Traffic-related air pollution may be hazardous for women's mental health

New study suggests that this specific type of pollution is associated with depression; sociodemographic status and reproductive health factors also play a role

The Menopause Society

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CLEVELAND, Ohio (Jan 22, 2025)—It is no secret that air pollution of any kind is bad for our health. Recently, though, there has been more focus on the association between traffic-related air pollution (TRAP) and depression specifically. A new study not only supports previous findings about this association but also identifies the mediating effects of menstrual cycle characteristics. Results of the study are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The Menopause Society.

Thanks to population growth and urbanization, nearly one-quarter of the US population now live in proximity to high-volume roadways, exposing these persons to hazardous TRAP, which includes particulate matter and nitrogen oxides. The adverse health outcomes, including psychiatric health conditions, of such exposure have been well documented.

Multiple studies have already examined the association between TRAP and depression, including a study that suggested that women are more vulnerable to the psychiatric effects of TRAP exposures than men. A number of these studies confirmed that the closer the distance to the traffic, the greater the depressive symptoms, regardless of whether the exposure was short or long term.

What the previous studies lacked, however, was the examination of whether these linkages are independent of key variables such as sociodemographic factors and overall reproductive health. With respect to sociodemographic factors, there are obvious racial or ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in TRAP exposures. That’s because minority and poorer populations are more likely to live in high-traffic areas.

TRAP exposures in midlife women have also predicted aspects of body composition, including fat mass, proportional fat mass, and lower lean mass, as well as the risk for type 2 diabetes. From a reproductive health standpoint, TRAP exposures have been linked to a number of adverse outcomes, including an earlier age of puberty, menstrual cycle irregularity, reduced fertility, and negative birth outcomes.

In this latest study focused on the depressive effects of TRAP exposure, regression analyses were done on nearly 700 healthy reproductive-aged women involved in the Ovarian Aging Study. Researchers concluded that TRAP exposure is related to depression in women, and this association is independent of a host of sociodemographic and health factors, as well as menstrual cycle characteristics. Additionally, however, it found that the association between TRAP exposure and depression may be partially mediated by menstrual cycle characteristics, reflecting reproductive health status more broadly.

Study results are published in the article “Traffic pollution, reproductive health, and depressive symptoms in a healthy multiethnic sample of reproductive age women in the Ovarian Aging Study.”

“This study highlights the association between traffic-related air pollution and depression in reproductive-aged women. The findings also showed a significant independent effect of socioeconomic status (SES) and reproductive health factors on risk for depression. The SES-depression links are especially troublesome because TRAP exposures disproportionately burden lower SES people, potentially setting the stage for a clustering of risk factors for poor mental health in vulnerable persons,” says Dr. Stephanie Faubion, medical director for The Menopause Society.

For more information about menopause and healthy aging, visit www.menopause.org.

The Menopause Society (formerly The North American Menopause Society) is dedicated to empowering healthcare professionals and providing them with the tools and resources to improve the health of women during the menopause transition and beyond. As the leading authority on menopause since 1989, the nonprofit, multidisciplinary organization serves as the independent, evidence-based resource for healthcare professionals, researchers, the media, and the public and leads the conversation about improving women’s health and healthcare experiences. To learn more, visit menopause.org.

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Journal

Menopause

DOI

10.1097/GME.0000000000002483 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Traffic pollution, reproductive health, and depressive symptoms in a healthy multiethnic sample of reproductive age women in the Ovarian Aging Study

Article Publication Date

22-Jan-2025

 

Study: Civil organizing persisted during Syrian civil war

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau

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Civil organizing persisted during Syria’s civil war but also shifted to “translocal organizations” operating in rebel-held territory inside Syria and in neighboring countries, according to research co-written by Rana B. Khoury, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies comparative and international politics, with a focus on the Middle East.

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Credit: Photo by Fred Zwicky

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Where, when and how did civilians organize during the Syrian civil war that started in the aftermath of the Arab Spring in 2011 and lasted until the toppling of President Bashar Assad in late 2024? According to new research co-written by a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign political scientist, civil organizing persisted during Syria’s armed conflict but also shifted to “translocal organizations” operating in rebel-held territory inside Syria and in neighboring countries.

Civil organizing by Syrians was able to endure in the face of ongoing political violence and focus not only on the basic concerns of protection and survival, but also on more far-ranging issues such as governance and revolutionary politics, said Rana B. Khoury, a professor of political science at Illinois.

“I wanted to investigate what happened during Syria’s uprising in the years after the Arab Spring,” she said. “The story that’s been told was of a nonviolent movement that was severely repressed by the Assad regime, and things then devolved into a nasty civil war. That’s all true, but at the same time, those nonviolent Syrian activists didn’t just disappear. Some demobilized, some might have joined armed groups, but many of them continued to adjust and adapt to the change in conflict conditions. And what we found was the development of something that almost looked like a civil society both inside Syria and in exile.”

Drawing on a large-scale original dataset of public Facebook posts produced by Syrian organizations from 2011-20 and qualitative case studies based on 10 months of field research among Syrian activists in Turkey and Jordan, Khoury and co-author Alexandra A. Siegel of the University of Colorado Boulder were able to systematically examine “geographic, temporal and substantive variation in civil organizing,” according to the paper.

The research suggests that civil organizing emerges and persists in more places, times and domains than is typically assumed.

“In wartime, hundreds of organizations emerged, and civil organizing can combine efforts by local actors with those by refugees in border states or by the diaspora,” Khoury said. “We thought about how we could capture this broad range of action, both geospatially and substantively, and its persistence during the depths of the conflict.”

Khoury created a dataset of public Facebook pages that she said “were kind of a digital ecosystem or public space for Syrian citizens and organizations.” 

“This was in the 2010s, so Facebook was where Syrian civilians turned at the time,” she said. “I put together this dataset that ends up being more than 1,300 Facebook pages. With my co-author, we then collected the millions of posts on the pages which gave us this really rich, granular and Syrian-produced view into their organizing activities.”

In addition to analyzing social media, Khoury also did 10 months of field research in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. 

“My conversations with these civil actors and activists afforded me a better understanding of the broad array of actions that they were undertaking, everything from humanitarian relief to human rights advocacy, transitional justice preparations and long-run contributions like development and schooling,” said Khoury, also an affiliate of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the Illinois Global Institute.

“Collecting data under wartime conditions presents a unique challenge, but the field research was how I came to understand the ways that these organizations were interacting and having this representational existence on Facebook. I wouldn’t have felt confident in the dataset had it not been for the qualitative research component.”

The implications of the study point to the persistence of civilians operating under risky conditions, Khoury said.

“Even in the midst of all this violence, these civil organizing groups didn’t go dark, although they sometimes went underground, literally and figuratively. They migrated to other places, usually in rebel-held territory and in refuge, but they didn’t cease to exist,” she said. “Sometimes it was literally underground because the areas where they were operating, where the rebels held sway, were under constant regime shelling. They were sometimes antagonized by armed groups, including the more extremist or Islamist factions. And so, literally sometimes, some of these schools for displaced children began as underground schools. Or there were underground medical exchanges, trying to get medical supplies to areas besieged by the regime.

“And yet, despite these very risky conditions, organizations persisted and evolved, and some became more formal nongovernmental organizations working with international aid organizations, as our case studies illustrate. It’s going to be these kinds of civil organizing groups that will help heal and rebuild Syria in the post-Assad era.”

The paper was published in the journal Perspectives in Politics, published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association.

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Journal

Perspectives on Politics

DOI

10.1017/S1537592724001907 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Civil organizing in war: Evidence from Syrian Facebook Communities

 

Subterranean ‘islands’: strongholds in a potentially less turbulent world

Earth’s mantle reveals hidden treasures

Utrecht University

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Location of the LLSVPs and a schematic representation of the Earth's cross-section for speed and damping of the seismic waves.

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Credit: Utrecht University

Deeply hidden in Earth’s mantle there are two huge ‘islands’ with the size of a continent. New research from Utrecht University shows that these regions are not only hotter than the surrounding graveyard of cold sunken tectonic plates, but also that they must be ancient: at least half a billion years old, perhaps even older. These observations contradict the idea of a well-mixed and fast flowing Earth’s mantle, a theory that is becoming more and more questioned. “There is less flow in Earth’s mantle than is commonly thought.” This research will be published on January 22nd, 2025 in Nature.

Large earthquakes make the whole Earth ring like a bell with different tones, just like a musical instrument. Seismologists study Earth’s deep interior by investigating how much these tones are ‘out of tune’, because whole Earth oscillations will sound out of tune or less loud when they encounter anomalies. This way seismologists will be able to make images of the interior of our planet, just like a hospital doctor can ‘see’ through your body with X-rays. At the end of the last century, an analysis of these oscillations showed the existence of two subsurface ‘super-continents’: one under Africa and the other one under the Pacific Ocean, both hidden more than two thousand kilometres below the Earth’s surface. “Nobody knew what they are, and whether they are only a temporary phenomenon, or if they have been sitting there for millions or perhaps even billions of years,” says Arwen Deuss, seismologist and professor of Structure and composition of Earth’s deep interior at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “These two large islands are surrounded by a graveyard of tectonic plates which have been transported there by a process called ‘subduction’, where one tectonic plate dives below another plate and sinks all the way from the Earth’s surface down to a depth of almost three thousand kilometres.”

Slow waves

“We have known for years that these islands are located at the boundary between the Earth’s core and mantle. And we see that seismic waves slow down there.” Earth scientists therefore call these regions ‘Large Low Seismic Velocity Provinces’ or LLSVPs. “The waves slow down because the LLSVPs are hot, just like you can’t run as fast in hot weather as you can when it’s colder.” Deuss and her colleague Sujania Talavera-Soza were keen to find out if they could discover more about these regions. “We added new information, the so-called ‘damping’ of seismic waves, which is the amount of energy that waves lose when they travel through the Earth. In order to do so, we did not only investigate how much the tones where out of tune, we also studied their sound volume.” Talavera-Soza adds: “Against our expectations, we found little damping in the LLSVPs, which made the tones sound very loud there. But we did find a lot of damping in the cold slab graveyard, where the tones sounded very soft. Unlike the upper mantle, where we found exactly what we expected: it is hot, and the waves are damped. Just like when the weather is hot outside and you go for a run, you don’t only slow down but you also get more tired than when it is cold outside.”

Grain size

Their colleague Laura Cobden, who specializes in the minerals that we find deep in the Earth, suggested to study the grain size of the LLSVPs. According to their American colleague Ulrich Faul, temperature alone cannot explain the absence of high damping in the LLSVPs. Deuss: ”Grain size is much more important. Subducting tectonic plates that end up in the slab graveyard consist of small grains because they recrystallize on their journey deep into the Earth. A small grain size means a larger number of grains and therefore also a larger number of boundaries between the grains. Due to the large number of grain boundaries between the grains in the slab graveyard, we find more damping, because waves loose energy at each boundary they cross. The fact that the LLSVPs show very little damping, means that they must consist of much larger grains.”

Ancient

Those mineral grains do not grow overnight, which can only mean one thing: LLSVPs are lots and lots older than the surrounding slab graveyards. Even more so: the LLSVPs, with their much larger building blocks, are very rigid. Therefore, they do not take part in mantle convection (the flow in the Earth’s mantle). Thus, contrary to what the geography books teach us, the mantle cannot be well-mixed either. Talavera-Soza clarifies: “After all, the LLSVPs must be able to survive mantle convection one way or another.”

Engine

Knowledge of the Earth’s mantle is essential to understand the evolution of our planet. “And also to understand other phenomena at the Earth’s surface, such as vulcanism and mountain building,” Deuss adds. “The Earth’s mantle is the engine that drives all these phenomena. Take, for example, mantle plumes, which are large bubbles of hot material that rise from the Earth’s deep interior as in a lava lamp.” Once they finally reach the surface, they cause vulcanism, like under Hawaii. “And we think that those mantle plumes originate at the edges of the LLSVPs.”

Large earthquakes

In this type of research, seismologists make good use of oscillations caused by really large earthquakes, preferably quakes that take place at great depths, such as the great Bolivia earthquake of 1994. “It never made it into the newspapers, because it took place at a large depth of 650 km and luckily did not result in any damage or casualties at the Earth’s surface,” Deuss explains. The whole Earth oscillations, or tones, are mathematically described in such a way that we can easily ‘read’ the damping (i.e. how loud the oscillation is) due to a specific structure and separate it from the wave speed (i.e. how much out of tune it is). “Which is impressive, because the damping of the signal is only one-tenth of the total amount of information that we can unravel from these oscillations.” For this type of research, it is not necessary to wait until another earthquake occurs. The data from previous earthquakes is just as useful. “We can go back to 1975, because from that year onwards, seismometers became good enough to give us data of such high quality that they are useful for our research.”

Schematic representation of the process of subduction of tectonic plates and of a mantle plume rising from an LLSVP. In the latter, the mineral grains are larger than those in the subducted plates.

Ubicación de las LLSVP y representación esquemática de la sección transversal de la Tierra para la velocidad y amortiguación de las ondas sísmicas.

Representación esquemática del proceso de subducción de placas tectónicas y de un penacho térmico que se eleva desde una LLSVP en el manto. Los granos minerales son más grandes en la LLSVP que en las placas tectónicas subducidas.

Credit

Universidad de Utrecht

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-024-08322-y 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Global 3D model of mantle attenuation using seismic normal modes

Article Publication Date

22-Jan-2025

Fighting experience plays key role in brain chemical’s control of male aggression

Findings may shed light on waning effectiveness of antipsychotic drugs

NYU Langone Health / NYU Grossman School of Medicine

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Like humans, mice will compete over territory and mates, and show increased confidence in their fighting skills the more they win. At first, a brain chemical called dopamine is essential for young males to master this behavior. But as they gain experience, the chemical grows less important in promoting aggression, a new study shows.

Dopamine has been linked to male aggression for decades. How past experiences might influence this relationship, however, had until now been unclear.

In experiments in rodents, a team led by researchers at NYU Langone Health boosted activity in dopamine-releasing cells in a part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area. The findings revealed that in inexperienced male fighters, this led the animals to attack for twice as long as they would have fought naturally. When the cells were blocked, the novice mice would not fight at all.

By contrast, this pattern did not hold true in males that had extensive fighting experience. Whether or not dopamine-releasing cells were boosted or blocked, the duration of attack did not change. Notably, though, the more clashes a mouse won, the more fights it would start in the future.

“Our findings offer new insight into how both ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ shape aggression in males,” said study senior author Dayu Lin, PhD. “While aggression is an innate behavior, dopamine — and fighting experience — is essential for its maturation during adulthood,” added Lin, a professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and of Neuroscience at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

A report on the findings is publishing online Jan. 22 in the journal Nature.

Building on their evidence for the role of dopamine in learning aggression, authors set out to better understand the brain mechanisms that might explain it. To do this, the team prevented cells in the ventral tegmental area of the brain from releasing dopamine into another region called the lateral septum, a site known to regulate aggression. They found that novice males would never learn to fight, but those with previous fighting experience would continue to engage in aggressive behavior. Similarly, promoting dopamine release in this area of the brain boosted hostility in rookies but had no effect on veterans.

This suggests that the lateral septum is a key brain site for dopamine to promote “aggression learning” in rodents and likely in other mammals, including people, says Lin, who is also a member of NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s Institute for Translational Neuroscience.

The team also measured dopamine release in the lateral septum as the animals gained fighting experience. They found that the chemical surges the most on the day they first decide to attack. As the mouse becomes more experienced with fighting, this dopamine spike becomes less dramatic, supporting a central role of the chemical in initial aggression learning.

Importantly, the researchers also found that dopamine did not appear to play a similar role in female aggression. In fact, manipulating dopamine levels did not affect aggressive behaviors in female mice in any way.

According to Lin, the results may offer new insight into addressing mental health conditions marked by intense shifts in mood and behavior, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder. Antipsychotic drugs that interfere with dopamine release are commonly used to treat such diseases, as well as to suppress violent behavior in psychiatric patients.

“Our results suggest that targeting dopamine may not be an effective tool when treating those with a long history of aggression,” said Lin. “As a result, healthcare providers may need to consider a patient’s history, as well as their age and sex, when considering which therapy to use.”

Lin adds that the results may also explain why antipsychotic drugs are known to have a stronger and longer-lasting effect in children than in adults, for whom aggression often returns once they stop receiving medication.

That said, Lin cautions that while mice share similar brain chemistry with people and that the current findings echo human clinical results, more research will be needed to demonstrate the impact of past behavior on the effectiveness of antipsychotic medications in humans.

Funding for the study was provided by National Institutes of Health grants R01MH101377, R01MH124927, U19NS107616, U01NS11335, U01NS12082, P30DA048736, and R01MH133669. Further study funding was provided by the Vulnerable Brain Project.

In addition to Lin, other NYU Langone researchers involved in the study are Bingqin Zheng, MS; Xiuzhi Dai; Xiaoyang Cui, BS; Luping Yin, PhD; Jing Cai, PhD; and Nicolas Tritsch, PhD. Other study investigators include Yizhou Zhuo, PhD, and Yulong Li, PhD, at the Peking University School of Life Sciences in Beijing; and Larry Zweifel, PhD, at the University of Washington in Seattle. Bing Dai, PhD, a former graduate student at NYU Langone and a current postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, served as the study lead author.

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About NYU Langone Health
NYU Langone Health is a fully integrated health system that consistently achieves the best patient outcomes through a rigorous focus on quality that has resulted in some of the lowest mortality rates in the nation. Vizient, Inc., has ranked NYU Langone the No. 1 comprehensive academic medical center in the country for three years in a row, and U.S. News & World Report recently placed nine of its clinical specialties among the top five in the nation. NYU Langone offers a comprehensive range of medical services with one high standard of care across six inpatient locations, its Perlmutter Cancer Center, and more than 300 outpatient locations in the New York area and Florida. With $14.2 billion in revenue this year, the system also includes two tuition-free medical schools, in Manhattan and on Long Island, and a vast research enterprise with over $1 billion in active awards from the National Institutes of Health.

Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-024-08459-w 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Experience-dependent dopamine modulation of male aggression

Article Publication Date

22-Jan-2025

SIEG HEIL!

Musk salute at Trump rally celebrated by extremists online


By AFP
January 21, 2025


Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gestures as he speaks during a post-inauguration celebration in Washington - Copyright AFP ANGELA WEISS
Bill MCCARTHY

Elon Musk’s hand gestures at an inauguration event for US President Donald Trump, which quickly drew comparisons to Nazi salutes, appear to have resonated in some far-right extremist spaces online.

Several neo-Nazi leaders have shared clips of the viral moment from Musk’s Monday speech, in which the billionaire brought his hand to his chest and extended it straight out, twice, before saying: “My heart goes out to you.”

“Donald Trump White Power moment,” the head of a neo-Nazi group in Australia wrote on Telegram, in one of several posts AFP reviewed.

Many people, including several historians, have likened the movement to the “sieg heil” used by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler — criticism that Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, has dismissed as “dirty tricks” and “propaganda.”

On the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront, a user posted an image of Musk striking the pose under text reading, “Heil Hitler.”

A chapter of the far-right Proud Boys militia group, whose members were among those Trump pardoned Monday for storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, also shared video of the moment on Telegram.

The group offered a slightly different message: “Hail Trump!”

“There is no question among white supremacists that Musk was making a Nazi salute,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told AFP.

Beirich said far-right figures were “more than thrilled” and that “generally, they believe Musk’s raised arm is an endorsement of their beliefs.”

The University of Virginia’s T. Kenny Fountain, who studies rhetoric and extremism, said that Musk’s “intention is important, but so is reception.”

“If an eager audience interprets this gesture as a meaningful acknowledgment, we are in dangerous territory,” Fountain wrote on Bluesky. “Unsurprisingly, it seems many on the far-right are reading it that way.”

Andrew Torba, founder of the social media platform Gab, posted a photo of Musk and wrote, “Incredible things are happening already.”

Christopher Pohlhaus, the leader of the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, shared a side-by-side video edit to Telegram that lined Musk’s movements up with footage of the group’s masked members making Nazi salutes while carrying swastika flags.

Followers reacted with lightning bolt emojis, a reference to the Nazi regime’s SS paramilitaries.

On Musk’s social media platform X, an anonymous account that has Hitler speeches pinned on its page shared another mashup video comparing Musk’s gesture to clips of Hitler.

“Sieg Heil?? Are we so back?” the post says. It received more than 2 million views.

AMERIKAN MISOGYNY

Trump fires first woman to head a US military service


By AFP
January 21, 2025


Admiral Linda Fagan, pictured speaking during a Senate hearing in June 2024, has been replaced as head of the US Coast Guard 

- Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File Andrew Harnik

President Donald Trump’s administration has removed Admiral Linda Fagan — the first woman to lead a US military service — as the head of the Coast Guard.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees the Coast Guard, did not immediately respond to a request on Tuesday for comment on Fagan’s dismissal.

Fox News cited a senior official saying reasons included her failure to address border security threats, excessive focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, and an “erosion of trust” over the Coast Guard’s investigation into sexual assault cases.

Trump and other Republicans have long railed against government programs aimed at fostering diversity, and border security is a key priority for the president, who declared a national emergency at the US frontier with Mexico on Monday, the first day of his new term.

“She served a long and illustrious career, and I thank her for her service to our nation,” acting DHS secretary Benjamine Huffman said in a message to the Coast Guard, which is one of the five US military branches.

Fagan had led the Coast Guard since 2022, and previously held posts including vice commandant of the service.

She “served on all seven continents, from the snows of Ross Island, Antarctica to the heart of Africa, from Tokyo to Geneva, and in many ports along the way,” according to an archived version of her biography, which is no longer available on the Coast Guard website.


Bishop lectures stony-faced Trump in church

By AFP
January 21, 2025

Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde launched a strong criticism of President Donald Trump's policies from the pulpit - Copyright AFP Jim WATSON

Donald Trump was forced Tuesday to sit through a sermon by a bishop begging him to have “mercy” on gays and poor immigrants as the Republican celebrated the start to his second term as US president.

Trump scowled as the Washington National Cathedral’s Mariann Edgar Budde pleaded the case from the pulpit for LGBT people and illegal migrants — two groups that Trump targeted with executive orders within hours of being sworn in on Monday.

Trump had gone to the traditional presidential service to commemorate his inauguration and was clearly not expecting the criticism.

“I ask you to have mercy, Mr President,” the bishop said softly, evoking the “fear” that she said is felt across the country.

“There are gay and lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families,” she said.

“The people who pick our farms and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation,” she said.

“But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.”

An unsmiling Trump, who sat in the first pew, looked back at Budde and sometimes away. His family and Vice President JD Vance seemed similarly surprised and displeased at the intervention.

Asked later by a reporter for his reaction, Trump said: “I didn’t think it was a good service.”

“They could do much better.”

Among scores of executive orders signed late Monday were measures to suspend the arrival of asylum seekers and expel migrants in the country illegally.

Trump also decreed that only two sexes — male and female, but not transgender — will be recognized.

Bishop makes powerful plea to Trump to ‘have mercy’ on LGBTQ people and migrants

Olivia Barber

Today
Left Foot Forward

‘I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now’

A bishop delivered a powerful speech to Donald Trump urging him to have mercy on LGBTQ people and migrants targeted by his administration’s policies.

During an inaugural prayer service yesterday, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, said: “I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now”.

Rev Budde added: “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and Independent families, some who fear for their lives.”

“The people who pick our crops, and clean our office buildings, who labour in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants, and work the night shifts in hospitals”, she said, “they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.”

She added: “They pay taxes and are good neighbours.”

In reference to Trump’s immigration policies, Budde said: “I ask you to have mercy Mr President on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.”

“Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.”

Between 2017 and 2021, the previous Trump administration separated at least 3,900 children, some only a few months old, from their parents under what it called a “zero-tolerance” policy against people crossing the US-Mexico border illegally.

Trump sat with a stern, irritated expression beside Melania Trump and Vice President JD Vance during Budde’s speech.

Online, people have praised the Reverend’s courage for “speaking truth to power”.

Trump told reporters, “I didn’t think it was a good service,” and in a video on X, Georgia Representative, Mike Collins, suggested: “The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list”.

In an unhinged rant on Truth Social, Trump attacked the Reverend stating: “The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater”.

“She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart…. She and her church owe the public an apology!”

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward