2026-02-21 07:05:26
On Thursday just before noon, bundled up couples and small groups of people wandered through the President’s House on Independence Hall, some snapping photos and others inquiring what was happening as four National Park employees worked in tandem, behind a barricade, to reattach panel after panel of the President’s House slavery exhibits. They worked in the cold, lifting the massive glass squares up onto the brick wall and then screwing them into place. Philadelphia’s mayor Cherelle L. Parker approached, admiring the exhibit for a moment before shaking hands with the workers and thanking them.
“I want you to know I’m grateful,” Parker said. “It’s our honor,” one of the employees responded.
They continued to work until at least 16 panels of the memorial were reinstalled. The exhibits had been removed on a Thursday afternoon nearly a month before, in accordance with Trump’s 2025 “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order to rid “public monuments, memorials, statues, markers or similar properties” of content that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” But after the city sued, US District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe issued an injunction ordering the government to “restore the President’s House Site to its physical status as of January 21, 2026.” That order was overruled on Friday, just one hour before the deadline Rufe had set for the exhibit’s reinstallation. Now, the National Park Service must maintain the status quo—leaving 16 of 34 panels up—while the federal government appeals the initial injunction.
For a community that fought to restore history, the initial order to restore the President’s House exhibit had been cause for celebration. “We need to understand what we’ve done here. This is actually a moment in time; your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, are going to be talking about this for years and decades to come,” said Michael Coard, attorney and founding member of Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), a broad-based Black-led coalition of activists, on Thursday as the the National Park Service initially started to restore panels. “This here, right now, what we’ve done is people power.” As Coard spoke, he stood in front of a wall engraved with the names of the nine people enslaved by Washington. At the bottom of his podium rested the 1863 image “Scourged Back,” which was marked for removal from Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park last year.
ATAC had been an instrumental part of establishing the exhibit in 2010 and had filed an amicus brief in support of the city’s lawsuit on January 27.
The exhibit in Center City was one of a dozen other signs and materials from national parks removed after Trump’s executive order. The Washington Post reported that park staff interpreted the order as including “any references to historic racism, sexism, climate change, and LGBTQ+ rights.” As America approaches its 250th anniversary this year, these removals foreshadow a celebration that, on the national level, excludes underrepresented communities’ contributions to American history, refuses to reckon with its more difficult periods, and ultimately obfuscates the truth of our collective past.
When Philadelphia was the nation’s capital, the President’s House was the site where Presidents George Washington and John Adams lived and worked. The original building was demolished in 1832, but visitors today can still walk through its foundation, which sits near the Liberty Bell Center. The slavery exhibits at the President’s House include displays that memorialize the names and experiences of the nine people enslaved under Washington, along with relevant historical moments like Washington’s signing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793.
After the exhibit’s removal in January, the ATAC kept the space alive with numerous rallies. A few days prior to the court’s order to reinstall the panels, despite the leftover snow that piled along the sidewalks and on the lawn, hundreds of concerned Philadelphia community members gathered at the President’s House demanding the restoration of the slavery exhibit.
“African American history is American history, and we stand and continue to fight to make sure that Donald Trump will not whitewash the history here in the city of Philadelphia,” said Kenyatta Johnson, Philadelphia’s 2nd Council District President, as the crowd applauded. “It’s shameful that as we celebrate the 250th celebration of the birthplace of America that we have to be out here today advocating and fighting to make sure our true history—our true history, not his story—is known.”
Other speakers included a direct descendant of Black founding father Bishop Richard Allen, city council members, a historian, and a George Washington reenactor. They all echoed a similar message: the history presented by these panels needed to be restored because they tell an intrinsic part of American history, despite the current administration’s view that they were “disparaging.”
The main brick walls, where two long horizontal silver slabs hung covered in glue residue—a reminder of what had been there—had been plastered with various handmade flyers protesting the erasure of history and even recreating parts of the exhibit for those who came to view the site.
The City of Philadelphia filed their federal lawsuit against the US Department of the Interior and the National Park Service the day the panels were initially removed, arguing the removal of the exhibit was “arbitrary and capricious,” violating a 2006 Cooperative Agreement between Philadelphia and the federal government.
“This is not about hatred of America or the United States; it is about telling the full American story again.”
“This action is a disservice to our city, our nation, and it denies future generations the chance to learn from our history, fostering an environment of ignorance rather than understanding,” said Catherine Hicks, the president of Philadelphia’s NAACP branch, to the crowd. “We must confront the complexities of our past, honoring the lives and legacies of those who suffered under the institution of slavery.”
Hannah Gann, a high school African American history teacher attending the rally, said every year she’d teach her students about the people Washington enslaved, particularly Ona Judge, a young woman who escaped to New Hampshire. This year, when her students heard the memorial was torn down, they were “upset that their real history was being erased and a huge part of our city’s history was being taken away and covered up.”
Gann said the exhibit’s removal reminded her of how vital educators are. “We can’t just feel satisfied that we’ve done enough,” she said. “Every year we have to renew our energy, our commitment to the truth, our commitment to Black uplift and celebrating stories of Black resilience and power and having our students see themselves in those stories.”
As the rally to restore history took place in Philadelphia, in Washington, the House Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held an oversight hearing titled “All in for America250: Public-Private Partnerships Supporting America’s Semiquincentennial on our Public Lands.”
During the hearing, Alan Spears, National Parks Conservation Association’s Senior Director for Cultural Resources, recalled that when he was young, his parents would take him to places like Gettysburg. He said it was there that his passion for American History manifested, but it didn’t “take hold” until he started seeing people who looked like him in those spaces.
“I think what we’re looking at right now is the danger of taking that in a completely opposite direction, where people don’t see themselves reflected or are seeing themselves actively removed and excised from our shared national narrative,” Spears said during the hearing. “We don’t need to go in that direction. This is not about hatred of America or the United States; it is about telling the full American story again, about the times when we failed to live up to the better angels of our nature. That’s us too.”
John Garrison Marks, a historian and the author of Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory, had hoped that America’s anniversary would be an opportunity to “establish a more complete, more inclusive and more widely shared understanding of the nation’s history,” including the history of slavery.
Marks said people have debated Washington’s involvement in slavery for almost 250 years. The founding father enslaved people right up until the day he died, while privately writing about becoming “uneasy” with slavery and hoping that the institution would be abolished in southern states. Washington even circumvented a Pennsylvania law by deliberately moving the people he enslaved in and out of the state every six months to ensure they wouldn’t be freed by the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. Marks noted that the president understood the hypocrisy of leading a revolution to found a nation dedicated to the ideas of liberty and equality while enslaving people.
Marks said you can’t to talk about Washington without talking about his involvement in slavery. He argued that some people struggle to see Washington as “an actual human being” with “egregious flaws,” and instead see him as a symbol of the nation itself; for some, “criticizing Washington is criticizing America.”
“There are a lot of people whose sense of patriotism, whose sense of self, is tied to the idea that America is the land of the free, is tied up in the idea that this is a nation that should only be celebrated,” he said. “And when you try to introduce this idea that we need to reckon with the history of slavery to understand Washington, there are a lot of people who view that as kind of a personal attack.”
With Philadelphia having the potential to see so many visitors this year, not only for the 250th anniversary, but for the FIFA World Cup or the MLB All-Star Game, the removal of the slavery exhibit at the President’s House was “a huge missed opportunity” to give people an uncensored history, one that Marks believes most people want to learn.
“On the eve of the 250th there are going to be people who are now waving the flag talking about how they love this country, and my thing is this: you can’t love a thing or a person until you know the good, the bad and the ugly,” Coard said after the rally. “So, the 250th shines a spotlight about the absolute necessity of knowing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about your country.”
Following the initial legal victory, community members were cautiously hopeful.
“My heart is really exploding with joy, but it’s the type of joy that we often experience as Black people in this country,” said Michelle Flamer, a retired attorney, who helped get the exhibit installed over 15 years ago. “Where is the permanency? I want to make sure that this is permanent and not to ever be taken away. This history belongs here. There have been many people who have talked about moving it somewhere else or telling it, and I support efforts to continue to tell this history as broadly and as widely as possible, but it belongs here on this ground, because this is actually where the president’s house existed.”
Whatever the result of the administration’s fight to change the signage at the President’s House and other sites across the country, nothing can change what happened at these places, and who it happened to.
2026-02-21 02:28:41
Under normal circumstances, the sex workers arriving to their jobs at Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel in Pahrump, Nevada, have a predictable routine. Most people’s shifts at the ranch last for at least a week, and the process involves picking out a room that they’ll stay in and work out of for the duration, visiting with a doctor, and some paperwork. The week of Christmas, however, things went very differently. Sheri’s workers showing up say they were presented with a surprising and objectionable new contract that would give the brothel unprecedented control over them, their intellectual property, and their digital likenesses.
“They want everything,” says Jupiter Jetson, a sex worker, model, and adult film actress who’s worked at Sheri’s for eight years.
“Their motivation is to get ahold of our videos and the ability to create AI likenesses.”
Jetson says there had been hints that something might be afoot: in the fall, brothel management started offering what she wryly calls “teaser trailers,” saying things like “There’s a new contract coming, a lot of ladies aren’t going to like it” while at the same time insisting, she says, that “there weren’t any major changes” and framing it as a chance to “tie up some loose ends and fix some clerical errors.” Like many people in adult businesses, Sheri’s Ranch workers—referred to as “courtesans” in Nevada, the only state where prostitution is legal—are classified as independent contractors, but some say they’re treated more like employees, with the ranch controlling basic aspects of their jobs, including how much they charge and what they can wear.
According to three women with experience working at Sheri’s, the new contract made an unprecedented play for their intellectual property, one that they worry could be a bid to make money from their likenesses, including through AI, as well as potentially owning a piece of anything they might create while working at the ranch. The contract, which Mother Jones has viewed, also gives Sheri’s power of attorney over the workers’ intellectual property; as the contract puts it, to “further the prosecution and issuance of patents, copyrights, or other intellectual property protection.” The women say the contract was shown to many arriving workers in what seemed like a deliberately rushed fashion, with someone in management immediately flipping to a back page and asking them to sign without reading it closely.
In addition to the contract, the workers have other longstanding labor issues, including the “limo fees” that they’re required to pay to help transport customers from the Las Vegas strip, and the system of tip splitting—both of which organizers say appear to be legally questionable. But as sex work has become an increasingly digital field, their major concern is the contract’s threat to their ability to protect their image and likeness, especially from potential AI uses. The issue is no longer hypothetical: just this week, major Hollywood players expressed concern and outrage after the Chinese company ByteDance made an AI video featuring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
Instead of signing, some of the women began talking among themselves, reading the fine print, and largely deciding that the new language was intolerable. As a result, Sheri’s Ranch workers have launched a unionization drive, forming the United Brothel Workers, a branch of the Communications Workers of America. If successful, they’ll be the country’s first brothel workers’ union to gain employer recognition.
While the workers and the CWA declined to share a specific number, they say they have collected signed union cards from a “heavy supermajority” of the ranch’s sex workers. They’re calling on Sheri’s to recognize the union voluntarily, which seems unlikely: multiple women have been abruptly terminated for what organizers say is protected union activity, including Jetson, who said she was fired via email 24 hours after collecting signed cards in the ranch’s parking lot.
“We live in a spicy panopticon,” Jetson says, referring to the security cameras that cover public areas of the ranch. “There is no covertly organizing a union.” Instead, she says, “we did a lightning strike-style drive to sign the union cards,” where organizers stopped workers coming from their cars to talk about their labor rights. Jetson and another worker involved in the drive, who has also since been dismissed, continued even after learning from a colleague inside that management appeared to be gathering around security camera monitors to watch their efforts.
“We got a lot of union cards” that day, Jetson says. “The brothel got our voluntary notice of recognition on Wednesday,” about 24 hours later, she says. “On Thursday, I was fired at 3:12 PM via email.”
Another worker, Molly Wylder, said she was also fired over email after management appeared to learn that she was helping with the union effort, and before she’d even had a chance to decline to sign. “They just knew what I was doing,” Wylder says. A third worker, Adalind Gray, attempted to sign the contract with a notation she hoped would indicate she was doing so under duress. She says that management refused to accept that, telling her she could leave instead. When she began recording the interaction on her phone—Nevada is a one-party consent state, and the conversation took place in an office that is already monitored by security camera—she says she was told “my contract was no longer on the table.” The CWA has so far filed four unfair labor practice complaints with the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of terminated workers.
While the Sheri’s Ranch website says the brothel is owned by retired car dealership owner and former homicide detective Chuck Lee, he died in 2018. The business, which currently appears to be held by at least one LLC, didn’t respond to specific questions about the legal concerns raised by the unionizing workers, or about the termination of Jetson and other workers. Instead, Jeremy Lemur, the brothel’s marketing director, provided a statement saying the ranch “has been actively working with independent contractors to revise and improve the existing contract with the goal of making it more workable and agreeable for everyone.” It said the company has been in “ongoing dialogue” with its workers, and that it believes “the final version will be viewed by the independent contractors who choose to work here as fair, balanced, and supportive of their ability to operate their own businesses.”
The statement makes clear that Sheri’s primary concern is that the unionization drive could result in the sex workers being classified as employees instead of independent contractors. As Lemur’s statement adds, “Sheri’s Ranch has long believed that the independent contractor model has served Nevada’s licensed sex industry, and the women who work within it, well for decades. It has allowed independent businesswomen to maintain autonomy, set their own paths, and build success under an established and lawful framework. While we respect that individuals have the right to express differing views, the company remains committed to preserving a structure that has provided opportunity, stability, and economic independence for generations, while continuing to support a safe, professional environment for contractors, clients, and the surrounding community.”
Despite the already intense backlash from management, the organizers forming the United Brothel Workers say that what’s on the line is nothing less than existential—for them and for sex workers at other Nevada brothels.
Alice Little, a legal sex worker at the nearby Chicken Ranch who’s known for advocating for sex worker’s rights, says she, too, recognizes that a union contract at Sheri’s could be seismic for the industry—which is why she’s opposed to the effort. “In my personal opinion, it is the brothels who would benefit from making employees of the independent contractors, not the other way around,” says Little, who I was referred to by Lemur, but who told me that she was not speaking on behalf of brothel owners. Little says she’s concerned that an employee system would allow brothels to impose stricter rules and guidelines on sex workers, including how often they need to work (be “on tour,” in industry parlance). “It would be almost a win for these locations to set a standardized contract and require us to be on tour however often.”
In her view, “It’s in our best interest to negotiate and contract individually and exercise the freedom to change locations,” meaning to quit a brothel if contract terms aren’t acceptable. “That makes a bold statement to a location if you take your business somewhere else. The Chicken Ranch and Sheri’s are within walking distance… It’s incredibly easy to just go work at the brothel next door. There are so many freedoms and options within this industry.”
In fact, a Sheri’s Ranch schedule shows that Little will begin working there in March, something she did not disclose in our conversation. Little confirmed by text that she would start there “next quarter. My license currently is for Chicken Ranch and I’m taking bookings there through the end of the month.” Little also published an op-ed this morning in the Nevada Independent, reiterating her opposition to the unionization effort; the piece does not disclose she’ll soon start work at Sheri’s.
Similarly, Jetson thinks that the new intellectual rights provisions in the Sheri’s contract are also a bellwether—which is why she and her colleagues are fighting against it.
“If this contract had been successful and they’d been able to roll this out without a peep from us,” Jetson says, “they would’ve taken it to the brothel owners association and we would’ve seen contracts like this in every house in Nevada in the next two years.”
Sheri’s Ranch has previously declared itself AI-skeptical. In a 2025 blog post, Lemur wrote that while AI “is certainly revolutionary and rapidly evolving, the tech raises serious questions about consent, authenticity, and what we trade for convenience.” By contrast, he wrote, Sheri’s “serves as a cultural counterpoint. Here, we provide genuine connection between real people—licensed sex workers who choose their profession and meet clients face-to-face in a safe and regulated environment. From the initial email contact to the sexual encounter, Sheri’s employs no deepfake imagery, no ghostwritten communication, and no deception throughout the customer experience.”
“I could be starring in adult videos that I never agreed to and never consented to.”
But the sex workers who provide those encounters worry the company’s attitude has shifted. Jetson says that in a conversation with the ranch’s madame last year, she “expressed the owners’ desire to get in on what they see as their owed piece of the content we’re making,” apparently meaning the workers’ social media presences, including on platforms like OnlyFans. “Their motivation is to get ahold of our videos and the ability to create AI likenesses.”
“This is how you end up the face of a Japanese lubricant company without ever having signed a document,” Jetson previously told the Associated Press. “This is how you end up finding yourself on a website offering AI companionship without ever seeing a penny.”
“I’ve never filmed pornography,” Wylder says. “But they have plenty of pictures and videos of my body and me walking in and out of the office, myTikTok, photos of me on Twitter before my account was deleted. They could easily make a composite of me, and I could be starring in adult videos that I never agreed to and never consented to.”
The contract has no language suggesting the provision is limited to AI pornography or virtual sex uses, the workers add. “If you write a book, or a recipe for a food blog, or take pictures on vacation and they decide they could get paid selling them to a travel company,” Jetson says the new contract allows them to do that. Gray, a musician, adds, “If I write music for the band I have, I worry they could take a piece.”
While the firings are a real blow to their lives, Jetson says Sheri’s Ranch response to their workers’ complaints about the contract has also left them unsatisfied. “Their approach has been to gaslight us and tell us we’re mistaken about what these clauses mean,” she says, telling the women, for instance, that they “need our power of attorney to share our photos with journalists or make sure we can’t spread lies about the ranch. It’s all complete nonsense.”
Gray, Wylder, and Jetson say they hope to get their jobs returned and be able to work for a professional and fair employer. “We’re fighting for Sheri’s to be a good place to work,” Gray says. “I’m looking forward to going back.”
Jetson, meanwhile, has a message for other sex workers in Nevada watching what’s going on at the ranch from afar. “When informing yourself about what’s going to be the best for you and your rights and your future,” she says, “don’t ask the people who stand to profit from you making a bad choice. I’ve heard so much propaganda, for lack of a better word, that’s been spread far and wide throughout this industry about how ‘employee’ is a four letter word and the end of our rights. In actuality, employees with collective bargaining power have so much more freedom and so many more rights than what is currently known in the brothel system.”
“Don’t ask the owners,” she concludes. “Ask your coworkers.”
Update, February 20: This story has been updated with information on Sheri’s current ownership and Alice Little’s upcoming work for the brothel.
2026-02-20 23:51:34
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that most of President Donald Trump’s world-wide tariffs are illegal, dealing a setback to one of the president’s top priorities. Since his second month in office, Trump has set about to impose drastic, varying, and haphazard tariffs on countries across the globe. Trump claimed that most of these tariffs were authorized under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. But in a 6-3 decision, the justices ruled that IEEPA did not give the president power to impose tariffs. Trump will now have to turn to other, more limited statutes to impose his unilateral tariffs.
Although the outcome is a clear loss for Trump, the court is likely doing him a favor.
IEEPA authorizes the president to respond to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” from abroad, including through the power to “regulate… importation or exportation.” The Trump administration argued that the word “regulate” encompassed “tariff regulation,” which Solicitor General John Sauer described during oral arguments as “the quintessential, most historically-tested method of regulating imports.” But the justices disagreed, finding the words “regulate” and “importation” are not enough to give the president uninhibited tariff power.
“Based on two words separated by 16 others in Section 1702(a)(1)(B) of IEEPA—’regulate’ and ‘importation’—the President asserts the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion. “Those words cannot bear such weight.”
To use IEEPA, Trump had taken a capacious view of the meaning of “unusual or extraordinary threat.” For tariffs on Canada and Mexico, he said it was because they were letting fentanyl across the border. For dozens of other countries, he seized on decades-old trade deficits that most economists agree are not a big deal. For Canada (a second time), he pointed to a World Series TV ad that offended him. For Brazil, it was the gall to prosecute a former president for trying to overturn the results of an election. Trump argued that it was his power alone to declare such emergencies, and that these declarations were unreviewable, even by the courts.
Roberts dispatched with this argument by saying that Congress could not have handed the president such broad powers over matters generally reserved for itself—the power to impose tariffs—without more explicit language: This view “would replace the longstanding executive-legislative collaboration over trade policy with unchecked Presidential policymaking,” Roberts wrote. “Congress seldom effects such sea changes through ‘vague language.'”
Roberts’ decision is short, leaving some important things out and raising questions for the future of other Trump policies. First, Roberts relies, along with Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, on the major questions doctrine, the conservatives’ purported principle that if executive agencies are to take a major action, Congress must first clearly assign that authority. This doctrine is a recent invention of the Roberts Court, used until now to strike down only Democratic policies, including student loan forgiveness. It’s infinitely malleable because “major” is not an objective standard. As such, the three Democratic appointees rejected its application and instead found regular tools of statutory interpretation sufficient to dispose of Trump’s power-hungry reading of IEEPA.
By relying on the major questions doctrine, Roberts side-steps actual major questions that are likely to arise in future cases, including the court’s ability to second-guess other presidential declarations of emergency. The decision offers no remedy for the billions of dollars already collected under Trump’s illegal tariffs; it will likely be up to the Court of International Trade to sort out that morass.
After the Roberts majority opinion came another half-dozen concurring and dissenting opinions, largely dedicated to the justices’ internal debates over the meaning of the major questions doctrine. Justice Brett Kavanaugh argues in his dissent, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, that the major questions doctrine should not be used to assess foreign-facing statutes, because authority over foreign affairs is generally a presidential prerogative. Kavanaugh claims that Roberts has vastly expanded the major questions doctrine into the realm of foreign affairs. But Roberts’ ruling holds tariffs up not as a presidential tool for foreign policy, but as a taxing power assigned to Congress. Despite Kavanaugh’s worries, it’s not clear that Roberts has actually decided to apply the major questions doctrine to powers that Roberts would himself deem part of the president’s foreign policy arsenal.
In waving off the major questions doctrine, the conservative dissenters demonstrate how the doctrine is malleable enough to allow them to pursue their preferred ends. In addition to their new idea that the major questions doctrine cannot be wielded against anything touching foreign affairs, Thomas used his own dissent to put forward an additional carveout: there’s no problem with Congress vaguely delegating “powers of the Crown”—authorities that the Constitution bequeaths to Congress, but which Thomas discovered in old books actually once belonged to English kings. It’s a bit too on the nose: After fighting a revolution against a monarchy and then reassigning executive power to the legislative branch in the creation of a democracy, Thomas wants to hand those powers right back to a president who fancies himself a king.
Although the outcome is a clear loss for Trump, the court is likely doing him a favor. Trump’s sweeping and erratic tariffs are a drag on the economy. They increase uncertainty and stymie investment. They raise prices and decrease employment. The result is a weaker economy heading into this year’s midterms—a downward trend that is likely to continue throughthe 2028 elections.
The Republican-appointed 6-3 court majority depends on Republicans winning at the ballot box, as does the pro-business, pro-Christian nationalist, anti-democratic agenda the conservative justices are enacting. They surely understand that this project could be undermined by a tariff-fueled recession, even if Trump himself doesn’t seem to get it. To bring the point home, the case was argued the day after Democrats overperformed in November elections in New Jersey, New York City, and Virginia, winning voters worried about high prices.
The best way to understand this case was not as a tricky task of legal or constitutional interpretation, but rather as an attempt to mediate between two competing factions of the Republican firmament. On one side is Trump, who has used tariffs to dole out rewards and punishments on businesses, individuals, and other countries. On the other side were some of the biggest GOP funders, including the Koch network, who are generally committed to a pro-corporate, libertarian capitalism. These longtime GOP funders prefer Trump to a Democratic president, but they don’t want him to completely take over the levers of the economy. Groups funded by the Kochs and likeminded tycoons funded some of the libertarian legal nonprofits that launched lawsuits challenging the tariffs. These same funders also poured millions into the Federalist Society and other outside groups that helped ensure each of the six Republican appointees made it to the high court.
The result is that the court’s GOP-appointees were mediating a disagreement between two parents who maintain a sometimes rocky marriage—the funders who enabled their majority, and the president who will protect it and who personally appointed three of them. The justices had to pick a parent in this fight, and enough of the conservative wing picked the billionaires and big business over Trump.
2026-02-20 20:30:00
The people of Springfield, Ohio, are exhausted. It’s been one hit after another lately.
Some of the trouble started back in 2024, when Donald Trump claimed during a presidential debate that Haitian immigrants in this small blue-collar city were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs.
It was a false, racist rumor, but it thrust the otherwise quiet town into the national spotlight. White supremacists showed up to march. Bomb threats rocked local schools. Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who was born in Springfield, sent state troopers to protect residents.
Then Trump returned to the White House and began his deportation campaign. His administration has sought to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for certain immigrants. That’s a humanitarian designation that allows a person to stay in the United States because their home country is too dangerous for them to repatriate.
“You speak to the mayor, ministers, business owners, neighbors—they’ll tell you the Haitian community has revitalized a city that was dying.”
With TPS for Haitians on the brink, this little Midwestern city with a big Haitian population is back in the spotlight, coping with all the chaos and terror that attention from Trump and his administration can unleash. “It just feels like a lot of forces are coming to bear on this one small city,” says Marjory Wentworth, a writer who volunteers with efforts to help immigrants there. “We are trying to navigate,” adds Vilès Dorsainvil, a Haitian community leader, but it’s “very difficult.”
Springfield is, in some ways, an unlikely target. Florida, New York, and California are home to many more of the country’s 350,000 Haitian TPS holders. But the city stands out for its ratio of newcomers: By some estimates, roughly a fourth of its 60,000 or so residents are Haitian. Many settled in Ohio during the pandemic, especially after Haiti’s president was assassinated in 2021. Haitians first received TPS in 2010, after the island experienced a devastating earthquake. Their status has been renewed repeatedly because of political instability and gang violence in Haiti—the latest renewal was set to expire on February 3.
The newcomers were welcomed by DeWine and business leaders who were worried about Springfield’s long declining population and hoped immigrants could fill jobs there. “You speak to the mayor, ministers, business owners, individuals on the school board, neighbors—they’ll tell you the Haitian community has revitalized a city that was dying,” says Pastor Keny Felix, who leads the Southern Baptist Convention National Haitian Fellowship from Florida and has met with community leaders in Springfield.
“We went from being one of the fastest shrinking small cities in America to the fastest growing small city,” says Pastor Carl Ruby of Springfield’s Central Christian Church, who has built a reputation providing services to immigrants.
Trump’s deportation blitz, however, threatened the city’s revival. Springfield’s Chamber of Commerce had been getting about 20 inquiries a year from businesses looking to relocate to the city, but after Trump’s debate-stage rant about cats and dogs, companies stopped reaching out. Many Haitians in Springfield were laid off last year after the administration tried, unsuccessfully, to end their TPS status early—in August 2025. A court blocked the move, but too late to save their jobs.
And the official expiration date of February 3 was just around the corner.
A church rally in support of Haitian residents “was filled to capacity—the fire marshal had to ask people to leave.”
By January, Springfield’s Haitians were lying low, afraid to leave home for groceries or to bring their kids to school. Some struggled to pay rent or cover their legal expenses without jobs. They watched the news as Immigration and Customs Enforcement violently occupied another Midwestern city, Minneapolis, and wondered whether they’d be next. Once their status expired, they’d be immediately deportable. Raids were expected.
A group of Haitians around the country had filed a lawsuit to block the administration from ending Haiti’s TPS, and the judge was expected to weigh in any day. On February 2, one day before the expiration date, more than 1,000 people crammed inside St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Springfield to show support for the immigrants. “The place was filled to capacity—the fire marshal had to ask people to graciously leave,” says Felix, who was there. Later that day, a federal judge in Washington, DC, issued a ruling that temporarily blocked the administration from ending TPS while the lawsuit continued.
“It was a relief,” says Dorsainvil, who runs the Haitian Support Center, a community nonprofit helping immigrants through this uncertain period, including by delivering food to families who are afraid to leave home. “Even though I knew it was not a final victory, at least we had some time to breathe.”
It was “a huge celebration,” Marian Stewart, a retired minister who volunteers with the group Springfield Neighbors United, told me the next day from Yellow Springs, a nearby city where she lives. She cautiously hoped that some of her immigrant neighbors might emerge from home again.
The bomb threats began anew less than a week later.
On February 9, the Springfield City School District received the first of the threats by email. So did the county municipal court and public safety building, where suspicious duffel bags were found. Officials closed roads and public schools. “These are threats that also referenced Haitians,” Gov. DeWine told reporters. “The whole essence was…get rid of the Haitians.”
Haitian parents rushed to pick up their kids from class, some recalling the bomb threats that followed the presidential debate in 2024—the one where Trump proclaimed, absurdly, “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats”—or thinking of their old lives in Haiti, when they had to rush to extract their kids from school during spates of political violence and street demonstrations. Haitians who came to the United States, Dorsainvil says, “never expected to get into a situation like this” again.
Even the judge in the TPS case has been getting threats: “The best way you could help America is to eat a bullet.”
After the bomb threats, law enforcement promised to check the schools every morning before they opened, but many kids stayed home the next day, according to Wentworth.
There were more bomb threats on February 10, this time targeting Clark State College, Wittenberg University, and the Clark County Department of Job and Family Services. The county sheriff said an initial investigation suggested the messages came from overseas, as in 2024.
A day later, a synagogue and two local churches received threats, including the church where the Haitians’ supporters had rallied on February 2. “This week’s been miserable,” says Wentworth, who teaches at Wittenberg. Pastor Ruby, who personally received dozens of harassing phone calls, had breakfast with another pastor who said he’d gotten an unexpected package in the mail—it was a camera, but he had to treat it as though it might be a bomb. The phone calls to Ruby came after people on TikTok spread vicious rumors that he and other faith leaders assisting immigrants are actually helping ICE and trafficking immigrant children. “Everyone’s on edge,” Ruby says.
“There is a real trauma that these folks are going through,” Geoff Pipoly, an attorney representing the Haitians who are suing the government over TPS, told me.
US District Judge Ana Reyes, who is adjudicating that lawsuit, is also receiving threats. In a recent hearing, she read aloud from angry missives people have sent to her chambers: “I hope you die today…The best way you could help America is to eat a bullet.”
“To those who would threaten judges,” Reyes, an immigrant herself, added, “we will act without fear or favor…We will continue to do our jobs…We will not be intimidated.”
Springfield’s Haitians may have enough supporters to fill a church, and then some, but their arrival was not without its tensions. The influx of 10,000 to 15,000 new people strained city services. “Apartments suddenly had occupants again, but that caused stresses: ‘We need more desks in schools,’ or ‘I had to wait an extra turn at the light,'” says Stewart, the former minister. At City Commission meetings, some residents referred to their immigrant neighbors using racist language, according to New York Times reporter Miriam Jordan, who has reported extensively from Springfield.
In 2024, local frustrations over resources became a breeding ground for the nasty political rhetoric that emerged during Trump’s campaign; that September, Republican VP pick JD Vance, who represented Ohio in the Senate, tried to attack Kamala Harris by spreading baseless claims about Springfield that were first fueled by far-right activists and neo-Nazis. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he tweeted.
Springfield police immediately shot down the pet-eating claims, but Vance’s lies took off on social media, spread by Elon Musk to his nearly 200 million followers on X. “Cat Lives Matter!” wrote Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.).
If ICE comes to Springfield to deport all Haitians, “they’re going to have to push their way into the church and arrest pastors.”
They have detractors still, but Springfield’s Haitians also have many defenders, and local groups have sprung up to support them. The Haitian Support Center, led by Dorsainvil, is a key resource. So is G92, a faith-based coalition that has offered Know Your Rights workshops and trainings for how to deescalate interactions with federal immigration agents. There is not a big ICE presence in Springfield yet, but there was a surge of ICE officers this winter in Columbus, just an hour away.
More court action could happen this week. If Haitians lose TPS status, additional ICE agents would likely show up. What would that mean for families? Last year, the county health department reported about 1,200 kids under the age of 5 who were born in Springfield to Haitian parents—children who could be left without their guardians if deportations ensue. “That’s a whole lot of kids potentially without parents,” she says.
The St. Vincent de Paul charity is helping families take precautions, including by designating alternate caregivers and securing passports for their children. The nonprofit Nehemiah Foundation is trying to set up safe spaces where kids can stay if they are separated from their families.
Making matters worse, driver’s licenses held by Haitian TPS holders expired on February 3. Ohio’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles won’t renew them as long as TPS status is up in the air. “It’s like a million small cuts,” says Wentworth, who says she and other volunteers are driving Haitian kids to school or their parents to doctor appointments.
The recent court decision is but a temporary reprieve; the administration could appeal up to the Supreme Court, which in October allowed it to terminate TPS for Venezuelan immigrants. “Haitians are in limbo,” Lynn Tramonte of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance noted during an organizing call led by the advocacy group Red Wine and Blue. “How do you plan your life? Figure out where your kids will go to school? Sign a lease?”
And when is it safe to emerge from your home? As long as Judge Reyes’ order keeps TPS from expiring, the odds of a large-scale ICE operation in Springfield are reduced. “But if a higher court overturns that court order in two weeks, [ICE] can start raids in two weeks and a day,” says attorney Pipoly.
Haitians in Springfield have likened deportation to a death sentence—a return to gang violence, food shortages, and political instability. Even Trump’s State Department continues to warn against travel to Haiti. The dangers are so acute that I had trouble finding Haitian immigrants willing to speak to me for this article. “They will answer phones for people they know, maybe,” says Stewart, “but they are in serious fear, because they know if they get caught and have to go back to Haiti, more than likely they will get killed.”
Some local religious leaders are ready to offer them sanctuary if raids begin. “If they want to get them, they’re going to have to push their way into the church and arrest pastors,” says Ruby.
“The stress is unbelievable” for the Haitian immigrants—”feeling like you’re being attacked on all sides,” Wentworth adds. “You don’t know: What are you going to wake up to tomorrow? When are they going to pounce? It’s just exhausting.”
2026-02-20 20:30:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The Trump administration claims its latest move to gut climate regulations and end all greenhouse gas standards for vehicles will save Americans money. But its own analysis indicates that the new rule will push up gas prices, and that the benefits of the rollback are unlikely to outweigh the costs.
On Thursday, the president and his environmental secretary, Lee Zeldin, announced the finalized repeal of the endangerment finding, a legal determination which underpins virtually all federal climate regulations. He claimed the rollback would save the US $1.3 trillion by 2055.
Late on Thursday night, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a regulatory impact analysis to back up that number. The savings will come from two places, the document says: some $1.1 trillion will stem from reduced vehicle prices, while another $200 billion will come from slashed electric vehicle purchases and lowered spending on charging infrastructure.
But a chart within the analysis indicates that the US will through 2055 incur $1.4 trillion in additional costs from increased fuel purchases, vehicle repair and maintenance, insurance, traffic congestion, and noise. An additional $40 billion in costs will come from reduced energy security, increased refueling time and lowered “drive value,” or costs associated with operating a vehicle.
In total, this means the repeal of the endangerment finding will impose an estimated costs of $1.5 trillion, overshadowing the projected $1.3 trillion in savings. And that’s before you take into account the huge social and climate costs.
“Their own analysis shows that the costs outweigh the benefits,” said Kathy Harris, who leads clean vehicle programming at the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council.
In an emailed statement, an EPA spokesperson said: “The Trump EPA is following the law, ending the bogus overreach of previous administrations done by agenda-driven climate zealots.”
In a scenario that assumes severely lowered fuel prices, the benefits of the repeal would outweigh the costs, the analysis says.
That low fuel price case is based on report from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). It was included in the document to properly account for the other “policies being implemented by President Trump that are intended to drive down the price of gasoline,” the authors write.
But that imagined circumstance is “not really realistic,” said Harris.
“That EIA’s low oil price [scenario] was never meant to show the effect of any policies that Trump would implement,” she said. “It’s designed to showcase the uncertainty and the volatility of domestic oil prices due to international forces on the global oil market that drives gas prices in the US and abroad.
“Like most actions within this administration, this decision lacks any regard for everyday people.”
The EPA also fails to provide evidence to support the claim that Donald Trump’s policy will “or even could” drive down fuel prices to the extent envisioned in that scenario, Harris said.
“They’re cooking the books here,” she added.
Trump has repeatedly pledged to lower gasoline prices for Americans. But when the analysis compares a case study in which vehicle regulations continue, versus one where they are repealed, it does not appear that promise will be met.
Eliminating the greenhouse gas standards, the regulatory impact analysis shows, will increase gasoline prices by some $0.75 per gallon by 2050.
“That’s about a 29 percent increase in gasoline prices compared to if we maintain the policies that are in place,” said Harris.
The administration’s analysis also fails to examine the additional costs that deregulation could create due to increased global warming, which experts say could be massive. “This is aligned with what we’ve been seeing from this administration, where they focus on the cost to industry while completely ignoring the costs to the health and climate costs,” said Harris.
Repealing the endangerment finding could increase the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by a stunning 10 percent by 2055, and impose up to $4.7 trillion in additional expenses tied to harmful climate and air pollution by that time, according to projections from advocacy group the Environmental Defense Fund.
Critics say the repeal will benefit Trump’s wealthy oil-boss donors while harming the working class and vulnerable Americans.
“Like most actions within this administration, this decision lacks any regard for everyday people and seems to be a play to deepen its loyalty to fossil fuel companies and billionaires who have proven that they are willing to take actions that endanger human life,” said Abre’ Conner, the director of climate and environmental justice at the NAACP.
The EPA spokesperson said: “These activists picked winners and losers and regulated our economy to the tune of trillions at the expense of the American people with zero measurable environmental impact to show for it. The people who are expressing outrage now are simply upset that their preferred ideology can no longer bypass Congress and the will of the people to dictate how Americans live, work, and drive.”
The person did not address questions about the agency’s economic analysis.
2026-02-20 05:56:03
On January 31, federal agents fired tear gas into a crowd of civilians, clergy, and children gathered outside the ICE building in Portland, Oregon. Witnesses say, and video shows, that the demonstration was largely peaceful before the gas was deployed. In the weeks since, a federal judge moved to restrict the use of these chemical munitions at the site following reports that agents used them against demonstrators who posed no imminent threat.
Under the second Trump administration, displays of force against protesters have become increasingly common. So it’s important to know which chemicals are being deployed against those exercising their First Amendment rights—because they’re not benign.
Tear gas, the most widely deployed crowd-control weapon, can cause more harm than temporary irritation. Beyond burning eyes and skin, it has been linked to corneal ulcers and menstrual cycle disruptions, with some reports suggesting possible associations with miscarriage.
But tear gas is just one type of chemical used by federal agents for crowd control.
On January 24, federal agents used hexachloroethane smoke—more commonly known as HC—on protesters at the same Portland ICE facility where they would tear gas children just a week later. According to medical experts, HC is “demonstrably more dangerous” than tear gas. The smoke releases zinc chloride, which can cause chemical burns, acute respiratory distress, and pulmonary edema at high concentrations. Safety data from the manufacturer also warns of potential long-term risks, including organ damage and cancer with repeated exposure.
The US Army has been moving away from HC use in training for decades due to health risks to soldiers, replacing it with less toxic alternatives. Yet spent HC canisters have been documented at protests in Portland—including during the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Past reports linked exposure to symptoms ranging from vomiting and hair loss to prolonged appetite loss and significant weight decline.
As the Department of Homeland Security continues deploying these chemical agents, serious questions remain about their safety and the long-term health effects for those exposed—including DHS’s own officers.
