Homelessness in America reached the highest level on record last year, according to new data released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development—and it will likely only get worse, in light of both a Supreme Court decision issued in June and President-elect Donald Trump’s forthcoming presidency.
The annual report—which estimates the number of people staying in shelters, temporary housing, and on the streets on a single night—found more than 770,000 people experiencing homelessness on a single night this past January, up 18 percent from a night in January 2023. The increase in the rate of families experiencing homelessness was even steeper, rising 39 percent from 2023 to 2024. And there was a 33 percent increase in children experiencing homelessness, bringing the amount recorded earlier this year to nearly 150,000 kids. (Experts say the numbers are likely an undercount.)
HUD attributes this rise to “significant increases in rental costs, as a result of the pandemic and nearly decades of under-building of housing,” as well as natural disasters—such as the deadly August 2023 Maui wildfires—that destroyed housing. Other factors include “rising inflation, stagnating wages among middle- and lower-income households, and the persisting effects of systemic racism [that] have stretched homelessness services systems to their limits,” the report says. (Black people remain overrepresented, accounting for 12 percent of the US population but 32 percent of those experiencing homelessness, according to the report.) California and New York had the highest numbers of people experiencing homelessness.
Some of the nationwide increase, the report notes, was also due to “a result of [communities’] work to shelter a rising number of asylum seekers.” In New York City, for example, asylum seekers accounted for almost 88 percent of the increase in sheltered homelessness. HUD points out that the counts were conducted after Republicans in Congress blocked a bipartisan Senate deal that would have funded border security and before President Joe Biden’s border crackdown via executive action—a reference Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) aimed to use to his advantage.
Biden administration admits #BidenBorderCrisis resulted in more homelessness.
Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, responded on X that this was a “misdiagnosis of its causes,” adding that he has a report forthcoming on “this easy scapegoating of migrants for the homelessness crisis.”
Despite the bleakness of the data, there were some signs of progress: Homelessness among veterans dropped to the lowest number on record: 32,882—an 8 percent decrease from 2023. The report also spotlights a few places (Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chester County, Pennsylvania) that saw significant decreases in people experiencing homelessness thanks to targeted efforts to increase the availability of housing and other supportive services.
Still, it’s hard not to see the data as an indictment of one of the world’s wealthiest nations, where basic necessities—housing, food, and healthcare—are out of reach to many low- and middle-income families. And, as the report intimates, it is likely that people experiencing homelessness will face even greater challenges in light of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the June Supreme Court decision that essentially greenlit the criminalization of homelessness. (As I have reported, domestic violence prevention advocates expect the ruling will be catastrophic for survivors, given the role abusive relationships can play in driving victims to homelessness.)
Ann Olivia, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in a statement she hopes the data will spur lawmakers “to advance evidence-based solutions to this crisis.” (Vice President Kamala Harris made new housing construction a key part of her campaign.) Some Democrats agree that politicians have to act—and fast:
This is the richest country on earth.
770,000 Americans should not be homeless, and 20 million more should not be spending over half their incomes on rent or a mortgage.
We need to invest in affordable housing, not Trump’s massive tax breaks for billionaires. https://t.co/MOiMOZHthw
But don’t hold your breath: Trump’s acolytes have signaled their desires to slash the social safety net and enact mass deportations of undocumented people, which experts have said will likely exacerbate the housing crisis given the role immigrants play in the construction industry. The closest his budding administration has come to offering a solution is VP-elect JD Vance’s claim that mass deportations will solve the housing shortage by freeing up units.
Homelessness in America reached the highest level on record last year, according to new data released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development—and it will likely only get worse, in light of both a Supreme Court decision issued in June and President-elect Donald Trump’s forthcoming presidency.
The annual report—which estimates the number of people staying in shelters, temporary housing, and on the streets on a single night—found more than 770,000 people experiencing homelessness on a single night this past January, up 18 percent from a night in January 2023. The increase in the rate of families experiencing homelessness was even steeper, rising 39 percent from 2023 to 2024. And there was a 33 percent increase in children experiencing homelessness, bringing the amount recorded earlier this year to nearly 150,000 kids. (Experts say the numbers are likely an undercount.)
HUD attributes this rise to “significant increases in rental costs, as a result of the pandemic and nearly decades of under-building of housing,” as well as natural disasters—such as the deadly August 2023 Maui wildfires—that destroyed housing. Other factors include “rising inflation, stagnating wages among middle- and lower-income households, and the persisting effects of systemic racism [that] have stretched homelessness services systems to their limits,” the report says. (Black people remain overrepresented, accounting for 12 percent of the US population but 32 percent of those experiencing homelessness, according to the report.) California and New York had the highest numbers of people experiencing homelessness.
Some of the nationwide increase, the report notes, was also due to “a result of [communities’] work to shelter a rising number of asylum seekers.” In New York City, for example, asylum seekers accounted for almost 88 percent of the increase in sheltered homelessness. HUD points out that the counts were conducted after Republicans in Congress blocked a bipartisan Senate deal that would have funded border security and before President Joe Biden’s border crackdown via executive action—a reference Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) aimed to use to his advantage.
Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, responded on X that this was a “misdiagnosis of its causes,” adding that he has a report forthcoming on “this easy scapegoating of migrants for the homelessness crisis.”
Despite the bleakness of the data, there were some signs of progress: Homelessness among veterans dropped to the lowest number on record: 32,882—an 8 percent decrease from 2023. The report also spotlights a few places (Dallas, Los Angeles, and Chester County, Pennsylvania) that saw significant decreases in people experiencing homelessness thanks to targeted efforts to increase the availability of housing and other supportive services.
Still, it’s hard not to see the data as an indictment of one of the world’s wealthiest nations, where basic necessities—housing, food, and healthcare—are out of reach to many low- and middle-income families. And, as the report intimates, it is likely that people experiencing homelessness will face even greater challenges in light of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the June Supreme Court decision that essentially greenlit the criminalization of homelessness. (As I have reported, domestic violence prevention advocates expect the ruling will be catastrophic for survivors, given the role abusive relationships can play in driving victims to homelessness.)
Ann Olivia, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in a statement she hopes the data will spur lawmakers “to advance evidence-based solutions to this crisis.” (Vice President Kamala Harris made new housing construction a key part of her campaign.) Some Democrats agree that politicians have to act—and fast:
But don’t hold your breath: Trump’s acolytes have signaled their desires to slash the social safety net and enact mass deportations of undocumented people, which experts have said will likely exacerbate the housing crisis given the role immigrants play in the construction industry. The closest his budding administration has come to offering a solution is VP-elect JD Vance’s claim that mass deportations will solve the housing shortage by freeing up units.
In the op-ed—reportedly published online Saturday and in print Sunday—Musk writes that the AfD is “the last spark of hope for this country” and, essentially, that his vast wealth makes his politics a matter of public interest.
“As someone who has made significant investments in Germany’s industrial and technological landscape, I believe I have the right to speak openly about its political orientation,” Musk writes, according to a Google translation of the text. As the country approaches a snap election on February 23, following the November collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government, AfD is polling second, at 19 percent, behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany.
Musk outlines five areas in which he claims AfD reigns supreme:
“Economic revival” — Musk praises the party’s focus on de-regulation, writing, “Its approach of reducing government over-regulation, cutting taxes, and deregulating the market reflects the principles that made Tesla and SpaceX successful.”
“Immigration and national identity” — Here Musk calls for “the preservation of German culture and security” in the face of globalization and immigration.
“Energy and independence” — Musk lambastes the current German government’s decision to “phase out nuclear power and instead rely heavily on coal and imported gas, as well as volatile wind and solar power.”
“Political realism” — Musk lauds the party for eschewing “the political correctness that often obscures the truth” (sound familiar?) and argues that the AfD can’t possibly be far-right because its leader, Alice Weidel, “has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!” (Yes, he actually wrote this.)
“Innovation and the future” — Musk claims AfD “advocates for educational reforms that encourage critical thinking instead of indoctrination and supports the technology industries that represent the future of global economic leadership.”
His op-ed was published alongside a rebuttal from editor Jan Philipp Burgard, who writes that “Musk’s diagnosis is correct, but his therapeutic approach that only the AfD can save Germany is fatally wrong.”
Burgard notes that the AfD wants to remove Germany from the EU, which he says would be a “catastrophe” given the nation’s reliance on exports and the reliance of German citizens on the EU single market. He further argues that AfD’s isolationist focus could harm its relationship with the US in particular—and “doesn’t Elon Musk want to see many Teslas rolling along Germany’s highways in the future?” And, Burgard points out, Musk’s claims that the party isn’t so bad ignore the reality that Björn Höcke, another AfD leader, has been convicted—twice—of using banned Nazi slogans.
The publication of Musk’s op-ed elicited immediate internal backlash. Die Welt‘s opinion editor, Eva Marie Kogel, announced on X on Saturday that she’d resigned after it posted online.
Musk’s piece was meant to expand upon Musk’s December 20 X post that “only the AfD can save Germany.” (The party thanked him with a public video from party leader Weidel.) But as my colleague Alex Nguyen wrote, AfD is even controversial among Europe’s nationalists.
In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitler’s paramilitary organization.
When you dig more into the priorities of AfD leaders, it makes sense that they’re on an island of their own—and why Musk is trying to court them. Some party officials, like Trump, have been clear about their desire to carry out mass deportations. As Mother Jones contributor Josh Axelrod, a Berlin-based reporter, wrote recently:
The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by nonwhite immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.
“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones.
As Burgard put it in his Musk rebuttal: “Even a genius can be wrong.”
In the op-ed—reportedly published online Saturday and in print Sunday—Musk writes that the AfD is “the last spark of hope for this country” and, essentially, that his vast wealth makes his politics a matter of public interest.
“As someone who has made significant investments in Germany’s industrial and technological landscape, I believe I have the right to speak openly about its political orientation,” Musk writes, according to a Google translation of the text. As the country approaches a snap election on February 23, following the November collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government, AfD is polling second, at 19 percent, behind the center-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany.
Musk outlines five areas in which he claims AfD reigns supreme:
“Economic revival” — Musk praises the party’s focus on de-regulation, writing, “Its approach of reducing government over-regulation, cutting taxes, and deregulating the market reflects the principles that made Tesla and SpaceX successful.”
“Immigration and national identity” — Here Musk calls for “the preservation of German culture and security” in the face of globalization and immigration.
“Energy and independence” — Musk lambastes the current German government’s decision to “phase out nuclear power and instead rely heavily on coal and imported gas, as well as volatile wind and solar power.”
“Political realism” — Musk lauds the party for eschewing “the political correctness that often obscures the truth” (sound familiar?) and argues that the AfD can’t possibly be far-right because its leader, Alice Weidel, “has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!” (Yes, he actually wrote this.)
“Innovation and the future” — Musk claims AfD “advocates for educational reforms that encourage critical thinking instead of indoctrination and supports the technology industries that represent the future of global economic leadership.”
His op-ed was published alongside a rebuttal from editor Jan Philipp Burgard, who writes that “Musk’s diagnosis is correct, but his therapeutic approach that only the AfD can save Germany is fatally wrong.”
Burgard notes that the AfD wants to remove Germany from the EU, which he says would be a “catastrophe” given the nation’s reliance on exports and the reliance of German citizens on the EU single market. He further argues that AfD’s isolationist focus could harm its relationship with the US in particular—and “doesn’t Elon Musk want to see many Teslas rolling along Germany’s highways in the future?” And, Burgard points out, Musk’s claims that the party isn’t so bad ignore the reality that Björn Höcke, another AfD leader, has been convicted—twice—of using banned Nazi slogans.
The publication of Musk’s op-ed elicited immediate internal backlash. Die Welt‘s opinion editor, Eva Marie Kogel, announced on X on Saturday that she’d resigned after it posted online.
Musk’s piece was meant to expand upon Musk’s December 20 X post that “only the AfD can save Germany.” (The party thanked him with a public video from party leader Weidel.) But as my colleague Alex Nguyen wrote, AfD is even controversial among Europe’s nationalists.
In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitler’s paramilitary organization.
When you dig more into the priorities of AfD leaders, it makes sense that they’re on an island of their own—and why Musk is trying to court them. Some party officials, like Trump, have been clear about their desire to carry out mass deportations. As Mother Jones contributor Josh Axelrod, a Berlin-based reporter, wrote recently:
The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by nonwhite immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.
“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones.
As Burgard put it in his Musk rebuttal: “Even a genius can be wrong.”
Trump’s mass deportation agendais already taking shape—for a second time—in coastal Oregon.
A racist letter reportedly circulating through Lincoln County, which has a population of about 50,000 people and is located on the state’s western coast, encourages residents to surveil and report “brown illegals…who you suspect are here in our country on an illegal basis” to the Department of Homeland Security.
The letter implores white locals to help facilitate “the largest round-up of brown illegals in our history,” referring to Trump’s pledge to begin mass deportations of approximately 11 million people, and promises white residents a chance to seize the victims’ homes.
In starkly racist language, it proceeds to outline a dystopian vision for surveillance of people of color everywhere from churches to schools and grocery stores:
Sit in your church’s parking lot and write down the license plate [number] of brown folks. This is extremely important if you attend a catholic church—many brown folks are catholics!! Shopping, again if you see a bunch of brown folks getting in a car—write down the plate [number]. Schools, as you wait in line to pick up the kiddos or the grandkiddos—if you see brown folks—record the plate [number]. Your neighborhood—you know where the brown folks live in your neighborhood—again record the plate [numbers]. If you see a construction crew and/or a landscaping crew who have brown folks—write down the name of the company and a phone [number].”
The letter claims Oregon’s status as a sanctuary state makes it especially fitting for its perverse anti-immigrant demands: “We have received information brown folks, who are currently in Idaho and Montana, are planning to move to our state, because they believe it will be ‘safer’ for them. So don’t limit the license plate to just Oregon—brown folks from any state will be able to be reported to the Department of Homeland Security.”
And it outlines Trump’s vision for how deportations will be enacted, writing, “the brown folks will remain [in county jails] until the camps are completed in Texas—then these folks will be transferred there,” referring to the detention camps that, as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported, Trump’s acolytes plan to build.
“When the brown folks are rounded up,” the letter continues, “their properties will be confiscated just like the properties belonging to the Japanese in California were during World War II. So, within a short term, there will be a whole lot of homes on the market for us white folks to purchase and with the inventory so high—the prices will be very low and affordable.” (Again, experts say otherwise.)
It is unclear how many people have received the letter, but the recipients included local lawmakers in the city of Toledo, including its mayor, who received a copy in the mail, Portland NBC affiliate KGW reported. He, and other local officials, have publicly condemned the letter: In a Facebook post, Lincoln CountySheriff Curtis Landers characterized it as “harmful, divisive, and inconsistent with the values we uphold as public servants and community members.”
“We strongly advise against engaging in activities such as those outlined in this letter, including collecting or sharing information about individuals based on their demographic or perceived immigration status,” Landers added. His post also notes that state law “generally prohibits the inquiry or collection of an individual’s immigration or citizenship status, or country of birth,” and that the sheriff’s office “does not inquire about, document, or share such information with” ICE. The sheriff could not immediately be reached for comment on Sunday.
Oregon’s Democratic Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum also condemned the letter. ABC affiliate KATU of Portland reported that the FBI’s Oregon office is aware of the letter, and encouraged “community members who feel they are being physically threatened” to report concerns to local law enforcement.
In a statement provided to Mother Jones Monday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said: “Racism has no place in Oregon or anywhere else, and I’m proud to add my voice to the chorus of state and local officials denouncing this cowardly and cruel letter.” Oregon’s other Democratic Senator, Jeff Merkley, does not appear to have publicly commented on the letter, and his office did not respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday afternoon.
The letter is reminiscent of the racist texts, now the subject of an FBI investigation, sent to Black people in the days after the election, demanding they “pick cotton,” as my colleague Anna Merlan reported at the time; other texts also targeted Hispanic and LBGTQ people. Anna also reported on a theory of where they originated:
Researchers at the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank at Princeton that studies and attempts to mitigate political violence, wrote in a rapid response analysis that the language of the texts appears to have been drawn from 4chan and from a now-deleted subreddit that was removed by Reddit’s moderators.
“An individual or individuals likely copy-pasted the text and used virtual phone numbers to send out the texts, selecting recipients based on their demographic profile,” the researchers wrote. “The recipient phone numbers could have been obtained via a data broker or a pre-existing data breach.”
While the identities of the senders of those texts, and the letter in Oregon, may be unknown, one thing is clear: Right-wing racism is gaining steam.
Update, Dec. 23: This post was updated with a statement from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
President Joe Biden has officially surpassed president-elect Donald Trump’s record of judicial appointed to federal courts—by one single judge.
On Friday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, tasked with carrying out the confirmations of Biden’s appointees, announced that it had confirmed Biden’s 235th judge—one more than Trump during his term in office, when he blitzed the courts with white, male, right-wing judicial activists. “We just beat Donald Trump’s judicial confirmation record,” the committee announced in a post on X. “Our 235 judges confirmed under President Biden are diverse, fair, qualified, and will be a frontline of defense on attacks against our democracy.”
The judges will be “a significant protection for our civil rights and civil liberties to preserve our democracy” in Trump’s next term, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the committee, told reporters on Friday. As I have reported, the judges—who are appointed for life—play a significant role in deciding cases focused on reproductive rights, among many other issues of major importance to Americans; it was Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas, for example, who issued the anti-science ruling last year that paved the way for anti-abortion activists to bring an ultimately unsuccessful case to the Supreme Court challenging the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in a medication abortion.
The sheer amount of cases federal judges take on also contributes to their power: “The power of lower court federal judges is immense,” David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, told me last month, “because the Supreme Court only deals with such a limited number of cases.”
The courts are also expected to play a particularly significant role in light of the threats posed by Trump, who has threatened to prosecute his political enemies, and the ultra-conservative Supreme Court that has enabled political corruption, as my colleague Pema Levy recently wrote.
“The rule of law, which we used to take for granted, is under enormous stress, and is really threatened,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said Friday, “and the importance of what we did is that we have 235 jurors who are committed to the rule of law—and that includes a respect for judicial restraint, a respect for the proper role of the legislative branch, and a willingness to step in when there’s overreach, either by the legislature or the executive branch.”
According to the committee, the confirmed judges include 187 district court nominees, 45 circuit court nominees, one Supreme Court nominee—Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the high court—and two Court of International Trade nominees. About two-thirds of the judges confirmed under Biden are women and about two-fifths are women of color—both records, the committee says.
“Judges shape our lives,” Biden said in a post on X, announcing the record-setting confirmation. “I’m proud of those who heeded the call to serve, and of the legacy I’ll leave with the men and women I’ve appointed.”
“These exceptionally qualified individuals are dedicated to upholding the rule of law,” added Vice President Kamala Harris, “and they reflect the diversity of America.”
Trump does not appear to have publicly commented on Biden beating his record—but he may be glad to know that there are still 36 judicial vacancies he can fill in the federal courts, all but 2 in the district courts. (A couple of Biden’s nominees did not wind up being confirmed after he reportedly did not formally submit their nominations to the Senate in time.) Republicans are already preparing to squash Biden’s newly-established record: “On January 20 of 2029, Trump’s going to brag about having 240,” incoming Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told NBC News.
To Cohen, the law professor from Drexel, the news is more nuanced than either Democrats or Republicans would like it to be. “Multiple things can be true at the same time,” he told me Sunday. “It’s fantastic they confirmed so many judges to counterbalance the Trump cadre of judges. But also, there should be zero vacancies remaining.”
Trump’s mass deportation agendais already taking shape—for a second time—in coastal Oregon.
A racist letter reportedly circulating through Lincoln County, which has a population of about 50,000 people and is located on the state’s western coast, encourages residents to surveil and report “brown illegals…who you suspect are here in our country on an illegal basis” to the Department of Homeland Security.
The letter implores white locals to help facilitate “the largest round-up of brown illegals in our history,” referring to Trump’s pledge to begin mass deportations of approximately 11 million people, and promises white residents a chance to seize the victims’ homes.
In starkly racist language, it proceeds to outline a dystopian vision for surveillance of people of color everywhere from churches to schools and grocery stores:
Sit in your church’s parking lot and write down the license plate [number] of brown folks. This is extremely important if you attend a catholic church—many brown folks are catholics!! Shopping, again if you see a bunch of brown folks getting in a car—write down the plate [number]. Schools, as you wait in line to pick up the kiddos or the grandkiddos—if you see brown folks—record the plate [number]. Your neighborhood—you know where the brown folks live in your neighborhood—again record the plate [numbers]. If you see a construction crew and/or a landscaping crew who have brown folks—write down the name of the company and a phone [number].”
The letter claims Oregon’s status as a sanctuary state makes it especially fitting for its perverse anti-immigrant demands: “We have received information brown folks, who are currently in Idaho and Montana, are planning to move to our state, because they believe it will be ‘safer’ for them. So don’t limit the license plate to just Oregon—brown folks from any state will be able to be reported to the Department of Homeland Security.”
And it outlines Trump’s vision for how deportations will be enacted, writing, “the brown folks will remain [in county jails] until the camps are completed in Texas—then these folks will be transferred there,” referring to the detention camps that, as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported, Trump’s acolytes plan to build.
“When the brown folks are rounded up,” the letter continues, “their properties will be confiscated just like the properties belonging to the Japanese in California were during World War II. So, within a short term, there will be a whole lot of homes on the market for us white folks to purchase and with the inventory so high—the prices will be very low and affordable.” (Again, experts say otherwise.)
It is unclear how many people have received the letter, but the recipients included local lawmakers in the city of Toledo, including its mayor, who received a copy in the mail, Portland NBC affiliate KGW reported. He, and other local officials, have publicly condemned the letter: In a Facebook post, Lincoln CountySheriff Curtis Landers characterized it as “harmful, divisive, and inconsistent with the values we uphold as public servants and community members.”
“We strongly advise against engaging in activities such as those outlined in this letter, including collecting or sharing information about individuals based on their demographic or perceived immigration status,” Landers added. His post also notes that state law “generally prohibits the inquiry or collection of an individual’s immigration or citizenship status, or country of birth,” and that the sheriff’s office “does not inquire about, document, or share such information with” ICE. The sheriff could not immediately be reached for comment on Sunday.
Oregon’s Democratic Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum also condemned the letter. ABC affiliate KATU of Portland reported that the FBI’s Oregon office is aware of the letter, and encouraged “community members who feel they are being physically threatened” to report concerns to local law enforcement.
In a statement provided to Mother Jones Monday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said: “Racism has no place in Oregon or anywhere else, and I’m proud to add my voice to the chorus of state and local officials denouncing this cowardly and cruel letter.” Oregon’s other Democratic Senator, Jeff Merkley, does not appear to have publicly commented on the letter, and his office did not respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday afternoon.
The letter is reminiscent of the racist texts, now the subject of an FBI investigation, sent to Black people in the days after the election, demanding they “pick cotton,” as my colleague Anna Merlan reported at the time; other texts also targeted Hispanic and LBGTQ people. Anna also reported on a theory of where they originated:
Researchers at the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank at Princeton that studies and attempts to mitigate political violence, wrote in a rapid response analysis that the language of the texts appears to have been drawn from 4chan and from a now-deleted subreddit that was removed by Reddit’s moderators.
“An individual or individuals likely copy-pasted the text and used virtual phone numbers to send out the texts, selecting recipients based on their demographic profile,” the researchers wrote. “The recipient phone numbers could have been obtained via a data broker or a pre-existing data breach.”
While the identities of the senders of those texts, and the letter in Oregon, may be unknown, one thing is clear: Right-wing racism is gaining steam.
Update, Dec. 23: This post was updated with a statement from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
President Joe Biden has officially surpassed president-elect Donald Trump’s record of judicial appointed to federal courts—by one single judge.
On Friday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, tasked with carrying out the confirmations of Biden’s appointees, announced that it had confirmed Biden’s 235th judge—one more than Trump during his term in office, when he blitzed the courts with white, male, right-wing judicial activists. “We just beat Donald Trump’s judicial confirmation record,” the committee announced in a post on X. “Our 235 judges confirmed under President Biden are diverse, fair, qualified, and will be a frontline of defense on attacks against our democracy.”
The judges will be “a significant protection for our civil rights and civil liberties to preserve our democracy” in Trump’s next term, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the committee, told reporters on Friday. As I have reported, the judges—who are appointed for life—play a significant role in deciding cases focused on reproductive rights, among many other issues of major importance to Americans; it was Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas, for example, who issued the anti-science ruling last year that paved the way for anti-abortion activists to bring an ultimately unsuccessful case to the Supreme Court challenging the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in a medication abortion.
The sheer amount of cases federal judges take on also contributes to their power: “The power of lower court federal judges is immense,” David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, told me last month, “because the Supreme Court only deals with such a limited number of cases.”
The courts are also expected to play a particularly significant role in light of the threats posed by Trump, who has threatened to prosecute his political enemies, and the ultra-conservative Supreme Court that has enabled political corruption, as my colleague Pema Levy recently wrote.
“The rule of law, which we used to take for granted, is under enormous stress, and is really threatened,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said Friday, “and the importance of what we did is that we have 235 jurors who are committed to the rule of law—and that includes a respect for judicial restraint, a respect for the proper role of the legislative branch, and a willingness to step in when there’s overreach, either by the legislature or the executive branch.”
According to the committee, the confirmed judges include 187 district court nominees, 45 circuit court nominees, one Supreme Court nominee—Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the high court—and two Court of International Trade nominees. About two-thirds of the judges confirmed under Biden are women and about two-fifths are women of color—both records, the committee says.
“Judges shape our lives,” Biden said in a post on X, announcing the record-setting confirmation. “I’m proud of those who heeded the call to serve, and of the legacy I’ll leave with the men and women I’ve appointed.”
“These exceptionally qualified individuals are dedicated to upholding the rule of law,” added Vice President Kamala Harris, “and they reflect the diversity of America.”
Trump does not appear to have publicly commented on Biden beating his record—but he may be glad to know that there are still 36 judicial vacancies he can fill in the federal courts, all but 2 in the district courts. (A couple of Biden’s nominees did not wind up being confirmed after he reportedly did not formally submit their nominations to the Senate in time.) Republicans are already preparing to squash Biden’s newly-established record: “On January 20 of 2029, Trump’s going to brag about having 240,” incoming Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told NBC News.
To Cohen, the law professor from Drexel, the news is more nuanced than either Democrats or Republicans would like it to be. “Multiple things can be true at the same time,” he told me Sunday. “It’s fantastic they confirmed so many judges to counterbalance the Trump cadre of judges. But also, there should be zero vacancies remaining.”
Something is missing from the new Trump-backed year-end spending bill that Congress has to pass by midnight on Friday to prevent a government shutdown: Support for critical services for abused women and children.
As I have reported for Mother Jones, there is a funding crisis facing the Crime Victims Fund, a pot of federal money established by the 1984 Victims of Crime Actthat supports domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and child advocacy centers nationwide. The money comes from financial penalties levied in corporate criminal cases, and as federal prosecutors have collected less money, deposits into the Crime Victims Fund have shrunk massively, from about $6.6 billion in 2017 to $2.5 billion this year. (Because of caps set by Congress since 2000 to manage fluctuations in the fund, the amount of money disbursed has been even lower.)
Those cuts have trickled down to programs that provide lifesaving services for women and children in the aftermath of abuse. As I chronicled in a months-long investigation published in October, the declining funds—which are distributed to states based on their population size, and then to programs—have had ripple effects across the country, put multiple hotlines catering to domestic violence survivors at risk and imperiling legal advocacy services for survivors, among other impacts. As Judge Shelley Santry, a family court judge in Louisville, told me: “The consequence [of losing those services] may be death.”
The declining funds have also been disastrous for child advocacy centers: One center in rural northern Wisconsin that provided trauma-informed forensic interviews to about 50 kids annually for free—to gather the facts of their abuse to support criminal prosecutions and facilitate the kids’ healing—shuttered in October due to the funding cuts. Advocates in four other states told me the funding declines forced them to cut personnel or left them unable to fill vacant positions, leading to longer wait times for children and burnout for existing staff. Lynn Scott, executive director of the Alabama Network of Children’s Advocacy Centers, told me further funding cuts “would really close some doors” in her state—likely at a half-dozen or so centers in rural areas, she estimated.
Lawmakers introduced a bill in Congress earlier this year that promised to help fix the funding crisis and seemed to have sweeping, bipartisan support: The CVF Stabilization Act would divert additional funds collected through the False Claims Act, which penalizes defrauding of the government, through 2029. It attracted more than 200 co-sponsors in the House, and a half-dozen in the Senate. Advocates said that while it would not permanently solve the the crisis, it could play an important role in helping to restore the funds: Since fiscal year 2017, according to the DOJ, $1.7 billion from the False Claims Act has gone into the General Fund of the Treasury—money that could otherwise go into the Crime Victims Fund if the new bill was passed.
Despite a big push from advocacy groups to get the bill passed before the end of the year, it failed to get any committee hearings or floor votes. (Spokespeople for the House and Senate Judiciary Committees chairs Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who also co-sponsored the Senate bill, did not return requests for comment. Neither did spokespeople for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-.N.Y.) or House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).)
Its exclusion from the spending bill is the final nail in the coffin, at least for this session of Congress. “We tried hard to get it included in the [spending bill], but right now, there’s not an agreement on anything,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), a cosponsor of the CVF Stabilization Act. “It is very clear to me that Congress has got to do better job of prioritizing crime survivors.”
There are other measures Congress could take that it hasn’t: Biden has recommended a $7.3 billion infusion into the Crime Victims Fund to account for the historic decline, but Congress has yet to act on it. Advocates are hoping that when the next budget does pass next year, Congress will include $1.9 billion in appropriations for the Crime Victims Fund. While the draft Senate appropriations bill meets the request for $1.9 billion, the draft House bill is so far only offering $1.5 billion.
“Survivors and programs cannot continue to wait in limbo for the funding they desperately need.”
In letters to Congress earlier this year, more than 700 prosecutors and 42 state attorneys general urged members to bolster the funding source in both the short and long-term to support survivors. “Millions of victims, including abused children and battered women, will be left without access to safety, justice and healing,” the prosecutors wrote.
Dingell said she doesn’t think her colleagues don’t care about supporting survivors of crimes, but rather that they don’t understand how dire the funding crisis actually is. “I think it’s a matter of peoples’ priorities,” she said. “If they don’t talk to [survivors] like I do, they don’t understand they’re going to be left without assistance and nothing—nothing—to help them navigate the aftermath of crime.”
Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) is one of the co-sponsors of the CVF Stabilization Act—and one of its most vocal defenders. Michael Brochstein/ZUMA
Advocates fear what further funding cuts will bring. “Survivors and programs cannot continue to wait in limbo for the funding they desperately need,” Stephanie Love-Patterson, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, said in a statement Thursday. She added that the organization remains “encouraged by the overwhelming bipartisan congressional support of the bill” and hopeful that the bill would pass in the next Congress.
But Claire Ponder Selib, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Advocacy, is less optimistic. “I’m personally quite concerned about the possibilities of this being passed next session,” she told me, adding that it’s “very disappointing” the text of the legislation is absent from the spending bill. Steve Derene, former executive director of the National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators, is also skeptical: “I’m sort of cynical about it getting past the Senate Judiciary Committee.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the incoming chair of that committee, has not signed onto the Senate bill and would be key to it getting a committee hearing. Grassley has not been entirely opposed to replenishing the Crime Victims Fund: He was an initial co-sponsor of the VOCA Fix Act, a 2021 law that diverted revenue from deferred and non-prosecution agreements to the Crime Victims Fund, and earlier this year said Congress should appropriate “the highest possible obligation limit [to the CVF] to help provide resources to crime victims.” But Grassley has also questioned the DOJ about why the VOCA Fix Act has been inadequate to restore the funds, and supported amendments to the False Claims Act—the new proposed source of revenue for the Crime Victims Fund in the latest bill—to bolster support for whistleblowers. (The only organized opposition to the CVF Stabilization Act appears to have come from whistleblowers, who allege that the legislation would siphon funds from people who report government fraud; advocates of the bill say it would preserve payments for whistleblowers.)
A spokesperson for Grassley said in a statement that he “will continue his oversight of the DOJ next Congress to ensure the agency complies with the law and the CVF is filled.” The spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether he would give the CVF Stabilization Act a hearing in the next session.
Dingell, for her part, said she’s undeterred. “I’m gonna work my butt off,” she said. “And I refuse to say there’s no chance.”
Something is missing from the new Trump-backed year-end spending bill that Congress has to pass by midnight on Friday to prevent a government shutdown: Support for critical services for abused women and children.
As I have reported for Mother Jones, there is a funding crisis facing the Crime Victims Fund, a pot of federal money established by the 1984 Victims of Crime Actthat supports domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and child advocacy centers nationwide. The money comes from financial penalties levied in corporate criminal cases, and as federal prosecutors have collected less money, deposits into the Crime Victims Fund have shrunk massively, from about $6.6 billion in 2017 to $2.5 billion this year. (Because of caps set by Congress since 2000 to manage fluctuations in the fund, the amount of money disbursed has been even lower.)
Those cuts have trickled down to programs that provide lifesaving services for women and children in the aftermath of abuse. As I chronicled in a months-long investigation published in October, the declining funds—which are distributed to states based on their population size, and then to programs—have had ripple effects across the country, put multiple hotlines catering to domestic violence survivors at risk and imperiling legal advocacy services for survivors, among other impacts. As Judge Shelley Santry, a family court judge in Louisville, told me: “The consequence [of losing those services] may be death.”
The declining funds have also been disastrous for child advocacy centers: One center in rural northern Wisconsin that provided trauma-informed forensic interviews to about 50 kids annually for free—to gather the facts of their abuse to support criminal prosecutions and facilitate the kids’ healing—shuttered in October due to the funding cuts. Advocates in four other states told me the funding declines forced them to cut personnel or left them unable to fill vacant positions, leading to longer wait times for children and burnout for existing staff. Lynn Scott, executive director of the Alabama Network of Children’s Advocacy Centers, told me further funding cuts “would really close some doors” in her state—likely at a half-dozen or so centers in rural areas, she estimated.
Lawmakers introduced a bill in Congress earlier this year that promised to help fix the funding crisis and seemed to have sweeping, bipartisan support: The CVF Stabilization Act would divert additional funds collected through the False Claims Act, which penalizes defrauding of the government, through 2029. It attracted more than 200 co-sponsors in the House, and a half-dozen in the Senate. Advocates said that while it would not permanently solve the the crisis, it could play an important role in helping to restore the funds: Since fiscal year 2017, according to the DOJ, $1.7 billion from the False Claims Act has gone into the General Fund of the Treasury—money that could otherwise go into the Crime Victims Fund if the new bill was passed.
Despite a big push from advocacy groups to get the bill passed before the end of the year, it failed to get any committee hearings or floor votes. (Spokespeople for the House and Senate Judiciary Committees chairs Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who also co-sponsored the Senate bill, did not return requests for comment. Neither did spokespeople for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-.N.Y.) or House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).)
Its exclusion from the spending bill is the final nail in the coffin, at least for this session of Congress. “We tried hard to get it included in the [spending bill], but right now, there’s not an agreement on anything,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), a cosponsor of the CVF Stabilization Act. “It is very clear to me that Congress has got to do better job of prioritizing crime survivors.”
There are other measures Congress could take that it hasn’t: Biden has recommended a $7.3 billion infusion into the Crime Victims Fund to account for the historic decline, but Congress has yet to act on it. Advocates are hoping that when the next budget does pass next year, Congress will include $1.9 billion in appropriations for the Crime Victims Fund. While the draft Senate appropriations bill meets the request for $1.9 billion, the draft House bill is so far only offering $1.5 billion.
“Survivors and programs cannot continue to wait in limbo for the funding they desperately need.”
In letter to Congress earlier this year, more than 700 prosecutors and 42 state attorneys general urged members to bolster the funding source in both the short and long-term to support survivors. “Millions of victims, including abused children and battered women, will be left without access to safety, justice and healing,” the prosecutors wrote.
Dingell said she doesn’t think her colleagues don’t care about supporting survivors of crimes, but rather that they don’t understand how dire the funding crisis actually is. “I think it’s a matter of peoples’ priorities,” she said. “If they don’t talk to [survivors] like I do, they don’t understand they’re going to be left without assistance and nothing—nothing—to help them navigate the aftermath of crime.”
Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) is one of the co-sponsors of the CVF Stabilization Act—and one of its most vocal defenders. Michael Brochstein/ZUMA
Advocates fear what further funding cuts will bring. “Survivors and programs cannot continue to wait in limbo for the funding they desperately need,” Stephanie Love-Patterson, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, said in a statement Thursday. She added that the organization remains “encouraged by the overwhelming bipartisan congressional support of the bill” and hopeful that the bill would pass in the next Congress.
But Claire Ponder Selib, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Advocacy, is less optimistic. “I’m personally quite concerned about the possibilities of this being passed next session,” she told me, adding that it’s “very disappointing” the text of the legislation is absent from the spending bill. Steve Derene, former executive director of the National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators, is also skeptical: “I’m sort of cynical about it getting past the Senate Judiciary Committee.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the incoming chair of that committee, has not signed onto the Senate bill and would be key to it getting a committee hearing. Grassley has not been entirely opposed to replenishing the Crime Victims Fund: He was an initial co-sponsor of the VOCA Fix Act, a 2021 law that diverted revenue from deferred and non-prosecution agreements to the Crime Victims Fund, and earlier this year said Congress should appropriate “the highest possible obligation limit [to the CVF] to help provide resources to crime victims.” But Grassley has also questioned the DOJ about why the VOCA Fix Act has been inadequate to restore the funds, and supported amendments to the False Claims Act—the new proposed source of revenue for the Crime Victims Fund in the latest bill—to bolster support for whistleblowers. (The only organized opposition to the CVF Stabilization Act appears to have come from whistleblowers, who allege that the legislation would siphon funds from people who report government fraud; advocates of the bill say it would preserve payments for whistleblowers.)
A spokesperson for Grassley said in a statement that he “will continue his oversight of the DOJ next Congress to ensure the agency complies with the law and the CVF is filled.” The spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether he would give the CVF Stabilization Act a hearing in the next session.
Dingell, for her part, said she’s undeterred. “I’m gonna work my butt off,” she said. “And I refuse to say there’s no chance.”
The next ranking member of the House Oversight Committee will reportedly be nine-term Democrat Gerry Connolly of Virginia.
Connolly, 74, beat out his competitor, 35-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), 131-84 at a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, the Associated Press reports. The current Oversight ranking member, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), is vacating the post to replace Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) as ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, as my colleague Pema Levy reported last month. The OversightCommittee—which is now controlled by Republicans and chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.)—played a key role in holding President-elect Donald Trump and members of his administration accountable during his first term.
The news comes as Democrats have been grappling with how to move forward in the face of their losses of both the White House and the Senate last month, and their failure to recapture the House. While some pundits, and Democrats themselves, have called for a generational change in leadership—and some younger Democrats have indeed managed to oust their elders from committee leadership roles—that did not seem to have been enough of a concern to propel AOC to victory here. Lawmakers toldAxios that while Connolly—who revealed last month he was recently diagnosed with esophagus cancer—campaigned on his experience, AOC emphasized her far-reaching platform and her role as an effective communicator for the party.
“Tried my best,” AOC wrote in a post on Bluesky after the vote. “Sorry I couldn’t pull it through everyone—we live to fight another day.”
“I think my colleagues were measuring their votes by who’s got experience, who is seasoned, who can be trusted, who’s capable and who’s got a record of productivity and I think that prevailed,” Connolly reportedly told journalists after the vote.
Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) told Axios she was “disappointed” by the outcome, adding, “I know Gerry will do a great job. But there’s no substitute for having someone in that position that literally has millions of Americans following her [on social media].” (AOC has 12.8 million followers on X and 8.1 million on Instagram; Connolly has just over 87,000 followers on both platforms combined.)
“I think that the seniority issue in this building gets in the way,” Balint added. “Our people back home, they don’t care about seniority.”
After being released from prison in October, Steve Bannon seemingly did everything in his power to get Donald Trump back in the White House. Now he appears interested in helping the president-elect remain in the Oval Office—even beyond what is constitutionally allowed.
At an event hosted by the New York Young Republican Club on Sunday, Bannon reportedly floated the idea of a third Trump term, which if attempted, would be in direct violation of the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution. But to Bannon, that seems to be a mere technicality to overcome.
“I don’t know, maybe we do it again in ’28. Are you guys down for that?” Bannon asked the crowd which cheered in response. “Trump ’28!”
According to Bannon, GOP lawyer and Trump defender Mike Davis had told him that because the Constitution “doesn’t actually say ‘consecutive,'” Trump may be able to run for a third term.
It may be tempting to dismiss such remarks as Bannon being Bannon. But Trump himself has also pointed to the possibility of staying in power beyond another four years. At a July event hosted by the conservative political nonprofit Turning Point Action, Trump told the Christian audience that if he won reelection, “you won’t have to vote anymore,” as my colleague Arianna Coghill covered at the time. A few days later, he declined to walk back or clarify those comments, even doubling down on them in an interview with Fox News.
Bannonalso has a record of accurately characterizing Trump’s moves. As I reported last month, just after Trump’s reelection, Bannon on his War Room podcast promoted a social media post from right-wing podcast host Matt Walsh that said, “Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol.” After reading the post on air, Bannon chuckled, saying, “Fabulous. We might have to put that everywhere.” Trump would eventually confirm as much.In an interview with Time Magazine published just last week, Trump told the magazine, “I don’t disagree with everything in Project 2025, but I disagree with some things.”
Spokespeople for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions on Monday afternoon about whether Bannon speaks for Trump or whether the president-elect will commit to vacating office at the end of his next term in accordance with the Constitution.
Davis, the lawyer Bannonclaimed proposed the idea that a third Trump term was possible, tried to dismiss the comments as a joke. “Steve Bannon is obviously trolling,” he wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Only Obama gets a third term, with his puppet Biden.”
ABC News will pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit that president-elect Donald Trump brought against the network, centered on incorrect comments that anchor George Stephanopoulos made about the civil lawsuit against Trump brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.
The lawsuit focused on a March 10 interview that Stephanopoulos conducted on the network’s Sunday morning show, “This Week,” with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.). In that interview, Stephanopoulos confronted Mace—who has said she’s a rape survivor—about her endorsement of Trump, falsely noting that “judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape, and for defaming the victim of that rape.”
Stephanopoulos was referring to the lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll, who alleged that Trump raped her in 1996 in the dressing room of a New York City department store; as my colleague Russ Choma reported, while the jury found that Carroll’s attorneys did not prove the rape allegation, they did agree that Trump forcibly sexually abused and defamed her, and ruled that Trump had to pay Carroll $5 million.
Still, it is even more complicated than that. As my former colleague Katie Herchenroeder reported, the judge in the Carroll case went to great lengths to clarify that while Trump was not found liable for “rape” under New York’s strict definition—vaginal penetration by a penis—his alleged actions of forcible penetration with his fingers meet the definition of what many people broadly understand as “rape.”
That the jurors did not find that Carroll had proven rape, [Judge Lewis] Kaplan explained, “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “Indeed,” he continued, “as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Federally, rape is defined as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” This broader explanation, while still dependent on penetration, would include assaults using fingers.
Lawyers for ABC and Stephanopoulos referenced this context from the judge’s statements in their unsuccessful motion to dismiss the lawsuit they filed earlier this year, court records show.
As Katie wrote, New York wound up passing a law that expanded the law to include nonconsensual anal, oral, and vaginal sexual contact. When she signed the bill into law, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) recognized Carroll “for her courageous efforts to make sure justice was done.”
As part of the settlement, ABC will pay the $15 million to the Trump presidential library—which currently only exists online—plus another $1 million in Trump’s attorney fees, court records show. The network also added a note to the online story about the interview, noting that both ABC and Stephanopoulos “regret” the comments.
Mace—who accused Stephanopoulos of “shaming” her during the original interview—celebrated the ruling on Saturday, writing in a post on X: “Let this be a warning to all haters: Defamation is real, and your free trial of badmouthing just expired.” In another post, she wrote: “2025 will be the year of [mainstream media] apologies.”
Media scholars and experts have been sounding the alarm about journalists’ and media companies’ capitulation to Trump—who just last month said he would be ok with someone shooting through a crowd of journalists—ahead of his second term.
And they have good reason to be worried: While Trump has claimed he now believes a free press is “vital,” there are fears that he and his acolytes could use baseless lawsuits to go after journalists whose coverage is unfavorable to him—particularly after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) this week blocked a federal shield bill that, if passed, would protect journalists from being forced to reveal their confidential sources.
Devin Nunes, the ex-California congressman and current head of Trump’s struggling social media platform, Truth Social, is getting his prize for being the next president’s long-serving yes-man.
On Saturday, Trump announced that he would appoint Nunes as chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a group of up to 16 private citizens who get high-level security clearance to advise the president on “the effectiveness with which the [intelligence community] is meeting the nation’s intelligence needs.”
In his Truth Social post announcing the news, Trump said Nunes would assume the role “while continuing his leadership of Trump Media & Technology Group,” the company that runs Truth Social. The role reportedly does not require Senate confirmation.
As my colleague David Corn has reported, as former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Nunes attacked the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election as a baseless partisan smear by Democrats—which, in Trump’s eyes, made him uniquely qualified to receive top-level security clearance.
“Devin will draw on his experience as former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and his key role in exposing the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, to provide me with independent assessments of the effectiveness and propriety of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s activities,” Trump wrote in the announcement.
Nunes will draw on a robust track record of foot entering mouth. He compared homeless people to a “zombie apocalypse”; created a fake news site that insisted male privilege doesn’t exist; sued both the Fresno Bee, a local newspaper in California’s Central Valley, and a satirical Twitter account purporting to be his cow.
The Bee famously once called him “Trump’s stooge.” That seems to be the main qualification needed for the next admin.
After being released from prison in October, Steve Bannon seemingly did everything in his power to get Donald Trump back in the White House. Now he appears interested in helping the president-elect remain in the Oval Office—even beyond what is constitutionally allowed.
At an event hosted by the New York Young Republican Club on Sunday, Bannon reportedly floated the idea of a third Trump term, which if attempted, would be in direct violation of the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution. But to Bannon, that seems to be a mere technicality to overcome.
“I don’t know, maybe we do it again in ’28. Are you guys down for that?” Bannon asked the crowd which cheered in response. “Trump ’28!”
According to Bannon, GOP lawyer and Trump defender Mike Davis had told him that because the Constitution “doesn’t actually say ‘consecutive,'” Trump may be able to run for a third term.
It may be tempting to dismiss such remarks as Bannon being Bannon. But Trump himself has also pointed to the possibility of staying in power beyond another four years. At a July event hosted by the conservative political nonprofit Turning Point Action, Trump told the Christian audience that if he won reelection, “you won’t have to vote anymore,” as my colleague Arianna Coghill covered at the time. A few days later, he declined to walk back or clarify those comments, even doubling down on them in an interview with Fox News.
Bannonalso has a record of accurately characterizing Trump’s moves. As I reported last month, just after Trump’s reelection, Bannon on his War Room podcast promoted a social media post from right-wing podcast host Matt Walsh that said, “Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol.” After reading the post on air, Bannon chuckled, saying, “Fabulous. We might have to put that everywhere.” Trump would eventually confirm as much.In an interview with Time Magazine published just last week, Trump told the magazine, “I don’t disagree with everything in Project 2025, but I disagree with some things.”
Spokespeople for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions on Monday afternoon about whether Bannon speaks for Trump or whether the president-elect will commit to vacating office at the end of his next term in accordance with the Constitution.
Davis, the lawyer Bannonclaimed proposed the idea that a third Trump term was possible, tried to dismiss the comments as a joke. “Steve Bannon is obviously trolling,” he wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Only Obama gets a third term, with his puppet Biden.”
ABC News will pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit that president-elect Donald Trump brought against the network, centered on incorrect comments that anchor George Stephanopoulos made about the civil lawsuit against Trump brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.
The lawsuit focused on a March 10 interview that Stephanopoulos conducted on the network’s Sunday morning show, “This Week,” with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.). In that interview, Stephanopoulos confronted Mace—who has said she’s a rape survivor—about her endorsement of Trump, falsely noting that “judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape, and for defaming the victim of that rape.”
Stephanopoulos was referring to the lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll, who alleged that Trump raped her in 1996 in the dressing room of a New York City department store; as my colleague Russ Choma reported, while the jury found that Carroll’s attorneys did not prove the rape allegation, they did agree that Trump forcibly sexually abused and defamed her, and ruled that Trump had to pay Carroll $5 million.
Still, it is even more complicated than that. As my former colleague Katie Herchenroeder reported, the judge in the Carroll case went to great lengths to clarify that while Trump was not found liable for “rape” under New York’s strict definition—vaginal penetration by a penis—his alleged actions of forcible penetration with his fingers meet the definition of what many people broadly understand as “rape.”
That the jurors did not find that Carroll had proven rape, [Judge Lewis] Kaplan explained, “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “Indeed,” he continued, “as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Federally, rape is defined as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” This broader explanation, while still dependent on penetration, would include assaults using fingers.
Lawyers for ABC and Stephanopoulos referenced this context from the judge’s statements in their unsuccessful motion to dismiss the lawsuit they filed earlier this year, court records show.
As Katie wrote, New York wound up passing a law that expanded the law to include nonconsensual anal, oral, and vaginal sexual contact. When she signed the bill into law, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) recognized Carroll “for her courageous efforts to make sure justice was done.”
As part of the settlement, ABC will pay the $15 million to the Trump presidential library—which currently only exists online—plus another $1 million in Trump’s attorney fees, court records show. The network also added a note to the online story about the interview, noting that both ABC and Stephanopoulos “regret” the comments.
Mace—who accused Stephanopoulos of “shaming” her during the original interview—celebrated the ruling on Saturday, writing in a post on X: “Let this be a warning to all haters: Defamation is real, and your free trial of badmouthing just expired.” In another post, she wrote: “2025 will be the year of [mainstream media] apologies.”
Media scholars and experts have been sounding the alarm about journalists’ and media companies’ capitulation to Trump—who just last month said he would be ok with someone shooting through a crowd of journalists—ahead of his second term.
And they have good reason to be worried: While Trump has claimed he now believes a free press is “vital,” there are fears that he and his acolytes could use baseless lawsuits to go after journalists whose coverage is unfavorable to him—particularly after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) this week blocked a federal shield bill that, if passed, would protect journalists from being forced to reveal their confidential sources.
Devin Nunes, the ex-California congressman and current head of Trump’s struggling social media platform, Truth Social, is getting his prize for being the next president’s long-serving yes-man.
On Saturday, Trump announced that he would appoint Nunes as chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a group of up to 16 private citizens who get high-level security clearance to advise the president on “the effectiveness with which the [intelligence community] is meeting the nation’s intelligence needs.”
In his Truth Social post announcing the news, Trump said Nunes would assume the role “while continuing his leadership of Trump Media & Technology Group,” the company that runs Truth Social. The role reportedly does not require Senate confirmation.
As my colleague David Corn has reported, as former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Nunes attacked the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election as a baseless partisan smear by Democrats—which, in Trump’s eyes, made him uniquely qualified to receive top-level security clearance.
“Devin will draw on his experience as former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and his key role in exposing the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, to provide me with independent assessments of the effectiveness and propriety of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s activities,” Trump wrote in the announcement.
Nunes will draw on a robust track record of foot entering mouth. He compared homeless people to a “zombie apocalypse”; created a fake news site that insisted male privilege doesn’t exist; sued both the Fresno Bee, a local newspaper in California’s Central Valley, and a satirical Twitter account purporting to be his cow.
The Bee famously once called him “Trump’s stooge.” That seems to be the main qualification needed for the next admin.
When children in rural Hayward, Wisconsin, suffered abuse, the small community of 2,500 people was ready with an important resource: a child advocacy center with a team of experts prepared to guide them through the trauma.
For nearly eight years, the Marshfield Child Advocacy Center satellite clinic was the only place in a more than 100-mile radius where law enforcement officers, prosecutors, medical professionals, and child protective service workers joined forces to support the child’s wellbeing and pursue a criminal case against the abuser. An average of 50 children a year have spoken here to a trauma-informed, specially trained forensic interviewer, with law enforcement listening from another room. The interviews were recorded, and often played later in court, to minimize the amount of times the children had to repeat details of abuse.
These were critical services for kids who may have otherwise ended up answering questions in a police interrogation room, or not reporting at all. But in October, the Hayward satellite office was forced to close its doors.
It was one of more than 960 child advocacy centers nationwide that have become essential for communities and law enforcement, and they rely heavily on public support to serve kids and families free of charge: Federal funds accounted for an average of 35 percent of centers’ budgets nationwide last year, according to the National Children’s Alliance.
Much of that money comes from a fund created by the 1984 Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), which redirects financial penalties levied in corporate criminal cases to domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and child advocacy centers nationwide. But as prosecutions have declined, the government’s payout from that fund has been plummeting for years, throwing the already underresourced organizations that rely on them into disarray.
“To have a law enforcement officer, for instance, or a social worker drive a patient three hours for a forensic interview—chances are, that’s not going to happen.”
The final straw for the Hayward facility came this year, when it saw an 80 percent cut to its federal funding.
Rural areas like Hayward “have limited resources all around, but when it comes to be child abuse and neglect, there’s obviously a paucity of those,” said Kristen Iniguez, director of the Marshfield Child Advocacy Center, which oversaw the Hayward satellite clinic from its headquarters about 150 miles southeast. “To have a law enforcement officer, for instance, or a social worker drive a patient three hours for a forensic interview—chances are, that’s not going to happen.”
Now, this is the reality facing abused children near Hayward. As I recently reported in a months-long investigation, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers have seen devastating cuts to their hotlines and legal advocacy services, among others, as a result of the declining VOCA funds.
Leaders of centers in five states told me the VOCA cuts are also forcing them to cut personnel or left them unable to fill vacant positions, leading to longer wait times for children in need of services and burnout for existing staff. And even for organizations that have managed to avoid the worst-case scenario—closing their doors—they are bracing for more funding cuts to come.
The funds mostly come from financial penalties levied in corporate criminal cases. But as federal prosecutors have pursued more deferred and non-prosecution agreements—which allow defendants more time to pay up or avoid charges entirely if they cooperate with the government—deposits into the Crime Victims Fund have shrunk from about $6.6 billion in 2017 to $2.5 billion this year. (Because of caps set by Congress since 2000 to manage fluctuations in the fund, the amount of money disbursed has been even lower.) The funds are distributed to states based on their population size, and then to eligible programs.
Kids room with toys at the National Children’s Advocacy CenterCourtesy of the National Children’s Advocacy Center
There have been efforts to shore up VOCA funds, but they’ve so far been inadequate. President Biden signed the VOCA Fix Act into law in 2021, diverting revenue from deferred and non-prosecution agreements to the Crime Victims Fund, but it has yet to fill the gap. The Crime Victims Fund Stabilization Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in bothchambers of Congress this year, would divert additional funds collected through the False Claims Act, which penalizes defrauding of the government. Since fiscal year 2017, $1.7 billion from the False Claims Act has gone into the General Fund of the Treasury—money that could otherwise go into the Crime Victims Fund under the new bill. But the prospect of the bill becoming law before the end of this session looks increasingly unlikely.
More cuts without a solution enacted at the federal level means that future child abuse victims like those in rural northern Wisconsin will be less likely to see their cases prosecuted and to have a sense of closure, according to Iniguez.
“It’s kind of just unfair for the victim—and a child victim, at that,” she said.
While the House version of the bill introduced by Missouri Republican Rep. Ann Wagner now has nearly 200 bipartisan co-sponsors, it hasn’t yet gotten a needed committee hearing. Spokespeople for House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) didn’t respond to questions.
Wisconsin’s GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany, whose district includes both Hayward and Marshfield, has not signed on to support the bill. His office did not respond to requests for comment. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) supports the Senate bill and is waiting to be added as a co-sponsor, according to a spokesperson. Wisconsin’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson, has not signed on and did not respond to a request for comment. That bill, too, is still waiting for a committee hearing.
“My fear is that with the lack of funding, more and more CACs are going to be forced into making really difficult decisions about their ability to continue providing services, and to what degree in their communities—it’s a crisis.”
While politicians in DC dawdle, advocates fear the worst. Last year, VOCA funds supported more than 1,000 child abuse service organizations, according to DOJ data; support for victims of child sexual and physical abuse and neglect were among the most common services the funds supported, that data also shows. “Millions of victims, including abused children and battered women, will be left without access to safety, justice and healing,” more than 700 prosecutors wrote in a letter to Congress earlier this year, urging them to act. As Chris Newlin, the CEO of the National Children’s Advocacy Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the first-ever child advocacy center, told me, “My fear is that with the lack of funding, more and more CACs are going to be forced into making really difficult decisions about their ability to continue providing services, and to what degree in their communities—it’s a crisis.”
The National Children’s Advocacy Center campus in Huntsville, AlabamaCourtesy of the National Children’s Advocacy Center
The hallmark of child advocacy centers, experts say, is the multidisciplinary team—the collaboration among the group of officials who determine how to best support the child going forward.
The National Children’s Advocacy Center was established in 1985 with the help of former Democratic Rep. Bud Cramer, who saw firsthand how the system failed child abuse victims during his time as district attorney of Madison County, Alabama. In a 2013 column for Roll Call, Cramer wrote that he realized the system needed an overhaul when the grandmother of a child abuse victim told him the girl had to recount her allegations of abuse 11 different times during the course of his prosecution. “I had to ask myself, why aren’t we talking to each other—social workers, law enforcement, prosecutors and victims advocates? We all touched the case at some point, but had yet to coordinate any part of the investigation,” Cramer wrote. “So, I decided to change that.”
This approach has proven effective: Research has shown that child advocacy centers lead to higher rates of felony prosecutions of child sexual abuse, faster processing of cases, and greater satisfaction among both children and their caregivers.
The goal is always to ensure “that that child is always the first priority in that room, and that their needs for comfort and safety guide that process,” says Emily Perry, a forensic interviewer in Indiana. Susie’s Place—the child advocacy center she founded in 2009, which now has three locations throughout Indiana—is designed to feel like a cozy living room, outfitted with couches, toys, televisions, and books. In the interview room, kids sit in overstuffed armchairs with weighted blankets and an easel in between them and the forensic interviewer. (Drawing is among the techniques used to elicit information from kids.)
This sense of comfort is the point, and a personal priority for Perry, who has seen firsthand how victims struggle without the support offered by the centers. As a child protective service worker in the 1990s, Perry recalls walking a 5-year-old child sexual abuse survivor through the halls of a sheriff’s department—housed in the same building as the local jail—to a sterile detective’s interrogation room to be interviewed by someone without specialized training about their experience of abuse. “I knew that the trauma of the investigation,” she says, “was sometimes more harmful than the abuse itself.” Now, at centers like Susie’s Place, “we can gather reliable information to guide an investigation, but also springboard [children] into healing and recovery while that’s happening,” she adds.
Emily Perry founded the child advocacy center Susie’s Place in 2009, and it now has three locations throughout Indiana. Courtesy of Emily PerryRooms at Susie’s Place are designed to make children feel comfortable when they speak to a forensic interviewer.Courtesy of Emily Perry
The work of these professionals doesn’t end with the forensic interviews. They often also offer medical exams conducted by child abuse pediatricians, mental health counseling, and advocates, who explain the criminal justice process and help connect kids and families with other resources.
Perry said she hasn’t had to slash her facility’s services yet, as the state has done a good job minimizing the impact of the declining funds. But at some child advocacy centers, even additional state support hasn’t prevented casualties.
In West Virginia, federal VOCA funds have dropped 58 percent since 2017, even as the need is rising. Last year, more than 4,800 children in West Virginia received services from a child advocacy center for the first time—a 10 percent increase compared to the previous five years, according to the statewide child advocacy network. Maureen Runyon, coordinator of the child advocacy center at Charleston Area Medical Center Women and Children’s Hospital, lost one of her three VOCA-funded advocates last month and she is not planning to rehire due to the uncertain funding picture. Even though the West Virginia legislature allocated funds to offset the VOCA cuts over the last several years, there’s no guarantee they’ll do it again next year, when the state’s 21 child advocacy centers are expected to face a $2.5 million cut.
Runyon expects the impacts of losing an advocate will be felt by other staff who have to pick up the slack—and by the 450 children they serve on average each year, whose families will have to wait longer for the help an advocate offers. “At the end of the day, helping this child get what they need so they can grow up and be an emotionally healthy adult is the most important thing we do,” she said, “and our advocates are the ones who are primarily responsible for trying to make sure that happens.”
Maureen Runyon, coordinator of the child advocacy center at Charleston Area Medical Center Women and Children’s HospitalCourtesy of Maureen RunyonThe medical exam room at the Charleston Area Medical Center Women and Children’s Hospital’s child advocacy centerCourtesy of Maureen Runyon
Only one of West Virginia’s federal lawmakers, Republican Rep. Carol Miller, has supported the bill. Neither of West Virginia’s senators—Republican Shelley Capito and outgoing Independent Joe Manchin—have signed on to the Crime Victims Fund Stabilization Act; nor has Republican Rep. Alexander Mooney. Their offices did not respond to requests for comment.
Cuts to federal funding for child advocacy centers in Alabama have “created a mass exodus” of specially trained staff from the state’s three dozen centers, said Lynn Scott, executive director of the Alabama Network of Children’s Advocacy Centers. And while the state has provided some funding to support the centers, it has not kept pace with the 57 percent drop in VOCA funds the state received since 2017, Scott says.
Since Scott joined the statewide group in 2019, half of Alabama’s executive directors have left their positions, mostly “due to the burnout and stress of having to do multiple roles because the funding for direct services has been cut.” Two centers have not rehired leaders, she said, and all centers have seen increases in wait times for forensic interviews and counseling sessions and even higher caseloads. Further cuts, Scott added, “would really close some doors”—likely at a half dozen or so centers in rural areas of the state, she believes.
Yet support for new funding from the state’s federal lawmakers has been mixed. Four of the state’s seven House representatives and GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville are supporting the bills. Alabama’s other Republican senator, Katie Britt, frequently advocates for “protecting kids,” including, famously, through misrepresenting an anecdote about a child sex-trafficking victim during the State of the Union rebuttal. But she has yet to sign on, and a spokesperson did not respond to repeated inquiries about why.
To advocates like Scott, the inaction is confounding. Fighting “child abuse is bipartisan,” she said. Increasing funding, she added, “should be an easy ‘yes.’”
The National Children’s Advocacy Center was established in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1985, and it became the model for child advocacy centers nationwide.Courtesy of the National Children’s Advocacy Center
When I askedadvocatesto share their message for lawmakers about the need to support these services, several emphasized that early intervention can reduce the likelihood that child abuse victims will face challenges later in life, including substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, and becoming perpetrators of violence themselves.
“We can’t keep children from being abused at a child advocacy center,” said Runyon from West Virginia, “but once they are, we’re their best chance for having good quality intervention, and having a healthier, happier adulthood.”
Even if theCrime Victims Fund Stabilization Act were to pass Congress this session, advocates say it would not solve the entirety of the funding crisis facing the centers: The funding mechanisms still rely on unpredictable criminal penalties. It would take some time before centers saw the increased funds. And the bill is only written to be valid through 2029. “This stabilization bill is just a band aid,” Perry, from Indiana, says. “If there isn’t more of a steady, consistent flow of funds into the Crime Victims Fund, then we’re just going to be revisiting this time and time again.”
Some state and local governments have tried to offset the federal funding cuts for their local centers, but many of those appropriations are temporary, and the facilities can’t plan for them to continue. There are a couple notable exceptions: One is Maryland, where officials passed a law last year compelling the state to supplement federal VOCA funds to ensure $60 million is available annually. Wendy Myers, executive director of the Maryland Children’s Alliance, which represents two dozen centers, said the new law helps “stabilize services for the most vulnerable Marylanders, including child victims of abuse,” and that the funds support training for forensic interviewers, trauma therapists, and language translation for direct services at all child advocacy centers across the state. Another exception is Colorado: The state passed a ballot measure last month that will provide tens of millions of dollars annually to 19 child advocacy centers and other VOCA-funded organizations through a 6.5 percent excise tax on firearms and ammunition.
Forensic interview room at the National Children’s Advocacy CenterCourtesy of the National Children’s Advocacy Center
Advocates say these kinds of long-term solutions are necessary to stabilize needed funding—but federal and state lawmakers largely continue to punt the issue. Biden’s budget recommended a $7.3 billion infusion into the Crime Victims Fund, but Congress has so far left it out of the relevant appropriations bill. As the National Children’s Alliance pointed out in its brief on VOCA cuts, private donors are unreliable, and relying on fundraising events leads to more overhead costs for nonprofits. “No other source offers the stability and scale that federal funding can provide for critical services for child crime victims,” the brief says of VOCA.
In the meantime, children are suffering without services, and centers in need are losing qualified staff. Iniguez, from the Marshfield CAC in Wisconsin, will leave the state to run a center in Ohio in the new year, she said. Ohio’s last federal award was almost double Wisconsin’s—and Iniguez hopes that means she won’t have to fight as hard to provide the services children need.
“The community I’m going to,” Iniguez said, “is very responsive to the needs of children who have been victimized.”
In an unexpected developmentSaturday night, Syrian rebels who had been fighting government forces for over a decade, captured the capital city of Damascus, bringing an end to a more than decade-long civil war and an even longer reign of terror by the family of President Bashar al-Assad.
Opposition forces reportedly announced on national television, “The city of Damascus has been liberated. The tyrant Bashar al-Assad has been toppled.” They added that they had also freed prisoners from the prison complex Sednaya,a major facility on the outskirts of the capital city.
The developments mark a stunning end to the 24-year reign of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, 59, whose late father, Hafez al-Assad, was president for nearly three decades. Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Assad has gone to brutal lengths to cling to power—including by deploying devastating chemical attacks on civilians, including children. All told, by 2022, more than 306,000 civilians had been killed in the war, according to the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner.
According to Russian state media, Assad has fled with his family to Moscow. The Syrian Prime Minister, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, reportedly said he is ready to cooperate with the opposition to facilitate a transitional government and called for free elections.
Videos show Syrians celebrating in the streets and cheering as they tore down a statue of Assad and dragged another one through the streets. Many people who had been imprisoned by the Assad regime are now reportedly being reunited with their families as rebel forces empty the prisons. Syrians around the world also gathered to mark the occasion. In London, a crowd gathered outside the Syrian embassy to demand the Assad flag be removed. In Doha, Qatar, Syrians gathered to sing and dance at the opposition embassy. Photos also showed Syrians celebrating in Istanbul, Munich, London, and Berlin.
It was an unthinkable scene just one week ago: Syrian rebels in the heart of Damascus celebrating the fall of the regime, with the whereabouts of President Bashar Assad unknown.
The longconflict sparked the world’s largest refugee crisis, according to the UN Refugee Agency, displacing more than 14 million Syrians, approximately 5.5 million of whom went to the 5 neighboring countries of Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. Footage posted to social media Sunday showed a road full of cars, reportedly filled with Syrian refugees returning to their country from Turkey.
President Biden on Sunday addressed the nation following the developments. “This regime brutalized and tortured and killed literally hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians,” he said, in an address from the White House. “A fall of the regime is a fundamental act of justice.”
In his remarks, Biden also mentioned Austin Tice, a freelance American journalist who has been detained since 2012 after having been kidnapped while reporting in Syria. “We remain committed to returning him to his family,” Biden said. Later, in response to reporters’ questions, Biden said officials “have to identify where [Tice] is.”
The Tice family toldAxios in a statement: “We are reaching out to all contacts in government and the region. We encourage everyone to help us in our search for Austin. As a family, we are all in DC working for his fast and safe return.” Axios also reported the Tice family met with officials from the Biden administration on Friday.
Human rights advocates hope the latest developments will provide an opportunity for justice for the victims of the Assad regime. “This historic opportunity must be now seized and decades of grave human rights violations redressed,” Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, said in a statement, adding that suspected perpetrators of crimes should be investigated and tried if warranted, and that prison records and other documentation be preserved. According to prior research from the organization, Syrian authorities used “murder, torture, enforced disappearance and extermination” to quell dissent following the start of the civil war in 2011, and targeted civilian areas, hospitals, and medical facilities with Russia’s support.
In an epic two-part 2019 investigation, former Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer traveled to Syria to get a firsthand look at American involvement in the conflict. In 2012 President Barack Obama declared that the use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that would prompt the US to intervene in Syria—but then did nothing after al-Assad launched a chemical attack a year later, killing more than 1,400 people. The CIA set up a $1 billion program to arm Syrian rebels, but President Donald Trump ended that program in 2017. These flip-flops embody the inconsistent response to the conflict by the US.
“The only thing that seemed worse than getting sucked into the conflict was not getting involved at all,” Bauer wrote. As a result, “American involvement in Syria has been as fragmented and volatile as the conflict itself.”
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This is the full letter being distributed around Lincoln County Oregon