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2026-02-28 04:51:09

Avery Rowland starts almost all of her days by posting a TikTok video beginning with “good morning” and, often, explaining the latest anti-transgender action from her state’s Republican supermajority. 

“Today is a rough day here in Kansas,” Rowland, who grew up in the state and is now running for a state representative seat, began her TikTok on Thursday. “My license got invalidated.” 

Rowland is one of the hundreds of transgender Kansans now tasked with replacing their driver’s licenses after a new state law went into effect this week that invalidates preexisting IDs with gender markers that do not match someone’s sex assigned at birth. The law applies to new IDs moving forward, too. It also invalidates the birth certificates of people who changed the document’s gender marker. If a driver is caught on the road with an old ID, they’ll be required to surrender it. In Kansas, driving without a license could result in fines and, in specific cases, end in jail time.

The new law, known as SB 244, also mandates people entering government-owned buildings to use the restrooms, showers, and locker rooms that correspond with sex assigned at birth. In an escalation from some other state laws, it deputizes people to accuse others, allowing anyone to claim someone used the restroom not allowed under the law and sue for damages of $1,000. Two transgender Kansans sued to strike down the law and pause the state’s enforcement on Friday.

“The persecution is the point,” Rep. Abi Boatman, a Wichita Democrat and the only transgender member of the legislature, told The Kansas City Star. Boatman, like other Kansans who had changed a gender marker on their identification, received a letter in the mail this week noting that their license would be invalid. The law doesn’t include a grace period for changing IDs and also doesn’t provide funding, forcing individuals to pay the cost of the new driver’s license.

The law was rushed. Republicans used a “gut and go” maneuver. Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the bill, but the legislature quickly overrode the decision. 

“They want me to hide or leave or disappear, not to be visible and active in public society,” Rowland told me. She’s running in this year’s midterm for the Kansas House of Representatives to represent District 2 as a Democrat.

I spoke with Rowland about the law and going toe-to-toe with the state’s Republican lawmakers. 

Could you walk me through this morning?

My work is a 25 mile commute, so I didn’t feel comfortable driving without a valid license. I went to the county courthouse because it was only a mile drive, and I felt I could do that safely. 

I went in and I pulled some shenanigans. I looked up yesterday what is needed for a lost driver’s license, which was two proofs of ID and proof of residency. I talked to the clerk, a very kind, nice young lady, and I said, ‘I lost my license. I misplaced it, I need to replace it.’ And she did the whole thing, took a picture, and handed me a brand new paper printout license and it said female. And I thought, ‘hmm interesting.’ Then I pulled out the letter from my purse that says, ‘Avery Rowland, your valid license has been invalidated.’ I played kind of dumb, saying, ‘I don’t quite know what it means. What do I need to do?’

She looked at it, and she had no clue what to do. So she had to go call the state office, and then they changed it on their side in the computer from female to male, and then reprinted it. She was confused when I handed her the letter, because my passport says female, I very much look like a female, because I am a woman. It’s confusing.

Have legislators done a good enough job at informing their constituents that their IDs have been invalidated?

We are a Republican supermajority. So unless you live in a Democrat district, what do they give a shit about telling you that your license is invalidated? They obviously didn’t care enough to stop this legislation. I don’t expect a single peep out of it, other than ‘We’re keeping men out of the women’s restroom!’ from the Republicans. ‘Yay! We won! We kept the men out!’ I don’t expect a single word of ‘Hey, this is what you need to do.’ 

You’re not expecting a ‘Know Your Rights’ infographic.

Hell no. 

This law also includes imposing these new limits on bathroom access.

The bathroom bounties. That’s a huge one that scares a lot of people. It’s not just the ideas. This is the fact that you can get a fine and be arrested for using the restroom, and people can sue. Nobody in Kansas knows how it’s going to be enforced. 

Do you expect to see, as we’ve seen elsewhere, situations where people are asked to ‘prove’ which bathroom they can go to?

I think a lot of people will not comply with the law. If you pass, you’re going to use the restroom you’re going to use. But, there will be malicious compliance. And Kansas is a right to carry state. Kansas is a stand your ground state. So who knows what’s going to happen. 

Are you scared? 

Am I scared for myself? No.

Are you scared for others? 

I’m scared for the gender nonconforming college kids, the teenagers and the adults who will never pass as cis without lots and lots of surgery, the folks who are obviously trans. Because trans is beautiful and you should have the right to live openly and authentically. And those people are being denied that. I’m being denied that as well, but we all are. 

How much of your decision to run for office was based in this increasingly hostile environment for trans people in your state?

Essentially all of it. I’ve known since I was a little kid that I wanted to be a legislator of some sort. I got to visit Washington, DC, as a kid and I thought ‘Oh, this would be so cool to speak for people.’ It’s not just running for me, it’s for marginalized Kansans. Right now, I work for the state. I do food stamp processing. I work with the poorest of the poor. It’s about helping everybody. Kansas came into the Union as a free state 165 years ago and we should be a free state for everybody, not just cishet white Republican men.

This law doesn’t just impact IDs going forward, as some other states have done, but reverses validity of current documentation. What do you make of this escalation?

They have nothing. The Republicans have nothing. They cannot legislate, they cannot lead, they cannot govern. All they have are societal issues that they think are a wedge and that that’s what they go after because they have nothing of substance. Because transgender folks are approximately 1 percent of the population, who’s going to miss us?

The Kansas GOP is just running roughshod: move fast and break stuff. They’re going just as fast as they can and ramming terrible bills through the state, and a lot of it’s performative, and this feels very much performative, because I imagine most of them don’t really care. 

I don’t expect more transgender legislation this session. I do expect other states to go. ‘Hey, look what Kansas did.’ Now, there’ll be lawsuits. There’ll be lawsuits out the wazoo in Kansas and all the way up to the federal level.

There’s a general sense of confusion. It’s enacted; it’s rolled back; it’s going to this court. Maybe for a little bit, it’ll be allowed, but then who knows. What impact does this confusion have on Kansans?

It causes so much stress and anxiety of not knowing what’s going to happen—the turmoil of being in a whirlwind, in a Kansas tornado. Really, none of it matters. We’re trying to sort the fly shit from the pepper. It just blends in. You got to keep your eye on the prize and a bigger goal of freedom for everybody.

Can you tell me about choosing to stay?

The morning after Trump got elected the second time, we looked at all our options. We have enough privilege that we could leave if we wanted to. It wouldn’t be nice or fun, but we could get out. I said, ‘No.’ My wife desperately wanted to leave, still does. She’s not happy with me. But no, I want to fight for Kansas. I want to fight for the rights of queer people. If I weren’t staying to fight for that, I would go somewhere safe.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.     

2026-02-28 04:19:34

Word of the Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson’s death last week transported me back to the summer of 1987, when I was the editor of Mother Jones, and met him in person for the first time at the start of his second campaign for the presidency. One of his generation’s greatest orators, he blended Bible verses and calls for social justice like Dr. King. Invocations of self-affirmation, though, were distinctly Jesse. On Sesame Street he once taught a multiracial group of children to shout: “I AM SOMEBODY.” The son of an impoverished single mother from South Carolina, Jackson was a key figure in the struggle for racial equality by the time he was 23. Two decades later, he turned that slogan on himself by launching an improbable bid to run the country.

If you’d seen him thundering before massive crowds on television or in person during the ’60s and ’70s, as I had, you never forgot his booming baritone and rhythmic wordplay. So when I met him at his headquarters on the South Side of Chicago, Jackson was a familiar figure. At 6’4”, he towered over me, with the bruiser build of his father, a onetime boxer, and broad shoulders of the football player he’d been in college. That was the first impression—larger than life—no surprise. But the sound of his offstage voice was muted and even whispery, hard for my tape recorder to pick up. He was blunt about the business at hand. “What are we doing?” he rasped.

Related

Read Foster's 1987 cover story, "He Thinks He Can Win"

In the weeks ahead, Jackson would prove the most challenging subject for a profile I ever encountered. He had a skeptical squint and used it strategically, with long pauses and silence that telegraphed he wasn’t yet sure this interlocutor was worth his trouble. “That’s not fair! That’s not fair!” he grumbled when pressed on the wisdom of attacking the very media companies whose airwaves he needed to carry his campaign message to voters. “I have an analysis of the role the media play in the power structure of this country. Our press is privately owned by wealthy people who have substantial investments in the world economy. And they have power without accountability. Any publisher can make a political judgment and unleash the hounds. That power is real.” When I asked another question he didn’t like on our way to the airport, he began his reply, took a catnap midway, and roused himself at the terminal to finish—less gruff, without ever losing the thread. As we spent more time together—in town cars; on a flight from San Francisco to New York; and at many events—he seemed to unwrap himself, layer by layer, a little like the pastor portrayed in Purpose, the Pulitzer Prize–winning play more than loosely based on his sometimes tumultuous family life.

Jackson wasn’t the first Black person to mount a nationwide campaign for president. Shirley Chisholm, bold and brilliant, ran for the Democratic nomination in 1972. In 1984, he’d upped the ante, though, earning about 3.3 million votes, nearly one-in-five Democratic primary voters. He outlasted five famous officeholders, including a former nominee for president; an astronaut who became a senator from Ohio; the former governor of Florida; a well-known senator from South Carolina; and Sen. Alan Cranston, a political powerhouse from California. Former Vice President Walter Mondale won the nomination, but got flattened by President Ronald Reagan’s reelection apparatus in the general election.

It still irritated Jackson four years later that his first run should be referred to as a failure, just as he would bristle years later that his second run was also dismissed as a “failed campaign.” The biggest challenge he faced was turning an audacious move into something perceived as plausible. He had never been elected to anything before. (This was Before Times, when a candidate for president thought experience in public office mattered.) With just one Black senator out of 100, the field remained tilted against the very notion of Black eligibility for generations. (Four decades later there are five.) The first primary of the season, then, took place in the realm of the imagination.

Against that backdrop, coverage of his second campaign orbited around speculation about his underlying motivations. Headlines for stories ran along these lines: 

JESSE JACKSON
“What Does He Really Want?”

That was the headline we also used at Mother Jones when we put the accompanying story on the cover. “To win,” he kept repeating at campaign events. “Not as in place well, not as in good showing, not as in making a difference! Not nothing like that! As in win. We can win!” He knew his job as a candidate was to deny any doubts, but of course he carried them. Even one of his friends considered the presidential run a vanity project, telling Jackson he had zero chance. (He predicted, accurately, that all the other candidates would coalesce around an elected officeholder when they dropped out.) 

His status as a celebrity proved doubled-edged. Jackson drew high-wattage attention, which kept an underfunded campaign in the news, but celebrity treatment also yielded superficial coverage. On the flight, I watched this dynamic play out, listening as Jackson and his top aide labored over a major address he would give the next day. That speech heralded a set of detailed proposals he called “New Internationalism.” It was anti-protectionist and pro-worker, calling for a new global effort to prevent union-busting worldwide and to punish corporations for divesting in the U.S. He favored a nuclear freeze; reversal of Reagan’s tax cuts for the top 10 percent; revival of New Deal–era Public Works Administration and farm programs; reparations for slavery; a single-payer health care system; a 15 percent cut in military spending; ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment; and establishment of a Palestinian state—proposals that also proved ahead of their time.

After his powerful address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People convention, he looked spent but reassured that he’d made clear his candidacy was no vanity project. Early the following morning, though, Jackson looked low ebb. A story about Sen. Joe Biden, one of his early primary adversaries, was on the front page of the New York Times and a shorter piece about his appearance at the NAACP convention was buried deep inside the paper. “I gave a major address about the uneven playing field that American workers are forced to play on, caused because multinational corporations have incentives to move capital abroad and no incentives to reinvest, redevelop and retrain workers,” he pointed out. “Yet the coverage was: ‘He came, they cheered, they sang, they prayed, he got rousing applause.’” That experience only deepened his skepticism about the willingness of journalists to treat him fairly.

“Why do you speak so much about the farm crisis?” I asked on the way back to the airport for his flight to Chicago. “Because I know that can turn its back on the family farmer, it’s open season on everybody,” he replied. That led to a kind of meditative free association about what had happened on the campaign trail so far. In Wisconsin, he mused, he’d seen posters for his campaign on porches where the Confederate flag also flew. I must have looked jolted, thinking of the physical attacks he and Dr. King withstood by people waving that flag. The sight of his own face beside the Confederate flag had not unsettled him. “A sense of gratification, a sense of vindication. A sense of joy,” Jackson explained. “To make progress we have to forgive each other, redeem each other, and focus on common ground.”

For a year he kept up the same kind of schedule and ended up earning nearly 7 million votes in 1988, more than twice what he achieved four years earlier, but short of the 8 million to 10 million votes he calculated he would need to become the nominee. His chief adversaries had been white men with distinguished careers in elected office—an eventual majority leader in the House of Representatives, three senators, and Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. (Dukakis was nominated but then lost in a rout to Vice President George H.W. Bush.) Jackson showed up at the nominating convention, looking buoyant and sounding like a victor. He closed his speech there by thundering: “We must never surrender. America will get better and better. Keep hope alive!”

Twenty years later, on election night in November 2008, we stood in Chicago’s Grant Park, waiting for the Obama family to appear so a newly elected president—the first Black chief executive—could claim his victory. Nearby, Reverend Jackson clutched a small American flag and wept unashamedly. Watching him, I was carried back to the weeks we spent together on the campaign trail in 1987. During our final conversation on the road, in an unusually guarded off-the-record moment, Jackson admitted: “I know what my job is. It’s to bang on the door. Kick at the door. Bang on the door harder and push harder still. Someday, someone else will walk through it.”

Many of his contemporaries preceded him in death, too many of them assassinated in their prime. It’s a little miracle that Jackson, the target of so many threats, managed to play such a pivotal role in politics through six decades and survived into his 80s. When I moved to Chicago 20 years ago, it was easy to find an aging Jesse Jackson. If you joined, or reported on, any protest about injustice, odds were that you would bump into him. A rare neurological disease called supranuclear palsy left him wobbly on his feet and nearly mute for years. Critics, as always, considered him a showboat addicted to the limelight. Who cares? He showed up over and over in the right places anyway, even when there was little coverage.

“He was the free-est Black man I ever met,” Deborah Douglas, a Chicago journalist and friend of the family, told me. “And he outlived so many who were gunning to take him down.” For that last decade of his life, Jackson no longer mesmerized crowds with his boyish baritone. Whispers faded to a distant mumble. He marched as far as he could each time, then stood at the edge of the crowd, looking as if he was holding auditions for a successor. Whenever some emerging talent launched into a particularly effective peroration, he marked it with a tight smile and quick nod. Jesse Louis Jackson, still somebody, could see there was a new generation stepping up to speak in his place.

2026-02-28 03:20:18

Donald Trump’s media corporation told investors on Friday that it is considering spinning off his Truth Social platform into its own company—a move that comes after years of struggling to make money from the business. The president founded Trump Media and Technology Group in 2021, portraying it as a giant-killer that would one day displace the major social media platforms, streaming platforms like Netflix, and Amazon’s AWS web hosting platform—all of which the then-former president declared to be too woke.

So far, the company has achieved none of those things and has instead bounced from investment idea to investment idea—stockpiling Bitcoin, launching MAGA-themed financial products, and even announcing plans to merge with a fusion energy company and beginning to build power plants. This month, the company’s share price has flirted with all-time lows.

Trump’s company is expected to announce it’s fourth quarter earnings soon. Judging from the numbers it produced through the first three quarters of last year, the results could be unimpressive. In September, Trump Media said that it had pulled in only about $2.6 million in revenue in the first nine months of the year. And this time last year, the company reported losing $400.9 million in 2024—it attributed those losses in part to difficulties in going public that it blamed on the Biden administration. Meanwhile, the company reported just $3.6 million in revenue for all of 2024. For context, a well-run McDonald’s franchise averages a roughly similar level of revenue.

These numbers are not totally surprising. The company’s core product—Truth Social—is almost entirely reliant on one super-user: the president. To say the platform is rarely used besides Trump’s postings is an understatement. Last May, the platform reportedly had just 359,000 active users. For comparison, X has roughly 600 million active users. Left-leaning social media startup BlueSky, often derided for its relatively small user base, has around 3.5 million active users.

Trump Media and Technology Group doesn’t have much else in the way of products, which is not the way things were supposed to go. When it launched in 2021, the founders imagined the company would have $1.8 billion in revenue by this point and 69 million active users on Truth Social. They also envisioned a streaming service to rival Netflix and Amazon Prime. The streaming platform does exist, but Truth+ hardly compares to its competitors. The content selection is anemic and largely consists of videos that are available for free elsewhere—the most-watched list on the platform recently included an Elon Musk hagiography and a documentary about the Illuminati, both of which are available on YouTube. In the original investment pitch, the streaming business was supposed to have more than 32 million users by now.

With the original plans seemingly not materializing, the company has attempted other strategies. Earlier this year, it announced it would begin accumulating bitcoin, in an attempt to build a “bitcoin treasury”—essentially tying part of the company’s value to the then-increasing value of bitcoin. After purchasing more than 11,000 bitcoins for a total of $1.2 billion in September, the company initially saw its investment pay off. The price of bitcoin rose, and the company’s stockpile at one point was worth roughly $173 million more than what it had paid. But the price of bitcoin began collapsing in the fall. Trump Media sold off some of its bitcoin in late December; the rest is now worth about $658 million—a loss of roughly $428 million.

Trump still owns approximately 59 percent the company—a stake worth about $1.63 billion. But on paper, at least, those shares were once worth a whole lot more. The company began its life on the stock market in 2021 with a share price of $10 but quickly soared to nearly $100, before falling precipitously. It rebounded to above $60 in March 2024, as Trump was campaigning for president. It is currently languishing below $11 per share, and briefly dipped under $10 several times in the past week.

So an investor who bought Trump Media when it launched and has hung onto the shares since then has, at best, broken even. Unless, that is, they were able to purchase shares at a discount. Trump received his shares for free, meaning that as long as the shares are worth anything, he’ll make a profit.

2026-02-28 02:15:00

This story is published in partnership with The Florida Trib.

In a small, piercingly bright room inside a state prison in northeast Florida, Frank Walls was strapped to a gurney and injected three times: first with a sedative meant to render him unconscious, then a paralytic to prevent any visible movement, and finally potassium acetate to induce cardiac arrest.

Walls’ execution on December 18, 2025, capped Florida’s deadliest year in modern history. With 19 executions last year, Florida more than doubled its own record, and put more people to death than Texas, Alabama, and South Carolina combined. This execution spree came even as Florida’s lethal injection protocol has come under scrutiny, prompting fears that those executed are at risk of complications and needless suffering. 

In his final appeal, Walls asked Florida to review its three-step protocol, arguing that the way the state’s been carrying out executions would violate his Eighth Amendment right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. His attorneys documented allegations that even though men in the death chamber couldn’t physically show the effects due to Florida’s three-drug protocol, some may have suffered and died with the feeling of drowning. And an analysis of court records, prison logs, redacted autopsy reports, and eyewitness testimonies by Mother Jones found documented issues in half the executions last year before Walls.

In at least nine executions from February to September 2025, there were signs of underdosings, the use of expired drugs, drug substitutions, or flaws in drug logs maintained by the Florida Department of Corrections. 

“Mr. Walls will die a needlessly cruel death if Florida insists on trying to kill him with Florida’s version of lethal injection,” wrote anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot, who met Walls at the Florida state prison five months before his execution, in an affidavit Walls’ defense team submitted to the District Court in Tallahassee. 

Autopsy results for Walls, who was sentenced to death for the 1987 killings of an Air Force airman and his girlfriend, have not yet been released. But Zivot feared the three-drug protocol could cause pulmonary edema, a condition that’s been found in previous autopsies of people executed by Florida, and which Zivot said causes “the terror that accompanies drowning and asphyxiation as they choke on their own blood.” 

The Florida Attorney General’s office didn’t dispute Walls’ assertion that he could experience the sensation of drowning and gasping for air after the second drug is injected. They called it “irrelevant.” 

The state has been similarly unmoved by problems in recent executions. 

In June 2025, logs included in a lawsuit showed that one man was executed with half of the required amount of paralytic, and another man didn’t receive a full dose of the drug meant to swiftly induce cardiac arrest. 

Florida Department of Corrections’ own records indicated that the execution team used expired sedatives in four deaths, raising concerns about the effectiveness of the drugs and the risk of complications, including severe pain. They also recorded the use of a local anaesthetic that’s not part of the state’s execution protocol, and listed dates for use of the drugs that don’t match execution dates. 

Each of these issues would violate Florida’s own protocol. Rather than order an investigation, the state’s governor and past presidential candidate, Republican Ron DeSantis, has already scheduled four executions this year.

The death penalty has waxed and waned in public opinion over the years, with botched executions, racial disparities, and wrongful convictions under scrutiny in recent years. Florida alone has seen at least 30 exonerations from its death row. 

But reviving the federal death penalty is a key tenet of President Donald Trump’s tough-on-crime agenda—and DeSantis has positioned Florida at the vanguard of the Trump-led Republican Party. His own political future is unclear after his failed presidential run, but he’s echoing loud and clear the president’s enthusiasm for harsh and swift executions. Florida is leading the death penalty’s resurgence.

“The exact reasons as to why DeSantis has chosen to ramp things up now—I don’t think we know,” said Hannah Gorman, who teaches death penalty law at the Florida International University’s College of Law.

But she said the pace of Florida’s executions have ramifications nationally and internationally. In 2025, executions in the U.S. nearly doubled, and 40% of them were in Florida alone. 

“Florida is an outlier in the U.S.,” said Gorman. “But this is also a massive message coming out of America.” 

DeSantis has issued death warrants for 32 people since he took office in 2019, and 250 people remain on Florida’s death row. 

DeSantis’s office didn’t respond to a list of questions by Mother Jones. But in November 2025, DeSantis said he was doing his “part to deliver justice” to victims’ families by executing those who have been on death row for decades. And the governor has unusually broad power to enact this penalty: he both sets execution dates and proceeds over the clemency hearings that could halt his own execution orders.

The last review of lethal injection protocol by the Department of Corrections Secretary Ricky Dixon was in February 2025, after the year’s executions had already begun. Dixon wrote in a letter to Gov. DeSantis that his department’s lethal injection procedure was in line with decency standards and “dignity of man.”  

“The foremost objective of the lethal injection process is a humane and dignified death,” Dixon wrote. “The process will not involve unnecessary lingering or the unnecessary or wanton infliction of pain and suffering.”

The one-page letter didn’t explain what Dixon’s review entailed, and the Florida Department of Corrections didn’t respond to questions about the review. 

A month after this letter was sent to Tallahassee, in March 2025, Florida executed Edward James. Prison drug logs disclosed in court records show James was given a local anesthetic—lidocaine—that’s not mentioned in the 14-page protocol signed off by Dixon. 

It’s unclear why that drug was administered or who authorized it. 

To Ron McAndrew, a former Florida State Prison warden who led Florida’s executions from 1996-98 and oversaw three electric chair executions, Florida ought to slow down and examine its protocol before executing anyone else. 

Now an anti-death penalty advocate, McAndrew’s concerns extend beyond procedure. He worries about the toll on staff. The ones doing the “dirty work.” 

McAndrew has overseen and witnessed executions gone wrong. He was in charge in 1997, when Pedro Medina’s head burst into flames on the electric chair. The former warden said he wouldn’t wish that on anyone, especially prison staff. 

“To put a warden and a death team through 19 executions in one year was a horrible thing for the Governor to do,” McAndrew said. “These are the people that are going to wake up screaming in the middle of the night. These are the people that are going to suffer for the rest of their lives because the people they have killed are going to come visiting with them on a regular basis. They’re going to sit on the edge of their bed at night and talk to them.” 

In the past, botched executions or deviations from established execution procedures have prompted death penalty states to pause. Under Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida prison officials botched a lethal injection in 2006, and Bush temporarily halted executions. In Oklahoma, Republican Gov. Mary Fallin had to delay executions twice, after the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in 2014 and again after the revelation that the state substituted a new drug to stop Charles Warner’s heart in 2015. Warner’s final words, the Associated Press reported, were: “My body is on fire.” A grand jury investigation found “negligence” and serious errors in the state’s executions. 

In 2022 in Tennessee, Republican Gov. Bill Lee paused all executions and sought an independent review of its execution protocol over concerns about independent testing of the lethal drugs. When the review ended in 2024, citing fewer opportunities for mistakes, Tennessee moved from a three-drug protocol to a single drug, as at least 1o other states and the federal system have now done.  

Florida has been using the same three-drug combination since 2017. Florida’s governor, however, is yet to announce any investigation into this method or its recent executions, let alone slow his pace in signing death warrants, despite repeated pleas and public accounts. 

In 2025 alone, media coverage described troubling scenes in at least three executions in Florida. In April, Michael Tanzi’s chest heaved for about three minutes, the Associated Press reported. Tanzi was given the unauthorized sedative, lidocaine, prison logs later showed. 

During the execution of Thomas Gudinas in June, media reported that his eyes rolled back and his chest spasmed. Drug logs filed in court records showed that Gudinas was injected with half the amount of paralytic required by Florida’s protocol. Then in November, NBC News reported that former Marine Bryan Jennings’ chest heaved and his arms twitched. Jennings’ autopsy report found that he experienced pulmonary edema—which mirrors the feeling of drowning, and the condition a medical expert feared would happen to Walls at his December execution. 

After Walls’ execution, a spokesperson for the governor’s office said there were no complications with his three-step lethal injection. There were close to 30 witnesses in attendance, including relatives of Walls’ victims. The Pensacola News Journal reported “about six minutes of labored breathing.” 

And Maria DeLiberato, Walls’ former attorney and the legal and policy director for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said she saw Walls gasping and his chest heaving: “Like he’s choking.” What she witnessed, she said, didn’t match the state’s media briefing from the Raiford prison. 

“I thought something was wrong,” DeLiberato said.

In January, Gov. DeSantis signed his first death warrant of this year for Ronald Heath, who was convicted for the 1989 armed robbery and murder of a traveling salesman near University of Florida. A jury sentenced him to death on a 10-2 vote.

Unanimous jury decisions were not required when Heath was convicted. They became law in Florida after a landmark 2016 Supreme Court judgement, but in 2023, Gov. DeSantis signed a bill into law requiring only 8 of 12 jurors to vote for death. 

Heath’s final appeal urged the U.S. Supreme Court to look into Florida’s three-step lethal injection method, citing previous use of expired drugs, inconsistent dosing and inaccurate logs about what happened in the death chamber. The state argued that the Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, “not inaccurate bookkeeping.”

The Supreme Court denied Heath’s request, and Heath’s execution was quick and without outward signs of complications, according to news coverage and a witness. Two weeks later, as Melvin Trotter’s execution date loomed for the murder of a grocery store owner in 1986, he asked for a stay of execution based on the risk of a mangled execution. Though the Supreme Court also rejected Trotter’s petition, this time, Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed her concern about Florida’s “troubling” execution records. 

Sotomayor agreed with denying Trotter’s petition, but acknowledged that prisoners like him are caught in a Catch-22: because they don’t have enough evidence of cruel and unusual punishment, they have been denied the records they’d actually need to prove it. “The very reason” they are seeking these documents, she noted in a four-page statement, is to prove their claims. 

“By continuing to shroud its executions in secrecy, Florida undermines both the integrity of its own execution process and, potentially, this Court’s ability to ensure the State’s compliance with its constitutional obligations,” Sotomayor wrote. 

As Trotter was executed on Feb. 24, he breathed heavily and his body twitched, PBS News reported. Details about the drugs used in Trotter’s execution won’t be revealed until the autopsy reports are made public. 

DeSantis has already ordered two more executions, Billy Kearse on March 3 and Michael King on March 17. And Sotomayor’s words are already reverberating on the busy death row. Within a day of Sotomayor’s statement, her critique of Florida’s secrecy had already been cited in a new appeal—and state officials had already dismissed the justice’s concerns as “speculation.”

2026-02-27 20:30:00

The United States has welcomed refugees fleeing persecution under the same law for 45 years, following a tradition dating back to World War II. Through an orderly process, applicants for refugee status undergo extensive federal vetting before arriving. A year after entering the US, they can apply for a green card, and barring any issues, receive one. But late last year, the administration quietly changed the rules.

On January 9, the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services began putting its changes to work, seeking out and detaining lawful refugees who have broken no laws and followed DHS’ processes to the letter. One moment they were law-abiding refugees, the next many were arrested, shackled, and interrogated. DHS calls it Operation Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening (PARRIS), and its first targets are some 5,600 lawful refugees in Minnesota. Nationwide, the new rule means some 100,000 refugees could be locked up—and alongside another, even broader, change initiated by the Trump administration, it suggests that the government’s plan to fill the warehouses it is buying and converting to detention centers rest on ignoring the laws that control its operations.

On January 28, John Tunheim, a federal district judge in Minneapolis, ordered DHS to stop detaining refugees under the new policy in Minnesota as the case proceeds, finding it is likely illegal. It is also a particular brand of authoritarian. The idea of the dual state, developed by Jewish-German labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel in the 1930s to explain the legal system of the Third Reich, describes an authoritarian state divided into two realms: the normative state and the prerogative state. In the former, the rules are followed and the laws upheld. In the latter, the state simply imposes its will, and no law or right or freedom can protect its victims. Frankel described how most Germans in the 1930s lived in the normative state where life and commerce continued to feel normal, while Jews, political dissidents, and other disfavored groups were in the prerogative state, subject to the violent recriminations of the regime. The regime is able to accomplish the goals of the prerogative state because most people lived in the normal of the normative state.

The Trump administration’s treatment of refugees and other immigrants echoes the dual-state model. People who were protected by the laws are suddenly subject to arrest and detainment, possibly for a long time. The scaffolding of their rights is collapsing, and they are now subject to the dark underbelly of Trump’s lawless detention regime.

“ICE is the face of a prerogative state, emerging or actual,” Evan Bernick, a constitutional law professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law, explained to me last year. “It swoops in, it ignores safeguards, you can’t escape it.” 

Courts in a burgeoning dual state are left to either push back or validate an unlawful policy. To justify the PARRIS detentions, DHS lawyers point to a section of the 1980 Refugee Act which allows them to take refugees into custody in order to assess their eligibility for a green card. In a new memo released this month to bolster its case, DHS claims that that is an open-ended authority to detain refugees for days, months, or even years as they are vetted again. In his initial order, Tunheim disagreed: “On the plain reading of these statutes, the Court concludes that none of these provisions authorize the prolonged detention” of the plaintiffs. The authority the government cites, Tunheim found, simply isn’t there.

Tunheim also found the government’s argument would lead to absurd results. Because the law “makes refugees ineligible for adjustment [to lawful permanent resident status] until one year after entry, Defendants’ interpretation would subject every refugee to detention, unless USCIS conducted the inspection and examination precisely at the one-year mark,” he wrote. “That outcome is nonsensical and would cause many unadjusted refugees to celebrate their one-year anniversary in this country in a jail cell.” This is obviously not what the law requires. But the administration is asking the courts to apply the judicial stamp of approval to its cruel and absurd policy anyway.

This is not the first instance in which the administration has announced new interpretations of decades-old statutes in order to fill its new detention facilities. In a tortured reinterpretation of a 1996 immigration law, the Trump administration announced in July that anyone who entered the country without permission, no matter how long ago, must be detained without bond for as long as it takes for the government to get their removal order—a process that can take years. As with the new refugee policy, the detention policy makes a hash of the statute. It dares the courts—which have almost uniformly ruled that a bond hearing is required—to interpret a law in a nonsensical and gratuitously cruel fashion. As of early January, some 300 federal judges had found the policy illegal; only around 30 have agreed with the government. 

This month, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the administration’s July policy. Suddenly, people who at any point entered the country without permission are subject to months or years of detention if they are in the three states within the circuit: Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In these states, the grounds for release in federal court have now shrunk considerably. Moreover, engaging a lawyer to file a case is a tall order for the millions of people who could be locked up under the policy. 

The Fifth Circuit decision came from a three-judge panel in the nation’s most reactionary appeals court, which Trump appointees have turned into a proving ground for far-right and MAGA-aligned priorities. “Congress did not secretly require two million noncitizens to be detained without bond,” Judge Dana Douglas, a Biden appointee on the circuit, wrote in dissent, “when nothing like this had ever been done before, and the whole history of American immigration law suggested it would not be.” Indeed, her colleagues’ ruling didn’t just change the law but, for millions of people now at risk of detainment without bond, effectively nullified it. 

Douglas also hinted at the slippery authoritarian slope of the government’s policy, the way in which it will pull more and more people, and eventually citizens, into its lawless vortex: “With only a little imagination, the government’s and the majority’s reading means that anyone present in this country at any time must carry the precise kinds of identification they would otherwise have only carried to the border for international travel, lest they be mistaken for an inadmissible noncitizen,” she wrote. “The majority seems to be unable to imagine what it might mean to be detained within the United States without the appropriate proof of admissibility, and, without a bond hearing, to require the services of a federal habeas corpus lawyer to show that one is entitled to release and deserves to see the outside of a detention center again.”

A key facet of a dual state is that the normative state is not truly safe. At any moment, one can fall from its protections into the prerogative zone. Racial minorities are certainly more likely to lose their rights in a system that will slowly suck more people into its lawless operations.

In the short term, the decision will incentivize the government to whisk people to the 5th Circuit as soon as they are apprehended, beyond the reach of all the district court judges around the country who have found the policy illegal. But at some point—and it may be soon—the Supreme Court will have to decide whether to help the administration push millions into its growing network of concentration camps, or whether it will call out a blatantly illegal policy. As Bernick warned, “A Supreme Court that gets out of the way” of ICE, “where the state is at its most brutal, and tries to manage everything else as normal, is a dual state Supreme Court.”

Trump campaigned for president on deporting violent wrong-doers. But as both of these new detention programs demonstrate, the administration’s ambition to fill warehouses with millions of humans can only be achieved by locking up people without criminal records. As of November, just five percent of ICE detainees had committed a violent crime. To attain their numbers, the administration must suddenly claim that their own rules no longer apply. 

The effect of the mandatory detention policy now sanctioned by the 5th Circuit is to detain people who could otherwise be allowed freedom while removal proceedings take place. According to a brief submitted in the case by the American Immigration Council, a legal and advocacy group, tens of thousands have likely already been the victims of this new policy in recent months. These include people without any criminal history and adults who have been in the US a long time and have deep ties to their community, including children whom they care for and support.

DHS is detaining people who are coming in for immigration appointments, meaning they are specifically targeting people who are already following government orders. This also includes Dreamers, people brought here as children who gave their information to the government in exchange for lawful presence in the country. The government is likewise locking up young people who had assurances against deportation because they crossed the border alone or were abused or abandoned by their parents. Suddenly, all these groups who entered into an agreement of protection from deportation with the government—what is called “deferred action”—are being locked up despite the government’s own rules to the contrary. 

Suddenly deprived of the protection of the law, the immigrants and refugees whose detention has been ushered in by these new DHS policies do not enter a civilized detention program, but one that operates with life-threatening cruelty. Accounts from inside detention centers detail conditions of torture. People are fed little, and what they do receive is often moldy, or seems, as a detainee in New Jersey described it in a lawsuit, “identical to cat food.” People with serious health conditions are denied medications. At a detention center in Dilley, Texas, children enter healthy, then soon fall ill, and then are denied care. In Illinois, a woman was detained two weeks after giving birth via cesarean section; while her newborn daughter was away in a hospital NICU, she slept on a bench without access to a breast pump or pain medication. A Cuban man detained at a tent camp in El Paso died in what ICE claimed was “medical distress” but the county medical examiner determined was homicide. 

These conditions are so dangerous that people give up and agree to leave the country rather than waste away, making the torture a form of coercion forcing people to give up their legal rights. “People are being deprived of due process already because detention is so coercive,” says Rebecca Cassler, an attorney at the American Immigration Council. “You don’t have access to a lawyer. In many cases, your family might not know where you are for a couple weeks. You’re not getting enough food, you’re not getting medical attention.”

Dual states are characterized by “systematically a domain of lawlessness and systematically a domain of lawfulness,” explains Aziz Huq, a University of Chicago constitutional law professor writing a book about the theory. “You only get that when you have a multiplicity of measures that move people across the line from the world of legality to the world of lawlessness.”

It seems clear that, whether or not Trump will fully achieve this, his administration is trying to create a domain of lawlessness around immigration enforcement. ICE ignores constitutional constraints as a matter of policy, operating as a thuggish paramilitary force. The Trump administration wants to trap more and more people in its immigration enforcement apparatus—and keep them there. A Supreme Court that has allowed this legal black hole to expand is aiding in such a state’s creation. And almost certainly, the nation’s highest court will be asked to decide the fate of Trump’s new mandatory detention policy, and likely its novel refugee policy as well.

The Supreme Court has already stepped in to essentially pause constitutional protections that have gotten in the way of the administration’s immigration crackdown. Last June, it allowed the government to proceed with deporting immigrants with final removal orders to so-called “third countries”—a country that is not their home country or another designated in the removal order—even though the law requires a different outcome and the Constitution requires due process, allowing the immigrants to object that they might be tortured in the new country. On Wednesday, a district court judge in Massachusetts issued a ruling against the policy, which means it will wind its way back to the Supreme Court in the coming months. But he stayed the ruling pending appeal, meaning people can still be sent to third countries without an opportunity to object, and where they are likely to be imprisoned, tortured, killed, or returned to their home country for a similar fate.

And last September, the Supreme Court allowed ICE to continue a policy of racial profiling in its detention sweeps and stops, even though the court has repeatedly ruled against the use of race in government policy. Notably, the decision expanded ICE’s terror to US citizens and others people lawfully present, based solely on how they look or talk.

These policies, alongside the new mandatory detention policies, track Trump’s attempts to carve certain disfavored groups out of the protection of the law since his first day back in office. On January 20, 2025, he issued an executive order denying citizenship to certain people born on US soil, despite the clear language of the Constitution’s birthright citizenship clause. In the face of more than a century of near-unanimous consensus, the administration simply declared that the law wasn’t what it said. 

On April 1, the highest court will hear arguments over that executive order, which attempts to revoke birthright citizenship for thousands by fiat; to take a class of people clearly entitled to all the protections of citizenship and turn them into a stateless underclass. As Trump attempts to ethnically cleanse the nation through a lawless detention and deportation regime, the birthright citizenship case is one especially high profile test, among many more to come, of what the administration will be allowed to get away with. The contours of a dual state are coming into view, one in which anyone targeted by Trump’s deportation and detention program have no rights that can save them.

2026-02-27 20:30:00

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

Agriculture is widely known to be the biggest driver of forest destruction globally, especially in sprawling, high-profile ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest. 

But new research published this week finds that non-forest ecosystems—the world’s grasslands, savannas, and wetlands—are being devoured for agriculture at nearly four times the rate as forests. As with forests, the primary driver is livestock.

“The goal of this research was really just to understand where in the world this is happening,” said Elise Mazur, a researcher with the Land and Carbon Lab at the World Resources Institute and one of the report’s authors. “We know where deforestation is occurring. But we were less sure about where non-forest ecosystems are being lost.”

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a unique attempt to analyze which types of agriculture are forcing the conversion of natural ecosystems on a global scale, and then to attribute that conversion to demand for specific commodities.

Making that link is critical. Grasslands occupy more of the world’s surface than any other ice-free land, and store a significant chunk of terrestrial carbon—about 34 percent compared to 39 percent for forests. Researchers say they are the most at-risk ecosystems on Earth and yet get relatively little policy attention relative to forests, largely because their disappearance and the causes behind it are not as well understood. Wetlands are being converted to crop and pastureland at about half the rate of dry lands, the researchers found, but are especially important climate sinks.

The new study, which looked at the period from 2005 to 2020, found that, as with forests, the biggest driver of grassland loss is livestock production—from both conversion into pasture for grazing and cropland for growing feed. About half of all non-forest conversion is to pasture, 27 percent to cropland for food and 17 percent into cropland to grow feed for animals, including corn and soybeans.

“When you add together how much conversion there is to pasture and to cropland that’s being used for animal feed, that’s the majority of the conversion,” Mazur said. “The takeaway from this is that livestock and dairy play an outsized role in the loss of our non-forest ecosystems when compared to other commodities or foods.”

The researchers found that feed for livestock accounted for more than one-third of the overall cropland conversion globally, yet in certain growing regions, including Brazil, Argentina, the United States and China, that percentage reached more than 50 percent. More than 30 percent of those crops were destined for export, driven by demand for livestock-based food elsewhere. 

The researchers found that biofuels, including ethanol and biodiesel, were major drivers of grassland loss, especially in countries with high demand linked to policy incentives, like the Renewable Fuel Standard in the US. So while just over 12 percent of global non-forest land was converted to cropland for biofuels, that percentage rose to 28 percent in the US., mostly in the prairies of the upper Midwest.

Globally, food consumption accounted for 54 percent of cropland-driven land conversion, meaning much of the world’s finite arable land mass is not being used directly for calories.

The team behind the report, which also included experts from the Rainforest Alliance and Germany’s Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, looked at extensive land-use change datasets, then used models to allocate the change to particular types of agriculture. Finally, they analyzed trade data to determine how market demand contributed to the conversion.

Land-use datasets, historically, have been unable to adequately distinguish pasture from cropland, mostly because one is often converted to the other and existing measurements aren’t sensitive enough to determine the difference. That has meant previous research either focused just on conversion to cropland or failed to capture the distinction between pasture and cropland or the contribution of particular agricultural commodities to either.

Mazur says her hope is that policy makers and companies that depend on agricultural commodities start to incorporate grassland conversion into conservation targets. Some voluntary initiatives, including the Soy Moratorium in Brazil, were credited with reducing deforestation there, but also pushed agricultural expansion into the neighboring Cerrado, a vast savanna. 

“Both forests and non-forest ecosystems need to be addressed together,” Mazur said. “If you only look at one, it can push the conversion to another ecosystem. We want to make sure that any policy or voluntary targets address all natural ecosystems.”