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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) 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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2) 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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3) 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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4) 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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5) 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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6) 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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7) U.S. Launches Major Strikes on Islamic State Targets in Syria
The airstrikes followed an even larger attack in December to avenge the killing of three Americans last year.
By Eric Schmitt, Reporting from Washington, Jan. 10, 2026
A view of the Sheikh Maksoud neighborhood amid fighting in Aleppo, Syria, on Jan. 10. Credit...Adri Salido/Getty Images
The United States carried out major airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria on Saturday, following up on even larger retaliatory attacks last month to avenge the deaths of two U.S. Army soldiers and a U.S. civilian interpreter killed in a terrorist attack in the country.
About 20 Air Force attack planes, including F-15Es, A-10s and AC-130J gunships, as well as MQ-9 Reaper drones and Jordanian F-16 fighter jets fired more than 90 bombs and missiles toward at least 35 targets on Saturday, according to Capt. Timothy Hawkins, a spokesman for the military’s Central Command.
The targets included weapons caches, supply routes and other infrastructure used by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, Captain Hawkins said in an email.
“The strikes today targeted ISIS throughout Syria as part of our ongoing commitment to root out Islamic terrorism against our warfighters, prevent future attacks, and protect American and partner forces in the region,” Central Command said in a statement.
The strikes on Saturday came after American fighter jets, attack helicopters and artillery fired more than 100 munitions at more than 70 suspected Islamic State targets across central Syria, including weapons storage areas and other operational-support buildings, on Dec. 19.
The earlier strikes sought to fulfill a promise that President Trump made after the two soldiers from the Iowa National Guard and an American interpreter were killed last month in an incident that U.S. counterterrorism officials blamed on the Islamic State. The Americans were supporting counterterrorism operations against the Islamic State in Palmyra, a city in central Syria, when they came under fire from a lone gunman.
Those soldiers were the first American military casualties in the country since the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2024.
Since then, U.S. troops, working with Syrian government forces and the Jordanian military, have redoubled efforts to root out the remnants of the Islamic State.
Top U.S. intelligence officials told Congress last year that the Islamic State would try to exploit the end of the Assad government to free 9,000 to 10,000 ISIS fighters and about 26,000 of their family members now detained in northeastern Syria, and revive its ability to plot and carry out attacks.
Though it no longer holds much territory, the Islamic State is still spreading its radical ideology through clandestine cells and regional affiliates outside Syria and online. In 2024, the group was behind major attacks in Iran, Russia and Pakistan.
The deadly attacks against the American soldiers also highlighted the challenges for the nascent Syrian government, led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, as it steers a deeply fractured country emerging from nearly 14 years of civil war.
In a statement last month, the Pentagon’s Central Command said the Islamic State had inspired at least 11 plots or attacks against targets in the United States over the past year. In response, the command said its operations resulted in 119 insurgents being detained and 14 killed over the past six months.
U.S. military and Syrian security personnel in November carried out missions to locate and destroy more than 15 Islamic State weapons caches in southern Syria. The operations also destroyed more than 130 mortars and rockets, multiple rifles, machine guns, anti-tank mines and materials for building improvised explosive devices, Central Command said.
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8) Who Was Renee Good, the Woman Killed by an ICE Agent in Minneapolis?
Ms. Good, 37, was a poet and a mother who grew up in Colorado. Her wife said the couple had “stopped to support our neighbors” when Ms. Good was shot.
By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Ann Hinga Klein and Dan Simmons, Jan. 10, 2026
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Dan Simmons reported from Minneapolis, and Ann Hinga Klein from Kansas City, Mo.
Protests took place in cities and towns across the country following the killing of Renee Good. Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
In her final moments, Renee Good was in the driver’s seat of her maroon Honda Pilot, wearing a light blue flannel over a red hoodie and speaking to an immigration agent who was recording her on his phone.
“That’s fine dude, I’m not mad,” she said as the agent circled her car, which was blocking part of a road. He was using a cellphone to record Ms. Good and her wife, Becca, who prodded him: “You wanna come at us?”
Moments later, Ms. Good was dead, shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, Jonathan Ross, on Wednesday morning. The agent was near the front of her car and fired his gun after she drove toward him and then turned to the right on a snowy Minneapolis street.
Amid ongoing debate about whether the shooting was justified and the overall tactics employed by the deportation operations of the Trump administration, thousands in Minneapolis and across the country have been mourning Ms. Good, 37, who had only recently moved to Minneapolis with her wife and 6-year-old son. This weekend, protests against ICE took place in cities and towns across the country.
When she was killed, Ms. Good and her wife had been participating in a protest in response to ICE agents who had been spotted in the neighborhood, one of whom had gotten a vehicle stuck in the snow.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, has said that Ms. Good was one of several “agitators” who were trying to block the agents from leaving. In a chat called Central Rapid Response on Signal, the encrypted app, Ms. Good’s wife was described by another member as a “helper” in Wednesday’s action.
Becca Good, in a statement to Minnesota Public Radio, described her wife as a Christian woman who believed in loving others, as well as finding and nurturing kindness in people. She was “made of sunshine,” Becca Good said.
A Mother and Poet
Ms. Good, a poet and a mother of three, was born in Colorado Springs, Colo., and grew up in the state. Later in life, she moved to Virginia and Kansas City, Mo., before arriving in Minneapolis sometime last year.
She attended Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., where she won a prize in 2020 for a poem entitled “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” before graduating with an English degree in December of that year.
A former classmate remembered her camaraderie when they were both pregnant during the same semester in 2019.
“We encountered each other at a time in my life when I was walking on new, wobbly legs in very uncharted territory,” said the classmate, Marie Branch. She said Ms. Good’s excitement for her new son “was palpable,” and that Ms. Good, who had already had two children, had helped guide her.
“She mentored me when she herself was in the throes of it — she was a nurturer to her core,” Ms. Branch said.
A Move to Kansas City
Ms. Good moved to Kansas City, Mo., sometime after college, and, in October 2023, successfully sought to change her name to Renee N. Macklin Good, writing in a court petition that she wanted “to share a name with my partner.” (She was born Renee Nicole Ganger.) In the court filing, she said that her two older children lived in Colorado at the time.
In Kansas City, neighbors recalled a happy family of three — the Goods and their exuberant son, now 6 years old — who lived in a small home with a gay pride flag in a quiet neighborhood on the south side of the city.
One neighbor, Zach Howdeshell, 34, said he did not think of Ms. Good as an activist. He lamented that her son — whose father died two years ago — was now without her as well.
“Her little boy was just so sweet,” he said. “And that’s one of the things that breaks my heart the most.”
Jennifer Ferguson, who lived across the street, said she and her husband would sit outside drinking coffee in the morning, waiting for their daughter’s bus, and that they would hear laughter flow out of the kitchen window of the Goods’ home.
Even though they were only neighbors for about six months in 2024, Ms. Ferguson recalled seeing “a lot of tender moments” between the couple. When they parted, they would often hug in the driveway or at their doorstep. And they frequently drove their son to school together.
Their son would play with the Fergusons’ daughter, and, when they spotted each other from across the street in the mornings, he would shout, “Have a good day!” If there was time, he would rush over and give her a hug.
Ms. Ferguson said she and her husband felt lucky to have had such friendly neighbors who were part of a loving family. Becca would sometimes talk handyman projects or tools with Ms. Ferguson’s husband, and the two families swapped Christmas cookies that year. Becca even once asked if they wanted some red wine that the couple had used to cook with, since she and her wife did not drink.
The two families did not talk about politics, Ms. Ferguson said, though it seemed clear that the Goods did not like the political direction of the country. They had talked about moving to Canada, she said, and seemed to grow more serious about the prospect after President Trump was elected.
A Fresh Start in Minneapolis
The Goods left Kansas City at the end of December 2024, dropping off two final gifts at their neighbors’ house: a lawn mower and a deep-freezer that they were not taking with them. Ms. Ferguson said she figured they were moving to Canada.
It is not clear exactly when they arrived in Minneapolis, but they had begun sending their son to school there.
“Like people have done across place and time, we moved to make a better life for ourselves,” Becca Good said in her statement. “We chose Minnesota to make our home. Our whole extended road trip here, we held hands in the car while our son drew all over the windows to pass the time and the miles.”
The family lived in a house in Powderhorn, a diverse neighborhood that has gentrified in recent years but that is still known for its activist community, particularly after a police officer killed George Floyd nearby in 2020.
Becca Good said in her statement that “there was a strong shared sense here in Minneapolis that we were looking out for each other.”
On the day her wife was killed, Becca Good said they had been trying to support their neighbors. “We had whistles,” she wrote. “They had guns.”
Jesse Stensby, who lives near where Ms. Good was killed but did not know the couple, said that neighbors in the community had only grown closer since immigration authorities began targeting Minneapolis and St. Paul last month.
The day before Ms. Good was killed, he said, a “block captain” for a group that monitors ICE agents’ movements had knocked on doors in the neighborhood, handing out pamphlets and whistles to blow when agents were nearby.
“We all got to know each other very quickly,” he said. “We know how to organize and take care of each other.”
Christina Morales, Kurt Streeter and Jazmine Ulloa contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett and Georgia Gee and contributed research.
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9) NBA coach calls Renee Good shooting 'straight-up murder'
By Carl Gibson, January 10, 2026
Milwaukee Bucks head coach Glenn Anton "Doc" Rivers on January 9, 2026 (Image: Screengrab via Milwaukee Bucks / YouTube)
Glenn Anton "Doc" Rivers, who is the head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks NBA franchise, spent several minutes from a recent post-game press conference to denounce the killing of Minneapolis, Minnesota resident Renee Good at the hands of federal agents.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that Rivers — whose team defeated the Los Angeles Lakers by a score of 105-101 on Friday — called Good's killing "morally wrong" while speaking to reporters after the game. The 2008 NBA champion head coach stated that he viewed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) fatal shooting of the U.S. citizen and mother as "straight-up murder."
"It's awful. This lady was probably trying to go home and she didn't make it home and that's really sad," he said. "The whole ICE thing is a travesty."
Rivers went on to accuse President Donald Trump's administration of "attacking Brown people," and noted that while he is a person of color, that it shouldn't just be people of color calling out what he viewed as racist federal policy.
"I don't care what side of this thing you're on politically," he said. "What's going on in our country is absolutely wrong as far as the race stuff. The politics I'm not going to get into, the race stuff I will. And it's just wrong, and we have to do something. But the only thing we can do right now is keep speaking up. Because it doesn't seem like they care. And that's troublesome."
The Bucks head coach told reporters that he felt the president was serving as a poor "role model" for young Americans to emulate, and accused Trump of governing as a "bully."
"I keep thinking about kids," he said. "And when I grew up, the president was always the role model. And I think about that, and the effect of being a bully, lying, how is that good for our kids? and that worries me for our future."
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10) Somalis Fled Civil War and Built a Community. Now They Are a Target.
A fraud scandal has made the Somali community in Minnesota a focus of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants.
By Jazmine Ulloa and Campbell Robertson, Photographs by Jamie Kelter Davis, Jazmine Ulloa reported from Minneapolis, Jan. 11, 2026
Abdulahi Farah, a Somali American community organizer, handed out sambusas, traditional Somali pastries, at a memorial for Ms. Good.
On an icy Friday morning, Mahad Omar watched armed federal agents run down the street and tackle one of his neighbors to the ground. They handcuffed the man and put him inside a black-tinted S.U.V.
Mr. Omar, 28, an Uber driver, immigrated to Minneapolis from Somalia two decades ago. He had never imagined seeing something like that in his community.
“Minneapolis is a great city,” Mr. Omar said after the agents had left and residents emerged from their homes to discuss in hushed voices what they had seen from their yards and windows. Several women wept.
“It’s never been like this,”said Mr. Omar, one of thousands of Somalis who fled civil war in their country and came to the United States through a federal refugee program, many of them settling in Minnesota.
Cities around the country have taken their turn in the glare of President Trump’s immigration enforcement campaign, and now Minneapolis is the focus. The federal crackdown, triggered in large part by a viral video purporting to show widespread fraud at Somali-run day care centers, is concentrated among the city’s Somali-Americans.
Somali residents, lawmakers and civic leaders in Minneapolis and beyond say they have been accustomed for decades to being treated with suspicion for being Black, immigrant or Muslim. But the disparagement from Mr. Trump and his allies, both in his first term and now, has solidified into a more direct rhetorical attack on them.
Now, many said, they feel targeted simply for being Somali.
“Maybe they got tired of attacking Muslims,” Imam Yusuf Abdulle, director of the Islamic Association of North America, which oversees more than three dozen Islamic centers and groups across the country. “Now, they have another name, another reason,” he said, citing Vice President JD Vance’s use of the words “the Somali problem.”
Most Somali Americans in Minneapolis say that in recent weeks they have been subject to a level of intense scrutiny far beyond anything that had come before. The tensions ratcheted up further last week after a federal agent shot and killed a woman, Renee Nicole Good, at the wheel of her S.U.V., which was partially blocking a lane in a Minneapolis neighborhood. The killing has ignited protests nationwide, but has evidently not diverted the federal pressure in Minneapolis from its focus on Somalis.
Representative Ilhan Omar, who in 2018 became the first Somali-American elected to Congress, spoke on Saturday morning outside a federal building in Minneapolis, where she said she and two other congressional Democrats were denied full entry to inspect the detainee holding area.
“He’s trying to scare them and terrorize them every single day,” she said. “And what we know is that Somalis are not intimidated.”
President Trump’s derision of immigrants stretches back decades and has largely focused on people from African and developing nations. At times, that has included Somalis, with Mr. Trump calling their resettlement in Minneapolis a “disaster,” and repeatedly attacking Representative Omar. He unleashed an especially xenophobic tirade at Somali Americans in December, when at the tail end of a Cabinet meeting, he called Somali immigrants “garbage” as he denounced a fraud scandal in Minneapolis involving social services run by Somalis.
“President Trump is right,” said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson on Saturday. “Aliens who come to our country, complain about how much they hate America, fail to contribute to our economy, rip off Americans, and refuse to assimilate into our society should not be here.”
Last week, Mr. Trump said his administration was taking steps to strip some naturalized Somali Americans of their U.S. citizenship.
First Refugees, Then Citizens
The attacks have reverberated across Somali communities in the United States, where refugees began arriving in large numbers in the early 1990s, fleeing a country that was engulfed in civil war. In 1990, there were around 3,000 Somali-born people nationwide. Many of them were in Southern California where the climate was familiar, according to Ahmed Ismail Yusuf, a writer and teacher who was raised in a nomadic family in Somalia and now lives in Minneapolis.
In 1992, though, a handful of young Somali men found work at a poultry plant in southwest Minnesota, and word began to spread of a friendly (if cold-weathered) place with plenty of jobs, good wages and a low cost of living.
Now there are 260,000 people across the country with Somali heritage, and roughly 42 percent of them live in Minnesota, mostly in and around Minneapolis and -St. Paul. The majority are U.S.-born, and more than 92 percent are U.S. citizens. The rest have various forms of legal protection, including visas and asylum, or are undocumented.
Nationwide, about 700 Somalis nationwide were living and working under the Temporary Protected Status program, a humanitarian initiative for people from troubled nations. Trump officials have long targeted the program, and in November they moved to revoke the program’s protection of Somali immigrants.
Minnesota has a long history of immigrant resettlement and has, for the most part, been a welcoming place.
In the southern part of the city, the scent of spices, perfumes and homemade foods waft through the Karmel Mall of Somalia, a thriving cultural hub that includes shops, child care centers, a senior care facility, a mosque and a Quran school. Further north, stores in the Cedar-Riverside area, known as “Little Mogadishu,” attract new arrivals.
Over time, poverty levels in the Somali community have dropped, and homeownership has increased. Many Somalis have found work in home health care or opened small businesses. Some opened child care centers, said Ismail Mohamed, an Ohio state representative and one the first Somali-Americans to be elected to the Ohio General Assembly, because they wanted their children to be looked after by people who shared their language and religious values.
Somali-Americans have also become involved in politics, winning seats on city councils, in state legislatures and in Congress.
Suspicion and Scrutiny
Still, the Somali community has at times been viewed with suspicion. After the Sept. 11 attacks, when anti-Muslim sentiment spread nationwide, agencies that people used to send money to relatives in Somalia were temporarily shut down. In the late 2000s, when federal authorities discovered that around 20 Somali-Americans had left Minnesota to join terror groups overseas, federal law enforcement agencies began working with the community to prevent the radicalization of young men.
In 2016, after President Trump denounced Somali refugees at a nearby campaign rally, the Dar Al-Farooq mosque in Bloomington, Minn., which has a largely Somali congregation, began receiving threatening emails and calls. The harassment peaked in 2017 when a white supremacist bombed the mosque.
The last few weeks, though, have felt altogether different.
Armed immigration agents have been marching through apartment complexes and shopping malls, demanding to see documents and handcuffing some people. Black tinted S.U.V.s have circled residential blocks while local volunteers kept watch and blew whistles to warn others in the neighborhood that the agents were coming.
Somali-American schoolchildren have come home in tears, saying that classmates had called them “garbage.” Strangers with no evident connection to the government have walked into cafes and Somali-run businesses and demanded to see people’s papers.
“Just going to the grocery store, people look at you differently,” said Mina Omar, 27, a nurse who was born and raised in Minneapolis. She recalled coming to the defense of an elderly woman recently when another shopper demanded that the woman “go back home.”
Sidewalks in Somali neighborhoods, once bustling, are now quiet.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said on Saturday that “claims law enforcement officers are ‘terrorizing the Somali community’ is absolute garbage.”
“Our law enforcement are arresting criminal illegal aliens who are terrorizing American citizens,” she said.
A Viral Video Inflamed Tensions
Although Mr. Trump had been making bigoted remarks about Somalis for some time, declaring that “they come from hell” and “we don’t want them in our country,” the deep chill in Minneapolis set in following the posting of a viral video that purported to expose extensive fraud at Somali-run child care centers in Minnesota.
“Once I saw the video,” said Mr. Yusuf, the writer, “I was actually punched in the gut. I just knew something terrible was just on the horizon.”
Federal prosecutors in Minnesota have described a brazen and sprawling fraud scandal in which people stole millions and possibly billions of dollars from state social service organizations. Of the 98 people who have been charged in connection with the fraud so far, 85 are of Somali descent, according to the White House.
“ICE’s homeland security investigations are conducting operations to identify, arrest, remove criminals who are defrauding the American people in Minnesota,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “We will root out this fraud and hold those who steal from American taxpayers accountable.”
Abdulahi Farah, a Somali American community organizer, and other Somali leaders said that fraud should be investigated and rooted out because child care and senior centers are desperately needed in Minnesota and should function with integrity. But he and others said they saw in the White House’s reaction an orchestrated attempt to entirely take away the services, denigrate all Somali immigrants and use them as scapegoats.
“It’s a way to distract Americans,” Mr. Farah said.
Fraud allegations in Minneapolis first became public years ago, but the viral video, which was posted online in late December, attracted sudden, intense nationwide scrutiny to a community that was used to being overlooked.
“We are just like a blip, literally — in a population of, like, 330 million, we are such a small, insignificant group,” said Mr. Mohamed, the Ohio state representative. “I don’t think I would have naturally thought that the vice president and the president, Elon Musk and everyone would be tweeting about Somalis.”
Now, the killing of Ms. Good has felt like another turning point. Some Somali Americans said they have felt heartened by the surge in protests against the Trump administration’s actions. Mr. Farah, the mosque leader, likened the spirit of Ms. Good to that of the neighbors and community volunteers who helped rebuild his mosque and who stood outside with signs spelling messages of love and solidarity to successfully deter harassers.
On a snowy Saturday evening, Mr. Farah and other organizers were passing out Sambusas, or East African pastries, they had bought from ailing Somali restaurants to people stopping by to pay their respects at a memorial for Ms. Good.
A day earlier, Taher Muse, 38, the owner of an auto shop in Minneapolis, ran toward a man who had been stopped by federal immigration agents down the block, shouting at him that he had a right not to answer any questions. Within minutes, a caravan of black S.U.V.s pulled up outside Mr. Muse’s garage.
Mr. Muse, who was born in Mogadishu, arrived in Minneapolis when he was two years old, as his parents fled the Somali civil war. He became a U.S. citizen long ago, and opened his auto repair shop last year after working at a laundry list of other jobs — including as a poultry factory worker, a truck driver, and an employee at a rental car company.
Now federal agents were asking Mr. Muse and his workers for their identification. Among the agents was Gregory Bovino, a top Border Patrol official and key figure in the federal immigration crackdown. Mr. Muse and the other workers at the garage refused to answer any questions and waved the agents off.
“I thought they would stop after killing Renee Good, but they are still out here harassing people,” Mr. Muse said later Friday afternoon, after the federal agents had left. Still, he said, he believed there were limits to what the administration could do.
“This country is better than they think it is,” he said.
Kirsten Noyes and Jeff Adelson contributed research.
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11) Pope Leo Confronts Trump on His Own Terms
By David Gibson, Jan. 11, 2026
Mr. Gibson is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.
Anwar Amro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Since his election in May as the first American pope, Leo XIV has become a political and temperamental counterweight to an incendiary American president.
A face-off between the two most prominent Americans on the world stage was inevitable, if only for the contrast between President Trump’s blustery inconstancy and Leo’s soft-spoken yet firm dignity. The pope is “neither quiet nor shy — if he has something to say, he will say it,” in the words of his eldest brother, Louis Prevost, a Trump devotee whom the president has hosted in the Oval Office and at Mar-a-Lago.
Indeed, after Mr. Trump sent forces to seize the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the pope declared that Venezuela’s “sovereignty” must be guaranteed along with “the rule of law enshrined in its Constitution.” Leo had already urged the United States not to follow through on threats against Venezuela and criticized the administration’s military buildup in the Caribbean. He also repeatedly lamented the treatment of immigrants by U.S. authorities and called on American clergy members to be vocal and active on the issue, which they have been.
But rather than viewing Leo’s statements as one half of a mano-a-mano between pope and president, they may be better seen as the articulation of a post-Trump global order, one informed by universal values and institutional norms rather than tribal and individual self-interest. Leo is not looking for a fight with Mr. Trump; he is looking past him. When he challenges the president’s policies, he does so as an American-born pope recalling the American-inspired system that Mr. Trump is dismantling — one that values statesmanship over gamesmanship, the common good over national conquest and common decency over jingoist bullying.
In early December Leo met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and said he would like to visit the country, which has suffered a yearslong assault from Russia. Hours later, he criticized the Trump administration’s peace plan: “Trying to reach a peace agreement without including Europe in the discussions is not realistic,” he said. “The war is in Europe.”
Soon after, in remarks that could have been aimed at the MAGA movement, Leo told European politicians on the center-right that “the mark of any civilized society is that differences are debated with courtesy and respect.” He later told diplomats that honesty is the greatest virtue in “an international context plagued by prevarications and conflict” and he blasted the “war of words armed with lies, propaganda and hypocrisy.”
Throughout the Christmas season and into the new year, Leo continued to call for a world based on old ideals, pushing for “the strengthening of supranational institutions, not their delegitimization.” He lectured civic leaders on how to be responsible public servants. On Christmas he urged world leaders to pursue peace through dialogue — even as Mr. Trump was launching military strikes on Islamic militias in Nigeria, ostensibly to protect Christians.
In his state of the world address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican on Friday, Leo delivered his most thoroughgoing defense of postwar multilateralism, calling the rule of law “the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.”
“A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force,” the pope said. “The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined.”
Leo obviously has no hard power to deploy and his is not a nostalgia for a durable yet flawed Pax Americana. But his voice, with its American accent, is filling a void. During Leo’s first international papal trip last fall, to Turkey and Lebanon, he showed himself to be a classic American internationalist speaking in a classically Christian register. La Croix’s Vatican reporter Mikael Corre noted that the trip was marked by “the exact opposite of the diplomacy we now associate with the United States: no hyper-personalization, no show of force, no shocking announcements or thunderous slogans.”
Since Benedict XV tried and failed to stop World War I, popes have sought to address the global political reality in which they have found themselves. In the 1980s the Polish pope, John Paul II, helped Ronald Reagan hasten the end of the Soviet empire, but he was at a loss in navigating the cultural and political upheavals that followed. His successor, Benedict XVI, elected in 2005, was an inward-looking theologian whose focus was “less diplomacy and more Gospel,” as one Vatican reporter put it. That left the papacy adrift internationally and internally.
Francis, the Argentine pope elected in 2013, provided a powerful rhetorical and moral language that could stand up to the noisy demagogues and populist nationalism that emerged during his papacy, an era he framed as “a third war, one fought piecemeal.” The solution, Francis said, would be “artisanal” or “handcrafted” peace between individuals and among communities.
Pope Leo has brought an even more insistent focus on peace. His vocabulary evokes Pope John XXIII’s Cold War-era encyclical addressed to “all men of good will" and its focus on human rights and interstate relations, and a pragmatic sensibility that recalls the founders of Europe’s unification, Robert Schuman, Alcide De Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer, all devout Catholics. His worldview is also informed by decades of living in Peru and his global travels as head of the Augustinian order to which he belongs, and by the input of the cardinals from around the world who almost certainly elected him in part because he epitomizes the America they miss.
Will it make any difference? Mr. Trump and his Catholic allies in the administration thought nothing of criticizing Pope Francis, and they don’t appear too interested in heeding Leo. “I haven’t heard any statements from the pope,” Mr. Trump told Politico last month before going on to sing the praises of the pope’s brother Louis. Mr. Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, a Catholic, has also dismissed Leo’s view on the negotiations to end the war in Ukraine as too “Eurocentric.”
The Catholic Church, it is said, thinks in centuries, and Pope Leo is unlikely to worry about such pushback. He is a fit 70-year-old who could potentially set a papal record as the oldest pope to die in office, outlasting another Leo, Leo XIII, who was 93 at his death in 1903. Donald Trump, who turns 80 on June 14, has three years left in his second term and faces political headwinds that has conservatives talking about a post-MAGA vision for the Republican Party. Of course, even three more years of Mr. Trump could do incalculable damage not only to the United States but to the global commonwealth.
When Leo was elected, there were regular references to the first pope to take that name, Leo the Great, who served in the fifth century amid the declining Roman Empire. As barbarian armies swept across Europe, that first Pope Leo led a delegation to northern Italy to meet Attila the Hun and his invading forces. Leo’s holiness and diplomacy (perhaps aided by a menacing vision Attila was said to have had of SS. Peter and Paul brandishing swords) is credited with persuading Attila to turn back and spare the Italian peninsula.
But a more apt parallel for our current circumstances might be the legend of Leo’s meeting three years later, in 455, with Gaiseric the Vandal outside Rome. On that occasion, it is said, Leo was able to persuade the barbarian king only to spare several large churches so that thousands of Romans could find sanctuary from the ensuing devastation. In the aftermath, Leo and his successors were able to rebuild city and society.
Catholicism has a knack for preserving the best of the past to help seed a better future. Today’s Leo may be the surest guardian of a legacy that America, and the world, will desperately need.
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12) Warriors’ Steve Kerr rips US government’s response to ICE ‘murder’ in Minneapolis
AP, January 11, 2025
Golden State head coach Steve Kerr gestures during the second half of Friday’s game against Sacramento. (photo: Godofredo A Vásquez/AP)
Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr delivered a blistering condemnation of the US federal government on Friday, criticizing official accounts of the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis and praising the Minnesota Timberwolves for publicly acknowledging the woman’s death.
Speaking to reporters before the Warriors’ game against the Sacramento Kings at Chase Center, Kerr said the response from federal authorities following Good’s killing by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent was “shameful”, accusing officials of misrepresenting events despite the existence of video footage and eyewitness accounts.
Good, 37, was shot and killed on Wednesday on a residential street in Minneapolis after ICE agents approached her vehicle, which was partially blocking a lane of traffic. Video of the encounter shows agents ordering her to exit the car and attempting to open the driver’s side door. As Good tried to pull away, one agent stepped in front of the vehicle and another fired shots, killing her.
The incident has sparked protests across the Twin Cities and intensified scrutiny of federal immigration enforcement tactics. US president Donald Trump and senior administration officials have said the agent acted in self-defense, claiming Good used her vehicle as a weapon – a description disputed by Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, and other local officials, who have characterized the shooting as reckless.
“I’m glad that the Timberwolves recognized her life and the tragic nature of her death,” Kerr said, referring to the moment of silence held Thursday night before Minnesota’s home game against Cleveland. “It’s shameful, really, that in our country we can have law enforcement officers who commit murder and seemingly get away with it.
“It’s shameful that the government can come out and lie about what happened when there’s video and witnesses who have all come out and disputed what the government is saying. So, very demoralizing, devastating to lose anyone’s life, especially in that manner. So it’s terrible, terribly sad for her family, and for her, and that city, and I’m glad the Timberwolves came out and expressed that sadness.”
Timberwolves coach Chris Finch addressed the shooting before Thursday’s game, offering condolences to Good’s family and acknowledging the toll the incident has taken on the Minneapolis community. “Our community has suffered yet another unspeakable tragedy,” Finch said. “We want to convey our heartfelt wishes and prayers to everyone affected.”
Kerr, 60, has long been one of the most outspoken figures in American professional sports on political and social issues, particularly around gun violence and accountability in law enforcement. He has frequently criticized Trump and his administration during both of Trump’s terms in office, using his platform to speak on issues that extend well beyond basketball.
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