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2026-03-06 03:30:07

On Tuesday, now-former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified for hours in a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing about her department’s immigration enforcement actions. At one point, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois turned the questioning to the issue of DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program intended to shield from deportation undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.

He pointed to a February DHS letter signed by Noem that disclosed the scope of the Trump administration’s targeting of DACA recipients: 261 arrested and 86 deported between January 1 and November 19, 2025. Sen. Durbin then highlighted the case of a 42-year-old mother with DACA who had lived in the United States for more than 25 years before being detained at her green card interview last month and deported to Mexico within 24 hours. “In tears, she hugged her daughter goodbye,” he said.

Sitting in the audience was the woman’s 22-year-old daughter Damaris Bello. When I met her after the hearing at a Latin American food hall in Union Market, she was still processing watching Noem dodge the question of why DHS had deported dozens of active DACA recipients like her mother, Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez. “There’s no straight answers given by the Secretary,” Bello told me. “It feels like it’s purposely dismissed and gone over.”

Since its creation in 2012, DACA has allowed hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants to live and work in the United States without being subject to deportation. DACA recipients have generally been spared from immigration enforcement—until now. In a betrayal of the program’s intent, the second Trump administration has publicly taken the position—not reflected in the existing regulation—that DACA no longer protects people from deportation and started detaining and removing beneficiaries with permission to be in the country.

The data DHS has reported to members of Congress on the number of DACA recipients who have been arrested and deported since January 2025 has been inconsistent. In a January letter in response to a request for information from Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL) and other lawmakers, the department stated that 270 DACA recipients had been arrested between January 1 and September 28, 2025—more than the 261 figure shared with the Senate. DHS claims most people arrested have criminal convictions or pending charges, even though DACA recipients have to undergo regular background checks to keep their status.

The letter also disclosed that 174 DACA applicants were deported during the same period. “None of these applicants had been granted protected status at the time of their removal,” the letter said. (Mother Jones has reached out to DHS for comment on the discrepancies.)

The events of February 18 are still fresh in Bello’s mind. That morning, she helped her mother get ready for what they had thought would be the final step in Estrada Juarez’s process of becoming a lawful permanent resident as the relative of a US citizen over the age of 21. “We definitely didn’t think that she wouldn’t be coming home that day,” Bello said. The duo, residents of Natomas in northwestern Sacramento, California, had even made plans to eat at Estrada Juarez’s favorite breakfast restaurant.

Mother and daughter went in for the scheduled 10:30 a.m. interview, prepared with all the documentation—tax forms, vaccination records—and evidence of the life Estrada Juarez, who worked as a regional manager for Motel 6 and has no criminal history, had built for herself in California for more than two decades. They were so confident about the strength of her case that they didn’t think to bring a lawyer. During the interview, Bello and Estrada Juarez told the US Citizenship and Immigration Services officer that Estrada Juarez had DACA status and that in 2014 she had been granted permission to travel to Mexico, which she did, and experienced no issues when returning to the US.

As they neared the end of the interview, the dynamic shifted. The USCIS officer gave Estrada Juarez a piece of paper stating her case couldn’t be completed, according to the Sacramento Bee. He explained that her record showed a previous removal order from when she first came to the United States in 1998 at the age of 15. Estrada Juarez said she didn’t know about the alleged removal order. (In a statement to the newspaper, then–DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin reportedly said Estrada Juarez had “illegally re-entered” the United States.)

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.”

After the officers took Estrada Juarez away, Bello called her mother’s boss and close family friend for help. The immigration officers had told her to go home and collect some clothes and diabetes medication. Once at the home they shared, she went upstairs and stared at her mother’s big closet. She packed some shirts, pants, underwear, socks, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. “I felt like I had a timer,” Bello said. “It was so horrible because I knew that I only had a certain amount of time where I could see my mom.”

Later, Bello said she was taken to what appeared to be a visitation room where she could talk to her mother through a glass window. She said Estrada Juarez had asked to see an immigration judge to fight her case and that she didn’t want to be deported. The next morning, Bello received a text from her mother, who had been sent to Mexico. “She says she’s fine,” Bello said, “but I know she’s devastated because her life is here.”

For Bello, an only child, returning alone to the house she had shared with her mother was heartbreaking. Everywhere she looked, she saw reminders of Estrada Juarez, including the makeup she had used that morning. In the fridge, Bello found the ingredients for the pupusas they were going to make the following weekend. “Now I just feel like I’m staring at a house,” she said. “It’s no longer a home. It’s like a broken home.”

As a nursing school student, Bello said she will have to move out because she can’t afford the rent or the electricity bill. Two weeks after her mother’s deportation, she has already started packing. “My whole life has to change because she’s not here,” she said. “I feel like I’m grieving my mother.” But Bello hasn’t given up hope yet. “I want to fight for my mom because I know what they did was illegal and it was unjust,” she added.

Speaking from Mexico in a press call with reporters on Thursday, Estrada Juarez expressed her wish to return to the United States. “In a single moment, nearly 30 years of my life were taken away from me,” she said. “My home, my work, my community. The place where my memories and my future were.” She said the greatest pain in this moment is losing time with her daughter. “My family should not have to be torn apart.”

2026-03-06 03:25:20

Kristi Noem’s time as Department of Homeland Security secretary is coming to an end, according to a Truth Social post from President Donald Trump. Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a Republican from Oklahoma who is a former Mixed Martial Arts fighter, will replace her. 

“A MAGA Warrior, and former undefeated professional MMA fighter, Markwayne truly gets along well with people, and knows the Wisdom and Courage required to Advance our America First Agenda,” Trump wrote, adding that Noem “has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!)”

It’s unclear if or when Mullin will get Senate approval, as Congress remains locked on funding the agency he’s named to lead.

Noem will move into a new role, according to the president, as “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas” a “new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere” the administration plans to announce Saturday. Her removal will be effective March 31. 

Since Noem was confirmed in January of 2025, her tenure has been defined by a violent mass-detention and deportation campaign, which included Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deadliest year in two decades in 2025, two US citizens being shot and killed—who Noem painted as domestic terrorists—and the repeated use of chemical weapons on protestors and minors by DHS agents. 

Her replacement, Mullin, is the only sitting Native American senator. He describes himself as a “Christian. Husband. Father of 6” in his social media profiles and repeatedly posts in support of DHS and ICE’s actions. 

On January 7, hours after DHS confirmed that an agent had shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis—who would later be identified as Renée Good—Mullin posted a message defending agents. “ICE agents aren’t Disney villains. They’re our neighbors, friends, and loved ones,” he wrote. “These immigration and customs enforcement officers are red-blooded American patriots doing a tough job to keep our nation safe.”

2026-03-06 02:08:58

A lawyer for the Justice Department argued on Wednesday that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine decisions are protected from legal scrutiny, in a case brought by medical groups challenging HHS’s vaccine policy changes. So much so that the Trump administration appears to believe that Kennedy’s actions are “totally unreviewable.”

Reuters reports that Trump administration lawyer Isaac Belfer was asking District Judge Brian Murphy to rule that Kennedy and other health officials are protected from legal challenges by, for example, medical groups who accuse the department of imperiling the public’s health. 

Murphy asked: “If the secretary said instead of getting a shot to prevent measles, I think you should get a shot that gives you measles, is that unreviewable?”

“Yes,” Belfer replied.

As of February 27, 1,136 confirmed measles cases were reported in the United States in 2026, primarily from the large outbreak in South Carolina, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—though that number is likely higher.

Should Murphy, a Biden appointee, rule in the DOJ’s favor, Kennedy and his team could have further leeway to upend long-held vaccine schedules and inject confusion into the health decisions of everyday Americans.

Related

The Plot Against Vaccines

James Oh, a lawyer for the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups included in the case, urged Murphy to block a series of actions by HHS, including a May directive to the CDC to remove its vaccination schedule recommendation for COVID-19 shots for pregnant women and children, as well as another move from January to reshape and diminish childhood vaccination schedules. 

He also requested that the judge block a meeting from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices scheduled for later this month that will cover “COVID-19 vaccine injuries and Long-COVID.” Oh told the judge that the meeting is a “recipe for spreading distrust and dare I say misinformation or disinformation about vaccines.”

This is the same advisory committee that voted to abandon the universal hepatitis B birth dose recommendation for newborns in December, ending a decades-old advisement. Oh argued that the committee violates balance rules in the Federal Advisory Committee Act after Kennedy, last Summer, fired all 17 members of ACIP and installed allies. 

Murphy said he plans to rule on the arguments before the next ACIP meeting, calling it his “hard deadline.”

2026-03-05 23:49:26

On Monday afternoon, as war raged with Iran, President Trump was seemingly preoccupied with more trivial matters. “FREE TINA PETERS!” he wrote on Truth Social, referring to the former Colorado election clerk who’s serving a nine-year sentence for giving election conspiracists access to sensitive voting equipment.

While it might seem odd for Trump to be posting about Peters as bombs fell on Tehran, there’s a connection between her and Trump’s orbit—her lawyer, Peter Ticktin, is a former classmate of Trump’s at the New York Military Academy who has represented the president in litigation against his political opponents. And Ticktin is now pushing Trump to declare a national emergency, based on the false claim that China interfered in the 2020 election, so that the president can assume vast new powers over the voting process. After the US invaded Iran, Trump reposted an article from a far right news site claiming that Iran also attempted to interfere in the 2020 and 2024 elections, seemingly tying the military effort to his voting crusade.

The 17-page executive order Ticktin is lobbying Trump to sign would completely upend how Americans vote and have their ballots counted in an unprecedented attempt to usurp powers that the Constitution gives to states and Congress. The order claims that an emergency declaration would allow Trump to unilaterally outlaw mail-in voting for most Americans and seize voting machines in favor of a hand count of all ballots, which would take much longer and be far more error-prone than a regular machine count.

That’s not all. The order would require all Americans to re-register to vote in person before the 2026 midterms, effectively voiding all state voter rolls, and force voters to re-verify their status before every election, a wildly impractical measure. It would mandate that all absentee ballots be notarized and restrict mail-in voting to those who have a medical condition or are out-of-town during the election. It would require strict forms of voter ID and proof of citizenship to cast a ballot, which could disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans who lack such documents. “Taken together, the proposal amounts to a radical attempt to reshape the rules of elections ahead of the 2026 midterms,” notes the voting rights group Fair Fight.  

“Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that,” Ticktin told the Washington Post. “But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes. That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”

Of course, there is no evidence that China interfered in the 2020 election. And the two statutes that Ticktin claims allow Trump to declare a national emergency—the National Emergencies Act (NEA) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)—in fact give the president no control over the voting process. (The Supreme Court just ruled that the president could not invoke the IEEPA to justify his tariffs.)

“None of the cited authorities delegates the president any power to change voting laws, let alone the wholesale takeover of federal and local elections that the draft EO attempts to enact, even in the face of national emergency—including attempted foreign interference,” says an analysis from the Center for American Progress.

For these reasons, any such executive order would likely be immediately blocked in the courts, much like the last executive order on elections Trump issued last March.

Trump said last week he’s “never heard about” Ticktin’s proposal, but he’s already vowed to issue a new executive order on elections. And given his obsession with the 2020 election and calls for Republicans to “take over the voting in at least 15 places,” the allure of attempting to gain dictatorial control over the electoral process, no matter how illegal it is, is sure to appeal to the president.

Some of the sketchiest figures in the far right’s election denial movement are behind this push.

Ticktin, whose friendship with Trump dates back to their time at the military academy in the 1960s, has had a rocky career as a lawyer. He’s been suspended twice from the Florida bar. After the 2020 election, he represented Trump in a sprawling racketeering lawsuit accusing Hillary Clinton and Democrats of manufacturing allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit and ordered sanctions against Trump’s lawyers, including Ticktin.

“The rule of law is undermined by the toxic combination of political fundraising with legal fees paid by political action committees, reckless and factually untrue statements by lawyers at rallies and in the media, and efforts to advance a political narrative through lawsuits without factual basis or any cognizable legal theory,” wrote US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks.

Ticktin subsequently went on to seek pardons for election deniers including Peters, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, members of the Proud Boys, and other January 6 insurrectionists. He told Steve Bannon the 101^st Airborne should be sent in to free Peters, who was convicted of giving access of 2020 election records to an associate of My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell.

Ticktin has been promoting the proposed executive order since last April, including on QAnon-affiliated talk shows. “If President Trump can’t call a national election emergency, then we will lose our country,” he told QNewsPatriot in January. Ticktin said the right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi has also “been very involved” in the effort. Corsi has been circulating a new draft since the summer alleging that Trump could invoke emergency powers because of alleged foreign intervention in the 2020 election.

Corsi was the driving force behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign against John Kerry’s military record in 2004 and the birtherism conspiracy against Barack Obama, which Trump amplified. Corsi was investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller for allegedly acting as a conduit between Trump adviser Roger Stone and WikiLeaks as part of the effort to leak emails from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Corsi falsely claimed the emails were leaked by murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich.

The work of these fringe characters has been amplified by outside advisers closer to the president. Cleta Mitchell, the former Trump lawyer who helped the president attempt to overturn the 2020 election, said on a podcast in September that she believed “the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.” Bannon has repeatedly promoted the national emergency scenario on his radio show in recent days.

In December 2020, the likes of Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Patrick Byrne went to the White House to urge Trump to order the military to seize state voting machines. Trump was talked off the ledge by his advisers, but now says he regrets not doing so.

Whereas the craziest schemes hatched by election deniers were rejected by Trump’s aides in 2020, today those very election deniers hold prominent positions in the administration and are plotting from the inside. Recently, six administration aides took part in a gathering hosted by Flynn where attendees called on Trump to declare a national emergency. “At some point,” Byrne, the ex-CEO of Overstock.com, said, “he’s got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency.”

2026-03-05 20:30:00

Children were starting to stream out of Peres Elementary School in Richmond, California, as activist Katt Ramos pointed towards a plume of smoke in the distance. Ramos is an activist who, at the time, helped to lead the Richmond chapter of Communities for a Better Environment. She was standing outside of the school in the Iron Triangle, the local name for a part of town defined by three railway tracks. The smoke was emanating from the vast Chevron refinery that borders the elementary school.

Chevron is Richmond’s largest employer—and its largest polluter. When it flares hazardous gases, or when mysterious, sulfurous smells suffuse the city, there is no daily newspaper to report on health concerns or keep residents in the know. The primary local news site, the Richmond Standard, largely avoids covering local health issues or the impact of Chevron’s facilities on people’s well-being. Perhaps because the site is owned by Chevron itself.

Given Richmond’s status as a news desert, most people here have come to accept the lack of deeply investigated stories, the kind that help keep corporations accountable. But plenty of locals are deeply aware of the implications of living in proximity to the refinery, and, like Ramos, have turned to their own activism and organizing. I spent time in Richmond interviewing and photographing local people, including former Chevron employees, activists, reporters, and politicians.

This work was done in conjunction with a project about news deserts and misinformation supported by Amplifier Art.

2026-03-05 20:30:00

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

Just over a year ago, the Trump administration gutted staff across the National Park Service, triggering a series of protests around the country, a signal of the public’s deep passion for America’s “crown jewels.” 

Since then, the service has been in flux. Though a federal judge required the administration to rehire much of the staff laid off in that February 2025 purge, gaping holes still exist across the agency following firings, loss of seasonal workers, buyouts, and forced retirements. The National Park Service lost 2,750 employees in the first 11 months of the second Trump administration, a 15 percent drop, according to an analysis of federal workforce data from the Office of Personnel Management by my colleague Peter Aldhous. 

On top of this, a recent series of changes—from the pending appointment of a new director to the mandated elimination of certain park exhibits that discuss racism and climate change—could fundamentally reshape the future of the National Park Service, experts say. 

After more than a year without an official director of the National Park Service, President Donald Trump in February nominated hospitality executive Scott Socha to head the agency, which oversees more than 85 million acres of land and water. Socha is the president of parks and resorts at Delaware North, a food, venue, and hotel management company that operates across the US and in Australia. The company provides services for several national parks, according to its website. 

Many conservation groups, elected leaders, and outdoor enthusiasts have pushed back. These shifts, they say, threaten the long-term future of the parks—and rewrite the American legacy they represent. 

However, Delaware North’s relationship with the service hit a major bump in 2015, when it lost a contract to operate concessions inside Yellowstone National Park, the Guardian reports. The company sued the National Park Service over costs related to the trademark rights of names and logos, and the agency eventually settled for $12 million after a yearslong court battle. 

Trump’s choice of Socha falls in line with the administration’s push to privatize US public lands, and it doesn’t sit well with some advocates. 

“The private park concessionaire executive, Socha, has zero experience in public service or conservation,” Jayson O’Neill, spokesperson for the Save Our Parks campaign, told SFGate. “Instead, he’s made a career out of extracting maximum profit from our national parks, not protecting them, making it abundantly clear he’ll be doing the bidding of special interests and corporate interests.” 

The National Parks Conservation Association, which said the new director “must reverse course on the damage that’s been done to parks and park staff over the last year,” put out a statement that reserved judgment. 

“Our national parks need strong, sensible leadership now more than ever before,” the group’s president and CEO, Theresa Pierno, said in the statement. “Given Mr. Socha’s years of experience working with the Park Service, we hope he will be that leader.” 

An August investigation by the New York Times found that at least a fifth of the country’s 433 national parks had been significantly strained due to Trump-related cuts. I spoke with former National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis in May about the cascading impacts the job cuts could have on the country’s public lands. Another former director, Charles F. Sams III, echoed these concerns, along with other former park staff and recreation experts, as Blaine Harden reported for ICN in January.

Meanwhile, US Customs and Border Protection intends to build border barriers throughout the Big Bend region of southwest Texas, which plans show will cut through part of the popular Big Bend National Park, as my colleague Martha Pskowski reported. Scientists and conservationists have condemned the project. 

“One of our most beloved national parks and our state’s largest park will be scarred beyond repair,” David Keller, a noted archaeologist of the region, told ICN. 

Last March, Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which directed the Department of the Interior to ensure that exhibits, installations and signs across the national parks system do not “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” Interior is the park service’s parent agency. 

A May order from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum doubled down on this effort, requiring staff to report signage that catalogues negative parts of history and the environment for potential removal. 

A new analysis of an internal government database reviewed by the Washington Post found that staffers have filed a number of inquiries from across the country that indicated confusion over what would fall into the category of disparaging American history, but nonetheless flagged signage discussing everything from climate impacts at Arches National Park to segregation in the South. 

The Trump administration in January took down an exhibit at the President’s House historical site on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall that detailed the lives of nine people enslaved by President George Washington. Intense public outcry followed. The city of Philadelphia sued. In February, a federal judge ordered the exhibit to be reinstalled as the court battle continues, PBS reports. 

In her opinion brief, Senior US District Judge Cynthia Rufe wrote that the federal government does not have the power “to dissemble and disassemble historical truths.”

I reached out to the Department of the Interior to get the agency’s response to all of this. I asked about the criticism of its signage removal efforts and advocates’ concerns about Trump’s choice to lead the National Park Service. A spokesperson sent this reply right before publication: “Your story is full inaccuracies but that should come as no surprise seeing this is a far-left blog, funded by well known liberals, with an agenda to push the Green New Scam and DEI initiatives meant to divide Americans.”

Adding to the administration’s legal fights, the National Parks Conservation Association and a coalition of scientists, historians and advocates filed a federal lawsuit two weeks ago to “cease all unlawful efforts to remove up-to-date and accurate historical or scientific information from the national parks.” 

“We want Americans to know that their parks actually hold this powerful history, and that parks are a place that they can…go learn that history,” David Lamfrom, the vice president of regional programs at the National Parks Conservation Association, told me. “We don’t want people to feel like when they go to parks, that history is going to be edited, and it’s going to be edited by the government because the government doesn’t believe that Americans can handle or manage that truth.”