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Protesters cross the Brooklyn Bridge during a Climate Strike march on September 20, 2024, in New York City. Research shows air pollution already fuels higher asthma death rates among Black women, a disparity experts say could worsen under weaker federal protections.
Andres Kudacki/AP
As EPA Weakens Air Pollution Regulations, Black Women Stand To Face the Greatest Health Risks
Feb 17, 2026
Rhonda Anderson has spent nearly three decades fighting for clean air and water in Detroit. As an environmental justice organizer with the Sierra Club, she led campaigns to raise awareness about lead poisoning of babies and children in the vicinity of steel mills and is part of a Clean Air Act lawsuit against the EES Coke Battery, a local industrial facility.
So watching the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) taking one step after another to weaken air pollution regulations over the last year has felt “really, pretty much devastating,” she said.
“Just looking at my little world, we’ve worked so hard to get a lot of these things recognized,” Anderson said. Most of her work has been in southwest Detroit, which has over 150 industrial facilities and some of the worst air quality in Michigan. Just a year ago, “we had a fifth grader who passed from an asthma attack,” she said.
In addition to overturning dozens of regulations aimed at reducing air pollution to save lives, the EPA has also exempted over 100 industrial facilities, including the Coke Battery plant Anderson has been fighting, from more rigorous rules to reduce pollution, created under the Biden administration.
Experts say all these moves combined favor industry while sacrificing public health — and it is Black women like Anderson, as well as their families, who stand to be harmed the most.
Black women already have the highest death rates due to asthma, a condition caused and exacerbated by air pollution. They are four times as likely to die of an asthma-related death as White men, according to a report from the Asthma and Allergy Foundation. Black children are also eight times more likely to die from an asthma attack than White children.
One of the reasons is that these women and their children also disproportionately live in medical deserts with limited health care infrastructure and insurance. Cuts to Medicaid stand to make the risks of asthma even worse. “We know that half of the children with asthma in the U.S. are covered by Medicaid or CHIP,” said Lynne Bosma, health equity director with the Asthma and Allergy Foundation. “If individuals that need that access lose it, they are going to struggle to get medication, specialty care access, and then emergency care as well.”
Due to their physiology, women are more likely to develop asthma in adulthood compared to men — and their asthma is also more likely to be severe. Some studies show a connection between the estrogen hormone and asthma, with girls after puberty experiencing higher rates of asthma diagnosis compared to boys. A study from 2025 found that asthma risk is also linked to pregnancy, menopause and even the menstrual cycle.
Because women typically take on caregiving responsibilities, they are also more likely to be tasked with taking care of sick kids when their asthma flares up. This leads to more days of lost work compared to men, and a greater financial burden for women-led households.
Most recently, the EPA made headlines after the New York Times reported it would no longer calculate the cost to human health when making new regulations on particle and ozone pollution, and instead would only calculate the benefits to industry, further burdening women and their households.
An agency spokesperson told The 19th the EPA is not stopping the calculation, but simply pausing it “until our models can better reflect the smaller, more complex changes seen as these pollutants continue to decline nationwide.” The spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up question asking when the agency would release a new calculation, nor what steps it was taking to monetize the health costs.
Sarah Vogel, a senior vice president of healthy communities with the Environmental Defense Fund, doesn’t buy the explanation. “The reason they eliminated it is because air pollution has a huge impact on our health,” she said. Industries don’t like that because it shows the benefit of stricter regulations, which are more costly for polluters, she said.
The country had been slowly moving toward cleaning up the air that both causes and exacerbates this life-threatening diagnosis since the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970, which resulted in an 80 percent drop in air pollution. “That legislation saved more lives than any doctor could,” said Dr. Panagis Galiatsatos, a spokesperson for the American Lung Association. “It allowed people to enjoy capitalism without feeling like their lives and health are being sacrificed for it.”
Since then, he said, newer regulations have been about fine-tuning that law to better reflect the science that shows the impact pollution has on health. But by overturning those newer standards, and no longer calculating the cost to human health, “American lives will be the cost,” he said bluntly.
While the air is no longer as toxic as it once was, air pollution is still heavily concentrated in communities of color, like Anderson’s. Across the country, majority Black and low-income communities have a disproportionately high concentration of industries and freeways that result in poor air quality, which has been linked to a higher risk for their residents of asthma and other diseases.
Anderson said that in her community, “I see Black women dying at a rate that I would only describe as shameful.” She believes the pollution she grew up with may be the reason she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to have a mastectomy. Others in her family have also been diagnosed with breast cancer.
Her observation aligns with research showing that higher rates of particle pollution have been associated with higher rates of certain kinds of breast cancer in Black women living in the Midwest. Air pollution has also been associated with a higher risk of strokes, dementia and heart disease.
For Vogel, the EPA’s latest moves are all about putting polluters’ pocketbooks ahead of people’s health.
“You’re shifting the burden of all this pollution — and they’re doing it with toxic chemicals — literally onto our bodies,” she said. “And it’s really pretty despicable when you really get down to like, who is actually benefiting here.”
As EPA Weakens Air Pollution Regulations, Black Women Stand To Face the Greatest Health Risks was originally published by the 19th and is republished with permission.
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Ken Burns’ The American Revolution highlights why America’s founders built checks and balances—an urgent reminder as Congress, the courts, and citizens confront growing threats to democratic governance.
Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash
Partial Shutdown; Congress Asserts Itself a Little
Feb 17, 2026
DHS Shutdown
As expected, the parties in the Senate could not come to an agreement on DHS funding and now the agency will be shut down. Sort of.
So much money was appropriated for DHS, and ICE and CBP specifically, in last year's reconciliation bill, that DHS could continue to operate with little or no interruption. Other parts of DHS like FEMA and the TSA might face operational cuts or shutdowns.
You might think that only ICE and CBP could operate without interruption, but as this Wall Street Journal article notes, DHS Secretary Noem has a pretty freewheeling approach to how to spend the agency's money.
The article also notes Noem's antipathy towards FEMA which suggests that that sub-agency of DHS would receive no special help while new funding is unavailable.
Could Congress appropriate funds for FY2026 all of DHS except for ICE & CBP? Sure. Rep. DeLauro (D-CT3) proposed exactly that this week. But so far her proposal has not garnered any interest.
If Congress took that route, ICE and CBP would still have, according to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), 750% more money than they had before the reconciliation bill passed.
Both chambers of Congress are out next week so no movement is expected until the week of February 23 at the absolute earliest.
Tariffs
Last year, Speaker Johnson (R-LA4) used a Rules Committee rule to block any votes in the House that would object to the President's use of tariffs. Well, that rule ended this week. When Johnson tried the maneuver again this week it failed 214-217. And that opened the door to the first of probably many successful votes against the President's vast new tariff structure.
Because the Senate would also have to agree to the resolution to end the tariffs and then the President would have to sign it, it's extremely unlikely that this vote will lead to an end to any tariffs. But it is one of the very few instances of the Republican majority not squashing an objection to something the President really wants and is thus notable.
DOJ Spying on Lawmakers Reviewing Epstein Files
Speaker Johnson has become something of a broken record whenever he's asked about some administration overstep into Congressional authority: he says he doesn't know anything about it and/or that it's probably fine. So it was a bit of a surprise this week when he had heard the news that the Department of Justice was spying on legislators' search histories during their reviews of Epstein files and said it was "inappropriate". Not exactly a robust defense of Congressional power, but a notable departure from his usual pattern.
House Passed a Few Other Bills
None of these bills are anywhere near becoming a law. They first have to pass the Senate.
- H.R. 1531: PROTECT Taiwan Act, which would make it the policy of the United States to prevent China from participating in certain international organizations if the President determines that Taiwan or the interests of the United States are being threatened, passed 395-2.
- H.R. 6644: Housing for the 21st Century Act, passed 390-9. This is a large bill with lots of parts, but the Bipartisan Policy Center has an explainer.
- H.R. 2189: Law-Enforcement Innovate to De-Escalate Act, which would would amend the definition of firearm in the Gun Control Act of 1968 to exclude certain nonlethal projectile devices, passed 233-185.
- H.R. 3617: Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply Act, which would direct the Department of Energy to assess vulnerabilities in critical energy resource supply chains, including critical minerals and rare earth elements, and develop strategies to address disruptions and over-reliance on adversarial nations (sponsor press release), passed 223-206.
- S. 1383: Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would enact a host of new requirements to register to vote, passed 218-213. This bill, despite originating in the Senate, still has to go back to the Senate for another vote because originally S. 1383 was about something totally different. The House substituted in new text about voting registrations, changed the bill name and now it has to go back to the Senate.
- H.R. 261: Undersea Cable Protection Act of 2025, which would prohibit the Secretary of Commerce from prohibiting, or requiring any permit or other authorization for, the installation, continued presence, operation, maintenance, repair, or recovery of undersea fiber optic cables in a national marine sanctuary if such activities have been authorized by a Federal or State agency, passed 218-212.
One New Law
- H.J.Res. 142: Disapproving the action of the District of Columbia Council in approving the D.C. Income and Franchise Tax Conformity and Revision Temporary Amendment Act of 2025, which prohibits Washington, D.C. from opting out of tax cuts passed last year, passed 49-47. It goes next to the President for signing.
Amy West is the GovTrack research and communications manager.
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A public health professor argues that trauma-informed, flexible, community-centered teaching is essential to help students succeed in 2026’s volatile environment.
Photo by 2y.kang on Unsplash
Transform Teaching Now: Accommodate Learning In Chaotic Times
Feb 16, 2026
It’s an extremely stressful time for many Americans, including students in higher education. They need to deal with the ongoing impact of chaos on their learning through this academic year and beyond. Faculty need to adjust to their needs.
The most recent American Psychological Association Stress in America™ survey shows “62% of U.S. adults 18 and over reported societal division as a significant source of stress in their lives.” Seventy-six percent of U.S. adults say the future of the nation is a significant cause of stress.
Following the ongoing protests, arrests, disruptions and ICE killings in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, a recent New York Times/Siena University poll says 63% of Americans disapprove of ICE tactics. Sixty-one percent say ICE has gone too far.
As a public health professor with over a decade of teaching experience, I’m deeply concerned about the ability of students in higher education to meet their learning goals in this volatile socio-political environment made intentionally chaotic by erratic and disruptive events that arise almost daily.
Eighty-seven percent of the 127 students and guests (my class is open to the public) in my graduate public health course recently responded to a poll that they feel that the current and past social, economic, and political policies and programs cause them stress or anxiety.
Chronic anxiety and stress impact all systems of the body – musculoskeletal, respiratory, cardiovascular, endocrine, gastrointestinal, nervous, and reproductive systems. These impacts result in tight shoulders, feelings of shortness of breath, occasional heartburn, nausea and headaches.
The chronic anxiety and stress about the socio-political environment today can also make people feel unsafe, making it hard to concentrate, retain information and integrate concepts. Research shows that stress and emotions have a main influence on the learning process.
In a national study, 30% of college students reported that anxiety impacted their academics. Another found that one in five college students are stressed all the time.
This is not new. During the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety and depression spiked globally, increasing 25% in two years impacting the academic performance of students. The efforts taken then need to inform action today.
In responding to the broad mental health needs, many universities, like mine, added mental health providers, created safe spaces for students and provided evidenced-based programming for students. Yet few efforts were made to encourage faculty to change their pedagogical approaches and/or their lesson plans and assessments to accommodate student learning.
When students feel unsafe and uncertain, some simple adjustments by faculty can help. Integrating efforts to deepen the relationships within the learning community in the class can allow for organic mutual support and sense of community.
This can be done by adding more interactive learning activities that allow the students to share their knowledge and expertise in a discussion-based learning process.
Integrating more breaks and reflexivity in the learning process is also helpful. Studies show, for men in particular, that students report being unable to sustain attention to a lecture longer than 20-30 minutes.
Integrating evidenced-based trauma informed approaches like mindful breathwork, taking a set of intentional collective deep breathes before learning begins, or starting class with music or storytelling is also helpful in welcoming students to the learning space.
Instructors can provide more agency and control over the assignments by inserting flexibility in the assessment process. They can allow students to choose their topics or assignments and opt out of some assignments (for instance, they can complete seven out of 12 assignments). Flexible assignment deadlines can provide students some relief when they are unable to focus.
Deeply integrating community engagement in teaching so each learning objective can be applied and experiential can also ease stress. My own research has shown this can have multiple levels of benefits.
If needed, faculty must be able to set the syllabus aside and identify a set of learning experiences that allow faculty to facilitate students learning in new and innovative ways.
For instance, in spring 2025, when ICE was sent to Chicago neighborhoods, students in my class were dealing with a high level of anxiety. My co-instructor and I put aside what we had planned and instead co-designed, as a class, a learning event called Mindful Meals to meet the learning objectives in a more trauma informed way.
This leveraged the assets of the students themselves to host a meal for the school community. Faculty, staff, students and community partners were invited to sit with us, using a World Café model.
Students demonstrated mastery of the course concepts and practiced their community engagement skills to create an environment where students could sit and reflect on the harms we are experiencing as a public health community.
One student arranged video documentation of the World Cafe, so it could inspire other teachers in other schools of public health to make critical modifications to their instruction during this difficult time.
The Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health call for transformative approaches to teaching and learning that involve diverse and inclusive learning communities to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.
Included in this changing environment is a level of chaos most have not seen before. This chaos includes the loss of funding for health equity research and programming making future public health careers uncertain.
The public health field is experiencing censorship and erasure of critical theoretical and methodologic approaches that situate health as determined by a social and political process. This is seen in federal requirements to remove words from research such as structural, systemic, political, legislation, segregation, marginalized, underrepresented, and disadvantage. This is causing disorientation, frustration and stress.
During this difficult time, it is critical for faculty and instructors across higher education to rethink their syllabi and teaching approach and deepen our connections as a learning community to adapt to the unique needs that 2026 has wrought.
In her 1994 book, Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks writes, “As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.”
Jeni Hebert-Beirne, PhD, MPH is an award-winning Professor of Community Health Sciences at the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project.
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AI-generated “nudification” is no longer a distant threat—it’s harming students now. As deepfake pornography spreads in schools nationwide, educators are left to confront a growing crisis that outpaces laws, platforms, and parental awareness.
Getty Images, d3sign
How AI Deepfakes in Classrooms Expose a Crisis of Accountability and Civic Trust
Feb 16, 2026
While public outrage flares when AI tools like Elon Musk’s Grok generate sexualized images of adults on X—often without consent—schools have been dealing with this harm for years. For school-aged children, AI-generated “nudification” is not a future threat or an abstract tech concern; it is already shaping their daily lives.
Last month, that reality became impossible to ignore in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana. A father sued the school district after several middle school boys circulated AI-generated pornographic images of eight female classmates, including his 13-year-old daughter. When the girl confronted one of the boys and punched him on a school bus, she was expelled. The boy who helped create and spread the images faced no formal consequences.
The case ignited debate over internet safety, deepfake pornography, and school discipline. But it also exposed a deeper truth we are reluctant to confront: decisions made by powerful tech leaders are reshaping childhood faster than schools, parents, or laws can respond—and schools are being left to manage the fallout without the tools they need.
Recent survey data confirms this is not an isolated incident. Researchers found that AI “nudification” is increasingly common in schools, used to harass, humiliate, and exert power over peers. What adults may still perceive as shocking misconduct has, for many students, become disturbingly normalized.
In nearly all 50 states and Washington, D.C., creating and distributing child sexual abuse material is a crime. AI-generated deepfakes, however, present a unique challenge. These images are easy to create, can be shared widely in seconds, and often disappear from platforms just as quickly. Even when perpetrators are identified, the speed, volume, and anonymity of digital sharing make enforcement extraordinarily difficult.
Expecting the legal system to track and prosecute every child and teenager contributing to this epidemic is neither realistic nor effective. If we focus only on punishment after harm occurs, we will always be too late. The goal must be prevention.
Research shows that 31 percent of young people are familiar with deepfake nudes, and one in eight knows someone who has been victimized by them. Girls account for 99 percent of the victims. One in 17 youth and young adults has been directly targeted by AI-generated sexual images—roughly one student in every middle school classroom in the United States. This is not a fringe issue or a moral panic. It is a widespread form of sexual harassment enabled by technology that outpaces our safeguards.
Students need clear guidance to navigate a digital world where a single harmless photo can be transformed into a weapon—sometimes without malicious intent, but with devastating consequences. Yet only 28 states and the District of Columbia require sex education, and just 12 include instruction on consent. This gap has created ideal conditions for the deepfake crisis to flourish.
Without education on bodily autonomy, digital boundaries, consent, and meaningful safeguards from tech companies, young people are left unequipped to recognize the harm in creating and sharing explicit AI images. They are even less prepared to respond when they or their peers become targets.
As a mother, I resist the urge to say simply that parents need to talk to their kids. Parents are essential, but many lack the technical knowledge, consistent access, or awareness needed to explain how these images are created, how quickly they spread, and the profound psychological harm they cause. That is where schools must step in.
As a former middle school teacher, I have sat across from parents explaining the seriousness of emerging online trends long before they reached Facebook groups, GroupMe chats, or parent blogs. Schools are often the first places where this harm appears—and they are uniquely positioned to respond.
Schools can and should provide structured, age-appropriate education that reaches all students, ensures consistent messaging, and creates space for honest discussion. Lessons should include:
- How popular apps and tools generate AI images
- The legal ramifications and potential criminal liability
- The deep psychological and emotional harm inflicted on victims
- Clear school- or district-wide reporting protocols
- The rights of victims and available supports
Educators already manage cyberbullying, hunger, school violence, and adolescent mental health. Some may ask whether this is one burden too many. But integrating education about AI-generated pornography is not an added responsibility—it is a necessary evolution of student safety in a digital age.
Unlike many victims, both the woman targeted on X and the 13-year-old girl in Lafourche Parish reported their abuse. But for every report, how many students suffer in silence—ashamed, afraid, or unsure whether adults will take them seriously?
While platforms like X attempt to normalize or minimize the harm of deepfake nudification, educators must push back against the idea that this behavior is accessible, acceptable, or consequence-free. That message does not stay online. It reaches classrooms, school buses, and lunch tables. When perpetrators face little accountability and victims are punished for reacting, the lesson students learn is devastatingly clear.
If tech leaders will not fully account for the damage their products enable, schools must act—not through harsher punishment, but through education. Teaching AI literacy, consent, and respect is our strongest defense against a problem that is only growing. Prevention, not discipline, is how we protect children—and how we ensure no more students have to fight back just to be heard.
Julienne Louis-Anderson is a former educator, curriculum writer, and educational equity advocate. She is also a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in Partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute
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