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) John Roberts Believes in an America That Doesn’t Exist
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, May 6, 2026
Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
“Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield,” President Lyndon Johnson declared as he signed the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6, 1965. “This act flows from a clear and simple wrong,” he continued. “Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote.”
And so it did.
The Voting Rights Act put the final nail in the coffin of American apartheid and opened the door to something that looked worthy of the name democracy. It brought a flowering of political participation, not just in the states of the former Confederacy but also throughout the country, as disadvantaged and disenfranchised Americans took advantage of new rules and protections to fight for and win political power. Latinos, Native Americans and other ethnic and linguistic minorities all won greater access and influence under the act and its subsequent amendments and reauthorizations.
The change was most transformative, of course, for Black Americans, who seized the passage of the law to win local, state and federal representation at numbers not seen since Reconstruction. In 1964, there was just a handful of Black officeholders at any level of government in the South. By 1980, hundreds of Black Americans had won local and state office.
With that said, it took a major amendment to the Voting Rights Act and a Supreme Court decision to give Black Americans the opportunity to win more than token representation in Congress. In 1982, Congress reauthorized and amended the V.R.A. to combat disparate impact in voting and electoral outcomes. Four years later, in 1986, a unanimous Supreme Court declared that the Voting Rights Act forbade voting schemes that impaired the ability of “cohesive” groups of language or minority groups to “participate equally in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice.” Following this decision, states across the country — especially in the South — used the 1990 census and redistricting to create majority-minority state legislative and congressional districts where Black voters could elevate Black lawmakers and officials to federal office.
At the 10th anniversary of the act in 1975, there were 17 Black members of Congress, up from six in 1965. All of them served in the House of Representatives. At the 20th anniversary in 1985, there were still only 20 Black Americans in the House (and none in the Senate). By 1995, however, there were 43 Black Americans serving as voting members of Congress, including one senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. This, even after the Democratic Party suffered its largest congressional defeat of the postwar era. Nonetheless, it would take another 20 years before Black Americans’ share of the House approximated their overall share of the population.
With its decision in Louisiana v. Callais last week, the Republican-appointed supermajority on the Supreme Court has delivered the latest in a string of decisions — stretching back to Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 — that have weakened the Voting Rights Act’s ability to stop racial discrimination in voting and to secure fair representation in both Congress and state legislatures. Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, the conservative justices have sidelined lawmakers, invented doctrines and ignored their own rules and procedures in a relentless drive to trim the Voting Rights Act beyond all recognition.
In this case, the court gave Republican-led states in the South the tools necessary to destroy majority-minority legislative districts under the guise of partisan gerrymandering, newly blessed by the court as a legitimate aim of state lawmakers. In concurring opinions, the conservatives say that this is a blow to equal protection — a step on the path to a “colorblind Constitution” that has put an end to a “disastrous misadventure” in voting rights jurisprudence.
As a tool, the majority-minority district functions as a prophylactic — an obstacle to politicians who might want to undermine or eliminate minority representation for invidious reasons. As long as those districts exist, these communities — formed by historical circumstance and shaped both by past discrimination and present-day disadvantage — will have some representation in their state legislatures and in Congress. It is less likely that they’ll be ignored, neglected and left to fend for themselves.
Descriptive representation, as it is known, is not perfect; race alone does not guarantee that a lawmaker will act in the interest of his or her community. But the record suggests that in places where racial polarization is the norm, where the legacy of Jim Crow segregation shapes the political and social landscape, the opportunity provided by a majority-minority district can mean the difference between some representation and none at all.
For the Roberts court, however, these districts are little more than a “racial entitlement,” to borrow a phrase from Justice Antonin Scalia. In the court’s view, you may have the right to vote, but you do not have the right to representation, and certainly no right to representation that supports “racial classification” — as if the government is the reason that Black Americans see themselves as a discrete and particular community — or outweighs a state’s purported right to engage in partisan gerrymandering.
In the name of a colorblind Constitution and the equal protection of the laws, then, the Supreme Court has given the green light to a gleeful attempt to end Black political representation at the state and federal level. And as long as there isn’t clear evidence of intentional discrimination — a standard that would have been difficult to prove at the height of Jim Crow, which rested on the same fiction of facial neutrality — it passes constitutional muster. In fact, lawmakers in Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi are already planning special legislative sessions to apply the court’s ruling and erase the majority-minority districts in their states.
At a minimum, the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution were written, passed and ratified to end the subordination of Black Americans and ensure their representation in the political community. It is perverse that this Supreme Court has used both amendments to facilitate what might become the largest reduction in Black representation at the federal and state level since the end of Reconstruction and the “redemption” of the South. Words meant to secure the political equality of all Americans are being raised as weapons to deprive them of just that.
Here, we see the problem with conservative “colorblindness.” A constitution that doesn’t see color — a constitution that treats all classifications as one and the same in a country defined by its sordid history of racial subordination — is a constitution that cannot see group inequality. And worse, it is a constitution that reifies this inequality through its willful blindness to the plain realities of our society. Liberty for those who profit from the cruel legacies of our past, endless struggle for those crushed under their weight.
Speaking in 1883, after the Supreme Court nullified the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Frederick Douglass cried out for a court that would be as “true to the claims of humanity” as it “formerly was to the demands of slavery”: “I say again, fellow citizens, O for a Supreme Court which shall be as true, as vigilant, as active and exacting in maintaining laws enacted for the protection of human rights, as in other days was that court for the destruction of human rights!”
Nearly a century later, Justice Thurgood Marshall, rebuking colleagues who would uphold racial disadvantage in voting as long as it was done with a patina of neutrality, warned the court that “manipulating doctrines and drawing improper distinctions under the F14th and 15th Amendments, as well as under Congress’s remedial legislation enforcing those amendments, makes this court an accessory to the perpetuation of racial discrimination.”
One imagines that both Douglass and Marshall would say much the same if confronted with the handiwork of Roberts and his court.
It took more than half a century after Plessy v. Ferguson to get a court that was willing to enforce the Reconstruction amendments and use them to expand the substance of American freedom, not curtail it. For all our current setbacks, however, we live in a very different world than we did in the past. We do not need to wait a lifetime for change.
If the Supreme Court is going to act as a partisan institution — as a super-legislature whose judgments override the decisions of voters on the thin basis of ideology — then the only path worth taking is to discipline and transform the court with all the tools Congress has at its disposal under the Constitution.
Beyond court reform, Americans have to reacquaint themselves with constitutional thinking — with the idea that we, the people, make constitutional meaning. To the extent that the Supreme Court claims broad authority to say what our Constitution means, it is in large part because we have given this authority to them through our indifference.
It may be that the first step in truly reining in the court is to remember that the Republic — and the Constitution that brought it to life — is meant for us. It is ours to interpret and ours to transform.
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2) You Can’t Be Born Here. You Can Only Die.
By Jessica Grose, Opinion Writer, May 6, 2026
When Bonner General Health stopped providing labor and delivery services in 2023, the families of Sandpoint, Idaho, were devastated. Jen Jackson Quintano told me that back in 2014 she had planned on a home birth, but it was not progressing, and her midwife took her to Bonner General, where she had a C-section. It went so well, she became friends with her obstetrician.
If you’re a pregnant woman in Bonner County, in the northern panhandle of the state, your options for receiving prenatal and postpartum care and giving birth are quite limited. If you want to get an ultrasound, you are probably driving nearly an hour to Coeur d’Alene, or over an hour to Spokane, Wash. That’s in good weather. But try navigating a bumpy dirt road and mountain passes, which sometimes close, in an ice storm, while in labor.
As a result, many pregnant women in the area are either opting for planned home births with midwives, or, if it’s possible, they are booking short-term rentals or staying with family near hospitals with obstetric units. If a planned home birth goes sideways, fast, some of these women may end up in Bonner’s emergency room, which no longer has obstetricians nor pediatricians to manage neonatal resuscitations. Some of them are buying helicopter insurance in case they need to be airlifted.
Quintano, who is a progressive activist, gathered birthing stories from other community members when Bonner closed its labor and delivery unit three years ago. Without having Bonner’s obstetric care available, “I likely never would have tried to start a family knowing that all my prenatal appointments were over an hour away,” a woman named Jonell said as part of the collected stories.
The closure of rural labor and delivery units is not just a northern Idaho problem. According to a 2024 report on maternity care deserts from the March of Dimes, “In 1,104 U.S. counties, there is not a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician.” This is also not solely a recent problem, though it will be worsened by cuts to Medicaid by the Trump administration. The federal Rural Health Fund, which seeks to modernize ailing country hospitals, among other improvements, will not offset these cuts by much.
I’d describe it more as a slow-rolling disaster that is picking up speed across the country.
Over 130 rural labor and delivery units have closed since 2020, per the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, a nonpartisan policy organization. Women who live in rural areas (that are not adjacent to urban areas) without hospital-based obstetric care are more likely to have preterm births and less likely to receive adequate prenatal care, according to a 2018 investigation published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. They are more likely to give birth in emergency rooms that are not set up for obstetric emergencies.
I have now heard stories from across the country of women giving birth on the side of the road or in their cars because they did not make the long journey to the hospital in time.
The existential pain of losing birth services
As I was reporting this article, I heard from mothers, physicians, nurses, midwives and doulas living in rural areas from Maine to Oregon. They described the same interwoven set of dynamics making it hard to keep rural labor and delivery units open. The first issue is the aging population of rural America, which means fewer babies, and less revenue. Rural hospital administrators say that if a labor and delivery unit drops below 200 births a year, its financial viability is endangered, and it may no longer be able to guarantee the safety of its maternity care.
Maternity care tends to be a financial loser at urban hospitals, too, because insurance reimbursement rates for it are not great. But higher-volume procedures compensate for the losses. And if a city hospital ends labor and delivery services, a prospective patient’s travel time to another hospital tends to be far shorter and less perilous.
Still, when any hospital loses obstetric services, it puts pressure on the closest hospitals. Patients now wait longer to see providers, and I heard anecdotes about women having to give birth in the hallways of hospitals because there was no bed for them.
Richard Leidinger is the medical director of surgical specialists at Northern Light Health in Presque Isle, Maine, part of Aroostook County. Half of the county’s obstetrics departments have closed in the past 10 years. So Leidinger’s hospital, which has one of the two remaining units in a county larger than Connecticut, is seeing women who “have had no prenatal care and arrive in active labor on our doorstep with no warning.”
Keeping staff at rural hospitals is a huge problem in many medical specialties, because doctors and nurses often prefer to be closer to the amenities of more populous areas. Elizabeth Khan, a primary care physician who was formerly based in sparsely populated Mendocino County, Calif., and also gave birth while living there, said that the closest obstetrician to her hospital “was an hour and a half drive through the mountains from us” while some of her patients have to drive four hours to San Francisco, where she now lives, to see a neurologist.
Katy Backes Kozhimannil, a co-director of the Rural Health Research Center at the University of Minnesota, told me that when a community loses its labor and delivery unit, that loss is about so much more than just some medical procedures — it becomes existential. We all have a story of where we were born, she told me.
“What does it mean to live a good life in a place?” Kozhimannil mused. “It feels like there is a deep loss in a community if you can’t be born there — you can only die.”
Cutting red tape, increasing reimbursements
The good news is that there are many common-sense, bipartisan policy solutions to this problem, and there is both state and federal legislation in the works aimed at some of the obstacles to rural woman getting quality care.
“The simplest solution is for health insurance plans (both commercial insurance and Medicaid) to pay adequately for labor and delivery services. ‘Adequately’ means enough to cover the lowest feasible cost of delivering high quality care in that community, not some amount that might be adequate, on average, for large hospitals,” said Harold Miller, the president and chief executive of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. Because there are fewer deliveries at small hospitals, there needs to be a higher payment per delivery to keep them afloat.
Miller also explained that ideally hospitals should be receiving what’s called a standby capacity payment from each health insurance plan, a payment that would “support the minimum fixed costs of maintaining labor and delivery staffing in that community regardless of how many births there are.” After all, he said, we don’t fund fire departments based on how many fires there are every year.
There is a bill sitting in Congress called the Rural Obstetrics Readiness Act that would provide grants to rural hospitals for equipment and emergency obstetric training for physicians. I heard from many family medicine doctors who said that it would be useful to have additional obstetrics training, since they are providing cradle-to-grave care in many hospitals in rural America. This doesn’t fix the problem of keeping staff in rural areas, but it’s something.
Another policy solution, which some states have already taken steps to institute, is unbundling Medicaid payments for prenatal, birth and postpartum care. In many states, Medicaid reimbursement is a one-time payment for everything. In practice this can result in a delay in reimbursement or in hospitals potentially seeing no money at all if someone receives prenatal care from their obstetricians but delivers in another setting. By reimbursing on a fee-for-service plan, small rural hospitals can see more funding for what they are providing.
There also needs to be better reimbursement for and easier access to midwives and doulas, who are providing essential care to rural women. I spoke to Sara Fichtenbauer, who is planning a home birth for her third child in Chippewa Falls, Wis. She told me she is paying $6,000 out of pocket for midwife care, and she isn’t sure she’s going to get reimbursed — she’s still filling out paperwork. California recently passed a law that cut some of the red tape for midwife-run birthing centers to help ease the burden of maternity deserts. This isn’t a cure-all, though, because midwives cannot perform C-sections, and sometimes infants really need a NICU, and fast.
The babies are going to keep coming whether there’s a labor and delivery unit to care for them. There is no shortage of ideas, nor of passion for fixing this problem. The issue is the political will and the slow pace of legislative solutions.
Leidinger, the hospital medical director in Presque Isle, told me that he served at a combat surgical hospital in Iraq, and he also treated patients in rural Guatemala. What he is seeing now in Maine makes him think that we’re headed in the direction of those levels of medical care.
This shouldn’t happen in the richest country in the world, Leidinger said. And I couldn’t agree more.
End Notes
· I didn’t even have space to get into the way abortion bans are part of the rural maternity care story in red states. Jen Jackson Quintano told me that her obstetrician in Idaho was Amelia Huntsberger, who left the state to practice in Oregon. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, all four of Sandpoint hospital’s obstetricians left because they felt they could no longer safely practice in Idaho, Huntsberger told Oregon Public Broadcasting last year. From August 2022 to December 2024, Idaho lost nearly 35 percent of its obstetricians.
· Foreign physicians are a vital piece of the rural medical work force, and the Trump administration’s travel ban prevented many of them from coming to this country. As of last week, that ban has been reversed for doctors. But foreign physicians who are practicing here have already suffered. According to Miriam Jordan in The Times: “Ezequiel Veliz, a family doctor from Venezuela who fell out of legal status and whose new visa had not been processed, was detained by federal agents on April 6 at a checkpoint in Texas. He was released 10 days later.” I would imagine this kind of thing has a chilling effect on doctors who would have otherwise been excited to come to the United States.
· I’m not usually into romance novels but I decided to try “An Academic Affair” by Jodi McAlister after I saw it recommended in the very fun newsletter “Links I Would Gchat You if We Were Friends.” It is a totally delightful and low-stakes book about two academics jockeying for jobs in a dying industry, with an archetypal enemies-to-lovers plot.
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3) A Look Inside the Case That Enshrined Political Power for Billionaires
After Watergate, Congress tried to curtail the role of money in politics. But a pivotal Supreme Court case nipped it in the bud. Years later, new details are emerging on how wealthy Americans were conferred with a “right to spend” on elections.
By Danny Hakim, May 6, 2026
A landmark Supreme Court case laid the groundwork for the tremendous amounts spent on today’s elections. Keystone Press Agency/ZUMA Press Wire, via Reuters
For a brief moment in American history, the rich didn’t control politics.
Back in 1974, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Congress passed new campaign finance restrictions that would have largely eliminated the ability of wealthy people to buy elections. In addition to donor disclosure rules and contribution limits, the new legislation capped so-called “independent expenditures” on behalf of political candidates at $1,000 a year. There were even curbs on what rich people could spend to get themselves elected.
David Koch, a wealthy industrialist, was enraged.
“I have the right to spend whatever I choose to promote what I believe,” he later wrote, adding that the law “makes my blood boil.”
Flash forward to the 2024 presidential campaign. Six of the nation’s wealthiest billionaires spent more than $100 million apiece to help get another billionaire, Donald J. Trump, elected president. Independent expenditures by wealthy outsiders for the first time in history exceeded what the candidates’ own campaign committees spent, a New York Times analysis showed. Mr. Koch’s brother Charles was among 300 billionaires and their families who accounted for 19 percent of all contributions in federal elections.
So what happened?
A Supreme Court decision that most Americans probably never heard of. Fifty years ago, in a case called Buckley v. Valeo, the court upheld many aspects of the post-Watergate campaign finance law, clearing the way for public financing of presidential elections and empowering the new Federal Election Commission.
But it eviscerated other parts of the law, leaving the rich with their own set of rules. The court ruled that wealthy Americans could spend unlimited amounts of money to independently support candidates and causes they favored.
Later cases, like the better-known Citizens United decision, opened the doors even further. But it was Buckley that established the nation’s modern, muddled campaign finance system, and Buckley that allowed the Koch brothers to build a right-wing political money machine that rivaled that of the Republican Party itself.
The case is as relevant as ever. Since taking office, Mr. Trump has celebrated billionaire donors at a White House dinner and raised unprecedented sums for a lame-duck president.
Interviews with surviving Buckley combatants and a review of archival records from the Library of Congress, the National Archives and three universities, as well as other available documents and research, explain how post-Watergate legal and political currents upended a momentary defeat for the wealthy, creating an environment where a single donor can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a favored candidate.
What it shows is that the legal assault on the most expansive campaign finance legislation in the nation’s history was engineered not just by well-funded right-wing activists, including the Koch-backed Libertarian Party. It was also pushed by some liberals and the American Civil Liberties Union, who agreed with conservatives that the right to spend money on behalf of candidates and causes was an essential element of free speech.
Gerald R. Ford, who had inherited the presidency after Richard M. Nixon resigned, had felt obliged to sign the legislation. But documents show that his administration nonetheless worked to undermine the law. One midlevel State Department official, Francis L. Kellogg, was even among a small group of people who financed the litigation against it, archival records show.
Robert Bork, the Ford administration’s hard-line conservative solicitor general charged with defending the law in court, privately referred to the statute, the Federal Election Campaign Act, known as FECA, as “fecal matter.” Records have shown that Mr. Bork helped devise an unorthodox strategy that allowed the administration to submit dueling briefs, both supporting and undercutting the 1974 amendments to the law that were at issue.
The Washington law firm of Covington & Burling took the case pro bono. But expenses were also covered by a small group of bankers, oilmen and industrialists who appear in the archives of the lead plaintiff, Senator James L. Buckley of New York, who was a standard-bearer of the Conservative Party in New York, founded in the 1960s amid dissatisfaction with the G.O.P.
Senator Buckley’s private files, at St. John’s University in Queens, include copies of thank-you notes to moneyed donors to the litigation effort, including Boeing and G.D. Searle, the pharmaceutical company that developed the first birth control pill. Individual contributors whose names appear in fund-raising ledgers include the Texas oilman Perry Bass; John C. Whitehead, who would soon become co-chairman of Goldman Sachs; and Thomas S. Murphy, who once controlled ABC.
The Libertarian Party joined Senator Buckley as a litigant; Charles Koch cut a $10,000 check to the party right before it paid its share of legal expenses, and included checks from his brother David and their mother as well. He was regularly kept apprised of developments in the case by the party’s leadership, archival records show — though in a statement, a spokesperson said that Mr. Koch “was not involved in this litigation” and his contribution had been directed generally to the party.
One of the most instrumental supporters of the legal challenge was John Bolton, who would have a long history in politics and diplomacy and went on to become President Trump’s national security adviser, and, after he was ousted, one of his critics. He was subsequently indicted by the Trump Justice Department and has pleaded not guilty.
At the time, Mr. Bolton was only recently out of Yale Law School, and pushed Covington & Burling, where he’d joined as a new associate, to take on the Buckley case.
Today, Mr. Bolton concedes that campaign finance is as deep a problem as ever.
“The system now is such a wreck that nobody would have put it in place,” he said in an interview. “In fact, that was one of our thoughts. If we could blow enough holes in it, the whole thing would have to come down.”
But that is not what happened.
‘Post-Watergate Morality’
The Watergate scandal emerged after operatives of Mr. Nixon’s re-election campaign were caught breaking into Democratic Party headquarters in 1972. Revelations followed about secret Oval Office tapes and funds laundered by the Nixon campaign through a Mexican bank.
Then came a “spasm of post-Watergate morality,” as the Washington Post columnist David Broder put it.
But not long after President Ford signed the campaign finance legislation, Mr. Bolton, new to Covington, received a call from David Keene, an aide to Senator Buckley and a future president of the National Rifle Association.
Mr. Bolton learned during the call that Senator Buckley had taken an interest in potential litigation over the new law.
“I consider this challenge to be one of the most important projects I have undertaken since coming to Washington,” the senator wrote in a 1975 letter to potential donors.
The new campaign finance law limited House candidates to expenditures of $140,000 for both the primary and general elections, about $900,000 in today’s dollars, which is less than half of the average spent by winning congressional candidates today.
It also limited independent expenditures: Even interest groups could not spend more than $1,000 promoting a specific candidate, at a time when a full-page ad in The Washington Post cost $6,971.04. That raised hackles on both the right and the left.
“A thousand dollars may well have been too low,” said Fred Wertheimer, who was legal counsel for Common Cause when it intervened in the case, in a recent interview. But on the other hand, he said, “a system of unlimited contributions is inherently corrupt.”
For the Koch brothers, the issue at hand was their inability to continue infusing large amounts of money into the Libertarian Party, which favored an end to most government regulation.
They and many other hard-line conservatives had felt betrayed after the Nixon administration imposed wage and price controls and abandoned the gold standard, leading them to back third parties. In a 1975 letter to fellow oil executives, Charles Koch lamented that Republicans “were no better allies in the fight for free enterprise than the Democratic Party.”
Third-party supporters believed the new legislation favored the two large parties and their extensive donor networks. David Koch, who died in 2019, called the new law “an act to preserve the two-party monopoly.”
Mr. Bolton volunteered to join the Buckley legal team, successfully pitching it to Covington. Mr. Keene worked on assembling a coalition. He reached across the aisle, recruiting Eugene McCarthy, an anti-Vietnam War Democrat who later ran for president. But his biggest get was the New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. The A.C.L.U. had already been skirmishing in court over Nixon administration attempts to use campaign finance laws to block the A.C.L.U. and other groups from running advertisements on the Vietnam War and other issues.
“Keene was the guy who at some point calls me and says, ‘Well, we’re thinking of challenging the whole ’74 amendments. You guys want to?’” recalled Ira Glasser, the former head of the A.C.L.U. “I loved the whole idea, because my position was: It had to be made clear that this was not a liberal versus conservative issue, that this is an issue of speech that affected everybody.”
The case was the first of the year to be filed in the Federal District Court in Washington, in January 1975.
Mr. Bolton likened the motley assemblage of plaintiffs to “the bar scene in Star Wars.” Joel Gora, an A.C.L.U. lawyer who worked on the case, recalled that “every time we met they would razz me about the A.C.L.U. position on affirmative action.”
The opposing lawyers were even more unlikely bedfellows. One of Mr. Nixon’s most bungled acts was known as the Saturday Night Massacre, on Oct. 20, 1973, when he ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor. The attorney general and his top deputy refused, resigning in protest. That left Mr. Bork to carry out the order.
Mr. Bork and Mr. Cox now found themselves on the same side of the Buckley case. But only technically. Mr. Bork loathed the campaign finance legislation. But because the president had signed it, the Justice Department released a supportive brief. However, the department also filed an unusual second brief raising constitutional concerns about contribution and spending limits, reflecting Mr. Bork’s view.
The chairman of the F.E.C., Thomas B. Curtis, whose agency was created by the law, was not pleased.
“Where is the vigorous defense when the chief defense counsel seeks to carry water on both shoulders?” he wrote in an October 1975 letter to the Justice Department.
Other lawyers took the lead in defending the law, including Mr. Cox, who intervened on behalf of Senator Edward Kennedy, a proponent of the campaign finance legislation, and Lloyd Cutler, a future White House counsel
Mr. Bolton credited Ralph K. Winter Jr., the lead lawyer and one of Mr. Bolton’s former professors at Yale, with developing the case’s main legal theory, an argument that became known as “money is speech.” It held that preventing people from spending money to express their political views violated their constitutional rights.
In August 1975, a ruling came down in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia largely upholding the legislation; an appeal was quickly lodged with the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in November.
The justices’ views did not track along simple ideological lines. Justice Byron White, a Kennedy appointee, felt that limiting spending was critical; otherwise, “you can get and spend all the money you want,” according to notes kept by Justice William J. Brennan Jr.
But five other justices were First Amendment hard-liners, from William Rehnquist, a conservative future chief justice, to Harry Blackmun, a liberal stalwart. Mr. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, both liberals, contemplated supporting Justice White, and Congress, in curbing spending. But the archives show that both feared giving the government the ability to silence groups like the NAACP, where Justice Marshall, the first Black justice, had served as lead counsel.
“On the one hand, there’s this huge concern about corruption in government,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “On the other hand, there are these very powerful First Amendment arguments that had not ever been really considered by the court.”
‘The Current World’
Even as the justices were deliberating, the Libertarian Party was exploring whether the Kochs could test the new campaign finance limits by donating $25,000 to the party itself, rather than to a specific candidate. Mr. Bolton, who also did legal work for the Libertarian Party, helped devise a plan to put a $25,000 contribution from the Kochs in escrow while they awaited word on whether it would be legal, a gambit ultimately rejected by Charles Koch.
On Jan. 30, 1976, the court handed down its decision, a 6-to-2 ruling that upheld the law’s limits on contributions to political campaigns, its disclosure requirements and the new program for public financing of campaigns. But the justices ruled 7 to 1 against limits on how much people could spend on their own campaigns, or on independent expenditures on behalf of other politicians they hoped to see elected.
Three years later, David Koch seized on what he called, in a letter to fellow Libertarian Party members, “the best loophole the Supreme Court gave us.” The rich could spend on their own campaigns without limit. He offered himself as running mate to the party’s 1980 presidential candidate, Ed Clark.
“I have no particular expertise in politics, campaigning or running a campaign,” he explained in the letter. But he did have a very large wallet.
The Libertarians — who were calling for abolishing the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all income taxes — captured just over 1 percent of the vote. The Reagan campaign took advantage of the new loopholes and organized independent campaign committees, including one led by Mr. Keene that ran a $1 million campaign to persuade Southerners to abandon Jimmy Carter, who was soundly defeated.
The Kochs pivoted in the years that followed, reimagining political power as a vertically integrated business, leveraging all that was made possible by Buckley. They began underwriting favored professors and university programs as test wells for ideas like climate change skepticism and hostility to regulation. They backed think tanks like the Cato Institute to refine those ideas, and interest groups to spread them.
They pioneered efforts to overhaul the judiciary and, finally, anointed certain politicians to advance their ideas, including candidates like Mike Pence and the former Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker. In the 2024 election cycle, the Koch political influence machine spent nearly $550 million.
But it was Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who officially spent about $300 million on a single candidate, Donald Trump — not counting the “dark money” donations that the Supreme Court’s later decisions did not require him to disclose. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election,” Mr. Musk boasted.
It was the culmination of the court’s half-century of reshaping of the nation’s campaign finance system. Few are pleased with the situation as it stands.
“Sure, it bothers me to see these half a dozen people giving a ton of money,” Mr. Gora, the former A.C.L.U. lawyer, said, reflecting on his group’s role in Buckley. But spending limits don’t prevent billionaires from pushing their agendas, he added. They can just buy newspapers or social media platforms.
Some who backed Buckley find themselves on the wrong side of a billionaire president, including Mr. Bolton. Covington & Burling has been targeted by the Trump administration for its work with Jack Smith, the former special prosecutor who twice indicted Mr. Trump.
Mr. Bolton’s position on Buckley has not changed. No one side of the nation’s political divide benefits more than the other from the ability of wealthy donors to move elections, he said.
“We’ve never had anything like Trump, that’s for sure, but the fact is that big money is more evenly divided than people think, and I think it’s especially true now,” he said.
Campaign finance records back Mr. Bolton up. A Times analysis showed a vigorous foray by Democrats into anonymous big-money donations in 2024, helping give former Vice President Kamala Harris a financial edge over Mr. Trump.
But if billionaires are not necessarily tilting power to one party or another, they do hold enormous sway over the two-party system in general. And that goes back to Buckley.
“If those justices had been aware then of what we now face, my guess is that we would have had the opposite result,” said Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago and co-editor of a new book of Buckley scholarship. “They weren’t imagining the current world.”
Steven Rich contributed reporting.
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4) Storm Season Is Here and the National Weather Service Is Short Handed
After deep cuts last year, the agency is hiring hundreds. But fears linger that it isn’t equipped for imminent tornado and hurricane threats.
By Scott Dance, Judson Jones and Amy Graff, May 6, 2026
The reporters have been tracking changes in National Weather Service staffing levels and forecasting activity across President Trump’s second term. They welcome confidential tips at nytimes.com/tips.
The National Weather Service is struggling to recover from last year’s deep staff cuts, raising doubts among some meteorologists about whether the agency is ready for severe storms or hurricane season, which starts next month.
One key facility in Oklahoma that leads tornado forecasting and warnings has an unusual five open positions, its website shows. Others around the country will lose meteorologists temporarily as officials shuffle them to cities that will host World Cup soccer games in June and July, according to an internal email reviewed by The New York Times.
The agency’s roster of more than 2,500 scientists shrank by about 15 percent last year through firings and early retirements. The Weather Service’s data and expertise forms the backbone for all kinds of forecasts, including those shared by television meteorologists and smartphone apps.
The government has been trying to hire back to reverse the damage. In the last six months, officials have hired more than 200 meteorologists and hydrologists — scientists responsible for issuing forecasts and warnings of imminent tornadoes, floods and other severe weather. Neil Jacobs, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the Weather Service, told a House committee this week that the agency had recently extended job orders to another 206 potential new staffers.
But internal agency data reviewed by The Times show that as of early last month, the work force of meteorologists and hydrologists was about 300 fewer than it had been in late 2024.
Those who remain have struggled to keep up with the workload, Ken Graham, the Weather Service’s director, told The Times in an interview in late January. Mr. Graham said then he hoped a reorganization still in its early stages would help.
“People are burning out,” Mr. Graham said.
The Weather Service posted job listings last week with a goal of adding 145 additional entry-level meteorologists across the country over the next five months, said Kim Doster, a Weather Service spokeswoman. Mr. Graham told agency staff in an email sent last week and reviewed by The Times that more hiring would follow. But bringing new employees on board and training them takes months, delaying the arrival of reinforcements, meteorologists said.
“Preventing and recovering from burnout takes time, but recent hiring has helped spread the workload,” Ms. Doster said. “As with many public safety roles, being a meteorologist can also be a demanding and stressful job, but our forecasters are dedicated and skilled professionals whom the public and our partners can continue to rely on.”
As storm risks ramp up and the World Cup and hurricane season approach, meteorologists remain concerned about whether some local offices have the bandwidth to keep up. The plan to shift more forecasters to World Cup host cities could boost the safety of tens of thousands of people gathering at outdoor stadiums during stormy summer months, but it could also raise the risk that severe weather warnings are delayed — or missed altogether — elsewhere, current and former staffers said.
The result of all this churn is that the ranks at the Weather Service are generally less experienced. As of last month, the average tenure was 15 years, compared with more than 25 years a decade ago, according to staffing data and agency data.
Alan Gerard, a meteorologist who spent 35 years at the Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory before retiring early last year, said the agency is showing some signs of inexperience. Some warnings have appeared overly cautious, Mr. Gerard said, while others were incomplete — such as when no tornado watch was issued when a deadly March tornado hit a part of southern Michigan.
“It seems like there is almost like a crisis of confidence,” Mr. Gerard said. “There are certain events where there are a ton of warnings being issued and then other events where you can see slow warnings and late warnings.”
The Weather Service offices that were forecasting that March tornado outbreak were fully staffed and issued tornado warnings when severe weather threats materialized, Ms. Doster said.
Observers also said the talent pipeline at the Weather Service was broken after younger scientists were fired last year, among the thousands of government employees still in probationary employment status whose jobs were cut by the administration.
“By getting rid of all the younger people and then all the experience and then only leaving the people in the middle, this is going to cost a tremendous amount to build the agency back while also trying to modernize,” said Victor Proton, a meteorologist who took a buyout to leave the Weather Service in April 2025 after 28 years at the agency.
Staffing shortages last year contributed to a decline in launches of weather balloons, which carry devices that collect wind and temperature data that is fed into supercomputer weather models to guide simulations of future conditions. While a handful of offices have continued skipping some of the twice-daily weather balloon launches this year, Ms. Doster said that’s because of equipment issues and helium shortages, not staffing.
Over the last several months, a new vision for the agency has begun to emerge: A tiered staffing approach that shifts employees away from more rural areas with quieter weather to locations where the most people and property frequently face severe weather threats.
Some officials called the cuts ordered by Mr. Trump’s administration and the subsequent attempt to rehire an “opportunity” to reconsider the organization’s fundamental operations.
“Not every office has the same workload,” Mr. Graham said in January. “I can beef up some of the offices that have the highest workload, keep everybody 24/7, but eliminate some of the burnout that we have in the busiest offices.”
But efforts to turn that vision into reality have been slow, despite steps to help the agency hire faster than usual.
After months of lobbying by Mr. Graham — and the urgency of July 4 floods that took Texas Hill Country by surprise and killed dozens of children at a summer camp — Mr. Trump last summer exempted Weather Service employees from a federal hiring freeze. That order also gave Mr. Graham a new level of hiring authority, allowing him to bypass normal protocols and select new staffers himself.
For example, at the American Meteorological Society conference in Houston this past January, Mr. Graham hired four people on the spot. Even during the 43-day federal shutdown last fall, the Weather Service continued to post job openings.
Still, many offices remain hollowed out because the agency shed staff so fast last year that the pace of hiring has not been able to replace workers as rapidly. At the Storm Prediction Center — responsible for forecasting tornadoes, hail, severe winds and wildfires — five critical roles are currently vacant, according to the center’s website. It had previously been rare for even a single vacancy to linger at such a prominent post.
Low morale even prompted Mr. Graham to return to the front lines of forecasting, stepping up in March to help issue warnings as severe storms swept through the Washington, D.C., area. He told staff it was “to show my support for the entire N.W.S. team,” according to Christopher Vaccaro, an agency spokesman.
Otherwise, Mr. Graham said he is focused on rolling out plans not just to hire more scientists, but to reshape the agency for a new era of weather volatility, using ideas he was pursuing even before Mr. Trump took office. The agency is moving forward with long-planned efforts to embed meteorologists in state and local emergency operations centers where officials make decisions on everything from school closings to travel bans to evacuation orders.
“It’s not a plan on a shelf,” Mr. Graham said. “We’re doing it.”
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5) Illinois State Police to Investigate Fatal ICE Shooting
Officials said they were examining the shooting of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez last summer during a Chicago-area crackdown on illegal immigration.
By Mitch Smith, Reporting from Chicago, May 6, 2026
A memorial for Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, who was shot by an ICE agent in Franklin Park, Ill., last year. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
The state police in Illinois said on Tuesday that they were investigating the fatal shooting of a man by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent last summer in suburban Chicago.
The shooting of the man, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, who was from Mexico, came in the midst of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration in the Chicago area, and it immediately drew outrage from residents and local officials.
Federal officials claimed that Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez, who they said was in the country illegally, drove a Subaru into officers and dragged an officer while fleeing a traffic stop in Franklin Park, Ill., near O’Hare International Airport. The agency said one officer had been severely injured.
But video of the shooting, which took place on Sept. 12, raised questions about aspects of that account.
Footage reviewed by The New York Times showed Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez attempting to flee from officers. But it did not show Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez, 38, hitting an officer with his car, and an officer was heard on one of the videos saying his own injuries were “nothing major.”
Department of Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond for a request to comment on Tuesday night about the Illinois State Police investigation. Federal officials also did not immediately respond to questions about the status of the officer who fired or of any internal investigations into the shooting.
The investigation of Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez’s death, and any attempt to bring criminal charges, could face several hurdles.
Law enforcement officers have wide latitude to use deadly force in situations in which they reasonably fear that they or someone else is at risk of death or significant injury. And the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause bars the state prosecution of federal officers in a broad range of circumstances.
Melaney Arnold, a spokeswoman for the State Police, said in an emailed statement on Tuesday night that the Franklin Park Police Department had requested the state investigation. Once it is finished, she said, the findings will be turned over to the county prosecutor’s office. She declined to comment further.
The police chief in Franklin Park, a Chicago suburb with about 18,000 residents, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The shooting of Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez was one of several events during the immigration crackdown in the Chicago area that raised questions about how federal agents were using force and interacting with residents.
While the Trump administration described the campaign, known as Operation Midway Blitz, as essential for public safety, state and local officials dismissed it as politically punitive and constitutionally dubious.
As masked agents deployed tear gas and made hundreds of arrests, federal judges raised concerns about their tactics, their use of force, their justification for locking up immigrants and the conditions under which those immigrants were being held. The courts also blocked an attempt by President Trump to deploy National Guard troops on the streets of Chicago.
In addition to the shooting of Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez, federal agents shot and wounded a woman, Marimar Martinez, during the campaign. Federal charges against Ms. Martinez were later dismissed.
Last week, a state commission in Illinois released a report that described Operation Midway Blitz as a “whole-of-government approach to suppress opposition and pressure Illinois because of its immigrant-friendly policies, under the guise of achieving mass deportation.”
Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat who is thought to be weighing a run for president, named Mr. Villegas-Gonzalez and Ms. Martinez in a statement after that report was released. He expressed hope that “law enforcement agencies will review this evidence and take any steps in their power to deliver justice to Illinoisans.”
In Minnesota, where federal agents shot three people during a subsequent immigration crackdown, federal officials have resisted sharing with their state counterparts information as basic as the names of the agents who fired.
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6) Neil deGrasse Tyson: Give Us the Aliens
By Neil deGrasse Tyson, May 6, 2026
Dr. Tyson is an astrophysicist and the author of “Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter.”
Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times
Ever since childhood I’ve wanted to be abducted by aliens. Now, as a professional astrophysicist armed with the knowledge of the size, age and composition of the cosmos, I know that nothing prevents any of us from imagining a universe teeming with life.
So the impending release of U.S. government files on aliens and U.F.O.s is a good thing, even if it feels like a distraction from other important files we’ve all been waiting to be disclosed. I expect the alien files will be anticlimactic. After a parade of alien insiders and whistle-blowers testified under oath to Congress in 2023, 2024 and 2025, what’s left to learn?
Personally, I’d be delighted if the files were accompanied by an actual alien. Alive or dead or undead. Preferably alive. Is that too much to ask for?
The whistle-blowers have already told us about the crashed flying saucers, extraterrestrial bodies and alien technology in our possession — hidden in undisclosed places. Not only that, but secret files have been declassified before. A 2017 headline in this newspaper was unambiguous: “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” And who could forget the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which studied more than 12,000 U.F.O. sightings from 1952 until the project was terminated in 1969, with the goal of assessing threats to national security.
What’s clear, however, is that if an authentic alien walked out of the halls of Congress, nobody would ever again have to ask if you “believe” in aliens, just as nobody questions the existence of elephants. An alien of the alien files could become the literal elephant in the room.
Without good evidence of what actual aliens look like, we’re stuck imagining them. And imagine them we do. IMDb, an online database about entertainment, lists hundreds upon hundreds of films, TV shows, video games and documentaries about aliens — both friendly and evil. Mostly evil.
Disappointingly, in nearly all these portrayals, these aliens look a lot like us. They’re humanoid, with a head, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a neck, shoulders, a torso, arms, fingers and legs. Remember that most life on Earth, with which we have DNA in common, looks nothing like us or any vertebrate animal. So we should expect aliens with no DNA in common — or no DNA at all — to look at least as different from humans as humans and other life-forms on Earth (like jellyfish or termites) look different from each other.
The only thing that would shock me about a living, declassified alien is if most Hollywood depictions ended up being right, violating everything we know about biodiversity on Earth and across the universe.
We care a lot about what aliens look like, but we don’t pay nearly enough attention to what we might look like to them. If an alien emissary landed in Los Angeles, for example, its first impression might be that Earth’s dominant life-form is the automobile. The city is heavily crisscrossed by major freeways, many of them 12 lanes wide. People line up in their cars on slow lines to obtain fast food handed through a window. They consume the food while still seated, never exiting their vehicles. Some of the larger life-forms on the freeway carry multiple automobiles within them. To the aliens, these car haulers are surely pregnant.
Assuming on arrival that the alien knew we were human, it would probably want to meet the person in charge. Who exactly would that be? The president? The prime minister? The pope? Or would it be a multibillionaire or captain of industry? Not knowing anything in advance about human civilization, but picking up clues from our cultural norms before arrival from leaked radio waves, an alien might instead expect to meet Ryan Gosling, Taylor Swift or Oprah Winfrey.
If we look more deeply into our own alien stories, there’s a persistent plotline that aliens are evil and want to kill us all. I suspect those fears are based not on what we believe about aliens but on what we know about humans.
In the history of our species, there’s no shortage of technologically advanced cultures that commit rampant violence against less-advanced ones. Within what we call civilization, humans oppress — or kill — one another over which creator of the universe they worship, or who they sleep with, or what side of an arbitrary line on Earth’s land masses they’re born, or how absorptive their skin is to sunlight, or what set of sounds comes out of their mouths.
Upon bearing witness to our irrational ways, any visiting alien that might have accompanied the release of the alien files surely long ago escaped back home to report, “There’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth!”
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7) Trump’s Gyrations on the War Leave Even Rubio Out of Sync
The administration’s latest shifts on the status of the conflict show how treacherous it is to speak for a president who cultivates an erratic style.
By Erica L. Green, Reporting from Washington, May 6, 2026
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio took to the lectern of the White House press briefing room on Tuesday, he seemed to revel in serving as the administration’s chief spokesman of the day.
He smiled, joked and jabbed gently at reporters, calling on them by the color of their blazers. He took on a range of questions on topics from rising gas prices to Cuba to his upcoming visit with the pope. He invoked the lyrics of ’90s hip-hop songs to describe U.S. adversaries.
And when it came to the war in Iran, or Operation Epic Fury as President Trump branded it in February when the United States joined Israel in striking the country, Mr. Rubio confidently described the state of play in a conflict whose status has been increasingly muddy.
“The operation is over,” Mr. Rubio declared. “Epic Fury is — as the president notified Congress — we’re done with that stage of it. We’re now on to this Project Freedom.”
The current American effort in the Strait of Hormuz, he explained, was focused on providing humanitarian support for civilian crews stranded on ships. He spoke emphatically about the desire for peace with Iran and liberation for its people, indicating that the conflict was moving into a new phase.
But as most things go in Mr. Trump’s orbit, what appeared definitive was fleeting.
Just three hours later, the president announced that Project Freedom, the day-old mission he announced on Sunday to help guide ships out of the strait, would be paused “for a short period of time.”
Then on Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump suggested in a social media post that the war was not, in fact, over. Only if “Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to,” he wrote, the “legendary Epic Fury will be at an end.”
“If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before,” Mr. Trump added.
It was the administration’s latest U-turn in what has been a stream of chaotic and confusing messages about the U.S. posture and its objectives in the war.
The president’s constant turns have roiled the markets, tested the patience of Republican lawmakers and bewildered U.S. allies trying to navigate the fallout of the conflict.
His latest rhetorical shift hit closer to home, underscoring how treacherous it is to speak for a president who cultivates a bombastic and erratic style, one that Mr. Trump insists keeps his adversaries off balance.
In this case, however, he appeared to be throwing off balance his own secretary of state, who also serves as the president’s national security adviser.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said that Mr. Trump’s vacillations reflected the reality of the fast-moving situation on the ground, and his desire to keep all options open to ensure that Iran’s “nuclear dreams are eliminated for good.”
“Right now, negotiations continue, which move quickly by nature,” Ms. Kelly said. “This president is the most transparent and accessible in history, and no other administration has done more to keep the press and the public apprised of these developments in real time.”
Throughout the war, Mr. Trump’s positions have changed by the sentence. He has described the conflict as, alternately, a “war,” an “excursion” and, most recently again on Wednesday, a “skirmish.” He has gone from saying that the United States had already “won” the war, to threatening to wipe out Iran’s civilization if its government did not meet more demands. He has said that Iran has no leaders left, but that he is in communication with some who are “desperate” for a deal. He threatened that bombings would continue, only to extend a cease-fire at the last minute.
Mr. Rubio sought on Tuesday to reinforce the idea that the president would not back down, sometimes with humor.
While Mr. Trump has threatened that the United States will continue “bombing our little hearts out” if Iran does not agree to a deal, Mr. Rubio encouraged its leaders to “check themselves before they wreck themselves in the direction that they’re going,” referring to Ice Cube’s 1992 song “Check Yo Self.”
Still, he asserted that the United States “was not cheering for an additional situation to occur. We would prefer the path of peace.”
Tommy Pigott, a spokesman for the State Department, said in a statement that Mr. Rubio’s news conference reflected the transparency of the administration.
“Part of keeping the American people informed means there are updates as the situation changes in real-time,” Mr. Pigott said. “President Trump’s objectives have been clear from the beginning, and the world is safer because of the decisive outcomes of Operation Epic Fury.”
By Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Trump was back to sounding optimistic, telling reporters in the Oval Office that the United States had “very good talks” with Iran in the previous 24 hours. He suggested that the tension earlier in the week, when Iran fired at ships in the strait, had subsided.
“A few days ago,” he noted, “is a long time ago in the world of war.”
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8) Shell Reports Nearly $7 Billion Profit Amid ‘Unprecedented Disruption’
The oil giant’s earnings in the first three months of the year were more than double the previous quarter’s and followed similarly strong results of European rivals.
By Gregory Schmidt, Reporting from London, May 7, 2026
Shell reported huge profits for the oil company in the first three months of the year. Ronaldo Schemidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The British energy giant Shell reported robust profits following the surge in oil prices prompted by the U.S.-Israel war with Iran.
The company, based in London, said Thursday that its adjusted profit soared to $6.92 billion in the first three months of the year, higher than expected and more than twice what the company earned in the previous quarter.
The strong financial turnout came amid an “unprecedented disruption in global energy markets,” the company’s chief executive, Wael Sawan, said in a statement.
On Thursday, the price of Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, hovered just below $100 a barrel, an increase of about 37 percent since the war began on Feb. 28. Oil prices briefly traded above $126 a barrel last week.
The oil shock has pushed up energy costs through higher prices for products like diesel and jet fuel, prompting airlines to cut flights and reduce snack services. Americans, spending more for gasoline and airfares, are rethinking their summer travel plans.
Shell is not the only major European oil producer to report increased profits. In April, Britain’s BP said it more than doubled its profit in the first quarter, to $3.2 billion, from the previous quarter, driven by superior oil trading and elevated oil prices. And the French oil company TotalEnergies, which reported quarterly net income of $5.4 billion, said it would raise its dividend and double its share buybacks.
The strong returns have renewed calls for a windfall tax on oil profits, similar to the response when oil companies benefited from higher energy prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
On Friday, Exxon Mobil reported $4.2 billion in first-quarter earnings, down 46 percent from a year earlier primarily because of accounting reason, while Chevron said that its quarterly profit slid to $2.2 billion, a 37 percent drop from a year earlier. Both companies attributed the decline to paper losses that would be unwound in the coming months.
Exxon and Chevron, the two largest American oil producers, said on Friday that they are not planning to further increase oil drilling to take advantage of higher gas prices.
The war in Iran has upended the global outlook for the industry. Oil reserves are being tapped to help ease supply disruptions, according to a report last month from the International Energy Agency, which lowered its forecast for oil demand for 2026.
Even if the Strait of Hormuz were to reopen soon, the pressure on supply would continue. “Energy markets and economies around the world need to brace for significant disruptions in the months to come,” the agency said.
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9) Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.
By Anna Louie Sussman, May 7, 2026
Ms. Sussman, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the forthcoming book “Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty.”
Raleigh Rivera and her husband had spent five years fine-tuning their parenthood plan: In 2025, they would move from Los Angeles, where they have been living since 2023, back to Ms. Rivera’s hometown, Minneapolis, where they could afford to buy a home and start their family. “We both have been baby- and kid-crazy for our entire lives,” she said.
They had planned to start trying when Ms. Rivera turned 30, a birthday she celebrated last summer. But that same year, everything that had felt stable to them started to crumble. It began with the Palisades and Eaton fires decimating parts of the city they called home. The prospect of a first-time home buyer credit, something Kamala Harris had campaigned on, had disappeared. By summer, Ms. Rivera’s parents in Minnesota were choking on smoke drifting over the border from Canadian wildfires. Her husband is a citizen, but since he is Mexican American, she worried that racial profiling policies put a target on his back. Ms. Rivera, who has a master’s degree in public health, worried about sending a future child to school with unvaccinated classmates. “We felt like we had worked hard on ourselves, making sure that our finances and our health and everything was in order,” she told me when we spoke last August. “And those plans are on pause right now because everything is — it’s just impossible to know.”
With their stable jobs and supportive marriage, the Riveras are exactly the kind of people demographers would expect to be well on their way to parenthood today. Researchers who study population trends have shown that births tend to rise when economies are on the upswing, and more recently have proposed a relationship between gender roles and the birthrate: Very high levels of equality in the home and in society are associated with more births. (The same goes for very low levels of gender equality.) Yet in most places around the world, birthrates have marched steadily downward for the past two decades, even where economies have grown and working women’s male partners handled more household tasks. The Riveras may point to why.
The collective reluctance to procreate is perhaps most glaring in the Nordic countries. With their stable economies, strong social safety nets, robust family policies and equitable gender relations, they maintained relatively high birthrates through the early 2000s. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, however, sometimes referred to as the Great Recession, births in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland declined, and then declined some more, even as their economies recovered throughout the 2010s. Little about those nations’ family policies had changed, and as far as anyone could tell, men were still doing their share of the dishes. The same downward trend held in the United States, where births have fallen by about 23 percent since 2007, despite high rates of immigration until last year. Births have also been declining in East Asian countries, even though governments in the region have thrown buckets of money at the problem. And in France, despite its longstanding pronatalist policies.
This is not simply a matter of affordability, the buzzword so often invoked to explain why people are choosing to have smaller families. Government support for parents can help, but overall, people are having fewer children both in countries that offer very little and in those renowned for their generous family benefits; moreover, the trend holds among those who are struggling to make ends meet and among those who, like the Riveras, have advanced degrees and salaried jobs. What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.
The future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a time of spectacular uncertainty. In the United States, job tenures have contracted and income volatility has risen. Life expectancy, once on an inexorable march upward, has fallen for less-educated women and men. Many of the forces our economy is built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly volatile; disruption, once a byword for a disturbance or problem, is the governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy. The rise of prediction markets has turned the world into one large casino. The climate crisis is spiraling, as are the costs of everything that could enable parenthood, whether that’s a roof over one’s head or child care. The past half-century has brought us breathtaking inequality, accompanied by a sharp decline in social mobility. The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the psychological and financial scars of coming of age amid world-scale catastrophes: Older millennials entered the labor market during the Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes. Gen Z, whose lives were upturned by the Covid-19 pandemic, now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even prospective partners. The man running America seems single-mindedly devoted to chaos at home and abroad.
Even declining fertility rates feed into the cycle: How will society function if each generation is smaller than the last? The Gen X writer Astra Taylor calls ours “the age of insecurity”; the Gen Z writer Kyla Scanlon has described “the end of predictable progress.” Zoomers’ uncertainty about the future can’t be captured by the usual metrics or entered neatly into a spreadsheet. But it may be the X factor in the global parenting free fall.
Daniele Vignoli, a demographer at the University of Florence, had been cautiously optimistic in 2008 when Italy’s fertility rate reached nearly 1.5 births per woman — still far below the 2.1 that is typically necessary to keep population levels stable in the absence of immigration, but the highest rate since the 1980s. “We were all celebrating this new spring of fertility, this new spring of demography in Italy,” he recalled. Then the Great Recession hit and fertility declined not just in Italy, where today it stands at under 1.2, but all over Europe.
No existing demographic theory could explain the near uniformity of this decline across the continent, which continued irrespective of how deeply a country was affected by the recession or how swiftly it recovered. It became clear to Mr. Vignoli that structural factors such as employment status or the housing market, while important context, do not tell the whole story of where people see themselves in the future. Raising children is an inherently forward-looking project, and in Mr. Vignoli’s analysis, increasing exposure to a volatile global economy and accelerating technological change makes it hard for young people to project a path forward with even a modest degree of confidence.
In one study, Mr. Vignoli and his co-authors found that though people’s current job situation — whether they had long-term or only temporary employment — influenced their decision to become a parent, equally influential was their sense of their future prospects, and whether, if this job went away, they could find another at comparable pay. That sense is a function of both real-world conditions and individual temperament — “resilience toward unexpected outcomes,” as Mr. Vignoli puts it.
To understand current population shifts, then, we must look further than just the indicators that researchers in other contexts have referred to as the “shadow of the past” — is someone employed? Married? College-educated? We must also consider what have been called the “shadows of the future.”
Doing so helps to explain why certain longstanding patterns are beginning to change. American women with less education tend to have more children than their more educated peers. That was true in the era before birth control became available and marriage ceased to be effectively compulsory, but it was also true afterward, when women had more choices. Researchers theorized that motherhood actually reduced uncertainty for young low-income mothers, even in their precarious circumstances, because it gave them a defined and valued social role, with clear responsibilities and an identifiable path.
The decline in births after the Great Recession affected women of all education levels, but between 2007 and 2016, it was steeper among American women without college degrees, whose births dropped 12 percent below projections, according to an analysis by the demographer Lyman Stone. That’s an estimated 3.1 million “missing” births in that cohort alone. Among women with graduate degrees, births dropped by just 7 percent from 2007 levels. Reproduction fell most precipitously among nonwhite women, especially Hispanic and Native American women, who earn less, on average, than white women. As with any sweeping social change, more than one factor is at work, but a growing body of evidence suggests that the anxiety of bringing a child into such an uncertain world may increasingly outweigh the appeal of motherhood.
The world has seen uncertainty before, so why is this time different? One possibility is that we live in an era of “polycrisis” — a term coined in the 1990s by the philosopher Edgar Morin and his co-author Anne Brigitte Kern to describe the interplay of many crises at once. For the particular question of having a family, among the many crises, the Great Recession may have been particularly consequential. “It changed the world,” said Chiara Ludovica Comolli, a demography professor at the University of Bologna. It “produced such levels of inequalities that the relationship between people and between groups, it was completely altered.”
Ms. Comolli has been studying how economic uncertainty rippled through the social sphere, eroding social trust and spurring the rise of radical right-wing parties, and how those changes in turn affect fertility. In Sweden, the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats have talked about protecting the family and increasing child allowances. But Ms. Comolli found that in towns and cities where the party was gaining popularity, birthrates actually fell. Highly educated women, whom the researchers described as most likely to feel alienated by their neighbors’ support for the radical right, were especially likely to forgo having a child.
The Great Recession’s outsize impact may also be due to its status as the first economic crisis of the era of nonstop digital information deluge, which rendered it, and the sense of dread it engendered, all but inescapable, even for people not financially affected. The same goes for natural disasters, political upheaval and war: In a global world, no one is insulated. “It’s not just your own uncertainty, but it’s that you get all the uncertainty around you as well,” said Trude Lappegård, a sociology professor at the University of Oslo. “It’s difficult to disentangle what concerns you and what possibly can concern you, and what’s concerning other people.”
Or as Axel Peter Kristensen, who did his graduate research with Ms. Lappegård, put it when we spoke last summer, “Which uncertainty matters? Is it the one that’s very close to you? Is it the one that is on a larger abstract scale? Is it one that’s here in Europe? Or is it in Norway?”
Mr. Kristensen himself has a partner and a job and owns a small apartment in Oslo, but at 33, he is not yet a parent. He contrasted his life course with that of his parents, who had all three of their children by their early 30s. At the time, Mr. Kristensen’s mother was training to be a nurse, and his father was a carpenter. From today’s vantage point, theirs was not “a secure situation — renting, not having that much money,” he said. “But they still felt that, of course, we’re going to have children.” Mr. Kristensen’s mother intended to pursue education, and his parents wanted to eventually buy a home, but in that era, kids were not viewed as obstacles to achieving those goals. “They were not postponing birth. They were just doing it at the same time.”
He talks with his mother about these generational patterns. “The biggest difference, watching her narrative and my narrative, my feeling is that these things should be in order first,” he said. Seen through a lens of uncertainty, the global pattern of delayed marriage and childbearing may signify something more than just a matter of “shifting priorities.” It may represent a desperate attempt to create some sort of stable foundation in what one economist recently described as “a singularly turbulent” era.
“Having a nice income, having steady employment, a nice education, having an apartment,” Mr. Kristensen said. “These new milestones, has the importance of them changed in an era or time where economic uncertainty is being felt much more close to the skin?” Their greater significance, though, comes at a time when they have become much harder to attain. In the United States, the median age of a first-time home buyer just hit 40. “One possible way of coping with this would be to postpone having children,” he said, “or would be to maybe drop it.”
Even proponents of the uncertainty theory acknowledge that there are plenty of other factors that contribute to the world’s declining birthrates. There has been a marked decline in marriage. Increased social isolation, to say nothing of what some have called a “sex recession,” certainly does not augur a baby boom. Nor do today’s employment prospects. Educated workers face what the economist Claudia Goldin has called “greedy jobs,” positions that demand far more of an employee than can be contained between the hours of 9 and 5, while less-skilled workers cope with unpredictable shifts and wages that have barely kept pace with the cost of living. It’s hard to square either with the expectation that parents will invest huge amounts of time and money in their children’s development. Education campaigns and access to long-acting contraception effectively reduced teen pregnancy, a change that has been a significant driver of the overall drop in births in the United States.
Look hard enough, though, and many of those factors become forms of uncertainty too. Ms. Comolli told me that she and her partner have postponed parenthood until their job situations feel more settled. She often thinks about how her worries over her advancing age and the possible health consequences compare with material factors that are the primary concern of so many other people, such as mortgage rates or rising prices: “Both in my personal and professional life, I often wonder whether these are fundamentally different types of uncertainty — something that should perhaps be defined and named differently — or whether they are simply two sides of the same coin,” she said. In any case, whether the uncertainty is psychological or structural, “the key challenge is to better understand how these dimensions interact.”
Like nearly every other scholar I spoke to, Ms. Comolli emphasized the need to clarify the concept of uncertainty and refine ways of measuring it. Perhaps the simplest way is just to ask people how they’re feeling about the future. Demographers are doing this via the Generations and Gender Survey, which queries 10,000 respondents per country in over two dozen countries every three years. A new set of questions asks how worried people are about things like climate change, high unemployment and military conflicts in the future.
Daniel Schneider, the Harvard sociologist, sees the connection between uncertainty and fertility as a middle ground between the two sides of what he called “the family wars” — those endless cultural debates in which the right pushes old-fashioned family structures with tradwife moms home-schooling 10 kids, and the left argues that the era of the nuclear family is over and “everyone’s just going to live with their cats,” he joked. The uncertainty research suggests that, in fact, “People do want to have families, but encounter this really uncertain and unstable world that also demands these really intense standards of parents,” Schneider said.
Solving the problem with one-off pronatalist gestures such as a tax break for having children has proved futile time and time again. To truly make a change, policymakers must take a “holistic approach to making lives and systems that are more conducive to having and raising children, and more conducive to living a happy and secure and healthy life as a person,” said Sarah Hayford, who directs the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University. “You can’t address the parenting part without addressing the secure life part.” That takes structural change.
Or very deep pockets. In South Korea, home to one of the world’s lowest fertility rates — 0.8 lifetime births per woman — the construction company Booyoung Group made headlines in 2024 when it offered 100 million Korean won (around $68,000 today, or roughly twice South Korea’s annual per capita income) to any of its employees who had a baby. Last year, the company reported 36 births — an increase of about 60 percent compared with the average before the program was launched. The bonus is on top of ongoing support for medical expenses and eventual college tuition. Employees who have a third child can potentially choose between the 100-million-won payment and guaranteed, permanent housing support. “The company resolved the financial concerns that were my biggest worry in having a second child,” one employee told a Korean newspaper, which calculated that if the company were a nation, its birthrate would be 3.6 times as high as South Korea’s.
In the United States, twice the annual per capita income amounts to about $153,000. Is that the scale of intervention it would take to change people’s minds? Most policy proposals aimed at families barely nibble around the edges. The Heritage Foundation has called for the government to issue a $2,000-per-child “home child care equalization credit” to subsidize a married parent who stays home with a kid, an amount less than one-third of what the average American household spends in a single month. These nickels and dimes will never be able to counter the sweeping sense of uncertainty that governs so many young people’s lives.
There is, however, one low-cost fertility policy that actually seems to work: faith, perhaps the original uncertainty reduction strategy.
Religion has long been associated with big families; groups such as the Amish, Mormons, ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Hutterites are known for their higher-than-average fertility rates. In a 2024 book, “Hannah’s Children,” the Catholic University of America economist Catherine Pakaluk and a colleague interviewed 55 American women who had five or more children. All were religious. Faith offers multiple levels of assurance, teaching that humans are part of a cosmic chain, having children is a moral virtue, and God will provide for them. On a practical level, faith offers a ready-made community that affirms and supports family life.
But while certain denominations such as Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism are seeing an increase in converts, overall, more Americans are identifying as “nones,” or having no particular religion. Of particular relevance is the rate at which women are fleeing the fold. The Heritage Foundation’s January report on the future of the American family refers to religion dozens of times and paid family leave just a couple of times, even though a bipartisan majority of Americans have said the policy is important to them.
Clare Zakowski, a 28-year-old who works part time as a manager at a therapy practice, says she would welcome a federal paid family leave program, not that Congress is offering. She has always loved children; as a high schooler in Green Bay, Wis., she babysat and ran the activities for a summer camp. “I love their naïveté and innocence,” she told me. “I just think kids rock.” Ms. Zakowski has been with her boyfriend for over seven years, and children have been part of the discussion since the two first got together. But lately, she has been appalled by the manosphere, and worries about how A.I. will affect society. “The news every day is crazy, and it’s been that way for a while,” she said. “It just feels like we’re living in a really, really weird time.” Beyond paid leave (or universal health insurance for that matter), she yearns for something deeper: a sense of security, something that she has yet to experience in America in her adult lifetime. “I feel like there’d have to be, I want to say a revolution, but basically big political change, like a moral awakening from everyone,” she said.
She had been looking for a full-time, higher-paying job to set herself up for parenthood, but found the search to be so stressful that she gave up. “I know there can be negatives to not planning ahead,” she told me, but “who even knows what the future holds?”
When I spoke to Ms. Rivera again in early April, she had some happy updates. A number of her close friends had become pregnant, a development that sparked in her a newfound sense of agency. “My very best friend is due in July, and that was a pretty instant feeling.” She said she found herself lying awake at night thinking, “I can’t give up. There’s no choice. I need to support her, and I need to keep working to improve the world.”
Then while poking around online, she and her husband stumbled onto a beautiful home in Minneapolis not far from her parents and grandmother, and decided to go for it. Mere days after their offer was accepted, Department of Homeland Security forces descended on their fair city of Minneapolis. Watching members of their community rally to protect one another further bolstered her sense of agency. “I really think witnessing the bravery of the people, in the place that is becoming our home again, kind of shifted something for us,” she said. Perhaps this was a world in which they could have a child after all.
Their change of heart hasn’t completely banished the fears she described last summer. “I know that it’s going to be really scary,” she said. But the moment she and her husband allowed themselves to imagine becoming parents, “extreme baby fever” overcame them both, “in a way that feels actually crazy — primally, really, really emotionally intense,” she said. “I don’t feel like I have a choice but to give it a shot.”
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10) What Are ‘Teen Takeovers’ and Why Are Police Struggling to Stop Them?
Across the country, police and city officials are trying to crack down on sometimes violent youth gatherings, but the teens themselves say they need some way to socialize and blow off steam.
By Clyde McGrady, Emma Schartz and Julie Bosman, May 7, 2026
Clyde McGrady reported from Washington, D.C., Emma Schartz from New York and Julie Bosman from Chicago.
“All of this had brought back a fierce debate over curfews, in Detroit, Chicago and elsewhere. This week the District of Columbia Council voted 8 to 5 to give the mayor authority to declare 8 p.m. “curfew zones” to prohibit large teen gatherings in certain areas and require youth event programming whenever the mayor or police chief establishes such zones. The measure still needs approval from the mayor and Congress and likely wouldn’t be in effect at the beginning of summer.”
Police officers detained a young person after chasing him down a street amid rumors of a “teen takeover” in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago last month. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
As the school year draws to a close, the perennial worry about teenage misbehavior and how to keep youth occupied in the summer has a new name with ominous undertones: “teen takeovers.”
In Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, the nation’s capital and elsewhere, large, quickly organized gatherings of youths have popped up in downtowns, parks and leafy neighborhoods. They can be noisy, boisterous and at times violent, their impact often amplified on television, especially in conservative media outfits like Fox News.
And city leaders have begun to pay more attention.
“It has gotten worse when it comes to the bad behavior,” Larry Snelling, the superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, said in an interview. “Kids just start to fight, so they get increasingly more violent.”
Societal anxiety over juvenile delinquency is not new. A family court judge told The New York Times in 1952, “The reasons for children getting into trouble are the same yesterday as forever — revolt, rebellion, the need for self-expression, denied to them somehow, in a natural way.” At that time, authorities attributed the “extreme behavior of youth” to the Korean War, national and international insecurity, and a lack of mental health treatment.
Now it’s social media and the long tail of Covid-19, with its resulting Zoom-from-home generation. But what is undeniably new is the role that platforms like Instagram and TikTok play in the speed of organization and the scale of assembly. And the larger the gatherings, the better the chance that something can go wrong.
“Detroit teens do have a thing for pulling out guns while fighting,” said Malaysia McCline, 15, who recalled stumbling into a teen takeover last month after the Tigers’ opening day.
She and friends had noticed a growing crowd at the city’s waterfront that included a former classmate she’d lost touch with. It was fun, but by nightfall, some became rowdier, yelling and running. Police officers moved in.
“I was scared,” she said.
Law enforcement officials around the country are enjoying a period of good news. Crime overall in cities including Columbus, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles has dropped significantly in recent years. Homicides nationally are poised to hit their lowest rate in more than a century, data shows, a remarkable recovery from pandemic highs.
But the pandemic exacerbated a decline in the amount of time that teenagers spend going out and socializing, and socializing is a natural impulse, said Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor who studies adolescent development. It is bound to burst out.
Just what should be considered a teen takeover is nebulous. On May 3 near Oklahoma City, at least 23 people were injured in a shooting at what police labeled an “unsanctioned” lakeside party. Like classic takeovers, it had been advertised on social media and drew a large crowd of teens and people in their early 20s.
Politics might be amplifying how adults are perceiving the threat. In a year when midterms loom and Republicans are facing stiff headwinds on the war in Iran, the economy, inflation and the cost of living, the issue of crime might be a bright spot for the party. A Pew Research poll last week found that by 17 percentage points, more Americans said they agreed with Republicans than Democrats on crime policy, a bigger edge than the party had two years ago.
Ahead of summer, some urban leaders have tried to make inroads with teens, hoping to channel their urge to socialize into more constructive activities that keep them safe and prevent bad actors from disturbing the peace.
After a pair of teen takeovers in Detroit last month, Mayor Mary Sheffield summoned the youthful organizers to her office. They hashed out ideas like late-night basketball at city recreational centers, new public space developments and a new youth advisory board.
“They wanted a place to get out, be free, have fun and hang out,” Ms. Sheffield said in an interview.
It’s not that easy, said Ashley Jennings, 17, who serves on the Youth Advisory Panel for the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners. It takes money and transportation to get to the suburbs, where teenagers can bowl or watch a movie and avoid the city’s 10 p.m. curfew. Teen takeovers, by contrast, are free and accessible.
The panel provides Ms. Jennings with a platform to authorities that most teens don’t have.
“When somebody shuts you up so much, you have no choice but to think your voice is not important,” she said.
Louis Custard, another Detroit teenager, agreed. What adults call teen takeovers, he called breaking free of the constraints that social media, gangs and excessive policing impose on teen lives.
“What I see is a bunch of kids trying to escape from the modality of their regular day-to-day life,” said Mr. Custard, 16.
Some of the panic over teen takeovers has echoes in worries over “wilding” in the late 1980s and “superpredators” in the 1990s.
“There was a lot of dog whistling there about the fact that these are Black kids who are gathering together in these large groups, and we should be afraid of them,” Mr. Steinberg said.
Black and Latino youth gatherings are more likely to be assumed as criminal, said Kristin Henning, a Georgetown University law professor who specializes in juvenile justice. White children in skate parks in the 1980s and 1990s did not generate nearly the same level of surveillance and arrests as Black gatherings, she said.
That doesn’t mean concerns over rowdy teen gatherings are confined to white people or conservative media outlets. Small business owners and neighbors of all kinds are vexed.
“Every bar and restaurant, corner store or hamburger shop or pizza slice place, they want customers, and customers don’t come back when there are kids jumping on top of hoods of cars, running down the street, knocking people over, threatening people,” said Chuck Thies, a political consultant in Washington, D.C., who advised a former mayor, Vincent Gray.
In the nation’s capital, the issue has been made more urgent by the district’s Democratic mayoral primary in June, an economy sagging under the weight of Trump administration job cuts, and the threat of still more budget cuts by Congress.
Police are taking notice. Officers in Chicago monitor social media for what they call “teen trend” announcements, and receive tips from parents, community organizers and school officials when a takeover is posted.
They first try to stop it from happening, talking to teenagers, parents and principals. Superintendent Snelling estimated that the department has headed off “hundreds” of takeovers — in the heat of summer in Chicago, there can be several planned each day, he said.
For takeovers it doesn’t stop, the police department makes sure that officers are stationed at the scene.
“There’s zero tolerance for when we see crimes being committed,” Mr. Snelling said. “We will take someone into custody and charge them accordingly.”
In March, a takeover in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, near the University of Chicago, left a trail of property damage after teens stomped on car hoods and broke windshields. Two weeks later, parents and educators on the city’s South Side decided to organize a “parent takeover,” which drew more than 60 people who stood outside a coffee shop and monitored the area.
Trez V. Pugh III, the coffee shop owner, thinks the kids are just bored. “Some kids are just looking for attention, and they don’t realize there are repercussions, consequences for their actions,” he said.
All of this had brought back a fierce debate over curfews, in Detroit, Chicago and elsewhere. This week the District of Columbia Council voted 8 to 5 to give the mayor authority to declare 8 p.m. “curfew zones” to prohibit large teen gatherings in certain areas and require youth event programming whenever the mayor or police chief establishes such zones. The measure still needs approval from the mayor and Congress and likely wouldn’t be in effect at the beginning of summer.
Last summer, Mayor Brandon Johnson in Chicago vetoed a curfew measure passed by the City Council.
Even proponents say such curfews are at best a temporary solution. Teens are especially leery.
In Atlanta, Haile Irving, 17, and Devin Mitchell, 16, delivered a speech in March titled “Re-Imagining Third Spaces” at a conference for the city’s public school students. In front of school board members, a superintendent and aides for Mayor Andre Dickens, Ms. Irving and Mr. Mitchell argued that teenagers needed their own spaces, modeled after co-working spots downtown, to do homework and art projects, host charity events, or hold pop-up shops to sell goods and services.
The mayor’s chief of staff awarded the duo a $50,000 grant to help make the concept happen.
“The issue is having to deal with being seen as a criminal when you’re trying to access fun as a kid,” Ms. Irving said. “There are issues with safety when safety isn’t adequately built for you.”
Kim Bellware contributed reporting from Chicago.
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11) ICE Agents Barred From Wearing Masks in New York Under State Budget Deal
State and local officials will also be prohibited from formally cooperating with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement under the agreement.
By Grace Ashford, May 7, 2026
Masked federal agents have been a frequent presence outside immigration courtrooms in New York City. Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Four months after masked federal agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis, New York leaders announced a plan to implement some of the strictest rules for immigration officials of any state in the country.
The package, which is included in the state budget deal announced on Thursday, prohibits state and local officials from entering into formal or informal cooperation agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and forbids law enforcement agents from wearing masks.
The rules also prohibit ICE from using local jails to house detainees and from searching New Yorkers’ homes, hospitals, churches and schools without a warrant signed by a judge. But they will not affect the ability of law enforcement officials to coordinate with the agency on public safety issues.
Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Thursday that the changes were necessary given the extent of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
“They didn’t just target hardened criminals and gang members, which I would have supported — we did support,” Ms. Hochul said. “They also targeted mothers still nursing their infants, separating them, an 85-year-old widow in her nightgown.”
She said that ICE had used intimidation tactics to evade responsibility, adding: “New York will no longer stand for it.”
Democrats expect many of the measures — including a new provision that would allow the families of those who have had their rights to life, liberty or property violated by government agents to seek retribution — to be challenged in court.
Those cases will not only set up a novel legal battle, but will also provide an opportunity for the country to see in real time what happens when states and their citizens resist the federal government’s’ immigration enforcement efforts.
Days before the measures were finalized, Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, threatened to respond with force if they were approved.
“We’re going to flood the zone,” Mr. Homan said this week during a speech in Phoenix. “You’re going to see more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen before.”
Ms. Hochul quickly pushed back on his comments. “Donald Trump himself said he would not send a surge of ICE agents to the state of New York unless I ask,” she said. “I’m not asking.”
The package’s inclusion in the budget deal speaks to increased momentum among Democrats to counter the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.
It also reflects the evolution of Ms. Hochul, a moderate Democrat who first rose to national attention as a county clerk opposing a state mandate to provide driver’s licenses to immigrants without legal status.
In an interview earlier this year, Ms. Hochul said that the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE — and in particular its separation of families — threatened the value system on which the country was founded.
“I feel like it’s unraveling, and I have a moral responsibility as a human being, but also as a leader, to use my platform, my voice, to call it out and try to rectify it with every fiber in my being,” she said.
The issue was elevated by the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a blind Rohingya refugee who was found dead after immigration agents left him alone outside on a cold Buffalo night. The city’s medical examiner determined his death was a homicide.
Ms. Hochul referred to the case, which took place in her hometown, in announcing the budget agreement on Thursday. “Come on, that’s not who we are,” she said. “Not as New Yorkers, not as Americans.”
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