Veterans For Peace Condemns
U.S. Attack on Iran
Military Members and Civilians:
Resist Illegal Wars!
Veterans For Peace condemns the U.S./Israeli attack on Iran in the strongest possible terms. We call on our members, friends, and allies to resist this dangerous and illegal war. We offer our support to members of the military who decide to refuse illegal orders and resist an illegal war.
A War Based on Lies
The Trump administration’s ever-changing rationales for going to war against Iran are lies. Iran posed no threat to the United States. This military operation is not a defensive war, but rather a war of choice by Israel and the U.S., a war of aggression, a war for regime change – very much like the disastrous U.S. wars that killed millions of people in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – wars that many veterans remember with horror and regret.
Contrary to President Trump’s oft-repeated lie, Iran has repeatedly stated that it has no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons. Rather, the United States, the only country to attack another nation with nuclear weapons, has unilaterally abrogated multiple arms control treaties, and is investing Two Trillion Dollars in a new generation of nuclear weapons. It was the U.S., not Iran, that violated and withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. Israel also has nuclear weapons – undeclared and uninspected. Two nuclear powers attacking Iran, claiming to stop it from pursuing a nuclear program, is the height of hypocrisy.
The aggression against Iran follows by less than two months the U.S. attack on Venezuela and the unlawful abduction of its president and wife. It comes amid the ongoing war threats and oil blockade of Cuba. This complete disregard and abuse of the process of negotiations only encourages nuclear proliferation around the world.
Illegal and Unconstitutional
The U.S. war on Iran is illegal in multiple ways. It is a violation of the UN Charter, a treaty which is the “supreme law of the land” under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The unilateral war of aggression against Iran is a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly grants Congress the sole authority to declare war. This power was intentionally given to the legislative branch to prevent unilateral military action by a single executive.
These legal and constitutional issues may seem quaint to those of us who have seen them routinely violated by president after president with the complicity of a supine Congress. Nonetheless, they constitute both international and domestic law. They are the legal codification of a moral framework for international peace and cooperation. Peace-loving people must struggle to ensure that these laws are followed. We must hold our government officials accountable when they are not.
Refuse Illegal Orders – Resist Illegal Wars
Veterans For Peace reminds our sisters and brothers, children, and grandchildren in the U.S. military that an order to participate in an illegal war is, by extension, an illegal order. You have the right and even the duty to refuse illegal orders. Veterans For Peace and many others will stand with you when you do, and provide helpful information and resources. Whatever legal consequences you may endure pale compared to risking your life in an illegal war or living with Post Traumatic Stress and Moral Injury.
Veterans and civilians also have the right and the responsibility to resist the illegal actions of our government at home and abroad. This attack is a very critical moment in the history of the United States and the world. We must be in the streets protesting. We must be on our phones telling our representatives to Vote Yes on the Iran War Powers resolution. We must be on our keyboards, writing letters to the editors. Tell them to:
IMMEDIATELY HALT U.S. MILITARY ATTACKS ON IRAN!
· End U.S. Support for Israel and Genocide in Palestine!
· End Economic Warfare against Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba!
· End ICE and Authoritarian Repression in U.S. Cities!
· Abolish Nuclear Weapons and War!
PEACE AT HOME, PEACE ABROAD!
https://prod.cdn.everyaction.com/emails/van/EA/EA015/1/94223/Alqa3p0mdFGQOfwCaEOYO6dpWCJEn2qC1GPoEaid_7O_archive?emci=6196a802-9415-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&emdi=d3c0d4a7-a515-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&ceid=10474381
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Hands Off Rick Toledo, Pro-Palestine Grad Student at Cal Poly Humboldt! Give Him His Electronics Back!
Don't forget to sign this sign-on letter for Toledo here:
https://stopfbi.org/news/hands-off-rick-toledo-pro-palestine-grad-student-at-cal-poly-humboldt-give-him-his-electronics-back/
Please email any statements of solidarity to:
stopfbi@gmail.com
On the night of March 19, 2026, University Police Department returned with a warrant to the apartment of Rick Toledo, Students for a Democratic Society organizer at Cal Poly Tech Humboldt, and seized his laptop, phone, and other electronics such as a camera. They attempted to force him to give up his passcodes, and he told them no. He did the right thing.
This violation of his privacy comes as part of their effort to charge him with four bogus felonies - false imprisonment, conspiracy, battery, and assault - related to the student protest on Feb 27. This is the latest in their string of acts to suppress any campus free speech for Palestine and divestment from Israel, along with suspending and firing him from his university teaching job.
We should be perfectly clear about it: there is nothing wrong with supporting any student action, including building occupations, that is taken to make demands of a university. Our rights to free speech and freedom of assembly are protected by the First Amendment, enshrined in the constitution. College protest is a long-time tradition, and it continues on today. Toledo committed no crime in supporting the student protest, and the university is determined to create lie after lie in order to demonize him.
In our view, what they really want to do is punish Toledo not for the one-day building occupation last month, but for the 9-day building occupation during the encampment movement in spring of 2024. That display of courage by the students in the name of ending university support for a genocide made it to millions of TV screens, and the state of California and university want someone to pay. Toledo is their target of choice, years later.
We demand that he not be charged of any crime, because he didn't do anything wrong. We demand that his devices be returned ASAP. Activists should learn from his example of not telling the police a single thing, including a passcode. The university and police are the criminals here for trying to scare activists out of speaking out against the university's continued financial support to Israeli apartheid. Now is not the time to suffer in silence; it’s the time to speak out. We need to condemn political repression, stand with Rick Toledo, and defend our rights to speak out for Palestine.
Don’t Charge Rick Toledo!
Give Him His Property Back!
Protesting for Palestine Is Not a Crime!
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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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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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
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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 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 auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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) Goodbye, ‘Queer Eye.’ Goodbye, Queer Acceptance.
By Rosa Rankin-Gee, March 29, 2026
Ms. Rankin-Gee is a novelist. Her forthcoming novel, “My Only Boy,” is about a lesbian and a gay man who fall in love.
Doris Liou
When the final season of “Queer Eye” dropped this year, it did so with too little fanfare: a scant five episodes and a late, fleeting appearance on the Netflix home page for someone who had faithfully cried over all previous episodes — me. The show’s low-key farewell could be down to well-documented intracast disputes or air dissipating from a franchise that has run for nearly a decade. But the end of “Queer Eye” also dovetails with a second story: the beginning of a precipitous fall in the acceptance of gayness in mainstream American culture. It’s a particularly bitter aftertaste for a show that placed the pursuit of acceptance at its heart.
I am a lesbian in my late 30s, around the same age as the “Queer Eye” cast. Many of our microgeneration missed the almost universal brutality that our gay predecessors endured — criminalization, forced sterilization, the AIDS crisis. But we did encounter that era’s stinging tail: “don’t say gay” laws, conversion therapy and casual conversations that now sound archaic. When I was at university, a fellow student asked, “Would you prefer for your son to be born gay or have no legs?” and people around me responded, “No legs.” This was in 2010. But in the years after we graduated, in a new post-marriage-equality lull, many corporations sponsored Pride. There was a certain cachet in being gay, and then labels seemed on course to become irrelevant altogether.
Now we are caught up in an era of backlash-whiplash, when the gains of the past few decades seem to be at increasing risk of slipping away.
“Queer Eye” is a reboot of the original franchise, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” which ran from 2003 to 2007, battleground years for gay rights. The premise: Five gay men perform a makeover on someone whose cobwebs could do with a dusting. The first version was criticized for sanitizing gayness for straight audiences and leaning into limiting stereotypes — gay guy as hairdresser, interior designer, sidekick. But through television screens, it got gay people into homes they might not have otherwise entered, just as the national fight for gay marriage started to ramp up.
When the show was reimagined with a new cast in 2018, liberated from its “for the Straight Guy” shackles, the hosts reflected a more expansive expression of queerness — less white, more gender diverse — and many of the heroes, as the makeover subjects are known, were from red states. It was an exercise in bridge building that wasn’t shy about its ambition: “The original show was fighting for tolerance,” Tan France, the fashion expert, says in the first episode. “Our fight is for acceptance.”
The first stop for “Queer Eye,” filmed after President Trump’s first election, was in Dallas, Ga. The show’s first hero, Tom Jackson, describes himself as a “dumb old country boy from Kentucky”: He drinks margaritas from liter tankards, keeps barbecue tongs by his bed and has a giddy crush on his ex-wife. When the Fab Five flamboyantly ambush him in a diner, cameras capture restaurantwide looks of surprise and delight. There are jokes about douching, and Jonathan Van Ness (grooming) covers the hero’s ears: “Don’t scare her. We just got here.” When the hero asks Bobby Berk (design) about his marriage, “Are you the husband or the wife?” he’s gently re-educated. By the end, the hero, beard marshaled and socks pulled up, says, “I’ve never hung with gay guys before, and they were great.” It was indicative of the period’s prevailing hope that familiarity would lead to acceptance.
Eight years later, however, anti-queer bias is in ascent. Transgender people’s rights are being upended in states across the country. Even marriage equality no longer feels indelible. The current 47-point gap between Republicans and Democrats on gay marriage is the largest since Gallup began tracking the measure three decades ago. Research from psychologists at Harvard and Northwestern suggests that acceptance of gay people peaked in 2020 and, instead of plateauing, fell sharply. Strikingly, that reversal is most robust among people under 25. In America, Gen Z is more likely to identify as queer than any previous generation. But globally, the younger generation is also more traditionalist: Gen Z men around the world are more than twice as likely as boomers to think that wives should obey husbands.
Popular culture is sending warning signals, too. Pixar’s chief creative officer recently revealed that the company ordered the removal of gay content from the 2025 film “Elio” because “we’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy.” Netflix has canceled highly acclaimed adult shows with gay representation, like “Boots,” a show that inspired the Pentagon to call Netflix’s programming “woke garbage.” In the months after Elon Musk acquired X, homophobic, transphobic and racist hate speech on the platform soared by 50 percent, and engagement on posts with hate speech doubled.
And yet in New York City, where I live, we are still in a formerly unimaginable utopia. There it feels as if every second person is gay. I just had a child with my wife, and even though I’ll have to adopt my own daughter in order to ensure that I’m legally protected as her mother, the experience was relatively easy. We see the rabid response to “Heated Rivalry” and think: Maybe it can all flip yet again. Cycles of backlash have become shorter and shorter. We tell ourselves it’s a pendulum that will swing back. I wish I felt more confident.
Fifteen years ago, I could feel nervous about holding my first girlfriend’s hand because of looks that seemed to say, “You are doing something kids shouldn’t see.” Over the past decade, those looks — or the worry that made me watch for them — faded. Now they’re back.
There is a theory that gay acceptance became swept up in a wave of rejection, by the right, of liberal elites telling people what to think. It is possible to see “Queer Eye” as an emblem of this — polished urbanites coming to backwaters with improvements to make — but for me, the show felt different. Some of the hosts were from small towns themselves, and they were seemingly beloved by heroes and viewers alike. A makeover show alone was never going to change culture, but it did reflect a hopeful cultural landscape. Today, however, even tolerance is in doubt.
And so this goodbye from “Queer Eye” feels apologetic, even if the hosts are apologizing for something far outside their control. For the finale, the Fab Five take on Washington, D.C. “The eye of the storm,” Mx. Van Ness calls it. Against this backdrop, the hosts grasp for their trademark optimism: “This is not the end,” Mr. France tells the camera. “We were just starting off a movement.” “Now it’s your turn,” Karamo Brown (culture) says. “It’s your turn,” Mx. Van Ness echoes. Jeremiah Brent (design, a newer addition) says nothing. He appears to be on the verge of tears.
In these final episodes, when the hosts video-call their husbands and children, it reads as one last request for acceptance: We are just like you. Please let us keep this.
I hold my daughter in my arms, too. She is 5 months old. I know how lucky I am. It’s so much better than it was. You don’t know how good you have it. But we do. That’s the point.
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2) U.S. Allows Russian Oil Tanker to Reach Cuba, Despite Blockade
The tanker full of crude oil could reach its expected destination by Monday, providing a lifeline to the island amid intense U.S. pressure.
By Jack Nicas and Eric Schmitt, Published March 29, 2026, Updated March 30, 2026
Jack Nicas reported from Mexico City, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
Havana during a blackout this month. Credit...Adalberto Roque/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The United States Coast Guard is allowing a Russian tanker full of crude oil to reach Cuba, delivering a critical supply of energy to the island nation after months of an effective oil blockade by the Trump administration, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter.
The tanker, which is carrying an estimated 730,000 barrels of oil and is owned by the Russian government, was within several miles of Cuban territorial waters on Sunday evening, according to MarineTraffic, a ship-data provider. At its speed of 12 knots, it could reach its expected destination of Matanzas, Cuba, by Monday night.
The Russian ship’s arrival would shift the trajectory of a rapidly accelerating crisis in Cuba, buying the island nation at least a few weeks before its fuel reserves run out, analysts said.
It would also reduce pressure on a Cuban government facing a looming economic collapse and escalating threats from Washington, and show that, at least for now, the island can still depend on its longtime ally Russia.
The Trump administration had been enforcing what amounted to an oil blockade around Cuba since January, threatening nations that had been sending fuel to the country and, in one case, escorting a tanker heading toward Cuba away from the island.
The Coast Guard has two cutters in the region that could have attempted to intercept the Russian tanker. Yet the Trump administration did not order those vessels to act, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operations. Barring orders instructing it otherwise, the Coast Guard planned to let the tanker reach Cuba as of Sunday afternoon, the official said.
It was unclear why the White House did not issue orders to block the tanker or whether it would allow future Russian oil shipments to reach the island. The decision avoids a potential thorny confrontation with Russia just off the coast of Florida.
Asked by reporters about this article on Air Force One Sunday evening, President Trump confirmed it. “We don’t mind having somebody get a boatload, because they need — they have to survive,” he said. “I told them, if a country wants to send some oil into Cuba right now, I have no problem with that. Whether it’s Russia or not.”
But he played down the benefit for Cuba.
“It’s not going to have an impact — Cuba is finished,” he said. “They have a bad regime. They have very bad and corrupt leadership. And whether or not they get a boat of oil, it’s not going to matter.”
The Russian Embassy in Mexico said in a statement that “the Russian Federation expresses its full solidarity with Cuba, considers all restrictions imposed against it to be illegitimate — including those related to the supply of energy resources — and is prepared to provide all necessary assistance, including material support.”
Cuban officials did not respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. oil blockade has been choking Cuba, leading to daily blackouts, severe gas shortages, soaring prices and deteriorating medical care. The policy has attracted international criticism, including from the United Nations, that the United States is causing a humanitarian crisis in Cuba. At the same time, White House officials have been threatening the Cuban government publicly, while pushing it privately to remove its president, Miguel DÃaz-Canel.
Mr. Trump said this month that he believed he will “be having the honor of taking Cuba” and suggested that he could target the island with military force after the Iran war. “I built this great military,” he said at an investment conference on Friday. “I said, ‘You’ll never have to use it.’ But sometimes you have to use it. And Cuba is next, by the way.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday that the White House wanted new leaders in Cuba. “Cuba’s economy needs to change, and their economy can’t change unless their system of government changes,” he told reporters.
Cuban officials have dug in, saying the nation is prepared to defend itself.
“Our military is always prepared and, in fact, it is preparing these days for the possibility of military aggression,” Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de CossÃo, said on NBC’s Meet the Press last week. “We would be naïve if, looking at what’s happening around the world, we would not do that. But we truly hope that it doesn’t occur.”
The oil tanker now nearing Cuba may change the shape of tensions between the countries. Cuba was quickly running out of energy supplies, relying on solar power, domestic oil production and small fuel shipments to private Cuban businesses to prop up a failing energy grid. The crisis had led to small protests — a rarity in Cuba — and was raising questions of how the government would survive.
But the Russian oil will ease that crisis, at least temporarily. The oil can be refined into various products, including diesel, gasoline, jet fuel and fuel oil, which is used to power many Cuban power plants. That should help stabilize the energy grid, reduce blackouts, improve transportation and aid agricultural production, said Jorge Piñón, a former oil executive who studies Cuba’s energy system at the University of Texas.
“It buys them time,” Mr. Piñón said. “But this is not a magic wand that all of a sudden, by the arrival of this tanker, all of their problems are solved.”
Mr. Piñón said that the oil would take about three weeks to refine into other products and then another week to be distributed around the country.
Diesel, he said, is the most critical product for Cuba, as it powers trucks, tractors and many power plants, and is in desperately short supply on the island. Some humanitarian aid has been trapped at warehouses because trucks don’t have diesel to distribute it, farms have been paralyzed with powerless tractors and some power plants have been shut down because of a lack of fuel.
Cuba has kept the lights on — albeit inconsistently — because 40 percent of its energy grid is supported by power plants that largely run on crude oil that Cuba produces domestically. Cuba has also been racing to install solar panels to prop up the grid. But Mr. Piñón said that 40 percent of the grid depends on smaller power plants that use diesel.
He estimated that Cuba could use up the Russian oil in less than a month. But he expected the government to preserve some energy supplies for its strategic reserves and security forces.
“This is going to give diesel to the police, to the military units, to basically the whole apparatus of the Cuban government,” he said.
The Russian tanker, which is called the Anatoly Kolodkin, left Primorsk, Russia, on the Baltic Sea on March 9. The U.S. government placed sanctions on the tanker and its owner, a Russian state-owned shipping company called Sovcomflot, in 2024.
The Anatoly Kolodkin initially broadcast its destination as “Atlantis, USA,” a possible joke. On Sunday, it was broadcasting its destination as Matanzas, Cuba, according to MarineTraffic.
Carlos Alzugaray, a former Cuban diplomat who lives in Havana, said that the Trump administration had set up the blockade to try to strangle the Cuban government into submission, but that it was taking longer than expected even before the Russian oil neared.
“Trump and Rubio are thinking in terms of this government collapsing on its own,” he said. “But that’s not the way that the Cuban government sees it. The Cuban government is convinced that they can survive.”
Christiaan Triebert contributed reporting.
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3) Israel Debates Law to Hang Palestinians Convicted of Deadly Attacks
The bill is broadly popular and expected to pass. Critics say it would strip away many of the safeguards intended to preserve due process, including the possibility of a pardon.
By Aaron Boxerman and Johnatan Reiss, March 30, 2026
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, and Johnatan Reiss from Tel Aviv.
The Israeli Parliament appeared ready on Monday to enact a death penalty that would in practice apply only to Palestinians convicted of deadly acts of terrorism, not to Jewish extremists, handing the country’s far right a long-sought victory.
The bill, which was being debated ahead of a final vote expected by Monday night, would make death by hanging the default sentence for Palestinians convicted in Israeli military courts of killing people in militant attacks, though judges would be allowed to make exceptions.
Israeli hard-liners, particularly Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, have long campaigned on executing Palestinian militants.
Critics in Israel and abroad say that the measure would strip away many of the safeguards intended to preserve due process, including the possibility of a pardon for those convicted in military courts.
“There’s nothing here but vengeance, hitched onto a narrative of Jewish pride and violence,” said Rabbi Benny Lau, a public intellectual from Jerusalem. “Somehow, we have to put this demon away.”
In theory, Jewish Israelis could also be executed under the new law, but legal experts say the odds are vanishingly small, because the death penalty could be imposed only for homicide where the intention was to “negate the existence of the State of Israel.”
That would exclude even an extremist like Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down 29 Palestinians at a West Bank holy site in 1994, said Yoav Sapir, a law professor at Tel Aviv University who formerly ran Israel’s public defender’s office.
“The intent is clearly for the law to apply to Palestinians and not to Jewish terrorism at all,” Mr. Sapir said.
He argued that Israel’s Supreme Court would most likely strike down the legislation.
Nonetheless, the measure was expected to pass with little public outcry and with the support of some members of the opposition. Opinion polls have consistently shown majority backing for the legislation among Jewish Israelis, reflecting the country’s right-wing shift in the wake of the two-year war in Gaza.
Few Western democracies other than the United States have executed criminals or even mass murderers in recent decades. Opponents say the death penalty risks executing the innocent and argue that there is little evidence the punishment prevents crime.
Israel already has a death penalty on its books, but it has been used just twice. The first execution, just weeks after Israel’s establishment in 1948, was of Meir Tobianski, an Israeli army officer accused of spying and speedily put to death — only to be publicly exonerated a year later. The second and final case, in 1962, was of Adolf Eichmann, one of the leading Nazi planners of the Holocaust.
Supporters of the new legislation say it is not about revenge. They argue that by executing some Palestinian militants rather than imprisoning them, Israel would reduce the incentive for armed groups like Hamas to seize Israeli hostages to use as bargaining chips to swap for Palestinian prisoners.
Israeli military courts, which try Palestinians who live under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, already have weaker civil rights protections than Israeli civilian courts, and many Palestinians view them as fundamentally unfair.
Military prosecutors would not be permitted to waive their right to request the death penalty. While most U.S. states require a unanimous jury verdict to impose the death penalty, the Israeli law would require only a simple majority of judges. Palestinians sentenced to death would not be eligible for a pardon or for a commutation of their sentence.
Authors of the legislation resorted to the gallows after the union representing Israeli doctors rejected the idea of carrying out lethal injections.
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4) Trump Says Birthright Citizenship Was for ‘the Babies of Slaves.’ He’s Wrong.
By Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur, March 30, 2026
Dr. Jones is a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Masur is a professor of history at Northwestern University.
Ben Hickey
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the constitutionality of President Trump’s executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship as we have known it. The court’s eventual opinion in the case, Trump v. Barbara, will almost certainly hinge on how the justices interpret the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, which says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
The court will probably also respond to the first words of the president’s March 19 brief, which asserts that “The ‘main object’ of the Citizenship Clause was to grant citizenship to freed slaves and their children.” That is a polite version of a more informal claim he has made elsewhere, that birthright citizenship was intended only for “the babies of slaves.”
However the court decides, history shows that Mr. Trump is wrong.
Yes, the 14th Amendment affirmed the citizenship of all Black Americans, most of whom were either newly freed or descended from people who had been enslaved. However, Mr. Trump’s extremely narrow interpretation disregards the historical record. The Senate arrived at the final language of the Citizenship Clause only after a robust debate about the implications of writing birthright citizenship into the Constitution.
The 39th Congress took up the citizenship question amid a broader effort to set the nation on a new, more inclusive course after the Civil War. At the end of 1865, it established a Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which began drafting the 14th Amendment.
The House passed a version of the amendment that did not include the now familiar Citizenship Clause. In the Senate, however, Jacob Howard, Republican of Michigan, argued that such a clause was needed. He noted the absence of a concrete definition of citizenship — and who was entitled to it — in the existing Constitution: “It is not, perhaps, very easy to define with accuracy what is meant by the expression, ‘citizen of the United States,’ although that expression occurs twice in the Constitution.”
Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio offered this reply: “I have always believed that every person, of whatever race or color, who was born within the United States was a citizen of the United States.” Here Wade took a position widely shared among Republicans, and among Black activists of the era, that previous efforts to exclude free Black Americans from citizenship, including Chief Justice Roger Taney’s 1857 opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, ran counter to the common law tradition Americans had adopted at the nation’s founding.
Senator William Fessenden of Maine probed the limits of Wade’s view by bringing immigrants into the picture: “Suppose a person is born here of parents from abroad temporarily in this country.” Wade held to his interpretation, granting only a narrow concession founded in English common law. By a “fiction of law,” he said, “the children of foreign ministers” were excluded from birthright citizenship.
During another round of deliberations on the wording of the amendment, Senator Howard returned to the issue of citizenship, asserting that the amendment needed to clear the matter up. He proposed the wording that was the basis for the Citizenship Clause, which, he said, was “simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already,” that, “every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen.”
Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania was incredulous that his colleagues intended to extend citizenship so broadly. He asked, “Is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration of the Mongol race?”
Cowan continued with a statement that presaged the blood-and-soil populism that is part of today’s political debates, suggesting that if the children of Chinese immigrants, for example, desire the rights of a citizen, they should look to China, not the United States: “If I desire the exercise of my rights I ought to go to my own people, the people of my own blood and lineage.” Cowan prompted Senator John Conness of California to weigh in. Conness, who had himself emigrated from Ireland, affirmed the inclusive principle generally supported by Republicans of that era: “I voted for the proposition to declare that the children of all parentage whatever, born in California, should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States.”
Later in the debate, Senator Thomas Hendricks, a Democrat from Indiana, argued that the very nature of American citizenship would be degraded if it were extended to “the Negroes, the coolies and the Indians.” As crudely as that sentiment might strike us today, it did serve to illustrate clearly that what was up for debate was not citizenship for only Black Americans but also for people of many different ethnicities and origins.
In 1866, the amendment was approved by both houses of Congress. It was ratified by the states in 1868.
As the legal scholar Garrett Epps has explained, looking back from today we cannot exhaustively discern the intent of the men who produced the amendment and its birthright provision. We can, however, be certain of what they said on the public record. Senators discussed two specific exceptions to birthright citizenship: the children of foreign diplomats and those of American Indians belonging to sovereign nations. It was understood that under common law, children born to occupying armies were not birthright citizens. Though some lawmakers urged otherwise, Congress never excluded the children of immigrants from birthright citizenship. As Mr. Epps explained in a 2010 history of the Citizenship Clause, “The language about ‘full and complete jurisdiction’ refers to the legal immunities of these Indians, not in any way to immigrant populations within the United States.”
A final source worth considering is Frederick Douglass, who began his life enslaved and went on to become a free man, political leader, diplomat and statesman. He had been among those who, before the Civil War, insisted that free Black Americans were birthright citizens. In the war’s aftermath, he endorsed the capacious essence of the 14th Amendment in a speech titled “Composite Nation.” Of the United States, he said:
We shall spread the network of our science and our civilization over all who seek their shelter whether from Asia, Africa or the isles of the sea. We shall mold them all, each after his kind, into Americans; Indian and Celt, Negro and Saxon, Latin and Teuton, Mongolian and Caucasian, Jew and Gentile, all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm and seek the same national ends.
To exclude children born here from citizenship because their parents are temporary or undocumented immigrants is to betray both the letter and the spirit of the 14th Amendment. From the start, birthright citizenship was understood as a vehicle by which “all persons” born here would become full members of a newly remade democracy.
Martha S. Jones is the author of “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America.” Kate Masur is the author of “Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction.” They filed an amici curiae brief in the Supreme Court birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara.
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5) Trump Faces a Decision on Whether to Start a Ground War in Iran
The president wants a negotiation, but the Iranians say they are refusing until a cease-fire is declared. And while Marines and the 82nd Airborne Division offer new leverage, the risks escalate quickly.
By David E. Sanger and Tyler Pager, March 31, 2026
David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents and frequently writes about the revival of superpower conflict. Tyler Pager has covered President Trump’s political campaigns and his military action against Venezuela and Iran.
President Trump and his tight circle of close aides have made opening the Strait of Hormuz a new, and nonnegotiable, issue. Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
As the war in Iran has entered its second month with no negotiations yet scheduled between the major combatants, President Trump is facing several interlocking decisions that will determine how long American forces will stay engaged in the battle, and with what kind of risks.
The most pressing choice seems to be whether he should narrow his war aims in hopes of pushing through a negotiated settlement with a new crop of Iranian leaders. Talking to reporters on Sunday night aboard Air Force One, Mr. Trump called the Iranian leadership “a whole different group of people” who have “been very reasonable.” (His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was significantly more skeptical.) Deal-making, as Mr. Trump knows, requires give-and-take — although he generally dislikes being seen as giving an inch.
But if the Iranians continue to rebuff him, claiming as they did on Monday that there is nothing to talk about until the United States and Israel stop bombing Iranian territory, he has different choices to make.
With more than 4,000 Marines and the 82nd Airborne Division about to arrive in the region, Mr. Trump can put muscle behind his threat to take Kharg Island’s oil-exporting facilities, free the Strait of Hormuz and perhaps seize Iran’s cache of near-bomb-grade nuclear material.
But the risks of all three steps are enormous. Even Mr. Trump admitted on Sunday that if he sent troops to seize Kharg Island, keeping it operating would require the U.S. military “to be there for a while.” The same goes for opening the strait, which the Iranians now say is their sovereign territory — and that ships wanting to pass will have to pay the multimillion-dollar tolls they have begun to impose.
Control of the strait was not even an issue four weeks ago, when the war started. But Iran’s assertion of control over traffic has so disrupted the global trading system that it looms large in any discussion of how the conflict gets resolved.
“The strait will reopen either with Iran’s consent or through an international coalition including the U.S.,” Mr. Rubio said on Monday.
If getting it reopened fails, Mr. Trump added on his social media account, “we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island, (and possibly all desalination plants!)”
Setting aside for a moment that such attacks against civilian infrastructure would almost certainly constitute a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, Mr. Trump knows that Iran could strike back against similar facilities in the Persian Gulf, with its dwindling fleet of drones and medium-range missiles.
“The Iranians have achieved mutual assured destruction without a nuclear weapon,” said Robert S. Litwak, a scholar at George Washington University who has written extensively on Iran’s nuclear program. “If Trump attacks Iran’s civil infrastructure, Iran will destroy the comparable energy and desalination facilities in the Gulf.”
At the heart of Mr. Trump’s strategic dilemma is the fact that even after striking 11,000 targets, he has yet to achieve the kind of political changes in Iran that he talked about on Feb. 28, as the operation began. Of course, he still has time: He predicted a war that would last four to six weeks, and there are nearly two weeks left on that clock.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Monday that “the four-to-six-week timeline does remain.”
If it takes longer, as most senior officials now concede it may, they think they have the political leeway to buy more time.
But listen carefully to Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio, and it is easy to see how goals are being pared back.
On his Air Force One flight on Sunday evening, Mr. Trump already claimed one big success, contending that “regime change” had already taken place in Iran, even if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and clerical leaders remain in charge of the country.
Blurring the distinction between a change of government system and a change of leaders, he told reporters, “We’ve had regime change,” adding: “The one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead.” And he maintained that Iran was now in the control of a “third regime,” which is involved in negotiations. He did not urge the Iranian people to rise up, as he did when the war started a month ago, to seize power and overthrow their government — which would be true regime change.
Mr. Rubio, meanwhile, posted on the State Department’s social media account a narrowed group of goals, along with what seemed to be a jab at news organizations that have pointed out the shifting objectives.
“You should write them down,” he wrote, before listing four goals: destroying the air force and navy, “the severe diminishing of their missile launching capability,” and “the destruction of their factories.” But he made no reference to eliminating Iran’s nuclear capability — the ostensible immediate objective of launching the attack — or protecting Iran’s protesters, who were slaughtered in the streets in January, prompting Mr. Trump to declare that help was on the way. Nor did he make, in that list, a reference to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
A few hours later, Ms. Leavitt offered her own list. She added “dismantle their missile and drone production infrastructure, significantly weaken their proxies throughout the course of this operation and then, of course, preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
While Mr. Trump boasts that Iranian leaders are begging to make a deal, some senior Trump administration officials are privately downplaying the diplomatic progress. Officials said the conversations were better described as “talks” at this stage rather than formal “negotiations.”
Pakistan’s foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, said on Sunday that his country would host talks between the United States and Iran in the coming days, though U.S. officials say no meeting has been scheduled. On Tuesday, Mr. Dar is traveling to Beijing to secure Chinese backing for a framework to host U.S.-Iranian talks.
The Beijing visit follows a second round of consultations on Sunday among the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, a grouping that has convened twice in 10 days as regional powers search for a way to contain a widening conflict.
Vice President JD Vance, who is expected to take part in any face-to-face meeting if one is confirmed, is scheduled to travel to Hungary next week to show support for Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Some officials have said that trip could include another stop for negotiations if Iranian officials agreed to meet.
Mr. Trump has not ruled out increased military aggression should a diplomatic solution continue to elude him. But as the president faces domestic challenges from the war, exacerbated by a partial government shutdown, some of his allies are hoping he finds an end to the conflict within his six-week timeline.
And to address some of those economic challenges, Mr. Trump might be calling on Arab countries to help cover the costs associated with the war. When a reporter noted that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had helped pay for the gulf war in the early 1990s, and asked Ms. Leavitt whether Mr. Trump wanted a similar arrangement, she said the president was “quite interested” in it.
“I won’t get ahead of him on that,” she said. “But certainly it’s an idea that I know that he has and something that I think you’ll hear more from him on.”
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.
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6) Europe Has a ‘Guns vs. Butter’ Problem. War in Iran Makes It Worse.
After decades of prioritizing domestic over military spending, the continent’s leaders are trying to pivot. That is straining national budgets and could anger voters.
By Jim Tankersley and Amanda Taub, March 31, 2026
Jim Tankersley reported from Berlin, and Amanda Taub from London.
“The war has also complicated European leaders’ efforts to change that dynamic. It has further strained an already difficult trade-off between what governments spend on people and what they spend on the machines of war. That trade-off is classically known as the ‘guns versus butter’ problem, and it has emerged as the defining political and fiscal challenge for European governments in the years to come.”
A weapons factory in Herstal, Belgium, this year. Most European countries have realized that they need to spend a lot more on guns to reduce their military dependence on the United States. Eric Lalmand/Belga, via Associated Press
If there is one thing American and European leaders agree on at a fractured time in trans-Atlantic relations, it’s that Europe has spent much too little, for far too long, on its own defense.
War in Iran has underscored that point, reducing even Europe’s strongest militaries to bystander status as the United States and Israel rain missiles on Tehran. Privately, European officials say they have little leverage to pressure President Trump to end the war quickly, largely because they do not have the offensive or defensive firepower to alter the course of the fighting.
The war has also complicated European leaders’ efforts to change that dynamic. It has further strained an already difficult trade-off between what governments spend on people and what they spend on the machines of war.
That trade-off is classically known as the “guns versus butter” problem, and it has emerged as the defining political and fiscal challenge for European governments in the years to come.
Most European countries have realized that they need to spend a lot more on guns to reduce their military dependence on the United States. That probably means spending less on “butter” — nonliteral shorthand for social benefits like welfare payments and pensions — because many European governments have exhausted their ability to borrow cheaply and spend more.
Shifting that balance could be fiscally and politically painful. Rapid rearmament is expensive. As Europe’s populations age, governments need to spend more on social care, not less. And opposition parties have courted voters by promising to keep spending big on butter, raising the political risks for leaders who don’t.
War in the Mideast threatens to pile costs onto already strapped governments, who are under intense pressure from voters to buffer the pain of soaring oil prices, through tax cuts or spending initiatives, and whose economies are saddled with low growth and high debt.
Many European countries are now “caught a little bit between a rock and a hard place,” Pal Jonson, Sweden’s defense minister, said in an interview.
“This journey should have started much earlier,” said Mr. Jonson, whose country — which has nearly tripled its military spending as a share of its economy since 2017 — started earlier than most.
Why Europe stocked up on butter, until it couldn’t
The current predicament was seeded at the start of the Cold War. The United States spent heavily on European defense, stationing troops and weapons across the continent to deter the Soviet Union.
Washington’s European allies, including a war-chastened Germany, spent much less — by design. Instead, they invested in cradle-to-grave welfare services for their citizens, like health care and state pensions. That deal held through the fall of the Berlin Wall and into the 21st century.
President Barack Obama and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. prodded European leaders to begin to buy more guns. But it was Mr. Trump who drove the message home. He flirted with pulling the United States out of NATO and scolded European allies for spending too little on their militaries.
When Mr. Trump returned to the White House, European officials rushed to lift their military spending.
Why it’s hard to stop buying butter
Fiscally speaking, the timing of the Trump-induced military spending spree was not ideal.
Europe’s vaunted pension systems were designed for much younger societies in which large workforces could support current retirees and then be supported in turn by younger generations as they aged.
Today, Europe is aging faster, and the system can’t keep up.
Longer life expectancies have extended the amount of time that retirees collect pension payments. Falling birthrates mean there are fewer younger workers. So pensions cost more, and Europe’s economies aren’t growing fast enough to increase tax revenues to pay for them.
To bridge that gap, and to support new military spending, governments must raise taxes; cut social benefits; welcome immigrant workers, who pay taxes and bolster economic growth; or borrow money. The first three options tend to be unpopular with voters. More borrowing is increasingly expensive, and sometimes not really an option. Only Germany, which kept its borrowing relatively low, is now able to embark on a large borrowing spree to reassemble a world-class military.
“Italy, Spain and France have limited fiscal space for pretty much any new big spending program,” said Christoph Trebesch, an economist at Kiel University in Germany.
Why it’s costly to buy guns
For most countries, the budget math is daunting. France is a good example.
French government researchers have estimated that the country will need to spend 3.5 percent of its economic output to meaningfully improve its defense.
Covering that cost would require a nearly 10 percent increase in the national VAT tax over the next five years, or an almost 10 percent increase in wealth taxes on the “ultra rich,” the researchers estimated.
Raising the money via spending cuts would be even more difficult. Welfare spending represents approximately one-third of France’s annual economic output. There is little public tolerance for reducing it, especially if that means overhauling pensions, which make up nearly half the costs.
Far-right parties across Europe, including the National Rally in France and the Alternative for Germany, have wooed working-class voters in part by opposing pension cuts. President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany have both faced opposition to their efforts to alter social programs.
Other spending programs are already feeling the crunch, including the development and aid programs that European countries use to help impoverished states.
“Our public budget is shrinking,” Reem Alabali Radovan, the German minister for development, said in an interview. Policymakers will need to find creative ways to improve aid, she added, because “It’s going to shrink more.”
War in Iran brings new challenges, which could grow. The conflict has choked tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and sent global oil prices skyrocketing. Lawmakers across Europe are already facing calls to provide relief at the gasoline pump.
If the oil shock persists and causes deep economic pain, as some forecasters predict, governments will come under pressure to spend more or to cut taxes to try to reignite growth.
That strategy only works if it is possible to raise borrowing without encountering a fiscal crisis, and many experts worry Europe could encounter one.
“How long can this go on before markets react?” said Beata Javorcik, chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a multilateral institution that focuses on Eastern Europe.
“Crises take longer to happen than you think,” she added. “But once they happen, they happen much faster.”
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7) Arab World Faces ‘Profound’ Economic Crisis From Iran War, U.N. Agency Warns
An economic simulation warned that the region’s economy could lose more than $190 billion in just one month, and that Gulf states that have often bankrolled reconstruction efforts will be less able to help.
By Erika Solomon, March 31, 2026
One month of the American-Israeli war with Iran could plunge four million more people across the Arab world into poverty and shave off up to 6 percent of the region’s economic output during that time, according to projections by the United Nations Development Program.
The report, released on Tuesday, uses an economic simulation to project the effects of an ongoing conflict, and warns of “profound and widespread socio-economic impacts across the Arab region.”
Abdallah Al Dardari, the director of the U.N.D.P.’s regional bureau for Arab states, told The New York Times that the projections were based on just four weeks of war, which the current conflict has already exceeded.
He said that the agency had used such a simulation to predict the economic impact of the war in Gaza and Israel’s last offensive against the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon in 2024. According to the models, he said, the economic damage of the current war gets exponentially worse as the conflict drags on.
“Every week we add to the destruction, the structural weaknesses sink in and that will make the recovery more difficult and more costly,” he said.
One month of war, Mr. Al Dardari said, is projected to cost the Arab region $194 billion in lost economic output, a downturn he described as “unprecedented.”
As the war inflicts economic pain across the world, Arab nations in the Middle East are particularly vulnerable. Gaza and Lebanon were already facing huge reconstruction needs after the most recent Israeli military offensives. Syria is also in dire need of investment as it tries to recover from a 13-year civil war.
Now, regional officials warn that the current war could tip more countries, including Iraq, Jordan and Egypt, into severe economic crises. Egypt, the most populous Arab country, at around 120 million people, is already facing the strain of rising fuel prices and is struggling to finance its heavy debt. Like many countries in the region, it is also reliant on investments from oil-producing Gulf countries whose energy production has come under attack during the war.
Dependency on Gulf investments is a dilemma that the region must grapple with in the years to come. Even after the war ends, Mr. Al Dardari said, the Gulf nations that have often bankrolled postwar rebuilding efforts in the Middle East will be consumed with funding their own economic reconstruction.
“There isn’t enough surplus revenue in the Gulf to invest in the recovery of those countries,” he said. “That’s a structural challenge we never faced before.”
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8) Americans Count Their Pennies at the Pump as the Iran War Grinds On
Since the Iran conflict began on Feb. 28, gas prices across the United States have increased about 35 percent. They are now above $4 a gallon, and drivers are wincing.
By Audra D. S. Burch, Andy Newman, Edgar Sandoval, Anna Griffin and Pooja Salhotra, March 31, 2026
In Harlingen, Texas, and everywhere else, drivers are strategizing about how to stay on the road at a reasonable price. Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The New York Times
As Americans pumped gas into their cars Monday, pennies were getting pumped right out of their pockets. A lot of pennies.
As the Iran conflict entered its fifth week, gas prices had increased about 35 percent since Feb. 28, with the national average hitting $4.02 per gallon on Tuesday. It was the largest increase in decades. The conflict has threatened oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, which previously carried a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil.
Motorists in every corner of the country are watching the numbers tick up and — rarely — down. On Monday, New York Times reporters followed along as they made their calculations.
Brooklyn, N.Y.
At a Mobil station on Atlantic Avenue along a popular route to Kennedy International Airport, Mohammed Razzak, an Uber driver, paid $70 on Monday to top up his Chevrolet Suburban, a purchase that would have cost about $53 earlier this year.
“This is too much,” Mr. Razzak, 48, said. “Since the beginning of the war, it’s gone up almost $1 a gallon” — to $3.69, from $2.79.
Uber has offered drivers increased discounts on gas, but Mr. Razzak, who has been driving for 14 years, said his bottom line has gotten steadily worse.
“Every week, I’m spending $100 extra,” he said. “It’s not like my fare is going up every day. We are suffering, all the drivers, all the people — not the government. There’s nothing I can do. No choice.”
Orlando, Fla.
Many mornings, Penelope Cepeda drives her mother to work and in the afternoon picks up her sister from school. And she commutes to her own job or to college classes.
She drives a relatively fuel-efficient Kia K4, but the skyrocketing gas prices caused by the Iran war — more than a $1 hike per gallon in Florida over the last month — have cut into an already tight budget. Before the increases, Ms. Cepeda paid about $35 for a tank of gas. That price is now more than $45. For Ms. Cepeda, who earns $12 an hour as in-home caregiver, every penny counts.
“If you’re counting on the dollars that you’re earning by the hour, it’s like, ‘Damn, 80 cents?’” said Ms. Cepeda, a student at Valencia College who fills her tank two or three times a month. “That’s money that I’m losing for my car bill. That’s money that I’m losing for my water bill or my phone bill.”
Ms. Cepeda, 20, gave up on plans to travel for spring break, but hopes gas prices will stabilize by the summer so she can take a vacation.
“Maybe a cruise. Maybe something cheap. If cruises go up, then maybe we’re just going to stay here.”
Portland, Ore.
Russell Dupuis of Minneapolis had a mountain of luggage and a two-day trip home ahead of him Monday morning. Still, he was smiling at the decision his family of four had made to take Amtrak to a gymnastics meet for his son, Mitchell, 14.
“Flying was just too expensive,” he said. “And driving? Nobody wanted to do that.”
Mr. Dupuis and his wife, Mary Dupuis, do enough driving at home between their own lives and their children’s activities — school, gymnastics, hockey, soccer, and time with friends. Gas prices are straining their budget, but Mr. Dupuis sees no other choice.
Taking the train to Portland cost the family a little under $950. They also used Uber rather than renting a car in Oregon, a decision that felt especially wise when they saw the price of gas in Portland. In Minnesota, a gallon costs around $3.50. In Oregon, they saw some stations at over $5 a gallon.
“Can people really afford that here?” Ms. Dupuis said.
She’s got more sticker shock ahead. Mitchell Dupuis’s team did well enough to qualify for another tournament later this spring in Texas. Ms. Dupuis is planning to drive. How much will that cost in gas?
“My parents are coming, and my dad’s booked everything, so I’m just not going to ask him,” Ms. Dupuis said. “I’m scared to know.”
Mission, Texas
Lucas Agüilera stopped at a gas station in Mission, a border city, and winced as he saw the price at the pump go up, and up, and up.
“It used to take me about $70 to fill my tank and now it takes me about $90,” Mr. Agüilera said. A gas-powered generator in his truck bed would have to go unfilled for now. “I don’t know how long we can keep up paying these prices,” he said.
A few feet away, José Hector Martinez took a second peek at the price — $3.35 for unleaded.
“That’s a lot more than I’m used to,” Mr. Martinez said in Spanish. He filled the tank for his 1998 Dodge truck for $24 and prayed that it would last all week.
“I would drive and shop for cheaper prices, but I don’t want to waste the gas,” he said.
Kendal Asbury contributed reporting.
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9) Fresh Food Distributors Add Surcharges as Fuel Costs Rise
Delivering salmon, fruits and other perishable foods has become more expensive as the war with Iran pushes up diesel prices.
By Julie Creswell, March 31, 2026
As fuel costs rise because of the war in Iran, surcharges are being added to the shipping cost of certain food items, such as seafood imported from far-flung locations. Sandy Carson for The New York Times
Jesse Filion, who raises chicken, pigs and cattle on 100 acres in Walterboro, S.C., made a tough decision this month. He will add a fuel surcharge of $5 for deliveries of his Keegan-Filion Farm meat to homes and the 20 restaurants he serves.
Simply raising overall prices wasn’t an option for the fourth-generation family business. Mr. Filion, the owner, said the company’s “products are already expensive” because the animals are “raised as free-range and processed in a humane facility.”
“People are only going to pay so much,” he said, adding that “the $5 surcharge is a way to be transparent, but also to cover some of the increased fuel prices that we’re seeing.”
America’s food industry is highly sensitive to fluctuations in oil prices and is among the first sectors to feel the impact of a sharp rise in the cost of fuel. Diesel is used for the tractors and combines on farms, and powers the trucks that haul burger patties to restaurants and avocados to grocery stores. Trucks transport 83 percent of America’s agricultural products and 92 percent of dairy, fruit, vegetables and nuts, according to the Agriculture Department.
The price of a barrel of Brent crude, the international benchmark, has risen 56 percent since the war with Iran began. The average price of diesel is up 44 percent. Should the war continue, the cost pressure on businesses up and down the supply chain is likely to worsen.
Fuel surcharges are already being added to the shipping cost of certain food items, such as fruits that are highly perishable or seafood that is imported from far-flung locations, analysts said.
Salmon caught off the southern tip of Chile, for example, are first taken to Puerto Montt and then sent on trucks to Santiago. From there, they are flown to Miami and delivered on trucks to restaurants and grocery stores all over the country.
The wholesale price of salmon has risen to $6.48 a pound from $6.25 in February. The price increased just before the Easter holiday, when many chefs will highlight the fish on their menu, said Janice Schreiber, who tracks the seafood industry at Expana, a market data provider for the agriculture and food industries.
“It all has to be done rather quickly, and at each of the different points, there is a fuel surcharge being added,” Ms. Schreiber said. “All during one of the highest periods of demand for salmon.”
Grocery stores, restaurants, hospitals and even schools are most likely seeing costs for their food shipping climb. Many of the nation’s largest food distribution companies, including Sysco, U.S. Foods and Performance Food Group, have fuel surcharges that move in tandem with national diesel prices.
Before the war shocked energy prices, for example, UNFI, a U.S. food distributor, tacked on about $35 for each delivery when the average national diesel price reached $3.81. Last week, the average national diesel price was $5.38 and UNFI’s surcharge was $65.
UNFI declined to comment.
The Independent Grocers Alliance, a group of 2,600 independent grocery stores, said on its website last week that price increases on shelves might not be apparent until midsummer, noting that it will take time for various fees to work their way through the supply chain.
For every 10 percent rise in the price of fuel, the group said, food prices could go up 2 to 3 percent, based on historical averages. That comes on top of existing food inflation in grocery stores, which is on track to be about 2.4 percent this year, according to the Labor Department.
Costs for beef and dairy will rise the most because of fuel and energy costs associated with animal raising, slaughtering, processing, transporting and refrigerating, the group said. The cost of packaged goods is also expected to rise because of higher energy costs.
But passing along those higher fuel expenses to shoppers is a delicate dance. Consumers, already fatigued from several years of food inflation and other rising expenses, may not be willing to absorb much more. And now that people are being squeezed at the pump, they may cut spending in some areas.
“We’ve been talking about the price of food for the past five years,” said David Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State University, noting that grocery store prices are nearly 30 percent more than they were before the Covid-19 pandemic. “Particularly for lower-income households, food is a necessity, and they will protect their food budgets, which means they will cut down on other things like eating out.”
Historically, when gas prices climbed above $4 a gallon, consumers cut back on spending at restaurants and on other leisure activities, according to a 2022 study by Technomic, a research and consulting firm for the food industry.
“Already, the shopper is stressed,” said John Ross, the chief executive of the Independent Grocers Alliance. “For people who spend every nickel they have on daily expenses, if grocery prices go up $5, that $5 has to come from something else. But it’s hard for the grocers to eat it also. For every $1 that consumers spend at the register, the grocery store is keeping about two pennies. There’s very little room there.”
While grocers can try to negotiate better promotions or bundles with manufacturers — like buy one, get one free — or direct consumers to lower-priced store brands of ketchup or spaghetti sauce, those are short-term fixes, Mr. Ross said.
“Over the long run, the rising input costs will be borne by the consumer,” he said. “There’s no other way around it.”
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10) Most Americans Favor Birthright Citizenship. That Wasn’t Always True.
In the 1990s, Democrats were split in their support for birthright citizenship, and even proposed legislation to end it.
By Ruth Igielnik, March 31, 2026
In 1993, a freshman senator from Nevada stood on the Senate floor to denounce birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and introduced legislation to end it.
“No sane country,” he said, would offer a “reward for being an illegal immigrant.”
Thirteen years later, that same senator, Harry Reid, walked onto the Senate floor, this time as the Democratic minority leader, to denounce his bill, calling it “the biggest mistake I ever made.”
“That is a low point of my legislative career, the low point of my governmental career,” said Mr. Reid, who died in 2021.
His change of heart illustrates a little-discussed truth: Democrats were once largely split on birthright citizenship, and generally favored stronger immigration enforcement.
The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on Wednesday on President Trump’s executive order removing birthright citizenship for children whose parents do not have legal status.
Generations of Americans became citizens through birthright citizenship, which is well-established through the Fourteenth Amendment and nearly 130 years of case law.
And most Americans support the right, according to a New York Times analysis of polling on the subject. That includes a vast majority of Democrats and about 40 percent of Republicans.
But the history of public support for birthright citizenship also reflects just how volatile the immigration issue has been.
In the mid-’90s, as the United States struggled with an influx of undocumented immigrants, Democrats were much more divided about birthright citizenship as well as immigration.
Since then, Democrats and independent voters have embraced birthright citizenship, and moved to the left on a host of other immigration issues. Republicans have stayed largely divided on the issue, while becoming more conservative on most other immigration issues.
The result is that more Americans than ever support birthright citizenship, at least since polling began on the issue.
Americans have increasingly supported birthright citizenship
When Mr. Reid introduced his bill, Bill Clinton had just won the presidency, in large part by moderating the Democratic Party’s liberal positions on a number of issues, including immigration. While immigration was not a focus of his campaign, he called for stronger action at the border and enhanced enforcement in the workplace.
“He positioned himself as a centrist, a new Democrat and a law-and-order candidate,” said Doris Meissner, who served under President Clinton as a commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. “Immigration was a big part of that.”
Polling from the time shows that Mr. Clinton’s views were in line with most Democrats in the country. Two-thirds of Democrats said they preferred candidates that backed tougher laws to limit immigration, according to a 1992 poll from Gallup, CNN and USA Today.
In 1996, Mr. Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which among other things made it easier to detain and deport undocumented people. The bill passed with bipartisan support, though many Democrats, particularly those in the party’s left flank, remained opposed. Mr. Clinton’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Democrats’ appetite for stricter immigration laws began to wane in mid-to-late-2000s during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as an era of hyper polarization began to set in on nearly every issue.
The Pew Research Center found that the share of Democrats who held liberal policy views nearly doubled from 2004 to 2014.
When it came to birthright citizenship, Democrats began the 1990s evenly divided on the topic. By 2010, when Mr. Obama was in the White House, about 60 percent of Democrats supported it.
About a year later, Mr. Trump began to question President Obama’s birthplace in interviews, pushing a racist lie that he was really born in Kenya and therefore ineligible for the White House.
Support solidified among Democrats around 2015, and by 2023, Democrats had become nearly unanimous, with 90 percent supporting.
Majorities of Democrats and Independents support birthright citizenship
Share of each group that supports birthright citizenship.
Mr. Trump vocally opposed birthright citizenship in all three of his presidential campaigns. And he increasingly began using the term “anchor baby” — a dismissive way to describe immigrants who crossed the border to give birth to a child in the United States. In a 2015 interview with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, Mr. Trump repeatedly used the phrase, driving it to the forefront of the political conversation at the time.
That term, Ms. Meissner said, captures the feeling at that time.
“The number of people actually coming here with the purpose of having babies was very small,” she added. “But there was a palpable and growing concern, particularly on the right.”
Polling in 2015 shows that most Republicans found the term to be accurate while most Democrats said it was offensive.
The Democrats who thought the term was accurate, a little over a quarter of those polled, were largely white and older, the last vestige of the party’s old-guard views on immigration.
“The increasing use of the term ‘anchor babies’ was the inflection point” on birthright citizenship, said Josh Pasek, a political science professor at University of Michigan. “It becomes very real to people. They stop thinking about it as a legal issue around the 14th Amendment and start thinking about it as a social issue that matches their views on immigration.”
By 2016, as Mr. Trump continued to hammer the issue, Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ presidential nominee, and the rest of the party coalesced around strong and sustained support for birthright citizenship.
“They were so angry with Trump’s approach, it pushed them into a more positive direction,” said Michael Tesler, a political science professor at University of California, Irvine.
Republicans tell a different story. Large majorities support Mr. Trump’s shutdown of the border and campaign for mass deportation, but a sizable share, about 40 percent, still favor birthright citizenship. This number has been fairly stable throughout the 1990s.
“Even people who want secure borders and don’t want illegal immigration recognize that people didn’t do anything wrong by being born here,” said David Bier, who studies immigration for the Cato Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
Being born here gives you a greater stake in the country, he added.
More than 50 percent of Hispanic Republicans, a growing share of the party, said they favor birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants, according to a 2025 survey from the Pew Research Center.
Younger Republicans are also more supportive than older generations.
The increasing support mirrors the increasing percentage of first or second generation immigrants. That figure — 29 percent — has nearly doubled since 1985, according to Pew Research Center.
Measuring public opinion over time on something like birthright citizenship is complicated. There is no single question that has been asked consistently through the years to perfectly track changing attitudes.
And the actual question also matters a great deal. When poll questions specifically mention Mr. Trump and his executive order, responses tend to be more partisan. A question that asks about “continuing birthright citizenship” elicits a different response than one that asks about “ending” the practice.
But the Times analysis, which included all questions that ask about birthright citizenship, finds a clear pattern over time, regardless of how the questions were phrased.
Many legal scholars say that the Fourteenth Amendment was originally intended to be an apolitical issue.
The idea was that “it doesn’t follow political whims,” said Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a progressive legal think tank. “It doesn’t depend on whether you’re a favored group — or an unfavored group.”
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11) A Lifeline for Cuba
We look at the energy crisis on the Caribbean island.
By Sam Sifton, I am the host of The Morning, March 31, 2026
A tanker off the coast of Cuba yesterday. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Russian oil tanker Anatoly Kolodkin was just offshore the port of Matanzas, Cuba, early this morning, carrying an estimated 730,000 barrels of oil. The delivery offers a critical measure of relief for the island nation, which has struggled to function under crippling, sometimes dayslong electricity blackouts since January, when the Trump administration told the rest of the world to stop providing Cuba with oil.
President Trump eased up on that stance over the weekend. “We don’t mind having somebody get a boatload, because they need — they have to survive,” Trump said on Sunday night. “I told them, if a country wants to send some oil into Cuba right now, I have no problem with that. Whether it’s Russia or not.”
Yesterday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the United States would evaluate oil shipments to Cuba on a “case-by-case basis.”
Trump says it doesn’t matter anyway. “It’s not going to have an impact — Cuba is finished,” he continued. “They have a bad regime. They have very bad and corrupt leadership. And whether or not they get a boat of oil, it’s not going to matter.”
Simon Romero, who has been covering Cuba, told me yesterday that a boatload of oil might matter quite a bit. “It is one of the most mission-critical moments of the last 67 years in Cuba,” he said. “The regime is under intense pressure from the U.S. — but it is also extremely adept at maneuvering itself out of difficult situations. The arrival of the Russian oil is buying them valuable time.”
Life without oil
In the meantime, life in Cuba is punishing. The blockade has led to severe shortages of oil, gas and diesel fuel. Food is in short supply and difficult to keep refrigerated. The blockade has also incapacitated Cuba’s universal health care system, which was once seen as a jewel of the poor nation but now fights to provide even basic care.
My colleagues Ed Augustin and Jack Nicas wrote about that:
Hospitals are canceling surgeries and sending patients home because doctors and nurses can’t commute to work. Clinics are struggling to administer treatments like chemotherapy and dialysis because of power outages.
Many ambulances are parked because drivers can’t find gas. Pharmacies are largely empty because the virtually bankrupt state is struggling to buy medicine.
Production of medicine has been mostly halted because factories run on diesel. Vaccine makers are searching for ingredients because flights that once carried them are canceled because of a lack of jet fuel. And refrigerated vaccine stocks could soon spoil if the blackouts continue.
I got Jack on the phone yesterday to ask about the fuel in particular. He told me that if you have a private vehicle in Cuba and want to get gas for its tank, you have to enter a virtual queue and wait your turn. That takes more than a month. If you have an official government vehicle, like a taxi, you can fill up once a week. “What we’re learning is that people are siphoning off some of that gas and selling it on the black market,” Jack said. The price is approaching $40 a gallon.
What comes next?
The arrival of Russian oil could be a signal that the U.S. does not want to contribute to a humanitarian crisis, some experts say. The blockade has attracted international criticism, including from the United Nations. “Cuban society and infrastructure is so hampered right now that there is a real risk of a complete breakdown that would not be in anybody’s best interests,” one expert told The Times. “That’s a bridge too far.”
But it also could be that the Trump administration wants time to handle the war in Iran before it turns to Cuba. “There is a palpable delay,” the expert continued.
What might pull the White Houses’s attention back toward the island? “One thing that’s important to remember is that Venezuelan oil propped Cuba up for years,” Jack told me. “And who controls Venezuelan oil now?”
Jack did not want to speculate whether an invasion of Cuba could happen, but he allowed that it is difficult to imagine Trump finding a suitable political partner anywhere in Cuba, certainly not anytime soon. “Cuba is not Venezuela,” he said. “It’s going to be hard to find someone in the government there who is not loyal to the revolution.”
Related: The U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay is one of the few places in Cuba where power is plentiful. A bowling alley, a sports bar and an arcade are operating without interruption.
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