The Lever - ✈️ Now boarding ICE Air

🔥 Today in The Lever: Factory farms are blaming eggflation on animal welfare laws, in an attempt to boost their margins and crush their competitors.

👇 Spend four minutes reading this 1,003-word newsletter to learn about: 

• How JB Pritzker betrayed Illinois’ workers for Jeff Bezos.
• The lucrative private air travel boon behind Trump’s deportations.
• How Republicans are trying to tank your credit score. 
• A SCOTUS victory for the First amendment.

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🇺🇲 New phone, Houthis? As further proof we’re living in a real-life idiot plot, top members of the Trump administration accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief to a Signal group chat where they were discussing secret war plans. Officials — including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Vice President JD Vance — were apparently unaware they were leaking the administration’s plans to bomb Yemen to a journalist until he removed himself from the chat.

💉 Republicans want your medical debt to destroy you. Tomorrow, industry-bankrolled Republicans will likely vote to repeal a Biden-era rule banning credit scores from reflecting medical debt. According to research from Accountable.US, Republican members of the House Financial Services Committee have received nearly $900,000 in donations from health care trade groups and debt collectors supporting the move, which would add roughly $49 billion in medical debt back onto Americans’ credit reports.

👷 Pritzker betrays workers for Bezos. Illinois’ Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker — one of the “good” billionaires — just vetoed a bill that would have limited Amazon’s productivity and speed quotas for its warehouse workers. A congressional report commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) found Amazon warehouses recorded over 30 percent more injuries than the warehousing industry average in 2023, in part due to the company’s “relentless” productivity demands. That year, “the rate of serious injury at 14 of Amazon’s 15 Chicago-area warehouses [was] above the statewide average for general warehousing,” according to Block Club Chicago.

• In 2021, state lawmakers and corporate lobbyists stymied workplace safety legislation just months before six Amazon employees in Southern Illinois were killed by a tornado at work. Meanwhile, the company still refuses to build storm shelters in its Midwest warehouses. 

🧬 23andMe just lost your DNA. The genetic testing company just filed for bankruptcy and is looking for a buyer, meaning the sensitive genetic material of their 15 million customers is now up for sale. California’s attorney general issued an alert last week to 23andMe customers urging them to invoke state privacy law and pressure the company to destroy their genetic samples. 

🆘 That time the government actually helped the working class. A new Federal Reserve report finds that when the government extended unemployment benefits during the pandemic, it particularly helped the working class. The pandemic aid “largely offset the adverse effect of the surge in unemployment, especially in the lower half of the distribution of household income.” President Biden and a Democratic Congress overcame GOP opposition and extended that aid, but then it expired, crushing the working class. Soon after, Democrats were destroyed at the polls.

The realignment of X/Twitter. (Source: Kyle Tharp/Chaotic Era)

A small Wynn at SCOTUS. The Supreme Court has rejected casino magnate Steve Wynn’s bid to expand libel law to journalists who criticize him. Wynn asked the High Court to reconsider its landmark 1964 decision New York Times v. Sullivan, which requires journalists to show “actual malice” to be held liable for defaming public figures. Wynn previously tried and failed to sue the Associated Press for publishing sexual misconduct allegations made against him.

Migrants deported from the United States arrive in Venezuela on Monday, March 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Welcome to ICE Air. This month’s GOP spending bill — which has now been signed into law, thanks to Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — included a $485 million budget hike for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That will likely mean money for shadowy aviation contractors benefitting from the billion-dollar business of deportation flights — including three flights that carried migrants to El Salvador last week, even after a federal judge ordered the planes to turn back. 

For-profit deportations — sponsored by Trump’s donors. ICE uses private air charter companies — in some cases the same as those that ferry professional sports teams across the country — to carry out its deportations at an extremely high cost. (The flights chartered to El Salvador likely cost the government upwards of $8,000 per hour per aircraft.) At the center of this business, a Project on Government Oversight report revealed last week, is a New Mexico firm that has donated generously to Trump. 

Fight for the flights. Last year, CSI Aviation won a $3.6 billion contract for its ICE flights — although its main competitor, CIA-linked Classic Air Charter, says it was cheated out of the award and is challenging the contract in court. Also profiting off Trump’s mass deportations is GEO Transit, a subsidiary of the world’s largest private prison company and another key Trump donor.

Flying in the dark. Congressional reports alongside previous appropriations bills required ICE to disclose details about its private detention contracts and the private charter airlines that it contracts with to carry out deportation flights. But the new spending bill circumvented those requirements (which advocates say ICE was already flouting). Despite the exorbitant cost and history of abuses, much about these deportation flights has been kept secret. Now, critics say the agency will be empowered to operate them with even less transparency.

Contributing reporting by Katya Schwenk.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Senator Schumer: Lead the fight against Trump, or step down as Leader! Senate Democrats need a strong, principled leader committed to doing everything possible to stop Trump’s attacks on working families, protect democracy, and hold the administration accountable. If Chuck Schumer isn’t up to that task, he should step aside and let someone who is take the lead. Demand Leader Schumer act now or step aside!

🐟 The world’s ugliest animal is New Zealand’s fish of the year. We kinda like him.

📚 Overwhelmed? So were humans living 400 years ago. Read this for ancient strategies on coping with information overload. 

🧠 Running a marathon changes your brain. New science reveals long-distance runners’ brains are affected for as long as two months after a marathon.

Deregulating everything, subsidizing corporations, and then hoping CEOs will benevolently provide the basic necessities of life can be called neoliberalism, Reaganism, or Abundance™. It's all semantics describing the endless campaign to make sure the New Deal never comes back.

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