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- Trump Interrupted By Protesters As He Fights To Rally Texas Voters Behind Paxton...
President Donald Trump fought to rally Texas voters behind Senate candidate Ken Paxton as a series of protests disrupted his rally in San Antonio. [TheTopNews] Read More.15 hours ago - October 7: How Can So Many People Celebrate a Massacre?
At more than 100 sites around the world today, sincere but poorly-informed people are holding vigils—not for the innocent Israeli civilians (and foreign nationals) slaughtered in southern Israel three years ago, but for the Palestinian war dead, at least half of whom were Hamas fighters, according to Hamas itself. This is like using the anniversary of 9/11 to honor the Taliban soldiers killed at the Battle of Tora Bora. But it’s even more perverse than that. Everyone attending these vigils supports boycotting Israel. And almost everyone there will take photos on their phones. Few know that many of the components of their Samsungs (including the cameras) were designed and developed in Herzlia, near Tel Aviv. Maybe the iPhone is non-kosher? Nope. Apple’s second-largest R & D facility in the world is located in Israel, too. I’m not holding my breath for the protesters to throw their phones away in “solidarity” or to welcome a more nuanced analysis of the conflict. We’re way past that point now. Nuance is a distant shore. When I wrote for the old Newsweek in the 20th Century, we sometimes relied on a cliched qualifier: “To be sure….” This was a way to acknowledge that an opposing argument or inconvenient fact had to be very briefly “flicked at,” as we put it, before rapidly pivoting to our main points. For the last three years, the events of October 7, 2023 have been framed with, “To be sure…” It felt as if every conversation and the entire tone of the global debate was a variation on, “To be sure, October 7 was horrendous, but you have to see it in the context of the broader struggle in the Middle East.” Or: “To be sure, more than 1,000 people died on October 7, but of course the IDF killed 73,000, including thousands of children.” Today, to commemorate the third anniversary of October 7, allow me to flip the cliché for a moment. To be sure, the IDF has killed far too many civilians, including children. To be sure, the settler violence on the West Bank is horrendous and the ethnic cleansing there must end. To be sure, it is absolutely essential that Netanyahu lose the October 27 election. But…. As Jews might say on Passover, on all other nights we eat the bitter herbs of the abuses that have led Israel to become a pariah state. But… [TheTopNews] Read More.24 hours ago - “The Single Most Toxic Issue in the Midterms”: How America Turned on Data Ce...
Tim Murphy joins Garrison Hayes to break down the bipartisan revolt against data centers. America is hopelessly divided along party lines. That’s a stubborn fact, we’re told, and the polling bears it out: Democrats dislike Republicans and Republicans dislike Democrats, in almost precisely the same proportions. But every election produces surprising coalitions that defy entrenched partisanship. In these midterms, left and right have found something so commonly loathed that politicians across the country are flip-flopping in real time. Mother Jones has been tracking the backlash to data centers on the ground long before the water-guzzling behemoths became the country’s bête noire. The AI boom, with its insatiable need for computing, has unleashed a power grab by tech billionaires. “Data centers have replaced megayachts as the preferred theater of oligarchic status signaling,” national correspondent Tim Murphy wrote in his big Mother Jones investigation into hyperscale data centers and the communities they land on. “Oligarchy is now more than an idea; it is a place.” On today’s episode of Stress Test, Tim joins host Garrison Hayes to discuss how data centers—and other AI-boom technologies, like Flock cameras—have upended political fortunes and ripped up the partisan playbook ahead of November’s vote. “Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it.” “It’s maybe the single most toxic issue in the midterms this side of, you know, gas prices,” Tim tells Garrison. “It’s like a three-to-one opposition among voters. Nobody wants data centers. Everybody’s fired up about it.” Take Texas. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott promoted the state as a place where companies could build almost anything. Then rural and suburban communities got the facilities, and the gas plants that power them, in their backyards, along with strained water supplies, pollution, and rising utility bills. “People are complaining about what they have to live next to,” Tim says. “And it just builds and builds and builds.” Under pressure (and running for reelection), Abbott made a stunning reversal, announcing steps that amount to a moratorium. And he’s not the only one feeling the heat. So what changed? Data centers used to be half the size of an Amazon warehouse; now they’re measured in “multiples of Manhattan,” says Tim, who explains how we got here and what to expect next. He heads back to Texas in the coming weeks, and we’ll follow what he learns right up to Election Day. For more, read Tim Murphy’s road trip… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 day ago - Martin Soto Went Out for Diapers. He Came Home Eight Months Later.Martin Soto, a Peruvian man thrown into solitary confinement after organizing a hunger and labor strike inside the notorious for-profit ICE detention facility Delaney Hall, was released from New Jersey’s Elizabeth Detention Center with an ankle monitor Tuesday night. Soto came to the United States from Peru in 2024 and was pursuing asylum. He was detained by federal agents in February while buying diapers for his two young children. Though he has no criminal record, he spent eight consecutive months in ICE detention, including several months in solitary confinement—retribution, his wife Gabriela said, for his role as an organizer. Gabriela Soto organized a series of protests outside Delaney Hall in May, as her husband worked to improve conditions inside. On May 22, a group of over 300 detained immigrants, including Martin, announced a two-week hunger and labor strike inside the for-profit detention facility, demanding freedom and due process, as well as a meeting with the governor and an end to coercive pressure to self-deport. The state of New Jersey sued to close Delaney Hall as reports of inedible food, violent guards, and inadequate medical care continued to emerge from the facility. The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, claimed the hunger strike never happened. By the end of May, Martin Soto was transferred to the nearby Elizabeth Detention Center, where he was held for another four months. “They don’t want him associating with more people because they’re afraid that he might start another hunger and labor strike inside a facility,” Gabriela Soto told journalist Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg in early September. “So they keep him away from life in general.” In August, Soto began pursuing a U-Visa, a specialized visa “reserved for victims of certain crimes…who are aiding law enforcement investigations.” In September, Gabriela Soto sent a handwritten letter to New Jersey Attorney General Davenport asking Davenport to sign Martin’s U-Visa certification as her office investigates alleged human rights abuses against Soto and others inside Delaney Hall. “I know that my advocacy, Martin’s bravery, has placed this case in the spotlight & therefore your decisions in this are under that same spotlight,” Gabriela wrote. “But I ask you to please consider providing us with this documentation so we can continue our fight.” That visa certification was approved this week, according to independent journalist Kevin Ortega-Rojas. Soto’s October 6 release was first reported by Radio Jornalera NJ, a local community radio station. New… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 day ago
- Trump Administration Plans to Have Its Own Lawyers Represent Migrant KidsThe Trump administration has quietly announced that its own lawyers will represent unaccompanied migrant children in immigration court, facing off against other administration lawyers who are trying to deport the kids. Immigration advocates are concerned that the arrangement, announced last week in the Federal Register, could pose a conflict of interest. In the past, unaccompanied minors were represented by a network of independent nonprofits, but the administration ended the contract this year after the network refused to hand over privileged information about its young clients. “I’m concerned about the lack of independence” of these new government lawyers, says Ana Raquel Devereaux, an attorney at the nonprofit Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, part of the network that lost the contract. The administration’s new attorneys will be housed in the Department of Health and Human Services, in a section called the Unaccompanied Alien Children Legal Representation Division. HHS did not respond to questions about when they would begin their work. The federal rules in place to protect immigrant kids from harm and exploitation “rely on experienced legal representatives trained to work with children.” Unaccompanied minors are granted special protections under federal law because they are so vulnerable after entering the United States without a parent or legal guardian; many of them are very young and could be at risk of trafficking or abuse. The Trafficking Victims Protection and Reauthorization Act requires that they be assigned independent lawyers. This requirement is particularly important, immigrant advocates point out, because the other arms of immigration court are far from independent: Immigration judges work for the Department of Justice and deportation attorneys work for the Department of Homeland Security. “We already don’t have an independent [immigration] judiciary, and to have the defense side of representation also be within the government makes me feel like it’s all a farce and everybody is working together to get the kids removed,” says Devereaux. The Federal Register notes that the new division of lawyers will be separate from another division at HHS, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which temporarily houses unaccompanied kids after they cross the border alone until they can be reunited with sponsors, who are often relatives. As my colleague Isabela Dias and I reported last week, ORR has been holding children for significantly longer periods under the Trump administration and is also detaining children who are arguably not even unaccompanied. In a statement to… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 day ago
- Fear Kept Immigrants Away From Medicaid. Now Many Can’t Come Back.Laura doesn’t know what she’s going to do when her medication runs out. For years, she relied on Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid, to cover the costs of treating her Type 2 diabetes: doctor visits, tests, medication. An undocumented immigrant from Mexico, she benefited from California policies that opened Medi-Cal to all low-income residents, regardless of immigration status. Last winter, however, she received a notice that her coverage was set to expire and that she would need to renew it. At the time, Laura, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, said she rarely left her home, scared of getting caught up in an immigration enforcement operation. For months, she had missed many of her appointments and sent friends to pick up her prescriptions. But she eventually ventured to the enrollment office. There, the person reviewing her renewal application told her that, since some of her family members were paid under the table, they would all have to make and sign attestations of income. Her husband was hesitant, worried by news of Medicaid’s data-sharing agreement with ICE. “For me it was more about fear,” she said in Spanish. “I didn’t write the letter and I didn’t take it back…We didn’t know if [the news about data sharing] was true or what they could do.” They decided the risk was too great. The deadline passed. And now Laura cannot get her coverage back. On January 1, California began denying full Medi-Cal benefits to undocumented adults amid a growing budget deficit and federal Medicaid cuts. Now, only those enrolled before 2026 can keep their coverage, as long as they don’t roll off; for Laura, it was too late. Since the start of the second Trump administration, doctors and policy experts across the country have increasingly warned that immigrants are avoiding medical care as deportation fears weigh heavily on their day-to-day lives. During Minnesota’s Operation Metro Surge last winter, for instance, researchers found that the rate of missed appointments increased by more than 80 percent among Spanish-speaking families. Medicaid doesn’t fund full coverage for undocumented immigrants. In fact, this October, it scaled back coverage for many immigrants with legal status who were previously eligible, as provisions of the GOP’s July 2025 budget bill—better known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—kicked in. But many immigrants are also choosing to drop out of programs that they are still eligible for, including state-funded coverage—even though,… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 day ago
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