The first pilot episode of Reveal exposed how the Department of Veterans Affairs was overprescribing opioids to veterans and contributing to an overdose crisis. Journalist Aaron Glantz explained how he received—surprisingly quickly—a decade’s worth of opioid prescription data from the federal government.  “Sometimes, you have to sue to get the records,” he said. “I have to think that there were some people over there in DC who were as concerned as we were about this.” After that first show was made, host Al Letson didn’t know what to expect. “We weren’t sure if any public radio stations would even air it,” he said.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Reveal’s VA investigation sparked outrage. Congress held hearings during a government lockdown, and there’s been a sea change in the way veterans are prescribed painkillers. And today, the show is on more than 500 stations.  This week on Reveal, we celebrate our 10-year anniversary with a look back at some of our favorite stories, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic. And we interview the journalists behind the reporting to explain what happened after the stories aired.   This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in March 2025.

Dan McClellan has spent much of his life learning—and relearning—what the Bible and its authors were trying to tell us. But the years he spent in graduate school studying Hebrew texts, Near Eastern cultures, and the concept of deity taught him something else: The way scholars talk about the Bible is much different from how churchgoers—or most people on social media—talk about it. So several years ago, McClellan began pushing back against what he saw as misguided biblical interpretations online and found an audience. Today, he has almost 1 million followers on TikTok who look for his thoughts on topics like the “sin of empathy,” what the Bible says about slavery, or maybe just to see what graphic T-shirt he has decided to wear that day. (He confesses to also being a comic book nerd.) But one strand of thought that weaves through many of his videos is how Christian nationalists have recently used the Bible to gain political power. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “The hot new thing right now is to be a Christian nationalist,” says McClellan, who also wrote The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. “And I think a lot of people are jumping at the opportunity to get on board this attempt to take over the government on the part of Christians. And unfortunately, it means hurting an awful lot of people along the way.” On this week’s More To The Story, McClellan sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the ways people throughout history have used the Bible to serve their own interests and describes a time when his own perspective of the Bible was challenged. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2025. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: So you got a new book out, but wait, before we get to that, before we get to that, I should tell my listeners that I am such a huge fan of your work. I’ve been following you for a while and I think I came across your work because I’m the son of a preacher man, grew up in the church and definitely have my own religious beliefs. But what I love about the work that you do is you are just kind of demystifying the Bible and putting it in context. How did you end up doing this type of work, for lack of better term, fact-checking people’s conception of the Bible on TikTok and Instagram? Dan McClellan: Yeah, that was definitely not what I was aimed at when I started graduate school. In fact, I think from an academic point of view, my career looks more like a failure than anything else. Because I have taught at some universities, but never on a full-time basis. I don’t have a tenure-track position or anything like that. But something that has always been a concern of mine, even when I was an undergraduate and then moving into graduate school was the fact that the way scholars and experts talk about the Bible and think about the Bible is very, very different from the way the folks on the street or in the pews think and talk about the Bible. There’s a very big gap between those two. And the more I learned about the Bible and an academic approach to the Bible, the more that gap bothered me and the more I wanted to be able to share the insights that come from that expertise with the folks on the street and in the pews, which is not an easy thing to do, not only because it requires packaging frequently very complex concepts into things that are more easily digestible, but also because there tends to be a lot of pushback from the streets and the pews when you say, “Actually, that’s not what the Bible is like, it’s more like this.” Because of how deeply embedded in their worldviews their own understandings of the Bible are. And so I’ve always tried to engage on social media with the discourse about the Bible and religion. And I’ve always tried to combat the spread of misinformation and speak out against hoaxes and fake artifacts that people try to pawn off as real, have been doing this for a long time on blogs and on message boards and on Facebook and things like that. And the reach is just not that great on those channels. And then for whatever reason, I stumble across TikTok and suddenly I’m able to find an audience that is interested in someone who is there to call balls and strikes rather than to try to defend one dogma or one identity over and against the other. And I’m very happy to be in a position where I say that I combat the spread of misinformation about the Bible and religion for a living. And I wouldn’t take a university position right now if somebody offered me one. So very happy to be in the position I am right now. If any of our listeners have not seen you on TikTok or Instagram and they’re just listening to this conversation and they’re being introduced to you for the first time, I think they would be surprised to know that you’re also a huge pop culture nerd, like myself, a specific type of nerd though. You’re a comic book nerd. I mean, I’m sure you cover many nerddoms, but the one we definitely have in common is comic book and so which makes your videos fun. I think, from what I gather, there are an awful lot of folks out there who find my work relatable precisely because I do not come across as some stuffed shirt, Ivory tower academic. I’m just another dude who likes to wear graphic tees and likes to read comic books and stuff like that. And so I mean, how much better off could things be for me that the things that I enjoy are things that my audience enjoys and that I get to just riff about? So when I think about you on TikTok, I mean, basically you’re fact-checking people who are bending the message of the Bible for their own purposes. I mean, people have been doing this since the Bible was written. But today with social media, those interpretations are now being delivered in a new and really effective way. Yeah. I think the Bible for a long time has been viewed as the highest authority, and particularly after the Reformation when a lot of Christians got rid of everything else and now all we have is the Bible. But if you have something, a text that is supposed to be God’s very word and inspired and inerrant and that is the ultimate authority, if you can leverage that in support of your identity markers, in support of your rhetorical goals and everything like that, that’s a powerful tool in structuring power and values and boundaries. And so it becomes the… That’s the holy grail. That’s what you need to have on your side. But because it’s a text, it has no inherent meaning. It has to be interpreted, which then means whoever best interprets the text in support of their ideologies is going to be able to leverage that ultimate authority. And so I think an awful lot of people spend an awful lot of time trying to read their own ideologies and their own identity politics into the text because that is a very attractive instrument that they can then leverage to serve their own ends. And unfortunately, far too often that means powerful people using that as a tool against less powerful people and groups. And I think that’s particularly true today. I would say that when we look at the way religion is being used to fight against things like homosexuality, the way the Bible is being used to reframe slavery. There was one clip where Charlie Kirk was a person that you were taking his, I wouldn’t say misinformation, I would say disinformation because I think that he actually knows the truth of what he’s saying, as someone that knows the Bible a little bit, even I can look at the things he’s saying and be like, “What are you talking about?” Yeah, he’s an example of somebody I get tagged in his videos a lot and I try not to engage unless there’s a plausible case to be made that what he’s talking about overlaps with the Bible. That’s an example of somebody who right now is trying to leverage the Bible in defense of Christian nationalism because that’s the hot new thing right now is to be a Christian nationalist. And I think a lot of people are jumping at the opportunity to get on board this attempt to take over the government on the part of Christians. And unfortunately, it means hurting an awful lot of people along the way and structuring everything to serve the interests of already privileged and powerful groups over and against the interests of already vulnerable groups. I think folks who love power more than they love people are the actual problem that is causing a lot of the social ills that we have today. And unfortunately, the Bible is very frequently one of the main instruments that we find in the hands of those people. A couple months ago, the thing that I was hearing a lot on social media specifically from right wing religious folks is the idea that there’s the sin of empathy. And on its surface I thought it was laughable, but I have you here now. So my question is is there anywhere in the Bible that talks about the sin of empathy? Certainly not. There are certainly times when in narratives God will say, “Show no mercy,” or something like that. And these are particularly problematic passages where God says, “You will go through the town and you will kill everything that breathes, men, women, children, the suckling baby. Show no mercy.” And so I think you could interpret that to mean there are times when God does not want you to be empathetic, at least there are times when the narrative calls for that. But I think we can point out that’s a bad narrative and that’s a bad message. There’s certainly no point where anyone says empathy is a sin just in general. And the notion of the sin of empathy is just an attempt to try to overturn the fact that we’re social creatures and we are evolutionarily and experientially predisposed to feel what other people are feeling. That is what allows us to cooperate. That’s what allows us to build larger and more complex social groups without things breaking down. Empathy is important to the survival of humanity, but it has a negative byproduct because we all understand ourselves according to specific sets of social identities. And if you have a social identity, you have an in-group and then you have an out-group. And so empathy can be problematic when we empathize with the in-group to the degree that we then become antagonistic toward the out-group. We call that parochial empathy. If you are empathetic toward the people you identify with to the degree that you then antagonize and harm the out-group, that can be harmful. But I don’t think that’s what people are talking about when they are talking about the sin of empathy because those are the people who are overwhelmingly trying to defend precisely parochial empathy because they’re trying to convince others it’s bad for us to empathize with undocumented immigrants. It’s bad for us to empathize with people from other nations. It’s bad for us to empathize with either conservatives or liberals. I think empathy that is outward looking is good. Empathy that is parochial, I mean, it serves a purpose. Smaller groups that are threatened, that are vulnerable, in order for those identities to survive, they have to kind of circle the wagons and you have to kind of be a little protective of your identity. This is what the Judeans and the Jewish folks throughout history have had to do. And that’s necessary, I think, in certain contexts for the survival and the protection of vulnerable identities. But once you become the oppressor, once you become the empire, once you become the dominant group to then say the out-group is bad and to exercise that parochial empathy, I think that becomes phenomenally harmful. And so ironically, there can be a way that empathy is bad and the folks who talk about the sin of empathy are primarily defending the bad kind of empathy and criticizing the good kind of empathy. So I think they have it precisely backwards. And I think all they’re trying to do is protect their own privilege and power. Yeah. I mean, I think they have it backwards, but I think they have it backwards purposefully so. I think that there are a lot of people who don’t know any better and they say things based in their ignorance, but I also think there are a lot of people who interpret the text in a way that justifies the things that they already believe to be right. It’s good for them to… I mean, sometimes when I’m listening to some folks talk about the Bible and Jesus, the image of Jesus that comes in my mind is Jesus riding horseback on a Tyrannosaurus Rex with two sub-machine guns in his hand. With an AK, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s like that’s not the Jesus that I see, but I understand how some people can twist their beliefs to fit that image. Yeah. And you do, anytime you have these movements, you’ve got a lot of people who are there along for the ride. They’re convinced of things, but a lot of the thought leaders and a lot of the people who are driving the car are conscious of what they’re doing, are very intentionally doing it. So tell me about your book. why’d you write it? All the things. All the things. It’s called The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. The framing that I came up with is the Bible says so because one of the most common things that I’m confronting in social media is the notion that the Bible says X, Y, and Z. And so that was the genesis of this manuscript that turned into this book, which has 18 different chapters, an intro, and then I give a little broad-level view of how we got the Bible. But then 18 different chapters, each one addresses a different claim about what the Bible says. So the Bible says homosexuality is an abomination. The Bible says God created the universe out of nothing. The Bible says you should beat your kids. A lot of different claims about what the Bible says. And in each chapter I try to go through and share what the data actually indicate about what the authors and earliest audiences of these biblical texts understood the text to be doing and to be saying, where normally when people say the Bible says X, Y or Z, they’re sharing what makes the Bible meaningful and useful to them in their specific circumstances. And what I do is try to say, “I’m going to set that aside and I’m going to try to understand what would’ve made this text meaningful and useful to its authors and earliest audiences irrespective of how meaningful and useful that may make it to us.” And so I try to share what we think the authors were trying to say when they wrote whatever they did right in the Bible. All of your studies that you’ve… And you’ve gone deep into all of this, is it fair to look at the Bible as a historical document or do you see the Bible more as a collection of stories that try to teach people, specifically people of that time how to live their lives, like how to be safe, how to create community, all of those things? I think there’s a degree to which many parts of the Bible are historical, but I think that’s incidental. The Bible was certainly not written as a history book. And I think overwhelmingly, the Bible is a collection of texts from that time period that were intended to try to do certain things with the audiences. It wasn’t also always necessarily about how to live right. I think a lot of the times it’s about trying to establish who’s in control and what kind of understanding of our identity we should have and things like that. So there are a lot of different rhetorical goals going on, and sometimes one set of authors might be arguing against another set of authors. You see that particularly between Samuel and Kings and Chronicles. You have a lot of things being changed because the editors of Chronicles were like, “I don’t like the way you do it. I’m going to do it this other way.” And they’re trying to make different points. But yeah, they’re definitely rhetorical texts. They’re definitely to some degree propagandistic texts, and particularly a lot of the historical texts having to do with the Kings and things like that in the Hebrew Bible. Once we get into the New Testament, I think it’s probably a little more in line with texts intended to help people understand how to live according to the opinion of the authors. Tell me if this categorization is fair. The God of the Old Testament is, my dad would kill me if he heard me say this, but the God of the Old Testament feels very much a God of get off my lawn, kids and very much like an angry wrathful God, like, “You step in line with me or I will smite you. I will burn whole cities down. And if you turn around and look at those cities, I will turn you into pillars of salt. I don’t mess around. There’s no mercy.” Then after Jesus is born and Jesus lives his life, the God we meet there is a much more generous and loving God, the God who hung out with tax collectors, who hung out with prostitutes, who told you to love your neighbor as you would love yourself, all of these things that are a much more softer and loving deity than what we see in the Old Testament. Would you agree that that’s true? I would agree that that’s a very common interpretation. And I would agree that on the surface, if we’re not looking incredibly closely, it can seem like that. But I think there’s a problem with that perspective, and there are a few things going on here. Because you have an angry vindictive God in the New Testament as well, but it’s isolated to only a couple places and primarily like the Book of Revelation represents a deity that will bathe its sword in the blood of victims, and you also find a phenomenally merciful and long-suffering God in different parts of the Hebrew Bible. And this is one of the reasons that I’ve tried to point out there’s no one God of the Bible. You have numerous different divine profiles being represented throughout both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Different authors are going to represent God in whatever ways serve their own rhetorical interests and goals, but there is a chronological trajectory as well. As things are changing in the world in societies, you go from far more warfare, far more conflict between societies to a time period when there’s still war and conflict, but there’s a lot more advocacy for peace. And it’s not the division between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament where that pivots, it’s actually before the end of the Hebrew Bible. I think that that dichotomy of the vindictive and violent God of the Hebrew Bible and the loving merciful God of the New Testament also is problematic from an antisemitism point of view because that has taken up frequently to frame the God of the Jewish people as evil and the God of Christianity as good. And that facilitates, or it historically has facilitated a lot of problems. So I try to help people understand that you’ve got a mix of both in both sets of texts, and it’s really your choice what you choose to emphasize, give priority to and center. This is exactly why I love your videos because I have a long-held belief that I’ve thought about over years. And then you come along and you blow it all up. You blow it all. Not only do you blow it up, you point out the places where that belief is problematic because until you said it, I never would’ve thought of it in the frame of like antisemitic. It’s the blind spot, I don’t see it like that, but when you frame it in that way, I get it. I get why that thinking is totally problematic, and I think that’s the power of what you do on social media. And that’s something that it’s a lesson I had to learn myself as well. Because I saw somebody posted on Twitter many years ago a picture of Santa Claus in somebody’s living room, but he was angry and had an ax or something, and there’s a little kid on the stairs looking around the corner and says, “Oh, no, it’s Old Testament Santa.” And I was like, “Aha.” And I shared this and some of my Jewish scholar friends immediately were like, “Bad form. Here’s why this is bad.” And it had never occurred to me either, and then I couldn’t unsee it. Once I accepted that people with very different experiences are going to feel very differently about the joke and what’s being expressed there, I couldn’t unsee that. It’s interesting to me growing up in the Baptist church that when I was in church and in the church that I went to, the Bible verse that I heard more than anything was that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than a rich man to enter the gates of heaven. And that was kind of a thing in the church that I was in, and most of the churches that I went to, that wealth did not equate that you were a pious and good person. It was more the opposite, that wealth meant that your actions had to be more because it was going to be hard for you to get through the gates of heaven. And it seems that that Bible verse is completely forgotten by, well, A, like a lot of these Christian nationalists or preachers who engage in the prosperity gospel. Yeah, it’s a big issue. And I mean, there are ways that people try to get around that verse. They say that, “Oh, eye have the needle doesn’t mean an actual sewing needle. It refers to what’s called a wicked gate, a little door that is inside of the main door of the city gate.” And so it just means that you have to open the little door and the pack has to be taken off the camel and they have to shimmy through on their knees. And I don’t think these people have ever seen a camel in real life who are saying this because camels are not going to do that. But there were no such gates anywhere in, around or near Jerusalem, anywhere near the time of the composition of the New Testament. And this is very clearly hyperbole that is coming at the end of a story about a rich young ruler comes to Jesus and says, “I’ve kept all the commandments since my youth. What do I have to do to inherit the kingdom of God?” And Jesus says, “Sell everything you own and give it to the poor.” And then it says the man went away sad because he had a lot of possessions. And that’s where Jesus goes, “Tsk, tsk. It’s going to be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven,” and then gives this hyperbolic notion of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. And for people who try to endorse a prosperity gospel interpretation of this, not only is it incredibly hard to do and it’s never really convincing unless you are already there and just need to be made to feel like it’s not impossible. But like everywhere else in the gospels, Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and mammon.” And Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor.” And you can look in the sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 5, and it says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” And so people say, “Aha. It doesn’t say… That’s not about economic poverty, that’s about humility.” But you can then go to the sermon on the plain in the Gospel of Luke and it just says, “Blessed are the poor.” Which very clearly is referring to economic poverty. As I said before, the Bible is a text. It has no inherent meaning. We create meaning in negotiation with the text, which means we’re bringing our experiences and our understanding to the text, and that’s generating the meaning. And if you have experienced privilege and wealth your whole life, you’re going to interpret the Bible in a way that makes that okay. It’s very rare that we have someone in a position like that who comes to the text and can think critically enough to realize, “This is about me. This is saying that I am the problem. I better fix myself.” That’s phenomenally rare. What is far more common is for someone to bring their own experiences to the text and say, “I was right all along. The problem is everybody else. The problem is not me. I can find endorsement or validation of my own worldviews and my own perspectives and my own hatred and my own bigotry in the text and that authorizes and validates it.” And that’s what we see going on overwhelmingly in public discourse about the Bible. Tough question that you’ve probably been asked a million times before, but the fact that you are doing such deep research on the Bible, how does that affect your religious belief? And I think for a long time I assumed that you are an atheist, that you didn’t believe in God, but then you did a video and you talked about being a Mormon, and I was like, “Wow, okay. That’s a wrinkle. That’s something there.” So yeah, talk to me about that. How do you balance the two things? Well, and this is something I’ve for a long time said, I don’t talk about my personal beliefs on social media, so that’s a boundary that I try to maintain. But what I will say is that I have always tried very, very hard ever since I started formally studying the Bible to ensure that I was compartmentalizing my academic approach to the Bible from my devotional approach to the Bible, keeping them firmly separate, which is not an easy thing to do because I was raised more or less without religion. And like I mentioned earlier, I joined the LDS church as an adult. I was 20 years old. I didn’t really have much that I had to deconstruct when I started studying the Bible academically. So I would say that a lot of people reach out to me for help with deconstruction, for help with trying to understand these things through a prism of faith. And that’s where I say, “That’s above my pay grade.” I don’t take a pastoral approach to this. I’m not here to hold anybody’s hand through faith crises and things like that. There are content creators out there who do that kind of thing. I’m just here to try to present the data and my own personal grappling with that is something that is private. So I do keep that separate. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

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.

Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar said Sunday that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulled over her son this weekend and asked him to prove his citizenship.  In an interview with WCCO, a CBS affiliate based in Minneapolis, the Somali-born congresswoman said she’s feared for her 20-year-old son since President Donald Trump and ICE began targeting Somali immigrants in the Twin Cities area earlier this month.  “Yesterday, after he made a stop at Target, he did get pulled over by ICE agents, and once he was able to produce his passport ID, they did let him go,” Omar, a refugee from Somalia, told WCCO’s Esme Murphy.  Since descending on Minnesota, home of the largest Somali community in the US, ICE agents have detained several US citizens, according to local officials and video evidence. The operation, “Metro Surge,” has prompted area residents to begin carrying around their passports and even avoid going outside, according to The New York Times. This includes Omar’s son, who “always carries” his passport with him, the four-term congresswoman told Murphy.  The incident described by Omar occurred one day after she announced that she was launching two formal inquiries into the Trump administration’s “escalating attacks on Somali communities in Minnesota and across the country,” her website reads. In a December 12 letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE acting director Todd Lyons, Omar wrote that “constituents, advocates, and local officials have documented blatant racial profiling, an egregious level of unnecessary force, and activity that appears designed for social media rather than befitting a law enforcement agency.” > “I kept calling to see if he was okay, if he had any run-ins, and he wasn’t > answering,” Omar told WCCO. Among other questions, Omar wants Noem and Lyons to answer: “How many arrests were the result of judicial warrants?” “How can the public report potential violations of constitutional rights, and how will those be investigated?” and “How is ICE ensuring due process protections while a large volume of new officers are on the ground?” Amid a barrage of xenophobic remarks about Somali people in recent weeks, President Trump has repeatedly targeted Omar, who arrived in the US as a refugee in the 1990s and became a citizen in 2000. These attacks go back to Trump’s first term, when Omar was first elected to Congress. “She’s garbage,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting December 2. “Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.” In that meeting, the president also said that Somalia “stinks” and that immigrants from the country “come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch.” “We don’t want them in our country,” he said multiple times. At a Pennsylvania rally this past Tuesday night, Trump called Somalia “about the worst country in the world” and mocked Omar. “I love this Ilhan Omar, whatever the hell her name is, with the little turban. I love her, she comes in, does nothing but bitch,” he said. “She should get the hell out, throw her the hell out,” Trump continued as his supporters chanted “GET HER OUT!”  In her interview on Sunday, Omar said ICE had previously entered a local mosque where her son prays, before leaving without making any arrests last Friday. Omar said that throughout that day she was watching videos of ICE stops in the same neighborhood as the mosque. “I kept calling to see if he was okay, if he had any run-ins, and he wasn’t answering,” Omar told WCCO. “Eventually, that night I did get a chance to talk to him and I had to remind him just how worried I am.” 

Earlier this fall, hundreds of activists from all over the world crowded onto several dozen boats and set sail for Gaza. Their goal: Break through Israel’s blockade of the territory and end one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet. They thought that by sharing their journey through social media, they could capture the world’s attention.  At first, it was easy to dismiss the Global Sumud Flotilla—until it wasn’t. Before reaching Gaza, the flotilla was attacked by drones, and activists were arrested by the Israeli navy.  “We were at gunpoint; like, you could see the laser on our chest,” says flotilla participant Louna Sbou.   Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. They were then sent to a high-security prison in the middle of the Negev desert. “You have no control, you have no information, and you have no rights,” says Carsie Blanton, another participant. “They could do whatever they want to you.” This week on Reveal, we go aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla for a firsthand look at what activists faced on their journey and whether their efforts made any difference.

Jason Stanley isn’t afraid to use the F-word when talking about President Donald Trump. The author of How Fascism Works and Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future is clear: He believes the United States is currently under an authoritarian regime led by a fascist leader. At a time when the Trump administration is putting increasing pressure on private and public universities to conform or lose funding, Stanley recently left his position at Yale University and moved his family to Canada, where he’s now the Bissell-Heyd chair in American studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The move, he says, has allowed him to talk about the US in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if he remained in the country.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “I knew that if I stayed at Yale, there would be pressure not to bring the Trump administration’s wrath onto Yale,” he says. “I knew that Yale would try to normalize the situation, escape being in the press, urge us to see the fascists as just politically different.” On this week’s More To The Story, Stanley traces the recent rise of fascist regimes around the globe, and explains why he describes what’s happening in the US today as a “coup” and why he thinks the speed and scope of the Trump administration’s hardline policies could ultimately lead to significant pushback from those opposed to the president. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: So your new book, Erasing History, focuses on what you call the rise of global fascism and specifically on the role of education in authoritarian regimes. Tell me about that. Jason Stanley: It’s really a prequel to my 2018 book, How Fascism Works. So I’m a philosopher first and foremost, so what I’ve been doing, really, I envisage a kind of trilogy eventually with the third book being what to ho, how to stop this, but How Fascism Works is about fascist politics, how a certain kind of politics works to catapult people into power when they use it as a practice, whether they might be ideologically fascist or not. I think everybody accepts that whatever the Trump machine believes behind the scenes, they’re employing techniques familiar from the Nazis. It’s the same set of scapegoats except not the Jews, but immigrants, LGBTQ citizens, opposition politicians, et cetera. So for fascist politics to be maximally effective, you need a certain kind of education system that tells people that their country is like the greatest ever. And as I show in the book, Hitler is extremely clear about this in Mein Kampf, he speaks in very clear terms about education and the necessity of having an education system where you promote the founders of the nation, the great Aryan men who founded the German nation as great exemplars and models, and you base the education around that. And hey, in the United States we already had an education like system like that. So if that is your background education system, then you can set up great replacement theory. You can say America’s greatness is because it had these great white Christian men. And so if you try to replace those men, if you try to replace white Christian men in positions of power by non-whites or women, or non-white women most concerningly from this perspective, then that’s an existential challenge to American greatness. Just for basis of this conversation, can you give me your definition of fascism? Many countries have fascist, social, and political movements, and have them in their history. The United States certainly does: eugenics, the immigration laws that Hitler so admired. And in the United States, in the black intellectual tradition you consider Jim Crow a fascist social and political movement. And Jim Crow, the second Ku Klux Klan was, ideologically very similar to German fascism particularly. But whereas in Europe you had–and this is what we think of when we think of fascism–you had a cult of the leader. So I would go with something like a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ citizens, feminists, and leftists. Jim Crow South did not have a cult of the leader, wasn’t organized around a Trump figure, but what we now have in the United States is something that looks a lot closer to German fascism. You consider President Trump a fascist? Oh, yeah. And even more… I mean, if you think of fascism as a set of tactics and practices, yes. What President Trump has in his heart, I don’t know. Do you feel like America is living in an authoritarian state? Of course. I think right now, the Trump regime has decided it has enough of the levers of power that they don’t need to have public support anymore. And it is not clear to me whether or not they’re correct on that. They might be wrong. They might have just misstated the moment, and in fact, there will be civil resistance. The institutions will see that they have to unify. That might happen. Civil society is not, I think, buying the propaganda line of the regime. So I’m not saying by any means that things are lost. And in fact, the rapidity by which this has happened might actually work against this coup that is now happening. But the problem is the Supreme Court is nothing but a far-right Trump loyalists, nothing but, so everything they’re going to do, they rule almost entirely in favor of Trump. They’re not minds on that court for the most part, the conservative majority, they’re only there for the purposes of keeping Trump in power and whatever far-right machine replaces him. And things are moving quickly, they’re seizing the levers of power. But I do not think they have popular support, and I think they will have even less popular support as this proceeds. You just used the word coup. Do you think that a coup is happening in the United States? Yes, a coup is happening in the United States. Walk me through that. Why do you think it’s a coup, in the sense of, I mean, these guys were elected? I’m just curious why you use that word, that’s all. Right, let’s look at what’s happening with the boats that they’re blowing up and now in the Pacific, first in the Caribbean, now in the Pacific, they’re just simply assassinating people for no reason whatsoever. It’s completely illegal. In fact, what it now means is that Trump could just kill anyone anywhere just by saying they’re a terrorist. The way it’s going to work is they’re going to say, “Okay, these narco traffickers are terrorists. Oh, the immigrants are terrorists. Anyone protesting ICE now is a terrorist. If you’re against us blowing up boats without any legal justification or evidence, or if you are against ICE brutalizing little kids, you are a terrorist. The Democratic Party are terrorists.” So they’re trying to illegalize the opposition. What they’re doing is so far beyond what’s legal, so there’s no legality anymore. Everybody who supports Trump gets pardoned. Trump tells people, tells the military the real enemy is within, namely the opposition. The Democratic states and Democratic cities will have the military, the National Guard, the red states are essentially invading the blue states. All of this is an overthrow of the Democratic order, and it’s already happened. So you’ve been studying this for a long time. You’re watching America change or maybe kind of realize the destiny that’s kind of always been under the surface because I would argue that what we’re seeing now was set up long time ago. And it just took a little while for it to come to the surface. In seeing all that, was that a part of why you decided to leave the United States? I knew when I made the decision in March that people were going to be harshly critical. Somebody yelled at me the other day, they were like, “You are safe, you’re a Yale professor.” I just didn’t want to deal with the whole structure. I knew that if I stayed at Yale, there would be pressure not to bring the Trump administration’s wrath onto Yale. I knew that Yale would try to normalize the situation, escape being in the press, urge us to see the fascists as just politically different, and talk about polarization, which is just fascism. All the people talking about polarization are just fascism enablers. They’re almost worse than the fascists because they’re just like, “Hey, how do I keep getting money in power?” I’ll say the fascists are normal. And so I was just like, “Okay, I have this great opportunity.” And I thought that without that pressure, because I do love Yale, and so I love my time there. I love my colleagues, I love my students, I love the institution as a home to do my work, and I just felt I would be torn. I couldn’t hit hard in the way that I’m hitting hard now with you and I’m hitting hard when I go on TV and I’m hitting hard when I write my op-eds, I can say whatever I want in Toronto about the United States and about global fascism, and I’m building an institute here to create fellowships for journalists from all around the world to figure out what’s going on and how to respond to what’s going on. And I don’t think I could have done that in a university in the United States. So the Trump administration is targeting funds for private universities in hopes of pushing them into a more conservative agenda. And as of this recording, it’s closing in on a deal with the University of Virginia. You’ve called this a war. So how would you advise other universities, given where we are in the world, but also the desire within those universities to protect the institution? Everyone has to say fuck you. I mean, it’s the only way to… I mean, you could say Yale predates American democracy, which is true, but a university in a democracy is a core democratic institution. That’s why they attack universities first and the media. They’ve taken the court. Obviously, the Supreme Court is taken. So unfortunately, what you have to do, every single democratic institution has to band together and defend each other. And we’ve already had that total breakdown because starting in 2015, we had this Coke-funded movement creating a moral panic about universities, and the New York Times piled on this moral panic. You couldn’t open the New York Times for years without reading another op-ed about hysterical moral panic about leftists on campus. All the while it was a total fiction that the whole time the right-wing press from Turning Points USA’s Professor Watchlist, originally Breitbart, Campus Reform, there was this massive attack on progressives and universities where progressive professors were terrified of being targeted by the conservative students and universities completely. So the media viciously attacked universities and set the groundwork for Trumpism. So that has to stop, and the both-siderism has to stop. The whole stuff about polarization, that’s just enabling fascism. Yeah, explain that to me because you don’t like when people talk and say polarization, because the polarization, the idea that things are more toxic than they’ve ever been, and people are choosing sides, and all of that. Specifically, why don’t you like that? Because one side is led by fascists. I mean, it’s like saying the Civil War, the problem with the Civil War was polarization. It’s literally like that. History will look back at this time at figures who talk about polarization exactly like history looks back on people who called John Brown a crazy person or who said, “Oh, it’s too early for abolition. It’s, oh, terrible, polarized time.” One group thinks that slavery is good, and the other group thinks it’s bad, terribly polarized. Or Nazi Germany. One group thinks Jews should be killed, the other one thinks they’re okay, it’s Polarized. It’s nonsensical. It’s just fascism enabling. Let me ask you this: do you think Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascist? Oh, well, of course, more so than Trump even. You’ve said in the past that Jews in particular need to speak out about what’s happening and how history will look back at this time period. Why do you think it’s so important for Jewish people to speak up at this time? Well, first of all, because the genocide is being perpetrated in our name, there’s a long tradition of European Jews from which I come who do not accept, from my father’s side. My mother’s Polish Jewish and has very different views about Israel than I do, and I’m not questioning, I don’t know what it means to question the existence of a state as Israel’s there, nobody should be killed in Israel, nobody should be moved away from Israel, it’s there, but Israel should stop the practice of apartheid. Obviously, they should not commit a genocide, and it’s the first televised genocide in human history. Jan Karski spent… of the Polish Home Army spent… deeply risked his life visiting the Warsaw Ghetto, infiltrating the death camp system to spread word of what was happening in Poland with the death camp, with the Nazi death camps, and no one… Roosevelt didn’t believe him. Now we’ve got it all on social media. So Jews have to speak out about that. We have to say this is not in our name, and we have to do that in a way that makes it clear that we’re not calling for the end of… for anyone to be thrust out of Israel. Palestinians and Jews should have equal rights, and apartheid has to end. And then Jewish people have suffered fascism. I mean, Russians have suffered fascism too, but they’re still awfully fascist, so that’s what we learned from Israel as well. But my Judaism, my version of Judaism is the tradition of liberalism. And we Jews did represent liberalism, the idea that a nation cannot be based on an ethnicity or a religion, the idea that if you are in a place, that is your home, and it doesn’t matter what your religion or ethnicity is, that’s why we were killed and why we were targeted. What is it about this moment in time that we are seeing fascist movements all over the planet happening and gaining power? What is it at this moment that we’re seeing all this? Well, one thing I think is essential to see is the global nature of this. You cannot investigate Trumpism just by looking at the United States. Now we’re seeing Trump offer $20 billion to Argentina to support their far-right leader. I mean, that’s a crazy amount of money. And they’re saying, “Well, you better keep them in power.” So these are connected movements. I’ve been thinking about writing about this for months, but now it’s getting more attention now that Homeland Security has tweeted it, but remigration. It’s very clear there are powerful links between Germany’s fascist party, Alternative für Deutschland, and the Trump regime since the Munich Security Conference at least. Vance went over and met with the head of AfD and not with the Chancellor of Germany who’s a conservative. And then there was all this stuff about Germany threatening to ban AfD. That became central to the Trump regime. So when Homeland Security tweets remigration, which is not a word in the English language. It’s a word created by Martin Zellner who intended it to mean taking citizenship away from non-white, from Muslims. Right. When we look back on moments like Nazi Germany and wonder why people didn’t do something about these atrocities faster, do you think that people just at some point become complacent? Yeah. I mean, people just don’t get that under fascism or virtually any kind of authoritarianism, you can still go to the club, there are still raves, there are restaurants, there are bars. They’re like, “How could it be fascism because I can go to the restaurant and complain about the government to my friends?” So it’s like what you’re saying, a large chunk of the population are still living their regular routine, going to work, coming home, taking care of their kids, all of that, but they’re oblivious to… or they’re tuning out what’s happening to people in the margins? Yeah. I mean, we’re creating large concentration camps for immigrants. Lawyers can’t get into these places. Congress people are being blocked from their oversight role. So we now have concentration camps in the United States. We have people in masks kidnapping people off the streets. I don’t even like to say, “Oh, now it’s going to go to protesters,” which it obviously will, but because it’s bad enough that little kids are watching their parents snatched away in immigration courts, that’s bad enough. And all the people who are enabling this, all the people who are normalizing this, I don’t myself believe in hell, but I think there’s a lot of people out there who are patting their wallets, getting that extra attention by normalizing this, by saying, “Oh, maybe we need to really… This cruelty is okay, it’s part of… It’s just you disagree with it. We’re polarized.” Yeah. Well, I think that we have, in many ways, been dehumanized by the media we consume. When you look back at the civil rights struggle, when those images came on TV, it made change… Exactly. … because we were in a different place. Now, the reaction is when young people rise up, when they see images on the screen or they see what’s happening to immigrants or they’re seeing what’s happening to democracy, heads are getting cracked or they’re threatening to crack heads. I mean, I think this is what I was saying before, I’m not sure they’re going to be successful on this because I think civil society is really pushing back, and they’ve threatened people if they showed up at the No Kings demonstrations, but people still showed up, so it kind of didn’t work. What do you see for the near future for the United States? Well, I’m actually heartened by certain things, I’m heartened by the… I see that the regime has… So the regime is going hog wild. They’re soaking themselves in cruelty and corruption and illegality, and their justifications for this are not playing with the American people. Most Americans are starting to get that we’re facing a dictator, an out of control dictator. I think that what you’re going to see as people see the American Republic being cracked apart and sold for parts to the tech fascists, to anyone really. Basically, Trump is saying, “Line up behind my corruption, line up behind my brutalization of immigrants, my targeting of domestic opponents, and you’ll profit, you’ll get that $50,000 signing bonus for ICE, you’ll profit, you’ll get the government contracts, the courts will rule in your favor.” But I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer to many Americans what’s going on. The problem is fascism and dictatorship, and the regime went over its skis. So that’s where I see the hope here, that I think they went too fast. So it’s a bad time, but I think that there is a lot of civil society reaction, and so we just don’t know what’s going to happen right now. Yeah. Jason Stanley, thank you so much for taking your time to talk to me, man. This was great. Yeah, great conversation in difficult times.

If you had to describe the last decade or so of political life in America, the list would likely include the following: The Black Lives Matter movement. The death of George Floyd. America’s first Black president. The rise of the MAGA movement. The election and reelection of Donald Trump. A resurgence of white nationalism. An erasure of Black history. America in these last 10 years has experienced generational political upheaval, clashes over race and identity, and a battle over the very direction of the country itself. Few writers have charted these wild swings better than staff writer for The New Yorker and Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb. And for Cobb, it all started when he was asked to write about an incident that was just beginning to make national news: the death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black 17-year-old in Florida. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “At the time, I thought of Trayvon as this particularly resonant metaphor. But I didn’t understand that he was actually the start of something much bigger,” Cobb says. “I’m still kind of hearing the echoes of that moment.” Cobb recently released Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012–2025, a collection of essays from more than a decade at The New Yorker, that all begin with that moment of national reckoning over Martin’s death. On this week’s episode, Cobb looks back at how the Trayvon Martin incident shaped the coming decade, reexamines the Black Lives Matter movement and President Obama’s legacy in the age of Donald Trump, and shares what he tells his journalism students at a time when the media is under attack. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Tell me about that time when you started writing and reporting on Trayvon’s death and how it’s evolved into where it is today. Jelani Cobb: That was a really striking moment, I think, partly because of the contrast. There was a Black president. We had seen circumstances like Trayvon’s, decades and centuries. We had never seen that in the context of it being an African-American president. The first thing that I ever wrote for The New Yorker was a piece called Trayvon Martin and the Parameters of Hope, and it was about exactly that contradiction. The fact that we could be represented in the highest office in the land, that we could look at Barack Obama and see in him a barometer of our progress, even though lots of things people agree or disagree with about him politically, but the mere fact that he could exist was a barometer of what had been achieved. And at the same time, we had this reminder of the way in which the judicial system can deliver these perverse outcomes, especially when there are cases that are refracted through the lens of race. At the time I thought of Trayvon as this particularly resonant metaphor, but I didn’t understand that he was actually the start of something much bigger, because Black Lives Matter is an outgrowth. The phrase, the framing, that language, Black Lives Matter, came out of the aftermath of the verdict that exonerated George Zimmerman, who is the man who killed Trayvon Martin. And in a weird kind of bizarro world response, Trayvon Martin’s death was also cited as the impetus for Dylann Roof, who three years later killed nine people in the basement of the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and he said he had been radicalized by the Trayvon Martin case. And it went from there. Really both of those dynamics, those twin dynamics of this resurgence of white nationalism and this kind of volatile Christian nationalism and this very dynamic resonant movement for black equality or for racial equality, and almost the kind of crash the path that those two were put on in that moment. Yeah. Three or More Is a Riot, is a collection of your past essays. After you were finished putting all this together, I’m just curious. What did you learn about the things that you had written, and also what did you learn about yourself? Because I think when I look back at old writing that I did I see myself in where I was, versus where I am today. Yeah, I think writing is either intentionally or unintentionally autobiographical. You’re either putting it out there and saying, this is what I think at this moment about these things, or time does that for you. If you come back, you can go, oh wow, I was really naive about this, or I really saw this very clearly in the moment for what it was. When I was combing back through these pieces, one conversation came to me, which was a discussion I had with my then editor, Amy Davidson Sorkin at The New Yorker. After I’d filed the first piece on Trayvon Martin, she said, “Why don’t you just stick with the story and see where it goes?” In effect, I’m still doing that. I’m still kind of hearing the echoes of that moment. There are 59 pieces in this collection, some of them short, some of them lengthy, but in looking at each of these pieces, I started to plot out a path. And that’s why the subtitle for the book is Notes on How We Got Here: 2012 to 2025, because I started to plot out a path seeing the rise of Trumpism and the MAGA movement, seeing the backlash to Barack Obama, the mass shootings, the racialized mass shootings in El Paso and Pittsburgh and Buffalo, all of which I had written about, and the way that these things were culminating into a national political mood. Yeah, yeah. I’m curious. I can remember when Obama was elected, I was volunteer/working with young black men, or boys at the time. Now they’re all grown up. But I was mentoring a group of black kids that were in a very poor neighborhood, and they were struggling to get by. The parents were. A lot of them had single parents, not for the reasons that most people prescribe. A lot of them had single parents because their other parent had passed away, and they were just trying to get by. I remember when Barack Obama was elected, I felt like this sense of hope, and also a little bit of relief because I’d been telling these boys that they could be anything they wanted to be. And deep down inside, I felt like I had been selling them a lie, but I’d been selling them a lie for a higher purpose, like for them to reach for something bigger. And when Barack Obama got elected, I felt like, okay, I’m not lying anymore. This is a good thing. I felt hopeful. Over his first term, though, what I began to realize with working with these young men is that nothing in their life was changing. Nothing at all. Everything that was changing in their lives happened because of what they were doing, but nothing changed when it came to national politics or what the president can do. I guess the question I have in saying all of that is how do you look back at the Obama years? Do you feel like in this weird way that it was a dream that never was really actualized, or was it a dream that was actualized? Did we see progress through that? You know what’s interesting, and I hate to be this on the nose about it, but I actually kind of grapple with that question in one of the essays called Barack X. It’s a piece I wrote in the midst of the 2012 election because he was running for reelection, which didn’t have the same sort of resonance because we already knew that a black person could be elected president. We had seen that. And that motivation was different, and it was this question of whether or not people would stay the course, whether people would come out. Incumbency is a powerful advantage in American politics, but there’s also, even at that point, you could see these headwinds forming around Obama. In that piece, I grapple with the question of not only what Obama had done, but I think more substantively what it was possible for him to do in that moment. It became this question for history I think. It takes 25 years after he’s left office to have a fair vantage point on what he reasonably could have done versus what he actually did. And the reason I say that is substantively, I think a lot of us felt that way, that things weren’t changing, that we were still grappling with the same sort of microaggressions at work, sometimes even worse. We were dealing with police who were behaving in a way that they were, and at the same time, this is the President of the United States who was called a liar while addressing Congress. This is a person who got stopped and frisked essentially, and had to show his birth certificate to prove that he was eligible to vote in the election he actually won. Not the question of whether he was eligible to be president, it was a question of whether or not it was even legal for him to vote in that election if he wasn’t a citizen. And so when you stacked all of those things up, and you saw the entrenched opposition that had determined that their number one objective from the time that he was elected was for him to be a one-term president. That’s what Mitch McConnell said. That’s what the other kind of aligned forces in the Republican Party. Where the standard thing is, even if it’s just boilerplate, even if it’s just kind of standard political speech that they say, well, we’ll work with the president where we can, but we’ll stand by our principles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s not what they said. Yeah, normally they’re just like, well, we’re going to work for the good of the American people, and if the president lines up with us, we will be happy to work for him. Yes, yes. Exactly. Mitch was very clear. That’s not what they said about him. And so balancing those two things, figuring out what the landscape of possibilities actually was, and then inside of that, what he achieved or failed to achieve relative to those things. So when Barack Obama was running for election, I just didn’t believe it was going to happen, until the day it happened. I was in disbelief. I was shocked. On the flip side, all the black lash that we have gotten ever since his presidency ended, and during his presidency really, all the black lash, I was completely, yeah, that’s par for course with America. It’s so unsurprising to me. You can just look back to Reconstruction and see how all that ended to kind of understand where we’re going. One of the things that Obama did in his political rhetoric period, was that he frequently denounced cynicism. He didn’t talk about racism very much, but he talked about cynicism a lot. And in fact, he often used the word cynicism in place of the word racism, that someone would do something racist, and he would say it was cynical. And it made sense because as the black president, you can’t be the person who’s calling out racism left and right. It just won’t work to your advantage politically. At the same time as his presidency unfolded, the people who he had called cynical, or at least people who were skeptical or maybe even pessimistic, began to have an increasingly accurate diagnosis of what he was up against. I like to think that before he was elected, Barack Obama knew something that nobody else in black America knew, which was namely that the country was willing and capable of electing a black man to the presidency of the United States. But after he was elected, I think black America knew something that at times it seemed like Obama did not, which is that people will stop at no ends to make sure that you are not successful. My father grew up in Jim Crow, Georgia, and he had the standard horror stories that everyone who grew up in Jim Crow had. And the message that he would give me is never be surprised by what people are willing to do to stop you as a black person, especially if you make them feel insecure about themselves. And it seemed like as the Obama presidency unfolded, that sentiment that he had dismissed as cynical became more and more relevant as the backlash intensified, as he was denied the unprecedented denial of a Supreme Court appointment, which was astounding. The tide of threats against his life that the Secret Service was dealing with. All of those things, when you pile all up together, it begins to look like a very familiar pattern in the history of this country, especially as it relates to race. I was definitely taught those same lessons. Definitely. My father is a Baptist preacher who loves everybody, but was also very clear. You’ve got to work harder, you’ve got to be better, and don’t be surprised. And I feel like that is the thing that has stuck with me all these years. It’s interesting, the right-wing political commentator, Megyn Kelly, recently said that basically that everything was good, and then Obama came and kind of broke us. Oh, yeah. And I just thought it was such a telling statement. Well, it’s a very cynical statement to borrow a line from Obama. Yes, it was a very cynical statement, and kind of telling on herself in the sense of, I think that that’s where the backlash is coming from, the idea that we had this black man as president, and now we have to get this country right. Yeah. Well, the other thing about it, there was a kind of asymmetry from the beginning. There was this congratulation that was issued to white America or the minority of white America that voted for a black presidential candidate. And on the basis of this, people ran out and began saying, which is just an astounding statement to even think about now, they ran out and said, this was a post-racial nation. Yeah, I remember that. But the fact that it was, and I would point this out. A minority of white voters in 2008 and in 2012 voted for a presidential candidate who did not share their racial background. In short, a minority of white voters did, but the majority, the overwhelming majority of black voters had been doing since we’ve been allowed to vote. Since we had gotten the franchise in our newly emancipated hands, we had been voting for presidential candidates that did not share our racial backgrounds. No one looked at black people and said, oh, they’re post-racial. They’re willing to look past a candidate’s skin color to vote for someone. In fact, it was more difficult for African-American presidential candidates to get support from black voters than it was for white candidates to do so, which is the real kind of hidden story of Barack Obama’s success. One of the lesser kind of noted things was that Barack Obama won the South Carolina primary with an overwhelmingly black electorate, but he won it after Iowa, after he had demonstrated that he had appealed to white voters. And I’ve long maintained that if those two primaries had been reversed, had they had been South Carolina first and then Iowa, he might’ve still won Iowa, but it is doubtful that he would’ve won South Carolina. So the Black Lives Matter movement, it was like the rebirth of the civil rights movement, so to speak. But right now, we’re living in an era where Black Lives Matter signs are literally being demolished and black history… I’m a Floridian. I’m talking to you from Florida right now, and I could tell you the assault on black history specifically in schools is real. Do you feel like Black Lives Matter as a movement failed? Do you see us coming back from this as a country, like being able to really talk about the history of this country, because it feels like we’re just running away from it now? There’s an essay that I’m going to write about this, about what black history really has been, and what Black History Month really has been, and why Dr. Carter G. Woodson created what he then called Negro History Week in 1926 and became Black History Month in 1976 to mark the 50th anniversary. But they had very clear objectives, and these were explicitly political objectives that they were trying to create a landscape in which people would spend a dedicated amount of time studying this history for clues about how to navigate through the present. That first generation of black historians went through all manner of hell to produce the books, to produce the scholarly articles, to produce the speeches, to create a body of knowledge that redeemed the humanity of black people, and specifically made a case against Jim Crow, against disenfranchisement. They understood that history was a battleground, and that people were writing a history that would justify the politics of the present. And so when you saw that black people had been written out of the history of the country, that slavery had been written out of the history of the Civil War, that the violent way in which people were eliminated from civic contention, had been whitewashed and airbrushed, and that what you saw in the day-to-day was segregation, poverty, exploitation, the denial of the franchise, the denial of the hard-won constitutional rights, there’s a reason, for instance, that the first two black people to get PhDs from Harvard University, and those two were W.E.B Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, they both got their doctorates in history because they were trying to create a narrative that would counterbalance what was being done. When I look at the circumstances that this field came into existence under, I’m less concerned about what’s happening now. I should say that what’s happening now is bad, but I think that we have a body of scholars. Now there are people who every spring a new crop of PhDs in this field is being minted, and people are promulgating this history in all kinds of ways and so on. And so I think this is a battle that has to be contested and has to be fought and ultimately has to be won, but I don’t lament about the resources and our ability to tell these stories. You’re on faculty at Columbia University and the last couple of years it’s been center stage not only for protests- Yeah, complicated. Yeah, complicated. How do you manage that in the classroom? I have to say that as a journalism school, there’s a very easy translation because the question is always, how do we cover this? What do we need to think about? What are the questions that need to be asked at this moment? After October 7th, when the wave of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations and the kind of solemn memorials on either side, I said to my students repeatedly, if I said it once, I said it 20 times, which is that you lean on your protocols at this point. You question yourself. You question your framing. You question how you approach this story. What is the question the person who disagrees with how you feel? What is the question that person would ask? And is that a fair question? And you relentlessly interrogate. And that’s also the job of your editors to relentlessly interrogate where you’re coming from on this story. I kind of jokingly said to them, I said, “We have told you from the minute you got here to go out and find the story, and we forgot to tell you about the times that the story finds you.” Yeah. How did you feel about Columbia’s administration’s response to the Trump threats? The only thing I can say is that it was a very complicated situation. As a principal in life, I have generally been committed to not grading people harshly on tests that they never should have been required to take in the first place, if that makes sense. Yeah. There was a lot that I thought was the right thing. A lot of the decisions I thought were the right decisions to make. There were other decisions that I disagreed with, some that I disagreed with strongly. But the fundamental thing was always framed in the fact that the federal government should not be attacking a university. That was what my overarching kind of statement was. But I will say that also the journalism school has tried to navigate this while maintaining fidelity to our principles and our support of free speech and support of the free press. Yeah. I think there’s a lot of hand-wringing among journalists right now. Fact-based reporting is being drowned out by misinformation and disinformation. What do you tell your students? How do you teach them in a time when journalism itself is under such threat? Well, the thing that we teach is that this is indicative of how important journalism is. Powerful people don’t waste their time attacking things that are not important. And so we’re able to establish kind of narratives. And granted, we’ve lost a few rounds in this fight, that people not only have less trust in us, but they have more trust in people who are sometimes outright charlatans, or people who are demagogues, and that is a real kind of difficult circumstance. But I also think that it’s reminiscent of the reasons that Joseph Pulitzer founded this school in the first place. The school was established in 1912 with a bequest from Joseph Pulitzer’s estate. Pulitzer understood at the time journalism was a very disreputable undertaking, and he had this vision of it being professionalized, of journalists adhering rigorously to a standard of ethics and thereby winning the trust of the public. And that was part of the reason that people actually did win the trust of the public over the course of the 20th century. Now we’ve had technologies and cultural developments and some other changes that have sent those numbers in the opposite direction, which I also will say this is not isolated. People distrust government; they distrust corporations; they distrust the presidency; they distrust all of these institutions that used to have a much higher degree of public trust. My approach to this has been we should not ask the public to trust us. We should not anticipate ever regaining the level of trust we had once enjoyed. But I think that the alternative is that we now just show our work to the greatest extent possible. Sometimes we can’t because we have sources who can only give us information anonymously, but we should walk right up to the line of everything that we can divulge so that we say, don’t trust us. Read for yourself what we did. If you wanted to, you could follow up Freedom of Information Act and get these same documents that we are citing in this reporting. Or we should try to narrow the gap between what we’re saying and the degree to which people have to simply take us at our word. America has obviously changed over the last 10 years. How have you changed? Oh, what’s really interesting is that, and this is the kind of unintentional memoir part of it, I think that I’m probably more restrained as a writer now than I was 10 years ago. Keeping my eyebrow raised and kind of like, hmm, where’s this going? I try to be a little bit more patient, and to see that what the thing appears to be may not be the thing that it is. And at the same time, I’m probably more skeptical than I was 10 years ago. I haven’t given up on the idea of there being victory, of it being a better tomorrow, but I also think that it will exact a hell of a cost for us to get to that place.

This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive our biggest stories as soon as they are published. When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned. “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.” But that is far from the reality many citizens have experienced. Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched. About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones. Videos of US citizens being mistreated by immigration agents have filled social media feeds, but there is little clarity on the overall picture. The government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans. So ProPublica created its own count. We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests. While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President Donald Trump’s second administration. Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. That includes four who were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to the family’s attorney until a congresswoman intervened. Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino. Immigration agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers. These cases have often wilted under scrutiny. In nearly 50 instances that we have identified so far, charges have never been filed or the cases were dismissed. Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors. Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed and punched a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative. In another, agents knocked over and then tackled a 79-year-old car wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he was held for 12 hours and wasn’t given medical attention despite having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart surgery. In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for more than two days, without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that time. (The Supreme Court has ruled that two days is generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without charges.) In response to questions from ProPublica, the Department of Homeland Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin. A top immigration official recently acknowledged agents do consider someone’s looks. “How do they look compared to, say, you?” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said to a white reporter in Chicago. The White House told ProPublica that anyone who assaults federal immigration agents would be prosecuted. “Interfering with law enforcement and assaulting law enforcement is a crime and anyone, regardless of immigration status, will be held accountable,” said the Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson. “Officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens, and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism.” A spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not return an emailed request for comment. Tallying the number of Americans detained by immigration agents is inherently messy and incomplete. The government has long ignored recommendations for it to track such cases, even as the US has a history of detaining and even deporting citizens, including during the Obama administration and Trump’s first term. We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made at a later date after a judicial process. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire. Experts say that Americans appear to be getting picked up more now as a result of the government doing something that it hasn’t for decades: large-scale immigration sweeps across the country, often in communities that do not want them. In earlier administrations, deportation agents used intelligence to target specific individuals, said Scott Shuchart, a top immigration official in the Biden, Obama and first Trump administrations. “The new idea is to use those resources unintelligently”—with officers targeting communities or workplaces where undocumented immigrants may be. When federal officers roll through communities in the way the Supreme Court permitted, the constitutional rights of both citizens and noncitizens are inevitably violated, argued David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He recently analyzed how sweeps in Los Angeles have led to racial profiling. “If the government can grab someone because he’s a certain demographic group that’s correlated with some offense category, then they can do that in any context.” Cody Wofsy, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, put it even more starkly. “Any one of us could be next.” When Kavanaugh issued his opinion that immigration agents can consider race and other factors, the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices strongly dissented. They warned that citizens risked being “grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.” Leonardo Garcia Venegas appears to have been just such a case. He was working at a construction site in coastal Alabama when he saw masked immigration agents from Homeland Security Investigations hop a fence and run by a “No trespassing” sign. Garcia Venegas recalled that they moved toward the Latino workers, ignoring the white and Black workers. Garcia Venegas began filming after his undocumented brother asked agents for a warrant. In response, the footage shows, agents yanked his brother to the ground, shoving his face into wet concrete. Garcia Venegas kept filming until officers grabbed him too and knocked his phone to the ground. Other co-workers filmed what happened next, as immigration agents twisted the 25-year-old’s arms. They repeatedly tried to take him to the ground while he yelled, “I’m a citizen!” Officers pulled out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to those legally in the US But the agents dismissed it as fake. Officers held Garcia Venegas handcuffed for more than an hour. His brother was later deported. Garcia Venegas was so shaken that he took two weeks off of work. Soon after he returned, he was working alone inside a nearly built house listening to music on his headphones when he sensed someone watching him. A masked immigration agent was standing in the bedroom doorway. This time, agents didn’t tackle him. But they again dismissed his REAL ID. And then they held him to check his citizenship. Garcia Venegas says agents also held two other workers who had legal status. DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Garcia Venegas’ detentions, or to a federal lawsuit he filed last month. The agency has previously defended the agents’ conduct, saying he “physically got in between agents and the subject” during the first incident. The footage does not show that, and Garcia Venegas was never charged with obstruction or any other crime. Garcia Venegas’ lawyers at the nonprofit Institute for Justice hope others may join his suit. After all, the reverberations of the immigration sweeps are being felt widely. Garcia Venegas said he knows of 15 more raids on nearby construction sites, and the industry along his portion of the Gulf Coast is struggling for lack of workers. Kavanaugh’s assurances hold little weight for Garcia Venegas. He’s a US citizen of Mexican descent, who speaks little English and works in construction. Even with his REAL ID and Social Security card in his wallet, Garcia Venegas worries that immigration agents will keep harassing him. “If they decide they want to detain you,” he said. “You’re not going to get out of it.” George Retes was among the citizens arrested despite immigration agents appearing to know his legal status. He also disappeared into the system for days without being able to contact anyone on the outside. The only clue Retes’ family had at first was a brief call he managed to make on his Apple Watch with his hands handcuffed behind his back. He quickly told his wife that “ICE” had arrested him during a massive raid and protest on the marijuana farm where he worked as a security guard. Still, Retes’ family couldn’t find him. They called every law enforcement agency they could think of. No one gave them any answers. Eventually, they spotted a TikTok video showing Retes driving to work and slowly trying to back up as he’s caught between agents and protestors. Through the tear gas and dust, his family recognized Retes’ car and the veteran decal on his window. The full video shows a man—Retes—splayed on the ground surrounded by agents. Retes’ family went to the farm, where local TV reporters were interviewing families who couldn’t find their loved ones. “They broke his window, they pepper sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor,” his sister told a reporter between sobs. “We don’t know what to do. We’re just asking to let my brother go. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car.” Retes was held for three days without being given an opportunity to make a call. His family only learned where he had been after his release. His leg had been cut from the broken glass, Retes told ProPublica, and lingering pepper spray burned his hands. He tried to soothe them by filling sandwich bags with water. Retes recalled that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.” He said one DHS official laughed at him, saying he shouldn’t have come to work that day. “They still sent me away to jail.” He added that cases like his show Kavanaugh was “wrong completely.” DHS did not answer our questions about Retes. It did respond on X after Retes wrote an op-ed last month in the San Francisco Chronicle. An agency post asserted he was arrested for assault after he “became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement.” Yet Retes had been released without any charges. Indeed, he says he was never told why he was arrested. The Department of Justice has encouraged agents to arrest anyone interfering with immigration operations, twice ordering law enforcement to prioritize cases of those suspected of obstructing, interfering with or assaulting immigration officials. But the government’s claims in those cases have often not been borne out. Daniel Montenegro was filming a raid at a Van Nuys, California, Home Depot with other day-laborer advocates this summer when, he told ProPublica, he was tackled by several officers who injured his back. Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who oversaw the LA raids and has since taken similar operations to cities like Sacramento and Chicago, tweeted out the names and photos of Montenegro and three others, accusing them of using homemade tire spikes to disable vehicles. “I had no idea where that story came from,” Montenegro told ProPublica. “I didn’t find out until we were released. People were like, ‘We saw you on Twitter and the news and you guys are terrorists, you were planning to slash tires.’ I never saw those spike tire-popper things.” Officials have not charged Montenegro or the others with any crimes. (Bovino did not respond to a request for comment, while DHS defended him in a statement to ProPublica: “Chief Bovino’s success in getting the worst of the worst out of the country speaks for itself.”) The government’s cases are sometimes so muddied that it’s unclear why agents actually arrested a citizen. Andrea Velez was charged with assaulting an officer after she was accidentally dropped off for work during a raid on street vendors in downtown Los Angeles. She said in a federal complaint that officers repeatedly assumed she did not speak English. Federal officers later requested access to her phone in an attempt to prove she was colluding with another citizen arrested that day, who was charged with assault. She was one of the Americans held for more than two days. DHS did not respond to our questions about Velez, but it has previously accused her of assaulting an officer. A federal judge has dismissed the charges. Other citizens also said officers accused them of crimes and suddenly questioned their citizenship—including a man arrested after filming Border Patrol agents break a truck window, and a pregnant woman who tried to stop officers from taking her boyfriend. The prospects for any significant reckoning over agents’ conduct, even against citizens, are dim. The paths for suing federal agents are even more limited than they are for local police. And that’s if agents can even be identified. What’s more, the administration has gutted the office that investigates allegations of abuse by agents. “The often-inadequate guardrails that we have for state and local government—even those guardrails are nonexistent when you’re talking about federal overreach,” said Joanna Schwartz, a professor at UCLA School of Law. More than 50 members of Congress have also written to the administration, demanding details about Americans who’ve been detained. One is Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat. After trying to question Noem about detained citizens, federal agents grabbed Padilla, pulled him to the ground and handcuffed him. The department later defended the agents, saying they “acted appropriately.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How We Did This Americans have reported a wide range of troubling encounters with immigration agents. To get a wider sense of agents’ conduct, we cataloged all incidents we could find of citizens being held against their will by immigration officers. Critically, there is no way to know the complete scope of these stops since the government itself does not track them. But we were still able to fill in the picture a bit more. We reviewed more than 170 cases overall, which we sorted into two categories. The first is Americans who were held because agents questioned their citizenship. We found more than 50 such cases. The second category is Americans arrested by immigration agents after being accused of assaulting or impeding officers at protests or during immigration arrests of others. In that category, we tallied about 130 Americans, including more than a dozen elected officials. In many of these cases, the government never charged these individuals or the cases were dismissed. We also tracked another nine citizens who reported being concerned about racial profiling after being extensively questioned by immigration officials. This includes a Mescalero Apache tribal member who was pulled out of a store and asked for his passport, and a California man who was previously deported by mistake and got another deportation order in the mail. We did all this by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We compiled cases from the beginning of the current Trump administration through Oct. 5. Our accounting of arrests in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago is particularly limited, since the events there are still unfolding. We did not review cases of Americans detained in airports or at the border, where even citizens are more likely to encounter increased questioning. We also did not review cases of Americans arrested at some point after alleged encounters with immigration agents since those involved a judicial process. We similarly excluded arrests of immigration protestors by local police who, unlike many of the federal agencies, booked protesters into a local jail where they could access the legal process and their families could find them. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Do you have information or videos to share about the administration’s immigration crackdown? Contact Nicole Foy via email at nicole.foy@propublica.org or on Signal at nicolefoy.27.

“Good afternoon,” is how Magistrate Judge Heide Herrmann welcomed detainees into DC Superior Court room C-10 when it was their turn to stand in front of the bench on Monday. But at 8:37 p.m., it was hardly “afternoon” anymore. Nor was it a good day for most of the inmates. They had been brought over from DC’s central cellblock, where accommodations consist of metal “beds” without mattresses. Some of the detainees were still in the pajamas they were wearing when they were first arrested. All were shackled at the wrists and ankles.  > “MPD knows how to do this. The other law enforcement mentioned who are out > making arrests apparently do not.” Judge Herrmann was responsible for deciding whether they would continue to be held or released on the promise to appear at their next court date. The constitution requires defendants see a judge within 48 hours of arrest, but because superior court is closed on Sundays, Mondays consist of two days’ worth of criminal misdemeanor arraignments and felony presentments. It’s often the courtroom’s busiest day. Several of the 105 cases Herrmann considered involved serious allegations: one defendant allegedly shot someone, requiring the victim to undergo bladder surgery, and there were also a litany of domestic violence charges. But since President Donald Trump has unleashed scores of federal law enforcement officers to help police DC’s modest population of 702,000, the caseload has been especially long—and often frivolous. Just a couple Mondays ago, it took a judge until almost 1:30 a.m. to get through what lawyers call the “lock-up list.” (A lawyer who sometimes represents defendants in C-10 says that before Trump’s crackdown, ending between 7-8 p.m. would have been considered an especially late Monday. ) The recent liveliness of C-10 should concern DC locals as well as the residents of blue cities that Trump has alluded to targeting next. But not because the room’s fullness proves Trump’s bold thesis that the entire city has been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals.” Rather, experts say, the surging volume of charges and the allegations therein indicates a different problem: overzealous and ineffectual prosecuting. “We are in the in the DC Superior Court pretty much every day and have seen enormous changes under Trump,” says Abbe Smith, the director of a Georgetown Law School clinic that provides criminal defense assistance to people who can’t afford other representation. “None of them good.” The aggressive posturing is no doubt putting a tremendous strain on judges and public defenders. “Aye yai yai,” grumbled one of about five public defenders in the room on Monday when she learned she had more than a dozen clients left to represent after 6 p.m. At one point, even the stoic judge bemoaned the contents of some of the arrest affidavits. She attributed this to federal agents who, unlike members of the Metropolitan Police Department, are not accustomed to street patrol duty. In this case, federal agents had helped apprehend a young man arrested for smoking weed in a park. Possession of marijuana is legal in DC, but public consumption of it is not (though it’s rarely prosecuted). After he was arrested, MPD and federal agents performed a subsequent search that led them to conclude the young man was storing THC wax—a more concentrated form of weed that isn’t legal in DC—in a backpack. Law enforcement tacked on a possession charge, but the affidavit said nothing about how agents knew the backpack (and the THC wax) belonged to the defendant. “MPD knows how to do this,” the magistrate judge said of the incomplete affidavit. “The other law enforcement mentioned who are out making arrests apparently do not.” In early September, another man was approached by law enforcement because DEA agents “observed a bulge consistent with a bag of marijuana coming from the pants pocket” of the individual, the affidavit says. He willingly showed the agents the bag of marijuana (which, again, is legal in DC). They then patted him down and noticed an “abnormal bulge” in his sock. It was a small bag containing what the agents described as five Oxycodone pills. They arrested the man for possession of a controlled substance. This case was recently dismissed, but normally, such cases wouldn’t have been prosecuted in the first place. Instead, they are usually “no-papered,” meaning the prosecutor would opt against filing formal charges after the arrest. Smith says it was previously common for as many as a quarter or a third of cases to be no-papered misdemeanors because the allegations lack sufficient evidence to convict, or because there are questions about whether the defendant’s constitutional rights were violated. But now in DC, she says, “nearly every single misdemeanor is being papered.” Anecdotally, law enforcement seem to be more aggressively pursuing searches that may not be legally justified. In one instance, federal agents approached a man in a lawn chair merely for being close to a miniature bottle of wine—the kind you can buy on an airplane. Moments later, he was thoroughly searched and then charged for drug possession and for carrying a handgun without a permit. Less that two blocks from the superior court sits DC’s federal district court. Here, convictions are generally accompanied by stricter sentences. Yet, the federal charges defendants have faced in recent weeks haven’t necessarily been any more serious than those judged in local court. In between a sprinkling of serious child pornography and narcotics hearings were more negligible matters, such as shoving and vague threats. A man who allegedly shoulder-checked a National Guard member and said “I’ll kill you” was initially charged with assault and threatening to kidnap or injure a person, which carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. (On Tuesday, a grand jury declined to indict him. Subsequently, DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office charged him with two misdemeanor counts instead.) There was also a woman arrested for assault while protesting ICE agents in July. Amid efforts to restrain her, an FBI agent’s hand was allegedly scraped against a cement wall. Extraordinarily, a grand jury opted against indicting her for felony assault three times. She’s since been charged with a misdemeanor and awaits from home a trial in October. Pirro’s office also won’t give up on convicting the the infamous former Justice Department paralegal, Sean Dunn, accused of assault for tossing a wrapped Subway sandwich at the chest of a Customs and Border Patrol agent in August. A grand jury opted against indicting him, too. (He’s since been charged with misdemeanor assault; jury selection for the trial is slated to begin November 3.) Shootings have continued amid the crime crackdown, but Trump and Pirro can count at least one win: Nobody in DC has thrown a sandwich at an officer since prosecutors tried to throw the book at Dunn. Our long national nightmare is over.

Donald Trump’s plan to rig the 2026 midterms through a series of unprecedented mid-decade gerrymanders shifted from Texas to Missouri on Wednesday, as the GOP-controlled Missouri legislature began a special session to pass a new redistricting map that would eliminate one of two Democrat-held US House districts and net Republicans an additional seat. If successful, the new map would give Republicans 90 percent of seats in a state Trump carried with 58 percent of the vote in 2024. The Republican leader of the state senate said the plan was designed “to be sure Missouri’s representation matches Missouri’s Christian conservative majority.” The map targets the seat of Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, one of two Black members of the state’s congressional delegation, by stretching his Kansas City-based district 200 miles east into red, rural counties that have little in common with the urban areas he’s represented for 20 years in Congress. Cleaver’s hometown of Kansas City, where he served as mayor before joining the US House, would be split into three districts to dilute Democratic voting strength. According to The Downballot, Cleaver’s district, which he won by twenty-four points in 2024, would now favor Trump by 18 points. > If successful, the new map would give Republicans 90 percent of seats in a > state Trump carried with 58 percent of the vote in 2024. “President Trump’s unprecedented directive to redraw our maps in the middle of the decade and without an updated census is not an act of democracy—it is an unconstitutional attack against it,” Cleaver said in a statement. “This attempt to gerrymander Missouri will not simply change district lines, it will silence voices. It will deny representation. It will tell the people of Missouri that their lawmakers no longer wish to earn their vote, that elections are predetermined by the power brokers in Washington, and that politicians—not the people—will decide the outcome.” After pressuring Texas to pass a new congressional map that is expected to net Republicans five new seats, Trump is now lobbying legislators state by state—much like he attempted to overturn the 2020 election— in an outlandish bid to prevent Democrats from retaking the House and investigating his administration. Even if California approves a new map that would offset Texas’s gains, Republicans believe they can net up to seven additional seats in a gerrymandering arms race, making it much tougher for Democrats to turn Trump’s unpopularity into a wave election. “Trump made the demand and all the Republicans folded,” says Sean Soendker Nicholson, a Democratic political consultant who’s worked on nonpartisan redistricting campaigns in Missouri for many years. “This would be the most extreme Missouri gerrymander since the Civil War.” Gerrymandering is not the only way Missouri Republicans are attacking democratic norms. Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe also asked lawmakers to severely restrict the state’s ballot initiative process after Missouri voters passed a slew of progressive policies in recent years, including redistricting reform, paid sick leave, a higher minimum wage, Marijuana legalization, Medicaid expansion, and a constitutional right to an abortion. > Missouri Republicans are trying to predetermine election outcomes through > extreme gerrymandering while taking away voters’ ability to do anything about > it. Instead of needing a simple majority to pass a citizen-led initiative, Kehoe’s proposal would require a majority of support in each of the state’s congressional districts (which the legislature is currently gerrymandering). That would allow 50.1 percent of voters in one district to thwart the will of a majority of the state’s voters overall. “You could get 90 percent of the vote to pass a constitutional amendment and it still wouldn’t pass,” says Nicholson. “It’s minority rule on steroids. It would allow any part of the state to veto something supported by the rest of the state.” The plan would still need to be approved by the state’s voters, likely in November 2026. It’s telling that the gerrymandering of congressional districts and the gerrymandering of the ballot initiative process are happening at the same time. Missouri Republicans are trying to predetermine election outcomes through extreme gerrymandering while taking away voters’ ability to do anything about it. Nicholson predicts these efforts will backfire, however. He says the Missouri courts will likely reject the mid-decade gerrymander because the Missouri Constitution states that redistricting must follow the decennial census. And he believes the state’s voters will oppose efforts to undercut the ballot initiative process. “Republicans are pulling out all the shenanigans,” he says. “People will see through what they’re trying to do.”