In Peru, a High-Stakes Election for Women
BY LORENA PROCHAZKA
Women’s rights under attack. Hard-won gains rolled back. A political agenda moving steadily backward. Sounds familiar? As Donald Trump’s administration chips away at women’s freedoms in the United States, women inhabit a similar battlefield a few thousand miles to the south in Peru, where I am based as a journalist. Heading into the final stretch of a deeply polarizing presidential election, we find ourselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.
After a chaotic first round, the runoff has come down to an unexpected contender and an infamous veteran, respectively: leftist Roberto Sánchez and right-wing Keiko Fujimori. After initially trailing Sánchez, Fujimori—a woman—has clawed back to a lead of around 30,000 votes. Though the race remains open, with 99% of ballots counted, each update makes it more likely that Fujimori, who has run four times, will finally win.
At first glance, the candidates couldn’t seem more different: Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular (FP) carries a legacy of human rights violations linked to her father, president-turned-dictator Alberto Fujimori. Sánchez’s Juntos por el Perú (JP) promises to defend human rights while positioning the candidate as heir of socialist ex-president Pedro Castillo.
But here’s the rub: Neither party appears to have women’s interests at heart. Peru is following a global trend of setbacks in women’s rights amid rising conservative pressures, but in our case the trend pops up across the political spectrum. As former Minister for Women and Vulnerable Populations Marcela Huaita tells The Meteor, those advocating for human rights are "no longer pursuing a progressive agenda, but one of resistance.”
Peru is already at a point where reports of femicide have increased, and thousands of sexual abuse cases have gone unpunished. To make matters worse, current president José María Balcázar has defended child marriage and normalized sexual relationships between teachers and students.
Huaita sees “no ground for optimism.” We already know what FP stands for, she points out: It opposes same-sex marriage, abortion even in the case of rape, and comprehensive sex education, which FP charges will “homosexualize” children. FP has a natural ally in ultra-conservative Renovación Popular (RP). Together, they’re just one vote away from a Senate majority. And RP passed a law that eliminates “gender perspective”—a framework used to address gender inequality, gender-based violence, and sexual and gender diversity.
It's not just a matter of rhetoric: This law removes the concept of gender from all legislation, obscuring how gender-based power dynamics drive violence and discrimination, Huaita explains. It limits access to comprehensive sexual education, health and reproductive rights; it means even more impunity for abusers and less support for survivors. It also sends an important institutional message: Women are not a priority.
The new administration will decide whether to preserve or dismantle the “gender perspective” framework. But it’s not as if a Sánchez presidency would have necessarily saved the project: Both Fujimori’s and leftist Castillo’s party supported the law eliminating it.
And Peru’s left has not always aligned with progressive positions on gender issues. For instance, Pedro Castillo opposed the gender-equality approach in education. Sánchez, who claims to be his political heir, has sent mixed signals on women’s rights. After criticism over the absence of gender-focused policies during his first campaign, he presented a revised government plan expanding on them. But just a day earlier, he had signed a commitment to an evangelical church emphasizing "family, life, and religious freedom.” His political friendships also raise some questions. Ricardo Belmont, president of the OBRAS party, which backed Sánchez ahead of the runoff, stated that “legalizing abortion will allow me to shoot anyone who accesses it.” Meanwhile, Antauro Humala, leader of a radical nationalist-socialist movement—once a close ally whom Sánchez has since distanced himself from—is openly homophobic.
Peru’s women had a bad candidate and a worse candidate to choose for president—and it looks like the worse candidate has won. But no matter what comes next, it’s clear they’ll have to wage a battle for women’s rights on their own terms, regardless of political party.
Lorena Prochazka is a journalist and documentary producer at Pacha Films. She specializes in documentary research, development and production of human-centered stories across Latin America.
This "stupid" journalist did some math
  June 9, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, We’re not even going to discuss what happened at Madison Square Garden last night because this city and this team need all of our positive energy right now.  In today’s newsletter, we get nerdy with numbers for the benefit of women journalists. Plus, a horrific man is running for governor in Georgia. In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritu Brunson, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONKeeping track: Earlier this week, Donald Trump stormed out of an interview with Meet the Press after accusing journalist Kristen Welker of being “either crooked or stupid.” Welker, the first Black journalist to host Meet the Press, was just doing her job, asking follow-up questions after Trump made an unsubstantiated claim about elections in the U.S. being rigged. As he walked out, Trump also called Welker “darling”; her skin, somehow, did not melt off her body. This, of course, is not the first time that Trump has insulted a journalist for asking questions. I know because this episode made me so curious that I did something that normally sends a chill up my husband’s spine: I made a spreadsheet. A search of Trump’s insults toward journalists going back to 2015—when he attacked then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly for having "blood coming out of her wherever”—reveals at least 30 reported instances. This research is non-exhaustive; it surfaced only the best-reported cases, and there are surely more. But here’s what the numbers show: Of those 30 instances, two-thirds were directed at women. Given that women make up less than half of political reporters, it’s safe to say the president has a special fondness for insulting women more than men. The nature of those insults also tells us something. In his known tirades against women journalists, he’s called a quarter of them “dumb” or “stupid.” How many men are dumb and stupid? None. He’s called their coverage stupid, as we’ve seen with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who has been in Trump’s crosshairs since his first term. But it is incredibly rare for the president to refer to a man journalist as stupid, especially to his face.  EMMY, MATRIX, AND NATIONAL PRESS CLUB'S FOURTH ESTATE AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST KRISTEN WELKER. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Trump, of course, also enjoys going after women for their looks. He called Katie Rogers of The New York Times ugly. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins has “hatred in her eyes.” Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey is a “piggy.” And when you take a closer look at the data, an even more disturbing pattern emerges: Trump seems especially comfortable insulting Black women journalists. According to data from the Pew Research Center, just five percent of government and politics reporters in the United States are Black. But roughly 36 percent of the incidents we found target Black women reporters. Consider Akayla Gardner of MS Now, who was called “not a smart person” for asking about the rising costs of Trump’s ballroom, and ABC’s Rachel Scott (“one of the worst reporters”), who pressed Trump about his focus on construction projects around DC in the midst of a war with Iran. So when we say Trump hates Black women, that’s not vibes. That’s data. We’ll be continuing to track these instances for the remainder of Trump’s term. Because the collective memory on how this man treats the fourth estate may be short, but spreadsheets are forever. AND:
 THIS IS WHAT $259 WILL GET YOU. A BIG OL' SLAB OF SCALLOPED WOOD. (VIA BALLERINA FARM)
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Let's Take This Outside
The never-ending work to diversify the great outdoors
By Shannon Melero
Rockland State Park, nestled in Upper Nyack, New York, was a summertime staple of my youth. Every year, my family would pile into a car with coolers, chairs, bags of charcoal, and enough groceries to feed a small army and make the hourlong sojourn from the Bronx first thing in the morning to secure a spot on the grass. Location was everything. We needed a flat surface to set up games and blankets, but also had to be close to one of the grills the park provided, and most importantly, we needed to be a reasonable walking distance from the park’s massive pool.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but those trips to Rockland were my first introduction to the great outdoors, a relationship which years later would blossom into a love of hiking and staring at trees.
What made Rockland such a comfort was that everywhere I looked, I saw families that mirrored my own. Huge groups of Latine and Black people gathered around decaying wooden picnic tables, laying out tubs of familiar foods our matriarchs had cooked the night before—potato salads; three different preparations of rice; pork; and pasteles, all of which would be handed out at dinnertime. Rockland was a full-day experience from sunup to dusk.
But like many outdoor locales that attracted urbanites of color, Rockland State Park was segregated up until the late 1950s, so the fact that I saw so many families of color in one area wasn’t mere happenstance. It was, historically speaking, where we had been gathering all along.
The idea of “public lands” goes back as far as the 1780s, when states began ceding land rights to the newly formed federal government. Since that time, the idea of who gets to be outside, where, and when has been racially inflected. While the restrictions have now changed—anyone can travel or pay a fee and go to any national or state park—their impact lingers. In 2025, outdoor publication The Trek found that 96% of long-distance hikers on the Appalachian Trail were white. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has enacted its own efforts to make the outdoors white again.
“I always say that white people were really onto something when they invented the great outdoors and then gatekept it,” Chevon Linear, co-founder of Black People Outside, tells me. Chevon, who goes by Chevy, is warm and inviting, even through the computer screen that separates us. Chevy was a Girl Scout as a child but notes that, “The outdoors were really deemed as ‘white people shit.’” It’s a common term we use when referring to the outdoors, and while it’s often said in a joking manner, it’s a genuine phenomenon. For much of American history, going outside for leisure was a privilege—a prohibitively expensive one that has now become a trillion-dollar industry by catering mostly to white, affluent outdoor enthusiasts.
Chevy founded Black People Outside with her fiancé, Kameron Stanton, after an impromptu trip to Grand Teton, a national park in Wyoming, six years ago. The couple, who had never camped before, traveled with one of Chevy’s friends, who loaned them all of the gear they needed. Kameron called the experience “spectacular.”
“The true dark night sky, the energy from everyone around you…everyone was just so nice,” he recalls. “And it's like, dang, outdoors got everyone acting friendly.”
For Chevy, who had traveled all over the world before the pandemic, that night in Grand Teton sparked a calling. “Just seeing the stars, I was crying,” she recalls. “I had never seen the sky like that. It was truly quiet and I’d never heard it so quiet before.” But what she didn’t see were many other Black people. “I’m from Chicago, so I’m used to seeing Black people everywhere I turn,” she says. Witnessing the beauty of nature and the profound silence that brought her peace. She knew she had to share the experience with more people.
“I just feel like we have these irrational fears about the outdoors because of our past,” Chevy says. “As Black people, we were outside because we were escaping, running through the woods for survival. It wasn’t for joy.”
As Chevy and Kameron embarked on their mission, forming what would eventually become Black People Outside, they came across the same barriers that many communities of color face: limited access to green spaces, high costs, and that age-old idea that going outside was just more white people shit. Then, as with so many things, there’s the barrier of representation. In 2018, a writer at the University of Toronto described advertising around the outdoors as “visual apartheid.” Chevy, at least, had the Girl Scouts when she was young, but Kameron says he had no sense of Black people in the outdoors at all until he reached adulthood. “I remember growing up watching TV, the only people that was on there hiking and being outside and skiing…was white people and Dora [the Explorer],” he says. “She was in the streets with the backpack, and I was there with her. But the reality is Black people [not seeing themselves represented] contributes to the disconnect that we sometimes have with nature.”
Chevy and Kameron refer to all of these as invisible barriers, most of which they’ve been able to overcome through educational programming, community outreach, and working with brands to provide gear to those without. But one additional extremely visible barrier has many outdoors people reconsidering their plans for the summer: the Trump administration.
In his second term, Trump rolled out massive budget cuts to the National Park Service, changed admission costs for non-U.S. citizens, and relaxed hunting regulations, which puts both forest animals and backcountry hikers in more danger. Then there are the non-park-related factors that have made it more difficult than usual to just go outside as a person of color—ICE, emboldened white supremacists, and most recently, gas prices. Outside isn’t just reverting to white people shit; it’s turning into wealthy white people shit.
The founders of Black People Outside, though, refuse to flinch.
“I’m gonna do what I wanna do and go where I wanna go, and I want our people to have that same energy,” Linear says. “National parks are not the only place to recreate. We still have state parks, we have county parks. We are going to be outside.” For Linear, it’s not a euphemism or a business slogan; it’s a fact. She will not be pushed back indoors, and she is adamant that no other outdoorsperson feels alone or unsafe.
Although Chevy, Kameron, and I are speaking with each other for an interview and are complete strangers, our mutual love of the outdoors creates a level of comfort. I share with them stories of hiking with my daughter. We laugh about the time I misread a map and had to scramble down an enormous rock with a one-year-old on my back and my mother —who vows she will never do that trail with me again—yelling at me for dragging her out to the wilderness. I relay my fears and discomfort over what this summer may hold as I try to go outside with my daughter, to create the same kinds of core memories my mother made for me all those years ago at Rockland State Park, before I ever had to wonder if the hiker next to me questioned if I belonged on a trail.
“You have to attack ignorance with your presence,” Kameron says. “Ain’t nothing going to change if you end up hiding.”
The Make America Married Again Era
  June 4, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, This Sunday, the most powerful bicon to ever gyrate on screen is returning. Life is looking up.  In today’s newsletter, we take a look at the field of battle (including, yes, Graham Platner's odds) five months out from the midterms. Plus, THE expert on marriage answers our questions. 🧛🏼♀️, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONRunning up that (Capitol) hill: This year’s midterms will be upon us sooner than we think and while the experts say Democrats are poised to take back the House, the Senate is an entirely different beast. To survive the remainder of the Trump administration, we’ll need all the political firepower available, and that includes a majority in the Senate. Plus maybe a voodoo doll or two, who knows. This week’s elections brought some morale boosts for Democrats: In Iowa, a Trump endorsee lost his primary, exposing the slow fade of the president’s pull; Deb Haaland is on her way to making history in New Mexico; and Montana’s Alani Bankhead is leading what appears to be a successful charge to flip a Senate seat. Is that hope we’re smelling? Yes. But there’s still a long road ahead. The state that could make all the difference in the Senate is (🥁) Alaska. Both parties are pouring millions into the state’s top candidates, Democrat Mary Peltola and incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan. (There are actually two Republican Dan Sullivans running; the GOP favors the one from Anchorage.) Alaska hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2015 but experts say Peltola, a former tribal judge who served in Congress for three years, has made the race competitive. “You're likely to see an election that, just by historical standards, is a little bit tougher for Republicans,” a senior political advisor told Alaska Public Media. On the opposite side of the country, another contentious battle is brewing in Maine—particularly for women voters. The race will most likely come down to Graham Platner—who is still in the lead for the Democratic nomination despite being embroiled in a sexting scandal, and who last year had to have a Nazi tattoo covered up on his chest—and longtime Senator Susan Collins, a Republican who famously claims to be pro-choice but acts otherwise on the daily. Before Platner’s spicy texts went public, he was considered a strong candidate to make a real run at Collins. But now, he’s given voters (and every woman who might find “he kept an AR-15 in his apartment” a red flag) pause. And if Platner or any of these Democratic hopefuls want to turn the tide in November, it is women voters they’ll have to convince. Women now vote significantly more than men in this country and, in fact, the number of women who vote in midterms has been on a steady rise for decades—roughly 10 million more women voted in the 2022 midterms than did in 2006. No wonder the right is suddenly hyper-focused on suppressing women’s votes. In other words: It seems clear that massive turnout this November by women is the simplest way to put the brakes on Trump’s runaway train (and maybe even impeach him in January). It worked in Hungary. It can work here. AND:
 A VISION AND A VISIONARY (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 Three Questions About...MarriageIs there any hope for hetero couples? Historian Stephanie Coontz’s new book has surprising answers.BY NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ  THE MARRIAGE EXPERT HERSELF. (COURTESY OF STEPHANIE COONTZ) As someone who’s obsessed with both feminist history and equitable marriage, I’ve long considered the work of family historian Stephanie Coontz a north star. Throughout her 50-year career, she has closely examined the evolution of marriage, gender roles, and the nuclear family, most famously in her bestselling 1992 book debunking midcentury nostalgia, The Way We Never Were, and in her 2005 book Marriage, a History, which was cited in the 2015 Supreme Court decision granting marriage equality. Amid the rise of the manosphere and tradwives, or what Coontz dubs the MAMA (Make America Married Again) era, I’d already been itching to get some historical context from her—and then she dropped a new book, For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage. I spoke with Coontz about why 1950s nostalgia is roaring back, how gender roles are inseparable from the legacy of democracy, and how history can save our marriages. I was pleasantly surprised when I heard about your new book because, as far as I’m concerned, you wrote the definitive history of marriage. What made you want to tackle this subject again? In the last few years, a lot of people have asked me about heteropessimism and the idea of toxic masculinity, and do we have to give up on heterosexual relationships and marriage? In this book, I don’t deny the problems, but also suggest that people take a little historical perspective. For me, if I know a certain behavior is how people were trained to behave, it’s easier for me to confront the change I want without concluding that the person [exhibiting the behavior] is bad or uncooperative. I call these gendered behaviors “historical earworms”—messages that have been passed down to us from children's stories, lullabies, books, politicians, all of which tell us the way men and women supposedly “are” and the way they need to act or can't help but act. Boys get a lot of those very early: Don't be a baby, don't cry, toughen up. Women get them, too: [We’re supposedly] more moral and better at caregiving and domestic tasks, which leads us to gatekeep those tasks. These historical earworms echo in people's heads long after they have decided they want to change the ways they're relating to people. History gives us the self-knowledge to see how these earworms are intertwined in us, and therefore how we can dismantle them. One of the most fascinating chapters in this book was about how the legacy of democracy created unique forms of “earworms”—particular gender stereotypes that are relatively new. Can you explain that? I'm not saying that the older, aristocratic patriarchy was better. It was very, very brutal. But it operated on a different set of beliefs. Men were the ones claiming to be the idealistic ones who sacrificed for the greater good, while women were too selfish and ambitious and therefore had to be dominated. There wasn’t this idea that men couldn’t be emotional: If you go back to the 12th-century epic poem, The Song of Roland, 10,000 soldiers faint and fall off their horses and weep bitter tears when Roland dies. Men from the 18th century would write to a fellow man who’d gone away, "I cried when you left. I will be so lonely until you come back." This changed, ironically, when societies began to espouse equality during the democratic revolutions [of the late 18th century]. We developed the idea of political and social equality and yet continued to enslave Black people, dispossess [Native people], and oppress women. So if they believed that all human beings were created equal, how did they explain keeping these other groups down? That's when you really get the invention of the most horrible biological explanations. For Black people, [the white men in charge claimed] they were less than human. For women, it was that they’re wonderful and virtuous but they're weak, so we need to protect them. By the mid-19th century, we expected women to be moral and to take care of people and stay at home. Masculinity became defined as the opposite of femininity, so men started taking pride in being aggressive and not being altruistic. You now think you were too dismissive of people who are nostalgic for midcentury America in your book The Way We Never Were. Why? [The height of marriage in this country] was embedded in a time when social and economic conditions were improving. There were rising wages and social access for people who were not ever going to become millionaires, but who could see themselves making what people during the early [American] Republic used to call a “competency”—something that made you competent to be on your own. I was surprised to learn that not just white people are nostalgic for the 1950s: 53% of Black people and 57% of Latinos believe our country’s culture and way of life have “mostly changed for the worse” since the 1950s [compared to 55% of white people], according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 American Values Survey. Even for people living under segregation and oppression, there were civil rights movements going on, there was hope that things were getting better. Of course, because of feminism, we now have higher standards for what our marital relationships should look like; households in the 1950s had much higher rates of domestic violence and abuse. For my book, A Strange Stirring, I interviewed more than a hundred women who had read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique [when it was published in 1963], and it was clear that even the women who were not getting abused were very deeply unhappy with… the lack of interest in them as human beings. So maybe what all these people are looking back at fondly is not the kinds of homes that people actually lived in, but how much easier it was to get a home in the first place.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
Welcome to the Childcare Thunderdome
  June 2, 2026 Salutations, Meteor readers, Wishing everyone a joyful Pride, except for Sam Levinson. I hope that man gets a series of really bad paper cuts that never fully heal because his skin keeps coming into contact with painful and stinging irritants.  In today’s newsletter, Nona tries to understand why it is so incredibly difficult to navigate American childcare. Plus, Rebecca Carroll on which movie you absolutely need to see next. Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONDispatch from a childcare desert: I am a working mother of two, not at all a stranger to the red tape and wheel-squeaking required to secure affordable childcare. I learned the hard way that, at least in the small upstate New York city where I live, you often have to sign up your first-trimester fetus for daycare if you hope to have a spot by the time your baby is crawling. Yet I recently had a day that would make even the most psychotically organized parent’s blood pressure rise to unsustainable levels. Here’s what went down: I had long looked forward to the financial relief that would come when my four-year-old was eligible for my district’s Universal Pre-K program, which is free and has enough spots for every kid who wants one. But there’s an infuriating catch: The school only goes until 2 pm, so securing an aftercare spot (which does cost money, but less than the alternatives) is absolutely essential. I’d heard horror stories about how the aftercare’s capacity is woefully insufficient due to “staffing difficulties,” and gotten warnings that it’s first come, first served and your finger better be on the trigger come enrollment day. There are 40 aftercare spots available this fall for an estimated 120 children in UPK—an improvement, I was told, from last year. So I marked the date and time of signup on my calendar. And at the appointed hour, I hurried a venerated historian I happened to be interviewing off the phone so I could be available to hit that button. I made triply sure I had a pdf of my daughter’s vaccination form; the week before, I’d made a special in-person trip to my pediatrician’s office, heeding the warnings on the pre-registration materials that, without the correct form, my application would “BE CONSIDERED INCOMPLETE AND UNPROCESSED.” All-caps mine (technically; it felt like they were yelling).  A SNIPPET OF MONDAY'S GROUP CHAT And when the clock struck noon, my husband and I refreshed the registration portal until the link appeared, then filled out a seven-page form as quickly as humanly possible. Then came the texts from moms (and only moms) who were scrambling: “I didn’t even get the Brightwheel message” or “I don’t have that stupid fucking form they’re asking for” or “I have the right form, but it’s from 2024” or “Is it this form or the other one?” Some moms blamed themselves—“Eh, it’s my own lack of foresight!!”—but my boiled blood was directed at the system: Why was securing childcare during working hours harder than scoring Beyoncé tickets? Why did we need to all be Type-A Virgos for the privilege of PAID aftercare? What was enrollment like for people even busier than me, or parents who don’t work from home, or for the 12% of my city who are immigrants, who have to navigate this process in their second language? Should we move back to the city just because of the Mamdanicare?? (Haha, just kidding, I am not paying $4,500 a month for a two-bedroom apartment!) I tell this extremely detailed story not just to vent, but because it so painfully illustrates just how many ways our childcare system is broken. It is broken in the way that, even in a blue state that has made preschool a budgetary priority, the limited hours for UPK programs do not nearly reflect the obligations of working parents. It is broken in the way that the aftercare program, meant to fill this gap, is having trouble hiring staff because jobs at places like Target and Starbucks pay more than those offered by early childhood education. It is broken because, like nearly half of young children in the United States, my kids live in a childcare desert, where parents need to be ruthless ninjas in order to finagle care, or even find it. It is broken because, according to numerous studies, in the vast majority of cases it’s the mother who handles childcare logistics, taking time out of their workdays to put out fires such as these. It is broken because despite all these problems, and despite what they cost us, the question of how to fix childcare is still too rarely asked in political campaigns and debates. While I wait to find out whether my enrollment has been approved, I will say this again for the cheap seats in the back, and the moms in my group chats: It does not have to be this way, and we deserve far better than a series of small heart attacks on random workdays. —Nona Willis Aronowitz AND:
A Film Made Straight From the Gut of a Black Woman ArtistWhy you absolutely must go see “Is God Is”BY REBECCA CARROLL  DIRECTOR ALESHEA HARRIS WITH TWO OF THE FILM'S STARS, ERIKA ALEXANDER AND VIVICA A. FOX. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Aleshea Harris did not come to play. With her utterly dauntless directorial debut, “Is God Is,” she dares the film’s audience, along with all of Hollywood, to fuck around and find out what would happen if God really was a Black woman. The film, which Harris adapted from her own same-titled play after a successful off-Broadway run in 2017, follows twin sisters Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) as they embark on a very Black Homeric journey through the American South. The mission is to carry out the dying wish of their estranged mother (Vivica A. Fox): “Make your daddy dead. Real dead.” The twins, now 21, grew up in the foster care system thinking their mother had died in a tub full of flames, where their father, called “Man” (a brilliantly against-type Sterling K. Brown), left her after he knocked her out, poured alcohol over her body, and then, with an eerie nonchalance that we see in sepia-toned flashbacks, lit a match and dropped it onto her body. But somehow she survived, if you can call the life she has since lived in a body maimed beyond recognition “survival.” Outside the small care center where the sisters have now been summoned, Racine, the take-no-prisoners twin, anoints their mother, whose real name is Ruby, as “God” because, “She made us, didn’t she?” We first meet Ruby laid up in bed, draped with a lime-green satin counterpane, as several young Black women stand on either side braiding her long micro braids. Through the holes of a compression mask worn to cover her burns, Ruby’s eyes conjure a deep and etheric beauty. Like, that might actually be God sitting up in that bed. Anaia, the we’re-not-killers twin, was also badly disfigured in the fire: Ruby tells her after they meet that it’s because Anaia had tried the hardest to save her. She has spent her whole life being called ugly, which Racine, her protector, has avenged on Anaia’s behalf without hesitation. The dynamic between Anaia and Racine, who often speak through telepathy conveyed with typed-out words on the screen, is in turns magnetic, tender, and unnerving. On its face, “Is God Is” is a revenge film, with clear nods to Southern Gothic and spaghetti western genres. There are also several moments that pay tribute to the canon of Black women filmmakers, like “Daughters of the Dust” by Julie Dash and “Eve’s Bayou” by Kasi Lemmons. It’s also extremely gruesome and violent at parts (although I would refrain from the Tarantino comparisons, because I think Harris has more vision). But at its core, this is a film that was made straight from the gut of a Black woman artist. Somewhere between a fever dreamscape, an ancestor’s love letter to Black girls everywhere, and a Salt-n-Pepa video from the ‘90s, “Is God Is” is a miraculously pure piece of art, and a welcome antidote in a moment when technology is bullying creatives, exploiting Black women and our likeness, and pushing an agenda of inevitability. AI, you could never.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
Did Trump Ruin the Workplace?
  May 29, 2026 Did Trump Ruin the Workplace?Three women reflect on the evolution of misogynyBY MARIN COGAN Earlier this year, 2016 nostalgia took over social media, with our friends posting wistfully about their more naive selves. The trend quickly ran its course, but that decade, from 2016 to 2026, has seen huge change—for politics, culture, the world. And it made us wonder: What’s different from then to now, particularly when it comes to women’s lives? What have we lost, and maybe gained? We'll be exploring this topic this summer, and we're starting here, with a deep dive on how work and the professional sphere have changed—or not—for women. A lot can happen in a decade. Around this time ten years ago, Americans were still debating whether to take the new Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, seriously. Global pandemics seemed like old-timey problems; artificial intelligence was still mostly in the realm of science fiction. The culture back then was different, too. In various industries, women were starting to speak out about workplace harassment and abuse. Others made noise about the chronic lack of representation of women and minorities. The discussions pressed both big companies and individual actors to acknowledge wrongdoing and work towards more just and equitable workplaces. And then came the backlash: the comebacks, the anti-woke movement, the defamation lawsuits, the assault accusations ignored, the startling rise of the manosphere. Ten years later, we are living in the aftershocks of that era, both the progress made and the retaliation it inspired. The Meteor spoke with three women–leaders in government, tech, and Hollywood–about what’s changed in their workplaces for women in the last decade, for better and for worse.  CLAIRE TRICKLER-MCNULTY IN 2022, WHEN SHE CAME TO GENEVA TO PRESENT AT THE COMMITTEE ON THE ELIMINATION OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. (COURTESY OF CLAIRE TRICKLER-MCNULTY) Used to ICE’s Old Boys’ Club, She Became the Target of a Sexist AttackClaire Trickler-McNulty, a lawyer, served as a Deputy Assistant Director at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Obama and during Trump’s first term, then as an Assistant Director there during the Biden administration. She witnessed dramatic swings in rhetoric and policy between administrations, and ultimately became the target of a deeply partisan investigation by House Republicans, who accused her of trying to push a “woke agenda” inside the agency—claims she says were baseless. Trickler-McNulty is now a policy fellow at Hyphen and co-hosts a podcast called The Melting Pod about immigration. There were some efforts under Obama, and then under Biden, to encourage the hiring of more female officers. But the whole time I was there, law enforcement was still predominantly male. If I hadn’t been a lawyer, I would never have been in those rooms. There were definitely parts of ICE that felt like old boys’ clubs—cliques of men where you had no hope of getting into their inner circle of leadership. When I took maternity leave the second time in 2015, my boss told me…that the real burden of maternity leave is on men, because they have to pick up for women who are taking leave. Which is not what you want to hear from your boss as you're taking maternity leave. I befriended a lot of female law enforcement officers during my time there. I wanted to support women moving into leadership positions because I knew it was a gendered environment. I saw a number of women–really good, dedicated law enforcement officers–repeatedly passed over for promotions in favor of men. The women would tell me, “The guys who get promoted are the ones who go drinking with the boys, who go to strip clubs together.” I absolutely saw women get passed over while less qualified men moved up through these networks. That was happening during the Biden administration. It’s recent history. [But] under the first Trump administration, things changed significantly…It definitely felt like more men were being elevated into leadership positions. A certain clique became more ascendant. That said, the [changes of the] first Trump administration felt slower to me. It was more like watching sandcastles slowly get washed away. That’s part of why I wanted to go back into government later. There was still so much detention reform work to do, like trying to implement the Prison Rape Elimination Act. I felt like so much of what we had tried to fix had been washed away, and I still had this fire in me to try to fix some of it. And then, in 2023, I got heavily attacked by the far right. Part of it absolutely felt gendered. I think I was an easier target because I was a woman on the West Coast with a hyphenated last name. When I look at younger women coming up now, I do see progress in how they interact with men and set boundaries. That makes me happy. But then I look at what’s happening at the senior levels, and it doesn’t feel like there’s been nearly as much progress there. I still think about the moments where…women reported harassment and leadership just shrugged. Those are the things I feel guilty about, especially because I was a supervisor. Looking back, I wish I had been less afraid. Less worried about making men angry. Less worried about what they thought about me. More secure in myself and in what I was doing.  TRACY CHOU AT WORK. (COURTESY OF TRACY CHOU) She’s a Tech Worker Who Started at Google—and Became an Anti-Harassment AdvocateTracy Chou started her tech career with internships at Google and Facebook before becoming a software engineer at Quora and Pinterest. In 2013, Chou posted a viral Medium post about the lack of publicly available data about women in engineering roles at tech companies. Chou earned media recognition and awards–but also backlash from male colleagues and internet trolls. Later, she founded Block Party, a digital anti-harassment tool. Quora was this new question-and-answer platform when I was there in 2010-2011, and we needed content for the site. So all of us who worked there were trying to generate content. I found my little niche answering questions about being a woman in engineering. I had colleagues who really didn't like it and would act out. Sometimes they would try to undermine me, or complain about me [advocating for representation of women.] I had one Asian engineer say to me, “Engineering is the one thing that Asian guys have. Why can't you just let us have it?” And other people who complained to me about how we already lowered the bar so much for women and minorities, do we have to lower it even more? I felt like I had to overperform as an engineer. I remember getting in super early to the office, working really late, and trying to create that extra space for diversity work on the weekends, so that it wouldn't feel like it was taking away from my main job. Probably around 2018, my platform had gotten a bit bigger. I started experiencing more pile-ons, but there was still also targeted harassment from individual people who would go pretty deep–I had instances with thousands of trolls on Reddit, and then some of that spilled over onto 4chan, and those people started coming after me too. Then I also had to deal with people who became obsessed with me. There was one guy who was stalking me. He lived internationally but showed up in San Francisco multiple times. Block Party came directly from the experience of dealing with harassment myself and from having seen it on platforms I had previously helped build. I was frustrated by companies saying, “Abuse and harassment are really hard problems to solve.” I thought: It’s not that hard. I’m sure you can do better than what you’re doing now. I had literally worked on some of these platforms [so I knew it was possible]. And I had also been the target of abuse and harassment myself. The silver lining is that I was able to take that firsthand experience and turn it into better solutions—not just for myself, but hopefully for other people too. All the diversity efforts and the MeToo movement impacted the tech industry in similar ways. If you look at computer science enrollment numbers, many more girls are enrolling and graduating with computer science degrees. There are also many more female founders now. The whole ecosystem seems to have improved, and there are many more efforts supporting women in tech, women in VC, women in engineering, and underrepresented minorities more broadly. I also think the general cultural awareness around these issues has increased dramatically. Ten or 15 years ago, most people didn’t know what intersectionality meant. Now, many people are at least familiar with the concept. That’s all positive. What’s worse is the recent backlash and demonization of DEI—the fact that people feel so emboldened to be loudly and proudly anti-DEI. I expected progress to be slow. I didn’t expect this level of aggressive backlash. Still, the work will continue in some way. So overall, I’m still mildly optimistic. But I also feel tired of fighting.  AMY ADRION, RIGHT, ON SET DURING HALF THE PICTURE. (PHOTO BY ASHLY COVINGTON) She’s a Director For Whom “MeToo Absolutely Mattered”Amy Adrion is an Emmy-nominated writer and director. Her 2018 film, “Half the Picture,” examined the experiences with systemic discrimination faced by women directors in Hollywood. She has also directed episodes of Storyline Online, and teaches filmmaking at Rochester Institute of Technology. I never had any particular instance of sexual harassment or overt discrimination. I worked as a production assistant, as an assistant director, and as a low-level crew member on tons of independent films. I worked for a distribution company in New York at the time when [Harvey Weinstein’s] Miramax was the big player in town. I went to Sundance and all the film festivals. I never personally had a negative experience in my early career in film. But I do think the issue was less about individual moments of discrimination and more about the fact that the people in power tended to be white men from a certain cohort, and they responded to the stories that connected with them. And so you would have these breakout films by women directors at festivals [and then] you would see them kind of drop out of the cultural conversation after 10 years. I think that is discrimination in a broader sense. The stories that make women, nonbinary, or gender-expansive people feel better about being themselves just haven’t had as many people in positions of power supporting them. As frustrated as I am by the current state of things, it would be totally disingenuous to say nothing has changed. A lot has changed. You look at the stories that are being made now, and they’re very different from what was in theaters or on television 20 years ago. There is more diversity of voices and stories being told. Is it enough? No. And it’s frustrating because there was this energy around diversity and hiring different voices–especially around 2020–and it definitely feels like there’s been a backslide. A lot of women directors I know who finally got their first TV episode, or maybe their second, aren’t really getting hired anymore because the business is contracting. MeToo absolutely mattered. It was an important movement that had a real impact. Harvey Weinstein is in jail. You can’t say it came and went without consequences. It was necessary and important, and it’s had lasting repercussions. That said, I think MeToo also created a lot of discomfort among people in power, and that discomfort led to backlash. When I started making “Half the Picture,” I interviewed some women who had been part of a group inside the Directors Guild back in the early ’80s who were looking at the numbers of women working as directors and agitating for change. They were probably in their sixties when I interviewed them, and while they were grateful there was renewed attention on discrimination against women directors, they also had this very world-weary attitude of, “Oh, this again.” At the time, I was very much like, “No, this is different. Things are changing. The ACLU is investigating. Women are speaking out. We’re finally making progress.” And now, 10 years later, I find myself with a much more cautious optimism. I think human beings naturally assume things just evolve and get better over time—that progress is inevitable. But it’s not. If the last 10 years have taught us anything…it’s that you have to keep fighting for these rights constantly, or they will be threatened or taken away. That was a hard lesson for me to learn in my forties. The interviews have been edited for clarity and length.  ABOUT MARIN COGANMarin Cogan is an independent journalist. She was most recently a senior correspondent at Vox and has worked as a writer for New York magazine, GQ, ESPN the Magazine, and other publications.  ENJOY MORE OF THE METEOR Thanks for reading the Saturday Send. Got this from a friend? Don’t forget to sign up for The Meteor’s flagship newsletter, sent on Tuesdays and Thursdays. |
Next they came for the IUD users
  May 28, 2026 Hello, Meteor readers, Y’all. I caught up on part one of the “Summer House” reunion last night, and I just…🚬😮💨. Obviously, I was too emotionally exhausted to put together a coherent newsletter, so I put the bat signal up, and Nona is here to come to all of our rescues.  In today’s newsletter, North Carolina’s absolutely bonkers abortion bill marks a new era for anti-choice rhetoric. Plus, what the DOJ’s campaign of retribution against E. Jean Carroll means for her. Reunions should be fun, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ON
Abortion opponents go for blood: You may have gotten wind of a proposed law out of North Carolina, the gruesome language of which belongs in a dystopian novel. HB1232 would grant a fertilized egg full personhood and not only permit the death penalty for women who get abortions but also legalize vigilante violence against anyone seeking to destroy a fertilized egg (a category which could include abortion providers, yes, but also anyone who uses an IUD, does IVF, or even drives a patient to an abortion clinic). This bill has an almost zero chance of passing, especially after a social media outcry that caused one of the bill’s co-sponsors to remove his name (but we saw you there, Rep. Ben Moss of Richmond). Still, the proposed law is worth pausing on, because it reveals a lot about the anti-abortion movement’s true intentions—and just how much its polite mask has fallen away in recent years. Even just a decade ago, anti-abortion activists were united in their attempt to make their extremist goals sound less so. This often manifested as a form of double-speak that classified abortions as murder, yet did not explicitly seek to punish the people who got them as murderers. If anyone revealed themselves to be ignorant of this logic—like when then-candidate Donald Trump told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in 2016 that there should be “some form of punishment” for women who’ve had abortions—the right wing would jump in to make clear that they viewed these women not as criminals, but victims who deserve sympathy. (Even Trump, notoriously averse to apologies, was forced to walk back his abortion comments.) Feminist journalists like Jessica Valenti and Irin Carmon have been drawing attention to the punitive nature of the anti-abortion movement for years, and conservatives had been criminalizing pregnancy for individuals way before Dobbs. But until recently, the official line of GOP politicians was that women were not the targets of anti-choice legislation. How times have changed. Just in the last couple of years, a growing number of bills have popped up that would criminalize a person having an abortion. Proposed legislation in Montana threatened women who travel out-of-state for abortion care with up to five years in prison. Red states continue to regularly introduce bills classifying abortion as homicide—a crime, of course, that generally carries stiff penalties. A bill out of South Carolina, which passed committee in April and is awaiting a vote in the state Senate, would explicitly sentence women who’ve had abortions to prison time. Again, none of them have passed yet. But just a few years ago, virtually no politician on the right would even state these goals out loud, let alone draft legislation incorporating them. And this is how extreme abortion rhetoric—much like online misogyny and “household voting”—slowly gets normalized. Years ago, fetal personhood proponents seemed like fringe wackos; now their language is embedded in state laws across the country. Most actual people, to be clear, still oppose punishing abortion patients, but they’re increasingly witnessing respectable-looking lawmakers in suits and ties, or pundits behind podiums, talking about it. I’ve always been of the opinion that when you really decode most conservative talking points, however rote they sound, the results are pretty damn violent. Now there’s no decoding needed. Abortion is no exception. If powerful zealots devoid of empathy really believe abortion is murder, and that the life of a fertilized egg trumps that of the woman carrying it, it’s only a matter of time before they follow that position to its logical conclusion. Our job is to take them at their word, and keep being appropriately shocked by their bloodthirsty language. —Nona Willis Aronowitz AND:
 WHY DON'T I EVER LOOK THIS GOOD WHEN I HIKE? (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 WEEKEND READING 📚On changing tides: In? Matriarchy. On its way out, albeit slowly? Patriarchy. (The Persistent) On screen: Why the rom-com “One Night Only” should give all of us some pause. (The KHole) On that book: The novel Yesteryear hits different for Latine readers. (Subestack) And speaking of that book! Thanks to all of you who joined us last week for the first but don’t-worry-not-last Meteor book club. We loved meeting you, hearing your thoughts about Natalie and Caleb, and generally chewing the feminist fat together. If you missed it and want to join future gatherings, send us an email.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
You may now disenfranchise the bride
  May 26, 2026 Happy Monduesday, Meteor readers, Siri, play Ja Rule’s “New York”:  THIS IS THE FIRST TIME WE'VE SEEN THIS HAPPEN IN 27 YEARS, THE CITY IS HEALING ITSELF. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) In today’s newsletter, we try to understand how a decision to change your name after getting married could impact your vote. Plus, Pope Leo XIV makes a big statement. Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONMrs. Voter: Despite its unpopularity in the Senate and with voters, Donald Trump is still working on making the SAVE Act happen with an obsessive laser focus that would put Gretchen Wieners to shame. In case you’ve forgotten, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act is a bill that has passed the House twice, only to be defeated in the Senate. Its supposed goal is to prevent non-citizens from voting, a problem that, once again, does not exist in the way that Republicans want their base to believe. But if passed, the bill would mainly affect American citizens. The bill would change voter registration and ID requirements—and establish a rule that the name on one’s current ID has to match one’s birth certificate. These requirements have many feminists concerned over the disenfranchisement of married women voters. First of all: How many people would this affect? Quite a few: According to a 2023 report from the Pew Research Center, roughly 80 percent of women married to men take their spouses' last name after marriage, while five percent hyphenate their name. Ironically, of women who did change their name, white, Republican-leaning women were more likely to make the change compared to Democrats, moderates, and women of color. Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic women are more likely to take on a hyphenated name. It would appear the GOP is trying to shoot itself in the foot by making things harder for its base. These numbers also raise a related question: Why do the vast majority of all women continue to change their names despite there being no tangible benefit to doing so, and a mountain of paperwork to make it happen? “It doesn’t necessarily mean a conscious acceptance or endorsement of patriarchy,” author and marriage historian Stephanie Coontz tells The Meteor. Sometimes it’s a preference for a different name, a dislike for your own name, or a desire for the whole family to unite under one name, like an ancient Scottish clan. “For a lot of people, [it’s] just a convenient way to deal with the fact that they're going to have kids and the kids [can’t] keep indefinitely combining their names,” says Coontz. In my own case, my full last name is Melero-Ureña, the surnames handed down by my father and my husband, respectively. My decision to hyphenate was driven largely by my culture, which traditionally applies a maternal and paternal surname to a child to preserve both lines of the family tree. But perhaps, in a strange way, surname changes are an acknowledgment of patriarchy’s erosion. A paper published last year in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility identifies a fascinating dynamic that the average married person may not have considered: “compensatory gender display.” Observing data from the state of New Jersey over a period of 21 years, researchers found consistent evidence that women who have lower financial or education status than their husbands tend to take his name, reflecting what they call a “marital exchange/bargaining approach.” This correlates with the Pew survey, which found that, overall, the more highly educated a woman is, the less likely she will take her husband’s name. But this study also found that women whose status exceeds their husbands’ are also more likely to take their husbands’ names than if their status were the same. They do so, the researchers argue, “to compensate for their deviation from traditional gender roles”—in other words, as a sort of apology to the world for their success. These cases “highlight the enduring power of gendered expectations…despite women’s rising status.” Whether we’re aware of it or not, there’s a bit of patriarchal residue over a lot of our decisions, and this one, about taking our spouse’s name, will likely be around for a while. But will hundreds of years of naming tradition and underlying patriarchy be the thing that kills our votes should the SAVE Act pass? Not if we keep pushing back. AND:
 HANG THIS IN THE LOUVRE...BUT DON'T LET IT GET STOLEN. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
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The Dangers Rise for Clinic Staffers
  May 21, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, I’ve been informed by my husband that everyone loves Landry Shamet right now (Knicks player, don’t worry if you’ve never heard of him). And I would just like to say that I was loving on Shamet in December!! I’m finally a trendsetter. Anyway, congratulations to the entire city of New York for how well we’re all doing in the playoffs. In today’s newsletter, violence against abortion providers is on a steady rise. Plus, farewell to Stephen Colbert and hello to E. Jean Carroll. Shamtastic, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONAn emboldened wave of zealots: Imagine checking in several patients for their appointments at your job at an abortion clinic, only to have them begin throwing unknown liquids and powders throughout your facility—at which point you realize they are not patients at all, but undercover extremists. That’s what went down in July 2025 at the Women’s Center of Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Given that the incident “happened in the space [where staffers] spend countless hours providing compassionate care,” says Amanda Kifferly, Vice President for Abortion Access, “clinic staff felt uneasy and violated.” Kifferly’s recounting of this story, along with so many others, was gathered in a new report from the National Abortion Federation (NAF), which found that since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, violence against abortion providers and disruptions at clinics have increased across the country; instances of death threats, clinic theft, and stalking doubled over just the first year of Trump’s second term. And anti-abortionists aren’t satisfied with targeting providers; they’re also going after patients more often. Incidents of obstruction—anti-abortionists physically blocking a patient’s entrance to a clinic—have quadrupled. Tracii Wesley, the head of security at Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation in Atlanta (and the star of the Oscar-nominated short “The Devil Is Busy”) told NAF that she sees protesters block patients’ path multiple times a week, sometimes shouting “explicitly racist” rhetoric to the clinic’s mostly Black and brown patients. (The white patients, she said, receive a less hostile “We’ll pray for you.”)  A YOUNG WOMAN, WHO TRIED TO POSE AS A CLINIC ESCORT, REMAINS STATIONED OUTSIDE OF A CLINIC READING THE BIBLE ALOUD FOR THOSE TRYING TO ENTER. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Violence against providers is certainly not new, but it’s thriving under an administration that has stopped enforcing the 1994 Freedom to Access Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a law meant to criminalize obstruction, property damage, or threats of harm to employees of clinics and religious establishments. Rather than maintain the law, Trump claimed that the Biden administration had been overzealous in prosecuting anti-abortionists. Shortly after taking office, he pardoned known perpetrators, among them Lauren Handy (the infamous activist who stole aborted fetuses) and those same extremists who would go on to invade and vandalize the Women’s Center in Pennsylvania. NAF also notes that the newly aggressive administration brought with it “the fear of ICE raids and violence against immigrant communities, alongside a surge in hate speech and racist rhetoric”—all of which may deter patients from seeking reproductive healthcare, the report states. NAF’s numbers only cover reported instances, which means there are likely untold numbers of stories out there. As Abortion, Every Day writer Jessica Valenti points out, “We know why anti-abortion extremists are feeling so fearless.” They’ve got the president and the entire right-wing machine on their side. But providers and patients have us on their side. The Women’s Center, which has multiple locations, has a reproductive freedom ambassador program that allows volunteers to get active in supporting patients and centers. Planned Parenthood offers a patient escort program. And if neither of those are your jam, the Center for Reproductive Rights has a plethora of options on how to get involved at all levels. Anti-abortionists are working together to fulfill their mission; it’s on those of us who care to match that energy. AND:
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When your parents get detained by DHS
 May 19, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, You know how you think in your mind something is a great idea, and then the longer you ponder, the less great it sounds? Anyways, I signed up for a 36-mile group hike. It’s giving mid-life crisis, but at least I get to see some trees.  In today’s newsletter, we look at the staggering number of children who have been abandoned after their parents were detained by ICE. Plus, the woman who was forced to give birth in a New York courthouse. Training mode, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONThe forgotten children: In February, ProPublica spoke to a group of children who had been detained in Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. Those children, some as young as two years old, were detained with their parents. Many of them pleaded to be rescued. The response was sizable: Protests were held outside of Dilley with demands from locals, mom groups, and even Ms. Rachel to release the children from detention. Some have been released while others face an uphill legal battle. Because of the publicity surrounding Dilley, we know some of these children’s names. They are real to the public; their faces give the average person something to fight for. But what about the children we don’t see? The ones who are left at home, but without their caregivers? “We know surprisingly little about what happens to children of detainees,” a new report from the Brookings Institute states. Relying on “demographic characteristics of detainees matched with likely unauthorized immigrants in the American Community Survey,” the organization estimates that since the beginning of the second Trump administration, 205,000 children have been impacted by parental detention, meaning one or both parents living in the household with them have been detained. Roughly 145,000 of those children are U.S. citizens, and nearly a third are under the age of six. In the most extreme cases, 22,000 children who are citizens of this country have been left with no parents because both parents have been detained. (Brookings notes that these numbers are not exact due to limits on available data from the Department of Homeland Security, but says they are a very close estimate.)  PROTESTORS ON THEIR WAY TO THE SOUTH TEXAS FAMILY RESIDENTIAL CENTER IN JANUARY AFTER THE ATTEMPTED DEPORTATION OF LIAM CONEJO RAMOS AND HIS FAMILY. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) What’s more, little is being done—at least by the federal government—to help. “No government entity is responsible for [the children’s] well-being,” Brookings states. And there is “no systematic approach to protecting the children of those detained by ICE.” All in all, we’re talking about more than 200,000 children left without one or both of their parents. That’s equivalent to the entire population of cities like Little Rock, Arkansas or Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s more than 60 times the population of the entire city of Dilley, Texas. Imagine an entire city, traumatized. That is how many kids we’re talking about. And the government, it seems, wants more. Brookings estimates that if the administration continues moving towards its goal of removing every unauthorized immigrant from the U.S., 2.5 million children will be affected. The report calls for, at the bare minimum, DHS to collect and report accurate data on these children. But what is needed more than that is an end to the unjust immigration policies that leave them parentless to begin with. The midterms are 24 weeks away. The people we vote in will control how much funding DHS gets. Every candidate should be asked about what they are doing about the tens of thousands of kids whom our government has abandoned, and about the 2.5 million more who are at risk. AND:
 AN ICONIC STOLE FOR AN ICONIC GRADUATE. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
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