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2025-05-09 18:00:00

On April 3, a Justice Department contracting officer sent the Acacia Center for Justice a “notice of termination for convenience.” The email instructed the nonprofit to discontinue several federally funded programs described as “no longer needed.” Among them was the little-known National Qualified Representative Program (NQRP), which appoints government-paid counsel to detained immigrants deemed unfit to represent themselves in court due to serious mental health needs or cognitive disabilities.

The termination notice put the organization and its dozens of legal partners on high alert. As the federal government’s main contractor for this $35 million program since 2022, the Acacia Center for Justice has relied on federal dollars to refer anywhere between 300 to 400 cases a year to a network of about 35 direct services providers that includes other nonprofits, small private law firms, and solo practitioners.

The following day, the Washington, DC-based group received another letter, this one rescinding the previous order “until further notice.” As they tried to make sense of the confounding messages, within the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review—charged with managing the US immigration courts system— agency officials were discussing how to reduce the scope of the NQRP and “end representation funded by EOIR,” according to internal emails obtained through litigation. The downsizing, they anticipated, should “allow for representatives to withdraw” from ongoing cases and “facilitate finding other representation.”

The planned defunding was the latest in a series of cuts by the Trump administration to legal aid for immigrants. In practice, it would all but eliminate the only available mechanism for immigration courts to designate counsel to people with mental health needs in detention centers across the United States.

Finally, on April 25, the Justice Department dealt the final blow, notifying the Acacia Center for Justice of its decision to cancel the discretionary nationwide initiative that immigrant rights advocates, attorneys, and former immigration judges say is a lifeline for hundreds, if not thousands, of detained people in immigration proceedings. With the exception of detainees in Arizona, California, and Washington—where court-ordered government-appointed counsel provisions remain in place—advocates anticipate these especially vulnerable immigrants will go unidentified and unrepresented, left to face potential deportation without a fighting chance.

“What I fear the most is that they are going to languish in detention with no end in sight,” said Lisa Okamoto, program director for the NQRP at the Acacia Center for Justice, “or without understanding what they are facing.” Without federal funding, immigration attorneys are unlikely to take on these highly complex cases since most detainees, many of whom are held in remote detention centers where pro bono assistance is hard to come by, can’t afford legal representation. (The EOIR declined to comment on the termination of the program.)

“To think of those people behind bars without anybody telling them where they are or why they are there or what might happen to them…” she said, pausing as her voice became emotional. “And then the serious risk of them being put on a plane and possibly even sent to a country they have no ties to.”

The nationwide government-appointed counsel program was created in 2013 in response to a first-of-its-kind class action lawsuit and settlement order in Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder that established the right to legal representation for immigrant detainees in Arizona, California, and Washington, who have been deemed “incompetent” by an immigration judge to properly defend themselves.

One of the named plaintiffs in the case was José Antonio Franco-Gonzalez, a 29-year-old Mexican man with an intellectual disability. A psychological report had found that his cognitive functions resembled those of a toddler. An immigration judge requested a psychiatric evaluation of Franco-Gonzalez, which concluded that he had no idea what kind of court he was appearing in and it would be “impossible for him to stand trial.”

The judge agreed that Franco-Gonzalez’s case couldn’t move forward without legal representation and decided to put it on hold. But Franco-Gonzalez remained in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), without another day in court. Talia Inlender, then a young lawyer giving “know-your- rights” presentations to immigrant detainees at the Santa Ana City Jail, had learned about his case from an ICE officer. When she met him in late 2009, he had been detained for almost five years. Franco-Gonzalez couldn’t sign his own name to join Inlender’s workshop.

Even today, Inlender, now the deputy director of UCLA School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, still remembers her first encounter with Franco-Gonzalez. She said his skin looked almost translucent from the lengthy confinement period and he was practically nonverbal. He didn’t know his birthday or age. And, he had little understanding of his situation other than wanting to be reunited with his family members, many of whom were US citizens and lawful permanent residents.

In early 2010, Inlender’s organization at the time, Public Counsel, and the ACLU sued on behalf of Franco-Gonzalez and another detainee, both of whom were “effectively lost” in the system. Franco-Gonzalez was released from detention three days later. (He went on to become a naturalized US citizen.) “But we knew he wasn’t the only one suffering in immigration detention solely as a result of a mental disability,” Inlender said. Around that time, Human Rights Watch published a report titled “Deportation By Default” noting that people with mental illnesses made up an estimated 15 percent of the detained immigrant population.

So they expanded the case to a class action lawsuit to cover detainees whose conditions—including schizophrenia, severe depression, and dissociative identity disorder—might prevent them from having a fair day in court. In Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, the courts found that detained immigrants with mental disabilities facing deportation were entitled to counsel as a reasonable accommodation based on the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In fact, that was the “only means” by which someone not competent for self-representation could exercise their rights.

On April 23, 2013, a federal district judge in California issued a permanent injunction requiring the government to appoint a qualified representative to those immigrants and to grant a bond hearing to detainees who had been in custody for six months or more. The permanent injunction only applied to the three states covered by the lawsuit. But just the day before that injunction, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security announced a policy to “enhance procedural protections,” including processes for mental health screenings and competency hearings, throughout the country.

Today, that nationwide program is being gutted. “I know firsthand the difference it makes to have a fair hearing with a lawyer by your side,” Inlender said. “I think it’s just a devastating blow to due process and to all of the individual people and families that are going to be deeply impacted by the termination.”

Amelia Wilson, a law professor and director of the immigration justice clinic at Pace University who served as the NQRP’s program manager from 2016 to 2018, described the program as a “massive seismic change.” Wilson had been involved in deportation defense work on behalf of immigrants with mental health issues for years. Prior to 2013, she said, it was a “hodgepodge system.” She used to get “clandestine calls from immigration judges” alerting her to unrepresented immigrants on their dockets who needed assistance. Sometimes the information about a potential client came from a DHS attorney or guards in detention centers. “I would take cases that would just appear before me,” she said. “But there was no referral system.”

The rollout of the nationwide policy program was imperfect, Wilson said. But it was an opportunity to offer life-saving legal services, in a formalized way, to more people who otherwise would have been unlikely to receive them. By the time she left, the program had been implemented in 25 locations outside of the original Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction and, as of 2024, more than 2,500 immigrants had been given legal counsel through it.

“We could fund not just the attorney but also social workers, experts, post-release planning so if the person was going to be released on bond or if they won their case, it wasn’t just like, here, open the doors, goodbye, good luck,” Wilson said. Most immigration judges were receptive to, if not enthusiastic about, the initiative. “It was a major shift for the population it was meant to serve—by far the most vulnerable of any immigrant group I can think of.”

Detained immigrants in removal proceedings, especially those who are unrepresented, already face an uphill battle. Unlike in the criminal justice system where someone is considered innocent until proven guilty, immigrants seeking relief bear the burden to prove their case. To be found credible, they usually have to recount past events in detail. For people with dementia, for example, or experiencing memory issues due to traumatic brain injury, that alone can present an obstacle.

Gregory Pleasants, a lawyer who worked in the creation of the government-appointed counsel program, said immigrants with mental health needs were often detained indefinitely and subject to solitary confinement. As a result, their conditions only worsened. “Predictably,” Pleasants said, “people who are detained with mental illness just got deported without being heard by a system that is primarily designed to deny detain and deport.”

Pleasants recalled a former client with schizophrenia who had a recurring delusion about something he called a “re-existence plan.” Eventually, after spending time with the man and his family, Pleasants was able to gather information helpful to the case, and the client was allowed to stay in the United States. “No trial can be fair that leaves a person with mental illness alone before a court, especially one as draconian as the immigration system,” Pleasants said. “Without a lawyer, people don’t have a prayer. They don’t have a chance in hell.”

What the NQRP did was build an infrastructure of skilled lawyers, paralegals, and social workers equipped to provide meaningful and trauma-informed detention and deportation defense. For Pleasants, it represented a “brief gleaming moment” of promise that due process could be realized in the immigration system. The dismantling of the program means “that promise is slipping out of our hands,” he added, “and that’s a grievous loss.”

On May 5, nine legal service providers filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s partial termination of the government-paid counsel program. The organizations argue they are faced with an “untenable choice” between having to withdraw representation from some of the roughly 100 affected NQRP cases or continuing the work without payment. Alternatively, they might have to move funds from other critical services and risk staff layoffs.

“We are not talking about a huge amount of money, especially relative to some of the other programs,” said Evan Benz, a senior attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, the only subcontractor providing legal services under the program across Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North and South Carolina. “But these resources make all the difference in these individuals’ lives because without this program there’s no realistic way that they would ever have a competent and qualified attorney to represent them in their case.”

Laura Lunn, the director of advocacy and litigation at Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network in Colorado, has represented somewhere between 20 and 30 NQRP clients in her nine years as a qualified representative. Often, she explained, these types of cases are more time and resource-intensive because of the added challenges of obtaining testimony, collecting evidence, and doing cross-examination. Lawyers may need to rely more heavily on forensic psychology and country condition expert reports, both of which incur expenses.

Some of Lunn’s clients have experienced audio and visual hallucinations that prevent them from knowing what’s real and what’s not. These symptoms are further exacerbated by prolonged detention. “Imagine trying to synthesize an immigration case while dealing with those types of external stimuli,” Lunn said. Without legal counsel, people will lose in court not because they lack a strong case, but because they simply can’t present the information needed to an immigration judge.

In some instances, someone’s claim to stay in the United States is based on their disability and how it could make them susceptible to harm or even persecution if they are deported back to their home country. Lately, Lunn has been thinking a lot about one of her clients from South Sudan, a survivor of the civil war who became an orphan as a child. As a result of severe PTSD, he heard voices of people threatening to kill him. Ultimately, he was allowed to stay in the United States. “If he had been flown back there,” Lunn said, “I have no doubt in my mind that he would have been targeted and he would have been killed.”

That man is just one of many people Lunn and her organization have helped over the years. She chokes up thinking about those immigrants whose needs may prompt an immigration judge to determine they should be appointed counsel, only for there not to be anyone available to ensure they have a shot at a reasonably fair process. And she wonders: How much longer can they keep assisting their current clients? The Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, which had anticipated more than $310,000 in funding through the NQRP for 2025, has 15 clients whose legal counsel falls under the now-stricken program.

“People have survived so much in their lives to get to the place where a court appoints a qualified representative for them,” Lunn said. “It’s just heartbreaking to think about them being alone again.”

2025-05-09 18:00:00

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The federal Energy Star program is among the most successful government initiatives in modern history. Its signature blue label is now nearly as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or a Coca-Cola can, and appliances bearing it save American consumers some $40 billion annually in energy costs, or about $350 for every taxpayer dollar that goes in. 

This week, however, President Donald Trump’s administration moved to kill it, the Washington Post first reported. Grist also reviewed a US EPA document obtained by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that shows the program is slated to be “eliminated.”

“Energy Star has saved American families and businesses more than half a trillion dollars in energy costs,” said Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the ranking member of the committee, in a statement. “By eliminating this program, [Trump] will force Americans to buy appliances that cost more to run and waste more energy.”

Launched in 1992, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, Energy Star sets efficiency specifications for products ranging from dishwashers to entire homes. Those standards are beyond government-mandated minimums, and Energy Star’s website says the goal is to provide “simple, credible, and unbiased information” people can use to make better decisions. 

While Energy Star certification is voluntary, most major manufacturers participate. According to the government, around 9 in 10 households recognize the Energy Star label. Depending on the year, as many as 80 percent say the label “very much” or “somewhat” influenced their purchases. Overall, consumers have bought more than 300 million appliances with the Energy Star label and the program has cumulatively helped avoid 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. 

“Energy Star remains one of our most effective bipartisan tools for ensuring energy reliability, affordability, and American competitiveness,” said Paula Glover, president of the nonprofit coalition Alliance to Save Energy. She noted the broader economic impact of the program as well, including creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the manufacturing, retail, real estate, and energy services industries. “Shutting it down is a risk to those jobs.”

For years, though, Trump has complained about efficiency benchmarks for appliances. Lower-flow showerheads, he said, make showers “five times longer.” LED light bulbs make him look orange. People are flushing efficient toilets ”10 times, 15 times” and, with dishwashers, “the electric bill is 10 times more than the water.” These claims are, by and large, inaccurate. 

Veracity aside, Trump’s efforts play into a larger culture war against appliance standards—one that the White House has continued to aggressively wage since his second term began.

In February, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced it was delaying efficiency regulation of appliances ranging from central air conditioners and freezers to washing machines and dryers. In March, it said it was withdrawing four efficiency standards that the Biden administration had proposed and was pushing back the implementation date of others. Last month, Trump issued an executive order titled, in all caps, “MAINTAINING ACCEPTABLE WATER PRESSURE IN SHOWERHEADS.”

The Energy Star rollback would likely be the most visible attack yet on appliance efficiency, and it even has manufacturers worried. Last month, more than 1,000 companies, cities, and groups wrote a letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin urging him to support the program.

“This would be a very big deal,” said the representative of one manufacturer, who asked not to be named given the sensitivity of the potential closure. Energy Star, they explained, helps companies market and move higher volumes of high-efficiency products. “It’s an odd thing that you would jettison a voluntary public-private partnership that costs a rounding error in EPA’s budget and affords consumers billions of dollars of value.” 

Beyond eliminating staff, the EPA’s exact plans and timeline for any Energy Star rollback remain unclear. The agency did not respond directly to questions about the program’s future but in an emailed statement told Grist the “EPA is delivering organizational improvements to the personnel structure that will directly benefit the American people.”

Losing Energy Star could have a range of ripple effects. In addition to making selecting products more confusing for consumers, it could hinder people’s ability to qualify for federal, state, or utility incentives that are tied to the certification. There is, for example, a federal tax incentive for building Energy Star homes. Appliance rebates are also often linked to the designation. 

“How are those programs now going to know which kinds of appliances they want to give a rebate to or a tax incentive for?” asked Glover. States or utilities could conceivably fill that void with their own standards, creating a patchwork of regulation and incentives. “Having Energy Star that gives a federal standard makes far more sense. It’s certainly easier for consumers to understand what their options are.”

These are among the many details that would have to be worked out if the Trump administration proceeds with its plan. 

“I don’t think they expected this kind of pushback,” said Steve Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, about the media attention that the latest change has garnered. “This is getting a lot of publicity.”

The move could also face legal challenges, he said, pointing to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 as one possible roadblock for the administration. It directs the EPA and DOE to, among other things, “promote Energy Star-compliant technologies as the preferred technologies in the marketplace” and “preserve the integrity of the Energy Star label.”

Another possibility is that the DOE takes over as Energy Star’s primary administrator. But as with other aspects of the president’s ambitious agenda, it could take time to sort out real-world impact. 

If Energy Star is ultimately eliminated, Nadel said the labels would eventually go away—as would potentially billions in consumer savings. But, he added, “Nothing is done yet.”

2025-05-09 06:09:55

In late March, Ed Martin, then the embattled acting US attorney for DC, showed up at a community meeting at a police station to tout his efforts to combat crime in the district.

Martin politely fielded questions from attendees, even answering one from a man who, citing Martin’s widely condemned description of his office as “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers,” asked: “How do we as residents trust that you are going to have our back and not be a personal lawyer for the President of the United States, who is a felon and a racist?”

Martin responded by citing Matthew Graves, who had occupied his position under President Biden. “My predecessor” also “worked for the guy elected president, for his polices, for his vision,” Martin said. “And that was his preference. There is nothing wrong with that.”

“The president ran on an agenda,” Martin added. “The agenda includes major policy initiatives that a prosecutor has a role in. And I certainly, as you know, don’t shy away from being public about those.”

As far as I know, that is the most that Martin, whose nomination Trump pulled Thursday due to opposition by GOP senators, has said publicly in defense of his wildly controversial tenure.

It was a dishonest downplaying of his effort to make the country’s largest prosecutorial office into an instrument of MAGA retribution, but also telling.

As US attorney, Martin fired, demoted, and investigated January 6 prosecutors, threatened to prosecute congressional Democrats for hyperbolic political statements, suggested his office would investigate DOGE critics and former prosecutors faulted by Trump, and harassed medical journals, Wikipedia and Georgetown’s law school with threats to punish them over their speech.

Martin’s remarks at the community meeting justified these actions as merely the GOP-version of what Democratic prosecutors did under Biden. I don’t know if Martin really believes that, but it’s not true.

US attorneys do pursue the policies of presidents who pick them, but within legal and normative limits set by the Constitution, Congress, and longstanding practice. No US attorney, until Martin, volunteered to use his office against critics of government policies, including those who “acted simply unethically” and “chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.” No other US attorney has reportedly attempted to present a grand jury with evidence for a criminal case against the Minority Leader of the US Senate based on five-year-old criticism of the Supreme Court. Nor has a US attorney personally attempted to use criminal investigative power to seize money from environmental groups awarded contracts by the past administration without having any evidence of a crime.

Martin’s Democrats-did-it-first rationalization for debasing his office is not just his. It is the lie justifying Trump’s broader effort to weaponize the Justice Department and turn the entire federal government into an instrument of his personal interest.

Martin, though only an acting US Attorney, got a torrent of negative press coverage in part because he loudly volunteered himself as the leader of Trump’s crusade to use the DOJ against his political enemies. As we wrote in a March: “In a new administration defined by a mixture of malevolence and ineptitude, Martin has emerged as an avatar: a typo-spewing henchman of the moment, eager to help Trump transform the Justice Department into a political tool—and unable to shut up about it.”

The evident defeat of Martin’s nomination is a loss, though by no means a death knell, for proponents of the unitary executive theory’s claim that Justice Department prosecutors are the president’s lawyers, and have always been.

With Martin, Trump tried to force GOP senators to confirm an unqualified bumbler and extremist just because he is Trump’s “favorite US Attorney.” That didn’t work. That makes Martin’s derailed nomination a defeat for Trump too.

Trump backed off the nomination after Senate Republicans said they lacked the votes to confirm him. The fatal blow came from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a judiciary committee member who said he would oppose Martin due to his support for January 6 rioters. In January, after initially appearing to oppose Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary, Tillis, who is up for reelection next year, buckled amid heavy pressure from Trump and supported the former Fox News host’s confirmation. Though Martin sought a lesser post, Tillis’ decision to stand firm against this nomination may signal that Trump’s plummeting poll numbers have diminished his power.

The rejection of Martin’s nomiation is also a sign of the limits of Trump’s effort to rewrite the history of January 6 and the lies that led to it. Martin, as Mother Jones has detailed, was a 2020 election truther who was deeply involved in the Stop the Steal organizing. In the aftermath of January 6, he claimed “antifa” was behind the attack, called it a “hoax,” referred to January 6 attackers as “patriots” and said the marauders who were prosecuted should receive “reparations.” Martin has never renounced those claims. As US attorney, he has continued to promote a conspiracy theory suggesting that the FBI helped plan January 6. He even railed against January 6 prosecutions while appearing, in his official capacity, at a March fundraiser attended by convicted seditionists and an alleged Nazi sympathizer who Martin later tried to distance himself from.

Installing Martin as the head of the office that prosecuted 1,600 people for the attack was a deliberate provocation to anyone, including Republican senators, who rejects Trump’s effort to redefine a deadly attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power as a “day of love.” Ed Martin is a minor figure. But his defeat is a significant sign that Trump’s power to make the government accept his lies is ebbing.

2025-05-09 05:25:23

The Conclave has spoken, and President Donald Trump will not be the next pope. Instead, that designation will go to Robert Francis Prevost, who will be known as Pope Leo XIV, the Vatican announced on Thursday.

Leo, who is 69 years old and was born in Chicago, will be the first American pope following the April 21 death of Pope Francis—and everyone wants to claim it as a win for their side of the political aisle. To some on the right, Leo’s selection is a boon for Trump’s “America-first” administration. To other Republicans, he is not pro-Trump enough, based on a series of seemingly critical posts on his X account. The left, on the other hand, is eating those up.

Trump called Leo’s selection “a Great Honor for our Country” in a Truth Social post congratulating him. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk claimed that voting records show Leo is a strong Republican who has consistently voted conservatively. Some of his prior comments appear to make him indistinguishable from the MAGA crowd: The New York Times previously reported that in 2012, Leo spoke out against what he called “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.” And as a bishop in Peru, he railed against what he called “the promotion of gender ideology” in schools, which he alleged “seeks to create genders that don’t exist.”

But Trump opponents quickly pointed to Leo’s X account as evidence that the new pope may be a member of the resistance. Leo’s most recent repost shared comments from Evelio Menjivar, an auxiliary bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, who criticized the Trump administration’s seemingly illegal deportations to El Salvador.

Leo also posted two links this year that criticized Vice President JD Vance following Vance’s attempt to use an ancient Catholic concept to justify the administration’s mass deportations of immigrants, which Francis blasted as incorrect. “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” read the headline of one article Leo posted. Ten days later, Leo shared another article recounting Vance’s and Francis’ different interpretations of the doctrine. Nonetheless, Vance congratulated him on his selection as pope on Thursday.

In May 2020, at the height of protests following the police murder of George Floyd, Leo wrote: “We need to hear more from leaders in the Church, to reject racism and seek justice.” And during Trump’s first term, Leo shared posts decrying Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and the violence in Charlottesville, where Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides”; supporting Dreamers; urging Trump to take action on climate change; and criticizing Trump’s Muslim ban.

Some political strategists and advocates on the left pointed to these posts as evidence that the pope shared their politics. Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters, on the other hand, were triggered. Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer called him “anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis” in a post on X.

“Catholics don’t have anything good to look forward to,” she added. “Just another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.”

After far-right activist and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec dug up Leo’s prior X posts, he wrote, “God Save the Church,” and, “The Pope is not infallible on political matters.”

The truth is that only time will tell where Leo falls on the ideological spectrum. As his own record suggests, he will more than likely not be a faithful adherent to either side of the political aisle. Pope Francis was not either. While he supported immigrants and Palestinians under Israeli bombardment and tepidly welcomed gay people into the church, he was firmly anti-abortion, reportedly used an anti-gay slur, and claimed “gender theory…does not recognize the order of creation.”

Like Francis, we can expect Leo to be fully loyal only to the man upstairs.

2025-05-09 04:25:25

On Wednesday, following controversy about inconsistencies in her résumé, President Trump withdrew his nomination of Dr. Janette Nesheiwat to become surgeon general and gave the nod to alternative medicine practitioner and author Dr. Casey Means.

“Her academic achievements, together with her life’s work, are absolutely outstanding,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Dr. Casey Means has the potential to be one of the finest Surgeon Generals in United States History.”

Her academic achievements include dropping out of a medical residency in otolaryngology because, she says, she was frustrated that the discipline did not focus on “root causes.” Means’ medical license is inactive, according to Oregon medical board records.

Her life’s work includes co-founding Levels, a business that sells glucose monitors, co-writing the book Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, and promoting an eight-day online course on metabolic health. 

Means has promoted the idea that the national epidemic of chronic disease is attributable to diet and lifestyle choices, an argument that largely echoes the talking points of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That’s no coincidence: both Means and her brother Calley, who describes himself as a lobbyist and evangelist for healthy food, played a central role in advising Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Calley Means, who now works with Kennedy as a White House health advisor, is said to be assisting with the creation of a “Make America Healthy Again” commission, set to focus on chronic disease and preventable illnesses in children—meaning ones influenced by lifestyle factors like diabetes, rather than vaccine-preventable illnesses like measles. Last September, at a four-hour Senate roundtable hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) that was meant to welcome Kennedy’s MAHA movement to the GOP fold, the senator hailed Casey “the person who is the catalyst for this event.” 

In her writing and speaking gigs, Casey Means highlights the importance of metabolic health, an enthusiasm for many alternative health practitioners. Like many of them, she assigns a mystically important role to the gut: In Good Energy, Means states that “conditions like depression and schizophrenia” are “tied to poor gut bacteria,” adding that “researchers can identify a person with depression or schizophrenia just by analyzing their gut bacteria composition.” (The study Means appears to be citing specifically says that more research is needed to determine whether there’s a causal link between schizophrenia and the gut microbiome.) She’s also hailed raw dairy, writing how she wants “to be free to form a relationship with a local farmer, understand his integrity, look him in the eyes, pet his cow, and then decide if I feel safe to drink the milk from his farm.”

But Means’ medical opining has occasionally veered in a more New Age direction. She has claimed that “the universe” speaks to her and that people can “manifest” what they want by writing it down. “Perhaps the body is simply the material ‘radio receiver’ through which we can ‘tune in’ to the divine,” she wrote in an October 2024 newsletter. “We will get instructions (through human inspiration and reason) for what we need to do to raise the vibration of humanity and create a sustainable future… The future of medicine will be about light. I don’t exactly know how yet.”

“Humans are out of alignment with the Earth and depleting its life force,” she wrote the next month. “And human bodies are now exhibiting signs of blocking the flow of energy through them. This is insulin resistance. We are the Earth.”

Means’ track record of statements about medicine and health that aren’t backed by science are troubling to Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator at McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. He noted that Means’ treatment modality of choice, functional medicine, is not a recognized medical specialty, and that it often involves unnecessary tests and unproven supplement regimens. Functional medicine is “using a veneer of medicine to sell supplements in the hope that these fix a patient’s health problems,” he said. “It is not evidence based.” Jarry was “appalled, yet not surprised in the slightest” about her nomination, which, he said, “shows a continuing disregard for expertise and an embrace of make believe.” 

It’s not just people in the scientific community who are displeased with Means’ nomination. Despite seemingly crowd-pleasing views on topics like life forces and raw milk, some of Kennedy’s allies in the anti-vaccine and alternative health worlds have intimated that they see the Means siblings as sinister functionaries of Big Pharma, Big Food, or something much worse. Some of those people greeted Means’ nomination with outrage and dark suspicion, with many claiming Dr. Kelly Victory, a health influencer and ivermectin fan, was Kennedy’s preferred choice.

Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, the founder of the anti-vaccine group Americans for Health Freedom, tweeted that Victory had told her she was being chosen for the position last week, but that she ultimately “was passed over because of her outspoken stance against the mRNA shots. Clearly RFK has no power.” Several other major anti-vaccine figures also tweeted their anger that Victory hadn’t been chosen, including Steve Kirsch, a wealthy Silicon Valley figure turned anti-vaccine crusader. “As surgeon general, @DrKellyVictory would have advocated to pull the mRNA shots from the market immediately,” he tweeted. “Probably why she was not selected. Trump does not want those shots to be pulled.” 

Kennedy’s former running mate Nicole Shanahan also expressed immediate displeasure, tweeting that Means’ nomination was “very strange,” as she hinted at a longtime distrust of Casey and Calley Means. 

“Doesn’t make any sense,” she wrote. “I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate confirmation that neither of these siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment (and that people much more qualified would be). I don’t know if RFK very clearly lied to me, or what is going on. It has been clear in recent conversations that he is reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions (and it isn’t President Trump). With regards to the siblings, there is something very artificial and aggressive about them, almost like they were bred and raised Manchurian assets.”

Shanahan didn’t respond to a request for comment about whose “Manchurian assets” she believes the Means siblings to be. 

Shanahan’s tweet was, in turn, a quote tweet of Dr. Suzanne Humphries, an osteopathic physician who’s been critical of vaccines. (Humphries appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast last month to promote those views.) Humphries, too, was critical of Means as a choice, tweeting, “I can’t help but think this is a very carefully groomed and selected person. Just about no clinical experience. Talks a great game about everything but vaccines. Feels all wrong. Why? There were so many better choices.” 

2025-05-08 23:34:01

Last week, baffling many and delighting a few, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared during a Trump administration Cabinet meeting that he’s engaged in a hunt for what he said were 300,000 missing children trafficked by the Biden administration.

“We have ended HHS’s role as the principal vector in this country for child trafficking,” Kennedy declared. “During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that. We’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”

To even remotely understand what Kennedy is talking about requires one’s brain to be thoroughly bathed in the corrosive acid of the right-wing internet, where it’s taken on faith that the Biden administration either allowed hundreds of thousands of children to be trafficked or perhaps actively participated in that trafficking themselves. 

Kennedy’s comments are an excellent demonstration of how, in the Trump era, public statements by administration figures and their congressional backers are heavily influenced by the far-right and conspiratorial internet—sometimes in addled, confused, or strangely remixed forms. Why is Attorney General Pam Bondi promising to release an “Epstein client list” that probably isn’t real?Why is Kennedy also claiming that vaccines are made from “fetus debris,” which is a lie, and promising to fight chemtrails, which don’t exist, but which he recently claimed DARPA is spraying into the sky? Why is Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) claiming he wants a Congressional hearing into “what actually happened” on September 11, as he claimed a “controlled demolition” brought down building 7? Why are Donald Trump and Elon Musk reviving a 1970s conspiracy theory which claims that the gold inside Fort Knox might be gone? Why was a government website where Americans could once order free Covid tests has been transformed into a webpage promoting an extremely longwinded version of the still-unproven lab leak theory? Why is Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) declaring there were “two shooters” involved in the JFK assassination, before hosting a hearing that in no way proved that?

Rumors, conspiracy theories, memes, jokes, contextless claims and thinly-sourced allegations all now find their way at lightning speed to the White House and to other senior Republican officials, where they’re immediately spat back out in statements and public appearances. These statements make it incredibly clear how deeply online and profoundly conspiracy-brained the modern GOP is—and how much taxpayer-funded time the Trump administration plans to spend pursuing ideas that range from ludicrous to already debunked. 

Kennedy, who has previously admitted that he falls for online misinformation “all the time,” and his bald claim that HHS engaged in the trafficking of children caused uproar and confusion, even among the conservative faithful. “If true, this would be a really really big deal,” tweeted collegiate swimmer turned conservative activist Riley Gaines. “Arrest and prosecute!!!!” “HOLY SHLIT,” tweeted Chaya Raichik of the far-right Libs of TikTok. 

The way that the claim about 300,000 missing children made it out of Kennedy’s mouth helps to demonstrate how conspiracy theories function in the current, fever-dream version of the GOP. The claim has a long and increasingly convoluted pedigree in right-wing and conspiratorial spaces: versions circulated during the Biden administration, when a self-proclaimed HHS whistleblower named Tara Rhodas claimed the agency routinely released unaccompanied migrant children into the care of people affiliated with gangs like MS-13. Rhodas suspected that these sponsors would then traffic the children.

The claims are a pastiche of true and unproven: in one 2021 case highly publicized by Republican lawmakers, two children were sent to a home where their sponsors had suspected MS-13 ties. Other migrant children—in cases Republican lawmakers have been less excited to discuss—were sent to places where they were labor trafficked, forced to work in slaughterhouses, farms, and factories.

While the Biden administration may have helped create this situation by pressuring caseworkers to move children out of shelters and release them to sponsors as quickly as possible, Kennedy’s more QAnon-ish claim—that 300,000 children have simply vanished into thin air—seems to have its roots in a August 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General. That report found the government “could not monitor the location and status” of all unaccompanied minors known to be in the country, including some 291,000 who ICE had never made steps to remove, and another 32,000 who did not appear for court dates. The report did not state that any of the children had been trafficked. As an expert at the Acacia Center for Justice’s Unaccompanied Children Program explained to CBS, this isn’t a problem of “missing kids” but one of “missing paperwork.”

It’s a very long walk from those facts to claiming that the children are “missing,” let alone being sex trafficked. But by in October 2024, JD Vance claimed during a debate with Governor Tim Walz that 300,000 children were missing. Trump gave a lurid version of the line in a December Time interview. “We have 325,000 children here during Democrats—and this was done by Democrats—who are right now slaves, sex slaves or dead,” he said. “What I will be doing will be trying to find where they are and get them back to their parents.” That month, incoming Trump border czar Tom Homan suggested that the “missing” youth had been trafficked and pledged to track them down in an interview with the Washington Post where, with no apparent sense of irony or contradiction, he also discussed how the administration would bring back the family separation policy Trump deployed during his first term.

But while most people who heard about Kennedy’s claim greeted it with bafflement, reflexive outrage, or, rarely, demands for further proof, according to author and journalist Mike Rothschild, the QAnon community celebrated.

“Kennedy’s comments at the Trump cabinet meeting/praise-a-thon are a great example of a conspiracy theory that makes little sense outside the right wing influencer bubble, but a cause for celebration inside it,” Rothschild, who has written a book about QAnon and another on antisemitic conspiracy theories, explains.

Whether he knows it or not, Rothschild adds, “Kennedy is pushing hardcore QAnon-style moral panic to an audience of devotees who are desperate for Trump to finally sweep away the bad guys and deliver on the promises Q made years ago,” namely to uncover sex trafficking being conducted by high-level Democratic politicians. 

“For people who aren’t steeped in these theories, it sounds like the ravings of a madman,” Rothschild adds. But Q and its ilk are so mainstream on the right now that it’s finding a large and receptive audience.”

Embracing conspiracy theories has worked incredibly well for the current GOP and Trump administration, a way to keep their base captivated and profitably enraged. In one ongoing example, a February attempt to release Epstein names and flight logs to a group of conservative influencers quickly turned into a mess once it became clear the files weren’t new at all. Nonetheless, Attorney General Bondi has continued to insist new information on the case is forthcoming, claiming this week that the FBI is combing through “tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children.” While Rep. Luna’s first JFK hearing did not produce the second gunman she’s said she’s in search of, she has pledged to keep working to provide “needed transparency about federal secrets to the American people,” including about the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

And while Kennedy’s son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has provided no further information about the 300,000 children he claims are missing, there’s no question that their speculative existence will be mentioned again, whenever it might be politically profitable to do so.