2026-03-04 06:29:05
Kristi Noem faced frustration from some Republicans during a Senate oversight hearing Tuesday over how she’s handling her job as secretary of homeland security.
During the nearly five-hour hearing, Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) criticized Noem for refusing to take responsibility for the killings of two U.S. citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents in Minnesota, and for allegedly stalling investigations into the Department of Homeland Security while spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on agency ads.
“We’re beginning to get the American people to think that deporting people is wrong,” Tillis said about Noem’s job as DHS secretary. “It’s the exact opposite. The way you’re going about deporting them is wrong.”
The probes into both cases are led by Homeland Security Investigations, an agency within the DHS, and the Office of Professional Responsibility, while excluding local authorities. The Justice Department, which would typically be involved, is not investigating the killing of Renée Good but has initiated a civil rights probe into the killing of Alex Pretti.
“One of the reasons why ICE officers are having threats…is because you’ve cast the pall on them by acting like we should investigate things differently,” Tillis told Noem. “Officer-invovled shootings have a formula that we should go through every time.”
Tillis later mentioned a letter from the Office of Inspector General, saying “10 different instances under Ms. Noem’s leadership where they’ve been misled and not allowed to pursue investigations.” Last month, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) sent a letter to Noem saying she learned that DHS general counsel told the investigators multiple times that Noem could kill their investigations.
Tillis vowed to put a hold on all “en bloc” nominations, a procedure allowing the Senate to confirm nominees as a group, if he didn’t get a response from Noem to questions he sent a month ago about federal agents in Minneapolis’ use of force. Tillis also criticized DHS for its reliance on administrative warrants to detain citizens.
While Tillis has a long track record of criticizing Noem, including calling for her resignation in January, Kennedy does not.
Kennedy went after Noem for starring in $220 million worth of taxpayer-funded DHS ads.
He suggested that the videos “were effective in [Noem’s] name recognition” rather than promoting the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement.
Kennedy also cited reports that the department sidestepped competitive bidding rules. One of the largest contracts went to Safe American Media, a company created just days before it won the deal. The company is run by the husband of Noem’s former chief spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, who also worked on ads for Noem during her time in Congress and as governor of South Dakota.
The hearing came as many Republicans urged Democrats to approve funding for the Department of Homeland Security, citing the need to strengthen protections against possible retaliatory terror attacks after US and Israeli strikes on Iran that began Saturday.
2026-03-04 04:12:26
When Donald Trump announced the launch of his war on Iran in a videotaped message, he declared he was “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” If there were indications that Tehran was about to strike American targets, that would have been reflected in US intelligence reports. Yet a member of the House intelligence committee, Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), says that no such intelligence was shared with the committee and that the Trump administration for months had refused to provide intelligence on Iran to the committee. “We were kept in the dark,” he notes.
In an interview with Mother Jones, Gomez contends that there is no reason to believe Trump’s claim of an imminent threat, and maintains that Trump was just spinning the nation into a war of choice. He also notes that if the Democrats win control of the House in the coming midterm elections, the House intelligence committee is likely to mount an investigation of the pre-war intelligence, as well as Trump’s use and possible misrepresentation of intelligence regarding other national security matters, including the attack on Venezuela: “We not only have an obligation but we do have a right to conduct these investigations. We have to see if intelligence was politicized…We have to know what really happened….I’m looking forward to holding them accountable.”
Gomez adds, “There are things we have to look at that people don’t even know about, and they’ll never know about.” That sounds ominous.
The Trump administration, he says, “never came to show us the evidence there was an imminent threat to the United States.” The flow of intelligence was shut down after media reports noted intelligence assessments of Trump’s air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June did not back up Trump’s claim the sites had been “obliterated.” And, according to Gomez, the Republicans on the House intelligence committee have not pushed for more access to Iran intelligence. “Now that they have a Republican president, the oversight is not as robust as it was during the Biden administration,” he says.
“There’s no way people should trust what the administration is saying,” he comments. “They’re trying to find facts on the ground to justify whatever goal they have.” Gomez points out that though Trump has said Tehran posed an immediate danger to the United States due to its ballistic missile program, the Defense Department has concluded they are ten years away from developing missiles that can strike America.
2026-03-04 02:43:51
A federal judge voided a Trump administration directive that pressured educational institutions to end all programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion last month.
The directive, issued by the Department of Education as a “Dear Colleague” letter to public schools in February 2025, stated that school districts who failed to drop “discriminatory” DEI practices could violate civil rights law and lose federal funding. The letter cited the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions are unconstitutional.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit the following month on behalf of the National Education Association, a labor union of about three million educators, arguing that the Education Department’s policy violated due process and First Amendment protections.
On February 3, the Education Department stepped back from enforcing the directive. But the Trump administration continues to pursue other methods to crack down on DEI through executive orders and civil rights investigations.
This decision hit a personal note for me. I attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill while a federal judge considered a case against it that would ultimately kill affirmative action programs in college admissions across the nation. My first article for Mother Jones investigated the ways Asian-American students fit within debates over affirmative action, where many felt they faced discrimination in the college admissions process. SFFA largely latched onto this argument in their lawsuits against UNC and Harvard, painting a monolithic view of Asian American cultural and political identity. The case was a major step in establishing a signature Trump administration policy meant to erase historical inequities, let alone explore attempts to remediate.
To try to understand how last month’s decision fits within the Education Department’s campaign against what they deem to be dangerous discriminatory DEI, I spoke last week with Sarah Hinger, the deputy director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program. Singer also served as counsel of record for the plaintiffs, who filed the lawsuit against the Education Department with other legal professionals in the ACLU and NEA.
How does the decision on the “Dear Colleague” letter fit within the Trump administration’s efforts to target DEI in schools?
At the end of the first Trump administration, there was an effort to restrict contractors working with the federal government from the ability to talk about equity and diversity along the lines of race [and] gender. Those didn’t really end up coming into effect because of the change in administration, but we saw a series of state legislatures pick these up as concepts and prohibit them from being incorporated across K-12 and higher education.
One of the key problems with these policies were the ways in which they were worded. The laws didn’t just say you can’t talk about race or suggest that affirmative action is a good thing. They tried to get at that through more amorphously-phrased concepts that made it extremely difficult to understand exactly where the line between permissible and prohibited exists. They might apply, for example, to teaching novels or teaching aspects of US history.
The problem that we were faced with is that everyone across the education profession was left in fear to guess at whether or not their program—their livelihood—could come into question by the federal government.
This case [from last month] came on top of those state efforts. In the intervening years, the Department of Education issued guidance in the form of that “Dear Colleague” letter. The Department of Education has issued these over the years to provide some advice to school districts about how to comply with existing civil rights laws.
In this case, they characterized it as a “Dear Colleague” letter, but they did an about-face from prior guidance, which had talked to schools about the ways in which they can create a learning environment that furthers goals of diversity and inclusion.
This letter vaguely said that DEI programs are illegal. [The Trump administration] condemned “illegal DEI,” in which schools were bringing discrimination into their school. But they didn’t define what, in their view, was an illegal DEI program. And so the same issues existed there: It was difficult for any educator or school leader to understand what the administration was claiming was now illegal, particularly when previous guidance had recommended many things that could now be characterized as supporting DEI.
The problem that we were faced with is that everyone across the education profession was left in fear to guess at whether or not their program—their livelihood—could come into question by the federal government. That leads to self-censorship and a chilling effect.
The letter said that schools had two weeks before the administration could potentially hold someone liable. This was followed up very shortly by a newly-announced requirement for school districts and schools to certify their compliance with these new directives under not just the penalties of a potential investigation, but also the revocation of federal funding and liability under the False Claims Act.
This was in line with some of what we’ve seen happening with individual institutions of higher education and the use of any and every lever to convince schools that it would be easier to move away from these practices rather than fight.
Does the case against the “Dear Colleague” directive have any effect on how the Trump administration is using other levers like civil rights investigations against school programs and executive orders?
There are a wide range of schools that are struggling with these cases and the fearmongering that comes as a result. It’s not just the most prominent schools and universities, but it’s also community colleges, K-12 public school districts, and people who create curriculum who are in teacher training programs in colleges.
Yeah, I think they do. We saw the Department of Education say, “we will withhold your funding if you don’t do these things.” It’s now clear that the department will have to more clearly spell out what it thinks complies with or doesn’t comply with existing civil rights laws and how—and that requires more analysis. I think that’s an important precedent going forward. It allows us to assess whether or not that analysis is consistent with the case law and legal precedent and for the education community to assert the value of their work. It also means if the Education Department suggests that school districts are liable for engaging in programs related to DEI, it would be more susceptible to challenge. It’s harder for them to operate in such a sweeping way where they say, in our view, that everything is illegal.
Many states have their own anti-DEI agendas. Does this ruling have any effect on how challenges to state policies may proceed?
Yes, I think we see that this is impactful for states that follow the federal government’s example. New Hampshire was an early effort to create a state corollary and a state law that would prohibit DEI practices in their schools. The ACLU and ACLU of New Hampshire filed a suit against that law, and it’s similarly been enjoined. The court rulings in federal cases cited that there are now a series of cases finding that these types of prohibitions have constitutional flaws. That provided an important source of support for the challenge at the state level.
Is there anything significant that we should consider in trying to understand the scope of these cases against DEI in education?
There are a wide range of schools that are struggling with these cases and the fearmongering that comes as a result. It’s not just the most prominent schools and universities, but it’s also community colleges, K-12 public school districts, and people who create curriculum who are in teacher training programs in colleges.
We saw specifically in this litigation—because of how far-reaching in scope the policy directive was—the range of people who were seeing it show up in their work and the impacts that it was having on them. So you know, community college professors, students who were training to become teachers themselves were teaching special education in colleges.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
2026-03-03 23:26:24
The Supreme Court on Monday evening overturned a New York state court ruling that found that the Staten Island-based district of Republican US House Rep. Nicole Malliotakis discriminated against Black and Latino voters and needed to be redrawn. The Supreme Court’s intervention preserves a GOP-led seat that would have been likely to shift to Democrats this November.
The court’s ruling sets a disturbing precedent for voting rights in several ways. Federal courts are supposed to defer to state courts on matters of state law. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that courts should not change election laws in the middle of an election season, and in this instance the filing deadline for candidates in New York has already passed.
Alito is essentially saying that districts drawn under the Voting Rights Act or other federal and state laws to remedy centuries of racial discrimination are as racist as the racism they were meant to rectify.
In her dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the court’s conservative majority for using one set of rules to uphold redistricting maps that benefit white voters and Republicans in states like Texas while using a completely different set of rules to strike down maps that benefit racial minorities and Democrats in places like New York.
“Time and again, this Court has said that federal courts should not interfere with state-court litigation,” Sotomayor wrote. “Time and again, this Court has said that federal courts should not meddle with state election laws ahead of an election. Today, the Court says: except for this one, except for this one, and except for this one.”
The majority did not explain its reasoning, but most concerning was the concurring opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, in which he wrote that districts drawn “for the express purpose of ensuring that ‘minority voters’ are able to elect the candidate of their choice” represented “unadorned racial discrimination, an inherently ‘odious’ activity that violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause except in the ‘most extraordinary case.’”
Alito is essentially saying that districts drawn under the Voting Rights Act or other federal and state laws to remedy centuries of racial discrimination are as racist as the racism (including the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow) they were meant to rectify.
Court watchers speculate that Alito, because he has not authored an opinion from the court’s term last October, is writing the majority opinion in a hugely important case the court has yet to rule on concerning the constitutionality of the last remaining section of the Voting Rights Act. If that’s the case, the VRA—and by extension, the fate of American democracy—will be in very, very bad shape.
The Roberts court has repeatedly gutted the VRA and if it were to rule that it is unconstitutional for states to draw districts that allow voters of color to elect their candidates of choice that would essentially spell the death of the country’s most important civil rights law. Based on his opinions in other major voting rights cases and his concurrence in the New York case, Alito seems certain to kill the VRA outright or narrow it to the point of irrelevancy.
If the court were to rule against the VRA this spring, that could shift roughly a dozen seats in the GOP’s favor this year, turbocharging Trump’s efforts to manipulate the midterms. Alito is now telegraphing just how far he’s prepared to go.
2026-03-03 20:30:00
When I spoke last December to Dan Gividen, an immigration attorney in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, he tried to sum up how his law practice has been transformed over the past year with some back-of-the-napkin math. Prior to 2025, he said, half of his caseload was comprised of removal defense in immigration court; a fourth had to do with visas and legal benefits applications with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency; and another fourth was federal litigation, which included criminal cases.
Now? Most of Gividen’s work has shifted to the federal courts.
For lawyers like Gividen, who are on the front line representing immigrants in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, that realignment has been seismic. Instead of negotiating immigration law with government attorneys in the immigration courts overseen by the Department of Justice, they are pleading for federal judges to step in and uphold the basic constitutional rights of thousands of immigrants held in government custody. Seemingly overnight, lawyers trained in immigration law have found themselves doubling as federal litigators as district courts became the de facto battleground in detention defense during the second Trump administration.
“It’s just been insane,” Gividen, who served as deputy chief counsel for ICE between 2016 and 2019 before starting his own private practice, explained. “I’m going into federal court to get a federal judge to tell ICE and the immigration judge that they have to play by the rules.”
“It’s just been insane. I’m going into federal court to get a federal judge to tell ICE and the immigration judge that they have to play by the rules.”
This sea change in the legal landscape isn’t by accident. In its aggressive pursuit of more arrests in the interior of the United States and push for record deportations, the Trump White House is detaining more people than ever, while closing off the regular avenues for due process and release. (The current detained population stands at about 68,000.) Over the summer, the Department of Homeland Security and the DOJ adopted a mandatory detention stance that reinterpreted decades of federal immigration statute. That radical policy change made most detained immigrants who entered the country without permission—including those who had lived in the United States for years and had no criminal history—ineligible for a bond hearing before an immigration judge as they awaited the conclusion of their cases, a process that could take months or even years.
To find an alternative pathway to get immigrants out of ICE detention, lawyers have turned to a centuries-old legal mechanism that dates back to English common law: habeas corpus, which translates from Latin to “you shall have the body.” Also known as the “Great Writ,” this fundamental right enshrined in the US Constitution prevents the government from arbitrarily detaining someone without a reason. Once an emergency legal remedy against unlawful imprisonment, habeas is now an everyday tool.
“The only way that the overwhelming majority of people that ICE is detaining right now is going to get out,” Gividen said, “is through the habeas system.”
Gividen didn’t have his mind set on immigration law after graduating from Gonzaga University School of Law in Washington state in the early Obama years. He moved to Texas and clerked for the late US DistrictJudge Jorge A. Solis, whom he described as “the greatest man I’ve ever known.” After a stint at a criminal defense firm, he joined the ranks of ICE attorneys during Trump’s first term. “The headache of every day trying to tell ICE officers and everybody else to act within the law and the Constitution was not worth it,” Gividen said.
Now, he’s back in that position, only on the other side.
Gividen isn’t alone. Since January 2025, lawyers across the country have flooded the courts’ dockets with more than 24,400 federal lawsuits challenging the detention of immigrants as unlawful and seeking their release. That’s more than during the three previous administrations combined, according to a ProPublica analysis of immigration-related habeas cases.
“We’re suing the federal government weekly,” said Jeremy McKinney, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. With virtually every door closed for immigrants to be freed from detention, he added, “We have to kick the door down.”
The demands on Gividen illustrate the nonstop work involved in “kicking the door down.” On Halloween, Gividen filed a habeas petition in the Western District of Texas, fighting the detention of an immigrant client who came to the United States from Peru as a minor. On November 18, he submitted a legal filing seeking the release of a pregnant Salvadoran woman picked up at a routine ICE check-in. That same day, he entered a case on behalf of a client who was eligible for temporary protection from deportation and work authorization but was detained during a traffic stop in June.
By February, Gividen estimated he had sued the federal government some 6o times in the past five months, charging against the detainment of immigrants.
When the internal ICE memo eliminating bond for most undocumented immigrants became public in July, McKinney chuckled. The administration “revisited its legal position on detention and release authorities” so that all immigrants who entered the country unlawfully should be treated as recent border crossers and denied access to bond. That meant even people who had been here for decades could be subject to mandatory detention. “It’s laughable that you would change how things have been done, just normal practice, 30 years later,” he said.
Some immigration judges started adopting the government’s novel legal theory. Then, in September, the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews decisions by immigration judges, sealed the deal with a precedent-setting ruling that sided with the administration. In Matter of Yajure Hurtado, the BIA determined that immigration judges lack the authority to hear or grant bond requests to immigrants who crossed the border without inspection. (The panel that handed the decision down was made up of two judges appointed to the bench during Trump’s first presidency and a temporary judge assigned by Attorney General Pamela Bondi in June.)
“The timing is really unfortunate because after decades of practice allowing people to have bond hearings, ICE changed their position and then the board changed their position,” said Andrea Sáenz, a one-time removal defense attorney who served as a BIA judge for three and a half years before being terminated in March. “The board just adopted DHS’s position, and it’s created these incredibly harsh effects.”
As the number of habeas corpus petitions challenging mandatory detention soared, so did the wins for detained immigrants. Since the BIA decision in September, federal judge after federal judge has rejected the Trump administration’s reading of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The repudiation has been nearly unanimous. As many as 400 judges—including Trump appointees—in some 4,400 cases have arrived at that consensus, according to a Reuters review of court records.
In their decisions, federal judges have often expressed frustration with the volume of similar petitions coming before them. Some are even consolidating cases and issuing bulk orders for the immediate release of detainees or granting them bond hearings.
“We’ve never seen something like this,” said My Khanh Ngo, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, “where you have judges appointed by all sorts of different administrations in various states across the country agreeing that the government is reading the law incorrectly and also that this violates people’s due process rights.” Gracie Willis with the National Immigration Project noted this is the most unity she has ever encountered in the federal court system.
“We’ve never seen something like this, where you have judges appointed by all sorts of different administrations in various states across the country agreeing that the government is reading the law incorrectly and also that this violates people’s due process rights.”
As successful and critical as habeas litigation has proved to be, practitioners argue it’s not an adequate substitute for a functioning immigration court system. “You’re having to go to one court to ask permission to go to another court,” said Mike Kagan, director of the immigration clinic at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His habeas work has more than doubled since May and is now a main part of his legal practice. “That’s a crazy system and inherently inefficient. If someone is detained illegally, it means they sit in detention waiting, sometimes for weeks, when they shouldn’t be there at all. That’s not a good result in a democracy based on the rule of law.”
The deluge of lawsuits has not only overwhelmed the federal courts but also prosecutors. Amid the immigration enforcement crackdown in Minnesota, more than 427 habeas cases were filed in that district just in the month of January, leading the US attorney’s office to divert resources away from other priorities, such as criminal matters. In early February, an ICE lawyer detailed with the office half-joked in court when questioned by a judge about delays in complying with orders of release that she wished to be held in contempt so she could finally get some sleep. “The system sucks,” she said. “This job sucks.” She was removed from her DOJ post shortly after.
Some of the strain on the system is explained by the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrants who previously simply wouldn’t have been a priority. That’s the case of Pastor Steven Tendo, a Ugandan asylum seeker and licensed nursing assistant who fled torture and political persecution in his home country. On February 4, ICE arrested him without a warrant in the parking lot of the assisted living facility where he works in Shelburne, Vermont.
For years, Tendo had been under an order of supervision that required him to check in with the agency regularly, which he complied with. ICE had also previously granted him a so-called stay of removal, putting his deportation proceedings on hold while he continued to fight his case. His current stay expired on February 3, but his lawyers had informed the agency that they were in the process of requesting a renewal. Still, a couple of days before his next scheduled appointment, ICE took him and transferred him to a detention center in New Hampshire.
“ICE is not following those procedures. They’re simply arresting and detaining someone and worrying about due process later.”
A habeas petition submitted on the day of his arrest claimed the government had failed to provide notice and a reason for revoking Tendo’s longstanding order of supervision and had not given him an opportunity to respond. “ICE is not following those procedures,” his lawyer Christopher Worth said. “They’re simply arresting and detaining someone and worrying about due process later.”
Tendo, who has diabetes, spent 16 days detained until a federal judge ordered his release, finding his re-detention was unlawful. “I know it’s easy to enter, and getting out is very hard,” Tendo said of immigration detention. It took him back to the two years he had spent in ICE custody in Texas after arriving in the United States back in 2018. While Tendo was detained, an immigration judge rejected his asylum claim and ordered him removed. Tendo repeatedly appealed without success. He was released from detention in 2021 while his case was pending and has lived in Vermont since. Last year, he filed a motion to reopen his immigration proceedings.
“Is this going to be the second nightmare of staying in detention forever?” Tendo wondered. When the officers moved him on Friday, February 20, he thought he was about to be deported. “I never believed I was being released until I was back in Vermont,” he said. Tendo said he has an upcoming check-in with ICE in March.
Tendo is one of the lucky ones. Despite their volume, these habeas cases cover a mere drop in the bucket in a record-high detainee population. Only a minority of immigrants in custody have access to lawyers to contest their detention, much less have a shot at winning release. That’s why the ACLU and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project filed a class action lawsuit last year asserting the right of detainees to a bond hearing.
A judge in the central district of California declared the government’s no-bond policy unlawful and certified a nationwide class. But that win didn’t lead to people having their access to bond restored across the board. As immigration lawyers kept filing individual habeas petitions, the ACLU returned to court to ask Judge Sunshine S. Syke to clarify her order and the government’s obligations. In legal filings, the civil rights group argued that immigration judges had been encouraged by the DOJ and DHS attorneys to ignore the court’s ruling and defer to the controversial BIA decision in Yajure-Hurtado. Judge Syke agreed and tossed the mandatory detention policy memo.
That still wasn’t the end of it. Chief Immigration Judge Teresa Riley has instructed immigration judges to continue to abide by the BIA precedent despite the California judge’s order and emphasized a recent Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling upholding the Trump administration’s interpretation of the law for detainees in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The issue facing several appeals courts is likely to come before the Supreme Court. In a February order vacating the BIA ruling, Judge Syke excoriated the government for carrying out a “campaign of illegal action” and “taking positions that seek to bludgeon separation of powers into oblivion.”
“We’re just kind of in this whole new world where the government is not complying,” the ACLU’s Ngo said. “It really is part and parcel of this administration upending legal norms.” Several federal judges have scolded the government for failing to timely abide by court rulings ordering the release of ICE detainees. One judge in Minnesota criticized the administration for pushing the legal process to a breaking point. “The Catch-22 created by arresting and detaining individuals without a warrant, then making them obtain court orders to vindicate their due process rights, only to deny them the due process they are owed based on a problem of the Government’s own making cannot be condoned,” Judge Michael J. Davis wrote. Another judge in New Jersey accused the government of engaging in “manifest recklessness.” (In statements to the press, DHS has blamed “activist judges” for obstructing President Trump’s mass deportation agenda.)
Meanwhile, lawyers are continuing to fight for their clients’ rights in federal courts. The demand is so great that programs to mentor immigration attorneys to file habeas cases are emerging. The newly launched National Immigration Habeas Institute, an initiative by the National Immigration Litigation Alliance and Cardozo Law School, drew 75 lawyers to its inaugural in-person training last October in New York.
“I’m on all these listservs and groups where people are saying, who can help me in Arizona, who can help me in Mississippi, and people are stepping up and helping each other,” said Sáenz, the former BIA judge and the institute’s managing director. “It feels like that’s where people can make a difference.”
Gividen has kept a tally of the outcome of the habeas petitions his law firm has worked on. So far, his tracker counts at least 35 resolved cases in which judges either granted people release from detention or ordered a bond hearing. That doesn’t include two instances when ICE released clients before a judge issued a final decision. In February, Gividen took on a pro bono case for a Spokane asylum-seeking father and daughter from Guatemala. They had been detained for about a month at the Dilley family detention center in South Texas. Days after Gividen filed the lawsuit challenging their detention, ICE set them free.
“The flip side of all this,” he said, “is that we’re having success damn near everywhere.”
2026-03-03 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and made possible through its partnership with the Salt Lake Tribune, a nonprofit newsroom in Utah. It is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Relations between states are becoming so strained over their different approaches to fossil fuels and renewables, some politicians are calling for a “divorce.”
Utah Republicans celebrated last week when PacifiCorp, one of the largest utilities in the West, announced it would stop serving customers in Washington state. PacifiCorp mainly operates in Utah, but also in Wyoming and Idaho—and, to the chagrin of some Utah legislators, blue states like California and Oregon. Utah legislators had previously pressured to break their utility’s ties with states with more aggressive climate policies. Now, PacifiCorp is handing over its 140,000 customers in Washington—along with two wind farms, a natural gas plant, and other energy infrastructure—to Portland General Electric for $1.9 billion.
“We want a divorce from the three states that don’t look like Utah,” said Mike Schultz, Utah’s Republican House Speaker. “This is the first step forward.”
In announcing the sale, PacifiCorp noted that navigating “diverging policies” among the six states it serves had “created extraordinary pressure,” a challenge that had affected its financial stability. Utah is still heavily reliant on coal, while California, Oregon, and Washington have been moving forward with policies to shift away from fossil fuels.
Washington, for example, aims to slash greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by 2030, using 1990 levels as a baseline. As of January, Washington required PacifiCorp to stop charging Washington customers for coal generation, reducing costs for ratepayers by $68 million compared to the status quo—and potentially shifting coal-related costs back onto states like Utah.
“Clean energy is just the way we’re moving… It’s really a question of just how fast we get there.”
It’s not just money driving the wedge, but also identity. “Absolutely, this seems like a culture war thing,” said Matthew Burgess, an environmental economist at the University of Wyoming who studies political polarization. He sees Republican politicians playing up cultural tensions to appeal to their base, particularly in places where coal’s long-term decline has fueled economic anxiety and resentment. “Some of this rhetoric that blames maybe what’s happening in the industry on coastal progressives and their climate histrionics—you can see how that sort of message might be resonant or cathartic with those communities that are having real problems,” Burgess said.
As the divide grows between blue states demanding clean energy and red states seeking to protect coal, oil, and natural gas, the economic realities of sharing the grid have become a point of contention. This is all unfolding at a time when concerns about rising costs have gripped the country. Electricity prices have climbed, with the average US home’s energy bill 30 percent higher in 2025 than it was 2021—a steep rise, but still in line with overall inflation. While Republicans often blame environmental regulations for rising electricity prices, Democrats typically blame Trump’s attacks on clean energy or the rise of energy-hungry data centers.
The tension over sharing energy costs with blue states rose in Utah in 2024, when Rocky Mountain Power, Utah’s largest electricity provider and part of PacifiCorp, proposed a 30 percent rate increase for most of the state’s customers. The utility said the increase was needed to cover the costs of building new infrastructure and complying with regulations in different states. Utah Republicans grilled Rocky Mountain Power and suggested it could break up with PacifiCorp, its parent company, because of the progressive climate policies it had to comply with in California, Oregon, and Washington. Last year, Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, signed a resolution encouraging an “interstate compact for regional energy collaboration” with Wyoming and Idaho.
“Sadly, we know Utahns are paying more for power because of decisions being made in coastal states, places like Oregon and Washington,” Cox said at the time. “But this is so much more than that.”
This theme has popped up in other parts of the country. Last September, five Republican-led states—Montana, North Dakota, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas—asked federal regulators to stop a $22 billion transmission expansion designed to connect cities in the Upper Midwest to the Great Plains. They argued that sharing the cost of the project would effectively force their ratepayers to subsidize wind and solar for the benefit of Democratic states’ clean energy goals.
Yet as Republicans complain about the costs of building clean energy, Democrats are blaming the costs of keeping fossil fuels alive, noting that the Trump administration is forcing expensive coal plants to stay open past their retirement dates in Washington, Colorado, Indiana, and Michigan. The Michigan coal plant cost ratepayers $80 million in the first four months of running it beyond its planned retirement date, according to the chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission.
“Clean energy is just the way we’re moving,” said Meredith Connolly, director of policy and strategy at Climate Solutions, a clean energy nonprofit in the Pacific Northwest. “It’s really a question of just how fast we get there, and do you create these headwinds that slow down the transition or try to give an unfair leg up to fossil fuels? Those are the silly things we’re seeing that actually drive up electricity costs.”
There are plenty of pressures affecting utilities—market forces, the scramble to procure more electricity to power data centers, and even climate-driven risks. In many states, particularly in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, replacing outdated equipment, protecting power lines, and other measures to withstand more extreme weather conditions is the main driver of rising costs. In California, infrastructure upgrades to reduce wildfire risk (and thus liability costs) are a key factor behind the soaring electricity bills. PacifiCorp, for instance, has faced a slew of lawsuits accusing it of sparking fires in Oregon and California with poorly maintained equipment and has agreed to pay $2.2 billion in settlements.
Some climate advocates worry about what would happen if splitting up the energy market along partisan boundaries became a trend. “Our fates are tied across the energy market,” Connolly said. “And so these would be pretty artificial lines.”
