On a dark November evening, I find myself outside one of the units at a garden-style apartment complex in Memphis, its parking lot alight in flashing blues and reds. The police are here—about a dozen cars—responding to reports of a violent crime. I’m accompanied by Mauricio Calvo, a 50-year-old local whose friend Diego lives here. Calvo knocks. “Soy yo,” he whispers at the door—“It’s me.” “I told him not to open the door under any circumstance,” he informs me. The door cracks open and Calvo nudges me through. I’m disoriented. It’s pitch-black inside, curtains drawn, lights off. Diego stands in the entryway, but I only see the outline of his body, not his face. Buenas noches, he whispers, and guides us to the living room. A little boy comes up beside me. “I wanna play!” he says in English, gesturing toward the TV and Xbox. Nobody turns it on. This family has nothing to do with the situation outside, but still they are hiding. Diego, not his real name, explains that when the police pulled into the lot earlier that night, he instinctively hit the floor as though dodging bullets. “We were afraid, because what we are feeling these days is immigration is everywhere,” he tells me in Spanish, voice shaking. He and his wife—a Dreamer whose parents brought her to the United States as a child—and three of their four kids, all US citizens, stayed that way about 10 minutes, flat on the ground in the dark. Then they called Calvo, who leads Latino Memphis, an organization that helps immigrants. “I got very scared they could start knocking on doors looking for the suspect and scared they would take him,” Diego’s wife says, nodding at her undocumented husband. She knew that where police go in Memphis, lately at least, there will be immigration officers, too. On September 29, the Trump administration launched the Memphis Safe Task Force, deploying, according to the Washington Post, some 1,700 federal officers from a mix of agencies, ostensibly to help the Tennessee Highway Patrol, the Memphis Police Department (MPD), and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office crack down on crime. It’s one of many such task forces the administration has launched, or plans to launch, nationally. The MPD has reported success—large declines in serious crimes reported since the feds arrived. The feds are getting something out of the arrangement, too; local cops are chauffeuring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers around town, leaving many immigrant families afraid to leave their homes. Some refer to the task force as “the occupation” and say the feds are using the crime issue as a Trojan horse. “I feel nervous—I have to protect them and myself,” Diego’s 12-year-old daughter tells me as she sits beside her parents in the dark. “I’ve lived here for a long time,” Diego adds, “and I’ve never seen so many police cars.” Neither have I. Though I’m new to Memphis, I’ve been reporting on the criminal justice system for more than a decade and have spent time in cities with a lot of law enforcement. I’ve also lived in an authoritarian country overseas, yet I’ve never experienced a police presence like this. Some Memphians critical of the surge liken the city to a war zone, with helicopters circling over neighborhoods, National Guard officers patrolling downtown, and unmarked law enforcement vehicles in the streets. Immigrant citizens carry their US passports, lest they be detained. One volunteer I spoke with compared the vibe to 1930s Germany. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, has welcomed the task force, and Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, has cooperated, crediting the effort for reducing 911 calls about gun violence. But Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, another Democrat, compares occupied Memphis to a failed state. “Our risk is that [America is] gonna become a Yemen or a North Korea, or something else altogether, where there is an armed individual with a semi-automatic weapon and military fatigues on many corners,” he told me. “There may be zero crime, but we also won’t be leaving our houses. I know that’s a dark scenario, but that’s kind of where we are.” My hours spent in the dark with Diego’s family—and talking with local activists, teachers, businesspeople, and residents—revealed how the militarized federal onslaught is reshaping daily life in blue cities like Memphis, keeping kids out of school and parents from work, and turning grocery shopping into a mission that risks one’s family being torn apart. When I finally left Diego’s complex that night, a police cruiser whipped past, lights and siren blaring, followed by another, and another—more than 20 in all—racing off to terrorize another neighborhood. Andrea Morales/MLK50 I had arrived in town three days earlier, hoping to document a local surge of federal law enforcement that hadn’t received nearly as much attention as those in cities like Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles. That’s partly because the residents of Memphis—a blue city in a deeply red state—have not responded with the same headline-grabbing protests. There are no inflatable frogs, no sandwich-hurling federal employees, no throngs of demonstrators trying to block ICE vehicles. The thinking, Calvo speculates, is that “less resistance will make these people less interested in being here, and they will just move on. It’s like, why poke the bear?” But that doesn’t mean there’s no resistance, or that locals appreciate the expansive police presence. I meet up with Maria Oceja, 33, who recently quit her job at a court clerk’s office. She’s offered to drive me around to show me how pervasive the task force presence has become. It doesn’t take long. Shortly after we set out, we see two highway patrol vehicles on the side of the road. Then a police car, then another. “Look, we got an undercover over there,” she tells me, gesturing toward an unmarked car that’s pulled someone over.  Oceja, who sports a pink nose ring and has a rosary hanging from her rearview, co-leads Vecindarios 901, a neighborhood watch with a hotline to report ICE sightings. She’s exhausted: They’ve been averaging about 150 calls a day since the task force took shape in late September. The group has documented home raids, too, but traffic stops are the most common way ICE rounds people up. The highway patrol will pull over Black and Hispanic drivers for minor violations like expired tags or a broken taillight, or seemingly no violation at all: “‘You got over too slow. You’re going one or two miles over [the speed limit].’ Just anything!” says Tikeila Rucker of Free the 901, a local protest campaign. Then immigration officers, either riding shotgun or following behind in their own vehicles—or, occasionally, vehicles borrowed from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency—swoop in. In one stop I witnessed, three Black friends were pulled over for their car’s tinted windows; one of them, from the Bahamas, was sent to ICE detention. The car’s owner, Keven Gilles, was visiting from Florida. He told me that he’d been pulled over five times in a week and a half in Memphis, and “every time, there’s at least five more cars that come, whether that be federal agents, more troopers, or regular city [police] cars.” Memphis is the nation’s largest majority-Black city, with more than 600,000 people in all. Ten percent are Latino and 7 percent are immigrants. The biggest contingent hails from Mexico—according to the Memphis Restaurant Association, the city has more Mexican restaurants than barbecue joints—but there are also well-established communities from China, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Vietnam, and Yemen, and more recently Nicaragua, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Oceja, whose parents immigrated from Mexico, says the city’s undocumented population is relatively young—lots of families with school-age children. She takes me to Jackson Elementary, which she attended as a child, to ask employees about how the policing surge has affected this immigrant-heavy neighborhood. “I’ve been here 22 years, and I’ve never seen it this bad,” PE teacher Cassandra Rivers tells me. Because people are afraid of being detained while dropping off their kids, the Memphis-Shelby County School Board has agreed to create more bus routes. Meanwhile, daily attendance is down at least 10 percent at Jackson, Rivers says. Some students are so anxious that she has started calling their homes in the afternoon just to assure them that their parents are safe and sound. Earlier, on Jackson Avenue, we’d passed a parking lot with a few men standing around. “This is where the day laborers come and ask for work,” Oceja told me. There are fewer lately, now that officers are pulling over contractors’ trucks and arresting workers at construction sites. “Prior to the occupation,” she explains after we leave the school and turn onto Getwell Road, “you could see immigrant vendors every morning on this street selling food.” We drive by shuttered fruit stands and yet another police car, then stop at a gas station, where I meet Jose Reynoso, a Guatemalan man selling tamales and arroz con leche out of a pickup truck. He says he doesn’t know how long his business will survive—customers are afraid to come out. At Supermercado Guatemala 502 on Summer Avenue, manager Rigoberto Cipriano Lorenzo gestures at empty aisles and recalls how packed his store used to be. Alex Lopez, a barber down the block, says many clients ask him to cut their hair at home now. Religious leaders are worried, too. A local imam told me members of his congregation are asking whether they must pray at the mosque, or can they do so from home? The county courthouse is overwhelmed. In its first six weeks, the task force conducted nearly 30,000 traffic stops, issued 25,000 citations, and made more than 2,500 arrests—creating a six-month backlog in traffic court, one attorney told me. That’s not including stops made by federal agents operating solo. An FBI agent speaking to a local rotary club noted that as long as the task force is operating, just about everyone in Memphis can expect to be pulled over at some point. (The latest, just-released figures show more than 4,000 arrests and nearly 200 people charged by the feds.) Jail overcrowding had resulted in detainees sleeping on mats on the floors, so the county declared a state of emergency and moved some of them to another location. “I don’t know how many times I have to say it, but the jail is at a horrific state right now,” Sheriff Floyd Bonner told ABC24 reporters during my visit. “We hear stories,” County Mayor Harris told me, of “individuals that are standing for 24 hours straight because there’s no room, or place for them to sit down. I don’t have the words for what’s happening over there.” Task force personnel near the intersection of Jackson Avenue and North Hollywood Street in Memphis, November 18, 2025.Andrea Morales/MLK50 In his darkened living room, blocked off from the glow of police cruisers outside, Diego speaks in hushed tones as he shares his story. I sit on a sofa beside his 6- and 16-year-old sons. He sits on another sofa, flanked by his wife and their 12-year-old daughter. Diego grew up in a small town in Chiapas, Mexico, where he worked as a farmer. He moved to the United States in 2004, at age 20, for more money and “a better future.” His sister’s husband lived in Memphis, so he settled there too, finding a landscaping job. It paid much better than he was used to, though the weather could be brutal, “very cold,” and he missed the food from back home. In 2006, he met his future wife, also from Mexico, who was selling tamales outside a convenience store. Their first son was born in 2007. Three years ago, they moved into this housing complex, eager for independence from their in-laws, with whom they’d been living. Today Diego works as a cook and janitor at a school where his wife is an assistant teacher. The Memphis Safe Task Force has affected the family’s routines in too many ways to count. Diego has a heart condition and needs to see a doctor every three weeks for monitoring—he was hospitalized not long ago. But he’s afraid to go to his next appointment, drive his kids to school, or commute to work. He’s heard about people getting pulled over for nothing. Immigrants are getting picked up despite having work permits or pending green cards—even people a decade into the legal residency process with just one hearing to go. Diego would have little chance to avoid deportation if he were pulled over. “I get very nervous, like shaky and sweating,” he says of his drives. His daughter, whom I’ll call Liliana, listens quietly as her father talks, gripping a blanket to her chest. Even though she’s a citizen, she has had to be vigilant about law enforcement, she says: “If I do a wrong movement, that would bring them here.” It’s very tiring. At school recently, a teacher asked her to complete a project that involved sharing personal information like her age and why her parents came to Memphis. “I got worried. Why are they asking those types of questions? I feel like it was a trap and they are trying to take information to them”—ICE—she tells me. Liliana is an intelligent, curious kid. She wants to be a nurse someday, Diego told me, which requires doing well in school. But she decided not to turn in her project, just to be safe: “I feel kind of overprotective,” she explains.  As Liliana talks, I try to remember she’s only in sixth grade. I ask her what she likes to do for fun. “Exploring,” she says, and shopping at the mall, but lately she spends most of her time at home. It’s not always pleasant; there’s a clogged sewer line, so the toilet keeps overflowing and flooding the bedrooms, and the property manager hasn’t fixed it. She watches TV trying to fend off cabin fever, and dreams of going on outings with her whole family, maybe to the park, grilling some food. “Most of the time I can’t go out,” she says, “because I’ll be scared.” A Customs and Border Patrol helicopter circles a community protest against an xAI data center development.Andrea Morales/MLK50 The Trump administration has used crime as a pretext to conduct its immigration operations, even in cities where crime is lower than it’s been in decades. In Memphis, it was at a 25-year low before the task force began. But most locals I spoke with said it’s still a problem: In 2024, Memphis had one of the nation’s highest rates of violent crime, higher than similarly sized cities such as Detroit or Baltimore. In six weeks, the Memphis Safe Task Force said it seized 400 illegal guns, and that, compared with the same period in 2024, robberies had dropped 70 percent, and murders were down from 21 to 12. The cops I encounter around town seem eager to emphasize the public safety aspect of their work, and markedly less eager to discuss immigration enforcement. At a gas station where I stop to refuel, I approach Sheriff’s Sgt. Jim Raddatz, a 32-year veteran who, along with federal task force officers, has just finished arresting someone—a criminal case, he says. Sitting in his cruiser, Raddatz tells me he appreciates the expanded police presence, as the sheriff’s office has lost some 300 patrol deputies in recent years. MPD has about 2,000 officers, and 300 highway patrol officers were diverted to the task force. Given the roughly 1,700 officers from more than a dozen federal agencies participating, the total for Memphis proper—even without sheriff’s deputies, who also police Shelby County—would be about 6.5 cops per 1,000 residents, a ratio more than triple the average for cities of this size. When I mention that I’ve heard the task force has made more than 300 noncriminal immigration arrests, he gets a tad defensive. “That might come from ICE. That’s not from us,” Raddatz says. He has neighbors who are immigrants, he explains, and wouldn’t want the sheriff’s office to target them: “All this ‘targeting, targeting, targeting’—we get sick of hearing about it, because we’re not,” he adds. “I understand they’re upset”—people see stuff on TikTok and other social media about immigration enforcement, and they get scared, “but it ain’t coming from us.” The sheriff’s office and the MPD, unlike the highway patrol, cannot conduct immigration arrests independently; for that they would need a special type of 287(g) agreement, the arrangements that govern local law enforcement cooperation with ICE. (The sheriff’s office can hold immigrants inside the jail under another type of 287(g) agreement.) But even if they can’t arrest immigrants, the local agencies are assisting with Trump’s deportation agenda by allowing federal agents to tag along on crime-related work—during traffic stops, the feds can legally ask for proof of citizenship, which inevitably leads to noncriminal immigration arrests. The federal officers I encountered while driving around town were similarly tight-lipped on immigration, and much chattier when talking about crime. At one point, I sat in my car watching some of them search for a sex offender at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. One of the officers—who drove an unmarked vehicle—approached me. Don’t worry, he said, we’re just here “getting the bad guys.” They didn’t find their culprit, but their presence had ripple effects. After they left, I met an 18-year-old Hispanic man who lived next door to the house where the alleged sex offender was believed to be staying. He told me his immigrant mom was still inside—terrified—after the officers, looking for the perpetrator, had pounded on her door. She didn’t open it, and thankfully they left her alone. A traffic stop at Jackson Avenue and North Hollywood Street, November 18, 2025:.Andrea Morales/MLK50 In another neighborhood, I meet an 11-year-old named Justin. He’s standing outside his house, his dog and a soccer ball in the front yard. His mom is inside. It’s time for school. He carries a black camo backpack with a little tag on it; whoever picks him up at the end of the day will need a matching tag, and it won’t be his mom. Task force officers had come by the house a couple of weeks earlier with a warrant for a criminal suspect. That person no longer lived there, so instead they took Justin’s dad, an immigrant from Mexico who was undocumented. “A lot” changed after that, Justin tells me. As we talk, he squeezes some green slime that seems to function more as a stress ball than a toy. His mom, from Honduras, is afraid to emerge, even to shop for groceries. “She always stays at home,” he says quietly. “Before, she would usually go to the store.” With many immigrants in this mother’s situation, local volunteers have started delivering food. On a single day in October, 120 families reached out to the Immigrant Pantry, a project of Indivisible Memphis that normally serves about 50 families a week. Some other food pantries, especially those that accept government funding, require ID. This one doesn’t. “It blew up a few weeks ago,” says volunteer Sandy Edwards, whose T-shirt reads “Have Mercy.” “It’s about as sad as you can possibly imagine.” Edwards and her peers have seen a lot. There was the immigrant mother who resorted to feeding her baby sugar water—she didn’t have formula. Another was stuck in a motel room with four kids under 6, all citizens, and nothing to eat. Vecindarios 901, the neighborhood watch group, told me about a woman who called in tears because she couldn’t find her boyfriend; he’d been detained by ICE, leaving her in charge of his 3-year-old daughter. In another case, an undocumented mother begged agents outside a gas station to take her instead of her partner, who had a work permit, but they went for him anyway and left her with the baby and no means of support. The pantry volunteers drop off onetime emergency food and supplies to these desperate caregivers: canned goods, tortillas, diapers, plus $50 per family worth of fresh produce and meat. They organize the deliveries on Signal, an encrypted messaging app, and vet potential drivers online; the goal is to ensure they’re not in cahoots with the feds, who could use the delivery addresses to arrest people. “This is a vulnerable population,” notes Jessica Wainfor, another volunteer. “We cannot make mistakes.” A day before I visited, news broke that DHS was considering hiring private contractors to ferret out undocumented immigrants’ home and work addresses, bounty-hunter style—with bonuses for accuracy, volume, and timeliness. The volunteers asked me not to disclose their pantry location and said they were taking other precautions, like varying the stores where they shop and watching for unmarked vehicles that might be tailing them. It’s not only low-income immigrants who are afraid. At a Palestinian-owned café, I met Amal Arafat, a naturalized citizen from Somalia who moved to the United States at age 4. Now she lives in Germantown, an affluent suburb, and carries her US passport with her in case she’s pulled over for having dark skin and wearing a hijab. When I ask how this makes her feel, she starts to cry. “It’s a scary time, because there are people with citizenship being snatched away,” she says. She wonders whether the task force will really reduce violence—or just people reporting it. If she were a crime victim, I ask Arafat, would she call 911 now? “It does blur the lines of who is here to protect me, and who is here to terrorize and target me,” she replies. It’s a fair question. Back in October, Mayor Harris had told me that Latina survivors of domestic violence were not reaching out to a Shelby County program that helps them file for protective orders against their alleged assailants. “We know domestic violence hasn’t gone away, and we know Latina victims haven’t gone away,” he says. “What has gone away is their willingness to go to a public building and ask for help.” A Memphis pastor told me a story I have not corroborated about a local Guatemalan man who was beaten and stabbed but didn’t call 911 because he was afraid of being deported. Instead, he went home to heal, developed an infection, and died. It never made the papers. Harris, like many task-force critics, suspects violent crime is down primarily because all the police activity has made people reluctant to get out and about, for fear of getting stopped and harassed. What happens when the feds pack up and the task force dissolves? “I don’t think this is a long-term solution, and it’s making things really bad,” Calvo, Diego’s friend, told me. “You can pick your lane: This is really bad for the economy. Or this is really bad for our democracy. Or this is really bad for people’s wellbeing.” We need “fully funded schools. Money for violence intervention programs. Money for the unhoused community. A better transportation system,” adds local activist Rucker. “There are a lot of things we need—not more bodies that are gonna inflict more harm, pain, and trauma on an already traumatized community.” “This is not making us safer,” concurs Karin Rubnitz, who volunteers with Vecindarios 901 and shuttles Justin, the 11-year-old with the tag on his backpack, to school. “They are destabilizing the immigrant community.” Memphis may be a harbinger. On my last day in town, the Trump administration announced a similar task force in Nashville, where the highway patrol teamed up with ICE in May to arrest nearly 200 immigrants in a week. Other task forces were dispatched around the same time in Indianapolis, Dallas, and Little Rock, Arkansas—all purportedly focused on crime but co-led by DHS. More than 1,000 local law enforcement agencies nationwide are collaborating with ICE through 287(g) agreements. And the feds have launched their own immigration enforcement operations in cities from Chicago to Minneapolis. Tennessee Gov. Lee has said the task force in Memphis will continue indefinitely, despite the cost of bringing in hundreds of federal cops, housing them in hotels, and hiring extra judges to tackle the strain on local courts. (“We’re going to be millions of dollars in the red because of this,” Mayor Harris told the Washington Post.) Weeks into the occupation, so many immigrants are trying to self-deport that Calvo’s Latino Memphis now invites Mexican consulate officials to its office once a month to help process passports. “For the first time in the 17 years that I have worked here, we’re getting calls of people saying, How do I leave? And that is just devastating,” he says. Arafat’s husband, Anwar, an imam, told me his family is considering a move to a different part of the United States. “The people that are supposedly eliminating crime are making the city unlivable,” he says. “I really don’t want to leave,” their son Aiman, a high school freshman, told me. “I have a life here, a really good life.” Andrea Morales/MLK50 Back in the dark living room, Diego has a question for me. When will this all be over? Almost everyone I meet in Memphis asks the same thing. I have no answer, of course. If the task force carries on much longer, Diego says, he may have to return to Mexico and take his family with him. I ask Liliana how she feels about that. “Kind of sad and kind of happy,” the girl says. “I kind of want to be somewhere I feel safer. I can explore more, go more places.” It took a while, but my eyes have finally adjusted to the dark. Diego, clad in a T-shirt, is sitting beneath a joyous wedding portrait in which he sports a pink tuxedo and holds his wife’s hand. Now his hands are rubbing his head; he’s tense and exhausted. “I feel like my kids live here better than they would in Mexico, so I would like for them to stay, but if things continue to deteriorate, I don’t know what we will do,” he says. “I am more scared in the last month than in the last 20 years,” he adds. When the cops came, “I thought they were gonna kick down the door and take me away.” Diego suddenly realizes how long we’ve been talking. The police are still outside, but he figures maybe by now it’s safe to turn on a flashlight and make dinner for his family. He bids me a polite farewell, guides me out of the apartment, and closes the front door, upon which every knock brings a sense of dread.

It was National Voter Registration Day, and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows was on her way to a small liberal arts college for a voter registration event. That’s when she learned the US Department of Justice was suing her over how she manages Maine’s voter registrant list. While the DOJ appearing as the official plaintiff was new, what the federal government sought through the lawsuit—access to Maine’s complete, unredacted voter roll file—was not. Bellows, a spunky, no-nonsense 50-year-old who grew up in a log cabin without running water, already had received a litany of demand letters, public records requests, and lawsuits throughout her five years serving as the top election integrity official in Maine. Citing the National Voter Registration Act, most of the requests for the state’s voter data had the ostensible aim of ensuring Maine was adequately removing the names of individuals who should not be on the voter roll. But this lawsuit was the first of its kind from the government itself. The September legal complaint was an escalation of a yearslong coordinated effort by conservatives to obtain voter roll data from numerous states, compare it to incomplete datasets they’d found on the commercial market, then attest that mismatches between the two are clear evidence of people illegally voting. The apparent goal: buttressing decadeslong, though still unproven, claims of rampant voter fraud and removing allegedly ineligible voters from the rolls, with potentially dire consequences for future elections. In the past, these sorts of legal gambits came from right-wing groups like the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank co-founded by Brooke Rollins, now the secretary of agriculture; the Dhillon Law Group, whose founder, Harmeet Dhillon, is now the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the DOJ; and the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative legal group whose former counsel, Maureen Riordan, now leads the DOJ’s voting section. Riordan and Dhillon remain in the same line of business, citing familiar statutes in their barrage of new lawsuits against state election officials like Bellows; the key difference now is that they are promoting their routinely debunked theories from within the US government. Specifically, from the highest law enforcement agency in the country. > “The election deniers are now ascendant in the federal government.” “The election deniers are now ascendant in the federal government,” says Bellows, who spent eight years as the executive director of the Maine ACLU before assuming her current post. “These requests are not unlike the requests that the organizations they used to be affiliated with have asked for years.” But unlike conservative legal organizations, she adds, “the Department of Justice has the power to investigate, prosecute, and place people in jail.” Riordan and Dhillon have been pursuing Maine’s voter information since July, when the voting section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sent Bellows a letter requesting the state’s unredacted registration list. Bellows wrote a careful response referencing federal court opinions and state statutes that preclude her from sharing the voter roll without appropriate redactions. In return, the DOJ sent her another threatening letter, followed by the ironically timed lawsuit on National Voter Registration Day. Maine isn’t the only state the DOJ contacted. Over the last six months, it has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from dozens of states in an effort to create the federal government’s first-ever national database of registered voters, accompanied by their private information: party affiliation, voting history, Social Security numbers, driver’s license information, even physical characteristics. The DOJ has formally sued 14 states for the data so far, 12 of which are led by Democrats. (The sole exceptions are Vermont, which has a Republican governor but is otherwise deeply blue, and New Hampshire, where Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte has publicly disagreed with President Donald Trump’s plan to redraw congressional maps in advance of the midterms to give Republicans more seats.) Bellows believes Maine was among the first two states to be sued “because of animus”—also known as old-fashioned retribution. The Justice Department already has tried to retaliate against Trump’s political enemies, such as former FBI Director James Comey, who investigated ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who sued Trump over allegations that he inflated the value of his real estate holdings. (A federal judge recently dismissed both indictments, ruling that the prosecutor who brought the charges had been unlawfully appointed. The DOJ is reportedly weighing whether to re-indict them.) Bellows, though lesser known, is likely on the administration’s radar for other reasons, too. Citing the 14th Amendment’s clause barring officials who “engage in” insurrection from holding future office, she attempted to remove Trump from Maine’s 2024 presidential ballot based on his connection to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. But Bellows, who is now running for governor, may not be the only one harmed by the DOJ data grab and the spurious claims supporting it. In 2024, crude analyses of voter roll data by right wingers led election officials in Waterford Township, Michigan, and Virginia to remove duly registered voters from the rolls. So far, challenges like these have taken place on a much smaller scale: state by state or even county by county. The DOJ’s current effort to assemble every state’s voter data poses an exponentially larger threat to voting rights. More than a dozen state election officials, former DOJ staff, and election experts told Mother Jones that a national database of voter registration information could lead to massive data breaches of Americans’ private information and reinforce false narratives about the frequency of voter fraud—narratives Trump and his allies could weaponize to challenge election outcomes. Worse yet, the bad data could give Republican-led states cover to illegally cull eligible voters from their rolls, stopping certain people from voting at all. “These unprecedented demands for vast amounts of voter data are part of a larger pattern of actions indicating a reckless grab for power over American elections,” Bellows says. It could also lead to a vast expansion of the number of citizens who appear on Trump’s hit list—one that, depending on your personal data, may soon include you. The right-wing campaign to weaponize the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which former Attorney General Eric Holder once called the “crown jewel” of the department, dates back more than two decades. After the election of President George W. Bush in 2000, National Review called for a radical restructuring of the division. “There may be no part of the federal government where liberalism is more deeply entrenched,” wrote national correspondent John J. Miller. “Republicans should work to gain more control over the civil rights division and its renegade lawyers.” > “My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of > the section.” And a year later, that’s precisely what they did. Attorney General John Ashcroft tapped Brad Schlozman, a Kansas-based lawyer with no prior civil rights litigation experience, as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights. His responsibilities included overseeing hiring and supervision for the division’s voting section, which enforces the Voting Rights Act and other federal voting laws. Schlozman did little to hide his disdain for the section he now led. “My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section,” he wrote to a former colleague in July 2003. Schlozman embarked on a hiring spree of what he called “RTAs,” short for “right-thinking Americans,” recruiting lawyers from the Federalist Society, the National Republican Lawyers Association, and the Bush-Cheney campaign. A joint investigation by the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility found that “virtually all of the attorneys (97 percent) hired by Schlozman whose political and ideological affiliations were evident in the hiring process were Republican or conservative.” Veteran civil rights lawyers with decades of experience began leaving in droves, including the well-respected chief of the voting section, Joe Rich. Schlozman made Hans von Spakovsky, who had been among the first major figures in the GOP to push the myth of widespread voter fraud, de facto head of the section. Soon, the department’s political appointees overruled career lawyers to approve GOP-backed laws that were regarded as racially discriminatory, including a mid-decade congressional redistricting plan in Texas that eliminated two majority-minority districts and a Georgia voter ID law that disproportionately harmed Black voters. David Plunkert “You take an oath to uphold the laws of the United States,” Robert Kengle, the deputy chief of the voting section from 1999 to 2005, told Mother Jones’ Ari Berman in his 2015 book, Give Us the Ballot. “These guys didn’t believe in the laws of the United States. They came in to work for an institution for which they had the utmost contempt.” One of the attorneys hired by Schlozman was J. Christian Adams, a solo practitioner in Virginia who had served as a Bush-Cheney poll watcher in Florida. Rich described him as “Exhibit A of the type of people hired by Schlozman.” Adams helped bring the DOJ’s first-ever Voting Rights Act case on behalf of white voters, who claimed they were discriminated against by the Black head of the local Democratic Party in Noxubee County, Mississippi. Career lawyers viewed it as a perversion of the law, which was intended to protect Black voters who were disenfranchised by segregationist whites in states like Mississippi. By the end of the Bush administration in 2008, the DOJ’s inspector general found that Schlozman had violated federal law and committed misconduct by “improperly [considering] political and ideological affiliations in the recruitment and hiring of career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division.” But the anti-voting positions of the likes of von Spakovsky and Adams had already become institutionalized and were spreading within the GOP. A couple of years later, in 2010, Adams loudly accused the Obama administration of anti-white bias when the DOJ dropped a case he spearheaded alleging that white voters were intimidated at the polls in Philadelphia by the New Black Panther Party. An internal review found no evidence of improper political interference, but by this point, Adams had resigned in protest. He would go on to become head of the right-wing legal group PILF in 2015. In addition to filing lawsuits against local jurisdictions to force them to remove voters from their rolls, PILF published two reports in 2016 and 2017, “Alien Invasion in Virginia” and “Alien Invasion II,” that sought to validate Trump and his allies’ claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens. The reports, which included names, addresses, and private information like Social Security numbers, claimed that more than 5,500 noncitizens had registered to vote in Virginia and 1,852 people had cast nearly 7,500 illegal ballots since the late 1980s. “This is the real foreign influence on American elections,” Adams told Fox News. “Foreigners are getting on American voter rolls and, as we documented, casting ballots by the thousands.” PILF called on the Justice Department to bring felony charges against the voters it identified. Republican political activists drew up plans to post signs at polling places warning of voter fraud, which Adams said should be “in Spanish” to be “effective.” It soon became clear, however, that PILF had relied on faulty methodology. As Mother Jones previously reported, “Alien Invasion II” spotlighted the “astonishing” example of one voter, Maureen Erickson, who listed a Guatemalan address on her registration form. “Ms. Erickson voted in 14 different elections—most recently in 2008—before her registration was canceled,” the report stated. But it turned out that Erickson was a US citizen living in Guatemala as a missionary. “I think it is odd that they chose ‘Maureen Erickson’ as their poster child for voter fraud,” her husband, Todd Erickson, wrote in a letter to the Washington Times after it picked up the story. “There was obviously not much additional research done on the person that they held up as an example of this illegal activity.” When Virginia election officials warned PILF that it was using unreliable data—such as targeting individuals who did not check a citizenship box at the DMV—to identify “suspected aliens,” PILF staffer Logan Churchwell agreed in an email to Adams that their concerns could “be true.” But this was an opportunity, Churchwell said, to “convert pushback into official confusion to justify our call for a top-down overhaul.” “The fog of war favors the aggressor here,” added Churchwell, who remains research director at PILF. In 2018, four Virginia voters whom PILF falsely accused of voting illegally filed a lawsuit against Adams and PILF, accusing them of violating the Voting Rights Act and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act—which empowers individuals to sue when vigilante groups threaten their 14th Amendment rights—through “a modern, covert, and particularly insidious method of voter intimidation.” PILF settled the case before it went to trial, with Adams agreeing to apologize to the plaintiffs and PILF pledging to redact sensitive personal information. The reports should have been a cautionary tale about the dangers of overhyped fraud claims and the misuse of sensitive voter information, but Trump and his allies were undeterred and determined to spread such misinformation to a much bigger audience. After claiming with no proof that he lost the popular vote in 2016 because 3 million people voted illegally, Trump brought back veterans of the Bush Justice Department, including Adams and von Spakovsky, as members of his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Von Spakovsky advised the commission to reprise the Schlozman-era playbook and exclude Democrats and “mainstream Republican officials and/or academics” from serving on it. He and Adams secretly advised Vice Chair Kris Kobach, then–Kansas secretary of state, on the commission’s first major action: a sweeping request for sensitive voter data from all 50 states, including party affiliation, voter history, and Social Security numbers. Kobach wrote that it would be “very helpful in the Commission’s work identifying fraudulent registrations and other forms of voter fraud.” But the request, made in June 2017, infamously backfired. The Republican secretary of state of Mississippi, Delbert Hosemann, told the commission to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.” His GOP counterpart in Louisiana said the “President’s Commission has quickly politicized its work by asking states for an incredible amount of voter data that I have, time and time again, refused to release.” Even Kobach, in his position as the top election official in Kansas, was unable to hand over voters’ Social Security numbers because they couldn’t be divulged by state law, nor could secretaries of state from Indiana, Maine, and New Hampshire, who also served on the commission. In the end, 21 states refused to provide any data, while the rest only partially complied. The commission had tried to validate Trump’s fraud claims, but it disbanded after less than a year while facing at least eight lawsuits. A draft staff report of its findings included a section on “Evidence of Election Integrity and Voter Fraud Issues” that was, tellingly, left blank. The commission’s failure should have put to bed the myth of widespread voter fraud once and for all—and prevented the federal government from ever again asking for such extensive information on voters. But Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election convinced more of his supporters that elections were rigged, emboldening groups like PILF to turbocharge their efforts to restrict access to the ballot. In the runup to the 2024 election, Trump and his allies filed scores of lawsuits designed to make it harder to vote and easier to question election outcomes. PILF, along with the RNC and Harmeet Dhillon’s law firm, were at the forefront of this legal onslaught. When Trump returned to the White House, an emboldened MAGA movement once again set its sights on transforming the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and its voting section from a place that is entrusted with protecting people’s right to vote to one that jeopardizes it. “This administration is abandoning the congressional mandate that the division has to stamp out discrimination and protect vulnerable populations,” says Chiraag Bains, who served as a high-ranking official in the Civil Rights Division from 2014 to 2017. “They’re not just abandoning it. They’re actually weaponizing the power of the federal government to try to cut off access to the ballot.” A week after the 2024 election, Cleta Mitchell, a recent chair of PILF’s board (von Spakovsky is the current chair) and an attorney involved in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, called on the administration to fire “every lawyer in the Voting Section and likely in the Civil Rights Division. They are not supportive of Pres Trump or MAGA. There has to be a reckoning.” The now-reinvigorated wolves were back in the henhouse. Two days after the inauguration, the department’s political appointees ordered the Civil Rights Division to freeze work on all new cases. Shortly thereafter, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had traveled to Pennsylvania in 2020 to amplify Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, was confirmed as US attorney general. The department put Mac Warner, a former West Virginia secretary of state who claimed that the CIA stole the 2020 election, in charge of the Civil Rights Division on an interim basis. Over the winter and spring, the Trump DOJ began systematically withdrawing from voting rights cases filed under the Biden administration, refusing in nearly every instance to meet with the career attorneys who worked on them. “There was an utter lack of interest in what the day-to-day work of the voting section entailed,” says one former lawyer in the Civil Rights Division. On March 31, when the department dropped a case challenging voting restrictions passed in Georgia in 2021, Bondi alleged that the Biden administration had “fabricated claims of false voter suppression.” “The press release from the Georgia case was insulting to all the career lawyers who worked on it,” says another former DOJ lawyer. “To call something fraudulent from the institution you now lead was deeply troubling.” Days later, the Senate confirmed Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally whose law firm had filed several lawsuits attacking voting rights, as head of the Civil Rights Division. Dhillon had amplified Trump’s false claims of fraud as a legal adviser to his 2020 campaign, calling on the Supreme Court to overturn the election results. Dhillon removed the division’s longtime mandate of stopping racial discrimination in voting from the section’s mission statement and instead pledged to address Trump-inspired priorities that included “preventing illegal voting, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error.” By the end of April, Trump’s appointees had dismissed every active case in the voting section and reassigned the section’s chief and five top managers to the obscure complaint adjudication office, the DOJ’s version of Siberia. Career attorneys who’d stayed during Trump’s first administration and thought they could survive Trump 2.0 decided to leave en masse. Just a few months in, more than 250 attorneys had departed the Civil Rights Division, 70 percent of the total staff, and the number of career attorneys in the voting section had shrunk from 30 to just three. At the end of May, Maureen Riordan, who had been litigation counsel at PILF during the Biden years, took over as acting head of the voting section. A 20-year veteran of the DOJ who spent much of her career in the voting section, Riordan had resigned when Biden took office. At PILF, she had focused on filing lawsuits against various states, aimed at obtaining their voter roll information for the purpose of analyzing it for purported fraud. When she returned to the DOJ under Trump, the department’s work had effectively become inseparable from the mission of the right-wing “election integrity” organizations whose leaders now staffed the new administration. With the MAGA takeover complete, the voting section launched its most audacious scheme yet, reprising the Trump administration’s demand for sensitive voter data from all 50 states. And this time, it would retaliate against those who refused to comply. A couple of weeks before the DOJ began demanding Maine’s voter rolls, PILF, Riordan’s old employer, sent its own letter to Bellows, alleging that its assessment of commercially available data and newspaper obituaries suggested there were more than 18,000 “apparently deceased” people on Maine’s voter rolls. Responding to that previously unreported accusation, Bellows called its claim a “damned lie from an organization that cares more about conspiracy theories than election integrity.” Churchwell, from PILF, says their data collection methods have evolved since 2017 to prioritize credit data over other “cheap” commercial options: “We’ve raised the standard. Your experts are in the wailing and gnashing of teeth in outer darkness stage of their activism, and my heart goes out to them.” For starters, every month, Maine’s 487 municipal election clerks review death records from the state’s vital records bureau and cancel the registrations of individuals who have died. As a fail-safe, Maine also compares its voter roll to the Social Security Administration’s Limited Access Death Master File at least once annually. Moreover, even if a deceased person’s name did appear on the voter roll for a short time, that does not mean a vote was illegally cast in their name. This wasn’t the first time PILF made such a claim. The group sued Michigan in 2021, alleging that its assessment of publicly attainable data showed there were 25,000 dead voters on Michigan’s rolls. A federal judge dismissed the claim in March 2024. In May, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected PILF’s argument a second time, concluding that Michigan makes an “inherently rational, sensible attempt at maintaining accurate voter registration lists.” (In November, PILF asked the Supreme Court to reconsider the lower court’s decision.) But PILF succeeded in advancing the voting fraud narrative—even if its lawsuit has so far failed. As is often the case, the rulings on the Michigan lawsuit didn’t get nearly as much attention as the claims that precipitated it. “Usually, sensational allegations of crimes go viral,” Bellows says, “and the less sensational finding that people are innocent often doesn’t have the same reach.” Most of the lawsuits—whether from groups like PILF or the mightier Justice Department—allege violations of the National Voter Registration Act. Congress passed the 1993 bipartisan law with the intention of making it easier to register to vote. Dubbed the “Motor Voter Act,” the law simplified voter registration by making the process accessible at DMVs and other public agencies across the country. The law also included a provision to ensure that state voter rolls, which were anticipated to add new voters, were properly maintained. The US Constitution assigns the responsibility of managing elections to the states, and consequently, the act doesn’t tell states how exactly they should maintain their rolls; it merely says they should “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters.” Bellows attests that Maine is doing just that. In February 2025, the state’s election division canceled 180,584 inactive voter registrations—the largest bulk removal in nearly 20 years. But the act’s open-ended language has provided an opening for election denialism crusaders, including the ones who now run the DOJ. > “Many election officials, including me, worry that the Trump administration > wants this information so that it could be used to target, harass, and > intimidate individual citizens.” “These groups are trying to weaponize the law in a way that’s contrary to the purposes of the statute,” says Bains, the former DOJ Civil Rights Division official, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Most of these lawsuits that we’re talking about are aimed at pursuing mass purges of exactly the nature that the statute was written to prevent.” At least 40 states have received written requests from the Justice Department for their voter files, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. DOJ officials have said they eventually want the data from every state. So far, only two—Indiana and Wyoming—have complied, though the administration has adopted a harder stance in recent weeks. As of early December, the department has filed lawsuits against 14 states, beginning with Maine and Oregon. “On the surface, it may seem like regular oversight, but it’s not,” Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar argued during a September press briefing with the States United Democracy Center, a group devoted to fair and secure elections. “The DOJ has the backing of the federal government. They’re trying to use the immense power to intimidate states into complying.” At the same briefing, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson outlined multiple ways the data demanded by the department could be used vindictively. “Many election officials, including me, worry that the Trump administration wants this information so that it could be used to target, harass, and intimidate individual citizens, political adversaries, and potentially deter entire communities from voting,” Benson said. “It could also be used to pressure states to remove otherwise eligible citizens from the rolls based on pernicious or suspect information.” Administration officials have yet to explain their reasons for trying to create a national voter roll, but the DOJ confirmed to States Newsroom that the data was “being screened for ineligible voter entries.” The agency is working with the Department of Homeland Security to run voter information through Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, an online platform that provides access to various government databases in one place. Since its inception in 1987, the tool has been used to verify the citizenship of people applying for government benefits by checking alien identification numbers assigned to them by DHS. The Trump administration has dramatically expanded the tool in recent months, adding Social Security numbers and passport information to the system. As Mother Jones reported last month, DHS is also trying to connect every state’s driver’s license database to SAVE, so states can run their entire voter rolls through the database at one time. (A spokesperson for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers SAVE, says states will need to ensure they are using the platform lawfully.) The allegation that noncitizens are flooding state voter rolls is not supported by any data. One 2016 survey of 42 voting jurisdictions by the Brennan Center found just 30 cases of possible noncitizen voting out of nearly 24 million votes. Statistically, that’s one ten-thousandth of 1 percent. Further, voter registration forms require Americans to affirm they are citizens, under penalty of perjury. The same form warns that those who lie could be fined, imprisoned, or deported. They’d also risk their future eligibility for citizenship. “To jeopardize that opportunity by voting just doesn’t make sense,” Nevada’s Aguilar says. While using SAVE to root out voter fraud is unlikely to turn up many—if any—noncitizen voters, the massive expansion of the program is likely to wrongly flag some American citizens as noncitizens, particularly naturalized citizens, newly married people who changed their last names, and people whose names don’t match on their documents (for example, a man whose license says Nick but whose passport says Nicholas). A lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center in September warned that DHS and the DOJ are “encouraging and enabling” states to search their voter rolls against SAVE, which the lawsuit alleges may culminate in some states “purging voter rolls.” In November, a federal judge agreed that the new use of SAVE was concerning: “The Court is troubled by the recent changes to SAVE and doubts the lawfulness of the Government’s actions,” wrote Judge Sparkle Sooknanan. However, she declined to block the administration from using it because the plaintiffs hadn’t yet identified someone who had been directly harmed. Even if the DOJ doesn’t find any legitimate evidence of noncitizen voting, false matches would produce sensational headlines across the MAGA-verse, giving the administration more ammunition to undermine trust in elections. “My guess is they want the voter files to be able to say we have the voter files, and we know there are X or Y fraudulent people on it,” says Justin Levitt, who served as deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama. “It will be fiction, but now they’ll say it because they have them. Even if they find an infinitesimal number of wrong people on the rolls, they will lie about the numbers.” The DOJ declined to comment for this story. Beyond the possibility of voters being disenfranchised, the League of Women Voters and EPIC argue that every person’s federal right to privacy would be encroached by the DOJ and DHS sharing data among themselves and state governments. Congress passed the Privacy Act of 1974 specifically to prevent the federal government from creating “formal or de facto national data banks” or “centralized Federal information systems” that would integrate the personal data of Americans stored at separate agencies, the lawsuit points out. Add to all this the fact that a national voter file could also be a gold mine for hackers, especially as the Trump administration dismantles efforts to combat foreign and domestic election interference. “The danger is once you compile all this information, then hackers only have to go to one place instead of going to all 50-plus jurisdictions that run elections,” says Eileen O’Connor, who worked in the DOJ’s voting section for nearly a decade, including during Trump’s first term. “It’s just a hacker’s dream to have all of this private, sensitive information collected somewhere.” In its efforts to inspect state voter rolls, the DOJ is also, evidently, considering sharing Americans’ personal data with outside election denial groups. Rick Richards, a retired physician from Georgia with no experience as an election official, has met with Riordan and marketed his mass voter registration challenge system called EagleAI, which he helped develop with Cleta Mitchell’s support, to the DOJ. “We demonstrated the software to the DOJ. They like it. They would like to use it. Apparently, we can get data they can’t,” he said during a meeting hosted by Mitchell’s group, the Election Integrity Network, according to a transcript obtained by Mother Jones. “I am in conversation with them about letting us have a task, a federal task, to bring their data into what we’re doing and then be able to use the federal data, SAVE data, Social Security data, other data in here as well.” Despite its name, EagleAI uses no artificial intelligence. Like PILF, EagleAI relies on incomplete information, such as self-reported address changes registered with the US Postal Service and datasets purchased from private entities like utilities, credit card companies, or magazine publishers. Richards boasted on the same call that EagleAI flagged more than 50 percent of Fulton County, Georgia, voter registrations as “potential problems”—an indication of the system’s dubious accuracy. Had the right-wing election integrity skeptics behind EagleAI actually believed the county’s voter roll was teeming with fraudulently registered voters, they likely would have presented these concerns to local officials. But according to Nadine Williams, Fulton County’s director of registration and elections, that hasn’t happened; her voter roll is audited monthly using verified data sources, and she’s never heard from EagleAI, which she called an “unverified third-party group.” In response to questions from Mother Jones, Richards claimed that “the EagleAI Network program no longer exists,” even though his email signature still includes that affiliation and the group’s data was used to challenge more than 900 voters in New Jersey as recently as a month ago. If the DOJ takes up Richards on his offer to use EagleAI on state voter rolls the department is suing to collect, it wouldn’t be the first time Riordan has worked at a place that relies on faulty data to spread questionable conclusions about voter fraud. Normally, the DOJ’s voting section would work to prevent these kinds of efforts from affecting Americans’ ability to vote. Now, the voting section itself is in on the effort. “The main activity the section seems to be engaged in at this point,” says Levitt, the former deputy assistant attorney general, “is something illegal.”

A page from an Altamides sales brochure.

Three years ago, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority enabled states to severely restrict abortion or ban it outright. Since then, 17 states have enacted such limits; infant and maternal mortality have risen in many of them. But the impact of overturning Roe v. Wade extends far beyond medical catastrophes. It also appears in the quieter struggles—a myriad of small, compounding barriers that stand between individuals and their access to health care. Here are some of the stories of people who have stepped up to do what they can to provide care, and some of the women who found themselves trapped in a system increasingly difficult to navigate. So much of the barrier to care is an information gap. We have funds, and there are three all-trimester abortion clinics in our region. If more people knew that, I think it would make navigating care easier. Once they have an abortion scheduled, we can provide financial help for the procedure. If their gap in funding is less than $500, we can generally say, “We’ve got you!” If it’s a much larger gap, we may have to start a “solidarity thread,” which is when we start fundraising with other abortion funds to try to close that gap. Solidarity threads tend to be for cases that are 20 weeks and up because they’re more expensive. From 20 to 28 weeks, you’re looking at gaps of $5,000 to $6,000. After 28 weeks, you’re looking at $10,000 and up. We have six or seven foundations that give us in the $10,000 to $80,000 range, but most of the rest comes from individuals. In 2023, their contributions allowed us to help almost 4,000 abortion seekers. On a good week, we can fund 75 to 80 people. If we run out, we try to refer them elsewhere or suggest they call us back next week when our budget resets. Telling someone they might have to reschedule their appointment is not easy. But there’s just such limited funding, and so many people who need it. After Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect in May 2024, we saw a big uptick—about 225 percent. [Floridians] now make up the fourth-highest volume of people we fund. Some people are confused about why they’re having to travel for an abortion when their pregnancy isn’t even viable. Someone told them, “You could die if you continue this pregnancy.” Those are some of the more emotionally complex cases. They’re people who had a wanted pregnancy, and they’ve been told they must travel to a place they’ve possibly never been before to have a potentially multiday procedure. It should be as easy for everyone as it is in DC, where you can get on the metro system, go a couple of stops, and get to a clinic. Access should not be defined by your zip code. —Alisha Dingus, executive director, DC Abortion Fund Read more Abortion Diaries here.

For kids like me, who grew up in the 1960s and ’70s, comics were a big deal. Our media landscape otherwise consisted mainly of books and records, commercial radio, and, in my family’s case, a small black-and-white TV with a coat hanger antenna that got four staticky channels. So we periodically raided our piggy banks and headed to the Stop-N-Go for candy and comics. My favorite was Richie Rich.  Richie was wildly popular, a brave and generous little fellow with unfathomably wealthy parents. He’s 9 or 10 years old in the comics, with a signature outfit consisting of white booties, blue shorts, a black jacket, and a white shirt with a big red bowtie. (He’s a teenager, with outfits less Little Lord Fauntleroy, in the 1980s cartoon series—ditto the 1994 Macaulay Culkin movie.)  Swimming pools filled with cash, monogrammed ships and planes. All part of the Riches’ over-the-top aesthetic.NBCUniversal Had someone compared you to Richie back in the day, you might have thanked them. After all, he used his vast wealth for good. But Richie’s reputation has fallen upon hard times. “We all knew Trump was richie rich scumbag,” one Bluesky user wrote in March. Another posted, in reference to the Virginia governor and Trump sycophant Glenn Youngkin: “‘Richie Rich’ Youngkin (R), thinks poor people should just fucking stay poor.” A third circulated a parody comic book cover, “Richie Reich,” featuring a dour Musk/Richie hybrid doing the Nazi salute. It got more than 1,100 likes. “Richie is so misunderstood,” laments 30-year-old news producer Jonny Harvey, whose late grandfather, Leon, along with brothers Alfred and Robert, churned out hundreds of issues of Richie Rich on their family-friendly Harvey Comics imprint from 1960 through 1982—with an encore from 1986 to 1989, when the company was sold—in addition to titles like Little Audrey and Casper the Friendly Ghost. Richie would not appreciate being associated with Elon Musk.Gretchen Kent “I think people believe he’s this spoiled rich kid,” says Harvey, who is working on a documentary about the late family business. “Because of the blond hair, because he was the son of a multimillionaire, people make that [Trump] comparison. And there couldn’t be anything further from that.” Something clearly has shifted in our culture that we would so defame this icon of upper-crust benevolence. As a journalist who covers inequality and the author of a book, Jackpot, about the American wealth fantasy run amok, I decided it was time to revisit Richie to try to understand how economic changes since his heyday might account for the transformation. As it turns out, there are important lessons here for grownups, even if you’ve never heard of “the poor little rich boy.”  The Richie comics, in retrospect, are wildly incongruous. Richie’s family (much like Trump’s) is comically ostentatious. His mom is a jewel-laden socialite, his dad some sort of industrialist. They have swimming pools filled with cash, piles of gleaming gemstones, safes swollen to bursting, and driveways paved with gold bars—not to mention monogrammed ships and planes and swank mansions. The “help” includes butler Cadbury, robot maid Irona, and Bascomb, a chauffeur who shuttles Richie around in a stretch limo. Their dog, Dollar, has dollar signs for spots. It’s all quite over the top, and that’s part of the appeal. Billionaire and former Dallas Mavericks majority owner Mark Cuban, raised in a middle-class Pittsburgh family, “loved, loved, loved Richie Rich,” he told me via email. “Watching the cartoon was like driving around wealthy neighborhoods, dreaming of one day being able to afford one of the palatial homes I never thought I would ever even walk inside.”   Yet Richie is no snob. His endless money is leavened by courage, loyalty, and sheer goodness. Despite his vast fortune, he steers clear of the trust-fund kids, opting instead to share his adventures with public school pals. Richie’s besties, Freckles and Pee-Wee Friendly, basically live in a shack. “It was so funny,” says Angelo DeCesare, who wrote and drew Richie for Harvey Comics from 1978 to 1980. “It looked like this beat-up old thing with boards. They really made them poor!” Gloria Glad, Richie’s sweetheart, is the proverbial middle-class girl next door.  “Reggie was a jerk. The idea was to be more like Richie..” says former Harvey Comics artist Angelo DeCesare. “Reggie was presented as the guy who always got his comeuppance.”NBCUniversal Plots typically involved Richie using his limitless resources to bail out a friend, help solve somebody’s problem, or foil the bad guys forever scheming to steal his family’s wealth. In a paper, York University marketing professor Russell Belk summarized one 1966 story like this: “To keep his girlfriend Gloria’s father from being transferred out of town, Richie Rich buys a hot dog factory for $500,000 and has her father made general manager. The man Richie outbids for the plant is his father, who was buying it as a gift for Richie’s next birthday.”  The Harvey neighborhood crew includes a Black kid—quite the rarity in mainstream comics back then, though race is never referenced: Tiny’s distinguishing trait is his diminutive stature. “It was a way of showing that we’re all part of the same neighborhood, that we all have the same aspirations…that we all can have fun together,” Kathy Jackson, a professor of media at Virginia Wesleyan University, told Jonny Harvey in an interview for his film. “Certainly, in the 1960s, in the age of civil rights, that had important ramifications.”  Most of Harvey’s founders, artists, and writers were first- or second-generation Jewish immigrants, more than a little familiar with ethnic bigotry. Their mission was to sell comics by creating stories that appealed to kids, encouraged them to read, and imparted good values along the way. Richie would be appalled by the thought that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” as Elon Musk told Joe Rogan in February. He would never, as Musk did on X, brag about a weekend spent “feeding USAID into a wood chipper.” Nor would he terrorize federal workers or seek Medicaid reductions to facilitate tax cuts for his family. He wouldn’t slash research funding, either—Richie loves scientists and inventors. He’d be inclined to build them new, cutting-edge labs—and gleaming hospitals for the sick, and cozy abodes for the unhoused. Because Richie Rich is not an asshole.  He is, alas, entirely fictional. “There was no such person like that in the world, who had that kind of money and would use it in the way Richie did,” DeCesare told me. To longtime Harvey Comics editor Sid Jacobson, “Richie was his idealized fantasy of what he really wished the wealthy would be; they would be kind,” says son Seth Jacobson, 67, who remembers hanging out with his late father’s team at their offices in Manhattan’s old Gulf and Western Building. “My dad was a diehard Democrat,” he recalls. “He wanted taxes to be higher for the rich and the upper middle class. He wanted universal health coverage.”  Some Richie characters were more in sync with the Mar-a-Lago crowd, like Reginald Van Dough, Richie’s greedy, scheming cousin, and Mayda Munny, a snooty social climber who is desperate to woo Richie away from Gloria but inevitably fails because Gloria loves Richie despite his money, not because of it. “Those comics were very moral. That’s what I liked about them,” says DeCesare. “Reggie was a jerk. The idea was to be more like Richie. Be generous, kind, have empathy for your fellow human beings. Reggie was presented as the guy who always got his comeuppance.” Ideally, children are encouraged to share and tell the truth—and to care about others. As we grow up, some people continue to embrace those values. Others clearly don’t. As for Richie’s parents, the question of what it might take to amass and protect such riches or who may have been exploited in the process is never explored. Did Mr. Rich, like even the “good billionaire” Warren Buffett, have vast holdings in polluting industries or take advantage of obscure (if scandalously legal) tax avoidance strategies? We’ll never know. Richie exists in a realm free of adult politics, unscathed by what one wealthy Silicon Valley denizen described to me as the “blasé weirdness” experienced by the heirs to vast fortunes—think Succession. (“My wife and I are doing our best for that not to happen,” Cuban told me. “I hope my kids are more like Richie.”)  The values Richie embodied, and our notion of noblesse oblige—the duty of society’s richest to behave with honor, generosity, and responsibility toward those with less—have waned in tandem with a staggering rise in wealth inequality. In 1960, if your salary exceeded $60,000, every additional dollar was taxed at a rate ranging from 71 percent to 91 percent. This helped keep our financial differences in check. But the tax cuts signed by President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s chopped the top bracket from 70 percent to 28 percent. Two years after he left office, Congress enabled a type of trust—by accident, the lawyer credited with inventing it told me—that America’s dynasties now use routinely to transfer vast fortunes, often billions of dollars, to offspring without paying a dime of inheritance tax.  Since Richie’s heyday, we’ve also witnessed the rise of the zero-sum mindset embodied by Trump and his minions. Namely, the idea that every transaction has a winner and a loser—and you do not want to lose. This ethos is now standard operating procedure for a subset of the superrich, compelling ultrawealthy parents to bribe and cheat their children’s way into elite colleges, as revealed in the 2019 scandal dubbed Operation Varsity Blues. It also helps explain why more than 84 percent of that year’s incoming college freshmen—whose collective top priority in 1969 was “developing a meaningful philosophy of life”—selected as their new No. 1 goal: “being very well off financially.”    A uniting myth of America for scrappers and strivers and immigrants is that of a land of opportunity, despite the bigotry that has pervaded our laws and culture. (Leon Harvey would have excelled in advertising, grandson Jonny told me, “but Jewish sons of Jewish immigrants mostly could not get the advertising jobs.”) The distribution of wealth in Richie’s day was by no means egalitarian, but it was markedly more so than today. The notion of a child of superrich parents attending public schools and mixing with poor and middle-income kids was less laughable in 1965, when the pay ratio of CEOs to typical workers at the nation’s 350 largest companies was 21 to 1. By 2019, the ratio had soared to 320 to 1.  A real child of billionaires today probably wouldn’t be running around with poor kids like Freckles and Pee-Wee.NBCUniversal/Sally Edelstein archive Such vast resource differences contribute to what social scientists call “income segregation,” and I like to call “wealth flight.” “The things that people can afford tend to dictate the spaces that they inhabit,” explains Cornell sociologist Kendra Bischoff, who studies the phenomenon in collaboration with Stanford’s Sean Reardon. Rising inequality increases “the spatial separation of people of different incomes,” she told me. When parents opt into private schools, elite sports leagues, and other exclusive activities for their children, “those are the kinds of structural conditions that lead kids to be a lot less likely to hang out with each other,” and that lack of exposure very plausibly “limits their understanding of the world and decreases empathy for people who are different than them.” There’s that word again—the one that, in the Trumpian mindset, belies weakness. Indeed, there’s good evidence that people of higher socioeconomic status tend to be less empathetic than their lower-status counterparts. “We find that people who are relatively well-off are less likely to orient to others in social environments,” says Paul Piff, a psychologist who studies wealth and behavior at the University of California, Irvine. What’s more, he says, “upper-class individuals show—both explicitly, they talk about it, and physiologically—reduced signs of compassion, less sympathy. They’re less moved by the needs of others.” Who’s to know if hoarding money makes some people callous or whether less-empathetic people are simply more prone to pursuing materialistic aims? Cuban restated a theory I’ve heard numerous times, that great wealth merely amplifies a person’s character: If you’re a Reginald sans dough, you’ll end up a Reginald Van Dough. But “if you were nice and caring” before you hit the jackpot, you’ll remain a good person—and have more resources to do good. “Where I think people deviate from that is during the grind to make money—to get to having more than you ever dreamed of,” Cuban says. “That grind is filled with uncertainty for all those not born wealthy. That’s where you focus on your company, often to the exclusion of others. Families. Relationships.”  The ramifications of America’s wealth divide have grown clearer as the Trump regime lays waste to agencies and programs that the families of Richie’s friends might have relied upon and seeks to privatize federal services and enact more tax breaks for the wealthiest 0.01 percent—a group who began this year with an average of $938 million in estimated household assets, and whose share of the nation’s overall wealth has more than quadrupled since 1976, even as the middle class’s share has dwindled.  Richie Rich was a good egg, if a Fabergé one. But today, as America’s wealthiest have fallen in line behind the most egregiously materialistic human being ever to occupy the Oval Office, Richie seems like an anachronism. Remember that Gulf and Western Building where Harvey Comics once had its offices? In the mid-1990s it was acquired by a consortium that included a certain New York City real estate developer. Now it’s the Trump International Hotel and Tower.  The irony, as they say, is rich.

In the early morning hours of January 28, as dozens of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrived in New York to round up undocumented immigrants, a shimmering Kristi Noem appeared in the Bronx. She wore a bulletproof vest and a baseball cap, but also dramatic makeup and hair coiled to show off a set of pearl earrings. “We are getting the dirtbags off these streets,” the new Homeland Security secretary said in a three-second clip she posted to social media. The operation seemed designed for maximum coverage, despite actual goals achieved. (While Trump officials claim operations round up felons, many of the migrants arrested by ICE so far have no criminal record.) Still, Noem would later tell CBS News that the raid was not about creating a “spectacle.” Instead, she said the government simply sought “transparency.” But was that all? Here was a top-ranking Trump appointee asserting the absence of performance after a theatrical show of force. That Noem tagged along for the predawn crackdown in the full glam of a Real Housewife made the claim even more absurd. Noem’s anti-immigrant politics might have been familiar to South Dakotans. But did they recognize their former governor? Noem is one of several figures—a few men, but mostly women—in President Donald Trump’s orbit to undergo striking physical transformations as the boundaries that once delineated celebrity and political power fully disintegrate. The resulting look has since sparked satirical backlash online, with critics mocking “conservative girl makeup.” Clockwise from top left: Kristi Noem, Matt Gaetz, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Lara TrumpChip Somodevilla/Getty(2); Ivan Apfel/Getty; Dominic Gwinn/Zuma But the most jarring aesthetic in this burgeoning MAGA stagecraft is the unbridled embrace of face-altering procedures: plastic surgery, veneers, and injectables like Botox and fillers. (As one Daily Mail headline declared, “Plastic surgery was [the] star of [the] show” at the Republican National Convention in 2024.) The overall look has since been disparagingly referred to as “Mar-a-Lago face.” Although plastic surgery and injectables are enjoyed far beyond conservative circles, what distinguishes Mar-a-Lago face from what you and I might contemplate getting done on an especially self-flagellating day is the aggressive, overt nature with which MAGA-ites seem to pursue it. “Over the top, overdone, ridiculous,” is how one New York plastic surgeon I spoke with described it. “What we’re seeing with something like Mar-a-Lago face is a swing back toward [an era of plastic surgery when] people can tell that people have had work done,” Alka Menon, a professor of sociology at Yale University, told me. The lack of discretion within the current GOP might feel strange today when many—even Kim Kardashian—appear to prize confidentiality. But for the MAGA-verse, today’s tweaks seem intended to signal membership with Trump, a man notoriously obsessed with the literal pageantry of beauty, and his broader efforts to force strict gender norms onto the electorate. The aesthetic is, like Trump’s politics, ridiculously blunt. > “Over the top, overdone, ridiculous,” is how one New York plastic surgeon > described it. “I read it as a sign of physical submission to Donald Trump, a statement of fealty to him and the idea that the surface of a policy is the only thing that matters,” says Anne Higonnet, a professor of art history at Barnard College. “In a way, these women are performing a key part of Donald Trump’s whole political persona.” Take Noem. Soon after Trump said that he was considering her to be his running mate, Noem released an infomercial-style social media video debuting dental work. The new smile, one Republican strategist told the New York Times, was “all about her appeal to an audience of one.” Noem never got the VP role, and she was sued for “deceptive advertising practices.” That lawsuit was dismissed, and she denied being compensated for any advertisements. Still, Trump did appoint her to lead the Department of Homeland Security, despite the fact she had neither worked in the department nor had a background in law enforcement. What Noem did seem to have was the face for the job. “I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads,” Noem recently recalled Trump saying, referring to a set of new taxpayer-funded ads celebrating the immigration crackdown. “I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.” Is one’s proximity to power in Trump’s administration, then, governed at least partly by a willingness to mold oneself to the MAGA aesthetic, no matter how severe the undertaking? As Menon put it to me: “Plastic surgery that is very visible makes it clear that women have invested in their body, and that’s a signal that they’re sending to everybody that they’re putting in this work.” Call it girlboss logic with a MAGA facelift. Strange and self-abasing tactics to signal affinity with the ruling class have always existed. During Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, artificially blackened teeth were considered fashionable among those who wanted to mimic the genuinely decaying teeth of a monarch who consumed too much sugar. If plastic surgery operates as a kind of professional certification, a move to level you up in this administration, then is it not an act of empowerment? It isn’t far-fetched to imagine these women and men—former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), to start—believing that going under the knife could be a form of legitimate labor, getting the literal work done to maximize one’s economic and political standing. Our capitalist beauty bonanza, of which I am a faithful adherent, insinuates similar ideas: Botox advertises injectables as a path to confidence for women. On TikTok, openness about the procedures you’ve undergone is seen as a critical ingredient for virality. The right has adopted this laboratory to sell itself to women, too. Trump-era Republicans have long played a similar trick with the pop feminist catchphrase of “empowerment.” In 2016, Lara Trump led a “Women Empowerment Tour” for the man who would later gut Roe v. Wade and destroy initiatives to help women get equal job opportunities. “Blazing a trail to empowerment” is how a lifestyle magazine described Kimberly Guilfoyle, who led fundraising for Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. In 2019, now-Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote a Sun Sentinel editorial urging voters to reelect Trump headlined: “President Trump empowering women across America.” Casting Mar-a-Lago face as a path to female freedom isn’t that odd, considering the fun-house mirror feminism of the GOP. As Corey Robin wrote in The Reactionary Mind, one need only turn to Phyllis Schlafly—the godmother of the Republican women’s movement—to see how the right “adopts, often unconsciously, the language of democratic reform to the cause of hierarchy.” Schlafly famously co-opted the language of feminists when she criticized the Equal Rights Amendment as “an attack on the rights of the wife.” (Noem’s office was generally evasive when reached for comment on this piece. But one exchange struck me: “I imagine you are focusing on men, right?”) The new look among MAGA women is consistent with the conservative movement’s decades-old willingness to embrace women’s rights—up to a point. As Ronnee Schreiber, a politics professor at San Diego State University, notes: “The caveat is, ‘Of course, women should have the ability to make choices, but we don’t want to go as far as the feminists.’” At a time when the GOP is viciously exploiting transgender Americans as a cultural scapegoat, Schreiber notes, hyper-femininity also helps reinforce the “norms and differences between femininity and masculinity.” In this way, women in Republican politics show their male counterparts that they are committed to the same conservative goals, but are not threatening. “It reaffirms the femininity of women,” she adds, “even if they have power.” Here is the gender-affirming care the right can celebrate. Cut deeper. What happens to the self when surgery is embraced for the purpose of political conformity, consciously or otherwise? At its most extreme, the result might look something like a steady stream of fembots, indistinguishable and dulled. But the urge to do Mar-a-Lago face also feels familiar to any woman. “To me, it’s less about the gaze of one man,” Schreiber explains of Mar-a-Lago face, “and more about the broader political meaning of gender.” For women to have power, she notes, they often feel they must appease, with their appearance, a man in power. This plays out in garish ways in Trumpworld. But the pressure on women is not unique to politics. > Trump’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, once offered a winner $25,000 > worth of plastic surgery. We already know what happens when digital trends and algorithms dictate real-life beauty standards. Just look at everyone’s cheeks. After years of popular buccal fat removal procedures, Allure reports that in 2025, facial fat grafting, wherein fat from other parts of the body is used to fill in those recently hollowed-out faces, will be the look to chase. Yet as fast-moving as our digital trends are, so too are the whims of Trump, a man notorious for his chaotic management style. Naturally, the whiplash extends to his views of plastic surgery. After bringing Laura Loomer to several events to commemorate September 11 last year, prompting alarm that the right-wing, xenophobic internet troll could serve somewhere in his administration, the Atlantic reported that one of the final factors to convince him otherwise was not only her hateful views, but also the extent of her surgery. The president has also specifically gone after face-altering procedures to humiliate women. “She was bleeding badly from a facelift,” he once said as president in 2017, referring to MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski. Meanwhile, it’s been alleged that Trump himself has had work done—which is to say nothing of the many women in his orbit who have seemed to enjoy unfettered access to procedures. Heralded as his most ambitious real estate endeavor, Trump’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, once offered a winner $25,000 worth of plastic surgery. But young conservatives seem to be struggling with the aesthetics of their MAGA elders. As MAGA influencer Arynne Wexler told New York’s Brock Colyar in January: “We need to be better. That’s why I put my face in my videos. People need to see that I look like a liberal! I look like a girl that would, ugh, vote for Kamala [Harris].” The urgency with which Wexler underscores a need to look “normal,” even like a “liberal,” is clarifying: Young conservatives see many things to celebrate about Trump—the end of DEI, the return of the r-word, cruelty—but looking like a fembot is not one of them. It hints at the possibility that MAGA’s aesthetic choices could expire as quickly as all the facial injections. Or it simply could be the fact that they’re still young. The ambient pressure will eventually come for them; it comes for us all. When was the last time I caught a stranger looking at me with subtle desire? Working full time from home at the cusp of early middle age, as a relatively new mom with a 3-year-old, I genuinely can’t recall. I look like garbage most days and since giving birth, the internal hormonal shift has left me, at times, smelling like an Italian sub. (Botox could fix that, too, I know.) So far, I have resisted the siren song of cosmetic enhancements, even as friends, and many with increasing regularity, dabble in procedures. Yet I am just as mesmerized by the standards of our internet-fueled homogeneity as anyone else. It simply feels good to look good. And when the world feels so bad, why not use everything available to feel good? So I spend too much on serums and dodge the mirror in the mornings. > I look like garbage most days and since giving birth, the internal hormonal > shift has left me, at times, smelling like an Italian sub. You could attribute my current resistance to a bunch of factors. But I suspect that one of the strongest is having already experienced what seems like our future every time I visit South Korea, the plastic surgery capital of the world and my parents’ birthplace. The faces of manipulated uniformity—double eyelid surgery, face-whitening injections, breast implants on laser-toned thin bodies—are jolting to witness. And at first, it’s almost funny; the absolute chokehold is weird to behold! But by the third or fourth day, the ambient sense that I am the odd one, even ugly, starts to creep in. Perhaps a quick visit to one of Seoul’s 600 plastic surgery clinics would fix things. Which is to say that I hesitate to fault anyone in the eyeshot of the most powerful person in the world—against all the signals both in and out of the White House—for aesthetic choices made on their paths to power. Look at Joe Biden, who in his own catastrophic stubbornness to retain the presidency was suspected of heavy Botox. But any empathy one might have for those who apparently feel a need to conform to Mar-a-Lago face instantly evaporates when power is wielded for the shocking cruelty we now see before us: mass deportations, but make it sexy. Noem in a cowboy hat threatening “economic pain” upon other nations. Inhumanity as ASMR. Each features a callous energy that courses through. In the same way their aesthetics build on conservative notions of gender, ultimately producing such garishness, Trump builds on old American ideals—empire and capitalism—and turbocharges them into the nightmare before us. This is the real brutality of the Mar-a-Lago aesthetic. It’s not the makeup or potential plastic surgery, but the eagerness with which its adherents capitulate to the whims of their king. American politics, like our faces, may never recover.

One day about 10 years ago, Alicia Mitchell-Mercer experienced one of those moments that change the course of a person’s life. She was a longtime paralegal in Charlotte, North Carolina, working for a consulting company that helps law firms with project management. In the lobby of a client firm that day, she overheard a troubling conversation. A receptionist was explaining the firm’s rates to a caller who was clearly in distress. Ray (a pseudonym) was a single father and fast-food manager with three girls between the ages of 7 and 12. His estranged common-law wife, struggling with addiction, had moved in with a man who’d done prison time. Ray had heard she was planning to leave town with him and take the kids, and he was desperate to prevent it. Despite the urgency of his situation, the receptionist was telling Ray the firm would be unable to help—he couldn’t afford their fees. Mitchell-Mercer reached out to Ray. It turned out he’d already been to the sheriff’s office and had consulted with a court advocate. Both said he needed an emergency custody order—and a lawyer. She knew how to help him, but she couldn’t do it on her own. Laws in all 50 states forbid what’s known as “unauthorized practice of law.” UPL statutes generally preclude the provision of legal services by nonlawyers, even old hands like Mitchell-Mercer, who, in addition to her decades as a paralegal, has served in state and national legal organizations and volunteered as a court-appointed child guardian. For Ray, she found a workaround. On her own time, she ghostwrote a complaint and had an attorney she knew review it. Ray filed the complaint as an unrepresented litigant and got his emergency order. But by the time his daughters were located, several weeks after Mitchell-Mercer reached out, the girls were living in another state and said they’d been assaulted and sexually abused. Mitchell-Mercer dreads to imagine how much worse things might have been had she not intervened. “This man had gone to everyone under the sun to try and get help and wasn’t able to,” she said. “That was one of the first times I realized how broken things were.”   With that realization, she would soon find herself drawn into an unusual coalition of left-leaning academics, grassroots activists, and libertarian lawyers, all striving to democratize civil legal services by suing states, including her own, to roll back their UPL laws. Strange bedfellows, to be sure, but their timing is impeccable. As the pendulum swings in favor of deregulation, even some progressive politicians and traditional fans of zealous government oversight have cast a skeptical eye on overbearing restrictions, like the zoning and environmental codes that are thwarting construction of desperately needed housing and clean energy projects. Depending on whom you ask, if Mitchell-Mercer and her allies can put their arguments before the Supreme Court, they could either smash barriers that have left millions of Americans helpless against abusive partners, bad landlords, and heartless corporations or usher in a bonanza of poverty predation—or both. Either way, their efforts have the potential to change the legal landscape profoundly.       The failings of America’s criminal justice system are common knowledge, but our civil legal system, which affects even more people, is no less compromised—and there’s no civil equivalent to the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel in criminal cases. A 2022 report from the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), a nonprofit that Congress established during the 1970s to fund free civil legal aid for the poor, notes that “low-income Americans do not get any or enough legal help for 92 percent of their substantial civil legal problems.” More than 70 percent of low-income families encounter at least one such issue a year, the LSC reports. As in Ray’s case, these are often true emergencies—domestic violence, eviction, predatory debt collection—with life-altering stakes. A 2018 study found, for example, that tenants facing eviction in the Minneapolis area were four to five times more likely to be forcibly removed from their home if they lacked legal representation. But lawyers charge around $300 an hour on average, putting their services out of reach for even much of the middle class. State legal aid organizations, meanwhile, are independent nonprofits and, despite some government support, are badly underfunded. In Mitchell-Mercer’s home state, there is only one Legal Aid attorney for every 8,000 eligible people—those with annual household income of no more than $39,000 for a family of four (125 percent of the federal poverty level). The National Center for Access to Justice ranked North Carolina the third-worst state for access to civil attorneys—only Mississippi and South Dakota scored lower. About half of its counties are legal deserts, with fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 residents.       This dearth of affordable representation affects communities of color disproportionately, and Mitchell-Mercer, who is Black, is regularly approached by members of her church. A woman needs assistance getting a restraining order. A family facing eviction doesn’t know how to respond to court papers. The immediate solutions are often straightforward—a matter of properly filing standard legal documents—and well within her realm of expertise. But even such minimal assistance is verboten. In theory, the UPL laws are in the public interest—conceived, in part, to protect people from predatory charlatans and incompetent practitioners. But they’re also the primary mechanism by which lawyers maintain their monopoly on legal advice. Even as Americans have grown used to receiving basic medical care from physician assistants and nurse practitioners—including diagnoses, treatment, and prescriptions—UPL rules ensure that no equivalents exist for legal services. Most of the statutes are extremely broad, encompassing everything from giving legal advice to drafting documents and appearing in court. They are vigilantly policed by the state bars, and violating them exposes nonlawyers like Mitchell-Mercer to sanctions, even including jail time. Which is why, when someone comes to her for help, there’s often little she can do.       To a degree unmatched by other professions, American law is a self-governing fiefdom. There are no federal rules for lawyers. Officially, state supreme courts act as industry overseers, but as a practical matter, regulation is largely delegated to state bars. These are the licensing bodies that lawyers join upon passing the bar exam, as opposed to bar associations, which are professional groups. State bars determine not only who may practice law but what constitutes that practice—including tasks that people without a law degree are quite capable of handling.      Stanford law professor Nora Freeman Engstrom and researcher James Stone trace the current regime back to the 1930s, when bar associations launched a fusillade of litigation against unions, homeowners associations, and auto clubs that provided legal services to members, accusing them of violating incipient UPL laws. “In state after state,” Engstrom and Stone wrote in the Yale Law Journal, the bar associations prevailed, eliminating competition and decimating “a once-thriving system for the provision of group legal services to ordinary Americans.”     The industry’s evolution over the past half-century has only made access to lawyers more exclusive, said James Sandman, a Penn Law School lecturer and former LSC president. In 1973, less than half of law firm revenue came from corporate clients, as opposed to individuals; by 2023, the figure was nearly 75 percent. “They’re going after the clients that can afford to pay,” Sandman said. “Individuals who don’t have lawyers have to navigate an unbelievably complicated, opaque system designed by lawyers for lawyers.” He continued, “But the image people have of what goes on in a courtroom, where both parties have lawyers arguing facts on behalf of their clients, is a fiction in more than three-quarters of civil cases.” > “I’m not going to jail for you or anybody else,” says a social worker who > helps with visitation and custody issues at a free legal clinic. “People say, > ‘What would you do?’ Well, I can’t tell you.” The legal industry fiercely resists incursions onto its turf. In response to a 2008 proposal to loosen UPL restrictions in Washington, the state bar association claimed the move would create “second class, separate but unequal, justice” and deprive less-affluent lawyers of work. The North Carolina bar issued a cease-and-desist letter that year to LegalZoom, saying the tech firm’s document-creation service violated UPL law. (The company, which has faced similar challenges elsewhere—most recently in New Jersey—then sued the North Carolina bar and later settled, agreeing to have lawyers vet all of its documents.) Meanwhile, a 2015 proposal to relax California’s UPL rules would, one foe argued, be “detrimental to the honest attorneys who are trying to make a living.” But the image of a general-practice lawyer hanging a shingle on Main Street is largely a relic of the past. Today’s median lawyerly income is roughly $150,000, and law is increasingly a business of corporate specialists. From 2013 to 2023, the number of lawyers working at firms that have more than 500 attorneys increased by 36 percent. The bar’s proposed solutions to the affordability crisis—increasing legal aid funding and expanding pro bono requirements—are woefully inadequate. “Providing even one hour of attorney time to every American household facing a legal problem would cost on the order of $40 billion,” legal scholars Gillian Hadfield and Deborah Rhode wrote in 2016—almost 30 times the overall legal aid expenditures in 2013. To provide even this minimal level of counsel, they calculated, every licensed attorney in the United States would have to clock more than 200 pro bono hours a year. To make a dent in the problem, legal aid organizations would need a massive increase in support. Last year, Congress approved only $560 million for the Legal Services Corporation, about a third of its budget request. And even if LSC were fully funded, lots of low-income litigants would be stuck on the sidelines. Those who are ineligible for financial or other reasons, and who can’t find other pro bono legal help, are left to navigate a patchwork of free clinics and courthouse services that vary greatly in quantity and quality. Concentrated in urban areas, these clinics are generally staffed by nonlawyers who cannot offer clients any actual legal advice.  Daniel Stolle On a recent morning at a courthouse in downtown Raleigh, employees of the Wake County Legal Support Center were helping people fill out standard forms and offering instructions on how to serve court papers. The center, one of the few of its kind in North Carolina, opened in January 2023. A local judge had estimated that 2,000 people might use it each year. In 2024, it served almost 14,000.  Seated at a long plastic table, a court advocate who specializes in domestic violence issues was especially busy. “Does she have a concealed carry permit?” she asked a bearded Black man in an orange construction shirt and mud-caked boots. The man shook his head. He was filing for an emergency protective order against his partner for himself and his child. Still, he said, “she could tweak out at any moment.” He left the center visibly relieved, an envelope of completed forms tucked under his arm. But the two young women who came next couldn’t decide how to proceed. They wanted the advocate to advise them, but she wasn’t allowed. Both left empty-handed.    This happens all the time, Norma Boyd, who was sitting at an adjacent table, told me. Boyd, a veteran social worker whom everyone calls Ms. Norma, handles questions about child custody and visitation. Often, she said, people have difficulty understanding basic legal terms. “I ask, ‘Are you the plaintiff or the defendant?’ They don’t know.” Even if they file initial paperwork, their cases are frequently dismissed when, without further guidance, they miss follow-up steps such as serving documents and filing certificates of service. For people without an attorney, the courtroom is an intensely frustrating, alienating place. “I felt like this street rat showing up to a cocktail party uninvited, and everybody knows what’s going on except me,” one North Carolinian who’d represented himself in a custody trial against a lawyered-up former partner told me. Boyd, with her proximity to family law, often knows perfectly well what the center’s clients ought to do. But “I’m not going to jail for you or anybody else,” she said. “People say, ‘What would you do?’ Well, I can’t tell you. I tell people, ‘These are your options.’ People want you to tell them what to do, and I can’t.”       Mitchell-Mercer’s quest to reform the system took shape in 2020, when she and another paralegal, S.M. Kernodle-Hodges, founded a nonprofit called the North Carolina Justice for All Project. They were inspired by policy changes in a handful of other states, notably Arizona, Utah, and Washington, that permit nonlawyers who’ve undergone special licensing programs to provide limited legal assistance. In Utah, they can work on family law matters, including domestic abuse, child custody, and divorce, plus eviction and debt collection cases. In Arizona, they can handle certain criminal and juvenile law issues. In both states, they can give advice; review, draft, sign, and file documents; and accompany clients to court. (Similar programs are now under consideration in about a half-dozen other states.) Kernodle-Hodges, a former deputy sheriff who calls everyone by their last name—she goes by “Kernodle”—had been thinking about bringing such a program to North Carolina. On a colleague’s recommendation, she reached out to Mitchell-Mercer, who had served a stint in the Army and written her master’s thesis on legal services. They proved a good fit. Kernodle, too, is Black and a court advocate. Both women are extraordinarily disciplined and scheduled to the hilt with professional and volunteer obligations. Both have a precise, punctuated way of speaking and a kind of regal poise. In January 2021, they proposed a program comparable to those in Arizona and Utah to the North Carolina bar. At more than 100 pages, their plan was deeply researched, with rigorous citations. The bar’s Subcommittee Studying Regulatory Change, of which Mitchell-Mercer and Kernodle were members, held a series of meetings and hosted outside experts to vet the proposal. > “When you have this many disparate parties involved, the Supreme Court is > going to have to resolve it…It’s going to be one of the first big economic > regulation cases of our era.”   In January 2022, the subcommittee issued a report fully endorsing it. But the authors weren’t convinced they would get a fair shake. “What we were hearing was that there was some hesitancy to move forward,” Mitchell-Mercer recalled. “Our ideas were getting explained to other bar committees, and not necessarily being well received.” Indeed, the bar went on to create another subgroup, supposedly to address the access question, from which the two women were excluded. When that committee first met, in October 2022, they posted a message to the Justice for All Project’s website: “We are concerned that this new committee was formed solely to appear that state bar leaders are doing something about the access to justice crisis and to appear empathetic to the plight of North Carolinians,” they wrote. And “there is reasonable concern that North Carolina State Bar officers have no serious intention of acting on previously discussed initiatives.”   A prominent lawyer sympathetic to Kernodle and Mitchell-Mercer told them that bar leaders were describing them as “angry and aggressive,” an offensive stereotype. Mitchell-Mercer tried to take it in stride. Kernodle was upset. “Mercer is a look-at-the-bright-side person,” Kernodle explained. “She will give you the very proper language about everything. My thing is: What’d you say?!” But they had been careful not to frame their proposal in racial terms. “No matter how cordial we were, it was still upsetting to them,” Kernodle said. The bar took no further action, in any case. And so, in 2023, the women submitted a similar proposal to the state legislature, backed by more than a dozen legal entities, including the US Department of Justice, whose antitrust division commended their “thoughtful analysis and policy recommendations and looks forward to reviewing any related bills that ultimately are introduced to the North Carolina legislature.” None were forthcoming. Kernodle and Mitchell-Mercer had encouraging talks with several lawmakers, but their proposal, which asserted that UPL laws gave attorneys “no meaningful incentive to provide affordable services,” clearly ruffled some feathers.  Amy Galey, a Republican state senator and an attorney, sent the women a blistering email that March, copying her Republican colleagues: “So you want to create a two-tiered system of legal representation, one of well-educated licensed lawyers for people who can afford them, and a second tier of unlicensed, unregulated people of questionable education for low income people,” she wrote. “If your response would be no, they would be licensed, and we would regulate them, and they would be required to have a certain education—yes we have that already, and they are called attorneys.” She went on: “Your proposal would create an A-team and a B-team…and ultimately solve nothing.” Asked for further comment, Galey replied, “That’s a really good quote, glad I said it, and I don’t have anything to add.” Her message effectively ended the discussion. Kernodle and Mitchell-Mercer heard nothing more from the legislature.         Even as they contemplated defeat, the women were introduced to an unexpected ally, Paul Sherman, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, an influential libertarian public-interest law firm. Founded in 1991 as a nonprofit with a $350,000 grant from Charles Koch’s foundation, the IJ now spends about $44 million a year, much of it litigating in federal courts to “protect the constitutional rights of Americans” against what its funders and principals view as regulatory overreach. Professional licensing laws are among the firm’s favorite targets. In Louisiana, Florida, Kentucky, and elsewhere, the IJ has successfully challenged what it argued were onerous licensing laws for engineers, diet coaches, florists, and tour guides. Since the late 2000s, it has increasingly framed professional licensing as a violation of the First Amendment, relying on a series of Supreme Court decisions that eroded the right to limit certain kinds of speech. In one 2015 case, Reed v. Town of Gilbert, the court held that an Arizona town’s attempts to restrict public signage based on its content were unconstitutional. In another, National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, in 2018, the justices rejected the idea that professional speech and commercial speech enjoy less protection than personal speech. “There’s never been a better time in American history to be litigating free speech cases,” Sherman told me. “The court has adopted a more or less libertarian interpretation of the speech clauses of the First Amendment.” > Without adequate guardrails, “there can be consumer fraud. There can be a > whole variety of issues…We need to be focused on: What’s good for the public?” In January 2024, Sherman filed a First Amendment lawsuit on behalf of the Justice for All Project that challenges the scope of North Carolina’s UPL prohibitions. Naming five local district attorneys and the president of the state bar as defendants, it builds on the IJ’s suit against New York state—where the firm represents a pastor and a legal-tech nonprofit called Upsolve, arguing that they should be able to advise clients battling debt collectors—and a similar case brought by the NAACP in South Carolina that centered on eviction. The Upsolve case is under review by the 2nd Circuit after a lower court issued a preliminary injunction in the nonprofit’s favor, and the South Carolina Supreme Court has granted the NAACP permission to train nonlawyers to provide eviction-related advice.    But the North Carolina claims are substantially broader, asserting the right of nonlawyers to advise clients on a spectrum of issues and charge for their services. This is by design. “The goal is for the Supreme Court to make clear that advice, no matter what the topic, is protected by the First Amendment,” Sherman said.  Legal experts figure this case, or a similar one, has a good shot at getting in front of the high court, and soon. “It’s not going to stop in North Carolina,” said Lucy Ricca, executive director of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford. “These cases have the potential to blow through” the political morass. “When you have this many disparate parties involved, the Supreme Court is going to have to resolve it,” concurred Dan Rodriguez, a professor at Northwestern Law School. “It’s going to be one of the first big economic regulation cases of our era.”   Sherman acknowledges that taking on the bar is, well, a high bar. “We tried to think of occupations that are composed largely of speech, and of course, one of the first that occurred to us was our own: the practice of law,” he said, but “before we could challenge that system, we had to have some victories involving other occupations to establish the legal principles in a setting that would be less scary to judges.” He now believes the Institute for Justice has the precedents it needs. It doesn’t hurt that at least one Supreme Court justice has expressed displeasure with the status quo. Lawyers “have used the expansive UPL rules they’ve sought and won to combat competition from outsiders seeking to provide routine but arguably ‘legal’ services at low or no cost to consumers,” Neil Gorsuch wrote in a 2016 article. “It seems well past time to reconsider our sweeping UPL prohibitions.”   A Supreme Court ruling favoring the IJ in the North Carolina case could greatly expand access to civil justice for the people whom Mitchell-Mercer and Kernodle aim to help. But even some access-to-justice proponents are wary. If you wipe out all restrictions on providing legal advice, “there’s no logical stopping place,” Northwestern’s Rodriguez told me. That’s part of why more than a dozen civil legal services and rights groups in New York oppose the IJ’s suit there, including Legal Services NYC, the nation’s largest provider of free civil legal assistance. > “When we started making these arguments, people laughed at the idea that the > First Amendment could apply to professional speech…People aren’t laughing at > these arguments anymore.” “Plaintiffs would immediately relegate low-income New Yorkers, including low-income New Yorkers of color, to receiving questionable legal advice,” the groups wrote in an amicus brief. “The consequences,” they argue, “can be disastrous.” Incompetent legal guidance could pave the way for “creditors and debt collectors to secure an unaffordable settlement agreement or an easy judgment that they can then use to freeze bank accounts and garnish wages.” Critics also fear that artificial intelligence would unleash a firehose of dubious counsel. Without adequate guardrails, “there can be consumer fraud. There can be a whole variety of issues,” Andrew Perlman, the dean of Suffolk University Law School, told me. It’s not hard to imagine entrepreneurs akin to payday lenders and skeezy tax preparers opening outlets in low-income neighborhoods to peddle legal help. “We need to be focused on: What’s good for the public?” Perlman said. The fact that Sherman’s group takes money from dynasties like the Kochs and the DeVoses doesn’t exactly ease liberals’ concerns. “Open their books and it’s a cornucopia of ProPublica’s worst nightmares!” Rodriguez quipped. “There are going to be people drafting on these sympathetic plaintiffs, looking for economic advantage. You think you’re protecting access to justice, but actually, you’re feeding the Koch brothers’ wildest fever dreams!”   Hadfield, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University and is an influential voice on the access issue, is skeptical of the First Amendment framing. “I don’t think that [just] anybody should be able to say anything to anybody about legal matters,” she told me, and merely empowering competent nonlawyers to provide advice isn’t enough, given the scope of the problem. She dreams of a future in which large nonprofits and businesses harness technology, including AI, to furnish reliable, ethical, low-cost legal assistance on a massive scale. Many academics who study civil legal access share a similar vision. You could have Amazon get in on the act, and also retailers like Walmart, whose customers might one day obtain a simple will or even a divorce while picking up their prescriptions. “We’re worried about the impact of these companies in communities, but they’re also just better at serving consumers than lawyers are,” said Stanford’s Ricca. “Lawyers think we’re really, really special—a privileged class. But we’re just not serving regular people anymore.” Qualms aside, Hadfield does hope the First Amendment cases succeed, “because we need to break open a very, very harmful set of practices: this stranglehold that the legal bar has.” There’s no evidence that litigants have been harmed in the states that have relaxed UPL rules, she added—and a scorched-earth approach may well be a necessary first step in creating a more equitable and thoughtfully regulated industry.             The Justice for All Project hit a snag in December, when a federal judge dismissed its case. The court ruled that North Carolina’s UPL statutes regulate “conduct”—the practice of law—with only “an incidental impact on speech,” and thus do not violate the First Amendment. The decision relied, in part, on a recent appellate ruling against another IJ client, a drone photography company that North Carolina targeted for the “unlicensed practice of land surveying.” The December ruling is “disappointing but not surprising,” Sherman told me, arguing that both decisions clearly misapply Supreme Court precedent. He is appealing the Justice for All case while the high court considers whether to review the drone case. For Sherman, both losses are merely temporary setbacks: “We’ve been litigating these cases for 15 years. What’s amazing is when we started making these arguments, people laughed at the idea that the First Amendment could apply to professional speech. The Supreme Court agreed with us. People aren’t laughing at these arguments anymore.” Mitchell-Mercer, too, was skeptical of Sherman’s strategy at first. “I had never thought of this as a First Amendment issue,” she told me. But she’s come around, even adopting some of the language of her libertarian allies. “People should be trusted to know that they’re gonna get what they pay for,” she said. “Prohibiting people from even having a conversation is almost a weaponizing of paternalism. Telling people that we’re going to control who you can talk to about your issue, who you can hear from, is not benefiting the public. It benefits the lawyers.” 

Luchia Brown used to bomb around Denver in her Subaru. She had places to be. Brown, 57, works part time helping to run her husband’s engineering firm while managing a rental apartment above their garage and an Airbnb out of a section of the couple’s three-story brick house. She volunteers for nonprofits, sometimes offering input to city committees, often on transportation policy. “I’m a professional good troublemaker,” she jokes when we meet in her sun-soaked backyard one fine spring day. She’s also an environmentally conscious type who likes the idea of driving less. Brown bought a regular bike years ago, but mainly used it just for neighborhood jaunts. “I’m not uber-fit,” she says. “I’m not a slug, but I’m not one of the warriors in Lycra, and I don’t really want to arrive in a sweat.” Then, a couple of years ago, she heard Denver was offering $400 vouchers to help residents purchase an e-bike—or up to $900 toward a hefty “cargo” model that can haul heavier loads, including children. She’d considered an e-bike, but the city’s offer provided “an extra kick in the derriere to make me do it.” She opens her garage door to show off her purchase: a bright blue Pedego Boomerang. It’s a pricey model—$2,600 after the voucher—but “it changed my life!” she says. Nowadays, Brown thinks nothing of zipping halfway across town, her long dark-gray hair flying out behind her helmet. Hills do not faze her. Parking is hassle-free. And she can carry groceries in a crate strapped to the rear rack. She’d just ridden 4 miles to a doctor’s appointment for a checkup on a recent hip replacement. She rides so often—and at such speeds—that her husband bought his own e-bike to keep up: “I’m like, ‘Look, when you’re riding with me, it’s not about exercise. It’s about getting somewhere.’” She ended up gifting the Subaru to her son, who works for SpaceX in Texas. The only car left is her husband’s work truck, which she uses sparingly. She prefers the weirdly intoxicating delight of navigating on human-and-battery power: “It’s joy.” Many Denverites would agree. Over the two years the voucher program—pioneering in scale and scope—has been in effect, more than 9,000 people have bought subsidized e-bikes. Of those, more than one-third were “income qualified” (making less than $86,900 a year) and thus eligible for a more generous subsidy. People making less than $52,140 got the most: $1,200 to $1,400. The goal is to get people out of their cars, which city planners hope will deliver a bouquet of good things: less traffic, less pollution, healthier citizens. Research commissioned by the city in 2022 found that voucher recipients rode 26 miles a week on average, and many were using their e-bikes year-round. If even half of those miles are miles not driven, it means—conservatively, based on total e-bikes redeemed to date—the program will have eliminated more than 6.1 million automobile miles a year. That’s the equivalent of taking up to 478 gas-powered vehicles off the road, which would reduce annual CO2 emissions by nearly 190,000 metric tons. Subsidizing electric vehicles isn’t a new concept, at least when those vehicles are cars. President Barack Obama’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act offered up to $7,500 to anyone who bought an electric car or light truck, capped at 200,000 per automaker. In 2022, President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act created new and similar rebates without the caps. The US government has spent more than $2 billion to date subsidizing EV purchases, with some states and cities kicking in more. Weaning transportation off fossil fuels is crucial to decarbonizing the economy, and EVs on average have much lower life-cycle CO2 emissions than comparable gas vehicles—as little as 20 percent, by some estimates. In states like California, where more than 54 percent of the electricity is generated by renewables and other non–fossil fuel sources, the benefits are even more remarkable. Now, politicians around the country have begun to realize that e-bikes could be even more transformative than EVs. At least 30 states and dozens of cities—from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Raleigh, North Carolina—have proposed or launched subsidy programs. It’s much cheaper than subsidizing electric cars, and though e-bikes can’t do everything cars can, they do, as Brown discovered, greatly expand the boundaries within which people work, shop, and play without driving. Emissions plummet: An analysis by the nonprofit Walk Bike Berkeley suggests that a typical commuter e-bike with pedal assist emits 21 times less CO2 per mile than a typical electric car (based on California’s power mix) and 141 times less than a gas-powered car. And e-bikes are far less resource- and energy-intensive to manufacture and distribute. Cities also are coming to see e-bikes as a potential lifeline for their low-income communities, a healthy alternative to often unreliable public transit for families who can’t afford a car. And that electric boost gives some people who would never have considered bike commuting an incentive to try, thus helping facilitate a shift from car dependency to a more bikeable, walkable, livable culture. In short, if policymakers truly want to disrupt transportation—and reimagine cities—e-bikes might well be their secret weapon. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I’m an avid urban cyclist who rides long distances for fun, but I don’t ride an electric. So when I landed in Denver in April, I rented a Pedego e-bike to see how battery power would affect my own experience of getting around a city. Reader: It was delightful. Denver is flat-ish, but it’s got brisk winds and deceptively long slopes as you go crosstown. There are occasional gut-busting hills, too, including one leading up to Sunnyside, the neighborhood where I was staying. Riding a regular bike would have been doable for an experienced cyclist like me, but the battery assist made longer schleps a breeze: I rode 65 miles one day while visiting four far-flung neighborhoods. On roads without traffic, I could cruise along at a speedy 18 miles an hour. The Cherry Creek bike trail, which bisects Denver in a southeast slash, was piercingly gorgeous as I pedaled past frothing waterfalls, families of ducks, and the occasional tent pitched next to striking pop art on the creekside walls. My Apple watch clocked a decent workout, but it was never difficult.  Author Clive Thompson (left) and Mike Salisbury ride together in Denver.Theo Stoomer I did a lunch ride another day with Mike Salisbury, then the city’s transportation energy lead overseeing the voucher program. Tall and lanky, with a thick mop of straight brown hair, Salisbury wears a slim North Face fleece and sports a beige REI e-bike dusted with dried mud. He’s a lifelong cyclist, but the e-bike, which he’d purchased about two years earlier, has become his go-to ride. “I play tennis on Fridays, and it’s like 6 miles away,” he says, and he always used to drive. “It would never, ever have crossed my mind to do it on my acoustic bike.”  E-bikes technically date back to 1895, when the US inventor Ogden Bolton Jr. slapped an electric motor on his rear wheel. But for more than a century, they were niche novelties. The batteries of yore were brutally heavy, with a range of barely 10 miles. It wasn’t until the lithium-ion battery, relatively lightweight and energy-dense, began plunging in price 30 years ago that e-bikes grew lighter and cheaper. Some models now boast a range of more than 75 miles per charge, even when using significant power assist. All of this piqued Denver’s interest. In 2020, the city had passed a ballot measure that raised, through sales taxes, $40 million a year for environmental projects. A task force was set up to figure out how to spend it. Recreational cycling has long been a pastime in outdoorsy Colorado, and bike commuting boomed on account of the pandemic, when Covid left people skittish about ridesharing and public transit. E-bikes, the task force decided, would be a powerful way to encourage low-emissions mobility. “We were thinking, ‘What is going to reduce VMT?’”—vehicle miles traveled—Salisbury recalls. His team looked at e-bike programs in British Columbia and Austin, Texas, asked dealers for advice, and eventually settled on a process: Residents would get a voucher code through a city website and bring it to a local dealer for an instant rebate. The city would repay the retailer within a few weeks. A program was launched in April 2022 with $300,000, enough for at least 600 vouchers. They were snapped up in barely 10 minutes, “like Taylor Swift fans flooding Ticketmaster,” Salisbury wrote in a progress report. His team then secured another $4.7 million to expand the program. “It was like the scene in Jaws,” he told me: “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Every few months, the city would release more vouchers, and its website would get hammered. Within a year, the program had handed out more than 4,700 vouchers, two-thirds to income-qualified riders. Mike Salisbury, former head of Denver’s e-bike voucher programTheo Stroomer Denver enlisted Ride Report, an Oregon-based data firm, to assess the program’s impact: Its survey found that 65 percent of the e-bikers rode every day and 90 percent rode at least weekly. The average distance was 3.3 miles. Salisbury was thrilled. The state followed suit later that year, issuing e-bike rebates to 5,000 low-income workers (people making up to 80 percent of their county’s median income). This past April, state legislators approved a $450 tax credit for residents who buy an e-bike. Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, told me he found it very pleasant, and highly unusual, to oversee a program that literally leaves people grinning: “People love it. There’s nothing we’ve done that has gotten as much positive feedback.”  I witnessed the good cheer firsthand talking to Denverites who’d taken advantage of the programs. They ranged from newbies to dedicated cyclists. Most said it was the subsidy that convinced them to pull the trigger. All seemed fairly besotted with their e-bikes and said they’d replaced lots of car trips. Software engineer Tom Carden chose a cargo model for heavy-duty hauling—he’d recently lugged 10 gallons of paint (about 110 pounds) in one go, he told me—and shuttling his two kids to and from elementary school. Child-hauling is sort of the ideal application for cargo bikes. I arrange a ride one afternoon with Ted Rosenbaum, whose sturdy gray cargo e-bike has a toddler seat in back and a huge square basket in front. I wait outside a local day care as Rosenbaum, a tall fellow clad in T-shirt and khakis, emerges with his pigtailed 18-month-old daughter. He straps her in and secures her helmet for their 2.5-mile trek home. “It’s right in that sweet spot where driving is 10 to 15 minutes, but riding my bike is always 14,” Rosenbaum says as we glide away. “I think she likes this more than the car, too—better views.” The toddler grips her seatposts gently, head swiveling as she takes in the sights. Rosenbaum rides slowly but confidently; I’d wondered how drivers would behave around a child on a cargo bike, and today, at least, they’re pretty solicitous. A white SUV trails us for two long blocks, almost comically hesitant to pass, until I give it a wave and the driver creeps by cautiously. At the next stoplight, Rosenbaum’s daughter breaks her silence with a loud, excited yelp: There’s a huge, fluffy dog walking by. E-bikes stir up heated opposition, too. Sure, riders love them. But some pedestrians, drivers, dog walkers, and “acoustic” bikers are affronted, even enraged, by the new kid on the block. This is particularly so in dense cities, like my own, where e-bikes have proliferated. By one estimate, New York City has up to 65,000 food delivery workers on e-bikes. Citi Bike operates another 20,000 pay-as-you-go e-bikes, and thousands of residents own one. When I told my NYC friends about this story, probably half, including regular cyclists, blurted out something along the lines of, “I hate those things.” They hate when e-bikers zoom past them on bike paths at 20 mph, dangerously close, or ride the wrong direction down bike lanes on one-way streets. And they hate sharing crowded bikeways with tourists and inexperienced riders. > “You have to build” bike infrastructure first, notes one advocate. “If we’re > going to wait for the majority of the population to let go of car dependency, > we’re never going to get here.”  In September 2023 near Chinatown, a Citi Bike customer ran into 69-year-old Priscilla Loke, who died two days later. After another Citi Biker rammed a Harlem pedestrian, Sarah Pratt, from behind, Pratt said company officials insisted they weren’t responsible. Incensed, a local woman named Janet Schroeder co-founded the NYC E-Vehicle Safety Alliance, which lobbies the city for stricter regulations. E-bikes should be registered, she told me, and she supports legislation that requires riders to display a visible license plate and buy insurance, as drivers do. This, Schroeder says, would at least make them more accountable. “We are in an e-bike crisis,” she says. “We have older people, blind people, people with disabilities who tell me they’re scared to go out because of the way e-bikes behave.” Dedicated e-bikers acknowledge the problem, but the ones I spoke with also felt that e-bikes are taking excessive flak due to their novelty. Cars, they point out, remain a far graver threat to health and safety. In 2023, automobiles killed an estimated 244 pedestrians and injured 8,620 in New York City, while cyclists (of all types) killed eight pedestrians and injured 340. Schroeder concedes the point, but notes that drivers at least are licensed and insured—and are thus on the hook for casualties they cause. Underlying the urban-transportation culture wars is the wretched state of bike infrastructure. American cities were famously built for cars; planners typically left precious little room for bikes and pedestrians, to say nothing of e-bikes, hoverboards, scooters, skaters, and parents with jogging strollers. Cars hog the roadways while everyone else fights for the scraps. Most bike lanes in the United States are uncomfortably narrow, don’t allow for safe passing, and are rarely physically separated from cars­—some cyclists call them “car door lanes.” The paths winding through Denver’s parks are multimodal, meaning pedestrians and riders of all stripes share the same strip, despite their very different speeds.  Even in this relatively bike-friendly city, which has 196 miles of dedicated on-road bike lanes, riding sometimes requires the nerves of a daredevil. I set out one afternoon with 34-year-old Ana Ilic, who obtained her bright blue e-bike through the city’s voucher program. She used to drive the 10 miles to her job in a Denver suburb, but now she mostly cycles. She figures she clocks 70 miles a week by e-bike, driving only 10. Her evening commute demonstrates the patchiness of Denver’s cycling network. Much of our journey is pleasant, on quieter roads, some with painted bike lanes. But toward the end, the only choice is a four-lane route with no bike lanes. Cars whip past us, just inches away. It’s as if we’d stumbled into a suburban NASCAR event. “This is the worst part,” she says apologetically. The fear of getting hit stops lots of people from jumping into the saddle. But officials in many cities still look at local roadways and conclude there aren’t enough cyclists to justify the cost of more bike lanes. It’s the chicken-egg paradox. “You have to build it,” insists Peter Piccolo, executive director of the lobby Bicycle Colorado. “If we’re going to wait for the majority of the population to let go of car dependency, we’re never going to get here.”  E-bikes can be rented in Denver. The city also has a voucher program to subsidize e-bike purchases.Theo Stroomer Advocates say the true solution is to embrace the “new urbanist” movement, which seeks to make cities around the world more human-scaled and less car-dependent. The movement contends that planners need to take space back from cars—particularly curbside parking, where vehicles sit unused 95 percent of the time, as scholar Donald Shoup has documented. That frees up room, potentially, for wider bike lanes that allow for safe passing. (New York and Paris are among the cities now embracing this approach.) You can also throw in “traffic calming” measures such as speed bumps and roads that narrow at intersections. One by-product of discouraging driving is that buses move faster, making them a more attractive commute option, too.  > The Inflation Reduction Act initially included a program that could have put > nearly 4.5 million e-bikes on the road. It was cut. Cities worldwide are proving that this vision is achievable: In 2020, the mayor of Bogota added 17 permanent miles of bike lanes to the existing 342 and has plans for another 157. (Bogota and several other Colombian cities also close entire highways and streets on Sundays and holidays to encourage cycling.) Paris, which has rolled out more than 500 miles of bike lanes since 2001, saw a remarkable doubling in the number of city cyclists from 2022 to 2023—a recent GPS survey found that more people now commute to downtown from the inner suburbs by bicycle than by car. In New York City, where bike lane miles have quintupled over the past decade, the number of cyclists—electric and otherwise—has also nearly doubled. Colorado has made some progress, too, says Toor, the Energy Office director. For decades, state road funds could only be used to accommodate cars, but in 2021, legislators passed a bill to spend $5.4 billion over 10 years on walking, biking, and transit infrastructure—“because it’s reducing demand” on roadways, he explains. The transportation department also requires cities to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets, which is why Denver ditched a long-planned $900 million highway expansion in favor of bus rapid transit and safer streets. One critique of e-bike programs, ironically, involves the climate return on investment. Research on Swedish voucher programs found that an e-bike typically reduces its owner’s CO2 emissions by about 1.3 metric tons per year—the equivalent of driving a gas-­powered vehicle about 3,250 miles. Not bad, but some researchers say a government can get more climate bang for the subsidy buck by, for example, helping people swap fossil fuel furnaces for heat pumps, or gas stoves for electric. E-bike subsidies are “a pretty expensive way” to decarbonize, says economist Luke Jones, who co-authored a recent paper on the topic. That’s because e-bikes, in most cases, only replace relatively short car trips. To really slash vehicular CO2, you’d need to supplant longer commutes. Which is clearly possible—behold all those Parisians commuting from the inner suburbs, distances of up to 12 miles. It’s been a tougher sell in Denver, where, as that 2022 survey found, only 5 percent of trips taken by voucher recipients exceeded 9 miles.  But the value of e-bikes lies not only, and perhaps not even principally, in cutting emissions. Cycling also eases traffic congestion and improves health by keeping people active. It reduces the need for parking, which dovetails neatly with another new urbanist policy: reducing or eliminating mandatory parking requirements for new homes and businesses, which saves space and makes housing cheaper and easier to build. And biking has other civic benefits that are hard to quantify, but quite real, Salisbury insists. “It has this really nice community aspect,” he says. “When you’re out riding, you see people, you wave, you stop to chat—you notice what’s going on in the neighborhoods around you. You don’t do that so much in a car. It kind of improves your mood.” That sounds gauzy, but studies have found that people who ride to work do, in fact, arrive in markedly better spirits than those who drive or take transit. Their wellbeing is fueled by fresh air and a feeling of control over the commute—no traffic jams, transit delays, or hunting for parking. “It’s basically flow state,” says Kirsty Wild, a senior research fellow of population health at the University of Auckland. Nobody has ascribed a dollar value to these benefits, but it’s got to be worth something for a city to have residents who are less pissed off. What would really make e-bikes take off, though, is a federal subsidy. The Inflation Reduction Act initially included a $4.1 billion program that could have put nearly 4.5 million e-bikes on the road for $900 a pop, but Democratic policymakers yanked it. Subsequent bills to roll out an e-bike tax credit have not made it out of committee. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- E-bike sharing companies are sometimes seen as gentrifiers, but Denver’s experience shows that e-bikes can be more than just toys for the affluent. Take June Churchill. She was feeling pretty stressed before she got her e-bike. She’d come to Denver for college, but after graduating had found herself unemployed, couchsurfing, and strapped for cash. Having gender-­transitioned, she was estranged from her conservative parents. “I was poor as shit,” she told me. But then she heard about the voucher program and discovered that she qualified for the generous low-income discount. Her new e-bike allowed her to expand her job search to a wider area—she landed a position managing mass mailings for Democratic campaigns—and made it way easier to look around for an affordable place to live. “That bike was totally crucial to getting and keeping my job,” she says. It’s true that e-bikes and bikeshare systems were initially tilted toward the well-off; the bikes can be expensive, and bikeshares have typically rolled out first in gentrified areas. Denver’s answer was to set aside fully half of its subsidies for low-­income residents. Churchill’s experience suggests that an e-bike can bolster not only physical mobility, but economic mobility, too. Denver’s low-­income neighborhoods have notoriously spotty public transit and community services, and, as the program’s leaders maintain, helping people get around improves access to education, employment, and health care. To that point, Denver’s income-qualified riders cover an average of 10 miles more per week than other voucher recipients—a spot of evidence Congress might contemplate. But there are still some people whom cities will have to try harder to reach. I ride one morning to Denver’s far east side, where staffers from Hope Communities, a nonprofit that runs several large affordable-­housing units, are hosting a biweekly food distribution event. Most Hope residents are immigrants and refugees from ­Afghanistan, Myanmar, and other Asian and African nations. I watch as a procession of smiling women in colorful wraps and sandals collect oranges, eggs, potatoes, and broccoli, and health workers offer blood-pressure readings. There’s chatter in a variety of languages. Jessica McFadden, a cheery program administrator in brown aviators, tells me that as far as her staff can tell, only one Hope resident, a retiree in his 70s named Tom, has snagged an e-bike voucher. The problem is digital literacy, she says. Not only do these people need to know the program exists, but they also have to know when the next batch of vouchers will drop—and pounce. But Hope residents can’t normally afford laptops or home wifi—most rely on low-end smartphones with strict data caps. Add in language barriers, and they’re generally flummoxed by online-first government programs. Tom was able to get his e-bike, McFadden figures, because he’s American, is fluent in English, and has family locally. He’s more plugged in than most. She loves the idea of the voucher program. She just thinks the city needs to do better on outreach. Scholars who’ve studied e-bike programs, like John MacArthur at Portland State University, recommend that cities set up lending libraries in low-income areas so people can try an e-bike, and put more bike lanes in those neighborhoods, which are often last in line for such improvements. In Massachusetts, the nonprofit organizers of a state-funded e-bike program operating in places like Worcester, whose median income falls well below the national average, found that it’s crucial to also offer people racks, pannier bags, and maintenance vouchers. As I chat with McFadden, Tom himself suddenly appears, pushing a stroller full of oranges from the food distro. I ask him about his e-bike. He uses it pretty frequently, he says. “Mostly to shop and visit my sister; she’s over in Sloan Lake”—a hefty 15 miles away. Then he ambles off. McFadden recalls how, just a few weeks earlier, she’d seen him cruising past on his e-bike with his oxygen tank strapped to the back, the little plastic air tubes in his nose. “Tom, are you sure you should be doing that?” she’d called out. Tom just waved and peeled away. He had places to be.

I meet Baba Anwar in a crowded, chaotic market in the city of Lagos, Nigeria. He claims he’s in his early 20s, but he looks 15 or 16. Maybe all of 5 feet tall, he’s wearing plastic flip-flops, shorts, and a filthy “Surf Los Angeles” T-shirt and clutching a printed circuit board from a laptop computer, which he says he found in a trash bin. That’s Anwar’s job, scrounging for discarded electronics in Ikeja Computer Village, one of the world’s biggest and most hectic marketplaces for used, repaired, and refurbished electronic products. The market fills blocks and blocks of narrow streets, all swarming with people jostling for access to hundreds of tiny stalls and storefronts offering to sell, repair, or accessorize digital machinery—laptops, printers, cellphones, hard drives, wireless routers, and every variety of adapter and cable needed to run them. The cacophony of a thousand open-air negotiations is underlaid with the rumbling of diesel generators, the smell of their exhaust mixing with the aroma of fried foods hawked by sidewalk vendors. Determined motorcyclists and women in brightly colored dresses carrying trays of little buns on their heads thread their way through the crowds. This article is adapted from Vince Beiser’s Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future, published November 19 by Riverhead (an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, all rights reserved).Penguin Random House; Spencer Lowell It’s no place for an in-depth conversation, but with the help of my translator, local journalist Bukola Adebayo, I gather that Anwar arrived here about a year before from his deeply impoverished home state of Kano. “No money at home,” he explains. In Lagos, a pandemoniac megalopolis of more than 15 million, he shares a room with a couple of friends from home, also e-waste scrappers. On a good day, he says, he can make as much as 10,000 naira—about $22 at the time of my visit. Thousands of Nigerians make a meager living recycling e-waste, a broad category that can consist of just about any discarded item with a plug or a battery. This includes the computers, phones, game controllers, and other digital devices that we use and ditch in ever-growing volumes. The world generates more than 68 million tons of e-waste every year, according to the UN, enough to fill a convoy of trucks stretching right around the equator. By 2030, the total is projected to reach 75 million tons. Alaba International, another major electronics market in Lagos. Tearing down a laptop at the Arena Market, also in Lagos. Only 22 percent of that e-waste is collected and recycled, the UN estimates. The rest is dumped, burned, or forgotten—particularly in rich countries, where most people have no convenient way to get rid of their old Samsung Galaxy phones, Xbox controllers, and myriad other gadgets. Indeed, every year, humanity is wasting more than $60 billion worth of so-called critical metals—the ones we need not only for electronics, but also for the hardware of renewable energy, from electric vehicle (EV) batteries to wind turbines. Millions of Americans, like me, spend their workdays on pursuits that lack any physical manifestation beyond the occasional hard-copy book or memo or report. It’s easy to forget that all these livelihoods rely on machines. And that those machines rely on metals torn from the Earth. Consider your smartphone. Depending on the model, it can contain up to two-thirds of the elements in the periodic table, including dozens of metals. Some are familiar, like the gold and tin in its circuitry and the nickel in its microphone. Others less so: Tiny flecks of indium make the screen sensitive to the touch of a finger. Europium enhances the colors. Neodymium, dysprosium, and terbium are used to build the tiny mechanism that makes your phone vibrate. Stripping a cellphone in Ikeja Computer Village. Your phone’s battery contains cobalt, lithium, and nickel. Ditto the ones that power your rechargeable drill, Roomba, and electric toothbrush—not to mention our latest modes of transportation, ranging from plug-in scooters and e-bikes to EVs. A Tesla Model S has as much lithium as up to 10,000 smartphones. The millions of electric cars and trucks hitting the planet’s roads every year don’t spew pollutants directly, but they’ve got a monstrous appetite for electricity, nearly two-thirds of which still comes from burning fossil fuels—about one-third from coal. Harvesting more of our energy from sunlight and wind, as crucial as that is, entails its own Faustian bargain. Capturing, transmitting, storing, and using that cleaner power requires vast numbers of new machines: wind turbines, solar panels, switching stations, power lines, and batteries large and small. You see where this is going. Our clean energy future, this global drive to save humanity from the ever-worsening ravages of global warming, depends on critical metals. And we’ll be needing more. A lot more. An entrance to Ikeja Computer Village. In all of human history, we have extracted some 700 million tons of copper from the Earth. To meet our clean energy goals, we’ll have to mine as much again in 20-odd years. By 2050, the International Energy Agency estimates, global demand for cobalt for EVs alone will soar to five times what it was in 2022. Demand for nickel will be 10 times higher. Lithium, 15 times. “The prospect of a rapid increase in demand for critical minerals—well above anything seen previously in most cases—raises huge questions about the availability and reliability of supply,” the agency warns. Metals are natural products, but the Earth does not relinquish them willingly. Mining conglomerates rip up forests and grasslands and deserts, blasting apart the underlying rock and soil and hauling out the remains. The ore is processed, smelted, and refined using gargantuan, energy-guzzling, pollution-spewing machines and oceans of chemicals. “Mining done wrong can leave centuries of harm,” says Aimee Boulanger, head of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, which works with companies to develop more sustainable extraction practices. > “The long lead times for new mining projects pose a serious challenge to > scaling up production fast enough to meet growing mineral demand for clean > energy technologies.” The harm is staggering. Metal mining is America’s leading toxic polluter. It has sullied the watersheds of almost half of the rivers in the American West. Chemical leaks and mining runoff foul air and water. The mines also generate mountains of hazardous waste, stored behind dams that have a terrifying tendency to fail. Torrents of poisonous sludge pouring through collapsed tailings dams have contaminated waterways in Brazil, Canada, and elsewhere and killed hundreds of people—in addition to the hundreds, possibly thousands, of miners who die in workplace accidents each year. To get what they’re after, mining companies devour natural resources on an epic scale. They dig up some 250 tons of ore and waste rock to get just 1 ton of nickel. For copper, the ratio is double that. Just to obtain the metals inside your 4.5-ounce iPhone, 75 pounds of ore had to be pulled up, crushed, and smelted, releasing up to 100 pounds of carbon dioxide. Mining firms also suck up massive quantities of water and deploy fleets of drill rigs, trucks, diggers, and other heavy machinery that collectively belch out up to 7 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. These operations are not popular with the neighbors. Irate locals and Indigenous communities at this moment are fighting proposed critical-metal mines across the United States, in addition to Brazil, Canada, the Philippines, Serbia, and many other countries. At least 320 anti-mining activists have been killed worldwide since 2012—and they are just the ones we know about. A shop in Ikeja Computer Village. All this said, while researching my book Power Metal, I was surprised to learn that the mining industry no longer gets away—not easily, anyway—with much of the nasty behavior it has been known for. Some collateral damage is inevitable, but a growing awareness of the industry’s history of human rights abuses and dirty environmental practices—as well as public pressure on consumer-facing companies like Apple and Tesla to clean up their supply chains—has made for some real improvements in how big mining firms operate. Yet even these beneficial developments come with an asterisk: In the 1950s, it took three or four years to bring a new copper mine online in the United States. Now the average windup is 16 years. “The long lead times for new mining projects pose a serious challenge to scaling up production fast enough to meet growing mineral demand for clean energy technologies,” the International Energy Agency warned in 2022. If this demand can’t be met, the agency added, nations will fail “to achieve the goals in the Paris Agreement,” the 2016 UN treaty aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (and from which President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to withdraw—again—during his second term). And then we’re really in trouble. It’s a vexing conundrum. In my reporting, I have talked to a wide range of people who are deeply and justifiably concerned about the threats our new mining frenzy will pose to the environment. While acknowledging their fears, I would always ask, “Yes, but what’s the alternative?” Their answer, almost always, was, “Recycling!” Engineer Austin and a colleague search for appropriate memory inserts for a customer’s computer. Some of the RAM they sell is scavenged from discarded units. Examining cellphone parts in Ikeja Computer Village. That may sound straightforward. It isn’t. Metal recycling is a completely different proposition from recycling the paper and glass we toss into our home bins for pickup. It turns out that retrieving valuable raw materials sustainably from electronic products—toasters, iPhones, power cables—is a fiendishly complex endeavor, requiring many steps carried out in many places. Manufacturing those products required a multistep international supply chain. Recycling them requires a reverse supply chain almost as complicated. Part of the problem is that our devices typically contain only a small amount of any given metal. In developing countries, though, there are lots of people willing to put in the time and effort required to recover that little bit of value—an estimated tens of thousands of e-waste scavengers in Nigeria alone. Some go door to door with pushcarts, offering to take or even buy unwanted electronics. Others, like Anwar, work the secondhand markets, buying bits of broken gear from small businesses or rescuing them from the trash. Many scavengers earn less than the international poverty wage of about $2.15 per day. I ask Anwar where he’s planning to take his circuit board. “To TJ,” he replies, as if I’d asked him what color the sky is. TJ is Tijjani Abubakar, an entrepreneur who has built a thriving business turning unwanted electronics into cash. His third-floor office, in a dingy concrete building across a roaring four-lane road from the Ikeja market, is a charnel house of dead mobile phones. At one end of the long, crowded room, two skinny young men with screwdrivers pull phone after phone from a sack and crack them like walnuts. Their practiced fingers pull out the green printed circuit boards and toss them with a clatter onto a growing heap at their feet. Thousands of such boards gleam flatly under the glaring LED ceiling lights. More young men sit around on plastic stools sorting them into piles and pulling aside those with the most valuable chips. The air is thick with sweat despite the open windows. At a scuffed wooden desk sits Abubakar himself—a big man with a steady demeanor, lordly in an embroidered brown caftan, red cap, and crisp beard. I await an audience as he fields calls and messages on three different phones and a laptop while negotiating a deal with a couple of visiting traders over an unlabeled bottle of something. A man at Ikeja Computer Village holds a stack of lithium batteries. Abubakar, who looks to be in his mid-40s, has been in the trade nearly 20 years. He, too, hails from Kano, where his father sold clothes—“not a rich man,” he tells me in his even baritone. He earned a business degree from a local university and made his way to Lagos, where a friend introduced him to the e-waste business. “We started small, small, small, small,” he says. But getting a foothold was easier then. Scrap was cheap, even free, because few people were willing to pay for it. Then, as the trade mushroomed, deep-pocketed foreign buyers—from India, Lebanon, and, above all, China—began flocking to Nigeria in search of deals. “Now everybody knows the prices,” Abubakar says. But his business has flourished. He exports several shipping containers full of e-waste every month to buyers in China and Europe. He’s grown wealthy enough to donate textbooks, meals, and cows to families back in Kano. Dead cellphones converted into education and food. Trash into possibilities. > In 2022, some 5.3 billion mobile phones were discarded globally. Placed end to > end, they’d reach almost to the moon and back. Abubakar handles all manner of e-waste, but the phones are his specialty. There is just shy of one mobile account for every one of Nigeria’s 220 million people. “What do I see here?” he asks, indicating his roomful of workers. “I don’t know whether any of these people have a computer. But I know all of them have a phone.” And all of those phones will one day wear out, malfunction, or get tossed by someone eager for a newer model. In 2022, an estimated 5.3 billion mobile phones were discarded worldwide. If you put them end to end, they’d reach almost to the moon and back. Abubakar deploys a vast network of buyers and pickers to source spent phones from Nigeria and neighboring countries, and occasionally as far away as France. They arrive by truck, train, and in sacks carried by people like Anwar. These precisely engineered products were manufactured in sophisticated, high-tech factories under ultra-clean conditions. Here, they are eviscerated by hand on a grimy concrete pad. Abubakar estimates he has about 5,000 workers bringing in millions of phones each year. When I express polite skepticism, he rises and gestures for me to follow. A door in the back of the office leads into a warren of rooms filled either with enormous sacks stuffed with phones, people cracking and sorting phones, or bales of circuit boards ready for shipping. The most desirable components are those circuit boards, etched with copper and often precious metals, including gold, that carry signals among the soldered-on chips and capacitors. The chips are removed for assessment. If they still work, they can be sold for use in refurbished phones. Abubakar shows me a lunch bag-sized sack of Android chips with serial numbers so tiny I can barely make them out. “This bag is worth around $35,000,” he says. A sack of phone cameras—consisting of the lens you see from the outside attached to a strip of metal foil on the inside—is also valuable. Abubakar trains security cameras on his workers to discourage pilfering. He fired someone the week before for stealing chips, he tells me. None of the phones were made in Nigeria, and their remains won’t stay here either. Extracting the metals therein requires sophisticated and expensive equipment that no facility in Africa has, so Abubakar sells to recyclers in China and Western Europe that do. Annes and friends are scrap buyers in Ikeja Computer Village. The problem of rich countries “dumping” e-waste on poorer ones has received plenty of attention over the past couple of decades. But in West Africa and other parts of the developing world, most e-waste is now generated domestically. The gadgets passing through Abubakar’s facility were largely imported as new or refurbished products, sold to Nigerian consumers, and later discarded. Relatively little goes to waste. If you live on $2 a day, after all, making a dime from a discarded electric toothbrush is worth your effort. The result is that about 75 percent of Nigeria’s e-waste is collected for some kind of recycling. In nearby Ghana, estimates run as high as 95 percent. The landscape is different in the United States, where fewer than 1 in 6 dead mobile phones is recycled. The same stat holds in Europe, where roughly two-thirds of all e-waste never makes it into official recycling streams. This is “surprising,” says Alexander Batteiger, an e-waste expert with the German development organization GIZ, “because we have fully functioning recycling systems.” Or maybe not so surprising. Nobody in the rich world, after all, goes house to house asking for old iPhone 6s or Bluetooth speakers. Sure, there are e-waste collection drives at schools and churches, and you can take old electronics to Best Buy or the local hazardous waste facility—but few people bother. Instead, countless millions of phones and laptops and blenders and microwaves accumulate in attics, closets, junk drawers, garages, and, all too often, the dump. In Africa, businesses like Abubakar’s keep countless tons of toxic trash out of landfills, reduce the need for mining, and create thousands of jobs—hardly a trivial consideration in a nation where nearly two-thirds of people live in poverty. There’s much to celebrate here. But neither is it the whole story. An hour’s drive from Abubakar’s office, through a maelstrom of Lagos traffic, sits the Katangua dumpsite, a sprawling, teeming maze of tiny workshops, scrapyards, wrecking zones, and slums, loosely built around a mountain of trash at least 20 feet tall. This colossus is surrounded by a corroded tin fence held up with bits of scrap wood. Plumes of thick black smoke wend upward from within. The squalor here is unfathomable. The ground underfoot consists of churned-up mud and trampled-in plastic trash. Barefoot children wander among shacks of cardboard, plywood, and plastic sheeting. Adebayo, the local journalist helping me out, and I pick our way around huge puddles, following men and women carrying sacks of discarded metals, all of us retreating to the roadside as trucks piled high with aluminum cans and other scrap wallow past. Practically every type of metal and e-waste is recycled somewhere in this labyrinth. The resourcefulness of the people is as astonishing as the conditions are appalling. At one yard, owner Mohammed Yusuf proudly shows me his aluminum recycling operation. Pickers bring him cans from all over the city, 2 or 3 tons a day. At the rear of the yard, there’s a covered area with a brick-lined, rectangular hole in the ground about the size of a bathtub, and a smell reminiscent of rotting chicken. Speakers and radio parts at Alaba International market. At night, Yusuf tells me, his workers fill the hole with cans, melt them down with a gas-powered torch, then scoop the molten metal into molds using a long ladle. This results in silvery, 2-kilogram ingots pure enough to sell to a manufacturer that makes new cans. The process generates intensely toxic fumes and dust, and his workers wear protective masks. “What about the others nearby?” I ask him. Yusuf nods sagely. That’s why they do it at night, he explains, when the people who live near the yard are asleep in their shacks. Later, squeezing through a gap in the ragged fence, Adebayo and I find ourselves in an open area at the base of the towering garbage pile. There, four young men are tending small fires, burning the coatings off piles of wire to get at the copper inside. The flames are beautiful—deep cupric blues and greens licking up amid the orange. The smoke, thick and oily and reeking of incinerated plastic and rubber, almost certainly carries dioxins, which are known to cause cancer and harm the reproductive system. The men are wearing shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops—no respirators or other safety gear in sight. > The smoke, thick and oily and reeking of incinerated plastic and rubber, > almost certainly carries dioxins, which are known to cause cancer and harm the > reproductive system. Between the open-air smelting, wire burning, and other miscellaneous wrecking, I’m horrified by the thought of how thoroughly poisoned Katangua must be. “Do you worry about breathing the smoke?” I ask one of the burners, a muscular 36-year-old named Alabi Mohammed. He shrugs: “We don’t know any other job. We don’t have any other option.” He’s been living here since he was 8, he says. There are other harmful recycling practices I don’t see at Katangua. Scrapped circuit boards are a good source of palladium, gold, and silver—according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, a ton of circuit boards contains from 40 to 800 times the amount of gold found in a ton of ore. You can run them through a shredder and ship the fragments to special refineries, typically in Europe or Japan, where the gold is extracted with chemicals. “It’s a precise, mostly clean method of recycling, but it’s also very, very expensive,” author Adam Minter explains in his 2014 book, Junkyard Planet. In many developing countries, he notes, the gold is “removed using highly corrosive acids, often without the benefit of safety equipment for the workers. Once the acids are used up, they’re often dumped in rivers and other open bodies of water.” The latter poses clear health and environmental hazards, but it’s cheap and easy, just as extracting copper from plastic-coated wires requires no special equipment—only gasoline and matches. Which is why low-wage laborers around the globe risk their lives burning old extension cords or dousing circuit boards with chemicals to retrieve metals that other low-wage workers risked their lives to dig up in the first place. In Guiyu, home to China’s biggest e-waste recycling complex, studies have found extremely high levels of lead and other toxins in the blood of local children. A 2019 study by Toxics Link, an Indian nonprofit, identified more than a dozen unlicensed e-waste recycling “hotspots” around Delhi employing some 50,000 people—unprotected workers exposed to chemical vapors, metallic dusts, and acidic effluents—and where hazardous wastes were improperly dumped. A man shows a laptop battery in Ikeja Computer Village. Spent lithium batteries present their own recycling challenge. They are potentially among the world’s best sources for critical metals—one study found that battery recycling theoretically could satisfy nearly half of global demand for certain metals. Yet only about 5 percent of them get recycled because they are uniquely hard to handle—and dangerous. Nigeria, for example, is awash in lithium-ion batteries, but no place on the continent recycles them. They need to be exported. Shippers don’t want to take them, however, because of their disturbing tendency to burst into flames when punctured, crushed, or overheated. Battery fires can exceed 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. They also emit toxic gases and are very hard to extinguish. American consumers are asked to bring unwanted lithium batteries to a domestic recycler or a hazardous waste site, and for good reason. Every year, batteries from everything from old Priuses to sex toys cause hundreds of fires in US scrapyards, landfills, and even on garbage trucks, causing millions of dollars in damage. Residents of Fredericktown, Missouri, even had to evacuate their homes earlier this month when a local battery recycling facility exploded dramatically into flames. Even in developing countries, unwanted batteries often end up in local landfills, where, beyond the fire risk, they leak toxic chemicals. Or unscrupulous exporters mislabel them, bribing port officials to not examine their shipments too closely. “I’ve heard there’s a major fire every six months,” says Eric Frederickson, vice president of operations at Call2Recycle, America’s largest battery-collection organization, “but you never hear about most of them, because they just tip the container over the side of the boat.” Arena Market in Lagos. Reinhardt Smit is trying something different. He’s the supply chain director for Closing the Loop, a Netherlands-based startup that aims to recycle phones from Africa using certifiably sound environmental and social methods: no burned cables, battery fires, trashed plastics, or unprotected workers—every step of the process done responsibly, the way Western consumers like it. In a 2021 pilot project, Closing the Loop collected and sent 5 tons of phones—plastic, batteries, cables, and all—from Nigeria to a Belgian recycler in what it claims was the first such legally sanctioned shipment ever. The project succeeded from a sustainability standpoint, but it was a money-loser. Clean recycling, it turns out, is hideously expensive. The phones were sourced from Hinckley Recycling, one of Nigeria’s two (yes, only two) fully licensed e-waste handlers. At Hinckley’s compound on the outskirts of Lagos, workers dismantle phones, computers, and TVs in a clean and well-lit warehouse, wearing reflective vests and protective gloves. It’s clearly a safer and more humane workplace than the others I witnessed, but that adds to the cost. Convincing a shipper to transport the batteries also required a pricey workaround: They were removed from the phones and placed in barrels filled with sand, eliminating the fire danger. But that meant Closing the Loop had to pay extra to transport hundreds of pounds of sand per shipment. > “It is clear that the biggest mine of the future has to be the car that we > already built,” Mercedes-Benz Group Chairman Ola Källenius noted in 2021. Dealing with unwanted materials was another cost. “If I recycle every component in a phone, I lose money,” explains Adrian Clewes, Hinckley’s managing director. Everyone wants copper, for instance, but phones are mostly plastic, which Closing the Loop must pay a recycler to take. Clewes talks about “positive” and “negative” fractions, meaning the profitable components vs. those that cost him money. Some fractions toggle between positive and negative depending on the prevailing prices. Say you want to sell a bag of circuit boards containing a total of 1 pound of copper. And say it will cost the smelter $2 to extract the metal. If copper is selling for $4 a pound, the smelter can buy the boards for $1 and make a tidy profit. If copper drops to $3, the deal’s off and the boards are sitting in your warehouse. If you have ample space, you can wait for prices to bounce back. If not, maybe you’re tempted to bring those boards to the dump. Finally, you have your administrative costs. Global regulations preventing rich countries from dumping hazardous waste on poorer ones have, ironically enough, made it harder to get waste out of the poor countries. The Basel Convention, for one, requires any ship carrying e-waste to get approval from the exporting and importing countries and consent from any country where it might dock en route. This creates oceans of red tape. “Observing the Basel notifications can be painful. It takes months,” says Batteiger, the German e-waste expert. “The Basel Convention is valuable—without it, there would be more dumping—but it has the side effect of blocking exports from the developing world to industrialized countries.” All told, the cost of doing things by the book makes it almost impossible to turn a profit. Smit’s idea is to get green-minded corporations to cover the difference by paying him to recycle one dead African phone for each new phone it buys. The concept is akin to selling carbon offsets, and it’s gaining some traction. Closing the Loop now operates in some 10 African countries and has collected several million dead electronic devices. Its near-future target is 2 million phones per year, though that’s admittedly a drop in the bucket. “There are 2 billion phones sold every year,” concedes founder Joost de Kluijver. “We can’t collect all that.” Comparing the efforts of companies like Closing the Loop and those of the “informal” sector in Nigeria and elsewhere, which provides jobs for thousands of desperate people, it’s hard to say which is better. One might ask, better for whom? Unregulated dumping, wire burning, and the lack of safety equipment don’t meet Western environmental and labor standards. But those standards aren’t top of mind for people who can barely feed and house themselves. Arena Market. There are other geopolitical aspects to the race for critical metals. Russia, for example, is a prodigious exporter of copper, nickel, palladium, and other metals so crucial that they were spared from international sanctions after Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine. And then there’s China, which—via its own resources, lax standards, diplomatic clout, and overseas investments—has come to dominate the global supply chain. Regardless of origin, most critical metals will at some point pass through China, which controls more than half of global refining capacity for cobalt, graphite (another battery ingredient), and lithium, and almost as much for nickel and copper. Using those metals, its factories pump out most of the world’s solar panels, a hefty share of its wind turbines, and a majority of its EVs. It also produces nearly three-quarters of lithium-ion batteries and recycles far more of them than any other nation. A subsidiary of CATL, China’s biggest battery maker, can now recycle up to 120,000 tons per year and is investing billions in new plants. Congress, having deemed China’s dominance in these sectors a threat “to economic growth, competitiveness, and national security,” has responded by sinking money into alternative sources. The 2022 infrastructure bill included $7 billion to develop a domestic supply chain for battery minerals, and the Inflation Reduction Act, passed the same year, unlocked billions more to subsidize batteries and EVs manufactured with domestically sourced metals—though some of the funds may be clawed back or left unspent under the new Republican leadership. > “The economics are very challenging…There’s no clear solution on how to get > these things out of people’s drawers.” In the United States and elsewhere, major automakers are partnering with recyclers and even building their own plants, recognizing that old batteries are a cheaper, cleaner, and more appealing source of critical metals than mining is. “It is clear that the biggest mine of the future has to be the car that we already built,” Mercedes-Benz Group Chairman Ola Källenius said at a 2021 climate summit. In remote Nevada, a company called Redwood Materials has built an enormous EV battery recycling operation. Redwood has inked deals with Tesla, Amazon, and Volkswagen and has attracted nearly $2 billion in capital. Redwood’s main rival is Canada-based Li-Cycle, which had more than 400 employees at the time of my visit. The company partners with commodities giant Glencore and boasts facilities in Arizona, Alabama, New York; Kingston, Ontario; and elsewhere. Earlier this month, Li-Cycle secured a $475 million line of credit from the Department of Energy. It is now capable of processing about 53,000 tons a year of shredded battery material, which consists mainly of copper and aluminum flakes, plus a grainy sludge known as “black mass” that contains cobalt, lithium, and nickel. At the company’s Kingston headquarters, I get a tour from Ajay Kochhar, a chemical engineer with neatly combed black hair who co-founded Li-Cycle in 2016 with a metallurgist pal. “We heard lots of people say, ‘You guys are too early,’” he tells me with a smile. The company produced its first batch of shredded battery material that year. “It took us three months to get 20 tons,” Kochhar says. Five years later, his company went public at a valuation of almost $1.7 billion. (As of this writing, the number is considerably lower.) Stripping a computer circuit board at Ikeja Computer Village. On the day of my visit, an aggregator had delivered a truckload of batteries from laptops, cellphones, and power tools. I watch as the batteries are loaded onto a conveyor belt, where workers strip off plastic casings and packaging and check labels to make sure they are indeed lithium-ion batteries. Further along, the batteries are dumped into a column of water leading to a shredder whose mighty steel teeth rip them into tiny pieces. Any remaining plastic floats to the surface and is skimmed off. The metals are separated in further steps. Breakfast-cereal-sized flakes of copper and aluminum are poured into large, heavy plastic bags, leaving the black mass behind. Li-Cycle currently sells the former metals to companies like Glencore, which make them into ingots. The black mass goes to other firms that use chemicals to extract the remaining metals. Perhaps the biggest immediate challenge for companies like Li-Cycle, oddly, is a dearth of batteries to shred. It’s mostly pre-consumer factory scrap and defective batteries from manufacturers keeping their conveyers busy. EVs are so new to the market that few have been junked—and even those are often snapped up for uses such as off-grid power storage. Most consumer lithium batteries aren’t collected at all. “We’ve looked at doing the collection ourselves, but the economics are very challenging,” Kochhar told me. “There’s no clear solution on how to get these things out of people’s drawers.” > The sap of Pycnandra acuminata, which grows on the nickel-rich island of New > Caledonia, can contain more than 25 percent nickel. So how can more e-waste be brought into the reverse supply chain? One approach is to shift the onus onto the firms that manufactured the gadgets in the first place, a policy known as “extended producer responsibility.” China and much of Europe have codified this policy in laws that govern not only e-waste, but also glass, plastics, and even cars. Sometimes, it just means charging manufacturers a fee to help cover the downstream recycling costs. In the EU, though, carmakers are responsible for collecting and recycling their own dead vehicles. China, which since 2018 has required manufacturers to collect and recycle lithium-ion batteries, also mandates that new batteries contain minimum amounts of certain recycled materials. China now recycles at least half of its batteries, according to CATL. “In North America, it’s mainly us and Redwood,” Kochhar says. “There are many more in Europe.” But what’s happening in China, he says, “is way ahead of what we’re doing here.” Old laptop computers at a shop in Ikeja Computer Village.. As a strictly economic proposition, it’s often cheaper to mine fresh metals than recycle them. And some of the relevant products are tremendously hard to recycle: Less than 5 percent of rare earth magnets are currently recycled, for example, and an estimated 9 in 10 spent solar panels—which cost roughly $20 to $30 to recycle vs. $1 to $2 to bring to the dump—end up in landfills. Ditto the massive blades on wind turbines, of which more than 720,000 tons are projected to be trashed by 2040. The bottom line is that meaningful e-waste recycling in the United States is probably going to require government support. And why not subsidize? China, our biggest rival in the clean energy sector, offers tax breaks to metal recyclers, even as US taxpayers spend billions subsidizing fossil fuels and mining operations. Under the Biden administration, Congress directed some $370 billion to bolster renewable energy technologies, including nearly $40 billion for nuclear energy and more than $12 billion to promote sales and manufacturing of EVs and their batteries, but has included only a couple of billion toward recycling. > If you’re dissatisfied with your old iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in > developing countries who would love to have it. New technologies might help somewhat. British researchers are working on inexpensive reactors they hope can facilitate recovery of rare earths. In Texas, Apple is testing a robot that can disassemble 200 iPhones per hour to aid in recycling. Mining giant Rio Tinto is experimenting with ways to extract lithium that exists in boron mining waste, and a Canadian startup is working to recover rare earths from tin-mine tailings. Scientists are even studying plants that can suck up trace metals through their roots and concentrate them in their sap, stems, or leaves. The sap of Pycnandra acuminata, a tree that grows on the nickel-rich Pacific island of New Caledonia, can contain more than 25 percent nickel. Other “hyperaccumulators” slurp up cobalt, lithium, and zinc. Startups are springing up, hoping to capitalize on these special properties, which could also be used to clean up polluted soil. None of this is a silver bullet. Even if humanity could recover all of the critical metals in use—and we can’t—we’d still have to mine more to meet rising demand. Consider that we now recycle less than 1 percent of the lithium used around the world, and we’ll be mining hard-to-recover rare earths for decades to come. “Nothing—nothing—is 100 percent recyclable, and many things, including things we think are recyclable, like iPhone touch screens, are unrecyclable,” Minter writes in Junkyard Planet. “Everyone from the local junkyard to Apple to the US government would be doing the planet a very big favor if they stopped implying otherwise, and instead conveyed a more realistic picture of what recycling can and can’t do.” A stall in Alaba International market. Recycling is important, yes. But it is also utterly insufficient to meet our needs. We tend to think of it as the best alternative to using virgin materials. In fact, it often can be one of the worst. Consider a glass bottle. To recycle it, you have to smash it to pieces, melt down the bits, and mold them into a whole new bottle—an industrial process that requires a lot of energy, time, and expense. Or you could just wash it and reuse it. That’s a better alternative—and hardly a new idea. For much of the last century, gas stations, dairies, and other companies sold products in glass bottles that they would later collect, wash, and reuse. Rendering a phone, car battery, or solar panel down to its constituent metals requires a great deal more energy, cost, and, as we’ve seen, unsafe labor than refurbishing that product. You can buy refurbished computers, phones, and even solar panels online and in some stores. But refurbishing is only really widespread in the developing world. If you’re a North American no longer satisfied with your iPhone 8, there are plenty of people in less-affluent countries who would be happy to take it. There are important lessons here, and perhaps the most important of all is this: As we look ahead, we will need to start thinking beyond merely replacing fossil fuels with renewables and increasing our supplies of raw materials. Rather, we will need to reshape our relationship to energy and natural resources altogether. That seems like a tall order, but there’s a range of things we can do—as consumers, as voters, as human beings—to assuage the downstream effects of our technological arms race. Moving forward, our critical metals will come from all sorts of mines and scrapyards and recycling centers around the globe. Some will emerge from new sources, using new methods and technologies. And the choices we make about where and how we get those metals, and who prospers and suffers in the process, are tremendously important. But no less important is the question of how much of all these things we truly need—and how to reduce that need. We’re lucky in one respect: We’re still only at the beginning of a historic worldwide transition. The key will be figuring out how to make it work without repeating the worst mistakes of the last one. Follow Vince Beiser’s ongoing reporting at powermetal.substack.com.

Democracy is at once everywhere and nowhere—on the lips of the masses calling for freedom and fearing for its safeguarding, while every day asking the question: What even is democracy? Starting in 2018, that is the question the Our Democracy team—me along with photographer Andrea Bruce and educator and videographer Lorraine Ustaris—set out to answer. Our starting point wasn’t simple, but it was frank. We would travel cross-country to see how Americans live and hear what they say democracy looks like in their daily lives.  We decided to follow in the footsteps of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in the 1830s and wrote an assessment about why democracy seemed to be succeeding here but had failed in other places. We began with the first words of Tocqueville’s 1835 volume of Democracy in America:   “Of all the novel things which attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of social conditions,” he wrote. “I had no difficulty in discovering the extraordinary influence this fundamental fact exerts upon the progress of society.” Much of the wealth of Newport, Rhode Island, originated in the slave trade; a local historian told us people once called it “slave island.” At the same time, the state was one of the first to allow Black men to vote. For Tocqueville, the “equality of social conditions” is a core principle of democracy that, broadly, meant the absence of aristocracy—a societal state in which, on individual levels, there are few divisions between the people based on birth, wealth, or social status. (Although Tocqueville did note that this equality was one to be found solely among white Christian men. The prejudice against Black Americans was then appearing to “increase in proportion to their emancipation,” he wrote, and he wondered how the United States would recover from being born of the mass genocide of Native Americans.) “I have looked [in America] for an image of the essence of democracy, its inclinations, its personality, its prejudices, its passions,” Tocqueville concluded. “My wish has been to know it if only to realize at least what we have to fear or hope from it.” > We found a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever. Nearly 200 years later, we set out to examine these social conditions—and to provide an updated record of the state of democracy, local and national, at this moment in American history.  What we found was a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever. A historical, generational, and ongoing inequality and a systemic exclusion—both racial and economic. Scholars like Martin Wolf, author of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, have said this inequality has been abetted by the neoliberal system, which “poses the most immediate threat to civil society.” Neoliberalism is loosely defined as the economic system in play from the late 1970s to the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, a study by the Pew Research Center found that even as the economy was growing following the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the gap in income between upper-income and middle- and lower-income households was also rising, with upper-income households seeing more economic growth faster. In 2023, the World Inequality Database reported that the United States is the only country in North America and Oceania in which more than 20 percent of national income goes to the wealthiest 1 percent, with nearly 50 percent going to the top 10 percent. We found that this crisis of inequality has festered into near-total disillusionment and consequent democratic atrophying on community levels, what Tocqueville referred to as a “loss of spirit,” which he warned could lead to tyranny. Yet we also observed an impulse to form hyperlocal microcosms of democracy to help keep the community alive on an individual level—in Tocqueville’s words, “spirit of association” or “self-governing” that generates democratic participation.  Crisis, in this sense, is a paradox, a kind of duality—a sort of pharmakon, as philosopher Jacques Derrida might say—both the sickness that kills democratic participation and perhaps the medicine that restores it.       Allen Plowman is one of thousands of residents in Paradise and Magalia, California, who are still trying to rebuild their homes. After the 2018 Camp Fire, “most of the community, people living without a safety net but getting by, now live in poverty, homeless and with few health resources they feel they can count on,” said Birgitte Randall, a local nurse. Fires in 2020 surrounded the towns of Paradise and Magalia, bringing back fear and PTSD from the Camp Fire that leveled the communities in 2018. In Paradise, California, a wildfire decimated the community while activating a group of individuals to restore its livability and ensure its survival. The November 2018 Camp Fire—the deadliest in the state’s modern history—devastated Paradise, a town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, killing 85 people in Butte County, displacing 50,000, and destroying roughly 14,000 homes. There, we were told persistently and insistently what a great leveler the fire had been. On Valley View Drive, “the richest street in Paradise,” where “you get the full-sized candy bars on Halloween,” $500,000 homes were reduced to fences left standing guard around empty lots. As federal and nonprofit humanitarian aid came and went, residents grew tired of the restrictions and empty promises they said came with it. They started to decline the help and decided instead, despite being unable to lean on neighbors since so many had lost homes and jobs themselves, to use the community to build the safety net all the outside aid could not. It was through the disaster and around its resulting adversity that the community came to congeal.  I couldn’t help thinking back to our time in Detroit in July 2019. There, we had a chance encounter with an elder named Elemiah Sanders. I was standing on the street, looking at a burned-out home, when Sanders called out to me from behind: “Young lady! What are you all out here doing?” I introduced myself and our project. He looked around before offering his thoughts: “The people lost their spirit,” he told me about his neighbors. “They don’t participate. I think it might be one of those things where we need a disaster to come up and raise up the neighborhood, but I hope it’s not that way.”  When independence and authority are no longer accessible to the community, Tocqueville urged, when the liberty to self-govern with representational significance that promotes equality is impeded, the ability and desire to swim against the current, to fight to participate when it is felt that participation has been wrenched from the people, wearies, making certain that the institutions and their communities both falter. Spirit withers. It’s just our human nature. Tocqueville insisted: “Patriotism does not long prevail in a conquered nation.” And I came to realize that was true on hyperlocal levels as well. Agape Outreach Ministries holds Sunday church service on the north side of Warner Robins, Georgia. When we visited in August 2018, the city had one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. In Warner Robins, Georgia, the spirit of patriotism is such a part of life and what residents believe democracy to be that it’s in its official motto: EDIMGIAFAD, or Every Day in Middle Georgia Is Armed Forces Appreciation Day. The city between Houston and Peach counties is home to Robins Air Force Base, and American flags appear on house after house as you drive through its neighborhoods. But at the time of visiting in August 2018, the city also had one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country.  Larry Curtis, a manager of the drones called “Blue Seaters” on the Air Force base and owner of the Curtis Office Suites, said it all comes down to both “the haves and the have-nots” abstaining from participation, “not calling out local injustice like misallocation of funds,” because the “haves feel comfortable and the have-nots feel like it won’t make a difference.”  The afternoon Curtis drove us onto base, the gray skies expected thunderstorms. It was no matter to Curtis, he kept driving all the same, past two officers holding M16s and pulling a car over, giving us the breakdown of the city’s economically organized geographical divide. He took us out onto Watson Boulevard, which was the zero degree—on one side was the north side, or “the blighted areas,” and on the other was the south side. A church marquee on the north side of Watson read, “When you reach the end of your rope, look up.” We don’t have money to give people, but we can cook, said Gigi Johnson, a keeper of her community in Warner Robins. “My mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother all cared about our community. It’s a legacy.” I asked Curtis what was the biggest problem Warner Robins faced. He answered first with just one word, “equality,” and then went on to explain. “Because when you see one part of town and then the other, you see it’s not equal, even down to cutting the grass,” he began. “In the nighttime, you see the lights—there’s no lights on this [north] side of town. The street lamps are out and you can’t get nobody to come out and fix it. The money’s on the south side,” he continued, before adding, “I hate to say the word ‘racial’—I’m more about what’s wrong and what’s right.” “At the city council meetings, they ask every other week about getting the lights fixed and getting the grass cut,” he said. “So the big problem is really down at city hall.”  We went to one of those city council meetings and watched residents address council members one after the other, to little or no response. It was clear there was a kind of agitated exhaustion among the residents, where they were almost too tired to keep speaking up just to remain unseen and unheard, but all there was to do was keep speaking up, so they did—the few who had the persistence and made the time to deliver it, for the sake of the many who had largely, as Curtis said, given up.  Democracy is not working, he told us, because the people don’t exercise their right to vote. Instead, he added, they just accept things for what they are, making it hard to know how to help create change. Despite voting being one of the answers we heard most frequently to the question of what democracy is, it was this loss of spirit, which Tocqueville referred to as a side effect of losing the power to self-govern, we witnessed atrophying democratic participation. And that loss of spirit is not always a choice. In vastly different communities occupying vastly different parts of the country, that loss of spirit in relation to voting was the same, albeit for different reasons.  In Memphis, ex-offenders are provided jobs and support through a local organization called Lifeline to Success. But they continue to confront what was for many of them an unthinkable and unending punishment: felony disenfranchisement. In Memphis in 2018, we spoke with ex-offenders working hard to put their lives back together through the community organization Lifeline to Success, only to continue to confront what was for many of them an unthinkable and unending punishment: felony disenfranchisement. They felt subjected to a system of governing they have no say in, despite having paid their dues to society, and that their lives were being irrevocably shaped by decisions being made for them that they might not have made for themselves.   In San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2021, locals referred to themselves as a colony, with no say in the colonizer’s impact on their lives. Puerto Ricans, as citizens of a territory of the United States, are not granted the right to vote in presidential elections. Vieques, a small island off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast known outside Puerto Rico as the former US Navy bomb training range and testing site, is known by Viequenses as “the colony of a colony.” The sense of silenced despair was especially pronounced as residents, many of them veterans, struggled with everything from meeting basic needs to transportation and the inexistence of medical care amid astronomically high cancer rates—the result of American military pollution, specifically from plutonium and Agent Orange.  Sonia Ventura (foreground), was born in Puerto Rico but grew up in the United States, returning in 2003 to help her birthplace. Through her organization Concerned Residents for Improvement Inc., she visited the elderly in Vieques, bringing them what they needed most, making them laugh and dance, and checking to make sure they were not forgotten. She died after contracting Covid-19 in 2021. With respect to voting, of the dozen locations we traveled to across the country, one stands out: New Hampshire. We bounced around more than a dozen towns—places like Laconia and Meredith; Tilton, Salisbury, and Moultonborough; Wilmot, Concord, Andover, and Franklin— visiting town hall meetings, schools, families living off the grid, and libertarians, and each town was largely the same. Participation in local direct democracy was not only high, it was an important and ongoing source of pride in the community. Asked why it was such a central part of life in the “live free or die” state, residents said it had always been that way and was a matter of the personal nature of caring for democracy and a sense of duty. But homogeneity also helps. New Hampshire is more than 60 percent white, with an average household income of $90,000 and a 2.6 percent unemployment rate, as of 2024. Self-governing in the best interest of the whole community is often an infinitely smoother negotiation, a process almost unimpeachably straightforward, when most of the members of that community share a relatively secure lived experience.   In New Hampshire, we observed that participation in local direct democracy—such as town meetings, like the one pictured—was not only high, it was an important and ongoing source of pride in the community. Town meeting season in New Hampshire traces back to colonial days. In most communities we visited, an enduring existential struggle with poverty was at the root of a communal loss of spirit, offset by the will of just a few individuals to fight back. When the coal industry largely responsible for building up McDowell County—the poorest county in West Virginia and among the poorest in the nation—dried up, it took most of the economy, resources, and population with it. The coal industry and the county seat, the city of Welch, were at their peak in the 1950s, with a sudden surge in population from roughly 700 to 100,000 and a thronging city center, but machines began to take over the work of men. The county became the first in the country to receive modern-era food stamps after a 1960 visit by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy—a program residents said decimated the community, because, they said, they needed jobs, not food stamps. More than once, residents referred to their county as “America’s forgotten county,” left to themselves and out of the national conversation when it was no longer carrying the weight of the state’s economy. Today, McDowell County is notorious as the coal country that changed its often-Democratic vote to Republican in the 2016 presidential election.  By 2019, most of Welch’s downtown area was shuttered—what remained were a few small businesses, local government services, and the Welch News, the last remaining news source in McDowell County. Missy Nester, the owner and publisher, told us that she would “print until she ran out of paper.” But the paper was forced to fold in the summer of 2023. Many residents referred to McDowell County, West Virginia, as “America’s forgotten county” after the coal industry dried up. The Welch News was the last remaining news source in McDowell County until it was forced to fold in the summer of 2023. “Our people have nothing,” owner and publisher Missy Nester told the Associated Press in July of that year. “Like, can any of y’all hear us out here screaming?” “Our people have nothing,” Nester told the Associated Press in July of that year. “Like, can any of y’all hear us out here screaming?”   Nester and the Welch community had pulled together to save the newspaper in 2018 after learning that the owner had plans to close its doors. The Welch News had an entirely voluntary team of local drivers who drove a six-hour route through the hills to hand-deliver papers to readers’ homes. Often, they took bread and milk deliveries with them for the elderly who seldom saw anyone but them, and they checked in on every resident they handed off to. It was an intensely personal system that inspired awe unlike much else does. “We have been the forgotten place for so long that we’re just used to taking care of each other,” Nester said. “We vote to take care of ourselves.” In some places, like among a sizable Somali immigrant community in Garden City, Kansas, in 2021, people struggled to build a community infrastructure from scratch where there had never been one at all. What little support they’d once had was provided by the nonprofit outreach organization LiveWell, which offered assistance programs and services to the growing population, but funding dried up and the community was left on its own to face everything from obstacles to medical care, to a bomb threat and the racism that came with it, and landlords that financially exploited refugees. The challenge became how to organize a community that was outward facing, that could integrate itself into American society while holding on to its cultural customs when the people could only turn inward for help, creating—naturally—something far more insular.  We visited the families of Jamie Bothwell and Melena Haley at their home in Seymour, Indiana, in 2021. They supported Donald Trump but said they had no problem with “the Mexicans and others” in town. I thought a lot then about the importance Tocqueville placed on the idea of “assimilation” as a means of survival, of a group’s adaptability to the social mores of the new Americans as the evidence of whether or not it would ultimately endure American democracy. I thought about, on the one hand, how well the people of New Hampshire felt democracy was working for them and the role of cultural, racial, and economic homogeneity in that, and, on the other hand, I thought about the damage the demand for adaptability, the forced assimilation, has done to entire populations of people who don’t fit into that homogeneity.  Could democracy ever withstand the pressures of governing over the pluralist society we not only have become, but have really always been? It’s a conversation I had with Latrice Tatsey, a citizen of the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana, while watching her children ride at a rodeo in July 2019. In fact, it was a conversation I seemed to be having with many Blackfeet leaders. Fox Runningcrane collects sweet grass on the Badger-Two Medicine, a rocky 130,000-acre region of sacred, forested terrain for the Blackfeet Nation in Montana. The area has been embroiled in a land fight for decades, as the tribe has fought for control against oil and gas development first opened up by former President Ronald Reagan. Members of the Tatsey family celebrate a birthday on the Blackfeet Nation. Leaders there have had to work on ways to “keep the cultures indigenous to their peoples alive,” says John Murray, the Blackfeet’s tribal historic preservation officer. The history of the attempted forced assimilation of the Native Americans at the hands of American settlers is, by now, no secret. Today, it is largely recognized as a genocidal effort that decimated the populations of the country’s nations and tribes not just by the violence of slaughter, but by the violence of cultural destruction and dispossession as well. The result is conditions of living—and sometimes dying, as young people face the challenges of poverty, drug addiction, and suicide—caught between “Western influence” and Native tradition, in which leaders have had to work on ways to “keep the cultures indigenous to their peoples alive,” John Murray, the Blackfeet’s tribal historic preservation officer, told me. “Is it democracy that ruined it all?” he asked. “Corporate democracy?” It was a question that had come up more than once for us on the road, as people wondered where the line money draws across for whom democracy works and for whom it does not stops. Could even a perfect democracy subsist within the context of America’s particular brand of capitalism? Does the subsistence of one subset of people require the continued subjugation of another—or all others?  “We’ve had a very difficult struggle, always at the mercy of the government for survival,” Virgil “Puggy” Edwards, a member of the Blackfeet Constitutional Reform Committee, said as he gave a rundown of the Blackfeet history he was working on that day at the office, where he takes care of archiving and documentation. Paradoxically, this work the community does to keep culture, family, and tradition alive for the Blackfeet is largely democratic, Tatsey said. It comes down to a duality of spirit, of patriotism, and for the Blackfeet, democratic participation goes back long before the arrival of the first pilgrims to American shores.    “Our family has adapted to live in both worlds, even though we’re all in this one with our cultural values system, and living in the Western values system—no matter what trauma our people have gone through, they’ve been able to adapt, and that’s why we’re still here today,” she said. “Democracy is, for me, just how our people function for immemorial time, because what you have in our tribal makeup is leaders who, in order to have that leadership role, they had to prove themselves to the people and earn feathers,” she continued. “And so for us, it was what you did for your people and how you were going to guide your people that made the people stand behind you.” Murray, a member of the Tatsey family, is at the center of a fight against oil and gas companies to protect sacred land called Badger-Two Medicine. He has also helped open the land to an archeological dig, finding remains that prove a 13,000-year existence of the Blackfeet Nation—making them one of the oldest people to continually inhabit land in North America. “Democracy is, for me, just how our people function for immemorial time,” says Latrice Tatsey. Some of her family members are pictured here preparing to compete in the North American Indian Days. Amid a presidential election—that naturally occurring crisis of democracy, as Tocqueville called it—burning like a wildfire across the country, the slow burn of our secondary crisis, that of the inequality of social conditions, is smoldering. The people, having become incendiary themselves, are a lit powder keg—the spark barreling through the wick. We return to Tocqueville’s words:  > “Of all powers, that of public opinion is the hardest to exploit. It is often > just as dangerous [for representatives] to lag behind as it is to outpace it.” The real test of our democracy, for either side of the party line, will be how we get through it—to the other side of not just the wildfire, but of the slow burn. How we make ourselves hard to exploit and make it hard to exploit each other.  Tocqueville believed that our loss of spirit would either paralyze our participation, further heighten our passions, and risk a break of the state, or be the catalyst for us to rise up and save what we each believe to be at stake. If we are able to marvel at these communities’ capacity for togetherness in crisis as a feel-good feat of democracy in spite of “democracy” itself, then we should be, to the same extent, able to learn from it that the power of democracy, to self-govern, must sometimes be the power to use democracy to wrench self-governing back. The power to use democracy against itself, for its own good.  We will perhaps find that the only way to fight for American democracy is for the true equalizer to be us (if we want it). If we must fall to Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” let it be because our heightened passions have unified not against each other, but to number the people together greater than the flawed system of governance so that the tyranny belongs to us all.  And if it gets too heavy and “you reach the end of your rope,” like that church marquee on the north side of Watson Boulevard in Warner Robins preached, just “look up.” The real work of regeneration comes after the fire.