The Trump White House is taking extra steps to try to deliver on the president’s signature campaign promise to conduct the largest mass deportation operation in US history. In an internal US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) memo from February obtained by the Washington Post, the administration instructs immigration officers to look for potential targets for “expedited removal,” a process that enables fast-track deportations without a court hearing.

The memo reportedly identifies migrants who crossed the border unlawfully between ports of entry, as well as those who were allowed into the country but haven’t applied for asylum, as examples of people whose deportations could be facilitated under this program. It also mentions immigrants who lawfully presented themselves at ports of entry but lacked documents or “misrepresented themselves.”

That could potentially include migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba who came to the United States as part of a Biden-administration parole initiative the Trump administration has since terminated, in addition to those who used a now-defunct Customs and Border Protection (CBP) application to make appointments to come apply for admission at the US-Mexico border.

The decision to boost “expedited removal” likely signals Trump’s growing frustration with the pace of interior immigration and enforcement and deportations, which he and border czar Tom Homan consider insufficient in light of the goal of deporting around 1 million people a year. Just a couple of weeks ago, the president removed Caleb Vitello from his role as ICE acting director, in what was widely seen as a sign of Trump’s impatience.

More than a decade ago, the Center for Investigative Reporting had a big investigation into how the Department of Veterans Affairs was worsening the opioid overdose crisis, and a big idea: Could they take the impactful work CIR was already doing and make a weekly radio show with the potential to change laws and change lives?

“We weren’t sure if any public radio stations would even air it,” said Al Letson, who back then was the new hire asked to host this brand-new investigative radio show.

You’ve probably got a sense of what happened next: Reveal’s VA investigation sparked outrage. Radio stations did want to run their work. And today, the award-winning show is celebrating its 10th anniversary on more than 500 stations nationwide.

This week on Reveal, the team looks back at how they got here, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic, and we hear from the journalists behind Reveal’s first decade of impactful reporting. 

This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes with Alexander C Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.

Costa Rica is positioning itself to take on Taiwan—and not just in the exports of pineapples.

In 2023, the Central American nation forged a new partnership with the United States to start manufacturing more semiconductors as Washington looked for new and less geopolitically sensitive sources of microchips. Last March, the Costa Rican Ministry of Foreign Trade issued an 80-page National Semiconductor Roadmap outlining plans for expanding the country’s so-called “Silicon Jungle.”

Any concerns that President Donald Trump might retreat from the Biden administration’s initiative were put to rest last week when Secretary of State Marco Rubio specifically singled out semiconductors during a summit with Costa Rican Rodrigo Chaves Robles.

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

The world’s largest island is known for its vast ice sheet, sprawling fjords and abundance of wildlife—from polar bears to narwhals. 

It’s also one of the latest targets in President Donald Trump’s bid for US energy and military expansion. Since his first term, Trump has talked of securing Greenland for its critical minerals, untapped oil reserves, opportunities for military positioning and central location in the international shipping network, particularly as melting sea ice opens up new trade routes. Now, he is pushing for a Greenland land grab with renewed vigor, offering to purchase the island from Denmark or even potentially take it by force. 

But the same warming temperatures that may transform the island into a trading hotspot are making it more inhospitable to development, research shows. Thawing permafrost and ice triggers landslides along jagged fjords and destabilizes the landscapes that infrastructure would need to lie on top of, while loose sea ice makes passing through Greenland’s waters a perilous journey. 

On Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi boasted that she had “declassified and publicly released files” related to the crimes of the dead and well-heeled pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Because this is the Trump administration, though, that release was carried out in a bizarre and hamfisted fashion, with binders of materials handed out to 15 right-wing, pro-Trump figures handpicked by the administration. While the recipients exuberantly waved them around for the cameras just outside the White House, it quickly became obvious that these particular files, which included flight logs and a heavily redacted contact list, presented nothing new. Some had already been public for close to a decade. 

Some MAGA figures denounced the release, while others suggested a new conspiracy.

Over the course of the day, the “release” devolved into a broad-scale civil war on the right, with Bondi accusing the FBI of failing to follow her declassification orders, and the MAGA influencers who were involved in the stunt trying to defend their role. In a predictably short period of time, some of those influencers quickly suggested that a deeper conspiracy was afoot. 

“These swamp creatures at SDNY deceived Bondi, Kash, and YOU,” tweeted conservative commentator and binder recipient Liz Wheeler, who seemed to be pinning the blame on FBI agents in the Southern District of New York, the federal court district where both Epstein and Maxwell were charged. “Be outraged that the binder is boring. You should be. Because the evil deep state LIED TO YOUR FACE.”

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

In December, Popular Information reported that Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial (WLF), a new venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family. Sun’s purchase resulted in a cash windfall for Trump. On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Sun sent a joint letter to a federal judge, asking for a stay of Sun’s case. Today, the judge granted the SEC’s request.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies, accusing him of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token. The SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest. Sun was also charged with paying celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and Soulja Boy, for endorsing his crypto “without disclosing their compensation,” which violates federal law.

A few weeks after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Sun publicly announced that he had become WLF’s largest investor, buying $30 million of its tokens. Sun added that his company, TRON, was “committed to making America great again.”

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

In the open grasslands of South Dakota, not far from the dramatic rock formations of Badlands National Park, lives one of the continent’s cutest, fiercest, and rarest animals: the black-footed ferret.

Black-footed ferrets, weasel-like animals with distinctive dark bands around their eyes and black feet, are ruthless little hunters. At night, they dive into burrows in pursuit of juicy prairie dogs, their primary food source. Without prairie dogs, these ferrets would not survive.

From as many as a million ferrets in the 19th century, today there are only a few hundred of these furry predators roaming the Great Plains, the only place on Earth they live. That there are any black-footed ferrets at all is something of a miracle. In the 1970s, scientists thought black-footed ferrets were extinct, but a twist of fate, and an unprecedented breeding effort led by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, brought this critical piece of the prairie ecosystem back from the brink.

In the fall of 1984, when I was a senior in high school in Washington, DC, the protests at the South African Embassy began. Civil rights leaders met with the ambassador of South Africa on Thanksgiving Eve. Timed for maximum press coverage, that meeting became a sit-in, and that sit-in launched a movement. Soon, there were protests at consulates across the country. College students held rallies, built “shantytowns,” and pushed their schools to divest.

Area high school kids like me got in on protesting the embassy too. And we had a soundtrack. “Free Nelson Mandela” had been released by the Specials in March. The leader of that British ska band, Jerry Dammers, later admitted he didn’t know much about Mandela before he went to an anti-apartheid concert in the UK, where a long-simmering boycott movement was rolling into a boil. The DC music scene was pretty wild then—a bouillabaisse of go-go, R&B, punk, New Wave; there was breakdancing in the hallways during lunch hour—and for some of us, ska was sort of a unified field theory. Musically but also culturally. (If you have a racist friend / now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to end.)

But it wasn’t just kids who cosplayed in checked socks or porkpie hats. In 1985, a month after I started college, Artists Against Apartheid recorded Steven Van Zandt’s “(I Ain’t Going to Play) Sun City”—essentially the music world launching its own boycott on South Africa. The song was not (like, at all) great, but the wild cross-genre supergroup—DJ Kool Herc, Lou Reed, Bonnie Raitt, Gil Scott-Heron, Pat Benatar, Bono, and Miles Davis to name but a very, very few—guaranteed continual rotation on a relatively new cultural phenomenon: MTV.

We were getting a collective education: Because South Africa was so dependent on Black labor and exports, if industrialized nations withheld trade and investments, we could backstop Black South Africans who’d been directly resisting the Afrikaner regime for decades. So, suddenly, amazingly, we did. By 1986, Congress had imposed sanctions on South Africa and banned direct flights to it. Coca-Cola became the first major company to pull out of South Africa. Sports teams joined the musicians in refusing to play there. Divestment battles raged on campuses and boardrooms for the rest of the ’80s. And they worked. South Africa’s economy ground to a near halt. Mandela was freed in 1990, and negotiations to wind down apartheid began. By 1994, free elections were held and Mandela became president.

On Tuesday, leaders at the National Science Foundation reportedly laid off about 170 employees, many via Zoom—an estimated 10 percent of the agency’s workers. One of those workers spoke to Mother Jones, requesting anonymity, about the chaotic and emotional meeting, and what the job losses mean for the $9 billion agency, which is tasked with funding and supporting the country’s academic research. Here’s their account in their own words.

At 9 a.m., we got an email from HR calling us for a meeting at 10 am. There was no agenda offered. But many of us suspected what it was.

Initially, the Zoom invitation listed all of the people who were going to be fired as co-hosts of the meeting, so they sent a second invite. Because of the confusion about which invitation was the correct one, a lot of people joined late. And so, at first, people who came late didn’t hear what the meeting was about.

They told us we were being terminated. People were angry. People were crying. It was just confusing, too. We were told, you could resign or you could be terminated. How do I know what to do? Some people had thought, I had finished my one-year probation. I am not a probationary employee. We were told the agency had made a mistake—it should have been two years, and they’d corrected that.

It’s hard to imagine a better opportunity to oust an incumbent than the one currently before the Democratic primary candidates challenging New York City Mayor Eric Adams. In the last few weeks, Adams has been engulfed in a growing scandal surrounding the Trump Justice Department’s decision to dismiss his federal corruption charges and the mayor’s corresponding willingness to cooperate with the administration’s mass deportation agenda. Though Adams has denied any quid pro quo, the administration’s border czar Tom Homan did threaten—on national television—to be “up [Adams’] butt” if the mayor doesn’t allow immigration enforcement officers on Rikers Island.  

Adams—who is battling a crowded field of challengers in June’s mayoral primary—now faces escalating calls to resign or be removed from office. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has decided against removing the mayor for now, but he could also be ousted by an “inability committee” made up of top city officials. Comptroller Brad Lander, who is running for mayor, has floated convening it. Adams, meanwhile, shows no sign of retreat, writing on X over the weekend, “I’m not stepping down, I’m stepping UP.”

If Adams does leave office before his term is up—voluntarily or not—he’d be replaced by New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. According to the city charter, if that happens before March 27 (90 days before the primary), the city would hold a nonpartisan special election to replace Adams. If it happens afterward, Williams would remain acting mayor until the general election in November. Either way, both the primary and general election would proceed as normal. But the process is untested, and it’s not clear if Adams could run again if removed. 

So where does that leave New York City’s sizeable but scattered progressive wing? They’re hoping to capitalize on Adams’ increasing vulnerability and what they see as a resurgence in anti-Trump momentum to elect one of several left-leaning candidates for mayor. But no definite frontrunner has appeared in the pack of progressive challengers. Instead, New Yorkers could see a familiar name atop the ballot in November: Andrew Cuomo. 

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, a new group pushed for President Donald Trump to serve an unconstitutional third term.  

The effort, called the Third Term Project, is being led by Shane Trejo, who once co-hosted a neo-Nazi adjacent podcast called “Blood Soil and Liberty.” An episode of the now-deleted show was titled “Tanner Flake for Fuhrer,” an homage to a senator’s son who’d posted racist and anti-gay comments under the screen name “n1–erkiller.”

The imagery and language being used by the Third Term Project is transparently authoritarian. The group’s poster at CPAC features Trump in the style of Julius Caesar. Trejo told the independent journalist Ford Fischer on Thursday that the group did so because “Trump is the Caesar figure that America has needed.” 

“We’re putting that out there, Trump as Caesar,” Trejo continued. “We think it’s great optics. We love the idea of Trump as our Julius Caesar-type figure.” He also argued that Trump is the “Napoleonic figure that has emerged to lead our country out of perdition and into greatness.”

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

Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced last week that he had uncovered evidence of a massive fraud perpetrated by the Biden administration. In a video posted to social media, the former Republican congressman from New York said that Biden’s EPA had “parked” roughly $20 billion at a private bank, “rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door before Inauguration Day.” 

The Biden administration’s plan, Zeldin said, was for the bank to distribute the money to a handful of nonprofits, which would then send it out to “NGOs and others” for climate-related spending. But he vowed to stop that plan. “The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” he said. 

But the scheme Zeldin described is not novel or a secret. The $20 billion he is trying to recover is money that Congress passed in 2022 for a program known as the “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund,” also known as the “green bank” initiative. This kind of program once enjoyed bipartisan support in states like Nevada, which opened a clean energy fund under a Republican governor in 2017, and Connecticut, where green bank legislation passed in 2011 with unanimous support from both parties. At least two centrist Republicans, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Don Young of Alaska, endorsed a national green bank bill in 2021. 

On Friday, a federal judge partly blocked President Donald Trump’s attempt to root out programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, within the government.

That includes at least one far-reaching executive order titled, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” in which the president claimed DEI programs are illegal. As my colleague Alex Nguyen reported at the time:

[The order] argues that DEI programs violate civil rights laws by illegally enforcing “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences” that “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement.” The White House also claimed that these policies are discriminatory because they select based on “how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.”  

As the New York Times has reported in detail, Maryland District Judge Adam B. Abelson barred the Trump administration from any effort to “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate any awards, contracts or obligations” related to diversity and inclusion, noting that such programs have been seen as “uncontroversially legal for decades.”

President Donald Trump is taking aim at the US Postal Service. 

According to a Thursday report from the Washington Post‘s Jacob Bogage, the president plans to fire the members of USPS’ board and hand the keys to the agency over to the Department of Commerce.

Trump plans to make the move through executive order as early as this week, the Post reports. The board reportedly intends to take the administration to court if Trump carries out the firings or tries to take control, with postal experts telling the Washington Post that absorbing the independent agency would likely violate federal law. A White House spokesperson later denied the report.

After his re-election, Trump discussed privatizing the Postal Service with Howard Lutnick—later confirmed as Commerce Secretary—at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to a separate Post article from December.

The anti-abortion movement has launched a pressure campaign urging President Donald Trump’s administration to take steps toward a nationwide ban on medication abortion, the method used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions nationwide.

On Wednesday, 30 leading anti-abortion activists sent a pair of letters to the acting heads of the Department of Justice and FDA, urging a multifaceted crackdown on abortion pills.

The letter to the Department of Justice takes aim at the distribution of mifepristone by mail. The FDA has allowed providers to mail mifepristone to patients since 2021, and the mail, of course, has been an important part of the supply chain for the medication for decades. But the letter, addressed to acting Attorney General James McHenry, asks him to take “immediate action” to implement the Comstock Act, the 19th-century anti-obscenity law that made it a crime to mail “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” The Biden administration interpreted the law to apply only to illegal abortions. And the Comstock Act has not been enforced for many decades, as I reported in 2023, when lawyers in the anti-abortion movement were increasingly raising the act in proposed local laws and legal filings:

In the past, the act was enforced by an army of postal inspectors who regularly peeked into people’s mail, screening letters and packages en masse for mentions of sex and contraception, [historian Lauren MacIvor] Thompson says. Today, though the statute is still on the books, a century of court decisions about privacy, freedom, and the First Amendment have rendered it dormant.

Chrystal Starbird, a cancer researcher at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, had been preparing to serve on her first National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant review panel at the end of January. On Wednesday, to her surprise, that meeting was abruptly canceled.

These NIH panels, or “study sections,” typically involve a group of about 20 to 30 scientists who meet to assess research grant proposals within their areas of expertise. Most of the grants, Starbird says, range from about $2 million to $10 million. Once the group reviews and scores the projects, a separate NIH “advisory council” decides which ones to fund.

The email Starbird received was vague. It came from her study section contact at NIH, within the Trump administration, and it said the multiday meeting, set for January 30 and 31, would not take place as planned. The message instructed her to save her files about the projects for the time being and thanked her for her service to the NIH. “I’ve never seen a complete pause like this as part of a transition,” she told me.

The “pause” goes beyond grant reviews. It appears to be part of a larger blackout on research at NIH and across the federal government. On Tuesday, as the Washington Post first reported, the Trump administration paused all external communications—”health advisories, weekly scientific reports, updates to websites and social media posts” at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the NIH, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

This story was originally published on Judd Legum’s Substack, Popular Information, to which you can subscribe here.

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was a top White House official during Trump’s first term. After exiting the White House in 2021, Kushner launched a new private equity firm, Affinity Partners, and announced he was seeking to raise $7 billion. Kushner had no experience in private equity, and his most significant business experience was nearly bankrupting his family’s real estate company.

Who would be interested in giving Kushner billions of dollars? Kushner raised $2 billion from the government of Saudi Arabia through its Public Investment Fund (PIF). The PIF committee that screens investments recommended rejecting Kushner’s proposal, citing “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management” and “excessive” fees.

The committee’s recommendation, however, was overruled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), with whom Kushner formed a friendship during his time in the White House. Kushner helped MBS manage the fallout after United States intelligence agencies determined that MBS had ordered the brutal murder of the US-based journalist and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. To date, Kushner has raised $4.6 billion, including additional funds from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

The Trump administration has snuffed out a plan to ban menthol cigarettes, handing a victory to the tobacco industry after it waged a massive and at times deceptive lobbying campaign.

The FDA proposed banning menthol cigarettes in 2022, amid pressure from groups including the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the American Lung Association, and the NAACP, which noted that menthol cigarettes, long aggressively marketed to Black Americans, have a disproportionate and deadly effect on their health.

Tobacco allies argued banning menthol would be racist.

To fight the proposal, tobacco companies—in particular Reynolds American, which earns a big chunk of revenue from its mentholated Newport cigarette brand—turned that argument on its head, asserting that banning menthols would be racist because Black people tend to smoke them.

On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aiming to restrict immigration, titled “Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.” It has been described as a revival of his first-term Muslim “travel ban,” making good on a campaign promise to bring back the controversial rule.

Buried in the executive order is the fulfillment of another vow from the campaign: an attempt to find a way to easily deport pro-Palestine demonstrators. 

While much of the new order mimics the old Muslim “travel ban” Trump signed on the first day of his first term in 2017, this order is more neutral on its face. This time, Trump is not explicitly naming specific countries to target, but asking agencies to submit a report within 60 days outlining countries from which to suspend immigration. 

“Students are afraid of being labeled as terrorists, and now there’s more ammunition from this executive order to actually carry that out.” 

Pop culture is full of lovable orphans. There’s Annie, of course, and Harry Potter, and the Boxcar Children, and James (with the Giant Peach), and Cinderella—the list goes on and on. They have familiar stories: The protagonist loses parents and finds themselves in dire straits, typically under the supervision of evil caretakers. But through grit, wit, and, often, the help of a wealthy, generous benefactor—think Daddy Warbucks—they’re able to succeed.

When author Kristen Martin lost her own parents to cancer as a child, her experience as an orphan was nothing like that. There were no evil stepparents to outsmart before going on epic adventures. Relatives stepped in; the grief was consuming. The “utter disconnect,” she says, between her experience and those of pop culture protagonists was part of the inspiration for her book, The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood. 

Martin explores the history of orphanhood in America since the 1800s and its harsh reality today, coming to a striking conclusion: It is poverty—rather than the death of both parents—that has often led children to be deemed orphans. “The fact is,” Martin writes, “most of the children we’re talking about when we’re talking about orphans had one or two living parents but were separated from them, either voluntarily or involuntarily,” she writes. 

Despite the narrative that “we are a nation that values the nuclear family, rallies around children in need, and believes all young people have promising future,” in reality, “only some are deserving of strong familial ties.”