In 2024, Brittany Charlton achieved what she now calls “one of [her] main career aspirations”: the launch of a research center at Harvard University’s medical school focused on LGBTQ health.

Opening the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence had been a goal for Charlton, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, ever since she first stepped onto the Cambridge, Massachusetts campus as a graduate student more than a decade ago. Those aspirations, according to Charlton, required a herculean, years-long campaign to convince the school that such an effort would be worth it. “It took so much advocacy to be able to help the university, and the general public, understand that LGBTQ health and health inequities are a legitimate field of inquiry, that it’s worthwhile, and that it’s fundable,” she told me by phone on Wednesday.

But within the past two months, all that work has been undone. After President Donald Trump’s executive orders seeking to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and transgender people from public life, Charlton was one of the many researchers whose National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants were abruptly canceled. The orders, which she says affected approximately $6 million worth of her grants, forced her to abandon five projects, including one on how anti-LGBTQ legislation, such as “Don’t Say Gay” laws, affect the mental health of young people who identified as LGBTQ, and another on the reproductive health of LGBTQ women. The lost funds have also forced Charlton to close the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at Harvard, which relied almost entirely on NIH funding—a reality she calls “devastating.”

But Charlton and other researchers are now fighting back as plaintiffs in a new lawsuit, filed in Massachusetts federal court on Wednesday, alleging that NIH’s sweeping cancellations of billions of dollars worth of research and training grants focused on diversifying science were politically motivated and illegal. The complaint—which names the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as defendants, along with the NIH’s newly sworn-in Director Jay Bhattacharya—alleged that the cancellations of these grants violate multiple federal laws that regulate agencies’ actions and mandate that the NIH fund research addressing health disparities.

One of those laws is the Administrative Procedure Act, which says that agencies cannot act arbitrarily or capriciously. The plaintiffs allege the HHS and NIH violated that law by terminating grants with no valid explanation. Indeed, many of the cancellations—which affected hundreds of projects focused on trans people and race and DEI, according to a public database maintained by some researchers—seem to be a product of a fishing expedition aimed at carrying out Trump’s orders to purge the government of DEI and recognition of trans people. Two of Charlton’s grant termination letters from the NIH, for example, state that “this award no longer effectuates agency priorities”—but do not state what the agency’s new priorities actually are. (Kennedy has claimed the HHS will tackle chronic diseases, safer foods and water, and environmental toxins, but staffers have said that the department has already long prioritized those issues—and they don’t know how they’ll continue to with the agency losing nearly 25 percent its workforce, including through Tuesday’s massive purge.)

The termination notices Charlton received appear to say the quiet part out loud about why the grants are actually being pulled. One of them—focused on the project about LGBTQ women’s reproductive health—seems to reflect Trump’s attacks on DEI: “Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness. Worse, so-called DEI studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans.” The other termination notice—focused on the project about LGBTQ young people—takes more direct aim at trans people: “Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans. Many such studies ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities.”

The complaint also alleges the grant cancellations violate the NIH’s own Grants Policy Statement, which says grants can be pulled “if a recipient has failed to comply with the terms and conditions of the award.” It charges that, in targeting research affecting health disparities affecting minority populations and grants aimed at supporting diversifying the scientific workforce, the NIH also usurped the mandate that Congress gave the NIH decades ago to do exactly that. “To exclude from consideration in human medicine the health outcome disparities between one ethnicity or the other, or one sexual orientation or the other, is to strike at the heart of the scientific enterprise,” said Dr. Peter G. Lurie, president of the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, who is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

The complaint also contains the accounts of several early-career researchers who lost funding and other research fellowships dedicated to supporting people from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue careers in science—another one-time priority the NIH is now dismantling.

The case is being argued by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Protect Democracy Project, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Charlton and the other plaintiffs—including researchers at the University of Michigan, University of New Mexico, and the American Public Health Association, which represents more than 20,000 public health professionals—are asking the court to declare the grant cancellations unconstitutional, force the NIH to restore terminated awards, and prevent the agency from canceling more awards in the future. Spokespeople for HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit from Mother Jones.

Some of the court challenges to Trump’s power trip since returning to office have, indeed, helped stop or reverse some of the most sweeping changes he has tried to enact, such as his attempts to overturn birthright citizenship and fire thousands of probationary federal workers. Charlton is hopeful that this one, too, could also make a difference. “I think we have to trust the courts to uphold the rule of law,” she said. “They’re necessary to safeguard open inquiry and scientific progress.”

But in the meantime, with her LGBTQ Health Center at Harvard shuttering and projects being abandoned, Charlton says she expects LGBTQ people will directly suffer the consequences. “The termination of these grants,” she said, “absolutely poses a threat to LGBTQ communities.”

After all the public groveling and taxpayer-funded trips to Mar-a-Lago, New York City Mayor Eric Adams appears to have successfully prostrated himself to freedom. A federal judge on Wednesday permanently dismissed the wide-ranging corruption charges brought against him.

“We can never allow this to happen to another innocent American,” Adams said shortly after the dismissal was announced, holding a copy of FBI director Kash Patel’s Government Gangsters. “I’m going to encourage every New Yorker to read it,” he added, referring to the conspiracy-addled book.

The remarks, though brief, succinctly captured the presence of a public figure historically incapable of remorse, something of a feat in an era of Trumpian shamelessness. Because one would think that the recipient of such enormous good luck—I mean, what else can we call this outcome?—against the backdrop of egregious levels of government corruption, would force some modesty out of a person even as brazen as Adams. But as the allegations against Adams fully demonstrated, acting in ill-advised ways is simply how he operates.

As my colleague Anna Merlan wrote, the alleged crimes that got him in trouble with the feds in the first place, which ranged from bribery to wire fraud, were grim. But they were also unquestionably comical, carried out with the clowning of a bad slapstick comedy. There was the alleged insistence on putting everything in writing; accepting piles of cash with zero regard for discretion; requiring Turkish Air for travel (the first stop is always Istanbul).

At first blush, the scandal seemed to instantly decimate Adams’ political future. His favorability among New York City residents plummeted and potential jail time was a genuine possibility. But two months after the charges were unsealed, Adams received the ultimate good fortune in President Donald Trump’s victory, kicking off months of ingratiating behavior by Adams. This extended into policy: the selling out of New York City’s long-held status as a sanctuary city and greenlighting Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s return to Rikers. Adams also refused to condemn the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student who was detained last month over his pro-Palestinian views despite holding a green card.

All the fawning has now landed Adams not just one, but two clear victories: the end of the federal investigation into his alleged corruption, and, perhaps more importantly, protection from the administration should it seek to refile.

In other words, Adams got away with it—handsomely. But in promoting the book of a conspiratorial MAGA head on Wednesday, Adams appeared to signal that he remained willing to go out of his way to boost MAGA’s agenda, even if now technically scot-free.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Department of Transportation has ordered a review of federal funding for bike lanes and plans to target recent projects that “improve the condition for environmental justice communities or actively reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

The move, outlined in a department memo obtained by Grist, is part of the Trump administration’s broader goal of steering federal infrastructure spending toward fossil fuels. The restriction of federal funding comes as health experts warn that pedestrian deaths have surged. 

DOT officials did not respond to requests for comment.

The undated memo, reportedly sent March 11 to DOT offices, ordered an immediate freeze on all grants made after January 2021, invoking a series of executive orders aimed at dismantling federal diversity and climate initiatives. It instructs agency employees to identify projects that provide “funding to advance climate, equity, and other priorities counter to the Administration’s executive orders.” 

It specifically targets any funds for projects “whose primary purpose is bicycle infrastructure,” one of many steps President Donald Trump has taken to boost the fossil fuel industry.

It also calls for flagging projects that might prioritize benefits to disadvantaged communities or reduce emissions. This likely includes hundreds of grants awarded through Safe Streets and Roads for All, a $5 billion initiative created by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The goal of these efforts is to help communities address roadway safety concerns, said John Tallmadge, the executive director of Bike Durham, a nonprofit group in Durham, North Carolina. The group is supporting a series of infrastructure improvements in Durham that were counting on funding from the agency’s BUILD grants, also expected to be impacted. 

The Durham project would add sidewalks, crosswalks, and bus stops to the city’s busiest transit corridor, which is used by thousands of people each day. “Numerous locations along this corridor have had pedestrian fatalities,” Tallmadge said. 

These safety concerns were highlighted in a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found Americans were 50 percent more likely to die walking in 2022 than in 2013. Its author, Rebecca Naumann, said infrastructure that prioritizes safety over speed—like the improvements Durham hopes to build—are proven solutions that protect everyone. 

She notes such designs have helped other high-income countries like Austria, Canada, and the UK, reduce traffic deaths in recent decades. The opposite is true of the United States, which as of 2022, saw more pedestrian deaths than any of the 27 other countries Naumann studied.

One DOT project manager, who requested anonymity to avoid professional retaliation, told Grist the memo and executive orders will make it “terribly difficult to use federal transportation dollars where it’s needed most.” That’s bad news for more than bike lanes: Sustainable transportation not only makes communities safer, it lowers travel costs; improves access to important services like medical care, schools, and work; and helps mitigate climate change. “It’s frustrating to see these solutions stall when so many communities urgently need them,” he said. As Tallmadge noted, delays and revisions to federal grants will increase the cost of any project—the opposite of government efficiency.

Other funding likely to be caught up in these restrictions include projects within the Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program, which supports multimodal travel; the BUILD program, which is designed to meet local or multi-jurisdictional needs; and the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, which helps communities harmed by past transportation decisions. Grants recently awarded under these initiatives range from $22 million for electric buses in Rhode Island to $157 million for green spaces that connect Atlanta neighborhoods currently divided by highways.

“The restriction of funding for projects like the Atlanta BeltLine and its RAISE Grant is an assault on disadvantaged communities,” said US Representative Nikema Williams, the Democrat who represents a wide swath of Atlanta. “These projects improve equity and mobility while spurring economic development.”

The DOT memo follows recommendations outlined in the conservative Project 2025 policy agenda that has shaped much of the Trump administration’s work. It broadly argued that the federal government should not fund local transportation projects. Instead, it suggests “user fees” and enabling “private companies to charge for transportation” through ventures like toll roads, removing air pollution regulations, restricting electric vehicle infrastructure, and eliminating federal funding for bicycle lanes, ferries, and other transportation. 

Yet the move to restrict programs like BUILD, which rely on community input, clashes with Project 2025’s emphasis on local decision-making, said Caron Whitaker, the deputy executive director of the League of American Bicyclists. The Atlanta BeltLine project, for example, was supported by private and public entities at almost every level of government in Georgia. “Why are we pulling back grants where local governments choose what they want to do?” Whitaker asked. “If safety is a federal issue, then local fatalities matter,” she added. “If the economy is a federal issue, then local economies matter.” 

The League, which is circulating a petition protesting the DOT’s review, recently led meetings with congressional aides to discuss the importance of funding active transportation projects. One former DOT employee who spoke to Grist said the scale of Safe Streets and Roads for All means there will be widespread impacts. “Safety is a bipartisan issue. You see Republican and Democratic representatives and senators touting the announcement whenever they’re awarded,” he said. “I think people just think, ‘Oh, this probably just hurts the coasts and the big cities,’ but there’s definitely rural areas that were trying to improve safety.”

It takes a lot of work for communities to get a federal grant, he said, often alongside finding matching funds. Whitaker agreed. “It puts local governments in a tough position,” she said. Because the Safe Streets program funding was congressionally allocated, explicitly including “bicyclists,” Duffy’s move to cut programs “whose primary purpose is bicycling” may not even be legal. Last week, a coalition of nonprofits and cities sued to reverse the federal freeze on grants, including the March DOT memo. “Since our nation’s founding, the Constitution has made it clear,” wrote the Southern Environmental Law Center, which is litigating the case, that “Congress controls federal spending—not the president.”

These efforts may limit transportation research nationwide. The DOT funds research and technical assistance projects through the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, or NCHRP, which is also subject to review. “If the policy memo is applied broadly to NCHRP, there could be a significant loss in current and future funding,” said Jennifer Dill, director of the Transportation Research and Education Center. “Without more research about countermeasures and solutions to fatalities, it will be hard to reverse that trend.” She worries Duffy’s recent actions will limit states’ ability to effectively use federal money for local priorities.

At headquarters, morale among many of those remaining at the DOT is at new lows. At first, the DOT project manager who spoke to Grist hoped to come up with ways to rephrase grants to avoid triggering words like “equity” and “climate.” But the new restrictions have escalated into an unprecedented level of scrutiny, with the political appointees reviewing every contract. 

“It’s gone beyond just switching words to get through the censor,” he said. “It’s not only making people afraid to carry on with good work that was underway, but has a chilling effect on everything we do going forward.”

Just a few months ago, Americans’ optimism about the economy was on the rise. The stock market boomed after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, and measures of business confidence rose. But all the positive sentiment came with an asterisk: It assumed that Trump would not follow through on his campaign promise to dramatically raise tariffs. Yet on Wednesday, Trump unilaterally ended nearly a century of international trade norms by announcing a baseline 10 percent tariff, with rates double or triple that being applied to several major trading partners. This marked a significant escalation over the tariffs he had already pushed through, even as US stocks have tumbled on fears of inflation and recession. Trump, it turns out, wasn’t bluffing.

If you think about politics traditionally, Trump’s tariffs don’t make sense. Presidents’ political fortunes are generally tied to the strength of the economy, so they can be expected not to take actions that almost all economists predict will cause economic pain, both short and long term. So if Trump is willing to hurt the economy, he must be getting something he wants even more in return.

That thing is power. With tariffs, Trump can exercise a kind of corruption that the country hasn’t experienced in some 150 years—a kind of control that is ultimately incompatible with both democracy and prosperity.

With tariffs, Trump is poised to trade a strong economy for one run on loyalty and retribution. Trump, a president who rules like a mob boss while claiming vast new powers, is transforming the government into a tool of reward and punishment. Already, prosecutions against Trump’s friends are being dropped, while those who have crossed him find themselves the target of vindictive executive orders. Media critical of Trump are under investigation by a weaponized Federal Communications Commission, while universities are being bullied into shutting down free speech. Tariffs will scale this weaponization across the entire economy. Viewed in this light, Trump’s willingness to sacrifice the economy in exchange for control over it makes perfect sense.

Even those close to Trump see this trade for what it is. “Tariffs are a tool the president enjoys because it’s personal power,” Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), who served in Trump’s first-term cabinet, told HuffPost Tuesday. “It’s personal―he doesn’t have to go through Congress. He can exercise personal power.”

But history shows that an economy run on favors and grievances is ultimately a poor one. “If you look around the world, it’s really clear that the places that are rich have good governments,” says John Joseph Wallis, an economic historian at the University of Maryland. “What Trump is doing is not governing well. He’s like a third world dictator. He’s trying to behave that way.”

Wallis’ research focuses on understanding why fairer political systems tend to create the strongest economies. His conclusion is that the answer lies in allowing everyone to operate by the same set of rules—what are known as impersonal or general laws. Just as American democracy was only truly realized by the 14th Amendment’s promise of equality and the expansion of voting rights to all citizens, an advanced capitalist society requires that every person and company operate under the same set of financial rules. The rules do not necessarily have to be unbound, laissez-faire capitalism without redistribution, but the rules and regulations must be evenly enforced.

Before the 19th century, no economy functioned that way, as governments manipulated market opportunities to build and secure political support. Take the example of starting a business. Today, anyone seeking to form a corporation files basic paperwork, pays a standard fee, and voila, they have a business. But, Wallis explains, “Nobody in the United States got a corporate charter that way before the 1830s. Every single corporate charter that was created was an act in the state legislatures.”

It’s easy to see how such a set up makes it easy to manipulate economic power for political gain. “The real danger of corruption is when the government passes laws that treat people differently, and when a government treats different people differently, in order to build a political coalition,” Wallis explains. An economy run on political favors is unpredictable, which causes slowdowns and inefficiency. Major investments are made based on political concerns, slowing economic growth. Ultimately, a country where every economic actor is at the mercy of an autocratic leader is not one investors can trust, much less its own citizens.

In an upcoming paper, Wallis and Naomi Lamoreaux, a historian at Yale and the University of Michigan Law School, examined laws passed by state legislatures between 1830 and 1850. Over that time, the number of pages of legislation nearly doubled, with 90 percent of the increase coming from bills benefiting specific people, businesses, groups, or localities, “granting them pensions, divorces, corporate charters, banking privileges, and the like.” This favoritism not only sparked outrage, it also hampered the economy, the paper explains, because in order to dispense economic favors, there must be “barriers to the free flow of economic resources.” 

This is systematic corruption, woven into the economy. This is different than the personal abuse of public office for private gain. From charging business leaders $5 million to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago to his side business as a crypto hustler, Trump’s history of such corruption is extensive. Elon Musk, who has leveraged a position to vacuum up contracts for his businesses, offers another textbook example. But the greater threat to the country, Wallis warns, is not the personal corruption of one or two powerful people, but corruption of the economic system itself. That would take us back to the 19th century. 

Wallis and Lamoureax conclude their forthcoming paper with a warning for our time: “Capitalism cannot thrive in polities where the pressure to hold factions together leads elites to manipulate the economy for political ends—where some elites gain access to profitable opportunities that are closed to everyone else.” They add: “But neither are these polities likely to remain democracies. Prone to instability, their fate is often to slide back into autocracy.” 

No advanced democracy with general rules has yet slid back into autocracy and personalized rules, says Wallis. In western Europe, for example, nations with general rules resisted the rise of fascism in the 1930s, and, once Nazi Germany was defeated, returned to democracy and capitalism. Countries that lacked general rules at the time—including Germany, Italy, Austria, Spain, and Portugal—succumbed to fascism and took decades to return to democracy. If the United States is not careful, it could be the first to fully backslide. 

Under Trump, tariffs will be a potent and unilateral mechanism for reintroducing systematic corruption into the economy. This is a two step process. First, Trump can raise or lower tariffs unilaterally. Second, he can grant waivers and exemptions, forcing people, corporations, localities, and even nations and foreign actors to come seeking reprieve on bended knee.  

Tariffs didn’t always operate this way. Until the 1930s, the United States generally had high tariffs, imposed by Congress. But in the throes of the Great Depression, the United States changed course and began building a new tariff system that lowered rates but gave presidents more power. Over the following decades, new laws delegated additional emergency authority over tariffs to the president.

Under this regime, tariffs were low, and while the executive branch could push waivers to particular businesses via the Department of Commerce, the system was “regular, routine, and bureaucratic and above board, for the most part,” says Douglas Irwin, an expert on the history of trade policy at Dartmouth. 

But that began to change during Trump’s first term. In 2018, Trump wielded little-used powers to impose tariffs on aluminum and steel imports, as well as imports from Canada, Mexico, China, and Europe. Requests for waivers skyrocketed, and those who hired well-connected Republican lobbyists received them. At other companies, CEOs cozied up to Trump, as Apple’s Tim Cook did while seeking exemptions for the company’s Chinese-made electronics. Inspectors general reports and academic research found the tariff exclusion process was opaque and possibly corrupt. One academic study concluded that firms that backed Republicans were more likely to receive waivers, which the authors said was “​​strongly indicative of quid pro quo arrangements.” 

Trump has been a proponent of protectionist trade policies for decades. The United States, he has long held, is being taken advantage of by foes and allies alike. His pitch to voters in each of his campaigns was that he would get a better trade deal with every country. But a better deal for whom? Businesses may discover they get exemptions if they eliminate DEI programs, donate to Trump’s political organizations, or buy his meme coins. Countries may find that they get exemptions if they are friendly to Trump’s business interests, as Argentina was in his first term. That would indeed be a better deal for Trump personally. But the best deal for Trump, he seems to believe, would be the power that comes from picking winners and losers. It would also erode the strength of the US economy and ultimately its democratic political system.

“You’re adopting economic regulations for political purposes, not for economic purposes,” warns Wallis. “So you’re going to benefit some groups at the cost of others, because those groups support you or the other groups oppose you, and that then makes capitalism go away. Instead of competing on high quality and low price, now you’re competing on who’s politically connected and not connected.”

Tariffs are not the only way that the Trump administration is manipulating the economy for political gain. Musk’s massive and indiscriminate DOGE cuts hurt red and blue states alike, but Republican lawmakers have been able to appeal to Musk for reprieve while their Democratic colleagues get the cold shoulder. The result is a system in which government funding is spent not based on Congress’s allocations, but on which lawmakers are loyal to the president. In unconstitutional executive orders, Trump has hamstrung the economic fortunes of law firms that have in some way crossed him—a threat to conform (as Paul Weiss and Skadden did) or face the wrath of the government. Trump targeted the mergers of companies he disliked in his first term, and large firms already fear a repeat of this political interference. Sensing the danger, billionaires behind the world’s biggest corporations were among the first to obey in advance.

Congress, of course, could claw back tariff authority from the president with legislation, and Trump’s dubious legal justifications for his new tariffs could presumably be challenged in court. But absent these interventions, tariffs could prove to be his most powerful tool yet, as they ensnare nearly every business and economic player.

If Trump’s first term was a gift to elites in the form of massive tax cuts, his second term may be defined by picking who those elites are through demands of loyalty. Tariffs—as well as other authoritarian tools—are the means. Being wealthy is no longer enough to do well under Trump; this time, you must also be loyal. If the economy suffers, Trump’s leverage over a desperate American business community will only grow. And he’ll be there to dispense reprieves and riches—for the right price.

In early 2015, the California Department of Public Health identified a case of measles in an 11-year-old who had recently traveled to Disneyland. Within a month, at least 125 US residents were stricken with the disease. About a third of them had visited the Magic Kingdom theme park, many were unvaccinated, and the outbreak spread to Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, as well as Canada and Mexico. This burst of measles prompted much public discussion about vaccine hesitancy. Yet Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed concern about the outbreak as “hysteria.”

At the time, several state legislatures were considering measures that would limit vaccine exemptions, in many cases ending the ability of parents to skirt immunization requirements for their children by citing a personal belief (as opposed to a medical reason). As one of the most prominent anti-vaxxers in the nation, Kennedy opposed these bills.

With Kennedy now leading the Department of Health and Human Services during a measles outbreak and providing medical advice that public health experts say is misguided (if not dangerous), this past episode reveals his troubling attitude toward measles and vaccines.

In early March 2015, Kennedy traveled to Salem, Oregon, to lobby against one of the state measures that would remove the personal-belief exemption. In a local theater, he screened a film called Trace Amounts that alleged there was a link between mercury in vaccines and autism and that assailed public health officials and researchers as corrupt fraudsters. But scientific studies had debunked the notion of a link between autism and vaccines. An infamous 1998 study conducted by a British medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield—based on just 12 children—that tied the measles vaccine to autism had been discredited years earlier and retracted by the journal that had published it.

Still, Kennedy continued to push this claim. At the Salem event, before a small audience of Oregon state lawmakers, legislative staffers, and vaccine opponents, he declared vaccines were causing autism in children. He pressed the legislators to reject the bill. Kennedy was accompanied by Brian Hooker, another anti-vax proponent. Hooker had published a paper claiming there was a connection between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism among young Black boys, and he had asserted the Centers for Disease Control was covering this up. But in October 2014, five months before this screening, the journal that had published his article retracted it, noting a “post-publication peer review raised concerns about the validity of the methods and statistical analysis” used by Hooker.

The day after the Salem event, Kennedy sent an email to several of his comrades in the anti-vax movement in which he suggested “the impetus for the current measles hysteria and the leap to close vaccine exemptions in state legislatures is being orchestrated by the vaccine industry.” He noted it was “very clear” that the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) was pushing these measures. NACCHO, no surprise, was at the time urging local health departments to promote vaccination.

Kennedy, in his email, which was obtained by Mother Jones, noted he had been “told” that NACCHO was “being funded by the vaccine industry” and suggested it was nefariously being used by the Big Pharma to whip up public sentiment in favor of vaccinations. He also informed his associates that he had shared this information with “various state legislators” and that this allegation encouraged these lawmakers to view the reaction to the measles outbreak not as “a public health crisis” but as “another familiar manipulation by a greedy industry that is manipulating their credulous colleagues as proxies, while skillfully remaining invisible from the sidelines.” He asked the other anti-vaxxers to “look out for” evidence of this relationship, adding, “I will know how to put it to good use for maximum effect.”

His email suggests that Kennedy was spreading the allegation that NACCHO was fronting for the vaccine industry without having confirmed that was true.

A NACCHO spokesperson refuted Kennedy’s characterization that it has been an agent of the vaccine industry and said that NACCHO’s 2015 annual report does not list any vaccine manufacturers among its funders.

That year, the annual report for the group disclosed 37 financial supporters. On the roster were Gilead Sciences and Janssen Therapeutics, two pharmaceutical companies. But both focused on developing antiviral drugs, especially for treatment of HIV/AIDS, not vaccines. (Janssen Therapeutics was an affiliate of Johnson & Johnson.) The group of NACCHO backers also included the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Society Association, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control, Johns Hopkins University, the National Marrow Donor Program, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the University of Nebraska, and other governmental, academic, and philanthropic entities.

A source familiar with NACCHO’s operation said that the vast majority of its funding has come from grants provided by the federal government, particularly the CDC. The group has tended to focus its advocacy at the federal level and not engaged in state issues.

The Oregon bill that Kennedy lobbied against was eventually withdrawn in the face of the opposition that Kennedy contributed to. The following year California became the first state in almost three decades to end non-medical exemptions from vaccine requirements for schoolchildren.

Kennedy’s 2015 email is telling. It showed that he did not take seriously the measles outbreak of that year and that he leaned toward a conspiracy theory that pharmaceutical companies were diabolically and secretly orchestrating a fake crisis in order to boost vaccine sales. Kennedy also acknowledged he was spreading this paranoid speculation without having obtained solid proof. These are worrying signs given he’s now in charge of the federal government’s response to the current outbreak that is continuing to spread.

Mother Jones sent Kennedy and HHS a list of questions about his approach to the 2015 outbreak, asking if he considers the current concern about measles to be hysteria, believes vaccine makers are now ginning up such worry to increase their profits, and still thinks the MMR vaccine causes autism and other harm. They did not respond.

Perhaps what was most significant in the debate at the US Supreme Court Wednesday morning, during oral arguments in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic—a major case over whether a state can unilaterally cut off Planned Parenthood’s access to Medicaid funding—is what wasn’t said.

Nobody in the courtroom argued that the doctors and nurses at Planned Parenthood weren’t medically qualified to care for patients. Nobody said that they did a bad job at prescribing birth control, treating sexually transmitted infections, or screening for cervical and breast cancer. Nobody argued that there was a medical reason to exclude Planned Parenthood from Medicaid reimbursements for the extensive non-abortion services it provides. (Medicaid already doesn’t cover abortion, except in the rarest of cases.)

In fact, everyone seemed to agree that in 2018, when South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, suddenly declared that the state would no longer consider Planned Parenthood South Atlantic a “qualified provider” for Medicaid purposes, it had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with politics. “The payment of taxpayer funds to abortion clinics, for any purpose, results in the subsidy of abortion and the denial of the right to life,” McMaster reasoned in his executive order, as he effectively cut access to birth control and basic health screenings for his state’s poorest residents in an attempt to financially punish Planned Parenthood.

Congress amended the federal Medicaid law in 1967 to ensure that patients would have the “free choice” to see any “qualified” provider who takes Medicaid. The whole point of that provision was to stop states from artificially restricting patients’ options. So, in response to McMaster’s order, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and one of its Medicaid patients, Julie Edwards, sued the state, arguing that it had violated patients’ right to choose their provider.

“There aren’t that many things that are more important than being able to choose your doctor, the person that you see when you’re at your most vulnerable, facing some of the most significant challenges to your life and your health,” Nicole Saharsky, attorney for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, argued before the justices on Wednesday. “Congress said a long time ago, this is something we want to protect.”

In opposing the case, the state of South Carolina has argued that Edwards didn’t have a right to sue in federal court. The lower courts sided with Edwards and Planned Parenthood—as have most federal circuit courts that have considered similar cases. So South Carolina appealed, all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Now, the justices will weigh whether patients can sue to enforce the “free choice of provider” provision when a state violates it. If the answer is yes, then patients will continue to have the power to fight back in the courts against governors like McMasters. But if not, states will have broader latitude to decide to which doctors Medicaid recipients can go.

Since Medicaid was passed decades ago, the Supreme Court has taken many cases concerning an individual’s right to sue in order to enforce different parts of the law. Justice Brett Kavanaugh referred to this history as a “45-year odyssey” during Wednesday’s oral argument. But just two years ago, the court reaffirmed the framework it’s told courts to use when deciding if an individual can sue. “Did you need a hit over the head?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked the lawyer for South Carolina.

But this time around, the case arriving at the court involves Planned Parenthood—and it’s at a moment when reproductive healthcare providers have never been more vulnerable to government targeting. Their abortion services are no longer shielded by Roe v. Wade. They’re facing just-announced cuts of tens of millions of dollars in federal family planning grants, plus impending massive cuts to Medicaid. Opportunistic prosecutors are filing criminal charges against alleged abortion providers. Add to this Trump’s sweeping pardon of anti-abortion extremists, some of whom have a history of attacking clinics and patients.

The financial stakes for Planned Parenthood and other providers of controversial healthcare loomed over the oral arguments on Wednesday. Medicaid is considered the country’s largest single–payer for family planning services, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation—and Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of those services. Half of Planned Parenthood patients are on Medicaid, Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said on a podcast Wednesday. If the justices side with South Carolina, it could lead more states to wipe out Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding.

Family planning can include contraception, physical exams, pregnancy testing and counseling, and STI screening and treatment. When those services are provided at specialized reproductive health care clinics, research has found that patients get access to a wider range of contraceptive methods. At Planned Parenthood, those options typically include an extended supply of birth control pills and, often, same-day IUD insertion, the Guttmacher Institute reports. As I’ve previously written, when states attack Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding, it has a devastating effect on access to birth control for their residents:

Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, and Texas all tried to impose similar restrictions, according to Jane Perkins, litigation director for the National Health Law Program. Texas was one of the few to succeed, [and] the attacks on Planned Parenthood there forced many reproductive health clinics to close, cut hours, charge patients new fees, or ration IUDs and birth control implants. Ultimately, they could only serve half as many patients. The teen birth rate rose an estimated 3.4 percent. 

On top of all that, patients receiving reproductive healthcare want to be able to choose a doctor who makes them feel comfortable. Yet in a Supreme Court brief, South Carolina suggested that Medicaid patients who lost access to care at Planned Parenthood could just go to the “crisis pregnancy centers” promoted by the anti-abortion group Heartbeat International—the vast majority of which offer no birth control options.

John Bursch, the bowtie-wearing lawyer from the powerful religious-right legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom—who is representing the state of South Carolina in the case, in a highly unusual arrangement—argued repeatedly that the free-choice-of-provider provision doesn’t technically give patients an individual right. “An obligation is not enough,” Bursch contended. “Telling a state that it has an obligation to do something, or that it must provide something, isn’t the same as saying you have the ability to sue them in federal court.” A federal law should only be considered to create a “right” if it uses words like “right,” “entitlement,” or “privilege”—”or their functional equivalent,” Bursch argued.

“The state has an obligation to ensure that a person—I don’t even know how to say this without saying ‘right’—has a right to choose their doctor,” Justice Elena Kagan objected. “That’s what this provision is. It’s impossible to even say the thing without using the word ‘right.'”

But if the conservative-majority court agrees with Bursch and rules that Medicaid patients don’t have the right to challenge McMaster’s decision, who does have the power to fight back? There appear to be no real options. Bursch suggested that doctors deemed “unqualified” could file an administrative appeal—but Planned Parenthood South Atlantic already tried that, only to be told by the state that it was “futile” given McMaster’s order, according to their brief.

Former Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins, who is representing the Trump administration, which sides with South Carolina, suggested during oral arguments that the federal government could theoretically withhold funding to force a state to follow the free-choice-of-provider provision. But that’s never happened before, and it’s extremely unlikely to happen ever, Sotomayor pointed out. “It does seem awfully odd to think that that is a remedy at all because what you would be doing would be depriving thousands of other Medicaid recipients of coverage,” Sotomayor said. “Is there much sense in that?”

The implications of the case potentially can extend beyond Planned Parenthood. Both South Carolina and the Trump administration want states to be able to cut as much funding as possible for doctors who provide the kind of care they object to: abortion, for example, but also birth control and gender-affirming care for transgender people. If states really thought nobody could stop them from cutting providers out of Medicaid, Kagan said, “We would have every state deciding their various policy justifications. It could be people who do provide abortions, people who don’t provide abortions. People who do provide contraception, people who don’t provide contraception. People who do do gender transition treatment, people who don’t.”

“That does not seem like what this statute is all about, is allowing states to do that and then giving individuals no ability to come back and say, ‘That’s wrong,'” Kagan concluded.

We’ll know by the end of June if the rest of the court agrees and if Medicaid patients have the right to fight back in federal court when governors like McMaster exclude a provider for political objections. “It’s clear that attacks on sexual and reproductive health care are only escalating because some people want to impose their own beliefs on everyone else,” McGill Johnson said in a statement before oral argument. “You should have the freedom to decide what’s best for you.”

One of the casualties of Tuesday’s massive purge of workers from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is an office dedicated to promoting healthy pregnancies. Most of the more than 100 employees at the Division of Reproductive Health lost their jobs this week, including some who conduct work mandated by federal law, according to seven former staffers who provided Mother Jones with the most complete public overview of its inner workings to date.

The move runs afoul of President Donald Trump’s and members of his administration’s pledge to prioritize healthy pregnancies and family planning. The mass purge came less than a week after Trump, at a Women’s History Month event at the White House, promised to be “the fertilization president.” And in January, at the anti-abortion March for Life, Trump said he would “work to offer a loving hand to new mothers and young families” and “protect women and vulnerable children.”

Experts and former staff say the latest firings will halt the IVF and family planning work Trump campaigned on.

The CDC’s reproductive health division functioned as “a key source of support for maternal and child health programs nationwide,” Elizabeth Kielb, director of maternal and infant health at March of Dimes, a nonprofit organization focused on maternal and infant health, said in a post on LinkedIn. “Cuts to this division risk disrupting prenatal care, contraception access, and efforts to reduce maternal and infant mortality.”

Kielb added: “Additionally, state and local health departments will now face added burdens without the federal backing they’ve relied on for decades. The ability to monitor, research, and improve reproductive health outcomes is at risk.”

Some of the former officials told Mother Jones they hope their firings will be reversed after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted Thursday to ABC News that some HHS firings were mistakes. An HHS official told Mother Jones, “Critical CDC programs will continue as a part of Secretary Kennedy’s vision to streamline HHS to better serve the American people,” but did not respond to specific questions about the Division of Reproductive Health. Spokespeople for the White House did not respond to questions from Mother Jones by Friday morning for this story. The division had an estimated $99 million budget as of fiscal year 2023, according to an internal document.

Employees of the division who received reduction in force (RIF) notices included the approximately 40-person women’s health and fertility branch, which included a team working on assisted reproductive technology (ART). Trump campaigned on expanding access to in vitro fertilization (IVF), the most common type of ART. In February, he signed an executive order demanding “a list of policy recommendations on protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.” But, by eliminating the six-person ART team at the reproductive health division, Trump is stopping the very work he promised to promote.

The ART team collected data from assisted reproductive technology clinics on their pregnancy success rates, as mandated by Congress in 1992, and maintained a nationwide database of clinics. The team also produced an online tool people could use to estimate their success of IVF and was in the middle of researching how to make treatments cheaper through state-mandated insurance, according to a former team member. “I don’t know if anyone else [in the federal government] that has the expertise that our team does,” the former staffer said. “How does cutting this program support the administration’s position? I don’t understand at all.”

Barbara Collura, president and CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, said in a statement that as a result of the firings, “there will be no experts on infertility who will be able to inform public policy, brief members of Congress, publish articles and reports, and advance public awareness on the causes and treatments for infertility.” Micah Hill, president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, which worked with the CDC team, called their work “vital to the field of reproductive medicine.”

The women’s health and fertility branch also included a team that collected national data about maternal and infant health outcomes through the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring Program (PRAMS). The massive, nearly 40-year-old annual survey collects anonymized information about peoples’ health and access to doctors before, during, and after their pregnancies, which state officials and health care providers then use to improve health outcomes. Researchers also use it to investigate promising interventions. As of 2020, the survey data represented more than 80 percent of births, with all but three states participating, HHS said.

Two members of the PRAMS team, which former staffers said consisted of about 15 people, told Mother Jones getting RIF notices and being fired came as a shock. “Our team is basically considered the gold standard for survey data collection,” Isaac Michael, a mathematical statistician on the team, said.

Michael says that while support for PRAMS should be bipartisan, it should also be a particular priority for the Trump administration, given that Vice President JD Vance and Trump’s sidekick, Elon Musk, have said they want to encourage more Americans to have more kids.

“This data will directly help their agenda,” Michael said. “If Republicans are interested in decreasing the infant and maternal mortality rates and increasing fertility rates, we have those variables. You can’t make any solid decisions without the data, and we’re the ones with the data.” Without the state-level data, another former PRAMS team member added, federal officials “won’t know where the funding for necessary resources have to go, and that will put women and infants at risk.”

Last month, a group of congresspeople wrote to CDC Acting Director Susan Monarez—now the new nominee tapped to replace Dave Weldon, whose nomination was withdrawn—raising their concerns of the potential loss of PRAMS under the reorganization of HHS, noting its “increasing importance as the US is experiencing a maternal health crisis.” But it’s unclear if Monarez ever responded to that letter, and spokespeople for the senator’s offices did not respond to questions from Mother Jones on Thursday night.

Laura Lindberg, a professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health, has used the PRAMS data in her own research on unintended pregnancy and in her classes as a teaching tool. “Abruptly shutting down PRAMS jeopardizes women and infants health at a time when maternal mortality rates in the US have been rising and access to maternity care is increasingly difficult,” Lindberg told me. “Dismantling PRAMS will make America less healthy, not more.”

The approximately ten-person fertility epidemiology studies team was also eliminated from the women’s health and fertility branch, according to an official. That team wrote the CDC’s contraception guidance for healthcare providers and conducted the annual abortion surveillance report, which collects voluntary data about legal abortions (and which, despite the cuts Trump is imposing, Project 2025 advocates for expanding).

A former official familiar with the team’s work said it was especially critical in light of mounting threats to contraception and increasing abortion restrictions nationwide. “We need guidance like this so that clinicians across the country can help women to make the best decisions for themselves—especially at a time when the ability to make those decisions is being threatened,” the official said.

Everyone in the reproductive health division’s field support branch was also fired, which included an approximately eight-person team that worked on providing guidance on the needs of pregnant and postpartum people and infants in emergencies, such as COVID-19, Zika, and Ebola, all of which posed particular risks for pregnant women.

That team’s work was mandated by Congress, which has repeatedly reauthorized a law first passed in 2006 requiring that HHS take pregnant women and other vulnerable populations into account when planning emergency responses.

“Pregnant, postpartum, lactating women have very special needs in emergencies,” the former official told me. “If they’re pregnant, they need to have continued access to prenatal care; if they’re postpartum or lactating, they potentially need assistance with feeding their infants or postpartum care.” The former official believes the firings of the emergency response team were “an unintended casualty,” adding, “I don’t think they realized it when they cut the entire branch.”

The field support branch also had a team of about a dozen senior CDC epidemiologists who deployed to state health departments to improve reproductive health, youth mental health, and healthcare access for parents and infants, in part by training more junior staffers in those fields. Prior participants helped establish state Maternal Mortality Review Committees, collected state-level data about COVID-19 in pregnant people, and worked to increase the enrollment of families on food stamps, according to an internal document describing the program.

“Many state and local health departments are understaffed and overworked, so they do not have the capacity to take on more focused research on topics like reproductive health, maternal health, and infant and child health,” a former scientist in the division said. “Cutting the entire branch will cause maternal and child health in those states and territories to worsen.”

The CDC only pays for 20 percent of the program, and states are responsible for paying for the rest—so it’s unclear why the program was targeted for termination.

The only team of the reproductive health division that remains is maternal and infant health branch, which works on tracking and preventing maternal and infant mortality. According to HHS, a new, so-called “Administration for a Healthy America” agency will take over maternal and child health issues. The fired staffers said they were glad that team will remain, given the maternal mortality crisis in the US, which ranks the highest among all wealthy nations and is worsening in light of expanding abortion bans. But, even so, the fate of that team remains unclear. “There’s a lot of unknowns, even for the programs that have survived,” one of the former officials said.

Michael, the statistician who was on the PRAMS team, knows one thing for sure: This was not what he signed up for when he voted for Trump. “I agree with a lot of the Trump administration,” he said. “But I think our team fell through the cracks, and I’ve got to advocate for it, because it’s important.”

Update, April 4: This story has been updated with a comment from an HHS official.

What happens to the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador now? In March, President Donald Trump invoked the wartime Alien Enemies Act—last used during World War II—to detain and remove alleged members of the gang Tren de Aragua without due process. The administration sent 238 men to a mega-prison in El Salvador as part of a multimillion-dollar deal with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. The move was in defiance of a court order blocking the deportations and instructing planes to be turned around.

As we reported, the evidence to support the accusations against many of these men was flimsy. Mother Jones spoke with relatives, friends, and lawyers of 10 Venezuelans sent to El Salvador, who say their loved ones have been unjustly targeted simply because of benign tattoos (like one of an autism awareness ribbon). More details about cases have since emerged and mistakes have become apparent. Last week, the Trump administration acknowledged that it had wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father who had been granted protection from deportation by a US immigration judge, due to “an administrative error.”

But even in light of the many problems with these removals, it is not clear what will happen to those sent to El Salvador. Lawyers for the federal government have said in legal filings that the courts lack jurisdiction to bring men like Abrego Garcia back to the United States.

“The claim that they can’t bring somebody back doesn’t make any sense to me,” says Deborah Fleischaker, a former career official who spent 14 years at the Department of Homeland Security, including investigating complaints with the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and a political appointee during the Biden administration, serving as acting chief of staff and assistant director for policy at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mother Jones spoke with Fleischaker about why the Trump administration should be able to bring back Venezuelans from El Salvador and the flawed criteria ICE used to identify alleged Tren de Aragua gang members.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

There have been several reports, including from Mother Jones, showing that many of the men sent to El Salvador without due process appear to have been targeted because of their tattoos and despite the fact they had no known criminal history. What has caught your attention about all this?

There’s a lot that’s caught my attention. The surprise invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, which has only been used three times previously in times of actual war. The seeming willingness to violate a court order to turn these folks around, which is really troubling and portends real constitutional challenges down the line, potentially. Then there is the lack of due process and ability for folks to challenge being placed under the Alien Enemies Act and considered to be members of Tren de Aragua. The fact that we are removing people—not just to be removed, but to be jailed indefinitely without charge—is also really problematic. 

There’s both the piece of using the Alien Enemies Act to move them to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador, then there’s the actual factual questions about whether—even if one would argue the use of the Alien Enemies Act is appropriate, which I don’t think it is—whether they are actually getting the people who they say are supposed to be eligible for [removal].

In several cases, the Venezuelans hadn’t actually been ordered deported by an immigration judge. How unusual is it for ICE to remove people who don’t have a final order of removal?

As far as I understand, it’s unprecedented. Title 42, for example, allowed the US government to expel people during the Covid-19 pandemic. But that order was a little bit different and it was CBP [Customs and Border Protection] doing the expulsions, not ICE. I’m aware of no corollary for ICE to be removing people without final orders of removal, that is, who are not considered to be removable under any normal immigration process. 

There’s usually two ways you can go through the immigration process. There’s what are called 240 proceedings, which is the standard way that one goes before an immigration judge who hears your claims and the government’s and makes the decision. Or you could go through expedited removal, where if you don’t claim a fear of return, you could get a final removal order very quickly. Those are all under the legal process that’s been set out for immigration proceedings and provide for some due process protections for the people going through those proceedings. The Alien Enemies Act doesn’t.

An ICE official said in court filings that the men were vetted through a rigorous process and the agency didn’t just rely on tattoos or social media posts. What is your sense of how ICE picked these men and determined them to be members of Tren de Aragua?

There’s been reporting now on the checklist they’re using to identify people they believe are Tren de Aragua gang members. The checklist appears to be quite flimsy on its face. It doesn’t appear to be designed to do a careful vetting. It appears to be designed to make sure that they have a steady stream of people that they could claim are Tren de Aragua members and therefore eligible for [removal under] the Alien Enemies Act. That’s not what factual determination of specific gang members is supposed to be. It’s not supposed to be a pathway in search of an end.

Mistakes and errors are always a risk in any bureaucratic system. That’s always a possibility. But the risk is so enormous under the way they’ve set this up. I cannot see how it’s worth it, even if you thought it was legal.

The Trump administration recently admitted to knowingly having deported someone who had received protection from deportation from an immigration judge based on fear of persecution by gangs in El Salvador. The government has said there’s nothing it can do about it. What do you make of that assertion? 

As a really fundamental matter, the United States is paying the El Salvador government to detain these people. That to me indicates that there’s some sort of contractual relationship between the US [government] and El Salvador. If they are detaining these people on our behalf, we should be able to ask for them back. It really is not a matter of El Salvador being able to do whatever it wants when it’s doing something on our behalf. I’m not understanding the claim that they can’t get these folks back.

There’s some sort of memorandum of agreement in place between El Salvador and the United States. Either there are terms for the return of individuals or the United States really dropped the ball in negotiating this agreement, because it’s totally foreseeable that they might want somebody back at some point.

What process does ICE have in place to locate and bring back people who were wrongfully deported?

Most of the time, you know that someone is wrongfully deported because they are probably represented and they have somebody who points out that, for example, they had legal protections and they shouldn’t have been removed. Most people aren’t being removed to prison in a foreign country, so it’s not usually difficult to bring them back. You put them on a plane and you bring them back. It’s not challenging. But I would also say that it doesn’t seem like it should be challenging here. The administration just brought another planeload of people to El Salvador. That plane returned to the United States. I am not clear why they could not request that certain people be released back into US custody and brought back to the United States at that point.

In many of the cases we’ve looked at, the men sent to El Salvador had upcoming court hearings in US immigration courts. What happens when they don’t appear in court?

I honestly don’t know. I think that’s a question for ICE or the [Justice Department]. I assume they’ll be [ruled] in absentia because they’ve been spirited away to a prison in El Salvador and they can’t make their court hearings. Those sorts of cases could be reopened upon request, but we don’t know what’s going to happen to them. 

In a functioning immigration system, there is a role for enforcement, detention, and removal. Those things don’t have to be in conflict with human and civil rights. Unfortunately, we now appear to be in an administration that has put them directly in conflict, and that’s not good for the health of the immigration system. That’s not good for the country.

The Trump administration’s top prosecutor for Washington, DC, spoke last month at a Florida fundraiser, where he criticized the Justice Department’s prosecutions of people involved in the January 6, 2021, attack on Congress. The speech was attended by numerous January 6 defendants, including former members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia who are still appealing their seditious conspiracy convictions in cases overseen by the DC United States Attorney’s Office. 

In his keynote address at the event, acting US Attorney Ed Martin compared the prosecution of pro-Trump insurrectionists to the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, and argued Americans would soon come to see the Capitol riot prosecutions similarly. “I hope, in not too short a time that the people who did this to so many people over the last four years will similarly—I hope God gives them shame—but I hope that the culture recognizes…that this was a wrong that was done against American citizens,” he said. “It was done not because of well intentions or anything. It was done truly because of bad, of evil in the world.”

The March 24 fundraiser was held in Naples, and hosted by the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, a conservative group Martin ran from 2016 until January, when he joined the administration. Cynthia Hughes, founder of the Patriot Freedom Project, which has provided financial support to January 6 defendants, helped organize the luncheon. Martin was also extensively involved in that organization, and served on its board until January.

Attendees at the event included Kelly Meggs—the former head of the Oath Keepers’ Florida chapter, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in the wake of the Capitol attack—and his wife Connie, who was also convicted of crimes related to the attack. Joseph Hackett, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy, and Kenneth Harrelson, who was acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted of other felonies related to January 6, also attended, according to pictures attendees posted online. Both Hackett and Harrelson were once members of the Oath Keepers.

While President Donald Trump pardoned around 1,600 convicted or accused Capitol attackers in January, Meggs, Harrelson, and Hackett are among 14 members of far-right groups who did not receive pardons. Instead, Trump commuted their sentences, freeing them from prison without expunging their felony convictions. The men are continuing to appeal those convictions, and Martin’s office is in charge of defending the guilty verdicts—even as Martin appears alongside some of the defendants in a smiling photo from the fundraiser.

Martin’s appearance at the Florida event is in some ways unsurprising. He is a diehard Trump supporter and former Stop the Steal organizer who has blamed the January 6 attack on “antifa.” While working as a lawyer for January 6 defendants, Martin called for Capitol rioters to receive “reparations” and suggested some officials involved in their prosecution should be jailed. As acting US attorney, Martin, who Trump has nominated to fill the position permanently, has fired and demoted prosecutors who brought January 6 cases. He has opened an internal investigation into attorneys in his office who pursued obstruction charges against Capitol rioters that were later thrown out by the Supreme Court. And Martin’s public threats to weaponize the DOJ against critics of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have made it clear that he is eager to use his office to advance Trump’s agenda.

But a sitting US Attorney publicly attacking his own prosecutors while appearing alongside insurrectionists may be a new extreme step—even for Martin—one that, according to ethics watchdogs, could create an appearance of a conflict of interest.

“It’s unusual—maybe unprecedented—for the US attorney to be associating himself with people who have been convicted of federal crimes,” said Michael Teter, the managing director of The 65 Project, a group that has filed bar complaints against lawyers who helped Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including Martin. “It’s a demonstration that Mr. Martin doesn’t take his oath and his responsibility seriously.”

Federal regulations that apply to the DOJ forbid government employees from participating in fundraisers in their official capacity “unless authorized by statute, executive order, regulation or agency determination.” A spokesperson for Martin’s office declined to say if he received clearance to speak at the event, which cost $50 per ticket, from anyone at the DOJ.

While the event was set to raise money for Phyllis Schlafly Eagles programming for college students, an invitation posted on the organization’s website promised the event would feature an “urgent update from January 6 defendants” and repeatedly referred to Martin by his official title—“U.S. Attorney Ed Martin.” The invitation noted that he had been “tapped by the Trump Administration to be the top attorney” in DC. “From cleaning up political corruption to sweeping crime out of D.C., Ed is doing great work and making big waves for truth and justice,”

While Justice Department rules permit employees to engage in fundraising in their “personal capacity,” they are not allowed to use their “official title or position” and cannot solicit donations from “persons having business with the department”—a designation that attorneys familiar with department practices said would apply to the Oath Keepers appealing their convictions who attended the fundraiser.

Meggs, Harrelson, and Hackett did not respond to questions, including about whether they paid to attend the fundraiser. Carolyn Stewart, an attorney representing Meggs, said she believed that her client and other January 6 defendants present had been gifted tickets, and sat at tables Hughes’ group had paid for. Hughes did not respond to questions. Stewart, who did not attend the lunch, said her understanding was that Martin “did not talk to Kelly Meggs or Ken Harrelson about their cases.”

Delaney Marsco, director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group, said regardless of the details of the event, Martin’s involvement risked creating at least the appearance of a conflict, which federal ethics policies aim to prevent. “Government work is supposed to be impartial,” Marsco said. “We are supposed to trust that officials are working on the public’s interest and not their own personal, political or financial interests.”

Guests at the Naples event constituted a who’s who of MAGA figures accused of crimes. Speakers included Douglass Mackey, who was sentenced to seven months in prison in 2023 for disseminating fake messages that encouraged Hillary Clinton supporters to “vote” via text message in 2016. Prosecutors alleged that Mackey—who used the pseudonym “Ricky Vaughn”— and others “conspired to use Twitter to trick American citizens into thinking they could vote by text and stay at home on Election Day—thereby suppressing and injuring those citizens’ right to vote.” According to court documents, Mackey had written on social media that “women are children with the right to vote” and that “Black people will believe anything they read ok twitter, and we let them vote why?”

Mackey, who declined to comment, is appealing his conviction. Though that appeal is not in Martin’s district, the presence of both men at the fundraiser still poses a problem, according to Teter. “It’s the United States of America v. Mackey. So a US attorney should not be associating with him,” Teter said.

In his own remarks in Naples, Mackey baldly sought Martin’s help. Trump had singled out Mackey’s case in a day one executive order purporting to combat “weaponization of the federal government” under the Biden administration. Martin’s US attorney office is involved in a DOJ task force launched in response to that order. “I’m very optimistic that attorney Ed Martin here and the whole weaponization committee can take a look at my case and see what went on there,” Mackey said.

Martin, in turn, praised Mackey as “a leader of people who see what happens and want to do something about it.” 

Also present was Michael Curzio, a January 6 convict who previously spent eight years in prison for attempted first degree murder—”a crime which, according to local news reports from Florida, involved him shooting the new boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend in the chest,” federal prosecutors stated. In prison, he joined a white supremacist gang, and he “bears tattoos with Nazi imagery,” according to court documents filed by prosecutors. 

In an interview Thursday, Curzio acknowledged joining the gang, but he said that he did so only for his own safety while behind bars and that he is not racist. “I did what I had to do to survive,” he said. Curzio said he did “nothing wrong” on January 6 and had merely “walked through an open door” at the Capitol. 

Martin spoke at the event after Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a New Jersey man known for once styling his moustache like Hitler’s and who, prosecutors charged, allegedly told a coworker that “Hitler should have finished the job.” In a letter Wednesday, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee faulted Martin’s association with Hale-Cusanelli, who they said has a “well-known history of antisemitism, misogyny, and racism.” Democrats noted a September event in which the two men appeared together, but were apparently unaware of the March fundraiser; Hale-Cusanelli didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Hale-Cusanelli was convicted in 2022 on January 6-related charges that included having ordered others to “advance” on the Capitol. He was one of the first rioters to enter the building, according to prosecutors.

In recent months, Hale-Cusanelli has enthusiastically touted Martin’s efforts to help January 6 prisoners. “If you’re a January 6 defendant, and your prosecutor hasn’t been fired by next week, message me,” Hale-Cusanelli posted on X February 1. A week later, he followed up: “If you’re a January 6 defendant please name your prosecutor(s) here.”

In his remarks in Naples, Hale-Cusanelli argued that American values were under attack until Trump “took back the throne, so to speak.” He showered praise on Martin. “For those that aren’t familiar, January 6 was an absolute set up,” Hale-Cusanelli said. “January 6 was a psy-op led by three-letter agencies.”

“Led by the current US attorney,” Hale continued, “we’re starting to see a vast restoration of the truth, which is that January 6 defendants were not criminals, they were in fact the victims…And we will expose these nefarious actors who set us up in the first place.”

When he took the podium, Martin did not contest those claims. He praised Trump for pardoning January 6 defendants, as well as two DC police officers in an unrelated case. And he referred cryptically to ongoing efforts by his office to look into “a lot of stuff related to January 6th,” though he added that he would avoid revealing details “to be careful.”

“In terms of getting to the bottom of what’s gone on in our country that’s off kilter, there’s no ending,” Martin said. “No one’s resting on that at this point, and there’s a lot more happening.” 

Martin’s nomination to be formally confirmed as DC’s US attorney faces heavy opposition from Democrats, and has even raised concerns among some GOP senators. This week, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said he would put a hold on Martin’s nomination, as Democrats push for Martin to face a contentious confirmation hearing—an unusual step for any potential US Attorney.

But Martin’s courtship of January 6 rioters while serving as interim prosecutor may be helping him consolidate far-right backing. His remarks in Naples enthused attendees, including Brenden Dilley, the leader of a right-wing “meme team.” Following the event, Dilley posted a video reworking the Steve Miller Band hit “Fly Like an Eagle” to urge the confirmation of Martin, who uses the X handle “EagleEdMartin.”

Martin also got an assist last week when Elon Musk tweeted, “Confirm Ed Martin,” prompting a ripple effect among the crowd of J6ers and their sympathizers.

On Wednesday, the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles issued a press release attacking Schiff’s hold. “The left…won’t stop the Trump Administration’s will to clean out the Department of Justice,” John Schlafly, the group’s treasurer said. “Ed Martin is at the tip of the spear of that effort.”

In the ten days since Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, her lawyers say their client has had three asthma attacks. During that time, according to three Democratic Senators and Öztürk’s lawyers, ICE has not provided the detained student her inhaler, or other medication required by law. (ICE did not return a request for comment.)

Like other students detained on suspicion of involvement in pro-Palestine activity, Öztürk has not been charged with, or accused of any crime. Instead, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin claimed Öztürk—who is a Fulbright scholar originally from Turkey—”engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” This, according to Öztürk’s friends and lawyers, strains credibility. Her lawyers say Öztürk is likely being targeted based on an op-ed she co-wrote a year ago, encouraging Tufts University to divest from Israel.

Öztürk, who studies child psychology, was moved by ICE agents from Massachusetts to Vermont and then to Louisiana, her attorneys report. For nearly 24 hours, her legal team was unable to contact or locate her. En route to Louisiana, she suffered her first of three asthma attacks. Hearings in Öztürk’s case began yesterday, with her lawyers describing the way she was transported across several state lines as “venue shopping” by the government and “an act of either furtiveness or bad faith.” They also revealed that in the days since being moved to a detention center in Louisiana, Öztürk has suffered two more asthma attacks. 

Unmanaged asthma can have severe acute outcomes, the most extreme being respiratory failure resulting in death, as well as long-term effects, such as permanently altering a person’s airways. The way to avoid these devastating effects is simple: people with asthma need to have access to their medication, like inhalers, to manage this chronic health condition.

ICE claims to follow Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which would require Öztürk to have the same access to medical care as everyone else. Denying Öztürk her medication could potentially impede her disability civil rights (failures to provide ICE detainees access to care have been the subject of complaints under Section 504 in the past). 

In an amended lawsuit filed on April 2, Öztürk’s lawyers said that due to her not having access to her medications, “each day Ms. Öztürk remains in detention puts her life at risk.” Due to the crowding in ICE detention facilities, Öztürk is arguably also at increased risk of catching COVID-19, which could exacerbate her existing respiratory problems.

Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)—whose district includes the Somerville street where Öztürk was abducted—posted on social media Thursday night that ICE’s reported failure to provide Öztürk with her medication is “a violation of her fundamental right to medical care.”

“This is cruelty, it is neglect, and it is a damning moral and legal failure,” Pressley wrote.

In a statement with Massachusetts Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, Pressley demanded that DHS “immediately provide Rümeysa with access to the health care that she needs,” provide compelling evidence as to why she was detained in the first place, and absent that evidence, release her and restore her visa. 

“Every minute she remains in custody is another minute her health and rights are at risk,” the legislators said.