Mother Jones illustration; Getty; NASA/JPL-Caltech

On September 5, 1977, a 1,800-pound, ladle-shaped spacecraft named Voyager 1 took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, bound for the edge of our solar system. After about two months, it passed Mars’ orbit. Within two years, it made it to Jupiter, and almost two years after that, Saturn. On Valentine’s Day, 1990—34 years ago today—it looked back and snapped an image of Earth, the so-called “Pale Blue Dot,” which remains one of science’s most iconic photos, and, in my view, one of the greatest photos ever taken in the history of the world.

The first time I can remember seeing “Pale Blue Dot” was in high school. I’d won a print of the photo, appropriately, in a science fair competition. In the image, the Earth is about a pixel wide, a minuscule fleck in a grainy sea of nothingness. And that was the point: In his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot, famed scientist Carl Sagan, whose idea it was to capture Earth from such an immense distance, famously described the image in a way that never fails to make me tear up:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Although the “Pale Blue Dot” may have looked static, in 1990, the planet, of course, was as alive and bustling as ever. At the time, the world celebrated the freshly fallen Berlin Wall; scientists had just created the World Wide Web and launched the Human Genome Project, an initiative to map the human genome for the first time; Ghost, Pretty Woman, and Home Alone topped domestic box office sales; Ralph Nader, then in his 50s, graced the cover of Mother Jones.

Thirty-four minutes after “Pale Blue Dot” was taken, Voyager 1 shut off its cameras, as it was designed to do, and continued its journey. In 2012, the craft crossed the “heliopause,” which NASA describes as “the boundary between our solar bubble and the matter ejected by explosions of other stars,” into interstellar space, or the space between stars. Voyager is still operating, but on its last legs, and is expected to have fully shut off its key science instruments sometime around 2025, NASA says.

It’s fitting that “Pale Blue Dot” was taken on Valentine’s Day. It was, in its most basic form, an act of love. Even 34 years later, it serves as a paradoxical reminder of our insignificance—and our singular source of life. It is, quite literally, our everything. And today, as our planet is plagued by violent wars, a climate crisis, and the fallout of a devastating pandemic, and in a critical election year no less, that message feels more important than ever.

Happy Valentine’s Day, dot. (And also to my boyfriend.)

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testifies during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing .Stephanie Scarbrough/AP

After failing to muster enough votes last week, House Republicans approved two articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. Democrats and constitutional law experts have decried the proceedings, which charge Mayorkas with “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and “breach of public trust,” as a baseless “political stunt.” 

“I knew I was entering an extraordinarily polarizing environment, an environment where norms were in jeopardy, where civility was not always respected,” Mayorkas told the Los Angeles Times. “I didn’t assume this.”

The House impeachment of Mayorkas will likely go down in history as one of the most futile uses of this constitutional power. Throughout, Republicans have had trouble distinguishing what makes Mayorkas’ conduct impeachable. Many wanted a crackdown at the border. But, as Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), one of the holdouts from the last impeachment told CNN, removing Mayorkas for disagreements on border policy would amount to “redefining the fundamental definition of impeachment” away from misuse of power to political differences.

Here’s a brief timeline of how we got to a hard-to-comprehend moment:

Feb. 2, 2021: The Senate confirms Alejandro Mayorkas as DHS Secretary. The son of Cuban refugees, he becomes the first Latino and immigrant to lead the department.

March 17, 2021: Mayorkas testifies before Congress for the first time amidst a spike in arrivals of unaccompanied minors at the border.

Aug. 12, 2021: Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) becomes the first lawmaker to move to impeach Mayorkas, accusing the DHS secretary of “reckless abandonment of border security and immigration enforcement.” At the time, Biggs falsely claimed that the DHS secretary was “systematically releasing COVID-19 positive aliens into our communities.”

Oct. 2021: GOP Texas Rep. Chip Roy circulates among his fellow Lone Star Republican lawmakers a memo, which Fox News has an exclusive on, making a case to impeach Mayorkas. “Republicans should unify behind that message and push against the President and Mayorkas,” Roy tells Tucker Carlson, “to impeach them both.” 

Nov. 16, 2021: Mayorkas testifies at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on immigration where Republicans grill him on the number of migrant encounters and a proposed settlement payment to families separated under the Trump administration. 

Nov. 21, 2022: “It will be a happy day when Mayorkas leaves DHS and an adult takes over,” the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing some 18,000 agents, posts on X.

Dec. 13, 2022: Republicans hold a press conference with former Trump administration border officials calling on then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to pursue articles of impeachment against Mayorkas.

Jan. 10, 2023: Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) files articles of impeachment against Mayorkas for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Feb. 2023: DHS hires a law firm to help with the response to a potential impeachment process. 

April 2023: Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security Mark Green (R-Tenn.) reportedly tells donors “get the popcorn—Alejandro Mayorkas comes before our committee, and it’s going to be fun.”

April 19, 2023: At a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing, Mayorkas tells lawmakers the “border is secure.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is silenced after calling the secretary a “liar.” 

July 26, 2023: Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) holds a House Judiciary Committee hearing where Republican lawmaker Ken Buck of Colorado (who has voted against the impeachment) said his constituents consider Mayorkas a “traitor.” Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee calls out Republicans, saying “this is an oversight hearing, not an impeachment hearing.”

Nov. 9, 2023: Marjorie Taylor Greene introduces a motion calling for the impeachment of Mayorkas to try and force a vote. The House blocks her efforts and sends the resolution to the House Committee on Homeland Security. This does stop Greene from trying again and filing a second motion accusing the secretary of failing to “maintain operational control of the border” and violating the Secure Fence Act of 2006. (She later backs down.)

Jan. 2024: House Republicans recruit two lawyers: Paul Taylor, a Republican Counsel for the House Judiciary Committee who defended Trump in the 2019 impeachment case as minority counsel, and George Fishman, a former DHS official under Trump and a senior legal fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Jan. 28, 2024: House Republicans unveil articles of impeachment against Mayorkas. In a memo rebutting the accusations, DHS says Republicans have failed to prove that Mayorkas committed high crimes or misdemeanors and calls the process a “transparent attempt to appease their most extreme Members.” 

Jan. 29, 2024: Greene claims credit for the House impeachment proceedings. “Absolutely this is happening because I forced that floor vote,” she told The Hill.

Jan. 30, 2024: After more than 10 hours of debate, the House Committee on Homeland Security approves and moves the articles of impeachment to the House Floor in a 18-15 vote along party lines.

Feb. 6, 2024: House votes 214-216 against the articles of impeachment. Reps. Michael Gallagher (R-Wis.), Ken Buck (R-Colo.), Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), and Blake Moore (R-Utah) joined Democrats in voting no. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) was absent. 

Feb. 13, 2024: Despite three “no” votes from GOP lawmakers, House Republicans manage to adopt the impeachment resolution with a 214-213 vote. It is likely to go nowhere in the Democrat-led Senate. 

Kentucky Republican state Rep. Jennifer Decker told a local NAACP chapter on the first day of Black History Month that her white father was a "slave"—before later admitting she "probably overstated," according to a local report.Jon Cherry/Getty

A Kentucky Republican politician made an audacious claim on the first day of Black History Month, according to a local report: her white father, she said, was a slave. 

State Rep. Jennifer Decker made the comments, first reported by the Louisville Courier Journal, while speaking to a local chapter of the NAACP on Feb. 1 about why she’d introduced a bill seeking to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public colleges and universities, which she has said make schools “more divided, more expensive, and less tolerant.” According to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by the Courier Journal, during the Q&A portion of the event, an audience member asked Decker if her family played any role in the slave trade. 

Per the Courier Journal, Decker replied: “My father was born on a dirt farm in Lincoln County. His mother was the illegitimate daughter of a very prominent person who then was kind enough to allow them to work for him as slaves. So, if you’re asking, did we own slaves? My father was a slave, just to a white man and he was white.” 

When a Courier Journal columnist tracked Decker down to ask what she could have possibly meant—given that white people were not, in fact, subject to the chattel slavery that millions of Black people endured on American soil for more than 240 years—she tried to brush off the reporter before seemingly walking back her originally comments. 

“Irrelevant, irrelevant.” Decker initially told the reporter about her initial comments, adding, “my father’s past poverty is a great equalizer.”

When the reporter persisted, Decker explained that her father—a preacher born around 1933, according to the Courier Journal, or 68 years after slavery was outlawed—was “born into poverty” and worked for free with his family on the property they lived on. (It’s unclear whether the adults were paid, though the Courier Journal notes that it sounds more like “Decker’s father was forced by his parents to do chores” and that the family were tenant farmers.) 

Decker eventually conceded that she “probably overstated. Was I saying that it was kidnapping and abuse the same as the slaves? No.” 

That’s one thing Decker is right about. As my colleague Garrison Hayes discussed with Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton historian and author of The History of White People, back in October, there is a historical difference between white people who worked as indentured servants and the centuries-long enslavement of Black people on American soil. As Painter explained: 

Irish people—and vulnerable English people, Scottish people, Welsh people, poor people, people considered criminals, or orphans—were often shipped outside of the British Isles to places like what became the United States, and what later became Australia and New Zealand, as indentured workers. There were lots and lots of unfree white people. But their unfreedom had a term limit. If you survived your indenture—and many, many, many people did not survive—then you could become a free person.

So yes, many early North American white people were unfree, but they were not enslaved for life. It took the North American colonies several decades to go to permanent enslavement. It didn’t happen overnight. The people whom warlords had rounded up in places like what is now Angola and sold to Europeans, it was their descendants who became permanently enslaved. So by the end of the 17th century, what we recognize as permanent servitude, that chattel slavery, was in place. And it did not include people we now consider white.

Ricky Jones, a professor of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville, was one of many readers who called Decker out for the ahistorical comment. 

“A white slave in the mid-20th century? Talk about recreating history!” Jones wrote in a post on X. “Maybe this makes sense in the alternate supremacist reality that is Kentucky, but nowhere else. Jennifer Decker and her Republican friends lie about and distort everything else, why not this?”

While shocking, Decker’s comments—and her political priorities—are not anomalies. Republicans across the country have been seeking to downplay the history of Black enslavement and abolish DEI initiatives and critical race theory in schools for years now (though CRT is a framework for legal scholarship that is not, in fact, being taught to six-year-olds). But still, as the Courier Journal columnist pointed out, comments like Decker’s are exactly why it’s so important for schools to teach diverse curricula about the real history of slavery and racism in the US—which is exactly what she’s fighting against. 

Decker and a representative of the local NAACP chapter she spoke to didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday afternoon. 

In her latest apparent bid to secure her place as Trump's running mate, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) has filed an ethics complaint against New York Attorney General Letitia James.Michael Brochstein/ZUMA

The Trump veepstakes rages on. The latest apparent audition? Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) on Monday filed an ethics complaint against New York Attorney General Letitia James over her handling of the state’s $370 million civil fraud trial against Trump. 

Stefanik, the fourth-highest-ranking House Republican and chair of the House GOP Conference, alleges that James conducted a “biased investigation and prosecution” of Trump that was motivated by “personal vendetta.” The formal complaint seeks to have James disbarred or suspended, a request that echoes Trump’s claims that James has long demonstrated bias against him. The move by Stefanik comes as Trump reportedly considers her as a potential running mate and days before the judge who presided over the case is reportedly expected to issue his final ruling over how much Trump owes. (Judge Arthur Engoron—who Stefanik also filed an ethics complaint against in November—already found Trump liable for fraud before the trial got underway, and the court proceedings that are the subject of Stefanik’s complaint essentially amounted to a penalty phase.)

Accordingly, Stefanik’s complaint reads like a document intended to appeal to Trump’s complaints about the case, which could end in significant financial damage to the former president. Stefanik cites James’ own description of “leading the resistance against Donald Trump in NYC” as evidence of James’ alleged bias against the former president. Stefanik declined, however, to include the full facts of what transpired during the court proceedings, including Trump’s repeated attacks against the federal judge and his clerk, the resulting gag order, and subsequent violations of that order.

As my colleague Russ Choma reported at the time, James filed the lawsuit against Trump back in September 2022, accusing him “of committing a variety of fraudulent business practices for a decade in the run-up and during his presidency.” James alleged that Trump and his adult children inflated the value of their family businesses to get tax breaks and beneficial terms for loans and insurance coverage. 

Spokespeople for Stefanik and the New York State Unified Court System didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones. A spokesperson for the New York Attorney General’s office declined to comment on the record. 

This is hardly the first time Stefanik has made headlines for her seemingly undying loyalty to Trump. She recently refused to commit to certifying the November election results. During an appearance on Meet the Press last month, she repeated the unfounded and discredited conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen before noting that she’d “be honored to serve in any capacity in a Trump administration.” As I reported then, her parroting of Trump’s “Big Lie” was unsurprising, based on her political evolution:

The onetime moderate, who at one point called Trump misogynistic, rose to her position as the highest-ranking Republican woman in the House by riding this very wave of election denialism, successfully booting Liz Cheney from the post in the process. And in the hours after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Stefanik was one of 147 Republicans who voted to overturn election results. 

But the odds of Stefanik becoming Trump’s right-hand woman may be a bit bleaker now than back in January, given that Sen. Tim Scott has landed at the top of Trump’s list, according to an NBC News report published yesterday.

President Joe Biden meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York in 2023.Susan Walsh/AP

Using a “wave of attacks” this weekend, Israel bombed Rafah—a southern city in Gaza holding more than 1 million displaced people—killing dozens. The reason? The Israeli government said it was, at least in part, to provide cover for a military operation that successfully liberated hostages. The calculus is haunting: Israel killed 67 people to free two people.

With over 27,000 killed in Gaza already, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not publicly backed down from an aggressive war effort—begun in response to the October 7 attack that killed over 1,200 people—even as the deaths mount. “Only continued military pressure until total victory,” Netannyahu said after the operation in Rafah, according to the Guardian, “will bring about the release of all of our hostages.”

So far, the United States government has mostly backed the war, despite mounting criticism. For years, as my colleague Noah Lanard reported, President Joe Biden has been fiercely pro-Israel—and even more hawkish than the typical Democrat. But there are tiny indications of a potential change. Last week, Biden in a press conference said the Netanyahu government’s response in Gaza was “over the top.” In recent days, as Israel has prepared for a ground invasion of Rafah—drawing heavy international criticism—the administration has, at least in leaks to the press, said it is asking for much clearer plans from Israel.

But much of this seems to just be talk. Or, if it is not, Netanyahu has made no public statements that would indicate he is changing course. Netanyahu told ABC’s “This Week” that the only two options available to Israel are to either enter Rafah or to “lose the war.” Last week, he called a ceasefire proposal from Hamas “delusional.”

It’s hard to square all the reporting about Biden supposedly taking a harder line with actual US policy. As Matt Duss—the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders—points out, such warnings are “meaningless” when the United States shows no signs of “consequences for anything Israel does.”

When I called Duss to ask him if the “over the top” statement by Biden should be seen as a legitimate pushback to Netanyahu he said: “I can’t take that seriously. I’m sorry. You’re still delivering the weapons. You’re still enabling this massacre. That is what matters.”

Since Biden has repeatedly made clear that there will be no consequences for anything Israel does, this is a meaningless warning. Its sole point is to generate tweets like the one below, so people can say there’s “private pressure” and feel better about supporting atrocities. https://t.co/Y2zIAZSzQc

— Matt Duss (@mattduss) February 11, 2024

The private pushback, Duss continued, isn’t compelling when the impacts of it are clear. “The message is: Oh, he’s putting pressure in private. And my response to that is: How’s that going?” Duss told me. “They turned Gaza into the moon. You have almost 30,000 people killed; almost 2 million people displaced. Whatever Biden is saying in private, what he’s doing in public is sidestepping Congress to rush more ammunition to Israel. That’s the message. That’s the policy.”

Duss said that what is occurring now in Rafah makes it clear that Biden’s diplomatic approach does not seem to be having an impact on Israel’s behavior: “How much is enough? Is there actually a red line? Is there actually a number of dead Palestinian children that is too much? Thus far the answer is no.”

As the war unfolds, there has been some movement by some Democrats in response to the mounting horror. Sanders—despite reticence to call for a ceasefire—has become more vocal about the war, pushing to impose conditions on aid to Israel. And last week the Biden administration put out a memorandum, NSM-20, requiring written confirmation from foreign governments receiving arms transfers that humanitarian law is being followed.

But, as critics pointed out, there are already policies against war crimes. The provisions of NSM-20, as Duss told me, are a step forward in that the Biden administration is publicly saying it is unwilling to send military aid to a country committing atrocities. But “if they really wanted to uphold US legal commitments and international legal commitments around military force, we don’t need this new layer of paper,” Duss said. They can just enforce laws and policies already in place.

For now, it seems we are stuck in the same cycle. Early today, NBC News reported that behind the scenes Biden has repeatedly called Netanyahu an “asshole” standing in the way of peace. And, at the same time, the administration is pushing for $14.1 billion in military assistance to Israel, which does not include many conditions for how it is used or strong provisions for transparency.

As Lanard reported previously for us, the dynamic makes clear US priorities:

“The administration’s rhetoric is slowly shifting, but the world is seeing [America’s] actions,” the podcast host and former Obama National Security Council spokesperson Tommy Vietor said last week. “It kind of doesn’t matter what Biden says at a closed-door fundraiser.” The world sees the Biden administration vetoing a UN ceasefire resolution that only 10 out of 186 nations opposed, bypassing Congress to get tank shells to Israel more quickly, and maintaining “unshakeable” support for a nation multiple human rights groups in and outside of Israel—as well as a former head of the Mossad—have concluded forces Palestinians to live under a system of apartheid.

“So long as you are supporting Netanyahu’s military operation in Gaza without condition, it makes absolutely no difference how much you turn the dial in your comments,” Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser to President Obama, told the Washington Post. “Fundamentally, you have to make a decision not to give [Netanyahu] a blank check of support.”

Few voters hold Trump accountable for his foundational roll in eradicating abortion rights across the country, according to a new poll.Allison Dinner/EFE/ZUMA

Despite Trump appointing three of the Supreme Court justices that were part of the majority that overturned the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade, most voters don’t hold him responsible for rising abortion restrictions nationwide, according to the results of a new poll released Monday. 

The poll, conducted in December by the progressive think tank and polling firm Data for Progress, found that less than a quarter of voters overall (only 36 percent of Democrats—and, oddly, only 11 percent of Republicans) see Trump as “responsible for new bans or restrictions on abortions in states across the U.S.” So who do voters hold more responsible? Republicans in state office (33 percent), Republicans in Congress (34 percent), and the Supreme Court (50 percent). That’s not necessarily surprising, given that it was the high court that ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe; that Republicans in Congress have already introduced several bills over the last few years aimed at essentially eliminating abortion rights; and that Republicans in statehouses across the country continue to say unhinged things as they seek to curtail abortion access. 

But, still, Data for Progress says the poll results—as well as another data point from that poll, showing that 52 percent of voters overall, and 67 percent of Democrats, believe the outcome of the next election will be significant for addressing abortion—show that “Biden’s focus on directing the blame to Trump” for the end of Roe “could help voters make more of a connection to the role Trump has played in curtailing abortion rights.”

To be fair, the Biden-Harris re-election campaign has been vocal about abortion rights being an important issue in the next election—and they have blamed Trump directly. Last month, on the 51st anniversary of the Roe ruling, Biden released a statement noting that “Vice President Harris and I are fighting to protect women’s reproductive freedom against Republicans officials’ dangerous, extreme, and out-of-touch agenda”; the White House also announced a slate of new initiatives aimed at bolstering protections for abortion access, including new guidance from the Treasury, Labor and Health and Human Services departments aimed at expanding access to contraception under the Affordable Care Act and defending the right to emergency abortion care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. Biden has also called on Congress to codify the protections Roe offered, pledging to “immediately” sign such a bill into law if it passed. 

An ad released by the Biden campaign last month highlights Trump saying he’s “proud” to have had a hand in facilitating the overturning Roe, and that “there has to be some form of punishment” for people who get abortions—a comment he later walked back after widespread outrage, stating that “the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman.” In addition to those comments, the Biden campaign ad also features footage of Kate Cox and Brittany Watts as examples of people who are “living with the consequences” of Trump’s anti-abortion politics. 

New ad: Trump is “proud” of ending Roe v. Wade.

Women across America are living with the consequences pic.twitter.com/uroI9P9HBn

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) January 22, 2024

A Biden-Harris campaign spokesperson also noted that other polls have shown that a candidate’s support for abortion rights is a particularly important issue for majorities of swing voters and that most independent voters believe Republicans will try to further restrict abortion access—alleging that these findings show that voters are, indeed, aware of Biden’s and Trump’s different stances on abortion rights. 

But Biden has also continued to attract criticism from some reproductive rights and justice activists who say he’s too tepid in his support for abortion rights, given that polling shows a majority of Americans not only disapprove of Dobbs, but also believe that abortion should be legal in all or most instances.

The Hill reported that at a fundraiser in New York City on Wednesday, Biden repeated a talking point he has said before: “I’m a practicing Catholic. I don’t want abortion on demand but I thought Roe v. Wade was right.” That quote attracted a lot of criticism on X, where abortion rights experts and supporters said the statement emboldened restrictions on abortion that are already in place as a result of Dobbs and undermined longer-term efforts to re-enshrine protections that go beyond what Roe did.  

“Can we be clear about what ‘abortion on demand’ is? It’s getting an abortion when we need it,” said Renee Bracey Sherman, co–executive director of the abortion storytelling advocacy organization We Testify, adding that Biden was “stigmatizing abortion.” 

A report published by Vox earlier this week found that while leaders of many abortion rights groups demand more be done to protect abortion access, none will explicitly call Biden out for his messaging around “restoring Roe.” Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, perfectly highlighted this tension in comments she made to Vox. On the one hand, she said the upcoming election presents voters with “a very clear choice between holding the line or descending further into what will be irreparable chaos and confusion”; on the other, she also said, “you can be certain that we are fighting for more than Roe v. Wade.” 

That’s the same needle Biden has chosen to thread ahead of November: appear moderate enough to appeal to the majority of Americans who believe in some restrictions on abortion, according to Pew Research, while also keeping in mind that most Americans broadly favor abortion access—and that there are a lot more protections many activists, and Democrats, want to see enshrined in the future. 

Carlos Bolsonaro, son of Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro, whispers in his father's ear.Bruna Prado/AP

Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro probably wishes he was still in Florida right now. On the same day the US Supreme Court considers whether Donald Trump should be on the ballot because of his role in connection to January 6, his “great friend” and Brazilian counterpart has been ordered to surrender his passport.

On Thursday, the police unveiled new accusations against Brazil’s defeated leader as part of a sweeping search-and-seizure operation linked to an ongoing federal investigation—overseen by the Supreme Court—into Bolsonaro and his allies’ alleged coup-like efforts to overturn the results of the 2022 elections.

The police accused those under investigation of “criminal organization that acted in an attempt to stage a coup d’état and abolish the Democratic Rule of Law” to keep Bolsonaro in power. They arrested two of Bolsonaro’s former aides and instructed him not to contact the other targets of the operation. Police officials who spoke to the Washington Post said the plot to undermine Brazil’s democracy “was far more advanced than previously known.” 

An order signed by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes authorizing the operation states that Bolsonaro had access to and made requests for edits on a draft decree to subvert the election results and seek the arrest of Moraes, another justice, and the Senate leader. The decree was then presented to military commanders.

The investigation cites Bolsonaro’s baseless attacks on the integrity of the Brazilian electronic system as evidence of coordinated efforts to “enable and legitimize a military intervention.” The former President went so far as to hold a meeting with dozens of foreign diplomats in July 2022 to raise suspicion of fraud. The police also reportedly have access to video of a meeting in which Bolsonaro claims he would “walk onto the field using my army, my 23 ministers…” 

“I left office more than a year ago, and I’m still suffering implacable prosecution,” Bolsonaro, who has been ruled ineligible to run for office until 2030 and is currently at his vacation home in a beach town outside of Rio de Janeiro, told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper. “Forget me, you now have another person governing the country.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2011 at the UN building.Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a ceasefire and hostage exchange deal presented by Hamas, calling the proposal “delusional.” Hamas’ plan, according to CNN, would have involved three 45-day-long phases in which fighting subsided and hostages were traded for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Hamas did not seek an immediate end to the war, a sticking point in earlier discussions. The deal was presented as a counterproposal by Hamas as the groups trade demands related to the potential pause in fighting and hostage exchange.

The ceasefire would have put a temporary halt to a military campaign by Israel in Gaza—begun in response to an attack by Hamas on October 7—that has reportedly killed over 27,000 in Gaza, displaced 1.9 million people, destroyed or damaged an estimated 50 to 62 percent of all buildings in Gaza, brought about an acute risk of famine in which “pretty much everybody is hungry,” and made life in Gaza, as one witness told us, “hell on earth.”

Netanyahu told the press that Israel will continue fighting until there is a more “complete victory.” He has promised the campaign would not end until the country achieves its goals: “the elimination of Hamas, the return of all our hostages, and ensuring that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel.” The prime minister has rejected the idea of establishing a Palestinian state. Israel is currently creating a “buffer zone” between Gaza and Israel. “I like to call it a ‘killing zone,’ but since ‘killing zone’ is not a nice term, we use the words ‘buffer zone,'” a former national security adviser to Netanyahu told Jewish Currents.

For months there has been persistent pressure for a ceasefire. At the United Nations, over 150 countries voted for a ceasefire resolution. Throughout the world, mass protests have been held. And a growing list of Democratic politicians have pushed for a cessation of fighting. Last October, a group of progressive Democrats introduced the Ceasefire Now Resolution. “We can’t bomb our way to peace, equality, and freedom,” Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), a sponsor of the bill, said. “With thousands of lives lost and millions more at stake, we need a ceasefire now.” Similar calls for an end to the fighting have been made by the city councils throughout the US, hundreds of Jewish organizations, Black faith leaders, the United Auto Workers (disclosure: Mother Jones workers are represented by UAW Local 2103), the editorial board of the Financial Times, and a slew of staffers at Democratic institutions.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a deadly attack on Israel, killing over 1,200 people and taking more than 200 hostages. Almost immediately, Israel declared war. President Joe Biden publicly made clear the United States would stand with its close ally Israel in the campaign. For five months, as Israel bombed the Gaza Strip relentlessly, the Democratic administration continued providing weapons and diplomatic cover—even as resistance grew.

The United States sends over $3 billion in aid to Israel annually. Since October 7, the Biden administration has pushed for $14.3 billion in additional aid. With that request stalled in Congress, Biden has twice avoided congressional approval to send $250 million in weapons to Israel. In November, the US pushed for humanitarian “pauses”—stoppages in the conflict to allow for some aid to enter Gaza and the exchange of some hostages and prisoners.

As my colleague Noah Lanard reported, Biden has shown a far deeper commitment to Israel than a typical Democrat might:

Much of Biden’s deference to Israel is deeply personal. As his supporters have put it, he identifies with the nation in his kishkes—his guts. That can be seen in the highly emotional and graphic way in which he has talked about victims of the Hamas attack being massacred, sexually assaulted, and taken hostage.

Both before and after October 7, the empathy Biden is known for has rarely extended to Palestinians. Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, said such statements are missing “to the degree that I don’t really think he sees the Palestinians at all.” In contrast, Khalidi added, Biden sees Israelis “as they are very carefully presented by their government and their massive information apparatus.”

A former Biden administration official shared a similar perspective with me. “The President does not seem to acknowledge the humanity of all parties affected by this conflict,” this person said. “He has described Israeli suffering in great detail, while Palestinian suffering is left vague if mentioned at all.”

Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.Jim Lo Scalzo/EFE/ZUMA

We are in an odd place when Republicans are voting down a bill that funds border security and war.

After months of negotiations, Senate Republicans have officially tanked a bipartisan border bill linked to a national security supplemental funding package. The now-dead agreement would have represented the most restrictive immigration overhaul in decades. And it would have given billions in aid to Israel and Ukraine. (Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) plans to strip the border security provisions from the larger national security bill and hold a separate vote on the latter.) 

President Biden has been urging Congress to pass the 370-page bill, calling it the “thoughest and fairest set of border reforms in decades.” But Donald Trump’s attacks coupled with House Speaker Mike Johnson’s statement that it was “dead on arrival” in that chamber led Senate Republicans to walk away from a deal largely catered to Republicans’ priorities. “The Senate bill has reforms Trump never came close to getting,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote in support of the proposed legislation, which also garnered an endorsement from the Border Patrol Union representing some 18,000 agents. 

The proposal, spearheaded by Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), would have directed $20 billion in funding towards border enforcement, increased detention capacity, and raised the standards for initial asylum screenings.

At the center of it was a provision that would have created a new border expulsion authority allowing the Department of Homeland Security to quickly expel migrants arriving between ports of entry when the average daily border encounters reached 4,000 in the span of a week. (That authority would be mandatorily triggered when that number rose to 5,000 or 8,500 in a single day, but officials would still have to process at least 1,400 asylum seekers at ports of entry.) This expulsion authority, immigrant rights advocates and some Democrats opposed to the deal have warned, would potentially create more chaos at the border.

Still, immigration experts have described the axed proposal as a “mixed bag.” It would have created a new process to expedite asylum determinations and added 50,000 new family and employment-based visas, among other provisions.

In an analysis, the American Immigration Council said the bill represented a “serious attempt to acknowledge, and solve, some of the key problems with current border and asylum policy” but “positive steps in this direction are ‘smothered’ by a new ’emergency authority’ that repeats mistakes made by the Trump and Biden administrations: making protection much less available for those in need, while failing to send a clear message to future arrivals.” 

Perhaps most importantly, as I have written, the deal signaled President Joe Biden and some Democrats’ willingness to compromise on longstanding goals like pushing for the legalization of long-term undocumented immigrants living in the United States. That will be hard for many to forget.

John Locher/AP

Roughly two months ago, Donald Trump reminded voters of his authoritarian tendencies when the former president expressed interest in ruling like a dictator on day one of a potential return to the White House. Now a new poll reveals that an overwhelming majority of Republican voters are fine with a one-day dictatorship under Trump.

The survey from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that 74 percent of Republican voters believe that it’s either “definitely” or “probably” a good idea for Trump to be a dictator for a day. Most Republican voters also believe that Trump, a Florida man facing 91 criminal counts, is innocent of the charges against him. The findings are at once shocking and expected; they fall in line with similar polls reflecting the GOP’s ride-or-die support for the former president. As my colleague Julianne McShane wrote last month, droves of Republicans are standing by Trump despite his well-documented attempts to overturn the 2020 election; 64 percent believed that he was a “person of faith.” 

Republicans today are more likely to be sympathetic to Trump regarding his involvement in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, compared to the week after the insurrection, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found. Fourteen percent of GOP-identified respondents said last month that Trump bears a great or good amount of responsibility for the deadly insurrection, compared to 27 percent who said the same nearly three years ago. Only 18 percent of Republicans in that survey said the insurrection was “mostly violent,” compared to 26 percent who said so in 2021. (As a reminder, the insurrection led to injuries to approximately 140 police officers.)

Trump has since claimed that his remarks were made in jest. But Republican voters apparently assenting to a one-day dictatorship, real or imagined, are further evidence of the iron-clad grip that Trump has on his supporters and the GOP.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is sworn in during the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/ZUMA

On Tuesday, House Republicans fell short of getting enough votes to adopt a resolution to impeach Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in what would have been the first impeachment of a cabinet leader since 1876. The vote was the culmination of incessant attacks by House Republicans against the secretary, who they accused of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and “breach of public trust.” For months, Democrats and an array of legal experts have decried the proceedings as a “political stunt” with no basis on constitutional grounds.

The final vote was 214-216 with four Republican lawmakers joining Democrats in voting against the resolution, including Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.), Ken Buck (R-Colo.), and Blake Moore (R-Utah).

“They say this is about securing the border,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said of his GOP counterparts on the House floor, “and their plan to secure the border is to impeach the guy responsible for securing the border and replace him with—now wait for it…they aren’t sure.” He added: “Republicans simply do not want to participate in government. They want to create chaos, they want to create confusion, and they want to create a campaign issue for Donald Trump going into the next election.”

As I’ve written about before, Republicans’ scapegoating of Mayorkas has been a long time in the making:

Almost since the moment Mayorkas, a career public servant with extensive experience as a federal prosecutor and head of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), began the job as head of DHS, Republicans have made him a target. They say that Mayorkas has willfully violated his oath of office by refusing to do his job of securing the border. Republicans claim Mayorkas has abused his office’s authority when using a discretionary parole program to allow certain groups to lawfully enter the country and has lied to Congress about having “operational control” of the border—an impossible, congressionally defined standard that requires “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States.” 

When asked about the process in a New York Times magazine tight-lipped interview, Mayorkas called the process “baseless” and “a political process, and I am not engaged in politics.” 

NEW >> Bipartisan former DHS Secretaries urge Speaker Johnson not to impeach Mayorkas

It “would jeopardize our national security”

“Policy differences are not Constitutionally permissible impeachment offenses”

“We urge you to set aside this groundless impeachment effort” pic.twitter.com/Utcs3TmzNa

— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) February 6, 2024

The failed effort to impeach Mayorkas represents an embarrassing blowback for House Speaker Mike Johnson—who is simultaneously handing a death sentence to the Senate bipartisan border deal negotiated with the White House with input from Mayorkas. It was also something of a test run. Conservative Republicans aspired to pursue an impeachment against President Joe Biden. “We’re here because the madcap wild goose chase to impeach Joe Biden has produced no wild geese,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said on Tuesday, calling the process against Mayorkas a “worthless trinket of a consolation prize.”

Prior to the vote, some House Republicans showed trepidation in moving forward with the impeachment process. In an op-ed, Rep. Buck declared he was voting no on the impeachment. “Partisan impeachments that do not meet the constitutional standard will boomerang back and hurt Republicans in the future,” he wrote. “I can envision a future Republican administration where a Democrat-led House uses this precedent to act against a Republican Cabinet member who isn’t discharging their duties in a way that Democrats desire.” 

“I think that it lowers the grounds of impeachment,” Rep. McClintock said in an interview with CNN, adding that they “will have been complicit in redefining the fundamental definition of impeachment.” Moreover, McClintock wrote in a 10-page memo to his colleagues opposing the impeachment, “it is delusional to believe the Senate will vote to remove Mayorkas on the grounds laid out by the [Homeland Security Committee]. At best it will be a party-line vote. More likely, it will be a bi-partisan repudiation of of a misuse of power.” 

Mayorkas’ impeachment would have faced an uphill battle in the Democrat-led Senate. 

Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) said he would not have certified the 2020 election results, and unfurled a litany of disproven election lies to explain himself.Michael Reynolds/EFE/ZUMA

There appears to be a loyalty test for aspiring Republican vice presidents: Will you question the 2020 election on TV?

In an interview that aired on This Week With George Stephanopoulos yesterday, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio)—the infamous former never-Trumper who is now reportedly under consideration to be Trump’s running mate—told the ABC News host that he would not have certified the 2020 election results, and unfurled a litany of disproven election lies to explain himself.

“If I had been vice president,” Vance told Stephanopoulos, “I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.” Here Vance seems to be referring to the potential of endorsing the slate of fake, pro-Trump electors in seven swing states who planned to try to overthrow the election—many of whom have since faced criminal charges. 

“That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020,” Vance continued. “I think that’s what we should have done.” 

Stephanopoulos clapped back: “So it’s very clear, you would have done what Donald Trump asked you to do there, not what Vice President Mike Pence did.” (Vance disputed this, claiming that “it’s not about what Donald Trump asks somebody to do.”) 

Vance also trotted out a litany of other disproven claims or half-baked theories easily refuted by the facts: “Do I think there were problems in 2020? Yes, I do. Do I think it was a problem that big technology companies, working with the intelligence services, censored the presidential campaign of Donald Trump? Yes. Do I think it’s a problem that Pennsylvania changed its balloting rules in the middle of the election season in a way that even some courts in Pennsylvania have said was illegal? Yes, I think these were problems, George, and I think there is a political solution to those problems.”

Let’s take each of those claims:

• As a Washington Post analysis notes, Vance was falsely suggesting here that the government’s efforts to work with social media companies to tackle misinformation about voting and the pandemic targeted the Trump campaign.
• His comments about Pennsylvania appear to refer to the state’s expansion of mail-in voting—a measure passed by Republican lawmakers in 2019. As Mother Jones previously reported, after Biden won Pennsylvania on the strength of that turnout, Republicans tried to have 2.6 million of those mail-in ballots invalidated, but the state Supreme Court tossed the lawsuit and the US Supreme Court declined to take it. 

There aren’t more bullet points of refutation to be made because Stephanopoulos abruptly ended the interview after Vance suggested the president should be able to defy the Supreme Court.

Vance’s talking points suggest he’s more interested in currying favor with Trump and auditioning for the job of vice president than sticking with the facts. After all, he previously called Trump “an idiot,” a “cynical asshole,” and “America’s Hitler” before securing his endorsement ahead of a successful 2022 Senate race.

As I reported last month, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), another VP hopeful, told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press that she wouldn’t commit to certifying this November’s election results—even though two independent firms hired by the Trump campaign to investigate the results found no evidence of wrongdoing, and more than 60 lawsuits filed by Trump challenging the legitimacy of the election were found to be without merit: 

When Welker pressed for clarity, Stefanik said she would only commit to certifying the results “if they are constitutional.” She then proceeded to repeat the unfounded and discredited conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen.

And for Stefanik, too, it seemed like a political strategy: 

Of course, Stefanik’s promotion of the falsehood is unsurprising: The onetime moderate, who at one point called Trump misogynistic, rose to her position as the highest-ranking Republican woman in the House by riding this very wave of election denialism, successfully booting Liz Cheney from the post in the process. And in the hours after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Stefanik was one of 147 Republicans who voted to overturn election results. 

So don’t be surprised if, over the next few weeks and months—as Trump continues to rise in the polls—you hear more GOPers falsely claiming the election was stolen. And when they do, keep in mind: they’re most likely auditioning for a job in the Trump administration. 

Army carry team moves the transfer case containing the remains of service member killed in a drone attack in Jordan.Matt Rourke/AP

On Friday, the United States launched retaliatory airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against targets linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and Iranian-backed militant groups. The strikes have reportedly killed nearly 40 people, with more military operations expected to follow amidst growing tension in the Middle East and fears of a wider regional conflict. “The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world,” President Joe Biden said in a statement about the airstrikes. “But let all those who might seek to do us harm know this: If you harm an American, we will respond.” 

Here’s what we know so far:

Why did the US attack Iranian military targets?

The Friday airstrikes were conducted in response to a January 28 drone attack on US troops that killed three American soldiers and wounded dozens of others at a military outpost in Jordan. The US Department of Defense identified the service members as Sgt. William Jerome Rivers of Carrollton, Georgia; Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders of Waycross, Georgia; and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett of Savannah, Georgia. The drone attack marked the first fatal assault by Iran-backed militias against US troops since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. This round of airstrikes follow US operations against Iran-aligned militant groups and an estimated 150 attacks by proxy forces against US bases in Iraq and Syria since October. Iran denied involvement in the drone attacks but a coalition of Iranian-backed militias known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed responsibility. 

What was the result of the US airstrikes?

Eighty-five targets at seven locations in western Iraq and eastern Syria have been hit by the strikes, according to the US Central Command, including command and control headquarters, intelligence centers, rockets and missiles, drone and ammunition storage sites, and other facilities. “There’s been no communications with Iran since the attack,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Friday night. At least 23 pro-Iran militants have been killed in eastern Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. 

What has Iran done in response and what are other countries saying?

Iran’s Foreign Ministry condemned the airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, calling them “violations of the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of those countries. “The attack last night on Syria and Iraq is an adventurous action and another strategic mistake by the American government which will have no result other than increasing tensions and destabilizing the region,” said Nasser Kanaani, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry. Prior to the attack, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi had said the country would “not start any war, but if anyone wants to bully us they will receive a strong response”; afterward, Yahya Rasool, a spokesperson for the Iraqi army, said the strikes “constitute a violation of Iraqi sovereignty and undermine the efforts of the Iraqi government, posing a threat that will pull Iraq and the region to undesirable consequences.” Notably, Iran has refrained from threatening to retaliate. 

Christian Ziegler attends a rally at the Hillsborough County Republican Party office. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP

Christian Ziegler, the former chairman of the Florida Republican Party who got booted last month after being accused of raping a woman who had been sexually involved with him and his wife, is now claiming to be the victim of a crime in an effort to fend off the release of information from his cellphone.

The woman reportedly told the police Ziegler “had been sexually battering her for years, and she never felt like she could say no to him.” Ziegler, who was under investigation but hasn’t been charged, said the October encounter when the alleged rape happened was consensual and that he had had consensual sex with the unnamed woman “approximately one dozen times since they first met,” according to police interviews and other records obtained by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. 

Ziegler’s lawyer, Matthew Sarelson, argues that a cellphone video Ziegler took of the encounter that was reviewed by the police “clearly exonerates him of any alleged sexual assault” and makes him “the victim of a crime, as his accuser has filed a false report to law enforcement authorities—a first-degree misdemeanor.” In a letter, Sarelson asked Sarasota City Attorney Robert Fournier to “take all steps necessary to ensure that no data or information from Mr. Ziegler’s cellphone is released to the public.” (Ziegler is also being investigated for allegedly engaging in video voyeurism by filming the sexual encounter without the woman’s consent, according to the Florida Center for Government Accountability.)

Newly released police reports include text message exchanges between Ziegler and his wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder and Sarasota school board member Bridget Ziegler, in which she wrote that the woman was “going through some shit” and she didn’t “want to feel like we ever take advantage of anyone (I know it’s always been consensual) but she seems…’broken.'” Ziegler suggested they should “hunt for somebody new.”

In the letter to the Sarasota city attorney, Sarelson further claims that Ziegler should be protected under Florida’s Marsy’s Law, which grants victims of crimes the “right to prevent the disclosure of information or records that could be used to locate or harass the victim or the victim’s family, or which could disclose confidential or privileged information of the victim.”

As my colleague Kiera Butler has reported, the Zieglers’ sex scandal also led to Bridget Ziegler’s resignation from the conservative Leadership Institute, where she held the title of vice president of school board programs and trained conservative candidates to run for school board seats across the country. She has continued to face mounting pressure to also resign from her role as Sarasota school board member, but has so far refused to do so. 

Congressional Democrats want Biden to do more to protect pregnant people from criminalization, pointing to the case of Brittany Watts.Sue Ogrocki/AP

More than 150 Democratic members of Congress have written to President Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra with a demand: Do more to prevent the criminalization of pregnant people post-Dobbs and to support those who are unfairly targeted by law enforcement. 

The letter, dated Thursday, highlights the case of Brittany Watts, the 34-year-old Black woman from Ohio who was charged with a felony in October over her handling of an at-home miscarriage; when she later sought care at a hospital, a nurse reported her to police. While a grand jury ultimately declined to indict Watts earlier this month, the letter notes that “the fact that Ms. Watts faced degrading law enforcement interrogation and that such a case was even brought forward at all is alarming and cruel.” It also emphasized that—as I reported earlier this week—Watts’ experience is indicative of broader inequities related to the criminalization of pregnant people, with women of color far more likely to face “punitive responses” from healthcare professionals. That includes the criminalization of adverse pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriages—which, as in Watts’ case, can be mistaken for self-managed abortions.

Spearheaded by members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, the letter urges federal officials to provide “educational, financial, and legal services support to any person who experiences or is threatened with pregnancy criminalization,” and to reduce the likelihood of criminalization in the first place through three specific measures: investigating prosecutions of pregnant people as forms of sex-based discrimination; reminding hospital and medical staff of patients’ rights to privacy under HIPAA; and enforcing the section of the Affordable Care Act that prohibits discrimination based on sex when federally-funded healthcare personnel “improperly report to law enforcement when patients miscarry, terminate a pregnancy, or seek other pregnancy-related care.” 

The letter also notes that—as my colleague Katie Herchenroeder and I reported in November—the fallout from the Dobbs decision “has only escalated efforts to charge people with crimes related to their pregnancies.” As Katie and I wrote a few months ago: 

On top of abortion clinics closing, obstetrics programs and maternity wards—from Alabama to Idaho—have also shuttered, putting providers out of work and leaving 1.7 million women living in counties without abortion or maternity care access, according to an analysis conducted by ABC News and Boston Children’s Hospital. Providers who are still working risk losing their license or going to jail if they miscalculate what thin exceptions to abortion bans mean for the care they can give. And with some bans incentivizing people to report those having abortions to law enforcement, criminalization is poised to get worse.  

Ultimately, the lawmakers wrote, “When individuals like Ms. Watts cannot seek medical care for pregnancy-related conditions without fear of discrimination and criminalization, our health care system and our justice system have failed.”

A Department of Justice spokesperson declined to comment on the letter. Spokespeople for the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday afternoon from Mother Jones. 

The timing of the letter comes as the Biden administration has made a renewed effort to campaign on their support for abortion rights as the November election nears. That effort is facing its own challenges, as well as criticism from some reproductive rights advocates who say that the Biden campaign is too narrow in its focus on mostly legal rights to abortion and contraception. These critics have called on Biden to embrace reproductive justice, a broader framework that goes beyond the right to abortion, to include the right for people to “maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” At Biden’s “Restore Roe” rally in Virginia last week, for example, which commemorated the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, protesters confronted him for continuing to support Israel in its war on Palestine, specifically noting that pregnant Gazans are miscarrying and struggling to access care, as I reported back in October.

While Democrats are far from united on their stances on Biden’s approach to the war, the number of lawmakers who signed onto Thursday’s letter suggests that there may be broader support for campaigning on reproductive justice issues. Supporters of the letter also hinted at this: “Across the country, we’ve seen pregnant people shamed, targeted, stigmatized, and criminalized for giving birth, experiencing a miscarriage, and having abortions,” Jamila Perritt, an OB-GYN and the president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health, said in a statement. “As a physician, I cannot over-emphasize how dangerous this is for individuals, families, and communities…medical standards, not politicians, judges, or police, should guide health care.” 

Indeed, as the reproductive rights legal advocacy organization If/When/How said in a tweet earlier this week in response to my reporting about Watts: “When care providers police their patients, they only make people afraid to get the care they need.”

Update, February 2: This post has been updated to reflect a comment received from a spokesperson for the Department of Justice. 

Moms for America president Kimberly FletcherMoms for America

Yesterday, I wrote about the “Take Our Border Back” convoy headed to three southwestern cities and the grab bag of conspiracies its participants embrace. But, wait, there’s more! Moms for America—not to be confused with that other right-wing moms’ group, Moms for Liberty—has joined the convoy, and here is what their leader, Kimberly Fletcher, has to say about why they’re going:

❗️Here’s why Moms for America is going to the border.
Join us and follow us along the way
👉 https://t.co/Nd0gHJP6uH#Texas #Texasborder #texasbordercrisis #BorderCrisis

As Kimberly makes her way to the Texas border please join us after at our Summit and Gala.
Grab tickets now… pic.twitter.com/tLdD84v2Ba

— Moms for America (@momsforamerica) February 1, 2024

Fletcher, who was subpoenaed for her involvement in the rally that preceded the January 6 Capitol insurrection, has spoken up about the border before. In 2018, Fletcher told the conservative outlet The Blaze about how, on a recent trip to the border, she had learned about a six-year-old migrant girl who “had been raped by 30 men!” But when FactCheck.org tried to verify the story with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, they learned that there was no evidence that the supposed rape ever happened. When the fact checkers called Fletcher for comment, she told them that she had heard the story from someone else. Politifact didn’t find any evidence to support Fletcher’s story, either.

Moms for America may not be as au courant as Moms for Liberty, but actually, it’s been around for much longer. Founded in 2004, the group says it “marches forward together to restore the value of motherhood, marriage, womanhood, and patriotism.” Last year, I wrote about Moms for America’s involvement in the right-wing takeover of the board of Florida’s Sarasota Hospital.

While Moms for America’s conference, coming up later this month, will not be as star-studded as Moms for Liberty’s presidential hopeful extravaganza last summer, there will be a few right-wing superstars in attendance: former national security advisor to former President Donald Trump, Mike Flynn (who tweeted Fletcher’s border convoy video yesterday, proclaiming, “I am Moms for America”), former Trump-era Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, and Hercules actor and conspiracy theorist Kevin Sorbo.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.Alex Brandon/AP

House Republicans have taken another step toward their unprecedented efforts to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who they blame for a migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border.

On Tuesday, the Homeland Security Committee held a hearing to consider two articles of impeachment accusing Mayorkas, the first Latino and immigrant to ever lead DHS, of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and a “breach of public trust.” Secretary Mayorkas, Chairman Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) said in his opening remarks, “has put his political preferences above following the law.” The Republican lawmakers voted early Wednesday morning to send the impeachment resolution to the House floor. 

As I’ve written before, Republicans have been scrambling to make an impeachment case that amounts to little more than policy disagreements. Today, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) called the proceedings a “baseless political stunt” by MAGA Republicans comparable to “throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks.”

Several constitutional law experts and former DHS officials say the process is making a mockery of the powerful tool of impeachment. As I reported:

Because impeachment wasn’t intended to be the equivalent of a vote of no confidence in parliamentary systems, [Frank Bowman, a University of Missouri law professor and author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump] explained, an impeachable conduct should meet “a very high treshold of seriousness” and be of a “type that corrupts or subverts the political and governmental process.” There is no evidence that Mayorkas has committed treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors. 

Ahead of the hearing, Mayorkas released a six-page letter to Green (R-Tenn.) responding to “the politically motivated accusations and personal attacks you have made against me.” In it, he noted that, contrary to GOP talking points, the Biden administration has removed or returned more migrants in the last three years than President Donald Trump did throughout his term.

Mayorkas added: “I assure you that your false accusations do not rattle me and do not divert me from the law enforcement and broader public service mission to which I have devoted most of my career and to which I remain devoted.”

In a statement during the hearing, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), highlighted the irony and hypocrisy of House Republicans charging against Mayorkas for not doing his job, while also siding with Trump in opposing the bipartisan border deal being negotiated in the Senate.

“You are sitting here right now trying to impeach a Secretary of Homeland Security for neglecting his duties literally while he is trying to perform his duties and negotiate legislation.” He continued: “The real reason we are here, as we all know, is because Donald Trump wants to run on immigration as his number one issue in the November 2024 election.” (I recently explained Trump’s immigration plans for a second term.)

There’s yet another irony here. Mayorkas, who could potentially become the first cabinet secretary to be impeached since the 1800s, is being targeted for an alleged failure to secure “operational control” of the border despite carrying out the very policies—including harsh restrictions on asylum at the southern border—that have opened up the Biden administration to criticism for not upholding its promises to fundamentally depart from Trump on immigration. 

Brittany Watts celebrated with supporters earlier this month after a grand jury declined to indict her on a felony charge for how she handled an at-home miscarriage. Sue Ogrocki/AP

Last week, Brittany Watts, a 34-year-old Black medical receptionist from Ohio, made national headlines when she gave her first television interview after being charged with a felony for how she handled miscarrying a pregnancy at home at the end of last year. The case sparked an outcry from reproductive justice advocates, who have long been concerned with the criminalization of pregnancy. 

On Friday, another important detail came out about the case: Watts revealed that it was a hospital nurse who first reported her to law enforcement.

The new detail from Watts is a jarring example of what my colleague Katie Herchenroeder and I reported back in November: that research has shown health care providers were the group of people most likely to report pregnant people for having self-managed abortions under Roe. (Self-managed abortions, or SMAs, occur when someone ends a pregnancy without clinical supervision or support—most often through abortion pills; unintentional miscarriages can sometimes be mistaken as intentional SMAs.)

Experts we spoke with said that this trend was likely to increase post-Dobbs. And they noted that racism and biases can play a role in who health care workers report to authorities. As we wrote:

More than 40 percent of cases featured in the If/When/How report [on people criminalized for ending a pregnancy without supervision from a doctor] “involved minoritized racial and ethnic groups, making people of color disproportionately represented in the sample”…a September report published by the legal advocacy organization Pregnancy Justice showed that poor Black women were overrepresented among those criminalized, along with poor white women, a trend the report attributes to the opioid epidemic’s impact on the latter demographic. 

Watts had a miscarriage last September, when she was right around 22 weeks pregnant—the point at which Ohio then banned abortion, “CBS Mornings” reported. (Ohio voters have since approved a ballot measure establishing a constitutional right to abortion until the point of viability, which is usually determined to be around 24 weeks, as my colleague Madison Pauly reported in November.)  The miscarriage occurred a few days after Watts’ water broke; prior to the miscarriage, Watts had seen her OB-GYN, who told her the pregnancy would not be viable, and spent two days at a hospital.

Watts told “CBS Mornings” she ultimately left the hospital to go home at the end of each of those two days, against medical advice, because she felt “frustrated” and “ignored” by doctors, who weren’t inducing labor despite knowing her pregnancy was not viable.

“I’m scared, I’m like, ‘there’s a nonviable pregnancy in me, am I going to die?'” Watts said she recalled thinking.

Brittany Watts was 21 weeks pregnant when doctors told her that her pregnancy was not viable and she eventually miscarried at home.

In her first TV interview, Watts tells @Jerickaduncan about then being charged with a felony crime after she suffered a miscarriage. pic.twitter.com/8lfRQuBN9n

— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) January 26, 2024

Watts’ medical records, obtained by CBS, show that hospital staff expressed “concerns about Brittany’s verbalization to staff that she wishes to terminate the pregnancy and continues to mention she feels that she is getting or consenting to an abortion.” The records also show that the ethics committee said they’d support induction “if it [is] the professional judgment of the physicians that Brittany is at high risk of bleeding and or serious infection that could lead to death,” and that “if induction occurs, there should be a well documented conversation with her (informed consent) that the procedure is only to prevent harm to her, and is not intended to terminate a potentially viable pregnancy.” Watts told CBS nobody at the hospital ever told her the ethics committee was involved in decisions about her care.  

At home, Watts miscarried in her toilet; after, she told CBS, she plunged the toilet and scooped up the contents into a bucket, which she dumped outside, adding that she never saw the actual fetus. (An autopsy report found the fetus died in utero, before delivery, due to complications of premature rupturing of the membranes, the New York Times reported.) 

After the miscarriage, Watts went back to the hospital for care, and that’s when she crossed paths with the nurse who ultimately reported her to police.

“The nurse comes in and she’s rubbing my back and talking to me and saying ‘everything’s going to be okay.’ Little do I know, the nurse that was comforting me, and saying that everything was going to be okay, was the one who called the police,” Watts said in the CBS interview. 

The 911 audio, obtained by CBS, shows that the nurse said she was calling about a mother who “had a delivery at home and came in without the baby”; when the dispatcher asked if the baby was alive or not, the nurse said Watts “said she didn’t want to look” and that “she didn’t want the baby.” (Watts disputed that allegation, telling CBS she “never said I didn’t want my baby.”) Her medical records, obtained by CBS, show that the nurse contacted police “to investigate the possibility of the infant being in a bucket at the patient’s residence” after the risk management team advised the nurse to do so. Police arrested Watts in October and charged her with felony abuse of a corpse, which carried up to a $2,500 fine and the possibility of a year in prison.

Earlier this month, a grand jury declined to indict her. Watts said she’s speaking out now because “I don’t want any other woman to go through what I had to go through,” adding that she believes she was charged “because of my skin color, honestly, and because there are no laws behind what you are to do in this situation.” 

Even though Watts wasn’t ultimately convicted, cases like hers can still have a chilling effect. As If/When/How said in a post on X today about Watts’ latest revelation: “When care providers police their patients, they only make people afraid to get the care they need.” 

Trump pledged to work "hand in hand" with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on deportations if he's re-elected.Michael Gonzalez via ZUMA

Last night, former president Donald Trump inserted himself into the showdown between the federal government and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, encouraging states to send troops to the southern border to try to curb illegal immigration. 

On Truth Social, Trump pushed for “all willing States to deploy their guards to Texas to prevent the entry of Illegals, and to remove them back across the Border.” In his Truth Social rant, Trump also pledged that, if re-elected, he would “work hand in hand with Governor Abbott” to enact what he called “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History.”  (Representatives of Abbott’s office and the Texas Military Department haven’t yet responded to my inquiries about whether they echo Trump’s request for states to send guards to the border or whether they have been in touch with the Trump campaign on the topic.)

“Those Biden has let in should not get comfortable because they will be going home,” Trump wrote. 

As I reported earlier this month, Abbott signed a law that would make undocumented immigration into Texas a state crime—and thus allow state law enforcement officials to arrest undocumented immigrants anywhere in the state. In response, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in federal district court arguing that the law violates the Constitution.

In a separate court proceeding with the Supreme Court, the DOJ said that the Texas National Guard had refused Border Patrol’s access to a 2.5-mile-long stretch of the border after three migrants, a woman and two kids, drowned there earlier this month. This week, the Supreme Court issued an order saying that federal agents could cut down razor wire Texas installed along that portion of the border in Border Patrol’s bid to gain access. 

One thing Trump and Texas appear to have in common? Neither see themselves as subject to the rule of law, even when it’s handed down from the highest court in the land. The Texas Military Department put out a defiant statement on Tuesday—the day after the Supreme Court order—saying it “continues to hold the line …to deter and prevent unlawful entry.” And CBS News reports that the Biden administration gave Texas until the end of the day today to grant Border Patrol full access to that area. (Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection also didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Trump’s alignment with Abbott is particularly loaded, since, as I reported earlier this month, the governor recently told a right-wing radio host that the only reason Texas officials weren’t shooting migrants crossing the border was “because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.” The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to my questions about whether they endorse Abbott’s comments about shooting migrants or whether, if re-elected, Trump would charge Texas officials with murder for shooting undocumented migrants crossing the border. 

But we already know, thanks to a bombshell New York Times report published in November, that Trump is planning an anti-immigraiton “blitz” if re-elected, a legally dubious strategy that would reportedly seek to end birthright citizenship, ban many Muslims, and detain undocumented immigrants in “vast holding facilities” until deportation, as my colleague Dan Friedman outlined. 

Trump’s latest comments, plus the reporting we have already seen that provides a glimpse into his plans if re-elected, show that, as my colleague David Corn wrote: if you want to know how bad Trump 2.0 could be, just listen to what he says. 

Judges at the International Court of Justice in the Hague ruled Friday that Israel must immediately work to prevent genocide in Gaza, but stopped short of calling for a ceasefire as requested by South Africa last month.Remko De Waal/ANP via ZUMA

The United Nations’ top court ruled Friday that a case brought by South Africa alleging Israel is committing genocide in Gaza will go forward. While the legal battle will play out for years, the court said Israel must take steps now to prevent genocide and get more humanitarian aid into Gaza.

The order from the International Court of Justice in the Hague stops short of the ceasefire South Africa requested when it filed the case last month. Still, it does acknowledge “a large number of deaths and injuries [to Palestinians], as well as the massive destruction of homes, the forcible displacement of the vast majority of the population, and extensive damage to civilian infrastructure.” Indeed, as my colleagues and I have reported, the toll of the war has been staggering for Palestinians: more than 26,000 have been killed, according to the latest numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry.

By early November, Israel had deployed more than 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, the equivalent of two nuclear bombs.

Yousef Hammash has watched it all unfold, sending out audio clips when internet access is available. This is his account. pic.twitter.com/1crTfpKxb9

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) December 19, 2023

The UN judges also pointed to several statements by top Israeli officials that helped establish the plausibility of the case, including a comment by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in which he pledged to “eliminate everything.”

The court order outlines steps Israel must take, including preventing the mass killing of Palestinians, stopping incitement of genocide, allowing for the provision of humanitarian assistance, and the “preservation of evidence” related to genocide claims. The judges also demanded Israel submit a report to the court in a month detailing the measures it has taken in response to the order, though South Africa had originally requested such a report be produced within a week of the court’s ruling. Fifteen of the 17 UN judges voted to support all of those measures; Justice Julia Sebutinde, of Uganda, voted against all of them, and former Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak—who the country appointed as an ad hoc judge earlier this month—voted against all but two (those requiring more humanitarian aid and the preventing incitement of genocide). 

The order also acknowledges that the judges are “gravely concerned about the fate of the [Israeli] hostages abducted” by Hamas on Oct. 7, and “calls for their immediate and unconditional release.” 

The @CIJ_ICJ on Friday declared that Palestinians had a right to be protected from acts of genocide, calling on Israel to “take all measures within its power” to prevent such actions and allow the entry of desperately needed humanitarian aid into the war-shattered enclave pic.twitter.com/W0tsSPKjw9

— UN News (@UN_News_Centre) January 26, 2024

Palestinian Foreign Affairs Minister Riyad al-Maliki said the judges “ruled in favor of humanity and international law.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the genocide accusations as “false” and “outrageous” in a statement, characterizing the country’s actions in Gaza as self-defense against Hamas, and pledging to limit harm to Palestinian civilians. South Africa, on the other hand, called the ruling “a decisive victory for the international rule of law and a significant milestone in the search for justice for the Palestinian people.” 

Experts hailed the court order as significant, but cautioned that it could be years before the court issues a ruling on the genocide allegations against Israel—and that, in the meantime, lawmakers must act to end the suffering of Palestinians. 

Raz Segal, a genocide scholar at Stockton University, told “Democracy Now” that the ruling is “unprecedented” and signals “the end of Israeli impunity in the international legal system.” And Palestinian human rights lawyer Diana Buttu told host Amy Goodman that “it’s now up to the world to make sure that this court ruling is actually enacted.”