2026-01-24 16:01:00
During an NCAA women’s swimming championship in March 2022, two seniors tied for fifth place. The race was unremarkable except for one fact: One of the swimmers, Lia Thomas, was a transgender woman. The swimmer she tied with, Riley Gaines, believed the NCAA never should have allowed her to participate.
The matchup, and Gaines’ subsequent transformation into a leading anti-trans activist, has fueled a growing movement to “save women’s sports” from trans women—and a conservative crusade against trans rights more broadly.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.This week on Reveal, we examine Gaines’ rise and radicalization, as her rhetoric shifts from calling out NCAA policy to calling trans women sexual predators.
Over the last year, the anti-trans movement has reached a tipping point. Trans girls are banned from girls’ school sports in the majority of states. The NCAA and US Olympic and Paralympic committees have banned trans women from women’s competitions. The Supreme Court is currently considering the issue, too.
Then we dive into the science to understand how gender-affirming hormone therapy affects trans women’s performance—and what questions science still has not answered around fairness in women’s sports.
Finally, we return to the swimming pool, as reporter Imogen Sayers speaks with Meghan Cortez-Fields, one of the last transgender swimmers to compete as a woman in the NCAA.
2026-01-24 08:57:44
The Trump administration is using an anti-Ku Klux Klan law to prosecute Minnesota activists for demonstrating against ICE at a St. Paul church. On Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had arrested Chauntyll Allen, Nekima Levy Armstrong, and William Kelly for their alleged involvement in a January 18 anti-ICE demonstration. The three protesters were charged with conspiracy to deprive rights—a federal felony under Section 241, a Reconstruction-era statute enacted to safeguard the rights of Black Americans to vote and engage in public life amid the KKK’s racial violence.
Levy Armstrong and Allen are both prominent Black community organizers. Levy Armstrong leads the grassroots civil rights nonprofit Racial Justice Network and once served as the president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP. Allen is a member of the St. Paul School Board and a founder of Black Lives Matter Twin Cities. (The DOJ did not immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did lawyers for Levy Armstrong, Allen, or Kelly.)
An affidavit filed in support of the government’s case by a special agent with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) also claims that the protesters sought to violate the “free exercise of religion at a place of religious worship secured by the FACE Act,” a 1994 federal law designed to protect people seeking abortion services. The affidavit appears to name several other redacted defendants as participants in the conspiracy.
Videos showed the group of activists disrupting the St. Paul church service with chants of “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good,” a reference to the 37-year-old mother of three who was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis earlier this month. Protesters selected the church because they say one of its pastors, David Easterwood, leads a local ICE field office. Reporting from PBS found that the church pastor’s personal information matches that of the acting director of the ICE St. Paul field office, and that Easterwood “appeared alongside DHS Secretary Kristi Noem at a Minneapolis press conference last October.”
The HSI agent’s affidavit designates Easterwood as “Victim 1.” The document also lists several chants made by “agitators” that “terrorized the parishioners,” including “this is what community looks like” and “hands up, don’t shoot.” (According to the affidavit, one churchgoer only heard the word “shoot” and therefore feared the protesters could have guns.) The agent also characterizes Good’s death as “an officer-involved shooting as a result of her assault on an immigration officer.”
A press release published by DHS on Friday called the three arrested activists “ringleaders” of a “church riot” and alleged that their actions amounted to an “attack on churchgoers’ religious freedom.” But a legal filing from Levy Armstrong’s lawyer arguing for his client’s pretrial release notes that Levy Armstrong herself is a Christian reverend.
“Contrary to the charges, there was no intent to deprive anyone of their right to worship, but the desire was to initiate a debate about religious values,” her lawyer wrote. “It was a non-violent protest, which under a normal government, would not lead to criminal charges, much less federal felony charges.” All three organizers were released from federal custody on Friday.
The extraordinary decision to charge the protesters with felony federal conspiracy against civil rights comes after footage of the event sparked days of viral outrage among Trump’s supporters, with right-wing websites calling the protest a “mob,” “riot,” and “attack.” The DOJ also sought to bring conspiracy charges against journalist Don Lemon, a former CNN host who was present at the protest, an effort rejected by a federal magistrate judge.
“Don Lemon himself has come out and said he knew exactly what was going to happen inside that facility,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon told far-right influencer Benny Johnson during a podcast appearance on Monday. “He went into the facility, and then he began ‘committing journalism,’ as if that’s sort of a shield from being a part, an embedded part, of a criminal conspiracy. It isn’t.”
The Trump administration evidently hopes to make an example of Allen, Levy Armstrong, and Kelly: “Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP,” Bondi posted on X on Thursday.
One of Trump’s first actions as president was to overturn a longstanding policy that restricted ICE enforcement at “sensitive areas,” including places of worship.
2026-01-24 05:45:30
In December, Pastor Sergio Amezcua put out a sign-up for Minnesotans who were afraid to leave their homes and needed grocery deliveries. He thought 10 or 20 families would sign up. Since then, his church, Dios Habla Hoy, has delivered food to 17,000 families.
“It’s really evil what’s going on,” says Amezcua. “And coming from the conservative government, ‘Christian’ government, I just think they’re reading their Bible backwards.”
Mother Jones senior reporter Julia Lurie spent the week in Minneapolis talking to clergy, protesters, and people confronted by ICE. Watch the video for more and follow along for updates.
2026-01-24 05:16:35
Documents unsealed by a federal judge this week confirm the federal government’s attempts to target, arrest, and deport students for pro-Palestine speech on college campuses last year. The court records also make clear the methods of investigation. The government looked to unverified accounts shared on social media and utilized Canary Mission—a shadowy online blacklist created by anonymous authors to smear pro-Palestine activists—to gather evidence against student protestors.
The documents were unsealed only after sustained pressure from journalists and press-freedom groups. News organizations, including the Center for Investigative Reporting, challenged the government’s efforts to keep large portions of the record secret, arguing that the public had a right to understand how speech was being scrutinized and punished. In unsealing the documents, US District Judge William G. Young sharply rebuked the Trump administration and called the government’s actions against pro-Palestinian speech an unconstitutional attempt to twist laws to intimidate students.
The new materials confirm previous accounts and reporting about the Department of Homeland Security’s targeting of students. In 2025, after Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk were taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, speculation spread quickly among advocacy groups that government officials were collecting names by looking at pro-Israel monitoring websites like Canary Mission.
The documents unsealed provide the clearest timeline of how this happened. And they make clear how quickly a case escalated, with Canary Mission’s help. Öztürk’s case is indicative. In March of 2024, Öztürk was one of four names published as part of a campus op-ed that criticized the Tufts University administration for failing to honor three student-led resolutions that had recently passed, including one calling for recognition of genocide in Gaza and another for divestment from the state of Israel.
Almost a year later, a profile of Rumeysa Öztürk appeared on Canary Mission. A month after that, according to the documents, government officials compiled a report on Öztürk. A week later, on March 25, 2025, Öztürk was arrested by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.
The new records make clear what happened: Öztürk’s participation in the op-ed was cited as the cause for her removal. (DHS and ICE did not show Öztürk had participated in any antisemitic activity.)
The documents show that federal agencies, such as Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) within the Department of Homeland Security, relied on “publicly available information,” including social media posts and third-party websites, to assess students’ eligibility for visas and residency.
And they confirm previous public testimony. In July 2025, Peter Hatch, an ICE official who was part of HSI’s division that compiled background reports on students, testified during the lawsuit’s hearings that “the direction [for his team] was to look at the website [Canary Mission].” Hatch says his team compiled more than 100 reports from a list of 5,000 names.
“Many of us have long been trying to raise alarm bells about the dangers of privately-funded, hate groups such as Canary Mission,” said Nadia Abu El Hajj, an anthropology professor at Barnard and Columbia University. “As testimony at the trial and the trove of newly released documents clearly demonstrate, Canary Mission’s blacklist has serious, material consequences: they have played a central role in providing names of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students to the federal government, calling for their deportation.”
Internal reports also show that social posts; news articles from sources like the New York Post; and unverified information from Canary Mission were used to justify the deportation of Khalil, Öztürk, and a slew of others, including Mohsen Mahdawi, Badar Khan Suri, and Yunseo Chung. The files for Khalil, Öztürk, and Mahdawi all specifically cite Canary Mission. The reports also include posts from X accounts like @CampusJewHate, which describes itself as an account to “put pressure on academic institutions to oppose Jew-hatred by exposing toxic anti-Israel climate on their campuses.”
“Secretaries Noem and Rubio and their several agents and subordinates acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment-protected political speech,” wrote Judge Young in his court order. “Moreover, the effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.”
The State Department, in a statement, was unapologetic. “The Trump Administration is using every tool available to get terrorist-supporting aliens out of our country,” a spokesperson said. “A visa is a privilege, not a right. We abide by all applicable laws to ensure the United States does not harbor aliens who pose a threat to our national security.”
The documents have been released as the US pushes once again to deport Khalil. Earlier this month, a US Appeals court overturned a lower court decision that blocked the Columbia former graduate student’s deportation. Following that ruling, a DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin went on NewsNation and promised to send Khalil to Algeria.
In a statement, McLaughlin told the Center for Investigating that “there is no room in the United States for the rest of the world’s terrorist sympathizers, and we are under no obligation to admit them or let them stay here. The framers of our Constitution and its Bill of Rights never contemplated a world where foreign citizens could come here as guests and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-American and anti-Semitic violence and terrorism.”
2026-01-24 03:14:53
This article was co-published with EdSurge, a nonprofit newsroom that covers education through original journalism and research. Sign up for their newsletters.
A little girl stared at a list of test questions in her science class, unable to answer the majority. Resigned, she wrote at the top, “I failed badly”—although she misspelled it, instead writing, “I felled bedly.”
She was not in a lower-level grade or even elementary school. She was a student of Laurie Lee’s sixth-grade class, more than two decades ago.
Lee never forgot the reading difficulties she witnessed while teaching fifth and sixth graders.
“It becomes clear pretty quickly how they’re struggling,” says Lee, now a senior research associate at the Florida Center for Reading Research. Beyond test scores, she says the struggle was also evident in the questions her students would ask their classmates in response to assigned reading: “It’s often not because of content areas; it’s because they can’t read.”
Lee was not the only education leader grappling with older students’ lack of reading skills. Rebecca Kockler saw similar issues when she worked as the assistant superintendent of academic content at the Louisiana Department of Education. Recently, the state was the second most improved in the nation for fourth-grade reading results, rising from the 50th in 2019 to the 16th in 2025, with high scores measured in 2024. But, despite the strides Kockler’s fourth-grade students were making, it was all but erased by the time they hit eighth grade.
“It was just, ‘What is going on?’” says Kockler, now the executive director at the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund’s Reading Reimagined program. “What was frustrating for me was that I could not touch my middle school reading results.”
According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress results, only 30 percent of eighth-grade students are reading at a NAEP “proficient” level. Fourth-grade students had similar scores, at 31 percent. Both fourth and eighth- grade scores were not significantly different from when the data collection first began in 1992.
Many states, similarly to Louisiana, are focusing on deploying research-backed reading programs for their younger students. But, despite a stagnant reading comprehension rate for older students, they are continually left out of the conversation about improving literacy.
“There’s this focus on K-3, without a lot of resources dedicated to helping the kids in secondary school that fell through the cracks.”
“There’s this focus on K-3, without a lot of resources dedicated to helping the kids in secondary school that fell through the cracks,” says Anna Shapiro, associate policy researcher for the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit public policy research firm. “Starting early makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways, but there’s also all these kids in the school system that didn’t benefit from that and do need intervention as well.”
The phrase “science of reading” has cropped up more and more over the last few years. Simply put, it looks into the research behind how one learns the foundations of reading, such as sounding out letters, forming words, and making basic sentence structures.
The research is not particularly new. Congress convened a 14-person panel in 1999, dubbed the National Reading Panel, which submitted a 480-page report in 2000 with its science of reading findings. It found that students need explicit instruction in five pillars of reading: phonics, phonological awareness (or sound structure of spoken words), fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.
But the last two decades have been dotted with various methods for improving— and teaching—reading skills. There’s phonics, or sounding out the letters of words, which was lauded in the National Reading Panel report. “Whole language” style of reading, which had readers focus on context clues and guess the word that would accurately fit the scenario, was widely popular in the middle of the 20th century, despite not being studied or recommended in the National Reading Panel report.
The modern science of reading push began to inch into the mainstream in 2019, after Mississippi overhauled the way its school systems taught reading starting in 2013—and saw drastic test result improvements six years later, catapulting to No. 9 in the nation for fourth-grade reading skills on the NAEP assessment. The state was number 1 for reading and math gains since 2013. Some dubbed it the “Mississippi Miracle,” with those in the state calling it a “Mississippi Marathon.” It was a model that Louisiana followed quickly after.
Then, the science of reading was flung into the general public’s consciousness with the hit podcast Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong, which details the history and debates behind teaching children to read.
By 2025, roughly 40 states had passed laws that either mandated or referenced using evidence-based methods for teaching reading, though what that specifically means, and how many resources are actually financially backing those methods, varies from state to state.
Some laws are more detailed than others, with most focusing on “foundational” —or lower-level—grades. Most, if they did specify, target kindergarten through third grades, requiring teachers of those grades to go through the science of reading training, and students that age to undergo screening practices. Others, including laws in North Carolina and Connecticut, expanded those efforts to K-5, with Iowa as a standout requiring personalized reading plans to struggling students through sixth grade. Some states, including New Mexico and Nevada, require all first graders to be screened for dyslexia.
But the change in student outcomes has been slow. According to a new study by EdWeek Research Center, more than half of the 700 polled educators said at least a quarter of their middle and high school students had difficulty with basic reading skills. More than 20 percent said half to three-quarters of their students struggle.
It’s affecting teachers too. According to a 2024 Rand survey, more than a quarter of middle school English teachers reported frequently teaching foundational reading skills like phonics and word recognition—“things that should be mastered in lower grades,” according to Shapiro.
By middle school, the consequences of poor literacy skills pop up across academic disciplines, like in Lee’s middle school science class.
“If they have trouble reading independently, they’ll have problems with other things as well. It’s not just language arts teachers; it impacts everyone,” Shapiro explains.
“If they have trouble reading independently, they’ll have problems with other things as well. It’s not just language arts teachers; it impacts everyone.”
Many reading experts have used the same example: A young child learns to read and understand the word “cat,” but that same child struggles when he gets older and comes across that same set of letters—c-a-t—in new, more complex words like “vacation” and “education.”
“It’s that application into complex words that we basically didn’t teach kids anywhere in our system, in the same explicit way we do with younger kids,” Kockler says.
Ideally, no child would arrive in middle school unable to keep up with his or her assigned reading. Some states are taking efforts to ensure that does not happen, with Louisiana, for example, passing a law in 2023 requiring students to be held back if they do not pass their state reading test unless they qualify for an exemption.
In the interim, though, older students with reading issues are still getting neglected. And researchers are at a loss about how it happens.
“From our research, we don’t really know exactly how these kids are getting to middle and high school and struggling with reading,” Shapiro says of Rand’s findings. “There’s this focus on K-3, without a lot of resources dedicated to helping the kids in secondary school that fell through the cracks.”
Identifying struggling students can be challenging. And there seems to be a major disconnect between what parents think about their children’s literacy skills and the reality. While 88 percent of parents believe their child is reading at grade level, only roughly 30 percent of students fall into that camp, according to a 2023 Gallup poll.
Most older students, once they hit a certain age, read independently—making it difficult for parents to know how well their child is grappling with the content. Meanwhile, some students with poor reading skills are able to cobble together their own tactics to understand assignments and may not be initially flagged as reading below grade level.
For older students who have been flagged as weak readers, there are traditional protocols to offer them additional support. Kevin Smith, who, along with Lee, co-founded the Adolescent Literacy Alliance, says in most schools, struggling students will leave their home classroom to work with a reading interventionist in the day, if the school has one. Other students get more intensive training, focusing on fewer skills for a longer period of time.
The missing piece: Implementing reading strategies in every class, across all grade levels—not just language arts classrooms.
“We can’t intervene our way out of instruction. There’s not enough time in the world to get caught up if they’re not getting help throughout the day.”
“We can’t intervene our way out of instruction,” Smith says. “There’s not enough time in the world to get caught up if they’re not getting help throughout the day.”
Most of that instruction tends to happen in the earlier grades.
“There’s learning to read, then reading to learn,” Tim Rasinki says, quoting an oft-used phrase. He taught middle school students before becoming a reading interventionist. “Even beyond grades three and four, there are still things you need to learn about reading. Critical thinking is a huge thing, but those [reading skills] need to be taught as well. I’m not sure the extent they are.”
Yet according to the EdWeek survey, 38 percent of educators said they are getting no training in how to handle older students reading below grade level, with roughly a quarter teaching themselves. The remaining 38 percent stated they are receiving training, from either their school, district, or state agency.
Many of the dozens of new state laws explicitly discuss teacher training, with California going so far as to mandate that universities change their teacher training programs. Other organizations, like the Reading Institute, have rolled out a free, 10-hour “Intro to the Science of Reading Course” for all New York City-based teachers.
But, teachers say they have an increasingly loaded plate juggling stressors, including test scores, and keeping curriculum on a set schedule.
As for building in more time for improved literacy teaching, “We’ve heard, ‘Look, Lincoln has to be dead by Christmas; how can we do that?’” Smith says. He advises teachers to focus on implementing evidence-based reading strategies on texts that are most challenging.
Katey Hills, the assistant superintendent for Governor Wentworth Regional School District in New Hampshire, said there was some pushback when her district initially began requiring professional development to teach science of reading techniques. Each of the kindergarten through sixth-grade teachers had to undergo training, along with seventh and eighth-grade English teachers.
“If you’re waiting, you’re a bit behind the times,” she says. “It is a lot of change and change is hard, but it can be done. It’s really important that teachers are trained and you give them the support, but it can be done. Once teachers start seeing the results, it sells itself.”
She recommends creating a task force to hear from teachers on the best adaptations for the material.
The district just put the program into place widely last year, but already, one first- grade classroom is 100 percent literate.
Meanwhile, Lee and Kockler both say they are optimistic about the future of literacy for older students.
“Mississippi and Louisiana are incredible examples of when you have good research and tools to deploy, you can see real results,” Kockler says, adding that the next step is to get more clarity and better tools focused on helping older children’s literacy. “I feel very hopeful. But there’s a lot of work to do, for sure.”
2026-01-24 02:57:57
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has taken a major step to stabilize water use in the state’s rural desert, where a Saudi-owned company established a massive farming operation more than a decade ago.
During her State of the State Address earlier this month, Hobbs announced she was placing the Saudi alfalfa farm within an “active management area,” a technical designation that allows Arizona to slow and possibly even reverse the growth of groundwater use in a remote desert area of western Arizona.
The megafarm near Vicksburg—owned by the Riyadh-based dairy company Almarai—began pumping massive amounts of groundwater in 2014 to grow hay for export to feed the kingdom’s dairy cows.
The Center for Investigative Reporting first broke news about the desert farm in 2015, drawing attention to a growing trend: Companies connected to foreign governments—Almarai was founded and is currently chaired by a member of the Saudi Royal family—were effectively exporting massive amounts of American groundwater in the form of hay, a water-intensive crop, to help their own countries cope with severe shortages.
But one country’s solution would become another’s problem, as the wells of Arizonans living in La Paz County near the farm began running dry.
The situation attracted international news coverage as awareness grew about the increasing global competition for groundwater, and other Arizona megafarms exporting desert water in the guise of agricultural products. The water grab would become a key issue in the state’s 2022 gubernatorial election.
The Grab, an Emmy-winning documentary based on our reporting, followed rural La Paz County supervisor Holly Irwin as she fought to protect residents’ precious water. Watch the trailer:
After the film’s release, Hobbs canceled some of the Saudi farm’s contracts to grow hay on land owned by the state. Attorney General Kris Mayes then sued Fondomonte, a wholly owned subsidiary of Almarai, seeking compensation for the locals whose wells were kaput.
Hobbs’ designation of the Ranegras Plain Groundwater Basin, located in western Arizona, as an “active management area,” allows regulators to curtail additional water use, effectively limiting the withdrawals to the people and entities pumping it today.
In the short term, the designation by itself cannot reduce the amount of water being used by foreign megafarms, but it can at least stop new ones from coming in—and current ones from expanding their operations—in addition to encouraging farms to reduce their withdrawals. “This is huge,” said Irwin, the county supervisor. “It prevents any future companies from being able to purchase land and come here to extract water.”
The global scramble for freshwater supplies is only increasing, according to a UN report released this week, which noted the world has entered an “era of water bankruptcy.”
