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‘Going Out of Its Way to Enable Trump,’ Supreme Court Has Used Secretive Shadow Docket Like Never Before
"That hugely consequential cases are decided with no transparency," said one civil rights lawyer, "only adds to the court's illegitimacy and further decreases the public's confidence."
Jul 02, 2026
As its conservative majority showed unprecedented deference to President Donald Trump, the US Supreme Court passed what ProPublica described as a "troubling milestone" during the term that ended last October.
For the first time in its modern history, an analysis published Wednesday found, the court decided more cases using its secretive "shadow docket" than using the regular process.
Unlike the so-called "merits docket," in which cases undergo lengthy periods of review, parties file briefs and make oral arguments for their side, and the justices issue extensive signed rulings explaining their reasoning, shadow docket decisions are expedited and offer little mechanism for accountability.
They are often unsigned, with no final vote count or explanation of the court’s decision, and are often issued within hours of legal action being taken, leaving no time for deliberation or public input.
These cases are meant to be reserved for emergency or temporary interventions. But as Trump has attempted to exert unprecedented executive authority that often brazenly pushes legal boundaries, ProPublica found that the court's use of the shadow docket has exploded.
The analysis found that during the last Supreme Court term, the court issued 63 decisions on the shadow docket, compared with just 56 on the merits docket. Analyzing more than two decades of decisions by the high court, they found that the court has never come close to issuing this many secret decisions in any previous term.
This is due largely to the Trump administration's unprecedented petitioning to have cases decided on the shadow docket after elements of the president's agenda were stymied by lower courts.
As ProPublica explained, the court "has repeatedly green-lit policies of his that lower courts have blocked—and has done so with little to no explanation," and often the decisions have been highly consequential and "have thrown lower courts’ processes into turmoil and have sometimes directly contradicted longstanding legal precedent."
On June 23, 2025, after a lower court had ruled that eight men being deported to South Sudan should have due process, the Supreme Court intervened after a request from the administration to stop that order. The men were deported. The majority didn’t issue an opinion justifying its ruling.
Three months later, the Supreme Court voted to allow immigration agents to stop people based on racial or ethnic characteristics while still-ongoing litigation against it proceeded. To justify the decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a rare shadow docket opinion that people who were in the country legally would be “free to go after the brief encounter.” These became known as “Kavanaugh stops.” Last year, ProPublica found more than 170 citizens who had been stopped and detained by ICE agents. The more than 50 Americans held even after agents learned of their citizenship were almost all Latino.
And in May, while an election in Louisiana was already underway, the justices allowed the state to immediately redraw its electoral map, removing one of the two majority-Black voting districts. Louisiana can now use that map for the 2026 midterms as part of a nationwide redistricting battle for control of the House of Representatives—an effort touched off by Trump’s call for Republican-led states to create more safe seats for themselves.
An analysis by the legal group Court Accountability in October found that the Supreme Court sided with Trump 90% of the time in the 23 orders included in its analysis of his second administration through October 2025, nearly all of which were issued on the shadow docket.
“The patterns show a court going out of its way to enable Trump,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University and a Supreme Court analyst, told ProPublica.
Noting that the American public’s approval of the high court has fallen substantially in recent years, Leslie Proll, a civil rights lawyer and the former director of voting rights at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, called the court’s unprecedented secrecy “utterly disgraceful.”
"That hugely consequential cases are decided with no transparency," she said, "only adds to the court's illegitimacy and further decreases the public's confidence."
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Records Shows That Trump, By His Own Definition, Is Guilty of Mortgage Fraud
“Given Trump’s position on situations like this, he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice,” said one mortgage law expert.
Dec 08, 2025
As US President Donald Trump targets political opponents with dubious allegations of mortgage fraud, an investigation published Monday revealed the Republican leader once did the same thing as a senior official he is trying to fire.
In an August letter, Trump announced his termination of Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook—an appointee of former President Joe Biden—for alleged fraud, accusing her of signing two primary residence mortgages within weeks of each other.
Cook, who denies any wrongdoing, has not been charged with any crime and has filed a lawsuit challenging Trump's attempt to fire her. In October, the US Supreme Court declined to immediately remove Cook and agreed to hear oral arguments on the case in January.
Trump called Cook's actions "deceitful and potentially criminal." However, ProPublica reviewed records showing that Trump "did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of."
Trump committed mortgage fraud, according to Trump.Somehow I doubt his DOJ will go after him the way he instructed his DOJ to go after his political enemies over this.Every Republican accusation is a confession.
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— Melanie D’Arrigo (@darrigomelanie.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 5:47 AM
According to the publication:
In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.
In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent—exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud...
Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for ProPublica were struck by the irony of Trump’s dual mortgages. They said claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time, as Trump did, is often legal and rarely prosecuted. But Trump’s two loans, they said, exceed the low bar the Trump administration itself has set for mortgage fraud.
"Given Trump’s position on situations like this, he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice,” Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law professor and leading expert on mortgage finance, told ProPublica. “Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.”
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, responded to ProPublica's analysis in a statement slamming "Trump's mortgage fraud witch hunt."
"The cruel and lawless hypocrisy of Donald Trump using the levers of government to dig up so-called mortgage fraud on his perceived political opponents, while doing the very same, is blatant," Gilbert said in a statement.
A federal judge recently dismissed the US Department of Justice's (DOJ) criminal case against Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was charged with bank fraud and false statements regarding a property in Virginia. Critics called the charges against James—who successfully prosecuted Trump for financial crimes—baseless and politically motivated. A federal grand jury subsequently rejected another administration attempt to indict James.
“The administration has used the idea of claiming a home as your primary residence without residing there to justify DOJ takedowns of Lisa Cook, Tish James, and more," Gilbert added. "If this is how they really feel, and the ProPublica reporting is accurate, then Donald Trump should be next in the DOJ crosshairs.”
ProPublica said that Trump hung up on one of its reporters who asked about similarities between his Florida mortgages and those of people targeted by his administration.
“President Trump’s two mortgages you are referencing are from the same lender," a White House spokesperson subsequently told the outlet. "There was no defraudation. It is illogical to believe that the same lender would agree to defraud itself.”
“President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law," the spokesperson falsely added.
Trump has accused other political foes, including US Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell—both California Democrats who played key roles in both of the president's House impeachments—of similar fraud. Swalwell is currently under formal criminal investigation. Both lawmakers deny the allegations.
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North Carolina GOP Official Uses 'Connections With the Trump Admin' to Threaten ProPublica Journalist
“I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump administration,” said the North Carolina GOP's communications director. “I would strongly suggest dropping this story.”
Oct 30, 2025
Republican Party officials are now using their "connections" to the Trump administration to threaten journalists into dropping critical coverage.
That's what Doug Bock Clark, a reporter for ProPublica, recently discovered as he worked on a feature-length story on the rise of Paul Newby, the Republican chief justice of North Carolina's Supreme Court, who has become one of the most quietly influential jurists in the nation.
The piece published Thursday examines how Newby, a born-again Christian who was elected to the bench in 2004, believes he was called by God to exact what he calls "biblical justice."
Over the past two decades, Clark wrote that Newby has "turned his perch atop North Carolina’s Supreme Court into an instrument of political power" and "driven changes that have reverberated well beyond the borders of his state."
Newby's most significant contribution has been the landmark decision that legalized partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina, a state that had long had some of the strongest laws in the country against partisan redistricting.
The change led the state's Republican-controlled Legislature to draw up wildly slanted maps that netted the GOP an additional six seats in the US House of Representatives in 2024, handing the party a national trifecta at the beginning of President Donald Trump's second term, which has allowed him to wield extraordinary power almost totally free of oversight from Congress.
It's just one of the ways, Clark said, that "Newby has provided a blueprint for conservatives to seize most of the nation’s state supreme courts, which have increasingly become the final word on abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights and voting rights."
The report drew from more than 70 interviews with those who know Newby professionally and personally. But he was unable to get in contact with Newby himself.
"I reached out to Newby multiple times during the course of my reporting and was even escorted out of a judicial conference while trying to interview him," Clark wrote on social media. "The court’s communications director and media team also didn’t respond to detailed questions."
When Clark attempted to contact Newby's daughter for comment, he instead received an ominous message from that aforementioned communications director, Matt Mercer.
Mercer ranted that ProPublica was waging a “jihad” against “NC Republicans,” which would “not be met with dignifying any comments whatsoever.”
He continued: “I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump administration, and I’m sure they would be interested in this matter. I would strongly suggest dropping this story.”
As Clark pointed out, "He bolded and underlined 'strongly,' in case we missed his point."
After the story, which made note of Mercer's threat, was published, Mercer then doubled down on social media, urging Trump to "feed ProPublica to the USAID wood chipper," referencing the president's near-total stripping of funds from the foreign aid agency.
Trump has issued an executive order slashing federal funds for media organizations supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, like NPR and PBS, in response to critical coverage of his administration. But it's not entirely clear how he would actually go about doing such a thing to ProPublica, which does not receive government dollars but instead subsists on private grants and donations.
At any rate, Mercer's messages were widely perceived as a not-so-veiled attempt to coerce ProPublica into ceasing its inquiries.
Travis Fain, a freelance reporter who previously worked for Raleigh's NBC News affiliate, WRAL, expressed disbelief at Mercer's belligerence on social media: "Well, there you go," he said. "The North Carolina Republican Party officially threatens journalists now."
Wiley Nickel, the former Democratic US House representative for North Carolina's 13th District, lamented that it was "not normal" for a party official to "threaten ProPublica with retaliation from Trump" for writing a profile about another GOP official.
Despite the threats, Clark says "ProPublica persisted" with the story that Mercer "warned [it] not to tell."
"I'm always amazed when grown-ups with jobs say things like this to journalists," said Jessica Huseman, a former ProPublica reporter. "Like, do you think that's gonna do anything but make us more eager to publish the story?"
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More Than 170 US Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents, Some Abused or Detained for Days: ProPublica
"Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents," the investigation found.
Oct 17, 2025
More than 170 US citizens have been detained by immigration agents against their will since President Donald Trump returned to office in January, according to a new investigation by ProPublica.
The reporters examined every publicly available case they could find in which citizens were detained by immigration officers.
"Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents," they wrote in the report published Thursday. "They've had their necks kneeled on. They've been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched."
"About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones," continued the report.
The findings fly in the face of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's recent assertion, in a ruling that allowed the Trump administration to use racial profiling to carry out its mass deportation agenda in Los Angeles, that "if the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go."
Video evidence from Los Angeles has shown immigration officials carrying out what appear to be large, indiscriminate roundups of random groups of Latino people.
Meanwhile, Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who has been at the helm of Trump's "Operation Midway Blitz" in Chicago, has acknowledged in an interview with a local news station that immigration enforcement decides whether to detain people based on "how they look," and suggested that the white reporter interviewing him would be less likely to be detained.
ProPublica's report bolsters the accusation that the administration is carrying out explicit racial profiling. The investigation found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship, almost all of whom were Latino.
And while immigration officials are allowed to arrest citizens who obstruct their operations or assault officers, it found that the 130 cases in which Americans were accused of doing so "often wilted under scrutiny." In nearly 50, it said, charges were never filed or the cases were dismissed, while only a small number have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.
Citizens who have been detained have often faced severe mistreatment at the hands of officers:
Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed, and punched a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative.
In another, agents knocked over and then tackled a 79-year-old car wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he was held for 12 hours and wasn't given medical attention despite having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart surgery.
In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for more than two days, without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that time. (The Supreme Court has ruled that two days is generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without charges.)
The investigation also found that at least 20 of the detained US citizens were children, including two with cancer. Another four were held, with their undocumented mother, for weeks without access to a lawyer. They were released following the intervention of Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.), but still remain without their mother, who has not been accused of a crime.
In many cases, agents were found to have ignored proof of citizenship. In one case, they tackled an Alabama construction worker, Leonardo Garcia Venegas, to the ground even as he shouted that he was a citizen. When officers took out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to US citizens, they dismissed it as fake and held Garcia in handcuffs for over an hour. Agents later detained him a second time and dismissed his REAL ID again, while also holding two other workers with legal status.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called ProPublica's report "absolutely shocking."
"ICE does not have the authority to detain US citizens during immigration enforcement—full stop," she said. "The Trump administration is out of control, violating the rights of American citizens. They must be held accountable."
ProPublica's investigation focused on the detention of US citizens, but Kavanaugh's contention that legal immigrants are also "promptly released" is also flagrantly untrue. While there has not been a comprehensive effort to aggregate the number of green-card or visa holders detained or deported, there have been numerous documented cases of them falling into the grasp of immigration enforcement without any clear justification.
Earlier this week, the BBC reported that 48-year-old Paramjit Singh, a green-card holder who has a brain tumor and a heart condition, has been in ICE detention for over two months and has been denied the medical care he needs, despite there being no active cases against him. Another green-card holder in Kentucky, Vicente Castillo Flores, who has lived in the US for over 30 years, was detained by ICE earlier this month at a toll booth despite showing agents his work visa. According to Newsweek, the agency has not provided a reason for why he was detained despite his legal status.
The ProPublica reporters noted that their investigation was undertaken because "the government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans." They said the number of US citizens held in detention was likely even higher than what they reported.
Their report is the latest in a long line of reports that have revealed an extraordinary lack of accountability and transparency for ICE and Trump's immigration enforcement agenda, which has mainly gone after people without criminal records despite Trump's claims to the contrary.
Last month, an investigation from the Miami Herald found that over 1,000 detainees held at Florida's 'Alligator Alcatraz' detention facility had mysteriously vanished, with no record of where they went, leading the Florida Immigrant Coalition to describe it as "an extrajudicial black site."
Three individuals have died in ICE custody just over the past two weeks, bringing the total number up to 23 this year, the highest number in 20 years.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) called ProPublica's report "an outrage."
"Every single Republican needs to answer for this," she said. "We can't let this administration sweep this kind of gross abuse of power under the rug."
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Kristi Noem Took Personal Cut of Political Donations While Governor of South Dakota: Report
"No wonder Pam Bondi gutted the public integrity section of DOJ. To protect utterly corrupt monsters like Kristi Noem."
Jun 30, 2025
The investigative outlet ProPublica revealed Monday that Kristi Noem secretly took a personal cut of funds she raised for a nonprofit that boosted her political career—and then did not disclose the income when President Donald Trump selected her to serve as head of the Department of Homeland Security.
ProPublica reported that in 2023, while Noem was governor of South Dakota, the nonprofit group American Resolve Policy Fund "routed funds to a personal company of Noem's that had recently been established in Delaware." The company is called Ashwood Strategies, and it was registered in June 2023.
"The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary," according to the outlet. "Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group—one that's not required to disclose the names of its donors—the original source of the money remains unknown."
Experts told ProPublica that the arrangement and Noem's failure to disclose the income were unusual at best and possibly unlawful.
"If donors to these nonprofits are not just holding the keys to an elected official's political future but also literally providing them with their income, that's new and disturbing," Daniel Weiner, a former Federal Election Commission attorney who now works at the Brennan Center for Justice, told ProPublica.
Noem's lawyers denied that she violated the law but did not reply to ProPublica's questions about whether the Office of Government Ethics was aware of the $80,000 payment.
Unlike many Trump administration officials, Noem is not a billionaire. But "while she is among the least wealthy members of Trump's Cabinet, her personal spending habits have attracted notice," ProPublica observed, noting that she was "photographed wearing a gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch that costs nearly $50,000 as she toured the Salvadoran prison where her agency is sending immigrants."
"In April, after her purse was stolen at a Washington, D.C. restaurant, it emerged she was carrying $3,000 in cash, which an official said was for 'dinner, activities, and Easter gifts,'" the outlet continued. "She was criticized for using taxpayer money as governor to pay for expenses related to trips to Paris, to Canada for bear hunting, and to Houston to have dental work done. At the time, Noem denied misusing public funds."
Political scientist Norman Ornstein wrote Monday that it was "no wonder [Attorney General] Pam Bondi gutted the public integrity section of DOJ."
"To protect utterly corrupt monsters like Kristi Noem," he added.
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Trump Seeks 90% Cut for Already Underfunded Tribal Colleges
"This would basically be a knife in the chest," said the president of one tribal college, "and I don't know how we can survive these types of cuts."
Jun 04, 2025
The Trump administration is proposing a nearly 90% reduction in federal funding for tribal colleges and universities, a move that would likely force many of the nation's 37 Indigenous institutions of higher learning—which are already severely underfunded—to close, according to a ProPublica report published Wednesday.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of the Interior released its 2026 budget request, which seeks $22.1 million for tribal colleges and universities for the next fiscal year. That's down from $122.4 million allocated for the current fiscal year.
"The numbers that are being proposed would close the tribal colleges," American Indian Higher Education Consortium president and CEO Ahniwake Rose told ProPublica. "They would not be able to sustain."
Matt Krupnick, who authored the ProPublica report, previously revaled that Congress was already underfunding tribal institutions of higher learning by around a quarter-billion dollars per year, based on legislation passed in 1978 under which the government promised inflation-adjusted appropriations for Indigenous colleges and universities based on the number of students enrolled in federally recognized tribes.
Big news: The Trump administration has essentially proposed shutting down tribal colleges and universities, displacing more than 20,000 students. My latest for ProPublica:
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— Matt Krupnick (@mattkrupnick.bsky.social) June 3, 2025 at 12:33 PM
As Krupnick noted:
The colleges have managed, despite the meager funds, to preserve Indigenous languages, conduct high-level research, and train local residents in nursing, meat processing, and other professions and trades. But with virtually no money available for infrastructure or construction, the schools have been forced to navigate broken water pipes, sewage leaks, crumbling roofs, and other problems that have compounded the financial shortcomings.
"I'm shivering in my boots," Manoj Patil, president of Little Priest Tribal College in Nebraska, told ProPublica. "This would basically be a knife in the chest. It's a dagger, and I don't know how we can survive these types of cuts."
The Interior Department's budget proposal comes amid the Trump administration's gutting of federal agencies, which is being spearheaded by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. It is also the latest in a series of administration actions targeting education for Native Americans, who suffered centuries of extermination, land theft, forced displacement, imprisonment in reservations and concentration camps, family separation, and other genocidal policies and practices of Euro-American colonizers.
Since taking office for the second time, President Donald Trump has suspended scholarship and research grants for Native Americans and rescinded a key White House initiative promoting Indigenous educational success.
However, as they always have, Indigenous people are fighting back. In March, Native students and tribal leaders sued the Bureau of Indian Affairs in a bid to stop the Trump administration's gutting of Indigenous education.
While some Indigenous leaders said they are counting on members of Congress to protect Native education, others expressed skepticism rooted in centuries of broken U.S. promises.
"It is a bit disheartening to feel like our voice is not being heard," Chris Caldwell, president of College of Menominee Nation in Wisconsin, told
ProPublica. "They don't hear our message."
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Insiders Say Trump Foreign Aid Cuts Causing 'Violence and Chaos' in Fragile Nations
"It is devastating, but it's not surprising," said one former senior State Department official. "It's all what people in the national security community have predicted."
May 28, 2025
U.S. State Department officials in at least two countries have recently warned that the Trump administration's sudden foreign aid cutoff is fueling "violence and chaos" in some of the world's most vulnerable nations, according to a report published Wednesday.
Internal State Department communications viewed by
ProPublica revealed that U.S. Embassy officials in the southeastern African nation of Malawi sounded the alarm on cuts to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), which have "yielded a sharp increase in criminality, sexual violence, and instances of human trafficking" in the Dzaleka refugee camp.
Meanwhile, dramatically reduced U.S. funding to feed refugees in Kenya has sparked violent protests and other incidents, including the trampling death of a pregnant woman during a stampede for food in which police opened fire on desperately hungry people.
"In Kenya, for example, the WFP will cut its rations in June down to 28% — or less than 600 calories a day per person — a low never seen before...The WFP’s standard minimum for adults is 2,100 calories per day." Just unbelievable suffering as U.S. withdraws foreign aid.
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— Lisa Song (@lisalsong.bsky.social) May 28, 2025 at 1:15 PM
This, as President Donald Trump's administration—spearheaded by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its de facto leader, Elon Musk—has taken a wrecking ball approach to vital offices and programs including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where contracts for programs including those that fed and provided healthcare for millions of people and fought diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS have been slashed by up to 90%.
Republicans have attempted to justify the cuts under the guise of tackling the staggering U.S. national debt, even as they push a massive tax cut that would disproportionately benefit the ultrarich and corporations while adding trillions of dollars to the deficit, according to a nonpartisan congressional committee.
Although a federal judge ruled in March that Musk's moves to shutter USAID were likely unconstitutional and ordered a halt to the effort, much damage has already been done.
"It is devastating, but it's not surprising," Eric Schwartz, a former State Department assistant secretary and National Security Council member, told ProPublica. "It's all what people in the national security community have predicted."
"I struggle for adjectives to adequately describe the horror that this administration has visited on the world," Schwartz added. "It keeps me up at night."
It is unclear if any of the cables were sent via the official dissent channel set up during the administration of then-President Richard Nixon in an effort to allow State Department personnel to voice opposition to U.S. policies and practices—especially in regard to the Vietnam War—and stop leaks to the press.
The State Department responded to the ProPublica exposé in a statement saying: "It is grossly misleading to blame unrest and violence around the world on America. No one can reasonably expect the United States to be equipped to feed every person on Earth or be responsible for providing medication for every living human."
Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed during a congressional hearing that "no one has died" due to USAID cuts, an assertion refuted by Congressman Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who displayed photos and harrowing stories of people who have, in fact, died since funding for vital programs was slashed or eliminated.
"It's clear that people are dying because U.S. aid was suspended and then reduced. But it's difficult to come up with a precise death toll that can be tied directly to Trump administration policies," according to a Washington Post analysis by Glenn Kessler published on Tuesday. "The death certificates, after all, aren't marked, 'Due to lack of funding by U.S. government.'"
Last month, the international medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said that there will be "more preventable deaths and untold suffering around the world" due to the Trump administration.
"These sudden cuts by the Trump administration are a human-made disaster for the millions of people struggling to survive amid wars, disease outbreaks, and other emergencies," Avril Benoît, who heads the U.S. branch of MSF, said last month.
"We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025."
On the ground in Kenya, WFP country director Lauren Landis told ProPublica that her organization is cutting daily aid rations to less than 600 calories per person—far less than the standard minimum 2,100 calories per day under agency guidelines.
"We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025," Landis said, describing children who look like "walking skeletons" due to severe malnutrition.
Meanwhile, enough food to feed more than 1 million people in some of the world's most fragile places through most of the summer is moldering in storage as USAID funds run dry and workers are laid off.
This,
warned WFP last month, "could amount to a death sentence for millions of people facing extreme hunger and starvation."
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'Life-Threatening Catastrophe': Trump Gutting of USAID Halts Agent Orange Cleanup Work
"The damage this administration has already done throughout the world is pretty staggering."
Mar 17, 2025
The Trump administration's unlawful dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development has ground to a halt critical Agent Orange cleanup efforts in Vietnam, which American forces sprayed extensively with the toxic, cancer-linked chemical between 1961 and 1971—impacting an estimated 3 million people.
ProPublica reported Monday that "workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding" last month.
"The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange," the investigative outlet noted. "After Rubio's orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind."
"And even more pressing, the officials warned in a February 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the verge of its rainy season, when torrential downpours are common. With enough rain, they said, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities, poisoning their food supplies," the outlet continued, observing that hundreds of thousands of people live around the air base.
Officials who sounded the alarm didn't receive a response from the Trump administration, according to ProPublica. The officials in Vietnam warned their colleagues in Washington that "we are quickly heading toward an environmental and life-threatening catastrophe."
The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates that more than 150,000 children in the country have been born with ailments attributable to Agent Orange.
Last month, as U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk took aim at USAID, The New York Times spotlighted the story of Nguyen Thi Ngoc Diem, who the newspaper noted was "born with a malformed spine and misshapen limbs—most likely because her father was exposed to Agent Orange."
"It makes no sense," Diem told the Times in response to the Trump administration's assault on USAID. "Agent Orange came from the U.S.—it was used here, and that makes us victims. A little support for people like us means a lot, but at the same time, it's the U.S.'s responsibility."
In the wake of Trump's illegal funding freeze at USAID, the Times noted that "bulldozers that were cleaning up contamination at a former American air base in southern Vietnam—which both countries might eventually want to use—have gone silent."
"Around 1,000 mine-removal workers in central Vietnam have been sent home," according to the Times. "Even if funding returns, in a year meant to mark recovery from the darkness of a cruel war, fundamental damage has already been done in ways that feel—for partners and victims in both countries—like a knife shoved into old wounds."
ProPublica stressed Monday that the Trump administration has not just ordered cleanup work to stop. It has also "frozen more than $1 million in payments for work already completed by the contractors the U.S. hired."
Jan Haemers, the CEO of Haemers Technologies—a company that has worked on Agent Orange cleanup in Vietnam—told ProPublica that "halting a project like that in the middle of the work" amounts to "an environmental crime."
"If you stop in the middle," Haemers said, "it's worse than if you never started."
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'Republican Abortion Bans Kill Women': Maternal Sepsis Rates Soar in Texas
"It is kind of mind-blowing that even before the bans researchers barely looked into complications of pregnancy loss in hospitals," said one expert.
Feb 20, 2025
"This is exactly what we predicted would happen and exactly what we were afraid would happen."
That's what Dr. Lorie Harper, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Austin, said after reviewing the data behind a ProPublica analysis published Thursday revealing that, since Texas banned abortion in 2021, the rate of sepsis soared by more than 50% for women hospitalized in the state when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester.
In the years immediately preceding Texas' abortion ban, the rate of sepsis—a life-threatening condition caused by infection—for women hospitalized in the second trimester of pregnancy held relatively steady around 3%. Since the ban, the sepsis rate for such women has shot up to nearly 5%.
"After the state banned abortion, dozens more pregnant and postpartum women died in Texas hospitals than had in pre-pandemic years, which ProPublica used as a baseline to avoid Covid-19-related distortions," states the report by Lizzie Presser, Andrea Suozzo, Sophie Chou, and Kavitha Surana.
Republican abortion bans kill women. Texas’ maternal mortality rate increased 33% since they banned abortion and threatened doctors with 99 years in prison. You never see laws targeting and denying healthcare for men that increases their risk of death.
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— Melanie D’Arrigo ( @darrigomelanie.bsky.social) February 20, 2025 at 5:51 AM
The analysis notes that "the standard of care for miscarrying patients in the second trimester is to offer to empty the uterus," which can lower the risk of infection and, by extension, sepsis. However, some hospitals don't allow doctors to perform the potentially lifesaving procedure until after a fetal heartbeat stops, or until they find a life-threatening complication.
That's because under Texas' misnomered "Heartbeat Law," pregnant people who have abortions cannot be penalized, but anyone who performs or aids in the procurement of the procedure faces as many as 99 years in prison, up to a $100,00 fine, and the possible loss of their professional license.
Texas empowers private individuals to sue anyone who "knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion" after the sixth week of pregnancy, a period before which many people even know they are pregnant. Plaintiffs who win in court are entitled to a reward of $10,000 plus costs and attorneys' fees.
Although the law contains an exception for "a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy," the authors of the ProPublica analysis noted that "the definition of what constitutes an emergency has been subject to confusion and debate."
In short, healthcare providers fear running afoul of the ambiguous law. This has resulted in deadly and life-threatening delays in care.
As the report highlights:
Forced to wait 40 hours as her dying fetus pressed against her cervix, Josseli Barnica risked a dangerous infection. Doctors didn't induce labor until her fetus no longer had a heartbeat.
Physicians waited, too, as Nevaeh Crain's organs failed. Before rushing the pregnant teenager to the operating room, they ran an extra test to confirm her fetus had expired.
Both women had hoped to carry their pregnancies to term, both suffered miscarriages, and both died.
"It's black and white in the law, but it's very vague when you're in the moment," Dr. Tony Ogburn, an OB-GYN in San Antonio, told ProPublica.
Republican lawmakers who helped write Texas' law have recently said they're open to revisions aimed at protecting pregnant peoples' lives in light of the harms reported by ProPublica and others. Last month, Republican Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said that "I do think we need to clarify any language so that doctors are not in fear of being penalized if they think the life of the mother is at risk."
However, it is uncertain how or when the law might be amended. Meanwhile, deaths attributed to abortion bans have also been reported—and reportedly covered up—in other states.
"It is kind of mind-blowing," perinatal epidemiologist Alison Gemmill told ProPublica, "that even before the bans researchers barely looked into complications of pregnancy loss in hospitals."
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Report Says Biden's 'Empty Threats' on Gaza Fed Israeli Impunity
One Middle East expert said that it's "hard to avoid the conclusion" that the U.S. administration's ultimatums to Israel "have all just been a smokescreen."
Jan 15, 2025
New reporting published Wednesday details the impotence and insincerity of President Joe Biden's "multiple threats, warnings, and admonishments" to Israel as it annihilated the Gaza Strip, killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians while receiving tens of billions of dollars in U.S. arms and unwavering diplomatic support.
Writing for ProPublica, Brett Murphy showed how multiple "red lines" issued by Biden administration officials were ignored by Israel with impunity. Murphy highlighted Secretary of State Antony Blinken's October 2024 demand that Israel take "urgent and sustained actions" to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza—mainly by allowing far more aid into the embattled strip—within 30 days or face a military aid cutoff.
"Netanyahu's conclusion was that Biden doesn't have enough oomph to make him pay a price."
Thirty days came and went without significant improvement or letup in Israel's onslaught. Yet the Biden administration insisted it found no indication that Israel was using U.S.-supplied weapons illegally. The arms flow continued.
As Murphy reported:
That choice was immediately called into question. On November 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel's methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was "consistent with genocide." Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations.
"Government officials worry Biden's record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity," wrote Murphy.
This reporting is so utterly damning. www.propublica.org/article/bide...
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— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes.bsky.social) January 15, 2025 at 1:55 PM
Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, told Murphy that "Netanyahu's conclusion was that Biden doesn't have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him."
"Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying 'no' to the current president," al-Omari added.
Conversely, Murphy noted: "On Wednesday, after months of negotiations, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire deal. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now, and who deserves the most credit, it's plausible that [U.S. President-elect Donald] Trump's imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line."
"Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months," he added, "raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives."
As Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, told Murphy, "It's hard to avoid the conclusion that [Biden's] red lines have all just been a smokescreen."
"The Biden administration decided to be all-in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something," Walt added, as Israel kept killing Palestinians with U.S.-supplied weapons and continued a "complete siege" blamed for widespread starvation and sickness in the Gaza Strip.
Murphy wrote that Trump "will inherit a demoralized State Department" in which many officials who haven't already resigned have "become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented."
As one senior department official told Murphy, Gaza "is the human rights atrocity of our time."
"I work for the department that's responsible for this policy. I signed up for this," the official added. "I don't deserve sympathy for it."
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