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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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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member 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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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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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols 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) The Ohio City Revived by Haitian Immigration Sees an Uncertain Future
In Springfield, Ohio, some residents see the end of an economic boom after the end of a humanitarian program for immigrants. Others see still darker possibilities.
By Miriam Jordan, June 29, 2026
Miriam Jordan reported from Springfield, Ohio. She has been reporting for two years on Haitian immigration there.
Risner, who brought his family to Springfield and bought a home, fears a bleak future in Haiti. Amy Powell for The New York Times
Haitians who arrived in Springfield, Ohio, by the thousands in recent years revived a city that had been in decline for decades.
They worked in manufacturing, distribution and the service sector, easing labor shortages and fueling economic growth. Their children starred on athletic teams and played in school concerts.
Now, Springfield faces the prospect of losing the people that powered its resurgence.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can proceed with terminating Temporary Protected Status for more than 330,000 Haitian and 6,100 Syrians. The humanitarian program, maintained by successive administrations, had allowed recipients to live and work in the United States because their home countries were considered too perilous to risk a return.
The Trump administration has argued that the protection, granted for up to 18 months at a time, has been renewed repeatedly and turned into a de facto permanent residency program.
The court’s decision threatens to transform Springfield into ground zero for what some legal scholars are calling the first mass “de-documentation” of immigrants in modern American history. The city of 60,000 — including more than 10,000 Haitians — could become the target of a major enforcement operation.
American residents are preparing to protect Haitians, with some making plans to care for their Haitian neighbors’ native-born children and even to hide and shelter immigrants who remain.
“The Supreme Court decision is not just a tragedy for Haitians, it’s a tragedy for Springfield, Ohio,” said Carl Ruby, pastor at Central Christian Church. “We went from being one of the fastest-shrinking cities to one of the fastest-growing cities in America. This undoes all that progress.”
And, on a more prosaic level, it threatens the Springfield High School soccer team, whose co-captain was Haitian. Other Haitian students were often on the starting 11 last season, when the team had its best record in years.
“The Haitians brought skills and talents, and made our team better,” said Emerson Babian, an American player.
“If the Haitians had to leave Springfield, it would be devastating,” said the rising senior. “Skill, morale and friends would be gone.”
But the Supreme Court freed the administration’s hand with a 6–3 ruling split along ideological lines, holding that federal courts have no authority to review T.P.S. terminations by the executive branch.
The decision handed President Trump a significant victory. While the case specifically addressed Haiti and Syria, it established a precedent that would let the administration dismantle the program for nearly 1.3 million T.P.S. recipients, including those from Afghanistan, Somalia, South Sudan and El Salvador. Many have been in the United States for years.
Haitian migration to the United States surged after a 2010 earthquake devastated the impoverished country. It accelerated again following the 2021 assassination of its last president, which unleashed gang violence, deepened instability and pushed the state to the brink of collapse.
After initially settling in established enclaves in South Florida, Boston and New York, Haitians began dispersing in search of opportunity. Thousands moved to Springfield between 2020 and 2024.
Once an industrial powerhouse, the city between Dayton and Columbus had fallen on hard times as manufacturing migrated overseas; Springfield had shed more than a quarter of its population since the 1960s.
Equipped with work permits, thanks to their protected status, Haitians assembled car engines at Honda, operated robots at Amazon and packed salads at Dole. They were welcomed by Republican leaders and business executives who had invested millions after being lured by the city’s revitalization plan.
“These Haitians were working and contributing to our community and economy,’’ Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said in a statement.
Haitians wove themselves into the fabric of the city: They filled church pews, bought new homes and renovated old ones. Their children played in high school recitals — and became soccer stars.
François, one of the starters, said that his parents sent him to the United States with an older brother in 2023 after their Port-au-Prince restaurant was ransacked by gangs.
“My friends were kidnapped,” said François, who asked to be identified by one name for fear of immigration authorities. “I hope I can stay here to study and maybe one day go back, if the situation gets better.”
Doubt began to suffuse Springfield in 2024 after the community was thrust into the rancorous national immigration debate: Mr. Trump amplified a baseless claim by his running mate, JD Vance, that Haitians there were stealing and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs.
The falsehood inflamed tensions that had already been building. At City Commission meetings, some residents denounced the newcomers in racist terms, accusing them of ruining the city and draining public services. White supremacists marched. Bomb threats closed schools and government buildings.
Throughout it all, Haitians kept a low profile. Since the Supreme Court’s decision, many have been stunned and confused, said Viles Dorsainvil, who leads a support center. Some are in denial, he said, and Christians are praying for God to intervene.
For others, including a 38-year-old immigrant named Risner, who has a young family and owns a home, the ruling has brought despair.
Risner, who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of attracting official attention, has had T.P.S. since 2021. In Springfield, he found work at an auto-parts plant and saved to bring his family, who came in 2023. The next year, they bought a three-bedroom house. They also welcomed a second son, an American-born child.
The family put down roots. Risner plays the bass and his wife, Fabiola, plays the saxophone in their church band. Fabiola, a nurse in Haiti, recently passed her U.S. licensing exam.
“If I’m forced to go back to my country, I don’t have a house. I don’t have anything,” he said. “All my money, I spent here in the United States.”
Sadrac Delva, a Haitian real estate agent, said that he had closed on more than 15 homes bought by Haitians since last month, reflecting the community’s cautious optimism.
Mr. Delva, who has lived in Springfield for six years, said he had entered the country lawfully and has a pending asylum claim. His daughters, 12, 7 and 4, take swimming lessons. The eldest is learning the violin. His wife, Gerda, is a nurse at the main hospital.
They had been thinking of buying a bigger house, he said, but the T.P.S. decision was making him uneasy.
“Even I am concerned about our future here,” said Mr. Delva, whose two younger girls were born in the United States.
Several American residents said that they favored better management of immigration, but that the administration would be going too far if it began roundups.
“I understand the need for laws around immigration and border control,” said Luke Taylor, 35, a software developer. “But the Trump administration should do a serious evaluation of conditions in Haiti.”
Haitians have been here legally, Mr. Taylor added. “Many have American children.”
Ben James, 44, who has a special-needs child, said that he had seen Haitians at a family services center.
“If your protected status is up, that’s it,” he said. “But if children are going to be separated from their parents, I disagree with that. These are humans.”
Amid the uncertainty, a loose network of Springfield supporters of Haitians has sprung into action.
Central Christian Church, which started a group called G92 after the ancient Hebrew word “ger,” for stranger, organized a City Hall rally to protest the court decision on Thursday.
“We are not laying down. We have been planning for this for 18 months,” said Jen Casto, an activist who spoke at the event.
Several churches have lists of congregants willing to care for American children of Haitian parents who are detained or deported.
A rapid-response group has been formed, and members are planning to drive through the streets and alert people about immigration agents if raids occur.
A small, secret network is ready to place Haitians in the homes of vetted Americans willing to shelter people in spare bedrooms and basements — hiding them the way that another generation of Springfield residents hid people fleeing slavery in the 1850s as part of the Underground Railroad.
At St. Vincent de Paul, a Catholic charity, more than 20 volunteers showed up Friday to pack boxes with rice, canned vegetables and cereal. Members of another organization, Springfield Neighbors United, delivered them to Haitian families afraid of leaving their homes.
“We don’t know if it’s going to get ugly,” said Tammy McEldowney, 67, a retired social worker who was among the volunteers.
Kevin Williams contributed reporting.
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2) Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Effort to End Birthright Citizenship
The justices blocked an executive order that banned birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and some temporary foreign visitors.
By Abbie VanSickle, Supreme Court reporter, June 30, 2026
Outside the Supreme Court in April. President Trump signed an executive order last year declaring that citizenship would no longer be automatically granted to babies born on U.S. soil. Credit...Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down President Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship, reaffirming the long-held principle that the Constitution guarantees that nearly all children born on U.S. soil are citizens.
The ruling was a significant blow to a policy long pursued by Mr. Trump to prevent babies born to undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign residents from automatically becoming Americans.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, explained that Mr. Trump’s executive order violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Children born in the United States to undocumented parents or to parents temporarily in the country, he wrote, are citizens at birth.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’”
He added: “We keep that promise today.”
The legal battle over birthright citizenship began on the first day of Mr. Trump’s second term, when he announced an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.”
In the order, he declared that citizenship would not longer be automatically granted to babies born on U.S. soil. In particular, children born to immigrants who entered the country illegally would no longer be citizens, nor would those born to parents here on a lawful but temporary basis, such as those on student, work or tourist visas.
The president’s order faced immediate legal challenges, as civil rights organizations, immigrant advocacy groups and expectant parents sued, successfully winning in court to block the order while lawsuits unfolded.
It never went into effect, and there were few signs the administration had been preparing the dramatic overhaul of the citizenship system that would have been necessary were it allowed.
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3) Supreme Court Allows States to Bar Transgender Athletes from Girls’ Sports
By Ann E. Marimow, June 30, 2026
Members of Concerned Women for America praying outside the Supreme Court before the decision was handed down on Tuesday. Credit...Allison Robbert for The New York Times
The Supreme Court upheld West Virginia and Idaho state laws on Tuesday that bar transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams, a decision with nationwide implications involving an issue championed by President Trump.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the conservative majority, said states “may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females,” but he ended his ruling by saying that transgender athletes who want to compete deserved respect.
“No student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified,” he wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the three Democratic appointees, issued a partial dissent, saying a West Virginia athlete should have been allowed to pursue a constitutional challenge, but agreeing that the state laws do not violate Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation in public schools.
The Trump administration, which backed the state bans, has targeted the participation of transgender athletes in sports amid a national pushback against expanding rights for transgender people. Mr. Trump hailed the decision, calling it a “BIG WIN” in a social media post.
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4) Supreme Court Lifts Spending Limits on Political Parties and Candidates
Republicans had asked the court to strike down restrictions on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates.
By Abbie VanSickle and Adam Liptak, Reporting from Washington, June 30, 2026
Delegates and supporters at the Republican National Convention in 2024. The National Republican Senatorial Committee brought a legal challenge against limits on coordinated spending when JD Vance ran for Senate in 2022. Credit...Jon Cherry for The New York Times
The Supreme Court lifted limits on Tuesday on how much political parties can spend on advertising and other expenses in coordination with candidates.
The 6-to-3 decision, divided along ideological lines, is a major victory for Republicans and could undercut one of the Democrats’ financial advantages going into the midterms.
The question before the justices was whether current federal limits on such spending — called coordinated party expenditures — violate the First Amendment. During oral arguments, Noel J. Francisco, a lawyer for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which brought the legal challenge, told the justices that such limits were “at war” with previous decisions by the court that have found that restricting how money can be spent in politics amounts to limiting speech.
The Republican groups had argued that such spending is necessary to allow political parties to spread their message.
The Trump administration had supported the Republican groups, asserting in court filings that the federal law “abridges the freedom of speech” under the court’s “recent First Amendment and campaign finance precedents.”
The coordinated spending case is the latest in a series of efforts to chip away at campaign finance regulations that were enacted after Watergate to lessen the influence of money in elections. In 2010, the Supreme Court struck down limits on independent spending by corporations and unions in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That decision cleared the way for a flood of new money to enter politics and set the stage for further challenges to spending limits.
The coordinated spending case had been closely watched as the midterm elections approached.
Experts said that the decision would immediately cut into one of the Democratic Party’s critical financial advantages in television advertising. That’s because federal law requires that television broadcasters give political candidates low advertising rates, but extends no such requirement to super PACs, which are often charged double, triple and even four times as much for the same television time.
Republicans in recent election cycles have been more reliant on super PACs and national party committees than Democrats, whose candidates have tended to out raise Republicans and who therefore often have been able to take advantage of the lower television ad rates.
Allowing unlimited coordinated spending between candidates and parties would essentially permit both to take advantage of the lower rates.
The case began in 2022, when JD Vance, then a candidate for the Senate in Ohio, sued to challenge the campaign coordination limits. He was joined by several Republican groups. The Biden administration defended the limits, and a panel of federal judges agreed they were legal.
After President Trump returned to office, the federal government flipped sides in the case and backed the Republicans challenging the spending caps.
With the government no longer defending the spending limits, the justices appointed the veteran Supreme Court litigator Roman Martinez to argue on their behalf. He argued the justices should dismiss the case as moot because Mr. Vance is no longer running for office.
Democratic groups intervened in the case, urging the court to uphold the spending limits. They warned that overturning the law would create a system in which political parties would pay candidates’ expenses for everything from flower arrangements to electric bills.
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5) Why Is Florida Executing So Many Prisoners?
In most of the country, executions are a thing of the past. But one state has been carrying them out at a record pace.
By Pamela Colloff, Photographs by Alec Soth, June 30, 2026
Pamela Colloff has been covering the death penalty for more than 25 years. She reported this article from Florida, interviewing a former death-row warden, capital defense attorneys, clergy, prisoners and protesters.
A group of people, most of them sitting on camp chairs, on a tarp while holding signs that protest the death penalty. The ground is wet and muddy as if it has just rained.
This spring, Father Dustin Feddon began waking up in the middle of the night. Heart racing, he would stand at the bathroom sink in the dark, splashing cold water on his face until the feeling passed.
For about a dozen years, Father Dustin had visited prisoners on Florida’s death row as their appeals wound their way through the courts. Some had waited for decades, but the priest learned, more or less, how to accompany people through years of confinement and isolation without losing himself in their desolation. Then in January 2025, Gov. Ron DeSantis began signing death warrants at an accelerated rate. What followed was the busiest period of executions in more than eight decades in a state that has long been a stronghold of capital punishment.
In November, DeSantis set the execution date for Frank Walls, one of the men Father Dustin was counseling. Walls was moved from death row, at Union Correctional Institution, about an hour west of Jacksonville in the northeast part of the state, to nearby Florida State Prison. There he was placed in one of the three cells, known as death watch, that sit 30 feet from the execution chamber. And with that, Father Dustin was drawn into the strange, intimate work of accompanying a condemned person through the final weeks of his life.
Seven days before Christmas, he sat beside Walls in the execution chamber, his hand resting on the man’s leg. Walls, with whom he shared communion just hours before, lay strapped to the gurney, his head freshly shaved, intravenous lines running into his right arm. His chest began to heave as he gasped for air for several minutes. Father Dustin watched as the man’s eyes rolled back and his body went slack and then fell still.
He was the 19th man put to death that year, shattering the state’s annual record of 11, first set in 1936; the Sunshine State accounted for 40 percent of all executions in the United States in 2025.
Soon there were more prisoners who sought out the priest. One received an execution date in February, another in May. With each new death warrant, Father Dustin felt the panic rising in his chest. The pace of executions had upended the nature of his work; no longer was he ministering to men living under sentences of death; he was preparing them to die.
Father Dustin spent years getting ready for this role without quite knowing it. He entered the seminary in his 30s after temporarily taking a break from a doctoral program in religion, and during a year of hands-on ministry before his ordination, he began visiting prisoners. He went on to found Joseph House, a re-entry home in Tallahassee, where he lives alongside men newly released from prison and often scarred by years in solitary confinement. There, he helps residents rebuild their lives — driving them to jobs, doctors’ appointments and therapy sessions; helping them obtain ID cards and open bank accounts; refereeing the inevitable dramas of communal living. There were no off days. He spent one Christmas waiting with a resident in an emergency room.
By the spring, he was ministering to the two men on death watch. As often as allowed, he came to see them, spending four hours on the road, round trip, to talk and pray with the men as they awaited execution. Some mornings he drove to Florida State Prison after only a few hours of sleep; and some days he returned to Joseph House so drained that the demands and small crises awaiting him there seemed strangely distant. At a spiritual retreat one afternoon, he suddenly became preoccupied with the idea that the priest who stood before him speaking was on the verge of collapse. Searching for an explanation, he told me he had become “hypervigilant of mortality — of other people dying, not me dying, but other people dying right in front of me.”
Florida has executed nine men this year, more than all other states combined. The pace has transformed death watch, which had typically been empty or held one man at a time. Now all three cells are often occupied, with the next man scheduled to die housed closest to the chamber. After each execution, the prisoners advance one cell closer; then another condemned man receives an execution date and is moved into the vacant cell. Death watch, once a lonely way station, has begun to resemble an assembly line.
Florida’s renewed embrace of the death penalty has unfolded against the backdrop of a decades-long national retreat from capital punishment. Thirty-three states have either abolished the death penalty or not carried out an execution in at least a decade. New death sentences have dropped even more precipitously, with prosecutors in capital cases seeking them less often and jurors more likely to choose life in prison. Just 23 people were sentenced to death in the United States last year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, compared with 307 in 1995.
Support for capital punishment has been worn away by an accumulation of forces. The mounting number of death-row exonerations — more than 200 since the early 1970s — has made the risk of executing an innocent person impossible to ignore. The steep cost of capital prosecutions has forced many prosecutors to think twice before seeking death; the years of litigation required to obtain and defend a death sentence can add millions of dollars to a case. Decades of declining violent crime have further blunted the public appetite for executions. Support for the death penalty now stands at its lowest since 1972; a Gallup poll last year found that a majority of Americans under 55 opposed it.
This July marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia, which reinstated the death penalty, making it a defining feature of the American criminal justice system. But capital punishment has since lost its hold on the political imagination, with executions persisting in only a small number of states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama and Missouri.
That retreat from capital punishment is apparent in governors’ offices across the country. In 2000, Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, a Republican, declared a moratorium on executions, after the exoneration of 13 men who had been on death row; before leaving office, he commuted nearly all death sentences in the state to life in prison. More recently, Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania imposed or maintained moratoriums. In June, Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, a Republican and a former prosecutor who helped write his state’s death-penalty statute, called for abolishing capital punishment there, concluding that it did not deter murder and abandoning his belief that it was morally justified.
President Trump, by contrast, has long been one of the death penalty’s most outspoken champions, making it a cornerstone of his law-and-order agenda. He resumed federal executions in 2020, ending a 17-year hiatus and reviving a punishment that had become an increasingly rare exercise of federal power. Before Trump took office, the federal government had executed just three people since 1963; in the final six months of his first term, it executed 13. He returned to the issue repeatedly on the 2024 campaign trail, calling for broadening the categories of crimes eligible for execution by proposing death sentences for drug dealers, human traffickers and migrants who kill American citizens.
Hours after taking office in January 2025, he signed a sweeping executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety” — signaling that the White House intended to put the full weight of the federal government behind the revival of capital punishment. He instructed the attorney general to pursue death sentences more aggressively; called on the Justice Department to challenge Supreme Court decisions limiting the death penalty; directed federal officials to help states obtain the increasingly scarce lethal injection drugs needed to carry out executions; and encouraged state prosecutors to seek capital punishment more often.
Nowhere has the president’s vision been pursued more relentlessly than in Florida, thanks to an unusual concentration of power in the governor’s office. In most states that still carry out executions, the process follows a familiar legal path: Once a condemned prisoner has exhausted his appeals, courts — not governors — set execution dates. In Florida, however, the decision rests entirely with the governor, who decides whether — and when — to sign a death warrant for one of the state’s eligible prisoners.
DeSantis, like his predecessors, makes execution decisions behind closed doors; the state’s Supreme Court has long held that setting execution dates is an exercise of the governor’s executive authority, putting it beyond the reach of the state’s otherwise expansive open-government laws. As a result, there is no way to know what criteria DeSantis uses when he chooses who will be put to death, a Tampa-based attorney with the A.C.L.U.’s Capital Punishment Project, Maria DeLiberato, told me. “He could be deciding who is next to die by throwing darts at a list of names,” she said, “or spinning a roulette wheel.”
The secrecy surrounding those decisions has left victims’ families, prisoners and their lawyers searching for clues about what principles, if any, guide DeSantis’s selection process. How long a prisoner has spent on death row does not appear to be a deciding factor; DeSantis has bypassed prisoners who committed their crimes as far back as the 1970s, scheduling the executions of men convicted of murders committed decades later. With no obvious overarching logic governing who is chosen next, the process has become a contest to attract — or avoid — his attention. Hoping to prompt him to issue a death warrant for Ronald Heath, convicted of the 1989 robbery and murder of a traveling salesman, the victim’s family sent DeSantis custom blue Sharpies — his pen of choice for signing both legislation and death warrants. DeSantis subsequently did so, and Heath was executed on Feb. 10.
In March, after the execution of a man named Billy Kearse by lethal injection took roughly twice as long as usual, lawyers for another man on death row, Chadwick Willacy, filed a public records request seeking information about the state’s execution protocol. A week later, DeSantis signed Willacy’s death warrant. That timing introduced more fear and uncertainty into an already opaque process. Lawyers representing condemned prisoners were left to wonder whether every legal challenge they raised risked drawing the governor’s scrutiny — and whether vigorous advocacy, intended to save a client’s life, could instead move him closer to death.
DeSantis has offered little public explanation for the record number of executions carried out since 2025 on his watch. The acceleration is particularly striking because it came after years of relative inactivity. In 2019, the first year of DeSantis’s governorship, Florida carried out two executions, and then three years passed without another. Though six men were executed in 2023, just one was put to death the following year before the pace abruptly ramped up in 2025. At a news conference in Jacksonville last November, a reporter asked him to explain the sudden increase.
DeSantis blamed the disruptions of the pandemic as well as bureaucratic challenges for the slow pace at the start of his governorship. Meeting with victims’ families, he said, had reinforced his determination to see old death sentences carried out. “There’s a saying: Justice delayed is justice denied,” DeSantis said. “We’re doing it to be able to bring justice to the victims’ families.” When I asked his office for comment, the head of communications, Alex Lanfranconi, sent a short response: “My advice to those who are seeking to avoid the death penalty in Florida would be to not murder people.”
Some observers see a different calculus. DeSantis is term-limited and will leave office in January, but his political future remains an open question. Since ending his campaign for the White House in 2024, he has worked to repair his relationship with Trump; in April, Axios reported that he was lobbying for a position in the administration, with an eye toward attorney general. Few who follow Florida politics believe he has abandoned his presidential ambitions. The sheer number of death warrants, wrote the editorial boards of The Orlando Sentinel and The South Florida Sun Sentinel last summer, “gives rise to wonder: Why the sudden rush? Is it another sign that he’s planning another run for president in 2028? Would he campaign as the governor who tried to empty his state’s death row?”
When Governor DeSantis signs a death warrant, no one on death row knows who among them has been selected until prison officials arrive at the condemned man’s cell. Of the 242 prisoners on death row, roughly half have exhausted their appeals and are eligible for a warrant. The routine is always the same: a cluster of officials in dress uniforms suddenly appears, the arrival announced by the heavy cadence of boots on concrete and the metallic jangle of handcuffs and restraints. “The warden is first, followed by the colonel and the major and the captain and about four of the biggest guards you’ve ever seen in your life,” a former death-row inmate, John Buzia, who was resentenced to life in 2017, told me from prison. “They come walking down the wing and it’s dead silent, because they’ve got their game faces on.”
The men listen as the footsteps pass one cell, then another. From inside their cells, they can see little beyond their immediate neighbors, unless they slip a mirror between the bars in violation of prison rules. Somewhere along the way, the footsteps stop. The warden informs the man whose name appears on the piece of paper he carries that the governor has signed his death warrant. The prisoner is placed in restraints and led back down the wing before being transported to Florida State Prison and placed on death watch.
Even before the ramp-up of executions in 2025, waiting for this moment was an exercise in near constant, close listening. “You become very ear-sensitive, sound-sensitive,” Buzia said. Years spent in near total isolation and the same monotonous routine sharpen the senses, lending the smallest break from the ordinary an outsize and terrifying significance: the unmistakable sound of several officers approaching, a certain rattle of keys, the wing suddenly falling silent.
Father Dustin saw the effects of this last July, when he went to visit Walls, who had been sentenced to death for killing an Air Force airman and his girlfriend during a 1987 robbery. Ten death warrants had been served in the previous seven months, and Walls was visibly on edge, telling the priest that he was barely sleeping because he was sure that his death warrant was going to come down at any moment. “They kind of know there’s this mysterious list,” Father Dustin said, “and they know they’re on it.” Walls, usually animated as he talked about whichever saint or prayer had most recently captured his imagination, struggled to collect his thoughts, and they sat in silence while he tried to focus. Father Dustin watched as exhaustion eventually overtook Walls and he nodded off.
The lawyers who represent condemned prisoners, most of whom work for Florida’s Capital Collateral Regional Counsel — a state-funded agency responsible for representing death-row inmates in their final rounds of appeals — live with the same uncertainty, never knowing which client will suddenly be scheduled to die, or when. Until a warrant is handed down, they can only guess which of the many cases they juggle will become their most urgent.
Texas, which has historically had the most active death chamber, requires at least 90 days to pass between the setting of an execution date and the execution itself. But in Florida, the period between the signing of a death warrant and an execution is roughly one month, on average. When a warrant arrives, it can set off an all-consuming race against the clock to determine whether there is any legal or factual reason the execution should not go forward: Were there witnesses who were overlooked? Or leads that earlier attorneys failed to recognize or fully investigate? Newer, more sensitive forms of forensic testing — which may have been unavailable, or less reliable, just a few years earlier — can shed light on old evidence. Advances in science and research can alter how courts view a prisoner’s longstanding claims of mental illness or intellectual disability. The imminence of an execution can prompt witnesses who have remained silent for years to speak.
This spring, a prisoner named James Duckett, convicted of the 1987 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, received an execution date. Five days before Duckett was to be put to death, the Florida Supreme Court stayed his execution while last-minute DNA testing and analysis in the case was completed.
Cases like Duckett’s illustrate why the period between a death warrant and an execution is so important, serving as a final safeguard against an irreversible punishment. Florida’s own history of wrongful convictions in capital cases underscores what is at stake. No state has exonerated more death-row prisoners, 30 men in all.
Now, with the added strain of one death warrant following another in rapid succession, the burden on the lawyers who are responsible for these cases has grown even heavier. “You have an execution, and then within a week or two, you’re working on a warrant again,” says Linda McDermott, chief of the Capital Habeas Unit at the Office of the Federal Defender in Tallahassee, which represents Florida death-row prisoners in federal court. Last year, eight prisoners represented by her office were executed.
The state’s accelerated pace leaves little room for error, or for the demands of life beyond the courtroom. When DeSantis signed a death warrant for Billy Kearse on Jan. 29, Kearse’s lead attorney of more than 20 years, Paul Kalil, was grappling with a family crisis: His father, who had been hospitalized for several months, would enter hospice care less than a week later. As Kalil worked to prepare the final challenges to Kearse’s death sentence, his colleagues sought additional time, explaining in one court filing that “due to his ethical obligations to Mr. Kearse,” Kalil had not been able to spend sufficient time with his father in the final days of his life. The courts granted only 48 additional hours.
Kalil’s father died on Feb. 8. Afterward, Kalil’s colleagues again asked for more time, explaining that the lawyer with the deepest knowledge of the case was now grieving his father’s death and making funeral arrangements. The Florida Supreme Court denied the request, and three weeks later, Kearse was executed.
On April 21, the day Florida was set to execute Chadwick Willacy, I made my way to the vigil that would be taking place outside Florida State Prison, near the small town of Starke. Across the two-lane highway that leads to the prison, a few dozen people were unfolding camping chairs on a sunbaked field, carrying signs with messages like “Execute justice not people” and “Thou shalt not kill.” A single, broad-canopied oak tree provided the only shade. There were no satellite trucks or television crews, no signs that something momentous was about to take place, other than a single counterprotester: a death-penalty proponent who held up a sign listing the names of every man executed since early 2025, each name crossed out with a red X. Every so often, a lone car or pickup would come barreling down the highway, hurtle past the protesters and vanish.
The relative invisibility of executions — the sense that they take place with little public awareness — was what prompted Melanie Verdecia, a Jacksonville attorney, to start writing a newsletter on Substack, “Tracking Florida’s Death Penalty,” that chronicles everything from new capital prosecutions to last-minute death warrant litigation, in real time. Years ago, Verdecia told me, she was driving to the Florida Supreme Court, where she was clerking, on the day of a scheduled execution, having spent weeks immersed in the legal battle over whether it would proceed. As she sat in traffic looking at the commuters around her, she realized none of them had any idea that a man was slated to die that day.
Verdecia is one of a small number of Floridians who meticulously track the state’s use of the death penalty, trying to make sure executions — and more recently, the ramp-up in death warrants — do not pass completely unnoticed. On the afternoon of the Willacy execution, Grace Hanna was sitting in a doughnut shop in Starke, keeping a different kind of record. Hanna, the 29-year-old executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, sat at her laptop as she communicated with a network of people who were affected, in one way or another, by Florida’s death penalty, including capital defenders whose clients were under active death warrants, as well as the state’s many death-row exonerees, to family members of condemned prisoners who were preparing for final visits, or grieving in the wake of an execution. Hanna told me that one of the most haunting parts of her job is when she is needed to collect the ashes of a condemned man and deliver them to his family.
When Hanna was 8 years old and growing up in Tallahassee, a cousin who worked the overnight shift at a convenience store in North Carolina was beaten to death during a robbery. The crime spurred long-running conversations in her home about crime, punishment and how society should respond after someone commits an act of violence. Her parents, Baptist deacons who ultimately left the church over its refusal to ordain women, raised their children to wrestle with such questions. “Clearly, something stuck,” Hanna told me. She went on to become a social worker, her brother a public defender. The man who killed her cousin received a sentence of life without parole, a punishment that spared her family from the many years or even decades of appeals that often accompany a death sentence. Justice, she said, had not demanded putting another person to death.
That day, Hanna was drafting a news release, as her team did every execution day, to be sent out after Willacy was put to death. It began by acknowledging the victim at the center of the case, Marlys Sather, who was 56 when she returned to her home in Palm Bay during her lunch break one day in 1990, interrupting a burglary. Court records show that Willacy beat her, bound her and set her on fire before fleeing.
These news releases try to hold two realities at once: the suffering caused by the crime and the complicated path that led there. Drawing on court filings, prison records and years of discussions with the lawyers and family members who know these men best, Hanna writes about forces that shaped their lives before prison: mental illness, intellectual disabilities, addiction, physical and sexual abuse and childhoods marked by neglect. She also looks at the decades of incarceration that follow their convictions, during which sometimes profound transformations take place. “This is often the only obituary these men will get,” she said.
Yet that was not the central focus of the Willacy release she was writing. Hanna devoted much of it to his unsuccessful effort to force the state to disclose records about its lethal-injection protocol. “Every Floridian,” she typed, “should be asking themselves tonight: What is the State of Florida hiding in those records?”
The execution went forward that evening. Shortly after 6 o’clock, around the time the lethal-injection drugs began to flow, the protesters gathered around a large metal bell. One by one, they stepped forward. “Not in my name,” each said before striking it. The sound was low and resonant, reverberating after each blow. The counterprotester, meanwhile, a lean retiree named Bill Campbell, tried to drown out the sound with a boombox blasting “Another One Bites the Dust.”
Above them, the sky stretched to the horizon, luminous in the early evening light. “Whenever we’re here for an execution, something wild happens in the sky, like a torrential downpour or the most beautiful sunset you’ve ever seen,” Hanna told me. She often takes a photograph of the sky and sends it to the prisoner’s family if they cannot bear to be there.
Soon a convoy of white vans emerged from the prison gates carrying witnesses, two members of the media and prison officials. The Florida Department of Corrections announced Willacy’s time of death as 6:15 p.m.
The protesters folded their chairs and gathered their belongings. A half-hour later, the vigil site had emptied out. Across the road, there was no visible sign that a man was put to death there that evening.
Another execution was already scheduled for nine days later. James Hitchcock, one of the longest-serving prisoners on Florida’s death row, was set to die on April 30. As Hanna headed to her car, she called out to another woman: “See you next week.”
Last December, with Florida on the verge of carrying out its 19th execution of the year, a retired warden named Ron McAndrew sat down to write an opinion piece for The Tampa Bay Times. A two-time DeSantis voter and self-described “law-and-order guy,” McAndrew was troubled by the rapid increase in executions. “That pace matters,” he wrote, “because executions depend on human beings performing complex, high-risk tasks under extreme pressure.” He warned of the potential for a serious error and the toll on those responsible for carrying out death sentences. “When something goes wrong in an execution chamber, it is not elected officials who absorb the consequences,” he wrote. It was prison staff members “who carry the memories long after the chamber is cleaned and the state moves on.”
McAndrew served as warden of Florida State Prison in the mid-90s, when Florida still used the electric chair. He walked three men to the execution chamber and gave the signal that sent electricity coursing through their bodies. The last execution he oversaw, on March 25, 1997, would help hasten the end of Florida’s reliance on the electric chair. Moments after that prisoner, Pedro Medina, received the first jolt of electricity, his head caught fire and flames leaped into the air. Smoke filled the chamber. Medina’s chest heaved until he was pronounced dead.
McAndrew threw out the uniform he wore that day, which smelled of burning flesh. Afterward, Gov. Lawton Chiles sent him to Texas to study lethal injection, the primary method Florida uses today. The cumulative weight of the executions followed him. He drank heavily, sometimes downing a bottle of Johnnie Walker in a single day. At night, he often awoke to find the men whose executions he had overseen sitting on the edge of his bed. “They’re haunting me,” he told his wife.
Thirteen years of therapy allowed him to regain his footing. Now retired, he lives in the small town of Dunnellon, roughly 70 miles southwest of Florida State Prison, where he had hoped for a quiet life, puttering along the Withlacoochee River on his pontoon boat. But as executions accelerated last year, he found himself worrying about the people inside Florida State Prison who were being asked to shoulder the burden he once carried, and of the effect on them of so much killing. He knew what it was like to stand inside the execution chamber, and what it was like for the other prison officials and staff members who were required to see the process through to the end. “It was damaging, and I mean very damaging, to the people in that room.”
I thought of the emotion with which McAndrew said “damaging” — as if he were describing an injury that never fully healed — when I spoke to Father Dustin on June 3, the day after a prisoner named Andrew Lukehart was executed.
Father Dustin had accompanied Lukehart, who was sentenced to death for the 1996 killing of his girlfriend’s 5-month-old daughter, through the final month of his life. The crime, the remorse he carried and the abuse that had marked his childhood were not the subjects to which Lukehart most often returned. Again and again, he spoke of the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route that winds across northern Spain, imagining that one day he might somehow walk its dusty roads. He and Father Dustin recited prayers, which the priest had found for him, that pilgrims have spoken for generations along the Camino.
Late in the afternoon on June 2, Father Dustin had been brought into the execution chamber at Florida State Prison, where he took a seat beside Lukehart, who was strapped to the gurney, and rested his hand on the man’s leg. Lukehart’s execution was the third that the priest would witness at Florida State Prison and his voice was heavy as he spoke to me the following morning. “To begin the sacrament of last rites for an otherwise utterly healthy man …” he said, trailing off.
He told me he had been flooded with images of the execution since waking before dawn. The scenes returned one after another: Lukehart’s face, flushed with pooled blood, as if he had been doing a headstand; a doctor leaning over the gurney, raising Lukehart’s eyelids to verify that he was dead; the prayer rope Father Dustin laid across the man’s still chest. Before Mass that morning, the images looped in his mind. “I just was seeing it, and seeing it, and seeing it.”
The priest was struggling to reconcile what he believed he was called to do with what that calling now required of him, and how to move forward as death warrants continued to be signed at a relentless pace. How could he keep doing this work? And yet, how could he abandon the men who had asked him to walk beside them? Inside the death chamber with Lukehart, Father Dustin told me, he felt a tension between the privilege of being with the condemned, he said, “to speak words of healing, of love, of God’s mercy” at their hour of greatest need, contrasted with the taking of a life. “Everything makes you want to cry out to the people around you, ‘Why are you making me do this?’” he said.
Lukehart was gone, but another prisoner he was counseling, James Duckett, whose execution had been put on hold for DNA testing, remained. The testing yielded no clear answers, and prosecutors were now asking the Florida Supreme Court to lift its stay so that the execution could proceed. The machinery of death had paused for him, but only briefly. Father Dustin would return to Florida State Prison to see him in just a few days.
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6) Why the True Death Toll of Venezuela’s Quakes Is So Hard to Know
Five days after devastating twin earthquakes flattened entire residential neighborhoods, experts fear the official death toll of 1,719 could be a serious undercount.
By Emma Bubola, Leo Sands, Isayen Herrera and Tibisay Romero, June 30, 2026
Emma Bubola reported from Buenos Aires, Leo Sands from London, Isayen Herrera from Caracas and Tibisay Romero from La Guaira.
The authorities have started an improvised morgue, so that relatives can look for the bodies of loved ones among the earthquake’s victims at La Guaira’s port in Venezuela. Fabiola Ferrero for The New York Times
It has been six days since devastating twin earthquakes flattened entire residential neighborhoods in Venezuela, and dozens of new bodies are still being hauled out of the rubble.
On Monday, rescuers piled up coffins inside an improvised morgue at the sun-scorched port in the town of La Guaira, one of the hardest-hit areas. Small trucks arrived with more bodies, leaving them arranged in a long row by a concrete dock.
“Every day the number of victims keeps going up,” said Jennifer Moreno Canizales, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Caracas. “And we expect it to keep rising.”
The official death toll after Venezuela’s earthquakes rose on Monday to 1,719 people, an increase of nearly 300 since Sunday. It is based on the number of bodies recovered during the search operations, said Ms. Moreno Canizales.
But sobering as it is, that figure could be a substantial undercount. Many more Venezuelans remain missing, with chances of finding them alive shrinking every day.
The uncertainty of the number is not just a matter for the journalistic or historic record. For many Venezuelans, it signifies their anguished limbo as they search for friends with bleeding hands, trapped between uncertainty and a desperate refusal to accept the worst.
There is no official or reliable toll for the missing. And with so much debris from tall residential buildings pressed tightly together, and a shortage of heavy machinery to remove the rubble, estimates of how many people might still be trapped inside vary widely.
Two forensic doctors at the main morgue in the capital, Caracas, estimated a death toll of about 4,000, basing that on the number of bodies that had been arriving at a morgue in La Guaira every day.
In anticipation of the toll increasing, the United Nations has been procuring 10,000 body bags in coordination with Venezuela’s government, said Gianluca Rampolla del Tindaro, the organization’s resident coordinator for Venezuela. “That is the applying assumption; it’s very sad,” he said.
According to an unofficial website where Venezuelans can report the missing, over 46,000 people were still unaccounted for. The New York Times could not independently verify the figure, which can include people who became separated from relatives.
To veteran rescue workers, the high number of reported missing may be ominous.
“Contact is difficult, but not that difficult that you wouldn’t have gotten in contact,” said Linda Hornisberger, the president of REDOG, a nonprofit Swiss search-and-rescue association that has deployed eight dogs and 88 emergency responders to Venezuela since Friday. “We must assume most to be dead.”
Ms. Hornisberger said that despite working eight- to 12-hour shifts for days, “we have not been able to rescue anybody.”
Disaster response experts say that it often takes several weeks for a full picture to emerge after disasters of this magnitude.
When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, the official government death toll was 64 people. Nearly a year later, they updated it to 2,975, nearly 50 times as high. After the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, when entire coastal villages were completely erased, it took the authorities over a year to settle on the final estimate of 230,000 victims.
Several signs out of Venezuela indicate that there might also be a delay before a final death toll is reached.
The area of the quakes
The day the earthquake struck was a holiday in Venezuela, when it was more likely that families would have been home, or had traveled to the seaside area of La Guaira. Many buildings there were built during an economic boom in the 1970s and 1980s, when developers erected tall towers, many 10 stories of more. A mountain range limited building space, which led developers to choose to build vertically, said Josué Araque, a Venezuelan geographer.
Now, many of those buildings have been pancaked into a dense tangle of debris.
“They are mountains of rubble from buildings of many, many levels, made of concrete, which basically turns them into tombs,” Mr. Araque said. It is difficult to search the lowest floors of the buildings, he said, “because there are 10 floors that fell on top of them.”
Mr. Araque said he believed that there were probably many more missing people whom “they probably will not be able to recover.”
There is 1.2 million tons of debris in the hardest-hit areas of La Guaira, the U.N. Development Program said on Monday.
Ms. Moreno Canizales, from the United Nations, said that 700 buildings had collapsed. Despite the rescue teams’ best efforts, she said, “it is hard to reach them all in time” to rescue those who might still be trapped alive.
Mr. del Tindaro, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Venezuela, also said in an interview that the high number of collapsed buildings indicated that the official toll was an undercount.
Ilan Kelman, a professor of disasters and health at University College London, said a full accounting of the death might never be known. But a preliminary projection that the final toll could exceed 10,000 — shared by the U.S. Geological Survey based on factors including the magnitude of the earthquake, the population density and local infrastructure — remains grimly feasible, he said.
A difficult search
The work of recovering bodies is painstakingly slow, and it’s not a priority for most response teams that are trying to save those who may be still alive. On Sunday, 49 rescue teams coordinated by the United Nations rescued seven survivors, Ms. Moreno Canizales said. Sometimes, she said, the teams are responding to families telling them that they can hear a relative crying from the rubble.
When the disaster response shifts, more bodies are likely to be found, experts said.
“The focus of the search-and-rescue teams is to look for those who might be alive" based on reports of sound and motion, said Phil Gelman, a Latin America coordinator with GOAL, an international humanitarian response agency. “When the search-and-rescue phase is ended, and heavy machinery is moved in to move rubble, the casualty count will rise.”
Even in well-organized response efforts, many survivors end up being rescued by untrained friends, family and neighbors, said Emily So, a professor of architectural engineering at the University of Cambridge.
One Caracas resident, Rosmaria Herrera, 30, said she had lost at least three relatives. Family members and other civilians pulled the bodies of her father, her cousin and her grandmother out of the rubble. But they couldn’t find her uncle.
“It’s strange, because there is practically nothing left of the building,” she said.
Witnesses and aid workers described a shortage of heavy machinery as one of the biggest obstacles to rescue efforts, saying volunteers often lacked the equipment needed to move concrete slabs and reach survivors trapped beneath collapsed buildings.
In videos widely shared on social media, residents pleaded for excavators and other heavy equipment. In one, a man says neighbors pooled their own money to hire machinery after waiting days for government assistance to arrive.
“If we keep waiting for our wonderful authorities, another week will go by with our relatives still buried there,” he says. “We had to start doing this ourselves.”
Some victims will likely die from their injuries, in part because of Venezuela’s already overstretched health system, Professor Kelman said.
Professor So said the final toll would likely be determined by the number of people reported missing, the extent of visible damage to buildings and impeded access to the worst hit areas, which has stymied some responses.
“Tragically, until they recover the bodies from underneath the rubble,” she said. “The count will be low.”
Genevieve Glatsky and Fabiola Ferrero contributed reporting from La Guaira and Bogotá.
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7) Trump’s Moneymaking Run: Unrivaled in Presidential History
The president’s move to open new business ventures, rather than eliminate potential conflicts, defies a long-held tradition.
By Eric Lipton, Reporting from Washington, Published June 30, 2026, Updated July 1, 2026
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s wife owned a profitable radio station. George W. Bush was on the board of an oil company while his father was in the White House. And Hunter Biden was paid by a Ukrainian natural gas company while his father was vice president.
But never before in American history has there been anything like Donald J. Trump, a president who in his first year back in office has collected about $1.4 billion in new revenues from cryptocurrency businesses that directly benefited from his actions as president, a financial disclosure report made public on Tuesday shows.
Overall, Mr. Trump’s revenue in 2025 jumped to at least $2.2 billion, compared with a minimum of $622 million in 2024 before he returned to office.
“It is completely unprecedented,” said Megan Gorman, a tax attorney and the author of a recent book, “All the Presidents’ Money,” that studied the history of presidential wealth dating back 250 years.
Generally, throughout history, Ms. Gorman and other historians said, American presidents have taken actions to try to separate themselves from corporate entanglements that might create conflicts.
“Public office, if anything, was a source of debt, not a source of revenue,” said Lindsay M. Chervinsky, a historian and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.
Mr. Trump and his family have done the opposite, creating new business ventures that are profiting from actions Mr. Trump has taken since he returned to the White House.
Those include the pardon Mr. Trump issued in October to Changpeng Zhao, the richest man in crypto, who founded the company Binance, which has been a critical business partner to the Trump family’s own crypto venture. They also include legislation that Mr. Trump signed last July to promote a form of cryptocurrency called stablecoins, four months after his family-backed firm introduced its own stablecoin.
In many ways, Ms. Gorman said, his acts are “a betrayal of the American social contract: that those who lead the country prioritize country over self — a premise that goes back to George Washington.”
The White House and Trump family have repeatedly dismissed any questions about the president’s moneymaking while in office, arguing that Mr. Trump’s two oldest sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., run the family business operations and that, as a result, there are no conflicts of interest.
“President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in late May when asked about profit-making stock purchases made on behalf of Mr. Trump in companies like Dell Technologies since he returned to office. “Which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media.”
The bulk of the new revenue for Mr. Trump comes from the cryptocurrency industry, which the family aggressively moved into starting in late 2024, just as Mr. Trump was about to be re-elected to a second term.
Mr. Trump served as a co-founder of his family’s crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. That business has now generated $799 million for the president, the financial disclosure made public on Tuesday shows, a significant share of which came from a payment from the government of the United Arab Emirates, which bought a stake in the company.
Three days before Mr. Trump was inaugurated, he separately helped launch a memecoin, $TRUMP, a kind of collectible version of a crypto token. That business has generated another $636 million for Mr. Trump, the disclosure shows, equal to slightly more than the entire amount of money Mr. Trump made from all his other business operations worldwide in 2024.
His memecoin business directly benefited from a February 2025 statement from the Securities and Exchange Commission notifying the industry that such tokens would no longer be subject to the agency’s oversight, reversing the position taken by the agency’s chairman during the Biden administration.
Real estate deals with a Saudi Arabia-based developer, including one that involves the Saudi government, have also brought tens of millions of dollars in new revenues to Mr. Trump and his sons, as have real estate deals in other parts of the world, including Vietnam and Romania.
This does not include business endeavors by Mr. Trump’s sons like recent investments in military contractors, or predictions market companies or companies pursuing billions of dollars of federal assistance to build mines that supply critical minerals — all of which stand to generate new profits for the Trump family, but not Mr. Trump directly.
When Mr. Trump arrived for his first term in Washington in 2017, he and his family agreed not to do any new international business deals, aware that it might leave them vulnerable to allegations that they were benefiting from Mr. Trump’s presence in the White House. Even with that, there were questions about conflicts, as a result of foreign government visits and lobbyists spending at Trump hotels and his family’s other venues.
Upon his re-election, the Trump family has been unapologetic about its aggressive pursuit of profits.
“The first term we did everything imaginable to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and frankly, we got crushed anyway,” Eric Trump said in late 2024, shortly before the election, contending that the presidency had cost his father “an absolute fortune.”
Eric Trump added: “We can’t just sit out in perpetuity, and I won’t.”
Mr. Trump’s sons do run the business operations, and legally they control trusts that were set up after Mr. Trump’s first election that collect the revenues from the business operations. But the president is the beneficiary of these trusts, so he still profits from the business deals.
By contrast, most former presidents in modern times have sold off businesses that they owned or even held stakes in, as well as individual stock holdings. George W. Bush, for example, sold his stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team before his election, while Jimmy Carter turned over operation of his peanut farm to an independent trustee.
Presidential historians said they could identify no other president in American history who entered into new business enterprises just before moving into the White House, and then continued to personally profit from them during his term.
Instead, they cited examples of efforts to avoid potential conflicts.
President Warren G. Harding continued to own an Ohio newspaper while he was in office, but it had been in his family for nearly four decades and after questions were raised about the investment, he agreed to sell the paper, shortly before his death in 1923.
After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson moved to the White House, his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, transferred her radio and television stations into a trust controlled by an outside lawyer and station executive, said Mark K. Updegrove, chief executive of the LBJ Foundation and a presidential historian.
“Presidents have worked assiduously to show they are not connected to anything that could in any way compromise their decision making or leverage their public virtue,” said Jeffrey A. Engel, the director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “The Trump White House seems to go in the opposite direction: that if we do so much of it, people will not think anything about it is weird.”
Even when children or siblings of presidents have pursued business deals — relatively minor in scale compared with the endeavors that have directly brought Mr. Trump money in the last year — these episodes have generated intense media attention and public backlash.
Examples include Billy Beer, the brand endorsed by Carter’s brother, and James Roosevelt, the son of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was a part-owner of an insurance company that sold policies for American corporations and government agencies, even as he worked as an adviser to his father.
After The Saturday Evening Post and The New York Times wrote prominent pieces about James Roosevelt’s insurance business, it became known as the “Jimmy’s Got It” scandal, forcing the president’s son to leave his government post.
Historians said that what is happening with Mr. Trump and his family actions appear to be disconnected from this legacy of sensitivity to such appearances.
Case in point: Jared Kushner serves as a Middle East foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump, his father-in-law, while his private equity firm has collected billions of dollars from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds.
“It is the openness, the flagrant nature of what they are doing, almost with pride — cashing in on the office itself,” Mr. Updegrove said. “That’s what makes it dramatically different.”
Andrea Fuller and Ben Protess contributed reporting.
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8) Five Words That Changed America
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, July 1, 2026
Naila Ruechel for The New York Times
There is a moment for every American when she first encounters the Declaration of Independence. For most, it comes to her as scripture — the highest and most sacred text in the nation’s civic religion, encapsulated by its moving assertion of human equality: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
This Declaration is a profound statement of values: of a universal aspiration for human freedom. As President Gerald Ford said in a speech marking the nation’s bicentennial, “The Declaration is the Polaris of our political order — the fixed star of freedom. It is impervious to change because it states moral truths that are eternal.”
As a matter of civic faith, this is what the Declaration means. As a matter of history, however, the story is much more complicated.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote it, the Declaration was less an affirmation of human equality than a pointed claim about the nature of political authority and a powerful assertion of the right of revolution, informed by the Enlightenment writings of John Locke and other social contract theorists. It was meant as an argument about the preconditions of government — an assertion of the purity of prelapsarian life — not a road map for emancipation.
“The opening assertions of ‘self-evident’ truths concern men in a ‘state of nature’ before government was established,” the historian Pauline Maier observed in “American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence.” “With regard to persons, equality meant simply that no one held authority over others by right of birth or as a gift of God.”
In other words, Jefferson was channeling a common sentiment in Revolutionary-era America, “a political orthodoxy whose basic principles colonists could pick up from sermons or newspapers or even schoolbooks without ever reading a systematic work of political theory,” Maier wrote. Just look to Thomas Paine, who wrote in “Common Sense” — published about six months before the signing of the Declaration — that “all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever.”
Jefferson’s equality was a thought experiment. It did not extend to political society, nor was it meant for those placed beyond the political community. Men could be created equal and still be different; men could be created equal and still be subordinate.
This, for many of the Patriot leaders, was a given.
But then there were those outside the circle of belonging: women, Natives, landless laborers and, most starkly, Black Americans, both free and enslaved. They did not read — or, most likely, hear — the Declaration as an abstract claim about a prelapsarian past. They understood it as a radical statement of principle for the present. And they wielded this principle against a society that would not extend the Revolutionary promise of freedom and self-government to those held in bondage.
It was their Declaration — the one that they made for themselves — that stood for a universal claim of human equality in the here and now. And it was their Declaration that would come to supplant Jefferson’s historical and metaphysical one as the linchpin of America’s civic ideal, passing from Black Americans to abolitionists to the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln, who consecrated their Declaration at Gettysburg as the spiritual foundation for a “new birth of freedom” and a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” established “four score and seven years ago” in 1776.
It is this Declaration that is under assault from a political movement that rejects the creedal vision of the American Republic in favor of an exclusionary racial nationalism, that defines American citizenship by blood and heritage, that sneers at the “five words about equality” in the Declaration and that worships at the altar of hierarchy and caste. But it is also this Declaration that still inspires Americans to fight for their place in this country and demand their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is hard to exaggerate the alacrity with which Black Americans seized on the rhetoric of the Revolution to demand a free and equal place in the new and nascent American Republic.
“We would therefore humbly pray, that whilst you are consulting, asserting and maintaining your own natural rights against the arbitrary designs of those who would subject you to slavery, that you would think on our unhappy case, who have been long groaning under the insupportable burden,” Bristol Lambee, an enslaved man bound in Connecticut, wrote to the “Sons of Liberty in Connecticut” on behalf of “a number of poor Africans.”
We do not know much about Lambee, but his petition — which was issued in October 1774 — is written in the idiom of the Revolution, using the same terms that Jefferson would deploy just two years later. “Your petitioners apprehend that liberty, being founded upon the law of nature, is as necessary to the happiness of an African as it is to the happiness of an Englishman,” Lambee wrote, “and that we, notwithstanding our present state of slavery, have, in common with other men, a natural right to be free, and without molestation to enjoy such property as we by our honest industry may acquire.”
Black Americans could speak the language of the Patriots as fluently as any member of the Continental Congress. And as the war intensified, so too did their petitions and demands, which began to make direct reference to the Declaration of Independence.
“Your petitioners apprehend that they have, in common with all other men, a natural and unalienable right to that freedom, which the great parent of the universe hath bestowed equally on all mankind, and which they have never forfeited by any compact or agreement whatsoever, but they were unjustly dragged, by the cruel hand of power, from their dearest friends, and some of them even torn from the embraces of their tender parents,” reads the 1777 petition of “a great number of Negroes who are detained in a state of slavery.” It is signed by Prince Hall — a leading member of Boston’s Black community — Lancaster Hill, Peter Bess and Brister Slenser, among others not listed.
“They cannot but express their astonishment,” the petitioners continue, “that it has never been considered, that every principle from which America has acted in the course of all her unhappy difficulties with Great Britain, pleads stronger than a thousand arguments in favor of your petitioners.”
The use of the language of the Declaration and of the Revolution was not merely rhetorical: The point of these petitions was to push legislators to treat the opening words of their Constitutions and laws as more than preambulatory; to treat them as pregnant with real meaning and live consequence.
A 1779 petition to the New Hampshire legislature from Nero Brewster, an enslaved man in his late 60s, and 19 others announces that “freedom is an inherent right of the human species” and beseeches the legislature to “graciously interpose in our behalf, and enact such laws and regulations, as in your wisdom think proper, whereby we may regain our liberty, and be ranked in the class of free agents, and that the name of slave may not more be heard in a land gloriously contending for the sweets of freedom.”
To read the words of Black Americans, free and enslaved, is to see the Declaration in motion — to see it as a living document with meaning far beyond the circumstances of American independence. And it is to see the fact that this meaning was made: constructed by people with an intimate, fundamental sense of what freedom meant and what it required.
As a form, the petition called on its authors to show some humility. Other formats allowed for more pointed, even fiery rhetoric, blasting Patriot leaders for their hypocrisy.
“Attend to your own declarations,” reads a 1783 editorial in The Maryland Gazette by the anonymous “Vox Africanorum.” “‘These truths are self-evident — all men are created equal; they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ We shall offer no arguments — nay, it would be insulting to the understanding of America at this enlightened period to suppose she stood in need of arguments to prove our right to liberty. It would be to suppose,” Vox continued, that “she has already forgot those exalted principles she has so lately asserted with her blood.”
Perhaps the most famous example of a founding-era Black American wielding the words of the Declaration as a promise to be fulfilled comes from Benjamin Banneker, the naturalist and mathematician, who quoted Jefferson’s words back to him in a 1791 letter confronting the secretary of state on his hypocrisy:
“You publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy to be recorded and remembered in all succeeding ages,” he wrote. “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”
Having hailed the Declaration as an eternal truth, Banneker then holds it up in negative contrast to its author. “How pitiable is it to reflect that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the father of mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges which he had conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves.”
Jefferson, then serving under George Washington, had never understood himself as making a statement about political and social equality. But Black Americans absolutely did. And as we see, they did not hesitate to pressure the former American revolutionaries with their own words and commitments.
Many of them felt the contradiction in ways that put lie to the modern idea that such “men of their time” were innocent of moral fault, or that it is a distortion or corruption of history to tell the truth about their hypocrisy. And in the present, you should see the assault on Black history and Black studies by conservative reactionaries as an attempt to obscure the fact that the Black Americans of the early Republic were “men of their time” as well.
One consequence of this pressure was that, by the first decade of the 19th century, most Northern states had either abolished slavery or put it on the path to extinction. Even in the South, there was a burst of energy related to manumission — Virginia amended its laws in 1782 to make it easier for owners to free their slaves, and several men — including John Payne Jr., Dolley Madison’s father — did just that.
This emancipatory energy was short-lived. Technological developments like the cotton gin and the burgeoning Industrial Revolution in England would make enslaved Africans newly valuable, a lucrative asset that drove the production of vital commodities.
It was during this time that the Declaration faded from mainstream view as an object of veneration, to be supplanted by the Constitution in American political discourse. Except, that is, among Black Americans and their allies, who continued to wield it as a binding promise of freedom and equality against slavery, slaveholders and the government that served their interests.
George Bourne, an English-born Presbyterian minister in Virginia, published “The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable” in 1816, where he condemned politicians who held “declarations of independence” in one hand and the lash in the other.
In his inaugural 1831 issue of The Liberator, his antislavery newspaper, William Lloyd Garrison quoted the Declaration extensively in his appeal on behalf of the enslaved. “While our Declaration of Independence boldly proclaims as self-evident truths, ‘that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’— at the very seat of government human beings are born, almost daily, whom the laws pronounce to be from their birth, not equal to other men, and who are, for life, deprived of liberty and the free pursuit of happiness.”
Garrison, it should be said, hated the Constitution and condemned it as a “covenant with death” and “an agreement with hell” because of the ways it empowered and strengthened the grip of the slave-owning South on the national government. But the Declaration was a torch that lit the path to salvation.
The South Carolina abolitionist Angelina Grimké declared slavery “contrary to the declaration of our independence” in her 1836 “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” and in a stark condemnation of American hypocrisy, the Colored Anti-Slavery Society of Newark proclaimed in 1834 that “it is our opinion, that if all the blood of our colored brethren shed by the people of the United States since the Declaration of Independence was kept in a reservoir, the framers of that instrument and their successors might swim in it.”
Frederick Douglass made what was the most famous condemnation of the United States in his 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July.” Throughout, he wields both the language and ideals of the Declaration like a scalpel. “Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting,” Douglass said to the hundreds of people packed in the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y., to hear him speak. “What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
It was in the hands of abolitionists, Black and white, carried over from Black Americans both free, freed and enslaved, that the Declaration worked as both an indictment and a promise — the spiritual foundation of the nation and the standard which its institutions must meet. And it is this vision of the Declaration that Abraham Lincoln hailed as he ascended to political leadership in the 1850s, fending off Southern slaveholders and their apologists.
Provoked by men such as Senators John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and Stephen Douglas of Illinois back into political combat at the start of the decade, by the eve of his election as president, Lincoln was hailing the Declaration’s claim of equality as “a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” It was an axiomatic truth, he contended in 1859, written into a “merely revolutionary document” that was “applicable to all men and all times.”
And it is in the first line of his Gettysburg Address — “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” — that Lincoln enshrines this understanding, shaped by the demands of enslaved people decades before his birth, into America’s national identity.
It is this vision of the Declaration that was written into the Constitution as the 14th Amendment, whose most consequential section guarantees the equal citizenship of all people born in the United States, a promise the Supreme Court just affirmed against the president’s attempt to end birthright citizenship by executive fiat.
“Let it be borne in mind that this is the government of men representing every people and kindred and tongue under the whole heavens, “ said Representative John Bingham of Ohio, a key architect of the amendment, in an 1869 speech defending his work about a year after its ratification, “and that in the inception of our national struggle for representative government, in 1776, the declaration of the people was not that all white men are created equal, but that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with the rights of life and liberty.”
As we mark, this year, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is important to see that its meaning is dynamic. And that meaning, as we understand it, flows less from the men who signed it than from those who heard its words and took ownership of them as a standard for their freedom and independence — not from Britain, but from bondage.
It is this Declaration — the slaves’ Declaration, the abolitionists’ Declaration, Lincoln’s Declaration — that is the beating heart of the American project. It is this Declaration that still lives as a promise to the people who call this nation home, as a challenge to those people to live up to their ideals and aspirations, and as a bulwark against those among them who would sacrifice their freedom for the false comfort of tyranny.
It is this Declaration that shows us the way we might be truly exceptional.
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9) Trump Suggestion of a Syrian Crackdown on Hezbollah Confounds Many in Mideast
During peace talks, President Trump repeatedly floated the idea that Syria could help subdue Hezbollah in Lebanon. The proposal revived bitter memories.
By Christina Goldbaum and Raja Abdulrahim, July 1, 2026
Christina Goldbaum reported from Beirut, Lebanon, and Raja Abdulrahim from Amman, Jordan.
A man in the village of Nabatieh al Fawka, Lebanon. He returned earlier this week after fleeing heavy fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah in the area. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
When the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon was threatening to unravel the U.S.-Iran peace deal, President Trump repeatedly floated an idea that took many in the region by surprise.
Neighboring Syria, whose relatively new government is no friend to Hezbollah, could help subdue the Iran-backed Lebanese militia.
The proposal revived bitter memories in Lebanon, which the Syrian military occupied for nearly three decades. It also baffled Syrians, whose government has made clear over and over again that it has no interest in meddling in its neighbors’ affairs or entering into more wars.
President Ahmed al-Sharaa reiterated that stance last week, rebuffing the notion that his U.S.-allied government was preparing to intervene militarily in Lebanon.
A solution for Lebanon that involves Syria “does not mean war and does not mean the old image of Syrian tutelage over Lebanon under the former regime,” Mr. al-Sharaa said in an interview on al-Mashhad TV, a Pan-Arab network based in Dubai. “We tried war, and we do not wish it on anyone.”
His stance reflects the geopolitical sea change that came with the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad by Mr. al-Sharaa’s rebel coalition in December 2024.
For decades under the Assad regime, Syria was a close ally of Iran and by extension its Lebanese proxy militia, Hezbollah. The country served as the main overland route through which Iran supplied Hezbollah with weapons and funds. In return, Hezbollah deployed its fighters to help the Assad government fight rebel forces during Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war.
The ouster of Mr. al-Assad changed that.
The rebels whom Hezbollah had spent years fighting in Syria were suddenly in power in Damascus. The group’s land bridge to its patron Iran was severed. And its most powerful ally aside from Tehran was gone.
Since taking power, Mr. al-Sharaa’s government has made it clear that it is no friend to Iran or its proxies in the region, including Hezbollah.
The Syrian Ministry of Interior has arrested people it suspects of being connected to Hezbollah, cracked down on cross-border smuggling and accused Hezbollah-linked groups of plotting attacks inside Syria. Hezbollah has denied those claims.
That animosity has probably contributed to the idea in Mr. Trump’s orbit of a Syrian intervention in Lebanon, analysts say. Mr. Trump has floated the idea repeatedly over the past two weeks as his frustration with Israel’s war in Lebanon has grown.
“I’d like to see a more surgical attack on Hezbollah,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with NBC News this month, adding, “We can help them with that, or we can recommend Syria.”
“Israel is fighting Hezbollah too long, and too many people are being killed,” Mr. Trump said at the Group of 7 summit in France days later, adding that “if Israel can’t do the job without killing everyone else,” Syria will.
The suggestion was Mr. Trump’s latest vote of confidence in Mr. al-Sharaa’s government. Over the past year, the Syrian government has cultivated close ties with the United States, winning sanctions relief and praise from Mr. Trump.
The United States also has close ties to Lebanon and is a leading supplier of military aid to the country.
“The U.S. is likely pressuring Syria into getting involved in Lebanon because successive U.S. administrations have viewed Lebanon and Syria as part of the same Levant file,” said Lina Khatib, a Middle East and North Africa fellow at Chatham House, a think tank. “And because both those countries’ governments are dependent on the U.S. politically.”
The proposal has raised alarm across the region.
Within Lebanon, it has stoked fears of repeating recent history. Syrian forces entered Lebanon in 1976 as part of an Arab peacekeeping force soon after the start of the Lebanese civil war. Syria subsequently occupied Lebanon for 29 years, during which it dominated Lebanon’s political and economic life. Its last forces pulled out in 2005, leaving behind anger and bitterness over its human rights abuses and interference in the country’s politics.
Syrian intervention could also expand the country’s influence in the region and by extension the influence of its ally Turkey — a prospect that analysts say could alarm Israel, which sees Turkey as a foe.
Even for Syria, the notion of fighting an old enemy in neighboring Lebanon has little appeal as its government works to consolidate its power and authority within its borders.
Having emerged from a brutal and fractious civil conflict, the country and its leaders are still struggling to rebuild both homes and infrastructure and a society divided along numerous fault lines, including sectarian ones.
“Getting Syria to intervene in Lebanon to help disarm Hezbollah is a recipe for destabilization in both countries,” Ms. Khatib said. “If Syrian troops enter Lebanon, this will spark sectarian tensions in the country and undermine the authority of the Lebanese government.”
Hezbollah might also try to retaliate by stirring trouble inside Syria, she added.
“Even if the U.S. pressures Syria, the last thing Syria wants is to be juggling domestic and foreign wars at once when the Syrian state is already struggling to exert its security and military authority within Syria,” Ms. Khatib said.
Reham Mourshed contributed reporting from Damascus, Syria.
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10) Killed by the Venezuelan Quakes Just Hours After Being Deported From U.S.
Many of the 146 Venezuelans deported from the United States the day the earthquake struck are feared dead.
By Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Patricia Sulbarán, July 1, 2026
The damaged state-run holding facility for deportees, on a hilltop in La Guaira, Venezuela, was meant to be a way station for a group that arrived there on Wednesday, June 26. Most of them never made it home. Vantor, via Reuters
The plane carrying 146 Venezuelans deported from the United States arrived at Venezuela’s main airport last Wednesday — just eight hours before the ground began to violently shake.
Venezuelan officials welcomed the deportees — 120 men, 19 women and 7 children — and recorded carefully staged videos celebrating their arrival after spending weeks in U.S. detention centers.
Most, if not all, were then ferried away from the cameras to a state-run holding facility, where they settled into bunk beds and were told they would be released the next day, after being processed, two deportees told The New York Times.
But as the sun began to set, the building started to sway, and what was supposed to be a bittersweet homecoming turned into one of the countless devastating tragedies to emerge from the back-to-back earthquakes that ravaged Venezuela last week.
Inside, the deportees screamed and scrambled to escape as the walls and ceilings fell around them, burying most of them beneath a hulking pile of rubble, two survivors told The Times.
Ninoska Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 45, said she rushed out of the room where she had been placed with other women on the first floor and barreled down a hallway, pushed and pulled by other deportees desperate to flee, when a wall pinned her legs.
She was trapped near two unresponsive men who had been struck on the head by metal beams. She yelled for about 45 minutes — “Auxilio!” “Help!” — until she dug herself out of the rubble.
Outside the flattened building, government officials loaded six survivors into a van. Ms. Gutiérrez Rodríguez said she ran into four other deportees, dust-covered and disoriented, stumbling in the darkness.
They were some of the few who made it out alive.
“We were anxious to return to our country to be free again,” said Ms. Gutiérrez Rodríguez, who had been detained by U.S. immigration officials in Miami after nearly two years in the United States. “For this to happen is terrible, absolutely terrible.”
As rescuers continue to recover bodies across Venezuela, pushing the death toll past 1,900 on Tuesday, the fate of Venezuelans deported by the Trump administration the same day the earthquake struck has thrust their relatives into an agonizing search for answers.
The Venezuelan government has not said how many deportees were in the building, which was perched on a hilltop in La Guaira, the hardest-hit state, or how many died. The government did not respond to requests for comment, and the families of the deportees said it has provided them with little information and restricted access to the facility.
Accounts from the families, shared in interviews with The Times, suggested that many of the deportees may have perished, their bodies recovered or still trapped in the rubble. Only a handful of survivor accounts have trickled out.
“No one wants to lose a family member, and if he is dead, at least tell us where his body is so we can give him the Christian burial he deserves,” said Glina Audivet, 42, whose brother, Ángel Romero, 31, was still missing. “He went to the United States in search of a better future, because unfortunately, there isn’t one in Venezuela.”
Left to fend for themselves, families have traveled from across Venezuela to La Guaira to demand answers from government officials. They have resorted to desperate pleas on social media, sharing pictures of their missing loved ones. And they have organized through a WhatsApp group called Vuelo 164 — or Flight 164, the flight number used by Venezuelan officials.
Their searches have often turned into days of anguish as they sift through decomposing bodies at morgues and hospitals, on the lookout for the identifying bracelets the deportees were given when they landed in Caracas, the country’s capital.
Anyela Escandela Reyes said she had bought her son, Arturo Alejandro Morales Escandela, 24, new clothes and organized a surprise party, filled with balloons and pictures of him, to welcome him home after he had been detained while driving in Texas.
His homecoming also coincided with his 25th birthday.
He called her from the holding facility on Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Reyes said, and asked for his grandmother’s address, where Venezuelan officials were supposed to drop him off. But a few hours later, the ground began to shake, and she never heard from him again.
His relatives set out on a more than 10-hour drive to La Guaira, rushing from hospital to hospital over three days, until they found his remains. They were able to identify him by a tattoo on his arm. The family buried him a few hours later in a rushed funeral because his body was badly decomposed.
“I was waiting with a welcoming hug,” Ms. Escandela Reyes said, sobbing. “Not a farewell hug.”
Her son and other deportees had traveled on one of the three weekly deportation flights that have returned tens of thousands of Venezuelans to their homeland as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrants. Many traveled north in the past few years, risking their lives in a dangerous trek as millions of Venezuelans fled an economic collapse and the country’s authoritarian regime.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment on whether deportations would be paused as a result of the earthquakes, which damaged the international airport outside Caracas. But there have been no deportation flights to Venezuela since last Wednesday, according to online flight trackers.
The facility where the deportees were held — a four-story, concrete refuge with a brick roof — was run by Venezuela’s intelligence services, known as SEBIN, an arm of Venezuela’s repressive regime. The force has a long history of political suppression and human rights violations, from torture to arbitrary detentions.
At least one survivor told The Times that the SEBIN had threatened him to remain quiet about what had happened at the facility.
The survivor, José, who requested to be identified only by his first name for fear of retribution, said he was lying down in a bunk bed on the second floor when the earthquake struck, forcing dozens of deportees to flee and creating a bottleneck.
“There were about 20 of us piled on top of each other, and about 12 of us made it out,” José said, describing how they pushed themselves toward an opening in the rubble where he saw light shine through from outside. “We, the deportees ourselves, were helping our fellow detainees.”
He said multiple SEBIN officials and two firefighters arrived at the building but they did little to search for survivors. At least some SEBIN officers and facility workers also died during the building’s collapse, two survivors said.
José said he was eventually transported to a SEBIN base near the airport, where he was joined by women and children who had survived.
Relatives of missing deportees also accused the Venezuelan government of not prioritizing a search for survivors and of providing scant information: The government shared phone numbers where the families could call, but the phone lines appeared to be down.
Daniely Pastora Hurtado Suárez, 32, said she was one of the first relatives to reach the facility on Wednesday night, searching for her husband, Eduardo José Ozal Mujica, 32, who had lived in Colorado and was detained by U.S. officials while making food deliveries.
She returned day after day and saw SEBIN officials eventually cordoning off the facility as more families gathered at the site. She and other relatives said they saw little rescue activity at the facility, even as families clamored to be let in to search themselves.
She eventually found her husband’s body on Sunday at a makeshift morgue in La Guaira that was filled with the foul stench of death. The bodies were so mangled, she said, that she almost took the wrong body home.
Ms. Pastora Hurtado said she was filled with guilt: She had convinced her husband to migrate to the United States three years ago so he could find a stable job and send money to give their 8-year-old son, Fernando José, a better future.
“My husband didn’t want to leave Venezuela,” she said over tears in a phone interview. “You don’t know how happy he was when they finally told him he was being sent to Venezuela.”
Some survivors were severely injured.
Marlene Lozano, 74, said her grandson, Anderson Daniel Salcedo Lozano, 22, had been pulled out of the wreckage after 26 hours. A video of the rescue she shared with The Times shows three men pulling him out of a hole in the rubble by his two arms, in shock and covered in debris.
Doctors had to amputate his legs at the hospital in Caracas where he remains intubated, she said.
“We’re just hoping that when he comes back to his senses it won’t be devastating to see he has no legs anymore,” Ms. Lozano said in a phone interview.
On Monday, two international rescue groups arrived at the facility with rescue dogs, families said. They determined that there were no signs of life beneath the rubble, and excavators soon began to arrive. Six relatives lingered outside the facility the next day, in hopes of recovering a body.
Luis Ferré-Sadurní
New York immigration reporter
My colleague Patricia and I set out to figure out what happened to the 147 Venezuelans the U.S. had deported to Venezuela just a few hours before the earthquakes struck. We reached two survivors who told us harrowing tales of deportees scrambling to get out of a holding facility. And we spoke with families who have been left in the dark by the Venezuelan government, forced to drive hundreds of miles, post desperate pleas on social media and search morgues for the bodies of deportees.
Isayen Herrera contributed reporting from La Guaira, Venezuela.
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