Monday, February 16, 2026
Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts
Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts
“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by sending subpoenas to tech companies for information on social media accounts that criticize or track ICE. Companies like Google, Meta, and Reddit have received hundreds of subpoenas, some of which they complied with, while others notified the account holders to challenge the subpoenas in court. The DHS argues it needs this information to protect ICE agents, but critics argue it infringes on free speech and privacy rights.
The department has sent Google, Meta and other companies hundreds of subpoenas for information on accounts that track or comment on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, officials and tech workers said.
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The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.
In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said. In the subpoenas, the department asked the companies for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. The New York Times saw two subpoenas that were sent to Meta over the last six months.
The tech companies, which can choose whether or not to provide the information, have said they review government requests before complying. Some of the companies notified the people whom the government had requested data on and gave them 10 to 14 days to fight the subpoena in court.
“The government is taking more liberties than they used to,” said Steve Loney, a senior supervising attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. “It’s a whole other level of frequency and lack of accountability.” Over the last six months, Mr. Loney has represented people whose social media account information was sought by the Department of Homeland Security.
The department said it had “broad administrative subpoena authority” but did not address questions about its requests. In court, its lawyers have argued that they are seeking information to help keep ICE agents in the field safe.
What you should know. The Times makes a careful decision any time it uses an anonymous source. The information the source supplies must be newsworthy and give readers genuine insight.
Meta, Reddit and Discord declined to comment.
“When we receive a subpoena, our review process is designed to protect user privacy while meeting our legal obligations,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement. “We inform users when their accounts have been subpoenaed, unless under legal order not to or in an exceptional circumstance. We review every legal demand and push back against those that are overbroad.”
The Trump administration has aggressively tried tamping down criticism of ICE, partly by identifying Americans who have demonstrated against the agency. ICE agents told protesters in Minneapolis and Chicago that they were being recorded and identified with facial recognition technology. Last month, Tom Homan, the White House border czar, also said on Fox News that he was pushing to “create a database” of people who were “arrested for interference, impeding and assault.”
Silicon Valley has long had an uneasy relationship with the federal government and how much user information to provide it. Transparency reports published by tech companies show that the number of requests for user information from different governments around the world has climbed over the years, with the United States and India among those submitting the most.
Some social media companies previously fought government requests for user information. In 2017, Twitter (now X) sued the federal government to stop an administrative subpoena that asked it to unmask an account critical of the first Trump administration. The subpoena was later withdrawn.
Unlike arrest warrants, which require a judge’s approval, administrative subpoenas are issued by the Department of Homeland Security. They were only sparingly used in the past, primarily to uncover the people behind social media accounts engaged in serious crimes such as child trafficking, said tech employees familiar with the legal tool. But last year, the department ramped up its use of the subpoenas to unmask anonymous social media accounts.
In September, for example, it sent Meta administrative subpoenas to identify the people behind Instagram accounts that posted about ICE raids in California, according to the A.C.L.U. The subpoenas were challenged in court, and the Department of Homeland Security withdrew the requests for information before a judge could rule.
Mr. Loney of the A.C.L.U. said avoiding a judge’s ruling was important for the department to keep issuing the subpoenas without a legal order to stop. “The pressure is on the end user, the private individual, to go to court,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security also sought more information on the Facebook and Instagram accounts dedicated to tracking ICE activity in Montgomery County, Pa., outside Philadelphia. The accounts, called Montco Community Watch, began posting in Spanish and English about ICE sightings in June and, over the next six months, solicited tips from their roughly 10,000 followers to alert people to the locations of agents on specific streets or in front of local landmarks.
On Sept. 11, the Department of Homeland Security sent Meta a request for the name, email address, post code and other identifying information of the person or people behind the accounts. Meta informed the two Instagram and Facebook accounts of the request on Oct. 3.
“We have received legal process from law enforcement seeking information about your Facebook account,” the notification said, according to court records. “If we do not receive a copy of documentation that you have filed in court challenging this legal process within ten (10) days, we will respond to the requesting agency with information.”
The account owner alerted the A.C.L.U., which filed a motion on Oct. 16 to quash the government’s request. In a hearing on Jan. 14 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the A.C.L.U. argued that the government was using administrative subpoenas to target people whose speech it did not agree with.
Sarah Balkissoon, a Department of Justice lawyer representing the government, said the Department of Homeland Security’s position was that it was “within their power to investigate threats to its own officers or impediments to their officers,” according to a court transcript viewed by The Times.
Two days later, the subpoena was withdrawn.
The Montco Community Watch accounts continue to post almost every day. The Times emailed a request for comment to the address associated with the accounts but did not receive a reply.
On Monday, the Instagram account posted an alert for ICE activity in the Eagleville area of Montgomery County. “Montco ICE alert,” the post said. “This is confirmed ICE activity.”
On Friday, the account posted a video of students at Norristown Area High School protesting against ICE. “We stand with you and are proud you made your voices heard!” the post said.
Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp.
Mike Isaac is The Times’s Silicon Valley correspondent, based in San Francisco. He covers the world’s most consequential tech companies, and how they shape culture both online and offline.“
With Latest Rollback, the U.S. Essentially Has No Clean-Car Rules
With Latest Rollback, the U.S. Essentially Has No Clean-Car Rules
“The Trump administration’s elimination of the “endangerment finding” effectively removes the U.S. government’s legal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars. This move, part of a yearlong deregulation effort, leaves the U.S. without meaningful fuel efficiency standards, potentially increasing emissions by 10% over 30 years. While automakers may benefit from reduced regulations, experts warn this could isolate them from the global shift towards electric vehicles.
The E.P.A.’s killing of the “endangerment finding” caps a year of deregulation that is likely to make cars thirstier for gas and less competitive globally, experts say.
The momentous end to the federal government’s legal authority to fight climate change makes it official.
The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.
That’s the practical result of the Trump administration’s yearlong parade of regulatory rollbacks, capped on Thursday by its killing of the “endangerment finding,” the scientific determination that required the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases because of the threat to human health.
“The U.S. no longer has emission standards of any meaning,” said Margo T. Oge, who served as the E.P.A.’s top vehicle emissions regulator under three presidents and has since advised both automakers and environmental groups.
“Nothing. Zero,” she added. “Not many countries have zero.”
Transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases in the United States.
Car buyers could still vote with their wallets, demanding more fuel-efficient cars. California has vowed to sue to maintain stricter standards. And the Department of Transportation still regulates fuel economy under rules meant to conserve oil.
But last year, the Trump administration proposed weakening the fuel economy standards to largely irrelevant levels. The Republican-controlled Congress also set civil penalties for violations at $0, essentially making them voluntary for automakers. In addition, Congress last year blocked California’s clean-car rules.
The bottom line is that the United States is set to stand apart from a majority of the world’s industrialized nations, which have mandatory fuel economy or greenhouse gas tailpipe emissions rules. The E.P.A. still regulates tailpipe emissions of specific pollutants, like nitrogen oxides.
The Biden administration had sought to tighten limits on emissions to encourage automakers to sell more nonpolluting electric vehicles.
The Trump administration’s elimination of the endangerment finding on Thursday is expected to face fierce legal challenges from environmental groups and others. The endangerment finding was a 2009 scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to Americans’ health and welfare. It provided the foundation to justify federal regulations that limit carbon dioxide, methane and other pollution, including from cars.
If the E.P.A.’s decision holds, it could increase the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent over the next 30 years, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group.
Greenhouse emissions are the main driver of global climate change, which in turn is intensifying heat waves, drought, hurricanes and floods while also melting glaciers, causing sea levels to rise.
Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, called the end of the finding “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” He accused Democrats of having launched an “ideological crusade” on climate change that had “strangled entire sectors of the United States economy,” particularly the auto industry, which has struggled to sell electric vehicles.
Climate concerns aside, it’s unclear whether the U.S. auto industry will ultimately benefit from the elimination of emissions and fuel efficiency regulations. The move could leave American automakers even more dominated by gas-guzzling trucks and sport utility vehicles, experts said, as China and other nations continue to shift toward cleaner electric cars.
That could leave them at a competitive disadvantage in coming years. “Our automakers are not going to survive,” Ms. Oge predicted.
John Bozzella, the president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents automakers in the United States, has declined to say whether he supports the end of the endangerment finding. But he said in a statement that the move would “correct some of the unachievable emissions regulations enacted under the previous administration.”
Mr. Trump has swung back and forth on his opinion of electric vehicles. During the 2024 presidential campaign, he said electric cars would “kill” America’s auto industry. But he appeared to at least temporarily soften his stance at the urging of Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and his one-time close adviser. In March, he said he would buy a Tesla.
“Globally, the push is in exactly the opposite direction, in the direction of electrifying vehicles,” said Ann Carlson, a professor at U.C.L.A. School of Law who served under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Transportation Department agency that sets fuel efficiency standards.
But now, “they’re saying no standards whatsoever,” she said.
For 17 years, the E.P.A. worked in tandem with the Department of Transportation, with the E.P.A. regulating carbon dioxide emissions (to protect health) and the Transportation Department governing how much fuel a car can burn (to conserve fuel).
The endangerment finding had allowed the E.P.A. in recent years to push standards more aggressively than possible using fuel-economy rules alone, setting targets so low they would eventually have become virtually impossible for gasoline engines to meet. The E.P.A. also had the authority, for example, to issue stop-sale orders if an automaker failed to meet standards, preventing them from selling certain cars until the issue was resolved.
The first Trump administration had moved to weaken both the tailpipe emissions and fuel economy standards. Mr. Biden had then reversed course, strengthening them. But now that the second Trump administration has eliminated the E.P.A.’s underlying authority to regulate greenhouse gases, another reversal by a future administration could be more difficult.
“Even if a new administration came in and was inclined to regulate greenhouse gasses, it would take years to reissue and defend the endangerment finding,” Professor Carlson said. “And in the meantime, they would have no authority to write any new greenhouse gas regulations.”
The remaining rules, such as the fuel efficiency requirements, could also be weakened. In December, the Trump administration proposed resetting the Transportation Department standard to require automakers to achieve an average of 34.5 miles per gallon for the full lineup of cars they sell by 2031. The Biden-era target was closer to 50 miles per gallon.
Those new standards would be less stringent than those in the European Union, as well as those of countries like China, Japan and India. Congress’s separate decision to eliminate fines for failure to comply with efficiency standards also makes the rules voluntary, saving automakers significant compliance costs.
Any resulting shift by American automakers toward gas guzzlers that can’t be sold in Europe or China could further isolate the U.S. market. And the United States would increasingly cede the future of automotive technology to Chinese electric vehicle giants like BYD, experts said.
“We’re an outlier now,” said Joshua Linn, a professor at the University of Maryland who studies environmental policies and the transportation sector. “Those larger trucks and S.U.V.s tend to make them more money,” he said. “But if they want to compete in Europe or East Asia, they really need to be able to produce these E.V.s.”
A divergence in tailpipe emissions rules could emerge domestically. California has promised a court challenge, saying the state would fight to continue to regulate greenhouse gases. Other states are expected to follow California’s lead.
“To have a patchwork of systems makes it really hard for companies that do business in 50 states,” let alone in other countries, said Anne L. Kelly, the vice president of government relations at Ceres, an advocacy group that works with businesses on their sustainability plans. “There is no world in which this is helpful for the auto industry.”
Matthew Beecham, a senior research analyst at S&P Global Mobility, an automotive company, said that given the uncertainties, automakers were likely to hedge their bets. They might expand their gasoline car lineups, he said, but most likely would not abandon electrification completely.
And despite no penalties for violating the remaining fuel economy standards, there was unlikely to be “wholesale lawbreaking,” he said, because state rules and investor scrutiny could keep companies in check. “Expect tactical shifts toward profitable trucks, not open defiance,” he added.
Still, a shift toward larger gasoline models could ultimately undermine their competitiveness in an intensifying global E.V. race. Carmakers around the world are scrambling to secure enough E.V. batteries, for example, and that race penalizes laggards, he said.
While the E.P.A. continues to regulate pollutants like nitrogen oxides that pose direct threats to human health, it is now also seeking to weaken those rules.
Aaron Szabo, the E.P.A.’s air quality chief, wrote in an opinion article published by The Hill in December that rolling back those rules would “reduce red tape and bring common sense back to rulemaking.” The move to roll back regulations increases choice and lowers the price of cars, he said.
But vehicles that burn more fuel cost car owners more at the pump, said Daniel Becker, the director of the Safe Climate Transport Campaign at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, in addition to the costs to the climate, public health and industrial competitiveness.
The Trump administration “is telling American manufacturers, ‘You guys go build gasoline cars again,’” he said. “The Chinese government is telling its manufacturers, ‘You go build the advanced vehicles that are going take over the world.’”
Maxine Joselow contributed reporting from Washington.
Hiroko Tabuchi covers pollution and the environment for The Times. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years in Tokyo and New York.“
Sunday, February 15, 2026
Opinion | The Depravity of Trump’s Immigrant Detention - The New York Times
This Is Much Worse Than Mere Detention
"You’re reading the Jamelle Bouie newsletter. Historical context for present-day events.
Writing about a recent ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that affirmed the Trump administration’s policy of mandatory and indefinite detention for immigrants held by either ICE or Customs and Border Protection, my colleague David French makes a point that bears repeating:
There are thousands upon thousands of immigrants facing brutal conditions who’ve been convicted of no crime and haven’t even been accused of a crime beyond their initial alleged illegal entry.
People who have lost legal status because they have overstayed their visas, he also notes, “aren’t guilty of any crime at all, since their original entry is lawful.” And even illegal entry is “a misdemeanor for a first offense.”
Immigration detention is not a criminal procedure. And yet the Trump administration is treating it as a criminal punishment. It is using detention to inflict pain on anyone — immigrant or citizen — caught in its grasp. It is subjecting detainees to horrific conditions of deprivation and abuse, meant to pressure people into leaving the country, even if they have valid asylum claims or even legal status. And the administration is trying to expand its system of internment camps, purchasing warehouses across the country meant to hold tens of thousands of people — an archipelago custom-ordered by America’s most famous real estate developer, Donald Trump.
It would not be an exaggeration to call these “concentration” camps. “A concentration camp exists wherever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process — sometimes to segregate people considered foreigners or outsiders, sometimes to punish,” Andrea Pitzer writes in “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.” Conditions within the administration’s detention facilities certainly meet the bill.
Here’s how a Russian family described its four-month ordeal at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in an interview with NBC News:
“Worms in their food. Guards shouting orders and snatching toys from small hands. Restless nights under fluorescent lights that never fully go dark. Hours in line for a single pill. “We left one tyranny and came to another kind of tyranny,” Nikita said in Russian. “Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this.”
Or consider this ProPublica exposé of the same facility, focused on the children who have been caught in the administration’s immigration dragnet.
Kheilin Valero from Venezuela, who was being held with her 18-month-old, Amalia Arrieta, said shortly after they were detained following an ICE appointment on Dec. 11 in El Paso, Texas, the baby fell ill. For two weeks, she said, medical staff gave her ibuprofen and eventually antibiotics, but Amalia’s breathing worsened to the point that she was hospitalized in San Antonio for 10 days. She was diagnosed with Covid-19 and RSV. “Because she went so many days without treatment, and because it’s so cold here, she developed pneumonia and bronchitis,” Kheilin said. “She was malnourished, too, because she was vomiting everything.”
A recent report from the American Immigration Council notes that one man who suffered a medical incident at the so-called Alligator Alcatraz facility in Florida was denied pain medication and forced to sit for hours in “in blood and feces-soaked clothing.” The rapid expansion of the detention system — along with the administration’s clear indifference to the health and safety of detainees — will almost certainly lead to continued and worsening abuse of the people held in these facilities.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, I asked readers to think seriously about Trump’s plan to remove millions of people from the United States:
Now, imagine the conditions that might prevail for hundreds of thousands of people crammed into hastily constructed camps, the targets of a vicious campaign of demonization meant to build support for their detention and deportation. If undocumented immigrants really are, as Trump says, “poisoning the blood of our country,” then how do we respond? What do we do about poison? Well, we neutralize it.
What we see now, with the immigration dragnets in American cities and the horrific conditions in the administration’s detention facilities, is what the president promised in his campaign. He said he was going to punish immigrants for being immigrants, and here he is, punishing immigrants for being immigrants, with every tool he has at his disposal."
Saturday, February 14, 2026
Friday, February 13, 2026
Thursday, February 12, 2026
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Opinion | Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show - The New York Times
Which Bad Bunny Halftime Show Did You See?
By Petra R. Rivera-Rideau and Vanessa DÃaz
"Drs. Rivera-Rideau and DÃaz are the authors of “P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance.”
Bad Bunny made history at the Super Bowl on Sunday, giving voice to Puerto Rican history and culture, and doing so in Spanish at a time when that alone could get you picked up by masked immigration agents. Though Bad Bunny did not yell “ICE out” or otherwise call out the Trump administration directly, his performance was unapologetically political.
And you know what? It was a party, too, complete with live salsa, perreo dancing and even a wedding. You didn’t have to understand Spanish or know anything of what he was talking about to enjoy it. But if you do speak Spanish, it was so much more.
We knew he would probably use the show to make a statement, but even we weren’t prepared for the emotional roller coaster Bad Bunny, a.k.a. Benito Antonio MartÃnez Ocasio, took us on. It felt subversive to see this display of joy, pride and resistance. It often felt as though there were two different shows unfolding — one for America and one for América.
His 13-minute set opened with a man dressed in white, guitar in hand and wearing a pava, the classic straw hat worn by the Puerto Rican jÃbaro, or small farmer, a contradictory symbol who is the embodiment of Puerto Rican national culture. “Que rico es ser Latino,” he said, holding his guitar. “How wonderful it is to be Latino.” That line tugged on the heartstrings of Latinos, immigrants and others who, like Bad Bunny, have been told they don’t belong here.
At times Bad Bunny looked into the camera and spoke to us directly — in Spanish, telling us to believe in ourselves, that we are so much more than we think we are. He sang, “Este es P.R.” — “This is P.R.” — and winked through the camera to those of us at home. And of course there were the white plastic chairsthat have come to symbolize the displacement addressed in his recent album and that sit in and on patios, porches and marquesinas, or carports, all over the Americas.
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People magazine described the performance as a “fun-filled dance party” that largely abandoned politics in favor of sexiness, joy and tropical flavor. A friend texted to say she was especially annoyed when one media outlet referred to the plants onstage as “shrubbery,” oblivious to how those sugar cane fields recalled a long history of chattel slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean.
During the set, Bad Bunny performed “El Apagón,” a searing critique of Puerto Rico’s failing electrical grid and the long legacy of colonialism behind it. The jÃbaros were recast as electrical workers, evoking the ingenuity of Puerto Ricans rebuilding after Hurricane Maria amid federal negligence. Where some viewers may have seen only electrical poles, we saw an acknowledgment of one of the most painful chapters in Puerto Rico’s recent history. And yet, the workers and Bad Bunny still danced, still partied, still lived.
Our friends in Los Angeles cheered when they saw the popular Villa’s Tacos stand, while those in Brooklyn lit up when Toñita of Williamsburg’s Caribbean Social Club handed Bad Bunny a drink. Nearly halfway through the show, the music stopped, and the camera cut to a real couple — two fans who had originally invited Bad Bunny to their wedding — being pronounced husband and wife during the performance.
In the reception scene that followed, the sight of a child dozing across the chairs reminded us of family parties and the endless waiting for our parents to call it a night. We saw ourselves in the little girl Bad Bunny spun around — memories of itchy puffy dresses at family gatherings, dancing with uncles, weaving between grown-ups to chase cousins. “Baila sin miedo, ama sin miedo,” Bad Bunny shouted. “Dance without fear. Love without fear.”
But there was more than feel-good nostalgia wrapped up in that halftime show. In one particularly poignant moment, Ricky Martin appeared sitting on a white chair in the Puerto Rican countryside to sing “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” one of Bad Bunny’s most explicit pro-independence anthems. In the song, Bad Bunny urges Puerto Ricans to hold onto their culture and their land in the face of gentrification and displacement.
Mr. Martin crossed over into the English-language market during the 1990s, helping usher in the Latin pop boom. To do so, he embodied many of the stereotypes associated with Latinos. Many likely remember him as the happy-go-lucky, hip-thrusting Latin lover who urged you to “shake your bon-bon.” Since then, he has come out as gay and become a vocal advocate for Puerto Rican sovereignty, joining Bad Bunny at the 2019 protests that led to the ouster of the governor at the time, Ricardo Rosselló.
In Mr. Martin’s autobiography, he wrote that he feared that acknowledging he was gay would ruin his career. He didn’t publicly come out until he was in his late 30s. As he sang, our minds flashed back to a scene moments earlier, where two male dancers grinded together as they stared at each other, sin miedo. It was a quiet yet defiant statement about queerness, visibility and Latin identity.
Bad Bunny showed us that when he said “We are Americans” at the Grammys, he wasn’t merely referring to citizenship status. He was challenging this country’s ever-narrowing definitions of who is — and is not — American.
Through a celebration of wedding, family, joy and community, he created a showcase in which many Latinos, especially Puerto Ricans, felt seen, heard and represented at every turn, with millions dancing along at home, even if they didn’t know exactly what was going on. He invited us all to join the party. And that might just be the biggest form of resistance for all.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 11, 2026, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Which Bad Bunny Performance Did You See?"
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
A Campaign to Revoke the Endangerment Finding Appears Near ‘Total Victory’ - The New York Times
Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation
"A small group of conservative activists has worked for 16 years to stop all government efforts to fight climate change. Their efforts seem poised to pay off.
In the summer of 2022, Democrats in Congress were racing to pass the biggest climate law in the country’s history and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declaring that global warming posed a “clear and present danger” to the United States.
But behind the scenes, four Trump administration veterans were plotting to obliterate federal climate efforts once Republicans regained control in Washington, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the matter.
Two of them, Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, were high-profile allies of Donald Trump. Mr. Vought, who has railed against “climate alarmism,” and Mr. Clark, who has called climate rules a “Leninistic” plot to seize control of the economy, drafted executive orders for the next Republican president to dismantle climate initiatives.
The other two, Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill, were lesser-known conservative attorneys with long histories of fighting climate initiatives. Ms. Gunasekara, a onetime aide to the most vocal global warming denialist in the Senate, and Mr. Brightbill, who had argued in court against Obama-era climate regulations, collected an “arsenal of information” to chip away at the scientific consensus that the planet is warming, documents show.
Their efforts are now paying off. In the coming days, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to revoke a determination that has underpinned the federal government’s ability to fight global warming since 2009.
That scientific conclusion, known as the endangerment finding, determined that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are supercharging storms, wildfires, drought, heat waves and sea level rise, and are therefore threatening public health and welfare. It required the federal government to regulate these gases, which result from the burning of oil, gas and coal.
In revoking that determination, the Trump administration would erase limits on greenhouse gases from cars, power plants and industries that generate the planet-warming pollution.
Unlike the swings in federal policy that have become routine when administrations change hands, getting rid of the endangerment finding could hamstring any future administration’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
“We are pretty close to total victory,” said Myron Ebell, who helped the first Trump administration set up its operations at the E.P.A. and has been attacking climate science and policies for nearly three decades.
Mr. Ebell said that dozens of conservative activists, lawyers, scientists and others had worked for years to prepare the case against the endangerment finding. But he singled out Mr. Vought, Mr. Clark, Mr. Brightbill and Ms. Gunasekara as the ones who drafted detailed plans of attack that the second Trump administration has largely followed.
“No amount of outside public support would have done anything if there hadn’t been those four people: Russ and Jeff and John and Mandy,” he said.
Funding an ‘Arsenal’
When the E.P.A. issued the endangerment finding under President Barack Obama, conservative groups and businesses immediately fought to dismantle it.
But as they lost legal challenges and public concern about global warming began to grow, many corporations withdrew from the battle. By 2017, when Mr. Trump first took office, hundreds of U.S. companies, including oil giants and major manufacturers, had accepted the reality of climate change.
Even Mr. Trump’s top advisers at the time rejected the most extreme demands of those who wanted to challenge the science. Days before Mr. Trump left office in January 2021, his E.P.A. denied a petition from Mr. Ebell’s group to reconsider the endangerment finding.
“There just wasn’t an appetite among any of the institutional crowd,” said Michael McKenna, who worked in the White House on energy issues during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Still, some conservative activists who insisted that the threat of climate change was overblown kept up the fight during the Biden years.
One of them was Ms. Gunasekara, who served as E.P.A. chief of staff during Mr. Trump’s first term and wrote the E.P.A. chapter in Project 2025, the set of conservative policy recommendations for a second Trump term. Another was Mr. Brightbill, a partner at the law firm Winston & Strawn who had served in the Justice Department’s environment division during the first Trump administration.
Ms. Gunasekara is known in Washington for handing a snowball to James M. Inhofe, then a Republican senator from Oklahoma and her boss, on a cold February day in 2015. Mr. Inhofe held up the snowball in the well of the Senate as evidence that the planet could not be warming dangerously.
Mr. Brightbill, for his part, had gained some attention for prosecuting the owners of the Oklahoma zoo featured in the Netflix documentary series “Tiger King.” But his main focus as a federal attorney had been defending the first Trump administration’s repeal of Obama-era climate rules, including a landmark regulation aimed at curbing greenhouse gases from power plant smokestacks.
In the summer of 2022, as Mr. Biden and Democratic lawmakers were ramping up their climate efforts, Ms. Gunasekara and Mr. Brightbill sought $2 million for a secretive campaign to kill the endangerment finding, according to a funding pitch obtained by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group that investigates the oil and gas industry.
The two wanted funding to draft regulatory documents that a future administration could use to abandon the endangerment finding. They also planned to solicit white papers from favored scientists who did not accept the physics of climate change.
The endangerment finding had helped Democrats wage a “war on fossil fuels,” Ms. Gunasekara and Mr. Brightbill wrote in the funding pitch. Conservatives needed a comprehensive strategy for reversing the finding on “Day 1” of the next Republican administration, they wrote.
The campaign would operate in secret “to prevent media and other conflicted sources from shaming participants and undercutting the work before it is done,” they added.
The Heritage Foundation eventually agreed to fund some of this work, although it is unclear whether the group provided the full $2 million, according to two people familiar with the matter. A spokesman for the Heritage Foundation, where Ms. Gunasekara was a visiting fellow from September 2022 to December 2024, did not respond to questions.
Ms. Gunasekara said in a text message that she was “extremely proud of the work I and others produced at the Heritage Foundation to rebut junk science and expose the Green New Scam.” She said her work for the group had helped inform “Cooling the Climate Hysteria,” a collection of essays by scholars who reject mainstream climate science. It features a melting ice cube on its cover.
Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, where Mr. Brightbill is now the general counsel, declined to make Mr. Brightbill available for an interview but said in an email, “Jonathan Brightbill brings a deep understanding of energy and environmental issues that make him exceptionally qualified for his role.”
Clinching ‘Total Victory’
While many conservatives lined up against the endangerment finding when it was established, Mr. Clark started to fight its core principles many years earlier.
In 2005, as a 38-year-old Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, Mr. Clark argued in federal court that the Clean Air Act did not give the E.P.A. the power to regulate greenhouse gases. The Supreme Court rejected that argument in a landmark 2007 case called Massachusetts v. E.P.A., clearing the way for the agency to issue the endangerment finding two years later.
It was a stinging defeat that Mr. Clark was determined to reverse, according to people familiar with the matter and his own remarks on podcasts, panels and other public forums.
His next opportunity came in 2022, when he joined a conservative research organization called the Center for Renewing America. Mr. Vought was running the center from an old rowhouse near the Capitol, where he complained of pigeons infesting the walls. From there, Mr. Vought drew up sweeping plans for a second Trump administration.
Under Mr. Vought’s supervision, Mr. Clark drafted executive orders that a future president could use to swiftly scrap Mr. Biden’s climate policies, according to two people familiar with the matter. He also brainstormed legal arguments that the future administration could use to repeal the endangerment finding, the people said.
Former colleagues of Mr. Clark’s said he was less concerned with reducing the costs to companies of complying with environmental laws than with fighting what he saw as government overreach in the form of climate policies.
Mr. Clark has called climate initiatives part of a plot to “control” Americans” and to undermine the U.S. economy. He has called environmentalists a “crazy climate cult” and compared them to the authoritarian pig characters in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Animal Farm.”
Mr. Clark is “an ideologue with very, very strong views that E.P.A. shouldn’t regulate greenhouse gases,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School and the author of the book “The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court,” in which Mr. Clark figures prominently.
“For the Russell Voughts, the Jeff Clarks, this has been a bee in their bonnet,” Mr. Lazarus said.
At the time that he was hired by Mr. Vought, Mr. Clark was facing a criminal investigation in connection with Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. President Trump preemptively pardoned Mr. Clark in November and the Georgia case was dismissed.
With Mr. Trump’s return to the White House last year, Mr. Clark became the government’s top regulatory official as the acting head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Mr. Vought is once again the White House budget director and Mr. Clark’s boss.
In their new roles, both men have focused on ridding the government of green initiatives. And Mr. Clark has pushed E.P.A. lawyers to strengthen their legal arguments for repealing the endangerment finding, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Allie McCandless, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, declined to make Mr. Clark available for an interview or respond to questions about his work. She said in a statement that Trump administration officials were “working in lock step to execute on the president’s deregulation agenda.”
Neil Chatterjee, a Republican who led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the first Trump administration, said conservative activists had helped sustain the fight against the endangerment finding even after businesses backed out.
“It’s not the corporate interests,” Mr. Chatterjee said, adding, “It’s the pure ideological activists who believe that climate change is a hoax, who believe that this was about transferring wealth and driving socialism and destroying renewable energy and promoting left-wing ideology.”
“This is their moment,” Mr. Chatterjee said.
Steven J. Milloy, a former Trump transition adviser who runs a website that promotes theories saying that climate change is not real, said the years of work of conservative activists might have gone nowhere if a different Republican had won the presidency. Instead, the activists found a receptive audience in Mr. Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and a “con job.”
The next challenge is to ensure the repeal of the endangerment finding holds up in court, he said.
“We’ve kept the skepticism alive,” Mr. Milloy said, adding, “I hope we don’t blow it. I don’t know when or if this opportunity will come around again.”
Coral Davenport contributed reporting.
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington."
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