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      Identity of second man illegally deported to El Salvador prison revealed

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      The identity of a second man illegally deported from the US by the Trump administration in defiance of a court order and now in detention in El Salvador has been revealed.Daniel Lozano-Camargo, a 20-year-old Venezuelan, was deported to El Salvador’s notorious Cecot terrorism confinement facility in March under the White House’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, Politico reported.His deportation came after authorities declared him, along with about 240 other men, to be a member of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the US government has defined as a terrorist organization. Lozano-Camargo’s family members deny that he has gang affiliations.Politico revealed Lozano-Camargo’s identity after a Maryland judge last month ruled that the Trump administration had improperly removed him in violation of a 2024 legal settlement that forbade immigration authorities from deporting him while his application for asylum was pending.The judge, Stephanie Gallagher, who was appointed to the bench by Trump, ordered officials to “facilitate” Lozano-Camargo’s return to the US. So far, the administration has not complied.He is reported to have entered the US in 2022 as an asylum seeker, initially spending time in a facility for underage migrants until he turned 18.According to Politico, he was subsequently twice arrested for possession of cocaine, most recently last November, and was sentenced in January to 120 days in prison. It was from there that he was transferred to the custody of the Immigration, Customs and Enforcement authority (Ice), which filed an application for his detention, claiming that he was in the country illegally.In her ruling, Gallagher agreed with immigrant rights advocates that Lozano-Camargo should not have been deported until his asylum application was resolved. While withholding his identity by referring to him only by a pseudonym, “Cristian”, she said he was “fleeing danger and threats in Venezuela”.Politico said Lozano-Camargo’s identity was disclosed in metadata embedded in government court filings.A justice department court filing released on Monday disputed the judge’s assessment, saying he belonged to “a violent terrorist gang”, thus disqualifying him from asylum in the US. Bringing him back to the US “would no longer serve any legal or practical purpose”, justice department lawyers wrote.Gallagher was due to further rule on the matter in a Baltimore court on Tuesday.Lozano-Camargo’s case resembles that of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland resident who was deported to El Salvador in March despite a previous court order issued in 2019 establishing that he had protected status because he was at risk of violence if he was returned to the country of his origin. Ábrego García is Salvadorian by birth. The US government, which has claimed that he is a member of the MS-13 gang – something Ábrego García denies – admitted that he had been deported by mistake but has defied court orders to return him to the US.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionÁbrego García was removed from the US on the same set of flights as Lozano-Camargo but has been transferred from Cecot to another facility because of the international publicity surrounding his case.Lozano-Camargo’s family has tried to draw attention to his plight in social media posts. His mother, Daniela, has proclaimed his innocence in a tearful Facebook video.Possessing a valid work permit, he is said to have been living in Houston and washing cars for a living before his detention.His deportation was among those highlighted by the Guardian in March, amid speculation that he was one of hundreds of Venezuelans singled out for removal on the basis of their tattoos, which authorities claimed identified them as members of Tren de Aragua.Lozano-Camargo is said to have several tattoos, including one bearing the name of his father – who died when he was a child. Critics say Tren de Aragua members do not use tattoos to advertise their membership of the gang. More

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      How Trump’s walkaway diplomacy enabled Israel’s worst impulses

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      The Israeli plan to occupy and depopulate Gaza may not be identical to Donald Trump’s vision of a new riviera, but his inspiration and the US’s walkaway diplomacy have ushered Benjamin Netanyahu to the precipice of a dire new chapter in the Israel-Gaza war.The common perception in both Washington and Israel is that Trump has largely moved on, leaving an emboldened Netanyahu to his own devices, while his offhand proposals for turning Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” have provided cover for rightwing Israeli politicians to enthusiastically support the forced resettlement of the Palestinian population.“Part of the tragedy is that the only one who can actually save us, Trump, is not even seriously interested in that,” said Amos Harel, a prominent military and defense correspondent for the Haaretz newspaper. “Our only hope to get out of this crazy situation is that Trump would force Netanyahu to reach a hostage deal. But [Trump] seems disinterested. He was enthusiastic when the Riviera [idea] was proposed, but now he has moved on to Greenland, Canada and Mexico instead.”Trump’s interventions – specifically envoy Steve Witkoff’s threats to Netanyahu during a tense Shabbat meeting – were instrumental in achieving a temporary ceasefire to the conflict in January. His influence on Netanyahu appeared to be greater than that of previous US presidents, including his rival Joe Biden.But since then the ceasefire has broken down, a two-month Israeli blockade on aid has sparked an even worse humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and, with few opportunities for a quick peace, the White House now appears uninterested and overstretched as Israel signals an offensive and occupation that critics have said will amount to a state policy of ethnic cleansing.It is a trend that has repeated with this White House: broad designs for a grand deal followed by frustration when diplomacy fails to yield instant results. Recently, the White House announced that it was also ready to walk away from negotiations over the Russia-Ukraine conflict if a quick deal was not achieved. That has incentivized Russia to wait out the Trump administration, observers have said, and bank on a policy of US non-engagement in the longer term. Netanyahu similarly appears to have been unleashed by the White House’s growing disinterest.The Israeli ultimatum comes as Trump is scheduled to tour the Middle East next week, with Israeli officials briefing that they will begin the operation only after he returns from a three-day visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Trump’s talks there are expected to focus on investment and a likely quixotic quest to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, but not on achieving a resolution to the war. On Tuesday, Maariv, an Israeli newspaper, reported that a Trump visit to Israel was not out of the question, but White House officials have not yet signaled that Trump is ready to go meet Netanyahu.Witkoff, the Trump envoy, still appears personally invested in a resolution to the conflict, but he is overstretched by attempting to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, and also negotiate an Iran nuclear deal simultaneously. The US has continued negotiations with Israel over an aid delivery scheme that would create a new mechanism for aid distribution to avoid Hamas, they have said. But the UN and all aid organizations working in Gaza have condemned the plan as an Israeli takeover. “It contravenes fundamental humanitarian principles and appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic – as part of a military strategy,” the heads of all UN agencies and NGOs that operate in Gaza said in a joint statement on Sunday.The Trump administration’s budget and personnel cuts have also signaled a retreat from diplomacy. The state department was reportedly ready to cut the role of the security coordinator role for the West Bank and Gaza, a three-star general who was tasked with managing security crises between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, particularly with regards to growing tensions between settlers and local Palestinian communities.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore importantly, Trump has given cover to Israeli officials who had sought more aggressive action in Gaza, including forced depopulations. Rightwingers in government have been particularly aggressive, with finance minister Bezalel Smotrich saying that within months Gaza would be “totally destroyed” and the Gazan population would be “concentrated” in a small strip of land. “The rest of the strip will be empty,” he said.But other ministers have also become more radical using Trump’s rhetoric for cover, said Harel.“Once Trump said that, you could see how not only the radicals, but also Likud ministers and so on, have an excuse,” said Harel. “‘It’s not us. It’s the world, the free world’s leader is saying that, so we have to play along.’” More

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      How Ohio became a hotbed of white supremacism, spreading its tentacles globally | Stephen Starr

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      By many accounts, Hilliard, a leafy suburb west of downtown Columbus, is a midwestern success story: its progressive school district gives a vacation day for all students to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr – the first in Ohio to do so – and its homes are highly sought-after by a growing number of diverse families where locals enjoy shopping at the oldest Asian grocery in the state.But it is also where Christopher Brenner Cook, a convicted terrorist, grew up. In April 2023, Cook and two others were sentenced for conspiring to attack America’s electrical grid, and he was given a 92-month prison term.Cook, who was 21 at the time of his sentencing for conspiring to blow up electricity stations, was previously a devout white supremacist who tried to recruit people to the neo-Nazi cause. He focused specifically on children in an effort to avoid detection by law enforcement.More than 3,780 miles away in Derbyshire, England, 14-year-old Rhianan Rudd encountered Cook on WhatsApp and Discord, the online chat app. As of September 2020, the BBC noted she had been in contact with Cook “for some time”. By early 2021, Rudd – who was autistic and had a history of self-harm – was spending up to 15 hours a day speaking to Cook online.Cook had been grooming, sexually abusing and radicalizing Rudd. The last time she had contact with Cook, he told her he loved her, and she felt a “gaping hole” and “very sad for a long time”.In May 2022, aged 16, Rhianan killed herself.American extremists are going globalAs prominent supporters and members of the current administration such as Elon Musk and Steve Bannon have taken to Nazi-style salutes in front of large audiences, the tentacles of a resurgent American white supremacism are stretching around the globe, often with deadly consequences.Members of American white supremacist groups, including Patriot Front and the California-based Rise Above Movement (RAM), have traveled across Europe to take part in public marches and distribute propaganda while the Base, a group of American neo-Nazis, reportedly has Russian links.A founding member of RAM was extradited from Romania in August 2023 to the US on charges of inciting violence. A Slovakian teenager who killed two people outside a bar popular with members of Bratislava’s LGBTQ+ community in October 2022 was radicalized in part by California- and Idaho-based leaders of the so-called “Terrorgram Collective”; those individuals last September were charged by the Department of Justice for soliciting hate crimes and other offences.View image in fullscreenBut not all of America’s far right’s global endeavors are confined to the dark corners of the internet or violent extremists. Trump’s closest allies have also courted a resurgent far-right across Europe where such parties are gaining mainstream support and power.Bannon, whose War Room podcast has more than 15,000 reviews on Apple Podcasts, has traveled to France, Hungary, Germany and elsewhere to meet with and advise far-right political leaders. Musk, who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories on X, was criticized for appearing online at a campaign event for Germany’s far-right AfD party in January.“The ideas that used to be fringe are much more mainstream,” says Christian Picciolini, a former white supremacist leader and author of White American Youth: My Descent into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement and other books.“This isn’t just my opinion; it’s the opinion of white supremacists. They love that the president has their back.”Ohio’s fall into extremismFor decades, Ohio was a national political bellwether that reflected America’s wider socioeconomic milieu. Its three large cities – Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland – provided a solid backbone of support for progressive politics.In the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama won more votes in Ohio than any Democrat in history, repeating the feat four years later when he was elected to a second term in the White House. Until 2011, Democratic party governors were not uncommon.However, in recent years, Ohio has seen a marked shift to the right.The perpetrator of the 2017 Charlottesville car attack that killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer and the founder of the Daily Stormer, an influential neo-Nazi website, are both from Ohio. The plot to kill the Democratic Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was formulated in Dublin, the same well-to-do Columbus suburb where Cook spent part of his childhood.Eighty-three Ohioans were charged for their part in the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol that was prompted by President Trump. After Delaware, West Virginia and Pennsylvania – all states geographically closer to the capital – Ohio had the highest per capita number of arrested rioters. The same year, Columbus experienced a higher per capita incidence of hate crimes than all but three other US cities.In 2023, a Nazi homeschooling effort with more than 3,000 online subscribers run by residents of Upper Sandusky in the state’s north-west was unearthed. Ohio’s department of education found that no law had been broken.Ku Klux Klan white supremacist flyers and marches by neo-Nazis are also now happening with growing frequency in places such as Springfield, Ohio, after Trump’s false claims in September that immigrants there were eating pets.Neo-Nazi publicity efforts in Cincinnati, Columbus and elsewhere in Ohio – a defined effort, experts say, to desensitize communities to their imagery and normalize their presence – are on the rise.View image in fullscreenAt the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, politics has been overrun by far-right Republicans. Increasingly, Ohio Republicans have voiced extremist views or passed laws that disproportionately affect minorities and immigrants – groups regularly targeted by white supremacists.“The far right has long been working to engage in local and state politics. They recognize that change is more likely when like-minded persons are designing policy and making decisions,” said Laura Dugan, a professor of human security and sociology at Ohio State University.“We have no mechanism to stop this radicalization when it is being reflected in the statehouse.”It was in this environment that Cook grew up. He and his co-conspirators “fanaticized” about “the opportunity for white leaders to take control of this country and its government”, according to his sentencing memorandum.Eight months after Cook was charged with conspiring to give material support to terrorists, the Columbus Dispatch ran an op-ed calling out some Hilliard residents for spreading hate. Some have filed lawsuits against the local school district to force staff to stop wearing badges in support of LGBTQ+ communities.“Nothing is happening in the schools, and I think it really needs to because young men especially are being influenced by this culture wars stuff and the manosphere,” said Picciolini.“There really isn’t enough happening to counter that.”Picciolini was recruited by the Chicago-area SkinHeads when he was 14 years old and spent eight years as a member of white nationalist groups. Since leaving the movement, he has been involved in founding or co-founding many deradicalizing programs and has criticized the lack of government support for them.Picciolini said he had seen children as young as nine be recruited online.“The reason that anybody joins these groups is not the extremist ideology. It’s [for] the sense of identity, community and purpose,” he said.“For people who feel marginalized, they have a difficult time with what I call ‘potholes’ – trauma or challenges with mental health; a health issue; physical abuse. It pushes people to the fringes and to the internet. A lot of these kids are being targeted because of their ‘potholes’.”For Rhianan Rudd, who struggled to make friends, the internet proved to be both a release and a trap.Her deepening online relationship with Cook saw her further radicalized, prompting her to make verbal threats to blow up a synagogue and download information on bomb making, for which she was arrested in October 2020. That resulted in her being taken out of Prevent, the deradicalization program her mother had signed her into the month before. Six months later, she became the youngest person ever charged with terrorism in the UK, charges which were dropped when investigators concluded she had been groomed and abused by Cook.View image in fullscreenAn officer for Prevent referred to Rudd as the “most vulnerable individual she’s ever met”, after the teen admitted that Cook had been radicalizing her. She told her social worker that she felt she had “two competing individuals in her head”.Cook wasn’t the only American male with a white supremacist background in Rudd’s life.Rudd’s mother, Emily Carter, had been in contact with Dax Mallaburn, a convicted felon and known member of the Aryan Brotherhood in Arizona, through a prison pen pal program. They began a romantic relationship that saw Mallaburn move to the UK and live with Rudd and her mother. Mallaburn is alleged to have sexually groomed Rudd, and information gathered by police found that Cook was in contact with Mallaburn, telling him to teach the child “the right way”.The terrorism charges against Rudd were dropped in December 2021, but the damage had been done.Just weeks before her death, she asked her mother for help contacting a neo-Nazi group in the US and attempted to travel to London to acquire a visa to travel to Texas.“Her being groomed was huge and I saw Rhianan change,” Carter said at an inquest into Rudd’s death and the role antiterrorism and other agencies played. The inquest is ongoing until June.Missed opportunitiesWhile the internet may have facilitated Cook’s abuse of Rudd, law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have come in for criticism.On two occasions in early 2020, Cook’s vehicle was stopped by law enforcement officials, in Ohio and Texas. Drugs, Nazi paraphernalia and weapons were found, and yet both times Cook was let go.The FBI shared information with British intelligence about Cook’s activities and grooming of Rudd five months before she took her own life, while several years before her death, an MI5 agent lamented to a senior colleague that Rudd couldn’t be referred to an anti-extremism program while she was under a police investigation.Although Cook’s sentencing memorandum recognized that his “singular” end goal was linked to “the propagation and fruition of white supremacist ideology”, he was not investigated for his exploitation of Rudd or faced potential charges related to her death.Legal experts say there is nothing precluding Cook from being charged for crimes related to the death of Rudd in the future, so long as no relevant statute of limitations has passed and there is probable cause to support specific crimes under US law. He could also be extradited to the UK to face charges, although that would be an unprecedented move.Ohio’s rising hateCook’s sentencing memorandum suggests he has embarrassment and remorse for his terrorism-related actions, pleading guilty to the crimes he was charged with. But given the opportunity to discuss details of his relationship with Rudd, Cook is more circumspect.When the Guardian sought to interview Cook through the federal correctional institute he is being held in South Carolina, he declined. In an interview with Columbus Monthly published last year, he also declined to discuss his interactions with Rudd.While Cook is set to be released well before his 30th birthday, there is little evidence to suggest that Ohio will have solved its problem of white supremacist extremism by then.In November 2023, a 20-year-old man entered a Walmart store in Beavercreek, Ohio, and shot four people before turning the gun on himself. Police found Nazi flags and a “SS history book” at his home. The Anti-Defamation League found that Ohio was second only to Texas for the number of white supremacist incidents in 2023.About a dozen neo-Nazis, some armed, unfurled flags and signs bearing extremist material in February 2025 over a highway close to a historically African American community in Cincinnati. In response, there’s been silence from the White House.“They love this administration,” said Picciolini of the extremists. “They love the environment they are in.” More

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      Not just Alcatraz: the notorious US prisons Trump is already reopening

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      Donald Trump’s proposal to reopen Alcatraz, the infamous prison shuttered more than 60 years ago, sparked global headlines over the weekend. But it isn’t the only notorious closed-down jail or prison the administration has sought to repurpose for mass detentions.The US government has in recent months pushed to reopen at least five other shuttered detention facilities and prisons, some closed amid concerns over safety and mistreatment of detainees. While California lawmakers swiftly dismissed the Alcatraz announcement as “not serious” and a distraction, the Trump administration’s efforts to reopen other scandal-plagued facilities are well under way or already complete, in partnership with for-profit prison corporations.The shuttered prisons are being revived for immigration detainees, unlike the US president’s purported plan for Alcatraz, which he claimed on social media would imprison “America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders”.US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has sought to reopen the California city correctional facility, a state prison in the southern California desert region that closed last year, according to government contract records. The facility is owned by CoreCivic, a longtime Ice detention partner, and previously housed more than 2,000 people.California Democrats have also warned that Ice was interested in reopening Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin, a US prison shuttered last year amid scandals surrounding systemic sexual abuse by staff, and concerns about mold and asbestos. The correctional officers’ union has reported that staff were recently forced to do maintenance work at Dublin in hazardous conditions, seemingly to prepare for a reopening, but Ice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP), which runs Dublin, have not commented on plans.Communities in California, the country’s most populous state and home to nearly a quarter of immigrants in the US, have long opposed Ice detention centers, and there are currently no Ice jails in the state north of Bakersfield in the Central Valley, said Susan Beaty, senior attorney for the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.View image in fullscreen“When there are fewer beds for Ice to incarcerate people, there are fewer arrests and less enforcement,” said Beaty, who represents people in Ice and BoP detention. “We don’t want Ice to expand their ability to cage our community members, because we know that will lead to more incarceration and allow them to terrorize our communities even further.”In rural Lake county, Michigan, Geo Group, another prison corporation, is reopening the closed North Lake correctional facility, which has capacity for 1,800 people and would be the largest immigration detention center in the midwest, according to the local news site MLive.com. Over the years, the facility has housed imprisoned teenage boys, out-of-state incarcerated people and immigrants. But it has sat dormant since it closed in 2022 under the Biden administration.In 2020, detainees at North Lake went on a hunger strike, alleging they were denied access to their mail and religiously appropriate food, their complaint paperwork was destroyed, and they were placed in extended solitary confinement. Geo Group denied the claims at the time.In Newark, New Jersey, Geo Group has recently reopened the closed Delaney Hall facility for immigration detainees even as the company faces a pending lawsuit from the city alleging it failed to file required construction permits or allow inspectors inside, according to news site NorthJersey.com.“They are following the pattern of the president … who believes that he can just do what he wants to do and obscure the laws,” Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, said on Monday.Christopher Ferreira, a Geo Group spokesperson, said in an email that the firm had a “valid certificate of occupancy” and complied with health and safety requirements. The mayor’s opposition was “another unfortunate example of a politicized campaign by sanctuary city and open borders politicians in New Jersey to interfere with the federal government”, he added.In a December 2024 earnings call, Geo Group said it was in “active discussions” with Ice and the US Marshals Service about their interest in six of its facilities that were idle.In Leavenworth, Kansas, CoreCivic is working to reopen an immigration detention center closed in 2021 under Joe Biden. The proposal for the Midwest Regional Reception Center (MRRC) has sparked backlash from the city of Leavenworth, which sued CoreCivic in March, alleging the company has not followed the proper permitting protocols.View image in fullscreenIn 2021, the ACLU alleged that the Leavenworth facility was beset by problems, including frequent stabbings, suicides and contraband, and that “basic human needs [were] not being met”, with food restricted, contact with counsel and family denied or curtailed, limited medical care and infrequent showers. A federal judge called the facility a “hellhole”.Ryan Gustin, a CoreCivic spokesperson, defended the company’s decades of operations in Leavenworth in an email on Monday, saying understaffing amid the pandemic “was the main contributor to the challenges” and “the issues were concentrated in about an 18-month period”: “We’re grateful for a more stable labor market post-pandemic, and we’ve had a positive response with nearly 1,400 [applicants] expressing interest in one of the 300 positions the facility will create.“At any of our facilities, including MRRC, we don’t cut corners on care, staff or training, which meets, and in many cases exceeds, our government partners’ standards,” he said. He also pointed to a recent op-ed by the warden, who argued the facility “is and always has been properly zoned”.CoreCivic also reopened a family detention center in Texas last month.The use of shuttered prisons is just one way Ice is expanding detention for Trump’s mass deportations. He has also moved immigration detainees into BoP facilities currently housing criminal defendants, causing concerns about poor conditions, rights violations and a lack of basic resources as staff manage multiple populations under one roof. Trump has also pushed to expand local jail contracts and use military bases for Ice.Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, which has obtained public records on Ice’s expanding detention, said Ice was ignoring safety concerns in previously shuttered facilities.“This is a continuing pattern of the Trump administration’s willingness to knowingly place immigrants in detention facilities already well-known for having dangerous conditions,” she said. “They’re putting people in facilities where the conditions are so dire … that people simply give up their valid claims of relief to stay in the United States.”There is growing local backlash to these facilities, Cho added: “When people realize what is happening in these facilities, it’s not something they want to see up close. People are becoming very aware that billions of dollars are being spent to enrich private prison companies to hold people in abysmal conditions … including their neighbors, co-workers and friends.”Ice did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.Donald Murphy, a BoP spokesperson, did not answer questions about the reported reopening of Dublin for Ice. William K Marshall III, BoP director, said in a statement that the bureau would “vigorously pursue all avenues to support and implement the president’s agenda” and had ordered an “immediate assessment” to determine “our needs and the next steps” for Alcatraz: “We look forward to restoring this powerful symbol of law, order, and justice.”Corene Kendrick, ACLU National Prison Project deputy director, dismissed Trump’s Alcatraz statement as a “stunt”, noting that the prison’s cellblock has no running water or sewage and limited electricity.“I don’t know if we can call it a ‘proposal’, because that implies actual thought was put into it,” she said. “It’s completely far-fetched and preposterous, and it would be impossible to reopen those ancient, crumbling buildings as anything resembling a functioning prison.” More

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      Trump is trying to pay his way into a US baby boom. Experts say it won’t work

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      One of Donald Trump’s priorities for his second term is getting Americans to have more babies – and the White House has a new proposal to encourage them to do so: a $5,000 “baby bonus”.The plan to give cash payments to mothers after delivery shows the growing influence of the “pronatalist” movement in the US, which, citing falling US birthrates, calls for “traditional” family values and for women – particularly white women – to have more children.But experts say $5,000 checks won’t lead to a baby boom. Between unaffordable healthcare, soaring housing costs, inaccessible childcare and a lack of federal parental leave mandates, Americans face a swath of expensive hurdles that disincentivize them from having large families – or families at all – and that will require a much larger government investment to overcome.It is true that the US is seeing declining birthrates – and has been for some time. While fertility rates bounced around what demographers call “replacement level” – the rate at which the population replenishes ageing people with new ones – in the decades that followed the post-second world war baby boom, they have been on a steady downward trend since the 2010 Great Recession, so that now, US fertility rates sit at about 1.6 births per woman.But these numbers are far from alarming, according to demographers and policy analysts. US birthrates are still in line with those in other developed countries, where societies and economies are continuing to thrive, and concerns about the sustainability of programs such as social security can be fixed through other remedies, like raising the tax limit.In the US, the modest decline in fertility can be attributed to a drop in teen pregnancy rates, as well as more families with two working parents and delaying having children. But these elements alone do not explain the trends we’re seeing, says Paula Lantz, a social demographer and professor of health policy at the University of Michigan. While the number of people who don’t have any children isn’t changing, demographers are seeing the percentage of families who have two kids drop, and the percentage of those who have just one increase. “There is something else going on,” she said.That “something else”, Lantz and her colleagues say, is how challenging it is to raise a family in the US from a financial perspective. For many Americans, having a larger family means sacrificing quality of life.Between the costs of healthcare, including the thousands on average that Americans pay just to give birth in a hospital, childcare, housing and basics such as formula and diapers, having a baby in the US is a huge expense – one that experts say a single $5,000 payment would barely make a dent in.“I had a baby a few months ago, and a one-time payment of $5,000 wouldn’t do much if I didn’t also have paid leave that let me keep my job, good health insurance, family support, incredible childcare and the kind of job that allows me to both provide for my family and be there for pickup,” said Lily Roberts, the managing director for inclusive growth at the Center for American Progress. “Every mom in America deserves that, and every dad does too.”Stephanie Schmidt, the director of childcare and early education at the Center for Law and Social Policy, emphasized that the average cost of infant care in the US is $14,000 per year, with that number ticking up to closer to $25,000 a year in high-cost-of-living areas. “$5,000 gets you almost nowhere when you’re thinking about utilizing it to pay for the expenses of having a young child,” she said.Schmidt also noted that when other countries have tried similar approaches, they made little to no difference in how many children people choose to have.In Australia, where a $3,000 baby bonus was put in place in 2004 to reverse declining fertility rates, there was a brief spike in birthrates immediately after a bonus was offered, but those rates dropped again in subsequent years. Experts say this is because families simply move up their timelines, having the same number of kids they already intended to have, only earlier.“They want to make sure they get [the benefit] before that policy is changed by the next government,” said Ron Lee, the director of the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley.Plus, most of the other countries that have tried baby bonuses also have robust social and healthcare systems, so the cash payments went further than they would in the US. “It’s not working in those contexts, so it’s certainly not going to work in ours,” said Lantz.To change minds and behaviors, there need to be much more substantial policy changes, experts say, that address the housing crisis, offer childcare subsidies, make healthcare accessible and affordable and guarantee paid family leave.“[This] would have such a more significant impact for families because it’s not a one-time investment,” said Schmidt.Deliberate efforts to address the climate crisis could also encourage more people to have children as younger people are delaying or forgoing starting families because of climate anxieties, says Lee, pointing to surveys that suggest this trend. Evidence also shows that people have fewer children during times of political uncertainty and instability – a dynamic experts say this administration is only intensifying.“If the problem they’re trying to solve is addressing a low birthrate, then create the conditions to make birth possible and make raising a family possible,” said Mary Ignatius, the executive director of advocacy group Parent Voices California.That isn’t to say that $5,000 wouldn’t be well-received, says Roberts. It might help pay for a month or two of childcare; help families buy a new crib, stroller and other gear, all of which are poised to become more expensive with rising tariffs; or offset hospital costs.For lower-income families especially, research shows that receiving no-strings cash bonuses can help them reach a point of financial stability, especially when kids are younger.But experts emphasize that other actions taken by the administration to dismantle programs that already support American families and children belie any honorable intentions. To date, the Trump administration has proposed eliminating Head Start, a program that supports families with very low incomes in accessing childcare, as well as cutting funds to Medicaid, which provides healthcare coverage for low-income Americans. (Congress also let the child tax credit – which expanded eligibility for pay outs of up to $3,600 for American families – expire in 2021, even though it’s been credited with lifting millions of children out of poverty.)“Those are the things that women need to be able to make the choices of how they want to be a parent,” said Ignatius. “Eliminating the programs at Medicaid, Head Start, TANF [temporary assistance for needy families], food stamps – that equates to much more than $5,000 in support for low-income families.”The dismantling of the federal workforce in the Department of Education, the justice department, which oversees juvenile justice initiatives, and the Department of Health and Human Services, where staff responsible for distributing funds for state welfare and foster care programs were gutted, will also have a negative impact on American families. “Even the little things that improve a family’s life, like children’s museum grants and public libraries, are reeling from cuts”, said Roberts. “All American families are going to feel the impact of this administration, and creepy plans to give moms a medal absolutely won’t make up for what they’re taking away.”For Schmidt, the White House’s actions speak to a fundamental disconnect between statements that encourage Americans to have children and actions that make doing so increasingly out of reach. “There is such an emphasis in this administration on birth, and such a lack of support for people once they’re here,” she said. 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      My rare disease was getting closer to a cure. RFK Jr could undermine that | Jameson Rich

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      Since Robert F Kennedy Jr assumed control of the US health department in February, with a mandate to “[lower] chronic disease rates and [end] childhood chronic disease”, he has moved quickly to remake the US’s federal health infrastructure. But the Trump administration’s actions on medical research are already threatening that goal – and could end medical progress in this country for good.Kennedy’s office oversees the National Institutes of Health, the control center of disease research in the United States. Kennedy’s agency has killed almost 800 active projects, according to Nature, affecting medical research into HIV/Aids, diabetes, women’s health, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and more. The administration wants to cut the NIH’s budget up to 40% while consolidating its 27 agencies – separated by disease area – into just eight. Elon Musk’s Doge has been reviewing previously awarded grant funding, reportedly requiring researchers to explain how they are using their grants to advance the Trump administration’s political goals. (Audio obtained by the Washington Post suggests this “Defend the Spend” initiative may be a smokescreen, with one NIH official admitting: “All funding is on hold.”) Separately, Donald Trump has aggressively targeted universities such as Harvard and Columbia over alleged antisemitism and diversity initiatives, using federal contracts that fund research as leverage. And just recently, the NIH passed a new rule banning any university from receiving future federal grants if the universities use DEI programs or boycott Israeli firms.Medical research is a wonkish issue usually kept far away from political discussions. Even popular initiatives like former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s cancer moonshot require long-term vision in a political landscape rarely concerned with anything beyond the day’s news. But in recent years, public and private investments in medical research have seeded a wave of potential cures across major disease areas. Now, just as that wave is about to crest, RFK Jr and the Trump administration’s incursion against the NIH threatens to ensure these cures are never finished.For me, the promise of those cures is personal. At three days old, I was diagnosed with a rare version of the most common type of birth defect: congenital heart disease. CHD affects one in every 100 babies born in the US and is the leading cause of birth defect-related deaths. Congenital heart problems can range from a small hole in the heart to being born with only one ventricle. Many defects are underdiagnosed, and chances are good that you know somebody who lives with one. Even JD Vance does: his relative was born with Ebstein’s anomaly, a deformity of the tricuspid valve that has resulted in her now needing a heart transplant at the age of 12.When I was six weeks old, doctors performed the first in a series of three surgeries aimed at correcting the circulation of blood within my heart and between the other organs of my body. The final surgery in that sequence had first been described in medical journals in 1971, and crucial refinements had been made only a few years before I was brought under the knife.Before the surgery’s advent, the prognosis was grim. Many children like me died before their first birthday. Of congenital patients in the 1950s, “half died before the age of twenty”, writes cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar in his book Heart: A History. “In short, they were cardiac cripples, their existence doomed.” But after the surgery, more of us started living into adulthood. Today, most of these patients live at least another 30 years after the operation. My survival past infancy was an accident of history, the product of being born at the right moment in the lifespan of medical research. “Don’t worry,” my first surgeon told my parents when I was a child. “He’s going to long outlive you both.”But my future and the future of others like me is not guaranteed. As I grew up, my doctors acknowledged that the surgery was merely palliative, not curative – a stopgap, medicine’s way of buying me some time. With medicine advancing so quickly, though, we could hope that new solutions would be brought into existence by the time I needed them. In the decades since, we have come to understand the surgery’s long-term consequences: likely progressive damage across organ systems, leading to the need for heart or multi-organ transplants in most patients by the age of 40. Last year, shortly after turning 31, I was formally diagnosed with cardiac cirrhosis and informed that I will need a combined heart-liver transplant within the decade. The time that those early developments bought me seems to be running out.In recent years, as the patient population has grown, more of us have been able to advocate for the need for new solutions. Private foundations have started pouring tens of millions of dollars into research aimed at discovering new treatments and identifying the root causes of birth heart defects so they can be prevented. These foundations have also begun correcting an imbalance in funding – historically, pediatric cancer has received five times the amount of funding that CHD does, despite similar prevalence and mortality rates.I volunteer on the patient board of one such organization, a privately funded non-profit aimed at curing heart defects like mine. With the help of researchers and hospital systems across the country, the organization has been making remarkable progress in a short period of time. But this work relies on the infrastructure of university labs. Even before Kennedy took office, the Trump administration ordered that the NIH change how grant funding is allocated by limiting what are known as “indirect costs”, which go beyond the direct needs of a given study. But often, these costs go into funds that help universities keep their labs running: things like building operations and upgrades, legal compliance and paying researchers. Even with this support, university labs struggle to keep the lights on, and researchers are constantly fighting to secure and retain funding. (The order has since been paused by a federal judge and is the subject of continuing litigation.)Some insist the US shouldn’t be funding research with taxpayer dollars at all. Instead, they would leave the task to pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms. But this fundamentally misunderstands the reality: in the decade leading up to 2020, researchers found, government funding played a role in the development of every new pharmaceutical drug; these drugs are then sold back to patients at a premium. The research that for-profit companies do fund is narrowly focused on things that are guaranteed to make money, or to advance discoveries begun in the public sector. For example, the new blockbuster medication category of GLP-1s – Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro – would not exist without a discovery that was first made by an NIH scientist. When people debate the American healthcare system, they often point to the innovations and cutting-edge treatments we’ve pioneered to support the idea that our system, while flawed, is the best in the world. That impression of a world-class system is due almost entirely to the quality and breadth of our university research infrastructure and our medical schools.Private non-profits, like the one I volunteer with, already fund a large amount of medical research. If more university labs start closing, there will be nowhere for this money to go or for this research to be performed. As Dr Kimryn Rathmell, former director of the National Cancer Institute, told the AP: “Discoveries are going to be delayed, if they ever happen.” The result will be both patients and the government spending even more money on emergency and palliative healthcare. That will only benefit the healthcare profiteers Kennedy claims to be going after: pharmaceutical companies, hospital systems and healthcare entrepreneurs such as Brad Smith, who, by some accounts, has been leading Doge’s firings within HHS.My disease isn’t the only one that will be affected by these cuts. Ongoing research has indicated that targeted mRNA vaccines may show promise in preventing or treating Aids and certain types of cancers. The technology is also being studied for its ability to treat cystic fibrosis, heart failure, sickle cell anemia and other genetic birth defects. But scientists working in these areas through the NIH have already been instructed to strike mention of mRNA vaccines from grant applications and materials, perhaps owing to Kennedy’s hostility towards vaccines and his repeated lies about mRNA technology.If the proposed funding cuts and changes at the NIH are allowed to proceed, Kennedy’s mandate to lower chronic disease rates will fail, and his failure will be obvious. We will see it in rising rates of cancer, birth defects, diabetes and other chronic illnesses. We will see it in the exodus of medical experts to other countries, and the collapse of the researcher pipeline in US universities. We will see the quality of our supposed world-class medical system crash as treatments stagnate. We will pay for this cruelty in blood and lives and lost generations.In truth, today’s congenital heart research has arrived too late to save my own life. My future is at the whim of our broken transplant system, itself already showing signs of strain under Kennedy. But I continue championing the work being done because of the hope that future children won’t be consigned to the same fate. The only thing that will have made the suffering I’ve faced worth it is if I’m a part of the last generation to do so.

      Jameson Rich is a writer and film-maker from Massachusetts who covers healthcare and culture More

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      The Zelenskyy-Trump deal – podcast

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      After the heated exchange between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February, the prospect of a deal between the US and Ukraine was uncertain.“Every week, it feels like we get a new position from Donald Trump,” Andrew Roth, the Guardian’s global affairs correspondent based in Washington DC, tells Michael Safi. “Sometimes we get multiple new positions from Donald Trump in a single morning. Nobody really believed that that was going to happen until the two names were on the dotted line.”And yet, last week the countries agreed a momentous minerals deal, agreeing to split future profits of the minerals industry in Ukraine 50/50.“We’re talking about natural gas, oil, possibly, but more importantly we’re talking about critical earth minerals. These include a couple of things, lithium, graphite, titanium. These are rare, important, critical minerals that are used in all kinds of industries around the world,” says Roth.Does US economic interest in Ukraine bring the country closer to peace?Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod More

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      Trump blocks grant funding for Harvard until it meets president’s demands

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      The US Department of Education informed Harvard University on Monday that it was ending billions of dollars in research grants and other aid unless the school accedes to a list of demands from the Trump administration that would effectively cede control of the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university to the government.The news was delivered to Dr Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, in a deeply partisan letter from Linda McMahon, the education secretary, which she also posted on social media.“This letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek grants from the federal government, since none will be provided,” McMahon wrote.The main reason for the crackdown on Harvard is the school’s rejection of a long list of demands from the Trump administration’s antisemitism taskforce, prompted by campus protests against Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023. McMahon also accuses the university of “a systematic pattern of violating federal law”.As Garber explained in a message to the Harvard community last month, the university decided to sue the federal government only after the Trump administration froze $2.2bn in funding, threatened to freeze an additional $1bn in grants, “initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status”.The government’s “sweeping and intrusive demands would impose unprecedented and improper control over the university”, Garber wrote.In its lawsuit against the Trump administration, Harvard said the government’s funding cuts would have stark “real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff [and] researchers” by ending crucial medical and scientific research.The text of McMahon’s letter, much like a Truth Social post from Donald Trump, is littered with all-caps words. “Where do many of these ‘students’ come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country – and why is there so much HATE?”“Harvard University has made a mockery of this country’s higher education system. It has invited foreign students, who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America, to its campus,” McMahon claims.The university recently published its own, in-depth investigation of allegations that Gaza solidarity protests had crossed the line into antisemitism, and a second that looked at anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias.But McMahon’s letter is not mainly about the claim that Jewish students feel unsafe at Harvard – a view the school’s president, who is himself Jewish, has some sympathy with – but is filled with extended diatribes about a series of other grievances, including: the supposed far-left politics of Penny Pritzker, a member of the university’s governing board who previously served as US commerce secretary during the Obama administration; the complaints of Harvard alumnus and Trump supporter Bill Ackman; what McMahon calls the “ugly racism” of Harvard’s efforts to diversify its student body; complaints about what Fox News has termed a “remedial math” course which is intended to address gaps in new students’ math skills following the Covid pandemic; accusations that the Harvard Law Review has discriminated against white authors; and two brief fellowships the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health offered to the former mayors of New York and Chicago, Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot.In language that seemed to echo Donald Trump’s own, McMahon told Harvard’s president that De Blasio and Lightfoot, who were recruited to share their experiences of bringing universal pre-kindergarten to New York, and leading Chicago through the pandemic, are “perhaps the worst mayors ever to preside over major cities in our country’s history”.“This is like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation,” McMahon wrote.“Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni,” McMahon wrote. “You have an approximately $53bn head start.” More