2026-05-15 18:00:00
Cars and trucks pass by. Some slow down and hastily take a quick photo or video of local law enforcement and ICE agents making the arrest. The scene disappears in their rearview mirror as they drive on. The arrests are fast. Within minutes, the person operating the vehicle is no longer there, snatched and torn away from one life and forcibly transported into another that will never be the same. And, within minutes, the nameless and often faceless agents in the unmarked SUV’s and trucks apprehending them on highways and roads across Oklahoma disappear as well.
A white Ford Transit work van sits abandoned on the side of a street in the north suburbs of Oklahoma City. Work tools remain in the storage area in the back. A work order lies on the passenger seat. Take-out food rests on the dashboard. On the south side of the city, a maroon Ford Fusion is left stranded in the grass off Interstate 44. Construction gloves, a camouflage jacket, yellow safety vest, a cooler and a thermos with an Arkansas Razorbacks logo remain inside the car.
In a state where all seventy-seven counties voted to support Trump and his anti-immigrant policies in 2024, state and local law enforcement have signed on as important allies in the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Over thirty state and local law enforcement agencies in Oklahoma now have 287(g) agreements with ICE, which effectively deputize them to ICE. This includes the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, with over 700 state troopers who are now empowered to make immigration arrests. Recently released data shows that more than 1,300 people were arrested by ICE in Oklahoma in the first two and a half months of 2026.
“Just because we don’t see the things that we’re seeing out of Minneapolis, doesn’t mean people aren’t being detained,” an Oklahoma City-based immigration lawyer said to me. “It doesn’t mean that people aren’t being taken and disappeared…because that is happening in Oklahoma.”
Years of criminal justice reform have left the state, several counties and towns, as well as the profit-driven private prison industry hungry to fill empty bed spaces or to explore new sources of revenue. Incarcerating and exploiting immigrants for ICE has proven to be an opportunistic and lucrative alternative. Jails in Kay, Logan, Grady, Blaine and Tulsa counties now detain immigrants for ICE. Cimarron Correctional Facility outside the town of Cushing operated by the private prison company CoreCivic, currently detains 600 immigrants per day.
And in late 2025, CoreCivic, DHS/ICE and the Oklahoma Department of Corrections cut a deal to repurpose and reopen Diamondback Correctional Facility, in Watonga, as an ICE detention center. The 2,000-bed prison in rural northern Oklahoma sat empty for ten years. Reopening Diamondback is expected to generate combined annual revenues of over $100 million for CoreCivic, the state, the county, and the city of Watonga, population some 2,500.
“We’re losing really, really wonderful people to this craziness.”
Attorneys, activists, churches, and community groups and organizers are responding with new strategies to serve and protect their communities. High school students—many from immigrant families—courageously walked out of class in protest of ICE activity and the racism and intolerance driving immigration policy.
Yet here in Oklahoma, ICE’s public elusiveness is also a menacing reminder of its presence everywhere. For individuals, mixed-status households and communities in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and smaller towns, the fear and anxiety of knowing but not seeing is often paralyzing.
The front doors at the ICE office on Sovereign Row in Oklahoma City close behind a Venezuelan man as he dutifully enters and presents himself for his scheduled check in with ICE. His friends sit in the car and cry when he never returns.
A Honda Civic sits in the parking lot of an apartment complex. The driver’s side window is shattered. A white plastic laundry basket remains in the front seat filled with clean clothes. Cars and trucks continue to pass by the white Ford Transit and the maroon Ford Focus. The day continues. Time moves on, yet inside that abandoned car or truck or van, time stands still. A worker doesn’t show up to the worksite or the office. A seat in a classroom is suddenly empty. A husband or wife, mother or father, brother or sister doesn’t return to their home in Oklahoma ever again. A life is violently suspended and replaced with absence and grief.
Detention
Grady County Jail, in Chickasha, Oklahoma is one of more than thirty counties, local law enforcement agencies and state agencies in Oklahoma with agreements to detain immigrants or perform immigration enforcement duties for ICE through an agreement with the US Marshals Service. In 2019, a 13,000-square-foot addition to the jail was completed, adding some 200 beds.
Diamondback Correctional Facility, in Watonga is operated by the private prison company CoreCivic, formerly CCA (Corrections Corporation of America); it opened in 1998 and held federal prisoners until it was closed in 2010, sitting empty for almost fifteen years.
In late 2025, the facility reopened as an immigration detention center. CoreCivic said in October that it expects to earn $100 million annually from Diamondback once the facility is fully activated. The Oklahoma Department of Corrections receives an ‘administrative fee’ of $833,333 each month to monitor CoreCivic’s compliance and perform other administrative functions related to the facility.
Watonga
Watonga City Manager Leroy Alsup explains how revenue from Diamondback could be utilized by the town: “It could be put into an equipment fund…being a small town, we’ve got a lot of dated equipment that could stand to be updated…Most municipalities have a lot of water and sewer lines that are aged and need to be replaced. When we apply for grants to update and replace water and sewer lines, we’ll have more funding for matching funds to get that. There’s a variety of ways that additional funding can help us. It’s just too early to show that impact yet, but the potential is there.”
Watonga Senior Center plays a vital role in Watonga, offering exercise classes, inexpensive meals, social events, and serving as a meeting place for the Kiwanis Club. I spoke to four of the women working there: they’ve noticed the increased traffic at Diamondback.
“We don’t get a whole lot of information about who all is out there and how many. If you drive by there, it’s packed with vehicles, though. Big vans, which I assume are bringing in people,” one of the women says.
Jim owns a paint and body shop in Watonga. Regarding the reopening of Diamondback Correctional Facility for the detention of immigrants for ICE, Jim says it will profit CoreCivic, but is skeptical that it will do much for Watonga.
“I really don’t see much of a benefit…I don’t know where they will bring in the workers from. Out of this county or what, but you would think there would be some that live here that might work there. It might bring a few jobs.”
Impact
After ICE arrested the driver of a nondescript sedan, the car was left on the side of the road. Several sets of chopsticks and air filter cartridges for a work mask were left on the floor. Construction gloves, a camouflage jacket, a yellow safety vest and a small cooler remained on the passenger seat. A yellow work helmet and some personal belongings remained in the back seat.
Federico, 39, was born in Mexico, but Oklahoma has been his home for over twenty-two years. He is married and has two children who are US citizens. In November 2025 he traveled on a bus with other musicians to perform a concert in Midland, Texas. In the city of Anson, Texas, local law enforcement asked to see the status of everyone on the bus. He spent the next six weeks detained by ICE. Eventually he was released on bond but was required to wear a GPS ankle monitor. Federico was one of more than 42,000 people ICE had shackled with GPS ankle monitors across the country as of February 2026.
“Having this monitor on my leg is a reminder that they have a hold on me by the foot. It’s them telling you that you’re not free.”
“I live with this fear that I’m always being monitored,” he explained to me. “It’s very complicated to have this thing on your leg when you’re going to sleep or during your routine in life every day. I’m always afraid of damaging it, bumping it on the edge of the table. I don’t want them to think I’m trying to damage it or trying to be free of it. Your life can’t go back to being normal. Nothing is back to normal. Having this monitor on my leg, it is a reminder that they have a hold on me by the foot. It’s them telling you that you’re not free.”
Several hundred students walked out of classes at Santa Fe South High School in Oklahoma City on February 18, protesting against ICE and immigration enforcement threatening their community.
“We deserve to be heard. We deserve to be seen as people. We are not animals to be deported,” one student demonstrator said.
On February 22, 2026, a young man from Honduras spent the morning washing his clothes at a nearby coin laundromat. ICE arrested him when he returned home to his apartment.
“They pulled up three deep and surrounded him. They blocked him in first,” a neighbor who witnessed the arrest said. “I saw one of them pull out their gun and broke the front driver’s side window. They jacked him out and treated him like a fucking animal. It was disgusting. They pulled him out, took his phone from his hand and just threw him on the ground. Then they just threw him in the car and took off with him. They didn’t say nothing else.”
Witnesses say the ICE arrest was quick, no more than a few minutes. A bottle of Centrum multivitamins remained in the cupholder between the seats. A laundry basket filled with unfolded clothes rested on the passenger seat.
Bureaucracy
The David L. Moss Justice Center is the site of the Tulsa County Jail. According to the most recent data released by ICE, each day, the facility is jailing an average of 33 immigrants for the agency, who on average stay five days before they are moved to other detention centers in Oklahoma, Texas, or elsewhere in the country. More than three out of four people detained by ICE here have no criminal record.
Of the thirty immigration-related bills filed by state legislators, most did not progress, including a bill prohibiting NGOs from providing assistance to undocumented people and asylum seekers, another mandating all law enforcement agencies in Oklahoma to enter into 287(g) agreements with ICE, and a law denying US citizenship to children born in Oklahoma to parents who are not US citizens or legal residents.
State Sen. Michael Brooks, Democrat of Oklahoma City, sits in his office at the Oklahoma State Capitol. A lawyer by profession, he specializes in immigration law and is the author of Senate Bill 1470, which proposed access for state-level elected officials or religious leaders to enter and inspect privately owned correctional facilities, including immigration detention centers.
“There were at least three private prisons in Oklahoma that were either being used for other purposes or were vacant…If we’re going to allow these private prisons to come to the state of Oklahoma, I think it’s reasonable that state elected officials would be able to go and inspect them,” he said to me. Though it received strong support, the bill failed to advance.
Pushback
Staff of the Spero Project assist a woman who has called into a rapid response hotline about her son, who was recently pulled over by local law enforcement while on his way to work, transferred into ICE custody, and placed in detention. She calls to try and find out where he is.
After searches through several online sources and phone calls, they locate the young man at Cimarron Correctional Facility in Cushing, Oklahoma. An hour later, a different woman calls the hotline to ask how she and her partner can self-deport.
Since October 2025, in partnership with a group called Critical Response Network Oklahoma, community volunteers and staff meet two days a week at an undisclosed location to operate the phone hotline.
“Any amount of information,” a hotline volunteer says, “even it it’s bad, helps them deal with the chaos” and lack of information. “When we’re able to find someone in the system and tell them where, and kind of explain what might happen—it’s terrible, but I think, especially the wives, that helps them kind of have something to deal with.
“They may not at that moment of crisis think of the questions to ask, but I think we generally tell them, this is where he is, this is what might happen, this is probably what the timeline will be. I think, in the midst of the chaos and tragedy, that little bit of information helps.”
“For somebody who doesn’t know where the person is, it’s really hard to find out. And the uncertainty creates a lot more stress and a lot more sadness to the family members,” the volunteer says. “It’s like, ‘I don’t know where he’s at. I don’t know where he is.’”
Elsewhere in Oklahoma City, vulnerable families and individuals attend free legal clinics where volunteers and immigration lawyers assist with powers of attorney, standby guardianship, community resources, and free legal consultations.
“We’re losing really, really wonderful people to this craziness,” says a member of Latitude Legal and Community Response Network, which organizes the clinic. “We’re losing community members. And what I think people are really beginning to understand is that we are in proximity with so many people that maybe have unstable legal status, and you would never know it.
“The way things have changed in policy over the past year and two months, it is making things increasingly difficult to stay in status. This argument of ‘come the right way’—well, they did come the right way, and those pathways are narrowing on them. We’ve changed the rules on them mid-game.”
Fear of ICE forces Maria, 30, to rely on friends, family, and volunteers, for rides to work and essential shopping.
“When President Trump came into office, everything changed overnight,” she said from the passenger’s seat during one ride. “Right now, you can’t go out without having constant fear that you’re going to get pulled over, or ICE is going to grab you. You almost don’t have a life, because you have to go to work, you have to go out to get groceries, but you’re going and looking in the rearview mirror to see if anybody’s there.
“Before you leave the store, you’re looking around to see if there’s a patrol out there waiting for you. It’s just being afraid for yourself, but also everybody around you. I’ve always been an independent woman, and I do my own thing and take care of my own life. It’s really hard to depend on other people to help me do things that I could do before.”
Reverend Kara Farrow of the Fellowship Lutheran Church in Tulsa leads a prayer at a know-your-rights and rapid response training in March, held by the state’s ACLU chapter and Community Response Network Oklahoma, a community defense organization.
“Within the last two weeks, about twenty members of the congregation have received letters,” Farrow says, demanding their presence at ICE offices in Oklahoma City, Dallas, or Houston. “Last Wednesday, the man that serves as the assisting minister was detained in Cushing. And there are just appointments upon appointments upon appointments coming up. What is heartbreaking is that as much as we’ve tried, they’re taking them anyway. I just found out that another person who was detained two weeks ago is being sent back to Venezuela. And so it’s just week after week.”
Greg Constantine produced this work as part of the 2026 Bertha Challenge Fellowship.
2026-05-15 08:25:16
The Supreme Court has rejected a federal appeals court’s attempt to end telemedicine and mail-order abortions, hitting pause on a fast-moving case that threatened to decimate access to abortion pills nationwide.
The one-paragraph SCOTUS order, issued late Thursday afternoon, means that for the foreseeable future, the abortion pill mifepristone can continue to be prescribed via telehealth and sent through the mail, even to patients living in states where abortion is banned.
“The number one message that we want to get across is that telehealth care is still available across the country,” said Lizzy Hinkley, legal director of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine.
Abortion patients, providers, and advocates have been in turmoil since May 1, when the far-right Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order suspending FDA rules that allowed online dispensing of mifepristone. That order was stayed by Justice Samuel Alito for 10 days while the Supreme Court struggled to decide how to proceed in a potentially monumental—and politically explosive—case.
Since the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, more than a dozen Republican-dominated legislatures have enacted laws that severely restrict or ban abortion within their borders. But over the past four years, the number of abortions has risen nationwide, including in states where abortion is almost entirely illegal.
Abortion foes blame Obama- and Biden-era FDA rule changes expanding access to mifepristone, one of two drugs used in the standard abortion-pill regimen, including a 2023 rule that eliminated a requirement for in-person dispensing. Now, almost two-thirds of abortions in the US happen with abortion pills, and nearly 30 percent occur by telemedicine.
Louisiana sued the FDA last fall, arguing that the 2023 rule change was arbitrary, capricious, and “avowedly political”—not based on sound science, the suit claimed, but on Democrats’ determination to negate the Supreme Court’s intent in Dobbs to return abortion policy to the states.
The FDA argued that the lawsuit would disrupt its own, ongoing review of mifepristone’s safety, announced last fall. Mifepristone’s manufacturers, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro Inc., warned of the potentially dire consequences of allowing states to upend drug regulations put in place years or even decades ago.
On Thursday, Alito—the arch-conservative who authored the Dobbs decision—was one of two justices who wrote in favor of letting the Fifth Circuit’s order go into effect. That would have cut off the supply of mail-order mifepristone to states like Louisiana, where telehealth providers are sending nearly 1,000 packages of abortion pills every month.
“Even this conservative Supreme Court is not willing to endorse anti-abortion extremists’ latest desperate attempt to deprive women of needed healthcare.”
Alito blasted his fellow justices’ decision to pause the Fifth Circuit order as “unreasoned” and “remarkable.” He also ranted about blue-state shield laws, which provide the legal protections that make it possible for telehealth providers to care for patients in states where abortion is restricted or banned. Such laws, he said, are “a scheme” to thwart states like Louisiana, which has some of the toughest anti-abortion restrictions in the country.
In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas brought up the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era federal criminal statute that conservatives argue remains the law of the land. If enforced, it would amount to a national abortion ban.
Comstock “bans using ‘the mails’ to ship any ‘drug . . . for producing abortion,’” Thomas wrote, and suggested that Danco and GenBioPro are engaged in a “criminal enterprise.” He said the drug companies—which appealed the Fifth Circuit ruling to SCOTUS—”cannot be irreparably harmed by [an] order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes.”
Abortion advocates expressed relief that the other justices—including several who have repeatedly ruled against abortion rights—did not let the Fifth Circuit ruling take effect. “Even this conservative Supreme Court is not willing to endorse anti-abortion extremists’ latest desperate attempt to deprive women of needed healthcare,” Hinkley said. She called the case “a deliberate effort to disrupt access to telemedicine abortion across the country and cause undue confusion among patients and providers.”
“The ban on mifepristone through telemedicine was never about safety,” said Dr. Angel Foster, a telemedicine provider and co-founder of The Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, or The MAP. “It was about controlling people’s bodies and lives.”
But the reprieve is only temporary, she added. “Lawmakers have made it clear they are desperate to block access to medication abortion by any means necessary.”
2026-05-15 06:48:56
Something big happened in Virginia last month that you probably missed.
On April 13, Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a bill making Virginia the 18th state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
That’s an agreement among states to elect the president by the popular vote rather than the Electoral College.
The compact goes into effect when enough states sign onto it and reach a total of 270 electoral votes—the number needed to elect the president.
With Virginia’s support, states in the compact now have 222 electoral votes.
And the results of the midterms could push the popular vote effort over the top.
If Democrats take control of state governments in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, or Arizona, and legislatures in those states adopt the compact, that would put it over 270.
That means there’s actually a chance the president could be elected by the popular vote in 2028 instead of the fundamentally undemocratic Electoral College.
Watch our new video to learn more about how consequential this would be.
2026-05-15 06:19:52
A few days before May Day—International Worker’s Day—I traveled to Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre for the West Coast premiere of activist-writer-director Boots Riley’s sophomore film, I Love Boosters. The 100-year-old movie palace—which was one of many businesses across the country closed on May Day in support of workers’ rights—seemed a fitting place for Riley’s star-studded satire to debut.
As the centerpiece of this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, at which Riley also made his directorial debut in 2018 with Sorry to Bother You, it was a packed house, with a long line of prospective popcorn munchers outside the venue hoping to cop a last-minute ticket. Like Riley’s first film, Boosters—also the title of a track on Pick a Bigger Weapon, a 2006 album by Riley’s hip-hop group the Coup—is an incisive critique of capitalism set in the Bay Area.
This time, Riley turns his lens on the fashion industry, zooming out through the supply chain to reveal the layers of exploitation usually rendered invisible. The film follows Corvette (Keke Palmer) and her gaggle of stylish, shoplifting women, or boosters, feuding with an oddball designer played by Demi Moore. And in typical Boots Riley fashion, it’s jam-packed with surrealist, sci-fi, and even supernatural elements like teleportation machines and demons. Plus some good old Marxist philosophy.
“Pointing out the problem is not enough, although I might enjoy those movies…we need something that makes people want to join a movement that can win.”
After the credits rolled, Riley and cast members Eiza González, Poppy Liu, and LaKeith Stanfield took the stage, and began fielding questions from a moderator. Asked what he thought when he first read the script, and what made him excited to be a part of the project, Stanfield said that he knew Boosters would “push the art form forward” and allow him and the rest of the film crew to speak to “this social issue that I think that we’re having trouble with, which is unity.”
“We have to challenge these structures above us,” he said, “and we’re only going to be able to do it together.”
The next day, while walking through downtown San Francisco to interview Riley in person, I watched a small plane cruise above the skyscrapers, dragging a banner through the cloudless sky that read, “STOP HIRING HUMANS.” It would have fit perfectly into one of Riley’s cartoonishly dystopian worlds—which is perhaps why his films resonate so much in our late-stage capitalist hellscape. Shortly after, I sat down with the filmmaker to discuss his inspirations, his thoughts on the state of socially conscious films, and I Love Boosters, in theatres on May 22.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What was it like being back at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre for the premiere of your sophomore film?
Well, Grand Lake Theatre, I’ve gone to since I was kid. [I] saw so many formative movies there. And since I did Sorry to Bother You, and they did so well with it, they gave me a lifetime pass to go there. So I go there all the time. I know everybody that works there. But just showing it in Oakland as well, it’s a real treat.
That’s amazing. I know that you encountered some obstacles in producing Sorry to Bother You. I wonder, after the massive commercial success of that, what it was like this time around.
It was a lot easier. It didn’t take that much shorter [an] amount of time, but it was a lot easier to convince people that they should do it.
Last night, you described I Love Boosters as your best work yet. What about it are you most proud of?
So many aspects. One, I feel like we got amazing performances. [And there’s] just so many cinematic things that I don’t think people have seen before. The connection to the characters that people feel when they’re watching, the roller coaster ride that people take, the politics of it, the fact that people are crying at different points.
To me, it felt like it ended on a more optimistic note than Sorry to Bother You. I’m wondering if that’s how you feel about the ending as well, and sort of how you came to that conclusion.
I don’t know. I feel like Sorry to Bother You ends with the Equisapiens leading an uprising against Steve Lift [played by Armie Hammer]. There’s something optimistic about that. So I don’t feel like it is more optimistic. I think maybe I expressed it a little more clearly [in I Love Boosters].
What do you think of the rise of socially conscious or anti-capitalist films that we’ve seen in the past five years or so? Because I feel like since Sorry to Bother You, there have been more movies that sort of touch on those themes.
Which ones are you thinking of?
Like Parasite, No Other Choice, Triangle of Sadness, or The Menu, that I think all kind of get at those themes to varying degrees of success.
I haven’t seen all of those movies. I have seen Parasite, and I’ve seen some other movies that might fall into that. [The thing is,] for instance, the Coup came out at a time when there were all these other things that were supposed to be conscious music, conscious hip-hop. The difference with us is that we were putting forth the idea that we need to be involved in class struggle to overthrow the ruling class. To me, they weren’t the same kind of music at all.
Often [one] would be like, ‘Hey, you need to change what you’re doing,’ right? Or, it would be like, ‘Here’s how the world is fucked up.’ I’m glad that there are movies that are saying, ‘Here’s how the world is fucked up,’ but I think what we need is a movement that actually tries to change things, and that movement needs to be a mass, militant, radical labor movement that uses the withholding of labor as a tactic and strategy to change policy and grow more revolutionary.
“We need victories…and we need to let people know about those victories.”
Pointing out the problem is not enough, although I might enjoy those movies. I think that what we need is something that makes people want to join a movement that can win. I think a lot of these things are saying it’s all bad, it’s nihilistic. I can’t say that about Parasite, I’m forgetting how it ends. But we need films that get people to join organizations, join movements, campaigns, parties, to help make and push this movement forward and make change. I don’t see that as a similar sort of a thing.
I see those movies as maybe having a more accurate world that they paint as far as the power relationships. But I think the point is that if you don’t make stuff where it shows that someone is actually struggling to change it, even if your main characters aren’t, if there’s no class struggle, not just class conflict, but class struggle, collective struggle, if that doesn’t exist in the world, then it ends up becoming defeatist.
I’m not gonna say, ‘Make it all your characters want to be Violeta [Eiza González’s character in I Love Boosters] or Squeeze [Steve Yeun’s character in Sorry to Bother You].’ [But] I think you can have danger with Squid Game, things like that, of being like, ‘See, the world is fucked up. Told you, that’s why nothing can work.’ At first it feels like a revelation, and it is that, ‘Wow, they are pointing out what’s happening,’ and sometimes they’ll have stuff happen where someone is rebelling against it. [But] we do need people to know that there’s a movement that they can join, there are things happening.
Since you mentioned Squid Game, that makes me wonder, when you’re creating art, how do you prevent it from being co-opted? I think about how Squid Game went on to be a game show.
I think it’s connected to the end point [of] this growing radical labor movement. And if somebody decided to continue the story and have the radical labor movement even existing right now, that would be a win. So I’m not worried about that. I’ll put it like this, and this is also why I would say Sorry to Bother You being optimistic is a thing. Because between 2020 and 2024 was the largest strike wave in the U.S. since the ‘70s, thousands of strikes and work stoppages [happened], a lot of them in places that didn’t have unions before, new unions popping up, just work things happening.
“I got messages that said some version of, ‘We had everybody watch Sorry to Bother You, and then [they] voted to strike.’”
Anyway, during that time, I got dozens of messages that said some version of, “We were trying to organize a union, or we were trying to make a strike happen. We were pessimistic that it could happen.” There was pushback, different things like that, because that’s always what happens, right? And all of them had some version of, “We had everybody watch Sorry to Bother You, and then everybody voted to strike, or everybody voted to make the union.”
So yeah, you can make another movie that continues that story, but that story is already continuing on another plane. It doesn’t matter what you do, by having the story go on, it’s already in the world in a different way.
You mentioned your music career, and I read that you’ve been making music for your films since you were a student at San Francisco State. How does your music inspire your filmmaking and vice versa?
Yeah, for [I Love Boosters], I didn’t make the music. Tune-Yards made the music for my film. I made the soundtrack to Sorry to Bother You, which was different [from] the score. But my process of making music is definitely a huge part of how I make film, what I go for—as far as visceral responses, as far as how I want people to not just know a thing is happening, but feel things happening, go along with that character, and use all the techniques I can to do that.
I will often be in the studio, and I’ll be the worst musician in the room, and it might be the best guitar player in the world, and a drummer that thinks he’s the best drummer in the world, and the bass player that’s really good. But I have to know that they are experts at their instruments, but I’m the only one that’s an expert at this idea, and so I have to figure out how to communicate to them, how to get them interested and get them to see what I’m doing.
And then, on top of that, know that just because the guitar player wants a solo, and he’s the expert at guitar doesn’t mean he’s the expert at what this is so [I have to] be able to say no, or to know that when the bass player says, “Oh, I got a better idea for [the] bass line,” to be like, “That is better”—and also to just go for it, make the thing you think you want to make, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.
Switching gears a bit… I wanted to ask you about your hat. I noticed it at the premiere yesterday, and you’re wearing it today. Do you know how tall it is?
I don’t. I have a lot of hats. I’m wearing the turquoise one a lot—one, because the costume designer Shirley Kurata got it for me as a wrap gift, but two, because it connects to the character of Corvette [Keke Palmer’s character in I Love Boosters]. But these are all from Uptown Yardie. It’s a guy’s business in London, and he is kind of inspired by Jamaican Yardie culture. I don’t know how tall it is, though.
Got it. And that was actually my next question: I was gonna ask if your hat was turquoise or aquamarine. [Another nod to the film.]
[Laughs.]
How would you compare your sensibilities as a filmmaker to fellow Oakland native Ryan Coogler—and I guess I’ll make this a two part question: what would you do if you had a $100 million budget, if you wanted to even make a movie at that scale?
Well, with this $20 million budget, I made a movie that has more than a lot of $200 million budget movies have. I don’t know. I don’t go from the budget. I go from the story that I want to tell, [and] I don’t ever know what the budget for that is.
How do we build a labor movement without a teleportation machine?
You can connect without a teleporter. You can connect to other movements that are happening around the world. But you have to be organizing first. The real thing is you have to be organizing first where you are. You have to be making that exciting. You do connect, like, “Hey, this is what’s going on over there. This is what we can do here.” That sort of a thing. You just do that through conversations. And you do that through building up small actions and getting people involved.
And there’s already one. Like I said, we had that strike wave that happened, and we also had, in Minnesota, a one-day strike that was symbolic, but it was hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people involved in a strike, a general strike that was not even just for their own immediate personal good. It was having to do with class solidarity against fascism. That’s qualitatively more radical than many things that have happened in the US in a long time.
The reason it took the form of a strike is because we’ve got this movement started and growing already, and the way that we do it is we need victories. We need some victories, and we need to let people know about those victories.
Do you have any final thoughts?
I need everybody to go see this May 22, and if you like it, tell folks about it.
2026-05-15 05:41:07
Can you trust Sam Altman?
That was one of the central themes at the high-profile trial between the OpenAI CEO and Elon Musk in California this week, as Musk’s lawyers peppered Altman with questions on his work relationships, including his temporary ouster from OpenAI three years ago by a mistrustful board of directors. Steven Molo, Musk’s top litigator, referred to testimony from executives like former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, who said Altman had a habit of “creating chaos” by “saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person.”
Molo also cited an April New Yorker investigation in which a wide array of sources close to Altman described him as someone with an unrelenting drive for power.
Distraught text messages from Altman to Murati pleading for his job in 2023 raised parallels with how Altman’s team framed Musk’s explosive exit from OpenAI in 2018, after the Tesla head lost a reported power struggle for control of the company. Altman’s lawyers framed Musk’s 2024 suit againstOpenAI and its leadership as simple retaliation, unmotivated by any actual concern about OpenAI’s original, feel-good nonprofit mission to advance AI in a manner “to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”
Musk’s argument is that OpenAI abandoned its values for profits and should therefore return $150 billion to its nonprofit arm—but for Musk, the trial doesn’t particularly seem to revolve around the facts of the case.
The wins, such as they are, come in the form of peeling back the tireless hours of public relations strategizing and mythologizing to make OpenAI and Altman look ridiculous. Musk’s lawyers’ examination of Altman seems intended to extract as many unconvincing responses of “I don’t recall” and “I can’t say how other people think” as possible. (Honestly, just getting these guys to talk in environments they don’t have full control over does most of the job.) Molo’s questioning often devolved into pettiness:
Molo: “Are you completely trustworthy?”
Altman: “I believe so.”
Molo: “You don’t know whether you’re completely trustworthy?”
Altman: “I’ll just amend my answer to yes.”
The public doesn’t need to think Musk is right; they only need to think Altman lies a lot.
A lot of the work has already been done for Musk. According to a national NBC News survey from March, 57 percent of registered voters said the risks of AI outweigh its benefits. Sam Altman is one of the most prominent faces of the industry, and there were two separate attacks on Altman’s home in the span of three days last month.
So as closing arguments wrap up and jury deliberations begin next week, the result of the lawsuit may not even matter. The damage is already underway.
2026-05-15 05:19:53
David Venturella, who spent more than a decade as an executive at the private-prison behemoth GEO Group, will be the next acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday. Venturella will oversee Donald Trump’s mass deportation operations—and the country’s rapidly expanding immigration detention system.
Venturella will begin leading the agency when current Acting Director Todd Lyons steps down May 31. (ICE has had a series of acting directors since 2017, meaning none of them have been confirmed by the Senate.)
This has been a banner year for GEO Group, the largest private prison contractor incarcerating immigrants in the US: ICE is its single largest client.
“Last year was the most successful period for new business wins in our company’s history, and we expect 2026 to be a very active year as well,” said GEO Group CEO George Zoley on a May 6 earnings call touting “new growth opportunities” the firm “captured in 2025 and are normalizing in 2026.”
ICE contracts drove a year in which GEO made “up to approximately $520 million in new incremental annual revenues…the largest amount of new business” the company has ever drawn in a single year, Zoley said on that call.
And with Venturella leading ICE, those contracts could get even bigger. GEO Group, Zoley said, has 6,000 “idle high-security beds that remain available.” If the company is able to fill those beds with detained immigrants, that alone “could generate in excess of $300 million in annual revenues.”
It’s not unusual for the Trump administration to hire from GEO Group’s talent bench. “Border Czar” Tom Homan—a longtime friend of Venturella’s—also contracted for GEO Group. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi worked as a lobbyist for the prison contractor.
And the pipeline goes in the other direction, too: at least six former ICE officials who left government over the past decade ended up working at GEO Group, as the Washington Post reported.
“If there was ever a classic example of the revolving door phenomena, it’s David Venturella,” who “has gone from high ranking positions at ICE to GEO Group to ICE once again,” said Silky Shah, of the nonprofit Detention Watch Network, in a statement. “Like Tom Homan, Venturella’s intimate knowledge of ICE will likely yield another spike of ICE detention facility openings in the coming months as the agency operates with impunity and unprecedented funding.”
