VICE

Alyza Enriques unpacks the role of detransitioners, or formerly trans-identifying people who have stopped medical treatment, in legislative efforts across the country to ban gender-affirming care, as well as those who oppose these polarizing bans; Alzo Slade travels to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which sits on top of more than half the world's known cobalt supply, to investigate the country's dangerous, yet highly profitable mining industry.

Paola Ramos travels to Texas to see how Republican Governor Greg Abbott's border enforcement initiative, Operation Lone Star, is potentially circumventing the federal government's authority over immigration. One year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and an estimated 300,000 casualties, Ben C. Solomon treks to the war-torn frontlines to reveal the grim reality of the ongoing conflict.

Natashya Gutierrez travels to Southeast Asia to explore a dark new form of online scamming, known as "pig butchering", that is involuntarily perpetuated by victims of human trafficking forced to steal for the Chinese mafia who run these manipulative scams. David Noriega investigates the deaths and disappearances of Moroccan migrants as they attempt to cross the Spanish border at Melilla and examines how outsourced European immigration policies may ultimately be responsible for these tragedies.

Vegas Tenold examines how new domestic terrorism laws in Georgia have alarmed some civil rights groups who worry that these efforts to combat homegrown extremism may infringe on the rights to free speech and assembly; Isobel Young investigates accusations that the Russian government is systematically deporting thousands of children from occupied areas of Ukraine, an illegal act that could be one of the most egregious war crimes of Russia's invasion so far.