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/
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Help World-Outlook Win New Subscribers
(the subscription is free of charge)
Dear reader,
Over the last month, World-Outlook and its sister publication in Spanish Panorama-Mundial have published unique coverage of U.S. and world events.
This includes the three-part interview with Cuban historian and writer Ernesto Limia DÃaz, ‘Cuba Is the Moral and Political Compass of the World.’ A related article by Mark Satinoff, World Votes with Cuba to Demand an End to U.S. Blockade, included information on the campaign to send medical aid to Cuba in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa and was shared widely by the Los Angeles Hands Off Cuba Committee and other Cuba solidarity groups.
A number of readers sent their appreciation for Cathleen Gutekanst’s article Chicago Residents Fight ICE Abductions, Deportations, which provided a compelling, eyewitness account of this example of working-class resistance to the Trump administration’s war on undocumented immigrants. Some readers shared it widely on social media platforms.
The news analysis Bigotry, Jew Hatred Take Center Stage in GOP Mainstream also generated interest. It is part of World-Outlook’s consistent analysis of the danger of the rise of incipient fascism that Trumpism has posed for the working class and its allies in the U.S. and the world.
Most recently, another article by Mark Satinoff, ‘From Ceasefire to a Just Peace’ in Israel and Occupied Territories, was promoted by Friends of Standing Together (FOST NY/NJ) on the group’s website. Alon-Lee Green and Sally Abed — the two Standing Together leaders featured at the November 12 event in Brooklyn, New York, that Mark’s article covered — and Israelis for Peace sent their thanks to Mark for his accurate reporting.
This is a small sample of the news coverage and political analysis World-Outlook offers.
We ask you to use this information to try to convince at least one of your acquaintances, colleagues, friends, fellow students, neighbors, or relatives to subscribe to World-Outlook. As you know, the subscription is free of charge. Increasing World-Outlook’s subscription base will widen the site’s reach. It will also provide new impetus to improve our coverage. Comments and reactions from subscribers, or initiatives from readers to cover events in their areas, often result in unexpectedly invaluable articles or opinion columns clarifying important political questions.
Feel free to share this letter, or part of its contents, with those you are asking to subscribe. And keep World-Outlookinformed about the reactions you get from potential new readers.
In solidarity,
World-Outlook editors
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Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest. Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) New Orleans Restaurants Feel Squeezed as Border Patrol Sweeps In
Ripple effects from a federal crackdown illustrate how heavily the city’s robust dining scene depends both directly and indirectly on immigrant workers.
By Shannon Sims and Allison McCann, Dec. 8, 2025
Eateries with a largely Hispanic customer base are choosing to close down temporarily. Cooks and dishwashers are staying home out of fear. Delivery drivers are sitting out shifts. And customers are finding that some menu items are no longer available, because somewhere along the supply chain someone was afraid to report for work.
As Border Patrol agents have fanned out across New Orleans over the past week to enforce the Trump administration’s deportation agenda, their presence has had a particularly chilling effect on the city’s many restaurants and their suppliers.
Amarys Koenig Herndon, a co-owner of Palm and Pine, an upscale restaurant in the city’s French Quarter, said that a few of her employees had chosen to stay home, regardless of their immigration status. “They’re working legally, but they’re hunkered down and not coming to pick up their paychecks,” she said.
The restaurant is struggling to keep offering all the items on its menu. “With the cuisine we do, we’re very dependent on our Latin markets for a lot of ingredients,” Ms. Herndon said, but many of those suppliers are short of staff and running out of inventory.
“One of the stores we go to, they get a lot driven in from Houston, and those trucks aren’t coming in,” she said. “They don’t want to risk coming into our city right now.
“There’s a lot of layers.”
Those ripple effects lay bare just how heavily New Orleans has come to depend on an immigrant work force to be the backbone of its robust culinary industry, which in turn helps sustain the city as a bustling tourism magnet.
Many of the city’s restaurants rely on undocumented workers — or migrants with a temporary legal status, which often comes with a work permit — to do jobs that few U.S. citizens and legal residents may be willing to take, like cleaning dishes. Some of these workers have been with their employers so long that they’ve become like family.
The Border Patrol operation leaves the restaurant owners in a bind: Either protect employees by letting them stay home from work, or press them to come in to keep the business afloat, and thereby increase the risk that they will be detained.
With many immigrant workers staying home, the demand for food deliveries has risen, but the supply of delivery drivers has shrunk. On Sunday, Ideal Market, a grocery that caters to Hispanic residents, said in a Facebook post that it had temporarily stopped offering delivery service “due to overwhelming demand.”
Border Patrol agents began arriving in New Orleans last Wednesday, led by Gregory Bovino, a senior agency official who has led similar operations in Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte, N.C. That afternoon, he led about two dozen agents through the French Quarter on foot in a show-of-force procession that drew stares, insults and praise.
The Department of Homeland Security said the operation, nicknamed Catahoula Crunch, would target “the worst of the worst” criminals who are in the country illegally, including violent offenders who had been released after being arrested.
In western suburbs like Kenner, which has a large immigrant population, there have been sporadic raids. Federal officials said that one undocumented immigrant was arrested on Thursday while working to repair the roof of a home on Marquette Drive, a move that bewildered the homeowner.
At the Cafe du Monde, a storied cafe in the French Quarter that is popular with tourists, sugared beignets and chicory coffee are served by a predominantly Vietnamese American staff, as has long been the case. On Thursday, some patrons at the cafe said they supported the immigration crackdown.
“I’m all for it,” said Jes Rathke, 56, who was visiting from San Antonio. “There needs to be rules, and there’s a right way to come into this country. Sneaking in is not right.”
“If they’re criminals, then yes,” Daniel Hahn, 26, who was visiting from Destin, Fla., said about the detention of immigrants. “But if they’re working, then leave them alone.”
Some residents have been organizing outings to visit the city’s Hispanic restaurants as a way of lending support. In June, as fear of a Border Patrol crackdown began percolating in the city, Craig Kraemer started a Facebook group called N’awlins Hungry Gringos, through which he organizes lunch meet-ups at Hispanic restaurants.
“I wanted to show some love to these communities that are being hated on right now,” he said, adding that he hoped other people would start similar groups.
On Friday, about a dozen people showed up for lunch at Jalisco Mexican Restaurant in Kenner.
The owners let customers in to the restaurant one at a time, locking the door behind each person, while Mr. Kraemer stood outside, keeping a lookout. “I didn’t expect to have to be watching for ICE during lunch today,” he said. “I didn’t realize how intense the fear really is.”
A waitress told the group that there was only one serving of fajitas left in the kitchen. “We usually get our fajita meat at Sam’s Club,” she explained, “but we’re too afraid to go there now.”
As plates of burritos and baskets of chips arrived at the table, the diners discussed the merits of their outing.
“Coming out to restaurants is a way to say we’re not afraid, and we’re going to do what we can to support you,” said Richard Saxer, 81, a retired Episcopal priest who has lived in New Orleans for over 40 years.
Across the table, Orissa Arend, 78, a mediator and social worker, mused between bites: “Eating out at great restaurants? This seems like such a New Orleans way to protest.”
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2) Massachusetts Church Keeps Anti-ICE Nativity Scene, Defying Diocese Leaders
The Christmas display, which replaces Jesus, Mary and Joseph with a sign saying “ICE Was Here,” has drawn criticism from Catholic leaders and immigration officials.
By Jenna Russell, Reporting from Dedham, Mass., Dec. 8, 2025
A Nativity scene at St. Susanna Parish in Dedham, Mass., displays a sign reading “ICE Was Here” in the spot where Jesus, Mary and Joseph would normally be. Credit...Brian Snyder/Reuters
Leaders of a Catholic church near Boston kept a Nativity display with an anti-ICE message in place on Monday, defying an order from the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston to remove it.
The display, outside St. Susanna Parish in Dedham, Mass., includes the traditional shepherds, sheep and wise men gathered around a hay-filled manger. But Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus are missing, replaced by a sign reading “ICE WAS HERE” in bold blue letters.
“The Holy Family is safe in the Sanctuary of our Church,” adds a smaller note inside the Nativity scene, which is protected by a plastic shield. “If you see ICE please call LUCE.” The display includes a phone number for LUCE, an immigrant advocacy group, which tracks the activity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Massachusetts.
ICE began a major immigration enforcement campaign in the Boston area in September, the forefront of a wave of similar efforts in other major cities.
Speaking to reporters late Monday outside the brick church, the Rev. Stephen Josoma said the intent of the display was to “evoke dialogue,” not cause a furor. He said parish leaders would confer with leaders of the archdiocese before making a final decision on its fate.
But, he added, “that some do not agree with our display does not render it sacrilegious.”
Last week, the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston told the parish to take down the signage in its Nativity display. In a statement, archdiocesan leaders said that churchgoers “have the right to expect that they will encounter genuine opportunities for prayer and Catholic worship — not divisive political messaging.”
That statement also cited church norms prohibiting “the use of sacred objects for any purpose other than the devotion of God’s people.”
Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, added his own criticism in recent days, telling The Boston Herald that the Nativity scene was “absolutely abhorrent” and part of “a dangerous narrative” responsible for a sharp increase in assaults on ICE officers.
Some members and supporters of the Dedham parish said they were confused by the demand from the archdiocese, which came one month after a rare and nearly unanimous statement from U.S. Catholic bishops condemning the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement campaign.
“We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants,” the November statement from the bishops said. “We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care. We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status.”
The display at St. Susanna, on a busy street in a well-off suburb south of Boston, is the latest in a series of nontraditional Nativity scenes staged by the parish. A version in 2018 sparked similar controversy for depicting the infant Jesus in a cage, a scene church leaders said was a reflection on immigration policy at that time. A year later, the parish focused on climate change, showing some of the figures partly submerged in water.
Other politically themed Nativity scenes have popped up around the country this Christmas season, including one at a church in Evanston, Ill., that includes a baby Jesus figure with his hands bound by zip ties. In another Nativity scene near Chicago, Mary, Joseph and Jesus are missing, with a sign telling viewers that “Due to ICE activity in our community, the Holy Family is in hiding.”
Catholics in Massachusetts tend to be more liberal than church members elsewhere, and many have defended the Dedham parish. On the church’s Facebook page, reaction to the Nativity scene was split. Some commenters thanked the congregation for “speaking truth to power,” while others offered harsh judgments, including one assertion that “the devil has infiltrated the church.”
“How shameful to make a mockery of Christ’s birth,” one observer wrote.
“You are on the right side of history,” countered another.
“I wish I lived close enough to attend this church,” one woman lamented.
Elizabeth Doris-Gustin, 67, a longtime neighbor of the parish who attends an Episcopal church, said she and many of her neighbors look forward to the Christmas displays at St. Susanna every year.
“You might not agree with everything, but it makes you think,” she said. “I wish a few more churches would be this bold.”
She hopes the parish will keep this year’s display, she said. “I’m going to say a little prayer that they keep it up.”
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3) Same Product, Same Store, but on Instacart, Prices Might Differ
The findings are the latest example of how the notion of a single price is breaking down in the digital age, a trend economists say could be pushing up some prices.
By Ben Casselman, Dec. 9, 2025
On a Thursday in early September, more than 40 strangers logged in to Instacart, the grocery-shopping app, to buy eggs and test a hypothesis.
Connected by videoconference, they simultaneously selected the same store — a Safeway in Washington, D.C. — and the same brand of eggs. They all chose pickup rather than delivery.
The only difference was the price they were offered: $3.99 for a couple of lucky shoppers. $4.59 or $4.69 for others. And a few saw a price of $4.79 — 20 percent more than some others, for the exact same product.
The shoppers were volunteers, participating in a study published on Tuesday and organized by the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive policy group, and Consumer Reports, a nonprofit consumer publication. In tests in four cities across the country, nearly 200 volunteers checked prices on 20 grocery items on Instacart.
On item after item, they found significant differences. In a Target in North Canton, Ohio, some shoppers were charged $3.59 for a jar of Skippy peanut butter that others could get for $2.99. At a Safeway in Seattle, some people paid $3.99 for a box of Wheat Thins while others paid $4.89. And at a Target in St. Paul, Minn., some people were charged $4.59 for a box of Cheerios that others could get for $3.99.
“Two shoppers who are buying the exact same item from the exact same store at the exact same time are getting different prices,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative. “The data really backs up how extraordinarily pervasive this is.”
An Instacart spokeswoman said that stores on its platform set their own prices, and that some of them engaged in pricing tests to “learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable.”
“The pricing tests are short term, randomized and designed so that people may see slightly lower prices and some may see slightly higher prices, with the goal of helping retail partners understand consumer preferences and identify categories where they should invest in lower prices,” the spokeswoman said. (Meredith Kopit Levien, president and chief executive of The New York Times Company, is a member of Instacart’s board of directors.)
A Target spokesman said the company “is not affiliated with Instacart and is not responsible for prices on the Instacart platform.” Instacart said that during the period covered by the Groundwork study, it was “evaluating different approaches” to covering its costs but has since ended pricing tests on Target orders.
Safeway and its parent company, Albertson’s, declined to comment.
Groundwork’s findings are the latest example of how the notion of a single price, offered to all customers for a predictable period, is breaking down in the digital age. Companies are using sophisticated algorithms to adjust prices quickly in response to competitors’ offers and consumer behavior. “Dynamic pricing” strategies, in which companies raise prices during periods of intense demand, have spread beyond sectors where they have become familiar, such as air travel and ride-hailing services, to other parts of the economy, including restaurants and retailers.
“Prices are definitely more flexible across categories than they were 10 to 15 years ago, and that has to do with the rise of e-commerce and these technologies that have allowed firms over time to react more quickly,” said Alberto Cavallo, a Harvard economist who has documented the rise of algorithm-based pricing strategies. High inflation after the pandemic accelerated the trend, Mr. Cavallo said, by encouraging companies to adjust prices more quickly.
These strategies are making prices more volatile and less predictable for consumers, research suggests. And there is some evidence they are pushing up prices, at least in certain categories, at a time when the rising cost of living has emerged as a political point of contention.
Grocery prices are up more than 25 percent over the past five years and continue to rise faster than before the pandemic. In surveys, voters consistently rank food prices among their top affordability concerns.
Democrats including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have accused large food companies of price gouging. On Saturday, President Trump signed an executive order creating task forces to investigate possible price-fixing in the food supply chain.
In total, the Groundwork study identified price differences on nearly three-quarters of the items tested. The price tag for the full basket of 20 goods varied by about 7 percent within each store, a difference that could add up to hundreds of dollars over a year of grocery shopping. The organizations conducted smaller-scale tests on several other grocery chains on Instacart and found similar results.
Dianna Dance-Lewis, a volunteer shopper in the study, said she had become frustrated by the rising cost of groceries and by the sense that companies were playing games with prices.
“Over the last few years, I have just been, as a shopper, just kind of looking at the different signs and online prices when you purchase and just saying, Something’s not right here,” she said.
Some of the other participants seemed shocked when offered different prices for the same products, said Ms. Dance-Lewis, a middle-school teacher in Virginia. But she said the experience just proved something she already suspected.
“It confirmed all the craziness that I see,” she said. “It’s so unfair to the consumer.”
The Rise of Algorithmic Pricing
Online retailers have acknowledged running experiments to test how different prices affect sales. Instacart in 2022 acquired Eversight, a software company that uses artificial intelligence to help grocery stores and packaged-goods manufacturers set prices.
In a call with investors last year, Fidji Simo, Instacart’s chief executive, said the technology “helps retailers dynamically optimize their pricing both online and in-store to really figure out which categories of products a customer is more price sensitive on versus less price sensitive on and really adjust their prices based on that information.”
The Groundwork study found no evidence that Instacart was basing different prices on customers’ individual characteristics like income, ZIP code or shopping history. But there is little doubt that Instacart and other online sellers have the ability to do so. Companies including Delta Air Lines, Amazon and Home Depot have been accused of experimenting with such personalized pricing, only to retreat after consumer backlash. (The companies have in most cases denied basing prices on users’ characteristics.)
“It has happened in the past where the technology is used and then firms realize it’s causing more antagonization and costs to them than the benefit, and then they stop,” Mr. Cavallo said.
Instacart said that its pricing tests were “never based on personal or behavioral characteristics” and that prices “never change in real time, including in response to supply and demand.”
“Affordability has always been at the heart of Instacart’s mission,” the company said. “Retail partners control their prices on Instacart, and we work closely with them to align online and in-store pricing wherever possible.”
As companies adjust prices more frequently, however, it may become harder for customers to tell whether they are all being offered the same price. That could make it easier for companies to adopt personalized pricing strategies in the future.
The Federal Trade Commission sent letters last year to eight companies that offer pricing services, demanding information about how they use consumer data. The F.T.C. did not accuse the companies of breaking any laws. In a preliminary report issued days before Mr. Trump returned to office, the agency’s staff found that “details like a person’s precise location or browser history can be frequently used to target individual consumers with different prices for the same goods and services,” though it did not say how often such strategies were being used in practice.
Alexander Tolley, another volunteer in the Instacart study, said that even if most companies weren’t using customers’ data to personalize prices yet, he worried that they would soon.
“If they know how you shop, even on other items, they can use all that information to say, ‘We’re going to tailor the price to you,’” said Mr. Tolley, a 71-year-old retiree in Merced, Calif. “We’re going to get the maximum amount of money out of you that you’re prepared to pay and drain your pocketbook.”
Efficiency vs. Transparency
Economists say variable pricing doesn’t always harm customers. In some cases, the practice may lead to more-efficient outcomes, or even to lower average prices.
A pizza restaurant that can charge more on game days might charge less on a random Tuesday, for example. And many economists welcome the surge-pricing strategy pioneered by Uber as a way to align supply and demand — by enticing more drivers to show up to an arena where a concert is letting out, for example.
“Economics would say there are potential welfare benefits from this,” said Alexander MacKay, a University of Virginia economist. He noted that many pricing strategies resulted in higher costs for less price-sensitive — and therefore potentially higher-income — consumers, while lower-income consumers paid less.
Companies have long found ways to offer different prices to different customers, said Kevin R. Williams, a Yale economist who has studied pricing practices. Coupons, loyalty programs and senior discounts all allow some customers to pay less. Early-bird specials and happy hours attract customers during otherwise slow periods.
But such strategies are transparent and predictable. If different customers start being offered different prices, or prices start changing more frequently, price-sensitive consumers could struggle to ensure they are getting the best deal, Mr. Williams said.
“Opacity is a business opportunity,” he said.
New pricing strategies may also be contributing to inflation. In a paper published in 2018, Mr. Cavallo found that the use of algorithms allowed price shocks — in either direction — to travel more quickly through the economy, leading to more volatility in inflation.
In a paper published in July, economists at the University of Michigan and University of Virginia argued that algorithms can lead to higher costs for consumers because if companies know that their competitors will almost instantaneously match their prices, they have less incentive to try to attract customers by offering a better deal — a pattern the authors call “algorithmic coercion.”
Even if just one company in a market is setting its prices algorithmically, “it can raise prices a lot,” said Mr. MacKay of the University of Virginia, who was one of the study’s authors.
Ms. Owens of Groundwork said such studies supported what many consumers already intuitively believed: While companies may say dynamic pricing is a way to improve efficiency, in practice it drives up prices.
“This isn’t about managing scarcity or efficient markets,” she said. It’s about “pushing to figure out the maximum amount you are willing to pay and squeeze it out of you.”
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4) Israeli Ban on Media Entering Gaza Remains, as Legal Challenge Is Delayed
Israel’s top court gave the government further reprieve on a long-stalled petition seeking free access to Gaza. Critics say barring journalists denies the world a full picture of conditions there.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Dec. 9, 2025
Destruction in Jabaliya, northeast of Gaza City, in November. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Nearly two months into the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, Israel continues to bar journalists from freely entering the Gaza Strip to report, despite a longstanding petition brought by journalists seeking access to the territory.
On Sunday, the Israeli Supreme Court gave the government an extension in responding to the petition, the ninth such delay since the case was filed in September 2024.
The Israeli government, which has yet to fully explain why it continues to bar journalists, is slated now to give its latest response on Dec. 21, according to court filings, a delay that could be extended further.
Since the start of the devastating two-year war, Israel has largely barred international journalists from freely reporting in Gaza. The Israeli military has allowed reporters in on supervised excursions, but press freedom advocates say that is not nearly enough to effectively document the war.
Palestinian reporters have still been able to work in Gaza — albeit at great personal cost — throughout the conflict. Palestinian journalists working with Reuters, The Associated Press, and other outlets have been killed in Israeli attacks, including in a strike on a Gaza hospital where they were reporting.
The Foreign Press Association in Israel, which filed the petition, on Tuesday denounced the latest delays in litigating the case. In a statement, the group — which represents journalists working for the international press in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, including The New York Times — called the situation “beyond absurd.”
“These repeated delays have robbed the world of a fuller glimpse of conditions in Gaza and made a mockery of the entire legal process,” the association said.
The Israeli prime minister’s office and the Israeli military did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“Since the war began, Israel has prevented our international journalists from entering Gaza except when accompanied by the military, limiting reporting on the ground that is vital to understanding the conflict and assuring the free and credible flow of information,” a spokeswoman for The Times said.
“The Times has supported appeals to the Israeli Supreme Court for safe and increased access to Gaza, and we call on Israel to lift restrictions without delay, allowing all journalists to work securely and without fear or hesitation.”
The Israeli military has allowed international reporters to enter Gaza on a limited number of tightly controlled visits accompanied by Israeli forces. Participants are not generally able to use those visits to independently investigate particular Israeli strikes or conduct interviews with Palestinians. The military has also sought to put conditions on what journalists publish from the tours, such as reviewing footage before broadcast.
Israeli officials have previously argued that allowing journalists to freely report in Gaza could pose a security risk to Israeli soldiers, as reporters might, for example, give away military positions. But critics argue that the Israeli government’s real concern is more about preventing bad publicity.
Sara Qudah, the Middle East and North Africa director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, compared Israel’s approach in Gaza to restrictions on press coverage during conflicts imposed by autocracies like Myanmar and Russia. She called the ban on the entry of international journalists “a deliberate barrier to accountability.”
The C.P.J. says more than 200 Palestinian media workers have been killed in Gaza during the war. Israel has said some of those killed belonged to armed groups such as Hamas, an accusation generally denied by their employers.
The war has already dealt severe blows to Israel’s international standing: the Israeli offensive razed much of Gaza and killed tens of thousands of people. Hamas ignited the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages.
Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in mid-October. Though some violence has persisted, the fighting has diminished from the height of the war, when Israeli soldiers swept through Palestinian cities.
The Israeli government told the Supreme Court in late October that it was planning on “re-examining its policy on the entry of journalists” within 30 days, in light of the truce, according to court filings. That deadline came and went, and the court decided on additional extensions.
Jonathan Conricus, a former senior spokesman for the Israeli military, said Israel should have begun easing the ban “more than a year ago, and definitely since the cease-fire.”
The policy made sense in the first months of the war, given the scope of the fighting in Gaza, he said in an interview, but that position became untenable as the conflict dragged on. Now it undermines Israel’s global standing by providing ammunition for the country’s critics, he added.
“Today, I think there is very little logic left,” said Mr. Conricus, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank. “I think it is self-defeating and does not serve any clear purpose for the State of Israel. At this stage, I think it is harmful.”
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5) Wrenching Pain, a Severe Infection: An ICE Detainee Is Ordered Released
A judge blamed “deliberate indifference” for the illness of a man held by immigration officials. Across the country, several courts have blasted conditions in U.S. facilities.
By Ana Ley, Dec. 9, 2025
Javier Tomas Muñoz Materano, 23, was transferred to eight immigration detention facilities. Along the way, he began displaying symptoms of a serious infection. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
The 23-year-old man arrived at immigration court in New York City this spring with no obvious signs of illness.
That changed after federal immigration officials took the man, Javier Tomas Muñoz Materano, into custody.
For more than three months, he was held in detention and not allowed to bathe or change clothes for days at a time as he was transferred 10 times to eight facilities across four states. He eventually began feeling excruciating pain and discomfort in his genitalia. At times his legs became numb, and he lost the ability to walk. A judge ordered his release in September, agreeing with his lawyers that he had “a sufficiently serious medical condition” to be let out. In his decision, the judge chronicled the graphic details of what Mr. Muñoz Materano had gone through, saying that that ICE officials had acted “with deliberate indifference” toward his medical needs.
Across the United States, several other judges have also criticized conditions at federal immigration detention centers or released migrants who lacked access to adequate medical care.
In August, a federal judge directed the Trump administration to fix what detainees have called squalid and overcrowded conditions inside migrant holding cells in New York City. In October, a judge in Detroit ordered that a Michigan man who had leukemia be released from custody or at least be given a bond hearing in immigration court as he faced the prospect of deportation. And in November, a judge in Chicago imposed restrictions on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility that he said had subjected migrants to “conditions that are unnecessarily cruel.”
Their actions highlight tension over what migrants and human rights advocates have denounced as inhumane treatment by the Trump administration. ICE officials have denied mistreating detainees.
The case of Mr. Muñoz Materano offers an especially telling example of the neglect cited by judges. The skin on his legs became itchy, and his genitalia began to swell, according to court records. He felt a burning sensation when he urinated. The apparent infection also seemed to spread to his face. Later, when he could not walk, he was given a wheelchair.
While in detention, he had nearly two dozen medical appointments with nurses and physician assistants who prescribed medication, according to federal immigration officials. But U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos wrote in his Sept. 9 decision that “as a result of the frequent, haphazard transfers to which he was subjected,” Mr. Muñoz Materano was not allowed to consistently take the medicine, and his symptoms worsened.
In an interview, Mr. Muñoz Materano said that he pleaded for the medicine, including an antifungal and antibiotic. He said he explained to prison officials that he was in pain, but he was told that ICE had not authorized them to give him the medicine.
“I would tell them, from the heart, that it hurt,” Mr. Muñoz Materano said in Spanish. “That I was sick.”
Andrew Free, a former immigration and civil rights lawyer who researches conditions and deaths in ICE custody, said that before this year, immigration officials were more likely to release detainees if their continued incarceration could put them in peril, such as at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
But Mr. Free said that as President Trump has expanded his crackdown on legal and illegal immigration, the government has imposed a harder line.
Mr. Muñoz Materano’s lawyers brought his case before Judge Ramos to argue that his detention was unlawful because it violated his due process as someone living lawfully in the country. They also argued that his incarceration later endangered his health.
In an email, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, rejected criticism regarding the agency’s treatment of detainees. She said that Mr. Muñoz Materano was given comprehensive medical care, receiving at least 23 medical appointments and intake screenings within 12 hours of arriving at each detention facility. Ms. McLaughlin did not address complaints from Mr. Muñoz Materano that he was deprived of access to a bath and clean clothes.
“This is the best health care many aliens have received in their entire lives,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
She referred to Judge Ramos as a “lone activist judge” and said that “smears like these” have led to an increase in assaults against ICE officers.
Mr. Muñoz Materano’s legal team retained the services of Dr. Kate S. Sugarman, a family medicine doctor in Washington who evaluated Mr. Muñoz Materano’s medical records and found symptoms of a fungal skin infection. Separately, she said the records showed that a lump in his testicles could be a sign of testicular torsion or of cancer.
“When a man has a mass in his testicles, it’s an emergency to make sure that that mass is not cancer,” Dr. Sugarman said. “Any delay in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer means that the cancer can spread and then the patient can die.”
Dr. Sugarman expressed concern that Mr. Muñoz Materano had not been “referred to a urologist or oncologist, nor received diagnostic imaging or a biopsy,” and she said that his medical records “do not indicate appropriate referrals, imaging, testing or follow-up care.” She said that immigration officials had displayed a lack of urgency about the serious decline in his health and had risked his death, calling their behavior “inexcusable.”
Since he was freed on Sept. 9 and taken to an emergency room at a New York hospital, medical officials have not diagnosed his condition. He lost his job and has struggled to find work and housing because of his pain. His lawyer, Rosanna Eugenio, said that he lost health insurance as a result of his detention. Ms. Eugenio said that he is working with his legal team to enter a program that can help him receive comprehensive care.
Mr. Muñoz Materano’s journey to the United States began after his family in Venezuela was targeted by Tren de Aragua gang members who invaded their home and threatened to kill them at gunpoint, according to the judge’s ruling in his case. He entered the United States through El Paso about two years ago by applying for a government program created by the Biden administration that allowed migrants to use an app to secure an appointment for admission.
He was granted humanitarian parole and given a work permit, which led to a job as a warehouse worker in Brooklyn. But on May 21, when he went to a scheduled asylum hearing at an immigration court in New York City, four people in plainclothes with no identification or badges rushed toward him, handcuffed him and took him to a van. They then took him to 26 Federal Plaza, the New York City headquarters of ICE, which has become synonymous with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
In his ruling, Judge Ramos noted that Mr. Muñoz Materano had been “living and lawfully working in the U.S., with no criminal history, for nearly two years.”
The Trump administration views the situation differently: “Javier Tomas Muñoz Materano never had legal status in this country,” said Ms. McLaughlin, arguing that the Biden administration had abused its parole authority by releasing him into the United States.
“I lost everything the day that they arrested me,” Mr. Muñoz Materano said in October during an interview at the offices of the New York Immigration Coalition, an advocacy group that arranged for his legal defense. “Absolutely everything.”
Mr. Muñoz Materano interrupted himself during the interview to say that he was in agonizing pain as he frowned and stirred in his seat. He stood up and sat down again as he struggled to find a comfortable position.
“I tried to follow the laws of the United States, and I was treated like a criminal,” Mr. Muñoz Materano said. “Many other people are going through the same thing that I am.”
Civil rights groups have raised concerns about at least two of the eight detention centers that Mr. Muñoz Materano was taken to: the Orange County Jail in Goshen, N.Y., and the El Paso Service Processing Center in Texas.
He was also taken to facilities in Louisiana and New Jersey.
In October, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest released a report about the Orange County Jail that delineated a lack of care for people with chronic conditions and issues with medication. The group is a nonprofit organization that offers legal assistance to immigrants.
Amnesty International issued a similar report after a visit in April to the El Paso Service Processing Center, where the organization heard reports of Venezuelans being disproportionately targeted under the Alien Enemies Act. Some were labeled as being gang-affiliated without evidence, subjected to solitary confinement and abused by guards, the organization said.
Sophie Dalsimer, the co-director of health justice at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, said Mr. Muñoz Materano’s case “is tragically emblematic of many of the abuses that we found.”
In late October, Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, released an investigation that included 85 reports of medical neglect in immigration detention centers across the country, including cases that led to life-threatening injuries and complications.
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6) Is Saturated Fat Actually Good for You?
Health experts have long recommended limiting it, but Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has signaled a shift in that advice.
By Alice Callahan, Dec. 9, 2025
Deanna Donegan/The New York Times; Photographs by Getty
For decades, nutrition experts and health officials have warned against eating too much saturated fat. Red meat, full-fat dairy products, fried foods and other big sources of the nutrient can raise your cholesterol, they have said, and with it the risk of cardiovascular disease.
But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other federal health officials, along with some proponents of the Make America Healthy Again movement, have taken a different stance — suggesting that the fats have been unfairly demonized and that the evidence to prove that they are harmful is insufficient.
Mr. Kennedy, the nation’s health secretary, has been dismissive of expert consensus and said that the next edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, expected in early 2026, will “stress the need to eat saturated fats.”
Why the potential about-face on decades of guidance? We asked nutrition experts to break down the evidence.
What are saturated fats?
All fatty acids are categorized into two main groups according to their molecular structures.
Saturated fats, which tend to be solid at room temperature, are predominant in animal products like butter, cheese, beef and pork as well as certain oils like coconut oil and palm oil.
Unsaturated fats are abundant in fish and foods like avocados, nuts, seeds and cooking oils like olive oil and soybean oil. These types of fat tend to be liquid at room temperature.
What does the research suggest?
Since the 1950s and 1960s, studies have consistently found cardiovascular benefits from limiting saturated fats, said Kevin Klatt, an assistant professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto.
Small clinical trials from the 1950s, for instance, found that when adults replaced saturated fats (from foods like butter or coconut oil) with unsaturated fats (from sources like sunflower oil or corn oil), their blood cholesterol levels decreased. Other studies published around the same time found that those who consumed less saturated fat tended to have lower rates of coronary heart disease than those who consumed more.
Based on this and other research, the American Heart Association began recommending in 1961 that adults at risk for heart disease replace saturated fats with unsaturated fats in their diets. Federal health officials issued similar guidance for everyone in the first edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans in 1980, and have recommended limiting saturated fats in subsequent editions.
Studies performed during the decades since have continued to support this advice, said Deirdre K. Tobias, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
In dozens of short-term clinical trials published since 1970, researchers have found that the more saturated fats people consumed, the higher their blood levels of LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol rose. Over time, high LDL can raise the risk of having a heart attack or stroke.
The results of longer-term trials, while mixed, have largely shown that the more people reduce how much saturated fat they eat, the lower their risk of having a cardiovascular event like a heart attack or stroke.
In observational studies that have followed large groups of adults for decades, researchers have also found that consuming less saturated fat — and more unsaturated fat — was linked to lower rates of both coronary heart disease and earlier death, Dr. Tobias said.
Observational studies can’t prove cause and effect, but these findings did jibe with previous clinical trial data, Dr. Klatt said.
All research on this topic has limitations, he added, but it’s generally all “pointing in the same direction.”
Why have some questioned the guidance on saturated fats?
Public health officials have provided little explanation for why they want to roll back the longstanding advice on saturated fats.
Some health influencers, including those in the MAHA movement, have argued that because humans evolved to eat red meat and other animal products high in saturated fats, those foods are inherently good for us. And they contend that unsaturated fat-rich seed oils like canola oil and soybean oil, which experts recommend as healthier replacements, have worsened our health. A return to butter and beef tallow, they say, would improve it.
But there’s no evidence that seed oils are harmful to health, or that saturated fats are beneficial, said Dr. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In fact, he added, the opposite is true: Eating fewer saturated fats and more unsaturated fats (including from seed oils) has most likely been one reason deaths from cardiovascular disease have declined by about 75 percent since the 1950s, he said.
The idea that eating more saturated fats would make us healthier is “fundamentally bogus,” Dr. Willett said.
There is broad agreement among scientists that replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats like those in plant oils, nuts, seeds and avocados can lower cholesterol levels and the risk for heart disease, said Alice H. Lichtenstein, a professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University. For this reason, Dr. Lichtenstein thinks the guidelines should focus less on limiting saturated fats and more on swapping them for healthier unsaturated ones.
There is also some debate among scientists about whether all foods that contain saturated fats are equally bad for you. Full-fat dairy products like yogurt and cheese, for instance, do not appear to be consistently linked to health harms, despite their high levels of saturated fats, said Benoît Lamarche, director of the Nutrition, Health and Society Center at Laval University in Quebec.
Processed meats and many other ultraprocessed foods, on the other hand, which are also major sources of saturated fats, are clearly linked to greater risks of heart disease and poor health, he said.
Regardless of the source, it would be a mistake to start eating more saturated fats, Dr. Klatt said. They aren’t beneficial for health — and they add extra calories to your diet.
This is one reason the current dietary guidelines recommend limiting saturated fats by prioritizing low-fat dairy products and lean meats, Dr. Klatt said. That leaves more room in your “calorie budget” for other foods rich in essential nutrients and heart-healthy fiber, like fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
What does this mean for you?
If the new dietary guidelines recommend consuming more saturated fats, many experts worry that Americans’ health may worsen, and that it would potentially cause an uptick in cardiovascular disease, Dr. Willett said.
To reduce your risk, experts recommended prioritizing unsaturated fats over saturated ones. Cook with olive oil, soybean oil or canola oil instead of butter or beef tallow, for example, and prioritize fish over red and processed meats. Use avocado instead of bacon in sandwiches and salads, and add nuts and seeds to plain yogurt.
If you shift your diet toward more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, fish and plant oils, you’ll get major health benefits in general.
“This is undisputed,” Dr. Lamarche said. And if you adopt this way of eating, you won’t have to worry about saturated fat, he said. “It’s going to be lower anyway.”
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7) ‘Voodoo Rituals’ and Banana Wars: U.S. Military Action in Latin America
The United States’ history in the region includes several about-faces, contradictions and missteps.
By Helene Cooper, Reporting from Washington, Dec. 9, 2025
The United States’ history in the region includes several about-faces, contradictions and missteps.
A U.S. military helicopter flying over burning buildings in Panama City in December 1989.Associated Press
President Trump, who recently pardoned a former Latin American leader for his drug-trafficking conviction, is considering direct military action against another, whom he accuses of sending drugs and criminals to the United States.
Latin America is used to interference by its behemoth neighbor. In fact, the U.S. military’s modern history in the region is filled with about-faces, contradictions and missteps.
There were the tamales in Panama that U.S. troops insisted were cocaine. A futile monthslong odyssey through the scrub of Mexico to find a certain former ally turned revolutionary foe. And that doesn’t include the C.I.A.’s adventures in the region or the Iran-contra affair, a political scandal so convoluted that it cannot fit in the confines of this article.
Now, the U.S. military is killing scores of people on vessels in the Caribbean Sea, accusing them of smuggling drugs, as Mr. Trump increases pressure on President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
Here is a look at some other examples of the U.S. military’s efforts at regime change in Latin America.
1898
Cuba
The Spanish-American War in 1898 led to a number of U.S. interventions in Latin America, particularly in Cuba.
The U.S.S. Maine was sent to Havana that January on a stated mission of protecting American citizens. After a mysterious explosion sank the battleship a month later, the United States began a naval blockade of Cuba and went to war with Spain. That campaign expanded to Puerto Rico, and then reached the Pacific to include the Philippines and Guam.
The war ended with the 1898 Treaty of Paris, signed in December, which ceded ownership of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States. Spain also relinquished control of Cuba.
Marines had landed in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in June 1898 and moved swiftly through the island. It was the start of a long period of Marine involvement in conflicts in Central America and the Caribbean, which came to be known as the Banana Wars.
“Before the Second World War, this is what the Marine Corps did,” said Mark F. Cancian, a senior adviser with the Central for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine Corps colonel. “Their bread and butter was destabilizing and overthrowing governments in Latin America.”
1912
Nicaragua
Nicaragua was in the middle of a revolt against its right-leaning and pro-American president when Marines landed in the country on a stated mission to preserve U.S. interests. This quickly turned into a direct military intervention and began 21 years of occupation of Nicaragua as part of the Banana Wars.
Tensions were high between the United States and Mexico in 1914, as the latter underwent political upheaval fomented by the former. The year before, the United States had worked to overthrow a Mexican president in favor of another who was viewed as more pro-American, leading to a coup d’état, only to turn around and withdraw support for the new president, backing the bandit and revolutionary leader Pancho Villa to depose him.
Then came the I’m-sorry-I’m-not-sorry squabble. The Mexican government arrested nine American sailors in April 1914 for entering an off-limits fuel-loading station in Tampico, on the country’s east coast. Mexico released the sailors, but the United States demanded an apology and a 21-gun salute. Mexico agreed to the apology but not the salute.
President Woodrow Wilson ordered a naval blockade of the Port of Veracruz, to the south. But before that could be carried out, he discovered an arms shipment heading to Mexico in violation of an American arms embargo. The U.S. Navy seized the Port of Veracruz, occupying it for seven months.
1915
Haiti
After President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam of Haiti was assassinated (shortly after ordering the execution of 167 political prisoners), Wilson sent Marines to the country. The stated mission was to restore order and stabilize Haiti’s turbulence, which had been fueled in part by U.S. actions such as the seizure of its gold reserves over debts.
The Marines stayed almost 20 years, finally withdrawing in 1934.
1915
Mexico
Remember Pancho Villa? By 1915, the United States had turned against him and was providing rail transportation for anti-Villa forces. That angered Villa, who started attacking American troops, citizens and their property in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States.
On March 9, 1916, Villa’s troops attacked a U.S. Army post in New Mexico, killing eight soldiers and 10 civilians, wounding eight more people, and stealing horses, mules and machine guns.
Wilson sent U.S. Army troops into Mexico to find Villa “with the single object of capturing him and putting a stop to his forays,” according to a military statement. They searched for almost a year but did not find him, and returned home in 1917. Villa eventually retired and was killed in 1923 in an ambush led by Jesús Salas Barraza, who claimed his motivation was a dispute with Villa over a woman.
The futile American hunt turned Pancho Villa into something of a folk hero in Mexico. “Whenever the U.S. became an arbiter of internal affairs, it skewed the politics,” said Miguel R. Tinker Salas, a professor emeritus of history and Latino studies at Pomona College.
The United States accused the government of Grenada of building an airport that would project Soviet power in the region, claiming that its long runway could enable the Soviet Union to land giant transport planes capable of moving weapons.
A political leadership crisis in Grenada that fall eventually led to the execution of its prime minister. The military announced a curfew and said anyone on the streets in violation of the order would be shot on sight.
At dawn on Oct. 25, President Ronald Reagan sent 7,600 troops, including two Army Ranger battalions, the 82nd Airborne, the Marines, Delta commandos and Navy SEALs, supported by American warplanes and Army helicopters. His stated reason was to protect 600 American medical students in the island country.
The U.S. troops made quick work of 1,500 Grenadian soldiers involved in the initial defense of the country, and within a few days most of the resistance was gone. Grenada’s military government was overthrown, and an interim one was installed. On Nov. 3, Reagan announced the mission was successfully completed.
Gen. Manuel Noriega, the military leader of Panama, had longstanding ties to the C.I.A. and to its director, George H.W. Bush, who would be elected president. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the United States paid General Noriega to help sabotage the left-wing Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the F.M.L.N. revolutionaries in El Salvador. He also worked with the Drug Enforcement Administration to restrict illegal drug shipments — and laundered drug money as a side hustle.
But around 1986, news reports surfaced in the American media about the criminal activities of General Noriega, who was now the military dictator of Panama. Mr. Reagan asked the general to step down; he refused. American courts indicted him on drug-related charges. General Noriega soured on the United States and started asking for and receiving military aid from Cuba, Nicaragua and Libya, which were Soviet-bloc countries.
The general survived attempted coups and a disputed election. On Dec. 15, 1989, Panama’s General Assembly passed a resolution declaring a state of war with the United States.
The next night, four U.S. service members were stopped at a roadblock in Panama; one was shot and killed. Mr. Bush ordered in U.S. troops to remove General Noriega.
And so arrives the story of the tamales.
Shortly after U.S. troops arrived in Panama, in late December 1989, they announced that they had found 50 pounds of cocaine in a guesthouse used by General Noriega. The head of U.S. Southern Command raised the amount found to 110 pounds.
The next month, the Pentagon issued a retraction. A department spokesman told reporters that the department had been supplied with “less than satisfactory” information by troops in Panama. The cocaine, he said, was actually tamales.
“It’s a bonding material,” The Los Angeles Times quoted Maj. Kathy Wood as saying. She added, helpfully, “It’s a substance they use in voodoo rituals.”
1994
Haiti
Sixty years after their first trip to Haiti, the Marines were back, this time with Army troops, after President Bill Clinton ordered the U.S. military to restore to power President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been democratically elected and quickly overthrown.
Ten years later, Mr. Aristide was out of favor with Washington and ousted in a coup orchestrated by the United States and France, which had colonized the country.
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8) $27,000 a Year for Health Insurance. How Can We Afford That?
By Zack Cooper, Dec. 10, 2025
Dr. Cooper is an associate professor of public health and economics at Yale.
…(if the U.S. health system were a country, in dollar terms, it would be the third-largest economy in the world)”
The New York Times
The debate over whether to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies has consumed lawmakers over the past two months, precipitated a government shutdown and sparked Republican infighting. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong debate.
While I believe we should extend the subsidies, which expire at the end of the month, to help families pay their insurance premiums, doing so wouldn’t fix the underlying problem: surging health care spending. That’s the reason we need the subsidies in the first place, and it’s bankrupting families and shredding jobs for low- and middle-income workers across the economy.
Just how bad is it? The best evidence we have shows that rising health spending in the United States since 1975 can explain roughly the same share of the growth in income inequality as increased trade, outsourcing or automation. It has pushed down wages, fueled inequality and left families drowning in unaffordable medical bills. Rising health care spending is killing the American dream.
Despite devastating out-of-pocket costs, Americans are generally insulated from the true cost of health care premiums. However, the expiring subsidies on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, where more than 20 million Americans get their insurance, show just how exorbitant premiums have become. Consider a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 a year. Without subsidies, their health insurance premiums next year will approach $32,000 (akin to buying a new Toyota Camry).
Those of us who get health care insurance from our employers — some 160 million Americans — may be breathing a sigh of relief. But our health care premiums are also staggering (an average of $27,000 a year for a family of four), and the fact that our employers pay part of the tab isn’t much of a reprieve.
That’s because decades’ worth of research shows that, even though employers pay most of workers’ premiums, those costs are passed on to workers in the form of lower wages and fewer jobs. That’s why the rise in health spending above the rate of inflation over the past decade has depressed wages by nearly 10 percent, according to my calculations. And because premiums are a bigger share of total pay for lower-income workers, the job cuts triggered by rising health care spending fall disproportionally on low- and middle-income workers and fuel income inequality.
Americans spend more on health care than other countries because we pay higher prices for identical goods and services, are quicker to adopt new and costly medical technology (whether or not it is cost effective) and have higher administrative costs in our complex, decentralized system. Health care markets have consolidated so much that in many regions, hospitals and other providers can charge near-monopoly prices. The fact that we pay providers per service delivered (rather than a fixed salary) also plays a role.
Next year insurance premiums will increase 10 percent for employer-sponsored plans and 18 percent for individual plans on the exchanges compared with 2025. In both markets, they’re going up because the price of medical care is rising (think hospital mergers, staffing shortages and tariffs that make drugs and devices more expensive) and Americans are increasingly using expensive weight loss and diabetes drugs known as GLP-1s. The exchange plans are seeing a sharper increase than employer plans because of the uncertainty lawmakers created over whether the Affordable Care Act subsidies would be extended. Insurers had to factor in the risk that healthier people would be less likely to buy insurance if the subsidies expired, which would lead to a sicker insurance risk pool and higher costs.
I wish there were a simple way to lower U.S. health spending. It’s easy to come up with ideas for what a better health system would look like if we could start from scratch. Unfortunately, the sheer scale of our system (if the U.S. health system were a country, in dollar terms, it would be the third-largest economy in the world) means there are no silver bullet solutions. Reform involves trade-offs. One person’s health care spending is another person’s health care income — profits, jobs and paychecks for the tens of millions of people who work in the health care sector. And some higher spending does lead to better care. As long as they’re in competitive markets, higher-priced hospitals deliver higher quality care. Slowing health spending would create winners and losers, which makes the politics of reform tricky.
If America is serious about lowering health spending, lawmakers need to pursue three paths of reform in parallel. First, we should fix existing policies that are plainly inefficient. For example, as a result of Medicare payment rules created in the 1980s, the government program pays more (sometimes double) for care delivered in a hospital or hospital-owned doctor’s practice versus in an independent doctor-owned practice, even if the care is identical. That makes it more profitable for doctors to merge their practice with hospitals than remain independent. These mergers give doctors and hospitals bargaining power and drive up prices and insurance premiums. To its credit, the Trump administration recently introduced policies that could save $10 billion over the next decade by requiring Medicare to pay hospitals the same rate they pay physicians to administer drugs, such as chemotherapy.
Second, there are numerous meaningful reforms that don’t involve wholesale change and could be introduced now. I run a project called the 1% Steps for Health Reform that identifies discrete interventions that could lower the cost of health care without adversely affecting quality. Enacting 10 reforms, each of which could lower health spending about 1 percent or less, would together have a big impact: more than $250 billion annually, substantially greater than the budget of the Department of Homeland Security. One such reform is to make it easier for people to donate kidneys — which would improve recipients’ health and save billions of dollars in Medicare spending on dialysis.
Finally, policymakers should explore the design and feasibility of larger structural reforms to the U.S. health system that could be introduced over a decade. These ideas include decoupling health insurance from employment, broadly regulating the prices hospitals and other providers negotiate with insurers, creating a very basic, but universal insurance coverage program and, yes, even Medicare for all. It is not enough, however, to describe what an idealized U.S. health system would look like. Serious exploration requires tangible solutions that are politically feasible and won’t tank the economy.
During the government shutdown, one idea that briefly surfaced was a bipartisan commission to study ways to lower health care spending. That commission shouldn’t be a footnote; it’s essential. At the same time, the real pain families are feeling requires extending the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies, at least temporarily. Americans have high premiums because elected officials have ducked the tough choices needed to rein in spending. Lower- and middle-income people shouldn’t be stuck paying for that failure. But subsidies alone aren’t a solution; they simply buy us time. The point is to use that time to build a system in which coverage is affordable because care is affordable. That would take political courage and an American public willing to reward leaders who choose to compromise and work together.
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9) Supreme Court Hears Death Penalty Case on Intellectual Disability
The case involves an Alabama man who challenged his death sentence after a murder conviction because of his varying results in a series of I.Q. tests.
By Ann E. Marimow, Reporting from Washington, Dec. 10, 2025
Two decades ago, the Supreme Court barred the execution of people with mental disabilities as a violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But the court’s composition has changed since then. Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times
The Supreme Court will revisit on Wednesday how states assess intellectual disabilities to decide which capital defendants should be spared the death penalty.
The justices will hear arguments in an Alabama case that involves how I.Q. tests should be used to assess mental capacity. It comes two decades after the court barred the execution of people with mental disabilities as a violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
That ruling, in Atkins v. Virginia, gave states leeway to determine their own processes for deciding who was intellectually disabled. It led to follow-up cases from Florida and Texas in which the court further limited capital punishment.
But the composition of the Supreme Court has changed since then with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal, in 2020 and the retirement in 2018 of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who was part of a coalition with the liberal wing that generally supported narrowing the use of the death penalty. They were replaced by two nominees of President Trump, who cemented the court’s conservative supermajority.
The issue in the Alabama case the justices hear on Wednesday is how states and lower courts should evaluate cases in which defendants have taken I.Q. tests multiple times and received varying results, as well as the extent to which they must consider a broader evaluation of evidence in deciding if a person is disabled.
The case deals with Joseph Clifton Smith, who was sentenced to death after being convicted of murdering a man he planned to rob in 1997. In the years before and after the murder, Mr. Smith took five I.Q. tests with scores ranging from 72 to 78. The key part of Alabama’s law on mental disability turns on whether defendants score 70 or lower on the test. But a lower court found Mr. Smith was intellectually disabled, in part because the tests have a margin of error.
The outcome will likely determine whether Mr. Smith is executed or spends the rest of his life on death row. It also has implications for how courts apply the death penalty in other states. Medical and disability groups have warned that a narrow, test-focused approach conflicts with past Supreme Court rulings and could increase the risk that people with intellectual disabilities are executed.
Mr. Smith’s legal team, led by former solicitor general Seth P. Waxman, told the court in filings that when I.Q. scores are “inconclusive, courts must consider other evidence regarding intellectual functioning.”
Twenty-seven states permit the death penalty, but they differ in how exactly they determine intellectual disability.
Rather than focusing on one low I.Q. score to allow a defendant to be spared from execution, the state says officials should be allowed to consider the cumulative effect of multiple scores. In court filings, Attorney General Steve Marshall of Alabama told the justices that Mr. Smith’s tests, viewed together, demonstrated he was not intellectually disabled.
The Trump administration, which lifted a moratorium on the federal death penalty in January, is supporting the state and will participate in Wednesday’s arguments. D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, said the Supreme Court’s past decisions do not require states to ignore a defendant’s complete range of test scores.
“Similar to polling in an election, multiple I.Q. test scores often produce a more accurate image than any single test score does in isolation,” the administration said in a court filing.
Wednesday’s case began when Mr. Smith challenged his death sentence, saying he could not be executed because he was mentally disabled.
As a child, Mr. Smith was physically abused by his father and stepfather, according to court records. He struggled in school and was assigned to a special class for students with intellectual disabilities.
Mr. Smith dropped out of school after failing seventh and eighth grades and spent much of the next 15 years in prison. At 19, he went to prison for six years for burglary. He was released on parole but was found to have violated the terms of his release and returned to prison, before being released again just two days before the murder.
That day, Mr. Smith and a partner lured Durk Van Dam, who they had heard was carrying cash, to an isolated area in the woods in Mobile County, where they attacked him with a hammer and saw, according to court records. After beating him to death, they stole $140, and Mr. Smith took Mr. Van Dam’s boots and pawned the tools from his truck, the records show.
Under Alabama law, to avoid execution, defendants like Mr. Smith are required to show “significant subaverage intellectual functioning at the time the crime was committed, to show significant deficits in adaptive behavior at the time the crime was committed, and to show that these problems manifested themselves before the defendant reached the age of 18.”
After lengthy litigation in state and federal court, a district court judge in 2021 found that Mr. Smith was intellectually disabled. When a score is close to, but higher than 70, the judge said he “must be allowed to present additional evidence of intellectual disability.”
With even one score of 72, the judge noted that it could mean I.Q. was actually as low as 69 because of the standard error of measurement. The district court judge also found Mr. Smith deficient in social, interpersonal skills, self-direction, independent living, and academics.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit affirmed the ruling, citing two earlier Supreme Court decisions that said that when a test score, adjusted for the margin of error, is 70 or less, the defendant must be able to provide additional evidence of intellectual disability.
In response to an earlier request from the Supreme Court in the matter, the 11th Circuit said its finding was based on a “holistic approach” and review of evidence — not just a single low score.
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10) U.S. Steps Up Campaign Against Maduro in Seizing Tanker Off Venezuela
The seizure comes as the United States builds up its forces in the Caribbean as part of a campaign against President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
By Tyler Pager, Eric Schmitt and Nicholas Nehamas, Reporting from Washington, Published Dec. 10, 2025, Updated Dec. 11, 2025
The United States seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela on Wednesday, a dramatic escalation in President Trump’s pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela.
Speaking at the White House before an event on a new luxury visa program, Mr. Trump announced the operation and said it was “a large tanker, very large,” adding, without elaboration, that “other things are happening.”
When asked about the ship’s oil, Mr. Trump said, “Well, we keep it, I guess.” He declined to say who owned the tanker. “It was seized for a very good reason,” he added.
Three U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a law enforcement operation, said the ship was carrying Venezuelan oil. They said there was no resistance from the crew and no casualties.
In a statement, Venezuela’s government called the seizure a “barefaced robbery and an act of international piracy” aimed at stripping the country of its oil wealth.
The operation was the latest tactic in an expanding effort to squeeze Venezuela and pressure Mr. Maduro. The Trump administration has accused him of running a “narcoterrorist” cartel sending drugs to the United States, although many current and former officials in Washington say the campaign is ultimately aimed at regime change.
Since September, the United States has launched more than 22 known strikes against boats in the region, killing more than 80 people. The Trump administration insists, without publicly providing evidence, that the boats are smuggling drugs. Legal experts say the strikes may violate international law.
Attorney General Pam Bondi posted a video on Wednesday evening on social media showing armed U.S. forces rappelling from a helicopter onto the deck of the tanker. The video could not be independently verified.
Ms. Bondi said the operation included the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard, supported by the Pentagon. She said the tanker had been used to transport “sanctioned oil” from Venezuela and Iran.
The U.S. officials said they expected additional seizures in the coming weeks as part of the administration’s efforts to weaken Mr. Maduro’s government by undermining its oil market.
One of the officials identified the tanker as a vessel called the Skipper, and said it was carrying Venezuelan oil from Petróleos de Venezuela, the state-owned oil company known as PDVSA. The official said the ship had been previously linked to the smuggling of Iranian oil — a global black market that the Justice Department has been investigating for years. The vessel was sailing under the flag of another Latin American nation in which it was not registered, the official said, and its ultimate destination was Asia.
A federal judge issued a seizure warrant roughly two weeks ago because of the ship’s past activities smuggling Iranian oil, not because of links to the Maduro government, the official said. Prosecutors have said that Iran uses money generated from oil sales to finance its military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the United States has designated a terrorist entity.
The administration did not address many details about the operation, including what happened to the crew and what ultimately will happen to the ship. It was not clear whether the seizure warrant — which is sealed — was for the ship or the oil or both. The White House did not immediately respond when asked whether the United States had the legal authority to keep the oil.
The ship, under a different name, had been put under sanctions by the Treasury Department in 2022. U.S. officials said it was part of “an international oil smuggling network that facilitated oil trades and generated revenue” to support Hezbollah and Iran’s revolutionary guard force.
The tanker may have been trying to conceal its whereabouts by broadcasting falsified location data before the seizure, according to an analysis of satellite imagery and photographs by The New York Times.
The Navy, the Coast Guard, Southern Command and the Pentagon all declined to discuss the episode, referring questions to the White House.
Venezuela is exceptionally dependent on oil, which makes these kinds of seizures potentially damaging to the country’s fragile economy. Oil accounts for the bulk of the country’s export revenues. In turn, Venezuela’s government spends much of the proceeds from oil exports to import basic necessities like food and medicine.
Although Venezuela is believed to have colossal untapped oil reserves, the country produces far less oil than it did at the start of the century, after mismanagement, U.S. sanctions and corruption at PDVSA hobbled output.
The United States was long the largest buyer of Venezuela’s oil, but political tensions have eroded those ties. China now buys roughly 80 percent of Venezuela’s overall oil exports.
Smaller amounts of Venezuelan oil are exported to the United States, often to refineries on the Gulf Coast, and to Cuba, where the island nation’s Communist leaders have long relied on such cargoes to provide a semblance of economic stability.
In recent months, Mr. Trump has ordered a huge buildup of U.S. forces in the region, with more than 15,000 troops and a dozen ships in the Caribbean, including the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford. Mr. Trump has authorized covert action against Venezuela and has warned that the United States could “very soon” expand its attacks from boats off the Venezuelan coast to targets inside the country. But Mr. Trump has also recently spoken by phone with Mr. Maduro about a possible meeting. The president said on Wednesday that he had not spoken to Mr. Maduro since their last conversation.
The administration has developed a range of options for military action in the country, including targeting Mr. Maduro and seizing control of the country’s oil fields. The president has repeatedly expressed reservations about an operation to remove Mr. Maduro from power, aides say, in part because of a fear that the operation could fail. Mr. Trump has been in no rush to make a decision, though he has shown a particular interest in extracting some of the value of Venezuela’s oil for the United States.
The oil tanker operation came on the same day the Nobel Peace Prize was formally bestowed on a Venezuelan dissident, MarÃa Corina Machado. She was not at the ceremony on Wednesday in Oslo, where her daughter received the prize on her behalf, but the Nobel Peace Prize committee said she had left Venezuela and was traveling to Oslo.
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11) A federal judge in Maryland orders Abrego Garcia’s release from ICE detention.
By Alan Feuer, Legal issues reporter, December 11, 2025
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant who was wrongfully expelled to El Salvador in March, saying it was “troubling” that the Trump administration had kept him in custody for nearly four months while promising to re-expel him from the country without actually having done so.
The ruling by the judge, Paula Xinis, was a stinging defeat for the administration in a long and byzantine saga that over the past year has transformed Mr. Abrego Garcia from an unknown Salvadoran migrant living in Maryland into one of the best-known symbols of President Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda.
Judge Xinis’s ruling, issued in Federal District Court in Maryland, meant that Mr. Abrego Garcia would be both free from immigration custody and, at least for now, out from under the immediate shadow of being deported from the country yet again.
But while the ruling was a stern rebuke of how Trump officials have handled Mr. Abrego Garcia’s multiple, intersecting cases, it was unlikely to be the final word in his story. The Justice Department could appeal the decision, and administration officials could also seek to open a new immigration proceeding against him.
Moreover, Mr. Abrego Garcia is still facing separate criminal charges of smuggling undocumented immigrants in a different court altogether in Nashville.
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12) U.S. Issues New Sanctions Targeting Maduro’s Family and the Oil Sector
The United States is escalating its pressure campaign on Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, after seizing an oil tanker off the coast.
By Nicholas Nehamas, Tyler Pager, Farnaz Fassihi and Alan Rappeport, Dec. 11, 2025
President Nicolás Maduro during a rally in Caracas on Wednesday. Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
The United States on Thursday issued new sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector and on members of President Nicolás Maduro’s family, while taking steps to keep tens of millions of dollars’ worth of oil from a large tanker that U.S. forces seized off the country’s coast.
Venezuela’s economy depends on oil and has been hurt by U.S. sanctions, leading Mr. Maduro’s government to smuggle and sell crude through a web of tankers and middlemen. The new sanctions target three nephews of the wife of Mr. Maduro and six shipping companies.
Separately, the Trump administration is seeking the legal authority to seize the oil from the Skipper, a tanker that U.S. forces boarded and took possession of on Wednesday in international waters near Venezuela, according to Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. The oil had come from a state-owned Venezuelan company. American authorities have so far obtained a seizure warrant for the tanker — saying that it had been used in the past to smuggle Iranian oil — but not for the cargo currently on board.
“There is a legal process for the seizure of that oil, and that legal process will be followed,” Ms. Leavitt told reporters at the White House on Thursday.
Together, the sanctions and the seizure of the Skipper represent a new front in President Trump’s campaign to destabilize Mr. Maduro’s regime. Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Maduro of operating a “narcoterrorist” cartel and has authorized a series of deadly military strikes against boats that he has said, without publicly providing evidence, are smuggling drugs. Many current and former officials in Washington say the military buildup in the region is ultimately aimed at regime change.
Later in the day, Mr. Trump suggested that immigration was one of the factors that prompted the tanker seizure, saying that Venezuela had “allowed millions of people to come into our country.”
And he reiterated past warnings about a greater escalation.
“It’s going to be starting on land pretty soon,” he said of strikes in Venezuela.
The U.S. government’s actions this week most likely will reduce the number of tankers that are willing to load oil in Venezuela, further isolating a country that depends heavily on the revenue it receives from exporting the fossil fuel. But there was little immediate effect on oil prices, which remained around $58 a barrel in the United States. The market is unfazed because Venezuela produces little oil, less than 1 percent of what the world uses.
New details emerged on Thursday about the seized oil tanker, including about its crew, which is mainly from Russia, according to a U.S. official, who was not authorized to speak publicly. American authorities have asked the crew to sail the Skipper to the United States, but they have another crew on standby if needed, the official said.
The tanker has a capacity of 2 million barrels. It was loaded nearly full at a Venezuelan port about a month ago, according to data collected by Kpler, a company that monitors global oil shipping. The value of the oil carried by the Skipper amounted to roughly $78 million, said Francisco RodrÃguez, an economist at the University of Denver.
The ship may have recently tried to hide its location and disguise its activities, according to a New York Times analysis of satellite imagery and photographs, reflecting the shadowy world of smuggling in which it is said to operate.
On Dec. 6, the Skipper conducted a ship-to-ship transfer in the open seas near Curaçao, offloading about 50,000 barrels of oil onto another tanker called the Neptune 6, according to Kpler, as well as TankerTrackers.com, a company that provides similar services.
Neptune 6 is currently headed to Cuba, said Homayoun Falakshahi, Kpler’s head of oil analysis.
The use of U.S. military and law enforcement forces to seize a foreign oil tanker on the high seas is unusual. But the Skipper had been on the radar of the U.S. government for several years, as part of a so-called ghost fleet that smuggles black market oil around the world. Venezuela and Iran have each made extensive use of such ships to smuggle oil and evade international sanctions.
In recent years, the Skipper has sailed the globe transporting oil for both Iran and Venezuela, according to ship tracking data from TankerTrackers.com and Kpler and analysis by The Times.
In 2022, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the Skipper, then sailing under a different name, for smuggling illicit Iranian oil. U.S. prosecutors have said Iran uses the profits from oil sales to fund terrorism. That designation allowed the United States to seize the vessel on Wednesday.
“The Department of Justice requested and was approved for a warrant to seize a vessel because it’s a sanctioned shadow vessel known for carrying black-market sanctioned oil” for Iran, Ms. Leavitt said at the White House on Thursday.
Despite the legal basis for the seizure relating to Iran, U.S. officials have made clear that their actions were designed to pressure Venezuela and that they could seize more tankers carrying Venezuelan oil in the future.
Among the moves by the Trump administration to squeeze Venezuela are the sanctions announced on Thursday.
Two of the Maduro nephews who were put under sanctions were arrested in Haiti in 2015 as they were finalizing a deal to transport a shipment of cocaine to the United States. The men, whom the Treasury referred to as “narco-nephews,” were convicted in 2016 on drug trafficking charges but were granted clemency in 2022 by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and returned to Venezuela, where, according to the Treasury Department, they continued trafficking drugs.
The sanctions also hit Venezuela’s economy by blacklisting six shipping companies — Myra Marine Limited, Arctic Voyager Incorporated, Poweroy Investment Limited, Ready Great Limited, Sino Marine Services Limited and Full Happy Limited — that have vessels transporting Venezuelan oil.
The targeted ships were “blocked” by the Treasury Department, impeding them from doing international business, although it was not clear if the U.S. planned to seize them.
Reporting was contributed by Simon Romero in Bogotá, Colombia; Christiaan Triebert and Rebecca F. Elliott in New York; and Eric Schmitt and Chris Cameron in Washington.
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13) Troops Involved in Boat Strikes Face a ‘Moral Injury’ Risk, Experts Say
Troops who play a part in deadly missions that they see as wrong or unjustified may suffer deep psychological harm as a result, research has shown.
By Dave Philipps, Dec. 12, 2025
Each deadly strike involves numerous military personnel who may be at risk of psychological harm. Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
The Trump administration’s missile strikes against boats that it says are carrying drugs have drawn fierce criticism from legal experts and from some members of Congress, who say that the killing of unarmed civilians in international waters is illegal and amounts to little more than summary execution.
Congress has convened classified hearings, and legal groups have sued to force the administration to release secret memos authorizing the strikes.
But amid all the high-level debate, little public attention has been given to how the strikes affect the low-level people who have to carry them out. For those people, decades of research has shown, the emotional effects of this kind of killing can be devastating.
Participating in killing — even killing seen remotely on a video screen — can leave deep psychological wounds and lead to long-lasting struggles. If the person perceives the killing as morally wrong or unjustified, the effect can be even greater. The Department of Veterans Affairs sees the problem often enough that it has a name: “Moral injury.”
It stems from feelings of intense guilt or shame that can lead to a number of psychological problems, including an increased risk of suicide. It is amplified when the person feels betrayed by an institution or leader that they believed in.
In the boat strikes, hundreds of military personnel could be affected.
When the Trump administration orders a missile strike on a boat speeding across the Caribbean Sea, executing the order isn’t as simple as having an admiral push a red button.
There are intelligence teams using surveillance drones and satellites to track boat traffic. Specialists to intercept radio and cellphone communications, and linguists to translate them. Analysts to sift through intelligence for potential targets, and targeters to call for a strike on a specific boat.
If the strike is carried out by an armed drone, there are sensor operators to aim the drone’s targeting laser, and a drone pilot who ultimately launches the missile. High-definition video footage is beamed to big screens in operations centers, where command teams and their staffs watch every move.
All of those troops, experts say, are at risk of psychological harm from participating in killings that they may see as legally dubious or morally appalling.
“Killing someone is the biggest, most consequential moral decision a person can make,” said Peter Kilner, who was an Army infantry officer for 15 years and then taught ethics at West Point. “Even in the best circumstances, it can be a heavy load to carry, and this is far from the best circumstances.”
Mr. Kilner, who has studied moral injury for more than two decades, said participants in the boat strikes might be at increased risk of moral injuries because the remote-control strikes against unarmed people appeared to fall short of what the military has long held to be moral, ethical and legal.
No service members have come out publicly with concerns, and there is no evidence they have gone privately to members of Congress or other authorities.
But Mr. Kilner said troops often express few misgivings in the heat of the moment. “It can take hold much later, after everyone else has moved on,” he added. “There is a deep feeling of being tarnished, unworthy. People can really struggle.”Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former infantry platoon leader, seemed to recognize the risk of asking troops to operate beyond ethical and legal boundaries in 2016, when Donald Trump was calling for the use of torture and the killing of terrorists’ families as he ran for office.
“He says, go ahead and kill the families,” Mr. Hegseth said on Fox News in 2016. “Go ahead and torture. Go ahead and go further than waterboarding. What happens when people follow those orders, or don’t follow them?”
No evidence has come to light of widespread misgivings among the troops carrying out the boat strikes, nor are any of them known to have refused orders. Because the operations are classified, it would be illegal for the troops to speak out publicly about them.
The troops who do this work are trained to execute orders quickly with little discussion. The orders come from “the customer,” military jargon for whichever command authority requests the mission. For at least some of the boat strikes, the customer has been SEAL Team Six, which reports to Adm. Frank Bradley, the head of Special Operations Command, and to Mr. Hegseth.
Military personnel have little if any say over the assignments they get or the orders they receive. Unlike civilians, they cannot simply quit their jobs. And in almost all circumstances, refusing an order is a crime that can lead to prison time.
Military personnel are allowed — and, in fact, are obliged — to refuse illegal orders. But to do so would probably result in swift punishment, while determining the actual legality of the order could drag on in court for months or years, according to Brenner Fissell, a law professor at Villanova University.
When a legally dubious order is given, he said, “the individual is in a horrible bind: If they refuse, they will likely immediately be charged with a crime, maybe put in jail. At some point, maybe, a judge may realize they were right, but at that point they have lost their job and become an outcast.
“There is huge incentive to just obey, even if you deeply, deeply don’t agree with what is happening.”
Mr. Frissell helps run the Orders Project, an organization that connects troops with independent lawyers who can advise them. Such groups say a small number of troops have contacted them with concerns, but none wanted to voice them publicly.
The quick video clips of fiery missile strikes that Mr. Hegseth has posted on social media can make the operations seem like a video game. Military personnel see something much more real.
The teams that manage airstrikes often watch potential targets for days beforehand. They may see a boat crew loading drugs, but they may also see them hug their children before casting off. After a strike, trained analysts view the aftermath — often in high-definition color — to determine how many people were wounded, how many were killed, and how many were civilians. That may mean watching people slowly die.
In the first of the boat strikes, two wounded survivors clung to the wreckage for nearly an hour and signaled for help before a second missile was ordered, killing them.
Because moral injury depends on each person’s individual sense of right and wrong, the same experience can hit people in different ways.
“You don’t know how it’s going to affect you until you’ve actually been in the seat and done the job,” said Bennet Miller a former Air Force intelligence analyst who worked on drone strikes in Syria and Iraq during the first Trump administration.
At that time, Mr. Trump had changed the rules governing airstrikes to loosen oversight. Large teams worked for a top secret task force, which was allowed to hit targets more often than before, based on less intelligence. The task force repeatedly ordered strikes, that hit homes and stores, people on the street and throngs of civilians seeking safety.
There was no public outcry at the time from troops working on the missions, but privately, people started to break down. Some wept. Some turned to drugs. Many left the career field as soon as their assignments were over.
In recent years the Air Force has assigned psychologists and chaplains to many drone units, in recognition of the persistent problems. Southern Command, which oversees the boat strikes, did not immediately respond to questions about how it planned to address the risk of moral injury.
Mr. Bennet said his work started to haunt him after his team followed an Afghan man who the customer said was a top Taliban financier. They watched him dine with his family and play with his children. Then one morning as he walked out of his house, the customer gave the order to kill him.
A week later, the same name reappeared on the strike list, and Mr. Bennet realized his team had been ordered to kill the wrong person. Similar mistakes happened twice more with other targets, he said.
“We could no longer trust that the intelligence was good,” he said.
Mr. Bennett said he had felt trapped, unable to refuse work that he believed was wrong. Eventually, he became suicidal and was hospitalized in 2019, and the Air Force medically retired him.
He said in an interview that his thoughts have lately been with the many people who have to carry out the boat strikes.
“I just hope they are getting taken care of,” he said. “And if they do raise concerns about the mission, hopefully someone can pull them off the line to get help, rather than punish them.”
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14) Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class.
By Dana Goldstein, Dec. 12, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us/high-school-english-teachers-assigning-books.html
"In addition, with more than 20 states passing laws over the past five years that limit teaching about race, gender and sexuality, using excerpts allows schools to avoid passages dealing with banned themes.https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us/high-school-english-teachers-assigning-books.html"
“We do one book after state testing, and we did ‘The Great Gatsby.’ … A lot of kids had not read a novel in class before.” — Laura Henry, 10th-grade English teacher near Houston
“My son in 9th grade listened to the audio of ‘A Raisin in the Sun.’ For ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ they watched the balcony scene instead of reading.” — Rebekah Jacobs, Rockville, Md.
“We typically spend a ridiculous amount of time reading each book, such that in my freshman year, we read only one, ‘Macbeth.’” — Liv Niklasson, age 16, Los Alamos, N.M.
In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading.
Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year, according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey by The New York Times.
Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts.
Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be imparted mainly through audio and video, the forms that are dominating in the era of mobile, streaming media.
We wanted to find out how students and teachers feel about the shift, and what role schools can play. So The Times asked educators, parents and students to tell us about their experiences with high school reading.
More than 2,000 people responded.
Many were longtime teachers who reported assigning fewer whole books now than they did earlier in their careers. Some complained about the effect of technology on students’ stamina for reading and interest in books. But more pointed toward the curriculum products their schools had purchased from major publishers.
Those programs often revolve around students reading short stories, articles, and excerpts from novels, then answering short-form questions and writing brief essays.
Students typically access the content online, often using school-issued laptops.
These practices begin in elementary school, and by high school, book-reading can seem like a daunting hurdle.
Popular curriculum programs like the one above were created by publishing companies, in part, to help prepare students for state standardized tests. Many schools and teachers are under significant pressure to raise students’ scores on these end-of-year exams, which feed into state and federal accountability systems. Test results are also prominently featured on school-ranking and real estate websites.
By the time teachers get through their required curriculums and prep students for exams, they often have little or no time left to guide classes through a whole book.
Andrew Polk, 26, teaches 10th-grade English in suburban Ohio, not far from where he grew up. As a high school student less than a decade ago, he was assigned many whole books and plays to read, among them, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” “The Crucible” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
But as a teacher, Mr. Polk must use StudySync, which centers on excerpts. Many colleagues do not believe students will read whole books, he said, though he noted his own experience had not borne that out.
He still assigns several longer works each year, and has taught “Macbeth,” “Fahrenheit 451” and the more contemporary “Paper Towns,” by John Green. Teenagers still feel “passion for a good story,” he said. “Students absolutely can and do rise to the occasion. It’s just a matter of setting those expectations.”
When whole books are assigned, they are most often from a relatively stagnant list of classics, according to research from the scholars Jonna Perrillo and Andrew Newman.
Here are the most frequently assigned books through the past six decades, according to their forthcoming study.
1963:
Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884; Hamlet William Shakespeare 1623; Julius Caesar William Shakespeare 1599; Macbeth William Shakespeare 1623; The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850; A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens 1859; Great Expectations Charles Dickens 1861; Our Town Thornton Wilder 1938; The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane 1895; Silas Marner George Eliot 1861.
What may have changed most is the number of these classics students have read. During the 2008-2009 school year, one survey found high school English teachers assigned an average of four books annually, with a significant minority assigning seven or more books.
A 2024 survey of English teachers by Dr. Perrillo and Dr. Newman found they assigned an average of 2.7 whole books per year. The results will be published in 2026.
Some educators explained the decline by pointing toward the Common Core, a set of national standards for English and math that most states adopted in the early 2010s, and that continues to heavily shape classroom practice.
The Core was intended to better prepare students for college, and introduced more nonfiction reading and thesis-driven writing into schools. It also suggested a more culturally diverse array of authors, and pointed educators toward a long list of titles characterized by “historical and literary significance.”
Many school districts responded by requiring teachers to closely adhere to curriculum products that took an anthology approach — exposing students to dozens of writers and many genres, but through shorter readings. StudySync, for example, includes a single chapter of Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club,” 1,179 words of “Born a Crime” by Trevor Noah and James Madison’s “Federalist Papers: No. 10.”
Sandra Lightman, an education consultant who helped to develop the Common Core, agreed that students should be reading whole books but argued it was wrong to blame the Core, which she said had been misinterpreted.
Advocates for the Core had pointed out that some novels commonly assigned to teenagers, like “The Grapes of Wrath,” were not challenging in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure. They were akin to a second- or third-grade reading level, despite being thematically rich.
“We never intended that should be banned, only that it shouldn’t be the sole source of reading,” Dr. Lightman said. She argued that overall, curriculum products include higher-quality, more interesting reading material today than they did 20 years ago, before the Common Core.
There are other reasons some schools prefer excerpts. It can be more expensive to purchase books than to assign a variety of shorter works, which are not subject to copyright restrictions and can be easily read on a laptop or tablet.
In addition, with more than 20 states passing laws over the past five years that limit teaching about race, gender and sexuality, using excerpts allows schools to avoid passages dealing with banned themes.
Laura Henry, the teacher in Houston, noted that StudySync offers a 988-word excerpt from “Enemies, a Love Story,” a darkly comic 1972 novel by the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. It deals with the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In Texas, she said, “There’s no way we would have been able to read the entire thing. It’s a beautiful book, but there is an affair in it.”
Timothy Shanahan, a leading literacy scholar and an author of the StudySync curriculum, said there was no data suggesting that students become stronger readers when they are assigned full novels. The current dominant approach — reading one or two full books per year as a class, alongside many excerpts — “makes great sense,” he said, as a way to introduce students to a wide array of writing.
Still, some young adults are frustrated by the lack of book reading in their schools.
Ella Harrigan, 22, of San Francisco, said she read only one book her freshman year, “The Hate U Give.” “I opted out and did an online course instead, where I read a book about every two weeks,” she said.
Parents who responded to the questionnaire complained, too, even when their children were enrolled in advanced classes at some of the most highly regarded public schools in America, including specialized high schools in New York City and affluent suburban schools in Montgomery County, Md.
Both districts said they encourage a mix of whole books and excerpts but give high school principals and teachers significant latitude in how often to assign longer works.
Kasey Gray, a spokeswoman for Imagine Learning, the company that develops StudySync, noted that the curriculum offers some units based on full-length novels. But Ms. Gray acknowledged schools using the program may not incorporate whole books.
“We understand the real constraints educators face — limited time, assessment pressures and diverse student needs,” she said in a statement.
StudySync is distributed by McGraw Hill, and the materials come with a disclaimer of sorts:
Please note that excerpts in the StudySync® library are intended as touchstones to generate interest in an author’s work. StudySync® believes that such passages do not substitute for the reading of entire texts and strongly recommends that students seek out and purchase the whole literary or informational work.
Companies that publish competing products centered on excerpts, including Savvas and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said they, too, encouraged teachers to assign whole books.
H.M.H.’s Into Literature includes one full-length play in each year of high school. In response to requests from school districts, the company is developing more daily lesson plans built around whole novels, said Jennifer Raimi, a senior vice president for product development.
There are many schools, educators and publishers defying the trend away from whole books — even if they have to bend the rules to do so.
“Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still assign whole books,” said Heather McGuire, a veteran high school English teacher in Albuquerque. Over the past year, she has assigned her juniors and seniors “Hamlet,” “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” “Life of Pi” and “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”
Her students, she said, have told her they much prefer reading print books than reading on a screen.
There are some smaller players in the curriculum market, like Great Minds and Bookworms, that emphasize full books. So far, much of their business is in younger grade levels. But John White, chief executive of Great Minds, said the company is exploring expanding into high schools.
Dr. White previously served as state superintendent of education in Louisiana. Policymakers can shift classroom practice, he said, by creating new standardized tests that require students to write about books they have read during the school year, instead of just responding to short passages contained within the pages of the test booklet.
A major benefit of a whole class reading a whole novel together is the muscle it builds for citizenship and debating big ideas, Dr. White argued.
“Maybe most important is the common project,” he said, “of engaging other young people in a conversation about a book that is open to multiple interpretations.”
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