Trump’s mass deportation agenda is 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].”
— Rachel Bitecofer
This is the full letter being distributed around Lincoln County Oregon
pic.twitter.com/VlvbzFldzZ
(@RachelBitecofer) December 20, 2024
Perhaps most disturbing are the ways that the letter directly echoes some of the Trump administration’s own anti-immigration talking points: Attacks on sanctuary cities, promises of detention, and allegedly solving the housing crisis through mass deportations, which the letter compares approvingly to Japanese internment.
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 County Sheriff 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.
Oregon’s Democratic senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, do not appear to have publicly commented on the letters, and their offices did not immediately respond to requests 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.
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.”
When Valentino Rodriguez started his job at a high-security prison in Sacramento, California, informally known as New Folsom, he thought he was entering a brotherhood of correctional officers who hold each other to a high standard of conduct.
Five years later, Rodriguez would be found dead in his home. His unexpected passing would raise questions from his family and the FBI.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.Before he died, Rodriguez was promoted to an elite unit investigating crimes in the prison. His parents and his widow say he had been hoping for the position for a long time.
But once inside the unit, the job consumed him. From day one, his fellow officers began to undermine and harass him. Stressed and fed up with how he was being treated, Rodriguez reached a breaking point.
He left the prison, but his experiences there still haunted him—so he went in for a meeting with the warden. He didn’t know it would be his last.
This week on Reveal, we partner with KQED reporters Sukey Lewis and Julie Small and the On Our Watch podcast to explore what this correctional officer’s story shows about how the second-largest prison system in the country is failing to protect the people who live and work inside it.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in March 2024.
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
I was 11 years old the year my older stepsister brought her high school boyfriend home for the first time. It was Thanksgiving 2006, and his Southern manners fit right in as we bantered between mouthfuls of cornbread stuffing, fried okra, and marshmallow-topped sweet potato casserole. Then, in the overstuffed lull before the desserts were served, my dad plunked his laptop in the center of the table. He opened it up and began clicking through a PowerPoint presentation chock full of data on ice sheet melt and global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.
My stepsister’s eyes grew wide with embarrassment. In an effort to welcome her sweetheart to the family, my dad had rolled out his version of a red carpet: one of his many family lectures on the horrors of climate change.
This wasn’t the first—or last—time my dad’s climate obsession took center stage at our family gatherings. On that particular occasion, he was doling out factoids about Arctic amplification—the prevalence of which was then a debate among climate scientists. It was just a warm-up to a typical holiday season spent quibbling over the ethics of farmed Christmas trees and openly scoffing at scientific inaccuracies during a movie theater showing of Happy Feet, the year’s seasonal offering about a dancing penguin named Mumble. A month later, on Christmas Eve, he forwarded me an email about how Santa Claus’ body would disintegrate if he were to travel through the atmosphere at the speeds necessary to meet his seasonal duties, adding a personal note: “Not to mention the emissions!”
Over the years, these tendencies earned him the family nickname “Dr. Doom”—a nod to his university professor title and compulsive need to share terrifying facts about our warming world. My dad hammed it up, interrupting his own lamentations by hooting out, “We’re all gonna die!” in a cartoonish falsetto. More than anything, it was a term of endearment. After all, we knew other households that spent their holidays arguing over whether climate change was even real.
Many of us know a Dr. Doom in our lives, or at the very least, a pessimist with a particular fixation. We each have our own ways of responding to it, such as my brother’s pragmatism, my stepmom’s knee-jerk optimism, my stepsister’s exasperation. Or, perhaps you are the doomer yourself.
I’m usually tempted to respond with, “I see hope in the next generation.” But doomerism—a label often used to describe climate defeatists—doesn’t typically leave room to talk about a better future. It’s a contagious kind of despair, often too credible to dismiss. Nowadays, my brother and I both work in climate-related fields, undeniably thanks to Dr. Doom’s influence. But growing up, it only took a few days of dad’s soapboxing before I’d tune out of anything climate-related until the New Year.
This Christmas, as we once again prepare to pass around the cranberry sauce and discuss the end of the world, I can’t help but wonder how my dad became Dr. Doom. And in a world of rising doomerism, what influence do such tidings have on others?
My dad’s journey to becoming “Dr. Doom” started with his formal training as a tropical ecologist. Until the early 2000s, his work meant trudging through rainforests, studying photosynthesis while battling mosquitoes. Then, the wear of human activity on his surroundings became too much to bear. He switched gears and has since spent his career leap-frogging between climate education jobs—from director of an environmental science program at the University of Idaho to president of a small school in Maine, which, in 2012, he led to become the first college to divest fully from fossil fuels.
Those entrenched in science, like my dad, seem to be especially susceptible to climate despair. That’s according to experts like Rebecca Weston, the co-executive director of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America, a community of mental health professionals trained to address the emotional and psychological challenges emerging in our warming world. Many in scientific fields, Weston says, are first to document and review the data behind irreversible loss.
The facts of the crisis are so dire that despair seems to be a hazard for many—scientists or not. After all, a study by researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that some 7 percent of US adults report potentially serious levels of psychological distress about climate change. Gale Sinatra, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education who studies how people learn about climate change, put it more simply: “Your dad’s problem is that he knows too much.”
The issue only gets worse when the climate-informed try to share what they know. In a short-lived position in 2007 as science advisor to the Florida state government (back when then-Governor Charlie Crist would actually acknowledge “climate change”) my dad was silenced during a presentation to the legislature. A report later said that the “awkward” situation arose when a Republican senator took issue with a discussion topic that “had not yet been accepted as fact.” According to my dad, the controversy stemmed from his decision to share the famous “hockey stick” graph, a data visual that shows that global average temperatures began spiking after human societies industrialized.
“We’re starting to understand it as moral injury,” said Kristan Childs, co-chair of a committee to support climate scientists with the Climate Psychology Alliance, referring to a psychological phenomenon that happens when people witness actions that violate their beliefs or damage their conscience. “They’ve been informing people for so long, and there’s just such a betrayal because people are not believing them, or are not doing enough to act on it.”
Like many, my dad’s response to this was to get louder—and darker. There’s conflicting research on how different kinds of messaging can affect people’s behavior. Some studies show that those experiencing distress are also more active, while others say that emphasizing worst-case scenarios, like so-called climate “tipping points,” is an ineffective strategy that can overwhelm and de-motivate audiences instead. It can also backfire on a personal level: Listeners of the podcast “This American Life” may be familiar with a story about a climate activist dad whose zeal led to his children cutting him out of their lives.
As a journalist on the climate beat, I’ve interviewed dozens of self-described “doomers,” and yet I’ve found the term is a bit of a misnomer. While many fixate on the worst possible climate scenarios, they’re generally not quitters. As Childs put it, “I don’t know anyone who’s just given up on it all.” Instead, nearly all have dedicated their lives to addressing climate change. And they can’t help but evangelize, warning everybody within earshot of the ways the coming century could change their lives.
Throughout these interviews, I’m tacitly looking for any insight that might help my own Dr. Doom. (Recently, I accompanied my dad to a physical therapy appointment where, upon seeing a disposable blood pressure cuff, he attempted to regale his doctor with facts about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the US health care system.) Childs might just have some. She offers a 10-step program for professionals who work in science-oriented fields, affiliated with a larger collection of support groups offered by the Good Grief Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to processing emotions on climate change.
“The group work is powerful because it really, really helps dissolve the sense of isolation,” Childs said. As she spoke, I shifted uncomfortably, wondering how many times my teenage tendency to tune out or respond flippantly made my dad feel I was invalidating his concerns.
The best place to start is often the hardest: acknowledging how bad the problem is. “It’s actually helpful to give people a place to share their biggest fears,” she said, adding that the typical workplace culture in scientific fields discourages expressing emotions. “Somehow some acceptance of how bad it is, and the fact that we can then still stay engaged, shifts the question to who we can be in these times.”
Weston agrees that entirely erasing climate anxiety isn’t realistic, especially as the effects of Earth’s changing atmosphere become more apparent and frightening. Instead, her group suggests reframing ideas of what having a meaningful impact looks like. “It depends on breaking through a kind of individualist understanding of achievement. It’s about facing something that will be resolved past our own lifetimes,” she said.
My dad has spent his career chasing that elusive sense of fulfillment—never quite satisfied with the work he’s doing. But lately, he’s found a reason to stay put. In 2019, he returned to my hometown to teach climate change to undergraduates at the University of Florida. Now and again, I’ve wondered how these 18- to 22-year-olds, many of whom grew up in the increasingly red state, respond to his doomsaying.
This year, while home around Thanksgiving, I sat in on his last lecture of the semester—a doozy on how economic systems can destroy natural resources. His students seemed completely at ease—chatting with him at the beginning of class, easily participating when he asked questions. I was already surprised.
“He’s just sharing the facts,” one of his students told me, when I asked a group of them about his teaching style after the class.
Another quickly interjected: “He’s too dogmatic. It’s super depressing, it’s super doom.” Others nodded.
A third chimed in: “It helps me feel motivated.”
Later that week, while I was reporting a different story at a local climate event, both his former students and local activists flagged me down to say how much they appreciated my dad’s courses and op-eds in local newspapers.
“We need all sorts of climate communication. People are responsive to different messages,” said Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the markedly anti-doomer author of What If We Get It Right?, a recent book that puts possibility at the center of climate action. In 2019, a Yale study on how people respond to different messaging tactics underscored this point—finding that “hope is not always good, and doubt is not always bad.”
For Johnson, getting through the climate crisis starts with who you surround yourself with. “This is not solitary work. Individual changemakers are not really a thing,” she said. “We never know the ripples that we’re going to have.”
The Christmas stockings on the mantle at my dad’s house haven’t changed in years, but the dinner conversations have. Now, instead of trying to brush aside Dr. Doom’s digressions, we lean in. Our evenings are spent butting heads over the recent climate optimism book, Not the End of the World, by data scientist Hannah Ritchie; swapping notes on heat pumps; and debating how to make the most of used-EV tax credits. My baby nephew, Auggie, of the latest generation to be saddled with our hopes and fears, brightens the room with his cooing at all manner of round fruits and toy trucks.
Between sips from warm mugs, my dad leans back in his chair and frowns at some news on his phone’s screen. “The wheels are really coming off the wagon, kids. Humanity faces an existential threat,” he says, to no one in particular. From the next room, my stepmom calls, “The sky’s been falling since I met you, Stephen.”
It’s hard not to smile. Who knows how many people my dad has influenced, or if he will ever feel satisfied with his mission. But as his doomy, gloomy self, he’s built a community and family that share his values. At that moment, I find myself thinking of something Childs told me: “You cannot protect your kids from climate change. But you can protect them from being alone with climate change.”
In our changing world, these conversations feel like something to be thankful for.
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