This week’s episode of True Detective: Night Country opens with a clever bit of sound editing, as the signature white noise of HBO’s logo blends seamlessly in with Police Chief Liz Danvers’ (Jodie Foster) white noise machine, at her bedside, failing to relax her. She can’t stop obsessing over the video she and Navarro (Kali Reis) found of Anne Kowtok’s last moments, looking for more clues. It’s Christmas Eve, and Anne’s cries for help are about to be joined by a chorus.
“Part 4” of Night Country is the season’s most haunted hour, the ghosts in the periphery of the show taking center stage, even as its protagonists continue to deny them. The emotional crux of the episode rests on Navarro’s sister Julia (Aka Niviâna), whom Danvers finds wandering in the snow without a coat, shivering through some kind of episode. Navarro checks Julia into a facility for extended care, but it’s already too late: She sees the dead everywhere. And so she walks out onto the ice and joins them.
Night Country’s protagonists have been speeding toward the brick wall of their own denial, and Julia’s death is the collision. The injustices and tragedies that haunt Ennis and intersect with each other are boiling over, and neither Navarro nor Danvers can ignore them much longer.
That doesn’t mean they don’t try: Navarro, grieving, starts a fight and gets her ass kicked. Danvers, who has been slowly revealed to be a woman broken down and shoddily rebuilt like a work of jagged kintsugi, becomes so hostile and toxic that she can’t hit up her fuckbuddy Captain Connelly (Christopher Eccleston) for a drunken hookup without browbeating him, and ends up spending the holiday wasted and alone. This would be a quiet, sad episode if it weren’t for the growing choir of the dead.
Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO
The thin membrane between the living and dead in Ennis is one of Night Country’s richest thematic veins, and showrunner Issa López never turns down an opportunity to remind us of it. Sometimes it is in casual juxtaposition, staging mundane conversations in front of a horrific “corpsicle”. Other times it’s in the ways the planet’s history is engraved on its surface too deeply for us to scrub out, like the ancient whale bones frozen in the background of the ice cavern where Anne Kowtok died. And finally, it is in the angry shades of dead women who scream in Navarro’s ear.
We’re past Night Country’s midpoint, and the assorted hauntings of “Part 4” form a ghostly mosaic of the show’s many concerns about our past, and how we work hard to ignore it. The eerie secrets locked away in ice, Navarro’s distance from her Indigenous culture, the toxic entitlement of men that causes women’s opportunities to curdle — if it doesn’t snuff them out outright. History can suffocate us if we pay it no mind. We can forget the dead but the dead may not forget us.
Danvers has her own haunting to contend with, a monstrous one-eyed polar bear that causes her to drive into a snowbank — a bear that Night Country suggests is not real. It’s another haunting, the shape of Danvers’ lost son Holden’s favorite stuffed animal. It’s one of the few things of his she keeps around, one of the only signs that she’s never stopped grieving, never did the work of moving on.
“The dead are gone,” she insists to Navarro. “Fucking gone.”
Navarro says that if Danvers believed that, she wouldn’t keep that stuffed bear. And perhaps, the viewer can infer, she wouldn’t throw herself into this job, seeking justice for Anne Kowtok, working her way through the spirals hidden across Ennis, staring at horrors others look away from. The ghosts surrounding Ennis will not be ignored. The white noise isn’t tuning them out anymore.
After four years away, True Detective returns for a new season with a sinistrous subtitle. We’re in Night Country now, and we’ll be following along each week to try to piece together, with the help of police chief Liz Danvers and detective Evangeline Navarro, who perpetrated those gruesome crimes in Ennis, Alaska. Read along for a breakdown of Episode 4.
Who Done It?
If endless darkness in the Arctic Circle didn’t sound isolating enough, try spending that time alone on Christmas. Episode 4 of True Detective: Night Country sees pretty much every resident of Ennis spending the holiday solo or reckoning with some form of personal turmoil—but it wouldn’t be True Detective without festering psychological trauma and existential dread, would it? But hey, it’s still Christmas—sit down, relax, and let your favorite Warner Bros. Discovery crime drama promote your favorite Warner Bros. Discovery Christmas movie.
Screenshots via HBO
Episode 4 presents some significant progress in the Tsalal murder case. Last episode, Liz Danvers and Co. discovered a chilling video of Annie Kowtok that she took of herself just before her death. It shows Annie in an ice cave with unidentified bones embedded in the wall, which leads the crew to deduce that Annie’s body was moved from that location into town to make some sort of statement to the locals.
Meanwhile, when tasked with tracking down anyone who had suffered similar injuries to the Tsalal scientists, Pete discovers the record of Otis Heiss, a seemingly crucial piece of the Night Country puzzle. After surviving the injuries—which included burned corneas and self-inflicted bites, with no reported cause—Heiss went off the grid. (He’s traceable only through his police record of disorderly conduct.) When Danvers and Evangeline Navarro seek out Ennis High School teacher Adam Bryce for assistance in locating the cave Annie was likely killed in, he suggests tracking down whoever mapped out the dangerous tunnels. A quick Google search reveals none other than Heiss as the man responsible.
This episode also has no shortage of flirtations with the spirit realm—which probably shouldn’t even be described as flirtations anymore. We just flat out saw multiple Conjuring-ass ghosts. Night Country has been very clear about the possibility of the supernatural at play; True Detective Season 1 never went far beyond merely hinting at it. I still don’t believe the killer will end up being a wholly supernatural force, but visions of the dead have been shown so frequently and assuredly by multiple characters that the existence of the paranormal doesn’t seem to be just speculation at this point.
Heartbreakingly, these visions lead to the death of Julia, Eve’s tormented sister whose persistent encounters with the dead drove her to walk into the freezing ocean. In Episode 3, we discovered that Eve and Julia’s mother was also driven mad by hearing voices, and she eventually left home and was murdered by someone who was never found. With her sister now gone too, Eve fears she’s next in line to be targeted by these specters, though it wouldn’t be her first brush with the supernatural. Episode 3 showed us that Danvers and Navarro’s last case involved a man named William Wheeler who abused and killed his girlfriend—it’s suggested that either Danvers or Navarro killed him upon arriving at the crime scene and covered it up by falsely reporting his death as a suicide. Episode 4 reveals that Navarro saw the dead girlfriend’s ghost in the room before one of the cops likely pulled the trigger on Wheeler.
The episode culminates with the spotting of a man wearing Annie’s pink jacket—the same one Raymond Clark was seen wearing in a Tsalal video—near the town dredges. Navarro and Danvers go to scope it out and basically find themselves in a game of Silent Hill. They quickly locate the mysterious figure, and Danvers chases him up the ladders of a dredge, only to discover the man is actually Heiss rather than Clark. So where is Clark? “He went back down to hide,” Heiss says. “He’s hiding in the night country. We’re all in the night country now.” Hey, that’s the name of the show! As Danvers races after Heiss, Navarro starts hearing voices calling her name and follows a trail of footsteps to an ominous Christmas tree. There, she stumbles upon an apparition resembling Julia—Eve’s haunted by another woman she couldn’t save. Danvers comes down to find Eve in a catatonic state with blood dripping from her ear (akin to the ruptured eardrums the scientists suffered, perhaps?) after the encounter.
Oh yeah, this episode also treated us to more oranges and one-eyed polar bears, plus Billie Eilish songs. Are we any closer to solving the Tsalal mystery? Let’s round up the suspects.
1. Raymond Clark
The Nikola Jokic of murder suspects, our boy Raymond remains atop the list. His whereabouts are still unknown (unless “hiding in the night country” counts as a location), but that Danvers found Heiss in the state he was in, in the same Annie jacket that was last seen on Clark, indicates that something went down there. Speaking of “down there,” what exactly did Heiss mean by saying Clark “went down” to hide? Last week in this column, my colleague Ben Lindbergh introduced the Inuit goddess of the sea and ruler of the Adlivun underworld, Sedna, as a potential suspect. It doesn’t get much more “down” than the underworld, and “night country” seems like an apt description of a frozen wasteland where souls are imprisoned. Could Clark be posing as, or possessed by, Sedna?
Clark has been built up to be such a prime suspect over the course of these four episodes that it seems almost too obvious for him to be the sole perpetrator. But the mounting evidence shows he is clearly involved in the murders somehow. That he’s been missing for so long also seems to be foreshadowing a big showdown for when Danvers and Navarro do eventually track him down.
2. Oliver Tagaq
Even though Tagaq wasn’t seen in this episode, he was still key in an important scene. As Danvers obsessively rewatches the Annie Kowtok video, she notices that it ends with the lights getting cut in the same way they do at the end of the Raymond Clark Tsalal video. Danvers surmises that there was some sort of power outage at the end of both videos, but Annie’s video was evidently taken in an ice cave—how could there have been power in there in the first place? Danvers remembers that Tagaq was an equipment engineer at Tsalal and would likely have access to the lab’s emergency generators. She sends Eve and Pete back to Tagaq’s place to investigate and, what do you know, he’s vanished. Tagaq left right after Danvers and Navarro confronted him in the previous episode, according to the others at his camp. Eve and Pete find a spiral symbol drawn on the ground and carved into a stone, and when they ask Oliver’s former neighbors if they know what the symbol is, they don’t answer—their dogs start barking, and they kind of just … stare menacingly.
My hunch is that Tagaq is a red herring who’s just very distrusting of authority. (Understandably so, after how the Indigenous population has been treated.) But he obviously knows something, and his connection to the spirals can’t be meaningless.
3. Kate McKittrick
Even if Kate didn’t actually murder the Tsalal scientists with her own two hands, she’s still evil as hell and guilty of something. Actually, we already know she’s complicit in polluting Ennis’s water supply as an executive of the Silver Sky mining company, which Annie had been protesting against before her death. Plus, we know Kate is close with Hank from their interaction at the ice rink in Episode 2, and he’s the one who hid Annie’s case files and failed to report some key evidence in her investigation.
In Episode 4, we see a brief scene with Kate after Danvers’s daughter, Leah, was caught vandalizing the mining offices, spray-painting the word “MURDERERS” across the front door (badass!). If Leah becomes a target next, that would further heighten my suspicion that Kate is involved somehow, but even if not, Kate seems very unhappy with the reputation of her company. Unhappy enough to commit murder? I’m not sure. She does have a potential motive for killing Annie, but theorizing why she would kill the Tsalal scientists is just conjecture—maybe they discovered something in their research that would be detrimental to Silver Sky if made public? And since Night Country takes so much inspiration from Season 1, Kate could ultimately serve as a Billy Lee Tuttle figure in a web of corruption.
4. Sedna
Not to copy Ben’s homework from last week, but the supernatural is still a huge possibility in unlocking the Tsalal mystery, and Sedna is still the best explanation. And Heiss’s description of Clark’s location wasn’t the only clue we got in this episode that could lead to Sedna.
Listen to the way Eve describes her family’s relationship with spirits to Danvers: “It’s a curse,” she says. “Something calls us, and we follow.” It’s been said that Sedna can imprison the souls of the living, and Julia’s death was due to walking into the ocean, which happens to be Sedna’s domain. As Julia marched in, it did seem as though she was being led somewhere—could it have been Sedna calling to her?
The prevalence of these visions makes it seem like the paranormal will play a part in solving this mystery in a way that it didn’t in past seasons of True Detective. I still believe a human will ultimately be found responsible for the murders, but there were simply too many ghosts in this episode to ignore.
5. Hank Prior
I almost feel bad including Prior here because my guy had a horrendous outing in Episode 4. He was supposed to finally meet his Russian fiancée, Alina, at the airport, but, alas, she never showed. Well, he might have seen her briefly get off the plane, make eye contact with him, and get right back on, which is an
extreme case of getting curved. But in all likelihood, Alina is probably just some dude with an internet connection catfishing Prior into sending him money. Still, Prior does a terrible job of pretending to brush off the whole situation to his son, saying that Alina’s cell service is probably just out (a classic rationale for victims of ghosting). As we see Prior sulk in front of a bottle of champagne and a rose-petal-adorned bedspread intended for a romantic night with Alina, we know he’s pretty heartbroken.
But that we get such a sympathetic portrayal of Hank in this episode doesn’t necessarily absolve him of culpability in the murders. He obviously tried to cover something up with Annie’s case, and he’s overall been a pretty big asshole to Danvers, Navarro, and his own son. But the Alina situation shows how naive Hank is, and that probably makes him a pretty terrible cop. With the Annie case, it seems possible that Hank is doing the bidding for some powerful person—maybe Kate?—while being kind of oblivious, or even willfully ignorant, about the severity of these cases. Which, again … really shoddy stuff for a cop to do. But it probably means he’s not the one committing the murders himself.
6. Captain Connelly
Let me cook for a second. The thing that raised my eyebrows this week was the way Captain Connelly responded when Danvers asked if he’d seen the Annie Kowtok video she’d sent him: a short nod and then, “You keep that on a need-to-know basis.” Yes, he’s a police captain who probably doesn’t want evidence leaking to the public, but it just struck me as a bizarre reaction to the uncovering of a crucial and traumatic clue in a years-old murder case. Plus, he’s been trying to wrangle control of the Tsalal case ever since it opened.
Danvers has made a lot of comments about how Connelly wants to look good for his future mayoral campaign (which Connelly himself has never really responded to), and that might be true—and that could certainly include ensuring that any skeletons in his closet never come out. Prior is, in all probability, compromised by his connections to Silver Sky one way or another, so why couldn’t Connelly be too? True Detective Season 1’s Errol Childress murders had connections all the way up to the Louisiana governor. A powerful and ambitious man like Connelly could easily get his hands dirty, too.
Galaxy-Brained Theory of the Week
Now let me really cook for a second. There have been multiple visions of a of one-eyed polar bear throughout Night Country so far (which have been presented in a sort of dreamlike manner but could be a real sighting in an Alaskan town). Both Navarro and Danvers have experienced these visions in the same way: by almost crashing into the bear in Episodes 1 and 4, respectively. A plush one-eyed polar bear that once belonged to Danvers’s son, Holden, has been a recurring image as well. It almost reminds me of another polar bear sighting …
Look, I realize it’s probably a different experience running into a polar bear in the Alaskan tundra than it is on a deserted island. But the polar bear sightings on Lost, surprisingly enough, actually had an explanation: They were brought to the island by the DHARMA Initiative for studies in electromagnetic research. So those polar bears had to come from somewhere. Who’s to say that the DHARMA Initiative never had a study-abroad program at the Tsalal research station specializing in polar bear recruitment? I don’t know, man, I’ll just take any opportunity I can to bring up Lost again. What a program.
Vikram’s Alaska Corner
True Detective: Night Country takes place in the cold fringes of the Last Frontier, otherwise known as Alaska. (Never mind that the season was filmed in Iceland.) The Ringer’s own Vikram Patel is a former resident of the state who still spends his winters there. Each week, we’ll pose a question to Vikram about his second home as we look to learn more about the local geography and culture.
Julianna: I have to be honest with you, Vikram—I’m four episodes into True Detective: Night Country and my California mind is still unable to comprehend just how cold Alaska is. I’ve lived in the Golden State my entire life and am currently typing this from Los Angeles, where it’s a lovely 73 degrees in January, and I still saw jackets and beanies outside. I could count the number of times I’ve seen snow in my life on one hand, and at least a couple of those times I’ve foolishly worn jeans and sneakers that quickly got sopping wet.
So my question is: How do you adapt to extreme cold? Do you ever get used to it? What are the wardrobe essentials for an Alaskan winter? Is an Andy Reid frozen mustache a common sighting? I realize that was multiple questions, but this is truly a world that boggles my mind.
Vikram: Like you, Julianna, I am from California. When I first moved to Alaska, I hadn’t had much exposure to cold weather, and it showed. The first winter I spent in Anchorage, my “coat” was a thin corduroy jacket, and I mostly wore a lot of sweatshirts and jeans. As many locals warned me, cotton kills. But I was too stubborn to buy myself a puffy jacket or the stretchy technical clothing that my friends wore to exercise in the cold. I was neither warm nor fashionable.
Fortunately, despite my inadequate wardrobe, my body did adjust. Exposure to cold weather activates something in our bodies called “brown fat,” which helps keep our bodies warmer, a sort of internal layer of long underwear. I noticed this effect most when I would visit my family in Los Angeles during the winter; they wore sweaters and jackets all day, while I could wear shorts and T-shirts without a shiver. It felt like a superpower.
But there’s a limit to what our bodies can withstand.
The coldest temperature I have ever been in is negative 35 degrees Fahrenheit, near Fairbanks, Alaska. It was a whole different kind of cold than I had grown accustomed to in Anchorage, where the temperature rarely drops below zero. The layer of ice covering the road in Fairbanks was a few inches thick but not as slippery as warmer ice (the thin layer of melting water on the surface of the ice is what makes your car slide around on the road). Taking a deep breath at negative 35 is an adventure—air that cold tends to cause an instant coughing fit. We visited some hot springs on that trip; I remember dunking my head in the water, coming up for air, and feeling my hair freeze in seconds. Extreme cold can be delightful.
But does Ennis get that cold? It’s hard to say—there isn’t a weather almanac to consult for fictional Alaskan villages. But we can make an educated guess. Night Country creator Issa López described Ennis as a “fictionalized amalgam of northern villages Kotzebue, Utqiagvik, and Nome.” These villages are further north than Fairbanks, but they are located on the water, which can help keep temperatures relatively mild—the brown fat of meteorology.
Stuck in weather-estimating hell, I reached out to Brian Brettschneider, Alaska’s leading climatologist. Brian told me that Ennis is likely “not as cold as Fairbanks, but notably colder than Anchorage. Nome, Kotzebue, and Utqiagvik are also quite windy places and are in the tundra,” where, he reminded me, trees cannot grow. Brian also sent me this handy dynamic temperature map. By my estimation, Ennis likely sees temps as low as negative 15 or negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the depths of winter. In a word: brrrrr!
If you are planning to visit a northern Alaska community next winter, here are some items you will want to bring along, courtesy of my Real Alaskan Advisory Committee (Tara, Emily, Zach, and Barry):
A wool hat that covers your ears
A thick neck gaiter that you can pull up to protect your face
Heavyweight thermal underwear—this is your second skin
Mittens (not gloves!), preferably with a long gauntlet—covering your wrist and lower forearm—to keep the warmth in and the snow out
A down parka, ideally 600 fill or above, that goes down to at least your thighs and has a proper fur ruff (synthetics don’t cut it when snow is blowing sideways)
Wool socks
Bunny boots, which are cartoonish snow-white boots that keep your feet warm by trapping air and leaving room for thick socks—if you can’t find any, a pair of Bogs or Muck boots (cold-weather boots all seem to have exceptional names) will also do
Hand and foot warmers to tuck into your mittens and boots—get the foot warmers with adhesives, or you’ll end up with a crumpled mass far away from your toes
Julianna, now that you’re prepared, I hope you’ll decide to visit Alaska in the winter sometime. I can’t guarantee you’ll see anything supernatural, but a snowy, dark Alaskan winter is magical all the same. The juice is worth the squeeze, even if it’s a little bit frozen.
Iconic True Detective Looks of the Week
Underneath the true crime mysteries at the forefront of each season, True Detective is admirably devoted to capturing the aesthetics that define each of its many eras. With that comes some pretty incredible costume and makeup work, which we’ll be highlighting throughout the season.
Rose Aguineau’s little Christmas party (and dress!) looked lovely. She seems like a great hang. Other than the fact that she has to deal with, as she says, “all the fuckin’ dead.”
Bro put on his best turtleneck and brought along a well-dressed stuffed animal only to leave the airport alone thinking he got stood up on sight. It’s so sad it almost makes me forget he’s a terrible person.
You ever look so good you cause a stranger to spiral into an abyss of loneliness and heartbreak?
Jo and Rob return to break down the third episode of True Detective: Night Country. They discuss the vast use of teal and what it might symbolize, why the flashback sequences are so effective, and Danvers’s (at times misguided) maternal instincts. Along the way, they talk about Hank’s ongoing suspiciousness and Navarro opening up for the first time. Later, they highlight some of the show’s most significant unanswered questions.
Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney Producer: Kai Grady
Chris and Andy break down the latest episode of True Detective: Night Country. They talk about how the lack of Easter-egging in this episode worked to its advantage (1:00) and the dynamic between Danvers and Navarro (24:07). Then they talk about the latest episode of Monsieur Spade and the show’s very dense plotline (35:55).
Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Producer: Kaya McMullen
It seems relatively routine — some “hillbillies” scuffling in the waiting room of a hospital, calling Danvers (Jodie Foster) away from an interrogation. Navarro (Kali Reis), left behind to monitor the bedridden victim, pokes her head around the corner, craning to see the commotion. And then, behind her, the man in the hospital bed suddenly sits up.
The scene is spooky enough on its own, a casual startle like a bag rustling in Audition. But the sound design makes it even more hair-raising: first a gasp on the audio track; now the man’s voice is different, gravelly and growling. “Hello, Evangeline. Your mother says hello. She’s waiting for you.” Then he points, lies back, seizes, and codes out. True Detective is on some shit with this one.
This seems as strong a case for the supernatural hanging over the town of Ennis as any, in an episode littered with unreal details like this. Heck, even at the beginning of the interview, Navarro was on edge, after the victim muttered the spectral phrase she previously heard in her car: She’s awake. But episode 3 is also concerned with the practical matter at hand, the murder of Annie K., giving us our best glimpse yet at the woman and whatever happened to her. The hour spends a lot of time tracking Annie’s movements — an Ariana Grande sweatshirt marking the start of a relationship, blue hair dye leading to someone who knew about Annie and her secret scientist boyfriend, the impact she had as a midwife and the vacuum she left behind.
Ultimately, the best piece of evidence so far comes out of last week’s cliffhanger, Annie’s phone containing the chilling final video she recorded somewhere in the ice, the screams of which play the episode out. It’s stomach-turning (Prior can’t even bring himself to watch it again), and just as chilling as the moment between Navarro and the surviving scientist. Something about this mystery feels beyond our comprehension, and paranormal explanations are increasingly looking like the easiest reason why. But there again, episode 3 is careful to remind us that not all is as it seems: As Danvers recounts the case that drove her and Navarro apart, we get her voice-over laid on top of a memory of the pair raiding a home the last time they worked together. There’s a weariness to Foster’s voice here, on all sides. She seems tired of the dead man’s excuses, of her inability to help a 19-year-old girl out of an obviously bad situation, of her own limitations. And as she relays the story, everything went to hell there: An abusive asshole killed his 19-year-old girlfriend, “then he shot himself.”
Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO
Two different huts, two very different interrogations for Navarro (Kali Reis) in True Detective: Night Country episode 3.Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO
Only that’s not what we see; right after that line from Danvers, the man in the flashback turns, with a ghoulish look on his face, and begins whistling. It makes sense that Prior isn’t getting the full story from Danvers, and in the same way, that the audience isn’t getting all the gory details from Night Country (yet — hopefully). We can’t make sense yet of Annie K.’s murder, or what that damned orange is doing on the ice (and again in the opening credits, peeled and spiraling out as “Bury a Friend” plays over flashes of important scene-setting). One sympathizes with Navarro trying to cut through Danvers’ Socratic method — fuck your games — and still following up on the demand: Ask the question.
In this way, True Detective: Night Country is making a strong case for itself as the best season yet, making the journey along the way feel just as important as who killed Annie, or whether Navarro really saw a man get possessed. When the show tells us to look one way over another, it feels worth it, even when it might seem like a distraction from the matter — whatever matter — is at hand.
At the end of each Night Country credits sequence, there’s a new image. In episode 3, it’s a small fishing hut, isolated and lonely on the ice. What happens there is a breakthrough for the case, sure — Navarro finds the location of a former Tsalal researcher — but it’s more a personal breakthrough for Navarro, recounting some of her life story for one of the few people she trusts, who breaks a small smile when she huffs back into the hut to fulfill his ask. The conversation she has there goes beyond merely the case, and Night Country is smart to linger there. True Detective isn’t telling us everything, but that doesn’t mean it’s telling us nothing.
The central mystery in True Detective: Night Country seems easy when the credits roll on episode 1. It’s not that viewers already have the answer, but it at least feels like we can see all the puzzle pieces in front of us. That is, until episode 2. The second, even better episode of Night Country deepens the season’s central mystery with clever world-building and the most disgusting and disturbing ice sculpture on television.
If True Detective: Night Country is about anything so far, it’s about Ennis. More than a little town in Alaska with the nighttime that lasts days, Ennis is a place that’s simultaneously peaceful and terrifying. Rose’s (Fiona Shaw) description of the town to Navarro (Kali Reis) seems close to perfect: a place where the universe comes apart at the seams. It’s a description that takes the strangeness of this world head-on but hints at the softer side of the town, too: The dead find their way back in Ennis (sometimes because they want you to join them). But Ennis is also the kind of town that feels careful and handmade; the seams are wearing like a well-loved toy, not tearing like cheap stitching from a factory.
It’s a beautiful and layered description, but it’s also one that clues us in to what the show is doing. Things here are supernatural, sure; something’s clearly afoot. But that doesn’t mean that zombies roam Ennis or that a quick seance will clear this whole mess up. The dead in Ennis are like the ice: It’s always there, but sometimes it shifts a little, so you’ll notice it. And neither one is giving up its secrets easily.
Episode 2 opens by unveiling the season’s central mystery: a frozen pile of the corpses of the Tsalal scientists, an introduction that comes with some pitch-black comedy involving a grisly hand-breaking that you have to laugh at just to break the tension. True Detective has a grand history of gruesome crime scenes that are gorgeous in their own dark-hearted way, but this is easily the series’ masterpiece so far. The frozen corpsicle is as grotesque as it is beautiful. It’s disfigured and horrible, each body with its own bizarre self-inflicted wounds, equally inexplicable and begging for some detailed reveal that might show us how any of this could have happened. The whole thing, sitting in the middle of an ice rink, a triumph of set dressing and design, looks like it could contain an infinite number of secrets and details, if only you had the misfortune to look at it for too long.
Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO
One of the show’s most brilliant and subtle strokes, though, is one that comes outside of the newly forever-cursed ice rink when Danvers (Jodie Foster) interrupts a classroom to ask her former booty call what exactly it is that Tsalal does. For the deaths of these scientists to merit something as extreme and seemingly otherworldly as their frozen remains would indicate, it seems perfect that their investigation was into something as utopian as the description Danvers gets. A cure-all, hidden away under millions of years of ice. A perfectly solvable puzzle, if only the ice would reveal its mysteries. The explanation makes perfect sense to Danvers; it’s her new burden too, after all.
And fittingly, she too turns to science to sort out her frozen puzzle. She and Pete (Finn Bennett) trot out all the classics that scientists have used for the Dyatlov Pass incident: paradoxical undressing, wild animals, some kind of invisible but natural force like gas or radiation. Not a single one sticks.
But the show’s too smart to let not having an answer defeat Danvers. She’s stubborn enough to stick to the case, and fight for it, but she’s not too stubborn to admit she needs Navarro’s help to figure it out. And with mysterious tattoos of spirals older than the ice, and a trailer full of creepy dolls, the show finally lets its two main detectives team up.
Technically, True Detective: Night Country’s second episode is mostly just table setting, getting our detectives together, laying out the facts and their complications, the oddities and their halfhearted explanations. But the show plays all this setup like Ennis finally boiling over. It’s a town at the edge of both the spiritual and physical worlds, and now it’s breaking open, little by little, under the weight of poison water and mine protests. And True Detective: Night Country is clearly eager to show us the secrets under the fragile ice of Ennis.
Chris and Andy discuss the second episode of True Detective: Night Country. They talk about some of the callbacks to True Detective Season 1 in this episode (1:00), the horror and paranormal elements that are becoming more prominent this season so far (17:49), and the way the environment plays a role in the plot (26:12).
Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Producer: Kaya McMullen
Chris and Andy talk about the first episode of True Detective: Night Country. They discuss how it differs from the past True Detective iterations (1:00) and how the setting’s constant nighttime affects the story (24:56). Then Chris is joined by creator Issa López to talk about how she came up with the idea for the show and working with Jodie Foster (35:37).
Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Guest: Issa López Producer: Kaya McMullen
True Detective is the rare show that was much more exciting and complicated after seven episodes than it is after three seasons. What started out as a brooding series about detectives looking into the dark heart of senseless, seemingly occult killings eventually transformed into a detective show mostly about men being sad. What is remarkable about the show’s newest season, True Detective: Night Country, is that in just one episode, new showrunner Issa López has managed to bring back the creeping, supernatural horror vibe that gave the first season so much promise.
The new season is set in the small town of Ennis, Alaska, and this first episode is mostly concerned with setting up the peculiarities of the town and the bones of this season’s mystery, along with getting to know our latest true detectives, of course. The show’s opening, and its central mystery, is classic cold-weather horror: A group of researchers in a secluded winter base suddenly disappear, only to be found far from their base, frozen deep in the ice.
Where the first season of the show hinted at the supernatural and the ways it sometimes may (or may not) peek through into our world, Night Country leaves no room for doubt. By the end of this episode, more than one character has had visions, and the condition the scientists are found in seems impossible to imagine happening naturally. But the true underline that makes the supernatural elements of the story undeniable is that local weirdo Rose (Fiona Shaw) is the one who finds the frozen scientists for the police, and the only reason she knew where to look is because some long-dead friend showed her the way.
López doesn’t let the supernatural overwhelm the rest of the world in Night Country’s first episode, but she’s unambiguous about its existence. This feels like a pointed response to the True Detective stories that have come before. Not combative, per se, but direct. While the previous seasons, particularly the first, led its characters from the natural and explainable world of crime toward something more supernatural, Night Country’s mystery is starting at unexplainable and working its way back.
Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO
But for all the ways that López seems to be responding to True Detective’s past in the first episode of her season, she makes her love for the series clear, too. When it comes to the cops looking into this case, López revels in characterizing them as every bit the same kind of broken bastards that original series creator Nic Pizzolatto placed at the center of his three seasons writing the show. Leading the investigation in Night Country is Liz Danvers (played marvelously by Jodie Foster), a brilliant cop with a mile-long record of pushing people away by being an absolute asshole. Then there’s Liz’s old partner Evangeline Navarro (boxer turned actor Kali Reis), a self-destructive hothead who let one case get stuck in her craw and consume her whole career.
The two cops don’t share the same dynamic as Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle and Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart, exactly, but it’s clear that López was after the same crackle the two had between them, and through just one episode she’s already seemed to nail it. The two only share brief scenes in episode 1, but the chemistry they have is instant and the bickering is pitch-perfect for cluing us in to the fact that they’re sure to work together again eventually.
Through just one episode, True Detective: Night Country feels like what True Detective was always supposed to be. Impossibly, it captures the vibes of the series’ best episodes better than anything in the second or third seasons ever achieved. López feels at war with the series’ history, not because she hates it, but because she loves it enough to want its best version. What Issa López wants is the twisty, supernatural, pitch-black mystery show that had the internet in an eight-week chokehold in 2014. And so far, she’s off to a great start.
On Jan. 9, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the caseof Californian George Sheetz, who applied for a permit to put a manufactured house on his land in El Dorado County and got hit with a $23,420 traffic mitigation fee. Objecting to the lack of any connection between the dollar amount and his family’s actual impact on traffic in the area, Sheetz paid the fee but turned to the legal system. Sheetz vs. County of El Dorado, California, addresses just a small piece of the state’s housing crisis. Nonetheless, it will matter for millions of people unable to find affordable homes here and in many other states.
When “impact fees” are unmoored from the increased costs a city or county will incur because of a new house or development, the fees can do more than present someone with an unfair bill — they can also reduce housing construction. In a country where a shortage of homes has led to sky-high prices, this matters more than you might think.
Developers should pay their fair share, of course. If construction fees fail to cover the costs of the increased public services required by new development, elected officials and voters turn to other means to cover or avoid those costs. They may impose growth restrictions or other exclusionary zoning policies to block the building of new homes rather than accept projects that lead to higher taxes or degraded services.
We see pervasive evidence of this happening when localities adopt rules such as single-family zoning, minimum lot-size requirements and aesthetic requirements that ensure that only expensive housing, which generates higher property taxes, can be built.
Properly set impact fees offer a way for development to pay its way, and they reduce political pressure against necessary growth. Local studies have found that appropriately set fees are associated with increased construction in suburban areas.
But when fees are set at arbitrarily high levels, they disincentivize new home building and add to the country’s housing affordability challenges, causing strain for renters and new home buyers.
In 2013, the Supreme Court held that all permit fees must have an essential connection to the actual impact of a development on city or county services, and a roughly proportional price tag. This sensibly reduces the risk that fees will choke off development.
In some states, such as Florida, jurisprudence goes even further, requiring that fees fund only infrastructure that serves the specific developments they were levied on. Not coincidentally, Florida has seen its population grow more than twice as fast as the country as a whole, reflecting its openness to new homes and relatively fair prices compared with much of the rest of the country.
But in other states, including California, Maryland, Washington and Arizona, courts have carved out an exception to the Supreme Court’s proportionality principle, allowing higher fees if they are set by legislation. Sheetz’s case will test whether that exception is constitutional.
Part of the rationale for the carve-out is that voters have a remedy against excessive assessments at the ballot box. In theory, they can vote out the lawmakers who are responsible.
However, any claim that voters can and will actually do this is dubious. Housing developers are a small share of any electorate. Future home buyers or renters — those who need municipalities to incentivize, not discourage, home building — may not even vote or live in the jurisdiction when the fees are determined. On the other hand, the people who do vote are likely to be those who already own homes nearby, and they tend to resist growth: Their property increases in value if high fees keep the housing supply low.
The housing affordability crisis is real. Californians in particular should understand the simple calculus of supply and demand that is exacerbating homelessness and causing seven cities (or metro areas) in the state to rank among the 10 most expensive in the nation, according to U.S. News and World Report. When and where state courts allow local politicians to cater to their wealthiest constituents, charge exorbitant impact fees and otherwise keep out new homes, the situation won’t improve.
The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on the El Dorado County fees in the first half of 2024. The legal case that all impact fees, no matter who sets them, should be subject to the same conditions is strong. And during a nationwide housing crisis, the economic case against state and local practices that worsen housing affordability and impede needed housing production is even stronger.
Charles Gardner is an attorney and research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Emily Hamiltonis a director of Mercatus’ Urbanity Project.
Although they don’t agree on much these days, members of Congress are on the same page about one thing: It’s an especially miserable time to have their job, especially if you represent California.
With California’s Dec. 8 filing deadline to decide on running for reelection just days away, seven Golden State members of Congress have opted to leave — with four retiring outright rather than run for another office.
That list grew on Wednesday with the former speaker’s announcement that he would quit the House by the end of December.
The past year has been marked by an almost unprecedented level of chaos, dysfunction, and near misses on self-inflicted national economic catastrophes in the GOP-controlled House, all bookended by two separate speakership crises. McCarthy, who has been at the center of the House’s 2023 maelstrom, lost his grip on the gavel in October.
The disarray has led to a surge in retirements from both parties. Thirty-one House members are leaving, including 16 who aren’t running for other office. In November alone, 12 members announced their retirements — the most in any month for more than a decade, according to Ballotpedia.
For Californians, the day-to-day burdens of the job are heavier than they are for many of their colleagues. Californians always face some of the longest commutes of any member of Congress. Forty of the state’s 52 House members are Democrats, and being in the minority is a drag — especially during the current era of hyperpartisanship. On top of that, in the span of two years California’s delegation has gone from having two of its own at the helm of both parties in the House to having none, with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-San Francisco) exit from leadership followed quickly by McCarthy’s ignominious demotion and decision to quit.
The real surprise isn’t how many California members are retiring — it’s how many are willing to stay after the past year of chaos.
“The travel sucks. It’s a long flight both ways. I get tired at random times of the day because of the time change,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) told The Times. On one recent flight, he was delayed six hours because the plane’s toilet wasn’t working — but he flies so much, he couldn’t remember when and where it happened.
Add to that a “Republican majority that’s doing a bunch of stupid stuff,” and the day-to-day in Congress “honestly feels more stupid” now than at any other point in Lieu’s decade in the House, he said.
And he’s a member of House Democratic leadership, serving as vice chairman.
It’s hard to overstate how maddening and demoralizing the last year in Congress has been for members of both parties.
McCarthy needed four days and 15 ballots to win the speakership in January. After months of struggling to get his conference to pass just about anything, he enraged his right-wing critics with a deal to temporarily avoid a government shutdown; they booted him weeks later. Since then, he has publicly lambasted the eight Republicans who voted to remove him; one of them accused him of elbowing him in the kidney, a claim McCarthy denied.
McCarthy announced his retirement in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he defended his decision to cross his right-wing critics on government funding deals — while hinting at Congress’ current dysfunction.
“We kept our government operating and our troops paid while wars broke out around the world,” he wrote. “No matter the odds, or personal cost, we did the right thing. That may seem out of fashion in Washington these days, but delivering results for the American people is still celebrated across the country.”
McCarthy’s allies are furious about how he was treated.
“Kevin did nothing wrong. He led us to victory. He led us to the majority. He led us well in the majority as our speaker. He’s done really great work. And he deserved to be our speaker,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall) told The Times last week, after indicating he expected McCarthy would retire. “A small gang, a gang of eight, took him out. And I hope that all eight of them recognize they made a mistake.”
Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), one of McCarthy’s closest confidants and the man McCarthy made acting speaker when he was ousted from office, announced he would retire on Tuesday.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), another close ally, said he could “certainly understand why” McCarthy wouldn’t want to stick around.
“He was shamefully mistreated. His removal was ridiculous,” he told The Times last week. “And I think those that voted that way and were responsible for it, particularly on our side, ought to think long and hard of the damage they inflicted to the institution and to our conference.”
Cole said he plans to run again himself. But when asked if he could think of another time in his two decades in Congress that has been less fun to serve, he didn’t pause.
“No!” he exclaimed with a wry laugh.
Three other House Republicans tried and failed to win the speakership after McCarthy’s ouster before an exhausted GOP conference was able to compromise on making little-known Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) speaker. He then cut a deal to punt a decision on a government shutdown past the new year — the exact same move that had sealed McCarthy’s fate.
But Johnson’s deal only runs through late January, when Congress will once again grapple with what was once an easy vote to keep the lights on and avoid a government shutdown. The past week, the House wasn’t voting on that issue — or high-stakes funding to help Ukraine ward off Russia’s invasion or supply more military aid to Israel. House Republicans instead moved toward an official impeachment vote of President Biden, before finally voting to kick out Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) from the House after keeping him for the past year in spite of his many alleged felonies because they needed his vote in a closely divided chamber.
Rep. Julia Brownley (D-Westlake Village) said her belief that the U.S. is at “a critical point in the history of our country in terms of fighting for our democracy” motivates her to stay in Congress. But her train of thought was interrupted as Santos stormed off the House floor during his expulsion vote, followed by a pack of reporters who nearly trampled us in the narrow hallway—just the latest moment of dysfunctional chaos.
Once they cleared out, Brownley conceded that “it’s not a pleasant experience” to be a member of Congress right now.
“The last three months clearly weren’t a lot of fun here, with the chaos that we saw. And that might not change in the immediate future,” Rep. Ami Bera (D-Elk Grove) told The Times.
Later, as The Times interviewed Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego) on the topic, Bera interjected.
“I think you should do the story about why are members staying in Congress, as opposed to the opposite,” he said.
“I can’t walk away from the big money and the constant praise,” Peters, one of Congress’ wealthier members, remarked sardonically. He, like many members, went on to say he was sticking around not because the job was pleasant but because it was important. “People have died for democracy. I can put up with some long plane rides and average parties to try to help the country,” he said.
Rep. Grace F. Napolitano (D-Norwalk), who is retiring at age 84 after serving in the House for a quarter-century, told The Times that the current period was the least pleasant she’d experienced in Congress. She said when she first arrived she was able to work across the aisle on issues important for California with members like former Rep. David Dreier (R-Claremont) — but that has disappeared over the years.
“This trouble between both parties has got to stop. It’s not good for our country,” she said. She’ll miss “the infighting, the inability to work with people on issues that are really critical” the least.
Three of the seven Californians leaving the House are gunning for promotions rather than escape from Congress: Reps. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), Katie Porter (D-Irvine) and Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) are all running for the Senate. But that doesn’t mean they’re loving their daily work right now.
“Things have become so much more personal and bitter, and we’ve seen the elevation of these kind of vile performance artists,” Schiff, whom Republicans removed from his committees in a retaliatory vote earlier this year, told The Times. “I think it contributes to some of the departures. One thing that attracts me about the Senate is the opportunity to get more things done.”
Add two transcontinental flights a week to a job where it’s tough to get much done, and you have a recipe for unhappiness.
“I don’t think I’ll miss the weekly commute. I won’t miss sitting in the middle seat economy in the back of the plane, and all the have-dos that come with this job,” said Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Menlo Park), who is retiring at age 80.
Rep. Tony Cárdenas is also retiring. His decision was the only one that surprised his colleagues — he’s only 60.
He’s burnt out on the lifestyle. Cárdenas’ normal week begins with a 5 a.m Monday wakeup so he can say goodbye to his wife and make it to LAX by 6 a.m. — the commute is 35 minutes before 6, and close to an hour after. He arrives in D.C. late Monday afternoon, works all day for four days, then tries to get home for a bit of the weekend. “Going back and forth puts a strain on relationships with our loved ones,” he said.
The travel takes a physical toll too. Cárdenas told The Times that he’d never had any back problems in his life. But after a few years in Congress and more than 30 transcontinental flights a year, he developed severe pain. When his wife touched his back to check, it made him scream. He’d developed sciatica from all the time crammed into airplane seats (acupuncture and working on his posture have helped).
Eshoo told The Times that she hadn’t decided to leave Congress because of how miserable it’s become — ”I don’t run away from anything” — but that she felt it was time to go.
Eshoo has been friends with Pelosi, the former speaker, for a half-century, dating back to the 1970s, and said it was a “tough conversation” to tell her she was retiring, especially since Pelosi lobbied her to stay for another term.
Multiple members said they were surprised that the 83-year-old Pelosi would outlast McCarthy, 58, in Congress. With Pelosi and McCarthy both out of leadership, Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands), the third-ranking House Democrat, is now the most senior Californian in House leadership of either party.
Californians who’ve left Congress say they don’t miss it at all.
Multiple former members have opted to return home and run for local office. Former Democratic Reps. Janice Hahn and Hilda Solis are serving on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
“I am 100% happy that I came home,” Hahn told The Times. “What has transpired in Congress recently only reaffirms that decision. It seems chaotic. It seems ineffective. And I think it causes the American public to be very disappointed in their policymakers in Congress.”
Los Angeles County is the most populous in the U.S. It has more than 10 million people — a population that’s larger than those of 40 U.S. states — and serving as one of the five supervisors is in many ways a more powerful position than being one of 435 members in an ineffective House.
Hahn spent three terms in the minority before retiring in 2016, having found “the partisan, polarizing atmosphere of Congress to be really almost debilitating at some times.” She said she was proud of creating a bipartisan caucus to support port cities. But her legislative achievements — like most minority members’ — were scant. “I mean, I named a post office,” she said.
Former Rep. Paul Cook, a Republican, is now a San Bernardino County supervisor. Democratic Rep. Gloria Negrete McLeod left Congress to run unsuccessfully for the same role. Democrat Jackie Speier, who retired from Congress after the last term, is now running for the San Mateo board of supervisors — a job she held early in her career.
Speier said she retired because she’d promised her husband she’d come home, and initially “almost resented” the decision. But now?
“As time wore on, I realized, oh my gosh, we live and work in this bubble, and don’t realize how insane it is. When you’re when you step back from it, you know, it’s like you’re a hamster on a treadmill. And you just keep doing it with no real positive results,” she said. “The institution is so dysfunctional now that it really frightens me.”
Like many reporters, I’ve been operating in Casaubon mode for much of the past eight years, searching for the key to Donald Trump’s mythologies. No single explanation of Trump is fully satisfactory, although Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer came closest when he observed that the cruelty is the point. Another person who helped me unscramble the mystery of Trump was his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Early in the Trump presidency, I had lunch with Kushner in his White House office. We were meant to be discussing Middle East peace (more on that another time), but I was particularly curious to hear Kushner talk about his father-in-law’s behavior. I was not inured then—and am not inured even now—to the many rococo manifestations of Trump’s defective character. One of the first moments of real shock for me came in the summer of 2015, when Trump, then an implausible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said of Senator John McCain, “He’s not a war hero … I like people who weren’t captured, okay?”
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I did not understand how so many ostensibly patriotic voters could subsequently embrace Trump, but mainly I couldn’t understand his soul sickness: How does a person come to such a rotten, depraved thought?
That day in the White House, I mentioned to Kushner one of Trump’s more recent calumnies and told him that, in my view, his father-in-law’s incivility was damaging the country. Strangely, Kushner seemed to agree with me: “No one can go as low as the president,” he said. “You shouldn’t even try.”
I was confused at first. But then I understood: Kushner wasn’t insulting his father-in-law. He was paying him a compliment.
Perverse, of course. But revelatory as well, and more than a little prophetic. Because Trump, in the intervening years, has gone lower, and lower, and lower. If there is a bottom—no sure thing—he’s getting closer. Tom Nichols, who writes The Atlantic’s daily newsletter and is one of our in-house experts on authoritarianism, argued in mid-November that Trump has finally earned the epithet “fascist.”
“For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric,” Nichols wrote. “Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ ” In a separate speech, Trump, Nichols wrote, “melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism.”
Trump’s rhetoric has numbed us in its hyperbole and frequency. As David A. Graham, one of our magazine’s chroniclers of the Trump era, wrote recently, “The former president continues to produce substantive ideas—which is not to say they are wise or prudent, but they are certainly more than gibberish. In fact, much of what Trump is discussing is un-American, not merely in the sense of being antithetical to some imagined national set of mores, but in that his ideas contravene basic principles of the Constitution or other bedrock bases of American government.”
There was a time when it seemed impossible to imagine that Trump would once again be a candidate for president. That moment lasted from the night of January 6, 2021, until the afternoon of January 28, 2021, when the then-leader of the House Republican caucus, Kevin McCarthy, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and welcomed him back into the fold.
And so here we are. It is not a sure thing that Trump will win the Republican nomination again, but as I write this, he’s the prohibitive front-runner. Which is why we felt it necessary to share with our readers our collective understanding of what could take place in a second Trump term. I encourage you to read all of the articles in this special issue carefully (though perhaps not in one sitting, for reasons of mental hygiene). Our team of brilliant writers makes a convincingly dispositive case that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. The country survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.
The Atlantic, as our loyal readers know, is deliberately not a partisan magazine. “Of no party or clique” is our original 1857 motto, and it is true today. Our concern with Trump is not that he is a Republican, or that he embraces—when convenient—certain conservative ideas. We believe that a democracy needs, among other things, a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party in order to flourish. Our concern is that the Republican Party has mortgaged itself to an antidemocratic demagogue, one who is completely devoid of decency.
This editor’s note appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A Warning.”
For Judith Ortiz, whose parents brought her to this country from Durango, Mexico, when she was 2, a mere 24 hours have made the difference between a life of freedom and opportunity and one constrained by limits and obstacles.
Ortiz and her twin sister, Janette, were raised in suburban Dallas, where Judith was her high school’s valedictorian, graduating with a 3.96 GPA.
Both girls had remained in the country illegally as toddlers when their family overstayed a tourist visa. When they turned 18, they became eligible for benefits under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program designed to shield from deportation young people brought to this country illegally as children.
Drawing on an unprecedented poll, this series tells the stories of immigrant life in America today, putting their voices in the foreground.
Because the girls have the same birth date, the same address and the same surname, their lawyer suggested Judith mail her application a day after her sister to avoid confusion.
Janette’s paperwork was approved six months later, in June 2021. Shortly after, a federal judge in Texas blocked the government from approving additional DACA petitions. Judith’s application — and her future — have been on hold ever since. She can’t be sure that the mailing date, not some other arbitrary bureaucratic quirk, caused the fateful difference, but in her mind, that one-day delay in sending off the application is what has set their lives on different courses.
“Having DACA would make my life 100 times easier,” said the 21-year-old, who attends classes at Texas A&M alongside her sister. “I was always scared of getting pulled over. There’s things that people don’t really think about sometimes.”
Judith took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, hoping to enlist in the military, and scored well enough to enter West Point, only to be rejected because of her immigration status. Because of that status, she can’t legally get a job or a loan because she can’t get a Social Security number.
Her twin, who entered the country on the same day and grew up in the same house, has a job, an apartment and a car loan.
Judith, who is slated to graduate in December, is eligible to be deported back to a country she never knew and can’t remember while her twin sister can legally remain, work and study.
“I grew up in America. I don’t know [Mexican] culture very well. It’s not the same,” she said.
Few who work in immigration law are surprised by the story; the capriciousness of America’s broken immigration system seems to be the rule, not the exception.
“It’s a bit of layer cake,” said Travis Murphy, a former U.S. diplomat who is the founder and CEO of Jetr Global Partners, a Washington-based firm that works to solve visa and immigrant issues for athletes and sports franchises. “Policies have been enacted year over year that don’t necessarily work directly, in a coherent way, with previous policies.”
Janette Ortiz’s DACA paperwork was approved in June 2021.
(Jordan Vonderhaar / For The Times)
“We don’t have consensus in what we want the outcome to be,” he added. “That’s the problem.”
The sometimes arbitrary and frequently confusing nature of American immigration law enforcement constrains the lives of millions of immigrants — those who live in the country legally as well as those here without legal status.
More than 4 in 10 immigrants who participated in a wide-ranging survey conducted earlier this year by the Los Angeles Times and KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, said they don’t understand how the country’s immigration policies work, nor how those policies affect their families. Yet they have no choice but to rely on those policies to be able to live, work, study and sometimes simply exist in this country.
Roughly 1 in 4 immigrants said they worry that they or a family member could be deported. The number is highest among the undocumented, but the fear is shared by one-third of legal permanent residents and 1 in 8 naturalized citizens. Many immigrants who have legal status have family members who do not.
Some 10.5 million people — precise estimates vary — lived in the U.S. without authorization in 2021. Roughly 1.8 million live in uncertainty, recipients of temporary protected status, student visas, DACA and other protocols that either have limited length or can be revoked, with little notice, at any time. Tens of thousands more are apprehended at the southern border each month trying to join them.
Judith Ortiz, left, was her high school’s valedictorian, graduating with a 3.96 GPA.
(Jordan Vonderhaar / For The Times)
Meantime, the pathway to legally immigrate to the U.S. has become so constrained that for many, it doesn’t truly exist.
The Cato Institute, in a June report titled, “Why Legal Immigration Is Nearly Impossible,” estimated that fewer than 1% of the people who apply to move permanently to this country are now able to do so.
“The government’s restrictive criteria render the legal paths available only in the most extreme cases,” wrote David J. Bier, Cato’s associate director for immigration studies. “Legal immigration is less like waiting in line and more like winning the lottery: It happens, but it is so rare that it is irrational to expect it in any individual case.”
The U.S. caps the number of permanent employment-based immigrants at 140,000 annually, with no more than 7% allowed from any one country. As a result, people in countries with large numbers of applicants could wait a lifetime. The wait for an employment-based green card for residents of India is 134 years, according to Cato’s estimate, based on government data. A U.S. citizen who wants legal permission for their married adult child to immigrate to the U.S. from Mexico would have to wait 160 years at the current rate of approval.
Those who do enter the U.S. legally aren’t exempt from the law’s complexities.
Six years ago, Agustina Vergara packed up her life and moved from Argentina to Southern California to finish a master’s program at USC.
With her employer’s help, she applied to exchange her student visa for one reserved for workers in fields requiring special knowledge. That’s when things went off the rails.
As she waited, Vergara’s father was diagnosed with cancer. She couldn’t go back to Argentina without abandoning her visa application, which would have meant starting the process over again with less chance of success. When he died, she couldn’t attend the funeral.
Weeks later, her lawyer gave her more bad news: She wasn’t going to get the visa anyway. The government offered no explanation why. Vergara was crushed.
“My thinking was perhaps a little too optimistic,” she said. “There is no way that a hardworking person that really loves America and wants to build a life here and contribute to make America the amazing country that it is, there is no way that they won’t have me.”
Like Judith Ortiz, Vergara, 35, had filed every form, paid every fee, followed every rule. She was, by all accounts, an outstanding student and a model citizen. Her background check came back as clean as hospital linen.
“There’s a point where it is so convoluted, so complicated, so nonsensical,” she said. “It cannot be an accident. It is, in a way, kind of designed to make it really difficult,” said Vergara, now an associate fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, a libertarian organization based in Santa Ana. “Is this an immigration system or an anti-immigration system?”
Most immigrants, 84%, say they feel the U.S. immigration system has treated them and their families fairly, the Los Angeles Times/KFF poll found. But that number is notably lower among immigrants from Mexico, Central America and India, who face some of the longest wait times. It is also lower among the undocumented.
And even those who feel the process was fair can often find it an ordeal.
Vergara was eventually allowed to stay in this country after moving up her long-planned wedding and marrying her fiance, a U.S. citizen, at the Laguna Hills courthouse. Millions of others, however, have had to put their lives on hold.
Elvina Kovaleva and her husband were welcomed into this country, but it could be years before they know if they’ll be able to stay. A respondent to The Times/KFF poll, Kovaleva agreed to a follow-up interview by email.
Kovaleva, 28, and her husband, Yaroslav, both Russian citizens, left well-paying jobs in Moscow last year after Yaroslav was mobilized to fight in Ukraine, a war the couple strongly oppose.
“We don’t want to take part in an awful war against a brotherly nation,” said Kovaleva, who was pregnant at the time they left. They had just a day to pack and make travel arrangements, but she and her husband didn’t have to discuss where they would go. “The country of freedom and human rights,” she said.
They don’t regret the choice.
“We have already received great help from the United States,” said Kovaleva. “Everywhere we meet people who are ready to help with anything. USA is really a country of migrants.”
The couple, who settled in Brooklyn, have permission to live and work here legally as their asylum petition is reviewed. Yaroslav, who was an engineer in Russia, has a driver’s license and is working as a heating, ventilation and air-conditioning technician while Elvina, who gave birth to a daughter this spring, is a stay-at-home mom.
But the Kovalevas are reluctant to make any long-term plans until their case is heard by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Should they buy a house? Expand their family? Start a business? How can they when their future is so uncertain. They would like to petition to bring their elderly parents to the U.S. because they believe they’re not safe in Russia, but they can’t do that until their immigration paperwork is approved. Nor can they exit the U.S. without abandoning their asylum request.
They have no idea when they will have answers.
The U.S. had 1.6 million pending asylum applications as of the start of this year, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which compiles and analyzes immigration data.
“We’re still waiting,” Kovaleva said. “We are told some people have been waiting eight to 10 years.”
In the meantime, she keeps her fingers crossed.
“The U.S. is a land of freedom, opportunity and choice,” she wrote. “And we do hope that this will never change.”
It’s certainly been a land of opportunity for Julio Calderon. But as for freedom and choice, well, not so much.
In 2005, Calderon fled the poverty and gang violence of Honduras for the U.S., entering illegally 30 days after his 16th birthday. That made him a month too old to apply for DACA when the program was introduced in 2012.
He also entered a few years too late to qualify for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a government designation that gave Hondurans in the U.S. employment authorization and guarded them from deportation after Hurricane Mitch devastated their country in 1998. TPS status has been extended multiple times since it was first established and now covers around 76,000 Hondurans.
“It’s like an invisible wall that keeps me away from building wealth,” Calderon, who has an economics degree from Florida International University, said of his undocumented status. “It’s difficult to learn when you’re hungry.”
Even as he fears being deported to Honduras, a country he hardly knows, Calderon said he’s not letting his immigration status hold him back.
“I want people to see the opportunities that you have even if you’re undocumented because I don’t think we’re talking about that. We focus too much on the limitations,” he said.
“So I am undocumented, but I graduated high school and college,” he continued. “I got scholarships. Now, whenever I go to a place, I know that [my] immigration status might have taken me to a different path. And sometimes I have to be the one creating those paths for those who are coming after me.
“I am qualified. I am qualified to do a lot of things. But just because I don’t have immigration status, I’m limited. At the end of the day, I am losing, but also this country is losing because I can give so much.
“Like myself, there are many out there ready to give back. Politics is what keeps us away from a solution.”
Even among immigrants, however, little consensus exists about what that solution might be. About 8 in 10 immigrants say that allowing people like Judith Ortiz, who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, to apply for citizenship would be a good idea.
Much like the native-born population, however, they’re more divided on other proposals. Asked about allowing people without documentation to apply for government-provided health insurance, 59% of immigrants called that a good idea and 37% said it would be a bad idea. Immigrants who are undocumented heavily supported that idea, but naturalized citizens split evenly, The Times/KFF poll found.
Immigrants divided closely on what they think of enforcement of U.S. immigration policies, with about 1 in 5 calling it too tough and another 1 in 5 saying it’s not tough enough. The rest said either that enforcement is about right (27%) or that they weren’t sure (35%).
Because of the capriciousness of the American immigration system, one of the Ortiz twins stays and works in the U.S. legally and the other remains without legal status.
(Jordan Vonderhaar / For The Times)
Calderon’s lack of documents costs him more than just economic opportunities. In Florida, where he lives, Gov. Ron DeSantis has required hospitals to ask patients about their citizenship or immigration status and has expanded penalties for employers who hire undocumented workers. Undocumented residents are blocked from applying for IDs or a driver’s license, and it is illegal for undocumented people to use driver’s licenses legally issued in other states.
“Mobility, it’s a big one,” Calderon said of the limits his immigration status has placed on his life. “Not being able to travel outside of the U.S., to have a driver’s license, I rely upon [other] transportation.”
About 4 in 10 poll respondents said they had avoided things like talking to the police, applying for a job or traveling out of fear of drawing attention to their status or the status of someone in their family.
Even among those in the U.S. legally, significant numbers say the same.
“It’s difficult,” said Santos González, 48, a construction worker from El Salvador who has lived nearly half his life in the U.S.
“I’ve been here more than 20 years, working every day. But in Washington they can’t come to an agreement to give us some kind of permanent status,” he said, speaking in Spanish.
González is covered by TPS, which the U.S. granted to Salvadorans after the Central American country was hit by a series of earthquakes in 2001. As with Hondurans, TPS for Salvadorans has been extended multiple times since, most recently for an additional 20 months beginning in July.
Under TPS, González has been able to work, buy a house in San Bernardino, build a family and pay taxes.
The Trump administration tried to end TPS for El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and several other countries, but courts blocked that. As Congress continues to kick the idea of a more stable solution down the road, González and hundreds of thousands of others covered by temporary status are left in limbo, fearing the next president could move to end the program again.
“Then we’d basically be done,” González said.
“TPS has a lot of benefits,” he said. “But they’re benefits that can be taken away. It’s complicated because I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“Just having to navigate that whole thing has been very nerve-racking,” said his 23-year-old son, Oscar González, a DACA recipient with a college degree and a job in the pharmaceutical industry. His two younger sisters, both born in the U.S., are American citizens.
“I don’t really know how it’s going to play out, so it’s just, I guess, figuring it out in the moment. You don’t have that security. Everything’s always like a gamble, really.”
The California population of immigrants lacking lawful status decreased by 150,000 between 2017 and 2021, but the state continues to have the highest number — 1.9 million — of unauthorized residents among the states.
According to a report published Thursday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, only two states saw an increase in such residents during the same period: Florida, which increased by 80,000 people, and Washington, which increased by 60,000.
Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois follow California as states with the largest unauthorized immigrant populations. Such immigrants have become less geographically concentrated, however, with those six states being home to 56% of that population in the U.S., down from 80% in 1990.
The Pew Research Center analyzed the most current data from the U.S. Census Bureau and government surveys such as the American Community Survey to estimate the size and characteristics of that population.
Among those counted as unauthorized immigrants by Pew are more than 2 million people with temporary permission to be in the U.S., including through pending asylum petitions, temporary protected status and the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Across the country, 10.5 million immigrants lacked legal status in 2021, down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007, but up slightly from a low of 10.2 million in 2019.
Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew, said the rebound is due in part to pent-up requests for U.S. entry after strict enforcement during the Trump administration and then pandemic closures.
The foreign-born population made up about 14% of the country’s total population in 2021. Between 2007 and 2021, the lawful immigrant population grew by a quarter and the number of naturalized U.S. citizens grew substantially, accounting for about half of all immigrants in the country.
Passel said naturalizations probably increased because of restrictions on legal immigrants, as well as the desire of immigrants to vote in presidential elections since 2008. After U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reopened following a pandemic closure, nearly a million immigrants became naturalized citizens in fiscal year 2022, the third-highest number on record.
But the Pew report notes that the new estimates don’t reflect changes since migrant arrests and expulsions started increasing in March 2021, later reaching historic highs.
The number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico decreased by 900,000 to 4.1 million in 2021. Meanwhile, the number of people from nearly every other region in the world grew rapidly, including from Venezuela, India and Canada. Immigrants from East Asia and India probably drove the increase in Washington, Passel said.
Passel said the decrease in Mexican immigrants partly explains the overall decrease in unauthorized immigrants in California. That‘s because many Mexican immigrants have returned to Mexico while fewer have entered the U.S., he said.
“In some ways it’s a status quo, but I think it’s notable that the sources are really changing quite a bit,” Passel said of the countries where immigrants were born. “We’re seeing some growth from almost every region of the world — not huge, but some — and the continued decline in Mexico as a source. I think that’s likely to continue for the next couple of years.”
During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing last week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas described the changes reflected at the southern U.S. border as a global phenomenon.
“We are facing economic, political and climate instability across the world, exacerbated in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic — instability that is fueling the greatest level of global migration since World War II,” Mayorkas said.
Fans can expect the biggest names in country music to show Us their fierce fashion sense at the 2023 CMA Awards in Nashville on Wednesday, November 8. From glittering gowns and flirty frocks to stylish suits, the Bridgestone Arena red carpet will be one to remember. Aside from serving up fashionable eye candy, the CMAs […]
Bryan and Manning, who cohosted the awards show for the first time in 2022, then made a joke about Swift’s star power — and one specific football team’s lack of efficiency.
“Luke, you know the difference between Taylor Swift and the New York Jets?” Manning pondered. “Uh, Taylor can sell out a stadium!” Bryan quipped.
The retired NFL quarterback applauded Bryan for nailing it, teasing, “I had you do that punchline Luke so I don’t get in trouble.”
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.Gotham/GC Images
Manning also brought his little brother, Eli Manning, into the discussion as he and Bryan commented on CMA Awards nominee Jelly Roll’s iconic face ink.
“Jelly Roll is so inspirational, he has my mom considering a face tattoo,” Bryan said, to which Peyton replied, “The Mannings are already way ahead of you pal. Eli got his already.” The former Indianapolis Colts player then showed a photo on stage of Eli, 42, with fake drawings all over his face.
The emcees concluded their opening monologue by singing together on stage. When Bryan started a song, he challenged his counterpart to finish it. Peyton trolled the singer when he claimed he couldn’t remember Bryan’s “One Margarita.”
Country music stars are celebrating big wins at the 2023 CMA Awards. This year’s ceremony, which takes place on Wednesday, November 8, at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, is being hosted by NFL legend Peyton Manning and country music’s own Luke Bryan for the second year in a row. In addition to his hosting duties, […]
Bryan revealed in October that he and Peyton easily secured the gig for a second time. “I think literally we were walking off the stage last year and the CMAs were already trying to get us to come on board one more time and sign up again,” he said during an appearance on Good Morning America.
The musician went on to tease the cohosts’ plans for landing laughs during the ceremony. “I think the main thing is just to be the master of ceremonies and let the music and the show and the artists speak for themselves,” Bryan explained. “Then, at some point, Peyton and I will have to try to come up with a couple funny jokes and poke a few people, but the bottom line is just be ourselves and really keep the people in the room engaged and the audience at home having fun and smiling.”
Luke Bryan and Peyton Manning.Disney/Art Streiber
While Peyton and Bryan’s chemistry was evident at the 2022 awards show, they did not see eye to eye on how to approach their roles. “I think we both have our little things that we’re strong at and it’s fun to blend them together,” Bryan noted in a sneak peek published by Parade in October. “I am a little more loose, off the cuff, and Peyton wants a play in.”
Peyton then chimed in: “I spend most of my time kind of nudging him, ‘No, Luke, just read the teleprompter.’”
The pair’s monologue from the 2022 ceremony made headlines after Peyton referred to an awkward moment when Carrie Underwoodgave Bryan side eye during his solo hosting venture the previous year. “Carrie Underwood and I have a lot in common,” Peyton told Bryan. “We both work with Brad Paisley, we’ve both been on Sunday Night Football a lot and we’re both very nervous about what Luke Bryan might say tonight.”
Bryan added at the time, “Hell, even I’m nervous about what Luke Bryan might say tonight.”
“Whatever makes you country, you are welcome here tonight,” Bryan said at the time. “Rest assured, we’re following all the health protocols to keep everyone safe, and it is so great to be here with all my fellow artists — tested and together. Or immunized? Who is it? Just playing.”
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The camera then panned to Underwood, who notably did not laugh at Bryan’s barb.
An Arab Muslim student at Stanford University was struck by a driver in a hit-and-run collision that the California Highway Patrol is investigating as a hate crime, according to the university.
The student was walking on campus about 2 p.m. Friday when the driver made eye contact before accelerating and striking the student, according to a news release from the university’s Department of Public Safety. The driver shouted, “F— you people,” as he sped away, the release said. The student’s injuries are not life-threatening.
Stanford’s president, Richard Saller, sent a message to the community condemning the violence.
“We are profoundly disturbed to hear this report of potentially hate-based physical violence on our campus. Violence on our campus is unacceptable,” he said. “Hate-based violence is morally reprehensible, and we condemn it in the strongest terms.”
The driver remains at large, authorities said. The victim described him as “a white male in his mid-20s, with short dirty-blond hair and a short beard, wearing a gray shirt and round framed eyeglasses.”
The vehicle was described as a black Toyota 4Runner, model 2015 or newer, with a tire mounted on the back with a Toyota logo in the center of the wheel. The victim said it had a white California license plate with the letters M and J, with M possibly the first letter and J in the middle.
Campuses across the country have been pushed to confront anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 surprise attack on Israel, in which militants killed 1,400 Israelis and took about 220 people hostage.
Relentless attacks by Israel in the Gaza Strip in the weeks since have killed more than 9,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
Earlier this month, Stanford Provost Jenny Martinez spoke to the university’s faculty senate, detailing concerns from Palestinian American and Muslim community members who fear for their safety and who have described “troubling incidents and interactions rooted in Islamophobia.” She also relayed that Jewish and Israeli students have reported feeling fearful on campus, “feeling that they are targets of hate because of their identity.”
The Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee has said it has heard from students across the country, including California, who have faced threats on campuses since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.
Abed Ayoub, the group’s national executive director, said his staff has also heard from students who are facing expulsion or losing job opportunities for expressing their beliefs. Others are having their social media posts monitored and are threatened with violence.
“Holy moly y’all. Someone pinch me. I can’t believe my eyes,” Wilson wrote via X in September after the nominations were announced. “Being nominated in these categories with my friends means the world to me. Entertainer of the Year?! Absolutely surreal. We bust our butts on the road every night to give yall the best show & I have the time of my life doing it. All I gotta say is thank yall. I love country music.”
Wilson also made CMA Awards history as the only artist to top the nominations list in her first two appearances on the final ballot. In 2022, her first year as a nominee, she was the top artist with six nods.
Scroll down for everything to know about the 2023 CMA Awards:
In addition to Wilson, the top nominees for the 2023 awards show are Jelly Roll with five nods, Luke Combs and HARDY with four each and Jordan Davis, Ashley McBryde, Chris Stapleton and Morgan Wallen all up for three awards.
The biggest category of the night, Entertainer of the Year, puts Wilson up against Combs, 33, Stapleton, 45, Wallen, 30, and Carrie Underwood.
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Who Are the Top 2023 CMA Awards Performers?
Bryan, Stapleton, Wilson, Jelly Roll, 38, K. Michelle, Little Big Town, Megan Moroney, Old Dominion, Carly Pearce and Tanya Tucker were all announced in the first round of performers. ABC revealed on November 1 that Kelsea Ballerini, Jordan Davis, Cody Johnson, Dan + Shay, The War and Treaty, McBryde, 40, and HARDY, 33, will also take the stage.
Post Malone will join the star-studded lineup alongside HARDY and Wallen for a “county classics medley,” according to the network’s press site.
The CMA Awards take place at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. The awards show airs live on ABC Wednesday, November 8, at 8 p.m. ET and will stream on Hulu for users with the site’s live TV plan.
Dolly Parton’s highly anticipated Rockstar album finally drops November 17, but the country-turned-rockstar herself just announced a special “global first listen event” in cinemas worldwide on November 15. The event will bring Dolly fans together for a musical preview of one of the year’s biggest albums.
Two days before the album reaches the rest of the world, theater attendees will not only get to experience select tracks and music videos from Rockstar but also footage of an exclusive interview with Dolly as well as performances of a holiday song and her classic hit “9 to 5.” Learn more and get tickets on the movie’s official website.
In a statement, Dolly shared, “I am excited to know that my fans around the world will be able to come together and be the first to hear a sneak peek of my Rockstar album. I am so proud of this music, and I am humbled by all the wonderful artists who joined me. I cannot wait for people to hear it!”
According to the website, in keeping with Dolly’s long-standing commitment to giving back, a portion of the proceeds from ticket sales will benefit Music Will, the largest nonprofit music program in the US public school system.
Dolly Parton’s Rockstar Global First Listen Event follows the wildly successful theatrical release of Taylor Swift’sTAYLOR SWIFT | THE ERAS TOUR FILM and comes just before Beyoncé’sRENAISSANCE: A FILM BY BEYONCÉ.
Just last week, Dolly dropped her latest single from Rockstar (a cover of Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball”) and her new fashion photo book, Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones.
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