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2025-03-19 22:03:43

This month marks the five-year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed 1.2 million people in the US alone. While life has returned to normal for most Americans, the threats to our health haven’t disappeared. Hundreds of people in the US continue to die of Covid each week, while millions more suffer complications from Long Covid. We’re experiencing the worst flu season in at least 15 years. There are multiple outbreaks of measles, the most serious occurring in an undervaccinated West Texas community. Then there’s the threat of bird flu, which has spread through dairy and poultry farms, sickening dozens of people and killing one so far.

At the same time, the second Trump administration has been actively reshaping and even dismantling the country’s public health infrastructure. Hundreds of employees across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Food and Drug Administration have been handed termination notices. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the country’s new secretary of health and human services, still questions the use of vaccines, specifically the MMR vaccine to prevent measles.

On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera about the collision course between the Trump administration’s health priorities and developing public health emergencies. 

Rivera says the US is still not testing enough people to determine whether these diseases and others are spreading. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is making things even more difficult by withholding regular public health data that infectious disease experts routinely rely on to assess whether a larger health emergency is emerging. “Without good data, we can’t make good informed choices,” she says. “And it is conceivable that [a pandemic] can be happening and brewing right underneath our nose and us not pick it up.”

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app.

2025-03-19 18:00:00

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

Before he was abruptly fired last month, Derek Copeland worked as a trainer at the US Department of Agriculture’s National Dog Detection Training Center, preparing beagles and Labrador retrievers to sniff out plants and animals that are invasive or vectors for zoonotic diseases, like swine fever. Copeland estimates the center lost about a fifth of its trainers and a number of other support staff when 6,000 employees were let go at the USDA in February as part of a government-wide purge orchestrated by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Before he received his termination notice, he says, Copeland had just spent several months training the only dog stationed in Florida capable of detecting the Giant African land snail, an invasive mollusk that poses a significant threat to Florida agriculture. “We have dogs for spotted and lantern flies, Asian longhorn beetles,” he says, referring to two other nonnative species. “I don’t think the American people realize how much crap that people bring into the United States.”

Dog trainers are just one example of the kind of highly specialized USDA staff that have been removed from their stations in recent weeks. Teams devoted to inspecting plant and food imports have been hit especially hard by the recent cuts, including the Plant Protection and Quarantine program, which has lost hundreds of staffers alone.

“It’s causing problems left and right,” says one current USDA worker, who like other federal employees in this story asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “It’s basically a skeleton crew working now,” says another current USDA staffer, who noted that both they and most of their colleagues held advanced degrees and had many years of training to protect US food and agriculture supply chains from invasive pests. “It’s not something that is easily replaced by artificial intelligence.”

“These aren’t your average people,” says Mike Lahar, the regulatory affairs manager at US customs broker behemoth Deringer. “These were highly trained individuals—inspectors, entomologists, taxonomists.”

Lahar and other supply chain experts warn that the losses could cause food to go rotten while waiting in ports and could lead to even higher grocery prices, in addition to increasing the chances of potentially devastating invasive species getting into the country. These dangers are especially acute at a moment when US grocery supply chains are already reeling from other business disruptions such as bird flu and President Trump’s new tariffs.

“If we’re inspecting less food, the first basic thing that happens is some amount of that food we don’t inspect is likely to go bad. We’re going to end up losing resources,” says supply chain industry veteran and software CEO Joe Hudicka.

The USDA cuts are being felt especially in coastal states home to major shipping ports. USDA sources who spoke to WIRED estimate that the Port of Los Angeles, one of the busiest in the US, lost around 35 percent of its total Plant Protection and Quarantine staff and 60 percent of its “smuggling and interdiction” employees, who are tasked with stopping illegal pests and goods from entering the country. The Port of Miami, which handles high volumes of US plant imports, lost about 35 percent of its plant inspectors.

Navigating the workforce cuts has “been absolute chaos,” says Armando Rosario-Lebrón, a vice president of the National Association of Agriculture Employees, which represents workers in Plant Protection and Quarantine program.

“These ports were already strained in how they process cargo, and now some of them have been completely decimated,” Rosario-Lebrón says. “We could be back to pandemic-level issues for some goods if we don’t fix this.”

The Department of Agriculture did not respond to a request for comment. Republican senator Joni Ernst, who has been a vocal backer of DOGE’s efforts, previously publicly supported the USDA’s dog training program and cosponsored legislation that would give it permanent funding. Her office declined to comment on cuts made to it.

Two federal judges and an independent agency that assesses government personnel decisions have already ordered that fired USDA employees be reinstated. Earlier this week, the USDA said that it was pausing the terminations for 45 days and would “develop a phased plan for return-to-duty.” But affected staff remain in the dark about their future, and the Trump administration has signaled it will fight court decisions to reinstate employees, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt calling one of the rulings “absurd and unconstitutional.”

As these legal and regulatory battles continue to play out, Hudicka says he anticipates a number of trickle-down effects to happen, such as local market wars over resources, which bigger cities and larger grocery chains will be better equipped for than mom-and-pops and rural communities. Hudicka says that allowing shipping containers to sit uninspected could also impact other sectors, as the delays will prevent them from being reused for other kinds of goods. “Those containers are supposed to be moving stuff every day, and now they’re just parked somewhere,” he says.

Kit Johnson, the director of trade compliance at the US customs broker John S. James, also predicts prices and waste to increase. But what raises the most alarms for him is the increased likelihood of invasive species slipping through inspection cracks. He says the price of missing a threatening pest is “wiping out an entire agricultural commodity,” an event that could have “not just economic but national security impacts.”

Decimating the Department of Agriculture could even have consequences for US Customs and Border Protection, which deploys the dogs trained by Copeland and other staffers at the National Dog Detection Training Center. CBP works closely with the USDA in other ways as well, particularly at points of entry. The two agencies run the Agricultural Quarantine Inspection program, but it’s funded by the USDA. Many Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service programs do not rely on taxpayer dollars to operate but instead collect fees from importers and other industry players. In this way, it subsidizes some of CBP’s agriculture-related activities. CBP did not respond to a request for comment.

As the fired USDA workers wait to hear whether their reinstatements will actually take place, ports are beginning to feel their absence. “There aren’t as many inspections being done, and it doesn’t just put us at risk,” says Lahar. “It puts our farmers and our food chains at risk.”

2025-03-19 06:49:25

Six days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Alishea Kingdom went to a medical appointment at the federal prison in New Jersey where she’s incarcerated. It was time for her to take the hormonal medication she’d been prescribed years before to treat her gender dysphoria. But prison staffers would no longer give her the medicine—or the bras, underwear, and other feminine items she’d gotten used to wearing. Without her hormone therapy, Kingdom started having panic attacks, struggled to sleep, and experienced suicidal thoughts.

Kingdom is one of about 2,000 transgender people in federal prisons who have lost access to medical care or may soon lose access to it because of the Trump administration’s new policies. Now she’s part of a class-action lawsuit filed last week against the president and his team. On Monday, her attorneys at the ACLU asked a federal judge in DC for a preliminary injunction that would allow trans people in federal prisons to continue receiving hormone therapy or other prescribed medical care as the litigation unfolds.  

The lawsuit follows other recent suits against the Trump administration by a smaller group of trans women prisoners; those other case are ongoing and primarily seek to stop the women from being transferred to men’s prisons. Trump’s policies are “part of a broader agenda of hatred for trans people and attempts to erase them from society,” says Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, which is representing Kingdom in the class-action litigation.

“Denying people needed medical care is going to be unbelievably devastating,” adds Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who is involved with the other cases.

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that declared war on trans people across the country, as my colleague Madison Pauly put it—instructing the federal government not to acknowledge their existence or protect them under anti-discrimination laws. Trans people make up about 1 percent of the incarcerated population in federal prisons. Trump ordered the Justice Department to keep trans women, whom he described as “males,” out of women’s detention facilities.

The executive order also prohibited federal officials from spending money on health care to treat gender dysphoria, the potentially life-threatening psychological distress that arises when a person’s gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. Under the Biden administration and during Trump’s first term, doctors in the federal prison system regularly prescribed hormone therapy and sometimes approved surgeries to treat the condition, in keeping with recommendations from the American Medical Association and other major medical associations. Most trans women still stayed in men’s prisons prior to Trump’s inauguration, but more than a dozen of them were approved to live in women’s prisons, where they were less likely to be sexually assaulted.

After Trump’s executive order, incarcerated trans people described “chaos and mistreatment” as federal prison staffers rushed to implement the new rules, according to Susan Beaty, an attorney in California who represents some of them. Different prisons have implemented the orders differently—a result of the broader disorganization and confusion at the Bureau of Prisons, which is also reeling from the departure of its director and other top managers.

Beaty’s clients at a federal prison in Texas said trans women were put into segregation and warned that they would soon be transferred to men’s facilities. In February, federal judges temporarily blocked the administration from moving 17 trans women who’d sued from various prisons around the country, but those orders didn’t protect the other incarcerated trans women who hadn’t. This month officials sent at least a couple of them to men’s prisons, according to Minter of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. He notes that the Prison Rape Elimination Act views trans women as particularly vulnerable to rape in men’s prisons: “Because of this new Trump policy, more people will be sexually assaulted,” he says.

Trump’s transfer orders affect a small portion of federally incarcerated trans people, but the ban on gender-affirming health care would change the lives of the vast majority. In late January, after Trump issued his executive order, the Bureau of Prisons announced that it was disbanding the Transgender Executive Council, the agency’s official decision-making body on all issues affecting the trans incarcerated population, including their medical care.

Then in late February, the agency issued memos that prohibited trans prisoners from buying “items that align with transgender ideology,” such as chest binders and hair removal devices, or obtaining undergarments that matched with their gender identity. Prison officials were ordered to refer to prisoners with pronouns corresponding with their sex assigned at birth, and male guards started patting down trans women. Books about LGBT identity were removed from prison library shelves. And the memos banned the use of federal funds for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug that would “conform an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex,” including hormone therapy.

Study after study has shown that hormone therapy and other gender-affirming treatments can be life-saving, decreasing depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. “Withdrawing gender-affirming health care from or denying such care to individuals for whom it is medically indicated puts them at risk of significant harm to their health,” attorneys at the ACLU wrote in the complaint. Some effects of hormone therapy are reversible, which means incarcerated trans men could lose some of their masculine features and trans women could lose some of their feminine ones without the drugs. Suddenly stopping the medication can also lead to headaches, hot flashes, and spikes in blood pressure, as well as depression, fatigue, anorexia, and muscle and joint pain. “We’ve heard from health care officials in prisons who are concerned,” Kendrick says.

“For patients for whom gender-affirming medical care is indicated, no alternative treatments have been demonstrated to be effective,” Dr. Dan Karasic, a psychiatrist who has treated patients with gender dysphoria for three decades and has consulted for state agencies and the United Nations on transgender care, told the court. Cathy Thompson, a psychologist who worked with the federal prison system for 23 years and advised it on best practices for trans prisoners before retiring in 2023, added that federal prisons lack enough clinicians to safely handle the suicide risk that would result from taking trans people off their medications. “I have grave concerns,” she wrote.

At Fairton Federal Correctional Institution, the men’s prison in New Jersey where Kingdom is incarcerated, the halting of medical care has been abrupt. Kingdom lost her hormone therapy in January and could no longer be evaluated by the Transgender Executive Council for surgery. She is 34 and has presented as female since she was a teenager. As her body adjusts to the drop in estrogen, she is experiencing extreme distress and frequently considers using scissors to castrate herself, according to the lawsuit. “After more than a month without care, my gender dysphoria has become incapacitating,” she wrote in a declaration to the court. “I frequently find myself thinking, I would rather not live than be forced to live as a man.”

Solo Nichols, a trans man at FCI Tallahassee in Florida, also joined the class-action suit. Prior to Trump’s inauguration, he’d been preparing to undergo a double mastectomy to masculinize his chest, having worn chest binders since he was about 15. His hormone therapy is also threatened under Trump. In February, he and some other trans men at the prison were given half their regular dose of testosterone, which led to lethargy and mood swings for Nichols. The side effects from the reduced dosage, he told a court, meant it felt “like the other transgender men and I were walking around like zombies.” Later, according to the lawsuit, prison staffers told him he could resume his entire dose “as long as the restraining order lasts,” referring to the court orders from the other lawsuits.

In Minnesota, staffers at FCI Waseca recently told plaintiff Jas Kapule that he could not receive any hormone treatments once his testosterone prescription ran out, and that he could no longer use a chest binder. He fears the return of his menstrual cycle, which caused him severe distress before his transition. “When my period ended due to the hormone therapy, I felt like I had turned over a whole new leaf and finally began feeling comfortable in my body,” he told the court.

The ACLU argues that ending medically necessary treatment for gender dysphoria in prisons violates the Eighth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies enforce regulations. On Monday, attorneys for the group requested a preliminary injunction to block the implementation of Trump’s executive orders and ensure that trans prisoners can keep receiving their medical care. The goal is to “preserve the status quo,” Kendrick says, noting that hormone therapy and surgery are prescribed only after significant consultation by prison medical staff and after many layers of review.

The Trump administration has suggested that trans people in federal prisons pose a threat to cisgender women there, and that these new policies are intended to keep women safe. But as Kendrick points out, incarcerated women face a much higher chance of being attacked by male correctional officers than by trans women. An entire federal prison in California recently closed, she notes, after multiple male staffers were found guilty of routinely sexually abusing women in their care. (At least one of attorney Beaty’s trans clients was also abused by staff there.) Trump’s vilification of trans prisoners? “It’s propaganda,” Minter says. “They are the ones who are extremely vulnerable.”

As the litigation continues, incarcerated trans people are living in fear. “I am scared that I will be forcibly detransitioned and taken back to a very bad place, mentally,” Kapule wrote to the court.

“There’s so much harm happening right now to many different groups of people and to trans people generally,” Minter adds, “but there’s something uniquely horrific about the situation of incarcerated transgender people—because they’re trapped.”

2025-03-19 06:03:45

The ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, instituted in mid-January, was always shaky. It could even be argued it never fully existed. Sixteen days ago Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza, prohibiting any food or medical supplies from entering the territory, and cutting off electricity to Gaza’s water desalination plants. At the beginning of March, Israeli negotiators refused to move into the second—more durable—phase of the ceasefire agreement. Three days ago, Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of Palestinians, including a group of journalists. In total, between the ceasefire’s start on January 19th and yesterday, Israeli forces killed at least 170 Palestinians.

Then, the official break: Over the past day, Israeli airstrikes killed over 404 Palestinians and wounded 560, targeting residential areas and reportedly wiping out entire families. Now, it is inarguable. The ceasefire is dead.

The United States was helpful throughout to its partner. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in direct consultation with US President Donald Trump’s administration as he ordered airstrikes, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said. In late February, Trump bypassed a congressional review to authorize $3 billion worth of arms transfers—mostly, 2000-pound bombs—to Israel. (Netanyahu benefitted personally, too; he was excused from a scheduled court hearing for his corruption trial today. And the mass killing has paid other dividends—ultranationalist right-wing minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, in an apparent response to the airstrikes, said today that he will rejoin Netanyahu’s governing coalition.) 

Netanyahu has called the offensive “open-ended,” making it unclear whether this means another ground assault into Gaza, where Palestinians have hardly begun rebuilding from the previous sixteen months of nearly nonstop bombardment. 

“This is only the beginning,” Netanyahu said Tuesday. Future ceasefire talks, he said, will take place “only under fire.”

Trump’s justification for his “full backing” of these airstrikes was that Hamas has not released all of the scheduled Israeli hostages. But many hostage families are decrying the resumption of violence. Bombing the place where their family members are being held hostage puts relatives in danger.

The international condemnations are rolling in, too. United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Volker Türk described this round of bombing as “adding tragedy onto tragedy.” Palestinians themselves want more than condemnations, though. As Palestinian UN ambassador Riyad Mansour told his colleagues Tuesday, “You are the Security Council. Act. Stop this criminal action. Stop them from denying our people food in the month of Ramadan. You have resolutions. Act. You have power. Act.”

Throughout both the bombardment and the ceasefire the only internationals allowed into Gaza have been doctors and aid workers. Two of those doctors called me from Gaza and told me what they saw.

Sabrina Das, an OBGYN from the UK, entered Gaza earlier this month hoping to be part of the rebuilding effort. She was there to train primary healthcare workers in using ultrasound machines for prenatal care. She traveled from south to north Gaza each day to go to the clinic.

The training was “really, really successful,” Das said. “There’s just been this real thirst for knowledge and development, and also, you know, just normalcy.” She was planning to bring handheld ultrasound machines to the north Gaza clinic where she holds the training “within the next couple of days.” 

But, in the middle of the night on March 18th, she woke up to the sound of bombs—and the news that the Netzarim Corridor between north and south Gaza was closed once again. That meant she wouldn’t be able to deliver the ultrasound machines after all. 

“I mean, my brain knew that the ceasefire might or might not hold,” Das said. But her colleagues’ hope to rebuild their lives was infectious. “I’d just gotten so caught up in the optimism all around me.”

She and her colleagues plan to go to Nasser Hospital and serve as extra hands while they can. And for some of those doctors, this all feels familiar. Dr. Tammy Abughnaim, from California, has been to Gaza three times in the past year. 

“I think ceasefire is a very loose term,” Abughnaim said. “Although the frequency of air strikes was minimized, that did not necessarily guarantee our safety.” When she arrived, the infrastructure around her was still demolished—and, two weeks before today’s bombings, Israel stopped letting food into Gaza. “I wouldn’t say we entered Gaza at a time of peace and quiet.” 

“We haven’t had any meat or chicken in Gaza for the last two weeks,” she said. “There’s only so many ways that you can make canned tuna, and they’re utilizing all of them.” 

Nonetheless, Abughnaim said, the day before the bombing was the most normal she had ever felt in Gaza. She had the chance to walk on the beach, and she even planned to take a bus north to visit friends. People sold goods out of pop-up market stalls in front of the hospital complex, and children played in the streets. There was, for once, “a semblance of people returning to life around us.” 

Then they woke up to the bombs. 

“We were up from two to 6 a.m., maybe got a half-hour of sleep, and all I could think was: we’re going to go back to this, and the world is going to continue to not care,” Abughnaim said. “I don’t know why more people aren’t burning shit down over this, I really don’t.” She has tried to talk to her legislators about Gaza, she said, but is met with canned responses that Israel has the right to defend itself.

Meanwhile, she said, she was receiving dispatches from colleagues across the strip. One doctor, at Shifa Hospital, went out on the balcony after a night spent intubating children and counted 50 bodies in the courtyard. 

“I’ve gotten messages from nurses saying, this is the worst night we’ve experienced in a very, very long time,” Abughnaim said. Today, outside the guest house where the foreign physicians are staying, there were no children playing. 

“Americans need to know that the Trump administration has signed off on all of this,” Abughnaim said. “They need to know that Israel has violated the terms of the ceasefire by this unprovoked attack, and they need to know that the ceasefire itself was not, in reality, a ceasefire.  It has been a time of strategic mass starvation for the Palestinian people. I don’t know what kind of ceasefire agreement includes provisions for mass starvation, but it’s not one that any reasonable person would accept.” 

2025-03-19 02:11:24

In what appears to be the first arrests of health care providers for allegedly violating a post-Roe v. Wade state abortion ban, Maria Margarita Rojas, a midwife working in the region around Houston, and her employee, medical assistant Jose Manuel Cendan Ley, were taken into custody by Texas authorities on Monday.

Court records from Waller County, west of Houston, show that law enforcement initially accused Rojas with practicing medicine without a license, but on Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he was adding the illegal performance of an abortion to her indictment—a second-degree felony in Texas, carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Ley is facing the same charges.

The New York Times reports that court documents allege that Rojas “attempted an abortion” on a woman on two occasions in March and was “known by law enforcement to have performed an abortion” on another patient this year. In his press release, Paxton claimed that Rojas ran a network of clinics in towns around Houston that “unlawfully employed unlicensed individuals who falsely presented themselves as licensed medical professionals.” The website for the network, Clinicás Latinoamericanas, advertises urgent care services, treatment for chronic illness, and dietary counseling to a Spanish-language community. Paxton’s office said it had filed for a temporary restraining order to shut down the clinics.

On Tuesday, Paxton announced that a third person associated with the clinics, nurse practitioner Rubildo Labanino Matos, whose license is currently on probation, was arrested on March 8 and charged with conspiracy to practice medicine without a license.

“I will always do everything in my power to protect the unborn, defend our state’s pro-life laws, and work to ensure that unlicensed individuals endangering the lives of women by performing illegal abortions are fully prosecuted,” Paxton said in his statement on Monday. “Texas law protecting life is clear, and we will hold those who violate it accountable.”

Maternal deaths have surged in Texas since it enacted its abortion ban, according to an analysis published last month by ProPublica. Dozens more pregnant and postpartum patients died in Texas hospitals in 2022 and 2023, compared to before the pandemic. Sepsis rates likewise rose more than 50 percent among women who were hospitalized after losing their pregnancies in the second trimester. Experts attribute the increasing danger of being pregnant in Texas to doctors delaying or withholding treatments out of fear of running afoul of the state abortion ban, which only provides a narrow exception to save the life of a patient.

It’s unsurprising then that these charges are coming from Paxton, the three-term state attorney general who survived a 16-count impeachment effort in 2023. Ever since Texas implemented its near-total abortion ban, Paxton, a longtime abortion opponent, has embarked on zealous enforcement efforts of anti-abortion laws, even beyond his state’s borders. Nonetheless, until now in Texas, as in other states that have passed near-total abortion bans, law enforcement has struggled to identify abortion providers to prosecute—much to the frustration of the anti-abortion movement. The Texas legislature is currently considering a bill that would expand Paxton’s power by enabling him to target providers who send abortion pills through the mail. Like a mini “Comstock Act,” the measure focuses on the telehealth practitioners and community activists who, post-Dobbs, have become a critical part of the US abortion access infrastructure by mailing abortion medications into red states.

Instead of directly going after providers, Paxton has found other ways to carry out his anti-abortion crackdown. He sued the city of Austin last fall over its creation of a fund to help pregnant patients travel out of state to get abortions. He’s fighting to overturn 25-year-old HIPAA privacy rules shielding patient data from state investigators as well as recent regulations adding extra protections for abortion patients’ private health information. And, according to the Washington Post, last year Paxton’s office quietly launched an initiative to find cases to prosecute by collecting tips from the male sex partners of women who receive abortions.

“The doctors all across the state are saying that they are afraid that their judgment is going to be second-guessed,” Marc Hearron, interim associate director of US litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told The Cut on Monday. “All of these actions show that Paxton is chomping at the bit to go after anybody who provides an abortion.”

A tip from the male partner of an abortion patient is what reportedly led Paxton, last December, to file a civil lawsuit against Margaret Carpenter, a New York doctor accused of using telehealth to prescribe the abortion medication mifepristone to a Texas patient. Carpenter, who is protected by New York’s shield law for abortion providers, has not appeared in Texas court to defend herself but recently was ordered to pay a $100,000 fine. In late January, a prosecutor in Louisiana followed Paxton’s lead and indicted Carpenter for allegedly prescribing abortion pills to a pregnant teenager. But New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has blocked attempts to extradite her.

The case against Rojas appears to represent the first time a health care provider has been arrested and jailed on charges of providing an illegal abortion. A website for a birthing center linked to Clinicás Latinoamericanas says Rojas was born in Peru, received her Texas midwife certification in 2018, and has attended “over 700 births in community-based and hospital settings.” The birthing center opened the same year Rojas got her license. Its website describes the center as focusing “on providing comprehensive care to pregnant woman and their families…Women here are treated with love and respect, empowering them to fulfilling their desire for a natural childbirth.”

Rojas’ friend and fellow midwife, Holly Shearman, reacted to the charges with shock, the New York Times reported. “They’re saying that she did abortions or something?” Shearman told the Times. “She never ever talked about anything like that, and she’s very Catholic. I just don’t believe the charges.”

According to Bloomberg, Rojas’ bail has been set at $1.4 million, and Ley’s at $700,000.

2025-03-19 00:18:40

On Saturday evening, federal judge James Boasberg unambiguously ordered the Trump administration not to deport any Venezuelans using an extreme wartime presidential power. Boasberg made clear that the order applied even if it meant turning around planes that were already in the air. The Trump administration ignored the order.

Officials kept jets carrying Venezuelans flying towards El Salvador, where right-wing President Nayib Bukele has struck a deal with the US to house the immigrants in an infamous prison. The deportees had their heads shaved upon arrival in a dystopian video that was quickly promoted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House.

Senior Trump officials have left little doubt that they willfully disobeyed. “We are not stopping,” White House border czar Tom Homan said on television on Monday. “I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the Left thinks. We’re coming.” President Donald Trump has now called for Boasberg to be impeached, writing on social media, “This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President.”

Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney representing the Venezuelans suing to prevent their deportation, made the stakes clear on Monday. “I want to choose my words very carefully,” Gelernt told the court. “There’s been a lot of talk over the last few weeks about constitutional crises. I think we’re getting very close to it.”

Boasberg issued his oral order blocking removals at about 6:45 pm Eastern Time on Saturday. “You shall inform your clients of this immediately,” he said. “However that’s accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you.” A written order to the same effect appeared on the court’s docket about forty minutes later.

Flight data analyzed by the Washington Post shows three removal flights taking off from Texas on Saturday, landing in Honduras, and then continuing on to El Salvador. Two of those flights were en route to Honduras at the time of the court order. They then took for El Salvador despite Boasberg’s command that they be turned around. The third flight appears to have taken off in Texas about 50 minutes after Boasberg’s oral order.

The administration alleges that the last flight did not carry any Venezuelans covered by the ACLU’s suit. In a filing on Tuesday, the Trump administration said two of the planes departed before 7:25 pm, and the one that departed after the judge’s written order had only individuals with final orders of removal who were not being “removed solely on the basis of” the proclamation.

At a Monday afternoon hearing before Boasberg about the flights, the Trump administration made an absurd and unconvincing case for why not turning around the flights complied with the court orders. Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli argued that because Boasberg only ordered flights to turn around orally—and not explicitly in writing—the administration was free to keep them flying to El Salvador. “The idea that because my written order was pithier it could be disregarded,” Boasberg replied, “that’s one heck of a stretch.”

Kambli also suggested on Monday that the administration officials felt entitled to ignore Boasbaerg because the first two planes headed to El Salvador were allegedly outside of US territory by the time the judge weighed in. Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck has made clear that it is essentially nonsense to claim that Boasberg lost authority over government-chartered planes as soon as they left US airspace.

Nor does the administration have the legal authority to ignore a federal judge because they think he’s wrong. They must comply with court orders and then file appeals in the hopes of having them overturned. Instead, the administration defied Boasberg. As a senior Trump official told Axios over the weekend, “There was a discussion about how far the judge’s ruling can go under the circumstances and over international waters and, on advice of counsel, we proceeded with deporting these thugs.”

Bosaberg responded on Monday by ordering the government to provide information about the deportation flights or, if the administration refused to do so, to submit an explanation as to why the information could not be provided. The government respond by largely doubling-down on its logic. The Trump administration also said that because their motion to stay the judge’s order is pending, “the Government should not be required to disclose sensitive information bearing on national security and foreign relations until that motion is resolved, especially given that this information is neither material nor time-sensitive.”

Amidst the legal back and forth, it is easy to lose sight of what led the ACLU and Democracy Forward to sue in the first place. The removal flights to El Salvador resulted from the White House quietly invoking the Alien Enemies Act on Friday. The law, which came into force shortly before the now infamous Sedition Act of 1798, had only been invoked three times in US history before: during the War of 1812; World War I; and World War II. The White House has said that 137 Venezuelans have been deported so far under it.

Trump is providing no due process for Venezuelans who are accused of being members of Tren de Aragua. It means that they can be deported without ever having a chance to make their case to a judge. That is particularly disturbing because the administration’s now largely abandoned plan to deport Venezuelans to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base made clear that US officials often appear to be falsely accusing people of being gang members.

The Venezuelans sent to El Salvador in defiance of Boasberg now face a terrifying reality as they are indefinitely held at a mega-prison notorious for human rights abuses, while cut off from lawyers in the United States. Lindsay Toczylowski, the president and CEO of the Los Angeles-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center, told Mother Jones on Monday that her organization is representing a Venezuelan asylum seeker who she believed was in that position after entering the United States last year.

Toczylowski said the client, whose name she is withholding due to fear of potential retaliation, had been detained in the United States last year after being falsely accused by US immigration officials of being a gang member because of tattoos. In reality, she explained that the asylum seeker, who previously worked in the arts, had tattoos “that you really could see on any art student in LA or New York.”

“They’re fairly benign. Clearly not gang tattoos,” Toczylowski continued. “But we never got to the point where we could dispute that fact because our client was supposed to have court on Thursday. And when our attorney went to court, the client was not produced by ICE.”

By the time of the Thursday hearing, Immigrant Defenders’ client had already been moved to Texas. They learned on Friday that he had been moved again but they were unable to determine to where. By Saturday morning, he had disappeared from ICE’s detainee locator system.

“This is someone whose had a lawyer the entire time,” Toczylowski stressed. “It’s truly a terrifying development in deportation [procedures]. It’s essentially, sending someone, we believe, outside of the United States with no due process. With no ability to refute the allegations against them. And in the case of our client, it’s happening to someone that we can definitively say has been wrongly accused of being in a gang.”

Later on Monday, around the same time Boasberg was hearing from the Trump administration, Immigrant Defenders’ and the Venezuelan asylum seeker were supposed to be in immigration court again. This time, his legal team got confirmation from the government: Their client is in El Salvador. They have no way to contact him, or any idea what will happen to his theoretically still pending asylum claim. A man with American lawyers has effectively disappeared into a Salvadoran gulag in defiance of a federal court order.