2025-05-17 06:50:06
In a 7-2 ruling on Friday afternoon, the Supreme Court once again barred the Trump administration from removing Venezuelans held at Texas immigration detention centers under the Alien Enemies Act, which gives the government extraordinary powers to summarily deport noncitizens during a “declared war” or “invasion.”
The justices found that the federal government violated the due process rights of detainees at Bluebonnet Detention Facility by failing to give them enough notice to contest their imminent removal on April 18, when dozens of men were put on a bus and vans headed to a nearby airport, presumably to be deported to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. The notice provided by the Trump administration to the Venezuelans, the court ruled, was severely inadequate—especially in light of the possibility of indefinite detention in a foreign prison.
“The Government has represented elsewhere that is unable to provide for the return of an individual deported in error to a prison in El Salvador,” the majority wrote in reference to the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the government has acknowledged it wrongly deported, “where it is alleged that detainees face indefinite detention…The detainees’ interests at stake are accordingly particularly weighty. Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster.”
The Court also reaffirmed that Venezuelans facing removal under the Alien Enemies Act are “entitled to constitutionally adequate notice prior to any removal, in order to pursue appropriate relief.”
As a Mother Jones investigation based on firsthand accounts from six detainees at Bluebonnet previously revealed, the Trump administration tried to abruptly expel about 60 Venezuelan men without giving them a meaningful opportunity to challenge their removal—which the Supreme Court had previously required. The interviewed detainees, who were handed a one-page document informing them they were going to be removed under the Alien Enemies Act as alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang, disputed the government’s accusations.
In some cases, the men received the notice—written only in English and without any mention of their right to seek relief in court—just hours before being loaded onto a police-escorted convoy headed to the Abilene Regional Airport. Had it not been for a last-minute legal effort by the ACLU, which led to the men being returned to the detention center, they could have joined the hundreds of Venezuelans now trapped in President Nayib Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Center. (In an overnight order on April 19, the Supreme Court then blocked the administration from deporting Venezuelans detained in northern Texas under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act “until further order” of the Court.)
The Court did not address the merits of the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to conduct summary deportations: “[W]e decide today only that the detainees are entitled to more notice than was given on April 18,” the decision states. Instead, the justices sent the case back to the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, instructing it to consider whether the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in challenging the legality of President Donald Trump’s use of the act, as well as “the issue of what notice is due” to Venezuelans facing potential removal under the wartime statute.
The Fifth Circuit will have to contend with a permanent injunction issued earlier this month by Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. in the Southern District of Texas that bars the government’s use of the Alien Enemies Act in that jurisdiction. In it, Rodriguez, a Trump appointee, concluded that the “historical record renders clear that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.”
In a concurring opinion on Friday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh indicated that he would have preferred to see the Supreme Court take on the merits of the case, rather than have lower courts do so first. “[C]onsistent with the Executive Branch’s request for expedition—and as the detainees themselves urge—I would grant certiorari, order prompt briefing, hold oral argument soon thereafter, and then resolve the legal issues,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissenting opinion that was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. “First and most important, we lack jurisdiction and therefore have no authority to issue any relief,” Alito argued. “Second, even if we had such authority, the applicants have not satisfied the requirements for the issuance of injunctive relief pending appellate review.”
Alito claimed that on April 18—the day District Court Judge James Wesley Hendrix, a Trump appointee in the Northern District of Texas, did not block the Venezuelans’ removal—the legal record “contained only sketchy evidence about any imminent threat” to any of the Venezuelans at Bluebonnet. In doing so, he brushed off a court declaration from a lawyer attesting to the men’s likely imminent removal as “double-hearsay.” (The majority disagreed with that assessment, noting evidence that the government had in fact taken steps on April 18 to remove the detainees.)
ACLU’s lead counsel in the case, Lee Gelernt, made clear in a Mother Jones interview last month that the stakes that day couldn’t have been higher.
“In more than 30 years of litigating,” Gelernt said, “I can’t remember a situation that was this urgent or extraordinary, where we were worried that every minute we delayed filing something could mean that our clients would end up permanently in a brutal foreign prison for the rest of their lives. It was literally minute to minute.”
In a statement, Gelernt called Friday’s ruling “a powerful rebuke to the government’s attempt to hurry people away to a Gulag-type prison in El Salvador.”
2025-05-17 04:58:19
Why do Republicans and their enablers insist on fantasizing about one of the most evil empires in science fiction?
In a recent CNN appearance, former Mitch McConnell adviser and GOP operative Scott Jennings went on the defense, justifying Emperor Palpatine’s violent vision for a galactic empire. When podcaster and contributor Van Lathan pointed out just one of the many war crimes the Empire engaged in—blowing up Princess Leia’s adopted home planet and massacring everyone on it—Jennings replied: “I think some could argue that it was warranted, given their rebellious activities. I mean, he defended the Empire against unelected hippies and violent protesters.”
The entire massacre of a planet is justified because of some “unelected hippies” and “protesters”?
It turns out Jennings isn’t the only right-winger to defend the Empire’s actions—and specifically the destruction of an entire planet. For decades, the GOP and its allies have played with defending the Empire’s violence for the sake of order. (Republican and former FCC chairman Ajit Pai literally quoted Palpatine in a hearing once.)
Now, of course, Star Wars is entirely science fiction. It’s not real. But this past week, the final episodes of Andor, Disney’s critical and audience hit about how the rebellion in the original trilogy came to be, dropped. And the show has pulled the Star Wars franchise into somewhat of a cultural renaissance, as its obvious point of view on authoritarianism marks a return to what made Star Wars: Dissecting the effects of state violence on the everyday people who work toward liberation.
“I do think that looking at how Star Wars and other stories like it are used in our political conversation reveals something interesting about our political moment: Republicans are gunning for their own Galactic Empire, and they will blow up a planet to make it happen. Or in this case, they will blow up our country.”
2025-05-17 02:29:14
President Donald Trump insists that accepting a $400 million Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from Qatar’s ruling family would not amount to a huge bribe. That’s because this opulent new Air Force One would go to his “library” when he leaves office.
That, at least, is what the president claimed amid concern that he might make personal use of a library-owned aircraft. Disputing that, he has suggested the plane would instead serve as a museum piece, like the decommissioned former Air Force One displayed at President Ronald Reagan’s library facility.
The president, or unnamed aides, are regularly attempting to wave off ethical concerns by saying that various huge donations will eventually go to the “library.”
It’s not yet clear whether this curious claim—that a so-called “flying palace” that US taxpayers may pay more than $1 billion to upgrade will be parked at a to-be-determined site in Florida after just a few years of use—will really come to pass. Facing rare bipartisan criticism over his plan to accept what experts call an unconstitutional emolument, Trump left Qatar Thursday without a public announcement finalizing a deal for the plane.
But Trump’s explanation is part of a trend. The president, or unnamed aides, are regularly attempting to wave off ethical concerns by saying that various huge donations will eventually go to the “library.”
Trump’s inaugural committee hasn’t said how much remains from the record-shattering $250 million raised via fealty displays from corporate chieftains. But the balance will go to the library, a “person close to the inauguration” told the Wall Street Journal. Proceeds from the million-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinners and $5 million-one-on-one meetings with the president—organized by the pro-Trump MAGA Inc PAC—are “all going to the library,” a “person familiar with the dinners” told Wired.
Then there are Meta (owner of Facebook) and Disney (owner of ABC News), which settled dubious lawsuits Trump had filed against them by pledging $15 million and $22 million, respectively, to Trump’s presidential library foundation.
There is ample reason to be wary about how the money could ultimately be used. For one, these are pledges to give money to a organization that is only partly established.
Disney, in its a settlement actually said it would transfer settlement funds “to a presidential foundation and museum” before one existed. The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library was incorporated in Florida a few weeks later, apparently as a way to accept the settlement. (Meta’s January settlement, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said “looks like a bribe,” is also reportedly bound for that foundation.)
Modern presidential libraries are run by nonprofit foundations. They often take the form of hagiographic museums, which include a repository of presidential papers administered by the National Archives. Trump’s library foundation has not indicated if it has yet sought IRS recognition as a nonprofit, and it hasn’t publicly announced a board of directors.
Trump’s record with non-profit organizations leads to additional reasons for concern. In 2019, a New York judge ordered his nonprofit Trump Foundation to pay $2 million to an array of charities—and then to dissolve entirely—after finding Trump misused the foundation to further his political and business interests. In 2022, the Trump Organization and Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a suit brought by the DC attorney general charging that the committee illegally misused nonprofit funds to enrich the Trump family by “grossly overpaying” Trump-owned companies “for use of event space at the Trump Hotel for certain inaugural events.”
Trump, of course, was indicted in 2023 for hiding highly classified government documents he had removed from the White House. Trump reportedly insisted the federal records, which belonged to the National Archives, were “mine.” Whether the 747 and the millions in donations and settlement money truly end up benefiting the future library—which would be run in part by the very same National Archives—remains to seen.
“If past is precedent, I don’t know that we should take them at the word until we see how the money is spent,” Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Mother Jones.
Regardless, the library itself is hardly an ethical panacea. Gifts to presidential libraries “fall between the cracks of campaign finance regulations and rules governing ethics in office,” Jacob Levy, a political theory professor at McGill University, wrote in a recent op-ed arguing that presidential fundraising for libraries while in office creates a “loophole you could fly a plane through.”
Levy noted that the foundations are bound only by loose rules applied to US nonprofits. Critics have labeled presidential libraries, generally, “a scam.”
“The fact that, according to President Trump, the plane would not remain in service to the United States but would rather be donated to his presidential library after his term concludes further raises the possibility that this ‘nice gesture’ is intended as a bribe to Donald Trump,” Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee charged in a letter to Trump’s attorney general and White House counsel. The plan, they argued, was “corrupt.”
Though legally Trump cannot simply pocket funds and assets intended for the library, he faces few other limits. He could choose to “take a salary,” Levy told Mother Jones. “He can fly around on the plane.”
Trump’s ability to raise donations that he could later personally benefit from creates a major ethical issue, Levy argued. “The fact that he can solicit those contributions” from people currying his favor during his presidency, Levy said, “makes them corruption.”
2025-05-16 21:03:25
In March, Axios reported that Donald Trump’s Oval Office had begun to resemble an Oscar night gift suite, as world leaders and business officials knew that showing up empty-handed risked earning Trump’s displeasure. In response to the news outlet’s catalogue of favors visitors bestowed on the president in such meetings, a White House spokesperson declared, “President Trump is a masterful negotiator and is using his astute business acumen to reshape our economy and reinvigorate American economic dominance. Companies and countries are being forced to come to the table and retreat from their America Last policies and once again are betting on America.”
Trumpese is used by government spokespeople, who provide absurdly aggressive (and often comically untrue) responses.
This was, of course, ridiculous—a hamfisted bit of propaganda that did not address the allegations in the story and was designed to convince no one. It did, however, do what a lot of statements from Trump administration spokespeople are meant to: telegraph defiance, display a swaggering disregard for the basic tenets of reality, and, of course, curry favor with the president. Welcome to the age of the hyper-aggressive, doggedly loyal flack, who is fluent in one language: Trumpese.
One true and neutral thing to be said about Donald Trump is that he’s transformed how his fans and imitators use the English language. Trump’s love of adverbs, bloviation, grandiosity, exaggeration, baldfaced lies, weird metaphors, and hatred of windmills has been the subject of endless commentary across the last decade. Over that time, the way he talks has increasingly seeped down to the people who seek to emulate him—or at least to keep their jobs in his employ. In his second term, with his chaotically malign agenda in hyperdrive, Trumpese is being used to full effect by government spokespeople, who often answer even the most benign of requests for comment with absurdly aggressive (and often comically untrue) responses.
The level of aggression established itself early, especially with Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung, now the White House communications director. When Trump was audibly lisping during an August campaign appearance, Huff Post‘s S.V. Date asked Cheung about it. His response, in full, was: “Must be your shitty hearing. Get your ears checked out.” In March, the Atlantic declared Cheung to be “the voice of Trump,” citing his penchant for ruthless campaigning and colorful insults: saying California Sen. Adam Schiff has a “watermelon head,” likening CNN anchor Erin Burnett to “a donkey trying to solve a Rubix cube.”
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the outlet that the Trump White House has adopted what she called Cheung’s “battle rhythm.” She certainly has, as exhibited by her response to the economic turmoil inflicted by Trump’s April global tariff announcements. As Trump waffled over setting and retracting rates and threw the global economy into chaos, she scolded reporters not to trust their eyes and ears: “Many of you in the media clearly missed the Art of the Deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.” Her toadying reference to Trump’s 1987 book did not clarify what the president was “doing here,” but it did affirm, again, Leavitt’s fealty to the president.
There may not be a better example of frantic, bizarre administration spin than its response to the revelations that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed military attack plans in at least two separate Signal chats. (One inadvertently included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg alongside senior Trump officials, the latter included Hegseth’s wife, brother, and personal attorney). The response from Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, issued on Twitter, was a multi-paragraph fusillade of Trumpese.
“The Trump-hating media continues to be obsessed with destroying anyone committed to President Trump’s agenda,” he wrote, in part. “This time, the New York Times—and all other Fake News that repeat their garbage—are enthusiastically taking the grievances of disgruntled former employees as the sole sources for their article. They relied only on the words of people who were fired this week and appear to have a motive to sabotage the Secretary and the President’s agenda.”
Trumpese has also been employed in response to the most inconsequential requests for comment. When the New York Times wrote in March about how Donald Trump privately mentioned a childhood love of music to Kennedy Center board members, Cheung declined to answer the reporters’ questions directly, instead describing the president as “a virtuoso” whose “musical choices represent a brilliant palette of vibrant colors when others often paint in pale pastels.”
Trump, a spokesperson claimed, is “a virtuoso” whose “musical choices represent a brilliant palette of vibrant colors.”
Nor are the fawning, verbose statements limited to praising Trump himself. Take last month, when the Atlantic reported that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum demands his staff freshly bake him cookies, “once instructed political appointees to act as servers for a multicourse meal,” and dispatched a “Park Police helicopter for his personal transportation.”
The response from a department spokesperson was, again, both non-responsive and absurd—a symphony, if you will, of weird insults and puffery. “These pathetic smears are from unnamed cowards who don’t know Doug Burgum and are trying to stop President Trump’s Energy Dominance agenda,” Interior spokesperson Katie Martin told the outlet in a statement. “Everyone knows Secretary Burgum always leads with gratitude and is humbly working with President Trump.”
Similarly, when Wired reported in May that director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reused the same password for years—one that incorporates the name she’d reportedly been given by the fringe religious sect in which she grew up—White House spokesperson Olivia Coleman wrote, “Attempting to smear the DNI as being in a cult is bigoted behavior,” adding, “Your bigoted lies and smears of a cabinet member and your story fomenting hinduphobia is noted.”
(The Science of Identity Foundation, the group in which Gabbard is alleged to have grown up is a nominally Hare Krishna group, but one not connected to mainstream Hinduism or the larger Hare Krishna movement. Gabbard’s family reportedly has deep ties to Science of Identity, although her personal spokesperson also previously called questions about the group “Hinduphobia,” telling the New York Times that Gabbard “has never and doesn’t have affiliation” with the group.)
Even Trump Media and Technology Group, Donald Trump’s media company, has incorporated a similar communication style. When journalist Hunter Walker recently asked why they were airing bizarre conspiratorial content about lizard people, spokesperson Shannon Devine declared, “Having trafficked in absurd conspiracy theories for years, the partisan hacks at Talking Points Memo, at the behest of their leftwing puppet masters, turn around and demand we censor content on our free-speech platform.” (The irony of accusing TPM of being part of sinister conspiracy for reporting on the company’s content promoting a sinister conspiracy didn’t seem to register.)
In the end, Trumpese doesn’t say much: instead, it’s a kind of blustering white noise designed by turns to provoke, batter, smear and, above all, shut down questioners. And whenever this age of American history is over, its strange linguistic conventions will stand as one of many reminders of just how far things went.
2025-05-16 18:02:00
One day, Sarah Ortiz bought a sweater at Target. She knew money was tight. She had just moved across the country from California to Massachusetts with her two toddlers and husband to seek costly, specialized medical care for one of her boys. But, Ortiz thought, it was just $25. And she needed a new sweater.
Still, Ortiz was nervous. She always handled the shopping for her family, filling the fridge, clothing her children, and ensuring the needs of her home were met. Often, like “any other person,” that meant heading to Target, she told me. “Especially, moms, right?” But all this shopping had to fall within a budget her husband, Tyson, set. If Ortiz wanted to purchase something over $25, she had to ask his permission.
“It was basically like a parent giving a child a card and then telling them, ‘This is what you can do with it, and if you step outside of that, then I will take it,’” Ortiz recalled. “And that was always the threat. If you don’t do X, I will take this from you.”
When Tyson handed Ortiz a Target credit card with her name on it, Ortiz didn’t think much of it, especially given his control over her budget. But she did wonder how her name could be on a card she never signed on to. “He said: ‘Oh, I opened it. I’m paying the bills anyway. What do you care?’” Ortiz recalled. If she was going to be spending so much money at this store, she remembers him saying, then why aren’t we getting anything out of it?
That credit card was opened over six years ago. Today, despite not having signed up herself, Ortiz owes Target $6,096. She also needs to pay Capital One $5,304, she owes Citibank $1,553, and half of the $18,052 debt to Bank of America held between her and Tyson. She struggles to remember all the rest: the student loans, the mortgage, the tabs spread across different retail stores and banks.
Five years ago, Ortiz began the process of leaving her husband. Since then, she has been trying to prove to the judges in her divorce proceedings that she was left in the dark by her husband and unknowingly saddled with debilitating debt.
“Right now, he’s in debt around $100,000,” Ortiz told me, and he wants her to pay half of it—on top of the $45,926 (and 99 cents) of debt in her name. “Most of [it],” she continued, “I didn’t know existed.” It’s a hard battle. “It’s his word versus mine,” she said, “and my name is on the document.”
“It’s his word versus mine, and my name is on the document.”
There was a time when credit card users needed to walk into a physical space, sit down at a desk, and sign their names to gain access to credit. Those intimacies are not required anymore. Having access to the internet makes it remarkably easy to open a credit account for yourself. All you need is personal data potentially accessible by a partner: an address, email, Social Security and telephone numbers, and sometimes employment status and gross income. “Basic information that, of course, my husband is gonna know,” Ortiz told me. She is an authorized primary user on many of the credit cards. But she says she isn’t the one who opened them. There’s one big problem, she tells me: “There’s no way I can prove it.”
According to surveys of survivors of intimate partner violence, up to 99 percent of victims of domestic violence experience some kind of financial injury related to the abusive relationship; this ranges from lost wages from missed work to costs associated with housing instability and the more extreme cases, like Ortiz’s, of mass debts accrued by a controlling partner. The coercion happens in private. Lines of credit are opened on a computer in a shared home. The debt balloons, but the payments aren’t made. Then the victim gets a call from collectors, telling them they are responsible for thousands of dollars in unpaid charges.
One of the most pernicious kinds of financial abuse is what Ortiz experienced: coerced debt or “nonconsensual credit-related transactions,” as Teal Inzunza, associate vice president of justice initiatives at the Urban Resource Institute in New York, told me.
Over several interviews, Ortiz detailed being haunted by debt previously unbeknownst to her, brought on throughout a marriage she has been trying to leave—claims confirmed by her lawyer and a family member, in addition to court documents, police records, emails, and messages sent through the co-parenting application OurFamilyWizard that were reviewed by Mother Jones.
Tyson did not respond to a detailed list of questions and, when reached, asked to not be on the record. When I attempted to reach him on the phone, he did not respond. He has said over email to Ortiz’s lawyer that “these cards were used for survival during challenging financial times.”
On average, people experiencing financial abuse incur $15,938 in coerced debt from a partner each year. Forty-three percent of survivors report being pressured to take out credit in their own name when they did not want to, and 52 percent reported that an abusive partner put debt in their name through a fraudulent or forced transaction.
Understanding this kind of manipulation can be complicated, Inzunza said. “Economic abuse can vary and often is done in ways that are not as easy to understand for people because our financial system is so complicated,” she said. “It’s confusing.”
That also makes it ridiculously hard to crack down on. When handled outside of divorce court, Inzunza told me, coercive debt is often treated like identity theft. In the eyes of the law, someone who had their card information swiped at a gas station and a victim of domestic financial abuse are often grouped into the same category. In the United States legal system, the burden of proof in financial identity theft cases falls upon the victim, not economic institutions like banks. This burden is compounded for survivors. To erase or relieve debt, victims must file a report either through their local police department or with the Federal Trade Commission, the governmental agency that handles identity theft and consumer debt nationally.
The structures that allow coercive debt to run rampant have remained largely untouched over several decades. The credit industrial complex has little to no accountability for how abusers co-opt their services to keep victims, especially women, locked out of economic safety and security. When coerced debt occurs between intimate partners, it can be relegated to an interpersonal, rather than legal, matter, leaving it up to individual survivors to navigate these financial and legal institutions.
“It’s complicated for me as a person who is actually practicing,” Naomi Mo Chee Young, a lawyer who years ago launched the Marital Debt Project, which focused on matrimonial and consumer debt matters, told me. “Consumers are burdened with making their own case, and it’s absurd.”
The first time many victims of domestic violence learn that their abuser took out a credit card in their name is when they get called by a debt collector to pay it back. “Once someone realizes somebody stole their identity,” Young, who works in New York City, notes, “their mind immediately goes to, ‘Oh, I know who did this.’” Proving who did it, though, is a much more arduous, red tape–filled process. Survivors and advocates told me that trying to recover from coercive debt or navigate the complicated laws surrounding financial abuse can feel insurmountable.
Early last summer, four years after initially filing for divorce, Ortiz and her husband sat down with their lawyers to discuss terms of custody agreements ahead of an upcoming trial date. That part, Ortiz told me, “actually was very simple. He basically signed off on everything.”
“But then,” she continued, “when it came to debt, he said, ‘No, I want you to pay everything in your name’—half of what’s in his name—and then pay off his credit cards that he’s currently using.” After Ortiz denied his request, she told a judge what happened—detailing the abuse, the credit cards, and the crushing debt. In response, the court-mandated debt counseling to figure out their finances.
Tyson and Ortiz, along with their lawyers, unsuccessfully struggled to find a counselor to talk to virtually and coordinate a time to do so. So they’re now back in court to figure out who is legally required to pay back the debts accrued throughout their marriage—and complete its dissolution.
“It, to be honest, scares me,” Ortiz told me of the court requiring her to meet with her husband to discuss the debt. “Because I’d be going by myself in a room with somebody with the history he has with me, talk about finances, and then walk back out to my car by myself…Like, this is not safe.”
Proving that debt isn’t yours, Inzunza told me, can take survivors “months and months and months, and sometimes years, honestly, sometimes decades to figure these things out.” Those who are trapped in it are “likely advised by their attorney not to pay debts that are not theirs,” she continued, “because as soon as you pay that, then you’re saying, ‘Okay, this is my debt.’”
Implicit in coerced debt, compared with other loans, is what appears to be a paradox: that paying the debt back, even a little, can worsen your claims for justice. Throwing twenty dollars, or a thousand, at student loans, car payments, or a mortgage lessens the overall amount you’ll need to pay later—diminishing the tide one payment at a time. But for those who didn’t know they were on the hook for this debt, paying it back can signal that they’re claiming ownership over it.
During those months, years, and even decades, the debt can continue to accrue, often at high interest. Late fees compound. And debt collectors keep calling. Survivors, advocates, and lawyers all told me that these constant reminders of the money create prolonged and indefinite associations with the abuse.
“I have never done more suicide assessments than when I’ve run credit reports with clients and found coerced debt or identity theft,” Inzunza, who has worked with victims of financial abuse for years as a social worker, told me. “It is devastating to people in a way that I think is really hard for people to understand.”
“I have never done more suicide assessments than when I’ve run credit reports with clients and found coerced debt or identity theft.”
In December 2024, during the final month of Joe Biden’s presidency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that it was seeking information in advance of “preparing a proposed rule to address concerns related to information furnished to credit bureaus and other consumer reporting agencies concerning coerced debt.” The Center for Survivor Agency & Justice, along with the National Consumer Law Center, petitioned the CFPB to amend its rules to enable survivors with coerced debt to “avail themselves of identity theft protections under the Fair Credit Reporting Act,” according to a document released by the CFPB.
But with President Donald Trump’s administration targeting the CFPB, it’s unclear when or even if these potential changes could be implemented. In February, representatives from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency were seen at the headquarters and were able to access some of the CFPB’s internal computer systems, calling into question the safety of scores of Americans’ sensitive financial information. Days later, Russell Vought, the new acting director of the CFPB and an author of Project 2025, told employees in an email not to come in to the office and to “not perform any work tasks.” In late March, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from the mass firing of workers or otherwise dismantling the CFPB. The future of the main US agency tasked with protecting consumers—including survivors fighting financial abuse—remains uncertain.
“The active dismantling of the CFPB against the will of Congress is just stunning to behold,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) told Mother Jones, “and is so wrong.” A funded CFPB, she added, “could be a powerful vehicle” for protecting the rights of survivors of coerced debt.
Smith, along with Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.), introduced the Survivor Financial Safety and Inclusion Working Group Act in February 2024. The bill aims to support victims of financial abuse, including coerced debt. The pair, according to Smith, is planning to reintroduce the bill this year. Rather than laying out a specific legislative solution, the act would put together a working group of federal financial regulators, advocates, and other relevant players to parse through what national protections can be established for survivors.
After hearing more and more constituents bring up financial abuse and coerced debt as a problem, Smith and Velázquez started to explore national legislative options. “And as we started to talk more with advocates and other experts, we realized that we weren’t ready yet for a policy solution,” Smith said.
The group, Smith continued, could work on policy actions that could be pursued. “It’s not a partisan issue,” she told me. “It’s something that everybody should agree shouldn’t happen, and yet this is a glitch in the law that we have to fix, and that’s what our bill would do.”
Yet, Smith said, the two members of Congress have struggled to gain Republican support. “Our issue is not so much active resistance as what I would describe as passive resistance,” she said. “Some of our outreach to Republicans has been met with a new kind of pushback, which is basically, well, we don’t want to create another working group, because this is the kind of thing that DOGE is going after, and they’re not going to like it.”
“How stunning is that?” Smith said. “This unelected billionaire is having this chilling effect on what Congress needs to do to develop good policy solutions for people that are getting abused and ripped off by intimate partners.”
“This unelected billionaire is having this chilling effect on what Congress needs to do to develop good policy solutions for people that are getting abused and ripped off by intimate partners.”
Some states have made moves to ease this process for survivors, pursuing laws designed to help victims of coercive debt—but they’re not cure-alls. In Texas, lawmakers passed a bill expanding the definition of identity theft to include this kind of debt. Nonetheless, a lawyer there told me that she can rarely use this law because it doesn’t intersect with family court, where divorces play out.
A New York City law broadened the definition of victims of domestic violence to include economic abuse, but at the same time, a state bill that would have done more to protect victims from coerced debt stalled last year. The legislation, which would amend the general business law and “establishes a right of action” for claims arising out of coerced debts, passed the state Senate but didn’t make it out of the Assembly by the time the legislative session finished. Inzunza, from the Urban Resource Institute in New York, spent months trying to get the legislation passed. But “the banks have started strongly opposing the bill behind the scenes,” she told me, adding that they would argue, “The banks are also victims of this bill.” The bill was reintroduced in both the Senate and Assembly in 2025.
The Maine legislature passed “An Act to Provide Relief to Survivors of Economic Abuse,” which requires the removal of any debt or portion of a debt that resulted from economic abuse on reports by a consumer reporting agency. A 2022 California law, a similar version of which also passed in Minnesota, prevents creditors from collecting if a survivor can demonstrate that the debt was coerced. And at the end of last year, Connecticut lawmakers established that if a survivor can prove that the debt was coerced, the abuser is legally required to pay it back.
“I think it’s important that we understand what a big step this is in Connecticut,” said Mary-Jane Foster, president of Interval House, the state’s largest agency focused on ending domestic violence and providing services to survivors. “It is one more tool in the toolbox to protect victims.”
Because banks and creditors are primarily privately run in the US, they’re given substantial legal leeway on how they process claims of fraud or financial abuse. “To report fraud to a financial institution, to a bank, typically, what that bank is going to want to see is a police report,” said Young, who co-founded the Economic Justice for Survivors Collective and has worked with people trying to get rid of coerced debt. According to a 2019 survey from the Department of Justice, only 41 percent of all violent victimizations were reported to police—and proving financial abuse can be more difficult than a physical offense that leaves visible evidence. “The burden of proof should never have been on the victim in the first place,” Young said of coerced debt. “It’s like if you went to the police and they told you to solve your own murder before they would take you seriously.”
If survivors are unable to obtain a police report or don’t feel comfortable going to law enforcement, banks are able to dismiss their claims. And once the debt is accrued, these same banking institutions can transfer or sell the case to collections—effectively washing their hands.
For Ortiz, the trauma of financial abuse didn’t exist in a vacuum—it was paired with physical and emotional abuse, too.
The physical violence began before they started living together—always, Ortiz explained, under the guise of a joke. He didn’t like a comment she made in front of family members, so he threw a tomato at her leg so hard that it exploded. Ortiz was ironing a shirt in a way he didn’t approve of, so he hit her with a wire hanger. It only escalated from there.
Three days before their wedding in 2010, Ortiz and her soon-to-be husband got into an argument outside. She says he had been drinking, was high on marijuana, and was trying to drive away in Ortiz’s car.
“No, you’re not gonna take my car,” she recalled saying. “If you’re gonna act like an idiot, take your car, but it’s not mine.” She remembers having her hand on the hood of the car, telling him not to leave. “And then he pulled forward and hit me with the car and knocked me back into a planter.”
“So,” Ortiz continued, “on our wedding day, I had bruises and scratches all down my body from being thrown into a brick planter.”
About five years ago, around when Covid was first pushing people indoors, Ortiz said the physical abuse increased. She detailed the abuse in an affidavit for a restraining order. Ortiz had been keeping track of days when things became physical and what Tyson said to her: “You get out of the bed or I am going to come in there and piss on you like the sack of shit you are,” “You’re an abomination, what a mistake, what a fucking mistake,” and “piece of trash” were a few.
In one instance, Ortiz writes about a time she went into the bedroom following a fight to de-escalate and collect herself. Tyson came in and wanted the room, telling her to leave. “When I did not leave he grabbed me out of the bed and dragged me out of the room. When we got to the door he tossed me out and closed the door behind me,” she wrote in a document labeled “Tinctures,” just in case Tyson went through her computer. In an email exchange from September 2020, Tyson and Ortiz discussed, in part, this situation.
The kids “heard you drag and push me out of my own room,” she wrote.
“I did get physical in pushing you out of our room several months ago, and this was wrong,” Tyson responded. “But again there’s much more to the story than the manipulative picture you paint. I went to the room to lie down and escape your berating,” he replied. “You followed me into the room to continue berating me. I asked you repeatedly to stop, to leave me alone, and you just kept standing over me haranguing me until I finally decided to force you out of the room.”
She was granted the restraining order.
In that same email, Tyson wrote: “I have thrown things in the past, but the last time I threw something intending to hit you was in Sacramento in 2013 when I threw a 1-lb bag of wood chips at you from the garage. The other times I’ve thrown something it’s been when I lose control because you won’t stop haranguing me, and in my frustration, I’m desperate to get you to stop.”
“I’ve learned a lot since then and come to see that you deliberately provoke these reactions,” he continued, “so you won’t be able to get me to react like this again.”
Everyone in her family knows about the physical abuse and the ongoing divorce proceedings. The debt? Not so much. Ortiz told me that it was notably easier “to say I got shoved, hit, pushed, hit by a car—all of those are less embarrassing than the financial piece.” Why?
“Because that’s what it feels like. It feels like, ‘How could you not know that?’” she said. “And it’s hard to explain to people who haven’t been in that situation.”
Katie Ray-Jones, CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, told me that “a lot of women say the hardest part to clean up, when they left the relationship, was the financial damage—because it’s not a quick fix to repair your credit.”
“A lot of women say the hardest part to clean up, when they left the relationship, was the financial damage—because it’s not a quick fix to repair your credit.”
Without access to your own bank accounts, it’s difficult to plan where to go and how to pay for it. And in each of these moments—when applying for an apartment, figuring out car insurance, paying one of the debt collectors—a gatekeeper runs a credit score, which can act as a persistent reminder of the abuse. “You’re out of the relationship, you’re feeling independent,” Ray-Jones said, “gotta go buy a car—whoops, there it is again. And it comes back really fast.”
Not too long ago, most women couldn’t have access to credit or a credit card of their own without a man signing off on it. On October 11, 1974, the New York Times front page read, “Congress Passes Bill Banning Bias Against Women on Credit.” It was about the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, a new law that prohibited credit card companies from discriminating based on sex or marital status. The legislation came over two decades after the first “charge card” was introduced. (About two years later, the law was expanded to protect race, color, religion, national origin, age, and receipt of public assistance benefits.)
The legislation was a direct response to complainants who included married women, unable to access credit cards in their own names regardless of their personal income, or single women who had been denied bank loans or were “granted smaller amounts than a single man with an identical financial background,” according to the Times. Put simply, access to lines of credit, without reference to a male partner, meant that women obtained more financial power to start businesses, build generational wealth, and leave abusive partners on whom they were financially dependent.
“Betting on her to be able to work every day for the next four years isn’t the same as betting on a man,” one creditor said in the early 1970s. “It is impossible to put a man and a woman on the same level completely as far as extending credit is concerned.”
“Betting on her to be able to work every day for the next four years isn’t the same as betting on a man. It is impossible to put a man and a woman on the same level completely as far as extending credit is concerned.”
In the years that followed, banks and other financial institutions, which were once the primary antagonists of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act’s text, began to see the law as a financial win. In one TV ad, a “well-dressed working woman [is] pulling out her credit card to pay for a romantic dinner with her husband.” In another, a woman is exiting a sporting goods store with a lacrosse stick—and a briefcase.
“American Express recognized in the late 1970s that its traditional market, the middle-aged traveling businessman, was already well-supplied with credit cards, but women presented a growth opportunity,” K. Shelly Porges, who served as director of consumer card marketing for the company, told the Washington Post in 1986.
Decades later, the credit honeymoon seems to have worn off for American banking institutions, and they remain a roadblock for survivors attempting to recover from coerced debt. Banks and creditors today benefit from how easy it is to obtain debt and skirt responsibility if abusers choose to co-opt that ease.
According to a survey of callers to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, 73 percent remained in abusive relationships longer because they were concerned about how they could support themselves or their children. Erika Sussman founded Center for Survivor Agency & Justice in 2007 and currently serves as the organization’s executive director. About two decades ago, Sussman remembers being at a conference aimed at bringing together domestic violence and consumer protection advocates.
“At that early point in time, there was a literal rift in the room, like you could visually see it and also hear about it,” she told me. On one side, there were domestic violence advocates, “who were very familiar with survivors’ safety needs and the ways in which economics played a prominent role,” Sussman said. And then on the other side of the room were consumer advocates, “who were very aware of the remedies that existed but not so aware of the ways that survivors’ safety risk analysis needed to play a critical role in navigating that advocacy.”
The Center for Survivor Agency & Justice and it Consumer Rights for Domestic and Sexual Violence Survivors Initiative were formed to fill that gap. Today, Sussman and her team spend their days meeting with congressional leaders, financial institutions, and survivors to educate these intersecting groups about consumer finance law and how to mitigate coercive debt.
Still, Sussman said, because “our current credit system is confounding for most consumers” and “is for the most part unregulated,” actually getting courts or banks or collections companies to side with the survivor is hard.
“The path of undoing those harms,” she said, “is really just unbelievably challenging for folks.”
In January, Ortiz and Tyson went back to court—this time for a trial. Ortiz sat on the stand for hours as her lawyer and his lawyer drilled her about their marriage, about who said what and when, and what would be best for their three children, of whom Ortiz has primary custody. Her lawyer said she may not hear a judge’s decision for several months or over a year. In the meantime, this debt is still on her credit report.
After five years of fighting for some acknowledgment of who should be responsible for the debt, Ortiz is tired—so tired that she’s ready to pay every cent of money taken out under her name. Especially if it would mean no more court dates, no more messaging through lawyers, no more seeing his name pop up on her phone.
When I asked her whether the act of testifying was at all empowering, she replied that it felt like she wasn’t even in the room—let alone on the stand.
“I’ve told my story so many times that I feel like at some points, it doesn’t even feel like mine anymore,” she said. “I’m telling somebody else’s story just because I feel like that helps me. If I detach from it, then it’s not as big.”
But as Tyson spoke, Ortiz was there again. She began scribbling notes each time she felt he was rewriting their past. “It was infuriating,” she said. She wanted a record of it.
“Even in court, when I’m sitting there with proof in front of me…that little voice starts to come up again that’s like: ‘Wait, am I remembering it wrong? Am I altering it?’” Ortiz told me.
“It’s like fear with fury, with confusion, with wanting so badly to prove that you aren’t in the wrong. And part of that, I think, comes from when you were in the wrong, when you were with that person, there was a consequence. And that’s the fear. It’s: ‘Oh no, I don’t want another consequence. I did nothing. Somebody, please believe I didn’t do anything so that I don’t get hurt again.’”
2025-05-16 18:00:00
This story was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.
Laura Beth Resnick was delivering snapdragons and anemones to clients near the White House when she got the news: In his first wave of executive orders, President Donald Trump had frozen all projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, one of his predecessor’s signature achievements. Resnick was awaiting reimbursement for solar panels she’d purchased for her flower farm via the Rural Energy for America Program, which had received a $1 billion IRA injection to help farmers invest in renewable energy projects. Her frozen grant left her $36,000 in the hole.
Resnick pulled over, got out, and just started walking, shaky with adrenaline. “This sudden knowledge that we are on the hook for this money we don’t have—it’s so overwhelming,” she said in March.
“It would seem like they’re trying to create fewer farms.”
Trump’s chaotic first months back in office—his flurry of orders, tariffs, and cuts by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—have sent America’s farmers into a tailspin. Few farms were spared, but smaller and newer ones have been disproportionately harmed—with potentially far-reaching consequences for their communities. “I don’t think [the administration] knows enough about how the economy works to back up what they’re doing,” said Kevin Leavitt, an organic farmer in Maine whose own frozen funding threatened to tank his business (before his contract was honored in April). But “it would seem like they’re trying to create fewer farms.”
It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly Trump’s policies have disrupted farmers’ lives. According to DOGE’s (often dubious) “efficiency leaderboard,” the Department of Agriculture is among the federal agencies that have endured the deepest cuts. This spring, the USDA suspended billions of dollars in outstanding payments for at least 15 programs for farmers and rural communities. It also cut $1 billion destined for schools and food banks (another hit for the farmers who supply them) and gutted regional USDA offices, which provide a vital lifeline to farm country. Today, some farmers “may have to drive a hundred miles or more to get to an office,” said Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, meanwhile, has fired hundreds of workers and plans to slash its budget by 25 percent, which could jeopardize its ability to provide the accurate weather forecasts farmers rely on. And DOGE’s cuts to Bureau of Reclamation staff are so dramatic that water managers fear the government will be unable to operate the complex system of reservoirs, dams, and canals that supply Western farms. Compounding all of this are the tariffs Trump imposed on farmers’ top export markets; as of late April, two of them, China and Canada, had responded with their own tariffs of 125 percent and 25 percent, respectively, though many tariffs have since been suspended.
“Trade relationships are built over time,” said Aaron Lehman, a fifth-generation corn and soybean farmer and president of the Iowa Farmers’ Union. Farmers’ efforts, he added, “can be undone really, really quickly.” Some buyers never came back after the trade war in Trump’s first term. Now, many growers who depend on exporting crops like soybeans are concerned they could hemorrhage buyers again, as countries like China turn to farmers in Brazil and Argentina.
Small farms are uniquely vulnerable. The Biden administration had provided their owners with a range of grants that also advanced priorities such as climate reform, food security, and racial equity. In dismantling Joe Biden’s policies, Trump left those farmers in the lurch. “Many smaller farmers or farmers of color who are just getting started, they don’t have a Plan B,” said Michelle Hughes, co–executive director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, which works closely with small farmers and farmers of color. “They don’t have generational wealth to rely on.”
“Many smaller farmers or farmers of color who are just getting started, they don’t have a Plan B.”
As far as Trump’s trade war is concerned, large family and corporate farms, which are more likely to grow commodities like corn, wheat, and soybeans, are better positioned to withstand the financial chaos—and get some relief. Trump provided a $28 billion “bailout” to farmers damaged by his first-term tariffs and may do it again. But that bailout focused on commodity growers, was distributed unevenly, and favored large producers; farmers still took a $27 billion hit from retaliatory tariffs, while multinational corporations walked away with over $100 million in bailout funds. Small farmers specializing in noncommodity crops were usually left in the dirt.
If small farms go belly up, their land will be ripe for the taking. Over the past few decades, large agricultural operations and wealthy landowners have gobbled up an ever-greater share of the nation’s cropland, doubling the size of their holdings between 1987 and 2017. The costly tariffs and deep cuts to federal aid could accelerate the trend, as economic stressors force small and midsized farmers to sell. One need only look at the trade war Trump initiated during his first term as evidence: Farm bankruptcies spiked, jumping 24 percent from 2017 to 2018.
The cuts will also almost certainly dial back environmental progress, which analysts worry would empower Big Ag and degrade rural communities. According to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s Lilliston, large agricultural operations tend to grow single commodity crops on large tracts of land, and that monoculture depletes the soil and relies on pesticides and chemical fertilizers. In Iowa, farm consolidation has coincided with a remarkable uptick in pollution. Thanks to runoff from nitrogen-based fertilizers, the state has one of the highest rates of nitrate pollution in the United States; it also has one of the nation’s highest cancer rates.
By accelerating farm consolidation, Trump’s policies will further hollow out rural communities. As large agricultural operations gobble up smaller ones, they displace middle-class farm families and undermine mom-and-pop businesses; big growers tend to buy their supplies from multinationals, not local purveyors. “ It usually means fewer people in the town, fewer kids in school, fewer small businesses,” Lilliston said.
In the long term, the winner here could well be private equity at the expense of rural communities. The average American farmer is 57 years old. The scions of large, consolidated farms are often uninterested in running the family empire themselves. “Their kids move to Long Beach and then they rent out the land to a capital asset manager in Chicago,” said Austin Frerick, an expert on agricultural and antitrust policy and the author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry.
Seven or eight years ago, Frerick had a conversation with a high-level official at the Iowa Farm Bureau. “He said something I’ll never forget: ‘The future of Iowa is six towns and a bunch of driverless tractors,’” Frerick said. The state is already trending in that direction, he added—farm towns are “slowly becoming ghost towns,” and most farmland in Iowa is now owned by non-Iowans. “Iowa’s just an extraction colony at this point.”
The irony is that rural communities have tended to be loyal supporters of the president: Nearly 78 percent of voters in the nation’s farm-dependent counties cast their ballot for Trump in 2024.
Resnick finally received her grant in April. Soon after, a federal judge ordered the White House to unfreeze IRA funding already allocated in states that sued. But for her, the damage is permanent. “My trust in the government,” she told me, “has been irrevocably broken.”
