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.

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.

The last major tournament staged by FIFA, the body behind the World Cup, was last summer’s Club World Cup—an international tournament where Donald Trump crashed the trophy presentation at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, joining the winning team’s celebrations as they lifted the prize. 

As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote at the time, autocracies have long used international sports events as a platform to whitewash abuses of power. Aptly, human rights advocates coined the term “sportswashing” to describe it. During the Club World Cup, ICE continued to raid and occupy Los Angeles, Trump passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the US military struck three nuclear facilities in Iran shortly after Israel launched strikes of its own in the middle of negotiations.

For the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, which starts Thursday, the situation may be even worse.

“If we’re talking about President Donald Trump trying to use the event to sportswash, we would start with what he is trying to deflect attention from,” Jules Boykoff, a professor of politics at Pacific University in Oregon and former professional soccer player who represented the United States’ under-23 team, told me last month. “We’ve got the terrible approval ratings right now. We’ve got the Iran war he’s carrying out with Israel that’s going terribly in terms of meeting his goals.”

Boykoff has written extensively about the intersection of politics and international sports, including the Olympics—the 2028 Games in Los Angeles will provide Trump ample further opportunities for sportswashing—as well as activism against systems of power behind the massive developments that come with events like the World Cup or the Olympics, and how they intersect with politics beyond sporting events.

Boykoff’s latest book, Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine, was released June 9. I spoke to him about the upcoming games, the sportswashing phenomenon, and the wider politics of international sporting events.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I’ve seen the term “sportswashing” enter mainstream coverage, but it’s often used to characterize autocratic figures and states in the Global South. How do you think it applies to this upcoming World Cup?

Sportswashing is when political leaders use sports to appear important or legitimate on the world stage, while deflecting attention from chronic social problems, from human rights woes at home, and also while teeing up opportunities for political and economic advancement.

And yes, the term has been used in the past, I’ll be honest, in a somewhat xenophobic, ethnocentric fashion. It’s waggling a finger at those other countries that do it. Now, they do it: Russia in the 2018 Men’s World Cup definitely was a sportswashing endeavor; Qatar in 2022 was definitely a sportswashing endeavor. 

But it can also happen in places that are putative democracies. I know it’s a discussion now as to whether the United States is even a fully-fledged democracy anymore. Some of my political science brethren are calling it the new “competitive authoritarianism,” not unlike what we saw under [former Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán in Hungary. The point is, it can happen in places like the United States. 

Second, when we ask ourselves whether sportswashing works or not, a lot of times it’s implicit that it’s talking about a global audience. And that’s true. You could look at the Qatar World Cup of 2022 and, after the World Cup, their tourism numbers went up and they became even more of an important mediator in the region. But you should also look at domestic audiences.

Right after the Sochi, Russia, Winter Olympics of 2014, President [Vladimir] Putin’s ratings were higher than ever. He was standing on the stage looking legitimate as a world leader. What did he do with that? He invaded Crimea between the Olympics and the Paralympics. Domestic audiences can be really important here as well. Putin used those two events to basically get the oligarchs in line and on sides for him.

So that takes us to 2026, and while the [term] sportswashing hasn’t often been applied to the United States, I think it very much should, if we accept the definition that I gave before.

If we’re talking about President Donald Trump trying to use the event to sportswash, we would start with what he is trying to deflect attention from. We’ve got the terrible approval ratings right now. We’ve got the Iran war he’s carrying out with Israel that’s going terribly in terms of meeting his goals. There’s the lingering Epstein files, in which he’s named thousands of times. The list goes on and on. He needs to use this opportunity to look important on the world stage, especially for a domestic audience ahead of these midterm elections. And let’s be real, President Donald Trump has used sports to his political advantage more than any president in the recent history of the country. 

We shouldn’t be surprised that he’s going to talk about the importance of this World Cup to his presidency. He’s going to talk about that UFC event happening three days into the World Cup on the White House lawn. And he’s going to talk after that about the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

The book looks back at FIFA’s history, and accusations of sportswashing, corruption, or just excessive commercialization even before this World Cup. I was specifically interested in an inflection point around the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. Can you expand on that history and how that foundation was really established?

To understand the history of the World Cup in regards to sportswashing, you have to go back to 1934, the second World Cup ever, in Italy under Benito Mussolini—where he used that soccer team as this sort of embodiment of machismo, the embodiment of the fascist new man. Mussolini would actually ride around on a horse without a shirt a long time before Putin ever did. 

He talked about how the players on the Italian national team were what he called “soldiers of sport” and as the new fascist man who was bigger than just what was happening on the field. When they won that World Cup, he maximized his propaganda value. 

If you shimmy forward to the event you were talking about in 1978, this was the World Cup for Argentina carried out by a military junta. Only 700 meters from where Argentina beat the Netherlands in the final, 3-1, was a place where leftists were imprisoned, tortured, and even in some cases killed. They got a massive sportswash assist from Henry Kissinger, the human rights ogre of yore who showed up there and palled around with General [Jorge Rafael] Videla, the guy who was really running the junta at that time, who was maximizing his leverage over the World Cup. 

Before the World Cup started and journalists from around the world descended on Argentina, the junta dialed back its direct repression—took a little bit of a break, if you will. They ramped it back up after the global media left, but it did provide an opportunity for groups like Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo—[mothers fighting against Argentina’s military dictatorship]—to have a bit more space, and the global media were there to cover it. I’m interested to see whether that happens [again].

Let’s be real, though: [for] the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Putin actually passed a law that said it was illegal to protest in the host cities [and surrounding regions], but you could protest elsewhere. I’ll be interested to see whether, under Trump, there is space for dissent.

You just mentioned soccer fans being a part of organizing. Where do you see space to expand that coalition?

These events are so huge, and they’re so enormously popular that they provide activists with an opportunity to piggyback. For the Olympics, I’ve seen this over and over again. 

I lived in Rio de Janeiro in the lead-up to and during those Olympics, and I saw it out in the streets with my own two eyes. We saw it in Tokyo in the lead-in until it got scuppered by Covid. And we’re seeing it in Los Angeles where activists have been active since 2017.

It’s really true when activists chant “the whole world is watching” with the World Cup and Olympics. So it’s an incredible opportunity to speak to a wider audience. 

Before I started writing about the politics of sports, I wrote about the suppression of political dissent. It was hard to jumpstart conversations with people about that topic, especially with people who didn’t necessarily hold my [political] beliefs.

I’ve had a lot more success using sport to open the political door to have discussions with people who I might not agree with on a lot of things, but they can agree with me [that the way] we use public money should be more savvy, instead of just handing it over to the barons of sport.

And that can be a real entry point for having conversations about other things like policing around these sports mega-events, or how locals are kind of left out in the cold. I think that’s the logic behind a lot of the activism we will be seeing at the World Cup. I’ll be interested to see how that pans out.

I am also interested in your experience in professional soccer and with the US men’s under-23 team, as players’ unions have criticized player schedules. It’s almost the end of the season and I’m already seeing players getting injured and tired. Do you relate your experiences while playing to your thought process now [about] how these mega-tournaments function?

When I was running up and down the field for the US under-23 men’s national soccer team, I was 19 years old. That’s when I played my first international match against Brazil. I was quite clueless about a lot of the things that we were talking about today. 

When I arrived at the first match, I expected people to cheer vociferously. I’d been weaned on a steady diet of pro-US propaganda. And that just wasn’t the case all around France. This was a tournament in France where we played Brazil, and then what was Yugoslavia, what was Czechoslovakia, and what was the Soviet Union. It really got me thinking. 

We did not have a union back then, and when I was playing professional soccer, that was actually a real problem. We got paid okay, but we could have gotten paid so much more. More importantly, we had no protection. So if we got hurt, I mean, I could just like lose my contract the next day if I got seriously hurt. 

So I’m really happy to see these unions popping up both in Major League Soccer in the United States—it’s only getting stronger—[and] at the international level, there’s FIFPro, who has been raising a lot of important questions about athlete health and safety at this World Cup.

There’s the number of matches that players have played. You can chalk up quite a lot of this to the FIFA greed machine. They’re cranking out tournament after tournament—they trial ballooned the idea of having a FIFA Men’s World Cup every two years. 

FIFPro [has also] been smart and outspoken on the issues around climate change and its attendant heat issues. There are a few indoor stadiums that are air conditioned, but places like Miami are absolutely not. 

And what does FIFA do? They decided to institute water breaks partway through each half, regardless of weather at the World Cup. On one hand, great, the FIFPro union got a concession for worker safety. On the other hand, they’re using it as an opportunity to make even more money. I mean, they’re allowing commercials during those water breaks. Leave it to FIFA to figure out a way to monetize climate change to their advantage.

I think that things have changed a lot, and for the better, since I was playing [pro] soccer in the 1990s, and I hope things continue to get better. I’m concerned that groups like UEFA, the European body for soccer, and FIFA are just going to continue to milk these players for all the money they can squeeze out of them. But the World Cup is a good chance to raise awareness about this, especially both in the lead-in to the tournament, where players are coming down with injuries, who’ve played thousands of minutes over the last few months, but also during the tournament in the early stages, when some big names, unfortunately, might just get hurt.

Saudi Arabia has the 2034 World Cup and other sports investments—like their own soccer league with players like Cristiano Ronaldo, as well as golf and e-sports. Where do you see Saudi Arabia within this framework and their relationships with FIFA and the US?

Saudi Arabia has been active in sportswashing for a long time. They’re also spending quite a bit of money on sort of what we might call macho sports—boxing and UFC, and so on. That fits pretty nicely with the history you and I were talking about before, with authoritarians affiliating themselves with these macho fighters. Trump does it, of course, all the time.

One episode in the book that is extremely instructive is how two sportswashers, President Trump and [Saudi crown prince] Mohammed bin Salman, came together for a state dinner and extended visit in Washington, DC. These folks internationally are often working together and supporting each other’s sportswashes. It [also] reminds us that sportswashing isn’t just [events]—it’s about cutting deals and advancing yourself politically and economically. And that’s all that that state dinner was about.

Cristiano Ronaldo, who you just referenced, was there. He [hadn’t] come to the US since 2014 because of the credible rape allegations against him, [but] he knew Trump would not let anything happen to him. 

Another key ligature to all this is FIFA President Gianni Infantino. He was buddies with Putin back in 2018 for that World Cup, played football in the Kremlin with Putin in the lead-up to that tournament, and received a special friendship order from Putin afterwards. He lifted his residence, moved to Qatar for the 2022 World Cup, and ran interference for the emirs there around all the issues with human rights and [migrant] workers. And now he moved to the United States. He and Trump are extraordinarily friendly. They both have a penchant for political spectacle. They both like being around wealth and affluence and they both like being in the spotlight.

Infantino handed the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia, there was no real serious bid process around that. There’s so much to say about that, but I would argue Infantino has a crucial role in all this.

I’m curious about a lot of people who are justly criticizing and boycotting the World Cup—what they enjoy about soccer and what it could be. Do you have any thoughts on that, and how we could get to the ideal where soccer is legitimately for everyone who has some form of the sport that they love?

I have had the privilege of soccer enriching my life from the time I was a four-year-old kid.

I understand the effective power of sport and how it can be channeled for good. In my memoir, Kicking, there’s a lot of stories about how soccer activists in Portland fought back against the power brokers of soccer in Portland. They got the [Portland Thorns’] general manager [fired after supporting a coach alleged to have abused players]. They got the owner of the Thorns to sell the team. Those are huge victories that wouldn’t have happened were it not for the bonds that soccer created being used then to pivot into political action. 

With all the money swirling through the highest levels of echelons of sport, I’m concerned that maybe the game has become so heavily commercialized that it’s losing a lot of the luster of community-building. But, you know, there are leagues around the country and around the world that aren’t necessarily at that highest level that we watch on TV every Saturday and Sunday, but where you can engage in a much more community-oriented way.

In Portland, Oregon, we’ve got a professional [lower league] team called Portland Bangers FC. And it’s super fun. The mascot is like a seven-foot-tall sausage, and it’s totally goofy. The soccer is fine, but it’s really about community, and tickets are very affordable. Now we have a team called the Cherry Bombs in Portland where the sponsor is Planned Parenthood. 

I think [community-building through soccer] is too important to give up on, and I’m going to keep fighting alongside others for improvements for worker-athletes on the field and for conditions for fans and others off the field.

An immigration judge has ordered the deportation of Columbia University graduate student Mohsen Mahdawi, who is Palestinian, to Jordan in a legal filing published Wednesday. Mahdawi has been targeted by the Trump administration for his pro-Palestinian activism for more than a year, in a high-profile case that saw him abruptly detained by immigration authorities during an April 2025 naturalization appointment.

Mahdawi is one of hundreds of students nationwide who experienced visa revocations, arrests, or threats after participating in protests denouncing Israel. The Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech, which began in the first days of President Trump’s second term, continues: many protesters are still fighting deportation cases, and in some cases criminal charges. Mahmoud Khalil, abducted as a recent Columbia graduate, was given a temporary reprieve in mid-May after he spent months in custody in 2025, missing the birth of his son—but must now petition the Supreme Court to halt deportation proceedings to Algeria. 

Other targeted noncitizen students, like Tufts’ Rümeysa Öztürk and Cornell’s Momodou Taal, chose to leave after facing the American security state. Öztürk, who was detained for weeks over an op-ed in Tufts’ student newspaper, returned to Turkey after graduating. 

“The time stolen from me by the U.S. government belongs not just to me, but to the children and youth I have dedicated my life to advocating for,” Öztürk wrote in April. “With them in mind, I am choosing to return home as planned.” 

Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman detained at a Columbia University protest, was held in a notorious Texas ICE jail for a year, until her release last April. She, too, is still fighting deportation. “I mean, to be imprisoned for a whole year simply for practicing my freedom of speech and to be accused of horrific things that I have nothing to do with, it’s outrageous,” Kordia told PBS in May. 

Mahdawi will be appealing his case, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a press release Wednesday. “The First Amendment protects all of us from government censorship, citizen or not,” said Nate Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “The government’s continued persecution of our client for his beliefs should send a chill down the spine of everyone in this country, because once we start allowing exceptions to the First Amendment for speech the current government doesn’t like, there’s no telling where the censorship will stop.” While a separate habeas corpus petition by Mahdawi makes its way through federal court, he cannot be re-detained or deported. 

Documents from the AAUP v. Rubio trial, in which the American Association of University Professors sued to stop the US from detaining students on ideological grounds, proved the federal government frequently used spurious sources to target students based on their political opinions. As my colleague Najib Aminy reported in January, those sources included anonymous blacklisting sites like Canary Mission. 

DHS and the State Department “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment-protected political speech,” the judge in that case wrote in his court order. “Moreover, the effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.”

With Donald Trump’s pardon of former Indiana Rep. Steve Buyer over the weekend, he has now pardoned at least 11 former GOP politicians, almost all of them on charges of corruption or somehow violating the public trust.

Buyer served in Congress from 1993 to 2011, and after leaving office, he promptly went to work as a consultant and lobbyist for many of the companies that used to lobby him. In 2018, while golfing with an executive from T-Mobile, Buyer learned that the company was reviving its bid to take over Sprint, a fact that was not yet public. He promptly began buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Sprint stock. In 2019, Buyer learned of another impending merger through his work and bought shares of Navigant—a move that would later earn him several hundred thousand dollars.

In 2022, Buyer was convicted of insider trading and sentenced to 22 months in prison, which he served. The Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. In May, Trump posted letters written by Buyer’s former GOP colleagues, alleging that Buyer—who had made $354,000 from his two insider trading schemes—was a victim of the “deep state.”

“Like you, Mr. President, Steve has been the victim of lawfare conducted by the Biden Administration,” the Republican lawmakers insisted.

Trump’s official pardon of Buyer doesn’t list any specific reasons or rationale, other than the support of the other GOP politicos. Maybe it was Buyer’s penchant for golf—not only did he learn some of the insider info on the golf course, he was known in Congress for his love of the sport.

Regardless of the reasoning, Buyer’s crimes sound a lot like those committed by another onetime elected official who received clemency from Trump.

In December 2020, after losing re-election to Joe Biden, Trump pardoned former New York GOP Rep. Chris Collins, who had pleaded guilty to insider trading charges just a few weeks earlier. Collins admitted that, while attending a party at the White House in 2017, he received a phone call from the board of directors of a health care company warning that one of the company’s products had failed an important regulatory test. Collins promptly sold his shares, avoiding nearly half a million in losses he would have incurred if he had waited until the news broke publicly.

Congress is currently debating—and has been for years and years—provisions to restrict stock trading by sitting lawmakers. Current laws ban insider trading for everyone—not just members of Congress—but that definition doesn’t cover members of Congress buying and sell stocks that could be affected by legislation they vote on. One of the proposed reforms would ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks, but the most recent version, advanced by the Republican majority, would allow current members to hang onto the individual stocks they already own.

Federal employees are banned from owning stocks that might be affected by their work, but the president is exempted from that. Trump does disclose his financial transactions, and earlier this spring, revealed he had made more than 3,600 stock trades this year, including numerous stocks directly impacted by decisions he made as president.

Trump’s pardons and commutations for politicians haven’t been limited to insider trading. In all, he’s given clemency to 13 former members of Congress, all of whom were either charged with or convicted various forms of financial wrongdoing or corruption.

The list includes:

• George Santos, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identity theft.
• Michael Grimm, Republican from Long Island, who pleaded guilty to tax fraud, but also acknowledged wire fraud, hiring undocumented immigrants, and perjury.
• Rick Renzi, an Arizona Republican who was convicted on 17 charges for a variety of misdeeds, including threatening to use his legislative power to stop a land deal unless he was paid by an investor.
• Duke Cunningham, a California Republican who pleaded guilty to tax evasion, conspiracy to commit bribery, wire fraud, and mail fraud.
• Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who pleaded guilty to misusing campaign funds, including to finance activities related to extramarital affairs.

Of those 13 onetime members of Congress who received clemency from Trump, two were Democrats—current Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, who was facing felony charges for money laundering and bribery, and Rod Blagojevich, the former member of Congress and Illinois governor who infamously tried to sell Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat. Blagojevich appeared on The Apprentice with Trump and supported his 2020 and 2024 political campaigns.

Trump has suggested that Cuellar was indicted because, despite being a Democrat, he did not support Joe Biden’s border policies. Stepping up to help Cuellar escape prosecution did not, however, endear the Democrat lawmaker to Trump—at least not in the way Trump hoped. Cuellar said that despite being a conservative Democrat, he wasn’t about to become a Republican, earning him an angry, and threatening, Truth Social post from the president: “Such a lack of LOYALTY, something that Texas Voters, and Henry’s daughters, will not like. Oh’ well, next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!”