George Foster, a third-generation farmer in Middlebury, cut corn on a neighbor’s farm on Tuesday to help feed his 950 cows after this summer’s drought shrunk his own crop. 

The 2,000 tons of additional feed cost roughly $100,000, Foster said, not including the labor of harvesting the corn and trucking it home to his dairy farm. The last time the 2,300-acre farm had to buy extra feed was in 1965, Foster said. 

The U.S. Drought Monitor, a national drought mapping project out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, shows that all of Vermont is in a moderate or severe drought, as of Sept. 2. For farmers, that’s making a difficult dairy business even more challenging as they’re forced to haul water and buy feed to keep the cows producing milk through the heat. 

Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, the state climatologist, said there are two types of drought in the state right now: a long-term drought that began last fall and a flash drought that began around June 4. Some streamwater gauges and groundwater wells are at the lowest levels ever seen in Vermont since record keeping began up to 109 years ago, according to Dupigny-Giroux. 

While this particular drought has not yet been directly linked to climate change, a warming planet, caused largely by the burning of fossil fuels, increases extreme weather events and patterns like heat waves, floods and drought. 

Dupigny-Giroux encouraged Vermonters to record what they’re observing with the drought at the University of Nebraska’s Drought Condition Monitoring Observations and Reports; so far, she said, there were only two observations recorded across the entire state. 

Jon Lucas, of Lucas Dairy, has been hauling up to 5,000 gallons of water per day from a creek to his farm in Orwell since his three wells started drying up in June. Lucas said a typical milk cow needs to drink about 50 gallons of water to produce 100-150 pounds of milk a day. Some farmers said they’ve lost about ten pounds a day of milk per cow because of the heat, and the lack of feed could worsen the conditions, Lucas said. 

“The first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing I think about before I go to bed is making sure the cows have water,” Lucas said, adding that along with being a huge time commitment, hauling the water was mentally draining. 

The dry spell comes from a shortfall in precipitation that’s affecting the entire state, but particularly the Northeast Kingdom, Dupigny-Giroux said. Rainfall could hit Vermont through the weekend, she said, but it won’t cure the various types and stages of drought impacting the state. 

“It took us a while to get into this drought,” Dupigny-Giroux said. “It’ll take us a while to get out, barring tremendous amounts of rain.” 

Depending on the region of the state, it would require roughly six to eight inches of rain throughout a month to pull the state out of the drought, according to Dupigny-Giroux. That much rain would have to make it down through the soil and into the groundwater without being taken up by thirsty plants along the way. 

Lindsey Brand, the marketing and communications director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, a farmer-led organization advocating for sustainable agriculture, said the state’s drought particularly impacted livestock farmers. 

“We’re seeing a lot of folks who have not been able to do a third cut of hay,” Brand said, referring to a harvesting practice that increases grass yields by cutting the crop throughout the season. “That’s a pretty serious blow on the farm.” 

That means farmers like Lucas and Foster, who normally can grow enough to feed their herds, have to buy additional feed, creeping into their already slim margins in the dairy industry, where there are fixed prices for fluid milk that don’t oscillate to meet the needs of the milk producers. 

A consolidating dairy industry means there’s a very small number of buyers, and they’re able to set a low milk price, Brand said.

“The choice for dairy farmers is, do they want to sell or not sell their milk?” Brand said. “The price is set for them. They can’t negotiate based on an increased cost of production, so a year like this serious drought situation and buying more feed because cows can’t graze means their already-small margins have shrunk significantly.” 

Graham Unanst-Rufenacht, the policy director at Rural Vermont, a small-farmer advocacy organization, said most small-scale vegetable farmers are less vulnerable because they can rely on irrigation. Larger animal operations, however, have struggled to rotate their grazing lands, provide enough feed and access enough water since wetter weather ended in June. 

Unanst-Rufenacht manages his own animals to encourage ecological resilience on his Marshfield farm, frequently moving animals in tight groups across his 15 acres. But a drought like this summer’s slows pasture regeneration and can impact how much pasture is available for feed. 

Lucas said he’s spending $50,000-$100,000 on feed products like corn, hay and wet brew, a byproduct from making beer, to feed his 300 cows and supplement what he normally harvests from his 900 acres of cropland along Lake Champlain. 

Lucas is a first-generation farmer, and he said this is the worst dry spell he’s experienced on his farm since he purchased the acreage in 2012. 

State funds could help alleviate the crunch through a proposed Farm Security Fund, said Unanst-Rufenacht. 

Originally, the measure requested $20 million annually to support farmers impacted by extreme weather conditions increasing under climate change, but that request was whittled down to $1 million during the last legislative session before lawmakers tabled the bill entirely. 

“The exact purpose is that, if there’s an extreme weather event, rather than a business being rocked to the ground, it can receive flexible, quick funding and recover,” Brand said. She said the fund was more important than ever to meet the new paradigm of a changing climate that has swung between two years of horrible floods to a summer largely impacted by drought, along with a smaller spate of floods in July. 

“Farmers are on the front line of climate change,” Brand said. “We don’t want to see our agricultural system collapse in the face of this new normal.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: As drought persists, livestock farmers in Vermont are hurting.

This story is a partnership between VTDigger and Grist.

For about two decades, Americans for Prosperity, the conservative political network, has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into stalling climate action nationwide. Founded by Charles and David Koch, the libertarian oil billionaires behind Koch Industries, the group has local chapters that block renewable standards, clean car rules and carbon pricing at the state level. For decades, it’s been a bulwark of climate science denial that has shaped the modern-day Republican party. After notching wins against climate policy in states like Ohio and Kansas, the group is now testing its playbook in one of the bluest states in the country: Vermont.  

In March 2023, the group launched its Vermont presence as part of its 50-state strategy to involve Americans for Prosperity in traditionally more progressive states like California and New York. In the two and a half years since, the group has spent tens of thousands of dollars launching mail and digital campaigns targeting the state’s energy legislation like the Affordable Heat Act. It has also testified in favor of repealing laws like the Global Warming Solutions Act. 

The work in Vermont is being led by Ross Connolly, the group’s 34-year-old northeast regional director. Connolly, who grew up in New Hampshire, where he now lives, has said that his work in Vermont was focused on deregulating state government and helping residents realize their American dream. On a recent podcast, he called Vermont “bizarro-New Hampshire.” He later said that was due to its geographic upside-downness along with its politics, which zigged to the left while New Hampshire zagged to the right.

“I could talk endlessly about all the good things New Hampshire’s doing and all the bad things that Vermont has done,” Connolly said on the podcast, 802 Scoop. Vermont’s Republican governor, Phil Scott, “has been a great champion for Vermonters here, but there’s a lot more work to do here than New Hampshire.”

In July, the group launched an affordability road show, and in a media release, Connolly wrote that “the state’s progressive majority has chosen to inflate taxes and increase regulations” and “advance their own radical agenda.” He expressed gratitude to Scott for his “continued commitment to Vermonters despite the progressive majority.”

Vermont, often the first to go blue on national election nights, has served as a testing ground for national legislation like the right to same-sex marriage and now a law to hold oil companies accountable for their pollution. Perhaps one of its best-known exports, U.S. senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has a long history of opposition to Koch-backed groups like Americans for Prosperity. He was a vocal opponent of the Citizens United case, which opened up election influence to the billionaire class.

“So many groups on the right, center-right, don’t get involved in the northeast outside of New Hampshire or Pennsylvania,” Connolly said in an interview before an event the group hosted at a golf course this month in Rutland, Vermont. “If we don’t fight for people in those areas we’re never going to make any sort of difference.”

But well-funded campaigns like the ones Americans for Prosperity has launched in Vermont — with a total of $186 million at the national group’s disposal, according to its 2023 nonprofit filings — are unfamiliar for the small state, where grassroots politics have long ruled. The annual tradition of Town Meeting Day, for example, marks a regular practice of direct democracy at the local level. 

Americans for Prosperity claims its driving mission is helping Vermonters afford to live in the state. But its founding and financing by some of the richest oil men in the world, and a history of spewing climate disinformation, casts that in doubt. 

Americans for Prosperity is one of the first conservative dark money groups to enter Vermont politics in a big way. Other high-profile groups have often supported liberal causes, and those groups were often funding candidates. Americans for Prosperity doesn’t directly fund candidates; its nonprofit status means it seeks to influence policies and elections through other means like mailers, ad campaigns, and in-person meetings. AFP-Action, an associated super PAC, does spend hundreds of millions on federal elections in support of right-wing politicians, but has not yet invested in a Vermont candidate, according to Connolly.

In Vermont, Connolly said Americans for Prosperity aims to help make the state more moderate. Its arrival comes on the heels of an election where Vermont lost more Democratic seats than any other state in the nation, and the state is struggling with rising housing, health care, and education costs, which makes their affordability message especially salient. 

The organization has been planting seeds in Vermont, especially when it comes to energy policies it hopes to see repealed. And as the group has repeatedly said on podcasts, during panels, and in an interview with VTDigger, it plans to root here permanently. 

Over the summer, the group organized about half a dozen speaking events, including in Rutland. Four legislators spoke at the panel event, including Republican legislators from the Rutland region: Rep. Todd Nielsen, Rep. Chris Keyser, and Sen. Terry Williams, who joined the Legislature in 2023 and serves on the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy.

While organizers expected 30 people in Rutland, about 15 came, including local officials and former legislators.

Williams said he was expecting more. He heard about the group two weeks earlier when Rachel Burgin, the organization’s northeast regional deputy director, contacted him. Burgin, who lives in Georgia, is one of three lobbyists registered in the state through 2026, along with Connolly and Lauren Schley, whose LinkedIn page says she works for Americans for Prosperity out of Washington, D.C.

No one who works for Americans for Prosperity on Vermont issues lives in Vermont, Connolly said, though he noted one person in the national office lives in the state.

Sen. Anne Watson, D/P-Washington, said groups like Americans for Prosperity opposed the energy transition because it undercut the profits of its oil tycoon founders. 

“Vermonters need to be savvy about that,” Watson said, “and recognize when outside influence is coming in to try and affect our policies and our elections.”

AFP sets its sights on energy policy

While the group first arrived in the state in 2023, it launched its first campaign last summer by attacking a first-of-its-kind climate policy — Act 18. The law studied the feasibility of a clean heat standard, which was intended to lower fossil fuel emissions from thermal energy sources like heating oil commonly used to warm Vermont homes.

“We focused on it because we came here and heard from Vermonters, and that was the one thing we heard across the board, was the concern on energy costs, and if that bill was implemented the amount of money that would cost the state and ratepayers,” Connolly said.

Supporters of Act 18 said the law was intended to regulate price-volatile fossil fuels and speed up the transition to cleaner sources like electric heat pumps. In a press release last year, Vermont House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, wrote the cost of heating oil had jumped from $2 per gallon in 2020 to $5.87 per gallon in November 2022.

“The goal of the Affordable Heat Act is to help insulate Vermonters from fossil-fuel price swings, and to make it easier and more affordable for them to transition – if they want to – to more sustainable energy sources,” Krowinski wrote. 

But Americans for Prosperity opposed Act 18 and in May 2024 launched “a major five-part mail and digital campaign” that initially cost more than $63,000, according to the group’s disclosures. Another group within the state, Vermonters for Affordable Heat, supported by the state’s locally owned fuel dealers, spent around $11,300 on postcards and a petition opposing the law. 

Liberal groups spent much more money in support of the law, but that money largely came through super PACs, political action committees that can raise unlimited sums of money to fund campaigns but cannot coordinate directly with parties or candidates. The out-of-state Green Advocacy Project, a Washington, D.C.-based pro-clean heat group, contributed three times that — $180,000 — to a Vermont super PAC to boost candidates supporting the program. 

Within Vermont, the super PAC Vermont Conservation Voters, part of the national League of Conservation Voters, spent almost $218,500 on pro-clean heat mailers, ads and videos, endorsing candidates with environmental records the group supported. While it supports election reform that wouldn’t allow for super PACS, the organization’s political director Justin Marsh told VTDigger in November that the growing presence of Americans for Prosperity was the reason they spent more than in past election cycles. 

Legislators, local officials and advocates who spoke to VTDigger said they weren’t aware of any other conservative out-of-state group like Americans for Prosperity spending tens-of-thousands of dollars to influence Vermont politics.

Other groups like the Ethan Allen Institute, part of the State Policy Network, another Koch-affiliated group, have occasionally run conservative advertising campaigns in the state, according to Ben Walsh, climate and energy program director at Vermont Public Interest Research Group, an environmental advocacy organization. But that group has far less funding and is not concentrated on climate policies, he said.

“I imagine a group like AFP with long and well-documented ties to the fossil fuel industry has a real interest in making sure policy that’s good for clean energy and bad for fossil fuels is not enacted, and if anything, it’s a little surprising that they didn’t show up sooner,” Walsh said. “But now that they’re here, they’re making it very clear that anything good for the transition to clean energy is something they oppose.” 

In March 2025, a month before Americans for Prosperity settled a lobbying violation with the state, the political advocacy group launched a second state-wide mail campaign, spending $13,425 between March 13 and June 12, according to lobbying disclosures.  

The mailer said Vermonters should call their legislators and ask them to repeal Act 18, claiming the law “guarantees energy price hikes across the state,” according to a media release. The associated mailer, sent to Vermont households this spring, stated “Vermonters want Energy Abundance. Vermonters are responsible. They do not need Government mandates.”

If it had moved forward, Vermont’s clean heat standard would have been the first in the nation. But lawmakers never passed the program, largely because a Public Utility Commission report found the program would be too expensive to implement without help from other states in the region.

“Vermont was considering this first-of-its-kind clean heat standard that would hold fossil fuel companies to a standard of actually reducing carbon emissions in a way that the electric utility sector has had to do for decades,” said Elena Mihaly, vice president for the Vermont chapter of the Conservation Law Foundation, a clean energy advocacy group based in New England. “They were trying to nip it in the bud here in Vermont before it got out.”

Connolly said his group advocated for the full repeal because progressive legislators were trying to wait it out until they had a majority again and “could force it down the throat of Vermonters when Vermonters don’t want this policy at all.” 

Watson, chair of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy, which is in charge of the bill, said that while she wasn’t necessarily saying the clean heat standard should move forward, she disagreed that Vermonters didn’t want effective clean energy policies.

“We know Vermonters care about climate change, and they care about affordability,” Watson said. “Both of those things are met by advancing renewables and renewable energy sources in the state because the vast majority are cheaper than their fossil fuel counterparts.” 

Because the clean heat standard never became a law, it doesn’t impact Vermonters’ utility bills. But Americans for Prosperity has repeatedly said the state’s energy policies, including laws like the Global Warming Solutions Act, have “without a doubt” driven costs higher for consumers.

The group is also against federal subsidies for energy programs that could lower energy costs for low-income Vermonters. In the days before the Rutland event, the state lost $62.5 million promised for solar programs after the “One Big Beautiful Bill” axed federal clean energy initiatives. 

“We believe those subsidies should have ended,” Connolly said of Solar for All. Upon the passage of the Trump omnibus bill that withdrew the funding, the national group threw a party called the One Big Beautiful Bash.

Instead of renewables, Connolly said the region needed more nuclear energy, such as small modular nuclear reactors, which have yet to be developed anywhere in the U.S., as well as the expansion of natural gas pipelines. 

“We should look at all the options on the table,” Rep. Zachary Harvey, R-Castleton, said of natural gas and nuclear power, after speaking at the event.

Connolly said his group was also against the Climate Superfund Act, which charges oil companies for greenhouse gas emissions between 1995 and 2024. The law applies a “polluter pays” mindset to climate recovery, potentially giving Vermont resources to build back from disasters like recent devastating floods. 

“If your concern is climate change, that does absolutely nothing to solve climate change,” Connolly said. 

“It’s sort of petty type politics where it’s like, we’re going after Big Oil and punishing them,” Connolly continued. “Vermont isn’t going to bankrupt ExxonMobil or any of these companies. You’re just going to drive them out of your state and drive energy costs higher because of it.”

On podcasts, in interviews and during speaking events, Connolly has repeated the same talking point: Vermont isn’t going to solve climate change. Harvey agreed, and said the Rutland event wasn’t about climate denialism, noting Williams told the room, “We agree there’s climate change.”

“We’re not denying climate change exists,” Connolly told VTDigger. “We’re saying the way we’re going about it in this state is hurting people, and we should put people first and solve the problem in a more reasonable and moderate way.”

‘Kingpins’ of climate science denial

Connolly’s acknowledgment of climate change may be a made-for-Vermont approach, but that tone doesn’t match the two decades of action Americans for Prosperity has taken to sow disinformation about climate science. 

It was founded in 2004 by libertarian billionaires Charles Koch and his late brother David Koch, who died in 2019. They amassed wealth through Koch Industries, an oil refinery and pipeline conglomerate that has siphoned up many other companies since their father created the business in the 1930s, profiting through deals with the Stalin and Hitler regimes, according to Dark Money, a book by Jane Mayer.

Together, the Koch family grew their worth to more than $141 billion. After years among the top ten richest people in the world, David Koch’s family and Charles Koch now rank 21st and 22nd, according to Fortune.

They’ve used this wealth to remake the national GOP into the party of climate denial, after government regulation of pollution and a push for renewables threatened their oil empire. In 2008, they began the “No Climate Tax Pledge,” asking officials to vote against spending money to fight climate change without equivalent tax cuts. By 2013, 411 officials had signed, including a quarter of senators and a third of representatives, along with other leaders like U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. 

In that era, Greenpeace called the brothers the “financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition,” partnering with and then outspending better-known oil corporations like ExxonMobil. During the first Trump administration, they launched local campaigns through Americans for Prosperity to roll back car emissions standards. 

Under Americans for Prosperity, and a host of other front groups, the brothers have long denied the threat of climate change, and have gone as far as to say that a warming world would benefit people. David Koch told a reporter in 2010: “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because far greater land area will be available to produce food.”

The consensus of the international community says otherwise. A warming atmosphere increases food and water insecurity for much of the planet, and causes increasingly dangerous weather events like heat waves and floods. In the two decades since Americans for Prosperity’s founding, more than half a million people were killed by the world’s 10 deadliest extreme weather events so far. All those events were made worse by the burning of fossil fuels, according to a report by World Weather Attribution, an academic outfit based at Imperial College London that scientifically quantifies how climate change influences extreme weather.

And while the Koch brothers have publicly clashed with President Trump, they have benefited enormously from his elections, earning more than $1 billion per year from the first Trump administration’s tax bill. They plan to extend tax cuts and roll back regulations, including in the energy industry, through Americans for Prosperity’s work under the second Trump administration, according to a 2025 plan obtained by The Guardian. 

Their networks have also heavily influenced both Trump teams. Under the first, about 50 administration officials had ties to Koch networks, including Energy Secretary Rick Perry and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Today, key figures like Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have worked closely with and donated large sums to both Americans for Prosperity and other Koch-affiliated groups.

The summer campaign in Vermont comes as the second Trump administration launches an unprecedented attack on climate and clean energy policies that gained traction under the Biden administration. Along with deleting climate information and reports from federal websites, the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy have spent six months deregulating fossil fuels and slashing clean energy projects. 

Most of that work was outlined by another source of environmental skepticism that received funding from the Koch brothers: the Heritage Foundation, responsible for creating Project 2025, the unofficial blueprint for the second Trump administration. It includes the breakup of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s premier climate science agency, calling it “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” Trump’s 2026 budget proposal eliminates the agency’s research arm responsible for helping the country adapt to climate change. 

‘Here to stay’

Vermont Democrats have made the most of Americans for Prosperity’s slip ups. 

On an August mailer, Americans for Prosperity had misspelled their URL -– GreenMountainProsperity.com — instead printing GreetMountainProsperity.com. Around midnight on Aug. 8, May Hanlon, the 26-year-old executive director of the Vermont Democratic Party, spotted the error and bought the misspelled web domain for $12.19.

Now, when users visit the website, a two-minute video pops up in which Hanlon calls the Americans for Prosperity mailer “sloppy” and “full of false claims about what Democrats are doing in the state legislature.” Visitors are redirected to a webpage about Democratic wins during the 2025 legislative session, emphasizing affordability concerns like housing. 

“While Americans for Prosperity spent thousands of dollars on a recent mailer to spread misinformation about our legislators’ priorities, they misspelled their own website,” Hanlon said in a text message. “They can’t get their own website right, so it’s no surprise their claims don’t add up.” 

Months earlier, the Virginia-based group was fined thousands of dollars for violating Vermont law on a mailer asking Vermonters to contact their legislators to repeal Act 18. That mailer said the campaign was “Paid for by Americans for Prosperity Vermont.” But that group was not registered in the state. 

Vermont law requires that a lobbying advertisement like a mailer contain the name of the entity that paid for it, according to an email sent by the Vermont Attorney General’s Office, which responded to a formal complaint by Jim Dandeneau, the former executive director of the Vermont Democratic Party. 

In a settlement with the state on April 29, Americans for Prosperity agreed to stop using that name and paid a $3,000 fine.

“We don’t really comment on legal things,” Connolly said of the settlement. “That has been resolved. It was just, I think, a miscommunication. We changed our disclaimers. No problem.”

He said the fine didn’t reflect the work the group was doing in Vermont, where he said it has had over 5,000 Vermonters take direct action like mailing letters or making calls since 2023. 

“That mailer was received very positively, again focusing on the moderation of the legislature and the issues that Vermonters care about,” Connolly said. “Little disputes in election law are not top of mind for Vermonters.”

Harvey, a first-term legislator appointed by Gov. Scott in January, said Vermont needs groups like Americans for Prosperity to revitalize voters. He first met the lobbyists during a dinner in Stowe early in the 2025 legislative session, and said even though the group came from out of state, they’d made an effort to get to know legislators and were committed to policies he supported. 

For Connolly, a rightward transition in his politics came during college, when he read Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, a book that argues government planning can lead to tyranny and also radicalized Charles Koch’s politics, according to Dark Money.

After graduating, Connolly worked for Republican campaigns before joining Americans for Prosperity in 2013. The group has since expanded to 37 state chapters, but the only chapter across six New England states is New Hampshire. 

Connolly ran that state’s chapter before taking on the entire New England region. Down the road, the nonprofit could establish a chapter in Vermont, which would give it infrastructure and full-time staff and enable a permanent presence in the state. 

“We promise we will be here for the long term,” Connolly told the audience at Rutland. “We at AFP are not going anywhere.” 

Ethan Weinstein and Shaun Robinson contributed reporting.

Jane Mayer is a board member of the Vermont Journalism Trust, which operates VTDigger.

Correction: A previous version of this story had the wrong legislative office and district for Rep. Zachary Harvey and misstated the committee that Sen. Anne Watson chairs.

Read the story on VTDigger here: How a Koch-funded campaign is trying to reverse climate action in Vermont.

In a flurry of filings, state and nonprofit organizations have asked federal courts to dismiss lawsuits brought against Vermont’s Climate Superfund Act, a first of its kind law demanding fossil fuel companies pay for their pollution.

Those lawsuits, filed by the federal government, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute, a lobby for oil companies, and 24 red states led by West Virginia, claim the Vermont law interferes with federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and punishes fossil fuel companies while raising costs to consumers. 

Last week, Vermont filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuits. The state argued the act does not conflict with federal law, regulate fossil fuel emissions or punish fossil fuel producers. Rather, it will look at the costs to the state of companies burning fossil fuels and will allocate a portion of those costs to those companies to help the state finance adaptation efforts under climate change.

The White House, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the West Virginia attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. The American Petroleum Institute directed VTDigger to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because the group is the lead litigant in the case, according to spokesperson Justin Prendergast.

The international scientific community overwhelmingly agrees that climate change is largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and can produce more rain in shorter, heavier bursts, and a warmer ocean can fuel stronger hurricanes. Those conditions can lead to more flooding, like those that inundated Vermont in 2023 and 2024, and again in July 2025. Hotter temperatures can also cause more extreme wildfires, contributing to human health risks in far flung places, like the wildfire smoke that hung over the state this summer. 

“Our community has been enormously impacted by the climate crisis,” said Grace Oedel, executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, an organization that supports sustainable agriculture, in a statement issued Friday. “This law helps Vermonters deal with the fallout by funding critical climate adaptation projects, and we are committed to defending this law that will help so many of our farmers and community members navigate these extreme challenges.”

Along with the Conservation Law Foundation, an advocacy group based in New England, Oedel’s group backed up the state by asking federal courts to dismiss the lawsuits Friday. The pair of nonprofits were granted the legal authority to intervene in the lawsuits earlier this summer. The Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based environmental group focused on legal action, is providing support for their work through its attorneys. 

“Let’s be clear: this law is not a sweeping effort to regulate global greenhouse gas emissions, punish fossil fuel companies, or set federal policy on climate change,” Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice president for law and policy at the Conservation Law Foundation, said in a statement. 

The Climate Superfund Act imposes a one-time payment on fossil fuel companies for their emissions between 1995 and 2024. The model is called “polluter pays” and empowers the state to demand payment from polluting companies whose extraction or refining of fossil fuels caused at least one billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the last two decades. It’s based on science that connects the increase in greenhouse gas emissions to specific events like the increase in temperatures over time, or a disaster like a hurricane or a flood. 

A group of nine economists made an additional filing Thursday arguing the lawsuits didn’t properly reflect the impact of the law. Not a party to any lawsuit, they are academics who study how government policies affect markets and well-being. They include professors who have taught at Columbia, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California-Berkeley. One was the former chief economist of the World Bank, another co-founded the social entrepreneurship center at Middlebury College, and a third chairs the economics department at the University of Vermont.

The group submitted an amicus brief, a legal document that provides additional information to help courts make decisions. They argued the one-time fee on fossil fuel companies demanded by the law wouldn’t impact states or consumers. 

That’s because those “fixed costs” are based on past pollution, the economists argued. The potential fee doesn’t impact the costs of future production, or how the companies choose to shift those current or future costs onto customers, they said.

Such a law is different from one that concerns future emissions, like a carbon tax applied to oil companies for every barrel of oil produced, or a liability case that asks an oil company to stop activities that contribute to climate change, the economists wrote. In their arguments against the superfund law, plaintiffs alleged economic harm to the tune of “hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars,” but the economists say this is “implausible.” 

“Based on recent performance, such payments are unlikely to threaten these companies, given that the one-time payments may represent only a fraction of a liable company’s profits for a single year,” the brief states. 

While the state and federal backlash against the law came just months after President Donald Trump took office, the timeline for demanding payment from fossil fuel companies is still years away. The state treasurer’s office isn’t required to submit a cost report until January 2027. Rules for determining costs will be filed in January 2028, and the state plans to issue final cost recovery demands to oil giants by July 1, 2028. 

The Department of Justice argued in its suit that Vermont is attempting to “usurp the power of the federal government by regulating the national and global emissions of greenhouse gases.” 

That lawsuit comes as the federal government simultaneously tries to rid itself of such regulations by rolling back emissions standards and attempting to overturn the “endangerment finding” that determined in 2009 that greenhouse gases threatened public health. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: State and nonprofits ask federal courts to dismiss lawsuits against Climate Superfund Act.

The federal government killed a program that was designed to reduce the cost of electricity for low-income Vermonters by installing millions of dollars worth of solar energy across the state. 

The state is set to lose $62.5 million in grant funding, according to a letter received by the state on Thursday evening from the Environmental Protection Agency. 

That grant was part of a $7 billion national initiative called Solar for All, introduced by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The program intended to pass on solar benefits to more than 900,000 households in low-income and disadvantaged communities across the country. Approximately 60 grant recipients, including 49 states and six Native American tribes, are affected. 

“The Department of Public Service, with the full support of Gov. Scott’s team, is working with our affected colleagues nationally, as well as the Vermont Attorney General’s Office, to pursue every opportunity including litigation to restore funding to this critical program,” Kerrick Johnson, commissioner of Vermont’s Public Service Department that received the grant, wrote in an email. “That work has just begun and so much more to come.” 

On X, formerly known as Twitter, Sanders wrote on August 6 that the program “significantly reduces electric bills for nearly a million working class Americans, creates many thousands of jobs and cuts carbon emissions. That’s why the Trump administration wants to illegally cut it. We won’t let them.” 

The state has spent roughly $150,000 on staffing, and they bill EPA on a reimbursement basis for expenses the month after they incur them, according to Melissa Bailey, director of the state energy office within the Vermont Department of Public Service. 

The state has a grant agreement with Vermont Housing Finance Agency to support planning and implementation of one piece of the state’s Solar for All program, and that agency is  incurring expenses that they would expect to be reimbursed, according to Bailey. More than a third of the $62.5 million grant was awarded in May to the agency, a quasi-public entity that acts like a bank for affordable housing. 

From there, the funds would have been awarded to new affordable housing projects like multi-family apartment buildings, largely benefiting renters, in early 2026.

The EPA said it plans to reimburse states for money they’ve spent implementing the program so far, according to the agency’s August 7 letter.

Partners on the project, however, may not be made whole by a refund from the feds. While the state may attempt to subsidize those costs, the partners have built an annual program and staffing budget based on doing Solar for All work, Johnson said in an email. Those losses also don’t include “the potential loss of reduced energy bills for Vermonters due to this EPA action,” Johnson wrote. 

The cancellation came on the heels of the July 4 passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill. The law repealed grants from a $27 billion Inflation Reduction Act program called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which aimed to lower carbon emissions. One of the three programs within that fund was Solar for All. 

In a video posted on Friday, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said his agency “no longer has the authority to administer the program or the appropriated funds to keep this boondoggle alive.” 

He called Solar for All a “grift” with 15% of programmatic costs going towards “middle men taking their own cut.”

But for states like Vermont, the purpose of the program was to help low-income energy users.

“Towns with the highest energy burden in Vermont have the least amount of installed solar,” Johnson told VTDigger in May. The primary objective of the program, Johnson said, was to deliver the grant’s benefits to disadvantaged Vermonters, regardless of where they live.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Trump cuts $62.5 million in promised federal funding to Vermont solar projects.

BURLINGTON — On Wednesday afternoon, a typically routine commission meeting of airport officials was swept up in the growing backlash over the second Trump administration’s ramped up push to deport undocumented immigrants. 

Dozens of Vermonters spilled out of the tiny Wright Room, a conference room on the second floor of the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport, and into the atrium to demand that Vermont’s largest airport take a stand against the transfer of people detained by ICE through its terminals.

The commission meeting was the culmination of months of conflict between Burlington-based activists who have tracked the movement of people detained by ICE through the airport and airport officials who continue to assert they have no communication with or control over the federal agency. 

“I’ve had no communication with ICE, ever, on these situations,” Nic Longo, aviation director at the airport, said after the meeting. “The last communication I had with ICE was a few months ago that said, ‘If you don’t move your cars I’m going to be towing them.’” 

But activists, who have been tracking the movement of ICE agents and people detained by the agency through the airport since May, have argued that the transfer of detainees amounts to illegal human trafficking because of their perceived lack of access to legal representation and communication with their family members. 

In early July, activists attended an airport commission meeting and presented data they’d collected, which showed more than 450 people detained by ICE had been moved through the airport since January. Then, on July 16, activists claimed their protest of moving three women detained by ICE through the airport in the early morning hours led to those women being removed by ICE from the airport. On July 25 and Aug. 1, activists recorded and shared with VTDigger two instances of ICE agents moving people detained by ICE through nonpublic side doors of the airport and into what appeared to be TSA security checkpoints. 

“Trump and ICE have trafficked over 450 people through BTV airport since January, terrorizing our neighbors and sending them to concentration camps in Arizona, Louisiana, and Texas,” a flyer for the monthly meeting created by an activist read. The flyer went on to say that the airport was “complicit” in this relocation by “granting special access to masked agents and hiding them from accountability while pretending to be ignorant.”

Almost 40 Vermonters rotated in and out of the room that held only 18 chairs for the public to speak during the public forum portion of the monthly meeting. Their comments, both in person and online, lasted almost three hours. Even more people milled about on the second floor, listening to testimony from speakers through a megaphone connected to a Zoom recording. 

Airport commissioners listened quietly and often nodded along. Longo said there were more people than they typically see at the monthly meetings, and they changed the meeting room, with a maximum capacity of 30 people, to accommodate a rotating cast of speakers.

Many speakers shared stories of their affection for the small airport, and their disappointment that airport staff weren’t taking a public stand. Others shared stories of working with immigrants and refugees who were detained, including farm workers who have spent decades in Vermont’s dairy industry. 

Along with activists who had been monitoring the airport, teachers, veterans, former lobbyists and retired lawyers showed up to demand action. One Vermont woman cried while making a public comment over Zoom, sharing the experience of growing up in fear that her father would be deported before he received his U.S. citizenship. Some people called for a boycott of the airport, and others asked for commissioners and the aviation director to resign. 

Jana Porter, a 75-year-old Vermonter who spoke in person, echoed many speakers when she called the commissioners complicit in the movement of ICE detainees. 

“It’s time for you to take a stand on this and say no,” Porter said. “ICE is not going to be sneaking human beings in the back door in the dark of the night.” 

The movement of ICE agents through non-public side doors, recorded by activists, was mentioned by several speakers as their impetus for attending the commissioners’ meeting. After the meeting, Longo said using a side door, either by a member of the public or airport staff, was not allowed unless there was coordination with a law enforcement agency. When asked why ICE agents were using non-public side doors, Longo said he had no idea. 

“As far as I’m aware, we have not given out a badge to access any of our doors to ICE,” Longo said. “Their coordination would have had to have been through another federal agency.” 

The Department of Homeland Security, the umbrella agency over ICE and the Transportation Security Administration, does have such a badge that they could have shared with ICE agents, Longo said. He didn’t know where ICE agents went after entering the side door, he said. 

At the end of the meeting, Longo addressed the speakers and acknowledged their time spent sharing their perspectives and advising the commissioners. He said he and the mayor were working to address their concerns after meeting with activists over the last few weeks. 

“We have a lot of work to do, and we have a lot of limitations,” Longo said. 

Commissioner Chip Mason said it was frustrating to hear hours of emotional testimony and that it felt personal to be accused of being complicit with ICE’s activities. He asked Longo for a deliverable focused on the issue. Longo said he didn’t know if one existed, calling the situation “one of the most complex things I’ve worked on since I’ve been here.” 

“I don’t think public pressure is going to be abated until a work product comes forward,” Mason said. “I could quit, you could quit, but I don’t know if we as a commission have the authority to tell ICE they can’t move through our airport.” 

In July, airport officials told VTDigger they are obligated to work with federal law enforcement officials because the airport receives millions of dollars in federal grants. But a recent decision by a California judge prevents the federal government from withholding funds for impeding ICE’s actions, according to Longo. Vermont was part of the lawsuit that spurred that preliminary injunction.

But the airport’s relationship with ICE remains legally dicey. 

According to a memo the airport received in June after requesting legal advice from Kaplan Kirsch, a national law firm, the city’s obligations are “immensely complicated and changing in real time as litigation proceeds on various fronts challenging the administration’s changes to how local governments like the city are directed to interact with ICE.”

The memo emphasized that many of the conclusions in the report could change day to day as legal challenges unfold, but it stated that ICE had broad legal authority to enforce federal immigration law and operate through the public areas of the airport. City action to interfere with ICE actions or operations could lead to criminal penalties, according to the memo.

“The law might say that the airport must allow it,” David Miskell, a retired organic farmer, told commissioners during the public forum. “I believe our brave little state has done many U.S. firsts. We can stop ICE hate here in this Leahy airport.”

The city could, in fact, have some effect on ICE operations because it has the power to regulate the airport, according to the memo. The law firm suggested some rules and regulations that could affect ICE and its operations without targeting the agency, such as enforcing vehicular rules, limiting access to non-public areas like offices or portions of the airfield and limiting the servicing of chartered flights.

Longo said he has talked to colleagues at other airports across the country and they had a shared frustration over interactions with ICE, but that none felt they had direct control over the actions of federal law enforcement agencies. 

Helen Riehle, another commissioner at the meeting, requested more information on federal and state human trafficking laws, and how other similarly sized airports were handling their relationship with federal law enforcement agencies around the country. 

“Right now, airports are kind of alone on this subject,” Longo said. “It’s very, very challenging talking to other directors and colleagues because each airport is doing a different thing with a different solution.”

Longo noted that the airport had begun putting signage on the back of bathroom stalls in different languages to call out human trafficking. An activist called that hotline last Thursday after witnessing ICE agents move detainees through a non-public side door, but said the hotline redirected them to an ICE tipline, according to Leif Taranta, a fellow activist who heard the call. 

Commissioner Connor Daley asked if the situation with ICE could be a standing item on the airport commission’s agenda moving forward.

“I don’t think this is the end,” Riehle said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermonters demand action on ICE transfers at airport meeting.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have begun quietly moving detainees through a nonpublic side entrance at the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport, according to activists. The new tactic, activists say, bypasses public scrutiny and calls into question previous statements airport officials have made regarding their involvement in transfers.

Activists, who have been monitoring the airport for months and argue that ICE is carrying out illegal transfers of immigrant detainees, told VTDigger they observed ICE officials escorting a group of people through a side door early Thursday morning.  

A video taken by activists and shared with VTDigger shows a white 15-passenger van parked around 3:30 a.m. Thursday at a side entrance of the airport that appeared to lead to the security screening area. An unidentified man in a gray shirt at the back of the van is seen holding out both his hands and telling two activists, “Y’all need to stay right there.”

Unidentified people can also be seen walking through a heavy metal doorway. 

Julie Macuga, a Burlington resident and activist who has helped surveil the airport, and Leif Taranta, a second activist, attempted to get information from the people moving inside the airport before they disappeared into the building, along with the man in the gray shirt. 

The video then shows the activists walking inside the airport to find that a metal gate closed off the Transportation Security Administration security screening area.

The activists said ICE’s 3:30 a.m. arrival was earlier than usual and before TSA opened for the day. It’s the second time in less than a week they’ve witnessed ICE officials move detainees through a side entrance, according to videos and emails the activists shared with VTDigger. 

Airport security later told the activists that they were aware of the activity, and that the people they had seen go through the door included ICE agents, one video showed.

An additional video reviewed by VTDigger, taken on July 25, shows unidentified men in masks moving people from a white van parked behind a BTV airport truck through a different side door and directly into the airport’s TSA security checkpoint line.

In response to criticism about the large number of detainees passing through the Burlington airport, airport officials have suggested in previous meetings and interviews that they don’t know when ICE transfers happen and that they have little interaction with the agency.

“We don’t get advised. We don’t get any communication,” said Nic Longo, the airport’s director of aviation, at a recent airport commission meeting. 

In an email response to VTDigger’s questions, David Carman, deputy director of aviation at the airport, said the use of the side door does not represent a change in airport policies. 

“Airport staff do not get involved with assisting with ICE/DHS detainee movements, nor does the airport have any communication with ICE on when or how the movements are taking place,” Carman said in the email. 

For years, federal law enforcement agencies “have had access to the secure areas of the airport for the purpose of law enforcement and supporting other federal law enforcement agencies,” he said. 

“Any actions pertaining to ICE detainee movements and how they bring detainees to the post-TSA checkpoint public spaces of the airport (where passengers board aircraft) are federal law enforcement and DHS decisions, and completely outside the purview of the airport,” he added. 

But activists say the apparent use of a nonpublic side door represents a change in the way ICE agents are using the airport. 

When pressed by activists at a recent airport commission meeting, Longo said airport staff have pushed back against ICE when agents parked in areas where parking wasn’t allowed — nearly towing the vehicles in some cases. At the time, Longo said the airport’s goal was to treat the agents like other law enforcement officials or members of the public. 

Almost two weeks later, Longo said it’s extremely rare for airport staff to interact with ICE, but because the airport receives federal grant funding through the Federal Aviation Administration, it was obligated to cooperate with the federal government.

Longo told VTDigger that airport officials allow ICE to transport detainees through the airport because it’s a public use facility, and he can’t pick or choose federal agencies or members of the public who can use the facility. 

“Our obligation is to cooperate and not impede U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” Longo told VTDigger on July 15. 

When asked about federal agents using the side door at the Burlington airport, James Covington, a spokesperson for ICE’s Boston field office, told VTDigger that “ICE Boston does not wish to comment on security protocols.”

‘They’re in the custody of government agents’

One of the videos taken Thursday shows advocates going to the closed airport police office, which the Burlington Police Department operates, according to Carman. They called the airport police number and told the responder they had witnessed people being in through a side door. 

“I’m aware of what you’re referring to and those people have been identified as ICE agents,” the police officer responded. 

Taranta asked if police had reviewed legal documents. 

“I know that as police you’re allowed to ask them for documentation that the transport itself is legal,” Taranta said.

“Yeah I have no reason to ask them for that,” the officer said.

“So the fact that there have been past illegal transfers doesn’t make you as an airport security make you think you should ask that this one is legal?” Taranta asked. 

“Nope, I’m not doing that,” the officer said. “I’m aware of what’s going on here. I’m confident that they are who they say they are.” 

“Are you sure the detainees are legally being taken from this country?” Macuga asked. 

“They’re in the custody of government agents,” the officer said. 

Macuga told him that wasn’t an answer. 

“Well it is,” the officer said. “I’m not going to debate this any further with you. I’ve got other stuff going on.”

The Burlington Police Department did not respond to a request for comment. 

‘I have to do my job right now’

ICE detentions and deportations have skyrocketed under the second Trump administration, with more than 36,700 people booked into ICE detention in June, and more than 56,800 held in ICE custody as of July 13, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research organization housed at New York’s Syracuse University. 

A study by the loose group of activists, which includes Macuga and Taranta, showed roughly 450 people detained by federal law enforcement in immigration cases have been transferred through Vermont’s largest airport since January.

The videos shared with VTDigger show the potential escalation by ICE officials in moving detainees beyond traditional public access routes into the airport to avoid detection as activists continue airport surveillance, according to Macuga.

The group of activists sent an email to the mayor’s office and Longo, Burlington airport aviation director, following the event. 

In the email, the group told officials that activists were in the public portion of the airport over the past week “as a stop gap measure while the airport and city improve their policies.” 

The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

“We thought it was heading in a good direction,” Macuga said of prior conversations with city officials. “But then things really started to escalate in the past week to a point we haven’t seen the whole time we’ve been doing this work.”

Macuga said the activists’ work has led people across New England to reach out to them and that a network is forming of people who want to take on similar work at their own airports. 

They’ve also been training people to be bystander activists, including learning basic Spanish phrases. Over the last two weeks, someone in their advocacy network has stayed at the airport multiple days a week, Taranta said. 

“We want people to be safe, and to be told by TSA agents that investigating human trafficking in an airport is not their job is very chilling,” Taranta said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Video: Activists sound alarm over immigrant detainee transfers through nonpublic side door of Burlington airport  .

The state has likely failed to reduce pollution from fossil fuels enough to meet its legally-binding emissions reduction goals over the next decade, according to a new report released by the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources on Friday. The same day, a state court judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by a conservation group meant to hold the agency accountable. 

The 2020 Global Warming Solutions Act requires Vermont to reduce its carbon emissions to help lessen the dangers of a warming planet. The state has legally-binding goals to lower greenhouse gases by 26% below 2005 levels by Jan. 1, 2025, 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

The new agency report is both an estimate of how much carbon, methane, and other greenhouse gases Vermont emits every year since 1990 compared to historic baseline levels in 1990 and 2005, as well as an updated forecast of the state’s progress towards hitting those targets. 

In 2022, the inventory measured 8.25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emissions, or almost one million metric tons above the 2025 goal, and falling only slightly from 2021 levels. The most common sources of emissions are transportation and heating. Both sectors are still largely dependent on fossil fuels like gas and oil, the burning of which are the largest drivers of human-caused climate change.

The forecast suggests that by 2026, greenhouse gas emissions will be roughly half a million metric tons, or around 6%, above the level the state was expected to meet the previous year, on January 1, 2025. By 2030, the state would be more than 1.5 million metric tons above the state’s legally binding goal of 5.24 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, overshooting by roughly 29%. Those projections are far from state goals set half a decade ago.

“It’s surprising the state has not done more given where we need to go,” said Elena Mihaly, vice president for Vermont’s chapter of the Conservation Law Foundation, an advocacy group based in New England that brought the lawsuit against the agency. “We haven’t seen any big policies adopted to reduce our emissions.”

The most recent Climate Action Plan, also required by the Global Warming Solutions Act and adopted by the state on July 1, outlines ways the state can tackle climate change. But historically, big-swing programs like a regional cap-and-invest model for transportation emissions and a wonky reworking of the heating fuels market known as the clean heat standard, have failed to materialize.

While there’s a downward trend in emissions, “it’s not as rapid as we’d like or hope we would’ve seen given the substantial investments over the last several years of state and federal funds in climate action,” said Julie Moore, secretary for the Agency of Natural Resources.

The inventories are generally three years behind, so the data for the January 1, 2025 emissions target — which looks at 2024 emissions — won’t be released until 2027, according to Moore. But the agency agreed that it likely hadn’t reached the 2025 goal after analyzing a report published by the Energy Action Network, a Vermont-based energy research organization, which found that the state had fallen up to 39% short of emissions reductions required by law. 

The Conservation Law Foundation sued the state last year for failing to adequately prepare to meet the 2025 target, but a judge dismissed the suit last week. 

Moore said the judge shared her agency’s perspective that it was too early to bring forward a private lawsuit under the Global Warming Solutions Act. 

“It’s unfortunate that it required a significant amount of staff time on our end to have our position affirmed,” Moore said, adding that groups like Conservation Law Foundation would be able to sue the state when the 2024 emissions inventory is published two years from now, representing the emissions up until Jan. 1, 2025. 

But Mihaly, the foundation’s vice president for Vermont, said on Monday that whether the state could be sued before 2024 emissions were released in 2027 was still unsettled. She noted that the judge didn’t make any comment on whether the modeling the agency used was correct or flawed. 

“Although the state made some corrections to its climate model as a result of the concerns CLF raised in this lawsuit, this decision means the public can’t legally challenge the Agency’s review,” Mihaly said in a press release. “This lack of accountability is troubling.” 

The foundation had not yet decided whether to appeal, according to Mihaly. 

Vermont’s emissions are the lowest in the nation, far below neighboring, more populous states like New York, which emitted 371.08 million metric tons of carbon in 2022, or New Hampshire, which emitted 15.21 million metric tons of carbon in 2021. But Vermont remains the highest emitting state per capita in New England, according to a 2025 study by the Energy Action Network.

While not all extreme weather events have been attributed by scientists to climate change, the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events, like short bursts heavy precipitation that contributed to the floods hitting Vermont three years in a row on July 10 have been predicted as the planet warms.

Clarification: A previous version of this story imprecisely described Vermont’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions.

Read the story on VTDigger here: State concludes Vermont is failing to meet its carbon reduction targets.

In what could be the first case in which activists have successfully intervened to stop immigrants in the custody of ICE from being flown out of Vermont, three women escorted by agency officials early Wednesday morning turned around, left the airport and were returned to the jail where they had been held for several days.

This surprising turn of events comes after activists have spent months tracking the transportation of immigrants by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement through Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport and asked local officials to intervene and discontinue cooperation with deportations that have skyrocketed under the second Trump administration. More than 57,800 people were held in ICE custody as of June 29, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research organization housed at New York’s Syracuse University.

A study the loose group of activists presented to the airport commission in early July showed at least 450 people detained by federal law enforcement in immigration cases have been transferred through Vermont’s largest airport since the start of January.

Lexington Kennedy, a 21-year-old Burlington resident, said they arrived at the airport together with another Burlington activist around 3:50 a.m. to observe the movement of ICE detainees through the airport.

Around 4:15 a.m., the two said they observed a white Sprinter van pull up to the airport with Department of Homeland Security license plates. Around 4:30 a.m. the van doors opened and three plain clothes officials emerged and took three women from the van into the airport. They were joined inside by a fourth plain clothes official, the two activists said.

While the activists said the officials had no identifiers beyond the van that could identify them as ICE agents, VTDigger confirmed that at least two of the three women seen at the airport were in ICE custody and were returned back to Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility. VTDigger was able to confirm these details through information the activists provided, including A numbers — the nine-digit number ICE uses to track detainees — from papers the detainees’ carried. The activists said they obtained the information directly from the detainees in the airport.

People VTDigger interviewed differed in their description as to why the women in ICE custody ended up not boarding the flight. The activists said airline officials turned away the people in ICE custody after being informed their policies allowed them to refuse to board someone on a flight who did not want to go. The activists said they made the case to the airline officials, and the three detainees were visibly crying as they stood at the airline check-in counter.

A spokesperson at American Airlines denied it was the company’s decision to keep the ICE officials from boarding a flight with the three women in their custody. Instead, the airline spokesperson said the ICE officials and the three detainees chose not to travel Wednesday morning and that it was not an airline decision. The airline said it could not confirm flight details of the ticketed passengers.

ICE did not return a request for comment. 

While Julie Macuga, a Burlington resident, was not present Wednesday morning, she said she witnessed an earlier transport of seven female ICE detainees through the airport around 4 a.m. on May 30. Macuga also attended the July 3 airport commission meeting where activists encouraged airport staff to make a statement about ICE transportations through the hub. She said the interaction between ICE and activists on Wednesday morning was part of their ongoing work to monitor the transport of people in the custody of ICE at the airport.

“I’m hoping this sets a precedent for airlines at the airport that there is something they can do that’s already in their policies,” Macuga said. 

Macuga said she and other advocates are continuing conversations with local officials like the airport commission to secure a statement describing, or even condemning, the use of the Burlington airport by federal immigration officials.

A video of the incident shared with VTDigger by the activists shows a pair of community members approaching the three women in ICE custody outside the airport and asking in Spanish if they had phone numbers that could be used to contact anyone.

“Nope,” an agent replied, and asked the two activists to back up.

The activists said they had asked the women for their names and emergency contacts before ICE officers stepped in front of them and formed a wall with their arms and bodies. They said the officers told the three detainees not to speak to the advocates.

The activists said two of the detainees provided their A numbers and gave directions on how to reach out to emergency contacts or family members, underscoring a desire by the women to fight back against ICE detention if given a chance, they said.

ICE officials brought the detainees to the American Airlines desk, according to a photograph provided by the activists, who said they witnessed the interaction as they stood to the side. They said airline officials told the group that if the three women were expressing an unwillingness to travel, the airline could not let them on the plane because the airline could be liable. The activists told VTDigger that the ICE agents argued with airline staff before departing the airport with the three women.

The activists declined to name the airline fearing its employees could face retaliation, but flight logs show the flight ICE officials intended to board with the detainees was likely American Airlines 1015 to Washington National airport scheduled to depart at 6:10 am. The activists said ICE agents told them the planned final destination for the three women was Phoenix, Arizona. 

Airport officials said they could not confirm flight details. 

Vermont’s Department of Corrections jail tracking system shows two of the detainees were re-booked at Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility later Wednesday morning, about an hour and a half after they left the detention center.

The two detainees, a 21-year-old and a 28-year-old, were initially booked on July 11. They were released just after 4 a.m. Wednesday and re-booked the same day at around 5:30 a.m. They were released again just after 12:15 p.m., but their current location could not be confirmed. 

Kennedy said they and the other activists who converged at the airport Wednesday are not affiliated with any particular group and were merely  civilians concerned about human trafficking. 

“Our primary objective is to make sure anti-trafficking laws and policies that already exist are being enforced,” Kennedy said. “Ideally that would be the job of somebody at the airport, and until that happens, civilians can and will show up and do that ourselves.”

Nic Longo, aviation director at the Burlington airport, said in an interview Wednesday afternoon that he had heard about the interaction between members of the public and ICE agents, but neither he nor any airport staff were involved. Longo said he was not at the airport at the time. He said it was the first time he has heard of such a situation unfolding at the airport. 

“Interrupting or disturbing our activities is a really, really tough scenario here at the airport,” Longo said.

Asked why airport officials allowed ICE to transport detainees through the airport, Longo said that, “I can’t pick and choose any federal agency that can and cannot access this public use facility,” he said. “It’s no different that I can’t pick and choose which members of the public can use this facility.”

Longo said it is extremely rare for airport staff to interact with any outside agency, including ICE. The airport, which accepts federal grant funding through the Federal Aviation Administration, is obligated to cooperate with the federal government, he said. The funding includes about $30 million in grants the airport will use in fiscal year 2025 and about $180 million the airport will request over the next couple years, Longo said. 

“Our obligation is to cooperate and not impede U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement action,” Longo said.

The activists argued that the fact that ICE is a federal law enforcement agency doesn’t make its actions legal. 

They noted the case of Kseniia Petrova, a genetics researcher at Harvard Medical School, who was detained at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility and flown through the Burlington airport this spring before a Vermont judge declared her detention unlawful in May. 

Kennedy said they believe it is the first time the transport of ICE detainees through an airport has been stopped. 

Law enforcement officers, including immigration officials, are supposed to provide detainees with meaningful translation services, notice of their rights and an opportunity to communicate with counsel, said Jill Diaz, executive director of the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project. 

“But what we see in practice is that ICE is moving so quickly and carelessly that we’re seeing people who are getting detained without being charged with an immigration violation,” Diaz said. 

It is not clear how or why the three women were in ICE custody.

Ethan Weinstein and Henry Fernandez contributed reporting.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Advocates say they helped prevent 3 ICE detainees from being flown out of Vermont.

Jose Ignacio “Nacho” De La Cruz and his stepdaughter, Heidi Perez, were granted bond during hearings in a Massachusetts immigration court on Thursday. 

Chelmsford Immigration Court judge Natalie Smith granted De La Cruz bond for $10,000 and Perez for $4,000. Both are set to be paid through the Vermont Freedom Fund, an independent nonprofit set up during the first Trump administration by Migrant Justice, an advocacy organization for immigrant rights, according to the group’s spokesperson, Will Lambek.

“Bond is being posted now in both cases,” Lambek said Thursday. “We don’t know exactly when they’ll be released. Probably not today, but shortly.” 

The amount of bond is discretionary, according to Brett Stokes, an attorney at the Center for Justice Reform at Vermont Law and Graduate School who represents De La Cruz and Perez.

“It’s undeniable that Heidi’s case is sympathetic,” Stokes said in a text message Thursday. “The fact that she is 18, just graduated high school, really played with the judge.” 

To receive bond during an immigration court hearing, the attorney for a detained immigrant must convince the judge that the person is neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community. The federal government, on the other hand, seeks to prove that one or both of those risks warrants keeping them behind bars. 

The Department of Homeland Security, the federal agency that oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which held De La Cruz and Perez in detainment since their apprehension almost a month ago, didn’t convince the judge that Perez should be kept in custody, according to Stokes.

“Nacho’s was higher because [the] judge indicated that she believed that Nacho posed a greater flight risk,” Stokes said. 

When considering De La Cruz’s flight risk, the judge weighed the amount of time De La Cruz spent in the U.S. without taking substantial steps toward applying for relief for his potential removal from the country, Stokes said. 

Neither the judge nor the Department of Homeland Security argued that De La Cruz or Perez posed a danger to their community. Stokes called the granting of bonds the right outcome. 

“My heart breaks thinking of the toll that getting to this point took on both of them,” Stokes said. 

Both De La Cruz, 29, and Perez had cases pending in both federal court and immigration court.

In federal court, both filed habeas corpus petitions alleging their initial apprehension on June 14 by U.S. Customs and Border Protection was unlawful and the result of racial profiling. 

The pair were pulled over in De La Cruz’s Ford Transit van on a Saturday around noon after delivering food to local farmworkers who have been apprehensive about leaving their farm in the midst of an ongoing immigration crackdown under the Trump administration, according to court records. Both allege in filings in that case that Border Patrol agents did not give them a valid reason for the stop.

In a declaration filed in support of his habeas corpus petition, De La Cruz stated that Border Patrol Agent Arnold Parent, who initially pulled them over, told him in broken Spanish “that the fact that I spoke Spanish and did not understand English was enough for the stop.” 

In a separate affidavit filed by Parent’s colleague, Parent said he had reasonable suspicion for the stop: He noticed through the van’s windows that both De La Cruz and Perez appeared evasive to law enforcement, with darting eyes, hands clenched on the steering wheel, and the fact that they did not smile or wave when driving past the agent. Parent said he had not seen either on the rural road previously and they were not wearing the typical clothes of farmworkers.

De La Cruz and Perez allege that they were physically harmed by the interaction. De La Cruz’s face was injured when a Border Patrol agent bashed in the driver’s side window, shattering glass, De La Cruz said in his declaration. Agents also twisted Perez’s arm behind her back and injured her nail, she and De La Cruz attested. 

Border Patrol agents threatened further harm to Perez, De La Cruz alleged in his declaration, if he did not cooperate with providing information, such as his fingerprints and DNA. He said an interpreter told him “that they did not want to hurt her again but would do so if it became necessary. He also said that they had children and would not want anyone to harm their own children.” 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Michael Niezgoda told VTDigger on Tuesday that matters around De La Cruz’s and Perez’s cases “all relate to an ongoing criminal prosecution, court proceeding, or immigration hearing currently being litigated in the District of Vermont District Court or Immigration Court,” and therefore would not comment.

Their cases were heard in Massachusetts because Vermont does not have an immigration court that hears ICE cases.

Both De La Cruz and Perez had bail hearings scheduled this week for their federal petition in Vermont Federal District Court in Burlington. Perez’s hearing was delayed after the judge asked for more information from both sides, and De La Cruz’s was postponed. They had a temporary restraining order, which prevented their removal from Vermont by the federal government, until July 31.

Those bail hearings and that restraining order will be nullified. But while De La Cruz and Perez return home from ICE detention, their cases aren’t over. Both their habeas petition and their deportation proceedings will move forward.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Two immigrant leaders, detained at traffic stop in June, granted bond.

Eyes widening and darting. A stiffened body. Hands clenched on the steering wheel. No smile or wave. Plain clothing. 

These are the observations Border Patrol Agent Brandon Parent made to justify pulling over a gray Ford Transit van on Route 105 in Richford on June 14. In an affidavit written by Parent’s colleague, Parent would later state that behind the driver and passenger, he believed he saw more people in the back seats through the van’s tinted windows. Those people would turn out not to exist.

The driver of the van, 29-year-old Jose Ignacio “Nacho” De La Cruz, was returning from delivering groceries at a farm near the border with Canada that Saturday morning, according to a declaration De La Cruz filed on July 6 in support of his bail proceedings. His stepdaughter, 18-year-old Heidi Perez, was in the passenger seat. 

Both are from Mexico, but De La Cruz moved to Vermont in 2016 to establish his life as a dairy worker. Perez followed in 2023 and became a student at Milton High School, where she graduated a week earlier, according to court documents.

For more than three weeks since the traffic stop, both have been detained in Vermont jails by Immigration and Customs Enforcement awaiting deportation proceedings. In declarations filed this week, De La Cruz and Perez allege they were physically injured by Border Patrol agents, and that the agents threatened further harm if they did not cooperate. 

Both are arguing to be released on bail, but their proceedings have been delayed.

As De La Cruz’s and Perez’s cases continue to unfold, their experience, illustrated largely through court documents, shows some of the tactics U.S. Customs and Border Protection uses on non-citizens amid ballooning deportation quotas mandated for the Department of Homeland Security by the Trump administration.

De La Cruz and Perez are part of a record of ICE detentions that reached more than 56,000 in mid-June, according to data collected by TRAC Reports, a nonpartisan group that gathers and analyzes immigration data. More than half of those people were booked into ICE detention centers in May, according to the data clearinghouse. Less than 30% have a criminal record, and those that do often have minor offenses like traffic violations, according to TRAC. 

On Monday, during Perez’s bail hearing, Vermont District Court Judge Christina Reiss delayed Perez’s potential release, requesting more information from her attorneys and the federal government, who argued her bail should be denied. 

On Tuesday, De La Cruz’s bail hearing was postponed in response to a request by Brett Stokes, an attorney at the Center for Justice Reform at Vermont Law and Graduate School who represents De La Cruz and Perez.

Criminal accusations sometimes surface after apprehensions, like in the high-profile case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to El Salvador after a routine traffic stop and now faces charges of human smuggling connected to a 2022 traffic stop. 

De La Cruz faces a similar accusation. After his apprehension, Border Patrol agents began a criminal investigation into his possible connection to an individual who illegally crossed the U.S.-Canada border into Vermont in April. He has not been charged.

“There’s somewhat of a trend nationally that in these high-profile cases, the charges and allegations come after the fact,” Stokes said. “It’s not uncommon to see subsequent charges like this.”

While most immigrants in ICE detainment are transferred to bigger facilities outside Vermont in states like Louisiana and Texas, which together hold more than a third of ICE detainees, De La Cruz and Perez remain in the state’s detention system largely because their own immigration advocacy work meant they knew their legal rights and an attorney was quickly contacted on their behalf. Their attorney helped them file petitions alleging their arrest was unlawful and each received a temporary restraining order to remain in Vermont instead of being transferred out of state. 

Those transfers, common during the second Trump administration, can limit an immigrant’s access to both legal representation and the moral support of their communities, and can serve as a quicker route to deportation, according to advocates and legal experts.

Though De La Cruz’s encounter with Border Patrol agents appeared to be by chance, the situation soon escalated. After De La Cruz was taken to the Richford Border Patrol Station, a Border Patrol investigator noted similarities between De La Cruz’s name, location, and phone number with an individual who allegedly helped a Mexican citizen enter Vermont from Canada in April. 

The government filed a search warrant for his cellphone, and his black Samsung has been in federal possession since, but no criminal charges have been filed.

“Border Patrol’s recent allegations do not change the essential fact that Nacho and Heidi were detained without cause while delivering food to farmworkers,” Will Lambek, a spokesperson for Migrant Justice, a Vermont-based advocacy organization for immigrant workers, said in a statement on the search warrant.

“Border Patrol claims that Nacho had previously made a plan to give a ride to a woman who was planning on immigrating to the United States without authorization. If true, this incident is wholly unrelated to the actual circumstances of their violent detainment,” Lambek said.

The legal obligation of U.S. Customs and Border Protection to protect a porous border with Canada overlaps with the escalating demands on ICE. While both agencies are under the Department of Homeland Security, ICE recently became the country’s largest federally-funded law enforcement  program after the passage of President Donald Trump’s omnibus budget bill last week.

While ICE operations have expanded under the Trump administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the operations of Border Patrol have remained the same. In both De La Cruz’s search warrant and Garcia’s case, ICE is not a party in the investigation or legal case, though the agency holds the detainees while their deportation proceedings play out.

In response to a detailed list of questions from VTDigger, U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Michael Niezgoda wrote in an emailed statement that because the matters “all relate to an ongoing criminal prosecution, court proceeding, or immigration hearing currently being litigated in the District of Vermont District Court or Immigration Court,” it is his agency’s policy not to comment. 

Stokes said neither De La Cruz nor Perez are being criminally prosecuted.

The traffic stop

Border Agent Brandon Parent was parked on Drew Road, a rural lane in Franklin County that dead ends at a dairy farm split in half by the international border with Canada. 

Agents like Parent monitor the border with Canada in uniform from marked vehicles under the mission of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an agency in the Department of Homeland Security established after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The main mission of the agency is to stop terrorists from entering the country, according to Ryan Brissette, a public affairs specialist for the New England region of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which includes Vermont.

Legally, individuals can only enter the U.S. through a port of entry. If they enter by another means, they must report directly to Border Patrol and could be subject to arrest until they do so. Those individuals can then be transferred to ICE jurisdiction if the U.S. government determines they need to go through deportation proceedings. 

“The only time we really engage with ICE is when we have someone being removed,” Brissette said in a phone call unrelated to this case. Enforcement and Removal Operations, an agency under ICE, can apprehend the individual if they do not have legal status in the U.S. 

But in order to pull over a vehicle in Vermont with Vermont plates, like the one De La Cruz was driving on June 14, an agent must have reasonable suspicion that the driver or passengers in the vehicle have committed an immigration violation or federal crime. If they don’t have probable cause, both the driver and passenger have the right to remain silent and not answer questions about their immigration status, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, a nonprofit civil rights organization with a chapter in Vermont.

In an affidavit filed by Border Patrol after the encounter, Parent said he observed that De La Cruz’s “arms and hands appeared clenched and rigid on the steering wheel.” He declared he hadn’t previously seen the car on Drew Road, where residents were “generally friendly and supportive” of agents like himself, and he was typically acknowledged “with a smile, head nod, or a wave.” De La Cruz and Perez were wearing plain clothing and didn’t appear to be local farm workers, Parent noted. They didn’t make a full stop when exiting Drew Road.

Parent observed that these behaviors were “often seen in subjects engaged in suspicious behavior upon noticing law enforcement.” When he began tailing the vehicle, he said he thought he saw people in the back through the van’s tinted windows.

Stokes determined these observations could amount to racial profiling. He laid out this argument in a writ of habeas corpus, a petition asking the court to review their unlawful detention, filed two days after their apprehension.

Parent contacted Swanton Sector Dispatch and matched the license plate to Jose Ignacio De La Cruz, a 29-year-old who lived in Milton. Parent stated in the affidavit filed by his colleague, David T. Palczewski, that he believed “alien smugglers were possibly using vehicles with Vermont license plates to blend in with the local population.”

He pulled the van over at 12:07 p.m. He quickly saw that there were no additional people in the back, as he had previously believed.

De La Cruz asked why he was stopped, but Parent did not give a reason and requested his driver’s license, according to the Border Patrol affidavit and declarations filed this week by De La Cruz and Perez.

“The officer then said, in broken Spanish, that the fact that I spoke Spanish and did not understand English was enough for the stop,” De La Cruz wrote in his declaration. He said Parent tried to open the driver’s door but it was locked.

Two additional supervisory Border Patrol agents appeared on scene — Thomas Blaser and William Haffley — who ordered De La Cruz to step out of the car. 

De La Cruz then called the Migrant Justice emergency hotline, and handed the phone to Perez, according to his declaration. In the Border Patrol affidavit, Parent reported that the two refused to effectively communicate and called others on their cellphones.

Marita Canedo, a Migrant Justice spokesperson, was on the line with Perez. During a rally protesting the detainment of De La Cruz and Perez in June, she said, “Nacho did everything that he knew to defend his rights.”

The American Civil Liberties Union recommends that if police, ICE, or Border Patrol pull over an individual while in transit that they stay calm, open the window part way, and if they don’t have immigration papers, tell the official they want to remain silent. 

De La Cruz stated in his declaration that he rolled his window down just enough to hear the officer, and then asked why they were detained and if they were free to go four separate times. After the fourth time, Border Patrol agent Blaser used a duty-issued baton to break the driver side window and remove him. De La Cruz stated that “glass shattered and hit the left side of my face, causing an injury to my head and left ear.”

After agents pulled De La Cruz from the car, Perez left voluntarily from the passenger seat, Perez wrote in her declaration. De La Cruz shook his head at Perez, warning her not to speak, according to the Border Patrol affidavit. 

They took the pair to the Richford Border Patrol Station, according to the Border Patrol affidavit. There, De La Cruz and Perez note in their declarations that they asked to make phone calls and were denied. De La Cruz was told to sign documents, according to his declaration, and when he refused, he said one of the officers said in Spanish, “You are going back to fucking Mexico, you don’t have any documents, you don’t have the right to make a phone call.”

When Perez refused to give personal information, an officer “grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back, causing her visible pain and injuring her nails,” De La Cruz wrote. “He only stopped when another officer told him to.” He was told through an interpreter that he needed to convince his stepdaughter to cooperate and “that if she continued to refuse, they would hurt her until she complied,” De La Cruz declared in court records.

“The interpreter added that they did not want to hurt her again but would do so if it became necessary. He also said that they had children and would not want anyone to harm their own children,” De La Cruz wrote.

The two were separated and placed in different cells. De La Cruz agreed to give fingerprints and DNA when he was told that, if he cooperated, he could be reunited with Perez, he noted in his declaration.

While they were apprehended, David T. Palczewski, the prosecution agent for Richford, received an email noting the apprehension of two subjects during a traffic stop with a vehicle registered to De La Cruz out of Milton. 

He thought he recognized the name. In the affidavit he filed a week later, Palczewski wrote that he advised agents that De La Cruz was a possible match to a phone number noted in a deportation case where a woman communicated with someone named “Nacho” for assistance in crossing the U.S.-Canada border. Agents seized De La Cruz’s cellphone and kept it at the Richford station after he was transferred to Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans.

Two days later, Palczewski said he used his government-issued cellphone to call the number associated with that case and De La Cruz’s cellphone rang. A day later, Palczewski wrote that through “open-source reporting” he learned De La Cruz goes by “Nacho.”

“By the agent’s own admission, Border Patrol did not connect the alleged incident to Nacho until after he was stopped and detained without cause,” Lambek said. Lambek noted that the stated reasons for the traffic stop “only strengthen our belief that this was an act of racial profiling, pure and simple, in violation of Heidi and Nacho’s constitutional rights.”

Neither De La Cruz nor Perez have a criminal history, but a criminal investigation into De La Cruz began. 

The phone number

A week after the traffic stop, Palczewski filed a search warrant for De La Cruz’s cellphone. 

The warrant and attached affidavit alleged that De La Cruz was the same person as an individual called “Nacho” who tried helping Yoselin Gonzalez-Flores, a Mexican citizen, cross the border from Canada into northern Vermont between April 9 and 11. Nacho intended to pick up Gonzalez around midnight on April 11 at a Mobil Gas Station in Saratoga Springs, New York, and bring her to a house in Burlington, according to the affidavit. 

But by 3:44 a.m. on April 11, according to the affidavit, Gonzalez texted the number associated with a person named Nacho and said she would not be crossing near Saratoga Springs. Instead, she would travel to Montreal and cross through the woods.

Gonzalez crossed the border on the night of April 18, according to the affidavit. Around 10 p.m., the crossing activated cameras near Berry Road in Franklin County. A few hours later, on April 19, she was apprehended with three others, along with two people in a minivan who intended to pick up the individuals after crossing, according to a criminal complaint that details Gonzalez’s apprehension. None of those people were De La Cruz.

Gonzalez waived her Miranda rights and turned over her cellphone to Border Patrol agents, according to the criminal complaint. Her phone showed WhatsApp messages in Spanish between herself and the person called Nacho, according to the affidavit.

Stokes called the warrant a “fishing expedition” in line with what’s happened in other cases of detainees being retaliated against by the Department of Homeland Security. 

“The fact remains that all this is is a warrant to search his phone for evidence of something that may or may not be there,” Stokes said of the search warrant. “I don’t know where the allegations and charges are coming from, but the fact remains that we stand with Nacho, and we believe Nacho.”

But three days later, Gonzalez was deported, along with another individual who crossed, according to the complaint. VTDigger contacted the lawyers associated with the Gonzalez case, but Gonzalez’s location was unknown at the time of publication. 

Agents may have focused on the area surrounding Berry Road, near where Gonzalez was apprehended on Richford Road, because, according to the criminal complaint, it has “recently experienced a significant uptick in illicit cross-border activity.” 

But northern border crossings overall have plummeted in 2025, according to data collected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In May, the agency encountered 5,063 people at the northern border, less than a third of the 18,663 people border officials encountered in May 2024. 

While crossings have dropped, border officials still detain people crossing illegally. U.S. Border Patrol’s Swanton Sector apprehended hundreds of people between Feb. 1 and May 31, 2025, according to a social media post made by Robert Garcia, the sector’s chief patrol agent.

“Despite the significant decrease in cross border apprehensions, Swanton Sector has apprehended over 300 individuals from 45 different countries,” Garcia wrote, noting the majority were from India, Mexico, and Ecuador.

Gonzalez was arrested near Pleasant Valley Farms, according to a map depicting the encounter in the criminal complaint.

Two days later, border agents entered that farm, the largest dairy in Vermont, and arrested eight immigrant farm workers who lived and worked on site after a report from concerned citizens of two individuals leaving the woods near the U.S.-Canada border, according to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection statement.

“We’re still catching a lot of questions about targeting migrant workers on dairy farmers,” Brissette said in a phone call unrelated to De La Cruz’s case. “If we come across someone who is here illegally they’ll get arrested. But we’re not targeting those individuals.” 

All eight farm workers were from Mexico, according to Migrant Justice, and at least four have since been deported. Two were released on bail and returned to Vermont. At least one, Jesus Mendez Hernandez, remains at the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center in Texas. 

The location of the eighth, Adrian Zunun-Joachin, was not available in a locator system provided by ICE. But Stokes, his attorney, said Zunun had told him in previous conversations that he was considering abandoning the fight to stay in the U.S. and instead return to Mexico. Stokes said he was likely deported. 

The hearings

On Tuesday, roughly a hundred protesters gathered in front of a federal courthouse in Burlington at a rally hosted by Migrant Justice to support De La Cruz. This was the second rally in two days, after protestors gathered to support the bail hearing for Perez on Monday. 

Perez spent roughly three weeks at Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility before her bail was deferred. A new court date was not set by Wednesday morning. Perez has been in Vermont since she crossed into the U.S. in February 2023 when she was 16 years old. De La Cruz, who also has a 3-year-old son — a U.S. citizen born in Vermont — entered the U.S. without crossing a legal port of entry in 2016, and again in 2022 after briefly returning to Mexico. 

Wuendy Bernardo, an undocumented farmer and immigrant advocate, attended the rally on Tuesday and reflected on a time when she was detained with her children.

“I was detained too, along with my children, and it’s not easy being locked up in jail,” Bernardo said. “It’s not fair because we come here to work, we contribute here, to this state, to this country, and it’s not fair that they’re locked up.”

De La Cruz and Perez remain in Vermont because they and their attorney alleged that Border Patrol agents lacked reasonable suspicion for the traffic stop, violating their constitutional rights. De La Cruz is being punished “for his Mexican-descent and disfavored speech,” Stokes wrote in court documents.

A judge recently extended a temporary restraining order to keep De La Cruz and Perez in Vermont. It now lasts until July 31. 

While De La Cruz’s cellphone remains in the hands of Border Patrol, according to Stokes, the agency hadn’t pressed criminal charges in the weeks since searching the cellphone’s emails, texts, maps, photos, videos, Internet browsing and search history, geolocations, contact lists and financial transactions.

“I don’t know where it’s going to end up,” Stokes said. “But ultimately, it’s directly out of the authoritarian playbook.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘Fishing expedition’: How one Vermont traffic stop raises questions about racial profiling and illegal border crossings.

A loose group of advocates is urging the panel that oversees operations at Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport to issue a statement describing — and, some said, condemning — how federal immigration agents have repeatedly used Vermont’s largest air hub to transport people detained in the state and possibly facing deportation to other parts of the country.

Speaking at the Burlington Airport Commission’s monthly meeting Wednesday evening, two advocates also presented data they said showed federal immigration agents are flying far more people out of the airport, which is run by the City of Burlington, than is widely known.

Leif Taranta of Burlington and Brian Clifford of Essex said their findings, which they’ve compiled into a public chart online, suggest at least 450 people detained by federal law enforcement in immigration cases have been transferred through the Burlington airport since the start of January. That includes transfers by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

VTDigger has not independently verified Taranta and Clifford’s work, though a representative from the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, which is one of the state’s few networks offering pro bono legal aid to non-U.S. citizens, endorsed the advocates’ effort at Wednesday’s meeting.

“The airport, at a minimum, has a responsibility to let the public know what’s happening inside these walls, and on the tarmac,” Julie Macuga of Burlington, another advocate who spoke at the meeting, told the airport commissioners.

The panel did not develop a statement at its meeting, though the body’s chair, Tim George, said in an interview afterward that he and the other commissioners would continue to discuss the request, including what, specifically, his counterparts would be willing to say.

“I think we’ll have some conversations about that and see how we want to proceed,” he said.

Wednesday’s meeting comes as Vermont officials’ interactions with immigration authorities have drawn increased scrutiny following the high-profile arrests of Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist Mohsen Mahdawi and Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk. Both students were in the country legally but have been targeted by President Donald Trump’s administration for deportation. Mahdawi is a Vermont resident, while Öztürk’s detention was challenged in federal court in Vermont.

Federal officials have shuffled detainees from other states into and out of Vermont, and used commercial flights out of the airport, which is in South Burlington, to facilitate deportations, VTDigger has reported. Those jailed in Vermont’s prisons include people with established lives in the state, like farmworkers. Vermont’s prisons have also held people from other New England states, including Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist working at Harvard University.

Öztürk was shuttled from Massachusetts, where she was arrested, to an ICE field office in St. Albans before being flown out of the Burlington airport early the following morning to Louisiana. She spent weeks in detention there before a judge in Vermont ordered her release. Meanwhile, agents attempted to fly Mahdawi out of the airport to Louisiana, as well, after he was arrested while attending a U.S. citizenship interview in Colchester, the student’s lawyers have said.

That a public body as minor as the airport commission — which is only advisory by design and consists of residents from Burlington, South Burlington and Winooski — was facing questions about the actions of federal immigration agents is evidence of just how focused public scrutiny of immigration enforcement in the state has become. 

One commissioner, Helen Riehle, a former longtime state legislator from South Burlington, called the use of the airport for transporting ICE detainees “abhorrent.” 

Still, it’s not clear there is much — if anything — the commission, or the staff who run the day-to-day operations at the airport, could do to impact how the federal government chooses to use the facility to transport detainees, said Nic Longo, the airport’s director. He said the airport administration generally is not privy to information about immigration operations there.

“We don’t know when these are happening,” he said, referring to when people are transferred through the airport by federal immigration agents. “We don’t get advised. We don’t get any communication.”

He added, too, that the airport could risk losing access to federal grants and other funding assurances by impeding or refusing to comply with immigration enforcement — a point U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy made publicly earlier this year. (That threat has since been temporarily blocked by a federal judge after a coalition of 20 states, including Vermont, sued to challenge its legality.)

There were several instances, Longo noted, in which ICE agents were parking their vehicles in areas where parking wasn’t allowed. The airport pushed back — in some cases, nearly towing the vehicles — and got the agents to park in spaces generally available to the public. The airport’s goal, he said, is to treat the agents as if they are any other law enforcement officials, or members of the public.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday about its operations at the airport. 

Taranta, one of the activists, said the group collected data on those operations using U.S. Department of Justice press releases, the PACER system that tracks federal court cases, and a Vermont Department of Corrections website that provides access to a jail tracking system where people can find friends and family members in the state’s prisons. They also verified the data through news articles and direct observations at prisons and the Burlington airport, they said. 

The activists said the data they collected shows as many as 500 immigration detainees have likely been moved through Vermont between Jan. 1 and July 1. About 460 were highly likely to have been transferred through the Burlington airport, the citizen researchers believe, with many of them booked on early morning flights. 

“That’s a shocking number if true,” said Brett Stokes, an attorney at the Center for Justice Reform at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, in an interview Wednesday. Stokes said he would be inclined to trust it unless proven otherwise, but he doesn’t believe it’s a statistic the federal government is required to track.

Activists shared that they were concerned people are being moved through the state without access to legal representation. 

A major concern expressed by those who spoke at the commission meeting was that people flown out of the airport — who were often unshackled, in plain clothes and accompanied by U.S. Marshals — did not have an opportunity to meet with an attorney before facing deportation proceedings outside of the state. The early hours of transport, which the activists have said their findings repeatedly show, also make it difficult for attorneys to connect with clients, they said.

“It’s become clear to us that the airport plays a large role in the region’s ICE operations and most people don’t know about this, including the airport commissions,” Taranta said in an interview. “I hope they’ll take some actions against it.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Burlington airport leaders face questions from advocates over ICE transports.

On Tuesday, as the federal government continued its unprecedented attack on clean energy and climate funding, Vermont’s Climate Council published its 2025 Climate Action Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote resiliency in the state.

The plan is a requirement set by the 2020 Global Warming Solutions Act to publish a new framework every four years for tackling the climate crisis. The 2025 plan could guide legislative action on helping Vermonters, especially those with low or moderate incomes, adopt more efficient and less polluting sources of home heat and transportation, the two highest-emitting sectors in the state. 

Other priorities included mitigating future climate hazards, building a climate-ready workforce, weatherizing an additional 79,000 homes, reducing or sequestering emissions on farmland and finding funding to implement all these ideas.

While Vermont files its second Climate Action Plan to try and meet legally-binding emissions reductions, federal funding programs that made possible climate initiatives in small states like this one are on the chopping block. Now, as the state looks for other sources of revenue and support to achieve its climate goals, the new plan lays out what Vermonters might see prioritized in the coming years. But with reduced political will in the last legislative session to proactively deal with climate change, it remains to be seen whether those plans are fiscally realistic under a governor who prioritizes short-term affordability over long-term resiliency.

“Before focusing too much on a new, shiny thing, we should really be thinking about how we maintain the current pace and level of effort,” said Julie Moore, Agency of Natural Resources secretary and a member of the Climate Council who voted for the plan. “Maintaining our current pace is far from certain in this moment.” 

The state’s initial Climate Action Plan preceded devastating floods that wrecked homes and businesses along Vermont’s river valleys in 2023 and 2024. As the atmosphere warms, holding more moisture, precipitation in Vermont has become heavier and more frequent, causing deluges that can lead to deadly floods. 

Climate change, largely driven by the burning of fossil fuels, has also brought increased high heat days that most homes in Vermont are ill-equipped to handle. Wildland fires have become more common and air quality has diminished in the warmer months as enormous wildfires burn elsewhere, according to the plan.

But even with the tangible effects of climate change in Vermont, state lawmakers’ attempts to significantly reduce emissions along outlines from the 2021 Climate Action Plan have failed to meet state emissions targets. Big proposals like the clean heat standard were shelved during the spring legislative session, and the state likely missed its 2025 emissions-reduction target required by the Global Warming Solutions Act. A court case currently playing out in Montpelier could help determine whether the state missed that target.

Now, as the state looks for more guidance on how to lower its emissions, the federal government could squeeze Vermont further as the Trump administration eviscerates clean energy funding and advances in climate science prioritized under President Biden. The 2025 Climate Action Plan recognized the impact of federal cuts, noting that the work to combat climate change was not about to get easier.

What’s in the plan?

The Global Warming Solutions Act binds the state to lower greenhouse gas emissions by milestones set in state statute: 26% below 2005 emissions levels by 2025, 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. 

The Climate Action Plan outlines pathways to reach those goals every four years, through Climate Council planning meetings, technical analysis with consultants, and community input. More than 1,000 Vermonters and Vermont-based organizations participated in creating the plan, including 850 who joined virtual and in-person meetings and 250 who submitted public comments, according to the plan.

But even with four years of planning, Vermont is still behind its legally-binding goals. While the state initially claimed that it reached that first milestone on Jan. 1, 2025, a report by the Energy Action Network, a Vermont-based nonprofit that conducts energy and emissions analysis, instead found Vermont to have fallen up to 39% short of the emissions reduction required by law. 

Moore’s agency reviewed the report and has agreed that the state was unlikely to achieve the 2025 goal, but final datasets to assess emissions won’t be available until 2027.

Previous ambitious reductions programs like the clean heat standard were shelved after a campaign by out-of-state fuel lobbyists along with Gov. Phil Scott’s rejection of the plan as unaffordable. State regulators found costs associated with the program were too high, but some members of the Climate Council disagree with those fiscal priorities. 

“When we have a conversation on benefits and costs, we can’t lose sight of the cost of the status quo, which is already too high,” said Jared Duval, one of the 23 state-appointed members of the Climate Council. He quoted numbers from the state tax department that found about $2 billion a year was spent on fossil fuels for transportation and heating in 2024. An economic analysis done for the Climate Action Plan identified a potential $6 billion in costs that could be avoided by 2050 if the state pursued emissions reductions recommendations, Duval said. 

With the lapse in federal funding, Duval said that in order to reduce emissions, the state would need to return to the polluter-pays principle, where fossil fuel corporations are responsible for paying for climate damages and resiliency efforts. This principle doesn’t only apply to the state’s legal battle with fossil fuel corporations in the climate superfund law, Duval said. It also stands as the rationale behind ambitious programs like the clean heat standard and the cap-and-invest model, which the climate action plan asked the state to research this year. 

“The cost of those policies has always been designed to apply to importers of fossil fuels to Vermont,” Duval said. While fuel companies have said those costs will be passed onto customers, Duval said a key difference between the clean heat standard, pursued through the 2021 climate action plan, and the cap-and-invest model, again pushed forward by the 2025 plan, is that cap-and-invest can provide direct payments to Vermonters through rebates, based on their income. 

Duval, along with 15 others, voted for the 2025 plan. Two councillors were not present to vote, and five voted against it, including Sarah Clark, the Agency of Administration secretary; Anson Tebbetts, the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets secretary; Michele Boomhower on behalf of Joe Flynn, the Agency of Transportation secretary; Lindsay Kurrle, Agency of Commerce and Community Development secretary; and Matt Cota, owner of Meadow Hill Consulting and representing the fuel sector. All except for Cota are in Gov. Scott’s administration and report to the governor, who has worked to overturn the legal requirements in the Global Warming Solutions Act. 

Others were reluctant with their yes votes. While Moore, secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources,, voted for the plan, she said that decision was mainly a reflection of her appreciation of the work of state government staff. Moore said she continues to have “some real concerns.”

“Specifically, I’m concerned about what it will take to operationalize the plan’s vision,” Moore said. “It’s sort of left up to interpretation.”

The Conservation Law Foundation, which sued the state last year claiming the Agency of Natural Resources failed to properly prepare to meet the 2025 emissions goal, called the 2025 Climate Action Plan “toothless” in a statement on Tuesday. 

“The Council has worked hard to come to a consensus and deliver recommendations that include financial incentives to drive down emissions,” said Elena Mihaly, the foundation’s vice president for Vermont. “But it has failed to put in place real, enforceable policies that demand major polluters do their part too.”

The return of cap-and-invest

Much of the council’s attention this last year has been on a cap-and-invest program to reduce climate pollution. Cap-and-invest programs place a declining cap on greenhouse gas emissions, according to the state, while reinvesting the proceeds to climate-friendly projects like energy efficiency and weatherization. In March, Mike Pieciak, Vermont state treasurer, spoke to the council during a special session on cap-and-invest, reminding members that of the billions the state spends on fossil fuels, “over 75% of those dollars flow out of the state.”

But a cap-and-invest model could keep more money in the state and create up to 810 jobs, according to Pieciak, especially if the state were to partner with cap-and-invest initiatives already underway such as the Western Climate Initiative, which includes California, Quebec and Washington, and the cap-and-invest program in New York state. A modified clean heat standard could complement this program, according to the 2025 Climate Action Plan, focusing on the electrification of air and water heating in low- and moderate-income households. 

Such a partnership could avoid problems that Vermont encountered while pursuing a clean heat standard, the council’s previous plan to reduce thermal emissions. In a January report, the Public Utility Commission, which studied the clean heat program, told lawmakers that it would likely be too expensive for the state to take on a first-of-its-kind credit market on its own. 

But this isn’t the first time cap-and-invest has been studied. Over the last four years, the Legislature asked the agency, under guidance from the 2021 Climate Action Plan, to dig into both the clean heat standard and the cap-and-invest program. 

“We’re a little bit taken aback by the price tag associated with each one, along with the administrative complexity,” Moore said. “I’m hopeful that there will be an opportunity for conversation about both what we can do with existing resources.”

Moore said the cap-and-invest program could only work if Vermont joins a multi-state program, and the only one that currently exists – the Western Climate Initiative – has indicated they’re not accepting new members, she said. New York’s plan for cap-and-invest, which could be a better fit as a neighboring state, is not yet operational. Instead, Moore said, the state should focus on more actionable items like continuing to weatherize homes as federal funding disappears. 

“It’s absolutely important to acknowledge long term savings associated with these practices, but you can’t gloss over the fact that there are real and significant upfront costs,” Moore said. “Figuring out how to pay for this work to generate long-term savings is fundamental, and the climate plan, I feel, doesn’t give enough treatment to that issue.” 

Richard Cowart, the former chair of the Public Utility Commission and a member of the Climate Council, said the 2025 plan did a good job marrying provisions that can help communities become more resilient against the impacts of climate change alongside measures to reduce carbon emissions, while also saving the state money.

“The notion that addressing climate change has to be viewed simply as a burden is incorrect,” Cowart said, noting that instead the state’s economy could benefit from doing its part to slow the warming world. “How can we afford to continue to spend $2 billion a year to import fossil fuels that we know that we shouldn’t actually be burning?”

He pointed to Efficiency Vermont as an example of how the state has invested in efficiency, saved money, and provided environmental and health benefits. The 2025 plan builds on that experience, he said, and shows that the state doesn’t require federal money to build important programs like the first-of-its-kind utility launched a quarter century ago. 

“We did not need federal money to launch Efficiency Vermont, instead we made our own decision to reduce bills for Vermonters,” Cowart said. “We can and need to do the same thing with respect to our ongoing fossil fuel bills.”

Federal funding cuts

But how the state will pay for myriad programs and strategies the 2025 plan puts forward appears to be the crux of the climate debate in Vermont, as the arguments over affordability continue. 

On the federal level, the attack on climate action has never been more brutal. For months, the Trump administration has worked to gut billions of dollars in renewable energy incentives and subsidies for proven initiatives like buying electric vehicles and scaling up charging infrastructure, increasing financial access to heat pumps and solar panels, and supporting big-budget projects like green hydrogen and wind energy.

“The cost of electricity to the people you represent and the folks I represent in Vermont is going up,” said U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., directing the remark toward President Trump.

On Friday, Senate Republicans announced a new axe to clean energy: In the Trump administration’s budget overhaul called the One Big Beautiful Bill, the Senate suggested not only cutting federal funding for renewables but taxing those projects. 

The proposal would have penalized solar and wind projects if they sourced materials from countries the Trump administration has a strained relationship with , including China, which dominates the world in clean energy production and materials. The North America’s Building Trades Unions called it “the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country” and equated it to “terminating more than 1,000 Keystone XL pipeline projects.”

On Tuesday afternoon, the Senate passed the budget reconciliation bill, all but ensuring that Trump’s agenda will go into effect later this summer. But the tax was removed before Vice President J.D. Vance casted the tie-breaking vote as three GOP Senators – Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Sen. Tim Tillis of North Carolina and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine – broke with their party and voted against the bill.

The bill now moves for a vote in the House.  

“In Vermont and across the country, this bill will kill jobs, raise energy prices and move us in exactly the wrong direction in the fight against climate change,” U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told VTDigger in an email on Monday before the vote. “It will keep our country hooked on dirty and expensive fossil fuels by creating enormous new handouts for the very industry that is destroying the planet in pursuit of massive profits.”

Increasing frequency and severity of disasters have also taken the toll in Vermont: Since 1953, out of the 62 federally declared disasters in the state, half have occurred since 2011. 

The analysis of these disasters was included in the 2025 plan, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency tool that outlined those disasters was taken down by FEMA on June 30, the day before the report was published. Days earlier, the federal climate website, climate.gov, disappeared. 

The web address now redirects users to the climate webpage of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal government’s premier climate science agency currently facing severe staffing and funding cuts. The country’s sixth National Climate Assessment, which provides essential data for state and regional reports like this one, was shelved this spring when scientists were told to stop their work. 

With or without federal support, Vermont will begin its third Climate Action Plan in 2028, with a new publication planned for July 1, 2029. 

It recently became more difficult to understand what  the regional Northeast climate will be like at that time: The fifth National Climate Assessment, which was published in 2023, is no longer available on the federal website.

Correction: A previous version of this story misrendered a quote from Richard Cowart.

Clarification: A previous version of this story did not correctly distinguish which arm of the Energy Action Network authored a report.

Read the story on VTDigger here: The 2025 Climate Action Plan grapples with the costs of climate programs.

Vermont, the state with the lowest overall carbon emissions in the country, has become a national leader in efforts to address climate change. But this year, lawmakers were subdued about further efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions. 

One reason was that the political climate had changed. 

Democrats lost more seats in Vermont than anywhere else in the country last November. The state faced multiple lawsuits against its landmark plan to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their contributions to a warming world. Gov. Phil Scott, a legion of heating fuel dealers and a media campaign run by a conservative super PAC convinced voters that the state’s plan to reduce its second largest source of fossil emissions — heating — was too expensive to be implemented. 

“Everyone knew the plan was dead the day after the election,” said Matt Cota, a member of the Public Utility Commission’s Clean Heat Technical Advisory Group that studied the proposal, known as the clean heat standard.

At the national level, fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas — the largest drivers of climate change and increasingly expensive energy sources to produce and burn — strengthened their foothold in the U.S. economy when President Donald Trump declared an energy emergency on the first day of his second term. 

In Vermont, meanwhile, action on climate quieted, and perhaps the state’s most comprehensive plan under consideration to reduce emissions entered a state of limbo. The clean heat standard, half a decade in the making, would have established a wonky credit market to regulate the heating of air and water in buildings like homes and hospitals. But it was neither adopted as law nor formally repealed this legislative session. 

Instead, key lawmakers shuffled the plan into the dusty corners of committee. Advocates and lawmakers do not expect it to reemerge.

The program’s failure could leave the state with fewer options to reach the goals of the 2020 Global Warming Solutions Act, which legally mandates reducing emissions by 80% below 2005 levels by the midcentury. Critics say the state already missed the first deadline, and the first lawsuit against the state has already been filed. 

Under the shadow of that deadline, why did the clean heat standard fail, and what might Vermont do next?

An incentive structure

Vermonters are among more than 10 million households, largely in New England and the Midwest, still dependent on heating fuels, like oil or propane, according to a May 2025 national report from RMI, an energy think tank. Most of the households that use heating fuels live in single-family homes and skew more rural, older and more likely to live on a fixed income.

The clean heat standard, also known as the Affordable Heat Act, was compelling because it relied on incentives. Instead of a simple tax, or fee, on heating bills, like the charge Vermonters see on their electric bills to fund efficiency programs, the program attempted to promote efficiency through a credit system.

“The first conversation was, how can we reward these heat fuel dealers performing this efficiency work, this good work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, by creating an incentive structure?” Cota said.

Fuel dealers have long delivered the fossil fuels to heat individual homes through Vermont’s long winters. But these fuels and the people who distribute them are less regulated than other forms of energy like electricity. The standard would have created a registry that tracked fuel dealers and worked to help them acquire credits.

Each “clean heat credit” represented a unit of greenhouse gas emissions eliminated because of actions taken by fuel dealers. Details like how fuel dealers could earn such credits were still in the works, but the intention was to push fuel dealers to promote weatherization and more efficient heating systems like cold-weather heat pumps. Then customers could access state incentives to help pay for them. (Additional incentives of up to $2,000 for heat pumps once available through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act are now on the Trump administration’s chopping block.)

Switching to more efficient heat pumps could reduce energy bills by an annual average of $990 in Vermont, according to the RMI report on heating fuels. Across the country, customers could save an average of $15,000 over the life of the heat pump. If all delivered fuels were replaced with heat pumps, the country would save nearly $8 billion in energy costs, according to the report.

But program expenses rose because of possible subsidies prioritizing low- and middle-income Vermonters. As fuel dealers looked at taking on the costs of the program, it seemed clear that some of those costs would have to be passed onto customers, according to a January report submitted by the Public Utility Commission. The kind of credit system had also never been done before, and Vermont would have had no other state’s model to rely upon, which also increased overhead costs.

“Modeling a complex sector-wide program is extremely difficult and relies on a number of assumptions that could vary widely from real-world implementation,” wrote the public utility commissioners in the January report to the Legislature. They told lawmakers their estimates should be taken as “very rough.”

Customers would pay approximately $0.08 more per gallon of fuel oil in 2026, according to the report, or about $56 for residents who bought an average of 700 gallons to heat their home. If customers continued to use fossil fuels instead of taking advantage of incentives to switch to other options, the cost could rise to $0.58 per gallon, or about $406 more by 2035 for the same amount of fuel.

For the first decade, the commission’s report estimated the program could cost the state, including those costs to customers, as much as $956 million. The commission did not recommend implementing it. 

‘They just parked it’

While that number is large, whether it’s considered affordable depends on a number of factors like how Vermonters heat their homes, the flexibility of their spending, and whether they use state incentives to lower their fossil fuel use.

But the governor took the position that the plan was unaffordable no matter what. In 2022, Scott vetoed the bill’s first version, H.715, and that veto was sustained by a single vote in the House. 

A year later, in May 2023, it became the Affordable Heat Act, or S.5, a bill that set up the clean heat standard for further study but did not implement the program. Scott again vetoed the bill, but this time he was overruled by the then Democratic supermajority in both chambers. 

That new law, Act 18, gave the Public Utility Commission and two advisory groups 18 months to figure out the details. In the 2025 legislative session, once the commission issued its January report, little action was taken. Another bill, S.65, would have repealed the clean heat standard completely but never made it out of committee.

While the commission’s final report was in development, the conservative super PAC Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch brothers, launched a $60,000 digital and mailer campaign claiming the standard would “skyrocket” Vermonter’s utility bills and “wreak havoc on Vermonters’ wallets.”

That campaign skewed the definition of affordability and promoted misinformation, according to advocates of the law. But the Green Advocacy Project, a pro-clean heat group, contributed three times that — $180,000 — to a Vermont super PAC to boost candidates supporting the program.

But even that didn’t help incumbents like Chris Bray, the former Democratic chair of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy who served in the Legislature for more than a decade. He lost his November race. In early June, Bray said part of that loss had to do with the campaign against the clean heat standard. 

“The fossil fuel industry was vehemently opposed,” Bray said. “It would’ve been the country’s first assessment on fossil fuels designed to look at their emissions impact and translate that into a variable fee.” 

Bray had pushed back against the argument that the program was unaffordable. He asked lawmakers to consider not just the climate impacts but the volatile pricing of fossil fuels. During the winter of 2020 through the winter of 2023, the cost of heating oil more than doubled, according to numbers Bray compiled from the Department of Public Service and Joint Fiscal Office. 

While the governor often cited a potential $4 per gallon increase in fuel costs, far more than what the final commission report concluded. 

If he’d continued on as chair, Bray wanted to see his committee push the standard forward by working out wonky details like how much a credit would cost and how they could be obtained. But too many Democrats lost, he said, and the ones who remained were chastened by the governor’s claims that the program was unaffordable. 

“They just parked it,” Bray said of Democrats. 

There wasn’t enough movement on climate and environmental work this session because legislators were playing defense rather than going on the offensive and continuing to try and make progress, Bray added.

Sen. Anne Watson, D/P-Washington, who took over as chair of the Natural Resources and Energy Committee after Bray lost his seat, said the standard wasn’t a great fit for Vermont at this time. Because Vermont would be starting the standard from scratch, there were high overhead costs, and it would be easier if another state enacted the law first, she said.

“Nobody wanted to move forward with implementing it this session,” Watson said. But she largely blamed state leadership.

“It’s unfortunate that we’re limited by a governor who doesn’t want us to do the hard work of getting Vermonters off of expensive, price-volatile fossil fuels,” Watson said. 

At a conference in June at the University of Vermont, Lt. Gov. John Rodgers repeated these talking points, claiming that consumers, not oil companies, would have to pay for the clean heat standard. 

“Every oil company has said, ‘This is our business. If we have extra cost we have to pass it on to the consumer,’” Rodgers said in an interview afterward. “But there are people in the Legislature that are saying ‘oil companies are going to pay for it,’ and it’s just a false narrative.”

He said the Affordable Heat Act should be repealed because Vermonters couldn’t afford it. 

When asked if paying roughly $50 a year on heating oil was unaffordable — which Vermonters would pay in 2026, according to the PUC — Rodgers said he would have to go back to the report. 

“I thought it was much more than $0.08,” Rodgers said, adding that if there was a real benefit from the standard, he might consider $0.08 a gallon affordable. 

‘There isn’t currently an active plan’

As Vermont creeps toward its self-imposed, legally binding emissions deadlines, pieces of its first plan to mitigate its contribution to climate change continue to fall away. 

In 2021, a multistate pact to create a cap-and-invest program that would have reduced emissions from transportation, called the Transportation and Climate Initiative Program, crumbled. Another plan to phase out the use of gasoline-powered cars and trucks is under direct threat from the Trump administration. Now, the clean heat standard appears to be scratched off the list. 

Last Tuesday, in a courthouse in Montpelier, Vermonters began to see the first skirmishes in what could be a long, drawn-out battle if the state doesn’t come up with new ideas for meeting its goal. 

“There’s a mechanism in the Global Warming Solutions Act where there’s accountability for exactly this, where you have a governor obstinate against climate goals,” Sen. Watson said. “It’s played out in Massachusetts and maybe it needs to play out here.” 

That mechanism is a citizen lawsuit. 

Jenny Rushlow, an attorney in the clean energy and climate change program at the Conservation Law Foundation, successfully litigated that Massachusetts case. 

Now, her group is in the first stages of a suit filed against Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources, the state body in charge of implementing those reductions. The suit, filed in September 2024, alleged that the state was on track to miss the January 1, 2025, target to reduce emissions by 26% below 2005 levels. 

The agency sought to dismiss that suit, and now both parties await the judge’s decision. If he denies that motion, the Conservation Law Foundation’s case — which argues that the review was so insufficient it was rendered invalid — would proceed, according to Elena Mihaly, the vice president for the organization in Vermont, after oral arguments on the motion.

“There isn’t currently an active plan for how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the thermal sector at the level that’s required,” Rushlow said. “The clean heat standard was the focal point for reducing emissions from that sector, and it died under pressure from outside fossil fuel interests and misinformation about the cost of the program.” 

But Mihaly said no part of this lawsuit hinges on whether the clean heat standard passed, nor could a judge siding favorably with her foundation force the Legislature to pass the standard or the Agency of Natural Resources to adopt it. 

Instead, the latest focal point in the Global Warming Solutions Act is the new Climate Action Plan set to be published on July 1, which will reset the state’s priorities in reducing emissions. That plan is developed by a 23-member Climate Council legally obligated to produce the plan every four years. Now the council is considering a modified clean heat standard, according to Cota, who serves on the council.

While the clean heat standard could have been a key mechanism to help them meet the emissions goals of the Global Warming Solutions Act, “it was not ever going to be the silver bullet,” Watson said.

A leaky roof

With limited progress made this legislative session, it’s unclear what pathway the state has for meeting its emissions targets.

“When you look at what this Legislature did — or more accurately didn’t do — on climate this session as compared to the last few years, it’s a stunning reversal,” Rushlow said. “That being said, the Legislature doesn’t have a supermajority, and Gov. Scott loves to veto, particularly on issues related to the environment. So it’s completely understandable that they were not confident in their ability to make progress on climate this session.”

In lieu of meeting the state’s climate goals, Scott and fellow lawmakers have tried to cripple the Global Warming Solutions Act. During the legislative session, the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee took up H.289, a bill that never made it out of committee but is intended to defang the Global Warming Solutions Act.

In March, Jared Duval, a member of the Vermont Climate Council, testified on the bill, telling lawmakers: “It is important that we remember that there are costs not just to action, but of inaction.” 

He gave an example: If you have a leak in your roof, there’s a cost to get it fixed. But the cost of damage to the roof from inaction is far greater than the cost of the repair. 

“It’s too bad, because the problem didn’t go away, but it’s just being ignored for a while,” Bray, the former lawmaker, said. “It’s just going to be more expensive to address for having put it off. But ultimately, unless we’re going to accept the idea that we’re going to destroy the planet on our watch, we’re going to have to do better.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: The clean heat standard is dead. What comes next?.

Ben & Jerry’s leadership wanted to put out a social media post last week in support of migrant community members detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Vermont, but London-based parent company Unilever denied them, according to sources familiar with the matter. 

“The recent detention and deportation of migrant farmworkers in our home state isn’t just a threat to individuals – it’s a threat to the fabric of our communities and our human rights,” the post, crafted by the ice cream making behemoth’s independent board, read. 

The post, which VTDigger viewed, named two individuals recently detained by ICE, Jose Ignacio “Nacho” De La Cruz, 29, and his stepdaughter, Heidi Perez, 18, a recent high school graduate. 

Both are prominent leaders with Migrant Justice, a Burlington-based migrant advocacy organization. De La Cruz, a former dairy worker turned construction worker, helped launch the group’s Milk With Dignity campaign, which seeks to provide worker rights and a better life on dairy farms. Ben & Jerry’s was the first major company to join the campaign and agree to purchase milk only from farms that meet the standards of the program. The participating farms the company sources from represent about a fifth of Vermont’s dairy industry. 

“We stand with Migrant Justice and call for transparency, accountability, and the protection of constitutional rights for all,” the proposed post read. “Join us and urge the release of Nacho and Heidi so they can return to their families and community in Vermont.”

The post then linked to a Migrant Justice web page that included an Action Network petition demanding the release of De La Cruz and Perez. VTDigger is not naming the sources who shared the post due to their concerns about retaliation. 

De La Cruz and Perez were driving home to Chittenden County from delivering food to migrant farmworkers in Franklin County when they were pulled over by U.S. Customs and Border Protection due to “suspicious border activity,” according to a CBP spokesperson. De La Cruz’s window was smashed and they were detained.

De La Cruz is currently held in the Northwest State Correctional Facility in Swanton and Perez is being held at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington, according to the state prisoner locator. They are both citizens of Mexico without legal immigration status in the U.S.

Unilever did not respond to multiple requests for comment by the time of publication on Tuesday. 

The Vermont-based ice cream maker has long aligned with progressive causes, including the Black Lives Matter movement and Palestinian rights campaigns in recent years. The company does so under an independent board that was established when Ben & Jerry’s was acquired by Unilever in 2000 to maintain the brand’s social mission.

But disputes between the brand and Unilever have ramped up since the election of President Donald Trump last year. 

In November, Ben & Jerry’s sued Unilever in U.S. District Court in New York, claiming the parent company shut down statements to support Palestinian rights. In January, they alleged Unilever barred them from criticizing Trump in a social media post on the day of his inauguration. 

In March, after Unilever fired CEO David Stever, Ben & Jerry’s again sued Unilever, alleging Stever was fired for his commitment to the social mission and without properly consulting the brand’s independent board, according to court filings. 

Stever had been with the company since 1987 and moved into the role of CEO in 2023. The complaint stated that the motive for removing Stever was “his commitment to Ben & Jerry’s Social Mission and Essential Brand Integrity … rather than any genuine concerns regarding his performance history.”

The dispute comes as the arrests of Vermont’s migrant residents have ramped up under the second Trump administration, including detainment of nine farm workers in April and the deportation of four. In May, four landscape workers and ten construction workers were also detained by Border Patrol agents in northern Vermont.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Ben & Jerry’s parent company blocked release of social media post supporting Vermont migrants, sources allege.

Hundreds of people gathered outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in St. Albans on Friday, waiting to hear if Wuendy Bernardo, a migrant farm worker who has lived on a dairy in Orleans County for over a decade, would return home to her family or face deportation proceedings.

They cheered as she emerged from the office around 10:30 a.m. to return home to her family with orders to report back on July 21. Migrant Justice, a Burlington-based migrant advocacy organization, estimated that roughly 200 community members turned out to support Bernardo. 

“It’s really difficult because every time I come here I don’t know if I’ll be going back to my family or not,” Bernado said, tearing up while Will Lambek, a Migrant Justice spokesperson, translated. 

Susanna, 79, a retired textile designer from Albany, paced around the parking lot in her raincoat ahead of Bernardo’s arrival. She met Bernardo more than six years ago when she began taking her to prenatal appointments at Bridges to Health, a migrant health care program through the University of Vermont. 

“I’m really nervous about this,” she said. 

She described Bernardo as a charming friend and an excellent mother who loves gardening and her family. (Susanna asked for her last name to be withheld because of her work with migrants). 

Bernardo is a mother of five children, ages five to 18, and guardian to two orphaned half-sisters, according to Lambek. All her children are still in school, and none have immediate concerns about their immigration statuses, he said.

“We’re in a moment of intensifying attacks against immigrant communities around the country and here in Vermont,” Lambek said. “These are premeditated political actions to tear families apart and violate people’s rights.”

Bernardo and her community have been under increasing stress since she was first detained in Vermont in 2019, according to Susanna.

“For a while it was just, ‘be careful and observe the speed limits, and don’t do anything outrageous,’” said Susanna, who also came out to support Bernardo’s prior ICE appointment in April. “And now, of course, it’s no holds barred.” 

Bernardo pulled into the parking lot at 10:00 a.m., accompanied by her daughters. Supporters cheered and called “I love you Wuendy,” as she joined her attorney inside the ICE office. While inside, dozens of cars lined up and down Gricebrook Road and more supporters joined the semi-circle surrounding the office’s front doors. Thirty minutes later, Bernardo walked outside smiling while her daughter tugged the end of her ponytail. 

Bernardo’s saga with immigration officials began in 2019 when she was stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection while a fellow parishioner drove her home from church. She and two of her children were detained at a border patrol facility and then the ICE office in St. Albans where they were processed and released, according to Lambek. He said border protection agents gave no reason for pulling the car over. 

Border protection and ICE officials did not answer a request for comment by the time of publication. 

Following the 2019 detention, Bernardo was on a telephonic check in schedule until ICE told her in 2022 to come to the office, ordering her to bring a plane ticket that showed she would leave the country. Bernardo applied for a stay of removal — a formal request that her deportation proceedings be delayed. She was allowed to remain in the U.S. while that request was under consideration, according to Lambek.

But earlier this year, Bernardo was again ordered to report to ICE. In April, about 100 supporters rallied outside the office to support her stay in the country, and she was told to return in two months. Attorneys refiled her stay of removal, and that stay remains pending, according to Brett Stokes, Bernardo’s attorney and the director of the Center for Justice Reform at Vermont Law and Graduate School.

‘A lot of risks’

Abel Luna, a 36-year-old Migrant Justice field coordinator, joined the rally supporting Bernardo with his daughter. Luna, who was a farm worker in New York state beginning at age 13, called the recent detentions and deportations of migrants in Vermont a “fear tactic” by the federal government.

Since April, at least 25 migrant workers and students, including farmers, landscapers and construction workers, have been detained in northern Vermont by border officials.

On Saturday, 29-year-old Jose Ignacio De La Cruz, known as Nacho, and his stepdaughter, Heidi Perez, 18, were pulled over by border officials due to “suspicious border activity,” according to Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Ryan Brissette. The agents smashed their car window and detained both De La Cruz and Perez. De La Cruz is being held at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in Swanton and Perez is at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington, according to the state prison locator. 

The two have filed petitions in federal district court alleging their detainment was unconstitutional. The chief judge of Vermont district court, Christina Reiss, issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting ICE from moving them out of state. Both remain in custody pending deportation proceedings. 

Luna said his community was seeing more arrests during the second Trump administration, especially mass arrests, including a group of eight farm workers arrested in April at Berkshire’s Pleasant Valley Farms, the state’s largest dairy, and the detainment and monitoring of community leaders who worked closely with Migrant Justice like Bernardo, De La Cruz, and Perez.

“Nacho especially, and Heidi in her own right, were both very politically active,” Stokes said. “I think it’s important to consider whether that was a justification for this arrest.” 

Stokes didn’t know if they were targeted for their organizing work, but Luna said outspoken migrant leaders were detained during both Trump administrations.

“But it doesn’t matter who you are, you could be driving on the road and get stopped and detained,” Luna said. “There may be some targeting of leaders, but being a migrant worker in the state of Vermont, being a border state, there’s a lot of risks.” 

Stokes said Bernardo’s situation was unique because she was first detained with an expedited removal order upon her initial entry to the U.S. in 2014, and later let out on parole. Bernardo is currently ineligible for asylum because she didn’t apply during her first year in the U.S., and right now, she doesn’t have a pathway to citizenship. Like many others in the U.S., Stokes said, she has spent her time in the U.S. undergoing periodic check-ins by ICE officials. 

ICE under Trump 

ICE practices have changed under the second Trump administration, according to Lambek. While those under ICE supervision like Bernardo were once monitored through email or telephonic check ins, ICE is now ordering more in person appointments. Lambek said this increases stress for migrants, who know that visiting an ICE office could result in detention and deportation.

State leaders have supported Bernardo’s case for more than two years, including a 2023 letter of support by 67 state legislators, and Stokes said the congressional delegation has assisted his office in getting information from ICE about other migrant deportation cases. But Vermont officials could do more to support migrant workers who live in the state, he said.

De La Cruz and Perez had robust community support from Migrant Justice and were able to quickly get in touch with Stokes to start working on their petitions to remain in the state, but that type of support often requires knowing attorneys, like Stokes, exist.

“A lot of other folks who are detained in the state aren’t that lucky,” said Stokes, who can’t find clients to represent unless they get in touch with him.

“There are many other ICE detainees in the same facilities that I’m in that haven’t contacted me that I don’t think anyone knows are there and they don’t know who to call,” Stokes said. 

There could be a better effort to provide intakes for ICE detainees and triage their individual situations, along with pushing for universal representation in immigration proceedings, he said. Vermont has a small community of legal support for immigrants, and he said it was important for the state to fund that work in a meaningful way.

But for detainees who are well-connected, rallies can help support those like Bernado facing stressful situations. 

“I felt a lot of nerves going in, but hearing the chants of ‘Si Se Puede’ gave me strength and made me think that everything was going to turn out okay,” Bernardo said while Lambek translated. “It’s nice to know that there are still good people in this world, people who are out here supporting our community.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Migrant leader heads home after hundreds rally at her ICE appointment.

Rossy Alfaro stood in front of the Vermont Statehouse on Monday evening and, in a voice choked with emotion, told hundreds of onlookers about the despair and rage she felt since immigration authorities detained her daughter and partner two days earlier. 

“It is an injustice that they have been taken from me and it has shattered my heart into a million pieces,” said Alfaro, who is also spokesperson for Migrant Justice, a Burlington-based advocacy organization for migrant workers. “We want them back with us because no one should have to feel the pain that I am feeling now.” 

On Saturday morning, her partner, 29-year-old Jose Ignacio De La Cruz, known as Nacho, and her daughter, 18-year-old Heidi Perez, drove to farms in Franklin County to deliver food, according to Will Lambek, a spokesperson for Migrant Justice.

“They were bringing food to members of their community who didn’t want to put themselves at risk leaving the farm to drive the streets and backroads of this state,” said Lambek. Many farm workers rely on people to bring them food in order not to leave their farms, he said in an interview earlier that evening.

They were driving home to Chittenden County on VT Route 105 in Richford when they were pulled over by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers. De La Cruz asked why they were pulled over and when the agent didn’t provide a reason, they exercised their right to remain silent, Lambek said Monday. 

Within 10 minutes of stopping them, around 12:30 p.m., officers shattered the glass of the driver’s seat window, opened the door, and forcibly detained them, according to Lambek. 

Ryan Brissette, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson, said the arrest near the U.S.–Canada border stemmed from “suspicious border activity.” He did not clarify what the suspicious activity was by the time of publication.

“The vehicle’s occupants refused to answer the agents’ questions, would not roll down the vehicle’s windows, and refused to comply with the agents’ lawful orders,” Brissette wrote in an email Tuesday. “Agents were forced to break a window to remove both occupants.”

They were brought to Richford Station and processed. De La Cruz is currently held in the Northwest State Correctional Facility in Swanton and Perez is being held at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington, according to the state prisoner locator. 

Brissette said it was determined that both De La Cruz and Perez were citizens of Mexico and did not have a legal immigration status in the U.S., and therefore remained in custody pending removal proceedings.

“Border Patrol will continue to enforce the law,” Brissette wrote. “Those illegally present in the United States will be apprehended and will face consequences.” 

Marita Canedo, a Migrant Justice spokesperson, was on the phone with De La Cruz when he was arrested, she said at the rally Monday night. 

“Nacho did everything that he knew to defend his rights,” Canedo said. Under every administration, she said, the treatment of immigrants is the same. “They want to put us in fear. They want to hide us,” she said. 

Both De La Cruz and Perez are prominent leaders within Migrant Justice.

De La Cruz served on the Coordinating Committee, the principal leadership body of the advocacy organization. He was a leader in the Milk With Dignity campaign, a program demanding fair working conditions for dairy workers, after spending years working in the dairy industry, sleeping on wooden pallets and on tractors, according to friends and co-workers who spoke at the rally. His work has been central to immigrant rights legislation that passed through the Vermont Legislature, according to Migrant Justice, including a new law increasing housing access for immigrant families that was signed by Gov. Phil Scott on Thursday.

He now works as a worker-owner at New Frameworks, a Vermont-based sustainable construction company. 

Perez was a frequent attendee at migrant rallies and marches and used her voice in the legislature to push for a 2024 law that ensures all students, regardless of immigration status, could access in-state tuition and need-based financial aid. She graduated from Milton High School a week before she was detained. She planned to attend Vermont State University in the fall, using the expanded opportunities and protections from the law she helped pass. 

Pete Wyndorf, a teacher at Milton High School, said he and his colleagues strongly condemned her arrest, which they called “a kidnapping of a community member and the unjust treatment of individuals who have every right to be here.” 

De La Cruz and Perez filed petitions in federal district court, which accepted jurisdiction of their case, and issued temporary restraining orders against the government to prevent their transfer out of Vermont, Lambek said Monday. 

“They’re asking for the judge to grant their release because of the unconstitutional nature of the detention,” Lambek said. “We certainly believe they have a strong claim and that that claim should prevail.” 

Arrests of migrant residents have ramped up since President Donald Trump took office in January, including detainment of nine farm workers in April and the deportation of four. In May, four landscape workers and ten construction workers were also detained by Border Patrol agents in northern Vermont.

Rebecca Sheppard, a Montpelier resident retired from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, was among the ralliers on Monday. 

“I’m worried about their safety, and I think they have the right to be here,” Sheppard said. She’d attended the No Kings Rally at the Statehouse Saturday in the capital city, the day De La Cruz and Perez were arrested.

The Saturday rally drew more than 1,000 people to the Statehouse, while 16,000 more showed up at the Burlington waterfront. They were part of more than 40 events held across Vermont to protest the Trump administration’s immigration policies, budget cuts, assault on medical rights, and protect democracy as President Trump held a military parade in Washington, D.C. on his 79th birthday.

This spring, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials boosted arrests through workplace raids in cities like Los Angeles that led to anti-ICE protests. In response, the Trump administration deployed U.S. Marines to one of the country’s biggest cities and commandeered the California National Guard. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is challenging the takeover in federal court. 

The Trump administration has set a goal for immigration arrests at 3,000 per day, according to Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. Over the past week, arrests by immigration officials shot up to 2,000 a day, detaining workers at restaurants, factories, farms, and other businesses like Home Depot. 

Pushback from industry leaders led President Trump to abruptly pause raids this weekend, according to The New York Times, until Sunday night, when he again called on ICE to increase mass deportations in Democrat-led cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the administration’s plan to overhaul the federal budget including massive cuts to social services like Medicaid, would also increase immigration enforcement. Reconciliation provisions under the bill include funding one million annual migrant removals, hiring 10,000 new ICE personnel, and creating centers to detain at least 100,000 people per day. The bill would also create an asylum application fee. Instead of applying for free, individuals would need to pay $1,000. 

In Montpelier, the personal impact of these policies could be seen as 10-year-old Regina, a friend of Perez, struggled to speak through her tears.

“Heidi is my friend, she is an inspiration to me,” said Regina, whose last name was withheld by organizers because she is a minor. “I hope one day I can grow up to be a fighter for rights like her.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermonters rally to demand the release of 2 migrant leaders.

Hundreds of people gathered under grey skies in Burlington’s City Hall Park Tuesday to rally against deportations of immigrants in their state and across the country that have ramped up under the Trump administration. 

Along with those in dozens of cities across the U.S., the demonstrators stood in solidarity with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Los Angeles where the Trump administration deployed 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines this week, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom called unlawful. 

“Although Vermont is a small state, especially in comparison with California, we are not so different,” Cristian Santos, a construction worker and former dairy worker, said Tuesday night. He spoke on behalf of Migrant Justice, a Vermont-based advocacy organization for migrant rights. Rachel Elliott, also with Migrant Justice, translated his words from Spanish to English for the crowd. 

“Here in Vermont, ICE has been attacking our communities and taking away our friends and our family and our neighbors,” Santos said. 

In April, nine migrant farm workers were detained by U.S Customs and Border Protection and turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In May, four landscape workers and 10 construction workers were detained by immigration officials in northern Vermont. 

“Is being an immigrant a crime?” Santos said.

“No,” the crowd shouted back. 

Federal officials claimed the troop deployment in Los Angeles was in response to protests against workplace raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials that happened over the weekend. But city and state officials, along with the Los Angeles Police Department maintained that the protests were peaceful and under control by state officials. At least two people detained in those raids have already been deported, according to The New York Times.

“What they’re doing in Los Angeles is preparation for what they want to do to all of us,” Ashley Smith, a book editor in Burlington who was representing the Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation, told the crowd. He, along with about a dozen others in the crowd, all waved Palestinian flags. 

“I got drawn into the whole situation in Los Angeles,” said Andrea Rogers, a retired director for The Flynn venue in Burlington who participated in the rally. They held a sign that said “Put Trump on ICE,” and said they came to the rally to protest the abuse of undocumented immigrants. 

“It’s a Trump-ed up situation,” added their friend, Meg Pond, a retired worker in affordable housing who lives in Shelburne. Pond said they came to the rally to stand with immigrants. 

The protest, where more than half a dozen speakers denounced ICE, was coordinated by Vermont-based advocacy groups including the Vermont Party for Socialism & Liberation, Migrant Justice, Green Mountain Democratic Socialists of America, Vermonters United, and Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation, according to a social media post. 

Speakers emphasized the interconnection between immigrant rights and Palestinian rights, along with the rights of incarcerated people and workers rights. Nikhil Goyal, a sociologist who studies poverty and incarceration at the University of Vermont, told the crowd that President Trump was “waging a campaign of terror.” Along with calling for ICE out of Vermont, Goyal reminded rally-goers that cuts under the Trump administration’s budget proposal would limit access to medical and food benefits like Medicaid and SNAP. 

Migrant Justice led the crowd out of City Hall Park and up Church Street. For nearly an hour the demonstrators filled the city’s pedestrian blocks, marching and chanting while onlookers sitting outside at cafes clapped and cheered them on. When they ended in front of City Hall just before 8:00 p.m., the crowd was encouraged to attend another rally called No Kings Day that will be held on Saturday at 10:00 a.m. at Waterfront Park.

Just before the rally began, a federal judge declined Newsom’s emergency motion filed Tuesday to block further militarization of the city from the Trump administration and the Department of Defense. After the rally, Mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass imposed an 8 p.m. curfew on a section of the city’s downtown core.

“Donald Trump is behaving like a tyrant, not a President,” Newsom said in a media release about the request for a restraining order. He said the federal government had turned the military against American citizens.

On Monday, California sued the Trump administration over the unlawful deployment of troops in the city. Under federal law, states have to request National Guard troops, but Trump sent troops that had not been requested by California officials. 

“How can it be that we have a criminal in the White House who has more than 34 charges against him, and somehow we who come to this country to work hard and to make our lives better and to make a better life for our family, how are we the criminals?” Santos asked. 

Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Rachel Elliott’s name.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hundreds gather in Burlington to protest ICE raids.

When Bob Champagne-Willis opened his email in late May, he was shocked to see the valuation of the highest taxed property in his tiny town of Maidstone cut by more than half.

“I’m very frustrated by this whole process,” said Champagne-Willis, a lister and treasurer in Essex County. “We’re the poorest county, and all of a sudden everyone’s tax bill went up a bit,” because at least in his town, the tax on the local electric provider went down. 

In Vermont, towns appraise their property values themselves through listers like Champagne-Willis who are typically elected, contracted or employed by the town. Those properties can include homes, garages, businesses, farms and utilities. This year, the valuation of Maidstone’s electric utility, the Vermont Electric Cooperative, dropped by about 55 percent. The utility’s 2024 valuation of over $1.6 million shrunk to $724,800 in 2025, according to an email from the state tax department. 

Champagne-Willis estimated the tax increase for his municipality would be about $1,900 split among about 365 tax bills that account for all the taxed parcels in the town. He was one of many town listers who began emailing each other and sharing their changed values.

“There may not be a big mystery, there may be an explanation,” said Deborah Fillion, one of three elected listers in East Montpelier in Washington County. She confirmed her own town’s utility valuation for Green Mountain Power and Washington Electric Cooperative, before a fair market adjustment, dropped almost 30%, from about $6.1 million to $4.3 million.  “We’re just waiting to find out what that explanation is, but there’s quite a bit of talk among listers,” she said.

Utility valuations fluctuated in towns across the state last month as the tax department readjusted the valuation of nearly 20 utilities to better match national standards. Those changes were part of a larger overhaul pushed forward by the House Committee on Ways and Means to build a more consistent valuation system across sectors, according to Rep. Emily Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro, the committee’s chair. 

Over the past five years, her committee has been working with the state tax department to build more consistent valuations, including helping towns appraise unusual properties like ski resorts or dams. Last year, the state began tackling electric utilities.

“The overall goal is for us to have fair and consistent grand lists throughout the state to support the work of municipalities,” Kornheiser said. “We want municipalities to understand that the state has their back when it comes to property valuations.”

But some listers remained confused as they adjusted to the new numbers. George Blakeslee, the town clerk and chair of the lister board in Guildhall, also in Essex County, said the value of property owned by the two utilities in town, Green Mountain Power and Vermont Electric Cooperative, saw decreases of 60% and 41%, respectively. 

“Something strange is happening,” Blakeslee said. “That’s a lot of depreciation in one year.” 

On Monday, the listers were among more than 90 people who joined a webinar hosted by the Division of Property Valuation and Review within the tax department. The meeting was led by the division’s director, Jill Remick, who’d spent the previous week fielding calls and questions from people across Vermont’s more than 250 towns who were confused about the changes. 

Those changes aimed at solving issues that had plagued tax experts like Remick for years. For the last two decades, the state’s valuation was based on the utility providing an inventory of its properties and the state publishing those values, according to Remick. 

“But assessing town by town is not how utility valuation should work,” Remick said. 

Utilities are a unit, and they’re meant to be appraised as a unit. The way the state evaluated utilities for taxation was outdated and not up to national standards, so her department contracted with a utility valuation expert, Brian Fogg. He and his team created a new method that calculated a utility’s total value and then redistributed that value across Vermont’s municipalities roughly based on the number of electric customers in each town.

That new method increased taxes utilities pay statewide by about 7%, according to Remick. 

“Utilities will be paying a little more overall,” Remick said. But while some towns’ utility valuations went up, others, including small towns like Maidstone and Guildhall, went down.

“Vermont has such tiny municipalities that some of these towns that are very rural may not have as many customers,” Remick said, noting a smaller customer base could lower their values. 

Remick said the response her division had been getting from towns was tough because the division rolled out the new method at the same time the state Legislature began requiring towns to adopt those new values.

“Towns are like, I have this new value, and now I don’t have time to do something about it,” Remick said. “I understand it feels scary.” 

The state has traditionally provided town-by-town valuations for utilities, factoring in the distribution systems, like the number of transmission lines or substations in a given community. Then, the town could choose whether to adopt the state’s assessment. 

Those values get added to a grand list that exists in every Vermont town. That list compiles all the properties that are taxable for the state’s education fund and the town’s municipal fund. Along with personal property like houses and farms are properties with utility infrastructure. Those utilities include Green Mountain Power, Vermont Electric Cooperative and about 15 others. 

Every year, unless tragedy strikes like a house or a barn burning down, each town expects their grand list to grow as people build more homes, sheds and garages. This is one the first times towns could see those lists significantly reduced, according to listers.

After the Monday meeting, Champagne-Willis said in an email that he came away with more questions. He worried that the per-customer valuation hurt small rural communities like his own. 

“I did learn that the valuation is a complex animal,” he wrote, “but [I’m] discouraged that the process was so poorly rolled out.”

Remick said she could see the issue resurfacing in future legislative sessions.

Correction: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the number and type of utilities in Vermont.

Read the story on VTDigger here: New process for taxing utilities prompts confusion in some towns.

Smoke from Canadian wildfires continued to obscure Vermont skies on Friday as the Department of Environmental Conservation issued another air quality alert for the northwest portion of the state. The alert, which includes the counties of Chittenden, Franklin and Grand Isle, is set to end at midnight. 

An expanded alert will be issued by the agency Saturday, according to the National Weather Service office in Burlington. The air quality alert will last from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. and cover the counties of Caledonia, Chitteden, Essex, Franklin, Grand Isle, Lamoille, Orleans and Washington. 

“It’s a moderate level of pollutants, so it’s not going to affect everybody, but it’s mainly for sensitive groups like people with heart or lung disease, older adults, and children,” said Peter Banacos, science and operations officer at the National Weather Service’s office in Burlington. While rain is helping to drown out the particulates, smoke that’s hovering over the St. Lawrence Valley could move into northern Vermont over the weekend, according to Banacos.

Those tiny particles within the smoke, known as fine particulate matter or PM 2.5, can get trapped in people’s lungs before entering their bloodstream, causing possible health problems. The wildfire smoke brings elevated concentrations of those particles that can be unhealthy for sensitive groups like older adults and children, pregnant people, outdoor workers and people living outside.

People with asthma should keep their relief medicine nearby, and if residents experience scratchy eyes or throat, a headache or coughing, they’re encouraged to move indoors, according to a media release from the Department of Environmental Conservation on Friday.

On Friday afternoon, the air quality for much of the state was good, and residents could enjoy outdoor activities. But in Burlington and St. Albans, the Environmental Protection Agency’s fire and smoke map indicated that the levels of PM 2.5 were above 100 on the air quality index, meaning the air was unhealthy for those sensitive groups.

The smoke has migrated from more than 200 wildfires churning through Canada, with six new fires starting Friday. Canada faces an especially severe and early start to its fire season, as more severe wildfires become more common under climate change, which is primarily driven by the burning of fossil fuels. While 69 fires are burning in British Columbia, more than 100 have consumed the country’s less fire-prone prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

“With these wildfires so far removed from Vermont, we’re not expecting real significant issues,” Banacos said. He recalled worse conditions in 2022, when wildfires raging in Quebec brought thick, low-level smoke to Vermont that reduced visibility and increased air quality issues. “If we get fires that are closer, that could change,” Banacos said.

The worst effects are across the Great Lakes, where smoke has settled over major cities like Detroit and Toronto, but unhealthy air has traveled as far south as Florida this week.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Wildfire smoke brings air quality alert to northwest Vermont.

In December 2019, state agriculture investigators observed manure from Iraburg’s Nelson Farms, a dairy in the Northeast Kingdom, running into a local waterway. 

The staff from Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets were required under a 2017 interagency agreement to report the runoff to Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources immediately. But they failed to do so until four months later, according to a petition filed to federal officials by environmental advocates. 

This misstep wasn’t uncommon. A month earlier, the agricultural agency had inspected the McKnight Farm in East Montpelier and found agricultural wastes flowing through a barnyard and entering surface water, but didn’t refer the matter for over a month.

The mistakes are part of a broader problem in Vermont, state environmental advocates say, in which a conflict between the agencies that govern natural resources and agriculture has thwarted a regulatory system that’s required under the federal Clean Water Act. Since January, they have urged the Legislature to step in. 

“I feel strongly that this is not a choice,” Elena Mihaly, vice president for the Vermont chapter of the Conservation Law Foundation, said in a legislative committee hearing on May 15. “We’ve gone too long trusting that this system is working and it is not.”

Last summer, the federal Environmental Protection Agency agreed that the state has been violating the law.

The only way to come into compliance, the EPA told the Agency of Natural Resources, would be to put the state environmental agency in charge of inspecting farms and issuing permits related to water quality — dramatically shrinking the agriculture agency’s role. 

This legislative session, a debate about how to fix the system has been playing out in Montpelier. A bill, S.124, which cleared the Vermont Legislature on Friday and is headed to Gov. Phil Scott’s desk would give the Agency of Natural Resources a greater role. 

If the bill becomes law, the agency will be authorized to hire three new staff members who would lead some farm investigations. The agency would also be tasked with undertaking a new permitting program to align with federal law and with forming a stakeholder group to work on water quality regulations that includes environmentalists and farmers. The leadership of both of the state agencies have backed the bill.

But critics say this solution may not move the needle. Beyond these changes, the bill looks much like the ghost of regulations past: by maintaining a familiar split between agencies, it could also amount to maintaining the status quo. 

“We’re in the middle of a long-term process to build a better regulatory program,” said Scott Sanderson, director of Conservation Law Foundation’s farm and food initiative, in a statement. “This bill takes important first steps and creates a needed stakeholder process, but it doesn’t confront what EPA identified as a root cause of Vermont’s broken system: the division of jurisdiction over agricultural water pollution between the Agency of Natural Resources and the Agency of Agriculture.” 

‘Zero is unique’

Under federal law, farms are allowed to  send runoff into local waterways only if the farm is monitored under a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO, permit. 

Vermont has more than 140 medium and large animal operations that could be CAFOs, defined as where animals have been stabled or confined for at least 45 days, which includes most  dairy farms. Another 1,000 small farms are potential CAFOs and need to be monitored for unpermitted waste discharge, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

For more than half a century, the Environmental Protection Agency has delegated the authority for ensuring that farms, waste systems and waterways comply with the federal Clean Water Act to the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources. In a small state, Vermont’s authority to administer the 1974 federal law meant it could staff its state agencies with experts more capable of managing rural places than federal officials traveling in from outside regions, according to Julie Moore, secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources.

The Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets oversees state monitoring of water quality on farms. 

The CAFO program is the natural resource agency’s vehicle for that federal regulation, but the state has never issued a single CAFO permit.

This fact, and the corroborating examples, became the foundation of a 2022 petition filed by the Conservation Law Foundation, along with the Vermont Natural Resources Council and Lake Champlain Committee, that claimed Vermont was polluting its waterways in violation of the Clean Water Act. 

The Environmental Protection Agency studied the state for the following two years, launching its own investigation into Vermont farms and the two agencies in charge of monitoring them. 

In the EPA’s 2024 response to the petition, they wrote that the failure to implement this law was caused by “the division of Vermont’s agricultural water quality program between ANR and AAFM, which has resulted in ANR’s nonperformance of delegated duties,” along with insufficient resources given to ANR to administer the federal program. 

If the agency didn’t make significant changes, the state’s authority to implement the Clean Water Act would be revoked and the federal government would take over, according to the EPA’s 2024 letter in response to the petition.

EPA staff conducted 10 on-farm investigations and found several farms “had evidence of ongoing or recent discharges that appear unaddressed.” 

EPA staff also looked at 113 complaints about discharge received by either agency between February 2021 and January 2023. Many complaints described discharges to surface waters, but almost a quarter of these complaints were unresolved, and about 45% were concluded without a violation notice from ANR, according to the EPA. Only 7% were noted as Clean Water Act violations, and even then, the farm was allowed to correct the violation without a penalty or CAFO permit requirement.

“Us issuing zero is unique,” said Moore of the lack of CAFO permits in the state. But even with a better system, still only a small subset of farms would likely be required to obtain a CAFO permit. In neighboring states like New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, a vast majority of farms are not regulated as CAFOs, Moore said.

While the agriculture agency has no authority to enforce the law, it has nine staff at least partially responsible for investigating farms for pollution to surface water, known as discharges, while the natural resources agency only has two. Because of their limited staffing capacity, ANR has long relied on agriculture officials to report discharges back to them.

“If we’re going to have a robust CAFO program, we don’t have enough capacity currently,” Moore said. By the end of 2026, ANR will have to report back to EPA on what they think they’ll require in staffing, according to their corrective action plan. 

While the EPA gave four options to remedy the problem, the federal agency said the only viable option that would allow the state to stay in charge of enforcement was “consolidated agricultural regulatory authority with ANR,” meaning ANR should be the lead agency monitoring water quality on farms.

The Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets declined an interview request for Secretary Anson Tebbetts and instead sent a comment over email.

“The Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets is working closely with the Agency of Natural Resources to address the issues raised by the EPA,” wrote Scott Waterman, director of communications for AAFM. “We are proud of the work of our Vermont farmers who are doing the hard work to improve our environment. That work will continue today and well into the future.”

Source of pollution matters

The split between the two agencies goes back to the split between how Vermont monitors water quality, distinguishing between two kinds of sources of pollution: nonpoint and point sources. Nonpoint pollution is diffuse, like runoff from rain or snow flowing over land, while point source pollution comes from a singular and identifiable source, like a pipe or ditch. 

For decades, Vermont has regulated farms with this separation in source pollution. Nonpoint sources are regulated by the state’s agricultural agency, while point sources are meant to be regulated by ANR.

CAFOs are considered point sources due to the amount of waste they produce and how that waste is stored, in lagoons or spread as fertilizer over farm fields. When manure or waste is discharged into a waterway, the CAFO needs a permit. 

In the last five years, the state Agency of Agriculture has reported 170 potential discharges to ANR, according to the agriculture agency’s attorney, Steve Collier. But neither agency knows how many of those were investigated, nor how many showed evidence of an actual discharge, according to attorneys for both agencies who testified in front of the House Environment Committee in May.

Farmers have long worked with the agricultural agency and have developed trust that its officials are working to protect their interests as agriculture faces increasing challenges from global economic rifts and climate change. 

They’re not as used to working with ANR, largely because Vermont’s CAFO program is underfunded and understaffed, meaning farmers have interacted less frequently with ANR than they might have under a more robust program, according to Moore.

“I anticipate there are some farms that would require CAFO permits,” Moore said. “But part of our challenge as we sit here today is that we don’t know what we don’t know as far as the number of farms.”

Because no permits have been issued before, implementing such a system has struck a nerve in the farming community.

“It doesn’t exist, but people worry about the worst version of it,” Moore said. “Most Vermonters prefer not to be regulated.”

Collier told lawmakers in May that it wasn’t a victory for the state to issue a CAFO permit. “It’s a victory to have farms not discharging,” Collier said.

But as the 2022 petition and the EPA response showed, farms are discharging, and a CAFO permit is meant to predate a discharge. Without the permit, that discharge is illegal under the Clean Water Act. Therefore a CAFO permit could be a protective measure for farmers, but only if they’re issued.

“We all agree that (the agency of) agriculture’s program is pushing farms to achieve a no discharge standard, so the question is what happens when they don’t, and if they need time to come into compliance,” Moore said.

Caroline Sherman-Gordon, the legislative director for Rural Vermont, a group that advocates for small farmers, said farmers would adhere to CAFO permitting if necessary: “They’ll bite into the sour apple,” she said.

’Dysfunctional and broken’

This isn’t the first time Vermont’s approach to monitoring water quality on farms has been put under a microscope.

Challenges can be traced back to 2008, when the Vermont Law School Environmental and Natural Resources Clinic filed a petition  that resulted in a 2013 corrective action plan. Vermont agreed to improve its approach to farms under the requirements of the Clean Water Act.

But by 2016, both agencies were attending a bureaucratic version of couples counseling. The  Center for Achievement in Public Service began hosting a series of meetings and retreats for staff members. Early in that process, the center noted the two agencies had divergent missions and cultures and a lack of a shared vision. It noted a history of errors, exclusions, misunderstandings and misinterpretations that “was long and unaddressed,” according to details in the 2022 petition.

After a retreat a month later, the center concluded that the Agency of Agriculture focused on promoting farms and supporting people, the other focused on policy and enforcement. When issues arose, so did groupthink: each agency “tended to rely on assumptions about the other group’s motivation,” according to the center.

For example, when an ANR officer expressed frustration that an agricultural officer had failed to contact him about a point source discharge in a timely manner, after some back and forth the ANR officer emailed, “It seems pointless to discuss these details anymore when we are both working within such a confusing and highly flawed system.”

More emails in 2019 showed that the agricultural agency had called ANR’s work “a waste of taxpayer dollars,” in an email quoted in the petition.

Moore wrote in an email to agricultural secretary Tebbetts: “The assertions that our work is either poorly conceived or nefarious makes [it] extremely difficult to engage constructively and needs to stop.”

A year later, Moore wrote a memo in response to the governor’s call to improve efficiency across state agencies. She said the dual oversight was fact-intensive, time-consuming, and reduced clarity for the farming community. She proposed transferring agricultural staff responsible for inspections under the Clean Water Act to ANR to create a single program because the division had “led to tension and conflict between the agencies, regulatory uncertainty for farmers, and more time-consuming outcomes for water quality resulting in more pollution.” She suggested it would save two inspector positions and an estimated $350,000.

In an email to Secretary of Administration Susanne Young, she called the challenges that existed between the agencies not only institutional and statutory but “at times, even personal.”

The Vermont Agency of Administration declined to act on Moore’s suggestion.

“It’s really easy to write it in a memo and much more challenging to implement as it involves real humans and changing where they work and who they work for,” Moore said of the memo five years later. “It raised concerns in the agricultural community that they don’t have the same relationship with ANR and therefore we haven’t built trust in that community yet.”

But by 2022, the petition was filed by three environmental organizations to the EPA alleging that the relationship was “dysfunctional and broken.”

“All Vermonters are harmed by AAFM’s stubborn rivalry with ANR, including farmers,” the petitioners wrote.

The EPA report noted that for over 15 years, Vermont has had “ample time and opportunity to cure longstanding program deficiencies” but failed to do so. The EPA concluded that consolidating the authority to implement the agricultural water quality program into ANR “is the only workable solution” to avoid losing the state’s ability to oversee the Clean Water Act.

‘This is crazy’

Early in the current legislative session, a different bill, H.146 — endorsed by the environmental organizations that filed the 2022 petition — suggested an easy answer: entirely transition the state’s water quality regulation and enforcement to ANR and require all large and some medium farms to obtain federal permits. That bill never left committee.

Sherman-Gordon, the legislative director for Rural Vermont, said her organization opposed the original House bill.

“What we often hear is that if farmers have to deal with ANR, then they feel less heard and less seen,” Sherman-Gordon said. 

She said farmers feel historically underrepresented in the legislature, and she doesn’t feel that farmers were appropriately consulted or invited to testify on H.146. “The issue is that ANR hasn’t been doing the job they’ve been told to do, and instead of holding them accountable, the discourse is can we take away jurisdiction without hearing from farmers.”

Instead, by mid-May, the compromise bill, S.124, was being discussed in the House Environment Committee as members tried to determine whether to add language that could make the bill more stringent. 

On May 21, when the committee was voting on that amendment, Collier, with the state’s agriculture agency, interrupted the meeting with a raised hand. In a previous meeting, he’d told the committee that the Agricultural Agency felt the regulatory work was getting done. He argued that the only reason they were discussing this issue was because “the advocates filed a petition and they want ANR to do all the work.”

“We have some of the most restrictive water quality regulations in the country so the question is not about whether ANR should do more, it’s whether anyone should do more,” Collier told the committee on May 21.

“That’s crazy,” said committee chair Amy Sheldon, D-Middlebury, clearly frustrated. 

“We’ve been confronted with a petition that has been years in the making. We have water quality issues, staff are under stress. We need to be engaged in this and empowering the agency to take responsibility,” Sheldon said. “Under the current political regime, ANR hasn’t taken responsibility, and we’re saying they need to take responsibility.”

Rep. Rob North, R-Ferrisburgh, encouraged his fellow committee members to “take a breath.” 

“There’s been a fair amount of animosity pointed towards these two departments that are trying to work together,” said Rep. Christopher Pritchard, R-Pawlet. He claimed that the advocates who wrote the petition had “no skin in the game” and wouldn’t have to deal with the repercussions of the amended bill.

“From the point of view of the advocates, the skin in the game we all have is that if we want to have better water quality in our state, this is how to go about it,” Rep. Larry Satcowitz, D-Randolph, said in response.

While the EPA’s most recent letter supported S. 124, it acknowledged that it would likely require more legislation in the future. 

Moore said she expected more information from the federal agency in the coming weeks. ANR plans to do 10 farm inspections this summer and take the lead on inspections required on medium and large farms next year under its revised corrective action plan with the EPA. 

If the EPA approves of the legislation, ANR will draft a new document that will outline the agreement between the dual agencies by September 1. That document could give ANR new authorities related to inspections and establish a more thorough stakeholder process to help the agencies coexist and reconcile their responsibilities.

In the background is an unsettling federal landscape under President Donald Trump’s administration. In committee meetings, legislators have wondered about including language from the federal Clean Water Act into state law. That way, if the federal law is overturned or changed, the state law will remain strong.

“There’s real value in having people on the ground doing work that are familiar with the specifics of Vermont and our rural nature and the small, small size of many of our systems,” Moore said. “A lot of that would be lost if the programs were returned to EPA.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont is violating the federal Clean Water Act. Will a new state legal framework for regulating farm runoff help?.

A Vermont migrant farmworker, one of nine who were detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in April, has been released on bond, while two others had their bond denied during hearings on Thursday.

Jose Edilberto Molina-Aguilar’s $10,000 bond will be paid by Vermont Freedom Fund, an independent nonprofit that Migrant Justice helped set up during the first Trump administration, according to Will Lambek, a spokesperson at Migrant Justice, an advocacy organization for migrant rights.

Meanwhile, Meredith Tyrakoski, a judge in San Antonio Immigration Court, denied bond motions for both Jesus Mendez Hernandez and Adrian Zunun-Joachin, according to Lambek.

All three are being held at the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center in Texas. 

Diblaim Maximo Sargento-Morales — who was also detained last month while working for Vermont’s largest dairy — was released on bond from the same processing center a week ago. He arrived at the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport over the weekend in an orange T-shirt and camouflage pants.

“Thank you for all the support you’ve shown me and my coworkers,” Sargento-Morales told a group of supporters in Spanish, according to a social media post by Migrant Justice. Sargento-Morales’ bond was set at $1,500, the lowest amount possible by law.

Four of the detained farmworkers — Juan Javier Rodriguez-Gomez, Luis Enrique Gomez Aguilar, Urillas Sargento and Dani Alvarez-Perez — have already been deported to Mexico by ICE without a hearing or an opportunity to request asylum. They were deported from a facility in Louisiana under “expedited removal” procedures, according to Brett Stokes, their attorney at the Center for Justice Reform at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. 

In the past, that authority has only applied to people seeking entry through a checkpoint or found crossing the border, but under the second Trump administration, it’s been used for people who currently live in the U.S. and don’t fall within the typical scope of that deportation process.

Such removals are almost impossible to challenge, according to Stokes.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection detained eight farmworkers on April 21. They were working on Pleasant Valley Farms, a dairy in northern Vermont, just a few miles from the Canadian border. The detainment has been described by advocates as the largest single immigration arrest of farmworkers in recent Vermont history.

Arbey Lopez-Lopez, who was employed at Pleasant Valley Farms for at least five years according to his attorney, was arrested almost two weeks earlier at an intersection patrolled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. He was held in immigration detention for 42 days, primarily at FCI Berlin, a federal prison in New Hampshire, before he was released on a $3,000 bond by an immigration judge on Monday.

He was transferred to New England’s Immigration and Customs and Enforcement headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts, on Thursday, where advocates from Migrant Justice drove to pick him up. 

“I presented to the judge that if this guy isn’t released, his 5-year-old child is going to become destitute because his housing is tied up with his employment,” Lopez-Lopez’s attorney Enrique Mesa said on Thursday.

Mesa said he plans to help Lopez-Lopez apply for a work permit, and he’ll ask U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services to cancel his removal proceedings, arguing that he is the sole financial support for his daughter.

Like the other eight migrant workers, Lopez-Lopez is originally from Mexico. He has lived in Vermont since 2006. The government opted to close previous removal proceedings for Lopez-Lopez in 2018, said Mesa, adding: “It really has me scratching my head on why the government decided to detain him again.”

Mesa said it was apparent at the bond hearing on Monday that Border Patrol officers “were stalking immigrants at a certain intersection.” As a member of Migrant Justice, Mesa said Lopez-Lopez knew his rights, but patrol agents told him he had an order of deportation and threatened to break down the window of his vehicle if he didn’t comply and go with them. Lopez-Lopez then left the vehicle and was detained, according to Mesa. He had gone to pick up groceries which he was delivering back to his co-workers at the farm.

“I find it very irritating that people can’t practice their normal routines and their normal lives without thinking ICE is going to be there harassing them,” Mesa said. “I understand them going after criminals but this guy (Lopez-Lopez) was going to get his groceries.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Another detained migrant farmworker in Vermont has been released on bond.

A fourth Vermont farmworker, out of the nine detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection last month, was deported to Mexico this week, according to Burlington-based advocacy group Migrant Justice. 

Juan Javier Rodriguez-Gomez, 41, could not be found in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement database on Thursday morning.

“We’ll know more once he makes contact on his arrival to Mexico,” Will Lambek, spokesperson for Migrant Justice, wrote in an email. 

Five migrant farm workers remain in ICE custody, including four who were transferred to a detention facility in Texas last week. A Massachusetts immigration court granted one of them release on bail Thursday morning.

The deported worker, Rodriguez-Gomez, was previously held at the Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana. In early May, three other farmworkers were deported from this facility, all under the same “expedited removal” procedure, according to a Thursday press release from Migrant Justice. Brett Stokes, attorney for the Center for Justice Reform at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, has said that type of deportation is almost impossible to challenge.

The four deported men were among eight detained on April 21 at Pleasant Valley Farms, Vermont’s largest dairy, located a few miles from the Canadian border. Another farmworker, Arbey Lopez-Lopez, 36, was previously detained on the road to the farm while delivering groceries to workers almost two weeks earlier.

Diblaim Maximo Sargento-Morales, a 30-year-old known as Max, could return to his home in Vermont as early as Thursday, according to Lambek. Vermont Freedom Bail Fund, an organization that raises funds to support migrant detainees, plans to pay for his bond release. The $1,500 bond is the lowest possible amount, according to Migrant Justice. 

Supporters are still determining how to pay for his flight, Lambek said, adding that Sargento-Morales will remain in Vermont while ICE officials push forward a case to deport him to Mexico.

The geography of these remaining cases is complex. 

Sargento-Morales was one of four farmworkers transferred to the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center in Karnes City, Texas, on May 8. 

But his bond hearing happened at an immigration court in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, which has jurisdiction over the prison in Vermont, where he was held on May 7 when he applied for bond. The judge presiding over his case determined that her court still had jurisdiction over him while in Texas.

But a different judge considering a second case in the same immigration court on Thursday  came to a different conclusion. In the case of Jose Edilberto Molina-Aguilar, 37, Judge Natalie Smith determined her court did not have jurisdiction over him after he was transferred to Texas. Stokes, his attorney, objected, but the judge upheld her opinion. Stokes must now file a bond motion with the Texas immigration court for Molina-Aguilar.

“Justice delayed is justice denied,” Stokes said in a statement. He called Smith’s decision “an arbitrary and incorrect interpretation.” 

Lopez-Lopez, who is being detained in New Hampshire, had his hearing postponed. Smith said since she received materials related to Lopez-Lopez’s bond motion only on Wednesday, she was not prepared to reach a decision. She rescheduled the hearing for Monday at 1:30 p.m.

“What happened today was procedural,” Lopez-Lopez’s attorney, Enrique Mesa, said in a statement. “We will return to court to continue the fight to reunite Arbey with his 5-year-old daughter and the community.”

None of the three detainees who had hearings scheduled Thursday have formally applied for asylum, according to Lambek.

Materials presented in the bond hearings included evidence that supports the farmworkers’ ties to their community and included a letter from almost 100 state elected officials, including Vermont’s lieutenant governor, the speaker of the House, and the Senate majority and minority leaders. The letter, dated May 7, was written in support of all nine men arrested in April, including the four who have since been deported.

“We’re very pleased that Max will soon be released from immigration detention and will be back with his family and community in Vermont,” Lambek said following the hearings. “We’re very disappointed that the judge did not rule in bond hearings in two other cases, but we’re still optimistic that when those cases are finally heard that they’ll win their release as well.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: A 4th Vermont farmworker is believed to have been deported as another is released on bond.

Updated on May 14 at 11:39 a.m.

In Washington, D.C., House Republicans plan to gather Tuesday to vote on whether to shred the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark law that has issued hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy incentives since 2022, as part of President Donald Trump’s new budget proposal.

Meanwhile, in Vermont on Tuesday morning, a state program funded by that very law announced more than $22 million of the state’s total grant of $62.5 million would go to help install solar power on low-income housing in the state.

“Currently towns with the highest energy burden in Vermont have the least amount of installed solar,” Kerrick Johnson, commissioner for the Department of Public Service, which controls the state’s grant, said in a statement. “That’s why the primary objective of this program is to deliver benefits to disadvantaged Vermonters, regardless of their dwelling status.”

The funding is part of the Solar for All program, a $7 billion national initiative to lower the cost of electricity by installing solar on buildings and developing solar arrays in communities. Across the country, the program could pass on solar benefits to more than 900,000 households in low-income and disadvantaged communities, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the federal office that administered the grant to 49 states and six tribes, among others.

Vermont’s congressional delegation championed the initiative, including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who introduced Solar for All into the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

But funding for the solar program has been under threat before by the Trump administration, and it could be under threat again as the Republican-dominated Congress moves to axe programs from the IRA to achieve the multi-trillion-dollar budget President Trump is calling “The One, Big, Beautiful Bill.”

On Sunday, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce committee proposed to meet the budget goals by repealing grants from a $27 billion IRA program called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which aims to lower carbon emissions. One of the three programs in that fund is the Solar for All program.

“Donald Trump campaigned on lowering electric bills for working Americans. As president, he’s doing exactly the opposite,” Sanders said in an email Tuesday. “The disastrous reconciliation bill being pushed by Trump and Congressional Republicans would not only make electric bills more expensive for Vermonters, it would make the climate crisis worse.”

Sanders said the good news was that the budget bill couldn’t legally rescind Vermont’s $62.5 million grant that was allocated to the Vermont Department of Public Service.

“The bad news is that Trump does not respect the Constitution or rule of law,” Sanders said. “I will continue to do everything I can to make sure Solar for All funding is deployed to lower electric bills, slash carbon emissions, and create thousands of good jobs.”

The road to how the federal government got to this massive repeal process began in January, when Trump took office and issued a flurry of executive orders. Those included Unleashing American Energy, which called for a 90-day freeze on IRA funds. A letter sent a week later by the EPA notified Solar for All recipients that the hundred of millions of dollars they’d received so far was paused until further notice. Programs across the country, including New Mexico, Tennessee and Wisconsin, were suddenly unable to access their grant funding and proceed with solar projects that require significant upfront investment.

“While the federal funding landscape is dynamic, we have a binding agreement with EPA and the funding is obligated,” said Randy Brittingham, grant program manager at the state energy office for the Vermont Department of Public Service, in an email. After a pause in communication and access to funds this winter, Brittingham said the state is back in regular contact with the EPA. “We’ve successfully drawn funding for this program since that February pause,” he said.

But Lee Zeldin, the new EPA administrator, has gone further since February, claiming in March that President Joe Biden’s administration had doled out billions of dollars that were vulnerable to “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Zeldin tried to claw back $20 billion from the two other programs in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and while caught up in court battles, those funds largely remain frozen. Meanwhile, the EPA Office of Inspector General launched an audit into the program. The audit is ongoing, according to Kim Wheeler, director of strategic communications for that office.

“Solar for All was selected because it is a $7 billion program with a financing structure that is new and different for the EPA,” Wheeler said in an email on Tuesday. She later said that while about $62.5 million has been obligated for Vermont’s Solar for All program, the state has only spent approximately $78,000, and by April 11 all 60 recipients had spent about $31 million.

While Wheeler said her office doesn’t have the authority to make or revoke funding decisions, if her office found an issue with an award during an investigation, it could make recommendations to the EPA.

“If we identified an issue during an audit (such as the project you are asking about), we could recommend that the Agency evaluate whether to suspend payment or terminate the award,” Wheeler said of the Solar for All program.

Until the audit is concluded, Solar for All funding will continue to trickle down to Vermonters. More than a third of the $62.5 million grant was awarded this week to the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, a quasi-public entity that acts like a bank for affordable housing, to make solar more accessible for low-income households.

These funds – called Multi Family Affordable Housing – will be awarded  to new developers for affordable housing projects like multi-family apartment buildings, largely benefitting renters. Separate programs that fall under the state’s Solar for All program push benefits toward single-family homeowners and community solar projects. 

“We know that renters have been very underserved by solar resources in the past, so it’s exciting for us as a housing funder to help developers successfully electrify their buildings and rely less on fossil fuels,” said Mia Watson, special programs manager for the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, who is supporting the Solar for All award.

Tenants who have an electric bill could see at least 20% in bill savings and tenants without an electric bill would receive an equivalent benefit, Brittingham said. He added that all residents would benefit from the climate impacts of growing Vermont’s solar generation.

Residents and developers can attend public outreach sessions hosted by the finance agency in the coming months. The finance agency in partnership with the state will submit a work plan for EPA approval by December. They expect to award funds to developers early next year.

“We’re still cautious about what may happen at the federal level, but so far the indications we have are good that this program is going to happen,” Watson said. “We’ve had strong support from the state and our congressional delegation, especially Sen. Sanders, but I think everyone involved is a little concerned that things could change unexpectedly.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly characterized  the relationship between EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and the Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General. 

Clarification: An earlier version of this story misnamed the EPA Office of Inspector General query into Solar for All. It is an “audit.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Solar for All distributes more than $22 million in funding but remains under threat.

The federal government deported three migrant farmworkers to Mexico this week, out of eight detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents last month on a dairy in northern Vermont.

The deported workers include Luis Enrique Gomez-Aguiliar, 28; Urillas Sargento, 32; and Dani Alvarez-Perez, 22. A fourth worker, Juan Javier Rodriguez-Gomez, 41, has been detained in Louisiana, where he faces a high likelihood of imminent deportation, according to his attorney Brett Stokes.

The workers were deported “without due process, in clear violation of their rights,” said Stokes, the lead attorney for all eight detainees and director of the Center for Justice Reform of Vermont Law and Graduate School, in a statement Wednesday. None of the three had been previously deported, he said.

Both U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Stokes said federal immigration officials were likely relying on an unprecedented expansion of an authority called “expedited removal.”

The authority used to be applicable if a person was seeking entry or was found crossing the border into the United States. But since January, President Donald Trump’s administration has used that authority to arrest people who currently live in the United States and don’t fall under the traditional scope of this deportation process, according to Stokes.

Stokes said the arrests were a “foreseeable result of the current enforcement landscape in this country” but that expedited removals are almost impossible to challenge.

“I can’t appeal these decisions unfortunately,” Stokes said of the deportations. Instead he planned to connect with other folks in the country who’ve seen similar issues to take on the expansion of expedited authority. “I’m not sure there are any remedies for these three but the door, maybe, remains open,” he said Wednesday.

The farmworkers were detained at Pleasant Valley Farms, the state’s largest dairy, less than 3 miles from the Canadian border in Berkshire after Border Patrol agents responded to a report alleging that two men wearing backpacks had crossed through the woods and onto the farm property.

In April, Ryan Brisette, a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, said in a written statement that agents apprehended one of those individuals while the second fled. 

“During the ensuing search of the area, agents located and apprehended additional individuals determined to be illegally present in the United States,” Brisette said.

But Stokes said he did not believe any of the eight individuals arrested matched the identities of the two whom federal agents were initially investigating.

“It’s remarkable because what we have here is the reported suspicious behavior of one, maybe two individuals, which results in the warrantless arrest of eight individuals, and based on my accounting of their stories, which I believe, none of them were the individuals being investigated,” Stokes said.

The detentions happened on farm property, with most farmworkers detained while in a trailer where they fled after seeing immigration officials. They were arrested around 6 p.m. April 21, and they were booked into the Northwest State Correctional Facility between 4 and 6 a.m. the following day, according to Vermont’s jail tracker system.

On May 1, three of the men were transferred to Louisiana, according to Stokes. They were held in the Alexandria Staging Facility, a 400-bed transfer center near an airport that holds detainees for about 72 hours before ICE removes them from the country. Rodriguez-Gomez was shown to be held at the facility on May 7, after he was temporarily transferred to a detention facility in New Hampshire, according to ICE’s online locator system.

The other four remain at the Vermont correctional facility. At least one was seeking asylum before the arrest, according to Migrant Justice, a Burlington-based advocacy group for migrant workers.

All eight workers have family in Vermont, said Will Lambek, a spokesperson for Migrant Justice, and some of those family members continue to work at the dairy.

Vermont’s farming community has been nervous about the impact of the Trump administration’s ramp-up of deportations for those who don’t have authorization to work in the United States since Trump was elected last year.

“There’s migrant farm labor on probably every farm in the state,” Stokes said. “But detentions like this were not common in Vermont until a couple of months ago.” 

Migrant workers are hired by almost every farm in Vermont, according to a 2025 report published by the state Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets. Up to 850 migrant farmworkers are employed year-round by Vermont farms, mostly on dairies. About 500 more farmworkers, largely from Jamaica, are also hired seasonally through the H2A visa program, which supports agricultural workers who are in the U.S. temporarily.

Nationally, migrants make up more than half of dairy laborers, according to the report, and  losing this workforce could nearly double retail milk prices and cost the U.S. economy more than $32 billion.

“Farmers in Vermont tell us they are concerned about their workers and are doing their best to take care of them during a difficult time,” state agriculture Secretary Anson Tebbetts said in an emailed statement Wednesday, noting that immigration issues had created anxiety for farmworkers and farmers. 

“It’s time for Washington to address the issue,” Tebbetts said. “Reforming our visa and immigration laws would provide the nation with a legal and reliable workforce while maintaining our food supply, and the invaluable contributions of our migrant farm workers.”

The co-owner of Pleasant Valley Farms, Amanda St. Pierre, said in an email that she didn’t have an update to share on the workers, and she did not respond to specific questions. Following the arrests in April, the company released a public statement on its Facebook that their “employees were hired following the federal and state employment requirements.”

“What I can tell you is that we’re continuing to support them and all our employees,” St. Pierre wrote in the Wednesday email. “We hope this is resolved soon.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: 3 migrant farmworkers deported to Mexico following detainment on state’s largest dairy.