Stress Test, from Mother Jones

Exclusive interview: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has used social media and a cunning instinct for politics and publicity to build a megaphone that rivals Donald Trump’s—especially regarding the US detention of migrants who enter the country at its southern border. On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez was part of a 16-member congressional delegation that got a rare glimpse inside three highly fortified migrant detention facilities, which she has referred to as “concentration camps.” Congressional staffers had privately worried that officials would sanitize and curtail their tour inside, but the visit turned out to be more revealing than anyone had expected. A Mother Jones contributor, Jonathan Katz, accompanied the delegation to the sites, though reporters were not permitted inside. Later, he sat down with Ocasio-Cortez to get her perspective on what had happened during the day, how we got here, and where things might go next. Listen to our Q&A with the congresswoman who has catapulted the issue to national attention

On this week’s episode, we take you deep inside the system that sustains the world’s harshest punishment. Mother Jones reporter Nathalie Baptiste travels to Tennessee where a death row inmate was recently put to death, a community leader speaks about forgiveness in the face of heinous crimes, and the daughter of an executed man pleads with the state to test DNA evidence that could clear her father’s name.

The finale of "Behind the Lines": An American woman says she was tortured by ISIS, survived the US-led assault on Raqqa, escaped the Islamic State, and now wants to go home. Senior reporter Shane Bauer meets Samantha Elhassani at a sprawling refugee camp in northeastern Syria. But two months later, she is sent to the United States on a military cargo plane and brought before a federal judge, becoming the first American woman to be charged with terrorism-related crimes after living inside ISIS territory. Bauer traces her story back to Indiana and looks at the events leading to her husband’s decision to take her and their young family to Syria’s front lines. Bauer investigates Elhassani’s role in her husband’s enslavement of three Yazidi children, and looks at how her and the government’s competing claims may play out in her upcoming trial.

Beneath a crumbling soccer stadium in Raqqa, in northeast Syria, is a maze of narrow corridors and underground cells where ISIS once held its prisoners. In this installment of our “Behind the Lines” podcast series, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer tours these abandoned tunnels with a former prisoner who recounts the atrocities that happened beneath the stands where he’d watched soccer matches as a boy. Pro-ISIS graffiti still covers the walls of the cramped rooms were prisoners were kept in darkness, released only to be interrogated, tortured, and fed ISIS propaganda. While some prisoners made false confessions and were beheaded, others tried to save their lives by accepting their captors’ religious message; some escaped by joining ISIS. In this episode, Bauer provides an inside look at the place where ISIS held its captives and created new recruits.

Introducing "Behind the Lines", a Mother Jones Podcast series featuring senior reporter Shane Bauer’s exclusive, on-the-ground reporting in Syria. A year in the making, this series contains never-before-heard audio from one of the 21st century’s bloodiest conflicts, including an interview with the first American woman charged with terrorism-related crimes for joining her husband in ISIS territory. Bauer takes listeners inside an abandoned ISIS prison; hunts for clues about a devastating US-led air strikes; and travels to a battlefront where a proxy battle between superpowers is fueled by oil and gas fields. Episode One goes  to the bombed-out city of Raqqa, the former ISIS stronghold, where forensics teams conduct the harrowing work of uncovering thousands of bodies from the rubble. The city was liberated in 2017 following an intensive four-month siege and bombardment by US-led forces as part of President Donald Trump’s aggressive escalation of the war against ISIS in Syria. By early 2018, when Bauer visited, as much as 80 percent of the city’s buildings had been destroyed or damaged; Amnesty International called it “the most destroyed city in modern times.” Bauer follows the heartbreaking daily routine of 16 rescuers with no more lives to save; now their grim task is retrieving bodies throughout the city.  In this episode, Bauer talks about why he embarked on this risky trip into Syria and discusses the shifting web of combatants that makes the war so difficult to comprehend. Our podcast series is being released at the same time as an in-depth package on MotherJones.com presenting Bauer’s in-depth report and riveting videos from behind the lines. For more, visit: motherjones.com/syria.

Happy Pride Month! This week marks the start of annual celebrations for the LGBTQ community in what has been a turbulent year in the fight for equality. On the one hand, queer communities are more visible than ever. Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is running for president, and the 2018 midterms ushered in an unprecedented number of LGBTQ elected officials at all levels of government. On the other hand, President Donald Trump has become more aggressive in pushing forward with banning transgender people from joining the military. It’s also a historic pride year, marking half a century since the revolution at a small New York City bar that started it all. On this show, you’ll hear from two Stonewall veterans who were there, and a filmmaker who chronicled the making of the LGBTQ movement before the uprising. You’ll also take a trip to Jacob Riis Beach, a historic summer haven for queer New Yorkers, where sun-lovers answer a simple yet surprisingly provocative question: What makes a queer space in 2019? Finally, a quick correction: In the podcast, we say the Stonewall uprising was half a decade ago. It was clearly half a century ago. Our excuse? Gays don’t age.

There are 7,383 state legislators in the United States, and many of them, it seems, want to do something about the border. But there’s only one state lawmaker who actually lives there. Poncho Nevarez can’t just see Mexico from his house; when the breeze is right, he can hit a golf ball there. That makes the 46-year-old trial lawyer and four-term Democratic state representative from Eagle Pass, Texas, a unique voice in the debate over border security. Getting the border right, in Poncho’s opinion, starts with listening to the people who live there. And Poncho has a lot to say. Buckle up: you’re going to Texas as our host, Jamilah King, interviews senior reporter Tim Murphy about his recent visit to Eagle Pass, Texas. You can read (and watch) more about Tim’s travels with Mother Jones’ digital producer Mark Helenowski at MotherJones.com.

The key to covering the 2020 election? More women. From the #MeToo movement to the fight for workplace equality to the dystopian abortion bills popping up around the country, male supremacy is plainly on the agenda in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. How should the media, particularly women in media, cover such a fraught moment? To help guide us toward an answer, MoJo's Jamilah King recently hosted two live events in New York City that brought together five women journalists of various ages and backgrounds. First, Jamilah spoke with Jessica Yellin, CNN’s former White House chief correspondent, at The Wing DUMBO, a women-only space in New York City, to discuss Yellin’s new novel, Savage News; the 2020 presidential election; the not-so-secret bro culture of cable news; and life after TV news. This week’s episode of the Mother Jones Podcast also contains highlights from another live event Jamilah hosted at Manhattan’s New School. The conversation features some of today’s leading women in media discussing the challenges and the hope of achieving equality in the industry: Imara Jones, a black transgender woman and host of The Last Sip on Free Speech TV; Antonia Hylton, correspondent and producer for Vice News Tonight on HBO; Kat Aaron, an organizer and producer at Pineapple Media; and Allie Maloney, senior politics editor at Teen Vogue.

Democratic presidential hopeful Julián Castro spoke with Mother Jones for this exclusive interview at one of his favorite restaurants in San Antonio. He told our immigration reporter Fernanda Echavarri that he’s still preaching patience—even though he’s recently been polling at around one percent in a very crowded field. This week, we hear from Castro, who remains upbeat and on message, on his top policy priorities: pushing universal health care with Medicare-for-All, addressing climate change while investing in sustainability, and putting forward “bold immigration legislation” that would give millions of undocumented immigrants a legal path to citizenship.

The US census is conducted every 10 years and determines how hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding is allocated, how much representation states receive, and how political districts are drawn. But next year’s could be different: The Trump administration wants to add a question asking for the respondent’s citizenship.

Voting rights experts say such a move has the potential to derail the entire census—and shift power to the Republican Party for the next decade—because it will greatly reduce the number of people willing to participate. If large numbers of immigrants, for example, don’t respond to the census, which has not asked about citizenship since 1950, the areas where they live could lose federal funding and representatives in Congress, and economic and political power could shift to whiter and more Republicans areas.

Three federal courts have struck down the citizenship question so far, and it was recently in front of the Supreme Court. On this week’s show, host Jamilah King talks about what’s at stake now with Dale Ho, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s voting rights project who recently went up against the government in oral arguments at the high court, and Mother Jones’s voting rights guru Ari Berman.