2026-01-27 23:52:00
Donald Trump announced Monday that he is sending his border czar, Tom Homan, to Minnesota to take charge of the chaotic immigration operation that led to the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good by federal agents. According to Trump, Homan “knows and likes many of the people” in the state, and his arrival comes amid growing criticism—including from some Republicans and conservatives—over the administration’s violent crackdown. The Trump administration also removed hard-right Border Patrol official Greg Bovino from Minnesota.
Homan is being portrayed by many as a less extreme and more professional alternative to the leadership of Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. But these days, Homan is hardly a moderate. Last year, he called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) “the dumbest congresswoman ever” and attempted to enlist the Justice Department to investigate her over her efforts to educate migrants on their constitutional rights. In April, during a speech in Arizona, he waved off concerns that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tactics were spreading fear, saying that “if you’re in this country illegally, you should be looking over your shoulder.”
For decades, Homan worked at Customs and Border Protection, before being appointed to position at ICE during the Obama administration. He pioneered the use of family separations to deter immigration and helped implement that policy as acting ICE director in the first Trump administration.
Homan left government in 2018 and established a consulting business. In the summer of 2024, he was reportedly recorded accepting $50,000 in a paper bag from businessmen—who were actually undercover FBI agents—seeking help winning contracts with ICE if Trump returned to office. Homan has said he did nothing illegal and has stated that he “didn’t take $50,000 from anybody.” Trump’s Justice Department ultimately dropped the matter after investigators, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing.”
In 2018, my colleague Noah Lanard wrote a lengthy profile of Homan. People who worked with Homan prior to the Trump years remembered him as a voice for nuance who was focussed on ensuring positive public optics for immigration policy. At the time, some officials who had interacted with him for years were surprised that Homan was fitting into the Trump administration’s immigration machine so smoothly. Homan, one said, had become “unrecognizable”:
Homan was “the person who made the most passionate argument against removing anybody,” [former Obama White House official Cecilia] Muñoz says. Muñoz had won a MacArthur “genius” grant for her work on behalf of immigrants, yet Homan was the one making the strongest case against arresting people who came to the US as minors. Homan, she recalls, said he didn’t want a repeat of the 2000 Elián González case, when a Cuban boy was taken from his Miami relatives at gunpoint. Homan says in a statement to Mother Jones that he didn’t think the arrests would have been “the best use of our limited resources.”
Still, Homan became the face of Trump’s aggressive enforcement efforts in the first term, recommending the policy that led to family separations. He was known for fiery attacks and for firmly backing his boss. And he seemed to understand how how to leverage Trump’s fixation with appearances:
Crucially for a president obsessed with appearance, Homan—a barrel-chested former cop—looks the part. His presence is imposing enough that two former colleagues said, unprompted, that they’d never seen him bully someone. In July, Trump said he’d heard that Homan looks “very nasty.” He replied, “That’s exactly what I was looking for.” Many of the 12 former colleagues of Homan interviewed for this article, from Arizona, Texas, and Washington, DC, say he has a soft side behind the gruff exterior. But that hasn’t stopped Homan from playing up his “cop’s cop” persona on TV, surely aware that it goes over well with his most important viewer.
In Trump’s second term, Homan’s perceived proximity to private interests has emerged as a significant issue. FBI sting notwithstanding, he pledged to avoid any involvement with federal contracting when he returned to government in 2025 as White House border czar. But as Mother Jones and the Project on Government Oversight reported last fall, at least some prospective government contractors seemed to believe he could be helpful. In one instance, we found that a company seeking federal contracts told investors that it was “trying to get access to Tom Homan and the folks over at DHS at the secretary level.” Meanwhile, some of Homan’s former clients are landing big federal paydays:
In addition, a review by Mother Jones and the Project On Government Oversight shows that a number of Homan’s former clients from his time in the private sector have been awarded lucrative border and immigration-related contracts during the second Trump administration. Those projects include constructing private prisons, sprawling migrant detention camps, and a section of border wall. It is not clear whether Homan has played any role in helping his former clients land these deals—the White House says he has no involvement in the “actual awarding” of contracts.
Regardless, the pattern highlights what critics call the legalized corruption of Washington. While Homan denies taking a bag of cash to rig a contract, he openly ran a business in which he traded on his years of government work and high-level contacts to help clients who paid him prosper in the procurement process. Now that he is back in government, even the impression that he can influence federal contract awards creates the appearance of corruption, ethics experts argue.
Homan will be reporting directly to Trump as he leads the operation in Minnesota. In a social media post on Monday afternoon, Trump seemed to be striking a conciliatory tone, indicating Homan would be working with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. It remains to be seen whether that will help diffuse the crisis Trump and his team have already created.
2026-01-27 23:25:44
On Saturday, federal immigration agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse in Minneapolis, sparking swift backlash both in the streets and online. Even some conservatives characterized the incident as a bridge too far. But, in other corners of the internet, female conservative Christian influencers appeared to be attempting to convince their largely female audience that officers were simply doing their job.
Rachel Moran, a Senior research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, sees influencers’ messages as part of a broader pattern. “For more conservative female influencers, we’re seeing them frame ICE-related violence within cultural frames that feel comfortable to them, such as religious narratives—battles of ‘good versus evil’ in which ICE is always good and any form of protest bad,” she wrote via email.
One of the loudest voices calling for women to stand with ICE is Allie Beth Stuckey, a podcaster, commentator, and author of a 2024 book titled Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. That phrase, “toxic empathy,” stands in for a larger argument of how Christian morality has been used to pull people—especially evangelical Christians—to the left. As Stuckey explains on the podcast of the New York Times‘ Ross Douthat:
Empathy by itself is neutral. Empathy by itself, I believe, is neither good nor bad….But putting yourself in someone’s shoes, feeling what they feel, can also lead you to do three things that I say makes empathy toxic: One, validate lies. Two, affirm sin. And three, support destructive policies.
You can catch the drift here: Calls to love your neighbor have, according to Stuckey, drowned out the other side of the equation—the harms supposedly caused by helping someone. If you are empathetic to an immigrant, you are ignoring the harm Stuckey says immigration causes.
On Tuesday, Stuckey tweeted that Pretti and Renée Nicole Good, who was shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, “were people made in God’s image whose lives had value, and their deaths are tragic.” Still, she wrote, their deaths were the result of “local law enforcement refusing keep the public from impeding ICE and local politicians stoking the flames by calling ICE ‘Gestapo.’
Megan Basham, a Christian influencer and author of the 2024 book Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, retweeted Stuckey and added some of her own messages, as well:
“If your favorite fashion or beauty or home design [influencer] or what have you is posting anti-Ice sentiments, please DM me,” she tweeted on Sunday to her 197,000 followers on X. “I’d like to hear about it.” A few hours later, she tweeted, “Ladies, we need you on Insta being informed and unafraid!”
Basham also reposted a tweet that speculated that Pretti might have been radicalized by the nurse’s union he had joined. “It’s time we have a talk about the way healthcare orgs and unions including MNA and SEIU are radicalizing their employees and members across Minnesota and have been for several years,” it said. (The tweet has been liked more than 12,000 times.)
Stuckey and Basham were not the only female Christian influencers defending ICE. While others were tweeting about their shock and sadness about Pretti’s death, Anna Lulis, an anti-abortion influencer with 122,000 followers, was posting photos of children who she said had been murdered by illegal immigrants, ostensibly in an effort to show the other side of the story in the toxic empathy equation. Stuckey amplified some of those posts.
In a similar vein, an account called Conservative Momma, with 135,000 followers, tweeted out a photo of a college student who had allegedly been killed by an undocumented immigrant. “To the those wanting to ‘stop ICE,’ you are advocating for more innocent lives to be cruelly taken,” she wrote.
Kristen Hawkins, president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life, tweeted, “This is about the Left, the party that celebrates 1 million abortions a year, wanting to stop Trump from enforcing our immigration laws, creating chaos, and trying to win over the public (despite his very high approval ratings) before this November.”
On Instagram, one creator posted a tongue-in-cheek series of tips titled “Simple Ways I Lower My Risk of Being Shot By ICE.” The list was accompanied by cozy, stylized photos, including “drinking coffee and cuddling with my baby,” “cooking nutrient dense and healthy meals,” and “hanging out with my husband.”
“Such frames advance traditional conservative Christian values that tell women to disengage from political discussion as it’s outside of their realm of authority,” Moran wrote me. Posts like this encourage followers to “interpret emerging news about ICE violence as justified or outside of their responsibility.”
Still, some followers of these influencers seem increasingly skeptical. In replies to some of the pro-ICE posts, followers pushed back. “It’s sad that you just can’t condemn something that was so clearly wrong,” one commenter told Stuckey. “You are a kook if you can’t watch the video and see for yourself he was not brandishing a gun and threatening anyone,” wrote another.
But Stuckey, at least, appears to be undaunted. “I am really glad I have never listened to the naysayers on X who say changing women’s minds on culture and politics is pointless and impossible,” she wrote on X on Saturday. “I have seen their minds change—over and over and over again. To others with me in that fight, keep slugging.”
2026-01-27 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Already, a bitter burst of cold is gripping much of the country, and in the next few days, it will reach at least 45 states and extend across two-thirds of the country. It is one of the most extreme winter storms in years.
The National Weather Service on Thursday warned that “dangerously cold and very dry Arctic air” will spill into the continental United States and lead to “life-threatening risk of hypothermia and frostbite” as temperatures drop well into negative territory, creating some of the coldest weather on Earth.
For millions of Americans, this is not merely a forecast anymore.
Schools were already announcing closures around the country Thursday morning. Lines were forming at grocery stores. The Texas power grid operator issued a winter warning as it braces for higher electricity demand and disruptions from freezing rain.
“It always ends up colder than the models initially predict, and the models are always playing catchup.”
Wintertime cold is normal. But what is unusual is how this kind of cold tends to arrive: These icy spells sneak up on us, posing a greater challenge to forecasters and leaving little time to prepare compared to slower-moving extremes like heat waves.
“Oftentimes, longer duration signals, such as heatwaves, can be more predictable, whereas short bursts of cold are more difficult to predict,” Matthew Rosencrans, meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center, told Vox in an email.
Cold snaps are especially jarring when they’re interspersed with milder weather. And even though the planet just came out of one of the hottest years on record and is poised to heat up more, shocks of extreme cold are not going away, nor are their disruptions and dangers. Winter Storm Uri in 2021 cost the US economy more than $200 billion as it triggered deadly blackouts and fuel disruptions in Texas.
New forecasting methods are helping meteorologists close the gap on predicting future winter storms. But they are racing against rapid planetary changes, and the US is deliberately hampering its own weather forecasting capabilities with major personnel and budget cuts to science agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That could leave more Americans less prepared for dangerous weather, which can quickly turn deadly.
A cold wave is a distinct meteorological event where temperatures plummet below the average for a region for several days. But conventional forecasting tools often struggle to track all the factors at work and can underestimate the full extent of the chill. That makes it more difficult to prepare for the severity of a storm, often until it’s already set in.
“It always ends up colder than the models initially predict, and the models are always playing catchup,” said Judah Cohen, a research scientist at MIT studying weather forecasting.
Bouts of cold like the one this week have their origins at the North Pole. Icy air tends to remain corralled at the Arctic by a spinning band of strong, cold wind that is normally confined to 10 to 30 miles above the North Pole, known as the polar vortex. It tends to get stronger in the winter. The polar jet, which flows at a lower altitude some three to six miles above the ground, also plays a role.
Waves of air can start to form in the atmosphere. Those waves can collide with the polar air currents, with some of their energy bouncing off and some of their energy getting absorbed. The collisions deform the wind rings holding chilly Arctic air in place, breaking the neat circles into oblong lobes that drape over lower latitudes.
“If that energy gets absorbed, it kind of energizes or amplifies the wave over North America, and you get these more extreme weather events,” Cohen said. “This [weather this week] is a very nice example of that.”
So meteorologists have a pretty good grasp on how the process works. The challenge is figuring out what signs can tell us what’s coming.
There are interactions between the Arctic Ocean, the ice above it, and the sky that influence weather patterns around the world. There are also other sources of variability, like the periodic warming and cooling pattern in the central Pacific Ocean known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. It adds up to a knotty problem that scientists have slowly unraveled over decades.
To speed up progress and to encourage new approaches, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts held a contest to see who could build the best new AI-powered model for subseasonal forecasts, looking two to six weeks ahead.
This remains one of the toughest windows to hit for weather forecasters because both long-term and short-term variables are at play. But good predictions in this timeframe could be very useful in planning for extreme weather, helping communities issue alerts, shore up power, and stockpile supplies. A good forecast is a lifesaving tool, one that has helped drive disaster-related deaths downward over the years.
Cohen’s team won the latest contest for the 2025-’26 winter season. There’s even a certificate. (“I’m excited, of course. I shared it on social media,” Cohen said.) He started raising the alarm as early as November that a blast of extreme cold was heading toward the United States in the coming months.
His team trained their model on decades of observations across the Northern Hemisphere. They found that there were really far-flung variables at work, like weather in Eurasia in October and ocean temperatures in parts of the Arctic like the Kara Sea.
How does climate change play into all this? That is, as scientists say, an area of active research. In general, the planet is heating up, and winter temperatures are rising faster than in the summer months. But in certain areas and at specific times, there are still periods of intense cold, and some evidence suggests that warming in the Arctic is contributing to these cold weather spillovers. The Arctic is currently warming up to four times faster than the rest of the planet.
The extent to which human activity is altering cold snaps isn’t known, and there are other scientists who think that Arctic warming doesn’t play a big role in cold weather in lower latitudes and found that global warming has led to fewer extremely cold temperatures.
A complication on top of all this is that while teams around the world are in a heated competition for better forecasts, the US is cutting back on a lot of its scientific research, especially around climate change.
In particular, the Trump administration has its crosshairs on the National Center for Atmospheric Research, one of the best places in the world for conducting weather and climate predictions. Job cuts across the government have already led to less collection of raw data that informs weather models. So at a time when the country needs a better sight of the world ahead, the current administration is obscuring the view.
2026-01-27 07:11:56
You might’ve seen the video: a Minneapolis resident defiantly stands up to ICE, filming as they persistently question her. Nimco Omar, a citizen and long-time Minneapolis resident, was on her way to work when federal agents demanded to see her ID. Her viral video shows agents repeatedly asking her where she was born, with Omar calmly refusing and stating her rights. They finally gave up.
“You’re terrorizing people, and it’s unacceptable,” Omar tells the agents. “I’m a citizen, this is my home.”
Mother Jones senior reporter Julia Lurie spent last week in Minneapolis talking to community members, protesters, and people confronted by ICE, including Nimco. Follow along for more updates.
2026-01-27 04:08:30
About a decade ago, when Doris Tyler was 76, she still had her eyesight. She’d quit driving, but she could see well enough to cook, do laundry, and clean her Central Florida home. But when the treatment for her macular degeneration stopped working, she began exploring other options. Stem cell therapy—whereby patients receive injections of their own stem cells, usually sourced from fat or bone marrow—isn’t approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for her condition, but it sounded “promising,” she says. Representatives at a clinic in Georgia assured her, according to court documents, that injecting stem cells into her eyes would be safe and might even save her vision. After pulling together $8,900 for the procedure, she made an appointment for September 2016. “We were hopeful and very excited at that point,” she recalls. “Until things began to fall apart.”
Within a month of the treatment, Tyler woke up unable to see in one eye—her retina had detached, a doctor would confirm. Soon after, the other one did, too. She tried several surgeries to fix the problem, but by December, she was permanently blind. “I don’t see any shapes or anything,” Tyler, now 85, told me. “All I see is blackness.”
“It’s completely changed my life. And I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”
The clinic, part of the Cell Surgical Network, is one of thousands that have cropped up across the United States over the last two decades, touting stem cell treatments for a wide range of conditions: Alzheimer’s, autism, erectile dysfunction, Covid, joint pain, and more. While some stem cell therapies—like bone marrow transplants—are proven, many clinics, experts say, operate in a legal gray area, jumping ahead of the current science. Rather than rein them in, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to end the FDA’s “war” on alternative medicine, which may include unapproved stem cell treatments. (Tyler sued Cell Surgical Network and eventually settled out of court. The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
Some stem cells are like a wild card in the game Uno; the embryonic ones can develop into any tissue type (blood, heart, nerve, etc.), whereas nonembryonic “adult” stem cells are limited by the tissue in which they reside—blood stem cells, for example, produce only red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets. It’s “a very promising field,” notes Sean Morrison, who chairs the Public Policy Committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, but scientists are still striving to understand stem cells and evaluate their potential as therapies. “We can’t just skip over the process of testing in clinical trials,” he says. Paul Knoepfler, a professor of cell biology and human anatomy at UC Davis, has read “encouraging” stem cell studies involving Type 1 diabetes, spina bifida, Parkinson’s, and age-related macular degeneration like Tyler’s. But clinics “are prematurely marketing stuff that’s not really ready for primetime yet.” And they are proliferating.
In 2016, Knoepfler and a colleague tallied 570 clinics nationwide offering stem cell treatments. By 2021, there were more than 2,700, with hotspots in California, Florida, and Texas—many promoting stem cells for things like pain relief, sports medicine, and general wellness. That same year, Pew Charitable Trusts identified 360 reports of bacterial infections, blindness, cardiac arrest, organ failure, tumors, and other “adverse events” related to unapproved stem cell and regenerative medicine procedures from 2004 through September 2020. Toronto resident Srini Subramaniam told me he spent $28,000 at a Florida stem cell clinic to treat retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary eye condition, to no avail: “It was just that money down the drain.”
How is this even allowed? Well, the FDA covers drugs, but regulation of medical practice—licensing, exams, surgical procedures—falls to the states. In 2018, the Trump administration sued clinics in Florida and California, along with the Cell Surgical Network, arguing that stem cell treatments are drugs and should be regulated as such. The case made it to the US Supreme Court, which effectively sided with the FDA.
But under RFK Jr., the FDA seems less eager to crack down. Last May, Kennedy told a podcaster—the biologist and wellness influencer Gary Brecka—that he didn’t want to see a stem cell “Wild West,” but added that “charlatans” and “bad results” are an inevitable risk of medical freedom. “If you want to take an experimental drug,” he said, “you ought to be able to do that.” He himself had gone to Antigua for stem cell therapy to treat spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological voice condition, and it helped him “enormously,” Kennedy said.
Several states, including California, now require clinics to disclose to customers when therapies aren’t FDA-approved. And a few state attorneys general have sued clinics for deceptive marketing. But several other states, as Knoepfler wrote in Stat last July, have introduced “right to try” bills that would allow clinics to offer biologically derived drugs like stem cells, and let the buyer beware. That’s not such a healthy policy for experimental medicines. Tyler told me that she never would have agreed to stem cell injections had she known the risks. “I grew up in the time when you went to a doctor, you expected them to tell you the truth,” she says. “And you trusted them. And that’s not true anymore.”
As for RFK Jr., “if he thinks it should be approved,” he should talk to patients like her first. “It’s completely changed my life,” Tyler says. “And I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”
2026-01-27 03:57:59
Last Wednesday, the Trump administration “paused” immigrant visa applications for people from 75 countries, mostly in the Global South, on the supposed grounds that people from those countries are of “nationalities at high risk of public benefits usage.”
Since the 19th century, the United States has used “public charge” rules to restrict entry, alleging that immigrants and even visitors would strain public services—reasoning very much rooted in the eugenicist and ableist thinking that shaped key aspects of public policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including the claim that so-called “defective” people would produce “defective” children.
As president, especially in his second term, Donald Trump has brought eugenicist immigration policy roaring back. I’ve detailed Trump’s long history of eugenicist claims and policies—which he’s since added to, most recently with his series of explicitly racist tirades about “low IQ” Somali Americans in Minnesota.
I spoke with University of Iowa professor emeritus Douglas Baynton, the author of Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics, to ask what history can teach us about the role of eugenics in the anti-immigration crusade of Trump and White House figures like Stephen Miller.
You’ve written that immigration policy in the United States has been rooted in the exclusion of people potentially deemed a burden. How so?
Until the 1880s, the US was pretty much open to anybody. There were some state laws in coastal states like New York and Massachusetts that had some inspection, and some laws that excluded what they called “lunatics” and “idiots,” and people likely to become a public charge. But it was just a few states, and it wasn’t really much enforced.
Eugenicists held that “the ‘superior’ parts of any race were set apart—kind of like our billionaires.”
In the 1880s and ’90s, the federal government starts getting involved—they pretty much just followed the state’s examples and excluded what they call idiots and people likely to become public charge. But it was mainly disabled people [who were]likely to become a public charge. That was the main signifier of someone who was likely to be a pauper. Then in the 1890s, and especially after the turn of the century, they started excluding more and more people with disabilities, and being more and more specific about it. The fear was of disabled people who would pass on their disabilities to future generations, something that led you to be inferior.
What role did the eugenics movement play in that change?
Big role. At the time, [when] eugenicists talked about what eugenics meant, they’d say there were two main tracks that it ran on. One was stopping the reproduction of “defective” people through forced sterilization and institutionalization and such. And the other was immigration reform, immigration restriction, to keep people out of the country who were defective. [Eugenicists] had a big influence on policy: they testified before Congress, they pressured their congressional representatives. They generally just made it a public issue. That’s really the start of American immigration law, which is rooted in the eugenics movement. That was the original intent of the laws, was to keep people out who were defective.
Only later in the 1920s did they start focusing on race. When they had to focus on “defective” [people], they implemented policy by inspecting people who came in and weeding out the “bad seeds.” That turned out to be very expensive and ineffective. They couldn’t increase staffing enough to make the inspection effective. [Eugenicists were] also racist, of course, as well—so when they talked about weeding out defective people, they figured that would reduce the numbers of people from “inferior races,” because people from inferior races were more likely to be defective.
So they switched strategy in the ’20s to restrict people by race, by which they meant nationality. Race had a broader meaning at this time: some people talked about the Italian race and the Irish race, and so on. By restricting by race, they [thought they] would also capture most people with disabilities.
[Their thinking was that] defect ran in races and then in particular parts of races: Eugenicists would often be at pains to point out that superior Italians were fine, that the upper classes of Russia were fine, [that] it wasn’t the entire race— it was always that they were just more prone to defect. The “superior” parts of any race were set apart kind of like our billionaires [and] world leaders today—they see themselves as being a special species of some kind. Since people from inferior races were more likely to be “defective.” Disability and “defect” were at the center of immigration law.
The US is suspending immigration visa applications from 75 countries based on the supposed risk that people from those countries are more likely to need public assistance. What are the parallels between that and early immigration laws?
That’s generally [the] justification for the 1920s laws. It was thesame idea that certain countries were more likely to produce immigrants who would need public assistance. But again, the primary concern was that they would spread their genes and pollute the bloodstream of America, which, as you know, Trump used that language too. It was really the blood of America. The “American race” was the issue, more so than the economic impact, but [eugenicists] believed the economic impact over time, over generations, would grow and grow as they spread their “defective genes” more widely in the population.
Is there anything else on the subject that you’d like to add?
Gender and race, and class and ethnicity, are all used as proxies for disability. In the women’s movement in at the turn of 20th century, the suffrage movement, anti-suffragists would be prone to point out women’s defects: women were [supposedly] more likely to be overly emotional, prone to hysteria, and incapable of rational thought. These are all disability, but never thought about that way. The same goes with ethnicity and race. When you want to point out somebody’s inferiority, you point to their disabilities, and that justifies treating them differently. So this is part of a larger pattern of using disability in this way to justify inequalities based on identity.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
