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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
Born in rural Ohio, Howard Keylor attended a one-room country schoolhouse. He became a member of the National Honor Society when he graduated from Marietta High School.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Howard fought in the Pacific Theater in World War Two, during which he participated in the Battle of Okinawa as a Corporal. The 96th U.S. Army Division, which Howard trained with, had casualty rates above 50%. The incompetence and racism of the military command, the destruction of the capital city of Naha and the deliberate killings of tens of thousands of Okinawan civil-ians – a third of the population - made Howard a committed anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-racist for the rest of his life.
Upon returning to the United States, Howard enrolled in the College of the Pacific, but dropped out to support Filipino agricultural workers in the 1948 asparagus strike, working with legendary labor leader Larry Itliong. He became a longshore worker in Stockton in 1953. As a member of the Communist Party, Howard and his wife, Evangeline, were attacked in the HUAC (McCarthy) hearings in San Francisco. Later, Howard transferred to ILWU Local 10. In 1971 he, along with Brothers Herb Mills, Leo Robinson and a ma-jority of Local 10’s members, opposed the proposed 1971 contract which codified the 9.43 steadyman sys-tem. This led to the longshore strike of 1971-1972, which shut down 56 West Coast ports and lasted 130 days. It was the longest strike in the ILWU’s history.
In Local 10 Brother Keylor was a member of the Militant Caucus, a class struggle rank-and-file group which published a regular newsletter, the “Longshore Militant”. He later left the Militant Caucus and pub-lished a separate newsletter on his own, the “Militant Longshoreman.” Howard advocated deliberate defi-ance of the “slave-labor” Taft-Hartley law through illegal secondary boycotts and pickets. Running on an open class-struggle program which called for breaking with the Democratic and Republican Parties, form-ing a worker’s government, expropriating the capitalists without compensation and creating a planned economy, Howard won election to the Executive Board of Local 10 for twelve years.
The Militant Caucus was involved in organizing protests and boycotts of military cargo bound for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1975 and 1978 and again in 1980 to the military dictatorship in El Sal-vador. The Caucus also participated in ILWU Local 6’s strike at KNC Glass in Union City, during which a mass picket line physically defeated police and scabs, winning a contract for a workforce composed pri-marily of Mexican-American immigrants.
In 1984, Brother Keylor made the motion, amended by Brother Leo Robinson, which led to the elev-en-day longshore boycott of South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1986, Howard again partici-pated in the Campaign Against Apartheid’s community picket line against the Nedlloyd Kemba. When Nel-son Mandela spoke at the Oakland Coliseum in 1990 after his release from prison, he credited Local 10 with re-igniting the anti-Apartheid movement in the Bay Area.
Other actions Brother Howard initiated, organized or participated in included the 1995-98 struggle of the Liverpool dockworkers; the 1999 coastwide shutdown and march of 25,000 in San Francisco to de-mand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal; the 2000 Charleston longshore union campaign; the 2008 May Day anti-imperialist war shutdown of all West Coast ports; the shutdown of Northern California ports in pro-test of the murder of Oscar Grant; the blockades of Israeli ships to protest the war on Gaza in 2010 and 2014; the 2011 ILWU struggle against the grain monopolies in Longview; Occupy Oakland’s march of 40,000 to the Port of Oakland, and countless other militant job actions and protests. Throughout his life, Brother Keylor always extended solidarity where it was needed. He fought racist police murders and fas-cist terror, defended abortion clinics, and fought for survivors of psychiatric abuse. Having grown up in Appalachia, he has always been an environmentalist, and helped shut down a Monsanto facility in Davis in 2012, as well as fighting pesticide use and deforestation in the East Bay.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Inspector of Buckling Building Cited for Missing Problems at Other Sites
A New York Times review of city records shows that the firm, Domani Inspection Services, was repeatedly accused of breaking New York City rules.
By Stefanos Chen, Dionne Searcey, Asmaa Elkeurti and Mihir Zaveri, July 9, 2026
The reporters conducted dozens of interviews for this article, including with engineering experts and city officials, reviewed hundreds of pages of city documents and analyzed millions of rows of city violation records.
“Gary LaBarbera, the president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, which represents unionized workers, said he was concerned about Domani’s role as an inspector on this project, given its history of violations. And he also pointed to the flawed nature of special inspectors who are paid for by property owners. ‘You can’t inspect yourself, and that is essentially what is going on,’ he said.”
An ambitious building project at 235 East 42nd Street in Manhattan was evacuated suddenly after workers noticed columns beginning to buckle. Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Before columns buckled inside a Midtown Manhattan office tower on Tuesday, a private firm conducted several inspections of major structural alterations being done at the site — and apparently signed off on at least some of them, records and interviews show.
The firm, Domani Inspection Services, certified the safety of high strength bolting, steel welding and the structural stability of changes being made as part of an ambitious project to transform the offices into a 37-story apartment building.
It was not clear whether any of the work inspected by Domani contributed to the failure of columns on the 21st floor of the building. But a New York Times examination of the inspection company’s record has found that it has been repeatedly cited for missing warning signs at other building projects in the city.
The damage at the building, at 235 East 42nd Street, forced the evacuation of several other buildings throughout the area, disrupting workplaces and choking off a vital thoroughfare during a time of peak tourism. The disruption has placed scrutiny on the future of office-to-residential conversions as a creative and efficient solution to the city’s crippling housing shortage.
It has also put a spotlight on MetroLoft, a developer of the project, and Domani, the private firm hired by the property owner as a so-called special inspection agency. Such firms are supposed to ensure specific tasks performed by individual workers are done properly. And they sign and stamp technical reports attesting to as much. The city requires their approval before deeming large projects completed.
The New York City Department of Buildings accused Domani three times from 2012 to 2017 of violations ranging from conducting unlicensed concrete testing to failing to report a facade collapse. Two of those cases were dismissed, while a third resulted in a fine of $1,000, records show.
In 2019, Domani was accused of failing to perform inspection duties after a six-foot section of concrete wall broke loose from the 25th floor of an Upper East Side building project it was hired to monitor. The concrete crashed through the roof of a neighboring six-story building and into an occupied apartment, causing significant damage. It was not clear whether anyone was injured. The inspection firm was fined $12,500 in that incident, records show.
A spokeswoman for Domani said the firm was involved in litigation related to that incident and could not comment on it for that reason.
At least some private inspections by Domani appear to have been conducted by John McMonagle, whom city officials identified as “the director” of the inspection agency.
He was fined $12,500 by city officials for making a false statement during the inspection of another Manhattan property, in 2022. Records show that the fine was never paid, but a spokeswoman for Domani, commenting on behalf of Mr. McMonagle, said the firm has no record of the violation.
Later that year, the city accused him of failing to perform his duties at a landmark building in Lower Manhattan that was found to be so unstable it eventually had to be demolished. That case was dismissed.
Mr. McMonagle was listed as having performed numerous inspections at the Midtown building project that was evacuated on Tuesday on East 42nd Street.
Although Domani has had a number of brushes with the Buildings Department over the years, there was no indication in city records that it had been singled out for violations more frequently than other inspection agencies.
In a statement issued by the Domani spokeswoman, Mr. McMonagle said the firm was still reviewing records related to the office conversion on East 42nd Street and added that it would be “inappropriate to speculate” on the cause of the incident or whether “any inspection issue contributed to it.”
“Domani has performed tens of thousands of special inspections throughout New York City over many years, and we take our professional and regulatory responsibilities extremely seriously,” he said.
Such inspection firms are not the only ones on a work site responsible for safety. Contractors, developers and engineers also play roles. The Buildings Department hovers over it all, sending inspectors on occasional spot checks to make sure building codes and safety regulations are being followed and to ensure all work matches approved construction plans.
But those reviews, known as development or enforcement inspections, occur less frequently than special inspections. They can include serious findings, like dangerous work conditions, or administrative issues like paperwork mishaps.
Before the conversion project ran into trouble on Tuesday, city inspectors had flagged at least 22 administrative violations at the site.
On fewer occasions, they found serious safety concerns.
The property owners were required to pay the city more than $32,500 in safety violation penalties in 2025. The Buildings Department issued a stop work order in August of that year after a large metal panel fell from the 33rd floor onto the sidewalk outside.
The Buildings Department conducted four enforcement inspections from March to May of this year, said Andrew Rudansky, a spokesman for the department, and found no unsafe or illegal conditions.
On Wednesday, Mr. Rudansky said the Buildings Department is still investigating the cause of the buckling of the columns.
MetroLoft said that it is working with the Buildings Department to fix the problems. The company said the tower was never at risk of collapse and the issues affected only a small area of the project.
Still, the incident at the East 42nd Street building raises questions about the city’s inspection process, including its reliance on special inspection agencies, like Domani, to monitor and ensure the safety and soundness of construction.
“Was work being performed in accordance with approved plans, permits and any post-approval amendments?” said Pierina Sanchez, a member of the City Council who chairs the Committee on Housing and Buildings. “Were the engineer of record, special inspection agency, construction superintendent, site safety manager and other required professionals fulfilling their responsibilities?”
Jamison D. Morse, principal at PVEDI, an engineering and architecture firm that also acts as a special inspector, said the system works well because it lightens the load for the city.
“It’s hard for cities or municipalities to staff people with this kind of expertise, and also then to keep up with the volume of projects,” he said. “If you talk about the number of special inspectors, and the number of projects in construction right now in New York City requiring this, there’s just not enough.”
City building codes have required special inspections of major projects since 1968, and the rules were strengthened in 2008 to prevent unqualified inspectors from signing off on crucial safety reviews. Today, there are more than 2,000 special inspectors registered in New York City.
After an incident at a Queens construction site Domani was supposed to be inspecting in February 2017, the city asked the firm to come to the site the next day. The city accused Domani of failing to cooperate with the Building Department’s follow-up inquiries. That citation was dismissed.
During excavation work at a Brooklyn construction site in 2018, adjacent bracing — temporary supports that can affect the stability of the building and neighboring properties — was removed improperly, the Buildings Department said. Domani had been hired as the project’s special inspector, but the city cited the firm for failing to perform the structural safety inspections required for that work, according to city records.
City inspectors said that the site had become hazardous and the Buildings Department was never notified, though the case was later dismissed.
And after the incident involving falling concrete in 2019, city inspectors found that the walls of the Upper East Side tower Domani was hired to inspect were thinner than required by the construction documents — a compliance violation the special inspectors never flagged in their reports.
Steve Bongiorno, a structural engineer who has worked on high-rise projects in New York, said relying on such private inspectors like Domani can work well, but the entire program must be better monitored.
“The city really needs to put the brakes on here and re-evaluate their process for assuring quality control,” he said.
The joint project on East 42nd Street, the former headquarters of the drug company Pfizer, is intended to be the largest transformation of office space to housing in New York City. It began construction in 2024 to convert the office space into a massive 1,602-unit apartment complex with a rooftop pool, shops and a fitness center, and had been expected to be finished early next year.
But transforming cubicle farms into apartments is often challenging because of various codes and structural challenges, and this one was particularly complicated.
For now, city officials say the building is stable, and workers are undergoing the process of shoring it up. Temporary supports had been added to the building where four new floors and a large vertical portion had been added onto the existing building in recent months.
Gary LaBarbera, the president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, which represents unionized workers, said he was concerned about Domani’s role as an inspector on this project, given its history of violations.
And he also pointed to the flawed nature of special inspectors who are paid for by property owners.
“You can’t inspect yourself, and that is essentially what is going on,” he said.
Claire Fahy, Caitlyn Freeman and Ashley Southall contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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2) A $3.2 Trillion Deal-Making Frenzy Is Spurred by the A.I. Economy
This year’s boom represents the most spent on global deal-making in a six-month period in a decade. But questions persist about whether it can continue.
By Lauren Hirsch, July 9, 2026
The Magnificent Seven: Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, Google.
The frenzy has heavily favored large companies, with 44 deals announced in the first six months of this year that were larger than $10 billion. Karsten Moran for The New York Times
An ebullient stock market, huge bets on artificial intelligence and an open regulatory environment have fueled one of the biggest six-month booms in deal-making in years.
Through the end of June, there have been about $3.2 trillion in global deals, a 45 percent jump from a year earlier, according to Dealogic, a data provider. That is the most spent on deal-making over a half-year period in at least a decade.
The frenzy heavily favored large companies, with 44 deals announced that were larger than $10 billion, including takeovers and large-scale fund-raising in the private markets. Those blockbusters pushed the overall value of deals higher even though the total number of transactions fell about one percent from last year, as companies with less financial fire power or those more vulnerable to geopolitical uncertainties stayed on sidelines.
Executives of many large companies, however, have brushed aside the uncertainties posed by tariffs and the war in the Middle East to pursue takeovers that are more likely to be approved by regulators under the Trump administration than they were during previous administrations.
Many companies “perceive they have a window in which to attempt to affect something transformational, and now is really the time to try to do it,” Matt McClure, a global co-head of investment banking at Goldman Sachs, said in an interview.
Bankers insist this time is different from previous booms, like the record-low-interest era of the Covid-19 pandemic, the leveraged buyouts of 2007 and the dot-com bubble in the 1990s.
The companies driving this year’s deal-making surge are among the world’s largest and best-funded and many of them are aiming to transform their business by doing big mergers, rather than making smaller acquisitions.
Some of this activity is propelled by a need to simply keep pace in an economy dominated by only a handful of giant corporations. Consider that companies need to be about twice as large to enter the S&P 500 as they did five years ago. Exxon Mobil, once the most valuable company in the United States, is about one-eighth the size of the largest of the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies.
“The definition of scale keeps moving, so companies need to be bigger and bigger, and big companies need to do bigger and bigger deals to have an impact,” said Ben Wilson, a co-head of North America mergers and acquisitions at J.P. Morgan.
NextEra’s $118 billion deal for Dominion Energy, which was announced in May, would create a utility giant aimed at supplying the increasing amounts of electricity needed to power artificial intelligence. SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition last month of Cursor, a start-up that makes code-writing software, is aimed at helping Elon Musk’s rocket company build its A.I. models.
Typically, companies are reluctant to take on big deals in times of turmoil. Disruptions to oil supplies because of the war with Iran and the White House’s open hostility toward America’s biggest trading partners in Europe show no signs of abating. Questions also persist around the A.I. build-out, such as the costs for computer chips, supply constraints and potential delays on when these A.I. companies might reap profits.
“What makes the current boom a little counterintuitive is it appears to be associated with maybe not unprecedented, but top-quartile-level uncertainty and volatility,’’ said Jonathan Knee, a Columbia Business School professor and senior adviser at the investment bank Evercore.
The deal activity has been a boon for banks, too, with details likely to emerge when they announce earnings next week. Bank of America expects its investment banking revenue in the latest quarter to be up 28 percent from a year earlier, while JPMorgan Chase expects a 10 percent increase, according to a research note from Jefferies.
Not every company has joined the party. In all, 21,727 deals were announced this year, down slightly from 21,997 at this point last year. Some of that decline can be attributed to the challenges facing private equity. Companies owned by private equity firms made up 24 percent of the overall deal value, according to Dealogic, down from about 34 percent in 2024 through 2025. Many of these firms are grappling with the uncertain values of the software companies they acquired before A.I. posed a threat to them, making them difficult to sell.
“So far this year, it’s just not been quite at the pace the market originally anticipated,” Mr. McClure said.
Initial public offerings during the first half of the year were dominated by larger companies bent on powering the race for A.I. and those in defense technology.
Madison Air Solutions, a cooling company that serves data centers, raised $2.23 billion in an I.P.O., and Cerebras, a Silicon Valley maker of A.I. chips, raised $5.55 billion. And, of course, SpaceX raised more than $75 billion, in the largest-ever initial public offering.
These offerings helped boost the value of I.P.O.s in the United States to $155 billion, the most since 2021, when a flurry of so-called blank check vehicles stampeded into public markets.
Bankers say the door for other offerings related to A.I. remain open. SK Hynix, a South Korean memory chip maker, is set to raise $28 billion in a U.S. listing this week.
But the first weeks of trading for SpaceX shares have been volatile. While still above its I.P.O. price of $135 a share, SpaceX’s stock on Wednesday dipped below $150, where it opened in the frenzied first minutes of trading when it hit the market last month. It closed at $148 a share on Wednesday.
Other recent debutantes have seen their shares fall below their I.P.O. prices. They include Cerebras, as well as Fervo Energy and X-Energy, both of which aim to power data centers. About a third of companies that went public in the second quarter are down below their I.P.O. price, according to data from the research and advisory firm Renaissance Capital. Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, said those results were largely in line with how I.P.O.’s have performed historically in their early months of trading.
“There are a number of examples of I.P.O.s generating a lot of initial hype then fizzling out,” Mr. Kennedy said. “At the same time, other speculative bets are holding up.”
Questions about whether demand will ultimately justify enormous spending on A.I. continues to swirl over the markets, along with other uncertainties like the war in the Middle East and inflation. Shares of the Magnificent Seven helped lead the S&P 500 through its best second quarter in six years, even as shares of those companies fell roughly 9 percent in June.
Still, Mr. Kennedy said, “I do think the A.I. theme will continue to drive activity through the end of the year.”
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3) Big Tech Is Now Targeting Native American Land for Massive Data Centers
The data center boom has roiled communities across the country, but on Native land, a Big Tech push for quick approvals has pitted the need for development against a history of exploitation.
By David W. Chen, Photographs by Tamir Kalifa, July 9, 2026
David W. Chen and Tamir Kalifa reported from Tulsa and Oklahoma City, as well as the Seminole, Cherokee, Muscogee and Caddo Nations, to hear how tribal leaders are wrestling with data centers.
“True wealth is the well-being of our families,” Chebon Kernell, a tribal council member for the Seminole Nation, said during a tour of his family’s cemetery.
Since its casino closed in 2017, the Caddo Nation, an hour west of Oklahoma City, has struggled, so some Caddo leaders see only hope in the data center boom. “We’re not poor,” Bobby Gonzalez, the Caddo chairman, said. “We’re broke.”
But in Binger, Okla., home of the baseball legend (and Choctaw) Johnny Bench, Mr. Gonzalez bumped into Tracy Newkumet, a former tribal council member who felt differently about a future tied to Big Tech. She could live without a cellphone, she said as she prepared for the Caddos’ traditional turkey dance, but not without water, maybe the biggest concern for data-center development in Indian Country.
The dizzying expansion of data centers to power artificial intelligence has communities in Republican and Democratic states feeling blindsided as citizens and local governments are forced to grapple with noise, water and energy concerns. That division may be even more palpable on Native lands, where outside exploitation has a long and ugly history and where technology companies see a chance for rapid development that gets past the red tape impeding projects elsewhere.
The National Congress of American Indians wants to capitalize on the Trump administration’s A.I. Action Plan to “build, baby, build.”
“Tribal lands, which are vast, strategically located, and home to an eager American work force, are the ideal place to build the infrastructure that will power America’s A.I. dominance,” wrote Larry Wright Jr., the Congress’s executive director, to the White House last fall.
Chebon Kernell, a tribal council member for the Seminole Nation, rejected what he called “the false fruits of wealth” that conjure painful memories.
“True wealth is the well-being of our families,” he said during a tour of his family’s cemetery, an hour east of Oklahoma City. “True wealth is being able to live on this Earth Mother without fear and without having to look over one’s shoulders.”
Last fall, at the National Congress’s annual conference in Seattle, activists interrupted an A.I. panel by chanting, “You can’t drink data!” and “The biggest lie is A.I.!” Traci L. Morris, executive director of the American Indian Policy Institute at Arizona State University, was onstage and was reminded of when the federal government expanded broadband access to reservations in 2010.
“There were tribes that were like: No, we’re never going to go on the internet,” said Ms. Morris, a member of Oklahoma’s Chickasaw Nation. “Well, data centers are here, and tribes need to make a decision.”
The issues have cropped up on Indian lands nationwide. In the Pacific Northwest, the Yakama Nation went to federal court in May to block a clean energy project on a sacred site that would power a data center campus. Honor the Earth, a national Indigenous group, has kicked off a Stop Data Colonialism campaign featuring an interactive map tracking proposed data centers.
But Oklahoma, which has 38 federally recognized tribes, “is really ground zero,” Ms. Morris said.
Among the reasons tech companies find tribal lands so appealing is speed, according to the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. While energy projects on nontribal lands can face permitting delays of three to 10 years, projects on tribal land often proceed more quickly because tribes wield sovereign authority to handle their own regulations and permitting.
But many tribal leaders are in no rush. Mr. Kernell was in Washington, D.C., on business when his wife texted in February to see if he had noticed the very last agenda item at the next Seminole council meeting — approving a nondisclosure agreement with a data center developer.
There was “no consultation, no conversation,” Mr. Kernell said, so he hastily organized a town hall that drew dozens of opponents from inside the tribe and outside. Days later, the council, with Mr. Kernell on it, unanimously passed a data center moratorium, the first tribe to do so.
Last year, after intense opposition, the council of the Muscogee Nation, 40 miles south of Tulsa, rejected rezoning 5,570 acres from agriculture and meat processing to business for a technology park. Jordan Harmon, a Muscogee lawyer and policy specialist for the Indigenous Environmental Network, pointed to Honor the Earth’s “Stop Data Colonialism Manifesto” that is “completely anti-A.I., specifically generative A.I. developed by Big Tech.”
“That’s where the community sometimes is in conflict or butting heads with tribal leadership,” she said.
Now all eyes are on the influential Cherokees, the country’s most populous tribe, with 480,000 enrolled members, whose 7,000-square-mile reservation is almost the size of New Jersey.
Two prominent Cherokees — Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma and Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, both Republicans — are vocal data center proponents. Mr. Mullin, when he was still Oklahoma’s junior senator, called data centers a “game changer,” highlighting a Google hub in Pryor, Okla., that generates millions in tax revenue.
So far, Chuck Hoskin Jr., the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, has been cautious, establishing a task force to study the environmental and economic impacts.
“We don’t want to be on the sidelines, but we don’t want to be bystanders,” he said. “We’re moving probably slower than some governments.”
Even that approach has its detractors. Oklahoma City, Tulsa and other municipalities have paused data center development. State Representative Brad Boles, a Cherokee member who won last month’s Republican primary for a seat on the state’s regulatory board, shepherded a bipartisan effort to insulate households and businesses from electric bill spikes caused by data centers’ energy demands.
One co-sponsor, State Representative Amanda Clinton, a Tulsa Democrat and Cherokee, called the frenzy “the new land run.” Still, she understands the appeal.
“I think Oklahoma is so strained for jobs and economic development that we will roll over too easily and give away the farm,” she said while driving around the perimeter of Project Clydesdale, a $1 billion, 500-acre data center now under construction in Tulsa County.
The Colusa Indian Community of Northern California, which has operated its own power plant and electricity grid for two decades, hopes to bridge the gap between skeptical Native Americans and outside tech giants.
“There’s a mistrust of corporate America in general, and we share that mistrust,” said Ken Ahmann, chief operating officer of Colusa Indian Energy, which just opened a Tulsa-area office. “Our charter in this space is to help act as a firewall and a negotiating partner on behalf of the tribes.”
The Colusa are now in talks with the Caddo, among other tribes, to build a power plant for a data center in Oklahoma by the end of the year.
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4) Sifting Through Quakes’ Rubble, and the Ashes of a Revolution
The devastation of Ms. Zúñiga’s city in Venezuela follows the demise of her political project. The revolution is over, but the human ties that help her cope remain.
By Anatoly Kurmanaev, Photographs by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez, July 9, 2026
Anatoly Kurmanaev has reported in La Guaira, Venezuela, over the course of 12 years, including after last month’s twin earthquakes.
Jacqueline Zúñiga, 52, between several public housing complexes that collapsed during the twin earthquake. Ms. Zúñiga’s building was damaged and she is living in a makeshift shelter.
I first met Jacqueline Zúñiga in the port city of La Guaira, just as Venezuela was beginning its descent into an economic quagmire from which it has never emerged.
It was 2014, and I had recently moved to Venezuela as a rookie reporter. I wanted to know how the ruling Socialist Party’s base was reacting to the downturn, and came across Ms. Zúñiga’s work on the internet.
A lifelong believer in social causes, Ms. Zúñiga ran a women’s rights project in La Guaira, one of thousands of so-called social movements that formed the foundation of the government’s power pyramid.
Ms. Zúñiga had just managed to arrange for dozens of members of her group to get apartments at new government-built housing towers in eastern La Guaira, a scruffy, narrow stretch of concrete between Venezuela’s coastal mountains and the Caribbean Sea.
Despite the growing economic troubles, it was a moment of immense pride and, for some, the achievement of their lives.
Last week, I found Ms. Zúñiga again, and we returned to those towers. Almost all had been reduced to rubble. We watched as rescue workers carried body bag after body bag from the ruins.
They were among the sea of buildings that were destroyed by powerful twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela last month, killing over 3,800 people, mostly in La Guaira.
Ms. Zúñiga, now 52 and with a few gray hairs, had met many of the quake’s victims over her three decades of social activism in a small state where everyone seems to know each other. As we drove through the destroyed city, the landscape evoked a raft of memories.
She mentioned close friends, neighbors and distant acquaintances. She spoke about people she saw regularly at bakeries, banks and street markets. There were also political enemies, people with whom she had competed for the shrinking resources of the bankrupt state.
All were dead or missing.
La Guaira’s physical destruction followed the unraveling of the political project to which Ms. Zúñiga had dedicated her life. Hugo Chávez had died the year before I met her. The revolution he declared after becoming Venezuela’s president in 1999 was already waning.
Venezuela’s economic model, based on price and currency controls and inspired by Cuba’s state-run system, tumbled like a house of cards when oil prices collapsed in 2014. The corruption and incompetence of the Chávez government became glaring when the oil bonanza stopped.
Venezuela, once the world’s biggest oil exporter, lost most of its economic output and, over the next decade, millions of its citizens dispersed around the world.
The U.S. raid in January that led to the capture of Mr. Chávez’s handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro, was a coda to a socialist experiment that, by last year, existed largely on paper. The Socialist Party remains in power, but is now under the thumb of the Trump administration, which is focused on exporting Venezuelan resources to the United States.
Over the past decade, Ms. Zúñiga’s group has tried to continue its work. Members created furniture workshops and tourism and urban farming projects, all aimed at empowering working-class women.
Most of these initiatives failed.
As Venezuela’s economic crisis deepened, Ms. Zúñiga and her group became involved in disputes with rival factions of the ruling party over the diminishing spoils of the government’s patronage system. She fell out of favor with La Guaira’s current authorities.
Some of those political conflicts were intense, involving evictions and police raids. Others were tragicomic. One of Ms. Zúñiga’s friends, Joanna Corro, recounted how their group once briefly kidnapped a housing official to obtain a larger apartment quota.
These were some of the same homes Ms. Zúñiga and I visited in 2014, shortly after the first residents moved in from nearby slums. These buildings are known as OPPPE, an abbreviation that reflects the complexity of Venezuela’s bureaucracy. It stood for “the Presidential Office for Special Plans and Projects,’’ though few residents knew that.
Many residents had been victims of flash floods in 1999 that swept away their previous homes in La Guaira’s hillside slums, a disaster those who lived there simply call “La Tragedia,” the tragedy.
Overall, Ms. Zúñiga figured 120 of the roughly 600 members of her activist group, the José María España Women’s Movement, had received government housing in La Guaira. They lived there with their children and sometimes extended family.
For most families, who had lived in shacks they built themselves, the apartments were their first formal accommodation. When I visited in 2014, about two years after their construction, the paint was already peeling in the tropical heat, the wall plaster was nonexistent or of dismal quality, and only some of the elevators worked.
But the apartments had running water, flushing toilets, washing machines, garbage chutes and air conditioning. And the government gave the apartments away and did not charge rent.
Free housing was the apex of a sprawling patronage system that helped keep the Socialist Party of Venezuela in power for nearly three decades.
Ms. Corro, Ms. Zúñiga’s friend, recounted the perks: “Cars, apartments, food, TVs, bank credits, school supplies.”
“There was everything, everything, everything,” she added.
All free.
In return, recipients were expected to attend government rallies, vote for its candidates and pressure others to do so as well. Those who supported the opposition risked losing benefits, including their apartments.
The high occupancy of government housing is one reason it appears to account for a significant share of the earthquake’s death toll. There are also questions about their structural integrity.
“Look where we ended up sticking you,” Ms. Corro, 43, said to no one in particular as she looked at the rubble of one tower. “We never imagined it would end up like this.”
Her sister Isamar, 35, was somewhere between the concrete slabs that tumbled like pancakes, presumed to be dead.
The relationship between the Socialist Party and Venezuela’s poor was deeply transactional. But the sense of political empowerment among its supporters was real and has outlived the handouts.
Ms. Zúñiga recounted the racial discrimination she felt before Mr. Chávez, who was mixed race and came from a poor rural family, took power.
“I always felt uncomfortable going into formal places. Should I be here? Can I even be here?” she said
“Now, I am proud to be Black,” Ms. Zúñiga said. “The people know they have value, that they are visible.”
Ms. Zúñiga was born in a working-class neighborhood of Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, into a Colombian family that had escaped their homeland’s civil war.
She often came to La Guaira to visit her father, who worked in construction.
She became involved in local projects, organizing a public transport cooperative and lobbying for street paving. When Mr. Chávez became president, she enrolled in one of his first poverty-reduction programs and received a subsidized loan. She used it to buy an apartment in a middle-class neighborhood in La Guaira.
She lived in that apartment for nearly 27 years, until it was destroyed last month by the back-to-back earthquakes. She escaped unscathed, but lost all her possessions.
“Do you know how much I fought for that house?” Ms. Zúñiga asked me as she looked at the damaged building, called “La Marina.” A green curtain flapped in the window of her sixth-floor apartment. A red letter “D” was sprayed by the entrance, signifying a demolition order.
“We have done so much together only for him to come and destroy the house,” she said, referring to God. “So many people I know have died. This has me so confused.”
Ms. Zúñiga and her friends’ belief in the Venezuelan government has long faded. But they have maintained their commitment to social justice and their distrust of the free markets. Above all, years of activism have given them a sense of community that has helped them weather repeated adversity.
They had each other, and their mutual support was clear during the latest and, for most of them, their greatest tragedy.
We stood by piles of rubble and watched U.S. military helicopters fly overhead and heavily tattooed, muscular American rescue workers in cargo pants working among the destroyed buildings.
Ms. Zúñiga said she was wary of the Americans and had little faith in Venezuela’s interim government, which is led by Mr. Maduro’s former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. She said she would still vote for a left-wing candidate when the next elections are held, but not necessarily one from Ms. Rodriguez’s party.
I asked Ms. Zúñiga if the decades spent campaigning for Mr. Chávez’s anti-imperialist and socialist slogans were worth it.
“Chávez had the best intention in the world, but there was a lack of education,” she said. “But we had the opportunity to do very beautiful things. So many women have gained tranquillity, opportunity, visibility.”
Since the earthquakes, Ms. Zúñiga has been sleeping in an open-air market stall in La Guaira’s downtown. She has outfitted the stall with a mattress, makeshift curtains and an electric fan. At night, she locks the market’s gate to keep herself safe.
The market is part of Ms. Zúñiga’s long-running food distribution initiative, which allows La Guaira residents to buy fresh produce directly from regional farmers. The farmers whom she has befriended over the years have given Ms. Zúñiga a place to sleep, food and modest pay for helping serve customers.
She has turned a community canteen that she founded near her house into an aid distribution center and a temporary shelter for children who have lost homes or relatives in the quake.
She said she is depressed but forces herself to go because people are hungry and need help. I cry a little bit, and then I get up,” she said in her makeshift room.
We got up to visit friends who were still looking for relatives in the rubble. As we walked out, a farmer’s wife took Ms. Zúñiga by the arm and gave her a hug.
“You’re going to lift yourself up like a warrior,’’ the woman said, “the one that you are.”
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5) Sea Mining Could Devastate an Enigmatic Group of Creatures, Researchers Warn
The snails and other mollusks around hydrothermal vents have evolved to thrive in extreme conditions, but mineral extraction could drive more than half to extinction.
By Catrin Einhorn, July 9, 2026
The scaly-foot snail is among the undersea animals found to be at risk of extinction from mining. Chong Chen
Deep-sea mining threatens to drive to extinction more than half of the snails and other mollusks that rely on hydrothermal vents, according to the latest update of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, the global scientific authority on the status of species.
The finding comes as nations are expanding plans for deep-sea mining, eager to access valuable minerals needed for electronics and other uses.
Some of these minerals are found in and near chimney-like structures around hydrothermal vents, areas where cold seawater seeps through fissures in the earth’s crust and hits magma. As the water heats, it picks up elements like copper, zinc, gold and silver before shooting back into the ocean at temperatures that can reach over 750 degrees Fahrenheit. The rapid cooling causes the metals to precipitate out. Companies are interested in harvesting these and other deep-sea metals, arguing that growing demand combined with the serious environmental impact of mining on land make oceans an attractive source.
But the vents and their surrounding areas are rich in life as well as metals. Around the world, they are home to creatures like giant tube worms that can reach more than six feet long, swarms of ghostly white shrimp and furry-looking crabs. The chimney structures are also coated in snails and other mollusks, which are the focus of the Red List update.
The animals’ strangeness is part of their scientific significance. Not many living things could survive, let alone thrive, in such an intense environment. Instead of relying on sunlight for fuel (whether directly, like plants, or indirectly through the food web) these animals run on bacteria that turn chemicals released through the hydrothermal vents, like hydrogen sulfide, into food.
“Down there, they use the Earth as energy,” said Chong Chen, a senior scientist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology who worked on mollusk assessment.
And the strangeness doesn’t end there. Take the scaly-foot snail. Its external flesh is covered in scales that contain iron sulfide nanoparticles, and its shell is also infused with iron.
“It’s the only animal that sticks to magnets,” Dr. Chen said. When the snails are exposed to air, he added, “they rust.”
The scaly-foot snail is among the 62 percent of these mollusks, or 125 of 201 known species, that were found to be at risk of extinction from deep-sea mining. These species are not currently thought to be in decline. Rather, they are threatened precisely because they live in areas where permits have already been issued for mining exploration.
“The reason that they’re assessed as endangered is because there is a clear, active threat that their entire habitat, every place they live on earth, could be destroyed if commercial-scale deep-sea mining goes ahead as is currently intended,” said Julia Sigwart, the head of marine zoology at the Senckenberg Research Institute and museum in Germany and one of the scientists who helped lead the assessment.
Even if the chimneys are left in place, she said, sediment from disturbing surrounding areas would smother the mollusks.
Across the world’s oceans, there are about 600 known sites containing hydrothermal vents, each often the size of an auditorium or a football field. Hundreds more are thought to exist.
One mollusk, the hydrothermal vent monoplacophoran, has been found at only two locations along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge off the Azores. But because those places both fall within marine protected areas, the species was among more than 30 that were classified as being of “least concern.”
Researchers have found that, of the various deep-sea habitats threatened by mining, these vents nurture the highest density of life. That has made them especially controversial. Currently, the main focus for deep-sea mining lies elsewhere, with the potato-size nodules found on certain underwater plains. But those areas come with their own unique life, and in 2021, the International Union for Conservation of Nature called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining until its risks were understood and effective protection of the marine environment could be ensured.
The Metals Company, a front-runner in deep-sea mining exploration, did not respond to questions about the mollusks’ vulnerability.
The Trump administration has moved to push ahead with deep-sea mining in international waters without global approval. The International Seabed Authority, the body that regulates deep sea mining in waters outside of national jurisdiction, is meeting this month in Jamaica to continue what has been a highly contentious series of negotiations.
In addition to the mollusks in protected areas, Thursday’s update to the Red List included another example of conservation success. The numbat is a stripy Australian marsupial that was widespread across southern Australia until European settlers introduced cats and foxes to the continent. By the late 1970s, its numbers had shrunk to around 300 individuals, according to I.U.C.N. But intensive efforts — captive breeding, fencing to keep cats and foxes away, and the killing of foxes and feral cats — have paid off. There are now 2,000 to 3,000 numbats. The efforts need to continue, scientists have noted, but the species has moved from being classified as endangered to near threatened.
But the desert rain frog, which has gone viral on social media for its grumpy-looking face and round body, has moved from near threatened to vulnerable because of diamond mining and energy infrastructure developments in South Africa and Namibia.
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6) Gaza Aid Worker on His Way to Watch World Cup Killed by Israeli Strike
The Israeli military said it had struck a Hamas militant but was aware of reports that “uninvolved civilians” were harmed.
By Adam Rasgon and Abu Bakr Bashir, July 9, 2026
Adam Rasgon reported from Jerusalem and Abu Bakr Bashir reported from Sheffield, England.
An Israeli airstrike has killed a Palestinian aid worker who played an instrumental role in delivering humanitarian relief in the Gaza Strip, according to his family members and colleagues.
The worker, Mohammed al-Waheidi, 65, served as a member of the Egyptian Committee in Gaza, a relief group. In addition to facilitating deliveries of humanitarian aid, the committee helps resolve disputes between families, and was organizing World Cup watch parties around Gaza over the past few weeks.
The Israeli military said it had struck a Hamas militant in the attack on Tuesday in northern Gaza, but did not identify that person or say whether they had been killed. It said in a statement that it was aware of “the claim that uninvolved civilians were harmed as a result of the strike” and “regrets any harm” to such people.
Israeli forces have been carrying out frequent airstrikes in Gaza despite signing a U.S.-backed cease-fire deal with Hamas last October. Israeli officials have said the military has been going after Hamas militants who participated in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which ignited the war in Gaza.
Israel said 1,200 people were killed in the Oct. 7 attack and about 250 more were taken back to Gaza as hostages. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says that more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza were killed during the war.
While the military has issued many announcements saying its strikes in Gaza have killed Hamas militants, interviews with medical officials in Gaza and hospital records indicate that Israel has also killed civilians over the past nine months.
More than 1,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the October cease-fire, including children, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Mr. al-Waheidi was in a car on his way to a friend’s house to watch the Argentina-Egypt World Cup match on Tuesday night when he was hit by the Israeli strike, according to his son, Fawaz, 22. It was not immediately clear where he was in relation to the targeted Hamas militant.
The younger Mr. al-Waheidi said in a telephone interview that he was told on Tuesday evening that an airstrike had killed a person with his last name. He frantically tried calling his father, but a stranger answered the phone and said only that someone had been wounded.
He said he then raced to the hospital, where he identified a bloodied body as belonging to his father.
“I was totally stunned,” he said. “He was such a good man.”
Fawaz said his father was a supporter of peace with Israelis. He had worked in Israel years ago and was a teacher for the Palestinian Authority, the Western-backed government that Hamas expelled from Gaza in 2007 and which now administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
He also said that Hamas had arrested and tortured his father before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack because of his opposition to the group.
“He was persecuted by them,” he said of Hamas.
Ismail Thawabteh, the director general of the Hamas-run government media office in Gaza, declined to comment.
Mohammed Mansour, a spokesman for the Egyptian Committee, said Mr. al-Waheidi had managed the group’s relations with local leaders. He coordinated with them to ensure the safe delivery of aid in Gaza, where two years of war have devastated the territory and left hundreds of thousands of people displaced and living in tents.
Fawaz said he did not want anyone to use his father’s killing for more violence.
“What we need is peace,” he said. “May God have mercy on my father.”
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7) Man Killed by Federal Agent in Houston Was Not the Target of ICE Search
Officials say agents believed a passenger resembled one suspect, but the encounter quickly escalated into a fatal shooting.
By Edgar Sandoval and Hamed Aleaziz, Published July 9, 2026, Updated July 10, 2026
Federal immigration agents who killed a man during a traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday had been searching for a different person, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman.
The targets of the ICE investigation were two people from Guatemala, one of whom the agents believed was in a white van being driven by the man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who were not permitted to speak about the case.
But the Guatemalan immigrants were not in the van. Mr. Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the United States without authorization for 35 years, was on his way to work with three other men.
When agents tried to stop the vehicle, the encounter quickly escalated, and an agent shot Mr. Araujo in the abdomen. He died at a hospital hours later.
Homeland security officials said Mr. Araujo had tried to use his vehicle as a weapon, though no video or other evidence for that claim has emerged.
Federal agents had surveilled an address connected to one of the two Guatemalans weeks before and had seen two white vans at the property, the spokeswoman said in a statement. When they returned to the address on Tuesday, she said, “they observed a white van with an individual who resembled the target,” and initiated the traffic stop.
The agents were not wearing body cameras, according to the spokeswoman. Before trying to stop the van, the agents had looked into its owner and learned it was Mr. Araujo, who did not have legal status in the United States, according to the two people familiar with the case.
The shooting is part of a growing number of similar violent interactions involving civilians and immigration agents. More than 20 people have been shot at since September, nearly all of them in their cars. Some cases have been fatal. The shooting also comes as the Trump administration has ramped up its deportation campaign.
The killing of Mr. Araujo has incited outrage in Texas and beyond. Mr. Araujo’s sons said during a news briefing on Wednesday that they believed their father tried to get away because he was being chased by unmarked cars. Ronaldo Salgado, his oldest son, and a growing number of elected officials and immigration activists have demanded an independent inquiry.
“This is outrageous to me, and this is ridiculous to hear that no one in that van was a target of any sort of investigation,” Mr. Salgado said in response to the news that his father was not being sought by federal agents.
Federal authorities had said earlier that agents with ICE stopped a vehicle around 6:50 a.m. on Tuesday and tried to arrest Mr. Araujo, whom they described as an “illegal alien.” ICE alleged that Mr. Araujo “weaponized his vehicle” and tried to run over the agent, who then fired at him.
The other passengers in Mr. Araujo’s vehicle, according to a person familiar with the case, were Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego, Daniel Tirado Pantoja and Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, the victim’s younger brother.
Dominga Aguilar Salgado, who is married to a third Araujo brother, said the family has not talked to Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, who remains in immigration detention in Conroe, Texas, outside Houston.
“Imagine, one of them died and the other is in a detention center,” Ms. Salgado said. “The family is going through a lot. He saw what really happened.”
During the news briefing Wednesday, Ronaldo Salgado held back tears as he described seeing a video showing his father in agony moments after he was injured. Videos on social media and from news outlets appear to show immigration agents hovering over a man holding his abdominal area. Other images showed another man on the ground with his hands behind his back as someone screamed in pain.
About 40 people attended a vigil on Thursday night at the site of the shooting. An impromptu memorial was decorated with candles, flowers, rosaries, balloons and photos of Mr. Araujo. Some of the signs left there read, “We will not look away” and “every life is valuable regardless of immigration status.”
“I live not far from here and it just felt important to pay our respects,” said Nishta Mehra, 42, adding, “It’s important not to pretend like this isn’t happening.”
The Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office is conducting an investigation. The F.B.I.’s Houston office said it will focus its investigation into what the authorities have called an assault on a federal law enforcement officer.
In many immigration enforcement shootings, videos have later surfaced that contradict agents’ accounts. Those instances include two fatal shootings in Minneapolis during a crackdown in January. In another case, video undermined an ICE agent’s account, resulting in dropped charges against the man who was shot.
Mr. Araujo’s family remembered him as a hard-working father of three U.S. citizens who was in the process of obtaining a work permit.
“He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” Ronaldo said.
Kitty Bennett contributed research. Maria Jimenez Moya contributed reporting from Houston.
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8) Witnesses of ICE Killing in Houston Dispute the Official Account
The agency said a Mexican resident driving a van tried to ram agents before they shot him dead. A lawyer for three passengers said that was untrue.
By Pooja Salhotra, July 10, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/houston-ice-shooting-witnesses.html
The site where a federal immigration officer shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Three men who witnessed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s killing by federal immigration officers in Houston disputed the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the shooting and said the victim never attempted to run over a federal agent.
The men, who were inside the vehicle, were arrested during the Tuesday encounter and spoke from immigration detention with their lawyer, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra. They said that Mr. Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant who was driving to work at a construction site, did not use his vehicle as a weapon or attempt to run over the immigration officers who opened fire.
Soon after the shooting, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, David Venturella, released a statement saying that Mr. Araujo had tried to run down the officer. No evidence was provided to support that account. ICE agents stopped the vehicle around 6:50 a.m. and tried to arrest the driver, according to Mr. Venturella.
Mr. Araujo was shot in the abdomen and taken to a hospital, where he died.
“After speaking with these three men that were in the vehicle with Lorenzo, I have no doubt that what these ICE agents are saying is completely false,” Mr. Balderas-Ibarra said in a video posted on Instagram. “At no point did they ever use the van to ram into the ICE agents and at no point were these ICE agents’ lives ever in any danger.”
The account of the witnesses was first reported by The Washington Post.
In recent months, video evidence has disproved several federal law enforcement accounts of shootings by immigration agents.
In the Houston killing, surveillance videos broadcast on local television show ICE cars tailing the white van and appearing to cut it off. Others appear to show immigration agents hovering over a man holding his abdomen. More images show another man on the ground, his hands behind his back.
The Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office is leading an investigation into the shooting. The F.B.I.’s Houston office is also looking into the case, primarily as an assault on a federal officer.
Mr. Araujo’s family has called for an independent investigation into his death, which was ruled a homicide by the Harris County Medical Examiner.
The agents who killed Mr. Araujo had been searching for a different undocumented immigrant when they killed Mr. Araujo.
Mr. Araujo has lived in the United States without authorization for 35 years. He was a husband, father of three children and a business owner. According to his sons, he was in the process of obtaining a work permit.
“He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” his son, Ronaldo Salgado, said at a Wednesday news briefing. “That’s how I want the world to know my father: not as someone who got shot and killed, but as a family man, a man who understood that good things come to those who put in hard work.”
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9) Claims of Poor Conditions in ICE Facility Are Bolstered by Health Inspectors
Detainees at the Delaney Hall center in Newark have complained for months about dirty, unhealthy living conditions. Documents echo their claims.
By Ana Ley, Claire Fahy, Mark Bonamo and Nicole Hong, July 10, 2026
Delaney Hall has emerged as a flashpoint in President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Lexi Parra/The New York Times
Inside the kitchen of an immigration detention center, potato salad sat at 81 degrees, twice the temperature considered safe. Surfaces that were used to prepare food were left unsanitized. Workers touched open garbage containers as they made meals.
Migrants at the Delaney Hall facility in Newark have complained for months about unsafe meals, dirty living quarters and bad medical care. Because federal officials have restricted access to the detention center, their claims have been hard to verify.
Now, health inspection reports, court filings and other public records reviewed by The New York Times are providing the first documented evidence of conditions inside Delaney Hall, which has been a flashpoint in President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Pleas from inmates have inspired weeks of protests outside the New Jersey detention center and renewed broader concerns about migrant holding cells from Arizona to New York.
To detractors of Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration campaign, the detention centers represent the flaws and excesses of the administration’s mass deportation efforts. Critics have argued that the administration has detained too many people too hastily, leading to overcrowding, maltreatment and abuse.
To the White House and its supporters, the detention centers are a crucial element in the effort to deport undocumented immigrants, and the government agencies that oversee the facilities insist that the care detainees receive exceeds what is provided in most U.S. prisons and jails.
Only three months after the Trump administration began using Delaney Hall to detain immigrants last year, a federal inspection identified deficiencies in food refrigeration and determined that food was not protected from overhead leakage. Inspectors found other contamination sources, including condensation dripping into the food freezers. The findings appeared in a report from the Office of Professional Responsibility at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
The public records reviewed by The Times included reports from New Jersey state health inspectors. Those records, obtained through a public information request, show that just before midnight on Feb. 9, a tipster wrote to the Health Department that “the bathroom condition is extremely unhealthy and it needs to be looked at.”
State health inspectors, who were granted limited access to Delaney Hall in late May, reported that staff members were not washing their hands in a timely manner, including before work and after using the restroom.
The inspectors, who visited only the kitchen, noted other violations. They found that two covered stainless steel trays holding chicken stew were improperly cooled. Cooked meatballs in a hot holding area had an internal temperature that was nearly 50 degrees below what was needed to kill harmful contaminants. Staff members put cases of soda in the same closet next to chemicals. Sanitizer in a dishwashing machine was below proper concentration levels.
Dr. Novneet Sahu, the deputy commissioner of the Public Health Services Branch of the New Jersey Health Department, received a complaint at the time of the kitchen inspection from a physician about a detainee with an active case of tuberculosis. The physician said that an employee at University Hospital in Newark had told her that the inmate was brought to the hospital and taken back with no follow-up plan to contain the infection. Dr. Sahu’s account appears in an affidavit that is part of a lawsuit filed by the New Jersey attorney general.
While the inspectors had access to food service areas, they were denied entry to the housing and medical units, according to a statement from Raynard E. Washington, the New Jersey health commissioner. The facility has 1,000 beds, according to Geo Group, the private contractor that operates Delaney Hall.
Dr. Sahu said that the Health Department tried to inspect Delaney Hall’s infection control protocols and practices on June 1 but was repeatedly rebuffed. The attorney general had sued to force the center to allow state health inspectors inside so that they can evaluate infection control measures. The suit is pending.
“The department cannot confirm whether Delaney Hall is engaging in protocols or practices that pose a serious risk of harm to both detainees within the facility and to the public outside of it,” Dr. Sahu wrote in the affidavit on June 22.
The Department of Homeland Security said in an emailed statement that the state’s lawsuit was frivolous and noted that the state Health Department’s kitchen inspection in late May had determined that conditions were overall satisfactory.
Federal officials denied Dr. Sahu’s assertion that a detainee had been diagnosed with tuberculosis.
“All detainees are provided with three meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap and toiletries,” Homeland Security said in a statement. “Certified dietitians evaluate meals.”
Geo Group disputed allegations of substandard conditions included in the federal and state reports. Christopher V. Ferreira, a company spokesman, said in a statement that “in the event issues are identified, deficiencies are promptly addressed through established corrective action processes” required by ICE. The company said that the facility’s services included round-the-clock access to medical care as well as meals that accommodated religious and specialty diets.
Detainees and their families have complained for months about the conditions at Delaney Hall. More than a dozen current and former detainees, relatives and visitors who spoke with The Times described jail-issued meals that were often moldy, spoiled or frozen. Visitors said common areas were acrid from the smell of body odor.
Latif Hafraoui, 61, a Moroccan immigrant who moved to the United States 38 years ago before settling in Bayonne, N.J., was detained at Delaney Hall for 108 days before being released in November. He said meals would sometimes consist of small portions of roast chicken, beans and rice. Other times, he was served slices of cheese, bologna and bread. Meat was sometimes unidentifiable — “very weird stuff” that most detainees would refuse.
Detainees complained about poor ventilation, and said that inmates were often forced into overcrowded cells where temperatures were either sweltering or frigid.
Azizullah Qasemi, 30, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, said that he slept in a freezing room in December with 11 other detainees, with no idea why he had been detained. Court records show that he was arrested after he showed up for an immigration appointment at the ICE office in Manhattan. An immigration judge has since granted him asylum.
“I did not feel safe there,” Mr. Qasemi said through a Dari interpreter.
Gabriela Soto, 28, is the wife of a detainee, Martin Soto, who was detained at Delaney Hall in February before being transferred in May to another facility in Elizabeth, N.J. Ms. Soto said that her husband had dealt with a stomach ailment for about a month inside Delaney Hall and struggled to get help.
“We couldn’t get the medic to see him,” Ms. Soto said. “After lights out, he would have to beg the guard to open the cell just so he could go to the bathroom.”
Ashleigh Gomez, 29, drives two hours each way to visit her husband and said she had been turned away after making the long trip in recent weeks because visitation hours had been canceled with little notice.
“Seeing him makes a big difference for my children,” Ms. Gomez said. “They’re always crying without him.”
Delaney Hall, which had been used to hold migrants until 2017 when it was converted into a halfway house, was reopened as an ICE detention facility in May 2025 — the first under Mr. Trump’s second administration.
The protest movement at Delaney Hall began after jailed migrants decided to stage a hunger strike, refusing cafeteria meals. Inmates who had been assigned to tend to common areas stopped doing the work. With paper and pen, the migrants wrote down their complaints and in May, went public.
Demonstrators soon gathered outside and stayed for weeks, blocking vehicles as federal agents in riot gear formed shield lines and fired chemical irritants. As dramatic images from the clashes captivated the nation, calls to shut down Delaney Hall grew loud.
“It is quite unique in the sense that it was powered by the detainees themselves,” said Andrei Camurungan, a volunteer organizer.
Census figures show that immigrants make up more than 23 percent of New Jersey’s total population, the second-largest share of any state, after California. New Jersey has a robust and tightly knit patchwork of volunteer groups that has helped detainees at Delaney Hall find legal representation and other services. The groups have shaped a media campaign using messages from detainees, publishing their handwritten letters.
Acts of resistance have played out in other detention centers, including in Tacoma, Wash.; Adelanto, Calif.; and Alvarado, Texas. At Delaney Hall, demonstrators have benefited from the proximity to urban centers in New York and Pennsylvania.
The movement has received key support from powerful religious figures, including Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Newark and friend of Pope Leo XIV.
“There’s a growing number of Americans who see the situation as it really is,” Cardinal Tobin said after he led a prayer near the facility in June with more than 50 people in support of the migrants. “They cut through the ideology, they cut through the attempts to dehumanize people and they can see suffering human beings.”
Susan C. Beachy and Georgia Gee contributed research. Jonah E. Bromwich and Tracey Tully contributed reporting. Safiullah Padshah contributed translation.
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10) How American Socialism Changed, and Stormed the Democratic Party
The movement was better at critiquing the system than reshaping it. But it has never had this much mainstream political power.
By Jia Lynn Yang, July 10, 2026
The labor leader Eugene V. Debs addressing a crowd, circa 1910.Fotosearch, via Getty Images
The word “socialist” has a unique ability in American politics to provoke high emotion. President Trump warned last month that the recent success of democratic socialist politicians posed “the most serious threat to our country since its existence.” He compared it to “an uncontrollable form of cancer” that will eventually destroy the country.
And that’s just the Republican response. Some Democratic leaders, too, want nothing to do with the socialists after a number of incumbents in New York and Colorado lost their primaries last month to insurgents from the left. These candidates won by harnessing a wide sense of grievance. They have also staked out positions uncomfortable for top Democrats, like ending all deportations and stopping military aid to Israel. “If you’re a socialist, you’re not a Democrat,” said Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey. “We are capitalist, not socialist,” announced a letter signed by a group of moderate House Democrats worried that their whole party will look extreme — and will lose in purple states and districts.
Socialists are used to losing in this country. Yet their movement has endured, because socialism — more of a spirit than a single ideology — adapts to each era. Socialists are astute critics of the status quo, always imagining other ways to live, whatever historical moment they happen to be in. Now their fortunes have turned, and they could be “on the verge of the political revolution we have fought for for such a long time,” as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has bedeviled the party while becoming the most influential American socialist in a century, said last week.
But if the movement is so amorphous, what is the type of socialism that is ascendant now?
Viewed through the lens of history, the modern version of American socialism is in some ways a throwback. The Democratic Socialists of America platform calls for universal health care, an idea long since implemented by their counterparts in Europe. Socialists have always tried to advance a spirit of cooperation, rather than competition. They abhor inequality — and don’t mind agitating the establishment in pursuit of their moral ends.
In one important way, though, the American socialist movement is breaking new ground. “This is the first time that a mass socialist organization has had members where almost all of them decide to run as Democrats, instead of running on their own party line,” said Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University and a former editor of Dissent, a magazine of the social-democratic left.
It’s a bet that, with a new strategy this time, socialist ideas can be realized at a greater scale than ever before in the United States. The inside track is less revolutionary but far more threatening to the Democratic Party leadership, weakened after losing to Trump in 2024 and no longer able to ignore the rising forces to its left.
The ascent of the new D.S.A. candidates may have surprised the political establishment. But it’s not because the socialists have changed their tune. It’s because throughout their history, they have fallen short when they worked outside the two-party system. And now the call — ringing louder and louder — is coming from inside the house.
The outside arc
When socialism emerged in Europe in the early 1800s, the idea of capitalism had not fully crystallized. The earliest socialists were utopian thinkers. They dreamed of a society where people felt bonded to their neighbors, never pitted against them.
But the very loftiness of socialism has left room for wide interpretation and disagreement — both over what it looks like in practice and how to achieve it politically. Some proponents have wanted to smash capitalism entirely. Others hoped to work within liberal governments to reform it, spreading wealth to more people. Always, there are pragmatists who chase achievable results and purists who scoff at such moral capitulation.
But socialism also persists because its ideas can win adherents in moments of political and economic crisis. When the market collapses, when leaders are venal, when everything seems too expensive, socialism is ready. At its heart, socialism is “the hope for human freedom and justice under the unprecedented conditions of life that humanity will face,” wrote Michael Harrington, who led the American socialist movement in some of its most fallow years and co-founded the D.S.A. in 1982.
Some of the earliest socialists were in fact capitalists — only they were consumed by a utopian vision requiring a total restructuring of society.
Robert Owen, a Welsh industrialist and cotton manufacturer, became horrified by factory conditions in England in the early 19th century. Children as young as 6 worked for 16 hours a day. Workers were routinely maimed or died on the job. To Owen, industrialization felt exploitative and cruel. The more factory owners competed with one another, the more they squeezed their workers to accrue greater profits.
In an era with no factory regulations, Owen shortened the workday, refused to employ children under the age of 10 and opened a company store with affordable goods for workers. Then he began to imagine entire communities built in the spirit of cooperation. Socialism was to be a new science of society itself, with ideas for how to eradicate poverty and inequality. He moved to Indiana in 1825 and founded a community called New Harmony, where everyone would pitch in to farm, to clean, to cook. All would be shared. Within a few years, however, the project failed.
Compared with England, it took longer for socialism to emerge in the United States, since the country was slower to industrialize. But when the ills of factory life arrived in the late 19th century, the socialist movement soon flowered. The Socialist Party, founded in 1901, attracted an unusual collection of people horrified by the way economic forces were reshaping their country. There were tenant farmers on the Great Plains, secular Jews in New York City and tradesmen in Midwestern cities, united in their revulsion toward big business. Socialist newspapers, bookstores, even summer camps flourished. Many socialists were Christians fervently trying to follow Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
Eugene V. Debs, a charismatic labor leader from Indiana, became the face of the movement and ran for president five times, urging crowds to vote out “the foul and decaying system.” His strongest performance came in 1912, when he won 6 percent of the popular vote.
Further down the ticket, though, some socialists were victorious and began running cities. These mayors, in places like Milwaukee, built a reputation for good governance. Known as “sewer socialists,” they cleaned up unhygienic water systems, built libraries and parks, fortified funding for public schooling.
These years would mark the apex of American socialism in the 20th century, though. Cold War politics would later mash socialists and communists together into one common enemy. Yet the two groups were in fact often rivals. Many of their ideals overlapped, but when the Bolshevik Revolution inspired some leftists to swear their loyalty to the new Russian regime, socialist leaders balked. The Communists formed their own party, and thanks to Soviet sponsorship, its ranks swelled as the Socialist Party lost members.
Still, in times of crisis, socialist ideas occasionally took hold.
When capitalism nearly self-destructed during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted programs like Social Security, modeled on a socialist idea for old-age pensions. The president borrowed another socialist notion — public works projects — and employed millions of jobless Americans to build structures like the Hoover Dam and the Lincoln Tunnel.
In the 1960s, socialists were among the most effective leaders of the civil rights movement, bringing radical ideas of racial and economic equality to the masses. A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, both socialists, organized the 1963 march where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Harrington, an ally of King, emerged in the late 1960s as the next leader of the socialist movement. He brought a new approach. Harrington believed that the socialists would never succeed by running candidates under their own flag and instead should work to transform the Democratic Party in order to pursue a “left-wing of the possible.” After Harrington’s influential book “The Other America” drew a devastating portrait of American poverty, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration asked him to help wage the so-called war on poverty. Harrington urged Americans to notice that they were settling for a far weaker welfare state than other liberal democratic countries in Europe.
Nevertheless, these were decades of decline for socialists. By the end of the 1980s, capitalism was in full triumph as communist regimes crumbled. An ethos of individualism and competition — the opposite of the original socialist spirit — animated American culture. At the turn of the century, the movement seemed anemic, with D.S.A. membership numbering roughly 5,000.
A new path
But the inside track would eventually bear fruit. The 2008 financial crisis exposed terrifying cracks in the economy, now thoroughly globalized and maximized for profit by Wall Street. Millennials graduated college into the most miserable job market since the Great Depression, and Americans began paying more attention to an elderly senator from Vermont who called himself a democratic socialist. In 2016, Sanders soared in the Democratic presidential primary, winning over young people, including many independents, who feared economic insecurity more than a Soviet boogeyman that had been vanquished for decades.
Among these fresh acolytes were figures like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom eventually won elections in New York by running in Democratic primaries. Others in this cohort have won that way this spring, from New York to Colorado to the District of Columbia, where the next mayor is set to be a socialist. A feeling of revolution is back in the air. But for now it is the party, not the country, that is being remade.
The D.S.A. has an opening because of dissatisfaction not just with the economy but also with Democratic leaders. In a recent New York Times/Siena poll, more than half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents indicated they felt frustrated with the party. Many of these voters want it to stop promising to return America to the pre-Trump status quo, since they no longer believe in that system.
The socialists are drawing from a national rage at the state of the country that has been gathering steam for decades and transcends party and ideology. Americans are bitter over how their leaders have handled its economy and its wars, and each cycle they have tried to express it, one way or another. First, the Republican base took out its party’s leadership and installed Trump and the MAGA movement. Now Democrats are firing incumbents.
Some Democrats argue that in the face of the rising tide of D.S.A., the party should affirm its support for capitalism. This may be a tough sell in a time when capitalism is falling in popularity. Under half of Americans say capitalism is working very well or even somewhat well, down from 60 percent a decade ago, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC survey. Whatever you want to call the status quo, many Americans say they simply don’t want it.
This is precisely the type of historical moment when socialism begins to make sense to more people, and now socialists have come to Democratic voters to offer it. When your life feels horribly constrained by forces beyond your control, when it feels as if every possible avenue has been exhausted, socialism arrives with a vision of another way: Here, it says. Here lies the way out.
Jia Lynn Yang
Explanatory reporter
Hi everyone,I set out to write this piece because in all the reaction to the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America, it felt a little hard to perceive what we were actually looking at. American socialism is not new, so how does the current wave compare with what’s come before? And what exactly is socialism in the first place?I relied on several books on the history of the American left and the emergence of socialism as an idea in 19th century Europe. I found it to be a story filled with drama, with a real lineage, all leading to our current moment.I’m curious to hear more from readers: How do you feel about socialism as an idea? And why do you think the D.S.A. is gaining so much traction within the Democratic Party right now?
Jia Lynn Yang is a senior Times writer.
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11) How Marco Rubio Is Running Venezuela From Afar
The secretary of state effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government. His grip on the country is a vivid manifestation of American power in the Trump era.
By Tyler Pager and Anatoly Kurmanaev, July 11, 2026
Tyler Pager, who covers the White House, reported from Washington and Caracas. Anatoly Kurmanaev, who covers Venezuela, reported from Caracas.
President Trump was sitting in the Oval Office earlier this year with Secretary of State Marco Rubio when an idea came to him.
Maybe he should dispatch Mr. Rubio permanently to Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, where U.S. commandos had carried out the proudest foreign policy achievement of Mr. Trump’s second term: the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president.
Mr. Rubio could be the next leader of Venezuela, Mr. Trump suggested. And while the president’s aides say he was joking — and that he frequently teases Mr. Rubio about an overseas assignment — the fact is that Mr. Rubio does not need to move to Caracas.
He already runs Venezuela from Washington.
In the six months since U.S. forces blew open Mr. Maduro’s bedroom door and snatched him in the dead of night, Mr. Rubio has become the de facto viceroy of Venezuela, holding sway over a sovereign nation in a way that no American official has since L. Paul Bremer III arrived in Baghdad in 2003 to run U.S.-occupied Iraq.
Mr. Rubio now effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials and people close to both governments in Washington and Caracas, who provided details about his involvement in steering the country’s policies. Many spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private interactions and internal discussions.
While he has not visited Venezuela in person since the U.S. took over, the secretary of state is deeply involved in the country’s day-to-day operations, keeping in close contact with Delcy Rodríguez, who was Mr. Maduro’s vice president and now leads her country on an acting basis, with the imprimatur of the United States. The two exchange messages in Spanish on WhatsApp, trading gossip, birthday greetings and selfies.
Despite the banter, the relationship between Mr. Rubio and Ms. Rodríguez is far from a partnership. It is a manifestation of Trump-era American power, in which the winner takes all regardless of sovereignty and international law.
The Venezuelan government did not respond to a request for comment. The Trump administration did not address detailed questions about Mr. Rubio’s authority in Venezuela. Mr. Rubio has downplayed his role, and largely avoids discussing his work. He declined multiple requests for an interview.
Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement that “with renewed cooperation and sound economic stewardship, Venezuela can re-emerge as a stable, prosperous partner whose citizens benefit from its vast natural wealth and strengthened ties with the United States.”
The direct control over Venezuela’s public revenues, in particular, distinguishes Washington’s influence there from most other countries beholden to its military and financial might.
The U.S. Treasury receives the revenue from most of Venezuela’s exports, then disburses it gradually to Venezuela through the country’s private banks, a relationship akin to parents handing out allowances to children. Mr. Rubio and his team set the conditions on what that money can be spent on, and by whom.
This system has allowed Mr. Rubio to stop Venezuela’s most egregious corruption schemes. And it brings some benefits to the Venezuelan government, which uses the effective protection of the U.S. Treasury to receive revenues without being hounded by the numerous creditors seeking repayment of billions in unpaid debt.
But the arrangement has also given Mr. Rubio immense leverage over Ms. Rodríguez, who depends on the money to pay workers and prop up the national currency.
He also oversees the application of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, deciding who gets to do business in the country and how. He has worked to reshape the oil sector and boosted the access of U.S. companies. For her part, Ms. Rodríguez runs important government appointments by him, such as the minister of defense.
Since two earthquakes struck Venezuela last month, Mr. Rubio has sought to bolster the country’s interim government. The United States has sent 900 military personnel to Venezuela, committed nearly $400 million in aid and delivered crates of cash to the Venezuelan government.
The earthquakes have complicated Mr. Rubio’s stated mission to return Venezuela to democracy (“It’s a setback in that regard,” Mr. Rubio acknowledged last month). But the country’s ability to recover is critical to Mr. Trump’s ultimate goal: securing Venezuelan oil for U.S. interests.
The arrangement is deeply unusual, unfolding 80 years after the United States relinquished its last sizable formal colony, the Philippines.
But Mr. Trump has made clear he wants to return to an era of American expansionism, musing about taking control of Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal.
He has found the most success in Venezuela. But there are risks.
Mr. Trump’s critics accuse the United States of siphoning Venezuela’s resources and propping up an authoritarian government by leaving Mr. Maduro’s henchmen largely in place. The arrangement also entangles the United States in the fortunes of a deeply unpopular, unelected regime facing increasingly restless clamor for political change.
“Secretary Rubio said that we are not at war with Venezuela,” Representative Sean Casten, Democrat of Illinois, said to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a congressional hearing in February. What authority, Mr. Casten asked, did the United States have to control Venezuelan assets?
Mr. Bessent told Mr. Casten that he would get back to him.
Mr. Rubio’s hard-nosed realpolitik in Venezuela is a sharp departure for a man who spent his career fashioning himself as a champion for democracy in Latin America. He has said his goal is an eventual democratic transition.
The outcome of the Venezuela foray could shape Mr. Rubio’s political future as Mr. Trump considers his successor.
‘Make Venezuela Great Again’
In the early hours of Jan. 3, shortly after Mr. Maduro was captured, Mr. Rubio reached Ms. Rodríguez by phone. Speaking in Spanish, Mr. Rubio told her that she had a choice between working with the United States or witnessing a broader attack targeting Venezuela’s infrastructure, military bases and senior officials.
After some negotiation, Ms. Rodríguez agreed.
She told Mr. Rubio that “she’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” according to Mr. Trump. The president said the United States would “run the country” until there was a “safe, proper and judicious transition” of power.
Days later, Mr. Trump told The New York Times in an interview that he expected the United States to run Venezuela for years.
At the center of the fulcrum is Mr. Rubio, dubbed by other officials as “viceroy,” the title given to the powerful governors who ruled the Spanish empire until Venezuela and most of its other provinces rebelled and won independence in the early 19th century.
As Ms. Rodríguez started to set up her government, Mr. Rubio weighed in on key personnel decisions, and encouraged her to purge Mr. Maduro’s family and business partners. She followed through.
Most Venezuelans expressed relief at Mr. Maduro’s downfall only to watch in disbelief as the Trump administration struck an alliance with most of his chief enforcers. Inflation has fallen but remains the world’s highest, and the country’s currency keeps losing value. Millions are clamoring for new elections, putting pressure on Mr. Rubio to move beyond economic deals and bring political change. Investors are nervous about putting capital into a system that could crumble at any moment.
Before the earthquakes, Ms. Rodríguez had been asking Mr. Rubio for more financial autonomy and the scrapping of economic sanctions, to reduce the domestic pressure on her government.
Mr. Rubio has been sympathetic to her arguments, but the U.S. government has not released control.
Mr. Rubio’s work with Ms. Rodríguez has provoked grumbling among some career U.S. diplomats, Venezuelan Americans and Mr. Trump’s allies, who bristle at the idea that Mr. Maduro’s chief lieutenant is in power.
Mr. Rubio and other officials have dismissed those concerns, pointing to how Ms. Rodríguez has followed nearly every order the administration has made, especially those related to the country’s finances. Venezuela sells much of its oil through two oil trading companies, Trafigura and Vitol, in an arrangement set up by the Trump administration.
Mr. Rubio has largely eclipsed Chris Wright, the energy secretary, in opening up Venezuela’s oil industry to foreign investment, the cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s vision for the country. He has prioritized the arrival of new American companies at the expense of European oil producers who were already working in the country.
Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for Mr. Wright, said the secretary has worked closely with Mr. Rubio, and has spoken regularly with energy industry leaders and Ms. Rodríguez.
Washington’s grip on Venezuela’s economy extends beyond the oil revenues. Mr. Rubio’s team drafts the licenses that provide companies who want to do business in Venezuela with exemptions from sanctions. Mr. Rubio has warned Ms. Rodríguez’s government to abstain from business with U.S. adversaries. Following Mr. Maduro’s downfall, for example, Venezuela’s state oil company has quietly taken over the operations of the oil projects that it co-owns with Russia’s state-run Rosneft. Rosneft did not respond to request for comment.
The Trump administration has also successfully pressured Ms. Rodríguez to turn over Venezuelans who have crossed the Justice Department. At the behest of the United States, Ms. Rodríguez’s government in February detained Alex Saab, the billionaire friend and business partner of Mr. Maduro, and approved his extradition to the United States, after stripping him of his Venezuelan passport.
Some officials believe the Justice Department wants to use Mr. Saab to strengthen the case against Mr. Maduro, who has been charged with various drug trafficking crimes.
And in June, the Rodríguez government helped the United States kill a criminal boss with longstanding ties to Venezuelan officials, according to several people familiar with the operation.
U.S. forces used the intelligence provided by Ms. Rodríguez’s officials to kill Niño Guerrero, one of the leaders of the gang Tren de Aragua, in a missile strike in a remote area of southern Venezuela. It was the first military collaboration between the two countries in decades. The Venezuelan government later recovered the gang leader’s body and passed it to the United States.
The Trump administration has accused Tren de Aragua of working with Mr. Maduro to flood the United States with drugs and illegal migrants, even though U.S. intelligence agencies last year assessed that Mr. Maduro did not control the gang.
The Trump administration even exerts control over Ms. Rodríguez’s public appearances and statements. In May, Mr. Rubio announced that Ms. Rodríguez would travel to India before the Venezuelan government mentioned it, surprising Venezuelan officials and foreign diplomats.
When the Fox News anchor Bret Baier contacted Ms. Rodríguez about participating in an interview, she told him that Mr. Trump would have to approve. Mr. Trump loved that Ms. Rodríguez was deferring to him, and has repeatedly recounted the story to others when they ask about her, according to multiple people familiar with his comments.
When the United States attacked Iran, Yvan Gil, Venezuela’s foreign minister, issued a soft condemnation of the aggression against Venezuela’s longtime ally.
The Trump administration communicated to Ms. Rodríguez that the post should be taken down, and warned her not to publicly support its adversaries again. Mr. Gil deleted the post hours after posting it.
In effect, it was an admission that Venezuela no longer set its foreign policy.
Mr. Gil did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Rubio was asleep in Bahrain last month when he was awakened by a call from the White House Situation Room. Two massive earthquakes had hit Venezuela, and early images were grim. Entire neighborhoods were flattened, and scores of people were missing.
Shortly after, Mr. Rubio spoke to Ms. Rodríguez, promising the full assistance of the United States. American rescue teams were on the ground two days later. Mr. Rubio has described the administration’s plans for Venezuela in three phases: recover the economy, stabilize the country and transition it to democracy.
Before the earthquakes, U.S. officials said they were in the second phase, working to open up Venezuela to international investment. To further that goal, senior Trump administration officials have traveled to Venezuela to meet their counterparts and strike new energy and mining deals.
The resulting announcements, however, have mostly been optimistic outlines of potential investments.
In March, Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, visited Venezuela and met with Ms. Rodríguez at the Presidential Palace. During the visit, Mr. Rubio texted her to ask how the meeting was going. Ms. Rodríguez said it was going well, and sent a selfie with Mr. Burgum.
But the meeting was overshadowed by damaging news. Reuters reported that day that the Justice Department was quietly building a legal case against Ms. Rodríguez.
Ms. Rodríguez’s administration was shocked, and sought clarification from the White House. To allay Ms. Rodríguez’s concerns, Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general, called the report “completely FALSE.”
But the Venezuelan government sought further assurances. So the next day Mr. Rubio texted Mr. Rodríguez the link to a social media post from the U.S. president.
“Delcy Rodríguez, who is the President of Venezuela, is doing a great job, and working with U.S. Representatives very well,” Mr. Trump wrote. Ms. Rodríguez was pleased, and wanted to thank Mr. Trump with a post of her own. But first, she shared the draft with Mr. Rubio. She posted it after receiving his approval.
Before Mr. Maduro’s capture, U.S. prosecutors had been looking into many Venezuelan officials, including Ms. Rodríguez, though it is unclear if those efforts have revealed evidence of crimes. The Associated Press reported in May that the Trump administration told prosecutors to stop investigating Ms. Rodríguez.
The success of the efforts to bring stability to Venezuela, the second phase of Mr. Rubio’s plan, largely hinges on foreign investment. But investors are cautious. The oil sector is degraded and corrupt, and Ms. Rodríguez’s grip on power in uncertain. The earthquakes have delayed the negotiations for new oil contracts.
Mr. Trump appears unworried. He has repeatedly suggested that Venezuela could become the 51st state.
Who may lead the country on a more permanent basis is still deeply uncertain. María Corina Machado, the exiled opposition leader, remains the country’s most popular politician. But she has sworn enemies among Venezuela’s security and military officials, leading Mr. Rubio to bypass her and settle on Ms. Rodríguez as the country’s handpicked leader.
Once a staunch supporter of Ms. Machado, Mr. Rubio has distanced himself from her in recent months. The cooling relationship between the Trump administration and Ms. Machado became an open breach after the earthquakes. U.S. officials have refused to help her return to Venezuela out of fear of stoking unrest.
The time frame for the final phase of Mr. Rubio’s Venezuela plan, the free elections, remains undefined. When The Times asked Ms. Rodríguez in May when she would hold elections, she said, “I don’t know. Sometime.”
Political analysts say that Ms. Rodríguez may be trying to run out the clock on the Trump presidency, hoping that the pressure to hold the vote would fade under his successor.
For now, the question of when an election would be held is not in her hands. It is in Mr. Rubio’s.
Eric Schmitt and Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
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12) Times Journalists Subpoenaed as Trump Escalates Pressure on Media
The Justice Department is seeking to compel testimony from reporters who wrote about the new Air Force One. The Times called the move a “brazen act.”
By Michael M. Grynbaum, July 11, 2026
President Trump speaking to reporters before boarding the new Air Force One last week. Doug Mills/The New York Times
The Trump administration issued subpoenas on Friday to several journalists for The New York Times, after the news outlet reported this week on security concerns involving President Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One.
The subpoenas — which seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday — were an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s efforts to threaten and intimidate independent news organizations.
In some cases, the subpoenas were delivered by federal agents who showed up at reporters’ homes.
The Times denounced the administration’s actions.
“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” said David McCraw, The Times’s top newsroom lawyer, in a statement on Friday evening.
“Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used,” Mr. McCraw wrote. “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”
The subpoenas contain few specifics, asking only that the journalists testify “in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law.” They were issued by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Mr. Clayton, who leads one of the country’s most prominent law enforcement offices, was recently nominated by Mr. Trump to serve as director of national intelligence.
Representatives for the White House and the U.S. attorney in Manhattan did not respond to inquiries on Friday evening.
The Times journalists who received subpoenas included Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt, who reported on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had departed Turkey on the old Air Force One as a security precaution at the urging of the Secret Service. On Thursday, The Times reported that the new Air Force One, a Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8, lacked some of the advanced security features of the older aircraft, including antimissile capabilities. Both articles cited sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues.
Before the Wednesday article was published, a senior official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation contacted a reporter and a senior editor at The Times to ask that the article be held, calling it an issue of national security, according to a person familiar with the conversation. The F.B.I. official declined to explain the security issue. The official also asked The Times to disclose its sources for the article; the newspaper refused to do so. (A spokesman for The Times, Charlie Stadtlander, confirmed the account.)
Mr. Trump has long been a harsh critic of the news media. But in his second term in office, he has moved aggressively to use the immense powers of the federal government in his efforts to attack the press.
Earlier this year, the Justice Department sought to compel testimony from journalists at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. The Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas after both news organizations fought back in sealed filings.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations have initiated leak investigations into the disclosure of classified information. But subpoenas aimed at journalists are not common, and First Amendment advocates say they can chill the work of news gathering.
In January, F.B.I. agents took the rare step of searching the home of a Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, as part of an investigation into a government contractor’s handling of classified material. The agents seized phones, laptops and a smartwatch after executing a search warrant. Ms. Natanson had spent months speaking with government employees while reporting on the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal work force.
The Times is a party to several lawsuits involving Mr. Trump and his administration.
The president sued The Times last year, accusing it of defaming him, disparaging his reputation and seeking to undermine his 2024 candidacy.
In December, The Times sued the Defense Department after it imposed restrictions on reporters who cover the military. The company sued again after the agency reduced reporters’ physical access to the Pentagon.
In May, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued The Times, accusing it of employment discrimination. On Friday, The Times filed a counterclaim, saying the lawsuit was an act of retaliation for its coverage of the Trump presidency and a violation of its First Amendment rights.
Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting.
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13) An American Politician is Blocked by Israeli Settlers in the West Bank
Representative Ro Khanna was barred from leaving for 90 minutes. Where past U.S. leaders toured the region to show support for Israel, today’s Democratic presidential aspirants are going to bolster their credentials as critics.
By Lisa Lerer, July 11, 2026
Representative Ro Khanna visits a Palestinian school destroyed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank village of Khirbet Zanouta. Samar Hazboun for The New York Times
The Israeli settlers had guns and Representative Ro Khanna was scared.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Khanna, the congressman from Silicon Valley who is exploring a 2028 presidential run, was visiting the ruins of Khirbet Zanuta, a tiny Palestinian Bedouin village in the southern West Bank that was abandoned after escalating attacks from settlers and then demolished.
Suddenly, a car of men holding guns pulled up and blocked the narrow road out of the village. The men began taunting the congressman and his team, swearing at them in Hebrew and Arabic and kicking the tires of their minibus, according to accounts, photographs and video footage from Mr. Khanna, an aide and his security guard. A photographer for The New York Times traveling in a different vehicle also saw the interaction. Soon, a Jeep with more men arrived.
When two cars from the Israeli military pulled up, Mr. Khanna assumed the soldiers were there to help him pass. Instead, the soldiers smoked cigarettes, chatted with the men and after the settlers left, moved a car to block the road, he recounted.
“I felt powerless in that situation, which is not an easy thing, as I have a lot of privilege in life,” said Mr. Khanna, who was eventually allowed to continue his journey after calls to the U.S. embassy and Israeli police. “Imagine how people feel every day, Palestinians under the occupation, if they could make an American congressperson feel powerless for 90 minutes.”
Mr. Khanna said the experience was the most frightening part of a three-day trip organized by a member of his staff. Representatives of the Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At a time when Israel is hemorrhaging support among Americans and particularly among Democrats, a tour of the West Bank is a new way for progressive politicians to signal their concern.
For decades, potential presidential aspirants made pilgrimages to Israel in hopes of burnishing their foreign policy credentials. Their trips followed a familiar itinerary: meetings with Israeli political leaders, sightseeing at the Western Wall, a tour of an Israel city damaged by Palestinian rocket fire and visits with Palestinian leaders in Ramallah, a city in the West Bank. The goal was to demonstrate their commitment to the United States’ special relationship with a longtime ally.
But where past Democratic leaders headed to the region to show their support, so far today’s Democratic presidential aspirants are going to bolster their credentials as critics.
Mr. Khanna said what he observed in the West Bank would inform his politics and perhaps his run for president. If he mounted a campaign, Palestinian rights would be a key focus, he said.
“I have something unique to offer about the injustices of Palestinians,” he said “I’m going to go to every corner of America, regardless of whether I run or not, and tell their stories and tell the story of what is happening in the West Bank.”
Violent attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank have intensified since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that set off the war in Gaza. The responses of the Israeli authorities have generally ranged from unkept promises to address the problem, to blame shifting, to outright denial.
As Mr. Khanna was being blocked by settlers in the West Bank, Rahm Emanuel, another potential presidential candidate, was speaking at Tel Aviv University, where he delivered his own critique of Israel and “a 23-state solution” for Israel and all the Arab nations. He had been invited to give a speech at the university and also met with leaders in the country.
“The prime minister and his government have led Israel into a dead end,” said Mr. Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff, who called for an end of U.S. military aid to the country.
Opposition to Israel has emerged as a key factor in midterm races from Michigan to New York, as a progressive wing has positioned the issue as a central moral test for Democratic candidates. The visits this week by Mr. Khanna and Mr. Emanuel indicate that presidential aspirants are preparing for America’s relationship with Israel to become a litmus test in 2028.
Democratic voters are now more likely to be critical of Israel and its government than they are to be supportive, according to several recent polls, a monumental change in American sentiment.
Mr. Khanna, too, has shifted on the issue. He has visited Israel three times, including in October 2024 as part of a bipartisan delegation that met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and King Abdullah II of Jordan.
Mr. Khanna says he still supports Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, but criticism of the country has become increasingly central to his public image. He has repeatedly accused the country of genocide and endorsed calls to cut off U.S. support even for the Iron Dome missile-defense system.
Last month, Mr. Khanna went from a target of Track AIPAC, a group that opposes the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to winning its endorsement in his race for re-election this year.
What he saw in the West Bank, Mr. Khanna said, convinced him that the region’s problems won’t be solved just by replacing the Israeli leadership.
“One of the things it’s made me realize is how hard a two-state solution is going be in practice, that it’s going require the removal of a lot of violent settlers,” he said. “The on-the-ground reality is so much more brutal and hard and difficult.”
On his trip, Mr. Khanna visited a number of Palestinian towns and met with families and local business owners. The mayors of Bethlehem, Beit Shair and Beit Jala described the restrictions on their freedom of movement and access to water. They told Mr. Khanna that they had never met a member of Congress, according to video recorded by his team, and would welcome his colleagues.
In the southern West Bank village of Umm al-Khair, he met with the family of Awdah Hathaleen, a well-known Palestinian activist whose work was featured in the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” and who was killed by an Israel settler. On his final day, he visited a school where a 14-year-old was gunned down in broad daylight by a settler and met with Palestinian Americans, who described stories of being beaten and threatened.
Mr. Khanna, who is Indian American and grew up in Pennsylvania, said he had never been so aware of his race as on this trip.
“In Palestine, I felt first as someone who was brown,” he said. “We really saw the apartheidlike conditions, the inequality.”
He added: “No American would support this if they knew the details of what was going on here.”
Mr. Khanna’s trip was organized by Cameron Kasky, a Parkland school shooting survivor, who ran for Congress with a platform of opposing what he called Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Mr. Kasky, 25, withdrew from the race to work with Mr. Khanna on combating settler violence in the West Bank. He now works for Mr. Khanna on digital strategy.
The idea of the trip grew out of an interview that Mr. Khanna did with Jasper Nathaniel, an independent journalist who focuses exclusively on the West Bank.
Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush and has been involved with trips for U.S. dignitaries, said Mr. Khanna had apparently received a particular view of the region.
“He got an earful in the company of people who, I would say, are probably not objective analysts,” said Mr. Kurtzer.
But Mr. Khanna described the visit as an “uncurated,” “Palestinian-led” glimpse into the West Bank and is one he believes more members of Congress — and potential presidential candidates — should experience.
He also left with some parting words for the Israeli government.
“Free advice to the Israelis: It’s not a good idea to detain long-shot presidential candidates,” he said. “Not how you’re going to build good will with the next American president, whoever that is.”
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14) Kansans Will Vote on an Elected Supreme Court. The Target: Abortion.
Frustrated by the appointed court’s support of abortion rights, which has been affirmed resoundingly by voters, Republicans are pushing an Aug. 4 referendum to elect Kansas justices.
By Kate Zernike, July 11, 2026
A doctor entering an exam room to consult with a patient at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Kansas City, Kan., in 2022. Voters supported a state ballot measure supporting abortion rights that year. Charlie Riedel/Associated Press
A summer ballot measure in Kansas four years ago showed the enduring popularity of abortion rights even in deeply red states, and started a trend of ballot measures to defend them.
Next month, Kansas will again vote on a measure with consequences for abortion — as well as for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, congressional redistricting and other hot-button issues. But none of those words will appear on the ballot.
Kansans this time will decide whether to elect their state’s supreme court.
Frustrated by the appointed court’s decisions, especially on abortion, Kansas’ Republican-controlled legislature put a measure on the Aug. 4 primary ballot to abolish the current system under which the governor — since 2019, a Democrat and supporter of abortion rights — chooses justices from a list submitted by a nine-member commission of lawyers.
Republicans see this as their best hope to finally overturn a 2019 Kansas Supreme Court decision that recognized a right to abortion in the state’s Constitution, a decision affirmed by voters in 2022 when they declined to overturn it.
The state has become an abortion access point for women from the South in the four years since the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the federal Constitution does not protect a right to abortion. Planned Parenthood, the state’s largest provider, says its affiliate there has seen a 700 percent increase in abortions since Roe v. Wade was overturned, well outpacing the national rates. Some 75 percent of women have come from out of state.
Opponents and backers alike say that if the measure passes, it could inspire similar moves to elect courts in other red and purple states where nonelected supreme courts have blocked Republican efforts to ban abortion or gender transition treatments, and to abolish independent redistricting commissions.
With conservatives dominating the U.S. Supreme Court, national and local groups that support abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. protections have tried to secure those rights under state constitutions.
Conservatives are trying to short-circuit those efforts.
“There is a real desire to bring back some accountability to the judiciary,” Kris Kobach, the Kansas attorney general and a longtime opponent of abortion rights, said in an interview. “It’s not just about abortion. It’s about this whole panoply of potential areas where plaintiffs can ask a state supreme court to create a new liberty interest that is far broader than anything created in the U.S. Constitution.”
Even before the Kansas court’s decision on abortion, Republican elected officials in the state had bristled against a ruling that required the legislature to spend more on public schools.
Backers of the ballot measure argue that nearly half the states elect their supreme court justices. But the United States is extremely rare in electing judges at any level, and opponents of the measure say that doing so puts the court up for sale to the highest bidder.
An election to decide a swing vote on abortion in the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2023 became the most expensive judicial election in United States history, with $51 million spent. Two years later, an election for another seat on that court broke that record, with $100 million spent.
Abortion rights groups say Republicans are looking to ban abortion against the wishes of the state’s voters.
“Voters resoundingly rejected the push to end abortion rights in the state Constitution, so they have to come up with another tactic,” said Emily Wales, the president of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, which is fighting the amendment.
The current judicial appointment commission is made up of nine members, including one lawyer and one nonlawyer from each congressional district. The state bar association elects the lawyers, as well as another lawyer to lead the commission, and the governor appoints the nonlawyers.
The governor fills vacancies on the court from a list put forward by the commission, and the new justices then face retention elections after a year, and every six years after that. Backers of the ballot measure note that no justice has ever lost a retention election.
“The reason no one ever loses is there is no opponent who has an incentive to raise money,” Mr. Kobach said. “Most members of the public have never heard of who’s been on the Supreme Court because they’ve never seen an advertisement or heard any deliberation about whether this is a good justice or not.”
Opponents of the ballot measure argue that the current system was designed to make sure that the court reflected the entire state, and that elections would deny a voice to less populated areas.
“This is a system that Kansans developed specifically because of concerns about political gamesmanship in the courts,” Ms. Wales said. “When the court is not making headlines every day, that means the court is calling balls and strikes the way they should. They have held both parties accountable, and they have remained true to the Constitution.”
The ballot measure in August 2022 asked voters to declare that there was no constitutional right to abortion, which would have effectively repealed the court’s 2019 decision saying there was.
Abortion opponents hoped that putting the measure on the ballot in the summer, when historically turnout is lower, would smooth its passage. Instead, voters outraged by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe six weeks earlier defeated the measure by an 18-percentage-point margin.
Mr. Kobach, then running for attorney general, called for the legislature to put an amendment on the ballot to elect judges, telling anti-abortion activists it was the best path to “slowly and quietly” affirm justices who would overturn the 2019 ruling, allowing a ban the legislature had passed to go into effect.
The 2022 measure in Kansas inspired abortion rights supporters in a dozen other states who have used ballot initiatives to establish or protect a constitutional right to abortion, overturning near-total bans in states including Missouri and Ohio. Courts in Utah and Wyoming have blocked abortion bans, citing protections in their state constitutions. In Utah, the court has also upheld an independent redistricting commission passed by voters, prompting the Republican legislature to remake that state’s judiciary system.
Kansas switched from a system of elected justices to the appointment commission after a notorious scandal known as the “triple play” in 1957. The state’s chief justice, an ally of the governor, resigned from office claiming health issues. The governor, who had just lost his primary bid for re-election, followed suit. Then the lieutenant governor was sworn in as governor and promptly named the former governor as chief justice in his only official act of a two-week tenure.
The system Kansas adopted is known as the Missouri Plan, after that state’s system. Now, however, Missouri is among the states that have proposed ballot measures like the one in Kansas to move to elected courts.
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15) Israel Struck an Iranian Steel Facility. Was It a Valid Military Target?
During the war, Israel attacked Iran’s steel plants, saying they provided forces with revenue and the means to make weapons, but it also hurt the civilian economy.
By Yeganeh Torbati, July 11, 2026
Workers at the Mobarakeh Steel plant in Isfahan, Iran, in 2016. Candy Welz/Picture Alliance, via Getty Images
Over the course of the Iran war, U.S. and Israeli warplanes hit missile depots and launchers, security forces’ headquarters and air defense systems.
Yet not all of the targets during the six-week campaign were traditional military sites. On March 27, and again a few days later, Israeli airstrikes pounded a vast steel complex just outside Isfahan called Mobarakeh Steel, and another one in the southwest of the country.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel asserted that his country’s strikes had slashed Iran’s steel production capacity and eliminated revenue for the powerful Revolutionary Guards, whose repression underpins the Iranian government.
Companies like Mobarakeh illustrate the complexities inherent to Iran’s economy. While Iran’s clerical leadership and security forces are deeply enmeshed in the country’s most profitable and important businesses, those same companies are vital to the livelihoods of millions of ordinary Iranians, regardless of whether they have deep ideological allegiance to the government.
The attacks shut down major parts of the Isfahan plant for weeks, idling over 20,000 workers and choking off the supply of steel to domestic manufacturers. “I felt like my own home had been destroyed,” said Mostafa, a former employee, who asked to speak on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution by the government.
The United States and Iran have lurched between peace talks and exchanges of fire in recent weeks. Their negotiations were expected to cover the economic benefits Iran might receive in return for long-term limits on its nuclear program.
The interim cease-fire agreement, signed last month, could result in as much as $300 billion for Iran’s reconstruction and economic development. But that now seems a distant prospect, after President Trump said this week that he believed the temporary truce was “over.”
If any investment does flow to Iran, companies like Mobarakeh will undoubtedly come into focus because of their importance to Iran’s economy, as well as their affiliation with Iran’s most powerful security forces.
Mr. Trump has frequently threatened to attack Iranian infrastructure, and if war restarts, there will be scrutiny over any such strikes.
On Thursday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps accused the United States of striking a railway bridge that connected the country with Turkmenistan. A spokesman for U.S. Central Command confirmed that the United States struck the railway bridge, describing it as military logistics infrastructure that enabled a flow of weapons and other military supplies to key areas.
Mobarakeh has provided revenue to an investment fund belonging to a state-run militia, the Basij, which answers to the Guards, according to the U.S. Treasury. A 2021 report by Iran’s Parliament identified the investment fund as a major shareholder of Mobarakeh.
Recent financial statements from Mobarakeh show that its shareholders include an investment fund ultimately controlled by Iran’s supreme leader. Although the statements do not show a link to the Guards, they often obscure their ownership through proxy investors.
In justifying the strikes on steel facilities, Mr. Netanyahu said they would deprive the regime “of both financial resources and the ability to produce many weapons.”
Mobarakeh executives did not respond to a request for comment, and it is unclear if the steel produced at Mobarakeh was used in making Iran’s weapon systems.
“Mobarakeh Steel products might not be directly used in missile production, but the company is most probably engaged in research and development of modern high-strength steel alloys for future large-scale production,” said Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow with the Washington Institute and an expert on Iranian military affairs. He added, “Mobarakeh Steel products, though, are more likely used in producing missile transporter-launcher vehicles.”
International law prohibits strikes on industrial sites that serve civilians, unless the facility makes an effective contribution to military action and striking it confers a definite military advantage, international law experts said.
The dominant international view rejects the idea that generating revenue for military operations is enough to qualify a civilian site as a military target, said Susana SáCouto, director of the War Crimes Research Office at American University’s Washington College of Law.
Miad Maleki, a former U.S. Treasury official, said that while he believed the complex was a legitimate target for sanctions, he doubted that it should have been hit in military strikes. “These are the Iranian people’s assets, and it’s going to hurt the economy even way beyond the Islamic republic,” he said.
“It does employ many people and pay salaries for many people,” Mr. Maleki added. “But at the same time, it’s really just a major source of revenue for a lot of corrupt actors.”
Opaque ownership
Built by an Italian business group, Mobarakeh became operational in 1992 and was a symbol of Iran’s industrial development and rebuilding after the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
People with ties to the Revolutionary Guards moved into leadership positions at the plant starting in the late 1990s, two former employees said, declining to be named to avoid repercussions from Iran’s government. For instance, Mehdi Taj, a former senior Guards commander, served on the complex’s board of directors and held an executive position there in the early 2000s.
Mr. Taj is now the director of Iran’s soccer federation, which did not respond to a request for comment.
And a privatization drive carried out in the mid-2000s transferred portions of state-owned companies, like Mobarakeh, to powerful and opaque players such as the Guards and conglomerates that answer to Iran’s clerical leadership.
In 2008, a consortium led by Mehr Eghtesad Iranian Investment Company, an outfit belonging to the Basij, purchased 45 percent of Mobarakeh’s shares. As of 2021, Mehr Eghtesad was one of Mobarakeh’s largest shareholders, with a nearly 14 percent stake, according to a parliamentary report written that year.
The Basij is one of the primary forces that the regime deploys to suppress protests, including the recent nationwide demonstrations in December and January. Those protests arose over discontent with Iran’s currency crisis and perceived economic mismanagement by the government.
Mehr Eghtesad’s owner, a bank, in 2020 merged with another Iranian bank, Bank Sepah, which did not respond to a request for comment.
Mobarakeh earned roughly $1.6 billion in net profit in 2024-2025. The U.S. Treasury said in 2018 that the company “has provided millions of dollars” annually to Mehr Eghtesad.
“Some part of the economy is run through the government, but some larger part of the economy is run through the shadow government or Revolutionary Guards,” said Mahdi Ghodsi, an economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies.
One relatively new shareholder of Mobarakeh, according to documents filed with the Tehran Stock Exchange, is a company belonging to Astan-e Quds-e Razavi, an Iranian foundation that the United States put sanctions on in 2021 for being controlled by Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The company owned 1.79 percent of Mobarakeh as of last year.
Other major owners include several state-owned pension funds. Iran’s pension funds have been struggling for years to make payments to retirees, and the destruction of key sectors of the economy is likely to worsen that problem.
Iranian legislators investigated possible corruption by managers at Mobarakeh in 2021 and blamed many of its issues on the flawed process of privatization, saying it was “now governed by completely opaque ownership alongside entirely state-controlled management.”
A ‘beloved’ company
Interviews with some of the people who used to work at Mobarakeh present another image of the company.
For aspiring engineers growing up in Isfahan, working at Mobarakeh was a “dream job,” said Maryam, who now lives outside Iran. She and some other former employees whom The New York Times spoke to requested that they not be fully identified, for fear of repercussions for speaking publicly.
Some said they felt they were at a prestigious, state-of-the-art company that was contributing to the country and cared about their well-being.
“Even before I was born, my father was working in steel,” said Maziyar Shokrani, who, like his father, worked at Mobarakeh.
Mr. Shokrani began working there as a lawyer in the mid-2000s, taking a bus each day to the sprawling plant 40 miles outside Isfahan. “I know my entire life and existence to be from steel,” he said.
Mobarakeh also donated funds to build stadiums and educational institutions and supported poor families in the area surrounding the complex, said Mostafa, the former employee, who now lives outside Iran.
“It was beloved in that region,” Mostafa said. “Any industry that hit a snag, or any group that had a problem, they had some hope that Mobarakeh Steel would arrange for some kind of support.”
The Iranian news outlet Rouydad24 reported in early May that of 27,000 workers, just 2,000 were still working at the plant. Iranian officials have said that Mobarakeh is being rebuilt more quickly than expected, and in early June the company relaunched a furnace that had been damaged in the strikes.
In interviews, former employees had differing views about who was to blame for the strikes on Mobarakeh.
“More of the blame should be cast with the Guards, because it deliberately and consciously took the country’s economy down this path,” said Mr. Shokrani, who now lives outside Iran.
In the minds of Iranians, the United States and Israel were closely linked in their conduct of the war, said Abbas Kamranian-Marnani, a mechanical engineer who worked at Mobarakeh or its contractors for a decade and now lives in Europe. “They worked mostly toward the destruction of infrastructure and the destruction of Iran,” he said.
Mr. Kamranian-Marnani said strikes like the one on the steel plant had caused Iranians to lose hope in the idea of better relations with the United States.
A senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said they did not know of any U.S. role in the steel strikes.
Josh Holder, Sanam Mahoozi and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
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