2026-03-18 04:32:32
Tennessee teenagers are suing Elon Musk’s company xAI over allegations that its artificial intelligence tool Grok undressed photos of them as minors—the latest challenge against the wealthiest living person’s chatbot.
The three plaintiffs, two of whom are currently minors, are seeking damages after AI-generated images of them spread across Discord and Telegram and were eventually used as bartering tools for users to obtain other child sexual abuse material, according to the complaint detailed in new Washington Post reporting.
“xAI—and its founder Elon Musk,” the complaint reads, “saw a business opportunity: an opportunity to profit off the sexual predation of real people, including children.”
One of the plaintiffs said she received a link to a Discord server “which contained images and videos of at least 18 other minor females, many of whom Jane Doe 1 recognized from her school,” the lawsuit alleges.
Some of the images stemmed from her homecoming or yearbook photos.
The lawsuit comes after months of backlash against Musk’s chatbot after the company allowed Grok to undress people nonconsensually using the “Imagine” tool. The complaint argues that a “model that can create sexualized images of adults cannot be prevented from creating CSAM of minors.” According to earlier reporting from the Post, Grok’s previous leniency towards fulfilling users’ sexually explicit requests was a marketing technique, meant to increase the popularity of the chatbot.
Musk and his company didn’t respond to the Post in their coverage of the Tennessee lawsuit. Musk has repeatedly placed responsibility onto the individual users requesting such content and has held that Grok “will refuse to produce anything illegal,” despite the chatbot itself, in at least one instance, posting that its actions might have violated the 2025 TAKE IT DOWN Act, legislation criminalizing the nonconsensual publication of intimate images, including AI-generated deepfakes.
According to an investigation by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Grok generated approximately 3 million sexualized images in just an 11-day period, from December 29 to January 8. Around 23,000 of those, according to researchers, appeared to depict children. In a January 14 post, Musk claimed that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.”
Later than month, 35 state attorneys general penned a letter to xAI demanding the company “take all necessary measures to ensure that Grok is no longer capable of producing” this kind of nonconsensual sexual imagery and child sexual abuse material. The European Union and regulators in the United Kingdom and California have launched investigations into Grok.
In January, following rising international ethical and legal objections to the mass spread of nonconsensual sexual imagery, some of Grok’s Imagine image generation features were limited to paid X users. Yet Grok image tools are still seemingly offered for free on the standalone website and application. And even if restricting elements of the service to paying users could limit the quantity of material, introducing a nominal fee for those hoping to create nonconsensual sexual imagery of people, including minors, doesn’t answer a key legal question: Will Grok be meaningfully changed to protect women and girls from this kind of digital abuse?
The Tennessee teens are just some of the scores of girls and women impacted by Grok’s undressing, reportedly including at least one woman who Musk knows personally.
Ashley St. Clair, a conservative content creator who has a child with Musk, said that Grok created nonconsensual sexual imagery of her. Some of the images, according to an interview she did with NBC News, were from when St. Clair was a minor.
Annika K. Martin, the lead counsel in the suit, had a question for Musk as a father:
“Your child’s voice on video screaming. Can you imagine that as a parent?” she asked. “Can you imagine that for your child and feel okay with what you’ve done?”
2026-03-18 04:10:01
On Tuesday, the oversight and investigations arm of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing to discuss alleged Medicare and Medicaid fraud—a major talking point of the Trump administration and Robert F. Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services, which have deployed fraud claims to help justify cuts to critical funding and programs used by a huge swath of aging, disabled, and low-income Americans.
“For too long, states have been permitted to run Medicaid programs with weak guardrails, making them easy targets for criminals to exploit,” subcommittee chair John Joyce (R-Pa.) said in his opening statement. “Under the leadership of Dr. Mehmet Oz, this administration is taking bold steps to stop this fraud more than any other presidential administration before it.”
There are false and exaggerated claims in systems the size of Medicare and Medicaid—both Republican and Democratic members agreed that fraud from providers does exist. But only Democratic members raised concerns that withholding Medicaid funds from Minnesota, for example—where investigations into large-scale social services fraud have become a major conservative talking point—will hurt disabled and aging people, as well as children. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has made similar allegations about “ethnic” fraud in the Los Angeles area, was not present, something Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) took offense to.
“I think he’s just a grandstander who likes to go on TV but doesn’t really do anything substantively that’s meaningful to help Medicare and Medicaid recipients,” Pallone said.
In Oz’s absence, CMS deputy administrator Kimberly Brandt claimed that the agency’s “fraud war room” was using artificial intelligence to root out alleged Medicare and Medicaid fraud, particularly increased rates of home and community-based services billing in New York and California.
“We are constantly using heat maps and data analysis to be able to look and see where we think the largest shifts are,” Brandt said.
A recent article published in the Health Affairs journal by four academics focusing on health and disability warned that such a focus by the Trump administration could lead to HCBS, an optional Medicaid program, being further dismantled. “Growth in HCBS spending does not reflect evidence of systemic corruption but rather bipartisan federal policy choices, demographic change, and structured statutory evolution,” they wrote. It is also not an easy process to qualify for HCBS, with each process slightly different per state, and over half a million people on waiting lists to even qualify.
Rep. Kevin Mullen (D-Calif.) said that he was very concerned that his constituents could lose access to Medicaid services if California came under the kinds of attacks that Minnesota now faces from federal agencies.
“My constituents deserve better than to have their lifesaving health care used as a pawn,” Mullen said.
During her turn on the floor, Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) raised doubts that the Trump administration actually cares about rooting out Medicaid and Medicare fraud.
“Donald Trump unilaterally fired the HHS inspector general immediately after taking office, contradicting his claim that combating fraud is a central goal of this administration,” Trahan said. “Not only did the President move the leading official for detecting fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, but he left the role unfilled for almost an entire year to then fill it with a partisan loyalist.”
Trahan also listed the names of convicted fraudsters of Medicaid and Medicare fraud who were pardoned by Trump, including Philip Esformes.
“These cases involve large-scale fraud against taxpayer funded health care programs intended to serve seniors, people with disabilities and low income families—and the President of the United States freed every single perpetrator of those crimes,” Trahan said.
2026-03-18 04:00:09
Joe Kent has resigned as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of President Donald Trump’s ongoing war against Iran. Kent, a twice-failed Washington congressional candidate aligned with the isolationist MAGA right, is the highest-ranking Trump official to quit because of the war.
But Kent didn’t portray the president as the real villain in the lengthy resignation letter that he posted on X on Tuesday. That distinction goes to Israel and its supporters in the United States. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote, “and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Kent went on to argue that in the letter “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” launched a “misinformation campaign” early in Trump’s current term that undermined his America First agenda. Writing directly to Trump, Kent argued that this “echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States.” He added the Israelis had used the same approach to “draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.”
Trump, of course, is the president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world—not some hapless victim of Israeli deception. He willingly joined Israel to initiate the current war, despite the apparent reservations of some of his senior advisers. It was his responsibility to determine what was in the best interests of the United States, and he failed spectacularly in that task.
It is certainly true that Israel played a major role in pushing Trump towards war. Netanyahu has wanted the United States to attack Iran for decades, and he finally found a willing accomplice in the second-term version of Trump. It was not for nothing that a New York Times article headlined “How Trump Decided to Go to War” began with Netanyahu walking into the Oval Office in February determined to keep Trump “on the path to war.” The Israeli leader was particularly concerned that the Trump administration’s efforts to reach a diplomatic solution with Iran would prevent the battle he longed for.
After the war began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but admitted that the United States had been dragged into the war by its ally. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he explained on March 2.
Still, Trump could have easily said no to that pressure. He chose not to.
On a political level, Kent’s resignation is one of the most significant public splits thus far over Israel among the president’s supporters. In one camp are traditional neoconservative hawks like Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas). In the other is a more isolationist faction that includes Tucker Carlson and, at times, antisemitic figures like Nick Fuentes.
The energy within the GOP base—particularly among younger voters—is clearly with Carlson, who is known for being close to Vice President JD Vance. Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s recent decision to respond to criticism from hawkish conservative commentator Mark Levin in notably crude terms is another sign of how things have turned. Where that leads remains to be seen. But it is increasingly clear that should Trump’s second term turn out to be a bust, much of the far right is prepared to make Israel a convenient scapegoat for the president’s own incompetence. Some, like Fuentes, will no doubt extend the blame to Jewish Americans.
For Kent, seeing the United States launch itself into another poorly planned war has a deeply personal dimension. As I reported in a 2022 profile, Kent is a former Green Beret who did 11 combat deployments in the wake of 9/11. Serving in what came to be called the Global War on Terror was a radicalizing experience. “Was it worth it for our nation?” Kent said in a 2020 interview. “Was it worth it in terms of what we gained? It’s just hard to justify.”
Most tragically, Kent’s wife Shannon, a Navy cryptologist and the mother of his two boys, was killed by an ISIS suicide bomber in 2019. As I reported, Kent later said that he and fellow veterans lost so many comrades that putting their names on memorials became “one big numb.” He continued, “It’s still very surreal that Shannon is now one of those.”
In his resignation letter, Kent blamed Israel for drawing the United States into Iraq two decades ago. That contrasts with a 2024 interview he gave to the podcaster Shawn Ryan, in which he did not single out Israel when assigning responsibility for the senseless wars in which he served. “Where do you think the big push came from?” Ryan asked Kent about the Iraq War. Kent blamed “moneyed interests in Washington, DC,” before citing Vice President Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton. Iraq, as he put it, was “good for business.”
Kent’s populist anti-interventionism was always the area where he was most likely to overlap with some on the left. On domestic politics, though, there was far less common ground. As I wrote after Trump picked Kent last year:
The Black Lives Matter and antifa protests in Portland during the summer of 2020 triggered fears for him that the United States could similarly implode. Everything, he felt, was crumbling. He and his two young boys quickly left the city for rural Washington.
“We need to treat antifa and BLM like terrorist organizations. We need to use the tools of the federal government, the FBI, the US Marshals—go after them like organized criminals and terrorists,” Kent said in a 2021 conversation with the podcaster Tim Pool about the group’s leaders. “So, when we start arresting these guys and charging them with federal terrorism charges, that’s going to take away a lot of the incentive to go out and riot.”
That is part of what makes putting Kent in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center so unsettling. He is a trained counterinsurgent who is now far more attuned to threats from within than those from overseas.
Last May, the Times reported that Kent had pushed intelligence officials to rewrite an assessment of the relationship between the Venezuelan government and the criminal organization Tren de Aragua. The move came after Trump sent more than 200 Venezuelans to an infamous Salvadoran prison based on the false premise that they were all members of Tren de Aragua, and that the group was controlled by the Venezuelan regime.
Referring to Trump and his boss, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Kent wrote, “We need to do some rewriting” and an additional analysis “so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS.” In essence, Kent was pushing to twist intelligence to justify the indefinite detention of innocent men in horrific conditions. Unlike the Iran war, that, apparently, wasn’t a red line.
2026-03-17 19:30:00
When Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill announced last month that she was planning to sue the governors of New York and California for refusing to extradite doctors accused of mailing abortion pills to her state, Gavin Newsom was unfazed. “@AGLizMurrill: Go fuck yourself,” he mocked on X. “California will never help you criminalize healthcare.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul didn’t bother responding. But she’d already made her position clear last year. “I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana,” Hochul said at a news conference. “Not now, not ever.”
This pushback—and the fact that, weeks later, Murrill still hasn’t followed through on her threat—says a great deal about the surprising reality of abortion access almost four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, making abortion a states’ rights issue. Put simply, the abortion-access movement is winning. That’s thanks largely to “shield” laws—blue-state statutes that protect abortion providers and helpers from being investigated, prosecuted, sued, and harassed for providing care to patients living in places where abortion is illegal.
Shield laws are designed to thwart the near-total abortion bans and other restrictions that have proliferated in red states since the 2022 Dobbs decision. Broadly speaking, these measures prohibit law enforcement and state agencies from engaging in actions that could help abortion opponents bring criminal or civil cases against abortion doctors, helpers, or patients. In most shield-law states, police can’t serve arrest warrants; court clerks can’t issue subpoenas; IT staff can’t comply with records requests, and governors can’t sign extradition orders.
So far, 22 states and Washington, DC, have created some version of shield protections; eight of those states, including New York and California, have adopted laws that explicitly protect people who provide or facilitate abortion care via telemedicine. The laws have proven to be “one of the strongest tools that reproductive freedom advocates have to protect abortion access in a post-Roe reality,” says Ashley Kurzweil, a senior policy analyst at the National Partnership for Women & Families. “It’s painfully obvious that anti-abortion extremists are targeting shield laws because they are working.”
“It’s painfully obvious that anti-abortion extremists are targeting shield laws because they are working.”
The best evidence of the laws’ effectiveness comes from the Society of Family Planning’s #WeCount project, which has been tracking changes in the volume of abortions since just before Roe fell. In the most recent data, providers operating in shield states accounted for nearly 15,000 abortions per month—about 15 percent of the total number of abortions nationwide and an indication of the most unexpected development of the post-Roe era. Access to abortion hasn’t disappeared since Dobbs—it’s expanded. Instead of the steep declines that almost everyone was expecting, the number of abortions across the US has actually gone up.
This is true even in the most conservative parts of the country. Louisiana, for example, prohibits abortions in almost all cases, classifies the abortion medications mifepristone and misoprostol as “controlled substances,” and equates abortion providers with “drug dealers.” Yet according to #WeCount, more than 900 patients there are getting abortion pills from telemedicine providers every month.
The numbers are even more stunning in Texas. Abortions began plummeting in the state after lawmakers enacted SB 8, also known as the Heartbeat Act, which banned terminations after six weeks of pregnancy. Shortly after Dobbs, the state outlawed abortion almost entirely. But this past June, almost 4,200 women in Texas managed to access abortion care via telehealth, #WeCount found.
“Anti-abortion extremists thought, ‘we’re going to overturn Roe, we’re going to ban abortion, we’re going to trap people [where they live], and they’re not going to get care,’” says Lizzy Hinkley, legal director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, which advocates for shield protections across the country. “Because of shield laws and telehealth providers, that’s not the case—and they’re furious.”
Louisiana AG Murrill’s frustration has been increasingly evident in her public pronouncements. Blue states “don’t agree with the laws of our state, and so they have this whole system set up to nullify our laws,” she complained to NOLA.com last month. Last summer, she and other Republican attorneys general urged GOP Congressional leaders to pass federal legislation rendering shield laws invalid. “These laws are blatant attempts to interfere with states’ ability to enforce criminal laws within their borders and disrupt our constitutional structure,” their letter said.
Also signing the letter was Texas Attorney General—and GOP senatorial hopeful—Ken Paxton, who expanded on his grievances in a press release. Shield protections, he wrote, “embolden lawlessness, weaken our ability to enforce Texas laws, and trample on the rights of sovereign states to protect the unborn.”
Yet it was a 2021 Texas law—legislation that Paxton strongly supported—that prompted abortion advocates and blue-state policymakers to start looking for creative and expedient ways to protect abortion providers and patients. SB 8, the brainchild of far-right legal strategist Jonathan Mitchell, banned abortions early in pregnancy in flagrant violation of Roe (indeed, one of Mitchell’s goals was to use the law as a vehicle to reverse Roe). Even more ominous, it created a novel “bounty hunter” provision that gave any private citizen the power to sue anyone who “aided and abetted” an abortion for $10,000 per violation.
The law was a clear sign that if and when Roe was reversed, red states would try to enforce their anti-abortion policies across their borders. “The end game wasn’t just to stop abortions in Texas,” says Rachel Rebouché, a law professor at the University of Texas in Austin who previously was dean of Temple University’s law school. “It was to stop abortion everywhere.” SB 8 also showed that abortion foes intended to be audacious in their strategies; if abortion supporters wanted to stave off disaster, they needed to be innovative and fearless, too.
Texas SB 8, the “bounty hunter” law, made clear: If abortion supporters wanted to stave off disaster, they needed to be innovative and fearless, too.
Soon Rebouché and two fellow legal scholars, Drexel University’s David Cohen and the University of Pittsburgh’s Greer Donley, were brainstorming about some of the measures the Biden administration and Democratic-controlled states might take to safeguard patients and providers. What began as a conversation over lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Philadelphia in May 2021 morphed into a series of influential op-eds and journal articles. “We put every idea on the table,” Rebouché says.
At the time, there was no such thing as a shield law because there was no need. True, in America’s federalist system of government, states frequently pass laws that conflict with each other—on issues like gambling and recreational marijuana, for example. But to function, federalism also depends on interstate “comity”—the principle of mutual respect and deference to the laws and sovereignty of other states. “No local prosecutor is going to be that upset that someone from a state where casinos are illegal spends a weekend going to Las Vegas to gamble,” Cohen says. But abortion has never been this kind of an issue. “Because of its unique position in American politics and law,” Cohen says, “abortion highlights the complications of the [federalist] system in a different way.”
Perhaps the closest analogy to abortion shield laws is the “personal liberty laws” that Northern states enacted to resist the Fugitive Slave Act before the Civil War. Some laws required that fugitive slaves be given a jury trial before being returned to the state from which they had fled; others prohibited state officials from arresting or returning fugitive slaves and local jails from housing them.
“The liberty laws were something we were consciously emulating,” says Connecticut state Rep. Matt Blumenthal, who reached out to the law professors after reading an op-ed they published in the New York Times. Within weeks, he co-sponsored his state’s abortion shield law, which was signed in May 2022—the first in the country. Blumenthal brushes aside complaints by the likes of Paxton and Murrill that by passing shield laws, blue states somehow weren’t playing fair. His favorite response to the red-state critics: “Put down your sword, and we’ll lay down our shield.”
Blumenthal’s favorite response to the red-state critics: “Put down your sword, and we’ll lay down our shield.”
A month after the Dobbs decision, Massachusetts enacted the first shield law in the nation that included explicit protections for telehealth providers. Nearly four years later, almost every Democratic-controlled state has some form of shield laws—most by statute, four by executive order—and many states have already updated their 1.0 versions to make them stronger. (Eighteen states and Washington, DC, have also put in place shield laws for some aspects of gender-affirming care.)
While the exact wording differs, most states protect prospective witnesses from having to cooperate with anti-abortion prosecutions and lawsuits, as well as “nonfugitive” abortion providers from being extradited to face prosecution in states where abortion is illegal. Most bar the expenditure of state resources on anti-abortion legal cases and protect providers from having their medical licenses suspended or their malpractice insurance cut off for providing abortion care that’s legal in their own state. Some laws protect confidential patient information or allow people sued under an anti-abortion statute in another state to file their own “clawback” lawsuit in retaliation. But only eight states go so far as to specifically protect teleheath abortions, and several strongly pro-choice ones—including Illinois and Maryland—are not on that list.
Among the most expansive are California’s laws, which also protect lawyers who defend abortion providers and researchers who study abortion care. Last year, lawmakers exempted pharmacies in the state—which supply the vast majority of abortion pills to telemedicine patients around the country—from having to include the names of patients or doctors on abortion-medication labels. “This is how some lawsuits have been brought,” says Diana Kasdan, of UCLA’s Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy, “with disgruntled exes and partners literally rifling through [a patient’s] personal belongings to find their medication.” But one of California’s most important protections—barring the extradition of abortion providers—is by executive order, and not yet enshrined into statutory law.
When first discussed, shield laws seemed so far-fetched that some of the biggest mainstream abortion rights groups—including Planned Parenthood—wanted nothing to do with them. Now, Hinkley says, they are key to protecting abortion access for vast swaths of the country. “They are a perfect example of how the abortion rights movement has thought creatively and strategically and boldly” in the post-Roe era, she says. “And thankfully, state legislators and governors have moved along with us and been willing to take those big swings.”
Another surprise of the post-Roe era? The expected tsunami of anti-abortion lawsuits and prosecutions across state lines has been more like a slow drip. While shield laws might be a deterrent, Cohen notes that there seems to be little public appetite to punish people harshly over abortion care. “Abortion is politically popular, so prosecutors going after providers or patients are probably running the risk of suffering political blowback.” It’s one thing for conservatives to declare their anti-abortion bona fides on the campaign trail, Cohen says, “but another thing to actually bring a lawsuit or prosecution that’s going to take a lot of resources and time. Maybe you don’t really want to do that to an individual, even if you don’t think abortion is right.”
Finding cases that can stand up in court has been another challenge. “The reality is, most people who get abortions do so in the privacy of a medical office or their own home,” Cohen says. “They come away from [the experience] perfectly healthy and unpregnant, go about their lives, and not many people know about it, or if they do, they’re supportive. It’s the rare case where someone finds out and tells Ken Paxton.”
“The reality is, most people who get abortions do so in the privacy of a medical office or their own home. . . It’s the rare case where someone finds out and tells Ken Paxton.”
In fact, it took years from the signing of Connecticut’s law for red-state AGs to counterattack. In December 2024, Paxton filed a civil suit against Dr. Margaret Carpenter, a New York-based provider and cofounder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, accusing her of supplying abortion pills to a Texas woman who ended up in the emergency room with complications. A month later, Murrill indicted Carpenter for allegedly supplying the abortion pills used to end the pregnancy of a Louisiana teenager; Murrill also indicted the girl’s mother.
In both cases, New York’s shield law held. Paxton sued Carpenter for $100,000 under a variety of Texas laws, but Carpenter and her lawyers—citing the shield law—didn’t respond, resulting in a default judgment in Paxton’s favor. When a county clerk, again citing the shield law, refused to enforce the judgment, Paxton sued him—so far, unsuccessfully. “Texas has no authority in New York,” the state’s AG, Letitia James, declared, “and no power to impose its cruel abortion ban here.” Gov. Hochul similarly refused to extradite Carpenter to face the Louisiana charges.
More recently, abortion foes have trained their sights on a California doctor, Rémy Coeytaux, and the European-based organization he’s affiliated with, Aid Access, which prescribes and mails abortion pills throughout the US. Murrill has accused Coeytaux of sending pills to a man who allegedly forced his ex-girlfriend to take them; she’s also tried to extradite the same doctor for a 2023 case. Gov. Newsom’s response was quick and concise: “Louisiana’s request is denied.”
Paxton, meanwhile, has filed suit against Aid Access and Coeytaux as well as against a Delaware provider, Her Safe Harbor, and the nurse-practitioner who runs it. And Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general who helped write SB 8, has sued Coeytaux and Aid Access separately in federal court over lurid allegations that two women were coerced or tricked into having medication abortions by their exes. All those cases are pending.
In court documents and public statements, Paxton and Murrill are arguing that the shield laws violate two provisions of the Constitution that are bulwarks of the American legal system: the Full Faith and Credit Clause, which holds that states must respect “the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings” of other states, and the Extradition Clause, which requires the extradition of anyone “who shall flee from justice, and be found in another state.”
Unsurprisingly, conservative groups agree. Cooperation between states “is required by the Constitution, and by multiple agreements that most states have signed,” Thomas Jipping, a former senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, opined at The Daily Wire last year. “Abortion shield laws break from that tradition, potentially causing irreparable damage to the interstate comity that has characterized the United States for so long.”
But there are important exceptions to the Full Faith and Credit Clause, legal scholars who support abortion rights say. For example, the Supreme Court has long held that states aren’t obligated to uphold civil judgments from other states that are “penal” in nature—that is, when the goal of the judgment is to punish someone for behavior the state disagrees with. “Every action that we’ve seen these states try to enforce against abortion providers in the shield context is penal in nature,” Hinkley says. Another exception some lawyers mention is when a court judgment issued in one state (say, Texas) violates the “public policy” of another (say, New York’s support for abortion rights).
The Extradition Clause, meanwhile, typically applies to individuals who have committed a crime in one state and fled to another. But providers in shield-law states are operating out of their own states, where abortion is legal; they are not fleeing. “The claim that the US Constitution requires extradition,” Rebouché says, “is a tough one for them to win.”
But these theories remain to be tested. Legal scholars see the looming showdown as the most consequential fight over states’ rights and abortion since the Dobbs decision—one that is almost guaranteed to end up before the Supreme Court. “I frankly think the [justices] will be annoyed with those blue states . . . trying to undermine the promise of Dobbs,” Erik Baptist, senior counsel of the influential conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, told attendees at the National Pro-Life Summit last year. “I’m looking forward to the future of that litigation.” (ADF did not respond to a request for comment.)
“I frankly think the [justices] will be annoyed with those blue states, such as California and New York, trying to undermine the promise of Dobbs.”
Texas and Louisiana aren’t waiting around to see what happens. Both states have passed harsh new laws targeting abortion pill providers, and Murrill and Paxton have filed lawsuits challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of mifepristone, including Biden administration rules that allowed telemedicine abortions. In his various lawsuits, Mitchell has argued that the mailing of abortion pills violates the federal Comstock Act, a long-defunct Victorian-era obscenity law that, if enforced, would amount to a national abortion ban. At the federal level, abortion opponents have been pressing the Trump administration to stop the flow of pills (with little luck so far); Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri just introduced a bill that would direct the FDA to revoke its approval of mifepristone.
Abortion supporters aren’t waiting around, either. Connecticut is among the states with legislation this year to extend shield protections to telehealth providers operating from within their borders, and Vermont has updated its laws to cover telemedicine providers visiting from other states. Various states have upgraded their shield laws to exclude providers’ names from abortion pill labels, and New York is considering a bill to leave off patients’ names as well. In California, repro rights groups are pushing to codify the ban on extraditing abortion providers like Coeytaux before Newsom leaves office at the end of the year.
Meanwhile, thanks to these laws, telemedicine abortions are becoming mainstream in a way that few people imagined four years ago—and that could be very difficult to reverse. “Every day, more and more people are getting comfortable using abortion pills they get online,” Rebouché says. “It’s very hard to claim … that this is a radically dangerous drug, when thousands and thousands of people use it successfully every day.”
Top image: Mother Jones illustration; Lev Radin/ZUMA; Jill Connelly/ZUMA Press; Chris Graythen/Getty; Allen G. Breed, File/AP
2026-03-17 19:30:00
On January 7, Daniel Suitor raced the less than half a mile from his home to the spot where a federal immigration agent had just killed Renée Good in Minneapolis. He had heard from a local group chat that someone had been shot, and he wanted to bear witness. At the scene, Suitor, a lawyer, started talking to witnesses. One observer who had recorded the incident shared the video with Suitor, who sent it to local authorities and the press and posted it on social media. Soon, the images were everywhere.
For most Americans, the shocking killing of Good, followed by government officials’ “domestic terrorism” claims, brought into stark relief the brutality of the immigration enforcement operations the Trump administration unleashed in cities across the country. In the weeks after the shootings of Good and then Alex Pretti, public sentiment has reportedly turned against the crackdown and the actions of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
That watershed moment proved to be a catalyst for Suitor, who, until now, primarily represented Minnesota tenants in various disputes. A couple of days after Good’s death, while recovering from emergency gallbladder surgery, he started to consider how to best employ his University of Minnesota law degree. He put his sole practice on hold and stopped taking on new cases. “It’s all hands on deck for the legal community,” Suitor declared on LinkedIn, issuing a call to action to other legal practitioners. “When this is over, will you be able to say you were one of the helpers? Which side are you on?”
Earlier this year, the self-described “nobody lawyer” and “dipshit with a 7-year-old laptop and a bad attitude,” Suitor turned to helping immigrants in Minnesota who have been swept up in the immigration enforcement dragnet and detained by ICE. Undeterred by his lack of immigration law experience, he has joined the ranks of attorneys nationwide filing so-called habeas corpus petitions in a massive legal counteroffensive to the Trump administration’s aggressive mass detention and deportation practices.
Here, Suitor describes his own experiences in this work. His observations have been edited for length and clarity.
I grew up in New Hampshire and spent most of my first few decades in New England. I moved here [to Minnesota] to go to law school. It was 2018, I was 29 years old, and I didn’t like my corporate job [as a financial analyst]. It was kind of boring. I was not living my values. It was the middle of the first Trump administration, and I’m like, what should I do? I really wanted to do employment law and fight for workers.
I wound up starting my career in tenants’ rights, working for a nonprofit called HOME Line, which I found suited me very well. Any tenant in the state can call and get free advice. Eviction is a huge deal in every state, but particularly in Minnesota. Keeping somebody in their home is one of the most powerful things you can do.
The first case I ever did [involved] a single mother. I think she had just had her third kid, and she sued for her security deposit herself and won. She got her security deposit back, but the landlord wouldn’t pay and hired a lawyer to get the judgment undone. It was a pretty simple case and a couple of grand, but it was such a lifeline for that person. Helping people, even in a small way, to claw back against these historic harms means something to my clients. And if it means something to my clients, it means something to me.
I left the nonprofit in September 2024 and did a year at a plaintiff employment law firm. I was fired in September 2025 for my pro bono work. I took a campaign practices case for two Democratic socialist candidates. I told my boss that I was going to take it on my own time. They told me not to file the case, and I said, I’m sorry, I filed it two days ago, and I was fired. I have no regrets. The next day, I started my solo practice [focused on landlord-tenant cases.]
Starting in December and January, as ICE really ramped up enforcement, a lot of people started responding. There was this loose coalition of movement lawyers who were starting to do habeas petitions and doing them really fast and dirty, and trying to just get as many people out of jail as possible. At that time, people were being moved out of state within hours. I got tapped into that.
After Renée Good was murdered, that was the moment when the legal community was like, “This is no longer just for the activists and the dirtbags around the edges.” I always joke that I’m probably like a bunch of respectable lawyers’ dirtbag lawyer friend, and then I’m a bunch of activists’ lawyer friend. I have a foot in both worlds. I put my practice on pause. My wife has a good job, but especially after I was fired, we were pretty paycheck-to-paycheck, and we didn’t have a lot of savings because she had cancer two years ago.
I was trying to make money and trying to take cases, and balance paid work with being committed to my community. I love tenants’ rights. There’s nothing I love more than going to housing court. If I could be a rat who lived under the stairs at that courthouse, I probably would. But my heart wasn’t in it. If I’m not going to give people my best, I don’t think I can take their cases. I just realized that’s what I had to do in that moment. There are times your skills really are needed and vital. What am I supposed to do? Work out retainer agreements while I feel like I could be helping people?
“What am I supposed to do? Work out retainer agreements while I feel like I could be helping people?”
This [Minnesota] law firm organized a habeas training, and 300 attorneys showed up on Zoom. There was another one within a week that I think over 250 people attended. There was this outpouring of support from the legal community. I was still a little worried about doing it because I’m not an immigration attorney. What held me back for a week or two was wondering, What if I screw it up? What if I keep someone in jail?
I started doing the trainings, and a case landed on my lap that needed emergency help. Somebody gets grabbed, and you start burning up your social network and every resource you have available. No one could take the case right away. I can’t just sit around waiting for the right time. There is no right time. There is no perfect time. I was in the Costco parking lot, and then I wound up filing the case at 1 or 2 a.m. the next morning.
People are working at 1,000 percent capacity right now. The nonprofits only have so many resources, and the private firms are taking a lot of these [cases]. A lot of the immigration firms have to make money. They can’t do this for free, so they’re charging. I’m taking a very specific subset of cases that aren’t getting help from other resources. I do them all for free. I haven’t charged anyone a dime for this work. I’ve filed 20 cases. I think I’ve been successful in 14 so far.
A lot of my clients have had criminal histories. Some of them were just one incident, 25 or 30 years ago, and they’ve had entire lifetimes since then. In all cases, they’ve paid their debt to society through imprisonment, through probation, through all sorts of penalties. The government can deport them the right way if they want. But they’re not doing it the right way. Due process in immigration is pretty thin to begin with. If the government can’t even bother to do that, then all these people deserve to be out of detention.
My first client was a Hmong man. He was on an order of supervision, and he got scooped up. They didn’t revoke his supervision until he was already detained. When he was released from jail, he brought with him a handwritten list of people’s names and alien numbers. He said, “This is the same story as what happened to me.” Of those 18 people, I personally filed on behalf of 10, a friend filed on behalf of another one, and we’ve gotten eight released. A few are waiting. Two were denied. I’ve represented people in three different jails in Minnesota—in Freeborn, Kandiyohi, and Sherburne [counties]. My clients have mostly been released without incident.
“I grew up like a New England Protestant. I believe that you toil and then you die, and you dig a ditch every day of your life. And at the end of your life, there’s the ditch. That’s how I treat this work. It’s gotten me to this point where I can help people and that’s enough for me.”
I’m a really small-time guy. Doing 20 cases in the last month was a lot. I can do these pretty quickly, and with every single one, I get better. But there are enough cases in Minnesota to keep me busy. I don’t think I’m a special talent in any way. I grew up like a New England Protestant. I believe that you toil and then you die. And you dig a ditch every day of your life. And at the end of your life, there’s the ditch. That’s how I treat this work. It’s gotten me to this point where I can help people, and that’s enough for me.
I don’t even want the attention for this work. I’m just one guy. There are so many people doing so much more than I. I just have one small corner. The reason why I’ve talked to people about habeas work is because I want to encourage people to do it. What I want to do is get the people who are on the fence, or maybe they have a lot going on, but they see that this work is really important. I think it’s good propaganda to show that we’re winning, that when you fight, you win. You can stand up to bullies. You don’t know when you’ll be next, but prepare your own community.
The level of enforcement activity is down, but it’s still very active. There’s still this long ripple effect because they put so many people in detention. I’m cleaning up the messes of people who were arrested a month ago or two months ago. They’re still arresting more people every day. Last week, I filed for somebody who had been detained two or three days before. They’re still throwing more people on the pile.
We got all these people out on habeas, but ICE is going to try to deport them. I always say I’m not an immigration attorney; I can’t stop your deportation. How do we train non-immigration attorneys to do removal defense? That’s the next battle. There’s a level of camaraderie right now in the state bar that I haven’t felt before in my relatively short career. As things slowly go back to normal, I hope we remember this moment.
2026-03-17 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In the world’s waters, fish are making a quiet, biological retreat. The once simple rules of the ocean—grow larger than potential predators—are being rewritten as temperatures reach record highs. Desperate to survive, fish are hitting the fast-forward button on life in a biological shift that will soon impact what ends up on dinner tables globally.
“There are simply no real winners here.”
Fish are getting smaller and dying at higher rates as they adapt to warming waters, researchers warn in a report released Thursday in the journal Science. This evolutionary change will reduce global fish yields by one-fifth under current warming predictions, and up to 30 percent in high-emissions scenarios.
This will trigger potentially irreversible evolutionary processes, shaking up entire ecosystems and food webs, with consequences for the billions of people who rely on seafood for protein—a demand expected to increase.
“What I found frightening about this work was that it was difficult to identify winners and losers—there are simply no real winners here,” said Craig White, the study’s co-author and an evolutionary physiologist at Monash University in Australia. “The combination of warming and evolution was always bad for fisheries.”
Fish mortality rates have already been rising as waters warm. Although fisheries management often assumes fish are evolutionarily inert when it comes to overcoming such environmental changes, this is false. Instead, fish are maturing at a younger age and at a smaller size to improve their chances of surviving long enough to reproduce, according to the report.
Fishery yields were already expected to reduce by 14 percent when global temperatures reach 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. However, when incorporating evolutionary impacts, the researchers’ new model predicts this reduction worsens to 22 percent.
For the Alaska pollock—a key species for human consumption in North America—this would equate to a reduction of half a million metric tons harvested per year.
“This is a loss of over 1.1 billion meals of high-quality protein per year as a consequence of the effects of global warming on just one species,” said David Reznick, a professor of evolutionary ecology at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved with the study but co-wrote a new piece about it in Science. “Climate change represents an immediate threat to the earth’s capacity to sustain human life.”
Decades of decreases in size, age at maturity and abundance in species like Atlantic salmon and Baltic cod appear to validate the model’s predictions. In total, the life histories of nearly 3,000 species of fish were tested to corroborate the model’s accuracy.
“What we can’t do is assume that species will evolve their way out of trouble in a way that suits us.”
Researchers noted impacts will vary by geography. Freshwater systems are predicted to warm more than oceans and will therefore see the most severe size reductions.
There will also be consequences beyond harvesting. “Much of what happens in the ocean in terms of who eats whom is based on body size: Big things eat smaller things,” said Joseph Travis, a biologist and former dean of Florida State University’s College of Arts & Sciences. If the size of harvested species decreases, they will become vulnerable to predation by other fish, said Travis, who co-wrote the Science piece about the study.
“The entire ecosystem could be thrown into an alternative configuration as the system moves past its tipping point,” said Travis, highlighting the example of the reconfiguration of Canada’s western Scotian shelf in the late 20th century. Here, the average size of 53 top predators—like cod and haddock—dropped 40 percent in 40 years. As a result, former prey increased by 300 percent as they became predators for young cod.
Increases in fish death frequency from disease, deoxygenation, or overfishing will only add further pressure. “If people try to compensate for smaller fish and less revenue per fish by harvesting more fish, then the problem worsens quickly,” said Travis, warning of potential stock depletion. “The net effect, in the long run, will be less protein available.”
“If humans, as predators, cause the fish to evolve, as do predators in natural ecosystems, then they also cause changes that will not spring back to their former state,” said Reznick. Indeed, as fish decrease in size, populations are losing the genetic variations that encode large bodies. And, as ecosystems shift, populations might be locked into new food chain states they cannot reverse.
“What we can’t do is assume that species will evolve their way out of trouble in a way that suits us,” said White, highlighting that effective climate policy could preserve roughly 18 million metric tons of fishery yields each year.
His message to policymakers is clear: While fish can adapt to survive, the only way to protect people who rely on fisheries for their protein and their livelihood is to reduce warming.
