By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN

HYATTSVILLE, Md. (AP) — The wife of a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador joined dozens of supporters at a rally before a court hearing Friday, where his lawyers will ask a federal judge to order the Trump administration to return him to the U.S.

Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen, hasn’t spoken to her husband, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, since he was flown to his native El Salvador last month and imprisoned. She urged her supporters to keep fighting for her husband “and all the Kilmars out there whose stories are still waiting to be heard.”

“To all the wives, mothers, children who also face this cruel separation, I stand with you in this bond of pain,” she said during the rally at a community center in Hyattsville, Maryland. “It’s a journey that no one ever should ever have to suffer, a nightmare that feels endless.”

The campaign to reunite the couple will shift to a courtroom in Greenbelt, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

The White House has cast Kilmar Abrego Garcia, 29, as an MS-13 gang member and assert that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction over the matter because the Salvadoran national is no longer in the U.S.

Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have countered that there is no evidence he was in MS-13. The allegation is based on a confidential informant’s claim in 2019 that Abrego Garcia was a member of a chapter in New York, where he has never lived.

Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation, described by the White House as an “administrative error,” has outraged many and raised concerns about expelling noncitizens who were granted permission to be in the U.S.

Abrego Garcia had a permit from the Department of Homeland Security to legally work in the U.S., his attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said. He served as a sheet metal apprentice and was pursuing his journeyman license.

He fled El Salvador around 2011 because he and his family were facing threats by local gangs. In 2019, a U.S. immigration judge granted him protection from deportation to El Salvador because he was likely to face gang persecution. He was released and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement did not appeal the decision or try to deport him to another country.

Abrego Garcia later married Vasquez Sura. The couple are parents to their son and her two children from a previous relationship.

“If I had all the money in the world, I would spend it all just to buy one thing: a phone call to hear Kilmar’s voice again,” Vasquez Sura said. “Kilmar, if you can hear me, I miss you so much, and I’m doing the best to fight for you and our children.”

Finley reported from Norfolk, Virginia.

By Alex Brown, Stateline.org

For many California residents, the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year were the latest and most searing example of the devastating effects of climate change. Some estimates have pegged the damages and economic losses from the fires at more than $250 billion.

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“We’ve had disaster after disaster after disaster,” said Assemblymember Dawn Addis, a Democrat. “It’s the taxpayers and the insurance ratepayers that are bearing the cost. It’s not sustainable, it’s not right and it’s not ethical.”

Addis and Democratic lawmakers in nearly a dozen other states want to force the world’s largest fossil fuel companies to help pay for the recovery costs of climate-related disasters. Last year, Vermont became the first state to pass a “climate Superfund” law, followed soon after by New York.

This session, 10 states have seen similar proposals, several of which have advanced in key committees. Advocates point to legislation in Maryland that has drawn support in both chambers, as well as to strong grassroots support in California after the Los Angeles wildfires.

Lawmakers say the rapidly increasing cost of climate disasters — from wildfires to floods to sea level rise — is more than state budgets can bear.

“Climate Superfund is the ‘it girl’ policy of the [2025] session,” said Ava Gallo, climate and energy program manager with the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, a forum for state lawmakers. “There’s a lot of popularity in the idea of holding polluters responsible.”

The momentum for these “polluter pays” bills is tied to the maturation of attribution science. That new field of research can help calculate fossil fuel companies’ contributions to historic emissions totals, as well as the role climate change played in causing or worsening natural disasters.

Vermont’s law was the first attempt to use that science to charge emitters for their role in causing devastating floods and other catastrophes.

Fossil fuel companies and their allies have fought back hard. Late last year, the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit challenging Vermont’s measure. The groups argue that emissions are governed by the federal Clean Air Act, precluding states from charging companies over global pollution.

Neither group responded to a Stateline interview request. The Independent Petroleum Association of America also declined an interview request.

A separate lawsuit, led by 22 Republican attorneys general, is challenging the New York law. And a conservative group has targeted Rachel Rothschild, an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, who helped draft the legal justification for climate Superfund policy. The group, Government Accountability and Oversight, has sought to subject Rothschild to a deposition, The New York Times reported, a move that some experts view as an intimidation tactic.

Meanwhile, oil and gas executives asked President Donald Trump during a White House meeting in March to direct the Justice Department to join the legal fight against climate Superfund laws, The Wall Street Journal reported. Industry leaders are also pushing Congress to shield them from more than 30 lawsuits brought by state and local governments that aim to make them pay for some of the results of climate change.

While experts expect a bruising legal battle over climate Superfund policies, the threat of lawsuits hasn’t deterred more lawmakers from backing the concept.

“States were a little bit wary; they wondered, ‘Is this some new radical plan?’” said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director with the Make Polluters Pay campaign, a coalition of groups backing such bills. “Then one of the littlest states passed it and this powerhouse, New York, passed it. That really set the ball rolling.”

Fossil fuel companies have cast doubt on attribution science. They also note that their production of oil and other products was done legally under U.S. and international regulations.

“Manufacturers will see this as a shakedown of any industry you don’t like at some point in the future, even though in the past they were licensed and operated under government regulation,” Brett Vassey, president and CEO of the Virginia Manufacturers Association, said during legislative testimony about a climate Superfund proposal in that state. “It will have a chilling effect on Virginia being able to grow its economy.”

Proponents of Superfund legislation point to legal settlements with large tobacco companies in the 1990s. Although those companies also sold their products legally, they were held responsible because they knew about the harmful effects of those products and deceived the public. Most climate Superfund proposals target companies for their emissions over the past 30 or so years, after leading experts had documented the dangers of greenhouse gases.

“There’s good documentation of how well the fossil fuel industry knew the probable long-term impacts of their product,” said Oregon state Sen. Jeff Golden, a Democrat. “Should an industry that made such historic profits over a period of time and made so many representations that we had no problem not bear any of the costs?”

Golden and other lawmakers say it’s becoming impossible for taxpayers to cover the costs of recovery from wildfires and other catastrophes. In Rhode Island, sea level rise is causing massive damage for coastal communities, said Democratic state Rep. Jennifer Boylan, who has sponsored a climate Superfund bill to help the state adapt.

Some advocates also note that Trump’s return to the White House has cut off the possibility of federal climate relief.

“All the states are affected by the disappearance of this federal funding,” said Gallo, of the state lawmakers group. “States everywhere are going to be looking at some way to fill the gap.”

This session, climate Superfund bills have been introduced in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Virginia.

While the bills are structured differently, they all seek to target the largest polluters — often covering companies that produced 1 billion metric tons of emissions over the last 30 or so years. Lawmakers say that applies to roughly 100 companies.

The measures also take different approaches to assigning damages. Some direct state agencies to conduct complex studies to determine the costs of climate-caused disasters over a certain period, the approach pioneered by Vermont. Others set a fixed number that represents a conservative baseline for those damages. New York’s law set that figure at $75 billion over a 25-year period.

Many of the bills also require that significant amounts of the funding be directed to the communities hit hardest by pollution.

Advocates are particularly optimistic about the measures in California and Maryland.

Lawmakers in Maryland modified their bills to commission a study about the financial impacts of climate change. Those measures passed both the House and Senate, and legislators are working to reconcile the versions from each chamber. Figures produced by the study would be the backbone of a climate Superfund policy in a future session.

“From a legislative perspective, it’s a shot in the dark as to what the costs are,” said Democratic Del. David Fraser-Hidalgo, who sponsored one of the bills. “This will give us the factual data needed to make a more well-educated decision on policy.”

In New Jersey, an Assembly committee advanced a climate Superfund bill in March. State Sen. Bob Smith, a Democrat who chairs the Environment and Energy Committee and who sponsored the bill, said it will help to rebuild and fortify water treatment plants, schools and firehouses. He noted that Trump has called for the dismantling of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“The end of the world is coming; it’s kind of hard to ignore,” Smith said. “FEMA has been the backstop to help communities recover from disasters. If the handwriting isn’t on the wall to all the states that they’ve got to deal with this, shame on them.”

Lawmakers in many states have heard from mayors and other local government leaders that more climate recovery funding is essential.

“Municipal officials are getting behind [climate Superfund policies],” said Massachusetts state Sen. Jamie Eldridge, a Democrat who has sponsored similar legislation. “They’re facing the costs of flooding, of droughts, of heat waves, and really asking for relief.”

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

To travel north of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is to enter a graveyard of the Russian army. When I was there in 2023, the battlefield had been largely cleaned up, and the villages were coming back to life. But the signs of mortal struggle were everywhere. Buildings were pocked with bullet holes, some were reduced to piles of rubble, and I could still spot the occasional hulk of a destroyed Russian tank.

A year earlier, the scene was different. Russia had just retreated, and bodies were lying in front of ruined homes. There were so many destroyed Russian tanks in the streets, The Associated Press reported, that their charred remains had left a “layer of black dust” that covered the suburbs. It was a scene of carnage more suitable for World War II than for a prosperous suburb outside a modern European capital.

It was all a monument to Russia’s colossal failure.

This was not supposed to happen. The Russian military had spent enormous sums modernizing its forces. It had enjoyed success in a much more limited conflict in Syria. In 2014, it had taken Crimea while hardly firing a shot. The Ukrainian military was supposed to be outmatched and outgunned.

What happened? It’s a complicated story, but one lesson is clear: A military and intelligence apparatus organized around pleasing the boss is ripe for catastrophic failure. As a 2023 analysis in Foreign Policy found, Russian President Vladimir Putin “sits atop an intelligence and policy machinery that tells him only what he wants to hear.”

So Putin walked into war thinking that Ukraine was more fragile than it really was, that Ukrainians actually wanted Russian rule and that the Russian military was more capable than it proved to be. But that’s what happens when a national security establishment prioritizes political loyalty over professional excellence — armies fail and many, many people die.

Not just a question of competence

It’s a mistake to think of the Trump administration’s Signal scandal — in which top officials discussed sensitive military plans on an unsecured civilian messaging app — as merely a problem of competence or even a problem of corruption. It’s much worse than that.

Let’s look at the Signal chat in context. Days after President Donald Trump took office in January, he fired the Pentagon’s inspector general, who is often a watchdog of last resort for soldiers who call out corruption or face unfairness or injustice in the ranks.

Then, immediately after Pete Hegseth assumed office as secretary of defense, the administration fired the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, the vice chief of the Air Force and the top JAG generals at the Air Force, the Army and the Navy.

They were not relieved because they were corrupt or insubordinate, or because they had failed on the battlefield. The only discernible reason was that they were perceived to be out of political alignment with the administration.

And the JAG generals, like the inspectors general, are also crucial instruments of accountability.

Hegseth has trumpeted his early tenure as turning the page on woke, as a sign of a more lethal military that is laser-focused on America’s enemies — a true military meritocracy.

Then he went and committed an extraordinary violation of operational security, a violation so dangerous that Navy pilots are furious that he put their lives at risk.

By putting operational plans in a civilian chat app (with a journalist present!), he risked leaking some of the most sensitive military information that exists: the timing and targets of an attack. Had the Houthis or their Iranian allies obtained that information, they could have prepared for the attack, they could have launched their own preemptive strike, and they could have moved targeted assets and individuals to a more secure location.

But a security breach is a problem. It doesn’t create a crisis if it’s handled properly. At the very least, this should mean a Justice Department investigation. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton faced an FBI investigation when classified information was found on her private email server.

When Sandy Berger, former President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, took classified documents from the National Archives, he was prosecuted. So was former CIA Director David Petraeus when he improperly shared classified information with his mistress. The Department of Justice under President Joe Biden appointed a special counsel to investigate Biden when classified documents were found in his home.

So how did Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, respond? She all but dismissed the possibility of an investigation and pivoted to condemning Hillary Clinton. Even if you believe that Clinton should have faced prosecution (as I do), the response to the failure of the Department of Justice under President Barack Obama isn’t to lower standards even further.

Professional vs. political

The difference between the U.S. and Russian militaries is easy to articulate. At its core, the U.S. military is professional. The Russian military is political. That doesn’t mean that the Russian military doesn’t have professional elements; it’s that when push comes to shove, political loyalty is the ultimate value.

You can reach the highest heights if you have unwavering loyalty to Putin. If you do not, then you can forfeit your career (and even your life). Traditionally in the U.S. military, politics is irrelevant to your advancement. And if politics does intrude, it’s seen as a grave breach of the military ethos.

It’s rare to even know the political affiliation of U.S. admirals and generals. When Dwight D. Eisenhower retired from the Army, for example, both parties courted him to be their presidential nominee.

According to the soldier’s creed, a U.S. soldier isn’t just a warrior; he’s a guardian of “the American way of life.” One does not defend the American way of life by contradicting and violating fundamental American principles of political freedom and accountability.

Trump’s presidency is fundamentally anti-system. If there is anything that unites his coalition (apart from love of Trump), it’s the desire to disrupt, to break things, to smash the system. But what if the system that he’s breaking happens to be the best in the world?

No one should argue that the military is perfect. I spent eight years as a JAG officer, and I had to respond to several incidents of serious misconduct. But one thing I never questioned was the vast majority of my peers’ core commitment to honor and courage.

Their honor and courage made me regret that I didn’t join the military sooner. I joined later in life, and went to officer basic training when I was 37 years old. When I arrived at Fort Lee in May 2006, I realized immediately that I’d made the right decision. Serving my country alongside those men and women was the great honor of my life.

Indeed, it’s the ordinary service member’s commitment to honor and courage that gives me optimism that the military can resist Trump’s worst depravity — at least for a time. But if the MAGA ethos governs the military long enough and ruthlessly enough, then the military will warp and change in response.

The path to promotion will run through political subservience as long as Trump and Hegseth are in charge, especially at the highest levels of command. For example, witness Trump bragging that his choice for chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wore a MAGA hat and said he “loved” Trump and would “kill” for him — a possibly fictional story that nonetheless illustrates Trump’s priorities perfectly.

The illusion of Russian prowess

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, several leading Trumpists developed a strange fascination with the Russian army. They contrasted masculine Russian recruitment ads, which featured chiseled Russian soldiers displaying their martial prowess, with much softer American ads on social media.

The Russians were masculine and tough, they said. Americans were woke and weak. But the illusion of Russian prowess was shattered on those battlefields north of Kyiv. There is much more to military strength than physicality and bravado. Ukraine, the much smaller representative of the so-called woke West, has turned much of Russia’s conventional arsenal into smoking ruins.

It’s telling that Hegseth is turning to martial, masculine symbolism to save his career. He’s putting out images of himself working out with Navy SEALs, as if his fitness can cover for his carelessness and incompetence.

Sure, service members like it when senior leaders work out alongside them, but they like it much more when senior leaders live by the same standards they impose on their troops. They also like it much more when senior leaders can keep the nation’s most precious secrets.

David French writes a column for the New York Times.

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The old argument for higher taxes

Once again we get the same old “if only the wealthy would pay their fair share” argument from DFLers who are always eager to raise taxes. They never define what “fair share” means (or what “wealthy” means for that matter.) But we all know that it is always much more than whatever they pay now.

In Tuesday’s Pioneer Press, House DFL Leader Melissa Hortman was quoted saying, “If Democrats were setting (budget) targets on our own, these targets would, of course, look very different. We would have asked the wealthy and large corporations to pay their fair share in order to make additional needed investments” — the word “investments” always a euphemism for more spending — “in public education and affordable healthcare.”

Perhaps Leader Hortman needs reminding that, with the sixth-highest top tax bracket rate, we already have one of the most progressive of state income tax regimes in the nation. Or maybe she needs reminding about income tax rates in our neighboring states, with whom we compete to attract business and investment: North Dakota’s top rate is 2.5%, Iowa’s at 3.8%, Wisconsin at 7.7%, and of course South Dakota with no state income tax.

Don Jacobson, Shoreview

We can see the results coming

I have a message for the recent letter writer, and everyone else who urges people to “give Trump a chance” and let his policies play out before passing judgment. Although you may need to see the results of his actions in the real world in order to understand them, people in the know do not. Economists know how to predict the effect that tariffs on foreign imports will have on the price of goods sold in the U.S.  They also know how to predict the economic effects of lowering taxes on the wealthy and increasing unemployment by firing many thousands of government workers.  Medical researchers know how to predict the resulting rates of illness and death if funding is cut for preventive measures like vaccines and for research.  Environmental scientists know how to predict the degree to which air and water pollution will increase if environmental protections are lifted. And the list goes on and on.

We can’t possibly understand all of the details that make up the complex world we live in.  All we can do is rely on the knowledge of the people who’ve dedicated their careers to an area of study, and now is the time for us to listen to those people.  We don’t need to actually destroy our economy, or democracy itself, to know that’s where this administration is leading us.

Lori Wohlrabe, St. Louis Park

Fears

If I were a parent in Sweden or Japan, I would be afraid to send my child to an American university, where they can be disappeared for expressing an opinion.

John Evans, St. Paul

Making America Corrupt Again?

In the first 70 days of his second term, President Trump is rapidly trying to implement his vision of Making America Corrupt Again.  His actions have attempted to undo a century’s-worth of laws and institutions put in place to prevent conflicts of interest and abuse of power. Trump is rapidly breaking down the rule of law for his personal gain.

One example is the elimination of “watchdogs” — people and organizations set up to hold our leaders accountable to the laws of our nation. Trump fired inspectors general and prosecutors, eliminating independent checks on his actions. He removed the leader of the Office of Special Counsel. He fired the head of the government’s ethics office without cause. He fired top military leaders so that he cannot be challenged in his unconstitutional plans.

Trump has taken actions to protect himself by using the Justice Department as his personal law firm to defend him and attack his opponents. He also pardoned the violent Jan. 6 criminals, showing them that they can commit violence in support of him without legal consequences.

Trump and Elon Musk have tried to control the media and free press so that he doesn’t face scrutiny for his actions: lawsuits against public media companies, “CBS should lose their license”, controlling social media X and Trump Social, and trying to “rescue” Tik-Tok so that it will serve their purposes.

Trump ignores conflicts of interest. He brazenly aligns policies with his and his favorites’ business interests with schemes of personal enrichment. Examples: Gaz-a-Lago, and Donald and Melania’s novelty crypto currencies which allow people seeking influence or favors to give them unlimited amounts of money without any public record — the ultimate in corruption. Also, Trump’s and his Commerce Secretary’s open promotion of Musk’s Tesla cars and stock. Trump has put a stop to enforcing anti-money laundering laws to protect his shell companies.

Trump has opened the doors for international actors to influence him by gutting enforcement of statutes against foreign influence and suspending enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. He is strengthening his alignment with notorious corrupt leaders such as Russia’s Putin.

Many of these actions appear to be illegal and are being challenged in court.

While Trump claimed President Biden was corrupt, he produced no convincing evidence. But we all can see Trump’s actions toward a completely corrupt presidency. We The People must not allow this.

Chris Lyons, St. Paul

How do teachers pensions compare?

What did I find missing in the  March 30 article, “Bills would change teachers pension rules“? Any discussion of how teachers pensions compared to others in the public or private sectors. Rather, just a listing of statements that the current system was not sufficient.

How can one know that unless one compares it to pensions in other job categories? A quick internet search leads to AI generated statements like the following:

The percentage of workers covered by a traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plan that pays a lifetime annuity, often based on years of service and final salary, has been steadily declining over the past 25 years and while most private sector pensions do not provide any inflation adjustments to benefit payments, a majority of state and local government pensions provide adjustments; for the majority of retirees the lack of indexing of defined benefit pensions is obvious; millions of households have seen the purchasing power of their benefits decline by more than 20 percent.

So I would appeal to our state legislators, before you agree to spend more money, please convince me that the current teachers pension program is not competitive with other retirement programs.

Ed Erickson, Woodbury

Since state workers don’t want to come back to work …

Since State Workers would rather remain in their pods than come to work, I propose we compromise on the issue. Let the State of Minnesota repurpose its unused office buildings on the state Capitol grounds in St. Paul instead as homeless shelters, mental health resources, drug treatment centers, and needle exchanges.

Even better, let them give the drug dealers who currently inhabit the downtown area immunity from prosecution as long as they limit their selling activities to the state capitol grounds. Let the state senators and house representatives run the gauntlet when they come to work to vote against anti-poverty or drug treatment programs. Remind them that they, unlike the rest of the state government workers, cannot flee so easily back to their pastoral homes in order to escape the uncomfortable economic realities of their state.

Maybe a few years ago such a bold directive would have been impossible. It would have been more safely framed in the manner of Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal.” However, things have changed in the last few months. Now we just have to say that “no immigrants are involved” and the federal government will look the other way.

Such a move would make policy-sense as well, regardless of what side of the issue one stands. It provides additional shelter for the unhoused and consolidates treatment centers and clients into one defined area. It gives downtown St. Paul some much needed breathing space to proceed with its conversion to a mixed-use neighborhood. And most importantly, it gives state workers an opportunity to feel good about themselves — at least until AI replaces them.

Alex Jeffries, St. Paul

Loyalty over competence

The Peter Principle is only applied to those that get promoted. Now it seems to also apply to those that get appointed or elected. One would think if you were looking for a person or persons to fill a position your search would require someone that is completely capable of the task.

When filling the US Cabinet positions the requirements focused more on loyalty than competence. I would also apply it to those who voted to support their appointment. The ones who I call the enablers.

I know some, but not all, of elected senators knew better. I would have a different name for them. The ones who didn’t know better I believe could be included in “The Peter Principle of Maximum Incompetence“ along with some of the peoplethey confirmed.

Tom Kapsner, White Bear Lake

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