A Plea for the “Disappeared” at the Statue of Liberty

June 3, 2025

Greetings, Meteor readers,

I want to extend the happiest of Happy Prides to all the organizers and participants of a historic sporting event that took place in Oslo on Sunday, the Ruck You Match. The event was a rugby game with a team of cis gender women scrapping against a team of trans women. It was organized as a big ruck you to a spate of bans on transgender women in sports. (If you’re curious, the final score was 34-7 with the cis women’s team coming out on top.)

In today’s newsletter, we talk to filmmaker and activist Paola Mendoza about uplifting the stories of disappeared Venezuelans. Plus, a little good news for the girls and the gays, and a rundown of big upcoming Supreme Court decisions.

🏳️‍🌈♥️,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

Yearning to breathe free: Last Sunday, a group of strangers dressed in white sat, screamed, and held hands at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Before them stood filmmaker and activist Paola Mendoza, reading the names of the 238 Venezuelan men who have been “disappeared” by the Trump administration and sent to the El Salvadoran mega-prison Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). The demonstration, spearheaded by Mendoza, was a re-enactment of the now-infamous images of detained Venezuelan men being brought into CECOT, where they’ve been cut off from their families, along with any shred of due process.

(PHOTO BY KISHA BARI)

When Mendoza conceived of the protest, she chose to center the men’s humanity—to remind everyone of the 238 human beings getting treated like political pawns. “I’m desperately trying to refuse to allow [these disappearances] to become normalized, to allow it to just be the banality of regular life,” she said. “How I do that is by uplifting stories, to say, ‘This is not normal … and we cannot allow it to become normal.’”

One of the names Mendoza read was that of Ysqueibel Peñaloza, who was sent to CECOT in March despite having no criminal record in any country. Peñaloza was in the U.S. legally on a CBP One application, and was with friends shooting a music video when ICE agents raided the home and arrested him and several others. His mother, Ydalis Chirinos, has been vocal about her son’s plight. “Ysqueibel is one of the two greatest treasures that God gave me,” Chirinos tells The Meteor, and yet “I have no knowledge of how my son is being treated.” Chirinos, who is 50 years old and lives in Venezuela, says she waits up nearly all night hoping to hear from her son or his lawyers; the loss of sleep makes it hard to care for her daughter and ailing father.

As she waits for the legal system to run its course, Chirinos appeals to the mercy of those in the United States: “What is happening has no explanation, at least for me, since we are human beings and children of God. We do not leave our country for pleasure, we do it out of necessity…I sincerely ask you to help me.”

THE FIRST GROUP OF MEN SENT TO CECOT IN MARCH. THEIR HEADS WERE SHAVEN UPON ARRIVAL AND THEIR HANDS AND FEET ARE CHAINED TOGETHER. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Mendoza is hopeful that more Americans will hear pleas like Chirinos’. “[Prison abolitionist] Mariame Kaba says that hope is a discipline,” she said. “And this is when we have to be the most disciplined.” She posits that even though all sides generally agree that the immigration system is broken, the entire debate can be boiled down to a “yes” or “no” question: “Do you want to be a place that welcomes immigrants, or do you want to be a place that disappears them?”

Increasingly, the U.S. looks like the latter; an anti-immigrant domino effect has been rolling out since the Obama administration, and with recent decisions from the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is poised to do even more damage. Nonetheless, “if we can figure out a way to get ourselves to the moon, figure out a way to create cell phones and process data and create AI centers,” Mendoza said, “then you got to fucking believe that we also could figure out a way to fix this immigration system. But there isn’t a [political] will or desire to do so and that is the problem, not immigrants.”

Which is why the work of changing public opinion is so essential. Mendoza recounts the advice given to her by Morena Herrera, a former guerilla and reproductive rights activist in El Salvador: “She told me all regimes fall. How long a regime lasts is up to the people.

AND:

The White House continues to go hard at the arts, and especially at the Smithsonian. According to the Washington Post, the White House is requesting new cuts that would completely eliminate funding for the Anacostia Community Museum—whose website says it “offers a platform where diverse voices and cultures can be heard”—and the planned National Museum of the American Latino. The new budget has not been made final but you can always support the Smithsonian by making a donation. And if you’re in New York and hungry for Latine history, El Museo del Barrio is waiting for you.
On Sunday, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition launched a ship, the Madleen, from Sicily, headed towards Gaza. The Madleen is carrying aid supplies and several human-rights activists, including Greta Thunberg, in hopes of reaching Gaza and distributing food and medical supplies. The Madleen and her crew will face an Israeli naval blockade on their journey and odds are low they will accomplish their mission. Just last month a different ship, Conscience, was damaged by a drone attack off the coast of Malta

SOME OF THE MADLEEN’S CREW MEMBERS ON THE DAY THEIR VOYAGE BEGAN. (VIA GETTY AIMGES)

Lawmakers in Missoula, Montana, have made the Pride flag an official city flag after the Montana legislature banned it from being flown in state buildings or public schools under HB819. Several other cities with bans have enacted workarounds for ringing in Pride month in full color, but here’s the beauty of Missoula’s move: HB819 allows for “historically significant” and “official flags” to fly, which allows for other controversial flags like the Confederate flags and the Thin Blue Line flag to exist unbothered. By making the Pride flag “official” to the city, Missoula used conservatives’ own loopholes against them.
In response to the UK Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the legal definition of “woman” is based on biological sex, British pop singer Kate Nash is giving us a new acronym and a new song: GERM. It stands for “girl, exclusionary, regressive, misogynist” and is, in Nash’s opinion, a more appropriate term for TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). Nash argues in her song that those people aren’t “rad at all” or even feminists. We love a bop with a message.
If you’re old enough to remember the emotional toil of organizing your MySpace Top 10, we’ve got bad news. Your midlife crisis is on the way.

CHEAT SHEET

What SCOTUS Is About to Do to Our Summer

BY CINDI LEIVE

PROTESTERS GATHERED OUTSIDE OF THE COURT EARLIER LAST MONTH TO SPEAK OUT AGAINST THE ADMINISTRATION’S THREATS TO BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Welcome to June, the month when the most legally-obsessed person in your friend group (hi, that’s us) starts compulsively refreshing the Supreme Court opinion site to be first to know what the Robed Ones have planned for our futures. These are the hot summer weeks that, in past years, have made us rejoice, rage, and panic—and 2025 will be a doozy: The justices are expected to rule on a raft of major cases with real-life, national impact before they break for the summer. A taste of what’s ahead:

The trans-rights case. In United States v. Skrmetti, the court will rule on whether the state of Tennessee is violating the Constitution with its ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors. (Here’s Chase Strangio, one of the lawyers representing the three trans teens and their supportive parents, talking about the context of the case last year.)
The LGBTQ+ book case. Mahmoud v. Taylor hinges on whether parents have a religious right to opt their children out of reading material that covers LGBTQ+ themes—like Pride Puppy, about a dog that gets lost at a Pride parade. (If that sounds like a good gift for a five-year-old in your life, you know what to do.)
The voting-rights case. Louisiana v. Callais looks at the state of Louisiana, where more than 30% of the population is Black, but, thanks to maps drawn by the legislature, only one out of the state’s six U.S. Congressional districts was majority-Black. Under pressure, the legislature created a second one—but “non-African-American” voters challenged it, and the court is set to rule on their arguments.
The “reverse discrimination” case. Sensing a theme here? In Ames v. Department of Youth Services, the court will rule on whether it should be as easy for majority-group plaintiffs—like Marlean Ames, who says she was discriminated against for being straight—to argue discrimination suits as it is for minorities to do so. If she wins, “straight, white people everywhere could be filing,” one HR expert told the Washington Post.
The Planned Parenthood case. At issue in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic is not whether you can use Medicaid funds to cover an abortion—that’s already illegal in South Carolina. It’s whether the state can keep you from using your Medicaid coverage from getting a mammogram, Pap smear or any other care at Planned Parenthood. Arguing for the state are your old friends the Alliance Defending Freedom, who helped bring down Roe v. Wade. Fun!
And finally, the birthright citizenship case, in which the justices are weighing not just Trump’s executive order denying citizenship to some children born in the United States (which flies in the face of 150 years of legal precedent and practice), but also the practice of nationwide injunctions. Lower courts have used injunctions to halt roughly two dozen Trump policies so far this term.

Exhausted? Same. And that doesn’t even include big cases on pornography, Obamacare, or everything that joins the birthright case on the “emergency docket”—which is bulging lately given the steady stream of challenges to legally nonsensical White House orders.

Stay tuned for more as the decisions roll out. And give thanks for the three queens of SCOTUS sanity, Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Elena Kagan, who continue to stand for the law and our rights through all of it.