2026-03-26 03:33:57
This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) will introduce a bill Wednesday that aims to put a national moratorium on data center construction “until legislation is enacted that safeguards the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will introduce a similar bill in the House in the coming weeks.
While it’s highly unlikely that the bill will pass—especially given the Trump administration’s full-throated endorsement of AI, and the massive amount of money the industry is set to spend this year in Washington—the bill marks a new line in the sand for progressives seeking to address both concern around data center construction and the potential harms artificial intelligence may bring.
“A moratorium will give us the chance to figure out how to make sure that AI benefits the working families of this country, not just a handful of billionaires who want more and more wealth and more and more power,” Sanders said in a speech on the Hill Tuesday evening. “A moratorium will give us the time to figure out how to ensure that AI is safe and effective and prevent the worst outcomes. A moratorium will give us the time to figure out how to make sure AI does not harm our environment or jack up the electric bills that we pay.”
Sanders’s bill puts an open-ended moratorium on the construction or upgrading of new and existing data centers used specifically for artificial intelligence—defined in the bill via a series of physical parameters, including energy load above 20 megawatts. The moratorium, the bill states, will end only when laws are enacted that not only prevent data centers from contributing to climate change, harming the environment, and raising electricity bills, but also prevent tech companies from producing products that displace harm the “health and well-being of working families, privacy and civil rights, and the future of humanity.” Tech companies, the bill states, must ensure that wealth generated from AI is “shared with the people of the United States.” (A separate section forbids the export of computing hardware, including semiconductor chips, to any country that does not have similar laws.)
“I don’t think there’s very many people who want to have higher energy bills just so some chatbot can corrupt some 13-year-old kid online.” —Ron DeSantis
The bill name-checks wealthy tech executives, including xAI’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who have both profited greatly from artificial intelligence and sounded alarms at just how quickly the technology could change society.
The urgent push to build out data centers across the US has ignited a wave of opposition over concerns about higher electric bills, water use, energy impacts, and land rights. Recent polling from Pew shows that nearly 40 percent of Americans believe that data centers are bad for the environment and home energy costs, while 30 percent say that they have a negative impact on quality of life for people living nearby.
Public opposition to data centers, and the high energy bills they could cause, has played a role in elections in states like Virginia and Georgia, where data center development has accelerated in recent years. Last year, a report found that $98 billion in data center projects had been stalled or canceled due to community pushback in the second quarter of 2025 alone.
In December, Sanders became the first national politician to call for a moratorium on data centers, days after a coalition of more than 230 progressive groups sent a letter to Congress calling for a national moratorium. The letter claimed that “rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate and water security.”
Dozens of cities and counties across the US have introduced local moratoria on data center development in response to local pushback. At least a dozen state legislatures—in Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—have introduced state-level moratoriums this year.
But Sanders’s bill marks a significant departure from many of these pieces of legislation. The new bill focuses not only on the environmental and community impacts of data centers, but on AI safety as a whole. Since his announcement in December, Sanders has been outspoken about the potential dangers AI poses to society, particularly to workers.
“It makes sense to me that his bill is going to focus primarily on that aspect,” says Mitch Jones, the policy and litigation director at Food and Water Watch, an environmental watchdog group which has advised Sanders’s office on the moratorium. Food and Water Watch also convened the December letter from progressive groups.
Pew’s polling found that Democrats are more likely to view data centers negatively—but it’s not just national progressives raising concerns. Before Sanders voiced his opposition to data centers, some prominent Republican and MAGA politicians, including representative Thomas Massie, senator Josh Hawley, and then-representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, were already vocally questioning the data center buildout. Last month, Hawley and Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal introduced a bill to insulate customers from electricity rate hikes due to data centers. In December, Steve Bannon, one of the most influential anti-AI voices in Washington, hosted a segment on his War Room podcast called “Data Centers Are Devouring Public Land.”
Many of the bills introduced at the state level were sponsored by Democratic politicians. (Food and Water Watch helped craft the New York bill.) Bills in some states, including Oklahoma, were introduced by Republicans; Georgia’s bill had both Democratic and Republican cosponsors.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been especially outspoken on the potential harms from both data centers and artificial intelligence. “I don’t think there’s very many people who want to have higher energy bills just so some chatbot can corrupt some 13-year-old kid online,” DeSantis said at an AI roundtable in February. In December, DeSantis endorsed legislation that would have established a bill of rights to protect consumers from potential harms from AI, including prohibiting minors from interacting with AI chatbots without parental consent, as well as a data center proposal to strip subsidies from tech companies and prohibit data centers from raising electricity bills. The resulting AI bill of rights legislation passed the state Senate, but died in the House.
Both the White House and Big Tech companies have acknowledged that the push to build out data centers suffers from bad public optics. In March, representatives from top data center developers and AI companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google, gathered at the White House to sign a nonbinding agreement intended to make data centers pay “the full cost of their energy and infrastructure” and protect consumers from rate hikes.
“Data centers … they need some PR help,” president Donald Trump said at the event. Experts told WIRED that the agreement signed at the White House was largely symbolic, and that some of the key aims of the agreement—including having data centers absorb any additional costs to customers’ bills—are largely out of both the White House and tech companies’ hands.
“A moratorium would limit internet capacity, slow critical services, eliminate hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs, drain billions in local tax revenue, and raise costs for American families and small businesses,” Cy McNeill, the senior director of federal affairs at the Data Center Coalition, an industry group, told WIRED in an email. The industry, McNeill says, “remains committed to working with communities, local officials, state and federal policymakers, and the Administration to ensure the continued responsible development of this industry while protecting families and businesses.”
2026-03-25 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In January, the Trump administration announced that it had completed its dismantling of yet another Biden-era climate program. This time, the target was the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which Democrats had injected with almost $400 billion to support ambitious new clean energy projects.
The Biden administration pursued climate policy primarily by having Congress pass massive subsidies for solar power, wind energy, and electric vehicles. But much of the infrastructure needed to push the US further away from fossil fuel dependence—like new nuclear power plants, high-voltage transmission lines, and battery factories—needed more than the tax credits at the core of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to get off the ground. The Loan Programs Office was meant to fill that gap by making prudent loans to ambitious projects that the private sector saw as too risky. With its $400 billion windfall, the once-obscure office became the largest energy lender in the world.
That ambition apparently put the office in the crosshairs of Trump’s secretary of energy, Chris Wright. He said the Biden administration “rushed [loans] out the door in the final months after Election Day,” and said he had rooted out projects that “do not serve the best interest of the American people.”
“I think in some ways, it’s to convince Trump that they’re shutting down loans.”
Wright claimed to have scrubbed or “revised” around 80 percent of the Biden administration’s $100 billion loan portfolio, and he teased plans to advance new loans that would support President Donald Trump’s anti-renewable-energy agenda. He even rechristened the office as the “Energy Dominance Financing” program—a reference to Trump’s catchphrase for his fossil-fuel-friendly energy policy.
The truth, however, bears little resemblance to Wright’s combative rhetoric. Former federal officials and sources who have worked with the Loan Programs Office say that the program has survived the Trump-era purge in something close to its Biden-era form—and that it is still supporting the buildout of clean energy. Wright has vastly overstated his revisions and left untouched projects that will support emissions-free energy at the country’s utilities, including major transmission upgrades and nuclear power plants. (The anonymous sources quoted below requested anonymity to avoid retaliation or because they have ongoing work with the federal government; the Department of Energy declined to answer questions or make Wright and other program leaders available for interviews.)
The quiet about-face by the Trump administration may signal a recognition that carbon-free energy can play a major role in managing the electricity price hikes that have angered voters in recent years.
“It sounds like the Trump administration seems to be responding to the energy affordability politics in a way that is, if not constructive, at least acknowledges that steel needs to get in the ground,” said Advait Arun, a policy analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise, a nonprofit that supports government-led economic development. “There are ways to reframe all these projects for their agenda.”
Here’s how the Loan Programs Office typically works: A utility or startup approaches the Department of Energy proposing to build a new power plant, transmission line, or battery factory. Once the applicant is approved, it borrows money from the US Treasury at a lower rate than it could get from private banks, and the Department of Energy guarantees the loan. If the project falls through, the department pays back the Treasury with the money appropriated by Congress.
This program was first established during George W. Bush’s presidency in 2005, to help spur clean energy development. But under Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama, the Loan Programs Office became a magnet for controversy. That’s because the authority lent around $500 million to the solar cell manufacturer Solyndra, which later collapsed, leading the government to lose almost its entire investment. Republicans seized on the episode as evidence of the program’s failure—despite the fact that the loan authority also financed success stories such as Tesla, and its overall loss rate of 3 percent is much lower than that of many private sector lenders.
The controversy was largely a distant memory by 2022, when Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act gave the office almost $400 billion—around 10 times its initial mandate—in guarantee authority to invest in battery startups, new renewables, and grid upgrades to support a clean energy transition.
But the office was slow to deploy its new authority, and former officials later said it suffered from an excess of post-Solyndra caution and bureaucracy. This led to long negotiations and risk analysis around every individual loan. A report from three former Energy Department staffers later found that the “executive branch machinery…defaulted to caution, process, and reactive strategies.”
It took more than a year for the office to develop a fast-track process for major utility loans, and many deals weren’t completed until after Trump’s 2024 win. The projects that Wright claimed were “rushed out the door” had in fact suffered from too much due diligence, in the eyes of many observers, rather than too little.
When Secretary Wright arrived in DC, he jammed up the program even more. The Loan Programs Office had three different leaders in the first six months of the Trump administration, lost more than half its staff to Elon Musk’s workforce reduction efforts, and halted almost all communication with borrowers.
“They’re sending a signal that they’re only going to approve projects that a New York private equity firm would finance.”
“Moving any application through any milestone would require political appointee approval as part of a new consolidation of decision rights, and approvals were not granted,” said Jen Downing, who served as a senior adviser at the Loan Programs Office under the Biden administration and stayed on for the first few months of the Trump administration, in a letter to Congress last summer.
Downing, who left the office last May and is now a partner at a clean tech investing firm, told lawmakers that the new Trump administration leadership spent months examining almost every loan made under Biden, in an apparent search for wrongdoing or poor lending decisions.
Wright did nix a few major loans such as the Grain Belt Express, a wind power transmission line in Missouri opposed by Republican senator Josh Hawley. But former Energy Department staffers said that many of the $30 billion in loans that Wright claimed to have shut down were in fact cancelled by the borrowers themselves, which is typical for risky and complex projects. Many withdrew even before Trump’s election, including a battery recycling plant project that fell apart due to market conditions.
“The number is fake,” said Jigar Shah, who led the Loan Programs Office under Biden. “I think in some ways, it’s to convince Trump that they’re shutting down loans.”
Other Biden-approved projects have survived, like a $1.45 billion loan to a solar panel manufacturer in Georgia called QCells, which has continued without interruption. In the case of a loan for a mine at Nevada’s Thacker Pass, which was supposed to produce lithium for electric vehicle batteries, the department doubled down and took an equity stake in the project, rather than cancelling the loan.
The new leader of the loan office is Greg Beard, a former executive at the private equity firm Apollo who also ran a crypto mining company. Thus far, Beard has only advanced projects that began under Biden. That includes the office’s most recent announcement of a massive $26.5 billion loan to Southern Company, the regional utility that serves Georgia and Alabama. The loan will fund upgrades at the utility’s new nuclear power plant in Georgia, new long-duration batteries that can store solar power, and upgrades to 1,300 miles of transmission lines.
That said, the final version of the loan also substitutes 5 gigawatts of new gas power in place of a solar project that was included under the Biden-era version of the deal, according to former Loan Programs Office officials. But this change isn’t as big a deal as it might sound; the utility was always planning to build both solar and natural gas as part of its response to surging power demand, and it will still build both. The only thing that changed between administrations is which power plants will receive low-cost federal financing. The Trump administration’s three other announced loans are also holdovers from Biden. They have little to do with fossil energy, despite Trump’s repeated promises to revive coal and oil. They include a new transmission line and the restart of another nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.
The last date that the office can make loans is September 30, 2028.
“I do think that it’s in many ways a branding exercise,” said another former Department of Energy official who worked in the loan division.
Beard has said he wants to use the office to “make energy more affordable,” “win AI,” “bolster the grid,” and “get us out from under the China strategy to dominate certain critical minerals.” But it’s unclear how much appetite utilities have for the reconfigured program. The Energy Department has held roadshow meetings with data center developers, courting hyperscalers such as Meta with the promise that they will build nuclear power for data centers on federal land. Beard told CNBC that he has a pipeline of around 80 projects waiting to move forward, but that’s less than half of the 191 projects that were in the pipeline in December of 2024, as Biden prepared to leave office.
Shah said that was in part due to the fact that Beard has applied similar standards to those he maintained in his private sector job at Apollo. Beard has suggested he wants all applicants to provide corporate guarantees for their debt, which makes it hard for many projects to qualify.
“Not only are they sending the signal that they’re canceling loans, but then the other side, they’re sending a signal that they’re only going to approve projects that a New York private equity firm would finance,” said Shah. Sources familiar with the program said that the office has already received at least one major new loan application, which is related to nuclear energy, but it’s still in the early stages. The loan office is also trying to coordinate multiple utilities to purchase nuclear reactor parts in bulk.
Thanks to a change in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the major tax law signed by President Trump last summer, the program can now directly support fossil generation such as natural gas. This federal loan support was illegal under the Biden administration, when projects had to reduce greenhouse gases. But it’s far from clear that Wright and Beard could succeed in repurposing the loan program for pure fossil fuel finance, if that’s their goal. Interest in new coal plants is almost nonexistent, and there is plenty of other capital available for new natural gas generation, including from data center developers themselves. A more likely outcome is that the revamped office will continue to support a handful of deals for “clean firm” energy projects that Trump and Wright find appealing, like nuclear, as well as critical minerals production.
Spokespeople for the Department of Energy and the Energy Dominance Financing office, as the loan program has been renamed, declined to answer questions or make Beard available for an interview.
Experts say that even if the deal flow in the office slows down, there’s still a silver lining for the energy transition. More important than the exact shape of the new loans is the fact that Congress did not slash the program altogether, as it did with other Inflation Reduction Act programs such as the electric-vehicle tax credits and the Environmental Protection Agency’s “green bank.” Still, the long-term future of the program is uncertain. When Republicans in Congress modified the loan office with Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, they also added an expiration date. Unless lawmakers choose to renew the program, the last date that the office can make loans is September 30, 2028.
Even so, the fact that two presidents with opposite views on climate policy have both made use of the program may bode well for its survival.
“I still think that the program is an important tool,” said a consultant in the energy field who has interacted with the loan office. “The technology areas that the current administration is prioritizing, all of those sort of squarely fit into the boundaries or the authorities that exist.”
2026-03-25 19:00:00
In January, after ICE detained 5-year-old Liam Ramos—with his blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack—and his father near Minneapolis, the two were sent to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the nation’s only detention center for families. Located on a flat, desolate stretch of land about an hour south of San Antonio, Dilley is a sprawling collection of trailers run by the private prison company CoreCivic. The facility held as many as 1,400 people, including young children, teenagers, and their parents, earlier this year.
About a week into the Ramoses’ stay at Dilley, Liam’s mother told reporters that he was vomiting, had a fever, and no longer wanted to eat. His increasingly dire situation immediately sparked public outrage, prompting protests and congressional visits. Soon, reporting by ProPublica, the Associated Press, and others reintroduced Americans to the poor conditions and substandard care that have long plagued the facility, which was closed by the Biden administration in 2024 but reopened last spring as part of the Trump White House’s $45 billion immigration detention expansion.
Stories about life inside Dilley are hard to come by. Journalists are not allowed inside, and until earlier this month, lawmakers were barred from conducting oversight visits unless they submitted an application a week in advance. The facility has reportedly clamped down on detainees’ access to the outside world, even confiscating art supplies; some detainees have lost access to Gmail. (The Department of Homeland Security and CoreCivic have denied these restrictions.)
Despite these challenges, there is another way to learn about the conditions at Dilley: sworn oral declarations given by dozens of detained children and their parents to legal aid groups.
The facility has reportedly clamped down on detainees’ access to the outside world, even confiscating art supplies; some detainees have lost access to Gmail.
Some of the declarations were exhibits in ongoing litigation; others were collected by RAICES, a nonprofit organization that provides legal services to families detained at Dilley, simply to provide a record. Taken together, they paint a bleak picture of life at the facility: stomach-turning food and water, a dangerous lack of medical and mental health care, impossible sleeping conditions, and intimidating treatment by guards. While the number of people held at Dilley dropped dramatically this month and educational options have improved, advocates say the abysmal conditions persist.
DHS and CoreCivic, meanwhile, have consistently refuted these claims. In late February, both groups published websites dedicated to Dilley, describing the detention center as a safe, family-friendly place where detainees have access to high-quality medical care, educational opportunities, toys, books, outdoor activities, and food for special diets and allergy needs. In a statement to Mother Jones, DHS added that drinking water is clean and baby formula is provided for free.
We went through hundreds of pages of the detainee declarations, which were made between June 2025 and February of this year, and pulled out some of the most telling excerpts. Many were translated into English by sworn interpreters.
“The reality is when we look back on this, these are the primary sources,” says Faisal Al-Juburi, co-CEO of RAICES. “These are the people who’ve been impacted by some of the cruelest aspects of this administration.”
You can’t drink the water here. The smell is bad, and it hurts our stomachs a lot. We have to buy it at the commissary if we have money. In the dining area, there is milk and juice, but there isn’t water. The guards say: “This is all that there is. If you don’t like it, buy it at the store.”
—26-year-old mother of 5-year-old girl, on their 30th day at Dilley
They say the water is drinkable, but it’s not. We are all without drinking water. It has a fake smell, like perfume or lotion. Maybe it’s chlorine, I don’t know. If you drink it, your stomach hurts so badly. More than anything, I worry for the kids. If you don’t have money, you can’t buy bottled water from the store. Then you just don’t drink water.
—26-year-old mother of 8-year-old girl, on their 17th day at Dilley
The main complaint I have here is the water. Every time I want a bottle of water for my baby’s formula, the guards tell me I have to go to medical. I have to get a piece of paper that says my baby needs a bottle of water.
—27-year-old mother of 6-month-old girl, on their 12th day at Dilley
Some staff will give me bottled water for my daughter’s formula and some will not. My daughter drinks about six bottles per day. This morning, I was asking staff for bottled water for the baby’s formula. The guard said I should use water from the faucet. The doctor was nearby, so I asked the doctor and she told the guard to give me the bottled water. But instead of giving me the entire bottle of water so that I could also use it for another bottle later, the guard poured the water into the baby’s bottle and kept the rest of the water bottle.
—25-year-old mother of 1- and 2-year-old girls, on their 31st day at Dilley
My younger son does not eat the food here; he is hungry all the time. He will only accept breast milk and it is not enough for him. He is growing. He is 2 and a half, and he needs to eat. I often worry that I will stop being able to produce breast milk for him. I hardly sleep and I am anxious all the time; I don’t know what we would do. My toddler is losing weight very quickly.
—Mother of 2- and 7-year-old boys, on their 36th day at Dilley
My brother doesn’t eat anymore, so he needed PediaSure. My parents had to almost beg the medical staff to give him PediaSure. He doesn’t like the food served here, and neither do I.
—14-year-old girl detained with 7-year-old brother and parents, on their 54th day at Dilley
We were given wormy food, and when someone spoke out about it and said that the children should get better food, he was taken in the middle of the night and threatened that he and his family would be separated. Officers told him that he would go to an adult detention center and his children would go to foster care.
—Father of 4-year-old boy, 11-year-old girl, and 13-year-old boy, on their 45th day at Dilley
Sometimes there are strange things in the food, and it seems like strange parts of an animal that shouldn’t be in the food. But many children do not eat the food here. It worries me when there are so many small children who are just not eating.
—42-year-old mother of 14-year-old boy, during their third week at Dilley
I have been served raw meat at Dilley. I noticed this when I was cutting into it. Another person was served raw meat, but you didn’t have to cut into it to see how raw it was. Another person said they found worms in their beans. I stopped eating the beans since then. One woman became so sick from eating the food that she began vomiting blood. Another woman had to take antibiotics for an infection she got from the food being served to us here at Dilley.
—49-year-old mother, on her 63rd day at Dilley
The lights are on all night here. My son cries all night almost every night because it is so hard for him to sleep with the lights on. This has been going on for two months straight. I tried to hang a towel up to hide the light from my son, but the supervisors immediately tore it down and threw it away. They said I couldn’t do that.
—22-year-old mother of 2-year-old boy, on their 52nd day at Dilley
Our room now has 12 people in it. It’s totally packed. We talked to the therapist and guards about moving rooms, and they said we can’t move. It’s very uncomfortable. We can’t sleep. The TV is on high volume all the time.
—14-year-old child with mother, on their 41st day at Dilley
We’ve tried to find a manual and have asked why adults and children have to sleep with the lights on. They keep the temperature very low, and adults and children are constantly sick and are unable to get better…Sometimes the officers will turn on their walkie-talkies near the children’s rooms at 2 or 3 in the morning. Sometimes they’ll walk into the room and talk loudly on their walkie-talkies for no reason.
—Father of 4-year-old boy, 11-year-old girl, and 13-year-old boy, on their 45th day at Dilley
It is impossible to get good rest here. The guards check on you every 20 minutes. One guard in particular comes into our room every 20 minutes and says exactly the same sentence. He wakes us up—it doesn’t matter if my children are sleeping or I am sleeping. He comes in and says: “Hi, my name is ___. If you need anything, contact me. I am checking that everything is okay with you.” Every 20 minutes. Now it just feels like a mockery and he is just coming in to make it impossible for us to get any rest.
—33-year-old mother of 8- and 10-year-old boys, on their 24th day at Dilley
At about 6 in the morning, they start yelling your name for count, and that wakes us up as well. Some guards seem to not have patience with the children. Being in this place, I feel like a bad mother for having them in these conditions. I always ask my children for forgiveness for making them suffer through all of this.
—Mother of 2-year-old boy and 12-year-old girl, on their 90th day at Dilley
After being at Dilley, [my 13-year-old son] Carlos became anxious. He couldn’t sleep—he began to suffer from nightmares and insomnia. He was waking up five times during the night, yelling for me every night. Carlos also began to pee himself in bed. Carlos has been wetting the bed at night for the last 12 days…[The psychiatrist] prescribed pills for Carlos. I do not know the name of the pills. They are to relax him and help him sleep better. But these pills are affecting him a lot because now he sleeps all day. Today, for example, I had to wake him up to bring him for this meeting, and it was already late morning. Before he started taking the pills, Carlos woke up at a normal time in the morning. Since [the psychiatrist] gave him this prescription, he sleeps until 11 unless I wake him up. Even the caregivers come to give papers or meds and he is sleeping. One time, the caregivers found him asleep on the floor. They thought he was hiding, but he was sleeping. I often have to wake him up so he can go have lunch…I just want my son to be okay. I don’t want him to be overmedicated or to be suffering from insomnia. I want him to be a normal child.
—31-year-old mother of 3-year-old girl and 13-year-old boy, on their 19th day at Dilley
My kids are terrified; we are all depressed, staying here just waiting for our fate. My older son is suffering so much. He is only 7 years old. He is sensitive, but since being detained, he cries constantly, he is volatile and emotional. We were so worried for him that we took him to the psychiatrist here, who prescribed antidepressants and antipsychotics. I think a kid of his age should not be taking this type of medication. But since the doctor told us it could help, he has been taking it, but it hasn’t helped. He is still so unable to regulate his emotions that the psychiatrist increased his dosage. He keeps telling us he just wants to get out of here.
—Mother of 2- and 7-year-old boys, on their 36th day at Dilley
There was another mother who was having such a hard time. She went to get help from the medical staff, and they gave her a pill to take in the morning and in the night. It just put her to sleep. She slept day and night, and her 3-year-old and 6-year-old just stayed in their bedroom all day and night. They couldn’t go by themselves to get food in the cafeteria, so they just took the snacks from the fridge with snacks and juice to eat for days. The kids didn’t bathe or leave the room because they had to be in the room with her, and she was practically drugged and sleeping from the medicine they gave her to take. I was able to help her a little bit and tell her she had to keep going for her kids and that she should do everything possible to stay awake—take a cold shower, anything. I said if the medicine is making things worse for you, if it makes you feel dead, you should stop taking it. She started to get a little better and then finally was able to stay awake and started taking care of her kids. She gave me a big hug and she said thank you for helping me. But the medical services did not help her and instead made things terrible for her and her children. And none of the staff helped with her children during that time either. But anyone could see what was going on.
—42-year-old mother of a 14-year-old boy, during their third week at Dilley
There are moments where my daughter and I are having a normal conversation and she gets quiet and just says: “Mom, when will we leave? When are we getting out? How many more days?” I’ve noticed a change in her attitude and personality, mostly because she is so tired all the time. She can’t rest properly. She doesn’t cry, she is just quiet and thinking. She is withdrawn. She is on and off with the other kids. Sometimes there is interest from her to play with them, but then she just wants to sit alone for a long time.
—26-year-old mother of 8-year-old girl, on their 13th day at Dilley
There was recently a measles outbreak at the detention center where we were “quarantined” for about 20 days. They did nothing to help reduce the spread of this. We were not even given masks to help prevent us from getting sick. We were also not put in isolation; it was business as normal. The only thing they did in those 20 days was check some people’s temperature using the same thermometer without even cleaning it before putting it on others’ faces directly. It almost felt like they were intentionally trying to infect us.
—Mother of 16-year-old boy, on their 47th day at Dilley
While here, a staff member was mopping and accidentally hit [my 6-year-old daughter] with the end of the mop in the cheek and eye. A little bit of blood left her eye. We went to medical. We saw the receptionist wrote on the intake papers that she “fell while playing.” I told her that isn’t true, she got hit by a staff worker here who was mopping. The person mopping did it by accident; it was not intentional. I didn’t want him to get in trouble, but I do want staff to be more careful, especially when working around little kids. The injury happened on a Sunday, but there is not a pediatrician here on Sundays. Medical said we’ll call you on Monday, the next day, when the pediatrician is here. No one called us Monday. They called us Tuesday. They said her eye is fine, but my daughter still says it bothers her sometimes. We are worried she will have long-term eye issues. The other day, she spilled a drink on herself and when we asked what happened, she said my eye isn’t working, I couldn’t see it. She sometimes she tells us that it itches, hurts, or causes her vision to be blurry.
—30-year-old mother of 6-year-old girl, on their 23rd day at Dilley
My 4-year-old son…hit his head and developed a black eye while in custody. He also began experiencing symptoms including vomiting and dizziness, but he had not received any medical scans or diagnostic tests regarding his head injury. I am very concerned that he may have suffered a head concussion and his condition has not been adequately addressed.
—Father of 3-, 4-, and 6-year-old children, on their 20th day at Dilley
My daughter has inflammation in her heart, something called acute pericarditis…I told them about this condition when we first got here. But the medical staff did nothing. When I take her to the medical area because she is in pain, they do not attend to her. We have been consistently denied medical attention for her condition. We got tired of going and being rejected, so I just give her Tylenol to help ease her pain, since it helps. Her pain is persistent. When she feels anxiety and when she sees that we are still here while other people are leaving, her condition acts up. She has fainted about three times, and the officers come and take her to the clinic…I am scared that something grave will happen to her here. There are moments when she gets worse and I am scared she will faint and be unconscious. I am scared for her life.
—Mother of 2-year-old boy and 12-year-old girl, on their 90th day at Dilley
I go every day to school. It’s just the basics: addition and subtraction. I feel like I am losing my education here. I was in ninth grade before I came here. If I had to go back to my country now, I’d have to repeat the grade because of all the school I’ve lost.
—14-year-old child with mother, on their 41st day at Dilley
I don’t want to go to the school at this place anymore because the teacher told me that every month, they start repeating the work from the previous month, since new kids are coming. So if it just repeats, I don’t get to learn anything new.
—11-year-old child, on their 53rd day at Dilley
There is not a school here. There is a place for the children to go for an hour where the teachers seem to be trained to get information out of them about their immigration cases rather than teach them. One of my daughter’s friends told her that the homework was to write a story about why she was scared to go back to her country. That is not healthy for my daughter or any of the kids to write about. The questions about immigration they ask the kids during class are not proper. What does ICE have to do with math?
—31-year-old mother of 9-year-old girl, on their 46th day at Dilley
My son went to the classroom at the beginning, but every time he would go, the teachers would ask him about his case. It was just additional stress for him, so he stopped going about a month ago. He was not learning anything anyway. Children should have a daily class to at least be learning English. That class was basically just addition, subtraction, and coloring.
—32-year-old mother of 14-year-old boy, on their 56th day at Dilley
I have been living in Florida and Texas for 10 years. I was just starting my junior year. Things were going great in school. I had made new friends, and I was doing really well…I don’t go to the classroom here; it’s not anything like my high school or the education I had before. It is just one hour a day, and I don’t know what they would teach high school students who have been going to school in the US. If I was at my high school, I would be learning statistics, American history, astronomy, English, AP Spanish, and entrepreneurship.
—16-year-old child with mother, on their 22nd day at Dilley
There was a protest because there were families that had been here a long time and their cases were not being solved. They did not know what was happening, so the conditions got bad, people got upset, and all the kids were sick. Leading up to it, there was a sickness going around making people vomit and have diarrhea, so it was bad seeing all the kids in these conditions. After all of that, we all demanded that we wanted liberty and better treatment…We have not committed crimes nor infractions; we did not want to be treated like criminals. The guards, I would say close to 100, during this time threatened us, saying they would bring charges against us, that they could see who was involved by checking the cameras. It was a lot of verbal abuse and the consequences we would face for our actions.
—Father of 4-year-old girl, at Dilley for at least six weeks
Yesterday, the staff and officers suddenly started cleaning everything up. There were a lot of staff and officers sitting around and we didn’t know why. And then all of a sudden, they got up and they started playing with kids and organizing games. It was so strange. It’s not usually like that. I think it may have been because you, the Flores lawyers, all were here. It’s usually a disaster. Things are messy, the bathrooms are not very clean. There are balls, but children can only play with them in certain spaces, like in the gym, but not outside. Yesterday, things were very different. Normally, it takes a long time to get something if you request it, like if you need a new shirt or something. But yesterday, we got many of the things we had been asking for for days.
—42-year-old mother of 14-year-old boy, during their third week at Dilley
The staff intimidate us. For example, staff will say that if ICE comes and sees our room is messy, they are going to make us cry. Other staff have discouraged us from submitting grievances, saying those people “come out last.” Another staff told a resident that if she didn’t stop letting other residents use her email, they would take away her daughter.
—31-year-old mother of 9-year-old girl, on their 46th day at Dilley
We are scared to ask for anything, because the officers start threatening us that they’ll put us in different detention centers and put our children in foster care…It feels like we were in fascist Germany, and it feels like they are going to put gas into the room and just let us die.
—Father of 4-year-old boy, 11-year-old girl, and 13-year-old boy, on their 45th day at Dilley
2026-03-25 18:01:00
Back in November, two National Guard members were shot just blocks from the White House. One was killed. The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan national who came to the US through a Biden-era humanitarian parole program and had applied for a special immigrant visa, which allows Afghans who worked with the US military to obtain a green card. In the shooting’s aftermath, President Donald Trump halted the visa program and called for a review of all Afghans who have come to the US.
Dozens of American organizations have formed in the past decade to help Afghans with the complicated visa application and resettlement process. Jeff Holder is a pastor with one of them, an organization called Tarjoman Relief made up of military and civilian volunteers.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.“I had families that were so very close to getting their visa and being put on a plane when the new administration came in and everything stopped,” Holder says. “I know some of what we’re hearing in the news and from this present administration is: ‘They need to go back. They need to pack up. We didn’t ask them to come.’ But we did promise. We made a promise.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Holder talks with host Al Letson about the Afghan allies now in limbo, the extensive vetting process they undergo to come to the US, and what he sees as lies about America’s Afghan communities being told by people in power.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
2026-03-25 05:19:45
Editor’s note: O’Rourke ended her candidacy on March 23.
On an unseasonably hot October day, a small crowd gathered at Genesis Farm, a 226-acre nonprofit in Blairstown, New Jersey, to help pull up beets before winter set in. It was the farm’s annual harvest festival and for Megan O’Rourke, a former federal climate scientist running for Congress, a natural campaign stop.
O’Rourke, after all, knows her way around a farm: At 46, she’s spent more than half of her life studying, teaching, researching, or otherwise advocating for sustainable agriculture, most recently at a small agency within the Department of Agriculture that supports food and farming research. Or at least it did. After President Donald Trump took office in 2025, taking aim at climate research and unleashing doge, the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture was forced to freeze its funding and suspend accepting new grant applications. She quit NIFA in July and launched her campaign, in part to resist the policies that drove her from government.
At Genesis Farm, seven or eight festivalgoers gathered around O’Rourke. She’d dressed appropriately for the setting, in cuffed black jeans, hiking boots, and a salmon-colored Oxford shirt. Most of the group didn’t seem to know who she was. “You’re running for…” said one attendee, his voice trailing off. “Congress,” she answered warmly, brandishing a business card.
She hopes to unseat Republican Tom Kean Jr., O’Rourke explained, the second-term congressman who she says “inherited” the seat from his ex-governor father. “I emphasize Junior,” she said. She leaned into her wide-ranging résumé, which includes a tenured professorship at Virginia Tech, a congressional fellowship, and eight years as a civil servant. “So this would be your first public office?” a guy wearing a Smithsonian cap asked. “Yeah,” she said, adding with a laugh, “Start big.”
There’s no doubt her race has big stakes. While the district narrowly went for Trump in 2024, with control of the House up for grabs, Kean is considered to be among the country’s most vulnerable Republicans, and there’s no shortage of Democrats gunning for him. As of March, at least eight had joined the contest, including a former Navy pilot, a marketing entrepreneur, an icu doctor, and a Biden-era Small Business Administration leader, who will first face each other in June. “It’s a bit of a crowded primary,” O’Rourke told the group.
O’Rourke says science—hustling for grants, spreading ideas—is not all that different from campaigning.
However things go, O’Rourke’s candidacy reflects a shift in how scientists are pushing back against Trump. Since he returned to the White House, researchers—traditionally a politics-averse group—have organized “Stand Up for Science” protests, published letters of dissent from within agencies, rescued datasets erased by the administration, and carried on research that would have been abandoned. If elected, O’Rourke would be among the first women in Congress with a scientific PhD, but she is hardly the only scientist running in 2026. In December, 314 Action, a fund that backs Democratic candidates with science backgrounds, announced it was already working with nearly 100 campaigns—more than double what it says is typical.
This shift, O’Rourke believes, is in part a response to Trump’s “assault” on science, which caused “a shock to the system.” “I think it took us a little while, including me, to even start thinking about becoming an activist, because we haven’t had to,” she says, adding that scientists are now figuring out “what should we do and how do we get organized?”
Growing up, O’Rourke was fascinated by food and where it came from. As the “poor kid” in class, she and her family relied on their church’s food pantry. Her father’s mental health issues and her mom’s long hours meant she and her three siblings typically had to fend for themselves, eating things like dry oatmeal, bread slices rolled up into a ball, or hot chocolate mix poured into a glass of milk. “It wasn’t that we went hungry, per se,” she tells me, “but nobody was feeding us.” She also loved the outdoors. Nearby her childhood house in Blairstown, in a forested wilderness now held by the Nature Conservancy that her family nicknamed “Dinosaur Mountain,” O’Rourke and her brother skipped rocks, fished, and picked berries to supplement their lunches.
Agriculture blended her interests in food and the natural world. As a master’s student in sustainable agriculture at Iowa State University, adviser Ricardo Salvador recalls, O’Rourke was a quiet, steady presence. “Whenever she did engage,” he says, “you could tell that she had been observing, that she had been thinking, asking questions.” She went on to earn a PhD in agricultural ecology from Cornell University, researching insect pest population dynamics on nearby farms while running a small fruit and vegetable farm and raising three children with her husband, Aaron Rust, whom she met as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University. After working as a climate change adviser at the usda’s Foreign Agricultural Service and an environment adviser at the now-dismantled US Agency for International Development, she landed a job at NIFA at the tail end of Trump’s first term. There, she oversaw the allocation of more than $170 million in agriculture research funds related to climate science.
After Inauguration Day in 2025, things turned south. She’d worked under three administrations, but Trump 2.0 and its executive orders targeting climate science were “just so beyond what I’d experienced,” O’Rourke says. At NIFA, she recalls, DOGE and other Trump-friendly bureaucrats hunted out work they deemed counter to the administration’s priorities. The agency’s animal reproduction portfolio was flagged, O’Rourke suspects, over the word “reproduction” and its possible proximity to sex and abortion. Her publications on climate change were deleted from the usda’s website, and her projects funded by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act were terminated. At one point, with so much canceled, including all meetings related to the National Climate Assessment, Rust recalls O’Rourke looked at her calendar and found it empty. O’Rourke had read that her congressional district in the state’s northwestern reaches, New Jersey’s 7th, was among those Democrats hoped to flip. Considering a run, she did what any academic would do: study. She took trainings from the Democratic National Committee and Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. And she resigned from NIFA.
Her calendar is no longer empty. The day I visited the harvest festival, she’d had at least two other events, including a local Democrats meeting. (To save time, she keeps a hairbrush and granola bars in her Prius.) “I work harder at this than I have ever probably worked at anything,” she says, “and I’ll compare that to getting my PhD with three little kids [while] running a farm.” She’s earned key endorsements from science-minded Democrats like Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree, an organic farmer, and former New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt, a plasma physicist. In February, more than 200 scientists across the country publicly announced their support. But so far, that hasn’t led to a windfall in financial support. While she reportedly raised $175,000 on her first day as a candidate, by March, O’Rourke had brought that to only $459,000—significantly less than her better-heeled primary opponents.
In biology, there’s a concept of an ecological niche—how organisms precisely fit into their environment. If the same idea applies in politics, O’Rourke occupies a distinct niche in the Democratic Party: She’s an active member of her Mormon church, a mother, and—as she’d say herself—more of a listener than a talker. When I asked her about political role models, she mentioned Washington state Blue Dog Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (a “rural Democrat,” “working-class,” and “willing to reach out across the aisle,” O’Rourke says), as well as New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury (who also earned a Cornell graduate degree) and New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim (like her, “dorky”)—two lawmakers who’ve been members of the party’s progressive caucus.
If she feels out of place as a scientist in politics, she doesn’t show it. Back at Genesis Farm, she got into the weeds with a farmer on cover crops and seed phenotypes while admiring two species of bees buzz through sunflowers. “I heard you talking about pollinator conservation,” an attendee wearing a flannel and no undershirt said to O’Rourke, asking if there were anything the government could do to encourage pollinator-friendly gardening. On the way out, they posed for a photo.
O’Rourke says doing science—hustling for grants, running a lab, and spreading ideas—is not all that different from campaigning. And, she suggests, more scientists should join her. “I never really wanted to be a politician,” she told me toward the end of my visit. “This is not what I thought I would do with my life.” But “now is the time that our country needs people to step up.”
2026-03-25 04:22:43
On Monday, a federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return to the United States of a Sacramento mother who was detained at her February green card interview and deported to Mexico within 24 hours. Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez had active protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which temporarily shields undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, at the time of her arrest and removal.
In a 15-page decision granting Estrada Juarez’s motion for a temporary restraining order, Judge Dena Coggins ruled that she must be returned to the US within seven days of the court order. Estrada Juarez, the judge wrote, “was removed in flagrant violation of the regulatory protections afforded to her under DACA” and the Constitution’s Due Process Clause. The judge determined that she should have the protections afforded by DACA restored “as if her February 19, 2026, removal never occurred.”
Estrada Juarez’s ordeal began in February, when she attended an appointment as part of her adjustment of status process to become a lawful permanent resident as the relative of a US citizen, her daughter Damaris Bello. Having lived in the United States for almost 30 years, and with her DACA status valid through at least April 2026 pending renewal, Estrada Juarez didn’t think she had reason to fear being detained. Still, at the interview, Estrada Juarez was told her case couldn’t be completed because she had a decades-old order of removal from when she first entered the country in 1998. The government then reinstated that order, which Estrada Juarez didn’t know about, to deport her.
In early March, I spoke with Bello, who accompanied her mother to last month’s scheduled interview. She described what happened that day:
Bello recalled that after a brief period of time, someone knocked on the interview room’s door and asked for Maria Estrada. When she answered, Bello said agents without uniform or name identification came in and said she was going to be detained and deported to Mexico. Before the officers could handcuff her, Estrada Juarez asked if she could hug her daughter one last time. She held Bello’s face and told her to be strong, that God would guide them to the right place.
“It was so sudden and unexpected,” Bello said. “It felt like she never really had a chance.”
By the next morning, Estrada Juarez had been sent to Mexico, a country she hadn’t lived in since she was 15 years old. The separation proved devastating for Estrada Juarez and Bello, an only child. After Estrada Juarez’s sudden deportation, Bello said she would likely have to move out of their shared home because she couldn’t afford rent or utility bills without her mother’s income from her job as a Motel 6 regional manager. “My whole life has to change because she’s not here,” Bello told me. “I feel like I’m grieving my mother.”
On March 10, Estrada Juarez filed a petition in the district court for the Eastern District of California, arguing that her removal was unlawful and violated her due process rights. Estrada Juarez has continuously held DACA status since 2013. In 2014, the government authorized her to leave the country for a short trip, and she was lawfully admitted when she returned. The petition claims Estrada Juarez never received a copy of the 1998 reinstated expedited removal order or notice of the reason for her February deportation. Instead, it says she was handed a document stating she was barred from coming back to the United States because an immigration judge had ordered her removed, even though she didn’t appear before one. Records show Estrada Juarez refused to sign the form.
“They’ve reinstated something that doesn’t exist. The whole thing has fallen apart.”
Still, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) denied her adjustment of status application on the basis of that decades-old removal order. But Estrada Juarez’s lawyer, Stacy Tolchin, said the 1998 order, which the government submitted as part of the record in the case, wasn’t signed by a supervising officer and can’t be considered final. “They’ve reinstated something that doesn’t exist,” Tolchin said on Tuesday. “The whole thing has fallen apart.” Even if the order was valid, she explained, Estrada Juarez’s DACA status should have prevented it from being enforced. (Tolchin has asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to review the order of reinstatement of removal and filed a motion to reopen and reconsider the green card denial with USCIS.)
The government opposed Estrada Juarez’s petition, arguing the court lacked the authority to review “discretionary decisions” to execute a removal order and mandate her return. The administration also contended that the court didn’t have jurisdiction over her habeas claims because Estrada Juarez had already been removed and was no longer “in custody.” Judge Coggins disagreed, citing Ninth Circuit precedent allowing a noncitizen unlawfully deported from the United States “under extreme circumstances” to seek their return, despite not being detained in the district where they are challenging their removal. “Indeed, it is difficult to argue that Petitioner’s removal constitutes anything less than an ‘extreme circumstance,'” the judge wrote.
She further rejected the government’s position that Estrada Juarez didn’t meet the “extreme circumstances” standard because she hadn’t, within the less than 24 hours between her detention and deportation, rushed to court to secure an emergency order stopping her removal. “Essentially, Respondents argue that the government is immune from liability from any claim for violation of a noncitizen’s right to due process in removal proceedings so long as that right is violated quickly,” the decision reads.
Judge Coggins recognized that “each day Petitioner remains unlawfully separated from her daughter, they both suffer unimaginable irreparable harm.” In a declaration submitted to the court, Estrada Juarez and Bello described the “severe emotional trauma and financial hardship” they have experienced, adding that her “wrongful deportation has deeply broken [her] family.” Bello wrote in her own declaration that her mother’s removal “has left [her] feeling completely alone and afraid.”
To Tolchin, this case shows why the courts and due process are important. “We’re seeing [the Department of Homeland Security] trying to hide due process and people’s constitutional rights from them,” she said. In a statement, Estrada Juarez expressed relief and hope of coming back to the United States soon: “I followed the rules and trusted the process, and I just want to return to my family and rebuild my life.”
