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The Bay Area Demo Legal Collab and friends are hosting a Grand Jury education and training event. Join us for a political history of how Grand Juries are used for political repression, hear from Grand Jury resisters and learn how to plan for repression for yourself and your community.
In the Bay Area there have been recent FBI visits, Grand Jury subpoenas and investigations into our political movements. If you are contacted by the feds or other law enforcement agencies you should exercise your rights and reach out to legal support:
· You do not have to open your door or let FBI or other agents into your home without a warrant.
· You have the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney: you do not have to talk to FBI or other agents or answer their questions. It can be dangerous to do so. Say, "I do not want to answer questions without my lawyer. Please slip your card under the door and my lawyer will call you."
· For legal help, call the Bay Area Federal Defense Line, 415-285-1041 and someone will return your call within 48 hours.
The Bay Area Federal Defense line can help connect you to a lawyer if you are contacted by agents related to progressive political activism. It is sponsored by the Bay Area Demo Legal Support Collaborative- a joint effort of Legal Solidarity Bay Area, NLG-SF, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, Anti-Repression Committee, and Oaklaw.
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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.
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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) Should Letting Children Play Alone Outside Be a Crime?
Some parents have been surprised to find themselves in the legal system’s cross hairs.
By Ian Frisch, Aug. 11, 2026
“I was so naïve,” said Mallerie Shirley, regarding the investigation into her family. “I thought that nothing was going to come of this. But I was mistaken.” Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times
Mallerie Shirley knew something was wrong the second she saw her then-6-year-old son walk through the front door. It was November 2025, and he had just returned from riding his scooter to a playground about a quarter of a mile from their home in Atlanta, Ga.
Ms. Shirley remembers how he looked: shoulders slouched, eyes cast downward. She asked him what happened. He explained that a woman stopped him on his way home and demanded to know his age, why he was alone and where he lived. Scared, he ignored the woman and continued on his way.
Ms. Shirley and her husband, Christopher Pleasants, believed in instilling a sense of independence in their two children, and they had recently started to give their son opportunities to do things unaccompanied, like asking him to find items in the grocery store. Typically, after he explained to concerned adults that he had permission from his parents, people felt reassured.
But this woman’s concern felt more accusatory than empathetic. “I think she followed me in her car,” Ms. Shirley remembers her son telling her.
She didn’t think much of it until two days later, when a case manager from the Fulton County Division of Family and Children Services showed up at her house. Ms. Shirley was not home, but Mr. Pleasants was. The case manager explained that a complaint had been filed, and that she would need to inspect their home and interview their son at school. (The conversation was recorded on the family’s Ring camera.)
“When we were growing up, our parents would be like, ‘Oh, you know, go ahead, it’s fine,’” the case manager said, “but now he would have to be, like, 13.”
“13?” Mr. Pleasants said. “Is that the law?”
“I mean, they are going to consider that inadequate supervision for him to go completely by himself,” the case manager said. “Because anything could happen, right?”
“He’s extremely vulnerable at that age,” the case manager added.
In recent years, in places like Baldwin City, Kan. and Silver Spring, Md., parents have been investigated — or even arrested — for letting their children walk to the store, play in the park or ride their bicycles unsupervised. Proponents of childhood independence say it’s beneficial for kids to have autonomy; others see this approach as potentially dangerous. And vague child-neglect laws force law enforcement to make difficult judgment calls regarding whether a child is in legitimate danger.
But as the stories of well-meaning parents have gained attention, the way lawmakers think about child independence is starting to change: All told, 13 states have either created new, less restrictive child-neglect laws or amended existing ones. A bipartisan federal bill, the Promoting Childhood Independence and Resilience Act, was introduced in the House of Representatives in May.
Despite the shift, some parents are still finding themselves in the government’s cross hairs.
“I was so naïve,” Ms. Shirley said of the investigation into her family. “I thought that nothing was going to come of this. But I was mistaken.”
A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Two forces — fear and control — have systematically reduced childhood independence over the past four decades, said Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, a professor of developmental psychology at Ohio State University.
First came a newfound worry about child abductions and “stranger danger.” In 1979, the disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz in New York City drew widespread media attention. Congress passed the Missing Children Act in 1982 and, two years later, missing children’s photos were put on milk cartons nationwide. Inflated statistics on abductions, with estimates sometimes as high as 50,000 minors annually, underpinned the discourse. (In reality, authorities estimate that closer to 100 children are kidnapped by strangers each year.)
These events were contributing factors “in cultivating a sense of fear and a need for more protection,” said Aliza Pressman, a developmental psychologist and co-founder of the Mount Sinai Parenting Center in New York City.
Then, in the early 2000s, helicopter parenting started to take hold, particularly in middle-class families. Parents began to control many — or even most — aspects of their children’s lives in order to prepare them for an increasingly competitive society.
“It was a concern with protection, and then a concern with producing successful children,” Dr. Schoppe-Sullivan said. “This leaves children with little time to themselves, and often involves things that are scheduled by adults.”
In a recent Harris Poll of children from 8 to 12, 62 percent said they had never walked or biked somewhere without an adult.
“We’re not allowing children to learn that they’re both physically and psychologically tough,” said Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College and the author of the forthcoming book, “Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety.”
“We assume they’re fragile and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said.
Dr. Gray pointed to more than a dozen studies that draw an association between overprotective parenting and increased rates of anxiety and depression in children, adding that independence increases a child’s self-reliance and self-worth.
It’s not that parents are oblivious to the benefits of giving their kids autonomy. According to a 2023 poll by C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., 84 percent of parents of children from 9 to 11 said kids benefit from having free time without adult supervision. But in that same poll, only 50 percent of parents said their child would go to find an item in a store when the parent is in a different aisle.
“There is no way for a child to feel capable and competent without being given space to make survivable mistakes,” Dr. Pressman said. “You want the child to stretch and bend, but not break. That’s the premise of healthy child development.”
Mallerie Shirley said that her son was more fulfilled when she let him do things on his own. But with the D.F.C.S. investigation looming over their family, Ms. Shirley kept her son indoors. “We were afraid of being arrested,” she said. “His mental health really struggled.”
In late December, the agency notified Ms. Shirley and Mr. Pleasants that the complaint against them of child abuse and neglect had been substantiated. The couple hired a lawyer and filed an appeal. They also discovered that the law was on their side: Georgia had recently narrowed the definition of child neglect to give children the right to engage in independent activities, including playing outdoors alone.
Ms. Shirley raised this during a recorded phone call with a D.F.C.S. supervisor. The supervisor responded, “Logically speaking, policy or no policy, let’s just talk about being a parent. This baby is 6 years old. How is he able to self-protect at 6 years old?” The exchange gave Ms. Shirley the impression that the supervisor’s personal feelings could be influencing her work on the case.
The Georgia Department of Human Services, which oversees Fulton County’s D.F.C.S., declined to comment on the investigation into Ms. Shirley and Mr. Pleasants, but in a written statement, they said, “We take seriously every report that might be made to the agency and work with law enforcement when appropriate to ensure the safety of Georgia’s children.”
‘Free-Range Kids’
In 2008, Lenore Skenazy, a mother living in New York City, wrote a column for the New York Sun about why she allowed her 9-year-old son to ride the subway alone. The article went viral and Ms. Skenazy went on a media blitz, explaining why she thought it was detrimental for parents to make judgment calls based on long-shot what ifs.
“I call it worst-first thinking,” she said in a recent interview. “We’ve all been trained as parents to go to the worst-case scenario first and proceed as if it’s likely to happen.”
Ms. Skenazy coined her belief in reasonable childhood independence the “free range kids” movement, and she began to call attention to cases where free-range parenting collided with the law. Eventually, state laws about child neglect began to change.
After attending one of Ms. Skenazy’s parenting lectures, Connor Boyack, the founder of a libertarian think tank, helped conceptualize the nation’s first law on childhood independence, passed in Utah in 2018. It specified that neglect does not include “permitting a child, whose basic needs are met and who is of sufficient age and maturity to avoid harm or unreasonable risk of harm, to engage in independent activities.”
Georgia revised its bill last year after Brittany Patterson, a mother of four, was arrested and charged with misdemeanor reckless conduct for allowing her 10-year-old son to walk alone to a nearby dollar store. When deputies from the Fannin County Sheriff’s Office came to her house and handcuffed her, “I was livid,” she said. She added that her arrest, and the subsequent media attention, were more traumatizing to her children than anything that had ever happened to them while they were unsupervised. The charges were eventually dropped.
This January, Kansas amended its child-neglect law after Shaley Knickerbocker, of Baldwin City, was twice reported by a neighbor for allowing her preteen children to play outside unsupervised. Both times, law enforcement came to Ms. Knickerbocker’s house. “I feel a lot of relief to now have a law that protects those decisions,” she said.
Some experts point out that preventable accidents can occur when a child is given too much independence, and that the new laws could make protecting children more challenging. Last May, a mother and father were charged with involuntary manslaughter after their 7-year-old son was hit by a car and killed while crossing a busy road with his 10-year-old brother in North Carolina. “In such cases, adults must be held accountable for their responsibilities to ensure a safe environment for their children,” the Gastonia Police Department said in a statement. The couple pleaded guilty and received probation.
Karen Ruskin, a family psychotherapist based in Scottsdale, Ariz., said a law’s specificity might make law enforcement more hesitant to approach a child to confirm that they are safe: Is a child riding her scooter one mile, two miles, four miles? If a child is home alone, what time will the parents return?
Jason Baron, an assistant professor of economics at Duke University who studies child welfare systems, agreed that the concept of child protection is ambiguous and nuanced.
“You can imagine these types of laws having unintended consequences, just like you could imagine it helping a few families that got tangled up with the system that maybe shouldn’t have,” he said. “The question we have to ask as a society is: Do we want to err on the side of caution or do we want to err on the side of not bothering parents?”
As for Ms. Shirley, in January the Georgia Department of Human Services sent a letter stating they did not agree with Fulton County’s finding of neglect and that the allegations would be labeled unsubstantiated. Ms. Shirley and Mr. Pleasants were cleared.
Soon after, they allowed their son to once again ride his scooter to the playground alone. “He was overjoyed,” Ms. Shirley said. “That’s all we want as parents, feeling like he is capable of taking care of himself.”
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2) New Evidence Shows Agents Using Slurs, Bolstering Profiling Claims
Body-camera video and other court evidence capture federal agents using slurs and targeting Latinos while bypassing white bystanders during immigration sweeps in Chicago and Los Angeles
By Jazmine Ulloa, Maia Spoto and Jill Cowan, Aug. 11, 2026
The reporters collected body-camera and bystander footage, text messages and court filings from more than a dozen cases filed across the country. An artificial intelligence model helped reporters comb through 169 hours of footage across 459 videos. The reporters checked the model’s work.
Federal agents making an arrest in Minneapolis in January. Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
Since immigration agents began carrying out a string of big, aggressive sweeps last year, civil rights groups have argued that the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has been defined by brazen racial profiling.
Now, body-camera footage, text messages and other documents emerging from lawsuits around the country reveal how race and ethnicity have figured in the dragnets that unfolded in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and other U.S. cities.
In several instances documented in court filings, federal agents referred to targets as “tonks” — a derogatory term typically used to refer to Mexican immigrants and intended to echo the sound of agents’ flashlights striking their heads. Migrants suspected of being undocumented were described as “wet,” shorthand for the slur wetback. And an agent who led an operation in Southern California later described the appearance of individuals he considered suspicious: “older Hispanic males.”
Yet even as evidence of racial profiling has come to light, what seemed like settled law — that law enforcement officers could not question or detain someone solely based on their race or ethnicity — has turned out to be far more of an open question when it comes to immigration enforcement.
Last year, the Supreme Court took a step toward upending a half-century of jurisprudence when Justice Brett Kavanaugh gave a provisional blessing to such racial profiling by agents seeking out undocumented immigrants. The government has maintained that their operations are constitutional.
The lawsuit that led to the court’s temporary decision and other similar suits are still working their way through lower courts, and it could be months before they are resolved and years before the Supreme Court has a chance to say more.
In the meantime, civil rights lawyers are continuing to amass what they hope will be a valuable trove of evidence that racial profiling by immigration agents is prevalent — and that it is unconstitutional in the manner that it is being carried out today.
In 1975, the Supreme Court cleared the way for some degree of racial profiling in immigration enforcement when the justices allowed race and ethnicity to be one of the factors — but not the only one — used by agents deciding when to stop a car on suspicion that the occupants include undocumented immigrants.
Jennifer M. Chacón, a Stanford law professor who studies immigration law, said the current wave of cases — and the Supreme Court’s recent order — engages with the question of whether the 1975 decision, in U.S. v. Brignoni-Ponce, still holds.
“Is this still good law, and even if it is, when does agency behavior cross the line of what is permitted?” Professor Chacón said.
The latest batch of depositions, videos and surveillance records in Los Angeles, first reported by CalMatters and The Los Angeles Times, show that immigration agents and officers were focused on finding “day laborers.” But civil rights groups argue that their vague and varying explanations for whom they were looking for often defaulted to anyone who looked Latino, had darker skin or spoke English with an accent. That reliance on perceived race and ethnicity, they argued, also ended up unlawfully sweeping up U.S. citizens.
In one sworn declaration, a driver in a traffic stop in San Bernardino, Calif., said an officer told him he had been pulled over “because he looked like a ‘paisa,’” a slang term for a Mexican compatriot or newly arrived immigrant.
In another declaration, Angel Santiago Tafolla, a U.S. citizen in Anaheim, Calif., said that agents chased him — a dark-skinned Latino man — while ignoring his light-skinned co-workers at the Orange County carwash. One agent discharged a Taser, arcing electricity in front of Mr. Tafolla, whose clothes were wet from his work. He was handcuffed and loaded into a van, according to the document.
“I kept saying ‘I’m American,’ but they just kept telling me I was Latino and my documents were false and to stop talking,” he said.
Such encounters were not limited to California. In more than a dozen lawsuits filed in courts across the country — including in Alabama, Illinois, Oregon and Minnesota — civil rights lawyers argue that residents, predominantly Black and Latino, were wrongly targeted based on their appearance, specifically their skin color, perceived ethnicity, accents and work attire.
At least 65 U.S. citizens were described as having been stopped, questioned or detained, and because all of them were eventually released, they were able to provide lawyers with detailed accounts of their encounters with immigration agents. Some said officers refused to accept their passports or valid drivers’ licenses as proof of citizenship. Several were threatened with Tasers, tackled and handcuffed. A few were held for hours before being released, according to court filings.
Many of the filings depict federal agents as working under crushing pressure to meet a new national quota, which for a time was as high as 3,000 immigration arrests daily. The increase — a near threefold increase in May 2025 from the prior base line — forced officers to shift from individualized investigations to street sweeps intended to round up as many people as possible. Roving teams of officers in unmarked S.U.V.s repeatedly converged on Latino neighborhoods and businesses, including carwashes, Home Depot parking lots, construction sites and shopping corridors, the court records state.
“For the individuals that they’re stopping, they don’t have any information about them other than the demographic profile that they appear Latino and working class,” said Mayra Joachín, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union working on the Los Angeles case.
Government lawyers maintain in court filings that immigration operations have been highly targeted, and that isolated examples of derogatory or inflammatory language are not evidence of an agencywide policy or intent. They also argue that agents have broad powers to question people they believe are not citizens of the United States, particularly when they are only briefly stopping someone to investigate their legal status and not necessarily to conduct an arrest.
In an emailed statement, Katherine Currie, a homeland security spokeswoman, did not respond to questions about agents using slurs. She called allegations that federal officers were engaged in racial profiling “disgusting, reckless, and categorically false.”
“What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S. — not their skin color, race or ethnicity,’” Ms. Currie said.
For more than 50 years, courts have taken the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, along with the 1975 Supreme Court ruling to mean that immigration agents cannot stop or detain people without a specific, factual basis for believing they are in the country illegally and that race or ethnicity cannot be the sole factor in targeting someone.
Federal law has granted immigration officers far more latitude at immigration checkpoints and within a 100-mile radius of any of the nation’s borders. But civil rights groups argue Border Patrol agents have been exercising those powers deep in the interior of the country.
Now, as the cases move through the courts, the rulings will determine whether federal agents are exclusively relying on race and ethnicity to stop, question and detain people for immigration violations — and whether the limits banning such tactics will remain in place.
Kevin R. Johnson, an expert in immigration law and a professor at University of California, Davis, said that most recent Supreme Court order and accompanying opinion from Justice Kavanaugh had emboldened federal officers to rely on racial profiling nationwide.
But he cautioned that the emergency order was not the last word. The newest footage — taken from inside patrol vehicles in Chicago and Los Angeles — could raise fresh concerns for the justices when the underlying lawsuit almost certainly returns to the Supreme Court for full consideration, he said.
“The racial slurs are troubling and coupled with the recent string of Latinos killed in car stops and detention centers, they are likely to get the justices thinking about what is going on here in ways that they haven’t,” said Mr. Johnson, a former dean of the law school at U.C. Davis.
In videos from Chicago, agents point out people on the street as “tonks.” The slur has been used since at least the 1990s by immigration officers along the nation’s Southern border.
The epithet is echoed in the latest batch of video evidence filed in the Los Angeles case. More than a dozen body-camera and bystander videos capture agents bypassing people who appeared white, moving instead to question and detain men who appeared Latino nearby.
In one video, taken Aug. 6, 2025, a group of heavily armed, masked agents in camouflage cluster in the back of a moving truck, peering out. A backpack is visible on the floor.
“Whose backpack is that? Tonk?” one agent asks. “Tonk backpack?”
In most of the other footage, agents appear to be casual as they drive, joking and speculating about how successful raids had been.
“They filled three vans,” one agent says to another as they drive through a Los Angeles neighborhood on June 19, 2025. Later, one of those agents recounts seeing a man sitting in a minivan whom he did not end up approaching. “I’m pretty sure he was wet,” he says.
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3) As Credit Card Debt Mounts, Home Becomes a Piggy Bank
A rise in home equity to record levels has led many Americans to refinance their mortgages to pay their bills.
By Gregory Schmidt, Aug. 11, 2026
Linda Boroski used a home-equity loan to pay off her credit card bills and to buy new windows for her home in Bellevue, Ohio. Credit...Daniel Lozada for The New York Times
When Linda Boroski bought her three-story Queen Anne home with a wraparound veranda in Bellevue, Ohio, in 2021, she made sure it fit her budget.
“My mom taught me, ‘We like to cross our t’s, dot our i’s, and we pay our bills on time,’” said Ms. Boroski, a 63-year-old retired schoolteacher.
So she was concerned when she ran up $26,000 in credit card bills to pay for travel for medical treatment. It meant putting off renovations for her drafty house and visiting her family less.
“I was so strapped each month,” she said.
When Ms. Boroski got an offer from Rocket, a mortgage lender, for a home-equity loan, she took out $45,000, paid off her bills and bought new windows. And she still has a little left over for a trip to see her granddaughter.
Americans continue to spend freely, keeping the economy humming, even as they amass more credit card debt. But like Ms. Boroski, many homeowners have built up a nest egg to help pay for their lifestyles: $35 trillion in home equity, a record high.
“People are sitting on all this money,” said Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin, a real estate brokerage firm. “So they pull some of that equity out of their home to pay off their credit card debt.”
Household debt dipped 0.1 percent in the second quarter of 2026, to $18.8 trillion, from a year earlier, according to a report on Tuesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, using data not adjusted for inflation. But credit card balances climbed to $1.26 trillion from the year before.
In the first three months of this year, homeowners withdrew an estimated $47 billion in equity, up 2 percent from a year ago, according to a report from the Intercontinental Exchange, a financial services company. Second mortgages amounted to $25 billion, a 1 percent increase from a year earlier, but refinancing existing mortgages to take cash out jumped 18 percent year over year to $22 billion.
The accumulation of housing wealth is partly a result of a moribund property market. Soaring home prices and elevated mortgage rates have made buying a home less attainable, prompting buyers to pause. Sales of existing homes fell 1.7 percent in July from the month before, the National Association of Realtors reported on Tuesday.
Homeowners who secured mortgage rates as low as 3 percent just a few years ago are reluctant to sell their homes. They have built up an average of $310,500 in home equity, according to a recent report by Cotality, a housing market data provider.
“That equity provides an important financial cushion as everyday costs continue to rise,” Selma Hepp, Cotality’s chief economist, wrote in the report.
That enormous wealth comes with a caveat: Because it is tied up in their homes, owners have to refinance their mortgage to take advantage of it. Still a home loan at 6.69 percent — the average rate for a 30-year, fixed rate mortgage, according to the mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac — is a better option than credit card debt with an interest rate in the double digits, financial experts say.
“Nobody really talks about their credit card rates being 23 percent,” said Alex Elezaj, the chief strategy officer at United Wholesale Mortgage, a mortgage lender that works exclusively with independent brokers. “They are paying minimum payments, and they kick the can down the road.”
But as revolving debt mounts, he is seeing more homeowners looking to refinance their mortgage. To be sure, sometimes the money goes to renovating the home or paying for a vacation, but more often, he said, it is used for credit card or student loan payments.
“Most people are looking at it as a way to bring down their overall household interest rate,” he said.
Financial brokers are seeing more refinancing activity across the country, as more people seek to pull themselves out from under a pile of bills.
The average debt per cardholder grew 22.7 percent from 2018 through last year, to $7,161, according to a report from the Century Foundation, an independent think tank. (For comparison, cumulative inflation in the same period rose 28.2 percent.)
But Stacey Melton, a broker in Gilbert, Ariz., said the people who come to her for help carry an average of $20,000 to $50,000 in credit card debt, and sometimes as high as $90,000.
Hoping to avoid refinancing their mortgage in order to hang on to their low rate, many request a new line of credit using their home equity as collateral, but the math never works out because the rates on most home-equity lines are too high.
“You are basically trading apples for apples at that point,” said Ms. Melton, who recommends refinancing, even if the homeowner snagged an ultralow rate when buying the home.
But as more Americans use their homes as emergency slush funds, Ms. Fairweather worried that the activity could put them at risk if the economy starts to tumble.
“They might be in a situation where they have to sell their home because they can’t pay that refinanced mortgage,” she said.
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4) He Was Deported to a Country He’d Never Heard of. He May Never Go Free.
As the Trump administration sends a growing number of immigrants to countries they have no connection to, some find themselves imprisoned with no way out.
By Nicholas Casey, Aug. 12, 2026
Nicholas Casey spoke to deportees imprisoned in Eswatini, via a cellphone one of them obtained following a hunger strike.
Roberto Mosquera in detention in Eswatini. Moises Saman/Magnum, for The New York Times
As he stepped out of the American military cargo plane, Roberto Mosquera still couldn’t tell where he was or why he had been taken there. When federal immigration agents forced him onto a secret flight 30 hours earlier, it was a hot July afternoon in Texas. Now, after traveling thousands of miles, he felt a cold winter’s morning in the air.
He was in the kingdom of Eswatini, a tiny, landlocked country in southern Africa that until recently was called Swaziland. Mosquera had never heard of it. He hadn’t set foot outside the United States since he was 12, when he arrived on a fishing boat as part of the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba with his mother, a sister and her infant daughter. As a teenager, he joined a Miami gang, and in his 20s, he took a plea deal after being charged with attempted murder for shooting a rival gangster in the leg. That would have been grounds to deport him had he been from almost any other country. But Cuba wasn’t cooperating with the United States on deportations, so Mosquera was allowed to stay, provided he checked in with the authorities each year. He built a new life for himself, becoming a specialty plumber and a born-again Christian; he married and had four daughters.
Then one day in June of last year, Mosquera, who is 59, went to renew his work permit at an immigration office. The appointment was usually short; Mosquera had borrowed the company truck so that he could head to a job when he was done. But it didn’t turn out that way. An immigration official told him that his time in America was up. With President Trump now back in office, Mosquera knew these were not empty words. But if the United States couldn’t send him to Cuba, where would he go?
He was taken to the Krome Detention Center, a notorious holding facility for deportees in Miami, then to another in El Paso, Texas, where he was confined without being able to contact lawyers for nearly two weeks. Soon agents told him to get ready to move again. Mosquera was surprised when he was loaded onto a small luxury jet — it seemed to him more like something the singer Marc Anthony would rent, he told me. Along with him were four other detainees, from, as he would later learn, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Vietnam. They were transferred to a military cargo plane at a U.S. air base in the East African nation Djibouti, and more than a day later, the five men landed in Eswatini.
Before they could make sense of the situation, they were forced inside a metal cage that was fitted onto a transport truck and driven to the Matsapha Correctional Complex, Eswatini’s maximum-security prison. In a post on X, the Department of Homeland Security had called Mosquera and the four other men “depraved monsters” who were “so uniquely barbaric their home countries refuse to take them back.” Now they were met by dozens of guards wielding large sticks.
That was more than a year ago. Mosquera still sits in that same maximum-security prison with nowhere to go. No charges against him. No way to appeal his predicament. No sign that he will ever be freed. Cuba has not signaled any willingness to take him, and Mosquera says he has no desire to go there. Eswatini will not release him from prison, even though he served his time in the United States and committed no crime in Africa.
I first heard about his case through Alma David, an immigration lawyer at Novo Legal Group in the United States, who represents him. When I reached Mosquera on a WhatsApp video call in early June, he had already spent 11 months behind bars. The Eswatini government refused to let me visit him or any of the others detained with him, so WhatsApp video calls were our main means of communication. As we spoke, Mosquera squinted at me; in detention, he had developed glaucoma, and a doctor told Mosquera he had lost half his vision in one eye and 80 percent in the other. He has struggled to receive treatment for the condition.
“Can I ask you a question?” Mosquera asked me. Behind him I could see the green bars of his cell where he spends his nights and the silhouettes of some of the other prisoners.
“Do you think I’ll ever get out of here?”
Mosquera is one of a growing number of people whom the Trump administration has put into a global administrative limbo. For more than a year, it has been offering millions of dollars — often without disclosing the payments — to foreign governments to take immigrants the United States was having trouble deporting to their countries of origin. This includes not only people with criminal pasts like Mosquera but also deportees who were under court protections not to be returned to their homelands because they faced threats there.
The practice of deporting someone to a so-called third country isn’t new, but it used to be rare. In the past, the United States might deport someone to a place deemed safe — Canada, for instance — or to a country where they had dual citizenship. But in 2019, the first Trump administration began sending thousands of foreign nationals, including people from the Caribbean and Central America, to Mexico. In Trump’s second term, the practice has vastly expanded: At least 35 countries have made deals to take deportees, a list that includes nations as far-flung as South Sudan, Ghana, Palau, Uzbekistan and Moldova, according to Third Country Deportation Watch, a monitoring group that tracks the agreements.
The deportations bring up serious legal questions that have been the subject of multiple federal lawsuits. The removals — whether they involve immigrants with criminal histories or not — often happen before deportees can argue their cases before a judge. Some of the countries selected by the Trump administration don’t offer the basic legal protections to which the deportees would be entitled in the United States, such as access to a lawyer. And because they are foreign nationals, with no legal status in the countries to which they have been sent, the deportees generally remain under indefinite detention abroad, without charges and with little or no recourse in American courts. In a written statement to The Times, the Department of Homeland Security maintained that anyone who was deported received due process: “These third-country agreements, which ensure due process under the U.S. Constitution, are essential to the safety of our homeland and the American people.”
A number of the countries that have made the deals are unstable or autocratic and usually desperate for American cash. The Central African Republic is in the middle of a civil war. The Democratic Republic of Congo took 15 deportees shortly before the recent Ebola outbreak. Eswatini, which received $5.1 million in its arrangement with the Trump administration, is one of the world’s last absolute monarchies.
The deals first drew widespread attention when the autocratic President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador accepted a $6 million payment in March 2025 to hold some 250 Venezuelan immigrants in CECOT, his Terrorism Confinement Center, a megaprison he had recently built to house as many as 40,000 Salvadoran gang members. The Venezuelans were later flown home, and many claimed that they were abused and tortured by their prison guards while in custody.
The detention archipelago started growing last fall, when the Trump administration began directing flights to Ghana and Cameroon. Human rights lawyers said that this wave of deportees was made up of immigrants seeking asylum who were protected by court orders from being returned to the countries they had fled. Some were also covered under the Convention Against Torture, a United Nations treaty to which the United States is a signatory, which bans the deportation of people to a country where they were tortured or could face torture.
“They have legal protection which means they cannot be deported to their country of origin, and the U.S. is exploiting that protection by deporting them to other countries instead,” says Bella Mosselmans, director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council, a rights group that has filed multiple lawsuits in the United States and abroad over third-country deportations. “It is then enlisting those countries to detain and deport them back to their country of origin, where they face persecution, torture and worse.” This workaround, known in international law as chain refoulement, is banned under the Convention Against Torture.
But some never get out. They remain in the third countries to which they are sent, stuck in a kind of purgatory — a new class of prisoner created by America’s widening crackdown on immigration.
Human rights lawyers I spoke to have identified at least two dozen cases in which people have been in long-term detention: the 19 men imprisoned in Eswatini and another six or seven in South Sudan. Some were convicted of assault and murder decades ago and had completed their sentences. Some were living in the United States legally; others were not. Many of the cases had additional complicating factors. Mosquera is caught in a diplomatic quagmire that began with Cuba’s 1959 revolution. Others come from countries without a functioning government or with no diplomatic ties to the country where they are being detained. None of the detainees I interviewed had been allowed to collect passports or any other documents that could serve as identification before they were deported.
The situation, in some respects, has come to resemble a more famous case in which the United States sent detainees abroad in haste: the detention center at Guantánamo Bay. In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, hundreds of foreign nationals were kept out of the reach of American courts, spending years in prison without ever being charged.
Alma David, who now represents some of the other deportees in Eswatini in addition to Mosquera, compared the situation of the Eswatini detainees to a legal black hole. “It’s like you wake up, and you’re in this place, and there’s no way out,” David said. Once Mosquera was flown out of the United States, there were no options for challenging his detention in American courts, so David helped him find a local lawyer in Eswatini. (That lawyer was blocked from seeing Mosquera for nearly a year.) “People are disappearing into this no man’s land,” she said. “They have no connection to their new country, and they also apparently have no legal rights.”
Of the foreign prisons, the one in South Sudan is perhaps the most troubling. As of June, it had been months since anyone, even their lawyers, had heard from the people believed to be in detention there, men born in Laos, Vietnam, Cuba and Myanmar. The only person I found who was allowed to visit the prisoners was an American congressional aide who went last summer to Juba, the South Sudanese capital, to investigate detentions. Even so, the aide said, U.S. Embassy officials declined to accompany her to the prison. Now she is afraid for the fate of the detainees should South Sudan fall into another civil war.
The Eswatini government did not respond to a list of detailed questions I sent to the prime minister’s office about its arrangement with the United States. But my calls with Mosquera, who had obtained a phone with the help of a friendly prison guard, offered a view of a world where medicine was scarce, power outages were commonplace and food was purchased with money sent by relatives via Western Union to the prison warden.
Among those trapped with Mosquera was Kassim Saleh Wasil, arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Detroit more than a year ago. He arrived in the United States from Yemen in 1977 on an immigrant visa and became a permanent resident. He was convicted of second-degree murder in 1999, serving 20 years in prison. ICE said in a statement that he was one of “the many public safety threats and immigration violators that our officers work to take off the streets every day.”
When I met Wasil, who is now 71, over WhatsApp, I saw that he had lost weight in jail and appeared gaunt. “I thought I had paid my debt to society,” he said. He told me he has tried contacting diplomats from Yemen — which is ruled by dueling governments of civilians, soldiers and rebels — but he had not heard back. Wasil, who is Muslim, told me that his worst fear is that he will die forgotten in a Christian country where he will not receive a proper burial.
On another call, I reached Juan Carlos Font Agüero, another Cuban, who is 60 and has been held in Eswatini since last fall. Font told me he was released from a Florida prison in 2022 after serving a 17-year murder sentence, for killing someone during a fight. He showed me paperwork that he submitted during ICE detention, which showed that he had agreed to be deported to Mexico. He was sent to Eswatini instead, a country with no Cuban Embassy.
Font said he was ready to return to Cuba, and one of his daughters, still in Havana, has petitioned the Cuban government to allow his return. But so far there has been only silence. “I was kidnapped, pure and simple,” Font said of his deportation. “The only thing they didn’t do was put a blindfold on my face.”
In its statement, the Department of Homeland Security said the administration was “using every tool available to get criminal illegal aliens out of American communities and out of our country. Our message is clear: Criminals are not welcome in the United States.”
Mosquera arrived in America along with thousands of other Cubans, in Key West. His mother, Matilde del Peral, had been a political prisoner in Cuba, locked up for 18 months after she refused to attend meetings of the neighborhood Communist committee. Not long afterward, Fidel Castro, Cuba’s leader, declared that anyone who didn’t support his revolution was free to go, and President Jimmy Carter promised that the United States would welcome the refugees with “an open heart and open arms.” It was the beginning of an exodus of some 125,000 Cubans, including del Peral and all but one of her eight children.
The evacuation, however, was messy. Del Peral and her children initially were housed in a stadium, and like many of the other refugees, they left the matter of obtaining green cards for a later date as they struggled to start from scratch. Mosquera told me that while his mother fed the family and kept a roof over their heads, she didn’t understand that Miami was different from Havana, where the Castro government had all but eliminated petty crime. “Roberto was never a bad boy,” said his sister María Victoria de Ortíz, who lives in Miami. “It was the bad company that changed him, made him take another path.”
When Mosquera was about 14, he told me, another teenager started referring to their clique of friends as the Latin Kings. The name caught on, and Mosquera began to go by the nickname Power. At first, they were mostly playacting, Mosquera said, getting into fistfights and hiding from local beat cops they knew. But things changed when members of the real Latin Kings — a gang that began in the Puerto Rican community in Chicago — started to migrate to Miami. Suddenly, Mosquera found himself in the middle of a turf war, which began with tit-for-tat attacks between rivals before expanding into something much worse.
A raft of stabbings, shootings and car thefts ensued, with Mosquera and his friends often at the center of them. Mosquera told me that in 1988 he was ambushed at a fairground by rival gang members, who knocked his teeth out with a set of brass knuckles. (He still has rows of gold upper and lower teeth that flash as he speaks.) His gang decided to take revenge. One night in Coconut Grove, a neighborhood in Miami, they shot at a 16-year-old rival gangster, who survived the attack but was wounded in his leg.
Mosquera, who told me openly about many crimes he committed during his gang years, insisted he was not there that night. But fearing a life in prison if he stood trial, he took a plea deal for attempted first-degree murder and received a nine-year sentence. By 1996, Mosquera, then 26, had served his time. He thought he had a new life ahead of him, but as an undocumented immigrant, he was rearrested by immigration agents. Mosquera was caught in what is known as administrative detention — which, at the time, allowed immigrants to be held indefinitely before deportation. With Cuba still refusing to take deportees from the United States, Mosquera was held another six years, serving time in various prisons. A 2001 Supreme Court decision banned this practice, requiring the United States to release administrative detainees after six months if they cannot be deported.
It was during that time that the most brutal aspects of the American prison system came into focus for Mosquera. In 1996, he said, he and four other Cubans demanded a meeting with immigration authorities. Instead, he said, the guards assaulted them with pepper spray and tear gas. Later that night, he told me, a guard captain arrived with a group of subordinates, one of them wielding a metal pipe. Mosquera was beaten unconscious. As Mosquera and I talked, he lifted his right thumb, which is crooked. He hasn’t been able to move it since the attack, he said. (Human Rights Watch, which was alerted to the assault, reported that the men did not receive medical care for more than a week after the guards bludgeoned them.)
Mosquera was finally released in 2002 under an agreement that would allow him to remain in the United States and work, while maintaining regular check-ins with immigration authorities. Raised Catholic, he became a born-again Christian in prison. He also left his gang, even though others who tried to do so had been killed in retaliation, and started a family. As he spoke to me on a video call, he tilted his head back to show me the names of his daughters — Destiny, Faith, Monica and Cynthia — tattooed across his neck and chest.
But he still found his way into trouble. Around 2009, after being pulled over by a police officer while riding his motorcycle, he tried to flee, resulting in criminal charges and three years’ jail time. He told me that after his release, he was cited for two parole violations. But as time passed, he began to put all that behind him. In 2014, Mosquera took a temporary job at a Miami plumbing company.
He rose from apprentice to plumber and eventually to foreman; his former boss described him to me as a man who had turned his life around. “He wasn’t just a hard worker; he inspired the guys around him,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he employs other immigrants who could be targeted by ICE for deportation.
Mosquera had never paid attention to politics. But by 2024, as Donald Trump again set his sights on the White House, Mosquera was undergoing a political awakening. He saw himself as one of the working-class Americans whom Trump — long popular in Miami’s Cuban American community — said he would defend. Mosquera often went to work with a hard hat emblazoned with a bald eagle, his former boss told me. Mosquera’s sister de Ortíz told me she remembered Mosquera practically stumping for Trump. “He would sit on the patio and say, ‘Trump is going to change everything, you’ll see,’” she said. “He even told his daughter to vote for Trump.”
Still, as Mosquera’s annual immigration date approached last summer, de Ortíz had a bad feeling. It was clear to her that the president’s nationalist message offered no exceptions, not even for the many Florida Cubans who supported him in two victories. “I told him, ‘Don’t go.’ And he told me, ‘No, sister, nothing is going to happen.’”
At the maximum-security prison in Eswatini, the deportees were ordered to strip so they could be examined. Mosquera knew similar treatment from his years in American prisons, but this time he was indignant: He had committed no crime, he thought. The guards ordered a 24-hour lockdown for the prisoners. No calls, no lawyers. Their food was a small piece of bread for breakfast and a bare-bones lunch and dinner; a small piece of chicken was served once a week.
After the Eswatini prisoners were barred from calling their families for a month, the warden brought a phone for the prisoners to use. Mosquera called his sister in Miami. “We’d been looking for him everywhere, and then he tells us he’s in Africa,” she said. With the help of his niece, Mosquera made contact with David. “I could see he was somebody who spent enough time in the U.S. criminal justice system to have a concept of what his rights were, and there was a process that had to be followed,” David said. “He was like, You just can’t do this to me.”
One morning, according to Mosquera, an Eswatini general visited the prison and, along with the warden, demanded that the men all sign papers that the government had prepared saying they had declined legal counsel. The prisoners refused. At one point, the guards began to blast Christian music through loudspeakers and eventually demanded that the men, including Wasil, the Yemeni Muslim, stand outside in the yard and pray as the music played.
Mosquera reached a breaking point in October, he said, when a flight carrying 10 deportees arrived. People were coming in faster than they were going, and he had no answers about what would come next. “I said, ‘Lord, what is the way out?’” he told me. Mosquera told the guards he would not eat until he could see a lawyer and was told why he was being held.
At first, the prison guards ignored Mosquera, treating his hunger strike as a joke. At one point, Eswatini officials claimed in a statement that he was on a voluntary religious fast. As the weeks passed, the effects of the hunger strike became agonizing for Mosquera. He recorded his condition in a handwritten diary. “The kidney pains began, my arms and right foot began to fall asleep,” he wrote on Day 22. “In my body I have a headache and am very tired, a lot of dizziness.”
Mosquera sent me photos of his diary, and as I scrolled through the pages, I could see that he had spent much of the hunger strike writing about his 10-year-old daughter, Faith, whom he last saw a week before he was deported. (Mosquera and the girl’s mother are divorced.) “I miss Faith so much. When we would go buy you little clothes, we’d go eat at the mall that you liked so much, we’d go to the movies,” he wrote. “I felt like the happiest father in the world seeing you happy.”
After Mosquera had gone nearly a month without food, his lawyer, David, reached him through one of the prison guards’ phones, urging him to stop the fast. She said he needed to be strong if they were going to fight, Mosquera told me. Mosquera relented; the only other option was to starve himself to death, he said.
After he ended the hunger strike, the guards allowed him to purchase his own cellphone, using money he had been sent by relatives. It was a small victory, but far from the one he sought.
Only two deportees have managed to return to their countries of origin since arriving in Eswatini. One of them, Orville Etoria, the Jamaican man who was on Mosquera’s flight, was repatriated last year. Etoria, who had been a legal resident in the United States since age 12, had his green card revoked by an immigration judge who ordered him deported in 2009, while he was serving a 25-year sentence for a 1996 murder. After his release in 2021, immigration officials instead allowed him to stay in the United States, provided he made regular check-ins. It remains unclear why he was sent to Eswatini; the Jamaican government says it had not blocked his return, as the Trump administration asserted.
When I called him in the town where he had settled, he told me that being deported at age 62 left him feeling disillusioned by the place that once adopted him. “This administration went for people who had changed because they want to prove a point — that you could never change in their mind,” he said.
When I asked Mosquera to imagine some kind of life back in Cuba, what he conjured was grim. “I’m a loudmouth, as you can see when we speak,” he said. “If I was sent to Cuba, probably they’d lock me up too, just like they did to my mother.”
As we continued to send messages week after week, he told me about the end of his marriage, which came about after years of acrimony. His divorce was made official three days before he was deported, but he had always been close to his children, especially Faith. Now he had stopped calling even her. “I need to get the hell out of here,” he texted me one morning. “My life is passing.”
I asked Mosquera why he hadn’t talked to his daughter. He paused for a minute and then started telling me about the day of his ICE arrest. A judge granted him joint custody of Faith, and they were about to spend their first week together, he said. She was home waiting for Mosquera when he was detained. “And now she asks me, ‘When are you coming home?’ It is the greatest pain I ever had — I’ve cried like a child,” he told me. “I, who have been stabbed and shot, I never cried. If I let myself think of her, I will break.”
One day Mosquera mentioned that he had begun a long-distance relationship with a woman. I asked if I could speak to this new girlfriend, and he sent me a South Florida number with the name Ivy Mercado. When I called Mercado, who works for a health care company from her home in Jupiter, Fla., she told me that she met Mosquera in the 1980s when he was dating a friend of hers. They had fallen out of touch, but when word spread that Mosquera had disappeared into ICE custody, she said, “I cried like a baby, and I couldn’t understand why was this affecting me so hard.” A mutual friend sent her Mosquera’s phone number, and they had a long conversation late last year. Mercado called again. She soon realized she was in love.
If there was one thing that seemed to be sustaining Mosquera during his detention, it was his relationship with Mercado. Sometimes Mosquera would talk nostalgically with her about 1980s Miami. Mercado would often tell him about legal research she had done on his case. As we talked, Mercado told me that she was well aware that Mosquera’s imprisonment, which brought them together, is also the thing that keeps them apart. “I tell him: ‘It’s God’s orchestration. You know, we have to believe that,’” she said. “And he’ll say: ‘Well, it brought you to me. It brought us to each other.’”
One morning in July, my phone buzzed. I could see Mosquera had sent me several shaky videos he had just filmed from the prison courtyard. In one, there was a convoy of four vehicles, including what looked like a military truck, entering the grounds. In another, 11 people filed past, some wearing white uniforms. One of them raised his fist in a gesture of resistance. A new group of prisoners had arrived, the third since Mosquera’s flight last year. “No cubanos,” he wrote to me. “One Belize. One Jamaica 🇯🇲 the rest from Africa.”
I called Mosquera, and he began handing the phone to the new arrivals. They looked nervous on the video call. Like Mosquera, they said they had not heard of Eswatini before they arrived. All of them said they had criminal records — some for violent crimes — that had led to their deportations, but they had not expected to be sent to this corner of Africa. Several of them told me they were under protective judicial orders that barred them from being returned to their home countries, where they would be at risk of persecution. They now feared Eswatini would simply forward them to the places they had fled.
One of them, a 64-year-old pastor from Jamaica, named Junior Alves, told me a judge had barred him from being deported to his country because of threats to his family. He said he first came to the United States in 1982. He was arrested on various drug charges when he was a young man, he said, but he had since turned his life around.
Alves handed the phone back to Mosquera. Until now, it had been months since the United States sent new deportees to the prison, but Mosquera was sure there would be more — the guards had been clearing more space, giving everyone new bars of soap.
Now Mosquera had work to do. He needed to show the new arrivals how to get money sent from home. Where they would wash their clothes. What to do when the power went out.
But what everyone really wanted to know was how long Mosquera had been in Eswatini.
“I tell them a year,” he said. “And they get sick to their stomach.”
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5) Even Elite Colleges Have Become Trade Schools
By Jessica Grose, Opinion Writer, Aug. 12, 2026
Eleanor Davis
Gideon Sobek graduated from Lehigh University in the spring with a bachelor’s degree in economics. He arrived at college wanting to major in architecture, but he let go of that pretty quickly because he thought it was too much of a long shot as a career.
Sobek was admitted to a highly coveted global business and public policy honors program as a junior. He got a grant that covered most of the cost of college, but still graduated with around $20,000 in debt. Lehigh, which is in Pennsylvania, is a prestigious school, with a 26 percent acceptance rate.
Listening to Sobek talk about his résumé and skill set, I assumed that employers would be throwing themselves at his feet, even in a tough year for new college grads. But he told me that after sending out hundreds of applications and getting nowhere, he decided the job market was so grim that he would go to graduate school at his alma mater.
It used to be easier for people “to get jobs with bachelors’ of science in economics,” Sobek said, but now he feels that employers are looking for “highly specialized” graduates who had internships going all the way back to freshman year of college. Sobek said it feels that, as a country, we’re “losing the point” of college, which in his mind, was supposed to be about figuring “out who you are and what you’re interested in.” His experience was that “people need to know what they want to do after college when they get to college,” which is a tall order for a teenager.
Sobek put his finger on a pressure that has been sitting on young people for many years, a poignant anxiety I hear when I speak to college students: They have started worrying about employability the second they walk through the campus gates, if not before. While President Trump has pitted the idea of higher education against trade schools, as if the two types of institutions have different aims, that distinction is largely antiquated.
As the new school year begins, it’s worth pointing out how students and administrators treat colleges — even elite universities — as a catapult to a “good job” above all else.
Which is to say: Colleges are already trade schools.
The top two majors for students at four-year institutions as of 2022 are business and health professions. In June, the Department of Education issued its “earnings accountability” rule, which states that undergraduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a high school diploma, and graduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a college diploma, or they risk losing access to federal loans.
Nathan Heller, in a 2023 New Yorker article about the death of the liberal arts major, offered a history of the competing aims of the American university. In the 1960s, our institutions of higher ed were described by Clark Kerr, president of the University of California system, as a multiversity that “incorporates the tradition of land-grant universities, established with an eye to industrial-age skill sets. And it provides something for everyone.” The pursuit of knowledge and beauty, scientific research, and pre-professional studies were all bound together, even if it was never a harmonious union.
That fractious union was breaking apart long before the second Trump administration took a wrecking ball to the federal funding of research across disciplines. But the effort to put higher education in its place started much earlier. Over the past 30 years, there has been a concerted effort by mostly conservative politicians to diminish trust in the value of college, and to provide less federal funding for it. They paint America’s colleges and universities as foolish, progressive hotbeds of ethnic studies departments where impressionable young people get expensive Marxist indoctrination rather than marketable, useful skills.
It wasn’t always like this. There used to be bipartisan agreement that our universities were a source of civic strength, and local leaders wanted to keep educated young people from leaving their states. The political scientists Eric Schickler and Elina Maria Rodriguez analyzed a data set of over 1,000 state and national party platforms from 1980 to 2025 to show how Republicans have turned against higher education. In the ’80s and ’90s, some state-level Republicans supported public universities with high praise and high funding, Schickler and Rodriguez explain in an article published this year in the journal Studies in American Political Development.
Drilling down a little more, it seems that the 2008 recession was the point when Republican support for higher education turned net negative. In the shadow of the Great Recession, state and federal support for higher education declined. This is part of what led to the cost of college paid by students doubling in the past three decades. Though many families do not end up paying the sticker price of tuition, higher education is still burdening millions of young people with what feels like insurmountable debt; 40 million people hold $1.7 trillion in federal loans.
And what are recent college graduates getting for their trouble? The latest jobs numbers are sobering and sad. The unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22-27 is 5.7 percent (the unemployment rate for the same age group without a college degree is 7.2 percent). Despite all the lip service paid to trade jobs and apprenticeships, especially for young men fresh out of high school, the supply of manual laborers is greater than the demand. No wonder just 26 percent of young Americans feel hopeful about the future of the country, down from 55 percent just five years ago, according to the spring edition of the Harvard Youth Poll.
When we reduce college to metrics like short-term return on investment, we are ignoring so much human potential it is staggering: Young people who don’t have the resources to pay out of pocket for their college degrees are going to be pushed into jobs that they might be ill suited for, rather than getting to explore their intellectual potential in fields that are not immediately remunerative.
Who knows how many kids we have already trapped in a cutthroat competition to get a small number of finance or tech jobs, when their brains might have been put to better use creating the next great piece of literature, designing a new kind of green building, or working in a lab that could lead to the next medical breakthrough? When we impugn the more esoteric ambitions of higher education, we lose the ability to dream big about what our young people can accomplish.
Back to Gideon Sobek, the practical young man who decided to go to grad school rather than continue banging his head against the closed door of the 2026 job market. He is among the minority of young people who still do feel hopeful about the future, even if everything seems scary right now.
Sobek had a poetic description of how the job search feels: It’s like riding a bicycle with a blindfold on, he said: “You can feel the thrill of the bicycle and you also have this weird anxiety about not knowing where you’re going to end up next. And it’s still moving.”
I can tell he got a lot out of his college education, and I’m rooting for him, and all the other kids getting on that bicycle.
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6) Kennedy Stirred Vaccine Fears in Pennsylvania Years Before Measles Outbreak
At a speech in Lancaster County, Robert F. Kennedy mocked the threat of measles. Now local officials are racing to contain one of the largest outbreaks in the country.
By Teddy Rosenbluth, Aug. 12, 2026
Teddy Rosenbluth spoke to local leaders, doctors and members of the plain community in Lancaster County, Pa., as well as those involved in vaccination efforts in the area.
Before becoming health secretary, Mr. Kennedy promoted vaccine skepticism as the leader of Children’s Health Defense. Desiree Rios for The New York Times
Pressed recently on whether he might accept responsibility for the resurgence of measles in the country, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fended off any suggestion that his history of promoting vaccine skepticism might be partly to blame.
The groups facing these outbreaks were “almost all religious communities that just don’t vaccinate,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash.
“It’s hard to blame that on me,” he added.
But what Mr. Kennedy failed to acknowledge is his own role, and the role of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group he once led, in stirring distrust in those very communities. That includes in Lancaster County, Pa., which is now at the center of one of the largest measles outbreaks in the country.
The state has reported dozens of hospitalizations and more than 230 cases, a number some local doctors consider to be a vast underestimate given that local Mennonite and Amish communities tend to avoid traditional health care.
Five years ago, Mr. Kennedy stood behind a wooden lectern on a farm in the county and delivered a warning to the local Amish community about the nation’s public health agencies.
“Those agencies are going to do everything in their power to make the Amish vaccinate,” he said. “Because they cannot stand the fact that you are healthy.”
A large crowd — 1,500 people according to a local paper’s account — spilled out from under a white tent at the annual farming fair to hear from Mr. Kennedy, then the leader of Children’s Health Defense. He turned to measles, a disease that was so horrible, he joked, that when he fell ill with it as a child he “had to stay home and watch TV the whole week.” The audience erupted with applause and laughter.
“The cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A,” he added.
Local leaders acknowledged that improving childhood vaccination rates has long been a challenge within the area’s Amish communities, where just a quarter of people have been vaccinated against measles, according to a 2025 estimate.
But they also said the work of anti-vaccine groups, including Mr. Kennedy’s visit with Children’s Health Defense, hadn’t made it any easier.
“All it takes is somebody like that, an anti-vaxxer, to make a personal appearance to a group who already has second thoughts about immunizations,” said Dr. Alan Peterson, a family medicine physician in the county and former medical director of a program that provided free vaccines to children in Lancaster County. “Some of them just say, ‘OK, that’s all I need to know and we’re not going to get our immunizations.’”
Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said that under Mr. Kennedy’s leadership, the agency has mounted an aggressive measles outbreak response which has included investing more than $8.5 million to support affected communities and deploying experts to offer assistance.
She added that the department works “to ensure that all communities — including those who choose not to vaccinate — have access to appropriate medical care, including therapeutics.” Children’s Health Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
To those on the front lines of the Pennsylvania outbreak, Mr. Kennedy’s assessment of the current measles situation was off-base on several counts.
For one, area doctors pointed out that the virus wasn’t only spreading through insular religious groups, as he suggested on CNN, but also those in the broader community. The percentage of children vaccinated against measles has declined in the county — falling to 88 percent of kindergartners in 2025, down from 94 percent in 2019 — as it has in the United States overall.
Several local leaders who work with or are part of the area’s so-called plain communities — a group that includes Amish and Mennonite people, who often refrain from using consumer technology, dress modestly and adopt other lifestyle restrictions — also pushed back against the characterization that they simply refuse vaccines.
There are a variety of attitudes toward vaccines within these communities, though it’s true that vaccination rates tend to be lower. . That is because of cultural skepticism toward secular authorities and because children often do not attend public schools, which require vaccinations, said Cory Anderson, who studies those groups at Penn State University.
But historically, the groups were more willing to accept vaccines when there were strong relationships with local doctors, community outreach and acceptance of the shots by local Amish leaders, said Dr. Jeffrey Martin, a physician at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health.
“The Amish are not a group that simply doesn’t vaccinate,” he added.
Allen Hoover, an Old Order Mennonite, spent nearly two decades leading vaccination efforts as the administrator at Parochial Medical Center, a clinic that mainly serves the county’s plain community. Changing attitudes was a slow process that required gentle encouragement and frequent one-on-one conversations about the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, which is highly effective at preventing infection and has an excellent safety record.
Gradually, as families saw children spared from the worst diseases, vaccination rates began to climb, he said. (The Pennsylvania Department of Health does not routinely collect vaccination data broken out by religion.)
“We had gained so much trust,” Mr. Hoover said.
Then the pandemic hit, bringing mask mandates, business closures and restrictions on church gatherings.
“It just really eroded the public trust, particularly in those communities, and really gave a stronger voice to those that were advocating for alternatives to the vaccination,” said Alice Yoder, the executive director of community health at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health during that time.
Dr. Ken Brown, a retired scientist living in Lancaster County, remembered taking out an ad in 2021 to encourage vaccination in The Pennsylvania Busy Beaver, a publication that goes out to tens of thousands of Amish and Mennonite people in the region. Two trusted figures in the community had received their Covid-19 vaccines, he wrote, and “neither had a problem!”
The next month, Pennsylvania Coalition for Informed Consent — a partner organization of Children’s Health Defense’s Pennsylvania chapter — took out an almost identical advertisement captioned: “Vaccines can have unintended consequences.”
Distrust spread quickly from the Covid-19 vaccine to other routine shots.
“I would guess that we lost almost as much as we had gained in 20 years,” Mr. Hoover said.
Mr. Kennedy’s visit hammered home the message that public health officials — and the vaccines they promote — should not be trusted, said Dr. Peterson, the local doctor.
Dr. Richard Besser, former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, noted that Mr. Kennedy has a history of promoting vaccine skepticism in vulnerable communities.
He and other public health experts point to Mr. Kennedy’s visit to the Pacific island of Samoa in 2019, where he amplified doubts about the safety of the measles vaccine just a few months before an outbreak that killed more than 80 people. In the midst of a 2017 measles outbreak in Minneapolis within a Somali American community — where vaccination rates had fallen because of fears about autism — Mr. Kennedy visited to “discuss vaccine safety concerns,” according to a Children’s Health Defense post.
Even after Mr. Kennedy stepped away from Children’s Health Defense in 2023, the Pennsylvania chapter continued its outreach to the plain community at the same event he had attended.
The group posted a photo of their table at Family Days on the Farm in 2024, which displayed a poster titled “The Secret to Childhood Health Maybe as Simple As Just Saying No,” above graphs purporting to show better outcomes for unvaccinated children. Another poster advertised Mr. Kennedy’s book “Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak.”
The group purchased a table at the event again last month, even as measles cases were rapidly increasing.
“That is one of the modus operandi of the anti-vaccine movement,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a prominent vaccine scientist who wrote a book about the rise of anti-science movements. “They try to take insular groups that may already be distrusting of either the federal government or health care and they’ll exploit that.”
As outbreaks rage on in the United States, Mr. Kennedy has offered stronger endorsements of the M.M.R. vaccine on social media and during TV interviews. But the Amish community in Lancaster — which does not use social media or own televisions — are unlikely to have heard that message.
Mr. Hoover said he thought that if Mr. Kennedy were to reach out directly to strongly encourage measles vaccination, it would “actually make a difference,” because of his influence with some community members.
Ms. Hilliard, the H.H.S. spokeswoman, declined to comment on whether Mr. Kennedy would do so, but said that the department’s measles response has involved reinforcing that “M.M.R. vaccination remains the most effective way to prevent measles.”
Public health experts said they thought a visit to Lancaster County was unlikely, given Mr. Kennedy’s track record as health secretary, which has included minimizing measles outbreaks, promoting unproven treatments for the virus and undermining confidence in childhood vaccines.
“Every now and then, Kennedy will be dragged in front of the camera and begrudgingly make some offhand positive comment about the M.M.R. vaccine,” Dr. Hotez said. “But that’s about the best you’re going to get out of him.”
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7) Heat Kills Hundreds of Workers Each Year. A Postal Carrier Was One.
About half a dozen states explicitly protect workers from excessive heat. And some others, like Texas, prevent local governments from passing their own laws.
By Kurtis Lee, Photographs by Shelby Tauber, Aug. 12, 2026
Reporting from Dallas, where meteorologists recently clocked a heat index of over 100 degrees for seven days in a row.
Scorching temperatures and high humidity blanketed much of the country this summer.
The afternoon temperature soared to 98 degrees as Danny Rodriguez slammed the door of his Postal Service van. Three years ago, on this same route through a leafy Dallas neighborhood, another mail carrier died from hyperthermia. Mr. Rodriguez thinks about the man often, especially during summer shifts.
“The job can drain you,” said Mr. Rodriguez, who has been a mail carrier for 13 years and wears a wide-brimmed hat to block the sun.
As scorching temperatures and high humidity blanket much of the country this summer, with cities notching record highs, outdoor workers face increasingly perilous conditions with limited rules to protect them.
Texas has even barred its cities and counties from passing local heat protections, arguing that mandates aren’t necessary. There are no specific mandatory federal rules to protect workers from extreme heat, and the Trump administration is working to cut back proposed Biden-era heat rules that would have mandated breaks and access to water. Republicans in Congress have gone further, proposing legislation that would prohibit the Department of Labor from adopting the Biden-era proposals.
But the risks of on-the-job heat exposure will only worsen with climate change, according to safety experts and labor groups.
More than 550 workers die annually from heat exposure nationwide, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has estimated. Over the years, deaths have included a 23-year-old construction worker who became unresponsive on a job site in Arizona, a 35-year-old farmworker in Florida who became disoriented while harvesting strawberries and 66-year-old Eugene Gates Jr., the letter carrier who collapsed on a front lawn along the route that Mr. Rodriguez now walks.
A study by researchers at George Washington University and Harvard calculated that there are 28,000 heat-related work injuries every year.
“Society and employers tend to dismiss the risk factors,” said Barrak Alahmad, director of Harvard’s occupational health and climate change program and an author of the report. Heat exposure can worsen existing health issues like diabetes and asthma, and can cause fainting and seizures, as well as conditions that break down muscle tissue and prompt a dangerous dip in sodium levels in the blood.
“Heat-related injuries can come in different forms,” Dr. Alahmad said. “It’s not just a person passing out.”
In California, employers with outdoor workers must provide shade and encourage employees to take breaks when temperatures hit 80 degrees. Failure to offer those sorts of interventions to prevent heat illness is the second most frequently cited violation by Cal/OSHA, the state’s workplace regulator. In 2024, the agency fined a Southern California landscaping company around $270,000 for flouting heat regulations, including denying access to shade and forcing employees to buy their own drinking water. Maryland is the only state on the East Coast with heat protections for workers.
Two of the hottest states, however, have no laws for heat standards, and lawmakers there have even prevented local governments from instituting their own.
In Florida, Miami-Dade County had taken steps to require shade, water and breaks for outdoor workers, but in 2024, the State Legislature passed a law barring cities and counties from adopting their own standards.
A similar dynamic played out in Texas. After cities like Austin and Dallas had taken measures to mandate 10-minute breaks for construction workers every four hours, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill in 2023 that eliminated local rules requiring water breaks for workers. The measure was backed by business groups, including the National Federation of Independent Business, a powerful lobbying group, which argued that heat regulations would be burdensome for small businesses.
Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade group representing the construction industry, supported the Texas law. Geoffrey Tahuahua, the group’s president in Texas, said the state law ensures that businesses operating across Texas are not beholden to a “patchwork of conflicting local regulations.”
Agriculture and construction are among the most hazardous jobs for heat-related injuries, according to Dr. Alahmad’s research. Letter carriers, who have to work outdoors all year, have tallied more than 1,330 heat-related incidents during a two-year stretch, according to a 2024 report from the Postal Service’s inspector general.
On June 20, 2023 — six days after Mr. Abbott signed the Texas legislation into law — Mr. Gates, the Dallas mail carrier, died on his route northeast of downtown.
The heat index that day reached 113 degrees. Before he started what would become his last shift, Mr. Gates texted his wife, Carla, who worked from home and took daily walks through their neighborhood.
“If you go out, be careful,” he warned her, referring to the heat.
Mr. Gates, who delivered mail to 400 addresses a day, received two 10-minute paid breaks and a 30-minute unpaid lunch break. He often checked the weather and packed extra water bottles and a cooler filled with ice.
Mr. Gates took pride in interacting with people along his route, his wife said, and he made an effort to remember their faces and birthdays. But after more than 30 years as a postal carrier, he was beginning to think about retirement.
Around 3:45 p.m. that day, a phone number from the post office called her cellphone. Mr. Gates had fallen in front of a house where he was delivering mail. He was rushed to a hospital.
Her husband died of heart disease and hyperthermia. His body temperature was 104 degrees, his wife said.
“He needed more support, but these workers are on their own,” Ms. Gates said. “The blame is on them if the mail does not get delivered.”
“He was just doing his job,” she added.
OSHA fined the Postal Service $15,625 for his death, citing the agency for failing to recognize the “hazard of high outdoor heat including high temperature, high humidity and direct sun exposure.” The service declined a request for comment.
Kimetra Lewis, the president of the Lone Star Branch 132, a local of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said the sum was insulting.
“The Postal Service, the state, all failed him,” Ms. Lewis said.
In an open letter from June, as temperatures began to rise, the Texas A.F.L.-C.I.O., which works alongside the local letter carriers’ union, wrote that “unions have the power to take care of workers now by sharing heat safety tips.”
“Acclimatization, hydration, rest breaks and proper planning save lives,” they wrote, calling for workers to organize. “But we shouldn’t be in this position.”
Last month, another Dallas-area postal carrier collapsed and died during a period of extreme heat. A cause of death is pending.
On a recent afternoon, Ms. Gates, 59, took me to the neighborhood where her husband collapsed. She visits his grave regularly, but had never returned to the neighborhood where he made his final deliveries. It had been too painful.
As we walked the route, we ran into Mr. Rodriguez, who was finishing up his shift. His phone calculates his steps, and most days he logs well over 10 miles.
The two had never met. For a few minutes under the shade of a gnarled live oak, Ms. Gates peppered Mr. Rodriguez, 38, with questions, as if she were his mother.
“How are you staying hydrated?” she asked.
“Plenty of water,” he said, using his shirt collar to wipe sweat from his brow. “At least two gallons a day.”
“Do you take breaks, even unscheduled?”
“Sometimes,” he told her. “When absolutely needed.”
He told Ms. Gates that he had known her husband, saying Mr. Gates had struck him as a quiet, thorough worker.
The two said goodbye, and Mr. Rodriguez finished delivering mail to the houses on the street before hurrying back to his van parked in a shaded area. He blasted the air-conditioning and drove to the next block.
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8) Ward Churchill, Professor Who Challenged His Dismissal, Dies at 78
His inflammatory essay about the Sept. 11 attacks prompted his dismissal by the University of Colorado for unrelated research misconduct. A jury later found that he had been wrongfully terminated for his views.
By Francesca Regalado, Aug. 12, 2026
Ward L. Churchill, a professor whose firing by the University of Colorado in 2007 inspired a lawsuit that became a landmark case about academic freedom and free speech, has died. He was 78.
The death was confirmed by his former lawyer, David Lane. No further details were provided.
When he was dismissed, Mr. Churchill had been a tenured professor at the university’s Boulder campus since 1991 and had served as chairman of its ethnic studies department. In 2007, a faculty panel found that he had plagiarized and falsified parts of his research on Native Americans, prompting his dismissal.
He filed a wrongful termination suit against the university, claiming that the real cause for his firing was to punish him for an essay he had written on Sept. 12, 2001, and published online a few days later, in which he argued that the United States had brought on itself the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
In the essay, he compared office workers who had been killed to Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official whose later defense that he was merely “following orders” helped inspire the writer Hannah Arendt to develop the concept of “the banality of evil.”
In Mr. Churchill’s essay, titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” he wrote that the financial workers who died at the World Trade Center were not innocent bystanders, but “little Eichmanns” who were part of “a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire.”
The essay garnered little notice at the time of its release, nor when it was expanded and published as a book in 2003. But when Mr. Churchill was invited to speak at Hamilton College in New York in 2005, it resurfaced and caused an uproar, and the organizers canceled the event.
Under pressure, including from Governor Bill Owens of Colorado, the university formed a panel to investigate Mr. Churchill’s conduct. It concluded that he had committed serious academic misconduct, including falsifying and fabricating historical details and plagiarizing work by an environmental group and another scholar.
The panel was divided about whether he deserved to be dismissed, with three of the five members in favor, and two recommending a two-year suspension.
The university’s leaders decided to fire him, prompting Mr. Churchill to start his legal challenge. When the lawsuit went to trial in March 2009, Mr. Churchill’s lawyers described the university panel’s search for professional misconduct as a pretext for a foregone decision to dismiss him. Mr. Lane, his lawyer, said at the time that Mr. Churchill was the victim of a “howling mob” of university administrators, conservative media and politicians “falling over themselves” to secure his removal.
In April 2009, the jury found that Mr. Churchill had been wrongfully dismissed, awarding him a symbolic $1 in damages. It found that his political views had been a “substantial or motivating” factor in his dismissal, and that the university had not shown that he would have been dismissed anyway for his academic misconduct.
“The jury’s award is some vindication,” Mr. Churchill said. “I didn’t ask for money, I asked for justice.”
A Denver District Court judge ruled that the university did not have to reinstate or compensate Mr. Churchill, a decision which was upheld by the Colorado Court of Appeals. In 2012, the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed the lower courts’ rulings.
Ward LeRoy Churchill was born on Oct. 2, 1947, in Urbana, Ill., to Jack LeRoy Churchill and Maralyn Lucretia Allen. They divorced when he was a year old. In a 2003 essay in an academic journal, he claimed to be of Muscogee Creek descent through his father, and an enrolled member of the United Keetowah Band of Cherokee Indians through his mother.
The Cherokee tribe said in 2005 that he was an associate member rather than a full member. A former member of the tribe’s enrollment committee said that Mr. Churchill could not prove his eligibility by blood but was granted associate status based on his advocacy work.
Mr. Churchill grew up in Elmwood, Ill., and graduated in 1965 from Elmwood Community High School, where he played football and basketball. Former classmates told The Denver Post in 2005 that he liked to debate politics, even as a teen.
He joined the United States Army in 1966, training as a light-truck driver and projectionist, then served in Vietnam. He told The Denver Post in a 1987 interview that he had attended paratrooper school and was assigned to an elite reconnaissance patrol unit, details which did not appear on his Army record.
He was discharged from the Army in 1968. He said in the 1987 interview that he became active in antiwar leftist circles in Chicago after he returned from Vietnam.
He received a bachelor’s degree in technological communications from Sangamon State University in Springfield, Ill. (now the University of Illinois Springfield), in 1974, and a master’s degree in communications theory from Sangamon State in 1975.
He was hired by the University of Colorado in 1980 to be the acting director of its American Indian Equal Opportunities Program. In 1991, he became an associate professor in the communications department and received tenure. He became a full professor and transferred to the ethnic studies department in 1997.
His classes were popular enough that up to 60 students would be on the wait list, Arturo Aldama, a professor in that department, told The Denver Post in 2005.
Mr. Churchill was married four times. His first wife, Dora-Lee Larson, filed to end their common-law marriage in 1984 and accused Mr. Churchill of “past violence and threats.” His second marriage, to Marie Annette Jaimes, a colleague at the University of Colorado, ended in divorce in 1995. That same year, he married Leah Kelly, who was struck and killed by a car while crossing a street near Boulder in 2000, at the age of 25.
Mr. Churchill’s fourth wife, Natsu Saito, was a fellow professor in the University of Colorado’s ethnic studies department. In 2006, while he was being investigated by the university, Ms. Saito resigned to teach at Georgia State University.
Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
In 2017, Mr. Churchill returned to speak at the Boulder campus, and he remained defiant. “Academic freedom in America is dead,” he told the crowd. “I had my identity before I was a professor, I had it while I was a professor, and I have it now.”
Alexandra E. Petri contributed reporting.
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9) New Yorkers Who Lost Insurance After Trump Cuts Face Hard Choices
New York State’s generous health plan for working-class people was hit hard by federal funding cuts. More than 400,000 people are now looking for new coverage or living without it.
By Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Aug. 13, 2026
Health experts have warned that the number of uninsured New Yorkers will rise as people struggle to afford private plans after losing their low-cost, federally subsidized coverage. Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times
When Mireille Satheu’s family lost their health insurance last month, she signed up her three children for a new plan. But she and her husband could not afford coverage for themselves.
Ms. Satheu, a personal care assistant who lives in Plattsburgh, N.Y., was among more than 400,000 people in the state who lost their low-cost health coverage, known as the Essential Plan, after federal funding cuts under President Trump.
“I was disappointed and also scared,” she said. “You never know. You could get sick any time.”
Ms. Satheu said that she and her husband, a machine operator in a warehouse, could not pay hundreds of dollars per month for insurance. Their previous plan had no monthly premium. She plans to work more hours and seek coverage through her employer.
New York’s Essential Plan, an unusual state program that is almost entirely federally subsidized, was a lifeline for people who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but struggle to pay for private insurance. Established in 2015 under the Affordable Care Act, the plan also became popular with immigrants ineligible for Medicaid, and drove down the number of people in New York without health insurance to below 5 percent.
Now, health experts are worried that number will rise and that more people will lose access to care. And many New Yorkers are now paying more for insurance at a time when families are already struggling to afford housing and groceries.
The plan had become a spigot of billions of federal health care dollars, more than were routed to other states. When Mr. Trump’s domestic policy law was approved last year, it restricted which noncitizens were eligible, reducing the flow of funding. The state then limited eligibility. The earnings threshold for a family of four used to be $82,500; now it is $66,000.
Health officials and community groups are rushing to help people find new insurance. Nearly 450,000 people lost coverage on July 1, and about 242,000 have since joined new plans, state officials said. New Yorkers have until the end of August to sign up for coverage through the state’s marketplace.
Elisabeth Benjamin, a vice president at the Community Service Society, an antipoverty nonprofit that helps people access health care, said that many of those who lost coverage were freelancers and hourly workers.
“Our call volume has doubled,” she said. “People are confused and upset. They’re going without insurance.”
The deep cuts to the Essential Plan come as congressional Republicans have reduced federal subsidies for people on A.C.A. plans, and enrollment has dropped. More New Yorkers are expected to lose their insurance in January when new Medicaid rules, including work requirements, take effect. State officials have warned that more than one million people in New York could lose Medicaid coverage in the coming years.
Helen Arteaga, the deputy mayor of health and human services in New York City, said in an interview that she had met with health executives and community groups about how to support people who are losing coverage.
“This is not a one-time problem,” she said. “We’re going to need solutions to support New Yorkers for the next two to three years.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York met with Ms. Arteaga at City Hall last week and posted a video on social media expressing concern about the health care cuts. Democrats have sought to highlight the issue ahead of the midterm elections in November.
Republicans like Representative Mike Lawler have defended the cuts, arguing that they reined in wasteful programs. A spokesman for Mr. Lawler, who is facing a competitive race in the Hudson Valley, said that Gov. Kathy Hochul “built a health care program no other state in the country runs, spent New York into a corner and now wants to blame Washington when the bill comes due.”
Bill Hammond, a health care policy analyst at the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank, said the Essential Plan was unsustainable under the previous rules. Those losing coverage have incomes between 200 percent and 250 percent of the federal poverty level, or between $31,900 and $39,900 for a single adult.
“I think it’s reasonable to ask people in that range to pay more,” he said.
Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, has said that she fought to preserve the plan for more than one million people with lower incomes. Nicolette Simmonds, a spokeswoman for the governor, said that the state was helping people find new coverage.
“Make no mistake: The devastation families are experiencing is a direct result of Republicans’ callous vote,” Ms. Simmonds said, “and the governor will continue to do everything in her power to ensure New Yorkers are protected.”
Some state lawmakers had called on Ms. Hochul to provide state funding to prevent people from losing coverage, but it was not included in the state budget deal earlier this year. Keeping those 450,000 people on the plan could have cost more than $2 billion annually, experts said.
Mary Leming, a part-time teacher and editor who lives in Stony Brook on Long Island, lost her coverage last month and signed up for a plan on the state marketplace that costs more than $800 per month. She puts it on her credit card.
“That is not in my budget,” she said.
The new plan is worse than her old one, she said, and her dermatologist does not accept it. “I’ll have to pay out of pocket,” she said.
New York City’s public hospital system could be further strained by an influx of uninsured people.
Dr. Jonathan Jiménez is a family physician and executive director of NYC Care, a program overseen by the hospital system that provides low-cost and free services to those without insurance. He said he was worried about those who will delay preventive care and end up in hospitals.
“That’s where you see the impact of not having access,” he said. “People in their 40s or 50s showing up with a massive stroke and they had hypertension, but they weren’t connected to care. Those are all preventable deaths.”
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10) What’s Happening in Kansas Should Alarm Us All
By M. Gessen, Aug. 13, 2026
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Kansas and Colorado
Anne Vetter for The New York Times
On Feb. 25, Siobhan Kirchstein received an official letter from the Kansas Division of Vehicles instructing her to surrender her driver’s license. She was one of hundreds of Kansans who received such letters when Senate Bill 244, a hastily passed piece of legislation, invalidated driver’s licenses on which the gender marker did not match the holder’s sex as assigned at birth.
“Additionally, please note that the Legislature did not include a grace period for updating credentials,” the letter said. “This means that once the law is officially enacted, your current credential will be invalid immediately.” The law was going into effect the next day.
Kirchstein, who is 41, had transitioned in 2023. She had changed her legal name and her gender marker in the Social Security system, on her passport card and on her Kansas driver’s license. It required jumping through a lot of bureaucratic hoops — the name change alone required a court hearing and proof that Kirchstein had notified her bank, credit card company, landlord and others — but it was worth it, to make it official.
Now she considered disobeying the instruction from the Division of Vehicles. She went down some internet rabbit holes to figure out what the consequences might be. It appeared that if she was caught driving with an invalid license, she would be fined and sent to jail for five days; if caught doing it more than twice, she would face three months in jail. She’d heard that Kansas might be placing transgender women in men’s prisons, and she feared violence, even rape. So, while some friends wondered aloud whether the state was really going to enforce the new law, Kirchstein decided to comply.
Afraid of getting pulled over, she asked a friend to drive her the next day. At the Division of Vehicles, located in a mall across from a Burger King and next to the Kaw Valley Bridge Club, she handed a clerk the letter she had received. Without looking at her, the clerk made a notation and sent Kirchstein to wait to be called. The next staff person didn’t look at her either — just took her paperwork and, a few minutes later, handed her a temporary paper license with the “M” gender marker. Kirchstein started crying. As she walked toward the exit, she thought that she could see it in the faces of many of the people standing in line: They’d gotten the letter, too.
“We apologize for the inconvenience this causes you,” the letter said.
Some of the words or expressions in this article may at first blush seem hyperbolic. One of them is “fascism.” That’s how Kirschstein characterized the process when we met in Lawrence in July: “It was soft fascism.” It was. Fascism usually begins with redefining the nation by excluding certain groups, which are branded threats to national health and unity. The Trump administration has fixated on two groups most of all — immigrants and trans people — in just this way, smearing us (I am a member of both groups) as predatory, sick, at once subhuman and terrifyingly powerful. Even before Donald Trump was elected for the second time, more than half the states had considered or passed legislation limiting the rights of trans people. The process has intensified in the last year and a half, and the law enacted in Kansas in February is one of the most restrictive pieces of anti-trans legislation passed in any state so far.
The law, Senate Bill 244, redefined “gender” to mean “biological sex at birth” and directed state agencies to revoke and reissue driver’s licenses and birth certificates that had previously been changed to align with people’s identities. It also directed all government and public buildings to designate “multiple-occupancy private spaces” — bathrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms — as reserved for one sex. Like the infamous 2021 Texas law that enabled ordinary people to sue any person perceived as helping someone get an abortion, S.B. 244 created a bounty system, allowing people in Kansas to sue, for “actual damages or liquidated damages in the amount of $1,000, as well as declaratory and injunctive relief,” anyone they suspected of violating the bathroom provision.
With the possible exception of Lawrence (and even Lawrence is a stretch), Kansas is a place where a person cannot survive without a car — can’t go to work, can’t shop for groceries, never mind see friends or go to a movie. And let’s talk about the bathrooms. All trans people are accustomed to some level of stress when it comes to bathrooms. Take me, a person fortunate enough to live in a blue state and work in a supportive environment. I prefer not to use the men’s room at work lest my presence discomfit male colleagues who know that I was assigned female at birth, and I prefer not to use the women’s room lest my presence discomfit women who don’t know me and would perceive me as male. The New York Times building has many single-occupancy bathrooms designated as “gender-neutral.” They are on different floors than the one where I work, and on a couple of occasions, during high-traffic times in the building, I’ve been late for a meeting because I was stuck waiting for an elevator. That is a minor inconvenience.
Now take a trans person in Kansas. Matthew Neumann, the executive director (and until recently the sole employee) of the L.G.B.T.Q. Foundation of Kansas, told me that his organization had heard from one trans man who was fired for leaving the state building where he worked to use the bathroom in another building. Another trans man, who switched to using the women’s bathroom pre-emptively, explains the law to anyone he encounters there, lest that person be startled by his presence. Imagine having to come out to strangers this way every time you have to pee. Alternatively, imagine being unable to use a bathroom outside your home. Then imagine having to choose between not driving, because your license is invalid, and outing yourself as trans every time you enter a club, buy an alcoholic beverage, go to a building where security personnel check ID (an office building, your kid’s school), vote (Kansas is one of 10 states that require so-called strict photo ID to vote), rent a car, check into a hotel or are stopped for a traffic violation.
Which brings me back to the word “fascism.” In 1938, Nazi Germany passed a law requiring Jews to add a specific middle name to their identity documents — Israel for men, Sara for women — so that they could be easily identifiable. “It would be laughable, if one couldn’t lose one’s reason over it,” the German Jewish linguist Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary at the time.
“I got the hint. I left.” I met Olivia Perdue at a roadside Panera Bread not far from her home in Missouri, where she had moved a week earlier. Perdue laid a half-dozen laminated ID cards on the greasy glossy table in front of us. “The V.A. thinks I’m female, the F.A.A. thinks I’m female, the Social Security Administration thinks I’m female, the state of Missouri thinks I’m male.”
A study by the Williams Institute found that about 21 percent of trans Americans have served in the armed forces, more than double the national average. In Perdue’s age group, the percentage may be even higher. She signed up for the Army right out of college, in 2016, soon after President Barack Obama’s administration announced a new policy allowing transgender troops to serve openly and to get gender-affirming care. She was out to all her friends but had not transitioned medically. The recruiter advised enlisting as a man and coming out once she was already in the service. The military had guidelines, an established process for transitioning troops, and this process could require one to stay in one place for a year or more. Perdue decided to wait until after basic training, then until after officer school, then until after her first deployment — and then it was March 2019, she was in the woods in Poland, scrolling through Reddit, and she learned that the Pentagon was going to make good on President Trump’s 2017 promise to ban trans troops.
Lieutenant Perdue had less than a month before the new policy went into effect. She got her official diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” just two days before the deadline. She started hormones in March 2021. But, she told me, “I’d seen the writing on the wall.” Yes, Joe Biden was by then president and things might change again (they did), but then they could change right back (they have). Perdue decided to get out of the military while she was still young enough to start a civilian career.
She moved to Manhattan, Kan., and enrolled in Kansas State University’s aviation program. In February 2025 she received her certification as a flight instructor. But she had not considered that flight instruction is, as she puts it, a “very public-facing job.” Perdue’s résumé gets her a lot of first interviews. She has traveled all over the country for them. And she has learned to recognize a look. “Their eyes kind of dim once they realize you are a trans person,” she said. They seem to think that their customers will not want to learn flying from a trans woman who doesn’t particularly try to pass — and at 6-foot-4, probably couldn’t. The one job she was offered, in New Jersey, paid so little that she couldn’t afford to take it.
Perdue changed her name and the gender marker on all her documents in 2022. In 2023, the Kansas Legislature passed Senate Bill 180, which backers called the “women’s bill of rights.” It defined sex as biological and binary and decreed that “‘female’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova, and a ‘male’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.” (It was, in other words, an earlier version of an executive order Trump signed on the first day of his second term in office; that was titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”) The Democratic governor of Kansas, Laura Kelly, vetoed the bill. The Legislature overrode the veto.
Perdue didn’t think the new law would affect her — it seemed like a symbolic pronouncement. Then the state’s attorney general, Kris Kobach, a longtime Trump ally, sued to bar state agencies from allowing the use of gender markers different from the sex people were assigned at birth. He claimed that he was trying to enforce S.B. 180. A court temporarily granted his request. Perdue, meanwhile, moved into a new house and excitedly sent away for a driver’s license with the new address. The license came back with the gender marker “M.”
In 2025, a state appeals court reversed the lower court’s decision. Perdue went back to the Division of Vehicles and got a license with the marker “F,” as on all her other ID cards. Less than a year later, the Legislature passed S.B. 244. Perdue got what trans Kansans refer to as the Letter — the same one Kirchstein got, informing her that her driver’s license would expire by the end of the day. It was 2:30 in the afternoon when she took the envelope out of her mailbox. She thought it was lucky that she had the day off — she got her new/old driver’s license with the “M” marker before close of business.
All this back-and-forth with the gender marker was absurd, and this is how Perdue experienced it: as ridiculous more than threatening. She had been living openly and happily in small-town Kansas for five years, and she didn’t see that changing. But she was also going through a divorce (Perdue married when she was 22, the same year she joined the military), which required going to court.
She pulled up a photo on her phone. It showed a bathroom door in the courthouse, painted institutional yellow. A printed notice attached with blue masking tape summarized the bathroom provisions of S.B. 244 and warned: “Any violation of this law may subject the individual to civil and criminal penalties.” It no longer seemed so ridiculous.
Perdue moved in with her boyfriend, a trans man, in Missouri, but both of them realize that this is probably only a temporary solution. “The problem is that Kansas is kind of a test case,” she told me. “It shows what’s possible.” Missouri, where Republicans hold both houses of the legislature and the Statehouse, had considered its own driver’s license and bathroom bills. The couple have been talking about moving to Chicago. In the meantime, Perdue is working as a caregiver and studying to be an airplane mechanic, a less public position in which she hopes she will be more employable.
Some days are happy. On July 7, I went to the Douglas County courthouse in Lawrence to attend a name-change hearing. The petitioner was a 36-year-old trans woman whose last name was Baney and whose legal first name, which she wanted to change, sounded like a parody of a macho all-American name. She was very nervous. She had been in a courtroom only once before, for a custody hearing, and that hadn’t gone well: She gets her 7-year-old daughter only every other weekend.
The judge, Mark Simpson, had a kind voice. He asked a series of yes-or-no questions, establishing that Baney was a resident of Kansas and had given proper notice of her name change. Baney, wearing a flowy white and blue dress, fidgeted behind the podium. The judge signed her petition and said, “Congratulations. Congratulations, Tracy!”
Later Baney emailed me about that “Congratulations, Tracy!” line: “That was so amazing I hope I never forget it.” As we left the courthouse, she exclaimed excitedly, “My mother is going to hate this!”
Baney, who grew up with her mother in Nebraska, was around 13 when she was caught in the girls’ locker room trying on someone’s clothes. Things at home got tense enough that she ended up moving to Kansas to live with her father, a Trump-voting, immigrant-hating, gun-toting man, and he became the center of her world. She enlisted and, as a gift from her father, got a large tattoo of a bald eagle wrapped in an American flag with dog tags around its neck; the low-cut dress she wore to her name-change hearing exposed most of it. After her father died four years ago, Baney started therapy, began identifying as trans and bisexual, and began her medical transition. Now she says she is the happiest she has been in her adult life. She has found a community in Lawrence. She has a boyfriend who works as a custodian at the same large manufacturing plant where she works in maintenance; they take lunch together. It’s hard to square that happiness — and that name-change hearing — with the new anti-trans law and the fear it has generated. “I have whiplash,” she told me.
I had whiplash, too. It’s as if there are two Kansases — a kind, loving Kansas where neighbors accept one another and churches offer sanctuary to immigrants and create summer camps for queer kids. I visited such a summer camp outside of Wichita on the first day of its weeklong session. Ninety-seven middle schoolers and high schoolers, with hair every shade of the rainbow and more sartorial finery than one might see at a prom, had been delivered to Camp Sunflower by their parents, who placed their progeny’s duffel bags in the designated pile and handed over their medication bottles and prescriptions to the designated staff members. Amanda Mogoi, a straight married mother of three who runs a Wichita clinic that provides care to some 4,000 trans people, was on hand to set up the orderly distribution of whatever antidepressants, A.D.H.D. medication or hormones the campers had been prescribed.
Mogoi’s clinic has a decorative fish tank filled with figurines of queer mermaids, and every room features a mural of a queer hero: Elliot Page, Harvey Milk, Jonathan Van Ness — and the Obamas. When S.B. 244 passed, Mogoi hastily organized a wedding in the clinic’s lobby: One of the nurse practitioners was engaged to a trans man, and they wanted to get married in time to avoid his being marked as “F” on the marriage license. Now Mogoi is running for an open seat in the Kansas Legislature. Her slogan is “Midwest kindness, real solutions.”
And then there is Kris Kobach’s Kansas. Kobach’s website boasts that he brought the first case against the Obama administration over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents seeking broader powers to detain and deport. He sued the Biden administration repeatedly and challenged vaccine mandates in court. Kobach served as Kansas’ secretary of state from 2011 to 2019, and in that time he instituted some of the strictest voter ID regulations in the country. During the first Trump administration, he served as vice chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, an early institutional effort to sow doubt about the integrity of our elections. As attorney general, he has pursued a policy agenda as closely aligned with Trump’s as any in the country. Anti-trans legislation has been a centerpiece.
“I knew it was coming because they do something like this every year,” Abi Boatman, a state representative, told me. Boatman was appointed to fill a vacant seat at the beginning of the 2026 legislative session. She is the only out trans person in the Legislature, and only the second trans legislator in Kansas history. The court ruling that blocked Kobach’s early effort to prevent Kansans from changing their gender markers had come down after the previous legislative session ended. Now Republican state legislators used a maneuver known as gut and go, when the text of a pending bill is entirely replaced by something unrelated. The original S.B. 244 had concerned bail bonds; the Republican state representatives stripped that language out and replaced it with a set of anti-trans provisions, allowing legislators to drastically shorten public comment and testimony, leaving open, among others, the question of how schools and other public buildings should cover the expense of reconfiguring their facilities in the manner the law required. “I’m not saying that transgender rights is not a divisive issue,” Boatman told me. “I’m saying most Kansans don’t want to spend millions of dollars to fix bathrooms that don’t need to be fixed.”
I asked Boatman how she was managing after the law was enacted. The Kansas State Capitol in Topeka is a grand 19th-century building whose ornate frescoes, murals and exhibits attract droves of tourists daily. It’s also a public building that is subject to the bathroom provisions of S.B. 244. “I have my separate but equal bathroom,” Boatman said — the Capitol’s one single-occupancy bathroom, which doubles as a lactation room. (“So now you are pitting a breastfeeding woman against a trans woman,” Boatman told me ruefully.) One time there was a call of the House, a parliamentary procedure used to create a quorum. Boatman didn’t hear the call because she was on a different floor, awaiting her turn in the bathroom. Later, a fellow legislator called her out for having been absent. “I was using the only bathroom this Legislature has said I can use,” she said.
The State Capitol is one of a few major tourist attractions in Topeka. Another is the Westboro Baptist Church, infamous for spewing hate against gays, trans people, Jews, soldiers and many other groups, and for winning a 2011 Supreme Court case that secured its right to do so in audacious ways. The church displays hate messages in rotation on a giant marquee. (I won’t quote them, but if you hover over this phrase, you’ll see the URL the church uses.) Two houses stand across the street from the church, one painted the rainbow colors of the L.G.B.T.Q. flag, the other pink, white and blue, the colors of the trans flag. Two visions of Kansas, silently facing off day after day.
Another tourist attraction in Topeka, less than 10 minutes’ drive from Boatman’s “separate but equal” bathroom, is the building that once housed Monroe Elementary, the school at the center of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The building is now a museum managed by the National Park Service. It’s a good place to learn about the long history of Kansas choosing what kind of state it wanted to be. In the 19th century, Kansas heeded the abolitionist John Brown’s call to join the union as a free state. After the Civil War, the Black population of the state grew and grew, but it took a decision of the Supreme Court to end segregation in Kansas. For the purposes of this article, it seems important to note that the winning argument in Brown v. Board of Education was likely to have been conceived in 1944 by Pauli Murray, then a Howard University law student who would go on to become a leading civil rights attorney and also a person who repeatedly sought and was denied gender-affirming care.
Charles, who asked me to use only his first name, lives in one of those places in Kansas where the nearest post office is a couple of towns over and the nearest town is a ghost town. Geographically speaking, most of Kansas fits this description. Charles grew up here. He lived out on the West Coast for eight years — this was after he left the evangelical church in which he was raised — but 18 years ago he returned to Kansas for “family, chosen family, price of land, warm weather, thunderstorms, the night sky, the tallgrass prairie, wide horizons,” as he told me. “The family (relatives) bit of that didn’t turn out so well,” he added later in a text message, “but I still love the rest of it.” He and his mother have barely spoken since he came out to her as trans in 2023 — four years after he actually started his transition. But his next-door neighbor, who is also his boss at the cattle ranch where he has worked for most of the last dozen years, is supportive, as are friends.
The night before Charles went in to change his driver’s license, he couldn’t sleep. He got up and gave himself an extra-short haircut. In the morning he put on a T-shirt that accentuated his cattle-rancher muscles. A friend drove him the roughly 30 miles to Emporia, where the Division of Vehicles shares a mostly deserted mall with a dialysis center. When it came time to take his picture, Charles scowled as best he could, to underscore the absurdity of his face appearing on a driver’s license with an “F” gender marker.
Now he regrets changing the license. Charles had assumed that he would get the Letter, because when he renewed his license in January, a clerk told him that his license had been “flagged,” and Charles figured it was because he’d changed his gender marker back in 2022. So when the Legislature overrode the governor’s veto, he texted his boss, alerting him that he might not have a valid driver’s license the next day. The boss told him to stay on the clock while he took care of the paperwork, the boss’s small way of trying to make things better. But then days passed, and the Letter never came, and Charles wonders if it ever would have.
Fascism works not only by the passage of arbitrary, dehumanizing laws but by the arbitrary, dehumanizing enforcement of the laws. Only about 1,700 people have received the Letter; this is certainly only a fraction of Kansans who have changed their gender marker. Several people who have not yet received it — including Abi Boatman, the legislator — told me that they regularly checked the state website to see if their old license still came up as valid. If so, is it safe to drive with it? The license is still illegal under the law. Amanda Mogoi, who runs the clinic in Wichita, told me that some of her trans patients have received the Letter three times while most haven’t received it once; some who tried to update their driver’s licenses without the Letter weren’t able to.
On May 5, Kris Ripper, a trans woman, was stopped while driving home from work for failing to turn on her headlights in the rain. The police officer repeatedly asked her why her license indicated that she was male; she explained that the law required it. Almost two months later she found out that she had been charged with a misdemeanor for driving without a valid license. (Ripper talked to another trans reporter about her predicament, but declined to speak with me.) The charge was eventually dropped, but not before she was threatened with a $1,000 fine and jail time.
In the 1930s, a German Jewish jurist named Ernst Fraenkel developed a model he called the dual state. It is a state in which some people are subjected to increasingly restrictive laws that are applied arbitrarily while others continue to live in a regular, rules-based society. Fraenkel referred to the former as the prerogative state — a state whose defining characteristic is the authorities’ exercise of their prerogatives — and the latter the normative state. Fraenkel’s theory has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the United States during Trump’s second term, probably because it helps many Americans square their understanding of a rising autocracy with their subjective experience of daily life continuing as before. In Nazi Germany, the prerogative state was small: It encompassed some 600,000 Jews and even smaller numbers of Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, members of the Communist Party and the physically and mentally disabled. In the United States, Black people, Indigenous people and many immigrants, at a minimum, have long — have always — experienced state power as arbitrary and violent. That’s a much larger group. But even so, when the prerogative state expands, it shocks us: When a white U.S. citizen is shot by an immigration agent, or when a white person in Kansas wakes up to find out that they no longer have a valid ID — in a sense, to find that they are now undocumented in their own country.
When S.B. 244 passed, Amanda Mogoi started giving her patients letters to carry around attesting to their gender-affirming treatment, and including her nursing license number and contact information. She learned this approach from her husband, a Kenyan immigrant. Even though he has legally lived in the United States for two decades, until recently, he carried what Mogoi describes as a giant accordion folder in his car, containing his immigration papers, his nurse-practitioner diploma, their marriage license, photographs of their family and more. It came in handy, Mogoi said, when he was “sundowned out of a town” where he had gone to see a patient. She added, “I’m afraid that’s where we are headed with our trans folks.”
It was striking to hear Mogoi make that comparison. But this is part of the dual-state effect: the shocking realization that you can suddenly be thrown into the category of people who can’t drive down a country road without risking running afoul of the rules. And once you are in that category, you can’t hide. Charles, for example, lives 25 miles from where he grew up. People here have known him since childhood. Many have been either supportive or quietly accepting of his transition. But that was before the Kansas attorney general and the U.S. president declared war on trans people. “It worries me sometimes,” Charles said. “It’s a rural area. And everybody’s got guns.”
“This is a state-created refugee crisis,” said Samantha Boucher, a political organizer based in Denver. Boucher used to work in disaster relief. “You know how some trans people overcompensate?” she asked me by way of explaining why, before transitioning, she had done the manliest of jobs in the scariest of situations. When S.B. 244 passed, she called a friend, a straight cis man she’d worked with on several disaster deployments, and together they started a rescue effort she named Operation Lifeboat. There is no public database of people in Kansas who are trans or who opted to change their gender markers, but it’s possible to use publicly available information to find people who have legally changed their first names. Using this and other creative sleuthing, Operation Lifeboat did a text blast to roughly 30,000 people who were likely to be trans or friends of the trans community, and several hundred responded to ask Operation Lifeboat for help.
I have written about many displaced people in different parts of the world. One thing I’ve learned is that the people who leave first are usually those who have resources, those who have connections elsewhere, those who have traveled. Generally speaking, these are not the people who are hit hardest by whatever disaster they are escaping. In Kansas, for example, it’s the working-class people who have jobs that require a driver’s license, the people whose bathroom breaks are timed, the people who can’t afford to pay a fine if they are issued a citation who are likely to feel the effects of S.B. 244 most acutely. “The people who call us are usually flat broke and desperate,” said Keira Richards, who is also based in Colorado and runs another organization for displaced trans people, the Trans Continental Pipeline. In November 2023, during an event for Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual commemoration of victims of anti-trans violence, Richards and her friends noticed a lot of new arrivals. That year, state legislatures across the country considered a record-breaking 615 anti-trans laws and passed 87 of them, according to the research organization Trans Legislation Tracker. (In 2025, the group found that well over 1,000 anti-trans bills were considered and 126 passed.) These included bathroom bills; gender marker bills; bills banning drag, books and gender-inclusive language in schools; and bills restricting access to gender-affirming care. So trans people and their families were leaving states like Texas, Utah and Idaho. Many of them were moving next door, to blue Colorado.
“And then I was standing on a picnic table saying, ‘What if we created a Welcome Wagon?’” At the time Richards, who is now 27, was working in the office of the Colorado state auditor. She began with research. “And in the process I learned how horrible it was in other places. I met a girl who just got in her car and started driving.” This was a truck driver from Texas. Someone from Missouri got a one-way ticket to Denver, where they knew no one. Those people needed a lot more than a Welcome Wagon — they needed help deciding where to settle; they needed transportation and temporary housing; they needed help finding doctors, schools and other resources at their destination. Richards registered a nonprofit organization, quit her job, and started raising money by selling patches at punk music concerts. By June 2024, she had raised less than $6,000. Then Trump got re-elected and donations started pouring in, along with requests for help. The Trans Continental Pipeline has now raised more than $1.5 million, employs two part-time staff members and dozens of volunteers. It has assisted some 400 people, almost 100 of them with what Richards calls “full relocation,” and it has helped 10 similar organizations get off the ground. Most of their clients — internally known as trans-plants — left Texas, Oklahoma and Florida, though since the passage of S.B. 244, a majority of cases have come from Kansas.
Take, for example, D., A. and T., three trans men who asked me not to use their full names, who were part of a large polycule in Lawrence.
When S.B. 244 passed, D. said that he had to leave Kansas. He could not even contemplate being outed. A. decided to go with him. T. wasn’t sure he was emotionally equipped to move. “Everyone I care about is in Kansas,” he told me. “But then we were having a shitload of ICE activity in tiny little Lawrence. I get around on a mobility scooter, I look vaguely Hispanic, even though I’m not, and I look clearly queer.” It was T. who filled out an application on the Trans Continental Pipeline website.
A recent report conducted by the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law showed that almost half of the transgender Americans surveyed were considering leaving or had already left their state or the country. Most of them cited the “anti-trans climate” in their state. Many can’t leave, though. Tracy Baney, the woman whose name-change hearing I attended, can’t leave because her 7-year-old daughter is in Kansas.
Abi Boatman, the state legislator, has already had to start her life from scratch once. Back in 2011 — after the end of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy but before the Obama administration allowed trans people to serve openly in the military — Boatman, who had been in the service for more than a decade, came out and was forced to take a medical discharge. Her wife took the kids and left. Only since last fall has Boatman had contact with her older child, and it has been as exhilarating and as difficult as anything she could have imagined. In April, Boatman remarried; she met her wife at an ICE protest in 2018. They held the ceremony on their front porch in Wichita. “This is where I’ve made my life,” she told me on that same front porch. “This is where I live. I don’t think I should have to leave just because some Republican lawmakers think I don’t belong here.”
Lawrence is a town full of cheap vintage shops and queer-friendly bars, a town where there are drag shows every week, a town where people making very little money can afford to live — and when they fall short, the community will reliably step in to cover the night’s drinks or the month’s rent. These are some of the things Siobhan Kirchstein loves about it: her friends at Lawrence Pride, the mutual aid, the performance classes she takes with a drag king named Johnny Diablo, the queer pool tournament in which she has had some excellent showings and the life-work balance she found here since dropping out of her master’s program in religious studies and taking a job as a custodian in one of the lab buildings at the University of Kansas.
Two days after I interviewed Kirchstein at Harbour Lights, the bar that hosts the queer pool tournament, and just over four months after she got the Letter about her driver’s license, she got another letter. “I am reaching out to you from human resources in response to a report received that I have an obligation to follow up on,” it said. “The report received was that you used a restroom in Parker Hall on the first floor in violation of Kansas Senate Bill 244 on June 22, 2026.”
Kirchstein was stunned. Everyone in the building — the people she works with, the people she cleans up after — knows her. Everyone, she thought, had her back. At the beginning, the letter said, “I wish to preface this email by acknowledging this is a sensitive matter and my intention in reaching out is to provide awareness of the report and the law, extend to you an opportunity to be heard, and if helpful, share resources.” Three paragraphs down, it said, “Regardless, please ensure you are adhering to S.B. 244.”
It reminded me of an extraordinary artifact on display at the Brown v. Board of Education museum. It’s a letter from the Public Schools of Topeka to one of the Black teachers in the district. In anticipation of the Supreme Court ordering the desegregation of schools, it terminates her employment, because, it says, white parents probably aren’t going to want a Black teacher in the classroom. “I think I understand that all of you must be under considerable strain, and I sympathize with the uncertainties and inconveniences which you must experience,” the letter said. It’s that same way of putting a concerned face on dehumanizing demands that Kirchstein described as “soft fascism” the first time we spoke.
Kirchstein’s supervisor suggested she take the afternoon off. After a couple of hours, she made a decision. She forwarded the email she had received to me and a reporter at The Lawrence Times, and left a request for representation on the website of the A.C.L.U. of Kansas. Then she headed over to Harbour Lights to figure out her next steps. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was going to fight.
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11) Oklahoma Becomes First of Three States to Execute Inmates on the Same Day
Executions were also scheduled in Alabama and Tennessee, which faces scrutiny over a failed execution last month.
By Emily Cochrane, Reporting from Nashville, Aug. 13, 2026
Alabama is one of three states planning to carry out executions by lethal injection on Thursday. Dave Martin/Associated Press
Oklahoma became the first of three states to execute an inmate on Thursday using lethal injection, in what would be the first time in more than a decade that three people on death row are killed on the same day.
Tennessee was scheduled to carry out its execution at the same time, while the execution in Alabama was planned for the early evening.
Nationally, states are on track to execute far fewer people in 2026 than in previous years. Public support for capital punishment is at its lowest level in decades, according to Gallup polls, even as the Trump administration has called the death penalty an “essential tool for deterring and punishing” horrific crimes.
Each of the three men scheduled to die Thursday was convicted of murder. In Tennessee, Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, was convicted of the 1985 stabbing and murder of a motel maid. In Oklahoma, Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, was convicted of fatally shooting his then-girlfriend in 2003. In Alabama, Jeremy Williams, 42, pleaded guilty to the sexual assault and murder of a 5-year-old girl in 2021.
Officials at the Oklahoma Department of Corrections confirmed that Mr. Cuesta-Rodriguez died at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, about 130 miles east of Oklahoma City. He was pronounced dead at 10:13 a.m.
Officials in Tennessee had convened Thursday for their execution. That procedure was expected to be closely watched because it comes after officials called off the scheduled lethal injection in May of Tony Carruthers, a man convicted of three 1993 murders, when medical staff were unable to find a vein. Mr. Carruthers received a yearlong reprieve from Gov. Bill Lee.
Maria DeLiberato, a lawyer for Mr. Carruthers who witnessed the series of failed attempts to insert a line for the lethal drug, later wrote in The New York Times that it was an agonizing experience that lasted more than an hour.
Mr. Hines’s lawyers have asserted that the state’s lethal injection procedure could violate the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. In one court filing, the state of Tennessee responded that “the U.S. and Tennessee Constitutions do not demand avoidance of all pain in executions.”
Mr. Hines was found guilty in 1986 of the stabbing death of Catherine Jenkins at the Kingston Springs motel where she had worked as a maid. He has maintained his innocence and unsuccessfully fought for a new trial in Tennessee.
Tennessee restarted executions in 2025 after a pause begun in 2022 when it admitted that its lethal injection drugs had not been properly tested. Mr. Hines is part of a lawsuit challenging the new injection procedure.
Lawyers for Mr. Hines have also criticized state officials for not disclosing more information about the failed execution of Mr. Carruthers. The state also won’t disclose whether the doctor who was unable to administer the lethal drugs to Mr. Carruthers would be tending to Mr. Hines.
Tennessee officials say that state procedure bars the identification of any medical staff involved in an execution.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday declined to intervene in Mr. Hines’s case.
Only six states have plans to carry out capital punishment this year. Florida remains by far the most aggressive in its use of the death penalty, accounting for 12 of the 20 executions carried out so far this year.
Oklahoma has executed three people this year. Mr. Cuesta-Rodriguez, the inmate executed Thursday, said at a recent hearing that he did not want clemency, according to local reports. Instead, he said he wanted to apologize to the surviving children of Olimpia Fisher, 43, his then-girlfriend. After a string of domestic assaults, he shot and killed her during a confrontation.
In Alabama, Mr. Williams will be the state’s first person executed this year after the Supreme Court issued a rare decision in June blocking the scheduled execution of another inmate by nitrogen gas. Mr. Williams dropped an appeal, effectively requesting that the death penalty be carried out.
Ann E. Marimow contributed reporting from Washington.
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12) U.S. Investigated Left-Leaning Groups During Minnesota Immigration Crackdown
The government conducted expansive surveillance, infiltrated group chats and obtained financial records of organizations never accused of crimes.
By Alan Feuer and Ernesto Londoño, Aug. 13, 2026
Alan Feuer reported from New York, and Ernesto Londoño from St. Paul, Minn.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/13/us/politics/dhs-inquiry-immigration-protests-minnesota.html
People marched through downtown Minneapolis in late January to protest the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Four days after Alex Pretti was fatally shot while filming officers taking part in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota, the Homeland Security Department quietly opened an investigation at its office in St. Paul.
The target was not the Border Patrol agents who had killed Mr. Pretti, a 37-year-old government nurse, in late January. Instead, it was several left-leaning political organizations — labor unions, a climate change group, socialist collectives — that investigators believed had provided help and money to what they described as the “violent opportunists and agitators” on the street, according to newly released government documents.
As part of their inquiry, the documents show, homeland security officials used an array of invasive tactics during the first half of this year to gather information on many groups and individuals who were never accused of crimes, crossing the line that has traditionally stood between investigating criminal activity and political dissent.
In one instance, officials used administrative subpoenas to obtain more than three years of financial records from the Sunrise Movement, an environmental action group, and a labor union, the Communications Workers of America. That time frame went well beyond the civil unrest in Minnesota, which was prompted by the deployment of thousands of immigration agents to the state during the winter.
In another, investigators scrutinized three years’ worth of wire transfers made by the nation’s biggest health care workers union, the Service Employees International Union, in what they referred to as an inquiry into “domestic terrorist financing.”
The documents further detailed an expansive covert surveillance operation in which undercover agents spied on protesters and organizers at meetings held online, as well as in libraries, parks and churches, taking down not only what they said, but also their names and sometimes license plate numbers. The undercover agents also infiltrated group chats on Signal, listening as activists discussed coming demonstrations and their political opinions.
So far, none of the organizations targeted by the homeland security inquiry, conducted with the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, have faced charges. And yet, as the investigation moved forward, prosecutors showed grand jurors a PowerPoint slide asserting that 18 groups — including the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the country’s largest federation of labor unions — were part of a conspiracy to impede the work of immigration officers in Minnesota.
Ultimately, that supposed conspiracy led in June to the indictment of 15 people accused of interfering with law enforcement agents as members of the far-left movement known as antifa.
The Homeland Security Department did not respond to a message seeking comment. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to answer questions about the investigative tactics.
By its own account, the institutional left in Minnesota, especially the labor movement, played a central role in bringing out hundreds of thousands of people to march in protest of President Trump’s immigration crackdown in the state. But the demonstrations — and corresponding efforts to monitor the movements of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — were largely undertaken by ordinary residents, most of whom have said they were committed to peaceful resistance.
“While federal agents repeatedly broke the law, ordinary people exercised their First Amendment rights to protect their neighbors,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement. “The Trump administration is now trying to intimidate individuals and organizations who opposed his agenda.”
Some of the 15 people charged in the so-called antifa case did, in fact, belong to some of the unions and political organizations that faced scrutiny over several months during the spring and winter. But the newly released documents, which were disclosed as part of a motion asking for more details about the criminal inquiry, suggest that investigators used those tenuous connections to take a deep dive into the inner workings of the groups.
Kevin Riach, the lawyer who filed the motion, in Federal District Court in Minnesota, wrote that the homeland security investigation into the interference with federal agents “extended far beyond any potential threat to law enforcement safety.”
“It concluded, with no evidence (but obvious political animus),” he wrote, “that numerous Twin Cities unions and nonprofit organizations were involved in a widespread conspiracy,” adding that “it surveilled and surreptitiously gathered financial records generated by these organizations despite the lack of any connection between those organizations and criminal conduct.”
The investigation in some ways called to mind Cointelpro, the intrusive counterintelligence program that the F.B.I. ran against leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s under the leadership of the bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover.
The Minnesota surveillance reports in particular documented what largely appeared to be political activity protected by the First Amendment. They showed how undercover agents embedded themselves in a “noise protest” outside a hotel where immigration agents were staying and took down notes at other gatherings as demonstrators brainstormed ideas on how to protest the surge of officers who descended on Minnesota late last year.
Former federal prosecutors questioned why homeland security officials took the lead in a case that would typically be overseen by the F.B.I. Others said that the broad use of subpoenas targeting labor unions and other groups was unusual and concerning, especially if it turns out there was no evidence that the organizations were breaking the law.
“The government’s power to investigate is extraordinary, and with that power comes a responsibility to exercise care and restraint,” said Harry Jacobs, who resigned as the chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota in January in protest over the Trump administration’s handling of the killing of Renee Good.
“An investigation should begin with a legitimate basis to suspect criminal conduct, not with a chosen institution or group,” Mr. Jacobs added. “Prosecutors must follow the facts and the law wherever they lead, rather than select a target and work backwards to build a case.”
Several of the groups that were targeted in the inquiry, known as Operation Puppet Master, and in a follow-up investigation called Project Whipple Shield, declined to comment. (Whipple Shield is a reference to the Whipple Building, which served as a hub of the immigration operation.)
When Daniel N. Rosen, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, announced the indictment of the 15 purported antifa members two months ago, he chose his words carefully, insisting that the defendants had been charged only because each of them had “violently opposed” federal agents taking part in the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.
“Be assured,” he told reporters, “the Department of Justice and my U.S. attorney’s office has and will distinguish between lawful protest and criminal conduct.”
But what Mr. Rosen did not disclose that day was that the charges filed against the 15 defendants stemmed from a sprawling investigation. Its tentacles had touched the lives of scores of ordinary people — teachers, veterans, union members — who in many instances had gotten together to do little more than discuss monitoring ICE agents or abolishing ICE altogether.
The case in St. Paul, like others against ICE protesters, arose from a sweeping directive issued last year by Mr. Trump known as National Security Presidential Memo 7. The memo ordered a whole-of-government approach to stem what officials have described as a rising tide of left-wing political violence.
But former prosecutors and civil rights lawyers have criticized it for encouraging aggressive investigations and prosecutions of groups and people on the left for activities typically protected by free speech laws.
In drafting their indictment, prosecutors under Mr. Rosen focused on an organization called Direct Action Minnesota, or DAMN, an umbrella group that describes itself as a “decentralized coalition of working-class people engaged in various forms of community defense against the current federal occupation” in Minnesota. Prosecutors said that the group trained its members in how to use shields against law enforcement officers, conduct surveillance, plan events and mount “rapid mass mobilization” against actions by ICE officers.
The indictment details some behavior by protesters with ties to DAMN that clearly seems violent or obstructive.
For example, prosecutors said that on Jan. 23, demonstrators who had gathered at the Whipple Building threw ice blocks at law enforcement vehicles. They also formed a blockade, boxing federal agents into one area near the federal building. Weeks later, prosecutors added, some of the defendants put debris in a road outside the building, trying to block access to it.
But the indictment also notes that the defendants often relied on information gleaned from group chats whose members tracked and monitored vehicles going to and from the Whipple Building — behavior that is not necessarily illegal. Indeed, the federal judge overseeing the case, Katherine M. Menendez, has already issued an order in a separate civil proceeding saying that protesters cannot be arrested simply for following federal agents in their vehicles.
Nonetheless, some groups that organized and ran the group chats were targeted by the surveillance operation and later identified in the prosecutors’ grand jury presentation as being part of the conspiracy to interfere with ICE agents. Other members of the alleged conspiracy were said to include the local chapters of the S.E.I.U. and the Democratic Socialists of America, a state teachers’ union — and even the Grease Pit, a small bike shop in Minneapolis.
In his motion, Mr. Riach described how federal agents took down the license plate numbers of people who attended a protest at a church in Roseville, Minn., and used that information to obtain their names. The agents then searched social media for images of the people, compiling an “intel work-up” that included detailed personal information about them.
“None of these individuals did anything other than engage in protected First Amendment speech in a church meeting room,” Mr. Riach wrote. “Yet now their personal information is memorialized in a D.H.S. dossier.”
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