2026-02-27 20:30:00
The United States has welcomed refugees fleeing persecution under the same law for 45 years, following a tradition dating back to World War II. Through an orderly process, applicants for refugee status undergo extensive federal vetting before arriving. A year after entering the US, they can apply for a green card, and barring any issues, receive one. But late last year, the administration quietly changed the rules.
People protected by the laws are suddenly subject to arrest and detainment.
On January 9, the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services began putting its changes to work, seeking out and detaining lawful refugees who have broken no laws and followed DHS’ processes to the letter. One moment they were law-abiding refugees, the next many were arrested, shackled, and interrogated. DHS calls it Operation Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening (PARRIS), and its first targets are some 5,600 lawful refugees in Minnesota. Nationwide, the new rule means some 100,000 refugees could be locked up—and alongside another, even broader, change initiated by the Trump administration, it suggests that the government’s plan to fill the warehouses it is buying and converting to detention centers rest on ignoring the laws that control its operations.
On January 28, John Tunheim, a federal district judge in Minneapolis, ordered DHS to stop detaining refugees under the new policy in Minnesota as the case proceeds, finding it is likely illegal. It is also a particular brand of authoritarian. The idea of the dual state, developed by Jewish-German labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel in the 1930s to explain the legal system of the Third Reich, describes an authoritarian state divided into two realms: the normative state and the prerogative state. In the former, the rules are followed and the laws upheld. In the latter, the state simply imposes its will, and no law or right or freedom can protect its victims. Frankel described how most Germans in the 1930s lived in the normative state where life and commerce continued to feel normal, while Jews, political dissidents, and other disfavored groups were in the prerogative state, subject to the violent recriminations of the regime. The regime is able to accomplish the goals of the prerogative state because most people lived in the normal of the normative state.
The Trump administration’s treatment of refugees and other immigrants echoes the dual-state model. People who were protected by the laws are suddenly subject to arrest and detainment, possibly for a long time. The scaffolding of their rights is collapsing, and they are now subject to the dark underbelly of Trump’s lawless detention regime.
“ICE is the face of a prerogative state, emerging or actual,” Evan Bernick, a constitutional law professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law, explained to me last year. “It swoops in, it ignores safeguards, you can’t escape it.”
Courts in a burgeoning dual state are left to either push back or validate an unlawful policy. To justify the PARRIS detentions, DHS lawyers point to a section of the 1980 Refugee Act which allows them to take refugees into custody in order to assess their eligibility for a green card. In a new memo released this month to bolster its case, DHS claims that that is an open-ended authority to detain refugees for days, months, or even years as they are vetted again. In his initial order, Tunheim disagreed: “On the plain reading of these statutes, the Court concludes that none of these provisions authorize the prolonged detention” of the plaintiffs. The authority the government cites, Tunheim found, simply isn’t there.
Tunheim also found the government’s argument would lead to absurd results. Because the law “makes refugees ineligible for adjustment [to lawful permanent resident status] until one year after entry, Defendants’ interpretation would subject every refugee to detention, unless USCIS conducted the inspection and examination precisely at the one-year mark,” he wrote. “That outcome is nonsensical and would cause many unadjusted refugees to celebrate their one-year anniversary in this country in a jail cell.” This is obviously not what the law requires. But the administration is asking the courts to apply the judicial stamp of approval to its cruel and absurd policy anyway.
This is not the first instance in which the administration has announced new interpretations of decades-old statutes in order to fill its new detention facilities. In a tortured reinterpretation of a 1996 immigration law, the Trump administration announced in July that anyone who entered the country without permission, no matter how long ago, must be detained without bond for as long as it takes for the government to get their removal order—a process that can take years. As with the new refugee policy, the detention policy makes a hash of the statute. It dares the courts—which have almost uniformly ruled that a bond hearing is required—to interpret a law in a nonsensical and gratuitously cruel fashion. As of early January, some 300 federal judges had found the policy illegal; only around 30 have agreed with the government.
This month, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the administration’s July policy. Suddenly, people who at any point entered the country without permission are subject to months or years of detention if they are in the three states within the circuit: Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In these states, the grounds for release in federal court have now shrunk considerably. Moreover, engaging a lawyer to file a case is a tall order for the millions of people who could be locked up under the policy.
The Fifth Circuit decision came from a three-judge panel in the nation’s most reactionary appeals court, which Trump appointees have turned into a proving ground for far-right and MAGA-aligned priorities. “Congress did not secretly require two million noncitizens to be detained without bond,” Judge Dana Douglas, a Biden appointee on the circuit, wrote in dissent, “when nothing like this had ever been done before, and the whole history of American immigration law suggested it would not be.” Indeed, her colleagues’ ruling didn’t just change the law but, for millions of people now at risk of detainment without bond, effectively nullified it.
To attain detention numbers, the administration must suddenly claim that their own rules no longer apply.
Douglas also hinted at the slippery authoritarian slope of the government’s policy, the way in which it will pull more and more people, and eventually citizens, into its lawless vortex: “With only a little imagination, the government’s and the majority’s reading means that anyone present in this country at any time must carry the precise kinds of identification they would otherwise have only carried to the border for international travel, lest they be mistaken for an inadmissible noncitizen,” she wrote. “The majority seems to be unable to imagine what it might mean to be detained within the United States without the appropriate proof of admissibility, and, without a bond hearing, to require the services of a federal habeas corpus lawyer to show that one is entitled to release and deserves to see the outside of a detention center again.”
A key facet of a dual state is that the normative state is not truly safe. At any moment, one can fall from its protections into the prerogative zone. Racial minorities are certainly more likely to lose their rights in a system that will slowly suck more people into its lawless operations.
In the short term, the decision will incentivize the government to whisk people to the 5th Circuit as soon as they are apprehended, beyond the reach of all the district court judges around the country who have found the policy illegal. But at some point—and it may be soon—the Supreme Court will have to decide whether to help the administration push millions into its growing network of concentration camps, or whether it will call out a blatantly illegal policy. As Bernick warned, “A Supreme Court that gets out of the way” of ICE, “where the state is at its most brutal, and tries to manage everything else as normal, is a dual state Supreme Court.”
Trump campaigned for president on deporting violent wrong-doers. But as both of these new detention programs demonstrate, the administration’s ambition to fill warehouses with millions of humans can only be achieved by locking up people without criminal records. As of November, just five percent of ICE detainees had committed a violent crime. To attain their numbers, the administration must suddenly claim that their own rules no longer apply.
The effect of the mandatory detention policy now sanctioned by the 5th Circuit is to detain people who could otherwise be allowed freedom while removal proceedings take place. According to a brief submitted in the case by the American Immigration Council, a legal and advocacy group, tens of thousands have likely already been the victims of this new policy in recent months. These include people without any criminal history and adults who have been in the US a long time and have deep ties to their community, including children whom they care for and support.
DHS is detaining people who are coming in for immigration appointments, meaning they are specifically targeting people who are already following government orders. This also includes Dreamers, people brought here as children who gave their information to the government in exchange for lawful presence in the country. The government is likewise locking up young people who had assurances against deportation because they crossed the border alone or were abused or abandoned by their parents. Suddenly, all these groups who entered into an agreement of protection from deportation with the government—what is called “deferred action”—are being locked up despite the government’s own rules to the contrary.
Suddenly deprived of the protection of the law, the immigrants and refugees whose detention has been ushered in by these new DHS policies do not enter a civilized detention program, but one that operates with life-threatening cruelty. Accounts from inside detention centers detail conditions of torture. People are fed little, and what they do receive is often moldy, or seems, as a detainee in New Jersey described it in a lawsuit, “identical to cat food.” People with serious health conditions are denied medications. At a detention center in Dilley, Texas, children enter healthy, then soon fall ill, and then are denied care. In Illinois, a woman was detained two weeks after giving birth via cesarean section; while her newborn daughter was away in a hospital NICU, she slept on a bench without access to a breast pump or pain medication. A Cuban man detained at a tent camp in El Paso died in what ICE claimed was “medical distress” but the county medical examiner determined was homicide.
These conditions are so dangerous that people give up and agree to leave the country rather than waste away, making the torture a form of coercion forcing people to give up their legal rights. “People are being deprived of due process already because detention is so coercive,” says Rebecca Cassler, an attorney at the American Immigration Council. “You don’t have access to a lawyer. In many cases, your family might not know where you are for a couple weeks. You’re not getting enough food, you’re not getting medical attention.”
Dual states are characterized by “systematically a domain of lawlessness and systematically a domain of lawfulness,” explains Aziz Huq, a University of Chicago constitutional law professor writing a book about the theory. “You only get that when you have a multiplicity of measures that move people across the line from the world of legality to the world of lawlessness.”
“People are being deprived of due process already.”
It seems clear that, whether or not Trump will fully achieve this, his administration is trying to create a domain of lawlessness around immigration enforcement. ICE ignores constitutional constraints as a matter of policy, operating as a thuggish paramilitary force. The Trump administration wants to trap more and more people in its immigration enforcement apparatus—and keep them there. A Supreme Court that has allowed this legal black hole to expand is aiding in such a state’s creation. And almost certainly, the nation’s highest court will be asked to decide the fate of Trump’s new mandatory detention policy, and likely its novel refugee policy as well.
The Supreme Court has already stepped in to essentially pause constitutional protections that have gotten in the way of the administration’s immigration crackdown. Last June, it allowed the government to proceed with deporting immigrants with final removal orders to so-called “third countries”—a country that is not their home country or another designated in the removal order—even though the law requires a different outcome and the Constitution requires due process, allowing the immigrants to object that they might be tortured in the new country. On Wednesday, a district court judge in Massachusetts issued a ruling against the policy, which means it will wind its way back to the Supreme Court in the coming months. But he stayed the ruling pending appeal, meaning people can still be sent to third countries without an opportunity to object, and where they are likely to be imprisoned, tortured, killed, or returned to their home country for a similar fate.
And last September, the Supreme Court allowed ICE to continue a policy of racial profiling in its detention sweeps and stops, even though the court has repeatedly ruled against the use of race in government policy. Notably, the decision expanded ICE’s terror to US citizens and others people lawfully present, based solely on how they look or talk.
These policies, alongside the new mandatory detention policies, track Trump’s attempts to carve certain disfavored groups out of the protection of the law since his first day back in office. On January 20, 2025, he issued an executive order denying citizenship to certain people born on US soil, despite the clear language of the Constitution’s birthright citizenship clause. In the face of more than a century of near-unanimous consensus, the administration simply declared that the law wasn’t what it said.
On April 1, the highest court will hear arguments over that executive order, which attempts to revoke birthright citizenship for thousands by fiat; to take a class of people clearly entitled to all the protections of citizenship and turn them into a stateless underclass. As Trump attempts to ethnically cleanse the nation through a lawless detention and deportation regime, the birthright citizenship case is one especially high profile test, among many more to come, of what the administration will be allowed to get away with. The contours of a dual state are coming into view, one in which anyone targeted by Trump’s deportation and detention program have no rights that can save them.
2026-02-27 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Agriculture is widely known to be the biggest driver of forest destruction globally, especially in sprawling, high-profile ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest.
But new research published this week finds that non-forest ecosystems—the world’s grasslands, savannas, and wetlands—are being devoured for agriculture at nearly four times the rate as forests. As with forests, the primary driver is livestock.
“The takeaway from this is that livestock and dairy play an outsized role in the loss of our non-forest ecosystems.”
“The goal of this research was really just to understand where in the world this is happening,” said Elise Mazur, a researcher with the Land and Carbon Lab at the World Resources Institute and one of the report’s authors. “We know where deforestation is occurring. But we were less sure about where non-forest ecosystems are being lost.”
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a unique attempt to analyze which types of agriculture are forcing the conversion of natural ecosystems on a global scale, and then to attribute that conversion to demand for specific commodities.
Making that link is critical. Grasslands occupy more of the world’s surface than any other ice-free land, and store a significant chunk of terrestrial carbon—about 34 percent compared to 39 percent for forests. Researchers say they are the most at-risk ecosystems on Earth and yet get relatively little policy attention relative to forests, largely because their disappearance and the causes behind it are not as well understood. Wetlands are being converted to crop and pastureland at about half the rate of dry lands, the researchers found, but are especially important climate sinks.
The new study, which looked at the period from 2005 to 2020, found that, as with forests, the biggest driver of grassland loss is livestock production—from both conversion into pasture for grazing and cropland for growing feed. About half of all non-forest conversion is to pasture, 27 percent to cropland for food and 17 percent into cropland to grow feed for animals, including corn and soybeans.
“When you add together how much conversion there is to pasture and to cropland that’s being used for animal feed, that’s the majority of the conversion,” Mazur said. “The takeaway from this is that livestock and dairy play an outsized role in the loss of our non-forest ecosystems when compared to other commodities or foods.”
The researchers found that feed for livestock accounted for more than one-third of the overall cropland conversion globally, yet in certain growing regions, including Brazil, Argentina, the United States and China, that percentage reached more than 50 percent. More than 30 percent of those crops were destined for export, driven by demand for livestock-based food elsewhere.
“Forests and non-forest ecosystems need to be addressed together.”
The researchers found that biofuels, including ethanol and biodiesel, were major drivers of grassland loss, especially in countries with high demand linked to policy incentives, like the Renewable Fuel Standard in the US. So while just over 12 percent of global non-forest land was converted to cropland for biofuels, that percentage rose to 28 percent in the US., mostly in the prairies of the upper Midwest.
Globally, food consumption accounted for 54 percent of cropland-driven land conversion, meaning much of the world’s finite arable land mass is not being used directly for calories.
The team behind the report, which also included experts from the Rainforest Alliance and Germany’s Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, looked at extensive land-use change datasets, then used models to allocate the change to particular types of agriculture. Finally, they analyzed trade data to determine how market demand contributed to the conversion.
Land-use datasets, historically, have been unable to adequately distinguish pasture from cropland, mostly because one is often converted to the other and existing measurements aren’t sensitive enough to determine the difference. That has meant previous research either focused just on conversion to cropland or failed to capture the distinction between pasture and cropland or the contribution of particular agricultural commodities to either.
Mazur says her hope is that policy makers and companies that depend on agricultural commodities start to incorporate grassland conversion into conservation targets. Some voluntary initiatives, including the Soy Moratorium in Brazil, were credited with reducing deforestation there, but also pushed agricultural expansion into the neighboring Cerrado, a vast savanna.
“Both forests and non-forest ecosystems need to be addressed together,” Mazur said. “If you only look at one, it can push the conversion to another ecosystem. We want to make sure that any policy or voluntary targets address all natural ecosystems.”
2026-02-27 03:22:48
Last fall, an informational sign vanished from a patch of grass across from Chevy Chase Circle in Northwest Washington, DC. The placard—installed in 2022 by the National Park Service after much discussion—described the career of Sen. Francis Newlands, who represented Nevada in Congress for a quarter century and championed irrigation projects in the American west.
In early November, without any announcement from the Park Service, neighbors noticed that the sign was gone. “It just disappeared one day,” said Stephanie Rigaux, a local historian whose Facebook post about the removal is one of the few records of the incident.
The Interior Department, which runs the National Park Service, wouldn’t answer my questions about what happened to the sign. But the mystery doesn’t seem hard to crack. It was evidently a casualty of Donald Trump’s campaign to bar the government from presenting American history in “a negative light.”
“It just disappeared one day.”
The timeline is instructive. In 1932, Congress approved naming a fountain in the circle, which sits on federal land, after Newlands. Ninety years later, in the wake of a nationwide racial reckoning, the Biden administration’s National Park Service installed the offending sign in an effort to add some context regarding Newlands’ legacy. It noted that in addition to his legislative accomplishments, Newlands was a white supremacist who advocated denying citizenship and voting rights to people of color.
Then last March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order instructing government agencies to purge “improper ideology” and “divisive narratives” from federal lands and museums and to ensure that those sites are “uplifting.” The Trump administration appears to have determined that the Newlands sign violated that policy.
Chevy Chase Circle is far from alone. Last May, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum moved to implement Trump’s order, directing the Park Service to scrutinize more than 400 national parks, monuments, battlefields, and historic sites—as well as federally controlled DC green space—for insufficiently patriotic material. The Park Service is removing and altering signs, exhibits, and other media deemed to be “non-conformant” with Trump’s wishes. So far the department has reviewed more than 2,000 pieces of media, according to a person with knowledge of the effort, and has ordered the removal or alteration of at least a few hundred signs and exhibits.
The Interior Department is keeping the precise figures under wraps, and it declined to provide specifics about why the material being targeted is objectionable. “Because this work is still underway, there is no finalized or comprehensive list of changes, and it would be premature to speculate about specific wordage, images, or exhibit content that may or may not be revised,” a spokesperson said.
The Trump administration, that is, is attempting to remove public information in secret.
“It’s left everybody who is concerned about this in the dark,” Alan Spears, senior director at the non-profit National Parks Conservation Association, told Mother Jones. “There is no transparency. We don’t know where these sign removals are going to happen.”
As Trump’s clandestine censorship campaign proceeds, displays that focus on persecution and environmental degradation have become particular targets. But the Park Service is also planning to remove signs that merely acknowledge the existence of controversy or conflict.
At Fort Laramie National Historic Site in Wyoming, the National Park Service plans to alter or remove a sign, titled “A Father’s Grief … A Soldier’s Honor,” that sits alongside a burial marker for Mni Akuwin, the daughter of Lakota chief Spotted Tail. The placard consists mostly of quotes from Army Colonel Henry Maynadier describing a funeral service he arranged at the fort for Mni Akuwin, who had died a few months earlier. The elaborate funeral, which Maynadier reported had moved Spotted Tail to tears, likely helped secure a peace deal with the tribe.
A Park Service official told me that the sign had been flagged by the Interior Department due to a line it quotes from a letter Maynadier sent his wife. Maynadier wrote that after the funeral service, “I can never be willing to see these people, swindled, ill-treated and abused as they have been.” (You can read the full text of the sign here.)
“How stupid can we get?”
Charles Rankin, a longtime editor and historian of the American West who has written about Mni Akuwin’s funeral, finds the decision galling. “That signage celebrates the fact that these people, over her grave, came together,” Rankin said in an interview. “It celebrates reconciliation. How stupid can we get?”
At Montana’s Glacier National Park, the Park Service is preparing to remove signs telling visitors why the eponymous glaciers are shrinking, as well as placards about declining air quality. The agency has taken down a season of a podcast, called Headwaters, that was produced by park employees. And Interior has ordered employees to remove or alter a film about the park shown to visitors. Written guidance from the department said the changes are necessary due to “scientific inaccuraries [sic]” in the film, but it did not specify what is supposedly incorrect.
Glacier is also removing a sign that attributes a sharp increase in wildfires in the American west to “hotter and drier conditions,” as well as a sign that describes the “controversy” over the hunting of wolves. The department did not explain those decisions.
The department was more forthcoming with its reasoning for replacing a different sign at Glacier. That placard, titled “Blame It on the Grain,” describes the construction of a dam that created a reservoir in the eastern part of the park to support farming. “Rename it something else,” Interior guidance sent to the park says. ”’Blame’ has negative tone to it, when the actual reality is the dam was created to help support American Agriculture and feed America’s growing population.”
Some of the administration’s efforts to implement Trump’s order—such as the removal of exhibits in Philadelphia about people enslaved by George Washington and of panels citing the effects of climate change at Acadia National Park and Fort Sumter—have already drawn attention and outrage. On February 16, federal District Court Judge Cynthia Rufe ordered the Park Service to restore the Philadelphia exhibits. Rufe said the removal violated agreements requiring the city’s consent, and compared the Trump administration to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984. (After restoration began, a federal appeals court gave the administration a partial stay, freezing the exhibits as they are while the court considers the case.)
Still, NPS is moving ahead with sign removals at an industrial scale. The process, launched with Trump’s executive order in March, accelerated in May when Burgum issued a memo implementing the president’s plans at the Park Service and other Interior agencies. The memo instructed NPS to “remove content” that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).” Burgum also ordered the removal of information regarding natural features of the American landscape if it “emphasizes matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance or grandeur of said natural feature.”
Burgum did not elaborate on that latter instruction. But current and former parks employees described it as ill-advised, and baffling, since applying it literally would require removal of many signs providing basic scientific information. At Muir Woods National Monument in California, for example, the agency recently covered a sign explaining how carbon emissions harm redwoods. And Big Bend National Park in Texas plans to remove signs related to geology, prehistoric times, and fossils, according to the Washington Post.
What remains might not be especially enlightening. “You don’t really need an exhibit at a historic viewpoint to say, “Hey, that really looks good,” said Bill Hayden, Glacier’s former head of interpretation.
In June, Park Service staffers across the country were instructed to post QR codes and signs encouraging visitors to report any material they felt should be altered. Burgum also ordered the heads of national parks units to submit for review their own lists of signs or other media that might run afoul of Trump’s executive order. The Interior Department sent back decisions in September and then made additional rulings in January.
Current and past parks employees derided these commands. “I think it’s stupid,” said Hayden. “The goal was to explain the nature and cultural resources to the visiting public—and a lot of those concepts and ideas are not just readily apparent to someone stopping on the side of the road and looking at something.”
Responding to widespread criticism, an Interior spokesperson said that the department’s review “is not about removing history or advancing any single political ideology. It is a collaborative process designed to ensure that the full and accurate history of America is presented, grounded in professional standards and inclusive of multiple perspectives, including those of tribal nations.”
But Park Service employees, who spoke to Mother Jones on the condition of anonymity, described this process, as it has played out nationally, as haphazard, top-down, and far from collaborative.
“It’s childishly unprofessional,” said one current NPS employee involved with producing public material. “It’s not like a serious engagement with the process, or an attempt to educate the public about science or our world.”
Employees said the Interior Department’s instructions are vague, leaving senior career officials, who in many cases are worried about their jobs amid mass firings of government workers, to decide how much self-censorship to engage in.
The department’s demands “paralyzed a lot of the parks, because there was no guidance,” one employee said.
According to material obtained by Mother Jones, some park units, like Yellowstone, submitted few or no signs for review by Interior Department officials in Washington. But some other park superintendents generated extensive lists of potentially non-compliant signs. Department officials designated many of those submissions for removal, often without explaining their reasoning, park employees said.
Mother Jones obtained a spreadsheet summarizing the Interior Department’s review of submissions from 33 sites in NPS’ Intermountain Region, which includes some of the most-visited parks. Of 81 submissions, the department said 46 should be altered or removed. The document does not include the department’s reasoning beyond declaring the items to be in “non-conformance” with Burgum’s order. Those include the signs slated for removal at Glacier, the Fort Laramie sign, the Big Bend signage related to dinosaurs and geology, and a panel at Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park describing the role of a cavalry captain who explored the region in an 1870 massacre of Blackfeet Native Americans.
“We are being undermined by a clown show of greedy billionaire priorities that are not of service to the parks or country.”
Park service employees described the sign removals as part of a string of interference from Washington that has crushed NPS morale.
“We are being undermined by a clown show of greedy billionaire priorities that are not of service to the parks or country,” one employee said.
A former NPS employee who was laid off last year characterized the department’s management style as “bullying and demoralizing,” carried out “in an idiotic and not thought-through way.”
The Park Service had lost around a quarter of its workforce by July of last year, due to firings and other causes, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. And attrition continues as the agency struggles to replace departing staff, employees said.
The Interior Department meanwhile is moving to increase its control over various park service communications. The department has shifted hundreds of employees in public outreach jobs into what it calls a “Consolidated Office of Communications.” Last month, it imposed “a strategic pause” on website updates by NPS staffers as it installed a system in which department officials sign off on new online content. And it recently announced that the department’s press staff will review publication of all social media produced by national parks, according to employees and internal material shared with Mother Jones. “Social media needs to be reviewed and published by someone trained and educated and aligned with NPS and the department as a whole,” Elizabeth Peace, a senior public affairs specialist at the Interior Department, said during a January 15 call with Park Service employees.
NPS employees have even received directions on how to respond to questions about sign removals. Internal guidance instructs them not to “reference media stories, leaked documents or internal reviews”; suggests they “redirect calmly and consistently”; and says that they “do NOT need to engage in conversation about individual signs or parks, which signs are from [Burgum’s order] vs weather or damage. The comms team will take those.”
The department’s communications team did not answer my questions about individual signs and parks. In response to a detailed list of queries, a spokesperson wrote: “Mother Jones is a failing liberal blog that has this story completely wrong. This blog is too small and insignificant to waste our time correcting them when we are focused on implementing the agenda of President Trump – the most iconic and accomplished President in the history of our great nation.”
The iconic president’s war on park signs isn’t slowing down. Many of the removals the Interior Department has ordered in colder locations will not be executed until spring. In guidance sent to NPS employees in January, Burgum said the department is still reviewing material and instructed parks “to work with regional offices to review next steps for their non-conformant media items.” Interior Department officials have recently visited sites throughout the Park Service’s Washington, DC, region, according to an NPS employee, generating worries they will demand additional alterations.
This chaotic process, current and former agency employees said, contrasts with the deliberative efforts through which the signs and exhibits were originally created. The Newlands sign, for instance, was installed in 2022, the culmination of a multi-year project. Its design and brief narrative were influenced by an expert group convened in 2020, following nearly a decade of debate over public calls to rename the fountain.
The sign disappeared, however, without notice. The removal came during the government shutdown last year, when federal employees were furloughed, raising the question of who actually dislodged it. An NPS employee told Mother Jones that Frank Lands, the Park Service’s deputy director for operations—the top career employee at the agency—personally removed the sign to comply with White House wishes.
Lands, whom I contacted directly, didn’t respond to my questions about this claim. An Interior Department spokesperson said only that the agency “does not comment on specific personnel,” and wouldn’t even confirm that the department was responsible for the sign’s removal.
That is how the United States government is implementing a presidential directive to “restore Federal sites dedicated to history.” The administration appears to have removed a carefully created piece of public information—with no announcement or explanation for why Americans should not be informed that a prominent US senator was a racist.
Now, where the sign once stood, all that remains are two small holes in the ground.
2026-02-27 02:37:17
Federal immigration agents detained a Columbia University student on Thursday morning after reportedly gaining access to university housing by falsely claiming they were looking for a missing person, according to Claire Shipman, Columbia’s acting president.
The Department of Homeland Security went after Ellie Aghayeva, a senior majoring in neuroscience and political science, according to a statement released by her friends to a faculty organization, the American Association of University Professors. The statement said that Aghayeva, who is from Azerbaijan, is an international student with a visa.
Aghayeva posted a photo of what appears to be her sitting in a car on her Instagram story Thursday morning with an overlay of text: “Dhs illegally arrested me. Please help.”
Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal wrote on X that federal agents “used a phony missing persons bulletin for a 5 year old girl” when they “purposefully deceived campus housing/security to gain entry to the student’s apartment.”
Shipman, in her statement, said the university was “working to gather more details.” New York outlet The City is reporting that Aghayeva has already filed a habeas corpus petition asking a federal judge to order her release.
Aghayeva was detained the morning after an “ICE Off Campus” protest demanding that Columbia “establish stronger protections for international students and declare itself a sanctuary campus,” according to the Columbia Daily Spectator.
The detainment also comes close to a year after Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist and legal permanent resident who had just graduated from Columbia, was detained by plainclothes officers in university housing. Khalil became one of the highest-profile detainees in the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against non-US citizens and students who displayed pro-Palestinian views. Khalil was released from detention over the summer, but is still actively fighting deportation.
It’s not clear whether Aghayeva has any connection to the Columbia encampments or campus protests against ICE.
In a joint statement Thursday, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin and council member Shaun Abreu, whose district includes Columbia, wrote: “ICE has no place in our schools and universities. These activities do not make our city or country safer, but rather drive mistrust and danger.”
Aghayeva, who has more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, often posts influencer-style videos about studying and her dedication to schoolwork. In a video she posted in August of last year, she compiled a supercut of her studying in the library with the caption, “Studying is hard but my parents sacrificed everything across the ocean for me to be here. They deserve a successful daughter.”
2026-02-26 23:30:15
At 26, Isaiah Taylor had accomplished more than most people do by the time they’re twice his age. The founder of Valar Atomics, a Southern California-based company that aims to make small-scale nuclear reactors, Taylor, a father of four, has government contracts, invitations to Mar-a-Lago, and investments from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley venture capital. His goal is nothing less than to usher the United States into an era of nuclear power domination—becoming the next Elon Musk while he’s at it. “We do not appreciate SpaceX enough,” he tweeted last year. “If it were not for a single highly motivated American startup, China would be preparing to simply own outer space. Now they’re playing catch-up. I plan to make Valar Atomics the equivalent for energy.”
The political winds appear to be at his back. “Unleashing nuclear energy is how we will power American artificial intelligence,” posted US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright on X last year. “Nuclear energy provides the constant energy needed to power data centers and release the full potential of American innovation.” Last September, the DOE named Valar as one of four companies to participate in a pilot program to build nuclear fuel lines; two months later, the company became the first-ever venture-backed startup to reach the nuclear milestone of splitting atoms using its own reactor. “This moment marks the dawn of a new era in American nuclear engineering—one defined by speed, scale, and private-sector execution with closer federal partnership,” Taylor said of the achievement in a press release. Max Ukropina, Valar Atomics’ Head of Projects, added, “America should be thrilled but wanting more.”
Taylor’s trajectory has been as unconventional as it is meteoric. The high-school dropout’s path to success included a controversial Christian nationalist church and an assist from a Russian-American power broker with ties to both the Kremlin and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein—but practically no experience with nuclear energy. Nuclear experts have raised red flags about both the feasibility of Valar’s goals and its safety claims—but those concerns do not appear to faze Taylor, who went on the offense last year, entering Valar into a lawsuit against the US government over what it considers a prohibitively restrictive interpretation of US nuclear safety rules. As Taylor put it in a tweet last November, “Civilization is an inconceivably precious thing. But the way to keep it alive is by continually treating it as a frontier, not covering everything in bubble wrap.”
“Civilization is an inconceivably precious thing. But the way to keep it alive is by continually treating it as a frontier, not covering everything in bubble wrap.”
But those rules have not stopped the Trump administration from working with Valar—earlier this month, the US government announced a partnership with the company to test its reactor for government use. “President Trump promised the American people that he would unleash American energy dominance,” US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright enthused about the partnership with Valar on X. “This is the next chapter for U.S. energy.”
Since the advent of nuclear energy in 1942, the field has been controversial, largely because of high-profile accidents such as the disasters at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. Tight safety regulations make large-scale reactors expensive and cumbersome to build, and people don’t exactly jump at the chance to host one in their neighborhood.
Taylor founded Valar to address these barriers—smaller, more nimble reactors, he reasoned, would be both safer and more convenient. While the larger, traditional reactors typically produce enough power to fuel up to a million homes continuously, Taylor’s units are much more modest, big enough to power only about 5,000 homes.
Small-scale nuclear reactors like the ones that Taylor aims to build are not new—in fact, during the Cold War, both the United States and Russia used them to power satellites. Building them on land, however, has always proved prohibitively expensive; it’s much more cost-efficient to build one big reactor than a series of small ones, explains Nick Touran, a nuclear engineer who runs the informational site whatisnuclear.com. But that thinking is beginning to change: Small reactors could come in handy for AI data centers and also on remote military bases, where shipping fuel is both expensive and dangerous. In theory, small, portable reactors could act like batteries, powering a data center or a base for years without the need for more fuel.
The handful of nuclear experts I spoke with all acknowledged that small reactors would be desirable, but they weren’t sure Valar could manage to make them both cost-effective and scalable. “It’s not a new technology, but nobody’s been able to make it successful in electricity markets,” said Allison Macfarlane, a former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission who currently heads the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. She referred to Taylor and other nuclear start-up founders as “nuke bros” who “don’t know what they don’t know.” Touran said he thought it was possible for Valar to make good progress on small reactors, but he had his doubts that they would succeed in making them profitable. “I think high risk, high reward,” he said. “It’s unlikely to be economically competitive, in my opinion.”
The long odds don’t seem to bother Taylor, who sees himself as fitting in the grand tradition of an old-fashioned rags-to-riches American story. In a 2024 post on X, Taylor described growing up poor in Kentucky and teaching himself to code on the family computer before he was even in high school. When he was 12, he wrote, his father promised to buy him a laptop if he would agree to pay his own way through college. Taylor took him up on the offer and proceeded to drop out of high school. By 16, he claimed that he was “making six figures.” By 17, he had moved with his family to Moscow, Idaho, where he started an auto-repair shop while living on his friend’s couch. “The business was deep in the red and barely hanging on,” he recalled in the post on X. But he persevered, and eventually the shop succeeded. “My software career did well too,” he wrote. “Life is more comfortable now, monetarily. I still work like a dog, but I don’t think about the next rent payment as much as I did.”
Small-town Idaho may seem like a strange place for an ambitious young coder, but he stayed there for a compelling reason. As Taylor explained on X in 2023, he lived in Moscow “in order to be part of a medium-sized church community.” That community was the fiefdom founded by Doug Wilson, the self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor of Moscow’s Christ Church. In a 2023 tweet, Taylor described Wilson as “a huge influence on me regarding wealth.” In an email to Mother Jones, Wilson said he first met a teenage Taylor when his family relocated to Moscow; Wilson described Taylor as “a go-getter.” Taylor didn’t respond to our request for comment on his relationship with Wilson and other details of this story.
Wilson has attracted widespread media attention for his controversial statements, including his remark to CNN last year that “women are the kind of people that people come out of.” As I wrote in 2024:
He has argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” called the trope of the dominant man and a submissive woman “an erotic necessity,” and opined that women never should have been given the right to vote. When I asked him about his most provocative statements, he compared himself to a chef who cooks with jalapeño peppers: “Some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapeños, and put them on one Ritz cracker,” he told me.
While running the auto repair shop, coding, attending Wilson’s church, and starting a family, Taylor spent the next six years on “nights and weekends of research,” he told the tech publication Infinite Frontiers in 2024, he decided to tackle the problem of making nuclear power profitable—large reactors often scare off investors because they can cost billions to build and can take more than a decade to come online. Taylor says his interest in nuclear power runs in the family; his great-grandfather, Ward Schaap, worked on the Manhattan Project as a nuclear physicist. In 2023, Taylor founded Valar Atomics in the Southern California defense tech hub of El Segundo. Although Taylor hasn’t explained publicly why he chose the name, in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, the Valar are angelic guardians who helped create the world and control nature.
In El Segundo’s macho scene of young, conservative Christian founders, Taylor fit right in. With his friend Augustus Doricko, founder of another buzzy El Segundo startup, the cloud-seeding company Rainmaker, he began attending a nearby church in the denomination Wilson founded. On social media, Taylor sometimes posts scripture—for Christmas last year, a bible verse about the birth of Jesus appeared on the Valar house account, accompanied by a photo of its nuclear reactor prototypes wearing Santa hats.
In El Segundo, Taylor quickly scored connections to an exclusive network of high-powered tech investors. He secured a pre–seed round of $1.5 million from the firm Riot Ventures, and just over a year later, in 2025, he announced a seed round of $19 million, with funding from Silicon Valley power players such as investor and author Balaji Srinivasan. Later that year, he obtained a $130 million funding round.
And here is where the story departs from the more familiar tech entrepreneur-scores-a-big-win narrative, with an unusual Venn diagram of Taylor’s professional, religious, and personal interests converging on an unexpected protagonist. A co-leader of that round was Day One Ventures, a firm that says it aims to “back early-stage companies with customer obsession in their DNA.” Day One’s founder, visionary leader, and sole general partner is Masha Bucher, a one-time pro-Putin Russian political activist-turned Jeffery Epstein publicist-turned Silicon Valley kingmaker.
Before Bucher came to the United States in 2014, she still lived in Russia and was an enthusiastic supporter of Putin. There is a well-circulated 2009 photo of her as a teenager kissing Putin on the cheek; it became the subject of the 2011 documentary Putin’s Kiss. It’s unclear how she landed a gig doing publicity for convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in 2017, but her name comes up several times in the recently released batch of files of Epstein’s communications. On one occasion in 2017, when she still had her original last name, Drokova, she asked Epstein to connect her with “adequate Russian oligarchs.” In 2018 Epstein wrote in an email to Bucher that her friend had “told me about the project she is doing researching a really bad guy that gets children for sex sent to his island…she almost fainted when I told her that person is me.” He asked her for nude photos of herself 11 days before he was arrested for the second time in 2019. Bucher, who did not respond to our request for comment, has claimed that she was never paid by Epstein for the work she did.
Bucher apparently already had some of those connections to wealthy Russians that she had asked Epstein to arrange—and in fact, she introduced Epstein to one of them. Her first boss in the world of tech venture capitalism was Serguei Beloussov, who later changed his name to Serg Bell. “Connecting you here,” she wrote to Epstein and Bell in 2018. “You both are one [sic] of the most intelligent and fun people I met in my life. Super smart and special.”
Bucher worked for Bell at two firms Bell had cofounded: Runa Capital and Acronis. In 2022, Bell was one of a handful of Russian expats living in the US who were tracked by the US government for allegedly attempting to export US tech developments to Russia. The government did not find evidence of a security breach, but it did bar Acronis from sensitive government contracts last year. (Bell recently told the Washington Post that he never worked for Epstein, and that he advised others against doing business with him; he has also disavowed his Russian connections.)
“I gave up my Russian passport years ago, can’t return without risking my freedom, and have publicly opposed the Putin regime.”
According to reporting by the Washington Post, early fundraising materials for Day One Ventures show Bucher boasting of her connections to Russian billionaires Alexander Mamut and Vladimir Yevtushenkov, though she later denied writing the fundraising materials and has said she never took money from Russian oligarchs. She has said she left the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi in 2010, and she recently posted on X that was branded a traitor by Russian state media in 2017. “I gave up my Russian passport years ago, can’t return without risking my freedom, and have publicly opposed the Putin regime,” she wrote. Yet sleuths on X have found evidence that those statements may not be true. Reporting by Russian-British investigative journalist Maria Pevchikh shows Bucher speaking at a pro-Putin event in 2019, years after she claimed to have disavowed him. According to records obtained by Pevchikh, she still holds a valid Russian passport, though she told the Washington Post in 2022, “I deeply regret ever joining Nashi and supporting Putin and his government.”
Bucher, who has also invested in Taylor’s friend Doricko’s company, seems to be more than just a funder for the companies she supports. A Day One pitch deck boasts that the firm is “actively involved in its portfolio companies and play a real, tangible role in helping them grow.” In an interview last year with TechCrunch, Bucher said her goal in founding the firm was to provide not only funding but also PR help to the companies she invested in. She also appears to enjoy a close relationship with Valar executives, posting photos of herself on social media attending parties with them. While Doricko cut ties with Bucher after the most recent Epstein disclosures, Taylor has done no such thing.
Bucher said that Taylor himself drew her to Valar. “I can’t think of a better founder,” she told TechCrunch. The decisions she would trust him with, she added, are “literally life-and-death.”
Not everyone is as bullish as Bucher about Valar’s prospects—nuclear experts have raised serious questions about the safety of the company’s technology and the qualifications of its leadership. In April 2025, Taylor boasted in a post on the Valar website that the company’s spent fuel was so safe that holding it in one’s bare hands for five minutes would result in a dose equivalent only to that of a CT scan. On X, Touran, the nuclear engineer, challenged the claim. “This statement cannot possibly be true,” he wrote. “Any nuclear reactor of the power you’re referring to makes spent fuel [that] would give a person a fatal dose within a few seconds if they were to hold a handful of spent fuel.” Another nuclear engineer, Gavin Ridley, chimed in with his own calculation: He found that Valar’s spent fuel would deliver a lethal dose in 85 milliseconds of direct contact. Taylor posted in response, “I will follow up with a detailed writeup tonight or tomorrow, back to back today. Should be fun…” He never did.
Although there are now some seasoned nuclear engineers in the company’s leadership, some of the top brass appear to have as little nuclear experience as Taylor. Kip Mock, a fellow member of Wilson’s Idaho church and a co-founder of Taylor’s auto repair shop, is now Valar’s head of operations. Another church member, Elijah Froh, serves as Valar’s director of business operations. (A story last year by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project revealed that Mock accidentally set Froh on fire in 2021 when he poured old diesel into a wood-burning stove and caused an explosion.)
Questions about safety apparently have not deterred Taylor, who appears to be as determined as ever to forge ahead. Last April, Valar announced it was joining several other companies and a handful of states in filing a lawsuit against the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission over what they claim is an overly broad interpretation of safety regulations around testing nuclear reactors. In a post about the lawsuit, Taylor argued that the rules should allow Valar to test its reactor prototype, the Ward One. “Operating Ward One in a remote testing area within the United States would not pose a threat to the health and safety of the public or impact national security based on any reasonable accident scenario,” wrote Taylor. “However, because the NRC has failed to implement rules which would exempt this small test reactor from full NRC regulations, we are building and testing this reactor in the Philippines instead.” Mock, Taylor’s employee who accidentally set his buddy on fire in Idaho is heading the Philippines project. Taylor told Business Insider that the company planned to move “really fast” on it. Separately, last May, the state of Utah, a fellow plaintiff in the lawsuit, announced that it had won a “tight race”—through its Operation Gigawatt program aimed at attracting nuclear companies—with other states to host Valar’s first test reactor for the DOE.
The Trump administration is on board with nuclear, too. In an executive order last May, Trump vowed to have three test reactors up and running by July 4th of this year. In a recent interview with podcaster Shawn Ryan, Taylor called that goal “unbelievably exciting.” Last fall, the Trump administration quietly pushed through a suite of major changes to the laws that govern US nuclear facilities. The new rules, which weren’t made public but were only shared with companies with government contracts, dramatically loosened requirements around safety, accidents, and environmental protections, according to reporting by NPR.
In his interview with Ryan, Taylor lavished praise on Trump and his administration. “You have to give President Trump credit for that in bringing this unbelievably talented, motivated group of people together,” he said. “Listen, I think this Trump administration is going to usher in the nuclear golden age.”
“Listen, I think this Trump administration is going to usher in the nuclear golden age.”
His enthusiasm turned out to be warranted. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced that it had chosen Valar’s reactor for a contract with the Department of War and the Department of Energy. On February 15, the reactor was transported on a special flight from March Air Reserve in Riverside County, California, to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. “The successful delivery and installation of this reactor will unlock significant possibilities for the future of energy resilience and strategic independence for our nation’s defense,” a DOW press release stated. “This event is a testament to the ingenuity of the American spirit and a critical advancement in securing our nation’s freedom and strength for generations to come.”
2026-02-26 07:17:44
The Trump administration is considering an executive order that would compel banks to collect citizenship information from customers, new and existing, who want to maintain service in the United States, according to new reporting from the Wall Street Journal.
This potential escalation in the administration’s campaign against non-US citizens would also add more hurdles for victims of domestic abuse who are trying to leave their unsafe circumstances—whether they’re citizens or not.
While banks are required to collect some personal information to protect themselves from fraud, “banks don’t routinely share that information with the government,” and there “is no prohibition on banks opening accounts for noncitizens,” per the Journal.
White House spokesman Kush Desai told the Journal that “Any reporting about potential policymaking that has not been officially announced by the White House is baseless speculation.” But banks, the paper reports, are “alarmed.”
It’s unclear what exactly the administration would demand from banks and their users, though the action could impact those who are in the country legally but aren’t citizens and those without access to key documentation that could prove citizenship—a category that includes many survivors of intimate partner violence, up to 99 percent of whom also experience some kind of financial abuse. Teal Inzunza, associate vice president of justice initiatives at the Urban Resource Institute in New York, works with survivors of domestic violence. Financial abuse, she told me, can look like “withholding documentation.”
“An abusive partner will hold somebody’s ID, their passport, their immigration information, as a form of power and control in an abusive relationship,” she said. If the Trump administration were to require banks to confirm citizenship, Inzunza continued, it would “add another layer of difficulty for survivors and immigrants to access a necessary part of our economy” and “will make getting a bank account nearly impossible for many of them.”
Having access to an independent bank account for those experiencing financial and domestic abuse can be paramount for making a plan to leave. Proof of income is often required to secure housing; courts discerning custody agreements want parents to illustrate that they can financially support children; employers might ask for a direct deposit form or banking information; getting access to a vehicle may require a bank account or credit information. It’s also safer for survivors to siphon money away into a bank account than to depend on hoarding cash in the same home as their abuser.
Even if President Donald Trump doesn’t move forward with an executive order, others in the GOP may take up the cause. After the Journal’s initial reporting on Tuesday, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas was quick to show his support for the potential bank requirement. “I strongly support President Trump taking action to prevent illegal migrants from accessing our banking system,” he wrote on X, adding that he “will be introducing legislation on this issue shortly.” Cotton also shared a letter that he wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in October of last year, urging the department head to “undertake a comprehensive review” to prevent “illegal aliens” from accessing US banks. The senator wrote that “we are permitting illegal aliens to establish financial roots and integrate economically.”
As Trump and his administration continue to detain tens of thousands of non-US citizens, an already complicated reality for immigrant survivors of abuse has become even more fearful.
In January of 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was rescinding protections for “sensitive zones,” which can include domestic violence shelters. In the spring of 2025, The Alliance for Immigrant Survivors surveyed over 170 advocates and attorneys nationwide. When asked, more than three in four advocates reported that the immigrant survivors they work with have concerns about contacting the police. As The Marshall Project noted, several victims of domestic violence were killed by their abusers last summer after reportedly not reaching out to law enforcement because they feared deportation.
Because of the imminent fear of violence, victims often need to flee quickly—sometimes bringing very little with them. Needing those documents to prove legal status, should the banking rules change, could mean trying to get an abuser to hand them over or paying large sums to have them replaced. Gaining access to documents can be complicated and dangerous, especially, Inzunza said, if “your abusive partner is holding those hostage.”
