| The tensions surrounding President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportations hasn’t abated. Thousands of troops are deployed in and near Los Angeles. Protests are spreading to other cities, with Trump threatening to confront protesters, violent or otherwise, this weekend during the military parade in D.C. and “No Kings” protests. A California senator was pushed to the ground and handcuffed in California when he tried to interrupt Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem at a news conference. In New Jersey, a Democratic congresswoman was indicted for allegedly interfering with police at an immigration protest where no one was injured. Overnight Thursday, a legal battle raged over Trump’s deployment of troops to California: A federal judge said Trump illegally sent the National Guard and must return soldiers’ control to California’s governor. Then an appeals court gave control back to Trump for now. Trump is skilled at drawing the nation’s attention where he wants it to go. So what else happened this week while everyone was focused on L.A.? Kennedy replaces the nation’s vaccine board with vaccine skeptics This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did what public health experts feared he might do: He fired the entire panel of medical professionals who determine which vaccines to recommend and replaced them with several vaccine skeptics, including someone who called for mass infection of covid. Staff that provides the panel with research has been pushed aside too, The Washington Post reports. Kennedy recently dropped recommendations for coronavirus vaccines for most babies, kids and pregnant women. But a few days later, in an extraordinary contradiction of its leader, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continued its covid vaccination recommendations. The government can’t ban vaccines, but they can make vaccines easier or more difficult to get ahold of. Insurance is required to cover what officials recommend. And more broadly, public health experts worry this will undermine trust in vaccines, right as the nation is experiencing one of the worst measles outbreaks in decades. “I’ve never seen such an anti-health agenda,” Alexandra Phelan, an expert in global health law and a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security, said in an interview earlier this year. “It’s an agenda that is intent on threatening the health of Americans.” The Trump administration slashed pollution rules for power plants Describing efforts to fight planet-warming emissions as a “cult,” the nation’s top environmental official undid limits on greenhouse gases from power plants. Experts said it’s a major blow to fighting climate change as the world warms to dangerous levels and fuels more extreme weather. “Power plants are the second largest source of carbon dioxide emissions after transportation in the United States,” reports The Post’s Jake Spring, “and loosening the toxics rules probably would lead to more cases of cancer, brain damage and birth defects.” Trump has launched what environmental experts describe as an all-out war on efforts to fight climate change, rolling back standards limiting “forever chemicals” in water and going so far as to try to stop states like California from making their own policies to limit emissions. “If we are not working in the direction of addressing it, then we’re in trouble,” Jody Freeman, who was an energy lawyer in President Barack Obama’s administration and founded Harvard University’s environment and energy law program, told me recently. The federal government keeps losing experts Hundreds of disease control experts who study HIV, environmental health and even antibiotic-resistant sexually transmitted diseases have been asked to come back to work for the government after being fired recently. The Post’s Lena H. Sun reports it’s not clear how many will actually return. “They fired me at 5 a.m., with no warning, and now they want me back? These people are jerks,” one laid-off scientists told Lena. The entire 12-person board tasked with overseeing the State Department’s Fulbright Program resigned this week, claiming political interference from the Trump administration to let foreign scholars study in America. Over the past few months, scientists ranging from astrophysicists to cancer researchers have started looking for jobs abroad as the government’s support for research virtually ends. Trump is planning to send thousands of migrants to Guantánamo One of several logistical problems with Trump’s mass deportation plan is where to hold migrants after they are arrested and before they are deported. The administration is making plans to repurpose the notorious prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a place to send thousands of immigrants, The Post reported this week. Sending migrants there is particularly startling because the plans include shipping immigrants from U.S. allies like Britain and Italy, The Post’s John Hudson and Alex Horton report, to a military facility that “became a global symbol of torture and abuse” as it held suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The move comes as the Trump administration appears to be ramping up deportations, arresting people in their workplaces and in their communities while they are generally living their lives — something that hasn’t happened at scale in modern America. It’s a scale that could have a huge impact on the economy as well, as businesses across the country lose hundreds of workers at a time. Trump appeared torn this week about whether to stop raiding farms and other parts of the agricultural industry, The Post reported. Trump declared an ability to abolish national monuments The Trump administration appears to be laying the groundwork to allow for drilling on millions of acres of public land that are currently protected as national monuments. This week, the Department of Justice released a legal opinion declaring that Trump can abolish national monuments that previous presidents created. The Post’s Spring reports the aim is to free up more land for oil drilling and mining. This will likely be litigated in court, and Spring reports it’s unclear what might happen. | 
