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Hands Off Rick Toledo, Pro-Palestine Grad Student at Cal Poly Humboldt! Give Him His Electronics Back!
Don't forget to sign this sign-on letter for Toledo here:
https://stopfbi.org/news/hands-off-rick-toledo-pro-palestine-grad-student-at-cal-poly-humboldt-give-him-his-electronics-back/
Please email any statements of solidarity to:
stopfbi@gmail.com
On the night of March 19, 2026, University Police Department returned with a warrant to the apartment of Rick Toledo, Students for a Democratic Society organizer at Cal Poly Tech Humboldt, and seized his laptop, phone, and other electronics such as a camera. They attempted to force him to give up his passcodes, and he told them no. He did the right thing.
This violation of his privacy comes as part of their effort to charge him with four bogus felonies - false imprisonment, conspiracy, battery, and assault - related to the student protest on Feb 27. This is the latest in their string of acts to suppress any campus free speech for Palestine and divestment from Israel, along with suspending and firing him from his university teaching job.
We should be perfectly clear about it: there is nothing wrong with supporting any student action, including building occupations, that is taken to make demands of a university. Our rights to free speech and freedom of assembly are protected by the First Amendment, enshrined in the constitution. College protest is a long-time tradition, and it continues on today. Toledo committed no crime in supporting the student protest, and the university is determined to create lie after lie in order to demonize him.
In our view, what they really want to do is punish Toledo not for the one-day building occupation last month, but for the 9-day building occupation during the encampment movement in spring of 2024. That display of courage by the students in the name of ending university support for a genocide made it to millions of TV screens, and the state of California and university want someone to pay. Toledo is their target of choice, years later.
We demand that he not be charged of any crime, because he didn't do anything wrong. We demand that his devices be returned ASAP. Activists should learn from his example of not telling the police a single thing, including a passcode. The university and police are the criminals here for trying to scare activists out of speaking out against the university's continued financial support to Israeli apartheid. Now is not the time to suffer in silence; it’s the time to speak out. We need to condemn political repression, stand with Rick Toledo, and defend our rights to speak out for Palestine.
Don’t Charge Rick Toledo!
Give Him His Property Back!
Protesting for Palestine Is Not a Crime!
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Jobs and Workers Are in Balance. Nobody Is Happy About It.
Lower immigration has brought labor supply in line with shaky demand, but economists worry that such a slow-moving job market is at risk of toppling over.
By Lydia DePillis, April 3, 2026
Cesar Zapata, who owns four restaurants in Miami, said that when news of immigrant arrests across the city spread, staff departures quickly increased.
In a healthy labor market, enough jobs are being created to soak up all the new people looking for work. But what if those numbers are essentially zilch?
That’s the conundrum facing Federal Reserve officials, as they eye employment reports that have registered in the red for five of the last 12 months. The economy has added 156,000 jobs over the past year, the slowest pace since the Covid-19 pandemic and, before that, the aftermath of the financial crisis. The rate of hiring has fallen to lows from April 2020 and early 2010.
And yet, in contrast to those economic cataclysms, the jobless are not lining up at unemployment offices. Because of President Trump’s hard turn toward deportations and clampdown on legal immigration channels, there just aren’t that many new job seekers.
“You’ve got a sort of a zero employment growth equilibrium,” said Jerome H. Powell, the Fed’s chair, at the central bank’s meeting last month. “Now that’s balance, OK, but I would say it does have a feel of downside risk, and it’s not kind of a really comfortable balance.”
The unease reflects the unfamiliar nature of a no-growth U.S. job market. The labor force has slowed down before, including during the Great Recession, when many immigrants who had come for construction jobs during the housing boom left after those opportunities evaporated. Their departures served as something of a safety valve, preventing unemployment from rising even higher.
But labor force growth has never come to such a standstill outside that kind of downturn. And it is accelerating the reality that now faces many developed countries: As birthrates dip, the working-age population flatlines and may shrink, unless foreigners come in to refresh it. The United States was supposed to reach that point a few decades hence. Now, it’s already here.
“There is so much angst about the state of the economy right now, and that’s because it’s so different from what we’ve seen in recent decades,” said Luke Pardue, policy director at the Aspen Institute’s Economic Strategy Group. “What we’re seeing right now is a strong hint of what we will see in the future given the current and projected demographic trends.”
The new equilibrium creates some challenges. Surmounting them — if the federal government remains committed to keeping foreigners out — would require some very focused effort.
Harder Questions
As long as a country has basic preconditions for prosperity, like a functional government and universal education system, moderate population growth is a tailwind for living standards. More people mean more customers for goods and services, more available workers to execute on good ideas and more opportunities to move around and grow.
Think about the economy as a company. If it’s growing, employees have an easier time moving to different roles as they learn and try new things, since the firm is able to backfill what they were doing before. When the business stays the same size, it’s harder to maintain that trajectory, and workers may not fulfill their potential.
It’s possible to maintain a certain amount of churn and dynamism without adding workers; it’s just more difficult. One person moving out of a position to take another job leaves a vacancy that may be tough to fill.
“For these big developed economies that have relatively stagnant populations, it makes all these trade-offs way more tangible,” said Dietrich Vollrath, a professor of economics at the University of Houston. “You very much have to make choices that some places are going to shrink and do worse, and some places are going to do better. The growing, expanding population allows you to skip past the hard questions.”
At the same time, the composition of the labor force is changing, adding more people in their 50s and 60s while fewer 20-somethings are getting started. Although age brings some benefits, such as knowledge and experience, older people tend to be less likely to take the kinds of risks that create new ideas and businesses. They also are less well equipped for physical jobs, like nursing and construction.
Also, as workers retire, that labor force has to support a larger nonworking population. That creates two problems.
One, Social Security is designed around adding taxpayers faster than they age out of the system. The equation has also long depended on immigrants, who typically contribute payroll taxes and rarely get benefits in return. Slowing immigration has already moved up the date by which Social Security will become insolvent, which would force benefit cuts, tax increases or both.
And two, older people consume far more health care, which is inherently labor intensive. The sector is already essentially the only source of employment growth, and probably could be growing faster if there were enough qualified workers. With a constrained labor force, satisfying health care demand means that some other part of the economy will need to make do with less.
Finally, for both businesses and policymakers, there is something psychologically unnerving to the number zero. When the economy isn’t creating more jobs, employers may worry that people will have less disposable income, and start to shrink their own payrolls in anticipation.
“Does Walmart say, ‘We have less demand in our stores — let’s extrapolate that out and assume we’re going to have less demand in 2026 than in 2025, and we’re going to build less, hire less, expand less’?” said Wendy Edelberg, a former chief economist at the Congressional Budget Office. “All of that can create its own momentum for a downturn.”
Wealth Without Growth?
A flatlining population is by no means an economic death sentence. Plenty of countries are already dealing with it.
The prototypical example is Japan, where even though the population has been sinking since 2008, the labor force has been rebounding after a concerted effort to help women stay employed with more robust child care and parental leave. Older people are working longer as well. When humans aren’t available, robots fill many menial positions, like making coffee and stocking shelves.
Another policy lever that can help places with low or negative population growth is helping people retrain and find new positions quickly if they lose a job. The United States spends far less as a share of its economic output on these “active labor market policies” than other wealthy nations, and might benefit from trying a bit harder to keep people in productive employment. Continuous education also helps make workers as productive as they can be, compensating for losses in manpower.
Perhaps the best way to maintain a healthy economy, even as work force growth slows, is to make sure prosperity is widely shared, with high minimum wages and adequate health care. If people on the low end of the income spectrum are able to go to the movies and remodel their homes, money keeps circulating and creating the demand for new goods and services. Other countries with stable or shrinking populations, including Japan as well as Scandinavian nations, have much lower rates of inequality than in the United States.
“Distribution can be an element that drives growth, because it spreads out and creates a larger market,” Mr. Vollrath of the University of Houston said. People starting businesses want to know if there are enough customers with the wherewithal to buy what they’re selling. “We all benefit from that,” he said. “A more equitable distribution can create some scale for us that didn’t exist before.”
But the easiest policy fix is one that America is currently rejecting: Allow more immigration.
It’s not just the size and the age structure of the work force that matter. New arrivals have historically been willing to take jobs that native-born workers haven’t wanted because — with the benefits of language and cultural fluency — they have better options. In that way, immigrants are like complementary ingredients in a recipe: If you don’t have enough sugar, you can’t make as many pies as you’d like, so you use less flour.
Natural experiments have buttressed this conclusion. In 2021 and 2022, U.S. companies that missed out on getting visas for seasonal workers saw reduced revenues and employed fewer native-born workers. And in South Korea, when a migrant worker program was suspended during the pandemic, companies went out of business and wages for Korean workers fell.
“It’s not like you take away the migrant worker and you can replace them with a native worker,” said Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development who has argued that wealthy countries should welcome more migrants. “Really what happens is the business closes down.”
This recipe math is accentuated by the potential dislocation of artificial intelligence, which appears very likely to destroy desk jobs for which there is no shortage of native-born workers. The occupations that have depended the most on immigrants, like home health care and landscaping, will scarcely be affected.
That’s why some countries without a long tradition of integrating people from many other places have stepped up their efforts to recruit immigrants, if not as full citizens, at least to supplement their labor forces. That includes Japan as well as Italy, where even as the conservative premier, Giorgia Meloni, battles unauthorized migrants on land and on sea, she has quietly opened the door to 500,000 foreigners to work on farms, as caretakers for older people and in other essential settings.
“You have to balance the social and political implications against the economic need,” said Lant Pritchett, a professor at the London School of Economics who has studied ways to make migration more palatable in destination countries. “Even a right-wing government who came to power on the premise that it was anti-immigrant realized that you can’t be anti-worker.”
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2) Economists Once Dismissed the A.I. Job Threat, but Not Anymore
Artificial intelligence hasn’t disrupted the labor market, economists say, but they are increasingly convinced that it will — and that policymakers are unprepared.
By Ben Casselman, April 3, 2026
“I was hoping that at this stage, I would have something lined up,” said Erin Torres, who has been searching for a job for months. Marisa Chafetz for The New York Times
Among tech evangelists in Silicon Valley, it has become conventional wisdom that artificial intelligence will rapidly reshape the labor market, for better or worse. Economists, however, have often discussed A.I.’s impact with a skepticism bordering on dismissiveness.
Rising unemployment among young college graduates? The result of high interest rates and macroeconomic uncertainty. Dire predictions of widespread job losses? A failure to understand the lessons of past technological revolutions. Even the layoffs that companies themselves blamed on artificial intelligence were often chalked up to “A.I.-washing” from executives looking for something to blame other than their own mismanagement.
Recently, however, the message from economists has undergone a subtle change. Most still do not see much evidence that A.I. is disrupting the job market. But they are starting to take seriously the possibility that it could someday soon. If it does, they are worried that policymakers are not ready to respond.
“I don’t think A.I. has hit the labor market yet, and I don’t think it’s radically changed corporate productivity yet, either, but I think it’s coming,” said Daniel Rock, a University of Pennsylvania economist who has studied the economic impact of artificial intelligence.
In a working paper published this week, a team of researchers surveyed economists about their outlook over the next five and 25 years. Most expect the economy to grow a bit more quickly as A.I. improves, but not to diverge substantially from historical patterns. If the technology improves rapidly — a possibility they consider unlikely but plausible — they envision a far more drastic scenario with faster growth but also greater inequality and the disappearance of millions of jobs.
“Economists are certainly taking A.I. seriously,” said Ezra Karger, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago who was one of the study’s authors.
Economists’ expectations for the future looked relatively similar to those of A.I. industry insiders, who were also surveyed for the study. Both groups agree the future is uncertain: A.I. could either wipe out whole categories of jobs or cause few job losses. Its effects could be concentrated among entry-level white-collar workers or spread to more experienced workers and those in blue-collar jobs. The changes could upend the economy within years or take decades to play out.
Given the potential scale of the disruption, economists say it is time to start considering the policies that could help workers displaced or otherwise harmed by the changing economy — something that societies often failed to accomplish in past technological transitions.
“There’s enough conversation around this that we certainly should, as a country, be talking about what sorts of policies make sense in a world where the way employment and careers work now changes a lot in the next two to five years,” said Robert Seamans, an economist at New York University.
A Paradigm Shift
When OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, Alex Imas, an economist at the University of Chicago, did not necessarily see it as an economic game changer, he said. The technology was powerful but limited, prone to mistakes and incapable of producing work with the quality and consistency necessary for most professional applications.
“I knew it was important, but I was definitely on the more skeptical side when it first came out,” Mr. Imas recalled.
For Mr. Imas, the real shift came in late 2024, when OpenAI released a model capable of “reasoning,” meaning it could work through a question step by step before producing an answer. That ability greatly expanded the type of problems the model could tackle, and made it more reliable at solving them.
“It was just a paradigm shift for me,” Mr. Imas said. “And then I started thinking, ‘This is potentially an industrial revolution-scale event, if not more.’”
For other economists, the shift came just in the past few months, with the release of Claude Code — a tool from the A.I. company Anthropic that writes computer code from users’ prompts — and the widespread rollout of A.I. “agents,” autonomous systems capable of performing tasks directly.
Molly Kinder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies A.I., said that as she experimented with the new tools, she had a realization: She no longer needed anyone to do the kind of basic research that she ordinarily hired college students and recent graduates to perform — and that she had performed herself early in her career.
“I really don’t know anything a college student can bring to my team that Claude can’t do,” she said. More senior jobs — ones that require interacting with clients and investors, or making strategic decisions — may be safe for now, she said. But “if you can do your job locked in a closet with a computer, ultimately you’re going to be in trouble.”
Everywhere but the Statistics
Technological advancement alone will not reshape the economy. For that to happen, companies need to adopt the tools and figure out how to use them productively.
History shows that the process almost always takes longer than the inventors expect. Legal and regulatory hurdles slow things down. Companies have to retrain workers or hire new ones. Corporate leaders have to develop new processes and overcome resistance from reluctant managers and cautious information technology departments.
“These conversations have been, in my opinion, overly focused on what the technology can do,” said Martha Gimbel, the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale University. “There’s plenty of technology that could have changed things and didn’t.”
Many hospitals kept patients’ health records on paper for decades after the technology existed to digitize them, Ms. Gimbel noted. Videoconferencing tools have existed for years, but it took a pandemic to force companies to embrace them.
There are signs that A.I. could flow through the economy more quickly than past innovations. Already, nearly one in five companies reports having used A.I. in the last two weeks, according to data from the Census Bureau, and in some industries the rate is twice as high. Workers report using A.I. at even higher rates, suggesting many may be experimenting with the tools on their own initiative.
And while A.I. has not yet had a big impact on aggregate statistics, some economists argue its effects are visible beneath the surface. In a paper published last year, researchers at Stanford University found that employment was declining for entry-level workers in jobs that were highly exposed to A.I.
Technological advancements “sometimes take decades” to appear in the economy in the form of increased productivity, said Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the authors of the Stanford paper. “I don’t think it’s going to be decades this time.”
‘How Painful Is It Going to Be?’
Mr. Brynjolfsson stands out among economists for his confidence in A.I.’s impact. But his forecasts look sober compared with many coming out of Silicon Valley.
Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, has warned that A.I. could eliminate 50 percent of entry-level white-collar jobs within years. The tech investor Vinod Khosla predicted last year that A.I. would replace 80 percent of jobs by 2030. Elon Musk has said the technology will render work “optional.”
Many economists dismiss such predictions, arguing that the A.I. debate should focus less on where the economy will wind up in the end and more on the potentially difficult period of transition.
“The pressing question is, ‘You’re going to have a technological shock — how painful is it going to be?’” said Ms. Gimbel of the Yale Budget Lab.
The spread of A.I. does not have to mean large-scale job losses, economists argue. As much as 70 percent of jobs, by some estimates, are in some way exposed to A.I. But that does not necessarily mean those workers are about to be laid off.
In a report published on Friday, researchers at Boston Consulting Group estimated that more than half of the jobs in the United States would be “reshaped” by artificial intelligence over the next two to three years but that far fewer would be replaced entirely. Most workers perform a range of tasks in their jobs, only some of which can be done reliably by A.I. And even where it may be possible to replace a worker, companies are proceeding cautiously because the stakes are higher if humans are no longer signing off on the computer’s work.
“What we’re actually seeing is that full-scale replacement of jobs is much, much slower because the implementation is harder,” said Greg Emerson, the report’s lead author. “Whereas the augmentation and the reshaping of jobs is happening much, much faster.” Still, A.I. will almost certainly cause job losses in specific industries as companies adapt. How painful that transition turns out to be, economists say, depends on two factors: speed and breadth.
If the A.I. revolution plays out gradually, it will give workers time to adapt. Older workers can finish out careers, while younger ones can learn relevant skills or change careers entirely. If A.I.’s impact is limited to certain sectors, that will make it easier for workers to find opportunities in other parts of the economy.
But a broad, rapid change will give workers little time to adapt, and few places to hide.
“If speed is slow, then you have time for employment to adjust, for new roles to be created,” said Mr. Imas, the University of Chicago economist. “There’s disruption, but not something we haven’t seen before. But if it’s fast, you can get really wacky things start happening.”
How to Prepare
However A.I. affects the labor market, economists say policymakers should act now to modernize programs that could help displaced workers.
The unemployment insurance system, for example, excludes many of the new graduates who are likely to be hit first by A.I. Retraining programs are often slow-moving and poorly funded.
But some economists worry that such tools are not up to the challenge.
“In the past, our social safety net was designed to help people over transitory shocks,” said Anton Korinek, an economist at the University of Virginia. “This one might actually be a more permanent shock.”
Mr. Korinek was an early convert to the idea that A.I. could prove to be a uniquely transformative technology. He remains an outlier among his peers in his willingness to consider more extreme scenarios, such as the possibility that A.I. becomes better than humans at every task.
Many economists shy away from such discussions, Mr. Korinek said, an impulse he called “emotionally understandable but practically a really bad idea.”
“As economists, part of our job is to worry about what are the biggest risks,” he said. “What could cause disruptions, and how should we prepare for those disruptions?”
Mr. Korinek will continue to make those arguments, but not from an academic perch. At the end of the semester, he will take a leave from the University of Virginia to join Anthropic.
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3) Trump’s defense spending request would be offset in part by steep cuts to domestic programs
By Tony Romm, Reporting from Washington, April 3, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04/03/us/trump-news#section-859387654
With the United States at war with Iran and embroiled in conflicts around the world, the White House said on Friday that it would ask Congress to approve about $1.5 trillion for defense in the 2027 fiscal year. If enacted, that amount would set military spending at its highest level in modern history.
The request, which arrived on Friday as part of President Trump’s new budget, would amount to a roughly 40 percent bump from what the United States spent on the Pentagon this fiscal year. The administration said it would couple the proposed increase with a call for $73 billion in cuts across domestic agencies, including the elimination of some climate, housing and education programs.
By Friday morning, the White House had released only a summary of its budget request, which covers the period beginning Oct. 1, with fuller details expected later. Together, the ideas sum to a fiscal blueprint that could add trillions of dollars to the brimming federal debt over the next decade, if lawmakers translate the president’s full vision into law without other changes to federal spending.
Mr. Trump urged Congress to approve most of the new defense money, more than $1.1 trillion, as part of its work to fund the government, and to enact the remaining $350 billion using the same legislative tactic that allowed Republicans to clinch their tax cuts last year. He also asked lawmakers to increase federal funding to aid with border enforcement and mass deportations.
In the days before releasing the initial details of his plan, the president and his aides framed the proposed increase for defense in urgent terms, citing a need to restock munitions and other supplies as the war with Iran continues. At one point, Mr. Trump indicated at a private lunch that military spending needed to be a national priority, even at the expense of federal safety-net programs and other government aid, though his budget is not expected to address Medicare and Medicaid.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things,” he said. “They can do it on a state basis.” He added that the focus had to be “military protection.”
But Democrats and Republicans have expressed a shared unease recently about raising military spending to the extent that Mr. Trump has suggested, fretting that the administration had failed to keep them updated about the status of the Iran war, which is now in its fifth week.
Nor have lawmakers always responded favorably to some of the president’s proposed cuts for agencies and programs that serve American families and businesses. Only months ago, Democrats and Republicans approved spending packages for the current fiscal year that rejected most of the reductions that Mr. Trump had endorsed as part of his 2026 submission.
For the next fiscal year, the White House appeared to back off from some of those most sweeping changes. But it still asked Congress to slash domestic spending by about 10 percent, targeting a wide array of once core government services, some of which have historically had bipartisan support.
Some of the proposed cuts would target programs that serve minority groups and their communities, under the presumption that the spending — meant to expand access to lending, bolster minority-owned businesses and combat housing discrimination — is “woke,” “weaponized” or facilitates “cultural Marxism.”
The Trump administration also proposed to slash some funding for teacher training on the grounds that the money helped to “indoctrinate” them. And the White House asked Congress to cancel about $15 billion in clean energy and other green funds adopted as part of the 2021 infrastructure law, including money for renewable energy and electric vehicle chargers.
The administration signaled it would reserve its most significant increases for law enforcement, including more than $40 billion for the Justice Department, a 13 percent increase.
Nevertheless, the president’s blueprint does not carry the force of law; only lawmakers have the authority under the Constitution to set the nation’s spending levels. But Mr. Trump has at times upset that balance by claiming that he possesses vast powers to control the nation’s purse strings and carry out his budgetary vision, even without the express approval of Congress.
Over the first year of his second term, the president closed agencies and programs he disliked; dismissed thousands of federal workers across the bureaucracy; and halted billions in congressionally enacted funds for health, education, foreign aid, public broadcasting and more. The actions frequently drew widespread political rebukes and hundreds of legal challenges, many of which have not resolved in the president’s favor.
The roughly $1.5 trillion sought for the Pentagon would amount to about 4.5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of its economic output, according to Jessica Riedl, a budget and tax fellow at the Brookings Institution. By that measure, it would be the largest year-over-year increase for defense since the Korean War, her analysis showed, after adjusting for inflation.
The request comes less than a year after Mr. Trump secured about $150 billion in extra funding for the Pentagon as part of Republicans’ sweeping tax cut package. The government has raced to disburse those funds in recent months while pursuing additional money to help fund the war with Iran.
Marc Goldwein, a senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates deficit reduction, said the president’s increases could exacerbate the federal debt, now at nearly $39 trillion.
Without other substantial changes to federal spending and tax revenue, another half trillion in new military spending could total about $5 trillion to $6 trillion to that imbalance over the next decade, according to his analysis before the budget was released, after accounting for interest on what the government already owes.
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4) ‘Iran Is Being Destroyed in Front of Our Eyes’: Tehran Is Gripped by Fear
Fifteen residents of Tehran said in telephone interviews and text messages that the capital was weathering heavy bombardment Friday.
By Farnaz Fassihi, April 3, 2026
Residents in front of buildings damaged by airstrikes in Karaj, Iran, on Friday. Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
A mother huddling with her small child in the bathroom, trying to shield them against the explosions rocking their neighborhood. Younger relatives frantically wheeling a 90-year-old bedridden patriarch to the hallway minutes before the windows shattered. A family of four descending from their 22nd floor apartment by staircase, avoiding the elevator for fear the power may go out.
These were some of the scenes unfolding in Tehran, a sprawling metropolis of 10 million people, on Friday night and into the early hours of the morning Saturday local time. The capital, including dense residential neighborhoods in the leafy northern parts of the city, came under heavy bombardment as the war’s fifth week came to a close.
Fifteen residents of Tehran said in telephone interviews and text messages that they were simply terrified. Many asked that their last names not be used for fear of retribution.
“I have lost my concentration; I don’t know what will happen to us,” Golshan Fathi, a resident of Tehran, said in a text message from the bathroom she was hiding in. “I’m very, very worried.”
Saghar, another resident of the capital, said in a series of text messages that her home had shaken so violently from the airstrikes that she thought it would collapse and bury her family. “I thought, ‘OK, it’s over. We are all dying.’” she said. “I don’t know what to say, what just landed was very near and terrifying.”
For five weeks, ordinary Iranians have been caught in the cross-fires of the intensifying war with the United States and Israel. They have watched with dismay and anxiety as President Trump has threatened to bomb them “back to the Stone Age,” and as airstrikes have hit critical infrastructure — from steel factories, power plants and airports to scientific research centers and top universities.
“Iran is being destroyed in front of our eyes,” wrote Afshin, a 58-year-old business owner, adding, “What if we are left here to rot in the hands of this regime with no connection to the outside world?”
The Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based rights organization, said that over the past 24 hours it had recorded 206 attacks in 13 provinces in Iran, with at least one civilian killed. In total, the group has recorded at least 1,607 civilian deaths since the start of the war.
Augmenting people’s anxiety are the recent escalations from Iran’s leadership. On Friday, Iran shot down an American fighter jet in the southwest part of the country. While one of the two airmen in the jet was rescued, American rescue teams and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were both hunting the mountain terrains looking for the other on Friday. Iran also claimed responsibility for an American A-10 Warthog plane that crashed in the Persian Gulf around the same time as the jet, and shot at a military helicopter, which was forced to make a landing outside Iran’s borders.
Government supporters said they hoped the missing American crew member would be taken as a prisoner of war.
Earlier in the evening, crowds of government supporters gathered in several squares in Tehran waving flags and celebrating the downing of the American aircraft, according to video reports posted on state media. The front pages of several Iranian newspapers, posted online, celebrated with headlines that read, “The sky is under Iran’s control,” and “End to the fantasy of defeat.”
But others worried of the consequences.
“I hope the Americans find the pilot because if we capture him who knows what Trump will do to us,” said Reza, a 48-year-old accountant. Reza, who went to the basement of his high-rise building with his wife and two children on Friday night, said they were anxious about electricity and water going out.
Iranians who were able to connect to the internet flooded social media with messages that captured the panic gripping the city. Milad Alavi, a journalist in Tehran, posted on social media, “Tonight’s explosions in northern Tehran have been suffocating. The population density in these areas is high, and people are in a panic, abandoning their homes.”
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5) Europe’s Options in the Strait of Hormuz: Few, and Risky
European leaders and other officials have ideas for bringing shipping back to the strait once the Iran war ends. But none of them are sure bets.
By Jim Tankersley, Reporting from Berlin, April 4, 2026
Cargo ships near the Strait of Hormuz last month. Reuters
When senior officials from 40 countries met virtually this week to discuss how to bring shipping traffic back to the Strait of Hormuz, Italy’s foreign minister had a proposal. He urged them to establish a “humanitarian corridor” allowing safe passage for fertilizer and other crucial goods headed to impoverished nations.
The plan, described after the meeting by Italian officials, was one of several competing proposals from Europe and beyond that were meant to prevent the Iran war from causing widespread hunger. But it was not endorsed by the envoys on the call, and the meeting ended with no concrete plan to reopen the strait, militarily or otherwise.
European leaders are under pressure from President Trump to commit military assets, immediately, to end Iran’s blockage of the strait and tame a growing global energy and economic crisis. They have refused to meet his demands by sending warships now. Instead, they are hotly debating what to do to help unclog the vital shipping lane once the war ends.
But they are struggling to rally around a plan of action.
That partly reflects the slow gears of diplomacy in Europe and the sheer number of nations, including Persian Gulf states, that are invested in safeguarding the strait once the war ends. Many nations involved in the talks, including Italy and Germany, have insisted that any international effort be blessed by the United Nations, which could slow action further. Military leaders will take up the issue in discussions next week.
More than anything, the struggle reflects how difficult it could be to actually secure the strait under a fragile peace — for Europe or for anyone else. None of the options available to Europe, the Gulf states and other countries look foolproof, even under the assumption that the major fighting will have stopped.
Idea 1: Naval escorts
The plan: French officials, including President Emmanuel Macron, have repeatedly raised the possibility that French naval vessels could help escort merchant ships through the strait after the war ends. American officials have pushed for Europeans and other allies, like Japan, to escort ships sailing under their own countries’ flags. (A French escort for a French ship, for example.)
The catch: Naval escorts are expensive. Also, their air defense systems alone might not be sufficient to stop some types of attacks, like drone strikes, should Iran choose to start firing again. “What does the world expect, what does Donald Trump expect, from let’s say a handful or two handfuls of European frigates there in the Strait of Hormuz,” Defense Minister Boris Pistorius of Germany said last month, “to achieve what the powerful American Navy cannot manage there alone?”
Idea 2: Sweep for mines
The plan: German and Belgian officials, among others, say they are prepared to send minesweepers to clear the strait of explosives after the war.
The catch: Western military leaders aren’t convinced that Iran has actually mined the strait, in part because some Iranian ships still pass through it. So while minesweepers might be deployed as part of a naval escort, they might not have much to do.
Idea 3: Help from above
The plan: Send fighter jets and drones to intercept any Iranian air assaults on ships. American officials have pushed Europe to do this.
The catch: Also quite expensive. Still not guaranteed to work. Iran can attack ships with a single soldier in a speedboat, and if just a few attempts succeed, that could be enough to spook insurers and shipowners out of attempting passage.
Idea 4: All of those, plus diplomacy
The plan: Use negotiations and economic leverage to pressure Iran to refrain from future attacks, and deploy a variety of military means to enforce that. This effort would go beyond Europe. On Thursday, the German foreign ministry called on China to use its influence with Iran “constructively” to help end the hostilities.
The catch: Expensive. Still not guaranteed. Negotiations seem to have done little to stop the fighting. But this may be Europe’s best bet, for lack of a better one.
What if none of that works?
Iranian officials said this week that they would continue to control traffic through the strait after the war. They have already made plans to make ships pay tolls for passing through the strait, which is supposed to be an unfettered waterway under international law.
A continued blockage risks global economic disaster. Countries around the world rely on shipments through the strait for fuel and fertilizer, among other necessities. In some regions, shortages loom. In others, like Europe, high oil, gas and fertilizer prices have raised the specter of spiking inflation and cratering economic growth.
“The big threat right now is stagflation,” said Hanns Koenig, a managing director at Aurora Energy Research, a Berlin consultancy. “You’ve got higher prices, and they strangle the tiny growth we would have seen this year.”
Reporting was contributed by Lara Jakes from Rome; Michael D. Shear and Stephen Castle from London; Koba Ryckewaert from Brussels; and Catherine Porter from Paris.
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6) America Is Used to Hiding Its Wars. Trump Is Doing the Opposite.
By Charles Homans, April 4, 2026
Photo illustration by Chantal Jahchan
On April 1, 32 days after abruptly launching a wave of airstrikes on Iran, President Trump made his first formal White House address to the American people about the war. He offered no new information or clarity on his strategy or goals. It was mostly just Trump, talking. But amid the familiar superlatives and tangents, there was a curiously specific digression.
“It’s very important that we keep this conflict in perspective,” Trump said. “American involvement in World War I lasted one year, seven months and five days. World War II lasted for three years, eight months and 25 days. The Korean War lasted for three years, one month and two days. The Vietnam War lasted for 19 years, five months and 29 days! Iraq went on for eight years, eight months and 28 days.” All of this was to say that 32 days was really not very long at all.
What was most surprising about Trump’s history lesson was its inference that wars were linear events with beginnings, middles and endings. This was not the impression that a reasonable person would have gotten from the past several months of increasingly disjointed foreign adventures: the capture of Venezuela’s president, an oil blockade and intimations of regime change in Cuba, weeks of open deliberation over invading Greenland and finally the Iran war.
These episodes followed the logic of content more than conflict, not so much ending as just kind of receding down the feed, replaced by bigger and better explosions. The White House social media team leaned trollishly into the idea, posting videos to X that spliced airstrike footage with movie and video game clips and a reference to the unofficial Proud Boys motto, “[expletive] around and find out.”
By the time Trump addressed the nation, however, America seemed to be settling into its own finding-out phase, and even the president’s allies were getting nervous. Memes had given way to maps of the Strait of Hormuz; gas was clearing $4 a gallon. Scapegoats were being sought: “As this thing goes south,” the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said, “we need to know exactly who talked him” — Trump — “into it and what representations were made to convince the president that this was a good idea.”
One Trump national security official, the National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent, had already resigned over the war. “In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars,” Kent admonished Trump in his resignation letter, blaming “Israel and its powerful American lobby” for luring him into an open-ended conflict.
The “never-ending wars” that Kent bemoaned have been the dominant condition of American foreign policy throughout the 21st century, a once-dystopian-seeming possibility that, somewhere in the long shadow of Sept. 11, became a quietly accepted reality. Americans don’t particularly like endless wars, but it’s been years since they opposed them all that actively, a fact that surely has to do with how little the wars — fought under thickening layers of classification by a professional military drawn from a sliver of the population, and with a rapidly expanding suite of autonomous technologies — cost them personally.
Trump has benefited from this jaded complacency as much as anybody. He railed against the entanglements of the Bush and Obama years in his 2016 campaign and declared in a first-term State of the Union address that “great nations do not fight endless wars.” But in that term, he mostly served as a distracted custodian of the occupations and covert operations he inherited, and voters did not seem inclined to punish him for it. Though he lost the 2020 election, in Gallup polling published early that year only about a quarter of Democrats and independents, and even fewer Republicans, considered foreign affairs an “extremely important” issue.
In his second term, Trump seems hellbent on changing that. “Trump 47 is almost a different president from Trump 45,” says Michael O’Hanlon, the director of research for the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution.
A leader who was once ambivalent at best about far-flung conflicts has, in the space of a few months, tried on several centuries’ worth of American imperialist costumes: the unapologetic empire-building of James Polk and James Monroe, the petro-political intrigues and Latin American chess games of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s spooks, Donald Rumsfeld’s fantasies about frictionless air wars. Trump’s April 1 speech, with its scattered musings about triumphs both real and imaginary, did not suggest he planned to change course anytime soon.
This president is, eternally, a break from American history and a logical culmination of it at the same time. On the one hand, his newfound adventurism would seem to run counter to the unspoken pact that Americans and their government have arrived at in the 21st century, in which the country’s citizens agree to mostly ignore the open-ended and opaque military operations conducted in their name as long as the government agrees not to ask them to sacrifice anything for them. On the other hand, the weightless vision of war-making that the Trump White House is presenting to the American people is an obvious product of this same recent history.
The Rise of the Endless War
“This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger,” George W. Bush said in his speech at the National Cathedral three days after the Sept. 11 attacks. American history would beg to differ: The United States was actively involved in military conflicts at home or abroad for most years of the 19th and 20th centuries, and has remained so in the quarter-century since Bush’s speech.
Public opinion of these wars has reflected less resolve than suggestibility. In his 2009 book “In Time of War,” Adam J. Berinsky, an M.I.T. political scientist, surveying seven decades of public opinion data, found that while Americans’ support for wars was affected by major attacks on the country — Pearl Harbor, Sept. 11 — it mostly followed the domestic “ebb and flow of partisan and group-based political conflict”: That is, it tracked politicians’ fights about the wars more than the events of the wars themselves.
This is understandable. Wars are complicated and, for Americans, almost always fought far away. The sacrifices they entail, even when they are painfully felt, are open to interpretation. But the fickleness of public opinion has provided obvious incentive for presidents — who, since Franklin D. Roosevelt, have closely studied polling on their wars — to withhold or shape information.
This project proceeded steadily through America’s postwar hegemony. Congress hasn’t formally declared war since World War II. Heeding the lessons of Korea and Vietnam, presidents have gradually shifted the financing of wars toward borrowing and printing money and away from a direct “war tax,” making it harder for voters to assess their cost. Richard Nixon ended the draft, corralling wars’ human losses within a small and, increasingly, demographically and culturally specific segment of the population.
The War Powers Act of 1973, informed by Vietnam, was supposed to reassert Congress’s authority to openly debate wars before beginning them. But with the arguable exception of George W. Bush, every president since Ronald Reagan has invaded or bombed a country without congressional approval.
Sarah Kreps, a professor at Cornell University who has studied military financing, argues that these innovations have gradually undermined one of the most famous ideas in democratic theory, advanced by Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay “Toward Perpetual Peace.” Kant argued that democratic states behave differently, and more judiciously, in their war-making than monarchies and oligarchies. Their governments are responsive to their citizens, Kant reasoned, and their citizens are responsive to the costs of war, because they bear them. But what if the cost is hidden from them?
From Drone Strikes to TikTok Spartanism
And what if the gravest costs are not borne by them at all? This question has become particularly urgent since the advent of armed drones, which, in their capacity to inflict death without risking it, have changed the elemental moral calculus assumed in warfare. A country that does not incur much human cost from its wars is a country that does not think much about them at all. “The absence of casualties isn’t a bad thing,” Kreps said, “but what it does is make Americans not think twice about how they are spending their resources.”
This became evident during Obama’s presidency, as his administration attempted to shift the war on terror away from the Bush-era counterinsurgencies and into a more amorphous, drone-centric program of counterterrorism. Critics have long contended that this was a perverse consequence of mounting concern over the civil liberties violations of the Bush years: a replacement of black sites and Guantánamo detentions with ghostly assassinations by increasingly autonomous airborne machines, the particulars of which would remain far from the view, and consciences, of the president’s supporters.
It was a bargain that many of those supporters were tacitly willing to accept. Polls during Obama’s presidency found that even as large majorities of Americans opposed staying in Afghanistan, most also approved of the administration’s drone strikes — even when a plurality of respondents couldn’t name the countries being targeted.
The professional-class liberalism of the Obama years, happy to whistle past its moral and ideological contradictions, is one of the main targets of Alexander Karp’s 2025 book “The Technological Republic.” Karp is the chief executive of the data analytics firm Palantir, which used Obama-era Afghanistan operations as a laboratory to develop battlefield software it now provides to Trump’s Pentagon; its programs have been used to target airstrikes in Iran.
In “The Technological Republic,” he describes a fast-arriving future in which wars with beginnings and ends are replaced by constant tactical engagement with elusive, artificial-intelligence-enabled threats. In this new reality, Karp argues, one of the most pernicious threats to national security is the estrangement of American elites from the battlefield: Silicon Valley executives and programmers who angrily protest the military use of the tools they create, a political class that has “never flown halfway around the world to risk one’s life.” He argues for a return to the values of the early Cold War, when technology, culture and national defense were united in common purpose, and has suggested resuming the draft — that America “only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
Now that we are fighting the next war, however, it’s not hard to see the contradiction between Karp’s civic vision and his products. Advances in military technology, and especially the transformative technologies currently poking into view, aim to reduce the risk and cost of warfighting, not to share them as widely as possible. In the Palantir-assisted Iran airstrikes, we are getting a glimpse of a new reality in which human deliberation is considered a tactical liability. This is a recipe for a country in which citizen participation in war, where it exists, takes on a different and shallower meaning — “engagement” in the digital audience analytics sense, not the civic one.
You can see this contradiction on particularly garish display in Trump’s second-term bellicosity. The administration’s TikTok Spartanism, on a surface level, affirms Karp’s vision: The White House’s Iran content is an unapologetic brief for American hard power in a zero-sum world full of enemies. But it is a burlesque of the technologized warrior republic rather than a real enactment of it. The videos are possible only in a country that asks little from its people beyond their YouTube clicks, where the intellectual and moral muscles necessary to work through questions of war and peace disappeared into the couch a long time ago.
It is another variation on a familiar decadence rather than a repudiation of it, another reminder of how malleable the narrative of a nation is when it comes unmoored from reality. Once the links between citizen and conflict have been severed, you can tell yourself whatever story you want about who you are and what you are doing in the world.
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7) New Attorney General, Same Albatross: Trump’s Quest for Retribution
The name atop the Justice Department’s organizational chart matters less than the presence of a president whose demands for revenge have become so extreme that even his most obsequious appointees have fallen short.
By Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush, April 4, 2026
President Trump’s pick to replace Pam Bondi will face the same conundrum that every attorney general he has hired and fired has confronted: It is hard to steer the Justice Department when the president is grabbing the wheel and stepping on the gas.
Mr. Trump is searching for a tougher version of Ms. Bondi but the fault lies not in the shirking weakness of those he has called upon to execute his will, but rather in the impossibility of his request — to bring criminal charges against political targets with little to no evidence or legal justification.
The president has settled for the moment on Ms. Bondi’s chief deputy and his former defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, whose grasp of legal matters and low-key personality represent a contrast from the voluble, less lawyerly Ms. Bondi.
Yet the name atop the Justice Department’s organizational chart matters less than the overbearing presence of a president whose demands for retribution against his enemies have become so frequent and extreme that even his most obsequious appointees have fallen short.
“It’s certainly not about the willingness or the loyalty of any one person to carry out the president’s orders,” said Mimi Rocah, a former federal prosecutor who is writing a book about the current state of the Justice Department.
“It’s more that there are limits on the president — courts, grand juries, lawyers and investigators who understand norms and ethics — that have started getting in his way.”
Over the past few months, those limits have become more visible as the legal system has pushed back in an extraordinary manner against the president’s attempts to investigate and prosecute his enemies, no matter how much — or rather, little — evidence exists to support the cases. Judges, grand juries and some federal prosecutors have stepped in to block Mr. Trump’s most egregious efforts, serving as a bulwark against his maximalist personal and political goals.
It remains unclear for now how long Mr. Blanche, 51, might stay in his new job as acting attorney general — or who is likely to replace him. One senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, described the job as Mr. Blanche’s to lose.
Several other names have been floated in recent days, including Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency; Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah; and Senator Ashley Moody, Republican of Florida. But it is unclear how serious any of these candidates might be, given Mr. Trump’s habit of musing with his associates about potential personnel moves.
Some of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies seem to believe that all he needs to do is appoint a more belligerent attorney general to force through what Ms. Bondi failed to accomplish.
“We want to see heads roll,” Representative Chip Roy of Texas said on Friday morning on Fox News, adding, “The next attorney general needs to be very aggressive.”
Moreover, some of Mr. Trump’s supporters on the right have renewed their effort to portray Mr. Blanche — the architect of the president’s scorched-earth legal strategy — as trying to quietly sidetrack investigations demanded by the Trump base.
Ms. Bondi tried to redirect some of the president’s anger by blaming local federal prosecutors who have, in several important cases, declined to quickly indict those he had singled out as criminals.
At a reception for U.S. attorneys last December, Mr. Trump berated the top federal prosecutor in Maryland, Kelly O. Hayes, for not indicting Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and an outspoken critic, for mortgage fraud, as Ms. Bondi and stunned officials looked on, according to a person who attended the event.
Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche got the president’s message, stepping up efforts to investigate several other Trump targets, including the Democratic fund-raising group ActBlue; John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director; and Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, according to two officials briefed on the effort.
But more aggression in the courts is unlikely to solve the problem that Mr. Trump and his supporters are actually facing: that the cases he has asked for — and the people he has chosen to go after — are not, on the basis of the facts and law, targets for viable prosecution.
Mr. Blanche, who represented Mr. Trump in three of the four criminal cases he faced while out of office, at least comes to the job of leading the department with an advantage that Ms. Bondi and most of the other candidates never had: strong ties to the president forged during their shared time in the courtroom. The cases drew the men together in a bond based on a mutual feeling that Mr. Trump had been wronged by the Justice Department during the Biden administration.
Still, even Mr. Blanche, who has often claimed to have witnessed firsthand how the law was “weaponized” against the president, may not be able to deliver in the end on Mr. Trump’s desire to go after those he believes went after him.
Under Mr. Blanche, the Justice Department has already failed to win cases against two of Mr. Trump’s most reviled adversaries, the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the New York attorney general, Letitia James. Those cases died in November when a federal judge determined that Lindsey Halligan, the inexperienced loyalist who was handpicked by the president to bring charges, was put into her job unlawfully.
The department also failed on Mr. Blanche’s watch to secure an indictment against six Democratic lawmakers who made a video last year reminding military and intelligence personnel of their obligations to disobey illegal orders. Around the same time, prosecutors were unable to move forward with making a case against former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and aides over allegations that they had broken the law by using the autopen to sign presidential documents
In yet another unusual move, Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief federal judge in Washington, threw a significant roadblock last month into an investigation into Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, over claims that there were overruns in the central bank’s renovations of its headquarters. Judge Boasberg determined that prosecutors had issued subpoenas to the Fed for no other reason than to harass Mr. Powell, who had long run afoul of Mr. Trump for not dropping interest rates, more or less at the president’s request.
Despite the renewed bid by Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche to move against targets of Mr. Trump like Mr. Brennan and Ms. Hutchinson, there is no guarantee that those investigations will fare any better in the courts than previous inquiries have. Pushing forward with them might actually leave Mr. Blanche or his successor in the lurch.
Neither, after all, is a slam-dunk case, and both would most likely have to proceed in Federal District Court in Washington. Since last year, grand juries there have repeatedly refused to return indictments against Mr. Trump’s adversaries and others caught up in some of his signature policies, including his surge of National Guard members and federal agents onto the city’s streets.
Before Mr. Trump began demanding that the Justice Department file cases against his enemies, grand juries rarely rejected efforts to secure indictments and prosecutors could go through long careers without experiencing the embarrassment of failing to get charges.
But under Mr. Trump, such failures have become more common — so common, in fact, that last month Judge Boasberg issued a remarkable standing order directing grand jury forepersons to alert the court if they rejected an indictment in what is known as a no true bill.
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8) Trump Budget Does Little to Address Nation’s Fiscal Challenges
While the federal deficit has started to shrink under President Trump, his plans could make the long-term situation worse.
By Andrew Duehren and Alan Rappeport, Reporting from Washington, April 4, 2026
President Trump’s latest budget proposal includes little that would realistically bolster the country’s financial health. Eric Lee for The New York Times
So far during President Trump’s second term, the federal budget has, at first glance, held up just fine.
Of course, the outlook for America’s fiscal state is still bleak in the long run. But even after Republicans passed a huge tax cut last year and Congress rejected most of Mr. Trump’s proposed spending cuts, the deficit has shrunk a bit. A combination of money from the president’s tariffs and, perhaps surprisingly, a bump in income tax revenue has kept the fiscal situation steady.
Both of those supports are now at risk of sagging, and Mr. Trump’s latest budget proposal includes little that would realistically bolster the country’s financial health.
The White House budget plan released on Friday pairs a huge increase in military spending with steep cuts to many nondefense programs. Like his budget last year, it does not include many of the typical forecasts for how the administration’s agenda could affect the federal debt over time.
“It’s the most number-free budget we’ve seen in recent history,” said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “I have to imagine that there’s a story that the numbers would tell that they don’t want to tell.”
What the White House presented as its fiscal outlook relied on spending cuts that would be difficult to get through Congress and projections of strong government revenue, fueled by tariffs and bounding economic growth. Every administration’s budget presents optimistic assessments of its own plans, but this year’s felt particularly perfunctory to independent budget experts.
Absent were proposals for how to address growth in spending on Social Security and Medicare, the two most expensive federal programs, and the supersized military budget could add significantly to the debt if continued in perpetuity.
“They’re not even pretending to try,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
But even without a detailed plan, the current budget situation has not significantly changed under Mr. Trump — yet.
The president’s single largest fiscal change has been the roughly $5 trillion tax cut that was passed last year, and his most recent budget does not propose any other tax changes. Unlike the tax cut from his first term, much of last year’s was put into place permanently. To do that, Republicans worked around congressional rules that would have prevented approval of such a significant fiscal measure without bipartisan support.
That means the law will shape the country’s fiscal trajectory for decades, but its costs have so far been masked. Its most costly provisions didn’t take effect until this year, and Mr. Trump’s improvisational tariffs have raised significant sums of money that have offset some of that lost revenue.
The Supreme Court threw out many of those duties in February. Mr. Trump has begun imposing other tariffs in their stead, and his budget forecasts roughly $6 trillion in tariff revenue through 2036.
But independent experts expect those new duties to bring in far less. The Yale Budget Lab estimates the current tariff regime will generate roughly $1.7 trillion over the same period, about $1 trillion less than its estimate for the tariff system the Supreme Court blew up. (And even that smaller sum is likely an overestimate: Unlike the tax cuts, Mr. Trump’s tariffs could be abandoned single-handedly by a future president.)
Mr. Trump’s most prominent cost-savings initiative — the Department of Government Efficiency — failed to live up to its ambitions of reducing federal spending by $1 trillion last year and has faded in prominence. This year, the White House has turned to a new task force dedicated to combating fraud as a way to recoup federal funds that are slipping through the cracks, an effort that is unlikely to have an effect on the budget overall.
And Congress may reject many of the spending cuts Mr. Trump requested in his budget, as it did last year, even as the war in Iran starts to weigh on the budget. “The President’s Budget Request is just that, a request,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement outlining her concerns with several of Mr. Trump’s proposed cuts.
Not only could the war drive up military spending, but its economic fallout could also eat into tax revenues. The war has rattled financial markets, meaning Americans may begin to recoup less from their investments. A strong stock market the last couple of years has returned more to Americans who cash out, prompting them to pay more income taxes on their gains.
As of November, Americans had reported nearly $1.2 trillion in income from capital gains in 2025, a more than 40 percent increase from the year before, according to Internal Revenue Service data. That has translated into higher tax receipts. Revenue from income taxes that are not withheld from paychecks, a category that includes taxes on capital gains, is up roughly 30 percent so far this fiscal year, which started in October.
Overall, government revenue is up about 11 percent this fiscal year, which has helped trim the deficit 12 percent from a year ago, according to Treasury data. The deficit also dropped slightly last fiscal year.
While that has reversed its growth over the last couple of years of the Biden administration, the deficit is still very high by historical standards, at 5.8 percent of gross domestic product. And it is far from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s goal of getting it below 4 percent by the end of Mr. Trump’s term.
William Hoagland, a budget expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said that goal would probably not be reached with military spending growing so fast and proposed domestic spending cuts unlikely to win approval from Congress.
“I think that’s a good goal, but I don't see how that they would even come close to that based on what they submitted,” Mr. Hoagland said of the president’s budget.
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9) Trump Wants to Make Deportation Deals. Autocrats Are Ready to Listen.
The White House has turned deportations, a signature domestic issue, into a major piece of foreign policy. Here’s what we know about the program.
By Eileen Sullivan, Hamed Aleaziz, Megha Rajagopalan and Pranav Baskar, April 4, 2026
Eileen Sullivan and Hamed Aleaziz reported from Washington, Megha Rajagopalan from London, and Pranav Baskar from New York.
A prison in El Salvador where many Venezuelans were sent after being deported from the United States. Fred Ramos for The New York Times
As President Trump searches the world for countries willing to accept thousands of migrants deported from the United States, he is finding that some of the most receptive leaders are strongmen, autocrats and human rights abusers.
American diplomats are under such pressure from the White House to cut deals that they have put nearly everything on the negotiating table, records show: The United States will pay foreign security forces, ease visa restrictions or tariffs, finance public health services and even reconsider a country’s placement on U.S. watch lists.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s office, in a February cable seen by The New York Times, coached diplomats on how to extract initial offers.
“If you are willing to take more individuals, then we can potentially provide more support,” was one suggested line. “Without making any promises, what do you have in mind?” was another.
The cable put no constraints on whom the United States could negotiate with. Regarding a list of unspecified “Countries of Concern,” American diplomats were told that accepting migrants “can help a country improve its relationship with the United States.”
The negotiations show how Mr. Trump has turned mass deportation, one of his signature domestic initiatives, into a central part of American foreign policy.
The Trump administration has deported thousands of people to about a dozen countries, often to places where they have no ties. As mass detention in the United States becomes politically complicated, the administration is eager to cut more deals to deport migrants.
Such arrangements are taking shape in particular in Africa, where Mr. Trump has ushered in a new style of diplomacy that prioritizes deal-making over enforcing human rights and promoting democracy. The policy is called “America First in Africa.”
The Trump administration is in talks, records show, to send migrants to the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo, two countries where the judicial systems are dysfunctional and government forces have been linked to torture and forced disappearances.
The United States has already cut deals with the strongman leaders of Cameroon and Rwanda. Migrants are being detained under an arrangement with Equatorial Guinea, an autocracy where torture is systemic. Others are being held in Eswatini, a monarchy with a history of human rights abuses, and South Sudan, which is teetering on civil war.
Many of these migrants had been living in the United States under legal protections preventing them from being sent to their home countries because of the threat of political, religious or ethnic persecution.
“Third-country removal is the only mechanism by which ICE can simultaneously honor its two key legal obligations: the obligation not to return individuals to a country from which they have been granted protection, and the obligation to enforce a final order of removal,” John A. Schultz, a senior official at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, told a federal judge last month.
The State Department declined to comment on its communication with other countries. The Times pieced together details of the deals through diplomatic cables, funding records, government correspondence and other documents, as well as through interviews with U.S. officials and migrants. Some officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the program.
The contours of the program are still taking shape, but the State Department is under pressure to step up the pace.
As the administration scales back its highly visible, militarized deportation operations in major American cities, Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, has expressed frustration at the speed and scope of the third-country deals in calls with the State Department, according to two U.S. officials with knowledge of the conversations.
The message from the White House is clear: more deals, more quickly for more migrants.
Who is being deported under this program?
The United States has faced an immigration dilemma for years: What happens to foreigners who are not legally allowed to stay in the United States but who cannot go back to their own countries for fear of persecution or death?
Over the past decade, amid the largest immigration surge in U.S. history, thousands of migrants said they fell into that category. Without a clear solution, American officials allowed many to stay by default, without legal standing.
Last year, the Trump administration found a new option: Let another country figure it out.
The administration has not disclosed how many people have been sent to third countries. The biggest group by far, though, is the nearly 14,000 people who were sent to Latin America and the Caribbean, according to Human Rights First, a nonprofit group that tracks deportations.
Officials have said they are focusing on deporting people with criminal offenses.
“We are working with other countries to say, ‘We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries, and will you do that as a favor to us?’” Mr. Rubio said last year.
Some of those deported to third countries do have criminal records, and their convictions have sometimes made their home countries unwilling to accept their return.
But many do not have records. After President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador made a splashy video of hundreds of Venezuelans arriving at a maximum-security prison in March 2025, many were found not to be criminals.
And court documents show that many of those being targeted for deportation similarly have no records.
About 560 migrants were in immigration custody in early March, waiting to be sent to a country other than their own, American officials told a federal judge. Of those, 139 had convictions. The administration said the offenses included murder, rape and assault.
The government is eyeing deportation for another 7,600 migrants who are not detained. About one in six has a criminal record, it said.
“I came to the U.S. for protection,” one woman said in an interview from detention in Cameroon. She said she had been arrested while trying to enter the United States and was granted legal protections preventing her from being sent home.
She spoke on the condition that her name and home country not be identified because she feared reprisals, including being sent home against her will.
“I don’t know what I’m doing in this country,” she said. “I don’t know how I got to this country.”
Why are people being jailed overseas?
In its efforts to deport as many people as possible, the Trump administration is seeking two paths.
First, the United States is sending people abroad and letting them apply for asylum there. That’s happening in Uganda, for example, where eight migrants landed this week.
But government documents show that the administration is now prioritizing a second path, one in which people are deported to countries that make no promises to let them stay.
These countries agree to take migrants temporarily, then deport them again. That has led to people being detained with little, if any, help navigating immigration and criminal justice systems that are often broken.
In Cameroon, migrants are held in a government compound in Yaoundé, the capital. A lawyer said at least two deportees had contracted malaria, which is rampant in the region. The windows stay open, and the facility often does not have electricity or hot water, the lawyer said. Recently, people have been allowed to leave between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.
In South Sudan, migrants are held in a gated, three-story house just outside Juba, the capital. A Laotian man told his lawyer that he and others were being held in intense heat with relentless mosquitoes.
Lawyers for some migrants have not heard from their clients in months.
Eswatini is holding people in a maximum-security prison. Another Laotian man told his lawyer that he felt “like a caged animal with no end in sight.”
A State Department report said that the prisons in Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, were overcrowded and dilapidated.
“These are people who should not be in any correctional facility, let alone a maximum-security correctional facility,” said Mzwandile Masuku, a lawyer in Eswatini who is challenging the deportation deal there.
Equatorial Guinea is holding people in a remote hotel owned by a member of the country’s ruling family. Armed guards patrol outside. “We are like prisoners here,” one migrant said in an interview, adding that some had contracted typhoid fever.
Some migrants in Ghana were jailed at a military training camp, according to a Nigerian man who is trying to use U.S. courts to challenge his detention.
“There has been no reliable power, internet or running water. Ghana is not safe for any of us,” the man, identified as D.A., wrote in court documents in September. “But I am even more afraid of returning to Nigeria.”
What do countries get in return?
Each deal appears to be different. In some cases, the arrangement is never revealed and the benefits can be only inferred.
After El Salvador agreed to take migrants, for example, the United States paid the country millions of dollars, and the State Department upgraded its travel advisory. Diplomats cited the country’s falling crime rate, but El Salvador now has the safest travel rating, ahead of France or Spain, whose rates are the same or lower.
“Just got the U.S. State Department’s travel gold star,” El Salvador’s president announced.
Weeks before Equatorial Guinea announced its agreement, the Trump administration temporarily lifted sanctions on its vice president, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, so he could come to the United States for the United Nations General Assembly meeting. The United States also wired the country $7.5 million, according to federal data.
Shortly after Ghana announced its agreement to accept deported West Africans, the United States lifted visa restrictions on the country.
Other arrangements are detailed in government records in Washington and overseas.
The United States paid Eswatini $5.1 million. Its Parliament is investigating how that money is being spent.
A deal with Sierra Leone is in the works, with the United States sending $1.5 million to the government, American records show.
The Central African Republic agreed to take migrants after an $85 million U.S. infusion to an international migration organization. No deal has been announced, but records show that the money will be used to address the country’s already overwhelming migrant and refugee problem. Some will also be used to build centers to house people deported from the United States.
Federal spending records show that a U.N. agency received $50 million to arrange “third-country national agreements” in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Burundi resisted a deal without a U.S. pledge of $8 million to the U.N. migration agency to address its own migration problems, records show.
Is this legal?
Among the most contentious questions is whether the American authorities are using foreign governments to do what they are prohibited from doing themselves: sending migrants to their home countries despite protection orders.
In September, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights described these arrangements as the United States “externalizing migration responsibilities.”
The Trump administration has explicitly told governments that migrants should not be forced to return to their home countries or sent anywhere they will be persecuted, records show.
In some cases, though, that is happening.
Some migrants sent to Equatorial Guinea were returned to their home countries over their objections, according to interviews with migrants and their lawyers.
“The administration knows very well that these are countries where rule of law is very weak or nonexistent,” said Tutu Alicante, a lawyer from Equatorial Guinea who is working with some of the deportees. “They know these governments are going to immediately send people back to their home countries.”
In Cameroon, the authorities told migrants that they would be sent home, according to a video seen by The Times. Three already have been, their lawyer said.
Neither Equatorial Guinea nor Cameroon responded to requests for comment.
The Justice Department has said that once people arrive in another country, neither the administration nor judges can tell foreign governments what to do.
Tanya S. Chutkan, a federal district judge in Washington, reluctantly agreed.
“What this appears to be is an end run around the United States’ obligations,” she said in court. Nevertheless, she ruled that her hands were tied.
Still, several legal challenges continue.
Annie Correal contributed reporting from Mexico City, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs from Washington.
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10) Trump’s Immigration Policy Sidelines Foreign Doctors Amid Shortage
Physicians from 39 countries are being pushed out of U.S. hospitals as a policy blocks their ability to work.
By Miriam Jordan, April 4, 2026
Miriam Jordan is a national immigration correspondent.
Faysal Alghoula, a 38-year-old pulmonologist from Libya who treats patients in an underserved area, could lose his ability to work in the U.S. because of a Trump immigration policy. Austin Anthony for The New York Times
One Nigerian doctor performed knee and hip replacement surgeries at a New York teaching hospital. A Venezuelan physician treated people with diabetes and hypertension in rural Texas. A U.S.-trained ophthalmologist from Iran can no longer perform eye surgeries in Arkansas.
All three physicians have been forced to stop seeing patients after they were pushed out of their jobs because of a Trump administration policy that took effect in January and froze visa extensions, work permits and green cards for citizens of 39 countries as well as people with Palestinian Authority travel documents.
The fallout of the move, which stemmed from a December travel ban, is expected to be most pronounced in rural areas that have long had a dearth of doctors, and in communities with large populations of older Americans coping with chronic conditions. The disruption comes amid a broader immigration crackdown as the Trump administration has detained undocumented people, reduced refugee admissions and tightened visa scrutiny, among other measures.
“This was a big swipe at immigration without regard for particular categories of immigrants, like physicians, who are desperately needed,” said Andrew Wizner, a lawyer who represents medical institutions that hire foreign doctors.
In response to questions, the Homeland Security Department said in a statement that decisions on cases involving immigrants from “high-risk countries” had been placed on hold “to ensure they are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”
The U.S. currently faces a shortage of about 65,000 physicians, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. That deficit is expected to balloon over the next decade as Americans live longer and more physicians retire.
Foreign doctors currently comprise 25 percent of all doctors practicing in the country, and many have become citizens.
The Times reviewed a list of more than 100 physicians affected by the new policy, including doctors already on administrative leave and others who could be forced out when their work permits and visas expire.The list was created by the doctors themselves. Some agreed to be interviewed on the condition they not be identified, citing fear of retribution.
The Nigerian surgeon, who was performing knee and hip operations at a New York hospital as part of a fellowship, was pulled off the job in February after the government failed to renew his work permit.
The doctor, who has published dozens of peer-reviewed articles, has been offered a position at a university hospital in an underserved area starting July 1. That job treating patients and teaching residents is now in jeopardy.
The office of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand contacted U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to expedite the doctor’s case but was told he was ineligible because he is from a country subject to the processing freeze. Colleagues and hospital leaders said his removal harmed patient care, lowered morale and strained an already short-staffed team.
“We’ve doing this for decades, and there has always been a pathway forward for foreign physicians,” said Mr. Wizner. “Now it’s just a dead end for those affected by this adjudication pause.”
The affected doctors come from countries included in the ban, mostly from Africa and the Middle East, and are unable to work because they had immigration cases pending when the policy was announced.
Hundreds of foreign physicians affected by the pause have formed an informal professional network to exchange information. About 200 attended a recent online presentation by Curtis Morrison, a lawyer who has filed 13 lawsuits in federal court to compel the government to process the applications of particular individuals .
In a Feb. 27 letter to the secretaries of Homeland Security and State, chief executive of the American Medical Association, John Whyte, called for an exemption from the policy for physicians, citing national interest and harm to patients.
“It is important to support and expand pathways for these physicians to be able to enter and remain in the U.S. to care for our U.S. patients,” wrote Dr. Whyte, who noted that 900 patients were left without adequate care in a rural area after a physician was removed.
Ezequiel Veliz, a family physician from Venezuela who was named resident of the year in 2025 at UT Health, Rio Grande Valley, has been unable to work for months.
“I am stuck in processing purgatory,” said Dr. Veliz, 32. “The saddest part is that my patients are being affected.”
In a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, his former supervisor, Jose Cano, said that, “Dr. Veliz delivers outstanding, compassionate care to the patients of the Rio Grande Valley.”
Dr. Veliz’s patients adhered to treatment plans and consistently attended appointments, said Dr. Cano, who added that Dr. Veliz had served on the committee reviewing resident applicants and was among 20 young doctors chosen for a state leadership program.
American medical schools do not produce enough doctors. For residency positions starting this July, there were 41,000 residency positions available, according to official data, but only 32,000 applicants from U.S. medical schools.
Some 7,000 foreign doctors were selected to fill the gap, after rigorous exams and background checks. Once they complete training, many take jobs in federally designated underserved areas.
More than 60 percent of the foreign physicians practice primary care, including family medicine, internal medicine and pediatrics, fields that Americans often shun because of punishing workloads and lower pay compared to other specialties
“International medical graduates fulfill a critical need for our country,” said Dr. Rebecca Andrews, chair of the Board of Regents for the American College of Physicians, which represents internists, primary care doctors who treat adults.
“Bottlenecking the influx of these physicians will leave our health care system in a tenuous state,” said Dr. Andrews.
At Family Health Centers of Southwest Florida, which provide primary care to about 100,000 patients annually, half of the physicians are foreign born, including some from banned countries, said David Koester, vice president of the network.
“We would be hamstrung if they were not able to work or we were not able to recruit new ones,” he said. “A lot of these patients would overrun ERs and place a burden on hospitals.”
Physicians from the banned countries whose visas will expire soon are bracing for what is to come.
Among them is Kasra Moein, an Iranian physician on a small team conducting National Institutes of Health-funded research on heart disease and aging at the University of Oklahoma.
Dr. Andrew Gardner, who leads the study, said Dr. Moein has made significant contributions to the project.
Another doctor, Faysal Alghoula, of Libya, provides care to 960 patients, including military veterans, at two hospitals in rural Indiana.
He arrived in the U.S. in 2016. After rising to chief resident at Creighton University’s hospital in Nebraska, he went on to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where he completed three years of training in pulmonology and critical care.
In Indiana, Dr. Alghoula assesses patients referred to him from across the region with suspicious spots on their lungs and determines the appropriate treatment, surgery, chemotherapy or monitoring. In the ICU, he cares for patients on ventilators and suffering from heart failure.
But his O-1 visa, which is issued to people with extraordinary ability, will expire on Sept. 6. Although he has a green card application pending, he will have to stop working when the visa lapses. He has sued to compel the government to act.
“My life is suspended,” said Dr. Alghoula, a father of two U.S.-born girls, 3 and 4. “Should I renew my lease or not? Should I take a job in another country or not?”
He has received offers from Canada, but said that he preferred to stay in a place where there is a physician shortage.
“I’ve been screened and heavily vetted,” he said. “Now they say I’m high risk because I was born in Libya.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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11) Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying
A record number of student loan borrowers are in delinquency and default. Some are making the drastic decision to leave the country and abandon their loans.
By Laura O’Connor, April 4, 2026
Amanda Lynn Tully, 37, moved to Prague and defaulted on her student loans. She hasn’t made a payment in over seven years. Milan Bures for The New York Times
Amanda Lynn Tully spent her teenage years as a ward of the State of Colorado and believed a college degree was her ticket to a better life.
So, when she graduated in 2017 with a master’s degree in historic preservation from the University of Oregon, $65,000 in federal student loans and no job offers in the conservation field, she felt misled.
“I was never financially stable because I was never taught to be financially stable,” Ms. Tully, 37, said.
Less than a year after graduating, Ms. Tully made a drastic decision: She moved to Prague, where she had completed an internship, and defaulted on her loans. She hasn’t made a payment in over seven years.
More than 40 million borrowers are saddled with federal student debt, and a record number — 7.7 million — have defaulted on their loans, according to recently released data from the Education Department.
For some borrowers, moving abroad and out of reach of debt collectors can be tempting. In interviews, people who made this decision cited relieving the psychological burden of student debt as a motivator, as well as having a higher quality of life, even on a lower salary, outside the United States. Many who fled abroad, including Ms. Tully, said they had no plans of ever returning.
Figures on the number of borrowers who abandon their loans in this manner are unknown, but many debtors have shared their experiences on forums like Reddit. Credit reporting agencies like Experian, aware of the issue, have advised borrowers who have moved abroad to “resist the temptation to stop making payments.” Borrowers in delinquency and default will likely see their credit scores plummet, raising their borrowing costs and making it difficult for them to access credit.
Ms. Tully was on an income-based repayment plan, which allows many borrowers to have their remaining debt forgiven after 20 years of making qualifying payments. She was paying $60 per month when she defaulted. This amount, to many, may seem manageable. But for her, it remained psychologically burdensome.
“The payments weren’t even paying off the interest, so it was frustrating,” Ms. Tully said.
Stanley Tate, a Baltimore lawyer specializing in student debt, warns against this approach. “Federal student loans are contractual debts,” he said, meaning the obligation to repay does not go away, regardless of citizenship or residency. Moreover, the foreign earned income exclusion often allows federal student loan borrowers who live abroad and earn less than $130,000 (for the 2025 tax year) to pay $0 per month under an income-driven repayment plan, he said, recommending this path over defaulting.
But affordable payments haven’t stopped borrowers on such plans from defaulting — abroad or at home.
Michele Zampini, associate vice president of federal policy and advocacy at the Institute for College Access and Success, or TICAS, has seen borrowers in a situation similar to Ms. Tully’s, with seemingly manageable payments, default because of a combination of low earnings and a sense of hopelessness.
“The psychological weight of carrying debt is a really widespread issue, even if it seems financially manageable,” she said. “It’s not necessarily ‘I can’t afford it.’ It’s sometimes ‘It feels like I had no other choice but to go to college and I had to take out loans to go, and now I’m going to be stuck with this,’ which can define people’s lives in a way that feels very unfair and harmful.”
In 2016, Eric Cooper graduated from a state school in Georgia with a degree in logistics. He received good grades and found a job as a logistics manager earning $52,000 a year almost immediately. But he had $80,000 of student debt, most of it consisting of parent PLUS loans through his mother.
“I did what everyone says to do — go to college, sign up for the loans,” said Mr. Cooper, now 31. “My concern when I was 18 was that it was a lot of money, but everyone tells you that you’ll get a good job and pay it back, no problem.”
Mr. Cooper’s payments were over $600 a month, and he was living paycheck to paycheck. He considered his options and planned to default not long after graduating, realizing his debt would take decades to pay off.
“I thought about it one day and was like, ‘Am I really going to be doing this until I’m 50 or 60?’”
His primary concern was the parent PLUS loan. “If I left and didn’t pay it, they would be forced to,” he said of his family. After working for three years and making timely payments, he refinanced the loan into his name with a private lender. Within months, he moved to Southeast Asia to teach English and continued making minimum payments while applying for citizenship in his new country. He stopped paying when it was secured.
Mr. Cooper defaulted on his loans in 2019, changing his email and phone number, never alerting debtors to his new address.
“I think there were a few letters sent to my parents, but after the first year, I just never heard anything from anyone,” he said.
For Enrique Zúñiga, debt wasn’t on his mind when he began his studies. He received a full scholarship to Princeton and was grateful to avoid having student debt — until he received a $16,000 tax bill.
Mr. Zúñiga, 25, comes from a working-class family in Tiltil, Chile. In his final year of high school, EducationUSA, a State Department initiative to recruit international students to the United States, came to his class and handed him pamphlets for Princeton, where he applied to study chemistry and later switched to majoring in Spanish and Portuguese.
Mr. Zúñiga was living in university accommodations while dishwashing part time, with his scholarship covering both his tuition and his living expenses. But Mr. Zúñiga didn’t realize that all funding exceeding his academic costs represented “nonqualified” funding, meaning that it was taxable.
Princeton states on its website that most nonacademic funding (including for international students) is taxable, but Mr. Zúñiga did not recall being told this. When he received his first tax bill from the university at the beginning of his second year of studies, he panicked.
“I walked into the financial aid office, and I told them: ‘I don’t have this money, so what do I do? I need to enroll in my classes,’” he recalled. Princeton offered him a private loan to cover the tax bill. Mr. Zúñiga had hoped to stay in the United States after graduating and find a good job with his Ivy League degree. With these plans in mind, he took on additional private loans to cover his tax bills until graduation.
TICAS has advocated for all scholarship funding to be nontaxable to prevent students from taking on tax-related debts. However, Ms. Zampini said she had never seen a situation like Mr. Zúñiga’s, where the university provided loans to cover the taxes. The student newspaper has also published an opinion article highlighting the issue.
In July 2022, Mr. Zúñiga graduated with $16,736 in loans to Princeton. He received letters and emails demanding payment almost immediately. After months of unemployment and couch-surfing, Mr. Zúñiga found work as a legal assistant and interpreter at a legal charity in Philadelphia, but he was still unable to afford payments.
By November 2023, Mr. Zúñiga had paid back less than $1,500, and loan servicers began demanding he make more payments. He was then was offered a job in Shanghai as a college admissions counselor.
“I thought to myself: ‘Well, they can’t enforce any judgments against my debts. I might as well go,’” he said. Before moving to China, he tried to negotiate with the loan servicers, but he said they were unwilling to budge.
Even in Shanghai, a Chinese loan recovery organization began contacting Mr. Zúñiga almost daily throughout 2024, urging him to pay his debt to Princeton.
“I was depressed,” he said, describing a cycle of receiving daily phone calls and blocking numbers. Today, Mr. Zúñiga still receives emails about his debt, which has grown to $28,196.13, but he has no plans to pay it back.
Besides the emails, debt plays virtually no role in Mr. Zúñiga’s life in Shanghai. Ms. Tully and Mr. Cooper also lead seemingly debt-free lives. They largely rely on local jobs and freelance work, still living comfortably despite earning far less than their American peers. Both have visited the United States without encountering issues and said they rarely thought about their debt.
Ms. Zampini said she was concerned about the narrative that defaulted borrowers living abroad were “gaming the system,” or being such a small minority of borrowers that their experiences shouldn’t motivate policy change.
“This is one piece of the bigger puzzle of how borrowers are managing,” she said. “The fact that someone would need to make such a drastic life change driven by student debt is, itself, an indictment of a broken system.”
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