Some Texas business leaders worry how Trump’s pledged deportations will impact the economy

Photo by Josh Olalde on Unsplash

The Texas Tribune

January 08, 2025

In Texas, undocumented people have built apartment complexes and skyscrapers that changed skylines. They have picked fruits and vegetable in fields, cooked in restaurant kitchens, cleaned hospitals and started small businesses. They have become stitched into communities from El Paso to Beaumont.

Now some of their employers worry that many of them could get deported when President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House.

A number of Texas business leaders interviewed by the Tribune describe a sort of wait-and-see apprehension about Trump’s pledged mass deportations. The impact any deportations could have on Texas’ economy will largely depend on the specifics of what Trump does, business leaders say. But those specifics are not yet clear.

“I don’t think any of us know exactly what’s coming as far as policy — we’ve heard all of the rhetoric,” said Andrea Coker of the North Texas Commission, a nonprofit that promotes the Dallas region.

The owner of a Rio Grande Valley agriculture import-export business who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of legal repercussions said four of his seven employees are undocumented. A majority of similar businesses would take a hit should the government deport undocumented people en masse, the business owner estimated.

Without undocumented workers, he said, “We wouldn't survive and we'll have to close."


A farm worker moves containers to be filled with grapefruit near Mission on Dec. 16, 2024. Credit: Michael Gonzalez for The Texas Tribune

He said he hired undocumented workers because he struggled to find U.S. citizens and legal residents willing to do the grueling work.

"The people who are here legally don't want to work here. They'd rather collect unemployment," he said. "We've hired people who were documented, but they don't last."

In speaking about mass deportations, Trump and his incoming aides have said they will prioritize deporting people with a criminal history, while also noting that anyone who has entered the country illegally has committed a crime. Any large-scale deportation plans are sure to face legal and logistical challenges.

But Texas’ state leaders are eager to help Trump, and the state is a target-rich environment. The Pew Research Center estimates that unauthorized immigrants make up approximately 8% of the state’s workforce, including a large presence in the hospitality, restaurants, energy and construction industries.

The state comptroller’s office did a study in 2006 to find out how the state economy would look without the estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants living in Texas in 2005. The study said their absence would cost the state about $17.7 billion in gross state product — a measure of the value of goods and services produced in Texas. The state has not updated the study since; analysis replicated by universities and think tanks have reached similar conclusions that undocumented Texans contribute more to the economy than they cost the state.

“We know that immigrants are punching above their weight,” said Jaime Puente, director of economic opportunity at the left-leaning nonprofit Every Texan. “We are looking at a significant loss of productivity.”

Among major Texas industries, construction has the highest proportion of undocumented workers, according to the Pew Research Center. Mass deportations could disrupt the state’s homebuilding industry in the midst of a housing shortage, which could lead to fewer new homes built and even higher home prices and rents, according to housing experts.


A recent paper from researchers at the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin-Madison explored the aftermath of the deportation of more than 300,000 undocumented immigrants nationwide from 2008 to 2013. In the places where deportations happened, the study found, homebuilding contracted because the local construction workforce shrank and home prices rose. The researchers discovered that other construction workers lost work too because homebuilders cut back on new developments.


A construction worker along Highway 1604 in San Antonio on Dec. 19, 2024. Credit: Scott Stephen Ball for The Texas Tribune

“We really find ourselves in the situation where anything that kind of disrupts the process of [adding] housing supply would be detrimental to the housing affordability crisis,” said Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Stan Marek’s Czech grandfather arrived in Houston in 1938 and began hanging sheetrock. Nearly 100 years later, Marek’s family owns a large Houston-based construction firm with roughly 1,000 employees.

“I have watched the stages of immigration,” said Marek, 77. “Eighty-five years later and our immigrants are here, and like they’ve always been, to do the work that no one else wants to do or can do.”

Marek sees a long overdue opportunity to fix a lingering mess — the country’s immigration laws. He said deportations “will be terribly expensive and terribly nonproductive” but granting widespread amnesty to undocumented people would not work either.

Marek believes giving a path to citizenship to people who arrived in the country as children and received deportation protection through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, could help the state reduce its workforce shortage. He also believes in the creation of a similar program for adults to gain legal status — which he calls “Adult DACA” — so that they can work legally.

“It’s not just construction. Who’s picking all the fruit and all the vegetables? Who’s milking all those cows? Every job you look at all over the United States, there are immigrants,” Marek said. “We gotta have the business community step up. That’s the key because the business community, more than anybody, is responsible for the labor.”

In the oil-rich Permian Basin, mass deportations could reduce populations in cities and in turn result in closed businesses and the disappearance of sales tax dollars, said Virginia Bellew, executive director of the Permian Basin Regional Planning Commission.

“I think you've seen communities just waiting [to see what Trump does], don't want to take any steps to predict, discuss, or make decisions,” Bellew said.

In Austin, a 43-year-old man who arrived from Mexico 25 years ago said his first job involved sweeping up debris at a construction site for less than $8 an hour. Today he is a foreman for a general contractor, supervising projects and coordinating crews. He asked his name not be published for fear of jeopardizing his pending residency application.

He said he is not letting himself be consumed by the fear of Trump's promises of mass deportations. He has deep roots in Texas now. He and his wife have raised their three kids in Austin in a house they built themselves.

His kids are U.S. citizens and his wife has legal status through DACA. He’s in the process of applying for legal residency through his eldest daughter, a student at St. Edward’s University in Austin.

“I try to be a great citizen,” he said in Spanish. “[Trump] can not deport everyone because there are so many of us who are indispensable to this country.”

Disclosure: Every Texan and the North Texas Commission have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/08/texas-immigration-mass-deportations-economy/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org

'My harvest would be lost': Visa program for farm workers facing uncertain future under Trump

Farm workers in San Luis Obispo County, California in 2016 (Wikimedia Commons)

Alex Henderson

January 06, 2025

ALTERNET

President-elect Donald Trump hasn't backed down from his promise to carry out mass deportations after returning to the White House on Monday, January 20. In fact, he has maintained that the deportations will be a top priority.

But some major economists, including former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, have warned that mass deportations could inflict major harm in the U.S. economy — as agriculture and other industries are quite reliant on workers from other countries.

In an article published on January 6 — the day outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris oversaw the counting and certification of Trump's Electoral College victory over her in the 2024 election — Arizona Republic reporters Clara Migoya and Laura Gersony emphasize that agriculture has grown increasingly dependent on the H-2A visa program, whose future is uncertain now that he's on his way back to the White House.

READ MORE: Krugman delivers economic reality check: Trump’s mass deportations will make grocery prices soar

"Undocumented workers still make up about half of the workforce across the country," Migoya and Gersony explain, "but the number of H-2A workers has quadrupled in just a decade. Already under strain, the workforce is in the spotlight following the victory of President-elect Donald Trump, a candidate who won reelection warning of competition between native-born Americans and migrants, particularly those who are undocumented."

Migoya and Gersony note that Trump "attempted to tweak the H-2A program during his first term in office, though the agriculture industry continues to push for a more comprehensive reform effort."

According to the reporters, "The political future of the issue is critical for thousands of farmers and farm workers, whether through reforms to the H-2A system or deportations of unauthorized migrants…. The H-2A program has an outsize effect in parts of Arizona, a border state that produces 25 percent of the nation's leafy greens and where employment eligibility checks are mandatory for all businesses."

Gonzalo Quintero, an Arizona-based agriculture veteran, warns that his "harvest would be lost" if fewer H-2A workers are available.

READ MORE: Experts: Mass deportation will hurt at least one red state's economy

Quintero told the Arizona Republic, "The locals, we who were in the field, we’re running out. If I wanted to put together a lemon (harvest) crew, I wouldn't get enough people."

Read the full Arizona Republic article at this link (subscription required).

How your stress levels affect your dog

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Photo by Ryan Walton on Unsplash

The Conversation

January 08, 2025


Dogs have lived alongside humans for thousands of years. They have been used to hunt, guard, herd and perform many other tasks, but today they mainly act as companions. While their lives today may seem easy compared with their ancestors, they still face many stresses – including visits to the vet.

A couple of years ago, researchers in France showed that how a dog owner behaves at the vet affects their pet’s stress levels. The study showed that negative owner behaviour, such as scolding, increased dog anxiety during a veterinary examination.

But before our recent research at Queen’s University Belfast, no one had investigated the effect of owner stress on their dogs in a controlled environment. Our study differs from the research above, as it looks specifically at the effect of owner stress, measured through heart rate changes, on the stress experienced by their dog when at a vet.

Twenty-eight owners and their dogs took part in our experiment. Both owners and dogs wore heart-rate monitors throughout the experiment so that we could monitor and record their heart rate and heart-rate variability – to measure stress levels.

We then exposed the owners to either a stressful or a stress-relieving intervention and monitored the effect it had on them as well as on their dogs. The stressful intervention consisted of a digital stress test, which required owners to perform a mental arithmetic task, as well as a verbal presentation task. The stress-relieving intervention was a five-minute guided breathing meditation video.

We found that dogs’ heart rates decreased as they got used to the veterinary clinic environment. This suggests that vets should give dogs time to get used to the clinic before examining them. Not only will this reduce their stress, it may also improve the validity of any examinations or tests performed, as measures such as heart and respiratory rates can be elevated as a result of heightened stress.

Emotional contagion

We also found that changes in the owner’s heart rate from before the experiment to during the experiment could predict the heart rate changes of their dog. If the owner’s heart rate increased or decreased during the experiment, their dog’s heart rate was also likely to increase or decrease in tandem.

These results suggest that dogs may recognise stress in their owners, and this could influence their own stress levels, through the process of “emotional contagion”. This is a phenomenon where people, and other animals, may “catch” or mimic the emotions and behaviour of those around them, either consciously or unconsciously.

It may also indicate that dogs look to their owners to inform their response to new environments. Owners were asked not to interact with their dogs for the duration of the experiment. So any assessment of owner stress made by their dogs was done without direct communication between owner and pet.

So what does this mean for the average dog owner? If our stress has the potential to influence our dogs, then this should be considered when we visit the vet. If vets help owners feel more calm while attending the clinic, it could help their dogs feel more at ease, too.

A holistic approach to veterinary care, where the animal, their owner and the environment are all taken into consideration, is likely to result in the best welfare outcomes.

While our research primarily focused on the bond between dogs and their owners, a recent study investigating canine behaviour found that the smell of sweat from a stressed human, who was unfamiliar to the dog, affected the learning and cognition of that dog during a cognitive bias test. The test measures whether an animal is in a positive or negative emotional state, and whether they are likely to make decisions with an optimistic or pessimistic outlook. This shows that dogs may be affected by the stress of strangers, as well as that of their owners.

What is clear from our latest research is that dogs are perceptive animals that are influenced by the world and the people around them. People caring for or working with dogs should bear in mind that their own stress may affect that of their dogs.

Aoife Byrne, PhD Candidate, Animal Behaviour and Welfare, University of Nottingham and Gareth Arnott, Lecturer in Animal Behaviour and Welfare, Queen's University Belfast

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SHE DIED FOR HER ART

Maria Callas: how inflammation, crash dieting and heartache may have shaped her unique and polarizing voice

Pablo Larraín/Netflix

The Conversation

January 05, 2025

Maria, the new biopic being released in cinemas and on Netflix, is the third in Pablo Larraín’s cinematic trilogy of remarkable women. The equally astounding Angelina Jolie portrays the late, great soprano Maria Callas – one of the most talented opera singers of the 20th century. But Callas’s career is known for being as brief as it was revered.

She made her debut in wartime Athens – in Tosca, aged 18. Her willpower was founded on insecurity. She came from a humble background and was judged fat and unattractive by her own family.

Some considered her extensively trained voice beautiful. Others thought it was anything but, finding it to have a rather dry, even ugly quality. There was also no consistent agreement as to which notes on her impressive three-octave range were her finest. Some critics thought her best at the highs of a musical scale, others at lows.

Even Callas disliked her own voice, describing it as something she had eventually come to accept. Yet she forged a successful career in opera based on what else her voice was able to achieve – to conjure something that was truly expressive and poignant.

Rendered practically blind by severe short-sightedness, she found herself isolated from the audience when on stage and was described as a dreamer. She had more than just the gift of beautiful music. Callas turned opera back into what it had been: a dramatic rendition of a story via both singing and meticulous acting.

Such was the transformative nature of her performances that some joked that opera should be divided into two main periods: BC and AC (before Callas and after Callas).




She developed an undeserved reputation for diva-ish outbursts. And her exacting standards meant that she would sometimes cancel events, or walk out of them if she felt unable to deliver.

Regardless of critical opinion of her, a deterioration in Callas’s voice was noted as early as 1956 when she was just 33. This would become more clearly pronounced, making the difficult arias she was previously able to perform impossible. It eventually diminished her voice to a shadow of its former self.

In recent years, a study quantified the audible differences between her recordings of Tosca and Nabucco, a decade apart. They found that she had become increasingly sharp, irregular and unstable.

What prompted the demise of this iconic voice has been a subject of hot debate in the operatic world. Many have credited this decline to her heartbreak at losing Aristotle Onassis to Jackie Kennedy. Others have claimed that it was simply the result of going in too strong, too soon, in her performance. Many of Callas’s earlier roles had been very technically demanding – and may have proved injurious.

Her notable technique focused on intonation to add dramatic effect to her singing, and may also have been responsible for hardening her vocal cords. These are the folds of membrane that vibrate across the outflowing jet of air from your lungs, making a voice or musical sound.




Callas’s diet may also have had an effect. Modelling herself on the grace of Audrey Hepburn, she lost a staggering amount of weight (over 35kg) in her twenties. There was even speculation that she may have ingested tapeworms to do so.

This dramatic weight loss, like that achieved through rapid diets of the modern day, might also have caused her to shed muscle mass. The voice is as much an output of muscle action as, say, flexing a bicep. The movement and vibration of the vocal cords are determined by the action of different groups of muscles in the larynx (or voicebox). These muscles stretch the cords or tense them, like the strings on a harp or violin. They can also make them open or close.

In losing laryngeal muscle, her extreme dieting may have been responsible for her weakened voice.

Another clue may lie with a report that was published more than 25 years after Callas’s death by a doctor who consulted with her in her autumn days, living in Paris. She held out her hands to show how they had changed from “that of Floria Tosca [to] those of a labourer”.

Dermatomyositis

What she was demonstrating was the roughened, swollen, violet-marked hands associated with the condition dermatomyositis. This is a connective tissue disease that causes inflammation in both skin and muscle.

Alongside the same purple rash on her neck, her stooped posture and weakened voice (otherwise called dysphonia) were hallmarks of this illness. After treating the inflammation with the steroid drug prednisolone, Callas noted some improvement. Sadly, it was to be short-lived.

Callas died in Paris, in 1977, of a heart attack. She was 53 years old.

Jolie reportedly undertook seven months of operatic tuition to sing at the film’s climax. Now nominated for her ninth Golden Globe and perhaps looking toward her third Oscar, she gives us a glimpse of her extraordinary capabilities.

Regardless of what she manages to vocalise in Maria, since Callas was famed for embracing her imperfections and creating something truly magical from them, Jolie’s inspired performance is on track to do the same.

Dan Baumgardt, Senior Lecturer, School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

‘Squid Game’ Season 2 is a dystopian reflection of capitalism’s dark side

People walk past a doll of Young-hee to promote the second season of Netflix’s series ‘Squid Game’ at Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul, South Korea, Dec. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

The Conversation

January 08, 2025

The second season of Squid Game, Netflix’s most-watched show of all time, has been eagerly awaited by many. The first season featured players participating in a series of deadly children’s games to win prize money.

The new season, which is also on track to set another Netflix record, takes a deeper look at the economic context and constraints surrounding the surrealistic games.

More than a third of the season takes place outside the actual game setting, highlighting the dystopian life circumstances that drive participants to enter the deadly competition in the first place.

In many ways, Squid Game Season 2 is a very South Korean story. The country has one of the highest levels of household debt in the world, much of which has incurred through a failing social security system.

Most notably, a nominally public health-care system offloads considerable burdens on those who require special treatments or operations. Gambling, too, has emerged as a pressing social and economic problem among young Koreans.

Beyond that, Season 2 highlights one specific feature of a capitalist system built on zero-sum competition: people are drawn into it because of the promise of fairy tale wins for a few, despite it resulting in devastating losses for the many.

 

‘Squid Game’ Season 2 trailer from Netflix.

The illusion of choice

In contrast to other contemporary critiques of capitalism that tend to highlight the players behind the scenes, Squid Game unearths the reasons why the general public plays along with the system in the first place. It’s a depiction of a very real individual financial abyss.

Squid Game doesn’t shy away from the motive of greed, a sentiment famously encapsulated in the 1987 film Wall Street. However, the show frames this greed against a broader canvas of personal bankruptcy, unpaid health-care bills and gambling losses in the form of failed crypto investments. ‘Squid Game’ Season 2 trailer from Netflix.

Squid Game’s perspective on contemporary capitalism, and why it’s supported by billions of people around the world, is striking. Crumbling public services, privatized insecurity and unattended health issues are not mere side-effects of neo-liberal economic policies — they are designed to push people into the system.

Almost all the players in the game see it as the only option left for them. No one enters the game willingly; they are all thrust in it involuntarily out of necessity.

It is a role in this game that provides the hope of steering clear of the potential abyss against which a declining middle class in many capitalist economies has survived. Like the players of Squid Game buy into the game as their only means of survival, we, too, buy into the capitalism system because we don’t have another choice.

In a global context, the show highlights how extreme poverty and lack of public infrastructure force vast parts of the population in so-called developing countries to participate in exploitative — and often lethal — labour conditions.

Business professor Bobby Banerjee has explored the latter aspect under the label of “necrocapitalism,” while professors Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming have explored the experiences of first-world white-collar workers in their book Dead Men Working.
The promise of more

The repeating votes and battles over the continuation of the game highlight why so many people continue to participate in the broader capitalist system: the promise of more.

Recently, we have seen some junior investment bankers literally working themselves to death. Private gain as the “defining trait of capitalist society” is a well researched phenomenon.

Squid Game plays on the almost comical ability people have to believe in their own capacity to survive and be the chosen winner. 

 

The red light green light game returns in Season 2 of Netflix’s ‘Squid Game.’

The cruelty and violence of the game itself fuels players’ almost transcendental convictions that they are destined to be the sole victor of the games. These desires, however, clash with the core humanity of the players.

Camaraderie develops as the players work together, and family ties, past friendships, shared experiences, compassion and spirituality all have a clear presence in the show. But in the end, they are overshadowed by the rigid logic of the overarching game.

The most scandalous recent example for such behaviour is American financier Bernie Madoff who ruthlessly defrauded family and kinship in the Jewish community for his personal gain.

‘Temporarily embarrassed millionaires’

Some critics bemoaned that Season 2 is too focused on the lives of the players, with the actual games not beginning until episode four.

However, this shift arguably makes the relationship between the players’ real lives and the games much more explicit. In turn, it makes the show’s critique of capitalism even more pronounced.

While the high-stakes games are undoubtedly the series’ main draw, the popularity of the series still has a lot to do with its intrinsic message, which becomes much more pronounced in the second season. People can identify with the characters risking their survival for the promise of heroically winning another lease on life against all odds.

As American writer John Steinbeck once put it, many middle- and working-class Americans see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed capitalists.” This mindset encapsulates the relentless participation in a capitalist system that offers only the faint possibility of success.

This dynamic is illustrated in Squid Game Season 2, which explores how individuals rationalize their participation in a game that otherwise runs counter to their most basic human impulses.

The lyrics to Bertold Brecht’s satirical song March of the Calves comes to mind: “Following the drum / The calves trot / The skin for the drum / They deliver themselves.” It’s a sobering metaphor for the way the promise of success often blinds us to the personal sacrifice we may pay to achieve it.

Dirk Matten, Professor of Sustainability, Hewlett-Packard Chair in Corporate Social Responsibility, Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

WAR ON PUBLIC EDUCATION U$A

Failing AZ charter school reopens as a private religious school — funded by taxpayers

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Eli Hagerand
Pro Publica

January 05, 2025


Reporting Highlights
An Opaque System: Arizona imposes no transparency or accountability requirements on private schools that receive taxpayer dollars through the state’s voucher program.
Buyer Beware: Voucher parents shopping for a school say it’s hard to obtain independently verified information on the quality of instruction or financial stability of private schools.
Opposed to Reform: As other states replicate Arizona’s program, voucher advocates oppose requiring publicly funded private schools to meet the same educational standards as public schools.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

One afternoon in September, parents started arriving for pickup at Title of Liberty Academy, a private Mormon K-8 school in Mesa, Arizona, on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix.

Individually, the moms and dads were called in to speak to the principal. That’s when they were told that the school, still just a few months old, was closing due to financial problems.

There would be no more school at Title of Liberty.

Over the course of that week, more parents were given the news, as well as their options for the remainder of the school year: They could transfer their children to another private or charter school, or they could put them in a microschool that the principal said she’d soon be setting up in her living room. Or there was always homeschooling. Or even public school.

These families had, until this moment, embodied Arizona’s “school choice” ideal. Many of them had been disappointed by their local public schools, which some felt were indoctrinating kids in subjects like race and sex and, of course, were lacking in religious instruction. So they’d shopped for other educational options on the free market, eventually leading them to Title of Liberty.

One mom had even discovered the school by window shopping: It was in the same strip mall as her orthodontist’s office, next to a China Palace, and she’d noticed the flags outside with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints imagery. (The school was not formally affiliated with the church.)

An LDS member herself, she was soon ready to start paying tuition to the school from her son’s Empowerment Scholarship Account — a type of school voucher pioneered in Arizona and now spreading in various forms to more than a dozen other states. ESAs give parents an average of over $7,000 a year in taxpayer funds, per child, to spend on any private school, tutoring service or other educational expense of their choice.

Yet Arizona’s ESA program provides zero transparency as to private schools’ financial sustainability or academic performance to help parents make informed school choices.

For instance, the state never informed parents who were new to Title of Liberty and were planning to spend their voucher money there that it had previously been a charter school called ARCHES Academy — which had had its charter revoked last school year due to severe financial issues. Nor that, as a charter, it had a record of dismal academic performance, with just 13% of its students proficient in English and 0% in math in 2023.

When it was a charter (which is a type of public school), these things could be known. There was some oversight. The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools had monitored the school’s finances and academics, unanimously coming to the conclusion that it should be shut down.

Yet just a month after the board’s decision, ARCHES was re-creating itself as a renamed, newly religious private school, simply by pivoting to accept voucher dollars.

In other words, it was closed down by a public governing body but found a way to keep existing and being funded by the public anyway, just without the standards and accountability that would normally come with taxpayer money.

Arizona does no vetting of new voucher schools. Not even if the school or the online school “provider” has already failed, or was founded yesterday, or is operating out of a strip mall or a living room or a garage, or offers just a half hour of instruction per morning. (If you’re an individual tutor in Arizona, all you need in order to register to start accepting voucher cash is a high school diploma.)

There is “nothing” required, said Michelle Edwards, the founder and principal of ARCHES and then of Title of Liberty, in an interview with ProPublica. It was “shocking how little oversight” the state was going to provide of her ESA-funded private school, Edwards said.

According to charter board members as well as parents and family members of her former students, Edwards is a well-intentioned career educator who cares deeply about children. But she has repeatedly struggled to effectively or sustainably run a school.

She said that when she first transformed her charter school into a private school, she and her team called up “every agency under the sun” asking what standards the new school would have to meet, including in order to accept voucher funds. For example, what about special education students and other vulnerable children — would there be any oversight of how her school taught those kids? Or instructional time — any required number of minutes to spend on reading, writing, math, science?

State agencies, she said, each responded with versions of a question: “Why are you asking us? We don’t do that for private schools.”

“If you’re gonna call yourself a school,” Edwards told ProPublica, “there should be at least some reporting that has to be done about your numbers, about how you’re achieving. … You love the freedom of it, but it was scary.”

This school year, ProPublica has been examining Arizona’s first-of-its-kind “universal” education savings account program. We are doing so both because other states have been modeling their own new ESA initiatives after this one, and also because President-elect Donald Trump has prioritized the issue, most recently by nominating for secretary of education someone whose top priority appears to be expanding school choice efforts nationwide. (And Betsy DeVos, his first education secretary, was and remains a leading school voucher proponent.)

These programs are where the U.S. education system is headed.

In our stories, we’ve reported that Arizona making vouchers available even to the wealthiest parents — many of whom were already paying tuition for their kids to go to private school and didn’t need the government assistance — helped contribute to a state budget meltdown. We’ve also reported that low-income families in the Phoenix area, by contrast, are largely not being helped by vouchers, in part because high-quality private schools don’t exist in their neighborhoods.

But the lack of any transparency or accountability measures in Arizona’s ESA model is perhaps the most important issue for other states to consider as they follow this one’s path, even some school choice supporters say.

“If you’re a private school that gets most of its money now from the public, which has happened in Arizona, at that point there should be accountability for you as there is for public schools,” said Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a center-right and pro-voucher education reform think tank. “If the public is paying your bills, I don’t see what the argument is for there not to be.”

To illustrate this double standard: Private school parents can speak at public school board meetings, and they vote in school board elections. But public school parents can’t freely attend, let alone request the minutes of, a private school governing body’s meetings, even if that school is now being funded with taxpayer dollars.

Defenders of universal voucher programs counter that the goal of American education should be a free market of educational options for families to choose from, unburdened by excessive state regulations and paperwork. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank associated with Trump, has maintained that in such a system, schools would have “a strong incentive to meet the needs of their students since unsatisfied parents can take their children and education dollars elsewhere,” which the group says would create “direct accountability to parents.”

Yet in a truly free market, opponents say, consumers would have information, including about vendors’ past performance, to make purchasing decisions in their own best interests.

And if the product fails and has had a history of similar problems — as Title of Liberty did — there would be recourse, as with “lemon laws” that protect consumers who’ve unknowingly bought a defective car.

Several ESA parents across the Phoenix area said in interviews that they absolutely want educational choice and flexibility, but that they also want the sort of quality assurance that only government can provide. Most said that the Arizona Department of Education should provide at least some information as to the background and credentials of private schools and other educational providers that accept voucher money, and also that the department should do something to protect families from badly unqualified providers.

Rebekah Cross, a mother of five in the northwest Phoenix suburb of Peoria, said that the ESA program, overall, has been “life-changing” for her family; she is also an administrator of multiple Facebook groups of ESA parents. Still, she said, it’s “on you” to check the credentials and the criminal history of every private school founder and provider to whom you’re considering paying your ESA dollars, because in Arizona, “anybody can start a private school, you have no idea.” There are mostly “just rumors to rely on,” she said.

Cross pointed out that many local private schools and other educational vendors have started advertising on Facebook and elsewhere that they are “ESA certified,” even though there’s no state “certification” beyond simply signing up to receive the voucher payments. “There’s no criteria; that’s not a thing,” she said.

“You’re putting your kid in [a school], hoping it’s going to work,” Cross said. “If it closes midyear, you’re kind of screwed.”

Doug Nick, spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Education, responded that state law “makes it clear that we have no authority to oversee private schools,” even ones receiving public dollars.

Regarding publicly funded private schools closing midyear, he said that parents “have the wherewithal” to find another schooling option “regardless of the time of year,” and that the law “does not contemplate the department making recommendations to parents” at all.

Asked if the department knew how much public money had gone to Title of Liberty, Nick responded, “We don’t track that information since there’s no business reason to do so.”

Edwards, the Title of Liberty founder, first had the idea for her own school more than a decade ago. She’d long been an educator; she even ran a tutoring business in high school, she told me. At the beginning of her career, she taught Head Start and kindergarten in public and charter schools.

Through that experience and also seeing her own six kids not always having their individual needs met in Arizona’s K-12 system, she came to the conclusion that “to try to teach every child the same is ridiculous.”

Edwards began pitching the state charter board on a concept for a school that would meld principles of hands-on learning, borrowed from the Boy Scouts of America, with a proposal that students be grouped by learning level — “novice,” “apprentice” and so on — rather than into standard grade levels.

The board ultimately allowed her to open this school, ARCHES, in 2018. But it kept a close eye on her finances, in no small part to try to prevent a damaging outcome for students like a midyear closure. While giving her room to innovate, which is a chief goal of charter schools, the board monitored her enrollment numbers and staffing.

As it turned out, Edwards had persistent problems not just with low state test scores but also with unsustainably low enrollment, which would later plague Title of Liberty.

In our interview, she attributed those issues to the transience of many students during the pandemic and post-pandemic period as well as her business managers not being as experienced “as they probably should have been.”

This March, the charter board issued a notice of its intent to revoke ARCHES’ charter contract — a rare, serious move, according to ProPublica’s interviews with board members. (Edwards later reached an agreement with the board to surrender the charter.)

At that hearing, one of the board members commented to Edwards that “I love the fact that you have, you know, ideas and plans and things. … [But] I’m concerned about the kids. I’m concerned about the staff. I’m concerned about the families.”

Another added: “Don’t let that take away personally, on your end, the value of your intent.”

She didn’t. Edwards wanted to keep helping kids, she told me, including several ARCHES students whose families decided to stick with her.

She had the private school idea almost immediately. A post appeared on ARCHES’ Facebook page: “Hey parents! Interested in joining us next year at Title of Liberty Academy?” This was accompanied by an invitation to an “ESA workshop” to help them fill out voucher applications.

Meanwhile, Jason Mow, an ARCHES board member who was helping with its transition to Title of Liberty, tried to recruit new students: “Get your kids out of the government run schools,” he posted, adding, somewhat paradoxically: “The state ESA program will pay for tuition!!!!”

At one point, a parent asked him whether — if state money was going to be funding the school — it would be required to take part in state testing.

“As a private school using ESA, we have a great deal of latitude and not mandated to,” Mow answered.

He also said, “This is how we save the Republic.”

This last comment was part of a larger move that Edwards’ school was making: not just from charter to private and from some public accountability to none, but also from secular to religious with a right-wing bent, which was fully allowed even though it would be bankrolled by taxpayers. So, where ARCHES had touted an “American Revolutionary Classical Holistic Educational System,” Title of Liberty would simply be a “private faith-based school focused on the values of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

Meanwhile, Edwards had already been planning to move the school into a new space: a series of storefronts in a strip mall that another charter school had previously occupied.

Over the summer, largely through sheer force of personality, she enrolled about two dozen students.

But Title of Liberty was ultimately even more disorganized than ARCHES had been. For one, Edwards told me, “We didn’t yet have [enough] students enrolled to be able to afford teachers. … But we had to have teachers in order to be able to get students.” She ended up hiring mostly her own family members, both for teaching positions and to do much of the school’s financial paperwork.

She also blamed difficulties with the ESA process, like some parents being told that they hadn’t submitted their email addresses or signatures in the right format. She made clear that none of this involved the state actually scrutinizing her school; still, she wasn’t able to obtain ESA funding as quickly as she had expected to.

The landlord, waiting on unpaid rent, finally asked Edwards to pack up the school and leave. According to one of the property managers, “She just left the space for us to deal with this shit,” which he said amounted to six large dumpsters’ worth.

Edwards responded that she couldn’t afford moving vehicles or storage space for all of those desks, bookshelves, books and files. She said that she’d provided the landlord with information about another school that could have moved in and used the furniture and supplies. (A representative of the owner of the building said that they were done with questionably funded schools by that point, and that they gave Edwards time to clear out.)

“It all depends on how you define success,” Edwards told me. “I feel like the time that our kids had with us was valuable and they learned a lot and took a lot with them from that.”

“We did try to hold to a super high standard,” she added, noting that there’s no one at the state level checking on all the other private schools out there that might not care to meet that standard.

Calls for school transparency and accountability used to be a feature of the center-right education reform movement. No Child Left Behind, one of President George W. Bush’s signature legislative achievements, mandated that public school students in certain grades undergo standardized testing in core subjects, on the grounds that schools should have to prove that they’re educating kids up to state standards and, if they’re not, to improve or else risk losing funding.

That testing was often rote, providing incomplete information as to the varied lives of students and pressuring many teachers to “teach to the test,” critics alleged. But it did offer a window into school performance — which, in turn, gave the voucher movement ammunition to criticize failing public schools.

Still, early voucher efforts too included basic transparency and accountability measures. When vouchers were first proposed in Arizona, for instance, a state task force said that “private schools must also participate in the same accountability process as public schools in order to qualify for state funding.” Louisiana’s voucher program, similarly, required participating private schools to administer state student achievement tests just like public schools did.

But voucher advocates changed course between 2017 and 2020. By that time, several academic studies had found that larger voucher programs had produced severe declines in student performance, especially in math.

Asked about a set of particularly negative findings out of Louisiana, DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education, blamed the state’s voucher program for being “not very well conceived.” Part of the problem was that it was overregulated, she and other advocates said.

In the years since, fully unregulated universal ESA programs have become the favored program design of many school choice supporters.

The result is a situation in which, on the one hand, the Arizona Department of Education annually publishes detailed report cards on all public schools in the state, including charter schools. You can look up any Arizona public school’s overall letter grade (ARCHES had a D when it was still a charter school); the academic performance and progress of that school’s students, including by demographic categories; the experience levels of its teachers, and so on.

On the other hand, Arizona private schools receiving public funding have to do no public reporting at all. If they want, they can self-report their enrollment and performance numbers to be published on websites like Niche.com, but they are free to exaggerate.

In other words, it’s not that this newer ESA model has been a clear academic success or failure. It’s just that the public, and more specifically parents, can’t know.

Not all states keep information as hidden as Arizona. At least five, for example, require schools that accept voucher money to be accredited or to provide evidence that they don’t have financial troubles.

Yet even these minimal efforts at transparency and accountability have been opposed by big-money voucher supporters.

Walmart heir Jim Walton, for instance, gave $500,000 this year to defeat a proposed Arkansas state constitutional amendment that would have required private schools receiving state funds to meet the same educational standards that public schools do. At the Ohio Legislature, provisions of a proposed bill that would’ve made voucher schools submit an annual report showing how they’re using state funding were recently removed under pressure from voucher advocates.

And in Arizona, Republicans in the Legislature have opposed every effort by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to increase oversight of private schools that receive ESA money — except for one reform: They decided that such schools must fingerprint their teachers.

But the new law doesn’t require the ESA schools to run those fingerprints through any database or to use them in any way.

About a month ago, I asked parents if they could still pay Title of Liberty from their taxpayer-funded voucher accounts. I was curious not because I thought Edwards was collecting voucher money for a closed school but because it remained listed in ClassWallet, the Arizona Department of Education’s privately owned payment interface for ESA schools and vendors.

One mom sent me screenshots showing that she could indeed still pay the shuttered school from her ESA account, though she would need to produce an invoice.

What’s more, when she’d clicked on it in ClassWallet, “ARCHES Academy” was what had popped up — the name of the failed charter school that was repurposed into Title of Liberty.

The school, whatever it was called, was still open, as far as the state of Arizona was concerned. (It was only disabled in ClassWallet after recent inquiries from ProPublica.)

Wanting to make triple-sure that I wasn’t missing something, I drove over to the strip mall a few weeks ago to see if anything was still going on there.

What I found inside was a scene of school choice in its endstage. A sort of zombie voucher school, with dozens or possibly hundreds of books and papers scattered across the floor. Student records, containing confidential information, had been left out. There was food in the cafeteria area, molding.

Under quotes from the Book of Mormon painted on the walls and a banner proclaiming that Title of Liberty would strive to be a “celestial stronghold of learing [sic],” a document was sitting on a table. It offered guidance for parents on how to select the right school for their little ones, including this line: “You might be surprised how many schools are just flying by the seat of their pants.”

And on top of a file cabinet next to that was a stack of postcard-sized flyers that had been printed off at Walmart, reading, “Sign up your student for ESA.”


Mollie Simon contributed research.

Religious schools claim Maine’s anti-discrimination law creates ‘chilling effect’

Photo by 戸山 神奈 on Unsplash

Eesha Pendharkar,

 Maine Morning Star

January 08, 2025

Two religious schools from Maine argued in federal court on Tuesday against the state’s anti-discrimination law, which they say infringes on their constitutional right to free exercise of religion.

To what extent Maine can allow religious schools to follow their practices — many of which uphold traditional Christian values and can be inherently exclusionary to LGBTQ+ students or students practicing other religions — while protecting the rights of all students will be determined by federal judges in the coming months.



“Can a state that has an anti-discrimination law make that apply to everyone, or are religious organizations going to get an exemption from that?” asked Christopher Taub, Maine’s deputy attorney general who is representing the state in the trial.

“Most people, most taxpayers, would not want their funds to be used for purposes of discrimination. And so the question is, can states stop that from happening or not? And I think the decisions that we get in these cases might help answer that.”
Appellants say Supreme Court precedent protects against exclusion

Crosspoint Church, which runs Bangor Christian Schools, and St. Dominic Academy in Auburn appealed in separate cases heard back-to-back in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston.

Citing several Supreme Court decisions, including one in 2022 that allowed religious schools to be eligible for public funds, they said the state’s educational nondiscrimination provisions create what they described as a “chilling effect,” that in effect exclude religious schools from a state program that allows private schools to receive public education funding in cases where mostly rural students without a local public school can opt in to another school or district.

“The First Amendment actually does protect religious organizations from the very activity that the state of Maine is trying to impose upon them,” said Jeremy Dys, attorney for Crosspoint Church from the First Liberty Institute, a national religious freedom organization. “What we want is not to be penalized for the exercise of religious beliefs.”

Both appellants asked for a reversal of a 2024 U.S. District Court decision to allow Maine to apply its Human Rights Act — which prohibits discrimination on the basis of protected classes, including race, color, sex, sexual orientation (which includes gender identity and expression), among other categories — to all K-12 private schools accepting public funds.

Neither school has applied for the program because they said doing so would allow the state to scrutinize their religious practices.

For example, under the Maine Human Rights Act, Bangor Christian Schools’ practice of not admitting gay or trans students, or expelling students for premarital sex, would violate the law. For St. Dominic’s, it would mean if a student who refuses to pray three times a day or attend mass is denied admission, that student could seek protection by filing a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission. Also, teachers wouldn’t be able to say that their faith does not allow them to use students’ preferred pronouns, or they risk being investigated under the Maine Human Rights Act, according to Adele Keim from Becket, the law firm representing St. Dominic’s that fights religious liberty cases.


“Non-discrimination law is important for everybody,” she said. “But as important as it is, it can’t be used to deprive religious believers of their rights.”

If the appeals court does not rule in favor of the religious schools, Dys said the case may have to return to the U.S. Supreme Court, which currently has a conservative majority, “if that’s what it takes to make sure that these religious organizations are treated fairly and equitably.”

State argues cases are premature

The state of Maine argued Tuesday that the cases are premature, since neither religious school that appealed has yet applied for funding and so does not know exactly how Maine’s anti-discrimination law would impact their practices.

It is also possible to comply with state law as a religious school, Taub said, as evidenced by Cheverus High School in Portland, which has been approved to accept public funds for students for years, and has not had to face any complaints or investigations.

One of the arguments appellants focused on was the general applicability of the law, which came under question since Maine also allows rural students to choose out-of-state private schools, which Keim pointed out don’t have to adhere to Maine’s Human Rights Act.

However, out of the 4,500 students statewide that use the tuition reimbursement program, only two go to out-of-state schools, Taub said. Since Maine does not have jurisdiction over other states, it can’t apply its nondiscrimination law to those institutions that receive tuition from Maine municipalities, regardless of whether those schools are religious.

Finally, it is possible to strike down part of the Maine Human Rights Act that could be seen as stifling religious freedom without allowing religious schools to be completely exempt from following the law, Taub said. That would mean religious schools can reject students based on whether or not they align with the school’s beliefs, but they would not be able to reject a student on the basis of sexual orientation or gender, for example.

“This particular provision that talks about allowing religious expression, if the court thinks that’s problematic, instead of breaking down everything, it could just strike down that one provision,” Taub said.

Maine Morning Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com.

How Christian nationalism played a role in incorporating phrase ‘so help me God’ in presidential oath of office

An oil painting of George Washington taking the oath of office as the first president of the United States on April 30, 1789, in New York City. Ramon de Elorriaga/Encyclopedia Britannica via Wikimedia Commons


The Conversation

January 08, 2025

On Jan. 20, 2025, Donald Trump will take the presidential oath of office: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” And then he will probably add the phrase “so help me God.”

Those four little words are not in the Constitution, but for many Americans, the phrase has been a part of the oath ever since George Washington was said to have added it 236 years ago.

But did Washington really say “so help me God?” There is no evidence that he did. In fact, no one said he did until 1854, 65 years later, when Rufus Griswold, an editor and literary critic, told the story in a book titled “The Republican Court”: “[Washington] added, with fervor, his eyes closed, that his whole soul might be absorbed in the supplication, ‘So help me God!’”

As a professor of U.S. history, I don’t care if Washington said it or not; my interest is in how quickly “so help me God” became established in the American national memory.

For a 2014 article titled “In Griswold We Trust,” I used various online databases such as Google Books, Internet Archive, American Periodicals Series and Newspapers.com to search for the phrase. Before 1854, there are no accounts of Washington saying “so help me God” at the end of the oath – at least in the millions of print records covered by the databases. Then Griswold told the story, and by the end of the 1850s, almost a dozen books and magazine articles had repeated it. Griswold’s story was so thoroughly accepted that, through the 20th century, no one, including academic scholars, thought to question it.

The best way to understand Griswold’s mythic insertion of “so help me God” into the presidential oath is through the lens of Christian nationalism. While the phrase is relatively new, Christian nationalism itself has been around for a long time.
Second Great Awakening

Scholars Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry have defined Christian nationalism as “a cultural framework … that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life.”

Christian nationalism was big in the early 19th century. Legal scholar Steven K. Green noted in his 2015 book, “Inventing a Christian America,” that the Second Great Awakening, a Protestant evangelical revival movement that peaked in the 1830s, “brought about … a desire to see religious values reflected in the nation’s culture and institutions.”

Rev. Ezra Stiles Ely, a Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia, took things a step further when he told his congregation in 1828 that only leaders “known to be avowedly Christians” should be elected.

In the words of religious studies scholar Richard Hughes, many participants in the Second Great Awakening “sought to transform the nation into a Christian Republic.” In its aftermath, Griswold’s account of Washington prayerfully adding “so help me God” to the presidential oath became part of America’s Christian creation myth.
Another age, another “so help me God” story

Like many cultural ideas, Christian nationalism has waxed and waned through American history. It was popular again in the years just after World War II, a time of increased tensions between the United States and the “godless communists” of the Soviet Union.

Religion was an important weapon in the Cold War. As Sen. Joseph McCarthy said, “The fate of the world rests with the clash between the atheism of Moscow and the Christian spirit throughout other parts of the world.”

In this Cold War context, the U.S. added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, made “In God We Trust” the country’s national motto and created a new version of the Griswold story: that every president, not just Washington, had ended their oath of office with “so help me God.”

 

The Pledge of Allegiance. United States Government Publishing Office via Wikimedia Commons

Actually, there is no compelling evidence that any president added “so help me God” before September 1881, when Chester A. Arthur was sworn in after the death of James Garfield.

But it was important in Cold War America to prove that it was a Christian nation, so a new story was added to the American creation myth: Through the nation’s history, all presidents invoked God as part of their oath.

A search of the databases shows that this story began in 1948. One of the earliest examples was from Frank Waldrop, editor of the Washington Times-Herald, responding to the Supreme Court’s decision in McCollum v. Board of Education that it was unconstitutional for public schools to promote religion. “Every President from Washington down to Harry Truman has always taken that oath with his hand on the Bible,” Waldrop wrote, “and every President … has added the undeniably religious phrase, ‘So help me, God.’”

Waldrop used the assertion that presidents have all said “so help me God” as an argument for inserting religion into public schools. This is an important point about Christian nationalism: As scholar Eric McDaniel and others have shown, it is not just a view of the past; it is a call for action, specifically to reclaim America as a “holy land.”

Christian nationalism relies on a flawed understanding of the American past, but it has become an increasingly important part of our history.

David B. Parker, Professor of History, Kennesaw State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trump Bible gets new 'Inauguration Day Edition' just in time for Jan. 6

(RNS) — A new ad urges supporters to buy a Bible commemorating Trump's return to the White House. The new edition of the God Bless the USA Bible features Trump's name on the cover and will be on sale until Jan. 19.

FILE - Then former President Donald Trump endorses the “God Bless the USA” Bible in a video in March 2024. (Video screen grab)

Bob Smietana
January 6, 2025
RELIGIOUS NEWS SERVICE

(RNS) — The makers of the God Bless the USA Bible, endorsed by President-elect Donald Trump, have issued a new edition just in time for Trump’s second inauguration.

Launched Monday (Jan. 6), the limited-run “Inauguration Day Bible” costs $69.99 — or four copies for $59.49 each — and features an embossed cover with Trump’s name and the date of his upcoming inauguration. The Bible includes the King James translation along with the text of the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance and the lyrics to the chorus of “God Bless the USA,” the 1984 Lee Greenwood hit. It also comes with a DVD of a concert honoring Greenwood’s career.

Trump fans can still order the original God Bless the USA Bible for $59.99. There’s also “The Day God Intervened” edition, embossed with the date of the failed assassination attempt in July. Some of Trump’s supporters have claimed God spared Trump’s life. The website also offers a signed Trump Bible for $1,000, Trump-related apparel and links to Trump-themed guitars and God Bless the USA coins.

RELATED: As Trump hawks Bible, debate over ‘Christian America’ spreads outside church

First announced in 2021 by a marketing company with ties to Greenwood, the God Bless the USA Bible has been a source of controversy ever since. An initial version featuring the New International Version translation was canceled after a number of authors published by Zondervan, which also publishes the NIV, objected. The Bible was then resurrected when the marketing company switched to the King James Version, which is in the public domain.

It was largely forgotten until this past spring, when Trump began hawking the God Bless the USA Bible in video ads, tying it to the need to reverse the decline of Christianity in America. A video ad claims Trump is bringing faith back to the “forefront of American life.”

“Christianity has been experiencing a recent surge, and now more than ever, every home needs to have Bibles readily available,” the ad claims, urging Trump fans to buy the edition before Jan. 19. A press release for the new edition says Trump has not yet decided which Bible to use during his swearing in on Jan. 20.

Trump has a complicated history with the Bible. As a candidate in 2016, he referred to the Apostle Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians as “Two Corinthians” during a speech at Liberty University. In 2019, he created more uproar by signing Bibles during a visit to an Alabama church, while in 2020, police expelled a priest from an Episcopal church near Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., so then-President Trump could have his photo taken with a Bible during the protests that followed the death of George Floyd.

This past fall the state of Oklahoma put out a request to buy 55,000 Bibles that had to include the Constitution and other patriotic documents — a description that seemed tailor-made for the God Bless the USA Bible. That request was later amended.

FILE – Then former President Donald Trump, left, and musician Lee Greenwood on the website for the God Bless the USA Bible. (Screen grab)

The God Bless the USA Bible, like almost all other Bibles sold in the United States, was printed in China, a nation Trump has loudly criticized. In 2019, Bible publishers in the U.S. worried proposed tariffs during the first Trump administration would raise the cost of Bibles, but Bibles were later exempted from the tariffs.

His paid Bible endorsement, in which Trump said “we must make America pray again,” debuted during Holy Week and came about a month after he promised during a speech to the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville to return political power to Christians.

“If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump told the annual gathering in February.

America’s Christians fueled Trump’s return to the White House, with almost two-thirds of Protestants (63%) and 58% of Catholics voting for him, according to election polls. That included 72% of White Protestants, 61% of White Catholics, 64% of Hispanic Protestants and 53% of Hispanic Catholics.

Black Protestants (85%) were the only major Christian group to support Harris, along with 78% of Jews, 58% of other non Christians and 71% of religiously unaffiliated voters.

While claiming the God Bless the USA Bible is the only Bible Trump has officially endorsed, the site also makes it clear Trump does not own or have any control over the God Bless the USA Bible but instead was a paid endorser

The new ad for the God Bless the USA Bible comes at a time when sales of the Christian Scriptures are booming, according to The Wall Street Journal.