Table of Contents:
1) Events and Appeals
2) Current News
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1) Events and Appeals
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Help World-Outlook Win New Subscribers
(the subscription is free of charge)
Dear reader,
Over the last month, World-Outlook and its sister publication in Spanish Panorama-Mundial have published unique coverage of U.S. and world events.
This includes the three-part interview with Cuban historian and writer Ernesto Limia DÃaz, ‘Cuba Is the Moral and Political Compass of the World.’ A related article by Mark Satinoff, World Votes with Cuba to Demand an End to U.S. Blockade, included information on the campaign to send medical aid to Cuba in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa and was shared widely by the Los Angeles Hands Off Cuba Committee and other Cuba solidarity groups.
A number of readers sent their appreciation for Cathleen Gutekanst’s article Chicago Residents Fight ICE Abductions, Deportations, which provided a compelling, eyewitness account of this example of working-class resistance to the Trump administration’s war on undocumented immigrants. Some readers shared it widely on social media platforms.
The news analysis Bigotry, Jew Hatred Take Center Stage in GOP Mainstream also generated interest. It is part of World-Outlook’s consistent analysis of the danger of the rise of incipient fascism that Trumpism has posed for the working class and its allies in the U.S. and the world.
Most recently, another article by Mark Satinoff, ‘From Ceasefire to a Just Peace’ in Israel and Occupied Territories, was promoted by Friends of Standing Together (FOST NY/NJ) on the group’s website. Alon-Lee Green and Sally Abed — the two Standing Together leaders featured at the November 12 event in Brooklyn, New York, that Mark’s article covered — and Israelis for Peace sent their thanks to Mark for his accurate reporting.
This is a small sample of the news coverage and political analysis World-Outlook offers.
We ask you to use this information to try to convince at least one of your acquaintances, colleagues, friends, fellow students, neighbors, or relatives to subscribe to World-Outlook. As you know, the subscription is free of charge. Increasing World-Outlook’s subscription base will widen the site’s reach. It will also provide new impetus to improve our coverage. Comments and reactions from subscribers, or initiatives from readers to cover events in their areas, often result in unexpectedly invaluable articles or opinion columns clarifying important political questions.
Feel free to share this letter, or part of its contents, with those you are asking to subscribe. And keep World-Outlookinformed about the reactions you get from potential new readers.
In solidarity,
World-Outlook editors
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Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest. Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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2) Current News
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1) Is It About the Oil?
We look at what President Trump is trying to achieve in Venezuela.
By Sam Sifton, I am the host of this newsletter, Dec. 18, 2025
“…Trump remembers a past when South and Central America were open markets. Before Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in 1976, foreign companies accounted for 70 percent of production there. American drillers like Exxon, Mobil and Gulf Oil were major players. (Today, only one American company, Chevron, still operates in Venezuela.) … Stephen Miller, the White House homeland security adviser, recalled that bygone era on social media. … ‘American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela,’ he wrote. ‘Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.’”
Petrostate
Yesterday, Venezuela said its military would escort oil tankers heading to Asia to stop the United States from seizing them. Washington spent the fall punishing and pressuring the Caribbean nation in an ostensible campaign against drugs. Now we may have a glimpse of where this conflict is going.
Venezuela, which once welcomed American energy companies, has the world’s largest oil reserves. President Trump wants access to them again. He wrote on social media that U.S. operations there would continue until the country returned to the United States “all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
That helps explain the last three months.
An escalation
The campaign began on Sept. 2, with military strikes on small speedboats that the Trump administration claimed, without offering evidence, were trafficking drugs. Then the strikes continued, again and again. There have been 26 so far, killing 99 people across the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean, acts that legal experts say may amount to war crimes.
Then the campaign escalated. Trump authorized planning for covert C.I.A. action and deployed the largest naval force in the Caribbean since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The military positioned warships off Venezuela’s coast, sent bombers to fly just offshore and dispatched troops and sensitive radar equipment to Trinidad and Tobago, an island nation just a few miles away.
These moves didn’t always make sense. Officials explained each development as an effort to stop the flow of drugs from Venezuela to the United States. They call the country a narcostate and its president, Nicolás Maduro, a cartel leader.
But Venezuela is not a drug producer, and most narcotics smuggled through the country are headed for Europe, not the United States. U.S. officials say it’s about dislodging Maduro from power. Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” the president’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told Vanity Fair.
Why? Developments in the last week offered another rationale.
Liquid gold
In the last week, the United States has seized a Venezuelan oil tanker and promised to blockade “ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS” going to and from the country. Officially, these boats are trading crude in violation of U.S. sanctions on Iran, as they’ve done for many years, especially since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
But there’s more, as my colleagues Edward Wong and Julian Barnes put it:
Venezuela and its oil lie at the nexus of two of Mr. Trump’s stated national security priorities: dominance of energy resources and control of the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela has about 17 percent of the world’s known oil reserves, or more than 300 billion barrels, nearly four times the amount in the United States. And no nation has a bigger foothold in Venezuela’s oil industry than China, the superpower whose immense trade presence in the Western Hemisphere the Trump administration aims to curb.
Trump wants that oil for the United States. He has wanted it for years. During his first term, he backed attempts to oust Maduro. After he left office, he lamented their failure. “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse,” he said in a 2023 speech. “We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil.”
This time, Edward and Julian report, he’s pushing harder. In secret negotiations with the Trump administration, Maduro offered to open Venezuela’s oil industry to American companies. But that would have left Maduro in charge of dispensing it. The White House said no deal.
Prospecting
Acquiring oil is not the administration’s only argument for a sudden and fierce Venezuela policy. The U.S. strikes have also targeted boats off Colombia, suggesting the attacks are not entirely about Maduro. Additionally, much of Venezuela’s oil trade violates U.S. sanctions — and props up governments like Cuba’s.
But Trump remembers a past when South and Central America were open markets. Before Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in 1976, foreign companies accounted for 70 percent of production there. American drillers like Exxon, Mobil and Gulf Oil were major players. (Today, only one American company, Chevron, still operates in Venezuela.) In the early 1960s, my colleague Simon Romero explains, Venezuela had the largest American expatriate community in the world.
Yesterday, Stephen Miller, the White House homeland security adviser, recalled that bygone era on social media. His post, a political gambit filled with misrepresentations, read like the beginning of a mission statement. It was an explanation of all that had come before, from the boat strikes to the military buildup to the threat of a blockade. It read like a prologue.
“American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela,” he wrote. “Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.”
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2) Four Takeaways From Trial of Judge Accused of Aiding Undocumented Immigrant
The Milwaukee judge was charged with obstructing federal immigration agents, who were trying to arrest a man who had appeared before her on a battery charge.
By Julie Bosman, Reporting in Milwaukee, Dec. 18, 2025
Judge Hannah C. Dugan, right, outside the federal courthouse in Milwaukee earlier this week. Credit...Sara Stathas/Reuters
A lawyer for Hannah C. Dugan, a Milwaukee judge who is accused of helping an undocumented immigrant evade arrest, made a final appeal to the jury on Thursday in her trial, arguing that she was the victim of an overzealous prosecution.
“They’re trying to besmirch her reputation, her honest reputation, her hard work, and amount her to a few minutes of a decision that she made under the confusion of the situation that she was in,” said the lawyer, Jason Luczak, in his closing argument at her federal trial.
Judge Dugan faces up to six years in prison if convicted of obstructing federal immigration agents in April after they arrived at the Milwaukee County Courthouse to arrest an undocumented immigrant, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who had appeared in court on a misdemeanor battery charge.
Kelly Brown Watzka, a prosecutor, told jurors that Judge Dugan had let her views on immigration policy drive her actions. “No judge may decide that her personal beliefs matter more than the law itself,” she said.
The prosecution by the Trump administration is widely seen as an effort to send a message to judges who interfere with the president’s deportation efforts.
Here are four takeaways from the weeklong trial:
Tensions were high over immigration arrests in a county courthouse.
Weeks after President Trump was sworn in to a second term, judges in the Milwaukee County Courthouse noticed what appeared to be a change in policy: Immigration agents were making arrests at the courthouse.
In emails, judges shared concerns about the arrests, which occurred in March and April. They worried that the presence of immigration agents could deter defendants from showing up to hearings. They pressed the chief judge of the courthouse, Carl Ashley, to develop guidelines for how agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement could operate in the building.
“I had great concerns about whether or not they could interfere with our state functions,” Judge Ashley said in testimony.
Federal agents’ plan to arrest Flores-Ruiz quickly went awry.
A team of six federal agents who arrived at the courthouse on April 18 had an administrative warrant for Mr. Flores-Ruiz’s arrest, issued after they produced evidence that he had been deported in 2013 and returned to the United States illegally.
The agents planned to wait outside Judge Dugan’s courtroom on the sixth floor and arrest Mr. Flores-Ruiz in a public hallway.
That plan was disrupted almost as soon as the team arrived. Though the agents wore plainclothes — sweatshirts, baseball caps and jeans — they stood out as they sat in the courthouse hallway. A public defender stopped to snap cellphone pictures of them, and a court clerk told the judge about their presence.
Judge Dugan corralled another judge, Kristela L. Cervera, and the two went into the hallway to question the agents. Judge Dugan instructed them to go to the chief judge’s office down the hallway.
While several agents were in the chief judge’s office, Judge Dugan adjourned Mr. Flores-Ruiz’s case and ushered him and his lawyer through a side door. Two agents followed and arrested him on the street after a brief foot chase.
The testimony offered a glimpse into the workplace dynamics of a courthouse.
The Milwaukee County Courthouse was, in some respects, like any other office.
Witnesses described being irked by the behavior of co-workers. Judge Cervera, who was junior to Judge Dugan in age and experience, testified that it was “embarrassing” when Judge Dugan entered her courtroom and motioned with a finger that Judge Cervera should follow her into the public hallway, and then pressured her into keeping her judicial robe on while she questioned ICE agents, even though it was unusual to wear it outside of the courtroom.
Whispered conversations that were recorded in Judge Dugan’s courtroom were dissected in the trial. Joan Butz, a court reporter, testified that she had volunteered to help guide Mr. Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer down a hallway that could have helped them avoid immigration agents.
But some of the chatter recorded in Judge Dugan’s courtroom didn’t mean much, Ms. Butz suggested.
“That was just bubbler talk,” she said at one point in her testimony, using Milwaukee slang for a water fountain.
Judge Dugan’s defense leaned on one well-known character witness.
He may not be a household name outside of Wisconsin, but Tom Barrett, the former longtime mayor of Milwaukee, got the jury’s attention when he took the stand as the final witness for the defense on Thursday morning.
Mr. Barrett’s testimony, watched intently by jurors who leaned forward in their seats, only lasted a few minutes. He told the jury that he had known Judge Dugan since she was 11 or 12 years old.
“I think she is extremely honest,” said Mr. Barrett, a Democrat. “And I think she will tell you exactly how she feels.”
After Mr. Barrett left the stand, a lawyer for Judge Dugan said that she would be not be testifying in her own defense.
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3) U.S. Will Pay $450,000 to Wildfire Fighters With Cancer
They will be eligible for a one-time payment as well as college tuition for their children. The effort is part of a legislative push to address the dangers of working in toxic smoke.
By Hannah Dreier, Dec. 19, 2025
Members of a wildfire crew last August in San Luis Obispo County, Calif. Loren Elliott for The New York Times
The federal government has known for years that wildfire fighters, who spend weeks at a time in poisonous smoke, can develop deadly cancers from the exposure.
Now, they will be eligible for a payment of nearly $450,000 and college tuition for their family if they die or become debilitated from a smoke-related cancer, under a law signed by President Trump on Thursday.
The measure is part of a bipartisan push in Congress to overhaul how the government protects and compensates firefighters who work in toxic wildfire smoke — with multiple bills pending that would enforce the use of masks, expand benefits and recognize smoke exposure as a major occupational hazard.
Worsening fire seasons have meant that firefighters spend more time in dense smoke, and many are developing serious diseases at young ages.
“The reality is that they are being exposed to stuff that puts them at greater risk to save us,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, who sponsored the bill alongside Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota.
The legislation, which passed as part of a larger military spending bill, requires that some 20 smoke-related cancers be automatically treated as line-of-duty injuries or deaths. The aid includes a one-time tax-free payment of $448,575 and four years of financial support for the firefighter’s children or spouse to pursue higher education. Families who have lost loved ones within the last six years will be eligible to file for benefits retroactively.
Over the summer, The New York Times tagged along with the Oregon-based wildfire crew of Casey Budlong, who was diagnosed at 40 with brain cancer and died in 2024, leaving behind an 8-year-old son. On Thursday, his widow, Katy, said the benefits could alleviate the financial stress of suddenly becoming a single parent, helping her to pay for things like roof repairs and save for their son’s college education.
“It would literally be life-changing,” she said. “It would mean we could focus on making happy memories and doing things together that Casey would have loved, and not have to worry about if we’re going to be OK.”
She said she hoped the change would encourage the government to take smoke exposure more seriously.
“His job killed him in a way we never anticipated happening,” she said. “Part of me is really angry about it. When it comes to the government, I think the only thing they listen to is money.”
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4) Gaza City Famine Averted, Global Experts Say, but Palestinians Face Major Difficulties Accessing Food
Food security experts said a famine reported in August had been alleviated but that the situation remained dire across the enclave, despite a cease-fire in October and greater flows of aid.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Dec. 19, 2025
Palestinians lining up to receive food packages during a distribution in a town in the central Gaza Strip.Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
A panel of global experts said that hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza still faced major difficulties accessing food, but found that famine conditions previously reported in Gaza City had been alleviated since October’s cease-fire.
In a report published on Friday, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or I.P.C., acknowledged that the flow of aid and goods into Gaza had improved, although only basic survival needs were being met, it said.
It said that around 1.6 million people were still experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity.
The group, which the United Nations and aid agencies rely on to monitor and classify global hunger crises, said that more than 100,000 people faced catastrophic conditions as of the end of November across the four regions of Gaza that it had looked at but did not classify any one region as facing widespread famine.
The I.P.C. uses five phases to categorize food insecurity. If a household is experiencing the highest level of food insecurity, including starvation, and risk of extremely critical acute malnutrition and death, that is classified as a “catastrophe.” The term “famine” is used when it is classifying conditions across an area.
The group said that there was “emergency” level, or phase four, food insecurity across Gaza.
The Israeli agency responsible for coordinating the entry of aid and commercial goods into Gaza, known as COGAT, described the report as showing “blatant, biased and deliberate disregard” for the 500,000 tons of food that it said had entered Gaza since the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
Riwaa Abu Quta, 31, a displaced person in Khan Younis, said she had seen fruits, vegetables and frozen meats in local markets but that many families were still unable to afford them.
About 80 percent of Gazans are unemployed, according to a December 2024 report from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
In August, the I.P.C. reported famine in Gaza City and its surroundings and said at the time that at least half a million people across the enclave were facing an extreme lack of food.
After that report, Israel accused the I.P.C. of “departures from transparency, neutrality and methodological rigor.”
In its latest report, the I.P.C. predicted that more than 100,000 young children would face moderate or severe acute malnutrition by mid-October 2026.
“Despite the improved situation, the population of the Gaza Strip still faces high levels of acute food insecurity and acute malnutrition,” the report said.
In its latest report, the group said that almost a million people were at Phase 3, defined as “crisis” levels of food insecurity; more than half a million at Phase 4, or “emergency”; and over 100,000 at Phase 5, or “catastrophe.”
On Tuesday, Ramiz Alakbarov, the United Nations’ deputy special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, said the hunger situation in Gaza had improved during the cease-fire, but he warned that most of the population lacked access to “key protein sources.”
“Humanitarian access remains restricted, with aid convoys facing logistical and security obstacles,” he told the U.N. Security Council, adding that Gaza was grappling with “severe shortages” of clean water, medical care and shelter.
On Dec. 7, Carl Skau, the deputy chief of the U.N. World Food Program, told The New York Times that the agency had made progress in delivering food to Gaza, but he cautioned that other humanitarian organizations were struggling with Israeli restrictions and that insufficient fresh fruits and vegetables were reaching the enclave.
He said that the program was sending roughly 100 trucks into Gaza daily and had helped 1.5 million people in the territory in November.
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5) Immigration Officials Deport Queens 6-Year-Old and Father Who Fled China
Hundreds of people had rallied for the family in New York City after they were separated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in November.
By Ana Ley and Hamed Aleaziz, Dec. 19, 2025
A father and his 6-year-old son who were separated by immigration officials in New York City have been deported to China, weeks after their case drew outrage.
The child, Yuanxin Zheng, is among the youngest migrants in New York to be taken from a parent by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials during a routine check-in. He and his father, Fei Zheng, who lived in Queens, were detained on Nov. 26; President Trump’s deportation crackdown has swept up increasing numbers of migrant families and children.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in an email that the family was sent to China on Wednesday.
“We are happy to report we were able to remove the family back to their home country,” Ms. McLaughlin wrote in an email.
Jennie Spector, a community activist and family friend who spoke with Mr. Zheng two days before he was deported, said that he complied with the deportation order because he wanted to be reunited with his child. He had resisted previous attempts to force him and Yuanxin back to China. Mr. Zheng had told ICE officials that he had tried to kill himself while in detention and was later put on suicide watch, according to a person familiar with the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it.
“It is quite sad,” Ms. Spector said on Friday. “He came here wanting to give his son a different and better life than he might have had in China. That’s what they were coming for. And they had a lot to offer.”
The day before Thanksgiving, the Zhengs showed up for a scheduled appointment at 26 Federal Plaza, ICE’s headquarters in the city and the epicenter of migrant arrests. After the two were arrested, Mr. Zheng was sent to an adult detention center in Orange County, N.Y., while officials prepared Yuanxin to be transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which holds unaccompanied immigrant children.
Their separation led to criticism from community leaders and elected officials, including Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City. Hundreds of people gathered at a Queens playground in early December to protest their separation.
Mr. Zheng and his son illegally entered the United States in April through Mexico. They were discovered by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Dulzura, Calif., and after being placed in custody, Mr. Zheng told federal agents that he had come to America because he was afraid of being tortured in his native China.
Immigration officials determined that his fear was not credible, and an immigration judge affirmed that finding. Mr. Zheng does not have a criminal history, according to government records.
The family cycled in and out of detention at least twice. Immigration officials had tried two times to get Mr. Zheng to board a plane to China, but he refused.
When immigration agents arrested Mr. Zheng last month, he became aggressive with officers and hit his forehead against a wall, according to internal records. Officers placed him in handcuffs, and Mr. Zheng said that he wanted to die, the records said.
From Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January through mid-October, ICE has arrested at least 140 children younger than 18 in the New York City area, according to federal data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Nationwide, the government has arrested about 2,600 minors.
Camille Hlavka, whose child attends the public school in Queens where Yuanxin was enrolled, said in an interview on Friday that she was devastated to hear about the deportation.
“He was taken from an opportunity that his dad worked so hard for,” Ms. Hlavka said. “I think we are forgetting as a society that every human matters.”
Jonah E. Bromwich and Nicole Hong contributed reporting.
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6) U.S. Strikes on Syria Underscore Scale of Challenge for Its President
The Syrian government did not comment directly on the extensive American strikes targeting the Islamic State on Friday, but said it was intensifying its own efforts to fight the group.
By Abdi Latif Dahir, Reporting from Damascus, Syria, Dec. 20, 2025
Syrian government forces at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Damascus in April. The U.S. launched airstrikes targeting the Islamic State group in central Syria on Friday. Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times
The barrage of airstrikes launched by the United States across Syria late on Friday underscored the challenges facing the country’s president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, as he struggles to assert control over the nation and navigate a fragile, nascent relationship with President Trump.
American fighter jets, attack helicopters and artillery attacked more than 70 suspected Islamic State positions across central Syria, targeting the group’s infrastructure and weapons sites, according to the U.S. military’s Central Command. Jordanian warplanes assisted in the operation, it said.
The Syrian government did not comment directly on the extensive strikes but said in a statement early on Saturday that it was intensifying its own military operations against the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS.
Since Syria joined a global coalition to defeat the Islamic State last month, the group has ramped up its attacks, according to American and Syrian officials, as well as security experts.
“The Syrian Arab Republic invites the United States and member states of the international coalition to support these efforts in a manner that contributes to the protection of civilians and the restoration of security and stability in the region,” the Syrian government said.
Nanar Hawach, senior Syria analyst at the International Crisis Group, a think tank, said that Mr. al-Sharaa’s government wanted to project authority over Syria’s affairs, while balancing that with a need to engage with its international partners.
Some of Mr. al-Sharaa’s more hard-line supporters could bristle at a Western country carrying out strikes on their homeland, Mr. Hawach added. “The government is trying very hard to walk a thin line,” he said.
The U.S. strikes came a week after Mr. Trump said he would retaliate against ISIS for killing two American soldiers and a civilian U.S. interpreter in the ancient city of Palmyra.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for that attack, though initial assessments suggest that it was most likely carried out by the Islamic State, according to the Pentagon and American intelligence officials.
Syrian officials said the gunman was a member of the country’s security forces who was slated to be removed from duty because of his extremist beliefs. The killings exposed persistent weaknesses within Syria’s security structure. Some supporters of Mr. Trump have called for a withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Mr. al-Sharaa and his rebel forces swept to power just over a year ago after toppling Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s longtime dictator. The country has since grappled with a shattered economy, rising sectarian violence, political instability and the growing threat of terrorism.
Mr. Trump and Mr. al-Sharaa have maintained a warm relationship, even meeting at the White House in November. This week, Washington repealed a final batch of crippling sanctions on Syria.
After the deadly attack on Americans last week, Mr. Trump reiterated his support for Mr. al-Sharaa.
“This had nothing to do with him,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Monday. “This is a part of Syria that they really don’t have much control over. And it was a surprise. He feels very badly about it. He’s working on it. He’s a strong man.”
The U.S. carried out large-scale attacks against ISIS when Mr. al-Assad still ruled Syria. Though the group’s power has significantly diminished in recent years, largely because of military defeats and loss of territory, it still maintains a presence in the deserts of central Syria.
This month, the group claimed to have killed four Syrian government officers in the Idlib governorate in the country’s northwest. It also claimed two attacks in the Deir al-Zour governorate in the east, one of which involved targeting an army vehicle with an explosive device.
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7) These Young Adults Make Good Money. But Life, They Say, Is Unaffordable.
Economists say that a typical middle-class family today is richer than one in the 1960s. Americans in their 20s and 30s don’t believe it.
By Sabrina Tavernise, Dec. 20, 2025
Alicia Wrigley and her husband, Richard Gailey, both musicians and teachers, live in Salt Lake City with their 2-year-old.Kim Raff for The New York Times
A nerdy economics essay recently went viral. It asserted that the federal measure for the poverty line was woefully outdated and that for a family of four, the income needed today to function in American society was $140,000.
The essay, by Michael Green, a financial market strategist, struck a nerve and set off another round of debate about affordability, focused this time on whether people with six-figure incomes should feel strapped.
Economists derided the essay. They pointed out that the typical middle-class family today is actually much richer than its counterpart in the 1960s, when the poverty measure came about. And, they added, most Americans eat out, have smartphones and take flights, unimaginable luxuries generations ago.
President Trump has tried to dismiss the issue of affordability, saying in a speech last week that it was “a hoax” and “you don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter.” On Wednesday, he returned to the topic, defending his record and asserting that gas and drug prices had come down.
But in interviews with Americans in their 20s and 30s, they said that the raw numbers did not come close to capturing the reality of their lives. They were all what economists regard as middle class, some making well over $63,360, the median for full-time, year-round workers.
They knew they were not poor. They could afford to buy eggs. But they are contending with an economy that has grown increasingly unequal in recent decades.
They described feeling that the basics of a middle-class life — owning a home, providing for the children, dining out occasionally — seemed unattainable or required unpalatable trade-offs. Is it worth sacrificing a yearly vacation to save for a down payment, when housing prices keep rising? What about buying a home that is 90 minutes from work — or a two-bedroom for a family of four? Are children even possible?
For many, the answer to these questions was a hard “no.” Whether realistic or foolhardy, their views seemed to reflect the quiet quitting of a long-held American expectation: that by working hard and acting responsibly, people can attain a life appreciably better than their parents’.
“Upward mobility is sort of dead,” said Gray Thurston, 27, an electrical engineer in Philadelphia, who earns about $90,000 a year. His parents are baby boomers. “My parents’ generation did great. Everybody I work with at that age has big retirement accounts, are taking vacations and own multiple houses. Good for them.”
But things are supposed to get better for each generation, he said. “And it feels fundamentally broken that they’re not.”
Expectations Versus Reality
Fundamentally, this is an argument about the dimensions of need. The poverty line is a measure of privation — do you have enough to eat?
But in his Substack essay, Mr. Green said $140,000 represented “the price of participation” — how much it costs to build a middle-class life in America today.
This price has been the subject of public debate for centuries. The 18th century economist Adam Smith drew the line at being able to appear in public without shame, said David Brady, who teaches public policy at the University of Southern California. In Smith’s Scotland, that meant being able to buy a linen shirt.
“We need water, food and shelter,” Dr. Brady said. “But beyond that? It is impossible to have a coherent definition of needs that does not reflect our culture, our values, our norms, our expectations, given the societies we live in.”
In other words, what is considered necessary is relative.
For Americans, the price of participation is often measured by the cost of a home. And even with two incomes, many people interviewed said homeownership felt ever more distant, particularly in urban areas where most Americans now live.
In 1991, the typical first-time home buyer was 28 years old. This year, that buyer was 40, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Eric Fuqua, 25, a structural engineer earning $86,000 a year, said he had known for a while that he could not afford a house in the Atlanta neighborhood where he grew up and where his parents still live. He had pinned his hopes on a small condo.
But rising prices and high mortgage rates mean settling for a place far from the city center, he said, adding as much as 90 minutes each way to his commute.
He does not want to live that way. So, he keeps renting and splurges a little, visiting friends in other cities.
“There’s a sense of futility at this point,” he said. “I’m not going to rough it for five years to save for a house I’ll never be able to afford. So why not live my life the way I want to?”
This financial pessimism is being felt en masse. In a study published last month, economists at the University of Chicago found that young adults with few prospects of buying a house are disproportionately more likely to spend on leisure or risky investments like cryptocurrency. Those who own a home, or have a better chance at homeownership, take fewer risks and strive harder at work.
Of the homeowners interviewed, nearly all got financial help. Jesse Iverson, 28, an energy researcher, and Macy Mack, a graphic designer, bought a house last fall in East Grand Forks, Minn. They relied on a loan backed by the Department of Veterans Affairs, which meant there was no down payment. (He enlisted to help pay for college.)
Geography mattered. Mr. Iverson said he was also offered a job in New York State, but with housing prices there significantly higher, he chose Minnesota.
“Is it theoretically possible?” he said of buying a home. “Yes, and I’m proof of that. But I don’t think the bar to entry should be joining the military, having to work full time during college, and getting a loan from the V.A.”
It’s not just housing. Adults under 35 are not accumulating wealth as fast as they once had, said Edward N. Wolff, an economics professor at New York University. That is a sharp contrast with baby boomers, who are gaining an ever larger share of the country’s wealth.
Keyana Fedrick, a full-time manager at a department store in northeastern Pennsylvania, said she and her friends feel stuck in jobs that do not pay enough to rent an apartment, never mind buy a house.
She lives with her parents and said she had paid off her student loans. But she still feels as if she is waiting for her life to begin.
“I’m 36, and I don’t have children yet,” she said. “I should have a flipping life by now. I should be traveling. I should have a luxurious closet. But instead all I have is a good credit score and a paid-off 2013 Nissan.”
Ms. Fedrick sees a stark contrast between her generation and that of her parents. Both worked hard, as a teacher and a bus driver, and retired with pensions.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to retire,” she said, adding, “Boomers made out like bandits.”
But What About the Kids?
Since the beginning of time, economists point out, people on limited budgets have managed to successfully raise their children.
But many people interviewed were hesitant. They want to provide a better life for their kids — and for themselves.
Mr. Iverson, from Minnesota, said that he remembers his anxiety as a child when his family could not buy gas for the car.
Being poor “led to a whole bunch of fights and a whole lot of stress and some really nasty memories for me,” he said. “That’s affected me a lot in what to accept if I bring another person into this world.”
Mr. Thurston, from Philadelphia, said he wanted children. But right now, he and his partner must climb three floors to their rental apartment. Their car is a two-door “death trap.”
His salary, about $90,000, would need to cover student loans and child care. He also wants to live in a good school district and pay for extras, like music lessons and sports leagues.
“I know you don't need those things,” he said, “but as a parent, my job is to set my child up for success.”
Even for those who own a home, the thought of children can be daunting. Stephen Vincent, 30, and his partner, Brittany Robenault, a lab technician, first went to community college to save money. Then, he said, they “ate beans and rice” for several years to save for a down payment.
Now an analyst for a chemical company with a household income of about $150,000, he likes his lifestyle in Hamburg, Pa., and wants to keep it.
“We live in the richest country in the history of human civilization, so why can’t I eat out twice a week and have kids?” he said.
To the skeptics who say these trade-offs are simply lifestyle choices, there was a rejoinder: Hey, you try it.
“It’s very easy from a place of wealth and privilege to say, ‘You should be happy with something more modest,’” Mr. Thurston said.
But, he said, “it would kind of suck to live that way.”
Alicia Wrigley is grappling with the trade-offs. Ms. Wrigley and her husband, Richard Gailey, both musicians and teachers, own a two-bedroom bungalow in Salt Lake City and feel lucky to have it — they say they could not afford it now. But juggling in-home music lessons with their 2-year-old’s needs can feel like a squeeze. They want another child, but wonder how it would all work.
“I know it’s possible,” she said, looking through the window at her next-door neighbor’s house, which is exactly the same size.
That neighbor raised six children there in the 1970s. One way mothers then would cope, Ms. Wrigley said, was to “turn their kids out all day, and they’d just run around the neighborhood.”
She said she would not do that today, not least because someone might report her.
“The world,” she said, “is fundamentally different now.”
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8) Trump Administration Pushes Asylum Seekers to Apply in Other Countries
In immigration courts, U.S. lawyers have filed thousands of requests to dismiss asylum cases and force people to pursue asylum elsewhere.
By Jazmine Ulloa, Allison McCann and Hamed Aleaziz, Dec. 20, 2025
Federal agents detaining a man after his immigration hearing at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York earlier this year. Credit...Adam Gray for The New York Times
The Trump administration is intensifying efforts to deport people to countries where they have no connections.
Last month, lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security filed almost 5,000 motions to dismiss asylum cases and force applicants to seek protection elsewhere, a staggering increase from the few hundred such motions filed each month this summer.
The surge, documented in an analysis of public immigration court data, comes as federal officials have been working out new asylum agreements with a handful of nations, including Honduras and Uganda. Under these “safe third country” accords, foreign governments are offering to take in limited numbers of asylum seekers from the United States, promising that the U.S. deportees will be able to apply for asylum in those nations instead.
In immigration courts across the country, government lawyers are now increasingly asking judges to “pretermit,” or dismiss, asylum cases without hearings, asserting that applicants can seek asylum in those “safe third countries.”
Judges appear receptive to the requests, according to the court data analysis. In November, at least 230 asylum seekers who were not citizens of Honduras were ordered expelled to Honduras, as compared with 40 such people in October and one in September.
Homeland Security officials say the process will allow people to pursue asylum claims in countries where they do not fear persecution. “D.H.S. is using every lawful tool available to address the backlog and abuse of the asylum system,” the agency said in a statement.
In some cases, an immigrant may be subject to multiple motions, and D.H.S. officials have told agency prosecutors across the country that they should list as many third-country agreements as possible for a given immigrant, according to agency guidance obtained by The New York Times.
But as this practice has been expanded, it has been coming under more scrutiny, with deportation to Uganda, more than 7,000 miles from Washington, faulted by some immigration lawyers as unduly harsh.
On Friday, D.H.S. lawyers were issued a new directive that motions seeking deportation to Uganda could be filed only for immigrants from most other African nations, according to the document obtained by The Times. For motions to Uganda that had already been filed, it instructed lawyers to “expeditiously move to withdraw” them. That included the high-profile case of Heng Guan, the Chinese national who sought asylum in the United States after recording the surveillance of Uyghurs.
Lawyers who represent immigrants and scholars who study the asylum system called the motions the latest attempt to dismantle international human rights protections that President Trump has denounced as a “scam.”
In the federal lawsuit filed during the first Trump administration and resurrected in September, several asylum seekers and immigrant rights groups contend that the third-country asylum agreements are unlawful and an attempt to shirk the United States’ international obligations.
For decades, a person who enters the United States and seeks asylum has been allowed to live and work in the country while the case moves through an overburdened and underfunded court system.
But with fewer and fewer legal pathways to enter the United States, asylum claims have proliferated in recent years. The backlog now totals almost four million cases, and wait times for hearings have tended to span about four years and in some cases longer. That in turn has made the asylum system a target for critics from across the political spectrum. They argue the broken system incentivizes migrants with claims that have little or no merit under international law to use the form of relief as the surest path to remain in the country for at least several years.
In his first term in office, Mr. Trump, a vocal skeptic of asylum seekers, began an almost methodical approach to dismantling the asylum process. In 2024, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. prevented migrants from seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border after crossings at the border reached record heights, a policy that led those numbers to later drastically drop.
Since Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, his administration has taken its most aggressive actions against the system yet. It has directed Homeland Security lawyers to request the dismissal of asylum cases en masse. It has urged immigration judges to deny relief without holding hearings. It has put all pending asylum applications on hold.
Hiroshi Motomura, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the asylum system had long been due for a reckoning because of the pressures it has been under for generations. But accelerating dismissals of asylum cases is a misguided way to address the backlog, he added. The administration has been pursuing the fast-track strategy while simultaneously underfunding the system, he said, meaning fewer resources to ensure petitioners are having their cases fairly resolved.
“Efficiency is one goal, but so is accuracy, and you can be very efficient but be very inaccurate,” he said.
The analysis that showed the surge in dismissal motions for asylum seekers was conducted by Joseph Gunther, an independent mathematician, and Brandon Marrow, a civic technologist, who teamed up to analyze immigration court data as part of an effort to make the asylum process more transparent. Their research is shared on a website that Mr. Marrow created to provide free immigration court insights for lawyers.
The analysis showed that Homeland Security lawyers began filing motions to dismiss in hundreds of cases in Omaha over the summer, shortly after the administration signed new asylum agreements with Guatemala and Uganda. The practice took off in November after the Board of Immigration Appeals — the Justice Department body that reviews rulings from immigration courts and sets their policies — overturned a judge’s ruling in one of those asylum cases and delivered a decisive victory for the Department of Homeland Security.
Under that decision, immigration judges are instructed to consider whether to dismiss asylum cases without hearings on the grounds that immigrants can instead be sent to other countries to pursue relief there. The United States has had such an agreement with its close ally and neighbor Canada for more than two decades. But the new agreements are with a host of less stable nations: Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras, all of which have endured high levels of gang violence, and Uganda, which has a checkered human rights record and borders conflict regions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
For months, the Trump administration has been deporting migrants to troubled nations such as South Sudan, and to the tiny African monarchy of Eswatini. But the newer “safe third country” agreements are different in that they require that deportees from the United States be afforded access to a bona fide asylum process.
It remains unclear how many people the government will ultimately be able to deport to Uganda and elsewhere. Yet in courts, asylum seekers are already seeing their cases upturned.
Immigration lawyers say they are being given little notice of the new government motions and have not received copies of the third-country agreements, making it difficult to identify potential exceptions for their clients.
The board’s decision has left some asylum seekers and their lawyers to try to assess risks for several countries at once. “People are now in a position of having to show they fear persecution in five countries at the same time,” said Keren Zwick, a lawyer with the National Immigrant Justice Center, one of the groups that filed suit against the administration over its use of third-country agreements.
In an interview, Mauro, 43, an asylum seeker in Virginia, said he fled Ecuador and applied for U.S. asylum in 2023. He said he had been tortured and threatened with death by political operatives. But a day before his final hearing this November, his lawyers were notified that the U.S. government wants to send him to Honduras instead. Now, he and his lawyer are preparing to argue that he would fear persecution there as well.
“I’ve always believed that the United States is the only country where the values of free speech and democracy prevail, the only country where asylum is truly granted,” said Mauro, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation from his persecutors.
At 26 Federal Plaza, the federal building that has become the epicenter of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in New York City, the new fast-track strategy was evident this past week in the churn of cases going before judges in immigration courts.
In at least three courtrooms over two mornings this past week, Homeland Security lawyers in nearly all asylum cases moved to dismiss their cases and asked that immigrants be removed to any of the countries with asylum agreements, beginning with Uganda.
In Judge Karen Nazaire-Francois’ courtroom, some lawyers objected, to which she responded that she had little say in the matter.
“I cannot make a decision on whether or not I think it’s fair or legal,” Judge Nazaire-Francois said, citing the recent board of appeals decision ramping up the motions. “I have no choice under the board’s decision,” she added.
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9) U.S. Coast Guard Boards Tanker Carrying Venezuelan Oil
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said a vessel had been “apprehended.” It was the second action this month against a tanker carrying Venezuelan oil.
By Nicholas Nehamas, Anatoly Kurmanaev and Christiaan Triebert, Dec. 20, 2025
The Centuries, seen here in Venezuelan waters after loading oil in early December, was boarded on Saturday by the U.S. Coast Guard. Credit...TankerTrackers.com
The U.S. Coast Guard stopped and boarded a Panamanian-flagged tanker carrying Venezuelan oil early Saturday, according to a U.S. official and two people inside Venezuela’s oil industry.
All three spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. The boarding represents the United States’ second action this month against a tanker carrying Venezuelan crude oil to Asia, escalating President Trump’s pressure campaign against the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Maduro of flooding the United States with fentanyl and of stealing oil from American companies, without providing evidence.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump had announced “a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela.”
But the vessel boarded on Saturday, called the Centuries, is not on a list of entities under U.S. sanctions that is publicly maintained by the Treasury Department. The people inside Venezuela’s oil industry said the cargo belongs to an established China-based oil trader with a history of taking Venezuelan crude oil to Chinese refineries.
The ship had recently left Venezuela and was in Caribbean waters.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said in a post on X Saturday afternoon that the Coast Guard had “apprehended” a tanker that had been docked in Venezuela.
“The United States will continue to pursue the illicit movement of sanctioned oil that is used to fund narco terrorism in the region,” she wrote. “We will find you, and we will stop you.”
Ms. Noem also posted a video that appeared to show U.S. forces rappelling from a helicopter onto the ship’s deck.
It was unclear how long the United States intended to detain the Centuries. The U.S. official who confirmed the boarding of the ship said that American authorities did not have a seizure warrant to take possession of it, as they did when they seized another tanker earlier this month that was carrying Venezuelan oil.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
The Venezuelan government said in a statement that the country “denounces and categorically rejects the theft and hijacking of another private vessel transporting Venezuelan oil, as well as the forced disappearance of its crew.”
The Centuries had loaded between 1.8 million and two million barrels of Merey-16 crude oil at the José Terminal in Venezuela between Dec. 7 and Dec. 11, according to data analyzed by TankerTrackers.com and Kpler, two companies that monitor global shipping. The voyage was the vessel’s seventh export of Venezuelan oil since 2020.
With tensions between the United States and Venezuela rising significantly, Mr. Maduro recently ordered his navy to escort oil tankers leaving Venezuelan ports. Satellite imagery reviewed by The New York Times showed the Centuries on Thursday heading east, flanked by three vessels that may have belonged to the Venezuelan Navy. The flotilla appeared to escort the supertanker, alongside two other merchant vessels, to the limit of Venezuela’s exclusive economic zone and did not seem to have been present during the boarding on Saturday.
International law states a ship may be boarded if there are reasonable grounds to believe it is not legitimately registered to the state whose flag it is flying. The U.S. official said that the Coast Guard was trying to determine if the Centuries’s Panama registration was valid.
On Dec. 10, armed U.S. agents boarded and seized a tanker called the Skipper that was carrying Venezuelan oil, was flying a false flag and was under U.S. sanctions for previously carrying Iranian crude. In that case, American authorities had obtained a seizure warrant for the Skipper from a federal magistrate judge, based on the vessel’s connections to Iran, which the United States has said sells oil to finance terrorism.
Centuries has no known connection to Iran and is not known to have not transported Iranian oil, according to the people inside Venezuela’s oil industry and data from TankerTrackers.com and Kpler. Its last six voyages involved transporting Venezuelan crude and fuel oil, which it would often transfer to other vessels at sea. Those secondary vessels then delivered the cargo to China, which buys much of Venezuela’s oil.
The tanker — like many others that belong to what law enforcement authorities call the ghost fleet — has also engaged in a pattern of deceptive shipping practices to maintain this trade.
On its most recent trip to Venezuela, for instance, the Centuries broadcast a false location hundreds of miles away, pretending to be on the move when it was in fact loading oil at the port, a Times review of ship-tracking data and satellite imagery revealed. This method of faking location data by ships is known as spoofing.
Reporting was contributed by Edward Wong and John Ismay from Washington, Zolan Kanno-Youngs from West Palm Beach, Fla., and Simon Romero from Bogotá, Colombia
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10) Land Grab: Israel’s Escalating Campaign for Control of the West Bank
By Michael D. Shear, Daniel Berehulak, Leanne Abraham and Fatima AbdulKarim, Dec. 20, 2025
Every Saturday, sheep owned by Jewish settlers march through the olive groves that Rezeq Abu Naim and his family have tended for generations, crushing tree limbs and damaging roots. The extremist settlers, armed and sometimes masked, lead their herds to drink from the family’s scant water supplies while Mr. Abu Naim watches from the ramshackle tents of Al Mughayir, where he lives above the valley.
“I beg you, I beg you. God, just let us be,’” Mr. Abu Naim recalled telling settlers during a recent confrontation. “Just go away. We don’t want any problems.”
Vast stretches of his family’s farm and wheat have been seized by Israeli settlers who have set up outposts, illegal encampments that can eventually grow to become large settlements, on the nearby hills.
New roads cut through the land on which his own flock of sheep graze — and settlers routinely steal the animals, he said. Six months ago, a masked settler armed with a gun broke into his family home at 3 a.m., he recalled. He described raiders tearing through his son’s nearby home at night last December, slashing tents and stealing solar panels.
The family takes turns at night guarding their sheep against attacks from settlers. On a recent day, we found Mr. Abu Naim resting on pillows, a portable radio pressed to his ear listening for regional news.
Go away. Go away from here. Leave, Mr. Abu Naim said the settlers have told him repeatedly.
“I’m 70 years old, and I’ve been here all my life,” he replies. “But you came yesterday, and you want me now to leave, to go home.”
“This is my home.”
The fate of a farmer trying to wrest a livelihood out of a landscape dotted since biblical times by sheep and gnarled olive trees may seem distant from a modern world of clashing superpowers.
But these remote hilltops and hamlets sit at the leading edge of an intractable geopolitical conflict.
Even as the war in Gaza commanded the world’s attention over the past two years, the facts on the ground were shifting in the West Bank, intensifying the battle for control of the lands of Bethlehem and Jericho, Ramallah and Hebron.
For many Palestinians, they are the foundation of a future state of their own — and a future peace. But for many Jews, they are a rightful homeland.
Extremist Jewish settlers and Palestinian farmers are the foot soldiers in this endless conflict, an extension of the war in 1948 that accompanied the establishment of Israel. And since the Oct. 7., 2023, attack on Israel by Palestinian militants from Gaza, Israel’s far-right government has embraced a playbook of expanding settlements across the West Bank, transforming the region, piece by piece, from a patchwork of connected Palestinian villages into a collection of Israeli neighborhoods.
The unrelenting violent campaign by these settlers, that critics say is largely tolerated by the Israeli military, consists of brutal harassment, beatings, even killings, as well as high-impact roadblocks and village closures. These are coupled with a drastic increase in land seizures by the state and the demolition of villages to force Palestinians to abandon their land.
Many of the settlers are young extremists whose views go beyond even the far-right ideology of the government. They are not generally operating on direct orders from Israel’s military leadership. But they know the military frequently looks the other way and facilitates their actions.
In many cases, it is the military that forces Palestinians to evacuate or orders the destruction of their homes once settlers drive them to flee.
We attempted to speak to settlers near two of the West Bank villages that have been the targets of such pressure. None were willing to speak with us.
In a statement, the Israeli military said that its “security forces are committed to maintaining order and security for all residents of the area and act decisively against any manifestations of violence within their area of responsibility.”
The far-right Israeli government has been transparent about its mission: to sabotage what diplomats call the two-state solution and its goal of an Israeli and a Palestinian nation living side by side. “Every town, every neighborhood, every housing unit,” Bezalel Smotrich, the ultra-right-wing finance minister, said recently, “is another nail in the coffin of this dangerous idea.”
For years, the United Nations, the United States and much of the Western world have warned that the continuous expansion of Israeli settlements would eventually make the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.
Across the West Bank, there is desperation among Palestinian villagers and farmers as they watch the takeover of their lands at a pace never seen before. And there is fear that the changes are already becoming irreversible.
We spent more than two months in a dozen villages in the West Bank, meeting with Palestinian families, local officials, Bedouin farmers and young human rights activists, often visiting from abroad. We watched as groups of young Israeli settlers showed up in Palestinian villages to harass or intimidate them.
We met a family in Tulkarm whose 21-year-old daughter, Rahaf al-Ashqar, was killed in February by an explosion set off by Israeli soldiers who raided their home, claiming they were looking for terrorists.
We saw a 16-foot fence covered with razor wire that was built this year in the town of Sinjil that now separates Walid Naim from his family’s orchards.
We watched settlers block the road and try to stop Palestinian farmers from leaving their land after harvesting their olive trees in October.
In October, after settlers and soldiers stormed the gate of Masher Hamdan’s farm in the village of Turmus Aya, he decided to evacuate his sheep, goats, lambs and poultry to save his livelihood.
The New York Times studied mapping data and court orders that document the expansion of claims by the Israeli government to land that had long been in Palestinian hands. We photographed the construction of Israeli roadblocks designed to limit Palestinian movements and saw the installation of fences that cut off farmers from their land.
The Israeli onslaught has all but vanquished a free Palestinian existence in the West Bank. While the Palestinian Authority governs part of the West Bank, the Israeli military remains the occupying power of the whole territory, and military law supersedes the authority’s rule.
There is little due process and villagers live at the mercy of vigilante settlers and members of military platoons who exert almost total power over them. Settlers, who are subject to Israeli civil and criminal law rather than the military’s jurisdiction, are rarely detained or arrested for extremist or violent actions, while the military routinely rounds up Palestinians with little explanation or justification.
In late November, the Israeli military launched what it called a counterterrorism operation in the West Bank city of Tubas, arresting 22 Palestinians. On Dec. 10, Israeli officials approved construction of 764 homes in three West Bank settlements. The day before, the military uprooted about 20 acres of olive trees in a village south of Nablus.
How to Empty a Village
The campaign to isolate Palestinians and drive them off their land is evident in Al Mughayir, about 20 miles north of Jerusalem. What used to be a thriving Palestinian village has been surrounded by Jewish settlements, and villagers like Mr. Abu Naim have been squeezed into increasingly smaller areas, cut off from their land and their livelihoods.
Al Mughayir is one of several small Palestinian villages clustered roughly in the center of the West Bank, all of which have been relentlessly targeted in recent months by settlers and the Israeli government.
This is the pattern that has played out across the West Bank, transforming the entire territory.
A Jewish outpost, not authorized under Israeli law, pops up — a small trailer, perhaps, or a large tent housing just a few young men. Settler attacks soon follow. Then come the military orders demanding evacuations of Palestinian communities and the installation of large, iron roadblocks cutting off Palestinian villagers from the rest of the West Bank.
Over weeks and months, the outposts grow and are often eventually authorized by the Israeli government. Settlers build homes, businesses, schools and roads to accommodate hundreds and eventually thousands of Jewish families. In the Palestinian villages, the opposite happens. Schools are shuttered, farmers are cut off from their lands, and homes are destroyed.
The campaign started in earnest after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office in 2022 and accelerated after the war began. In 2024 and 2025, Israelis built about 130 new outposts, more than the number built in the previous two decades, according to Peace Now, an Israeli activist group that tracks settlement expansion.
Erasure
The flip side of the construction is destruction.
Across the West Bank, settlers and the military razed more than 1,500 Palestinian structures in 2025 — double the annual average in the decade before the war.
The dismantling of one long-established Palestinian community, East Muarrajat, began not long after a settler attack. On July 3, settlers, aided by members of the Israeli military, went house to house through the village where Bedouin families had lived for several generations in the white sand hills of the Jordan Valley, just north of Jericho.
The residents, who had already suffered years of harassment, decided that night to abandon their homes in the middle of the night when dozens of masked settlers, many of whom appeared to be drunk, showed up on four-wheeled ATVs. Some brandished guns as they raced through the village on the vehicles and circled crying women and children.
The settlers rammed the vehicles into people’s homes, then ransacked them, tearing down furnishings and throwing belongings outside while screaming obscenities.
“It was like the whole village was a compound of people screaming and yelling,” recalled one villager, Mohammed Mlehat. “We were afraid of things that are unspeakable, because they were dozens of young men who seemed to be drugged or drunk.”
A statement by the Israeli military said soldiers arrived in East Muarrajat that night after receiving reports of “friction” between Palestinians and settlers but “no violent incidents were identified.”
Fearful of more attacks, the villagers left that night, Mr. Mlehat said, and the destruction of the homes happened in the days and weeks that followed. His family now lives in tents without access to drinking water or electricity, just a few miles from where the village, now reduced to mostly rubble, once stood.
Among the few buildings still standing in East Muarrajat is an abandoned school that began operating in 1964. Through broken classroom windows, there are SpongeBob curtains still visible and school supplies scattered on the ground. A playground is littered with discarded hula hoops and backpacks strewn about.
Mr. Mlehat’s nephew, Jamal Mlehat, said the attacks showed the hypocrisy of settlers who seek sympathy, saying they want only to establish homes for themselves. He cited a Bedouin proverb: “You attack with the wolf and you cry with the sheep.”
“This is what they did with us,” he said.
Unending Harassment
The episodes of intimidation rarely let up.
The number of attacks by extremist settlers in the West Bank has skyrocketed in the last two years. In October, there were an average of eight incidents per day, the highest since the United Nations began keeping records two decades ago.
That coincided with the start of the olive harvest in the West Bank, when many Palestinian farmers have just four weeks to secure their livelihoods from the ancient trees that cover the region’s valleys and hills.
We saw Yousef Fandi and his brother, Abed Alnasser Fandi, being attacked in a field of olive trees in the village of Huwara on the morning of Oct. 9. They told us later that day that they had been tending the family olive grove when they were surrounded by settlers.
One was on horseback, armed and masked. Two others walked beside him. A fourth carried an assault rifle.
“What are you doing here?” demanded the man with the gun, leveling the weapon at them, Yousef Fandi recalled.
The settlers took the men’s phones, ordered them to the ground and proceeded to kick them in the ribs and head for about a half-hour, a scene we witnessed ourselves. Blood spotted Mr. Fandi’s shirt as he later recounted the beating to us.
“I thought that they might shoot us,” he said.
Since Oct. 1, the United Nations reports, 151 Palestinians have been injured in more than 178 separate attacks on olive harvesters. About half were tied to settlers and the rest to soldiers, the organization said.
By the time the Israeli soldiers arrived that morning in the village of Huwara, southwest of the city of Nablus, a large group of villagers had gathered, joined by journalists and activists who had heard about the clash.
The soldiers told the settlers to leave — but bore bad news for the Palestinians eager to return to their harvest.
As the villagers pushed to gain access to the fields, one of the soldiers waved a copy of a military order. A map on the document showed the olive orchard in Huwara completely covered in red, indicating that Palestinians were not allowed in the area for the next 30 days.
“The order was signed following an operational situation assessment,” the Israeli military said in a statement in response to questions. “Accordingly, farmers were informed that they would not be permitted to harvest in the area at that time.”
Military orders have become a staple of the Israeli settlement drive in the West Bank, with the government often declaring territory to be “state land” and denying Palestinian claims to family-owned property.
The clash in Huwara that day ended the way many others did during the olive harvest: with the farmers denied access to their fields.
“I have the documents of this land,” Yousef Fandi protested. “This is my land.”
Deadly Confrontations
For Sayfollah Musallet, a 20-year-old Palestinian American, one of the clashes with settlers turned deadly.
One Friday in July, young Israeli settlers cascaded down from their hilltop outpost above Sinjil, armed and masked, instigating a clash with Palestinian farmers whose land the settlers claimed as their own.
A pickup truck driven by the settlers ran into a crowd of Palestinians and activists, breaking one man’s leg before speeding off, according to Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli activist who witnessed the incident. When a Palestinian ambulance arrived, settlers pelted it with rocks and batons, cracking its windshield, Mr. Pollak said.
During the confrontation, Israeli settlers beat Mr. Musallet to death, according to his family members and the Palestinian authorities. Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel and a staunch supporter of the Netanyahu government, called the death a “criminal and terrorist act” and demanded that the Israeli authorities “aggressively investigate” it.
A second Palestinian man, Mohammad Shalabi, 23, was also killed during the clash. His body was found by villagers late that night with a gunshot wound and extensive bruising on his face and neck, according to his uncle.
Both men were buried at a funeral two days later that was attended by hundreds of villagers.
In the past three years alone, there were more than 1,200 Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank, nearly double the number for the decade before that, the United Nations reports.
A statement about the incident in Sinjil from the Israeli military said that “terrorists threw stones at Israeli civilians near the village” and said that the incident was being investigated.
Mr. Pollak, who was helping the Palestinians in Sinjil and was arrested by the Israeli military that day, said the violence by the settlers was part of a clear pattern.
“I want to say it was an inconceivable tragedy, but really, tragedy isn’t the right word,” he said. “You know, a tragedy is a force of nature. A tragedy is being hit by a lightning bolt. This is not what happened here.”
Renewed Attacks
For Mr. Abu Naim, the farmer in Al Mughayir, the threats to his family have not stopped.
On Sunday, Dec. 7, at 1:40 a.m., eight masked settlers armed with clubs attacked the caves and tents where Mr. Abu Naim and his nine children and grandchildren live. Six members of the family were sent to the hospital, including his 13-year-old grandson, who suffered cuts and bruises to his head.
The scene was described to us by activists, several of whom were sleeping at the home and were also injured. One of them, Phoebe Smith, who is from Britain, was wakened by screams, she said. When she went outside, she was attacked, too.
“I was outside of the tent, being beaten by them around the torso, the legs, the head,” Ms. Smith recalled as she recovered in Ramallah. “It was terrifying. Really terrifying.”
The Dec. 7 onslaught lasted about 10 minutes, she said. The attackers turned over furniture, grabbed three phones and used Ms. Smith’s laptop computer to beat several of the family members. They did not enter another tent, where Mr. Abu Naim’s daughter, nearly nine months pregnant, was cowering inside with two children.
Before heading out, the settlers issued a warning: Leave for good within two days, they said, or we will return and burn you in your home.
The Israeli military did not show up on Dec. 7. But three days later, on Dec. 10, settlers did return for another round of intimidation. Then a few hours later, activists said, five military jeeps carrying 20 soldiers and border police officers arrived with an order declaring the family’s compound a closed military zone.
Two activists were detained, and Mr. Abu Naim’s pregnant daughter and several children fled to safety. On Dec. 12, the military returned and extended the closure for 30 days. In a statement, the Israeli military said Palestinians instigated the Dec. 10 clash by throwing stones and rolling burning tires toward Israelis, which the villagers deny.
The statement said the area was declared a military zone on Dec. 12 “to maintain calm in the area following a prolonged period of tension.”
From the rocky edge of a cliff overlooking the valley, Mr. Abu Naim can keep an eye on his sheep. He can see the Jewish outposts that have sprung up in recent months. And he can try to spot any settlers headed toward his home to warn his children and grandchildren.
The war in Gaza, Mr. Abu Naim said, was a turning point.
“We used to come and go, mostly without any problems,” he recalled recently. “If we met the army, they would ask for our IDs. We give them. We went back and forth. We didn’t have the same problems.”
“But,” he added, “these guys are completely different.”
Map data sources
The historical map showing three communities near Ramallah from 1880 was produced by the Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, accessed via the David Rumsey Map Collection.
The map showing the same communities in 2025 uses data updated in March from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) to show roadblocks, checkpoints, gates and earth walls. This map uses data from Peace Now to show the extent of declared state land, Palestinian localities, Israeli settlements and outposts, newly approved settlements, and new settler roads. It uses data from B’Tselem to show settler attacks from 2020 to Oct. 2025, and communities expelled between 2022 to Oct. 2025.
The state land data in this map includes known declarations announced between 1998 and 2025. Settler roads include those built between mid-2023 and mid-2024. Land administered by the Palestinian Authority was provided by The Palestine Ministry of Local Government (GeoMOLG). The extent of the temporary military order outside of Al Mughayir came from an Israeli military order on Aug. 22, 2025. Lands declared firing zones are from UNOCHA.
The chart showing checkpoints includes both partially staffed and continuously staffed checkpoints.
Peace Now data showing settlements and outposts is as of July 2025. Newly approved settlements do not include 19 settlements authorized by Israel’s security cabinet in December 2025.
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11) Trump Takes America’s ‘Imperial Presidency’ to a New Level
In his first year back in the White House, President Trump has greatly expanded executive power while embracing the trappings of royalty in ways not seen in the modern era.
By Peter Baker, Dec. 21, 2025
Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, has covered the past six presidencies and wrote a book about President Trump’s first term. He reported from Washington.
New York Times Photographs by Kenny Holston, Eric Lee, and Haiyun Jiang
When President Trump hosted the crown prince of Saudi Arabia last month, he pulled out all the stops. To the traditional pomp of a formal White House visit, he added a few even fancier touches: a stirring military flyover, a procession of black horses and long, regal tables for the lavish dinner in the East Room instead of the typical round tables.
For surprised White House veterans who were paying attention, the unusual flourishes looked a little familiar. Just two months earlier, King Charles III of Britain welcomed Mr. Trump for a state visit that included, yes, a stirring military flyover, a procession of black horses and a long, regal table for the lavish dinner in St. George’s Hall at Windsor Palace.
In his first year back in office, Mr. Trump has unabashedly adopted the trappings of royalty just as he has asserted virtually unbridled power to transform American government and society to his liking. In both pageantry and policy, Mr. Trump has established a new, more audacious version of the imperial presidency that goes far beyond even the one associated with Richard M. Nixon, for whom the term was popularized half a century ago.
He no longer holds back, or is held back, as in the first term. Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 unleashed. The gold trim in the Oval Office, the demolition of the East Wing to be replaced by a massive ballroom, the plastering of his name and face on government buildings and now even the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the designation of his own birthday as a free-admission holiday at national parks — it all speaks to a personal aggrandizement and accumulation of power with meager resistance from Congress or the Supreme Court.
Nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch. Mr. Trump takes it upon himself to reinterpret a constitutional amendment and to eviscerate agencies and departments created by Congress. He dictates to private institutions how to run their affairs. He sends troops into American streets and wages an unauthorized war against nonmilitary boats in the Caribbean. He openly uses law enforcement for what his own chief of staff calls “score settling” against his enemies, he dispenses pardons to favored allies and he equates criticism to sedition punishable by death.
Mr. Trump’s reinvention of the presidency has altered the balance of power in Washington in profound ways that may endure long after he departs the scene. Authority once seized by one branch of government is rarely given back willingly. Actions that once shocked the system can eventually become seen as normal. While other presidents pushed the limits, Mr. Trump has blown right through them and dared anyone to stop him.
“His second term in many respects represents not simply a break from presidential norms and expectations,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “It’s also a culmination of 75 years in which presidents have reached for more and more power.”
It is also a culmination of four years of planning between Mr. Trump’s first term and his second. The last time around, he was a political novice who did not understand how government worked and surrounded himself with advisers who tried to restrain his most extreme instincts. This time, he arrived in office with a plan to accomplish what he did not in his first term, and a team of like-minded loyalists intent on remaking the country.
“The president knew exactly what he wanted to do coming into office this time,” said Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser. “Now the president had four years under his belt. He knows exactly how everything works. He knows all the international players. He knows all the national players. He knew what strategies and tactics worked the first go around and what strategies didn’t work.”
Strong and Weak
The presidency is a living organism, shaped by the person inhabiting it, whether it be self-styled men of action like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, father figures like Dwight D. Eisenhower, legislative wizards like Lyndon B. Johnson or captivating communicators like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. More than the sum of the clauses of the Constitution’s Article II, it is an evolving construct, one that has adapted to the ever-changing challenges of a complex and fast-moving world.
Mr. Trump wears it like a cloak. Power is the leitmotif of his second term. For the record, he disclaims royal aspirations. “I’m not a king,” he said after millions of Americans took to the streets in “No Kings” demonstrations in October. But at the same time, he embraces the comparison, at least in part to troll his critics but also, it seems, because he enjoys the notion.
He and his staff have posted images of him in monarchical regalia, including an A.I.-generated illustration of him wearing a crown and flying a fighter jet labeled “KING TRUMP” that dumps excrement on protesters. He delighted when the South Koreans gave him a replica of an ancient golden crown. “LONG LIVE THE KING!” he wrote about himself on social media.
To his supporters, Mr. Trump’s assertion of vast power is invigorating, not disturbing. In a country they see in decline, a strong hand is the only way to dislodge a liberal, “woke” deep state that in their view has suffocated everyday Americans to the advantage of unwelcome immigrants, street criminals, globalist tycoons, underqualified minorities and out-of-touch elites. Voters struggling to maintain their standards of living or make sense of a society changing rapidly around them have twice given Mr. Trump a chance to make good on his promise to blow up politics as usual and address their concerns.
To his critics, Mr. Trump is narcissistic, uncouth, corrupt and a danger to American democracy. He has used the office to enrich himself and his family, sullied the image of the United States around the world, sought to erase the true history of Black Americans and pursued policies that harm the very people he purports to represent.
What everyone agrees on is that Mr. Trump dominates the political landscape like none of his predecessors going back generations, single-handedly setting the agenda and forcing his will on the rest of the system. At the same time, he is the most consistently unpopular president since the advent of polling. He has never had the support of a majority of Americans, not in any of his three presidential elections and not for a single day of either term in Gallup surveys.
His current 36 percent approval rating in Gallup is lower than that of every elected modern president at the end of their first year, lower even than it was in his first term (39 percent) and seven percentage points below the next-lowest (Joseph R. Biden Jr., at 43 percent). If compared against presidents who served two terms consecutively, Mr. Trump is still below each of them at the end of their fifth year, except Mr. Nixon, who had plummeted to 29 percent in the throes of Watergate.
Some critics predict that Mr. Trump’s unpopularity will begin to erode his power. “It’s been striking that Republicans in Congress have stuck behind him,” said former Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona who broke with Mr. Trump in the first term. “But I do think that is changing. Some of it’s not exactly a profile in courage, but it’s looking at the electoral wins and realizing the midterms are going to be very difficult.”
Mr. Trump’s allies dismiss that as wishful thinking by the president’s critics. Mr. Miller called current polling a “temporary blip” that will reverse as tax cuts passed earlier this year take effect in the first couple of quarters of 2026. “Once the economy rockets to where everyone’s predicting it to be for Q1 and Q2,” he said, “that will all snap back.”
Bypassing Limits
Presidents have been pushing the boundaries of power going back to the early days of the republic, most aggressively during wartime. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus even beyond the battlefield and emancipated enslaved people in rebel areas. Woodrow Wilson prosecuted critics of World War I and effectively censored some newspapers. Franklin D. Roosevelt interned more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens. In most cases, the pendulum swung back to a degree after the wars were over and security restored.
In the modern era, the notion of an imperial presidency was made prominent by the book of that name published in 1973 by the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who had worked in John F. Kennedy’s White House. Mr. Schlesinger argued that under Mr. Nixon, who refused to spend certain money appropriated by Congress, secretly bombed Cambodia, wiretapped opponents and used government to pursue his enemies, the presidency “has got out of control and badly needs new definition and restraint.”
The system of checks and balances eventually did reassert itself during Watergate. The Supreme Court unanimously ordered Mr. Nixon to release incriminating tapes and a bipartisan coalition in Congress moved to impeach the president, prompting him to resign. Starting late in Mr. Nixon’s tenure, Congress passed new laws meant to restrain the executive on war powers, impoundment, eavesdropping and government ethics.
Some argued that the post-Watergate reforms went too far in emasculating the presidency after the voter-abbreviated tenures of Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter. Mr. Reagan and George W. Bush in different ways worked to empower the office again, particularly in foreign policy and national security. Mr. Obama pushed further by exempting from deportation many immigrants who had arrived illegally as children and Mr. Biden unilaterally tried to forgive $400 billion in student loan debt. But all four encountered pushback from the courts and Congress and none went as far as Mr. Trump has.
“Some of the stuff that people were upset at Nixon for doing was kind of quaint compared to just the totally out-of-control stuff” that Mr. Trump has been doing, said Robert Schlesinger, a son of Arthur Schlesinger and himself a longtime journalist and historian of the White House.
“Even Nixon was a guy who got that there were limits that he had to tread carefully around even as he was trying to push them,” Mr. Schlesinger added. “Whereas Trump, he’s not interested in limits. And whether it’s through a conscious strategy or just unconscious cunning, by being so open about it, it normalizes it to some extent.”
Learning Curve
That may stem from Mr. Trump’s distinctive ability to overcome obstacles and scandals that would hobble any other politician. He was impeached twice, indicted four times, convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual abuse and found liable for business fraud while his firm was convicted of criminal tax evasion. Yet he won a stunning, against-the-odds comeback election victory. The Supreme Court even granted him and his successors broad immunity that it had never bestowed on any previous president.
And so Mr. Trump evidently sees little reason to restrain himself. He has pursued an everything-everywhere-all-at-once strategy of pushing policies, even knowing that some of them may be rejected — a gamble that paid off, from his vantage point. As it turned out, not only has Congress acquiesced to vast intrusions on its traditional spheres of authority, most notably spending, but even the courts have been more of a speed bump than a stop sign.
That owes a lot to the team Mr. Trump has built around him, one that cheers him on rather than holds him back. Mr. Trump got off to “a fast start,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who tracks administration turnover. “They were rolling in the beginning. So, clearly, there’s been a learning curve and a recognition that staff chaos is not helpful to the cause.”
But as she pointed out, that does not mean there has not been staff turmoil. It’s just that Mr. Trump does not advertise it as much by firing people on social media, as he did the last time around, and Americans have become used to it. Without much notice, Mr. Trump withdrew 52 nominations in his first 10 months in office, four times as many as Mr. Biden did in the same period, according to figures compiled by Chris Piper, a Brookings colleague.
Working off a Project 2025 blueprint devised by allies during his four years out of power, Mr. Trump came back to office with a raft of executive orders that have allowed the instant-gratification president to dispense with the slow grind of congressional negotiations. So far this year, Mr. Trump has issued about 225 executive orders, nearly three times as many as any other first-year president in three-quarters of a century.
Mr. Miller credits a more cohesive team. “There are a lot less hangers-on or superfluous characters floating around,” he said. “That White House is about getting things done.”
But some Republicans said the lack of contrary voices in the West Wing has a cost. While Mr. Trump has successfully sealed the border as he promised and brokered a fragile cease-fire in Gaza, he looks out of touch on affordability and was rolled by the bipartisan coalition demanding the release of files related to the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
“You live in a bubble if that’s the situation and sometimes you get blindsided by reality,” said Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, one of the few incumbent Republicans who has been critical at times. “I don’t know that he’s hearing that kind of feedback. His first administration he had people who would say, ‘Mr. President, I know what you’re saying, this is what I’m thinking.’” By contrast, Mr. Bacon said, “this time, you’ve got pretty much yes men.”
Imperial or Imperiled?
The lack of checks on Mr. Trump has given him latitude that his predecessors did not enjoy, not just in policymaking but also in profit-making. While other presidential families have cashed in on the White House, none has been as successful or brazen as Mr. Trump and his clan. In the 11 months since he reclaimed the White House, the president’s family has made billions of dollars, at least on paper, through business deals around the world and cryptocurrency investments from people with a vested interest in American policy.
At the same time, Mr. Trump has systematically dismantled many instruments of accountability. He installed loyal partisans at the F.B.I. and Justice Department, fired inspectors general and the special counsel, purged prosecutors and agents who participated in past investigations into his dealings and gutted the public integrity section that probes political corruption. Congressional Republicans who eagerly looked into Hunter Biden’s business ties have no interest in scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s.
The question is how much of this change will be sustained. Is the presidency rewired for the long run or will it cycle back down the road?
As the year ends, there have been signs of resistance to unchecked power. A judge threw out the Trump administration’s indictments against two of the president’s adversaries, Letitia James and James B. Comey, and two grand juries refused to re-indict Ms. James. In addition to legislating release of the Epstein files, Congress passed a measure slashing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget by 25 percent if he does not turn over video of a second strike on a boat of supposed drug traffickers.
If Democrats win the midterm elections next year, they will surely use their newfound power to push back further against Mr. Trump. Some, like Mr. Flake, predict that even some Republicans will begin to speak out after filing deadlines for possible primary challengers have passed. And legal analysts expect the Supreme Court to clip Mr. Trump’s wings on tariffs, and possibly on birthright citizenship.
Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, acknowledged the nation’s long history of expanding presidential authority. But, he added, “we have an equally robust history of cramming the presidency back into its constitutional box once war or economic crisis has passed.”
That history “strongly suggests that what we are seeing today will not, in fact, endure.” Is that a guarantee? “I’m not smart enough to know the answer to that.”
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12) ‘It’s Just Us’: The Firefighter, His Son and a Treacherous Choice
For two decades, Luis Martinez has fought wildfires for the U.S. government. Now he’s facing down cancer, debt and the threat of separation from his 11-year-old.
By Hannah Dreier, Photographs by Loren Elliott, Dec. 21, 2025
For this story, Hannah interviewed more than 100 immigrant firefighters, spoke to U.S. Forest Service supervisors in 14 states and created a database tracking deployments of immigrant crews.
Luis Martinez, a wildfire fighter in Washington State, and his 11-year-old son, Rooney. Loren Elliott for The New York Times
Luis Martinez was still trying to figure out how to tell his 11-year-old son that his cancer might be back when his phone rang. He squinted to make out the name of his son’s soccer coach.
The coach wanted to know if Luis could drive his son, Rooney, to a tournament in Seattle, three hours away. A last-minute dropout meant their team suddenly had a chance to compete against the best players in the state.
Rooney was in the next room running his nightly footwork drills, the ball thudding against the wall. Luis figured he would want to go. He closed his eyes. He used to feel he knew exactly how to keep his son safe, but lately he wasn’t sure.
The coach had called instead of texting because Luis struggled to read messages. His eyes had been damaged two years earlier, when he was 38 and had nearly died of a cancer linked to the job he’d done his whole adult life: fighting wildfires for the federal government.
The coach waited. To have a shot at winning, the team needed its best players, and Rooney was one of them.
He offered to cover the entry fees, then asked again, could they make the drive?
Luis hesitated. His doctor had said she didn’t like the look of his most recent blood work and had scheduled more tests. She had warned him to pay attention to his fatigue. A long drive was probably more than his body could handle.
When Luis called Rooney over to ask if he wanted to make the trip, he instantly said yes. For weeks, he had sensed that something was wrong with his father. Luis was moving more slowly and going to the clinic more often. So Rooney was trying to stay close and work harder at making him proud. They ran soccer drills every afternoon until the light faded, and found local games most weekends. A road trip would mean more time together after Luis had spent months away on wildfires.
In their small, secluded town, nearly everyone was connected to the private companies that the government hired to fight fires. Smoke-related sicknesses were a shared fact of life. So were periodic immigration crackdowns. Lately, the road to Seattle was becoming a corridor for ICE enforcement.
Families were staying home, waiting until the danger eased. But Luis didn’t feel he had that kind of time. He told the coach they would try to make it. He had a week to decide.
Luis was about Rooney’s age when his father pulled him out of school to work in the fields in Mexico. At 18, he crossed the desert and made his way to Mattawa, a town of 3,500 people in Washington’s Columbia River basin. Almost entirely Latino and surrounded by miles of orchards, the town had been bypassed by highways and chain stores. Most of Luis’s neighbors had arrived the same way, crossing illegally and taking whatever work was available.
Luis immediately fell into a rhythm of pruning fruit trees in the winter and fighting fires in the summer.
He worked for a private firefighting company, but in the field, everyone took orders from U.S. Forest Service supervisors. He was usually assigned “mop-up,” one of the smokiest parts of the job. After flames had died down, he would get on his hands and knees to feel for spots that were still smoldering. When he found lingering embers, he smothered them with dirt.
By the end of the day, ash and grit would fill his nose and mouth. He might do this for weeks on end, cloaked in poisonous smoke that the Forest Service has known for years can damage hearts and lungs and cause fatal cancers.
Over time, he noticed how inconsistent the directives were. One day, his crew might be told to clean up everything 10 feet into a burned area; another day, 100. Sometimes the supervisors sent them back to the same patch again and again, stirring up more ash. “It was like, ‘We’ve been here five times — there’s nothing left,’” he said.
He figured these were at least safer assignments, farther from flames. In fact, mop-up is among the most carcinogenic work on a fire.
The Forest Service’s own researchers warned in 2016 that supervisors were assigning mop-up more often than needed, endangering firefighters’ health. The agency’s policy is to limit mop-up to only what is strictly necessary. In practice, though, that work is still frequently being done — it has just fallen to immigrants.
Dozens of the firefighting companies that the government relies on are built on immigrant labor. Worker advocates and the Forest Service’s internal watchdog have estimated that as many as 70 percent of these firefighters are undocumented.
By his 30s, Luis had watched many co-workers his age collapse into illness: heart failure, incurable cancer, lung problems that put them out of work. His company offered no health insurance. When someone got sick, Luis would spend days cooking carnitas to sell in town to raise money.
He had thought he would eventually return to Mexico, but then Rooney was born. Named for Wayne Rooney, the Manchester United star considered one of England’s best players, Rooney mostly lived with Luis. They had always been inseparable, the boy’s mother said. She lived nearby and took Rooney when his father was fighting fires.
When Rooney turned 7, Luis bought him a soccer ball and started taking him to tournaments. Soon, he was invited to join a travel team, and Luis began dreaming of a college scholarship. He kept Rooney’s homework folders on the table and lined his soccer trophies and certificates for perfect attendance along the kitchen wall. When he was away for fire season, he called his son every night.
It felt like a stable life. Then one day in 2023, Luis’s vision suddenly dimmed, as if cobwebs were covering his eyes. After a trip to the emergency room, he was quickly diagnosed with a rare leukemia that often causes life-threatening hemorrhages. In Luis’s case, the bleeding had started in his eyes.
When Rooney got to his father’s hospital room, Luis could recognize him only by his voice. The boy was just a shadow in a hazy door frame.
Rooney began visiting most days after school. He changed his father’s socks and ate his Jell-O cups. At night, he crawled into the hospital bed and asked to stay over.
The Forest Service recognizes that wildfire smoke is linked to leukemia and other cancers. When firefighters who work directly for the federal government fall sick with these illnesses, they’re entitled to workers’ compensation coverage, which pays for medical care. But these benefits do not extend to contract workers like Luis.
After a month in the hospital, he received a bill for $133,000. He had been earning $20 an hour fighting fires, a number that shrank after taxes and deductions for Medicare, Social Security and other benefits that, as an undocumented immigrant, he was not allowed to use. “There are lots of people who prefer to die in Mexico,” he said. “But my place is here with Rooney.” Luis asked the hospital to set him up on a payment plan.
When the hospital sent him home, he still saw the world in shadows and needed regular injections in his eyes. At night, while making dinner, he sometimes cut his fingertips.
He wanted to shield Rooney as much as possible, so he continued to get dressed every day and go to the orchards, where he sat in the sun while his friends worked. They raised money for him, as he had for others. Luis kept a list of every person who helped — more than a hundred names — folded in the closet beside his son’s clothes.
After 11 months of chemotherapy, Luis went into remission last year, though his doctors explained that he was not cured. His vision had improved enough to drive and manage daily tasks. They told him to find lighter work, maybe in a store. But in Mattawa, there were only two kinds of jobs: the orchards or the fires. And fires paid better. So in April, he asked to be put back on a crew.
For years, Luis had pitied the sick men who kept going back to fires. He also thought they were reckless, choosing money over safety and endangering their crewmates.
Now, though, he felt he had to go, even when Rooney asked him not to. “I told him, here everyone has to work so they can eat,” Luis said.
Soon, he was able to start paying bills. But it felt like the job was getting more dangerous.
In August, a firefighter who had grown up near Luis had a heart attack and died on a Montana fire. Days later, immigration agents appeared at a Washington wildfire and pulled aside a crew for questioning. One firefighter was deported. Another, who had lived in the country since he was 4, was sent to detention.
After the raid, some of Luis’s colleagues started turning down deployments. Those who kept going tried to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
During a large fire in October, The Times watched as a team from Luis’s company was sent alongside two government crews to a hillside that had partly burned. When the supervisor asked them to check for smoldering ash, the two government crew leaders said the smoke exposure wasn’t worth it: The fire would likely tear through the area again anyway.
But the immigrant firefighters got directly to work. They hiked up the charred hill and called out warnings in Spanish as smoke enveloped them. They poked into holes, finding smoldering roots and stirring up embers. They kept at it until dark.
The next day, the whole hillside burned.
Forest Service supervisors told The Times they feel pressure to assign mop-up even when it may not be strictly necessary. Residents grow alarmed when smoke lingers. Supervisors also fear being blamed if a fire reignites, a worry sharpened by the Palisades fire in Los Angeles, which may have begun with a leftover ember. They often give mop-up to contractors. (The Forest Service said “mop-up is where we lock in the hard-fought gains in suppressing a fire” and supervisors are trained to weigh risks against potential gains.)
By the time the fire season ended, Luis was exhausted. His muscles ached, his legs were going numb and he couldn’t keep up with Rooney during their daily soccer drills. He told himself maybe it was his age, 40 now. But at the end of October, he went in for blood tests. The doctors said things he couldn’t quite understand and gave him an injection. “They told me my results were very bad and I was backsliding,” he said.
Luis had kept the news to himself, and the coach’s call had come as he was trying to figure out how he could rest with bills piling up and a sixth-grader counting on him. Now he sat beside Rooney at Mass, debating whether to make the trip.
So many people wanted to pray lately that their church, Our Lady of the Desert, had moved its services into a warehouse. Mass was held in Spanish, and nearly every pew held firefighters and their families. As incense filled the room, some started coughing.
In the back, Luis knelt and prayed for protection. Rooney leaned his head on Luis’s shoulder, repeating the wish he’d made every day since his father went back to firefighting: Please let him not get sick again.
After Mass, they drove to do soccer drills next to an orchard. They usually ran a few warm-up laps around the field together. But today, Luis let Rooney run ahead while he struggled to walk one lap.
“I know I’m sick again,” he said in a low voice. “I can feel it.” He stood to catch his breath and watched Rooney run toward him.
The day before the tournament, they were training again.
“Are you going to take him?” another father asked. They were standing at the edge of the field, hands jammed into their pockets against the cold, watching their sons practice. “Won’t there be ICE there?”
Luis didn’t know. Mattawa still felt safely isolated, but firefighters who worked for his company were being picked up in the cities closer to Seattle. He told the other father he hoped ICE would not raid a children’s soccer tournament. “That would be too cruel,” he said.
Rooney sprinted by, cheeks flushed. Luis waved him back into position and reset the cones. Most of the other children on the team, which was based in a larger town an hour away, trained with soccer academies. Luis and Rooney had learned the drills by watching videos on Luis’s phone.
When they drove home, Luis stayed 10 miles under the speed limit and waited at stop signs until the road was empty in all directions. His eyesight had improved, but he still drove only in daylight, when the weather was clear.
He had barely made it inside when there was a knock. It was the recruiter who had sent him to his first wildfire crew at 18, stopping by because he’d heard ICE was patrolling the roads.
A whole Oregon-based crew had been detained, he said. “If they start asking for papers next summer, we’ll go from 15 crews to five.”
Luis looked over to see if Rooney was listening, but he seemed absorbed in a video game.
When he first got sick, Luis borrowed money to apply for a humanitarian relief program that shields immigrants with serious illnesses from being deported. The mayor wrote him a character reference letter. His lawyer said he had a good chance. But this year, under President Trump, his case stalled.
After Rooney fell asleep beside him, Luis scrolled on his phone, the text set to the largest size. He saw real-time ICE alerts, fund-raisers for legal fees, posts on protecting children if parents were deported.
Luis switched to looking at training videos. He watched his son breathing under the heavy blanket.
“It’s just us,” he said. “I have to make sure he stays on a good path.”
Luis closed his eyes. Tomorrow, he decided, they would drive to Seattle.
Before they left, Luis and Rooney bowed their heads before a small altar they kept in the kitchen. Luis prayed to the memory of his parents and to God to protect them on the road. Rooney prayed to play well.
Luis kept his immigration paperwork in the glove compartment. Standing in the sunny driveway, he smoothed and photographed each page.
“That way if they rip it up, I’ll still have it,” he said. He had heard the best thing to do if he was stopped was simply refuse to answer any questions. “I can’t answer that,” he said aloud in Spanish. While he practiced a few more times, Rooney threw his backpack in the back seat and waited.
At a gas station outside town, Rooney jogged up and down the aisles. He picked a corn dog for himself and nothing for Luis. He’d seen a brochure called “Does sugar feed cancer?” in a doctor’s office, and didn’t want to tempt him. “I have to make sure he stays healthy,” Rooney said.
Between fires over the summer, Luis had found work in the orchards and, for the first time, Rooney had gone with him. Rooney said he wanted to help pay for his school clothes. Watching his son come home dusty and exhausted, Luis worried he was passing on the same burden he’d experienced as a child. He told Rooney it was so he would remember why school, soccer and college scholarships mattered.
“But he understands too much already,” Luis said. “He talks like an adult now.”
Back on the highway, Luis scanned the side of the road like he had during mop-up, looking for anything that stood out. The silence between them deepened when they passed a stopped patrol car.
Rooney was too nervous to sleep, and spent the hours until Seattle playing games on his phone.
At the sports complex where Seattle’s professional teams trained, Luis and Rooney stared at the children on the other teams. They were tall, with logos buzzed into their salon haircuts. Their cleats were from the mall, not sent by relatives in Mexico. They wore pressed uniforms stenciled with their names. Rooney’s said “James,” a hand-me-down from the coach.
Rooney’s team, the Cubs, would have to win all their games on this first day to make it to the finals. The coach held Rooney back until the team was down 0-2. When he got in, he scored three goals in the space of a few minutes.
After the third goal, Rooney glanced at his father and saw that he looked proud. “Have fun, Rooney,” Luis shouted.
Luis couldn’t make out the expression on Rooney’s face, just the number on his back. But he knew the drills by heart and felt good seeing them put into action. It was a little like being on the fire line, everyone pulling in the same direction.
The team won every match that day. Luis and Rooney spent the night at a friend’s in Seattle, and Luis cooked for everyone. Restaurants and churches were mostly empty now, the friend said; ICE had been patrolling all week.
At the complex the next morning, Luis watched Rooney warm up. He was glad they had come. “It’s the only thing I have to give him,” he said. “To show him when I’m gone that I loved him and supported him in the things he cared about. He’ll remember this when he’s older and trying to find his way.”
Soon, it would be time to get on the road. Rooney would fall asleep against the car window, a medal resting on his chest.
There would be more tests and appointments waiting for Luis back home. But he wouldn’t tell Rooney. Not just yet.
Julie Tate contributed research.
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