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2026-04-10 01:02:27

Sam Altman wants you to know that he’s just fine. Sure, his company, OpenAI, is reportedly building technology that it fears and some of his former colleagues think he’s a pathological liar, but really? It’s no big deal.

The company’s upcoming model is being finalized and only being given to select group of companies, according to a Thursday Axios report. 

This news comes just after the company released policy recommendations on Monday in a 13-page document titled “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First.” Their “ambitious ideas” claim to add guardrails and safety nets as AI evolves toward a “superintelligence” capable of “outperforming the smartest humans even when they are assisted by AI.”

One terrifying proposal: policymakers should reimagine taxes as AI reduces the need for companies to employ as many workers. OpenAI says the trend could expand corporate profits and capital gains while “erod[ing] the tax base that funds core programs like Social Security, Medicaid, SNAP, and housing assistance.” To ameliorate the potential problem, there could be higher taxes on those capital gains and corporate profits.” 

(Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI has denied the allegations.)

And another: create a “Public Wealth Fund” that gives “every citizen—including those not invested in financial markets—with a stake in AI-driven economic growth.” 

The week started with a New Yorker investigation that might be the most thorough look yet at Altman and why so many people worry about him being at the helm of such powerful technology.

Reporters Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spoke to more than 100 people, most of whom described Altman as someone with an unrelenting drive for more power. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person,” an OpenAI board member told the pair. “The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.” 

Sue Yoon, a former board member, said that Altman wasn’t a typical “Machiavellian villain,” but instead someone who could convince himself of the ever-fluctuating landscapes he portrayed in his sales pitches.

Combining OpenAI’s policy proposals with the New Yorker investigation reveals a familiar story where an authoritarian Silicon Valley leader becomes synonymous with their technology as their personal whims have significant influence on where the industry—and regulation on it—goes next. And regular people are the ones who deal with the consequences. 

The policy recommendations feel like a desperate PR move in light of OpenAI’s limited release of its new model. AI companies know that a lot of people hate their technology.

As my colleagues Anna Merlan and Abby Vesoulis wrote last month, many in the AI industry feel that the technology is exciting, terrifying, essential for the future, and too overwhelming to stop all at once.

Yet the New Yorker investigation noted that “Altman publicly welcomed regulation, he quietly lobbied against it,” referencing reporting that OpenAI lobbied the European Union to scale back its AI regulation.

Thank you for thinking of us, Sam!

2026-04-10 00:00:00

No sitting American president has ever put his name on US currency. That will change later this year when bills bearing President Donald Trump’s signature start to roll out.

Trump is engaged in a personal branding campaign unlike anything in the history of the American presidency. More than a dozen symbols of national life now bear his name or face, from a government prescription drug website to the national parks pass. And he shows no signs of stopping. There’s going to be a new “golden fleet” Trump class of Navy warships and the F-47 fighter jet, so named for the 47th president. A bill was introduced last year to add his face to Mount Rushmore, over engineers’ warnings that this would permanently damage the monument.

In fact, Trump is using the full power of the presidency to try to get his personal brand on as much of American public life as possible. He reportedly offered to unfreeze billions in federal infrastructure funding if Sen. Chuck Schumer would agree to rename New York’s Penn Station after him. And a congressional bill threatened to strip $150 million in annual funding from DC’s Metro system unless the city renamed it the “Trump Train.”

If this playbook feels familiar, it should. Authoritarian leaders have long understood that controlling the landscape, literally what people see when they look up at a building or pull money from their wallet, is itself a form of power. It’s how they make themselves feel bigger than the office itself. The goal is to replace the institution with the man.

But the thing about gold statues is that they have a way of coming down. History has remembered leaders who slap their name on stuff—just not the way they intended. That verdict belongs to the rest of us.

2026-04-09 22:13:34

A con man’s challenge is to stay ahead of his con. If his marks begin to see too many signs that they are being played—and the swindler can’t craft a cover story to account for these contrary facts—the artifice can start to crumble.

Donald Trump may be at this point.

Of course, millions of Americans have known from the start that Trump has long been a deceitful scammer. But millions of others have fallen for his hustle—and they stuck with his flimflam after his first stint as president demonstrated he lied when he promised cheaper and better health care, a revival of American infrastructure, and an end to budget deficits. Despite his failure to make good on these pie-in-the-sky promises, he managed to keep the con going—even after miserably mismanaging the Covid pandemic and then scheming to overturn a national election.

As we know—and he certainly does—many scams depend on people wanting to believe the scammer. That was evident in 2024, when Trump’s vow to lower grocery prices and spur an economic Golden Age appealed to voters slammed by inflation and the high cost of living. He had conned the electorate once before and nearly destroyed American democracy, but these voters were willing to give the bunko artist another shot. This was akin to an abused spouse offering their abusive partner a second chance on the promise that all will be grand this time.

Yet even within false realities, facts can emerge and threaten a hustle. That might be happening now. It has been widely noted that Trump campaigned as an America Firster opposed to so-called “forever wars,” and yet he launched this war of choice against Iran on what appears to have been a whim. (His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called it a “feeling.”) At the time of his impulse, negotiations between Washington and Tehran were still underway and Iran was not two weeks away from producing a nuclear weapon, as Trump has insisted. His trigger-happiness has belied his proclaimed aversion to Mideast wars and overseas interventions. He showed no fealty to what he professed to be a chief principle. This brazen contradiction is tough for everyone but the most committed Trump devotees to ignore.

And that’s not all. This past week, Trump proposed a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, which would entail a 44 percent increase for the military. Such a boost is inconsistent with an America First position. If the priority is the well-being of Americans at home, why spend so much more for potential overseas military actions? The 2025 US military budget is already $962 billion, the most in the world and more than the combined total of the next nine nations (China, $246 billion; Russia, $150 billion; Germany, $109 billion).

Moreover, Trump’s wish-list budget cut 10 percent of non-defense spending. He said last week that it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid, and child care costs—which was sort of big news that got lost in the shuffle. Any president saying something like that in years past would have faced days—maybe weeks—of headlines.

This budget proposal is unlikely to be adopted by Congress, but his call for shoveling an additional half-a-trillion dollars into the Pentagon while further gutting health care programs and much else is no America First position. Plus, pursuing such a path would exacerbate the budget deficits he once pledged to eliminate.

Trump’s con is being undermined on other fronts. His one big promise in 2024 was to lower prices and make life more affordable. His tariffs have done the opposite—so, too, the Iran war. He has cast himself as the champion of the little guy who’s been screwed over by Washington and the elites. Yet in his second term, Trump has wallowed in opulence and narcissistic self-worship, gold-leafing whatever he can, attaching his name to whatever he can, constructing a poorly designed White House ballroom, and pocketing tremendous amounts of money in assorted grift, including his own crypto scam. (In a December poll, 66 percent disapproved of Trump adding his name to the Kennedy Center; only 18 percent favored this self-glorifying move.) His claim that his mass deportation crusade targets criminal migrants has been proven false by horrific accounts of arrests, detentions, and deportations of law-abiding residents, including students, workers, grandmothers, and other valued members of local communities. And the public has reacted with revulsion to his immigration policies.

In a healthy sign of popular rationality, Trump’s approval rating has been on a steady decline over the past year, and many polls now have his approval only in the mid-30s. That means he’s getting close to his floor. My guess is that about 25 percent of American adults are full-on MAGA—people who believe whatever bunk Trump peddles and will follow the guy off a cliff, while he has the only available jet pack. These surveys suggest that non-cultists are not buying his crap anymore.

That seems especially true regarding Iran. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last month found that only 35 percent of Americans support the military strikes on Iran. And the numbers are sliding among non-MAGA Republicans. A CBS News poll in mid-March showed that while 92 percent of self-identified MAGA Republicans backed his war on Iran, only 70 percent of non-MAGA Republicans did. An Economist/ YouGov poll published on March 31 found that support for the war in Iran had dropped by 1 point for the MAGA GOPers fell by a whopping 23 points for those non-MAGA Republicans. Trump is losing everyone but the die-hard Trumpists, who don’t really give a damn about the supposedly cherished ideas of MAGA—such as America First—and are driven mostly by devotion to a divisive demagogue.

Trump’s act is getting old. His chaos does not wear well. He’s not delivering on the unrealistic promises he made, and he’s making things worse. And there’s not much room for improvement on the horizon, especially since it’s unclear how this dumb war will be resolved. Which may be why some folks fear that Trump—cornered like a wounded bear—might become more dangerous and resort to authoritarian measures in the midterms to preserve GOP power (to avoid a boatload of investigations and possibly another impeachment).

Or that he could lash out with more war. His Easter message to Iran’s leaders—“Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah”—showed derangement and desperation. His subsequent statement to Axios—“If they don’t make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there”—was a threat to commit war crimes.  

One commentator—I don’t recall who—recently observed that Trump might be hitting an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment. In that Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, the con is that the vain emperor’s new outfit is made of magical fabric only the intelligent can see. So he struts around naked, with everyone afraid to say he’s wearing nothing—until during a procession through town, while his aides pretend to be carrying his train, a child exclaims, “He hasn’t got anything on.” Then all the people join in and cry out the same: The dude’s not wearing anything! The scam is uncovered. The Emperor exposed (literally).

Is Trump close to such a brink? Andersen’s story does not conclude with that moment of truth. After the people see through the ruse, Andersen wrote,

The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.

The spell was broken. But the Emperor and his die-hard supporters continued with the charade.

Trump is the most successful con man in American history. Maybe in world history. (Who else ran a swindle that landed him in charge of an arsenal that can blow up the planet?) But the con is fraying. Perhaps it will collapse. As Bob Dylan once warbled, “Even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked.” Now, no one wants to see Trump in the buff. But it may be time to wonder what happens when his racket no longer holds—and what perils that could present.

2026-04-09 19:30:00

Maria de Jesús Estrada Juárez recalls the 40 days she spent in Mexico as a dark time. After more than 27 years in the United States, her country of birth no longer felt like home. At 42, Estrada Juárez found herself needing help with the smallest things, grocery shopping, for instance, or riding the bus. Worst of all, she was missing the most important person in her life: her US citizen daughter Damaris Bello.

“There were some moments where it was even hard for me to breathe,” Estrada Juárez said during a video call last week. “We’ve never been apart so much; we’ve always been together.”

In February, Estrada Juárez was wrongfully deported to Mexico despite having protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that shields undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation. She’s now back in Sacramento after a California federal judge ordered the Trump administration to return her to the United States. But readjusting to life post-deportation hasn’t been easy, and mother and daughter are still reeling from the forced separation.

“I think a lot of people assume that the story ends when your loved one comes back,” 22-year-old Bello said. “But that’s just the beginning of when the healing process starts.”

Their nightmare started on the morning of February 18 when Estrada Juárez appeared for an interview as part of the process of adjusting her immigration status to that of a permanent legal resident, which she was eligible for as the relative of a US citizen. Estrada Juárez was excited about the prospect of no longer being required to renew her DACA status, something she has had to do every two years since 2013. “We thought of it as the next step forward,” Bello said. “But obviously there were different plans in store, and things changed overnight.”

Estrada Juárez went to the appointment accompanied by Bello and prepared with years’ worth of tax filings, her work permit, proof of DACA renewals, and a copy of the advance parole authorization she had received in 2014 to go on a short trip to Mexico and lawfully return. The interview appeared to be going fine until the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officer told Estrada Juárez she had an outstanding order of removal from when she first entered the United States in 1998 at the age of 15. He said he would have to consult his supervisor.

Estrada Juárez, who had never known about a removal order, turned to her daughter and said, “I’m getting deported.” Bello reassured her that there was no reason to worry; after all, she had followed the rules and done everything right. But then they heard a knock on the door, and immigration agents told Estrada Juárez to stand up and put her hands behind her back. She was indeed getting deported to Mexico. All Estrada Juárez could think about in that moment was what would happen to her daughter, her only child. She felt helpless. When Estrada Juárez looked at Bello, she was pale and shaking.

“When it was happening, I was just looking around the room and seeing who was able to help me,” Bello said. “And then you step back, and you realize that there is no one there to help you. Everyone there is against you.” Estrada Juárez protested, saying she had valid DACA status through at least April 2026. But her pleas fell on deaf ears. “The feeling I got was they just wanted me out as soon as possible,” she said, adding that she never received a copy of the alleged 1998 expedited removal order.

The next several hours were filled with agony. After Estrada Juárez was taken away, Bello started checking the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) online system, looking for her location. Estrada Juárez recalled that her whereabouts kept shifting—she was moved to Stockton, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, and finally San Ysidro on the border. She described the experience as humiliating. “They refer to us, the people getting picked up and dropped off, as ‘We’re taking these,’ Are we dropping these off?’ How many of these are we taking?’ Like we’re not people, we’re things.”

At some point, Estrada Juárez said she was given a heated frozen burrito wrapped in what she thought was toilet paper, which made her feel even worse. When she requested her medication for diabetes, they turned her down. During the long car rides, Estrada Juárez said she had asked to be buckled to the seat and was told she should do it herself, even though she was handcuffed. Within less than 24 hours, Estrada Juárez was deported to Mexico, a country she had visited only once in decades. Her hometown of Atlixco in Puebla felt like a new place after all that time, Estrada Juárez said. Most days, she passed the time helping her mother around the house with cooking and cleaning.

When we first spoke, Bello said she felt as if she was “grieving” Estrada Juárez, who was the breadwinner of the household. She started packing their home because, as a nursing school student, she couldn’t afford the rent and utility bills. She went to Washington, DC, to attend a congressional oversight hearing where now-former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified about the department’s immigration enforcement actions and gave media interviews advocating for Estrada Juárez.

“It’s a little difficult to keep repeating the story and having those same feelings come up,” Bello said. “Even talking about it now, I still feel the anxiety and the trauma that I went through. But I would do it all over again if I had to in order to bring her back.”

Estrada Juárez is not an isolated case. At least 86 DACA recipients have been deported in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term. Many more have been arrested and detained in direct betrayal of the program’s intent. On March 10, Estrada Juárez and her legal team filed a case against the federal government in the district court for the Eastern District of California, claiming her deportation was unlawful under DACA and asking that she be returned to the United States.

The petition stated that Estrada Juárez never received a copy of the alleged decades-old removal order, which was the basis for her green card application denial. Instead, Estrada Juárez was given a document saying she was barred from returning to the United States as a result of an order from an immigration judge, even though Estrada Juárez never appeared before a judge, according to the court document. Her lawyer, Stacy Tolchin, further argued that Estrada Juárez’s 1998 expedited removal order didn’t constitute a final order because it hadn’t been approved by a supervising officer at the time. It also couldn’t be reinstated to deport Estrada Juárez, she said, because her client had last entered the country lawfully in 2014.

A couple of weeks later, on March 23, Judge Dena Coggins ruled that Estrada Juárez had been removed in “flagrant violation” of her DACA protections. “The court finds, clearly and unequivocally, that each day Petitioner remains unlawfully separated from her daughter, they both suffer unimaginable irreparable harm,” the judge wrote, mandating that the government facilitate Estrada Juárez’s return within seven days of the court order. Moreover, she ordered that Estrada Juárez’s benefits under DACA should be restored as if her deportation had “never occurred.”

Estrada Juárez received the good news with a mix of relief and apprehension. “They failed me once, they made a mistake once, what makes you think it’s not going to happen again?” she said. “The trust is not there anymore.” Estrada Juárez went from Puebla to Mexico City to pray at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe before flying to Tijuana, where she waited. As she strolled by the ocean in nearby Rosarito on March 29, Estrada Juárez realized that it was the first time she had walked on a beach without Bello since her daughter had been born.

“The fear of a system failure again took over,” she said. “I got very overwhelmed.”

At the US-Mexico border port of entry in San Ysidro the next day, Estrada Juárez said she was held for about five hours even though her parole authorization to re-enter the country had already been approved, and the government’s court-ordered deadline to bring her back to the United States was approaching. She said the border patrol officers repeatedly asked her what she was doing in Mexico. She explained she had been wrongfully deported and pointed them to the judge’s order mandating her return.

As Estrada Juárez watched some border crossers be turned away, she said she felt as if the officers were holding her just to assert their power over her. She couldn’t help but notice how long the government was now taking to allow her back, compared to how expeditiously it had sent her away. Finally, after more than a month in Mexico, Estrada Juárez was let into the United States and reunited with Bello. They embraced for a long time. “I feel like I got my life back,” she said.

But the life she returned to was not the same as the one she had left. Estrada Juárez has nightmares about being back in her mother’s house in Mexico. Bello is also struggling with anxiety. On a recent evening, they were expecting guests for dinner, but when Bello heard a knock on the door, she froze and was too afraid to open it. “I felt like I was right back in that moment again when they were taking my mom away from me,” Bello said. “And I think that’s when I realized that the trauma doesn’t just end there, it doesn’t just go away.”

The mother and daughter are now waiting for Estrada Juárez’s DACA to be renewed while they are appealing the denial of her green card application. They worry about what the next appointment might bring. Estrada Juárez said she has always been a confident person who doesn’t like to live in fear. “I don’t think I’m the same person,” she said. These days, a lingering dread of leaving the house always creeps in. “This feeling is the worst feeling I’ve ever felt in my life, trying to go outside and not having that little fear of ‘what if?’ I think it’s going to take some time for me to be able to get rid of that.”

Estrada Juárez added, “I think also it’s going to take some time for Damaris not to feel afraid of me going outside and having the certainty that I’m going to come back home for her.”

2026-04-09 19:30:00

This story was originally published by Popular Information, a substack publication to which you can subscribe here.

President Donald Trump and the election conspiracy theorists he surrounds himself with are determined to exclude people from voting in the 2026 election based on one database: the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system.

Why?

SAVE is an incomplete and flawed database that has been shown to produce a massive number of false positives, incorrectly identifying American citizens as aliens. Thus, using SAVE to exclude voters buttresses the lie that a significant number of undocumented immigrants vote in elections.

Trump’s latest effort came last week when he signed an executive order directing DHS to use SAVE and other databases to create, for each state, “a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.” Trump’s executive order then directs the Department of Justice (DOJ) to prosecute “individuals and public or private entities engaged in, or aiding and abetting, the printing, production, shipment, or distribution of ballots” to anyone not on the list.

The order, in effect, confirms that the administration aims to exclude purportedly ineligible voters by creating a national voter registration list. It is an effort to coerce states to use the SAVE database to purge voters or risk criminal charges. But SAVE, as its full name suggests, was designed to determine eligibility for government benefits—not citizenship. And, crucially, as NPR noted, “Not all of the data is necessarily up to date.”

Shortly after Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “optimized“ the SAVE database over two weeks, quickly adding a lot of additional information, including full social security numbers. DOGE also allowed state officials to search the database for hundreds of thousands of voters at once with bulk uploads.

Used in this manner, SAVE has produced an extraordinarily high error rate.

In Missouri, for example, Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins ran the state’s voter list through SAVE in November 2025 and distributed the results to county election officials. For St. Louis County, SAVE flagged 691 registered voters as noncitizens. But the county immediately determined that 35 percent of the names were naturalized citizens. After the list was cross-referenced with passport data in January, which has more accurate citizenship information, the list was cut to 133—meaning at least 81 percent of SAVE’s noncitizen results were incorrect. Even that list “may not be final“ and once a final list is established, anyone remaining on it will receive a letter and have 90 days to appeal.

Seventy county clerks in Missouri, Republicans and Democrats, sent a letter to the state’s legislative leaders warning that the SAVE database is repeatedly flagging “individuals we know to be US citizens—our neighbors, colleagues and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies.”

Texas also uploaded its voter list to SAVE. In Denton County, SAVE identified 84 supposed noncitizens registered to vote. Twelve responded to a notice with proof they were citizens. Fourteen others correctly marked on their registration forms that they were not citizens but were mistakenly registered anyway. The rest did not respond to the notice and were removed from the rolls, even though county election officials believe most of that group are eligible voters.

“What is bugging me is I think our voter rolls may be more accurate than this database,” Denton County elections administrator Frank Phillips told ProPublica. “My gut feeling is more of these are citizens than not.”

Trump’s executive order also attempts to weaponize the US Postal Service (USPS), prohibiting it from mailing ballots to anyone who does not appear on the new federal voter list.

Trump’s executive order, which would inject chaos into the voting process months before the election, is already being challenged in multiple court cases. These challenges have a good chance of success because the Constitution is very clear that states, not the federal government, have the primary authority to administer elections. Congress can pass laws that impact election administration, but Trump is attempting to invalidate state laws and procedures by executive fiat.

Trump’s efforts to enlist the USPS are also legally dubious, because it is an independent agency legally obligated to deliver mail throughout the country in a neutral manner. Trump’s order would transform it into an arbiter of voter eligibility.

But even if his executive order is blocked by the courts, the push to purge voters from the rolls before November—or challenge ballots after the votes are in—remains a threat.

Trump’s executive order is trying to force states to cross-reference their voting list with the SAVE database. But in November 2025, even before the executive order was issued, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that 26 states “already have, or are in the process of establishing, a memorandum of agreement for voter verification with SAVE.”

The USCIS website specifically lists 24 states that have formally registered to use SAVE: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. It’s possible that more will join before the election.

According to the DHS, SAVE has labeled 21,000 registered voters submitted by states as noncitizens. Whatever happens with the executive order, the purging of voters based on SAVE data in these states will continue. It’s unclear what, if anything, each state will do to verify the list of supposed noncitizens produced by SAVE.

Separately, the DOJ has requested detailed voter roll data from at least 48 states. The states were presented with a memorandum of understanding from the DOJ requiring them to remove any voters the federal government deemed ineligible using SAVE and potentially other databases. In December, the acting head of the DOJ Voting Section, Eric Neff, said 11 states were willing to comply with the MOU.

According to a tracker maintained by the Brennan Center, 12 states have provided (or committed to provide) a full list of registered voters, including drivers license numbers and other personal information, to the DOJ. (Several other states have provided publicly available voter data.)

The DOJ has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to force them to turn over detailed voter registration. Courts have dismissed cases against California, Oregon, Georgia, and Michigan. But the DOJ has subsequently appealed or refiled in those states. The rest of the cases are still pending.

If the DOJ is ultimately successful in some or all of those cases, it could use the data to pressure states to purge their rolls of voters SAVE identified as noncitizens—just as the executive order contemplates. It could also use SAVE’s list of alleged noncitizens to challenge the results of close elections.

The Trump administration has claimed that it is requesting states’ voter data to check for compliance with federal laws requiring states to maintain clean voter registration lists, including the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act.

At the end of March, however, CBS News reported that the DOJ and the DHS “are close to finalizing an agreement that will allow the federal government to use sensitive voter registration data for immigration and criminal investigations.”

According to CBS, under the agreement, the DOJ would share state voter registration data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to check whether noncitizens have voted or are registered. Sources told CBS that the White House was also involved in discussions about the agreement.

The DOJ’s agreement with DHS appears to contradict statements made in court by its lawyers. On March 3, during a hearing in Minnesota, the court asked DOJ attorney James Tucker if the voter data was being used for immigration enforcement. “Not to my knowledge,” Tucker said.

On March 19, a federal judge in Connecticut asked Tucker if the DOJ would guarantee that voter data would not be given to DHS. “I simply cannot state what the Attorney General’s purpose may be at some other time,” Tucker replied. “What I can say is, as of today, there has been no directive or instruction that the data, the non-publicly available data, is going to be transmitted to any other agency.” He went on to say, “Under the circumstances it’s not consistent with what the United States has specifically stated in its basis and purpose.”

But after CBS News asked the DOJ for comment on the agreement, a DOJ attorney acknowledged its true plans to the court. When asked by a Rhode Island judge whether the DOJ could ask DHS to check for noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, Neff said, “Yes, and we intend to do so,” the Rhode Island Current reported.

The timeline raises serious ethical questions about whether DOJ attorneys knew about the deal with DHS and have intentionally misled the court, which would violate American Bar Association rules. While CBS News “could not determine whether all of the lawyers…arguing the cases in court” knew of the plan, sources said that “at least a handful of senior attorneys from the Civil Rights Division have been privy to some discussions about the data-sharing plan…in addition to multiple officials in other Justice Department offices, including the deputy attorney general.”

2026-04-09 19:30:00

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

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), gave the keynote speech at a conference on Wednesday morning, one which was hosted by a prominent climate-denying think tank that previously compared those concerned about the climate crisis to the Unabomber on billboard posters in 2012.

“No longer are we going to rely on bad, flawed assumptions instead of accurate, present-day facts, without apology or regret,” Zeldin said at the Heartland Institute’s conference on climate change in Washington, DC, referring to well-established climate science.

Zeldin has been widely criticized by climate experts. Last month, more than 160 environmental and public health organizations called for him to resign or be fired, saying no EPA administrator in history “has so brazenly betrayed the agency’s core mission.”

In his speech, Zeldin poked fun at the media for calling him “controversial” for not “following blind obedience to whatever the dire, doom and gloom position of the day is from John Kerry or Al Gore or AOC”—referring to the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “It’s controversial that we won’t sign up for the script that the world is imminently about to end,” he said.

He derided previous administrations’ heeding of climate scientists’ warnings about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, and for ignoring “what’s good and necessary about carbon dioxide for the life of the planet.”

“What happened for years and decades in this country is that the elite, the ruling class, the people who would run the agencies, the people who have decided that they are in charge of the science, the politicians, the biggest grifters: there would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology,” he said. “And if all of you in this room, if any of you in this room dare to challenge any of that, well shame on you.”

Ahead of Zeldin’s Wednesday-morning speech at the Heartland conference, Environmental Defense Fund Action put up posters around Hotel Washington critiquing the EPA administrator’s participation and saying climate denial does not improve Americans’ lives. “Lee Zeldin is executing on the playbook of denial written by the Heartland Institute,” Joanna Slaney, a vice-president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said.

The Heartland Institute has accepted money from big oil companies including Shell and ExxonMobil, and from the Mercers, a family of Republican mega-donors. The thinktank was a contributor to Project 2025, the far-right policy blueprint for Trump’s second administration.

The Heartland Institute rejects the scientific consensus that the climate crisis is real, human-caused and urgent. Since the early 2000s, it has been a leading promoter of climate doubt, even branding climate science as “fake news.”

Experts agree that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are warming the planet, resulting in dangerous increases in temperatures and in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Scientists have long warned that the world must quickly phase out fossil fuels in order to preserve a livable climate.

Donald Trump has repeatedly dismissed the climate crisis as a “hoax” and dismissed environmental policies as a “scam.” And under Zeldin, the EPA has exempted polluting facilities from regulations, shuttered climate and environmental research offices, and shrunk its workforce. It has also rolled back dozens of environmental and climate protections.

“What we are doing in the last 14 months is no surprise,” Zeldin said in his speech. “It is what I pledged during my confirmation hearing, and it is what the American public voted for when they put Donald J Trump back in office. And thank God they did.”

The EPA administrator also spoke about his most controversial environmental rollback: the shredding of the legal finding underpinning virtually all US climate regulations, known as the “endangerment finding.” Scientists and other experts widely condemned the repeal, but the Heartland Institute has celebrated it.

“Carbon dioxide, which is required for life on Earth and happens to result from every single bit of human and animal activity on the planet, is not a pollutant and never was,” Anthony Watts, a senior fellow at the thinktank, said in a February statement praising the repeal.

References to the rollback were met with cheers at the conference in Washington on Wednesday morning, and Zeldin expressed “admiration” for the Heartland Institute’s advocacy against the endangerment finding in his speech.

Craig Rucker, the president of CFACT—a right-wing group which complains about “climate exaggeration,” introduced Zeldin at the conference as a “friend of sound science [and] climate realism, a real rock star.”

Another panel at Wednesday’s conference convened the authors of a contentious Department of Energy report that was written to back up the repeal of the endangerment finding. The publication was derided by climate scientists as making a “mockery of science,” and was not used in the justification for the final repeal of the finding. “While the world warned, a lot of things improved and got better, and continues to do so,” said Ross McKitrick, an author of the report, at the conference.

Another report author, Judith Curry—a climatologist who rails against climate “alarmism”—criticized the “monolithic consensus” on climate science that is “presented to the world.” Though the US government disbanded the group which produced the controversial report on the endangerment finding, Curry said the authors were currently reviewing comments on the report and preparing a new version to release this year.

Earlier on Wednesday morning, the Heartland Institute’s president, James Taylor, kicked off the conference with a rousing speech in which he invoked the debunked climate myth that increased carbon emissions are good for plants: “Restoring CO2 and restoring warmth to our world is…a restoration to more ideal conditions,” he said.

“The truth is clear: there is no climate crisis,” said Taylor. “The science is very clear.”