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Experts Warn That MAHA Bait-and-Switch by RFK Jr. and Trump 'Means Big Money for Big Wellness'
"They sell consumers their own version of the grift."
Feb 05, 2026
Government watchdog Public Citizen on Thursday issued a report outlining the major conflicts of interest held by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies in the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement.
In particular, the report focuses on Kennedy and three key allies: Wellness influencer Dr. Casey Means, who is President Donald Trump's nominee to be US surgeon general; her brother Calley Means, a senior adviser to Kennedy at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); and the siblings' business partner Dr. Mark Hyman.
Public Citizen centers its report on these individuals' ties to the wellness industry, which "encompasses nutritional supplements and fitness products, and increasingly overlaps with non-science-based health beliefs."
Taken as a whole, the report says, "MAHA's influence in US healthcare means big money for Big Wellness."
Among other things, the report noted that Casey Means owns a metabolic testing company that "may have already benefited from Secretary Kennedy’s promotion of wearable health tracking devices."
The report states that Dr. Means "has also potentially violated [Federal Trade Commission] rules on influencer marketing by failing to adequately disclose sponsorship relationships in dozens of web and social media posts" that promote assorted wellness products.
"Public Citizen’s review of Dr. Means’ website, newsletter, and social media feeds found that for the almost two dozen companies from which Dr. Means reported receiving affiliate fees, Dr. Means disclosed her financial relationship inconsistently and ambiguously," the report says. "In total, she failed to disclose her financial relationship 79 out of 140 (56%) times she promoted affiliated products."
Calley Means, meanwhile, comes under scrutiny for his company TrueMed, which Public Citizen said "relies on a legally dubious business model." The report also criticizes Means for regularly promoting "dangerous and false health information," including attacks on fluoridated water and Covid-19 vaccines, and the promotion of drinking raw milk.
And Mark Hyman, states the report, "oversees a wellness empire that stands to benefit significantly from HHS policies under Kennedy."
Eileen O’Grady, a researcher in Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division, acknowledged the appeal of many MAHA influencers' sales pitch, stating that "they accurately identify that much of the US healthcare system is beholden to corporate interests like Big Pharma and the insurance industry."
However, O'Grady said that what the Means siblings and Hyman are peddling isn't much different than what they criticize in the US healthcare system.
"They sell consumers their own version of the grift," she explained. "Excessive testing, unproven and underregulated health supplements, and assurances that only their products hold the key to better health. While MAHA influencers reap the benefits of lucrative sponsorship contracts and, in some cases, political appointments, regular Americans are once again being cheated."
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Private Jet of Billionaire Trump Donor Used to Deport Palestinians From US to Occupied West Bank
“They dropped us off like animals on the side of the road,” said 24-year-old Maher Awad, who’d lived in the United States for nearly a decade and was taken from his girlfriend and newborn son in Michigan.
Feb 05, 2026
A private jet owned by a top donor for President Donald Trump was used to secretly deport Palestinians out of the United States to the occupied West Bank, where they have been separated from their families, according to an investigation published Thursday by the Guardian and the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972.
On January 22, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that a private jet containing eight Palestinian men touched down at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv before dumping them off at a checkpoint near an Israeli settlement, where they were released into the occupied territory.
Security sources familiar with the case described it as "highly unusual," as chartering a private jet to Israel costs about $300,000—vastly more than the commercial jet travel that the US government typically uses for deportations.
But the Guardian and +972 have learned that the jet, which carried another set of Palestinian deportees to be dropped in the West Bank on Monday, is owned by Trump's longtime business partner, the Florida real estate tycoon Gil Dezer.
Dezer and his father, the Israeli-American Michael Dezer, have collaborated with Trump on six different residential towers in Miami and have donated at least $1.3 million to Trump's presidential campaign, according to campaign filings.
The jet was found to have been chartered by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through the Florida-based company Journey Aviation. Before it dropped Palestinians off in Israel, the group Human Rights First determined that it had been used for at least four other "removal flights" to Kenya, Liberia, Guinea, and Eswatini.
US officials did not answer questions about how much money they paid to charter the flights, but aviation industry sources told the outlets that chartering the two flights to Israel would probably cost between $400,000 and $500,000.
Maher Awad, a 24-year-old Palestinian man who was deported, said the men were carried on Dever's plane with their arms and ankles shackled after being taken out of a notoriously squalid ICE detention hub in Phoenix, Arizona.
When they arrived at the checkpoint, he said, “they dropped us off like animals on the side of the road.” All he had to show Israeli authorities was his Michigan driver’s license.
The men went to a house near the checkpoint, owned by a university professor named Mohammad Kanaan.
Kanaan said the men stayed at his home for about two hours. During that time, he learned that many of them had been in ICE detention for so long that some of them were considered missing.
“Their families were so happy to hear their voices,” he said. “One mother started screaming and crying over the phone.”
According to the outlets, the flights were "part of a secretive and politically sensitive US government operation to deport Palestinians arrested by ICE to the Israeli-occupied West Bank."
The Trump administration has aggressively targeted Palestinians for deportation, stripping legal status from hundreds of people who have protested or otherwise expressed solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel's two-year genocide in Gaza.
972+ reported that several of the deported men have held green cards in the United States. Many had wives, children, and other family members living there.
Awad, who had lived in the US for nearly a decade, was taken away from his girlfriend and his newborn son in Michigan. “I grew up in America,” he said. “America was heaven for me."
“I was feeling safe and secure in the United States until ICE arrested me," he said.
The secret deportation program has shocked many immigration attorneys, who described it as highly unusual and potentially illegal for the US to deport Palestinians to the West Bank, where they face systemic persecution and violence from Israel's occupation.
In recent weeks, state-sanctioned Israeli settler violence has exploded. In the three days following the first deportation flight, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported that "at least 10 serious Israeli settler attacks were recorded" in the West Bank, resulting in "extensive property damage, arson attacks, injuries, and forcible displacement of Palestinian families."
“Aside from the many irregularities with the deportation of eight Palestinians on a private jet and no due process, this transfer also violates the principle of nonrefoulement, which prohibits the forcible return of individuals to a country where there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be at risk of irreparable harm upon return, including persecution, torture, ill treatment, or other serious human rights violations,” Gissou Nia, director of the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council, told +972.
"The United States is bound by international treaties that explicitly prohibit this, including the Convention Against Torture,” she continued. “Therefore, the US violated this principle in sending Palestinian asylum seekers and Palestinians with other statuses back on a flight to Israel, where they face persecution."
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'I Am Speechless': Historians Sickened as Trump Set to Remove Mention of Racism from Medgar Evers Monument
"The murder of Medgar Evers was an act of racial terror," said human rights activist Martin Luther King III.
Feb 05, 2026
Historians and other critics expressed disgust on Thursday after news broke that the Trump administration was removing references to racism from the monument dedicated to civil rights icon Medgar Evers.
According to a report from Mississippi Today, the National Park Service has removed visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, Mississippi.
Two Park Service employees tell Mississippi Today that the brochures are expected to undergo significant revisions, including removing references labeling Evers' killer, Byron De La Beckwith, as a racist.
In fact, Beckwith was a member of both the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan, and remained a committed white supremacist up to his death in prison in 2001.
Mississippi Today noted that the removal of the brochures at the Evers monument aren't a one-off event, and the publication cited an earlier report from the Washington Post detailing how the Trump administration "has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks, including an 1863 photo that Christian abolitionists used to prove the horrors of slavery."
US Civil War historian Kevin Levin reacted with shock to the Trump administration's latest effort to whitewash American history.
"I am speechless," he wrote in a social media post referencing the changes to the Evers monument.
Historian Todd Arrington, site manager of the James A. Garfield National Historic Site, noted the suspicious timing of the change in the monument brochures.
"Today is the 32nd anniversary of Byron De La Beckwith’s February 5, 1994 conviction for murdering Medgar Evers in 1963," he wrote. "I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that this news broke today. That racist POS—who bragged about killing Evers at Klan meetings and rallies—died in prison in 2001."
Human rights activist Martin Luther King III, son of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr., slammed the Trump administration for trying to distort history.
"The murder of Medgar Evers was an act of racial terror," wrote King. "That fact is not partisan. It is historical. Calling it anything else is not 'restoring truth.' It is erasing it."
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Database of Court Filings Shows ‘Startling Pattern of Abuse’ by Federal Agents Against Citizens in Minnesota
A new database of sworn affidavits filed by the ACLU shows masked agents detaining citizens based on race without warrants, ignoring IDs, and pointing weapons at them.
Feb 05, 2026
Federal agents deployed to Minnesota by the Trump administration are systematically violating the rights of US citizens and lawful residents, according to more than two dozen sworn affidavits made available this week as part of a class action lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security.
The suit was filed last month by the ACLU of Minnesota and partnered law firms, which said that as part of President Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge, "masked federal agents in the thousands are violently stopping and arresting countless Minnesotans based on nothing more than their race and perceived ethnicity, irrespective of their citizenship or immigration status, or their personal circumstances.”
The case was launched by three plaintiffs, which include 20-year-old Mubashir Khalif Hussein, a Somali-born US citizen whose brutal arrest and detention was caught on video in December. He was placed into a headlock by masked agents and brought to an ICE office, where he said he was left in shackles for an hour and a half before being released miles from his home in the freezing cold.
The plaintiffs called it just one example of a "startling pattern of abuse spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that is fundamentally altering civic life in the Twin Cities and the state of Minnesota."
On Thursday, the online legal policy journal Just Security published a searchable database of the 29 sworn declarations filed so far as part of the case. Nearly all of them were filed by US citizens, while a few others were permanent legal residents or had pending legal status.
The statements detail numerous allegations that agents violated their basic constitutional rights, including by detaining them without showing a warrant; targeting Somali and Latino individuals based on their appearances; ignoring identifying documents that could prove their legal residency or citizenship; restraining them violently; and pointing weapons at them during searches.
Last year, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration's claim that when deciding whether to stop someone as part of "roving patrols," agents had the right to consider certain factors, including “the type of work one does,” a person’s use of Spanish or accented English, or their “apparent race or ethnicity."
While critics described it as an invitation to blatant and unconstitutional racial profiling and invasions of privacy, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion that the practice should not prove burdensome to those legally in the US: “If the person is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter,” he said.
Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and the co-editor-in-chief of Just Security, said that the “sworn affidavits show how, on the ground, this is simply not how ICE operates.”
"They did not identify themselves, and they did not present a warrant. They just opened my car door and started yanking me out of the car. I kept saying over and over that I was a US citizen."
One 33-year-old Latino citizen who was born in the US was driving to Menards on January 10 when he suddenly found himself boxed in by two cars at a stoplight. Before he knew it, he said agents were banging aggressively on his windows and one had started pointing a gun at him. When he put his vehicle in park, he said the doors opened automatically.
"When the doors unlocked, the agents did not ask me anything, they did not identify themselves, and they did not present a warrant. They just opened my car door and started yanking me out of the car," he said. "I kept saying over and over that I was a US citizen."
“Once they did get my seatbelt off and finally [pulled] me out of the car, they threw me to the ground and pinned me,” he continued. “They were pulling on my arms so tight to put on the handcuffs. They ripped my jacket, and it was torn up. My wallet fell on the ground. I was still repeating that I am a US citizen. I repeated it over and over. They never asked for or looked at my identification.”
The agents hauled the man into their car and began driving him around and interrogating him for about 20 minutes. He said the first question they asked him was his name.
"It seemed if they were going to violently arrest me before even looking at my identification, that they should have known who I was," the victim said.
Agents eventually realized they'd been searching for another person with the same name and birthdate. They drove their captive behind a warehouse, where nobody could see, and released him. But another agent had taken his car from the intersection. An agent said he'd only give it back if the agent could scan his face, which he did.
“I felt traumatized. My arm hurt, I had bruises from the handcuffs. They were so tight that half of my hand was numb for a few days. I guess it stopped the circulation to my hands while I was handcuffed. I had cuts on my face and hands,” the victim said. “Since this happened to me, I have to pass through that spot every time I drive to work. I keep going back to it and reliving it in my mind.”
According to the database, at least five other US citizens, lawful residents, or legal asylum seekers also claimed in court that they'd had weapons pointed at them by agents during their stops.
Two other US citizens and one lawful permanent resident detailed being subject to physical force during stops.
One 53-year-old Somali man, a US citizen since 2008, said he was physically grabbed and dragged from his car, handcuffed, and pinned against the vehicle by masked agents.
"One officer pressed his knee into my back," he said. When I screamed out in pain, another officer put his elbow into my neck, and one of the officers yelled at me, ‘Shut the fuck up, son of a bitch!’ One of the officers responded, ‘Why don’t you go back to your country?’"
"I believe that I was stopped solely because of the color of my skin and our appearance, including wearing a hijab."
One 22-year-old Somali-American citizen who was born in Minnesota said that on January 21, five agents hopped out of their car with multiple guns drawn as she was on her way to work.
She said they demanded to see proof of her citizenship, but rejected her valid ID, claiming it was fake. They demanded to see her passport, which US citizens are not required to carry under US law. The agents told her they did not believe she was a US citizen because of her “accent.”
"I believe that I was stopped solely because of the color of my skin and our appearance, including wearing a hijab," she said. "It was clear that the ICE agents did not know who I was when they stopped me. I had not violated any traffic laws, and the vehicle I was driving was registered to my mother, who is a United States citizen."
It's one of at least five cases in the database in which agents dismissed proof of a citizen or legal resident's status.
There have also been many other documented instances, including some caught on video, in which agents have detained a citizen or legal resident or refused to let them go because they believed the person's “accent” did not sound American.
All 29 of those who filed affidavits in the case have alleged unconstitutional racial profiling.
One 25-year-old Somali man, a US citizen born in Atlanta, said a group of masked agents accosted him and his mother while he was shoveling snow.
He said they were joined by a pair of unmasked men who appeared to be livestreaming and helped the agents to box him in. He later identified one of them as a right-wing YouTube influencer named Ben Bergquam.
Even though the vast majority of Somalis living in the US are citizens, he said the agents and the streamers were laughing and referring to him and his mother as "illegal aliens."
"I was unsure if I was going to be seriously injured or killed."
At least 12 people in the lawsuit have filed sworn testimony stating that agents forced them to stop while they were driving.
In one case, a Hispanic US citizen said that after following him for a few blocks, agents put on their lights and "rammed" his car off the road.
"An agent came up to my window, asking if I was a citizen. I was furious. I told them I was a citizen and they damaged my car," he said. "Instead of apologizing, they demanded that I produce documents to prove I was a US citizen. I was too angry. I told them again that I was a US citizen and I didn't have to prove it to them."
He said the episode lasted 45-60 minutes, with agents repeatedly demanding his ID, name, and place of birth. Eventually, he says, they confirmed his citizenship by taking photos and videos of him and scanning his license plate.
He said agents told him they would pay for the damages to his car, but that they drove away without providing any insurance information.
"Even though I am a United States citizen and I was carrying proof of my citizenship with me, ICE agents didn't believe me," he said. "I felt intense fear and shock. I was unsure if I was going to be seriously injured or killed."
The affidavits were filed as part of the case Hussen v. Noem, which claims that agents have violated Minnesotans' rights to equal protection and against unreasonable searches and seizures. A hearing is scheduled to take place later this month.
“The government can’t stop and arrest people based on the color of their skin, or arrest people with no probable cause,” said Kate Huddleston, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “These kinds of police-state tactics are contrary to the basic principles of liberty and equality that remain a bedrock of our legal system and our country.”
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