I have a confession: When I arrived at the Grand Hyatt hotel in D.C. on Thursday to cover an anti-vaccine conference, my intention was to make fun of it. That was wrong.
To be clear, I have an unshakable faith in vaccines. I have written about immunizations for years, so little of the anti-vaccine rhetoric at the convention surprised me much. Most of it — including the keynote address from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — was the same deceptive talking points I have heard countless times.
Over the course of the day, however, I realized that treating those views with disrespect, wrong though they might be, would help no one. It would only feed into the resentment that created the anti-vaccine movement as it is today.
The event, organized by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), which Kennedy once led, featured a long list of speakers who ran through the usual gripes of the “medical freedom” crowd. Sometimes that veered into odd territory, such as electromagnetic radiation and “chemtrails” (the white lines left behind airplanes that some people fear are toxic chemicals), but it almost always returned to vaccines — especially covid-era mandates.
Most people who appeared onstage were associated with CHD, but it also attracted a few prominent elected officials, such as Republican Sens. Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) and Rand Paul (Kentucky), who both took turns castigating Anthony S. Fauci and the medical establishment. Almost all of them took opportunities to chastise the reporters present, prompting audience members to jeer the section reserved for media.
There were a few particularly awful moments. The worst was a presentation from the MAHA Institute’s Mark Gorton, who described a “mass epidemic of vaccine injuries” responsible for practically all of America’s chronic illnesses. Astonishingly, he claimed that the millions of lives saved by vaccines were a lie. The eradication of polio, he said, was really the result of the elimination of DDT, an insecticide. That speech earned him a standing ovation.
At another point, Brian Hooker, CHD’s chief scientific officer, made a sarcastic reference to the “horrific, devastating measles pandemic” in Pennsylvania, eliciting chuckles from the audience. That became a theme throughout the event: The media has been overhyping measles outbreaks, even though Pennsylvania’s hospitalized 150 people and contributed to four fatalities — the worst death toll from the virus in the U.S. in decades.
The people I interacted with, however, were not outwardly hostile. Most were guarded, but some were curious about why I was there and my thoughts on the conference. One woman shrugged when I asked about how she perceived the measles outbreaks and acknowledged it was a problem. Another took a moment while walking past the media section to thank the reporters for showing up.
The full gravity of the conference hit when a man approached the press area to share the story of his son, who died from a tear in his aorta at age 34, two weeks after receiving a covid-19 vaccine. He choked back tears as he insisted that his family conducted tests and could find no other explanation for his death.
That was painful to witness, even if I doubted his belief that a vaccine killed his son. I can understand a parent grasping for any explanation to make sense of the sudden loss of their child, just as I can understand a caregiver of a child with autism embracing the idea that some faceless corporation is to blame.
My goal is not to sane-wash the views of the conference attendees. It is merely to point out that they are humans, which means they are vulnerable to the same sort of populist scapegoating that pervades much of U.S. politics.
Kennedy, while bemoaning the rise of chronic illnesses among children, cryptically repeated the phrase “something happened to our kids.” It’s a powerful rhetorical statement because it’s true: American children are less healthy today than they once were — they have worse diets, are less active and have higher rates of obesity. Vaccine critics hijack people’s anxiety about that real issue and ascribe it to their cause. It should be no surprise that many Americans fall for it.
Combating that is extremely hard. Casual media coverage of vaccine issues typically speeds past anti-vaccine claims by declaring them “false” or “discredited.” That can come off as dismissive, but it takes time and space for journalists to point out that rigorous studies have found no association between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.
Moreover, purveyors of false information often layer multiple claims on top of each other. Diving into any one of them can turn out to be a complicated rabbit hole. Kennedy, for instance, referenced a 2017 study that found babies in Guinea-Bissau who received the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine were more likely to die than those who didn’t get the shot. Except that paper was based on data from the 1980s, regarding vaccines that are no longer used and with questionable methodology. Plus, multiple other studies — including from the same authors — came to different conclusions.
This sort of detail makes readers’ eyes glaze over, so reporters rarely spend time parsing it. That gives anti-vaccine activists room to claim that the traditional media — indeed the entire political establishment — is against them.
That is what crushed me on Thursday — that sense of victimhood that nearly everyone in the conference shared. It is anger and fear and despair, emotions that are so easily preyed upon by opportunistic politicians. “Something happened to our kids,” Kennedy said, and the audience applauded.
That’s not a sentiment one should ridicule lightly.
In South Carolina, a woman supported students planning a walkout against Donald Trump’s immigration policies. A conservative blogger demanded law enforcement hold her accountable.
SUMMERVILLE, S.C.— Before she was called a groomer of children and a traitor to America, Dinah Chollet opened Facebook at her kitchen table.
On a community page for her suburb of Charleston, she noticed that a conservative blogger had riled his online audience. Local high-schoolers, he’d warned, intended to stage a walkout to protest President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
One commenter suggested they throw water balloons at the students. A second man proposed spraying them with apple cider vinegar. A third recommended deer urine.
Chollet, 45, shook her head. She and the blogger, Corey Allen Whittington (who goes by Corey Allen), had been feuding online for years by that afternoon in early February. She was a profane, unreserved liberal who ran a pub in a county Trump won by 15 percentage points in 2024. He was her political opposite, so devoted to the president that he had marched to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Chollet sipped a bottle of 5-Hour Energy as she alerted students’ parents to the comments on Whittington’s post, sharing screenshots on her own Facebook account. “If your kid is gonna be part of the walk outs, tell them to be very careful,” she wrote. Then Chollet went further. She followed a QR code from Whittington’s page and joined the Instagram group chat where dozens of Summerville High students were planning their protest.
“Hi! My name is Dinah Yo!” she wrote, using the moniker most people know her by. “We are very proud of yall!”
Chollet (pronounced sho-LAY) shared a link to her Facebook post and pledged that a group of adults would come out to support the protest, scheduled for a week and a half later. She told the students she wanted to help them make it “the BEST.”
Then she kissed her fiancé and dogs goodbye and headed to Food Lion. On the way to pick up tacos, her life began to unravel.
Whittington had been watching her in the chat.
In the hours and days that followed, he shared screenshots of her comments, suggesting that she’d encouraged the students to threaten him and to wish the president dead. Libs of TikTok, a far-right influencer with more than 6 million followers, picked up the posts and called them “so creepy.” Strangers labeled her a pedophile and bombarded the pub with 1-star reviews, then threatened to burn it down.
Versions of that experience play out weekly in the United States, where every issue, no matter how grave or trivial, can become an online outrage, often laced with violent imagery and toxic accusations. People get mad about yard signs or billboards, book bans or Pride flags. They call each other stupid and unpatriotic, then the furor subsides, most of it passing unnoticed by the wider world.
In Summerville, it didn’t subside, becoming a brief national fixation. The reasons were many, among them the speed at which falsehoods and conspiracies bloom on social media. But there was another, more consequential reason. At a time when many Americanshaveembraced Trump’s crusade to jailhis politicalenemies, legions of online activists insisted that, in a small South Carolina town, one of their political enemies should be jailed, too. And law enforcement listened.
When Chollet was told that the town police, county sheriff’s office, Secret Service and FBI were all investigating her, she didn’t believe it.
Her ideological foe was not the president, but a middle-aged podcaster with a Facebook page called “The Overton Report.” This was not Washington, it was Summerville, “Flower Town in the Pines,” reputed birthplace of sweet tea. And she was just a way-too-online firebrand who sold smash burgers and raised money for abused animals, made provocative T-shirts about reproductive rights and wore a belt buckle that read, “LAND OF THE FREE BECAUSE OF THE BRAVE.”
You did nothing wrong, she told herself.
But the police decided she had done something wrong — criminal, in fact.
One week after that moment at her kitchen table, Chollet got a call.
“We have a warrant for your arrest,” the Summerville officer told her. “We need you to turn yourself in.”
ELEVEN DAYS EARLIER, a Summerville High junior heard from a friend about a school walkout in a conservative community outside Indianapolis. Inspired, the 16-year-old, who was taking a class on intolerance and genocide, announced a walkout at her school.
“NO KKK, NO ICE, NO FASCIST USA,” she wrote from an anonymous Instagram account in the first week of February. “OUR VOICE SPEAKS FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS.” To organize the Summerville protest, she started a group chat.
In the aftermath of two fatal shootings in Minneapolis, thousands of students protested U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, walkouts that many conservatives denounced as left-wing disorder and many liberals lauded as civic activism. But a survey of news reports showed that unless demonstrations turned violent or dangerous, administrators in most cases either let the walkouts happen, often with supervision, or handled them as matters of school discipline, issuing unexcused absences and suspensions.
That’s not how officials at Summerville High handled it. Within a day or two, school resource officer Leanne Biles learned about the group chat and, according to her subsequent reports, infiltrated it. On Feb. 9, she used a “burner” account with a fake identity to request to join the chat, which included about 80 people by then.
The officer had worked in law enforcement for nearly a decade but started at Summerville High just six months earlier. Biles, whose department didn’t make her available for an interview because of potential litigation, would eventually reveal that she had monitored other student conversations, too. The school declined to comment for the same reason, but Biles’s boss, Summerville Police Chief Douglas Wright, later called the practice necessary to keep the school of 3,400 safe.
On the same day Biles entered the chat, Whittington, 39, shared on Facebook a flier for the walkout that had spread on social media. “Weird stuff,” he wrote, questioning whether the district condoned the students’ plan.
Whittington, who doesn’t have children at Summerville High, told The Washington Post that he spotlighted the teen walkout because he lives a mile away and didn’t believe it was “organic.”
There’s no reason to believe it wasn’t, according to a review by The Post of more than 5,000 group chat messages and interviews with four teens involved, including the founder. Their nervous, naive chatter about how to coordinate a protest exposed their inexperience.
The students, some as young as 14, fretted about how police would respond. One freshman girl wondered whether she should bring pepper spray for protection, and another asked about a pocketknife. Other students told them not to.
“we have SROS,” the founder reassured them, referring to officers like Biles. “and were just kids.”
As the uproar from Whittington’s Facebook post mushroomed, the tone inside the chat also shifted. A student Trump supporter taunted the organizers, and some lashed out. One wrote that he hoped the president would “get shot one day in the f—ing head,” adding, “Kill trump.”
Chollet joined the chat hours later, on the afternoon of Feb. 10, to praise the students’ advocacy and promise solidarity. Over 85 minutes, she commented six times, never mentioning Whittington.
In messages Chollet said she didn’t notice, the teens griped about him, questioning why a man they’d never heard of would vilify them.
“Corey Allen gonna get jumped,” one person wrote. Some wanted to protest at his house or egg and graffiti it. At least one tried to find his address.
Other students rebuked them, but Whittington ignored their cautions to each other, quickly posting screenshots of the threats against him and Trump. He included the teens’ internet handles, some containing real names. And he called out Chollet.
“the owner of ‘The Knot’ in Summerville, Dinah Yo is in the chat egging them on the whole way,” he wrote. “This is crazy.”
Whittington then escalated his demand for attention, tagging the Summerville police and county sheriff’s office.
He questioned how many other adults were in the chat but didn’t acknowledge that he already knew at least one: his own wife, who’d joined six hours before Chollet.
Whittington, who describes himself as an investigative journalist, later told The Post that he kept her presence a secret because he didn’t want to lose access to the students’ conversation. On Facebook, though, he suggested a wider conspiracy.
“What are they REALLY trying to do here?” he asked.
His followers volunteered answers: Democrats, Communists, Marxists, antifa, schoolteachers and Dinah Chollet were corrupting their youth with leftist ideology. Liberals, wrote one of the men who’d first discussed harassing the students, had become a “stain” on America.
Chollet watched the frenzy erupt on her computer screen. If she’d seen the students’ comments about Whittington before he publicized them, Chollet said, she would have interjected — to protect the teens, not him.
As always, she couldn’t help defending herself.
“these are CHILDREN, and people on Coreys page have been threatening them,” she replied on his post. “so they NEED adults by their side.”
Whittington’s followers were unconvinced.
“This is beyond free speech,” one wrote, “and venturing into grooming treasonous behavior.”
“MY, OH MY,” WHITTINGTON, in front of an American flag and a newspaper headlined “INSURRECTION,” said at the start of his Feb. 11 podcast. “Do we have a show and a half for you.”
Whittington opined nearly every day about something — trans women in sports, the crimes of undocumented immigrants, Islam’s incompatibility with Western society. His takes seldom spread beyond South Carolina. But he knew the walkout could draw a wider audience.
On the podcast, Whittington framed the story as one with grand national implications. Propaganda was seeping into American classrooms, he said, and in Summerville, malevolent adults had poisoned children’s minds for “political gains.” Local investigators, he divulged, had told him the FBI was now involved. His revelation came at a time when conservative media was consumed with the agency’s prominent cases: election rigging, antifa terrorism and America’s most infamous sexual predator, Jeffrey Epstein. And now, Whittington implied, the feds were looking into Chollet, too.
“Dinah Yo and the Knot Burger Pub has gone way too far. They’ve been after me for years,” said Whittington, wearing a blue and orange Hawaiian shirt. “It seems that this was a way that they could do it — that she, Dinah Yo, could do it without getting her own hands dirty, using high-schoolers to do what she has wanted to be done.”
The adults who’d influenced the children, he pronounced, would “pay the price for this.” In a YouTube video two days later, he described his discussions with police, saying he’d been “very adamant” that the adults “egging this on … be held accountable.”
Before he found a platform to excoriate Democrats and interview Republicans running for statewide office, Whittington spent a brief time cycling in and out of jail. Between 2015 and early 2018, state records show, he was convicted of four misdemeanors, from petit larceny to failing to stop for a police officer.
Whittington doesn’t hide his troubled past, ascribing it to an opioid addiction seeded at 17 when a doctor gave him OxyContin for a skateboarding injury. Whittington didn’t grow up with politics, he said, but rehab taught him to disdain government assistance.
“It was me finding personal responsibility,” he said. “Living in this way of self-pity, thinking I’m owed certain things, didn’t really work out for me.”
He and his wife sold their small service business in 2019, Whittington said, and when covid hit, he watched more news. In 2020, he attended a protest against the removal of a statue of a famous South Carolinian who’d defended slavery. Local media underreported the counterprotesters’ aggression, Whittington said, so he bought a $200 video camera and started filming. He railed online against critical race theory and mask mandates and, within months, conservative activist Candace Owens’s Blexit group invited him to the South Lawn of the White House.
“It all happened very, very quickly,” he said of his transition to punditry. “I don’t know that I really ever had a chance to think about it.”
Facebook, he said, has banned him twice. In 2024, Whittington was sued for defamation by a middle school teacher he accused of “grooming pre-teen students into an overtly sexualized lifestyle” because the educator had asked a class for their preferred pronouns and whether to share them with parents. Whittington couldn’t discuss specifics but said he was “pleased” with the impending resolution, while the teacher’s attorney said her client was “very pleased.”
For Chollet, other people’s messy histories didn’t interest her much because she’s not proud of her own. She grew up in a deeply conservative home with a loving but strident stepfather who protested abortion with his church. She had a daughter at 19, not long before she settled into a career behind a bar. Like Whittington, she struggled with addiction, taking painkillers for more than a decade after a doctor prescribed her Percocet for back pain. Into her 30s, she wore Dixie Outfitters T-shirts emblazoned with the Confederate flag, defending it as a symbol of her heritage until a Black bar patron explained the immense pain that symbol could cause. Chollet paid little attention to politics but briefly embraced Trump in 2016 because he said things nobody else would.
Then it just turned into him being a gross bully,” she said. “Like, quick.”
Her political awakening — and introduction to Whittington — arrived on Dec. 5, 2020. A Knot bartender texted Chollet and her fiancé, Derek Burcham, the pub’s owner, that it had been overrun by Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group that was fixated on the false conspiracy theory that Trump had actually won the election.
“What’s a Proud Boy?” Chollet recalled asking. At the bar, she walked in to find a group of 50 or so chanting “F— antifa,” as Whittington filmed much of the scene.
We’re taking the country back!” he shouted.
Burcham, an Air Force veteran, ordered the group to leave.
Afterward, Whittington shared Chollet’s photo in a Substack post: “Local Summerville, SC Establishment Owned By Antifa And Pro Marxist Supporters Slanders Conservative Customers.”
“I don’t think we’re going to back down,” she told a local TV reporter.
The story faded, but the feud it ignited never did.
Two years later, when Chollet sold T-shirts that read “No Uterus, No Opinion” to raise money for abortion rights, Whittington called her and Burcham “baby killers.” Three years after that, he, and many others, denounced her for a Facebook post, written on the day Charlie Kirk was shot, about Kirk’s claim that preserving the Second Amendment was worth the cost of gun deaths. “Whelp. S—. Wonder how he feels now?” Chollet wrote an hour before news broke that Kirk had died.
By then, Chollet had blasted Whittington online dozens of times, mostly on his own Facebook page. She’d called him bigoted and untruthful and, more than once, a “wet noodle.” He claimed that she used to post his mug shot in the comments. Chollet said she couldn’t recall doing that but wouldn’t be shocked if she had years ago.
The fury over Chollet’s support for the student protest eclipsed all of their past disputes. Over four days, Whittington posted about the case a dozen times, and on Feb. 13, his campaign broke out of local orbit. Libs of TikTok, which helped popularize the term “groomer,” posted his screenshots, Chollet’s photo and the Knot’s phone number.
Until then, internet critics had cast her as an overzealous progressive manipulating students to hate Trump, but rapidly, the narrative shifted. Now, an online throng decided, she was a sexual deviant who’d tried to lure children into her bar.
“Patriots need to swarm the place,” a man from Alabama wrote. “I would love to go Armed of course.”
Chollet didn’t know what would happen next, but Whittington suspected he did. Police never interviewed her, but he’d been in contact with them all week. Whittington demanded consequences, insisting that investigators take his allegations seriously — and they did.
Officers were watching over his home, and Biles, he said, called to assure him she was handling the investigation. Summerville police, Whittington added, told him they intended to hold the adults involved accountable. His closest collaborator taunted Chollet on Facebook: “Dinah is going to jail.”
She got the call on Feb. 17. An officer informed her she was being charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor that carries a potential three-year prison term. She collapsed to her craft-room floor. The day after, Chollet turned herself in and waited in jail for her virtual bond hearing along with three men, including one, she said, charged with attempted homicide.
Whittington announced the news on Facebook. An hour later, just before boasting that he’d reached 18,000 followers, Whittington celebrated “SRO Appreciation day,” indirectly thanking the officer who’d charged his political enemy.
He shared a collage of photos from Summerville High. In one, taken at a football game, Biles is holding a sign above her head: “GET LOUD OR GO TO JAIL.”
A week later, the school declared Biles its officer of the month.
CHOLLET’S MUG SHOT WAS EVERYWHERE. On booking databases she had never heard of and in messages from men she had never met. On X, Instagram, TikTok, Substack, Truth Social, YouTube, Google Reviews and a pair of local news sites. Even in comments on her own Facebook page.
Then Libs of TikTok shared it, drawing more than 43,000 likes.
Though Chollet hadn’t been convicted, to many onlookers, the image represented irrefutable evidence that what Whittington and his followers had said about her was true.
“That bar owner is going to be on a Registry and will have to refrain from being around children,” one woman declared on Whittington’s Facebook page, as the story spread nationwide.
“Pub owner allegedly urged teens to vandalize, be violent in a high school group chat,” read a headline on Yahoo. “Woman Charged After Joining Anti-ICE Teen Group Chat,” read another from Newsweek.
Chollet couldn’t fathom how many people were talking about the case, even in her defense. Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman from Illinois and frequent Trump critic, assailed the arrest in a video viewed more than 117,000 times on YouTube. “Didn’t we have a First Amendment?” he asked.
“It’ll be okay,” Burcham told her, and she wanted to believe him because, Chollet thought, the truth would soon absolve her. Chollet understood so little about legal bureaucracy that she bought two suits at Belk, convinced she’d get a chance to clear her name in court within days. The next hearing, though, wouldn’t come until April.
As she waited, people threatened to torch the pub. A man from Texas wrote her on Facebook Messenger that if she didn’t “leave kids alone,” he would rape her. “I will hunt you down like an animal,” he added, along with photos of assault rifles.
Overwhelmed, she canceled the Knot’s charitable events, worried a troll would show up. She feared leaving the house and sporadically broke out in hives, lost 20 pounds and upped her anxiety medication. Chollet maintained her bravado in online clashes but often wept later, as she cleaned dishes at home.
Chollet didn’t report the threats to law enforcement, she said, because she didn’t trust them to protect her. With her phone in custody, she couldn’t monitor the Knot’s security cameras, so friends stayed up all night, keeping watch in the parking lot.
CHOLLET’S ARREST WASN’T ENOUGH for Whittington. He pushed for more exposure, more condemnation, more intervention.
“I have stood firm from day one in what is right,” he wrote to his followers. “I will continue.”
Summerville police had given him what he wanted, but no other agency that examined the case pursued charges.
Biles recommended that the teen who discussed vandalizing Whittington’s house be prosecuted for “unlawful communication.” Because the boy lived outside the city, it fell to the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office, which dropped it, a spokesperson said, because “the information shared did not meet the elements of unlawful communication.”
On Facebook, Whittington hammered the sheriff’s office for dismissing his concerns and, to apply political pressure, he tagged more than a dozen lawmakers and public officials. None interceded on his behalf.
A Secret Service agent interviewed the teen who’d wished Trump dead, according to a Summerville police report, and concluded he didn’t have “any intentions of harming anyone.”
The FBI was aware of the incident, a spokesperson said, but it charged no one.
Only Summerville police stuck with the investigation. As Biles built her case against Chollet, she also sought charges against the two 14-year-old girls who’d asked in the chat about how to defend themselves. One said she was handcuffed in her math class.
A Secret Service agent interviewed the teen who’d wished Trump dead, according to a Summerville police report, and concluded he didn’t have “any intentions of harming anyone.”
The FBI was aware of the incident, a spokesperson said, but it charged no one.
Only Summerville police stuck with the investigation. As Biles built her case against Chollet, she also sought charges against the two 14-year-old girls who’d asked in the chat about how to defend themselves. One said she was handcuffed in her math class.
THE PRELIMINARY HEARING, Chollet had been warned, would be a formality. The court had to decide whether there were reasonable grounds to believe she’d committed a crime, but judges seldom dismissed charges at this stage. Her attorney told her not to come.
But inside Courtroom 1, the case’s significance was apparent. On that afternoon of April 8, half a dozen Summerville police officers watched from the gallery, including Wright, the chief, who said he personally signed off on the charge. Summerville High’s principal sat in the back.
Chollet’s three supporters in the audience suspected none of them would be there if not for politics. The head of the regional solicitor’s office, David Pascoe, switched to the Republican Party last year, contending that Democrats were “too soft on crime.” He’d appeared on Whittington’s podcast to discuss another case months before Chollet’s hearing and would again two weeks after to promote his run for attorney general.
Pascoe would later tell The Post that politics played no role in the prosecution, insisting that he didn’t even know Whittington was involved. Pascoe noted that his office does not make charging decisions, though it could have declined to prosecute the case.
It hadn’t, and instead, his chief deputy, Kelly LaPlante, handled the hearing personally.
The charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor hinged on two points: that Chollet had influenced the students to leave their classes and to threaten Whittington.
Biles, dressed in uniform, first alleged that Chollet’s encouragement crossed a line because the students intended to disrupt school, which the officer said would violate the law.
But she misquoted Chollet in important ways.
“Actually, like, let’s get together,” the officer accused Chollet of saying, though she never did, according to the chat reviewed by The Post and Biles’s own reports.
She also misstated another of Chollet’s messages — “Lets talk about how to make this the BEST.” — as: “We’re going to make this the best opportunity to skip school, disrupt school during instructional period.”
Chollet, Biles testified, then invited the students to her Facebook page, which is true. “I have a post up about all the threats yall are getting,” Chollet had written, including a link.
But Biles cast the moment as evidence of Chollet’s crime.
“This then led to a group of juveniles threatening to show up at one of those adults’ houses to —” Biles testified.
Chollet’s attorney popped up from the defense table.
“Led to?” Gustave “Tree” Martschink objected.
“Influenced. Influenced,” Biles corrected, invoking the precise language from the statute.
LaPlante urged her to expand on the extent of Chollet’s support for the students.
“You said she invited them to her business,” LaPlante reminded the officer.
“That’s a fact not in evidence,” Martschink interjected.
“To be honest, a lot of this is not in evidence,” Magistrate Judge Amanda Leviner replied.
What no one told the judge was that LaPlante’s assertion echoed a conspiracy theory that had contributed to Chollet being labeled a groomer. It began when Whittington, whose wife had remained in the chat, twisted a benign online exchange into: “Dinah Yo, telling children to come to her BAR to plot their walkout at school. Yikes.”
This is what actually happened: Chollet noticed a student defending the walkout to an enraged adult on Whittington’s Facebook page. Chollet took a screenshot, shared it on her own page and asked, “Whoes kid is this? Imma buy him a” Knot burger. That student then bragged back in the chat about Chollet’s post, saying, “ayyy she’s gonna buy me food.”
By the hearing’s end, though, Leviner had heard enough. First, the judge addressed the claim that Chollet influenced a student to threaten Whittington: “I don’t have any facts and evidence that tie the defendant to that.”
On the other allegation, Leviner said it appeared that, according to Biles’s testimony, Chollet had encouraged the students to disobey the school. But they’d canceled the walkout, so no underlying crime ever occurred.
The judge paused.
“I’m going to grant the defendant’s motion to dismiss,” she said, popping her wooden gavel.
Within minutes, Chollet posted the news to Facebook.
“If you spoke on it before, feel free to speak on it now at the same volume. I’ll wait,” she wrote, adding three emojis: two hearts and a middle finger.
CHOLLET KEPT WAITING, for retractions, apologies, vindication. They never came.
Almost none of the national blogs and YouTube channels that had publicized her criminal charge noted its dismissal. Nothing about the ruling appeared on Newsweek or Yahoo or Libs of TikTok’s accounts. Whittington spun it as a victory.
“Judge said that while she definitely influenced the behavior of these minors,” he posted, “that since they were stopped by the school from actually breaking the law by walking out, as she had, indeed, encouraged, that her encouragement didnt matter.”
“Either way,” he added. “Gross bitch.”
“you just make s— up bro,” Chollet commented.
“sure,” he replied.
Afterward, Whittington went largely silent about the case. But when questioned months later about the unproven allegations that derailed Chollet’s life, he remained defiant.
He insisted that she did not join the chat because of the threats adults made in response to his post. “That’s an absolute falsehood,” he said, despite the fact that she flagged the threats just before she entered the chat and, after she did, told the students about them.
He said that although the comments teens made about him were serious enough to warrant his public campaign and a criminal investigation, the ones the adults made about the teens were just “some random people” saying “something about a water gun.”
He said he still believes the “kirked” comment was a threat against his life, even though none of the law enforcement agencies that scrutinized the chat ever acted on it.
He said Chollet posted his Facebook page in the chat, triggering the threats against him. “Absolutely she did,” he said, though when asked for evidence, Whittington acknowledged he couldn’t provide any.
Chollet never went silent. She wanted her thousands of detractors to admit they were wrong, and she demanded it the only way she knew how: online.
“all my charges were dropped in the prelim because it was completely unfounded,” Chollet wrote one persistent tormentor on Facebook. “the terrible stuff you said to me, and about me … were just you being mean for NO reason.”
“only your regular customers give a wig,” the woman replied. “WE don’t.”
Chollet peered at the screen.
Oh. The truth doesn’t matter, Chollet thought, and then her mind returned to Trump, a man many of her antagonists revered and who’d also accused his enemiesof crimestheydidn’t commit.
The distance between what Chollet believed about herself — that she’d encouraged student activism — and what she’d been told online every day — that she was a child predator — felt impossible to reconcile.
She resumed her charitable work, even delivering gift baskets for dispatchers at the Summerville Police Department, but she never shed the paranoia that her community thinks she is the horrible thing the internet labeled her.
One day at Food Lion, a cashier looked her in the eye.
“I know who you are,” the woman said. As Chollet braced for an insult, the cashier extended a hand. They bumped fists.
Other strangers encouraged her, too.
A Summerville High parent, raised in Germany, thanked her for standing up for her child’s classmates, comparing Chollet’s circumstances to 1933, when the Nazis relied on citizens to report dissident neighbors. Another local mom urged her to sue every person and institution involved in her debacle.
Lots of people did.
“This was one of the most flagrant and blatant attacks on the First Amendment by a far-right-wing cabal of a far-right provocateur, an online mob, and public officials,” wrote the Palmetto Voice, a progressive South Carolina outlet.
“I don’t want to sue my town,” Chollet said at first. But then she thought of the students who’d never walked out and had suffered repercussions anyway. The group’s founder had been suspended for about a week; Biles, she said, told her the Secret Service had uncovered her real identity. The criminal cases against the two freshman girls remained open. One underwent therapy after her appetite disappeared, and the other, who’d been cuffed in class, moved away because her family said they no longer believed she could have a normal high school experience in Summerville.
One afternoon in late May, Chollet’s attorney told her he’d begun the paperwork to file litigation, asking her adversaries to preserve evidence. A surge of anxiety numbed her body, but Chollet told herself she could make a difference. The legal system had been used against her, but now, maybe she could use it to prove that even in 2026, the truth did matter.
That’s what she told herself again and again, but then she read that Trump had called for somebody else who’d opposed himtobeimprisoned. Then, not long after, she heard Whittington had introduced his audience to a new threat that demanded their anger and action: a local “tranny teacher” who, he said, was exposing children to “degeneracy.”
Then, on Facebook, another man called Chollet a groomer.
After a plane journey in shackles, an Iranian woman found herself in the middle of Africa in a country she did not know existed. She is one of thousands deported from the US on the back of shadowy deals made with dozens of countries. An in-depth investigation reveals the ‘show of force’ costing American taxpayers millions
No one would tell the shackled detainees onboard the US immigration plane where they were going. The officers in charge would taunt them when they asked, they said. It was only when the seat-back video screens finally showed a map that the 18 migrants worked it out.
Nika, a 32-year-old Iranian woman, recalled how the handcuffs dug into her wrists. She begged the officers to loosen them, but they did not. Other passengers had it worse, she said. Some of the men were restrained in black and yellow body wraps, as if mummified, after resisting orders to get on the plane.
Nika, who had fled Iran 18 months earlier after protesting against its regime, had imagined the US as a place of sanctuary. Iran was already one of the most repressive countries in the world when she left, and its horrors had only deepened since then: security forces gunned down thousands of other demonstrators this year, then Donald Trump’s administration launched the war there.
After more than a year locked up in a US immigration detention centre, Nika, whose name the Guardian has changed to protect her family in Iran, was granted legal protections and freed on a judge’s orders. Within two weeks, the Department of Homeland Security had rearrested her, and days later she was on the plane heading 7,000 miles east.
“They never told me they were going to deport me [to] this country,” she told the Guardian. “I don’t know anything about Africa.”
The Department of State warns US citizens not to travel to CAR because it says it is too dangerous. Nika spends most of her days there under a form of self-imprisonment, too scared to venture out from her small bedroom as she waits for an answer to the question on which her life depends: will she be sent back to Iran, and to a regime that could kill her?
Nika is one of more than 25,000 people deported by the Trump administration to countries that are not their own. About 20,000 people have been bussed to Mexico, according to a count by Refugees International and Human Rights First. And more than 5,000 others have been put on flights to countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and central Asia to which they have no connection, and then, often, returned to the countries where US immigration judges had ruled their lives or liberty were at risk.
Human rights lawyers describe these so-called third-country national arrangements as part of a “show of force” by the US intended to discourage migrants and asylum seekers from entering. People from Peru and Colombia have been sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). On 20 August, four Cubans, a Brazilian and a Cameroonian refused to disembark in Liberia, and were sent to Equatorial Guinea instead.
In order to compile the most comprehensive account of a policy that has mostly operated behind closed doors, the Guardian joined 23 other media organisations in the Deportation Project, a joint investigation coordinated by Paris-based Forbidden Stories. The consortium interviewed more than 100 people affected by, or involved in, the US drive to extinguish unauthorised immigration, and reviewed documents outlining details of the agreements made by US officials with governments around the world.
It has tracked more than 100 flights that have carried migrants and asylum seekers to 28 different countries. This is likely to be an undercount as the consortium’s dataset only includes flights it was able to independently verify.
The pace of flights is increasing. After an initial wave during the opening months of the second Trump administration, the number of deportations spiked in August again when, according to a count by Human Rights First, a record 16 flights carried people to 13 different countries that were not their own.
A US federal appeals court ruled on Friday that third-country removals were unlawful, arguing that they violated due process because people are not notified with enough time to mount a legal challenge to the decision to send them to another country. Human rights lawyers suggested this should immediately ground third-country deportation flights. The government is expected to appeal against the judgment, and to press ahead with its policy.
A state department spokesperson said implementing the Trump administration’s immigration policies was a “top priority” and “we are unwavering in our commitment to end illegal and mass immigration and bolster America’s border security”. They added: “The US government will use all legal means to remove those with no right to remain in our country.”
The Trump administration has said the people it deports are criminals. Yet documents obtained by the Washington Post as part of this project show that a majority of the 35 countries that have signed deals with the US have said they will not accept migrants with violent criminal records.
The people forced on to planes include those who spent most of their lives in the US, parents detained on the school run, the adult children of elderly relatives who depend on them for care.
Many are people whose fear of returning home was deemed so credible that immigration judges barred their removal from the US. Nika had been granted “withholding of removal”, a protection for individuals who may face severe harm in their country of origin but are ineligible for asylum. On 28 May, not only was she released from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s custody, but she was eligible to find a job, to work, and to stay.
The rug pull
Nika’s lawyer, Sahar Jalili, is Iranian and, like her client, studied in Tehran. She took the case when she was pregnant, and often worked past the point of exhaustion. “That could be me,” she said of Nika.
Combing through the case file, Jalili was shocked to learn ICE had officially decided to send Nika to CAR’s capital, Bangui, just eight days before a judge ordered her release from the detention centre. Her uncle’s family had prepared a room for her in Los Angeles. It took her two days to get there, and she spent a week with them, unfurling, after 18 months of hell.
Her re-arrest on 8 June, during what ICE officers had presented as a routine check-in, felt like cruelty for cruelty’s sake, Jalili said.
Nika said she had finished her appointment and left when an officer called her uncle and asked him to drive her back to pick up some papers.
This time there were new questions. A man took Nika’s fingerprints, then her photograph, Jalili said. “Then he came back accompanied by a female ICE officer, and they said put your hands above your head.” She said she was arrested, handcuffed and led to the basement.
Nika felt numb, she said, as she was transferred out of the detention facility that evening. Anti-ICE demonstrators smacked their palms on the side of the van as she passed through protests that had become a regular feature in LA.
For Jalili, the previous two days had already been a blur, as she and her colleagues battled to save two other Iranian women from being put on the same plane for Bangui. The lawyers managed to get the other two women off the plane, but not Nika. The only difference between them was that Nika was detained last, so by the time a network of immigration lawyers had learned of her case, there was not enough time before the flight departed.
Jalili said she begged every ICE officer: “Give me two days. Just two days.” She recalled: “They told me that they had respected the judge’s order to release her. But they’d never promised not to send her to a third country.”
African deals
When Rabbiatu Kuyateh, 58, learned that the country she had been sent to, Ghana, was deporting her to her childhood homeland, she was so scared it took a scrum of people to force her into the waiting van.
A video captured the moment last November when she was dragged, shoeless and distraught, by her hair. She still remembers the crack of her head on the stone steps as she begged not to be returned to Sierra Leone, screaming: “I’m not going.”
Kuyateh was a nurse and had spent most of her life in the US with her parents, after fleeing Sierra Leone. She cared for American coronavirus patients during the pandemic and had looked after disabled adults and children in the years since.
She had scrapped hard for the life she built, she said. She had raised her son, Mohamed, alone and they had bought a house together. By the time Trump was re-elected in 2024, her parents were so frail she began each day by checking on them before her shift, and then returning to make sure they were ready for bed.
In order to accelerate its expulsion of people such as Kuyateh, the Trump administration has remade the very institutions that were once intended to protect migrants who fled persecution.
“I would describe [this] as the Trump administration’s way of trying to undermine the concept of asylum and refugee protection,” said Alma David, one of the leading immigration lawyers tracking the policy. “While the US understands that they can’t deport them to their home country legally, what they can do is basically send them through this third country that perceives itself as a transit hub.”
The drive is being led by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who has been open about his desire to end most migration to the US. In interviews with the Washington Post as part of the Deportation Project, current and former US officials said Miller had rolled out the third-country removals policy by pushing key appointments inside the state department that have allowed him to overrule other foreign policy objectives in service of his agenda.
Among them is Christian Ehrhardt, a career state department official who heads the newly formed Office of Remigration – its name incorporating a term adopted by the far right to describe the forcible expulsion of minority ethnic immigrants. Ehrhardt has helped secure at least 13 third-country deportation agreements in Africa, after diplomatic tours through the continent.
Internal records reviewed by the Washington Post show the Trump administration has pledged at least $410m (£307m) to secure such agreements with 35 different countries, almost a third of them in Africa.
They indicate that $30m was earmarked for Cameroon, in order to support UN operations in the country, in return for accepting 1,000 migrants. The US has so far sent only 44. The DRC was promised $75m towards UN operations there, in return for accepting 2,000 migrants. It has only received 15, and flights to Kinshasa are on hold due to the country’s Ebola outbreak.
The arrangements differ from country to country. A handful, including Eswatini, have agreed to accept people with violent criminal histories. But many have said they will not take anyone with a record of violence or other types of serious crimes. The state department did not respond to questions about details of these agreements.
Ghana will only take people from west Africa; CAR did not specify nationalities, and the passengers on Nika’s plane were from places including Afghanistan, Iraq and Kyrgyzstan. Most of them had no ties to Africa at all, she said.
On 1 July 2025, Kuyateh’s son, Mohamed, had accompanied her to a routine ICE check-in, as her immigration status required. He remembered his mother feeling anxious that the cuffs on an officer’s belt were for her. “I doubt it,” Mohamed told her. But when they called Kuyateh into an interrogation room, he was told to wait outside.
“That’s the last time I saw her,” he said.
During Kuyateh’s four months in ICE custody, Mohamed spoke to her often. He had not heard from her on the day in November when he said he was called by another detainee who told him she had been sent to Texas. “And I was just like, why is she going to Texas?”
Two days later Kuyateh called him in tears. She was in Ghana, about to be sent to Sierra Leone.
The footage of her being dragged into a bus, beginning the onward deportation, appeared to anger the Ghanaian authorities when it spread across social media, according to Malick, the Senegalese man, also deported from the US, who filmed it. The Guardian has given him a pseudonym out of concern for his safety. “They got angry,” Malick said. “They came in the evening, at night, with two trucks full of soldiers.”
He said the troops drove his group to a remote military camp with faltering electricity and little contact with the outside world. The Ghanaian government did not respond to questions from the Guardian.
One woman sent to the camp said she grew so scared of what might happen if she was returned to her native Senegal that she attempted suicide by drinking bleach. She was treated in hospital, then sent back to Senegal anyway. “I drank the bleach because I wanted to die,” she said. “Because they wanted to force me to go back to my country.”
Malaria
Onboard Nika’s flight on 11 June this year, the inflight video showed Ghana as its initial destination, so the passengers assumed that was where they were going. But their stop in the capital, Accra, was brief. The 18 passengers then landed in Bangui at 9.45pm, flight monitors said. The officers onboard removed their cuffs, but did not get off the plane.
For several hours, the group did not meet anyone who spoke English. “They were communicating with hand gestures, like, get on a bus, and then they put us on a bus. And then they took us to give us some vaccinations, and I didn’t know what they were going to inject me with,” Nika said. It turned out to be for yellow fever.
Her room was in an apartment block. She was told she could stay for three months. But the idea of returning to Iran was unfathomable.
US-based Iranian rights groups say they have been unable to determine the fates of hundreds of other Iranian nationals deported back home during the course of the US-Israeli war on Iran. A recent lawsuit filed against ICE alleges the administration has shared the records of Iranian asylum-seekers with the very regime they had fled, further elevating the risk for those sent back.
When a headache started clouding her brain, Nika thought it was a migraine. She felt sick, her body hurt. She had been bitten by so many mosquitoes that her skin looked bruised, she said. A medical report, seen by the Guardian, confirmed she had malaria. Speaking by phone, Nika said: “I didn’t even know what that was.”
Back in Los Angeles, Jalili waited anxiously on updates about Nika’s situation. There were injections every 12 hours to clear her bloodstream of parasites. The bad news did not stop when she was well enough to return to her accommodation. Jalili was horrified to learn Nika had been deported from the US without her passport, meaning she had neither identification documents, nor a visa, and on trips to the hospital and vegetable market, police officers used her lack of papers to make threats.
The CAR government did not respond to a request for comment.
The second time she was stopped, Nika said, the police officer mimed the action of putting cuffs on her. The message, she said, was: “I can take you in, unless you pay us.”
Old tools to grease the wheels
As the Trump administration accelerates its third-country deportations, CAR is one of 13 host countries where the deported are being supported by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a UN agency, which provides them with food, lodgings and psychological counsel upon their arrival.
Although the Trump administration has announced sweeping cuts to its funding for UN agencies, there seem to be exceptions where the funds enable this deportation programme.
In March last year, the state department spelled out the logic. From now on, it said, humanitarian funding would be used to “reduce mass and illegal immigration, such as funding voluntary returns of illegal aliens, incentivising governments to implement safe third-country agreements, and building the migration management capacity of other countries”.
According to a federal government database that tracks spending, more than 60% of US grants to the IOM during the second Trump administration have gone to programmes in countries that accept deported migrants. In CAR, that meant an allocation of $85m. The highest US contribution to IOM in CAR under the Biden administration, according to the database, was $14m.
Nika said she had been treated well by the agency. “The people here are doing their best,” she said. The accommodation was secure and transport was provided when needed. “But at the same time, it’s not living. I’m breathing here, I’m not dying. But I can’t leave the house without a driver they provide here. I can’t find jobs. I don’t speak their language.”
The potential for a negative perception of its involvement in the programme is something the IOM has grappled with. An internal risk assessment for a programme supporting third-country nationals sent from the US to one African country, seen by the Guardian, warns it could lead the agency to be “perceived as complicit”.
An IOM spokesperson said in a statement that such assessments were conducted in order to ascertain whether host nations were able to commit to safeguards for the migrants, but added: “We are fully cognisant that states use financial assistance to advance their national priorities. However, IOM’s decisions to accept funding, provide post-arrival assistance, or support assisted voluntary return are guided by our own mandate and principles, and rest on a single question: whether our engagement will improve the lives of the migrants affected. In these instances, we believe strongly it does.”
Many in the human rights field are uncomfortable the UN is easing the process for governments that agree to cooperate with the Trump administration.
“It just feels very incongruous for IOM to be the organisation in charge of these men and women,” said Alma David. “These aren’t migrants in your typical sense. These aren’t people who chose to migrate,” she said. “These are people who were kidnapped, essentially.”
Life in the shadows
People who had been returned from third countries to the places they were born describe a life now lived in the shadows. Kuyateh left Sierra Leone within days of being sent back there. The Guardian is not naming her location. “I don’t sleep at night,” she said. “Sometimes I just wake up. I’ll be sitting down like, what am I doing here? Why am I here?”
She called her family every day. Sometimes, she said, she felt too sad to turn on the video and see their faces. She could get through the conversation with her mother without tears, she said, “but whenever I talk to my daddy, I’ll be crying. And when I sit here, I think about them. It hurts so much.”
She was not sure what scared her more: the thought of dying alone in a foreign country, or knowing that her parents might die without her at their bedside.
Annan, a gay man who fled Ghana after he was outed, and then hunted, by members of his family, said he was terrified when he touched back down in Accra. He had refused to disembark during his initial deportation from the US to Sierra Leone, and had to be forcibly removed from the plane, he said. He later begged authorities not to return him, he said, but they did not listen.
In a statement, the Sierra Leonean government said it took its “international obligations seriously” but that questions relating to immigration protections afforded by an American court were for the US government to address.
It added: “So far, no individual returned to Sierra Leone under the TCNA [third-country national arrangement] has requested to remain in Sierra Leone or not to be returned to his or her country of choice either in west Africa or beyond.”
Annan’s mother had used her savings to pay for his escape to the US. She was distraught when he called to say he was back. “She knew she couldn’t protect me,” he said.
He shared footage of where he lived now: an abandoned building with no electricity or running water in a neighbouring country, he said. He spent his daylight hours hiding, and walked almost an hour to find food when darkness fell. His bed was a blanket on the floor, although he barely slept, he said, too scared of being infected by one of the insects that crawled or buzzed around him. He said the loneliness felt crippling.
In recent weeks, someone had texted him anonymously, saying that his survival, as a gay man, would not be tolerated. The message made him feel hopeless: he could run, it said, but he could not hide for ever.
Exhaustion
In Los Angeles, Jalili is getting more calls about clients bound for deportation flights. In June, a 30-year-old Iranian woman with a blood disorder that made her so weak she needed a walker was told she would be sent to the landlocked south African nation of Eswatini.
Another client was “going crazy”, Jalili said. “They’re coming up with a new country for her every week.”
Immigration lawyers said that while their jobs had always been hard, the scale of the efforts to obstruct those opposing the Trump administration’s drive to quash all types of irregular migration was unprecedented.
When a client is detained, avenues of accountability have largely been shut, including the office of an independent ombudsman for immigration detention, which was responsible for investigating abuses and misconduct.
In court, immigration lawyers can face hostile judges after the Trump administration purged some of those deemed insufficiently loyal to the deportation agenda. Meanwhile, the cost of even filing a case has risen steeply, under the terms of a bill passed through Congress in July last year.
Jalili, like many others, spent much of the first Trump administration mounting legal challenges against a policy of separating children from their parents at the US-Mexico border. Knowing that what would follow might be worse, she decided on the eve of Trump’s re-election to start her own firm to fight the coming storm
It was not uncommon for calls from the desperate families of new ICE detainees to wake her in the night.
One of the biggest challenges, said Erica Reilly, an immigration attorney based in Washington DC, was basic communication with ICE officers.
“You send all these emails to deportation officers, and you’re like: ‘Hi, just following up again on the email I sent you last week, and the week before that, and the week before that, and the week before that, that you haven’t responded to,’” she said. “And they know they don’t have to because there’s no accountability.”
The worst thing, she said, was the powerlessness. But the cruelty and the lack of access, she had come to believe, “that’s all the point”.
“I think that the administration is doing what they can to get enough people to say, well, the alternative is too scary or too uncertain or too bad. I’ll just leave on my own.”
Getting through the day meant reformulating the wins, Reilly said. “Getting a call back from a deportation officer shouldn’t be a win, but in this environment it is.”
Jalili said she did her best to focus on the battles she could win. When she heard Nika’s flight had left for Bangui, she sank to the floor, called her mother, and began to cry. “It’s not a situation where you can just say: ‘Oh, I did my best.’”
Nika had lost the life she knew in Iran. The US offered little better. Jalili listed the cost.
“Being detained for 17 months. Being released from the federal judge’s order for 10 days. Being stripped away from her uncle’s hands. Being put in a car and then on a flight in shackles, and for 24 hours, sitting on that flight. She must have felt so lonely.”
’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the city, the Luminaria Tour is busless, which seems like a pity.
The city of Albuquerque announced Friday that ABQ Ride will cease operation of its annual Luminaria Tour starting this year.
Tickets for the event, which cost $1.50 in 2025, would often sell out quickly. But the city said that over the last decade, an average of 62% of reserved tickets went unused. In 2025, the tour cost approximately $200,000 to serve 586 attendees at $341 per person. The cost includes transit operations, staffing, barricades, police traffic control and signage.
Rules set in place by the Federal Transit Administration prohibit ABQ Ride from charging more than its regular bus fare for the tour.
“Luminarias are part of who we are as Albuquerque, and that tradition isn’t going anywhere,” Leslie Keener, city of Albuquerque transit director, said in a news release. “We’re working closely with community members on new ways for the public to enjoy the luminaria tradition while supporting neighborhood needs, using resources efficiently, and creating an approach that can be sustained.”
The city said ABQ Ride and the Huning Castle Neighborhood Association are working on alternatives that will preserve the luminaria tradition while reducing the operational demands of the bus tour, including a possible walking tour or revised bus tour option.
The absence of the annual estimate on the tax gap could make it more difficult to assess whether more taxes are going unpaid since President Trump took office.
The Trump administration has held up the publication of an annual Internal Revenue Service estimate of unpaid taxes, a delay that could mask the fiscal cost of the steep decline in the agency’s ability to audit the rich.
The I.R.S. has long published an estimate of the tax gap, the amount of tax owed under existing law that goes uncollected each year. The agency began releasing an estimate of the tax gap annually during the Biden administration, but under President Trump, it has yet put out an update. The current leader of the I.R.S., Frank Bisignano, has cast doubt on the metric and indicated he wants to focus instead on what he called the “addressable tax gap.”
The shift comes after the Trump administration pushed out roughly a quarter of the I.R.S. work force and cut the agency’s budget, weakening the government’s ability to conduct time-intensive audits. An inspector general report last month found that revenue collected from audits dropped by more than a third last fiscal year, a sign that the tax gap could be growing under Mr. Trump.
In its most recent projection, released in October 2024, the I.R.S. estimated that roughly $700 billion in owed taxes went uncollected in 2022, though the agency said it expected that roughly $90 billion of that would eventually be paid. The next estimate, for 2023, was scheduled for publication last fall, but has not been released.
The absence of an updated tax gap estimate is part of a pattern across the Trump administration, which has either stopped collecting or sought to change the measurement of federal data that scientists and other researchers have long relied on for a rigorous, unvarnished understanding of the country. The Pentagon declined to provide information to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office about the cost of the war in Iran, and last year the president fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the monthly job numbers, baselessly calling the labor market data “rigged.”
An I.R.S. spokesman said the agency was updating the methodologies used to calculate the tax gap and would release the figure when it was ready. Mr. Bisignano, in a statement, said revenue from tax enforcement was increasing this year and did not depend on the number of auditors.
“The I.R.S. is working smarter by using better data, advanced analytics, and technology like A.I. to address noncompliance more precisely, reduce false positives, and focus resources where they have the greatest impact,” Mr. Bisignano said in a statement. “The tax gap estimates are an important part of that work, but it is not a measure of current enforcement.”
In an email to I.R.S. staff on Tuesday, Mr. Bisignano said Vincent LaPadula, who joined the I.R.S. this summer from JPMorgan Chase & Company, would lead the agency’s work on the tax gap.
Since it covers 2023, the delayed report would not yet capture any change in tax compliance resulting from the Trump administration’s push to downsize the I.R.S. But the absence of the data could make it more difficult to assess whether more taxes were going uncollected after Mr. Trump took office.
“Without a metric of the tax gap that is telling us in real time about trends in compliance and how they’re changing, I worry that it’s hard for policymakers to see the full swath of the damage that’s been done by the gutting of the agency,” said Natasha Sarin, a Treasury official during the Biden administration who has written extensively about the tax gap. “And, in fact, I worry that’s the point.”
Beyond illustrating the extent and sources of tax noncompliance, the tax gap has also been a figure often cited to argue for giving more resources to the I.R.S. In 2021, Charles P. Rettig, Mr. Trump’s first-term pick to lead the I.R.S., speculated that the tax gap could be as much as $1 trillion a year, a figure much larger than the I.R.S. estimate at the time, as he called for a bigger budget for the agency.
For a time, there was bipartisan interest in giving the I.R.S. more resources to narrow the tax gap, since doing so generates more tax revenue for the government without having to raise taxes. That changed after Democrats approved an additional $80 billion for the I.R.S. in 2022. Republicans renewed their attacks on the agency and eventually clawed back much of the extra money. G.O.P. officials, cheered on by business groups, also began to question the reliability of the agency’s tax gap estimates.
“Republicans didn’t like that it really points the finger at the wealthy as being the problem,” said Barry Johnson, who previously oversaw the tax gap report as the chief data and analytics officer at the I.R.S.
The tax gap encompasses several types of unpaid taxes. It includes taxes that are simply late in being paid, as well as taxes that are uncollected as a result of people not filing a tax return. But most of the gap comes from people who file a tax return but do not report all of their income to the I.R.S., intentionally or not.
The agency has consistently found that income independently reported to the I.R.S., like wages, is rarely underreported, while income without third-party verification, like business profits, often goes unreported. Overall, 85 percent of owed taxes were paid voluntarily and on time in 2022, the I.R.S. said.
Still, the tax gap is somewhat imprecise, since I.R.S. analysts are estimating taxes owed on income that is not revealed to the agency. To do so, the I.R.S. conducts a statistical sample of intensive audits, and then extrapolates the rates of noncompliance it finds to the taxpayer population more broadly. Previously, the agency released a new tax gap estimate every few years, but during the Biden administration it started providing an annual update, responding to requests from lawmakers of both parties for more regular data.
Pooling together enough audit results takes time, though, and so the I.R.S. relies on the results from older samples to project noncompliance for a given year — and then updates the numbers as more recent data becomes available. For example, the 2022 estimate of the tax gap is based on noncompliance rates observed in tax filings from 2014 through 2016. Alan Plumley, a retired I.R.S. analyst who worked on the tax gap, said that methodology meant that an annual headline figure was not particularly meaningful.
“Doing random audits has become a luxury where in the past they had been viewed as a necessity,” he said. “If people realized how soft the tax gap estimates are, they would realize they shouldn’t be putting a lot of weight on the estimated total.”
In appearances before Congress in the spring, Mr. Bisignano, the first chief executive officer of the I.R.S., suggested that he was skeptical of the methodology behind the tax gap, saying that he wanted to focus on the subset of unpaid taxes that the I.R.S. could realistically collect.
“What I’ve seen is nobody’s ever worked on the tax gap,” Mr. Bisignano, who is also the commissioner of the Social Security Administration, said in April. “And we need to decide what is the addressable tax gap and we need to go get it.”
Former I.R.S. officials said that focusing limited resources on easier-to-collect taxes made sense and reflected current practice, since closing the tax gap entirely would be an enormous undertaking. Still, if the I.R.S. adopted a new standard for publicly reporting the tax gap, they said, it should also continue publishing estimates using the previous methodology, so that researchers can see trends.
And Mr. Bisignano has not yet defined what he considers “addressable,” a key point given that what is achievable for the I.R.S. depends on the budget and tax laws approved by Congress.
“The devil is in the details of what you’re describing as ‘addressable’ versus not,” said Daniel Werfel, who was tapped by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to lead the I.R.S. and stepped down in 2025.
Some of the most detailed information about the Iran war has come not from the office of the defense secretary or the White House, but from a report released by the Defense Department’s inspector general.
The independent oversight agency offered glimpses into the U.S. military’s inventory shortfalls, and the damage from Iranian counterattacks to consulates and other diplomatic facilities in the region.
The document, which was issued on Monday, covered only the first four months of the war, from Feb. 28 to June 30. On Tuesday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a separate report that war had cost the United States roughly $38 billion through Aug. 1.
Here are some key takeaways from the inspector general’s report.
A secret mission statement
The Pentagon and White House have said that their goal in Iran is to destroy its nuclear programs, attack drones, ballistic and cruise missiles, and its means of producing those weapons.
But the inspector general’s report noted that the Pentagon’s full mission statement for the Iran war “is classified.” That suggests that the military may have other goals that have not been made public.
Costs
The inspector general said that “it can be difficult to calculate the total ‘cost’” of the Iran war, given that the Pentagon has never had a separate appropriation from Congress to fund it.
Noting that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not request additional funds from Congress before launching combat operations, the report stated that funds for the war are coming from the department’s existing budget for training and maintenance of the force.
The costs to repair or replace U.S. military facilities damaged or destroyed by Iranian attacks — such as the Navy’s base in Manama, Bahrain — have not been calculated, as the Pentagon has indicated it may choose to close or not rebuild them.
On June 24, the report said, the White House submitted a $67 billion supplemental funding request for the war, of which $21 billion was slated for replacing munitions expended up to that point.
The inspector general also said that the State Department estimated that its embassies, consulates and other diplomatic facilities in the Middle East had suffered about $184 million in damage from Iranian strikes.
The U.S. diplomatic mission in Iraq was hit by “more than 600” Iranian attacks just in the first four months of the war, sustaining more than $157 million in damages.
Shortfalls of munitions
The Pentagon’s top acquisition office told the inspector general’s office that the expenditure of munitions in the Iran war “has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls.”
Military leaders have tried to speed up the production of munitions, the report noted, but added that “the defense industrial base requires ‘significant lead time’ to expand production capacities” for weapons.
Bottlenecks persist in the production of solid rocket motors that missiles rely on, as well as the supply of “high-grade explosives and propellants.”
The Congressional Budget Office report also found that the war had significantly depleted U.S. munitions. In response, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said that “claims of U.S. munition shortages are false.”
Troops, ships, aircraft and buildings
The U.S. military force in the Middle East supporting the war has numbered roughly 50,000, even as units rotate on deployment.
According to the inspector general’s report, the war has seen “a dozen each” of fighter squadrons, destroyers and air defense batteries deployed as well as mobile launchers for artillery rockets and guided missiles like ATACMS and PrSM.
The war has also seen the deployment of four aircraft carrier strike groups thus far, and a “partial deployment” of the 82nd Airborne Division.
Iranian counterattacks damaged and destroyed “hundreds of buildings and structures” at U.S. military bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the report said.
Additionally, dozens of U.S. military aircraft have been damaged or destroyed, including 30 Reaper drones, 12 KC-135 aerial refueling planes, four F-15 fighters and an A-10 attack jet.
Casualties and medical support
The Defense Department has limited medical treatment facilities at every location where U.S. forces are deployed in the region, the report said, and has built more advanced facilities to provide surgical support in several countries.
For care beyond what those facilities can provide, the Pentagon has relied on hospitals in those host nations.
Medical evacuation helicopters in Iraq and Kuwait had to be relocated after Iranian strikes, the report said, adding that “the nature of operations” during the war has meant most U.S. casualties have been transported by vehicles and ambulances to medical treatment facilities.
The U.S. has suffered 18 killed and 824 wounded in the war, according to a Pentagon casualty database.
Logistics issues
The destruction of the Navy’s main logistics hub in Bahrain forced the Pentagon to look for additional supply ships that were outfitted to transfer fuel and supplies to warships at sea, the report said.
The Navy’s move to use the British-owned island Diego Garcia — roughly 2,200 miles from the Arabian Sea — as its new logistics center means that supply ships have to spend two to two and a half weeks to travel to the island, take on goods and fuel, and return to the Navy’s main operating areas outside the Persian Gulf, according to the report.
Strain on other combatant commanders
Of all the Pentagon’s “combatant commands,” which are responsible for military operations in different parts of the globe, U.S. European Command, based in Germany, has provided the most support to the Iran war, according to the report.
It transferred “munitions, equipment, aircraft and personnel, and requisitioned and distributed fuel, food, and medical supplies” to Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East.
Mr. Hegseth ordered Pacific Command, which is based in Oahu, Hawaii, to pursue and board suspected Iranian merchant ships in the Indian Ocean — expanding the mission far outside the Middle East.
Pacific Command was also ordered to give up six warships for the Iran war. They included the aircraft carrier strike group centered around the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which left San Diego on Nov. 21 and spent roughly nine months at sea without a port call for its crew to rest.
The ship is currently returning to its home port in Southern California.
As Iran and its allies tightened their grip on shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia scrambled this week to reroute millions of barrels of oil after being forced to close a critical pipeline damaged in an attack.
The shutdown of the East-West pipeline risks keeping 4 percent of the world’s oil supply from reaching international markets and driving energy prices even higher.
Saudi Arabia on Friday said it had temporarily shut the pipeline after it was struck by an Iran-backed militia. The pipeline, a 750-mile network that transports crude across Saudi Arabia to ports on the Red Sea, had been the kingdom’s primary way of exporting oil since the war in Iran began in February.
On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia and the Houthi militia in Yemen exchanged fresh claims of attacks on one another. In what would be a sharp escalation in their fighting, the Houthis said they had downed a Saudi fighter jet, as Saudi Arabia said the Houthis fired a drone near the Muslim holy city of Mecca.
The Houthis last week gained control of a strategic Red Sea port and hit energy facilities in Saudi Arabia, exacerbating the squeeze on Saudi oil exports.
Now, Saudi Arabia, running out of options and under pressure to rapidly restore supply lines, is facing the prospect of a severe energy crisis with global implications, analysts said.
“It is unprecedented,” said Amena Bakr, head of Middle East & OPEC+ Insights at Kpler, a maritime data firm.
“We have two major waterways obstructed, active attacks, Iran escalating attacks, proxies being active and no signs of diplomatic talks,” Ms. Bakr said. “It’s a disastrous situation when you’re looking at it from an energy security angle.”
Any extended disruption to the pipeline network of Saudi Arabia, long the world’s biggest oil exporter, would send shock waves through the global energy market. Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, hovered around $107 per barrel on Wednesday, up 50 percent from its prewar level.
The world could lose 120 million barrels of crude if the East-West Pipeline is offline for a month, according to estimates from Kpler.
Goldman Sachs warned that global oil prices could rise as high as $120 a barrel if attacks in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea continue.
The precise amount of oil not making it to the global market will depend largely on the severity of the damage to the East-West pipeline. Neither the Saudi government nor Saudi Aramco, the national oil company, responded to requests for comment.
Saudi officials previously said only that the pipeline was shut as a precaution but have not disclosed the extent of the damage or a timetable for how long it might take to restart it. Satellite images taken on Sept. 10 and 11, reviewed by The New York Times, show damage at two pumping stations on the pipeline.
Estimates for how long it might take to get the pipeline running again vary widely.
Ms. Bakr, the Kpler analyst, said she believed it could take five to six weeks, but that partial repairs could be completed far sooner.
She and others noted that the kingdom has extensive experience dealing with attacks on infrastructure. In 2019, Aramco suffered a major Houthi attack on its facilities and was able to restart pumping operations within a few days. And in April, when a pumping station was attacked shortly after the war in Iran began, full capacity was restored within seven days.
Robin Brooks, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said he did not believe the “nightmare scenarios” that the pipeline could be offline for months.
“This attack has again raised in markets the fear that we could be on the cusp of another big spike,” Mr. Brooks said. But, he said, “The track record is that these things get repaired within weeks, and there’s already indications from satellite imagery that repairs are happening.”
Chris Wright, the U.S. energy secretary, said he believed oil flows through the pipeline would resume soon. “This will be a brief and temporary interruption,” Mr. Wright told CNBC on Tuesday.
Saudi Arabia has oil stored across the country, including the capacity for about 24 million barrels at its Red Sea port at Yanbu, creating a cushion. But those storage tanks are unlikely to be full, according to Rystad Energy, a consulting firm that estimated the port has about three to six days’ worth of crude.
The East-West pipeline was Saudi Arabia’s workaround when the war in Iran effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz. Stretching from Abqaiq in the east to the Red Sea oil terminal of Yanbu in the west, the pipeline bypasses the strait entirely. Oil could be transported through the Bab al-Mandab Strait on the southern end of the Red Sea or via the Suez Canal and a pipeline across Egypt at the northern end of the sea, headed primarily to customers in Asia.
Ship traffic in the Strait of Hormuz is a fraction of what it was before the war, when about 130 vessels moved through the waterway daily. An average of approximately 20 ships a day have passed through the strait over the past week, according to Kpler.
Yasir O. Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of Aramco, said in June that engineers had expanded the pipeline’s capacity to carry up to seven million barrels per day, nearly 30 percent more than before the war.
We had a similar situation back in the ’80s, where the Strait of Hormuz was threatened to be blockaded by the Iranian regime,” Mr. Al-Rumayyan said. “It was decided since then that we will have a pipeline from east to west.”
With the Houthis now largely in control of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, Saudi Arabia is once again steering vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, analysts said. Since Sept. 7, just two Saudi vessels have traveled through the Red Sea, according to Kpler.
The U.S. Navy has been able to keep some oil flowing out of the Strait of Hormuz on sea paths close to the coast of Oman, the opposite side from Iran. But those efforts have required an extensive and dangerous operation.
Capital Economics, an economic research firm, said that every week the East-West pipeline is closed, while the Strait of Hormuz is off limits, will shave at least 0.2 percent off Saudi Arabia’s economic activity.
The officer, a Customs and Border Protection agent at a Chicago airport, was accused of assaulting and threatening four women, all of Chinese descent, at hotel rooms in 2022.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer was found guilty on Thursday of sexually assaulting, robbing and threatening four women with a gun at hotels in the Chicago area in 2022.
After a nearly two-week trial, a federal jury in Illinois convicted the officer, Luis Uribe, on all charges, including 10 counts of deprivation of rights and one count of brandishing a firearm.
According to prosecutors, on at least six occasions between February and October 2022 in Schaumburg and Naperville, Ill., Mr. Uribe, who worked at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago at the time, entered the hotel rooms of four women, brandished his badge and threatened them with a firearm issued by Customs and Border Protection.
Mr. Uribe robbed each of the women, who were all of Chinese descent, sexually assaulted two of them and tried to sexually assault the two others, said a spokesman from the U.S. attorney’s office in the Northern District of Illinois. At least two of the women said they were working as prostitutes at the time.
During trial, Mr. Uribe’s lawyers acknowledged that he had visited prostitutes, according to The Chicago Tribune. But they argued that the accusations were false and that the women, who had sought Mr. Uribe’s help with immigration matters, had set him up. Mr. Uribe said from the stand, “I never robbed anybody in my whole life,” and urged that the relations he had with the women were consensual.
Mr. Uribe’s lawyers could not immediately be reached for comment on Thursday.
The verdict came after a federal grand jury indicted Mr. Uribe in December 2025 on the same charges. He was arrested that month and placed in detention, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Mr. Uribe’s lawyers tried to get the indictment thrown out, arguing in a motion that the grand jury had been “irreparably tainted” by the misconduct of the prosecutors, including one who “had inappropriate familiarity with grand jurors.” But the judge denied the motion, allowing Mr. Uribe’s trial to proceed.
Mr. Uribe, 45, is a former Marine who has worked for the federal government since 2009, court documents said. He has no history of addiction to alcohol or controlled substances and no mental health issues, the documents said. Mr. Uribe is still employed by Customs and Border Protection, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
“C.B.P. takes all allegations of employee misconduct seriously,” a Customs and Border Protection spokesman said in a statement on Thursday, adding that the agency is committed to “ensuring that all employees are held to the highest standards of integrity, professionalism and personal conduct.”
Prosecutors said that Mr. Uribe had followed some of the women to their hotel rooms and forced his way in. In one instance, Mr. Uribe threatened a woman, who had moved hotels to avoid him, with a knife and tried to assault her, but was interrupted by a knock at the door, court records show.
According to the court records, in early 2022, a fifth woman, who said she worked as a prostitute, was asked by her boss to meet with Mr. Uribe and take a photo of him to distribute to others as word of his abuse spread. She was also told get Mr. Uribe to agree to stop attacking the women in exchange for free sexual relations. But Mr. Uribe “did not abide by the terms of the bargain,” the documents said.
Mr. Uribe is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 21, 2027. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison and a minimum of seven years.
Christian Castro, the agent charged in the shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant in January, faces felony charges in state and federal courts. He was released from jail a day after his arrest.
An immigration officer who spent months fighting extradition to Minnesota to face charges stemming from a shooting appeared before a judge in Minneapolis on Thursday after spending a night in the county jail.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, Christian Castro, 52, was arrested Wednesday afternoon in Minneapolis after he drove from his South Texas hometown to Minnesota, where he faces felony charges in state and federal courts.
Appearing in court wearing handcuffs and an orange jail uniform, Mr. Castro agreed to waive the right to fight extradition from Texas as part of a series of conditions for his release pending trial.
Hennepin County District Judge Paul R. Scoggin set bail at $200,000 and prohibited Mr. Castro from possessing firearms and from having contact with victims and witnesses in the case. Mr. Castro also agreed to wear an electronic monitoring device.
Mr. Castro made no substantive remarks in the hearing, which he watched from an enclosed cubicle for detained defendants and spoke through a glass panel. He was released from jail on Thursday evening, according to a jail roster.
“Our commitment to accountability for Mr. Castro will be as strong as it has been from the beginning,” Mary Moriarty, the elected county prosecutor in Minneapolis, told reporters after the hearing.
The cases against Mr. Castro stem from a shooting on Jan. 14 that injured Julio Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant.
Prosecutors have said that after a person Mr. Castro was trying to detain led him on a high-speed chase through snowy streets, he fired a bullet through the closed front door of a Minneapolis duplex.
Shortly after the shooting, Mr. Castro falsely claimed that he had acted in self-defense after enduring a minutes-long attack with a shovel and a broomstick, according to state and federal investigators.
His account initially led federal prosecutors to charge Mr. Sosa-Celis and his roommate with assaulting a federal officer. The case unraveled after investigators watched a video of the incident that they said made Mr. Castro’s account implausible.
Daniel L. Gerdts, Mr. Castro’s lawyer, said after Thursday’s hearing that his client had intended to enter a not guilty plea in the state case. On Friday morning, he pleaded not guilty to the federal charges during a brief court hearing in St. Paul. Efforts to reach Mr. Castro for comment were unsuccessful.
Joshua Larson, the county prosecutor handling the case, asked Judge Scoggin to set a higher bail amount, arguing that state investigators have reason to believe Mr. Castro has mulled plans to travel to Mexico, where he has a romantic partner.
Mr. Gerdts said his client intended to attend future court hearings. “If he wanted to flee, he would have done that a long time ago,” he told the judge.
Mr. Castro faces four counts of felony assault with a dangerous weapon in the state case, a crime that carries a mandatory minimum three-year prison term.
That case led to a rare legal fight between Minnesota and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, after Mr. Abbott refused to honor a request to extradite Mr. Castro. As the extradition fight played out, Mr. Castro spent three months in jail in Texas, but he was released in late August.
Early this month, a federal grand jury indicted Mr. Castro on six counts of making false statements about the Jan. 14 encounter. After federal officials detained Mr. Castro on the federal charges, he agreed to travel to Minnesota for court hearings.
The federal case was a rare instance of the Trump administration’s seeking to hold an ICE agent accountable for on-duty misconduct. Mr. Castro is scheduled to appear in federal court in St. Paul, Minn., on Friday morning for a preliminary hearing.
The state case is being closely watched as local prosecutors across the country consider criminal charges against other immigration agents who participated in the Trump administration’s mass deportation push.
State prosecutors face formidable challenges in Mr. Castro’s case because federal officials have broad immunity from prosecution for on-duty conduct.
Ms. Moriarty, the county prosecutor, said she expected that Mr. Castro would seek to move the state case to federal court under a seldom-used mechanism for cases involving defendants who are federal government employees.
If that happens, Mr. Castro would face trial in federal court, under Minnesota statutes.
The European Union’s invitation to Canada on Wednesday to become an “associate member” of the bloc shows how intent traditional United States allies are on pursuing a more stable future by binding closer together, a move President Trump said could be perceived as “a hostile act.”
As if to confirm the deep concerns that pushed them closer, Mr. Trump threatened retribution.
“If Europe does that, with a bad intention — if it’s a good intention, that’s fine — if it’s bad intention we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe, which is a possibility,” he told reporters in North Carolina before a rally.
Hours earlier, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, told the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, “We must urgently reimagine our partnerships.” A beaming Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada sat beside her.
While details of what this relationship might look like remain scant, Ms. von der Leyen noted some potential areas of cooperation, including partnerships in manufacturing, technology, defense, energy policy and economic security.
This would not be “a partnership against anyone else,” she insisted, “but for our common strength.”
Mr. Carney’s office also said on Wednesday that Canada had formally applied to join the Joint Expeditionary Force, a British-led military coalition of 10 North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, seven of which are also part of the European Union.
European officials said that, in the lead-up to the speech on Wednesday, the bloc wanted to ensure that Mr. Trump did not see this new partnership with Canada as an anti-American move.
Still, if it isn’t precisely against the United States, then it’s unmistakably about it.
“Behind this is a desire to hedge against what for both partners is an increasingly fraught relationship with the United States,” said Ian Lesser, a distinguished fellow of the German Marshall Fund, based in Brussels.
“But it’s not just that it’s fraught,” he added. “It’s the most important geoeconomic and geopolitical relationship for both Europe and for Canada.”
Symbolism matters
For Mr. Carney, the invitation is both timely and symbolically important. He has decided to stand up to Mr. Trump, who has imposed tariffs on Canada and regularly threatens its sovereignty.
Mr. Carney has been pushing for Canada to get greater access to the European Union — its territory, its market, its funds and programs — without becoming a full member of the bloc.
He has found an enthusiastic partner in Ms. von der Leyen, who has painted Canada as a dependable source for Europe’s needs for energy and critical raw materials, as well as a steadfast ally that shares NATO membership, support for Ukraine and a commitment to the rule of law. Ms. von der Leyen does not represent the European Union’s 27 countries, but she sets the bloc’s agenda and commands its mighty bureaucracy.
The tie-up seems to make sense amid global turbulence and a shifting role for the United States. Between them, the European Union’s 27 members and Canada have more than 490 million citizens and include four of the world’s 10 largest economies.
What’s in a name?
The European Union is underpinned by dense, deep legal and procedural rules, built over decades by a group of nations that ceded sovereignty to one another, and to an unelected executive branch in Brussels.
Inserting a country an ocean away deeper into this web is not a straightforward business.
The label the European Union wants to confer on Canada, “associate member,” is not an existing type of partnership — meaning it is unclear what actions Canada would have to take to earn it, or for it to be given.
“It has no legal basis,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group. “It’s more symbolism and signal,” he added.
Ms. von der Leyen was taking a risk using the term, which had been floating for weeks ahead of her speech, and drew consternation from several member states, according to European officials.
It is seen as vague, untethered from legal frameworks and potentially antagonistic toward countries that already have detailed legal agreements with the European Union. These range from candidate nations such as Albania to close partners including Britain, Switzerland and Norway. Those countries have deep trade ties to the bloc and, in the case of Switzerland and Norway, have free movement into and out of other European nations.
Some Canadian officials do not appear to love the term, either, as membership in the European Union implies forfeiting some sovereignty, which is the opposite of what Mr. Carney has pledged to do. The Conservative opposition leader seized on the term, arguing that if Canada was never to be the 51st state of the United States, it should also not become the 28th member state of the European Union.
“There’s a lot of good will, but once one starts to look just a little bit closer, one also finds that many Europeans really don’t know Canada all that well, and they maybe aren’t fully taking on board Canada’s own sensitivities to sovereignty,” Mr. Lesser said.
Hours after Ms. von der Leyen spoke on Wednesday, the incoming Canadian ambassador to the European Union said that labels did not matter — but suggested that Canada preferred “alliance for the future” to describe the emerging new bond with the European Union. That phrase also appeared in Ms. von der Leyen’s speech.
“I think we’re still a ways away from actually landing on what we think the best way to describe it is,” Jonathan Wilkinson said.
Three European diplomats said that the title “associate member” may not stick.
Old World problems?
Officials from both sides are working to find tangible progress that they hope to announce at a European Union-Canada summit scheduled to take place in Montreal at the end of October.
Two officials, one from the European Union and one from Canada, with knowledge of the talks, said that officials were trying hard to reach that goal, but that work had been slow and difficult, in part because it is highly technical.
Just how hard it can be to get the European Union to agree on anything has been displayed frequently over the years. For example, talks over a trade agreement with Mercosur, the South American bloc, lasted a quarter century.
Canada has its own experience with these E.U. rigidities — and has some of its own. Its free-trade agreement with the bloc, in effect in practice for a decade, has still not been ratified by 10 of the 27 member states, for various reasons.
Canada already participates in a handful of E.U. ventures, including Horizon, a technology and innovation research effort, and SAFE, a defense industrial program. It had to pay $100 million to participate in Horizon, and other E.U. programs will likely require Canada to contribute to a budget.
Big ideas
Another immediate benefit for Canada from closer ties to Europe may be securing funding from the European Investment Bank. The major development bank, owned by E.U. member states and with more than $630 billion in assets, is eager and ready to invest in Canadian projects, particularly in critical raw materials, and its leader is heading to Ottawa on Sunday to advance talks with the Canadian government.
The bank is ready to start work in Canada, a European official with knowledge of the preparations said, but needed Ottawa to approve certain administrative formalities, such as allowing E.U. diplomats to work there.
Some of the ideas being discussed ahead of the October summit show the ambitious scope of the Canada-E.U. future relationship.
For example, officials said, Mr. Carney wants the bloc to work with Canada to build systems for payments and cloud computing that will offer an alternative to those of the United States in a bid to secure sovereignty.
Discussions have also been underway on a digital trade agreement, which could deepen cooperation on cybersecurity and regulatory cooperation.
Talks are more advanced to bring Canadian regulations in line with European ones in energy, including the monitoring, reporting and evaluation system used by the bloc to track methane emissions from vessels fueled by liquefied natural gas, as well as gas imports entering the European Union market. This is a necessity if Canada is going to export gas to the European Union.
Another area where Canada is particularly eager to see movement is the ability of its citizens to spend longer stretches of time in the European Union visa-free, have their professional qualifications recognized there and be able to study in European universities.
Because these policy areas hinge on complex and politically fraught immigration rules, major breakthroughs could be difficult. Additionally, any agreement improving Canadians’ access to Europe would require reciprocity, meaning that it would grant the same access to Canada for 450 million Europeans.
Some European diplomats have suggested that Erasmus — Europe’s popular student exchange program — could be an easier starting point for collaboration.
