2026-10-07 22:53:51
America is hopelessly divided along party lines. That’s a stubborn fact, we’re told, and the polling bears it out: Democrats dislike Republicans and Republicans dislike Democrats, in almost precisely the same proportions.
But every election produces surprising coalitions that defy entrenched partisanship. In these midterms, left and right have found something so commonly loathed that politicians across the country are flip-flopping in real time.
Mother Jones has been tracking the backlash to data centers on the ground long before the water-guzzling behemoths became the country’s bête noire. The AI boom, with its insatiable need for computing, has unleashed a power grab by tech billionaires. “Data centers have replaced megayachts as the preferred theater of oligarchic status signaling,” national correspondent Tim Murphy wrote in his big Mother Jones investigation into hyperscale data centers and the communities they land on. “Oligarchy is now more than an idea; it is a place.”
On today’s episode of Stress Test, Tim joins host Garrison Hayes to discuss how data centers—and other AI-boom technologies, like Flock cameras—have upended political fortunes and ripped up the partisan playbook ahead of November’s vote.
“Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it.”
“It’s maybe the single most toxic issue in the midterms this side of, you know, gas prices,” Tim tells Garrison. “It’s like a three-to-one opposition among voters. Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it.”
Take Texas. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott promoted the state as a place where companies could build almost anything. Then rural and suburban communities got the facilities, and the gas plants that power them, in their backyards, along with strained water supplies, pollution, and rising utility bills. “People are complaining about what they have to live next to,” Tim says. “And it just builds and builds and builds.” Under pressure (and running for reelection), Abbott made a stunning reversal, announcing steps that amount to a moratorium. And he’s not the only one feeling the heat.
So what changed? Data centers used to be half the size of an Amazon warehouse; now they’re measured in “multiples of Manhattan,” says Tim, who explains how we got here and what to expect next. He heads back to Texas in the coming weeks, and we’ll follow what he learns right up to Election Day.
For more, read Tim Murphy’s road trip through the towns living in the shadow of the AI boom: “How the American Oligarchy Went Hyperscale,” from our May+June issue.
Subscribe to Stress Test at youtube.com/motherjones, and read the full transcript bellow.
This transcript was generated with automated tools and may contain errors.
Garrison Hayes: Hello, hello, everyone. This is Stress Test from Mother Jones. I’m Garrison Hayes. Welcome to the second episode of this show. If you didn’t catch the first episode, I really think you should go back and listen to it. It was me and David Corn and our colleague Ari Berman, where we talked a little bit about this upcoming election and all of the Trump administration’s efforts to subvert the election, to strike fear into your heart. But this is the thing: If you go back and watch it—or listen—I actually think that we came away from it, at least I did, little less stressed than going into it. We were really able to pull it apart, the efforts that they are making and where they are failing.
It’s a really, really good, informative listen. So make sure you go back and listen to that. It’s just right behind this one in the feed, or you can go check it out on YouTube. Maybe you’re on YouTube, youtube.com/motherjones.
Okay, I am really excited to get into today’s conversation because there are these strange moments in the American political arena where oddly, people across both the left and the right, across the political spectrum, come together in some weird, kind of bizarro-world way. And we’re talking about exactly one of those topics today with data centers and Flock cameras and AI. And so today I am joined by my colleague, Tim Murphy. Tim is a national correspondent here at Mother Jones. I’m so excited to be talking to you, Tim. Thanks for being here.
Tim Murphy: Hey, thanks for having me. This is great.
GH: Tim, I have to tell you, whenever I read your reporting, which is always so smart and so in-depth, I always, like, laugh a little bit. And I don’t know if that’s a bad read, but there’s always, like, a little bit of humor kind of infused into the really often kind of grim things that you cover. You bring a really fresh perspective. Am I misreading that? Are you trying to be funny?
TM: A hundred percent. My entire life I’ve just wanted to be taken seriously, Garrison.
GH: [Laughs.]
TM: No, you know, I mean, I like to try and kind of keep things a little entertaining, you know, when the story kind of calls for it.
GH: I love that. Okay, so we’re bringing you on to talk about the rare bipartisan voter issue that we are seeing this election cycle, specifically data centers. But before we kind of dig into that, I feel like it’s important that we get a better idea, not only of, like, terms, but the way it’s kind of related to the news in general. We’ll get to all of that, but before we get to that, I’d love to hear, like, what’s stressing you out—something that we’re asking all of our guests.
TM: Well, I think probably germane to the topic at hand, I just looked at the calendar ’cause I was planning out, you know, what I have to do over the next, turns out, like, five weeks and realized that there’s absolutely no way that I’m gonna get to every single thing that I need to file. I always think of the election as God’s deadline. Like, there’s no fudging it. Anything that you didn’t finish before the election immediately becomes irrelevant, and so you just have to get it done. So I’m kind of mapping out my caffeine intake and just trying to kinda get through it.
GH: Amazing. Amazing. I mean, you could always do the postelection “Stop the Steal” effort that we saw in 2020. Okay, let’s dig into—
TM: Right, if Mike Pence has the courage.
GH: Yeah, right. Exact. Let’s dig into this. Okay, but everyone’s kind of talking about and certainly hating on data centers right now. But as I understand it, Tim, it wasn’t always this way. What have you seen on the ground and how things have shifted over the last year or so?
TM: It’s one of the more kind of stunning about-faces that I’ve seen in national politics. You know, I was in Texas last year and last summer, and I actually went to the site of one of the largest data centers being built in the world. It’s Sam Altman and Larry Ellison’s Stargate complex in Abilene. This was a project that passed, that was created almost, like, virtually unnoticed when it was first kind of developed. You know, I went and I went back and looked at, like, the community meeting, the various government agencies that approved this thing. Basically nobody showed up. Very little debate about this, and it just kind of went into play. And then Donald Trump talked about it at the White House with Sam Altman and Larry Ellison, and it started to blow up into a bigger thing.
But even as recently as last summer, this was an issue that not even the people talking the loudest about oligarchs, and tech oligarchs specifically, were necessarily, like, beating the drum about. This was something that in fact data center supporters were playing offense on. You had, you know, in the state of Texas, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, proudly an advocate for making Texas the epicenter of the data center boom. You know, people were talking about this as, like, this massive job creation construction strategy. It was kind of the getting in early on the future by—you know, flash forward to where we are now, and I’d say it’s maybe the single most toxic issue in the midterms, like, this side of, you know, gas prices.
It’s like a 3-to-1 opposition among voters. Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it. And candidates who were for them are hastily beating a retreat, like Greg Abbott, and people who didn’t stake out that position are throwing millions of dollars into kind of brutal attack ads on the subject.
GH: What do you think it is that has led to that kind of 180, that big switch? I guess the more specific question is: What seems to be the issue here for voters that’s turning them against data centers?
TM: One of the things with data centers is there’s so many ways that it can kind of reach you, that it can connect to your life. And so I think different people are engaging with it in different ways. Certainly over the last year and a half, AI oligarchs, and data centers as their No. 1 project, have become kind of like one of the main kind of features of the Trump administration. And so a lot of people are just straight up negatively polarized against those.
But if you’re living in a lot of states, you know, the rising utility costs are often associated with data centers. The pollution effects are associated with data centers. A lot of these are being built in rural and exurban areas where people do not expect to have, like, an Air Force engine and a diesel turbine as their neighbors. And they’re really, really, really fired up about that.
These projects are invariably kind of done kind of on the sly. They’re sort of pushed through anonymously. People don’t really know who they’re dealing with. And so it sort of brings all these different kind of things, from affordability to straight-up NIMBY complaints to political distrust, and gives kind of something for everyone. And what they see on the political side is that a lot of people who were supposed to sort of have their back and be their advocate let this happen or openly kind of brought it to pass.
GH: One of the really interesting things about your reporting is that you’ve actually seen data centers—like, a data center—in person. You’ve actually visited one. Many people, I imagine, haven’t been inside of one of these, kind of, these hyperscaler facilities. And so can you tell us what do they look like on the inside? What is it like being inside of one?
TM: I’ve not—I should clarify, I’ve not been inside. I’ve been outside, and like an increasing number of Americans, I’ve been able to kind of go right up to one and just hear what it sounds like. And you know, it really does, it sounds like an aircraft engine. I mean, if you go to one of these big hyperscale sites—so for instance, I went and, you know, drove down a cul-de-sac in Memphis, Tennessee, to see Colossus II, which is one of Elon Musk’s xAI, you know, Grok-powering engines. It’s burning gas on what they say are temporary generators. It’s, you know, pissing off a lot of neighbors, and it’s, you know, officially, like, a US Army contractor.
So these things, I mean, they’re enormous. And here’s, like, one of the main things that’s driving this shift, I think, when we talk about this 180: It’s that 10 years ago, five years ago, the data centers that they were building were, like, maybe half the size of an Amazon warehouse or something like that. They were kind of in the terrestrial building space. Now they’re measuring them out in, like, you know, multiples of Manhattan. Like, these are—they’re absolutely enormous.
And, you know, they’re not just many, many, many, many football fields, but they all come with natural gas power plants, you know, to go with them. They come with maybe solar power plants to go with them, which has also, you know, driven a little bit of unrest in some areas. You know, they require transmission lines, they require kind of a whole rebooting of everything, you know, depending on where you live. And so they’re incredibly intrusive spaces. It’s no longer just your kind of casual neighborhood server farm.
GH: Hmm. Interesting. I want to come back to what you were talking about with Texas. You mentioned Gov. Greg Abbott and his kind of big switch on this. Can you say a little bit more about that? But then also talk about some of the other politicians and efforts happening in the state of Texas.
TM: Yeah, I mean, Texas is a good way of looking at it because for a very long time the pitch for Texas to the rest of the world, and particularly to corporate America, has been that you can come here and build anything and do anything. And we basically don’t care—like, give us some revenues, let us, you know, have a big press conference about it. But you can do carte blanche. They lured, you know, Elon Musk to Texas and basically let him make his own town. Data centers were one feature of that.
So, like, in the Texas Panhandle outside of Amarillo, there’s something called Project Matador, which purports to be one of the world’s largest data centers. It’s complete with, like, a nuclear reactor. They’re gonna call the—final data center is, like, the Donald J. Trump Center for Intelligence or something like that. It’s—the company is called Fermi USA, and one of the guys leading it is Rick Perry. Like, all these things are things that should not go together, but in Texas, they just kind of can, and they’re gonna build this.
You know, we talked about the Stargate project in Abilene. You can go to, like, a town, you know, outside of Dallas, and there’s just, like, seven new data centers outside of town. So it was the face of this giant, giant building boom. And it’s this building boom that, like, has very few parallels in modern history. It’s almost, like, up there, you know, you have to go back to the railroads of the 19th century to find this much investment in a private business, in a private enterprise.
So Texas was the face of this. But you’re doing all this development in rural areas. You’re taking people’s water, you’re taking people’s power, or you’re just building your own, you know, fossil fuel–polluting power plant in their backyard. And you start to get this backlash. People are complaining about what they have to live next to. People are complaining about what’s happening to their water, to their utility bills, and it just builds and builds and builds. And recently Abbott announced a series of steps, like, basically a moratorium, until we can figure out what’s going on. It’s kind of a stunning thing to see from somebody like Greg Abbott, who’s made that his entire M.O.
GH: Yeah, yeah. So now Greg Abbott, governor of Texas, is on the same kind of political, you know, march as the governor of, let’s say, New York or Massachusetts, who are also, you know, leading these moratoriums.
TM: Yeah, it’s that kind of Kathy Hochul–Greg Abbott policy consensus we’ve always talked about.
GH: The one that we’ve always been going for. My question is, like, who is this appealing to? I mean, obviously we know that folks across the political spectrum are against data centers, but are voters actually responding to, say, a Greg Abbott moratorium in a positive way?
TM: Yeah, the jury’s still out. You know, Abbott is in a really surprisingly close race with the Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who has been pushing data centers really hard. I mean, she went out to Project Matador in Amarillo and walked the grounds that it’s going to be on. She went out, you know, to these Dallas suburbs and talked to the people who were organizing against it and really, I think, probably forced Abbott’s hand on this issue, and he’s very belatedly trying to kind of co-opt it and salvage, you know, a five-point win or whatever.
So I think there’s definitely a lot of evidence that it’s working in ways that maybe conventional, like, anti-corporate, anti-billionaire, even anti-tech attacks aren’t working. One of the races that I’ve been looking at, that’s, like, kind of a really funny example of this, is in Ohio. Marcy Kaptur, the Democratic congresswoman who was kind of miraculously held on during the Trump era, she’s in a rematch with the same guy she ran against in 2025. For is former state Rep. Derek Merrin. And in 2024, all the attacks are like, Dirty Derek is in the hands of, you know, big corporate America or whatever, and she won by about 2,300 votes. This year, running against the exact same guy, every single ad is about Data Center Derek. It’s about Dirty Derek, Data Center Derek, and how he sold out Ohioans for $2 billion of incentives for building data centers.
Even when you’re facing the same candidate that you beat last time, it’s a radically new message because data centers have come on and become this huge issue.
GH: Okay, so Dirty Derek—we’re talking about big money and the oligarchs and the folks who are funneling money into their big project with data centers and all of the people who are against it. But we know there’s one person who really marches to the beat of their own drum, for better or for worse. There’s one person who is maintaining that he loves this widely unpopular technology, and that’s President Donald Trump. He called data center opponents backwards and poor, which is a choice. And so Tim, I want you to listen to what he has to say about Flock cameras here.
[Clip plays.]
What do you make of that reaction from the president?
TM: I think he’s sort of starting to slip a little bit in, you know, his finger on the pulse of the American electorate, and Flock cameras are a good example of this in the same way that I think his general approach to the data centers has been. You know, there might be an environment in which there’s a huge anti-crime panic like we’ve had in a few recent election cycles, where suddenly this thing that a lot of police departments are adopting becomes maybe more favorable terrain. But right now people hate Flock cameras, and I think they hate them for some of the related reasons to data centers, right? I mean, it’s kind of this AI-powered, all-seeing thing that we don’t really trust the people who are in charge of it. You know, it seems like it’s often just being deployed as a way of, like, surveilling cops, ex-wives, and things like that.
And one of the things that you’ve seen in a lot of races around the country is candidates literally taking aim at Flock cameras. So, like, there’s a guy, Seth Bodnar, who’s an independent candidate for Senate in Montana, kind of the de facto Democrat, even though there’s a Democrat in the race. And he literally just takes a gun and blows up a Flock camera as a way of signifying, like, well, one, that he’s a gun owner. But two, I’m not gonna have it with this kind of government surveillance state. So Flock cameras have really become such a—in part because they are so pervasive, because they’re kind of everywhere—you know, they’ve become this thing that, you know, people can kind of use as a symbol of what they’re against.
GH: Yeah, you know, we were saying Flock cameras. I think people understand that to mean, like, these kind of surveillance cameras that are often used by local governments. But is there a tidier definition that we should kind of understand Flock to mean? Like, what is a Flock camera?
TM: Yeah, what makes it different from, like, the camera outside your bodega or subway station or whatever is that it’s all tied into a vast national network, and that anybody who has access to this thing can just look up anything happening in this kind of all-seeing eye. I mean, it’s not literally everywhere, but that’s the kind of crux of it. It’s the kind of—it’s what the security camera network looks like in the movie.
And so you’ve seen a lot of pushback. And again, this is something that in a place with sometimes libertarian leanings like Montana, like Texas, where James Talarico has talked a lot about Flock cameras, it’s something that’s a way to kind of—it’s kind of a—not necessarily a crossover issue, but it’s an issue that is not strictly partisan, that people in kind of whatever place on the political spectrum can feel the same way about.
GH: And we’ve been talking a lot about Texas specifically. But to zoom out a bit, is this an issue that is bigger than just that one state?
TM: Yeah, I think so. And I think this is, like, the type of thing that you’re gonna see more and more people talk about because it is such a potent symbol. Because this is a way of connecting, you know, how people feel, you know, to some extent how people feel about policing, but also how people feel about, you know, tech and government. And at a moment where there is this conversation about how much power is being, you know, accumulated in the hands of a few people in government, Flock cameras are kind of a way of really drilling down on that and picking a villain.
GH: Yeah, if I were to kind of maybe give my take here, I think that Flock cameras and data centers are both a part of this kind of anti-establishment, you know, instinct that’s in the American public right now in the electorate. You know, one, it feels as though the United States government and corporations are more or less one and the same, you know, corporate interests. And so people are certainly bucking against the corporate interests and in turn bucking against, you know, our government establishment. That’s my take. Is that the sense you’re getting when you report on this from the ground.
TM: Yeah, and I mean, I think—and you see that in these campaigns, right? Like, the villains have shifted. You know, to take on Data Center Derek for a second, you know, two years ago it was, like, the corporate boardroom kind of rich dudes, and now he’s depicted as a puppet, and it’s, like, a guy in a gray hoodie like Sam Altman holding one thing, and it’s a guy in kind of, like, a black shirt like Mark Zuckerberg, you know, holding the other end of the puppet. I mean, Trump has deliberately kind of fused the highest echelons of Silicon Valley with his administration.
And so people, I think, rightly see kind of pervasive surveillance tech as kind of connected to this broader, unchecked corporate and government power. And I think, you know, there’s like—we’re at a real kind of nadir of trust in politics, like, at the moment, and that’s driven a lot—I think that’s probably driven Trump’s success in a lot of ways, is a bottoming out of trust. But now that’s kind of bottomed out even further, and Trump is sort of one of the people that people distrust even more so. It’s—the corporations he’s allied with are things that people trust. And so, you know, I think people maybe aren’t as worried about the security—the surveillance state maybe when they feel a little bit more trustworthy about the system. But right now people are just done.
GH: Bottomed out even further is so hard to believe. But here we are. So I want to ask about what’s being built down there at the bottom. It feels like the anti–data center coalition could be a new coalition. Should we be stressed out about this coalition? And what do you think this kind of coalition may build?
TM: It’s tough to say. I mean, right now we’re at a moment where just no one has an incentive to take the data center side in public. Even if you are kind of looking at it and saying, well, you know, we gotta build some of these, maybe we can make these different exceptions, nobody really has an incentive to come out and say, like, you guys are going too far, no more moratoriums, things like that, at least not for another five weeks. I’ve only seen one candidate kind of saying, like, vote for me so I can, you know, stop the Democrats from ruining AI. That’s Roger Marshall of Kansas, and he’s probably running one of the worst campaigns of the cycle.
So I think right now a lot of people are kind of saying a lot of the same things. Some of that is just very defensive. Some of that is just to kind of get through the next five weeks so that they can kind of go back to setting AI policy with the Trump administration and Big Tech, you know, kind of on their minds. So I’m not sure a lot of people are mad at the same thing, but I don’t think they’re all mad in the same way. So it’s not necessarily to me a coalition, you know, that can take landowners and ranchers and everything and necessarily, you know, fuse that with, like, a progressive criticism of Big Tech in a way that, like, leads to the sweeping, you know, perfect AI legislation of 2027.
I think what you’re gonna get is a real fight in the next few years about what this, you know, next step is gonna be. I mean, I had a chance to talk with Greg Casar, the congressman from Texas, from Austin, recently about this. And he’s, like, really interesting because when I talked to him last year, AI didn’t come up. Which is not, you know, not a knock on him, but you know, he had other things on his mind. He had immigration on his mind, he had redistricting on his mind. He is in Austin and it just was not, like, something he was banging the drum about. Now he is all in on this stuff. It’s, like, the thing that he wants to talk about is introducing bills on this, he’s talking to everybody about this. He is obsessed with AI right now. So I think there has been a real kind of learning curve for a lot of people over the last year, and that’s really kind of only the beginning right now.
GH: Well, one thing that I’ve seen online as we kind of come to a close here—I’ve seen this conversation online, particularly on Twitter or X. They’re basically saying if you’re anti–data center, you’re anti-masculine, and you’re pro-China. Is there a risk—which I think is the question underneath it—is there a real risk that our, you know, the folks that we’re in competition with—you know, America’s constantly in competition with China over, you know, technological advancement. Is there a risk that if we do continue to fight against data centers as a country, if voters do choose anti–data center candidates, that America may fall behind in the tech, I don’t know, space race of its—if you could even call it that?
TM: Yeah, that’s certainly one of the major arguments that you get from the tech industry. And of course, loaded into that is, like, you know, this idea that we can’t let China have this technology. We need to let Donald Trump have this technology, which doesn’t necessarily track. And I think what you would hear from somebody like Casar is, like, actually, like, you know, again, thinking about this like bioweapons or nuclear weapons at its most extreme lens, like, treaties exist, you know, diplomacy exists. You should be able to kind of work with your competitors to set constraints by which you can compete. And so I think that’s one of the arguments that I think you would hear on the other side of that.
But it’s so interesting that you talk about the Chinese narrative because that’s one of the things that we’ve seen a lot of with the data center opposition, is this accusation from people like, you know, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, Kevin O’Leary, the guy from Fox News or Fox Business, you know, that data center opposition is actually, like, this astroturfed Chinese propaganda psyop. And, like, you hear enough of it that I think some people actually do believe this. I don’t think that they spent enough time in their districts or in these places talking to the people, because it’s just like a—there is just a very inherent organic opposition coming out of there. But that’s certainly the line that you’re hearing a lot.
GH: Wow. Okay. Well, Tim, the good thing is that we have you actually on the ground talking to people, and your reporting is so important. I hear that you’re headed back to Texas for another reporting trip very soon. What kind of stories can you expect to kind of gather while you’re there?
TM: Yeah, Texas has emerged as, you know, one of the, you know, tipping point states for the midterms, right? So I’m gonna be looking at, you know, the Texas Senate race, trying to track down Ken Paxton and James Talarico. And then, you know, I mentioned the governor’s race. This is not a race we expected to be close heading into the cycle. But Gina Hinojosa has run a really impressive campaign and again has really emphasized, you know, data centers and sort of tried to tell this story of a kind of a low-key corruption from the Abbott campaign and—or the Abbott administration, I should say. So I’m gonna be looking at those two top races, but also just kind of broadly taking the temperature of what is kind of the ultimate 2026 battleground.
GH: Well, we will be paying very close attention to your reporting and excited to have you on the show today. For everyone watching, make sure you follow Tim’s great reporting over on MotherJones.com and catch him on our Instagram account as well. Tim Murphy, national correspondent. Thank you so much for being here.
TM: Thanks for having me.
GH: Okay, that’s it for this one. Great conversation with Tim. Again, you can go back and check out my conversation with David Corn and Ari Berman in our last episode. Our great journalism work, like Tim’s reporting and this show, is only possible because of your support. Your views and subscriptions keep us going. So don’t forget to like this video, this piece of content, share it and subscribe to our YouTube channel, and let us know what you think of this episode in the comments down below. Our producers are eager to know your thoughts on this show, Stress Test. We will be back in just a couple of days with another edition of Stress Test from Mother Jones. Thanks for being here.
2026-10-07 22:44:46
Martin Soto, a Peruvian man thrown into solitary confinement after organizing a hunger and labor strike inside the notorious for-profit ICE detention facility Delaney Hall, was released from New Jersey’s Elizabeth Detention Center with an ankle monitor Tuesday night.
Soto came to the United States in 2024 and was pursuing asylum. He was detained by federal agents in February while buying diapers for his two young children. Though he has no criminal record, he spent eight consecutive months in ICE detention, including several months in solitary confinement—retribution, his wife Gabriela said, for his role as an organizer.
Gabriela Soto organized a series of protests outside Delaney Hall in May, as her husband worked to improve conditions inside. On May 22, a group of over 300 detained immigrants, including Martin, announced a two-week hunger and labor strike inside the for-profit detention facility, demanding freedom and due process, as well as a meeting with the governor and an end to coercive pressure to self-deport. The state of New Jersey sued to close Delaney Hall as reports of inedible food, violent guards, and inadequate medical care continued to emerge from the facility. The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, claimed the hunger strike never happened.
By the end of May, Martin Soto was transferred to the nearby Elizabeth Detention Center, where he was held for another four months. “They don’t want him associating with more people because they’re afraid that he might start another hunger and labor strike inside a facility,” Gabriela Soto told journalist Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg in early September. “So they keep him away from life in general.”
In August, Soto began pursuing a U-Visa, a specialized visa “reserved for victims of certain crimes…who are aiding law enforcement investigations.” In September, Gabriela Soto sent a handwritten letter to New Jersey Attorney General Davenport asking Davenport to sign Martin’s U-Visa certification as her office investigates alleged human rights abuses against Soto and others inside Delaney Hall.
“I know that my advocacy, Martin’s bravery, has placed this case in the spotlight & therefore your decisions in this are under that same spotlight,” Gabriela wrote. “But I ask you to please consider providing us with this documentation so we can continue our fight.”
That visa certification was approved this week, according to independent journalist Kevin Ortega-Rojas. Soto’s October 6 release was first reported by Radio Jornalera NJ, a local community radio station. New Jersey Democrats, including Representatives Rob Menendez (D-NJ) and Analilia Mejía (D-NJ), joined the Soto family and about two dozen supporters at the gates of the Elizabeth Detention Center Tuesday night.
In a video posted that evening by Radio Jornalera, Gabriela runs, sobbing, into Martin’s arms.
2026-10-07 19:30:00
Laura doesn’t know what she’s going to do when her medication runs out. For years, she relied on Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid, to cover the costs of treating her Type 2 diabetes: doctor visits, tests, medication. An undocumented immigrant from Mexico, she benefited from California policies that opened Medi-Cal to all low-income residents, regardless of immigration status.
Last winter, however, she received a notice that her coverage was set to expire and that she would need to renew it. At the time, Laura, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, said she rarely left her home, scared of getting caught up in an immigration enforcement operation. For months, she had missed many of her appointments and sent friends to pick up her prescriptions.
But she eventually ventured to the enrollment office. There, the person reviewing her renewal application told her that, since some of her family members were paid under the table, they would all have to make and sign attestations of income. Her husband was hesitant, worried by news of Medicaid’s data-sharing agreement with ICE.
“For me it was more about fear,” she said in Spanish. “I didn’t write the letter and I didn’t take it back…We didn’t know if [the news about data sharing] was true or what they could do.”
They decided the risk was too great. The deadline passed. And now Laura cannot get her coverage back. On January 1, California began denying full Medi-Cal benefits to undocumented adults amid a growing budget deficit and federal Medicaid cuts. Now, only those enrolled before 2026 can keep their coverage, as long as they don’t roll off; for Laura, it was too late.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, doctors and policy experts across the country have increasingly warned that immigrants are avoiding medical care as deportation fears weigh heavily on their day-to-day lives. During Minnesota’s Operation Metro Surge last winter, for instance, researchers found that the rate of missed appointments increased by more than 80 percent among Spanish-speaking families.
Medicaid doesn’t fund full coverage for undocumented immigrants. In fact, this October, it scaled back coverage for many immigrants with legal status who were previously eligible, as provisions of the GOP’s July 2025 budget bill—better known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—kicked in.
But many immigrants are also choosing to drop out of programs that they are still eligible for, including state-funded coverage—even though, as blue states including California, Colorado, and Washington roll back and cap enrollment for these programs due to funding constraints, they might not be able to recover that medical support later on.
“What past research has shown us is that just the chilling effect and the fears and uncertainty around these policies lead many more immigrants to disenroll from coverage than those who are directly impacted,” said Drishti Pillai, director of immigrant health policy at KFF.
As more federal policies are implemented, such as the new eligibility provisions and changes to the federal public charge rule, which now penalizes some green card applicants if they use non-cash public benefits like Medicaid, —it’s likely that the share of immigrants avoiding healthcare will keep “increasing as time goes on,” Pillai said.
Laura, who is going by a pseudonym in this article, said she was initially reluctant to share her experience for the same reasons she didn’t risk renewing her health insurance benefits. But it was important, she reasoned, to raise awareness of a situation that has also happened to other of her friends and acquaintances.
“I know I’m not the only person who is going through this,” she said.
From May 2025 to March 2026, around 244,000 immigrants disenrolled from California-funded expansion programs meant for low-income residents ineligible for Medicaid due to their legal status. It’s a drastic change from years prior, when enrollment in these programs generally increased each month.
Despite the fact that people in expansion programs only made up about one in nine of the state’s Medi-Cal enrollees as of May 2025, based on public enrollment data, they accounted for about a third of disenrollments in the state from that month to March 2026, according to Diana Camacho, a senior program officer at the California Health Care Foundation.
California doesn’t keep track of why its residents disenroll from Medi-Cal. Many people, like Laura, simply roll off when they don’t renew their plan before their deadline.
Conversations Camacho has had, however, suggest that “fear and lack of information” are at work. Her team has heard immigrants voice concerns “about immigration enforcement, data sharing, as well as changing public charge rules” in weighing whether to renew—even when, like Laura, they might not be able to reverse their decision.
“A whole generation of children and immigrant families are falling behind in school because of all of this.”
A recent analysis by the Latino Policy and Politics Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, compared data on ICE arrests with Medi-Cal enrollment numbers in state-funded programs. It found that, though enrollment rates in state-funded programs—which are used predominantly by undocumented immigrants—started decreasing after raids began in Los Angeles, the drops went far beyond the number of people arrested during that time.
Many factors “suggest that immigration enforcement has led to what is commonly known as the chilling effect,” said Arturo Vargas Bustamante, the institute’s faculty director of research. About a third of this group’s disenrollments in 2025, his study noted, couldn’t be explained by deportations or by regular enrollment fluctuations. Vargas Bustamante attributes that share of the decline to fear.
Though Northern California has been spared raids on the scale of Los Angeles or Chicago, Laura and her family have had much to be scared about: Last October, a planned massive ICE deployment was announced, then cancelled in the Bay Area, followed by news of ICE activity in multiple cities across the region and at San Francisco International Airport.
Laura’s biggest worry, she said, is that her family could be separated. Her two children, both US citizens, have told her they don’t want to move to a new country and leave their old lives behind. Though her children are young adults—her son just started college, and her daughter works and lives on her own—they still need her help. Her son is not yet financially independent; her daughter is autistic, so Laura wants to be close by.
Last year, when she still had coverage, “I would tell my doctor that I didn’t know why my glucose levels were rising,” Laura said. “I was working out, I was eating well, but I was stressed. And my stress was because my son was in high school and very worried about me. He would tell me to not go to his school, to not wait for him, and he would get worried. And I was even more worried for him.”
According to Vargas Bustamante, families like Laura’s, where undocumented parents are a household’s main providers, are among “the most affected” by these chilling effects: they are those for whom fears of family separation carry the most weight.
Even adults with coverage are underusing the health services they have access to, says Alma Santana of Mujeres Unidas y Activas, a nonprofit that supports Latina and indigenous women in Oakland and San Francisco.
“Our members have stopped going to their appointments, from basic ones to primary care visits,” said Santana, who heads the nonprofit’s immigrant rights program. “They’re worried about being detained if they go.” Two women she worked with, who had diabetes and cancer respectively, she said, decided to self-deport to Mexico, worried about interruptions to their medical care if they were detained.
It’s increasingly difficult for advocates and resource providers to tell immigrants what’s safe. Many of the federal administration’s new immigration policies have been challenged in court, though not always successfully. Sometimes, as with Medicaid’s data sharing agreement with ICE, the way the federal government plans to use the data remains unclear. But groups like Santana’s try to make sure immigrants have as much information as possible to weigh their options.
“There’s a lot of fear, and then there’s people who, at a moment in time, decided not to renew and then later regretted it,” Santana said.
That impact extends to kids. Over the years, San Francisco pediatrician Raul Gutierrez has built a lot of trust with his patients, many of whom are from Spanish-speaking immigrant families. But since the start of the second Trump presidency, he’s noticed they’re much more reluctant to seek treatment.
“More kids need reminders to come to their visits. Kids are missing their vaccines,” Gutierrez said. “Kids are missing their specialty appointments for things that they need to be evaluated on.”
One mother asked Gutierrez if it was necessary to take her daughter to the gastroenterologist; the specialist was located in a different city that she didn’t know well. ”She really was struggling with that question of, ‘Do we go and just risk the possibility of being detained?’” he said.
He has sought workarounds to let those families safely access care, such as phone appointments. But that’s not always possible. Some families, Gutierrez said, wait too long to access care; one family he knows, whose child had a condition that causes fluid accumulation in the brain, waited until their child needed emergency surgery.
Other families, he has noticed, have opted to not renew their children’s Medi-Cal altogether—even though children under 18 in California are still eligible regardless of immigration status. “There’s so many questions that are being asked and so much uncertainty about how that information is being shared,” he said.
Gutierrez worries that these lapses in coverage will leave immigrant children with even more unmet health care needs, including mental health support, which he notes more children now require amid deportation fears.
“I worry that a whole generation of children and immigrant families are afraid to engage in their communities and not take advantage of all the wonderful things that help them thrive and that help them just be children,” he said. “A whole generation of children and immigrant families are falling behind in school because of all of this.”
New state and federal policies could make disenrollments even worse in the coming year, Camacho said, and not just for immigrants. Further restrictions on Medi-Cal will kick in next year that add more eligibility checks and work reporting requirements, creating more barriers for all low-income California residents.
The “public charge” rule, implemented in mid-September, is among the policies that alarms advocates most: immigration officers now consider whether immigrants or their family members use public benefits like Medicaid and SNAP when reviewing applications for permanent residency.
“It’s hard not to live stressed, thinking about what might happen tomorrow if you go to the store and you don’t come back.”
After Trump first tried to implement a similar rule in 2019—when it was contested in the courts and eventually rescinded by the Biden administration—researchers found that, though the rule did not apply to many of the immigrant groups that qualify for benefits, it had broader impacts on those groups’ willingness to seek support. A 2021 KFF survey, for instance, found that 1 in 4 undocumented Latino adults, and 1 in 10 lawful permanent Latino residents, had decided to opt out of government assistance programs because they worried about its impact on their immigration status or that of a family member.
“Perhaps it’s going to go away at the end of the Trump administration,” Vargas Bustamante said. A group of 22 states has already filed a lawsuit challenging the rule. But for now, he predicts, it will only “generate bigger and more chilling effects in our communities.”
The last time Laura saw her doctor, she re-filled Laura’s prescriptions and said that they could figure out a way to continue their visits, even though Laura no longer had coverage.
It wasn’t the first time her doctor had expressed concern. Laura said the doctor had called her multiple times last winter, asking her why she wasn’t showing up to her appointments. Laura would say that she didn’t want to put herself at risk. But what would happen, Laura’s physician asked, if she stopped going to the doctor?
When Laura went to pick up her pills with her new prescription, she learned she’d have to pay out of pocket. She can’t cover that cost regularly—the 53-year-old hasn’t been able to find a consistent source of income since last year, when the woman she regularly cooked and cleaned for told her she could no longer afford to pay for her help due to the Bay Area’s rising cost of living.
“It’s a very uncertain future,” Laura said. “I don’t know if I’m going to have the same support.”
She is hardly the only one.
“With the messages we’re getting every day, it’s hard to stay calm,” said Santana, of Mujeres Unidas y Activas. “It’s hard not to live stressed, thinking about what might happen tomorrow if you go to the store and you don’t come back.”
2026-10-07 19:30:00
The Trump administration has quietly announced that its own lawyers will represent unaccompanied migrant children in immigration court, facing off against other administration lawyers who are trying to deport the kids.
Immigration advocates are concerned that the arrangement, announced last week in the Federal Register, could pose a conflict of interest. In the past, unaccompanied minors were represented by a network of independent nonprofits, but the administration ended the contract this year after the network refused to hand over privileged information about its young clients.
“I’m concerned about the lack of independence” of these new government lawyers, says Ana Raquel Devereaux, an attorney at the nonprofit Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, part of the network that lost the contract.
The administration’s new attorneys will be housed in the Department of Health and Human Services, in a section called the Unaccompanied Alien Children Legal Representation Division. HHS did not respond to questions about when they would begin their work.
The federal rules in place to protect immigrant kids from harm and exploitation “rely on experienced legal representatives trained to work with children.”
Unaccompanied minors are granted special protections under federal law because they are so vulnerable after entering the United States without a parent or legal guardian; many of them are very young and could be at risk of trafficking or abuse. The Trafficking Victims Protection and Reauthorization Act and other federal regulations require that they be assigned independent lawyers.
This requirement is particularly important, immigrant advocates point out, because the other arms of immigration court are far from independent: Immigration judges work for the Department of Justice and deportation attorneys work for the Department of Homeland Security. “We already don’t have an independent [immigration] judiciary, and to have the defense side of representation also be within the government makes me feel like it’s all a farce and everybody is working together to get the kids removed,” says Devereaux.
The Federal Register notes that the new division of lawyers will be separate from another division at HHS, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which temporarily houses unaccompanied kids after they cross the border alone until they can be reunited with sponsors, who are often relatives. As my colleague Isabela Dias and I reported last week, ORR has been holding children for significantly longer periods under the Trump administration and is also detaining children who are arguably not even unaccompanied.
In a statement to the Associated Press, HHS said the new lawyers would “give the Department an additional mechanism to provide these children direct legal support while dedicated public servants work around the clock to safely reunify them with their families.” But immigration advocates fear—not without justification—that the administration will instead work to deport the kids. As our earlier piece mentioned, the government tried to fly dozens of Guatemalan children from ORR shelters out of the country in the middle of the night last year, but a court intervened. And ProPublica reported that unaccompanied minors have been detained and removed from the United States at three times the rate they were during Trump’s first term.
The administration’s plan to represent migrant kids in court was announced after months of upheaval over who should play that role. At the end of July, the longstanding contract with the network of independent legal nonprofits expired. Then, the administration awarded a contract to Burke Law Group, a small Texas firm with far less experience in such matters, but greater ties to Trump: one of Burke’s co-founders served in the first Trump administration and one of its founding partners works for the second.
Facing backlash, Burke Law Group pulled out and the administration instead awarded the contract to Our Rescue, a nonprofit founded by a former ICE agent that had no experience representing immigrant kids in court.
Last month, dozens of federal lawmakers signed a letter expressing concern that the administration would give such an important job to “firms so plainly unqualified for the task.” The Our Rescue deal was put on hold after the nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice filed a bid protest, whereupon the administration awarded another contract to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. But in recent court filings, immigration advocates said USCRI was not representing kids in court, and its lawyers often sat silently as judges considered the children’s cases.
“There are rules in place…to protect children, but those rules rely on experienced legal representatives trained to work with children,” Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, deputy director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, also part of the nonprofit network that lost its contract, said in a press conference last month. “Instead, the administration has chosen to fracture this network of experienced child-centered advocates that existed, with no plan in place to replace it.”
2026-10-07 18:01:00
If you’ve ever listened to President Trump talk about our elections, you might hear something like this: Voter fraud is rampant. Noncitizens are regularly voting illegally. And our elections are rigged. The president often uses the bully pulpit to repeat these claims despite study after study showing they’re just not true. But it’s not just the president. There are many others at the ground level saying the same things to justify voting restrictions that could disenfranchise legal voters, especially voters of color.
One of them is J. Christian Adams. An activist and former trial attorney for the US Department of Justice, Adams was named to Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017. Today, he’s the president of Public Interest Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for stricter voter ID laws and sues states and local governments to remove illegal voters from election rolls.
On this week’s “More To The Story,” Adams claims there’s systemic voter fraud in the US before abruptly ending the interview after host Al Letson challenges his assertions. Al then talks with Mother Jones National Voting Rights Correspondent Ari Berman about the lack of evidence from activists like Adams, the claims Adams and PILF have made that noncitizens are illegally voting, and what conservative activists who say election fraud is rampant are really trying to achieve.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
2026-10-07 08:32:44
A newly released military study paints a frightening picture of the electric shock gloves ICE recently purchased by the thousands—and which the agency and its acting head David Venturella seem eager to deploy regardless of the potential consequences.
Records unearthed by the watchdog group American Oversight and first shared with the Associated Press show that in one set of trials carried out by the US Army in 2024, the electric shock gloves caused “overwhelmingly immediate” pain to soldiers playing the role of combative inmates in a mock forced cell extraction scenario, who then reported that “just seeing the glove” frightened them into obedience.
GLOVEs, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are taser-like devices that look like standard work gloves, but deliver a painful electric charge when the wearer touches a person’s skin. As I’ve previously reported, they’ve been described as “low optics”—police language for a weapon that causes harm but doesn’t leave marks, making it harder for victims to sue or for public outrage to stem from visible harm.
Two weeks ago, the shock gloves’ manufacturer, Jeff Niklaus, called the devices the “safest, most humane deescalatory product probably ever to come along.”
The Army study found that the gloves caused “intense pain,” but didn’t significantly change the amount of time it took to control a combative prisoner, or transfer someone from one unit to another. In one trial, a participant accidentally turned the shock gloves on; in another, “inmates” were able to fight off “guards” wearing the gloves for longer than they were able to hold off unarmed ones. People with water or oil on their skin felt more pain when shocked, and one participant reported lingering pain for 30 minutes afterward.
Soldiers, once shocked, were terrified to be shocked again. Army investigators reported “fatigue, soreness, and excessive apprehensiveness to being shocked again” in the soldiers playing inmates—and noted that the shock gloves gave a confidence boost to those who were playing guards, especially “smaller or less trained members.” The gloves, the study concluded, should be deployed in military prisons.
In September, ICE finalized its purchase of 6,650 pairs of the shock gloves for $16.7 million from Kentucky-based Compliant Technologies. White House border czar Tom Homan said in August that it could “be a while” before the gloves are in use in the field. But ICE, according to the Associated Press, was already well aware of the Army study when it chose to purchase the gloves.
