Immigration judges are seeing their dockets multiply as part of the Trump administration’s push to speed up deportations. Attorneys for the immigrants worry due process rights will be violated as a result.

June 6, 2026 at 10:34 a.m. EDTYesterday at 10:34 a.m. EDT

A family leaves the San Antonio Immigration Court on June 3. Immigration judges hear upward of 100 cases per day during “mega immigration hearings,” which are beginning this week in several major cities across the country. (Brenda Bazán/For The Washington Post)

By Arelis R. Hernández

SAN ANTONIO — Immigration Judge Cynthia LaFuente-Gaona typically hears a few dozen cases a day in the Texas courtroom where men, women and children come to implore her to allow them to remain in the United States.

But in recent days, her caseload has swelled. On Wednesday, there were 143 names on her docket.

There was a Guatemalan woman who had learned days earlier that her hearing, originally scheduled for next year, had been moved up. Nearby sat a Venezuelan woman who believed she qualified for a crime victim’s visa but hadn’t had enough time to find an attorney. Alongside them, a Colombian asylum-seeker tried to sooth her feverish 4-year-old daughter as she waited to be called.

Many others on the list did not show up at all.

“They rushed up everything,” said the mother, who spoke on the condition that The Washington Post not identify her because she fears jeopardizing her case. She said she has been slowly saving her housekeeping wages to pay an attorney. “I’m running out of time.”

In immigration courtrooms across the U.S., judges are now being asked to conduct “mega master hearings” that the Trump administration hopes will speed up the president’s mass deportation campaign and help clear a 3.5 million-case backlog. The master calendar hearings, as they are known, mark an immigrant’s first appearance in court since entering the United States.

Immigrants who entered the country illegally but were released after claiming asylum at the borderhave long waited years for their cases to go through the immigration court system. Immigration restrictionists argue those delays encourage people to enter illegally because they know they will be allowed to remain for long periods while waiting for a court date. The Department of Justice, which oversees the immigration courts, has fired dozens of veteran judges and replaced them with new recruits, who are being instructed to see cases through expeditiously and grant asylum sparingly.

“Unnecessary delay hurts both aliens with meritorious claims and the American public who wish to see aliens with non-meritorious claims removed as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review said in a statement.

Immigration attorneys and advocates say they worry the new mega dockets could violate the due process rights of people who do not receive proper notice, can’t find transportation or are confused by the changes and end up missing hearings inadvertently.They also fear that dramatically increasing daily caseloads means judges will not be able to carefully examine each case, potentially dismissing people who have legitimate asylum cases and may then be deported to countries where their lives could be in danger.

“I don’t think there is any problem with trying to process cases more efficiently — it just needs to happen fairly,” said Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, policy and practice counsel for American Immigration Lawyers Association. “The administration has shown they are wiling to cut corners for the sake of efficiency, which at the end of the day is not justice and not what we expect of a court in this country.”

In San Antonio, which has one of the nation’s biggest immigration case backlogs, the mass hearings were sparsely attended, which advocates and attorneys said was a result of people either not knowing they had a court date or being too afraid to appear. The consequence for many of those immigrants could be life-altering and irreversible:Most of those who do not appear at their initial appearance will be ordered deported if a judge determines thatthey received proper notice.

LaFuente-Gaona opened her chamber a half-hour earlier than normal to accommodate the expected mass of people. But less than two dozen of the 143 people on her docket arrived.

“That’s a lot of no-shows,” LaFuente-Goaona remarked to the bailiff.

She read those who did appear their rights and spelled out the allegations against them. Then she proceeded to reset most of the cases for August to give them time to find an attorney. One woman whose name she called out, and who did not appear, was listed as having an order of removal by the next day.

Federal data indicates the number of people missing hearings and being ordered deported has risen sharply — a contrast to previous years, when most immigrants have showed up for their hearings. Attorneys note the absenteeism grew when immigration enforcement officers began arresting people at courthouses.

The federal government notifies immigrants of their hearings by mail and through updating digital court files. Some people are contacted by phone if they are being monitored by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But advocates say it’s common for immigrants to miss notices because families move, may not have access to the mail or encounter errors while trying to visit the website.

“We are hearing many reports of individuals not receiving timely notice or being adequately advised that virtual hearings are no longer an option,” said Priscilla Olivarez, senior policy attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. “They are being set up to fail.”

San Antonio was the first major metropolitan area that tens of thousands of immigrants came to in the U.S. after crossing the border in South Texas during the Biden administration. Many chose to stay. The area is now the target of heavy immigration enforcement and has among the highest ICE arrest numbers in the country.

The Board of Immigration Appeals, whose opinions guide the nation’s 600 immigration judges, have instituted numerous precedent-setting changes during President Donald Trump’s second term. They have narrowed asylum eligibility and removed judges’ authority to issue bonds, effectively applying mandatory detention to all. Immigrants who were once able to log into hearings virtually are now being required to come in person if they do not have an attorney.

Many immigrants are giving up their claims for humanitarian protection and opting to depart the U.S. in exponentially higher numbers.

Court observers said less than a fifth of those scheduled to appear showed upat San Antonio’s immigration court this week as the mass hearings began. Judges spoke in stark terms to those who did come about who would and would not qualify for asylum.

“If you came here only to seek a better life or are escaping general violence in your country, this court cannot help you,” said Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers as a court interpreter repeated her words in Spanish to a handful of people. All but one had traveled hours from their homes in the Houston and Dallas areas to be there.

The judge told the immigrants that the court may be able to help, however, if they had experienced persecution or torture. Then Gonzalez Rogers asked the group to raise their hands if they could respond affirmatively to questions that included whether they had been in the country for 10 or more years, and whether they had a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse.

No one raised their hand.

When Border Patrol agents encountered border crossers at the Rio Grande during the height of the migration surgein 2022 and 2023, thousands received “notice to appear” forms assigned to the San Antonio immigration court. Immigrants move often and are required to report their new addresses to the court. Gonzalez Rogers, remarking on San Antonio’s “overloaded” caseload, reassigned those out-of-area cases to other courts.

In Gonzalez Rogers’s chamber, two girls, ages 8 and 5,entertained themselves playing with a beaded necklace while their mother spoke before the judge. The family was from Mexico and had traveled nearly four hours from outside Houston for the hearing. The sisters arrived in matching pigtails and western-print jackets. They giggled to each other and let out a squeal when a bailiff bulged his eyes in their direction and pressed a finger over his closed lips.

On the wall opposite the children was a sign taped to the wall: “A warning to self-deport.”

“I’m giving you all time to find an attorney,” Gonzalez Rogers told their mother and the other immigrants there. “But if they say you aren’t eligible, consider voluntary departure.”

A Venezuelan couple arrived at Judge Rifian S. Newaz’s courtroom with their daughter, also hoping to be granted more time. The parents’ hands trembled as they waited for the judge. Their 10-year-old child sat at a lectern nearby with a microphone positioned for someone taller.

The family had entered the U.S. illegally near Brownsville, Texas, in late 2023, the judge said. The father said they had applied for asylum but had done so without an immigration attorney’s help. They hadn’t been able to afford one.

The judge gave them until early September to find a lawyer — less time than has been standard in the past, several immigration attorneys said.

“We were spooked,” said the Venezuelan man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is in the country illegally and fears being targeted. He described how he and his wife had debated whether they should risk the drive from the Austin area and possibly be stopped by local police working with ICE to show up for the hearing. They were worried about all the reports of courthouse arrests and not getting a fair shot.

“We didn’t know whether to come. But we came because for her,” he said looking down at the curly-haired girl. “We want to be legal and do things right. We want her to grow up in a place where she is safe.”

The family quickly hopped into a car because the man had a scheduled check-in at an ICE office right after the hearing.

LaFuente-Gaona’s 143-person caseload was split in two, so that around 70 immigrants had their cases in the morning, and the other half in the afternoon. The judge, who previously worked as a congressional staffer and in the Texas attorney general’s office, has presided over hundreds of cases since 2017. Many are Venezuelan and Cuban immigrants, and most do not have an attorney.

As the judge called out their names, she provided each person with a standard list of legal resources and patiently answered questions through a translator. LaFuente-Gaona pointed to a stack of asylum applications, urging anyone who needed it to take them.

Just five adults and four children appeared before her that afternoon. All the adults were women and some were enrolled in electronic monitoring programs in lieu of detention. All said they had received calls or text messages days earlier alerting them that their hearings had been moved up to Wednesday.

“Your cases have been marked ‘expedited,’” the judge said. “I must address your cases before the end of the year.”

Dojaquez-Torres, of the immigrant lawyers association, said she and other attorneys are concerned that the mass dockets will mean people do not get an individual analysis of their case.

“Judges are getting pressured to move quickly and rush when they are supposed to evaluate each individual case,” she said. “In some courts, they are conducting classroom-style hearings, asking the group to answer by raising their hands.”

The Colombian woman who appeared with her toddler before LaFuente-Gaona earlier that day was so shaken after the hearing that she fumbled and dropped a bottle of Tylenol she was trying to open. The judge gave her until August to find an attorney and stave off a deportation order.

She sighed deeply as she entered the courthouse elevator. She’d entered the country in mid-2024 after fleeing a volatile border region she said has been overtaken by guerrilla violence. She said she had been summoned to court five different times already, but that her hearings had been delayed or continued for different reasons.

She was relieved not to have been detained, and now said she planned to focus on cobbling together enough money to hire a lawyer.

“I just don’t want them to deport me,” she said.

By

Tami Luhby

US Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Mehmet Oz holds a press briefing at the White House in Washington, DC, on June 2. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Millions of sick Americans could have a tougher time retaining — or even signing up for — Medicaid coverage after the first-ever federal work requirement begins in January in most states.

That’s because the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a new rule this week that takes a harder line on defining which low-income adult enrollees are eligible for an exemption for those who are “medically frail.” The rule guides states on implementing the work mandate.

To qualify for the exemption, not only must enrollees have an illness or medical condition, such as cancer or a behavioral health issue, but that condition must also significantly impair their ability to comply with the work mandate, according to the rule, released Monday.

The interpretation came as a surprise to many states and patient advocacy groups and immediately sparked an outcry, with warnings that it will strip needed health coverage from sick enrollees covered through Medicaid expansion.

“It is going to impose a lot more burdens to keeping coverage on people who have very serious conditions for whom loss of coverage can be catastrophic,” said Jocelyn Guyer, senior managing director at Manatt Health, a legal and consulting firm that advises states on Medicaid policy. “It will increase the number of people who lose coverage.”

The work mandate was included in President Donald Trump and his party’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed last year. CMS is in the process of issuing rules to help states implement the health provisions in the law, which includes historic cuts to Medicaid. The agency said its key focus for work requirements is to increase Medicaid enrollees’ self-sufficiency and economic mobility, while protecting the vulnerable.

The OBBBA requires Medicaid expansion enrollees ages 19 through 64 to work, volunteer, attend school or participate in a job program at least 80 hours a month, unless they are eligible for certain exemptions. Some 5.3 million more people are expected to be uninsured in 2034 because of the work requirement, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate from last summer.

Tying the exemption to an enrollee’s inability to work, however, is not in the law itself, experts told CNN.

Concerns about care

The rule prompted a swift response from a multitude of patient advocacy groups, who say the stricter interpretation will put people’s lives at risk by jeopardizing their coverage and access to care.

“Because of these requirements, an individual fighting for their life in active cancer treatment will now also have to have to climb what, for some, will be insurmountable obstacles to get or maintain coverage,” said Jennifer Hoque, associate policy principal at the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. “If they aren’t able to get through the system fast enough, they’ll show up to chemo or show up for cancer surgery and find out they don’t have the coverage they need. Their lifesaving treatment will be taken from them.”

CMS’ interpretation “clearly conflicts” with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, according to a group of 48 patient organizations, including the American Lung Association, the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation, and the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“Redefining the law’s medical frailty exemption to only apply to individuals who can prove they cannot work and drastically limiting the ability of states to accept self-attestation from patients about compliance and exemptions starting in 2028 clearly conflicts with the law,” the group said in a statement.

“These policies will place massive paperwork burdens on patients and providers, upend months of planning by states and create chaos just months away from the January 2027 implementation deadline.”

CMS did not reply to a request for comment about advocates’ concerns.

Scramble for states

The surprise interpretation adds an extra, two-step hurdle for state Medicaid agencies, who are already facing tight deadlines to stand up their work requirement programs by January. Many have already been setting up their systems based on informal guidance from CMS and must now make changes. Meanwhile, Nebraska launched its work mandate last month but will now have to conform to the new rule.

What’s more, CMS did not provide guidance to states on how to define and assess whether a person meets the medically frail exemption criteria, said Jennifer Tolbert, deputy director of the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at KFF, a nonpartisan health policy organization. States will likely adopt different practices, meaning there won’t be a uniform standard for determining if someone is too sick to work.

Further complicating matters is that the severity of these enrollees’ medical conditions — and the impact on their ability to work — can vary over time, as the rule noted.

The provision could also put doctors in a tough spot, since they may be called upon to help determine whether someone is able to work, which would affect their patient’s coverage. That is not typically part of providers’ clinical practice and area of expertise, Guyer said.

Plus, starting in 2028, enrollees and those signing up for Medicaid will only be allowed to self-attest that they qualify for the medical frailty exemption once. After that, if states don’t have data on file to confirm people’s eligibility, enrollees may have to provide documentation, which could prove to be a big lift for some.

States also will not be able to add additional categories to the exemption. For instance, the rule notes that being homeless would not automatically qualify a person as medically frail since that circumstance is not a health condition. However, if that person had a substance use disorder or mental health condition, they could be eligible for the exemption.

Curbing fraud

CMS officials defended their interpretation of the law in a call with reporters, which largely focused on the medical frailty provisions. States can use health claims data or ask for other documentation to determine whether an enrollee meets the criteria in the rule, they said.

“The exemption ensures that work expectations are directed towards those who can participate, while protecting those who cannot,” said Dan Brillman, who directs CMS’ Medicaid program.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, who oversees CMS and is a key player in the Trump administration’s crackdown on fraud in federal programs, linked the provisions to maintaining the program integrity.

“The mantra that we kept coming back to was that we’re forgiving but we’re not foolish,” Oz told reporters, noting that the work mandate will preserve Medicaid for the vulnerable. “Directionally, we are appropriately going after problem areas and doing it in a way that’s compassionate, forgiving — but we don’t want to be fools.”

The medically frail exemption is one of several examples of CMS’ stricter interpretations of the Big Beautiful Bill. Starting in 2028, the agency is eliminating the ability for enrollees to self-attest that they are meeting the work requirement, which can be important for gig workers or the self-employed, or that they qualify for an exemption, such as serving as a caregiver.

In 2027, states can accept self-attestations when there is no reliable data available to prove work hours or exemption eligibility.

Oz warned that enrollees must be honest when self-attesting.

“In the rare instance where you’re self-attesting, you need to tell the truth,” he told reporters on Monday. “We will be speaking with the different enforcement bodies to make sure that folks know that’s not a joke.”

Also, CMS last month proposed a rule that would further curtail states’ ability to boost certain types of payments to providers — beyond the limits Congress included in the law. These payments are used to encourage provider participation and improve access to care for Medicaid enrollees, but the agency argues that the practice drives up costs without ensuring better health outcomes.

The stricter work requirement rule met with the approval of at least one conservative health policy expert. Brian Blase, the president of Paragon Health Institute and an influential voice with the White House and Republican lawmakers, said it “strikes the appropriate balance” between protecting Medicaid’s integrity and accommodating those in need.

“Self-attestation alone for compliance or exemptions — particularly for medical frailty — risks repeating the improper enrollment and fraud seen in other programs when verification standards were weakened,” he said in a statement.

By

Daniel Dale

President Donald Trump arrives to participate in a roundtable at Custer Farms in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, on June 5, 2026. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

President Donald Trump uses a lot of fictional statistics. He usually deploys them with a breezy confidence.

At an event in Wisconsin on Friday, though, he made a statistical claim that sounded so clearly dubious that he wondered aloud where it had come from.

“And we’ve also had huge drops in — and I’ll tell you, this is something that’s amazing: African American unemployment is now doing better than it’s ever done. And I don’t know where that stat came from, but I’ll take it,” he said. “I don’t know where the hell that stat come — but we’ll take it.”

The mystery “stat” isn’t true.

The most recent unemployment rate for Black or African Americans was 6.6% in May, federal statistics show (all unemployment figures in this article are seasonally adjusted). That’s an improvement from the previous rate, 7.3% in April, and from its highest rate during Trump’s second term, 8.2% last November — but it’s not close to a record low.

It’s actually higher than the rate Trump inherited when he returned to office.

The Black or African American unemployment rate was 6.2% in January 2025, the month of his second inauguration, and 6.1% in December 2024, former President Joe Biden’s last full month in office. In fact, the 6.6% rate last month is higher than the rate in each of the last 34 full months of the Biden administration, from March 2022 through December 2024.

The record-low Black or African American unemployment rate — the record at least since the beginning of this federal dataset in the early 1970s — is 4.8%, set under Biden in April 2023. The previous record low, 5.3%, was set during Trump’s first term in August 2019 and September 2019. During Trump’s second term, however, the rate has not been lower than 6%.

And since Trump spoke vaguely of “huge drops,” it’s worth noting that even the 0.7-percentage-point decline in the Black or African American unemployment rate between April 2026 and May 2026, from 7.3% to 6.6%, was not a record month-to-month drop. For example, there was a 0.9-point decline from March 2024 to April 2024 under Biden, from 6.5% to 5.6%. (It’s always wisest to look at multi-month trends rather than one-month changes, which can be statistically volatile, but we’re covering our fact-check bases here.)

It wasn’t clear whether Trump ad-libbed the falsehood or whether he was citing something from his prepared text. The White House has not yet responded to CNN’s requests for an explanation of the claim, sent on Friday night and again on Saturday morning.

Under presidents from both major parties, the unemployment rate for Black or African Americans has been persistently higher than the rates for other racial groups. The overall national unemployment rate was 4.3% in May.

President Donald Trump wears the Olympic gold medal of Team USA speedskater Jordan Stolz during on June 5, 2026 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Other false Trump numbers

Trump used other inaccurate and long-debunked supposed statistics at the Wisconsin event on Friday. These were among the ones he didn’t question out loud:

• His repeated claim that “$18 trillion” is being invested in the US. That’s an imaginary figure far higher than the “$10.6 trillion” figure the White House’s own website used as of Saturday for supposed “major investment announcements” during this term – and even the White House figure is a major exaggeration.
• His repeated claim that “25 million” migrants were allowed to enter the country under Biden. This one is also not even close to the truth; through the last full month of the Biden administration, the federal government had recorded under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants during that administration, and that includes millions who were rapidly expelled from the country. Even adding in the so-called gotaways who evaded detection, estimated by House Republicans as being roughly 2.2 million, there’s no way the total was close to Trump’s number.
• His repeated claim that “the Biden administration had the worst inflation in the history of our country.” (He added that other people “say 49 years, 48 years” rather than in history, but said he still thinks “it was forever.”) Peak Biden-era inflation, 9.1% in June 2022, was the highest in between 40 and 41 years, not 48 years, and nowhere close to the all-time high of 23.7%, which was reached in 1920, or the highest point of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, 14.8%, which was reached in 1980. (And by January 2025, the month Trump was inaugurated, it had fallen to 3%.)

By

Ella Nilsen

Andrew Freedman

Jun 4, 2026

Researchers measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California on April 11, 2025. A new rule proposed by the Trump administration would put federal funding for scientific research in the hands of political appointees, likely cutting off money for studies of climate change and other topics the administration ideologically opposes. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images

Scientists across multiple disciplines are sounding the alarm after the White House proposed taking greater control over how scientific research gets funded and allowing political appointees to decide whether to approve scientific grants.

Critics of the proposed rule say it would codify the administration’s attempts to destroy the scientific research enterprise in the US that has led to remarkable discoveries on treating cancer, HIV and rare diseases — as well as understanding weather and climate science and developing artificial intelligence. It could have far-reaching implications on what kinds of research topics get studied in the first place.

One of the main casualties in OMB’s proposal would be the country’s longstanding scientific peer review process for grantmaking. Peer review has been widely used since the post-World War II research boom, and relies on panels of experts in their fields judging federal funding decisions on the scientific merit of the grant proposals, rather than any politically-motivated criteria.

The proposed rule would also ban research on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as gender, and stop federally funded international scientific collaborations. And OMB’s changes could target more than scientific research — applying to other federal grant awards from agencies to state and local governments.

“This proposal does not just apply to scientific research funding, it applies to other federal awards in all kinds of contexts,” said Stanford Law School professor Lisa Larrimore Ouellette.

Kate Marvel, a climate scientist who recently left NASA due to political interference in climate-science research there, said peer review has long been an enabler of America’s scientific leadership.

“One of the reasons the USA has historically been such a research superpower is that we’ve had a merit-based science funding system, where research is funded by the federal government based on the assessments of other scientists,” she said.

“The system wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t stupid,” Marvel added. “Putting uninformed political hacks in charge of it is deeply stupid.”

An OMB spokesman said the proposed rule would “bring transparency to the grantmaking process and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent wisely.”

“Federal grants were already politicized to promote a far-left agenda,” the spokesman said. “That ends now.”

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought speaks during the Republican National Lawyers Association National Policy Conference in Washington, DC, in April. Aaron Schwartz/Reuters

A plan to protect science

Like any other federal regulation, the OMB proposal is undergoing a public comment period before it gets finalized. Now, individual researchers, scientific journals, universities and medical societies are using this time to flood the zone with public comments. It’s a longshot attempt to trigger Congressional review.

“My goal was to try and mobilize as many people in the scientific community or adjacent communities — patient communities, science lovers, anybody can submit to this docket,” said Elizabeth Ginexi, a former senior program officer at the National Institutes of Health. “They’re required by law to read every single comment and respond to every single comment.”

Ginexi left the NIH after more than 20 years when the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency came in and started slashing programs all over the federal government. She took the deferred resignation program and has watched the administration try (and sometimes fail) to cut various grant programs. Ginexi said the sweep of the proposed OMB rule alarms her.

“When we’re trying to come up with new clinical trials to test out a new therapeutic for a rare form of cancer, we want the scientists to be judging the merit of those applications,” she said. “Is this clinical trial ready for prime time? Is the molecular biology correct? Who should be making that decision — other scientists, oncologists, or do you want Russell Vought and Donald Trump making that decision?”

Far-reaching impacts

The changes at OMB could impact issue areas from climate science to addiction research.

“Quite frankly, if this goes through, we’re going to see an uptick in addiction and overdose,” said Diane Fishbein, a senior scientist studying addiction at the University of North Carolina, representing the Addiction Science Defense Network.

Eliminating addiction research on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender is not an abstract concept; it could be devastating to real-world people struggling with addiction, Fishbein said. For instance, federally funded research has shown that intervening early with children and adolescents who may be experimenting with less addictive drugs can be a big part of stopping addiction early.

“If we ignore the social determinants of health and other very scientifically important topics, what will happen is this unequal, uneven distribution of services that could otherwise help all communities, all children, all families,” Fishbein said. “This rule basically takes out the ability to really focus on scientific terms, they’re not ideological terms.”

OMB’s rule change could also significantly limit the scope of climate and weather research that gets funded, putting the country at a disadvantage relative to other nations, such as China, which are stepping up in these fields.

Climate scientists warned that the influence of politics in science funding decisions could prevent important new scientific breakthroughs and set their field back years.

“The proposal to base funding decisions on alignment with the administration’s agenda is a particularly acute threat for climate and weather funding, which protects our nation’s infrastructure, economy, agriculture, public safety, and national security,” said Kim Cobb, who leads the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

A boat motors by as the Bidwell Bar Bridge is surrounded by fire in Lake Oroville during the Bear fire in September 2020. Human-caused climate change and droughts have exacerbated wildfires in the US and around the world. Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

President Donald Trump has falsely called human-caused climate change a “hoax” and repeatedly proposed budgets that would gut climate research. Congress has pushed back against those funding cuts, but the new rule is seen by some advocates as an end run around lawmakers, since it would assert more executive branch authority over spending.

Rick Spinrad, an oceanographer who headed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the Biden administration, said other countries — such as the former Soviet Union — have let politics dictate research funding with disastrous results.

He also said the OMB proposal contradicts scientific integrity policies put in place at federal agencies, including NOAA, during the past two decades. These have been aimed at limiting political interference in scientific research and communication.

“That all goes down the tube with this rule,” he said.

Published:

May 26, 2026

WASHINGTON—Growing increasingly angry and pacing his office, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was reportedly shaking with rage Tuesday after imagining a plus-sized astronaut. “Ugh, it makes me fucking sick to think about some fatass floating through space making Americans look like pathetic slobs,” said Hegseth, a large vein pulsating across his beet-red forehead as he visualized a portly mission specialist drifting toward the food station for third helping of rehydrated beef stroganoff. “I’m so pissed I can barely breathe imagining an obese couch potato waddling around NASA. When I close my eyes, I can see these lardos orbiting above our perfect country and it makes me want to punch someone. Chiseled Russian cosmonauts and svelte Japanese pilots sharing a capsule with a dumpy American in an XXXL spacesuit, it’s unacceptable!” At press time, Secretary Hegseth had flipped his desk over after realizing that the overweight astronaut could also be a woman.

The Onion

‘I Was One Of His Victims,’ Weeps President

Published:

June 1, 2026

WASHINGTON—Growing visibly emotional as he recounted the trauma surfaced by the Justice Department’s release of files on the serial predator, a tearful President Donald Trump told reporters Wednesday he had been sex-trafficked by disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump, who described himself as a “victim of really unbelievable stuff, some of the worst” at a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol, broke down several times as he claimed that Epstein had repeatedly lied to him and pressured him into sexual activity with others from their first meeting in 1987 until the convicted sex offender’s death in prison in 2019.  

“Today I stand before you as a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s horrendous abuses,” said the commander-in-chief, who paused to collect himself as he stressed that he was only a young, innocent 41-year-old when Epstein began grooming him in Palm Beach, FL. “He said he would get me a massage, and I didn’t know what that meant. Before I knew it, he was luring me to a private island with all these promises of real estate deals and then making me have sex with children for his sick pleasure. It was a nightmare I’m just now waking up from.”

“I am the first to come forward of the hundreds of businessmen sexually trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein, but I guarantee you I won’t be the last,” Trump added.

Due to the emotional nature of his remarks, Trump was accompanied to the Capitol by longtime supporters such as Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), Attorney General Pam Bondi, and first lady Melania Trump, who provided the distraught president with tissues as he insisted he did not want attention or compensation but simply wished for the decades of birthday notes, flight logs, photographs, emails, and other evidence cataloging his extensive relationship with Epstein to disappear and never be spoken of again by anyone.

“All of these news stories about parties he made me attend, all of these files about other defenseless guys like me he kidnapped and took aboard the Lolita Express—it’s just too painful to think about,” said Trump, who added that having his identity publicly exposed by the U.S. government had forced him to relive the most harrowing period of his life. “There is something so inhumane about how I’ve been treated by the press. They don’t understand the terrible things Jeffrey Epstein put me through. I still wake up in a cold sweat thinking about all the billionaires he trafficked who weren’t lucky enough to get away.”

“Please, I’m just begging anyone in Congress who has a heart to make all of this go away—if not for me, then for the many others out there,” he continued, openly weeping as his wife draped him in her jacket and ushered him from the podium.

Following the press conference, Trump reportedly signed onto an open letter calling on Congress to suppress any information related to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, joining dozens of other self-described survivors, including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Tom Pritzker, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. The Onion.

Fact check: Trump denied he made this remark about Iran. He made it on camera one day earlier | CNN Politicshttps://www.cnn.com/2026/05/03/politics/trump-iran-comment-fact-check

Trump keeps saying he wants to tilt the 2026 election for the GOP | CNN Politicshttps://www.cnn.com/2026/05/04/politics/trump-gerrymandering-2026-midterm-elections

Opinion | This Trump Proposal is Good for Private Equity — and Not Good for Our Retirement Accounts – The New York Timeshttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/opinion/trump-retirement-private-equity-401k.html

Charting how Trump became a historically unpopular president | CNN Politicshttps://www.cnn.com/2026/05/05/politics/trump-approval-rating-analysis-vis?source=sub_web_wall-exc