Mary Peltola speaks to a crowd of supporters for her candidacy for U.S. Senate at a campaign kick off event in Juneau on Jan. 23, 2026 (Photo by Corinne Smith/Alaska Beacon)
The leading challenger to Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan is proposing to eliminate income taxes for Alaskans earning less than $92,000 per year, the state’s median household income.
Democratic candidate Mary Peltola introduced the idea Monday as part of a newly expanded platform of campaign ideas.
Among some of the other ideas: a federally subsidized “Essential Freight Service” for air cargo to small communities, a renewal of the federal Expanded Child Tax Credit, tax credits for renters and child care facilities, and price controls and limits on corporate mergers.
There are relatively few seats in the U.S. Senate that could be won by either a Republican or a Democrat this year. In a recent analysis, NPR dubbed Alaska’s seat the “majority maker.” National Democrats are hoping that Peltola can beat Sullivan and help them take control of the Senate, which currently has a 54-46 Republican edge.
Meanwhile, Sullivan has continued to strengthen a network of connections within the state. He’s already received endorsements from the United Fishermen of Alaska — the state’s largest commercial fishing organization — and last week was endorsed by the ANCSA Regional Association, a group representing the state’s largest Alaska Native corporations.
Both groups represent constituencies that have previously favored Peltola.
Statewide opinion polls have found economic issues are at the top of Alaskans’ minds, and many Alaskans have an extraordinarily pessimistic view of the state’s financial health and their own financial situation.
Many residents believe that any economic improvements won’t trickle down to them, said Matt Larkin, a leading pollster, in a recent interview.
That’s the environment in which Peltola is launching her new economic campaign.
“Affordability — it’s on everyone’s mind,” she said in an interview ahead of the launch.
Peltola, who lives part of the year in rural Alaska, said she believes the high cost of heating fuel and stove fuel has created a crisis.
“I feel like we’re in a dire situation that I have never experienced,” she said, explaining that her monthly fuel bill now exceeds her mortgage.
During a recent visit to St. Mary’s, on the Yukon River in southwest Alaska, she talked to people who are currently paying $10 per gallon for fuel. They’re expecting prices to go up by 40-50%, she said.
If they can’t afford fuel, “that means there’s no electricity, there’s no heat, there’s no gas for hunting and fishing. This is dire. And I, you know, I just think we’ve got to get really serious about how to bring down prices for everyday Alaskans, for everyday households.”
Peltola drew a direct line between the American war on Iran and those high prices. Sullivan has been a staunch supporter of the war. Peltola believes Congress needs to intervene, though she stopped short of outright opposing it.
“There is a need for the War Powers Act. I do not believe that any President should be making these kinds of substantive decisions unilaterally,” she said.
Peltola’s call for an “Essential Freight Service” mirrors her support for Bypass Mail and the Essential Air Service, two existing subsidy programs that support flights to rural Alaska and other parts of rural America.
She said the exact scope of the freight program still needs to be worked out. Alaska is essentially “six states within a state,” and “and every single region is so unique, and I think it would have to be unique approaches in every region and every community.”
Monday’s announcement is the second significant policy launch by Peltola since she announced in January that she would challenge Sullivan for Senate.
In late March, she announced her support for Congressional term limits, a ban on stock trading by members of Congress and her support for a Constitutional amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court case known as Citizens United.
That case allows third-party groups to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns as long as they do not coordinate with candidates.
Speaking Friday, Peltola said anti-corruption and affordability are complementary issues.
“I think we’re all going to be looking at where the price gouging is and where we can halt corporate greed and inflation,” she said.
MP Materials’ Mountain Pass mine and processing facility in California was for years the only U.S. rare earth elements mine. Tmy350/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Rebuilding domestic mineral supply chains will depend not only on resource availability and funding, but also on whether the U.S. can rebuild the technical expertise and industrial systems required to process those materials on a large scale.
How America lost its lead
The United States was a global leader in rare earth minerals from 1965 through the mid-1980s. It produced about 15,000 metric tons a year, about three times the amount produced by the rest of the world.
The Mountain Pass mine in California supplied the majority of the world’s rare earth elements used in electronics and the defense industry. American metallurgists, chemical engineers and processing facilities had significant expertise in its production and processing.
However, environmental damage, including wastewater pipeline leaks that released radioactive wastewater into the Mojave Desert during the 1980s and 1990s, and tightening regulations increased operating costs in the United States. During that period, much of the world’s manufacturing base for rare earth elements shifted to China, where labor costs were lower and environmental regulations were less stringent.
As production grew abroad, U.S. production of rare earth elements fell sharply – to near zero by the early 2000s, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
These facilities require years of permitting, highly specialized equipment and a workforce trained in metallurgy, chemical engineering and industrial systems operation. The time from investment decision to production can stretch across a decade.
The U.S. currently has two domestic rare earth mining locations. One is in southeast Georgia, which extracts rare earth elements as a byproduct of heavy mineral sand mining. The other is Mountain Pass, which produces bastnaesite, a rare earth carbonate mineral. The mines produced about 51,000 metric tons of rare earth mineral concentrates in 2025, while the U.S. imported about 21,000 metric tons of rare earth compounds, most of them from China, according to 2025 U.S. Geological Survey data.
The U.S. has also lost expertise. Mining and mineral engineering education programs now produce only a few hundred graduates per year, well below the levels of past decades. The number of accredited programs has declined since the 1980s. Many faculty members are nearing retirement.
Industry projections estimate that the mining workforce will need to grow significantly in the coming years to meet rising demand. Specialized skills in areas such as rare earth separation, metallurgical testing and environmental systems design require years of training and practical experience. And while mining can produce high-paying jobs, the industry also has a reputation for environmental damage and hazardous conditions.
Environmental compliance is part of the skill set
Processing critical minerals is a dirty industry. That fact has made it more difficult for processing and refining companies to operate in the U.S.
For example, separating rare earth elements typically involves chemical processing with acids and solvents. When waste streams are poorly managed, these processes can produce toxic wastewater and air pollution and contribute to soil erosion. In parts of China where rare earth production expanded rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s, contamination from mining and processing has polluted rivers and damaged nearby farmland, and the wastewater can seep into soil and groundwater.
In the U.S., modern facilities must meet strict federal and state standards for air quality, water discharge and waste management that raise the cost of processing. These regulations were developed in response to environmental disasters, like the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969, when industrial oil and waste on the river burned, and hazardous waste crises like the Love Canal disaster that led to landmark environmental laws.
Operating a refinery or separation facility in compliance with regulatory standards today requires expertise in pollution control, waste treatment and sustainable process design. That requires a workforce skilled in materials science and engineering and with knowledge of environmental systems. Without environmental expertise, operational risks, regulatory challenges and project delays can increase, affecting long-term viability.
How to build a US supply chain
Rebuilding U.S. supply chains will require more than expanding extraction.
Canada’s critical minerals strategy offers an example. It connects mining projects to battery and electric vehicle manufacturing by funding processing facilities, developing regional supply chain hubs and investing in workforce training programs tied to those industries.
Australia has combined critical minerals policies with incentives and public financing to encourage domestic mineral processing, while also expanding university and vocational training in mining, metallurgy and mineral processing.
The United States has many of the key ingredients needed to rebuild its processing capacity, including research universities and workers with transferable industrial skills. Land-grant and technical universities could expand programs that integrate mining, materials science, environmental restoration and recycling. In regions such as Appalachia, where coal’s decline has left workers with skills but few job opportunities, retraining programs for new mineral recovery jobs could help people transition to a new industry.
A few federal programs support parts of this transition, including research hubs that develop new extraction and processing technologies, apprenticeship initiatives and university-industry partnerships. However, these efforts are spread across multiple agencies, with limited coordination to align priorities and investment.
The real bottleneck
America’s critical minerals strategy is often discussed in terms of geology and geopolitics – where resources are located and who has access to them.
But supply chains depend on people and systems. That’s America’s real bottleneck in creating a domestic supply chain.
A successful domestic supply chain will require workers who know how to separate neodymium from praseodymium, operate solvent extraction circuits and maintain hydrometallurgical plants within regulatory standards. These are highly specialized skills that take years to develop.
The United States has significant mineral resources and growing policy support. Now, it needs to pay attention to the workforce and industrial capacity needed to transform those resources into usable materials.
This gap developed over decades. Addressing it will likely require sustained investment alongside broader mineral policy changes such as permitting reforms and investment in domestic processing facilities.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Trump administration is trying to tie the hands of future administrations when it comes to regulating pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions.Chris Sattlberger/Tetra Images via Getty Images
As the Trump administration moves to weaken America’s air pollution rules, it is deploying new legal interpretations that are intended to tie the hands of future administrations for years to come.
In practice, the changes limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act. The result allows EPA officials to ignore science, data and the adverse effects their decisions will have on public health and the environment.
But the new interpretations are also designed to apply not just to the rule in which they are first set forth but into the future.
If affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in inevitable legal challenges, these interpretations could make it harder for future administrations to restore the public health protections that the Trump administration eliminates. They could also make it difficult to update rules to respond to new information about health risks.
Typically, moves to weaken pollution regulations through novel legal interpretations would have a good chance of being overturned in court. But the EPA’s new interpretations are strategically designed to appeal to the current U.S. Supreme Court’s view of federal agencies’ authority, especially in light of the court’s 2024 ruling in Loper Bright v. Raimondo. In that case, the court overturned what’s known as the Chevron doctrine. A 1984 Supreme Court ruling had established that courts should defer to executive agencies’ legal interpretations of their governing statutes when the text of the law was ambiguous or left gaps. That deference no longer applies.
As a former EPA appointee who helped write and review dozens of regulations under the Clean Air Act during the Obama and Biden administrations, I find these efforts to prevent the EPA from doing its job of protecting public health and the environment to be alarming. Here are two examples of how the new interpretations are playing out.
Blocking future climate regulations
In February 2026, the EPA rescinded its 2009 endangerment finding, a determination under the Clean Air Act that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare” because they contribute to climate change.
The endangerment finding was the scientific and legal basis for EPA rules requiring automakers, power plants and oil and gas operations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. Erasing it would make it easier for the Trump administration to eliminate greenhouse gas regulations.
Rather than try to challenge the science of climate change, which would be difficult given the growing mountain of evidence, the Trump EPA relied on legal arguments that were intended to dispense forever with the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
President Donald Trump and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin arrive for a White House event to announce a rollback of the 2009 Endangerment Finding on Feb. 12, 2026. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
First, the Trump EPA says the Clean Air Act should be read to limit the EPA’s authority to regulate air pollution only if its harm to the public is “through local or regional exposure.”
That would mean contributions from U.S. sources to global air pollution, no matter how demonstrable or how much they endanger Americans, are not covered by the Clean Air Act.
Second, the Trump EPA says that reducing greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles and engines would be “futile.” It points to global climate modeling that suggest these reductions would not meaningfully reduce the harm to public health and welfare.
What that argument fails to mention is that actions by people around the world to reduce emissions across different sectors add up. Motor vehicle emissions are the No. 1 contributor of U.S. emissions. If this sector is too small to regulate, then nothing is big enough.
Each of these interpretations is contrary to positions that the EPA took in the original endangerment finding, which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld in 2012.
Allowing more toxic air pollutants
A second example involves the EPA’s proposal on March 17, 2026, to weaken pollution restrictions on businesses that sterilize medical equipment using ethylene oxide, a known carcinogen.
In that proposal, the EPA is also changing a legal interpretation in a way that would constrain the agency’s ability to protect human health into the future, this time from emissions of toxic air pollutants.
The Clean Air Act, under Section 112, establishes a methodical program for the EPA to regulate industries that emit significant quantities of air pollutants that can cause cancer, birth defects, genetic mutations or neurological harm, or harm reproductive health.
The EPA reviews how facilities control their emissions and sets standards that require all facilities to meet what the best-controlled sources are doing. But Section 112 has an important provision called “residual risk” review: Eight years after the EPA sets the first technology-based standards, it must determine whether the public health risk posed by emissions from the facilities after controls are added is acceptable.
In 2024, the EPA updated its hazardous air pollution rule for facilities that use ethylene oxide to sterilize medical equipment sensitive to steam heat, such as devices containing plastic, rubber or electronic components. Because recent research showed that ethylene oxide posed a much higher risk of cancer than previously thought, the EPA also updated its 2006 residual risk finding and required additional safeguards.
The Trump EPA is now arguing that the agency can assess residual risk only once, even if more recent information shows that the health risk is unacceptably high.
By constraining its own authority, the EPA is withholding standards that would protect thousands of people from a higher risk of cancer. It is also creating a legal precedent that will justify weakening other standards. Those include standards for chemical manufacturing facilities that the Biden EPA updated in 2024 through residual risk review.
That precedent would also prohibit the EPA in the future from taking into account new information about the health effects of any regulated hazardous air pollutant from any type of industry the EPA regulates under Section 112 of the Clean Air Act, including petroleum refineries, chemical manufacturing and paper mills.
If the administration’s strategy works, the American public may be living, and dying, with the consequences of these industry-friendly regulations for years to come.
Janet McCabe is a volunteer with the Environmental Protection Network and has held several appointed positions at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Consistent with the Indiana University Statement of Policy on Institutional Neutrality, the comments contained in this communication are solely my views and are not intended to be construed, and shall not be construed, as the views of Indiana University or comments made on behalf of or by Indiana University.
If someone you know is detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it can be incredibly challenging to find and communicate with them.
For example, it can take several days just to confirm where they are. Even after locating a loved one, it is possible to lose track of them again, as ICE regularly moves people between facilities without notice.
Here’s what we know about how and where ICE is holding people as of May 2026.
A confusing web of detention facilities
When a person is arrested by ICE, the lack of a centralized immigration detention system makes it hard to figure out where they are.
For ICE detention, the federal government can contract with counties for county jail space or to execute service agreements with private prison companies. ICE also contracts with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to hold immigrants in their facilities.
Pennsylvania is no exception to this patchwork system. Four county jails – in Pike, Clinton, Cambria and Franklin counties – have contracts with the federal government to detain immigrants for ICE. Pike County, for example, received US$16 million from ICE in 2024 and 2025 for use of its jail.
Further, ICE contracts with Centre County so the county can serve as a pass-through for payment to the private prison company, the Geo Group, which runs the Moshannon Valley Processing Center. Moshannon is the largest detention center in the Northeast with 1,876 beds. This pass-through system allows the federal government to avoid the burdensome Federal Acquisition System for contractors. That purchasing system is governed by uniform policies that apply to all federal agencies that enter into contracts for services to ensure that business is conducted with integrity, fairness and transparency.
After a person has been arrested by ICE, major federal policy changes that are intended to keep people locked up or have them deported make it difficult to get that person released.
Residents of Danville, Pa., hold a candlelight vigil for local business owner Sergio Chavez Jimenez after he was arrested by ICE on Dec. 27, 2025, and detained at the Clinton County Correctional Facility. Paul Weaver/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Isolated from family and legal advice
Once arrested, ICE detainees have a hard time contacting the outside world.
Further, ICE detention facilities are often outside of major urban areas and far from legal services and community support. Moshannon, for example, is over 100 miles from any nonprofit immigration attorneys who provide representation to people in immigration removal proceedings.
Previously, the federal government funded a Legal Orientation Program where nongovernmental legal services offered information, referrals and representation to those in detention. In 2025, the Department of Justice ended the program, justifying its termination based on the executive order entitled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” Section 19 of that executive order relates to reviewing, pausing or terminating contracts, grants or other agreements with nongovernmental organizations that support or provide services “to removable or illegal aliens.”
Out-of-state transfers are common
ICE’s movement of people without notice across different facilities is a long-standing practice. However, a recent UCLA study found that out-of-state transfers of noncriminal Latino detainees jumped from 18% to 55% after President Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024.
Transfers are mostly about ICE’s own efficiency in maximizing the filling of bed space. Some advocacy organizations have alleged that transfers are conducted for retaliatory reasons against people who make requests or complain. Transfers are not only disorienting for the person involved but also impede communication with family and access to counsel.
The locator requires either a person’s country of birth and alien registration number – called an “A number” – or their full name and date of birth. A person might have an A number if they have a past or present case with the government, including having applied for a green card or asylum. It can take 48 hours for ICE to enter information about the person into its database so it can be picked up by the online locator. The name must be an exact match with what was entered into the system.
The Philadelphia field office covers Delaware, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. If you are a noncitizen, you might want a U.S. citizen to do this for you out of an abundance of caution, because ICE records information about the person calling. Call 215-656-7164 or email Philadelphia.Outreach@ice.dhs.gov.
Further, you can ask for help from your federal elected officials, such as your congressional representative or Sens. John Fetterman or Dave McCormick. If you have a more direct relationship with a local elected official, such as your city council member, it cannot hurt to see whether they can also help you.
How to prepare in advance
If you know someone who is at risk of arrest by ICE, you can help them prepare in advance. Tell them to:
1. Keep copies of their documents in a secure space.
This includes their A number as well as immigration documents, passport, birth certificate, marriage certificate, tax returns and any employment and medical records. If they have children, make sure to include their passports, birth certificates and medical records.
2. Memorize important phone numbers.
They should know the numbers of family members and their attorney in case their cellphone is taken from them.
3. Have an emergency plan.
A family preparedness plan includes designating a caregiver for children in case a parent or guardian is arrested. They should also consider filling out documents that may help a family member or friend to care for their children if they are unavailable because of detention or deportation. These include forms that provide temporary guardianship or custody of minor children, consent for medical care of minor children and information for the Philadelphia School District.
Philadelphia Legal Assistance provides free downloadable packets in English and in Spanish to build a family preparedness plan.
Jennifer J. Lee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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