Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s fellow inmates are being punished for talking about her. The government killed research into the exact virus now killing people on a cruise ship. ICE arrested an 18-year-old varsity goalkeeper on his way home from Popeyes. And the Trump administration is revoking travel documents from Americans at the same time they’re pushing a law that requires those documents to vote.
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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Inmates Are Being Punished for Talking About Ghislaine Maxwell
Ghislaine Maxwell — convicted child sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator, and the only person actually serving time for one of the most documented abuse networks in American history — has been living in a minimum-security prison camp in Bryan, Texas, since last summer.
According to CNN, Maxwell was moved to the Bryan prison camp after meeting twice with then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. She has since spoken flatteringly of Trump and signaled that if the president granted her clemency, she would clear his name of any wrongdoing related to Epstein.
When inmate Julie Howell relayed her thoughts about Maxwell’s arrival to a reporter after consulting the prison handbook to confirm there was no prohibition, she was shipped to a federal detention center in Houston. Meanwhile, the prison warden reportedly made clear from the start that commentary about the convicted child sex trafficker would not be tolerated.
A warden at a federal prison telling inmates that a particular inmate is off-limits for discussion is not normal prison policy. It is, however, a very efficient way to ensure that nobody finds out what’s happening inside a federal prison.
Maxwell has now filed another motion asking a federal judge to vacate her conviction. The judge has not yet responded, possibly because the request is insane.
The Passport Crackdown Starts With Deadbeat Dads
The State Department is calling the program “unprecedented.” They are not wrong about that.
The Trump administration has announced it will begin revoking U.S. passports from anyone who owes more than $100,000 in child support, with revocations starting as early as today. That would apply to approximately 2,700 passport holders. The plan is then to expand the threshold down to anyone owing more than $2,500, which would affect thousands more.
On its face, this is hard to argue with. People who owe $100,000 in child support should be paying it. The children waiting for that money need their money. But the program has an added dimension.
The program coincides with Republican efforts to pass voter ID laws that would require passports and birth certificates for voter registration. The Save Act is currently stalled in Congress, but if it passes, Americans without passports would face a higher bar to voting.
So, a policy that expands to anyone owing $2,500, strips them of the one document that might be required to vote, and arrives exactly as the administration is pushing to make that document a prerequisite for voting. A cynic would notice this. A journalist should say it.
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Trump Cut the Research. Now There’s an Outbreak.
In 2025, the Trump administration eliminated funding for a research group that had been studying the exact type of hantavirus that is now confirmed to be behind an ongoing outbreak on a cruise ship. The outbreak has killed three people and infected several more.
The virus in question is the Andes strain, a rare hantavirus capable of spreading from person to person. Experts know little about how human-to-human transmission works, in part because outbreaks are so rare. Learning more about it was the explicit goal of the research program that was canceled.
The NIH shut down all ten centers in the CREID network in 2025, declaring the research “unsafe for Americans and not a good use of taxpayer funding.” Virologists who worked with the network said there was no evidence their work posed any risk.
The ship is currently isolated at sea, and passengers who disembarked before the outbreak was identified have returned to at least five U.S. states: California, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, and Virginia.
The CDC, which once had full-time inspectors on cruise ships, classified this a level 3 emergency (its highest) and issued its first public statement four hours after the news broke. When asked about the risk to Americans, Trump said: “We should be fine.” That was the full response.
ICE Arrested a Teenager Four Weeks Before Graduation
The federal government’s top priority last Friday night, in Austin, Texas, was a teenager driving home from Popeyes.
Luis Fernando Cabrera Chavarria, 18, is a senior and the varsity soccer team’s goalkeeper at Northeast Early College High School. He was set to graduate in June. ICE detained him last Friday while he was driving home from his shift at Popeyes.
He came to the United States from Honduras in 2019 alongside his sister. They came through Eagle Pass, where they were stopped by immigration officials and claimed asylum. That is the legal process that exists for exactly this situation, the one you are supposed to use when you arrive at a port of entry and say you need protection.
What happened after that, in the years of backlogged immigration courts and stalled cases, is a longer story. The short version is that Luis Fernando Cabrera Chavarria has now lived in the United States for seven years, attended American schools, joined an American soccer team, taken an American job, and helped pay rent for an American household.
His sister said he wakes up every morning to take his nephew to daycare before going to school. His soccer coach said he is a sweet, caring young man who has spent four years working toward the moment of walking across that stage.
ICE noted in its statement that he entered illegally in 2019 as a family unit. He was eleven years old. ICE did not note that.
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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Federal court rules against new global tariffs Trump imposed after loss at the Supreme Court. After the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s sweeping global tariffs in February, the administration replaced them with a new set of tariffs under a different law. A federal trade court struck those down too, ruling 2-1 that the replacement tariffs were “invalid” and “unauthorized by law.” The administration is expected to appeal, which means the tariffs that were illegal are being replaced by tariffs that are also illegal, and we’re going to keep doing this until someone runs out of courts.
Judge says DOGE grant terminations are unlawful and ‘troubling.’ A federal judge ruled that DOGE staffers, two young men with backgrounds in tech and finance who used ChatGPT and DEI keywords to decide which humanities grants to cut, had no legal authority to do so. The judge determined that they “blatantly used” race, gender, and other protected characteristics as their criteria. In their depositions, the staffers confirmed they had not actually reduced the federal deficit, which was the stated goal, so the grants for Holocaust survivors and Black civil rights history were canceled for nothing.
New York to restrict ICE despite threat from Trump’s border czar. Border czar Tom Homan threatened to “flood the streets” of New York with ICE agents if the state passes legislation barring local police from coordinating with federal immigration enforcement. Governor Hochul responded that Trump himself had promised not to surge agents into New York unless she asked, and that she was not asking, which is the most efficient one-sentence shutdown of a federal threat seen in quite some time.
Child marriage ban narrowly advanced by Oklahoma Legislature. Oklahoma’s House passed a bill banning child marriage by a single vote, 51 to 36, after it had passed the Senate unanimously. Oklahoma is currently one of four states with no minimum age for marriage. One Republican representative argued against the ban by noting that people in his family had married at 16 and 17 and remained married until they died, and that the government had no business taking that opportunity away from children. He did not specify whether the people who married at 16 would have chosen to.
