New dietary guidelines announced Wednesday by Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. crank up the dials on red meat and full-fat dairy. The now-inverted food pyramid prominently features a steak, an entire chicken, and whole milk up top, relegating carbs to the bottom point—minor real estate compared to the portion they occupied before. Untethered from scientific research, the new recommendations seem more aligned with a burgeoning source of dietary advice: hypermasculine influencers. The fairly recent obsession with protein isn’t limited to men. “Protein has sort of become like a default or de facto good food, because it hasn’t been vilified in the same way that these other nutrients have,” says Charlotte Biltekoff, a professor at UC Davis who studies food and culture. It’s a buzzword in wellness corners around the internet. Yet the new guidelines basically ignore menopause influencers discussing the benefits of cottage cheese in favor of the red-meat-forward “manosphere.” Protein-maxxing obsessives can be found throughout MAGAville, ranging from Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson—with his “all beef” diet—to the so-called Liver King. Alongside fitness shakes and supplement powders, these kinds of dudes are often peddling the notion that a high-protein diet is essential for masculinity. > “Most of us eat, actually, way too much protein. I do worry about the longer > term health impacts of these kinds of recommendations.” The association of gender with certain foods isn’t new, but the wholehearted embrace of these perceptions is a more recent phenomenon, says Elaine Power, a dietician and professor at Queen’s University who studies food, gender, and health. In studies about a decade ago, when people were asked if they thought foods were gendered, they’d say no, “but then you show them a salad, and they say, of course that’s women’s food. You show them a steak, and that’s men’s food.” Her subjects, in other words, would initially deny that such perceptions existed. However, Power says she’s not sure she’d get that result if she repeated the experiment today. And these perceptions affect what men eat. A 2023 study titled “Healthful Eating as a Manhood Threat” found that men often avoid foods viewed as feminine, often favoring meat. This seems to have particularly affected young men, a greater proportion of whom—recent research suggests—have been eating meat daily and taking protein supplements. When asked why, many cited their desire for a more muscular physique, the baseline of the aesthetics advertised by macho influencers—some of the most notable of whom have been embroiled in steroid controversies. The ripped physiques influencers use to hawk carnivorous diets are hard to come by, of course, and consuming extra protein is often completely unnecessary. “Most of us eat, actually, way too much protein,” Power says. “I do worry about the longer term health impacts of these kinds of recommendations.” Besides being terrible for the climate, excessive meat consumption has negative health effects, including an increased risk of cancer and heart disease, even in young people. While the American Heart Association praised the new pyramid’s suggestions to limit highly processed foods, the group stated its disagreement with the emphasis on meat and RFK’s aim of “ending the war on saturated fats.” The contents of the pyramid are simply recommendations, with little to no direct policy influence. They may eventually be used to redesign school and other institutional lunches, but right now, “there’s no little to no infrastructure to act on this kind of dietary advice,” Biltekoff says. What’s more, the admonition to avoid processed foods and eat home-cooked meals are inaccessible to many. “This is just another set of ideals that become moralized,” Biltekoff says. “Eating real food becomes a part of identity and status, and it becomes a way of signaling or symbolizing certain kinds of class-based and race-based identities and reinforcing social hierarchies rather than addressing them.” And to the boys and men in the thrall of protein-maxxing, these new guidelines are just an affirmation that they’re headed in the right direction.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Pattie Gonia, the drag queen and environmentalist, arrived in San Francisco on Friday afternoon and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge with $1 million more than when she set out on her journey last week. The diversity and inclusion advocate completed the 100-mile trek from Point Reyes national seashore to San Francisco in full drag with her voluminous red wig and smokey eye. The effort was part of a campaign she launched to raise $1 million for eight nonprofits that aim to expand access and make the outdoors a more “equitable place.” > View this post on Instagram “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you can’t make a difference,” she wrote on social media after completing the journey. “When I started being Pattie, everyone told me I was crazy. When I told people I wanted to do this fundraiser, [they] laughed in my face. “Seven years later and I hope I can be a little bit of proof to you that combining who you are and what you’re good at to fight for the change you want to see in the world works.” Pattie Gonia has become one of the most visible drag queens in the US in recent years. In 2024, Donald Trump’s campaign used footage of her with Kamala Harris as part of an attack ad against the then vice-president. Earlier this year she helped organize a demonstration at Yosemite, where LGBTQ+ climbers hung a trans pride flag on El Capitan. > View this post on Instagram “We flew the Trans pride flag in Yosemite to make a statement: Trans people are natural and Trans people are loved,” she said in a statement at the time. “We are done being polite about Trans people’s existence. Call it a protest, call it a celebration—either way, it’s giving elevation to liberation.” Recently, she playfully challenged the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to a pull-up competition in a video that contrasted footage of her lifting herself with ease with video of Hegseth appearing to struggle through the exercise. > View this post on Instagram For the last week, she was on a solo trek on the California coast, getting in drag daily and setting up camp each night, while filming videos documenting the journey. She is set to perform her final show of the year in San Francisco on Saturday, “That is, if I can make it in time,” she said. Video posted to social media on Friday evening showed her strutting across the Golden Gate Bridge and ending her journey with cake. By Friday, a GoFundMe for the project had raised more than $1 million from almost 35,000 individual donations.

Women are the fast-growing population of incarcerated people. And if Republicans get their way, more pregnant women will be joining their ranks. That’s because conservatives are behind a growing push to criminalize pregnancy outcomes nationwide, in part by giving full rights to fetuses. And while abortion opponents have long claimed they do not want to criminalize abortion-seekers themselves, since the Supreme Court’s 2022 overruling of Roe v. Wade, a growing number of conservative lawmakers have begun introducing bills that would treat abortion as homicide and criminalize abortion-seekers. These laws will likely put more Black and Latina women behind bars, who are already imprisoned at higher rates than white women.  President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is also ensnaring pregnant immigrant women: A report issued last month by the office of Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) alleged that officials identified more than a dozen credible reports of the mistreatment of pregnant women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, which included not receiving adequate, or even urgent, medical care and being denied food. The Department of Homeland Security has disputed those allegations, saying in part, “Detention of pregnant women is rare and has elevated oversight and review.” These recent events make Rebecca Rodriguez Carey’s new book, Birth Behind Bars: The Carceral Control of Pregnant Women in Prisons, incredibly timely. Based on in-depth interviews with nearly three dozen women who were incarcerated in prisons throughout the Midwest while pregnant, the book provides rare insight into the experiences of pregnant women behind bars—an issue that lacked federal data until the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) issued its first report on the state of pregnant women in prisons earlier this year. But even the exact number of pregnant women in prisons remains unclear, in part because incarcerated women do not always have access to pregnancy tests: The BJS report, for example, cites more than 320 in state and federal custody in 2023, but past research from scholars and advocates has estimated about 3,000 pregnant people are admitted to U.S. prisons annually. “This invisibility,” Rodrigeuz Carey told me, “really contributes to systemic neglect.” In her book, Rodriguez Carey, an associate professor of sociology and criminology at Emporia State University in Kansas, counters this historic invisibility by relaying women’s experiences being pregnant, laboring, and giving birth while in prison. Some stories convey the despair and desperation you may expect: Some women recounted purposefully committing crimes in order to be pregnant in prison rather than on the streets; others recalled falling into postpartum depression after being separated from their babies after giving birth while incarcerated. But the book also spotlights the surprising ways women managed to cultivate hope, by hosting makeshift baby showers and making plans for how they would make their children proud once released. I spoke with Rodriguez Carey via Zoom last month about the state of abortion access in prisons post-Roe, the persistent problem of shackling incarcerated people during childbirth, and what most surprised her during the course of her research. This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.  I was struck by the fact that some of the women you interviewed deliberately committed crimes in order to have their basic needs for food, shelter, and medical care met in prison during their pregnancies. What do these women’s experiences indicate about the state of pregnancy care in the US more broadly? Well it’s really, really bad care when you have women who are seeking refuge in a carceral system. And that’s not to say that that the care in prison is optimal care by any means, but for those who are living at the margins of society, who are in extreme poverty and don’t know where their next meal is coming from, don’t know where they are staying each night, for them the mark of being a good mother is to ensure that those basic needs are met. And so that means turning to our criminal legal system. It’s really interesting to me that the incarcerated population are the only group of people in the US that are constitutionally guaranteed health care—that really says something.  > “There’s an absence of a social safety net, and we have people turning to the > criminal legal system to ensure their basic needs are met. “ You have some prisons being more progressive with their efforts to provide wraparound services, but then you have other prisons where there’s not a lot of prenatal and postpartum care, and so there’s really just a wide variation of care there from state to state, and even from facility to facility. I think that speaks to the larger picture of inequalities in the US. There’s an absence of a social safety net, and we have people turning to the criminal legal system to ensure their basic needs are met. Even before the Dobbs decision that revoked the constitutional right to abortion, accessing it in prison was difficult. Only two percent of participants in the BJS report had abortions; other research has found an even lower rate. What sort of barriers did incarcerated people face when Roe was still the law of the land? Many states have laws that prohibit any sort of state funding to go toward abortion. That includes travel—so if an incarcerated woman is looking to access an abortion out of state, typically you have to have a correctional officer accompany that woman. That would require state funding, to be in a correctional van for transportation and to provide the salary for the accompanying correctional officer. Many women who are incarcerated may not know that they are even pregnant until they come to prison, if they are living on the streets, for example, and haven’t had access to routine health care in some time. And so by the time they learn of their pregnancy, it’s often too late, because many states have laws that regulate the number of weeks that an abortion can be performed. Many pregnant women in custody remain shackled while laboring and giving birth despite the fact that leading medical groups have denounced this practice. What did your interviewees say this experience was like for them?  They felt like they were caged animals. When you are in the state of giving birth, you are extremely vulnerable. You’re not necessarily at a risk of fleeing; there have been no documented cases to date of a woman trying to escape while in labor. Many of the women that I interviewed had cesarean sections, so they were on the operating table, numb from the waist down—you are not going anywhere at that moment. Most women who are incarcerated are there on non-violent crimes, and even if a woman is pregnant who committed a violent crime, she’s not necessarily posing a risk to society while you’re in that vulnerable state of childbirth, where your legs are in stirrups and you have a correctional officer often in the room. Many of these correctional officers are men, and a lot of the women I interviewed talked about how they had experienced sexual abuse growing up, so that adds just another layer of harm when you’re in this very vulnerable state, often in layers of undress or completely naked. Most states have laws on the books now restricting shackling during delivery. But how widespread of a problem does this remain?  It’s really hard to say. A state may have a policy, but then we know that the policy is often different from the reality of what takes place. Many states that have issued restrictions on shackling still leave it up to correctional officers if there is a point of threat or perceived harm. And I think when we look at the different layers here, of who is more likely to be considered harmful or posing a risk to society, that’s women of color. So you still have these tropes that are persisting behind bars. What about prison nursery programs that allow mothers to parent their newborns in prison—what benefits do they offer and why aren’t they more common? [Editor’s note: There are currently eleven state-run prison nursery programs, plus two more operated by the federal Bureau of Prisons.] The first prison nursery program has actually been in place since 1901, so this is not necessarily new. Women who go through a prison nursery program and have access to that oftentimes there are reduced recidivism rates, there’s improved maternal mental health and fetal health outcomes. Otherwise they’re meeting their children, and they’re saying goodbye all in a span of 24 hours, and so that’s going to have negative health implications for years to come.  There are no national mandates or standardized policies governing the incarceration of pregnant women. As a result, it’s up to individual states—and even specific correctional facilities—to decide whether to invest in such programs. Unfortunately, awareness among policymakers remains limited. Prior to the 1900s, reformatories often emphasized family bonds, allowing incarcerated women to live with their newborns—much like today’s prison nursery programs. But by the 1970s, most states moved toward a more punitive approach, passing legislation that effectively eliminated many of these programs. Some of your interviewees used their incarcerations during pregnancy as a “transformative period” and sought to “optimize pregnancy and birth outcomes” despite their circumstances. Can you say more about how they did so?  Many of the women that I interviewed had been pregnant before. Some of them had also been incarcerated before, but this was the first time they were both pregnant and incarcerated. Many of them talked about how being pregnant and incarcerated was rock bottom, and that this was very much a wake up call to do right by their unborn child. Many of the women interviewed talked about how during previous pregnancies they were out on the streets, doing drugs, getting into trouble left and right. And so when they were in prison, it was really this time where they could focus on their pregnancy. So that was really special for them, and it was a time where they were doing their best to take advantage of different programs and initiatives that they maybe had access to in their prisons, like pregnancy support groups, for example, reading all the books and trying their best to implement that advice. The women talked about how when you’re incarcerated, all you have is time to think and make the best choices for your unborn child. Is there anything that surprised you in doing this research? I think one of the biggest takeaways from me was how much hope is found inside prisons, where you have women coming together, given the absence of maternal healthcare, given the absence of institutional resources and support, creating their own networks of community and care. Food was a huge topic; pregnant women in prison don’t have access all the time to regular and nutritious foods. So you have other women who are incarcerated helping them out and coming together and saying, “Hey, I don’t want my baked potato, you can have it because I know you’re pregnant and you need these calories.” Women are also taking pregnant women, especially the younger ones, under their wings, and saying, “be sure to get a job in the kitchen while you’re incarcerated, because that way you have regular access to food.” So you see these informal networks of support. After a woman gives birth, she’s sent back to prison, often within 24 to 48 hours of giving birth and asked to fall back in line as if nothing has happened, even though her world has just been rocked. So you have women who are incarcerated really coming together and rallying around the pregnant women to provide that support and care. What gives you hope for pregnant people in prisons and their newborns?  The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center in Topeka has a program called Play Free, which allows incarcerated mothers and grandmothers to spend a day at the children’s museum playing with their kiddo, free of these cages and environments that are not child- and family-friendly at all. It’s been really great to see the transformation, where it started just as a partnership with the Topeka Correctional Facility, and has since expanded to the men’s facilities in Kansas. You have incarcerated fathers as well, and centering the children in all of this is important.

Speaking at the Museum of the Bible on Monday, President Donald Trump repeated one of his favorite falsehoods as of late: That his deployment of the National Guard in Washington, DC has virtually eliminated crime in the nation’s capital. That is, of course, not true. But if that outright falsehood was not egregious enough, consider that Trump also complained that reports of domestic violence are inflating crime statistics and implied they should not be considered “crimes” at all. “Things that take place in the home, they call crime,” Trump said. “They’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime, see? So now I can’t claim 100 percent.” > Trump minimizes domestic abuse during a talk at the Museum of the Bible: > "Things that take place in the home, they call crime … If a man has a little > fight with the wife, they say this was a crime, see?" > > — Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) 2025-09-08T15:44:26.977Z Dawn Dalton, executive director of the DC Coalition of Domestic Violence, told me on Monday: “We don’t agree with what the president is saying.” Nearly half of women in DC, and more than 40 percent of men, have experienced intimate partner violence or stalking in their lifetimes, according to statistics the coalition compiled last year. Nationwide, an average of two dozen people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “There have been federal and local statutes in place for decades that does name domestic violence as a crime,” Dalton added, “and we know that domestic violence is often a precursor to other crimes, including domestic violence homicides as well as mass shootings.” Indeed, research has found that in nearly 70 percent of mass shootings, perpetrators had a history of domestic violence or had killed at least one partner or family member. “The frequency and the harm [of domestic violence] is not paid enough attention to, and remarks such as the president’s certainly underscore that truth,” Dalton added. Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones: “Of course the President wasn’t talking about or downplaying domestic violence—and any Fake News hacks trying to use this as a political cudgel against the President are doing a great service to actual domestic abusers and criminals around the country.” In fact, Trump has not only downplayed domestic violence through his speech, but also through his actions: His administration has cut millions of dollars in grants earmarked for victims of crime, including domestic violence, and has tried to force domestic violence service providers to agree to hand crime victims over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in order to receive federal dollars. A statement like the one Trump made is also not surprising when you consider the man that uttered it has himself been accused of rape by his ex-wife, Ivana Trump. She later claimed she did not mean it “in a literal or criminal sense,” adding that she “felt violated.” (Trump denied the allegation.) Trump has also stacked his cabinet and surrounded himself with men who have faced similar accusations. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s own mother called him “an abuser of women,” in a 2018 email, though she told the New York Times last year that she subsequently recanted and apologized for it. Hegseth has also been accused of rape and sexually inappropriate behavior, charges which he denies. (Hegseth paid the woman who made the rape accusation, the Washington Post reported, but he alleges the interaction was consensual.) Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was accused of groping a babysitter in the late 1990s. While running for president last year, he texted her to apologize and said he had no memory of the incident. Ex-Department of Government Efficiency head and Trump frenemy Elon Musk was accused of sexual misconduct by a SpaceX flight attendant in 2016, but he denied the claim—after Business Insider reported that the company paid her $250,000 in 2018 to keep her from filing a lawsuit. And Rob Porter, a top White House aide, abruptly resigned during Trump’s first term after two of his ex-wives came forward with domestic abuse allegations, which Trump himself cast doubt on. While there is ample evidence that the police do not always protect domestic violence victims or respond adequately to domestic abuse, it seems very unlikely that this is what Trump was referring to. The man is, after all, about the furthest thing from an abolitionist: His so-called One Big Beautiful Bill allocated more than $100 billion to ICE—the same agency that has created a chilling effect for immigrant survivors of domestic violence seeking help, as I previously reported. And the president has repeatedly threatened to send the National Guard to take over other cities after doing so in DC and Los Angeles. Instead, his latest comments are a throwback to the infamous Access Hollywood tape. Trump seems to believe that, if you’re a man, “you can do anything” to women—and that you deserve to get away with it.

You could say that Taylor Swift and NFL player Travis Kelce’s engagement, announced Tuesday in an Instagram post that has 17 million likes and counting, broke the internet. And right-wingers immediately started talking rings and talking cradles. News outlets sent push alerts. Celebrities and politicians sent their congratulations. “Taylor Swift engaged” was the number one trending search topic on Google, with more than two million searches by early afternoon. The news also ricocheted around right-wing corners of the internet, where leading conservatives said they hoped Swift’s engagement would help achieve some of their top goals, now backed by the Trump-administration: Inspire a nationwide boost in (heterosexual) marriage and birth rates. Ben Shapiro, co-founder of the right-wing Daily Wire news site, called Swift and Kelce’s engagement “unironically an excellent thing” in post on X to his nearly eight million followers. “I hope many other single people follow their example,” he added. Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, said he hopes Swift and Kelce “have lots of kids and end up very happy!” in a post to his five million followers. On his podcast Tuesday, Kirk said he hoped that marriage might make Swift more conservative: “Taylor Swift might go from a cat lady to a JD Vance supporter, and we should celebrate that…she should have more children than she has houses.” > Congratulations @taylorswift13 > > I can't wait to go see a Taylor Kelce Concert! > > To listen to the full podcast — and for daily drops, subscribe to The Charlie > Kirk Podcast on Apple or Spotify! > > LINK https://t.co/Xi9hTbH4hv pic.twitter.com/Do8zmyIV0Q > > — Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) August 26, 2025 Kristan Hawkins, president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life, wrote to her more than 92,000 X followers that she hopes Swift’s engagement “inspires young women to see the joy and purpose in getting married, starting a family, and committing to one person for the rest of their lives.” A bit later, Hawkins followed up with another take, claiming, “America is heading into its “get married & have babies” era.” Lila Rose, a fellow leading anti-abortion activist and founder of the group Live Action, told her more than 394,000 X followers: “Marriage is the best and tons of women look up to Taylor. So happy to see her embracing it.” Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia and author of Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, said to “expect a spike in marriage” following the news. That MAGA would rush to claim this news as a win is not surprising when you consider how hard they have been pushing for more marriage and babies in the second Trump…era (see what I did there?). The Trump administration—and particularly Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk—are obsessed with boosting the declining birth rate, as my colleague Kiera Butler has chronicled. (The president’s promise to make IVF more widely available as part of this, on the other hand, has pretty much gone nowhere.) In the Christian nationalist worldview that shapes many of these right-wing thought leaders, marriage is, of course, a necessary precursor to procreation. A new generation of so-called trad (short for “traditional”) wives are thriving online, extolling the virtues of marriage and motherhood and calling for a return to more traditional gender roles. And federal officials have also signaled their desires to boost marriage rates: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who is married with nine kids of his own, signed a memo in February recommending that his department prioritize “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” Vance has also decried the decline in marriage among young people in a May interview with the New York Times. But, seriously, do the right-wingers who hope Swift will inspire a new army of trad wives know anything about the pop superstar? Even I, an avowed non-Swiftie, know all too well that Swift does not aspire to the MAGA model of marriage and motherhood that they’re hoping for. First, Swift endorsed then-Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over Trump in the election, in an Instagram post featuring a photo of her with a cat—an obvious dig at Vice President JD Vance’s derision of so-called “childless cat ladies.” Secondly, while Swift has talked about wanting marriage and children, she has also spoken out against the pressure for women to think about having children once they turn 30. And perhaps most significantly, Swift has sung at length about resisting the double standards and traditional pressures women face. I mean…have they ever listened to “Lavender Haze“? > All they keep askin’ me (all they keep askin’ me) > Is if I’m gonna be your bride > The only kind of girl they see (only kind of girl they see) > Is a one-night or a wife > > […] > > Surreal, I’m damned if I do give a damn what people say > No deal, the 1950s shit they want from me Or “Bejeweled“? > They ask, “Do you have a man?” > I can still say, “I don’t remember” As Sam Van Pykeren, one of Mother Jones‘ resident Swifties, pointed out, the right-wing discourse around this proves that even Swift—one of the most famous and wealthy women in the world—can’t escape MAGA logic: Women only achieve their full value when they’re wifed up. Ruth Murai, Anna Yeo, and Sam Van Pykeren contributed reporting.

On Wednesday morning, the Labor Department quietly reposted grants aimed at getting women workers into fields like construction and manufacturing, tow months after DOGE sanctimoniously canceled the program. The move came as a shock to employees. DOGE previously eliminated dozens of the congressionally-mandated Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grants, which support recruiting and training women in industries in fields like construction, manufacturing, and information technology. As Mother Jones previously reported, DOGE cancelled the funds, which it dismissed as “wasteful DEI grants,” back in May. The Labor Department is trying to spin the renewed availability of the $5 million grants as proof of the Trump administration’s support for women in the workforce, even though the administration is also trying to eliminate the congressionally-mandated, 105-year-old Women’s Bureau that administers them. Instead, employees at the department say the agency’s attempted spin is laughable and yet another example of the administration backtracking on cutting support for marginalized populations after public outcry. “The press release makes it sound like it’s something they came up with,” said Gayle Goldin, former deputy director of the Women’s Bureau under the Biden administration. “This is a multi-decade grant program that has had bipartisan support for years.” A DOL employee familiar with the work of the Women’s Bureau agreed, adding, “This seems to be on trend for them, taking credit for revamping programs when they are largely the same.” (The DOL employees who spoke to Mother Jones for this story were granted anonymity for fear of retribution, given that a department official previously threatened staff who spoke to journalists with “serious legal consequences,” including criminal charges, ProPublica reported.) In fact, experts say the extent to which the program has been altered merely dilutes its goals. Compared to last year’s detailed guidelines for the grant, this year’s eliminate prior references to prioritizing “historically underrepresented communities,” such as women of color, women with disabilities, and women at or below the federal poverty line, and transgender and nonbinary people. Another DOL employee called those changes “unfortunate,” pointing to recent federal data showing a rise in Black women’s unemployment. “To remove this focus on underrepresented communities, it just makes it less likely that the organizations that ultimately get awarded will intentionally make sure that they are reaching all women, including and especially the ones who frankly need it the most,” that employee said. Another major change in this year’s grants: It reduces the amount of funds that can be used for supportive services like child care for participants’ kids or transportation to help them get to training programs. “We know how critical supportive services are to recruiting and retaining women in these programs,” the DOL employee added. The previously cancelled WANTO grants, which will not be restored despite the new funding announcement, were used to support programs for getting women and nonbinary into construction in places like North Carolina and Mississippi. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, cited some of these details included in my previous reporting when she questioned Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer about the status of WANTO grants at a House Appropriations Committee hearing. (Chavez-DeRemer declined to comment on the specific WANTO cuts at that hearing.) Prior grantees and experts have mixed feelings about the latest development. Goldin, the former deputy director of the Women’s Bureau under Biden, said that on the one hand, “it is surprising, in a good way, to see the grant announcement back up.” “At the same time,” she added, “I feel like this administration is all over the place. Do they actually want women in the workforce? If so, I really hope organizations apply for this grant funding and that they go ahead and fund them.” Nora Spencer’s North Carolina nonprofit, Hope Renovations, which supports and trains women and nonbinary people to work in construction, lost about $300,000 of its $700,000 WANTO grant in May. “We have gone through all of this frustration and heartache from the grants being taken away,” she told me on Wednesday, “and now they’re back again with no notice to us.” Spencer is unsure if she will reapply, citing ethical concerns about seeking the funding when this administration does not want to support historically marginalized populations. Those requirements, she said, would “limit the people that we can serve.” Rhoni Basden, executive director of Vermont Works for Women, a nonprofit that supports women’s and young people’s career development, also does not know if she will reapply. She had the remainder of her organization’s $400,000 WANTO grant cancelled back in May, and she did not know that the grants had been reopened for applications until I contacted her on Wednesday morning. The application deadline is in less than a month, and her organization’s prior WANTO-funded work was focused on serving marginalized populations, which seem to conflict with this administration’s priorities. Using funds for support services to help participants in rural Vermont attend their programming or pay for childcare was also critical, she said. “For us specifically,” she said, “it feels dismantling and backwards.” Spokespeople for the Labor Department did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

The US Supreme Court announced Thursday that it will hear a pair of cases in the fall involving state laws in that ban transgender girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s school sports. The cases originate in Idaho, which passed the country’s first trans youth sports ban in 2020, and West Virginia, which followed in 2021. In both states, transgender students represented by the ACLU filed lawsuits and succeeded in blocking the laws. Now, the states—both of which are represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-right legal group behind many of the Supreme Court’s anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion decisions—are asking the justices to reverse the lower courts and declare the bans constitutional. The high court’s decision to review the cases comes just two weeks after its landmark 6-3 ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, in which it upheld a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors, and a week since its ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, when the same conservative supermajority sided with parents seeking to opt their children out of LGBT-inclusive lessons. In the days since then, the justices have ordered lower courts to reopen cases that had been won by transgender plaintiffs—including rulings that had prevented state-sponsored health insurance plans from excluding gender-affirming care and required a state to let trans residents change the sex marker on their birth certificates. > “I just want to have a chance to participate in school sports like any other > girl,” the 11-year-old plaintiff in the West Virginia case wrote in a > declaration to the court . Now the Supreme Court will take up the constitutionality of transgender sports bans. The Idaho case, Little v. Hecox, was originally filed by Lindsay Hecox, a trans woman and first-year student at Boise State who wanted to run on the women’s cross-country team. Joining her was an anonymous cisgender girl worried about the part of the law that created a “sex dispute verification process” requiring girls and women in school sports to undergo medical exams if someone challenged their femaleness. Meanwhile, in West Virginia v. B.P.J, 11-year-old plaintiff Becky Pepper-Jackson wanted to try out for the girls’ cross-country team. “I just want to have a chance to participate in school sports like any other girl,” she wrote in a declaration in the case. “It is frustrating and hurtful that some people want to take that chance away from me and treat me differently from everyone else just because I am transgender.” Laws restricting trans athletes’ participation in sports have proliferated across the country over the past five years, along with laws targeting their medical care, their school bathroom use, and LGBTQ themes in school curricula. Today, lawmakers in 27 states have forbidden trans girls and women from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity, typically arguing that trans athletes have biological differences that make sports less fair and less safe for cisgender participants. Yet an effort to pass a nationwide trans sports ban failed in Congress this year, after Democrats argued that it would require invasive and potentially abusive sex testing of girls and women in sports and pointed out how few trans athletes there really are. Among the 510,000 total NCAA athletes last year, NCAA President Charlie Baker testified that he knew of fewer than 10 who were transgender. Opponents of trans athletes notched another major victory this week when the University of Pennsylvania, under pressure from the Trump administration announced that it would ban trans women from women’s sports teams, revoke the records of swimmer Lia Thomas, who became the first openly trans athlete to win a NCAA Division I title in 2022, and apologize to women swimmers “disadvantaged” by Thomas’ participation on the Penn women’s swim team. In March, the Supreme Court announced it will also review laws banning anti-LGBTQ conversion therapy on kids.

At a time when Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of reproductive health care, faces unprecedented threats to its very survival on multiple fronts, the Supreme Court added another one on Thursday. In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that if states decide to unilaterally cut off Medicaid funding to a healthcare provider—in this case Planned Parenthood—patients cannot sue to stop them. Justice Neil Gorsuch authored the decision in the case, known as Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. In his opinion, he wrote that the Medicaid provision that protects patients’ ability to choose their doctor lacks the “rights-creating language” needed for patients to bring federal lawsuits when a state restricts their choice. In a dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the decision would gut the landmark Reconstruction-era civil rights law giving ordinary citizens the ability to sue in federal court when their rights are violated. “South Carolina asks us to hollow out that provision so that the State can evade liability for violating the rights of its Medicaid recipients to choose their own doctors,” she wrote. The case began in 2018, when South Carolina Republican Gov. Henry McMaster disqualified the regional Planned Parenthood affiliate from receiving Medicaid reimbursements for the extensive non-abortion services it offers, such as birth control, sexually transmitted infection treatment, and screening for cervical and breast cancer. (Medicaid already doesn’t cover abortion, except in cases of rape, incest, or when the patient’s life is in danger. Nonetheless, many conservative states impose restrictions on their Medicaid programs that make it nearly impossible to access the procedure even under those circumstances.) As I reported in April, there was no dispute that McMaster’s decision was motivated by anti-abortion politics, rather than genuine concerns over patient safety or medical qualifications: > Everyone seemed to agree that in 2018, when [McMaster] suddenly declared that > the state would no longer consider Planned Parenthood South Atlantic a > “qualified provider” for Medicaid purposes, it had nothing to do with medicine > and everything to do with politics. “The payment of taxpayer funds to abortion > clinics, for any purpose, results in the subsidy of abortion and the denial of > the right to life,” McMaster reasoned in his executive order, as he > effectively cut access to birth control and basic health screenings for his > state’s poorest residents in an attempt to financially punish Planned > Parenthood. > > > > Congress amended the federal Medicaid law in 1967 to ensure that patients > would have the “free choice” to see any “qualified” provider who takes > Medicaid. The whole point of that provision was to stop states from > artificially restricting patients’ options. So, in response to McMaster’s > order, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and one of its Medicaid patients, > Julie Edwards, sued the state, arguing that it had violated patients’ right to > choose their provider. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, it had become a technical dispute over whether patients like Edwards even had the right to file such lawsuits, or if the federal government was alone in enforcing the free-choice-of-provider provision. During oral argument, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that the federal government’s only power to enforce the provision would be to pull Medicaid funding from noncompliant states—an extremely unlikely scenario. As a result, with today’s decision, the Court has removed one of the only practical ways to stop a state from punishing doctors it doesn’t like by kicking them out of Medicaid program. “Today’s decision is a direct attack on reproductive health care, and it is a dangerous green light for politicians to target any providers they don’t like,” said Jennifer Driver, Senior Director of Reproductive Rights at State Innovation Exchange, in a statement. “By allowing South Carolina politicians to block people enrolled in Medicaid from accessing care at Planned Parenthood, the Court has opened the door for extremist lawmakers across the country to do the same.” The ruling is a victory for the powerful conservative Christian legal group, Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the state of South Carolina in an increasingly common arrangement. ADF has long worked to obliterate abortion rights and is one of the forces behind the fall of Roe v. Wade and legal attacks on the abortion pill, as well as major anti-LGBTQ laws and Supreme Court cases. Thursday’s decision could pave the way for states beyond South Carolina to block Medicaid reimbursements to Planned Parenthood—or any other disfavored medical provider. As a result, it threatens access to care for Medicaid patients who rely on Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, Congress is considering separate moves to “defund” Planned Parenthood—and gut Medicaid entirely. Trump’s proposed budget, currently under consideration in the Senate, would block Medicaid reimbursements to nonprofits that offer reproductive health care if they also provide abortion. That policy change could force nearly 200 of Planned Parenthood’s approximately 600 health centers to close, the organization says. It’s part of the GOP’s proposed $723 billion in cuts to Medicaid—cuts projected to leave nearly 11 million people without health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Trump administration is also attacking another federal funding stream for Planned Parenthood and similar clinics. Title X provides grants to health centers so they can offer free or reduced-cost family planning services to low-income and uninsured people. As of last year, 49 percent of patient visits at Planned Parenthood health centers were paid for by Medicaid or Title X funding. In April, Trump announced it would withhold tens of millions in Title X grants to Planned Parenthood, affecting 297 clinics in 34 states and Washington, DC. And his budget proposes eliminating Title X entirely. “They know so much of our patient base is on Medicaid or needs Title X to pay for their care,” Planned Parenthood of Michigan chief external affairs officer Ashlea Phenicie told NBC News in early June. “They know that cutting this off will allow them to cut off access to abortion and they are willing to make that trade.”

In late March, the US Department of Education put state education officials on notice: No longer would the federal government tolerate what the agency described in a Dear Colleague Letter as the widespread infringement on parents’ rights to direct the schooling of their kids. “By natural right and moral authority, parents are the primary protectors of their children,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon declared in a cover letter attached to the guidance. “Yet many states and school districts have enacted policies that presume children need protection from their parents.” Like many of the executive orders and other directives coming out of the Trump administration since January, the guidance focused largely on trans and queer students—in this case, their right to privacy (or lack thereof). But McMahon’s sweeping rhetoric framed the issue as something much bigger. “Attempts by school officials to separate children from their parents, convince children to feel unsafe at home, or burden children with the weight of keeping secrets from their loved ones is a direct affront to the family unit,” she wrote. The US Supreme Court has long held that the parental right to direct the upbringing of one’s children is fundamental. But McMahon’s letter highlights how the Trump administration is weaponizing that idea to a degree that scholars and advocates say is unprecedented at the national level. The ideology of parental rights has emerged as a cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda, repeatedly invoked by him and others to justify the rollback of a wide range of policies—involving civil rights, education, public health, and reproductive health—that conservatives have vociferously opposed.  Some of the biggest supporters of the Trump administration’s actions are Christian nationalists intent on imposing a near-limitless idea of parental rights on American society, legal scholars and children’s rights advocates say. In the view of religious ultraconservatives, any government infringement on the right of parents to control every aspect of their children’s upbringing violates both the laws of the land and the laws of God.  > “Christian nationalists feel like, with Trump in control, they have the > political and cultural momentum, and they’re pushing to make this happen right > now.” “Christian nationalists feel like, with Trump in control, they have the political and cultural momentum behind them, and they’re pushing to make this happen right now,” says Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma and a leading scholar of the religious right. “They feel like, OK, this is our chance, and we are not going to apologize about pushing our agenda.” The parental rights agenda has found eager supporters on Capitol Hill, in state legislatures, and with state and federal courts. Here are some examples: * In January, Republicans in both houses of Congress introduced the “Families’ Rights and Responsibilities Act,” which would empower parents to use parental rights as a defense for any behavior that falls short of “serious physical injury” to or death of their child. * At least 22 states have enshrined “parental bills of rights” into their laws, reports the ultra-conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, which was responsible for Project 2025, the policy blueprint for the Trump 2.0 era. One of those states, Texas, just passed another bill that prohibits the government from infringing on “the fundamental rights granted to parents by their Creator.” Among other things, it bans DEI hiring programs in K-12 schools and school-authorized LGBTQ clubs. * Lawmakers and courts have been using parental rights to roll back reproductive protections for minors. In May, a Florida appeals court ruled that the state’s “judicial bypass” law allowing teenagers to seek a judge’s sign-off for an abortion violated the rights of parents. Last year, the ultraconservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals partially sided with a Texas father who sued to block Title X clinics in the state from offering birth control to minors without parental consent.  * Even child labor protections have been getting the “parental rights” treatment, with more than a dozen states weakening labor laws for children since 2021. An expansive idea of parental rights is also before the US Supreme Court this term. The case of Mahmoud v. Taylor was brought by a group of religious parents who opposed the required reading of LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks in public schools. A decision is expected by the end of June.  Legal scholars note that increasingly, conservatives are deploying “parental rights” as a way to advance regressive and unpopular social policies. Their strategy has been successful because “almost everybody can agree on the importance of parental rights,” says Naomi Cahn, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. “It’s a good Trojan horse.” But for Christian nationalists, “parental rights” is much more than a buzz phrase—it is part of a deeply held belief system, rooted in religion and patriarchy. They’re not egalitarians, Perry says. “They live in a world of authorities and hierarchies. One of those includes parents [having authority] over their children.” He points out that allowing “for the possibility that a child could kick against that [authority] to carve out their own space…is out of the question.” > “They live in a world of authorities and hierarchies. One of those includes > parents [having authority] over their children.” Whatever adherents are motivated by—a sincerely held belief in the rights of parents, or something more cynical—the expansion of parental rights comes at a cost to the very children that conservatives vow to “protect,” child advocates warn. “They may want to cloak this in the words ‘parents’ rights,’ but it’s about authoritarianism,” says Rebecca Gudeman, who leads health policy initiatives at the National Center for Youth Law. “It’s not about one parent’s ability to create a safe space for their child, it’s about controlling society.” Parental rights are far from being a new rallying cry. They have been invoked to support or oppose a slew of policies for over a century—titans of industry in the 1920s, for example, warned that restricting child labor would threaten the “fundamental institution” of the family. Around the same time, the Supreme Court issued two seminal opinions establishing parental rights in education: Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, which respectively struck down an English-only instruction law and a compulsory public education law. But the modern parental rights movement was born when the Supreme Court ordered public schools to desegregate in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Fearmongering by white parents about the federal government’s infringement on their right to direct their children’s schooling led to the widespread establishment of segregation academies: whites-only private schools, some receiving government funding, many of them religiously based. “You had largely evangelical Christian conservative populations in the American South say, ‘This was about family values, this is about traditional families. It’s not about racism. It’s just about us wanting to control our own families and their education,’” Perry says. “But of course, it looks a lot like segregation, and it looks a lot like just retreating from mainstream culture and values.”   Over the years, many of the hardest-fought parental-rights battles have been waged over education and reproductive health. In the 1980s and ’90s, its rhetoric was used to challenge sex education in public schools and school curriculums more broadly and to push for the right of parents to withdraw their children from school and teach them at home. Parental rights arguments also led to the passage of dozens of state laws requiring parental consent or notification for minors seeking abortion after Roe v. Wade in 1973.  > In the past, parental rights laws were aimed at “giving parents an individual > decision about whether to opt in or opt out of something, or to make an > individualized decision for their child.” Now, many of these laws “create > mandates coming top down from the state.” Importantly, most parental-rights laws of this era were aimed at “giving parents an individual decision about whether to opt in or opt out of something or to make an individualized decision for their child,” says abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. But since 2020, that’s changed: Now many of these laws “create mandates coming top down from the state, imposing [ideas or actions] on all parents in the name of parents’ rights.” The pandemic was a turning point for the parental rights movement. With school closures in early 2020, parents became much more involved in their children’s education—and many were clamoring for school re-openings or appalled by what they saw. Add to this, the “racial reckoning” that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and conservatives became mobilized in opposing curriculum changes around the teaching of American history. “Covid-19 opened parents’ eyes to the pervasive indoctrination taking place in many classrooms,” McMahon wrote in her March letter to educators. “Families across the country saw gender ideology and critical race theory taught on-screen at their own kitchen tables.”  Beginning in earnest in 2021, issues like vaccine requirements and mask mandates were weaponized in the name of parental rights by fledgling rightwing groups like Moms for Liberty as well as conservative behemoths such as the Alliance Defending Freedom. But the parental rights movement’s biggest obsession was diversity and school curricula focused on America’s racial, and racist, history. The CRT Forward Tracking Project at the UCLA law school found that local, state, and federal government bodies introduced nearly 900 policy proposals targeting critical race theory and diversity initiatives from September 2020 through the end of 2024. “Parents’ rights cannot help but be racialized,” UCLA law professor LaToya Baldwin Clark wrote in the Yale Law Journal in 2023, calling the parental rights movement and the anti-CRT movement “twins.” “The movements work in tandem because they are born from the same parent: White supremacy.” The next wave of bills focused on queer and trans kids. Queer acceptance—particularly the notion that children can be trans—was a direct threat not only to the order of men and women in society but to the authority of parents over children, Perry says. Hundreds of anti-trans bills, pushed by religious right groups, flooded state legislatures in the latter half of Joe Biden’s presidency. When Florida passed its then-groundbreaking Parental Rights in Education bill in 2022—banning, among other things, teaching about gender and sexuality from kindergarten through third grade—then-Republican House Speaker Chris Sprowls called the year “the session of Florida parents.” Meanwhile, the overturning of Roe v. Wade has led to a new flurry of actions targeting minors seeking abortion and other forms of reproductive care—notably, “abortion trafficking bans” in Idaho and Tennessee that make it a crime to help teenagers cross state lines to get an abortion. Cases like these prompted Ziegler and her colleagues to take a broader look at how parental rights are being used by conservatives: not to protect individual parents’ rights but to bring about a sweeping policy realignment that rolls back progressive policies. They call this strategy “retrenchment by diversion.”  “The idea is that you have to invoke some other goal—[in this case,] parental rights—to advance your agenda when you know that voters would be much more likely to reject it if you named what it was you were prioritizing,” Ziegler says. “There are bona fide movements for parental rights, and then there are movements with very different agendas that have hitched their star to parental rights arguments when they think doing so will help.”  > “There are bona fide movements for parental rights, and then there are > movements with very different agendas that have hitched their star to parental > rights arguments when they think doing so will help.”  Conservatives stop short of promoting parental rights when to do so would conflict with their other beliefs—like banning gender-affirming medical care for trans youth, regardless of whether parents support such care for their own children. Maxine Eichner, a family law scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sees this as evidence that the real goal of many parental rights bills is to turn back the clock on broad policies that conservatives abhor. “Recent uses of parental consent statutes seem like a subtle, or not so subtle, attempt by legislatures just to force minors to forgo some activity that the legislature simply doesn’t like,” Eichner says. Perry has seen what he describes as “a form of local resistance among red states to push parental rights” transformed, after Trump’s election, to become “mainstreamed at the national level.” It doesn’t matter to the religious right that Trump isn’t exactly a model Christian, Perry adds. The president is “Christian enough” since he represents a political vision that Christian nationalists want: A strong patriarch willing to break things in pursuit of what they see as righteous goals. “Whether they think Donald Trump should teach their Sunday school, I think they wouldn’t have that,” Perry says. But “he fights for their team. He is powerful. He doesn’t apologize, he’s not democratic, he’s not egalitarian. He’s an authority, and he issues executive orders, which they love. … So they do see him as a Christian leader in as much as he is leading our country back to ultimate authority: authority of the Bible, patriarchal authority, authority of God.”  This aggressive push for a no-guardrails version of parental rights has made children’s rights advocates deeply alarmed, because, put simply, parents don’t always act in the best interest of their children. Certainly, many well-meaning parents make decisions with good intentions that nonetheless end up having long-term negative consequences for their children. But as it expands its power, the parental rights movement is resisting efforts to impose minimal constraints in order to protect children from harm.  For example, this year’s battle over homeschooling regulation in Illinois. The state has among the loosest regulations on homeschooling in the United States, with no record-keeping mandates or requirements that a parent or other teacher has a high school diploma or a GED. When the legislature tried to pass a law addressing the lack of regulations—prompted by an investigation by ProPublica and Capitol News Illinois, which found that fatal child abuse went unaddressed due to the state’s homeschooling laws—homeschool advocates, supported by the Home School Legal Defense Association, launched a nationally-reaching opposition campaign. The bill’s sponsor, Democrat Rep. Terra Costa Howard, told multiple news outlets that she received a death threat in the mail. “God said ‘Do Not Kill,’ but also said ‘Smite thine enemy.’ We’re watching,” the anonymous letter read. > View this post on Instagram > > > > > A post shared by HSLDA (@hslda) The anti-regulation campaign was effective: Despite passing out of committee, the bill never received a floor vote in the Democrat-controlled House and died when the legislative session ended on May 31. That disappointed a homeschool reform advocate I’ll call Elizabeth, who calls the legislation’s attempts at oversight “bare minimum.” Elizabeth was homeschooled in Illinois from third through eighth grade and says her later education and transition to the workforce suffered from a lack of structure, oversight, and accountability. “The sheer spectrum of what can go wrong is so wide,” she says, “from something this simple like, I just was not educated, to situations of deep and horrific abuse that can happen when there’s [no regulation] in place.” The parental rights movement thinks about issues in terms of what parents want, rather than what children need, says Anna, another woman whose childhood experiences being homeschooled in Illinois have made her an advocate for more regulation. “My parents are the consumers of homeschooling, they’re the consumers of the curriculum,” Anna says. “But once I turn 18, they are done.” And then it’s left to the now-adult homeschooled children to pick up the pieces.  > “We have this legal historical construct, both in the world of policy and the > world of litigation, we have been trying to shed, which is that children are > chattel.” Homeschooling is far from the only issue that worries children’s rights advocates contemplating the Trump 2.0 era. In opposing the proposed “Families’ Rights and Responsibilities Act” introduced by Republicans in Congress, the bipartisan advocacy organization First Focus Campaign for Children underscores the threats to children’s well-being. Child abuse that falls short of “serious injury or death” would be harder to prosecute, particularly with the built-in parental rights defense afforded by the bill. State-level vaccine mandates for education could be nullified (alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push for greater vaccine scrutiny at the federal level). Requirements that parents “make and consent to” all healthcare for children would prevent adolescents from accessing STI treatment, mental health care, and reproductive health services, while likely denying them the right to refuse medical treatment that has proven to be harmful, including anti-queer “conversion” therapy.  “Parents are the guardians and not the owners of children,” First Focus Campaign for Children President Bruce Lesley wrote in a February letter to lawmakers. “Policymakers should reject philosophies that treat children as the property of parents or that assume children lack independent reason, agency, or understanding of their own ‘best interests.’” It’s a battle that’s as old as this country. For much of our history, white women were considered the property of their husbands and children the property of their fathers (marriages between enslaved people weren’t legally recognized, and neither were their parental rights). The family patriarch could force his children to work, enlist his sons in the military, marry off his daughters, and otherwise harm his children under the guise of corrective punishment. “We have this legal historical construct, both in the world of policy and the world of litigation, we have been trying to shed, which is that children are chattel,” says Kristen Weber, the National Center for Youth Law’s senior director of child welfare. The rise of the parental rights movement makes one thing clear, she adds: “We haven’t really fully gotten there.”

On Monday, as ICE swept Los Angeles with raids in President Donald Trump’s escalating drive for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, a client of the Survivor Justice Center had an appointment for a court hearing.  The purpose was to secure a permanent, five-year restraining order against her abuser, who had already violated a temporary restraining order, according to Carmen McDonald, executive director of the organization, which supports immigrant survivors of domestic violence. The woman had been dealing with extensive physical abuse, McDonald said, which—coupled with her abuser’s violation of a prior order—made getting stronger protection critical. But on Tuesday, the day after the hearing was to take place, McDonald learned from a staffer that the survivor had not shown up. Based on the woman’s immigration status, prior concerns she had shared with staff, the fact that ICE has been ramping up arrests at courthouses, and the agency’s ongoing raids across LA, McDonald and her staff believe the woman was likely afraid of being detained. As of Thursday, their client remains missing—“likely back with her abuser,” McDonald says. If so, she could be in serious danger: Advocates say survivors wind up at increased risk just after they file for a restraining order or try to leave an abuser. “She literally had to choose [between] physical harm or potential [ICE] custody,” said McDonald, who added that the survivor had a pathway to citizenship independently from her abuser. McDonald believes that “it’s the fear and the tearing apart of families that kept her in a dangerous situation.”  > “She literally had to choose: physical harm or potential [ICE] custody.” McDonald is one of a half-dozen domestic violence service providers in the LA area who told Mother Jones that the increased presence of ICE over the past week is creating a chilling effect for their organizations and the undocumented survivors they serve. Despite President Donald Trump’s claims he would “protect women,” advocates contend that intense immigration enforcement in LA and elsewhere is putting women and LGBTQ people, who experience the majority of domestic violence, at increased risk by making them less likely to seek help for fear of being detained. A recent federal policy change allowing immigration enforcement at domestic violence shelters and similar organizations has also created more barriers for undocumented survivors, who advocates say already deal with abusers threatening to report them to ICE or take their children out of the country as means of control. “When you send enforcement agents into courthouses and you take such broad immigration actions, you’re actually making it less safe for survivors because of this chilling effect,” said Connie Chung Joe, chief executive officer of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California. “Now victims are more scared about getting detained or separated from their children and family, and that becomes scarier than [not] being able to protect themselves against their abusers.” Local domestic violence advocates say the prospect of ICE appearing at shelters is their worst fear. That has become a more pressing concern since January, when the Trump administration rescinded guidance the Biden administration implemented characterizing domestic violence shelters and victim services centers, among others, as “protected spaces” where immigration enforcement should not take place due to the harm it could inflict on a community. The Trump administration’s updated guidance says ICE officials will make “case-by-case determinations regarding whether, where and when to conduct an immigration enforcement action in or near a protected area.”  According to Cristina Verez, legal and policy director at the immigrants’ rights organization ASISTA, the policy change led to “a flood of concerns and questions about what that meant for [domestic violence] orgs and how they could…protect everyone at those locations.” Several service providers in LA note that many of their staff are also from mixed-status families, making the concerns relevant to both staff and survivors.  > “It’s the fear and the tearing apart of families that kept her in a dangerous > situation.”  The policy change already appears to be having an impact. On Wednesday, LA city councilor Hugo Soto-Martinez said in a video posted to Instagram that ICE had shown up at a confidential domestic violence shelter, apparently in search of one person who was not present. “How they found out this information, we don’t know,” Soto-Martinez said in the video. (Federal laws protect individual survivors’ confidentiality, and many shelters keep their locations secret.) “These are places where people go and find refuge and try to be safe fleeing violence,” the lawmaker added. (His office did not immediately provide further information on the alleged incident; spokespeople for ICE, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and LA Mayor Karen Bass did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.) Chung Joe, McDonald, and two other LA service providers say their organizations have seen increases just this past week in survivors calling and asking for advice on how to navigate ICE. “Our clients are calling and scared, asking, ‘Can I go to my doctor’s appointment? Can I go to this Pride event? Can I take my kids to school?’” McDonald said. She added that of the approximately 1,000 survivors her organization serves per year, 70 percent are immigrants and more than half of those are undocumented. Another LA-area service provider who is not being identified for fear of retaliation added: “Domestic violence programs, rape crisis programs, should be safe sanctuaries, and we can’t even guarantee that anymore.”  LA-area service providers said they have ramped up “know your rights” trainings and implemented pandemic-era precautions to avoid potential raids. One LA organization that supports South Asian survivors said that its staff has been working from home since Monday, leaving their in-person office temporarily closed. Two other organizations located in areas close to raids also reported closing physical spaces where survivors can typically drop in to get resources; one provider said her organization left a note on its door instructing survivors to call their help line for assistance, and started what she calls “difficult conversations” with clients in shelter about how to prepare for the worst-case scenario: line up emergency contacts, gather their documents, and designate someone safe to take care of their kids if they are detained. “We don’t know if we’re sending a client to sit in a lobby to wait for a service, [if] ICE will come in,” the provider said.  Some providers say their clients have also been afraid to appear in-person for court hearings—as McDonald believes her missing client was—and have instead opted for virtual appointments. In California, state courts do not deport undocumented people, who can access domestic violence restraining orders and other family court services regardless of their status. Immigrant survivors of domestic violence and related crimes can also often access pathways to citizenship through special visas. But these protections can feel meaningless for undocumented survivors in light of Trump’s mass deportation efforts coupled with ICE’s increasing presence in and near courthouses. “They can’t afford to be detained and separated from their children or their families, so they’d rather just stay with their abusers,” said Chung Joe. > “If we keep these individuals from walking through the doors to any of these > facilities because of fear, then as society, we have failed them.” Some lawmakers have floated special protections for domestic violence shelters that they say are newly relevant in light of what’s happening in LA. Susan Rubio, a Democratic state senator in California, has put forth a bill that would prohibit immigration enforcement in private sections of shelters for homelessness, human trafficking, and domestic violence, along with rape crisis centers, without a judicial warrant. “If we keep these individuals from walking through the doors to any of these facilities because of fear, then as society, we have failed them,” said Rubio, who is also a survivor of domestic violence. The legislation has passed the Senate and has been referred for committee hearings in the Assembly. Similar legislation was recently proposed in New York and signed into law in Maryland. Casey Swegman, director of public policy at Tahirih Justice Center, an organization that serves immigrant survivors, said she is “heartened that states are taking up the mantle,” adding that these bills “empower the staff at those agencies to leverage the law to better implement policies at their shelter.”  At the federal level, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) has reintroduced the WISE Act in this session of Congress, a bill that offers a slate of additional protections for immigrant survivors, including prohibiting protections at domestic violence shelters and similarly sensitive locations. “When ICE shows up at domestic violence shelters or arrests survivors seeking help, it only empowers abusers, who too often use immigration status as a threat to keep people in abusive situations. This also impacts public safety overall by making immigrants fearful of local police and less likely to report abuse,” Jayapal said in a statement provided to Mother Jones. As promising as those bills may be, advocates say they cannot stem the immediate fear facing undocumented survivors, in LA and across the country. “Our clients are already living in fear,” McDonald, from Survivor Justice Center, points out. “Now, they’re afraid at home and they’re afraid in the community.”  If you or someone you care about is experiencing or at risk of domestic violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by texting “start” to 88788 or calling 800-799-SAFE (7233) or visiting thehotline.org. The Alliance for Immigrant Survivors also offers a list of resources, and the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence maintains a directory of organizations across the state.