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Dear Friends,
We are saddened to inform you that our dear comrade Nellie Wong passed away on January 2 from ovarian cancer.
She was diagnosed in mid-December and chose to forgo chemotherapy so that her quality of life would be on the level she was used to — spending time conversing with comrades, friends and family, writing poetry, enjoying good food, and consistently fighting for a better world. Nellie lived life the way she chose and that’s also how she left the world.
Nellie found her voice when she found the feminist movement. She was one of the first to call herself an Asian American feminist back in the mid-1970s. She embraced all of herself as a Chinese American woman, revolutionary, worker, poet, activist. She inspired many generations with her courage to stand by her beliefs and her willingness to fight for them.
Nellie was a prolific writer and she published five books of poetry and her writings were included in over 200 publications. She wrote for the Freedom Socialist newspaper and also penned the introductions to the anthologies Voices of Color and Talking Back. Her writings were a result of both her experiences and her socialist feminist politics. They were inseparable.
Nellie was a leader, the organizer of the San Francisco Bay Area FSP branch for 20 years. She was always proud to let people know of her involvement with the party and Radical Women. In every interaction, she weaved in her Marxist feminism, her belief that socialism is needed, and her conviction that the working class will make revolution.
FSP and RW will be holding a memorial for Nellie in the near future to celebrate her life and accomplishments, and we’ll let you know the details as soon as they are set.
Nellie Wong, ¡presente!
Nancy Reiko Kato
Bay Area FSP Organizer
Make a Donation:
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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”
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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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Articles
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1) I’m the Mayor of Minneapolis. Trump Is Lying to You.
By Jacob Frey, Mr. Frey is the mayor of Minneapolis, Jan. 8, 2026
Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On Aug. 1, 2007, the Interstate 35W bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed into the water during rush hour. Thirteen people died, and dozens more were injured.
In the immediate aftermath, the president, a Republican, showed up in a city full of Democrats ready to help.
Minneapolis leaders were passionate and vocal critics of President George W. Bush’s policies at the time. But when the crisis struck, it didn’t matter. We were partners in what mattered most: saving lives, steadying our community and rebuilding infrastructure. Cities could count on the administration in a crisis. Politics stopped, quite literally, at the water’s edge.
Blue cities like Minneapolis used to be able to count on good-faith partnerships with the federal government under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Under the Biden administration, our police officers worked with federal agents and the U.S. attorney’s office to bring down shooting rates in North Minneapolis. The effort wasn’t political — it was practical, and it continues to keep people safe.
But such partnerships, in both crisis and ordinary governance, are not the experience of big-city Democratic mayors under the Trump administrations. I learned that the hard way in 2020 during the civil unrest that came in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer. I’ll never forget the shock I felt when President Trump not only encouraged violence during the unrest, but denied federal approval for disaster relief.
On Wednesday, when I learned that a Minneapolis resident had been shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, I didn’t feel the shock in my gut that I felt over five years ago. Nothing about this was shocking. The chaos that ICE and the Trump administration have brought to Minneapolis made this tragedy sadly predictable. In mid-December, ICE agents were filmed dragging a pregnant woman through the street. Heavily armed agents have been deployed to arrest lone individuals in public libraries and malls. Even in the aftermath of this week’s shooting, ICE agents continued to spread chaos, apparently deploying chemical agents at a local public high school.
The actions of the ICE agents deployed to my city are dangerous, and now, even deadly. But that danger has been compounded by the administration’s claim that the victim committed an act of domestic terrorism. The Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, baselessly insisted the shooting was an act of self-defense. Mr. Trump falsely claimed that the victim, Renee Nicole Good, “behaved horribly” and “ran him over,” referring to the ICE agent. I’ve watched multiple videos, from multiple perspectives — it seems clear that Ms. Good, a mother of three, was trying to leave the scene, not attack an agent.
The Trump administration’s false narrative about this week’s shooting, and the demonization of the victim, are only part of a bigger lie. It wants the American public to believe that ICE’s heavily militarized crackdown across this country is an effort to keep cities like Minneapolis safe. It is not. It is about vilifying not just immigrants, but all who welcome them and their contributions to our communities. By defending the lie about this clearly avoidable shooting in Minneapolis and refusing to allow Minnesota officials to investigate the crime, the administration is sending a message to the entire country: If you show up for your immigrant neighbors, or even are simply present when those neighbors are taken, your rights will not be protected by the law and your life will be at risk.
Under both the first and second Trump administrations, the country has learned from watching Minneapolis that the federal government holds no regard for cities or the people who live in them. When coupled with this administration’s open contempt for democratic norms — indeed, our Constitution — this is a threat to the long-term endurance of our Republic.
I hope no more of my fellow mayors find their cities in this administration’s cross hairs. But for those who do, here is my advice: The best thing you can do is to build cities that work, and love those streets and those citizens above any ideology. By bringing down violent crime, Minneapolis has been able to successfully push back against those who have tried to portray our city as a postapocalyptic hellscape. By building housing and focusing on affordability, we have made our city a place that immigrants, transplants and native Minneapolitans can all call home. By supporting immigrant-owned small businesses, our city has become living proof that immigrants make our city and our nation stronger.
Cities are on the front lines of this dark hour in our national politics. But after we weather this moment — and we will weather it — it will be on us to light the way forward. The best way to convince the country that welcoming and lifting up immigrants is good for its communities is by proving it in our own cities.
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2) By Killing Renee Good, ICE Sent a Message to Us All
By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist, Jan. 8, 2026
Tim Evans/Reuters
Throughout Donald Trump’s second term, when he’s sent armed, masked ICE agents into cities, locals have tried to resist by organizing neighborhood watches, both to warn people that agents are coming and to document the arrests they make. Minneapolis, where this week ICE launched what its acting director called the “largest immigration operation ever,” was no different.
Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, told me that since ICE ramped up its operations in Minneapolis, it’s felt “like we are being inundated with a hostile paramilitary group that is mistreating, insulting, terrorizing our neighbors.” And the residents of Minneapolis have responded: “People have got their whistles, and they’ve got their little alert system to tell people ICE is in the neighborhood. They’ve been protesting. They’ve been out there trying to protect their neighbors.”
Many of these people probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.
The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption. ICE, said Ellison, is all but telling people, “‘You want to defend your neighbors, you’re going to do it at the risk of your own life.’ I think that’s the unmistakable message. Just looking at the tape, they could have said, ‘You get out of here,’ right? And then she gets out of there. They didn’t want her to get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what they did. And it was all about teaching lessons.”
The lesson didn’t end with Good’s killing — the administration had to smear her afterward. As The New York Times reported, bystander footage filmed from several different angles shows that the agent who shot Good wasn’t in the path of her S.U.V. when he fired on her. That did not stop Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from accusing Good of trying to run agents over in “an act of domestic terrorism.” Vice President JD Vance called her a “deranged leftist.”
In the imagination of some on the right, Good quickly came to stand in for all the grating Resistance moms they’d like to see crushed. Fox News sneered that Good was a “self-proclaimed poet” — she’s the winner of a prestigious poetry award — “with pronouns in her bio.” The conservative radio host Erick Erickson described her as an “AWFUL,” or “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.”
It’s entirely possible that had Good lived, the Trump administration might have tried to prosecute her. That’s essentially what happened to Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in Chicago, in October. Martinez was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials claimed she “rammed” a car driven by the agent Charles Exum, while her lawyers say he sideswiped her. Exum then got out of his car and shot her five times.
Martinez survived, only for the Justice Department to charge her with assaulting a federal officer. Her lawyers soon discovered that Exum had been boasting about the shooting in text messages. In one, he wrote, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” In another, he said, “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.” The Justice Department ended up dropping the case before even more messages could be revealed.
Exum’s giddy sadism shouldn’t have been surprising; it reflects the culture the administration is encouraging among its immigration enforcers. In one ICE recruiting ad, an agent mans a mounted gun atop some sort of militarized vehicle, with the words, “Destroy the flood.” It was a reference to the video game Halo, where players must kill hostile space aliens. Another shows sword-wielding knights with the words, “The enemies are at the gates.”
Homeland Security’s social media feed is an unending stream of demented propaganda and bellicose Christian nationalism. An image posted on New Year’s Eve shows a classic car on an idyllic beach with the slogan, “America after 100 million deportations.” Homeland Security has added the words, “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.” One hundred million, it’s important to note, is almost twice America’s entire immigrant population. They are telegraphing the creation of a far-reaching police state.
In such a system, the relationship between every citizen and their government is transformed by the constant demand for submission. Since Good’s death, Republicans have been lining up to threaten those who don’t immediately comply with ICE’s orders. “The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life,” Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas said on Newsmax.
All of us, citizens and immigrants alike, are being ruled by people who think life is a privilege bestowed by authority, and death is a fair penalty for disobedience.
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3) Federal Agents Shoot 2 During Traffic Stop in Portland, Ore.
The shooting came as Minneapolis grappled with a federal agent’s killing of a woman a day earlier, prompting calls from local leaders for an end to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
By Anna Griffin, Hamed Aleaziz and Thomas Fuller, Anna Griffin reported from Portland, Ore., Published Jan. 8, 2026, Updated Jan. 9, 2026
Federal agents shot two people in Portland on Thursday during a traffic stop, a day after the fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis stoked outrage over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
A Homeland Security Department spokeswoman said in a statement that U.S. Border Patrol agents were conducting a “targeted vehicle stop,” and that an agent fired a shot after the driver tried to run them over.
The spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, described the agents’ target as an undocumented immigrant and member of Tren de Aragua, a gang with roots in a Venezuelan prison that has been a frequent target of President Trump. She provided no immediate evidence that the person who was targeted was affiliated with the gang.
Bob Day, Portland’s police chief, said at an evening news conference that he had no information on the identity of the two people who were shot, a man and a woman. He said that the federal officials involved in the shooting were no longer on the scene when local officers arrived.
The police were alerted to the shooting when the injured man called 911, Chief Day said.
The chief’s comments appeared to underscore the limited cooperation between federal and local officials. Chief Day said local officials knew little about the shooting and that the investigation would be led by the F.B.I. “We do not know if this is an immigration-related event,” he said. “We do not know which federal agencies were involved.”
Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon called for a full and transparent federal investigation. “Trust is essential to maintain community safety and uphold the law,” she said. “Federal agents at the direction of the Department of Homeland Security are shattering trust. They are destroying day by day what we hold dear.”
The shooting occurred around 2:15 p.m. Pacific near Adventist Health Portland, a hospital and collection of health clinics in the Hazelwood neighborhood, about eight miles from the city center, officials said.
The driver of the vehicle that federal officials fired into drove off after the shooting, local officials said, and the victims were found by the police more than two miles away, with gunshot wounds. Emergency medical technicians who rushed the victims to hospitals described both as Spanish speakers in conversations captured by emergency radio broadcasts. The woman had a gunshot wound to the chest, an E.M.T. told a dispatcher. The man was described as having two gunshot wounds.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney, Portland’s City Council president, said during a council meeting Thursday afternoon that she believed the two people who had been shot were still alive, though local officials later said they did not know their condition.
Teddy Jay, 20, a resident of the Bria apartment complex in Hazelwood, said he believed the two people who were shot lived in the complex but that he did not know their names. He said he saw them arrive by truck earlier in the afternoon.
“Basically, I was sitting in the house. I heard complete chaos. A whole lot of police sirens,” he said.
Mr. Jay said there was a bloody footprint on the sidewalk outside his building. He said he later saw an official providing medical aid and loading the two people into an ambulance.
Residents said the neighborhood has a high crime rate. A former resident at the complex, Debbie Rembert, 60, said the area “was so horrible — the shootings and the robberies and the drugs.”
Portland was the site of months of clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in 2020. Last summer, protests at the city’s ICE facility at times turned violent, and led Mr. Trump to attempt to use the National Guard to quell demonstrations. A federal judge blocked that effort.
At the news conference Thursday, several officials sharply criticized the presence of federal officials in the city and demanded that they leave.
Kayse Jama, the majority leader of the Oregon State Senate, said that the shooting occurred near his home and that he was “outraged.” Addressing federal immigration officials directly, he said: “We do not need you. You are not welcome. You need to get the hell out of our community.”
On Thursday evening, hundreds gathered at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland to protest the crackdown, chanting slogans including “no justice, no peace.”
Just before 9 p.m. local time, the police arrived and began moving protesters out of the area. The Portland Police Bureau said that its officers arrested six people there on charges of disorderly conduct.
Despite their criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, local leaders urged calm, particularly in the wake of the already charged national environment following the fatal shooting of a woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis on Wednesday.
Mayor Keith Wilson said the incident was another sign that federal immigration efforts were out of control. He called on the Trump administration to end enforcement operations in Portland.
“The administration is trying to divide us, to pit communities against one another, to make us fear one another,” he said. “Portland, this is a moment to hold each other close.”
Pooja Salhotra, Amanda Waldroupe and Aaron West contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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4) Iran Is Cut Off From Internet as Protests Calling for Regime Change Intensify
As protests swelled around the country, Iran’s internet was shut down, and the heads of its judiciary and its security services warned of a harsh response amid calls for “freedom, freedom.”
By Farnaz Fassihi, Pranav Baskar and Sanam Mahoozi, Published Jan. 8, 2026, Updated Jan. 9, 2026
An image taken from social media shows Iranian security forces using tear gas to disperse protesters at the Tehran bazaar on Tuesday. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Iran plunged into an internet blackout on Thursday, monitoring groups said, as nationwide protests demanding the ouster of the Islamic government spread to multiple cities and grew in size, according to witnesses.
The internet shutdown came a day after the heads of Iran’s judiciary and its security services said they would take tough measures against anyone protesting. But the threats did not deter demonstrators.
In telephone interviews, more than a dozen witnesses said that they saw large crowds forming on Thursday night in neighborhoods across Tehran, the capital, and in cities around Iran, including Mashhad, Bushehr, Shiraz and Isfahan. They said the crowds were diverse, with men and women, young and old. The people interviewed inside Iran asked that their names not be published out of fear of retribution.
One resident of Tehran said that the crowds were chanting, “Death to Khamenei,” referring to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and “freedom, freedom.” The chants could be heard from several blocks away in the affluent neighborhood of Shahrak Gharb in Tehran, which had until now sat out the protests.
Videos filmed on Thursday night showed government buildings on fire across the country, including in Tehran, as protests grew. While the protests were mostly peaceful early in the evening, violence broke out later in the night in Tehran, with demonstrators setting fire to cars, buildings and items in the street. A video verified by The New York Times shows fires in the streets of Kaj Square in the capital, with thousands of protesters flooding the area.
In Karaj, a suburb west of Tehran, a video verified by The Times showed protesters fleeing after gunshots were fired, though it is unclear from the videos whether it was security forces firing.
As the protests grew, internet connectivity data showed an abrupt and near-total drop in connection levels in Iran on Thursday afternoon, according to NetBlocks, an internet monitoring group, and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Internet Outage Detection and Analysis database. The data indicates that the country is almost completely offline.
Iranian officials did not immediately respond to questions about the cause of the shutdown, but the government has previously enforced internet blackouts during moments of crisis. During the country’s 12-day war with Israel last June, Iran blocked access to the internet, saying that it was a necessary security measure to stop Israeli infiltration. That measure also cut off the flow of information outward to the rest of the world.
“The Iranian government uses internet shutdowns as a tool of repression,” said Omid Memarian, an Iranian human rights expert and senior fellow at DAWN, a Washington-based organization focused on the Middle East. “Whenever protests reach a critical point, authorities sever the country’s connection to the global internet to isolate protesters and limit their communication with the outside world.”
Iranians have been protesting against the authoritarian rule of the Islamic clerics for decades, in wave after wave of protests that have been repeatedly crushed.
The latest round of protests began a week ago. Multiple opposition groups, including Kurdish political groups, the Coordination Council of Azerbaijani Parties and Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah of Iran, had all called for people inside Iran to take to the streets. Mr. Pahlavi had said in a video message that people opposing the government should come to the streets at 8 p.m. on Thursday.
Pro-democracy activists, such as the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Narges Mohammadi, who is currently in detention, said in a statement with 17 prominent dissidents and film directors last week that the demand for democracy could not be quashed.
A resident in the southern city of Bushehr said the crowd was so large there that the security forces retreated.
A resident of Isfahan said that as a crowd of protesters marched, drivers honked and waved, and people in nearby apartment building whistled in solidarity.
A resident of Sadeghiyeh, a middle-class neighborhood in Tehran, said the crowd was swelling in size by the hour. He said security forces had fired their weapons into the air and fired tear gas canisters, but did not disperse the crowd. He said that some people in the crowd chanted, “Long live the Shah,” a reference to the last monarch in Iran, who was toppled in the 1979 revolution.
Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, said in a post on social media that the “Zionist regime” — referring to Israel — was behind the protests. “The destabilization puzzle has been activated; a puzzle that the Iranian nation will not allow to be completed,” he added.
A senior government official, who did not want to be identified, said in an interview that many officials were privately calling and texting one another, at a loss of how to contain the avalanche of protests. He said the Revolutionary Guards Corps, typically in charge of securing Iran’s borders not internal security, would likely take over.
The slogans chanted by the crowd covered an array of political views but with one united target: the end of the Islamic regime.
Amir Ali, a 32-year-old businessman in Tehran, said he and a group of friends had joined the protests and chanted, “death to the oppressor, be it king or supreme leader,” and “the street will prevail, the people will win.”
Shima, a 52-year-old from Tehran, said she and her husband, her teenager children and her elderly parents were all on the streets Thursday night protesting for the first time as a family and chanting, “we are together, we are together, don’t be afraid,” and “clerics, get lost, the shah is coming back.”
As the protest movement has spread to cities across the country, the head of Iran’s judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, told Iranian media that the protests were plotted by the country’s enemy and the government would show no mercy.
“This time it’s different. This time there are no excuses left,” he said. “The enemy has officially announced its support. I tell the people and the families that this time no one will be spared.”
Amnesty International said in a statement on Thursday that it had documented at least 28 protesters killed in the recent days of protest, including children. Three other groups that document and track human rights — HRANA, based in Washington, Iran Human Rights based in Norway and the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights — put the toll higher, at more than 40.
Amirparsa Neshat, an Iranian influencer and podcaster who supports the protests, was arrested when security forces raided his home in the middle of the night, Kaveh Rad, a lawyer and one of his relatives, announced on his Instagram on Thursday morning.
On Wednesday, a crowd of several hundred men stormed into a Shia seminary that trains clerics in the city of Gonabad, ransacking the building and beating up the clerics with “wood and batons,” said a statement from the cleric who directs the seminary, which was published in Iranian media. “We, too, are protesting the high prices, but protests are different than riots, people must part ways with rioters,” said the statement from the cleric, Hujjat al-Islam Ismaeil Tavakoli.
Merchants and business owners in the traditional bazaars in the cities of Tehran, Tabriz, Isfahan, Mashhad and Kerman have closed their shops to protest the dire state of the economy and the plunging value of Iran’s currency, according to interviews with witnesses and Iranian news media reports. These bazaars are at the heart of the country’s commerce and economy, and strikes could paralyze the economy if they continued.
Aric Toler contributed reporting from Kansas City.
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5) After Machado Offers Her Nobel, Trump Says It Would Be an ‘Honor’ to Accept It
President Trump indicated that he would meet the Venezuelan opposition leader MarÃa Corina Machado. Last year, she won the Nobel Peace Prize, an award he covets.
By Lynsey Chutel, Jan. 9, 2026
MarÃa Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader, at an election rally in Caracas in 2024. Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
President Trump indicated on Thursday evening that he will meet with MarÃa Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader, next week in Washington, after refusing to support her to lead the country following the U.S. seizure of Nicolás Maduro.
Ms. Machado has tried to ingratiate herself to Mr. Trump and earlier this week offered to give him the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded last year. Mr. Trump has long coveted the award.
“I understand she’s coming in next week sometime, and I look forward to saying hello to her,” Trump told the Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview at the White House.
Ms. Machado led a successful election campaign in 2024 against Mr. Maduro and had the greatest popular legitimacy to lead the nation, but Mr. Trump has said she doesn’t have the necessary support or respect within Venezuela to govern it.
On Monday, Ms. Machado said on Fox News that presenting the prize to Mr. Trump would be a token of gratitude from the Venezuelan people for the removal of Mr. Maduro. She had previously dedicated the award to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump said in the Thursday interview that “it would be a great honor” to accept the award, adding that it was “a major embarrassment to Norway,” where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, that he had not been given the prize.
Mr. Trump often claims credit for having ended several wars since taking office in January, and has taken credit for release of political prisoners underway in Venezuela.
In some cases, warring parties have credited him with advancing peace or calming hostilities. In others, his role is disputed or less clear, or fighting has resumed.
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6) More Agents Head to Minnesota as U.S. Takes Over Shooting Investigation
A day after an ICE agent fatally shot a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis, the governor activated the state’s National Guard, and 100 more federal agents were also being deployed.
By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mitch Smith and Jacey Fortin, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reported from Minneapolis, Mitch Smith from Chicago and Jacey Fortin from New York., Published Jan. 8, 2026, Updated Jan. 9, 2026
Federal agents were spotted around the Twin Cities on Thursday. Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
Disputes between Minnesota officials and the Trump administration intensified Thursday over a federal agent’s fatal shooting of a woman, after the state withdrew from the investigation into the incident because federal officials had denied it access to evidence.
The death of Renee Nicole Good, 37, prompted furious demonstrations; protesters were met with tear gas at a federal building Thursday morning and at least 1,000 people gathered in south Minneapolis in the evening. Gov. Tim Walz activated the state’s National Guard “out of an abundance of caution,” according to his office, though the troops have not yet been deployed.
Documents obtained by The New York Times suggested that at least 100 more federal agents were being deployed to Minnesota.
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis said in an interview on Thursday that the Trump administration would use any chaos as an opportunity to “occupy Minneapolis in some form.”
“Our community members are not taking the bait,” he said.
Officials have described the killing of Ms. Good in starkly different terms. She was killed on Wednesday during a protest on a residential street as federal agents ordered her to get out of her vehicle.
Administration officials, including President Trump, defended the shooting as lawful, saying that the agent who fired was acting in self-defense. City and state officials described those accounts as “propaganda” and “garbage.”
A video analysis shows that the woman’s vehicle appeared to be turning away from the officer as he opened fire.
State officials initially said they would investigate the killing. But Drew Evans, the superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, said on Thursday that the agency had withdrawn because it had been denied access to evidence.
Mr. Walz said at a news conference on Thursday that “Minnesota must be part of this investigation.”
“I say that only because people in positions of power have already passed judgment,” Mr. Walz added. He said that some of the federal government’s statements regarding the circumstances of the shooting had been “verifiably false.”
At a news conference in New York City on Thursday, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said that Minnesota and Minneapolis officials had failed to maintain order.
“They have not been cut out,” Ms. Noem told a reporter who had asked about state investigators. “They don’t have any jurisdiction in this investigation.”
Cindy Burnham, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. office in the Minneapolis area, declined to comment.
At a White House press briefing, Vice President JD Vance doubled down on claims about the shooting, calling news reporters “agents of propaganda of a radical fringe” for reports indicating that Ms. Good never put the ICE agent in danger before she was shot.
Last year, the federal agent who shot Ms. Good, identified as Jonathan Ross, was dragged about 100 yards by a different driver during an immigration operation in Minnesota, interviews and court records show. He and other agents had been trying to apprehend a Guatemalan man who had been convicted of sexual abuse. Mr. Ross was treated for a gash on his forearm that required 20 stitches after the episode, for which the driver was convicted of assault last month.
On social media, Attorney General Pam Bondi warned protesters in Minnesota not to cross a “red line” into obstructing, impeding or attacking federal law enforcement.
The Department of Homeland Security defended its work in Minnesota on Thursday, pointing to recent arrests of men who they said were in the country illegally and had been convicted of crimes.
“In the face of violent attacks, ICE law enforcement arrested pedophiles, rapists and drug traffickers in Minneapolis yesterday,” Tricia McLaughlin, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement. Operation Metro Surge, as the department calls it, has resulted in the arrests of more than 1,500 people in Minnesota, she said.
Protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement action in Minneapolis have occurred for weeks, but Ms. Good’s killing ratcheted up the tension. Demonstrators gathered Thursday at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building just outside the city, the home of local ICE headquarters. By 9 a.m., federal agents had pushed protesters across the street after deploying tear gas.
The building also houses an immigration court, which was closed on Thursday. Public schools were also closed across the city, and will remain so on Friday, because of “safety concerns” related to “incidents around the city,” school officials said in a statement.
Demonstrators gathered again on Thursday evening just blocks from where the shooting happened. At least a thousand people marched through rainy streets after dark, chanting and waving signs.
“Yesterday, they shot Renee Nicole Good, and today, news is coming out of Portland that they shot two more people,” one organizer told the crowd at the intersection of Lake Street and Chicago Avenue in south Minneapolis.
The two people were shot by federal agents on Thursday afternoon in Oregon’s largest city in an incident that also involved people in a vehicle. U.S. Border Patrol agents conducting a “targeted vehicle stop” opened fire after the driver tried to run over agents, a Homeland Security Department spokeswoman said in a statement. The conditions of the two people were not immediately clear.
In Minneapolis, many local and state leaders had been warning for weeks that the surge of immigration enforcement work was bound to stoke chaos. Mr. Walz put the blame squarely on Mr. Trump and Ms. Noem, asking them to pull back federal agents and declaring at a Wednesday news conference, “You’ve done enough.”
Now, more federal agents are on the way. The additional 100 federal agents the Trump administration plans to deploy are Customs and Border Protection officials who will travel to Minnesota from Chicago and New Orleans.
The Department of Homeland Security plans to pause operations in Chicago to support the operation in Minnesota.
The deployment of additional Border Patrol agents is expected to last through the weekend, with a planned return to their cities on Sunday. The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on the plans.
On Thursday, Mr. Walz put Minnesota National Guard troops on active duty after placing them on standby the day before. He indicated that while the troops would be “staged” and ready to help local law enforcement officers, there were no immediate plans to deploy them on the streets. The governor also issued a proclamation declaring Friday as a “Day of Unity” in honor of Ms. Good. He encouraged residents to observe a moment of silence and to participate in “acts of service.”
Tensions between federal and Minnesota officials have been exacerbated by a fraud scheme that siphoned money from social service programs in the Minneapolis area. The president has unleashed xenophobic tirades and made repeated, derisive comments about members of Minnesota’s large Somali diaspora, whose members make up a majority of the fraud defendants.
The shooting on Wednesday happened on Portland Avenue, less than a mile away from the spot where George Floyd was killed by the police in 2020, prompting angry protests and tearful vigils late into the night.
Mr. Frey said on Thursday that there were no major public safety incidents in Minneapolis overnight, and that local officials were still monitoring demonstrations.
The city’s priorities, he said, were “keeping people safe” and then “getting ICE out of here.”
Hamed Aleaziz, Devlin Barrett, Jamie Kelter Davis, Luis Ferré-Sadurnà and Madeleine Ngo contributed reporting.
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7) Agents in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Have Fired at Vehicles at Least 10 Times
The confrontations over the last four months have left two people dead and prompted criticism of federal agencies for allowing officers to open fire on moving vehicles.
By Tim Arango, Jan. 9, 2026
Law enforcement officials blocked off an area near where federal agents shot two people during a “targeted vehicle stop” in Portland, Ore. Credit...Jordan Gale for The New York Times
Maryland. Chicago. Phoenix. Los Angeles. Minneapolis.
And now Portland.
A day after a federal immigration agent shot and killed a woman in her vehicle in Minneapolis, federal agents in Portland, Ore. on Thursday afternoon shot a man and a woman in their car during a “vehicle stop.” The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the driver had tried to run the agents over.
The shooting in Portland was at least the 10th since September by federal agents who are part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown — and all 10 involved people who were in their vehicles.
At least two people, including the woman in Minneapolis, have died in these shootings.
Federal officials have said the shootings were justified because the vehicles had been “weaponized,” and that officers’ lives were in jeopardy. According to the Justice Department, agents can fire at a car only under two circumstances: if the person in the car is threatening the officer or others with “deadly force by means other than the vehicle,” or the driver is operating the vehicle in a way that threatens serious injury or death.
At the heart of the debates in many cases over the use of force by officers is whether a driver’s actions have posed a grave threat.
In the case of the Minneapolis shooting, a Times analysis of video of the incident, from multiple angles, raised questions about the official assertion that the driver presented a deadly threat. Instead, the woman appeared to be turning the car away from the officers.
“Look at the wheels on the car, they are turning to the right, and all he has to do is step out of the way,” Geoffrey Alpert, an expert on police use of force at the University of South Carolina, said this week after reviewing the Minneapolis video at the request of The New York Times. “She’s jacking the wheels all the way to the right.”
Many of the country’s largest cities, including New York and Los Angeles, have banned police officers from shooting at moving vehicles except in very rare circumstances, such as a driver shooting at the police, or a terrorist driving into a crowd. Police cadets often aren’t trained in shooting at moving vehicles, and officials have long warned the practice risks hitting innocent bystanders.
The Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit that studies law enforcement policy, put it this way in a paper published in 2023: “Shooting at a moving vehicle is not an effective way to get it to stop. There is the challenge of hitting a moving target, and the risk of an errant bullet hitting an unintended target, such as a bystander. There is also a risk that if the driver is struck, they will lose control of the vehicle.”
Law enforcement officers have been killed by drivers using their vehicles as weapons. Five officers died in this manner through the first seven months of 2024, according to the most recent data from the F.B.I.
This week, in the aftermath of the Minnesota shooting, Xochitl Hinojosa, a former spokeswoman for the Department of Justice during the Biden Administration, wrote on X that in 2022 the department updated its use of force policy for the first time in 20 years. She wrote that the new policy “included a duty to render medical aid and specifics on how firearms may not be discharged at a moving vehicle in most circumstances.”
Shaila Dewan contributed reporting.
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8) Democracy for the Rich Versus Democracy for All
By Bonnie Weinstein
Socialist Viewpoint, Jan/Feb 2026
Capitalism has turned democracy into its opposite—democracy for the few and brutal dictatorship over the many.
The U.S. touts itself as the quintessential leader of democracy in the world yet it costs tens-of-millions-of dollars to win an election here—and this true for all capitalist countries who call themselves democratic. Whether they have a parliamentary system, or a presidential system within a federal republic like the U.S.—it is the wealthy elite who rule over the majority. This is also true for countries who do not call themselves democratic.
The exception is Cuba—a tiny country with very limited resources. While they have a single “leader,” industry is nationalized and based upon production for need, not profit. They also have community councils that democratically govern community concerns at the ground level. Unfortunately, they are also in a severe economic crisis due to a worldwide U.S. blockade and embargo stripping them of their ability to trade for the things they need to improve the quality of life for the Cuban people—and everything to do with thwarting their ability to carry out the gains of the Cuban socialist revolution.
The U.S. war on Venezuela (and Cuba, Palestine, Syria, Nigeria, Sudan, to name a few) exposes the true nature of U.S. “democracy”
The assault on Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries the U.S. military is targeting has nothing to do with bringing democracy or economic stability to the people and everything to do with gaining control over their natural resources for U.S. private investment interests.
The U.S. first started investing in Venezuela in the 20th century spurred by major oil discoveries in the 1920’s making it a major oil producer with U.S. corporations claiming ownership of Venezuelan oil and the territory it sits on. In a December 18, 2025, New York Times article by Sam Sifton titled, “Is It About the Oil?” the author explains:
“…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.’”
And in a December 17, 2025, New York Times article by
David E. Sanger, titled, “For Hegseth, There Is One Boat Strike He Doesn’t Want the Public to See,” (specifically, the U.S. murder of two survivors of a U.S. targeted boat strike who were seen clinging to flotsam and waving for help then blown up by a U.S. drone.):
“Mr. Trump suggested the real objective [of the boat strikes] was to get Venezuela to return ‘all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.’”
So, the U.S. owners of corporate investments everywhere in the world claim that their ownership gives them the right not only to the natural resources, but to the very territory they sit upon or are extracted from.
This includes the U.S. factories around the world—in China, India, Vietnam, to name a few. U.S. corporations claim the right to invest in virtually every country where there is a profit to be made.
According to capitalist democracy, it is the democratic right of corporations to compete for and own property anywhere in the world they so desire. And this right is claimed not only by major U.S. corporations, but by corporations everywhere—placing U.S corporations in the forefront of fierce competition with corporations from other countries.
The right of the private ownership of the means of production under capitalism supersedes all other rights and can be enforced by any means necessary, including nuclear war.
Capitalists make the laws—including laws regarding democratic rights—and enforce them through the threat of war, the police, the courts and incarceration.
The democracy they fight for is the right of the rich to privately own and control the wealth and resources of the whole world at the expense of everyone else—the masses of the poor and the working class.
That’s why, under capitalism, only they can own and control the means of production. Only they can lay claim to the tremendous profits produced by our labor—our sweat and blood—and all too often, our lives in the case of war.
The democratic rights of workers under capitalism
The democratic rights of the masses—all of us who do not own the means of production—is the right to vote for one wealthy representative of the capitalist class over another.
As a Democratic or Republican candidate, you must support capitalism to survive in any capitalist party—to garner the millions of dollars of donations from wealthy capitalists in order to win an election.
We do not live in a democracy. We live in a capitalist dictatorship of the wealthy over the poor.
There is no democracy on the job. The boss is in charge, and workers have no right to vote on who will be the boss. Just as we have no right to vote on how much pay we earn; how much our rent is; how much we must pay for healthcare or education; how much in taxes we must pay or how much we must pay for a stick of butter. Prices are dictated to us by the corporations and enforced by the government—the police and the military.
Worker’s democracy
Worker’s democracy is defined by majority rule. A strike is an expression of worker’s democracy on the job. A strike is effective only if the majority of workers participate in it. And this depends on how well workers are organized in their own defense against the controlling minority—the capitalist class.
A victorious strike reinforces the reality that unity and solidarity toward a common goal can be victorious over the bosses because workers are the majority and if we go on strike and don’t work, the capitalist engine of production stops and so does their flow of profits.
Strikes are also an example that we who do the work could, in our numbers, completely control production without the capitalist class.
If workers were in ownership and control of production, we could stop the production of products designed to break down—creating not only financial hardship by having to replace things over and over again but creating trillions of dollars in waste of materials that become mountains of trash that pollute our environment.
In just the last ten years I have had to replace two refrigerators, a stove, two washing machines and two dryers that broke down and were unrepairable in spite of the “protection plans” I had been paying for regularly—the plans simply didn’t cover the specific parts that were planned to break down first!
Capitalist production is irrational because it is production for nothing else but profit. Having to buy products over and over again because they are designed to break down benefits the owners of the means of production—to the detriment of the owners of the shabby products they produce and to the horrendous detriment of our planet’s environment.
If the working class owned and controlled the means of production, we could produce products built and designed to last and that can be repaired instead of replaced. We could make waste obsolete.
It’s the workers who know how to run the factories, stores, hospitals, schools, construction, power and water services, farms, railroads, airlines—workers know how to work—proving that capitalists are completely superfluous to production. Their only role is to keep control of the profits, and that’s what they designed the capitalist state to do.
Unions
The major labor unions in the U.S. are run by a labor bureaucracy that acts in partnership with the bosses. They funnel union funds into the Democratic and Republican parties—the parties of the bosses—claiming that donating these union funds to capitalist party candidates will strengthen the union’s partnership with the bosses which will benefit the workers in the long run.
These labor fakers are paid many times more than the average worker in their industry. In the case of the auto industry, labor leaders earn around four-and-a-half times what the average auto worker makes.
United Auto Worker (UAW) President Shawn Fain earned a gross salary of $229,514, with total payments (including expenses/benefits) reaching $274,407. The average auto worker’s pay varies, but generally falls around $23-$28 per hour or $49,000-$50,000 annually, though top-tier union (UAW) assembly workers at the “Big Three” (Ford, GM, Stellantis) can earn much more, with experienced workers hitting $33+ per hour and total compensation potentially reaching $90,000+ with benefits, while newer hires start lower, around $17 per hour .
The high salaries for union leaders tend to conservatize them making them more likely to want to maintain the status quo of partnership with the bosses rather than putting up a real fight for better pay and benefits for the majority rank-and-file membership.
And far too often, workers are asked to vote on contracts, sight-unseen, upon the recommendation of the labor leadership. Union meetings are too frequently called to rubber-stamp decisions already agreed upon between the union leadership and the bosses behind closed doors.
This really puts a damper on union attendance by the rank and file and, without their participation in the decision-making process, the bosses essentially have no opposition.
To correct this, unions have to be democratized. Contracts should be negotiated and discussed and voted upon by the whole membership in detail, and labor leaders chosen based upon their independence from the bosses and their agreement with the decisive vote of the membership on the contracts. All union leaders and officials should come from the rank and file who have had experience actually working on the job. Shop stewards should come from the union membership not from graduates of “labor studies” courses in college.
Labor leaders must carry out the will of the majority of the rank and file. Labor leaders should be paid no more than the highest rate of pay of the average worker and the membership should be able to change that leadership if they do not carry out the will of the majority.
Workers are the majority and we should have the right to control our organizations without interference from the capitalist class.
We are the majority; we create all the wealth in the world and should have the right to own and control that wealth for the benefit of all of us.
Political organizations
Today we find ourselves splintered, divided, blinded by bigotry and hate to our universal common interests of freedom, justice and economic and social equality—the right to all the necessities of life and happiness—free from capitalist exploitation, starvation and war.
The only solution is to create an economy based upon production for the needs and wants of all by ending production based upon the private ownership of the means of production benefiting only the wealthy while condemning us to a life of servitude and ever-increasing poverty.
We need to build workers’ organizations that empower the entire working class to control our own destiny by rejecting capitalism’s minority rule over us.
We must, as the most powerful class in the world, reject bigotry of all kinds, unite in pursuit of our common interests—through cooperation, democratic discussions of the issues we face in common and democratic decision-making that allow we, the majority, to rule our own lives and livelihoods to benefit all of us everywhere in the world.
All workers’ political organizations—from united front coalitions to independent working-class parties—must be organized and run democratically—one-person-one-vote and majority rule.
Capitalist rule is from the top down—the wealthy rule—and the masses of workers and the poor must serve this tiny minority or starve.
Only well-organized, democratically run organizations of the working class and our allies can turn capitalist rule upside-down and take the control of our social structure and resources out of the hands of the capitalist class and into our own hands.
United Front-type organizations
United fronts are powerful tools for organizing massive support for particular issues that affect masses of people such as immigrant rights, free speech, the right to protest, the fight against war and genocide, LGBTQ rights, democratic rights, the right to healthcare, education, housing, etc. anyone can be a part of a coalition no matter who they are if they support the demands of the democratically organized coalition. They need not agree on other issues to form a powerful battle for the demands they do agree upon.
Participating in a united front type of organization should be a lesson in democratic decision-making including planned conferences and conventions, free and open discussions that include the right of the minority to participate fully in debates, etc., and ultimately, the right of the majority and the leadership it chooses, to rule until the next planned conference or convention.
The majority must have the right to carry out their program. That means that while the minority has a right to their opinions, they are obligated to respect and carry out the will of the majority until the next democratic decision-making body has had the time to evaluate the effectiveness of their program in the real world.
Again, any compensation paid to the leadership of any workers’ organization must not exceed highest wages of the average worker. And the rank and file must have the right to remove leaders who do not carry out the decisions of the majority.
A labor party
An independent labor party can represent the most rational alternative to the capitalist parties that are dead ends on the road to social and economic equality and freedom and justice for all.
Any labor party must, first and foremost, be completely independent of all capitalist parties. Capitalism, by its very nature, is undemocratic. It’s the rule of a tiny minority over the lives of the overwhelming masses of people in the world through the use of force and violence—to maintain their rule over us and the vast wealth produced from our labor—of which we get only a tiny portion. And we have to fight bitterly for every penny we get.
An effective labor party can bring the united front organizations together with the unions to democratically develop a common program to fight against war, violence, racism, sexism, and bigotry—all the things that capitalism has devised to divide us and make us feel helpless—and fight for the common needs and wants of all.
United, we will have the power and the strength we need to rid the world of the despotism of capitalism’s tyranny and establish a socialist society under the democratic control of we who do the work, to create a bounty of wealth we all can share.
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9) How Venezuela’s New Leader Went From Revolutionary to Trump’s Orbit
Delcy RodrÃguez, a guerrilla’s daughter, started out as a provocateur. She pivoted to revive a ravaged economy, making her vital to U.S. plans to run Venezuela.
By Simon Romero and Anatoly Kurmanaev, Jan. 10, 2026
Simon Romero, a former bureau chief in Caracas, began covering Venezuela in 2006. Anatoly Kurmanaev, who has covered Venezuela since 2013, reported from Caracas.
Delcy RodrÃguez, then Venezuela’s vice president, during an interview last year. Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
Venezuela’s streets were on fire as protests raged over misrule.
Paramilitary cells and security forces were killing protesters by the dozens. Delcy RodrÃguez, the foreign minister at the time, in 2014, convened ambassadors from around the world in a bid to flip the narrative and fend off sanctions over rights abuses.
In the closed-door meeting, Ms. RodrÃguez berated envoys from the United States and the European Union. Pointing her finger at them, she said those killed were terrorists, not protesters.
“She was yelling at them, using very aggressive language,” said Imdat Oner, a former diplomat at Turkey’s embassy in Caracas who witnessed the scene. “This is not the way a foreign minister acts. I found it shocking because it was completely out of line with diplomatic practices.”
Ms. RodrÃguez lost that battle when President Barack Obama ended up imposing sanctions. But her combative tactics served her well as she climbed through the ranks of a government dominated by men who were military figures or fire-breathing ideologues.
Now, with President Trump’s assent, Ms. RodrÃguez is Venezuela’s interim leader after U.S. forces captured and forcibly extracted her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, to stand trial in New York.
Venezuela’s streets were on fire as protests raged over misrule.
Paramilitary cells and security forces were killing protesters by the dozens. Delcy RodrÃguez, the foreign minister at the time, in 2014, convened ambassadors from around the world in a bid to flip the narrative and fend off sanctions over rights abuses.
In the closed-door meeting, Ms. RodrÃguez berated envoys from the United States and the European Union. Pointing her finger at them, she said those killed were terrorists, not protesters.
“She was yelling at them, using very aggressive language,” said Imdat Oner, a former diplomat at Turkey’s embassy in Caracas who witnessed the scene. “This is not the way a foreign minister acts. I found it shocking because it was completely out of line with diplomatic practices.”
Ms. RodrÃguez lost that battle when President Barack Obama ended up imposing sanctions. But her combative tactics served her well as she climbed through the ranks of a government dominated by men who were military figures or fire-breathing ideologues.
Now, with President Trump’s assent, Ms. RodrÃguez is Venezuela’s interim leader after U.S. forces captured and forcibly extracted her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, to stand trial in New York.
Reporting was contributed by Mariana MartÃnez from Caracas, Julie Turkewitz from Maryland, Pragati K.B. from New Delhi, and José MarÃa León Cabrera from Quito, Ecuador.
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10) The New Food Pyramid, Brought to You by Big Meat
By Matt Prescott, Jan. 10, 2026
Mr. Prescott is the author of “Food Is the Solution: What to Eat to Save the World.”
"However illogical the administration’s recommendations may be, they become a bit less baffling when one considers the members of the new review panel: According to disclosures buried in a 70-page U.S. Department of Agriculture report published alongside the guidelines, two-thirds of the reviewers had financial or other ties to the beef, dairy or pork industries, including research funding, consulting fees and leadership roles with industry groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Dairy Council and the National Pork Board. The panel even included an adviser to the company that owns the meat-focused Atkins diet brand. All of which feels hypocritical, given Mr. Kennedy’s claims that prior guidelines were driven by industry interests."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/opinion/food-pyramid-meat-industry.html
Andrés Magán
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has spent much of his public life warning Americans about environmental damage hidden in plain sight. He’s sued polluters. He’s denounced the ways powerful companies use their influence to shape laws, regulations and institutions. And he’s spoken passionately about ecological collapse — including at the hands of the meat industry.
So when the Trump administration released its new dietary guidelines for Americans on Wednesday, with an emphasis on animal-based proteins and fats and a food pyramid featuring images of a roasted bird, juicy steak, ground beef and cheese at the top, it felt a bit like a magic trick: Now you see an environmental crisis, now you don’t.
Food pyramids may seem quaint, but they shape the content of a great many meals — school lunches, military rations, federal nutrition programs, hospital menus. Mr. Kennedy has endorsed a framework that recommends Americans eat up to twice as much protein as previously advised, despite little evidence that most Americans are short on protein. Whereas earlier guidelines recommended limiting red meat, the new advice explicitly includes it, ignoring the input from an official committee of scientific advisers that called for prioritizing plant-based proteins over animal-based ones. In extolling meat and dairy, Mr. Kennedy’s not just offering lifestyle advice, but signaling approval for some of the most climate-intensive industries on earth.
Eating less meat remains one of the fastest, easiest and cheapest ways to cut emissions. It requires no new technology, no congressional approval, no subsidies or tax credits. And right now it’s especially important, as many other climate solutions become more expensive, politically fraught or simply unavailable amid a federal retreat from environmental regulation and support for clean energy.
Some people might prefer to divorce environmental considerations from dietary advice, but amid accelerating climate change, it’s not possible to separate our own health from that of the planet. Indeed, other countries are already incorporating sustainability factors into their dietary guidelines. By contrast, our nation’s new food pyramid will mean environmental and health burdens for Americans, even as it benefits the very industries Mr. Kennedy once warned us about.
And the environmental arithmetic isn’t subtle. According to the World Resources Institute, poultry converts only around 11 percent of the energy contained in livestock feed into human food. Beef converts only 1 percent of feed energy into human food.
This inefficient system contributes to deforestation, devours water in an increasingly thirsty world, gobbles up vast tracts of land and drives tremendous greenhouse gas emissions — largely through animals’ digestion and manure, as well as energy-intensive feed production. Chicken wings may be cheap and look modest on a plate, but their environmental shadow stretches across continents.
If Americans increased their protein intake by just 25 percent in response to the administration’s new recommendations, maintaining their current ratio of animal to plant protein, it would require about 100 million acres of additional agricultural land each year — an area larger than Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania combined — and increase annual emissions by hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to the World Resources Institute.
Mr. Kennedy himself once articulated the meat industry’s heavy toll with striking clarity. In a blurb for a 2004 book, “The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered America’s Food Supply,” he wrote, “The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of U.S. citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty.” In this country, 99 percent of livestock are raised on factory farms.
The new guidance didn’t emerge from the longstanding Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, made up of scientists. Instead, the Trump administration handpicked a new review panel — the existence of which wasn’t even reported until Wednesday — to “correct deficiencies,” it said, in earlier recommendations. The result was that the original committee’s advice to emphasize plant-based foods was rejected, while meat and dairy were elevated.
Beyond the environmental damage that could arise from more Americans potentially increasing their meat consumption, which is already well above the global average, the guidance also represents a dangerous divergence from mainstream public-health consensus. For decades, leading medical and nutrition organizations, including the American Heart Association, have noted that plant-forward diets — rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains — are associated with lower risks of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and premature death. Meat-heavy diets, by contrast, have repeatedly been linked to worse outcomes.
“The new food pyramid is simply bananas,” Michael Greger, a physician and founder of NutritionFacts.org, told me. “If nutrition guidelines were medicine, this would be malpractice.”
As Dr. Mehmet Oz, a top Trump health care official who was part of Wednesday’s news conference announcing the new guidelines, said when he was the host of “The Dr. Oz Show,” plant-based diets can be “easily and effectively” adopted and “have a major impact on how you feel and your overall health.”
However illogical the administration’s recommendations may be, they become a bit less baffling when one considers the members of the new review panel: According to disclosures buried in a 70-page U.S. Department of Agriculture report published alongside the guidelines, two-thirds of the reviewers had financial or other ties to the beef, dairy or pork industries, including research funding, consulting fees and leadership roles with industry groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Dairy Council and the National Pork Board. The panel even included an adviser to the company that owns the meat-focused Atkins diet brand. All of which feels hypocritical, given Mr. Kennedy’s claims that prior guidelines were driven by industry interests.
Ultimately, the pyramid isn’t about policing individual diets. People will continue turning to vegan and vegetarian diets or reducing their meat and dairy anyway, while others do neither. But that doesn’t mean that our leaders should endorse eating patterns that worsen climate change and threaten people’s health.
Mr. Kennedy’s earlier warnings about meat were cleareyed. His current enthusiasm for it is not. You can’t fight climate collapse or heart disease with sleight of hand, and a food pyramid that hides the cost of meat doesn’t make the problem disappear; it just makes the reckoning harder.
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11) What Happens if Federal Agents and Local Officers Stop Getting Along?
Cooperation among law enforcement agencies is critical to many investigations, experts say. After a series of shootings by immigration agents, the relationship is showing cracks.
By Shaila Dewan and Chris Hippensteel, Jan. 10, 2026
Federal agents at the scene where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
Normally, federal, state and local law enforcement officers are on the same side, investigating crimes, sharing leads, and tracking down suspects.
But under the Trump administration, tensions between some local and federal officials have intensified over immigration sweeps, sanctuary city policies and the deploying of the National Guard to Democrat-run cities.
Those fissures widened this week after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis. State investigators said federal authorities excluded them from the investigation. After a shooting in Portland the next day that wounded two people, local police said they had received no information from federal officials, several hours after the episode.
Now politicians are publicly blasting one another, sparking even more corrosive disputes that will not make the arduous task of fighting crime any easier.
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis told ICE to leave the city, saying in an invective-laden speech that the agency was harming public safety. In Philadelphia, the district attorney, Larry Krasner, warned ICE agents who intended to commit crimes to “get the eff out of here” or be prosecuted. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California decried “masked men snatching people in broad daylight” and military operations in U.S. cities as “an assault on our values.”
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, suggested that Minnesota authorities should focus on preventing violence and fighting fraud, a reference to allegations that hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid had been misspent in the state. She denied that state investigators had been cut out of the shooting inquiry, saying instead they lacked jurisdiction.
Cooperation between federal authorities and state and local law enforcement is essential to holding drug gangs, other violent criminals and white-collar offenders accountable, law enforcement officials say. It is also routine, with countless task forces bringing together officers from multiple agencies to combat terrorism, sex and gun trafficking and white collar crime, as well as to track down suspects like the one in a recent shooting at Brown University.
But new disputes over questions like whether states can bar immigration agents from wearing masks, allow residents to sue them for rights violations, or, in the case of Minnesota, investigate homicides that occur inside state lines have pushed the nation into largely uncharted territory. Longstanding relationships among law enforcement agencies could deteriorate.
“I don’t know that we, at least in the United States, have lived this history before,” said Craig Futterman, who directs the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at University of Chicago Law School. He added, “This isn’t normal.”
State authorities can and do arrest and prosecute federal agents who violate the law, Mr. Futterman said, although agents who believe they were acting in the line of duty can request immunity in federal court. Investigations into such shootings are sometimes conducted by federal and local agencies in tandem.
More broadly, federal agents have traditionally notified local authorities of most planned operations, both as a matter of courtesy and safety. Agencies often collaborate, splitting up duties according to their strengths — for example, local police are generally more adept at crowd control during protests.
When such teamwork breaks down, said John Sandweg, who served as acting director for ICE during the Obama administration, “My answer is, we all lose.”
Mr. Sandweg acknowledged that ICE’s immigration enforcement has long been controversial in some areas, but said its investigations into crimes such as money laundering have relied heavily, and usually harmoniously, on cooperation with other agencies.
“It’s breaking down not only, obviously, on the immigration side, but to the point where the ICE brand becomes so toxic that the state and locals don’t feel like they can cooperate even on the things where there would be widespread public support,” he said.
Turf wars among agencies are not exactly unheard of. But disagreements seem to erupt more sharply, more publicly and with less deference.
Even before the events of the past week, the district attorney in Uvalde, Tex. filed suit in May seeking to compel the testimony from three Border Patrol agents who responded to the massacre at Robb Elementary School in criminal trials against a former local officer and police chief. Two of the agents participated in killing the gunman.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection responded in court filings that the information sought was already included in an agency report on the shooting, or that the information sought did not meet the legal standard of what would be considered necessary for the agency to provide.
On Friday, the police in Anne Arundel County, Md. issued a statement publicly contradicting federal officials’ accounts of an earlier ICE shooting at a fleeing vehicle in the town of Glen Burnie.
And on Thursday night, Attorney General Dan Rayfield of Oregon said his office would investigate the shooting by ICE agents in Portland. “We have been clear about our concerns with excessive use of force by federal agents in Portland and nationally,” he said in a statement.
In Illinois, the Trump administration has sued to nullify a state law that bars arrests in and around state courthouses and allows residents to sue in state court for civil rights violations — normally such suits against federal agents must be brought in federal court, where they face enormous legal obstacles.
Police leaders expressed fears that ICE tactics cast a shadow on the professionalism of their officers and would undo their efforts to gain public trust.
Sheriff Rochelle Bilal of Philadelphia called immigration agents “made up, fake wanna-be law enforcement because what they do is against not only legal law but the moral law.” She added, “We have been fighting for years to build that trust between us and our communities.”
And though police unions are usually staunch advocates of officers’ right to defend themselves, one former union official, Charley Wilkison, former executive director of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, the state’s largest police union, criticized what he called “newly recruited, masked” immigration agents.
In a Facebook post, he wrote that they would “no doubt damage and destroy the reputations of our proud and professional officers.”
For now, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which usually investigates police shootings, remains sidelined in the matter of Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed in Minneapolis. But, the bureau said in a statement, “The BCA remains open to conducting a full investigation of the incident should the U.S. Attorney’s Office and F.B.I. reconsider their approach.”
William K. Rashbaum, J. David Goodman and Mitch Smith contributed reporting.
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12) When American Violence Becomes Too Much for Families
By Jessica Grose, Opinion Writer, Jan. 10, 2026
Eleanor Davis
The one group in the United States most interested in leaving the country and permanently living somewhere else is American women ages 15 to 44. According to Gallup, 40 percent of women polled in my age bracket expressed this desire, double the rate of all U.S. adults. That tells me that the women who are building their lives and the lives of the next generation are looking for the exit.
Women in other, similar nations do not share this desire to relocate. In November, I asked readers who were considering moving what was driving them out.
While the responses were varied (the rollback of rights for women, immigrants and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people was mentioned by several), the most common reason cited was gun violence in the United States. Whether at the hands of fellow citizens or militarized law enforcement officers, this particular form of violence and its unremitting nature is just not a significant problem in our peer nations.
In 2025, there were more mass shootings in the United States than days in the year, according to the Gun Violence Archive (which uses a broader definition than The Times). There were 75 school shootings. According to The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit focused on health equity, “The U.S. has among the highest overall firearm mortality rates, as well as among the highest firearm mortality rates for children, adolescents and women, both globally and among high-income countries”; Black Americans and American Indians are particularly likely to die from gun violence.
It feels as though we have hit a particularly horrifying patch of violence in the last month. A shooting at Brown University and the death of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three, who was shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis, were beyond disturbing. Some elected officials seem more interested in spreading disinformation about killings like these while gaslighting and smearing victims than doing anything to stop it.
As Adam Serwer pointed out about Good’s death, the administration’s victim-blaming playbook — Vice President JD Vance called her “a deranged leftist” — is shopworn, and has been used to defend police killings for a long time. In 2020, I commissioned a personal essay by the writer Imani Bashir, who purchased a one-way ticket out of the United States in 2015 after the death of Sandra Bland while in police custody, and who felt that living abroad was the only way to keep her Black son safe.
“For my husband and me, the conversation was: Where could we safely raise a family? Where could we feel like we didn’t have a constant threat or target on our backs?” Bashir wrote. George Floyd’s killing was another reminder of why she did not want to return to raise her child here.
When I spoke to readers who were considering moving abroad, they expressed similar sentiments. For a variety of reasons, they described the feeling that violence was closing in on them, and that they needed to get out of the country. Emma Stamper, who has dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States and lives in the suburbs of Denver, said that multiple high-profile mass shootings in Colorado played into her thoughts of leaving. Stamper, who has a 3-year-old son and a 15-month-old daughter, works for a nonprofit and her husband is a programmer. They both work remotely, so relocation is more possible for them than it is for many families.
Stamper cited the September 2025 school shooting in Evergreen, Colo., and the 2012 shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. (It is a pathetic marker of how commonplace school shootings have become that I did not even remember the Evergreen incident when she mentioned it, even though it occurred within the past year.) She also talked about feeling a less tangible shift, a sense that there’s “a cultural aggression that continues to spiral,” in the United States.
I also spoke to a couple — the husband is a veteran who works for the federal government and the wife is a professor — who live outside a major West Coast city. (They asked that I not use their names for fear of retaliation.)The family, which includes a school-age child, spent several months of a sabbatical living in Europe. The wife described the “underlying hum of anxiety” that just went away when they were living outside the United States.
The lack of threat from gun violence was part of that. But it was bigger than just the guns. The husband told me that children were given so much more freedom in Europe. There was also a lack of the coddling and helicoptering involved in American parenting (perhaps because there were almost no guns). His wife said it wasn’t just the absence of fear she felt when living abroad; it was also the presence of care. “I realized that I felt held there by the culture, by the society, by people.”
No one I spoke to who was contemplating a move was ready to pick up and leave tomorrow, and no one could say what would be the last straw. The women I heard from seemed more willing to go than their husbands, which backs up what Gallup’s polling found. A permanent move away from one’s homeland and extended family is a huge change that requires planning and deliberation in normal circumstances.
I checked in with Imani Bashir, and she returned to the United States two years ago, after some deaths in her family and to be near her father, who was having health issues. She now lives in Washington, D.C., and said she is hypervigilant about her family’s safety. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I am not constantly concerned about being here and under governmental threat, let alone some maniac that might want to shoot up a school,” she told me.
While I could always understand intellectually why this country could exhaust people and compel them to move elsewhere, I remained personally comforted by statistics: Even in the United States, gun violence remains rare overall. I know that when my children leave the house, they’re more likely to die in a car crash than to be the victims of random gun violence or a school shooting. I have been profoundly disappointed by our government before, but I always felt like a proud American with a deep investment in making this country better.
But over the years, as these violent incidents have piled up, it has become harder to soothe myself with cold rationality. The hour after I heard about the shooting at Brown, where I went to college, I was Googling “going to university in Europe” for the first time. For a few days, I considered the idea that the future might be brighter for my daughters elsewhere.
For now, it’s just a passing thought, one that’s already in the rearview. But I can’t predict what is coming next.
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13) America Doesn’t Need ICE
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, Jan. 10, 2026
Tyrone Siu/Reuters
Eight years ago, I wrote an article for Slate arguing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was an out-of-control agency that had become a “sinister” and “draconian” force “harassing and detaining people who pose no threat to the United States or its citizens.” The American people, I contended, needed “an honest discussion about whether ICE can be effectively reformed or if it must be abolished and replaced by an agency that can carry out its mission in a more effective and humane way.”
Now, however, we are past the point of conversation. In the hands of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, ICE is a virtual secret police. Masked and heavily armed, ICE agents are sent to cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis to terrorize immigrant communities and brutalize people who challenge their efforts to stop and detain anyone deemed suspicious. To expand its reach, ICE greatly lowered its recruitment standards, effectively enlisting anyone who cares to sign up. To attract new officers, ICE advertises the chance to do violence to people deemed “enemies” of the United States, likening civil immigration enforcement to a war on a dangerous, alien force.
The result is an agency whose agents’ first recourse appears to be violence or the threat of violence. According to The Trace, a newsroom dedicated to reporting on gun violence, immigration agents have opened fire in 16 separate incidents since last June: “At least three people have been shot observing or documenting immigration raids, and five people have been shot while driving away from traffic stops or evading an enforcement action.”
This week, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old resident of Minneapolis. She was sitting in her S.U.V. when agents ran up and demanded she exit the vehicle, pulling on the door in an effort to compel compliance. Soon after, three shots rang out. An analysis of video footage by The Times strongly suggests that Good had been moving away from the agent in question when he fired, killing her and causing the vehicle to crash nearby.
Since then, the Trump administration has been engaged in a relentless effort to tar Good as a dangerous militant who was using her S.U.V. to attack ICE agents, an act of “domestic terrorism,” according to the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem. “This was an attack on law and order, this was an attack on the American people,” said Vice President JD Vance. Good can be seen in a different video telling her eventual killer, “I’m not mad at you dude.”
Immigration enforcement seems to have ramped up its efforts even further in the wake of Good’s death. On Thursday, during an operation in Portland, Ore., Border Patrol agents shot and wounded two people. The administration, as it did with Good, immediately accused the victims of being dangerous threats to the nation.
It is true that the country needs some form of immigration enforcement. But it doesn’t need ICE. It doesn’t need an agency whose institutional identity is wedded to wanton cruelty and the apparent hair-trigger use of lethal force. It doesn’t need an agency that has been transformed into a paramilitary enforcer of despotic rule. It doesn’t need roving bands of masked thugs shooting and killing ordinary people under the cover of law.
During the first Trump administration, left-wing activists demanded that the nation abolish ICE. They were right then, and they are right now.
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