In 2025 President Donald Trump vowed that for every new regulation implemented, his administration would undo 10 that were already in place. In practice it has been taking more than 100 deregulatory actions for every regulatory one. While some creative math has gone into the claims about the resulting cost savings, it is unequivocally true that Trump has been dismantling the federal government at a pace that far surpasses anything the nation has seen before.

“After four years of stifling overregulation and astonishing government weaponization, 2025 marked the first chapter of the latest American comeback story under President Trump,” Mark Paoletta, general counsel performing the delegated duties of the OIRA Administrator, wrote in the introduction. “Now, the President is writing the next chapter. America is in a new Golden Age.”

Some agencies have few proposed or final rules to report. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration only has three, all of which pertain to mandatory workplace drug-testing procedures. The Bureau of Prisons is working on two, a proposed revision to the Prison Rape Elimination Act and another to the First Step Act. The Office of National Drug Control Policy has just one rule in progress, a short item about improving transparency in grantmaking decisions. The Food and Drug Administration has 65.

This rule might result in fewer pharmaceutical ads on TV. It might also result in ads that are a lot longer.

One that the Agenda has labeled “economically significant,” is the proposal to crack down on direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ads. The extremely American phenomenon of pharma companies using TV commercials to hawk medications to potential patients owes to a 1997 regulatory loophole that allowed potential side effects to be listed somewhere else, rather than during the ad. This meant that companies could fit all the legally required information into a 30-second commercial. The FDA now intends to close that loophole by requiring a “brief summary,” via a final rule that according to the Agenda is slated to arrive in December. This rule might result in fewer pharmaceutical ads on TV. It might also result in ads that are a lot longer.

“FDA anticipates that this rule, if finalized, will result in regulatory costs,” the agency stated in the Agenda. “Industry will face costs of either: 1) purchasing additional advertising time to include required product safety information, 2) dedicating additional advertising time within current advertising time slots toward the newly required information, or 3) the opportunity cost of choosing not to advertise if the cost of inclusion of all newly required safety information induces a decrease or cessation of product advertising.”

The agency pointed out that in 2023 the combined DTC ad spending for the top 10 pharma companies was around $13.8 billion, and that regulation would likely affect international investment and commerce.

“The benefits of this rule are in providing patients more complete safety information during all advertisements covered by the rule, thus improving consumer understanding when they participate in healthcare decision making,” the agency stated. “Risks: TBD.”

Among the Agenda’s updates on other FDA rules, the agency has once again punted its deadline for deciding whether to ban electrical stimulation devices (ESD), which purport to change self-harming or aggressive behavior by delivering shocks through electrodes affixed to the patient’s skin. Autism and intellectual disability advocates have for years testified that ESD are used for torture and punishment, and called on the FDA to remove them from the market. In 2024 the agency committed to reaching a verdict by May 2026. Having not done that, it has now suggested a deadline of November. The devices are still sanctioned at a “behavior modification program” in Massachusetts.

“FDA intends to review the comments received and assess any new data or information in connection with making a determination as to whether the use of ESDs for [self-injurious or aggressive behavior] presents an unreasonable and substantial risk of illness or injury and that the risks associated with ESDs for these intended uses cannot be corrected or eliminated by labeling,” the agency stated. “If FDA makes this determination again, the Agency will issue a final rule to ban these devices.” 

The FDA is also considering a regulation that would support “administrative detention of tobacco products … believed to be adulterated or misbranded,” which refers to the agency’s ability to freeze a retailer’s sale of any nicotine vapes to which it hasn’t granted marketing authorization, while the Department of Justice is looped in to explore legal action including permanent seizure of the products. The FDA claims that this would benefit public health through “the illnesses, injuries, or deaths prevented because the Agency administratively detained a tobacco product it has reason to believe is adulterated or misbranded.”

The majority of nicotine vapes that people actually use in the United States—responsible for the rather important public health benefit of reducing the combustible tobacco use that costs almost half a million lives each year—are not FDA-authorized.

“The ability for FDA to issue administration detention orders against new, unauthorized tobacco products, including ENDS, may encourage manufacturers to submit premarket applications requesting authorization for their products to be lawfully marketed, rather than continue to flood the market with additional unauthorized products,” the agency stated.

Image via United States Representative Rosa DeLauro

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“I am going to do everything for our country to save our nation. From danger,” de la Espriella yelled at the audience. “And that danger has a name … narcoterrorism!”

He’s expected to defeat Iván Cepeda, the left-wing candidate endorsed by Colombia’s current president, Gustavo Petro, in the June 21 runoff. He also recently received the endorsement of United States President Donald Trump.

“The results of this Election are very important to the future of Colombia and its relationship to the United States,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “Because of his tremendous accomplishments in life, and his political support for me, personally, it is my Honor to give Abelardo my Complete and Total Endorsement.”

De la Espriella has dual citizenship with the US. He also has a line of somewhat unusual branded products, reminiscent of Trump’s own line of products. He’s marketed rum, menswear products and music albums of him singing hits in “de la Esperiella style.”

While Colombia has collaborated with US efforts to counter the drug trade, President Petro has denounced Trump’s boat strikes in the Caribbean. So far more than 200 people have been killed in the attacks. De la Espriella has promised to add to that number. He’s called Petro a “criminal” and “drug addict.” 

His platform is a libertarian economic agenda—he promises to take a “chainsaw” to government spending, except the armed forces—coupled with an aggressive, militarized crackdown on the drug trade. De la Espriella’s ascendance represents yet another instance of right-wing ideology surging in Latin America.

A former defense attorney, de la Espriella once represented wealthy businessmen known for drug trafficking. He’s pledged a range of militarized crackdowns if elected, including a vast expansion of private prisons to hold “cockroaches and rats.” 

Trump has called Cepeda a “Radical Left Marxist.”

Inspired by El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who has dubbed himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” de la Espriella plans to build 10 mega-prisons modeled after El Salvador’s infamous CECOT. He’s also promised to deport immigrants who engage in criminal activity; almost all of the approximately 3 million immigrants living in Colombia are Venezuelan. 

“It’s a similar script. A lot of Latin American countries are being overtaken by right-wing forces,” Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, told Filter. “He’s very Trumpian. And models himself after Bukele. It’s a return to the bad old days.”

Tree noted a historical parallel with former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. 

“He was a strongman,” Tree said. “In the aughts, the country was dominated by paramilitary narco traffickers. It was a horrible human rights environment.”

In the 2000s, Uribe’s military lured thousands of impoverished young men into remote areas, executed them and dressed them in Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) fatigues to falsely boost their body count. De la Espriella has called the former president a patriot. His father coordinated a regional campaign for Uribe, and the families remain close.

Mass incarceration of people who use or sell drugs has never brought the drug trade to an end. Whenever someone is imprisoned, or killed in government air strikes, someone else will take their place. Taking out leadership of transnational drug-trafficking groups just creates a temporary power vacuum, and increases violence between groups and against civilians.

Left-wing rival Cepeda often speaks of the drug war as a failure, and advocates instead for investment in disenfranchised neighborhoods. Trump has called Cepeda a “Radical Left Marxist.”

Image via Wikipedia/Creative Commons 3.0/Trump White House Archives

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The move will “dramatically accelerate access to new medical research and treatments based on psychedelic drugs,” Trump said.

The order, which the president signed in the Oval Office on April 18 alongside federal health officials, advocates and the podcaster Joe Rogan, directs the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to issue new guidance for researchers on conducting clinical trials on psychedelics.

“In many cases, these experimental treatments have shown life-changing potential for those suffering from severe mental illness and depression—including our cherished veterans,” Trump said.

Steps taken under the order will “clear away unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles, improve data sharing among the FDA and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and facilitate fast rescheduling of any psychedelic drugs that become FDA-approved,” the president said.

Some psychedelics like psilocybin and MDMA have been designated with “breakthrough therapy” status, meaning that preliminary clinical evidence shows they can provide substantial improvement over existing therapies. Trump said his order will “expedite” the further review of such substances.

Trump also announced that the federal government is making $50 million available to support state-level research on ibogaine and is “opening a pathway for the substance to be administered to desperately ill patients under the Right to Try law” that he signed during his first term in office.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said at the signing event that under the president’s order his department “will accelerate research, approval and access to new mental health treatments, including psychedelic therapies.”

“We’re taking this decision, this decisive step, to confront one of the most urgent public health challenges facing our nation, the mental health crisis,” he said. “This executive order will remove legal impediments that block American researchers, scientists, physicians and clinicians from properly studying these medicines and, where appropriate, establishing protocols for their safe therapeutic use.”

Kennedy also said health officials will coordinate with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Department of Justice (DOJ) on “rescheduling reviews after successful Phase 3 trials” on psychedelics.

The order states that “the Attorney General shall, in consultation with HHS, initiate and complete review of any product containing a Schedule I substance that has successfully completed Phase 3 clinical trials for a serious mental health disorder, so that rescheduling, if appropriate under 21 U.S.C. 811, may proceed as quickly as practicable for such specific products that are ultimately approved under section 505 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.”

The FDA will issue three national priority vouchers for psychedelics.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said that his agency will issue three national priority vouchers for psychedelics.

“Under this new program in this administration, drugs can get approved in weeks—not a year or a year plus, but in weeks—if they are in line with our national priorities,” he said.

Makary also announced “the first ibogaine investigational new drug clearance,” which he said will “pave the way for the first-ever human trials in the United States” on the psychedelic.

Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-TX), who also attended the signing ceremony, said in a statement that he “can personally attest to the significant benefits of this treatment.”

“It changed my life, and I look forward to seeing the impact it will have on countless others,” he said. “We’re losing too many veterans. If this treatment gives us a chance to change that, then we owe it to them to pursue it. The President’s executive order brings us closer to a lasting solution that our veterans deserve.”

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz called the president’s action “a paradigm shift for mental health treatment.”

“Grateful to work alongside leaders who refuse to accept ‘No’ when lives are on the line,” he said.

A growing body of research and experience indicates that psychedelics can help people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injuries, substance use disorder and other mental health disorders.

The move comes four months after Trump issued an executive order to reschedule marijuana—though that still hasn’t happened.

Lawmakers in a number of states have passed legislation to support clinical trials with the aim of developing ibogaine into a legal medication with approval from the FDA.

Texas officials, for example, recently announced that the state will move ahead with launching its own research program on the psychedelic after the they couldn’t find a company to lead a consortium on the issue under a bill enacted in 2025.

The federal psychedelics move comes four months after Trump issued an executive order directing the DOJ to complete the process of moving marijuana from Schedule I of the CSA to Schedule III “in the most expeditious manner”—though that still hasn’t happened.

Meanwhile, Kennedy said in February that the Trump administration is “very anxious” to create a pathway for access to psychedelics therapy and that top officials across federal agencies want to “get it out to the public as quickly as possible.”

In an interview on the Joe Rogan Experience in February, Kennedy said he’s confident “we’re going to get it done,” with plans to develop and finalize rules that would enable patients with conditions such as PTSD and depression to access psychedelic substances like psilocybin and MDMA in a “very controlled setting.”

“Everybody in my agency … is very anxious to get a rule out there that will allow these kind of studies and will allow access under therapeutic settings, particularly [for] the military soldiers who have suffered these injuries to get access to these products,” the HHS secretary said. “We’re working through that process now. We’re all working on it and trying to make it happen.”

“I think that we’re going to get it done,” he said.

In June 2025, Kennedy said his agency is “absolutely committed” to expanding research on the benefits of psychedelic therapy and, alongside of the head of FDA, is aiming to provide legal access to such substances for military veterans “within 12 months.”

VA Secretary Doug Collins also disclosed in April that he had an “eye-opening” talk with Kennedy about the therapeutic potential of psychedelic medicine. And he said he’s open to the idea of having the government provide vouchers to cover the costs of psychedelic therapy for veterans who receive services outside of VA as Congress considers pathways for access.

Bipartisan congressional lawmakers introduced legislation this session to provide $30 million in funding annually to establish psychedelic-focused “centers for excellence” at VA facilities, where veterans could receive novel treatment involving substances like psilocybin, MDMA and ibogaine.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) has said ibogaine represents an “astonishing breakthrough” in the nation’s current “sick care system” where people with serious mental health conditions have been left without access to promising alternative treatment options.

Image (cropped) via the White House

This story was originally published by Marijuana Moment, which tracks the politics and policy of cannabis and drugs. Follow Marijuana Moment on X and Facebook, and sign up for its newsletter.

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The initiative will be co-chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and newly appointed Senior Advisor for Addiction Recovery Kathryn Burgum, who is married to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. There will also be an as-yet-unnamed executive director, as well as representatives from more than a dozen federal agencies.

“This initiative represents a fundamental shift from reaction to prevention, from fragmentation to coordination, from stigma to science, from short-term fixes to long-term recovery,” Burgum, who like Kennedy is public about being in long-term recovery from alcohol use disorder, stated at the Oval Office signing ceremony. “And for the first time we’re aligning federal leadership across health, justice, labor, housing, veterans, social services, the faith office and education.”

This is already the job of Sara Carter Bailey, the newly appointed director of the Office for National Drug Control Policy, who was standing a few feet away. So is most of the initiative’s agenda—coordinating the government’s response across different federal agencies, overseeing efforts to increase awareness, providing data-driven updates, etc. Everything else, even Burgum’s signoff—“Recovery is not the exception, it is the expectation”—is reminiscent of work already underway at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (Christopher D. Carroll, who by process of elimination is the official currently leading SAMHSA, did not appear to be in attendance.)

Though the ONDCP’s budget is currently on the chopping block and the already-gutted SAMHSA continues to exist in a state of turmoil, the new initiative doesn’t appear to be replacing or supplementing those efforts so much as borrowing their talking points. 

The signing ceremony was light on detail, though Kennedy did state that further major announcements about the initiative would follow the next week. Trump read an obligatory series of statistics about drug enforcement and overdose, almost all of which were wrong. The only ones that were technically accurate were that the government has seized over 47 million fentanyl pills and 10,000 lbs of fentanyl powder, which does match Drug Enforcement Administration seizure totals from 2025. He then claimed that “that’s a record,” which is not true for either figure.

Toward the end of the ceremony he informed those in attendance that he’d appointed Doug Burgum to his cabinet because of Kathryn’s physical appearance, so perhaps the initiative’s existence as a vehicle for getting her appointed as a White House advisor should also be considered.

“Addiction is … not simply a behavioral issue,” Burgum states. “Addiction is a lifelong, chronic, relapsing medical disease.”

“Addiction is not a moral failure. It is not a character flaw. And it’s not simply a behavioral issue,” Burgum continued. “Addiction is a lifelong, chronic, relapsing medical disease—as real as diabetes, cancer and heart disease.”

The brain disease model of addiction is popular among policymakers claiming to take a compassionate, evidence-based and non-carceral approach to drug use. In reality, rhetoric like Burgum’s is largely used to scapegoat drugs and alcohol as uniquely, insidiously addictive—people develop compulsive behaviors around all kinds of non-chemical things, from gambling to sex to video games—and to downplay the socioeconomic factors that are more relevant to understanding SUD.

The executive order does not have an overt law-enforcement bent; its veiled references to the private sector and faith-based organizations point more toward the rehab industry. Though the new initiative may not amount to anything more than messaging for messaging’s sake, the medicalization of SUD—or, more accurately, of public drug use—would support the administration’s escalating agenda around involuntary treatment. 

“Addiction is a chronic, treatable disease with relapse rates similar to other chronic diseases,” the order states. “Unfortunately, very few Americans who need treatment ever receive it or believe they need it.”

Image via the White House

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“I’m innocent,” he said when asked for his plea. “I’m not guilty. I am a decent man.”

The morning of January 3, shortly after the raid was carried out, US Attorney General Pam Bondi shared a federal indictment filed in the Southern District of New York. The now-unsealed document charges Maduro with one count each of “narco-terrorism conspiracy,” “cocaine importation conspiracy,” “possession of machineguns and destructive devices” and “conspiracy to possess machineguns and destructive devices.” Flores, Maduro’s son Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra and three others were also indicted on some or all of the same charges. Only Maduro and Flores appear to have been captured.

Both were transported to the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn ahead of the arraignment. They are expected to plead not guilty, and to be remanded back to the federal detention center while they await trial. They could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted.

Court documents filed January 5 show that Maduro’s legal counsel is Barry Pollack, the attorney who recently secured Julian Assange’s release from prison. Flores is being represented by former federal prosecutor Mark E. Donnelly.

Maduro was previously indicted on drug-trafficking charges in 2020, also in the Southern District of New York.

At a January 3 press conference President Donald Trump described the extraction as “an assault like people have not seen since World War II,” before claiming that both Maduro and Flores had been indicted “for their campaign of deadly narco-terrorism against the United States.” Flores, however, has not been indicted for narco-terrorism; only the cocaine and weapons charges.

“As alleged in the indictment [Maduro] personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as Cartel de los Soles, which flooded our nation with lethal poison responsible for the deaths of countless Americans,” Trump continued; “many, many Americans—hundreds of thousands over the years—of Americans died because of him.”

Despite repeated mischaracterization by the Trump administration, there is no single organization known as Cartel de los Soles; the name is a catch-all referring to the loose network of trafficking cells in Venezuela.

The indictment does not mention the overdose crisis, nor any drug-related harms at all.

Bondi, in a statement posted to social media January 4, also described the alleged trafficking activity as having “contributed directly to the drug crisis claiming American lives.”

Yet the indictment does not mention the overdose crisis, nor any drug-related harms at all. Overdose deaths in the US are primarily attributed not to cocaine but to fentanyl, a separate trade that is is not meaningfully associated with Venezuela or any South American country. Venezuela is involved in transport of cocaine from Colombia and other countries that produce it, but no moreso than half a dozen other countries in Central and South America.

In December 2025, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez from a drug-trafficking conviction for which he was serving a 45-year sentence in a federal prison in West Virginia.

“We’ve knocked out 97 percent of the drugs coming in by sea,” Trump claimed, referring to the series of Caribbean and Pacific airstrikes his administration began carrying out in September 2025. “Each boat kills on average 25,000 people … and those drugs mostly come from a place called Venezuela.”

Trump stated that is “going to run” Venezuela until such time as a peaceful transition of power can take place, to leadership that the US has approved. He claimed that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who was sworn in as acting president following Maduro’s capture, had told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that she prepared to cooperate with the US. Rubio will apparently play a prominent role in overseeing government operations in Venezuela, along with “various people” including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

“President Donald Trump, our peoples and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war,” Rodríguez subsequently posted to social media. “This has always been President Nicolás Maduro’s message, and it is the message of all of Venezuela right now … Venezuela has the right to peace, development, sovereignty and a future.”

Trump described an occupation that could potentially last for years, as “the money coming out of the ground is very substantial.” Plans to take over, revitalize and profit from Venezuela’s oil infrastructure dominated much of the press conference.

Image (cropped) via United States Department of State

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The drug war, not being a formally declared war, is a matter of law enforcement—not the military. But per the order, Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi will determine whether “enhanced national security resources” available to the recently renamed Department of War should also be available to the Department of Justice during a WMD emergency.

“Illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic,” the order states. “Further, the potential for fentanyl to be weaponized for concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries is a serious threat to the United States.”

It is a nonexistent threat to the United States. The takeaway from the constantly cited 2002 Moscow theater attack, the only credible report of fentanyl being used as a WMD, is that this is not a substance conducive to being deployed through the air. But the myth of passive, secondhand fentanyl exposure has been successfully conflated with the myth of imminent fentanyl-based terrorist attacks, because the government has invested a ton of resources into doing so.

The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has been working to position fentanyl as a chemical weapon since at least 2018, using WMD-specific funding streams like Project BioShield to create an artificial need for unnecessarily risky opioid overdose reversal products.

State- and federal-level efforts to designate fentanyl a WMD have been gaining momentum for years. An Ohio bill calling for the designation had its third House committee hearing in November. And notably, in 2019 a leaked Department of Homeland Security memo showed James F. McDonnell, DHS assistant secretary for countering weapons of mass destruction, briefing then-Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on a recent proposal to designate fentanyl a WMD.

“Fentanyl’s high toxicity and increasing availability are attractive to threat actors seeking nonconventional materials for a chemical weapons attack,” McDonnell wrote. “DHS/CWMD is in a position to help coordinate and leverage efforts from across DHS and the broader federal CWMD enterprise toward the fentanyl problem set. Relevant activities include using tools from the CWMD community for supply chain interruption.”

“No bomb does what this is doing,” Trump claimed.

In July, Trump signed the HALT Fentanyl Act, permanently banning fentanyl analogs under Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, after years of temporary scheduling orders being extended again and again. The White House referred to the new WMD designation as “taking the fight to the next level.”

In November, the White House released a national security strategy calling on Western Hemisphere governments to “cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels and other transnational criminal organizations” as the US works to “control migration” and “stop drug flows.”

“No bomb does what this is doing—200,000 to 300,000 people die every year,” Trump stated at a December 15 event prior to signing the executive order. “That we know of.”

Fentanyl purity has dropped precipitously over the past year, according to recent data from DEA seizures. In the US, fentanyl was involved in 42,233 deaths between April 2024 and April 2025. That we know of. In September, Trump claimed that “300 million people died … from drugs” in 2024. That would be almost the entire US population, and about five times as many people as died that year from anything anywhere in the world.

Various media outlets have reported that the WMD designation is essentially a PR stunt unlikely to have practical impact—because fentanyl isn’t actually being developed as a chemical weapon, because executive orders don’t rewrite laws, etc. Everything Trump does is about optics, sure, and the order can certainly be viewed as a legal veneer for the administration doing what it was going to do already.

But its function is to unlock counter-WMD funding and use wartime resources to arm law enforcement. The designation will support the ongoing boat strikes and escalating campaign against Venezuela, which is not a main player in the global fentanyl supply chain, and inevitable drone strikes into Mexico. Counter-WMD military sensors will increasingly be used for enforcement at the southern border. It’s hard to not see a practical impact in that.

Image via California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services

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In a letter to Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D) dated December 8, DOJ Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon wrote that the investigation will look for “pattern or practice” rights violations. Specifically, whether people in custody have access to adequate medical care and “safe and sanitary” housing, and whether youth in DYS facilities are provided “adequate nutrition” and protection from excessive force.

Lastly, DOJ “will also consider whether Colorado violates prisoners’ and detainees’ right to free exercise of religion by housing biological males in units designated for females.”

Since Trump took office in January, the DOJ has commenced only one new special investigation of law enforcement or corrections departments. That began in March, and focuses on whether the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is violating the “Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, including by requiring them to endure lengthy wait times when applying for concealed handgun licenses.”

In 2024, the department launched three “pattern or practice” investigations involving a prison system—California Women’s Prisons, Trousdale Turner Correctional Center in Tennessee and Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice.

DOJ launches investigation into Colorado prison conditions.

Thank you, ⁦@AGPamBondi⁩ and ⁦⁦@HarmeetKDhillon⁩

If Colorado has been treating Tina Peters fairly, then I’m sure there’s nothing to hide… https://t.co/2olupOEbrx

— Chad Mizelle (@chad_mizelle) December 9, 2025

Prisons overwhelmingly house people according to their sex assigned at birth, even contradicting their own policies that support using gender identity instead.

In 2024, following a class action lawsuit brought by trans women whom CDOC had housed in men’s prisons, a groundbreaking consent decree required the department to open an “Integration Unit” at a women’s facility, and a “Voluntary Transgender Unit” at a men’s facility. The former serves as short-term housing for trans women entering the system, and the latter allows them to be housed together if they choose.

Trump and various members of his administration have been openly linking the DOJ announcement to their support of Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, who facilitated unauthorized access to voting machines and data in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. 

In October 2024 Peters was convicted of multiple felonies and sentenced to a total of about nine years, making her the first and so far only person to serve prison time as a result of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. None of her convictions are federal, so Trump doesn’t have the authority to commute her sentence; Gov. Polis has declined to do so. Earlier in 2025, Peters filed a request to be released from prison while her appeal is pending. It was dismissed by a federal judge on December 8, the same day the DOJ announced its investigation.

Peters is currently incarcerated at La Vista Correctional Facility, which is one of the facilities named in Dhillon’s December 8 letter and which happens to have the same warden as Youthful Offender Center (YOS)—which is also at the center of the investigation. YOS is not a DYS facility. It’s a medium-security prison for youth between ages 14 and 19 whose convictions are considered violent, and who have been sentenced as adults. 

YOS has been in the news due to increasingly dire complaints about its policies around food. Portions and caloric intake requirements have shrunk, and food packages as well as canteen purchases are only authorized for those who’ve reached the least-restrictive level of custody.

In November, one person housed at YOS was hospitalized for malnutrition and told by doctors that he needed to double his food intake; upon returning to YOS he was not given more food than before. Shortly after, he went into renal failure and had to be flown to a Denver hospital; he’d lost 42 lbs in six weeks.

YOS has since enacted a policy change allowing everyone in custody to purchase food from the canteen, but by one estimate about 40 percent of the population can’t afford to do so. 

Recent reports by the Child Protection Ombudsman of Colorado and the nonprofit Disability Law Colorado described DYS, meanwhile, as subjecting the youth in its custody to “strip searches,” “physical force,” “excessive restraint” and “seclusion.” One facility was shut down in September due to “basic safety” failures. It appears to be quietly reopening.

Photograph of Platte Valley Youth Services Center via Colorado Department of Human Services

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The complaint was filed November 25 in the federal District of Rhode Island, and represents attorneys general for 18 states and the District of Columbia, as well as the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

Trump’s executive order expanded civil commitment and directed HUD to abandon its “Housing First” approach—meaning it should only fund programs that require abstinence or otherwise impose barriers that keep vulnerable people out of stable housing. The department has since begun to do that, making a series of changes that ultimately prompted the new legal complaint. The plaintiffs allege that the changes “essentially guarantee that tens of thousands of formerly homeless individuals and families will be evicted back into homelessness.”

Around 90 percent of CoC funds are allocated for permanent housing, in accordance with the Housing First model. But earlier in November CoC cut that down to 30 percent, as well as adding “Geographic Discrimination Conditions” to make grants more competitive for applicants in jurisdictions that aren’t openly hostile to unhoused residents. CoC also prohibited funding for housing dedicated to or inclusive of transgender residents, or for any housing services that don’t support the myth of a gender binary.

CoC evaluates applications using a points system, which the “Geographic Discrimination Conditions” impact substantially. Points are awarded to applicants located in jurisdictions that enforce bans on public drug use and public camping. Enforcement of civil commitment and surveillance of residents on sex offender registries are weighted in the selection process as well.

The complaint alleges that the gender-based criteria are unlawful. CoC is subject to an “Equal Access” regulation that requires housing and other services be made available to residents according to their gender identity. The regulation is currently still in effect.

Trans and gender-diverse people, people who use drugs and people on sex offender registries are already systemically disenfranchised from housing.

“Congress designed this program in recognition that homelessness is a crisis that requires immediate stabilization and continuing support to reverse,” stated Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, one of the three AG leading the coalition. “These changes are designed to trap people in poverty and then punish them for being poor.”

Among the other people quoted in Brown’s announcement was a Washington resident who described how after leaving a domestic violence situation they spent the next five years moving between shelters, cars and other forms of homelessness.

“My son spent his early childhood in that reality while I tried to navigate his disabilities and a maze of systems that made us constantly prove we deserved help,” they stated. “Getting housing was a huge relief, but functioning didn’t come back overnight. It took more than a year before I could manage daily routines or feel safe again. That’s why wraparound services matter—they are the bridge between ‘not dying’ and actually living.”

Four days before the complaint was filed, the same federal district court issued a permanent injunction barring the Trump administration from effectively shuttering the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Minority Business Development Agency Case, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service and the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. All four agencies were targeted for defunding under a March executive order, “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy.” 

Top image (cropped) via City of Tucson. Inset graphic via United States Congress.

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President Donald Trump signed a memorandum in mid-September to send the National Guard into the city as part of the new “Memphis Safe Task Force.” Governor Bill Lee (R) then authorized the deployment.

“The effort of this task force is crime,” Lee said at a September 26 press conference, according to Commercial Appeal. “It’s to fight violent criminals, drug traffickers, smugglers.”

Lee said that he is not declaring a state of emergency, but that the troops are necessary to provide support to local law enforcement.

“The crime crisis in Memphis has been driven by gang violence,” Senator Marsha Blackburn (R) told legislators September 17. The National Guard, she continued, would “help maintain order so that the Memphis police officers can … get these career criminals, these gang leaders off the streets.”

This is interesting to many of us incarcerated in Tennessee prisons, particularly the CoreCivic prisons where gang-related violence is rampant. It may sound like getting gang leaders off the streets is a good thing, but their power doesn’t vanish inside prison—it becomes more concentrated. Why is there not a similar push to send the National Guard to supplement the overwhelmed corrections officers? Lee’s office did not respond to Filter’s inquiry.

“Everyone in my organization realizes their work will more than likely involve prison time,” said P*, a gang leader currently incarcerated at South Central Correctional Facility, one of the four Tennessee prisons run by CoreCivic. “That means the clients are different, the work’s the same.”

Trump, Blackburn, Lee and others at the signing of the memorandum to establish the “Memphis Safe Task Force.”

Many prisons around the country, including in Tennessee, are gang-run. The balance of power shifted when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and corrections officers quit or stopped showing up to work.

For example, it used to be that when prisoners went out to the yard there’d be four officers supervising, plus another four or five during “movement” when the gates open for prisoners to go from one part of the compound to another; you’d get at least one pat-down just going from point A to point B. Now, no one supervises yard time, if we get it at all. If we do, there’ll be a single officer to open the gates, and that’s it. People go out in their pajamas.

Pre-COVID, if an officer needed help they could push a button or make a call over the radio, and within 30 seconds five more officers would arrive as backup. Now, at most maybe one shows up. Maybe no one does. The officers know that, and the gang members know that. So when the lone officer posted in a pod of 128 prisoners is told to leave a gate open, they’re not going to refuse or call for help. They’re just going to leave the gate open. 

“What am I supposed to do when I open the gate to release inmates out of the unit, and they push me out of the way and rush past me?” one officer who’s worked at South Central for about three years told Filter. “If I try to resist, I’m shown shanks. And, once, knocked out.” The officer was comfortable sharing this even though they requested anonymity—so many officers here have been knocked out at one point or another that this is not an identifying detail.

There aren’t enough officers to maintain control now. But there are more and more gang members. They continue to run their business from inside prison, and they also have free rein to rob their neighbors, collect drug debts or defy corrections officer authority.

In Tennessee prisons, gang members are mixed in with the general population prisoners who are not affiliated. Supposedly this dilutes their power, but what it actually does is establish each living unit as a substation of whichever gang emerges there as the strongest. They rule the roost.

“Moving my associates from the street to prison doesn’t change nothing,” said J*, a leader in a different gang at South Central. “We’ve got the power right now in the joints, and we’re banking while we can.”

J and P are both from Memphis. Both said that on the streets, leadership of their respective organizations were relocating, to avoid being caught up in the government’s impending show of force.

*Names have been changed to protect sources

Top image (cropped) and inset image via the White House

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In July, the Department of the Treasury announced it was sanctioning Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization, characterizing it as a Venezuela-based DTO that, led by President Nicolás Maduro Moros and other high-ranking members of his administration, endeavors to move fentanyl into the US. The department also linked Cartel de los Soles to Tren de Aragua, which it had already designated a “significant” terrorist organization in 2024.

The US intelligence community considers Tren de Aragua to no longer be a major player. Cartel de los Soles, meanwhile, is not really a DTO at all. 

Since Maduro’s election in 2013, Venezuela’s DTO activity has become decentralized. Cartel de los Soles isn’t the name of any single group, but is what think tank InSight Crime explained as a catch-all term for “a fluid and loose knit network of trafficking cells embedded within the Venezuelan security forces … less an organization run by [Maduro’s] Chavista regime and more a system that it regulates.”

The US doesn’t allow military resources to be used for law enforcement—only for matters of national security.

In the 54 years since President Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs, the US has intermittently deployed troops to Latin America in service of that agenda. But these efforts have always been hampered by the fact that US law doesn’t allow the president to send in military resources to do jobs meant for law enforcement, such as enforcing the criminalization of fentanyl. In order to tap into the full power of the US military, which has a budget that’s pushing $1 trillion, the drug war would have to be considered a matter of national security against a foreign threat.

For several years now, the public discourse around fentanyl has been steered toward language that you used to only hear when someone was describing chemical weapons like sarin gas, or the vague threat of nuclear war.

Since returning to office in January, Trump has set about militarizing the US response to the overdose crisis in a way that he didn’t during his first term. Sending troops to the southern border to provide immigration enforcement; designating DTO as foreign terrorist organizations; ramping up a program begun under Joe Biden’s administration by flying drones not just over the southern border, but actually into Mexico, to find the locations of unregulated fentanyl labs. Earlier in August, the New York Times reported that Trump had quietly begun ordering military resources deployed against the DTO that had been recently designated terrorist groups. 

Trump’s solution to “clandestine labs” is that we should just bomb them.

Despite how tightly organized hierarchical the media often portrays them, DTO aren’t militia. Their motives aren’t political or ideological; they’re commercial. The Drug Enforcement Administration has spent a lot of time building up the idea that synthetic drugs are an unprecedented threat partly because manufacturers can just set up shop anywhere, anytime, but since at least 2020 Trump has been floating the idea that the obvious solution to “clandestine labs” is that we should just bomb them.

Though the term “superlab” has become popular in the last two or three years, usually it refers to methamphetamine production, or to fentanyl production in Canada rather than in Mexico. Elected officials constantly describe fentanyl as a synthetic drug that’s “chemically produced in a lab,” without mentioning that the labs are often inside people’s homes.

Fentanyl’s potency means a large-scale DTO operation can be done in someone’s kitchen, in their house on a central street in a densely populated residential neighborhood. Which evokes somewhat different imagery than a lab, when you think about sending in unmanned drone strikes.

The inevitable deployment of the US military obviously won’t be the thing that finally makes prohibition work. Bombing fentanyl labs across Mexico wouldn’t be the end of the supply; the US and Mexico seize fentanyl labs all the time. But now that drone strikes are looking like a real possibility, cooks aren’t going to stay in the same place for long, given that the US is actively mapping their locations. And if they’re constantly on the move, setting up short-term labs with makeshift equipment in place of whatever had to be left behind in a rush, it’s not hard to guess whether that will be the end of the fentanyl supply chain or make it more chaotic than it already is.

Image of MQ-9 Reaper drone via United States Department of Transportation

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