Individual States Join World Health Organization After Trump Drops It

The White House may have pulled the plug on U.S. participation in the World Health Organization, but that doesn’t mean that Americans have to.

The Illinois Department of Public Health sidestepped the federal government this week by independently joining the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), the Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday. It is the second state to do so, after California joined the network last month.

Illinois officials said the decision was made in part to keep the state informed on the latest global health data.

“We knew this created serious concerns, really, in our effort as a big state in the United States to keep our awareness and [stay] alert about potential global outbreaks and how they could impact the residents here in the state of Illinois,” said Dr. Sameer Vohra, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, during a press conference. “Part of that was the fear that we would lose access to the WHO’s global surveillance system, which would really let us know about early warnings of outbreaks.”

Vohra underscored that it was critical that Illinois remain up-to-date with accurate information about surging health threats around the world, citing the Marburg virus outbreak that appeared in Ethiopia last week.

“This provides the real-time information to us,” Vohra said of GOARN. “Instead of waiting for the federal government to relay that, if and when that might happen, we’ll get direct access to that network of information.”

The Trump administration completed the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO on January 22. In a statement, the Department of Health and Human Services claimed that the global public health entity had failed not only in its efforts to address the Covid-19 pandemic but also to reform itself in the years since.

Not a single Republican member of Congress showed up to the public forum held by Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Robert Garcia on the violence inflicted by federal immigration agents, featuring testimony from the brothers of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis last month.

“With us in spirit are also Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. In spirit. They should be here in person, but they were murdered. They were murdered by their own government. They were killed in cold blood,” Blumenthal said to open up the forum on Tuesday, before turning to Good’s brothers. “I can only imagine how painful it must be for you to see that image of your sister. Which speaks to your courage. Your guts. Your grit and determination to be here today.”

Also testifying were Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by customs agents in Chicago; Aliya Rahman, who was violently detained by agents in Minneapolis while trying to go to the doctor; and Martin Daniel Rascon, who was shot at by Border Patrol in California while driving with his family.

Other Democrats who joined the hearing included Senators Amy Klobuchar, Dick Durbin, Adam Schiff, and Elizabeth Warren, as well as Representatives Yassamin Ansari, Shontel Brown, Jasmine Crockett, Summer Lee, Emily Randall, Melanie Stansbury, Suhas Subramanyam, and Rashida Tlaib.

This story has been updated.

The Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review, or EOIR, is charged with overseeing the country’s 71 immigration courts adjudicating a backlog of roughly 3.7 million cases. In the face of such an overwhelming project, the Trump administration has clearly enlisted its best and brightest—elsewhere, for some other task.

Daren Margolin, Donald Trump’s appointed director of EOIR, isn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, multiple people who worked alongside him told The Daily Beast.

Margolin, a retired Marine colonel who was relieved of a command position in 2013 for firing a gun inside his office, is a “total moron,” one person told the Beast.

“Such a fucking dope,” another person said.

“Nobody ever had much confidence in him,” a third person told the Beast. “I never got the impression he understood the law very well. He just wanted an easy job, where he didn’t have to learn or do anything.”

Others believed that it was Margolin’s low-achieving attitude that made him a perfect “puppet” for the Trump administration, poised for “rubber-stamping” millions of deportation orders.

“Margolin was chosen specifically because of his incompetence—he’s just going to be a mouthpiece, relaying orders and telling everybody else they have to follow them,” another person told the Beast.

Following Margolin’s appointment in October, his office announced the appointment of 11 immigration judges and 25 temporary immigration judges. Months earlier, the DOJ had lowered the requirements for who could serve as a temporary immigration judge, in a bid to replace the droves who departed or were fired after Trump entered office.

Since October, EOIR has been relatively quiet, only announcing two deputy chief appellate immigration judges and two appellate immigration judges. But George Pappas, a former Boston immigration judge fired in the early months of Trump’s second term, told the Beast that EOIR had suffered “generational damage.”

“We’re witnessing a complete dismantling of the immigration courts, which in substance are now dead,” he warned.

The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office is seeing a wave of resignations following the Department of Justice’s handling of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Eight lawyers are either leaving or have announced their intentions to quit the office, following six other resignations last month. The high turnover is unprecedented, as the office generally doesn’t even have that many resignations in an entire year, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports. Now there are fewer than 20 attorneys in the office to handle the state’s federal cases.

“More often than not, the people who come in don’t quit, they stay,” Tom Heffelfinger, who served as a U.S. attorney for Minnesota under two Republican presidents, told the Star-Tribune. “A lot of those [assistant U.S. attorneys] see these as career jobs. This is what they want to do. If they can get the job, they stay there.”

After ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Good last month in Minneapolis, the DOJ refused to initiate a civil rights investigation into her death and instead opted to investigate her wife over her activism. This prompted six attorneys in the office to resign in January.

The more recent resignations reportedly came after a meeting of the office’s criminal division with Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen. One attorney asked Rosen why local law enforcement was shut out of the DOJ investigations into the deaths of Good and Pretti. Others asked why cases involving the alleged assault of federal officers didn’t examine officer conduct. Rosen replied that he wasn’t asking staff “to do anything illegal,” according to one staffer.

One of the departures is the civil division chief, Ana Voss, who was in charge of handling the hundreds of wrongful detention petitions filed as a result of ICE’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Voss wrote in a recent legal brief that she couldn’t “effectively triage and review” every judicial order. Other employees besides the attorneys have also resigned from the office, including a victim witness coordinator and an evidence technician.

The DOJ has scrambled to bring 10 attorneys from other states—five from Washington, D.C., and five from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the legal branch of the United States Armed Forces—to try and fill the gaps. But the office is still “woefully understaffed,” according to one former U.S. attorney. Lawyers have their hands full, with 490 immigrants challenging their detention from December 1 to January 26, compared to 375 similar cases in the previous eight years combined.

“They’re in disarray,” said Doug Kelly, who was an assistant U.S. attorney in Minnesota in the 1980s. “I think it’s just demoralizing to the folks who are there.”

The health secretary is at odds with his own agency.

The director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, appeared before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday to discuss efforts to modernize the public health sector.

But his appearance spilled a deeper truth when ranking member Senator Bernie Sanders insisted that Bhattacharya clarify his position on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s deeply held belief that vaccines are linked to autism.

“Do you think that deep distrust … has something to do—when you have an organization like the American Medical Association telling us that vaccines do not cause autism, but you have a secretary of HHS who says the very opposite? Do you think that causes concern and mistrust among parents?” asked Sanders.

“In 2024 there was a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that said that only about 40 percent of patients still trust their doctors,” Bhattacharya said, noting the study was published before Kennedy’s appointment. “As someone who went to medical school myself, that’s absolutely shocking.”

“Let me ask you a simple question.… Do vaccines cause autism? Tell that to the American people: Yes or no?” pressed Sanders.

“I do not believe that the measles vaccine causes autism,” replied Bhattacharya.

“Nah. Uh uh. I didn’t ask measles,” insisted Sanders. “Do vaccines cause autism?”

“I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism,” Bhattacharya said.

Combating autism supposedly caused by vaccines is the cornerstone of Kennedy’s public health policy. Kennedy is a leader in a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, falsely linked autism to the jab.

The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

Since Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he has replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamin A. And just last month, he overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, potentially affecting vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

The Trump administration is targeting free speech with a little-known legal tool: administrative subpoenas.

The Washington Post reports that a retired Philadelphia man, Jon, 67, found himself in the government’s crosshairs after he emailed a lead prosecutor at the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Dernbach, who was handling the deportation case of an Afghan refugee, identified as H, asking him to consider that the man’s life was in danger from the Taliban.

“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life,” Jon wrote from his gmail account. “Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”

Later that day, Jon received an email from Google notifying him that an administrative subpoena had been sent to them from the Department of Homeland Security “compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.” Federal agencies can issue such subpoenas without an order from a judge or grand jury, and Google gave Jon, who withheld his last name to protect his family from the government, one week to challenge it.

Laws are supposed to restrict the use of administrative subpoenas, but DHS has used the tool against dissent protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Jon could not find who in the agency issued the subpoena, let alone a record of it to show an attorney.

Days later, DHS agents showed up at Jon’s door. A naturalized U.S. citizen originally from the U.K., Jon was worried about potential violence. The agents showed him a copy of the email and asked to see his side of the story. They didn’t know about the administrative subpoena but said they received orders to interview Jon by DHS headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Eventually, the agents agreed that Jon had committed no crimes after he told them he found Dernbach’s email address through a simple Google search. Jon secured pro bono representation by ACLU attorneys, who argue that the government is violating a statute that limits how administrative subpoenas can be used for “immigration enforcement” and that the government targeted Jon for protected speech.

“It doesn’t take that much to make people look over their shoulder, to think twice before they speak again,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, one of Jon’s attorneys. “That’s why these kinds of subpoenas and other actions—the visits—are so pernicious. You don’t have to lock somebody up to make them reticent to make their voice heard. It really doesn’t take much, because the power of the federal government is so overwhelming.”

Both Google and Meta received a record number of subpoenas in the United States during the first half of 2025 as Trump’s second term began, with Google receiving 28,622, a 15 percent increase over the previous six months. Jon was fortunate to have his case picked up by the ACLU and later reported on by a national media outlet. How many others in the U.S. haven’t been so lucky and face legal challenges for exercising their right to free speech?

On Monday, President Trump suggested that Republicans should “take over” and “nationalize” voting. But House Speaker Mike Johnson isn’t too concerned.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We wanna take over, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places’; the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump said on former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino’s podcast Monday. “We have states that I won, that show I didn’t win … like the 2020 election, I won the election by so much. Everybody knows it.”

CNN’s Manu Raju made sure to ask Johnson about the president’s statements the next day.

“Mr. Speaker, the president had called yesterday for a takeover of federal elections; [he] said to nationalize in some states, is that something that you think he should do?” Raju asked.

Johnson proceeded to claim that Trump just didn’t really mean that.

“The president is expressing his frustration about the problems that we have in some of these blue states, where election integrity is not always guaranteed,” Johnson said, making a baseless claim about election security in blue states in order to defend a man who still lies about winning the 2020 election. “So we have to figure out solutions to that problem, and that’s what I think—”

“Take over?!” Raju interrupted, not allowing the speaker to ramble on without acknowledging the actual question.

“No, no,” Johnson said.

The U.S. Constitution orders that elections be governed by states and locales, not the executive branch. Even still, it’s hard not to hear Trump’s comment about taking over elections without immediately thinking about January 6. This time we should take his threats seriously—especially given the recent FBI raid of an election office in Georgia’s Fulton County.

A Maryland community has nixed a previously issued building permit for a private detention center that local officials said would be used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Howard County government revoked the permit Monday, ending construction for the proposed detention facility at 6522 Meadowridge Rd. in Elkridge, just across the road from a quiet residential neighborhood and within half a mile of several schools.

“The retrofitting of private office buildings for detention use without transparency, without input, without clear oversight, is deeply troubling,” said county executive Calvin Ball during a Monday press conference. “In this case, the proposed detention center sits in an existing office park in close proximity to health care providers, schools, parks, and neighborhoods.”

The Howard County Council introduced two pieces of emergency legislation later that evening intended to formally prevent private entities from operating detention centers within county lines.

The five-person council will hold an emergency public hearing on the bills Wednesday, which will be followed by a vote.

“Since there are four co-sponsors on the bill, it is about 99.99 percent likely to pass,” County Council chair Opel Jones said to a standing ovation, WTOP News reported.

The proposed Elkridge detention center is the latest ICE contract to be killed in light of the agency’s escalating violence. Landowners in Oklahoma City backed out of a similar deal with the federal agency late last month, citing community safety concerns should ICE move in following the extrajudicial killings of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal agents.

It is far from the end of ICE’s encroachment in Maryland, however. The “Free State” already has three primary detention facilities, one of which is in Howard County. And last week, the Department of Homeland Security purchased a warehouse near Hagerstown, sparking concerns that the site could be used as yet another detention center for deportations.

ICE detained more than 3,200 people in Maryland in 2025, doubling the number of arrests of previous years, according to figures from the Deportation Data Project. Just one-third of the detainees had criminal convictions, while more than 50 percent had no criminal history whatsoever.

You’ll never guess which country launched a massive attack just hours after President Donald Trump announced yet another supposed temporary ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.

Sitting at his desk in the Oval Office Monday, Trump repeated his claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “agreed” to pause Moscow’s repeated strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, as the temperatures in Europe dropped dangerously low.

“I asked him if he wouldn’t shoot for a period of one week, no missiles going into Kyiv or any other town, and he’s agreed to do it, so it’s something,” said Trump, the king of wishful thinking—or more just utter bullshit.

Trump had initially claimed there would be a weeklong ceasefire during a Cabinet meeting Thursday, sparking some confusion in Kyiv about when the pause would actually begin, or what it would entail. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov clarified that Russia had only agreed to pause strikes until February 1 “in order to create favorable conditions for negotiations,” which are set to resume Wednesday in Abu Dhabi.

That would mean Trump’s supposed weeklong ceasefire was only in effect for two days.

True to its word, Russia resumed strikes overnight Monday, launching 450 attack drones and more than 70 missiles, hitting power plants in at least six regions and leaving more than 1,000 residential buildings in Kyiv without power. So, as much as Trump would like to play-act like he has Putin’s ear, that’s clearly not the case.

“Taking advantage of the coldest days of winter to terrorize people is more important to Russia than turning to diplomacy,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X, early Tuesday.

Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said the attacks on “purely civilian” targets amounted to “another Russian crime against humanity.”

The FBI’s raid of a Fulton County, Georgia, elections office last week confused local authorities and caused a dispute, despite the FBI possessing a judicial search warrant.

Body camera footage from Fulton County police reveals that officials at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operations Center were not clear on what was going on and expressed confusion about the warrant, which was shown to them on their phones instead of as a hard copy. FBI agents on camera told the officials that they were having computer problems and trying to get an updated warrant.

The agents said that when the first warrant was issued, they didn’t realize that the records they were seeking from the 2020 presidential election weren’t held by the county elections board, but by the clerk of court.

While local officials ultimately cooperated with the FBI, interactions were tense. The acting head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, Peter Ellis, said that he was letting county officials stay in the building during the search as a courtesy, but when county attorney Soo Jo said he was there to observe, another agent pushed back. The FBI said that the media and anyone taking video weren’t welcome inside.

“I want to remind you that this is a criminal search warrant and this location is kind of restricted at this point, respectfully,” an agent said at one point.

Agents also appeared willing to take the records by force if necessary. The Fulton County clerk of courts, Che Alexander, said that she was willing to unlock the storage areas where ballots were kept, but didn’t want to hand over records without knowing “what it is you’re looking for so you’re not taking other stuff.”

“They said they’ll break the lock and take ‘em,” Alexander told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In the end, more than 650 ballots were taken by the agents to an undisclosed location. What they will be used for is unclear, as President Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen have all been debunked in court. But for some reason, he has tasked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard with the case, raising the question of whether Trump is attempting to create a pretext to take over future elections.