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See the full list of signers and add your name at letcubalive.info

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/opinion/cuba-government-us-trump.html

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Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.

After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.

Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.

In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.

The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.

In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.

Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.

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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-

Amazon Labor Union

Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.

ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.

But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:

Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!

On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.

ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.

ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.

No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-

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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli

Organization Support Letter

Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)

To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,

We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.

Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.

Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.

A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."

Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.

A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.

In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.

We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:

Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.

We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.

Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations

Endorsing Organizations:

Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.

Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:

https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/

IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:

PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast

FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement

CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net

CONTACT INFO:

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.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/funds-for-kevin-cooper?lid=lwlp5hn0n00i&utm_medium=email&utm_source=product&utm_campaign=t_email-campaign-update&

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 speaking at a rally in support of his reinstatement as Professor at Texas State University and in defense of free speech.

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

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/24/fired-for-advocating-socialism-professor-tom-alter-speaks-out/

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Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign

An appeal for financial support

May 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
on behalf of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign

Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky

By Monica Hill

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 Kagarlitsky

We, 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

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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

Prison Radio is a project of the Redwood Justice Fund (RJF), which is a California 501c3 (Tax ID no. 680334309) not-for-profit foundation dedicated to the defense of the environment and of civil and human rights secured by law. Prison Radio/Redwood Justice Fund PO Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94141

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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) A Trump Obsession That Carries a Cost for Democracy

In demanding steps to address the integrity of voting, President Trump persisted in relitigating his 2020 election defeat while finding ways to cast doubt on the 2026 outcome.

By Peter Baker, July 17, 2026

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and reported from Washington.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/us/politics/trump-elections-politics.html

President Trump seen on a screen inside the White House briefing room as he addressed the nation on Thursday night. Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Trump used a lot of alarming words on Thursday night as he addressed the American people about threats to the integrity of elections in the United States: “Deep state.” “Rigged and stolen.” “Conspiring.” “Manipulation.” “Corrupt.” “Fraud.” “Cover up.”

But the bottom-line message he clearly wanted to leave with the public was this: He is not a loser, regardless of the result of the 2020 election. There were dark forces at work to thwart him. And if his party loses this fall’s midterm election, he intimated, that may not be an honest outcome either.

Mr. Trump’s prime-time speech from the East Room of the White House was an astonishing spectacle featuring a president intent on persuading the country that its elections cannot be trusted, at least not the ones where he or his allies fall short. He cited selectively declassified documents to make sensational claims about vulnerabilities of the election system, although nothing he revealed proved any outcomes were actually changed.

The exercise underscored how much Mr. Trump in his second term has come to be obsessed with relitigating the 2020 election and finding ways to cast doubt on the 2026 election. In the 18 months since he returned to office, he has installed election deniers in key positions, sought to change the rules to make it harder to cast ballots, seized voting records in a bid to prove his conspiracy theories and purged officials who investigated his efforts to overturn his election defeat six years ago.

“It does feel a little like Captain Ahab in ‘Moby Dick,’” said Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. “He is just fixated on his claim that he didn’t lose the 2020 election. Armchair psychiatrists can say he doesn’t like losing, he can never admit he lost anything. But it’s clearly become an important part of his psyche and in some ways an important part of this administration.”

On one level, according to people close to him, Mr. Trump’s fixation on rewriting the history of 2020 is about salving the wounded ego of a man who constitutionally resists ever admitting that he has lost anything. He has made it a litmus test for anyone working for him to accede to, or at least not contradict, the lie that he won back then, not Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Trump has authorized investigations to revisit his many claims that have previously been debunked, inquiries seemingly aimed not at following wherever the facts may take them but in search of facts to back up his own unsubstantiated certitudes. It is hard to imagine that he would accept any investigation concluding that he lost fair and square.

But while part of this is about looking backward, it also is about looking forward. With Mr. Trump deeply unpopular, according to polls — just 37 percent approve of his performance in the latest Washington Post-Ipsos survey — his party faces a possible drubbing in congressional races in November. So Mr. Trump seems intent on laying a predicate that, at the least, could explain away a defeat and, at most, his critics fear, potentially justify direct intervention aimed at changing the results.

“It’s the standard approach to cast doubt on the electoral rules of the game where many populist authoritarians feel threatened by unpopularity at the polls or if the results declare them the loser at the ballot,” said Pippa Norris, who has taught political science at Harvard University for three decades and was the founding director of the Election Integrity Project. “Indeed, it’s been a leitmotif which the president has used for more than a decade now.”

Mr. Trump’s allies insist that he has well-founded reasons for his election conspiracy hunt, that Democrats, the news media, career officials and foreign governments all had cause to try to stop him from winning a second term and then hide their tracks. A self-serving establishment, they say, is protecting its own power and eager to take down a disruptive outsider in the form of Mr. Trump.

“The president passionately believes he was wronged in the 2020 election,” said Christopher Ruddy, his friend and chief executive of Newsmax Media, “and I think he is motivated for two reasons, to get vindication and to prevent future election irregularities.”

But some Republicans wish Mr. Trump would move on, seeing the issue as politically unhelpful in a campaign season when voters are focused on the cost of living and other matters close to home.

An Economist-YouGov poll last month found that Mr. Trump has persuaded 50 percent of Republicans that the 2020 election was rigged, but that is more of an article of faith among the president’s base than the broader electorate. While 66 percent of self-identified MAGA Republicans share that view, just 32 percent of other Republicans do and only 23 percent of independents.

Mr. Trump’s repeated forays into election denialism this term also reflect the change in his inner circle. While there were powerful voices in his first term who told him that his claims of election fraud were not true, most notably William P. Barr, then the attorney general, Mr. Trump this time is surrounded by advisers who either cheer him on or keep quiet.

“Clearly, there’s nobody in the White House who can say no to him; there’s no adult in the room,” said former Representative Barbara Comstock, Republican of Virginia and a longtime Trump critic. “They won’t say to him, ‘Mr. President, you lost the damn election. Why are we doing this again?’”

Indeed, would-be administration officials at the start of this term were asked point-blank during job interviews if they believed Mr. Trump won the 2020 election. Those who said no were generally not welcomed into the fold. Conversely, Democrats have now made a point of asking the same question during confirmation hearings of Trump nominees, leaving them struggling to find an answer under oath that does not anger the president.

“Do you deny that Joe Biden won the 2020 election?” Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, asked Jay Clayton, the president’s nominee for director of national intelligence, during a hearing this week.

“Senator, I’m not an election denier,” Mr. Clayton responded. “Joe Biden was certified as the president of the United States.”

Democrats noticed the use of the word “certified,” as opposed to “elected” or “won.” That has become an escape word for Trump nominees. Even the president does not deny that Mr. Biden was certified; he just claims that he should not have been.

Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, tried to pin Mr. Clayton down. “Who won the 2020 election?” he asked directly.

“I’ve answered it,” Mr. Clayton said. “I’ve answered it.”

“Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question, to have to indulge the president’s delusions?” Mr. Ossoff replied.

Mr. Trump’s laser focus on 2020 was evident in his speech on Thursday night. As he spun out assertions of Chinese hacking, illegally registered voters and cover-ups, Mr. Trump referred seven times to the 2020 election that he lost, albeit without an explicit claim that he won. He offered no concerns about the validity of the 2016 or 2024 elections that he won.

And while he suggested that China intervened in the election six years ago because it “wanted me to lose,” he made no mention of Russia’s intervention four years before that on his behalf. He used the words “China” or “Chinese” 20 times and mentioned Russia only once as part of a list of nations that have the capacity to hack election machines.

In fact, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that while China made nascent efforts to influence American opinion during the 2020 election, it largely stayed on the sidelines, while Russia mounted an expansive and aggressive campaign to help Mr. Trump win in 2016.

With just less than 16 weeks until the next election, the pressing issue is where Mr. Trump plans to take the matter. He used the speech to announce that he has ordered the F.B.I. and other agencies to investigate election interference. He also pushed Congress again to pass legislation to require proof of citizenship to register and photo identification to cast ballots. But Senate Republicans have made clear to him again and again that there are not enough votes to pass it.

The idea that Mr. Trump might opt to take action if the election does not go the way he wants it to is not unthinkable. In an interview with The New York Times in January, Mr. Trump said he regretted not heeding advisers who urged him to order the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states that he lost in 2020.

“Great damage has been done to our country,” he said on Thursday night. “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.”

The question for many Americans will be whom do they trust.

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2) U.S. Hits Bridges and a Control Tower in Country’s South

The U.S. military’s Central Command said the latest round of attacks had “hit dozens of Iranian military targets” but made no mention of civilian infrastructure.

By Leily Nikounazar, Shirin Hakim, Lara Jakes and Max Bearak, July 17, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/07/17/world/iran-war-trump-hormuz

A cluster of vessels at anchor in flat waters.

Vessels at anchor in May off the coast of Oman, about 60 miles from Greater Tunb island in the Strait of Hormuz. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Bridges, rail lines, power and water facilities and other targets in Iran, Kuwait and elsewhere in the Middle East were attacked in airstrikes on Friday as the United States and Iran escalated their weeklong crisis over the Strait of Hormuz.

Since President Trump declared a cease-fire agreement “over” more than a week ago, daily bombardments have escalated into some of the most widespread attacks since the war began in late February. The U.S. strikes have hit not just military targets but also logistics infrastructure that can also serve civilian needs, including a control tower at Iran’s third-largest port. Iran has attempted to strike similar targets in U.S.-allied Gulf countries.

Straining to resolve a war that has dragged on far longer than he predicted it would, and one that has done lasting damage to the global economy, President Trump has threatened to attack any even wider array of civilian infrastructure to try to force Iran’s leaders to make a deal. Such attacks could be considered a war crime, and Iranian officials have warned they will retaliate more broadly if the United States targets civilian infrastructure.

The U.S. military struck bridges and a port facility in Iran, according to Iranian state media, which said the targets included rail and road connections between the southern coast and the rest of the country. Strikes also hit a railway station near the Bandar Abbas naval base, and a control tower at the Chabahar port on the Gulf of Oman was also destroyed in an attack, according to Iran’s state broadcaster.

The U.S. military’s Central Command said it had hit the tower, describing it as being part of a maritime surveillance network that Iranian forces used to surveil shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. In a separate statement early Friday, the U.S. military said the latest round of American attacks had “hit dozens of Iranian military targets such as coastal surveillance and air defense sites, military logistics infrastructure and maritime capabilities.” The statement made no mention of civilian infrastructure.

Eight people were killed and 20 others wounded in the U.S. attacks across Iran, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported on Friday.

The Iranian military said it had retaliated by firing on Middle Eastern countries that hosted U.S. military facilities, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar. Kuwait’s government said a power plant and a water desalination facility were hit, igniting fires and damaging several generators. Kuwait’s army said several personnel were wounded by Iranian drone strikes on military facilities overnight.

Attack drones were also shot down early Friday in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region, according to a statement from the regional counterterrorism force. It did not identify the source of the drones, though Iraqi Kurdistan hosts U.S. forces and has repeatedly come under fire from Iran and Tehran-aligned Iraqi militias since the war began.

A tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, off the coast of Oman, was struck by a projectile on Friday, according to United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, a monitoring agency run by the British Navy. The ship reported minor damage and no crew members were harmed, the agency said.

The strait is a major conduit for the global oil and gas trade, and Iran has repeatedly fired on commercial ships as it battles the United States over control of the key waterway. The U.S. military this week resumed enforcement of a blockade of Iranian ports as part of its pressure campaign on Tehran.

The Iranian Energy Ministry issued a statement on Friday, carried by the state broadcaster, asking residents of southern provinces to shut off air-conditioning for an hour during peak periods of use. Temperatures in Bandar Abbas, the capital of Hormozgan Province, were forecast to top 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the coming days.

Here’s what else to know:

Bandar Abbas attacks: A teacher in the southern Iranian port city said in an interview that airstrikes there in recent days had largely targeted the airport and air force facilities, and the area where docks and naval forces were. “The ground was shaking,” the teacher said, asking to be identified by her first name, Marzieh, out of fear of government reprisal. “It is truly terrifying.”

Oil prices: Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, rose 1.5 percent on Friday, to between $85 and $86 a barrel. The renewed hostilities between the United States and Iran have caused shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz to largely halt.

Yeganeh Torbati, Erika Solomon and Jenny Gross contributed reporting.

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3) The King of the North Won’t Save Britain

By Tom Hazeldine, July 17, 2026

Mr. Hazeldine is the author of “The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country.” He wrote from London.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/opinion/andy-burnham-britain-prime-minister.html

A black-and-white photograph of Andy Burnham looking pensive.

Kin Cheung/Associated Press

So Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade will be Andy Burnham. A veteran of the New Labour administrations turned feel-good mayor, Mr. Burnham was the only candidate nominated by Labour lawmakers, who were panicked by dire local election results in May. He is now tasked with reviving the government’s popularity, which cratered under his grim-faced predecessor, Keir Starmer.

With his northern accent, casual attire and everyman persona, Mr. Burnham trades on his outsider status, a precious commodity in these antipolitical times. Extraordinarily, he returned to Parliament — where he started his political career — only last month. For nearly the past decade he served as mayor of Manchester, acquiring the moniker “King of the North.” Suggestive of fantasy TV more than insurgent regionalism, the title captures much of what Mr. Burnham offers the country: a chimera of upended London-centrism and the dispersal of power and prosperity.

Yet the King of the North has long been a creature of Westminster. Despite what Mr. Burnham calls “bad doses of impostor syndrome,” he positively glided into the corridors of power. This duality, at once regular guy and state functionary, is part of a pattern in which Mr. Burnham promises to break with orthodoxy only to cleave to it. The early signs suggest his premiership will be similar. But Britain is mired in economic stagnation and marinated in social distemper. It will take more than a Labour reset to fix its longstanding problems.

Born and raised in northwest England, the son of a receptionist and a telephone engineer, Mr. Burnham studied English literature at Cambridge University. At the age of 24 he became a parliamentary researcher for a prominent Labour lawmaker. After the 1997 landslide that brought New Labour to power, Mr. Burnham worked as a special adviser for a cabinet minister; Tony Blair then fast-tracked him to a safe seat in Greater Manchester. At 31, his political career was up and running.

In Parliament, Mr. Burnham’s record was strikingly loyalist. He voted for the Iraq war and, as a junior Home Office minister, took a tough approach to law and order. At the time, he was known in Westminster as Flog ’em and Burnham. Promoted to the cabinet under Gordon Brown, he pushed along New Labour’s ruinously expensive program to rebuild hospitals with private financing.

His ambitions, however, were bigger. When Labour was ejected from office in 2010, Mr. Burnham stood for party leader on a word salad of “aspirational socialism” and finished fourth. He ran again in 2015 as the bookmakers’ favorite, only to lose after the surprise surge of support for Jeremy Corbyn. Two years later, he found an election he could win closer to home, becoming the inaugural mayor of Greater Manchester.

The mayoralty comes with few powers. Its chief functions, according to the Oxford Economics consultancy, are “to argue for the region” and provide “a point of contact for private investors.” Mr. Burnham had found his level. The wider city-region, which has a population of 2.9 million, has recorded stronger growth than Britain’s other conurbations. Disposable incomes haven’t grown by much, though, and house-price inflation has left many residents behind. Still, there’s enough construction activity and service-sector buzz to call it a success story.

Mr. Burnham claims to have found a secret economic sauce, “business-friendly socialism,” or just plain “Manchesterism.” Yet his mayoralty will be chiefly remembered for two things: taking buses back under public control, which he had to be talked into, and his furious off-the-cuff reaction in 2020 to tougher lockdown restrictions imposed by the Boris Johnson government. Mr. Burnham thundered at how Westminster was “grinding people down.” For his impromptu defiance, the media gave him that “King of the North” epithet.

Yet the appellation wasn’t so much plucked from the ether as lab-grown by the man himself. Speaking at an event earlier that year, Mr. Burnham had daydreamed about “sitting in my ‘Game of Thrones’-type castle at the heart of the dominant Northern Powerhouse, opening my birthday telegram from the monarch of the south of England.” A Labour ally took his cue, joking that “Andy’s going be on the Iron Throne and King of the North.” The Manchester Evening News duly ran the headline.

Mr. Burnham’s fiery talk helped him to get comfortably re-elected as mayor, twice. But his eyes were increasingly trained elsewhere. As Mr. Starmer flailed in Downing Street, the Manchester man inserted himself into the conversation about who might replace him. Importantly, he was the only recognizable party figure whose popularity ratings weren’t sub-zero. But for a third tilt at the leadership, Mr. Burnham needed to be in Parliament. Eventually, a route back to Westminster — in the form of a special election for the Makerfield constituency, 20 miles west of Manchester — opened up.

Mr. Burnham’s campaign culminated in a leadership pitch that this was the “last chance” to “lay out a new path for Britain.” His victory offered proof of concept that — for now at least — his personal political brand can shore up Labour’s regional heartlands menaced by Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform U.K. Seeing the writing on the wall, Mr. Starmer announced his resignation. Mr. Burnham’s first move was to announce a branch office of 10 Downing Street in Manchester, as part of a broader suite of devolution.

Otherwise, Mr. Burnham’s rushed preparations for government have pointed to a broad continuity with the world of Mr. Starmer — and indeed that of Mr. Blair. He has recruited his New Labour contemporary James Purnell as chief of staff and retained Jonathan Powell, once a key plank of Mr. Blair’s Downing Street operation, as national security adviser. In policy terms, he’s committed to the previous administration’s stifling fiscal rules and harsh asylum-rule changes designed to make it harder for refugees to settle in the country, along with vague promises of economic growth.

Mr. Burnham’s shtick is decidedly provincial. But when pressed on foreign affairs during his previous run for the Labour leadership, he said he’d resign from frontbench politics if Mr. Corbyn withdrew Britain from NATO. In an article timed to coincide with the NATO summit in Turkey last week, he reaffirmed his attachment to Atlanticism, Britain’s nuclear deterrent, ramping up defense spending and underwriting Ukraine’s long-term security. While he has reiterated that Mr. Starmer had been “too slow” to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, his policy on Israel is impeccably conformist.

Labour wanted a bounce after Mr. Starmer. They’ve opted, in the absence of anything better, for a career Blairite with a northern soul and Whitehall brain. For the country, it looks a lot like more of the same.

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4) How to Abandon Your Climate Commitments and Get Away With it

Big business made big promises about saving the planet. Following through hasn’t been easy.

By David Gelles, July 17, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/climate/company-climate-change-commitments-renege.html

An illustration of a hand pulling back on a lever with a smokestack as the handle.

Antonio Giovanni Pinna

Not so long ago, many of America’s biggest companies were making bold promises about saving the planet.

They pledged to stop polluting, get off fossil fuels and use recyclable materials. Some even promised to reinvent their core business practices, speaking aspirationally about a new, more sustainable economy.

These goals were set, and trumpeted, by the companies making the phone in your pocket, the shoes on your feet and the food in your fridge — and others. Coca-Cola, a company that produces as much plastic trash as any in the world, even began talking about “a world without waste.”

Over the past few years, however, many of these environmental commitments have evaporated.

Some companies have changed the way they measure progress. Others postponed their deadlines for making change. One company said its customers simply didn’t care about the issue anymore.

Under President Biden, there was extraordinary pressure for big business to address climate change. The Trump administration is now pushing companies to abandon climate goals and encouraging the use of more oil, gas and coal, claiming that environmental initiatives are “woke” distractions that hamper economic growth.

But the waning climate ambition across corporate America often has an even simpler explanation: Many companies have concluded it is simply too difficult and too expensive to drastically reduce planet warming emissions, especially at a moment of rising energy demand.

A number of big corporations are still working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and become better stewards of the environment. Even some of the companies that have retreated on certain fronts continue to make progress in other areas.

Yet after years of ambitious corporate pledges, the business world is now confronted with a quiet retreat by some of the very companies that only recently boasted about their efforts to combat climate change and help the environment.

Here are the ways some of the biggest companies across industries did it.

Abandoned targets

Many companies have simply acknowledged they’ve missed the targets they had set for themselves.

In 2020, Walmart said it would slash its greenhouse gas emissions by more than a third within five years and by almost two-thirds within ten years, from a 2015 base line. But in December 2024, the company acknowledged it would miss the first target.

From Walmart’s fiscal-year 2025 Environmental, Social and Governance report:

Although we anticipate missing our 2025 emissions target, our absolute emissions and emissions intensity are down meaningfully from our 2015 baseline.

The company’s emissions had actually risen the year before, and Walmart said that achieving its goals would “require innovation and technology that is not available or economically viable, or fully scalable today.”

Walmart also said it would miss its recycling goals.

From the 2025 Walmart report:

… without a breakthrough in the cost and availability of recycled content, we do not anticipate meeting our recycled content and virgin material reduction goals.

“Progress is not always straightforward or linear,” the Walmart chief sustainability officer, Kathleen McLaughlin, said at the time.

JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, in 2021 said it would eliminate or offset all of its emissions within 20 years, saying that “anything less is not an option.”

But last year, after Attorney General Letitia James of New York sued the company, accusing it of making misleading statements about its climate goals, JBS had a new message.

It described its emissions targets as an “aspiration.” And, in an interview with Reuters, the company’s chief sustainability officer, Jason Weller, said, “It was never a promise that JBS was going to make this happen.” JBS, which settled the lawsuit last year, is now targeting a 70 percent reduction of emissions by 2050.

Other companies said they simply were no longer trying.

In 2021, Tractor Supply Co., which sells farm products, announced it would redesign its operations so that it stopped adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2040.

But in June 2024, the company backtracked, saying its customers opposed its involvement in social and environmental issues.

“We have heard from customers that we have disappointed them,” the company said in a statement on its website. “We have taken this feedback to heart.”

From a June 2024 statement by Tractor Supply Co.:

Going forward, we will ensure our activities and giving tie directly to our business. For instance, this means we will:

… Withdraw our carbon emission goals and focus on our land and water conservation efforts

Walmart, JBS and Tractor Supply declined to comment for this article.

Shifted goal posts

When it seemed like ambitious targets might not be met, some companies just moved the goal posts.

In 2021, Pepsi said it would gradually reduce emissions, with the goal of no longer adding greenhouse gases to the environment by 2040.

“The severe impacts from climate change are worsening, and we must accelerate the urgent systemic changes needed to address it,” Pepsi’s chief executive officer, Ramon Laguarta, said at the time.

But last year, it extended that deadline by a decade.

It also changed the year by which its emissions reductions would be measured to 2022 from 2015. This change was subtle, but since it set a higher base line — emissions were higher in 2022 than in 2015 — it meant the company would have to do nearly 20 percent less to meet the goal.

“Our goals must evolve with us to keep our ambition,” Mr. Laguarta said upon announcing the change.

Pepsi’s biggest rival did something similar.

Coca-Cola, the world’s biggest soda maker, once aimed to reduce emissions by a quarter by 2030, using a 2015 base line.

But in December 2024, the company reset the clock. It is now using 2019 as a base line to measure its progress, and is no longer aiming for a specific percentage.

The new target is based on calculations about what the world needs to do to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the catastrophic effects of global warming would be unavoidable. The planet has already warmed 1.4 degrees.

From Coca-Cola’s “Sustainability” page:

We are taking action to help mitigate the impacts caused by climate change, so we set a target to reduce the company’s emissions in line with a 1.5°C trajectory by 2035, from a 2019 baseline.

Coca-Cola also walked back its packaging commitments. The company’s “World Without Waste” goal initially said its packaging would contain 50 percent recycled material by 2030. That was recently downgraded to 35 to 40 percent by 2035.

Another food and beverage giant, Kraft Heinz, has also reset its benchmarks. In 2017, the company set an emissions-reduction goal for the end of 2020.

From Kraft Heinz’s 2017 corporate social responsibility report:

Reducing our environmental footprint, currently defined as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, energy, water and waste-to-landfill by 15 percent by 2020 (vs. a 2015 baseline; per ton of product) across our global manufacturing network, is a priority for Kraft Heinz.

But after a couple years, its emissions had actually increased, so Kraft Heinz restarted the clock.

The company now is targeting a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2030, compared with a 2021 base line.

From Kraft Heinz’s 2021 E.S.G. report:

We previously set 2020 intensity targets in water conservation, energy use, greenhouse gas emissions and waste reduction, to reduce by 15 percent per metric ton of product made against a 2015 baseline, that we failed to meet as we contended with former supply chain challenges. … We recognize the shortcomings in our execution in these areas and we have both identified and learned from the gaps …

And in 2021, ArcelorMittal, the world’s second-largest steel producer and one of the biggest industrial emitters on the planet, introduced an ambitious target.

In just nine years, it aimed to reduce emissions in Europe by 35 percent, and overall by 25 percent. It aimed to achieve net-zero operations by 2050.

But in the years that followed, progress was slow. This year, ArcelorMittal significantly lowered its global 2030 target and dropped the Europe-specific target altogether.

From ArcelorMittal’s 2025 sustainability report:

… we now expect to reduce emissions intensity by up to 10% by 2030. Policy is essential to accelerate and enable the economics of decarbonised steelmaking, which realistically are likely to remain challenging in the next decade.

Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz and ArcelorMittal declined to comment.

New metrics

Walmart, America’s largest retailer, is among the companies that has used another tactic: including new measurements that make it easier to claim progress.

In addition to focusing on its absolute emissions, which continue to climb, Walmart also emphasizes a concept known as “emissions intensity,” or emissions per million dollars of revenue.

At a growing company like Walmart, where annual revenues have risen 25 percent over the past five years to $713 billion, that means more sales lead to a lower “emissions intensity.”

Starbucks has also used this approach.

In 2020, the coffee chain said it aimed to halve its emissions and waste sent to landfills by 2030.

But with those targets looking out of reach, Starbucks quietly dropped that goal and introduced new metrics. On packaging, for example, it began to focus more narrowly on how much of its “customer facing packaging” was “reusable, recyclable, or compostable.”

The company also restated its emissions goal, but with a hedge:

From Starbucks’s 2025 global impact report:

We are actively reassessing our 2030 emissions reduction goal stated on page 6 of this report while we evaluate the implications of emerging regulations, ongoing updates to relevant standards and other developments (including headwinds that impose significant challenges for the achievement of the goal).

Starbucks declined to comment.

Over the ‘moonshot’

Six years ago, Google put forth an ambitious plan to run all global operations on carbon-free energy, 24 hours a day, by 2030.

Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive, referred to it as a “moonshot” and said, “We are the first major company that’s set out to do this, and we aim to be the first to achieve it.”

But in the years since, it has become clear just how far away Google is from achieving that goal.

Rising energy use from artificial intelligence upended the tech giant’s plans to reduce emissions. In 2024, Google stopped claiming it was carbon neutral after it stopped buying some carbon offsets. Instead, it said it was “focusing on accelerating an array of carbon solutions and partnerships,” and began focusing on a longer term goal of becoming “net zero,” meaning that it was not adding emissions to the atmosphere.

Yet in its most recent report, Google acknowledged its emissions continue to rise.

“Over the past few years, the rapid rise of AI has reshaped global infrastructure and placed new demands on the grid,” the company wrote. “While our growth has widened the gap between our continued progress and our ambitions, our moonshots have energized our work.”

Other tech companies with ballooning energy use are confronting similar challenges. Amazon in 2019 co-founded the Climate Pledge, a voluntary agreement among companies to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040.

But Amazon’s emissions have gone up each of the past several years, and the company recently acknowledged that rising emissions from data centers could get in the way of its climate goals.

“The path is changing in ways that no one quite anticipated even just a few years ago — driven largely by the increasing demand for generative AI,” the company said in 2024, noting that it would “need to be nimble and continue evolving our approach.”

Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in a statement that “the world looks different now than when we co-founded The Climate Pledge, but our commitment hasn’t changed.” She added that Amazon was “transparent about the challenges, investing in innovation, and delivering measurable results.”

Microsoft also declared a climate moonshot in 2020: The company announced its intention to become carbon negative, meaning it would be removing more carbon than it emits each year, by 2030 and to remove all of its historical carbon emissions by 2050.

But emissions have risen sharply since then, and last year, it acknowledged that those goals were becoming harder to achieve.

“In 2020, Microsoft leaders referred to our sustainability goals as a ‘moonshot,’” the company’s chief sustainability officer, Melanie Nakagawa, wrote. “Nearly five years later, we have had to acknowledge that the moon has gotten further away.”

Google and Microsoft declined to comment.

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5) To Win Their Races, Black Politicians Confront a New Landscape

With the Voting Rights Act weakened, Black representation will depend less on Black voters and more on broad, multiracial appeal or on ideological outsider campaigns.

By Bernard Mokam and Clyde McGrady, July 17, 2026

Bernard Mokam reported from Yorkville, Ill. Clyde McGrady reported from Washington, D.C.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/us/politics/black-representation-voting-rights-act.html

Lauren Underwood, waving to people at a parade.

“The idea that Black candidates are only electable in Black districts is patently false,” said Representative Lauren Underwood, who represents a largely white district. Mustafa Hussain for The New York Times

As majority-Black districts are blown up one by one, the future of Black representation in Congress could look something like Yorkville, Ill., where Representative Lauren Underwood joined the town parade on the Fourth of July. The congresswoman and her parents were among the few Black people in a sea of white faces along the mile-long route.

Or it could look like the majority-white House district in and around Denver, where Melat Kiros, an Ethiopian-born 29-year-old, made far more of her socialist ideology than her race to defeat the white incumbent, Diana DeGette, in last month’s Democratic primary.

Black representation in government will depend less and less on Black voters in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that rendered many intentionally drawn majority-Black districts unconstitutional. Instead, Black politicians will have to win more votes from people who do not look like them, whether by appealing broadly to a multiracial, multiethnic electorate, or ideologically to just enough like-minded voters to give them a majority.

“The idea that Black candidates are only electable in Black districts is patently false,” said Ms. Underwood, who is running for a fifth term after flipping a seat in 2018 that stretches from Chicago’s suburbs to Illinois’s corn and soybean fields.

After the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act in April, Republican states in the South moved quickly to dilute Black voting blocs, arguing that dispersing concentrations of reliably Democratic voters wasn’t racially motivated but a purely partisan quest for more Republican House seats. Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee eliminated majority-Black districts first, but similar efforts loom ahead of 2028 in several other states.

In blue states such as Illinois and New York, Democratic leaders are likely to scatter highly concentrated Black voters into more suburban districts, trading Black urban seats won now by huge margins to more competitive districts that weaken Black voting power as they maximize Democratic seats.

Fears about dwindling representation hinge on the idea that Black candidates need Black voters to win office. But the data contradicts that: Already, about half of the more than 60 elected Black members of Congress represent multiracial, multiethnic constituencies in which Black voters are not a majority.

In 2024, Janelle Bynum pitched herself as a business-minded state politician and flipped a Republican-held seat that includes the suburbs of Portland, Ore., and the city of Bend, where less than one percent of her constituents are Black. She recalled door knocking for a State House seat in 2018 when the police received a call about a “suspicious person” in a neighborhood.

“You have to stay focused on the main thing, and the main thing is winning,” Ms. Bynum advised aspiring Black candidates.

Chris Jones, the Democratic nominee for a House district that includes Little Rock, Ark., and the neighboring suburbs, presents himself as a minister and the husband of a former combat flight surgeon. His campaign message centers on the affordability crisis.

When Mr. Jones was the Democratic nominee for governor in 2022, he introduced himself as a model minority, a physicist with a doctorate in urban studies from M.I.T., while his campaign videos extolled the importance of representation.

Now, explicit overtures about his race are limited.

“The time was different,” Mr. Jones said.

Another pathway for Black candidates is as an outsider, particularly on the left. Progressives such as Representative Summer Lee, a Democrat who represents Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny and Westmoreland Counties, have risen to power on kitchen-table policies, without an emphasis on race. Ms. Lee’s district is 73 percent white.

“Our race wasn’t so much about, you know, Black folks or Black issues,” Ms. Lee said. “It was about poor and working-class people.”

Ms. Kiros, the democratic socialist who just defeated a 15-term incumbent, said racial diversity was less important than representation “that can actually deliver the kind of equitable policies that would deliver liberation for Black people.”

Ideology can transcend differences the same way American-pie cultural ties evoke a broader sense of collective identity in less liberal districts.

“You’re finding candidates who understand how to tap into the phenomenon of outsider-versus-insider politics,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, a political historian at Johns Hopkins University.

In Detroit, Donavan McKinney is running as both an anti-establishment candidate and a racially conscious one in a district where Black people hold a small majority but are represented now by a progressive Indian American, Shri Thanedar.

“He’s not like us,” Mr. McKinney says of the incumbent in campaign ads, even as he courts left-wing voters through his association with the progressive insurgency group Justice Democrats.

Some Black politicians say that running as a Black candidate in a multiracial district does come with a higher hurdle to clear — “electability.” In 2018, Jahana Hayes was not the Democratic establishment’s preferred primary candidate when she ran in a Connecticut House district that was less than 10 percent Black. Ms. Hayes said she had worked “twice as hard” and leaned on her background as a schoolteacher who was once a teenage mother and had experienced homelessness.

“I went into communities that had never really voted for a Democrat, let alone a Black woman, and talked about the future I imagine for my children,” she said. “And just about everywhere, from the suburbs to the cities to the most affluent or the lowest income places, most people have a similar idea of what it is that they want.”

She trounced both her primary and general election opponents, both white.

“If I had listened to them,” she said, “I wouldn’t be here four cycles later.”

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6) ‘They Are Invisible People’: Hundreds of Rohingya Vanish at Sea

Members of the persecuted minority group from Myanmar set off in search of a better life weeks ago, but news of their boats sinking only emerged recently. More than 500 are feared dead.

By Verena Hölzl, July 17, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/world/asia/rohingya-myanmar-boats-sink-missing.html

A large wooden boat packed with people rests on a wet beach. Many individuals also stand in the shallow water and on the sand.

A boat carrying a group of Rohingya refugees landed in Indonesia’s Aceh province last year. Each year, thousands of Rohingya refugees attempt to reach Indonesia, Malaysia or Thailand on overcrowded, unseaworthy boats. Cek Mad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

When Nur Kalima’s two young children ask where their father is, she tells them he will be back soon. In reality, she is convinced he has been dead for weeks.

She said that she thinks her husband, Abdul Rahman, was on one of the two boats that the United Nations says sank off the coast of Myanmar early this month. The vessels were headed to Malaysia, where its passengers, mostly members of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority of Myanmar, had hoped to build a better life. On Thursday, the U.N. said that it fears more than 500 people died.

“Who will take care of me now?” said Ms. Nur Kalima, 24, who is pregnant with her third child.

Her family is among more than one million Rohingya living in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, since they were driven out of Myanmar by their countrymen almost a decade ago. They have little to no access to education or employment, and international aid has been shrinking for years.

About six weeks ago, Mr. Abdul Rahman left his family’s bamboo shelter in the camps, presumably to look for a job overseas. A week later, a man, who did not identify himself, called Ms. Nur Kalima on the phone and told her that her husband was on his way to Malaysia. He demanded about $3,000 to keep him safe, in a sign that human traffickers were involved in Mr. Abdul Rahman’s journey.

Then the calls stopped. Instead, news trickled in about bodies that had washed ashore on the coast of Myanmar. Ms. Nur Kalima’s heart sank.

The U.N. believes that two vessels departed from Rakhine State, an impoverished region in western Myanmar and the traditional homeland of the Rohingya, in late June. Some passengers were Rohingya who came back to Myanmar from the camps in Bangladesh. One boat lost contact with land soon after beginning its voyage, according to the U.N. The other reportedly capsized roughly a week into the journey.

There have been no reports of anyone coming to the rescue.

Lynn Htet, a Myanmar researcher with Fortify Rights, a Thailand-based rights group, said he was disheartened that hundreds of people could disappear without the world springing into action to help them, or even noticing before weeks had passed.

“If the people on the boats were from the West, many countries would have come together to form search groups. But Rohingya don’t have any influence. They are invisible people.”

Over the past decade, roughly 5,000 Rohingya have drowned at sea, according to the U.N., with 2025 being the deadliest year on record.

“This tragedy underscores, once again, the deadly consequences of the continued persecution, violence, and denial of basic rights faced by Rohingya people,” Doctors Without Borders said in a statement.

Rohingya are stateless in their own country and have been persecuted for decades. In 2017, Myanmar’s military launched an ethnic cleansing operation against them that the U.N. and the United States say was a genocide.

In April, 250 migrants from Bangladesh, including many Rohingya refugees, are believed to have died when their boat overturned in the Andaman Sea.

Mohammed Rafique, a 26-year-old Rohingya passenger, was among the few survivors. Conditions on the boat were so inhumane, he said, that some voyagers had suffocated to death in the overcrowded fish hold before it capsized.

“I went through the worst and would never encourage anyone to take this journey,” he said.

The U.N. is calling for attention on the rising number of boat journeys Rohingya are taking through the Bay of Bengal, which borders both Bangladesh and Myanmar, as they try to flee hardship and persecution, or are tricked onto boats by traffickers. “Stronger regional and international efforts are needed to prevent further loss of life along one of the world’s deadliest maritime routes,” the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration, a U.N. agency, said in a joint statement.

Hamid Ullah, 19, was among the residents of the camp in Bangladesh who went to Myanmar and is believed to have been on one of the boats. He remains missing. Even before his family lost touch with him, it was hard to reach him on the phone in Rakhine State, where connectivity has largely been severed because of chaos from Myanmar’s civil war.

His brother-in-law, Nur Mohammed, said, “The whole block is praying for him.”

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7) They Were Charged With Assaulting ICE Agents. The Cases Are Crumbling.

The Trump administration has lost or abandoned hundreds of criminal cases against protesters and immigrants, a Times investigation found.

By Mike McIntire, Danny Hakim, Alexandra Berzon, Jazmine Ulloa and Lauren McCarthy, July 18, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/18/us/ice-assaults-protesters.html

An officer’s hands stretch toward a man with his back to a chain-link fence in a still from a body cam video.

Jaime Diaz, an undocumented immigrant, was charged with assaulting a Border Patrol officer in Laredo, Texas. But video footage shows it was the officer who punched Mr. Diaz.

In its nationwide immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has charged hundreds of people with assaulting or impeding federal agents. President Trump has branded them “insurrectionists,” “animals” and “thugs,” part of a broader effort by his administration to cast protesters and immigrants as violent criminals.

But a close examination of those cases reveals that in its rush to meet White House demands for deportations, federal law enforcement has engaged in extensive misconduct — ranging from attacking protesters to destroying evidence and misrepresenting facts in court.

The New York Times found that the Trump administration has filed assault charges against more than 550 people who were caught in its immigration dragnet — far more than previously known. Of the more than 400 cases resolved so far, nearly half have unraveled: Juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them.

The record is abysmal by the typical standards of federal prosecutions: The Justice Department seldom loses criminal cases, with more than 90 percent of defendants pleading guilty or being convicted at trial.

The Times obtained court filings for every assault case and reviewed hearing transcripts, interviewed witnesses and federal officials and watched videos of dozens of encounters that led to criminal charges. The review, the most comprehensive to date, suggests that the administration’s use of the law has often been less about protecting federal agents than about providing legal cover to cow protesters and immigrants into submission.

“There seems to be a pattern of charges being filed without any merit,” said Jimmy L. Arce, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago who served on a commission that investigated immigration raids in the city last year. He added that some defendants were “having their speech criminalized by the U.S. attorney’s office.”

Earlier this year, the Trump administration dialed back some of its most confrontational tactics, leading to fewer assault charges. But it recently began an aggressive new wave of enforcement, with agents killing two immigrants in Texas and Maine. With hundreds of cases resolved, it is now possible to more fully assess the administration’s conduct and results.

In the half of assault cases that ended in the government’s favor, almost all were guilty pleas. The Times’s analysis of the 213 cases that the government has lost or abandoned found that:

In dozens of cases, court records and videos show that federal agents were the first to get physical — including shoving, tackling or pepper-spraying defendants. Many defendants successfully argued that the assaults they were accused of were actually acts of self-defense.

Judges repeatedly chastised prosecutors and immigration agents for misconduct including distorting facts and withholding evidence. Two judges found that agents purposely destroyed evidence, including ordering a defendant to delete cellphone photos.

Officers charged more than two dozen people who were filming or following agents, often while honking car horns, blowing whistles or shouting warnings like, “La migra is coming!” There was no allegation of physical contact with agents.

In more than 100 cases, prosecutors did not claim that any agents were injured. In at least seven other cases, officers’ injuries were caused by their or their colleagues’ actions. For example, a judge last fall dismissed assault charges against an immigrant, ruling that the agent involved had been cut by shards of glass from a car window he himself had smashed.

Sixty-five times, prosecutors abandoned or downgraded charges before hitting a deadline to present evidence to a grand jury or judge. Former prosecutors said that this pattern of rapid retreat was unusual and signaled that the cases should never have been brought.

Dropping charges

The government has lost or abandoned nearly half of the resolved cases in which it accused people of assaulting immigration agents. Normally the Justice Department wins more than 90 percent of its criminal cases.

The Trump administration’s strategy hinges on a once-obscure statute, 18 U.S.C. 111, that makes it a federal crime to assault or forcibly impede a government officer. Punishments range from a fine to 20 years in prison.

For decades, prosecutors used the law sparingly. One exception was when the Biden administration invoked it to charge hundreds of people involved in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Prosecutors had a perfect record of winning convictions in those cases, until Mr. Trump returned to office and issued blanket pardons.

As the Trump administration’s efforts to round up undocumented immigrants encountered resistance last year, officials embraced an expansive reading of the assault statute as a way to arrest and prosecute people who got in the way of ICE and Border Patrol agents. The government’s reliance on the statute became so great that agents at times called out “18 U.S.C. 111” as they got into scuffles and made arrests.

Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, declined to comment on specific incidents but said that “it should come as no surprise that there’s an increase in criminal referrals under 18 U.S.C. 111 as there’s been a massive increase in violence and threats against federal law enforcement.”

A Justice Department spokesman, Wyn Hornbuckle, echoed that. “Federal prosecutors are correct to prioritize these prosecutions and hold individuals accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” he said, adding that prosecutors sometimes downgraded or dropped charges based on “mitigating factors identified in a case.” Another Justice Department official said that in some instances prosecutors dropped charges when defendants were deported.

Gregory Bovino, the former Border Patrol “commander at large” who championed the use of smashmouth tactics against protesters and immigrants, was blunter. He said in an interview that too many “worthless” federal prosecutors chickened out by abandoning assault cases. And he thought more protesters and immigrants should have been prosecuted.

“We were being overly judicious in who we charged with 18 U.S.C. 111,” he said.

On occasion, officers were seriously hurt by protesters or immigrants, The Times found. Last June, Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala, a sex offender in the United States illegally, drove away while a federal agent had an arm inside the car window. The agent — who months later would kill the protester Renee Good in Minnesota — was dragged about 100 yards.

Mr. Muñoz-Guatemala is one of only four people in the Times analysis who was convicted by a jury. The other 22 who faced jury trials were acquitted. Nearly 200 others had the charges dismissed — including two mothers from Charlotte, N.C.

‘We Need Help Right Now’

Tatyana Reisini and her friend Kristen Roos were cornered. A group of armed men, some wearing masks, had surrounded their car on a dead-end street. The women screamed to a 911 operator for help.

Earlier that November morning, the two young mothers had been on their way to a Christmas market in Charlotte. They saw a car filled with immigration agents pulling into the parking lot of an outdoor shopping mall.

Operation Charlotte’s Web, as the immigration sweep in the city was known, followed a bloody and high-profile operation in Chicago. Ms. Reisini, 36, and Ms. Roos, 33, were wary of what might happen in North Carolina.

Ms. Reisini, an American citizen of Ecuadorean descent, and Ms. Roos had been organizing with other local mothers to be on the lookout for immigration agents. So they steered into the parking lot, stopping about 20 yards from the government vehicles. Other protesters were already gathered. They all began yelling at the agents.

After a few minutes, the agents moved their vehicles in front of and behind Ms. Reisini’s Acura S.U.V., she said. Several agents stepped out. Ms. Roos remembered them shouting at her and Ms. Reisini to leave and “trying to scare us.” The women drove to another part of the parking lot and watched as the agents pinned in another protester’s car.

The agents eventually drove off, and Ms. Reisini and Ms. Roos resumed their trip to the Christmas market, at one point stopping to alert a resident that federal officers were nearby.

Soon the women realized they were being followed by two unmarked cars. They called 911. An operator told them to find the nearest gas or police station, but they didn’t know where one was.

Ma’am,

are you able to safely get to a nearby police station or …

I am trying to …

I’m trying to get to a police station,

but they’re not —

they’re literally following me.

So every time I get to like a stoplight or something, they —

they’re trying to get in front of me.

They’re intimidating us.

Instead they wound up on the dead-end street. They turned into a driveway in a housing development. The unmarked cars blocked them in.

“We need help right now,” Ms. Reisini exclaimed to the 911 operator. “They’re going to [expletive] hurt us!”

Just then, an agent began smashing the driver’s side window — with the barrel of his rifle, which was pointed toward Ms. Reisini, according to footage recorded by a nearby resident.

The women were terrified; their shrieks can be heard on the 911 recording.

I am in an apartment complex right now.

It’s,

it’s

a —

they’re breaking open the window!

“We didn’t do anything,” Ms. Reisini said.

“Yes, you did,” an agent responded. “You impeded. 18 U.S.C. 111. Driving erratic.”

Lawyers said that was a misreading of the statute, which specifies that it applies when people use or threaten force. “It’s not enough to show that they might have been interfering with what was happening,” said Carissa Hessick, a University of North Carolina law professor.

Ms. Reisini and Ms. Roos were led from the car, and their hands were zip-tied behind their backs. One agent noticed a child seat in Ms. Reisini’s car and sarcastically remarked that she must be a “stellar” mother, she recalled.

Ms. Reisini retorted that she was, in fact, a stellar mother, which was why she was protesting against agents who she thought were breaking up families in her community.

The women were taken to the local F.B.I. building, where they spent several hours in confinement and eventually received tickets accusing them of violating 18 U.S.C. 111.

Mr. Bovino, who was running the Charlotte operation, shared a social media post from a far-right account that called the women “liberal terrorists,” and he praised what he called “excellent arrests for assault.” Yet the charges were so weak that the U.S. attorney’s office in Charlotte eventually withdrew them.

Asked about the agent’s use of a rifle muzzle to smash Ms. Reisini’s window, Mr. Bovino said he wasn’t concerned about the risk to the car’s occupants. “I’m more worried about the officer getting hurt or killed or the public getting hurt or killed, not necessarily the suspect,” he said.

Shoved by Bovino

Mr. Bovino’s crackdown soon moved to Minneapolis.

On Jan. 7, hours after Ms. Good was killed, Quentin Williams, a special education assistant at a high school about three miles away, was helping direct students to their rides after school.

He spotted a group of federal agents who had come onto campus while arresting someone. Mr. Williams moved toward a crowd that had gathered to watch. Some were yelling at or filming the agents.

Mr. Bovino ran up and shoved Mr. Williams, videos show. In an ensuing skirmish, agents yanked Mr. Williams by the hair, tackled him and, he said, choked him.

“I could not help but think of George Floyd,” Mr. Williams wrote later that day, memorializing the incident. “I was so scared for my life.”

Mr. Bovino said Mr. Williams was among a group of “rioters and anarchists” who failed to follow orders from law enforcement.

Mr. Williams was arrested, taken to a federal building and released that same day. Agents told him they’d be in touch.

About two weeks later, the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis charged Mr. Williams and 15 others for violating 18 U.S.C. 111. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, announced the charges on social media, posting photos of Mr. Williams and other shackled defendants, who she said were “resisting and impeding our federal law enforcement agents.” She cited the statute but left out its language about it applying when people “forcibly” interfere.

In a sworn affidavit, an investigator from the Department of Homeland Security said that an agent at the scene had seen Mr. Williams trying to grab and pick up a Border Patrol agent — a claim that Mr. Williams denied and that was not supported by video of the incident that The Times reviewed.

The U.S. attorney’s office later reduced the charge to a misdemeanor and ultimately dropped the case altogether.

The Times identified numerous other cases in which people were charged with assault even though officers were the ones who appeared to have used physical force first.

One involved Jaime Diaz, an undocumented Honduran man who was arrested last July during a traffic stop in Laredo, Texas. Prosecutors charged him with assault, saying he had struck a Border Patrol officer “two to three times.” But during his trial, body-camera video showed Mr. Diaz, who is slightly built and under five feet tall, being grabbed by the neck, forced to the ground and punched by the much larger officer as he tried to handcuff him.

A federal jury acquitted Mr. Diaz in November. He was then scheduled for deportation.

“In the past, this officer could’ve been prosecuted, based on the body cams,” said his lawyer, Roberto Balli. “And instead we have my client being prosecuted.”

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in South Texas said that Mr. Diaz elbowed the officer. “The jury did acquit the defendant, but it was a righteous prosecution,” she said.

In more than 20 cases that the government lost or abandoned, protesters and immigrants argued that what the government said was assault was instead self-defense.

Last May, Josefina Gabriel-Lopez, a Guatemalan immigrant, was pulling into her driveway in Biloxi, Miss., when federal agents suddenly approached and ordered her out of the car.

Ms. Gabriel-Lopez, who doesn’t speak English, didn’t immediately comply. An officer reached through the partly opened window to try to unlock the door, and the window closed on her arm. The agents blamed Ms. Gabriel-Lopez, but she said the officer had accidentally shut the window on herself as she pushed buttons inside the car.

After officers wrenched open the car door, Ms. Gabriel-Lopez struggled against an agent who climbed inside and twisted her arm and wrist before dragging her out. Her 18-year-old daughter ran out of the house barefoot and tugged on an agent’s protective vest.

Both women were arrested and charged with assault. When the case went to trial in September, they argued that they had acted in self-defense.

“I wasn’t resisting,” Ms. Gabriel-Lopez told jurors through an interpreter. She added, “I keep telling him it was painful, it was painful. He did not listen to me.”

The jury found the women not guilty. Ms. Gabriel-Lopez, who had entered the United States illegally in 2005, was later deported.

Scolded by the Court

The Times identified more than 30 instances of judges criticizing prosecutors or federal agents for conduct such as destroying or withholding evidence, violating rules about communications with jurors and making false or exaggerated claims, including some disproved by videos.

Judges have denounced the government’s actions as “flagrant,” in “bad faith” and “shocking to the universal sense of justice.”

One case of evidence being destroyed took place last September in San Bernardino, Calif. Federal agents were following a Nicaraguan man, Joseph Blandon-Saavedra, who was driving to work in a Toyota Corolla. At an intersection, the agents boxed him in with their two cars, smashed his window and arrested him.

All three vehicles were damaged. Mr. Blandon-Saavedra said the agents had hit his car when they cut him off. But the government said he had rammed them, and prosecutors charged him with two counts of assaulting officers with his sedan.

Mr. Blandon-Saavedra’s lawyers asked that the cars be preserved so their expert could examine them. But agents immediately repaired one of theirs.

The judge dismissed the count tied to the repaired vehicle, calling the agents’ actions part of a “growing pattern of mishandling evidence” that might undermine officers’ assault claims. Prosecutors appealed the dismissal. The count related to the other government vehicle is pending.

In April, a federal judge in Los Angeles threw out assault charges against two protesters, in the middle of a trial, after finding that prosecutors had failed to turn over internal “use-of-force” reports that could have been helpful to the defense. A month later, the government dropped charges against six protesters in Chicago after a judge criticized prosecutors for having mishandled a grand jury, partly by speaking to jurors outside the courtroom.

In Laredo, Ariana Guadalupe Garcia, a 19-year-old American, arrived at a border crossing last July to meet her young niece. Ms. Garcia, who had come from the U.S. side, had clothes for the girl to bring back to a relative in Mexico to sell, a common exchange at border crossings.

But Ms. Garcia found that the girl, who had arrived from Mexico, was being held in an inspection area, and when she tried to speak to her through a window, an officer told her to leave. Ms. Garcia did not immediately obey, prompting several other officers to approach her. After some back-and-forth, the officers began escorting Ms. Garcia away, according to court records.

As they passed through a short stretch of walkway with no working security cameras, Ms. Garcia took at least one photo with her phone. An officer swatted it away. Prosecutors said that Ms. Garcia then hit an officer on the arm and another in the ear, which she denied. She was arrested and later charged with assault.

Afterward, an officer told her to delete the photo she’d just taken, going so far as to watch her permanently erase it from the Recently Deleted folder.

The case against Ms. Garcia began to fall apart when the judge asked how prosecutors intended to prove she had hit anyone — especially since security footage from right before the alleged incident showed no sign of her acting violently toward the four male officers.

The deleted photos were the final straw.

“The government acted in bad faith in destroying the evidence,” the judge wrote, “further demonstrating that Ms. Garcia’s constitutional rights have been violated.”

Methodology

There is no simple way to identify immigration-related cases brought under 18 U.S.C. 111. We searched online databases — Nexis, CourtListener and Pacer (the federal judiciary’s electronic docket) — for all such cases since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term.

We used an artificial intelligence model to help remove duplicate cases, as well as cases unrelated to immigration enforcement. We checked the model’s work. We also requested records from the Central Violations Bureau, part of the federal judiciary, which processes tickets issued for violations of 18 U.S.C. 111. Our review was exhaustive, but it is possible that we missed cases.

We confined our analysis to 18 U.S.C. 111, though the government has occasionally invoked other laws to prosecute people for assaulting officers.

We created a database of court records, including hearing and trial transcripts, for the cases that were dismissed or ended in acquittals. With help from an A.I. model, we looked for common characteristics, such as courts admonishing the government for misconduct or agents initiating physical force against people they arrested. We reviewed every case the model flagged.

We also interviewed federal prosecutors and other experts and examined historical statistics about federal prosecutions, as reported by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Alan Feuer and Will Houp contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research. Produced by Alice Fang and Rumsey Taylor.

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8) ICE Agent Defended Shooting of Immigrant in Maine, Ex-Wife Says

The agent, whose identity has not been confirmed by officials, has a history of abusive and frightening behavior, according to a former wife and others who knew him.

By Jenna Russell, Pooja Salhotra and Jacey Fortin, July 18, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/18/us/david-brouillette-ice-agent-maine.html

A memorial for Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was killed by the ICE agent David Brouillette. Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

A federal immigration agent told his former wife that he was the person who fatally shot a Colombian immigrant in Maine this week and defended his actions to her, the ex-wife said.

The woman, Ashley Brouillette, identified the agent as David Brouillette, 37, in an interview on Thursday. She said that when she spoke to him on Wednesday about the shooting, Mr. Brouillette said that it was justified.

He told her not to talk to anyone about him, she said, but then asked her to defend his character. “He said, ‘You need to tell them I’m a good person,’” she recalled Mr. Brouillette saying, adding that he asked her not to tell anyone that he had abused her during their marriage. “I told him that I wouldn’t lie for him,” Ms. Brouillette, 37, said.

The Department of Homeland Security has not released the name of the shooter, and a spokeswoman for the agency declined to confirm whether Mr. Brouillette had fired the fatal shots, saying that publicizing agents’ names puts them at risk.

Ms. Brouillette said she had spoken to her ex-husband about the shooting and had also seen video and images of him at the scene. Two other people — one a relative who asked not to be identified and another a high school friend of Mr. Brouillette’s — said they also recognized him from video footage and witness photos, but could not confirm that he was the person who fired the fatal shots.

No video shedding light on who fired the fatal shot on Monday has emerged. But one video recorded just after the shooting appears to show another agent consoling Mr. Brouillette.

Mr. Brouillette was first reported as the agent who fired the shots by The Portland Press Herald.

The man who was killed, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 25, lived with his partner and 3-year-old daughter in Biddeford, Maine. He had been driving away from his home early on Monday morning when agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement confronted him. Multiple gunshots rang out, leaving holes in the windshield of Mr. Guerrero’s car.

Later in the week, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Mr. Guerrero illegally entered the United States on Sept. 1, 2023, via the southern border. Benjamin Gideon, a lawyer representing the Guerrero family, said on Thursday that Mr. Guerrero had been working in the United States lawfully.

A phone number listed in court records as Mr. Brouillette’s has been disconnected, and a message left at another got no response. He did not respond to an email seeking comment.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the ICE agents in Biddeford had been monitoring what they believed to be the residence of someone who was in the country illegally, for whom they had a removal order.

In a statement Monday, the department said an officer had opened fire, “fearing for public safety.”

When Ms. Brouillette spoke to him on Wednesday about the shooting, she said, Mr. Brouillette defended it as justified. “I asked him why he did it, and he said, ‘The guy tried to hit me,’” she said.

The statement did not name the person the agents had been seeking, but in the hours after Mr. Guerrero was killed, details emerged to suggest that he was not the target of their search.

Ms. Brouillette, who dated Mr. Brouillette throughout high school and was married to him from 2007 to 2009, said her former husband had become abusive after he joined the military in 2007. She said he had choked her, slammed her to the floor and pushed her against a wall.

Mr. Brouillette’s threats and harassment were so persistent that she left Maine in 2012 to escape him, she said.

Still, she said, he had threatened to kill her as recently as November after she disciplined their daughter by taking away her cellphone. “I have said to people, ‘If I end up dead, it’s him,’” Ms. Brouillette said.

Another woman identified as a former wife of Mr. Brouillette's in court documents has also accused Mr. Brouillette of abuse. In a filing for an order of protection in December 2019, obtained by The New York Times, the woman wrote that he had broken her door down, destroyed her belongings and dumped her clothes over a bridge. The filing also said that Mr. Brouillette had spit in her face and cornered her in a room.

“I am scared of him coming to my home or sitting in the parking lot of my work until I leave,” she said in the filing.

The woman could not be reached for comment.

Ms. Brouillette said her former husband had post-traumatic stress disorder related to his military service in Afghanistan in 2012 and 2013; in court records, the other woman identified as a former wife also said he suffered from PTSD.

According to Army Public Affairs, he served from 2007 to 2015. He enlisted as a quartermaster and chemical equipment repairer and then served as a medical logistics specialist. He also served in the Maine Army National Guard from 2007 to 2010. From 2010 to 2015, he served as a human intelligence collector in the Army. He left the Army as a sergeant.

He also worked as a police officer for the Department of Veterans Affairs in Maine, Ms. Brouillette said.

Ms. Brouillette said that her former husband should not have been hired to work in immigration enforcement. It was not clear when he joined ICE. “He has mental health issues, he’s short-tempered, he’s reactive,” she said. “He should be in treatment.”

Scott Collins, 37, said he was best friends with Mr. Brouillette throughout high school in Gardiner, Maine, outside Augusta, the state capital. In text messages to The Times on Friday, Mr. Collins described Mr. Brouillette as violent and “prone to start fights” and said he had long aspired to join law enforcement.

After completing high school, Mr. Brouillette lived with Mr. Collins’s grandparents because his mother had kicked him out of her house, Mr. Collins said.

Mr. Collins, a line cook who lives in Augusta, said he last saw Mr. Brouillette in 2016, when the two tried to reconnect over drinks at an Applebee’s. “He honestly reminded me of the same person I knew in high school,” Mr. Collins said. “It was almost like he never changed.”

The fatal Maine shooting, which followed another in Houston during a traffic stop by federal immigration agents, prompted vigils and protests in Biddeford, as well as in the nearby cities like Portland and Scarborough, the site of an ICE facility.

The Trump administration has recruited thousands of new ICE agents over the past year to carry out a nationwide immigration enforcement surge, and it appears to have cut training requirements.

At least 23 people have been shot at by federal immigration agents around the country since last year. Six have died, including three U.S. citizens.

Mark Arsenault and Murray Carpenter contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett, Georgia Gee and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

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9) My Son Was Killed by ICE. I Want Accountability.

By Rachel Reyes, July 18, 2026

Ms. Reyes is the mother of Ruben Ray Martinez, who was fatally shot by an ICE agent in March 2025.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/18/opinion/ice-shooting-ruben-ray-martinez-texas.html

A photo shows a wooden dresser, atop which there are a number of photos of a boy at different ages.

Harmon Li for The New York Times

This spring I watched Markwayne Mullin’s confirmation hearing to become the homeland security secretary. It was most likely the first confirmation hearing I ever watched. I have never been a political person.

I tuned in because Mr. Mullin’s words were of personal concern to me. In 2025 a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent killed my son, Ruben Ray Martinez, in Texas. He was 23 years old, a quiet, funny and gentle young man — and an unarmed United States citizen. He was shot nearly a year before federal agents killed two other Americans, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, in Minnesota and obviously well before the recent shootings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Guerrero in Maine. Yet many fewer people know Ruben’s name. The Department of Homeland Security, then under Secretary Kristi Noem, withheld the full details of his shooting from me and from the public.

It was not made public that an ICE agent was the one who shot my son until federal officials were forced to disclose that information because of an unrelated lawsuit.

I wanted to see evidence at his hearing that Mr. Mullin’s tenure would bring a more respectful, serious and transparent approach to America’s immigration enforcement, after the previous period so damaged public confidence in those efforts. I was let down then, and I continue to be let down. Over three months into Mr. Mullin’s tenure, there’s zero indication that Ruben’s death reverberated seriously within the Department of Homeland Security or that it would be treated as a serious test of departmental accountability. Mr. Mullin has not publicly acknowledged my son’s killing, much less explained what, if anything, the department has learned from the tragedy.

We should expect transparency and accountability from any administration — especially one that has claimed transparency as a governing principle. Like most other Americans, I believe immigration laws should be enforced. But we should not be asked to choose between enforcing the law and transparency when federal agents kill someone. The public deserves reliable facts. Families deserve honest answers. And the government should not have to be pressured into providing them.

Here’s what I know about what happened to my son: Ruben and his best friend, Joshua Orta, drove to South Padre Island to celebrate Ruben’s birthday. It was Ruben’s first trip away from San Antonio. He still lived at home while saving money from his job at an Amazon fulfillment warehouse. We were a close-knit family.

That weekend, Ruben and Josh did not tell me where they were going, probably because Ruben knew South Padre’s reputation as a party town and did not want me to worry. That was consistent with who he was: considerate, conflict-averse and reluctant to make himself the center of attention.

On what became his last night, Ruben was driving his car, with Josh in the passenger’s seat, when he approached the scene of a traffic accident at a busy intersection. For reasons that remain unclear, ICE agents were present and operating alongside local officers.

The video evidence, made public almost a year after Ruben’s death, is consistent with what Josh told me and others: He was trying to comply with conflicting directions from law enforcement about what to do. He was driving slowly and braking repeatedly and was not a threat to the officers. His car was in park when they pulled him out. An ICE agent, Jack Stevens, shot him at point-blank range through the open driver’s-side window multiple times. A toxicology report noted the presence of alcohol in Ruben’s system — which is obviously no justification for his death.

Josh said Ruben’s last words were “I’m sorry.”

The Texas Rangers investigated the shooting, and a grand jury declined to indict Mr. Stevens in February. We do not know what evidence the jury — which was closed to the public — did or did not see. A spokesperson from ICE told The Times that Ruben hit an agent with his car and that Mr. Stevens “fired defensive shots to protect himself” and his fellow agents. The spokesperson said that the shooting has been “investigated from every possible angle by an independent body, and it cleared our officer.”

What happened to Ruben deserves a more transparent response. The Department of Homeland Security should address the video evidence that raises questions about its public account, and implement safeguards to reduce the risk of another avoidable death.

These are basic expectations for any agency that sends armed officers into public spaces. ICE should have stronger rules about the use of body cameras and strict boundaries for when its agents become involved in local law-enforcement matters. It should more rigorously enforce its use-of-force standards. When a federal officer shoots and kills someone, there should be public reporting of what happened and temporary removal from field duty for the agent involved while the facts are examined. Those safeguards are not anti-law enforcement. They protect the public, responsible officers and the credibility of the agency itself.

No Americans who have experienced a tragedy like the one I have should struggle to obtain answers from their own government. The government’s dismissal and lack of accountability should concern everyone, regardless of political party.

Perhaps the Department of Homeland Security believes a lack of transparency is institutionally safer than candor. But secrecy does not strengthen law enforcement; secrecy weakens it. A government agency that will not fully explain a fatal shooting should not be surprised when citizens question its judgment.

Mr. Mullin may prefer to treat Ruben’s death as part of the department’s past. But when the government kills an unarmed citizen and then refuses to give a full public accounting, the matter is not past. It remains unresolved for my family and for any American who believes the government must be accountable when it takes a life.

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10) Fighting Intensifies With Strikes on Critical Infrastructure

In the days since the cease-fire unraveled, the United States and Iran have expanded the scope of their attacks, with reports of water facilities and other structures coming under fire.

By Aaron Boxerman and Leily Nikounazar, July 18, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/07/18/world/iran-war-strikes-trump-hormuz

A crowd of people in a square at night. Many of them wave red, white and green flags.

Pro-government demonstrators in Tehran on Friday. Credit...Vahid Salemi/Associated Press

The United States and Iran expanded the scope and intensity of their attacks on Saturday, striking critical infrastructure sites that included a power station and water facilities, with no sign of an off-ramp to end the fighting.

More than a week after President Trump said the cease-fire with Iran was effectively over, American forces stepped up their assault, targeting “surveillance sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage, and maritime capabilities,” according to U.S. Central Command.

The bombardment has failed to break the deadlock over the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway for global oil and gas shipments that Iran has blockaded. The United States has also reinstated its own blockade on Iranian ports. With no apparent negotiations taking place, the two sides appear to be sliding back toward a wider war.

Iranian state media reported on Saturday damage to bridges and roads in the south of Iran, and said that a water desalination plant in Jask was hit. It cited a local official as saying that about 10,000 people were facing water shortages. The U.S. military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on those claims.

Iran has responded with its own attacks on American allies in the Persian Gulf. Air-raid sirens continued to ring out in Bahrain on Saturday morning, warning of new Iranian strikes. And the Jordanian military said it had intercepted 10 Iranian ballistic missiles overnight, without reports of major damage.

On Saturday, Iranian missiles and drones pummeled the Gulf state of Kuwait, where the government said another power and water treatment plant had been attacked — the second in two days — sparking fires. An oil facility was also struck, leading to injuries and “severe material losses,” according to Kuwait’s state-run petroleum corporation.

Kuwait’s Army said late Friday night that several of its personnel had been wounded by Iranian drone strikes on military facilities. Iran’s military said it was targeting U.S. bases in Kuwait and elsewhere in the region. It largely did not comment on the attacks on infrastructure that served civilians.

Last month, the United States and Iran reached a cease-fire meant to reopen the strait and allow for broader negotiations. But Iran, citing ambiguous language in the agreement, has continued to assert control over the waterway, attacking ships attempting to transit through routes outside its channels.

Mr. Trump has frequently threatened to bombard Iranian infrastructure, including power plants and bridges, in an apparent effort to force Iran’s leaders to make a deal and end the war. Analysts say there is little guarantee that stepping up attacks would force Iran to change course.

Bombing critical infrastructure could further disrupt daily life for many civilians caught up in the conflict. Legal experts have warned that, depending on the circumstances and intent, such attacks are potentially war crimes under international law.

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11) Mamdani Says He May Still Order Netanyahu’s Arrest

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in an interview with The New York Times that he was in “an active conversation” with New York City’s Law Department on whether he had the authority to arrest the Israeli leader.

By Sally Goldenberg, July 18, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/18/nyregion/mamdani-netanyahu-interview.html

Zohran Mamdani wearing a suit and tie and walking on the street while holding a leather folder.

This week on “The Interview,” a New York Times show, Mayor Zohran Mamdani addressed questions about the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, affordability in New York City and his wife. Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said his administration was still discussing whether to arrest the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, if he comes to New York City as expected for the U.N. General Assembly in September.

“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mr. Mamdani told Lulu Garcia-Navarro this week on “The Interview,” a New York Times show, referring to the home of the United Nations’ International Court of Justice.

“He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,” Mr. Mamdani added. “And what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years.”

The mayor said it was unclear to him whether he has the legal authority to order the Police Department, which he oversees, to detain a foreign leader like Mr. Netanyahu. He said he was in “an active conversation” with the city’s Law Department about the matter.

“Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end,” Mr. Mamdani added.

During his mayoral campaign last year, Mr. Mamdani said in an interview with The Times that he would order the Police Department to arrest Mr. Netanyahu, who is pursuing re-election in Israel.

At the time, the mayor said that such an arrest would be honoring a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court over Mr. Netanyahu’s role in the war in Gaza, which Mr. Mamdani and a United Nations commission have called a genocide.

Mr. Netanyahu addressed Mr. Mamdani’s threat to arrest him during a recent radio appearance, saying he was not concerned, and he accused the mayor of supporting Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls a significant portion of Gaza. Hamas was responsible for the deadly attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that precipitated Israel’s war in Gaza.

“I think he should look at who he's condemning, who he’s praising,” the prime minister said during an interview this week with Sid Rosenberg, a local radio personality and a frequent critic of Mr. Mamdani. “He’s condemning Israel, the one democracy that stands shoulder to shoulder with American values.”

“Who does he champion? Hamas, that calls openly to massacre every Jew on earth, that conducted that horrible massacre, the worst massacre on Jews since the Holocaust,” Mr. Netanyahu added.

He also said Mr. Mamdani “doesn’t care” that “those who hate the Jews and Israel ultimately hate America."

“And in fact I think, secretly, he hates America,” Mr. Netanyahu added.

Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, accused Mr. Mamdani in a statement on Saturday of failing to focus adequately on rising antisemitism in New York City. Mr. Mamdani has rejected such accusations, noting that he has increased funding for an office to combat hate crimes.

“Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will come to New York, address the United Nations General Assembly with pride, and stand before the world to state Israel’s truth and its unwavering right to defend its citizens,” Mr. Danon said.

Mr. Mamdani has condemned the Oct. 7 attacks. He has made his extensive concerns about Israel a focal point of his political identity, raising the issue frequently. Several people who know him well have said he considers Palestinian liberation one of the most pressing moral issues of his time.

Mr. Mamdani’s views about Israel are no longer on the fringe of the Democratic Party. Nearly half of House Democrats voted this week to end U.S. aid to Israel, which was not enough for the measure to pass, but enough to demonstrate a shift in the party’s posture toward one of the country’s stalwart allies in the Middle East.

Asked by Ms. Garcia-Navarro about the political weight he places on Israel, Mr. Mamdani said the war was motivating voters throughout the country, including in House races in New York last month, when his endorsed candidates emerged victorious.

“It is hard to find a more bankrupt policy approach than what our country has done to Gaza and to Palestine,” Mr. Mamdani added.

He also talked about national politics, speaking positively about the prospect that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a fellow democratic socialist, may run for president in 2028.

“I think she’d make a good anything,” he said.

He denounced President Trump’s immigration tactics, but said border security was important and that he was “willing to work with the federal government” when immigrants are convicted of serious crimes.

“What we are unwilling to do,” he added, “is to participate in civil immigration enforcement with a federal government that has said openly it wants to deport a vast majority of people for crimes that we will never even know.”

Mr. Mamdani defended his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, amid criticisms of her from some of his fellow democratic socialists, reiterating that she has been successful at driving down crime in New York City. (Some of his supporters disagree with the frequency of the agency’s low-level arrests carried out under Ms. Tisch.)

He also lamented the media coverage of his wife, Rama Duwaji, an artist who has largely avoided the spotlight during his mayoralty. Ms. Duwaji has come under fire for some of her past social media behavior, including liking a post that celebrated Hamas’s attack on Israel.

“She is her own person,” Mr. Mamdani said. “She’s an incredible artist, and yet so much of how she engages with the world today is framed through her being my wife.”

The mayor shed some light on how he views an issue that is central to his political rise: the economic struggles of New Yorkers who fall into income thresholds higher than what was traditionally considered poor or working-class.

Asked whether he would consider someone making $250,000 a year working class, he replied: “I haven’t asked myself where it starts and stops. What I would say is those who are working to try and afford the basic dignities of life and aren’t able to do so, I think that that is also working class."

Ms. Garcia-Navarro followed up, asking about a janitor being lumped into the same category as a lawyer, to which Mr. Mamdani bemoaned “a fixation on a definition of something.”

“It’s not that everyone is making the same amount of money or facing the same amount of struggle, but that they just want to know, is there any way for them to actually be able to work this hard and afford a good life in the city?” he replied.

And he offered a window into how he views his new role as one of the country’s best-known politicians, saying, “I think there is some level of absurdity that you have to have as a part of yourself to believe that it should be you.”

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BAUAW NEWSLETTER

7/18/2026

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, July 18, 2026

End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli

Organization Support Letter

Funds for Kevin Cooper

Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign

An appeal for financial support

Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky

Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky

Join the Fight for Mumia's Life

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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression

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