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    Guided by angels, pursued by chemtrails: the weird world of Florida health chief’s influential wife

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    The wife of Florida surgeon general Dr Joseph Ladapo, a leading vaccine skeptic, believes that angels have spoken to her and that “dark forces” are targeting her family with chemtrails, and has claimed her husband won’t work with anyone she hasn’t vetted.In published works and interviews reviewed by the Guardian, Brianna Ladapo – who edited her husband’s USA Today op-ed from March 2020 against Covid-19 shutdowns and appears alongside him at conferences – claims to have regularly received visions that come true and believes her life has been saved “multiple times” by angels.Joseph Ladapo, a longtime vaccine skeptic who was handpicked by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has faced accusations by public health advocates of peddling “scientific nonsense”. Ladapo has defended his stances on vaccines and Covid guidance, stating in 2023 in response to allegations he falsified a Covid report: “Between my scientific experience and training, and the fact that I am only comfortable saying the truth and speaking the truth, I felt completely fine with that announcement.”He recently ended vaccine mandates for children in Florida against preventable diseases, including measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis, comparing mandates to “slavery” and claimed the move would receive the blessing “of God”. Florida is the first state in the US to do so.The Guardian made several attempts to reach Brianna Ladapo and Joseph Ladapo by email. They did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Florida department of health and DeSantis also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.In a Substack post on 5 September, Brianna Ladapo defended her husband’s decision to end vaccine mandates and claimed there are “dubious origins, nonexistent safety profiles, and dirty money trails surrounding vaccines”.She wrote in the post: “You believe in vaccines because you’ve been told to by a corrupt medical establishment that has a vested interest in keeping you subservient and stupid.”In a July 2025 podcast, Brianna Ladapo stated: “I often think if I hadn’t had to learn to trust my own gut and learn how to think and stand on my own two feet at such a young age, when Covid had come through, apparently swept away everyone’s brains, I might have been swept away right along with it if I didn’t already know how to listen to that truth that I believe is inside every single one of us.”She added in the podcast that “even to the lead-up, I was having visions, I was having dreams”, about the pandemic, before it began in early 2020. “Immediately, ridiculous inconsistencies started to show themselves.”She also appeared in an interview with the prominent anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense in January 2025, in which she said: “If we all listen to our intuition, we listen to that voice, we would not fall for propaganda. Like, what’s happened with Covid. People did truly insane things to keep from catching a virus that over, well over 99% of people survived without intervention, right? That’s textbook insanity.”Joseph Ladapo has appeared with his wife on stage at conferences on health and parenting.In Dr Ladapo’s 2022 memoir, Transcend Fear, he wrote that his wife has “a history of extraordinary experiences that were hard to explain with natural laws”. In March 2020, he wrote an op-ed for USA Today against shutdowns in response to Covid-19, the first of several he wrote about the virus, and noted that it was edited by his wife.Joseph Ladapo wrote in Transcend Fear that when he was recruited for the job of Florida surgeon general by DeSantis, his wife claimed it was the message she was waiting for.In Brianna Ladapo’s 2023 memoir, she claimed “as long as I can remember, I have received communications from beings beyond this realm. Even as a young child, angels regularly spoke to me.”She added that “since I was born, I have also received constant communications in the form of visions” and that “eventually, every single one of them came to pass”.In the book, Brianna Ladapo claims she went on a “pilgrimage” trip to Egypt in graduate school during which she saw the rest of a “recurring vision” from a past life.In a video podcast on Rumble earlier this year, she reiterated these claims about her “gifts”.“I was born a very sensitive child, the kind of kid who would see angels and talk to beings that no one else could necessarily perceive,” she said, claiming her family “perceived what was happening to me as satanic and demonic and evil”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I saw a lot of angels, but my angels would talk to me and they saved my life multiple times,” she claimed.Brianna Ladapo also claimed their children together “have all been having experiences like this since they were born” and have “innate divine intelligence”.She claimed one of her children as a baby had “a gift” that was temporarily shared with her.“I started to hear conversations that sounded like they were right next to me. There were no people anywhere near us. And they were clearly from different eras, sometimes different countries, different languages and dialects,” Ladapo said.She said initially in their relationship, her husband was skeptical, but came to believe in her “gifts”.“After a number of years, he came to deeply trust my gift and now he won’t work with anybody I haven’t vetted,” she said. The couple did not respond to requests for comment about Brianna Ladapo’s vetting.Later in the podcast, Ladapo claimed she floated an inch above the ground during a session with a former Navy Seal and self-proclaimed traditional healing guru, whom she said her husband had also seen and had similar experiences with. The healer declined to comment, citing client confidentiality.Ladapo is also a proponent of the chemtrails conspiracy theory about planes mass-dumping chemicals. She claims in the podcast interview that she and her children got sick because of chemtrails, and she used a patch that has been characterized as pseudoscience by medical experts.“As we try to chase down where this is coming from, who is funding the companies who are flying the planes, who are piloting these planes, where are they taking off? We don’t even know where they are, because none of this is on the books.” Ladapo said about chemtrails.She added in the podcast interview about a photo of a Florida sky outside of her home: “This is how the chemtrails have been looking outside our window for the past few weeks. They are, I hate to say it, but that looks like a pentagram and they’ve been plastering it in the sky right outside our house for the last few weeks.”She characterized the perceived chemtrailers as “dark forces” out to get her and her husband.“They’ve been trying to stop us for years,” she claimed. “We are operating at a level of light that puts us essentially out of the grasp of those with a very low vibration, very evil intention.” More

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      Florida crosswalk wars take DeSantis’s ‘war on woke’ to street level

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      A battalion of transportation workers armed with cans of black paint has been deployed to open a new front in Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke”, while young students trying to make their schools safer have joined the LGBTQ+ community as targets of Florida’s Republican governor.The saga began with the state moving in the dead of night to paint over a rainbow-colored crosswalk outside Orlando’s former Pulse nightclub, where 49 people were killed in a 2016 shooting. The city’s mayor, Buddy Dyer, called the erasure of the memorial to the mostly LGBTQ+ victims “a cruel political act”.Since then, DeSantis’s crosswalk wars have spread across Florida. The governor has ordered the removal of about 400 “non-standard” pieces of street art, even though they all received state approval as a condition of installation. A growing number of municipalities has pledged to fight him.The state’s declared intent, acquiescent to a national directive by the Trump administration last month, is to “keep our transportation facilities free and clear of political ideologies”, Florida’s transport secretary, Jared Perdue, wrote in a post to X.Perdue has also said painted roadways are a safety hazard, despite research showing improved driver behavior and a “significantly improved safety performance” at sites that have art installations.The purge, which has targeted more than just rainbow crosswalks and other street symbols of LGBTQ+ pride street decorations, has reverberated in cities from Tallahassee to Key West.Several municipalities, under threat of losing state funding, have complied. Those include Port St Lucie, which removed hearts painted on a roadway as a memorial to a teenager who died of a heart condition, and Daytona Beach, which painted over checkered flag crosswalks at the city’s famous international speedway.More than a dozen schools in Tampa were also snared, and will lose vibrant asphalt artwork designed by students installed as part of the city’s award-winning Crosswalks to Classrooms program. Florida’s department of transportation (FDOT) recognized it as a gold standard of road safety only four years ago.“The innovative and collaborative efforts to combine public art and engineering treatments to improve school safety was truly inspiring,” a department official said at the time.In Orlando, bicycle lanes painted in May at an elementary school, designed by fourth-graders who won a FDOT art contest, must also go.DeSantis, at a press conference in Tampa, was unrepentant. He suggested students use his street art directive outlawing “social, political or ideological messages” as a civics lesson.“What I would tell kids is we have a representative system of government. People elect their representatives. They’re able to enact the legislation with the governor’s signature and then when that happens, obviously people will conform their conduct accordingly,” he said.Other cities are digging in their heels, setting up a likely legal fight with the DeSantis administration. A special meeting of the Fort Lauderdale commission on Wednesday voted to file an administrative appeal against a removal order on four pieces of pride-themed street art in the city, including a large rainbow flag.“Tonight, we must stand our ground. We cannot allow ourselves to be bullied into submission and to allow others to dictate what we should do in our own communities,” Dean Trantalis, the mayor of Fort Lauderdale, said. Trantalis has previously called the governor’s crosswalk directive an act of “irrational vengeance” on the LGBTQ+ community.Commissioners also voted to hire the same firm of outside attorneys contracted by officials in Key West and Miami Beach, two other cities known for inclusivity, to help in the legal fight. Delray Beach commissioners voted earlier this month to defy the state and retain its giant pride streetscape. An administrative hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.View image in fullscreenAnna Eskamani, a Democratic state representative for Orlando, noted DeSantis’s long history of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation – including the “don’t say gay” bill and efforts to ban or restrict gender-affirming healthcare – and saw deeper menace in the crosswalk orders.“It’s not just, ‘I despise queer people,’ which is clearly a part of the MO here, it’s bigger than that,” she said.“It’s trying to control what local governments can and can’t do and an effort to essentially target, harass, bully and potentially even eliminate them. Overwhelmingly, cities that have these crosswalks do not support DeSantis and didn’t vote for him. These are the same municipalities that are now getting Doge, the same municipalities where DeSantis is trying to take away property taxes, which means no revenue and the consolidation and elimination of local governments.“It’s worth connecting the dots. It’s not as simplistic as another culture war on LGBTQ+ people.”Charlie Crist, the former Republican Florida governor who switched parties to become a Democratic congressman, and challenged DeSantis for governor in 2022, said it was an “absurd and embarrassing” effort to silence residents.“It’s hard to understand. We have a right to free speech in this country, and these murals in our cities and our communities reflect the values of those communities and cities,” he said.“The notion that the state government would want to suppress that right of free speech is bizarre.”Crist said he also saw the move as an extension of DeSantis’s targeting of minority groups: “It’s hard to draw a different conclusion, frankly, and I don’t understand it. I believe in the golden rule to do unto others as you would have done unto you, and I don’t think DeSantis knows what that is. It’s disappointing.”Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, predicted the push to remove pride street art would backfire.“DeSantis may paint over rainbows and art, but people are answering with defiance, chalking sidewalks, raising flags, covering cars with stickers, and businesses painting their parking lots with rainbows. These acts declare we are not intimidated and we will not be erased,” she said in a statement.“This isn’t about safety. It’s a cowardly abuse of power and the latest in his campaign to ban books, whitewash history, and attack LGBTQ people. Cities must push back to protect the values that make them welcoming places to live, work, and visit.” More

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      ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ to be vacated in compliance with court order to shut it

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      Florida’s immigration jail known as “Alligator Alcatraz” will probably be empty of detainees within days, a state official has said, indicating compliance with a judge’s order last week that the facility must close.The Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s administration appealed the order by federal court judge Kathleen Williams that the tented detention camp in the Florida Everglades, which attracted criticism for its harsh conditions, must be dismantled within 60 days.But in an email reported Wednesday by the Associated Press, Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida department of emergency management, which operates the jail on behalf of the federal government, appeared to confirm it would be shuttered.“We are probably going to be down to 0 individuals within a few days,” Guthrie wrote to Mario Rojzman, a Miami Beach rabbi who has been helping to arrange chaplaincy services.Representatives for Rojzman confirmed the authenticity of the memo to the news agency. Guthrie’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Miami Herald had previously reported that hundreds of detainees were moved from “Alligator Alcatraz” to other immigration facilities in the state in advance of Williams’s ruling.On Monday, protesters who have maintained an almost permanent presence at the gates of the jail reported seeing convoys of buses driving out.Maxwell Frost, a Florida Democratic congressman, said that he was told during a tour last week that only about 300 to 350 detainees remained.“Alligator Alcatraz” was touted by Donald Trump as a holding camp for up to 3,000 undocumented immigrants as they awaited deportation. The jail, he said, was reserved for “the most vicious people on the planet”.Since it opened in early July after being hastily constructed in late June at a remote disused airstrip about 50 miles (80km) west of Miami, it drew waves of criticism. Several lawsuits sought its closure, and there have been claims that hundreds of those detained had no criminal records or active proceedings against them.Williams’s ruling was a significant victory for a coalition of environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, who claimed the camp had caused permanent and irreparable damage to the ecologically fragile wetland and its wildlife.Another lawsuit, filed by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), claimed detainees were abused by jail staff, and that their human and constitutional rights were denied because they were refused access to attorneys and due process.The plaintiffs said the Everglades facility was not needed, especially because Florida plans to open a second immigration detention facility in the north of the state that DeSantis has dubbed “deportation depot”.Williams had not ruled by Wednesday on a request by attorneys for the state to stay her order of closure. In her original 82-page ruling, she said she expected the population of the facility to decline within 60 days by transferring detainees to other facilities, and once that happened, fencing, lighting and generators should be removed.She wrote that the state and federal defendants could not bring anyone other than those who are already being detained at the facility onto the property.The environmental groups and Miccosukee tribe had argued in their lawsuit that further construction and operations should be stopped until federal and state officials complied with federal environmental laws. Their lawsuit claimed the facility reversed billions of dollars spent over decades on environmental restoration.State officials have signed more than $245m in contracts for building and operating the facility at a lightly used, single-runway training airport in the middle of the rugged and remote Everglades. The center officially opened on 1 July.In their lawsuits, civil rights attorneys described “severe problems” at the facility which were “previously unheard-of in the immigration system”. Detainees were being held for weeks without any charges, had disappeared from the online detainee locator maintained by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice), and nobody at the facility was making initial custody or bond determinations, they said.Detainees also described worms turning up in the food, toilets that did not flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, mosquitoes and other insects everywhere and malfunctioning air conditioning that alternated the temperature between near freezing and extreme heat. More

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      Ron DeSantis enters the chat: governor eyes chance to redraw Florida maps

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      With Gavin Newsom and Greg Abbott, the respective heavyweight governors of California and Texas, trading blows over plans to gerrymander the 2026 midterms, it was always kind of inevitable that Florida’s Ron DeSantis would enter the chat.The Republican sees his state, the nation’s third-largest by several metrics, not least its 28 congressional seats, as pivotal in the redistricting wars for control of the House.So few were surprised this week when DeSantis gave his full-throated endorsement to two projects to try to save the Republican majority: Donald Trump’s call for an unprecedented mid-decade census that could blow things up nationally; and state Republicans’ efforts to redraw existing district maps in their favor, similar to Abbott’s scheming in Texas.“We have 28 now, we might have 29, 30, 31, maybe. Who knows?” DeSantis said at a press conference in Melbourne on Monday, expressing his belief that a new national population tally that excludes undocumented immigrants could expand Florida’s congressional delegation.Currently, 20 of those 28 seats are held by Republicans. Even without a census, DeSantis and allies including the Florida house speaker, Daniel Perez, have concluded that tinkering with existing boundaries and dumping blocs of Democratic voters into heavily Republican districts could net them several more.Perez, bolstered by a Florida supreme court ruling in July that approved DeSantis’s wholesale stripping of Black voters’ influence in the north of the state, is convening a “select committee on congressional redistricting” to do the same in the south.The long-serving congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Trump bete noire Jared Moskowitz are two of the prominent south Florida Democrats in DeSantis’s crosshairs.“We are going to have to do a mid-decade redistricting,” DeSantis said. “Obviously you would have to redraw the lines. Even if they don’t do a new census, even if they don’t revise the current census, I do think that it is appropriate to be doing it.”To Florida Democrats who have promised to fight the emerging threat to the eight House seats they do still hold, DeSantis’s maneuvering is a stereotypical power-play by a governor who has frequently been able to bend the state legislature to his will.“This isn’t about drawing lines on a map, this is about who gets hurt and who gets silenced in this thing we call democracy, or in this democratic process,” said Shevrin Jones, a Democratic state senator whose district covers parts of downtown Miami and Miami Beach.“Floridians were extremely clear years ago when we voted on fair districts that the redistricting process should be fair and transparent, that it should be reflective of the people and not the political ambitions of those who are in power. Yet that’s what we’re seeing right now.”To many critics, the Florida supreme court’s ruling, authored by the chief justice, Carlos Muñiz, a DeSantis appointee, was a sleight of hand: it stated that the districts drawn – by Republicans – that ensured fair Black representation violated a 2010 voter-approved constitutional amendment banning partisan and racial gerrymandering during redistricting.Yet the effect of the ruling was to essentially nullify the amendment by validating DeSantis’s manipulation of the northern districts to the Republicans’ advantage, and to give him a green light to do the same anywhere else.Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party, said the governor had seized on the ruling to blatantly attempt to rig the 2026 midterms.“After gutting representation for Black Floridians and stacking the court to uphold it, he wants to further gerrymander and suppress the vote of millions of Floridians,” she said in a statement.“If Ron DeSantis spent half as much time solving real problems as he does scheming to steal elections, maybe we wouldn’t be in the middle of a housing, insurance and education crisis.”Republicans hold a supermajority in both chambers of the Florida legislature, so any walkout by Democrats, similar to that seen in Texas where lawmakers fled the state to deny quorum, would be ineffective.Instead, Jones said, his party, at state level at least, will continue to call out what they see as underhand efforts by the DeSantis administration to join the national Republican drive to save its House majority in support of Trump’s agenda.“I understand where Gavin Newsom and a great deal of Democratic governors are coming from when they say fight fire with fire. That’s fair, we can’t continue as Democrats to show up to a gunfight with slingshots,” he said.“I also understand that the Republicans are in power, and I understand they have no scruples about what they’re doing, I get that. The question is when or how can we find the alliances that exist to push back on the bullshit that the Republicans are doing, because it’s an absolute threat to not just democracy, but an absolute threat to our national security and our future.”Jones said that DeSantis, a lame-duck governor about to enter his final year in office before being termed out, had leapt upon the opportunity to inject himself back into the national picture.Still wounded by the humiliating collapse of his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination a year and a half ago, DeSantis has seen himself eclipsed in the 2028 race by emerging hopefuls including Vice-President JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio, the former Florida senator.“This isn’t just about Florida, it’s about national political positioning. The only way Ron DeSantis can prove that his voice is still loud is doing or saying asinine things like this to continue to kiss ass to Trump,” Jones said.“I think the governor is trying to restart a failing campaign that lost gas quickly, and I think he’s trying to fill it back up. But that car doesn’t work any more, and I don’t know any mechanic that wants to work to fix it.” More

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      ‘Hundreds’ of people have been removed from ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ detention camp, says Florida governor

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      Florida has begun deporting people from the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp, the state’s governor said, and deportations are expected to increase in the coming weeks.At a press conference at the controversial facility, Ron DeSantis said “hundreds of illegals have been removed” from the facility. He later clarified that most of those were flown from Alligator Alcatraz to other detention facilities in the US. DeSantis, who has built a political career on his anti-immigration views, said 100 people had been deported from the US.“I’m pleased to report that those flights out of Alligator Alcatraz by [the Department of Homeland Security] have begun. The cadence is increasing,” DeSantis said. “We’ve already had a number of flights. … Hundreds of illegals have been removed from here,” De Santis said.He added: “We look forward to this cadence increasing.”Officials said two or three flights have so far departed, but didn’t say where those flights were headed.Last week, a number of non-profit organizations demanded the closure of the facility, which is based in the rural Everglades region, about 40 miles (64km) from Miami.The facility’s conditions are reportedly appalling, advocates said, with detained immigrants sleeping in overcrowded pods, along with sewage backups “resulting in cages flooded with feces”, and, in addition, “denial of medical care”. Advocates said the 39-acre camp, which was built in a matter of days, now holds more than 1,000 men in “flood-prone” tents.Donald Trump said the jail would be reserved for immigrants who were “deranged psychopaths” and “some of the most vicious people on the planet” who were awaiting deportation, but in mid-July it emerged that the jail contains hundreds of detainees with no criminal records or charges. Democrats have sued DeSantis, demanding access to the facility.Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida division of emergency management, said the facility had grown, in less than a month, to have a current capacity of 2,000 people. That will increase to 4,000, he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGuthrie defended conditions inside the facility, claiming that “whether it’s Florida standard or national standard [of conditions and services in detention facilities], we meet or exceed the higher standard”.Since the jail opened in early July, the Trump administration and local officials have specifically touted the brutality of the facility, including its remote location in a wetland surrounded by alligators, crocodiles, pythons and swarms of mosquitoes. Officials have also seemed to revel in the crude name the facility has been given, echoing the long-shut and notoriously harsh Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay. More

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      US supreme court blocks Florida from enforcing anti-immigration law

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      The US supreme court maintained on Wednesday a judicial block on a Republican-crafted Florida law that makes it a crime for undocumented immigrants in the United States to enter the state.The justices denied a request by state officials to lift an order by the Florida-based US district judge Kathleen Williams that barred them from carrying out arrests and prosecutions under the law while a legal challenge plays out in lower courts. Williams ruled that Florida’s law conflicted with the federal government’s authority over immigration policy.The law, signed by the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, in February and backed by the Trump administration, made it a felony for some undocumented migrants to enter Florida, while also imposing pre-trial jail time without bond.“This denial reaffirms a bedrock principle that dates back 150 years: States may not regulate immigration,” said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “It is past time for states to get the message.”After Williams blocked the law, Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, a Republican, and other state officials filed the emergency request on 17 June asking the supreme court to halt the judge’s order. Williams had found that the Florida law was probably unconstitutional for encroaching on the federal government’s exclusive authority over US immigration policy.The state’s request to the justices was backed by America First Legal, a conservative group co-founded by Stephen Miller, a senior aide to Donald Trump and a key architect of the administration’s hardline immigration policies.Florida’s immigration measure, called SB 4-C, was passed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature and signed into law by DeSantis. It made Florida one of at least seven states to pass such laws in recent years, according to court filings.The American Civil Liberties Union in April sued in federal court to challenge the law, arguing that the state should not be able to “enforce its own state immigration system outside of federal supervision and control”. Williams agreed.The law imposed mandatory minimum sentences for undocumented adult immigrants who are convicted of entering Florida after arriving in the United States without following federal immigration law. Florida officials contend that the state measure complies with – rather than conflicts with – federal law.Sentences for violations begin at nine months’ imprisonment for first offenders and reach up to five years for certain undocumented immigrants in the country who have felony records and enter Florida after having been deported or ordered by a federal judge to be removed from the United States.The state law exempts undocumented immigrants in the country who were given certain authorization by the federal government to remain in the United States. Florida’s immigration crackdown makes no exceptions, however, for those seeking humanitarian protection or with pending applications for immigration relief, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued in federal court to challenge the law.The ACLU filed a class-action suit on behalf of two undocumented immigrants who reside in Florida, an immigration advocacy group called the Florida Immigrant Coalition and the non-profit group Farmworker Association of Florida, whose members include immigrants in the United States illegally who travel in and out of Florida seasonally to harvest crops. Some of the arguments in the lawsuit included claims that it violates the federal “commerce clause”, which bars states from blocking commerce between states.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, in a statement issued after the challenge was filed said that Florida’s law “is not just unconstitutional – it’s cruel and dangerous”.Williams issued a preliminary injunction in April that barred Florida officials from enforcing the measure.The Atlanta-based 11th US circuit court of appeals in June upheld the judge’s ruling, prompting the Florida officials to make an emergency request to the supreme court.In a filing on 7 July, the state of Florida pointed to a brief filed by the Trump administration in the appeals case, in support of SB 4-C. “That decision is wrong and should be reversed,” administration lawyers wrote at the time.On the same day that Florida’s attorney general filed the state’s supreme court request, Williams found him in civil contempt of court for failing to follow her order to direct all state law enforcement officers not to enforce the immigration measure while it remained blocked by the judge. Williams said that Uthmeier only informed the state law enforcement agencies about her order and later instructed them to arrest people anyway. Williams ordered Uthmeier to provide an update to the court every two weeks on any enforcement of the law.Other states have tried to pass similar laws, including Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho and Iowa, which have attempted to make entering their jurisdictions, while undocumented, a state crime. More

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      ‘This bill protects our precious waters’: how a Florida environmental group scored a win against big oil

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      The giant and catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill, also known as the BP oil spill, didn’t reach Apalachicola Bay in 2010, but the threat of oil reaching this beautiful and environmentally valuable stretch of northern Florida’s Gulf coast was still enough to devastate the region’s economy.The Florida state congressman Jason Shoaf remembers how the threat affected the bay.“It harmed our commercial fishing, aquaculture operations, and just the threat of oil kept tourists away for months,” Shoaf recalls. “Businesses were forced to close, jobs were lost, and the disaster reshaped our region forever.”Those memories were freshly triggered in April 2024, when the Florida department of environmental protection (DEP) granted a permit to Louisiana-based Clearwater Land and Minerals for exploratory oil drilling on the Apalachicola River basin. So area residents, along with environmental and business groups, formed a Kill the Drill coalition to oppose the permit.A year later, the coalition’s efforts and an administrative challenge to the DEP’s permit by the non-profit Apalachicola Riverkeepers prevailed when Judge Lawrence P Stevenson recommended the department deny the permit.In May, the DEP reversed course and denied the permit.But that was not enough to convince those seeking to preserve the region’s environment. Shoaf, who represents Florida’s north-eastern Gulf coast region, applauded the DEP’s decision but says the threat of oil exploration and drilling near north Florida’s inland waterways would only be ended by a permanent ban. So to prevent future threats and the DEP from issuing other oil exploratory drilling permits, Shoaf and state representative Allison Tant co-authored House Bill 1143.“While the permit to Clearwater Land and Minerals was denied, we can’t assume the next one will be,” Shoaf says. “HB 1143 protects our precious water resources and the ecosystems that depend on them by prohibiting drilling, exploration and production of oil, gas and other petroleum products within 10 miles of a national estuarine research reserve in counties designated as rural areas of opportunity. It also requires the Florida department of environmental protection to ensure natural resources are adequately protected in the event of an accident.”In April, the legislature overwhelmingly passed HB 1143 with only one dissenting vote in the Senate. It was presented to Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, on 18 June. And, despite a poor recent record on protecting the environment, DeSantis signed the bill last week – handing the coalition that lobbied for it a cheering victory.The area now saved from the oil industry is invaluable both to nature and the people who live there. The Apalachicola River, formed by the meeting of the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers, flows 160 miles (258km) to the Apalachicola Bay and the Gulf. Both the river and bay are critical to the region’s tourism and seafood production industries.For environmental campaigners, the success of their efforts might help lay to rest the ghosts of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, which released nearly 3.19m barrels of oil into the gulf.“Oil from the BP spill didn’t reach our coasts, but the damage caused by the threat was enough,” Tant says. “We’ve seen what can happen. We’ve lived it. This is not theoretical. It was a perilous time for small businesses and for those who lived in the area. It stopped tourism and shuttered small businesses. So it defies logic to think it’s a good idea to drill for oil along the Apalachicola River.”Adrianne Johnson is executive director of the Florida Shellfish Aquaculture Association which represents more than 350 shellfish farmers in Florida. Johnson, an Apalachicola native, became involved in the Kill the Drill movement for personal and business reasons.“This region has a deep collective memory of how the Gulf oil spill devastated the regional economy and collapsed the oyster industry in Apalachicola Bay,” Johnson explains. “And that was just the threat of oil. The majority of the state’s oyster farms operate across Wakulla, Franklin and Gulf counties, and these areas downriver would be most impacted by oil drilling upriver (at the proposed site in Calhoun county). If there were to be a spill upriver because of drilling in the basin, it would have catastrophic environmental and economic impacts on the area that would be felt for generations.”Johnson also points to the region’s frequent weather-related natural disasters, such as hurricanes, as another reason why drilling had to be banned in the region.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Our shellfish farmers are still recovering from the multiple hurricanes of 2024,” she explains. “But the reality of being a Florida farmer is having to contend with these weather-related events. Hurricanes and natural disasters are outside of our control. Permitting oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas is very much within our control and is an unnecessary threat to our industry.”Tant agrees.“We are a hurricane-prone state,” she says. “We can’t get away from that. It’s not a question of will we get hit by a hurricane because we know it’s going to happen. But an oil spill caused by a hurricane would make the disaster 100 times worse.”According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the Deep Horizon oil spill caused the loss of 8.3 billion oysters, the deaths of nearly 105,400 sea birds, 7,600 adult and 160,000 juvenile sea turtles, and a 51% decrease in dolphins in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay.Craig Diamond, current board member and past president of Apalachicola Riverkeeper, says another factor behind the ban was the river system itself.“A spill would be highly impactful given the existing stresses in the system,” says Diamond, who has worked with the Northwest Florida Water Management District and taught graduate courses on water resources at Florida State University. “Apalachicola Bay Riverkeeper and its allies believe the long-term risks of fossil fuel exploitation in the floodplain or bay (or nearshore) far outweigh the short-term benefits.”Shoaf says he was inspired to write HB 1143 by the community’s grassroots efforts to defend the region’s natural resources.“This bill is essential to prevent unnecessary and irreparable harm to Apalachicola Bay, as well as the economies and ecosystems that depend on it,” he says.After DeSantis signed the bill into law, the threat of drilling has now receded into the distance for the foreseeable future. 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      The Guardian view on Trump and children: protect the innocent from this dark vision of the US soul | Editorial

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      “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children,” Nelson Mandela observed 30 years ago. Though the ugly heart of the Trump administration has hardly been hidden, there is an especially grotesque contrast between its vaunted family values and its treatment of the young.On the campaign trail, Donald Trump declared: “I want a baby boom.” JD Vance, his vice-president, says he wants “more happy children in our country”. Maga pro-natalists are pushing incentives for families to have more children.Yet Bruce Lesley, president of the advocacy organisation First Focus on Children, says that we may never have seen an administration “so laser-focused on targeting the nation’s children for harm”. Its dismantling of the Department of Education is on hold thanks to a judge. But it has already slashed staff at agencies overseeing key services such as child protection and the enforcement of child support payments. Mr Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget sacrifices the interests of babies for those of billionaires, slashing foundational programmes that provide healthcare and food to more than two-fifths of American children.One detail is telling: it would also deny the child tax credit to families with mixed immigration status. Mr Trump’s vision of the nation is the antithesis of Mr Mandela’s inclusivity. Unaccompanied migrant children as young as four are facing immigration hearings without lawyers. That’s unlikely to concern him: as many as 1,360 children separated from their parents at the border in his first term have never been reunited with them.An estimated 5.6 million US-citizen children live with at least one undocumented parent. Almost 4% are at risk of being left with no parent in their home in the event of mass deportation. Mr Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship makes explicit the belief that these children are not truly American either. They are what the historian Prof Mae Ngai has called “alien citizens”, whose standing is deemed suspect – if not denied – due to their race. Young US citizens have been deported alongside parents who say they were given no option to leave their children, one of whom had late-stage cancer. In another case, a two-year-old was sent to foster care when her parents were deported: this time, her mother was reportedly given no option to take her.The immigration crackdown will further encourage employers short of workers to turn to children – often those born to migrants – for badly paid, dirty and dangerous jobs. “Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when teenagers used to work at these resorts?” asked Florida’s governor, Ron deSantis. Child labour laws are already too frequently ignored, yet Republicans have loosened them further in 16 states in the last few years, and sought to do so in many more.Florida’s House of Representatives recently approved legislation allowing children as young as 14 to work overnight without breaks. Yet the state Senate chose not to move the bill – and overall more states strengthened than diluted labour protections last year. For now at least, the administration appears to have reversed course on eliminating the Head Start early education programme. Mr Trump and his allies are exposing their grim vision of a nation in which only some children deserve to be treated with care and basic respect. Others must continue to fight to protect the most vulnerable.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Ron DeSantis’s fall from grace: ‘He’s completely crashed to the ground’

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      These are challenging days for Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who would have been king. Barely two and a half years since his landslide re-election and anointment as “DeFuture” of the Republican party in a fawning New York Post cover, he stands isolated from the national political stage, feuding with his once blindingly loyal Florida legislature, and limping towards the finish line of his second term with an uncertain pathway beyond.It has been, in the view of many analysts, a fall of stunning velocity and magnitude. And while few are willing to completely rule out a comeback for a 46-year-old politician who was the darling of the Republican hard right until he dared to challenge Donald Trump for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination, it is also clear that everything has changed.“He’s completely crashed to the ground at this point and is certainly being treated like a more standard, average governor now,” said Aubrey Jewett, professor of political science at the University of Central Florida.“He’s lost the ability to push things through. He’s lost that luster he had that at one time seemed like he could do no wrong in Republican conservative circles. He’s definitely come back down to earth and some of it is his own doing because if you govern with an autocratic style, that doesn’t usually make you a lot of allies.”DeSantis’s once vise-like grip on Florida’s lawmakers has weakened, replaced by open dissent, bitter hostility and a hurling of slurs over a number of issues as the two Republican dominated legislative chambers try to reverse six years of passivity and reestablish themselves as a co-equal branch of government.DeSantis, in the words of Florida’s Republican House speaker, Daniel Perez, has begun to tell “lies and stories that never happened”, and has become increasingly prone to “temper tantrums”.The governor, meanwhile, hit back at what he sees as a “pathetic” agenda being pursued by the majority. He has also lashed out at their investigation of a charity scandal enveloping his wife, Casey DeSantis, as she mulls whether to run in next year’s election to succeed him when he is termed out of office in January 2027.Some Republicans, including Perez, want to know how $10m of a $67m legal settlement intended for Florida taxpayers ended up channeled through Hope Florida, a non-profit that Casey DeSantis founded, to political action committees operated by her husband’s allies to help quash ballot amendments last year on abortion and marijuana.“At one point Casey looked like she was going to be the heir apparent to Ron DeSantis and she was going to run, and he certainly seemed like he was trying to position her to do so,” Jewett said.“That would extend his legacy and help keep him around for some more years, he can be the first husband and people would say he’s an equal partner or whatever. That would take away some of his lame-duck status.”It is that drift towards political irrelevance, particularly on the national stage, that stings DeSantis the most, some analysts believe.If events had transpired differently, he could be sitting in the White House. Instead, the influence of the one-time prince of Maga (Trump’s make America great again movement) is limited to regular guest appearances on Fox News, and “press conferences” he hosts around Florida almost on a daily basis to assail judges whose rulings displease him and expound his hardline positions on immigration enforcement, higher education and drag show performers.More galling, Jewett says, is that DeSantis has seen himself eclipsed by rising newcomers in Trump’s firmament, notably vice-president JD Vance and Marco Rubio, the former Florida senator and current secretary of state, both named by the president this month as potential successors.“It’s notable that when Trump was asked who might follow him, he didn’t mention DeSantis at all,” Jewett said. “When DeSantis challenged Trump for the presidential nomination, it ticked Trump off and it ticked off a lot of Trump supporters, who up until then generally liked him.“It came out while he was running that he doesn’t have the great personality that a traditional politician has. He just didn’t seem well suited for shaking hands, eating hot dogs and kissing babies, the kind of typical American political things. It destroyed his air of invincibility.”View image in fullscreenOther observers see the same aloofness and confrontational manner behind DeSantis’s fallings out with Republican erstwhile allies in Florida, and a reason why many are rushing to support Trump-endorsed congressman Byron Donalds for governor even before Casey DeSantis has made a decision to run.“I don’t know that they necessarily think Donalds is the greatest thing since sliced bread – I think it’s, ‘Well, we got to block Casey from getting in’,” said Michael Binder, professor of political science and public administration at the University of North Florida.“The DeSantis-Trump feud appears to have mellowed but there are absolutely people in both camps, on both sides, that have not forgotten and will not forget. DeSantis’s political style in some ways is similar to Trump in that he makes a lot of enemies. The difference is Trump can make amends with enemies when it benefits him – think of Marco Rubio.“With Ron DeSantis you don’t see that. Once you’re on the outs with DeSantis, you stay on the outs. They burn those bridges.”DeSantis’s office did not respond to a number of questions submitted by the Guardian about the remainder of his term in office, or plans thereafter.His predecessor as governor, Rick Scott, successfully challenged Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson for his US Senate seat in 2018 and remains an influential Republican voice in Washington. Such a pathway appears blocked for DeSantis, a former congressman who in January appointed Florida’s former attorney general Ashley Moody to Rubio’s vacant Senate seat for the duration of his term.DeSantis would need to challenge a close ally who has already filed to defend it in the 2026 election.Still, Jewett said, the final chapters of DeSantis’s political career are yet to be written.“It doesn’t look good and his political prospects are definitely more dim than they were, his road seems that much more difficult right now,” he said.“But you just never know. One big wild card is how people view Trump in another year. It’s a decent assumption the Maga movement will continue and if Trump really falters then maybe DeSantis’s distance from Trump actually ends up being a positive in the longer run.“Even if he doesn’t get too much more accomplished in the next year and a half, he had a five-year run that was unprecedented in pushing through a very conservative agenda and changing Florida from the most competitive battleground to a heavily Republican state. So yeah, he’ll remind everyone of all the things he did that they liked on the Republican side.” More