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.
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) U.S. Says Venezuelan Government Can Pay for Nicolás Maduro’s Defense
The issue had been hanging over the former Venezuelan leader’s federal criminal case for weeks. Last month, a judge indicated that he was skeptical of the U.S. government’s rationale for blocking the funds.
By Jonah E. Bromwich, April 24, 2026
Nicolás Maduro being escorted from a helicopter to be taken to the federal courthouse in Manhattan in January. Vincent Alban/The New York Times
The U.S. government on Friday evening conceded that the Venezuelan government could pay for Nicolás Maduro’s defense lawyers, an issue that had been hanging over the case for weeks.
In a letter filed in Manhattan federal court, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, said that the Treasury Department had issued amended licenses that would allow defense lawyers for Mr. Maduro, the former president of Venezuela, and his wife, Cilia Flores, to receive payments from their country’s government.
The department had previously blocked those payments, setting off furious protests from defense lawyers.
The development comes a month after a hearing in which the judge presiding over the case, Alvin K. Hellerstein, sharply questioned the government as to why the funds were being blocked. The judge even suggested that if the United States did not change course, he might consider dismissing the case, a suggestion that had been made by a lawyer for Mr. Maduro, Barry J. Pollack.
In the letter, Mr. Clayton said that Mr. Maduro’s lawyers had agreed that the Treasury Department’s concession had rendered the defense’s efforts to dismiss the indictment moot and were withdrawing that request for the time being.
American forces seized Mr. Maduro from a compound in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, in January and transported him to the United States. He was charged in Manhattan with conspiracies to commit narco-terrorism and import cocaine, along with other counts. Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores, who was charged in the same indictment, have pleaded not guilty. Both are being held in a Brooklyn detention facility while they await trial.
A trial is still months if not years away. But the concession by the administration on Friday evening clears the first major hurdle in the case. The issue first became public in February when Mr. Pollack alerted Judge Hellerstein that the U.S. government was blocking the Venezuelan government from paying him through the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The office, known as OFAC, grants licenses that allow individuals and companies to enter arrangements with countries subject to U.S. sanctions that would normally be barred. Mr. Pollack said that after initially granting a license that would have allowed him to accept payment from Venezuela, OFAC amended that license to bar those payments.
Mr. Pollack argued that the restriction rendered Mr. Maduro unable to afford his services. He said that the decision interfered with Mr. Maduro’s Sixth Amendment right to the counsel of his choice.
At the hearing in Manhattan federal court last month, Judge Hellerstein appeared inclined to agree. He said several times that Mr. Maduro’s right to defense was “paramount” and suggested that the relevant sanctions might be outdated given the renewed relations between the United States and Venezuela.
When the judge indicated he might rule against the government, the lead prosecutor on the case, Kyle Wirshba, suggested that the Trump administration might revisit the issue.
In his Friday letter, Mr. Clayton said that the amended licenses subjected the Venezuelan funds to certain conditions, including that the payments are made with funds available to the country’s government after March 5, 2026, the day that Venezuela and the United States formally reestablished diplomatic relations.
The letter was filed before Judge Hellerstein ruled on the issue. Mr. Clayton said that the prosecution and defense were requesting a status hearing in 60 days, at which the next steps in the lengthy march to trial are likely to come into focus.
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2) Trump Seeks to Abolish Iran’s Atomic Stockpile, a Problem He Helped Create
President Trump withdrew from the Obama-era nuclear accord in 2018, saying it was the worst deal ever. But Iran responded with an enrichment spree that haunts the negotiations to this day.
By William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, April 25, 2026
William J. Broad and David E. Sanger have written about the Iranian nuclear program for more than two decades.
In February in preparation for a possible war with the United States, Iran moved missile launchers into positions within striking distance of Israeli and American military forces. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
As nuclear talks restart in Pakistan this weekend, President Trump will confront the complicated legacy of his own decision, eight years ago, to cancel what he has called “a horrible, one-sided deal.”
That Obama-era agreement suffered from flaws and omissions. It would have expired after 15 years, leaving Iran free after 2030 to make as much nuclear fuel as it wanted. But once Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, the Iranians went on an enrichment spree much sooner, leaving them closer to a bomb than ever before.
Now, Mr. Trump’s negotiators are dealing with the consequences of that decision, which he made over the objections of many of his national security advisers at the time.
Much recent attention has focused on Iran’s half ton of uranium that has been enriched to a level just shy of what is typically used in atom bombs. The majority of it is thought to be buried in a tunnel complex that Mr. Trump bombed last June. But those 970 pounds of potential bomb fuel represent only a small fraction of the problem.
Today, international inspectors say, Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various enrichment levels. With further purification, that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons — more than the estimated size of Israel’s arsenal.
Virtually all of that cache accumulated in the years after Mr. Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal. That is because Tehran lived up to its pledge to ship to Russia 12.5 tons of its overall stockpile, about 97 percent. Iran’s weapon designers were left with too little nuclear fuel to build a single bomb.
Now, matching or exceeding that diplomatic accomplishment is one of the most complex challenges facing Mr. Trump and his two lead negotiators, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who are expected to leave for Pakistan on Saturday.
Mr. Trump is acutely aware that whatever he can negotiate with the Iranians will be compared with what Mr. Obama achieved more a decade ago. While the two countries are still exchanging proposals, and could well come up empty-handed, Mr. Trump is already judging his own, yet-to-be-negotiated agreement as superior.
“The DEAL that we are making with Iran will be FAR BETTER,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site on Monday. The Obama-era deal “was a guaranteed Road to a Nuclear Weapon, which will not, and cannot, happen with the deal we’re working on.”
Based on Mr. Trump’s often-shifting objectives for the conflict with Iran, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff face a daunting list of negotiation topics, many of which the Obama team failed to address. They have to find a way to limit Iran’s ability to rebuild its arsenal of missiles. (The 2015 deal never addressed Iran’s missile capability, and Tehran ignored a United Nations resolution imposing limits.)
They need to find a way to fulfill Mr. Trump’s mandate to protect anti-regime protesters, whom Mr. Trump promised to help in January when they took to the streets. In fact, those protests were among the triggers for the American military buildup that ultimately led to the Feb. 28 attack.
And they must negotiate a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which the Iranians shut down after the American-Israeli attacks, a move Mr. Trump was clearly unprepared for. Now Iran has discovered that a few inexpensive mines and threats to ships have given it huge leverage over the global economy, pressure it can dial up or down in ways that nuclear weapons cannot.
But it is the fate of the atomic program that lies at the negotiations’ heart. As in the 2015 talks, the Iranians declare they have a “right” to enrich under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, one they refuse to give up. But that still leaves room for “suspension” of all nuclear efforts for some number of years. (Vice President JD Vance demanded 20 years when he met his Pakistani interlocutors two weeks ago, only to have Mr. Trump declare a few days later that the right period was “unlimited.”)
William J. Burns, the former C.I.A. chief who played a lead role in the Obama-era negotiations, said in The New York Times on Friday that a good deal would require “tight nuclear inspections, an extended moratorium on the enrichment of uranium and the export or dilution of Tehran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium in exchange for tangible sanctions relief.”
He also called for the Trump administration to delineate every term. “Unless the lines are clearly drawn and strictly monitored,” Mr. Burns said, “the Iranians will paint outside them.”
That is exactly what happened when Mr. Trump pulled out of the Obama agreement in 2018 and replaced it with nothing. At the time, Iran did not have a single bomb’s worth of uranium. Then it started enriching with a vengeance.
In the current war, Mr. Trump has spoken publicly about a possible raid to seize Iran’s half ton of near-bomb grade material, which could make roughly 10 weapons. But he has not talked about the overall 11-ton cache and the threat it poses to the United States and its allies.
It is hardly a new problem. In 2006, Iran began enriching uranium on an industrial scale. While it described its aims as peaceful and civilian in nature, its aggressive moves convinced experts that Tehran wanted to build a bomb.
The alarms rang louder in 2010, when Iran began enriching uranium to 20 percent. That level of purity marks the official dividing line between civilian and military uses. Iran said it wanted the 20 percent fuel for a research reactor at the University of Tehran.
The 20 percent enrichment alarmed the Obama administration. It put the Iranians on the road to the 90 percent fuel used to make a warhead light and compact enough to fit atop a missile. (It is possible to make a weapon from 20 percent fuel, but it would be so large and heavy that a truck, boat or aircraft would be needed to deliver it.)
In the Obama-era pact, the Iranians were prohibited from enriching fuel to a purity level greater than 3.67 percent, which is sufficient to fuel nuclear reactors for civilian power. The country’s entire stockpile was limited to about 660 pounds. The constraints were supposed to remain in place for 15 years, until 2030. But the Iranians were permitted to continue the low-level enrichment, and they built more efficient centrifuges.
That loophole turned out to set them up well for what happened after Mr. Trump scrapped the agreement three years later and reimposed economic sanctions. The Iranians responded by blowing past all those limits.
Early in 2021, just before Mr. Trump left office, Iran reinstituted its goal of raising the enrichment level to 20 percent.
Then a mysterious blast knocked out power at Natanz, which is Iran’s main enrichment complex. Iranian officials blamed it on Israeli sabotage, and retaliated by raising part of its stockpile to the 60 percent level, the biggest jump in the history of its enrichment program. That was just a hairbreadth away from the highest military grade.
From early 2021 to early 2025, the Biden administration tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate new limits. Throughout the negotiations, Iran kept enriching, expanding its cache of 60 percent fuel.
Then, in June 2025, Mr. Trump bombed Iran’s enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordo, as well as uranium storage tunnels and other facilities at Isfahan. He declared that the nuclear program had been “obliterated.”
Officially the U.S. government was more circumspect, saying the program had been “set back.” But if “Operation Midnight Hammer” did, in fact, cripple much of Iran’s atomic infrastructure, the Trump administration said little or nothing about the survival of Iran’s cache of enriched uranium, which the International Atomic Energy Agency has estimated at 10.9 tons, with purity levels ranging from 2 percent to 60 percent.
One of the few officials who did discuss it was Mr. Witkoff, who called the stockpile “a move towards weaponization — it’s the only reason you would have it.” Iran, he added, could turn its most enriched fuel into roughly three dozen bombs.
While public discussion has focused on whether a U.S. commando team could retrieve Iran’s half ton of uranium enriched to 60 percent, nuclear experts say Tehran could turn the entire 11 tons into bomb fuel, if it can activate new centrifuges, probably underground, to boost its levels of enrichment.
Edwin S. Lyman, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Iran’s stockpile could yield roughly 35 to 55 weapons depending on its skill in making not only the bomb’s fuel core but such nonnuclear parts as detonators that spark the chain reactions.
Thomas B. Cochran, a nuclear weapons expert who wrote an influential study on enrichment levels, concluded that Iran’s stockpile was sufficient for 50 to 100 bombs if further enriched.
For the United States, the location of the 11-ton stockpile is a major uncertainty. For Iran, it’s political leverage.
“Yes, a lot of their top scientists have been killed,” said Gary Samore, who advised the Obama White House on Iran’s nuclear program. “But they still have the basic industrial capacity to produce nuclear weapons if they decide to do that.”
Iran has another card in the nuclear game — uncertainty over the exact location of a new enrichment complex that Tehran was about to declare on the eve of the 12-day war with Israel last June. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that a disclosure meeting set for June 13, 2025, was “canceled due to the commencement of the military attacks on that day.”
Analysts now believe that Iran may have set up the plant in the maze of mountain tunnels that adjoin its sprawling Isfahan industrial site. That’s near where Tehran is thought to store the bulk of its uranium stockpile, raising the possibility that Iran harbors a deeply buried industrial site that could conduct new rounds of fuel enrichment.
“We can’t bomb away their knowledge,” said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear specialist at Harvard. And since a plant to enrich uranium can be “comparable in size to a grocery store,” he added, the mountainous terrain of Iran offers many places to hide a clandestine bomb effort.
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3) Under Trump, Green Card Seekers Face New Scrutiny for Views on Israel
In guidance to immigration officers, the administration describes participating in pro-Palestinian protests and criticizing Israel as “overwhelmingly negative” factors.
By Hamed Aleaziz and Nicholas Nehamas, Reporting from Washington, April 25, 2026
Supporters of Palestine demonstrating in New York last year. Under new guidance issued by the Trump administration, immigrants could be denied a green card for participating in pro-Palestinian protests. Credit...Vincent Alban/The New York Times
For decades, immigrants who have followed the rules and have not broken the law have had hopes of earning a green card, a document that allows them to live legally in the United States and gain a path to citizenship.
But under new guidance issued by the Trump administration, immigrants can now be denied a green card for expressing political opinions, such as participating in pro-Palestinian campus protests, posting criticism of Israel on social media and desecrating the American flag, according to internal Department of Homeland Security training materials reviewed by The New York Times.
The documents, which have not been previously reported, show how expansively the Trump administration is carrying out a directive from last August to vet green card applicants for “anti-American” and “antisemitic” views.
The administration includes criticism of Israel as a potentially disqualifying factor, with the training materials citing as an example of questionable speech a social media post that declares, “Stop Israeli Terror in Palestine” and shows the Israeli flag crossed out.
The materials were distributed last month to immigration officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and handles applications for green cards and other forms of legal status.
They reflect how U.S.C.I.S. — long considered the gateway agency for legal migration — has rapidly transformed under President Trump into another cog in his administration’s deportation machine. The agency has worked to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship and has hired armed federal agents to investigate immigration crimes.
The administration is also granting permanent legal residency to far fewer applicants. Green card approvals have fallen by more than half in recent months, according to a Times analysis of agency data.
“There is no room in America for aliens who espouse anti-American ideologies or support terrorist organizations,” Joseph Edlow, the agency’s director, told Congress in February.
Critics of Mr. Trump’s approach say the administration is seeking to restrict legitimate political speech, and has conflated opposition to Israeli government policies with antisemitism.
Basing green card decisions on “ideological screenings is fundamentally un-American and should have no place in a country built on the promise of free expression,” said Amanda Baran, a senior agency official under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Administration officials said they were defending American values.
“If you hate America, you have no business demanding to live in America,” said Zach Kahler, a spokesman for U.S.C.I.S.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said the administration’s policies had “nothing to do with free speech” and were meant to protect “American institutions, the safety of citizens, national security and the freedoms of the United States.”
The administration has moved aggressively against immigrants for expressing political views that officials have deemed anti-American, making ideology a central part of its immigration vetting process. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has revoked the visas of pro-Palestinian student activists, including one who wrote a column criticizing her university’s response to pro-Palestinian demands.
The Department of Homeland Security has proposed reviewing the social media histories of tourists seeking to visit the United States.
Immigration officers have significant discretion in deciding whether to grant foreigners long-term permanent residence. They have long considered a variety of factors, including criminal records, national security threats, family ties to the United States and employment histories.
Ideology has also traditionally been one of those factors. In some cases, U.S. law forbids officers from granting green cards to people who have belonged to a Communist or other “totalitarian” political party, have promoted anarchy or have called for the overthrow of the U.S. government by “force or violence or other unconstitutional means.”
But in the past, immigration officers have focused on statements that could incite or encourage violence, given concerns about infringing on constitutionally protected speech, former U.S.C.I.S. officials said.
The new training materials reviewed by The Times guide immigration officers through the factors they should consider when ruling on green card applications. They discourage officers from granting green cards to people with a history of “endorsing, promoting or supporting anti-American views” or “antisemitic terrorism, ideologies or groups.”
Immigration officers have been told to weigh those factors as “overwhelmingly negative.”
The documents list support for “subversive” ideologies as among other factors that could lead to an application being rejected. As an example, the materials point to someone “holding a sign advocating overthrow of the U.S. government.”
In addition, the guidance describes the desecration of the American flag as a negative factor, citing Mr. Trump’s executive order last year directing the Justice Department to prosecute protesters who burn the flag. The Supreme Court has ruled that flag burning is a form of political expression protected by the First Amendment.
Immigration officers have also been told to scrutinize applicants who encourage antisemitism “through rhetorical or physical actions.” They were instructed to “focus particularly on aliens who engaged in on-campus anti-American and antisemitic activities” after the Hamas attacks against Israel in 2023, the documents show.
Further examples in the documents of conduct characterized as antisemitic include a social media post showing a map of Israel with the nation’s name crossed out and replaced with the word “Palestine.” Another illustrative post suggests that Israelis should “taste what people in Gaza are tasting.”
Immigration officers must elevate all cases involving “potential anti-American and/or antisemitic conduct or ideology” to their managers and to the agency’s general counsel’s office for review, according to the documents.
In recent months, the agency has also changed the way it refers to the employees who adjudicate green card applications, long known as “immigration services officers.” In job postings, it now calls them “homeland defenders.”
“Protect your homeland and defend your culture,” one posting says.
Steven Rich contributed reporting.
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4) The 85-Year-Old Widow Snagged by Trump’s Immigration Crackdown
In her first interview since being deported, Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé, the French widow of a former G.I., recounted her experience in ICE detention.
By Catherine Porter, April 25, 2026
Catherine Porter interviewed Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé in Nantes, France, and spoke with her lawyer, children and a former neighbor.
Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times
Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé was in bed at home in Anniston, Ala., when she was startled awake by banging. Men had surrounded the bungalow where Ms. Ross-Mahé, a French citizen, had lived with her American husband until he died in January. They were knocking loudly on the windows and doors.
When Ms. Ross-Mahé, 85, opened the door, they pushed inside, saying they were the immigration police, she said in an interview. They handcuffed her and took her to an unmarked car before driving her to a jail cell. She was still in her bathrobe, pajamas and slippers, she said.
“I didn’t know what was happening to me really,” she told me in France this week, in her first interview since being deported after a 16-day incarceration. “It was very humiliating. My hair had not even been combed. I was just getting out of bed.”
After her arrest on April 1, Ms. Ross-Mahé was swallowed into the country’s sprawling immigration detention system, where, she said, she was chained by her wrists and ankles to other inmates and loaded onto buses and a plane “like a potato sack.” After two weeks in detention in Alabama and Louisiana, she said, she feared she might die.
Her story gives a glimpse into the opaque labyrinth of immigrant-detention sites operated by the Trump administration, where many like her see no lawyer, have no sense of where they are and understand little of why they are held or, in her case, later released. It also raises questions about how that system may be weaponized: A judge said in a ruling that she believed that Ms. Ross-Mahé’s stepson Tony Ross, who had been fighting with her over her late husband’s estate, instigated her arrest.
The New York Times could not independently confirm the details of her experience in detention, but it aligns with the accounts of others who have been detained in similar circumstances. Tony and his brother, Gary Ross, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did their lawyer.
The experience stunned Ms. Ross-Mahé, who previously considered herself a supporter of President Trump and so admired his policy to deport illegal immigrants that she thought it should be adopted in France.
“I didn’t think these things existed,” she said of the immigration facilities she was held in. “I thought that when we arrested them, we would treat them properly. It really shocked me.”
She added, “They treat them like dogs, not in a human way.”
Asked for comment, the Homeland Security Department said in a statement that “all detainees are provided with proper meals, quality water, blankets, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.” It added that “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens” and is “regularly audited and inspected by external agencies.”
Ms. Ross-Mahé said she and her American husband, Bill Ross, first dated in the 1950s, when they both worked at a NATO base on the outskirts of Nantes, in western France — she as a secretary, he as a soldier. Their romance was short-lived, she said, as he developed a relationship with one of her friends in town, Michèle Viaud, moving back to Alabama with her.
They stayed in touch over the decades as they built their lives and families. Mr. Ross married and raised two sons with Ms. Viaud, who died in 2018. Ms. Ross-Mahé had three children with her first husband, Bernard Goix, who died of lung cancer in 2022.
Mr. Ross sent her supportive messages when Bernard fell sick, she said.
Four months after Bernard died, Mr. Ross sent her a ticket to visit him in Alabama.
Their friendship quickly shifted to love. “Everything came back,” said Ms. Ross-Mahé. For almost two years, they flew between Alabama and France, visiting each other.
Last year, they married in Alabama in April, first in a parking lot before a notary and then in a church.
Mr. Ross hired a lawyer to process her application for permanent residency, she said. She received an employment authorization document from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, she added — a first step toward getting a Social Security number. Because she was a veteran’s spouse, the Department of Defense gave her an identification card, which The New York Times reviewed, that gave her grocery discounts at a nearby military base.
Weeks before her arrest, a neighbor took her to an appointment related to her application at the immigration office, she said.
“For me, I was legal,” she said. “I never thought this could happen.”
Mr. Ross died suddenly one night in January. Ms. Ross-Mahé said she found him in the bathroom, already cold. He left behind the bungalow with its backyard pool, worth about $173,000; two vehicles; and a bank account holding about $1,500, according to court records. He did not leave a will.
Soon, Ms. Ross-Mahé clashed with Mr. Ross’s sons, both in their 50s, over the inheritance.
The day after Mr. Ross’s death, his sons took his truck and car, according to a ruling by a county probate judge, making it hard for Ms. Ross-Mahé to leave the neighborhood. Court records said the sons forced her to give them her husband’s cellphone. That meant she couldn’t make local calls, she said, since she had only her French phone.
Ms. Ross-Mahé said they cut off her cable and internet, took their father’s credit cards and refused to help her fill her prescription for blood pressure medication.
Her neighbors came to her rescue, helping pay her electricity and water bills, she said. They took her to the hospital, bought her groceries and organized Meals on Wheels deliveries to the house, she added.
She found a second lawyer and changed the locks on the house so Mr. Ross’s sons couldn’t enter whenever they wanted, she said. She covered the windows with paper, so no one could see in.
“I didn’t want to let them win,” she said. “But I was not feeling good at all. I wasn’t eating. I wasn’t sleeping. I was scared to death.”
The probate court set a date for a hearing on April 9.
With eight days to go, Ms. Ross-Mahé was arrested by Homeland Security agents.
She said an ICE officer told her she had been illegally in the United States between September, when her 90-day visa ended, and early December, when her green card application was submitted. The Homeland Security Department initially said in a statement that she had overstayed a 90-day visa by roughly four months, but said in a later statement she had been in the country illegally for seven months.
In her ruling on April 10, the probate judge, Shirley A. Millwood, a Republican elected in 2024, accused Mr. Ross’s youngest son, Tony, a courthouse security officer and former state trooper, of initiating his stepmother’s arrest.
The judge said that U.S. marshals notified Tony the day before the arrest that she would be detained shortly. An hour after her detention, he received a text message confirming her arrest, the judge said.
At first, Ms. Ross-Mahé and her lawyer said, she was imprisoned in a filthy county jail, before being flown in chains to Louisiana and held in an ICE processing center.
Throughout the journey, she said, she was made to wait for hours without explanation on hard benches, dirty prison beds or in trucks.
“It was humiliation all the time,” she said. “They never talked, they were always yelling.”
The experience worsened her back pain and sciatica, making it hard for her to walk.
The other female inmates helped her move to the bathroom and shower, she said. They made her hot chocolate and offered her cookies. The night before Easter, she said, they sang hymns that brought her to tears.
“They were wonderful,” she said. “I found God in that jail through those women.”
After two weeks of detention, she said, she lost hope of being released and didn’t think she could survive much longer.
“I was waiting to die, really,” she said. “I knew I was not going to make it.”
On the morning of April 16, the 16th day of her incarceration, she said, she was awakened at 2 a.m. by a guard and told she was leaving. She was frightened that she would be transferred to another facility. Instead, she was flown to Dallas and later taken to an American Airlines plane heading to Paris.
The French consul general in New Orleans, Rodolphe Sambou, who had lobbied for her release, said the American government had “decided to release her, given her age and medical condition.”
Back in France with her sons, Ms. Ross-Mahé is still in shock. She wears clothes bought at the mall on her way back from the airport, since her old belongings remain in Alabama. A doctor has diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder, she said.
She learned about the judge’s ruling, and the suggestion that her stepsons instigated her arrest, only after her release.
“I didn’t think they were capable of doing something like that,” she said. “It has destroyed a part of me.”
Mr. Ross’s gold wedding ring hangs from a chain on her neck, together with a cross made of red gems.
“I will never be able to go back to my husband’s grave. I will not be able go back to see my friends there,” she said. “That really hurts.”
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting from New York.
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5) AIDS Creeps Back in Parts of Zambia, a Year After U.S. Cuts to H.I.V. Assistance
A once-robust H.I.V. treatment and prevention system, credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives, has begun to crumble.
By Stephanie Nolen, Photographs by Arlette Bashizi, April 25, 2026
Stephanie Nolen reported this story in Zambia. She has reported on the country’s H.I.V. epidemic for more than 20 years.
“During President Trump’s first month in office, his administration upended much of the flagship global H.I.V. program that had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Zambia. … Today, a pared-down system is operating on reduced U.S. support, and Zambia may lose that help entirely in the next few days. The Trump administration has set an April 30 deadline for the Zambian government to accept a new health funding agreement that is tied to giving the United States expanded access to the country’s mineral resources.”
Lewis Chifuta, a patient with advanced H.I.V. disease, in the men’s ward at the Mpongwe mission hospital in northern Zambia.
Saulo Kasekela died of AIDS on March 7, in a small town called Mpongwe in the copper belt of northern Zambia. He was a 37-year-old security guard, admitted to the mission hospital two days earlier. After his body was wheeled out of the men’s ward, a nurse set aside his chest X-ray, a clouded smear of lungs devoured by tuberculosis, a hallmark of advanced, untreated H.I.V. infection. A scrawled doctor’s note indicated the X-ray should be saved for medical students.
Of the eight patients in the ward at day, four had AIDS. Lewis Chifuta, 33, was bone thin, feverish and barely able to recognize his siblings when they reached his bedside.
A year ago, in Mpongwe, there was one case like this each month, or maybe two. In January this year, there were 28 new cases; in February, 28 more; in March, seven more.
During President Trump’s first month in office, his administration upended much of the flagship global H.I.V. program that had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Zambia. The Zambian government went into emergency mode, desperate to ensure that people with the virus could continue to receive lifesaving medications.
But other crucial aspects of the program had to be scrapped — interventions that had helped stop the spread of the virus and protected the most vulnerable people, those like Mr. Kasekela.
Today, a pared-down system is operating on reduced U.S. support, and Zambia may lose that help entirely in the next few days. The Trump administration has set an April 30 deadline for the Zambian government to accept a new health funding agreement that is tied to giving the United States expanded access to the country’s mineral resources.
The administration says the deal would offer Zambia five years of funding and help to build a stronger system that gives the country more control. But if Zambia doesn’t sign, officials warn that Washington could cut off all of its H.I.V. aid, a situation health officials here say would be disastrous.
What is happening in Mpongwe now is a grim echo of a time that most of the nurses and clinicians here are not old enough to remember. Three decades ago, hospitals in Zambia were packed with young men and women dying agonizing deaths, and the H.I.V./AIDS pandemic had overwhelmed the health system. Life expectancy had dropped to 37.
In 2003, President George W. Bush’s administration launched a historic humanitarian response to the pandemic — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR — and Zambia was a focus country. By then, a lifesaving cocktail of antiretroviral medications had beaten back AIDS in the United States and other high-income countries, but the drugs cost tens of thousands of dollars, and almost no one in Africa could get them.
PEPFAR changed all that. Hundreds of thousands of people were given free access to those drugs in cheap generic forms. The United States built a network of laboratories and clinics that drew on the best of American innovation and technology. The rate of new infections was driven steadily down. Life expectancy in Zambia rose back to 67.
Then, last year, as part of its restructuring of foreign aid, the Trump administration cut off its funding for H.I.V. programs, saying many of the programs had been wasteful and an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars.
Then it restored some of the funding, then withheld some. The United States Agency for International Development was delivering PEPFAR services in the northern half of Zambia — the region with highest rates of H.I.V. prevalence and transmission in the country — through dozens of local organizations. They closed abruptly.
Zambia’s top officials held emergency meetings and sent a directive to provincial health offices: Redeploy whatever staff you have to keep the antiretroviral medication moving.
“It was like a military state of emergency,” said Dr. Suilanji Sivile, the national technical adviser to the H.I.V. program. They managed it: 2,885 treatment facilities, a vast majority, have stayed open, he said. Most of the medications they distribute were purchased by the United States.
Today, the Zambian government says that most of the 1.3 million people who were on H.I.V. treatment in January 2025 are still receiving their drugs. (The health ministry estimates that 100,000 people stopped taking their medication in the upheaval, and 40,000 of them have yet to be re-engaged.)
But because many prevention services have been cut, health officials fear infection rates are inevitably rising. Testing has been cut, too, though, so they cannot be sure how much or how quickly. Many new H.I.V. infections will not be caught until people are seriously ill, and by then they may have infected others.
Dr. Lloyd Mulenga, who leads Zambia’s national H.I.V. program, sat with his colleagues in early 2025 and did the painful exercise of deciding what services they would cut.
They kept the bare essentials, Dr. Mulenga said, but much else had to go:
When a person tested positive for H.I.V., a team traced that person’s sexual contacts, counseled and tested each of them and put them on H.I.V. treatment if they were infected. This labor-intensive system, known as index testing, found 70 percent of the infections identified each year. It has shut down.
Pregnant women with H.I.V. had the amount of virus in their system tested three times over their pregnancy, so that a clinician could respond quickly to any hint that their medication was failing and their fetus exposed. That testing has been cut to once.
Babies born to H.I.V.-positive mothers were tested for the virus through a highly accurate but expensive genetic test within hours of birth, and antiretroviral treatment was started immediately for those who tested positive. Now babies are not tested until 6 weeks old, when a cheaper standard blood test can be used.
Everyone who came to a medical center for any kind of care was tested for H.I.V. Now testing is restricted to people who ask for a test or who have another sexually transmitted infection or tuberculosis symptoms.
The genetics of the virus infecting people newly diagnosed were sequenced, indicating how new the infection was: When the data showed a number of recent infections in people from one place — like a hub on a trucking route, for example — a “hot zone” team could blanket the area with testing and prevention services. The ministry of health decided it could not fund that testing.
Antiretroviral drugs were distributed in communities — in small market shops, at churches — making it easy and discreet for people to get their medication. Those sites were closed.
Community health workers phoned people to remind them of appointments and, if they did not turn up, went to their homes or traced them to new locations, to make sure they did not miss a dose of medication. Most of those workers have lost their jobs.
People from communities that are highly vulnerable to H.I.V. infection but who may face harassment or shame in the main medical system — gay men, sex workers — received services in small, dedicated sites. Those have been closed.
At every H.I.V. treatment site, data teams used electronic records to track who was positive, who picked up their medications and whose viral load was uncontrolled — so that clinicians could track patients. Most have returned to using paper.
Teenage girls have for years been the demographic most likely to be infected with H.I.V. Dedicated programs worked to target them with H.I.V. prevention and educational and vocational training to motivate them to avoid infection. Those were closed.
More than 100,000 Zambian men were given free circumcisions each year. (Circumcised men are less likely to become infected or transmit H.I.V.) That program was canceled.
A year later, the impact of all these cuts is visible in the hospital wards and H.I.V. clinics in the copper belt.
At the mission hospital in Mpongwe, Dexter Fundulu, an H.I.V. clinician, closed out Mr. Kasekela’s file after he died. Mr. Fundulu had diagnosed Mr. Kasekela with H.I.V. in December. But his new patient lived about 40 miles from the hospital, and he did not show up to pick up his medications in January or February. The mobile community team that used to deliver medicines to patients like him had been eliminated.
It seemed, Mr. Fundulu said, that more patients had been missed, or fallen away from care, in the upheaval a year ago. Now the devastating symptoms of uncontrolled H.I.V. are catching up with them.
At a clinic in a gritty neighborhood called Chipulukusu, in the regional hub of Ndola, Maureen Dhaka, who has H.I.V., gave birth on March 5. The baby was chalky and silent, the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, and an ambulance was summoned to take mother and infant to the children’s hospital.
There, the baby was placed on oxygen, and began to regain color. But no one tested him for H.I.V., even though his mother lives with the virus. No one gave him H.I.V. prophylaxis for nearly two full days after his birth, even though every moment counts to prevent an infection.
Before the cuts, a community health worker would have accompanied Ms. Dhaka and the baby to the hospital, and made sure the baby was swiftly given prophylaxis. Today, only one community health worker works at the Chipulukusu clinic, not five, and she did not catch up with Ms. Dhaka for days.
In Ipusukilo, a scrappy community outside the mining town of Kitwe, a 25-year-old patient named Precious Mulenga came to the H.I.V. clinic to pick up medication in February. When she arrived, she learned that the clinic — where a staff of 11 was reduced to just one for months after the funding cuts — had lost track of the results of a blood test she had taken last July. Those results were alarming: Her viral load was high. But there were no community health workers left to track her down to let her know, and help her take the correct medication to control it.
When Ms. Mulenga learned of those results seven months later, she was pregnant. The child she was carrying had been exposed to the virus for months. She was tested again, and in March came back to hear the new results. She sat, swinging her feet with anxiety, in the office of Ireen Lubwesha, the clinician who ran the clinic alone for much of last year. Ms. Lubwesha read Ms. Mulenga’s file, lifted her eyeglasses, and rubbed at the bridge of her nose. Here was another child facing a potential lifetime of infection, and it could have been avoided.
Despite years of discussion and millions of dollars spent on “localization” — moving responsibility for running services from PEPFAR to countries’ governments — the disruptions of the past year have made clear how little the Zambian government has taken over in the past two decades.
Thousands of critical health care workers were still employees of aid groups, and not the ministry of health, so they lost their jobs. Ministry employees had no idea how to use the drug- and test-ordering system. In Ndola they had to plead with the fired data clerks to come back and teach the remaining clinicians the passwords and how to look up patient records. The purchase of medications, operation of the supply chain, payment of staff: Zambia had continued to let the United States pay for and manage almost all of it.
At clinics throughout the north, visitors last month would see paper records stacked into teetering piles on desks, and heaped into boxes. Many clinics no longer have the funds to pay for internet access, so the tracking is intermittent and haphazard. That has led to weeks- or monthslong delays to follow test results.
At the Chipulukusu clinic, diagnosing infants now takes six weeks, not a week or 10 days as it used to. The region has a highly mobile population, people who cycle through the mines and related jobs, and in the six weeks it takes to learn if a baby is infected, mothers have often moved on — no one finds out children have contracted H.I.V. until they repeatedly fall ill. Half of Zambian children with the virus will die before age 2 if untreated.
There have been more new infections, more suffering and more deaths, Dr. Mulenga, the head of the country’s H.I.V. program, acknowledged. But Zambia is in the process of taking full responsibility for its H.I.V. program, and when it does, the country will be stronger, he said.
He hopes that a big push to distribute H.I.V. prevention medications — especially the new injectable lenacapavir, which provides protection from the virus for six months after each shot — may make up for the strategies that have been cut, and renew the effort to end the epidemic.
The United States continues, for now, to pay for a reduced but still significant amount of the H.I.V. care here, through bridge funding intended to carry the program while a new aid model is implemented.
The State Department is negotiating new health assistance funding agreements with countries that used to have U.S.A.I.D. support. These come with conditions, and Zambia’s has proved particularly thorny, because the State Department has tied support for the H.I.V. program to access to the country’s minerals.
The department has warned Zambia that if no agreement is signed by April 30, all U.S. support will end.
Zambia still has the support of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, but that fund is also heavily reliant on the United States and is cutting its budget.
Without a deal, Zambia will have to take over buying and moving antiretroviral drugs, laboratory chemicals, and H.I.V. tests itself; it is entirely ill prepared to do so. “If the stocks we have are the last we will get, what will we do?” Ms. Lubwesha said. “I always think about it. It will mean death.”
Under the terms of a draft agreement seen by The New York Times, Zambia would agree to hire thousands of new health workers, to replace those once paid by the United States. Dr. Mulenga hopes many will be community health workers who can restore some of the outreach that kept people in care.
In Ipusukilo, the bridge funding has allowed the clinic to rehire one data technician and a community health worker. Of the 2,000 people they had on antiretrovirals in February 2025, they lost 500 but have managed to bring 200 back. But there is no more testing or tracing the contacts of infected people.
These days, two or three people turn up in Ms. Lubwesha’s clinic every week with dangerously compromised immune systems, she said. “I know we can’t just depend on donors, we have to live within our means,” she said. “But it’s like we don’t care like we used to.”
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6) Measles Is Back. What Comes Next Will Be Worse.
By The Editorial Board, April 25, 2026
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times
The resurgence of measles — a terrible disease that can swell the brain and cause permanent disabilities or death — is alarming enough on its own. There have been more than 1,700 cases reported in the United States already this year, up from about 70 per year in the early 2000s. Three children died last year.
The rise of measles may also be a harbinger of something even worse, public officials say. “Measles is basically a canary in the coal mine for our entire system,” says Dr. Scott Harris, the state health officer in Alabama’s Department of Public Health. “When it surges like this, it signals that our vaccination programs are starting to fail, and that other diseases won’t be far behind.” Already, cases of whooping cough have surged, too. And after two Florida children died of Hib, a bacterial infection, epidemiologists worry that disease is resurgent.
The most maddening aspect of this situation is that it was almost certainly avoidable. It stems in large part from a yearslong scare campaign by vaccine conspiracists including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now serves as President Trump’s secretary of health and human services. Since taking office, Mr. Kennedy has turned his damaging ideas into federal policy. He has downplayed the seriousness of measles outbreaks; promoted dubious treatments and prevention strategies; replaced an expert panel that shaped federal vaccine recommendations with people who share his views but, for the most part, lack relevant experience or expertise; and made substantial changes to the childhood vaccine schedule without even convening that same group.
There is some reason to hope that the political climate is shifting against Mr. Kennedy. In March, a federal judge blocked his changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, calling them arbitrary, capricious and most likely illegal, and the Trump administration has not yet appealed. Last week, Mr. Trump announced the nomination of Dr. Erica Schwartz, a well-qualified Navy officer who supports vaccines, to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mr. Kennedy, appearing at several congressional hearings over the past week, tried to soft-pedal his views at times and even acknowledged that his department “has advised every child” to get the measles shot.
But Mr. Kennedy does not appear to have changed his actual views, and the threat to vaccines remains substantial. The military recently eliminated its flu vaccine requirement, for example. And the C.D.C. disingenuously canceled the publication of a study documenting large, continuing benefits from the Covid-19 vaccines.
Reversing the new vaccine skepticism will require a dedicated effort. State officials and members of Congress, especially Republicans, should speak up. So should doctors, religious leaders and corporate leaders. Protecting Americans from deadly, preventable diseases should not be a partisan issue, despite the attempts by opportunists like Mr. Kennedy to make it one.
Studies have suggested that only a small share of parents are hardened anti-vaxxers who refuse all shots. Many more are merely anxious and looking for trusted guides or good information. The key is to meet these families where they are. Health workers can listen empathetically and provide easily understandable information. They can be careful to avoid using too many statistics and jargon and instead tell human stories. Hearing about even one child who died from a preventable disease can sometimes be persuasive.
Skepticism about vaccinations began to grow in the early 2000s, in both the United States and some other wealthy countries. It sprang partly from a 1998 study that linked vaccines to autism and has since been discredited. The worries have been part of a broader rise in conspiratorial politics, fueled by a combination of partisan polarization, social media and other factors.
The Covid pandemic once seemed as if it might reinstill confidence. The virus was a new and terrifying pathogen for which scientists developed a safe, highly effective vaccine in record time. It offered a case study in the power of vaccination. But Covid, too, soon became subject to political polarization.
Many conservatives questioned the vaccine in irrational and self-defeating ways. Liberals rightly embraced the vaccine but sometimes went so far as to be alienating — insisting that children needed annual boosters (which most countries did not), calling for the firing of unvaccinated people and more. The combination played into many Americans’ pre-existing uncertainty about how much to trust public health experts. In the years since, vaccination rates for other diseases have slipped further.
A vast majority of American children — more than 90 percent by most estimates — are still vaccinated for measles. But it takes a threshold of 95 percent to stop the illness from spreading, and in too many communities, the rates are lower than that already, or falling fast. In Idaho, just 78.5 percent of kindergartners were vaccinated for measles last school year. Nationwide vaccination rates for several other diseases, including flu, hepatitis B, rotavirus, Hib, polio and whooping cough, are also down.
A policy known as “shared clinical decision making,” which Mr. Kennedy put in place for some shots in January and remains in effect, has proved pernicious. The practice sounds innocuous. It involves doctors discussing options with their patients and then allowing the patients to decide which course to pursue. But doctors normally reserve it for cases in which a treatment’s benefits are unclear, which is not the case with standard childhood vaccines. “It implies that either decision, to take it or not to take it, is equally OK, and that’s not the case with vaccines,” Dr. Harris said.
Doctors now must spend more time rebutting misinformation and making the case for vaccines. Doctors report that hesitancy is spreading from vaccines to other medical staples. Last year, for instance, at least three infants died after their parents opted out of a routine vitamin K injection meant to prevent internal bleeding.
The fallout from declining vaccination rates will not be confined to those who choose not to get vaccinated. For one thing, newborns cannot be vaccinated against most diseases and rely on the rest of society to provide herd immunity. For another thing, no vaccine is perfect: About 3 percent of people vaccinated against measles remain vulnerable to infection, often without realizing it. Immunocompromised people, like those on chemotherapy, can also be vulnerable. They, too, rely on herd immunity. A return of vaccine-preventable diseases would also strain hospitals and doctors’ offices and require quarantines, school closures and other disruptive safety protocols.
What can be done? So long as Mr. Kennedy remains health secretary and insists on making up his own facts, the options will be limited. The country needs vaccine policies based on scientific consensus and federal investments in both vaccine distribution and disease treatment.
Nonetheless, other leaders can step forward to mitigate the damage. Governors and members of Congress from both parties can issue clear messages about the benefits of vaccines. As Dr. Paul Offit of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia puts it: “Vaccinate your children against measles. The shots work and are safe, and nobody needs to die from this disease.”
States and local governments can also adopt helpful policies that counteract the Trump administration’s pseudoscience. One tangible step would be to make vaccines easier to obtain by opening more pop-up clinics in schools and community centers. It would also be useful to tighten the requirements for vaccine exemptions. Several states require families to receive information about vaccines before they can receive nonmedical exemptions, and more should follow. Families should also have to apply individually for any exemption, rather than being able to receive a blanket exemption covering all shots.
The arguments against vaccines have been circulating for more than a century, even if social media has allowed them to spread more easily. The claims can seem compelling but can be debunked. Vaccines prevent three million to five million deaths globally each year. They are not toxic and they do not cause autism, full stop.
To some extent, vaccines have been a victim of their own success. They made many disease outbreaks a thing of the past, and people have forgotten how terrible those outbreaks were. We are at growing risk of experiencing that misery again.
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7) Iran and U.S. Sink Into Awkward Limbo of ‘No War, No Peace’
Each side is betting they can last longer than the other, analysts say. But there are risks in a stalemate without a deal.
By Erika Solomon, April 26, 2026
A mural in Tehran depicting Iranian missiles attacking a U.S. Navy ship. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
With plans for U.S.-Iran peace talks derailed, at least for now, Tehran and Washington are sinking into an awkward limbo of neither peace, nor war, each hoping to outlast the other in a standoff with drastic stakes for the global economy.
Iranian officials seem confident they can withstand economic pain caused by war longer than President Trump, analysts say. But they are still concerned that without the momentum of negotiations, they will remain trapped under the persistent threat of U.S. or Israeli attacks.
“What’s happening is something akin to what we had at the end of the 12-day war, which is ending the war, but without any permanency,” Sasan Karimi, a vice president in Iran’s previous government and political scientist at the University of Tehran, said of the Israel-Iran war last June.
Over the weekend, an article published by a prominent conservative newspaper, Khorasan, and redistributed by several other Iranian outlets, described the current moment as “a strategic limbo” with considerable risks.
“Both sides have stepped back from the costs of full-scale war but have not moved beyond the logic of force and pressure,” it said. This “may be more dangerous than short-term war itself.”
The halting efforts to restart cease-fire talks brokered by Pakistan reflect the dynamics since the U.S.-Israeli bombardment of Iran ended in a cease-fire earlier this month. Both sides argued that they emerged with the upper hand. And Mr. Trump also seems to believe that the United States can outlast Iran in withstanding the war’s economic pain of the parallel blockades of the Strait of Hormuz.
The result is that neither side is willing to give ground that could allow talks to move forward.
Mr. Trump on Saturday called off sending his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, for a second round of truce talks. He said the Iranians would waste the negotiators’ time.
Iran’s top officials maintain they will not meet for direct negotiations until Mr. Trump lifts a U.S. naval blockade he imposed on Iranian ports after agreeing to the cease-fire.
Yet Iran’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, headed on Saturday to meetings in Oman after his visit to Pakistan a day earlier, although he returned to Pakistan on Sunday. He is set to fly to Russia later this week, according to Iranian state media, after holding a second meeting with counterparts in Pakistan.
Beyond Islamabad, which would host a future round of talks, the Iranians see coordinating with the Persian Gulf nation of Oman, the other government whose country lies along the strategic Strait of Hormuz, as critical to hammering out a settlement.
Mr. Karimi, the former Iranian official, urged Iran’s current leadership to take the moment to lay out an entire framework for a deal with the United States — from Iranian concessions to its ultimate demands, and a vision for a regional peace pact.
But in Iran, “the status quo is the most conservative way of behaving politically now,” he warned, ‘because any change raises the possibility of being blamed in the future” if the plan fails.
Iran also still believes that in terms of economics, “it can wait Trump out, at least on the horizon of several weeks, where actually the disruptions in the strait are more costly for Trump than they are for the Iranians,” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, chief executive of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a research organization based in London.
But Iran’s economy is already facing a severe crisis. Reports of layoffs are spreading across the country, which is grappling with shortages in production of petrochemicals and medicine as a result of the war.
Iran’s most prominent economic newspaper, Donya-e-Eghtesad, has forecast that annual inflation could rise to 49 percent “in the most optimistic case” of reaching a deal. A state of “no war, no peace,” it warned, could push inflation closer to 70 percent over the coming months while a return to war might spark hyperinflation of more than 120 percent.
Yet some economists estimate Iran’s authoritarian rulers can survive the current economic crisis for three to six months.
By contrast, Mr. Batmanghelidj said, the disruptions to oil production and exports like fertilizer, could start to cause deeper economic shocks to the global economy within weeks that could persuade Mr. Trump to move talks along.
Yet even if Iran can economically outlast the current impasse, he said, its strategic dilemma remains.
“The no-deal, no-war mode, from the Iranian standpoint, leaves them vulnerable,” he said.
Sanam Mahoozi contributed reporting.
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8) Israel and Hezbollah Trade Strikes in Lebanon, as Iran Talks Remain on Hold
Cease-fires in Lebanon and Iran are on shaky ground, with military attacks flaring and direct talks between Washington and Tehran to end their war stalled.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 26, 2026
A police officer walks past posters about U.S.-Iran cease-fire talks in Islamabad, Pakistan on Saturday. Anjum Naveed/Associated Press
Israel and Hezbollah traded strikes in Lebanon on Sunday and talks to end the war in Iran were in limbo, putting two Mideast truces on shaky ground.
The Israeli military said that it had attacked structures used across southern Lebanon by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group, overnight. The attacks were launched just days after the cease-fire in Lebanon was extended.
The Israeli military also said that Hezbollah had fired explosive drones at troops deployed in the Israeli-controlled zone in southern Lebanon.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that the military was operating “with significant force” and accused Hezbollah of “effectively eroding the cease-fire.” Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed several people over the past few days, including a well-known journalist. The Israeli military said at least four were militants.
At the same time, the fate of U.S.-Iran cease-fire negotiations was unclear a day after President Trump abruptly called off a trip by American officials to Pakistan, which has been acting as a mediator.
On Sunday, Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, returned to the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, after leaving on Saturday, according to Iranian state media.
Despite the tensions, the truces in Lebanon and Iran do not yet appear to have hit their breaking points. Mr. Trump extended the deadline for Iran to respond to his demands after providing an ultimatum that expired last week.
Analysts say that while neither the United States nor Iran wants to prolong the war, it is uncertain whether they can agree on terms for a durable peace deal. The talks hit a snag on Saturday as Mr. Araghchi was wrapping up his last round of meetings with the Pakistani mediators when Mr. Trump abruptly announced that some of his top aides — including Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law — would not travel to Pakistan for a new round of discussions. Mr. Trump said the Iranians would be wasting the Americans’ time after saying they had put forward an unacceptable proposal. He said Iran had subsequently presented a better plan but it was not clear if the American negotiators would return to Islamabad.
Mr. Trump has threatened multiple times to attack civilian infrastructure in Iran in an effort to force its leaders to accept American terms for an agreement. But he has pulled back from the brink on each occasion, offering the Iranian leadership more time to negotiate.
Between threats and talks, however, the Trump administration appears no closer to compelling Iran to hand over its stockpile of enriched uranium and curtail its nuclear program. Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed that Iran had agreed to his demands, only for Iran to issue official denials, with the country’s leaders insisting on their own conditions.
Now, the two countries cannot even agree to meet face to face, although they could keep the diplomacy alive by passing messages to each other via their Pakistani interlocutors.
Iran says it will not sit down with U.S. officials until Washington ends its naval blockade of Iranian ports. The Trump administration imposed a cordon in response to Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf waterway that is critical shipping route for oil and gas. The turmoil has sent energy prices skyrocketing.
This month, American negotiators led by Vice President JD Vance met with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, in the highest-level face-to-face encounter between the two adversaries in decades. But some two weeks later, the talks appear to be at a stalemate.
The Trump administration is also hoping to broker a long-term peace deal between Israel and Lebanon. Mr. Trump has said he wants to invite both Mr. Netanyahu and President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon to the White House in the coming weeks.
Sanam Mahoozi and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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9) U.S. Sanctions Zigzag in New World of Economic Warfare
With oil prices in mind, the Trump administration has deployed a haphazard approach to sanctions on Russia and Iran.
By Alan Rappeport and Ephrat Livni, Reporting from Washington, April 26, 2026
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at a Senate hearing on Wednesday, where he said the decision to extend the waiver on sales of Russia oil came after developing countries lobbied him. Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared in mid-April that the United States would not extend a waiver allowing the sale of Russian oil. Two days later, on a Friday evening, the Treasury Department quietly issued another 30-day reprieve.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, condemned the waiver, saying, ”Every dollar paid for Russian oil is money for the war.” Senate Democrats called the 180-degree reversal a “shameful” decision.
Then, on Friday, Mr. Bessent told The Associated Press that the United States did not plan to renew the waiver for sales of Russian oil another time. The current waiver ends on May 16.
The about-face on Russian oil sanctions underscored the haphazard state of U.S. statecraft as the Trump administration confronts the fallout from the war it and Israel started with Iran. While the United States could once use its financial might to cripple the economies of adversaries, countries such as Russia and Iran have been using their leverage in energy markets to fight back. That has forced the Treasury Department, which oversees the U.S. sanctions program, to improvise.
The Trump administration rolled out a blitz of sanctions on Friday, targeting 40 shipping firms and vessels that it identified as part of Iran’s so-called shadow fleet of oil tankers as it broadened its efforts to cripple the Iranian economy. The administration also imposed sanctions on an independent Chinese refinery, Hengli Petrochemical Refinery, which is one of Iran’s largest customers for crude oil and other petroleum products.
At a Senate hearing last week, Mr. Bessent said that the decision to extend the Russia license came after developing countries lobbied him to keep more Russian oil on the market while they were in Washington for the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
“It was my belief we would not do it,” Mr. Bessent said, but added that poor countries have been struggling with the global shortfall of oil.
The White House and Treasury Department had no comment on whether the decision to continue easing the Russia sanctions came directly from President Trump.
The sanctions relief has been filling Russia’s coffers with, by some estimates, as much as $200 million per day, undermining years of work by the U.S. and Western allies that aimed to make it harder for Moscow to pay for its war in Ukraine.
“You don’t have to read ‘The Art of War’ to know that helping your adversaries gain money while you’re at war is a terrible idea,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said while questioning Mr. Bessent at the hearing on Wednesday. “No country has profited more from this war than Russia,” Mr. Coons added, noting that the country’s revenues also help support Iran militarily.
The strategy toward Iran has been equally muddled. The United States last month granted a 30-day exemption allowing the sale of Iranian oil, arguing that it would help curb global oil prices while preventing the Iranians from profiting by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. But this month, the Trump administration changed course, letting the sanctions exemption expire and embarking on “Operation Economic Fury,” with new sanctions on Iran. The U.S. military also extended its blockade on vessels coming in and out of Iranian ports to the waters of the wider world.
Mr. Bessent has likened the initiative to a financial bombing campaign. Last week, he and Mr. Trump emphasized the economic pressures they are putting on Iran. They have argued that Iran will be unable to store any more oil in a matter of days and will be forced to shut its wells, leading to the wells’ possible eventual failure and driving economic collapse.
“It is a kind of whiplash in terms of policy,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank in Washington. “This whole back and forth is evidence the Trump administration did not expect this to last this long.”
Previously, “the primary vector of pressure” was military action, and the expectation seemed to be that bombing would force Iran to capitulate, she said. But as fighting has dragged on, raising the stakes of the war, the notion of military escalation became less palatable and Mr. Trump had already “escalated rhetorically to the maximum,” with his threat to wipe out Iranian civilization before a cease-fire, she said, leading to the focus on economics.
Iran complicated the U.S. sanctions strategy by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, engaging in economic warfare by military means.
An analysis from Lloyd’s List, the shipping intelligence firm, noted that there are “signs of disruption to Iran’s shadow fleet operations” amid the global U.S. blockade, with some tankers turning, diverting or pausing since its imposition. But vessel-tracking information also showed other Iran-linked tankers were actively sailing.
On Thursday, the Pentagon said U.S. military forces stopped and boarded a second sanctioned tanker carrying oil from Iran in the Indian Ocean, following a similar interdiction on Tuesday.
“But blockades are not quick fixes,” Ms. Kavanagh said. She has argued that Iran can probably withstand the pressure because they work slowly.
The global blockade raises legal and operational questions because it has no geographical boundaries. And the United States can only seize so many ships, suggesting the practical impact could be “marginal,” she argued, while at the same time degrading the U.S. reputation as an upholder of the international order, since many countries view such seizures as piracy.
Edward Fishman, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the haphazard use of sanctions by the United States reflects how economic and military warfare are merging. “We don't have a playbook for this kind of economic warfare, which may help explain some of the fumbling by the United States,” Mr. Fishman said.
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10) U.S. Mint Buys Drug Cartel Gold and Sells It as ‘American’
As prices for the precious metal soar, the industry’s guardrails have broken down.
By Justin Scheck, Simón Posada and Federico Rios, Visuals by Federico Rios, April 26, 2026
Reporting from illegal mines in northwestern Colombia, in the heart of Clan del Golfo territory
Workers in illegal mines endure long hours and toxic conditions.
Every year, the United States Mint sells more than $1 billion of investment-grade gold coins. Each is stamped with an icon like the bald eagle, signifying the government’s guarantee, required by law, that the gold is 100 percent American.
“To hold a coin or medal produced by the Mint is to connect to the founding principles of our nation,” the Mint declares.
But a New York Times investigation has found that the government’s program of gold sales is based on a lie. The Mint is actually the last link in a chain that launders foreign gold, much of it illegally mined, for an insatiable market.
The Mint buys gold that originates in a Colombian drug cartel mine. It makes Lady Liberty coins out of gold from Mexican and Peruvian pawn shops and from a Congolese mine that is part-owned by the Chinese government, records show. Some Mint gold has come from a company in Honduras that dug up an Indigenous graveyard for the ore underneath.
Congress in 1985 prohibited the Mint from making bullion out of foreign gold because it wanted to insulate the process from human rights abuses, primarily in apartheid South Africa. The Mint has flouted that law, across Democratic and Republican administrations, despite internal warnings.
Now, even President Trump’s 24-karat gold coin, commemorating the United States’ 250th birthday, could come from a swirl of non-American gold from any number of sources.
The Mint, the biggest name in the global market for investment gold coins, is an example of how the industry’s guardrails have collapsed. Gold prices hover around $5,000 an ounce, about four times the price of a decade ago. That gives criminal organizations and fly-by-night operators a huge incentive to mine in wasteful, destructive and risky ways.
Investors buy gold as a hedge against instability. Nearly every terrorist attack, war and financial meltdown in the past quarter-century has fueled a gold-buying frenzy.
But as prices climb ever higher, wealthy buyers are actually helping to create the very instability they are trying to hedge against.
Gold mining funds Sudan’s brutal civil war and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Surging gold prices have helped Venezuela and Iran temper the effects of financial sanctions. Colombia’s biggest cartel, the Clan del Golfo, traffics in gold alongside cocaine — and uses the proceeds to maintain control through murder and bombings. Illegal miners deforest and pollute the Amazon, poisoning people there with mercury. Terrorist groups, including some linked to Al Qaeda, are getting into the gold business, too.
The easier it is to sell this gold on the world’s legitimate exchanges, the easier it is to make war, sustain an autocracy, launder money or destroy the environment. Drug cartel gold ending up at the U.S. Mint is one example of that process in action.
The industry’s biggest players speak about bright lines between legal and criminal gold. Buying from a reputable source, like the Mint, is supposed to ensure that criminals, terrorists and polluters do not profit. In fact, the Mint has looked away for decades as gold from dubious sources flows into its plant in West Point, N.Y.
We tracked hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign gold entering the Mint’s supply chain in recent years. That includes secondhand gold, with provenance that is difficult or even impossible to determine, and gold from countries like Colombia and Nicaragua, where the industry is linked to criminal groups.
When we first approached the Mint, a spokesman said that its gold came entirely from the United States, as the law requires. After we shared our findings, the Mint said the U.S. was its “primary” source and said it was taking steps to better track its gold.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose department oversees the Mint, said he would investigate the gold procurement practices.
“This review is focused on ensuring that the U.S. Mint’s gold suppliers comply with the law and strictly satisfy their obligations, and that the Mint takes every step possible to continue to vigorously safeguard our national security and uphold market integrity,” he said in a written statement.
For illegally mined foreign gold to become an American Eagle coin, two seeming acts of alchemy occur.
First, the illegal gold becomes legal.
Second, it becomes American.
To see this sleight of hand at work, we headed into the heart of Clan del Golfo territory in northwestern Colombia. A six-hour drive from Medellín took us down the northern slope of the Andes and into the tropical lowlands.
Just outside the small city of Caucasia, a sign announced that we had arrived at a cattle ranch owned by the government “for the benefit of the Colombian people.”
It was clear that the Colombian government had long ago lost control. The roadside sign was charred black. An old man raised fighting roosters. All around, workers were grinding up the land, openly flouting a ban on mining.
The miners call the ranch La Mandinga, a name for an evil spirit.
For the past eight years, the Clan del Golfo has run La Mandinga with a short list of rules, a pair of mining supervisors told us. The most important: Nobody mines without cartel permission, and everybody pays.
Every month, the supervisors said, a man on a motorbike collects the Clan’s cut, $400 for each team of five. There are hundreds of teams, perhaps a thousand or more.
They work in open-air mines, using excavators and high-pressure hoses to turn La Mandinga’s hillsides into mud. Picking the tiny flecks of gold from that muck is impossible, so the miners mix the mud with mercury and stir by hand until the mercury binds to the gold.
All of this is illegal, environmentally destructive and toxic.
The Colombian authorities occasionally conduct airstrikes and raids on mines that support the Clan. But the miners at La Mandinga apparently need not worry, even though their operation directly abuts a military base. They operate with such impunity that, when we flew a drone over the area in February, we saw that workers had breached the base’s perimeter and were mining for gold on military land. [Related: See What Happened After We Found a Cartel Mine on a Military Base.]
At day’s end, workers gather their gray globs of mercury and gold, each about the size of a marble, and wrap them in plastic. They stuff these marbles in their pockets and drive their motorbikes down La Mandinga’s dirt paths and into nearby Caucasia.
La Mandinga gold has no business making its way into the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the Clan “a violent and powerful criminal organization” last year when the United States designated the cartel a terrorist group.
The Treasury Department keeps Clan del Golfo leaders on a financial blacklist, banning American companies from doing business with them. Government organizations and academics have documented the cartel’s gold mining activities here for years. (A Colombian lawyer for the cartel did not return a call for comment.)
Caucasia is a gold-rush city. Businesses sell excavators, pumps and million-dollar dredges for illegal riverbed mining. Fancy cafes and dance clubs have sprung up. Miners can sell gold to any of hundreds of storefronts. Every month, two shop owners told us, the Clan collects $400 from them, too.
Alex Cuevas works in one such shop. One by one, miners pass him mercury-and-gold marbles through a hole in a plexiglass window. His hands tremble — a symptom, he says, of long-term mercury poisoning.
Mr. Cuevas burns off the mercury with a blowtorch, weighs what is left and pays out cash — $2,500 for miners who had a good day, $50 or less for the unlucky. At the end of the night, he melts the gold together in a crucible and pours it into a mold.
And just like that, the first metamorphosis is complete. The gold is legal. The mercury, the off-limits mining, the payments to the Clan — it is all erased.
How?
Mr. Cuevas showed us ledger entries on the shop’s computer. His suppliers from La Mandinga, he said, have registered under a Colombian program for small-scale miners, or barequeros. Nearly anyone can get a license, as long as they mine in authorized areas using only hand tools and no mercury.
Of course, La Mandinga’s workers are not mining only with hand tools. Or in authorized areas. And they are using mercury. Mr. Cuevas knows all of this. He mines in La Mandinga himself. But it is not his job to look beyond the paperwork. And the Colombian authorities rarely examine barequero gold’s origins to determine legality.
Instead, they ask one question: Does it have paperwork?
And Mr. Cuevas does. He says each gram he buys is linked to a licensed miner. Every shop that sells gold for legal export keeps these ledgers, he says.
Gold industry players know how this works. “If you’re buying from barequeros, you’re buying illegal gold,” said the trader Patrick Schein. He said his firm, Gold by Gold, will not buy barequero gold.
The shop where Mr. Cuevas works, like others in town, sells to a government-owned exporter. The exporter said it checks the same database that Mr. Cuevas uses, verifying that the gold is legal. The gold from La Mandinga is mixed with supplies from around Colombia and melted into bars. Export records show that many of them, worth about $255 million over the past year or so, arrive in Texas.
There the gold becomes American.
At a refinery outside Dallas called Dillon Gage, workers dump the imported gold into a glowing cauldron, mixing it with molten gold from other suppliers: South American mines, secondhand U.S. jewelry dealers and Peruvian pawn shops, according to records and interviews.
But to Dillon Gage’s customers, once that gold leaves the Dallas cauldron, it ceases to be foreign. Dillon Gage is in the United States and mixes American gold with Colombian gold. So, the industry logic goes, the end product must be American. “As far as they’re concerned, it originated within the U.S.,” said Terry Hanlon, Dillon Gage’s chief executive.
Mr. Hanlon said that his company was on the lookout for illegal gold. But at this point, the Mandinga gold is legal, thanks to the shop ledgers and export paperwork. That means Mr. Hanlon’s purchases and sales are legal. (Mr. Hanlon said that he was surprised we found cartel gold in his pipeline. The company suspended purchases from the Colombian exporter.)
Among Dillon Gage’s biggest clients are two Mint suppliers, Mr. Hanlon said. He said he gives his customers annual lists of his sources, so even though the customers treat the gold as American, they know its true origins.
La Mandinga is just one of many cartel-controlled mines in the region. Mr. Cuevas works at one of hundreds of shops in just one city. There are many exporters, and even more buyers. In this trillion-dollar market, notorious for fraud and money laundering, the distinctions between dirty gold and clean exist mainly on paper. Unless a customer is willing to check, the distinctions melt away.
A full supply chain audit in the United States would flag the risk of Clan del Golfo gold. Colombian gold is considered high-risk by industry standards, and the U.S. government itself has documented the Clan’s operations in Caucasia, in particular.
But for two decades — a period covering nearly all of the post-Sept. 11 gold boom — the Mint never asked its suppliers where they bought gold, a Treasury Department inspector general audit found in 2024.
If it had, it would have found a remarkably transparent supply chain. Through import and export databases and interviews with intermediary companies, we found dozens of foreign sources in the Mint’s gold pipeline.
Those included industrial mines in Mexico and Peru. Some suppliers, like pawn shops, specialize in recycled jewelry.
One of the historically largest Mint suppliers, a Utah refiner called Asahi USA, is open about the fact that its cauldron contains gold from many different countries. Some of it comes from Dillon Gage. But there is gold from all over. “It’s commingled,” the company’s refining chief, Paul Healey, said. “And it comes out the other side.” Mr. Healey said the company would investigate our findings about the Clan del Golfo.
The Mint has said, in response to internal audits, that its gold counts as American because its suppliers offset any foreign gold with American gold. If the Mint buys a ton of gold, for example, it expects the supplier to buy that much American gold at some point.
U.S. law makes no allowance for this kind of trade-off. And for decades, the Mint has not enforced that provision or even asked its suppliers to comply, the Treasury’s inspector general found.
Even if it had, everything in the big Texas cauldron, including the cartel gold, could count as American.
But the Mint goes beyond not asking questions. It openly buys from sources that could not possibly supply the newly mined American gold the law requires. In recent years, records show, the Mint has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on gold bars from the Canadian Copper Refinery, which gets its gold from the slime that is left over from processing copper, not from newly mined gold.
Some of that copper comes from a Congolese mine owned in part by the Chinese government, export records show.
The Mint’s sourcing practices have at times raised red flags inside the Treasury Department, including during Mr. Trump’s first term, when the inspector general began asking questions.
That investigation took five years to complete. Along the way, auditors found serious problems. They said that the Mint was not following its own policies and that the Mint’s gold-offset plan (one ton of foreign gold for one ton of American gold) might violate U.S. law.
The Biden administration responded in 2024, saying it was just months away from publishing new plans for investigating gold sources.
It never did.
A Treasury spokeswoman said that the Trump administration was already taking steps to identify its gold sources. It has not cut off foreign gold; doing so, she said, would make it impossible to meet demand. But the government monitors its purchases.
The Mint still has not released its gold-tracking policy.
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11) 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.
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12) 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.
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13) ‘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.
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