Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk has been released from an immigration detention center in rural Louisiana in response to an order from a federal judge. Öztürk’s arrest led to nationwide outrage after a chilling video showed plainclothes immigration agents in masks pulling her off the street in Massachusetts in March.

Öztürk, a 30-year-old Turkish national, has been accused of no criminal activity. Instead, the Trump administration has falsely claimed that she “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” In reality, Öztürk co-wrote a op-ed for the Tufts Daily that pushed for divesting from companies with ties to Israel.

“Thank you so much for all the support and love,” Öztürk said outside the Louisiana immigration detention center on Friday. “I am a little tired so I will take some rest. But I really appreciate you being here.”

Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts PhD candidate whose sudden arrest by federal immigration agents made national headlines, walked out of a Louisiana detention facility after a judge ordered her release.

Watch the moment she spoke to supporters outside. https://t.co/rsttOeBNTz pic.twitter.com/KGd4zO1Q68

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump suspended refugee admissions from around the world. In February, Trump made one exception—ordering the US government to promote refugee resettlement for white South Africans. Now, the first group of Afrikaners is set to arrive.

National Public Radio reports that a flight with 54 Afrikaners will arrive at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC, on Monday. In a highly unusual move, the administration plans to have high-level US officials meet the Afrikaners at the airport for a press conference, according to NPR. The administration is reportedly trying to charter a jet—presumably at US taxpayers’ expense—from Johannesburg to bring in the South Africans.

“It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy.”

Timothy Young, a spokesman for Global Refuge, a resettlement agency, told the New York Times that thousands “of refugees from across the globe remain stranded in limbo despite being fully vetted and approved for travel, including Afghan allies, religious minorities and other populations facing extreme violence and persecution.” The fact that the Trump administration is bypassing those people in favor of white South Africans who have not met international criteria for refugee status lays bare the white nationalism at the heart of its immigration policy.

This dispatch by Bill Shaner, an independent journalist who writes the Worcester Sucks and I Love It newsletter, was first published by Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World.

I’m driving five miles across the city to check out a tip that there’s an ICE rendition ongoing. I’ve got the scanner on the car stereo as I’m about to pull onto the street in question. It’s a quiet neighborhood, small houses on small lots, people walking dogs, the mailman waving, the lawnmowers running, and I hear the dispatcher: “We have an ICE officer over there who’s allegedly being surrounded.”

“On our way,” the officer responds. 

As a local reporter for a decade now, I’ve learned that you can hear the cops at their most honest on the scanner. And as I’m hearing that “surrounded” comment I remember what the city’s police chief told the city council in January:

In August 2022, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall made a guest appearance on a local conservative talk radio show. It was two months after the US Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, and abortion was now illegal in Alabama. And Marshall addressed rumors that he planned to prosecute anyone helping people get abortions out of state.  

“If someone was promoting themselves out as a funder of abortion out of state,” Marshall explained to the host, “then that is potentially criminally actionable for us.” 

This particular threat launched an epic legal battle with implications for some of the most basic American rights: the right to travel, the right to free speech, the right to give and receive help. 

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

Steps from a public bathroom, across a narrow street from a home goods store in Tokyo, Japan, a tangle of delicate reddish stems fringed with rubbery emerald leaves pokes from a crack in the pavement. Smaller than a discarded Big Mac box, the plant sprawls close to the ground, appearing entirely unremarkable. Put more plainly: Common purslane looks like a weed.

Purslane is so inconspicuous that when Tomohiro Fujita, a biologist at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies in Ibaraki, started studying it in August 2021, he had trouble picking it out in the bustling cityscape. “There were several times when I walked around Tokyo for an entire day without finding a single individual,” he wrote by email. But once he learned to recognize the plant, he found it in all kinds of places. Growing in a lush, tree-ringed quad outside a cafeteria at Rikkyo University, for instance. Or eking out a modest living near a city bus lot not far from Sugamo Station.

Common purslane, known to scientists as Portulaca oleracea, is not just big in Japan. By some counts, it’s the eighth most widely distributed plant in the world. As happy growing in gardens as along roads or parking lots, it has been documented everywhere from Mexico City to Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park to Midway Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean.

On April 3, a Justice Department contracting officer sent the Acacia Center for Justice a “notice of termination for convenience.” The email instructed the nonprofit to discontinue several federally funded programs described as “no longer needed.” Among them was the little-known National Qualified Representative Program (NQRP), which appoints government-paid counsel to detained immigrants deemed unfit to represent themselves in court due to serious mental health needs or cognitive disabilities.

The termination notice put the organization and its dozens of legal partners on high alert. As the federal government’s main contractor for this $35 million program since 2022, the Acacia Center for Justice has relied on federal dollars to refer anywhere between 300 to 400 cases a year to a network of about 35 direct services providers that includes other nonprofits, small private law firms, and solo practitioners.

The following day, the Washington, DC-based group received another letter, this one rescinding the previous order “until further notice.” As they tried to make sense of the confounding messages, within the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review—charged with managing the US immigration courts system— agency officials were discussing how to reduce the scope of the NQRP and “end representation funded by EOIR,” according to internal emails obtained through litigation. The downsizing, they anticipated, should “allow for representatives to withdraw” from ongoing cases and “facilitate finding other representation.”

The planned defunding was the latest in a series of cuts by the Trump administration to legal aid for immigrants. In practice, it would all but eliminate the only available mechanism for immigration courts to designate counsel to people with mental health needs in detention centers across the United States.

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

The federal Energy Star program is among the most successful government initiatives in modern history. Its signature blue label is now nearly as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or a Coca-Cola can, and appliances bearing it save American consumers some $40 billion annually in energy costs, or about $350 for every taxpayer dollar that goes in. 

This week, however, President Donald Trump’s administration moved to kill it, the Washington Post first reported. Grist also reviewed a US EPA document obtained by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that shows the program is slated to be “eliminated.”

“Energy Star has saved American families and businesses more than half a trillion dollars in energy costs,” said Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the ranking member of the committee, in a statement. “By eliminating this program, [Trump] will force Americans to buy appliances that cost more to run and waste more energy.”

In late March, Ed Martin, then the embattled acting US attorney for DC, showed up at a community meeting at a police station to tout his efforts to combat crime in the district.

Martin politely fielded questions from attendees, even answering one from a man who, citing Martin’s widely condemned description of his office as “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers,” asked: “How do we as residents trust that you are going to have our back and not be a personal lawyer for the President of the United States, who is a felon and a racist?”

Martin’s Democrats-did-it-first rationalization for this is not just his. It is the lie justifying Trump’s broader effort to weaponize the Justice Department and turn the entire federal government into an instrument of his personal interest.

Martin responded by pointing to Matthew Graves, who had occupied his position under President Biden. “My predecessor” also “worked for the guy elected president, for his polices, for his vision,” Martin said. “And that was his preference. There is nothing wrong with that.”

The Conclave has spoken, and President Donald Trump will not be the next pope. Instead, that designation will go to Robert Francis Prevost, who will be known as Pope Leo XIV, the Vatican announced on Thursday.

Leo, who is 69 years old and was born in Chicago, will be the first American pope following the April 21 death of Pope Francis—and everyone wants to claim it as a win for their side of the political aisle. To some on the right, Leo’s selection is a boon for Trump’s “America-first” administration. To other Republicans, he is not pro-Trump enough, based on a series of seemingly critical posts on his X account. The left, on the other hand, is eating those up.

Trump called Leo’s selection “a Great Honor for our Country” in a Truth Social post congratulating him. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk claimed that voting records show Leo is a strong Republican who has consistently voted conservatively. Some of his prior comments appear to make him indistinguishable from the MAGA crowd: The New York Times previously reported that in 2012, Leo spoke out against what he called “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.” And as a bishop in Peru, he railed against what he called “the promotion of gender ideology” in schools, which he alleged “seeks to create genders that don’t exist.”

But Trump opponents quickly pointed to Leo’s X account as evidence that the new pope may be a member of the resistance. Leo’s most recent repost shared comments from Evelio Menjivar, an auxiliary bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, who criticized the Trump administration’s seemingly illegal deportations to El Salvador.

On Wednesday, following controversy about inconsistencies in her résumé, President Trump withdrew his nomination of Dr. Janette Nesheiwat to become surgeon general and gave the nod to alternative medicine practitioner and author Dr. Casey Means.

“Her academic achievements, together with her life’s work, are absolutely outstanding,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Dr. Casey Means has the potential to be one of the finest Surgeon Generals in United States History.”

Her academic achievements include dropping out of a medical residency in otolaryngology because, she says, she was frustrated that the discipline did not focus on “root causes.” Means’ medical license is inactive, according to Oregon medical board records.

Means’ medical opining has occasionally veered in a New Age direction.

When we think of “organizing,” we tend to think of protesters—of scruffy and earnest demonstrators taking on giant corporations, of people with cardboard signs standing in the cold or the sun. But really, organizing is any concentrated attempt of the (relatively) small and many to stand up to the mighty and few, and the last few days have seen some of the most unlikely and potentially effective organizing in a long time.

In this case, the small and many were not people used to thinking of themselves that way. Instead, they were university presidents and boards of trustees—almost without exception people of real distinction and power in their communities. I’ve served on university boards and broken bread with hundreds of college presidents (the price of lecturing to their students), and I know the breed: They tend toward the cautious and the conciliatory, but they have big reserves of local influence. They are, invariably, pillars of the community.

And so when President Donald Trump decided to try to crumple those pillars, they decided to stand up, circulating a letter that’s now been signed by more than 400 college presidents. It was—perhaps only after the Hands Off demonstrations and Tesla Takedowns—the most effective response yet to the creeping fascism in the Oval Office.

Everyone took their lead and their nerve from Harvard University, where President Alan Garber and board chair Penny Pritzker pushed back hard a week ago against the administration’s attempt to basically take over the university in order to enforce something called “viewpoint diversity.” Harvard’s sharp response obviously stunned the White House, which had doubtless been lulled by Columbia University’s pathetic capitulation; as is often the case with bullies, Trump started looking for a way to back down, with his people eventually claiming that they had sent Harvard their diktat “by mistake.”

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

China will continue to push forward on the climate crisis, Xi Jinping has said while appearing to criticize the “protectionism” of Donald Trump’s tariff policies.

The Chinese president was attending a closed-door virtual meeting with the UN secretary general, António Guterres, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and about a dozen other heads of state and government to discuss the climate crisis.

Xi told the meeting that China would “not slow down its climate actions,” according a draft of his remarks. He did not name the US or Trump but made apparent reference to them while noting that China had “built the world’s largest and fastest-growing renewable energy systems as well as the largest and most complete new energy industrial chain.”

The Department of Justice has restored two previously canceled grants supporting victims of violent crimes, including domestic violence, following a Mother Jones report on Thursday that highlighted the critical roles the programs played for survivors.

The DOJ informed the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) and the National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) on Thursday night that officials would restore the grants they previously canceled on Tuesday. Those cancelations were reportedly part of mass cuts to grants worth more than $800 million, according to Reuters, that supported victims of gun violence, addiction, and domestic violence. The terminations came as especially ironic in light of President Donald Trump’s campaign trail pledge to “protect women” if re-elected and to offer “unending support to every victim of crime” per a proclamation he issued for National Crime Victims’ Rights Week earlier this month.

Mother Jones was the only news outlet to report on the NNEDV grant cancelation, which supports an email hotline that offers personalized legal information for survivors in English and Spanish. The canceled, and since-restored, $2 million, three-year grant was intended to “increase awareness of and enhance access to its Spanish email hotline services.” On Tuesday, NNEDV officials learned that the remainder of the grant, about a half million dollars, was cut. A spokesperson previously said that while the NNEDV hoped to keep the services going with alternative funding, they would wind up being  “drastically reduced.”

In a statement provided to Mother Jones on Friday, Stephanie Love-Patterson, the organization’s president and CEO, said that while officials are “relieved and appreciative” that the grant cancelation was reversed, “the concerns and heartache remain, as this highlights the vulnerable state of services for survivors, which will affect those who need them most.”

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was charged with two felonies after being arrested by federal officers early Friday morning for allegedly helping a man without legal immigration status avoid arrest while in her courtroom on April 18. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Dugan helped direct an undocumented immigrant through a side door in her courtroom and down a private hallway into a public area when the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived to apprehend him.

The arrest of a sitting judge is a pivotal moment in the Trump administration’s escalation of immigration enforcement. It comes just months after the Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors to push forward criminal cases against local government officials who impede Trump’s immigration crackdown and go after state and local laws in court.

A spokesperson for the US Marshals Service in Washington, DC, confirmed to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Dugan was taken into custody at around 8 a.m. at the Milwaukee County Courthouse in Wisconsin. The spokesperson also told the newspaper that Dugan was charged with obstruction and concealing an individual. 

FBI Director Kash Patel posted the news on X on Friday morning, writing that the FBI arrested Dugan “on charges of obstruction” during an immigration arrest operation last week. According to Patel, the judge “intentionally misdirected federal agents” away from their target, allowing the man to evade arrest. (Patel later deleted his post.)

State organizations that advocate for disabled residents in New Jersey and Arkansas announced this week that they will have to limit their work due to not receiving the full federal funds they are owed by the US federal government.

Each state, territory, and Washington, DC, has a protection and advocacy agency to support the rights of disabled people, including providing one-on-one legal services. These agencies were created by the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act of 1975, which means their work is federally mandated. It’s currently unclear whether all protection and advocacy agencies have been impacted by shortages in federal funds.

“Are we going to a worldview that just contracts all those social services and basically says people must stand on their own or fall on their own?”

NJ.com reported that Disability Rights New Jersey (DRNJ) has received only $1.6 million of the $3.1 million it needs this year to represent disabled people, including those in group homes and in prisons. As a result, the agency—which also receives some state funding—is shutting down its services until May 5, and says it will not be able to make payroll next month if it does not receive its designated federal funds. The White House did not respond to NJ.com‘s request for comment on funding issues.

Ed Martin, the far-right activist–turned–acting US attorney for DC, apologized this week for praising an alleged Nazi sympathizer at an event last year.

But Martin’s ties to Timothy Hale-Cusanelli—who is known for wearing a Hitler-style mustache and who once allegedly told a co-worker that the Nazis “should have finished the job”—are far more extensive than just that one meeting.

Martin told the Forward this week that he was “sorry” for bestowing an award on Hale-Cusanelli during an August 2024 event at Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

“I denounce everything about what that guy said, everything about the way he talked, and all as I’ve now seen it,” Martin said. “At the time, I didn’t know it.”

On Friday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in New Orleans deported members of two families, including young children and a pregnant mother, under circumstances that have raised serious due process concerns. Among those deported were three children who are US citizens, including a two-year-old who was born in New Orleans and a child with a rare form of metastatic cancer who’d been receiving treatment in the US.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) alleges that ICE did not allow the mothers and children detained to have substantial or any contact with attorneys and family members, including with the two-year-old’s father.

“If this is what the Trump administration is orchestrating just three months in, we should all be terrified of what the next four years will bring.”

“These families were lawfully complying with ICE’s orders and for this they suffered cruel and traumatic separation,”  Mich P. Gonzalez, founding partner of Sanctuary of the South, which provides legal assistance, said in a statement. “If this is what the Trump administration is orchestrating just three months in, we should all be terrified of what the next four years will bring.”

In Steubenville, Ohio, many students are considered to be economically disadvantaged. But unlike some similar towns and cities across the United States, standardized testing doesn’t strike fear among members of the school board, principals, and superintendent.

That’s because for the past two decades, 93 percent or more of students in Steubenville’s public schools have scored proficient on state reading tests by the time they’re in third grade.

“It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” said Karin Chenoweth, who wrote about Steubenville in her 2009 book How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons From Unexpected Schools. According to research from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, Steubenville has routinely scored in the top 10 percent or better of schools nationwide for third-grade reading, sometimes scoring as high as the top 1 percent.

On March 15, federal agents rounded up more than 230 Venezuelan nationals who were then deported to El Salvador and locked up in the country’s notorious megaprison. The Trump administration said the men belonged to a violent Venezuelan gang, but presented no evidence, and there were no court hearings in which the men could contest the allegations. 

Nearly a month later, families of the Venezuelan men say they have heard nothing about their fate. It’s as if they disappeared. 

“We’re living in a world where you can just be rounded up with no hearing, not even an administrative hearing, nothing,” says immigration attorney Joseph Giardina. “Why couldn’t you have let their cases be adjudicated? There’s no logical answer other than a publicity stunt.” 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently denied a request from health officials in Milwaukee to investigate a lead poisoning crisis in that city’s aging schools. Instead, the city’s 67,500 public school students seem to be caught in the crosshairs of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mission to massively overhaul the Department of Health and Human Services.

“I sincerely regret to inform you that due to the complete loss of our Lead Program, we will be unable to support you with this,” Aaron Bernstein, director of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, told city officials in an email obtained by CBS News.

Kennedy is a longtime vaccine skeptic whose unorthodox approach to health and medicine has made him a perfect acolyte for Donald Trump and his best known sidekick, Elon Musk. Despite recently flip-flopping on the measles vaccine after a recent outbreak in Texas, he’s also forced a top vaccine official out of office and killed the National Institutes of Health’s climate change programs.

As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy promised to cut 10,000 of the agency’s 82,000 jobs in an effort to streamline the federal government’s efficiency. “We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl,” Kennedy told reporters in March, according to the Guardian. “We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic.”