Project Censored - 6-23-26

Welcome to the Project Censored radio show on Pacifica Radio.

I'm your co-host, Eleanor Goldfield, and here's some of the news that didn't make the news the week of June 22nd, 2026.

In new reporting by researcher and frequent guest of the show, Dr. Austin Coker, the number of active 287G agreements deputizing state and local police for immigration enforcement has skyrocketed from 134 in early 2025 to 1,954 as of last week.

Of course, local police don't need a 287G agreement to collaborate with ICE, but the agreement officially recognizes local police as federal immigration agents, which of course makes our communities doubly policed and far less safe.

Austin also notes that a recent report shows that it costs a conservatively estimated $500,000 a year per person to hold someone at the concentration camp known as Alligator Alcatraz.

Several things go into this exorbitant fee that's roughly 16 times bigger the $30,000 that Florida spends to house a convicted person in state prison, including the fact that the facility went up in eight days on a remote airstrip with no water, sewer, or power infrastructure.

So the state trucks in about 60,000 gallons of water and burns roughly 21,000 gallons of diesel a day.

Stupidity costs more than common sense, and torturing people costs more than treating them well.

America.

Relatedly, a new Institute for Policy Studies National Priorities Project report reflects on the home front cost of the perpetual and perpetually growing war machine.

For instance, one single precision strike missile is $1.6 million, which could fund 182 public housing units a year.

One Tomahawk missile costs $2.6 million, which could fund 1,144 people receiving SNAP food stamp benefits for an entire year.

One THAAD interceptor missile costs $15.5 million.

That could fund 1,809 people receiving Medicaid for an entire year.

And also, also relatedly, new research by Stephen Semler shows that nearly one in four tenants fell behind on rent in 2025, not least of all thanks to a rise in rental prices combined with the continued attacks on all social programs, the paltry ones we had, like Medicaid, student loan pauses, rental assistance, SNAP, etc.

And ProPublica's reporting shows that more than 770,000 children died.

are no longer receiving SNAP benefits after the Trump admin gutted the federal food program last year.

770,000.

Already in 2022, some 13 million children in the U.S. were food insecure.

13 million.

These numbers are absurd.

And most of these kids rely on school lunches to carry them through the day, even on a paltry amount of calories.

During the summer, of course, those school lunches aren't available, so millions of kids are even more hungry, causing the supposedly fun summer vacation to be a torturous wait for what in many cases is a barely edible school lunch.

And in case you were still in doubt that we live in an oligarchy, a recent report found that 88 of the largest U.S. corporations that paid no federal income tax last year spent roughly $852 million on U.S. campaign contributions and lobbying during recent election cycles.

And that's despite reporting combined U.S. pre-tax income of around $105 billion.