The massive piece of legislation to which President Donald Trump has just attached his legacy allocates $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement over the next four years—including $45 billion to expand the detention of immigrants to fulfill his campaign promise of mass deportations. It will make ICE the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history, with more money than the federal prison system, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration combined.

What will that mean, practically speaking? I turned to former officials who have run large prison systems, as well as attorneys who specialize in immigrant detention, to understand the logistical concerns with expanding a detention system so quickly.

Hugh Hurwitz was acting director of the Bureau of Prisons during part of Trump’s first term, managing 122 facilities and some 170,000 incarcerated people nationwide.

Martin Horn was secretary of corrections for Pennsylvania in the late 1990s and commissioner of New York City’s corrections department in the 2000s.

Eunice Hyunhye Cho is an attorney who challenges unconstitutional conditions in immigrant detention centers with the ACLU’s National Prison Project.

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy institute, wrote a book about the private prison companies that incarcerate immigrants.

In separate interviews—excerpts of which have been edited for length and clarity—they dove into how this $45 billion spend could, as Eisen put it, “drastically change the landscape of immigration enforcement and detention in this country.”

On the size of the allocation

Cho: “It’s enormous. Currently, ICE spends around $3.4 to $3.9 billion a year on immigration detention.”

Hurwitz: “Forty-five billion dollars is an astronomical amount of money—the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has an $8 billion annual budget. The money for ICE is available through September 2029, so Congress doesn’t expect Homeland Security to spend it in one year.”

Cho: “Even if you average it out over the years—and that may not be right, they may spend it very quickly—$45 billion is at least three or four times the amount they currently spend on immigration detention.”

Eisen: “It will drastically change the landscape. A vast infrastructure of detention will be built, and actually has already started, even before this bill was signed.”

On the number of potential detainees

Hurwitz: “ICE wants to increase their capacity from about 41,000 people a day to 100,000—that’s pretty significant. To put it in comparison, BOP’s population today is about 155,000. And ICE doesn’t have 122 prisons like BOP has.”

Cho: “This is an extraordinary number of people. ICE is rounding up people through home raids, workplace raids, court check-ins, courthouse arrests, arrests near schools, places of worship. The other thing is that ICE is refusing to release people from detention who have traditionally been released, people who may be eligible for bond and parole, people who are very medically vulnerable, and even people who have won their cases.”

On where the money might end up

Hurwitz: “Remember, ICE doesn’t own prisons. So my guess is the immediate effort will be in contracting with private prison companies or states and localities that have capacity to hold these people.”

Cho: “They have also discussed new ways of detention, including temporary tent detention sites, so some of the money may go to logistics corporations and toward sites like Alligator Alcatraz, an example of how they may contract with a state. And there’s Guantanamo—ICE is supposed to be reimbursing the Department of Defense for use of those facilities—as well as flights. They may choose to build their own facilities, but it takes time to do that, so to extend the number of detention beds quickly, they’ll probably go with preexisting facilities or temporary facilities.”

On staffing challenges

Horn: “How do you recruit enough staff to supervise that number of individuals? How quickly can you onboard them and train them? Staffing is absolutely critical—custodial staff, but also medical staff. And if you look at these very rural locations, typically there are not a large number of trained medical professionals, so you’re going to have to get people to relocate. Are there places for them to live? How long is the commute going to be?”

Hurwitz: “All correctional facilities nowadays are having difficulty hiring staff. The private prisons and states and localities, they’re all looking for the same candidates, right? Most places have increased the salaries and created other incentives to recruit people, but it’s still difficult to find good candidates.”

On medical concerns

Hurwitz: “In the BOP, we have sentenced inmates who have been in the system a while. Because we had them for a long time, we knew what their medical conditions were, so we could send them to the appropriate places. ICE has a challenge, because these people aren’t going to be there that long, so they don’t know their medical history, they just don’t have the depth of information that you have with sentenced inmates. And that makes everything more risky.”

Cho: “Immigration detention facilities were terrible places to be even before the Trump administration. We have documented conditions of abuse, medical neglect, preventable deaths, sexual assault, use of force, force-feeding on hunger strikers. There have been suicides. You have people who are placed in brutal conditions of confinement, who had mental health treatment outside, but once they come in they’re either cut off from their medication or placed in solitary confinement, which can further exacerbate mental health distress. We’ve been tracking cases where people who are life dependent on insulin are not receiving it.”

On Alligator Alcatraz

Horn: “The pictures that I saw of the Florida facility show a large open space separated by chain link fence with bunk beds. We don’t know how many showers, how many toilets, how many wash basins they’re providing.”

Hurwitz: “That was built by the state of Florida. I’ve never been in an ICE detention facility, so I don’t really know what an ICE detention facility looks like. That’s not how we would run a Bureau of Prisons facility.”

Cho: “I haven’t seen it. I don’t think many people have. There are some very clear issues—tent facilities in the middle of the summer, in the middle of the swamp. Heat concerns, whether or not it’s actually safe during hurricane season, inclement weather. They were already reporting flooding on the first day.”

Eisen: “They are talking about alligators and pythons guarding the perimeter of the facility. The cruelty and inhumanity here is pretty unprecedented.”

On local, state, and federal prisons taking immigrants

Eisen: “It is very common to find detention bed space in county jails and state prisons, and less common in the federal system, though it did happen in Trump 1.0. Conditions depend on the facility; some have air conditioning and enough space, and in some the infrastructure is much worse. These are immigrants who have not been convicted of a crime for the most part, or have not been accused of committing a crime. Correctional officers are trained for a certain population, whereas ICE detention officers are trained for a different population.”

Cho: “Jails or prisons may not have been set up to ensure that people can call immigration attorneys, or that people who speak different languages can access medical care. We were talking to folks in Alaska, and there were stories of people who had missed their immigration proceedings or their bond hearings because the facility just wasn’t set up to make sure they would be there.”

Hurwitz: “Obviously, [holding immigrant detainees] is not what BOP is designed to do, but BOP and ICE did sign an intergovernmental agreement, and BOP housed a small number of detainees for ICE at five, six facilities—maybe it’s more now. I think BOP generally tried to separate them—they were kept in separate housing units or separate wings away from the general population. When I was director, [operating to house immigrant detainees] certainly wasn’t our preferred method, because it was different than how we do things. And when you’re running a prison, you don’t like to do things differently.”

On private prison companies taking immigrants

Cho: “Private prison companies have been chomping at the bit for this reconciliation package to pass. They very early on recognized what an economic boon this would be.”

Eisen: “Ninety percent of people in immigrant detention facilities are in private facilities, and we have seen companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group already profit from the president’s immigration agenda. There’s the potential reactivation of a detention center in Leavenworth, Kansas; we’ve seen the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas reopen; the reopening of Delaney Hall, owned by GEO Group in Newark. What’s also really important to note is that these companies own transportation subsidiaries to transport people across the country, and those will be expanded as well.”

Hurwitz: “When BOP worked with private prisons, we were putting criminal aliens in those private facilities and didn’t require them to run programming—they were going to be deported after their release, so there was no reason for BOP to invest in programming—but yet, all of the contractors ran programming. And why did they do that? An idle population is more apt to get into fights. So they put in the programs on their own.”

On oversight

Eisen: “This new money comes at a time when the administration is rolling back attempts to oversee what’s happening. You’ve seen members of Congress attempting to visit detention facilities, and ICE issued guidance in June asking for 72 hours’ notice for a visit, even though federal law authorizes members of Congress to visit any detention facility at any time unannounced.”

Cho: “The Trump administration basically defunded the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties as well as the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, which were both responsible for investigating abuses in immigration detention facilities. [Facing blowback, the administration backpedaled, but advocates doubt its commitment to those missions.] And ICE has weakened standards for facilities that are going to be combined ICE detention plus criminal detention. Things as basic as not allowing legal groups to provide legal orientation, not specifying the number of telephones that must be provided, not specifying in their medical care guidelines that prescription medication must be provided to detainees. Standards have become so weak as to render them practically meaningless.”

Eisen: “In 2024, right before Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General issued a report after inspecting ICE detention facilities. They observed mold, rust, peeling paint in showers, bathrooms with clogged or inoperable toilets, broken sinks, water leaks, people not seeing doctors as often as they were supposed to. I bring all this up because those were the conditions when there was more significant oversight. So one can only imagine what’s going to happen with less oversight.”

On what won’t get funding—and what will

Cho: “It’s important to note what the $45 billion is being taken away from. There’s $11 billion being cut from Pell Grants, $20 billion being cut from Medicaid for the provision of nursing home staff. I am reading proposals for increased detention centers in places that were formerly nursing homes—that is one of the starkest manifestations of what this is going to look like, what this budget bill is doing in terms of the fabric of our communities.”

Hurwitz: “I believe the ‘big, beautiful bill’ had another $5 billion for BOP, so from a BOP perspective, the amount of money is pretty good.”

On the speed of the expansion

Hurwitz: “They’re on a pretty aggressive track, from what you hear from the president, but I have no reason to think that it can or can’t be done. I don’t have enough information.”

Horn: “Anything having to do with detention that you do in a hurry is generally not a good idea. That’s been my experience.”

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

They are vital pollinators who come out at night, but now moths have emerged into the bright light of day as co-creators of a new piece of music—composed using the insects’ own flight data.

Ellie Wilson composed Moth x Human in a protected habitat on Parsonage Down in Salisbury, Wiltshire. She assigned each of the 80 resident moth species a different sound, which was triggered when it landed on her monitor.

Around the automated melody created by the moths, she composed music for live violin, cello, trombone, piano, and synths. Wilson will be interviewed and the piece performed twice, at London’s Southbank Centre this weekend as part of the New Music Biennial.

“I wanted to compose a piece of music that was, in part, created by the insects themselves,” said Wilson. “The moths randomly created these little tiny melodies—little fragments and motifs which I used to compose the rest of the piece, including tapping on the body of the cello to imitate the sound of a moth getting trapped in a lamp.”

Moth populations are experiencing steep declines across the globe due to habitat loss, pesticides, and the climate crisis. This has a knock-on effect on the ecosystem because moths are an important food source for bats, owls and birds—but also because moths are critical to pollination, albeit in ways that are still not fully understand.

“Many of us don’t see moth numbers declining because they come out at night but they’re just as vital to our ecosystem as bees and butterflies,” said Wilson.

Wilson created the work with the support of Oxford Contemporary Music and with biodiversity scientists at the UK Centre of Ecology and Hydrology. The piece highlights the impact of the decline of the UK moth populations by ending with data from a different area: a farmland monoculture with only 19 moth species.

“I wanted the difference in moth populations to be audible,” said Wilson. “There’s so much sound at the beginning of the piece. At the end, there’s very little.”

Wilson said the scientists she teamed up with were enthusiastic about their work being turned into music. “They’ve been trying to get the message across about catastrophic moth decline but they can’t get traction using figures and data,” she said. “Music is an accessible way for people to understand the disaster unfolding.”

Wilson is not the only UK musician using nature to draw attention to the climate breakdown: Cosmo Sheldrake is appealing against the refusal of his legal attempt for the Ecuador forest to be recognised as a co-creator of a song he wrote.

“The nature of the ecological crisis is fast, so striking, so completely urgent and total—and natural sounds have so much charisma and power—that music based on nature can reveal and communicate things about the natural world far more effectively and powerfully than science can,” Sheldrake said.

“So much can be revealed from listening to ecosystems,” he added. “Removing a single tree devastates the soundscape even though the forest might not look any different.”

Radio Lento recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, streaming “captured quiet” from 105 locations in 26 UK counties. And the UK-based design and architecture firm Heatherwick Studio is transforming an uninhabited island in Seoul, South Korea, into a public park, featuring musical performances based on soundwaves created by the mountainous terrain.

But Finland has taken things one step further, becoming the first country in the world to create an official soundscape.

After leaving DC, with his business empire suffering, his relationship with President Donald Trump fractured, and his DOGE efforts deemed broadly unpopular, Elon Musk is not quietly retreating to his Texas compound of pronatalists’ dreams.

Instead, he announced on Saturday in a post on X that he will launch a new, third political party called the America Party. “When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” Musk wrote. “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.” The announcement came a day after Trump’s former top adviser and the world’s richest man teased the potential launch, polling his X followers on whether they wanted the new party; the results show that out of approximately 1.25 million respondents, 65 percent said yes.

Musk told followers in other posts that he plans to launch the party “next year,” which would be in time for the critical midterm elections, and floated the idea of focusing on “just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.”

“Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people,” he added.

In another post, Musk said the party would have legislative discussions with both the Democratic and Republican parties and caucus independently.

On Sunday afternoon, in a lengthy post on Truth Social, Trump claimed Musk had gone “off the rails” and denigrated his latest plan to launch a new party. “The one thing Third Parties are good for is the creation of Complete and Total DISRUPTION & CHAOS, and we have enough of that with the Radical Left Democrats, who have lost their confidence and their minds!” Trump wrote. Earlier this week, Trump had also floated the idea of having DOGE take a look at federal subsidies provided to Musk’s companies. “BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!” Trump wrote.

What sparked all this? It seems that Trump signing his legislative agenda into law on Friday via the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill—which Musk had previously railed against, describing it as “utterly insane” and arguing it would undo some of the work of DOGE—pushed Musk over the edge. In response to someone on X asking how Musk went from loving Trump to trying to undermine him, Musk wrote: “Increasing the deficit from an already insane $2T under Biden to $2.5T. This will bankrupt the country.”

Musk follows a long line of people who have attempted to launch a third party and discovered it was an uphill battle, due to ballot requirements and the need to build powerful political allies in a staunchly two-party system. In fact, Musk himself previously flirted with the idea in 2022 before seemingly abandoning it. As my colleagues wrote in a special issue of this magazine published last year, third parties’ electoral efforts have never been successful in America—at least, if you define success in terms of winning elections. And as David Corn wrote:

Third-party and independent candidates always talk about the legitimate need to enlarge the political debate. But they also present the major parties, billionaires, and even foreign governments with opportunities for political mischief.

Speaking of mischief, Musk’s massive wealth offers a unique form of power to potentially create it. The tech mogul, after all, spent more than $290 million on last year’s election to put Trump back in the White House, according to FEC filings. He also infamously spent $25 million earlier this year to try to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court election; Musk’s preferred candidate lost, and the race also became a referendum on his attempts to buy elections. Nonetheless, when someone on X outlined the laundry list of demands he would have to satisfy to successfully launch the America Party, Musk responded, “Not hard tbh.”

Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday morning. But some Trump- and third-party loyalists have already indicated they do not approve. Trump fan Roger Stone wrote on X that he “would rather see [Musk] pursue his efforts at electoral reform within the Republican Party primaries rather than having a new party splitting the vote of sane people and letting the Marxist Democrats gain control again.” The Chairman of the Libertarian National Committee, Steven Nekhaila, wrote in another post, “Elon, building a new party isn’t the shortcut you think, it’s a multi-decade slog.” But he offered an easy alternative, imploring him instead to back the Libertarian Party, the country’s third-largest political party that has never managed to score more than 3 percent of the vote in a presidential election.

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—who Musk reportedly sparred with in the past—offered what appeared to be the Trump administration’s first comment on Musk’s new venture. “The principles of DOGE were very popular,” Bessent said. “I think, if you looked at the polling, Elon Musk was not.”

If Musk’s recent activity on X is any indication, it looks like those who engage with him on the platform he owns will have a central role in shaping the party’s future. “When & where should we hold the inaugural American Party congress?” he wrote in one post early Sunday. “This will be super fun!”

In another post responding to someone outlining a potential “America Party platform”—which listed “free speech,” “pro natalist,” and “reduce debt,” among other priorities—Musk simply wrote, “Yeah!”

Update, July 6: This story has been updated to include comment from President Trump.

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

The US Environmental Protection Agency placed 139 employees on administrative leave Thursday, an agency spokesperson confirmed, after they signed a “Stand Up for Science” petition using their official titles and EPA positions. 

The affected employees received an email, shared with Inside Climate News, informing them that they are on leave through July 17, pending an investigation into whether they used work time or resources when signing the petition.

The email emphasizes that “this is not a disciplinary action.”

One employee, who asked not to be named, said they signed the petition “on a Sunday on my own device.”

“I’d be shocked if anyone used work resources,” the employee went on. “We’ve taken ethics training and are aware of the law.”

While the employees are on leave, they are prohibited from using government equipment, including cell phones, logging into government-issued computers, contacting any EPA employees for access to information, and performing any official EPA duties.

An EPA spokesperson wrote in an email that the agency “has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November.” 

The EPA also alleged that the petition contains misleading information, but did not specify what is incorrect.

The petition, addressed to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and members of Congress, is a “declaration of dissent” with the administration’s policies, “including those that undermine the EPA’s mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

“Since the Agency’s founding in 1970, EPA has accomplished this mission by leveraging science, funding, and expert staff in service to the American people,” the petition reads. “Today, we stand together in dissent against the current administration’s focus on harmful deregulation, mischaracterization of previous EPA actions, and disregard for scientific expertise.” 

More than 200 EPA employees, including retirees, signed the petition, some of them only by initials. The document criticizes the agency for “undermining the public trust” by issuing misleading statements in press releases, such as referring to EPA grants as “green slush funds” and praising “clean coal as beautiful.”

The petition also accuses the administration of “ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters,” most notably regarding asbestos, mercury, and greenhouse gases. 

Health-based regulatory standards are being repealed or reconsidered, including drinking water limits for four PFAS “forever chemicals” that cause cancer. 

“The decisions of the current administration frequently contradict the peer-reviewed research and recommendations of Agency experts. Such contradiction undermines the EPA’s reputation as a trusted scientific authority. Make no mistake: your actions endanger public health and erode scientific progress—not only in America—but around the world.”

Signatories also lambasted the EPA for reversing progress on environmental justice, including the cancellation of billions of grant dollars to underserved communities and the removal of EJScreen, a mapping analysis tool that allowed the public to see pollution sources, neighborhood demographics, and health data.

The petition also opposes the dismantling of the Office of Research and Development, whose work forms the scientific basis for federal rulemaking.

Nicole Cantello is president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Union Local 704, and leader of AFGE Council 238, a nationwide union that represents over 8,000 EPA employees.

She said the EPA’s allegations are baseless.

“These are trumped-up charges against EPA employees because they made a political statement the Trump administration did not like,” Cantello said. “Now the Trump administration is retaliating against them.”

Cantello said the union will fight for the employees on several legal grounds, including First Amendment protections and employment contractual rights. “We’ll be using all of them to defend our people,” she said.

Matthew Tejada, the former director of the EPA’s environmental justice program and currently senior vice president of environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, blasted the Trump administration for going after the EPA employees who signed the letter.

These civil servants, he said, were “totally within their rights” to speak out. “This is a public declaration by those employees that they continue to fight to do their jobs to help people across this country live healthier, safer, more prosperous lives,” Tejada said. 

Tejada emphasized that the individuals involved were not working in coordination with advocacy groups, but acting independently in defense of the agency’s mission and the public interest.

He called the administration’s reaction “another indication that this administration is unique in modern times for having zero regard for the Constitution, for protecting and supporting the people of the United States.” 

“We are in completely unprecedented waters here,” Tejada said.

On July 4, tragedy struck Texas.

A flash flood cresting at more than 20 feet killed at least 70 people across six counties in central Texas, according to reports. Most of the damage was concentrated in Kerr County, a region about 125 miles west of Austin. There, the dead include 21 children and 11 who reportedly remain missing from Camp Mystic, a Christian children’s summer camp in the unincorporated community of Hunt. Videos and images show homes destroyed, trees downed, and muddy waters flooding streets.

On Sunday morning, Trump announced he had signed a major disaster declaration for Kerr County, which unlocks federal funding and resources to support the emergency response and longer-term recovery. Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) has said that more than 800 people have been saved so far, but dozens reportedly remain missing.

But according to a new report in the New York Times, there were serious inadequacies in both preparation for and the emergency response to the natural disaster. In part, apparently because of staffing shortages at the National Weather Service prompted by Trump’s and Elon Musk’s dismantling of the federal government. Housed within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at the Department of Commerce, the NWS provides forecasts, weather warnings, and climate data that are used to help local and state officials protect communities in the face of weather disasters. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) invaded NOAA earlier this year, and hundreds of forecasters were reportedly fired; another 1,000 reportedly took buyout offers.

According to the Times, the San Angelo office of the NWS was lacking a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster, and top meteorologist. The nearby San Antonio office also had vacancies for a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, roles that are designed to work with local officials to plan for floods. The Times reports that the warning coordination meteorologist left after taking the early retirement offer that the Trump administration has used across agencies to try to shed staff, citing a person with knowledge of that worker’s departure. The Times also reports that while some of the open roles may predate the current administration, the current vacancy rates at both the San Antonio and San Angelo NWS offices are roughly double what they were in January, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents NWS employees.

John Sokich, former director of congressional affairs for NWS, told the Times the reduced staffing made it harder for the NWS to successfully coordinate with local officials.

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) said the vacancies should be investigated, adding, “I don’t think it’s helpful to have missing key personnel from the [NWS] not in place to help prevent these tragedies.”

Several factors, however, contributed to the scale of devastation in Texas, including some that may not have been able to have been anticipated, much less controlled.

Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said at a news conference on Friday that the NWS underestimated the amount of rain expected to fall in its forecasts, but several meteorologists told Wired in a report published on Saturday that the meteorologists could not have predicted the severity of this storm, and that their forecasts were accurate at the time they issued them. Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly also told reporters, “We deal with floods on a regular basis…we had no reason to believe that this was going to be anything like what’s happened here.” And as my colleague Henry Carnell points out on Bluesky, other factors that were at play included national reductions in FEMA funding and, in some cases, lags in communication by local agencies to the public advising evacuation.

A spokesperson for NWS said in a statement provided to Mother Jones on Sunday that the agency is “heartbroken by the tragic loss of life in Kerr County,” adding that the agency’s local offices in Austin and San Antonio had conducted forecast briefings for emergency management personnel on Thursday, and issued flash floods warnings both Thursday night and Friday morning.

Still, the vacancies in the local Texas offices, coupled with the devastation of the floods, point to what experts have said is an urgent need for the Trump administration to bolster resources for emergency responses to natural disasters. Just this week, emergency officials from across the country told CNN that FEMA was ghosting them despite the arrival of hurricane season. Also this week, the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA), a nonpartisan group of emergency management directors, sent Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem a letter demanding she make congressionally-mandated emergency management grants available immediately, given that they should have been available in May. Spokespeople for DHS and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday afternoon.

Acting FEMA Director David Richardson reportedly told staff last month he was not aware that hurricane season had started, which the White House dismissed as a joke, and a May internal review of FEMA concluded that the agency was not ready for hurricane season despite the June 1 deadline. NOAA is also seeking to cut another 2,000 employees in its proposed budget for the next fiscal year.

Appearing alongside Noem, who insisted that the Trump administration would upgrade what she described as an “ancient” NWS notification system, Abbott pledged at a Saturday press conference that officials “will be relentless in going after and ensuring that we locate every single person who’s been a victim of this flooding event.”

The tragedy is particularly chilling in light of a May open letter issued by five former NWS directors, who wrote that agency staff “will have an impossible task to continue its current level of services” in light of the Trump cuts, adding, “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”

On election night a couple weeks ago, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was in an unusually good mood for a man about to lose the mayoral primary. Once heralded as a potential frontrunner, he had consistently been polling in a distant third place to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. 

Lander has a record of progressive policy accomplishments and the self-assurance of a seasoned technocrat. But, wonkish and unassuming, he struggled to gain traction in the Democratic primary. There were bigger, showier personalities competing for attention, and Lander receded to the background of a crowded field. Though in 2021 the New York Times Editorial Board had weighed in on behalf of Kathryn Garcia—that year’s unassuming technocrat—it managed to dismiss all the candidates in this race. The editorial described Lander as an effective manager who “exudes competence if not inspiration.” 

A few weeks ago, though, Lander was thrust into the national spotlight when he was detained by federal agents while escorting a migrant out of an immigration court in Lower Manhattan. In videos, Lander can be seen holding onto the man and demanding to see a judicial warrant. (He was released several hours later without being charged.) It was a forceful side of Lander, tuned to a burgeoning resistance under the second Trump administration, that voters had not seen before. 

Ultimately, Lander’s star turn came too late to make his candidacy viable, but it amplified his never-Cuomo message. Lander had spent the last stretch of the race doing everything in his power to, at the very least, keep Cuomo out of office. He spent $750,000 on ads attacking the former governor and landed some punches during the second debate. On the eve of the election, Lander cross-endorsed with Mamdani and appeared with him on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—an important sign of support, as Mamdani has been repeatedly and baselessly accused of antisemitism.

In this way, Mamdani’s win is also partly Lander’s, and the comptroller has been on an extended victory lap. On election night, Lander was addressing supporters at his campaign’s watch party in Park Slope when news of Cuomo’s concession came in. Lander was nothing short of gleeful. “Andrew Cuomo is in the past. He is not the present or future of New York City,” he told the crowd. “Good fucking riddance.” 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

You took a more traditional route to the mayoral race—first as a city council member, then as the comptroller. In this primary, we’ve seen some rules of electoral politics get completely rewritten. Has this changed your understanding of New York City politics?

It did not go as I had mapped it out. That said, I was aware of the following fact when I got in the race: I am the 45th comptroller of the city of New York. The vast majority [of comptrollers] wanted to be mayor, and only one made it that was [Abraham Beame], and no one writes songs about Abe’s mayoralty. Comptroller is a job that teaches people about the inner workings of government and how to make it work better. But it isn’t so easy to make competence sexy or compelling. I knew that going in and was excited to get out there and talk to New Yorkers. It’s taken a bunch of twists and turns. I’m proud of the campaign we ran and feel very optimistic about the future of the city.

As a competitor to Mamdani, what did it feel like—and did it challenge ideas that you had about electoral politics—to see his surge in momentum?

Zohran ran a brilliant campaign—with a relentless focus on affordability, a mastery of the communication tools of the moment, and an understanding that people are being crushed by the cost of living. But he also had a real hopefulness that the city could be something better for working people in challenging times. He did that in a really compelling way. And I don’t know that that’s breaking the rules of politics. People get excited by someone who speaks to the things they’re feeling and projects a very hopeful vision that government can make it better.

But when it comes to the typical experts—editorial column writers, political consultants, and pollsters—they might have missed part of the story as the campaign was unfolding. Even Mamdani’s supporters were surprised by the outcome in the first round of ranked choice voting, right?

I think he over-performed everyone’s expectations—certainly mine, and I think even his own. One thing that has certainly changed is that, traditionally, in a race of this scale, you raise money, build a coalition, and reach voters primarily through paid TV and digital [advertising]. You would be helped in that greatly if you had the New York Times Editorial Board or a few marquee endorsements. That’s the way I won the comptroller’s race four years ago. 

The attentional landscape has changed dramatically. Zohran’s videos, door-knocking, and volunteers broke through in a way that was different from many prior citywide races. It’s always a challenge to get people’s attention. And there’s so much else going on, with Trump, with Eric Adams still in City Hall, and with the sense of dark inevitability that Cuomo was bringing. That was even harder. 

Look, until a few weeks before the election, I had not succeeded in enabling New Yorkers to see the parts of me I wanted to show and the kinds of leadership I could provide. And I give Zohran credit that he found powerful ways to do that.

Your campaign took a strong swing at social video, too. There’s been a lot of postmortem analysis of Mamdani’s online success—is it the form of the message? Is it the messenger or the content itself? I’m curious about what your read might be.

For myself, what I will say is that I come across best when I’m acting, when I’m leading, when I’m showing up. And I don’t think it was a coincidence for me that it was the arrest and the debate and the cross endorsement that helped me show leadership. I am just less telegenic. I made this joke throughout the campaign, but it really is true: All my daughter’s TikToks do better than mine. 

So it’s definitely medium and messenger. There are things I’m really good at, and that form of viral video content just turns out not to be one of them. We got better at it; we brought in a new digital team a little later in the race. I think our earned media was good throughout. But Zohran really captured the spaces of attention. And I don’t only mean the videos. He made it cool for young people to meet others and socialize and by volunteering and knocking on doors.

An issue that’s risen to the forefront of the mayoral race is Israel’s war in Gaza, which has deeply divided the Democratic Party at large. Last year, a group advocating for a ceasefire was denied a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention. And now New York City may elect a Muslim mayor who’s been outspokenly pro-Palestine. To you, is this a sign that Democrats should rethink how they’re talking about Israel and antisemitism?

I have long believed that we need a different dialogue that doesn’t divide Jews and Muslims. The cross endorsement that Zohran and I did showed that. We can have different points of view on foreign policy, but share a belief in the equal worth of humanity. And we can have a conversation about what the best ways to provide every single New Yorker with a home they can afford, a neighborhood they feel safe going to worship in, and a great school for their kids. Democrats have to get better at doing that. 

And that is not easy. The days since October 7 have been excruciating. This conflict, this war, is horrible in the cost it’s taking over there and the divides it has imposed here. I hope that what we did in the closing days of the campaign—to reach out and try hard to listen and understand—can be a model for bringing our party and our city back together.

Meanwhile, you have Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, who are three non-Jews weaponizing antisemitism and Jewish anxiety for their own craven political purposes, and it’s just critical that we don’t fall for it. 

One thing that’s on a lot of people’s minds right now is what comes next for you after your term as comptroller ends—whether that might be potentially joining a Mayor Mamdani’s administration or running for Congress. Do you want to stay local?

First, I’ll say I’m really flattered by all the interest. I’m moved, and honestly, still a little bewildered by the way in which the cross endorsement and the arrest generated so much goodwill and hopefulness. That all sits on top of the energy generated by Zohran and his campaign. 

There’s a lot still to do in the comptroller’s office, and I am deeply committed to ensuring that we elect Zohran Mamdani mayor in November. There’s a lot of work to do there—continuing the campaign and building a bigger coalition. He has a very big mandate for change, and it will take a lot of hands to make it happen. And I’d be happy to help in any way I can.

And to end on a lighter note: A few weeks ago, you tweeted at the comedian Tim Robinson and asked him to a New York Liberty game. I have two questions. The first is, did you hear back? And the second is, do you see the resemblance?

[Laughs.] For better or worse, it’s hard to miss the resemblance. He did not get back to me, sadly. But the offer stands. I have a half season ticket package to the New York Liberty, and he’s welcome to join me anytime.

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has made clear what he thinks of journalists and what should happen to us: Thrown in jail and raped, “sued like never before,” investigated for treason, “taken off the air.” Once he reassuringly noted that “I would never kill them, but I do hate them,” but since then he’s clarified that he “wouldn’t mind so much” if someone shot the “fake news.”

Ten years ago, some were inclined to shrug this off as hyperbole. Now it is crystal clear that Trump intends to do everything he can to stop journalists from reporting things he doesn’t like, which is most things that are true. If there was any doubt, he said it again shortly after his inauguration, in a speech at (tellingly) the Justice Department: “But these networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative and it has to stop. It has to be illegal.”

Trump has banned reporters from press briefings (while inviting sycophants and propagandists). He has taken government data offline. He has fantasized about journalists being raped in prison. He has threatened to pull licenses of television stations, signed an executive order to kill funding for public radio and television, had news organizations investigated (and claimed that they are paid agents of the government) and threatened journalists simply for asking him questions.

For these and other reasons, the United States is slipping on the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index; this year we sit in 57th place among 180 countries, right behind Sierra Leone. (The five countries directly ahead of us: Romania, Liberia, Ghana, Mauritius, and Mauritania.)

But the president doesn’t have to do all the dirty work of suppressing inconvenient truths himself. He can also outsource the job to corporate media owners. In the past six months we’ve seen that when faced with a choice between standing up for journalism and protecting their profits, leaders of our most powerful media corporations will often look out for the bottom line first. They may even convince themselves that accommodation is the moral choice—because it’s a way to “heal partisan divides,” “combat wokeness,” or simply “be objective.” But in the end, it’s just about the money.

Consider, most recently, Paramount, which owns CBS. Last year, CBS’s 60 Minutes had a sit-down interview with Kamala Harris, as it has with each major party candidate for decades. (Trump bailed on his 60 Minutes interview at the last minute; his spokesman said it was because the show insisted on fact-checking.)

Harris gave a long answer to a question about the Middle East, and CBS aired shortened versions of that answer on 60 Minutes and Face the Nation. The edits didn’t change the meaning of what Harris said—you can check for yourself in the transcripts. But Trump went ballistic, calling the interview a “Giant Fake News Scam” and promising to “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.” On Halloween, his lawyers filed suit in the Northern District of Texas—the district where cases automatically get assigned to a Trump-appointed, ultraconservative judge named Matthew Kacsmaryk.

The complaint is quite something. It alleges (with evidence such as numerous Breitbart citations) that CBS’s editing violated Texas consumer protection laws by making Harris’ answer appear more concise than it was, an “unconscionable” action “because it amounts to a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.”

CBS, and virtually every First Amendment expert, called the case “baseless.” But Paramount chairwoman Shari Redstone (the daughter of company founder Sumner Redstone) desperately wants to sell the company to Skydance Media (which, because we live in a nepo-baby world, happens to be owned by the son of Oracle founder and Trump pal Larry Ellison).

That sale needs approval from the federal government, and two days after Trump’s inauguration, the Federal Communications Commission opened its own investigation of the Kamala interview…and explicitly linked it to its review of the Paramount merger. Just in case anyone missed the point, shortly afterward, Trump doubled the size of his claim against CBS, demanding $20 billion (yes, with a “b”). Nice merger you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.

The media newsletter Puck News reported that Redstone asked CBS leaders to delay negative stories about Trump until after the Skydance deal was closed. In May, Bill Owens, the legendary executive producer of 60 Minutes, resigned, saying he had “lost independence from corporate.” His boss, CBS vice president for news Wendy McMahon, quickly followed. And on July 2, Paramount did settle the case with a payment of $16 million.

CBS isn’t the only target of Trump’s legal ire. In just the past year, the president has pursued litigation against many other targets, including the Des Moines Register, a pollster, Simon & Schuster, and CNN, with additional threats against the New York Times, the Pulitzer Prize board, and people who write books about him.

One of the most prominent cases was against another television network, ABC: Trump complained that host George Stephanopoulos had defamed the president by saying he had been “found liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case. (The jury found Trump liable for sexual assault—but the judge pointed out that under any definition except the very strict one of the New York penal code, Trump “raped her.”)

Like CBS, ABC initially pushed back hard. But weeks after the election, the network turned tail and paid $15 million to make the lawsuit go away. And that amount reportedly ended up setting the baseline for what Paramount paid in the CBS case: Had it shelled out a lot more, it might have opened itself up to shareholder lawsuits for bribery.

In other words, these settlements established the going rate for media companies to pay off Trump.

It doesn’t take a lawsuit to make a media tycoon come to heel. Sometimes they do it all on their own—witness how last fall the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post pulled their papers’ already written endorsements of Harris. Jeff Bezos has also decreed that the Post’s opinion section will henceforth endorse “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish articles opposing those ideas, while Patrick Soon-Shiong went on Tucker Carlson’s show to criticize his own paper. The LA Times owner was rewarded with a spot on Trump’s Middle East trip, where he posted videos of himself chatting with Trump and Saudi crown prince (and journalist killer) Mohammed bin Salman.

And don’t sleep on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has been going out of his way to butter up Trump, including by killing Facebook’s fact-checking program because it had become “too politically biased.” Surely nothing to do with a Justice Department lawsuit against Meta that Zuckerberg really, really wants to go away.

It’s depressing to see media owners roll over like that, but it probably shouldn’t be surprising. Billionaires like innovation and disruption when they’re on their way up. But once they’re on top, they love the status quo, and they support the politicians who will protect it.

A recent book by New York Times reporter David Enrich investigates the way in which litigation has been used to silence the press—including the lawsuit by a dark-money billionaire, Frank VanderSloot, against Mother Jones. Enrich interviewed me and summarized the dilemma we were in when we were battling that lawsuit. The case was filed with a monetary demand of just under $75,000 (the limit beyond which it would have gone from Idaho state court to federal court). We could have paid to make the case go away—but we would have had to essentially plead guilty, putting an asterisk on our reporting forever after.

Their strategy was to put us in a position where the safest thing for us to do was disavow our reporting,” she explained. But caving to billionaires wasn’t in her DNA, any more than it had been in the New York Times’ genes when a different bully, L. B. Sullivan, had sued over the Martin Luther King ad. Mother Jones would fight.

Finally, after more than two years of legal maneuvering, a state judge threw out the lawsuit: VanderSloot was a public figure, and there was no evidence that the magazine had deliberately or recklessly manipulated the facts. Regardless, the damage was done. Mother Jones had to shell out more than $600,000 to cover its legal bills, which it paid for out of a fund earmarked for new journalism projects. When it came time for Mother Jones to renew its libel insurance, the magazine’s broker approached forty-two different insurers. Forty refused to even offer a quote. Ultimately, the magazine found an insurer, but its annual premiums more than doubled to $75,000, even as the amount of coverage dropped by a third. Its deductible soared to $150,000.

Enrich’s book is truly worth a read. It chronicles how a combination of aggressive plaintiffs and a clique of lawyers driven by ideology and profits have made the cost of publishing controversial stories terrifyingly high. “Dozens of lawyers, many with decades of experience, told me that the popularity of these menacing legal tactics has recently surged to unprecedented heights,” he writes. “In such an environment, the safest course often seemed to be to avoid writing about anyone or anything that smacked of controversy—or at least anyone with the inclination and wherewithal to retain aggressive counsel. It was a form of quiet censorship all but inaudible to the American public.”

Trump and his allies have seen this kind of quiet self-censorship—and they love it. Who needs the state to bring the hammer down, when you can simply make publishers fret about the consequences of their reporting? In addition to lawsuits (from Trump or his minions), these consequences can include being hauled in front of a congressional committee, like NPR CEO Katherine Maher was, or being investigated by the Federal Communications Commission (also happening to NPR, as well as ABC, CBS, and NBC). Or the government could secretly dig through reporters’ phone and email records: Attorney General Pam Bondi recently revoked rules that kept the Justice Department from spying on journalists it suspects of working with whistleblowers.

“When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy,” authoritarianism scholar Stephen Levitsky wrote recently. “The Trump administration’s weaponization of government agencies and flurry of punitive actions against critics has raised the cost of opposition for a wide range of Americans.”

What makes this especially dangerous is that we won’t know the quiet censorship is happening—because it’s quiet. How will we know which opinion columns Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post (now “unapologetically patriotic”) is not commissioning or publishing? Who’s to say which stories ABC or CBS will consider worth paying the next $16 million settlement for?

But let’s not end on that grim note—because the truth is, independence has always had a cost. Our newsroom is living proof of that: In the 1980s, the Reagan IRS came after us. We fought and won. In the 1990s, we were sued by a Republican consultant. We fought and won. Ten years ago, in that lawsuit by dark-money megadonor VanderSloot, we fought and won. Six years ago, our sister radio show, Reveal, was sued by a taxpayer-funded charity connected to an alleged cult. They fought and won.

Yes, all these cases involved bullies who were strong, rich, and confident. Yes, there was a cost to standing up to them, and that cost is higher today than it was 10 or 30 years ago. Yes, it’s depressing that the billionaires who could afford to pay that price…won’t.

But that just means that this is one of those times when people and institutions, including news organizations, show you who they really are. And once they do, you have a choice. If they accommodate, normalize, soft-pedal, or cozy up, do they deserve your attention and your money?

Here’s what’s comforting for us, in this organization that has just about one-tenth of 1 percent of Paramount’s annual revenue: We get to wake up every morning knowing that we’re not accountable to any bully or billionaire. We answer only to you, our audience—and that means fighting back and standing up is in our DNA. Because it is in yours.

Late Sunday night, Axios reported that the Department of Justice and FBI have concluded that billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide. A two-page memo issued by the two agencies and obtained by Axios also stated that Epstein wasn’t engaged in a blackmail operation and didn’t have a “client list” of people who are believed to have engaged in sex crimes against women and girls alongside him. The DOJ also released surveillance video from outside Epstein’s prison cell in New York City’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, meant to help show that no one could have entered to murder him. Besides Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s procurer who is serving 20 years in prison for sex trafficking, the department determined that no one else will be charged in connection with his case.

“This systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list,’” the memo reads. “There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

This was, of course, cause for considerable uproar, both in the MAGA world and across the aisle, where Epstein conspiracy theories are also deeply rooted. The Trump administration has continually claimed they would declassify shocking and never-before-seen Epstein files, conducting a weird little stunt in February where a group of conservative bloggers and influencers were given folders full of supposedly unreleased Epstein-related material; the move flopped when it became clear that they held no new information. Earlier that month, Attorney General Pam Bondi even claimed that she had Epstein’s client list “sitting on my desk right now to review,” adding that doing so had been a “directive by president Trump.” 

Among the MAGA faithful, the news of the Justice Department’s decision brought a sense of betrayal and profound confusion, with some seeming to mistake it for a vindication of Epstein. Catturd, a prolific far-right Twitter poster and booster of the administration whose real name is Philip Buchanan, tweeted, “So all the girls who have testified about being raped on Epstein’s island were lying and Giselle Maxwell is in prison for being the madam for nobody? Please tell me this is fake news.” 

“Assuming this leaked Epstein Files memo is true, then we all know this is a shameful coverup to protect the most heinous elites,” tweeted Rogan O’Handley, better known as “DC Draino,” another right-wing commentator and Trump stalwart. “We were told multiple times the files would be released and now it looks like backroom deals have been made to keep them hidden.”

“I don’t understand this,” echoed conservative political commenter Glenn Beck, sounding a plaintive note. “I’ve invited AG Bondi, Patel, and Bongino to discuss. Hope someone takes me up on the offer.”

“This is the type of lying that radicalizes people. Sigh,” tweeted “Autism Capital,” another large pro-Trump news aggregation account. (The account is followed by several members of the Trump administration, including Director of the National Institutes of Health Jay Bhattacharya and Kingsley Wilson, a Pentagon spokesperson with a history of inflammatory and bigoted tweets.) 

Even Benny Johnson, a former Buzzfeed writer and plagiarist turned MAGA personality with close ties to the administration who frequently interviews various senior officials, responded with fury.

“To say there are thousands of ‘victims’ in a convicted sex trafficking ring and then to say there were no ‘customers’ when the operation happened right before our very eyes insults our intelligence,” he tweeted. “Trafficking women to no one? I don’t buy it.”

“There are other dark forces at play here,” he added, before quoting George Orwell: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Yet skepticism of the decision wasn’t just limited to the MAGA world. People on the left and throughout American society also seemed doubtful. For instance, the Rise Above Justice Movement, which advocates for survivors of sexual violence (and was previously known as Survivors 4 Harris), shared an Instagram post which read, “We all know Donald Trump is on the Epstein list… That’s why they’re concealing and redacting it. They admitted there was a list. Now they’re backtracking… We know why.” (Ellipses theirs.) 

The department’s memo comes not long after a Trump ally-turned-frenemy Elon Musk claimed that Trump is “in the Epstein files,” adding, “That is the real reason they have not been made public.” (After souring on Trump, Musk recently announced the formation of a new political party, dubbing it the America Party.)

While Musk appears to have since deleted those tweets, it is of course a documented fact that many powerful people socialized with Epstein, including Trump himself. The future president told New York magazine in 2002 that Epstein was a “terrific guy,” adding, “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Trump and Melania were also photographed alongside Epstein and Maxwell at Mar a Lago in 2000.

Musk greeted the news of the memo with a new fusillade of conspiracy-stoking tweets. “What’s the time?,” he posted very late Sunday night. “Oh look, it’s no-one-has-been-arrested-o’clock again.” He also retweeted a post from another conservative activist named Sarah Fields, which read, “If the entire government is protecting pedophiles, it has officially become the government against the people. I hope you understand that.”

“Next the DOJ will say ‘Actually, Jeffrey Epstein never even existed,” agreed conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones, responding to Musk. “This is over the top sickening.”

The complaints from Trump allies are part of a developing pattern in which administration officials—many of whom, like FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, were part of right-wing media before assuming roles in government—make sweeping promises of disclosure that they likely can’t ever fulfill. (On Monday, notably neither Bongino nor Bondi had tweeted anything about the Epstein memo.)

If Epstein’s death has become the JFK assassination of this generation, this memo stands to be its version of the Warren Commission report concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Skepticism about the JFK assassination and the commission itself took root almost immediately after it finished its work in 1964, with a considerable percentage of Americans believing that Oswald had accomplices or that the commission failed to answer lingering questions about the killing. Some saw the report as an attempt to simply put debate about the shooting to bed. The U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, for instance, later wrote that the commission’s “investigation into the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination was inadequate. The conclusions of the investigations were arrived at in good faith, but presented in a fashion that was too definitive.” 

We’re heading down the same long road again, with the Trump DOJ and FBI’s bizarre stunts and sweeping promises serving only to cement Epstein’s death further into the conspiracy firmament. In their memo, both agencies tried, faintly and quite ironically, to prevent the tide of recrimination they surely know is coming, writing: “One of our highest priorities is combatting [sic] child exploitation and bringing justice to victims. Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither of those ends.”

Senate Democrats are introducing legislation today that would force immigration officers around the country to wear clear identification while making public arrests.

The VISIBLE Act, introduced by Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), would require officers to display their agency name or acronym as well as their personal name or badge number during enforcement actions. It would also prohibit them from wearing non-medical masks or balaclavas that hide their faces. “When federal immigration agents show up and pull someone off the street in plainclothes with their face obscured and no visible identification, it only escalates tensions and spreads fear while shielding federal agents from basic accountability,” Padilla said in a statement accompanying the bill. 

The legislation would apply to a broad group officers from the Department of Homeland Security, as well as those from other federal, state, or local departments that have been recruited to help with mass deportations. In late June, House Democrats introduced a similar bill, the No Secret Police Act, that applies only to DHS officers. (California lawmakers are pushing for legislation that would apply to federal, state, and local officers working in that state.)

Padilla is a notable spokesperson for the VISIBLE Act. The son of Mexican immigrants, he has roots in Los Angeles, which has seen widespread immigration sweeps under the Trump administration. On Monday, federal agents in military green uniforms surrounded a park there on horseback and in armored vehicles, “a show of force akin to a Hollywood movie,” as the Los Angeles Times put it. In June, Padilla was forcibly removed from a press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after he tried to ask her a question about immigration enforcement in the city; federal officers pushed him to the ground and handcuffed him, sparking public outcry.

On Monday, Padilla and 13 Democratic senators sent a letter to Todd Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), requesting information about the agency’s policy on masking and uniforms. “Storming courthouses, grabbing students off the street, raiding places of work, and sweeping through restaurants at prime dining hours are in and of themselves tactics clearly designed to engender fear and sow chaos in the population. Doing so in plainclothes, with no identification of their name or agency, while wearing a mask designed to obscure the agent’s face, represents a clear attempt to compound that fear and chaos—and to avoid accountability for agents’ actions,” they wrote.

The lawmakers also cited safety concerns and noted that criminals have taken advantage of the chaos by impersonating federal immigration agents. “In one instance in Greensboro, North Carolina, several people were injured when armed individuals, falsely identifying themselves as ICE agents, pushed their way inside a home and robbed the family inside,” they wrote.

The VISIBLE Act would include exceptions for officers who need to mask for their safety, such as to protect themselves from environmental hazards, or to officers working on covert or nonpublic operations. It would apply only to arrests for civil immigration offenses, but not criminal ones.

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

Your city is probably fighting climate change in more ways than you realize. Perhaps your mayor is on a mission to plant more trees, or they’ve set efficiency standards for buildings, requiring better windows and insulation. Maybe they’ve even electrified your public transportation, reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. 

Ten years after the Paris Agreement, nations are still nowhere near ambitious enough in their commitments to reduce emissions and avoid the worst consequences of climate change. More than that, they haven’t shown enough follow-through on the goals they did set. Instead, it’s been cities and other local governments that have taken the lead.

According to a new report by the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, along with C40—a global network of nearly 100 mayors prioritizing climate action, collectively representing nearly 600 million people—three-quarters of the cities in the latter group are slashing their per capita emissions faster than their national governments. As global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, per capita emissions across C40 cities fell 7.5 percent on average between 2015 and 2024.

“The untold story is that cities and local leaders really mobilized in a big way in Paris, but also in the decade since,” said Asif Nawaz Shah, co-author of the report and the head of impact and global partnerships at C40 and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy. “It’s where the action happens, and it’s also where people are suffering the impacts the most.”

Cities are adapting because they’re experiencing especially acute effects of climate change as their populations rapidly grow. They’re getting much hotter than surrounding rural areas due to the urban heat island effect, in which the built environment soaks up the sun’s energy during the day and slowly releases it at night. Because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, they’re suffering increasingly catastrophic flooding as rains overwhelm sewer systems designed for the climate of yesteryear. And coastal cities have to deal with sea level rise in addition to fiercer tropical storms.

Mayors can more quickly deploy fixes than national governments can, climate experts say. Cities are less politically divided, for instance, and officials are more in tune with the immediate needs of their residents than a faraway federal government is. “I think that’s part of what makes it easier for mayors to make the case for climate action, because they’re not just addressing a concept that can seem a little abstract,” Shah said. “They’re addressing it through the lens of what people’s lived realities and experiences are.”

By making their cities more liveable, mayors also make them more sustainable, especially when it comes to walkability, bikeability, and vehicle transportation. The report notes that Melbourne, Australia, is on a quest to create “20-minute neighborhoods,” in which people can reach most of their daily needs—work, schools, grocery stores—within a 20-minute return walk from home. Over in Shenzhen, China, officials have electrified 16,000 buses, reducing annual CO2 emissions by over 200,000 tons. 

And by literally greening their cities, mayors solve a bunch of their citizens’ problems at once. In Quezon City in the Philippines, the government turned unused land into 337 gardens and 10 model farms, while training more than 4,000 urban farmers. The report also notes that Freetown, Sierra Leone, planted more than 550,000 trees, creating more than 600 jobs. In addition to significantly reducing urban temperatures, these green spaces also mitigate flooding by soaking up rainwater. “It is becoming clear, I think, to a lot of municipalities that this type of action will be absolutely essential,” said Dan Jasper, senior policy advisor at the climate solutions group Project Drawdown, which wasn’t involved in the report. “It’s not just about being uncomfortable. This is about protecting people’s lives.”

Mayors are also improving access to clean energy and more efficient appliances. The report notes that Buenos Aires, Argentina, installed solar panels on more than 100 schools, while Qab Elias, Lebanon, went a step further by partnering with a private supplier to allow half of its homes to install solar. 

It’s not as if all nations are leaving cities to their own devices, though. The Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships, for instance, is an initiative signed by more than 70 national governments to help cities, states, and regions with planning and financing climate action. “I find it very heartening, to be honest, that cities really are taking the lead,” Jasper said. “I think they’re going above and beyond in some respects, about planning for the future, as well as actually implementing some of the things that the federal governments have signed on to.”

Still, not nearly enough funding is flowing to cities and other local governments to do all the climate action they need. Unlike national governments, they can’t print their own money, so they’re strictly limited by their budgets. Conservative governments like President Donald Trump’s administration are also slashing funds for climate action. Last year, 611 cities disclosed 2,500 projects worth $179 billion, but urban climate finance has to rise to $4.5 trillion each year by 2030, the report says.

These are not donations but investments with returns: Spending money now to adapt to climate change means spending less on disaster recovery and health care in the future. “It’s not a call for handouts or for freebies,” Shah said. “It’s a call for genuine long-term investment that will yield results to protect citizens and livelihoods.