Tag: texas
Trump Names 22 Year-Old 'Intern' To Run DHS Counter-Terrorism Program

Trump Names 22 Year-Old 'Intern' To Run DHS Counter-Terrorism Program

When Thomas Fugate graduated from college last year with a degree in politics, he celebrated in a social media post about the exciting opportunities that lay beyond campus life in Texas. “Onward and upward!” he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket shooting into space.

His career blastoff came quickly. A year after graduation, the 22-year-old with no apparent national security expertise is now a Department of Homeland Security official overseeing the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention, including an $18 million grant program intended to help communities combat violent extremism.

The White House appointed Fugate, a former Trump campaign worker who interned at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, to a Homeland Security role that was expanded to include the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. Known as CP3, the office has led nationwide efforts to prevent hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and other forms of targeted violence.

Fugate’s appointment is the latest shock for an office that has been decimated since President Donald Trump returned to the White House and began remaking national security to give it a laser focus on immigration.

News of the appointment has trickled out in recent weeks, raising alarm among counterterrorism researchers and nonprofit groups funded by CP3. Several said they turned to LinkedIn for intel on Fugate — an unknown in their field — and were stunned to see a photo of “a college kid” with a flag pin on his lapel posing with a sharply arched eyebrow. No threat prevention experience is listed in his employment history.

Typically, people familiar with CP3 say, a candidate that green wouldn’t have gotten an interview for a junior position, much less be hired to run operations. According to LinkedIn, the bulk of Fugate’s leadership experience comes from having served as secretary general of a Model United Nations club.

“Maybe he’s a wunderkind. Maybe he’s Doogie Howser and has everything at 21 years old, or whatever he is, to lead the office. But that’s not likely the case,” said one counterterrorism researcher who has worked with CP3 officials for years. “It sounds like putting the intern in charge.”

In the past seven weeks, at least five high-profile targeted attacks have unfolded across the U.S., including a car bombing in California and the gunning down of two Israeli Embassy aides in Washington. Against this backdrop, current and former national security officials say, the Trump administration’s decision to shift counterterrorism resources to immigration and leave the violence-prevention portfolio to inexperienced appointees is “reckless.”

“We’re entering very dangerous territory,” one longtime U.S. counterterrorism official said.

The fate of CP3 is one example of the fallout from deep cuts that have eliminated public health and violence-prevention initiatives across federal agencies.

The once-bustling office of around 80 employees now has fewer than 20, former staffers say. Grant work stops, then restarts. One senior civil servant was reassigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency via an email that arrived late on a Saturday.

The office’s mission has changed overnight, with a pivot away from focusing on domestic extremism, especially far-right movements. The “terrorism” category that framed the agency’s work for years was abruptly expanded to include drug cartels, part of what DHS staffers call an overarching message that border security is the only mission that matters. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has largely left terrorism prevention to the states.

ProPublica sent DHS a detailed list of questions about Fugate’s position, his lack of national security experience and the future of the department’s prevention work. A senior agency official replied with a statement saying only that Fugate’s CP3 duties were added to his role as an aide in an Immigration & Border Security office.

“Due to his success, he has been temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships office,” the official wrote in an email. “This is a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.”

ProPublica sought an interview with Fugate through DHS and the White House, but there was no response.

The Trump administration rejects claims of a retreat from terrorism prevention, noting partnerships with law enforcement agencies and swift investigations of recent attacks. “The notion that this single office is responsible for preventing terrorism is not only incorrect, it’s ignorant,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an email.

Through intermediaries, ProPublica sought to speak with CP3 employees but received no reply. Talking is risky; tales abound of Homeland Security personnel undergoing lie-detector tests in leak investigations, as Secretary Kristi Noem pledged in March.

Accounts of Fugate’s arrival and the dismantling of CP3 come from current and former Homeland Security personnel, grant recipients and terrorism-prevention advocates who work closely with the office and have at times been confidants for distraught staffers. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the Trump administration.

In these circles, two main theories have emerged to explain Fugate’s unusual ascent. One is that the Trump administration rewarded a Gen Z campaign worker with a resume-boosting title that comes with little real power because the office is in shambles.

The other is that the White House installed Fugate to oversee a pivot away from traditional counterterrorism lanes and to steer resources toward MAGA-friendly sheriffs and border security projects before eventually shuttering operations. In this scenario, Fugate was described as “a minder” and “a babysitter.”

DHS did not address a ProPublica question about this characterization.

Rising MAGA Star

The CP3 homepage boasts about the office’s experts in disciplines including emergency management, counterterrorism, public health and social work.

Fugate brings a different qualification prized by the White House: loyalty to the president.

On Instagram, Fugate traced his political awakening to nine years ago, when as a 13-year-old “in a generation deprived of hope, opportunity, and happiness, I saw in one man the capacity for real and lasting change: Donald Trump.”

Fugate is a self-described “Trumplican” who interned for state lawmakers in Austin before graduating magna cum laude a year ago with a degree in politics and law from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Instagram photos and other public information from the past year chronicle his lightning-fast rise in Trump world.

Starting in May 2024, photos show a newly graduated Fugate at a Texas GOP gathering launching his first campaign, a bid for a delegate spot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He handed out gummy candy and a flier with a photo of him in a tuxedo at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Fugate won an alternate slot.

The next month, he was in Florida celebrating Trump’s 78th birthday with the Club 47 fan group in West Palm Beach. “I truly wish I could say more about what I’m doing, but more to come soon!” he wrote in a caption, with a smiley emoji in sunglasses.

Posts in the run-up to the election show Fugate spending several weeks in Washington, a time he called “surreal and invigorating.” In July, he attended the Republican convention, sporting the Texas delegation’s signature cowboy hat in photos with MAGA luminaries such as former Cabinet Secretary Ben Carson and then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

By late summer, Fugate was posting from the campaign trail as part of Trump’s advance team, pictured at one stop standing behind the candidate in a crowd of young supporters. When Trump won the election, Fugate marked the moment with an emotional post about believing in him “from the very start, even to the scorn and contempt of my peers.”

“Working alongside a dedicated, driven group of folks, we faced every challenge head-on and, together, celebrated a victorious outcome,” Fugate wrote on Instagram.

In February, the White House appointed Fugate as a “special assistant” assigned to an immigration office at Homeland Security. He assumed leadership of CP3 last month to fill a vacancy left by previous Director Bill Braniff, an Army veteran with more than two decades of national security experience who resigned in March when the administration began cutting his staff.

In his final weeks as director, Braniff had publicly defended the office’s achievements, noting the dispersal of nearly $90 million since 2020 to help communities combat extremist violence. According to the office’s 2024 report to Congress, in recent years CP3 grant money was used in more than 1,100 efforts to identify violent extremism at the community level and interrupt the radicalization process.

“CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS — to prevent terrorism,” Braniff wrote on LinkedIn when he announced his resignation.

In conversations with colleagues, CP3 staffers have expressed shock at how little Fugate knows about the basics of his role and likened meetings with him to “career counseling.” DHS did not address questions about his level of experience.

One grant recipient called Fugate’s appointment “an insult” to Braniff and a setback in the move toward evidence-based approaches to terrorism prevention, a field still reckoning with post-9/11 work that was unscientific and stigmatizing to Muslims.

“They really started to shift the conversation and shift the public thinking. It was starting to get to the root of the problem,” the grantee said. “Now that’s all gone.”

Critics of Fugate’s appointment stress that their anger isn’t directed at an aspiring politico enjoying a whirlwind entry to Washington. The problem, they say, is the administration’s seemingly cavalier treatment of an office that was funding work on urgent national security concerns.

“The big story here is the undermining of democratic institutions,” a former Homeland Security official said. “Who’s going to volunteer to be the next civil servant if they think their supervisor is an apparatchik?”

Season of Attacks

Spring brought a burst of extremist violence, a trend analysts fear could extend into the summer given inflamed political tensions and the disarray of federal agencies tasked with monitoring threats.

In April, an arson attack targeted Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, who blamed the breach on “security failures.” Four days later, a mass shooter stormed onto the Florida State University campus, killing two and wounding six others. The alleged attacker had espoused white supremacist views and used Hitler as a profile picture for a gaming account.

Attacks continued in May with the apparent car bombing of a fertility clinic in California. The suspected assailant, the only fatality, left a screed detailing violent beliefs against life and procreation. A few days later, on May 21, a gunman allegedly radicalized by the war in Gaza killed two Israeli Embassy aides outside a Jewish museum in Washington.

June opened with a firebombing attack in Colorado that wounded 12, including a Holocaust survivor, at a gathering calling for the release of Israeli hostages. The suspect’s charges include a federal hate crime.

If attacks continue at that pace, warn current and former national security officials, cracks will begin to appear in the nation’s pared-down counterterrorism sector.

“If you cut the staff and there are major attacks that lead to a reconsideration, you can’t scale up staff once they’re fired,” said the U.S. counterterrorism official, who opposes the administration’s shift away from prevention.

Contradictory signals are coming out of Homeland Security about the future of CP3 work, especially the grant program. Staffers have told partners in the advocacy world that Fugate plans to roll out another funding cycle soon. The CP3 website still touts the program as the only federal grant “solely dedicated to helping local communities develop and strengthen their capabilities” against terrorism and targeted violence.

But Homeland Security’s budget proposal to Congress for the next fiscal year suggests a bleaker future. The department recommended eliminating the threat-prevention grant program, explaining that it “does not align with DHS priorities.”

The former Homeland Security official said the decision “means that the department founded to prevent terrorism in the United States no longer prioritizes preventing terrorism in the United States.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

'More Than A Little Stupid': Republicans Try To Kill Renewable Energy

'More Than A Little Stupid': Republicans Try To Kill Renewable Energy

Wyoming is the second windiest state, after Nebraska. It's obvious why the wind power industry is investing $10 billion there. And it's hard to see why any state politician would oppose this. But some have. Wyoming is one of those fossil-fuel producing states in which so-called conservatives feel obligated — or are paid — to stop competition from clean energy. Texas is another.

Wyoming State Sen. Larry Hicks proposed a temporary ban on renewable energy projects. "It does one thing: puts a moratorium on wind and solar for the next five years," he said. "It's a simple little bill."

A "simple," five-year plan? How do you say, "Aw, shucks" in Russian?

Hicks swiftly diverted blame to California: "Our friends on the 'left coast' with their renewable portfolio demands, eliminating fossil fuels and moving in a direction that's unsustainable."

We can't untie this knot of confused ideology. But let's point out that renewable energy is the only kind of energy that is, by definition, sustainable. Wyoming may have coal, oil and gas. But it has wind forever.

This hostility toward wind power is even weirder in Texas. Texas harvests more electricity from wind than any other state, or nearly 28 percent of all wind-generated electricity in the U.S. In one recent week, nearly half of Texas's electricity came from solar and wind power.

The key for these renewables is batteries that can store power when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine. Texas has been crowned "ground zero" for a U.S. battery boom. Last year it switched on more power stored in batteries than California did.

Texas was expected to double its storage capacity this year — that is, until Donald Trump slapped huge tariffs on China. More than two-thirds of imported batteries come from China.

In March, the Texas Senate passed a mandate that half of all new power capacity come from sources other than battery storage. In other words, at least 50 percent of all new power plant capacity had to be produced from coal, natural gas, and oil. (The natural gas industry needed propping.)

Back in Wyoming, lawmakers wedded to fossil fuels are complaining that large wind and solar projects are fundamentally changing the look of Wyoming's wide-open spaces. That's ignoring the aesthetics of Wyoming's coal pits, wide open craters that stretch for miles.

Wyoming is over 63 times the size of Rhode Island, with less than half the population of the Ocean State. There are dozens of wind turbines in Rhode Island, onshore and off. More are planned with minimal complaint. Wyoming could easily accommodate new wind projects under its big sky.

There does exist public support for clean energy in Wyoming, which is why Hicks' initiative failed. Gov. Mark Gordon tried to bridge the differences by endorsing an "all of the above energy strategy." He wants to keep Wyoming as "the energy state" but also to address climate change by developing clean renewables.

The far-right Freedom Caucus went after Gordon for acknowledging climate change. It introduced a bill designed to stop the state from pursuing any carbon reduction targets and titled it "Make Carbon Dioxide Great Again."

A pragmatic Republican, Gordon called such proposals as "a little bit stupid."

The bottom line is that Wyoming continues to develop wind energy projects. The Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project, now under construction near Rawlins, will be the nation's largest wind farm.

Much of what happens from here on in depends on Washington. The recently passed House bill strips away subsidies for renewables. How it fares in the Senate remains to be seen. Suffice it to say, slowing America's move to cleaner and also cheaper energy is more than a little bit stupid.

Froma Harrop is an award-winning journalist who covers politics, economics, and culture. She has worked on the Reuters business desk, edited economics reports for The New York Times News Service and served on the Providence Journal editorial board. 

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Ken Paxton

Under New Bill, Texas Women Will Face Prosecution For Abortion

Late in April, the Texas Senate passed a new anti-abortion bill that opens the door to women being criminally prosecuted for obtaining an abortion — even in a different state.

Authored by Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Menola Republican, Senate Bill 2880 — titled the “Women and Child Protection Act” — ushers in a currently dormant 1925 abortion ban, and would be the first law in the country to allow pregnant women to be prosecuted for receiving abortion care.

“The most egregious point of SB 2880 is that it quietly revives Texas’s pre-Roe abortion ban by explicitly incorporating the 1925 law into the bill’s definition of criminal abortion law,” Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat, said during Senate debate over the bill on April 30.

“The 1925 law does not exclude women from prosecution and explicitly criminalizes ‘furnishing the means’ for an abortion — a vague clause that could be used to target those who assist abortion-related travel,” Alvarado added. “This bill will open the door to the criminalization of women seeking out-of-state abortions. The threat is not theoretical — it is written clearly into the text. This clause appears in no other abortion law currently on the books in Texas.”

In fact, the 1925 abortion ban is specifically referenced twice in SB 2880, Alvarado said.

Under SB 2880, for example, every one of the 35,000 Texas women who fled the state in 2023 to receive abortions in states where the care is legal could have been prosecuted.

Punishment for anyone breaking the 1925 abortion ban law is prison time of two to five years.

At a hearing for a similar bill — House Bill 44 from Rep. Charlie Geren, a Republican from Fort Worth — Texas attorney Elizabeth Myers testified that, “By explicitly referencing and defining Texas’s criminal abortion laws to include what has been called the 1925 ban, SB 2880 and (its companion House Bill) HB 5510 potentially re-animates a century-old abortion law that is currently void and unenforceable, as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held in 2004.”

“The 1925 ban does not exempt pregnant Texans from prosecution for obtaining an abortion,” Myers said. “The 1925 ban also prohibits ‘furnishing the means’ for abortions. Multiple state actors, including the Texas attorney general, claim that vague phrase makes it a crime to help a pregnant woman leave the state to get an abortion.”

Attorney General Ken Paxton appeared to support this idea in 2022, after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Paxton wrote on X that the pre-Roe anti abortion statutes in Texas, which would include the 1925 law, were once again enforceable.

“Texas’s pre-Roe statutes criminalizing abortion is 100% good law, and I’ll ensure they’re enforceable,” Paxton wrote in the post. “Thankful for SCOTUS’s Dobbs decision paving the way to make Texas fully pro-life!”

A Texas House committee is now considering SB 2880. A companion bill in the House, HB 5510, had a hearing on April 25. HB 5510 already has support from more than a third of Republicans — all of whom have signed on as co-sponsors.

1925 abortion ban may be the end goal

The inclusion of two references to the 1925 ban in SB 2880 is especially noteworthy, according to experts, since the Texas Senate ended a bruising battle over the “Life of the Mother Act” — also known as SB 31 — one day before passing SB 2880.

SB 31 unanimously passed on April 29, with both Democratic and Republican support after language was inserted into the bill aiming to clarify when health care professionals can use an abortion to save a patient’s life.

Rep. Donna Howard, an Austin Democrat, told Courier Texas that she supports SB 31 because it could clear up confusion that doctors and hospital administrators have had about when they can legally perform abortions in medical emergencies.

Since the passage of the “Texas Heartbeat Act” in 2021, maternal mortality in Texas has skyrocketed by 56 percent, deadly sepsis cases among pregnant women have soared by 50 percent, infant mortality has increased by almost 13 percent and three miscarrying women have been documented to have died when they were denied timely treatment in hospital emergency rooms in Texas.

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘happy’ to describe my feelings,” Howard said about the Senate approving SB 31. ”This is not a ‘choice’ bill. It doesn’t address rape, incest, and fatal fetal abnormalities. I would love to do more, but we don’t have the votes.”

Texas voters have elected a Republican trifecta — GOP majorities in the state House and Senate, and a Republican governor — for the past 23 years.

“But it does clear up the confusion so that mothers can be saved,” Howard said about the bill. “We can’t let the perfect get in the way of the good…if this allows me to save the lives of Texas moms, I’m going to do that.”

The battle over the inclusion of the 1925 abortion law in SB 31 received public attention after several of the women who sued Texas in the Zurawski v. Texas lawsuit publicly lobbied against the possibility of women being criminalized and prosecuted for getting abortions as a result of passing the bill.

Amanda Zurawski, the lead plaintiff in the Zurawski case — which also sought to clarify medical exemptions — said that she was “grateful” that the eventual amendments to SB 31 included language noting that the bill was not intended to affirm that the 1925 ban could be used to prosecute pregnant women.

“This is a step in the right direction,” Zurawski said. “I’m grateful that our electeds listened to our concerns and worked on this bill. There’s a lot of bad legislation on the table and we have to be vigilant about it.”

One of the other Zurawski plaintiffs — Kaitlyn Kash, who lobbied lawmakers alongside Zurawski to amend SB 31 — said that she appreciated that Hughes, the bill’s author, listened to the women’s concerns.

“I like that there is now hard text saying that the bill is not meant for women to be prosecuted,” Kash said. “I feel comfortable no longer standing in the way of the bill.”

She, Zurawski and other fellow plaintiffs have formed advocacy group Free & Just, and plan to continue to warn women about bills that threaten their reproductive health care.

“Women wake up, this is your lives,” Kash said.

But neither she, Zurawski, or other members of Free & Just could have predicted that just one day after successfully removing some impediments for Texas women to receive medically necessary abortions, Hughes would refuse to take references to the 1925 ban out of SB 2880.

Alvarado told the Senate that her request to Hughes to remove the references to the 1925 abortion ban in SB 2880 had been “ignored.” She called SB 2880 a “backdoor effort” to fully reinstate the 1925 law, adding that the bipartisan passage of the amended SB 31 now “rings hollow.”

Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, a Democrat from Austin, told the Senate that while the changes in SB 31 were “a tiny step forward,” they were “followed immediately by this staggering hurdle backwards.”

What looms if the Texas Legislature passes SB 2880?

In addition to SB 2880 opening the door to pregnant women being prosecuted for getting abortions out of state or taking medication abortion pills, the bill also establishes a bounty allowing any private citizen in the country to civilly sue a person they suspect of helping a Texas woman leave the state to get an abortion.

The bill is also targeted at manufacturers and distributors of abortion pills and the doctors who prescribe them, even if they are located in states where abortion is legal.

Eckhardt accused Hughes and Republican supporters of SB 2880 of designing it to “isolate pregnant women and to threaten family friends, the organizations, lawyers and even judges that they might turn to for help, driving women into hiding, into secrecy and into another state where individual rights to self determination are still recognized.”

Hughes was not moved by pleas to delete references to the 1925 ban. He insisted that SB 2880, including its mentions of the 1925 abortion ban, was necessary in order to protect every “innocent and helpless” “unborn baby sleeping in their mother’s womb,” and also to “protect” Texas women from taking “poisonous” abortion pills from out of state.

Eckhardt mocked Hughes for purporting to “protect us little ladies.”

“I don’t feel protected, I feel attacked,” she said.

Sen. Molly Cook, a Democrat from Houston, urged Republicans to “stop trying to punish anyone who tries to help anyone assisting women trying to obtain autonomy over their bodies. And instead we should be doing everything to make pregnancy safe in Texas and to care for babies and children.”

With pregnant women in Texas having a 155% higher risk of dying than pregnant women in California, Cook asserted that “it is so unsafe to be pregnant in Texas.”

“They (Republican lawmakers) are trying to stop pregnant people from getting the care they need and they don’t care how they hurt people, even if that isolates people and prevents out-of-state physicians and clinics from providing care to Texans,” added Blake Rocap, legislative counsel for Avow, a nonprofit fighting for abortion access across Texas.

Rocap called the reference to the 1925 abortion ban in SB 2880 a “flashing red warning light about the anti-abortion movement’s plans.” Rocap warned of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s likely support of “ex-abusive partners” attempting to control pregnant Texans who need abortions through the civil bounty part of the law.

Bonnie Fuller is the former CEO and editor-in-chief of HollywoodLife.com and former editor-in-chief of Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and USWeekly. 

Reprinted with permission from Courier Texas.

A Tennessee Mom Fought Back On Abortion -- By Running For Legislature

A Tennessee Mom Fought Back On Abortion -- By Running For Legislature

A rallying cry has gone up across America over the past few months, with people gathering in cities large and small to protest the influence of Elon Musk, DOGE, and Project 2025 on the federal government. In Austin, Texas, a group of more than 200 people came together in late February for a similar reason — but this gathering had a very specific goal at its core. The first-of-its kind conference was designed to strategize ways to fight the extreme right-wing attack on women’s reproductive rights.

In what’s been described as a pivotal moment for the abortion rights movement, the conference — titled “Abortion in America” and co-founded by author Lauren Peterson, activist Kaitlyn Joshua, and former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards (who died in January) — included panelists like Amanda Zurawski and Samantha Casiano, two of the 20 women who sued the state of Texas after being denied abortions, and Texas radio DJ Ryan Hamilton, who found his wife unconscious after being denied treatment for a miscarriage.

And it invited people from out of state to talk about their experiences, both the dangerous situations they and their loved ones have faced due to abortion bans, and the ways they’re fighting back.

“The aha moment that made me finally decide to go ahead was when I learned about the 10-year-old girl in Ohio, who was raped and had to travel to Indiana to obtain an abortion,” said Allie Phillips, a panelist at the event from Tennessee. “That was the last straw. I had a six-year-old daughter and I was like, ‘That’s it. Nobody is going to protect my daughter like I would, so I’m going to do it.’”

That was the moment, Phillips said, that made her decide to run for office.

The now 30-year-old announced her campaign at the end of 2023, but it took a year of heartache — and a very disturbing conversation with her state representative — to get her to that point.

Phillips and her husband, Bryan, found out they were expecting a daughter at their 15-week sonogram appointment in 2022. Allie said the pregnancy was a celebration for their whole family.

“I remember that I handed Bryan the positive pregnancy test and he was really excited,” she said. “He picked me up and twirled me around, he was so happy.”

Adalie, Phillips’ 6-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, was excited, too. “She told everyone who asked her that she was going to be a big sister,” Phillips said.

The family joyfully named the baby Miley Rose.

‘She only had half a heart working’

But then, a few weeks later, Phillips’ pregnancy took a turn.

“During my 20-week sonogram, Bryan and I were crushed by devastating news,” Phillips said. “Miley’s brain hadn’t developed properly and neither had her kidneys, her stomach, and her bladder. Even though her little heart was beating, she only had half a heart working.”

The fetus had a brain malformation called semilobar holoprosencephaly — a condition that was so severe that it was incompatible with life.

“Not only that, the doctor warned that she could die inside me at any time, and the longer I remained pregnant, the greater the risk would be to my own future fertility and even to my life,” Phillips said.

In Tennessee, abortions are banned after fertilization with very limited exceptions. And while those exceptions allow for saving the life of the mother, Phillips would have to get to the point where her life or a major bodily function required immediate saving before she’d be able to have an abortion.

In states with such extreme abortion bans, like Texas, doctors have left in droves due to the uncertainty around when they can step in to help their patients. There are also countless stories of women dying while waiting for an abortion.

“It was the thought of Adalie motherless that cemented my decision to find a medical facility somewhere that would perform an abortion on me at 20 weeks,” Phillips said. “My mom and I eventually were able to make an appointment at a clinic in New York City that could take me in the next week. But since my husband and I live paycheck to paycheck, I had to appeal to strangers on TikTok to help me raise the $5,000 I needed for the procedure and travel to New York.”

Phillips said that after she had her abortion, she knew she wanted to do something to help people in situations like hers, “regardless of their political views.”

“Shortly after I was back home, I was contacted by the Center for Reproductive Rights, asking if I would join a lawsuit against the Tennessee abortion law. I thought, ‘That’s how I could be of help.’”

Phillips joined the lawsuit, but said she also wanted to work on more immediate change.

A disturbing meeting with her elected official

“I decided to meet with my district representative in the state legislature,” she said. Her idea was a bill she’d called “Miley’s Law,” which would create an exception in Tennessee’s abortion ban allowing for the termination of pregnancies when the fetus has a fatal diagnosis.

She said the meeting with her lawmaker — state Rep. Jeff Burkhart, a Clarksville Republican — was disturbing.

“I quickly learned that these (Republican) lawmakers don’t know anything about reproductive care,” she said. “He was confused because I had had a healthy first pregnancy, and then lost my second one. He told me, ‘I thought only first pregnancies could go bad.’”

Burkhart, a 63-year-old father, told Phillips he’d set up a meeting for her with the state’s attorney general — but never followed through, Phillips said.

“After that, my mom said, ‘Maybe you should run against him,’” Phillips said. “And then my TikTok followers started to say the same thing.”

Burkhart did not respond to a request for comment from Courier Texas.

Fighting back by running for office

Phillips announced her campaign for District 75 in the Tennessee House of Representatives in late 2023. She was 28 years old.

“When I was door-knocking, a lot of people just wanted somebody to listen to them,” she said. “There were times I would stand at someone’s door for an hour, and they would talk about the struggles they had and they would thank me.”

Phillips said she learned that she and the people of her district had more in common than not. Her husband Bryan, a forklift mechanic, and she, a daycare provider, knew what it was like to live paycheck to paycheck, like many of the folks she talked to. And like them, she and her husband cared about their public schools and preventing vouchers from sending tax dollars to private schools.

“There were people who told me, ‘I’ll vote for you for the simple fact that you came and knocked on my door, and that had never happened before,’” Phillips said. “One gentleman told me that he had voted for Republicans for his entire life, and he said he didn’t agree with a lot of things that I was running on.”

But “he said that what was going on in our state and across the country is not okay.”

He cast his ballot for Phillips.

In the summer before the November 2024 election, Phillips and her husband found out they were expecting again. They’d been trying, knowing that it might take some time for her body to fully heal after losing Miley, but not without some hesitation.

“It’s scary to be pregnant in Tennessee,” Phillips said. “It’s scary to be pregnant in this country in general. But I took the risk because I’m not going to let some lawmakers take away the dream that I’ve had since I was a little girl.”

“I got tired of letting them control my brain and my fear. I made the decision to get pregnant again because I want to be — not because JD Vance wants more babies in America, but because it was my dream,” she said.

Phillips announced her pregnancy during her concession speech on Election Night. With just over 11,000 votes, Burkhart won reelection.

Phillips had earned 45 percent of the vote in her district, though — the closest margin of any Democrat in Tennessee trying to flip a seat in the state legislature in 2024.

Moving on

Phillips and her husband learned that the baby they’re expecting is a boy, and they’ve named him Archie. But they’ve worried throughout the whole pregnancy.

“All along I’ve known that if something were to happen to my baby, I wouldn’t be able to get care in Tennessee,” Phillips said.

She had to close her daycare business to campaign, and said if she runs for office again, it’ll be for something more local — like the county commission, city council, or school board. A place “where I could make more of an impact on my local community,” she said.

Phillips said no matter what comes next, she’ll keep sharing her abortion story.

“A lot of the Republican voters I talked to while campaigning didn’t even know we had an abortion ban,” she said. “I will share my story for 20 years if I have to, because it does make a difference.”

Like Phillips, women across the country are increasingly turning their experiences with abortion bans and their passion for reproductive justice into action by running for office. Women like Gina Ortiz Jones, whose lead in the May 3 race for mayor of San Antonio is currently growing.

“As a candidate, I found that what was most effective in connecting with voters was to remain authentic,” Phillips said. “I didn’t change who I was or lie about who I was. I was very open and honest about what I was going through.”

It’s that strategy — along with the determination to stand up and do something — that Phillips shared with the audience in Austin. And as the horror stories about what’s happening to women’s health across the country continue to be shared, it’s becoming more and more likely that women will go into the 2026 election cycle looking for leaders like them.

Reprinted with permission from Courier Texas.

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