NEW YORK — Federal auto safety regulators are investigating why Tesla has repeatedly broken rules requiring it to quickly tell them about crashes involving its self-driving technology, a potentially significant development given the company’s plans to put hundreds of thousands of driverless cars on U.S. roads over the next year.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a filing on Thursday that Tesla’s reports on “numerous” incidents involving its driver assistance and self-driving features were submitted far too late — several months after the crashes instead of within five days as required.
The probe comes two months after the electric vehicle maker run by Elon Musk started a self-driving taxi service in Austin, Texas, with hopes of soon offering it nationwide. The company also hopes to send over-the-air software updates to millions of Teslas already on the road that will allow them to drive themselves.
Investors enthusiastic about such plans have kept Tesla stock aloft despite plunging sales and profits due to boycotts over Musk’s support for U.S. President Donald Trump and far-right politicians in Europe.
The safety agency said the probe will focus on why Tesla took so long to report the crashes, whether the reports included all the necessary data and details and if there are crashes that the agency still doesn’t know about.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment, but the agency noted that the company has told it the delays were “due to an issue with Tesla’s data collection,” which Tesla says has now been fixed.
The new investigation follows another probe that began in October into potential problems with Tesla’s self-driving technology in foggy weather and other low visibility conditions, which has been linked to several accidents including one death. That probe involves 2.4 million Tesla vehicles.
The crash reporting rule for vehicles using Level 2 driver-assistance software, or those that require drivers to pay full attention to the road, was implemented in 2021. Since then Tesla has reported 2,308 crashes when the software was used, the vast majority of the more than 2,600 reported by all automakers, according to agency data. The numbers are skewed by the fact that Tesla is by far the dominant maker of partial self-driving vehicles in the U.S.
The company has been offering robotaxi rides in Austin to only a select group of riders, but said it will allow any paying customer to hail its cabs starting sometime in September, according to a Musk post on X earlier this month. Tesla has also begun allowing limited robotaxi service in San Francisco with a driver behind the wheel as a safety check to conform with California rules.
Investors in Tesla were initially cheered after Trump won the presidency in hopes he would reward his biggest financial backer, Musk, by getting safety regulators to go easier on the company. Now that isn’t so certain given Musk’s falling out with the president in recent months after Musk called Trump’s budget bill an “abomination” that would add to U.S. debt and threatened to form a new political party.
Tesla stock fell less than 1% in afternoon trading Thursday to $321.
MOREHEAD, Ky. — The summer after ninth grade, Zoey Griffith found herself in an unfamiliar setting: a dorm on the Morehead State University campus.
There, she’d spend the months before her sophomore year taking classes in core subjects including math and biology and electives like oil painting.
For Griffith, it was an opportunity, but a scary one. “It was a big deal for me to live on campus at the age of 14,” she said. Morehead State is about an hour from her hometown of Maysville. “I was nervous, and I remember that I cried the first time that my dad left me on move-in day.”
Her mother became a parent as a teenager and urged her daughter to avoid the same experience. Griffith’s father works as a mechanic, and he frowns upon the idea of higher education, she said.
And so college back then seemed a distant and unlikely idea.
But Griffith’s stepsister had introduced her to a federal program called Upward Bound. It places high school students in college dorms during the summer, where they can take classes and participate in workshops on preparing for the SAT and financial literacy. During the school year, students get tutoring and work on what are called individual success plans.
Upward Bound students test the robots they built in their robotics class – evaluating for programming and mechanical issues. Credit: Photo courtesy of the Upward Bound Programs
It’s part of a group of federal programs, known as TRIO, aimed at helping low-income and first-generation students earn a college degree, often becoming the first in their families to do so.
So, thanks to that advice from her stepsister, Kirsty Beckett, who’s now 27 and pursuing a doctorate in psychology, Griffith signed up and found herself in that summer program at Morehead State. Now, Griffith is enrolled at Maysville Community and Technical College, with plans to become an ultrasound technician.
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TRIO, once a group of three programs — giving it a name that stuck — is now the umbrella over eight some dating back to 1965. Together, they serve roughly 870,000 students nationwide a year.
It has worked with millions of students and has bipartisan support in Congress. Some in this part of the Appalachian region of Kentucky, and across the country, worry about students who won’t get the same assistance if President Donald Trump ends federal spending on the program.
Students Zoey Griffith, left, and Aniyah Caldwell, right, say the Upward Bound program has been life-changing for them. Upward Bound is one of eight federal programs under the TRIO umbrella. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report
A White House budget proposal would eliminate spending on TRIO. The document says “access to college is not the obstacle it was for students of limited means” and puts the onus on colleges to recruit and support students.
Advocates note that the programs, which cost roughly $1.2 billion each year, have a proven track record. Students in Upward Bound, for example, are more than twice as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24 than other students from some of the nation’s poorest households, according to the Council for Opportunity in Education. COE is a nonprofit that represents TRIO programs nationwide and advocates for expanded opportunities for first-generation, low-income students.
For the high school class of 2022, 74 percent of Upward Bound students enrolled immediately in college — compared with only 56 percent of high school graduates in the bottom income quartile.
Upward Bound is for high school students, like Griffith. Another TRIO program, Talent Search, helps middle and high school students, without the residential component. One called Student Support Services (SSS) provides tutoring, advising and other assistance to at-risk college students. Another program prepares students for graduate school and doctoral degrees, and yet another trains TRIO staff.
A 2019 study found that after four years of college, students in SSS were 48 percent more likely to complete an associate’s degree or certificate, or transfer to a four-year institution, than a comparable group of students with similar backgrounds and similar levels of high school achievement who were not in the program.
“TRIO has been around for 60 years,” said Kimberly Jones, the president of COE. “We’ve produced millions of college graduates. We know it works.”
Yet Education Secretary Linda McMahon and the White House refer to the programs as a “relic of the past.”
Jones countered that census data shows that “students from the poorest families still earn college degrees at rates far below that of students from the highest-income families,” demonstrating continued need for TRIO.
McMahon is challenging that and pushing for further study of those TRIO success rates. In 2020, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that even though the Education Department collects data on TRIO participants, “the agency has gaps in its evidence on program effectiveness.” The GAO criticized the Education Department for having “outdated” studies on some TRIO programs, and no studies at all for others. Since then, the department has expanded its evaluations of TRIO.
East Main Street in Morehead, Kentucky, just outside of Morehead State’s campus. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report
During a Senate subcommittee hearing in June, McMahon acknowledged “there is some effectiveness of the programs, in many circumstances.”
Still, she said there is not enough research to justify TRIO’s total cost. “That’s a real drawback in these programs,” McMahon said.
Now, she is asking lawmakers to eliminate TRIO spending after this year and has already canceled some previously approved TRIO grants.
“What are we supposed to do, especially here in eastern Kentucky?” asked David Green, a former Upward Bound participant who is now marketing director for a pair of Kentucky hospitals.
Green lives in a region that has some of the nation’s highest rates of unemployment, cancer and opioid addiction. “I mean, these people have big hearts, they want to grow,” he added. Cutting these programs amounts to “stifling us even more than we’re already stifled.”
Green described his experience with TRIO at Morehead State in the mid-1980s as “one of the best things that ever happened to me.”
He grew up in a home without running water in Maysville, a city of about 8,000 people. It was on a TRIO trip to Washington, D.C., he recalled, that he stayed in a hotel for the first time. Green remembers bringing two suitcases so he could pack a pillow, sheets and comforter — unaware the hotel room would have its own.
He met students from other towns and with different backgrounds. Some became lifelong friends. Green learned table manners, the kind of thing often required in business settings. After college, he was so grateful for TRIO that he became one of its tutors, working with the next generation of students.
TRIO’s all-encompassing nature makes it unique among college access programs, said Tom Stritikus, the president of Occidental College, a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles. He was previously president of Fort Lewis College, a public liberal arts school in Colorado with a large Native American student population. At both institutions, Stritikus said, he witnessed the effectiveness of TRIO’s methods, which he described as a “soup to nuts” menu of services for at-risk students trying to be the first in their families to earn degrees.
After participating in the Upward Bound program, David Green has had a successful career, becoming a community leader in his hometown of Maysville, Kentucky. Credit: Michael Vasquez for The Hechinger Report
Jones, of the Council for Opportunity in Education, said she is cautiously optimistic that Congress will continue funding TRIO, despite the Trump administration’s request. The programs serve students in all 50 states. According to the COE, about 34 percent are white, 32 percent are Black, 23 percent are Hispanic, 5 percent are Asian, and 3 percent are Native American. TRIO’s guidelines require that a majority of participants come from families making less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level. For a family of four living in the contiguous United States, that’s a max of $48,225 a year.
In May, Rep. Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican, called TRIO “one of the most effective programs in the federal government,” which, he said, is supported by “many, many members of Congress.”
In June, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia and a former TRIO employee, spoke about its importance to her state. TRIO helps “a student that really needs the extra push, the camaraderie, the community,” she said. “I’ve gone to their graduations, and been their speaker, and it’s really quite delightful to see how far they’ve come, in a short period of time.”
TRIO survived, with its funding intact, when the Senate appropriations committee approved its budget last month. The House is expected to take up its version of the annual appropriations bill for education in early September. Both chambers ultimately have to agree on federal spending, a process that could drag on until December, leaving TRIO’s fate in Congress uncertain.
While lawmakers debate its future, the Trump administration could also delay or halt TRIO funding on its own. Earlier this year, the administration took the unprecedented step of unilaterally canceling about 20 previously approved new and continuing TRIO grants.
At Morehead State, leaders say the university — and the region it serves — need the boost it receives from TRIO: While roughly 38 percent of American adults have earned at least a bachelor’s degree, in Kentucky, that figure is only 16 percent. And, locally, it’s 7 percent, according to Summer Fawn Bryant, the director of TRIO’s Talent Search programs at the university.
Summer Fawn Bryant, center, is director of TRIO’s Talent Search programs at Morehead State University in Kentucky. She stands with former TRIO students Alexandria Daniel, left, and Blake Thayer, right. Credit: Photo courtesy of Summer Fawn Bryant
TRIO works to counter the stigma of attending college that still exists in parts of eastern Kentucky, Bryant said. A student from a humble background who is considering college, she said, might be scolded with the phrase: Don’t get above your raisin’.
“A parent may say it,” Bryant said. “A teacher may say it.”
She added that she’s seen time and again how these programs can turn around the lives of young students facing adversity.
Students like Beth Cockrell, an Upward Bound alum from Pineville, Ky., who said her mom struggled with parenting. “Upward Bound stepped in as that kind of co-parent and helped me decide what my major was going to be.”
Cockrell went on to earn three degrees at Morehead State and has worked as a teacher for the past 19 years. She now works with students at her alma mater and teaches third grade at Conkwright Elementary School, about an hour away.
In a few years, 17-year-old Upward Bound student Isaac Bocook plans to join the teaching ranks too — as a middle school social studies teacher. Bocook said he was indecisive about what to study after high school, but he finally figured it out after attending a career fair at Morehead State’s historic Button Auditorium.
Upward Bound students visit the Great Lake Science Center in Cleveland for the end-of-summer educational trip. Credit: Photo courtesy of the Upward Bound Programs
Bocook lives in Lewis County, with just under 13,000 residents and a single public high school. At Morehead State’s TRIO program, Bocook met teenagers from across the entire region, which he said improved his social skills. TRIO also helped him with all kinds of paperwork on the pathway to adulthood. Filling out financial aid forms. Writing scholarship applications. Crafting a resume.
“I’m just truly grateful to have TRIO, as sort of like a hand to hold,” Bocook said.
His need for guidance is similar to what students at Morgan County High School in West Liberty, Kentucky, experience, said Lori Keeton, the school guidance counselor. The challenge facing these first-generation students, she said, is that “you just simply don’t know what you don’t know.”
As the sole counselor for 550 students, Keeton doesn’t have time to help each student navigate the complex college-application process and said she worries that some of her students will apply to fewer colleges, or no colleges at all, if TRIO disappears.
TRIO’s Talent Search program serves about 100 students at her high school, and roughly another dozen are part of Upward Bound. Each program has a dedicated counselor who visits regularly to guide and assist students.
Sherry Adkins, an eastern Kentucky native who attended TRIO more than 50 years ago and went on to become a registered nurse, said efforts to cut TRIO spending ignore the long-term benefits. “Do you want all of these people that are disadvantaged to continue like that? Where they’re taking money from society? Or do you want to help prepare us to become successful people who pay lots of taxes?”
As Washington considers TRIO’s future, program directors like Bryant, at Morehead State, press forward. She has preserved a text message a former student sent her two years ago to remind her of what’s at stake.
After finishing college, the student was attending a conference on child abuse when a presenter showed a slide that included the quote: “Every child who winds up doing well has had at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive adult.”
“Forever thankful,” the student texted Bryant, “that you were that supportive adult for me.”
Contact editor Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445, securely on Signal at NirviShah.14 or via email at shah@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
A federal judge on Thursday ordered an indefinite halt to new construction at an immigration detention facility that Florida officials have dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” and barred any new detainees from being brought to the site, siding with environmental groups who said the facility is endangering the Everglades and its wildlife.
The decision is a setback for Florida’s Republican-led state government and its aggressive efforts to aid the Trump administration’s hardline immigration agenda, including by deputizing thousands of state police as federal immigration officers.
The order by U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Williams did not require Florida officials to completely cease operations at Alligator Alcatraz, allowing the state to continue using existing structures there to detain immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally. But Williams barred any more detainees from being transferred to the site — dashing plans to expand the detention center.
The ruling says state and federal authorities cannot add any new tents to the site or carry out any paving or excavating, though they can repair existing facilities for safety purposes.
It also directs them to remove temporary fencing, light fixtures and generators from the site within 60 days. Housing facilities can remain in place, the judge said.
Williams wrote that, for decades, “every Florida governor, every Florida senator, and countless local and national political figures, including presidents, have publicly pledged their unequivocal support for the restoration, conservation, and protection of the Everglades. This Order does nothing more than uphold the basic requirements of legislation designed to fulfill those promises.”
The makeshift detention facility — located in what was largely an abandoned airfield — is one of several locations and prisons that Republican-led states have offered the Trump administration so they can be converted into immigration detention centers. Officials in Indiana and Nebraska have also allowed facilities in their states to hold immigrants facing deportation.
Thursday’s ruling stems from a lawsuit filed by the Miccosukee tribe and environmental activists who challenged operations at Alligator Alcatraz on environmental grounds. The Everglades are an ecologically sensitive area that’s home to endangered species, and many Floridians rely on the Everglades as a source of drinking water.
The plaintiffs argued that environmental reviews mandated in federal law should have been completed before the site was set up.
Florida officials have argued Alligator Alcatraz is not subject to those federal environmental requirements because the facility is run by the state. The Trump administration has said it will reimburse Florida for the effort using federal funds.
Williams had paused further construction at Alligator Alcatraz earlier this month, but only for two weeks.
A separate lawsuit over the legal rights of those held at the Everglades facility is also playing out.
That case was partially dismissed by the U.S. District Court Judge Rodolfo Ruiz earlier this week, since the Trump administration had designated an immigration court to hear the claims of those detained at Alligator Alcatraz, one of the main concerns raised by the lawsuit. But Ruiz allowed another part of the case centered on detainees’ right to in-person and confidential legal consultations to proceed, transferring the lawsuit to another federal judge.
CHICAGO (WLS) — Political retribution. That’s what Illinois U.S. Senator Dick Durbin describes as the only possible reason for the unprompted firing of immigration judges in Chicago and across the country.
In a new letter, he is demanding answers from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, saying it’s something judges are protected from by law.
One of those fired immigration judges spoke candidly the ABC7 I-Team.
Former Immigration Judge Carla Espinoza said she was under intense scrutiny from Trump administration officials during a high-profile immigration case just weeks before she was removed from her position.
“There was a lot of pressure regarding the decision that I would render,” she said.
When due process of law and the rule of law is eroded, as I believe is happening in this case, people distrust the process, and there’s a fair reason to do that under the circumstances
Carla Espinoza, former immigration judge
The case involved Ramon Morales-Reyes, who was accused of threatening to kill President Donald Trump, but Wisconsin investigators believe he was framed by a man trying to get him deported by sending threatening letters.
“I’m also concerned that my ruling in that particular case played a significant role in my subsequent termination,” Espinoza said.
Because evidence in the case presented to Espinoza showed Morales-Reyes was framed, she granted him bail, despite public comments from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, saying “Thanks to our ICE officers, this illegal alien who threatened to assassinate President Trump is behind bars.”
“The only fair result was for me to rule in the case efficiently and based on the law, and that’s what I did,” explained Espinoza, who is one of 103 immigration judges summarily fired or who have opted to take a deferred resignation by the Trump administration. Some were notified by mail with no justification included.
Espinoza said she was one of the judges who received no explanation, but she described for the I-Team what she saw as a troubling and illegal pattern in the firings she said are potentially based on race, ethnicity and gender.
“All of the judges that were sworn along me that have a Hispanic last name, such as myself, have been terminated,” Espinoza said. “All of those that have a Middle Eastern or South Asian last name have been terminated. All of those who are openly LGBTQ have been terminated.”
Matt Biggs, president of The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the union representing immigration judges, said this is a broad attack on the rule of law and due process.
“Chicago’s there at the top of the list as one of the one of the courts that’s been targeted,” he added. “Either bring in political hacks that will rule the way that President Trump demands they rule, and or just get to a point where you say, Hey, we don’t have enough judges to hear these cases, so we’re just going to deport people, period.”
Senator Durbin, recently standing side by side with Espinoza and other fired immigration judges, is now demanding answers from Attorney General Bondi. In a recently-released letter, he said in part, “The only plausible explanation for firing immigration judges… is a political one. However, immigration judges have protections from politicized hiring and firing.”
Espinoza is now back in private practice. She worries what about the future of a court system she cares deeply about.
“When due process of law and the rule of law is eroded, as I believe is happening in this case, people distrust the process, and there’s a fair reason to do that under the circumstances,” she said.
Espinoza said she is pursuing all legal avenues to remedy what she calls her illegal firing.
The I-Team reached out to Attorney General Bondi’s office, but has not heard back.
ICE-branded vehicles parked at the U.S. Capitol on August 13. Photo: Andrew Leyden/Getty Images
ICE is now flush with taxpayer cash thanks to the roughly $75 billion in additional funding the agency received from President Trump and the GOP’s new megabill, making Immigration and Customs Enforcement the most well-funded federal law enforcement agency in the country. Now, it is trying to use that money on some brand-new rides.
Government contracting documents made public this week show the agency proposed paying four companies more than $2.4 million: $2.25 million for 25 Chevrolet Tahoes from Hendrick Motorsports in North Carolina and about $174,000 for custom wrapping of Tahoes, Ford Expeditions and other vehicles by three companies, including two in the Washington region. ICE selected the companies without an open bidding process and was required to submit the documents to justify the lack of a full and open competition.
In the documents pertaining to the three vehicle-wrapping companies, the agency describes the need for the wraps as urgent and “essential for officers to provide support and a law enforcement presence in DC.” The agency also mentions “making the District of Columbia one of the safest cities in the world.”
They also want to buy some Ford Mustang GTs, Raptors, and GMC Yukon AT4s as part of a nearly $700,000 expenditure to support recruiting:
ICE wrote in the documents that the Mustangs were “an immediate request by the White House, on Thursday August 7, 2025.” The Mustangs — which are set to cost $121,450 — will aid in recruitment “by serving as a bold, high-performance symbol of innovation, strength and modern federal service,” the documents say.
DHS and ICE have already literally rolled out a few decal-wrapped ICEmobiles in D.C. and used footage of them on the streets in recruitment marketing on social media. The vehicles are emblazoned with gold ICE logos and the phrase Defend the homeland. The custom detailing also includes the words integrity,courage, and endurance on the rear bumper.
Spending millions on flashy vehicles is also sort of off-brand for ICE, since in its actual operations, the agency has become notorious for hiding its identity. Almost every time you see footage of ICE doing anything these days, it’s guys wearing full face masks and ad hoc tactical uniforms traveling around in unmarked vehicles and refusing to identify themselves.
In this sense, featuring the new ICEmobiles in a recruiting pitch is false advertising if recruits will never actually drive or ride in them. It would be more honest to slap terrifying, anonymous, and unaccountable on the bumpers.
The ICE vehicles’ color scheme and detailing also hold more than a passing resemblance to Trump’s crappy private jet:
Photo: Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images
And speaking of planes, ICE wants to spend way, way more to start its own airline, NBC News reports:
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is pushing for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use an influx of funds to buy, own and operate its own fleet of airplanes to deport immigrants, two sources familiar with the discussions told NBC News. Former officials said that ICE owning and maintaining its own planes would be costly but could make it easier for the agency to potentially double the number of people it deports each month.
ICE uses charter planes to deport immigrants and has done so for years. The agency has typically chartered eight to 14 planes at a time for deportation flights, according to Jason Houser, who served as ICE chief of staff from 2022 to 2023. He said that allowed the Biden administration to deport roughly 15,000 immigrants per month on charter flights.
Setting up ICE Air would cost billions:
It can cost $80 million to $400 million to buy a commercial airliner, according to aviation experts at the Pilot Institute, a company that trains pilots. Purchasing 30 passenger jets at that price range could cost $2.4 billion to $12 billion, but it’s unclear if ICE could lower the price per plane by buying a large number of them … Charter companies are also responsible for maintaining the planes and making sure they comply with Federal Aviation Administration rules. If Noem creates the first ICE air fleet, the agency would then be responsible for staffing the planes with pilots, medics and security, as well as maintaining them and ensuring they comply with aviation regulations.
It’s not clear whether this would save ICE money in the near or long term. NBC reports that according to one tracker, the agency chartered more than 1,000 charter flights through the end of July, and those flights typically cost about $25,000 per hour. And while the Trump administration would undoubtedly love to deport 30,000 people a month, it’s not at all clear that it will be able to do so, or for how long.
But even if ICE having its own airline ended up being a huge waste of taxpayer money, it’s hard to imagine Trump caring about that. He loves planes and symbolic branding opportunities almost as much as he loves the idea of turning deportation into America’s new pastime. And he’s already moving forward with the ill-advised idea of converting a jumbo jet Qatar didn’t want into the new Air Force One (which could cost $1 billion), while also trying to reopen Alcatraz (a potential waste of $2 billion). Plus, this week, he and Noem started having workers paint the southern border wall black so it would be hotter to the touch (during the day):
“There is no evidence whatsoever that it’s anything other than very secure,” said Simon.
In 2024, 1.2 million Minnesotans used mail-in ballots to vote, but it has a deep-rooted history in elections.
“This started in the Civil War, believe it or not, where Union soldiers from Minnesota were able to use absentee ballots in Minnesota by mail to get their votes cast in elections,” said Simon.
In addition, some remote Minnesota communities have long been able to choose via voting by mail.
“We have about 150,000 Minnesotans who live in communities where that is the main option for voting, which means they get a ballot automatically mailed to them,” said Simon.
Simon is also at odds with the Trump administration over the release of private voter information. The U.S. Department of Justice is asking for information that includes names, addresses, partial Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, email addresses and phone numbers. The DOJ has not said what it would do with the data.
The Minnesota Secretary of State’s office does provide a more limited set of voter information data to law enforcement, political parties and political campaigns. That information is available to those parties for a copying fee.
Esme Murphy, a reporter and Sunday morning anchor for WCCO-TV, has been a member of the WCCO-TV staff since December 1990. She is also a weekend talk show host on WCCO Radio. Born and raised in New York City, Esme ventured into reporting after graduating from Harvard University.
Trump’s campaign promises, coming to fruition: “Until June, deportations had lagged behind immigration arrests and detentions,” reportsThe New York Times. “By the first week of August, deportations reached nearly 1,500 people per day, according to the latest data, a pace not seen since the Obama administration.”
So far during President Donald Trump’s second term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has deported 180,000 people. The administration aims for 1 million this year, but if current numbers hold, it’ll be closer to 400,000. Stephen Miller, the ardent immigration restrictionist who has Trump’s ear, said on Fox News in late May that ICE would set a goal of a “minimum” of 3,000 arrests a day—far more than what it’s currently logging. But that’s beside the point: The administration seems interested in aggressive benchmarks and willing to use whatever tactics to get there, including compromising on apprehending the largest threats and instead going after people who’ve simply overstayed (a civil offense, not a criminal one).
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In fact, it’s looking very possible that the numbers will be juiced in order for these goals to be met, since the Trump administration enjoys its bragging rights. “The Department of Homeland Security says the total number of deportations so far under Mr. Trump is much higher—at 332,000. That figure includes people who are turned around or quickly deported at U.S. borders by Customs and Border Protection,” per the Times. There’s a fair bit of space between 180,000 and 332,000; expect more creative accounting as enforcement actions heat up further.
Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is pushing for ICE to simply buy its own planes. “ICE uses charter planes to deport immigrants and has done so for years. The agency has typically chartered eight to 14 planes at a time for deportation flights, according to Jason Houser, who served as ICE chief of staff from 2022 to 2023. He said that allowed the Biden administration to deport roughly 15,000 immigrants per month on charter flights,” reports NBC News. To double these numbers, Houser says, you’d need to purchase about 30 planes, at $80–400 million a pop; so purchasing 30 passenger planes could cost anywhere from $2.4 billion to $12 billion. It’s estimated that ICE had chartered a little more than 1,000 flights by the end of July, at $100,000 to $200,000 per flight.
Case in point: Angel Rodrigo Minguela Palacios, a strawberry delivery guy who had overstayed a tourist visa to escape his native Coahuila, a state in northern Mexico where he’d been the victim of stabbings and kidnappings, had been working for the same company for eight years and raising three kids with his girlfriend of eight years when Border Patrol nabbed him, reportsThe Los Angeles Times. He had been dropping off strawberries in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, outside of where California Gov. Gavin Newsom was holding an event—and where Border Patrol has lately taken to assembling.
Border Patrol detained him and threw him in the “B-18” federal detention center in downtown L.A., where he’s been since.
“When asked last week whether the person arrested outside the news conference had a criminal record, a Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency would share a criminal rap sheet when it was available,” reports the L.A. Times. “After four follow-up emails from a reporter, [Spokeswoman Tricia] McLaughlin on Saturday said agents had arrested ‘two illegal aliens’ in the vicinity of Newsom’s news conference—including ‘an alleged Tren de Aragua gang member and narcotics trafficker.’” Reporters asked for clarification as to whether that describes one person or two; then, “when presented with Minguela’s biographical information Monday, the department said he had been arrested because he overstayed his visa—a civil, not criminal, offense.”
It appears Minguela has no criminal record, and was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The kicker: When Minguela handed one of the agents arresting him a “Know Your Rights” card he keeps in his wallet, the agent reportedly said, “This is of no use to me.”
Scenes from New York: Wild. But I do believe it.
“outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and New Republic tend to have higher shares of graduates from elite schools than Fortune 500 CEOs, the US Congress, or federal judges. They have shares of elite school graduates comparable to the Forbes Billionaires list.” pic.twitter.com/B4O3HvCQYh
“SpaceX’s impressive track record, including the construction of the Starlink satellite-internet network and its innovation on reusable rocket technology, has had a deep impact on the space industry and US space policy. It has also made SpaceX among the most highly valued private companies in the world,” reportsBloomberg. But now, Starship—the first fully reusable orbital rocket, which Elon Musk says will be able to bring humans to Mars—is plagued by issues, which Musk is attempting to solve by shuffling around engineering talent internally. “To make Starship work, SpaceX is betting that it can draw resources away from its core rocket program at a time when the company faces weak competition. Some planned launches of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites on Falcon 9 rockets would potentially be pushed from the end of this year to early 2026 because of the surge of Falcon engineers working on Starship, the people familiar with the company’s planning said.”
“Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard began a fresh strike Tuesday against national security officials whom President Donald Trump deems political enemies, announcing she had revoked the clearances of 37 people, including several currently serving U.S. intelligence officials,” reportsThe Washington Post. Many of the officials who had their clearances revoked were involved in the 2016 Russian interference investigations and the Trump impeachment.
Really useful chart to help you make sense of how tariffs will raise prices:
Useful chart projecting how major goods categories will face sustained price increases due to rising US tariffs. Lotta manufacturing inputs in here: pic.twitter.com/7I8IPqSqDT
Relatedly: “Automakers can’t eat the cost of tariffs forever, and September is a convenient time to adjust prices, as the 2026 models begin arriving in showrooms,” reportsAxios. Interestingly, “if companies try to offset tariffs on imported cars with higher prices, they’ll need to make adjustments across their portfolio to maintain reasonable gaps between vehicle segments. [General Motors’] entry-level Chevrolet Trax, for example, is imported from South Korea, now subject to a 15% tariff. But if it raised the price of the Trax, it might end up costing about the same as a Chevy Equinox, currently made in Mexico but moving to the U.S. in 2027.” Industrywide, forecasters predict a roughly 6 percent increase in prices next year, best-case scenario.
Breaking the law:
An Israeli dance prof is suing UC Berekley for allegedly discriminating against her on the basis of her nationality. Having taught at the dance department before, she was encouraged in the summer 2023 to apply for renewal.
“A former top City Hall advisor and current campaign confidante to Mayor Eric Adams attempted to give money to a reporter from THE CITY following a campaign event in Harlem Wednesday,” reportsThe City. “The failed payoff—a wad of cash in a red envelope stuffed inside an opened bag of Herr’s Sour Cream & Onion ripple potato chips—was made by Winnie Greco, a longtime Adams ally who resigned last year from her position as the mayor’s liaison to the Asian community after she was targeted in multiple investigations.”
This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.
There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation – even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this new American Public Media podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences – children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.
Episode 14: The Cuts
Education research is at a turning point in the United States. The Trump administration is slashing government funding for science and dismantling the Department of Education. We look at what the cuts mean for the science of reading — and the effort to get that science into schools.
This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called DC protesters who heckled the pair “stupid white hippies.”
Top Trump administration officials on Wednesday thanked troops deployed in the nation’s capital and blasted demonstrators opposed to the aggressive anti-crime efforts as “stupid white hippies.”
At Union Station, Washington’s central train hub, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, accompanied by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, shook hands with National Guard soldiers at a Shake Shack restaurant.
“You’re doing a hell of a job,” Vance said, as demonstrators drowned him out with jeers and shouts of “Free DC!” He urged troops to ignore the “bunch of crazy protesters,” while Miller dismissed them as “stupid white hippies.”
The unfamiliar scene – the country’s vice president and top defense official visiting troops deployed not to a war zone but to an American city’s tourist-filled transit hub – underscored the extraordinary nature of the Trump administration’s crackdown in the Democratic-led District of Columbia.
Thousands of Guard soldiers and federal agents have been deployed to the city over the objections of its elected leaders to combat what Trump says is a violent crime wave.
City officials have rejected that assertion, pointing to federal and city statistics that show violent crime has declined significantly since a spike in 2023.
The president has said, without providing evidence, that the crime data is fraudulent. The Justice Department has opened an investigation into whether the numbers were manipulated, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.
Rifle, shotgun possession
Amid the crackdown, federal prosecutors in the District have been told to stop seeking felony charges against people who violate a local law prohibiting individuals from carrying rifles or shotguns in the nation’s capital.
The decision by District of Columbia US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, which was first reported by the Washington Post, represents a break from the office’s prior policy.
In a statement, Pirro said prosecutors will still be able to charge people with other illegal firearms crimes, such as a convicted felon found in possession of a gun.
“We will continue to seize all illegal and unlicensed firearms,” she said.
The White House has touted the number of firearms seized by law enforcement since Trump began surging federal agents and troops into the city. In a social media post on Wednesday, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said the operation had taken 76 illegal guns off the streets and resulted in more than 550 arrests, an average of 42 per day.
The city’s Metropolitan Police Department arrested an average of 61 adults and juveniles per day in 2024, according to city statistics. The Trump administration has not specified whether the arrest totals it has cited include those made by MPD officers or only consist of those made by federal agents.
A DC code bars anyone from carrying a rifle or shotgun, with narrow exceptions. In her statement, Pirro, a close Trump ally, argued that the law violates two US Supreme Court decisions expanding gun rights.
In 2008, the court struck down a separate DC law banning handguns and ruled that individuals have the right to keep firearms in their homes for self-defense. In 2022, the court ruled that any gun-control law must be rooted in the country’s historical traditions to be valid.
Unlike US attorneys in all 50 states, who only prosecute federal offenses, the US attorney in Washington prosecutes local crimes as well.
DC crime rates have stayed mostly the same as they were a year ago, according to the police department’s weekly statistics.
As of Tuesday, the city’s overall crime rate is down 7% year over year, the same percentage as before the crackdown. DC has also experienced the same declines in violent crime and property crime as it did beforehand, according to the data.
Increased immigration enforcement in Sacramento is causing fear among Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, with many worried about deportation and its impact on their daily lives. Sydney Fang from AAPI FORCE-EF said, “We’re feeling the impacts of ICE terror, and that’s because all of our families all migrate to the United States, to California, under many different circumstances.”Asian Americans make up about 19% of Sacramento County’s population, and this year marks 50 years since Southeast Asian refugees first arrived in the U.S. Many now live in fear, worried that deportation could come without warning. Fang said, “We are getting stopped at the border and getting detained at the border. We’re getting detained in interactions with law enforcement and ICE check-ins.”According to a report by the Asian American and Pacific Islander Policy Initiative, ICE arrests of Asians tripled from 2024 to 2025, sparking alarm across the country, including in Sacramento. Fang added, “Our families are afraid to go to work, afraid to go to school, afraid to even go to their health appointments. People are canceling their doctor visits.”Fang added that refugees and Asian American and Pacific Islander immigrants are being targeted with less visible, smaller raids in garment and fashion wholesale shops, shopping centers, massage parlors, nail salons, nightclubs, restaurants and grocery stores across California. In the Sacramento region, advocates say, the arrests have been more targeted.Sacramento City Council Member Mai Vang highlighted the challenges faced by the Asian American community, noting that issues impacting communities of color and immigrants often overlook Asian Americans. “Oftentimes when there are issues that are impacting our communities of color, our immigrant community, you often don’t hear the harm or the issues impacting our Asian-American community, and a large part of that has to do with the model minority myth that Asian-Americans, immigrant and refugee communities are doing well,” Vang said. In response to the crackdown, more than 100 people gathered on Tuesday night for a candlelight vigil, showing solidarity and resistance. Vang, whose family came to the U.S. as Hmong refugees, said, “This fight is really personal for me as a daughter of Hmong refugees. I have family and loved ones who came here as refugees and got their Green Card revoked because of some poor decisions they made when they were very young.”In a climate of fear, communities are turning to trusted messengers for critical information rather than relying on social media or officials. “Recently, our office worked to actually host a Know Your Rights workshop. We didn’t put that on social media. We didn’t post it up. What we did was share that with our elders, share that with our community, and we had over 100 people show up without it being marketed through the social media mediums,” Vang said.The AAPI community has relaunched the “Pardon Refugees” campaign to fight for pardons for Southeast Asian refugees and immigrants facing deportation. A rally and press conference will be held tomorrow at L and 14th streets in downtown Sacramento.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. —
Increased immigration enforcement in Sacramento is causing fear among Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, with many worried about deportation and its impact on their daily lives.
Sydney Fang from AAPI FORCE-EF said, “We’re feeling the impacts of ICE terror, and that’s because all of our families all migrate to the United States, to California, under many different circumstances.”
Fang said, “We are getting stopped at the border and getting detained at the border. We’re getting detained in interactions with law enforcement and ICE check-ins.”
According to a report by the Asian American and Pacific Islander Policy Initiative, ICE arrests of Asians tripled from 2024 to 2025, sparking alarm across the country, including in Sacramento. Fang added, “Our families are afraid to go to work, afraid to go to school, afraid to even go to their health appointments. People are canceling their doctor visits.”
Fang added that refugees and Asian American and Pacific Islander immigrants are being targeted with less visible, smaller raids in garment and fashion wholesale shops, shopping centers, massage parlors, nail salons, nightclubs, restaurants and grocery stores across California. In the Sacramento region, advocates say, the arrests have been more targeted.
Sacramento City Council Member Mai Vang highlighted the challenges faced by the Asian American community, noting that issues impacting communities of color and immigrants often overlook Asian Americans.
“Oftentimes when there are issues that are impacting our communities of color, our immigrant community, you often don’t hear the harm or the issues impacting our Asian-American community, and a large part of that has to do with the model minority myth that Asian-Americans, immigrant and refugee communities are doing well,” Vang said.
In response to the crackdown, more than 100 people gathered on Tuesday night for a candlelight vigil, showing solidarity and resistance.
Vang, whose family came to the U.S. as Hmong refugees, said, “This fight is really personal for me as a daughter of Hmong refugees. I have family and loved ones who came here as refugees and got their Green Card revoked because of some poor decisions they made when they were very young.”
In a climate of fear, communities are turning to trusted messengers for critical information rather than relying on social media or officials.
“Recently, our office worked to actually host a Know Your Rights workshop. We didn’t put that on social media. We didn’t post it up. What we did was share that with our elders, share that with our community, and we had over 100 people show up without it being marketed through the social media mediums,” Vang said.
The AAPI community has relaunched the “Pardon Refugees” campaign to fight for pardons for Southeast Asian refugees and immigrants facing deportation. A rally and press conference will be held tomorrow at L and 14th streets in downtown Sacramento.
The 18-year-old from Houston was going to start college in the fall at the University of Texas at Tyler, where she had been awarded $10,000 a year in scholarships. That, she hoped, would set her up for her dream: a Ph.D. in chemistry, followed by a career as a professor or researcher.
“And then the change to in-state tuition happened, and that’s when I knew for sure that I had to pivot,” said Ximena, who was born in Mexico but attended schools stateside since kindergarten. (The Hechinger Report is referring to her by only her first name because she fears retaliation for her immigration status.)
In June, the Texas attorney general’s office and the Trump administration worked together to end the provisions in a state law that had offered thousands of undocumented students like her lower in-state tuition rates at Texas public colleges. State and federal officials successfully argued in court that the long-standing policy discriminated against U.S. citizens from other states who paid a higher rate. That rationale has now been replicated in similar lawsuits against Kentucky, Oklahoma and Minnesota — part of a broader offensive against immigrants’ access to public education.
At UT Tyler, in-state tuition and fees for the upcoming academic year total $9,736, compared to more than $25,000 for out-of-state students. Ximena and her family couldn’t afford the higher tuition bill, so she withdrew. Instead, she enrolled at Houston Community College, where out-of-state costs are $227 per semester hour, nearly three times the in-district rate. The school offers only basic college-level chemistry classes, so to set herself up for a doctorate or original research, Ximena will still need to find a way to pay for a four-year university down the line.
Her predicament is exactly what state lawmakers from both political parties had hoped to avoid when they passed the Texas Dream Act, 2001 legislation that not only opened doors to higher education for undocumented students but was also meant to bolster Texas’s economy and its workforce long-term. With that law, Texas became the first of more than two dozen states to implement in-state tuition for undocumented students, and for nearly 24 years, the landmark policy remained intact. Conservative lawmakers repeatedly proposed to repeal it, but despite years of single-party control in the state legislature, not enough Republicans embraced repeal even as recently as this spring, days before the Texas attorney general’s office and the federal Department of Justice moved to end it.
Now, as the fall semester approaches, immigrant students are weighing whether to disenroll from their courses or await clarity on how the consent agreement entered into by the state and DOJ affects them.
Immigration advocates are worried that Texas colleges and universities are boxing out potential attendees who are lawfully present and still qualify for in-state tuition despite the court ruling — including recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, asylum applicants and Temporary Protected Status holders — because university personnel lack immigration expertise and haven’t been given clear guidelines on exactly who needs to pay the higher tuition rate.
At Austin Community College, which serves an area as large as Connecticut, members of the board of trustees are unsure how to accurately implement the ruling. As they await answers, they’ve so far decided against sending letters asking their students for sensitive information in order to determine tuition rates.
“This confusion will inevitably harm students because what we find is that in the absence of information and in the presence of fear and anxiety, students will opt to not continue higher education,” said Manuel Gonzalez, vice chair of the ACC board of trustees.
A billboard promoting Austin Community College in Spanish sits on a highway that leads to Lockhart, Texas. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Hechinger Report
Policy experts, meanwhile, warn that Texas’s workforce could suffer as talented young people, many of whom have spent their entire education in the state’s public school system, will no longer be able to afford the associate’s and bachelor’s degrees that would allow them to pursue careers that would help propel their local economies. Under the Texas Dream Act, beneficiaries were required to commit to applying for lawful permanent residence as soon as possible, giving them the opportunity to hold down jobs related to their degrees. Without resident status, it’s likely they’ll still work — just more in lower-paying, under-the-radar jobs.
“It’s so short-sighted in terms of the welfare of the state of Texas,”said Barbara Hines, a former law school professor who helped legislators craft the Texas Dream Act.
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For retired Army National Guard Maj. Gen. Rick Noriega, a Democrat who served in the Texas Legislature at the time, that reality hit close to home when he learned of a young yard worker in his district who wanted to enroll at the local community college for aviation mechanics but couldn’t afford out-of-state tuition.
Noriega called the school chancellor’s office, which was able to provide funding for the student to attend. But that experience led him to wonder: How many more kids in his district were running up against the same barriers to higher education?
So he worked with a sociologist to poll students at local high schools about the problem, which turned out to be widespread. And Noriega’s district wasn’t an outlier. In a state that has long had one of the nation’s largest unauthorized immigrant populations, politicians across the partisan divide knew affected constituents, friends or family members and wanted to help. Once Noriega decided to propose legislation, a Republican, Fred Hill, asked to serve as a joint author on the bill.
To proponents of the Texas Dream Act, the best argument in support of in-state tuition for undocumented students was an economic one. After the state had already invested in these students during K-12 public schooling, it made sense to continue developing them so they could eventually help meet Texas’ workforce needs.
“We’d spent all this money on these kids, and they’d done everything that we asked them to do — in many instances superstars and valedictorians and the like — and then they hit this wall, which was higher education that was cost prohibitive,” said Noriega.
The legislation easily passed the Texas House of Representatives, which was Democratic-controlled at the time, but the Republican-led Senate was less accommodating.
“I couldn’t even get a hearing,’” said Leticia Van de Putte, the then-state senator who sponsored the legislation in her chamber.
To persuade her Republican colleagues, she added several restrictions, including requiring undocumented students to live in Texas for three years before finishing high school or receiving a GED. (Three years was estimated as the average time it would take a family to pay enough in state taxes to make up the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition.) She also included the clause mandating that undocumented students who accessed in-state tuition sign an affidavit pledging to pursue green cards as soon as they were able.
Van de Putte also turned to Texas business groups to hammer home the economic case for the bill. And she convinced the business community to pay for buses to bring Latino evangelical conservative pastors from Dallas, San Antonio, Houston and other areas of the state to Austin, so they could knock on doors in support of the legislation and pray with Republican senators and their staff.
After that, the Texas Dream Act overwhelmingly passed the state Senate in May 2001, and then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, signed it into law the following month.
Yet by 2007, even as immigrant rights advocates, faith-based groups and business associations formed a coalition to defend immigrants against harmful state policies, the Texas legislature was starting to introduce a wave of generally anti-immigrant proposals. In 2010, polling suggested Texans overwhelmingly opposed allowing undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates.
By 2012, a new slew of right-wing politicians was elected to office, many philosophically opposed to the law — and loud about it. Perry’s defense of the policy had come back to haunt him during the 2012 Republican presidential primary, when his campaign was dogged by criticism after he told opponents of tuition equity during a debate, “I don’t think you have a heart.”
Still, none of the many bills introduced over the years to repeal the Texas Dream Act were successful. And even Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican border hawk, at times equivocated on the policy, with his spokesperson saying in 2013 that Abbott believed “the objective” of in-state tuition regardless of immigration status was “noble.”
Legislative observers say that some Republicans in the state continue to support the policy. “It’s a bipartisan issue. There are Republicans in support of in-state tuition,” said Luis Figueroa, senior director of legislative affairs at the public policy research and advocacy nonprofit Every Texan. “They cannot publicly state it.”
Meanwhile, as the topic became more politically charged in Texas, the Texas Dream Act ended up amplifying a larger conversation that eventually led to the creation of DACA, the Obama-era program that has given some undocumented immigrants access to deportation protections and work permits.
Even before DACA, many immigrants worked, and those who remain undocumented often still do, either as independent contractors for employers that turn a blind eye to their immigration status or by starting their own businesses. A study from May 2020 found that unauthorized residents make up 8.2 percent of the state’s workforce, and for every dollar spent toward public services for them, the state of Texas recouped $1.21 in revenue.
But without the immediate legal permission to work, undocumented college graduates who had benefited from the Texas Dream Act found themselves limited despite their degrees. As the fight for tuition equity spread to other states, so did the fight for a legal solution to support the students it benefited.
When these young people — affectionately dubbed Dreamers — took center stage to more publicly advocate for themselves, their plight proved sympathetic. By 2017, the same year Trump began his first term, polling had flipped to show a plurality of Texans in support of in-state tuition for undocumented students. More recently, research has indicated time and time again that Americans support a pathway to legal status for undocumented residents brought to the U.S. as children.
But arguments against in-state tuition regardless of immigration status also grew in popularity: Critics contended that the policy is unfair to U.S. citizens from other states who have to pay higher rates, or that undocumented students are taking spots at competitive schools that could be filled by documented Americans.
The DOJ leaned on similar rhetoric in the lawsuit that killed tuition equity in Texas, saying the state law is superseded by 1996 federal legislation banning undocumented immigrants from getting in-state tuition based on residency. That argument has become a template as the Trump administration has sued to dismantle other states’ in-state tuition policies for undocumented residents.
In Kentucky, state Attorney General Russell Coleman, a Republican, has followed in Texas’ footsteps, recommending that the state council overseeing higher education withdraw its regulation allowing for access to in-state tuition instead of fighting to defend it in court.
At the same time, the Trump administration has found other ways to cut back on higher education opportunities for undocumented students, rescinding a policy that had helped them participate in career, technical and adult education programs and investigating universities for offering them scholarships.
Back in Texas, the sudden policy change regarding in-state tuition is causing chaos. Even the state’s two largest universities, Texas A&M and the University of Texas, are using different guidelines to decide which students must pay out-of-state rates.
Clouds fill the sky behind the tower at the University of Texas. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Washington Post via Getty Images
“Universities, I think, are the ones that are put in this really difficult position,” Figueroa said. “They are not immigration experts. They’ve received very little guidance about how to interpret the consent decree.”
Amid so much confusion, Figueroa predicted, future lawsuits will likely crop up. Already, affected students and organizations have filed motions in court seeking to belatedly defend the Texas Dream Act against the DOJ.
In the meantime, young scholars are facing difficult choices. One student, who asked to remain anonymous because of her undocumented immigration status, was scrolling through the news on her phone before bed when she saw a headline about the outcome of the DOJ court case.
“I burst in tears because, you know, as someone who’s been fighting to get ahead in their education, right now that I’m in higher education, it’s been a complete blessing,” she said. “So the first thing that I just thought of is ‘What am I going to do now? Where is my future heading?’ The plans that I have had going for me, are they going to have to come to a complete halt?’”
The young woman, who has lived in San Antonio since she was 9 months old, had enrolled in six courses for the fall at Texas A&M-San Antonio and wasn’t sure whether to drop them. It would be her final semester before earning her psychology and sociology degrees, but she couldn’t fathom paying for out-of-state tuition.
“I’m in the unknown,” she said, like “many students in this moment.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
In a letter sent to Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Tuesday, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chair James Comer (R-KY) requested a staff briefing and all communications and records about federal funding for the high-speed rail project and any analysis over the train’s viability.
“The Authority’s apparent repeated use of misleading ridership projections, despite longstanding warnings from experts, raises serious questions about whether funds were allocated under false pretenses,” Comer wrote.
Comer’s letter copied Congressman Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee who has also voiced skepticism about the project. Garcia, whose districts represent communities in Southern California, was not immediately available for comment.
An authority spokesperson called the House committee’s investigation “another baseless attempt to manufacture controversy around America’s largest and most complex infrastructure project,” and added that the project’s chief executive Ian Choudri previously addressed the claims and called them “cherrypicked and out-of-date, and therefore misleading.”
Last month, the Trump administration pulled $4 billion in federal funding from the project meant for construction in the Central Valley. After a months-long review, prompted by calls from Republican lawmakers, the administration found “no viable path” forward for the fast train, which is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. The administration also questioned whether the authority’s projected ridership counts were intentionally misrepresented.
California leaders called the move “illegal” and sued the Trump administration for declaratory and injunctive relief. Gov. Gavin Newsom said it was “a political stunt” and a “heartless attack on the Central Valley.”
The bullet train was proposed decades ago as a way to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco in less than three hours by 2020. While the entire line has cleared environmental reviews, no stretch of the route has been completed. Construction has been limited to the Central Valley, where authority leaders have said a segment between Merced and Bakersfield will open by 2033. The project is also about $100 billion over its original budget of $33 billion.
Even before the White House pulled federal funding, authority leaders and advisers repeatedly raised concerns over the project’s long-term financial sustainability.
Roughly $13 billion has been spent so far — the bulk of which was supplied by the state, which has proposed $1 billion per year towards the project. But Choudri, who started at the authority last year, has said the project needs to find new sources of funding and has turned focus toward establishing public-private partnerships to supplement costs.
President Donald Trump’s tariffs are bad. But even if one were opposed to the tariffs on principle, they might be seduced by the revenue they generate and the potential of that revenue to make some progress toward reducing the deficit. The tariffs are expected to collect $300 billion annually—nearly matching the amount collected by the corporate income tax ($350 billion). It’s not a small amount of money. Trump has stated that his goal is to eliminate income taxes and replace them with tariff revenue.
Last month, Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) proposed tariff rebate checks, similar to the stimulus checks that were handed out during the COVID-19 pandemic, in an amount equal to the revenue that is to be collected—or possibly more. Hawley’s legislation proposes sending at least $600 to eligible adults and dependent children, and Trump has voiced support for sending money to “people of a certain income level,” who are most likely to spend that money quickly rather than save or invest it. This is a massively inflationary impulse, much like what we saw during the pandemic, and it will expand the deficit even more. This is a bad idea layered on top of bad ideas, and it will make the tax code even more progressive by effectively creating a negative income tax for those in the bottom tax brackets while fueling inflation.
We are currently running a budget deficit of close to $2 trillion, which Trump has made practically no effort to reduce by cutting expenses. He pledges instead to cut the deficit by increasing revenue from tariffs but plans to hand out the windfall in the form of rebate checks. Our last experience with a give-back program like this was a quarter-century ago.
The government was running a fairly large budget surplus in FY 2000—totaling over $236 billion—and lawmakers made impassioned arguments about how to spend it: Some wanted new domestic programs, others pressed for tax cuts, while then–Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan urged paying down the debt and retiring Treasury bonds. When George W. Bush became president shortly thereafter, he proposed immediate tax relief in the form of $300 and $600 rebate checks to singles and married couples, respectively, a key piece of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001.
Bush prevailed, and roughly 95 million households received checks. The surplus evaporated, federal spending surged on defense and homeland security following 9/11 later that year, and that was the end of the surplus—forever.
It is possible that the tariff rebate checks will not be inflationary. No one knows all the variables that cause inflation. Milton Friedman famously argued that it was “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” but inflation is also a psychological phenomenon—when people believe prices will rise, they often act in ways that make it happen. Trump is playing with fire, especially as he is in search of a Fed chairman who will be amenable to large interest rate cuts. The 2021–22 experience is instructive: a combination of pandemic-era stimulus checks, ultralow interest rates, and supply-chain bottlenecks helped fuel the fastest inflation in four decades, peaking at over 9 percent in mid-2022. We could find ourselves in an environment where Trump successfully creates inflation with the rebate checks and then has a captive Federal Reserve that is powerless to do anything about it.
The Bush rebate checks totaled about $38 billion. Trump’s proposal could amount to hundreds of billions. Still, the inflationary effect would depend partly on whether households spend the checks quickly or save them.
One of the criticisms of Bush’s rebate checks was that they were unevenly applied and did not go to the people who mainly paid the taxes—they went to everyone, which is a very populist approach. The argument could be made that, by aiming these proposed rebate checks specifically at lower-income households, they will benefit those who shoulder the hidden cost of tariffs, since tariffs disproportionately raise the price of basic consumer goods such as clothing, food, and household items, which make up a larger share of lower-income budgets.
It’s possible that one of the ulterior motives of the tariffs is flattening the tax code. This would shift the tax burden to people of all income levels, rather than the current income tax, which burdens half of the population while the other half pays very little or nothing. That is not something that has been articulated by the administration, however, and returning all the collected revenue seems counterproductive.
Trump has also proposed eliminating income taxes entirely for people making less than $200,000 a year, which would result in only the top 5 percent of taxpayers paying any income taxes at all. Trump is trending toward policies that would have only the wealthy pay taxes—an idea shared by the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.). Fiscal conservatives, however, voted for Trump in droves on his promises to reduce the deficit and lower taxes, and they are having buyer’s remorse. We shouldn’t have tariffs, and to the extent that we have income taxes at all, they should be flat and fair. Instead, we are headed toward a hyperprogressive tax code, accompanied by growth-killing tariffs.
Last month, James Boasberg, a seasoned federal judge, and Emil Bove III, a Justice Department lawyer, became foils in a parable about the rule of law during Donald Trump’s second term. On July 28th, the Department of Justice announced a misconduct complaint against Boasberg, whom it accused of harboring a personal bias against the President. The next day, Bove, whom Trump had nominated to a judgeship on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, was confirmed by Republicans in the Senate. Boasberg had “undermined the integrity of the judiciary, and we will not stand for that,” Pam Bondi, Trump’s Attorney General, wrote on X. By contrast, Bove, she said, “will be an outstanding judge.”
Beyond the fact that they’re both former prosecutors, and bald, the two men would appear to have very little in common. Boasberg, who is in his early sixties, was appointed to judgeships by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The Senate confirmed him to his current post by a vote of ninety-six to zero. In 2014, John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, named Boasberg to a seven-year term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, giving him high-level security clearance. “You knew when you went into court with him, that he was going to follow the rules,” a former Justice Department lawyer told CNN. “He was very predictable, because he followed the law.”
Bove, who is forty-four, worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York from 2012 to 2021, but his principal credential came two years later: after Donald Trump faced thirty-four counts of falsifying business records in Manhattan, Bove joined his criminal-defense team. (Trump was convicted on all counts and has appealed the result.) When Trump reëntered the White House, Bove was rewarded with a top job at the Justice Department, where he immediately distinguished himself as an enforcer. This past winter, when three prosecutors in the Southern District of New York resigned over the Administration’s ultimately successful push to dismiss a corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams, Bove was at the center of the controversy. The Justice Department had ordered prosecutors to drop the charges, evidently so that Adams would be able to enforce the Administration’s immigration policies. According to one of the prosecutors, Bove chastised them for taking notes at a key meeting, at the end of which he “directed the collection of those notes.” (Bove denies any quid-pro-quo deal, claiming that he ended Adams’s prosecution because it was politically motivated—Adams maintains that he engaged in no wrongdoing—and that he restricted note-taking to prevent leaks.)
The high contrast in which Boasberg and Bove currently stand is the direct result of a case that, by an accident of timing and circumstance, bound their political fates together. On Friday, March 14th, Trump signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to authorize the removal, in secret, of more than two hundred Venezuelan men to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. As a matter of federal policy, this was a radical move. With shoddy evidence, none of which the men were allowed to contest, the government accused them of belonging to a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua. Based on what Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had reportedly told them during their detention, the men thought that they were being deported to Venezuela. The majority of them hadn’t committed any crimes, and some actually had legal status in the U.S. Among those who didn’t, many had pending cases before immigration judges.
Shortly before Trump signed the proclamation, a group of D.O.J. lawyers met to discuss what would happen if a judge issued an order to halt the removals. One of them was Bove. Another was Erez Reuveni, a veteran government litigator freshly promoted to the job of acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation. According to Reuveni, who later filed a whistle-blower complaint, Bove told the lawyers that, once Trump signed the proclamation, one or more airplanes would set off for El Salvador that weekend “no matter what,” and he went on to say that if a judge tried to enjoin the flights, the department would “need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you.’ ” (Bove denies this.)
Within hours of the proclamation, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of five Venezuelan men in federal immigration custody, to block removal flights conducted under the Alien Enemies Act. On the morning of March 15th, at around eight, Boasberg learned that he’d been assigned the case at random. When he first “reached out to locate Government counsel,” Boasberg wrote, in a subsequent opinion, he didn’t receive a response. In the meantime, the plaintiffs’ lawyers reported that at least one of their clients was sitting in an airplane that could take off at any moment. Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order, just before 10 A.M. He said he had to “freeze in place the status quo until a hearing could be held.”
The hearing began at five o’clock that evening, a little more than an hour after Trump’s proclamation was posted publicly. The government’s lawyers were adamant that Boasberg should not certify a broader class—beyond the five plaintiffs—for protection against removal under the Alien Enemies Act. When Boasberg asked whether any flights might leave “in the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours,” Drew Ensign, the government lawyer, replied, “I don’t know the answer to that question.” According to Reuveni, however, Ensign had attended the meeting the previous day at which Bove had said that removal flights would be departing over the weekend.
Eventually, Boasberg called a forty-minute adjournment and instructed Ensign to get more information from the Department of Homeland Security. During that time, two planes, each carrying about eighty detainees, left Texas for Honduras. They were in transit when the hearing reconvened, but Ensign said that he had learned nothing further. At around six-forty-five, Boasberg issued a verbal order blocking the government from removing anyone under the auspices of the Alien Enemies Act. “This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately,” he said.
Reuveni had been listening to the live feed of the hearing. He immediately sent several e-mails to officials at the Departments of Homeland Security and State laying out, explicitly, what Boasberg had said. “Sorry for all the emails,” he wrote in one, at 6:48 P.M. “The judge specifically ordered us not to remove anyone in the class, and to return anyone in the air.” Reuveni was ignored, as was Boasberg. At 7:36 P.M., a third plane left Texas for Honduras. Between eleven-thirty-nine and twelve-thirty-nine that night, all three flights then flew from Honduras to El Salvador, carrying more than two-hundred Venezuelans, a group of Salvadorans, and one Nicaraguan.
On March 28th, the Trump Administration filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court, asking it to lift Boasberg’s injunction. Ten days later, by a vote of 5–4, the Justices ruled that the plaintiffs in the case, known as J.G.G. v. Trump, had chosen both the wrong venue and the wrong principle on which to file suit. Rather than claim a breach in administrative procedure before a district court in Washington, as the plaintiffs had done, the Court found that they should have filed petitions for habeas corpus in Texas, where the men were held prior to their removal. Nevertheless, the ruling was unequivocal on one point: anyone detained under the Alien Enemies Act had to be given notice before they were removed and an opportunity to contest their deportation.
The outcome effectively undid Boasberg’s injunction against the removals on March 15th, but it reinforced certain aspects of his ruling. “The Court effectively said that the Constitution flatly prohibits the Government from doing exactly what it did that Saturday, when it secretly loaded people onto planes, kept many of them in the dark about their destination, and raced to spirit them away before they could invoke their due-process rights,” Boasberg wrote in an opinion that he issued on April 16th. In that opinion, he also found that there is “probable cause” to believe that the Trump Administration could be held in contempt of court for having disregarded his initial order.
By that time, the government had arranged for two more planes to transport detainees to the same Salvadoran prison. The Trump Administration was no longer invoking the Alien Enemies Act, but it didn’t share the detainees’ names; there was no official record. On March 31st, the State Department announced that it had sent seventeen more migrants to the prison. Ten were Salvadorans, the rest Venezuelans. Two weeks later, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, posted on X, “Last night, another 10 criminals from the MS-13 and Tren de Aragua Foreign Terrorist Organizations arrived in El Salvador.”
When Boasberg wrote that there was “probable cause” to believe the government had ignored his orders, he was, in effect, initiating a more sustained investigation into what had happened on March 15th. But this wasn’t the only case in which Bove seemed to be at odds with a judge’s instructions. The Department of Homeland Security was planning to deport people apprehended on U.S. soil to third countries, often without adequate procedures or legal justifications. Several such cases prompted a separate lawsuit before a different judge about whether the government, in accordance with the Convention Against Torture, had properly determined that the migrants would not be tortured after their removal. After that judge temporarily blocked those removals, Reuveni raised questions within the Justice Department about whether the Administration was, once again, ignoring a judge’s injunction. On April 1st, according to Reuveni, he received a call from an acting Assistant Attorney General who told him that “Bove was very unhappy that Mr. Reuveni had contacted counsel at various agencies to ascertain whether DOJ had violated a court order.” Reuveni was instructed to stop sending e-mails and to restrict his future communications to phone calls.
A Yosemite National Park ranger was fired after hanging a pride flag from El Capitan while some park visitors could face prosecution under protest restrictions that have been tightened under President Donald Trump.Shannon “SJ” Joslin, a ranger and biologist who studies bats, said they hung a 66-foot wide transgender pride flag on the famous climbing wall that looms over the California park’s main thoroughfare for about two hours on May 20 before taking it down voluntarily. A termination letter they received last week accused Joslin of “failing to demonstrate acceptable conduct” in their capacity as a biologist and cited the May incident.“I was really hurting because there were a lot of policies coming from the current administration that target trans people, and I’m nonbinary,” Joslin, 35, told The Associated Press, adding that hanging the flag was their way of saying, “We’re all safe in national parks.”Joslin said their firing sends the opposite message: “If you’re a federal worker and you have any kind of identity that doesn’t agree with this current administration, then you must be silent, or you will be eliminated.”Park officials on Tuesday said they were working with the U.S. Justice Department to pursue visitors and workers who violated restrictions on demonstrations at the park that had more than 4 million visitors last year.The agencies “are pursuing administrative action against several Yosemite National Park employees and possible criminal charges against several park visitors who are alleged to have violated federal laws and regulations related to demonstrations,” National Park Service spokesperson Rachel Pawlitz said.Joslin said a group of seven climbers including two other park rangers hung the flag. The other rangers are on administrative leave pending an investigation, Joslin said.Flags have long been flown from El Capitan without consequences, said Joanna Citron Day, a former federal attorney who is now with the advocacy group Public Employees For Environmental Responsibility. She said the group is representing Joslin, but there is no pending legal case.On May 21, a day after the flag display, Acting Superintendent Ray McPadden signed a rule prohibiting people from hanging banners, flags or signs larger than 15 square feet in park areas designated as “wilderness” or “potential wilderness.” That covers 94% of the park, according to Yosemite’s website.Park officials said the new restriction was needed to preserve Yosemite’s wilderness and protect climbers.”We take the protection of the park’s resources and the experience of our visitors very seriously, and will not tolerate violations of laws and regulations that impact those resources and experiences,” Pawlitz said.It followed a widely publicized instance in February of demonstrators hanging an upside down American flag on El Capitan to protest the firing of National Park Service employees by the Trump administration.Among the climbers who helped hang the transgender flag was Pattie Gonia, an environmentalist and drag queen who uses the performance art to raise awareness of conservation issues. For the past five years, Gonia has helped throw a Pride event in Yosemite for park employees.She said they hung the transgender flag on the iconic granite monolith to express that being transgender is natural.This year, Trump signed an executive order changing the federal definition of sex to exclude the concept of gender identity. He also banned trans women from competing in women’s sports, removed trans people from the military and limited access to gender-affirming care.Gonia called the firing unjust. Joslin said they hung the flag in their free time, as a private citizen.“SJ is a respected pillar within the Yosemite community, a tireless volunteer who consistently goes above and beyond,” Gonia said.Jayson O’Neill with the advocacy group Save Our Parks said Joslin’s firing appears aimed at deterring park employees from expressing their views as the Trump administration pursues broad cuts to the federal workforce.Since Trump took office, the National Park Service has lost approximately 2,500 employees from a workforce that had about 10,000 people, Wade said. The Republican president is proposing a $900 million cut to the agency’s budget next year.Pawlitz said numerous visitors complained about unauthorized demonstrations on El Capitan earlier in the year.Many parks have designated “First Amendment areas” where groups 25 or fewer people can protest without permits. Yosemite has several of those areas, including one in Yosemite Valley, where El Capitan is located.Park service rules on demonstrations have existed for decades and withstood several court challenges, said Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers. He was not aware of any changes in how those rules are enforced under Trump.
A Yosemite National Park ranger was fired after hanging a pride flag from El Capitan while some park visitors could face prosecution under protest restrictions that have been tightened under President Donald Trump.
Shannon “SJ” Joslin, a ranger and biologist who studies bats, said they hung a 66-foot wide transgender pride flag on the famous climbing wall that looms over the California park’s main thoroughfare for about two hours on May 20 before taking it down voluntarily. A termination letter they received last week accused Joslin of “failing to demonstrate acceptable conduct” in their capacity as a biologist and cited the May incident.
“I was really hurting because there were a lot of policies coming from the current administration that target trans people, and I’m nonbinary,” Joslin, 35, told The Associated Press, adding that hanging the flag was their way of saying, “We’re all safe in national parks.”
Joslin said their firing sends the opposite message: “If you’re a federal worker and you have any kind of identity that doesn’t agree with this current administration, then you must be silent, or you will be eliminated.”
Park officials on Tuesday said they were working with the U.S. Justice Department to pursue visitors and workers who violated restrictions on demonstrations at the park that had more than 4 million visitors last year.
The agencies “are pursuing administrative action against several Yosemite National Park employees and possible criminal charges against several park visitors who are alleged to have violated federal laws and regulations related to demonstrations,” National Park Service spokesperson Rachel Pawlitz said.
Joslin said a group of seven climbers including two other park rangers hung the flag. The other rangers are on administrative leave pending an investigation, Joslin said.
Flags have long been flown from El Capitan without consequences, said Joanna Citron Day, a former federal attorney who is now with the advocacy group Public Employees For Environmental Responsibility. She said the group is representing Joslin, but there is no pending legal case.
On May 21, a day after the flag display, Acting Superintendent Ray McPadden signed a rule prohibiting people from hanging banners, flags or signs larger than 15 square feet in park areas designated as “wilderness” or “potential wilderness.” That covers 94% of the park, according to Yosemite’s website.
Park officials said the new restriction was needed to preserve Yosemite’s wilderness and protect climbers.
“We take the protection of the park’s resources and the experience of our visitors very seriously, and will not tolerate violations of laws and regulations that impact those resources and experiences,” Pawlitz said.
It followed a widely publicized instance in February of demonstrators hanging an upside down American flag on El Capitan to protest the firing of National Park Service employees by the Trump administration.
Among the climbers who helped hang the transgender flag was Pattie Gonia, an environmentalist and drag queen who uses the performance art to raise awareness of conservation issues. For the past five years, Gonia has helped throw a Pride event in Yosemite for park employees.
She said they hung the transgender flag on the iconic granite monolith to express that being transgender is natural.
This year, Trump signed an executive order changing the federal definition of sex to exclude the concept of gender identity. He also banned trans women from competing in women’s sports, removed trans people from the military and limited access to gender-affirming care.
Gonia called the firing unjust. Joslin said they hung the flag in their free time, as a private citizen.
“SJ is a respected pillar within the Yosemite community, a tireless volunteer who consistently goes above and beyond,” Gonia said.
Jayson O’Neill with the advocacy group Save Our Parks said Joslin’s firing appears aimed at deterring park employees from expressing their views as the Trump administration pursues broad cuts to the federal workforce.
Since Trump took office, the National Park Service has lost approximately 2,500 employees from a workforce that had about 10,000 people, Wade said. The Republican president is proposing a $900 million cut to the agency’s budget next year.
Pawlitz said numerous visitors complained about unauthorized demonstrations on El Capitan earlier in the year.
Many parks have designated “First Amendment areas” where groups 25 or fewer people can protest without permits. Yosemite has several of those areas, including one in Yosemite Valley, where El Capitan is located.
Park service rules on demonstrations have existed for decades and withstood several court challenges, said Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers. He was not aware of any changes in how those rules are enforced under Trump.
The Trump administration is proposing a new rule that would bar people with outstanding college loansfrom relief on that debt if their employers were found to be “undermining national security and American values through illegal means.”
The proposed rule, announced Monday by the Department of Education, would restrict people from participating in the federal Public Student Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program if the organization they work for is found to be engaging in certain illegal activities.
“President Trump has given the Department a historic mandate to restore the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program to its original purpose — supporting public servants who strengthen their communities and serve the public good, not benefiting businesses engaged in illegal activity that harm Americans,” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in a statement.
The loan program, which was launched in 2007 under President George W. Bush, is aimed at helping public employees such as teachers and police officers shed student loan debt.
The proposed rule lists some examples of what sorts of activities would be considered illegal, potentially resulting in an organization’s workers being excluded from the public service loan program. Those include assessments that an organization isaiding and abetting terrorism, violations of immigration laws, and what the rule describes as the “chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children.”
If an individual with outstanding student loans works for an employer deemed ineligible for the PSLF, the person could still participate in the program but would have to switch to an eligible employer, according to the proposed rule.
President Trump spurred the new rulemaking process in March by issuing an executive order that directed the Secretary of Education to revise the public service loan forgiveness program. The Education Department is soliciting public comments on the proposed rule until September 17.
The White House and the Education Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Department of Education said the proposed regulations are necessary to preserve the original intent of the Public Student Loan Forgiveness program, which is to reward public service. The agency also said it wants to protect Americans to ensure their tax dollars do not support organizations engaged in “unlawful activity.”
“The proposed rules would halt PSLF benefits to employees of organizations that are undermining national security and American values through illegal means, and therefore not providing a public service,” the Education Department said in a statement.
Critics of the draft regulation said it would allow Education Department officials to improperly exclude some public servants from loan relief under the federal program. The Student Borrower Protection Center, an advocacy group, said in a July blog post that the rule would give the Education Department broad authority to restrict funding to groups whose work conflicts with the Trump administration’s agenda.
“To be clear, if implemented this proposal would allow the secretary [of education] to disqualify from PSLF any employees of school systems that accurately teach the U.S.’ history of slavery, of health care providers who offer gender-affirming care and of legal aid organizations that represent individuals against unlawful deportations,” Winston Berkman-Breen, legal director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, said in a June 30 public hearing on the proposal.
Introduced as part of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007, the public service loan program cancels outstanding debt for borrowers who make 120 monthly payments, or 10 years worth of payments. Currently, the program provides benefits to all government employers and all qualifying 501(c)(3) employers.
Mary Cunningham is a reporter for CBS MoneyWatch. Before joining the business and finance vertical, she worked at “60 Minutes,” CBSNews.com and CBS News 24/7 as part of the CBS News Associate Program.
Jonnell Wieder earned too much money at her job to keep her Medicaid coverage when the COVID-19 public health emergency ended in 2023 and states resumed checking whether people were eligible for the program. But she was reassured by the knowledge that Medicaid would provide postpartum coverage for her and her daughter, Oakleigh McDonald, who was born in July of that year.
Wieder is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana and can access some health services for free through her tribe’s health clinics. But funding is limited, so, like a lot of Native American people, she relied on Medicaid for herself and Oakleigh.
Months before Oakleigh’s first birthday, the date when Wieder’s postpartum coverage would come to an end, Wieder completed and returned paperwork to enroll her daughter in Healthy Montana Kids, the state’s version of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. But her paperwork, caught up in the lengthy delays and processing times for applications, did not go through.
“As soon as she turned 1, they cut her off completely,” Wieder said.
It took six months for Wieder to get Oakleigh covered again through Healthy Montana Kids. Before health workers in her tribe stepped in to help her resubmit her application, Wieder repeatedly called the state’s health department. She said she would dial the call center when she arrived at her job in the morning and go about her work while waiting on hold, only for the call to be dropped by the end of the day.
“Never did I talk to anybody,” she said.
Oakleigh McDonald, Jonnell Wieder’s daughter, went without health coverage for six months when her paperwork was caught up in the 2023 process known as Medicaid “unwinding.”
Tommy Martino for KFF Health News
Wieder and Oakleigh’s experience is an example of the chaos for eligible Medicaid beneficiaries caused by the process known as the “unwinding,” which led to millions of people in the U.S. losing coverage due to paperwork or other procedural issues. Now, tribal health leaders fear their communities will experience more health coverage disruptions when new federal Medicaid work and eligibility requirements are implemented by the start of 2027.
The tax-and-spending law that President Trump signed this summer exempts Native Americans from the new requirement that some people work or do another qualifying activity a minimum number of hours each month to be eligible for Medicaid, as well as from more frequent eligibility checks. But as Wieder and her daughter’s experience shows, they are not exempt from getting caught up in procedural disenrollments that could reemerge as states implement the new rules.
“We also know from the unwinding that that just doesn’t always play out necessarily correctly in practice,” said Joan Alker, who leads Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. “There’s a lot to worry about.”
The new law is projected to increase the number of people who are uninsured by 10 million.
The lessons of the unwinding suggest that “deep trouble” lies ahead for Native Americans who rely on Medicaid, according to Alker.
Changes to Medicaid
Mr. Trump’s new law changes Medicaid rules to require some recipients ages 19 to 64 to log 80 hours of work or other qualifying activities per month. It also requires states to recheck those recipients’ eligibility every six months, instead of annually. Both of these changes will be effective by the end of next year.
Wieder said she was lucky that the tribe covered costs and her daughter’s care wasn’t interrupted in the six months she didn’t have health insurance. Citizens of federally recognized tribes in the U.S. can access some free health services through the Indian Health Service, the federal agency responsible for providing health care to Native Americans and Alaska Natives.
But free care is limited because Congress has historically failed to fully fund the Indian Health Service. Tribal health systems rely heavily on Medicaid to fill that gap. Native Americans are enrolled in Medicaid at higher rates than the White population and have higher rates of chronic illnesses, die more from preventable diseases, and have less access to care.
Medicaid is the largest third-party payer to the Indian Health Service and other tribal health facilities and organizations. Accounting for about two-thirds of the outside revenue the Indian Health Service collects, it helps tribal health organizations pay their staff, maintain or expand services, and build infrastructure. Tribal leaders say protecting Medicaid for Indian Country is a responsibility Congress and the federal government must fulfill as part of their trust and treaty obligations to tribes.
Lessons learned during the unwinding
The Trump administration prevented states from disenrolling most Medicaid recipients for the duration of the public health emergency starting in 2020. After those eligibility checks resumed in 2023, nearly 27 million people nationwide were disenrolled from Medicaid during the unwinding, according to an analysis by the Government Accountability Office published in June. The majority of disenrollments — about 70% — occurred for procedural reasons, according to the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
CMS did not require state agencies to collect race and ethnicity data for their reporting during the unwinding, making it difficult to determine how many Native American and Alaska Native enrollees lost coverage.
The lack of data to show how the unwinding affected the population makes it difficult to identify disparities and create policies to address them, said Latoya Hill, senior policy manager with KFF’s Racial Equity and Health Policy program. KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
The National Council of Urban Indian Health, which advocates on public health issues for Native Americans living in urban parts of the nation, analyzed the Census Bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey and KFF data in an effort to understand how disenrollment affected tribes. The council estimated more than 850,000 Native Americans had lost coverage as of May 2024. About 2.7 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives were enrolled in Medicaid in 2022, according to the council.
The National Indian Health Board, a nonprofit that represents and advocates for federally recognized tribes, has been working with federal Medicaid officials to ensure that state agencies are prepared to implement the exemptions.
“We learned a lot of lessons about state capacity during the unwinding,” said Winn Davis, congressional relations director for the National Indian Health Board.
Nevada health officials say they plan to apply lessons learned during the unwinding and launch a public education campaign on the Medicaid changes in the new federal law. “A lot of this will depend on anticipated federal guidance regarding the implementation of those new rules,” said Stacie Weeks, director of the Nevada Health Authority.
Staff at the Fallon Tribal Health Center in Nevada have become authorized representatives for some of their patients. This means that tribal citizens’ Medicaid paperwork is sent to the health center, allowing staff to notify individuals and help them fill it out.
Davis said the unwinding process showed that Native American enrollees are uniquely vulnerable to procedural disenrollment. The new law’s exemption of Native Americans from work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks is the “bare minimum” to ensure unnecessary disenrollments are avoided as part of trust and treaty obligations, Davis said.
Eligibility checks are “complex” and “vulnerable to error”
The GAO said the process of determining whether individuals are eligible for Medicaid is “complex” and “vulnerable to error” in a 2024 report on the unwinding.
“The resumption of Medicaid eligibility redeterminations on such a large scale further compounded this complexity,” the report said.
It highlighted weaknesses across state systems. By April 2024, federal Medicaid officials had found nearly all states were out of compliance with redetermination requirements, according to the GAO. Eligible people lost their coverage, the accountability office said, highlighting the need to improve federal oversight.
In Texas, for example, federal Medicaid officials found that 100,000 eligible people had been disenrolled due to, for example, the state system’s failure to process their completed renewal forms or miscalculation of the length of women’s postpartum coverage.
Some states were not conducting ex parte renewals, in which a person’s Medicaid coverage is automatically renewed based on existing information available to the state. That reduces the chance that paperwork is sent to the wrong address, because the recipient doesn’t need to complete or return renewal forms.
But poorly conducted ex parte renewals can lead to procedural disenrollments, too. More than 100,000 people in Nevada were disenrolled by September 2023 through the ex parte process. The state had been conducting the ex parte renewals at the household level, rather than by individual beneficiary, resulting in the disenrollment of still-eligible children because their parents were no longer eligible. Ninety-three percent of disenrollments in the state were for procedural reasons — the highest in the nation, according to KFF.
Another issue the federal agency identified was that some state agencies were not giving enrollees the opportunity to submit their renewal paperwork through all means available, including mail, phone, online, and in person.
State agencies also identified challenges they faced during the unwinding, including an unprecedented volume of eligibility redeterminations, insufficient staffing and training, and a lack of response from enrollees who may not have been aware of the unwinding.
Native Americans and Alaska Natives have unique challenges in maintaining their coverage.
Communities in rural parts of the nation experience issues with receiving and sending mail. Some Native Americans on reservations may not have street addresses. Others may not have permanent housing or change addresses frequently. In Alaska, mail service is often disrupted by severe weather. Another issue is the lack of reliable internet service on remote reservations.
Tribal health leaders and patient benefit coordinators said some tribal citizens did not receive their redetermination paperwork or struggled to fill it out and send it back to their state Medicaid agency.
The aftermath
Although the unwinding is over, many challenges persist.
Tribal health workers in Montana, Oklahoma, and South Dakota said some eligible patients who lost Medicaid during the unwinding had still not been reenrolled as of this spring.
“Even today, we’re still in the trenches of getting individuals that had been disenrolled back onto Medicaid,” said Rachel Arthur, executive director of the Indian Family Health Clinic in Great Falls, Montana, in May.
Arthur said staff at the clinic realized early in the unwinding that their patients were not receiving their redetermination notices in the mail. The clinic is identifying people who fell off Medicaid during the unwinding and helping them fill out applications.
Marlena Farnes, who was a patient benefit coordinator at the Indian Family Health Clinic during the Medicaid unwinding, said she tried for months to help an older patient with a chronic health condition get back on Medicaid. He had completed and returned his paperwork but still received a notice that his coverage had lapsed. After many calls to the state Medicaid office, Farnes said, state officials told her the patient’s application had been lost.
Another patient went to the emergency room multiple times while uninsured, Arthur said.
“I felt like if our patients weren’t helped with follow-up, and that advocacy piece, their applications were not being seen,” Farnes said. She is now the behavioral health director at the clinic.
Montana was one of five states where more than 50% of enrollees lost coverage during the unwinding, according to the GAO. The other states are Idaho, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah. About 68% of Montanans who lost coverage were disenrolled for procedural reasons.
In Oklahoma, eligibility redeterminations remain challenging to process, said Yvonne Myers, a Medicaid and Affordable Care Act consultant for Citizen Potawatomi Nation Health Services. That’s causing more frequent coverage lapses, she said.
Myers said she thinks Republican claims of “waste, fraud, and abuse” are overstated.
“I challenge some of them to try to go through an eligibility process,” Myers said. “The way they’re going about it is making it for more hoops to jump through, which ultimately will cause people to fall off.”
The unwinding showed that state systems can struggle to respond quickly to changes in Medicaid, leading to preventable erroneous disenrollments. Individuals were often in the dark about their applications and struggled to reach state offices for answers. Tribal leaders and health experts are raising concerns that those issues will continue and worsen as states implement the requirements of the new law.
Georgia, the only state with an active Medicaid work requirement program, has shown that the changes can be difficult for individuals to navigate and costly for a state to implement. More than 100,000 people have applied for Georgia’s Pathways program, but only about 8,600 were enrolled as of the end of July.
Alker, of Georgetown, said Congress took the wrong lesson from the unwinding in adding more restrictions and red tape.
“It will make unwinding pale in comparison in terms of the number of folks that are going to lose coverage,” Alker said.
This article was published with the support of the Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS) Health Journalism Fellowship, assisted by grants from The Commonwealth Fund.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
Nebraska Republican Gov. Jim Pillen announced plans Tuesday for an immigration detention center in a farming area in the state’s southwest corner as President Trump’s administration races to expand the infrastructure necessary for increasing deportations.
Pillen said he and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had agreed to use an existing minimum security prison work camp in rural McCook to house people awaiting deportation and being held for other immigration proceedings.
The new facility was dubbed the “Cornhusker Clink” last week by Rob Jeffreys, director of the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services. It can accommodate 200 people with plans to expand to 300. McCook is about 210 miles west of Lincoln, the state capital.
“This is about keeping Nebraskans – and Americans across our country – safe,” Pillen said in a statement.
Pillen announced he would order the Nebraska National Guard to provide administrative and logistical support to Nebraska-based immigration agents. About 20 Guard soldiers will be involved.
Emily Pietrzak holds a sign that reads “ICE=Gestapo” as other protesters gather outside the Nebraska governor’s office in Lincoln, Neb., Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2025. “I believe our government is hurting people who live in our country and I think we should stand up for each other,” she said.
Josh Funk / AP
He also said the Nebraska State Patrol would sign an agreement that enables troopers to help federal immigration agents make arrests.
DHS said in a news release that the agreement with the state to expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention space was made possible by Mr. Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” passed by Congress last month. The funding bill included $45 billion for ICE to expand its detention system, and nearly $30 billion for ICE agents and resources.
Jeffreys said the 186 people currently at McCook will be transferred to other state corrections facilities so the camp can be repurposed.
The facility will be run by the state of Nebraska but will be paid for by the federal government. All the people expected to be held there will be low to medium-risk detainees, Jeffreys said.
Jeffreys estimated it will take 45 to 60 days to relocate all the current McCook population while a prison in Lincoln is undergoing repairs from recent storm damage. It wasn’t immediately clear how quickly ICE might start sending detainees to McCook.
But Jeffreys said it’s already set up to house people, so detainees won’t be housed in tents or other temporary quarters. “That facility has already been accredited. It’s ready in the event that we are to move our folks out and move detainees in,” he said.
“Thanks to Governor Pillen for his partnership to help remove the worst of the worst out of our country,” Noem said in a statement Tuesday. “If you are in America illegally, you could find yourself in Nebraska’s Cornhusker Clink. Avoid arrest and self deport now using the CBP Home App.”
The Nebraska plan has already raised concerns.
In a video posted to social media, state Sen. Megan Hunt, an independent, blasted a lack of transparency about plans for a detention center, citing her unfulfilled request to the governor and executive branch for emails and other records about the plan.
She urged people to support local immigrant rights groups, and said any response by the Legislature would not come until next year — and only with enough support from lawmakers.
“The No. 1 thing we need to do is protect our neighbors, protect the people in our communities who are being targeted by these horrible people, these horrible organizations that are making choices to lock up, detain, disappear our neighbors and families and friends,” Hunt said.
Six protesters sat in the hallway outside the governor’s office Tuesday afternoon making signs that said, “No Nazi Nebraska” and “ICE = Gestapo.”
Maghie Miller-Jenkins of Lincoln said she doesn’t think an ICE detention center is a good idea, adding the state should tackle problems like child hunger and homelessness. “This state has numerous things they could focus on that would benefit the constituents,” Miller-Jenkins said.
The Trump administration is adding new detention facilities across the country to hold the growing number of immigrants it has arrested and accused of being in the country illegally. Older and newer U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement centers were holding more than 56,000 immigrants in June, the most since 2019.
When federal officials announced the opening of the Florida detention center, they said its focus would be on rounding up individuals with a criminal record — people that Mr. Trump and border czar Tom Homan have called “the worst of the worst.” However, many people who have been locked up there do not have criminal records, CBS News previously reported.
The Florida facility has also been the subject of legal challenges by attorneys who allege violations of due process there, including the rights of detainees to meet with their attorneys, limited access to immigration courts and poor living conditions. Critics have been trying to stop further construction and operations until it comes into compliance with federal environmental laws.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced last week that his administration is preparing to open a second facility, dubbed “Deportation Depot,” at a state prison in north Florida. It’s expected to have 1,300 immigration beds, though that capacity could be expanded to 2,000, state officials said.
Also last week, officials in the rural Tennessee town of Mason voted to approve agreements to turn a former prison into an immigration detention facility operated by a private company, despite loud objections from residents and activists during a contentious public meeting.
And the Trump administration announced plans earlier this month for a 1,000-bed detention center in Indiana that would be dubbed “Speedway Slammer,” prompting a backlash in the Midwestern state that hosts the Indianapolis 500 auto race.
The Trump administration moved Tuesday to revoke the security clearances of 37 current and former national security officials in the latest act of retribution targeting public servants in the federal government’s intelligence community.Related video from January above: White House press secretary comments on Gen. Milley’s security clearance being pulledA memo posted by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, accuses the targeted officials of having engaged in the “politicization or weaponization of intelligence” to advance partisan goals, as well as a failure to safeguard classified information and a “failure to adhere to professional analytic tradecraft standards.”The action, coming months after an even broader clearance suspension on his first day in office, is part of a broader campaign by President Donald Trump’s administration to scrutinize the judgments of intelligence officials he personally disagrees with. Critics of his approach have said it risks chilling dissenting voices within the government.”These are unlawful and unconstitutional decisions that deviate from well-settled, decades-old laws and policies that sought to protect against just this type of action,” Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer whose own clearance was revoked by the Trump administration, said in a statement.Many of the officials who were singled out left the government years ago. Some worked on matters that have long provoked Trump’s ire, including the intelligence community assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf, or have openly criticized him.Gabbard, in the last month, has declassified a series of years-old documents meant to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the assessment on Russian election interference.
WASHINGTON —
The Trump administration moved Tuesday to revoke the security clearances of 37 current and former national security officials in the latest act of retribution targeting public servants in the federal government’s intelligence community.
Related video from January above: White House press secretary comments on Gen. Milley’s security clearance being pulled
A memo posted by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, accuses the targeted officials of having engaged in the “politicization or weaponization of intelligence” to advance partisan goals, as well as a failure to safeguard classified information and a “failure to adhere to professional analytic tradecraft standards.”
The action, coming months after an even broader clearance suspension on his first day in office, is part of a broader campaign by President Donald Trump’s administration to scrutinize the judgments of intelligence officials he personally disagrees with. Critics of his approach have said it risks chilling dissenting voices within the government.
“These are unlawful and unconstitutional decisions that deviate from well-settled, decades-old laws and policies that sought to protect against just this type of action,” Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer whose own clearance was revoked by the Trump administration, said in a statement.
Many of the officials who were singled out left the government years ago. Some worked on matters that have long provoked Trump’s ire, including the intelligence community assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf, or have openly criticized him.
Gabbard, in the last month, has declassified a series of years-old documents meant to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the assessment on Russian election interference.
We’ve come a long way from Donald Trump routinely notifying administration officials of their termination via tweet. But working in the second Trump White House still sounds pretty unnerving. The administration just announced that Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey has been tapped to be deputy director of the FBI — which is pretty weird since Dan Bongino is already serving in that role.
Fox News Digital broke the news on Monday that Bailey will serve as co–deputy director alongside Bongino. The report included statements praising Bailey from both FBI director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“I am thrilled to welcome Andrew Bailey as co–deputy director of the FBI,” Bondi said. “He has served as a distinguished state attorney general and is a decorated war veteran, bringing expertise and dedication to service. His leadership and commitment to the country will be a tremendous asset as we work together to advance President Trump’s mission.”
The report did not clarify how the two deputy directors will divide their duties, nor did it allude to the conflict between Patel, Bondi, and Bongino over the administration’s botched release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Or that day Bongino didn’t show up to work in June, amid multiple reports that he was planning to quit because he was furious about the Epstein situation. All of which seems like it may be relevant?
Or not, if you trust Bongino’s one-word, no-exclamation-point response to this news:
The New York Timesreported that Bailey’s mysterious appointment has “bewildered many current and former F.B.I. agents, who said they had never heard of a co–deputy director.”
This strange move isn’t necessarily a dig at Bongino. It could be part of Trump’s maximum-chaos approach to governing. As the Times noted, “Mr. Trump has a tendency to appoint one person to multiple high-level positions, as well as task multiple people with the same role.”
And back in May, Bongino told Fox News that the job was taking a toll on him. So maybe the FBI put another person in the exact same role to help Bongino with his work-life balance?
Hey, it’s possible! Though considering that Trump officials once let it be known that a colleague was on the toilet when he learned he was getting canned, humiliating Bongino does seem like the likeliest explanation.
