*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a mem-ber of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Articles
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
1) We Will Be Paying for the Iran War for a Very Long Time
By Haider Ali Hussein Mullick, April 26, 2026
Mr. Mullick served in the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General from 2016 to 2026.
Max Slobodda for The New York Times
America’s spending on the war in Iran will far outlast active combat. The U.S. government has already made contracts and other commitments to repair damaged bases, field counter-drone platforms, feed and shelter thousands of troops and replenish munitions.
Even if President Trump signs a deal ending the war tomorrow, we will harden bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, by reinforcing aircraft shelters, building blast walls around fuel and communications nodes, replacing destroyed satellite communications equipment and installing layered defense systems to defeat Iranian drones — the kind that killed six Americans in Kuwait. We will monitor for years Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and the Strait of Hormuz with carrier strike groups, destroyers and intelligence assets. Also, the U.S. military will have to replenish its munitions stockpiles: The war has burned through U.S. supplies of offensive missiles such as Tomahawks, used to strike Iranian ground targets, and defensive Patriot and THAAD interceptor systems, deployed to halt an onslaught of thousands of Iranian drones.
I worked for a decade in the Defense Department’s inspector general’s office, conducting oversight of the sorts of conflicts that the United States so often finds itself in — ones that are easy to start and hard to end, just like this one. The Pentagon calls wars such as these “overseas contingency operations,” a misnomer that hides their true nature: long, stubborn conflicts marked by changing objectives, cost overruns, fraud and waste. The risk is high that the public will not understand how much the Iran conflict will cost and that a lot of money will be wasted, either lining the pockets of fraudsters or paying for things that are marginal to the mission.
Congress should force the Trump administration to provide full, regular transparency on what it has signed up the nation to pay. And it needs to be clear with the American people how well the government is using the billions it is set to spend.
The best path forward is to tap a special inspector general to estimate costs, audit contracts, investigate fraud, inspect logistics chains and track whether stated objectives are met. The conflict in Iraq and Syria has one, as do the conflicts in Afghanistan and Ukraine. While I was with the Pentagon inspector general’s office, we created a website that provides the public information on funding and other oversight work relating to America’s support of Ukraine in its war against Russia.
The Iran war has neither a special inspector general nor a public website explaining how much is being spent and on what.
Federal lawmakers know they cannot count on executive branch officials for a straight answer about this war’s cost. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, told the House Budget Committee on April 15, “I don’t have a ballpark for you.” It is incredible for him to claim that he has no general sense of the Iran war’s cost so far. Many people, including in the government, have been counting.
The Pentagon told Congress that the first six days of the war cost more than $11.3 billion. The Center for Strategic and International Studies calculated that munitions consumed 84 cents of every dollar spent on the Iran conflict in the opening 100 hours, as the U.S. military burned through Tomahawk, Patriot and THAAD inventories. With over 50,000 U.S. troops deployed in the region and about 13,000 strikes against Iran, the American Enterprise Institute estimated the cost at between $25 billion and $35 billion.
And that’s before the long-tail contracts that follow every war. Those costs can be enormous, and we need to anticipate them.
In 2014, the United States began its operation to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The so-called caliphate fell in 2019. Yet Congress enacted $11.5 billion for the operation across fiscal years 2024 and 2025 — six years after ISIS was supposedly defeated. The lead inspector general filed his latest quarterly report this February, in the operation’s 12th year.
Over 17 years, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction documented $26 billion in waste, secured 171 criminal convictions and recovered almost $1.7 billion in criminal fines and other savings to the U.S. government. And the spending on this conflict is not done. Most Americans think the war in Afghanistan ended in 2021. Active combat did. Thirty-two days after the U.S. pullout, a new operation began — the Defense Department’s over-the-horizon counterterrorism mission to contain terrorist threats emanating from Afghanistan, conducted mainly from bases in Qatar. In fiscal year 2025, about four years after the fall of Kabul, the Defense Department’s comptroller reported that the mission’s obligations exceeded $4.2 billion.
For Ukraine, the Pentagon inspector general found that the Navy outspent its funding by $399 million in a single fiscal year. A separate audit found $1.1 billion in questioned costs across 323 payments. Another evaluation discovered that most of the weapons sent to the Ukrainians had not been properly inventoried.
Congress should designate one person — the Pentagon’s inspector general — to lead aggressive and continuing oversight of the whole government’s Iran war effort, providing ample funding for this work in every supplemental war appropriations measure it approves.
Congress should also ensure that the Iran war’s watchdogs have real power, giving them subpoena authority to prompt government agencies to fix problems the auditors find. As of this month, there were over 1,400 open recommendations for the Department of Defense. In December, the Pentagon failed its eighth consecutive financial audit. This department has requested another $200 billion for its war in Iran and cannot account for the funding it already has.
The Iran war is not just about treasure. Thirteen American service members have died and more than 380 have been wounded. Good oversight would hold the government accountable for both. As a Navy Reserve officer recalled to active duty in April 2023, I supported the rescue of 70 U.S. Embassy staff and their families from Sudan as that country collapsed into civil war. The capabilities that made the rescue possible — the airlift, the intelligence, the precision logistics, the access to partner bases — are what inspectors general assess and protect.
The money is already flowing. The oversight must come.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
2) 40 Years After the Meltdown, War Layers Another Disaster on Chernobyl
Ideas have been floated for how the contaminated zone could bring economic benefits to Ukraine. But for the foreseeable future, it will be an army-controlled security belt.
By Andrew E. Kramer and Evelina Riabenko, Photographs by Brendan Hoffman, Reporting from the Chernobyl exclusion zone, April 26, 2026
A Ukrainian soldier taking part in a training exercise in the Chernobyl exclusion zone this month.
Vines twirl through the broken windows of long-abandoned homes, where the detritus of lives interrupted by disaster are still scattered about: children’s shoes, dishes, coats hanging on pegs, all covered in lichen and dust.
The ghost towns of the Chernobyl exclusion zone in northern Ukraine emptied of people after the catastrophic explosion and meltdown at the nuclear power plant there 40 years ago, on April 26, 1986. High levels of radiation mean humans may never live in them again.
But these towns served another purpose for Ukrainian soldiers who recently trained amid the ruins. The troops practiced defending the irradiated land against a repeat Russian attack, taking precautions to avoid the most radioactive areas. In February 2022, Moscow’s forces entered the zone on the first day of the full-scale invasion, and occupied it for five weeks.
During the exercise, soldiers crouched beside waterlogged, mold-covered walls, aiming their rifles. Others threw live grenades into homes, chipping walls already crumbling from dry rot. Their presence highlighted a reality in the Chernobyl zone: For the foreseeable future, it will be an army-controlled security belt along the border with Belarus, a Russian ally.
“Everything depends on security” in the zone today, said the commander of the battalion training in the area, who asked to be identified by only his nickname, Skif, in keeping with military protocol.
The explosion in 1986, set off by a safety test and exacerbated by design flaws, spewed fire and radioactive material into the air, in the world’s worst nuclear disaster. Two workers were killed in the initial explosion, over two dozen emergency responders and cleanup workers died in the three months after from radiation exposure, and some 200,000 people are believed to have been relocated from the area.
Over the years, the radioactive towns, villages, forests and swamps have posed quandaries for the authorities. The land could never be repopulated, they concluded, because of contamination from long-lingering isotopes, including plutonium.
But it could bring economic benefits. Ideas included using it as a storage area for other countries’ nuclear waste, as a test site for new generations of small modular reactors, as territory for solar farms and as a destination for so-called disaster tourism.
Now, everything, other than modest solar-farm development, is on indefinite hold. Tourists, who began showing up at the site 20 years ago, are not coming back anytime soon, said Shaun Burnie, the senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Ukraine. Chernobyl has become one disaster layered on another: war fought in a radioactive zone.
Russia’s invasion in 2022 harmed efforts to contain radiation in multiple ways. Moscow’s forces occupied the crippled nuclear power station and used it as a staging area for attacks on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, early in the war. Their heavy armored vehicles stirred up small amounts of radioactive dust. Weeks later, Russian troops were defeated in the battle for Kyiv, and they withdrew from Chernobyl.
More worrisome are longer-term war risks. Scientists cannot reach wells that measure groundwater radiation, lest they step on a land mine. Also owing to mines, firefighters cannot rush to extinguish wildfires that spread radiation in smoke. Foreign scientists who studied radiation in the environment have fled.
In February 2025, Russia flew an exploding Iranian-designed Shahed drone into the gigantic steel shell that encloses an older, rickety structure built over the ruined reactor shortly after the accident. That older structure, known as the sarcophagus, is at risk of collapsing and releasing radiation.
The drone explosion punched a hole in the $2.5 billion outer shell, called the New Safe Confinement, and started a fire that burned through material needed to maintain the airtight seal. No radiation was released, but the strike set back two decades of efforts to safely isolate the worst of Chernobyl’s radiation.
The attack came a day before the opening of the influential Munich Security Conference in Germany, a warning to Ukraine’s Western allies that the war could spread radiation to Europe, from Chernobyl or other nuclear sites.
It is unclear how the confinement structure can be repaired. To protect workers from radiation, it had been built away from the reactor and later moved on rails into position over it. Now, repair work will have to be done in the highly radioactive zone, possibly by cycling large numbers of workers through stints that cannot exceed 11 hours per year, to comply with safety rules.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has estimated that repairs will cost $500 million, begin in 2028 and last four years. Foreign donors, including France and Britain, have so far pledged 70 million euros, or about $82 million, for urgent repairs. The Russian drone most likely cost no more than about $50,000.
On Sunday, Rafael Grossi, who leads the International Atomic Energy Agency, told reporters in Kyiv that he had spoken with Ukraine’s energy minister about the need to start work before 2028.
“We believe that the repairs should start as soon as possible,” Mr. Grossi said, “and that leaving the situation as is now is problematic.”
Easier to repair was a nearby solar farm that was struck by shrapnel from the drone. The 18 damaged panels were replaced.
Two solar plants are operating in the Chernobyl zone, and a third is under construction despite the war. They sell electricity for the grid using high-voltage transmission lines originally built for the reactors, and they provide backup power for cooling ponds for nuclear waste.
Solar farms, which are unaffected by radiation and are largely impervious to missile and drone attacks because they are dispersed over large areas, still have a viable future in the exclusion zone, said Yevgen Variagin, the chief executive of Solar Chernobyl. The company opened the first solar plant there in 2018.
Otherwise, the area around Chernobyl is now primarily a military site, fortified against attacks from the north toward Kyiv and against possible Russian sabotage of the reactor or waste-storage facilities.
Tank traps, which look like X’s made from steel beams, and coils of razor wire stretch out over fields in the zone. At military positions, paths are covered in nets to protect against drones.
These defenses are typical for much of the front line in Ukraine. Other military preparations are peculiar to the radiation zone.
To fight in this landscape, the Ukrainian Army took special precautions. It did not dig trenches or burrow bunkers into the ground, lest it expose soldiers to radiation in the soil. Instead, aboveground berms or bunkers were built into hills of fresh sand that was trucked in.
Looking like large yellow anthills, these now dot the landscape around the Chernobyl plant.
Soldiers patrol the ghost towns, where buildings are covered in moss and surrounded by mature trees, lost in a swirl of dense vegetation like ancient Mayan ruins.
In the recent exercise, soldiers with the 28th Regiment of the National Guard maneuvered amid abandoned homes with corroded corrugated-metal roofs and broken windows.
Though devoid of people, the area must be defended against further damage, said Skif, the commander.
Compared with destruction inflicted elsewhere in Ukraine, an attack that released more radiation at Chernobyl, he said, would be “on a completely different scale.”
Constant Méheut and Kim Barker contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
3) ‘It Wasn’t Real, but It Was Real’
By Megan K. Stack, April 26, 2026
Ms. Stack is a contributing Opinion writer, reporting from Chicago.
“If U.S. immigration enforcement were an army, it would be the world’s third richest, outspent only by the militaries of the United States and China.”
Jonathan Michael Castillo for The New York Times
It was the quiet that most troubled Mara Lynne. Her street usually bustles and thrums, but when armed, masked agents grabbed a passing man and stuffed him into the back of an S.U.V., she was the lone witness.
“There was nobody around, just me,” she said. “It was silent. That’s the part that freaks me out the most.”
Witnessing what she called an “abduction” unnerved Ms. Lynne. It’s one thing to know that such things are happening; it’s another to see it unfold before your eyes, right outside your house. Quietly.
The arrest was part of Operation Midway Blitz, the huge federal immigration surge that swept through Chicago this past fall. It was a season of madness. Helicopters chewed the skies. Federal agents sped through the streets and launched tear gas, pepper balls and rubber bullets. At least two people were shot by immigration agents; one of them was killed. Thousands of people were rounded up, even when officials had no warrants, leading to a tangle of court cases. U.S. citizens, legal residents and even City Council staff members were detained. The Trump administration claims to target violent criminals, but as of December, only 3 percent of Chicago’s detainees had wound up having convictions for violent crimes.
These past months have seen Mr. Trump’s grandiose plans for mass deportation bogging down in litigation and scandal. The masking of agents, their propensity to prey on people at courthouses, the targeting of student protesters, the use of identifying information plundered from government databases — none of that has sat well with the public or the courts.
The intense, often physical animosity between immigration agents and ordinary people in Minneapolis last winter, with agents fatally shooting two American citizens whom officials quickly smeared as domestic terrorists, helped lead to the dismissal of the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, and a freeze in funding for the department.
But before Minneapolis, there was Chicago. It was here, in a city that has long thrived on immigration, that a federal agent first shot a U.S. citizen who was protesting, with the Department of Homeland Security calling her a “domestic terrorist” and officials later dropping charges against her. It was here that Immigration and Customs Enforcement unveiled some of the harsh, militarized tactics they later transferred to Minneapolis. I visited Chicago to find out what kind of mark ICE had left on Ms. Lynne’s community, Rogers Park.
The reactions I heard were unambiguous: Residents recoiled at federal agents swarming their neighborhood and hauling people off the street. If agents had been running down hardened criminals, that might have been different. But landscapers, cooks, churchgoers, kids, people washing their clothes at the laundromat? People couldn’t accept that.
The raids felt more like military occupation than law enforcement, and they triggered the same, distinctly American revulsion against overwhelming federal power and militarized abuse that threads through the Constitution. Many people here told me that the agents supposedly sent to vanquish criminal usurpers were themselves the criminal usurpers.
Ms. Lynne was one of the residents whose political ideas sharpened as she watched the mayhem. A former model and an impassioned advocate for disability rights, she hadn’t given immigration much attention, she told me, before Mr. Trump announced his mass deportation. “Never,” she said. “I had no clue. I knew nothing.” But the arrival of the agents, menacing and masked, brought Mr. Trump’s crackdowns crashing into daily life, making residents witnesses to a national project that seemed designed to prey on vulnerable people.
“I think it just opened people’s eyes to what’s been happening,” she said. “We just never saw it in real life. Then we had to learn. It’s in your face.”
Ms. Lynne attended training sessions where leaders of a local community watch organization taught people how to legally respond to immigration agents. She started carrying a whistle. She knew what to do.
And then she spotted the agents through her window. “I was like, ‘Oh,’” she said. “Like I was in a movie. It wasn’t real, but it was real.”
A Latino, perhaps in his early 40s, had come walking down the street, dressed casually in dark jeans and a jacket. He struck Ms. Lynne as wholly unremarkable.
Suddenly two masked men in brown uniforms, bulked up with gear, approached the man. Ms. Lynne picked up her phone and whistle and rushed out.
“Leave him alone!” she shouted at the masked agents. “He lives here!” The agents called her “ma’am” and told her not to worry about it. They pulled the man’s wrists together and cuffed them in the front.
“He was looking at me like he was a 2-year-old,” Ms. Lynne said of the man taken into custody. “It was terrible.”
His name was Emilio Bahena. He is from Mexico. He worked two jobs to support his children, both of whom are U.S. citizens. After his arrest, his daughter started a fund-raising campaign, explaining that the family was struggling to cover housing costs.
The government never accused Mr. Bahena of any crime except slipping over the border into the United States, where he built a new life. Nevertheless, he was locked up for two months until his family managed to get a lawyer, who in January got him released on bond while his deportation case makes its way through court.
When agents were forcing Mr. Bahena into the back of an S.U.V., Ms. Lynne peered after him and saw other men inside. One, she said, had blood on his face. As the agents prepared to drive off, she asked for a name or a badge number.
“Have a good day,” one of the agents replied in a singsong, she said.
“Like he was getting off on it,” Ms. Lynne told me.
Later that day, Ms. Lynne sat for hours, arms wrapped around her knees, mind racing. “My neighbor just got kidnapped,” she thought. Even like-minded friends, who listened sympathetically, she said, couldn’t grasp the severity of what she’d witnessed. She believes it’s the worst thing she’s ever seen.
I asked her: What was the feeling?
She didn’t hesitate. “I was enraged,” she said.
By the time federal agents surged into Rogers Park, Mr. Trump’s deportation campaign was already hampered by severe public backlash and weakened by the mission’s fundamental incoherence.
The president framed the ICE campaign as, simultaneously, a targeted exercise to track down violent criminals and a “mass deportation” that would empty the country of undocumented immigrants. The pairing of these goals never made sense; there weren’t nearly enough dangerous immigrants to result in anything resembling an en masse purge. On the contrary, immigrants (no matter their legal status) commit violent crimes at a lower rate than native-born U.S. citizens.
Pushed by their bosses to arrest as many people as fast as they could, and emboldened by the courts to use race as a “relevant factor” in arrests, Department of Homeland Security agents ended up sweeping buildings where immigrants were rumored to live, and grabbing random people who happened to cross paths with agents. Immigration experts warned that the rush to meet quotas interfered with the more careful, time-consuming work of nabbing criminals. Undeterred, the department went big and sloppy, snatching up legal residents and U.S. citizens in a deportation frenzy that has, since October, resulted in more than 4,400 judicial rulings against the agency.
At the same time, residents of targeted communities were alienated, enraged and increasingly eager to interfere. The broader public was also disgusted: By March, half the country, according to one poll, wanted to see ICE not just reformed but abolished. Many said the lawlessness and highhanded disregard for human rights ran all the way down to the roots of the agency, which was created in the swirl of nationalistic panic, expanded surveillance and diminished civil liberties that followed the attacks of Sept. 11.
Rogers Park, a dense, eclectic, comfortably scruffy area in the city’s far north, was never likely to embrace Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration push. With its cheerful jumble of mom-and-pop hair braiding salons, panaderias and hole-in-the-wall restaurants, the neighborhood has long been a magnet for migrants and refugees. It has been described as the neighborhood whose racial demographics most closely reflect Chicago overall, although its median annual household income of $63,293 is lower than the city average.
At least 47 people have been detained in the area since Operation Midway Blitz kicked off, according to community volunteers who have tracked and mapped the arrests. They included a school employee, people washing their clothes in a laundromat and parents whose children were left behind.
Kristin Jackson, a pastor who’s lived in Rogers Park for more than three decades, told me the immigration crackdown caused a disillusionment so profound that her understanding of the country had changed.
“I’m just realizing,” she told me, “this is not the Statue of Liberty land of the free that I thought it was.”
Ms. Jackson now feels obliged to venture out into the streets to help protect people from the excesses of the federal government rather than privately teach and pray in her congregation, many of whom were also upset by the raids.
One day, Ms. Jackson joined other local clergy members to pray outside the detention center in Broadview, near Chicago. Denial of spiritual counsel was one of many complaints about conditions inside the facility.
While she and other religious leaders prayed, the Department of Homeland Security sent armored vehicles thundering near the crowd.
“It’s so eroding,” Ms. Jackson said. “People’s lives have been turned upside down by something that just feels lawless.”
The raids started in Chicago on a Saturday in September, Torrence Gardner recalled, and “that’s the first time I would’ve said it felt like living in a military zone.” Helicopters hovered overhead during breakfast, he said, and by the time he headed out to go to the gym, he felt the area was being overrun.
“Helicopters, cars, chaos,” he recalled. “I just remember the helicopter sounds. The whole day changed on a dime.”
Mr. Gardner is one of the founding members of Protect Rogers Park, a volunteer group created during the first Trump administration in response to its prohibiting people from some Muslim countries from entering the United States. As ICE and the Border Patrol poured into the city last fall, the organization’s volunteer base swelled into the hundreds, attracting people who’d never been particularly political but felt compelled to help. School and bike patrols monitored the movements of federal agents. Community care teams tried to keep an eye out for immigrants who might need help during what felt like a lockdown.
The group has also been working to place markers on sites where people were taken into custody. The idea was partly inspired by Amsterdam’s Stolpersteine, small brass plates embedded in the sidewalks to mark the last known residences of people exterminated by the Nazis. The Chicago markers are flimsier and more ephemeral — bright ropes braided from scrap fabric and laminated orange construction paper printed with butterflies and a message in English and Spanish: “A neighbor was taken from this spot on ____.”
It’s a kind of groundswell from residents reluctant to let the streets swallow these events into obscurity. They wish to record that their neighbors have been disappeared. It’s a term I associate with other places — the Dirty War in Argentina, the civil war in Sri Lanka, the Assad regime in Syria, places where human beings vanished into the maw of a state — and never wished to apply to my own country. And yet it’s true: People are disappearing.
Their cars are found abandoned, they suddenly don’t show up at work, and nobody knows where they are at first and sometimes for a long time afterward. These people are not being executed, but they disappear, and many of them will never be back in their communities again.
Ki Lee knew the Hispanic whom immigration agents dragged from her car just outside his laundromat. A regular customer, she’d been waiting for her clothes and had stepped outside for a bite to eat. Mr. Lee watched helplessly while three men he calls “soldiers” jumped from an S.U.V. and surrounded her car, pulling his customer out and shoving her into their vehicle.
The agents returned an hour later, just as another customer, a Latino, was carrying his dried clothes out to his car. The man dashed back into the store. But the “soldiers,” Mr. Lee said, chased the man inside, handcuffed him and took him away.
“I was very shocked,” Mr. Lee told me soberly. “I couldn’t sleep for several days. They were regular customers. They were very good people.”
After that, he said, the laundry grew eerily quiet. The day I dropped in, he and a few family members were sipping tea and trading gossip. Many of the laundromat’s longtime customers had gone to ground. One day a customer panicked and became too frightened to walk home on the streets. Mr. Lee felt sorry for her. He drove her home in his car.
I heard more stories of damaged business and lingering anxiety when I dropped into a town hall with Mike Simmons, the state senator for Rogers Park and the surrounding area.
The son of an immigrant who escaped Ethiopia’s Red Terror by crossing several African countries on foot, Mr. Simmons talked briefly about SNAP benefits and Medicaid before turning to what he called “the elephant in the room”: ICE. He was optimistic about new state laws he’d helped pass in the last session, allowing Illinois residents to sue immigration agents for violating their constitutional rights and barring federal agents from arresting people within 1,000 feet of a courthouse.
Next Mr. Simmons said he’d push for a $50 million relief package to shore up local businesses hurt by decimated foot traffic and frightened workers ghosting their shifts. He also wants to incorporate community watch organizations like Protect Rogers Park into the government.
A resident with a dirty-blond bob asked him whether lawmakers in Springfield could create a fund for families whose breadwinners had been detained or people who couldn’t get to work. Mr. Simmons agreed: It was a good idea.
Then a middle-aged man with a crew cut stood up. He wore glasses, a fading polo shirt and thick, sensible shoes. Would he be the meeting’s contrarian, berating Mr. Simmons and extolling the virtues of immigration enforcement? But then the man said aloud the names of the people shot by immigration officers in Chicago — Silverio Villegas Gonzáles and Marimar Martinez.
“Obviously, there hasn’t been any accountability for those shootings,” he said coldly. Mr. Simmons, he continued, should join in efforts to push the state’s attorney to prosecute the agents who opened fire.
The man was a lawyer named Ben Meyer. Despite the complications of the Constitution’s supremacy clause, which sets federal law above state law and has hamstrung local officials in trying to curb ICE abuses, he told me, he believed there were mechanisms for the state to prosecute federal agents.
“It should not be the case,” he said plainly, “that we have immigration officers running around killing people.”
People in Rogers Park are still trying to make sense of their experience under Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown — and wondering whether another surge will come.
After immigration agents fatally shot the two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, condemnation exploded across the country. Suddenly the Trump administration seemed eager to distance itself from the whole mess. Officials stopped emphasizing “mass deportations.” Even some of the politicians who had ardently favored deportation began complaining that the administration had lost public support because of poor strategy. Mr. Trump — ever poll-conscious — briefly auditioned a jarringly gentler tone toward immigrants in late January.
“We have a lot of heart for people,” he said. “They came in illegally, but they’re good people, and they’re working now on farms, and they’re working in luncheonettes and hotels and all. And we’re not looking at — we’re looking to get the criminals out right now.”
With the Iran war bedeviling Washington and midterm elections drawing ever closer, a scandal-ridden ICE seemed to retreat into the background. But will the agency stay there? Money alone suggests not. ICE (created in 2003 with a relatively modest budget of about $3.3 billion) received an extra $75 billion from Congress last year, part of Mr. Trump’s $190 billion allocation for the Department of Homeland Security. If U.S. immigration enforcement were an army, it would be the world’s third richest, outspent only by the militaries of the United States and China.
With all those contradictory signals swirling, residents of Rogers Park didn’t know what to expect. And then, right in their neighborhood, a terrible thing happened.
Sheridan Gorman, a freshman at Loyola University Chicago, was shot dead in Rogers Park. She’d been strolling along a lakeside pier with friends when a man who had been lurking nearby shot her in the back.
Police soon arrested a suspect: José Medina, a 25-year-old immigrant from Venezuela. Mr. Medina, who lived in Rogers Park, seems very much like the dangerous immigrants Mr. Trump is forever invoking. Mr. Medina has been charged with first-degree murder and illegally carrying a gun. He had highly contagious tuberculosis. He crossed the border into Texas in 2023 — during the Biden administration — and turned himself in to Department of Homeland Security agents, who detained him briefly and then released him. He then boarded a bus headed to Chicago, where he was soon arrested, accused of shoplifting from Macy’s. When he didn’t turn up for court, a judicial warrant was issued for his arrest.
Ms. Gorman’s tragic death was immediately sucked into the vortex of political debate. A few members of a pro-Trump group called Chicago Flips Red, which voiced support for ICE and denounced local officials for spending too much money on immigrants, trekked to Rogers Park to protest. A handful of local residents turned out in counterprotest, and the two groups shouted back and forth.
Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, meanwhile, told reporters that her death illustrated “national failures.”
“Failure to have comprehensive immigration reform,” Mr. Pritzker said. “Failure of the president to follow his own edict to go after the worst of the worst.”
The eagerness with which people seized on a slain young woman to score points felt a little bit cheap.
And there is this point. Somehow, despite Mr. Medina’s shoplifting charge and judicial warrant, immigration agents upended life in Rogers Park, separated families and retreated, leaving untouched a man who, if the charges against him stand up in court, was among “the worst of the worst.”
After reading about Ms. Gorman’s death, I spoke with Ms. Jackson, the pastor. She sounded, most of all, exhausted.
“It’s heartbreaking that this shocking act of violence would happen in our neighborhood,” she said simply. “It’s a tragedy.”
But she was worried, too, about how Ms. Gorman’s killing would work its way into local politics. Like most people I met in Rogers Park, Ms. Jackson is worried that the federal agents will return.
“I feel just sick about it,” she said. “We know what the narrative is going to be. And it’s the wrong narrative.”
But there is no correct narrative to be spun from all of this. Ms. Gorman’s death, a terrible coda to the turmoil and heartbreak in Rogers Park, left a community counting the costs of whatever it was the federal government tried to do here.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
4) Supreme Court Reviews Police Use of Cell Location Data to Find Criminals
Geofence searches allow law enforcement to find suspects and witnesses by sweeping up location data from cellphone users near crime scenes.
By Ann E. Marimow, Reporting from Washington, April 27, 2026
A 2019 robbery at the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Va., led law enforcement to turn to a so-called geofence warrant in an effort to find leads. Steve Helber/Associated Press
When the Call Federal Credit Union outside Richmond, Va., was robbed at gunpoint in 2019, the suspect took $195,000 from the bank’s vault and fled before the police arrived.
A detective interviewed witnesses and reviewed the bank’s security footage. But with no leads, the officer relied on a so-called geofence warrant to sweep up location data from all the cellphones in the vicinity of the bank for the 30 minutes before and after the robbery.
The data he gathered eventually led to the identification and conviction of Okello T. Chatrie, now 31, a Jamaican immigrant who came to the United States in 2017.
Geofence searches have become increasingly popular as a tool for law enforcement, but critics say they put at risk the personal data of everyday Americans and violate the Constitution. Mr. Chatrie challenged the use of a geofence warrant in his conviction, in a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday.
The justices will examine how the Constitution’s traditional protections apply to rapidly changing technology that has made it easier for the police to scoop up vast amounts of data to assemble a detailed look at a person’s movements and activities.
It has been eight years since the court last took up a major Fourth Amendment case involving the expectations of privacy for the millions of people carrying cellphones in the digital age. In that 2018 case, the court ruled that the government generally needs a warrant to collect location data drawn from cell towers about the customers of cellphone companies.
The court has also limited the government’s ability to use GPS devices to track suspects’ movements, and it has required that law enforcement get a warrant to search individual cellphones.
In Mr. Chatrie’s case, the government did obtain a warrant, but one that his legal team said was overly broad, violating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
Millions of Americans use a Google service known as “location history,” which gathers data about every two minutes about where its users travel and when. Unlike traditional warrants, which target an identified suspect based on probable cause that they have committed a crime, geofence warrants operate in reverse. Law enforcement draws a virtual “fence” or boundary around a geographic area where a crime has been committed and asks Google for data on every user whose device happens to be in the area during a particular time.
Mr. Chatrie’s lawyer Adam G. Unikowsky compared geofence warrants to fishing expeditions, saying they allow the government to “search first and develop suspicions later,” in violation of the Constitution and the longstanding prohibition against warrants that are too broad or general.
“The technology may be novel, but the constitutional problem it presents is not,” Mr. Unikowsky wrote in a court filing. “The potential for abuse is breathtaking: The government need only draw a geofence around a church, a political rally or a gun shop, and it can compel a search of every user’s records to learn who was there.”
A person’s location history, which can be reviewed, edited and deleted, is private data, Mr. Chatrie’s lawyer said. The lawyer argued that even if Mr. Chatrie had agreed to share it with Google, he had not agreed to share it with the government.
D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, countered that Mr. Chatrie had voluntarily shared his location data with Google. Similar to a person’s bank or phone records, which are held by a business, Mr. Sauer argued there is no expectation of privacy for information that someone chooses to share with a third party.
Plus, the administration contended that surveillance video showed Mr. Chatrie holding his cellphone just before the robbery, meaning he had chosen to keep it with him during the crime. Mr. Sauer argued that a person in Mr. Chartrie’s position “has no reasonable expectation of privacy” over the stored location data, and that the time period specified by the warrant was too brief to be overly intrusive.
Google says it stopped responding to geofence warrants last year, because the company no longer stores such data and instead keeps location data on each user’s device. But law enforcement has made geofence requests of other tech companies, including Apple, Lyft, Snapchat, Uber, Microsoft and Yahoo, meaning the Fourth Amendment questions before the justices remain relevant.
Officers used automated license plate readers, for instance, to help identify the man suspected in the Brown University shooting last year. Investigators identified the “Golden State Killer” using artificial intelligence-powered genealogy tools.
In Mr. Chatrie’s case, a federal judge said the geofence warrant violated the Fourth Amendment because it did not meet probable cause requirements. But the judge allowed the evidence to be admitted in court, finding that the officer who requested the warrant had acted in good faith. Mr. Chatrie eventually pleaded guilty to charges related to the robbery and is serving a nearly 12-year sentence.
A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled against Mr. Chatrie, but for a different reason. The panel found that the search was valid because Mr. Chatrie did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the two hours’ worth of location history data that he voluntarily shared with Google.
Mr. Chatrie asked the Supreme Court to weigh in after a full complement of Fourth Circuit judges divided 7 to 7 and, in a one-sentence order, left Mr. Chatrie’s conviction in place.
In the last major Fourth Amendment case heard by the court, Carpenter v. United States, the justices in 2018 made a major statement about privacy in the digital age. In general, they said, law enforcement must seek a warrant for cell tower location information. The court found at that time that it did not matter that the records at issue were in the hands of a third party.
But the court’s membership has changed since that decision. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that opinion joined by four justices who had all been appointed by Democratic presidents, including Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Of the court’s other current members, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented.
Google did not take a position on the legality of the warrant in Mr. Chatrie’s case, but told the court that it had advocated robust Fourth Amendment protections for sensitive data such as location history and had objected to thousands of geofence warrants that it believed were overbroad and swept up the data of hundreds and sometimes thousands of people.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
5) Supreme Court to Hear Arguments in Landmark Roundup Weedkiller Case
A victory for the manufacturer, Bayer, could end thousands of lawsuits against the company claiming that the herbicide causes cancer.
By Hiroko Tabuchi, Published April 26, 2026, Updated April 27, 2026
The Supreme Court in Washington. The Trump administration has formally backed Bayer in the case. Eric Lee for The New York Times
The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on Monday in a case that could lead to the dismissal of tens of thousands of lawsuits against Bayer, the pharmaceutical and biotech giant, that claim the weedkiller Roundup caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Developed by Monsanto in the 1970s, Roundup is one of the best-selling weedkillers in the world, but it has been dogged by controversy over its effects on human health. The company, which was acquired by the German conglomerate Bayer in 2018, has faced thousands of lawsuits, amounting to one of the largest waves of such litigation in U.S. history.
Evidence in lab animals, and more limited evidence in humans, has indicated a link between Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, and cancer. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2015 classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
The Environmental Protection Agency considers the herbicide to be safe. The E.P.A. is responsible for pesticide labeling nationwide, and Bayer argues that the federal agency’s decision overrides state-level legal claims, effectively insulating it from lawsuits. The federal government faces an Oct. 1 deadline to re-examine the effects of glyphosate.
Monsanto, which was acquired by Bayer in 2018, had petitioned the court to review a lawsuit brought by John Durnell of St. Louis, Mo., a gardener who used Roundup for decades. Mr. Durnell received a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and sued the company in 2019, alleging that his illness was a result of exposure to the pesticide and that Monsanto had failed to warn of the cancer risks.
The Trump administration has formally backed Bayer in the case, reversing a position taken by the Biden administration. In February President Trump also issued an unusual executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to guarantee production of glyphosate-based herbicides, essentially elevating Roundup to a national security priority.
That came soon after Bayer made a move to end the bulk of its current litigation over Roundup, proposing a $7.25 billion class-action settlement. With a Supreme Court win, much of Bayer’s litigation woes over the weedkiller could be behind it.
The Justice Department agrees with Bayer’s argument that federal law expressly and implicitly pre-empts any failure-to-warn claims under state law, because the E.P.A. has already evaluated the pesticide and determined that a cancer warning is not required. That means manufacturers cannot unilaterally alter federally approved labels without violating federal law, D. John Sauer, the U.S. solicitor general, said in his brief.
Environmental groups argue the E.P.A.’s review process is deficient and routinely fails to require cancer warnings to protect the public. They note that a federal court vacated a health-risk assessment and pesticide-registration review conducted by the E.P.A. in 2020, calling the agency’s evaluation of glyphosate’s cancer risk flawed.
“E.P.A.’s overall review is limited, leaving an important and robust role for states,” George A. Kimbrell, lead counsel for the Center for Food Safety, wrote in his brief.
Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the United States, sprayed on “Roundup Ready” genetically modified crops including corn, soybeans, and cotton to control weeds. In the United States, about 280 million pounds of glyphosate are applied annually across nearly 300 million acres of farmland.
Farmers also often spray glyphosate on non-GMO crops such as oats, wheat, and lentils shortly before harvest, drying out the plants and making them easier to harvest. This leads to higher residues in finished products like oatmeal, bread and cereal.
Over the past year, Bill Anderson, the Bayer chief executive, has said the company could stop selling its Roundup weedkiller altogether because of the billions of dollars that it has paid out toward its Roundup litigation. The situation had become an “existential” threat to the company and farmers, he said in May.
That has raised concerns that American farmers could lose the dominant supplier of a weedkiller that has become the cornerstone of U.S. food production. Notably, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who as an environmental lawyer once helped win a $289 million jury award against Monsanto, now owned by Bayer — has stood by the administration’s support for glyphosate.
The food supply depended on it, he said in February, even as he said that herbicides and pesticides were “toxic by design” and “put Americans at risk.”
A growing body of scientific literature has linked glyphosate exposure to non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other cancers, as well other diseases. That research contradicts the findings of the E.P.A. as well as food regulators in Europe, which maintain that glyphosate is unlikely to be carcinogenic.
In December, a landmark study that found glyphosate was not a human health risk was retracted by the journal that published it in 2000, after revelations that Monsanto’s scientists had played a significant role in the research.
At a symposium on glyphosate in March, nearly 70 health experts called on regulators around the world, including the E.P.A., to address glyphosate’s harms to human health and its links to cancer and other chronic diseases. The experts said in a joint statement that “glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides harm human health and can cause cancer,” and “the comprehensive evidence supports this conclusion, with the strongest epidemiological evidence linking exposure to increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system.”
The full findings of the group are set to be published later this year.
A victory for Bayer at the Supreme Court could establish that, because the E.P.A. has reviewed glyphosate and determined it does not require a cancer warning, individual states cannot allow lawsuits that claim the product is mislabeled because it lacks that warning. That could eliminate a substantial portion of Bayer’s liability, said Nora Freeman Engstrom, a professor of law at Stanford Law School. “It would close the books on substantial liability,” she said. “But not all.”
The administration’s actions have stunned and infuriated both environmentalists and the largely female, health-conscious “Make America Healthy Again” activist supporters of Mr. Kennedy, who had thrown their support behind Mr. Trump.
Kelly Ryerson, a MAHA campaigner, said the movement planned to hold a rally at the Supreme Court on Monday when the justices hear arguments on Bayer’s case. The rally would be called “The People vs. Poison,” she said in a notice to her followers. “We plan for it to be huge!”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
6) Hezbollah Says It Will Keep Weapons as Lebanon Says Israeli Strikes Killed 14
Despite a cease-fire, Israel and Hezbollah have been trading attacks almost daily.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 27, 2026
A funeral in Maaroub, southern Lebanon, on Sunday, which according to the country’s health ministry was one of the deadliest days in the country since a truce was declared. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah declared on Monday that it would not lay down its weapons, a day after the authorities in Lebanon said 14 people had been killed in Israeli attacks in one of the deadliest days since a truce was declared this month.
Naim Qassem, the leader of Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed group, said in a written statement that it would not “relinquish its weapons or its defenses.” Israel has demanded Hezbollah’s disarmament as a precondition for ending its invasion of southern Lebanon.
But it is still far from clear whether the Lebanese government can rein in Hezbollah, whose devoted Shiite Muslim supporters and battalions of fighters have long made it Lebanon’s dominant military power.
The latest war in Lebanon began in early March when Hezbollah attacked Israel in solidarity after the United States and Israel launched a war on its patron, Iran.
Though President Trump has declared a cease-fire in Lebanon through mid-May, Israel and Hezbollah have continued to trade attacks almost daily. Hezbollah has fired rockets and drones at Israeli communities while Israeli forces have bombarded southern Lebanon and seized territory there.
The terms of the U.S.-backed truce permit Israel to continue defensive military operations. Israeli officials say that includes continuing to raze Lebanese border towns that Israel has seized.
Lebanon’s health ministry said the 14 people killed on Sunday included two women and two children, but did not give many other details, state media reported.
On Sunday, the Israeli military said a soldier had been killed in Lebanon, raising the death toll in Israel’s ranks in the current conflict to at least 16. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel accused Hezbollah of repeatedly violating the truce.
“Hezbollah’s violations are essentially disintegrating the cease-fire,” he said on Sunday.
Lebanese and Israeli officials have met twice in Washington to discuss next steps in the agreement, most recently at the White House. The talks broke a long taboo on high-level negotiations between the two countries.
Mr. Qassem condemned the Lebanese government for negotiating with Israel, adding that the country’s leaders had made a “gratuitous and humiliating concession” by even sitting down with Israeli officials.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
7) By Week’s End, Trump’s War Will Be Plainly Illegal
By Erwin Chemerinsky, April 27, 2026
Mr. Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
President Trump’s war with Iran is almost certainly illegal: Congress hasn’t declared war or authorized it by statute, and it wasn’t precipitated by an imminent attack or a national emergency. If the war continues through Friday without congressional approval, it will clearly be illegal, having passed the 60-day threshold and the 48-hour notice period that the president is given, under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, to conduct this kind of military operation.
Whether you support or oppose this war — or, as Mr. Trump has called it, this “excursion” — time will be up. And it is the obligation of the federal courts to say so.
The resolution, often called the War Powers Act, was adopted during the Vietnam War. It applies when American troops are engaged in hostilities or in situations in which hostilities are impending — such as during this war with Iran.
Despite Mr. Trump’s saying, on Thursday, “Don’t rush me” regarding the war’s timeline, the act requires that the president withdraw our military from participation in hostilities after 60 days unless Congress has declared war, has authorized a 60-day extension or is physically unable to meet as a result of an armed attack against the United States. The president can extend this by 30 days if he certifies to Congress in writing that an “unavoidable military necessity” regarding the safety of our armed forces requires it.
The Iran war began on Feb. 28. For these purposes, the clock started running on March 2, when the president formally notified Congress of his military action against Iran. Congress has not declared war or done anything to authorize the war, and its refusal to do so in no way constitutes the requisite approval to continue the conflict — the War Powers Resolution doesn’t come with a check box for opting out.
If the president and Iran’s leaders don’t reach an agreement to end the war before the deadline, every indication is that Mr. Trump and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate will ignore the act. To try to justify continuing the war, there’s a good chance they’ll come up with some new form of legal-sounding double talk. If that’s the case, it will be left to the courts to uphold the law. Suits should be brought, including by service members and by members of Congress, to enforce it.
Unfortunately, recent efforts to enforce the act have been dismissed by the courts as involving political questions that they cannot decide. For example, in Crockett v. Reagan, in 1982, a Federal District Court dismissed a lawsuit by members of Congress that challenged U.S. military assistance to El Salvador. In Doe v. Bush, in 2002, a Federal District Court dismissed a suit to enjoin President George W. Bush from invading Iraq. The court said that the issues raised were political questions “beyond the authority of a federal court to resolve.” Kucinich v. Obama, in 2011, challenged America’s military actions in Libya as violating the act and the Constitution. A Federal District Court dismissed the case.
These decisions make meaningless Congress’s war powers. In the face of congressional inaction, and without judicial enforcement, there are realistically no checks on the president’s ability to unilaterally wage war. If the federal judiciary, up to and including the Supreme Court, won’t uphold its responsibility here, it will nullify our Constitution’s design that two branches of government should be involved when our country goes to war.
The courts haven’t always been so reluctant. The Supreme Court decided several cases arising from the Quasi War, an undeclared naval war with France between 1798 and 1800: In Talbot v. Seeman (1801), the court emphasized the importance of Congress’s involvement in any type of war. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that the “whole powers of war” were vested in Congress. In Little v. Barreme (1804), the court held that even during wartime the president cannot authorize actions that violate acts of Congress.
In the Prize Cases, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of Abraham Lincoln’s blockading Southern ports in 1861. In a narrow 5-to-4 decision, the court ruled that although the president cannot initiate war, as the commander in chief he could meet an armed rebellion with force. It did not, however, question its own authority to rule on a president’s war powers.
The notion that courts cannot enforce constitutional and statutory provisions concerning war powers has no historical foundation. Nor is there any basis for arguing that the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional as an infringement of the president’s powers as the commander in chief. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress the power “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.” That last phrase has immediate and obvious relevance when it comes to our military blockading or boarding ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Constitution’s framers unquestionably intended that the power to use military force lay with Congress. During his presidency, George Washington wrote: “The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress, therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject, and authorized such a measure.”
Yes, presidents control the execution of wars, but they don’t decide whether to take the country to war. While in Congress, James Madison wrote: “Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued or concluded.”
The courts should simply hold that the War Powers Resolution requires the president to end our involvement in the war with Iran unless and until Congress authorizes it. This shouldn’t be — and isn’t — different than any other injunction on any administration to comply with the law. Mr. Trump might disregard such an order. But that isn’t a reason for the federal judiciary to abandon its duty to enforce the law.
Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school and a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
8) Et Tu, Brute? What Elon Musk’s Clash With Sam Altman Is Really About.
Mr. Musk’s lawsuit against Mr. Altman and OpenAI makes the case that all-encompassing greed is Silicon Valley’s defining feature.
By David Streitfeld, Reporting from San Francisco, April 28, 2026
Illustration by Ben Denzer; Photographs by Eric Lee/The New York Times, Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
One of the most controversial and overexposed men in the world is suing another man, who is equally unsympathetic and equally inescapable. Both are insanely rich.
It is so tempting to look away.
Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman involves onetime colleagues and buddies who became peevish enemies. Now they would like to take each other down. Happens all the time. These guys just have more lawyers.
Ignoring this conflict would be a mistake, however. The rancorous dispute between Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman, which went to trial this week with opening statements in an Oakland, Calif., federal courtroom on Tuesday, goes to the heart of Silicon Valley, a place that has always cloaked itself in virtue.
Mr. Altman and Mr. Musk started working on what was supposed to be a different sort of tech lab in 2015. OpenAI was a Manhattan Project for artificial intelligence, a nonprofit venture that would act as a shield against rapacious behavior by less benevolent outfits. The goal was to “shift the dialog toward being about humanity winning rather than any particular group or company,” according to a document in the case.
Mr. Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, provided the initial funding. Mr. Altman was OpenAI’s leader and spokesman. But Mr. Musk says their interests quickly diverged when it became clear just how much money was up for grabs. OpenAI converted to a for-profit company last year. “A textbook tale of altruism versus greed,” Mr. Musk asserted in his suit’s opening salvo.
The fact that the person calling himself an altruist here is likely to become the world’s first trillionaire doesn’t necessarily make it untrue. In his lawsuit, filed in 2024, Mr. Musk said Mr. Altman, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and others “unjustly enriched” themselves in the development of OpenAI “to the tune of billions of dollars.”
OpenAI, whose value is approaching $1 trillion, had the inevitable response: No, you’re the one who is greedy. The company argued that Mr. Musk walked away when he could not take over the entire enterprise.
“This case has always been about Elon generating more power and more money for what he wants,” OpenAI said in a statement.
One of the few things the moguls agree on is that their feud evokes the works of a certain Elizabethan playwright. Mr. Musk, 54, said in his suit that Mr. Altman’s “perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions.” Mr. Altman, 41, mused in a blog post this month that “there has been so much Shakespearean drama between the companies in our field.”
If there is a Shakespeare play that could sum up this soured friendship, it’s “Julius Caesar.” Brutus wants to stop Caesar from gaining too much power, or so he says. Caesar is quite surprised that he’s being assassinated by a supposed friend. “Et tu, Brute?” he cries. Brutus ends the play as dead as Caesar but is mourned as “the noblest Roman of them all.”
Mr. Musk should be so lucky to draw such praise.
‘For the Good of the World’
In the middle of the last decade, Mr. Altman was a Silicon Valley insider running the top start-up incubator, Y Combinator. Ambitious and persuasive, he didn’t want just to fund companies. He was on a mission to save humanity, which — unknown to the masses — was at great risk.
“I think A.I. will probably, most likely, lead to the end of the world,” Mr. Altman said in 2015. It was a fear he would often express. Why not, he asked, create a bulwark against the other A.I. companies “for the good of the world”?
Mr. Altman drew in Mr. Musk, who was even more worried about where A.I. was heading. “We are summoning the demon,” Mr. Musk once said.
Immediately, there was a problem. People everywhere work on nonprofit ventures for modest salaries. They sacrifice for their ideals. Mr. Altman knew that would not fly in Silicon Valley. The engineers and scientists would “get start-up-like compensation if it works,” he promised.
The nonprofit was dead almost before it began. OpenAI is owned by its employees and investors, including Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, as well as the OpenAI Foundation. (Mr. Altman has no direct equity in OpenAI but has other investments that make him comfortably a billionaire.) OpenAI is planning to sell shares to the public in one of the richest stock offerings in history.
Silicon Valley is the great wellspring of wealth in modern America. Nine of the 10 richest Americans are tech entrepreneurs, with Warren Buffett the only exception. People might be offended by OpenAI’s turnabout, but few could say they were shocked.
Except the richest man in the world, whose own A.I. venture, xAI, is now part of one of his other companies, SpaceX. SpaceX will soon sell shares to the public as a decidedly for-profit operation.
No Happy Ending
Tech companies are subject to relatively few constraints these days. Congress is generally passive. Federal regulators have been hobbled. The Trump administration is stocked with venture capitalists and others receptive to tech and its money, as is President Trump.
What’s left for tech opponents are civil suits. Social media companies face an onslaught of cases. One of the first, in Los Angeles last month, found that Meta and YouTube were to blame for anxiety and depression in a young woman who was a heavy user.
“Trials are all we have right now, and things are better because of them,” said Max Tegmark, a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit trying to reduce catastrophic technology risks. “Trials provide information that is not otherwise accessible.”
The exhibits in the Musk/Altman trial are an example of material that presumably would never have seen the light otherwise. That includes emails between the two leaders as they tried getting OpenAI off the ground.
“Do you have any objection to me proactively increasing everyone’s comp by 100-200k per year?" Mr. Altman wrote to Mr. Musk in 2015. “I think they’re all motivated by the mission here but it would be a good signal to everyone we are going to take care of them over time.”
The Future of Life Institute gives OpenAI an overall grade of C plus for safety while xAI got a D. “A.I. is less regulated in America than sandwiches,” said Mr. Tegmark, who is also a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You can’t open a sandwich shop without having your kitchen inspected. But you can release an A.I. girlfriend for 11-year-olds and that’s fine.” A defeat for OpenAI might begin to change that, he said.
Some A.I. watchdogs said they would like to see OpenAI brought to justice the way Meta and YouTube were. But they would prefer almost any plaintiff to Mr. Musk.
“I don’t have long-term faith in a system where we’re legislating through private litigation,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a Washington-based advocacy group. “I don’t want to rely on a billionaire with a grievance.”
If Mr. Musk wins, she pointed out, it would weaken or even destroy OpenAI, “opening up a large share of the market that an Elon Musk company can then gobble up.”
And if OpenAI gets the suit dismissed? “It would send a signal that it’s OK to launch as a nonthreatening nonprofit working for the public’s benefit and then cynically change to a for-profit without any accountability,” she said.
Ms. Haworth’s conclusion: “There’s no happy ending here.”
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Some critics are worried that, in the worst scenario for OpenAI, its charitable arm would shutter. That, they said, would wipe out a very large foundation that could have helped people. Mr. Musk says he will give any damages he receives to the foundation.
Others take a more benign view.
“The law doesn’t rely on you being a good person to act in the public interest,” said Shaoul Sussman, a former official with the Federal Trade Commission. “A lot of the dirty laundry of OpenAI is going to come out.”
In a different environment, Mr. Musk’s pursuit of OpenAI might have been brief, ending with a tip to regulators. But he is not keen on government oversight, which during the Biden administration produced investigations and enforcement actions into his companies.
Instead, Mr. Musk’s case against OpenAI uses a legal doctrine called ultra vires, which means “beyond the powers.” It holds that a corporation is restricted to activities defined in its charter. This approach was widely used in the early 19th century when the federal government was small and weak and only a competitor could rein in your company.
Most corporations now have wide-ranging charters that allow them to pursue multiple goals. But there is one exception: nonprofits.
“This is the first high-profile case that I know of being pursued under these statutes for 100 years,” Mr. Sussman said.
In a trial expected to last several weeks, the very old laws will meet the very new technology. As Shakespeare said, what’s past is prologue.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
9) Graduates Reset Ambitions in Pursuit of First Jobs
Young people aiming to build careers are entering fields they had not considered to find their footing.
By Sydney Ember, April 28, 2026
A dismal job market has turned the spring commencement season into a bruising ordeal for many, including Sadie Parker, who will graduate in June from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Credit...Adam Amengual for The New York Times
Sadie Parker was fretting about finding a job.
Many people she knew were having trouble landing work. She had wanted to join the Foreign Service, but she was worried that federal spending cuts could limit her options. She was petrified that artificial intelligence would wipe out other entry-level jobs.
“I was extremely anxious,” said Ms. Parker, 22, who will graduate in June from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a double major in political science and economics.
To improve her chances, she broadened her search, applying for positions in consulting and other fields. She spent hours on a cover letter for a job at KPMG, the accounting firm, advising the California state government.
“I was like, wow, this looks so interesting,” she said. “The next day, I got a rejection.”
Recent college graduates are facing the most dismal and unpredictable job market in years. Employers overall are hiring fewer workers, dimming the prospects in particular for first-time entrants to the labor market. The rise of A.I. and its abilities are intensifying fears that entry-level jobs will disappear forever.
Junior-level postings on the job site Indeed fell 7 percent in 2025 from the previous year, according to a report the company released last week.
“As a job seeker, you’re having to work a lot harder to land that same job now because the competition has just really stiffened in the last couple years,” said Cory Stahle, an economist at Indeed.
Those forces have transformed the spring graduation season into a bruising ordeal for many of America’s youngest degree holders.
In interviews and in responses to a New York Times survey, some college seniors and recent graduates said they had applied to more than 100 jobs without securing so much as a first-round interview. A number have resorted to tracking their applications using detailed Excel spreadsheets.
There is a swelling collective suspicion that A.I. is rejecting applications before human recruiters ever lay eyes on them.
The hunt has frustrated nascent career dreams and forced many job seekers to recalibrate their postgraduation plans. Some are working as servers at pizza joints, as baristas at coffee shops and in other jobs that do not require college degrees. Others have plans to attend graduate school to avoid the labor market altogether. Whereas embarking on a career used to be a goal after college, increasingly it is having any job at all.
“I’m, like, is it me or is it really, like, the market right now?” said Natalia Martinez, 24, a senior at the University of Central Florida. “I just feel like it’s so hard for somebody to take a chance on a college graduate.”
Ms. Martinez said she had applied to 150 jobs since February — “really anything that comes up in my area,” she said, including for positions as a receptionist or medical assistant — but she has not been successful. She spends sleepless nights doom-scrolling for jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed and is preparing for the possibility that she may have to move back in with her parents after graduation.
“I feel like I’m doing everything that I possibly can,” she said. “I just want some kind of path.”
Angst on college campuses about future employment is perennial and escalates during hiring slowdowns, when companies are more reluctant to bring on inexperienced workers. A front-page article in The Times in April 1991, for instance, took note of “traumatized seniors” whose job searches had “become a disheartening struggle of résumés, rejection and uncertainty.”
But fueled by the frenzy around A.I. and public prognostications of job market ruin, the typical jitters have hardened into dread.
“Students are definitely nervous,” said Sean McGowan, the director of employer relations at Carnegie Mellon University.
College graduates typically do better during economic downturns than workers without degrees. And while there have been dire predictions about A.I.’s effect on employment, the technology so far has not led to widespread job losses.
Still, the challenging job market has revived age-old questions among college students and recent graduates about whether going to college is worth it.
“I thought getting a college degree was the answer to everything,” said Lucy Kinyanjui, 22, a senior at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. “I feel like we just have to wait it out. I feel like getting my degree now is kind of useless.”
Ms. Kinyanjui, who juggles classes with work as a server at Topgolf, said she was constantly thinking about applying for more lucrative jobs that aligned with a career in health care. But she is concerned that her degree, in liberal studies, will not appeal to potential employers, especially in such a tough job market. She is thinking about getting a master’s degree eventually in the hope that it will make her more employable.
“I’m afraid of the rejection that I’m going to face,” she said.
Johnathon McCartney, 23, has felt similarly discouraged. A senior at the University of Florida who transferred from Colby College in Maine after his freshman year, Mr. McCartney studied public relations and wanted to get a job in communications. He focused his search on the Louisville, Ky., area so he could live near his girlfriend, but snubs piled up, including from a local P.R. firm.
“I applied for an internship with them and I interviewed, and I didn’t even get that,” he said. “Who is this state-level firm taking for a P.R. internship if not me?”
Mr. McCartney recently accepted a remote job as an immigration services officer with the federal government.
“I just feel fortunate or grateful that this is an opportunity that ended up working out for me,” he said.
For Ms. Parker, the senior at U.C. Santa Barbara, the sense of urgency was growing. None of her applications seemed to be gaining traction with employers. As A.I.’s technology improved, she wondered if she was running out of time to find an entry-level job.
“I was very much like, OK, I got to make sure I do this now,” she said.
When one of her friends suggested that she apply for a job as a finance associate at a large health technology company, she jumped at the chance even though she did not have experience in finance. She reached out to the company’s recruiters on LinkedIn and set up an informational chat.
Over the course of three months, Ms. Parker had one interview with the company, then another, and another.
“It was kind of a stressful process,” she said.
Three weeks after her third interview, in mid-December, she heard back for the last time.
She had gotten the job.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
10) Trump’s Top Child Care Official Wants a ‘Bonfire of Regulations’
As Americans face soaring child care costs, Alex Adams wants to loosen rules and tighten spending. Critics say that will harm children and shutter day cares.
By Coral Davenport, Reporting from Washington, April 28, 2026
Students at a Head Start program in Miami last year. The program provides child care and preschool to hundreds of thousands of the nation’s poorest children. Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press
When Alex Adams arrived in Washington late last year as the Trump administration’s point man on child care, he was little known outside his home state of Idaho, where he had helped engineer a massive deregulation effort that became the envy of many conservative activists.
He made his intentions clear right away.
Federal child care regulations, he told his new staff, should “fit on an index card in my back pocket,” according to two people who heard him make the remark.
Now, five months into his job as head of the Administration for Children and Families, which controls about $25 billion in child care and preschool funding for some 2.3 million poor children, Mr. Adams is preparing what he has said will be a “bonfire” of regulations.
Among his top targets: the most sweeping overhaul in a generation for Head Start, which provides child care and preschool to hundreds of thousands of the nation’s poorest children. Mr. Adams intends to loosen or eliminate the rules that limit how many children can be supervised by each teacher, according to three people familiar with the plans. Conservatives say the changes could give more poor children access to the service, yet many child care experts say they could jeopardize quality and safety. The alterations are expected to affect almost every other aspect of Head Start as well, such as nutrition standards for meals and health standards that require staff to ensure that children get access to medical care.
“We’re going to barbecue a lot of sacred cows,” Mr. Adams, who declined through a spokesman to be interviewed for this article, recently told the Imprint, a podcast about family policy. His office is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
As the Trump administration continues a quest led by its budget director, Russell T. Vought, to erase regulations and shrink bureaucracy in ways often unseen beyond industries and others who interact directly with the government, Mr. Adams is applying those conservative ideals in an area that will directly touch millions of Americans — particularly poor families who rely on federal subsidies for day care and other needs.
He appears to be relishing the role. In February, his office posted a cartoon on LinkedIn of Mr. Adams burning a hole through a stack of regulatory documents, sporting retro black-framed glasses, a Trump-esque extra-long red tie, and wielding a flaming match.
Mr. Adams has demonstrated an ability to tap hot-button issues important to the Trump administration. When Vice President JD Vance and other administration officials began highlighting rampant fraud involving day care centers in Minneapolis’s Somali migrant community, Mr. Adams attempted to cut off child care subsidies to Minnesota and four other Democratic-run states — a move that was blocked by the courts.
He is planning regulatory changes that would disqualify American children from receiving child care subsidies if one or more of their parents are not U.S. citizens, according to two people with knowledge of the effort who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans are not final.
President Trump last year tried but failed to freeze funding for Head Start, and considered proposing its full elimination, calling its curriculum “radical.” But Mr. Adams’s effort to transform the program by undoing regulations could have implications for many more young children than just those enrolled in Head Start. That is in part because preschools that enroll a mix of Head Start recipients and other children are generally required to follow the program’s rules and ratios for all students.
Mr. Trump has indicated in recent weeks that he would like to curtail federal spending on child care.
“We’re a big country, we have 50 states, we have all these other people, we’re fighting wars,” Mr. Trump said this month. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care.”
Mr. Adams’s efforts have drawn fire from critics who warn that deregulatory changes such as putting teachers and day care workers in charge of larger classes could endanger the children.
“There’s a difference between common-sense streamlining of regulations and throwing the rules that keep children safe into a bonfire,” said Elliot Haspel, an early-childhood education expert at Capita, a family policy research organization.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department, said that Mr. Adams “has demonstrated what effective leadership looks like by cutting unnecessary red tape while maintaining appropriate health and safety standards in programs.”
Mr. Nixon said that The Times’s description of Mr. Adams’s plans to deregulate Head Start by lifting federal child-to-staff ratios and other rules was “an inaccurate characterization.” But he also pointed to the health department’s proposed 2027 fiscal year budget for the program, which describes an approach that would “streamline” federal standards on “health and safety requirements, child-to-staff ratios, and definitions of quality.”
Before joining the administration, Mr. Adams was a minor celebrity in conservative circles for his work in Idaho.
As budget director for five years under Gov. Brad Little, a Republican, Mr. Adams pushed policies that helped make Idaho the most deregulated state, according to George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, which tracks state regulations.
Elon Musk, who stormed into Washington after Mr. Trump’s 2024 election win to oversee his austerity program, the Department of Government Efficiency, posted a chart then showing Idaho’s plunge in regulations, writing, “Wow,” and adding a heart-eyes emoji.
When Mr. Adams took the helm of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare in June 2024, he moved fast to cut what he called “rocks-in-shoes” regulations. He erased a rule requiring foster parents to receive training and limited child care subsidies to only families who are very poor.
He worked with Idaho lawmakers to craft a law loosening teacher-child ratios. Federal recommendations currently say that a single caregiver should supervise no more than four infants, six 2-year-olds, nine 3-year-olds, or ten 4- to 8-year-olds. Under the new Idaho law, one person can care for up to six infants, nine 2- to 3-year-olds, thirteen 3- to 5-year-olds or twenty-five 5-to-13-year-olds.
The goal, said state Representative Barbara Ehardt, a Republican who worked with Mr. Adams on the measure, was to make it easier for parents to operate small day care centers out of their homes.
“One more child can make or break the business,” Ms. Ehardt said.
After his confirmation by the Senate and his November swearing-in, Mr. Adams devoted his first days in Washington to foster care.
He sent letters to at least 10 states directing them to roll back rules that require foster and adoptive parents to affirm the preferred gender or sexual orientation of gay, bisexual or transgender children in their care. Those rules, he wrote violate the First Amendment and “exclude loving families from adoption based on ideological, religious litmus tests.”
Some of the letters included an implicit threat to cut off funds if the states did not comply. “As you know,” Mr. Adams wrote, “my responsibilities include monitoring the use of relevant federal funds and ensuring compliance with federal law.”
Massachusetts and Vermont soon reversed their policies.
In a step that won bipartisan accolades, he directed 39 states to end their so-called orphan tax, which diverts survivors’ benefits for foster children whose biological parents have died to welfare agencies. Idaho and 10 other states have already ended the practice. Since his letters, the governors or legislatures of at least eight states have moved to make the changes.
When attention turned in December to the day care fraud scandal in Minnesota, Mr. Adams sent letters to state officials there demanding the “complete universe” of personal data on families receiving subsidies, including Social Security numbers and alien registration numbers, which can be used by the Department of Homeland Security to track applicants for asylum.
Mr. Adams said the demand for data was intended to “give confidence to the American taxpayer” that the money was not being improperly spent. It is illegal to use federal subsidies to pay for child care for undocumented children.
After Mr. Vance and Mr. Musk shared a video by a right-wing influencer purporting to show more fraud at day care centers in the Somali community, Mr. Adams followed up with similar demands for data about child care subsidy recipients in New York, California, Illinois and Colorado. He threatened to cut off $10 billion in funding if the states did not comply.
The states sued, saying the administration had no justification for the action beyond a “desire to punish” them for their political leadership, and courts have halted the freeze in funds.
Mr. Adams also ramped up verification requirements for all states receiving child care subsidies, saying his agency would send payments only after receiving photo evidence or receipts detailing how the money was spent.
That process halted payments to hundreds of day cares in states that struggled to adapt.
In Missouri, for instance, state officials found that their access to a state account that distributes federal child care subsidies was suspended with no notice. Days passed before Mr. Adams’s agency informed them about the new requirements, and the funds remained blocked for almost two weeks.
The freeze temporarily halted subsidy payments to 1,743 Missouri child care providers, or roughly 53 percent of day care providers in the state, according to the Missouri Department of Education.
Jamaica Showers, who runs a day care in St. Louis serving 27 children, 23 of whom receive federally subsidized tuition, said that just six children attended during the period that funds were halted.
Ms. Showers said the episode has her questioning whether she should accept children who rely on subsidized tuition. “It feels very scary now,” she said.
On Jan. 6, the same date that his agency sent the letters to the four states, Mr. Adams agency also proposed repealing four regulations that had been designed to make it easier for child care providers to receive the subsidized tuitions for low-income children. The changes are designed to save taxpayer money on child care — but small day care owners say they would reimpose burdens on them.
The current rules require states to send child care subsidies to providers at the beginning of pay periods, based on enrollment numbers — the same method used to fund public schools. Without the rules, providers would be reimbursed afterward, based on documented attendance — and would not be paid for days that children don’t attend.
The proposed changes would also make poor families pay more out of pocket, by deleting a requirement that their co-payment make up no more than 7 percent of household income. And they eliminate a requirement that states reserve child care slots for children with disabilities.
The proposed rollbacks, which are expected to be made final in the coming months, have received more than 12,000 public comments.
Among the many commenters opposing the rollbacks was Crystal Rogers, who runs Cozy Couch day care in Martinsburg, W.Va. She said the changes would hurt her small business, along with other mom-and-pop operations — the very businesses Mr. Adams has said he wants to encourage.
“If they take away enrollment-based pay, I will have to close. And I know a lot of other providers will as well,” she said. “My mortgage, utilities and insurance, my food bills — they don’t stop when a child is sick. Tying payment to attendance means that if a child is sick for a week, I lose a week of pay.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
11) Trump Push to End Key Humanitarian Protection Reaches Supreme Court
The effort to dismantle Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., is part of a shift away from providing humanitarian assistance to people from troubled countries.
By Jazmine Ulloa and Miriam Jordan, April 28, 2026
Jazmine Ulloa, who reported from Newark, N.J., and Miriam Jordan, who reported from Los Angeles, cover immigration.
An aircraft technician and Venezuelan whose Temporary Protected Status has expired has gone from earning $1,500 a week in a job with health insurance and a retirement plan to making $600 a week. Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
For decades, the United States has had a way to swiftly provide temporary legal status to people whose home countries are convulsed by famine, war or other acute humanitarian crises.
Created by Congress in 1990, Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., was a signal to a volatile world that the United States was committed to helping people who couldn’t safely return to their countries, and were unlikely to qualify for permanent residency under longstanding international refugee or asylum protections.
But President Trump has been pushing to end T.P.S. for hundreds of thousands of people, and on Wednesday, his administration will ask the Supreme Court to bless that effort, which has faced a succession of legal challenges.
While the termination of T.P.S. for Haiti and Syria will be the question before the justices when they take the bench on Wednesday morning, the stakes are far greater. Already, the president has all but ended the resettlement of refugees, who for decades were admitted by the tens of thousands. The system for weighing asylum claims, long overwhelmed by the number of claims and the lack of resources, has been brought to a near standstill by the administration.
Now, if allowed to effectively end T.P.S., the administration would be taking another step in remaking the role of the United States in the global order, furthering a shift away from programs and ideals that leaders in both parties championed for more than half a century.
Mr. Trump and his allies have argued that humanitarian programs have become dominant pathways for many migrants to enter the country, even though the programs were intended to serve relatively few people. “If you have hundreds of thousands of fake asylum seekers, what happens to the real asylum seekers?” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau told the U.N. General Assembly in September.
Lawyers challenging the administration in court argue the effort to strip away protections for immigrants is fueled by prejudice and politics and is about expanding the pool of people who can be expelled as part of the president’s mass deportation campaign.
“What we’re witnessing right now is the dismantling of humanitarian pathways coupled with the largest de-documentation campaign in modern American history,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and chief executive of Global Refuge, a nonprofit serving migrants and refugees.
Mr. Trump has slashed refugee admissions to a record-low cap of 7,500 people for the fiscal year that started in October. He has rolled back other humanitarian programs that were created or expanded under his predecessor, and his administration has intensified its efforts to deport asylum seekers to countries where they have no connections. A New York Times investigation has found asylum grant rates have plummeted as the administration has systematically pressured the nation’s immigration judges to support the president’s aggressive enforcement agenda.
The actions, taken together, represent a striking shift away from international commitments that the United States took on in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II, and that it incorporated into law in later decades.
But those humanitarian efforts would come to be seen as unfairly favoring certain countries and ethnicities. The criticism came to a head in the 1980s as the United States backed right-wing governments in El Salvador and the country descended into civil war.
At the time, Jim McGovern was a congressional staffer fielding complaints from Salvadoran constituents visiting the office of his boss, Representative Joe Moakley. Many Salvadorans were seeking asylum, but the Reagan and Bush administrations “didn’t want to admit El Salvador was an unsafe place to be,” said Mr. McGovern, now a House Democrat from Massachusetts himself.
Under mounting pressure from Mr. Moakley and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, Congress created the T.P.S. program, part of a package of immigration legislation signed into law in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, a Republican.
Unlike asylum and refugee statuses, which are evaluated on a case-by-case basis and can take years to obtain, T.P.S. can be activated quickly and cover many people at once, whether recipients entered the United States legally or not. The homeland security secretary determines when a country should receive the designation, which can last from six to 18 months, and there is no limit on how many times a designation can be extended.
Until recently, that flexibility made it a vital tool regardless of which political party held power in Washington, said Cecilia Menjívar, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Now, “it has become so politicized,” she added.
T.P.S. designations have been relatively short-lived for some countries, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina after its 1990s civil war, as well as Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia during the Ebola crisis that swept West Africa. But the program has become all but permanent for recipients from Haiti, Syria and several other nations where crises have spanned many years.
Blanca Molina, 65, who fled El Salvador’s civil war and arrived in New Jersey in the 1980s, keeps photos of herself with the many political leaders she lobbied to make the temporary protections possible. Roughly 170,100 Salvadorans are now covered under the program. Some have held the status for more than two decades.
The T.P.S. initiative offers no pathway to permanent residency or citizenship, but it has provided some peace of mind, Ms. Molina said. “People have been able to put down roots, buy homes, start businesses, have full lives,” she said.
But that longevity has long drawn skepticism from Mr. Trump and Republicans, particularly as President Joseph R. Biden Jr. extended T.P.S. to some of the migrants arriving in record numbers at the nation’s southern border.
“T.P.S. was intended to protect immigrants who were in the U.S. when a disaster befell their own, not to encourage people fleeing those conditions,” said Representative Tom McClintock, Republican of California, at a House subcommittee meeting in December on the program’s impact.
The Supreme Court case could now test the fate of the program and shape how future administrations use it.
Lawyers representing T.P.S. holders argue that Homeland Security Department officials violated administrative procedures, failed to properly assess country conditions and, in the case of Haitians, acted with racial bias when the agency moved to revoke the temporary protections. But lawyers for the federal government have countered that U.S. law does not allow courts to review D.H.S.’s termination decision and that the protections are “contrary to the national interest.”
Since Mr. Trump took office last year, his administration has ended T.P.S. designations for 13 out of 17 countries that had them when Mr. Biden left office. Venezuelans made up the largest group of recipients, roughly 600,000 people.
The Supreme Court’s decision will apply to protections for 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians, but it is likely to have implications for all T.P.S. holders, an estimated 1.3 million people.
In the Miami area, Marcos, 27, an aircraft technician and Venezuelan whose status under the program has expired, used to earn $1,500 a week in a job with health insurance, dental care and a retirement plan. Now, Marcos, who spoke on the condition that his last name be withheld because of his immigration situation, makes $600 a week off the books as a freelancer repairing aircraft parts.
He specializes in air conditioning systems and in the components that start plane engines and control cabin pressure. He said he reads 300- to 400-page manuals to do the work, and that his skills continue to be in demand because of a shortage of trained technicians like him.
“It was the worst news of my life,” he said of learning he would lose his protected status.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
12) Civil Rights Cases Slow at Education Dept. Amid Trump’s Overhaul
Data obtained by The New York Times shows that the Education Department resolved 30 percent fewer discrimination complaints in 2025 compared with the previous year.
By Michael C. Bender, April 28, 2026
Michael C. Bender has been covering the Trump administration’s efforts to bring cultural changes to the American education system. He reported from Washington.
Linda McMahon, the education secretary, is scheduled to testify on Tuesday to a Senate appropriations subcommittee that controls her department’s budget. Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The Education Department resolved roughly 30 percent fewer complaints of discrimination in American schools last year than in 2024 amid a Trump administration overhaul of civil rights enforcement, the sharpest year-to-year decline in more than three decades, according to government data obtained by The New York Times.
The drop came despite a record number of students seeking help from Washington to confront claims of prejudice, bias and bigotry in schools, according to the 2025 budget request from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
The slowdown has left about 20,000 students awaiting word from the government about the status of their claims, according to the data, which is maintained by the Education Department. The slower pace raises questions about whether the Trump administration’s pursuit of severe cuts to the department’s civil rights staff has hampered its ability to enforce anti-discrimination laws.
Education Department officials blamed the slowdown, in part, on what they described as a significant backlog of unresolved cases left by the Biden administration. Attempts to clear those cases last year were also partially slowed by a 43-day government shutdown, administration officials said.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon may provide more insight on Tuesday, when she is scheduled to testify to a Senate appropriations subcommittee that controls her department’s budget. The White House has proposed a 35 percent cut for the Education Department’s civil rights office next year, including a 49 percent reduction in staff, from 530 workers to 271. Ms. McMahon has said a more efficient staff could meet the department’s statutory duties.
Some of Ms. McMahon’s testimony on Tuesday may detail a recent restructuring of the civil rights office. The changes, overseen by Kimberly M. Richey, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, were meant to increase efficiency by creating investigative teams dedicated solely to disability- and race-based complaints, instead of relying solely on a regional approach, a senior official at the Education Department said.
Senate Democrats were briefed last week on the findings of a report from the office of Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, who examined the sharp decline in resolved complaints.
The report, published on Tuesday, found that in 2025, the civil rights office negotiated the fewest anti-discrimination settlements with schools since the Education Department began posting the deals online in 2014.
These legally binding deals, known as resolution agreements, are typically the final product of extensive investigations, outlining clear steps for schools to remedy civil rights violations and avoid potential cuts to federal funding.
President Trump’s administration secured 112 of these agreements in 2025, compared with an average of 818 per year during his first term, according to the report.
At the start of 2025, 12,000 cases were pending in the civil rights office, meaning the administration’s 112 resolution agreements last year provided enforceable relief to students in less than 1 percent of investigations, the report found. In 15 states, no resolution agreements were reached last year.
Earlier this month the Education Department’s civil rights office canceled six resolution agreements negotiated by previous administrations, a move that Democratic and Republican lawyers said was without precedent.
Mr. Sanders said the report showed the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department, which he described as illegal, “have been a disaster for students and families.”
“When a child with a disability is denied the education they are entitled to, when a student faces racial or sexual harassment — they turn to the Office for Civil Rights for help,” Mr. Sanders said. “Yet the Trump administration has decimated this office. As a result, tens of thousands of students facing discrimination have been left with no recourse. That is beyond unacceptable.”
Amelia Joy, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said the civil rights office was no longer focused on “pandering to an extreme ideology.” (President Joseph R. Biden Jr. attempted to expand protections for transgender students while in office, but those efforts were struck down by a federal judge in Kentucky days before Mr. Trump took office.)
“The prior administration failed our students, but we are utilizing every tool at our disposal to resolve the backlog and return common sense to our schools,” Ms. Joy said.
A senior official in the Education Department said the Biden administration left a backlog of nearly 20,000 civil rights complaints, compared with 4,200 cases left by the first Trump administration, according to the civil rights office’s 2020 annual report.
The official said it was unfair to compare the number of resolved cases in the first year of one administration to the last year of another, saying priorities typically change along with leadership.
But the first year of other administrations have not produced similarly drastic declines. The civil rights office in the first years of the administrations of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton all resolved roughly the same number of complaints as the last years of their predecessors. During the first year of Mr. Trump’s first administration, for example, department officials said they resolved about 85 percent more complaints than the final year of the Obama administration, according to annual reports.
Democrats have said that the department’s attempt to fire half of its Office for Civil Rights staff appeared to be a significant reason behind the drop in production.
From March to December last year, about a quarter of the $140 million budget for the civil rights office was paid to investigators while they were barred from working, a consequence of lawsuits that challenged the firings, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan auditing arm of Congress.
The Education Department’s broad investigatory powers have been a cornerstone of Congress’s guarantee of equal educational opportunity and one of the most coercive tools to remedy violations of civil rights based on age, color, disability, national origin, race and sex.
Discrimination complaints are typically filed by parents, students or education groups. The executive branch can also open investigations into any school, college or educational institution that received federal funding.
Over the past decade, about half of discrimination complaints were filed on behalf of disabled students, according to annual reports from the civil rights office. Discrimination complaints based on race, national origin and sex account for the rest.
The decline in resolutions comes as Mr. Trump has prevailed in rapidly revamping federal investigative targets to align with his political priorities. Those goals include pursuing allegations of anti-white discrimination in schools and stamping out existing protections for transgender students.
“We absolutely are fulfilling all of our statutory requirements — have not failed to do any of those,” Ms. McMahon told senators in June. “Not only are we reducing the backload, but we are keeping up with what’s coming in now with a reduced staff because we’re doing it efficiently.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
13) F.B.I. Knew Civil Rights Group Informants Helped Bring Down Extremists, Lawyers Say
The Southern Poverty Law Center is planning to challenge the larger story of deceit and hypocrisy the Trump administration has been telling about its use of paid informants, court papers suggest.
By Alan Feuer, April 28, 2026
Southern Poverty Law Center lawyers met with prosecutors two weeks before the Justice Department unsealed its indictment against the organization in an effort to persuade them that the informant program, which was closed three years ago, had not been used to fund hate groups, but to hold them accountable. Rick Lewis/Alamy
The central premise of the federal charges filed last week against the Southern Poverty Law Center is that the storied civil rights organization defrauded its donors and betrayed its stated mission to fight hate groups by paying secret informants inside extremist networks.
On Tuesday, however, the law center pushed back firmly against the accusation that it sought to promote, not dismantle, far-right groups, asserting in court papers that information gleaned from its informants was shared at least three times with law enforcement agencies, including the F.B.I., resulting in arrests and prosecutions.
In fact, just two weeks before the Justice Department unsealed its indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, its lawyers met with prosecutors on the case in an effort to persuade them that the informant program, which was closed three years ago, had not been used to fund hate groups, but to hold them accountable.
During the meeting, the court papers said, the lawyers showed prosecutors evidence that the work of an S.P.L.C. informant helped the Justice Department during President Trump’s first term to secure a six-month prison term for a member of the white supremacist group Vanguard America who had lied to federal agents about his extremist ties during a background check for a security clearance.
Informants for the Southern Poverty Law Center also provided information to the F.B.I. about a member of a neo-Nazi group, the Atomwaffen Division, who had discussed attacks against Jews, gay people and others in Las Vegas and ultimately pleaded guilty to weapons charges, the court papers said. And their work formed the basis of a 45-page dossier that the S.P.L.C. gave the bureau, correctly warning that violence might erupt at the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in 2018 in Charlottesville, Va.
“The Department of Justice is well aware that the S.P.L.C. provided helpful information, through the use of its confidential informants, to law enforcement,” the papers said. “The Department of Justice also knows that these confidential informants helped law enforcement put violent extremists in jail.”
The two sets of papers, filed in Federal District Court in Montgomery, Ala., were the law center’s first legal response to the 11-count indictment charging it with wire fraud, lying to banks and a conspiracy to commit money laundering.
One of the filings asked Judge Emily C. Marks, who is handling the case, to bar prosecutors from making any false or misleading statements about the charges that could prejudice potential jurors. The other asked Judge Marks to allow defense lawyers to see the sealed grand jury proceedings in the case in an effort to determine whether prosecutors misled the panel that voted to return the indictment.
Both requests could face an uphill battle with Judge Marks, who was appointed by Mr. Trump. But taken together, they suggested that the S.P.L.C. was planning to mount a vigorous defense and would challenge not only the structure of the charges it is facing, but also the larger story of deceit and hypocrisy the Trump administration has been telling about the case.
In one of the filings, the law center’s lawyers accused Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, of falsely stating that the Justice Department was unaware that information gleaned from the group’s informants had been shared with the government.
“There’s no information that we have that suggests that the money they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement,” Mr. Blanche said on Fox News on the evening the indictment was returned. “To the contrary, or else we would have known, from their own words, that they had given this money to these guys. And we didn’t know.”
But the law center’s legal team, led by Abbe Lowell, who is fighting the Trump administration in several politically tinged cases, said that statement was untrue, pointing to the meeting that defense lawyers had on April 6 with Kevin P. Davidson, the acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama. The lawyers say that they also sent Mr. Davidson a letter one day after the indictment was released detailing how Mr. Blanche’s remarks were incorrect, but the government refused to retract or clarify them.
Mr. Blanche was not the only administration official who has made what the papers claimed were “false factual assertions” about the Southern Poverty Law Center and its informant program. Several Trump officials have overstated the accusations in the indictment, suggesting that the $3 million the S.P.L.C. is said to have paid its informants in recent years was tantamount to underwriting almost the entire far-right movement in the United States.
The papers pointed out that Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, baselessly claimed that the indictment showed the Charlottesville rally was a “hoax” perpetrated to discredit Mr. Trump. Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, has said that the S.P.L.C. engaged in “the ultimate hypocrisy” by funding hate groups they were supposed to be fighting.
And during a recent interview on “60 Minutes,” Mr. Trump himself asserted that “Charlottesville was all funded” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, adding without evidence that the violent rally, at which a young protester was fatally run over by a white supremacist’s car, was “part of the rigging of the election.”
The S.P.L.C. was formed in 1971 in Alabama and is best known for investigating groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy organizations. In recent years, Republicans have accused the group of unfairly targeting more mainstream conservative and Christian organizations, labeling them as extremists.
In October, Mr. Patel announced that the F.B.I. was severing its ties with the law center, claiming that it “long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine.” Around the same time, Mr. Patel also cut the bureau’s ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a group that fights antisemitism.
The court papers filed on Tuesday indicate that lawyers for the S.P.L.C. tried several times to persuade the Justice Department that the basic accusations in their case were incorrect.
Days before the indictment was unsealed, the group gave prosecutors 15,000 pages of records about its informant program in response to a grand jury subpoena. Defense lawyers claimed in their papers that the information they handed over to the government was not reflected in the charges that were ultimately filed.
For that reason, among others, they want Judge Marks to break the traditional secrecy of the grand jury process and give them access to transcripts of what took place behind closed doors. The lawyers wrote that they want the material because there are indications “that the grand jury was not merely misled by the government’s presentation of the law, but likely that it was actively weaponized to facilitate such charges.”
Requests for grand jury transcripts are rarely successful, but they have been made more and more as the Justice Department under Mr. Trump has pushed the boundaries of normal criminal procedure in an effort to satisfy the president’s demands to bring charges against those he perceives to be his enemies.
In November, a federal magistrate judge in Virginia agreed to give defense lawyers for James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, all of the grand jury materials used to indict him on charges of lying to Congress. The magistrate judge, William E. Fitzpatrick, ruled that the inexperienced prosecutor picked by Mr. Trump to oversee the matter had made a series of unusual errors in front of the grand jurors.
The magistrate judge raised the issue of whether the charges against Mr. Comey would have to be thrown out because of “government misconduct.” But the case was ultimately dismissed by another judge for another reason: because Lindsey Halligan, the prosecutor who filed the case, had been improperly in her job.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
14) F.B.I. Searches Businesses Around Minneapolis as Part of Fraud Inquiry
Investigators obtained nearly two dozen search warrants to collect evidence as part of a fraud investigation in a state that has become a top concern of the Trump administration.
By Ernesto Londoño, Reporting from St. Paul, Minn., April 28, 2026
Federal agents executing a search warrant in Bloomington, Minn., in December as part of a fraud investigation. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Federal agents on Tuesday morning searched businesses in the Minneapolis area, including day care centers, as part of a fraud investigation, the Department of Homeland Security said.
The operation was among the boldest moves since the White House launched a task force to combat fraud in social services programs last month, which Vice President JD Vance was appointed to lead.
A law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation, said agents from the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security had obtained 22 search warrants. The official added that the operation was unrelated to immigration enforcement.
“The task force and the DOJ will be relentless in exposing these fraudsters wherever they may be hiding,” Mr. Vance said on social media, referring to the Department of Justice.
Fraud in safety net programs in Minnesota has roiled the state in recent years, and captured the attention of the Trump administration. Federal prosecutors have charged scores of people with defrauding programs that were designed to feed low-income children, treat minors with autism and help people avoid homelessness.
Billions in taxpayer money have been stolen, according to federal prosecutors, with the first arrests occurring in 2022.
Although the fraud has been under scrutiny for years, the Twin Cities have been contending with aggressive federal actions since Trump beat Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Last year, roughly 3,000 federal agents were sent to the area to root out illegal immigrants, a surge that was met with fierce resistance by protesters and led to the killing of two residents.
In early January, Mr. Walz announced that he was not running for re-election so that he could devote more attention to combating fraud. He is scheduled to give his final state of the state address at the Capitol on Tuesday night.
The vast majority of the individuals charged in the state’s safety net fraud cases in recent years are of Somali origin. The White House cited that fact in justifying an immigration crackdown in the state this winter, even though the vast majority of defendants were American citizens.
Officials did not immediately disclose the nature of the businesses that were being searched or provide additional details.
Some locations federal agents searched on Tuesday included day care centers. Those businesses — some of which receive government funding — drew nationwide attention after Nick Shirley, a right-wing content creator, published a viral video in late December purporting to have exposed widespread fraud.
One business featured in that video — Quality Learning Center — became the subject of mockery because it had a sign that misspelled the word Learning. The site where the business operated was among those federal agents searched Tuesday, but it was not clear whether it remains operational.
Among the other locations federal agents were searching Tuesday morning was a tan building in south Minneapolis that houses two businesses: the Somali Senior Center and Adult Day Services, and the Original Child Care Center.
A local news station, KSTP, reported that federal agents had used a battering ram to enter another day care center in south Minneapolis.
Federal prosecutors have described the scale of fraud in Minnesota’s safety net programs as staggering. They say business owners have stolen several billion dollars in recent years by submitting claims for services that were not rendered.
The scandal has bedeviled Mr. Walz and other Democratic elected officials in the state as Republicans have questioned how so much taxpayer money was stolen on their watch. His administration has acknowledged that several programs lacked strong safeguards, making them magnets for thieves, and has tightened oversight.
State investigators were involved in the inquiries that led to the searches on Tuesday, according to the governor’s office.
“If you commit fraud in Minnesota you’re going to get caught — and that’s exactly what we saw today,” Mr. Walz said in a statement. “We catch criminals when state and federal agencies share information.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
15) Will Communist Cuba Ever Pay Back the Billions It Confiscated?
With Cuba in dire economic crisis, people whose properties were seized by its government decades ago say it’s time to resolve thorny compensation claims.
By Frances Robles, April 28, 2026
Frances Robles has written about Cuba for more than 20 years.
“Richard Feinberg, a fellow at Florida International University who has studied property claims, said tackling the issue was important to normalizing diplomatic relations and establishing a trusted business environment in Cuba. The topic was the subject of two meetings between Cuba and the Obama administration, but with no resolution. Mr. Feinberg held discussions with Cuban officials as part of his research and said they did not seem interested. ‘The Cuban government didn’t seem to get it,’ he said. ‘They would say to me: Richard, why are you making such a big deal about something that happened 50, 60 years ago?’ ‘It’s indicative of how little the Cuban government understood economics and capitalism,’ he added. ‘They didn’t get private property.’”
Teo A. Babún, Jr., has fond memories of the large blue and white corner house in Santiago de Cuba where his grandmother, a wealthy matriarch in pre-revolutionary Cuba, hosted family gatherings for her eight children and 21 grandchildren.
The Babúns were industrialists who, like about 200,000 other affluent Cubans, fled the island after Fidel Castro took power. The Babúns left behind a railroad, sawmill, shipyard and cement factory — and the grand estate called “La Mesquita.”
For a time, Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and the former president, lived there. Nearly seven decades later, the Cuban government uses it to house an Arab civic association.
Known as “Casa del Arabe,” the house, which includes a restaurant, is among thousands of properties seized by the Communist government from people who left Cuba, some with just the clothes on their backs, and never received compensation.
Cuba’s system appears to be on the edge of collapse, and the United States government is eager to hasten the fall.
As the two sides negotiate in secret, a decades-old thorny issue has resurfaced: the untold billions of dollars’ worth of homes, factories, farms, sugar mills and other businesses confiscated in the years after a socialist revolution nationalized businesses and instituted sweeping land policies.
“If you own something and someone took it away from you without any kind of compensation or resolution, it’s just not fair,” Mr. Babún said. “My family just wants justice.”
If the United States has a hand in negotiating Cuba’s future, former property owners are hopeful that the issue will be addressed.
Resolving confiscations is complicated and would take years. But experts say there is plenty of precedent around the world, from Vietnam to Germany to China, that offers a road map.
For years, Mr. Babún’s late father, Teófilo Sr., dedicated himself to helping exiles take up arms against the Castro government, including in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
The younger Mr. Babún, 78, ran a religious nonprofit financed by the U.S. government and tried to create a registry of properties taken from Cubans, hoping the U.S. State Department would lobby the Cubans over those losses.
But the endeavor proved too time-consuming and difficult and his project ended with 8,000 claims registered, a small fraction of potential cases. (He said many people seemed hesitant, fearing that joining a pooled claim would nullify their ability to negotiate larger individual deals with the Cuban government.)
His family hired consultants in 2018, who estimated the value of the family’s holdings by that point at $874.2 million, including $9 million for the house, he said.
But Mr. Babún said the passage of time and his homeland’s worsening crisis have softened his perspective.
“You’ve got to find the solution that protects the current occupants if it’s a home and doesn’t displace anybody,” Mr. Babún said. “And at the same time find justice.”
Before 1959, Cuba was run by a dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and known as a playground for American elites. Wealthy Cubans were often regarded as oligarchs who exploited the poor.
The Castro brothers, seeking to end rampant corruption, severe economic inequality and dependency on the United States, led an armed guerrilla movement that toppled Mr. Batista.
A few months after they took over, an agrarian law expropriated farmlands over 1,000 acres and forbade foreign land ownership. In 1960, Cuba confiscated American-owned oil refineries and nationalized large businesses.
As payback, the United States announced a crippling trade embargo against Cuba that remains in place.
A U.S. government commission documented losses by U.S. companies and citizens, certifying nearly 6,000 claims with a value of $1.9 billion. With 6 percent interest the commission tacked on, the claims are now estimated to be worth about $9 billion, an amount Cuba would be hard-presssed to pay.
Five of the top 10 claimants were U.S. sugar companies. Others included Exxon, Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive and Woolworth’s.
By U.S. law, for the embargo to be lifted, the Cuban government must return property or businesses or compensate American owners whose confiscations were certified by the U.S. government.
U.S. officials meeting with Cuban leaders for secret talks have made clear that compensation for Americans and U.S. companies remains a key priority.
Cuba’s foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
In the early 1960s, the United States and Cuba held talks lasting almost a year around the question of what would count as “prompt and adequate compensation” for seizures, said William LeoGrande, an American University professor who wrote a book about the history of U.S.-Cuba talks.
“Cuba did not have the cash to pay immediately and instead Cuba offered long-term government bonds, which the U.S. said was neither prompt nor adequate,” he said.
While the U.S. government negotiates on behalf of Americans or American firms with certified claims, that is not technically the case for the many Cuban exiles who left homes and businesses behind.
Cuba considered those “abandoned” and they were taken as the government ostensibly set out to redistribute wealth. But the government held on to many itself. Only Cubans who stayed were compensated for lost properties, said Lisandro Pérez, a Cuba scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City who wrote a memoir about his family’s home in Cuba.
No official tally has ever been made public of confiscations by the Cuban government. There is no reliable estimate of how many there are or how much exiles could be owed.
“We were not supporters of Batista, were not political or committing crimes — we should get it back,” said Nicolás J. Gutiérrez, a Cuban American lawyer in Miami whose family lost a fortune estimated in the early 1960s at $50 million.
Their holdings included two sugar mills, 15 cattle ranches, a rice mill, a coffee plantation, a bank, an insurance company and a wholesale food distribution company.
Mr. Gutiérrez, the corporate secretary of the National Association of Cuban Landowners in Exile, also works as a consultant for other families whose properties were taken and is involved in a lawsuit against Expedia for booking customers to hotels the Cuban government built on confiscated beach property.
Expedia claims that the plaintiffs had no standing to sue though the case continues.
Mr. Gutiérrez, 61, has never been to Cuba. But he says if the government returns his family’s properties, the family will put them back into production and help Cuba’s battered economy.
“Not everyone in the family will rush back. I will rush back,” he said. “My view is that Cuba is in such a deep hole that in order to get out of that hole, it’s going to need to get serious new foreign investment.”
Experts agree that it would be unfeasible to return houses that were given to renters or divided up into multifamily apartments. Nobody is advocating widespread evictions. But many majestic mansions are being used by international diplomats or government ministries.
One house the Gutiérrez family owned in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood is occupied by Lloyd's of London. Neighbors on a Havana street where the family had another house said properties that were “abandoned” should not be returned.
“If they left the country,” one neighbor, Jorge González Amores, said, “that means they were not interested in the building.”
Experts have offered a variety of proposals, including setting up public-private funds to rebuild Cuba’s energy grid and using part of the profits to compensate former property owners, said Jason Poblete, a lawyer who represents American and Cuban property owners.
Experts point to Vietnam and Germany, which in the 1990s used frozen assets in the United States to pay property claims. But in the Soviet Union and China, property owners received only a fraction of the value of confiscated properties.
In other countries, compensation funds were generated by the privatization of state-owned companies.
But Cuba says it also has claims against the United States.
In 1999, a Cuban court found the U.S. government liable for deaths and damage caused by its “aggressive policies” against Cuba, including the Bay of Pigs invasion and the U.S. trade embargo. The tab then: $181 billion.
Carlos Fernández de Cossio, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, said in a recent interview with the website Drop Site News that in the 1960s Cuba had offered a “holistic agreement” over properties that belonged to Americans and U.S. firms with a lump-sump payment, but that the United States had refused.
Mr. Fernández de Cossio said a lump sum was the only solution. In that scenario, the Cuban government would pay the U.S. government, which would then have to distribute payments to those who lost property.
Richard Feinberg, a fellow at Florida International University who has studied property claims, said tackling the issue was important to normalizing diplomatic relations and establishing a trusted business environment in Cuba.
The topic was the subject of two meetings between Cuba and the Obama administration, but with no resolution. Mr. Feinberg held discussions with Cuban officials as part of his research and said they did not seem interested.
“The Cuban government didn’t seem to get it,” he said. “They would say to me: Richard, why are you making such a big deal about something that happened 50, 60 years ago?”
“It’s indicative of how little the Cuban government understood economics and capitalism,” he added. “They didn’t get private property.”
Enrique Carrillo, whose family owned the Santa Cruz rum distillery east of Havana, said he was anxious for Cuban families to be compensated and to help the country rebuild.
“We have been waiting a long time for this moment and for the stars to kind of align,” Mr. Carrillo said. “My father worked very hard for many years to build the company, and I am not planning to roll over. My family is not planning to roll over on history.”
Ed Augustin contributed reporting from Havana.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
