Mother JonesModify

2026-02-13 07:09:02

In the summer of 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr. took the stage at the NAACP’s 47th annual convention in San Francisco. Speaking at the precipice of the Civil Rights Movement, King cautioned that “the guardians of the status quo are always on hand with their oxygen tents to keep the old order alive.” Over the next decade, Black Americans’ struggle for racial justice would lead to major victories from the workplace to the ballot box. But today, as King warned, the “old order” clings on, and the civil rights gains fought for in the ’60s are under siege. 

Since last January, the Trump administration has dismantled diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and shuttered civil rights offices across the federal government; rejected the legal framework used to protect marginalized groups’ access to jobs, housing, and education. Last month, Donald Trump even told the New York Times that he thought civil rights amounted to “reverse discrimination” against white people.

A year into Trump’s second term, and with months to go until the midterm elections, I spoke with NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson about Trump’s multifront attack on civil rights protections, federal agents’ violent invasion of Minneapolis, resistance to data centers in Black communities across the South, and the role of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization in this political moment.

Days before we spoke, an ICE officer shot and killed Renée Good in South Minneapolis, just blocks away from where George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020. Johnson, who has presided over the NAACP since 2017, called ICE’s intimidation and harassment of citizens and non-citizens alike, due process violations, and use of racial profiling (greenlighted by the Supreme Court) “something that we have not seen at this level in this country for many, many decades, if ever.”

The NAACP of the 1950s and ’60s—after leading the charge against segregation in the 1954 landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education—paired its winning legal strategy with support for nonviolent direct action. The year after Brown overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal,” the NAACP provided legal aid to Black Alabamians boycotting segregated buses in Montgomery, and years later, to students protesting discrimination at lunch counters across the South. It even played a pivotal role in planning the 1963 March on Washington. But in the next decade, during the more militant Black Power movement, and into the Reagan years, the organization struggled with the departure of its longtime executive director Roy Wilkins, declining youth membership, and financial challenges.

At the start of the 21st century, the NAACP focused on less confrontational strategies until the emergence of Black Lives Matter in the 2010s—and Trump’s election—threw the organization into a new period of uncertainty. Promising a “systemwide refresh,” it dismissed its 18th president in May of 2017. Six months later, Johnson—the interim president and then-head of its Mississippi conference—was elected to the role.

In Trump’s first term, the NAACP took on high-profile court cases like its successful defense of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and since the start of his second, it’s taken a more offensive posture, disinviting the sitting president from last year’s annual conference for the first time in its history, and stepping up its support for more direct, localized action in Black communities resisting aggressive ICE raids and rapidly expanding data centers.

At the end of January, the NAACP launched a campaign calling on senators to block federal funding for ICE, impeach and prosecute Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and, ultimately, abolish the agency completely.

More and more Americans are calling on the government to do the same. More than six in ten respondents in a New York Times/Siena poll— after the fatal shooting of Good on January 7, but a week before federal agents killed Alex Pretti on January 24—believed that “the tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have gone too far.” (Other polls show weakening support, even among Trump’s base, for the president’s immigration agenda, which may make it increasingly difficult for the GOP to hold on to its narrow majority in Congress.)

The same poll found that voters’ primary concern is the economy, where Trump’s approval ratings have plummeted. Data centers cropping up across the country have sent electricity bills surging, contributing to voters’ anger about the cost of living. As the AI industry booms, voters across party lines are pushing back on data center construction in their communities. 

Johnson told me that the NAACP has been “on the frontlines” of the data center resistance, starting with its work in Southwest Memphis, where Elon Musk’s xAI quickly built a data center in 2024, beginning construction last year on a second one on the Tennessee-Mississippi border, with talks of a third in the works. Last July, the organization threatened a lawsuit against xAI over the company’s use of polluting methane gas turbines to power those facilities, which it contends violate the Clean Air Act. Last September, the organization released resources for activists and organizers demanding increased transparency and accountability from the tech giants building this infrastructure. 

After Trump’s second victory, Johnson said it was clear to the group he heads that the administration “would pursue a course of mass distraction” to achieve its goals. Trump first deployed these “distraction tactics”—“othering communities and seeking to erode protections” at home and creating conflict abroad—to push through his tax and spending megabill, Johnson said.

Now, as immigration agents swarm blue cities and tensions escalate with countries like Venezuela and Nigeria, “we believe all of these things in sum total are means by which the administration is trying to avoid the accountability around the Epstein files and releasing them, and to mask the current economic predicament”—including prices that, despite Trump’s promises, continue to rise.

In preparation for the midterms, the NAACP has been “actively engaged in the mid-cycle redistricting process, which is unprecedented,” he told me. In addition to filing lawsuits in states like Texas, the NAACP is “working with policymakers in certain targeted states” to protect Black voters’ access to the ballot box. Last fall, the NAACP also launched a mass mobilization in support of California’s redistricting ballot initiative, Prop 50, as I reported for Mother Jones in November. 

Nearly 70 years after King’s speech, as the NAACP reaches its 117th anniversary—coinciding with a century of Black history commemorations and the nation’s semiquincenntinal—Johnson told me he believes “we are in a setback,” but also “at an inflection point.” 

What’s at stake, he said, is “whether or not we will have a true representative democracy, or something less than that.”

2026-02-13 06:01:48

Early voting in the primaries for a hotly contested North Carolina US Senate race began today, with a field that includes a moderate former Democratic governor, a January 6 rioter, and a Trump-backed Republican. Winning the battleground state’s Senate race is vital for Republicans who want to keep the seat—and the Senate—and for Democrats, who hope to flip it. 

Roy Cooper, the amiable ex-North Carolina governor with a middle-of-the-road approach to politics, is the anticipated pick for the Democratic Party. Cooper spent nearly 40 years in state politics, and his campaign has raised almost $18 million since launching last summer. If he were to win the race, Cooper would be the first Democrat to win a US Senate seat in North Carolina since 2008. As I wrote last month, Cooper was elected to his first gubernatorial term in 2016 at the same time President Donald Trump won North Carolina. 

Former RNC chair Michael Whatley is widely considered the frontrunner in the Republican primary. Though he enters the race with low name recognition compared to Cooper, he also has Trump’s endorsement, with the president promising that Whatley would be an “unbelievable Senator.” This is Whatley’s first time on the ticket, but he previously served as chief of staff for Sen. Elizabeth Dole and as legal counsel for former President George W. Bush during the recount for the 2000 presidential election. 

If he does win the whole thing, voters shouldn’t expect Whatley to challenge the president much. At a recent rally in Rocky Mount, North Carolina (in Cooper’s home county), Whatley told the crowd that they “need a conservative champion, and Donald Trump needs an ally in the Senate.” He told the Washington Post, “I think if I do disagree with [Trump], it’s going to be in private.”

Whatley’s primary challengers, Don Brown and Michele Morrow, haven’t raised nearly as much money, but they could still pose a threat. Brown is a retired Navy JAG Officer who previously ran for Congress in 2024, but lost in the primary. It’s not hard to see where Brown stands on the issues, thanks to the detailed list of policies on his website. Among these policies are 12-year term limits for members of Congress, an elimination of the federal income tax, and the end of the “failure” of the Department of Education “experiment.” 

Morrow previously ran for North Carolina’s superintendent of public instruction in 2024, where she lost by just a 2 percent margin. She is a registered nurse and former Christian missionary who was at the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection and has called public schools “socialism centers” and “indoctrination centers.” In the past, Morrow promoted QAnon conspiracy theories on social media. She called for the televised execution of former President Barack Obama. She asserted that the “+” in LGBTQ+ stood for pedophilia. On her campaign’s homepage, she claims that she’s “the one candidate Roy Cooper FEARS!”

A January poll from Carolina Forward still shows Cooper leading Whatley, 47 percent to 42 percent, in a potential November matchup. The poll also shows that Whatley will be the likely Republican candidate. Brown, who is his closest opponent, trails 36 percent to 6 percent. There are five other Democratic candidates and three additional Republican candidates, though none of them are likely to be factors in the race.

The start of the primaries launches what’s expected to be a tight, expensive race. Spending is expected to reach anywhere from $650 million to $800 million, according to Politico. 

2026-02-13 05:23:42

Federal officials from the Department of Homeland Security were eyeing a Kansas City warehouse for one of their next detention facilities for immigrants. The company that owns the Missouri warehouse, Platform Ventures, announced on Thursday that it is not moving forward with the sale. 

The move comes after steep pressure from locals who have been consistently protesting the potential sale since immigration officials toured the facility on January 15. 

Platform Ventures said it “is not actively engaged with the U.S. Government or any other prospective purchaser” in a statement to Kansas City Public Radio. 

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said that while his city welcomed the news, his office is prepared to keep fighting. “A mass encampment warehouse” is “offensive to the dignity and human rights of those who would be detained.”

According to a report from the American Immigration Council, by the end of November 2025, ICE was using 104 more facilities for detention than at the start of the year. That’s a 91 percent increase. The Council report found that the Trump administration’s arrest practices have led to a 2,450 percent increase in the number of people being held in ICE detention with no criminal record.

As DHS continues to expand its existing presence and open new offices around the country, Kansas City residents join other community leaders in Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, Ashland, Virginia, and elsewhere who are fighting back against potential ICE detention centers in their cities. 

Terrence Wise, a leader with the activist groups Stand Up KC and Missouri Workers Center, said in a statement that the no-sale wouldn’t have happened without “several weeks of protest and collective action” from locals who “will continue fighting to keep masked, unaccountable federal agents out of our communities.”

2026-02-13 03:34:59

Bianca Sonnenberg’s uniform has become her security blanket. Before ICE arrived in Minneapolis, she would change when she finished her route. Recently, she’s hoped her identity as a US Postal Service worker would protect her from getting targeted by ICE operations. She’s Native American, and over the last few months, she’s heard about ICE detaining Indigenous people in Minneapolis and around the country. It terrifies her. 

White House border czar Tom Homan announced today that the Department of Homeland Security will end Operation Metro Surge after months of chaos resulting in DHS claims of more than 4,000 arrests, the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, and immense community resistance. 

Sonnenberg spoke to Reveal about the big and small changes she and her colleagues witnessed along their routes in South Minneapolis during the disruptive operation. She spoke from her personal perspective and not as a representative of the USPS.

Her story has been edited and condensed for clarity.

As mail carriers, when we’re on our route for a long time, you start to know your community, so you memorize names. And a co-worker was like, “Alex Pretti’s on my route.”

And so I was like, “Oh my gosh.” He was like, “Yeah, they got a little memorial out there. I feel so bad. He has packages today.”

That almost made tears come to my eyes. It’s so sad how you’re here one second and you’re just gone the next. And you don’t think about that when you are ordering a package. You don’t think, “Oh, I’m not gonna be here to get my package.” 

It’s really sad that he was taken and he did nothing wrong. I’ve seen the videos, and he didn’t do anything wrong. He didn’t reach for any gun and all the stuff that they’re trying to make him seem like. First of all, they were calling him an assassin…but then it’s, “We gotta go through a full investigation.” How can you say that?

 I feel grateful that I got this privilege of being a federal employee. In the daytime, I can go to the store; I can move about my community and not feel like they’re gonna bother me, per se. But I wear my uniform home because I’m too scared not to. I could be targeted. 

My mindset is let me get what I need from the store or whatnot before I come home. Because God forbid somebody pulls the Uber driver over and I don’t have my uniform on. I run into the store before I get home, and there’s an operation on the block that I wasn’t paying attention to. I get caught up and they slam me around a little. I’m fragile. I’m 49 years old. I can get bruised. I bruise easily. I don’t want to go through that.

It’s crazy, because I always say I only fear God, but they have definitely triggered something in me to be more protective of myself and of my surroundings and the people that I care about, including other people on my route.  

I’ve been around them for over a decade. Most of them have all been on my route the whole time. So we’re a big village.

Our supervisor let us know (on January 24) that ICE had killed somebody close to the route. She said it happened in front of Glam Doll Donuts. I was like, “Oh my God, that’s my block.”

You could see the yellow tape and the community coming from every direction. I’m hearing the flash-bangs and I’m seeing the smoke. 

As I’m delivering, I got a few people saying: “You shouldn’t be at work! You shouldn’t be here! You know that they’re shooting tear gas on the other side of the block.” And I’m like: “Yeah, I know, but I gotta keep doing my job. I may have medicine. I don’t know what I have in my packages.” But that’s my job.

So I go into an apartment building. There are a lot of customers in the hallway, and they’re watching through the windows. I’m like: “You guys gotta stay in here and be safe. That’s tear gas. You don’t wanna breathe that in.” So everybody stayed in the apartment building. I said, “I’m gonna keep going and get this next building done.”

As I went outside, going from one building to the next is about 50 feet, that tear gas got into me. And I’m breathing in and it kind of felt like glass shards in my nose and my throat. I didn’t want to cough right away to breathe it in more, so I just hurried up and got into the next building. 

And then  just kind of breathed a little bit and I was like, “Oh, man, is this what I’m gonna do?” I was just in shock that this was really happening. There’s some people who probably would say: “Oh, this is a dangerous environment. Let me get off the street. Let me just take care of myself.”

I didn’t feel like that. I felt like a medic in the war. I just gotta make sure all my people are okay. I had to make sure everybody on my route was okay.

In my head, I’m always thinking, this is somebody’s medicine or something that they need. If I don’t get it to ’em today, they’re gonna have to wait till Monday. And that’s just me doing my part that I could at that moment. 

2026-02-13 03:14:44

After more than two months of an aggressive—and deadly—occupation of the Twin Cities, top immigration official Tom Homan said during a press conference on Thursday that the Trump administration is scaling back “Operation Metro Surge.” Yet some local officials who have long been at odds with federal leaders aren’t buying it.

Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Immigration enforcement will still continue in the region, Homan also admitted, adding that removing agents depends partly on if “agitators” behave as the administration sees fit. 

Homan cited “unprecedented levels of coordination” from state and local law enforcement, as well as elected officials, as one of the main reasons they are reportedly slowing down operations. But that coordination hasn’t been solely friendly. At one point, he said “I have not met with one county jail that says no to us.” But, according to the New York Times, the Hennepin County jail, the largest in the state, “has not agreed to change its policy of non-cooperation on civil immigration enforcement in any way.”

The announcement follows an aggressive takeover of the Twin Cities by immigration enforcement that included agents fatally shooting Renée Good and Alex Pretti, repeatedly using harmful chemical weapons, targeting operations at schools and on children, and overall creating an environment of fear that led many immigrants to fear leaving their homes. The Trump administration’s action in the area sparked nationwide protests and economic strikes. Homan was sent in to replace Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino, who oversaw the majority of the violent operation in the Twin Cities. 

Last week Homan announced that the Trump administration was removing 700 immigration agents from the area, yet around 2,000 federal law enforcement officials still remain in the Twin Cities. That’s nearly four times the number of officers in the Minneapolis Police Department.

Aisha Gomez, a Minnesota State Representative, released a statement calling the operation “authoritarianism” and vowed to continue fighting federal officials “until every abducted neighbor is returned to the arms of their family.”

2026-02-12 20:30:00

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

Each year, the Department of Veterans Affairs’ internal watchdog sends a survey to all 139 of the agency’s medical centers coast to coast with a straightforward question: Which jobs have severe staffing shortages?

In fiscal year 2025, the responses raised alarm: VA health care facilities reported more than 4,400 severe staffing shortages—a 50 percent hike from the previous year.

And once again, the job that topped the list for clinical positions among VA facilities? Psychologists. It’s the same occupation that took the lead spot in 2024 and has been in the top five since 2019.

Despite suicide prevention and veterans’ mental health being one of the VA’s top priorities, there are signs that psychologists and other mental health professionals on staff are reaching a breaking point.

“I loved my veterans and had the privilege of seeing real change in their lives over time,” said Laura Grant, a psychologist who left VA in September last year after nearly a decade on the job. But “burnout increasingly felt normalized rather than addressed.”

Grant was among six psychologists who left the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2025 and told The War Horse in interviews over the past several months that mental health providers are burning out.

Last year, the number of psychologists employed by the VA dropped for the first time in more than a decade. Every fiscal year since 2016, the department has added between 55 and 350 psychologists to its rosters, according to VA workforce records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request. In fiscal year 2025, however, the department lost more than 200.

In the most recent VA Office of Inspector General staffing report, 57 percent of VA health care facilities reported severe staffing shortages of psychologists. Shortages are defined by the government as occupations that are hard to fill, not necessarily positions that are vacant. Psychiatrists were the second most reported clinical occupation for severe staffing shortages at 55 percent of VA facilities.

The shortages aren’t unique to VA; more than 135 million Americans live in an area with a shortage of mental health professionals. And VA says it is currently posting hundreds of job openings for psychologists.

But the psychologists who left VA in the last year told The War Horse that the agency, once renowned for top-tier training—more than half of all US psychologists get training at VA—mentorship, and work-life balance is now one plagued by metrics and pressures to discharge patients more quickly to make room for new ones.

“There was so much I loved about the VA,” said Melissa London, a psychologist who left the San Francisco VA in January 2025 after her caseload doubled over the course of two years. “The [staffing] shortage was constant, but it was never nearly as bad as it was in the past year, or two years, at least.”

A VA spokesman dismissed the criticism, called concerns from former psychologists quoted in this story “unconfirmed hearsay,” and accused The War Horse of trying to make the Trump Administration look bad at all costs, regardless of the facts.

“The number of VA psychologists fluctuates from year to year based on labor market trends and demand for their services,” said Peter Kasperowicz, VA press secretary. “Today we employ more than 7,000 psychologists, which is more than VA had at many points during the Biden Administration.”

But as the number of psychologists declines, the demand for mental health care has continued to rise. VA saw 2.2 million patients for mental health care in fiscal year 2025, according to data obtained by The War Horse. That is a 40 percent increase from a decade ago. Meanwhile, the VA has increased the number of psychologists employed at the agency by only 24 percent since 2016. Psychologists aren’t the only ones who treat veterans’ mental health; some are seen by other providers, such as psychiatrists and social workers.

Despite the staffing shortages, psychologists still have the highest retention rates for surveyed VA employees in the first two years on the job. But a recent report from Democrats on the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs cited interviews with VA employees that indicate an ongoing “exodus” of mental health care providers at some facilities.

In a Senate committee hearing in December, Dr. Julie Kroviak, VA’s principal deputy assistant inspector general, acknowledged the trend. She said surveys found VA mental health providers “are losing clinical staff because of morale.”

Health care providers were protected from layoffs and ineligible for early retirement or deferred resignations when the VA shed more than 30,000 employees last year. VA insists it is prioritizing hiring mental health care providers, and is currently recruiting more than 400 psychologists across the country, said Kasperowicz. This week, there were 171 job postings under the code for clinical psychologist at the Veterans Health Administration in the USAJOBS portal.

However, multiple former VA psychologists told The War Horse they didn’t see evidence during their time on staff that hiring new psychologists was a priority.

A psychologist at the Bronx VA said they left their position focused on suicide prevention research and psychotherapy for veterans transitioning out of the military after their study’s federal grant funding ended. They said they weren’t able to find a new position in research or working with patients at their VA medical center, or to get the medical center director’s approval to get sponsored for a new grant. “There wasn’t any effort to provide me with bridge funding or to figure out how to keep me,” they said.

This psychologist, like some others who spoke to The War Horse, asked to remain anonymous either because they had friends or family who still worked at VA and feared backlash, or because they planned to apply for government-sponsored research grants and were worried that speaking with a journalist could lead to retaliation.

London recalled how difficult it was to hire new psychologists, including during the Biden administration. She cited hiring freezes and having to fight for new staff, even though “it was very clear to anyone in the field that additional staff was needed.”

Even before Trump returned to the White House, psychologists at VA were at a breaking point.

In September 2024, a psychology program manager at the Central Virginia VA Health Care System sent an email to several staff members. The subject: workload and burnout. The importance: high. In the email, the program manager stated that, since there would be virtually no new staff positions in fiscal year 2025, new strategies would be implemented to treat patients. “Effective immediately, we need to cut down on our caseloads, which have grown too large to be manageable,” they wrote.

An excerpt of an email sent by a VA psychology program manager. To read the full email, click here.

These new strategies included ending treatment with all veterans who have been in therapy longer than two to three years, pausing or ending treatment “with people who have not made progress recently and seem to have plateau’d,” telling patients they need to take a six- to 12-month break from therapy to practice skills, and starting all new patients on a short treatment model of six to 15 sessions.

“We just can’t keep seeing everyone in individual psychotherapy for long periods of time,” the program manager wrote. “It makes them dependent on psychotherapy, and it burns us out.”

A veteran, infuriated that his one-on-one therapy was cut off, later discovered the memo and tipped off The War Horse, which obtained a copy through a public records request.

The email may have been well-intentioned for both the therapists and the veterans. In 2024, a study found that when therapists are burnt out, veterans’ mental health care can suffer as well.

But one tactic to avoid burnout and care for more veterans mentioned in the email—the short treatment model of six to 15 sessions—has frustrated patients and providers, The War Horse has found.

And it isn’t unique to Central Virginia. Over the past several years, it has been rolled out at VA medical centers across the country, according to previous reporting by The War Horse.

VA has repeatedly told The War Horse that it does not have a national policy to cap mental health care.

Kasperowicz, the VA press secretary, called it “extraordinarily dishonest of you to take an email from the Biden Administration and try to misrepresent it as something that reflects the Trump Administration’s policies.”

Multiple psychologists in states across the country have told The War Horse they are still under pressure to limit one-on-one therapy.

One psychologist who left the Orlando VA Medical Center last year also said it was frustrating to frequently tell patients they couldn’t schedule future sessions for a month, or sometimes longer. “I felt like a factory worker.”

For several of the psychologists who spoke with The War Horse, the final tipping point came when Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, began rolling out initiatives in the late winter and spring of 2025—including reductions in force—that seemed designed to drive employees out. “Recognition for meaningful clinical work felt scarce, while scrutiny and suspicion became more common,” said Grant.

Grant said that one of the several reasons she quit was the agency’s dismantling of DEI initiatives, which she said “were directly tied to our ability to show up authentically, ethically, and competently for a diverse veteran population.”

Kasperowicz said VA is “proud to have abandoned the out-of-touch and divisive DEI policies of the past so we can focus solely on VA’s core mission.”

The return-to-office mandate was also difficult on psychologists, who require privacy to hold sessions with their patients. The psychologist at the Bronx VA said they didn’t have their own office and had to use the offices of absent colleagues to work. They once couldn’t find an empty office and were forced to take a telehealth appointment from their car.

“There’s no respect for what these veterans need, which is privacy,” they said. “I couldn’t wait to get out, even though I love working with veterans, and I have loved being at the VA for the most part, it was just really demoralizing.”

VA has been taking steps to address staff burnout, including appointing chief well-being officers whose roles are to reduce administrative burdens and improve employee wellness. This month, the American Medical Association recognized seven VA health care facilities through its Joy in Medicine program, which highlights facilities that have met specific program requirements to address physician burnout.

VA’s press secretary did not respond to The War Horse’s request to interview one of VA’s well-being officers, and few of the psychologists who spoke to The War Horse had ever heard of the officers—none had encountered them.

London said that at the San Francisco VA, there were efforts to mitigate staff burnout, like pizza parties. But many of these efforts felt surface-level. “There’s constant jokes about burnout and the memes of the pizza party,” she said, “when what we really need is a new hire.”

The majority of psychologists who spoke with The War Horse now work in private practice, where they can set their own hours and their own rates. And while some still work with veterans, none have joined the VA’s community provider network, which would allow veterans to see them through the VA’s Community Care program.

London and Grant say that issues with payments from insurance contractors and low reimbursement rates are some of the main reasons that private practice psychologists don’t want to participate in the program.

Many of the psychologists said that they would be open to returning to VA one day. One called working with young veterans “the most rewarding clinical experience of my life.” That echoes data published by the department; 69 percent of psychologists who left the agency said they would be open to returning, according to the latest workforce data available.

“I think there would have to be a little bit more respect and empathy and compassion for clinicians and some strategies about burnout,” London said. “But it’s something that I would consider if there was a clear indication that they actually cared.”

This War Horse news story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.