'It's a talent tax': AI CEOs fear demise as they accuse Trump of launching 'labor war'

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.”

Rich Pleeth Rich Pleeth (provided photo)

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.

Fraser Patterson Fraser Patterson (provided photo)

“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.”

'Drunk with power': Author tells how Chief Justice John Roberts 'corrupted' Supreme Court

Twenty years ago this week, John Roberts was sworn in as chief justice of the Supreme Court, at 50 years old.

On that day, Lisa Graves “wept.” As chief counsel for nominations with the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2002 to 2005, she anticipated Roberts’ commitment to “advancing a right-wing political agenda through the judiciary,” she writes in her new book: "Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights."

With President George W. Bush having two Supreme Court vacancies to fill, Roberts was considered a “bankable vote for the Right’s political agenda” and was supported by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, the activist and fundraising impresario now widely considered the architect of the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority, Graves said.

“The Roberts Court I feared would be terribly destructive of Americans' rights, and it's been even more destructive than I feared,” Graves told Raw Story.

From rulings in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ushered in an era of unfettered dark money influence on elections, to Trump v. United States, which granted President Donald Trump “unprecedented immunity … to act as though he is above the law,” Graves argues Roberts facilitated the politicized state of a court that’s supposed to be impartial, but is now packed with Republican “partisan loyalists.”

“Roberts had conveyed this image that he was going to be a fair umpire as part of his nomination, but he has not been a fair umpire,” said Graves, now executive director of public policy watchdog group True North Research.

"He has put his weight — his fist — on the scale of justice, in favor of Donald Trump.”

‘Arrangement was illegal’

"Without Precedent" reveals how Roberts “sidestepped the ethics code” of the Court before he sat on it, by not recusing himself from a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals three-judge panel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, while interviewing for “the biggest” promotion to the Supreme Court.

The appeals panel overturned a district court, ruling in favor of the Bush administration by determining that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a driver for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, held at Guantánamo Bay.

Roberts interviewed with Bush the same day the appeals court issued its order. Four days later, Bush announced Roberts’ nomination.

“Three prominent legal ethics professors later concluded that this arrangement was illegal under federal law,” Graves writes.

Lisa Graves Lisa Graves. (provided image)

Roberts would recuse himself when the case reached the Supreme Court, which determined that the Bush administration did not have the authority to establish war crimes tribunals, and special military commissions were illegal under the Geneva Conventions and military law.

“His ambition for power I think was key to him deciding to secretly interview with a party to a case before him and not recuse himself,” Graves told Raw Story.

“Had he recused himself, which would have been the right thing to do, he might not have been chosen to be the chief justice or to be nominated to the Supreme Court, and had he ruled against the Bush administration, he might not have been chosen for that position.

“In fact, I think it's fair to say in either scenario, he would not have been chosen.”

‘Corrupted’

Ethical concerns have plagued the Supreme Court in recent years, including revelations that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito accepted undisclosed luxury trips and gifts from billionaires, while their wives engaged in political actions related to the attempted overturning of Trump's loss in the 2020 election.

Roberts failed to stand up to Thomas and Alito’s “corruption and bias” and protect the integrity of the Court, Graves writes, by not agreeing to “commonsense and enforceable ethics rules.”

“In my view, the compelling explanation for why the self-described institutionalist facilitated Thomas and Alito’s unethical participation is that Roberts needed their votes to accomplish his agenda of aggrandizing presidential power to try to save Trump — as no one on the Court had dared to do for Richard Nixon — and to expand the power of the Court to have the final say over almost every issue,” Graves writes.

“That’s because Roberts, too, has been corrupted. As the saying goes, ‘A fish rots from the head down.’”

‘Reactionary docket’

The Supreme Court’s docket is “almost entirely discretionary,” and the Roberts-led Supreme Court has created a “reactionary,” case-load, Graves writes.

“The pattern we are seeing of the Roberts Court inserting itself into so many controversies reveals how the Court’s Republican appointees do not want American law — and culture — to remain as is,” Graves writes.

Without Precedent Without Precedent (provided image).

Last week, Thomas made a rare public appearance at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C., to say the Court should take a more critical look at settled precedent.

That’s “unsurprising,” Graves said, given Thomas and his Republican-appointed peers’ voting records in cases such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, which overturned the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade.

During his confirmation hearing, Roberts was “very clever” in setting the stage for his Court’s pattern of overturning precedents by assuring senators he understood the principle of respecting precedent but discussing leaving room for a decision to be reversed, Graves said.

“I would say Roberts Court is out of control, or maybe drunk with power, because it is arrogantly overturning precedent after precedent in order to allow Trump to behave as no other president has,” Graves told Raw Story.

‘Judicial junta’

The Supreme Court’s new term starts Monday. It is set to hear a slate of cases related to Trump’s policies, from tariffs to transgender rights.

One case set to be heard on Oct. 15 is the Louisiana redistricting case, Callais v. Landry, where Roberts is “poised to constrict” Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which he fought against as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration.

Graves reveals how at Roberts’ Supreme Court nomination hearing, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) was “deeply troubled” by Roberts’ “mean-spirited view,” of Section 2, which allows voters to seek judicial relief in response to a state or local government denying or limiting their right to vote based on race or color.

“Given the the performance of John Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, I don't think any legal precedents are safe from this judicial junta,” Graves said.

But while Graves writes that decisions from the Roberts Court have assaulted workers’ rights, environmental protections, access to healthcare and voting rights, to name a few, she doesn’t want readers to come away “hopeless.”

Rather she hopes readers feel “a moral imperative for us to join together to reform the United States Supreme Court and restore and expand our rights.”

“I hope that they have a greater understanding of how we got into this mess, and the role that John Roberts has played in dismantling our rights and advancing this right-wing billionaire-backed agenda,” Graves said.

“ I hope that they will engage in the vital effort to reform the court and repair the damage that John Roberts and his fellow right-wing appointees have done on the Court.”

'I feel guilty': Former anti-vaxxers horrified by RFK Jr disaster

When Heather Simpson decided she wanted to become a mother, she began researching healthy lifestyle choices to increase her chances of becoming pregnant.

As she researched, she kept coming across ads for a docuseries called The Truth about Vaccines, so she and her then-husband paid $200 to access the nine-hour series.

“We were hooked,” said Simpson, from Dallas, now mother to an eight-year-old daughter.

Featured in the series was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., founder of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine advocacy group.

Thanks to famous forebears including his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and father, former New York senator Robert F. Kennedy, the advocate’s name carried weight.

“I was like, ‘Man, if a Kennedy is saying to be cautious, that's probably something,” Simpson said.

“He was a big part of why I even became anti-vax.”

Kennedy claimed to be “pro-safe vaccines,” but “to me that means anti-vax,” Simpson said.

Simpson quickly went down “the rabbit hole of anti-vaxxers,” becoming an “anti-vax influencer,” even once dressing up as the measles for Halloween, making light of the deadly disease.

Simpson discovered Kennedy in 2016. Nearly a decade later, with President Donald Trump having appointed him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, parents are increasingly questioning whether to vaccinate their children, medical experts told Raw Story.

As U.S. Health Secretary, Kennedy has hired vaccine skeptics and is considering adding children with autism symptoms into a vaccine injury program, despite decades of evidence debunking the claim that vaccines cause autism.

He’s also cut $500 million of research funding for vaccine development, while his hand-picked vaccine panel has weakened recommendations for the COVID-19 vaccine.

‘It’s gotten worse’

Vaccine skepticism “has been going on a long time,” said Taryn Chapman, a vaccine and infectious disease specialist who runs a website, The Vaccine Mom.

“And of course, it's gotten worse with just things that Kennedy's HHS is putting out there.

“People are a lot more skeptical just because they tend to listen to who ‘the authorities’ are, right? But our authorities aren't really the people that probably should be putting out health information.”

Leslie Treece, a doctor at Cookeville Pediatric Associates in Tennessee, said she had seen an increase in parents not vaccinating their children because “they're scared,” given misinformation “floating around.”

Grandparents are also discouraging parents from vaccinating their grandchildren, Treece said, surmising “political” motivations.

For about 15 years, Treece’s practice has asked parents who don’t vaccinate their children to find another provider.

“We wanted to avoid having people infected with things that are sitting in our waiting room that could potentially kill a newborn or harm one of our patients that's immunocompromised, like some of our patients that are on chemotherapy, that sort of thing,” Treece said.

‘What if I'm wrong?’

In 2020, when COVID struck, Simpson “stood up for masks” to stop the spread of the virus — and promptly lost a lot of followers. She wanted her daughter to be protected, so she reached out to medical specialists, including one who specialized in the blood-brain barrier, the cellular border that protects the brain from viruses and other harmful factors.

“Anti-vaxxers have the theory that … polysorbate 80 [an emulsifier used in vaccines] will open [the blood-brain barrier] up, aluminum will get through it and cause inflammation, resulting in autism,” Simpson said.

The specialists she consulted “basically dismantled those arguments on a cellular level, where I was just like, ‘Well, dang, what if I'm wrong about everything?’”

Simpson kept researching “the actual biology of all of it, not just what people feel,” and slowly became more comfortable with vaccines.

When her daughter was scratched by a feral cat, she went to her doctor.

“I was like, ‘I'm so tired of being scared of tetanus. I wish there was something we could do,’ and the doctor just looked at me, and it was kind of a light-bulb moment, like, ‘What am I doing? There’s the tetanus shot,’” Simpson said.

Now calling herself an “anxious vaccinator,” Simpson started a website, Back to the Vax, with another former anti-vax mom, Lydia Greene.

“I was more of like the crunchy mom, like, ‘Don't let your kids have a cupcake from someone else,’” said Greene, a mother of three and a nurse at a hospital in a small Canadian town.

“Really took it to the extreme and got an eating disorder, and it affected my life quite severely in a lot of ways because I wasn't just anti-vaccine. I was anti-medicine, and I was trying to manage my own health issues with natural medicine, and I made myself quite sick a few times.”

Lydia Greene Lydia Greene, a mother of three and co-founder of Back to the Vax (provided photo)

“Crunchy moms” embrace more natural lifestyles for their families but are also sometimes anti-vaccine.

Today, such parents have found a “hero” in Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again movement, whose other efforts include eliminating food dyes and restricting purchases of sodas and energy drinks by food stamp recipients.

“I call myself the crunchy apostate,” Greene said, “because I just think, ‘If those things worked, we’d just call them medicine.’

“This isn't a new way of thinking. It's just a rebranding, this MAHA movement. It's always been around, this idea of raw milk or whatever they're doing, bleach enemas. On the darker side, they have like this urine therapy stuff, and it's really bonkers.”

Kennedy has championed raw milk, despite long-established concerns about harmful bacteria otherwise killed by pasteurization.

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Kennedy mentioned chlorine dioxide, a remark celebrated by social media users who think it can cure diseases including autism.

Some anti-vaxxers have advocated drinking urine as a cure for ailments. The medical community warns about the practice.

The perpetuation of such misinformation on social media has “a snowball effect,” Chapman said.

“It's gradually getting worse and worse. I hope that we're not going to be put decades behind with all these diseases coming back because of it.”

‘I hope people smarten up’

Greene said she lived with a “paranoia of toxins” but “never talked about this stuff with people because they would laugh.

“I was never out and that public with it, and now these people have been emboldened to share their message and spread their message. The government officials are saying the same thing, so why should they be afraid to spread this information? It's mainstream now.”

Every week or two, Greene said, she hears from a hesitant parent who wants to discuss vaccines through Back to the Vax — but it feels like “10 to one” how many more people are becoming anti-vax instead.

Simpson said one way anti-vaxxers change their minds is through witnessing local outbreaks like the recent surge of measles cases near Lubbock, Texas, her hometown.

“Once they realize, ‘Oh, this can kill my kid or leave them deaf,” and we can't rely on herd immunity, that was kind of a huge changing or turning point for people,” she said.

Greene said she has most success with convincing people who want to vaccinate but are “scared by people like RFK, who muddied the water.”

“It's not easy when you see the messaging that's out there from top officials,” Greene said.

“What can I say? What can I do? It feels like a train is coming at you, and you can't do anything about it. I hope I'm wrong, and I hope people smarten up before we see this massive consequence to the most innocent people in our society.”

‘Exhausted’

Treece expects a “big pendulum swing” back to vaccines as more outbreaks occur.

“I think if people realized just how horrific some of those things were and could be again, it would change their minds,” she said.

Leslie Treece Leslie Treece, doctor at Cookeville Pediatric Associates (provided photo)

In the meantime, she said pediatric resident doctors will start needing to learn skills like spinal taps, which have rarely been needed given the near-elimination of meningitis in the US, due to vaccinations.

“Given enough time and enough of a population for those things to circulate in, we're going to have to learn how to treat these things again,” Treece said.

As herd immunity fades, with more unvaccinated people, Greene said she expects stakes as high as death will be needed to persuade some anti-vaxxers to change their minds.

“The only way this is going to change is when kids start dying, and they're going to die in high enough numbers where you know a kid that ended up with horrible brain damage or death because of a vaccine-preventable disease,” Greene said.

“It's not even six degrees of separation anymore.”

As a healthcare professional, Greene said she’s “exhausted” watching the resurgence of even “old-timey” diseases like tuberculosis.

“There's some kind of karmic justice maybe for me in that I wished this would happen when I was an anti-vaxxer, and now I'm watching it play out, and it's a disaster, and I feel guilty a little,” Greene said.

“There's just something poetic, almost, or ironic, about this happening right after I figured out that I was very wrong about it. It’s hard to stay positive.”

'Warning shot': Sandwich guy and other grand jury refusals stir civil revolt against Trump

Grand juries are typically willing to “indict a ham sandwich,” a Republican judge famously said. But recently in Washington, D.C., in the case of a man who allegedly threw a sandwich at an immigration officer, a grand jury declined to indict.

That failed felony indictment and at least six similar cases signal a pattern of resistance to Donald Trump, experts said, citing opposition to what citizens see as overreach by an administration attempting to curb protest.

“The pattern of grand jury refusals indicates an emerging civil jury revolt against Trump-era federal prosecutions,” said Chad Cummings, who teaches law at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Fla.

“This suggests a coordinated resistance not from political actors, but from citizen-jurors who no longer trust the prosecutorial motives behind these charges.”

The wave of failed indictments is "astonishing” and “extremely rare,” said Harold Krent, professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Other lawyers told Raw Story such actions are “exceptional” and “very unusual.”

In 2010, the latest year for which figures are available, only 11 times out of 162,000 did a grand jury not return a bill of indictment, noted Nora Demleitner, a former law professor and immediate past president at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.

To Krent, recent grand jury rejections “reflect the sort of skepticism of people drawn across some sections of the community to the charges brought by the Trump administration.

“They're skeptical about the wisdom or the strength of the cases that are brought in these. They sense an overreach.”

Citizen pushback likely won’t stop there, Krent said, adding: “I absolutely think it is a form of resistance.”

On Thursday, in a case that made it to trial, a Los Angeles protester was acquitted of misdemeanor assault charges brought by a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney over the alleged assault of a border patrol agent. Immigration officials were accused in court of lying about the incident.

‘Really scrupulous’

In D.C., the sandwich thrower was later charged with a misdemeanor. Less than a week later, a D.C. grand jury refused federal charges against a New York woman accused of threatening Trump.

Two days after that, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro dropped federal felony charges against a man who allegedly threatened Trump. The man said he has disabilities and was intoxicated, according to WUSA9.

Discussing the case of the New York woman, Pirro claimed: “This is the essence of a politicized jury.”

She continued: “The system here is broken on many levels. Instead of the outrage that should be engendered by a specific threat to kill the president, the grand jury in D.C. refuses to even let the judicial process begin. Justice should not depend on politics."

Demleitner countered that jurors tend to be “really scrupulous,” adding: “They're really trying their hardest. They don't go in there with this idea of, ‘I'm not going to follow the law.’

“But then they see things differently and really struggle with that, so I think I would always want to assume goodwill on the part of a grand jury, especially because grand juries don't need unanimity.”

The prosecutor “runs the entire system” when it comes to grand juries, with no defense lawyer present, so grand juries “only hear one side” of any case, Demleitner said.

When grand juries refuse to indict, it can be because the prosecutor was unprepared, witnesses were doubted, or charges seemed overblown, Demleitner said.

“The problem is it's secretive, so we really don't know exactly what these grand juries are thinking,” Demleitner said.

“Some of them just seem to be cases that shouldn't have been charged, and I think there's a lot of people who say they wouldn't have been charged under a different administration.”

In early September, Pirro failed to get grand jury approval three times in a case related to an alleged assault of an FBI agent and an immigration officer.

“It should be a warning shot to the federal government to understand that they're not just going to go through with these cases and nobody will stand in their way,” Demleitner said.

‘A sword but also a shield’

Grand juries have long provided checks and balances on executive authority, Demleitner said.

“Pre-the creation of the United-States, the grand juries were actually really these amazing historical tools of rejecting, basically, the power of the king,” she said.

Turning back to the present, Demleitner pointed to other “no bill” decisions. Washington, D.C. grand juries have “rejected indictments in mandatory-sentence drug cases because they felt the sentences disproportionate to the offense.” Cases related to immigration protests in LA in 2018 also failed to produce indictments.

Jeanine Pirro U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro speaks during a press conference. REUTERS/Annabelle Gordon

Grand jury processes can be “really abused,” Demleitner said, such as when “grand juries did not indict members of the KKK when they lynched Black people, in the few cases where they seemingly went ever before a grand jury.

“It's not an unmitigated good for grand juries to do that, and the problem really is, we have no idea what the grand juries see and hear in the vast majority of cases, and so it's very hard to judge what actually went on in that room.”

To Cummings, recent grand jury refusals likely relate to jurors perceiving infringement on First Amendment free speech rights, the “holy grail of our civil liberties.

“It's not a Republican thing. It's not a Democrat thing. It's a free expression thing. It is a reluctance … to curtail those constitutionally protected civil liberties.”

Grand juries are “a sword but also a shield to protect private citizens like you and me from those overzealous, and I think in this case we can safely say politically motivated prosecutions,” Cummings said.

“Anytime we're applying felony charges to an expression of speech, that makes even lay people sit up and take attention.”

Krent said that as the Trump administration continues to clash with protesters and media over immigration enforcement, prosecutors can expect to see cases of jury nullification: when jurors return a not guilty verdict based on “their conscience,” even if they think the defendant broke the law.

“Jury nullification is the last protection a private citizen has against the overreach of the federal government,” Cummings said.

Nullification occurred under Prohibition, when jurors refused to convict defendants for alcohol-related offenses, and under slavery, when northern juries refused to convict escaped slaves and those who helped them, Krent said.

David Schwartz, an attorney who formerly worked in the grand jury bureau of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, said jury nullification can be “concerning,” describing it as “disregarding the law and deciding the case the way you want to.”

“We're seeing in front of our eyes the politicization of our criminal justice system, and it's unfortunate,” Schwartz said.

Cummings argued that many federal cases under the Trump administration are themselves politicized, especially compared to the last Democratic administration, under Joe Biden.

“These people in the grand jury are smart enough to figure out, ‘Hey, this is political. We weren't seeing this before. We're seeing it now. Hmm, what's changed?’”

‘Irony is brutal’

While recent grand jury refusals have occurred in places that lean Democratic, Krent said, “the phenomenon could arise in red states as well.

“A cross-section of the citizenry are asked to look at the facts, look at the law, and determine whether there's a sufficient cause to bring charges. I think some will be skeptical.”

Trump’s rhetoric around “prosecutors are corrupt, the media is fake, and the justice system is rigged” is backfiring, Cummings said.

“Trump broke the public’s faith in institutional fairness, and now the system cannot even protect him.

“Enough people believed him that now, when he actually needs those systems to function impartially on his behalf, they will not. The irony is brutal.”

'Never been busier': The ex-Trump devotee who helps others escape MAGA

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.

Rich Logis on the jumbotron at the 2024 Democratic National Convention Video of Rich Logis at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago (C-SPAN)

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.”

'We're fighting to make it': Small biz owners reveal anguish as Trump 'changed the game'

This summer, Arizona small business owner Sara VanFleet twice had to write unexpected checks for thousands of dollars, thanks to tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump.

In June, Trump raised tariffs on imported steel and aluminum from 25 percent to 50 percent.

VanFleet, who owns DB Trucks, a company in Glendale, Ariz., that builds and customizes water trucks, got an early morning call from her customs broker.

VanFleet needed to wire more money in order for a steel water tank her company manufactured in Mexico to be allowed into the country.

“How do you account for that as a small business when you have to cough up another 25 grand to get your tanks across?” VanFleet said.

“There's no crossing. There's no anything until you wire the money to the customs brokers to get these across. When you're crossing sizable products like tanks or something of size, it's a serious amount of money.”

In August, Trump levied an additional 50 percent tariff on imports with steel derivatives.

Compounding tariffs shot the tax percentage to 97.5 percent for a shipment already on a boat from China to Los Angeles, VanFleet said.

Her client had already paid the invoice, which accounted for a 57.5 percent tariff.

“We're doing the best we can to sort of navigate it, but it's very nerve-racking, and it's very difficult to navigate it when you're not a deep-pocket big company,” VanFleet said.

She employs seven people.

‘Can't buy in the U.S.’

Trump loves tariffs — he said it’s his favorite word. Since taking office a second time, he has announced a changing lineup of increased taxes on imported goods as a proposed way to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.

But the reality is that even if companies want to use American-made materials, some are not produced here.

That means small businesses suffer as they’re forced to pay higher prices, nearly a half-dozen owners told Raw Story.

“I can't buy in the U.S. if they don't sell it in the U.S.,” VanFleet said.

“There's really nowhere that actually manufactures a lot of these parts anymore. Maybe someday they'll come back, but a lot of the parts that I'm buying — spray heads and stuff like that — anybody that I can buy them from is already buying them from China.”

Water trucksWater trucks from DB Trucks in Glendale, Ariz. (Photo provided by Sara VanFleet)

Laide Olambiwonnu owns Pickytarian, an LA-based e-commerce company that makes eco-friendly dinnerware.

“When I was launching this business, I reached out to a bunch of factories in the U.S. to try to see if we can get this to be made in America, and everyone shut me down,” said Olambiwonnu, who buys bamboo and sugarcane pulp in Asia.

“People were just kind of like, ‘We don't do that. That's just not something we do.’ Nobody was really willing to entertain the concept I had.”

The rapidly changing terms of Trump’s tariffs have hurt small businesses forced to raise prices, take hits to their margins and delay expansions.

“We're four years old and fighting to make it, and it's just too much, too fast, too inconsistent,” VanFleet said.

“It's hard to eat margins and eat some of these tariffs when you just don't see them coming.”

Eroding margins

VanFleet says she now relies more on corporate clients versus individuals who needed water trucks for construction or farms but are now priced out.

Standard trucks that used to cost $40,000 now cost $70,000 to $80,000, and larger used trucks that cost $50,000 to $60,000 when VanFleet started her business four years ago now sell for nearly $100,000, she said.

“It's been a tough year, trying to figure out where to put the prices, what people can afford,” VanFleet said.

Olambiwonnu said costs increased 30 percent this year, but since she only started her business three years ago and is just starting to see growing sales, she isn’t comfortable raising prices.

Laide Olambiwonnu Laide Olambiwonnu, owner of Pickytarian (provided photo)

“I'm just absorbing the cost, and it's just eroding I think any margin that we have, but we're just trying to see what we can do to survive right now,” Olambiwonnu said.

That’s led her to not buy any “crazy amount of inventory” and leave some items out of stock, she said. She has also cut down from five contractors to two.

‘We’re all struggling’

Paul Gallegos, owner of Cutbow Coffee in Albuquerque, N.M., said tariffs as high as 50 percent on places like Brazil have required him to raise prices by 25 percent “across the board.”

That’s led to a 10 to 15 percent loss of customers, he said.

“It’s quite challenging,” he said. “There's no coffee produced domestically, so every bean that's roasted in America is imported.”

Gallegos said his beans come from Latin America, the South Pacific, Indonesia and East Africa, which all have faced increased tariffs.

“I would just hope that our government would consider the ramifications of their decisions and how it affects working class people and Americans in general,” Gallegos said.

Paul Gallegos Paul Gallegos, owner of Cutbow Coffee (provided photo)

“Every single one of us is affected by these all the way down to our children and elderly, and we're all struggling … it's just disheartening.”

Southern California-based Klatch Coffee has twice raised prices this year.

“Unfortunately, depending on what happens with the tariffs, we may have to do it again come the end of this year, first of next year, and that would be tariff-related again,” said Mike Perry, who owns 12 cafes.

Tariffs are costing customers $4 to $5 more per pound for coffee beans and 20 to 40 cents extra per drink, Perry said.

“We're paying more, and it's just not enough that anybody can absorb it,” Perry said. “They've got to increase that much just to break even.”

Despite the tariffs, Perry said Klatch Coffee was expanding to 10 more locations, through a partnership with supermarket chain Sprouts.

“You've got to be honest,” he said. “You're not going to beat the customer over the head, but if they ask about it … ‘I’ve seen your prices go up,’ we want to be able to address that and be honest with them on why, what’s going on.”

‘Weighing very heavy’

For the five-year anniversary of DB Trucks, VanFleet was hoping to expand and buy property. But, she said, “I just don't know if it's feasible right now.

“It's weighing very heavy on me, and I don't know what the good decision is because I've got a lot of people's livelihoods riding on my decisions of if we go out and spread our wings, are we going to make it next year?” VanFleet said.

“Do we sort of sit where we are and just hunker down and hope we survive and wait it out for another couple of years? I don't know.”

Amy McCord launched a DIY flower company, Flower Moxie, in 2014. Operating out of Oklahoma City, she’s delayed the launch of a new website, Petal Icon, since tariffs on supplies from China are “going to deeply impact” the business.

Petal Icon will provide supplies — flowers, buckets, vases — to build flower arrangements, McCord said.

But “the tariffs have really changed the game. It's, overall, just hurting everything.”

Amy McCord Amy McCord, owner of Flower Moxie, creates a flower arrangement (Photo provided by Amy McCord)

McCord has raised prices 10 to 20 percent and changed how she sells, requiring more bulk purchases versus individual stems, she said.

“I'm trying to kind of figure out the economic benefit [of tariffs] when the country's already kind of struggling with the cost of everything increasing,” McCord said.

“When you initially hear about it, you're kind of told on a certain level that other countries are getting some kind of free ride, and ‘We're just making it fair,’ but actually experiencing it, small businesses, and then Americans, the cost is just passed off to them.”

Exclusive: Turning Point student describes ‘total chaos’ after Charlie Kirk shot dead

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.”

Beck Dishman (provided photo)

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.”

'Like being in a gang': the Jan. 6 rioter who left MAGA and told Trump to shove his pardon

When President Donald Trump issued more than 1,500 pardons to rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, one insurrectionist who spent time in prison for his role in the attack told the president in no uncertain terms he didn’t want forgiveness.

“I don't regret refusing the pardon by any means, but I'm kind of stooping myself to Trump's level when I tell him to shove it up his a–,” Jason Riddle told Raw Story.

“I actually emailed the White House, apologizing for saying that.”

Still, Riddle has been pushing for the White House and the Office of the Pardon Attorney at the Department of Justice to formally acknowledge his refusal of the pardon — because the country is “heading to a real dark place” again under Trump, he said.

“I absolutely want it official that I'm against this because people that support this are going to be complicit with wherever this is going,” Riddle said.

‘Unhealthy obsession’

Riddle knows better than most where Trump has taken America already. He became a Trump supporter after watching him command the crowd during the Republican primary debates for the 2016 election.

In college, after serving in the Navy, Riddle said he and a fellow veteran found following Trump “a way to turn our school experience into just being able to hang out and drink and argue with people.” Together, they traveled to Trump rallies, drinking in the candidate's promise to Make America Great Again.

Riddle and his friend stayed loyal through Trump's first term. On Jan. 6, they both attended Trump’s Stop the Steal event in Washington, where the president and key allies pursued the lie that Joe Biden's 2020 election victory was the result of voter fraud.

Trump told supporters to march on Congress, there to “fight like hell” to block certification of Biden's win.

When Riddle arrived at the Capitol, he joined the second wave of rioters who went inside.

Now, Riddle says formal acknowledgement that he refused a pardon for what he did there — stealing a bottle of wine and a Senate procedure book — would be part of his process of leaving behind the “unhealthy obsession” with Trump that brought him to that point.

Jason Riddle at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 (Screen grab from the Department of Justice)

The insurrection failed. Trump faced criminal charges related to his election subversion but never faced trial and returned to power. Riddle was sentenced to 90 days in prison and three years of probation, in addition to paying $754 in restitution.

“You need to be in a state of tension to be a Trump supporter,” Riddle told Raw Story.

“You need to believe in something that’s not healthy to believe in. It’s only a matter of time that either consumes you, or you can free yourself.”

Now, the waiter from New Hampshire has asked members of Congress from his state — Sen. Maggie Hassan and Rep. Maggie Goodlander, both Democrats — for help in getting his refusal recognized.

In late August, Riddle emailed a Hassan staffer, asking for an approach to the pardon office.

“If I can be so bold as to ask if you can possibly pester them again,” he wrote, “I know they’re busy dismantling our democracy, I’d very much like to have this legitimized.”

Riddle said Goodlander and Hassan’s offices contacted the DOJ and pardon office but haven’t received responses.

The White House and DOJ did not respond to Raw Story's requests for comment.

‘That's when I was done’

Riddle is now part of a growing online community of former Trump supporters called Leaving MAGA, alongside members including a former teenage Trumper and a New York mother of four who was a QAnon believer.

While following the MAGA movement, Riddle said, “I didn't have any sort of normal friends."

“My whole family kind of gave up on me. My husband and I, it wasn't going well, and he thankfully stuck it out.”

Riddle said his time in MAGA involved a lot of heavy drinking with his college friend.

“It wasn't illegal, the life we were living, but it felt almost like being in a gang or [being] a gangster,” Riddle said.

“Everywhere we went, we were uninvited. People were upset, and then we started getting used to that and liking it.”

Prison forced sobriety on Riddle, he said, only for him to relapse after release. Having joined Alcoholics Anonymous, he hasn’t “gone back to that lifestyle since — not interested in it.”

“I replaced Trump rallies with Broadway shows and beach excursions, things like that,” Riddle said.

Jason Riddle in 2025 (Photo provided by Jason Riddle)

Years after the insurrection, Riddle was disturbed to learn just how close he had come to some of the people who died in and around the Jan. 6 attack, including Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who suffered two strokes after being attacked by rioters.

“That's pretty disturbing,” Riddle said.

He recalled learning about the death of Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter shot and killed by a U.S. Capitol police officer during the riot, from the man he said he “hawked” him the stolen Senate procedure book for $40.

“That's when I stopped thinking it was funny. I remember looking up and seeing all these cops barricading us into the Capitol building, and me thinking, ‘They can shoot us right now, legally,” Riddle said.

“I mean that’s the whole point of being a conservative, right? We're always trying to figure out [how] we can get away with legally shooting people, and there we were. Police telling us to, ‘Get back. Get away,’ and we're just ignoring [them]. I've never seen police officers so helpless, literally surrendering at the door where I'd entered.”

In April 2022, Riddle pleaded guilty to theft of government property and illegally protesting in the Capitol. When he reported to prison that summer, he said “correctional officers treated me better,” knowing he had participated in the Jan. 6 riot.

“My identity was, ‘I was the Capitol rioter,’” Riddle said. “It was actually positive attention, but it was in prison, so is that really positive attention?”

Riddle didn’t leave the Republican party. In fact, he declared his intention to run in the GOP primary for New Hampshire’s second congressional district, in both 2022 and 2024.

He wasn’t officially on the ballot in 2022 — because he was in prison. In a 2023 Ballotpedia survey, he called himself a “recently released January 6th political prisoner.”

When Trump asked supporters in 2023 to protest his indictment for falsifying business records related to hush money payments made to the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, Riddle said: “That's when I was done.”

Trump ultimately was found guilty of 34 felonies at the New York trial.

“I'm like ‘You're going to get another Ashli Babbitt killed.'”

Riddle said he then abandoned his political aspirations and deleted social media accounts where he’d amassed a following.

“I thought I was a politician on social media,” he said. “I tried to drop out of the Congress race that I signed up for and really showed my expertise in politics there. You can't.”

‘We’ve gone back’

Riddle said he supported former Vice President Kamala Harris' run against Trump in the 2024 presidential election, first because she was the “anti-Trump” candidate, then because she won him over with her messaging, specifically: “We are not going back.”

But that's exactly what’s happened since Trump was re-elected, Riddle said.

“We've gone back. We're back,” Riddle said.

“Look at D.C. It's under occupation. The FBI is raiding [Trump’s] former security adviser [John Bolton]. It's pretty dystopian.”

National Guard in D.C. Members of the National Guard walk near the White House on the National Mall. REUTERS/Al Drago

Riddle found his own recent interaction with the FBI concerning. After Trump's pardons were announced, he was contacted about retrieving his belongings.

“The FBI agents, basically, they didn't apologize, but [they] might as well have apologized,” Riddle said.

One “did say, ‘Sorry you had to go through this ordeal, and you will not be investigated anymore.’ He said that to me, and that's supposed to make me feel better? It doesn't. It's scary. It's a law enforcement agency choosing a political side.”

Another attack in Washington won't be out of the question at the end of Trump’s second term, Riddle said, “especially if he's forced to be removed.”

“I don't see him going peacefully,” Riddle said.

“It looks like Trump's literally setting the stage for it to happen, with the putting in the military in D.C.”

Leaving MAGA: NY mom who fell for anti-vaxxers, QAnon and Trump describes painful escape

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.

Erica Roach Erica Roach (Provided photo)

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.”

'Comes like a wave': Sandy Hook teacher on trauma now hitting Minneapolis shooting victims

The mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis on Wednesday in which two children were killed and 17 people injured was simply yet another product of too-lax gun laws, said a teacher who survived the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting nearly 13 years ago.

Abbey Clements, now executive director of Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence, spoke to Raw Story the day after a 23-year-old shooter fired into the church at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis.

The children at the Pre-K-through-eighth-grade school were attending mass.

“Every other country has folks who have mental health issues. Every country has issues that we have,” Clements said.

“We just allow easy access to firearms and ammunition, and that's why we have this problem.”

On Dec. 14, 2012, Clements was a second grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School when a gunman killed 20 children and six adults. Shootings like Tuesday's remind Clements of “just the level of horror and tragedy and what it does to a community,” she said.

Screen grab of Abbey Clements interview with Raw Story via Zoom

“It comes over like a wave,” Clements said.

“It's very visceral for me. It's like 13 years, but it was five minutes ago.”

Wednesday’s mass shooting was far from the first in 2025. Forty-four school shootings have occurred in the United States this year, killing 18 people and injuring at least 74, according to CNN.

“We can't wait around for any kind of federal change,” Clements said.

“What we're calling for is a seat at the table when it comes to local, district, state policies, protocols. We know our kids. We know what's best for kids, and there are things that we could be doing.”

Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence has nearly 30,000 members, including school shooting survivors, retired teachers, administrators and advocates.

One action the group is pushing for is for schools to distribute educational materials, ideally at least three times per year, about safely securing firearms in the home.

“We have allowed this issue to become partisan,” Clements said.

“It's not a political issue. It's a public health crisis. We as educators have a place in this fight.”

‘Brace ourselves’

The Minneapolis shooter, Robin Westman, was armed with a rifle, shotgun and pistol, purchased lawfully, and died at the scene by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

A name change application for a Robert Westman, with the same birthday as Robin Westman, was filed in 2020, explaining Westman "identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification,” outlets including ABC News reported.

Shortly after shots were fired through the windows of the church at Annunciation, prominent conservatives such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) began to push anti-trans messaging.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel both said Westman was male.

Clements said: “In this movement, we brace ourselves for the details because we know that the other side will hang on to anything — I say on the other side, it doesn't even make any sense.

“This is about saving lives. It's about children living, and people being able to go [to the] grocery store and to the movies and to a concert without getting killed — we brace ourselves to hear these details because we know that that's going to fall prey to whatever theory that they're going to concoct to blame.”

Right-wing commentators have falsely claimed a rise in transgender mass shooters, particularly after 28-year-old Audrey Hale opened fire at The Covenant School in Nashville in March 2023, killing three teachers and three 9-year-olds.

A police spokesperson told ABC at the time Hale was assigned female at birth and used he/him pronouns.

Clements said the fundamental problem was that it is “too easy to get a gun and too easy to get ammunition.”

“The [Minneapolis] shooter left a footprint of trouble, of crisis, and there are people who saw that, and there are things that could have been done,” Clements said.

‘Just horrible’

When news of the shooting in Minneapolis broke, Clements said she received a text from one of her students who survived the Sandy Hook shooting and is now in her 20s.

“They're forever changed, and it's not fair,” Clements said.

Clements recalled the day of the shooting.

Shortly after she entered her classroom following a check-in with Principal Dawn Hochsprung, Clements said, she heard “what sounded like metal folding chairs falling.”

She said she pulled two kids into her classroom.

“We huddled into the coats that were hanging on the side of the wall and listened to 154 shots blaring through the loudspeaker. I knew that this was traumatizing for them," Clements said.

“I wish I could protect them from the sound, and I tried to distract them. I sang songs to them and read books to them, but it was a long five minutes.”

Clements remembers a knock at the classroom door and eventually leading the kids to a firehouse where they were reunited with their parents, which was “just pure hell,” she said.

“It's difficult for me to talk about that because it was just rumors, and you’re starting to realize what's happening, and parents picking up their kids, and people couldn't find theirs, and it was just horrible,” Clements said.

Hochsprung was one of the 26 people killed.

Clements returned to teaching her students at an empty intermediate school nearby.

“I did that with kids who were traumatized,” she said. “We ran out of a building together, and they lost friends.

“I didn't want anybody to leave, go anywhere by themselves, so I would take everybody to the bathroom with me if anybody had to go.”

Following the Sandy Hook shooting, Clements said, she reached out to teachers who survived the shooting at Columbine High School in April 1999. There, two 12th-graders murdered 13 students and one teacher before killing themselves.

Those survivors told her the Sandy Hook shooting would stick with her “forever,” and the trauma would be “lifelong.”

“One of them said to me, ‘You'll think about it every day,’” Clements said.

To teachers, students and others traumatized by the Minneapolis mass shooting, Clements said: “I think what I would say is that I'm so, so sorry and that you are not alone, that there is a community of us out there, here to offer support in any way we can.”

I was a teenage Trumper: How a first-gen immigrant fell out of love with MAGA

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.”

Steve Vilchez Steve Vilchez (Photo courtesy of Steve Vilchez)

“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.”

'Something needs to change': Anti-Trump vendors flood Bernie Sanders resistance rally

CHICAGO — From crude to punny, rebellious to pleading, outside of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” rally in Chicago on Sunday, dozens of vendors sold a colorful array of shirts, hats and buttons slamming President Donald Trump.

Stan Sinberg traveled from San Francisco with a blue wagon he dubbed the “The Roving Anti-Trump ‘Save Democracy Tour!’ Band-Wagon.”

“Now in its 9th WTF Year!” read a sign Sinberg affixed atop an array of buttons he created and sold for $5.

Their slogans: “Non-Felon for President”

“Deport ICE”

“Don’t Drink the Bleach!”

“Border Personality Disorder" with a frowning photo of Trump.

Buttons on Stan Sinberg's wagon dubbed “The Roving Anti-Trump ‘Save Democracy Tour!’ Band-Wagon.” (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)

For seven years, Sinberg has traveled with his “band-wagon” to protests across the country.

“When [Trump] lost in 2020, I had a banner that said ‘happily going out of business sale,’ but he didn’t leave,” Sinberg said.

“He tried to steal the election, and then he just kept being a presence.”

Sinberg has been protesting against Trump since he secured the Republican nomination for president the first time in 2016.

“I wanted to do what I could to prevent him from foisting himself on the rest of the country,” said Sinberg, who was living in Trump’s native New York at the time.

Sinberg wasn’t the only vendor to travel thousands of miles to sell merchandise outside the University of Illinois Chicago Isadore and Sadie Dorin Forum.

Bobby Murray from Alabama sold T-shirts and hats with JR Concessions featuring a range of rallying cries from “MAGA More Are Getting Arrested” to simply “F— Trump."

“I like old Bernie,” Murray said.

“Something needs to change, that’s for sure.”

Bobby Murray sells T-shirts outside Sen. Bernie Sanders' "Fighting Oligarchy" rally. (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)

Terrill Leathers sold black “Rage Against the Machine” shirts showing Sanders resisting arrest at a Chicago civil rights protest in 1963.

“It should be important for all Americans to come out because the things that’s going on right now is outrageous,” Leathers said.

Terrill Leathers sells "Rage Against the Machine" shirts in Chicago. (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)

A button vendor, Sunshine Tea, who uses a “stage” last name, lives on the South Side of Chicago but spent years in Vermont and once met Sanders.

“When I met him, he was in the grocery store,” Tea said. “He was sick, and he was a senator. He was buying his own groceries, so I know for a fact he’s the only congressperson that knows what a gallon of milk costs.”

Sunshine Tea sells buttons outside the "Fighting Oligarchy" rally in Chicago. (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)

Tajh Pordos from St. Louis sold T-shirts featuring the "Fight Oligarchy" slogan with photos of Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who has shown up at some of Sanders' events on the tour.

“I really feel like this is a very good hustle,” Pordos said. “Overall, it’s a good thing.”

Tajh Pordos sells "Fight Oligarchy" shirts in Chicago. (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)

Sanders, an independent from Vermont, spoke alongside Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), a member of the progressive "Squad" with Ocasio-Cortez, and Illinois Sen. Robert Peters, who is running for Congress in Illinois' 2nd Congressional District.

Sanders called Trump "the most dangerous president in perhaps the history of this country" at the Chicago event.

"This is a demagogue whose function in life is to serve the oligarchy and to try to divide us up," Sanders said.

'Culture of fear': College records reveal campus ICE panic

A quick Walgreens trip near campus turned into an interrogation about foreign travel. Uniformed officers demanded citizenship papers from students. The FBI searched for a professor in the Center of African Studies. Department heads advised biology labs to lock their doors after U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) agents were allegedly spotted nearby.

Such stories ricocheted around the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign last spring, ratcheting up anxiety, internal emails obtained by Raw Story show.

Police chief Matt Ballinger wrote there was no evidence ICE had carried out any such operations but also explained the problem: ICE doesn’t notify local police when making inquiries.

The emails show how fear cascaded across Illinois’ flagship campus, where more than 12,000 international students — around 20 percent of the student body — suddenly felt at risk.

The panic unfolded amid high-profile national cases, as ICE detained student visa holders who had spoken out in support of Palestine. At Illinois, professors and administrators scrambled to respond: how should students handle being stopped by officers? Could they report crimes without drawing unwanted attention? Was it safe to attend graduation or even walk across campus?

As the Trump administration cracks down even on immigrants with green cards and visas, such panic amid the second-largest international student population at any U.S. public university is emblematic of the higher education landscape.

‘It’s going to be like this a long time’

“Another day, another rumor,” Martin McFarlane, director of International Student and Scholar Services, wrote on April 17 to Chief Ballinger and two associate chancellors.

“It’s going to be like this for a long time, isn’t it…”

Rumors persisted. But by mid-August, the university had “no confirmed reports” of ICE on campus, Patrick Wade, a UIUC spokesperson, told Raw Story.

Wade called incidents of panic “certainly concerning,” given “international diversity is one of the things that makes Illinois special.”

Megan Eagen-Jones, an assistant professor of musicology and director of undergraduate studies, said academic leaders sought guidance on “appropriate allyship and advocacy that's not breaking the law but is also standing by students who have these concerns.”

“We understand the anxiety and concern that students — and faculty and staff, for that matter — are feeling,” Wade said.

Wade said the university informed the campus community about “what to do if they encounter a federal agent” and “proactively communicated” that local and campus police “do not enforce immigration law, nor do they provide resources to federal law enforcement to do so.”

At other colleges, particularly in Florida, campus police departments have voluntary agreements with ICE that deputize campus officers for immigration enforcement duties.

“The past months have been unsettling and frightening for many members of our campus community, and we appreciate the work of all those involved in supporting our students and scholars,” Wade said.

‘Another universe’

Since Trump took office for a second term, the climate has changed at the University of Illinois, especially for international students “fearful of being deported all of a sudden, having their academic studies disrupted,” Eagen-Jones said.

“It tethers to every aspect of their life. The fears are pretty real and pretty raw.”

Eagen-Jones wrote to the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion on April 17, asking how to advise international students who want to file a police report but “are concerned about how that may draw ICE attention to them.”

“It sort of feels like living in another universe,” Eagen-Jones said.

“Five years ago. I wouldn't have imagined that I would be having the kinds of conversations with students that I'm having today and last semester.”

Eagen-Jones said international students were “worried … because if they express any political views whatsoever that might be seen as minor critiques … that would be foundation for some disastrous thing happening to them.”

Detention by ICE is the primary concern — stoked by the fates of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University, and Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia, both detained in March over views expressed in public forums.

A Raw Story investigation revealed a university in Florida flagging for police all negative commentary about the school’s partnership with ICE, raising free speech concerns.

“I want my students … not to be worried about being deported because they had a minor traffic violation, or they said the wrong thing in the wrong context,” Eagen-Jones said.

Eagen-Jones has participated in training sessions to learn more about international students’ rights.

“I'm in a college that really, really deeply values global connections and global creativity and is very much indebted to global partnerships,” Eagen-Jones said. “Rhetoric that demonizes international students and migrants, it's hard to process."

‘Distressing’

In an April 15 email, Supriya Prasanth, professor and head of the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, wrote to academic leaders to report the Walgreens incident involving a student of “Indian origin” who was left “quite shaken.” The similar incident at Target involved a student of “Chinese origin.”

Wojtek Chodzko-Zajko, vice provost for graduate education and dean of the Graduate College, responded, “It is disheartening to hear that one of our graduate students had an unsettling experience while simply trying to complete an everyday task.

“Even when an encounter appears polite, being unexpectedly approached and questioned can be distressing, particularly for international students who may already be under significant stress in the current moment.”

Alejandro Lleras, professor of psychology and associate dean for inclusive excellence, reminded James Imlay, professor and associate head of microbiology, that “in any interaction with a federal officer (ICE, FBI, DHS), it is of paramount importance that people do not lie.”

“Lying to a federal officer can be taken as a reason to cancel someone’s legal status in the US. But, I would say that students are not necessarily required to answer questions either,” Lleras wrote.

Lleras noted that spaces requiring an ID swipe for access, such as dorms and labs, are considered private and “safe.” ICE agents would be permitted in public spaces, including classrooms.

Lleras asked Imlay if he had any evidence ICE agents were in town, as reported by students, adding: “This is important because there is also a fear that some people might be impersonating agents, in which case there are legal repercussions for this.”

Ballinger, the chief of police, told leaders charges would likely be brought if an impersonator was located, but police found no indication of agents or impersonators.

“We continue to try and identify anyone that may be impersonating ICE, but it is like chasing our tails at this point with third-hand information that is incorrect,” Ballinger wrote on April 17 in an email chain involving “pressing questions about ICE agents.”

McFarlane, director of ISSS, noted that “rumors were flying,” and a black car parked with a “secure, contain, protect” decal “may have been misinterpreted as ICE.”

“Very frustrating but it’s going to continue as long as people are scared,” said Robin Kaler, associate chancellor in strategic communications and marketing.

Nearly a month later, Ballinger forwarded to campus police leaders an FBI contact who could answer questions about ICE operations.

“This is a serious safety issue,” Ballinger said.

Universal fears

As ICE agents continue to raid locations from Home Depots to farms and food markets, a nationwide Campus Defense Network has grown from a group in North Carolina.

Siembra NC provides “ICE Watch” training to at least 40 schools in 20 states, said Andrew Willis Garcés, a senior strategist.

Rumors of ICE sightings on the Illinois campus are similar to concerns at campuses across the country, Garcés said.

Siembra NC Siembra NC gathers at North Carolina State University (Photo courtesy of Siembra NC)

Florida Atlantic Faculty union leader Chris Robe said such fear is cultivated as a means of control.

“I think the point is the fear … to make people wary, to shut them up,” Robe said.

“How are they going to do [campus raids]? Practically, they're not. But they’re going to create the illusion that they can, and for a lot of people, that illusion is enough to stay quiet.”

He added that the impact of that strategy is unmistakable: “There’s a culture of fear this time around, of people not willing to speak on the record or just be public.”

Siembra NC has supported students setting up watch alert networks while some students are showing up to support international students at court, Garcés said.

“The concerns are related to what they've seen in the news — a student goes to a regular ICE check-in and is detained without warning, or students on campus who have valid visa work permits, green cards, getting detained, just getting abducted in broad daylight.

“International students are very understandably worried about any contact with law enforcement, with federal agencies.

“It really has, I think, changed just so much about it with what it means to be someone studying in the U.S.”

'It's wrong': 94-year-old Republican warns of GOP crisis after losing seat to gerrymander

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.”

'Very scary': Police alert issued after alum calls college's ICE deal 'disgusting'

Shortly after Florida Gulf Coast University’s police department joined several state colleges in signing agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Cody Crivello, a 29-year-old tennis instructor, used Facebook to call his alma mater’s partnership “truly disgusting.”

That prompted a “yellow alert” email — listing Crivello’s full name, along with a link and screenshot of the comment showing his profile photo — to various departments at the school in Fort Myers, including campus police, records obtained by Raw Story show.

While a university monitoring social media for critical posts isn’t out of the ordinary and is "constitutionally permissible,” First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh said alerting police to general negative commentary, particularly without any perceived threat or potential criminal activity, can create a chilling effect on free speech.

“I wouldn't, just as a categorical matter, convey all critical posts to the police,” Volokh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, told Raw Story.

“That can create an environment where people are discouraged from speaking out, where the university should be an institution that encourages people to speak.”

Crivello, who graduated FGCU in 2018, called the alert “weird” and “interesting,” expressing concern it might “negatively impact” him if he were to apply for graduate school or employment at the university.

“What would the police need to know about me saying that I disagree with their connections with immigration enforcement and deportation?” said Crivello, who ended up deleting the comment.

“I was like, ‘What's a comment on a Facebook post really going to do in the grand scheme of things?’ I figured they actually weren't listening. That was the funny thing. I was like, ‘They're not even going to read this.’ Little did I know, they were going to flag it, actually.”

The alert came from Fullintel, a private firm that conducts “AI-powered media monitoring” across platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Reddit and Discord, which FGCU has worked with since April 2023 and pays $124,000 per year as part of a five-year contract, records obtained by Raw Story show.

In addition to FGCU’s communications team, the school’s general counsel, Title IX office and campus police officials, including Chief James Kowalski, received alerts flagging more than two dozen comments and posts critical of the ICE agreement, which was signed following a February directive from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordering all state law enforcement agencies, including campus police at public universities, to enter into 287(g) agreements.

Such agreements grant campus officers the authority to perform duties typically reserved for federal immigration agents, including questioning individuals about immigration status, making arrests and preparing charges related to immigration violations on university grounds.

Few details have been revealed about the execution of 287(g) agreements, prompting Raw Story to conduct investigations.

As of August 8, 319 law enforcement agencies in Florida including 13 university police departments had signed 287(g) agreements, according to ICE records.

FGCU has yet to receive paperwork or training information from ICE, and the school hasn’t taken any immigration enforcement actions since signing the agreement on March 28, Pam McCabe, director of university communications and media relations, told Raw Story.

McCabe said the school uses Fullintel for “24-7, 365-day-a year” monitoring of web and social media posts related to “campus safety, security, compliance and reputational concerns.”

Fullintel uses an automated system to scan “public content for specific phrases related to safety risks or harm,” and its “curation team” reviews anything flagged “to ensure it’s relevant, providing the necessary context for our clients to respond appropriately,” Angus Nguyen, director of marketing for Fullintel, told Raw Story.

“Alerts from Fullintel include untargeted negative commentary, hate speech, hazing, targeted harassment, sexual violence, suicidal ideation, targeted threats and threats to public safety,” McCabe said.

Fullintel works with a small number of colleges, with FGCU its only Florida university client, and the firm does not work with police departments, Nguyen said.

“Our alerts are designed to help campus authorities and respond quickly to potential safety threats or compliance issues,” Nguyen said. “We focus on public content related to safety, not personal opinions or political speech.”

The alerts obtained by Raw Story all involved personal opinions about the 287(g) agreement, with no apparent threats of crimes or plans for protests.

‘Not a good idea’

Rachel Levinson-Waldman, an expert on police surveillance and a director of the Brennan Center for Justice, called FGCU’s monitoring practices “very problematic,” particularly when tied to immigration enforcement.

“This opens up a huge area of risk in terms of social media monitoring,” Levinson-Waldman said.

Levinson-Waldman said a First Amendment legal challenge would require someone to show concrete harm, such as being referred for discipline, denied housing or being prosecuted on the basis of speech.

Zach Greenberg, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said FGCU’s monitoring could create a “chilling effect” on student speech.

“It suggests that the university is monitoring the speech for potential discipline and for retaliating against students for engaging in controversial political speech, especially with regards to issues like ICE, immigration and Trump,” Greenberg said.

McCabe said she was unaware of disciplinary action against any student based on political social media posts.

“FGCU encourages constructive and informed discussions on campus in a peaceful manner, even when we disagree or find an individual’s expression offensive or controversial,” McCabe said.

Volokh said campus police might want to monitor the web for “possible criminal intentions” or protests where expanded police presence is required.

But, “You might say it's not a good idea for the university to be generally reporting to the police all criticism because that's going to create a climate at school which discourages kind of open debate and open discussion,” Volokh said.

“That's not something I'd be wild about when it comes to the university.”

The Brennan Center has long warned about the dangers of law enforcement use of social media surveillance.

While law enforcement agencies often claim such surveillance is used for legitimate public safety purposes, U.S. government agencies have a well-documented history of surveilling activist groups, particularly those advocating for racial justice and immigrant rights.

From 2017 to 2020, ICE and other DHS agencies tracked social media activity and compiled dossiers on U.S.-based activists, lawyers and journalists who opposed family separation policies or participated in protests labeled “anti-Trump.”

“The [Trump] administration obviously has made no bones about the fact that they're looking to do extensive detention and deportation efforts, and particularly based on the content of what people are saying online,” Levinson-Waldman said.

Recently, that’s exactly what has happened.

In March, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University, and Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University and a pro-Palestinian activist, were detained by ICE over views expressed in public forums.

The same month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said 300 student visas had been revoked as part of a crackdown against students who protested against the war in Gaza.

NAFSA: Association of International Educators has been tracking reports of visa revocations and terminations. As of May 7— the most recent update — more than 1,600 cases had been reported.

‘Creates fear’

FGCU received close to a dozen emails from concerned alumni and community members expressing “outrage” at the ICE partnership, accusing the school of "hypocrisy," “selling out its students” and promoting “surveillance and compliance with a racist agenda.”

One flagged post came from Unidos Immokalee, a Southwest Florida advocacy group, which expressed alarm over how the agreement “creates fear and increased likelihood of profiling” for international students and families with mixed immigration status.

The social media post, urging people to sign a petition opposing the 287(g) agreement, was flagged by FGCU’s third-party media monitoring system and shared with campus police and administrators.

“That’s extremely concerning,” Maria P., a volunteer with Unidos Immokalee, told Raw Story. “They say they want to create an inclusive and safe environment for people, but this really makes people fear they’ll be retaliated against — whether in school, in classrooms, or even as alumni.”

Maria, an FGCU alumna who declined to use her last name due to privacy and safety concerns, said her organization also emailed FGCU “really just to support the current students and prospective students as well. It’s very scary for students who are vulnerable, maybe away from families, as well as any visitors on campus.”

Immokalee, a predominantly immigrant farmworker community, is in Collier County, where the sheriff’s department has had its own 287(g) agreement since 2020 and has “seen a lot of racial profiling,” Maria said.

About a quarter of FGCU students identify as Hispanic, and 2 percent are international.

Unidos emailed university president Aysegul Timur, urging FGCU to withdraw from its agreement and seeking details of the university’s partnership with ICE — such as when officers would be trained, whether student data would be shared with law enforcement, and how the program might affect immigrant students and families.

Internal emails obtained by Raw Story show FGCU officials were reluctant to respond.

Lisa Jones, interim vice president and general counsel, advised against answering questions in detail.

“I am concerned about continuing to respond to questions on this topic as it is rapidly evolving,” Jones wrote to Timur and McCabe. “If we answer these questions, we can expect more. If there is new information and these answers change, I am concerned they will bring this email up to argue we were not truthful or transparent.”

Maria said: “There’s such a lack of transparency. It’s extremely disappointing that they chose to not be transparent. The concern is not only for those who may have mixed statuses — there are many other people who are affected within the school.”

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