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This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A ballot measure written by a conservative nonprofit could amend the Colorado Constitution to enshrine fossil fuel companies’ right to sell methane gas and possibly force communities that have tried to eliminate gas appliances from new construction to back away […]

Beijing’s planned restrictions underscored the country’s chokehold over an industry that is critical to the global economy.

Two years into Donald Trump’s campaign of mass deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement roundups so often result in violence that if you look away from social media or the news for a few hours, you may miss another death.On Monday, ICE agents killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old man from Colombia, after stopping his car in Biddeford, Maine. Durán Guerrero was the second person shot and killed by immigration enforcement agents in one week: Last Tuesday, in Houston, also in the course of an apparent traffic stop, an agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old father from Mexico who had lived in the United States for decades.Department of Homeland Security officials offered only a slight variation in their excuses for taking these lives. Initially, they claimed that both Durán Guerrero and Salgado Araujo had “weaponized” their vehicles against agents. This type of rationalization has become painfully routine in immigration enforcement. The only new thing about these excuses was how quickly they were doubted and discounted by the media and the public alike. Three men who had been with Salgado Araujo refuted the administration story within days, even as they were held in immigration detention, facing deportation themselves. After ICE killed Durán Guerrero, the official story landed amid months of lies; within hours, on the pavement where his life was ended and the evidence was still visible, someone chalked the words, “This is blood.”As if sensing it was not going to be able to victim-blame the agency out of responsibility, DHS issued a directive later on Tuesday, suspending “all ERO initiated enforcement vehicle stops until further notice.” (ERO stands for Enforcement and Removal Operations, a part of ICE.) That same day, in St. Augustine, Florida, another man was dead after an ICE “encounter.” In this case, four people fled their car when they spotted ICE. A truck hit and killed one of them, a 28-year-old man from Mexico, while he was running away. His name has not yet been released. Early Wednesday morning, the president showered praise on ICE, telling agents in a Truth Social post that they were doing “a GREAT job, one that has to be done” and that “we CANNOT give up” the agents’ key tactic, the “TRAFFIC STOP!” He threatened, “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.” He instructed, “Go back and do your very important job.” He soothed, “Remember, you are loved and respected in America.” The directive was dead; ICE business was barely altered.There is no shortage of policies or practices Trump has attempted to overturn by posting to his vanity social media site—which, if you have understandably forgotten in all that has happened over the past six years, exists because he fomented a riot at the Capitol, in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and was banned from the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. The “love” and “respect” with which Trump is rewarding ICE, however, after what may be the most lethal week of the agency’s 23-year existence, communicates the standards to which ICE is held just as surely as rolling back a directive.With this response to a rare policy change in the wake of multiple ICE killings, Trump again has indicated that ICE agents are his people. The message is of a piece with his regard for the Proud Boys (“Stand back and stand by … because somebody has got to do something about antifa and the left,” he said in a presidential debate). It is of a piece with his regard for “the Second Amendment people” (during his first campaign, he pondered aloud what they might be able to do to his opponent). The president thrills not only to what he wants but to how far his supporters will go to get it for him. “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump,” Trump told Breitbart in 2019. “I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”The Trump administration has tried before to appease public opposition after immigration agents killed people, such as after the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year. The administration’s mass deportations figurehead, Greg Bovino, commander-at-large for Immigration Operations, was sent packing from the Twin Cities, taking his Reich-styled greatcoat (even German media agreed that was his look) with him. Tom Homan, the White House’s “border czar,” was sent in to unconvincingly act like the kinder face of mass deportations. But all this was window dressing: ICE continued arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants, and Minneapolis remained under siege.Bovino, meanwhile, relieved of official duties, has been able to say what remained largely unspoken during his tenure. Now purportedly considering a run for the presidency in the 2028 race, he was a featured speaker at a recent “remigration” conference in Portugal, and he has repeatedly called for about one-third of the United States population to be deported—100 million people. With the euphemism remigration, they mean ethnic cleansing, remaking the country by removing people deemed to have no value. This attraction to what had once been a fringe white nationalist concept did not emerge when Bovino became a free agent. During the 2024 campaign, Trump pledged to institute remigration in the United States, and in his second term, he launched an Office of Remigration. Bovino may be gone, but the people who elevated him and who worked for him remain, issuing orders from the White House and holding guns on the streets.Such rhetoric may be shocking, even considering that anti-immigrant policing and detention has been violent in the United States for nearly as long as we have had anti-immigrant laws. Americans have been primed to accept that violence, because at all levels of law enforcement in this country, officers enjoy impunity both for racial profiling and for killing people. What has changed, what has escalated, is that the White House is now openly telling us that this not a broken system but a system it permits and prefers. Our everyday lives are now occupied by a secretive law enforcement agency that is empowered to round up people profiled as immigrants based on their race or ethnicity, a form of racial profiling given license by the Supreme Court. These are federal agents who kill and face no consequences, and are led by people pushing an ethnic cleansing campaign. These killings are simply part of that job.

It’s not just an affordability crisis. While inflation has been a national story for years and President Trump’s sporadic tariffs and war against Iran have only made matters worse, there’s another big stress on household budgets: Wages aren’t keeping up with rising costs.Advocates and think tanks aligned with progressives are pushing Democrats to focus not only on affordability but on increasing worker pay, as well. The One Fair Wage campaign has introduced bills to increase the minimum wage around the country, to varying success. An effort to hike the D.C. minimum wage to $25 an hour will not make the November ballot, but efforts in California and New York are ongoing. Allies in the U.S. House and Senate have introduced the Living Wage for All Act to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $25.Saru Jayaraman, who leads One Fair Wage and also worked on the Fight for $15 campaign, said that her organization used the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator to arrive at a minimum of $25: Nowhere in the country is the living wage lower than that figure, which shows just how much the economy has changed in the 14 years since this fight began.“When we were running the Fight for $15, we were talking about maybe 15, maybe 20 percent of the population that was earning less than $15 an hour,” she said. “Now we’re talking about a $25 living wage for all, and literally 50 percent of working Americans earn less than $25 an hour. So it is no longer this fringe issue.”The Living Wage for All Act would also eliminate the subminimum wage for youth, disabled, and tipped workers. Many more workers are staying in the service sector—as waiters, bartenders, baristas, and so on—than in the past, turning what was once seen as transitional work into a career. The fact that many tipped jobs pay a lower minimum wage means that those workers’ incomes can vary widely over the course of a week or month, making it harder to budget for the future.“I make $8 before I get tipped,” said Sylvie Kling, a 26-year-old bartender who lives in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the nontipped minimum wage is $16.94. “I work 40 hours a week. I am thankful for the position that I have, and that’s crazy because things have only gotten more expensive since I started working in restaurants in 2018. It’s definitely not gotten any easier.”But raising the federal minimum wage isn’t the only way to raise wages across the board. On Wednesday, the progressive nonprofit Economic Policy Institute released a new report showing how increasing union membership in the U.S. would boost incomes for everyone.The unionization rate in the U.S. hit its historic high point, accounting for around 30 percent of private-sector workers, during the 1950s. Increasing union membership to that share today would raise wages for the median worker—all workers, not just union members—by $7,700 a year, shifting an estimated $1.2 trillion to workers annually overall. This would narrow the K-shaped pattern of economic growth we see now, where labor is earning a decreasing share of gross domestic product while CEOs get even richer. It would also decrease racial pay disparities affecting Black and Latino workers.Of course, there are other benefits to unionization. Unions tend to score better benefits for workers, including health insurance, retirement savings, paid time off, and job protections. Such a high rate of unionization would fundamentally transform the economy, and politics more broadly.“Strong unions also give workers a voice in shaping the fabric of their communities,” said Heidi Shierholz, the EPI’s president, on a press call. “High-union-density states invest more in public education. They deliver unemployment insurance benefits to a much greater share of jobless workers. They have all expanded Medicaid, and on and on and on. So, to the extent that strong unions are a driving force behind those things, tripling union density will create better outcomes on a huge array of factors, and unions protect democracy.”Unions are more popular than ever, and membership ticked up slightly last year by almost half a million workers compared to 2024, to 11.2 percent, the first time it’s increased in 16 years. And a number of House candidates this year have won the Democratic nomination after stressing their own union experience, including Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York City and a firefighter, Bob Brooks, in Pennsylvania. In past interviews, Valdez told me that being a member of the union helped her get involved in politics in the first place.Of course, many right-to-work states, especially in the South, remain hostile to unions, as does the Trump administration. And for the past several decades, federal laws have eaten away at union power. The EPI pointed to three bipartisan bills active in Congress now—the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, and the Protecting America’s Workforce Act—that would reform labor law and make it easier for public- and private-sector workers to organize. Shierholz noted that a piece of the PRO Act, the Faster Labor Contracts Act, which would speed up the timeline employers have to approve a first contract, was separated from the larger bill to be acted on more quickly. It passed the House with 20 Republicans joining the Democrats, and Missouri Republican Josh Hawley supports it in the Senate—a rare instance of bipartisan agreement, on an unlikely issue.Without ambitious legislation, increasing union density to its midcentury peak would be tough if not impossible. But these efforts, as well as the proposals to increase the minimum wage, point to how conversations about high prices and affordability are drawing attention to broader, structural economic issues—and to the solutions that groups and politicians on the left have put out, in the hope that one day the Democrats will regain power and take them up.

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