A series of powerful storms have whipped up winds across the Southwest and southern Plains in the last few weeks, churning up vast clouds of dust that have turned highways into hazard zones. In the last month, at least 20 people have died in car crashes amid low or nonexistent visibility. The impact of these dust storms stretched beyond the region. Strong winds carried the dust unusually far — hundreds of miles north and east — where it mixed with rain, leaving residents as far as the Mid-Atlantic puzzled by the orange residue coating their cars and homes. Here’s a look at how a rare combination of drought and strong winds turned a relatively normal late-winter weather event into something far more unusual. In El Paso, ‘it looks like Mars.’ Dust storms are driven by winds that lift loose dirt up into the air — the drier the land, the less secure the soil. They occur all over the world, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa. In Europe, it’s not uncommon for fine particles of sand from the deserts of northern Africa to get kicked up by warm, humid Saharan winds that blow from the south or the southeast across the Mediterranean Sea and into southern Europe. That dust can even get dragged as far north as Britain, where it’s sometimes referred to as “blood rain” because of its dirty hue.These storms can also happen just about anywhere in the United States, including eastern Washington and California’s Central Valley. But they’re especially common in the desert Southwest and across the southern Great Plains, particularly in late winter and early spring. The activity there has long peaked in April, though research shows the season is shifting earlier with storms increasingly being reported in March. Deserts, overgrazed land and areas experiencing drought are especially prone to dust storms. It’s no coincidence that most of the Southwest and southern Plains are experiencing some level of drought, and it’s especially bad in far West Texas. In El Paso, there have been more days with low visibility from dust than clear ones so far this month, said Thomas Gill, a professor of environmental science and engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso. “It’s kind of the expected weather in spring, and we live with it,” he said. “But to have this dust that is so thick that you can barely see a block or two down the road and it looks like Mars, it’s really unusual to have a dust storm that bad, much less three in less than three weeks’ time.” Brownish snow fell as far as Iowa. There have been three main storms this month that have upended daily life in parts of the Southwest, southern Plains and Chihuahua, Mexico: one on March 3 and 4, one on March 14, last Friday, and one this week, on Tuesday. And each time, dust from this unusually intense succession of storms did something even more unusual: It was lofted up and carried hundreds of miles north and east to other parts of North America. National Weather Service offices in Charleston, W.Va., and St. Louis have shared satellite images showing that dust from the Southwest had been swept up high into the atmosphere and then, as light rain moved through their regions, been pulled down to the ground. Last week, television stations as far away as North Carolina were talking about the “dirty rain” that had fallen from the sky.Particles from Tuesday’s dust storm made their way to Iowa, where snow on the ground had a “brownish, yellowish tinge,” said Brooke Hagenhoff, a meteorologist with the Weather Service office in Des Moines. The dust was carried so far because of the orientation of the storm and the strength of the winds, said Bill Line, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research. These systems come from the West Coast and move up and over the Rocky Mountains, gaining strength and intensity, Mr. Gill said. Then they move into eastern New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma and Kansas, which is essentially the 1930s Dust Bowl region.“As these storms start intensifying in that region, the winds from those storms can extend hundreds of miles out from the center of the storm, all the way to the Mexican border and beyond and then all the way across the Plains,” he said. “As they get more and more intense, the winds crank up.” All three recent events lasted several hours, but experts agree the one on March 14 was the most severe, with winds over 80 miles per hour kicking the dust far into the sky and helping to propel it into regions that don’t normally see its effects. Aaron Ward, a meteorologist with the Weather Service, said an 83 m.p.h. gust was recorded in Amarillo, Texas — among the strongest ever measured by his office, with records going back 175 years. The dust from that event was carried well into Ontario by the next day, said Mr. Line. The March 14 wind storm didn’t only whip up dust, it also caused wildfires to rapidly spread across Texas and Oklahoma. In detailed satellite imagery you could see the thick dispersion of dust sweeping east as well as the darker milky gray smoke plumes rising above the brown dust.

Well before political leaders were taking action against cellphones in the classroom, the superintendent of schools in Schoharie, N.Y., a rural district about 40 miles west of Albany, was well along on his crusade against Big Tech’s commandeering of the adolescent mind. By the beginning of the school year in 2022, David Blanchard, who had been appointed as superintendent seven years earlier, had implemented a bell-to-bell policy. This meant that students could not use phones (or smart watches or earbuds) at any point during the school day — not during lunch or study halls or periods of transition from one class to another. The effort certainly seemed extreme. This was before Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” spurred consensus about the destructive impact phones were having on teenage mental health, before the former surgeon general’s call for warning labels on social media platforms. Mr. Blanchard was troubled by all the disconnection he was seeing. His experiment yielded benefits right away. “We found a transformative environment,” he told me recently. “We expected kids to be in tears, breaking down. Immediately we saw them talking to each other, engaged in conversation in the lunchroom.” One unanticipated outcome was that students flooded counselors’ offices looking for help on how to resolve conflicts that were now happening in person. Previously, if they found themselves in some sort of fight with someone online, they would have called or texted a parent for advice on how to deal with it, Mr. Blanchard told me. “Now students were realizing that their friends were right there in front of them and not the people on social, a few towns away, that they had never met.” Enrollment in elective classes also went up when the option to scroll your way through a 40-minute free period was eliminated. The success in Schoharie has been a showpiece in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s recent campaign to ban cellphones in schools across New York. At least eight other states, including Florida and Louisiana, have instituted restrictions of varying kinds. In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Phone-Free School Act requiring every school district in California to devise a policy limiting the use of smartphones by July 2026. This week a suggested cellphone ban was the subject of a public hearing in the Texas State Legislature, where a bill was introduced with bipartisan support a few months ago by a young member of the House who lamented that she had been “born into these devices.” Governor Hochul’s proposal follows the Schoharie bell-to-bell approach. In a rare instance of agreement between labor and government, it is supported by the United Federation of Teachers, the union representing New York City schoolteachers. As Michael Mulgrew, the president of the U.F.T., put it, “It is simple, and everyone knows what the expectation is.” Still, the proposal’s all-constraining formulation has not made it an obvious or easy sell. Introduced in January as part of the state’s current budget negotiations, it is opposed by some groups like the state’s School Boards Association. These groups favor an alternate strategy coming out of the statehouse that endorses the notion that local jurisdictions ought to have say in how policy limiting phone use is devised. Studies comparing students with and without cellphones in classrooms generally show better academic performance among those without. The advantage of keeping devices out of students’ hands for the entire day is that it both reduces the time teachers have to waste policing phone use and also minimizes the possibility that whatever erupts on Snapchat during lunchtime will kill any chance of paying attention to the “Moby-Dick” discussion in the afternoon. In Schoharie, students put their smartphones in a pouch with a magnetic lock — the kind used in stores to prevent theft — which cannot be opened until a school attendant releases them at the end of the day. In recent years, parents around the country have demanded more and more control over what their children are reading and doing in school. The constituents most opposed to all-day phone bans are the mothers and fathers who seem to be addicted to constant filial contact. Governor Hochul has spoken to aggrieved first-grade teachers who told her that they are overseeing classrooms full of children wearing smart watches. “Mommy and Daddy were checking in all day long saying, ‘I miss you and can’t wait to see you,’” the governor told me. “That’s a parental need,” she said, “not a student need.” The continuation of these patterns, she worried, was bound to keep children from emerging as fully functioning adults. It is the sadly all too reasonable fear of many parents that something catastrophic could happen at school without their being able to reach their children. It is a fantasy that communication would save them. Throughout the rollout of the proposal, the governor’s office has had law enforcement come in and speak with school groups to explain how misguided a notion that is. In an emergency, phones distract children from remaining focused on whomever has been entrusted to keep them safe; calls and texts create added panic. Should the governor’s proposal pass, it would take effect in September. Parents in Schoharie were quite resistant to the ban at first, Mr. Blanchard told me. But they came around when they realized that with the addiction broken, it became much easier to manage their children’s digital lives at home — and much more gratifying to see them engage with the world without staring at their hands.

President Trump announced Friday that the Education Department would no longer manage the nation’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio or supervise “special needs” programs in a major shake-up of an agency he has sought to eliminate. Student loans will move under the Small Business Administration, while special education services, along with nutrition programs, will move under the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Trump said. Mr. Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office that the moves would take place “immediately,” adding that he believed the restructuring — which critics swiftly vowed to challenge in court — would “work out very well.” “They’ll be serviced much better than it has in the past. It’s been a mess,” he said of the loans. He added, “You’re going to have great education, much better than it is now, at half the cost.” Mr. Trump laid the groundwork for his announcement on Thursday, with an executive order aimed at closing the Education Department. The department cannot be closed without the approval of Congress, which created it. But since Mr. Trump took office, his administration has slashed the department’s work force by more than half and eliminated $600 million in grants. Reassigning such primary functions would further hollow out the agency, though education experts and union officials questioned Mr. Trump’s authority to do so unilaterally, particularly in the case of student loans. Many suggested that the result would not be better service — only more confusion for borrowers. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, insisted on Thursday that major programs like student loans would still be run out of the Education Department, albeit a much leaner one. Pressed Friday to clarify what functions would be moved, and what legal authority Mr. Trump had to transfer them, she invoked Congress. “President Trump is doing everything within his executive authority to dismantle the Department of Education and return education back to the states while safeguarding critical functions for students and families such as student loans, special needs programs and nutrition programs,” she said. “The president has always said Congress has a role to play in this effort, and we expect them to help the president deliver.” High ranking Republicans in Congress have already committed to introducing legislation to support Mr. Trump’s efforts to eliminate the Education Department. Beth Maglione, the interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said it was “unclear” whether Mr. Trump could move aid programs away from the department. She suggested that a transition, even one authorized by Congress, would require time and careful planning. “The administration would first need to articulate a definitive strategy outlining how the work of administering student aid programs would be allocated within the S.B.A., determine the necessary staffing and resources and build the requisite infrastructure to facilitate the transition of these programs to another federal agency,” she said. “In the absence of any comprehensive plan, a serious concern remains: How will this restructuring be executed without disruption to students and institutions?” In the executive order, the president compared the size of the federal student loan portfolio with that of Wells Fargo, the bank — noting that Wells Fargo had over 200,000 employees, while only 1,500 people worked in the Education Department’s Office of Federal Student Aid. “The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students,” the order stated. On Thursday, Mr. Trump pledged that the legally mandated funding for students who attend high-poverty schools and who rely on federal Pell grants, as well as “resources for children with special disabilities and special needs​,” would be preserved even as the department was gutted in accordance with his plans. He indicated that this was important to Linda McMahon, Mr. Trump’s education secretary, who served as S.B.A. administrator during his first term. The restructuring Mr. Trump announced on Friday would transfer some of the largest programs handled by the Education Department into agencies that have had minimal involvement with schools and are going through staffing reductions themselves. The S.B.A., headed by Kelly Loeffler, announced Thursday that it would cut 43 percent of its roughly 6,500 workers, while H.H.S., led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has offered buyouts to most of its roughly 80,000 employees.

The Trump administration moved early Friday to detain an international student at Cornell University who has led protests on its Ithaca, N.Y., campus, in what appeared to be the latest effort to kick pro-Palestinian activists out of the United States. A lawyer for Momodou Taal, a doctoral student in Africana studies, said in court papers that he had been notified by email early Friday morning that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was seeking Mr. Taal’s surrender. Last year, Mr. Taal was among a group of pro-Palestinian activists who shut down a career fair on the Cornell campus that featured weapons manufacturers. As a result, the university had ordered him to study remotely for the spring semester. Mr. Taal, a great-grandson of Gambia’s first president, Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara, is a citizen of both Gambia and the United Kingdom. According to court documents, Mr. Taal, who is here on a visa, said he feared deportation in part because his name had been circulated on social media and in media reports as a potential ICE target. The move to detain Mr. Taal comes as the Trump administration tries to deport other pro-Palestinian students and academics. About two weeks ago, Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident of Palestinian descent who recently obtained a master’s degree from Columbia University, was detained in New York. On Monday, the government detained Badar Kahn Suri, an Indian citizen who was studying and teaching at Georgetown University, claiming he had violated terms of his academic visa. Other students have also been targeted. ICE did not immediately return a request for comment. Last weekend, Mr. Taal filed a pre-emptive lawsuit to block possible action against him. A hearing had been scheduled in that case for Tuesday in Syracuse, N.Y. A lawyer for Mr. Taal, Eric T. Lee, argued in the lawsuit that his client was exercising his right to free speech and that there were no legitimate grounds for his deportation. The lawsuit also challenged the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order to “combat antisemitism” that instructed federal agencies to deport immigrants whose actions could be regarded as “antisemitic or supportive of terrorism.” Earlier this week, neighbors saw law enforcement agents near Mr. Taal’s apartment building by Cornell’s campus, according to affidavits filed in the lawsuit in the Northern District of New York. “This does not happen in a democracy. We are outraged, and every American should be too,” Mr. Lee said in a statement. Lawyers for Mr. Taal are asking the court to delay his surrender to ICE, pending the outcome of the litigation. On Thursday, hundreds of Cornell students and supporters held a rally in support of Mr. Taal, who is also the host of a podcast called “The Malcolm Effect.”

On the night of Saturday, March 15, three planes touched down in El Salvador, carrying 261 men deported from the United States. A few dozen were Salvadoran, but most of the men were Venezuelans the Trump Administration had designated as gang members and deported, with little or no due process. I was there to document their arrival. For more than a year, I have been embedded throughout El Salvador’s society, working on a book chronicling the country’s transformation. From the huts of remote island fishermen to the desk of the President, from elite homicide detective units to elementary school classrooms, I have interviewed government officials and everyday people, collecting stories that would shock Stephen King. I’ve stood in classrooms full of happy students which not long ago were empty, because children here once learned early that schools were places to be raped or recruited. I’ve interviewed killers in prison and sat with them face-to-face. As I stood on the tarmac, an agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's ICE Special Response Team told me that some of the Venezuelans had weakly attempted to take over their plane upon landing. It wasn’t unusual for detainees to try to make a last stand, the agent said, guarding the doorway to the plane at the top of the gangway stairs. “They began to try to organize to overthrow the plane by screaming for everyone to stand up and fight. But not everyone was on board,” the agent said, cautioning me to be careful because some of the Venezuelans would fight once they were offloaded. Even if not fighting, almost all the detainees came to the door of the plane with angry, defiant faces. It was their faces that grabbed me, because within a few hours those faces would completely transform. The Venezuelans emerging from their plane were not in prison clothes, but in designer jeans and branded tracksuits. Their faces were the faces of guys who in no way expected what they first saw—an ocean of soldiers and police, an entire army assembled to apprehend them. One of the alleged organizers of the attempted overthrow fought the U.S. agents on the plane, cursing the Americans, the Salvadorans, President Nayib Bukele himself. El Salvador’s Minister of Defense, René Merino, who had been standing on the tarmac at the bottom of the gangway, rushed aboard, dragged the guy to the gangway himself, and flung him into the waiting hands of black-masked guards. The transfer from the plane to the buses that would carry them to prison was rapid, yet it might as well have been the crossing of an ancient continent. I felt the detainees’ fear as they marched through a gauntlet of black-clad guards, guns raised like the spears of some terrible tribe. I walked the line of buses waiting to depart, photographing faces. A guard noticed one of the detainees turned toward the window and wrenched his head back down into his chest. Around 2 a.m., the convoy of 22 buses, flanked by armored vehicles and police, moved out of the airport. Soldiers and police lined the 25-mile route to the prison, with thick patrols at every bridge and intersection. For the few Salvadorans, it was a familiar landscape. But for a Venezuelan plucked from America, it must have appeared dystopian—police and soldiers for miles and miles in woodland darkness. The Terrorism Confinement Center, a notorious maximum-security prison known as CECOT, sits in an old farm field at the foot of an ancient volcano, brightly lit against the night sky. I’ve spent considerable time there and know the place intimately. As we entered the intake yard, the head of prisons was giving orders to an assembly of hundreds of guards. He told them the Venezuelans had tried to overthrow their plane, so the guards must be extremely vigilant. He told them plainly: Show them they are not in control. The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster. The men were pulled from the buses so fast the guards couldn’t keep pace. Chained at their ankles and wrists, they stumbled and fell, some guards falling to the ground with them. With each fall came a kick, a slap, a shove. The guards grabbed necks and pushed bodies into the sides of the buses as they forced the detainees forward. There was no blood, but the violence had rhythm, like a theater of fear.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Rep. Jake Auchincloss's Massachusetts district is so safe he didn't even face a Republican opponent in 2024. So while some of his Democratic colleagues are focused on the careful messaging needed to appease swing voters or keep their purple seats, Auchincloss, 37, is fixated on the broader question facing his party: what are the big ideas that Democrats can offer the American people? TIME spoke to the rising House Democrat about owning up to the party's COVID-era mistakes, getting tough on social-media companies, building new cities, and what the Democratic vision of the future should be. What went wrong for Democrats, and how can it be fixed? It's encapsulated in the school closures. The school closures were a catastrophe. Those are elementary school kids who didn't learn reading and writing because it was on Zoom. That's high school kids who missed out on baseball practice. That's college kids who didn't get to enjoy the college experience. And what defined those school closures was a condescension, it was an inflexibility, and it was a resistance to feedback about the effects of our government’s decisions. It was this toxic confluence of smugness with inflexibility, and frankly, poor governance. Democrats need to acknowledge that we were wrong as a party on our stance on school closures. It's not enough to say we were wrong on this. We also have to have a plan of action for how we're gonna remediate it. I think it's twofold. One is we should make a commitment of one-on-one, high-dosage tutoring for every kid who's behind grade level in this country. We know it's one of the few educational interventions that are rigorously tested for efficacy. It's scalable, it's complimentary to the work that teachers are already doing, and we should be saying as a matter of party principle: every single kid who's behind grade level, Democrats are here to ensure that they get one-on-one, high-dosage tutoring. The second thing we should do is hold the social-media corporations to account for their generational attention fracking of our youth. I have legislation that's bipartisan to revoke Section 230, and make social-media corporations accountable to a duty of care for things like deepfake pornography that target young women. But we gotta go even further, and tax the daylights out of these social-media corporations. A 50% tax rate on all digital advertising that they accrue on the revenues. And use it to fund initiatives like local journalism and education. Does the party need a new direction? What should that direction be? That's the core challenge we have. It's that we are bereft of big ideas. And that's what I'm worried about. Everyone's focused on ‘we need a new message frame’ or ‘we need we need a new angle’ or ‘we need new leaders to emerge.’ I can assure you there is no shortage of ambition out there, candidates will emerge. There's a shortage of ideas. It's all kind of hand waving unless you actually have some big ideas. Let's put the big ideas out there. Let's talk about them. Let's see what people will get excited about. And then organically, I think a narrative starts to emerge from that. And this is to a certain extent what MAGA did and Donald Trump did. He came out talking about 'build the wall,' right? We forget, ‘build the wall’ was the foundation of MAGA, which has since engendered many other ideas and narratives. But you can see why it's kind of the intellectual genesis of that movement. So what should be the Democrats’ next big ideas? Let me put a few more out there. We have got to stop focusing on expanding health-care coverage and focus instead on lowering health-care costs. Community health clinics account for about,1% of U.S. health care spending, but they treat 10% of Americans. They are primary and preventative care and if they could team up with hospitals in particular, they can be incredibly effective stewards of health care dollars. We have to start subsidizing them directly, as opposed to what we currently do, which is subsidize the health-insurance companies. For 15 years we’ve been subsidizing health-insurance companies, and they keep on telling us everyone's going to get healthier, and all I see is that they get richer. How do we subsidize these community health centers? How about a value-added tax on junk food, in the way that the Navajo Nation has. The Navajo Nation put a tax on junk food. It's modest, but they've used it to fund wellness initiatives. We could do that nationally. So in the same way that we tie the attention tax to fund journalism and education, we tie the tax on junk food towards radically expanding funding to community health centers. So that everybody under 300% of the federal poverty rate has access to primary and preventative care. What should be at the core of Democrats’ economic agenda? Cost Disease needs to be the centerpiece. Our Democratic economic agenda really could be seven words: "treat cost disease and protect Social Security." What is cost disease? Can you explain it to me like I’m five? Let’s use two examples to explain it. The average family spends relatively less on TVs and electronics and relatively more on health care than they did 50 years ago. Why did that happen? The reason is that in sectors where they are able to do at-scale product manufacturing, the cost goes way down. In sectors that are very labor intensive, costs tend to go up over time. TVs got really cheap to make, and so a relative share of your budget they went down. Health care is very labor intensive, child care is very labor intensive, and so they, as a relative share of your budget, go up. The goal then, if we're serious about treating cost disease in housing and health care, which are the two sectors that are most affected by it, is: how do you turn a service into a product and then how do you mass produce that product? What does that mean for housing? We totally have to do land-use reform. We gotta make it easier to build. I'm here in Massachusetts, and it’s impossible to build in this state with our zoning code. But we also have to figure out how to turn housing construction from a very service-intensive endeavor into a product. And we actually know how to do that: offsite construction. One way to break through is for us to get serious about building new cities in this country that just totally bypassed the local zoning issue, right? Americans used to build new cities every time we ran into a river. We stopped building new cities, but they're very important ways to foment economic dynamism and mobility. We've got lots of decommissioned military bases that are not locally zoned, federal land that's not locally zoned. Let's invest in building new cities there, and it’ll open up lots of opportunities. What other big ideas do you have? We need to get rid of the primary system. Get rid of the primary system like California did or Alaska did, try to limit the influence of big money like Maine is trying to do. Every state should be pushing for those reforms and Democrats should be leading the charge there. Because what that does is it unlocks the power of the median voter. Right now, of 435 members of Congress, only 35 of them are oriented towards the median voter. The other 400 are oriented towards their primaries. So if you take all these big ideas together and package them, how would you describe them? How would you explain this worldview to somebody if you didn’t have time to go through each idea step by step? It's a great question, but I'm gonna reject the debate, actually. I am insistent that right now, we need to be talking about the ideas, the merits of the ideas. I am sure that some people will agree with what I'm putting forward. Some people will disagree. We need to be seeing what excites people. What actually galvanizes the electorate? What do people see as relevant to their lives? What I'm very skeptical of is this top-down approach where the pollsters or the storytelling maestros of Democratic circles say, ‘this message is what works, it’s about fighting for the working class,’ or whatever. Voters can tell.

Nearly a week after the Trump administration flew more than 200 Venezuelan men to El Salvador, the mass deportation is continuing to draw intense scrutiny, with a federal judge admonishing Administration officials for "evading its obligations," and skepticism building around the allegations that all of the men were members of a dangerous gang. Federal District Court Judge James E. Boasberg on Thursday called the Justice Department’s filings about the deportation flights “woefully insufficient,” as he sought to determine if Trump officials had ignored his verbal order on Saturday to turn around the flights and return the men to the U.S. Instead, the men were delivered to El Salvador and the Salvadoran government quickly released photos of them dispatched to the country’s largest prison. On Thursday, Boasberg expressed frustration that Administration officials had still not fulfilled his request for details about when the flights took off from the U.S. and when they landed in El Salvador. “The government has again evaded its obligations,” Boasberg wrote. If the judge believes the government violated his instructions, he could hold the Trump administration in contempt. Lawyers and family members of many of the deported Venezuelan men have disputed the Administration’s claims that they were members of Tren de Aragua. In a court filing this week, the Trump administration acknowledged that many of the people it has removed under the Alien Enemies Act do not have criminal records in the U.S. Robert Cerna, an official with the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement’s field office in Harlingen, Texas, said in the filing that the men had “only been in the United States for a short period of time" but that “agency personnel carefully vetted each individual alien to ensure they were in fact members” of the gang. In a claim that strains logic, Cerna told the court that the dearth of information the government has about many of the men bolsters its assertion they are dangerous. The “lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose,” the filing states. “It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.” Among the deported men with no apparent criminal record was Jerce Reyes Barrios, a 35-year-old Venezuelan and former professional soccer player who had sought asylum in the U.S. after he was electrocuted and suffocated following a protest against the repressive actions of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Reyes Barrios’ lawyer asserted in a court filing that border officials had incorrectly determined he was a member of a gang by misreading his tattoo and a hand symbol in a photo. “The Trump administration is willing to toss aside due process for splashy deportation theater,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “This is something that should make every American afraid.” Some of Trump’s loudest supporters seemed unsurprised that some of those swept up in deportations and jailed in El Salvador had no criminal record. “Guess what, if there are some innocent gardeners in there, hey, tough break for a swell guy,” Steve Bannon said Monday on his show War Room. “That’s where we stand. We’re getting these criminals out of the United States.” Stephen Miller told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that the Trump Administration didn’t need to wait for a crime to be committed before deporting someone. “Our job is to send the terrorists out before anyone else gets raped or murdered,” Miller said. He sidestepped a follow-up on whether the Administration would present additional evidence that all those deported were part of Tren de Aragua. Reyes Barrios originally dealt with Biden administration officials when he fled to the U.S. in September. Once in Mexico he made an appointment on the CBP One app to present himself to CBP officials at the border. He was initially placed in a “maximum security” section of the detention facility at Otay Mesa Detention Facility in California, and accused of being a Tren de Aragua gang member. Border officials made that determination, his attorney Linette Tobin wrote in a sworn declaration, because of a tattoo that features a crown on top of a soccer ball that was based on the logo for his favorite soccer team, Real Madrid; and a photo on social media of him posing with his fingers spayed out like horns—a hand gesture with multiple non-gang-related connotations. Working with an immigration attorney, Reyes Barrios applied for asylum in December and was set to appear before a judge at the Otay Mesa Immigration court on April 17. Reyes Barrios was moved out of the maximum security prison after his lawyer presented immigration officials with employment letters, a police clearance from Venezuela showing no criminal record, an explanation of the meaning of the hand gesture and a declaration from the tattoo artist about the meaning of the image. Reyes Barrios’ hopes of pleading his case in immigration court evaporated once the Trump administration took over. In early March, Reyes Barrios was transferred from Otay Mesa in California to Texas without his attorney being notified. On March 15, he was deported to El Salvador, 1,500 miles from his homeland of Venezuela. Three days later, his immigration attorney was able to reach an ICE official who confirmed that their client was in a prison in another country.

Since President Donald Trump returned to office and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) leader Elon Musk was tapped to lead a spree of federal government cuts, departments across the federal government have faced massive overhauls and layoffs. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which is responsible for national policy and programs that address housing needs and enforce fair housing laws, is no different. Trump-appointed HUD Secretary Scott Turner has been reviewing HUD’s charge as an agency and considering cuts to a variety of offices within the department. During Trump’s first term as President, he and his Administration repeatedly proposed massive cuts—including the slashing of entire affordable housing programs. But things seem even more heightened now. “In the previous go-around with Trump, there were very sharp proposed reductions and program eliminations, but Congress did not approve them. Now, we have DOGE, and they are basically undermining the capacity of the agency to fulfill its mission,” says Alex Schwartz, professor of urban policy at the New School. When asked how the department is faring, he replies: “In one word: Badly.” Turner has not only embraced DOGE’s mentality of massive cuts to government spending, but has launched his own DOGE taskforce within HUD to “identify and eliminate waste” within the department. On March 11, HUD and Turner showed their loyalty to Trump’s political goals when they rejected a draft version of what Schwartz calls a “routine request for disaster recovery assistance” from the city of Asheville, North Carolina, as the city continues its efforts to recover from the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in 2024. The rejection was based on the fact that the city’s recovery plan included a desire to “prioritize assistance for Minority and Women Owned Businesses (MWBE),” which HUD argued was not compliant with Trump’s January Executive Order titled “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing” that effectively dismantled diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at the federal level and efforts that are federally-funded. “HUD looks forward to helping thousands of North Carolinians rebuild after Hurricane Helene by directing funding assistance to impacted businesses, nonprofit organizations, and neighborhoods,” Turner said in a statement. “Once again, let me be clear, DEI is dead at HUD. We will not provide funding to any program or grantee that does not comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.” Beyond political changes in the department, the financial changes and cuts, Schwartz says, could undercut much of HUD's major charges, including the enforcement of fair housing and the development of affordable housing. This contrasts the fact that Trump ran on affordability throughout his campaign. “HUD is not a high profile agency, and frankly, most of its operations have gone to sustaining existing prior budget commitments, housing, and rental assistance. There's been very little growth over the last decade or more,” Schwartz says. Where HUD is looking to cut is “a very small part of the federal budget,” he continues, adding that many small organizations are “highly dependent” on the department’s financial assistance. Here’s how the Department of Housing and Urban Development is faring under the Trump Administration so far. Staff and field office proposed cuts As various departments across the federal government have encountered severe staff cuts, HUD is bracing for mass layoffs—in addition to the probationary employees who have already been fired—as Turner promises to reduce “waste” at the department in a similar fashion to Musk’s DOGE. The exact number of cuts have yet to be fully finalized by the department, but according to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), these cuts could include 50% of staff in the HUD office that administers vouchers, public housing, and Native American housing programs, which together help 7 million people afford housing. It could also impact 44% in the office that oversees the project-based rental assistance program, 84% in the office that administers homelessness assistance and grants that help communities build affordable housing and recover from disasters, and 77% in the office that enforces fair housing laws. “HUD is taking inventory of every program and process to determine when and where the department can be more efficient….this is not a bad thing…change is good,” said Turner in a video posted to social media. “We are taking a surgical approach and making sure we retain top talent and institutional knowledge so that we can best serve the American people.” Antonio Gaines, the president of AFGE National Council 222, a union that represents HUD employees, told Bloomberg Law the Trump Administration was planning to terminate 50% of HUD’s workforce, including in departments that enforce civil rights law and rebuild after disasters. “I think there's a really strong evidence base that a lot of what HUD does is really effective in reducing homelessness and helping people afford housing,” says Will Fischer who authored the report for CBPP. “Those programs only reach a fraction of the people who need help because of funding limitations, so there's a really strong case to expand them. But these costs are going to go in the opposite direction by disrupting and undermining.” ​​ Margaret Salazar, a career and political housing expert who worked for 12 years at HUD under three different Administrations believes that these programs will all still exist and distribute funding to communities around the country, but will be less effective with less personnel to work within said local communities. “I think something that people might not realize about HUD that's really unique is that half of HUD's staff is actually in the field offices,” Salazar says. “It's really because of the organization's connections on the ground to local governments, nonprofits, and housing authorities and to tribes.” On March 5, Bloomberg reported plans to close dozens of field offices across the U.S. However, there is a certain layer of protection expected, as U.S. housing law requires that HUD maintain at least one field office in every state in order to process applications so the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)—which is also set to have major staff and budget cuts—can underwrite mortgage insurance for buyers. Salazar says her former colleagues in the HUD headquarters and in the field office remain confused about what is currently underway. “They say they're not getting any clear direction or justification to what will or won’t be cut. There’s a lot of fear,” she claims. “I was talking to a colleague who said that normally when you’re facing [a] layoff, it's a personal issue. But when you're a federal employee and you're getting laid off, and there's no real clear justification for that, you're also worried about the housing projects [being worked on], so you are carrying that load as well.” Some of the $60 million funds were intended to go to small community nonprofits that develop affordable housing in Section 4 programming—which is meant to benefit individuals and families with low incomes. Enterprise Community Partners is one of the intermediaries that has deployed Section 4 grants to hundreds of organizations across the U.S., along with LISC and Habitat for Humanity. On Feb. 26, Enterprise Community Partners received a notification that HUD intends to terminate its Section 4 nonprofit capacity building grants and technical assistance program. “Make no mistake: Today’s decision will raise costs for families, hobble the creation of affordable homes, sacrifice local jobs, and sap opportunity from thousands of communities in all 50 states,” Enterprise president and CEO Shaun Donovan, former HUD Secretary, said in the group’s statement. “We intend to pursue every avenue to ensure these vital programs are not torn away from the neighborhoods and working Americans who benefit from them.” Salazar is CEO of REACH, a nonprofit affordable housing developer in Oregon and Washington State. She reports that two of REACH’s projects that were financed by an award from HUD have been stalled due to funding freezes from the federal government. Salazar says the $4.5 million may just be a “tick on a line” for HUD, but for her organization, it jeopardizes the future of one property designated for seniors and another designated for people with disabilities. “I think the one thing that housing developers need is certainty, so that we can plan out our timeframe and start moving dirt on projects,” Salazar says. “That's a certainty we [currently] don’t have.” Also concerning to Salazar is the possible termination of the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program, which she says is “one of the only really significant sticks and bricks housing investments that HUD received in the last several years.” The Green and Resilient Retrofit Program, which as a part of the Inflation Reduction Act, works to provide direct loans and grants to fund projects that improve energy, water efficiency, or climate resilience of affordable housing. “HUD helps to ensure Americans have access to fair and affordable housing. The previous Administration’s extreme energy efficiency crusade diverted valuable resources, including funding, from the department’s mission,” a HUD spokesperson tells TIME in an emailed statement. “The department is evaluating options to ensure rural, tribal and urban communities have the resources they need, which are not solar panels.” Rather than developing housing, these nonprofits work to combat housing discrimination, enforce fair housing laws, and educate people on their rights. In response, four fair housing groups—Massachusetts Fair Housing Center, the Intermountain Fair Housing Council, Fair Housing Council of South Texas, and the Housing Research and Advocacy Center—sued HUD and DOGE over cancelling contracts under the Fair Housing Initiatives (FHIP), arguing that HUD acted arbitrarily by failing to provide adequate reasoning for its decision. All four plaintiffs are members of the National Fair Housing Alliance. “The cancellation of [the plaintiffs’] FHIP grants has caused an immediate and devastating impact. They have had to shutter programs, terminate services, lay off staff members, and shrink their core activities,” the lawsuit states. “Many class members operate in states where no other organization engages in such work, and many serve communities that are often overlooked and underserved: rural areas, low-income neighborhoods, immigrant groups, veterans, and people with disabilities.” Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, and Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, released a statement on Feb. 27 addressing Turner terminating the anti-discrimination housing rule. “At a time when America is experiencing a full-blown housing crisis and record levels of housing discrimination complaints, this outright assault on civil rights takes us back to the days when the federal government rubber stamped segregation and discrimination,” the statement read. On March 3, Waters hand-delivered a letter to Turner and led an event outside HUD's main offices in Washington, D.C., to “sound the alarm on how Trump and DOGE's actions will worsen our nation’s housing and homelessness crisis and exacerbate discrimination in housing.” Meanwhile, on March 17, Warren and Waters were joined by 106 Congressional Democrats in sending a letter to Turner “demanding answers regarding recent actions taken by the Trump Administration to gut enforcement of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and other housing-related civil rights laws.” Schwartz says the defunding of these fair housing groups “signals” to voters that “discrimination is an issue that the federal government is not concerned about… and it’s certainly not going to help educate people about their rights.” Turner responded to the letter and statements penned by Warren and Waters during an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, saying that HUD “will uphold the law” and is "committed to uphold[ing] the Fair Housing Act.” A new plan for affordable housing Despite cuts under the Trump Administration, Secretary Turner and Trump have outlined ways that they hope to address the housing crisis. One of their strategies is to build homes on some of the 650 million acres of federal land as a way to face the housing shortage. The task force will be led by Turner and HUD as well as the Interior Department, per an announcement made by HUD on March 17. Turner and Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary Doug Burgum published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about their task force, stating that “America needs more affordable housing” and “making federal land available” will make it happen. They said “overlooked rural and tribal communities” will be at the center of the task force. “Historically, building on federal land is a nightmare of red tape—lengthy environmental reviews, complex transfer protocols and disjointed agency priorities. This partnership will cut through the bureaucracy,” Turner and Burgum wrote.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities,” that attempts to dismantle the Department of Education. It directs newly-instated Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “return authority over education to the States and local communities.” Trump said that the department will still keep some “core necessities," and that Congress will vote on whether or not to abolish, since only Congress can officially dismantle a government agency. The Democrats know it’s right. I hope they’re going to be voting for it,” Trump said at Thursday’s press briefing about signing the Executive Order. “Because ultimately, it may come before them.” The historic gutting of the department is part of the charge that has defined the first few weeks of Trump’s second term. Led by his Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE], under the watchful eye of Elon Musk, the President has made great strides to make the government smaller by implementing major cuts and funding freezes across the board. On March 11, news came that 50% of the Department of Education was set to be laid off—part of its “final mission,” according to the department’s website, which stated that “impacted department staff will be placed on administrative leave beginning Friday, March 21st.” Speaking to TIME in early March, Jonathan E. Collins, an assistant professor of political science and education at Columbia University's Teachers College, said: “We’re more likely to continue to see what we've been seeing from the Trump Administration. Gutting all the activity underneath it and basically make it [the Department of Education] a shell of itself.” Amid concern and confusion as to what the future holds under the Trump Administration, here’s a look at the history of the Department of Education and what it actually does: When was the Department of Education established? The origins of the Department of Education can be traced back to 1867, when the first Department of this name was established by Congress. Its charge back then was very different and mostly focused on ​​collecting statistics about schools and disseminating some best educational practices. Due to concern that the department would have too much purview over schools, it was then demoted to an Office of Education under different agencies. The Department of Education as we know it today was established by Congress in the 1979 “Department of Education Organization Act,” after calls for expanded federal funding in education and “national efforts to help racial minorities, women, people with disabilities, and non-English speaking students gain equal access to education,” according to the department’s website. Collins has pointed out how the department is in its “infancy” in comparison to other agencies. “We won’t even have begun to fully see how the Department of Education can grow and transform into the best version of itself it can be… the abolition discussion has clouded that fact,” Collins said during a follow-up phone call on March 20, ahead of Trump signing the Executive Order. “We’ve had education inequality for a long time. We’ve had it longer than we’ve had the Department of Education. The persistence of it just underscores the need for some federal agency that is committed to this," he said. How big is the Department of Education? The Department of Education employed around 4,200 employees last September, according to the Office of Personnel Management, which accounted for about 0.2% of overall federal employment last year—the smallest staff of the 15 Cabinet agencies. What does the Department of Education do? The Department of Education has many different and varied responsibilities under its current formation and governs many offices including the Federal Student Aid (FSA), Institute of Education Sciences (IES), Office for Civil Rights (OCR), and the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS). Under the FSA, the Education Department manages the $1.693 trillion outstanding federal student loan balance, as well several student aid programs like the Pell Grant and work study. The department is the largest source of loans for college students. The department also provides 13.6% of funding for public K-12 education, according to the Education Data Initiative, sending funding streams that include Title I—which describes federal allocation of supplemental financial assistance to school districts/schools with a high percentage of children from low-income families—as well as grants under IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), providing money to districts to serve and teach students with disabilities, and grants for things like adult rehabilitation services. The department collects data on education facilities nationwide, and enforces non-discrimination and civil rights laws in federally funded schools, including Title VI and Title IX. Collins pointed out that Title I, Title IX, and programs at the federal level create an equalizing factor that helps to cut through education inequalities between states, creating “incentives for continuity.” “This is the problem of pursuing so much responsibility and discretion at the state level,” he said. “The potential danger [with dismantling the Department] is that you're putting a lot of responsibility on the backs of these education agencies across states that are already strapped when it comes to their capacity, and you're creating an environment where [a person’s] educational experience will become heavily dependent on the state they live in”

Severance, the extremely popular Apple TV+ series about office workers who undergo brain surgery so that their home selves have no knowledge or memory of their working selves, and vice versa, is often described as science fiction. That’s a reasonable characterization, since the simple outpatient brain surgery that splits a person between an “innie” at the office and an “outie” at home isn’t available to the rest of us. But while the science the show depicts goes well beyond anything that’s currently possible, many brain specialists and neurosurgeons are still fans. “I love Severance because it brings up such an important function that the brain takes care of without our even realizing it,” which is establishing our identity simply by being aware of ourselves, our experiences, and our own inner drama, says Dr. Jordina Rincon-Torroella, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University. We asked Rincon-Torroella and other brainiacs who watch or are familiar with Severance their thoughts about how brain surgery and all things neuro are depicted on the show. A clean—and pretty believable—depiction of brain surgery The first step in changing the brain is being able to physically get at the brain, and it’s here that Severance’s sci-fi first spills over into sci-fact. Although the term “brain surgery” might call to mind a sawed-open skull exposing a pink, pulsating mass, the surgery that the subjects undergo involves drilling a small hole—about the size of a dime—in the posterior crown of the skull and inserting a small chip in the brain tissue underneath. The procedure is quick, simple and, as these things go, relatively bloodless. That kind of minimally invasive surgery is not at all outside of the realm of what’s possible today. “We can treat tumors or areas of the brain that cause epilepsy by drilling a small bore hole in the skull and inserting a laser probe under MRI visualization,” says Dr. Hoomin Azmi, director of functional and restorative neurosurgery at Hackensack University Medical Center. “We can then watch the tumor being burnt away on the MRI.” The surgeons in Severance use no such sophisticated imaging, simply peering into the brain and hand-placing the chip—and getting it right every time. ”In terms of surgery [in the show], it’s obviously a bit of science fiction,” says Azmi. Read More: 9 Things You Should Do for Your Brain Health Every Day, According to Neurologists Some types of brain surgery don’t require opening the skull at all. Aneurysms—or bubbles in the wall of an artery—can be treated by threading a probe from an artery in the groin or the wrist up to the brain and closing off the affected area with a coil or a stent. “This has drastically changed outcomes and complications for patients,” says Azmi. “I think the days of doing brain surgery in the office are still far from us. But the trajectory of less invasive and safer brain surgery has been going on for several years.” Some procedures are less invasive still, making no physical contact with brain tissue at all. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) applies magnetic pulses to the scalp to treat symptoms of major depression. Focused ultrasound can be beamed through the skull and ablate, or surgically remove, tumors without any reliance on a drill or a scalpel. “It's also helping us ablate centers of the brain in patients who have essential tremor, or a tremor that cannot otherwise be controlled,” says Rincon-Torroella. A less-realistic depiction of memory control Severance takes more scientific liberties when it comes to the part of the brain in which the memory-manipulating chip is implanted. That region in the crown of the head is known as the parietal lobe, and while the parietal does a lot of jobs—especially processing sensory information such as touch, temperature, pain, and spatial awareness—it is not where memory lives. The ability to form short-term memories is governed by the hippocampi, two structures which lie deep within both brain hemispheres. But a host of other parts of the brain—including the fornix, basal ganglia, thalamus, amygdala, caudate nucleus, and prefrontal cortex—also play a role in consolidating and storing longer term memories. That’s an awful lot of neural real estate for a chip implanted in the parietal to cover. At a minimum, says Rincon-Torroella, a memory-altering chip would have to target the hippocampi, for their memory-forming function, and the amygdala, which governs emotions. “Memory and emotions are so attached to each other,” she says. “These would be the areas that I would attempt to approach if we would consider the idea of whether we could split an identity.” But turning off key brain regions might not be reversible. “You could, for example, knock out short-term memory if you turned off or severed both hippocampi and the fornices,” says Dr. Daniel Orringer, associate professor of neurosurgery at NYU Langone Health. “People would not be able to create these memories, but that’s a destructive thing.” Azmi does not believe the memory control Severance depicts is entirely out of the realm of possibility—just not in the foreseeable future. “We'll probably reach the day that perhaps we can select memories and deselect other memories,” he says. “I think that's many years away.” Even if it were possible to toggle back and forth between on and off in two or three brain regions, that would not, by itself, be sufficient to create the dual identities the characters in Severance exhibit. “Memory is so complex and involves many different areas of the brain,” says Dr. Howard Riina, vice chair of the department of neurosurgery at NYU Langone Health. “It’s also hemispheric; there are components of memory on the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain. A chip would have to have some kind of global effect from the one area where it’s implanted.” The potential of brain chips That may not be possible with existing technology, but implanted brain chips that work locally—in a single targeted region of the brain—are already in development. California-based Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company, is working to create computer chips that could be implanted in the brain and allow quadriplegics to control computers and other devices with their thoughts. BrainGate, a consortium of neurologists, engineers, computer scientists, and more, looks to implant not chips but electrodes in the brain, similarly allowing people with paralysis, ALS, or brainstem stroke to manipulate their environments, sometimes simply by thinking about using their paralyzed arm and hand to manipulate a computer cursor. Deep brain stimulation—in which electrodes connected to a pacemaker-like device are threaded to targeted regions of the brain—is already being used to control tremors related to Parkinson’s disease, as well as epilepsy, Tourette’s syndrome, dystonia, and more. “You have people that have injuries, they have strokes, they have trauma, they have cerebral palsy,” says Riina. “You might be able to augment these people, or even use different parts of the brain to compensate for the damaged area.” Augmenting, inhibiting, or otherwise manipulating consciousness and identity, including memory, would be a much heavier lift than treating a lesion, injury, or disease in an isolated region of the brain, and while Severance makes for good TV, it does not on the whole invoke rational science—at least not in the remotely foreseeable future.