Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

The acting attorney general told eighteen Epstein survivors under oath that he’d already met with them when he hadn’t. The U.S. just indicted Raúl Castro for the 1996 killing of four Americans, and given what happened to Maduro, this may be less symbolic than it sounds. A former federal prosecutor is being charged for emailing herself one of the most classified documents in Washington. And the cops who got beaten on January 6th are now suing to make sure the guys who beat them don’t get a government check for it.

Before we get into it: Corporate media is running cover. The FCC chair is making sure they know what happens if they don’t. And independent outlets are being bought out one by one. This is the news they don’t want you reading. AlterNet America is the people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. We are reader-funded, editorially independent, and not for sale. We exist because of you. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, please upgrade today.

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Now, the news.

The Acting Attorney General Lied to Epstein Survivors Under Oath

Todd Blanche apparently committed perjury this week, which is a bold career choice for the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

Appearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Blanche was questioned by Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen about the Epstein survivors who have been desperately trying to meet with the Department of Justice. Van Hollen told Blanche the survivors were frustrated that the DOJ kept asking them to come forward with more evidence while refusing to actually sit down with them.

Blanche replied that Van Hollen’s characterization was “false” and that he had in fact already met with the survivors and their lawyers. “So whoever told you that unfortunately gave you bad information,” he said.

There was just one problem — or rather, 18 of them. A group of survivors then released a statement confirming that Blanche had not met with any of them, despite seeking a meeting with the Department.

The survivors noted they had already reported abuse to federal authorities “many times over the course of years” and said the burden should not be on them to keep making reports, but instead on the DOJ to investigate credible allegations and account for its own failures.

The DOJ’s response was to continue not meeting with them.

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Trump’s DOJ Just Indicted Raúl Castro. Ask Maduro How This Works.

The Justice Department found some time between running slush funds and lying to Congress to indict Raúl Castro.

A U.S. grand jury in Florida handed down federal criminal charges against the 94-year-old former Cuban leader and brother of the late Fidel Castro in connection with the Cuban military’s fatal downing of two civilian planes in 1996, which killed four people.

Castro was charged with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, four counts of murder, and two counts of destruction of aircraft. Five others were also named in the indictment.

Castro served as president of Cuba from 2008 to 2018 and as the top official of the country’s Communist Party from 2011 to 2021. The charges mark an escalation in the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against the Cuban government.

Cuba does not extradite people to the United States, which used to be the end of the conversation. Nicolás Maduro thought the same thing until U.S. forces showed up in Caracas, grabbed him, flew him to New York for trial, and installed a friendlier government in his place.

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Former Federal Prosecutor Charged With Stealing the Jack Smith Report

A former federal prosecutor is in court today over a very unusual dessert recipe.

Carmen Lineberger, a former managing assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida, has been charged with emailing herself a copy of Jack Smith’s sealed Volume II report, which contains the full findings of his investigation into Donald Trump’s hoarding of classified documents.

The indictment accuses her of sending the report to her personal Hotmail account with the subject line “chocolate cake recipe.”

Judge Aileen Cannon had barred the release of Volume II back in February, ruling it was “not customary” for a prosecutor to release findings in a dismissed case. The indictment notes that Cannon had issued an order in January 2025 prohibiting any DOJ official from “releasing, sharing or transmitting” the report outside the department.

Lineberger managed the Fort Pierce branch of the Southern District office, which was not part of the special counsel team, but in a supervisory role that gave her access. She faces charges including theft of government property and concealment of government records and could face up to 20 years in prison. She pleaded not guilty Wednesday during an appearance in West Palm Beach.

We don’t know what’s in the report. The government doesn’t want us to know. The recipe, for the record, has not been released either.

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January 6 Officers Are Suing to Kill Trump’s Slush Fund

Two police officers who helped defend the U.S. Capitol from the January 6th attack filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday to block anyone, including the rioters themselves, from receiving payouts from Donald Trump’s new $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

The plaintiffs are retired Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and D.C. Metropolitan Police officer Daniel Hodges. Their lawsuit describes the fund as a “corrupt sham” and argues it will compensate the very rioters who attacked them.

“In the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century,” the 29-page suit reads, Trump has created a taxpayer-funded slush fund to “finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.”

Vice President JD Vance and Acting Attorney General Blanche both declined to rule out compensating January 6 rioters who attacked police.

The fund was created as part of a settlement after Trump sued his own IRS over the leak of his tax returns. Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney, will appoint a five-member commission to determine who gets the money. The fox will be selecting the henhouse commission shortly.

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We Don’t Have a Billionaire. We Have You.

Every major outlet in this country has someone at the top whose financial interests quietly shape what gets covered and how. Those pulls don’t announce themselves. They just accumulate, story by story, until certain things simply don’t get written.

We don’t have that problem because we don’t have that person. Our subscribers are the entire business model. That means the only thing shaping our coverage is what actually matters to the people reading it.

If that kind of journalism is valuable to you, a paid subscription is the most direct way to make sure it keeps existing. Please consider upgrading today. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, you’re the reason we’re here, and we are genuinely grateful.

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Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Tennessee man jailed over Charlie Kirk post wins $835,000 settlement. A retired Tennessee cop spent 37 days in jail and had his bail set at $2 million for posting Facebook memes about Charlie Kirk’s death. Tennessee just agreed to pay him $835,000 to make the lawsuit go away, which is what happens when the sheriff arrests someone over a Trump quote meme and then admits he knew it was about a school shooting in Iowa the whole time.

Judge rules Trump White House must comply with Presidential Records Act. The Trump White House declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional, circulated a memo telling staff they only had to preserve text messages that met a series of vague criteria. It encouraged them to just write emails about their texts instead of saving the texts themselves. A federal judge ruled today that none of that is how laws work.

John Deere’s $99 Million Right-to-Repair Settlement Gets Preliminary Approval. A federal court granted preliminary approval to John Deere’s $99 million settlement with more than 200,000 farmers who sued the company for monopolizing the repair market by blocking their access to diagnostic tools for equipment they already owned. John Deere would like everyone to know it is “committed to providing customers with access to repair resources,” which is an interesting thing to say after spending years making sure they didn’t have any.

Hemp-based thermoplastic offers a greener alternative to plastic packaging. Researchers have developed a non-toxic plastic alternative made from CBD extracted from hemp plants that can stretch to 1,600% of its size, withstand boiling water, and serve as a direct replacement for PET, the petroleum-based plastic currently found in everything from water bottles to food packaging. There is not yet enough CBD being produced worldwide to fully replace PET, but the researchers note that costs would drop significantly if more hemp were planted.

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The IRS has been permanently barred from auditing Trump and his sons, forever, and that’s actually the word they used. The Senate took a rare shot at limiting Trump’s war powers in Iran. A Tennessee school board member who called a teenage girl “hot” and touched her has now been charged with assault. And U.S. aid cuts have helped turn a manageable Ebola outbreak into the third-largest on record.

Before we get into it: Independent journalism survives on one thing, and it isn’t a billionaire who bought us because he “believed in the mission” and then discovered he didn’t like what we wrote. It’s readers who pay for what they read. If you’re one of them, thank you. If you’re not yet, this would be a good morning to fix that. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. We can’t do it without you.

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Now, the news.

The IRS Can’t Audit Trump or His Sons Anymore

The man who campaigned on draining the swamp has discovered that the swamp is actually quite good for business.

The Department of Justice has released a settlement addendum permanently barring the IRS from ever auditing Donald Trump’s past tax returns, those of his adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, or the Trump Organization.

The one-page order, signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, states the IRS “releases, waives, acquits” any pending claims and is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing claims tied to returns filed before Monday’s settlement.

The addendum stems from Trump’s now-dismissed $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his confidential tax records during the Biden administration. In exchange for dismissing the suit, the DOJ agreed to establish a new $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” aimed at individuals who allege they were unfairly targeted by prior administrations.

You will recall that Trump spent years declining to release his tax returns, citing ongoing audits. The audits are now gone. Previous reporting found the IRS had been examining deductions and tax strategies that could have exposed Trump to roughly $100 million in liabilities. We’ll never know, because the government just agreed to stop looking.

A 2022 congressional investigation found the IRS had failed to properly audit Trump during his first term. That door is now closed, bolted, and the key has been thrown into the Potomac.

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The Senate Voted 50-47 to End Trump’s War With Iran

For the eighth time this year, the Senate tried to end an unauthorized war, and for the first time, it worked. Sort of.

The Senate advanced a resolution to limit Trump’s war powers in Iran on Tuesday, marking a breakthrough for Democrats after seven failed attempts. Senators approved a motion to discharge the resolution from committee in a 50 to 47 vote.

Four Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana — joined the bulk of Democrats in favor of advancing the resolution. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was the sole Democrat to oppose.

Cassidy’s vote was notable: it was the first time he supported advancing such a resolution, and it came days after he failed to survive a Republican primary, where Trump had endorsed one of his opponents. A man with nothing left to lose is a man who suddenly remembers what the Constitution says about declaring war.

Even if the resolution eventually passes the Senate, it must also clear the Republican-led House and garner two-thirds majorities in both chambers to survive an expected Trump veto.

The resolution faces the House and a press corps that has spent 80 days treating an unauthorized war like a foreign policy nuance rather than a constitutional crisis. Democrats have now cracked the Senate wall eight attempts in. That is not nothing. It is also not a ceasefire.

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There is an unauthorized war happening right now and most outlets covering it have been very careful not to make anyone in particular feel responsible for it. We are not being careful. If that’s important to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today.

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School Board Member Who Called a Student Hot Charged With Assault

Keith Ervin is still a school board member. But he’s also now a defendant.

Ervin, a member of the school board in Washington County, Tennessee, has been charged with assault following an incident at a meeting on April 2, 2026, in which he told a teenage student representative, “God, you’re hot, you know that? Where do you go to school at?” before reaching over and touching her shoulder.

After public outcry, the board called a special session where they unanimously voted to censure Ervin. The student spoke out for the first time at a meeting earlier this month, where she called the board members “cowards” and said they had taught her that “no one would stand up for her.”

The Board of Education has stated it lacks the statutory authority under Tennessee law to remove a sitting member from office, which raises some genuinely interesting questions about Tennessee law.

Ervin is scheduled to appear in court on August 7. He has maintained the video lacks context. The context, per the video, is that he called a high school student hot and touched her at a school board meeting.

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Trump Cut Ebola Response and Now There’s an Ebola Outbreak

We defunded the Ebola response. There is now an Ebola outbreak. If only someone could’ve predicted this.

The Trump administration slashed aid to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the months leading up to a fast-moving Ebola outbreak, causing a cascade of consequences that likely hampered both the detection of the outbreak and the response to it.

The DRC is now experiencing the third-largest Ebola outbreak on record. Experts estimate 130 people have died and at least 600 are sick, including an American.

HHS sent nearly $33 million to the DRC in foreign aid in fiscal year 2024. That number fell to less than $10 million in 2025. USAID sent some $67 million in the final three months of 2025, down from $715 million in fiscal 2025 and nearly $1.2 billion in fiscal 2024. The administration described those cuts as eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

The International Rescue Committee reduced its programming from five to two areas at the heart of the current outbreak due to U.S. cuts. Ebola response teams were frozen while programs designed to detect cases, alert communities, and dispatch response kits had their funding reduced or eliminated.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized the WHO for being “a little late” in identifying the outbreak. The United States withdrew from the WHO. He said this with a straight face.

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The Part the Billionaires Hate

The business model that kept journalism independent is gone. What replaced it is billionaires, access deals, and quiet understandings about which stories don’t run. The networks are getting phone calls they don’t talk about. The newspapers have new owners who play golf with the people we’re writing about. The FCC is making examples of outlets that don’t play ball.

None of that is happening here, because we don’t have anyone to sell out to. We have readers. If you’ve been reading AlterNet America for free, we’re glad you’re here. But free doesn’t keep the lights on, and the lights need to stay on.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, this is the moment. Your subscription isn’t a donation. It’s the thing that makes tomorrow’s newsletter possible. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription today.

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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Schiff Proposes Bill Requiring Data Centers to Pay for Own Power. Sen. Adam Schiff has introduced a bill that would require large data centers over 50 megawatts to secure their own power, pay for their own grid upgrades, and stop siphoning electricity from existing power plants, which drives up electricity costs for everyone else. This comes after major tech companies promised Trump in March they would do exactly that. The bill is, in other words, a law to enforce a promise that was apparently just a promise.

Judge orders hospital to resume gender-affirming care for trans youth.C hildren’s Hospital Colorado suspended most gender-affirming care for transgender youth in January after RFK Jr. threatened hospitals that continued providing it, opening a federal investigation into the hospital’s treatments. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled 5-2 this week that the hospital likely broke state anti-discrimination law when it did so, since it continued providing the same medications to cisgender youth for other conditions.

The Salt Lake Tribune just removed its paywall, making its journalism free to everyone. The Salt Lake Tribune, a 155-year-old nonprofit newspaper and Utah’s flagship news organization, dropped its paywall last week, making its journalism free to anyone for the first time in its history. The paper is moving to a donation-and-membership model backed by philanthropic support, operating on the bet that readers who can access the news for free will choose to fund it anyway. It is both an inspiring act of faith and a description of exactly what we do here.

Firefighters Save 25 Million Honey Bees Stuck in an Overheating Tractor-Trailer. A semi-truck carrying 480 beehives and an estimated 25 million honey bees broke down in Parley’s Canyon, Utah last week, leaving the bees at risk of dying in the heat since the parked truck no longer had airflow from moving down the highway. Firefighters kept the bees cool by carefully misting the trailer with a hose while mechanics worked on the truck. No firefighters were stung. It is not lost on us that the bees got more careful treatment than the people in today’s other stories.

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Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

The president’s top Treasury lawyer quit rather than distribute $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to Trump’s friends and himself. The administration is now weighing whether to open a second war, this time with Cuba. Trump bought $680,000 in stock in a drug company right as his own government handed that company a windfall. And the federal government has quietly brought back a spring-loaded cyanide device that shoots poison into the mouths of animals and occasionally children.

Before we get into it: We don’t have a network that needs White House access to survive. We don’t have a parent company doing quiet deals with the administration. We don’t have advertisers who’d rather you look away. What we have is readers. Right now, that’s the only position in American media that can’t be pressured into silence. A paid subscription to AlterNet America is a direct bet that independent journalism survives this moment. If you haven’t yet, please consider upgrading yours today.

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Now, the news.

Trump’s Own Lawyer Quit Rather Than Touch the $1.8 Billion Slush Fund

The good news is that someone in the Trump administration still has a line. The bad news is that they’re now unemployed.

The Trump administration announced on Monday that it was creating what it calls an “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a $1.776 billion pool of taxpayer money to compensate people who claim they were unfairly targeted by the Biden Justice Department.

The fund was created as part of a settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. The list of potential recipients includes January 6 rioters, right-wing think tanks, and Trump’s own super PAC.

The Treasury’s top lawyer resigned just hours after the fund was announced. Brian Morrissey had been confirmed to the role only seven months earlier. The fund will now be overseen by a five-member board appointed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who answers to Trump.

Morrissey did not publicly explain his resignation. A Treasury spokesperson said he served “with both honor and integrity” and wished him well in future endeavors. For context, they said the same thing about Kristi Noem.

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The Trump Administration Is Thinking About Starting a Second War

Having not yet finished one war, the Trump administration is now browsing for a second.

As the Iran conflict remains unresolved, officials have a new potential target in Cuba. Insiders confirmed to Politico that Trump and his advisors have grown frustrated that their pressure campaign, which includes an effective fuel blockade, has not forced the Cuban regime to adopt meaningful reforms. They’re now weighing what comes next.

Options reportedly on the table include a single airstrike as a warning shot or a full-scale invasion. Trump has separately floated the idea of parking an aircraft carrier offshore and seeing if Cuba surrenders.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel responded this week that any American military aggression would provoke, in his words, “a bloodbath of incalculable consequences.” Sources familiar with the discussions said this would not be Bay of Pigs 2.0, explaining that Cuban exiles have “no role here except as cheerleaders and busybodies.”

The nation’s holiday marking the end of U.S. occupation is May 20, prompting speculation that Trump could take action then. The Senate, for its part, rejected a Democratic effort to limit Trump’s ability to launch military action without Congressional authorization, 51 to 47.

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Tomorrow is Cuban Independence Day. Someone should be covering it without a defense contractor’s logo at the top of the page. That someone is us, but we need your help to do it. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription today.

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Trump Bought Eli Lilly Stock Then Made Eli Lilly Rich

The president bought Eli Lilly stock seven times. His government spent several months making Eli Lilly a fortune. You don’t have to be an artist to draw conclusions here.

Ethics disclosures released on May 14 show that Trump bought as much as $680,000 worth of stock in Eli Lilly, the maker of blockbuster GLP-1 obesity drugs, from January through March of this year. During that same period, his administration was advancing a Medicare pilot program that would allow patients to pay just $50 a month for those same drugs.

Eli Lilly has since been named a participating manufacturer in that program, calling it a “significant milestone.”

The first Eli Lilly stock purchase was made on January 6. The deadline for drug manufacturers to submit applications for the Medicare program was January 8.

This was not the only stock Trump was trading during this period. He also picked up shares in Microsoft, Nvidia, Boeing, Target, and Chipotle. What makes Eli Lilly different is the timeline, the scale of the government’s part, and the fact that the president controls the agencies that made those decisions.

They released the information on a Wednesday afternoon, which is when this administration drops the things it is legally required to disclose but would very much prefer you miss.

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The Federal Government Brought Back Cyanide Bombs for Wildlife

The Trump administration has reinstated a spring-loaded cyanide trap for wildlife, because whatever these people are protecting, it isn’t animals.

In a recent memorandum of understanding between the Bureau of Land Management and the USDA, the Trump administration cleared the way for renewed use of the M-44 cyanide bomb on federal public lands.

The M-44 is a spring-loaded device that uses a scented bait to lure an animal, then shoots a sodium cyanide pellet into its mouth. It has been used primarily to kill coyotes and foxes, but has also poisoned and killed endangered wolves, grizzly bears, and California condors. In 2017, an Idaho boy was injured and his pet dog was killed when one was accidentally triggered near their home.

The Biden administration had discontinued M-44 use on BLM lands in 2023. The Trump administration reversed that decision quietly, and appropriations language in a House bill has since directed the USDA to fully integrate the M-44 into its wildlife management strategy.

The administration has not explained why nonlethal alternatives were not sufficient. It has not explained why a device that has injured children and killed endangered species needed to be brought back. It has not held a press conference.

The memo was signed in April. Nobody told the coyotes. Nobody told you either, but at least you can read.

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No Billionaires Were Involved in the Making of This Newsletter

The business model that kept journalism independent is gone. What replaced it is billionaires, access deals, and quiet understandings about which stories don’t run. The networks are getting phone calls they don’t talk about. The newspapers have new owners who play golf with the people we’re writing about. The FCC is making examples of outlets that don’t play ball.

None of that is happening here, because we don’t have anyone to sell out to. We have readers. If you’ve been reading AlterNet America for free, we’re glad you’re here. But free doesn’t keep the lights on, and the lights need to stay on.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, this is the moment. Your subscription isn’t a donation. It’s the thing that makes tomorrow’s newsletter possible. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription today.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

The Next President Could Finally Be Elected by the Popular Vote. Eighteen states and Washington, D.C. have now joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a legally creative workaround that would hand a presidential election to the popular vote winner without actually touching the Electoral College. They need 270 and currently have 222. Experts say 270 is achievable by 2028, which would be an interesting development given recent events.

NAACP urges boycott of college sports in south over voting rights. The NAACP has launched a boycott called “Out of Bounds,” urging Black athletes and fans to withhold their talent and money from public universities in states that have moved to strip Black voting power following a Supreme Court ruling that gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. If it works, the SEC and ACC will have a roster problem, which is the most direct threat anyone has leveled at Republican-led Southern legislatures in years.

Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed the nation’s first ban on prediction markets this week, making it a crime to host or advertise platforms where people bet on elections, sports, world events, and beyond. The Trump administration immediately sued, because apparently the federal government’s position is that you should be able to bet on anything. Quick, someone check the odds.

Marine scientists discover record number of new species. Scientists discovered 1,121 new ocean species in a single year, a 54% jump from the previous record, among them a Ghost Shark older than the dinosaurs, worms living in glass castles made of crystalline silica on the ocean floor, and a brilliantly orange shrimp hiding in a cave off Marseille, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes you wish more of the news was about the ocean.

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Trump canceled an attack in the same social media post he announced it in. Florida is $608 million in the hole thanks to Alligator Alcatraz. More than 100,000 American children have had a parent taken from them by immigration agents. And the EPA just decided that your drinking water can have a little forever chemicals in it, as a treat.

Before we get into it: You’ve probably noticed that the news sites you used to count on are getting quieter. Softer. That is not an accident. That is a business decision made by the billionaires who own them. We haven’t made that decision, and we won’t, because we don’t answer to billionaires. We answer to you. A paid subscription to AlterNet America helps keep media independent. Please consider one today.

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Now, let’s dive in.

Trump Canceled an Attack on Iran in the Same Post He Announced It

On Monday, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he was calling off a planned military strike against Iran. This was also the first time anyone had heard about the planned military strike against Iran.

In a single social media post, Trump announced and suspended a previously undisclosed operation, promised that a deal was imminent, and claimed he was just doing what the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE requested. He then fired off 36 more posts about Tuesday’s primary elections.

In the same post, he instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine to “be prepared to go forward with a full, large scale assault of Iran, on a moment’s notice.” His post mentioning Hegseth came just hours after Hegseth had stepped away from his official duties to campaign in Kentucky.

Trump has repeatedly insisted for weeks that the U.S. “won” the war with Iran and was closing in on a deal, but many of his claims that agreement appeared imminent did not come to fruition. The war has now lasted more than two and a half months, with Trump blowing through deadline after deadline he set for himself.

The Strait of Hormuz remains partially closed. The administration continues to call this winning. So far, the only clear winner is anyone who owns an oil company.

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Alligator Alcatraz Cost Florida $608 Million and the Feds Won’t Pay It

When Ron DeSantis opened the detention facility in the Florida Everglades, he presented it as Florida leading the way on immigration enforcement. “Alligator Alcatraz” was a statement of values: a swamp full of detained migrants guarded by apex predators.

Then the bill arrived.

Florida has spent more than $1 million a day to run the facility, and DeSantis has said he expects reimbursement from the federal government. The state has not yet received the $608 million it has requested.

The Trump administration has declined to cover the costs, which is exactly what you’d expect from a White House that treats its allies the same way it treats its enemies.

DeSantis said Thursday that the facility “always was meant to be temporary.” He did not say this when he opened it. He did not say this when he was using it for photo opportunities. He is saying it now, when it became inconvenient to say anything else.

Detainees at the facility have described poor physical conditions and difficulty accessing lawyers. A handbook released as part of a lawsuit over attorney access revealed that during head counts, detainees aren’t permitted to move or speak.

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Over 100,000 American Children Lost a Parent to ICE Detention

Here is a number worth sitting with: over 100,000.

That is the Brookings Institution’s estimate of how many U.S. citizen children have had a parent detained since Trump’s mass deportation campaign began. About 400,000 people have been detained by immigration agents since Trump returned to office, but it’s nearly impossible to know how many family separations that has caused, since the administration does not track it.

This is not an oversight. The less data there is, the harder it is to argue about the data.

ProPublica found that in just the first seven months of Trump’s second term, at least 11,000 American children had a parent detained. Trump has been deporting about four times as many mothers of American children per day as President Biden did, and those are the conservative numbers from government data.

The Brookings estimate, which uses census data, comes in closer to 145,000 American kids with a detained parent.

A document known as the Parental Interests Directive was given a new name under Trump: the Detained Parents Directive. Its preamble, which once instructed agents to handle immigrant parents in a way that was “humane,” has been stripped of the word. No further editorialization required.

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The EPA Is Letting Forever Chemicals Stay in Your Water

PFAS are called “forever chemicals” because they do not break down. They accumulate in the body. The EPA has found that PFAS are linked to cancer, obesity, decreased fertility, developmental issues, and many other health problems. In 2024, the Biden administration set the first-ever federal drinking water standards for six types of PFAS. This was considered a significant public health achievement.

You probably know where this is going.

The Trump EPA announced Monday it will roll back four of those six protections entirely, and give water utilities two extra years to comply with the remaining two. This will delay or eliminate critical drinking water protections for up to 105 million people whose water providers have already detected PFAS above the levels the 2024 standards allow.

The American Chemistry Council and National Association of Manufacturers had filed a joint lawsuit against the EPA over the original regulations. The Trump EPA is now giving them most of what they asked for.

Here is where it gets shameless: the EPA put two employees of PFAS manufacturer Chemours on its Science Advisory Board, which provides guidance on EPA’s drinking water regulations. The people producing chemicals are now advising the agency that just decided not to regulate those chemicals.

The administration calls this deregulation. The word for it is corruption.

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Why AlterNet America Exists — and Why We Need You

The outlets that need White House access to survive will find a way to be careful about all of this. The ones with advertisers will find a way to look away from the parts that make their advertisers uncomfortable.

We don’t have advertisers. We don’t have access to protect. We don’t have a billionaire who bought us because he liked the vibes and then discovered he didn’t like the coverage.

What we have is readers, and we work for them. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, there has never been a better time to become one. The people we’re writing about would very much prefer that you didn’t.

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Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tonight.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Republicans trail Democrats by double digits on generic congressional ballot: Survey. A new New York Times/Siena poll has Republicans trailing Democrats by eleven points on a generic congressional ballot, 50 to 39 percent, with 11 percent still undecided. The poll was conducted May 11-15 among 1,507 registered voters, and released the same week Trump’s approval rating hit a second-term low. Republicans do have one advantage: their campaign arm has more cash on hand than Democrats, $78.2 million to $69.9 million. They are going to need every dollar of it to explain to voters why the last several months happened.

Judge Bars ICE From Making Immigration Arrests at Courts in New York. A federal judge ruled Monday that ICE agents can no longer make arrests without exceptional circumstances in and around three Manhattan immigration courthouses. The ruling came from U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel, a George W. Bush appointee who had originally allowed the arrests last year, but reversed course after federal prosecutors admitted in March that ICE had misled them about the legality of arresting immigrants at their court appearances. In other words, the government got caught lying to a judge, and the judge did not care for that.

Democratic district attorneys vow to prosecute federal agents who target voting sites. A coalition of Democratic district attorneys from Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Dallas, Austin, and Tucson announced Monday that they will prosecute any federal agents sent to intimidate voters at polling places this November. The announcement comes after Trump told reporters last week that he would do “anything necessary” to ensure honest elections and declined to rule out sending ICE or the National Guard to the polls. Federal law already prohibits this. The district attorneys would like the administration to know that they are aware of that.

FDA just approved the world’s first once-a-week insulin injection for diabetics. The FDA approved the world’s first once-weekly basal insulin, meaning the roughly 37 million Americans living with diabetes could soon go from 365 injections a year down to 52. Clinical trials found it matched or outperformed daily insulin on blood sugar control, and 93.7 percent of patients in one trial said they preferred it, which is about as close to unanimous as medicine gets. The catch, as always, is that the people who need it most are also the ones least likely to get quick access to an expensive new drug, and insurers have not yet weighed in.

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Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

Trump just turned a lawsuit he filed against his own government into a $1.8 billion fund he controls. Election officials across the country are preparing slide decks about what to do if the FBI shows up at a polling place. An ICE agent who shot a Venezuelan man through a closed door and then lied about it has been charged with assault. And most of the prisoners quietly and illegally pardoned by Kristi Noem have re-offended.

Before we get into it: Somewhere out there, a news organization is deciding how hard to push a story based on whether it costs them an advertiser. We are not doing that calculation because we do not have advertisers. What we have is a straightforward arrangement where we write what happened, you pay for it, and nobody in between gets to have opinions about the result. If that sounds like something worth having, become a paid subscriber today.

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Now, let’s dive in.

The President Filed a Lawsuit Against Himself and Won

If you tried to sue your own employer and walked away with $1.7 billion, you would be in prison. Donald Trump is in the White House

Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion on the grounds that the Biden administration had “weaponized” it against him. The judge overseeing the case had already ordered both sides to explain why the parties were adversarial enough for the lawsuit to legally proceed.

The answer was: they weren’t. Trump dropped the suit. In exchange, his Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate people who claim they were wrongly targeted by the Biden administration.

The amount is not a coincidence. The nation turns 250 this year. The robbery is patriotic.

The fund will pay out claims from people alleging Biden-era persecution. Republicans have never produced evidence of it. But people who say there was can now apply for a payout from a pool of taxpayer money managed by Trump’s hand-picked officials, with minimal oversight, through December 2028.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the same man who swore he’d released all the Epstein files, issued a statement about how “the machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American.”

Welcome to the machine.

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The People Running Your Elections Are Quietly Preparing for a Fight

Local election officials already had protocols for fires, floods, and aggressive voters. They are now adding a slide on what to do if the FBI shows up.

At least 71 percent of local election officials have begun some form of preparation for federal interference in the November midterms, according to a Brennan Center survey. The scenarios they are planning for include National Guard troops at polling locations, federal agents demanding access to ballots and voting machines, and the Postal Service refusing to deliver mail ballots because the White House told it to.

That last part stems from a March executive order directing the USPS to mail ballots only to voters on a federally approved citizenship list compiled by DHS and the Social Security Administration. Election law experts say the order is almost certainly unconstitutional.

Three federal courts have already blocked provisions of Trump’s first election executive order. The president has called this new one “legally foolproof.” Friendly reminder that he votes by mail.

In Wisconsin, a county clerk said local law enforcement won’t confront National Guard troops at polling sites because “the only recourse is really a legal one.” A Republican county clerk in Colorado is quietly shoring up relationships with local law enforcement so that any federal intrusion is “met with a pretty good force of resistance.” In Washington state, officials are encouraging voters to use drop boxes.

Six states hold primaries tomorrow. Thank god for the slide deck.

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ICE Agent Who Shot a Man Through a Door Has Been Charged

Christian Castro shot a man, lied about it to the FBI, and somehow Julio Sosa-Celis is the one who spent weeks in federal custody.

Castro, an ICE agent, shot Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan man, through the front door of a Minneapolis duplex on January 14. Then, according to prosecutors, he lied about it to fellow agents, to medical staff, and to the FBI.

The story Castro told was vivid. He had been attacked with a snow shovel and a broom handle. He fired in self-defense. DHS put Sosa-Celis’s mugshot on the internet. Kristi Noem called it “attempted murder.” The two Venezuelan men inside were federally charged with assaulting a federal officer.

Then the video emerged. A 911 dispatcher had turned a camera toward the duplex. It showed a brief struggle in the yard. A shovel and broom were nearby. There was no indication they were used as weapons. The bullet had traveled through the front door and through multiple interior walls before lodging in a bedroom wall where several small children slept.

The agents had followed the wrong person to the wrong house.

The DOJ quietly dropped all charges against both men in February. Two ICE agents were placed on administrative leave for making “untruthful statements” under oath. On Monday, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty went further: Castro has been charged with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime. A nationwide arrest warrant has been issued.

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The Criminals Kristi Noem Secretly Pardoned Have Been Arrested Again

Kristi Noem secretly pardoned nineteen prisoners and twelve of them went straight back to committing crimes, which raises some questions about her judgment that are separate from all the other questions about her judgment.

Twelve of the nineteen prisoners Noem pardoned as governor have since been charged with new crimes. Seven are facing felony charges, mostly drug offenses, with the rest involving DUI and/or domestic violence. Nine of the twelve have already pleaded guilty.

Noem pardoned the prisoners without the legally required endorsement of the state Board of Pardons and Parole, something no South Dakota governor had done in roughly two decades. She did it twice: seven pardons on Christmas Eve 2022, twelve more in 2023.

Victims’ families were not notified. In at least one case, the person she released had already been denied a recommendation by the board.

Meanwhile, the eight prisoners Noem pardoned through the proper board process have done considerably better. Five were released and only one has been charged with a new crime.

One of Noem’s first actions as governor was pledging in a 2019 executive order to follow the board process. No further punchline necessary.

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Nobody Owns This Newsletter But You

Let’s be direct about what is happening.

The government is threatening to pull broadcast licenses from outlets that won’t cheerlead a war. Billionaires are buying up the newsrooms that remain. And the reporters still doing real work are running out of places to do it.

AlterNet America exists to be one of those places. In three weeks, we’ve launched a whole new brand. Corinne Straight gives all the morning news. I get afternoons and Saturday coffee with you. In the coming weeks, we’ll be introducing Substack Lives in various topic areas so you can get all your progressive news in one subscription.

The people in power are counting on you to scroll past this and do nothing. Don’t.

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Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Trump’s Freedom 250 MAGA event hit with empty chairs as supporters leave early. Trump held a nine-hour taxpayer-funded prayer rally on the National Mall on Sunday, sent his supporters a pre-recorded video message instead of showing up in person, and watched from elsewhere as the crowd emptied out the moment his tape ended and the pastors kept going. Images of the vacant chairs spread across social media immediately, which is a fitting summary of an event billed as a national rededication to Jesus Christ that the guest of honor couldn’t make it to, during a heatwave, with limited shade.

Judge temporarily blocks gender-affirming care ban in big win for trans youth. A Kansas state judge on Friday temporarily blocked the state’s gender-affirming care ban after two mothers sued so their trans teenagers could keep receiving medication they had already been prescribed. The judge cited the Kansas Constitution’s protection of personal autonomy and parents’ fundamental right to make medical decisions for their children, meaning Kansas wrote a law that accidentally argued against itself and lost.

Mamdani’s First City-Owned Grocery Store Is Planned for the South Bronx. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Monday that the first of his five planned city-owned grocery stores will open in Hunts Point in the Bronx in 2027. The site is a former juvenile detention facility, in a neighborhood where 77 percent of households cannot afford basic necessities despite sitting directly next to one of the largest food distribution centers in the world. The Hunts Point market supplies nearly half of all the fish sold in New York City. None of it is affordable to the people who live there. That is changing.

New breakthrough brings researchers closer to a “functional cure” for HIV. Researchers at the nonprofit Caring Cross have published early results from a CAR-T cell therapy trial in which three participants suppressed HIV for months without their usual treatment. The therapy works by extracting a patient’s own T-cells, modifying them to both kill HIV-infected cells and protect healthy ones, and reinfusing them. Previous approaches that achieved something like a cure required stem cell transplants from donors with a rare genetic mutation and were only available to cancer patients. This one could work for anyone.

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The Senate parliamentarian blocked Congress from making you pay a billion dollars for the president’s ballroom, which was supposed to be free anyway. A Colorado Republican Party chair was arrested in a child predator sting. ICE deported a mother and then blamed her when her toddler was murdered. And Trump is now allowing Chinese ownership of American farmland, which was a thing he spent two years campaigning against.

Before we get into it: Independent journalism survives on one thing, and it isn’t a billionaire who bought us because he “believed in the mission” and then discovered he didn’t like what we wrote. It’s readers who pay for what they read. If you’re one of them, thank you. If you’re not yet, this would be a good morning to fix that. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. We can’t do it without you.

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Tomorrow at 1 PM ET, AlterNet America co-founder and managing editor Ryan Rose will be conducting a live interview with independent journalist Nolan Hamilton, who will discuss the rise of Christian Nationalism in the White House and across the country. Watch live on our homepage at AlterNetAmerica.com.

The GOP Tried to Bill You a Billion Dollars for the Ballroom and Got Blocked

When Trump announced his plans for a new White House ballroom last year, the White House said it would be funded entirely through private donations. Spoiler: it was not privately funded.

Senate Republicans signaled a willingness to support up to $1 billion in a federal spending bill for “security upgrades” related to the ballroom project. Senate Majority Leader John Thune clarified that only about $200 million of that would go toward the ballroom itself, with the rest going to other Secret Service needs.

The Senate parliamentarian has ruled the provision out of order, finding that as written, the language “inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee.”

The parliamentarian is not elected. She does not appear on Fox News. She has not been photographed at Mar-a-Lago. She reads Senate rules for a living, which is either the most boring job in Washington or, as of Saturday, the most important one.

Republicans said they plan to redraft, refine, and resubmit, which is the legislative equivalent of being carded and going home to get a fake ID.

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Republican Party Chair Arrested in Sting Targeting Child Sex Predators

Another week, another Republican official arrested in a child predator sting.

Hunter Rivera, the 24-year-old chairman of the Weld County Republican Party in Colorado, was arrested Thursday during an undercover operation targeting child predators. Investigators posted ads online posing as minors offering sexual acts; several dozen people responded. Rivera was one of two men who arrived at the agreed-upon location.

Rivera faces four felony charges: soliciting a child prostitute, internet luring of a child, cybercrime solicitation involving a minor, and attempted sexual assault on a child. He was held on a $6,500 cash-only bond, which feels like a detail worth sitting with.

Rivera has been involved in Republican politics since he was 17, when he joined the Northern Colorado Young Republicans. He went on to work as a field organizer, a national committeeman for the Colorado Federation of Young Republicans, and as a staffer on multiple Republican campaigns across the state.

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Windsor Republican who had supported Rivera’s bid for county chair, issued a statement condemning the allegations and calling for his immediate replacement. Colorado House and Senate Republicans called the charges “sickening, horrifying, and beyond reprehensible.”

The Weld County Republican Party accepted Rivera’s resignation Sunday. Apparently the GOP has some standards. They just don’t apply to the White House.

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ICE Deported Her and Then Blamed Her for Her Son’s Murder

Wendy Hernandez Reyes was pulled over in Alabama in early January while driving to her job laying concrete foundations. Local sheriff’s deputies, operating under the federal program that deputizes local law enforcement as immigration agents, handed her off to ICE.

Hernandez had no criminal record. She was an asylum-seeker who had missed an immigration hearing in 2022, which resulted in a deportation order. When she was detained, her two-year-old son Orlín needed somewhere to go.

She begged officers to let her take him. She begged them to release her because she was a single mother. They left Orlín in the care of her brother-in-law.

In March, the brother-in-law called 911 saying the two-year-old had collapsed. Orlín was dead. His body showed broken ribs, a transected pancreas, multiple burns, and evidence of possible sexual abuse. The medical examiner said the injuries were definitively not accidental. The uncle has been indicted on murder charges and has pleaded not guilty.

A week after Orlín’s death, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons issued a statement that did not include condolences. It accused Hernandez of abandonment, saying she “chose to leave her son here with a violent murderer who took his life.”

The Washington Post reviewed court records and found that Hernandez had repeatedly requested to be reunited with her son throughout her detention. She is still in Honduras. She has not been permitted to return to bury him.

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Trump Went to China and Broke a Promise to His Base

During his 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly pledged to block Chinese nationals and companies from purchasing U.S. farmland as part of his “America First” agenda.

Beijing has a way of changing a man.

This week, after his high-stakes summit with Xi Jinping, Trump defended Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland and welcomed 500,000 Chinese students to American universities. When Fox News host Sean Hannity pointed out that China would never let Americans own farmland near its military installations, Trump replied that the market was the market.

The reversal was so complete that a side-by-side video began circulating: Trump in Pennsylvania in 2024 saying “we don’t want you buying our land,” followed by Trump in Beijing in 2026 asking, “you want to see farm prices drop?” MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich posted the clip and asked simply: “Has China defeated our country?”

For the record, Chinese entities own about 277,000 acres of U.S. agricultural land, less than one percent of all foreign-held farmland in the country. But the president didn’t campaign on one percent. He campaigned on a crisis.

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The Part the Billionaires Hate

The business model that kept journalism independent is gone. What replaced it is billionaires, access deals, and quiet understandings about which stories don’t run. The networks are getting phone calls they don’t talk about. The newspapers have new owners who play golf with the people we’re writing about. The FCC is making examples of outlets that don’t play ball.

None of that is happening here, because we don’t have anyone to sell out to. We have readers. If you’ve been reading AlterNet America for free, we’re glad you’re here. But free doesn’t keep the lights on, and the lights need to stay on.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, this is the moment. Your subscription isn’t a donation. It’s the thing that makes tomorrow’s newsletter possible. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription today.

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Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tonight.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Democrat’s chances of flipping North Carolina Senate seat surge. A new poll shows former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper leading Republican Michael Whatley by eight points in the race for the Senate seat Thom Tillis is vacating, with Cooper’s lead growing every time a new poll comes out. Cooper’s favorability sits at nearly fifty percent while Whatley’s name recognition sits at nearly nothing, as over half of likely voters say they have never heard of him or have no opinion. Whatley’s campaign noted that no money has been spent on ads yet, which is the kind of thing you say when you are losing.

Louisiana rejects Gov. Jeff Landry-backed amendments again. Louisiana voters rejected every constitutional amendment backed by Governor Jeff Landry on Saturday, defeating them by margins of up to 56 points, with his own political organization having spent $1 million trying to pass them. This is the second time in about a year voters have done this, prompting Landry to issue a statement blaming George Soros for the loss. In Landry’s hometown parish, a majority of his own neighbors voted against him, which is the kind of feedback that is hard to spin.

Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna Push Billionaire Tax Plan. Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna introduced a bill this week to tax America’s roughly 938 billionaires at 5% annually, sending $3,000 to every person in a household earning under $150,000 and generating an estimated $4.4 trillion over a decade to fund Medicaid, teacher pay, and affordable housing. The Republican Party controls Congress, so the bill will not become law, but popularity and passage are different things in Washington, and this bill has one of them.

FDA approves first gene therapy for inherited deafness. The FDA approved the first gene therapy for inherited hearing loss, a one-time treatment that restored hearing for children born profoundly deaf due to a rare genetic mutation. Regeneron, the company behind it, said the drug will be free for patients in the U.S., forgoing what could have been $200 to $400 million a year in revenue, on the grounds that they didn’t need to charge millions of dollars to children who can’t hear in order to turn a profit. It is a low bar. They cleared it anyway.

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Good morning, AlterNet America family.

Welcome to the Saturday Wrapup, where I get you the week’s news as I consume my morning caffeine with you.

To our paying subscribers: thank you. Your support has allowed us to remain at #2 in Rising News on Substack for our first month. It’s also allowed us to hold our first Substack Live with independent journalist Erin Reed, with more to follow in the coming weeks. You make this possible. That means everything.

If you’re not yet a paying member, I’m asking you to join us today. Independent media has never mattered more. Support our people-powered movement and upgrade your subscription today.

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The United States’ 250th birthday is less than two months away, and Trump has big plans — including some taking place this weekend. Goddess willing, the country will make it to 251. Let’s talk about it.

America’s 250th Birthday Party Makes P.T. Barnum Look Tame

So here’s what’s happening around July 4, 2026, when the United States turns 250 years old: there’s going to be a UFC fight on the White House lawn, somewhere in the ballpark of 250 presidential pardons, a Christian nationalist prayer rally on the National Mall, commemorative coins with Trump’s face on them, and the “largest American flag in history.”

Buckle up.

The administration has been planning what it calls Freedom 250 for over a year now, a full calendar of events kicking off at Memorial Day 2025 and running through the end of 2026.

Some of it is normal enough: tall ships in New York Harbor, baseball’s All-Star Game in Philadelphia, a nice fireworks show. But then there’s the other stuff.

The UFC fight is real. A 5,000-seat arena is going up on the South Lawn of the White House for an event called UFC Freedom 250. It is scheduled for June 14th, not July 4th, but Trump’s 80th birthday. The White House appears to have decided these two occasions are essentially the same thing.

The pardons are also reportedly real. White House officials are discussing a plan to issue 250 pardons to mark 250 years of American independence, potentially announced on, again, June 14th. The pardon list is still being assembled, though there’s speculation a certain ex-girlfriend of Epstein will appear on it.

And then there’s “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” a daylong rally on the National Mall, organized with the White House’s blessing and headlined by some of the loudest voices in Christian nationalist circles. Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and Mike Johnson are all on the program. Trump is addressing the crowd by video.

The whole thing is being funded through a mix of taxpayer money and corporate sponsorships, with those giving around a million dollars reportedly receiving a reception with the president.

There are actually two Trump coins in play. The Treasury released draft designs for a commemorative $1 coin featuring Trump’s profile on one side. On the other, his fist raised in front of an American flag with the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT,” a callback to the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt.

A separate 24-karat gold commemorative coin was also approved by a federal arts commission, featuring Trump leaning forward at a desk looking stern. Legal experts have raised questions about whether putting a living president on a coin violates federal law, but that hasn’t slowed anything down.

Trump is also painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue. "American flag blue," which makes it look less like a national monument and more like a resort pool. The project was awarded via a no-bid contract to a Virginia firm, bypassing competitive bidding on the grounds that the country's 250th birthday created an "unusual and compelling urgency."

Trump initially said it would cost $1.8 million and take one week. Federal records show the actual cost has ballooned to $13.1 million, after the Interior Department quietly added $6.2 million to the contract last week.

And finally, the world’s largest American flag measures 776 feet wide and 1,492 feet long, longer than the Empire State Building is tall and nearly half the size of the Pentagon. The kicker: the National Mall isn’t big enough to unfurl it, so officials are considering venues like Joint Base Andrews, a NASCAR speedway, or a location in Lebanon, Kansas.

America250’s executive director summed up the vibe perfectly: “At the end of the day, America 250 will be remembered as President Trump’s celebration — nobody else’s.” He meant it as a compliment. We don’t think it is.

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Make America Healthy Again, But Keep It Under $4.60

RFK Jr. overhauled the national dietary guidelines in January under the MAHA banner, urging Americans to ditch processed foods and prioritize high-quality protein and full-fat dairy at every meal. Sounds great on paper.

The problem is that those guidelines now form the basis of federal nutrition standards for every school participating in the National School Lunch Program, which fed 30 million children last year, and nobody gave schools any money to actually implement them.

The federal reimbursement rate for a free school lunch is $4.60 per meal. Protein is already the most expensive item on the cafeteria plate. Schools that currently rely on processed, premade foods to stretch that $4.60 are now being told to swap them out for nutrient-dense whole foods, with no increase in funding to cover the difference.

The USDA says it is still working out exactly what the new standards will require of schools, describing the guidelines as kicking off a “multi-year effort,” which is another way of saying the mandate arrived before the plan did.

On top of that, schools are simultaneously contending with cuts to programs that helped them source food locally. The Farm to School Grant program was paused, then reopened with DEI requirements stripped out, which isn’t much help when your problem was always that you can’t afford grass-fed beef for 400 kids before third period.

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Trump Brought Every Billionaire He Knows to Beijing

Donald Trump took seventeen billionaires to Beijing this week and somehow still came home empty-handed.

Trump’s delegation included Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, and the CEOs of Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Mastercard, Meta, and Visa, among others. Every one of them has major business interests in China. Every one of them needed something from Xi Jinping.

That is the context in which Trump sat across from the leader of an authoritarian state and said nothing about Uyghur detention camps, nothing about Hong Kong, and nothing about labor rights. When asked by reporters whether he thinks about ordinary Americans’ financial situations during the talks, he said he doesn’t think about it at all, not even a little bit.

Meanwhile, two weeks before the trip, China quietly locked down the Uyghur region, blocking calls, restricting movement, and cutting information flows to ensure nothing inconvenient escaped while the Americans were in town. It worked.

AlterNet America did not send a billionaire to Beijing. We do not have a broadcast license the FCC can yank, a pending merger the DOJ can slow-walk, or a general counsel calculating the exposure on every story. We are not publicly traded. There is no advertiser to call in the morning asking us to cool it.

What we have is readers, and that is the only reason we can cover this without anyone running it through legal first.

Independent journalism doesn’t get bought by billionaires and survive on principle. It survives on subscriptions. If you’ve been reading for free, this is a good week to change that. Become a paid subscriber.

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We'll keep reporting. Air Force One doesn't have room for us anyway.

—Ryan Rose

Co-founder & Managing Editor, AlterNet America

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Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

Trump admitted the whole Iran nuclear standoff is mostly a “public relations” exercise. Florida’s attorney general has subpoenaed the NFL for the crime of interviewing Black coaches. A man in ICE detention asked for a dentist, got ibuprofen for three weeks, and died. And FEMA is being run by a former Navy SEAL who lost a congressional primary, while the guy in charge of disaster recovery claims he can teleport.

Before we get into it: No billionaire owns this operation. No advertiser is quietly asking us to find a softer angle. No parent company has a seat at the table with the people we write about. This publication exists because readers pay for it. If you’ve been reading for free, today is a good day to change that. Consider upgrading your subscription. Independent journalism doesn’t run on goodwill.

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Now, the news.

Trump Admits the Iran Nuclear Crisis Is Mostly for the Cameras

After bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, threatening further strikes, and dragging the world to the edge of a larger conflict, the president of the United States sat down with Fox News and said that recovering Iran’s enriched uranium was “more for public relations than it is for anything else.”

Trump told Fox News the U.S. has nine cameras on the bombed nuclear sites running around the clock, and that nobody has gotten close to the material. “We know exactly what’s happening,” he said. He then added that he’d still like to retrieve it. “I just feel better if I got it, actually.”

To summarize: the nuclear material is fine where it is, we’re watching it constantly, and the main reason to move it is optics. But also, we might bomb it.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Esmaeil Baghaei said enriched uranium is “as sacred to us as Iranian soil and will not be transferred anywhere under any circumstances.” Meanwhile, Trump is in Beijing telling Xi Jinping about all the great things China could do to help.

The war has strained global energy markets, driven up prices worldwide, and killed people on both sides. Somewhere in a foreign ministry, a diplomat is reading the transcript of that Fox News interview and wondering if the translation is correct. It is.

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Attorney General Investigates NFL for Interviewing Black People

There are six Black head coaches in the NFL. Florida’s attorney general finds this number troublingly high.

The Rooney Rule, adopted by the NFL in 2003, requires teams to interview at least two minority candidates before hiring a head coach, general manager, or coordinator. It does not require teams to hire any of them. It just requires a conversation.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has decided this is an act of racial discrimination.

Uthmeier threatened possible enforcement actions against the league in March if it didn’t suspend the 23-year-old rule. He sent a subpoena this week demanding extensive documents, including “all diversity reports, coaching census data, or demographic surveys that reflect the race and sex of coaching staffs of the teams from 2017 to the present.”

The NFL responded to his original letter by quietly editing its website to soften the language around the rule. Uthmeier then noted that removing the old language from the website after his letter may have constituted “deceptive and unfair business practices.” Damned if you don’t, damned if you do.

The NFL defended the Rooney Rule and its practices as in line with Florida and federal law, saying the rule “does not impose any hiring quotas or mandates, and it does not license clubs to consider race or sex in making hiring decisions.

The subpoena is 23 pages long. The Rooney Rule is one sentence.

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We’ve been covering the DEI rollback in the NFL, in federal agencies, in every institution that’s quietly updating its website hoping nobody notices. That’s what your subscription pays for. If you’ve been reading for free, please consider upgrading.

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A Man Died of a Toothache in ICE Custody

Emmanuel Damas was 56 years old, a Haitian asylum seeker, and being held at a private detention facility in Florence, Arizona, run by a company called CoreCivic. On February 13th, he told his family he had a toothache.

He asked for a dentist. He was given ibuprofen. His face began to swell. He kept asking. He kept getting ibuprofen. On February 19th, he collapsed. He was transferred to three separate hospitals. Doctors told his family the infection from his tooth had spread to his throat and then to his lungs. He went septic, was intubated, and never regained consciousness. He died on March 2nd.

This week, the Maricopa County Medical Examiner confirmed what his family knew in March: Damas died from a severe infection that spread from an untreated tooth. The official cause of death is “necrotizing mediastinitis with neck and retropharyngeal abscess in the setting of severe dental caries and periodontal disease.”

In English: his teeth killed him slowly over three weeks, while he was in government custody asking for help.

ICE’s own report said he “declined recommendations for tooth extractions.” His family says no dentist ever actually saw him and that the recommendations came with no urgency and no follow-through.

Damas is one of 18 people who have died in ICE custody so far this year. In 2025, ICE recorded 33 deaths, a threefold increase from 2024 when 11 people died. CoreCivic renewed its contract.

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FEMA Has No Leader, No Staff, and One Guy Who Claims He Can Teleport

Hurricane season starts June 1st. Here is the current state of the agency responsible for keeping Americans alive when it arrives.

FEMA has been without a Senate-confirmed administrator since January 2025. It has cycled through a series of acting officials: a man who was fired for saying the agency should continue to exist, a novelist who lasted six months, and a government IT manager known internally as “The Terminator” for her enthusiasm in cutting staff and funding.

This week, Trump nominated Cameron Hamilton to lead the agency. Hamilton was fired from FEMA a year ago for saying publicly that FEMA should not be abolished.

Gregg Phillips, the associate administrator for disaster response, has been making headlines not for disaster response but for claiming on multiple right-wing podcasts that he can teleport. He also pushed theories that Biden’s DHS conspired to assassinate Trump and that a “Chinese army” would invade the United States.

Three out of four top leadership positions at the agency remain vacant. The regions covering Texas and Louisiana have neither a regional administrator nor a deputy. Experts on emergency management recently graded the agency on disaster preparedness and gave it an F.

The good news is Gregg Phillips says he can be anywhere instantly. The bad news is teleportation isn’t real.

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About Our Billionaire Owner (We Don’t Have One)

Here’s what’s happening to the press while all of this is going on.

Local newsrooms are closing. National outlets are being bought by people who play golf with the subjects of their coverage. Networks are spiking segments. Reporters are self-censoring because they’ve watched what happens to the ones who don’t.

We’ve watched it too. The difference is we don’t have a parent company, advertisers with preferred outcomes, or a board of directors with opinions about which stories are worth finishing.

What we have is a publication that people read because they want to know. That’s the whole business model. No billionaire, no broadcast license, no quiet handshakes with the people in these stories. Just readers. Just you. If you’ve been reading for free, we’re asking you to subscribe. Not as a favor. Because that’s the only way this exists.

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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Texas Supreme Court rejects request to remove Democratic Rep. Gene Wu from office. Greg Abbott spent nine months trying to get the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court to remove a Democratic lawmaker from office for briefly leaving the state to block a gerrymandering vote. The court, appointed almost entirely by Abbott himself, said no, which is the judicial equivalent of your own dog biting you, except the dog also issued a 40-page opinion explaining why you deserved it.

House Democrats Launch Voter Protection Effort Ahead of Midterms. Hakeem Jeffries announced this week that House Democrats are mounting the largest voter protection effort in the history of the country, which is a remarkable thing to have to do six months before a midterm election in the United States of America. They are doing it because the Supreme Court just wiped out majority-Black congressional districts, and Republicans are planning the largest voter suppression effort in the history of the country.

New Hawaii law targets corporate influence in politics after Citizens United ruling. Hawaii signed a law this week redefining corporations in a way that bars them from spending on elections, the first serious legislative challenge to Citizens United since the Supreme Court decided in 2010 that corporations are people and money is speech. The law doesn’t take effect until 2027, which gives corporate lawyers plenty of time to sue, and the Supreme Court plenty of time to remind Hawaii how this works.

ICE releases wife of US soldier and Afghanistan veteran from detention. ICE arrested the wife of a 28-year Army veteran at her own immigration appointment, held her for weeks, and considered deporting her to a country she’s never lived in. She’s home now, fitted with a GPS ankle monitor, because the government that her husband has served for nearly three decades needed some way to make the happy ending feel like a punishment.

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The FBI director snorkeled over 900 entombed sailors at Pearl Harbor. The DOJ says Yale Medical School broke civil rights law by admitting too many Black students. ICE has detained the former Republican mayor of a Kansas town because he voted for Trump without being a citizen. And the EPA is letting coal plants dump mercury and arsenic into your drinking water so that ChatGPT can write your nephew’s cover letters faster.

AlterNet America is the people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. Corporate networks are cheerleading the war in Iran, and the FCC chair is openly threatening broadcast licenses of outlets that don’t toe the line. Independent journalism has never been more essential than it is right now. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please become one today. It is how we stay standing when everything else is being bought or broken.

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Now, let’s get into it.

Kash Patel Snorkeled Over 900 Entombed Sailors and Called It Work

When Kash Patel visited Hawaii last summer, the FBI wanted everyone to know he was absolutely not on vacation, issuing press releases about his very serious walking tour of the Honolulu field office and his very serious meetings with local law enforcement.

What the FBI neglected to mention was that days later, Patel slipped back to the islands and went snorkeling at Pearl Harbor. Specifically, he strapped on a mask and paddled around above the USS Arizona, the sunken battleship that has served as the underwater grave of more than 900 sailors and Marines since Japan put it there in 1941.

The outing has been described by government officials in internal emails as a “VIP snorkel.”

The USS Arizona is a military cemetery. Families of the sailors and Marines interred inside it are not permitted to snorkel there. Former FBI directors have visited Pearl Harbor on official business, but none are known to have gone snorkeling at the memorial.

This is not the first time Patel has treated government resources as a personal amenity. He has reportedly used FBI jets for date nights, and earlier this year was filmed throwing back drinks in the U.S. men’s hockey team’s locker room at the Milan Olympics.

At some point the FBI might want a director who is harder to find on a jumbotron.

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DOJ Investigates Yale for Admitting Too Many Non-White Doctors

The Trump Justice Department has a new target: Yale Medical School, which it is accusing of discriminating against white and Asian applicants by admitting too many Black and Hispanic ones.

The investigation, which took a year and produced no actual victims, concluded that Yale defied the Supreme Court’s 2023 affirmative action ban by continuing to weigh race in admissions. Yale said it was confident in its process.

This is part of a broader administration campaign against medical schools that have tried to diversify the physician workforce. The specific numbers, per the DOJ: Black and Hispanic applicants had slightly lower median MCAT scores than white and Asian applicants in the classes of 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Yale’s response was that its admissions process is holistic and that test scores are an imperfect measure of a person’s potential as a physician. The DOJ called this a cover story, which is what you do when you have already decided what you’re going to find before you start looking.

It is worth noting that the DOJ did not announce any investigation into the well-documented underrepresentation of rural Americans in medical schools, or the legacy admissions practices that have been quietly favoring the children of donors for decades. But those aren’t the gaps that animate Trump’s Civil Rights Division.

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A Man Who Voted for Trump Is Being Deported for Voting for Trump

Joe Ceballos has lived in the United States for 51 years, served two terms as mayor of Coldwater, Kansas, and made one mistake: he voted for Donald Trump.

Ceballos, 55, was detained Wednesday after reporting to an ICE office in Wichita. He was born in Mexico, brought to the United States by his family when he was 4, and is a legal permanent resident.

His detention came less than a month after he pleaded guilty in April to three misdemeanor counts of disorderly election conduct for voting as a noncitizen. Kansas outlets reported that Ceballos has said he believed his green card allowed him to vote and described the mistake as honest, not intentional.

Here is the part that tends to make people set down their coffee: Ceballos said last year he voted for Kobach and Trump because he always voted Republican like his friends did. The attorney general who charged him is Kris Kobach.

The administration has made eliminating illegal voting its signature justification for a sweeping immigration crackdown. The most prominent illegal voter they have found so far voted for them. We will await the press conference.

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The EPA Decided Your Drinking Water Is Less Important Than ChatGPT

Good news for coal plants, bad news for your tap water: the EPA has decided that the energy demands of artificial intelligence outweigh the requirement that corporations not poison rivers.

The EPA moved Thursday to roll back limits that require coal-fired power plants to prevent the release of toxic heavy metals into streams and rivers. Officials claimed the three-year-old rule is unduly costly for the energy industry at a time when energy demand is spiking.

It is the latest step that Trump’s administration has taken to pull back regulations on coal mining and empower fossil fuels as a primary energy source to feed the rapid growth of artificial intelligence data centers.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said that AI’s “power demand cannot be met under the overly restrictive policies of past administrations.” The overly restrictive policy in question is: don’t put mercury and arsenic in rivers.

The EPA had estimated in 2024 that its rule would reduce pollutant discharges by 660 to 672 million pounds per year, provide $3.2 billion in public health benefits each year, and especially benefit low-income communities and communities of color that are disproportionately impacted by pollution.

It had projected that electricity bills for the average household would increase by less than $3.50 per year. That is also roughly the cost of a bottle of water, which is what you will be buying instead.

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Billionaires Don’t Fund This. You Do.

Most publications have someone at the top of the org chart who gets to decide what kind of stories are worth telling, and what kind of stories are worth leaving alone. Often that person has a net worth, a portfolio, or a social circle that creates certain gravitational pulls. These pulls are rarely announced. They just shape what gets covered, and how, over time.

We don’t have that problem because we don’t have that person. Our subscribers are the whole business. That means our only obligation is to the people reading, so we can cover the water meter in Social Circle, the generals whose promotions got quietly blocked, and the president posting himself as Christ without calculating how any of it lands with billionaires.

If that’s valuable to you, a paid subscription is the most direct way to make sure it keeps existing. Please consider upgrading today. If you’re already a paid subscriber, you already know this. You’re the reason we’re here, and we’re eternally grateful.

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Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tonight.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

A growing number of Trump supporters are experiencing voter’s remorse. A new poll finds that roughly one-third of Trump voters who identify as moderates or African Americans say they would vote differently if the election were held again, with independents, young people, and college-educated voters also expressing regret. Tucker Carlson, once among Trump’s most devoted supporters, says he will be “tormented” by his backing of the president “for a long time” and is “sorry for misleading people,” which is the political equivalent of a Yelp review that starts with “great at first.”

Trump Media Reports Q1 Sales of $871,000 and $405.9 Million Net Loss. Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, reported first quarter sales of $871,200 and a net loss of $405.9 million, with the stock down 35% year to date. For context, a median American household earns more than that in about fifteen years, which is roughly how long it would take Truth Social to earn it at this rate.

Supreme Court Allows Abortion Pill Access by Mail to Continue. The Supreme Court on Thursday extended a freeze on new restrictions for the abortion pill mifepristone, preserving the ability to obtain it via telehealth prescription and mail delivery while the underlying legal fight continues. Alito and Thomas dissented, with Thomas arguing that mailing mifepristone violates the Comstock Act, a nineteenth-century law written to stop people from sending pornography through the post office, which is doing a lot of work in 2026.

Releasing balloons into the air would be prohibited under Connecticut bill. Connecticut’s Senate passed a bill banning the intentional release of helium balloons, dropping the legally permitted count from ten to zero, and requiring retailers to attach weights to any balloons they sell. Ribbons attached to balloons can entangle wildlife, while deflated plastic fragments get stuck in animals’ digestive systems. Four Republicans voted against the bill, which means the state has four legislators who looked at a sea turtle choking and decided the turtle had it coming.

Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

The Border Patrol chief has resigned after reports that he bragged to colleagues about paying for sex in Colombia and Thailand. Two members of Congress, one Democrat and one Republican, have been missing for over a month. A racist livestreamer is now facing attempted murder charges after a shooting at a Tennessee courthouse.. And Mississippi’s governor canceled its redistricting session while threatening the state’s only Black congressman by name.

Before we get into it: We don’t have a network that needs White House access to survive. We don’t have a parent company doing quiet deals with the administration. We don’t have advertisers who’d rather you look away. What we have is readers. Right now, that’s the only position in American media that can’t be pressured into silence. A paid subscription to AlterNet America is a direct bet that independent journalism survives this moment. If you haven’t yet, please consider upgrading yours today.

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Now, let’s get into it.

Border Chief Resigns After Reports He Bragged About Buying Sex Abroad

The man who spent the last sixteen months telling America he was stopping human trafficking allegedly spent a decade as one of its customers.

Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks announced Thursday that he is retiring, effective immediately. His resignation comes after a Washington Examiner investigation found that he “bragged” to colleagues about paying for sex with prostitutes while traveling in Colombia and Thailand over the course of a decade.

One former Border Patrol agent said that Banks is “going to third-world countries to take advantage of poor women.” Banks’s behavior was said to have been investigated by CBP officials twice, including last year, but the investigation ended abruptly while Noem was in office.

Banks denied wrongdoing. He then resigned effective immediately, went on Fox News to declare the border the most secure in history, and said it was time to go enjoy his family and ranch.

Banks’ departure marks the third high-profile turnover within DHS in two months. Trump fired Secretary Kristi Noem in March following months of controversy, meaning Markwayne Mullin has been on the job for two months and has already outlasted two predecessors.

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Congress Has a Missing Persons Problem

Congress currently has two members who have simply stopped showing up, which, in fairness, is hard to notice when the ones who do show up aren’t doing much either.

Representative Frederica Wilson has yet to explain why she hasn’t voted on a single issue since April 17. The Florida Democrat has been missing in action for weeks, though her team has been busy keeping her social media active and curated.

In one bizarre post flagged on X by Capitol Hill correspondent Jamie Dupree, Wilson’s team reused photographs of her from an October event, in an attempt to suggest that the lawmaker was still mingling with her constituents.

Wilson is not alone. Last month, there was significant stir over the prolonged absence of New Jersey Republican Rep. Thomas Kean Jr. Journalists, his constituents, and Republican allies attempted to contact him for weeks. Nothing worked until House Speaker Mike Johnson phoned him in late April, learning that Kean had been struggling with an unspecified “personal health matter.”

Meanwhile, both of these seats matter. Wilson faces a primary challenge from Christine Sanon-Jules Olivo, a small-business owner with ties to the NAACP, running to unseat her in the district’s Democratic primary on August 18. Kean’s district is a top target for Democrats, who have a crowded primary full of well-funded candidates.

Neither have voted in weeks, but their constituents certainly will in November.

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We don’t take weeks off without explanation. We don’t have staff posting old photos to cover for us. We just write the news and send it to you. A paid subscription keeps that going.

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A Racist Livestreamer Went to a Courthouse and Shot Himself

Dalton Eatherly built an online following by calling Black people racial slurs on camera. On Wednesday, he took that act to a Tennessee courthouse, got into a confrontation, and ended up on a stretcher after shooting himself. He is now facing attempted murder charges.

Eatherly, who goes by “Chud the Builder” online, is facing multiple charges including attempted murder after a confrontation with another man outside the Montgomery County Courthouse in Clarksville.

He told TMZ he was jumped outside the courthouse, prompting him to fire in what he claims was self-defense. He also told TMZ he accidentally shot himself. He livestreamed the incident while speaking with emergency personnel. “Did I shoot myself or did I graze it?” he asked a first responder in the video.

It penetrated. We’ll leave it there.

Eatherly was charged and booked for criminal attempt to commit murder, employing a firearm during a dangerous felony, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon.

Days earlier, Eatherly had been kicked out of a restaurant and arrested in Nashville on charges of theft of services, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. He had refused to pay his $371.55 bill.

So in the span of one week: skipped out on a check, got arrested, got released on bond, went to a courthouse, shot himself, and is now facing attempted murder charges. This is what the pipeline looks like at the end.

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Mississippi Won't Redistrict This Month, But Hold Your Applause

Mississippi’s redistricting session got canceled this week, which is good news for democracy and bad news for Tate Reeves, who had to settle for threatening a Black congressman by name instead.

The Mississippi governor announced Wednesday that he will cancel a special legislative session to redraw the state’s Supreme Court districts set for next week. The state will redraw its four congressional districts at some point, but Reeves noted it would be difficult to do so in time for the upcoming midterm election, and doing so could actually hurt Republicans in the long run.

So the session is off, but not because anyone had second thoughts about morality.

Reeves was adamant about going after Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson’s hold on Mississippi’s 2nd Congressional District. “The tenure of Congressman Bennie Thompson reigning terror on the 2nd Congressional District is over,” Reeves said. “It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when.”

Bennie Thompson has represented that district since 1993. His “reign of terror” consists largely of chairing the January 6th committee and doing constituent services.

Trump had pushed Reeves to add congressional redistricting to the agenda, writing in a Truth Social post that states should not conduct elections under unconstitutional maps simply for the “convenience” of state legislatures. Reeves, to his credit, did the math and didn’t like what he found.

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This Newsletter Exists Because of You

The business model that kept journalism independent is gone. What replaced it is billionaires, access deals, and quiet understandings about which stories don’t run. The networks are getting phone calls they don’t talk about. The newspapers have new owners who play golf with the people we’re writing about. The FCC is making examples of outlets that don’t play ball.

None of that is happening here, because we don’t have anyone to sell out to. We have readers. If you’ve been reading AlterNet America for free, we’re glad you’re here. But free doesn’t keep the lights on, and the lights need to stay on.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, this is the moment. Your subscription isn’t a donation. It’s the thing that makes tomorrow’s newsletter possible. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription today.

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Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tomorrow.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ the controversial Florida migrant detention facility, expected to close. Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention facility — built on a swamp runway, surrounded by alligators, denounced for inhumane conditions, and sued into partial compliance — is expected to close this summer. Ron DeSantis said it “served its purpose,” which is one way to describe a cage in the Everglades that cost millions of dollars and lost in court repeatedly.

Senators introduce ban on lawmakers becoming lobbyists. Rick Scott and Elizabeth Warren, two senators who agree on approximately nothing, have introduced a bipartisan bill that would permanently ban members of Congress from becoming lobbyists after they leave office. It faces a steep path to becoming law, which is a polite way of saying the people who would have to vote for it are the same people it would affect.

New House Resolution Would Dismantle DHS and Defund Trump’s War Machine. Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez introduced a 32-page House resolution this week calling to dismantle DHS entirely and abolish ICE. It has virtually zero chance of coming to the floor for a vote in the GOP-controlled House. The good news is that it puts every member of Congress on the record about whether they think the agency that has killed at least eight people in its custody this year alone deserves more money or less of it.

Iowa governor signs bill that will make it easier to get cancer screenings. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed a law this week requiring that doctors who want to screen a patient for cancer no longer need to ask insurance companies for permission first. Iowa has one of the highest cancer rates in the country, and prior authorizations were taking several weeks to approve or deny. The law also prohibits insurers from using artificial intelligence as the sole basis for denying a claim.

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The White House is planning 250 pardons to celebrate America’s birthday. The man Trump just made acting ICE director once had a woman deported as a personal favor for the man who introduced Trump to Melania. A North Carolina congresswoman told a fourth grader his teachers were indoctrinating him. And the federal government is spending your tax dollars on a nine-hour Christian nationalist prayer rally on the National Mall.

Corporate media is running cover. The FCC chair is making sure they know what happens if they don’t. And independent outlets are being bought out one by one. This is the news they don’t want you reading. AlterNet America is the people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. We are reader-funded, editorially independent, and not for sale. We exist because of you. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, please upgrade today.

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Now, let’s dive in.

Trump Wants 250 Pardons for America’s 250th Birthday

The White House has discovered that 250 is both the age of the country and a perfectly reasonable number of felons to set free.

Trump is considering granting 250 pardons this summer to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States. If approved, the announcement could come on June 14, which is Flag Day and Trump’s birthday, or on July 4.

Trump has already issued several high-profile pardons this term, including the founder of Binance, the founder of Silk Road, and a former CEO convicted of fraud. The next 250 recipients are unconfirmed.

The proposal has sparked intense speculation about who might make the final list, with Ghislaine Maxwell and Sam Bankman-Fried among the names being floated. Trump has reportedly shut the door on Bankman-Fried, whose pardon would trigger a massive political backlash given that his victims were everyday investors.

Trump has already issued more than 1,600 acts of clemency in his second term. More than half of the 88 individual pardons he granted through January went to white-collar criminals. In many cases, he also wiped out the requirement that they pay restitution, costing their victims an estimated $1.3 billion.

Happy birthday, America. The cake is for the convicts.

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New ICE Director Deported a Trump Ally’s Ex-Girlfriend as a Favor

The Trump administration has named David Venturella as ICE’s next acting director. Venturella spent 12 years at GEO Group, the massive private prison contractor, before returning to the federal government last year. That alone would be a story. But it is not the story.

Among the lowlights of Venturella’s time back in government: he helped a Trump ally get his ex-girlfriend deported during a custody battle.

Paolo Zampolli, the man credited with introducing Trump to Melania, called Venturella after learning his Brazilian ex, Amanda Ungaro, had been arrested on fraud charges in Miami. Venturella coordinated to have ICE agents pick Ungaro up before she could be released on bail.

Venturella emphasized that it was a favor for a friend of the president during the call. Zampolli denied asking for special treatment, claiming he simply called the head of ICE to understand the process.

GEO Group, Venturella’s former employer, is ICE’s largest detention contractor. During the 2024 presidential campaign, the company’s employee-funded super PAC donated over $1 million to a pro-Trump super PAC.

The man who now runs ICE used to run the company that profits from ICE’s expansion, called in a deportation as a personal favor, and did not have to be confirmed by the Senate for any of it. The revolving door is spinning so fast it has achieved flight.

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A Congresswoman Picked a Fight With a Fourth Grader and Lost

Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, 82, received a letter this week from a constituent. The constituent was ten years old. He had written a persuasive essay about electric vehicles for a school assignment, suggested a $5,000 federal tax rebate, and mailed it to her in an envelope with “4th grade” on the return address. He was proud of it.

Foxx wrote back. She told him he and his classmates would be personally responsible for paying down the national debt, cited climate articles from Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and then, in the section his mother later posted on Instagram —

“My guess is that your teachers will not give you a good educational experience and help you learn to think, as they are too interested in indoctrinating you. How sad,” Foxx wrote. She also instructed him to ask his teacher to explain propaganda to him.

Foxx, who chairs the House Rules Committee, voted for Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which is projected to increase the national debt by trillions. She used a letter about national debt to lecture a ten-year-old whose generation will inherit the debt she voted to create.

The post was shared more than 12,000 times. Foxx has not apologized. She did, for what it’s worth, chair the House Education Committee for six years.

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Your Tax Dollars Are Funding a Christian Nationalist Prayer Rally

The Trump administration has found a new way to spend your tax dollars: nine hours of Christian nationalism on the National Mall.

The Trump administration is hosting an all-day prayer festival this Sunday called “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” as part of the nation’s 250th birthday celebration.

The event will feature mostly evangelical Protestant leaders and members of the Trump administration, many of whom falsely claim that America’s founders wanted the country to be explicitly Christian. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are all slated to speak.

Trump’s spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain — who has compared Trump to Jesus — said the festival is about “really truly rededicating the country to God.” She added that the celebration would not include leaders “praying to all these different Gods.”

The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, has some thoughts on government-funded religious festivals. Legal scholars say that senior cabinet officials speaking at a taxpayer-funded event promoting Christianity as the nation’s founding faith is exactly what it was designed to prohibit.

Trump will not attend in person, sending a video message instead. A golden statue of him was recently unveiled at his Florida estate. The event is about humility before God.

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Nobody Owns This Newsletter But You

Let’s be direct about what is happening.

The government is threatening to pull broadcast licenses from outlets that won’t cheerlead a war. Billionaires are buying up the newsrooms that remain. And the reporters still doing real work are running out of places to do it.

AlterNet America exists to be one of those places. In three weeks, we’ve launched a whole new brand. I’m giving you all the morning news. Ryan Rose gets afternoons and Saturday coffee with you. In the coming weeks, we’ll be introducing Substack Lives in various topic areas so you can get all your progressive news in one subscription.

The people in power are counting on you to scroll past this and do nothing. Don’t.

If you’ve been meaning to subscribe, this is the moment. The stories we are chasing right now won’t wait, and neither can we. Hit the button below and put independent journalism on the right side of history.

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Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tonight.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Senate advances legislation to withhold pay from senators during government shutdowns. The Senate voted 99-0 to withhold senators’ pay during future government shutdowns, a policy that would have been useful during the 43-day shutdown last year when 670,000 federal workers were furloughed and Congress kept getting paid. It won’t take effect until after the midterms, so senators can still get paid through the next shutdown they cause.

Ukraine Support Act wins enough signatures to force vote in US House. A bipartisan discharge petition for the Ukraine Support Act hit 218 signatures Tuesday, forcing a House floor vote on military aid to Kyiv despite Speaker Mike Johnson refusing to bring it up. The final signature came from former Republican Kevin Kiley, who left the party to become an Independent, which says something about where the party is.

Oklahoma ban on child marriage becomes law. Oklahoma became the 17th state to ban child marriage this week, after a bill requiring anyone getting married to be at least 18 passed the House by a single vote. Republicans claimed it was government overreach into parental rights. The governor didn’t sign it, but under Oklahoma law it became law anyway, which is a sentence that tells you everything you need to know about how he feels about children marrying adults.

Judge Orders U.S. to Return Colombian Woman Deported to Congo. The Trump administration deported a 55-year-old Colombian woman to the Democratic Republic of Congo in April, a country she has no ties to and that had formally refused to accept her. Congo rejected her specifically because she has diabetes, hyperlipidemia and hypothyroidism, conditions its health system could not treat. A federal judge ordered her return this week, calling it “likely illegal.”

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Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

Trump left a secret letter in his desk in case he dies, which he’s increasingly convinced is going to happen. The federal government is stonewalling every request to explain why a convicted sex trafficker got a prison upgrade right after meeting with a top DOJ official. Nebraska’s GOP just nominated someone who doesn’t believe in elections to be in charge of elections. And ICE is officially coming to the World Cup.

Before we get started, AlterNet America was built as a direct challenge to billionaire control of the American press. When the ultra-wealthy own the outlets, they own the narrative. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a business model. Independent media exists to break that stranglehold, but only if readers step up to fund it. If you believe independent media matters, become a paying subscriber today.

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Trump Stashed an “If I Die” Letter in the Resolute Desk

Sebastian Gorka, the White House counterterrorism official you forgot existed, went on a podcast this week and revealed that the president has hidden a letter in the drawer of the Resolute Desk addressed to Vice President Vance, to be opened in the event of Trump’s death.

The letter is currently sitting in the drawer of the Resolute Desk. It contains, in Gorka’s words, “very firm instructions.” What those instructions say, Gorka did not share. That the instructions exist, Gorka shared immediately and without apparent hesitation, on a podcast, to the general public.

Gorka framed this as a geopolitical deterrent, claiming it sends a message of strength to nations like China, Iran, and Russia. “We have protocols, trust me,” he added, declining to elaborate.

The disclosure comes as Trump has grown increasingly preoccupied with his own mortality and legacy, including publicly admitting that he probably isn’t going to heaven. “I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to get me in heaven,” he said earlier this year. “I think I’m not maybe heaven-bound.”

He has since fundraised off this admission. A super PAC sent an email with the subject line “Friend, I want to try and get to Heaven.” Martin Luther would like a word.

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The Government Is Sitting on 120,000 Pages About Ghislaine Maxwell’s Prison Transfer

Here is what we know. Ghislaine Maxwell was quietly transferred from a low-security prison in Florida to a minimum-security camp in Bryan, Texas. The transfer happened shortly after she met with Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney and current second-in-command at the Department of Justice.

After the meeting, Maxwell reportedly told Blanche what he wanted to hear: that she never saw Trump do anything inappropriate with Epstein. She then received a nicer prison.

The Bureau of Prisons has refused to explain the transfer. Mother Jones filed a FOIA request. So did Democratic Senators Whitehouse, Blumenthal, and Schiff. After a months-long delay, the BOP said it would take up to nine months to fulfill the request. So Mother Jones sued.

Here is what the BOP disclosed in response to that lawsuit: the agency has completed its initial search and identified 15.8 gigabytes of potentially responsive records, so many that the system crashed during the download process several times. The bureau estimates there may be approximately 120,000 pages of material to review.

For context, the entire works of Shakespeare is about 5 megabytes.

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Nebraska Republicans Just Nominated an Election Denier to Run Their Elections

The man Nebraska Republicans just picked to oversee their elections does not believe the 2020 election was conducted legitimately. The fox has applied to manage the henhouse and the hens voted yes.

Scott Petersen, an Omaha businessman, defeated incumbent Secretary of State Bob Evnen in a primary election Tuesday by more than 16,000 votes. Should he win the general election in November, which is likely, he would be one of the most extreme chief election officials in the country.

Petersen amplified conspiracies about voting machines being hackable, argued that mail voting should be restricted to special circumstances, and promised to conduct full hand-counts of races. He also posted support for the January 6th rally at the White House, writing “What an amazing number of flags and unbelievable support for President Trump!”

The incumbent, Evnen, had spent months traveling the state conducting what he called a transparency tour, explaining how ballot-counting machines work and why Nebraska’s elections deserve their reputation as a gold standard. He lost by fifteen points.

Evnen had endorsements from sitting senators, congressmen, and eight years of a spotless record. Petersen had Facebook posts and a theory about the machines. Nebraska Republicans looked at both options and chose the Facebook posts.

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Come for the Soccer, Stay Because ICE Won’t Let You Leave

Forty-eight countries are sending their best soccer players to the United States this summer. The United States is sending ICE.

DHS confirmed that ICE officers will be present at some matches to help “secure” the events. “International visitors who legally come to the United States for the World Cup have nothing to worry about,” a spokesperson told The Hill.

ICE officers have not been told to stay away from stadiums. They have not been told they cannot make arrests.

ICE is offering its personnel to local police departments and federal agencies to provide extra security around the perimeters of games, similar to Homeland Security’s role at the Super Bowl and the Kentucky Derby. No one has confirmed whether anyone is actually taking ICE up on the offer, which means the answer could be all of them or none of them.

Earlier this year, ICE was deployed to airport security lines during a TSA shortage. At a Marine Corps graduation ceremony in South Carolina, ICE agents stationed outside the event caused a number of recruits to walk across the stage without their families, as parents stayed home out of fear of being arrested.

The AFL-CIO has asked FIFA to keep ICE out of host cities entirely. FIFA, which has never met a political controversy it couldn’t ignore, has not responded.

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Independent Media Dies Without You

The business model that kept journalism independent is gone. What replaced it is billionaires, access deals, and quiet understandings about which stories don’t run. The networks are getting phone calls they don’t talk about. The newspapers have new owners who play golf with the people we’re writing about. The FCC is making examples of outlets that don’t play ball.

None of that is happening here, because we don’t have anyone to sell out to. We have readers. If you’ve been reading AlterNet America for free, we’re glad you’re here. But free doesn’t keep the lights on, and the lights need to stay on.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, this is the moment. Your subscription isn’t a donation. It’s the thing that makes tomorrow’s newsletter possible. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription today.

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Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tomorrow.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Trump mega-donors pause Wisconsin development project, citing economic uncertainty. Uline, owned by Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, two of Trump’s biggest donors, has asked to pause construction on a $120 million warehouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, citing economic uncertainty caused by tariffs and trade tensions. The Uihleins gave Trump $144 million in 2024. The economy Trump built is now the reason they can’t build a warehouse.

Recall Petition Filed Against Louisiana Governor After Congressional Election Suspension. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry suspended U.S. House elections in the state, so two Baton Rouge residents filed a recall petition to remove him from office. They have 180 days to collect 500,884 valid handwritten signatures from Louisiana’s 2.5 million active voters. The man who canceled elections is now one petition away from facing one.

Texas banned rainbow-painted crosswalks, so locals found a workaround. Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered cities to remove rainbow crosswalks from state roadways. San Antonio complied, then painted the rainbows on the sidewalks instead. “We might’ve had to do what the state wants on their property,” said the local councilmember. “But we’re doing what we want on our property.” The state has not yet banned sidewalks.

A Simple Vitamin May Hold the Key to Treating Rare Genetic Diseases. Researchers at the Gladstone Institutes found that high-dose vitamin B3 extended survival in mice with NAXD deficiency, a rare genetic disorder that kills most children within months of birth, by more than 40 times. Treated mice were indistinguishable from healthy littermates. Untreated mice died within five days. The vitamin costs about twelve dollars at CVS.

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Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion and is discussing a settlement. The FBI has assembled a dedicated “revenge squad.” Tennessee Republicans have decided that the punishment for protesting racism is more racism. And the Trump administration is now suing the Catholic Church to bulldoze a pilgrimage site for a border wall.

AlterNet America is our people-powered response to the billionaire capture of America’s media. Corporate media won’t tell these stories the way they need to be told. That’s why independent media matters now more than ever. If holding power accountable is important to you, please subscribe to AlterNet America and become a member. Support the work that keeps democracy alive. Because without independent voices willing to speak truth to power, the billionaires win.

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Now, let’s dive in.

Trump Is Suing Himself for $10 Billion and Expects to Win

The president of the United States has sued the federal government for $10 billion, and the person who will decide whether to pay out that lawsuit is, without any irony whatsoever, also the president of the United States.

Trump filed the lawsuit alongside his sons in January, arguing that the wrongful release of his confidential tax returns caused significant and irreparable harm. He is seeking $10 billion in damages, paid by taxpayers. His legal team has said they are in “discussions” with the IRS to avoid protracted litigation.

The Justice Department is holding its own internal discussions about settling in the coming days, and one option on the table is simply having the IRS drop any audits of Trump, his family members, and his businesses entirely.

Trump himself, with a candor that borders on performance art, has acknowledged the conflict: “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself.”

The $10 billion figure represents about two-thirds of the IRS’s entire annual budget. To put that in perspective: it’s ten times what the administration has proposed cutting from the National Park Service, and enough to fund the Peace Corps for two decades.

Meanwhile, the IRS is simultaneously dealing with a reduction of 27% of its workforce, leadership turnover, and sweeping new tax law changes all courtesy of the same administration. Nothing says “I was harmed by this agency” like spending a year making sure it can’t function.

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The FBI Has a ‘Payback Squad,’ and It’s Exactly What It Sounds Like

Kash Patel once called the FBI a “diseased temple.” Apparently the cure is a dedicated unit for hunting political enemies.

The FBI now has a team of special agents being internally referred to as the “payback squad,” specifically assembled to handle politically sensitive cases, according to four sources briefed on the matter. The team is made up of agents willing to pursue political targets set by the Trump administration.

The squad’s current model for success is the recent criminal prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey. That case was indicted, dismissed by a federal judge who ruled the prosecutor had been unlawfully appointed, re-indicted, and is currently tied up in appeals.

Next on the list is former CIA Director John Brennan. The Director’s Advisory Team is building a criminal case that seeks to charge Brennan with a “grand conspiracy” against Trump, with an indictment expected in the coming weeks, likely in South Florida, in front of Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed jurist who dismissed the classified documents case.

The career prosecutor handling the Brennan case was recently removed after raising concerns, and replaced with Joe DiGenova, a Trump loyalist who previously represented his campaign in its failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Patel has called this “justice, not revenge.” Patel also sued a magazine for $250 million for implying he goes to nightclubs.

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Kash Patel has said he will “go after” the media. The “payback squad” is not just for political enemies. It is for anyone paying attention. Independent journalism is one of the few things standing between that squad and total impunity. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber today.

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Tennessee Republicans Punish Democrats for Protesting Gerrymandering

Tennessee Republicans spent last week eliminating the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, and this week eliminated every Black lawmaker from the committee process. The theme is not hard to identify.

Republicans called a special session, repealed a decades-old state ban on mid-decade redistricting, and rammed through a new congressional map designed to give the GOP a 9-0 congressional delegation, eliminating the state’s only majority-Black district in the process.

Democrats protested. They linked arms and walked out of the chamber as the vote was called. House Speaker Cameron Sexton took issue with this and stripped every Democrat of their committee assignments.

Representative Justin Jones, who is Black and represents Nashville, noted that by removing all Democrats from committees, Sexton had effectively removed every Black elected official in the Tennessee legislature from the committee process.

The Republicans’ defense for limiting debate time during the special session, in case you were wondering: they wanted to cap debate at 47 minutes, a deliberate nod to America’s 47th president, Trump, who personally called on lawmakers to pass the new maps.

Forty-seven minutes to dismantle decades of voting rights progress. They didn’t even need the whole hour.

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Trump Is Suing the Catholic Church to Build a Border Wall Through a Holy Mountain

The administration that spent two years telling Christians they were under attack has filed suit against an actual Catholic diocese to bulldoze a mountain with a giant Jesus on it. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Trump is harder to explain.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin initiated a lawsuit against the Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces to seize about 14 acres of church land in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, at the base of Mount Cristo Rey, a holy site the administration wants to use for border wall construction. The government estimates the land’s value at $183,071.

The land sits at the base of a mountain topped by a 29-foot limestone statue of Jesus Christ that dates to 1940. Up to 40,000 faithful climb the mountain and participate in Mass every autumn for the feast of Christ the King. Some pilgrims make the journey barefoot. A few ascend on their knees. The government’s offer works out to roughly $4.50 per pilgrim.

The church is fighting back using the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the same Religious Freedom Restoration Act that conservative Christians spent decades championing as a shield against government overreach.

It turns out religious freedom is for exempting Christian bakers from making wedding cakes, not for preventing the federal government from dynamiting a mountain with a giant Jesus on top of it.

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The Billionaires Are Counting on Your Silence

AlterNet America is our response to the takeover of CBS and The Washington Post. We don’t have a hedge fund, a billionaire with an agenda, or a corporate parent deciding which stories are too risky to run.

What we have is readers. AlterNet America is purely subscriber-led. People who looked at the current media landscape and decided that independent journalism was worth paying for.

This coverage doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone is paying attention and someone else is paying the bills. We’d love for that someone to be you. Join our people-powered movement. Please consider upgrading your subscription to paying today.

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Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tonight.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

South Carolina Senate rejects effort to tackle redistricting despite pressure from Trump. Trump demanded South Carolina Republicans eliminate James Clyburn’s majority-Black congressional district before the June 9 primaries. To do that, they needed to extend their legislative session past its Thursday deadline, which required a two-thirds vote. Five Republican senators voted against the extension, meaning South Carolina has now done something Indiana, Tennessee, and most of the United States Congress have been unable to do: say no.

$1.5b Trump Tower on Gold Coast scrapped less than three months after deal struck. Plans to build Australia’s first Trump Tower, a 91-story luxury hotel and apartment complex on the Gold Coast, were scrapped just three months after being announced. The Australian developer told CNN that the Trump brand had become “toxic.” The Trump Organization blamed the developer for failing to meet its obligations, which is one way to explain why nobody in Australia wants your name on their building anymore.

Spanberger signs bills to ban firearms at Virginia’s public colleges, universities. Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed legislation banning firearms on public college campuses, a measure spurred by the 2022 shooting at UVA that killed three football players. The law now restricts firearms on campus to law enforcement, ROTC cadets, and military personnel. It took four legislative sessions to pass, which means Virginia spent four years workshopping the answer to “should 19-year-olds carry guns to calculus.”

AOC Surges to Lead in 2028 Primary for First Time. A new poll from AtlasIntel, ranked the most accurate pollster of the 2024 election, shows Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leading the 2028 Democratic primary field for the first time with 26 percent. She’s ahead of Pete Buttigieg at 22 percent, Gavin Newsom at 21 percent, and Kamala Harris at 13 percent. AOC has not announced a run and has said her ambitions are “way bigger” than the presidency, which is the 2026 version of “I’m just focused on my current job.”

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Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

Trump wants Venezuela to be the 51st state. Epstein survivors are testifying publicly for the first time. An Alabama construction worker suing ICE after he was wrongfully detained twice has been arrested for a third time. And Louisiana wants to take its Confederate monuments out of storage and put them back on display at state parks.

Before we get into it: Corporate media is running cover. The FCC chair is making sure they know what happens if they don’t. And independent outlets are being bought out one by one. This is the news they don’t want you reading. AlterNet America is the people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. We are reader-funded, editorially independent, and not for sale. We exist because of you. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, please upgrade today.

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Let’s dive in.

Trump Floats Making Venezuela the 51st State

The president of the United States picked up the phone and called a Fox News anchor to pitch his latest idea: making Venezuela a U.S. state.

Fox News co-anchor and White House correspondent John Roberts revealed that Trump told him directly, over the phone, that he is “seriously considering a move to make Venezuela the 51st state.” Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, responded by saying her country has no plans to join the U.S.

Rodríguez became Venezuela’s leader after U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro in January. So the nation we invaded, whose president we arrested and flew to Brooklyn in handcuffs, and whose oil industry we are now actively trying to carve up has politely declined statehood.

The main draw for Trump appears to be Venezuela’s oil reserves, which he estimates at around $40 trillion. This is the entire foreign policy theory of the second Trump administration expressed in one sentence.

It’s not the first time Trump has floated annexing a country. He’s repeatedly threatened to take control of Canada, Greenland, and Cuba. The man is running out of continents to proposition. Antarctica, consider this your warning.

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Epstein Survivors Are Testifying Publicly for the First Time

Jeffrey Epstein has been dead for seven years. Today, his survivors finally got to speak.

A nearly three-hour hearing was held today in Palm Beach, Florida, organized by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. It focused on how the current administration’s actions have hindered the quest for justice.

The women were asked what they would say to former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who earlier this year sat in a congressional hearing room with survivors present and could not turn around to face them.

Jena-Lisa Jones had an answer: “You’re a woman. You’re a mother. And you look at us — couldn’t even look at the survivors. So what’s your part in this?” Dani Bensky wanted to know about Ghislaine Maxwell’s recent prison transfer: “What was the process — and we would ask the same of Todd Blanche — what was the process for moving Ghislaine Maxwell?”

Rep. Krishnamoorthi used the hearing to reveal that the Senate Finance Committee has found Epstein made wire transfers totaling $1.5 billion detailed in Suspicious Activity Reports that include the names of women and girls he may have trafficked, as well as the names of potential clients. Those reports have not been released by the Treasury Department.

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The mainstream press will note that the hearing happened. We’ll tell you what was actually said, who was in the room, and why the people with the power to make it official decided not to. That’s the difference between covering a story and covering it up. A paid subscription is how you make sure we can keep doing the former.

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U.S. Citizen Suing ICE for Wrongful Detentions Is Arrested Again

There is a class-action lawsuit currently working its way through federal court in Alabama. The lead plaintiff is Leo García Venegas, a construction worker and U.S. citizen who is suing the Department of Homeland Security for arresting him twice without cause.

While that lawsuit was pending, ICE arrested him a third time.

Venegas was detained twice in 2025 during raids on private construction sites where he was working, even though he had a REAL ID identifying him as a U.S. citizen. Each time, he told officers he was a citizen. Each time, they didn’t care. He filed suit.

Less than two weeks ago, Venegas was parking in front of his own house in Silverhill when an unmarked SUV blocked him in. Before he could hand his REAL ID to the two ICE officers who approached him, they pulled him out of the truck, tackled him to the ground, and shackled him around both his arms and legs.

The officers showed no interest in looking at his ID. They held him for roughly 15 minutes before their own technology confirmed what the card in his hand already said.

Leo García Venegas is a U.S. citizen, has been a U.S. citizen all three times ICE arrested him, and will presumably still be a U.S. citizen when they show up again.

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Louisiana Is Moving Confederate Monuments From Storage to State Parks

In 2017, New Orleans made international news when it removed four Confederate monuments in the middle of the night, under heavy security, with workers wearing body armor and face coverings because of credible threats. It was not a casual weekend project. It was a statement.

Nine years later, three of those four monuments are still sitting in city-owned storage. And Louisiana lawmakers want to move them to state parks.

A bill moving through the Louisiana legislature would transfer any “historical statue or monument” owned by a government and removed from public display on or after August 1, 2006, to the Office of State Parks. The parks would be required to provide signs with “accurate historical context,” including why each monument was both erected and removed.

The legislation is written broadly and technically covers all removed monuments, but Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser said plainly in an interview that it was designed to deal with Confederate monuments taken down in New Orleans in 2017.

It passed the Louisiana House 78-14, without any representative speaking against it on the floor.

Historians studying similar questions have pointed to Germany as a model: concentration camps preserved as museums, with detailed context about the horrors that occurred there, and not a Hitler statue in sight. Louisiana is considering a different approach: move the statues to a nicer location, add a sign, and call it history.

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We Don’t Have a Billionaire. We Have You.

Most publications have someone at the top of the org chart who gets to decide what kind of stories are worth telling, and what kind of stories are worth leaving alone. Often that person has a net worth, a portfolio, or a social circle that creates certain gravitational pulls. These pulls are rarely announced. They just shape what gets covered, and how, over time.

We don’t have that problem because we don’t have that person. Our subscribers are the whole business. That means our only obligation is to the people reading.

If that’s valuable to you, a paid subscription is the most direct way to make sure it keeps existing. Please consider upgrading today. If you’re already a paid subscriber, you already know this. You’re the reason we’re here, and we’re eternally grateful.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tomorrow.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Democrats Still Hold House Edge Despite Redistricting Setbacks. Republicans have spent the redistricting cycle redrawing maps across the South and securing court wins that made Democrats’ path to the House majority measurably harder. Democrats are still favored to win it anyway. IT turns out that when your president has a sub-40 approval rating and is currently managing two wars and a recession, no amount of gerrymandering fully plugs the hole.

Hawaii Passes New Millionaire Tax Bracket to Close Budget Gap. Hawaii just passed a new 13% income tax bracket for households earning more than $1 million a year, while protecting tax cuts for about 90% of families earning under $350,000. While Congress debates whether poor people deserve food assistance, Hawaii apparently decided millionaires could afford to help close the gap. What a concept.

How an ‘Impossible’ Idea Led to a Pancreatic Cancer Breakthrough. A new pill called daraxonrasib just nearly doubled survival time for patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer in a Phase 3 trial, recording 13.2 months compared to 6.7 months on standard chemotherapy. Pancreatic cancer has resisted treatment for decades, and researchers are calling this a potential landmark shift because for the first time, scientists can target the mutation that drives 90% of the disease.

Tropical forest loss eases in 2025 from record high. Tropical forest loss dropped 36% in 2025 from its record-shattering 2024 high, driven largely by Brazil’s enforcement of stronger anti-deforestation policies under President Lula, including relaunched federal anti-deforestation plans and increased penalties for environmental crimes. When a government decides something is worth protecting and follows through on it, it gets protected. Someone tell Washington.

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House Republicans have introduced a resolution to erase Trump’s two impeachments from the congressional record. The Trump administration launched a government website that directs pregnant women to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. Two Maryland Republican state delegates posted a thirteen-minute video mocking a Chinese-born colleague. And a new poll finds that Americans are more likely to believe in ghosts than support Trump’s ballroom.

Before we dive in: AlterNet America is the people-powered response to the MAGA billionaire takeover of American media. Corporate networks are cheerleading the war in Iran, and the FCC chair is openly threatening broadcast licenses of outlets that don’t toe the line. Independent journalism has never been more essential than it is right now. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please become one today. It is how we stay standing when everything else is being bought or broken.

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Now, the news.

Republicans Move to Erase the Records of Trump’s Impeachments

The GOP would like to inform you that two of the most significant votes in recent congressional history did not happen, actually.

House Republicans are moving to expunge Trump’s two impeachments from the congressional record. Rep. Darrell Issa of California has introduced a resolution, H.Res. 1211, that would treat both impeachments as if the articles had never passed the chamber at all.

More than twenty House Republicans have signed on as cosponsors. The resolution has renewed debate among constitutional scholars over whether the House actually possesses the authority to retroactively nullify an impeachment after it has already occurred.

The answer, according to most legal observers, is no. The answer, according to Darrell Issa, is that he would like to be on television.

This is not the first time Republicans have tried this. Earlier attempts were floated by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elise Stefanik, and went nowhere. Issa argues that new declassified materials from DNI Tulsi Gabbard constitute meaningful new evidence, specifically the materials suggesting the whistleblower behind the first impeachment coordinated with Democrats.

To clarify, even if the whistleblower coordinated with Democrats, the House still voted to impeach. The process, whatever its origins, produced a legitimate constitutional outcome. The whistleblower didn’t cast 232 votes.

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Trump’s Pregnancy Website Is Filled With Anti-Abortion Centers

The administration that got rid of the FDA’s food safety division has some thoughts on your prenatal care.

The Trump administration celebrated Mother’s Day by launching Moms.gov, a new government website that directs pregnant people to anti-abortion pregnancy centers. The first resource listed is the roughly 2,750 anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers around the country.

Crisis pregnancy centers are unregulated and often nonmedical, faith-based organizations whose primary goal is encouraging patients to continue a pregnancy. More than 70 percent of these centers use deceptive tactics, provide scientifically inaccurate information, and hire nonmedical staff to discuss medical issues.

Nearly 40 percent do not disclose that they don’t offer abortion services.

The assistance they do provide, like diapers and formula, can be conditional on the woman attending church or Bible study. RFK Jr. called this “Make America Healthy Again.”

These centers are not bound by HIPAA, meaning they have no legal obligation to protect patient information or keep medical details confidential. Many of them also offer what they call “abortion reversal” services, a procedure that is unproven, experimental, and potentially dangerous. They are, however, very well stocked with pamphlets.

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The federal government built a pregnancy website and filled it with organizations that are not required to tell you what they do or protect your medical information. Mainstream media isn’t covering that. We are. If you're not a paid subscriber, please become one today.

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Republicans Under Fire For Racist Video Mocking Colleague

Two Republican members of the Maryland House of Delegates have solved the mystery of who is spying on Maryland, and it is the guy who introduced an AI transparency bill.

Mark Fisher and Brian Chisholm are facing calls to apologize and take down a thirteen-minute video on social media targeting Del. Chao Wu, a Chinese-born Democrat representing parts of Howard and Montgomery counties.

The video is part of a recurring series Fisher runs called “Dumbest Bill in America,” focused on a bill Wu had introduced that would have required AI developers to disclose information about how they train their models. It had eight co-sponsors. Fisher and Chisholm did not mention them.

Instead, they cited a nine-month-old Washington Examiner story reporting that Wu had been involved, twenty years ago as a college student, with a campus organization the State Department once said had ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Chisholm claimed that Wu’s work at the FDA under Obama and as an engineer at a defense contractor are evidence of a spy operation.

“China knows they can’t take us down with tanks and bullets,” he said. “So they send in spies, people like Chao Wu, and try to gain intelligence.”

“If you are someone who moves from a communist country to the United States, you know what you never do? You never, ever, ever register as a Democrat,” Fisher added. “So if you register as a Democrat and then you run as a Democrat? I’m pretty sure you’re a Chicom.”

Wu, who holds a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland, said the spy allegation is “not a truth, not a fact,” and that he won’t let the video get in the way of his work. He added, with a patience that most people could not locate under the circumstances: “Find some issues that you can find a solution for. Don’t do name-calling.”

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Americans Are More Likely to Believe in Ghosts Than Support Trump’s Ballroom

There are many ways to measure a presidency. Polling averages, economic indicators, approval ratings across key demographics.

And then there’s this.

A new ABC/Washington Post poll found that only 28% of Americans support Trump’s White House ballroom project, while 56% oppose it. The numbers have barely moved since October.

CNN analyst Harry Enten noted that the ballroom’s 28% approval rating lags behind American belief in ghosts at 34%, as measured by Gallup and other surveys. “This ballroom is, simply put, unpopular,” Enten said, in what may be the most restrained assessment of the situation available.

When Trump first proposed the project, he called it a “gift” to the American people and promised that not one penny of government funds would be used. Now Republican lawmakers have proposed taking one billion dollars in taxpayer money to cover security upgrades, as the price tag has grown and the project has expanded in scope.

A federal judge has halted construction. Preservationists have sued. Ghosts have a six-point lead.

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Why We Write What We Write

Most publications have someone at the top of the org chart who gets to decide what kind of stories are worth telling, and what kind of stories are worth leaving alone. Often that person has a net worth, a portfolio, or a social circle that creates certain gravitational pulls. These pulls are rarely announced. They just shape what gets covered, and how, over time.

We don’t have that problem because we don’t have that person. Our subscribers are the whole business. That means our only obligation is to the people reading, so we can cover two Maryland delegates who think a Mac laptop is evidence of espionage, a federal pregnancy website whose first recommendation is not staffed by doctors, Republicans trying to erase history, and a ballroom that is losing to ghosts.

If that’s valuable to you, a paid subscription is the most direct way to make sure it keeps existing. Please consider upgrading today. If you’re already a paid subscriber, you already know this. You’re the reason we’re here, and we’re eternally grateful.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tonight.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Supreme Court temporarily extends women’s access to a widely used abortion pill. The Fifth Circuit ruled on May 1 to immediately end telemedicine access to mifepristone nationwide, and the Supreme Court stepped in while it considers the case. The medication will remain available until at least Thursday. The Trump administration, notably, declined to file a written brief defending the FDA’s own regulations, leaving both sides to interpret the silence as an endorsement of the appeals court ruling.

Black Hills drilling project canceled after backlash from tribes. A South Dakota mining company called Pete Lien & Sons has canceled a graphite drilling project in the Black Hills after nine tribes filed suit and a court granted a temporary restraining order, with the company telling the Forest Service it does not intend to file another plan for the project. The drilling site sits near Pe’Sla, a sacred meadow where Sioux tribes hold ceremonies, on land that the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie gave to the tribes before the U.S. government took it back upon discovering gold.

Mom Takes Action Against Proposed Data Center Just 12 Miles from Home, Company Gives Up. A Wisconsin woman named Jayne Black learned that a data center developer was planning a Microsoft AI facility twelve miles from her home, started a Facebook group, and within two weeks the company had pulled out of the project entirely. The group, now called “Stop the Northeast Wisconsin Data Centers,” gathered over 2,000 members in its first two days and has since grown to around 3,700.

New July 1 cyber law to stop ‘epidemic’ could see $2,500 fines for emails, texts and DMs. Starting July 1, Virginia’s stalking law will be updated to explicitly cover cyberstalking through messaging apps and email, with a first conviction carrying a Class 1 misdemeanor and a second within five years escalating to a felony. The update closes a gap that has existed for years, because the law had not caught up to the reality that most stalking now happens through a phone screen rather than outside someone’s window.

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Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

The Trump family is selling a phone that doesn’t exist and keeping the deposits. The FCC is openly threatening Disney for airing a late-night host who told a joke. Immigrants are being arrested for calling 911. And the administration wants coal country to keep mining while it quietly kills the only rule that might keep miners from suffocating to death.

Before we get started, AlterNet America was built as a direct challenge to billionaire control of the American press. When the ultra-wealthy own the outlets, they own the narrative. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a business model. Independent media exists to break that stranglehold, but only if readers step up to fund it. If you believe independent media matters, become a paying subscriber today.

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590,000 Trump Supporters Paid for a Phone That Doesn’t Exist

In June 2025, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump took the stage at Trump Tower to announce Trump Mobile. The pitch was simple: a gold-colored, American-made Android phone called the T1, $499, proudly built in the United States of America, and available for a $100 deposit.

An estimated 590,000 buyers collectively handed over roughly $59 million in deposits. Not a single one of them has received a phone.

Promised delivery windows of late summer 2025 slipped to November, then December, then the first quarter of 2026. By April, Trump Mobile quietly removed all shipping estimates from its website entirely. At one point, a customer service representative blamed the federal government shutdown for the delay.

Trump Mobile is a private company. The shutdown had nothing to do with it.

The “Made in America” promise also quietly dissolved. Within days of the June 2025 launch, claims that the phone would be domestically produced were quietly removed from the website. “Made in the USA” became “American-proud design,” then “brought to life right here in the USA,” then “designed with American values in mind.”

Then came April’s terms of service update. The published terms make clear the company does not guarantee the device will ever be produced or made available for purchase, a perfectly on-brand outcome from the family that brought you Trump University and Trump Steaks.

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The FCC Is Threatening Disney Over Jimmy Kimmel’s Jokes

Here is something that doesn’t happen often: a sitting federal regulator writing a letter to a private company’s CEO to warn them that her own agency is being weaponized against them.

That is what happened Monday. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez sent a letter to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro warning that ABC has been a victim of a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control” by the Trump administration. She decried the political “weaponization” of the federal media regulator under Chairman Brendan Carr, a Republican appointed by Trump.

Gomez’s letter said that the FCC’s recent demand that Disney apply to renew broadcast licenses for eight of its local TV stations, its probe into the ABC talk show The View, and its decision to reopen a complaint into how ABC moderated a 2024 presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris were “not a series of coincidental regulatory actions.”

Gomez also noted that all of this escalated after ABC paid Trump $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit. As she put it in the letter: that settlement did not buy them peace.

The FCC has not revoked a broadcast license in more than four decades. Disney’s licenses weren’t even scheduled for renewal until 2028. The review was initiated one day after the White House called for ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel over a joke about Melania Trump.

It all started with a Jimmy Kimmel monologue. As most major constitutional crises do.

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The press is under attack and the government isn’t even pretending otherwise anymore. What you can do about it, right now, today, is make sure the outlets telling you the truth have the resources to keep doing it. Hit the button below and become a paid subscriber.

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Immigrants Are Calling 911 for Help and Getting Arrested by ICE

The most dangerous thing an immigrant can do right now is ask for help.

In December, Axel Sanchez Toledo called 911 to request a welfare check on his 4-year-old daughter after hearing she’d fallen sick while staying with his ex-girlfriend. When officers arrived, one took Sanchez Toledo’s ID, retreated to the patrol car, and returned to tell him he was being detained for ICE.

This is not an isolated incident. Across the country, immigrants are learning that dialing 911 can end with deportation. The effect is exactly what you’d expect: people who need emergency help are not calling. They are waiting and hoping the situation resolves itself.

Domestic violence hotlines are reporting fewer calls from immigrant communities. Emergency rooms are seeing patients who waited days before seeking care. Fire departments in sanctuary cities have begun fielding questions from residents about whether calling for help is safe.

Local emergency services also say that federal immigration enforcement is making their jobs harder. Several described scenarios where witnesses to crimes would not come forward, where accident victims fled before ambulances arrived, and where neighbors watched emergencies unfold rather than risk a call.

ICE and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office have not explained themselves. Nobody has checked on the kid.

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Black Lung Is Killing Coal Miners and Trump Keeps Delaying Regulations

The Trump administration has declared coal essential to national security, signed executive orders funneling billions toward the industry, and made “beautiful clean coal” a rhetorical centerpiece of its energy agenda.

It has simultaneously gutted the agency responsible for keeping coal miners alive.

Researchers estimate that black lung disease now afflicts one in 10 miners who have worked in mines for at least 25 years. The surge is being driven by silica dust, crystalline particles released as miners cut through rock that act like shards of glass in the lungs and eventually cause the most severe form of black lung disease. There is no cure.

In April 2024, the Biden administration finalized a rule cutting the allowable level of airborne silica dust in coal mines in half. The Department of Labor projected the rule would avoid at least 1,067 deaths and 3,746 cases of black lung among working and retired miners.

The Trump administration has delayed implementation indefinitely. When the administration came into office, it cut MSHA’s budget and staff.

The agency had already been operating at a disadvantage: coal mine enforcement staff has been cut in half over the last decade. Ninety newly hired mine inspectors had their job offers rescinded.

The miners dying from black lung voted for Trump by enormous margins. The rule that would save them is sitting on a desk in Washington collecting a different kind of dust.

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Why AlterNet America Exists — And Why We Need You

The threat of losing a broadcast license has kept journalists in line for decades. Nobody even has to pull the trigger. The chilling effect is the whole weapon. Disney is learning that firsthand right now, and every other broadcaster in the country is watching very carefully to see how it plays out.

We don’t have to worry, because AlterNet America doesn’t have a broadcast license. We don’t have a parent company, a corporate owner, or an advertiser who can be pressured. What we have is you. We’re funded by nobody but the people reading this right now. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, become one today. Hit the button below.

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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Trump Sued Over Reflecting Pool Renovation as Cost Suddenly Skyrockets. Trump promised a $1.8 million reflecting pool renovation. It is now costing $13.1 million, awarded via no-bid contract to a Virginia firm that previously worked on his golf club’s swimming pools. The bottom of the pool has been grey since its construction in 1924. Trump painted it blue. He is now being sued over it, because the pool is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the paint job was subject to a federal review that never happened. The president needed it done by July Fourth. The Lincoln Memorial has waited 101 years. Apparently this couldn’t.

In win for voters, Montana court blocks Republican-backed attack on Election Day registration. Montana Republicans passed a law that would have cut off Election Day voter registration at noon, barring anyone who registered after 12 p.m. from voting in federal races, while still allowing them to vote in state races. A Montana court blocked it, noting that the state presented zero evidence of voter fraud associated with Election Day registration. What it did present was a system that would have required officials to track the exact minute each voter registered, issue two different ballots, and run separate processes for state and federal contests.

Utah’s new law banning VPN access is on hold for now. Utah passed a law making it the first state in the nation to target VPN use to get around age verification requirements for adult websites, holding adult content websites liable if a Utah user accessed them through a VPN and banning those websites from even explaining how a VPN works. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said compliance was technically impossible. A court apparently agreed, at least for now, blocking the law pending a lawsuit.

California county sues Meta over scam ads. Santa Clara County has sued Meta, alleging it has profited from Facebook and Instagram ads promoting scams in violation of California’s false advertising and unfair business practices laws. The company is accused of earning as much as $7 billion in annual revenue from so-called high-risk scam ads that show clear signs of being fraudulent. The county further alleges that Meta targeted scam ads at users who had already clicked on similarly bogus offerings in the past. In other words, Meta wasn’t just failing to stop scams. It was optimizing for them.

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Donald Trump has announced he will deploy an “Election Integrity Army” across every state in America. The Supreme Court is preparing to decide how easily states can execute people with intellectual disabilities. Pregnant women are being shackled and detained by ICE in defiance of ICE’s own written policy. And The Trump administration set up an email address where corporations could ask to be exempted from the Clean Air Act.

Before we get into it: We don’t have a billionaire. We don’t have advertisers. We don’t have a broadcast license the FCC can yank the moment we say something inconvenient. What we have is readers. And right now, that’s the most defensible position in American media. The Washington Post and the LA Times have already been consumed. 60 Minutes, sources say, is next. A paid subscription to AlterNet America is a bet on the kind of journalism that can’t be bought. Please consider making it today.

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Now, let’s dive in.

Trump Will Have an ‘Election Integrity Army’ at Every Polling Place

The president wants you to know the 2026 midterms will be free and fair. He is building an army to make sure of it.

On Sunday, posting from Truth Social, Donald Trump announced that Republicans would deploy an “Election Integrity Army” in every single state for the 2026 midterms. Much bigger than 2024, he promised.

He did not say who would be in it. He did not say how large it would be. He did not say what it would do when it got to the polling locations. These details were apparently beside the point. The point was the army.

In 2024, the Republican National Committee recruited thousands of volunteers to serve as poll watchers across the country. They were trained to challenge voter eligibility, observe ballot counting, and report irregularities. That operation, by Trump’s own description, is now the baseline.

Trump also said in February that he will only accept the midterm results if he feels they were honest. That same month, he called for Republicans to “nationalize the voting” in 2026. The administration has since deployed ICE agents to polling locations ahead of the election.

The midterms are six months away. The army is already being built. The concession speech is not being written.

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SCOTUS Could Make It Easier to Execute People With Intellectual Disabilities

In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The Court did not define intellectual disability. It left that to the states. This was, in retrospect, optimistic.

Joseph Clifton Smith has been on Alabama’s death row since his conviction for a 1997 murder. He has taken five separate IQ tests over nearly 40 years. In 1979, he scored 75. In 1982, 74. In 1998, 72. In 2014, 78. In 2017, 74. A lower court found him intellectually disabled and spared him from execution. Alabama appealed.

The Supreme Court, which now has a very different composition than it did in 2002, has agreed to hear the case. The Trump administration has filed a brief backing Alabama’s position.

The question before the Court is technical: how should multiple IQ scores be weighed? But the practical question is simpler. A man has scored between 72 and 78 on intelligence tests his entire adult life, has been found intellectually disabled by a federal court, and the state of Alabama would still like to execute him.

A ruling is expected by the end of June.

The 2002 ruling said executing the intellectually disabled was cruel and unusual. The current Court is fine with cruel. Unusual is the sticking point.

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Pregnant Women in ICE Custody Are Being Shackled and Left to Miscarry

ICE has a written policy. It says, plainly, that ICE “should not detain, arrest, or take into custody” individuals who are medically certified as pregnant. This policy is not a secret, and it has not been formally rescinded.

It is also not being followed.

Since Trump returned to office, credible reports of abuse in immigration detention centers have numbered in the thousands. Among the most documented: pregnant women arrested, transported in shackles, denied prenatal vitamins, denied food that meets basic nutritional standards, and in multiple cases, left without medical care while actively miscarrying.

One woman miscarried in detention after experiencing severe abdominal pain and bleeding for weeks. ICE returned her to the facility the night of her miscarriage. She was deported two months later and sought hospital care for a severe infection she developed while in custody.

Others described being told to “just drink water” when they reported pregnancy complications. One was left alone in a hospital room without water or medical assistance for over 24 hours while she miscarried. One woman detained in Louisiana reported being restrained at the ankles, hands, and waist during cross-country transport while pregnant.

ICE has disputed the reports, claiming that pregnant women in custody are properly cared for. No one has independently verified this, because ICE has also stopped publicly reporting how many pregnant women it is holding, and has refused to provide the number to Congress.

ICE’s official rules say the number should be near zero. Whatever the actual number is, it is not near zero.

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Corporations Asked to Poison Your Air and Trump Said Yes

Exemptions from the Clean Air Act used to take years of litigation. In 2025, they took an email.

The EPA set up an email address in March last year. Coal plants, chemical manufacturers, and copper smelters had until the end of the month to write in and request exemptions from Clean Air Act rules. No application was required. The agency’s own air quality scientists were not involved in reviewing the requests.

More than 3,000 pages of emails poured in. Executives from Citgo wrote in, which had active Clean Air Act violations at its refineries in Illinois, Louisiana, and Texas. A vice president at Sterigenics, a medical sterilization company, requested exemptions for nine facilities emitting a carcinogenic gas, including plants near Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Charlotte, and Atlanta.

More than 45,000 people live within a mile of those facilities. Most of them are not white.

Both companies got their exemptions approved. More than 180 facilities nationwide received a two-year pause on compliance with the rules the EPA had previously said would “provide critical health protections to hundreds of thousands of people living near chemical plants.”

The Clean Air Act is estimated to have prevented thousands of premature deaths. One hundred and eighty three companies decided those deaths were worth an email.

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Still No Billionaire. Still Here.

Here is what we know about the people in today’s newsletter: they would prefer you hadn’t read it. The corporations that emailed the EPA for clean air exemptions would prefer you hadn’t read it. The officials overseeing immigration detention would prefer you hadn’t read it.

None of these stories fit into a twelve-second television segment. None of them are easy to dismiss, which is exactly why the institutions capable of sustaining that kind of pressure are disappearing one by one.

We are not disappearing. We answer to you. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, there has never been a better time, or a more urgent one. Your subscription is the only thing that keeps this work free from the people we’re writing about.

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Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tonight.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

Trump forced to halt ‘Project Freedom’ after Saudi Arabia blocks US air access. Trump announced on Sunday Project Freedom, a plan to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz without telling Saudi Arabia first. Saudi Arabia, whose airspace the plan entirely depended on, said no, and the project was paused two days later. The project lasted 48 hours. It was paused to allow for negotiations, which is a diplomatic way of saying it failed.

Bill banning whites-only housing passes Pennsylvania House by 1 vote. Pennsylvania’s House passed a bill last week closing a legal loophole that allowed white nationalist groups to establish whites-only housing communities by operating as private membership associations. It passed 101 to 100. Not a single Republican voted for it. One Democrat voted against it. It now heads to the Senate, which is also controlled by Republicans.

California hospitals will soon provide free diapers to newborns. California will become the first state in the country to provide free diapers to newborns, with every family leaving a participating hospital receiving 400 diapers starting this summer. One in two families in the US struggles to afford diapers. A newborn goes through roughly eight to ten a day, so 400 gets a family about five weeks in. It is not nothing.

Many Medicare enrollees can get GLP-1 drugs for $50 starting in July. Starting in July, Medicare enrollees can access GLP-1 weight loss medications like Wegovy for $50 a month through a new pilot program running through the end of 2027. The drugs were previously not covered by Medicare at all, and cost as little as $149 a month without insurance. For millions of older adults managing obesity and related conditions, that is a meaningful change. We are as surprised as you are.

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Good morning, AlterNet America family.

Welcome to the Saturday Wrapup, where I get you the week’s news as I consume my morning caffeine with you.

To our paying subscribers: thank you. Your support has allowed us to remain at #2 in Rising News on Substack for our first month. It’s also allowed us to hold our first Substack Live with independent journalist Erin Reed, and we have more to follow in the coming weeks. You make this possible. That means everything.

If you’re not yet a paying member, I’m asking you to join us today. Independent media has never mattered more. Support our people-powered movement and upgrade your subscription today.

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Last weekend, I wrote about how I believe Democrats are going to sweep the midterms despite GOP gerrymandering. I still very much believe that. If you’re feeling hopeless, I’d recommend going back and reading that. But we still have to address how this redistricting is going to affect Black voting power.

Southern Republicans Trade the Literacy Test for Gerrymandered Maps

Memphis has had the same congressman since 2007. By Thursday afternoon, Memphis no longer had a congressional district.

On April 29, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority handed down its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, striking down Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map that had created a second majority-Black district. The decision was 6-3 along strictly partisan lines.

Election law experts called it one of the most consequential and damaging Supreme Court decisions in a generation. Although the court technically left Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act on the books, the ruling continued a years-long pattern of decisions that have gutted the landmark 1965 law born from the Civil Rights Movement.

Republican state legislatures heard the starting gun and sprinted.

Just one day after the ruling, Trump took to Truth Social to announce he had spoken with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who committed to redrawing the state’s congressional maps to deliver another GOP House seat. By Thursday, it was done.

Tennessee lawmakers passed a new congressional map dismantling the state’s 9th Congressional District. It was the only majority-Black district in the state, centered in Memphis and held by Democrat Steve Cohen since 2007. Under the new lines, Shelby County would be carved up between three separate districts, and every one of Tennessee’s nine congressional seats would have backed Trump by at least 20 points.

The scenes inside the Tennessee statehouse were extraordinary. Democrats linked arms and walked out of the chamber after the vote. Protesters flooded the gallery with shouts of outrage, booing Republican lawmakers as they left the floor. One Republican member arrived on the House floor wearing a Trump campaign flag as a cape.

Tennessee’s special session came just days after Louisiana suspended its House primaries outright to buy time for new maps. Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina are all moving to redraw their lines. Between those states alone, five majority-minority Democratic districts are now in the crosshairs. Florida didn’t even wait, as lawmakers approved four new GOP-leaning districts within hours of the ruling.

Republicans aren’t even pretending that this isn’t about race. It is explicitly about whether Black communities in Memphis, New Orleans, and Birmingham have a voice in their own government — and the GOP, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, has decided the answer is no.

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The Next Pandemic Might Already Be Here

On May 2, the World Health Organization was notified of a cluster of severe respiratory illness aboard a Dutch cruise ship, the MV Hondius. As of this week, three people are dead, and cases have been confirmed across multiple countries.

Passengers who disembarked before the outbreak was identified have now dispersed across at least a dozen countries, with exposed travelers turning up in five US states: Arizona, California, Georgia, Texas, and Virginia.

The specific strain is the Andes virus, the only known hantavirus that can spread between people. Scientists know relatively little about how that human-to-human transmission works, which is where things get uncomfortable for the Trump administration.

In June 2025, the NIH issued a stop-work order shutting down all ten Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a network launched in 2020 with $82 million in funding specifically designed to study pathogens that could jump from animals to humans. One of those centers was running a pilot project to better understand how hantavirus passes from rodents to people.

Trump’s NIH killed it, saying the research was “not a good use of taxpayer funding.”

It gets worse. RFK Jr.’s HHS fired virtually the entire staff of the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, the team responsible for keeping cruise ships from becoming floating outbreak vectors. Notably, those employees’ salaries were paid by the cruise industry, not taxpayers. The cuts saved the federal government nothing.

When asked about the outbreak this week, Trump called the reporter asking the question fake news, then said he hoped it was under control and that “a lot of great people are studying it.” Those would be the people his administration didn’t fire.

Public health experts say the alarming thing is not the hantavirus itself. It is what the administration’s sluggish response suggests about America’s readiness for something bigger.

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The War on the Press Just Got a Lot More Explicit

The Trump administration has spent eighteen months telling you it views a free press as an enemy. This week it used two federal agencies in two days to prove it meant every word.

The FBI this week launched an investigation into New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson after she published a story revealing that FBI Director Kash Patel had assigned federal agents to chauffeur and protect his girlfriend. Patel’s girlfriend claimed the reporting constituted stalking. FBI agents queried databases for information about Williamson, and Justice Department officials eventually found no legal basis to proceed.

On the same day, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit against the New York Times alleging racial discrimination in its hiring and promotion practices. The plaintiff is a white man who says he was passed over for a promotion. The timing was not lost on anyone in the industry.

Neither of these cases may go anywhere. That is not the point. The point is that a reporter now has to wonder whether their sources will call them back knowing the FBI might be watching. The point is that a newsroom’s lawyers are now in the room when editors are deciding what to publish and what to hold.

AlterNet America does not have a broadcast license, a pending merger, or a general counsel calculating the exposure on every story. We are not publicly traded. There is no advertiser to call on Wednesday morning asking us to cool it.

What we have is readers, and that is the only reason we can write this without anyone running it through legal first.

Independent journalism doesn’t get threatened with license revocation. It gets starved. The way to keep it alive is straightforward: fund it. If you’ve been reading for free, this is a good week to change that. Become a paid subscriber.

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We’ll keep reporting. Our white guys seem fine.

—Ryan Rose

Co-founder & Managing Editor, AlterNet America

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Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

The Pentagon dropped UFO files while the Epstein files continue to collect dust. Virginia’s Supreme Court decided that voters’ votes don’t count if Republicans don’t like the map they produced. A Utah Supreme Court justice was hounded out of her seat by Republican leaders over an allegation that was investigated and dismissed. And Trump wants to paint a historic landmark next to the White House white for $7.5 million.

Before we get into it: No billionaire bought us. No advertiser needs us to soften anything. No parent company is doing quiet deals with the people we cover. We don’t have a broadcast license the FCC can yank or a board of directors with opinions about what you should and shouldn’t know. What we have is readers, and we need them to pay for this. If you’ve been reading for free, we’re asking you to become a paid subscriber today. Independent journalism doesn’t survive on goodwill.

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The UFO Files Landed Right On Top of the Epstein Files

The government released UFO files today. The Epstein files remain classified. Make of that what you will.

On Friday, the Pentagon released what it’s calling “never-before-seen files” on UFOs covering decades of reported sightings. The documents are now housed at a dedicated government website, War.gov/UFO, because apparently the Department of War needed a UFO page.

The drop included 162 files dating back decades, from the FBI, the State Department, and NASA. The whole thing even came packaged with a heavily stylized website using white typewriter-style font against a black background, because if you’re going to do a distraction, do it with atmosphere.

Critics cast the UFO disclosures as a distraction from Trump’s political woes, including the unpopular U.S. military campaign against Iran and public pressure to release further files tied to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, not historically a voice of reason, wrote that she “really doesn’t care about the UFO files” and called the release “look at the shiny object propaganda.”

The documents contained no clear, immediate revelations. One file documents an FBI interview with a drone pilot who saw a light for five to ten seconds before it vanished. Another is a NASA photograph from the Apollo 17 mission showing three dots in a triangular formation.

The Pentagon noted there is “no consensus about the nature of the anomaly.” So: no little green men, no smoking gun, no explanation for what Jeffrey Epstein’s associates have been up to.

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Virginia’s Supreme Court Decided Votes on Redistricting Didn’t Count

Virginians voted for a new redistricting map. The Virginia Supreme Court voted for the old one. Guess which vote counted.

Virginia voters had approved a redistricting referendum by a 52% to 48% margin in April. The measure would have allowed the Democrat-controlled legislature to temporarily redraw congressional maps, responding to Trump’s push to have Republican-led states gerrymander their way to a permanent House majority.

The state Supreme Court, ruling 4-3, found that Democratic lawmakers made procedural errors in how they placed the question on the ballot. Specifically, the court determined the legislature began the constitutional amendment process too late, and that this violation, in its words, “incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy.”

Voters approved it. The court nullified it.

Republicans will now head into the midterms with a clear redistricting advantage. Republicans could gain as many as 14 seats from redrawn maps across six states so far, compared with six for Democrats. The RNC called it a win against election-rigging with a straight face.

Virginia Democrats said they’re evaluating every legal path forward. Virginia Republicans said Democrats tried to rig elections and lost. The voters already made their voices known.

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Utah Republicans Ousted a Judge Over a Dismissed Allegation

Here’s how this went: An allegation was made. An investigation was conducted. The allegation was dismissed. The judge was forced to resign anyway, because Republican leaders weren’t interested in what the investigation found.

They were interested in the vacancy.

Utah Supreme Court Justice Diana Hagen resigned Friday following controversy over an alleged inappropriate relationship tied to Utah’s redistricting case. The allegation involved a possible connection between Hagen and an attorney who had argued that Republican-proposed congressional maps were illegal.

The Utah Judicial Conduct Commission conducted an investigation and dismissed the complaint. It didn’t matter. Hagen was under intense pressure from Republican leaders, including Governor Spencer Cox, and eventually concluded that continuing to serve was not possible without, in her words, sacrificing the privacy and well-being of those she cares about.

The vacancy will be filled by the governor. The governor who wanted her gone will now pick her replacement. This is the part where someone says the system worked.

It’s worth noting that Utah recently expanded its Supreme Court by two seats, which the governor also gets to fill. One out, two in. If this looks like court-packing, that’s because it is.

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Trump Wants to Paint a Historic Landmark White and It Costs $7.5 Million

The country is at war with Iran. Millions are losing their health care. But the Eisenhower Executive Office Building is the wrong color, and that’s what matters right now.

Trump has proposed putting a coat of white paint on the exterior of the 19th-century historic landmark building next to the White House, which would cost taxpayers at least $7.5 million. The Eisenhower Executive Office Building is a National Historic Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The proposed painting is one piece of a broader plan to “make Washington more beautiful,” which also includes razing the East Wing to build a 1,000-person ballroom and closing Lafayette Park for fountain restoration.

The National Capital Planning Commission reviewed the proposal Thursday and declined to approve it, which is the kind of outcome that would stop most projects. This one has a federal lawsuit attached to it too, filed by preservationists. Neither obstacle has dampened Trump’s enthusiasm.

The $7.5 million estimate is preliminary, covers only the exterior, and was described as a starting point. The administration that spent the last year telling the country there was no money has not explained where the sense of priorities went, but the paint color has been selected.

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This Newsletter Has No Billionaire

Independent journalism doesn’t fail all at once. It fails one quiet deal at a time, one ownership change at a time, one phone call that never gets talked about.

The outlets that are pulling punches right now aren’t doing it because they want to. They’re doing it because they have to. Because someone owns them, funds them, or needs something from the people they’d otherwise be covering.

AlterNet America doesn’t have any of that. We have readers and a newsletter. And a paid subscription is what keeps us independent. Not independent in the way media companies use that word now. Actually independent. If that’s worth something to you, now is the perfect time to upgrade your subscription.

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Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tomorrow.

POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

NAACP files emergency petition to block Tennessee’s newly approved redistricting plan. Tennessee passed a new redistricting map that eliminates the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, carving up the Memphis-based seat held by the state’s lone Democrat into three separate pieces. The NAACP filed an emergency petition to block it. A Tennessee lawmaker responded by suggesting Memphis should just secede. The redistricting war is going great for everyone.

Colorado Passes New Law Against Conversion Therapy in Wake of SCOTUS Decision. The Supreme Court ruled in March that Colorado could not ban licensed therapists from using conversion therapy on minors, allowing a discredited technique likened to torture. Colorado responded by passing a new law that addresses the Court’s narrow First Amendment reasoning while keeping the prohibition intact and extending the statute of limitations so survivors have more time to sue the people who hurt them.

AI data center bans are rapidly multiplying, as 69 jurisdictions block new builds. A year ago, eight jurisdictions across the country had enacted bans on new AI data center construction. That number is now 78, with 14 new bans added between March and April alone, and four local governments making their bans permanent. The reasons are not complicated: wholesale electricity prices have skyrocketed by up to 267% in five years as utility providers upgrade infrastructure to meet data center demand.

85 Million Acres of Private Land Are Being Protected for Conservation. In the United States and Australia combined, more than 85 million acres of private land are now being conserved, largely through an old-fashioned mechanism: people deciding to leave their land to conservation organizations. In the US alone, the Land Trust Alliance reports that 61 million acres of privately held conservation land now exceeds the total acreage of all US national parks combined, and the organization is aiming to double that number by the end of the decade.

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