her younger brother apply for asylum. A New York firm told her they’d do it for $24,000. She put down $3,000 for a service nonprofits and immigration clinics, like Ohio State’s, can do for free. Brown noted that while some firms charge “exorbitant fees,” the cost of litigating asylum claims has risen as backlogs make cases lengthier and more complex. “Good attorneys are cost-prohibitive for a lot of people,” Brown said, “and it leads them to having to choose between funding their legal case and their basic needs.”

Dorsainvil’s cases are a litany of awful experiences: women and men vulnerable to human trafficking because they lost their work authorizations; families coming home to eviction notices with less than $20 in their bank accounts; people who have “nothing” and nowhere to go. There is parallel desperation between Haitian immigrants and the families they support back home that Dorsainvil can’t ignore; if a Haitian in the US gets detained or deported, it’s a matter of “life and death” for them and every person in Haiti who relies on them.

Because the Haitian Support Center’s reach is restricted to the Springfield community, he cannot help recover the $3,000 from the “predatory law firm” the woman who moved to New York engaged; nor can he help the immigrants frequently calling from Columbus or elsewhere in the state. Money flows to the center through small donations, some as little as $5. And, like Dorsainvil, most of its staff are Haitian immigrants. Should TPS expire, they face the same fate as the people they help.

Dorsainvil doesn’t know how much longer the Haitian Support Center can continue its work, including paying people’s rents and utility bills. But he feels obligated to continue until he’s forced to stop. He acknowledged that his work and status as a high-profile Haitian TPS holder place him at significant risk, but he calls it the “ultimate sacrifice.”

 

“Folks keep asking me what I am doing here, why I am exposing myself knowing I am not a citizen,” Dorsainvil said.

“I consider myself nothing when I know—when I experience firsthand— how people are going to suffer.”

Viles Dorsainvil, executive director of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center at Rose Goute Creole Restaurant, sits with interpreter James Fleurijean, left, a board member of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, in Springfield, Ohio, Saturday, January 25, 2025.Jessie Wardarski/AP

Of the 1.3 million TPS holders in the US, 97 percent are from just five countries, with the lion’s share coming from Venezuela and Haiti. Less than three weeks after Trump retook office, Noem announced her decision to terminate TPS for Venezuelans and began moving down the list soon after. By August 2025, DHS announced its intent to terminate TPS for more than a third of the 17 countries with active designations, Honduras, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Haiti among them. When the Supreme Court ruled in October 2025 that the Trump administration could terminate Venezuelans’ TPS designation even as litigation continued, the unsigned and unreasoned order offered no guidance for the wave of lawsuits behind it.

Haitians have been granted TPS continuously, either through DHS or court order, since the 2010 earthquake. Especially after 2021, thousands have flocked to Springfield, drawn by the promises of stable factory and warehouse work, a relatively low cost of living, and a burgeoning community of fellow resettled Haitians.

Many Haitians who were trained as physicians back home have taken nursing and other healthcare jobs in Clark County, including serving as interpreters. Vilès Dorsainvil’s younger brother, Vilbrun, is one such physician who became a nurse and worked at Springfield Regional Hospital. Vilbrun is a lead plaintiff in the TPS case before the Supreme Court; Vilès, who was already a plaintiff in a separate federal case challenging the termination of TPS, recruited him.

Like countless other Rust Belt cities, Springfield struggled with decades of depopulation as manufacturers moved out. And like other Ohio towns, particularly in the western part of the state, Springfield was devastated by the opioid epidemic, ranking consistently among US cities with the highest rates of fatal overdose. With thousands of new residents more than eager to work hard jobs for low pay, Springfield’s tax revenue increased, its unemployment rate decreased, and nearly a dozen Haitian-owned businesses opened in town.

Even with the benefits that may have come to the city, anti-Haitian sentiment in Springfield started long before Trump and Ohio’s own Sen. JD Vance capitalized on it during the 2024 campaign. The spark that ignited the flame came in August 2023, when a Haitian TPS-holder crashed into a school bus near Springfield, killing an 11-year-old boy. The driver, Hermanio Joseph, did not have a valid US driver’s license, because, he testified, he had not yet gathered the required documents. In May 2024, a jury convicted him of involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide, both felonies, and he was sentenced to 9 to 13 years in prison.

Joseph’s arrest and conviction only fueled the growing resentment against Haitians in Springfield. By the time Vance claimed in early September 2024 that his office was fielding reports of pets and wildlife being “abducted by Haitian migrants,” outraged residents had already swarmed city commission meetings, claiming Haitians were “invading” the community, driving up housing costs, and bringing a “flood of drugs” with them. The Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group Springfield is currently suing, descended on the city multiple times that summer, lobbing racial slurs at city officials and insisting the influx of Haitians threatened the city’s “good White residents.”

Trump’s targeting of Haitians has splintered Ohio’s Republicans. In the House of Representatives, Springfield-area’s two Republicans joined Democrats in April in voting to extend Haitians’ TPS through April 2029. But they remain largely loyal to Trump’s immigration crackdown, following Ohio’s two Republican senators voting to give ICE and Customs and Border Protection $70 billion over the next three years. One of those senators, former Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, is opposing the man who appointed him to replace Vance.

Gov. Mike DeWine, who with his wife helped establish a network of free schools in Port-au-Prince that closed due to violence, has repeatedly defended Ohio’s Haitian immigrants and called ending TPS the “wrong” choice. The situation in Haiti has “never been worse,” DeWine told reporters in February. After a federal judge halted the TPS termination from going into effect, First Lady Fran DeWine said she and the governor were “happy” for both Haitians and Springfield at large, noting immigrants’ contributions to the economy and community. “We’re just all praying for good things to happen in Springfield for everyone,” she said.

The governor’s prayers and verbal support fall flat to immigrants and advocates, however, when followed by inaction; even as he opposes ending TPS for Haitians, DeWine has clarified that Ohio would “follow” whatever the court decides. “He’s acting like, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do, I’m just the governor of Ohio,’” Lynn Tramonte, executive director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, said. She compared DeWine to Illinois’ Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, whose “fire-in-the-belly” response to ICE enforcement included calling Trump’s bluff on his arrest threat and standing behind legislation protecting immigrants at courthouses and hospitals, even as the federal government fights it. In Ohio, in contrast, immigrants rights advocates told me of asylum seekers, Haitian or otherwise, detained at their immigration check-ins, shuttled off to private prisons and county jails in the northeastern and southwestern corners of the state, and deported.

“There are people who will be glad they’re gone,” Marjory Wentworth, a Springfield resident and organizer with the local immigrant rights organization G92, told me. There is a burgeoning housing and homelessness crisis in Springfield, which some city officials have blamed, in part, on out-of-state companies buying properties and jacking up rents. The anger and blame may be wrongfully placed on immigrants, Wentworth said, but she can understand the dynamic.

The city has also faced serious consequences from the national attention sparked by the Trump administration’s attacks. It extends beyond the dozens of bomb threats made on schools, houses of worship, and government buildings. Within months of Trump assuming office, Clark County lost $4.25 million in federal funding, including $2.7 million from a Health and Human Services critical disease grant. Without that grant, the county health department laid off crucial staff, including disease investigators and medical translators, and had to abandon its plans for a new health facility and mobile clinic—important steps in improving access to primary and preventative care, especially in an area with little to no public transportation.

Now, with Haitians unable to lawfully work, Springfield’s economic outlook has deteriorated. Federal data show that the Springfield metropolitan area lost more jobs than any other area in Ohio, losing more than 1,000 between 2024 and 2025, nearly all from the manufacturing industry. Between 2021 and 2022, as large numbers of Haitians began settling in Springfield and tax policies shifted to accommodate remote work, the city generated $9.2 million in income taxes; between 2023 and 2025, income tax revenue was only $3 million. By June 2025, Springfield’s city finance director asserted Springfield’s economy was at a “critical juncture”: Income tax revenue, the “backbone” of the municipal budget, sharply declined and then stagnated. Between the loss of income taxes and the exhaustion of federal pandemic rescue funds, “Our general fund is under real strain,” Finance Director Katie Eviston told the city commission last June.

Publicity, as Wentworth and other Springfield activists have learned, is a double-edged sword; not only have Haitians been the targets of death threats and vandalism, but advocates themselves have faced harassment, including a social media conspiracy campaign that claimed local churches and community organizations were running a human trafficking scheme, stealing donations, and working with ICE to convince Haitians to self-deport. After the district court postponed Haitian’sTPS expiration, schools and government offices closed due to a renewed wave of bomb threats.

G92 and the Haitian Support Center are part of a sprawling web of community organizations advocating for Haitian immigrants in the Springfield area. They’ve offered rental assistance, food drives, transportation, and know-your-rights training to immigrants and advocates anticipating ICE activity. But beyond material support and prayers, Wentworth acknowledges there’s nothing advocates can do when Haitians’ futures ultimately lie in the hands of nine Supreme Court justices.

In late April, the court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Miot and Mullin v. Doe, cases brought by Haitian and Syrian TPS holders, respectively. The TPS holders argue that Noem ignored the necessary process in her review of TPS for both countries, including consulting other agencies about conditions in those nations. In ending TPS for Haitians, Noem insisted that renewing humanitarian protections would be “contrary to the national interest of the United States,” because Haiti lacks a central government to flag criminals attempting to enter the US. Even as the State Department maintains a “do not travel” advisory for risk of kidnappings, sexual assault, and robbery in Haiti, Noem declared the country acceptable for immigrants to repatriate to. Haitians will face the same dangers if deported back, Dorsainvil emphasizes: “There is no safe place in Haiti.”

Trump administration lawyers argue that all aspects of Noem’s determination are immune from judicial review. Ruling otherwise would open a hole “a truck could be driven through,” Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices. TPS holders’ attorneys, meanwhile, insisted that siding with the Trump administration would write it a “blank check” to enact federal policies without following required steps to prevent politicization and abuse.

And in Haitians’ case, attorney Geoffrey Pipoly argued, Noem’s decision was motivated by Trump’s racist views and his “bare dislike of Haitians in particular.” While the administration bolsters a refugee program for white South Africans, the president has called Haiti a “shithole country” whose immigrants, alongside those from other nonwhite countries, are “poisoning the blood” of America. “He vowed that he would terminate Haiti’s TPS, and that is exactly what happened,” Pipoly said.

The court is expected to issue its opinion in late June or early July. Springfield advocates aren’t feeling optimistic, but even if the court sides with TPS holders, Wentworth said it will not feel like a win. “The administration is making it as difficult as possible” for Haitians to remain and communities to support them. Ohio State’s Brown agreed, describing the Trump administration’s immigration policy generally as a “mass delegalization” project with one goal: “They are trying to push people into the shadows and encourage people to just give up and leave,” she said.

For most of our conversation, Dorsainvil spoke in soft, yet emphatic, tones indicative of his theological training as a Moravian pastor. But when he recalled the vulnerable, desperate people he’s helped in just the past week, he sounded exasperated. “Why is the administration doing that?” he often asks himself. He supplies the answer: In the Trump administration’s view, “I see you as the other, and once I see you that way, your life, your misery, and your experience don’t matter to me.”

Last spring, during a track meet at a Texas high school, 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony stabbed and killed Austin Metcalf, a white student and fellow athlete from a rival school, during an argument. Whether or not Anthony killed Metcalf wasn’t up for discussion: Anthony had admitted his guilt, and there were several witnesses present during the altercation.

The question at the center of Anthony’s trial was whether or not the Black teen was acting in self-defense. Texas is one of 31 states with “Stand Your Ground” laws that allow people to use reasonable force, including deadly force, against an assailant under certain circumstances. 

Similar laws have been invoked in several high-profile cases across the country, including the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, where George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain, was acquitted after claiming he shot the 17-year-old in self-defense. Zimmerman outweighed Martin and initiated the encounter; Metcalf was also larger than Anthony and the first to engage. But more than a decade later, Anthony would not be given that same judicial grace.

On Tuesday, a jury convicted Anthony, now 19 years old, of murder. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison. There wasn’t a single Black person on the jury—every Black potential juror was struck before trial. The case has reignited a decades-long conversation, both on and off social media: In the US criminal justice system, who do “Stand Your Ground” laws protect?  

Civil rights activists, celebrities, and politicians have expressed outrage at the case, with some saying that Anthony’s conviction highlights a clear double standard in self-defense claims in the United States: If a white person kills a Black person, courts (and white juries) are more likely to rule the killing justified than if the situation were reversed.

And the data backs that up.

According to a 2021 study from Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates against gun violence, homicides are deemed justified more often, in nearly every state, when the shooter is white and the victim is Black. A study from the Urban Institute found that homicides with a Black shooter and a white victim were ruled justified self-defense in a little more than 1 percent of cases. For a white shooter and Black victim, the figure jumps to 11.4 percent.

The response to Anthony’s conviction certainly hasn’t been helped by the far-right mouthpieces and conservative media figures who have invoked the case to justify blatantly racist rhetoric. Jake Lang, a far-right influencer who rose to prominence for participating in the January 6 insurrection, stood outside the Frisco courtroom in the days leading up to the verdict, spewing hateful rhetoric and posting it for his 169,000 Instagram followers to see.

I cannot say whether or not Anthony was acting in self-defense, but I can say that, while living in a country that has made the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse famous, I understand the Black community’s frustration.