Flanked by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump hosted a White House dinner with some of the richest and most powerful leaders of the world’s tech giants.

To Fraser Patterson, CEO and founder of Skillit, an AI-powered construction hiring platform, it was no coincidence that after the meeting last month of more than 30 Silicon Valley power players and Trump advisers, the administration unveiled a plan to charge $100,000 one-time application fees for H-1B visas, which tech companies typically use to employ highly skilled foreign workers.

“It can appear as though, rather than it being an improvement to immigration policy, it feels a little more like a labor war strategy,” Patterson said.

“Isn't one of the great tenets of the American way of life and Constitution the separation of church and state? Wouldn't that extend to business, too, between business and state?”

Patterson’s New York-based company employs eight — an infinitesimal fraction of the workforce at giants like Amazon, with more than a million employees and nearly 15,000 H-1B visa holders.

“The largest technology companies are going to be able to hoard the best global talent, and I think it's easy to be able to draw a straight line between that and shutting out the smaller startups and the smaller firms that can’t enforce that price tag,” Patterson said.

“I think it scales back the competitiveness of the technology industry, broadly speaking.”

‘Global war on talent’

The Trump administration says the current H-1B visa program allows employers “to hire foreign workers at a significant discount to American workers,” and the program has been “abused.”

Last week Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) reintroduced bipartisan legislation, The H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act, to close loopholes in programs they say tech giants have used while laying off Americans.

But, Patterson said, limiting H-1B visas will effectively end up “closing the door on skilled workers” and “gift Europe the best possible opportunity to label itself as the tech talent hub.

“The general consensus is this is going to narrow the pool,” Patterson said.

“There's going to be just fewer nationalities represented, fewer ideas. The U.S. becomes less of a magnet.”

Rich Pleeth, CEO and founder of Finmile, an AI-powered logistics and delivery software, agreed that the fee might tilt the scales of tech dominance away from the U.S., where places like San Francisco and New York have long been considered global hubs for innovation.

“The global war on talent is real,” Pleeth said. “Europe has a golden opportunity … Canada, Singapore, Berlin, they're all going to benefit.”

Finmile employs 15 people in the U.K., seven in Romania and two in the U.S.

“It's very challenging for smaller companies like us,” Pleeth said.

“Talent is everything, and if the U.S. makes it harder to bring in the world's best talent, where do you set up headquarters?”

While the Trump administration says the new H1-B fee will help American workers, particularly recent college graduates seeking IT jobs, Patterson said it would have the opposite effect, likely leading to “greater offshoring.”

Thanks to Trump’s array of trade tariffs, which he says will bring jobs back to the U.S., many American small businesses are already struggling to survive as they face increased costs.

“In reality, it's probably going to lead to labor shortages,” Patterson said. “You can't just turn on a faucet overnight to really highly skilled local workers.”

Nicole Whitaker, an immigration attorney in Towson, Md., said the proposed $100,000 fee sends the message to foreign workers seeking job opportunities in the U.S. that "our doors are closed ... find another country."

"This is a part of a bigger and broader push by this administration — even if things don't go into effect— to make it look like we are shutting down our borders. We are not open, and we're not welcoming toward immigrants," Whitaker said.

‘The next Googles’

Pleeth, a former marketing manager at Google, pointed to tech leaders including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who were born in India but came to the U.S. for college and to work.

“If you suddenly make it hard for talented people to come in, the next Googles are not going to be built in the U.S.,” Pleeth said.

“Talent is the oxygen for the tech industry. For decades the U.S. had an open pipeline … we don't expect the $100K toll to hit the tech companies who are the ones who can afford it the most.”

Skillit currently does not have any employees sponsored through the H-1B visa program but Patterson said he had used it when the fees were more reasonable, around $2,500.

Patterson, who was born in Scotland, came to the U.S. on an O-1 visa for foreign workers of “extraordinary talent.” He is now close to becoming a U.S. citizen.

“Very onerous, nerve-racking, even to get here … but I would say it wasn't disproportional to the value of coming here,” he said.

Pleeth wants to move from the U.K. to the U.S. with his wife, two daughters and dog, a process he expects some challenges with but is hopeful will “eventually move forward.”

“It's just going to become a lot harder for junior people who can share cultures, can come in with new ideas,” Pleeth said.

“It's a talent tax.”

Last summer, in a video blasted on the jumbotron at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Rich Logis called his years of supporting Donald Trump a “grave mistake.”

Until 2022, the Florida dad of two was a red hat-wearing, Make America Great Again pundit who wrote call scripts for the Trump campaign, hosted a right-wing podcast and sponsored a local GOP club.

Now, Logis wears a different red hat, emblazoned with the slogan “Leaving MAGA,” the name of the nonprofit and online community he founded to support other former Trump followers who found themselves lost in conspiracies, losing friends, even committing crimes in Trump’s name.

At the DNC, Logis said he was “all in” for Vice President Kamala Harris and throughout the 2024 election cycle warned that Trump “would not end but permanently damage our democracy” if he made it back to the White House.

Trump made it back. Logis told Raw Story he “sadly” felt he’d been proven right by “chaos” unleashed, from the administration dismantling government agencies and using aggressive immigration enforcement tactics to attacks on free speech in the name of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist murdered in Utah last week.

“The damage that has been caused will take many, many years to rectify,” Logis said.

“I will say I am not surprised at the pace at which this has been done. I have to emphasize that when in MAGA, chaos is welcome, because we always felt that if we were wreaking havoc, we were on the offensive, and that's exactly how I think the President and his advisers approach governing.”

‘Everyone against us’

Prior to the 2016 election, Logis considered himself a “very politically lonely person.”

“The two parties were the same,” he said.

In 2015, he was “curious” about Trump. By early 2016, Logis was a “full-fledged supporter.” After Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Logis went “deeper and deeper” into the MAGA community.

He “consumed only right-wing media.”

“Everybody who wasn't with you was an enemy,” he said. “Any information that didn't comport with the pervasively held beliefs and mythologies of the MAGA community, we shunned that information.”

Logis found community and a sense of belonging, calling MAGA his “second family.”

“As much as I'm embarrassed to admit it, my second family often took precedence over my own blood family, and that's the gravitational pull of MAGA as a community, is that it does make it hard to walk away from it,” Logis said.

In October 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Logis paid $350 to attend a Republican fundraiser at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Fla.

Logis hoped Trump would show up. He didn’t. Then-South Dakota governor, now Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem headlined the event instead.

Looking at a photo from the Mar-a-Lago event was one way Logis convinced himself to stay loyal to Trump through August 2022, as his doubts grew about the president and the GOP.

“I was unapologetically in the MAGA movement, and I felt that we were real Americans on the right side of history, and that everyone against us, they were on the wrong side, and they were the fake Americans,” Logis said.

‘Lies and falsehoods’

For Logis, doubts started accumulating at the end of Trump’s first term, between his handling of COVID, the lie that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrat Joe Biden, and the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol that lie inspired.

“I started to realize, albeit slowly, that a lot of my beliefs that I had held may not have been accurate, and I had to have this reckoning with myself that I might have allowed myself to believe a lot of lies and falsehoods,” Logis said.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was also an “accelerant” of Logis leaving MAGA.

“I supported him because he was the MAGA-endorsed candidate, and all of a sudden, this person I felt who was sensible was giving at his official press conferences megaphones to people who are anti-vaxxers,” Logis said.

“It really shocked and confused me.”

Logis “vacillated.” In May 2022, a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. For Logis, that was the “final straw.”

He began by “quietly” departing from MAGA. In August 2022, he decided to publicly apologize for supporting Trump.

“There was something that was gnawing at me at the time because I was always so very unapologetically public in my support for Trump and DeSantis and MAGA that I felt I needed to be public in my renunciation of it,” Logis said.

‘Never been busier’

Logis said diversifying his sources of news was one thing that “changed my life for the better,” because, “People in MAGA are not getting a full picture of all of these complex issues.

“I'm not saying that people in MAGA are the only info-siloed group, but I would argue that there's probably no group more info-siloed than those in MAGA.”

Logis said his community was steadily growing, to a few dozen people. Some come on their own. Logis finds others online.

Some Trump 2024 voters have recently started conversations, Logis said.

Leaving MAGA became a tax-exempt nonprofit in August 2024, bringing in a little over $34,000 last year, according to ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.

“We've never been busier,” Logis said. “We have never been more active than we are right now.”

Logis works in sales. He wants to run Leaving MAGA full time.

“This is a very unlikely, accidental, unintended place that I find myself in,” he said.

“I never sought out to be an activist. I never envisioned that I would be going around recounting my story to others.

“But I felt it was incumbent upon myself in the process of making amends, that if telling this story brought a little bit more hope and optimism for friends and family of those in the thrall of MAGA, I felt an obligation to do that.”

Before conservative activist Charlie Kirk took the mic at Utah Valley University on Wednesday, 19-year-old Beck Dishman captured a 6-second video of a packed crowd of supporters in red Make America Great Again hats, waving American flags on the sunny afternoon.

Shortly after noon local time, Kirk, the co-founder and CEO of conservative youth organization Turning Point USA was shot in the neck.

Kirk, 31, died after the shooting, according to President Donald Trump and reports.

Dishman, the vice president of the university’s Turning Point USA chapter, told Raw Story in a phone interview he was standing at the back of the audience near a fountain when Kirk was shot.

“People, when you heard the shot, they just kind of trampled through the fountain. There's like a stampede,” Dishman said.

“Obviously traumatic.”

Dishman said he didn’t see Kirk get shot himself, but that his 17-year-old sister did, who was at the event with her high school.

“Just a horrific event. I pray for Charlie Kirk and pray for his family and hope they're doing okay,” Dishman said before the news of Kirk’s death was announced.

“The aftermath was just total chaos.”

Dishman said he was able to call and reunite with his sister. Everyone was evacuated from campus, and he witnessed SWAT teams on his way to a friend’s apartment near campus, Dishman said.

“We just regrouped and are just recovering a little bit,” Dishman said.

“Praying and hoping and crossing our fingers.”

Of his involvement with the school’s Turning Point student chapter, Dishman said: “Being involved in the government and in the processes that make our democracy function so well is important to me and just being able to get involved, alone, is a lot more than others in my generation are willing to do,” Dishman said.

“It comes at costs, but we can't let other people scare us.”

Caleb Chilcutt, president of the Turning Point USA chapter, declined to comment when reached by Raw Story.

Dishman sent Raw Story further comment via text message:

“TPUSA UVU has always been committed to spreading American Values,” Dishman said.

“We cherish the constitution. We cherish democracy. And we cherish our families. Today was an attack on all three. We are praying for Charlie and his family and we will never, regardless of the opposition, relent.”

Long before “crunchy” moms championed the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Erica Roach found a Facebook group of women who homeschooled their kids and embraced wellness.

As some moms today who seek more natural lifestyles for their families are also anti-vaccine, so were some of Roach’s Facebook friends.

By the time her fourth child was born, Roach said, she was “pretty anti-vax,” declining vaccines in her baby’s first year after initial shots at the hospital.

“I was just kind of in [the Facebook group], slowly getting radicalized to different things,” Roach told Raw Story.

Roach said her beliefs soon became more extreme, and she ended up following a path that led to QAnon, the far-right conspiracy movement whose “outrageous” premise revolved around Donald Trump waging war on Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles among supposed Democratic elites in Hollywood and the federal government.

Coming out of the “extremism group” took months, Roach said, and led to her being doxxed — seeing private information shared online.

“My house was attempted to be broken into. Somebody had called the sheriffs and [Child Protective Services] and anonymously said I was in a pedophile ring,” Roach said.

“As much as it scared me, all those things, it emboldened me. It’s like I want nothing to do with people who will do this to me.”

Roach has now joined communities of “former-something extremists,” among them Leaving MAGA, a growing online community of former Trump supporters.

“It's remarkable how much happier I am,” Roach said, noting that her relationships and physical health have improved since she left QAnon and MAGA.

‘Mortifying’

Roach’s path to extremism started when her ex-boyfriend began sending her “Q-drops,” messages from the anonymous figurehead of QAnon.

“He kept telling me that Trump was going to save the world,” said Roach.

Initially she was skeptical — after all, she had disliked both candidates in the 2016 election, Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

But in her early 20s, Roach had dabbled in conspiracy theories, “getting into the Alex Jones type of craziness,” referring to the InfoWars host, and once considering herself a “9/11 truther,” convinced the terror attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001 were an “inside job.”

“It's so mortifying to admit out loud, but that's what kind of started me on this path,” Roach said.

Between her history and the moms’ Facebook group, when COVID-19 hit, Roach said she was “primed” to embrace QAnon. Soon she was spending between 18 to 24 hours a day as an administrator of a “pretty big Q-influencers channel” on Telegram, a platform popular with right-wing extremists.

“I listened to [Trump’s] pressers every day, religiously, at my dinner table with my kids because I wanted to know what was going on, and I was scared of COVID,” Roach said.

“I had believed that COVID was the tool that was supposed to enact this depopulation agenda.”

When Trump announced Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership to accelerate development of the COVID-19 vaccine, Roach said “it was confusing.”

“All the people that I trusted, all the people I communicated with every day, were saying this vaccine is going to kill us all,” Roach said.

With Trump as the hero of the QAnon movement, reconciling vaccine conspiracies with his actions required “mental gymnastics,” Roach said.

But “it was just enough to make me start questioning things because I was like, ‘This doesn't make any sense,’” she said.

Roach monitored Telegram channels for anyone posting negatively about “Q” or Q supporters, such as former Trump adviser Michael Flynn and pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood.

In a channel critical of Wood, Roach began noticing “inconsistencies” with beliefs she held and also articles questioning Trump’s “gross abuse of power” and millions of dollars made during his first term.

“It was enough to be like, there's something wrong with me, not them,” she said.

Roach said she reached out to the channel administrator, who met her “with nothing but kindness and empathy and genuine caring.”

“When you're anonymous, and you're in an extremist group, you don't know what's on the other side waiting for you because you're under the impression that they're going to eat you alive for believing in this stuff,” Roach said.

Through the administrator, Roach connected with someone who debunked QAnon conspiracies. Still, Roach wasn’t fully out of her QAnon world by the time of the 2020 election and wished there was “some magical way for Trump to stay” in office when Joe Biden won, she said.

A friend offered to pay for Roach’s travel from New York state to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, but she wasn’t able to arrange childcare.

“I watched it live all day, knowing that people who represented the cause I believed in … were there, and I was horrified, completely horrified,” Roach said.

“Watching them attack the Capitol, attack police officers, the things that they were saying, it stopped me on a dime. I've never wanted to distance myself so much from something because I realized this isn't peaceful. This is violence. This is an attempted coup.”

‘Fighting back’

Roach extracted herself from QAnon via four to five months of “re-educating” herself, she said.

A restaurant worker, she went back to college to study medical billing and coding. Last month, she self-published a book, “Leaving The Mirror World,” about her departure from QAnon.

She voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and was disappointed the US did not elect its first female president.

“I voted down-ballot blue, and I will till the day I die,” Roach said.

“I know the destruction that's in the minds of the Republican Party, and I could never support that again.”

Roach said her former QAnon friends were “cheering on” Trump’s second presidency, particularly the building of detention camps for migrants and the deployment of the National Guard in major cities, which she found “disgusting” and “sadistic.”

“Everything that's happened so far was outlined in Project 2025,” Roach said of the right-wing policy agenda created by the Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank.

“It is a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream that this is all happening to their enemies.”

Nonetheless Roach said watching “hundreds” of neighbors protest against Trump on a bridge in her town every Saturday made her optimistic.

“That's something uniquely American, I think,” she said. “That we're not going to destroy everything without fighting back.”

At 21, Steve Vilchez is much like any other senior at Illinois State University. Studying biology teacher education, he aspires to teach high school science.

But, Vilchez has an unusual story to tell. From 2016 until the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, he was a passionate teenage Donald Trump fan.

Breaking with Trump and the Republican party he dominates was a slow and challenging process, Vilchez said, particularly since Trump surged back to power this year.

Vilchez has found support in Leaving MAGA, an online community of former Trump supporters of which, he said, he’s by far the youngest member.

Setting out to tell others about his experiences, Vilchez told Raw Story: “I'm doing much better now than I was when I was in MAGA.”

‘The other side’

Back in 2016, while classmates played video games, Vilchez obsessed over politics and the U.S. presidential election.

He couldn’t vote. Just 13, he was still a middle-schooler in Berwyn, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. But he saw himself as a “very staunch Democrat,” all the same.

He called himself a “Bernie bro,” backing Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, for the Democratic presidential nomination. When the party nominated the former New York senator and U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Vilchez swallowed his disappointment, excited to witness the anticipated election of the first female U.S. president.

History had other ideas, so when Trump won, Vilchez decided to give him a chance, first by learning more about “the other side.”

“I was a little bit concerned about how my future was going to be, how my parents’ future was going to be,” said Vilchez, who says he is a "Hispanic, first-generation immigrant.”

“But … I wanted to see if maybe Donald Trump really isn't as bad as the Clinton campaign would say.”

Vilchez decided to do some research. That led him down a rabbit hole, lined with YouTube videos and social media posts.

Drawn to younger conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens, he also found Tucker Carlson, then a primetime Fox News star.

“Very quickly,” Vilchez “abandoned” his previous news diet of NBC, ABC, Vice, Vox and CNN, in favor of Fox News, One American News Network and Breitbart.

“It quickly became like an echo chamber for myself. I was only willing to hear things that supported Trump and Trump only,” Vilchez said.

“It was kind of like a downward spiral from there.”

As Vilchez became a “very, very hardcore Trump supporter,” some friends stopped talking to him.

Still, he found half-a-dozen other Trump fans to eat lunch with at school.

“Each day we would all talk about Trump, saying how he's this great person, and just repeating the same things over and over, just parroting each other and saying like a bunch of ‘what ifs’, and ‘Trump's gonna drain the swamp. He's gonna find the corruption,’” Vilchez said.

Vilchez listened to the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. He came to believe some “conspiracies that MAGA was saying.”

“If someone says a lie enough, people are going to believe it, and this lie was propagated so many times that I bought into it,” Vilchez said.

“I bought into this lie that there was this somehow a deep state that Trump was going to expose, and Trump keeps talking about it to this day that there's a deep state, but he hasn't done anything about it.”

‘Question my allegiance’

Vilchez stayed on the MAGA bandwagon throughout Trump's first term.

But in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, he began to “really question my actual allegiance to Trump.

“Seeing Donald Trump practically downplay it, and in a sense calling it ‘Kung Flu,’ ‘the China virus,’ and ultimately, when he reached a point where he was telling people to inject bleach in the body, [advising taking] hydroxychloroquine [and other medicines not proven against COVID], [and saying,] ‘You could shine a light through the body,’ that made me very upset.”

“Even though I didn't know much about immunology and disease prevention, I knew that these things were dangerous. I knew that some people might get hurt, and in rare cases, they might die.”

Vilchez said he started to further “question my faith with MAGA” when he considered the movement’s climate change denialism.

Despite such doubts, Vilchez remained a supporter through the 2020 election and at first “bought into” Trump’s claims the election was stolen by former vice president Joe Biden, the victorious Democratic nominee.

Vilchez liked a thousand tweets in three days, as “so-called evidence,” he said.

Now, he wants to “unlike those, so that I don't have to remind myself of those, but also I kind of do like seeing those in my memories because it reminds me of the change I've made.”

A “seed began to plant” in terms of doubts about MAGA, Vilchez said, and “as the days got closer to the insurrection, more water was being added to that plant.”

Watching the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, on live news coverage shown in his high-school English class, Vilchez said he was struck by the hypocrisy of Trump and his supporters.

Both said they “back the blue, blue lives matter,” Vilchez said, but “at the same time, they were completely complacent and tolerating many rioters and insurrectionists violently attacking and ultimately causing the death of Capitol police officers, so I was very taken aback by that.”

After that, Vilchez “made a vow to myself to not support Trump, but I still remained a pretty firm conservative.”

He didn’t fully leave the Republican party until the 2022 midterms.

“I was seeing the evidence happen real time, and as much as it pained for me to realize that maybe Trump was wrong, I had to take that pill,” Vilchez said.

“Very reluctantly, I made that choice to realize Trump isn't this godly figure that people claim him to be.”

‘I’m done’

Vilchez said the last straw was continued false claims of election fraud.

“Seeing [Trump Senior Adviser] Kari Lake kind of go back to that 2020 tactic of, ‘Oh, I lost, so it must be rigged.’ At that point, I was like ‘I'm done with the Republican Party,’” Vilchez said.

“This is what you're going to keep doing? You guys lost 2020, just admit that as much as it sucks, you guys lost.”

Lake lost her runs for Arizona governor and the U.S. Senate. Still a fervent Trump supporter, she is now overseeing the attempted closure of Voice of America.

Vilchez voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in his first presidential election and considers himself a “center left-leaning” voter.

But he retains some “conservative-ish” beliefs.

He’s a “big supporter of guns,” and “pro-life,” but he also wouldn’t “force my opinion” if his future wife wanted an abortion, he said.

He believes in health care for all, the need to meet the challenge of climate change and the benefits of giving children free school lunch.

“As much as people might call that socialist, I disagree,” Vilchez said. “I think it's called being a good person.

“In MAGA, we were all kind of living in fear of other people. That's the way that MAGA seems to operate is they like to run by fear … Donald Trump knows how to weaponize fear very, very well. It's very scary that he knows how to do it.”

Under the second Trump administration, Vilchez said, raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have prompted tough conversations with his parents.

“It reached a point where my parents sat me and my brothers down and talked to us, saying, ‘Hey, if we get deported, this is what's going to happen,’” Vilchez said.

“I never thought that I’d have to have that conversation, but given that it's a reality from any point until Trump's term ends, it's kind of grim.”

His previous support for Trump, he said, “goes to prove that very young minds are very impressionable, and if they're not guided correctly, then these things can happen.

“Since I'm trying to become a teacher, I should make sure that I teach students how to check their sources.”

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Connie Morella was a moderate Republican congresswoman from Maryland when Democrats told her if she didn’t change parties, redistricting would take away the seat she held for 16 years.

Morella told Raw Story she “chuckled” at the idea of changing parties, even as the Democratic state legislature cut out Republican voters in the northwestern part of her district and added a highly Democratic eastern area, ahead of the 2002 election.

“I thought, ‘By God, I'm going to show them. I'm going to stand up and fight,” said Morella, 94.

“As it turned out, I did lose.”

She lost by 9,000 votes to Democrat Chris Van Hollen — who is now a U.S. senator.

“Naturally, you go back and you look at the old district, and you think, ‘If they hadn't gerrymandered, would I have won?’ And I would have won,” Morella said.

“It would have been a little lower because people were very troubled about Republicans, I think, on a federal level, but I would have won if they had not redistricted.”

Morella wasn’t long without a job: in 2003, President George W. Bush appointed her U.S. ambassador to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, in Paris.

But Morella lamented the continued progression toward “one-party districts” — an issue now at the heart of political battle as Texas Republicans attempt to redraw congressional districts mid-cycle, to gain five U.S. House seats in 2026.

“Looking at the population for representation, [redistricting] should continue to be every 10 years, and not like now, all of a sudden, like what's happening in Texas,” Morella said.

“We're suddenly deciding, ‘Well, I think we're going to do our redistricting now.’

“I think that bucks the tradition, which is what worked.”

Morella, who calls herself a “RINO” — a term used by President Donald Trump to deride “Republicans in name only” — said she understood Texas Democrats’ “frustration” with their Republican peers.

“Obviously, it's become so very partisan,” Morella said.

“I think it's wrong, the redistricting, and then, of course, I can see [Democrats] trying to respond to it, but I'm not sure the response is the best one.”

Democratic state legislators fled Texas to deny a quorum for a special session on redistricting.

“Certainly, I don't think it's that effective, but nevertheless, I think what's happening with redistricting in Texas is an example of how we should do something about it.”

Morella co-chairs the ReFormers Caucus, a bipartisan group of former lawmakers pushing for reform and hosted by Issue One, a nonprofit that works to reduce the influence of money in politics.

Morella suggested not letting “people who are holding elective office be involved with the final decision about redistricting,” instead getting “independent entities that have nothing to do with politics to do the design.”

“[Gerrymandering] is certainly not the way to govern. It is certainly not democratic,” Morella said.

“You can see from what's happening now. There is not one party that is innocent. Both parties are guilty of it, and it's the American people that lose their respect for governing bodies, and I see that happening, a deterioration.”

In response to Texas’ redistricting efforts, Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a proposal to redraw congressional maps and put five more Democrats into the U.S. House.

From Missouri to New York, states followed suit in announcing redistricting plans.

‘Double-sided sword’

Gerrymandering — manipulating electoral boundaries to benefit a political party — was named after Elbridge Gerry, a governor of Massachusetts and vice president under President James Madison who passed a law creating a highly partisan electoral district in Boston opponents said looked like a “salamander.”

“It was so divergent that it looked like a salamander. It really literally did,” Morella said. “That is an example of what shouldn't happen.”

As a victim of gerrymandering herself, Morella said she had visited the grave of “good old” Gerry at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Gerrymandering can backfire, said Adin Lenchner, founder and principal at political strategy firm Carroll Street Campaigns, calling the practice a “volatile tool” that’s had “really mixed results.”

Lenchner said incumbents sometimes end up facing off in primaries due to redistricting, draining resources — as in 2022 with New York Democrats Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, and Illinois Democrats Sean Casten and Marie Newman.

“We've seen the more extreme the gerrymander, the higher the risk that it just collapses on itself when either voters’ priorities shift or the courts come into play,” Lenchner said.

“These moments really risk alienating voters and those already skeptical nonvoters even further.”

Republican redistricting backfired in Dallas County, Texas, when the party went from seven state House seats to two in 2018.

The same year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court determined 2011 congressional maps drawn by Republicans to be unconstitutional, ending up “flipping four seats to Democrats almost overnight,” Lenchner said.

“The very same districts that were meant to keep Republicans safe became the ones that cost them their majority,” Lenchner said.

‘Fundamentally unfair’

In Utah, voters are awaiting a ruling in a lawsuit that would force the Republican legislature to scrap maps drawn in 2021.

Those maps led to Republicans winning all four U.S. House seats, one of which was formerly competitive for Democrats.

Utah State Sen. Stephanie Pitcher is among those responsible for drawing congressional maps.

“In Utah, as a Democrat, I'm not happy by the way they gerrymander the districts here,” Pitcher told Raw Story.

“I'm sure the Republicans in California feel the same way, so it's a sentiment that we share.”

Pitcher commended Texas Democrats’ efforts to stop Republican redistricting.

“I think they've found some creative ways to stall the process and that's a process that they find fundamentally unfair,” said Pitcher, who is also a criminal defense attorney.

“I agree with them, and I would say the same thing if the roles were reversed.

“I don't think gerrymandering benefits anybody, whether you're a Democrat or Republican.”

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Twenty-three years ago, pioneers in artificial intelligence received an invitation to a Caribbean conference funded by “some rich guy.”

Now there is dismay among those who attended the three-day St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium in the U.S. Virgin Islands in April 2002 — because that “rich guy” was Jeffrey Epstein, the financier later convicted as a child sex offender who faced federal sex trafficking charges when he killed himself in 2019.

Amid swirling scandal, as President Donald Trump resists calls to release FBI files on his former close friend, two participants in the St. Thomas symposium told Raw Story what they remembered, having never before discussed the event with the media.

Another two attendees shared memories of the symposium via email.

“It was very disturbing when I first discovered that there was that connection, and I wish it had never happened,” said Benjamin Kuipers, a computer scientist who retired from the University of Michigan last year.

Symposium attendees said they did not witness illegal activity or have concerns about children in Epstein’s presence.

“When the Epstein thing all hit the fan, people would say … ‘Everybody had to know,’” said Mary Shepherd, 75, an owner of machine-reasoning AI company Cycorp who attended the meeting with her late husband and cofounder, Doug Lenat.

‘And I'm like, No, everybody didn't have to know, because I didn't know that this was going on.”

‘Really strange vibe’

The symposium took place on St. Thomas, but Shepherd and Kuipers recalled visiting Epstein’s private island, Little St. James, two miles away.

Kuipers remembered a banquet on the beach. An attendee who declined to be named said via email they remembered being “taken by boat to a beach on [Epstein’s] island for a bbq. We were not taken to any buildings on the island.”

Kuipers said: “As far as I know, being on Jeffrey Epstein's Island was a one-off. We were brought there for the banquet, and then brought back.”

Shepherd remembered going to the island on a boat sent by Epstein for her and Lenat, and MIT cognitive and computer scientist Marvin Minsky, who died in 2016, and his wife, Gloria Rudisch Minsky.

“Because the sea was a little rough, as soon as I got there, I needed to use the ladies room, so I went inside to use it, and Ghislaine Maxwell [Epstein’s associate and former girlfriend] was in the room that I had to walk through to get to the bathroom, and there were two girls there who I assumed were her children,” Shepherd told Raw Story.

Shepherd said she thought the teenage girls were Maxwell’s children “because of the way they were interacting,” which Shepherd compared to when “your mom was giving you instructions.”

In 2022, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for sex trafficking and other charges related to Epstein’s abuse of teenage girls.

Amid the current Epstein scandal, Maxwell is at the center of considerable attention. Last Friday, after giving a prison interview to Todd Blanche, Trump’s Deputy Attorney General, Maxwell was transferred from Florida to a minimum security facility in Texas.

“Things just did not seem right,” Shepherd said. “There was a lot of security. There was just a really strange vibe when I was there.”

Shepherd said she told her husband she was “not comfortable here,” and they left with Minsky and his wife to return to St. Thomas.

Shepherd said she didn’t report anything from her visit because “it was just a feeling.”

She and Lenat declined a Cycorp investment from Epstein. She did not recall the amount.

“Epstein had been considering investing in our company, and I said, ‘Doug, I don't like him. There's something wrong with him. I don't like him. He's a wheeler-dealer, and he's not the kind of person we want to be representing our technology,’ so we decided not to take his money.”

Shepherd recalled a conversation with her husband after Epstein was arrested in July 2019.

“It's like, ‘Wow, we really dodged that bullet,’” Shepherd said. “I'm really glad we got that feeling that he was skeevy because that would have been terrible. Terrible.”

‘That's rich guys for you’

During the symposium, Epstein “walk[ed] around like any sponsor of one of those things would,” Shepherd said.

Kuipers said: “It was clear he had a number of attractive young women around. Aside from just noticing that and thinking, ‘Well, that's rich guys for you,’ I really didn't have any sense that any of them were underage. Now, what that really means is it didn't occur to me to think about it.”

In August 2019, Slate reported that the AI theorist Roger Schank recalled Epstein walking into the symposium “with two girls on his arm.”

“[Epstein] was in the back, on a couch, hugging and kissing these girls,” said Schank, who died in 2023.

Neither Shepherd nor Kuipers remembered seeing Epstein hugging or kissing girls.

“I guess I had the impression that he had a number of assistants, and so they were functioning as assistants to him as he sort of hosted the conference,” Kuipers said.

“They were both at the conference itself in St. Thomas, and they were on the island. But, I mean, they were helping out, doing various things.”

Receiving a conference invite to a luxurious destination from a wealthy sponsor wasn’t out of the ordinary, Kuipers said.

“At the time, there were a variety of rich people who were interested in AI and would spend money to make this happen,” Kuipers said.

Epstein paid for accommodations and travel, offering rides on his jet, two attendees said.

Kuipers declined the ride since he was teaching at the University of Texas, Austin, so flying from New York “didn't make any sense at all.”

Aaron Sloman, 88, a philosopher and AI and cognitive researcher, attended the conference and co-authored a paper on the discussions. He told Raw Story via email Epstein paid for his travel from the U.K. He traveled on “a private plane owned by Epstein” to the island, he wrote.

“I think the accommodation provided by Epstein was lavish, though I can't remember details now,” said Sloman, citing memories “partly restricted by my slowly but steadily worsening dementia.”

The attendee who requested anonymity recalled staying in a “nice hotel” on St. Thomas.

Kuipers said: “Here was this rich guy, and he wanted to hold a conference … bringing together a whole bunch of people that I knew quite well, and we were talking about interesting things, and it was in the Virgin Islands ... so I figured, why not?

“Of course, a couple decades later, it became clear why not, but that was way in the future.”

‘Completely clueless’

Kuipers said the conference’s small size, with about 20 attendees, was appealing.

“The little ones tend to be particularly exciting because if you've got a bunch of people who are working on the same kind of stuff, then you can really spend a lot of time together, so I kind of felt like that was this,” Kuipers said.

“Clearly, news these days makes it pretty clear that there was a subtext going on. I was completely clueless.”

Kuipers said he didn’t remember spending time on St. Thomas beyond the conference days.

“We all spent a lot of time talking about how to solve these AI problems, and we had very compatible views,” Kuipers said. “We did go swimming. There’s a visual image of being on the beach and swimming in the water and enjoying that.”

Shepherd said she thought she and Lenat arrived a day early and stayed a day after the symposium.

“It's a beautiful island, and it’s almost like, ‘Oh, come to paradise for a meeting,’” she said.

Kuipers, Sloman and Shepherd all said the symposium did not have a significant impact on their work.

“I was actually somewhat disappointed because it had been built up as being this big deal, and it really wasn't,” Shepherd said.

Sloman said he didn’t remember if Epstein himself presented about AI or cognitive science.

“I think he was hoping to be able to use the new AI technology to extend/enhance his financial activities, though I don't recall that aspect being discussed,” Sloman wrote. “It could explain his motivation for spending so much money to bring people to the symposium.”

The attendee who requested anonymity described Epstein as “like an ADHD curious kid.”

“He was eccentric. If he had an interesting conversation with a scientist or liked them, he’d ask them what they would do if they had more funding,” the attendee wrote.

“Sometimes he’d ask a scientist a technical question, then would follow with a personal question, which I always found odd."

The same attendee said “Epstein had an interest in AI, believed it would grow in importance, and was very fond of Marvin Minsky.”

In a May 2016 deposition, unsealed in 2019, Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre — who killed herself in April this year — alleged Maxwell directed her to have sex with Minsky, The Verge reported. Minsky’s widow told the New York Post Minsky did not have sex with any girls.

“We were always together,” Rudisch said. “We didn’t stay at [Epstein’s] house or anything.”

Rudisch told the Post “none of” the girls at Epstein’s residences “seemed very young.”

“I’m a pediatrician, I think I would have noticed,” Rudisch said.

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As the U.S. and China race to develop advanced artificial intelligence chips — and as President Donald Trump recently considered broader restrictions on chip technology exports — publicly released technological innovations from hobbyist inventors in the U.S. could be giving foreign adversaries a competitive edge, experts tell Raw Story.

The stakes are high, as governments seek AI advances at unprecedented scale, with defense applications from satellites to stealth aircraft and missiles.

Irina Tsukerman, a foreign policy expert and national security lawyer, pointed to hobbyist inventors achieving advances in fields from drones to quantum communication and machine learning.

“A patented AI technique for optimizing logistics can be adapted for military planning by an enemy country, for instance, or a new sensor design could enhance missile guidance systems because a lot of missiles are now AI-guided,” Tsukerman said.

“They're civilian innovations, but they have potential military intelligence implications.”

‘Gray zone’

Innovations published online, especially those with defense applications, are subject to governmental export regulations. But research from inventors working outside traditional academic and business environments can go unmonitored, experts say.

Foreign companies and governments are searching the internet for research that falls in such a “gray zone,” Tsukerman said.

“When [inventors] publicize without adequate security review, or if there's no expert control oversight, they can become open source assets, so they're not just available to allies and commercial competitors but also to hostile state and non-state actors, and literally anybody who cares to open-mine,” Tsukerman told Raw Story.

“If one of these guys is masterminding a new type of AI chip, and that chip is not patented properly … China, that is basically working hard to automate as fast as possible and to make advances on the most top-of-the-line chips [but] cannot do so without exporting U.S. technologies, could use that sort of breakthrough for its own research.”

While a truly revolutionary idea would likely catch the attention of academic researchers or the U.S. government, that doesn’t stop foreign adversaries mining online research for advances in fields such as AI, experts say.

‘National security cracks’

One potential barrier to properly protecting independent innovations is the high cost of patenting, which can run between $25,000 to $30,000 as an attorney navigates the complex application process, said John N. Anastasi, a patent attorney in Boston.

“If you want to go outside the U.S., the cost can become exponential,” Anastasi said.

Nonetheless, “a patent is the only way to protect your invention,” said Mark Trenner, a patent attorney in Colorado.

The patenting process will also reveal any need for protection via “secrecy orders or export controls,” Anastasi said.

“If you have one of those sensitive areas, like something related to the military, they're not going to publish it. It's going to go under secrecy order,” Trenner said.

If an idea is published in the public domain without patent protections, inventors can lose foreign filing rights, Anastasi said. According to Tsukerman, “any future efforts to hide this is a no-go.”

Patented ideas enter the public domain 18 months after filing, but “a patent gives you the right to stop somebody else from making, using or selling your patented invention in the country that you have the patent,” Anastasi said.

Foreign competitors and governments scour patent databases, Tsukerman said, adding that such actors sometimes employ open source intelligence frameworks that look to replicate and build upon “emergent technologies that have slipped through national security cracks.”

”Any publicly available patent or trademark, anyone can look at … and adversaries can use that against us, and they do,” said John Price, founder of SubRosa, a cybersecurity firm.

“Everything from adversarial nations using it to even just corporate espionage, you could tell a lot about what a company’s developing from what they’re filing for patents.”

The same goes for government grant announcements and requests for research proposals.

“I could definitely see that being an attack vector, and [it] probably is something they're mining all the time, just to get a sense of what it is the government is asking for,” said Peter Morales, CEO at Code Metal, an AI start-up.

‘Blind spot’

Morales said, “There are plenty of hobbyists that have had huge impacts in AI specifically.”

But hobbyists unaffiliated with universities, federal agencies or government contractors “don't necessarily know all the potential weaponized applications of the invention because they're civilians,” Tsukerman said.

“It basically creates a blind spot and a weak pathway for intellectual capital that otherwise would be guarded under things like International Traffic in Arms Regulations or the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States,” U.S. government programs under the Department of State and the Treasury.

“Those have specific, highly prioritized legal processes that guard intellectual property from being disseminated to inappropriate venues,” Tsukerman said.

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While still under the leadership of Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) consulted with the leader of a little known arm of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), a memo obtained by Raw Story revealed — prompting legal and academic experts to warn of potential trouble ahead.

On March 19, Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale issued a “situational update” to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), USPS’s law enforcement arm, about a meeting with DOGE, according to the memo, which Raw Story received through a Freedom of Information Act request.

In the memo, Barksdale reiterated former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s requests for assistance from DOGE as outlined in a March 17 letter to Congress, including help with “efforts to combat counterfeit postage.”

But Barksdale also provided a new recommendation “when [DOGE representatives] asked for specifics on how they could assist us,” asking for "administrative subpoena authority.”

The request “essentially allows for government agencies to issue requests, subpoenas, without any type of specific judicial intervention or judicial approval,” said Felix Shipkevich, a professor of law at Hofstra University.

The request surprised more than half a dozen experts who reviewed the memo.

“I think this foray into the postal inspector’s realm, into his office, is to put the postal inspector on notice that DOGE is looking at them,” said James O’Rourke, a professor of management at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business who studies the postal service.

“The endgame is the dissolution of the U.S. Postal Service. Parts will be sold, and it will be entirely privatized, if the current administration gets its way.”

DOGE aims to slash trillions of dollars from federal budgets, resulting in cancelled government contracts, thousands of redundancies at government agencies, and intense controversy over Musk’s access to federally held data.

The world’s richest man last week left the Trump administration to return to businesses including Tesla and SpaceX.

But DOGE remains active.

A USPS spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. Representatives of DOGE and its House caucus could not be reached.

‘Mail theft epidemic’

USPIS is tasked with protecting the mail and investigating mail-related crimes. It employs more than 1,250 inspectors and nearly 450 police officers, according to its 2023 fiscal year report.

Mail theft and violent crimes against letter carriers have skyrocketed. Letter carrier robberies increased 543 percent in a three-year period, according to an exclusive Raw Story investigation.

In May 2024, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report calling on USPIS to better document decision-making processes in the wake of such a surge in mail-related crime.

USPS agreed with the GAO’s three recommendations, but they remain open a year later, said Derrick Collins, GAO’s director of physical infrastructure.

“They've told us that they're going to identify metrics or factors that they'll consider when making workforce decisions, but that's the extent of the information that we have at this point from them,” Collins told Raw Story. “They've not given us any additional details or timeframes.”

Asked if broader administrative subpoena authority could aid USPIS in investigating serious mail crimes, Collins said, “it did not come up in the course of our work, and we didn't explore it in part because it didn't come up.”

The U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General — an independent agency examining fraud, waste and abuse — also investigated USPS’s response to mail theft, finding ineffective efforts in stopping robberies of mail keys and collection boxes.

Tara Linne, a spokesperson for the USPS Office of Inspector General, told Raw Story the agency “didn’t address the administrative subpoena authority in any of our reports” and referred questions to USPIS.

The “mail theft epidemic” coincides with a 2020 statute reinterpretation restricting postal police officers to working on Postal Service properties, unable to intervene in mail crimes on the street, said Frank Albergo, president of the Postal Police Officers Association union (PPOA).

The PPOA and Postal Service remain in litigation about the jurisdiction of postal police officers.

“The Inspection Service now wants to essentially bypass the judicial process and then leave it up to themselves … they want to hoard investigative authority while they bench their own postal police force,” Albergo said.

“Think of how contradictory this is. So, their uniformed police officers don't have any authority to protect postal workers and mail, and yet their postal inspectors should have administrative subpoena power?”

A postal police officer in Detroit greets a letter carrier (Photo courtesy of the Postal Police Officers Association)

USPIS recently joined a Department of Homeland Security task force detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants, and participated in a drug and immigration enforcement raid in Colorado Springs alongside the FBI and IRS, the Washington Post reported.

“It’s a safe assumption that they would use this administrative subpoena authority to go after illegal immigrants,” Albergo said.

Albergo said both Democrats and Republicans in Congress were “really getting annoyed at the Inspection Service and mail theft,” adding: “It's just not going away that they have a police force that they refuse to use. What is the Inspection Service busy doing? They're busy asking for administrative subpoena power. If they were serious, they would ask for postal police power.”

‘Fishing expedition’

Approximately 335 executive branch agencies possess subpoena authority, including the Postal Service, according to a 2002 report to Congress by the Department of Justice, the latest available report.

That scope of authority extends to the postmaster general, said Harold J. Krent, a professor of law at the Illinois Institute of Technology who served in the Office of Management and Budget under President Joe Biden.

Barksdale’s request could signal an interest in “broader use of the subpoena power,” Krent said, adding: “They might want that enforcement authority to spread to more members of the agency.

“At the same time, if you have more agencies that have subpoena power, that then minimizes procedural protections that you might get from centralizing the power.”Krent said administrative subpoena authority is “incredibly important” and “a critical part of the arsenal agencies wield,” but “tensions” can arise if there are not “constraints for private parties, so that they're not fishing expeditions, there's not invasion of privacy.”

O’Rourke took Barksdale’s request to be “a fishing expedition, clearly.”

Shipkevich said administrative subpoena authority was a “very important power” but “overreach” can occur.

Whether DOGE should be involved in USPIS, and USPS overall, is up for debate.

Rick Geddes, a Cornell University economics professor who researches the Postal Service, said the agency had a “government-owned monopoly” over first-class and standard mail.

“It is unlawful to compete with the Postal Service in those areas — it's a crime. That's a recipe for inefficiency,” Geddes said, adding that there could be “a particularly useful role for DOGE to play in cases where a firm performs a fundamentally commercial service, and this is physical document delivery.”

Furthermore, the USPS reported a $9.5 billion loss in the 2024 fiscal year, compared to a net loss of $6.5 billion the year prior.

“A high fixed cost in the face of declining revenue in your core business is a recipe for losses, for fiscal instability,” Geddes said.

O’Rourke, however, said asking the Postal Service to turn a profit would represent a “downward” slope toward privatization of the mail and other agencies like the National Park Service and National Weather Service.

“We do not ask the Marine Corps to make money,” he said. “We don't ask the fire department to make money. We don't even ask them to break even because they don't. They can't.

“We're asking that of government services like the Postal Service. The demand is ‘start making money, or we'll take over and sell you, and we'll show you how to make money.’”

Barksdale said in the memo that USPIS and DOGE “share a common goal to eliminate unnecessary spending, identify redundancies and build efficiencies across organizations.”

Keith LaShier, a former president of the Association of United States Postal Lessors, said “it’s appropriate for the Postal Service to seek outside professional consultant help, on occasion.”

But LaShier, who has been a postmaster and worked in USPS finance, said it would be “very difficult for an outside entity” like DOGE to quickly resolve issues given that the Postal Service has “an endless number of stakeholders.”

“DOGE from what I've seen, just on a personal level, doesn't care what the stakeholders think,” LaShier said.

“It scares me as to what they might encourage the Postal Service to do or gain administration support to impose some changes that are not carefully thought out.”

O’Rourke said Barksdale’s meeting with DOGE was “concerning” and could signal a “principal way to get a foot in the door” as a path toward privatization, an effort reportedly advocated by DOGE and the General Services Administration.

“The sale and dissolution of the Postal Service would return us to the 1920s where there was no rural free delivery,” O’Rourke said.

“You can see, honestly, that it's the poor who will be disadvantaged the most.”

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A breastfeeding Florida mother with a pending asylum application remains in custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) more than two weeks after filing a petition for writ of habeas corpus, calling into question the “legality” and “cruelty” of Trump administration deportation and detention efforts, immigration justice advocates say.

As first reported by Raw Story, Yury Ussa Polania, 43, of Winter Park, Fla., has been held by ICE since May 4, and has been moved through at least five facilities across the state following her arrest for alleged petty theft on May 2.

Ussa Polania, born in Colombia, is now 200 miles from her family at Broward Transitional Center, an ICE detention facility in Pompano Beach, Fla., according to the ICE online detainee locator and her legal team.

A family member confirmed that Ussa Polania has not seen any relative in person since she was taken by ICE. Ussa Polania has been allowed a video call with her husband and their children.

“It’s just terrible to think about the emotional impact that this is having and the developmental impact this is having on her [1-year-old, U.S. citizen] daughter,” said Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, an advocacy and policy nonprofit.

“This is just emblematic of the cruelty of this administration's immigrant enforcement policies, honestly.”

In her petition for writ of habeas corpus, Ussa Polania requested immediate release, claiming her “custody is in violation of the laws and Constitution of the United States.” The petition named as respondents Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security; Pam Bondi, U.S. Attorney General; Pete R. Flores, Acting Commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection; ICE; the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and the Warden of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

On May 20, the respondents filed a motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction. It was referred to Magistrate Judge Leslie Hoffman Price, according to filings in the U.S. District Court, Middle District of Florida.

Mike Alvarez, media operations unit chief at ICE headquarters, acknowledged Raw Story’s questions about Ussa Polania but did not respond by the time of publication.

Early on Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed Republicans’ “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a spending measure including pay raises for ICE and border patrol agents, according to a Truth Social post from President Donald Trump.

In response to a request for comment, Deputy White House press secretary Abigail Jackson said: “The detained illegal immigrant is a citizen of Colombia who overstayed her visa and was arrested for petit larceny while already being in the United States illegally. President Trump is keeping his promise to the American people to deport illegal aliens and they are incredibly supportive of his immigration agenda.”

Jackson also questioned Raw Story's reporting, saying: “I noticed in your previous you use terms like: 'breastfeeding mom of US citizen' and 'breastfeeding mother from Colombia living in Florida' — is there a reason you refuse to say 'illegal immigrant?'”

In response, Raw Story explained that Ussa Polania’s legal team said their client did not enter or stay in the U.S. illegally.

When Raw Story asked for documentation about Ussa Polania’s illegal status as alleged by the White House, Jackson said: “She overstayed her visa and is illegally present in the US.”

‘Sad reality’

Immigration experts tell Raw Story ICE is likely continuing to hold Ussa Polania because of the zero tolerance policy for theft and mandatory detention guidelines in the Laken Riley Act, a law signed when Trump returned to office and named for a college student murdered in February 2024 by a Venezuelan man who entered the U.S. illegally.

“If you look at the law, it seems like even if she has a pending application, though they're not allowed to deport her without her consent or without her abandoning her application, they could still keep her behind bars,” Orozco said.

Ussa Polania was booked at Seminole County Jail on May 2 for charges related to petty theft with an estimated value between $100 and $750, according to Frances Matos in the booking department at Seminole County Jail and an arrest report from the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office shared with Raw Story.

Stefany Garcia Izquierdo, 34, a family member, shared a receipt showing Ussa Polania's husband paid a $500 bond on May 3, yet she wasn't released.

Ussa Polania “left with ICE” on May 4, Matos said.

Jay Bar-Levy, a paralegal for Ussa Polania’s attorney, Daniel Perez, said there was a "misunderstanding at a Walmart for $34."

Bar-Levy said ICE is “coercing her to sign a voluntary departure, which is not normal.”

“You don't do that, especially with people that are claiming that they are facing harm in the countries where they came from now,” Bar-Levy said.

Ussa Polania has a pending asylum application under the Convention Against Torture and a work authorization through 2029, according to her petition.

Under past administrations, ICE might have considered allowing Ussa Polania to leave detention, given her primary caretaker responsibilities to her 1-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son, with lawyers able to request an ankle monitor or more frequent check-ins while she pursued her legal process, Orozco said.

“This is the sad reality of what we expected was going to happen under the Laken Riley Act, that people with very minor issues are going to be taken into custody by ICE, and they're not going to have any recourse just because of the way the law is written,” Orozco said.

“It's very black and white, and it doesn't allow for the nuances of people's existence to be taken into account.”

Adriana Rivera, communications director for the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said the Trump administration doesn’t give “a hoot about due process” or “legality” in cases like Ussa Polania’s.

“[The Trump administration is] really being just blatantly unlawful, and that can be evidenced by all of the litigation that has been brought forth, all of the fights in the courts, the fact that even Trump-appointed judges, Bush-appointed judges have said ‘this is illegal. You cannot do this,’” Rivera said.

“What's even more shocking is the fact that they continue to brazenly not only continue their behavior, but also not pay attention to what the courts are saying.”

A federal judge said Wednesday the Trump administration violated a court order on deportations when eight immigrants were sent to South Sudan.

“Everybody in this country is entitled to due process,” Rivera said. “This isn't just something that you get once you become a U.S. citizen.”

Rivera said Ussa Polania’s case reminded her of Heidy Sánchez, who was deported to Cuba in late April, separated from her 17-month-old daughter and husband, both U.S. citizens.

“It's unfortunate that a lot of people fell into the lies and the manipulation of the administration using words such as ‘We're going to go after criminals,’ when it was all code,” Rivera said.

“It was just a coded language to say, if you don't have a regularized status, you are one of these ‘criminals’ that we're going to go after.”

‘Shame on you, Rick Scott’

Alianza Republicana de Las Americas, a Republican group, requested assistance from Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) with Ussa Polania’s case, but his office “refused to intervene because of the political climate,” said Bar-Levy, a member of the alliance.

“It’s a shame that your office is staying away from intervening in humanitarian cases such as this one and all because you don’t want to upset @realDonaldTrump!” Alianza Republicana posted on X on May 8.

“We are a Republican Alliance that fully supports our president’s decisions but NOT THIS ONE!”

Spokespeople for Scott did not respond to a request for comment.

Raw Story reached out to Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL) and Reps. Cory Mills (R-FL) and Maxwell Frost (D-FL) for comment, without response.

A spokesperson for Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-CT), who publicly expressed regretting voting for the Laken Riley Act, acknowledged Raw Story’s questions but did not comment.

Bar-Levy said Ussa Polania has been granted little contact with her attorney, and the legal team was planning to request bond on Thursday.

“She doesn't understand why her lawyer is being prevented from communicating,” Bar-Levy said.

Cristian Correa Izquierdo, Ussa Polania’s husband, told Raw Story on May 16 the situation was “not good,” but “we have faith she can get out.”

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With the closure of a nearby Planned Parenthood clinic at the beginning of May, students from Utah State University in Logan, Utah, face a “scary” situation in terms of accessing health care, prompting the creation of a carpool to drive patients on two-hour round trips to a clinic 50 miles away, community members told Raw Story.

Bridget Ackroyd, a USU senior, said Logan was “secluded” and “in its own little bubble,” with no public transit to reach Ogden, the closest Planned Parenthood clinic that remains open.

The loss of the Logan clinic hurts students who "might be in family situations where they are not able to charge something like an STI test to their health insurance, but they still want to make sure that they're healthy and safe," Ackroyd said.

The Logan clinic is one of two Planned Parenthood health centers in Utah — among at least a dozen across the U.S., according to Raw Story analysis — to shutter since President Donald Trump took office and froze federal funds for family planning services.

“It's just heartbreaking that now we know that those folks who relied on us either have to travel, defer care or figure out other ways to access the kind of health care they've depended on,” Shireen Ghorbani, interim president of the Planned Parenthood Association of Utah, told Raw Story.

“It's a big blow to these communities.”

A late-March freeze on Title X grants — federal funds which support family planning services from contraception to cancer screenings and testing for sexually transmitted infections — is just the start of funding challenges for Planned Parenthood health centers across the U.S., with more than 300 of its nearly 600 clinics across the country utilizing Title X funds.

Proposed cuts to Medicaid as part of a Republican megabill that advanced out of the House Budget Committee late Sunday but is still being negotiated between GOP factions would hit Planned Parenthood centers which also receive reimbursement from patients paying for services with Medicaid.

“The dismantling of health care in this country is happening before our very eyes,” Ghorbani said, “and now in this new budget … removing Title X, reductions in Medicaid, all of this is really spiraling us into a very, very bleak future when it comes to access to health care, especially for folks living on the margins in this country.”

Planned Parenthood has lost more than $20 million in Title X grants and $6 million for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, said Laurel Sakai, national director of public policy and government affairs at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

“We fully anticipate that we are kind of just the tip of the iceberg and that Title X funding may fully go away under this administration,” Ghorbani said.

‘Dismantling access’

The Planned Parenthood Association of Utah decided to shutter its Logan and St. George clinics on May 2, after the Trump administration froze $2.8 million in Title X funds.

In 2024, the clinic in Logan served 1,650 patients, and the St. George clinic served nearly 3,000, according to Ghorbani, who said 18 staff members lost their jobs.

Ackroyd, the USU senior, told Raw Story the closure of the Logan clinic was a “loss” for students who used a sliding-scale payment option instead of billing their parents’ insurance.

“If they're getting something like a birth control prescription or an STI exam, and they have parents that might have a very negative reaction if they see that charge, it puts into question the safety of those students that want to be able to access that health care without necessarily notifying parents,” Ackroyd said.

Alternative health care options in Logan are Intermountain Health and the campus health center but both rely on using insurance, Ackroyd said. Plus, she said, patients are likely to be stuck “waiting for sometimes hours and hours.”

Ackroyd said that at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Logan, she was able to get a next-day appointment for an intrauterine device.

“The Trump administration is dismantling access to … critical health care, by restricting these funds,” Ghorbani said. “It means that care goes away. People's jobs go away, and those decisions were made because of the actions of the Trump administration.”

‘Fundamental misunderstanding’

According to health policy nonprofit KFF, Planned Parenthood receives a third of its revenue from state and federal government funds.

But because of the Hyde Amendment, a federal measure passed in 1977, Planned Parenthood health centers do not receive any federal funds to provide abortions — which according to KFF make up just 4 percent of services performed at Planned Parenthood clinics.

In its newly released 2023-2024 annual report, Planned Parenthood confirmed that of more than 9.45 million services performed, 402,230 were abortions, while 34 percent of its revenue came from government health services reimbursements and grants.

Regardless, in late April, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced that defunding “big abortion” was among Trump’s policy priorities.

Sakai said attacks on Planned Parenthood are “not terribly surprising considering they went after us during the first Trump administration.”

But, “Planned Parenthood is not a line item in the budget,” Sakai said. “Patients choose to go to Planned Parenthood in order to get their health care that they need, and they're trying to take away that right and that choice of people.”

Cara Schumann, deputy director of federal strategies at abortion justice organization, All* Above All, said one in 11 women, particularly those on Medicaid, get reproductive health care from Planned Parenthood clinics.

That means cuts to Medicaid as well as federal grants like Title X and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program would be a “double whammy” for Planned Parenthood, she said.

“This is them attempting to defund Planned Parenthood clinics for reproductive health care they provide, so cancer screenings, STI screenings, basic contraceptives,” Schumann told Raw Story.

“What it seems is just like a fundamental misunderstanding of what Planned Parenthood does, what health care is, what services people need.”

Sakai said Planned Parenthood was gearing up to work with “champions in Congress” to “fight back against [the cuts] with any tools they have, to show that this isn't really about the budget or about any of their concerns they're pretending to raise about waste, fraud and abuse of the Medicaid program.”

“We know their goal is to shut down health centers, and we know that our clinics are doing everything possible to keep care in their communities.”

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From the beloved children’s show “Bluey” to the blockbuster “Harry Potter” films, directors and producers have warned that President Donald Trump’s proposed 100 percent tariff on movies made in “foreign lands” would damage the U.S. entertainment industry’s ability to produce hit shows.

But Lamont Pete, a veteran reality TV producer, told Raw Story “nobody should really pay this much mind,” because Trump’s May 4 Truth Social post isn’t grounded in “reality.”

“When he came out and said this I don't think he really thought it through, but surprise, surprise, that would not be the first,” Pete said. “Honestly, I think nobody should really pay this much mind … that’s the most ridiculous s-–t I’ve ever heard.”

Earlier this month, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was “authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative, to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”

“WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!” Trump said.

The next day, the White House said “no final decisions" had been made about instituting film tariffs. It did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

“Common is not even a word” to describe how often film and TV producers use locations outside of the U.S. for filming or hire international talent, said Pete, whose near-25-year career has included casting for shows such as “The Real World,” “Dating Naked,” “Wild ‘n Out” and “The Simple Life”.

“It's really, when are they not?” said Pete, who has also worked on movies including “Respect,” about the singer Aretha Franklin.

“It works out pretty well when you can do that because you can get the best creative work from any part of the globe. It's not always gonna be localized. It’s just not reality.”

Pete said the entertainment industry was still recovering from COVID-19, with filmmakers continuing to work on shrunken budgets — which often takes them to countries like Australia or Canada, which offer tax incentives.

The day after Trump’s post, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed working with the president on a $7.5 billion federal film tax credit plan.

“If you really care, you would say … everything made in the U.S., from pre- to post-[production], we're going to give you these tax credits, and it's gonna incentivize you to be here,” Pete said.

“That's what somebody who actually wants to see our industry thrive would do. [Trump’s] not that guy.”

Pete challenged the feasibility of enforcing tariffs on films that use international locations and questioned the concept of instituting tariffs on intellectual property rather than products.

“You gonna monitor the back credits? ‘Ooh, I think they went to Korea and did this’? You can't put tariffs on IP. It's intellectual property — concepts people think about. You can put tariffs on goods, but how do you tax an idea?”

‘It’s idiocy’

Thousands of economists have spoken out against Trump’s tariffs policy, which made the costs of imports soar, particularly from China.

“It's idiocy. It's like saying two plus two equals zero,” Donald Boudreaux, a leader of the Anti-Tariff Declaration and former chair of the Department of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., told Raw Story of Trump’s love for tariffs.

“It makes no sense. You can say it, but it’s just illogical.”

On Monday, the U.S. and China came to an agreement for a 90-day pause on 145 percent tariffs Trump instated last month, shrinking tariffs on Chinese imports to 30 percent, with 10 percent tariffs on U.S. goods going the other way.

“I can't believe that now Hollywood is in trouble,” said Jeep Kline, who teaches finance at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

“It's not a good idea to use tariff policy as a broad swath of how we actually protect and support any particular industry.”

Tariffs of any kind end up hurting those who work on film and TV sets as they are consumers, said Kline, founder and managing partner at Raisewell Ventures.

Boudreaux said of Trump: “He just has no plan. He just loves tariffs. I will give the man this: I think he is not acting in a venal way. I think he is — because he's been this way for 40 years — sincerely ideologically committed to tariffs.”

Pete, who said he crossed paths with Trump when he was the star of NBC’s “The Apprentice,” said he thinks Trump’s tariff attacks on the film industry are more of a “private get back” — because Trump has long been “ridiculed” by Hollywood stars.

“I think that this has more to do with a man who's been shunned by an industry that he wished at one point he was accepted by,” Pete said.

“He's been the butt of so many jokes, and Hollywood has been a thorn in his side. So, of course, you're gonna wake up one morning and say, ‘Man, how can I show Hollywood that I'm not to be messed with?’”

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A breastfeeding mother from Colombia living in Florida with a pending asylum application was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Sunday and faces a potential transfer to Texas, according to a filing in the U.S. District Court, Middle District of Florida, obtained by Raw Story.

Despite Yury Ussa Polania's claim of “lawful presence” in the U.S. and “irreparable harm” to her young child, a U.S. citizen to whom she provides primary care, immigration lawyers said the 43-year-old, who filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus following her arrest for a "non-violent misdemeanor" on May 5, faces an “uphill battle” to be released — a situation becoming more common under the Trump administration's hardline immigration policy, Hector Diaz, an immigration attorney in Miami, told Raw Story.

Jay Bar-Levy, a paralegal for Daniel Perez, Ussa Polania's lawyer in Gainesville, Fla., said she was being subjected to "diesel therapy" — a prison slang term for inmates being transported and transferred to different facilities. Bar-Levy also said Ussa Polania was being pressured to sign a voluntary deportation agreement and had been in four facilities since her arrest last Friday.

Perez declined to comment.

"When they want a defendant to plead guilty, what they do is they don't let them sleep, and they transfer them from place to place until the person gets tired," Bar-Levy told Raw Story.

"This is un-American to try to force or coerce someone to get tired and voluntarily sign the death penalty, technically … she faces a horrible, horrible fate if she goes back to wherever she came from."

Filing a petition for writ of habeas corpus means Ussa Polania alleges her detention “goes against the Constitution, and for that reason, [she] should be released immediately,” said Nicole Whitaker, founder and managing attorney at Whitaker Legal, an immigration law firm in Maryland.

Whitaker and Diaz reviewed Ussa Polania’s filing, shared by Raw Story. Neither is representing Ussa Polania.

“In my opinion, she's not being treated fairly, but she's being treated just like everybody else is being treated, which is they don't care that she just had a child,” said Diaz, managing partner at Your Immigration Attorney. "Even then, the likelihood of success is very small.”

Ussa Polania is currently more than 100 miles away from Seminole County Jail in Sanford, Fla., where she was first held. Her last known whereabouts is now Pinellas County Jail in Clearwater, Fla, according to a database from the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office and and the online detainee locator system from ICE.

In her petition, Ussa Polania said she faces “imminent transfer to Texas.”

Ussa Polania was booked at Seminole County Jail on May 2 for charges related to petty theft with an estimated value between $100 and $750, according to Frances Matos in the booking department at Seminole County Jail and an arrest report from the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office shared with Raw Story.

Ussa Polania “left with ICE” on May 4, Matos said.

Bar-Levy, the paralegal for Ussa Polania's lawyer, said there was a "misunderstanding at a Walmart for $34."

Stefany Garcia Izquierdo, 34, a family member of Ussa Polania, shared with Raw Story a receipt that Ussa Polania's husband paid on May 3 for her $500 bond, yet she wasn't released.

Ussa Polania is married to Garcia Izquierdo's cousin and also has an 11-year-old son. Garcia Izquierdo is godmother to Ussa Polania's baby daughter.

Garcia Izquierdo, a preschool teacher, is helping take care of the children with Ussa Polania's sister. That has been challenging, Garcia Izquierdo said, as the baby has been crying and experiencing diarrhea. The girl is being fed with breast milk Ussa Polania had refrigerated.

"For $34, look how hard she's been going. This is a nightmare," Garcia Izquierdo told Raw Story.

The Orange County Corrections Department told Raw Story Ussa Polania was being detained at Pinellas County Jail but did not confirm if she was ever held by the Orange County Corrections Department. The public information officer declined to provide comment from the warden, named as a respondent in Ussa Polania's petition.

The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office’s website shows Ussa Polania was booked on May 6 at 3:37 p.m. and remains in custody.

“I think it's wild that she was detained without having any more serious criminal convictions,” Whitaker said. “It's just a waste of resources, and it's clearly just this intent to inflate their enforcement numbers.”

In her petition, Ussa Polania challenges her “continued detention” and says she is both the mother of a U.S citizen child and holds “valid work authorization through 2029 pursuant to her pending application for asylum and protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT).”

The filing names as respondents Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security; Pam Bondi, U.S. Attorney General; Pete R. Flores, Acting Commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection; ICE; the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and the Warden of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

The White House, ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Orange County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to requests for comment. According to a filing from Judge Carlos E. Mendoza, respondents have until May 27 to respond to the petition.

Megan Mann, chief deputy of operations for the Middle District of Florida, confirmed the case was "pending."

Raw Story attempted to contact Ussa Polania and her husband but did not receive a response.

Bar-Levy said: "Even though I voted for Trump, it doesn't mean that I'm gonna allow these kind of things to happen. This is not normal."

‘Carte blanche’

Whitaker and Diaz said they have worked with clients in similar situations.

Whitaker said she represented a Hondouran national in Baltimore, Md., who lives with his girlfriend and infant child. The man, who has no criminal record, “not even a traffic violation,” had approved special immigrant juvenile status and deferred action, meaning “protection from deportation based on his approved petition,” Whitaker said.

The man made a delivery on a military base. Based on his work permit identifying him as an immigrant, ICE was called, Whitaker said. Without detention facilities in Maryland, the man was transferred to two facilities in Arizona, requiring him to hire three lawyers.

“Procedurally, because there's so many people being detained, because there aren't enough people, there's not enough organization in the detention center,” said Whitaker, who said her client had yet to be processed when she went to the ICE holding facility in Baltimore, meaning a formal bond request wasn’t heard before the man was transferred to Arizona.

“They want to increase how effective their enforcement looks, but in doing so, they're just detaining anyone who is considered low-hanging fruit, including people that are lawfully here, that are eventually going to go before an immigration judge and be released on their own recognizance,” Whitaker said.

Diaz said he appears in Texas “a lot,” typically experiencing “zero tolerance for any arrests.”

He represented a 22-year-old Brazilian man who came to the U.S. with his mother at 10 years old. The family couldn’t afford to return to San Antonio for a hearing, and the man “didn't know he was supposed to go to court,” Diaz said.

Even though the man had “zero, nothing … on his record” and was “taking care of an autistic sister,” judges were hesitant to release him on $7,500 bond, Diaz said.

“Now ICE officers and everybody else thinks that they have carte blanche to do whatever they want, and there's no accountability to anybody because they feel that leadership is going to back them up for whatever they do, so they're just doing whatever they want.”

‘Treated like a number’

Ussa Polania will likely face an “uphill battle if she goes to Texas and goes in front of those judges,” Diaz said.

Especially because Donald Trump signed the hardline Laken Riley Act into law in January, Ussa Polania might face “mandatory detention” for the petty theft charge, Diaz said.

“I know how she's going to be treated. She's going to be treated like a number,” Diaz said. “Immigration obviously doesn't care about your personal circumstances, and now, there's basically zero tolerance for anything.”

Diaz anticipates an ICE attorney will recommend no bond for Ussa Polania and defense against deportation will be “super hard,” even for asylum as Colombians face abuse from militant groups, as detailed by Human Rights Watch and CNN.

“They're going to wear her out, and then, if she has the wherewithal to withstand all that, she can make it to an asylum individual merits hearing, which will probably be four to six months down the line,” Diaz said.

“She'll have to stay in custody. What does that do? It makes you want to give up. ‘I'd rather go home than be incarcerated for six months.’ That's probably what's going to happen if she does not get out on bond.”

Whitaker was more optimistic that Ussa Polania would get to stay in the U.S. for a hearing before an immigration judge, but acknowledged it takes “forever,” even for a non-detained individual — as much as 10 years.

“It’s cases like these that are clogging up the system in general,” Whitaker said. “It’s making it, ironically, hard for her to get this bond hearing that she needs so quickly to be released.”

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At Christa Webb’s home in suburban Atlanta, a bicycle collects dust in the garage and a bedroom sits empty, its walls painted light pink, its closet full of clothes. They are meant for Cora, a little girl from China who was matched with Webb and her family for adoption more than five years ago.

Webb, her husband and her two biological children have dealt with grief and confusion as their plans to finalize the adoption of the then-three-year-old girl with a congenital heart defect have encountered a series of political hurdles.

Now, President Donald Trump’s tariffs on China are poised to make circumstances worse for the Webbs, one of more than 200 families holding out a last hope to bring home children in foster care and orphanages that they matched with, experts tell Raw Story.

“It's the kind of thing that governments do. ‘You're hurting us? We're going to hurt you. You're hurting our people? You're hurting our exporters? We're going to hurt people who want to adopt children in our countries,’” said Donald Boudreaux, a former chair of the Department of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

“That's the big picture: just the unnecessary antagonism causes foreign governments to take retaliatory actions.”

China suspended its international adoption program last August. More than 200 families were then awaiting approval to travel to China and finalize adoptions.

Webb told Raw Story: “It has been the hardest thing, the pain of this and the grief and the anger and the uncertainty has been the hardest thing my family has had to walk through, and it doesn't pale in comparison to the pain that our daughter feels because she deserves a family.”

Webb’s adoption was coordinated through a Christian ministry, Lifeline Children’s Services. It has been communicating with the Trump administration to try to get pending adoptions finalized.

The ministry’s executive director, Herbie Newell, told Raw Story he hoped Trump would talk to China’s President Xi Jinping, after 115 bipartisan members of Congress signed a letter in March advocating for the finalization of the pending adoptions. When Trump announced as much as a 145 percent tariff on Chinese imports, adoption discussions between the two presidents seemed much less likely, Newell said.

“I'm afraid that these kids are either going to be a bargaining chip on the table, or they're going to be forgotten in the trade war,” Newell said. “That's what we've been trying to highlight for this administration is don't let these kids be a bargaining chip. Don't let them be forgotten amidst the economic reality of the trade war with China.”

The State Department has “urged China to process the adoptions for U.S. families matched with children there,” a spokesperson told Raw Story.

“We deeply sympathize with the families and children affected by the government of China’s decision to end intercountry adoptions,” the spokesperson said. “We are committed to sharing updates with families and adoption service providers when we have them.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Kevin Cramer (R-ND) initiated the letter to Trump. Neither responded to requests for comment.

‘A trial like no other’

Before being matched with a child in China, Webb said, she and her husband participated in a four-month, “very rigorous education process,” which involved learning about parenting children from other countries who’ve experienced trauma or have medical conditions and disabilities.

After matching with a different girl in August 2019, Webb and her family “hit some grief” when they learned that a “paperwork error” occurred and another family was adopting her.

It wasn’t until January 2020 that the family’s caseworker gave them the file for Cora, the American name Webb planned to use alongside the girl’s given Chinese name, which Webb declined to share.

“I cried, and we knew that she was our little girl,” Webb said.

Under COVID-19, China halted adoption travel in January 2020 but continued processing paperwork, Webb said. The family matched with Cora in March 2020 and got paperwork approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“There's paperwork that China produced that has mine and my husband's name, and it has her name, and it says you can adopt her,” Webb said. “We have the U.S. immigration paperwork. All of it is set up and ready. We just need the finalization of it.”

While waiting for travel approval from China, Webb prepared Cora’s bedroom and met with doctors to discuss the girl’s congenital heart defect, which would need to be repaired before her fifth birthday for her to have a “sustainable, healthy life,” Webb said.

Cora is now eight — and still at an orphanage in northern China.

The family sent packages, including a tricycle, dresses and a winter coat, plus teas and treats for her caretakers. In return, Webb received videos and photos.

The last photo the family received was in August 2022. It showed Cora eating Rice Krispies Treats the Webbs sent in a care package.

“There's a video of her saying ‘Hi, Mommy and Daddy’ in Mandarin to us … one where she's singing a little nursery rhyme in Mandarin to us,” Webb said.

Webb said the family spent years ready to travel to China at a moment’s notice, and are still prepared to hop on a plane within 24 hours.

“It's a trial like no other to love a little girl 3,000-plus miles away, and you can't get to her and you know she needs medical intervention and therapies,” Webb said.

‘Appalling’ cost of tariffs

The State Department has hosted calls to provide updates on adoptions but the calls have started to peter out, Webb said, adding that families are unclear how China’s August decision to end international adoptions affects them.

“They did not say in that announcement what they were going to do with families that were matched with children, so that is what our government and the prior presidential administration and the current presidential administration, what we've been trying to get them to clarify is if families that were officially matched would be able to complete their adoptions because there's paperwork,” Webb said.

Newell said Lifeline Children’s Services lobbied Trump’s first administration “to talk to their counterparts, President Xi, over in China” to get pending adoptions finalized after the COVID-19 pause.

“Being very pragmatic, the Chinese government said the U.S. is about to go through a large-scale election, let's wait and see what happens with the elections,” Newell said.

Newell said Klobuchar and the Congressional Coalition on Adoption tried to make inroads with former President Joe Biden’s administration, and former Secretary of State Antony Blinken was set to make a “diplomatic ask.”

“That was right when the spy balloon floated across the United States, which derailed that, and there wasn't a lot of action towards the waning days of the Biden administration,” said Newell of the Chinese balloon that flew over the U.S. in 2023.

“We've now started to try to step in with the Trump administration and say, ‘Look, since your first term, there are these 300 kids. They've been promised to U.S. families. Those U.S. families have gone through the immigration process. We need to advocate for these kids to come home.’”

The March letter from members of Congress urged Trump to “elevate this engagement and press the Chinese government to finalize pending adoption cases so these children may finally be united with their adoptive families in the United States.” The letter emphasized that many of the children have “special health care needs.”

Again, Newell hoped Trump would talk with Xi, but “the tariff and trade war has hampered those efforts,” he said.

Boudreaux, a leader of the Anti-Tariff Declaration and author of a new book, “The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism,” said “damage has already been done” in terms of the U.S. relationship with China, thanks to Trump’s tariffs.

“The antagonism naturally throws up from foreign governments more barriers, bureaucratic red tape, more obstacles, more delays, more expenses and fees for Americans who want to go to China and adopt children,” Boudreaux said.

“It hurts the Americans. It obviously hurts the children, hurts the parents in China, all because one man in Washington decided he thinks Americans should pay more for Chinese washing machines.”

Exports from China have plunged, with China putting 125 percent tariffs on American products.

“Even if there’s no retaliation by the Chinese directly against respective adoptive parents, the higher cost of doing business makes it more costly for parents in the U.S. to adopt Chinese children. It's just appalling,” Boudreaux said. “It's just economic ignorance on stilts.”

To families like the Webbs, the political back-and-forth is exhausting.

“If I put my emotion and my hope in that, it would just be devastating, and there would be no hope because I just don't know — it's so far beyond comprehending,” Webb said.

Still, she hasn’t given up hope that the Chinese and U.S. governments might recognize finalizing adoptions is a “win-win” that could have both countries “come out looking really good.”

“We will never give up hope. Ever,” Webb said, through tears. “She's always our daughter, forever.”

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s chaotic town hall earlier this month stunned constituents who witnessed two men tasered by local police, according to emails obtained by Raw Story.

The Acworth Police Department arrested three attendees at the Georgia Republican congresswoman’s town hall at the Acworth Community Center on April 15, prompting emails to the Chief of Police Mark Cheatham, which Raw Story obtained through a Georgia Open Records Act request.

Catherine Renken, a pastor at Kirkwood Presbyterian Church in Kenesaw, Ga., emailed Cheatham the day after the town hall to share why she was “outraged.”

“I have never been so scared of the police as [I] was last night. I left the event shaking,” Renken wrote. “The police present was over the top and intimidating. Their use of excessive force in tasing the two men who spoke in protest and only asked ‘not to be grabbed,’ was outrageous.”

Andrew Russell Nelms, 40, and Johnny Keith Williams, 45, were tased and arrested on two charges: simple battery of a law enforcement officer and obstruction of a law enforcement officer, according to a release from Acworth police.

Kiyana Davis, 28, was arrested on a city ordinance charge for "vulgar language," the release said.

The town hall was one of many held by Republican members of Congress to have attracted protest and controversy since Donald Trump returned to the White House, to pursue a program of aggressive cuts to federal government budgets and staffing.

Renken, who lives “right around the corner” from the police department and volunteers as a county police chaplain, said she personally experienced "aggression and incivility” from the police when she choked on water during the commotion, then tried to reenter the town hall after using the restroom.

Saying police “chose to use force,” rather than “deescalate,” Renken called on city leaders to “rectify the situation immediately with an apology and dropping all charges” against the three individuals.

“I pray a reasonable judge will throw this out in court, and I’m confident the city of Acworth will be at the losing end of a court case for this,” Renken wrote. “This is unconstitutional, an embarrassment to the city, and will literally cost us taxpayers.”

Essence Johnson, chair of the Cobb County Democratic Party, told Raw Story this month she was assisting “distraught” family members of the arrested individuals. As of Monday, Johnson said charges against all three remained, to her knowledge.

Renken also emailed Acworth Mayor Tommy Allegood, saying the event was “not a town hall, but a tool of MAGA manipulation.”

Reached by phone, Renken declined to comment further, because she was “already talking with the lawyer for one of the people who was arrested.”

Allegood replied to Renken on April 17, saying the police department has a “great reputation for keeping our citizens and business safe,” and Acworth is “recognized as one of the safest cities in Georgia.

”Allegood declined to answer questions from Raw Story, saying, “There is an ongoing investigation into the events of Congresswoman Greene’s town hall meeting and our city attorney does not want us to comment.”

Cheatham told Raw Story he was unable to speak about the town hall as “this case has not been adjudicated.”

Another emailer wrote Cheatham, accusing the police of using “excessive force on people who are afraid of what our government is doing [to] our country.”

“If you stand up for Marjorie Taylor Greene and her insane views. God help you,” the emailer wrote.

David C. Beall, a member of the Floyd County Republican Party, wrote Cheatham to “commend your officers for their conduct and actions taken to keep the attendees of this event, and Ms. Greene and her staff safe.” Beall attended the event, which he said was “infiltrated by numerous bad actors.”

“Your officers acted swiftly and professionally each time a disruptor caused an issue,” Beall wrote. “At no time did I feel unsafe or concerned about being inside the venue.”

Beall and the other emailer did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Looking for negative sentiment’

Acworth police anticipated disruptions at the town hall, according to crime reports and emails obtained by Raw Story.

“Prior to the event, officers were briefed on possible security threats, including death threats made to the congresswoman via social media and threats of bringing firearms to the event, which were discovered by Acworth Police Department Analyst Williams,” said the crime report for Nelms. “To ensure public safety, officers were advised to remove any disruptive behavior from the event area immediately.”

The crime report for Johnny Williams describes a physical struggle as he allegedly attempted to “choke another officer.”

The report noted, “All officers were briefed beforehand that any individuals causing a disturbance while Congresswoman Greene was speaking would be immediately escorted from the premises to maintain order and provide safety for the rest of those in Attendance.”

Planning emails from March 5 indicated an analyst, Macey Williams, would be “looking for negative sentiment and report any concerns.”

Emails explain that the event would require “a considerable amount of planning,” including closing the community center for the entire day.“

Our Special Ops Team will be providing security similar to [Sean] Hannity a few years ago,” wrote Kim Watt, director of the Acworth Parks, Recreation, and Community Resource Department, on March 5. “With that, they plan to bring a bomb dog through the entire center that morning to clear the building.”

Hannity of Fox News hosted a town hall in Acworth on Oct. 17, 2022, for then-Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who lost a runoff to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock.

Russell Mines, Special Operations Division Lieutenant, confirmed the week before the Greene town hall that bomb sweeps would happen twice the day of the event.

On X on the morning of the town hall, Greene claimed "paid Democrat protestors" would be coming from throughout the country.

"I have one word of warning for you. If you’re planning to act up, scream and protest, you’re going to be thrown out, and that’s the way it goes," Greene said in a video posted to X on April 15.

After the town hall, Greene posted a video and statement voicing her "100% support of our heroic police officers" and said footage "proves the protestors were unruly and fighting and resisting police."

"These protestors were deranged and aggressive and lost control of themselves the second the town hall started," Greene posted.

Greene’s spokesperson, Nick Dyer, did not respond to a request for comment.

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As the Trump administration considers ways to encourage Americans to have more children — from a $5,000 “baby bonus” to a “National Medal of Motherhood” — both anti-abortion and abortion-rights clinics face uncertainty about how such policies might affect their federal funding.

For groups like Planned Parenthood, which provide abortions, contraceptives, sexually transmitted infection testing and other health services, the outlook appears bleak. Clinics have started shuttering following a freeze of tens of millions of dollars in federal funds.

“They're already struggling right now,” said Kristyn Brandi, a former board chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health and an OB-GYN who provides abortions in New Jersey, where some Planned Parenthood clinics have been laying off staff.

“They're already on thin ice, and I worry that any further pushes to decrease their funding could cause a lot of places to close,” Brandi added. “That ultimately only hurts patients. A lot of people are going to lose access to essential health care services because of it.”

Pregnancy help centers or crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) run by anti-abortion organizations aren’t counting on federal funds either. Such centers offer free testing, ultrasounds and social services to pregnant women but steer patients away from abortions and contraception.

The administration's “pro-family stance” is encouraging, Andrea Trudden, vice president of communications and marketing for Heartbeat International, a pregnancy help network, told Raw Story.

“If opportunities arise, we will notify the pregnancy health organizations about the opportunities, and it'll be up to each and every one of them whether or not it is right for their community and for their organization,” Trudden said.

“But if there are policies that are implemented throughout the administration that pregnancy health organizations could benefit from, we would definitely be certain that people are aware of them and see how we can utilize them in order to encourage life and encourage families.”

The White House did not answer Raw Story’s questions about federal funding for pregnancy centers. Instead, it emailed a statement from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

“President Trump is proudly implementing policies to uplift American families, from securing order [at the] border to keep violent criminals out of our communities, to lowering taxes and the cost of living,” Leavitt said. “The President wants America to be a country where all children can safely grow up and achieve the American dream. As a mother myself, I am proud to work for a president who is taking significant action to leave a better country for the next generation.”

‘Red and blue mentality’

Health clinics that provide abortions and anti-abortion pregnancy centers have both historically received federal funding through grants that support low-income families and family planning services.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that Planned Parenthood affiliates received about $148 million in federal grants and $1.54 billion in government insurance payments from 2019 through 2021.

The research firm Health Management Associates (HMA) found that 650 CPCs received more than $429 million in federal funds between 2017 and 2023. Generally, such clinics do not bill insurance, offering services for free.

The majority of federal funding provided to CPCs from 2017-23 (more than $289 million) came via the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020 and 2021. More than $102 million was provided through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) grants, according to HMA.

Federal funds distributed to health centers and pregnancy clinics through block grants like TANF will typically follow state political alignment, with Republican-leaning states more often directing funds to crisis pregnancy centers and Democratic-leaning states funding Planned Parenthood clinics, experts told Raw Story.

“It follows this ‘red and blue’ mentality of Planned Parenthood not being properly funded if it's in a red state, and CPCs are receiving more funding in a red state, and vice versa,” said George Carrillo, former director of social determinants of health for the Oregon Health Authority. “It's pretty rare to see where there's equal dollar amounts being able to provide services from both sides — from the CPC side and from institutions like Planned Parenthood.”

Neither crisis pregnancy centers nor health centers that provide abortions should get any federal funding, said Herbie Newell, president and executive director of Lifeline Children’s Services, a “pro-life” Christian ministry that supports pregnancy counseling and adoption services.

“I have a strong feeling that no pregnancy center should be getting government funding,” Newell said. “We don't really need to be overreaching into ideologies, and therefore, the government telling anyone what they should or shouldn't believe.”

‘Pro-natalist goals’

Heartbeat International’s network of more than 3,000 pregnancy help centers gets 90 percent of its funding from private donations and grants, Trudden said. CPCs are often unregulated and nonmedical, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, but they are overseen by medical directors and follow privacy best practices, Trudden said.

Federal funding is “not something that we depend on or ever have,” Trudden said. “We have a great deal of people within communities that offer their support, and that actually helps so much because then it raises awareness and lets them know of the services that we offer right there in their backyard. [Federal funding is] not off the table, but it definitely isn't something that we depend on because we know that with every administration it has the risk of going away.”

Julie Rabinovitz, principal at Health Management Associates who led research on CPC funding, said predicting how much federal funding the centers might receive in the future is challenging.

“I think it's really hard to say given it's the beginning of the administration,” Rabinovitz told Raw Story. “You have DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk], so they're trying to reduce federal spending in a lot of areas, yet we don't know where this administration is right now on any of these issues, so we'll have to see what happens.”

Brandi, the abortion provider from New Jersey, expects funds will “definitely” continue to be cut from Planned Parenthood and that the Trump administration has “all the tools that they need to really empower CPCs.”

“It is all in alignment with their pro-natalist goals,” Brandi said. “Likely CPCs will be funded more without ironically improving things like IVF or prenatal/maternal health care.”

Lisa Battisfore, founder of Reproductive Transparency Now, an organization that campaigns against CPCs, said she “absolutely” expects to see an increasing number of crisis pregnancy centers and “more effort to get taxpayer funding to them.”

“We already know that the Trump administration is in support of anti-abortion organizations, including crisis pregnancy centers. They are part of the framework with Project 2025, which is what is being executed here,” Battisfore said, referring to the policy plan for a second Trump administration produced by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

“Preventing people from accessing abortion is going to contribute, to some extent, to this birth rate strategy.”

From Musk to Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump administration leaders have made it clear that “more babies in the United States of America” is a priority amid global birth rate declines.

However, Karla Torres, senior counsel for U.S. human rights at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Raw Story the Trump administration had actually made it “more dangerous to be pregnant and more expensive to have and raise children in the United States.”

“There is a maternal mortality crisis in this country, and it is overwhelmingly killing Black and Indigenous women,” Torres said. “Pregnant people are bleeding out in parking lots after being turned away from emergency rooms in states that ban abortion.

“But instead of increasing access to resources proven to protect pregnant people, this administration is defunding critical research, firing federal public health workers, and dismissing lawsuits to enforce federal laws that require hospitals to provide emergency abortions — all while considering sweepstake-style incentives to encourage people to have more babies. The Administration's calculation is horrifying and on full display.”

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A chaotic town hall for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Tuesday ended in the arrests of two men — who were tased by local police — and a woman arrested on a "vulgar language" charge, all spending the night in jail, a protest organizer told Raw Story.

Andrew Russell Nelms, 40, and Johnny Keith Williams, 45, were arrested at Greene's town hall at the Acworth Community Center in Acworth, Georgia, on Tuesday, on two charges — simple battery of a law enforcement officer and obstruction of a law enforcement officer — and Kiyana Davis, 28, was arrested on a city ordinance charge for "vulgar language," according to a news release published by the Acworth Police Department.

All three were constituents who registered to attend the town hall and were not affiliated with the protest organized by the Cobb County Democratic Party, Essence Johnson, chair of the Cobb County Democratic Party, told Raw Story. Williams remained in jail as of Wednesday at 5 p.m. Eastern Time, Johnson said.

"Kiyana should have never, never spent the night in jail with the type of charges, the nonfactual charges, the inaccurate charges, the fictitious charges, that are brought up, the unlawful arrest," Johnson told Raw Story. "That's a ticket. She should have gotten a citation and released."

Mark Cheatham, chief of police for the Acworth Police Department, did not respond to Raw Story's questions about the arrests.

"Sadly, as soon as the Congresswoman began her presentation, several members of the audience became disruptive and created an imminent public safety threat for all in attendance. Their intentions were clear, to place the members of our beloved police department in a no-win situation in front of numerous media outlets," police said in the news release.

Six other attendees were removed without incident, but tasers were required to be deployed in the process of arresting Williams and Nelms as police were "threatened, physically resisted, and harmed in the process," the release said.

Greene posted a video and statement on X on Wednesday morning that voiced her "100% support of our heroic police officers" and said video footage "proves the protestors were unruly and fighting and resisting police."

"These protestors were deranged and aggressive and lost control of themselves the second the townhall started," Greene posted.

Nick Dyer, Greene's spokesperson, did not immediately respond to Raw Story's questions about the town hall.

"We have seen her disrupt. State of the Union, President Biden, disruption. Disrespect," Johnson said. "They didn’t disrespect her. Mr. Williams was walking out, tasered. Andrew, tasered. Kiyana, a curse word."

Johnson said the families of the arrested individuals reached out via the Cobb County Democrats' Facebook page, and she spent the last 18 hours in "constant communication" with the families who are "distraught."

"[Greene] is everything that an elected official should not be, and she showed her true colors like we've seen it over and over again," Johnson said. "But yesterday, to actually witness that firsthand and to see how people were treated, I am coming for your seat. Whoever's going to run again for that seat, the power of the Democratic Party and the power of those in CD14, we are coming for your seat."

Shawn Harris and Clarence Blalock competed in a June 2024 Democratic runoff to challenge Greene for her congressional seat, and both attended the protest outside of Greene's town hall on Tuesday, which had more than 200 attendees, Johnson said.

"Energy was very high, and the energy was also very peaceful," said Harris of the protest held across the street from the community center. "The only place that it was some issues was actually inside with Marjorie."

Blalock said security was "very strict" outside the town hall, but the "vibes were good" at the protest. Blalock estimated that 30 to 40 police cars were present, in addition to police on horses. He only witnessed police give a ticket to a man driving a van who was laying on his horn outside of the town hall.

Blalock already announced that he is planning to run in 2026 as a Democrat for the seat in Georgia's 14th Congressional District. When asked if he plans to run again, Harris said he hasn't made an official announcement, but told Raw Story, "I think so." Greene beat Harris with 64.4 percent of the vote in November.

Greene posted a video on X the morning before the town hall that confirmed attendees needed to be registered in advance, bring their IDs and questions were to be submitted in advance.

Greene historically has screened questions for her town halls ahead of time given the number of people who attend the events, Dyer told Raw Story last year.

“She goes through personally all of them unless they're offensive,” Dyer told Raw Story in June.

Greene also does not share the address of her town halls publicly due to security concerns, Dyer previously told Raw Story.

“Due to her popularity, we have people RSVP so we can get constituents in the door. That is critical for the town halls. They are meant specifically for constituents,” Dyer said. “We have people that would travel from hours away to attend a town hall. We do that explicitly to ensure that only constituents are in the location. Due to the security concerns, we only give verified constituents the address to those town halls.”

Some of Greene's constituents take issue with her decision not to allow live questions from attendees.

"To be told to be seen but not heard, that was not a town hall. That was a straight dictatorship," Johnson said. "A town hall, it's a communication. It's a conversation. It’s answering questions. She spoke at the people. That is not someone that's elected."

In her post prior to the town hall, Greene claimed "paid Democrat protestors" would be coming from throughout the country.

"I have one word of warning for you. If you’re planning to act up, scream and protest, you’re going to be thrown out, and that’s the way it goes," Greene said in a video posted to her X account on Tuesday morning.

Blalock said protestors came from throughout the district, including "pretty far away" Catoosa County, which touches the Tennessee border.

"I'm glad that people came out to it," Blalock told Raw Story. "It's just disgusting how they say, 'Oh, you're a paid protester,' as if everyone is happy with the direction of this country. Trump didn't get 50 percent of the vote. He doesn't have a mandate. He doesn't have a right to be a king."

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CHICAGO — The Aid for Women pregnancy clinic in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood might be one of the nicest offices I’ve visited for medical advice.

The clinic is located in the storefront of a newly constructed modern apartment building. Its windows are adorned with images of beautiful, diverse women, advertising free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds. With tasteful neutral tones throughout, the lobby has a cascading wall fountain with the nonprofit’s logo and a woman’s silhouette image, creating a peaceful atmosphere.

Yet, the clinic is not a medical office even though medical procedures and tests are offered there. Aid for Women is one of as many as 4,000 crisis pregnancy centers, or CPCs, operating throughout the country that present as healthcare clinics but are typically nonprofits with an agenda to stop women from getting abortions.

Aid for Women pregnancy center in Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood in December 2024 (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)

A new study from the University of California San Diego published on Dec. 2 analyzed the websites of 1,825 crisis pregnancy clinics, including Aid for Women, and created a database, choicewatch.org, to provide unbiased data about the services provided by these groups.

“We just want to start a policy debate around these issues,” John W. Ayers, leader of the study, told Raw Story. “With the new administration, there's a chance CPCs could be federally funded, and if those federally funded dollars are going to CPCs, under what conditions can they be given to maximize society benefits and reduce the harms?”

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Ultimately, the paper’s authors are calling for greater scrutiny of these clinics, particularly around the services offered, provider qualifications and conformity with regulations and medical best practices. Generally, such pregnancy centers are exempt from the licensing, regulations and credentialing requirements of healthcare facilities.

“When it comes to crisis pregnancy centers, there's a lot of unknown unknowns,” said Ayers, who is an adjunct associate professor of medicine and epidemiologist at the University of California San Diego. “Our study is independent of your position on abortion, and so, we just want to give data and solve this problem of there being no data.”

Doctors like Kristyn Brandi, an OB-GYN in New Jersey, often find crisis pregnancy centers to be “angering” and “annoying," requiring reeducation of patients after visiting a clinic, she said.

The clinics can also be dangerous to women’s health if unsafe and unproven procedures like “abortion pill reversals” are offered (Aid for Women advertises such a procedure on its website). Ayers and Brandi both pointed out that abortion pill reversals are not recommended by medical professionals and put patients at risk for hemorrhaging and sepsis as they involve pumping the body with progesterone after a first abortion pill is taken, even though the process of ending the pregnancy is likely already underway and no longer likely to be viable.

A screen shot from the Aid for Women website about abortion pill reversals

“At crisis pregnancy centers, they are not healthcare centers, and so they aren’t under the same regulations and rules that doctors and other healthcare providers have to abide by, which is really concerning as a healthcare provider knowing that I have many patients that go there first and then come to me for healthcare,” Brandi told Raw Story. “Hearing the stories about what these patients encounter when they go to these centers is really disturbing.”

Susan Barrett, executive director of Aid for Women, did not respond to Raw Story’s requests for comment.

‘Very weird and off’

When I first visited an Aid for Women clinic, I was just shy of five weeks pregnant. Several at-home early detection pregnancy tests came up positive, but I figured it didn’t hurt to have professionals confirm for me as I waited for my regular OB-GYN appointment at 10 weeks pregnant.

But rather than having a doctor or nurse confirm the pregnancy for me, I conducted the test myself at Aid for Women.

Instead of leaving a urine sample behind a mini door in the bathroom for technicians to grab as I was used to at doctor’s offices, I brought my sample back to a meeting room with an advocate and was told that I would be administering my own pregnancy test since there wasn’t a nurse on site at the time to do so.

I used a dropper to apply a sample to my test and had to write down that, yes, I understood my test was positive.

Brandi said typically patients at a medical practice are “not running their own samples” due to regulations requiring that collection and testing is accurate and a “real result” is being reported.

“It's weird for going to a healthcare center and having to do the stuff you would just do at home,” she said when told about my experience.

At the appointment, I spoke with an advocate about my “pregnancy intention,” a question also asked on an intake form where clients indicate whether they’re planning on parenting, abortion, adoption or are undecided.

The advocate made it clear that the center does not offer abortions but did not explicitly express disapproval for those seeking abortions.

However, the 20-plus-page informational booklet provided to me featured several pages on the risks and drawbacks of abortions, alongside photos of depressed-looking women.

Scan of pages in Aid for Women brochure about abortion

Raw Story shared the pamphlet with Brandi, an abortion provider, who said she was “struck” by the language in the brochure and found it to be “very focused on misleading information” and “very graphic depictions” of procedures like a dilation and evacuation surgical abortion, also known as a D&E.

“It was very much leading with all the risks, which I will not say that there are no risks to abortion care, but the risks are incredibly low and much lower than things like live births and C-sections,” Brandi said. “I make sure that when I counsel patients, I do absolutely tell them the risks, but I make sure to balance that information with all the benefits if they seek abortion, what are the health benefits to them versus continuing the pregnancy … there wouldn't be a field of OB-GYN, if pregnancy was always safe.”

Brandi also took issue with other components of the Aid for Women brochure, calling some parts “just very weird and off.”

For instance, the brochure’s timeline of the pregnancy does not reflect the “medically accurate” dating method, she said, and milestones noted such as the beginning development of a baby’s brain, spinal cord and heart at four weeks is misleading, she said.

“Usually at that time we have maybe three or four cells that are cardiac cells that eventually will turn into a heart in some time,” Brandi said. “It's not inaccurate, but it's misleading to say that those things are developed yet when they're definitely not developed in a significant way.”

Scan of pages in Aid for Women brochure about fetal development

Brandi noted that as an abortion provider, she looks at fetal tissue after a procedure, which typically isn’t seen until about 10 weeks pregnant, and it’s not visible to the naked eye at that point. The brochure said “a little face, fingers and toes” appear as early as six weeks and included images.

A first ultrasound experience

After my first visit, I decided to return to the clinic for another free service offered: an ultrasound. I didn’t have to pay hundreds of dollars or use insurance, so I decided to get an early sneak peek before my regular 10-week appointment.

I brought my husband with me to the clinic when I was just shy of eight weeks pregnant, and we heard our baby’s heartbeat for the first time, which was an exciting, emotional moment. I can imagine hearing a heartbeat that early for an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy might evoke upsetting emotions instead.

A sonographer conducted the ultrasound to check for basic criteria of a viable pregnancy such as noting if a heartbeat was present and that the pregnancy was located in the uterus. She produced two ultrasound images that didn’t look like much yet — I’d say the image resembled a small shrimp-shaped blob.

At barely eight weeks, I had a long way to go until the baby had any chance at surviving outside of the uterus. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology reports that premature births at 23 weeks have a 23 percent to 27 percent survival rate, which grows to 67 percent to 76 percent by 25 weeks of gestation and continues to go up from there.

I showed my ultrasound to one of my regular OB-GYN doctors, who accurately predicted the sonographer wanted to show me the heartbeat. Brandi reviewed the ultrasound and corresponding report, calling it “similar” to a typical report.

My report was signed off for review by an OB-GYN, Robert Lawler — something Brandi said is rare to find at crisis pregnancy centers.

Lawler was featured in a 2013 article by the Chicago Catholic, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Chicago, about a new OB-GYN practice he opened in the southwestern Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, Ill., to conform to the teachings of the church.

“I had visions of meeting the Lord at Judgment Day and him saying to me, 'OK, Robert, what part of 'intrinsically evil' did you not understand about contraception?'" Lawler said in the article.

The practice seems to have since closed as it has both an inactive phone number and web domain. A handful of negative Yelp reviews for the practice complain about lack of transparency about Lawler’s religious influence on his practice.

“He lets his personal religious beliefs undermine the health and well-being of the victims he lures into his office,” wrote one reviewer in March 2018.

Lawler appeared on an episode of the “Family Talk” show by Evangelical Christian author and psychologist James Dobson, where he discussed his opposition to a 2017 Illinois abortion bill that “forces pro-life doctors and nurses to violate their consciences and advocate for the murder of babies in the womb,” according to the video description.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

As of January 2024, Lawler is now the medical director for labor and delivery at OSF Little Company of Mary Medical Center, a healthcare system in Illinois founded by the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis.

Lawler could not be reached at his OSF office in the southwestern Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn, Ill. He did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment through Aid for Women.

‘Lying to women in vulnerable positions? Let's cut that out.’

For comparison I also visited a Planned Parenthood clinic a mile away from Aid for Women to confirm my pregnancy there as well.

The Planned Parenthood clinic was certainly not as stylish and welcoming as the Aid for Women office. It was located in a small strip mall next to a Dollar General. The waiting room was dark, and front office staff were seated behind plexiglass.

But the experience reflected that of a typical doctor’s office visit, where I entered a room with an exam chair (I was brought to a room that resembled a personal office with a desk, chair, side tables and sink at Aid for Women).

I answered some medical questions at Planned Parenthood and got my test result through a MyChart portal. I was given some informational materials that included statistics and risks of different procedures, and I was told that if I proceeded with the pregnancy to start taking a prenatal vitamin.

Scan from "Abortion Options" brochure from Planned Parenthood

I chose not to go through the ultrasound experience at Planned Parenthood because I didn’t want to prematurely use my insurance benefits before visiting my regular doctor.

Planned Parenthood clinics are regulated as healthcare facilities and must abide by regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to protect patient privacy.

When I went to Aid for Women, I asked about HIPAA and was told my information would be protected. I was given a "care and competence" commitment agreement that promised to hold client information in "strict and absolute confidence;" however, there was no mention of HIPAA on the form, and the Aid for Women privacy policy does not mention HIPAA.

"One thing that really worries me, especially in this Dobbs moment, is privacy," Brandi said, referencing Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 landmark Supreme Court decision that overturned the right to abortion protected by Roe v. Wade. "I think many people when they go to a healthcare center, they expect that the healthcare providers are not going to like share their information and talk about them to other people because we abide by rules like HIPAA that protect patients’ privacy. Because these centers aren't health care centers — they look like health care centers — but they have no reason to protect your privacy."

Spokespeople for Planned Parenthood did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

A Planned Parenthood clinic in Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)

The intake form I filled out during my visits at Aid for Women had me initial that I understood all questions on the form were optional, but when I didn’t fill in some information, such as my address, I got pushback from staff to include those details.

“I think when people are pretending to be doctors and have no legal liability if something bad happens, that's really concerning and scary to think about, that patients are trusting these centers when they don't necessarily get the health care that they deserve in these moments,” Brandi told Raw Story.

I returned to the Aid for Women Clinic months later at 37 weeks pregnant to learn about what support services the center offered. When I requested my medical records, I was required to give my address and was given a two-page report from my ultrasound, nothing else from the first visit or any other paperwork.

At this visit, like all my previous visits, the advocate asked me about my housing situation and made sure I had support and wasn’t experiencing any abuse. The nonprofit runs maternity homes and offers referrals for healthcare and community support resources.

I signed up to watch videos from the clinic’s "Earn While Your Learn" program to prepare for my impending labor and delivery experience. Clients who complete various tasks such as watching lessons and doing homework, participating in the nonprofit's newsletters and reviewing the center online can earn points to enter a monthly raffle to win essential baby supplies like a stroller or a crib set. The videos were produced by a group called True to Life Productions, who did not immediately respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

Aid for Women’s nonprofit tax filing is transparent that it’s a pro-life organization, describing itself as an operator of “pregnancy help centers, pregnancy medical clinics and residential programs to assist women in difficult and unexpected pregnancy situations so that they might choose life.” The nonprofit reported more than $2.5 million in contributions in 2023 and paid Barrett a salary of $101,519.

According to the data provided on choicewatch.org, Aid for Women is affiliated with Heartbeat International, an international pro-life group that supports the largest network of crisis pregnancy centers.

A screen shot about Aid for Women from choicewatch.org

While I visited Aid for Women knowing what type of facility it was, clients in crisis might not be aware of its pro-life mission and could be susceptible to misinformation.

“I think what our study does is it shows some of these crisis centers are bad actors, and CPCs can get behind getting rid of them," Ayers said. "Pro-life, pro-choice, lying to women in vulnerable positions? Let's cut that out."

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WASHINGTON — As Congress careened toward a Saturday midnight deadline to pass a government funding bill, legislators exclusively told Raw Story Friday that party leaders were negotiating through the “chaos” created by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies who sunk a deal that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) spent weeks brokering — making his future as House leader unknown.

A last-ditch effort funding bill indeed passed Friday night with a 366-34 vote in the House and 85-11 vote in the Senate, providing $100 billion in disaster aid, $10 billion in agricultural assistance to farmers and averting a government shutdown.

House Republicans tried to pass an 11th-hour spending bill on Thursday, which included a Trump demand to raise the debt ceiling, but it failed to pass Thursday night as 38 Republicans joined with Democrats to thwart the bill.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) told Raw Story Friday that Republicans "clearly" needed Democrats on board to get a bill passed before funding expired at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, which wouldn't happen with the debt ceiling language. Democrats got what they wanted in the bill, as the deal did not include raising the debt ceiling.

“Communications have been opened, number one,” Nadler said. “Number two, we will not discuss raising the debt ceiling until next year … because their motive for it is transparent. If we raise the debt ceiling now, they can lower taxes next year on the rich, as they did last time.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) took issue with Thursday's removal of language agreed upon by Republicans and Democrats to reign in pharmacy benefit managers after incoming Department of Government Efficiency leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy voiced opposition.

“The Trump people, they're causing the chaos right now, today, in the House, and as a result, some bad guys, middlemen, are getting in a position to rip off taxpayers and seniors,” Wyden said.

Wyden said he couldn’t believe that Trump was allowing “rip-off artists” to cheat on taxpayers and seniors after Trump called to “knock out the middlemen” at a press conference on Monday.

When asked by Raw Story if Johnson was doing a good job as a leader while trying to negotiate a deal that would prevent a government shutdown, Nadler said, “I don’t know.”

“I'm not a psychologist, but I can see with my own eyes what's going on,” Wyden said when asked if Johnson could be trusted.

After former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted last year, Johnson took over the role in October 2023 after a three-week leader-less period brought the House to a halt. Now, his future as Speaker of the House is in question as he struggled to broker a deal to avoid a shutdown.

“I think he’s done,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) told Raw Story.

Republicans expressed mixed feelings about Johnson's future after exiting an hours-long Friday meeting with Johnson held in the basement of the Capitol.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was the only Republican to say he plans to oppose Johnson's reelection to the leadership role.

"I don't plan to enter it as a negotiation. I plan to just not vote for him. I have no asks. There's nothing I want in exchange for my vote," Massie told Raw Story.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) said he was unsure about voting for Johnson as it would be "more of the same" and "more can-kicking."

"I don't know. It's too early yet," Burchett told Raw Story. "Trump's gonna make a big play on that. He'll probably be the one to decide who the speaker will be."

When asked if Johnson's speakership is secure, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said he supports him as of now, as Johnson worked on handling a new deal.

"Look, an hour is a lifetime in politics. We'll see," Norman told Raw Story. "Different day. Different time."

Other Republicans said they felt that Johnson's speakership was safe.

"I feel very comfortable," said Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL).

Darrell Issa told Raw Story Johnson has his "full support."

"If you say someone's on a tightrope wire, has it been a difficult job? The answer is 'yes,' but everyone else would be on that same wire," Issa said.

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WASHINGTON — As at least three Democratic-appointed judges changed their plans to move to senior status following President-elect Donald Trump’s reelection last month, four senators exclusively shared with Raw Story their theories — from financial to political — for the last-minute retirement changes.

“It implicitly conveys concern on the part of judges who concluded that there's a real risk that their successor on the circuit might be someone who would be more of an activist or be more of a disrupter to the balance of the circuit than they anticipated,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) told Raw Story.

U.S. Circuit Judge James Wynn, appointed by former President Barack Obama, announced on Friday his decision to revoke his plans to retire from active service on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., prompting a judicial misconduct complaint from Trump-allied Article III Project.

After Senate Republicans blocked President Joe Biden’s nomination to replace him, Wynn said he decided to “continue in regular active service,” rather than senior status, a form of semi-retirement that allows a new judge to be appointed and lets judges over age 65 with at least 15 years of federal bench service take on reduced caseloads.

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Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) echoed the concerns of North Carolina’s other Republican senator, Thom Tillis, who called Wynn’s decision “a slap in the face to the U.S. Senate.”

“It's ridden in political activity, unretiring for political purposes. That's the ethical charge that's at the root of it, and it's concerning,” Budd told Raw Story.

Another Obama-appointee, U.S. District Judge Max Cogburn, sent the White House a letter in late November rescinding his plans to move to senior status, announced in 2022.

Former President Bill Clinton appointee, U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley, in Columbus, Ohio, withdrew his plans to take senior status shortly after Trump’s Nov. 5 election victory.

“Individual justices decide when they want to retire. It’s their right,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told Raw Story. “I’m not familiar with their individual stories or their details. For all I know is they decided that their personal finances needed a few more years of work. I have no idea.”

Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) said he hadn’t seen the news of judges rescinding their retirement plans, and Coons said he was “not familiar with the details of specific judges.

“I'll tell you that is something that has happened previously. A judge has a lifetime appointment, and it's their decision when to take senior status,” Coons said.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump's pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to initially properly report more than half a million dollars in income from his anti-vax nonprofit and a law firm employer, according to new filings with U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

Kennedy's 2023 and 2024 public financial disclosure reports required during his run for president inaccurately reported his salary and bonuses by $503,794.41 from Children's Health Defense, a nonprofit Kennedy founded that has campaigned against vaccines, and JW Howard Attorneys, a California law firm that has litigated more than 40 cases against vaccine mandates and where Kennedy works as a constitutional and environmental litigator.

Two Dec. 11 letters to Shelley Finlayson, acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, amended the reports and said that Kennedy reported his net pay instead of his gross pay for the two groups, leading to the misreported hundreds of thousands of dollars in income.

Kennedy actually earned $836,571.25 from Children's Health Defense, instead of the $515,960 as reported in June 2023.

For his 2024 report, Kennedy's income for the nonprofit was actually $326,056 instead of $215,510.53 initially reported.He failed to report earning $481,732 from JW Howard Attorneys on his 2024 report, erroneously reporting a salary of $409,094.31 in July 2024.

"After reviewing that letter, I continue to conclude that Mr. Kennedy is in compliance with applicable laws and regulations," Finayason said a note on each report, signed Dec. 12.

After twice delaying filing his 2024 report, Kennedy reported earning millions from other sources, including conservative book publisher, Skyhorse Publishing, and his environmental law firm, Kennedy and Madonna, Raw Story reported in July.

Kennedy's nomination for health secretary has raised concerns about his views on widely accepted medical practices such as vaccinations and fluorinating water. Most recently, Kennedy backed off on reported efforts to revoke the approval for the polio vaccine.

A spokesperson for Kennedy did not immediately respond to Raw Story's request for comment.

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As Vice President-elect Sen. J.D. Vance walked the marble halls of the Capitol this week and attended Wednesday's Republican Conference lunch to advocate for Donald Trump's defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, the host's colleagues back at Fox News were also working the phones.

At least two senators have been contacted by people who work with the Fox and Friends Weekend co-host.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Raw Story that Hegseth's Fox colleagues got in touch with him and he considers them "pretty solid references," given that they work with him daily.

"I think most of us have a bias toward supporting the president’s nominees. I think there’s no doubt that Pete's doing a good job meeting people, and I would say also his colleagues at Fox who reached out — they reached out to me — and really giving him just stellar recommendations."

While Johnson said speaking with former colleagues as references is "what you do with any job interview," the secretary of defense is second only to the president as commander-in-chief in charge of the military.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told Raw story one Fox colleague had reached out to him directly, and the senator had called three more.

"They love him," he said. "It's very reassuring."

Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) told Raw Story "of course" the current relationship between Fox News and the Republican Party is worrisome.

"It's ridiculous," he said.

Tester wasn't aware that Hegseth's colleagues were reaching out to senators.

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"They’re gonna do what they wanna do. I just hope that the person who gets in that position, they’re up for the task and the job, Tester said. "It’s a really important damn job, and that’s the point. It isn’t good guy, bad guy. Doesn’t matter. You gotta be up for the job."

Since Trump nominated Hegseth on Nov. 12, his fitness for the position has been scrutinized. NBC reported that 10 of Hegseth's colleagues at Fox had concerns about his drinking, some allegedly smelling alcohol on him before going on the air. The New Yorker reported that Hegseth was forced out of other previous leadership positions for intoxication on the job, sexist comments and financial mismanagement.

As part of a nondisclosure agreement, Hegseth paid a settlement to a woman who accused him of raping her after drinking at a hotel bar. The Washington Post reported that he claimed the payment was made out of fear of "immediate termination from Fox."

“President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again," Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, told the Washington Post.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told Raw Story he had "not yet" been contacted by Hegseth's Fox News peers but agreed there'd been a change in the mood from Republicans this week towards supporting Hegseth.

"I think you'd expect that. Several senators had talked to him, and they were somewhat satisfied," Grassley said.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said he hadn't been contacted by people at Fox News. Both he and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) laughed when Raw Story asked if they were disappointed that Hegseth's colleagues hadn't called.

Hawley said he'd "be happy to talk" with Hegseth's colleagues and found co-hosts vouching for him, particularly regarding concerns about drinking, to be "reasonable and "not unusual."

Trump's decision to nominate cabinet members with strong connections to Fox News appears to be a strategic choice, Hawley said.

"I defer to the president's thinking on this. It seems like to me that he clearly wants people who can defend his policies on TV, in front of the media, so I think clearly he's thinking about if people can talk to reporters," Hawley told Raw Story.

A spokesperson for Fox did not immediately respond to Raw Story's request for comment, nor did a spokesperson for Trump's campaign.

A new watchdog report released Tuesday revealed that the Department of Justice under the first Donald Trump administration secretly obtained phone records for members of Congress, journalists, government staffers and incoming FBI director nominee Kash Patel — actions the top House Judiciary Democrat exclusively told Raw Story are a "gross abuse" of power worthy of investigation.

Two Democratic members of Congress. then-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Rep. Eric Swalwell (R-CA), were targeted in the report, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

"My suspicion alert level is at the highest, considering it was me and another Democrat who the president, President Trump would routinely call out all the time, either in his tweets or his public statements," Swalwell told Raw Story on Tuesday. "That's what he was willing to do in his first administration, where there were guardrails in place and serious [pushback] around him. It's very concerning as to what he'll be willing to do with unserious people around him who are seeking to be pit bulls of retribution."

Swalwell said targeting Congress members and staff is "incredibly concerning" and will be more so with the incoming administration of Trump loyalists as "any guardrails that were in place last time are gone now with this new team," he said.

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"Once you start going after like individual members who are critical of the president, you better be damn sure you have the goods, and it was clear that Schiff and I had done nothing wrong, and it was just a way to try and find something on us, to indict or embarrass us," Swalwell said.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the current top Democratic ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, exclusively told Raw Story that the Department of Justice investigation intended to have a "chilling effect."

"It's a gross abuse and ought to be investigated, although with Trump coming in, he's not gonna investigate it," said Nadler, who announced he would drop out of the Democratic House Judiciary race and endorsed Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD).

Schiff, who was sworn into the Senate on Monday, joined current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for a press briefing on Tuesday. He said that pre-emptive pardons were not necessary for himself or other members of the January 6 committee, but he did not take questions from reporters about the report.

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Content warning: This article discusses suicide and self-harm. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis and needs emotional support, help is available 24/7 via call or text at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.

Over the course of nearly 20 years, Carlos Ulloa has worked for the United States Postal Service in a range of capacities — from starting as a letter carrier to delivering parcels to driving trucks and serving as a supervisor of distribution operations.

But after two mental health episodes in the last four years due to work-related stress, Ulloa, of Belleville, N.J., transitioned to a custodial role at a national distribution center in Jersey City.

“My plans were to move up, to keep going up and not to end up as a custodian, cleaning bathrooms and floors and stuff like that,” Ulloa told Raw Story. “I was supposed to continue to grow up and stay into management after I was promoted.”

But about four years ago, Ulloa said a new plant manager “started putting me down in front of my own suit, my own employees, yelling and screaming and whistling and pointing his finger at me.” The manager would talk to him like he was “some kind of dog” and expected him to give up his weekends and work overtime — when he was already frequently late getting his grandkids to school and providing transportation for his daughter, Ulloa said.

One day Ulloa showed up to work intoxicated and ended up being reported missing after leaving the building and hiding in his attic.

“I guess I cracked under the pressure,” Ulloa said.

Postal inspectors, postal police officers and ambulance crews came to his home and took him to a hospital, where he was later put in a psychiatric ward for trying to run away, he said. Ulloa began seeing a psychiatrist every day for about five months where he said they discussed “any sadness, any problems, that we want to take our lives, alcohol, drugs.”

When Ulloa was ready to return to work, he was told that he couldn’t return to the same facility and was asked where he might want to be transferred to continue as a supervisor or potentially grow into other leadership roles.

That’s when Ulloa decided he didn't want to be in management anymore with “too much stress, too much going on.” He decided he’d be better off working as a mechanic or in maintenance.

However, the new custodial job didn’t provide the stress relief Ulloa was seeking either as he said his new supervisor bullied and harassed him, too. Last December, Ulloa told a supervisor he was considering ending his life due to work pressure.

One of Ulloa’s friends, a postal police officer who was off-duty at the time, was able to calm him down over the phone and drove to the facility to ensure Ulloa didn’t harm himself and was given medical attention. He spent another week in a psychiatric hospital.

“I used to never have a depression problem. Now, I gotta take pills for the depression problems,” said Ulloa, adding that he would like to see the Postal Service “be more supportive, maybe more aware of, especially upper management, to see their own supervisors or other managers how they treat employees.”

Ulloa isn’t the only Postal Service employee to recently deal with suicidal ideation. The latest annual report for the United States Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement branch of the Postal Service, revealed that 201 suicides were reported in its fiscal year 2023.

That’s more than quadruple the 47 suicides reported by the Postal Inspection Service in fiscal year 2022.

And it’s more than double the national suicide rate for the general population of 14.2 deaths per 100,000 people, according to 2022 figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Postal Inspection Service qualifies all of its crime figures — from burglaries to robberies to homicides, suicides and assaults — by saying in the report, “Though not all of these reports are credible, the Inspection Service takes all reports of violent crime seriously and responds to every reported incident.”

Based on the Postal Service’s reported 635,350 total career and non-career employees in 2023, the suicide rate for postal employees would be about 31.6 per 100,000 people, if all 201 reported suicides involved Postal Service employees.

Spencer Block, a public information officer for the Postal Inspection Service's Chicago headquarters referred Raw Story to the Postal Service headquarters. Spokespeople for the Postal Service and the Postal Inspection Service did not respond to Raw Story’s multiple requests for comment. Neither responded to clarifying questions about the suicide and crime statistics reported.

The need for a volunteer emergency response team

Thirty volunteers from the National Association of Letter Carriers union formed an emergency response team in March due to “concern with the letter carriers being assaulted out there on the street, issues of substance abuse, mental health issues that we saw within our craft,” Mack Julion, assistant secretary-treasurer for the National Association of Letter Carriers, told Raw Story.

Julion, who has been a letter carrier in Chicago since 1997, said the group has seen “quite a few this year” in terms of suicides by letter carriers and has responded to such incidents and other traumatic events by visiting affected facilities where members might be upset. The program is based off of the emergency response team model from the United Steelworkers union, and volunteers received certifications from the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, Inc..

“One traumatic incident could lead to more traumatic incidents, more trauma, if not properly dealt with,” Julion said. “It is healthy to address and deal with these traumatic situations and help people process their grief, because without that, that could lead to more trauma.”

In particular, violence against letter carriers has been an ongoing issue over the last five years, according to a Raw Story investigation that found a 543 percent increase in robberies of postal workers between 2019 and 2022.

Khalalisa Norris, a letter carrier in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, twice experienced gun violence on the job, most recently being robbed in January 2023 at gun point for her arrow keys — the antiquated universal keys that thieves target to unlock numerous mailboxes in a given zip code.

Norris told Raw Story in November that she still hasn’t been able to return to her full mail route out of fear after her robbery experience and that she still sees a psychiatrist for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She said she’s been working with her union to push Congress for more safety protections for letter carriers.

While the Postal Service offers a “pretty good” Employee Assistance Program, Julion said the emergency response team was “an attempt to go beyond that.”

“When these incidents happen out at the station, EAP comes out, talks to the carriers, and a lot of carriers are kind of skeptical, if you will, because this EAP service seemed like just the arm of the Postal Service or management,” Julion said. “By us having our own people going out, talking with our people and literally getting trained to go out to deal with these situations is very helpful.”

Julion said June was a particularly busy month for the emergency response team, which has two volunteers located in each of its 15 regions. He estimated that four suicides were reported within two weeks.

One incident the team responded to this year involved an attempted suicide at a post office in Aurora, Co., where a man expressed stress about his wife potentially being deported. He was saved when an office door was broken down to stop him.

A Marine Corps veteran committed suicide after “dealing with depression and suicidal ideation for some time,” Julion said. The unadjusted rate of suicide for veterans in 2021 was 33.9 per 100,000 people, according to a 2023 annual report from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

In October 2021, a letter carrier committed a double murder-suicide at a sorting facility in Memphis, killing a supervisor and manager before killing himself, AP reported. Experts said the COVID-19 pandemic added extra stress to Postal Service employees at the time.

Frank Albergo, president of the Postal Police Officers Association, told Raw Story that postal police officers, the Postal Service’s own uniformed police force, formerly patrolled that Memphis facility before the union became embroiled in a four-year-long dispute with the Postal Service about its ability to protect letter carriers and the mail off postal property.

“We rarely patrol it anymore because we just don't have the manpower,” Albergo said. “That would have been something that we might have been able to prevent. Whether or not we could prevent it, we'll never know, but we never even had the chance. That's the problem.”

‘Doesn't surprise me’: A history of postal employee suicides

The circumstances around suicides are “complex” and don’t always involved mental illness, Erich Mische, CEO of suicide education nonprofit, Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, told Raw Story.

Julion agreed that not all of the suicides the emergency response team dealt with were “so much postal related as much as it is life, situations happening, and people not knowing how to respond or deal with them.”

Still, Julion acknowledged that Postal Service employees work in a “high-stress, high-speed workplace.”

“We often tell people the post office is like no other place that you’ve ever worked. We feel we are the best at what we do. We deliver everything, everywhere, every day. Rain, snow, sleet, hail, COVID, we deliver,” Julion said. “It’s what we do, and to have a sort of expectation like that, you can imagine the kind of pace that we work at on the inside and the kind of pressures that can be put on us to deliver, particularly if there's issues of understaffing.”

Letter carriers, particularly, often take pride in servicing the American people and don’t want to disappoint customers, which can “drive people crazy,” Julion said.

Ulloa said he certainly felt that level of pressure.

“The post office is just stressful enough, just to know that you have a time limit to get the mail out or the packages out and stuff like that,” Ulloa said. “I understand that we all push it and everything else, but they always want more with less people, and then the people won't stay because the management just doesn't grow with them.”

Before becoming a postal police officer, Albergo was a letter carrier and still has nightmares about the job due to the “stressful environment,” he told Raw Story.

“All I can tell you is I was a letter carrier for six years. I would not want to be a letter carrier now,” Albergo said.

Harassment and abuse has “always been a problem in the Postal Service,” Albergo said, noting that workplace stress and violence has been an issue for more than 30 years, according to a February 1992 joint statement signed by postal unions. The statement was released in the wake of a quadruple murder-suicide in Royal Oaks, Mich., where a terminated employee fired more than 100 shots at a post office, killing four employees before killing himself.

“We openly acknowledge that in some places or units there is an unacceptable level of stress in the workplace; that there is no excuse for and will be no tolerance of violence or any threats of violence by anyone at any level of the Postal Service; and that there is no excuse for and will be no tolerance of harassment, intimidation, threats, or bullying by anyone,” the statement read.

While Mische wasn’t familiar with the specific statistic of 201 suicides reported in the 2023 Postal Inspection Service report, he said “it doesn't surprise me.”

“Generally speaking, suicide rates with postal employees, I think that's been an issue for a long time. I think you can go as far back as the last 10 or 20 years and find stories about suicide rates in terms of occupation for postal employees and actually federal employees," Mische said.

A December 2023 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called out that the suicide rate for male postal service clerks was 58.2 per 100,000 civilian, non-institutionalized working persons aged 16–64 in 2021.

Mische said “job stress” and “substance abuse issues” are significant factors when looking a suicide rates by job industry.

“Any organization, whether it's a federal government agency, the Postal Service, or it's a construction company, whatever agency or company, public or private, that conversation about suicide and suicide prevention’s got to start at the top with the leadership of any organization saying we are going to make this a priority addressing the issue of suicide,” Mische said.

Leadership needs to be open about the issue of suicides in the workforce despite decades of stigma, which “has cost more lives in our society than had we spent the last several decades being open and honest about the difficult circumstances surrounding suicide,” Mische said.

Institutions that want to provide support to employees struggling with suicidal ideation or related issues should present a message to employees saying, “We're going to make making resources available to help those who may be dealing with suicidal ideation, and get them the help they need. And then, as an organization, we're going to continue to support that individual until they get to a place where they feel as though they are stable," Mische said.

The National Association of Letter Carriers’ president was unavailable for an interview. The American Postal Workers Union did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

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Content warning: This article discusses suicide and self-harm. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis and needs emotional support, help is available 24/7 via call or text at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.

President Joe Biden’s 180-degree flip on Sunday from his promise not to pardon his son Hunter Biden prompted fierce backlash from politicians and pundits, calling the move a “tremendous strategic blunder that will haunt Democrats,” “the worst thing a president could possibly do to his party” and “the biggest public corruption scandal ever.”

While some legal experts have called Biden “justified” in the pardon of his son in anticipation of continued attacks from the incoming Donald Trump administration, departing Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) suggested that Biden could make the scales of justice “more balanced” by preemptively pardoning the president-elect.

Manchin doubled down on the idea on Tuesday, telling Raw Story at the Capitol, "I thought that would have been the balance that was needed here. It's the right thing. If you're gonna do one, then you do both and clear the slate, and then you move on."

Raw Story asked nine Democratic senators what they thought of Biden pardoning Trump, who has faced nearly 100 criminal charges across two state and two federal indictments — prompting reactions from laughter to dodging.

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‘Haven’t even considered’: Dem senators reject Trump pardon concept

The idea of Biden pardoning Trump for his federal charges — presidential pardon does not extend to state cases — made some senators laugh.

"Curious, what would you think if Biden pardoned Trump?" Raw Story asked Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) on Tuesday.

"I have nothing productive to say about any of that," Smith told Raw Story through laughter.

"You guys are all laughing," Raw Story observed.

The notion made Sen. Laphonza Butler (D-CA) laugh, too.

"Sounds like you're not buying it," Raw Story asked.

"Nope, can't say that I am," Butler said.

Other senators pleaded ignorance of Manchin’s comments and claimed not to have considered the notion.

"I haven't seen that," Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) told Raw Story.

"Sen. Manchin has said as much," Raw Story replied. "The look on your face says, 'Hell no.'"

"No. I just have no thoughts," Heinrich said. "I don't know where that comes from."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) told Raw Story,” I haven't thought about it," and Sen Jon Ossoff (D-GA) claimed to not “see what Sen. Manchin said.”

"I'd have to think about that,” Ossoff added.

When asked if a pardon from Biden would take down the temperature of political polarization and make Trump less aggressive in his pursuit of perceived political enemies, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Raw Story, "I haven't even considered that argument before.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) defended Biden’s "full and unconditional pardon" of Hunter Biden for any offenses between January 1, 2014, and December 1, 2024, which includes federal gun charges and federal tax evasion charges he was to be sentenced for later this month.

"Given the extensive way in which Donald Trump has moved to politicize the FBI, I believe what was done by President Biden was understandable," Wyden said, avoiding Raw Story's question about a Trump pardon.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) said his office has received calls from constituents both supporting and opposing a pardon for Hunter Biden, which started coming in even before the president’s late Sunday announcement of the decision.

As for a Trump pardon, Carper said the idea was “not really” something he was even contemplating.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) rejected the idea of Biden issuing preemptive pardons for other targets of “raw politics,” as Biden said was the case for his son.

"I do not endorse that," Kaine said.

Legal experts weigh in on likelihood of Trump pardon

Harold Krent, a law professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, said he’s thought for weeks that a Hunter Biden-Trump combo pardon would be a good idea to “show mercy, healing, unification,” but now the timing is too late.

“I think the gesture earlier would have been, maybe not meaningful, but maybe some kind of small step towards the healing of the divide in our country,” Krent told Raw Story. “I think the opportunity’s behind us, so I doubt that it's going to happen at this point.”

Krent, who formerly worked for the Department of Justice, expects that Trump will “obviously” order the department to discontinue any cases against him. Whether Trump can just pardon himself, Krent said he and many academic scholars are in agreement that the concept is “against the checks and balances of the Constitution, but it's never been tried … so, who knows?”

Neama Rahmani, a former assistant U.S. attorney and president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, said Trump doesn’t need a pardon from Biden as it is “well established that a sitting president can't be prosecuted.”

To wait until Trump leaves office in January 2029 to resume the cases against him is unlikely due to a typical five-year statute of limitations, Rahmani said.

“Trump, like any other criminal defendant, has a right to a speedy trial, so that's why you see Jack Smith moving to dismiss the two federal prosecutions, the one in D.C. and the one in Florida,” Rahmani said.

As for the state cases, the racketeering case against Trump in Georgia involving his alleged efforts to hold onto power despite his loss in the 2020 election has been paused since District Attorney Fani Willis’ relationship with a lawyer who worked on the case came under scrutiny.

Earlier this year, Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies in a Manhattan criminal case in relation to falsifying business records, but his sentencing is also on hold.

“I thought there would be a sentencing, and then they would toll it until after he served as president, but it looks like the judge may not even want to impose sentence,” Krent said.

Both Krent and Rahmani said the Hunter Biden pardon looks bad for the current president, with Rahmani characterizing the move as “misleading the American people for the past six months,” and Krent saying the decision left a “bitter taste in some people’s mouths.”

“To make it worse, he criticized his own prosecution as being biased. That's just like undercutting the legs out of the loyal members of the Department of Justice who do the investigation by calling it politically charged, so I think it's not a bright moment for the Biden legacy,” Krent said.

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As Americans flood the mail with holiday cards and gifts, their valuables and personal information remain at risk for theft due to internal bad actors and issues with deploying modernized technology, according to two recent reports from the United States Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General.

Thefts committed by U.S. Postal Service employees spiked to 1,790 closed cases in fiscal year 2023, and totaled 5,961 closed internal mail theft cases between October 1, 2019, and September 30, 2023, according to an Oct. 30 report.

The Office of Inspector General identified that inconsistent nationwide policies restricting personal belongings on workroom floors, nonfunctioning cameras, increased supervisor vacancies, and a lack of mail theft awareness training for employees contributed to the rising thefts.

“Employee mail theft damages the Postal Service’s reputation and diminishes public trust in the nation’s mail system. If the Postal Service does not have nationwide policies around what can be brought onto workroom floors and develop more robust training on mail theft awareness, there is a continued risk of internal mail theft occurring in processing facilities nationwide.,” the Oct. 30 report said. “Additionally, without ensuring there is adequate supervision on the workroom floor, employees will continue to have opportunities to steal checks, gift cards, narcotics and other items from the mailstream, and customers will not receive their mail.”

Robberies of letter carriers and mail receptacles by outside actors have also been an ongoing issue over the last five years, according to a Raw Story investigation that found a 543 percent increase in robberies of postal workers between 2019 and 2022 and an 87 percent increase in high-volume mail receptacle theft in the same three-year time period.

Experts estimate that the value of checks stolen from the mail totals nearly $100 million per month.

While the Postal Service “demonstrated” its commitment to improving mail security and carrier safety, its modernization efforts for mobile scanning devices and electronic locks, meant to better protect the mail and reduce the targeting of letter carriers for their keys, have fallen short, according to a Nov. 5 report.

The Postal Service reported the loss or theft of 1,936 of its real-time delivery scanning devices, some of which also open electronic locks, resulting in an undisclosed loss totaling millions of dollars. The Office of Inspector General estimates the total number of lost and stolen devices could total 7,209 nationwide, resulting in a further loss of millions of dollars (specific numbers were redacted from the report).

"The redacted monetary value is considered to be commercially sensitive to the Postal Service, which under good business practice would not be disclosed," Tara Linne, director of communications for the United States Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General, told Raw Story via email.

Other issues with the scanning devices include connectivity issues, insufficient training, inadequate battery oversight and limited deployment of features, according to the report.

In response to the spike in mail theft over the past few years, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy launched an initiative called “Project Safe Delivery” in May 2023 to better protect letter carriers with higher-security locks and mailboxes, increased accountability for arrow keys—universal keys that open mailboxes in a given zip code—and better law enforcement.

The initiative called for the replacement of 49,000 antiquated arrow locks — which is .5 percent of all 9 million arrow key locks nationwide. So far, 28,000 eLocks were installed as of March 2024, and the installation of 12,270 purchased eLocks were put on hold for various reasons, including installation wait-times, insufficient facility equipment and incompatible collection boxes, costing an undisclosed loss in the millions of dollars.

The Postal Service did not provide a specific plan for how it plans to install the eLocks on hold by the end of 2024, the report said.

"Here we go again," Frank Albergo, president of the Postal Police Officers Association, told Raw Story. "They had the same problem in 2020 with the antiquated locks that they weren't accounted for, and management controls were ineffective, and it seems the electronic locks, they're having the exact same issue."

The Postal Police Officers Association union has been embroiled in a four-year-long dispute with the Postal Service about its ability to protect letter carriers and the mail off postal property.

A second phase of the program to install another 50,000 eLocks was canceled and to be replaced with “a new lock capable of greater mail receptacle compatibility and less unlocking delay,” according to the Nov. 5 report. Further details about the new locks were not provided.

“The traditional arrow keys have been a target of thieves, looking to steal a key to gain access to collection boxes, as well as cluster boxes along a carrier’s route,” the Nov. 5 report said. “The eLocks provide a safer environment for postal employees to collect and deliver mail by eliminating the utility of a lone key for those looking to steal mail.”

The Office of the Inspector General also found that 14 of 15 facilities visited still used paper logbooks to keep track of its arrow keys.

“Arrow keys are specific target items involved in mail theft and carrier assaults; knowledge of unsecured arrow keys may cause the facility and its employees to become a target of theft or robbery,” the report continued. “The Postal Service risks a diminished reputation and public trust in the nation’s mail.”

Under DeJoy's leadership, the postal service has continued to face massive deficits, losing nearly $10 billion in the 2024 fiscal year ending in September. Last year's losses totaled $6.5 billion, CBS reported. Earlier this year, DeJoy paused his plans to consolidate postal service facilities until January amid mounting pressure from Congress.

The United States Postal Service and its law enforcement arm, the United States Postal Inspection Service, did not respond to Raw Story's request for comment, nor did the National Association of Letter Carriers and American Postal Workers Union.

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Like more than 72 percent of Americans using community water systems, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) — an orthopedic surgeon, three-term senator and former host of the “Senate Doctors” show — has consumed fluorinated water.

“I grew up with it. Still have my teeth,” Barrasso told Raw Story while riding the tram underneath the U.S. Capitol this week.

Barrasso’s teeth may be politician perfect, but his grandkids — and yours — may not be afforded a seamless smile.

If President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is confirmed, health experts fear communities across the nation could eliminate fluoride in their water.

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While few know what Kennedy is planning, at his rallies Trump made one thing clear: “I’m going to let him go wild on health.”

That has health care workers — doctors to dentists — freaking out.

‘Pro-vaccine and anti-mandates’

Despite most Americans drinking fluorinated water, communities across America have increasingly been ditching fluorinating their water, with more than 150 towns voting to keep fluoride out of their public water since 2010, according to anti-fluoride group, the Fluoride Action Network.

Kennedy posted on X that a Trump administration would advise all communities across the county to stop using fluoride in their water, claiming that fluoride is “an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders and thyroid disease.”

Medical organizations have called Kennedy’s claims unfounded. Fluoride has long been considered beneficial in strengthening teeth and reducing cavities.

Still, that and Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism hasn’t caused Barrasso, the incoming Senate Republican whip from Wyoming, to oppose his nomination—or that of Mehmet Oz, a celebrity cardiothoracic surgeon who previously pushed unproven theories about COVID-19 cures—to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“There's a lot to be said for the Trump administration putting in place people who are passionate and who have great interest in issues — that President Trump is making bold choices,” Barrasso said. “Every one of these nominees is going to have a hearing, a fair process and then a timely vote, and I think the hearings are going to be very instructive.”

Passion and policy are universes apart, though. And, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, passion has been winning out over long-established public health policies.

Like Bud Light, Sunday brunches, the NFL and even Pepsi, vaccines have become politicized, especially in conservative circles. And GOP leaders in Washington — whether they went to med school like Barrasso or not — are doing all they can to stay out of the fight.

Barrasso called himself “pro-vaccine and anti-mandates” and particularly praised Oz as “very qualified” given “his background in medicine” and experience as a “communicator.”

Raw Story reached out to every doctor we know of at the Capitol: 17 Congress members with medical degrees. We asked whether Oz or Kennedy’s controversial medical stances concerned them as healthcare practitioners.

‘Deeply concerned’: Democrats react to cabinet picks

Considering whether Oz and Kennedy are potential dangers to public health as trust in the media and Congress are hovering around historically low disapproval ratings, Rep. Ami Bera (D-CA) — a former chief medical officer for Sacramento County — says yes.

“They both have some crazy ideas and seem to get caught up in some conspiracy theories, but Trump's gonna nominate who he’s gonna nominate,” Bera said. “This is what the country voted for. It's not as though Trump didn't say he was going to give a role to RFK Jr., so let's sit down and let's just see what happens.”

Bera told Raw Story that members of Congress in the doctors' caucus will need to “push back on a lot of this and at least try not to allow the spread” of such conspiracy theories or misinformation. But the damage has already started, with COVID-19 vaccine skepticism spilling over into skepticism of other vaccines for “dangerous diseases” like measles, which have started resurfacing and putting lives at risk, Bera said.

“The vaccine stuff, fluoride, those are pretty safely proven public health benefits. Vaccines have probably been the biggest advance in medicine in our lifetimes, and we saw how effective they were during the pandemic,” Bera said.

Rep. Kim Schrier (D-WA), a pediatrician, told Raw Story that she is “deeply concerned” about Trump’s picks to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“I will try to reserve judgment and public comments until I see their actions,” Schrier said. “As a pediatrician who understands that vaccines are one of the most important developments — they have saved countless lives — I'm deeply concerned about those comments.”

Schrier said she is generally “very concerned about the perversion of science” but wanted to "reserve most of my judgment until I see what actually happens.” Still, the potential move to less fluorinated water alarmed her.

“As a pediatrician who understands that tooth decay is the most common disease in children, I am deeply concerned about these comments,” Schrier continued.

Raw Story did not immediately get responses from other members of Congress with medical degrees: Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Roger Marshall (R-KS) and Rand Paul (R-KY); and Reps. Scott DesJarlais (R-TN), Neal Dunn (R-FL), Mark Green (R-TN), Andy Harris (R-MD), Ronny Jackson (R-TX), John Joyce (R-PA), Rich McCormick (R-GA), Mariannette, Miller-Meeks (R-IA), Greg Murphy (R-NC), Raul Ruiz (D-CA) and Mike Simpson (R-ID).

In the new year, there’s chatter of an Obamacare overhaul if the GOP can muster the votes, though Congress is losing four of its current medical school-approved members.

Reps. Michael Burgess (R-TX), a doctor of obstetrics and gynecology, Larry Bucshon (R-IN), a cardiothoracic surgeon, and Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), a podiatric doctor, all decided not to seek reelection. Rep. Yadira Caraveo (D-CO), a pediatrician, conceded her reelection to Republican Gabe Evans.

Trump’s spokespeople didn’t respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

NOW READ: The end of left-leaning news?

In the final hours before President-elect Donald Trump left office in January 2021, “Joe Exotic” of “Tiger King” fame prepared for a presidential pardon from his two-decade federal prison sentence — with a limo and fans awaiting his release from confinement.

Trump didn’t come through with a pardon for the “Tiger King” — real name Joseph Maldonado. But as Trump prepares to return to the Oval Office in January, the star of the hit Netflix show is hopeful he will be a free man by April 2025, at the latest.

“Sean Hannity and a lot of people told me that I was on the pardon list, that they've seen the pardon list, and January 6 happened, and everything got screwed up, and then I got left behind,” Maldonado told Raw Story in a phone interview from Federal Medical Center, Fort Worth in Texas.

This time will be different because Trump has a “good start already,” Maldonado said, noting that not only has Trump been in executive office previously, but he’s also wasted no time in naming his cabinet picks.

So far, Trump has nominated eight picks for his cabinet from his group of high-profile MAGA supporters, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) as attorney general, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) as ambassador to the United Nations and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Maldonado said he wishes Trump would give him a cabinet position, too, as director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“I think I could save the taxpayers billions of dollars and get a little more honesty within that service,” Maldonado said. “We're spending billions of dollars on vehicles, staff, everything to regulate animals that are already regulated by international treaties.”

Maldonado said in the more than 20 years he ran the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma at the center of the 2020 Netflix documentary series, “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness,” he never heard from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Rather, he was licensed under the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Animal Welfare Act, he said.

“In 23 years of owning that zoo, I bred, I sold, I euthanized, I exhibited, and I let people play with baby tigers. 23 years,” Maldonado said. “Federal Fish and Wildlife never one time asked me how many I had, where the babies that are born went to, where any of the dead bodies went to, or what we've done with the dead bodies when one dies and we had to euthanize one, or anything. They never wanted to know how many tigers I had.”

Trump's spokespeople did not immediately respond to Raw Story's request for comment.

Maldonado is serving a 21-year sentence for two counts of murder-for-hire related to alleged plans to kill his big cat rescue foe, Carole Baskin, along with 19 other counts of wildlife crime related to the alleged killing of five tigers and the illegal sale of tiger cubs, violating the Lacey Act, prohibiting illegal wildlife trade, and the Endangered Species Act, according to the Department of Justice.

Maldonado maintains his innocence and is awaiting a response from an appeals court in Denver, he said. Maldonado said he expects to hear a decision by March or April 2025, so even if Trump or President Joe Biden don’t pardon him — and he said “they let me down four years ago" — Maldonado is hopeful to be out of prison at least through the appeals process.

Presidential aspirations

The “Tiger King” ran for president himself this year as a Democrat, suspending his campaign fundraising in May, Raw Story reported. He previously ran for president and governor of Oklahoma as a libertarian but switched parties due to too much party in-fighting, he said.

He also wanted to run as a Democrat in order to debate Biden about the economy and get answers about not following through on “campaign promises about justice reform and prison reform,” Maldonado said.

“I'm running as a Democrat because first someone has to become a new style of Democrat that meets in the middle like pro choice and pro 2nd amendment and tuff [sic] on violent crime but not so harsh on nonviolent offenders except sex offenders. Our prisons are over full of small time drug offenders while sex offenders and violent criminals go home first,” wrote Maldonado to Raw Story in a September 2023 letter on lined notebook paper with erratic capitalization.

Maldonado said despite running as a Democrat he ultimately endorsed Trump because “he was the strongest of all of them to keep us out of World War III and get the economy back on track, so I would have voted for him if I’d had the right to vote.”

Still, Trump's sweep of all swing states surprised Maldonado, along with the fact that Trump was the first convicted felon elected president.

“Now that Trump is a convicted felon, even if they drop his charges, he still got convicted. That will never leave an American citizen's mind. He was convicted, and America still loves him. They voted him in overwhelmingly,” Maldonado said. “I think people nowadays can look past the broken system and see through the smoke screens, and that's what I'm hoping President Biden or President Trump will do sooner than later is look through the BS and the smoke screens in my case.”