2026-03-10 04:39:29
When six-year-old Joseph Rodriguez got sick, his mother had to bring him along to her regular check-in at a California ICE office. There, last week, he was immediately detained and quickly deported—all without his hearing aids.
Rodriguez is Deaf; he and his mother Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez, an asylum seeker from Colombia fleeing domestic violence, live in the congressional district of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who sent staff to Colombia over the weekend to return Rodriguez’ assistive devices. A relative who attempted to provide them to the boy while he was in ICE detention was turned away; ICE officials refused to give him the hearing aids, according to local station KRON.
“This child has been dragged from detention center to detention center, to places that are not meant for children,” his attorney said to KRON. “They are definitely not built for children with severe disabilities. It’s inhuman, illegal, and unconstitutional.”
The family, who were deported as a group—six-year-old Joseph, his four-year-old brother, and Rodriguez Gutierrez, their mother—had lived for four years in the Bay Area city of Hayward, until their detention last week without due process or contact with their lawyers. Joseph was enrolled at the California School for the Deaf in nearby Fremont.
“Think about that for a moment: a six-year-old child with a disability suddenly in a different country, separated from the country he has come to know,” Swalwell said, “now surrounded by silence. The horror stories from this White House continue from ICE.”
Unlike many other medical devices, most hearing aids are highly customized to an individual’s hearing loss, and quality hearing aids can easily cost thousands of dollars, making them extremely difficult or impossible to replace in a situation like Rodriguez’s. (Some Deaf people choose to not use hearing devices and rely entirely on signing; Rodriguez and his family’s proficiency in ASL or other sign languages is unclear, and ICE facilities are not equipped to accommodate Deaf people without assistive devices.)
At the press conference, Swalwell also referenced ICE’s deportation of a six-year-old with cancer, among other deportations and deaths in custody that sum to a pattern of sometimes fatal hostility towards kids and adults with disabilities or other health needs. As I reported in February, the Department of Homeland Security now has just a few staff investigating civil rights complaints, meaning the department and its officials are unlikely to face any internal repercussions for their conduct—or any pressure to change course.
Swalwell, who is also running for governor of California, said that his office was working with the family’s lawyers to secure their return under humanitarian parole, but it’s not clear how long that would take.
“We will not stand by while ICE tears our families apart and endangers innocent children,” Swalwell said at the conference. “What happened here was not about public safety.”
2026-03-10 01:42:54
Zohran Mamdani maintained the right to peaceful protest on Monday, two days after two counterprotesters allegedly deployed two explosive devices during an anti-Muslim demonstration targeting the New York City mayor.
“Anti-Muslim bigotry is nothing new to me, nor is it anything new for the one million or so Muslim New Yorkers who know this city as our home,” Mamdani said in a Monday press conference. “While I found this protest appalling, I will not waver in my belief that it should be allowed to happen.”
Mamdani called the demonstration a “vile protest rooted in white supremacy,” but stressed that “violence at a protest is never acceptable.”
Jake Lang, a right-wing influencer and pardoned January 6 rioter, organized Saturday’s demonstration outside Mamdani’s official residence at Gracie Mansion. The rally, billed as “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City, Stop New York City Public Muslim Prayer,” drew counterprotesters who allegedly detonated two explosive devices at the scene. Lang has a history of organizing similar events; in January, he led an anti-immigration, pro-ICE rally in Minneapolis shortly after federal agents killed Renée Good.
According to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, Lang’s weekend protest drew about 20 people. The counterprotest, called “Run the Nazis out of New York City, Stand Against Hate,” drew about 125 demonstrators.
Tisch said one protester from Lang’s group used pepper spray against counterprotesters. About 15 minutes later, an 18-year-old counterprotester threw a lit device toward the protest area, where it hit a barrier and went out. The same counterprotester then took a second device from a 19-year-old and dropped it on the ground about a block from Gracie Mansion; that device also failed to detonate. No injuries from either device were reported.
Six people were arrested following the protest on Saturday: the two men involved in handling and deploying the devices, the person who used pepper spray, and three others related to disorderly conduct.
Mamdani said that he and his wife, Rama Duwaji, were not at the residence during the incident.
During the Monday press conference, Tisch said at least one of the devices NYPD officials found contained TATP, a chemical commonly used in improvised bombs. The two men who were arrested for deploying the devices would be prosecuted in federal court. The incident is being investigated as an act of “ISIS-inspired terrorism.”
A federal criminal complaint was released on Monday afternoon, which charges the two men with attempting to provide support to ISIS and using weapons of mass destruction.
2026-03-10 00:36:49
This story was originally published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and was supported by funding from the Pulitzer Center.
The word of the year last year in Japan was bear. Black bear sightings doubled from the previous year. There were 200 injuries and 13 deaths. Okuma, meaning “big bear,” is a town on the east coast of Japan. But it is not the bears that people in Okuma fear the most. It is radiation.
Okuma is the closest town to the three nuclear reactors that melted down at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant on March 11, 2011. On that day, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami destroyed the backup generators and cooling pumps at three reactors loaded with nuclear fuel. A fourth reactor was unfueled, but its building, filled with hydrogen from the neighboring unit, exploded along with the other three.
The wave that washed over Japan’s eastern shore killed 20,000 people, many of whose bodies were washed out to sea and never recovered. As radiation levels spiked around the destroyed reactors, 160,000 people were evacuated from Okuma and 11 other towns. A 20-kilometer ring around the plant, an area twice the size of New York City, was declared a nuclear exclusion zone. Hit by a freak snowstorm that covered the town with cesium 137 and other radionuclides, even Iitate, a village 60 kilometers to the northwest, was evacuated.
Fifteen years later, 4,000 workers struggle to control the ongoing disaster. The three melted reactors remain so radioactive that they destroy the robots sent to explore the damage. No one knows exactly where the melted fuel is located or how deep it has burrowed below the reactors’ concrete pedestals, possibly into the ground.
The water used to cool the reactors is stored in more than 1,000 tanks that reached capacity in 2023. This cooling water, which Tepco initially claimed was clean and has been releasing into the Pacific Ocean since 2023, was found to be contaminated with 62 radionuclides, including cesium, strontium, and plutonium. Two fuel pools packed with spent nuclear fuel have yet to be emptied. They sit precariously on top of units 1 and 2, which are exploded tangles of metal ready to fall over and spill into the ocean.
Cesium-laden microparticles from Fukushima have been found in air filters across Japan. As one drives the highways in Fukushima, some of the large green road signs that would usually indicate towns and turnoffs have been replaced by panels displaying radiation levels, given in microsieverts per hour. (A microsievert measures the biological effect of ionizing radiation on human tissue.) These readings can spike to dangerous levels depending on which way the wind is blowing. The radioactive material blown out of the destroyed reactors made Fukushima’s forests, which cover three-quarters of the nuclear exclusion zone, unsafe to enter. The wild boars that used to be hunted here, as well as the plants and mushrooms that used to be foraged for food, are too radioactive to eat.
Radiation levels in town centers and school yards were lowered, but a short walk into neighboring patches of grass will spike the needle on a dosimeter.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Japanese government denies that Fukushima is an ongoing disaster. “The situation is under control,” then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the International Olympic Committee as he lobbied for Japan to hold the 2020 Summer Olympics (which were delayed until 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic). Dubbed the “Recovery Olympics,” the torch was run through Fukushima’s depopulated towns before the first games were played at a baseball stadium in Fukushima City.
Okuma is the centerpiece of the government’s plan for resettling Fukushima. The government has spent millions of dollars decontaminating the streets and rebuilding the train station and other public buildings. Large subsidies and free schooling are offered to anyone willing to move into Okuma. Despite a new gym, a hotel, and a sample apartment where one can live for a week to try out the town’s amenities, Okuma has the forlorn feeling of someplace yet to recover from a great disaster. In a town that once had 11,000 people, the population is currently nudging over 1,000, with half of them newcomers. It is still unsafe to enter the woods or walk through the town’s weed-filled lots, many holding abandoned houses.
Some of Japan’s efforts to revive the area have been successful. Other measures have created injustices and stigma. The lived experience of people resettling the evacuation zone reveals an ongoing disaster at Fukushima—a disaster that is not well known in Japan or the rest of the world.
The 160,000 atomic refugees from Fukushima, known officially as internally displaced persons or IDPs, fled to other parts of Japan or were housed nearby in temporary shelters, measured by the size of tatami sleeping mats (roughly three by six feet). An eight-mat structure was deemed big enough for a family. IDPs received housing subsidies until 2017, when the government declared parts of Fukushima’s nuclear exclusion zone open for resettlement. This attempt to force displaced people back into the exclusion zone was criticized by UN rapporteurs on human rights, and the hardest hit of Fukushima’s towns still have only a handful of people living in them. The government claims that the current number of IDPs is 30,000. The United Nations says the actual number might be twice as large.
The push to resettle Fukushima’s red zone began in April 2011, when the allowable radiation dose was raised twentyfold, from 1 millisievert per year to 20. One millisievert per year remains the allowable dose for the rest of Japan, whereas 20 millisieverts per year was formerly the dose allowed for workers in nuclear power plants. The difference explains why women, particularly women with young children, have resisted returning to Fukushima, regardless of the new schools and subsidies for everything from eating out in local restaurants to gym membership.
Massive seawalls were built along Japan’s eastern coast. Fukushima was dotted with incinerators that burned up the debris left behind by the wave that washed up to 20 miles inland. Decontaminating the area included a pharaonic project to remove and bag all the topsoil contaminated with cesium 137. About 100,000 workers in protective suits and masks swarmed over Fukushima’s farms and fields, scraping up five centimeters of soil and piling it into great pyramids of black plastic garbage bags.
Radiation levels in town centers and school yards were lowered, but a short walk into neighboring patches of grass will spike the needle on a dosimeter. So, too, do the winter storms that wash radioactive material down from the mountains. In the forested hills that ring the coast, there is no way to lessen Fukushima’s radioactivity other than to wait out the half-life of cesium 137, which is 30 years. So how long does one have to wait? In about 300 years, or 10 times the half-life, the quantity of this radioactive isotope will have dropped to a thousandth of what it was.
Other strategies for decontaminating the area have had mixed results. Big gashes on the hillsides show where sand has been quarried and dumped into Fukushima’s rice paddies. With their intricate drainage systems destroyed by heavy equipment, deprived of topsoil, and covered in sand and gravel, many of Fukushima’s rice paddies have been abandoned, and the crop is barely more than half of what it was before 2011.
Many of Fukushima’s fields are covered with solar arrays. Others hold state-sponsored projects for building hydrogen fuel cells or drones. This is part of the government’s effort to turn Fukushima into what it calls the “innovation coast,” beginning with demonstration projects that the government hopes will develop into businesses. Another stretch of abandoned farmland is filled with the multimillion-dollar Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum. Opened in 2020, the museum is currently being expanded to include a hotel, a convention center, and even possibly a golf course.
The government seems to be ignoring Japan’s history and geology as it pushes to restart reactors on an archipelago that every year is struck by over 1,000 earthquakes.
A town in Fukushima, such as Iitate, might be considered decontaminated when as little as 15 percent of the radioactive soil is removed. This creates a kind of lily pad effect; people can safely hop from one clean spot to another or walk along narrow paths between radioactive hot spots. A law passed in November 2011 mandates that all of Fukushima’s radioactive soil, roughly 15 million cubic meters, will be removed from the prefecture by 2045. With no place having volunteered to take any of the soil, the government has decided to spread it across Japan.
Most of Fukushima’s bagged soil has been re-deposited into a dump built on the cliff behind the destroyed reactors. This facility separates the most radioactive elements from the soil and sequesters them in concrete bunkers. Soil containing less than 8,000 becquerels per kilo of radioactivity, which the Ministry of the Environment calls “Happy Soil,” is readied for shipment across the country, to be used in landfills and construction. (A becquerel is a unit of radioactivity, corresponding to one nuclear disintegration per second.) A load of Happy Soil, described as “revitalized and strong,” was recently dumped into the flower beds in front of the Prime Minister’s office in Tokyo.
“This is a dangerous level of radioactivity,” says Yukio Shirahige, who worked for 36 years as a cleaner mopping up spills at Fukushima Daiichi. “At these levels, you have to wear gloves and protective gear. If you had any cuts or open wounds, you were taken off the job.” At up to 8,000 becquerels per kilogram, one would not want to use this soil for growing food. (The maximum radioactivity concentration allowed for food in Japan is 100 becquerels per kilo.)
Japan has adopted this strategy to reduce the heavy burden on Fukushima and accelerate the area’s recovery. But Shirahige suspects another motive: “If all of Japan is contaminated, then Fukushima will appear to have recovered because it looks just like the rest of the country.”
In fact, the rest of Japan is already contaminated. Radiation detectors along highways measure gamma radiation, resulting from the presence of cesium 137. Recent research has found that highly concentrated cesium-bearing microparticles, formed during the reactor core melt-downs and scattered widely across Japan, might be far more dangerous if inhaled than external exposure to cesium.
“I debate this with my friends,” says Shirahige. “Those of us who worked at Fukushima believed that inhaling the dust or ingesting radioactive particles, where they do long-term damage to your lungs and other parts of your body, is more dangerous than external radiation.” Shirahige regularly scrubs down his house, trying to remove the dust, and he measures the radioactivity in every room. “The windows leak when the wind blows, and I can never get it down to zero,” he says.
The official investigation into the Fukushima disaster called it a “made in Japan” failure by a nuclear industry that suffered from regulatory capture, inbred leadership, defective engineering, and ruinous cost-saving decisions, such as not building an adequate seawall or waterproofed generators and pumps. The disaster at Three Mile Island could be dismissed as human error. The disaster at Chernobyl (as it was then spelled) could be dismissed as the product of human error and inferior Soviet technology.
“The government wants people to think that everything is improving, that there is nothing to worry about, but this is not true. “
Fukushima was different. The world’s worst industrial accident took place in an advanced industrial country with 54 nuclear reactors, supplying a third of Japan’s electricity. The final bill for containing the destroyed reactors, storing the waste, and rebuilding parts of the nuclear exclusion zone could cost over $1 trillion. This is one quarter of Japan’s annual economy. Yet, the government seems to be ignoring Japan’s history and geology as it pushes to restart reactors on an archipelago that every year is struck by over 1,000 earthquakes.
Every year in January, Coming of Age Day, a national holiday in Japan, honors teenagers turning 20 and assuming full citizenship. This year, Okuma held its ceremony on a Saturday afternoon. The event resembled a high school graduation, only more serious. The girls wore formal furisode kimonos with elaborate bows. Even the boys in Japan sometimes dress in traditional hakama skirts and half-coats. In Okuma, the boys wore black suits and neckties. Ten young people were coming of age, five boys and five girls. The ceremony took place in an auditorium flanked by long rows of seated politicians and town officials. It involved a great deal of bowing and many speeches, none by the young people coming of age.
The national news was covering the event, and the stage was sometimes more crowded with photographers than participants. This was a big day for Okuma. It represented coming of age after a nuclear disaster, a ceremonial rebirth for the town. These young people were five years old when they fled the area. So what did it mean to have them back in Okuma, transitioning from teenagers to adults?
Unfortunately, the event was not what it seemed. The town would have had 135 young adults coming of age this year, were it not for the nuclear disaster. Instead, 10 students returned for the ceremony, and they traveled long distances to get to the auditorium, as none of them live in Okuma. “I am sorry to say that I don’t know any of these people. I have never seen them before,” says Takumi Sakamoto, a slender young man who is studying sociology at Hosei University in Tokyo. The same is true for the other participants. Their official family registry is in Okuma, but these young people are returning to a town they no longer know. At least Takumi has a good reason for being here. He plans to write his thesis on Fukushima’s nuclear trauma and how people are coping with the ongoing disaster.
With remarkable ingenuity and self-reliance, people in Fukushima are living with high levels of radioactivity. These Argonauts of the Anthropocene are learning how to decontaminate their towns and fields. They are building citizen-science laboratories to check their food and monitor radiation levels. They compile archives and organize trips to Chornobyl (as it is now spelled) to learn from those who live in other nuclear exclusion zones.
Ai Kimura, a director and lead researcher at Tarachine, the Mothers’ Radiation Laboratory in Iwaki, with a yearly budget of a million dollars, primarily from donations, is as busy as ever. She runs a clinic for children and a laboratory outfitted with sophisticated equipment, including new machines for monitoring the tritium, strontium, and cesium in the cooling water that Tepco began releasing into the Pacific Ocean in 2023. (Tepco, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, owns the Fukushima nuclear power plant and other reactors in Japan.)
“The government wasn’t giving us the information we wanted, or they were giving it to us weeks or months too late,” Kimura says. “We are mothers. There are things we need to know now to take care of our children and families. It is not as if the crisis is over. There is no end in sight. The government wants people to think that everything is improving, that there is nothing to worry about, but this is not true. We have seen radiation levels rise in certain instances. We have seen parks and schools recontaminated. We have to monitor constantly and never forget. The need to test the water and soil and food and people’s health in Fukushima is ongoing, and even more dangers, from the delayed effects of radiation, lie ahead.”
“We can’t sell our fish as we used to. We get less money for our fish than other prefectures.”
Tepco plans to dump 22 trillion becquerels of tritium per year into the Pacific Ocean over the next 20 to 30 years. This is less than the tritium released from Canada’s nuclear reactors, which dump more than 3,000 trillion becquerels per year into the Saint Lawrence River. But cooling water from functioning reactors is not the same as water contaminated by melted fuel rods, which contain a brew of other radionuclides.
On several occasions, Tepco has been caught faking its safety data and covering up incidents. In 2018, the company was forced to admit that its treated water was still contaminated with plutonium, strontium, and cesium—62 radionuclides altogether—at levels, in some cases, thousands of times above regulatory limits. Tepco acknowledges that as much as two-thirds of the cooling water in its storage tanks remains contaminated. Strapped for cash, the company announced in January that it would cut $26 billion in expenses. This will slow even further the decommissioning effort at the melted reactors.
“We feel betrayed,” says Tadaaki Sawada, spokesperson for the Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Associations in Iwaki. “The government promised to consult us. They had other options besides dumping the water in the ocean, but they went ahead and did it anyway.”
A sturdy man in a blue work jacket, Sawada was visibly upset when I last saw him in 2022. At the time, Japan was reporting that a radioactive rockfish, glowing with 18,000 becquerels per kilogram of cesium 137, 180 times the legal limit, had been caught out of Shinchi harbor, 35 miles north of Fukushima Daiichi. The rockfish joined the list of 44 species that, at one time or another, have been banned from sale in Japan. The freshwater fish from Fukushima’s rivers are still banned because of high levels of radioactivity, but the rockfish and another 200 ocean species are back in the clear, at least for now.
Fukushima’s fishing fleet is half the size it used to be, and the catch is one quarter as large. The number of days allowed for fishing is limited. “We can’t sell our fish as we used to,” Sawada says. “We get less money for our fish than other prefectures.” The list of countries banning food imported from Fukushima includes Russia and China. “As long as the damage continues, we want to be compensated,” Sawada says. The criteria are complicated, and the subsidies could end soon, but at least for the moment, Fukushima’s fishers are paid for the days they don’t fish and for the fish they are forced to sell at a discount. “The money is paid by Tepco,” Sawada says, “but really it comes from the government.” (Tepco was effectively nationalized after the company was bailed out by a capital infusion of 1 trillion yen, or $12.5 billion, in 2012.)
Tomoko Kobayashi is showing me around the kindergarten she attended as a child. With a stopped clock and children’s desks exactly as they were on March 11, 2011, the kindergarten has been preserved as a memorial to the Tohoku earthquake. It is one of several memorials built in Odaka, a town that once had 13,000 residents and now has a third of that number. “We have to do this for ourselves,” Tomoko says. “We need to remember what happened. We need to know what life was like and how people survived the disaster. This archive will help us restore the town.”
Odaka is the most self-sufficient and creative town in Fukushima, in good part because of Tomoko. She owns the 13-room inn down the street from her former kindergarten. This is a traditional ryokan with warm water baths for men and women, but not much heat anywhere else, except in a central room with a long table that is piled with books, pamphlets, maps, drawings, and plans for the dozens of projects that Tomoko has helped to launch with the guests who gather every night for her common meal. In order to reopen her ryokan, Tomoko and Takenori, her husband, before his death in 2024, gathered volunteers from across Japan. They scrubbed everything and filtered the air. They opened a radiation laboratory for testing their food, and then the lab began testing food for everyone in Fukushima.
Every year, they gathered more volunteers to walk through Fukushima’s farms and fields, mapping radioactive hot spots. They organized four trips to Chornobyl to study life in another radioactive red zone. Tomoko published three volumes of interviews with Fukushima survivors. She filmed her travels and events as she revived the town’s traditional festivals and nurtured new businesses and restaurants. With unfailing cheerfulness, she worked as a sort of benevolent spider, weaving connections between everyone who came to sit at her table. The latest venture she helped to launch is the Oretachino Denshokan (commonly shortened to Oreden). Meaning “our memorial museum,” Oreden is a sculpture gallery, art space, museum, pottery studio, and library installed in a former warehouse that was decontaminated and rebuilt by a crew of 250 volunteers from around the world.
Ryoichi Sato, a ninth-generation rice farmer in a valley near Fukushima Daiichi, had a very good year in 2025. Rice paddies in his valley were not heavily hit with cesium. After deep plowing and the application of zeolite, potassium, and lots of organic material, Sato returned to growing rice again and selling it commercially in 2017. A lean, distinguished-looking man whose farm includes drones for surveying his fields, automated tractors, and a large conference room with a TV monitor and several whiteboards, Sato estimates that the rice crop in Fukushima is only 60 percent of what it used to be.
At first, the government demanded that he check radiation levels in every bag of rice, even the small ones that he sold for marked-down prices. Now he checks one bag out of every 50. Last year, Japan faced a serious rice shortage. Prices spiked by 50 percent, and Sato had a bumper crop. Since then, he has doubled his land holdings and now runs Fukushima’s largest cooperative farm, with 15 employees. He is experimenting with growing other crops such as corn and soybeans. In the meantime, a steady stream of officials from Japan’s Ministry of the Economy and other visitors parade through his conference room, consulting Sato for advice on how to improve Fukushima’s economy.
Haruo Ono also had a good year. He has a new fishing boat captained by one of his three sons. They run a 50-foot, near-shore trawler out of Shinchi harbor, Fukushima’s northernmost port. The catch was good last year, and no more radioactive rockfish have turned up. But Ono is still angry about the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. He speaks bitterly, almost yelling with frustration, about Tepco dumping radioactive water into the ocean. “They are treating it like a sewer,” he says.
With close-cropped black hair on top of a wind-weathered face, Ono is still restricted to fishing no more than 12 days per month. “Tepco plans to end its subsidies by the end of the year,” he says. “I am going to oppose it because they have yet to finish the decommissioning. They don’t even tell us when they are releasing the contaminated water. Most of us fishermen are calm now and don’t complain, but even if we spoke up, our voices wouldn’t reach all the way to Tokyo. The government never loses. They never apologize. They never take responsibility for what they have done. No one outside is talking about Fukushima, but we have not recovered.”
Another enterprising person trying to jumpstart the local economy is Yuji Onuma. Onuma, a big, bold character, worked for eight years as a professional actor in Tokyo playing Jean Valjean, the hero in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Onuma currently runs a solar power company in Ibaraki Prefecture, northeast of Tokyo. The price for the electricity that he sells to Tepco is being reduced now that the government is pushing to restart Japan’s mothballed reactors. Onuma often makes the four-hour drive to his hometown of Futaba, where he cleans his family’s graves and rents out four apartments. Futaba, which once had 7,000 residents, is the poor cousin to neighboring Okuma. The town held two of Fukushima Daiichi’s six nuclear reactors and was trying to build two more when the plant blew up. Fukushima’s expensive new memorial museum is located in Futaba, but on the coast, outside of town. “Look over there,” Onuma says as we walk in front of the abandoned houses that line what was once the main street. “They built an elevated bypass. Now people headed to the museum can turn off the highway and fly straight over Futaba.”
I meet Plaintiff #8 one morning at breakfast in our hotel. Plaintiff #8 is a young woman with thyroid cancer who has joined a lawsuit against Tepco, claiming damages for radiation exposure when she was a child. Plaintiff #8 is how she is identified in this case and by lawyers and the press. She has to remain unnamed because of the threats directed against people from Fukushima, particularly women with cancer, who are considered personally dangerous and politically injurious to the reputation of Japan. Thyroid cancer used to be rare in Fukushima Prefecture, with one case in a million. After five rounds of screening, the incidence rate is now 400 cases out of 380,000 people—1,000 times higher than before the disaster.
Plaintiff #8 had her thyroid removed when she was 17. “I was anesthetized but had my eyes open and cried throughout the surgery. Even today, recounting the experience makes my legs shake. I have suffered less than other people, but I still sometimes find myself weeping uncontrollably.” Plaintiff #8 is officially registered as handicapped after a nervous breakdown. At the trial, she was given five minutes to describe her experience.
The young woman and I walk to Odaka’s new heritage museum, where she shows me a photo of herself kneeling in front of one of the museum’s displays. Mariko Gelman, an artist from Chernobyl, had come to Fukushima and installed a sculpture called “Transparency Japan.” The sculpture is a wall of lighted bricks, each one containing a box of medicine for the pills that thyroid cancer victims in Chernobyl and Fukushima have to take for the rest of their lives.
Ruiko Muto, co-founder of the 3.11 Fund for Children with Thyroid Cancer, is helping to organize the thyroid trial. A longtime opponent of nuclear power in Japan, Muto is known for having addressed a large antinuclear rally in 2011, during which she compared Fukushima’s atomic refugees to hibakusha, the “bomb-affected people” of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. (Japanese Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe later declared that Fukushima was a third atomic bomb dropped on Japan, only this time Japan dropped the bomb on itself.)
Muto was the plaintiff’s representative in a criminal trial claiming that Tepco’s top three executives were criminally liable for placing corporate profits over public safety. After a 13-year trial, Japan’s Supreme Court found the executives not guilty. “Our courts in Japan are not politically independent,” Muto says. “They cleared the way for the next nuclear disaster.”
The government is fighting the thyroid case, claiming overdiagnosis and a lack of proof that Fukushima Daiichi is the radiogenic cause of cancer. “No matter how the case is decided, it is important for us to establish the facts and allow the plaintiffs to make a claim for justice,” Muto says.
If the coastal plains of eastern Japan are coming back to life, the hill towns in the Abukuma mountains are another matter. Rushing to beat a January snowstorm, Junko Takahashi, the Japanese journalist with whom I am traveling, and I drive up the winding roads and push farther into the forested hills to find Yoichi Tao. A University of Tokyo-trained physicist and hibakusha survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, Tao was the founder of a large engineering company before he retired to Sasu, the most remote of Iitate’s 20 hamlets. Here, he started an organization called Saisei-no-kai, the “resurrection of Fukushima,” a group whose ambitions are as large as its name. Tao built a laboratory and a guest house. He developed new methods for decontaminating rice paddies. He designed handheld radiation detectors linked directly to the internet. He and his daughter, an architect, turned a former hardware store into a research center filled with projects.
Tao hands us a statement that he wrote about living in Iitate. It describes his philosophy about the need for self-sufficiency in local communities, before concluding, “The past two years have made it clear that such ideas have remained no more than grains of sand—largely ignored by global leaders, experts, and bureaucrats.”
“The trees are too contaminated to use in my wood-burning stove,” he says. “I also failed at growing shiitake mushrooms without elevated levels of cesium. The old people are dying. We see lots of ambulances on the road, and the young people have not come back. This is our most serious problem. I thought we could revive Fukushima, but now I believe the area is likely to return to the mountains out of which it came.”
Tao pulls no punches when criticizing Tepco’s engineers. “They take advice from nobody, not even the Nobel prize winners who want to help. If their soil is safe, why do they have to remove it? Dumping cooling water in the ocean is another bad idea. Years ago, I advised them to build a closed circulation system. There is no way they can decommission the reactors by 2051, their target date. They tell us they have 880 tons of melted fuel, and, so far, they have managed to remove a piece the size of a grain of rice. I estimate it will take 100 years or more. Future generations will be cleaning up Fukushima long after we’re dead.”
Junko and I drive up another narrow valley to find Nobuyoshi Ito, who is known locally as “the measuring fanatic.” Ito walks around Iitate and up in the hills wearing a vest filled with radiation detectors. The bedroom in his house holds two professional spectrometers imported from Ukraine. Ito publishes a blog and regularly tests all the wild fruits and berries that people used to forage here in abundance.
When I last saw him in 2022, Ito handed me an Inohana “boar’s nose” mushroom, considered one of the most delicious of Japan’s 200 edible species. Ito warned me that the mushroom was radioactive. Finding his measurements hard to believe, I took the mushroom to an independent laboratory. How radioactive was it? The mushroom contained 88,000 becquerels per kilogram. It was 900 times more radioactive than the legal limit for food in Japan.
Things are a bit better this year, but not by much. Ito pulls a bag of Inohana mushrooms from his refrigerator, measuring 55,000 becquerels per kilogram. He thinks that reopening Iitate to returnees and settlers was a mistake. Three hundred people came for the housing and other subsidies, but some of them have already left. A town of 6,500 people is shrinking to one-tenth of its former size.
Ito hands us another interesting item. It is a postcard he mailed to people at the end of the year explaining why he was not sending them New Year’s greetings. “My existence is inconvenient to the village of Iitate,” he says. “They are exploiting poor people, trying to draw them here. They list subsidies but don’t mention radiation.”
As I traveled around Fukushima, I often heard people describe themselves as inconvenient.
“I am an annoyance to the town officials,” Ito says. “My existence makes life difficult for them. They lied about obtaining the people’s consent. They said they would consult us before releasing the contaminated water. They never did.”
Ito is also angry about Tepco trying to restart its nuclear reactors on the west coast of Japan. “I hate the unluckiness that I was born in a country that can forget its history in only 80 years,” he says, referring to the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II.
Ito leaves the room again and returns with a small brass bell. “The town gave me this to ward off bears,” he says. “We have had five reports of bears in the village. But they have given us nothing to protect against radiation.”
2026-03-09 19:30:00
Less than a day after President Donald Trump falsely suggested that Ilhan Omar had staged an attack on herself, the images started to circulate. In AI-generated fake photos that soon flooded both X and Facebook, the Minnesota representative is depicted posing next to the man who invaded a town hall meeting and sprayed apple cider vinegar on her from a syringe. In the AI-generated images, Omar and the man are both smiling; in some, the congresswoman is foisting a wad of cash, presumably to suggest that she bribed her attacker.
It’s extremely easy to trace not just the fact that these photos are fake, but how: one widely circulated image simply replaces a woman Omar’s attacker posed with in a separate Facebook photo with the congresswoman. And while the pictures were cartoonish and strained credulity—would someone engaged in a conspiracy with their attacker really pose with him holding a fistful of bribe money?—in two distinct senses, they worked. A false narrative soon broadly took hold on the right that Omar had planned the attack on herself; the fake photos have often been used on social media as further “proof” that the event wasn’t real. But even when the images weren’t taken to be definitively real, they still were effective at creating some useful amount of uncertainty about what might actually be true, and discouraging people from trying to find out.
“People have a very difficult time figuring out what is real and what is true.”
Dmytro Iarovyi is an associate professor at the Kyiv School of Economics who studies disinformation, propaganda, and “disinformation resilience.” Iarovyi, who is also a researcher at Vytautas Magnus University and a visiting scholar at Harvard, explains that the “sustained experience of living through disinformation changes people’s capacity to participate meaningfully in democratic life… In fact, it’s one of the major tasks of modern disinformation—not to persuade people in something, yet to discourage them, turn them into passive, tired, exhausted mob.”
In the United States, a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP suit, is one that is filed to silence one’s critics or scare journalists away from covering a story. What we’re seeing now could be termed “strategic memes against public participation”—images designed to confuse, sow doubt, and chill public engagement with political issues.
Take, for instance, a discussion that ensued under a Facebook post about Omar’s assault from Ted Howze, a failed 2020 GOP California congressional candidate whose party support faded after he was found to have made bigoted posts against Black people and Muslims. “The attack was a staged production,” Howze wrote above a fake photo of Omar. “Don’t fall for it.”
A few people in Howze’s comments pushed back, noting that the image appeared to be AI generated. A majority believed it to be real. But a third camp simply weren’t sure, and asked where the photo had come from or sought other contextualizing information not readily available in an unhinged Facebook comments section.
“Interesting,” one person wrote, “so hard to tell with all the abilities to add and change anything in a photo nowadays.”
“I think the first pic is fake,” another chimed in. “She is wearing the same sweater. BUT the others might be real.”
Fake images now attach themselves to virtually every global news event. Take, for instance, a spate of AI images claiming to depict Jeffrey Epstein, either showing him alive and well in 2026 or pictured with people we don’t know him to have associated with. One image shared on X by an obscure YouTuber claimed to show the dead convicted sex criminal walking in Tel Aviv; Hebrew speakers pointed out that road signs in the image were gibberish, among several tells that the image was fake. Nonetheless, the tweet has been viewed over 3 million times.
But that Epstein picture, where nonsense text immediately points to the image being false, is increasingly an exception, warns Georgetown University’s Renée DiResta, a social media researcher and globally recognized expert on propaganda and disinformation.
In the last few months, DiResta says, when it comes to AI-generated photos and audio, “We have crossed the threshold of it being virtually impossible for people to tell just with the human eye whether something is real or fake.”
The net effect, she adds, “is that people have a very difficult time figuring out what is real and what is true. And those are not always the same thing.” Something “real” could be a genuine photo in a false context; for instance, a picture of a Amazonian fire whose caption claims it depicts Los Angeles. Images that are “true,” DiResta explains, depict both a real image and contextualize it accurately.
By themselves, fake images can already do real harm. A recent study by researchers at the University of Hong Kong and Vanderbilt University found that susceptibility to fake news increases when false headlines are paired with “realistic” but fake photos. Other research from University of New South Wales shows that people tend to overestimate their ability to identify AI-generated faces.
“Researchers thought the risk profile for this stuff was going to be foreign bad actors.”
But a deeper issue is what the public does with the knowledge that a photo might not be real. In a painfully circular irony, more and more people are using Grok or other AI tools to attempt to figure out if AI-generated images are real. But AI models are simply bad at verifying photos, or giving appropriate context if they are able to correctly note an image is fake.
That’s happened with these photos of Omar. When asked by one user, Grok correctly noted a “pattern of edited images” targeting the congresswoman, but was unable to contextualize other parts of the fake image. “The photo appears to be edited or AI-generated,” Grok responded. “Searches show no credible evidence of a real image of Rep. Ilhan Omar wearing an IDF headscarf.” But that last sentence contains a revealing error: Grok did not even “read” the image correctly, as the letters on Omar’s scarf in the faked image don’t say “IDF” (meaing Israeli Defense Forces) but “DFF,” a watermark used by a Twitter account called “Dumb F#ck Finder,” which claims to expose “dumbfucks” by creating fake photos and getting people to fall for them.
The Trump administration, despite their constant, angry denunciations of what they consider to be “fake news,” has emerged as a prominent player in this disturbing blurring of visual truth and fiction. During this winter’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota, the White House published a doctored photo of the arrest of activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, who participated in a demonstration at a St. Paul church where one of the pastors reportedly leads a ICE field office. The altered photo showed Armstrong, who is African-American, wailing as she’s taken into custody, with tears running down her face; it also appeared to slightly darken her skin.
In this case, had then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem not shared the unaltered photo of Armstrong in an earlier post, it would have been difficult to tell that the image was fake. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out, it isn’t known if the move was a first for the White House.
“This incident raises the question of whether the Trump Administration feels emboldened to manipulate other photos for other propaganda purposes,” the digital rights organization wrote at the time. “Does it rework photos of the President to make him appear healthier, or more awake? Does it rework military or intelligence images to create pretexts for war? Does it rework photos of American citizens protesting or safeguarding their neighbors to justify a military deployment?”
The response from the White House was also notable; when asked by a journalist if the photo was manipulated, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded with mockery, posting a poorly-formulated meme on X mocking “debunkers” and the very idea of fact checking. Deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr responded with a statement that said, in part, “The memes will continue”—blurring deliberately produced, photo-realistic disinformation with the idea of a meme.
Indeed, the White House didn’t learn its lesson. Weeks later, it posted an AI-generated TikTok video showingTeam USA hockey star Brady Tkachuk calling Canadians “maple-syrup-eating fucks.” (Tkachuk was forced to clarify that the video wasn’t real, saying at a press conference, “I’m not in control of any of those accounts. I know that those words would never come out of my mouth. So, I can’t do anything about it.”)
According to DiResta, it used to be that “disinformation researchers thought the risk profile for this stuff was going to be foreign bad actors,” like troll accounts linked to the Russian or Chinese governments. “When it became clear that the U.S. government itself was doing this to own its domestic enemies, that was alarming.”
The Trump administration visibly uses AI in forms that are DiResta calls “obvious political propaganda”—for instance, the October 2025 video showing Donald Trump dumping shit on protesters from a fighter jet.
There’s a difference, Diresta says, between such images where “no one is fooled” and ones that are genuinely meant to be manipulative. The later kind, she says, are “contributing to the trust breakdown and reiterating that the U.S. government can’t be trusted.” They also can play a part in what she calls the “firehose of falsehood model,” where fake information and propaganda are launched at people with overwhelming and disorienting volume.
Iarovyi, who is Ukrainian, says that after years of Russian attacks, his home country now recognizes how disinformation “targets morale, trust, cohesion, and the credibility of institutions under stress.”
“Democratic life assumes at least a minimal shared picture of reality.”
In the United States—and in totalitarian societies like China and Iran—it’s reasonable to expect what he calls “truth decay” tactics, Iarovyi says, “Not just individual falsehoods. The strategic product is uncertainty, polarization, and distrust—conditions that make collective action harder.”
“When disinformation is constant,” Iarovyi says, “the everyday cost of knowing what’s going on rises. People spend more time verifying the basics, or they stop trying… It reduces meaningful participation because democratic life assumes at least a minimal shared picture of reality.”
Constant exposure to disinformation, by contrast, he says, can produce both cynicism and disengagement. “A high-volume, repetitive environment (especially when messages contradict each other) doesn’t need to persuade you of a specific lie,” he explains. “It can persuade you that truth is inaccessible, so politics becomes vibes, identity, and tribe. This is why the ‘flood the zone’ logic works: it produces exhaustion and withdrawal, not just misbelief.”
The primary aims of images like the ones targeting Omar and Armstrong are, of course, to harass, demean and discredit political opponents. But they have a secondary effect: to overwhelm the internet with unusable, false, unstable information, and then to mock, as Jackson did, the idea of finding out what’s true at all.
This type of bad information can make it genuinely difficult for people to figure out what’s real and what’s worth engaging with. And as AI-generated images like these become increasingly convincing, a new danger is emerging: that when people don’t know what is AI and what isn’t, they will distrust everything they see equally.
At that point, DiResta says, people can start to believe that “nothing is true and everything is possible,” a phrase coined by journalist Peter Pomerantsev in his 2015 book about working in Russian TV news.
The main risk in that circumstance, DiResta says, “is that you see trust fragment along very partisan lines. This has already happened to an extent. People come to believe something is true or not based on who says it.” The most successfully manipulative fake images, DiResta adds, convince people to share them quickly—before their brains can do the work of assessing whether they’re real.
“If they find it plausible and really believe that Ilhan Omar is a Somali agent, or here illegally, or in cahoots with a false flag attack, and they believe that, then they want people to know,” she says. “They believe they’re being righteous by sharing that… They won’t say, ‘Let me go and search for disconfirming evidence.’ That’s not an innate behavior.”
“In the moments where it matters most,” DiResta says, “You’ll see people do the least amount of checking.”
“The technology is developing so fast,” Katie Sanders, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, told the Texas Tribune. “What I suspect can happen is that it makes people more skeptical of what they see. If you feel that you can’t believe what you are seeing, you might be inclined to not believe anything.”
“Don’t treat disinformation as a temporary ‘media trend’ that will pass.”
Previous research has shown that exposure to fake news can lower trust in media and raise trust in government. A 2020 study from the Harvard Kennedy School found that it can also have a direct impact on whether people vote or engage in civic activity at all. “Public confidence in political institutions affects civic and electoral behavior, with distrustful citizens more likely to sit out an election or vote for a populist candidate,” the researchers noted. “While in some cases concerns about poor government may lead to citizen mobilization, high levels of cynicism and mistrust can cause people to withdraw from participating in politics.” This adds to what we already know about how conspiracy theories and fake news affect people’s desire to engage civically: a 2014 study by University of Kent researchers, for instance, showed that exposure to conspiracy theories about the government’s involvement in significant world events—in that case, the death of Princess Diana—“reduced participants’ intentions to engage in politics, relative to participants who were given information refuting conspiracy theories,” the researchers wrote.
A lack of civic participation and an inability to distinguish truth from fiction only benefits autocratic leaders. “If we don’t know what is happening in the world, if we do not have common reference points, there is no way to decide how to vote, whom to vote for, even how to have an opinion on what is going on,” warned Fred Ritchin, the dean emeritus of the International Center of Photography School, in a recent interview with the influential photobook publisher Aperture. “As many have previously warned us, including Hannah Arendt, there is now a widening path leading to autocratic governments when citizens become confused enough, essentially disarmed, so that a dictator emerges who will make the decisions for them.”
In some ways, this situation isn’t new: state-backed disinformation has always created confusion about what truths are knowable, with the hope that people set aside their own critical capacities and instead put their trust in a strongman leader. In 2015, journalist Adrian Chen first reported on the Internet Research Agency, a Russian government-linked troll farm where workers spent all day sowing disinformation about fake events: a “toxic fume” release in Louisiana, for instance, or an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta.
But when Chen considered the troll farm again in 2016—and spoke to Russian activists about its actual effects—he realized that their aim was “not to brainwash,” he wrote, “but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake content, seeding doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the Internet as a democratic space.”
Today, we find ourselves in a disturbingly similar situation. But the solutions, Iarovyi says, are complex. “Debunking is good, but it’s not sufficient,” he says. “Resilience is built when societies lower the spread capacity of bad information and raise the verification capacity of ordinary people—without outsourcing everything to heroic fact-checkers.”
Iarovyi’s research for an organization called the Baltic Engagement Centre for Combatting Information Disorders suggests that many people in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, countries with long experience fighting government disinformation, have learned tactical lessons: “They don’t treat disinformation as a temporary ‘media trend’ that will pass. That mindset changes the work—it pushes you toward long-term capacity building and institutional routines, not just reactive debunks.”
The United States, meanwhile, is still at the beginning of our journey towards understanding how state-backed disinformation, including increasingly realistic fake images, will affect our politics and our national life. In the meantime, fake images—some promoted by the federal government itself—clutter our feeds, and our sense of how the world really looks, and whether we can trust the evidence of our own eyes.
2026-03-09 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
During the year she spent leading the US Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, Kristi Noem faced a torrent of criticism. Lawmakers from both parties assailed her for lying about the shooting of protestors in Minneapolis and spending millions of dollars on television commercials. Government audits concluded that she “systematically obstructed” investigations and created security risks at airports.
Now she has become the first cabinet-level official fired by President Donald Trump during his second term. After a combative hearing last week, during which Noem seemed to mislead Congress about whether Trump approved her ad spending, the president fired her.
As DHS secretary, Noem also raised eyebrows for an unprecedented degree of control over staffing and spending at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She paused most FEMA payments, leading to extensive delays for disaster recovery, and sought to slash the agency’s on-call workforce by thousands of employees. She also expressed a desire to downsize or eliminate the agency entirely, shifting the burden of disaster relief onto the states.
A growing number of critics and experts believe that Noem’s interference with FEMA may well have been illegal. This week, two Senate Democrats released a report alleging that Noem’s blanket freeze on FEMA payments violated federal law. At the same time, lawyers for a federal workers’ union argued to a federal judge in California that Noem’s workforce cuts also violated the law. In both cases, critics pointed to legislation passed after Hurricane Katrina, which prohibits DHS from interfering with FEMA.
“I have reason to believe that you’re violating the law, either knowingly or unknowingly,” said Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican representing North Carolina, during his questioning of Noem.
“I think Congress never anticipated [that] what has happened would happen, or they would have probably put in more clarity”
These accusations will remain relevant if Noem’s apparent successor, Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, continues her quest to make permanent changes to FEMA’s structure—a goal that the president has frequently suggested he supports. Though President Trump has in many cases been able to make unilateral cuts to federal programs on a rapid timeline—as with the Department of Education and US Agency for International Development—the post-Katrina law may put FEMA on stronger footing for the rest of the president’s term.
“To my knowledge, DHS has never been involved in decision-making about the FEMA workforce,” said MaryAnn Tierney, a former FEMA official who led the agency’s regional office on the Eastern Seaboard for more than a decade.
The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 emerged from a series of federal investigations into the agency’s failures after the devastating storm, which killed more than 1,400 people and submerged much of New Orleans. A bipartisan select committee in the House of Representatives found that the agency’s leaders had dithered for days before activating key response measures, and that there were numerous breakdowns in the agency’s chain of command.
Congress also found that FEMA had withered after the Bush administration placed it under the newly-created Department of Homeland Security, where leaders were focused on combating terrorism in the wake of 9/11. As a result, they did very little planning for a major natural disaster like Katrina. State emergency managers testified to Congress that FEMA was “emaciated and anemic” and had been “lost in the shuffle” at DHS.
Congress tried to fix this in 2006 with a law requiring that FEMA leadership have experience in emergency management and giving the agency the ability to report directly to the president during disasters. The law also stated that “the secretary [of DHS] may not substantially or significantly reduce the authorities, responsibilities, or functions…or the capability of the agency.”
Noem attempted to do just this. Trump has not nominated anyone to lead FEMA since he assumed office last year—the law requires a FEMA administrator with at least five years of emergency management experience—and has instead designated three different acting administrators, avoiding Senate confirmation and the emergency management experience requirement. The most recent, Karen Evans, has been in office since December. It appears that all three of these acting administrators have taken direct orders from DHS, allowing Noem to fill the leadership vacuum.
“I think Congress never anticipated [that] what has happened would happen, or they would have probably put in more clarity,” said W. Craig Fugate, who led FEMA under the Obama administration and earlier served as the head of Florida’s emergency management agency.
In June, Noem asserted direct approval authority over all FEMA spending transactions that exceeded $100,000—a total that, given the nature of disaster response, includes most of the agency’s payments. The policy led to an immediate freeze in payments to cities that were rebuilding after recent floods and fires and an almost total halt in new infrastructure projects that will protect against future disasters.
A report released this week by Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Andy Kim of New Jersey found that the spending pause delayed more than 1,000 disaster-related projects. These included the opening of a call center after the July 4 floods that devastated the Texas Hill Country, temporary housing for survivors of Hurricane Helene and the Maui wildfires, and housing inspections for storm victims in places like Missouri. The senators argue that this blanket spending policy violates the post-Katrina law by depriving FEMA of autonomous control over its disaster spending. (After Sen. Tillis berated Noem during her Senate appearance, FEMA released around $80 million in Hurricane Helene recovery funding to his state.)
The spending freeze isn’t the only way in which Noem may have violated the 2006 law. In recent months, she also tried to downsize FEMA’s workforce, and in particular its Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery Employees, or CORE workers, who assist with recovery and response operations during major disasters. These workers tend to have their contracts renewed pro forma, but DHS ordered the non-renewal of around 200 such employees’ terms in January. Noem was reportedly targeting a broad cut of 11,000 workers—half the agency’s workforce.
A union of federal employees sued over the recent firings, arguing that they violate the post-Katrina law. In a hearing on Tuesday, a federal judge at first said she was inclined to let the firings go forward, but she changed her mind after a federal government lawyer failed to provide even basic information about who is making decisions for FEMA. FEMA’s acting administrator herself said in a sworn declaration that “DHS decided” not to renew the core workers, but the lawyer denied that was the case.
If confirmed as the new DHS secretary, Senator Mullin’s approach to FEMA will face extreme scrutiny from judges and lawmakers. A bipartisan group in the House of Representatives is pushing a bill that would extricate the agency from DHS, giving it full cabinet-level status. New leadership at DHS might also increase the pressure on Trump to appoint a permanent FEMA administrator.
If Trump does move to install a permanent leader, that person will have a lot of work to do to prepare the agency for hurricane season, according to Fugate.
“[Noem] has already broken them,” he said of the agency’s leadership, adding that the loss of many senior officials could leave it vulnerable during a big disaster. “There’s still good people at FEMA, but I just don’t know if there are enough of them, and if DHS has the sense to get out of the way.”
2026-03-09 19:30:00
This piece is adapted from Amy Littlefield’s new book, Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, published by Legacy Lit (Hachette) on March 10.
In 1974, an Internal Revenue Service attorney named Paul Haring pitched an idea to Catholic leaders that would shape the lives of millions of women for the next half-century.
A record of his plan, titled “Paul Haring’s Proposal,” details what then seemed like an improbable scheme. Haring, a devout Catholic with a history of anti-abortion activism and a flair for longshot legal maneuvers, wanted Congress to ban federal funding of abortion by passing an amendment to an appropriations bill.
Roe v. Wade had legalized abortion nationwide the year before, and Catholics were up in arms. But more Americans supported the ruling than opposed it, and an outright abortion ban wasn’t going to happen. So Haring and his allies came up with a new plan: a ban that targeted only poor women, a group far less popular than Roe, and did so through a backdoor, as a rider to an appropriations bill.
The Catholic church needed to endorse the idea—the same church that championed poor people in many of its teachings. The bishops weren’t ready. “The political strategists are sure this won’t work,” according to a memo shared with me by Sean Kelly, a scholar who discovered it in the bishops’ archives.
Unfortunately for generations of poor women, those strategists were wrong.
The policy Haring had failed to sell the bishops in 1974 would pass two years later and become the Hyde Amendment, a ban on federal Medicaid funding of abortion that will mark its 50th anniversary this year. As I researched my new book Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, I came to see the Hyde Amendment as the key to understanding the anti-abortion movement’s gradual destruction, and eventual reversal, of Roe v. Wade.
The amendment was the first major, successful use of the movement’s incremental approach to undermining abortion rights. It was an early example of co-opting the rhetoric of the civil rights movement to demonize abortion, in this case by claiming they were saving poor, Black babies (or, as the policy’s namesake, Republican Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde, called them, “little ghetto kid[s]”).
More broadly, it marked an early collaboration between Catholic social conservatives and Republican fiscal conservatives, under the guise of protecting “taxpayers”—an alliance that has been one of the most defining in American politics. This age-old American idea—that white men should be spared the burden of paying for things that women of color needed to keep themselves and their children alive—was moving to the forefront of national politics in the 1970s, when conservative “revolts” against taxes foreshadowed the election of Ronald Reagan.
The Hyde Amendment was an opening salvo in two contemporary wars: on women and on the poor. On a material level, the funding ban shaped the lives of women and the abortion rights movement in ways we take for granted now. The right to abortion became a right only for those who could afford it. In the years since its passage, an estimated one in four women who would otherwise have obtained an abortion paid for by Medicaid have instead given birth.
Yet the history of the amendment is mostly unknown, often reduced to a single quotation from its namesake, a jovial Catholic congressman from the Chicago suburbs. “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman,” Henry Hyde famously said in 1977. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the . . . Medicaid bill.”
As I discovered in writing my book, Henry Hyde didn’t come up with the idea for the Hyde Amendment. Behind his actions, I found an assortment of mostly forgotten men, some infamous in their time, others obscure, a few still alive in their eighties. In my two years of digging and reading and listening, I also found a common motive that I never would have imagined. Many of these men seemed to share a genuine belief that by restricting abortion, they were earning something everlasting for themselves—a ticket to Heaven.
The idea for restricting abortion for specific subsets of women originated with a Southern politician with a notorious mean streak. The late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina once refused to meet with the mother of a child who had died after contracting HIV from a blood transfusion because he believed HIV was just a gay disease that gay people deserved to die from. He tried to prevent Martin Luther King Jr. Day from becoming a national holiday. He called all Black men “Fred” because he thought it was funny.
He deserved far worse than having his house covered in a giant condom that read, “Helms is deadlier than a virus” (a brilliant stunt AIDS activists somehow pulled off in 1991). Instead, he spent 30 years in the Senate, retired in 2003, and died five years later, old and comfortable, on the Fourth of July. Helms was so Trumpian that researching him made me wonder if he had hidden a piece of his soul for our president to discover, like Tom Riddle’s diary at Hogwarts. He started out as a pundit on talk radio. He disregarded norms. He knew how to harness white male anger through blistering populism. He was even said to have small hands. Plus, he opposed sending US aid down what he called “ratholes” in poorer countries of the world, places that decades later Trump would call “shithole[s].” That was why he introduced the Helms Amendment in 1973, a ban on the use of foreign aid funds for abortion—a policy that under Reagan expanded with the Global Gag Rule. Fifty years later the Helms Amendment remains in place, renewed regularly by Congress, and an estimated 17,000 women die each year as a result. Trump, fittingly enough, broadened the Global Gag Rule’s restrictions on foreign aid in January, reaching beyond abortion to restrict international work around diversity and transgender rights. Helms would have been proud.
The first Congressional record I found of the Hyde Amendment—in essence, a domestic version of the Helms Amendment—was introduced, in November 1973, by Senator James Buckley. He was a staunch Catholic and abortion opponent who, along with Helms, would try unsuccessfully to ban abortion outright through a constitutional amendment. He served a single term in the Senate from 1971 to 1977 after winning an unlikely victory in New York on the third-party Conservative Party ticket. He was also the less-famous younger brother of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the National Review and the man who turned refusing to pay for the needs of poor people into an elite intellectual movement. It was Senator Buckley who suggested that if Congress was going to pass the Helms Amendment and prohibit federal funds from being used to help “foreign women” get abortions, “then at least we could accord the same protection to our own.” By February 1974, the Nixon administration was reported to be “quietly resisting the amendment.” (Watergate probably didn’t help.)
Paul Haring grew up in Goliad, Texas, where he went to Catholic church twice a week, sitting with his father on the side reserved for men while his devout mother, for whose sake the family attended these services, sat alone on the side for women. He would make a name for himself in the nascent anti-abortion movement in 1971, when he filed a lawsuit arguing that as a “taxpayer” he should have the right to stop abortions scheduled to take place at a Texas air force base under a federal policy that allowed the procedures under certain circumstances. He served a brief stint as head of Americans United for Life, which is now a major anti-abortion organization, but which back then, apparently, couldn’t afford to pay its director. Haring told me he did the job as a volunteer while working at the IRS. In other words, a man who would set about trying to revoke taxpayer funding for abortion was subsidizing his own activism with taxpayer funds in the form of his government paycheck.
Haring told me he wrote a version of the Hyde Amendment that was introduced in the House in the summer of 1974, months before he tried to sell the idea to Catholic leaders. It defined abortion as “the intentional destruction of unborn human life, which life begins at the moment of fertilization”—an early iteration of personhood. The House rejected a modified version of Haring’s proposal by a margin of 2 to 1. Another version of the bill was quashed in the Senate. Unfortunately for Medicaid recipients, that wasn’t the end.
If it hadn’t been for the sex scandal that torpedoed his political career, Bob Bauman might have gone down in history as a run-of-the-mill Republican tightwad with a fetish for offshore tax avoidance. Instead, in 1980, an FBI investigation revealed that the Maryland congressman and married father of four had been drunkenly cruising the streets of Washington, DC, behind the wheel of a Lincoln Continental with congressional plates, picking up men and paying them for sex. At least one of the men turned out to be a boy of 16. Bauman was far from exceptional as a closeted gay man in DC, but he was exceptional as a closeted gay man who was widely considered one of the most conservative members of Congress.
Unsurprisingly, Bauman lost his reelection bid later that year. He eventually moved to Wilton Manors, Florida, known as one of the gayest cities in the United States, and built a second career writing dictionary-length manifestos with titles like Where to Stash Your Cash Legally and Swiss Money Secrets. It was a perfect encapsulation of the conservative movement’s wider political project; the man who had helped cut off taxpayer funding of abortion had gone on to a second career helping corporations and the ultrawealthy avoid paying taxes at all. To reach him with an interview request, I had to fill out a form pretending I was a potential client with an eight-figure fortune. Thankfully, Bauman never asked me about my finances. Once I disclosed I was a journalist he likely realized I was notworth eight figures.
Like many of the men involved in the early days of the Hyde Amendment, Bauman was a devout Catholic. But his opposition to abortion wasn’t just religious—he was adopted. “I think, probably looking back on it, maybe it was my own adoption and the fact that I didn’t know who my mother was, I could have died, you know, and so on,” he told me. “But that was not an openly conscious thing; it might have been a subconscious thing.”
Bauman was also extremely unpopular on Capitol Hill. A 1976 New York Times profile described him as the “gadfly of the House, its most active nitpicker, its hairshirt, its leading baiter of its most powerful members.” When he introduced his own version of a federal abortion funding ban in 1975, it went down to defeat.
But he was smart enough to know how to work around his unpopularity. Understanding that the rules of Congress were approximately the rules of the playground, he looked for someone cooler and more popular to put his name and face to the idea. Bauman found his man in a 6 foot 3 former basketball player, the affable Illinois Republican, Henry Hyde.
“Henry was a very dynamic speaker. He was a large man,” Bauman, who was stocky and short, told me. “Very, very humorous, and a very friendly person.” One day in 1976, Bauman sidled up to his Midwestern colleague outside the House cloakroom and suggested that, in Hyde’s words, they “sneak an amendment” into the House appropriations bill.
Henry Hyde served in Congress for 32 years until just months before his death in 2007 at the age of 83. Abortion first came across his radar in 1969 when he was serving in the Illinois General Assembly and a Democratic colleague asked if he would cosponsor a bill to liberalize the state’s abortion ban. Four years before Roe, bills like these were being introduced all over the country. Women sickened by unsafe, illegal abortions were dying of infections and hemorrhages in hotel rooms and hospital septic wards. But Hyde was a Catholic, and he “quickly decided that abortion was something to be resisted strenuously,” he later wrote. Instead of supporting the bill, he worked to defeat it.
After coming to Washington in 1975, Hyde carved out a powerful role on the House Judiciary Committee, where he eventually became chairman. As leader of the Clinton impeachment trial, he was forced to make the embarrassing admission that he had carried on an extramarital affair of his own. On Capitol Hill, I learned from my reporting, he was also known for his propensity to grope women.
A former congressional staffer named Margaret Goodman told me Hyde had grabbed her ass one day while she was just trying to do her job. She wanted to slap his hand away but there was a room full of people watching, so she took a deep breath, steadied herself, and kept walking.
“You just made sure, you sort of sidled along with your back up against the wall,” she told me, “because Henry Hyde liked to reach out and grab you. On your butt, just, surreptitiously.”
Then there was the time, Planned Parenthood’s ex-president Faye Wattleton told me, he made a pass at her during a break in the Phil Donahue show. A man with a habit of treating women this way ought to have been disqualified from making laws about their bodies, although that would probably have disqualified many lawmakers from that era (which, come to think of it, might have been fine). But Hyde’s behavior didn’t make a dent in his popularity; instead, he went down in history as one of the most influential conservatives of his time.
Even with Hyde as the front man, getting the Hyde Amendment to pass was no easy feat. A main obstacle was Democratic Pennsylvania Rep. Dan Flood, a cape-wearing former Shakespearean actor who oversaw the subcommittee in charge of the bill. Flood hated the Hyde Amendment. Yes, he represented a heavily Catholic district and believed abortion was wrong. But a “vote for this amendment is not a vote against abortion,” he fulminated. “It is a vote against poor people. That is what it is, as plain as the nose on your face.”
That should have been that—except that now the Catholic leaders who had doubted Paul Haring were fully on board with the plan. A lobbyist for the Catholic bishops got every Catholic pastor in the district to write Flood a letter, the lobbyist would later brag to scholar Sean Kelly. Flood was flooded with anti-abortion mail. Suddenly he became a champion of the Hyde Amendment.
He was far from the only Democrat implicated in this history. After all, Democrats controlled the House and the Senate in 1976, when the Hyde Amendment passed. Many of these Democrats likely supported the right to abortion. But many of them likely realized that voting in favor of public funding of abortion so close to the 1976 election, when evangelical Christians were becoming a crucial new electoral force, would put them at risk of punishment by anti-abortion diehards.
That summer, pro-choice groups were doing their best to push back against this anti-abortion deluge. But as a NARAL lobbyist would write in a memo I found in the group’s archives, abortion opponents had “really outstripped” them. Records show that even as the pro-choice movement tried to fight the ban in Congress, they were shifting their hopes to what would become their primary strategy for the next 50 years: challenging abortion restrictions in court. In a July 1976 memo, the pro-choice Republican Senator Ed Brooke wrote that groups including NARAL were banking on the belief that they could defeat the ban with litigation. “The group[s] would prefer leaving the Hyde Amendment in if there is not sufficient support to strike it altogether, for they feel that they would have a strong court case against the Hyde Amendment,” he wrote, according to the memo shared with me by the scholar Nicola Beisel.
Unfortunately, they were wrong. In 1980’s Harris v. McRae, the Supreme Court upheld the ban, expressing in legal form the driving narrative of American conservatism: that being poor, especially when you’re pregnant, and most especially if you are a woman of color, is an individual moral failing, not a societal one. Or, as the court put it, a woman’s constitutional right to abortion did not grant her a “constitutional entitlement” to the resources she might need to exercise that right.
“If I don’t answer on the first few rings, be patient,” Bob Bauman wrote to me before our phone interview in late 2022. “At 86, I don’t move as fast.”
Before speaking with him, I devoured his 1986 autobiography, The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative, which dripped with sordid details about his complicated life. “I did not want to write this book,” Bauman admitted in the preface. “I wrote it because I need the money.”
This one of the many contradictions that plagued Bauman throughout his life. Although he was a single-minded devotee of fiscal conservatism, Bauman had been profligate with money. Once his family was saved from ruin by a friend, the intellectual champion of fiscal conservatism himself, National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.
When I asked Bauman his thoughts on the impact of the Hyde Amendment, he expressed a motive I didn’t expect.
“Well, if I get any credit when I get to Saint Peter at the gate, I hope that’s on my list,” he said. “I think it’s the most important thing I ever did in Congress.”
His words would be echoed the following year when I interviewed Paul Haring at a public library near his home in suburban Virginia. Haring used our interview to try to convert me to Catholicism and save my soul from hell.
“The most important thing is we go to heaven,” Haring told me, over and over, until his words took on the tenor of a marketing pitch.
Henry Hyde also shared a preoccupation with eternity, I discovered. “I believe that I will one day render an account to God for what I did and failed to do about the issues that have caused such deep distress in our national life,” he once wrote.
The Hyde Amendment has long been understood as an opportunistic use of the appropriations bill to restrict abortion access. But there were more opportunities hiding in the stories of the strange crew of men who brought it into being. My two-year investigation into the death of Roe led me to the conclusion that the anti-abortion movement succeeded because of mutually beneficial alliance between opportunists, like Dan Flood, and true believers, like Paul Haring.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the true believers were opportunists, too. In their quest for heaven, it turned out, the architects of the Hyde Amendment had their eyes on the greatest opportunity of all.
