2026-03-27 19:30:00
In the days leading up to this week’s opening of CPAC, the nation’s oldest conservative political convention, organizers still seemed to be holding out hope that some brighter MAGA luminary would agree to headline the event. The CPAC app and social media accounts offered a slow drip of news of newly confirmed speakers. There was the HUD secretary, a low-level HHS official, and a Nigerian lawyer who advocates for Christians in his Muslim country. On March 21, CPAC excitedly announced that Todd Chrisley would be joining the lineup.
Who?
You could be forgiven for not knowing about Chrisley. A minor reality TV star, Chrisley was in prison until May last year, serving a 12-year sentence for bank and tax fraud, when President Donald Trump pardoned him. What Chrisley has to offer the CPAC audience is unclear. “To speak on the process of receiving a pardon?” posited one incredulous Facebook commenter responding to the Chrisley announcement.
During the Trump decade, CPAC had been a showcase for the MAGA faithful, and Trump and his family were its biggest stars. Trump himself first appeared at the event in 2011 when he was toying with a presidential run. He hasn’t missed the event in a decade. “Nobody can deny that [CPAC] is the center of political gravity,” CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp told me in 2022.
But the center of gravity has clearly tilted if the modest crowd in the convention hall at the Gaylord Texan resort in Grapevine is any indication. “It’s shitty,” Warner Kimo Sutton told me of the turnout. “Last time this place was packed.” A GOP stalwart who who ran Trump’s 2016 campaign in Hawaii, he was here two years ago, the last time CPAC came to Dallas. He was still hoping more stars would show up. “I’ve heard the widow is coming,” he whispered, saying he had it on good authority that Erika Kirk, the widow of the murdered Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, might be making a surprise appearance.
Whether a late showing by “the widow” is enough to spice up the convention remains to be seen. After all, people book hotels and buy tickets months in advance, often expecting to see Trump and some of his famous children. CPAC doesn’t discourage this view. Trump’s previous appearances feature prominently on the CPAC website. But as of Thursday night, not a single Trump family member was on the 2026 lineup, and Trump has reportedly said he is not coming. (A CPAC intern on Thursday held out hope and told Sutton and me that Trump’s visits are often last-minute affairs.)
Still, CPAC attendees won’t even hear from Trump-adjacent Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former CPAC regular who was exiled to Greece as the US ambassador after Don Jr. ditched her for a younger woman. And the primacy of CPAC as a testing ground for future presidential candidates seems threatened. As of Thursday, not a single 2028 aspirant was scheduled to speak in Grapevine. No Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, no Vice President JD Vance. And Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio was way too busy plotting to overthrow Cuba. The closest he has come to the event was appearing on the big screen in the exhibit hall Thursday morning during a broadcast of the president’s predictably fawning cabinet meeting.
Headlining the annual Ronald Reagan dinner is Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. Currently running for the US Senate, Paxton is an underwhelming candidate to fill a speaking slot once occupied in 1985 by the Gipper himself. Paxton has a long history of scandals, ranging from a 2015 securities fraud indictment to his impeachment in 2023, to his messy divorce that revealed a series of infidelities. Despite Paxton’s popularity among MAGA voters, Trump has thus far declined to endorse him in his primary race against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.
Part of the problem with CPAC this year may be that many of its biggest draws in the past are now part of the government they long railed against. FBI Director Kash Patel, who wrote a whole book about “government gangsters,” is now one of them. Ditto for Pam Bondi, who just last year shared the mainstage with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz but now runs the Justice Department, where she’s under fire from Trump’s own fans for her handling of the Epstein files.
Former White House National Trade Council director Peter Navarro appeared at CPAC in 2024, shortly before heading off to prison for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena. Now pardoned, he has thus far skipped this year’s event, perhaps to better mismanage the president’s trade war—though he did find the time to show up at Politico’s Economy Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday. Those still on the schedule are a sorry lot of wannabes and has-beens. Former Florida representative and catastrophically failed Trump attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz? Check.
What might account for the lackluster affair? Sutton, a three-time delegate to the GOP presidential nominating convention who moved to Texas six years ago, suspects that the war in Iran is likely keeping Trump away. But he also despairs that “there’s a malaise in our party” preventing people from engaging more in this year’s midterms.
Perhaps Americans, even the MAGA faithful, are too pinched by gas prices to shell out for a trip to the resort in Grapevine, where, as Sutton complained, parking costs $29 a day. Maybe a lame duck Trump, whose approval rating has never been lower, has hurt attendance. Or maybe even Republicans have grown weary of an event that has strayed far from its roots as a conservative policy confab and increasingly served as a platform for some of the GOP’s most morally compromised representatives. As conservative radio host Erick Erickson lamented in an X post Wednesday, “’C’ in CPAC is now best represented by the world ‘clown’ than as any semblance of a conservative institution.”
“’C’ in CPAC is now best represented by the world ‘clown’ than as any semblance of a conservative institution.”
It’s also possible, however, that the main problem with CPAC is CPAC itself. The conference has suffered in recent years from competition, most notably from Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s conservative youth group. (T-shirts featuring Kirk as martyr are a hot item in the CPAC exhibit hall.) Turning Point’s national convention in December drew a whopping 30,000 people, which seems about 10 times larger than the occupancy of the Gaylord convention hall.
Even CPAC’s relatively paltry numbers seem padded with enough international visitors to make it a juicy target for ICE Director Tom Homan, who was a featured speaker on Thursday. Chief among these retinues is a huge contingent of conservative South Korean “stop the steal” activists associated with former president Yoon Suk Yeol. Yeol was impeached last year, and in February, he was sentenced to life in prison for starting an insurrection.
But the organization behind CPAC also seems troubled. I’ve been attending CPAC regularly since 2009, mostly when it was held in the DC area. It usually seemed like a decently well-oiled machine. But this year, its Grapevine event feels like it’s coming apart at the seams. Its buggy app wasn’t updated with the schedule until late Wednesday night, and it was clearly being tinkered with all day on Thursday, with headlines for sessions becoming snappier by the hour. A panel originally focused generically on “fraud” was transformed into “Ilhan Omar ‘Family’ Values.”
As of 5:30 pm on Thursday, there was still no public schedule available for Friday or Saturday, and new speakers were still being announced on social media throughout the day. “CPAC is proud to announce that Andrew Giuliani is a confirmed speaker for CPAC USA 2026,” came the news Thursday morning. The son of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is the current White House director of the FIFA World Cup task force. Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen once famously said that the younger Giuliani “may be dumber than Eric Trump,” making the former pro-golfer’s addition to the CPAC agenda a mixed bag.
Thursday’s announcement of the last-minute addition of HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. may help offset some of the disappointment with this year’s CPAC offerings. Even so, it can’t help the convention’s appeal that Schlapp is its MC. In 2024, the CPAC chairman settled a sexual misconduct lawsuit, reportedly for almost $500,000, filed by a man working on Hershel Walker’s 2022 Georgia Senate campaign who had accused Schlapp of groping him in the car.
Nonetheless, Schlapp still plays an outsized role in the convention, which is reflected in his salary. He earned more than $830,000 in tax year 2023, according to the group’s most recent IRS 990 form. Listed as “the Honorable Matt Schlapp” on the CPAC schedule, apparently in reference to his service as George W. Bush’s White House political director, he is the moderator of a disproportionate number of panels, along with his wife, (the Honorable) Mercedes Schlapp, who worked in the first Trump White House.
In fairness, not everyone seems disappointed with the event. I found Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of the Proud Boys, hanging out and watching Matt Gaetz record his OAN show in the CPAC exhibit hall. Tarrio seemed glad to be here and not in prison. In January last year, Trump pardoned him, saving him from a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy related to his involvement in the January 6 riot. He told me he comes to every CPAC and that this one was the same as in 2018, another non-presidential election season.
Tarrio said that a lot of people want to see Trump, and now that Trump doesn’t seem to be coming, they’re not that interested. He said some people at his hotel had cancelled based on the B-list offerings. But he shrugged it off, attributing the turnout to the normal political cycle rather than as a reflection on the current state of MAGA or CPAC itself. After all, he said, “It’s a midterm year.”
2026-03-27 19:30:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As the deadly war in Iran triggers what the International Energy Agency has described as the worst oil crisis in history, climate advocates are calling for a faster shift away from fossil fuels, but the conflict may also hamper that transition.
US-Israeli strikes on Iran have disrupted supply routes through the strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of global oil flows. The US, Israel and Iran have also all launched strikes on fossil fuel facilities, creating additional market shocks.
Reduced reliance on oil and gas is insulating some regions from the ongoing fuel crisis. “Electricity generated from wind and solar is largely insulated from fossil fuel price volatility—once built, the fuel is free,” said Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy at Oxford University.
But the war is also creating near-term challenges that could slow clean energy growth. Here’s what to know about how the current crisis could shape the expansion of renewable energy.
Climate advocates are calling for the world to grow its renewable energy capacity to boost energy independence. Former US secretary of state John Kerry this month told the Guardian that oil and gas were a “security challenge,” while the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, last week said that “our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing both the climate and global security.”
Some countries are indeed better positioned to withstand the current fuel crisis because of the growth of clean energy technologies. Spain and Portugal, for instance, have seen electricity prices decline in recent weeks.
“This should be the final wake-up call that there is a better way than continued dependence on fossil fuels.”
Pakistan, too, has seen a surge in the deployment of rooftop solar panels over the past five years, helping the country weather disruptions in the oil and gas market. There, “households and businesses have discovered that rooftop solar coupled with batteries are cheaper than electricity imported from the grid,” Rosenow said.
Electric vehicles have also helped some economies withstand price increases for gasoline, in which crude oil is a key ingredient. Two examples are China, where more than 50 percent of all new cars sold are electric, and Nepal, where that share sits at at 70 percent.
In light of this evidence, countries across the world are being urged to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels. But the Iran war may also make that more difficult.
Though it has re-energized calls for clean technology, the war and resulting supply chain disruptions are also posing problems for the clean energy transition.
Chokepoints in the strait of Hormuz, for instance, are disrupting the transport of metals needed to construct solar panels, such as aluminum. The Middle East also accounts for about 9 percent of global aluminum production, and producers in the region have begun to shutter or scale back their operations amid the war.
That could make it difficult to build the new clean power capacity climate advocates are demanding. So could the inflation that the war may spur, particularly because renewable energy projects require significant upfront investment for construction, equipment and installation.
The war and resulting energy shocks have been a boon in the short term for fossil fuels. That includes the dirtiest and most planet-heating energy source: coal.
“Renewables are winners here, but so is coal,” said Ira Joseph, global fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
“War is being used as a false justification for rushed and irresponsible extraction.”
Many Asian countries are heavily reliant on imported liquefied natural gas, much of which passes through the strait of Hormuz. To make up for current shortfalls in LNG supply, countries including India, Thailand and Vietnam are burning more coal to meet energy demand.
And though in 2025 China reduced its coal generation for the first time, disruptions to LNG—particularly after the world’s largest LNG terminal in Qatar was struck by Iranian missiles and drones this month—will probably reverse that trend, said Joseph.
In the short term, disruptions in the oil and gas market are also incentivizing more oil and gas drilling and exploration, as countries scramble to replace disrupted LNG supplies and as higher prices make previously unviable projects profitable.
“High fossil fuel prices generate windfall profits that flow back into exploration, extraction and export infrastructure,” said Rosenow. “We are already seeing this with LNG expansion plans being fast-tracked.”
The US company Venture Global on Monday announced a new five-year contract to supply LNG to Vitol, the world’s largest independent energy trading company. That same day, the Canadian energy company TC Energy said Iran war disruptions were increasing the likelihood that a huge LNG facility export facility will be expanded.
Donald Trump, whose campaign accepted record oil and gas donations and who calls the climate crisis a “hoax” has taken steps to further incentivize oil expansion amid the energy crisis. Most recently, on Monday, the White House said it would pay a French company $1 billion to abandon plans to build offshore windfarms and instead pursue fossil fuel projects.
The risk of this kind of expansion, said Rosenow, was a “carbon lock-in effect” where decision makers keep newly built infrastructure online for decades.
“War is being used as a false justification for rushed and irresponsible extraction. Instead, this should be the final wake-up call that there is a better way than continued dependence on fossil fuels,” said Lauren Pagel, policy director at the environmental non-profit Earthworks. “The decision to double down on fossil fuels doubles down on disaster—for people impacted by pollution, for the climate, and for our global politics.”
Policy could be shaped to encourage the green transition, with experts proposing a wide variety of schemes.
Rosenow called for governments to reform tax structures. “Right now, electricity bears a disproportionate share of energy taxes in most countries, making it artificially expensive relative to gas,” he said. It’s a widely discussed idea in Europe.
Gregor Semieniuk, a public policy and economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said officials should impose a windfall tax on oil and gas companies amid the war.
“By taxing away excess profit—a windfall from war, rather than business acumen—governments can signal to financial investors and the industry itself that it’s not so extraordinarily profitable, and put less pressure on expanding production,” he said.
Governments could also subsidize materials like aluminum specifically for the buildout of renewables, he said. This could be difficult in the short term, but officials should take the opportunity to engage in “careful study” to see how to do so without “causing undue disruption,” said Semieniuk.
Officials could also work to ensure interest rates don’t go up too high, potentially by imposing strategic short-term price controls, said Semieniuk. But the best thing, he said, would be to end the disruptions outright.
“The most important policy is to end the conflict,” he said.
Pagel said governments should also end fossil fuel subsidies and force polluters to pay for their pollution.
“We need to build in human rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, and environmental responsibility at every step,” she said. “The tools exist. What we need is the will to use them.”
Though the war is creating incentives to boost fossil fuels, doing so would be shortsighted, said Kingsmill Bond, a strategist for the energy thinktank Ember.
“This is the first oil shock in history where oil faces a superior alternative. Solar, wind and EV are cheaper, local, faster to deploy, and huge,” he said. “They were winning even before the crisis, and this just galvanizes change.”
2026-03-27 05:53:16
It’s 6:15 a.m. on Wednesday, March 18, and I’m being driven to Los Angeles International Airport by a loved one. The freeway is congested—traffic unrelenting. I bring out my phone to check my messages and am stunned to discover the New York Times’ investigation into the allegations of sexual abuse by multiple women at the hands of United Farm Workers co-founder Cesar Chavez. I tense up remembering that my loved one has suffered sexual abuse at the hands of family members. I’m reluctant to talk to her about the reporting. “Read it out loud,” she says defiantly.
For the next hour and 15 minutes of LA traffic, I find myself awkwardly reading the shocking report out loud, occasionally pausing so that she can catch her breath. After reading that Chavez raped children, I, too, need to catch my breath.
Pain, anger, and betrayal burn through me as I finish the story. I want to talk through what I’m feeling. Not surprisingly, my loved one processes in silence, not unlike the women Chavez abused.
Cesar Chavez was never a squeaky-clean movement leader. I was once undocumented and I grew up knowing he hated the likes of us (“wetbacks” and “illegals,” he called us). I looked past this because I felt U.S. Latinos needed a Mexican American leader to look up to. But the rape of women and children is not something any of us can look past.
I often speak to high school and college classes, and when I ask young people what they know about Cesar Chavez, some identify him as a labor leader while others think he was a boxer, and a few even think he was a revolutionary akin to Che Guevara. Ironic, if you consider that Che Guevara, much like Chavez, was better at revolutions than he was at governing.
According to Miriam Pawel’s The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement, Chavez’s lack of interest in establishing a well-run union was the main factor in the United Farm Workers weakening over time. Chavez saw how the 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which offered guarantees for union organizing, would shift the core work of the UFW from protest to administration, and he was not interested. Like Guevara, he was more interested in toppling institutions than in governing them.
The way Latino communities are rallying around the women who were raped and abused by Chavez should serve as an example to the nation for how to handle men who commit such crimes.
Records from those early days show that Chavez’s leadership relied on a kind of cultlike group therapy, known as the Game, which he borrowed from Synanon, the notoriously violent and controlling cult of the 1970s. (You can listen to “American Rehab,” our three-part investigation of Synanon and the rehab industry it spawned, here.) As author Jeffrey W. Rubin wrote for Dissent, “Playing the Game, a harsh variant of the encounter group therapies popular in the 1970s, participants ganged up verbally and emotionally against one member, hurling brutal insults and criticisms, ostensibly with the goal of strengthening the group. By mid-1977, the Game was played weekly at La Paz [the UFW headquarters], and almost everyone there joined in, along with union staff from around the state.” This toxic nature of his management led to the exodus to some of the brightest leaders in the movement.
The way the U.S. Latino community is rallying around the women who were raped and abused by Chavez should serve as an example to the nation for how to handle men who commit such crimes. No man is greater than a movement, and I include our founding fathers, who owned slaves, and Donald Trump, who for some ungodly reason continues to protect pedophiles on the Epstein list.
Chavez was a hero to many of us, yet the cruelty of our current president can be found in his cruelty. How he didn’t allow dissent in the ranks. How he demanded absolute loyalty. The way he assumed the movement was him, and vice versa. It is well documented that Chavez insisted on sacrifice and total commitment from the people within the movement. That’s how he kept power, and as we all know, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
As we begin to tear down statues of Cesar Chavez in our public squares, let us also tear down the statues of the Confederates who committed treason against our country. Only then can we begin to imagine a better nation. One where our statues, streets, and holidays are equally named after women—the founding mothers, long unsung and forgotten, but always the backbone of every movement.
As we continue to reckon with Chavez’s legacy, we must highlight the survivors, not just the perpetrator. So when it comes to that list of women and girls who process in silence, it’s important we do what my loved one told me to do that Wednesday morning: “Read it out loud.”
Ana Murguia. Debra Rojas. Dolores Huerta. Let’s put their names on some of those streets and squares.
Rafael Agustin, a member of Mother Jones’ board of directors, was a writer on the award-winning CW show Jane the Virgin and is the author of the bestselling memoir Illegally Yours and a producer of the new documentary Los Lobos: Native Sons.
2026-03-27 05:39:47
The first thing you notice when you enter Sherman Austin’s Long Beach, California, apartment is the sounds. His cellphone buzzes constantly, mostly notifications requiring his attention from StopICE.net, a crowdsourced nationwide alert system he developed to let users know when federal immigration officers are nearby. Then there are the beeps. Follow them and they’ll lead you to Austin’s cramped bedroom, where two large computer screens sit inches from his bed. On one, columns of characters scroll continuously, Matrix-style, tracking traffic and potential attacks on a server he uses for StopICE. The beeps come from the other, which displays security camera feeds outside his apartment. Every time a camera spots a potential intruder, it issues a series of loud beeps. It beeps a lot.
Threats come in two main varieties. The first are promises to hurt or kill Austin himself. “You’re [sic] last days are coming close,” read one February email. A recent commenter on Austin’s Facebook wrote, “You’re just lucky I am out of the US at the moment and it would take me 10+ hours to get there, or I would have already slit your throat in front of your loved ones.”
Austin, who has a long history in activism for which he spent nearly a year in federal prison in the 2000s, isn’t particularly rattled by these messages. “Most are just talk,” he says. But the other type of threat feels far less nebulous. Austin believes it’s only a matter of time before he looks at his security monitors and sees federal agents crouching outside his door.
“I’m not doing anything illegal, but we all know how these things go,” he says. “They look for people to make an example of.”
Austin, 43, is slim and lithe, with a patchy beard covering his angular face. Today, a cold rainy one in February, he’s wearing a gray-checked flannel and has his long dreadlocks partially tucked under a black baseball cap bearing a picture of a black panther. Despite his radical pedigree and a sideline as a competitive boxer—he turned pro in his mid-30s for six featherweight bouts—he’s an unassuming presence.
A set designer could not improve on his apartment’s vibe. The walls are adorned with an electric guitar, boxing gloves, a Malcolm X photo, and a map of tribal lands in the American Southwest. Much of the furniture is handmade. On one shelf are drills he uses doing contract electrical work. On another is a Rubik’s Cube, a xylophone, and three dozen books, including W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, and the SAS Ultimate Guide to Combat.
Austin launched StopICE in February 2025, one of a constellation of digital tools that emerged in response to federal agents terrorizing communities. Users can text in sightings of ICE, which are then blasted out to other nearby users. This is legal: “Reporting on the activities of law enforcement is fully protected by the Constitution,” says Eric Goldman, who co-directs the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “If the government is doing something in a public space, we’re allowed to report it, monitor it, catalog it, complain about it, protest it.”
Nevertheless, the Trump administration has declared war on ICE-spotting apps. In June, the agency’s acting director, Todd Lyons, accused one app, ICEBlock, of painting “a target on federal law enforcement officers’ backs” and contributing to a “500% increase in assaults” against them. Pressure from the administration prompted Apple and Google to remove the app and others like it, including Red Dot and Deicer, from their app stores in October. That same month, Facebook suspended an ICE watch group in Chicago.
Austin saw this crackdown coming. It’s why he designed StopICE as a text-based web service, not a downloadable app, which meant it survived this purge. “I built it this way for a reason,” he says. “I knew DOJ and DHS was going to pressure service providers to remove the apps.”
But StopICE’s survival means that Austin is under more scrutiny than ever. In September, the Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed Meta to turn over account information related to StopICE’s Instagram page. Austin challenged the subpoena, and it was ultimately withdrawn. But Austin sees traffic daily on StopICE from DHS-owned IP addresses. He suspects Customs and Border Protection agents were behind an attempted attack on StopICE’s main server in January. He believes one of them sent an ominous DM recently—“We’re coming for you. Tracking your every move”—which he traced to an agent whose Instagram bio included “1488 SS,” clear neo-Nazi symbology; CBP did not respond to a request for comment.
“Things have gotten to where people have wanted me not to stay here because there’s so many threats coming in,” Austin says. “But they’re not running me out of my own block.”
As StopICE expands—it now has more than half a million subscribers—Austin is dealing with the kind of growing pains many tech platforms face. He’s constantly adding features and fending off hackers, but doing it almost entirely himself, for no money, in this tiny apartment. Whereas many doing such work closely guard their identity, Austin is adamant that, in contrast with the masked agents he’s alerting people about, he has nothing to hide.
“The government’s narrative is, ‘We’ve got to track these people down who are building these apps, interfering with federal agents, trying not to be caught,’” he says. “My response is: ‘I’m right here. You have my name. You know where I live. If you want to do something, come do it.’”
Heavily armed federal agents have shown up on his doorstep before. On January 24, 2002, when he was 18 and still living in his mother’s house in Sherman Oaks, his twin sister woke him from a nap to tell him there were suspicious-looking vehicles outside. When he went to the door, two FBI agents pulled him through as more agents emerged from the bushes. He wasn’t surprised.
Austin was already a gifted programmer and a committed anarchist. At 16, he’d launched RaisetheFist.com, which ran stories about Mexico’s Zapatista uprising and anti-capitalist protests in the Pacific Northwest. The site became an organizing hub that also hosted other similarly minded websites on its platform.
“It promoted the idea of taking direct action, whether through nonviolent protests, civil disobedience, or promoting self-defense,” Austin says. RaisetheFist.com became popular enough to draw attention from federal agents. “I’d log connections that would come in from the FBI, the Defense Department, and other government agencies.”
The day the FBI stormed his mom’s home was not his first tangle with the law. Austin hoists his right pant leg to show me several scars on his calf, remnants of an encounter with Long Beach police during a chaotic 2001 May Day protest. “I got shot in the leg,” he says. “It was a rubber shell packed into a shotgun.” He runs his finger over the largest mark. “They couldn’t take this one out in the hospital. It was too close to the bone.”
After 9/11, law enforcement’s interest in RaisetheFist.com intensified. The FBI began intercepting all data crossing his DSL line, gaining access to his AOL Instant Messenger account. Unmarked cars parked outside his house, then quickly drove away when he got home, Austin says. When the FBI eventually raided his home, special agents confiscated Austin’s computers and questioned him for hours but didn’t arrest him. The following week, he drove to New York to protest the World Economic Forum. There, he was arrested by the NYPD, interrogated, released, then immediately rearrested by the FBI, which held him in solitary confinement for more than a week.
“They put me on a cellblock with two people supposedly involved in al-Qaeda,” he says. “One was convicted of the USS Cole bombing and one of bombing the US Embassy in Kenya. I was an 18-year-old kid who had a website.”
Austin was asked repeatedly about crude bombmaking instructions that appeared on a site RaisetheFist.com hosted. Austin hadn’t written them, and such material had previously been considered constitutionally protected speech. He was released and returned to California.
Austin’s case attracted attention from high-profile academic and activist figures like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha. But after federal prosecutors threatened a “terrorism enhancement” that could have added 20 years to any sentence, he pleaded guilty to distributing the bombmaking information. (Notably, the author of the material was never charged.) Prosecutors sought a four-month prison term, but the judge imposed a year. Austin served 11 months and later three years of probation, which barred him from using computers. Once his probation ended, he launched CopWatchLA.org, which collected civilian-submitted police complaints in a searchable database.
When Austin’s kids were born, he stepped back a bit from organizing, but President Donald Trump’s brutal immigration agenda drew him in again. “When I see people kidnapped by ICE, that affects me, because I know what it’s like to be kidnapped by federal agents,” he says. “It affects me physically, like a burning feeling in my stomach.” He worries about the potential impact on his family, but the price of inaction feels steeper. “My kids are teenagers now. I want to be that example to them that despite threats of retaliation and violence, you’ve still got to stand up and fight back.”
When I first spoke with Austin in early April 2025, StopICE had about 9,000 subscribers. After the LA crackdown, it had nearly 300,000. After Minneapolis, 500,000. Because StopICE is a crowdsourced platform, each new user makes it more useful, but there’s a catch. Every alert StopICE sends costs a fraction of a penny, but when alerts go to thousands of subscribers, those fractions add up. So far, it’s cost up to $8,000 or so a month, but as StopICE grows, expenses could rise exponentially.
Austin has raised about $48,000 via GoFundMe, but the budget is tight enough that he has to triage alerts. When one comes in that is vague, it will initially be pushed to only 30 percent of users in that area. If more information emerges, it is sent to more. This metering means some subscribers might not get a needed alert in a timely fashion, Austin acknowledges. “My goal is to continue to increase the capacity of alerts, but a lot of that comes down to resources,” he says.
Austin is the only full-time moderator checking submissions, and for the site’s first several months, no alerts went out until he’d personally reviewed them. He’s since automated some of the process and is working to onboard more human moderators. But StopICE is practically a full-time unpaid job. “He falls asleep on the computer,” says Coyotl Tezcatlipoca, who knows Austin through organizing and from playing in a band together since the two were teenagers. “Sometimes, he doesn’t eat. He’s consumed by it.”
When you subscribe to StopICE, the system asks only the area where you want alerts and the phone number to which to send them. You don’t have to provide any other identifying information. StopICE doesn’t track user locations either. This is intentional: If the government or anyone else accesses StopICE’s data, there’d be little to find.
Austin’s commitment to user privacy is another reason he doesn’t shield his own. He wants everyone to know the person behind StopICE is the same one who’s been challenging the federal government for most of his life. “We really can’t trust the information that comes from the apps. But I know Sherman personally, so I trust him,” says Ron Gochez, leader of Unión del Barrio, which runs patrols monitoring immigration agents in Southern California. “I’m glad people like him, trusted members of the community, are doing that work.”
Recently, Austin has added several new functions, including a database of vehicle license plates used for immigration enforcement and a way for users to get alerts via Signal. But because StopICE doesn’t collect user data, measuring effectiveness is tricky. There are no real metrics for deportations averted or immigrants able to go to work without fear.
“People keep telling me it’s an important tool they rely on, whether it’s rapid response groups or just to know what’s going on in the neighborhood,” he says. “Sometimes behind the computer, you’re disconnected from the fact people are using this to help keep each other safe.”
Sitting in his apartment, he told me he sometimes imagines the pretext the FBI might one day use to justify kicking in his door. It goes something like this: A StopICE user sends an alert containing an exhortation to do something illegal, like damage ICE vehicles or attack agents, which slips by the auto moderators and goes to subscribers. According to Lauren Regan, founder and senior staff attorney at the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which represents Austin, whether StopICE would be liable for distributing this kind of information isn’t clear. Social media companies typically aren’t. But Austin isn’t a billionaire with a fleet of lawyers.
“The current test for where the line is drawn between free speech and true threats is whether an individual is named so they’d reasonably be in fear,” she says. “There’s a line between spicy rhetoric and true threat. So there are protections available for rich guys like Mark Zuckerberg. We’d certainly attempt to apply those to Sherman.”
Does Austin find it ironic that the scenarios he worries about so closely mirror what already sent him to federal prison? “Yeah, it brings back a lot of memories,” he says. “When I see them saying, ‘If you track or criticize ICE agents, you’re a domestic terrorist,’ that was the same sentiment when they came after me with RaisetheFist.”
“I’m not looking to get arrested,” he says, nodding toward his front door. “I’m not looking for conflict, but I know conflict is inevitable. To me, what’s more important is being in a fight and using my skill set to contribute something to that fight. Then whatever is going to happen, it’s going to happen.”
2026-03-26 23:09:25
Democrats on Wednesday denounced a massive contract that the Homeland Security Department handed to a company owned by a financial supporter of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem as an example of what they called rampant corruption under President Donald Trump.
DHS last May awarded Salus Worldwide Solutions a contract worth up $915 million to provide flights out of the country for undocumented immigrants under a self-deportation program set up by the Trump administration. As Mother Jones has reported, Salus had limited prior federal contracting experience but won the business following extensive contacts with top department officials. A DHS contracting officer acknowledged the situation created “an appearance of favoritism,” according to a court document. Salus is owned by a former State Department official who in October 2024 gave $10,000 to a political action committee that supports Noem.
“The web of corruption here will take us some time to fully unpack,” Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) said Wednesday at an unofficial hearing held by House Homeland Security Committee Democrats.
Magaziner and other Democrats also pointed to a $220 million ad campaign Noem launched last year. The ads, crafted in part by firms with close ties to the former secretary and to her adviser Corey Lewandowski, were nominally aimed at urging immigrants to self-deport. But they also appeared intended to promote Noem herself, complete with a now infamous spot featuring the former secretary on a horse. CNN recently reported that the department paid $20,000 to rent the horse for Noem. The DHS inspector general has reportedly launched an investigation into that ad campaign.
Additionally, lawmakers cited an NBC News report alleging that Lewandowksi requested that companies seeking DHS contracts pay him, or hire people associated with him. A Lewandowski representative has called those accusations “absolutely false.”
The so-called shadow hearing Wednesday was part of a broad effort by congressional Democrats to trumpet plans to commence aggressive oversight of DHS and federal contractors should they take control of one or both congressional chambers next year—and regain the subpoena power that Republicans are largely unwilling to use to scrutinize the Trump administration.
“We want to assure the public that at some point there will have to be a reckoning for a lot of the contracts and other things that we question,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee’s ranking member, said Wednesday. “We plan to put as many people on notice as possible that the committee in due time will look at it.”
Noem’s rocky tenure at DHS is ending this week with the confirmation of former Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) to lead the department. But Democratic lawmakers have said they still plan to scrutinize Noem’s role in federal contracts as well as that of Lewandowski, who is expected to give up his role as special government employee.
One Wednesday, Sens. Adam Schiff (Calif.), Peter Welch (Vt.), and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), the top Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, asked federal contractors including Salus to preserve communications with Lewandowski and with people and firms working with him.
Elsewhere in Congress, House Judiciary Committee Democrats unsuccessfully urged that panel’s chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), to subpoena Lewandowski over this role in DHS contracting. House Oversight Committee Democrats have launched their own investigation into the former Trump campaign aide.
Democrats have denounced what they call the unprecedented corruption unleashed by the president and his family, whose personal wealth has skyrocketed since Trump retook office. In previously unimaginable ways, the Trumps have accepted money from people hoping to influence federal policy, including secretive investments by foreign interests in Trump family companies.
The contracting scandals involving DHS, by contrast, involve allegations of fairly traditional graft that would have been understandable to “boss” William Tweed of Tammany Hall. NBC News’ report last week included an allegation that an official at a firm seeking a subcontract under Salus Worldwide was pressured by someone at that company to hire “one of several consulting firms tied to Lewandowski.”
“I’m not a lawyer, but this sounds illegal to me,” Magaziner said Wednesday.
Lewandowski has denied this claim, and an attorney for Salus told NBC that the account was “entirely false” and that the company “would never entertain this type of arrangement.” Mother Jones has not independently confirmed these allegations.
Mother Jones and the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, have reported that Salus Worldwide won its $915 million contract with DHS after extensive contacts between the company and DHS officials. A contracting officer at DHS, according to a court document, found that Salus “appeared” to shape the government’s requirements for the contract that the firm was trying to win. The court filing by DHS disclosed that the same officer found that DHS officials had “shared high-level budget and task information with Salus that was not available to the public,” contributing to “an appearance of favoritism toward Salus.”
But the agency waived restrictions meant to prevent conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety, citing factors including the contract’s supposed urgency and “national security considerations.” And after a limited two-day competition, Salus received the massive contract.
Mother Jones and POGO have also reported that Salus’ owner, William Walters— who donated $10,000 to a political action committee backing Noem in 2024—is closely linked to other firms that are selling airplanes to DHS, including a luxury 737 with private bedrooms that was reputedly used by Lewandowski and Noem.
At Wednesday’s shadow hearing, Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the director of government affairs at POGO, argued that problems with large contracts on the scale of the one held by Salus can occur via subcontracts that firms give to other companies. Those subcontracts are subject to laxer regulation and fewer disclosure requirements than the primary contractors, he said.
Hedtler-Gaudette said there are indications Salus is awarding subcontract work to firms connected to Salus itself. “We are seeing potentially what looks like a shell game of a company and then a number of smaller companies that are linked to that company in some way,” he said.
Committee members said they would come back to the issue. “We’ll go forward in due time holding this administration accountable for this egregious waste of taxpayers’ money,” Thompson said.
Correction, March 26: A previous version of this story misattributed a statement made by Rep. Seth Magaziner.
2026-03-26 19:30:00
In 1981, Congress amended the Social Security Act to help millions of disabled people and older adults move out of institutions. Through home and community-based services (HCBS) waivers, some 7 million Medicaid recipients now receive support that lets them stay in their communities. But after years of neglect under both parties, experts fear that sweeping cuts to both Medicaid and FEMA—especially under the GOP’s most recent budget bill—may be the final straw for the often small, privatized, and budget-strapped providers behind that care.
That’s especially true as heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires and other climate events ramp up globally: almost a tenth of Medicaid recipients rely on HCBS, many in climate disaster–prone areas that have been targeted by the Trump administration for cuts. The administration’s attacks on Medicaid-based home care have focused on states like with Democratic governors like New York, California, Minnesota and Maine, all of which face risks from extreme weather—but almost all states are expected to cut home care funding as a result of federal Medicaid cuts.
HCBS providers, which range from smaller nonprofits to large, private equity–backed organizations, are essentially the coordinators of many Medicaid recipients’ independent living. Few have the flexibility to pour more funds into advance planning for growing risks like fires, floods, and hurricanes—a role that FEMA would once have done more to shoulder.
But the Trump administration has moved to, in effect, dismantle the agency, rolling back key services like FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program and moving to lay off thousands of workers (a plan that was put on hold), including those who could coordinate with home care providers for contingency planning.
That’s made clear to health care providers that their patients will shoulder even more of the risk in climate emergencies—as in Oregon, where FEMA sought to roll back a $14 million grant to a hospital for a tsunami shelter, KFF Health News reported.
“Oregon needs more shelters like the one that Columbia Memorial is building, emergency managers say,” reporters Hannah Norman and Daniel Chang wrote. “Hospitals in the region are likely to incur serious damage, if not ruin, and could take more than three years to fully recover in the event of a major earthquake and tsunami.”
Almost 200 hospitals across the country face similar risks, according to another KFF Health News report. But HCBS providers are generally smaller, less resourced, and even more widely geographically dispersed than hospitals, compounding both the risks and the resources needed to address them. They face emergency situations more frequently than in previous decades, depending on their locations, and more than other providers, HCBS providers face special challenges in getting reimbursed for the additional work and expenses that they contend with after emergencies, including those caused by climate change.
“Most states have some sort of individualized service plan, or a person-centered plan, which is approved in advance, and then the reimbursement is tied to the services that are outlined in the plan,” said Kim Musheno, The Arc’s senior director of Medicaid policy. “The payment model is just not designed for a sudden demand or to pay for services that are outside of that approved plan.”
“Until we get serious about ending the bias in institutionalization, hoping that home and community-based services are going to adequately meet the potential safety issues that come with increases in extreme weather….we’re doing the absolute opposite of what’s needed,” said Marcie Roth, the chair of the National Advisory Committee on Individuals with Disabilities and Disasters and a senior advisor to FEMA under the Obama administration.
Some states are more prepared than others: In California, for instance, regional centers under the state’s Department of Developmental Services coordinate with HCBS providers in their area during wildfires. Several have made permanent modifications to their HCBS waiver program to acknowledge the devastating risk of increasing extreme heat events: seven states, including California and Texas, cover air conditioning costs. And states can apply for broad federal waivers for more budgetary flexibility around climate disasters, which they could in theory pass on to providers—but with states also facing a major public health budget crunch driven by federal cuts, those concessions may not be much comfort.
Federal infrastructure around in-home care, especially in disasters, was already lacking, Roth said—and under the Trump administration, she added, it’s heading backwards. Roth, who is also executive director and CEO of the World Institute on Disability, told me that HCBS workers generally do not have the federal-to-local support that they need when climate disasters do happen.
“I don’t see any efforts in which people who are paid to support people with disabilities have the support that they need so that they can come to work,” Roth said. Home care workers face the brunt of the impact of cuts, which leave them struggling to secure livable wages or support for expenses like transportation in hazardous weather. According to KFF, more than half of employees providing direct home care for those on HCBS waivers across 34 states make less than $20 an hour, rendering many home care jobs unappealing and understaffed.
Brian Ketay runs ICL Texas, a network of smaller homes for disabled people in South Texas, where the cost of a climate event that involves evacuations—generally to hotels—could run into the tens of thousands of dollars, he told me. Medicaid recipients “have increased staffing needs” in disasters, Ketay said, which cuts into funds that could otherwise go to wages and benefits.
In Louisiana, which is grappling with even more frequent and severe hurricanes, HCBS providers can face 16-hour work days on phone calls, ensuring Medicaid recipients’ safety and trying to coordinate evacuations. Erica Smith Buchanan, the executive director at a large HCBS provider in the state, says some staff have quit due to the intensity during hurricane season.
“We are not very good at the state emergency planning level, including around climate and thinking about planning for disabled people of all ages,” said Alison Barkoff, the director of George Washington University’s Hirsh Health Law & Policy Program and a former senior official in the federal Administration for Community Living during the Biden administration.
In some cases, as during the height of the Covid pandemic, those failures have pushed people back into better-staffed—but more restrictive—institutions. Roth said she advised the Department of Health and Human Services to close these gaps under the Biden administration. It didn’t happen.
“We are certainly no better off, and probably a whole lot worse off…because of our failure to ensure that federal funds are being spent in ways that actually do support communities, to support the people,” Roth said.
