Category: Children / Kids / Minors / Teens / Family

Here’s To A Peaceful Day To All

along with some positive news.

The City That Protected Trans People’s Rights in 1975

Fifty years ago this month, Minneapolis passed an anti-discrimination law so forward-thinking that much of the U.S. is still catching up.

By: Kate Sosin December 22, 2025

This article was originally reported by Kate Sosin of The 19th. Meet Kate and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Gay Pride Day on June 28, 1975 in downtown Minneapolis. Credit: Minnesota Historical Society/John Hustad Papers/Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies/University of Minnesota

It was likely one of the last pieces of city policy passed that winter, just before the New Year, a parting gift from a progressive city council.

On December 30, 1975, Minneapolis became the first city to adopt a trans-inclusive LGBTQ+ non-discrimination ordinance. Fifty years later, the United States still lacks similar protections on a federal level.

Minneapolis was special in that the right people were there at the right time, said Seth Goodspeed, director of development and communications at OutFront Minnesota, the state’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organization.

“Minneapolis, since the early ’70s, has really been a leader in the gay rights movement,” he said. “That comes out of a lot of the student organizing at the University of Minnesota in the late ’60s.”

It was home to Jack Baker and Michael McConnell, two men who, in 1971, figured out how to legally marry, the first recorded same-sex marriage in history. It was also the stomping ground of Steve Endean, who founded the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign.

Endean started lobbying a city alderman, Earl Netwal, in 1973 to pass a gay rights ordinance. His timing was just right. In 1974 progressives won the mayoral race and the city council. That year they voted 10-0 to ban discrimination on the basis of “sexual preference.”

The next year, Tim Campbell, a local activist and publisher of the GLC Voice in Minneapolis, penned a trans-inclusive policy.

The council passed the ordinance on December 30, right before their term ended and a more conservative council was sworn in — one that would unsuccessfully threaten the ordinance later.

“I think it was a pendulum,” Goodspeed said. “The pendulum was sort of swinging back toward a more conservative mayor and a conservative city council.” (snip)

…

“You’re able to say, ‘We passed this two years ago, last year, in the past five years, and nothing’s really changed, there is no boogeyman under the bed,’” he said. “We’ve had these protections since the 1970s and all these fears that they might have … just never came to fruition.”

=====

The French City Striving to Stamp Out Sexism

From urban design to ‘gender-sensitive budgeting,’ Nantes is determined to create a safer, more equal place for women to call home.

By: Peter Yeung December 18, 2025

The public spaces in Nantes, a city along the Loire River in the west of France, might at first glance seem just like those in any other part of Europe. Across the city, there are numerous bike lanes, bustling fresh produce markets and pretty, historic squares.

But on closer inspection, there are signs of a profound attempt to make the city, its facilities and its built environment a more equitable place for women.

Hundreds of streets now bear the names of women, including Joséphine Baker, Frida Kahlo and Clémence Lefeuvre — the little-known creator of local specialty beurre blanc sauce. School yards, once dominated by soccer pitches, have been remodeled to incorporate spaces for calm and creativity. Stations for breastfeeding have been built in the city center to improve maternal comfort and visibly counter stigma. Free tampon dispensers have been installed in libraries, gyms and all kinds of other municipal buildings.

Boulevard Gisèle Halimi street sign
The new Boulevard Gisèle Halimi, named after the feminist lawyer (1927-2020), is located in the Prairie-au-Duc district on the Île de Nantes. Credit: Patrick Garcon / Nantes Métropole.

These initiatives form part of mayor Johanna Rolland’s bold plan to make Nantes, which is home to around 700,000 people and is the sixth largest city in France, a ville non-sexiste, or non-sexist city. From redesigning public areas to reallocating spending and inaugurating France’s leading center to counter gender-based violence, Nantes is trailblazing the way to safer, less discriminatory urban life.

“We couldn’t wait for change anymore, we had to take action,” says Mahaut Bertu, the deputy mayor of Nantes in charge of equality, the fight against discrimination and the non-sexist city project. “Femicides continue every year. Women suffer harassment every day. [To make change], we had to take a hold of the problem ourselves.”

Shortly after taking power in 2014, Rolland and her team set about carrying out research and compiling statistics on the extent of inequality in Nantes, since at that point limited information existed. 

The findings of the research, which included income, violence and public spaces, were striking. Analysis found, for example, that of the 3,000 streets in Nantes, fewer than four percent of them were named after women compared with more than 36 percent bearing men’s names. More broadly, it found that, in 2014, 58 percent of women aged 15 to 64 were employed, compared to 63 percent of men. And women represented 70 percent of the so-called “working poor” — those in employment but below the poverty line. 

From that understanding, city authorities went about introducing women-centered policy and ramping up investment. One of the most pressing issues was responding to gender-based violence.

In France, 99 percent of women have been victims of a sexist comment or act at least once in their lives, according to the French High Council for Equality, an independent advisory body. “Far from declining, sexism is becoming entrenched, even increasing,” its 2024 report concluded.

In November 2019, following years of consultation with residents, women’s rights groups and nonprofits, the city opened Citad’elles, a shelter for women victims of violence that provides free, centralized support 24/7 — something that to this day does not exist anywhere else in France. (snip)

…

This year, a pilot study is taking place in four of the schools to assess the impact of the new playgrounds. Fischer’s team is also working with school employees to help promote fairer use of the spaces.

At the same time, Nantes has an initiative to fight “period poverty” and to help reduce the costly burden of women’s sanitary products.

Community Orgs Monitoring ICE And Training Immigrants

Well, Here’s A Thing To Think About…

Politics / December 23, 2025

Trump’s Anti-DEI Crusade Is Going to Hit White Men, Too

Under the Trump administration’s anti-DEI directives, colleges would be forced to abandon gender balancing, disadvantaging men.

Kali Holloway

ne of the best-kept secrets about DEI is that it helps men—that includes white men—get into college. If you do not work in admissions, you are likely unaware of this fact, and that’s by design; one admissions officer even told The Wall Street Journal it’s “higher education’s dirty little secret.” But it’s been true for decades. Women’s college enrollment surpassed men’s all the way back in 1979, and the gender gap has only widened in the interim. Over just the last five years, as college enrollment numbers plunged by roughly 1.5 million students, men have accounted for more than 70 percent of that decline. In an increasingly difficult effort to maintain something approximating gender parity, admissions officers at private universities have for years used “gender balancing,” accepting male applicants at higher rates than female applicants. The Supreme Court ruled that race-consciousness in college admissions is unconstitutional in 2023. That means affirmative action is technically illegal, just not if it benefits men.

Under the Trump administration’s anti-DEI directives, schools would be forced to abandon gender balancing, leaving fewer men in college. More specifically, fewer white men, since they make up the majority of male applicants.

And the most precipitous drops would happen at America’s elite institutions of higher education. Private schools are the only colleges allowed to practice gender discrimination, which has been legally banned at public colleges since 1971’s Title IX passed. But the Trump administration, using federal funding as a bargaining chip, is pushing colleges to sign its Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. The plan specifically names “gender identity” as one of many traits that cannot be “considered, explicitly or implicitly, in any decision related to undergraduate or graduate student admissions.” And while there have been few signatories to that plan, the administration has succeeded in having Brown, Columbia and Northwestern sign agreements that state students will be accepted “solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”

Even as they use that language, which is deliberately crafted to imply unqualified women are getting away with something, right-wingers are well aware that men are increasingly turning away from college. Anti-anti-racist activists including Christopher Rufo have groused for years about the “feminization” of higher education, a complaint that makes sense only if said complainer understands that men are the ones quietly being advantaged. Their endless chatter about ending gender DEI in education is just right-wing PR—a way to keep grievances simmering instead of acknowledging who’s actually being given a hand up.

Take, for example, Brown University. Hechinger Report education journalist Jon Marcus finds the school had 18,960 men apply for the 2024–25 academic year, a pool dwarfed by the 29,917 women who applied. The Ivy League admitted nearly equal raw numbers of each gender—1,326 men and 1,309 women. But that’s not so equal proportion-wise, with roughly 7 percent of men getting in, but just 4.4 percent of women accepted. Columbia, the University of Chicago, Vassar, Tulane, Yale, Boston University, Swarthmore, and Vanderbilt also admit men at higher rates than women. Again, a lot of selective colleges do.

Not that any of them are shouting about this from the rooftops—and to be fair, admissions is opaque on every front. So how do we actually know men are being given an advantage—and not that, say, “women are more willing to apply to long-shot schools than men are,” as libertarian outlet Reason posits? There are clues. We know that women earn higher GPAs in high school, are almost twice as likely to graduate within the top 5 percent of their class, and are more likely to take AP courses—all things schools take into consideration. In addition, admissions officers sometimes just come right out and tell us. Shayna Medley, a former Brandeis University admissions officer who penned a 2016 Harvard legal paper on gender balancing, told The Hechinger Report that “standards were certainly lower for male students.” An ex-Wesleyan admissions officer told The New York Times that gender balancing required being “more forgiving and lenient” with male applicants, adding, “You’d be like, ‘I’m kind of on the fence about this one, but—we need boys.’” (“The process sometimes pained him,” the article notes, “especially when he saw an outstanding young woman from a disadvantaged background losing out to a young man who came from privilege.”) ”Probably nobody will admit it,” the former president of a small liberal arts college confessed in a 1998 Times piece, “but I know that lots of places try to get some gender balance by having easier admissions standards for boys than for girls.” (snip-MORE on the page)

A few Joe My God posts I want to share. Maybe some other sources if I want to share them.

tRump’s failing economy / Taking credit for Biden stuff / Stopping clean energy to push fossil fuels / The environment. 

Jim Beam To Shutter Production Throughout 2026

 

Hassett: We’ve Deported So Many Workers That People Are Going Back To Their Old Construction Jobs [VIDEO]

This is not true.  The construction industry has crashed in Florida.   No workers so nothing being built.  Half crews means nothing built.  The work is far to hard for most people.   Hugs

 

Duffy Takes Credit For Biden Infrastructure Funding

 

Trump Halts All Offshore Wind Projects Over “Radar”

 

Ethics Watchdogs Alarmed By Trump/Fusion Merger

 

 

 

tRump being hateful and who he is.  

Trump Denies Disaster Relief For Colorado Wildfires

 

 

 

The grift and use of taxpayer money as a slush fund by the tRump people.

FBI Buys “Specially Armored Luxury BMW” For Patel

 

 

tRump wants to be or thinks he already is US royalty.   It is why he hates anything positive about the Kennedy family

NYT: How Trump “Adopted The Trappings Of Royalty”

In his first year back in office, Mr. Trump has unabashedly adopted the trappings of royalty just as he has asserted virtually unbridled power to transform American government and society to his liking. In both pageantry and policy, Mr. Trump has established a new, more audacious version of the imperial presidency that goes far beyond even the one associated with Richard M. Nixon, for whom the term was popularized half a century ago.

 

New Battleship Class To Be Named For Glorious Leader

Trump is expected to announce plans to build a new, large warship that Trump is calling a “battleship” and is part of his larger vision to create a “Golden Fleet” that includes as many as 50 support ships, according to people familiar with the matter who were not authorized comment publicly.

 

Bigotry / Hate / Racism / DEI Misinformation / White Supremacy

TX Judge Files Federal Lawsuit To Overturn Obergefell

 

 

WH Threatens To Defund Smithsonian For Wokeness

 

JD Vance To Turning Point: “In The United States, You Don’t Need To Apologize For Being White Anymore”

 

Johnson Vows To Place Charlie Kirk Statue In US Capitol

Vance: The US Was, Is, And Always Will Be Christian

 

DHS Triples Self-Deportation “Exit Bonus” To $3000 For Migrants Who Voluntarily Leave US By The End Of 2025

 

 

 

tRump’s illegal actions for oil.  

US Seizes Second Oil Tanker Near Venezuela Coast

 

Coast Guard In “Active Pursuit” Of Ship Near Venezuela

 

 

Epstein stuff / DOJ

DOJ Denies Redacting Trump’s Name From Epstein Files

 

Raskin: Calls To Impeach Trump Officials Are Unrealistic

 

Massie: We’re Drafting Contempt Charges For Bondi

 

DOJ Un-Redacts Epstein Docs After Contempt Threats

 

DOJ Halts Funding For Human Trafficking Survivors

 

Clinton Spox Calls On DOJ To Release All Epstein Files

 

 

The US health system

South Carolina Measles Outbreak Continues To Grow

Food Safety Experts: System Is Headed For Breakdown

 

 

 

Stupid health ideas designed to do nothing to help the people but to enrich the wealthy

Rand Paul: My Plan Replaces Obamacare With Amazon

 

 

Benny Johnson Goes Full Bigot At TPUSA

Pure Hate from a self hating gay man hiding his sexual orientation to grift the right Christian hate movement.  Hugs

Entire Library Board Dissolved Over One Picture Book About a Trans Kid

https://www.them.us/story/randolph-county-public-library-board-dissolved-fired-trans-call-me-max-book

Randolph County Public Library is doing without its Board of Trustees for now.
By Samantha Riedel

A photo of Archdale Public Library.
Commissioners in Randolph County, North Carolina dissolved the county library system’s entire board of trustees last week, after the trustees voted to keep a picture book about a transgender boy on library shelves.
In October, the Randolph County Public Library’s Board of Trustees voted to keep the picture book Call Me Max on shelves despite some objections from members of the public. The book, written by Kyle Lukoff and illustrated by Luciano Lozano, tells the story of a young trans boy who asks to be called Max at school, eventually leading him to come out to his parents. The Randolph County trustees voted 5-2 to keep the book available, with some trustees reportedly commenting that removing or relocating the book would be a “slippery slope” toward censorship.

In response, the Randolph County Board of Commissioners voted 3-2 on December 8 to dissolve the library board and its governing bylaws entirely, Blue Ridge Public Radio (BPR) reported. Commissioner Hope Haywood, who cast one of the two dissenting votes, told BPR that the other commissioners’ likely intended to appoint new members, but that she had wanted to establish plans to facilitate that process first.

“Three commissioners didn’t see it that way. Three commissioners felt like, just abolish the board and then figure it out,” Haywood told BPR.

Minutes and video of the December 8 meeting were not yet available at time of writing. According to coverage of the meeting by local news website Randolph Hub, commission chairman Darrell Frye made bizarre comments about a member of his family he said had killed themself after being “brainwashed” on social media, apparently in reference to being trans. “It’s about, to me, exposing a child before it’s able to make a decision. It’s personal to me,” Frye reportedly said. Commissioner Kenny Kidd opined that dissolving the board of trustees was “a black-and-white issue,” and that “the soul of our children” was at stake.

“We adhere to the rules for the disposition of materials. We have the responsibility to serve all sides of issues,” trustee Betty Armfield reportedly told the board, adding that it was “parents’ responsibility to choose what they believe are appropriate books for their children.”

Call Me Max will still be available to check out from Randolph libraries in the wake of the commissioners’ vote, the county public information officer told CBS affiliate station WFMY. Still, Lukoff — who won a 2020 Stonewall Book Award for another picture book about a trans boy, When Aidan Became a Brother — lamented the vote and what it represents on Instagram last week.

“A library’s entire board of trustees was fired and replaced because they refused to ban one of my books. It’s so terrible,” Lukoff wrote. “I just feel so bad for the people who live in that community and love their library,” he added in a later reply.

Anti-LGBTQ+ activists have increasingly targeted local and school libraries over the past several years, particularly amid the rise in popularity of “Drag Queen Story Hour” events, some of which have been the subject of bomb threats and harassment from far-right militia groups. Tennessee officials have ordered libraries across the state to remove books with LGBTQ+ themes or characters this year, while in South Carolina, the York County Library board voted last week to move all books dealing with gender identity to sections for patrons aged 13 and older. One conservative activist claimed that move was necessary for “protecting childhood innocence.”

Issues of access to LGBTQ+ materials are increasingly landing in courts. Earlier this year, former Wyoming librarian Terri Lesley settled a wrongful dismissal lawsuit with county officials for $700,000, after she was fired in 2023 for refusing to remove LGBQ+ books from children’s and young adult sections of her library. (Neither party admitted wrongdoing as a result of the settlement.)

“People that want to keep pushing an agenda to go against these library materials and the First Amendment, I hope they see this, and I hope it’s a deterrent,” Lesley told CBC Radio in October.

Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.

Samantha Riedel is a writer and editor whose work on transgender culture and politics has previously appeared in VICE, Bitch Magazine, and The Establishment. She lives in Massachusetts, where she is presently at work on her first manuscript. … Read More

Dr Oz furious over ‘$150k penis surgery’ for trans youth – here’s the truth

https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/12/19/dr-oz-furious-over-150k-penis-surgery-for-trans-youth-heres-the-truth/

Dr Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Dr Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Mehmet Oz, better-known as Dr Oz, has raged about “$150k penis surgery” for trans youth, but he failed to cite any facts.

Dr Oz, who leads Medicaid and Medicare, announced on Thursday (18 December), alongside health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, measures that will ban gender-affirming care for trans youth.

The ban, part of Dr Oz’s bid to end “taxpayer funding of sex rejecting procedures for children in Medicaid and CHIP [children’s health insurance program], full stop”, takes the form of two new proposed rules from Medicaid and Medicare.

The first prevents doctors and hospitals from receiving federal Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care provided to trans youth under the age of 18, while the second blocks all Medicaid and Medicare funding for any services at hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care. 

Medicaid, which is the health care program that covers low-income Americans, alongside older and disabled citizens, is taken at most hospitals, meaning the proposals could have a wide-ranging effect, as per New Hampshire Public Radio. 

During announcing the proposals, Kennedy referred to gender-affirming care as “malpractice”, while Dr Oz went completely off topic. 

The 65-year-old began ranting about the prices of bottom surgery, which is very rarely performed on individuals under 18. 

“A vaginoplasty – a procedure a child does not need – costs $60,000,” he claimed, adding: “Shockingly, a phalloplasty, the creation of a penis, costs, on average, in America, $150,000 per child.

“I do believe, with doing some work, that these prices have continued to increase due to increased manufactured demand,” he continued. “A scrotalplasty, where you add testicles? That’s extra.”

Dr Oz didn’t clarify where he pulled his quoted figures from, but according to the Gender Confirmation Center, the price of a vaginoplasty is between $23,000 and $24,500, while phalloplasty ranges between $35,000 and $50,000.

According to 2025 data from the Williams Institute, about one per cent of people aged 13 and older identify as trans in the US, and despite the proposals attacking gender-affirming care for trans youth, multiple studies show that surgeries are rarely performed on minors.

A 2024 study by researchers at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health found that no gender-affirming surgeries were performed on trans or gender diverse youth (TGD) aged 12 and younger in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available.

For teens ages 15 to 17 and adults ages 18 and older, the rate of undergoing gender-affirming surgery was 2.1 per 100,000 and 5.3 per 100,000, respectively. The majority of surgeries were chest surgeries.

Co-author Elizabeth Boskey, instructor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, said: “We found that gender-affirming surgeries are rarely performed for transgender minors, suggesting that US surgeons are appropriately following international guidelines around assessment and care.” 

Lead author Dannie Dai, research data analyst in the Department of Health Policy and Management, added: “Our findings suggest that legislation blocking gender-affirming care among TGD youth is not about protecting children, but is rooted in bias and stigma against TGD identities and seeks to address a perceived problem that does not actually exist.”

Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.

ICE tore her away from her wife. Now she’s suffering in an endless legal limbo.

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/12/ice-tore-her-away-from-her-wife-now-shes-suffering-in-an-endless-legal-limbo/

Trump’s immigration policy is a “Kafkaesque nightmare.”

Photo of the author

Greg OwenDecember 21, 2025, 5:00 pm EST
Guard turning keys to a jail cellShutterstock

A same-sex female couple in Pennsylvania is suffering through a “Kafkaesque nightmare” after one of the women was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when she showed up for a regularly scheduled immigration check-in.

ICE agents detained her and shipped her to a detention center in California.

Xiomara Suarez, 28, arrived in the U.S. in 2022 seeking asylum after fleeing Peru, where she was stalked and endured a violent sexual assault based on her sexual orientation. In a sworn declaration to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials reviewed by Advocate, Suarez said Peruvian police refused to acknowledge her complaints or offer protection, and she feared for her life.

Suarez was admitted to the U.S. on “parole” as her request for permanent status was processed.

In February, Suarez married her then-girlfriend, Grazi Chiosque, 29, an American citizen. The couple hoped to adjust Suarez’s immigration status and smooth the way for her to obtain a green card. They filed the required documents in May.

Before that request was processed, however, Suarez was swept up in a wave of detentions by ICE at courthouses targeting immigrants scheduled for hearings — only to be arrested and shipped to detention centers despite their legal non-criminal status.

Suarez was now one of them.

Chiosque says her wife is enduring degrading and isolating conditions at the Adelanto ICE detention facility in Southern California, where she’s been detained since September.

“There’s mold in the food,” Chiosque said. “You don’t have any privacy.”

“She was put into shackles,” Suarez’s wife added. “She told me that crying because it really made her feel like she did something that was wrong, and she didn’t.”

Far from expediting Suarez’s immigration status, the couple’s decision to marry may have only complicated Suarez’s legal claim.

Earlier this month, she was scheduled for back-to-back appearances with government officials. The first was with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to adjudicate her spousal petition. The second was before an immigration judge related to her detention and status in the country.

Chiosque flew from Pennsylvania to help Suarez through the process.

At the first appointment, a supervisor with Citizenship and Immigration Services told Chiosque, referring to her wife, “USCIS does not have jurisdiction because she’s detained.”

“The immigration judge would have to adjudicate on both,” Chiosque was told.

But at that hearing, the explanation flipped, Chiosque said.

“‘No, I don’t have jurisdiction on the I-130,” the judge told Suarez, referring to her spousal petition. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“If USCIS does not want to give you an interview,” he added, “contact your congressman.”

The couple had hoped their marriage claim would help expedite Suarez’s permanent residency. Now it was keeping her behind bars.

“USCIS says it’s not them because she’s detained. And the judge says it’s not them, it’s USCIS,” Chiosque said.

Suarez was returned to detention. Her next immigration hearing is scheduled for January 28.

The couple’s legal limbo is indicative of a broader, and intentional, pattern by ICE and the Trump administration, said Álvaro M. Huerta, director of litigation and advocacy at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center.

“This administration is separating and trapping families like Xiomara and Grazielli in a Kafkaesque nightmare, with the clear intention of making life so unbearable that they abandon all hope,” Huerta said. “It’s not only a policy failure, but also a betrayal of LGBTQ immigrant families who deserve dignity, safety, and the chance to thrive.”

“It feels like we’re begging,” said Chiosque, whose wife sits in detention a continent away.

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Greg Owen writes about politics and culture for LGBTQ Nation. An award-winning writer, producer and journalist, he was recently recognized for Excellence in Online Journalism by NLGJA: the Association of LGBTQ Journalists for his coverage of the 2024 election. He’s written for Q Digital since 2015 and for LGBTQ Nation since 2022.

How Fox’s OutKick Relentlessly Targeted a Michigan Teen Girl

This is just hate and bigotry.  It is a group of people who hate trans people for some unknown reason and have made their life / career the harassment of trans minors who play sports.   I can not see how this harms this reporter and his group in any way.   To make your life about harming others is a real petty way to exist.  Many conservatives use their religion to justify such hate but the Jesus of the bible never said a word against the entire LGBTQ+ community.   So their hate is internally driven and they must be such miserable people.   So Sad.   The drive to regress the world’s most progressive countries back to an uneducated straight cis white male controlled society is really causing a lot of damage to people and freedom to express your life as you wish.  It seems driven by two groups, the older people who are uncomfortable with the progression of society and younger religious people driven by wealthy religious hate groups.    Hugs

 

https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/how-foxs-outkick-relentlessly-targeted

Dan Zaksheske has written 18 articles focused on a trans girl who plays high school volleyball. Why?

Hope Pisoni
Dec 20, 2025

Dan Zaksheske has written 18 articles focused on a trans girl who plays high school volleyball. Why?

Hope Pisoni
Dec 20, 2025

Photo by Canva / Yunus Tuğ.

Since Sept. 5, right-wing sports publication OutKick has published 19 articles about a 12th grade girls’ volleyball player at Skyline High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The player caught the attention of reporter Dan Zaksheske after he obtained public documents that appear to show her requesting a legal name change from a traditionally masculine first name to a traditionally feminine one.

Over the next three months, Zaksheske would write 18 of the 19 articles OutKick would publish about this student. He and other OutKick reporters attended multiple high school girls’ volleyball games where they recorded and reported on Skyline High’s volleyball season. At the heart of each article was a focus on the girl, who Zaksheske refers to as a “trans-identifying biological male.”

Zaksheske’s reporting stoked a controversy that drew the attention of multiple right-wing publications, politicians and influencers. This coverage led Sean Lechner, whose cisgender daughter played against Skyline and allegedly shared a locker room with their team, to file a Title IX complaint.

Lechner’s daughter at a press conference about the complaint. Screenshot via Fox Business.

While the Michigan High School Athletic Association (MHSAA) does require trans athletes to get a waiver approved to compete in official state tournaments, the Democrat-majority state Senate outright rejected the idea of a trans athlete sports ban earlier this year. In addition, LGBTQ Michiganders have strong anti-discrimination protections under the state’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act.

In the complaint, Lechner calls for a ban on “biological males from competing in female sports” and for a “full investigation into actions and communications of Ann Arbor Public Schools/Monroe High/Chet Hesson,” citing a Trump executive order that declares that trans-inclusive policies are in violation of Title IX.

Shortly after the complaint was filed, Uncloseted Media published an interview clip with Hesson, the athletic director of Monroe Public Schools, in which he simply said his “heart goes out” to the player for being under such scrutiny. Less than 24 hours later, he was put on administrative leave.

As this story spreads like wildfire, experts in journalistic ethics are raising concerns about Zaksheske’s reporting.

 

“OutKick’s inflammatory reporting on a Michigan high school volleyball player who may or may not be trans disregards several core principles of the Society of Professional Journalists’ [SPJ] Code of Ethics,” Dan Axelrod, chairman of the SPJ’s ethics committee, told Uncloseted Media. SPJ’s Code of Ethics, originally drafted in 1973, has been embraced and used by thousands of journalists from numerous newsrooms and schools.

“The Code cautions reporters to ‘show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage,’ and to ‘use heightened sensitivity when dealing with juveniles,’ while ‘weigh[ing] the consequences of publishing or broadcasting personal information,’” Axelrod says. “[OutKick] has essentially ignored all those ethical principles, given [Zaksheske’s] relentless coverage of the player, which has led the public to easily infer who she is, and its negative framing of her story.”

Zaksheske (right) on Fox News.

Ethical Questions

The player, whose mother did not respond to an interview request, does not appear to have publicly come out as trans prior to the publication of Zaksheske’s first article.

Chad Painter, associate professor and chair of the communications department at the University of Dayton, says this “brings up a whole host of issues.” While Zaksheske wrote that he did not name the girl “because the student athlete is under 18,” Painter says that doesn’t do enough to conceal her identity.

In his reporting, Zaksheske references the existence of publicly accessible name change documents, the girl’s county of residence and the name of a local volleyball club she’d been a part of. “Someone who is reasonably well-versed in being able to Google someone can figure this out pretty easily,” Painter, who has co-authored multiple media ethics textbooks, told Uncloseted Media.

“There’s longstanding norms in newsrooms that we don’t out people, that that is a very personal decision that an individual gets to make, and unless there is a massively compelling reason to do that, it’s not our role,” he says. “The idea that he is in the clear because he didn’t specifically write this person’s name in a story, it wouldn’t hold up to journalistic scrutiny.”

And Zaksheske’s reporting appears to have outed the girl. The same day that he published his first article on the matter, an X account whose mission is “to call out these male athletes and expose the damage that they have each caused to women and girls in sports” published the girl’s full name and deadname along with multiple photos and videos of her. (Uncloseted Media has chosen not to link to these posts directly in the interest of her privacy.)

Skyline High School. Photo by Dwight Burdette.

In addition to the 18 articles Zaksheske wrote, he also tweeted about the situation at least 41 times and attended at least four high school girls’ volleyball games. While watching, he recorded videos of the girls playing and then posted them to X and OutKick’s website.

“Having 19 stories about one athlete … to me, that seems like this coverage is out of line with how we’d normally talk about, especially high school sports, which, frankly, no one outside of this little area in Michigan are going to really care about,” says Painter.

“Outside of the culture war stuff, I don’t see where this is a story.”

When Zaksheske was confronted by multiple people at the school about attending and recording one of the games, he published another article accusing them of harassment. “I was shadowed by the school principal and harassed and stalked by Skyline supporters,” he wrote.

Painter notes that while Zaksheske was within his rights as a journalist and citizen to be attending and recording such events, he understands why the school would approach him with skepticism.

“I have a feeling that if I just started showing up randomly to high school volleyball games and taking photos and videos, there would probably be questions,” Painter says. “Because, again, we are talking about minors.”

“The reporter has a right to pursue news … and that right especially exists at a public school,” says Axelrod. “However, one has to wonder at what point is the coverage just pandering to curiosity as opposed to serving a valid societal purpose in informing and facilitating larger discussions about real and valid questions regarding the participation of trans athletes in sports.”

Misinformation and Animus

Zaksheske has pushed back against similar criticism on X, accusing those who question the ethics of his reporting of being “in favor of sterilizing, mutilating and castrating children” and characterizing his reporting as “exposing their heinous acts.”

“I don’t see that as an ethical problem because it doesn’t even enter into the world of ethics,” Painter says of Zaksheske’s rhetoric. “It is wrong factually and it doesn’t really have a place in what we do in terms of the journalism field.”

Misleading rhetoric about trans health care is common throughout OutKick’s reporting. Zaksheske has written several articles about gender-affirming care, where he has claimed that puberty blockers “take healthy children and sterilize them for life.”

Puberty blockers have been FDA-approved for treating precocious puberty in cisgender children since 1993. Multiple studies have found no evidence of them causing permanent infertility, and gynecologists and endocrinologists have said that they do not cause sterilization.

Much of Zaksheske’s coverage of trans people has been negative. Of adult trans women, he wrote that “that person might see himself as a woman, but we are under no obligation to ‘affirm’ that.” He also wrote that doctors who provide gender-affirming care “have to answer to their consciences.”

OutKick also generally misgenders trans women and girls, referring to them as “males,” “biological males” or “trans-identifying males,” additionally using masculine pronouns to refer to them.

Painter notes that this goes against the “Associated Press Stylebook,” which he says “any newsroom worth its salt is going to follow.”

“The journalist and the news outlet squander their credibility covering these types of societal questions when they use language … that fails to recognize and respect the underlying humanity of an entire group of people,” he says.

In an email, Brian Karpas, OutKick’s director of media relations, told Uncloseted Media that the publication “stands by the thorough and responsible reporting of Dan Zaksheske and will continue to protect women from competing against biological males.”

Beyond Michigan

OutKick’s extensive reporting of the Michigan volleyball player is reflective of the publication’s increasingly conservative bent since it launched in 2011. In 2021, it was acquired by Fox Corporation. Since then, it has partnered with Fox News and has become home to numerous right-wing personalities known for anti-trans rhetoric. These include founder Clay Travis, who has said World Aquatics is “encouraging …super young kids to be transitioned”; Tomi Lahren, who said that liberals “don’t know what a woman is”; and Riley Gaines, who referred to an eighth-grade trans girl as a “mediocre man.”

This story in Michigan is not the first time OutKick and Zaksheske have hyperfocused on one trans girl. They were one of the first national publications to report on California-based track and field athlete AB Hernandez, who later became the center of a feud between the Trump administration and Gov. Gavin Newsom. Since March, OutKick has published at least 24 articles about Hernandez, 10 of which were written by Zaksheske. They sent reporters to at least two games to photograph Hernandez and other teenage players. Additionally, OutKick published 15 articles and attended at least four games covering the story of a trans softball player in Minnesota, whose presence on the team became a key point of a lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group, Alliance Defending Freedom.

This massive amount of coverage is common for U.S. conservative media: A report published this year from Media Matters for America found that Fox News ran over 400 weekday segments mentioning trans athletes from Feb. 5 to June 6.

Consequences and Impact

Sean Lechner being interviewed on Fox Business.

All of this has had an impact. While the Title IX investigation is still pending, Hesson, who was named in the complaint, told Uncloseted Media that he had been targeted with harassment and vitriol online.

@unclosetedmedia

Uncloseted Media on Instagram: “Last Friday, Uncloseted Media p…

In the comments of the Instagram post, Hesson was attacked by numerous users: squaredbeach9 wrote, “Stop normalizing these freaks. You don’t give a bulimic chick a bucket and some gum.”

And others chimed in, saying:

  • “Guaranteed he has child pron on an electronic device.”
  • “Fuck off, poor tranny hates attention, give me a fn break.”
  • “So a male playing in women’s sports. And this cuck is defending it.”

All of this has come even though Hesson is not directly affiliated with Skyline High School, which is part of a different district. As such, he was not involved in the decision to allow the girl to play, and he was also not privy to whether she had a waiver.

Still, Zaksheske’s 18 articles have catapulted this small story to the national level. Lechner has been interviewed by journalists sympathetic to his cause, including Dave Bondy and Fox Business anchors. And since Hesson was placed on administrative leave, the Daily Mail, CBS News, the Toledo Blade, WTVG, MLive, The Times of India and more have covered the story.

In addition, numerous right-wing lawmakers and candidates have endorsed Lechner’s complaint. Republican state Rep. James DeSana posted a statement to Facebook “calling for Chet Hesson to be removed immediately.”

“The public cannot have good discourse, debate, or dialogue without good information,” Painter says. “Supplying that information is the fundamental duty of the news media. When journalists are distracted by inconsequential stories, then we’re not spending the time to cover interesting and important news that our readers really need.”

Both Painter and Axelrod took note of the small number of known trans athletes in the U.S. Last year, the NCAA’s president told a Senate panel that fewer than 10 of the 510,000 college athletes affiliated with the organization were transgender.

“This controversy is part of a much larger national narrative about transgender athletes and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole,” Painter says. “The entire national conversation is based on virtually nothing, so this particular set of stories are based on an inconsequential premise.”

Going Forward

If the Department of Education does find that Title IX was violated, the school district could risk losing federal funding if it continues to allow trans athletes to compete.

Zaksheske has been pressuring the MHSAA to confirm whether a waiver was approved for the volleyball player to compete, citing a statement from early September in which the association said it had not yet approved any waivers for the semester. On Dec. 9, MHSAA confirmed that one waiver was granted in the fall season, though no details were given in the interest of the student’s privacy.

While research into the relative athletic capabilities of trans and cis women is ongoing, numerous experts and athletes say that politicized vitriol, misleading information and outsized media attention about trans athletes makes girls’ sports less safe for all athletes.

“There are real, valid, and necessary societal discussions to be had about trans athletes participating against competitors who don’t match their birth gender, and ethical journalism can have a place in informing those discussions,” Axelrod says. “At the end of the day, this woman is still a human, and a child at that, not a canvas for OutKick to paint a distorted picture of one individual who’s a tiny part of a much bigger societal dialogue about trans athletes.”

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

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We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days.

Please note that this is from October so a lot more US citizens have been detained and abused by ICE.   Hugs

We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days.

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A man in jeans and a light hoodie stands at the entrance to a house, surrounded by bright red dirt.
Leonardo Garcia Venegas was detained by immigration agents while filming a raid on his worksite, despite having a REAL ID on him and telling the officers he was a citizen.

Reporting Highlights

  • Americans Detained: The government doesn’t track how many citizens are held by immigration agents. We found more than 170 cases this year where citizens were detained at raids and protests.
  • Held Incommunicado: More than 20 citizens have reported being held for over a day without being able to call their loved ones or a lawyer. In some cases their families couldn’t find them.
  • Cases Wilted: Agents have arrested about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, for allegedly interfering with or assaulting officers, yet those cases were often dropped.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.

“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”

But that is far from the reality many citizens have experienced. Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.

About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones.

Videos of U.S. citizens being mistreated by immigration agents have filled social media feeds, but there is little clarity on the overall picture. The government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans.

So ProPublica created its own count.

We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests. While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. That includes four who were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to the family’s attorney until a congresswoman intervened.

Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino.

Immigration agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers.

These cases have often wilted under scrutiny. In nearly 50 instances that we have identified so far, charges have never been filed or the cases were dismissed. Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.

Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed and punched a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative. In another, agents knocked over and then tackled a 79-year-old car wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he was held for 12 hours and wasn’t given medical attention despite having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart surgery. In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for more than two days, without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that time. (The Supreme Court has ruled that two days is generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without charges.)

A man with a mustache wears a white T-shirt and stands with his arms crossed on an empty road.
George Retes, an American combat veteran, at the site of his arrest by immigration agents on California’s Central Coast. Retes was detained for three days without access to a lawyer and missed his daughter’s third birthday.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the Department of Homeland Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

A top immigration official recently acknowledged agents do consider someone’s looks. “How do they look compared to, say, you?” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said to a white reporter in Chicago.

The White House told ProPublica that anyone who assaults federal immigration agents would be prosecuted. “Interfering with law enforcement and assaulting law enforcement is a crime and anyone, regardless of immigration status, will be held accountable,” said the Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson. “Officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens, and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism.”

A spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not return an emailed request for comment.

An immigration raid on 79-year-old Rafie Ollah Shouhed’s car wash left him with broken ribs. Courtesy of Rafie Ollah Shouhed. Compiled by ProPublica.

Tallying the number of Americans detained by immigration agents is inherently messy and incomplete. The government has long ignored recommendations for it to track such cases, even as the U.S. has a history of detaining and even deporting citizens, including during the Obama administration and Trump’s first term.

We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made at a later date after a judicial process. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire.

Experts say that Americans appear to be getting picked up more now as a result of the government doing something that it hasn’t for decades: large-scale immigration sweeps across the country, often in communities that do not want them.

In earlier administrations, deportation agents used intelligence to target specific individuals, said Scott Shuchart, a top immigration official in the Biden, Obama and first Trump administrations. “The new idea is to use those resources unintelligently” — with officers targeting communities or workplaces where undocumented immigrants may be.

When federal officers roll through communities in the way the Supreme Court permitted, the constitutional rights of both citizens and noncitizens are inevitably violated, argued David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He recently analyzed how sweeps in Los Angeles have led to racial profiling. “If the government can grab someone because he’s a certain demographic group that’s correlated with some offense category, then they can do that in any context.”

Cody Wofsy, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, put it even more starkly. “Any one of us could be next.”

The video Garcia Venegas made of an immigration raid on a construction site shows him walking away from the officer while trying to film and then stating that he’s a citizen before being detained. Courtesy of Garcia Venega

When Kavanaugh issued his opinion that immigration agents can consider race and other factors, the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices strongly dissented. They warned that citizens risked being “grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.”

Leonardo Garcia Venegas appears to have been just such a case. He was working at a construction site in coastal Alabama when he saw masked immigration agents from Homeland Security Investigations hop a fence and run by a “No trespassing” sign. Garcia Venegas recalled that they moved toward the Latino workers, ignoring the white and Black workers.

Garcia Venegas began filming after his undocumented brother asked agents for a warrant. In response, the footage shows, agents yanked his brother to the ground, shoving his face into wet concrete. Garcia Venegas kept filming until officers grabbed him too and knocked his phone to the ground.

Other co-workers filmed what happened next, as immigration agents twisted the 25-year-old’s arms. They repeatedly tried to take him to the ground while he yelled, “I’m a citizen!”

Officers pulled out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to those legally in the U.S. But the agents dismissed it as fake. Officers held Garcia Venegas handcuffed for more than an hour. His brother was later deported.

A man with a small goatee seated on the steps of a single-wide home, wearing a blue shirt, jeans and a pair of sandals.
Leonardo Garcia Venegas told agents he was a citizen both times he was detained. His REAL ID was dismissed as a fake.

Garcia Venegas was so shaken that he took two weeks off of work. Soon after he returned, he was working alone inside a nearly built house listening to music on his headphones when he sensed someone watching him. A masked immigration agent was standing in the bedroom doorway.

This time, agents didn’t tackle him. But they again dismissed his REAL ID. And then they held him to check his citizenship. Garcia Venegas says agents also held two other workers who had legal status.

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Garcia Venegas’ detentions, or to a federal lawsuit he filed last month. The agency has previously defended the agents’ conduct, saying he “physically got in between agents and the subject” during the first incident. The footage does not show that, and Garcia Venegas was never charged with obstruction or any other crime.

Garcia Venegas’ lawyers at the nonprofit Institute for Justice hope others may join his suit. After all, the reverberations of the immigration sweeps are being felt widely. Garcia Venegas said he knows of 15 more raids on nearby construction sites, and the industry along his portion of the Gulf Coast is struggling for lack of workers.

Kavanaugh’s assurances hold little weight for Garcia Venegas. He’s a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, who speaks little English and works in construction. Even with his REAL ID and Social Security card in his wallet, Garcia Venegas worries that immigration agents will keep harassing him.

“If they decide they want to detain you,” he said. “You’re not going to get out of it.”

A plywood shell of a house with men on top of it adding roof framing.
Men building a home in rural Baldwin County, Alabama. Garcia Venegas was detained by immigration agents twice while working on homes in the area.

George Retes was among the citizens arrested despite immigration agents appearing to know his legal status. He also disappeared into the system for days without being able to contact anyone on the outside.

The only clue Retes’ family had at first was a brief call he managed to make on his Apple Watch with his hands handcuffed behind his back. He quickly told his wife that “ICE” had arrested him during a massive raid and protest on the marijuana farm where he worked as a security guard.

Still, Retes’ family couldn’t find him. They called every law enforcement agency they could think of. No one gave them any answers.

Eventually, they spotted a TikTok video showing Retes driving to work and slowly trying to back up as he’s caught between agents and protestors. Through the tear gas and dust, his family recognized Retes’ car and the veteran decal on his window. The full video shows a man — Retes — splayed on the ground surrounded by agents.

George Retes’ family noticed his car in a compiled video posted to TikTok. This clip from that longer video shows his white vehicle surrounded by tear gas. Immigration agents later pinned him on the ground. nota.sra/TikTok

Retes’ family went to the farm, where local TV reporters were interviewing families who couldn’t find their loved ones.

“They broke his window, they pepper sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor,” his sister told a reporter between sobs. “We don’t know what to do. We’re just asking to let my brother go. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car.”

Retes was held for three days without being given an opportunity to make a call. His family only learned where he had been after his release. His leg had been cut from the broken glass, Retes told ProPublica, and lingering pepper spray burned his hands. He tried to soothe them by filling sandwich bags with water.

Retes recalled that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.” He said one DHS official laughed at him, saying he shouldn’t have come to work that day. “They still sent me away to jail.” He added that cases like his show Kavanaugh was “wrong completely.”

DHS did not answer our questions about Retes. It did respond on X after Retes wrote an op-ed last month in the San Francisco Chronicle. An agency post asserted he was arrested for assault after he “became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement.” Yet Retes had been released without any charges. Indeed, he says he was never told why he was arrested.

Retes said that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.”

The Department of Justice has encouraged agents to arrest anyone interfering with immigration operations, twice ordering law enforcement to prioritize cases of those suspected of obstructing, interfering with or assaulting immigration officials.

But the government’s claims in those cases have often not been borne out.

Daniel Montenegro was filming a raid at a Van Nuys, California, Home Depot with other day-laborer advocates this summer when, he told ProPublica, he was tackled by several officers who injured his back.

Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who oversaw the LA raids and has since taken similar operations to cities like Sacramento and Chicago, tweeted out the names and photos of Montenegro and three others, accusing them of using homemade tire spikes to disable vehicles.

“I had no idea where that story came from,” Montenegro told ProPublica. “I didn’t find out until we were released. People were like, ‘We saw you on Twitter and the news and you guys are terrorists, you were planning to slash tires.’ I never saw those spike tire-popper things.”

Officials have not charged Montenegro or the others with any crimes. (Bovino did not respond to a request for comment, while DHS defended him in a statement to ProPublica: “Chief Bovino’s success in getting the worst of the worst out of the country speaks for itself.”)

The government’s cases are sometimes so muddied that it’s unclear why agents actually arrested a citizen.

Andrea Velez was charged with assaulting an officer after she was accidentally dropped off for work during a raid on street vendors in downtown Los Angeles. She said in a federal complaint that officers repeatedly assumed she did not speak English. Federal officers later requested access to her phone in an attempt to prove she was colluding with another citizen arrested that day, who was charged with assault. She was one of the Americans held for more than two days.

DHS did not respond to our questions about Velez, but it has previously accused her of assaulting an officer. A federal judge has dismissed the charges.

Other citizens also said officers accused them of crimes and suddenly questioned their citizenship — including a man arrested after filming Border Patrol agents break a truck window, and a pregnant woman who tried to stop officers from taking her boyfriend.

The prospects for any significant reckoning over agents’ conduct, even against citizens, are dim. The paths for suing federal agents are even more limited than they are for local police. And that’s if agents can even be identified. What’s more, the administration has gutted the office that investigates allegations of abuse by agents.

“The often-inadequate guardrails that we have for state and local government — even those guardrails are nonexistent when you’re talking about federal overreach,” said Joanna Schwartz, a professor at UCLA School of Law.

More than 50 members of Congress have also written to the administration, demanding details about Americans who’ve been detained. One is Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat. After trying to question Noem about detained citizens, federal agents grabbed Padilla, pulled him to the ground and handcuffed him. The department later defended the agents, saying they “acted appropriately.”