Veterans For Peace Condemns
U.S. Attack on Iran
Military Members and Civilians:
Resist Illegal Wars!
Veterans For Peace condemns the U.S./Israeli attack on Iran in the strongest possible terms. We call on our members, friends, and allies to resist this dangerous and illegal war. We offer our support to members of the military who decide to refuse illegal orders and resist an illegal war.
A War Based on Lies
The Trump administration’s ever-changing rationales for going to war against Iran are lies. Iran posed no threat to the United States. This military operation is not a defensive war, but rather a war of choice by Israel and the U.S., a war of aggression, a war for regime change – very much like the disastrous U.S. wars that killed millions of people in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – wars that many veterans remember with horror and regret.
Contrary to President Trump’s oft-repeated lie, Iran has repeatedly stated that it has no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons. Rather, the United States, the only country to attack another nation with nuclear weapons, has unilaterally abrogated multiple arms control treaties, and is investing Two Trillion Dollars in a new generation of nuclear weapons. It was the U.S., not Iran, that violated and withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. Israel also has nuclear weapons – undeclared and uninspected. Two nuclear powers attacking Iran, claiming to stop it from pursuing a nuclear program, is the height of hypocrisy.
The aggression against Iran follows by less than two months the U.S. attack on Venezuela and the unlawful abduction of its president and wife. It comes amid the ongoing war threats and oil blockade of Cuba. This complete disregard and abuse of the process of negotiations only encourages nuclear proliferation around the world.
Illegal and Unconstitutional
The U.S. war on Iran is illegal in multiple ways. It is a violation of the UN Charter, a treaty which is the “supreme law of the land” under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The unilateral war of aggression against Iran is a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly grants Congress the sole authority to declare war. This power was intentionally given to the legislative branch to prevent unilateral military action by a single executive.
These legal and constitutional issues may seem quaint to those of us who have seen them routinely violated by president after president with the complicity of a supine Congress. Nonetheless, they constitute both international and domestic law. They are the legal codification of a moral framework for international peace and cooperation. Peace-loving people must struggle to ensure that these laws are followed. We must hold our government officials accountable when they are not.
Refuse Illegal Orders – Resist Illegal Wars
Veterans For Peace reminds our sisters and brothers, children, and grandchildren in the U.S. military that an order to participate in an illegal war is, by extension, an illegal order. You have the right and even the duty to refuse illegal orders. Veterans For Peace and many others will stand with you when you do, and provide helpful information and resources. Whatever legal consequences you may endure pale compared to risking your life in an illegal war or living with Post Traumatic Stress and Moral Injury.
Veterans and civilians also have the right and the responsibility to resist the illegal actions of our government at home and abroad. This attack is a very critical moment in the history of the United States and the world. We must be in the streets protesting. We must be on our phones telling our representatives to Vote Yes on the Iran War Powers resolution. We must be on our keyboards, writing letters to the editors. Tell them to:
IMMEDIATELY HALT U.S. MILITARY ATTACKS ON IRAN!
· End U.S. Support for Israel and Genocide in Palestine!
· End Economic Warfare against Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba!
· End ICE and Authoritarian Repression in U.S. Cities!
· Abolish Nuclear Weapons and War!
PEACE AT HOME, PEACE ABROAD!
https://prod.cdn.everyaction.com/emails/van/EA/EA015/1/94223/Alqa3p0mdFGQOfwCaEOYO6dpWCJEn2qC1GPoEaid_7O_archive?emci=6196a802-9415-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&emdi=d3c0d4a7-a515-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&ceid=10474381
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Hands Off Rick Toledo, Pro-Palestine Grad Student at Cal Poly Humboldt! Give Him His Electronics Back!
Don't forget to sign this sign-on letter for Toledo here:
https://stopfbi.org/news/hands-off-rick-toledo-pro-palestine-grad-student-at-cal-poly-humboldt-give-him-his-electronics-back/
Please email any statements of solidarity to:
stopfbi@gmail.com
On the night of March 19, 2026, University Police Department returned with a warrant to the apartment of Rick Toledo, Students for a Democratic Society organizer at Cal Poly Tech Humboldt, and seized his laptop, phone, and other electronics such as a camera. They attempted to force him to give up his passcodes, and he told them no. He did the right thing.
This violation of his privacy comes as part of their effort to charge him with four bogus felonies - false imprisonment, conspiracy, battery, and assault - related to the student protest on Feb 27. This is the latest in their string of acts to suppress any campus free speech for Palestine and divestment from Israel, along with suspending and firing him from his university teaching job.
We should be perfectly clear about it: there is nothing wrong with supporting any student action, including building occupations, that is taken to make demands of a university. Our rights to free speech and freedom of assembly are protected by the First Amendment, enshrined in the constitution. College protest is a long-time tradition, and it continues on today. Toledo committed no crime in supporting the student protest, and the university is determined to create lie after lie in order to demonize him.
In our view, what they really want to do is punish Toledo not for the one-day building occupation last month, but for the 9-day building occupation during the encampment movement in spring of 2024. That display of courage by the students in the name of ending university support for a genocide made it to millions of TV screens, and the state of California and university want someone to pay. Toledo is their target of choice, years later.
We demand that he not be charged of any crime, because he didn't do anything wrong. We demand that his devices be returned ASAP. Activists should learn from his example of not telling the police a single thing, including a passcode. The university and police are the criminals here for trying to scare activists out of speaking out against the university's continued financial support to Israeli apartheid. Now is not the time to suffer in silence; it’s the time to speak out. We need to condemn political repression, stand with Rick Toledo, and defend our rights to speak out for Palestine.
Don’t Charge Rick Toledo!
Give Him His Property Back!
Protesting for Palestine Is Not a Crime!
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Judge Agrees to Drop Charges Against Officers in Breonna Taylor’s Death
The Trump administration had asked the court to dismiss the charges, describing them as an example of “weaponized federal overreach” by the Biden administration.
By Chris Cameron, Reporting from Washington, March 27, 2026
A federal judge agreed to drop the remaining criminal charges against two Louisville, Ky., police officers who were involved in drafting the no-knock search warrant that led to the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor by police officers in 2020.
Judge Charles R. Simpson III of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky approved a request by the Justice Department to dismiss the charges with prejudice — meaning that the two officers, Kyle Meany and Joshua Jaynes, cannot be charged in the same case later. He made the ruling in a one-page order, without explanation.
Ms. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black emergency room worker, was watching movies in the apartment she shared with her boyfriend when plainclothes officers battered down the door looking for illegal drugs. Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, believing the intruders were robbers, fired a single shot at them with his licensed handgun, and the unarmed Ms. Taylor was killed in the hail of return fire from the officers.
In an interview with ABC News this week, Ms. Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, denounced the move to drop the charges against the officers, saying that her daughter “was killed because of their lies and negligence, and somebody should be held accountable for that.”
Federal prosecutors accused Mr. Jaynes and Mr. Meany of falsifying records to make it appear as if Ms. Taylor had a connection to criminal activity, charges that might have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence. Neither was present at the shooting.
No drugs were found in the no-knock raid on Ms. Taylor’s home. Three police officers fired more than 30 bullets into the apartment. Ms. Taylor was struck six times. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Last week, the Trump administration asked the court to dismiss the charges “in the interest of justice.” A Justice Department spokesman described the charges as an example of “weaponized federal overreach” by the Biden administration.
It was the latest effort by the Trump administration to intervene in support of the officers charged in Ms. Taylor’s death. Last year, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the department’s civil rights division, asked a federal judge to sentence a Louisville police officer convicted in the 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor to just one day in prison. The judge sentenced the officer to nearly three years in prison, but he was released on bail pending an appeal.
The Trump administration also abandoned a consent decree with the police department in Louisville, one of many agreements intended to rein in departments accused of civil rights violations — primarily police violence against Black people.
The death of Ms. Taylor was one of the main drivers of wide-scale protests that erupted in 2020 over police violence and racial injustice.
Under the Biden administration, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland charged four members of the Louisville Metro Police, accusing them of taking actions that led to Ms. Taylor’s killing during the botched search for a drug dealer she once dated.
The Justice Department under President Trump, however, has sought to rein in or abandon many civil rights cases begun under earlier administrations. The motion to drop the charges against the two officers, Mr. Meany and Mr. Jaynes, was signed by Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the department’s civil rights division. Ms. Dhillon has abandoned the unit’s historical mission of addressing discrimination against minorities and violence rooted in race.
At the direction of Mr. Trump and his subordinates, the federal government has focused instead on investigating claims of discrimination against white people — particularly white men.
The case against the two officers had already been significantly weakened before the charges were dropped.
Last August, Judge Simpson threw out some of the most serious charges against the two officers, including accusations that they had committed violations of federal civil rights laws.
In that ruling, the judge acknowledged that he was “troubled” by the officers’ potential falsification of the warrant, but said the government could not prove that their actions had directly led to Ms. Taylor’s death in a hail of police bullets.
He left in place several other lesser charges, including misdemeanor civil rights violations, falsified records and conspiracy to conceal the officers’ actions.
Three officers were fired in the aftermath of the killing, including Mr. Jaynes; Myles Cosgrove, who fired the fatal shot; and Brett Hankison, who was also present at the raid.
State prosecutors charged Mr. Hankison with wanton endangerment for firing 10 bullets through a covered window and glass door, although none of the rounds hit anyone. He was acquitted, prompting widespread calls for federal charges. In 2025, a federal jury found Mr. Hankison guilty on one count of violating Ms. Taylor’s civil rights by using excessive force.
In 2022, Kelly Goodlett, who worked closely with Mr. Meany and Mr. Jaynes, pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges for falsifying an affidavit to obtain the warrant and for lying to criminal investigators. She has yet to be sentenced, according to court records.
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2) Wild Ultimatums and ‘Bombing Our Little Hearts Out’: A Portrait of Trump at War
President Trump has vacillated between boasting about U.S. military superiority and deep frustration that his war of choice is not always having the desired effects.
By Erica L. Green, March 28, 2026
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent. She reported from Washington.
The president’s allies have always said that his unpredictability is his superpower, and that it keeps his enemies guessing. Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
President Trump was fresh off the golf course, and his fury was building.
It was March 21, and as he settled back into his Mar-a-Lago estate for the evening, he was reading another news account about how, for all the military success the United States had in Iran, he had yet to achieve his political objectives.
At 7:44 p.m., the president made his frustration known with an extraordinary ultimatum: If Iran did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours and allow much of the world’s oil and gas to flow through, he would bomb Iran’s civilian electric power plants. It was the kind of attack that could constitute a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.
But just hours before the Monday deadline expired, Mr. Trump delayed his threat by five days, easing fears of an imminent escalation with profound military, diplomatic and economic implications.
Still, he warned that “we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out” if Iran would not make a deal, and as the week progressed he made new threats that left allies off balance and spooked the markets. So on Thursday afternoon, after stocks on Wall Street suffered their largest daily decline since the start of the war, he added another 10 days to the clock, again seeking to ease the fears ignited by his own hard-line positions.
It is too soon to know whether the extra time will result in productive diplomacy. But it is already clear that Mr. Trump’s wild swings — from optimism to frustration and anger, from de-escalation to escalation — have combined to give his management of the war an erratic, make-it-up-as-it goes feel.
Ever since the United States, alongside Israel, launched the war on Feb. 28, Mr. Trump has vacillated between chest-thumping about U.S. military superiority and deep frustration that the tactical achievements on the battlefield did not seem to be producing the strategic outcome he predicted.
Although the supreme leader and many top military and intelligence leaders have been killed, the regime in Tehran remains in control. Iran’s leaders have all but sealed off the Strait of Hormuz, sending gas prices skyrocketing and rattling investors. And Iran retains control of the material it would need to produce a nuclear weapon, the main threat cited by Mr. Trump in taking the nation into the war in the first place.
Mr. Trump has said he understands there will be short-term pain from the war, which he accepts as a necessary price to ensure that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. And the president’s allies have always said that his unpredictability is his superpower, and that it keeps his enemies guessing.
But it also suggests an inconsistency of purpose that has led the president to keep shifting his goals, even as the risks of the war grow bigger by the day.
Mr. Trump spends his days immersed in the war, receiving several briefings a day either in the Oval Office or the Situation Room. Some of the briefings include a short montage video of less than a minute, White House officials say, primarily raw footage of military strikes that the U.S. Central Command also shares on X. When Mr. Trump is deliberating a decision, he goes around the room and asks his advisers what they think.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the president makes every decision with the same goal: victory.
“He understands that these sorts of things throughout history are ultimately judged by the outcome,” Ms. Leavitt said, “and the president knows that at the end of this, when we are able to declare that the Iranian terrorist regime no longer poses a threat to the United States militarily, that is going to be a legacy-making, history-marking moment.”
Mr. Trump gets military advice from two main sources: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mr. Hegseth is the president’s go-to when it comes to publicly defending military policies, U.S. officials say. But General Caine, a former Air Force F-16 fighter pilot and Pentagon liaison to the C.I.A., is the military’s Trump whisperer — its main interlocutor with the president on operational matters.
Pentagon and White House officials say Mr. Trump has developed a good rapport and strong personal trust with the low-key General Caine, whom he plucked from retirement to be chairman after Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. was fired in early 2025.
Before the war started, General Caine briefed Mr. Trump on an array of options, including some that he said could strain U.S. munitions stocks and risk American casualties. General Caine does not advocate one option or another in Situation Room discussions, U.S. officials say. Instead, he lays out the risks, benefits and consequences.
That occasionally puts General Caine in a difficult position.
Late last month, in the run-up to the war, Mr. Trump said General Caine believed that any eventual military action ordered against Iran would be “something easily won.” But that is not what General Caine had told Mr. Trump and other senior advisers.
The disconnect underscores just how much the Iran war is testing Mr. Trump’s usual strategy for dealing with crises: imposing his own reality and disregarding inconvenient truths.
“He thinks everything is transactional, he can deal with the deal one step at a time and see how things unfold, but war is fast, uncontrollable, unpredictable and deadly,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton history professor and the editor of a book of essays about Mr. Trump’s first term.
“He’s doing the same techniques he always does — threatening people, insulting people, seizing attention to what he wants to say — he’s learning that it doesn’t always work,” he added. “He’s doing the art of the deal in a way that’s just creating chaos.”
Embracing Military Power
During his first term, Mr. Trump seemed more hesitant to use the force of the U.S. military. In 2019, he approved military strikes against Iran only to call the operation off with minutes to spare, citing the possibility of Iranian casualties.
John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser who has supported aggressive military aggression against Iran, including regime change, recalled that Mr. Trump had seemed uncomfortable in his first term with the idea of striking Syria, which was using chemical weapons on its own people.
“He wanted it to look like it was a strong response, but not really be that strong,” said Mr. Bolton, who has become one of the president’s most vocal critics.
Now, after campaigning on a promise to keep America out of foreign entanglements, Mr. Trump is embracing American military might. And with the war in Iran at least, he has been far more matter-of-fact about the possibility that there could be American casualties.
He dispatched B-2 bombers to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in June; he launched a raid in January that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela; and U.S. forces have blown dozens of boats out of the water in the Caribbean, killing more than 160 people, in what the Trump administration says is an operation to combat drug smuggling.
His operation in Iran is far more complex, less popular and deadlier for American forces than those operations. So far, 13 U.S. service members have died. Mr. Trump has attended two dignified transfers, and Ms. Leavitt has said that Mr. Trump considers it the most important, yet the hardest part of his job as commander in chief. The father of one fallen soldier recently recounted the “pleasant surprise” of Mr. Trump’s emotion and “humanity” during a meeting.
At the same time, Mr. Trump insists that he is doing what no other president before him had the courage to do.
“We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time — Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today,” he wrote in a Truth Social post this month. “They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”
Mr. Trump’s cavalier attitude has shown cracks. When he was pressed about the deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school on the opening day of the war, Mr. Trump first blamed Iran and then claimed he did not “know enough about it.”
A preliminary inquiry has determined that the United States was responsible.
The president, who was granted five deferments from being drafted to fight in Vietnam, including for a diagnosis of bone spurs, has often mused that he would be a “good general.” Earlier this month, he posted an old picture of himself in uniform at the New York Military Academy, a notable choice as he launched a war.
As the weeks have gone by, the goals and objectives that Mr. Trump laid out at the start of the war have changed. Last week, as he said he was considering “winding down” military operations in Iran, Mr. Trump no longer mentioned the purpose of supporting regime change through a popular uprising, an objective he had set at the start.
“The war, like everything else that comes out of the White House, is a reflection of Donald Trump’s very unique personality and leadership style,” said Steven M. Gillon, a historian and the author of “Presidents at War: How World War II Shaped a Generation of Presidents.” “It’s focused on him as a great man. It is vague. It’s undisciplined. It’s unfocused.”
Mr. Trump has explained some of his back-and-forth decisions in the war by referring to the lessons he learned before he entered into politics, back when he was a real estate developer in New York.
“You have to understand,” Mr. Trump told an audience in Memphis earlier this week, “my whole life has been a negotiation.”
‘Presidents Don’t Need Permission.’
But Mr. Trump’s allies see his decision to go to war as his duty as commander in chief.
“President Trump is acting like a wartime president should — decisive, unafraid to use his constitutional authority and focused on protecting Americans rather than getting bogged down in the kind of endless and rudderless conflicts we saw under his predecessors,” said Mike Davis, who leads the Article III Project, a conservative advocacy group, and was an early supporter of Mr. Trump’s war.
“Presidents don’t need permission to defend the country, and the media and Democrats will do anything to delegitimize Operation Epic Fury,” he said. “President Trump’s legacy won’t be judged on process or polls, but on whether he succeeds in neutralizing the Iran threat and making Americans safer.”
Still, the conflict is deeply unpopular with a majority of Americans. The president chose to launch the war without first making the case to the American public or Congress, which perhaps contributed to the absence of a “rally around the flag” moment that many wartime presidents see. (He has acknowledged that he has been advised against calling it a “war” because he did not seek congressional approval, so he prefers to call it an “excursion.”)
Aside from the question of congressional approval, Mr. Trump has failed to provide any evidence that Iran posed an “imminent threat” to the United States. And he has repeatedly moved the goal posts for success — even declaring victory while at the same time arguing that the mission was incomplete. He said he would accept nothing less than an end with the “unconditional surrender” of Iran, a condition that his aides have said is up to his discretion.
Mr. Trump is not the first president to put forth a lofty yet elusive goal. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for the “unconditional surrender” during World War II. It is one of the few similarities between how the two approached war.
“When Roosevelt announced the unconditional surrender goal in World War II, it was not well thought through, and not fully coordinated with his team or his allies,” said Peter Feaver, an adviser to President George W. Bush on national security strategy and now a professor at Duke University who has studied how presidents lead in wartime. “I would not be surprised if President Trump’s announcement of unconditional surrender matched Roosevelt’s in that regard.”
But Roosevelt cultivated something that has eluded Mr. Trump: powerful allies, namely Winston Churchill, with whom he coordinated his aggressive military strategy.
Mr. Trump has instead alienated and threatened his allies for not joining the war effort. He has targeted most of his ire at Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, declaring that Mr. Starmer is “no Winston Churchill.”
“We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!” Mr. Trump wrote on March 7.
But now, with yet another deadline looming for Iran to fully open the Strait of Hormuz to shipping or face devastating strikes on its power plants, Mr. Trump has a decision to make about the next steps in a war that he estimated, at the outset, would last “four to five weeks.” The war has now been going on for nearly a month.
Mr. Trump is ratcheting up pressure on Iran to accept a U.S. proposal to end the war, even as he sends more troops to the Middle East and warns Iranians that “we’ll just keep blowing them away” if they don’t make a deal.
Iran has publicly rejected the overtures, though it has privately signaled some willingness.
“They’ll tell you, ‘We’re not negotiating,’” Mr. Trump said. “Of course, they’re negotiating. They’ve been obliterated.”
On Friday evening, during remarks at a finance conference in Miami Beach for Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment fund, Mr. Trump boasted how Iran was “begging to make a deal” and how the United States’ operation was helping ensure that the very “powerful” nation of Saudi Arabia would be safe.
While he was speaking, U.S. officials confirmed that Iran had struck a naval base in Saudi Arabia where U.S. service members were stationed. Twelve Americans were injured in the attack, which amounted to one of the most serious breaches of American air defenses in the course of the war.
Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.
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3) With Cuba Under Pressure, the Castro Dynasty Is Making a Comeback
As Trump officials demand changes, Castro family members are suddenly popping up across Cuba’s political scene. Some even ask: Could one be the “Cuban Delcy?”
By Simon Romero and David C. Adams, March 28, 2026
Simon Romero reported from Mexico City, and David C. Adams from Miami.
When President Miguel DÃaz-Canel of Cuba acknowledged this month that his government was engaged in secret talks with the Trump administration, he revealed that the person guiding the negotiations was the “historical leader of the revolution.”
That honorific is reserved for Raúl Castro, 94, who succeeded his brother Fidel Castro as Cuba’s president from 2008 to 2018, before retreating from the public eye to project an image of a civilian transition under Mr. DÃaz-Canel.
But with Cuba on the brink of economic collapse from a U.S. oil blockade and gripped by a worsening humanitarian crisis, other members of the Castro family have emerged from the shadows.
One has spoken directly with Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state. Another is taking part in the negotiations with the Trump administration. Yet another is the public face of Cuba’s groundbreaking (and tantalizing) decision to allow Cuban exiles to invest in the island.
The family’s new profile reflects a dynasty that never really exited the political scene, but instead evolved.
Even as Trump officials increase pressure for sweeping economic changes in Cuba and press for the removal of Mr. DÃaz-Canel, Raúl Castro’s handpicked successor as president, a family long vilified by U.S. leaders is positioning new generations of Castros as the nation’s ultimate power brokers.
“This could produce an absurd case of de-Castrofication where the family creates an illusion of change when the real power in Cuba still resides with them and other members of the post-1959 elite,” said Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba at the University of Wisconsin.
The Castros have shaped Cuba’s fortunes since 1959, when Fidel and Rául Castro, the sons of a wealthy sugar plantation owner, led the revolution that toppled an old order aligned with the United States. They moved Cuba into the Soviet orbit, turning the Caribbean island into a central player in the Cold War.
Fidel Castro, who died in 2016, was the Cuban Revolution’s charismatic “Maximum Leader.” Raúl Castro long maintained a low profile, acting as the main liaison with Moscow and the revolution’s organizational architect, prioritizing bureaucracy, clear hierarchies and administrative efficiency.
The Castro brothers faced many challenges to their rule, including C.I.A. assassination plots, a decades-long U.S. embargo and the collapse of the Soviet Union, once Cuba’s main benefactor. Venezuela had replaced the Soviets, becoming Cuba’s top oil supplier, until U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro in January.
Now, with the U.S. ordering Venezuela to halt oil shipments to Cuba, the family faces what may be its greatest challenge: a fuel shortage that has Cuba’s economy teetering, raising questions about the survival of the island’s repressive Communist government.
The U.S. fuel blockade is intended to produce a regime pliant to U.S. demands, similar to the way Venezuela shifted from adversary to client state with the removal of Mr. Maduro.
Mr. Rubio, referring to Cuba, said this month that “the people in charge, they don’t know how to fix it, so they need to get new people in charge.”
Replacing the Castros, if that is what the United States desires, is a tall order.
Raúl Castro, who is said to remain lucid and in relatively good health for a man his age, presides over the family. Since stepping down in 2018, his prestige and power remain rooted in his status as Cuba’s most powerful military figure. As defense minister under Fidel Castro, he oversaw the creation of GAESA, a sprawling military-run business conglomerate that is Cuba’s most important economic force.
Raúl’s children and grandchildren have more prominent official roles in today’s Cuba than Fidel’s descendants, one of whom is an Instagram celebrity known for flaunting a life of luxury in Havana.
One of Raúl Castro’s grandsons, Raúl Guillermo RodrÃguez Castro, 41, has emerged as a new player in the crisis. Known as Raúlito, he is also called “El Cangrejo” — the Crab — a reference to being born with six fingers on one of his hands.
Mr. Guillermo RodrÃguez has been part of his grandfather’s security detail, but these days mostly serves as his personal aide. He was once a fixture in Cuba’s elite social circles, hanging out with popular musicians such as the Charanga Habanera, who attended his 2008 wedding at an elite military club.
Now Raúlito also has a role as a messenger in the negotiations with the Trump administration, meeting with Mr. Rubio’s team at a recent event in St. Kitts and Nevis where Caribbean nations had convened.
Stunning those who had grown accustomed to his operating behind the scenes, Raúlito appeared this month on state television sitting alongside the regime’s highest-ranking members when Mr. DÃaz-Canel disclosed the talks with Washington.
Raúl’s only son, Alejandro Castro EspÃn, 60, is also resurfacing after largely disappearing from public life when his father stepped down as president. An engineer educated and trained in Cuba and the Soviet Union, and a brigadier general in Cuba’s army, he has held leadership roles in Cuba’s intelligence apparatus and has written books critical of the United States such as “The Empire of Terror.”
Now General Castro EspÃn is also taking a leading part in the talks with U.S. officials, according to news media reports.Such a role is not new for him; in 2014 he led Cuba’s side in secret talks with the Obama administration that produced a brief thaw in relations with the United States.
Another Castro family member suddenly rising in prominence is Óscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, 54, a soft-spoken engineer and grandnephew of Raúl and Fidel Castro. He is currently Cuba’s deputy prime minister and minister of foreign trade and foreign investment.
Mr. Pérez-Oliva leaped into the spotlight this month after announcing potentially one of the biggest policy shifts since the Castros seized power in 1959: allowing Cuban exiles to own businesses and invest in Cuba.
That showcased Mr. Pérez-Oliva as a public face of the regime’s survival strategy. It also ignited talk about whether he could be the Cuban version of Venezuela’s new Trump-friendly leader, Delcy RodrÃguez, a younger insider more amenable to the United States who can speak the language of international business and yield to Washington’s demands.
Those attributes, along with not having “Castro” in his name, could make him palatable to an administration in Washington that prizes regime compliance over regime collapse, some political analysts say.
At the same time, his family ties could allow him to shore up political support among those within Cuba’s power structures who view the Castros as a source of stability and revolutionary legitimacy.
Mr. Pérez-Oliva Fraga’s recent appointment as a deputy in Cuba’s National Assembly is also viewed as a calculated move, since under Cuban law only deputies can be president, some experts said.
“Maybe he has a future,” said Brian Latell, a former C.I.A. analyst and Cuba expert, said of Mr. Pérez-Oliva. “The Cubans are not without leverage. Trump doesn’t want a societal breakdown on his watch.”
The involvement of so many Castros in the regime’s survival strategy underscores one of the Cuban Revolution’s contradictions: While its Communist leaders sought to create a classless, egalitarian society, many of them become members of an elite class.
Castro offspring were among the most privileged members of this new ruling class, whose members often studied at high schools like the Lenin Vocational Institute, once the crown jewel of Cuba’s revolutionary educational system, or socialized at venues like the Club Habana, originally the pre-revolutionary Havana Biltmore and Country Club.
Still, the possibility of the family at the helm of Cuba’s authoritarian political system retaining its power would disillusion many Cuban exiles in the United States. Some have been pushing for decades for the Castros to be completely sidelined, along with erasing any Communist influence in Cuba.
The Castros are known as shrewd negotiators, extricating themselves from tough spots in the past, said Ricardo Zúniga, a former U.S. official who helped broker former President Barack Obama’s opening with Cuba and also served under President Trump.
The Obama talks took 18 months, partly because the meetings were held in secret, mostly in Canada, and the negotiating teams were tiny.
Those expecting a Venezuela-style outcome in Cuba could also be surprised. Venezuela’s political elite, divided into camps with different economic objectives, was relatively fractious before the capture of Mr. Maduro, making it easier for Trump officials to settle on someone like Ms. RodrÃguez, a technocrat who had already introduced market-oriented reforms aimed at improving Venezuela’s economy.
Cuba’s elite, in contrast, is far more cohesive after decades of purges and counterintelligence operations that detected even the smallest signs of dissent. Members of the Castro family have consistently benefited from this system.
“There’s no opposition waiting on the wings and no one like Delcy,” Mr. Zúniga said. Even amid so many challenges, that crucial difference could strengthen the Castros’ hand as they explore ways to hold onto power.
“The elements are in place,” he said, “where you could imagine them trying to transition from a revolutionary oligarchy to a capitalist oligarchy.”
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4) A Challenge for ‘No Kings’ Protests, the Third Time Around
Organizers want this to be largest protest yet. But is hitting a number enough to deliver an effective political movement?
By Jeremy W. Peters, March 28, 2026
Jeremy Peters has covered influential American political movements, including the Tea Party.
Demonstrators gather at Grant Park during the “No Kings Day” protest last October in Chicago. Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Millions of Americans are expected to turn out on Saturday for mass demonstrations against President Trump, the latest organized display of anger led by the coalition of progressive groups known as No Kings.
Organizers are aiming to make it the largest such protest yet, which would mean exceeding the seven million people they said showed up at the “No Kings” rallies in October and the millions of people they said turned out in June. (The Times has not verified those numbers, which encompass thousands of rallies.)
Those two protests gave the administration’s most ardent opponents an outlet for their discontent at a time when Democrats were deflated from their losses in 2024 and reassessing their missteps.
But as the third “No Kings” demonstration gets started, it’s an open question whether posting another big number will be enough to influence the course of the nation’s politics. Can the protests harness that energy and turn it into victories in the November midterm elections? How can they avoid a primal scream that fades into a whimper?
The phrase “No Kings” is a nod to the anti-authoritarian, democratic principles the country was founded on — which the protesters say Mr. Trump has ignored.
Otherwise, organizers said, “No Kings” protests intentionally lack a single, specific demand, reflecting the diffuse nature of the anti-Trump effort. Promotional fliers and emails highlight a range of issues, including immigration patrols, election interference, the White House ballroom, Ukraine and affordable housing.
Nor has a high-profile leader or public face emerged, in the way that Tom Hayden did during the 1960s antiwar protests or Jerry Falwell in the 1980s for Christian evangelicals. Luminaries of today’s left like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez act as champions of progressive causes rather than only as foils to Mr. Trump.
Organizers say the idea is to attract as many opponents of the administration as possible — especially the disaffected.
“You might think his consolidation of power is inevitable, but it isn’t,” said Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, a progressive group that is organizing “No Kings” events.
Protesters have planned events in more than 3,000 places, from Alaska to Florida, in liberal big cities and Republican strongholds. And beyond urging the faithful to turn out in big numbers and remain nonviolent, organizers have been hands-off about what they expect from attendees.
Bob Norberg, 70, from Gainesville, Fla., has been involved in all three “No Kings” events. On Saturday, he planned to be at a local park, he said, hoping “to invigorate the community to get involved, get motivated and help build momentum.”
Mr. Norberg said he believed the lack of focus in the “No Kings” message might have been less energizing for some. But, he said, he also believes the ambiguity is intentional and effective: The pro-democracy message can appeal to people on many levels.
He said, “It’s become apparent that ‘No Kings’ means ‘all of the above.’”
Videos of the peaceful demonstrations, whether taking up several city blocks or a small-town street corner, are meant to rev up the politically weary, organizers said. So are the whimsical costumes and homemade placards, with cheeky sayings like “Make Orwell Fiction Again.”
But skeptics of such events say that during Mr. Trump’s first term, progressives mistakenly thought that mass protests were a sign of the movement’s widespread popular support, without mastering the harder work of organizing.
“These large-scale protest events make people feel like they’re not alone — it’s like collective therapy,” said Dana R. Fisher, a professor at American University who studies civic engagement.
She has surveyed “No Kings” participants in her research and supports their work. But, she added, collective catharsis and hitting what she called “a magical number” of participants is not enough to sustain an effective political movement. “What we really need to do is the work of defending democracy in our communities,” she said. “It’s not about inflatable costumes. It’s not about clever signs.”
Some anti-Trump organizers have cited the conservative Tea Party movement as inspiration. Its combative, no-compromise spirit became an effective rallying cry for Republicans as they stymied President Barack Obama’s agenda — just as Democrats would like to do to Mr. Trump.
But the Tea Party thwarted Mr. Obama with the help of an expansive political infrastructure and wealthy donors willing to pay for it.
“No Kings” protesters do share one thing with their Republican counterparts: a belief that the country is being led to a precipice by a reckless president. In the Tea Party’s case, that was Mr. Obama.
“What really motivated the Tea Party was a deep, philosophical disagreement with Obama about what government should be — and the sense that his policies represented such an unprecedented overreach,” said Tim Phillips, a conservative activist and former president of the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity.
“People wanted to stop that,” he said. “The people opposing Trump today see their fight the same way.”
Mr. Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 36 percent as of March 23, from 45 percent around the time he took office last year, according to Reuters/Ipsos.
That kind of drop should help activists, but the “No Kings” rallies have forced progressives to assess whether their messaging is simple and direct enough to reach most voters.
Ms. Fisher of American University and a team of researchers surveyed participants at more than 300 “No Kings” events last summer and found them to be predominantly female, college educated and middle-aged. Close to 90 percent were white, the surveys found.
They were also deeply engaged politically, with more than two-thirds saying they had participated in a political boycott in the last year.
The organized opposition to Mr. Trump has had little difficulty summoning the nation’s outrage at opportune moments. Quantifying the impact of those protests is much harder.
Lara Putnam, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies political protest movements, said the recent level of activity inside the Trump opposition has been striking. In Pennsylvania, for instance, she said that she had found 80 different “No Kings” events across the state last October. That compared with 27 events on the day of the Women’s March in 2017, a mass demonstration against President Trump during his first term.
Because of social media, “it is much easier to get people in the same place,” Ms. Putnam said. “But it doesn’t necessarily make the other pieces needed for building a political movement.”
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5) Iran and Immigration Frustrations Fuel New Wave of ‘No Kings’ Rallies
Thousands of organized demonstrations stretched across the country. Minnesota was a focal point of the protests after a tumultuous immigration crackdown.
By Thomas Fuller, March 28, 2026
In the Twin Cities, a sea of people converged on the State Capitol, invoking the memories of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Demonstrators swarmed intersections in Portland, Ore., motivated by what one called a “national crisis” that had “escalated to a whole other level.” In Little Rock, Ark., where more than 2,000 people marched across the Arkansas River, one woman carried her own MAGA sign: “Morons Are Governing America.”
Protesters filled streets and town squares across the United States on Saturday at thousands of rallies, the third in a sequence of nationwide, loosely coordinated demonstrations under the banner of “No Kings.” They came to denounce President Trump and much of his second-term agenda, wielding signs and chants about issues such as mass deportation, restrictions on voting, attacks on diversity and two matters that have suddenly moved to the fore: the war in Iran and the soaring gas prices that have resulted from it.
“Prices are going up, and it feels like we can’t even afford to live anymore,” said John Moes, a Minneapolis resident who was dressed in a 15-foot puppetlike costume resembling the singer Prince, a local icon.
“This is one of the ways we can say we’re fed up,” said Mr. Moes, who described himself as an independent who leans Democratic.
The No Kings organizers said that eight million people took part; their estimates in some cities were higher than those of local public safety officials. The New York Times is doing its own reporting on some of the turnout, but has not independently confirmed the numbers from the thousands of protest sites.
The demonstrations stretched across the country, from above the Arctic Circle (Kotzebue, Alaska: population 3,000) to the tropics, in Puerto Rico. There were also 39 international No Kings rallies, according to organizers.
The Twin Cities were a focal point of the day’s protests after tumultuous months of an immigration crackdown that included the killing of two protesters, Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti, by federal agents. On a windy and cold day, protesters marched in orderly waves toward a stage at the Capitol in St. Paul, flying Minnesota state and American flags, chanting and singing. The Minnesota Department of Public Safety estimated that 100,000 people took part; No Kings organizers said the number was 200,000.
Jane Fonda, an icon of activism against the Vietnam War, addressed the crowd, and Bruce Springsteen took to the stage to perform “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he wrote as a tribute to the city and its defiance to the federal immigration crackdown.
“Here in our home they killed and roamed. In the winter of ’26,” he sang.
“We’ll remember the names of those who died. On the streets of Minneapolis.”
Other large protests took place in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. In Manhattan, demonstrators passed through Times Square in a procession that stretched for more than a mile. In Washington, D.C., marchers passed near the residence of Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and called for his removal.
With the midterm elections months away, the protests are being scrutinized for whether they could translate to any political shifts. Though the protesters were largely Democrats, dozens more No Kings events were held in Republican-dominated or battleground states on Saturday than during the last marches in October, according to the organizers. But overall the shift was marginal: Forty-nine percent of events were held in red or battleground states on Saturday, compared with 48 percent in October, according to data provided by the organizers.
Protests took place in deeply Republican enclaves such as Shelbyville, Ky., and Midland, Texas. In Anchorage, Alaska, a relatively liberal enclave in a reliably red state, scores of protesters gathered as temperatures hovered around 20 degrees.
One twilight march traversed the Florida district where on Tuesday, Emily Gregory, a Democrat, beat her Republican rival, Mike Caruso, in a special election for a seat in the state’s House of Representatives.
The district, which includes Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, had been won by the Republican candidate by 19 percentage points in 2024. The march headed toward Mar-a-Lago, following a route that included the newly named President Donald J. Trump Boulevard.
The White House has reacted to No Kings rallies with mockery. On Thursday, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said in a statement that “the only people who care about these Trump derangement therapy sessions are the reporters who are paid to cover them.”
The nationwide marches under mostly bright skies came amid an unpopular war in Iran, months of fury by progressives over sweeping immigration enforcement raids, falling stock markets and sustained frustration over the cost of living, especially rising gasoline prices.
They also came as federal lawmakers on Capitol Hill remain at loggerheads in a protracted fight over funding for immigration enforcement by the Department of Homeland Security. The resulting partial government shutdown has led to hourslong waits at the security checkpoints of some airports after many unpaid security agents stopped showing up for work. On Thursday, Mr. Trump announced he would pay them through another funding source.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll published Tuesday found Mr. Trump’s approval rating had fallen to 36 percent, the lowest point since he returned to the White House. Just 35 percent of respondents approved of the U.S. strikes on Iran, the poll found.
Valerie Tirado, the mother of a Marine who is headed to the Middle East, marched in Brooklyn on Saturday with a sign that said “Bring My Son Home.”
“Trump is using these military men as pawns, just to flex,” said Ms. Tirado, 60.
At a time when conservative control of Washington remains complete, in the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, the marches were a chance for Democrats to make their voices heard and to try to portray Republican domination as teetering.
At a small protest in Richmond, Ky., Missy Manet, 29, donned a red yarn hat and said she had attended the gathering as a show of frustration with the direction of the country.
“I feel somewhat powerless,” she said of being a Democratic voter in a staunchly Republican part of the country. “I feel like my vote doesn’t do a lot most of the times.”
The marches had no shortage of skeptics.
In Oxford, Miss., Cass Rutledge, a first-year law student at the University of Mississippi, walked through the No Kings protest and around the town square on Saturday and questioned why people thought Mr. Trump was acting like a king.
“He is, you know, a duly elected president who won the popular vote and the electoral college in a landslide,” Mr. Rutledge said. “And so I’m a little bit confused on how he’s acting differently than any other president.”
He pointed to the stalemate in Congress over the SAVE America Act, the Republican-driven bill to tighten voter identification and registration rules, which Democrats have called an attempt to suppress turnout based on false claims of voting fraud. Mr. Rutledge said that Mr. Trump was “going through the process” to try to get the legislation passed.
Saturday’s events were organized by national and local groups, including widely known progressive coalitions such as Indivisible, 50501 and MoveOn, as well as hundreds of smaller ones, like American Atheists, the Transgender Law Center and the Michigan Climate Action Network.
In June, the first No Kings demonstrations took place on the same day that Mr. Trump scheduled a military parade in Washington for the Army’s 250th anniversary, coinciding with his 79th birthday.
In October, more than seven million people attended No Kings demonstrations in all 50 states, according to organizers. (The New York Times has not verified the crowd numbers, which encompassed thousands of rallies.)
The No Kings protests are not focused on any particular issue, but are meant to serve as a unifying umbrella for people with various grievances about the Trump administration. In the long history of protest movements in the United States, many have achieved remarkable change, but they tended to be more focused, on women’s suffrage or civil rights, for example.
In Atlanta, a center of the civil rights movement, thousands poured out of the Memorial Drive Greenway to march across an overpass toward Georgia’s Statehouse. Led by a phalanx of labor union organizers, demonstrators demanded a $25-an-hour minimum wage. “We work! We sweat!” they chanted. “Put 25 on our check!”
Joseph Hayden Jr., 81, a lawyer, came to the demonstration on Saturday in Hoboken, N.J., six decades after he marched in civil rights protests in Selma, Ala.
“The protests I participated in during the 1960s mattered then,” he said, “and they sure matter now.”
Reporting was contributed by Ernesto Londoño, Miles G. Cohen, Mark Bonamo, Rob Moritz, Aaron West, Sheila M. Eldred, Tricia Fulks Kelley, Nate Schweber, LaReeca Rucker, Robb Murray, Sean Keenan and Wesley Parnell.
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6) A Show of Defiance Across the Nation
It’s the third time that the coalition behind the “No Kings” movement has organized events to protest President Trump and his policies. In the United States, more than 3,000 demonstrations were planned.
By Ernesto Londoño and Sonia A. Rao, Published March 28, 2026, Updated March 29, 2026
Ernesto Londoño reported from St. Paul, Minn.
In big cities and small towns across the world, protesters gathered for thousands of rallies against President Trump and his policies and actions, with the self-stated goal of fighting dictatorship.
Demonstrators, including elected officials and community leaders, chanted defiant messages and carried homemade signs that condemned the war in Iran, threats against voting rights and the White House’s mass deportation push, among other topics. Organized by a coalition of activist groups under the banner “No Kings,” it was the third such countrywide protest in the past 10 months.
No Kings organizers said eight million people took part, one of the largest protests in recent history. Their estimates in some cities were higher than those of local public safety officials. The New York Times is doing its own reporting on some of the turnout, but has not independently confirmed the numbers from the thousands of protest sites.
One of the largest rallies took place outside the Minnesota Capitol, where the singer Bruce Springsteen performed “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he wrote to protest the immigration crackdown that led to the fatal shootings of two American citizens by federal agents in January.
“They picked the wrong city,” Mr. Springsteen told the large crowd, adding that “these invasions of American cities will not stand.”
In Washington, D.C., some protesters marched to the military base where Stephen Miller, the White House official overseeing the mass deportation push, has been residing. Some chanted, “Stephen Miller’s got to go,” and “We’ve got the people outside your door.”
Protesters marched down small town main streets and thoroughfares, many bundled up to withstand chilly temperatures. Attendees at small gatherings, including one in Richmond, Ky., waved American flags as drivers signaled support by honking. In Atlanta, protesters chanted for an end to immigration raids.
Demonstrators seized upon topics where they said there was overreach by the Trump administration, including health care and the environment.
A White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, called the protests “Trump derangement therapy sessions” in a statement on Thursday.
The protests, organizers have said, intentionally lack a single, specific demand but rather seek to harness energy on a wide variety of grievances regarding Mr. Trump and his policies.
Like many silver-haired protesters gathered at Auditorium Shores, a riverside park in Austin, Texas, Gilbert Martinez, a 93-year-old Korean War veteran, sees Mr. Trump as reckless and rebellious. And that’s not aligned with the values Mr. Martinez has spent his life preaching.
He called the attack on Iran a “diversion.”
“That idiot is going to cause a lot of good military people to lose their lives,” he said.
A longtime local business leader, Mr. Martinez is from the Texas Panhandle and says he can trace his family lineage to El Paso. He started Austin’s Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 1973, he said, because in those days, downtown was a “backwater” devoid of Hispanic-owned businesses.
“I’m an American,” Mr. Martinez said. “We didn’t just get here.”
Chicagoans gathered at Grant Park, where Saira Bensett, 60, a retired zoological worker, described the turnout as cathartic.
“When I watch the news it’s often too much — the emotions I feel make me feel like I’m alone,” she said. “So I wanted to be here to feel like I’m not by myself.”
Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton of Illinois, who is also the Democratic nominee for a Senate seat, told a crowd, “We all know the power of turning our anger into action.”
Many who gathered outside the Minnesota State Capitol said they had been driven to protest by the tumultuous monthslong presence of federal immigration officers in the Twin Cities region.
“We don’t want to walk out our door in fear,” said Chas Jensen, 68, who has lived in St. Paul his entire life and marched with his wife, Kitty Warner. “I’ve seen a lot over the years, but nothing like this.”
“It’s been hell, the last few months,” added Sadikshya Aryal, who came from South Minneapolis with her husband and two friends. Ms. Aryal, 32, still carries her passport whenever she leaves her house, she said.
Attendees said they felt the area had not returned to normal since the immigration operation but were comforted by how many people showed up Saturday.
“As much as it can feel helpless, this shows it’s not,” said Ms. Warner, 80.
The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, gave a fiery address from behind a row of bulletproof glass panels, which underscored fears of political violence. Referring to the president’s oft-stated disdain for Somali immigrants, Mr. Walz said that their grandchildren would remain in the United States long after “the orange clown is in the dustbin of history.”
In New York City, Valerie Tirado said she decided to attend an anti-Trump demonstration for the first time because her son, a Marine, was set to be deployed to the Middle East.
“Trump is using these military men as pawns, just to flex,” said Ms. Tirado, 60, a registered Democrat.
Spouses Michael Bianco and Susan Draper said they had demonstrated in the streets for causes they support since 1968. What struck them most about Saturday’s was how many people their age were on the streets.
“I want to express my disdain,” said Ms. Draper, 77, a retired N.Y.U. urban anthropology professor.
Eileen McHugh, 59, traveled an hour from her Republican-leaning town in Westchester County to protest at Columbus Circle.
“The whole Republican Party has blood on their hands,” Ms. McHugh said. “Bombing boats in Venezuela and schools in Iran is murder.”
While immigration policy was the focus of past No Kings protests in Atlanta, demonstrators on Saturday drew attention to the war in Iran, the toll the partial government shutdown is taking on air travel and a bill Republicans are championing to tighten voting rules.
“They just keep pushing the limits every day to see how far they can take their regime,” said Alan Reed, 72, who attended the protest using a walker and had a rainbow flag draped over his back. “To see how much authority they can grab, until they can cancel our elections.”
Nicholas Phillips, 34, of Long Beach, Calif., cooled himself outside Los Angeles City Hall with a rainbow fan, joined by friends.
Mr. Phillips, who is gay, said he came to protest the Trump administration’s anti-transgender policies and the potential for the Supreme Court to reverse the country’s marriage equality laws.
“It’s important to show up,” he said.
Later in the day, tensions escalated toward a separate group of protesters who had gathered outside of the Metropolitan Detention Center. Tear gas was deployed, and rubber bullets were shot into the crowd. The police declared an unlawful assembly, formed a line, and made several arrests.
In statements on social media, the Los Angeles Police Department said that federal authorities had used nonlethal measures to move the crowd back after protesters were warned not to throw items or try to tear down the gate.
Amid the chaos, a bagpipe sounded above the din. Jack Duffy, a fourth-year computer science student at Chapman University, said he has been bringing his pipes to marches and protests in Los Angeles since last summer.
“The bagpipes have been taken into battle for hundreds of years,” he said.
A city councilor, Sameer Kanal, described “a sea of Portlanders” in a park near downtown. Many were wearing the inflatable animal costumes that have made the city’s anti-immigration rallies a viral sensation.
Deana Fredericks, 65, was among a group of women wearing outfits inspired by “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a show drawn from the Margaret Atwood novel that depicts a totalitarian society in which women are treated as property. “We’re concerned about women’s rights, but it’s also gone beyond that,” she said, citing the Iran war and voting rights.
Later, outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, hundreds of protesters gathered, with some breaking open a gate at the entrance of the building. The authorities pushed them back. State and city police officers arrived to further break up the crowd.
Friction escalated overnight. After protesters broke open the gate a second time, federal agents responded. They detained two protesters, pulling them roughly from the crowd and taking them into the building. One protester climbed onto the roof and broke security cameras, and others set U.S. flags on fire.
No Kings protesters gathered at the park at Pier A in Hoboken on the banks of the Hudson River on a chilly morning. A local folk singer, Ed Fogarty, played the classic Bob Dylan protest song “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Noah Schwartz, 54, one of the organizers of a march from Jersey City to Hoboken, used a bullhorn to lead the crowd in a chant.
“We will not stop our fun, our joy, our democracy,” he said. “Say it once, say it twice! We will not put up with ICE!”
Protesters with signs slung over their shoulders streamed into Anchorage’s Town Square Park, as temperatures hovered around 20.
Lynette Moreno-Hinz, a 67-year-old cabdriver from Anchorage, played a skin drum for the crowd. Ms. Moreno-Hinz, who is Tlingit, said she was protesting because Alaska Natives are concerned about federal support for myriad tribal programs. “He’s taking away the money for our Native people,” she said, referring to Mr. Trump.
The No Kings movement debuted in February 2025 on Presidents’ Day. The decentralized coalition had a stronger showing last June, on the day Mr. Trump marked his birthday by ordering the military to stage a large parade in Washington, D.C. The groups reported an even larger turnout in October.
In London, demonstrators carried scowling bobbleheads of Mr. Trump; the first lady, Melania Trump; and Vice President JD Vance. Caricatures of Elon Musk, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem also hovered over the crowd.
Carmen Kingston, a New Yorker who has lived in Britain for a decade, carried a poster with the words “Minab Massacre,” referring to the strike on an elementary school in Iran that killed at least 175 people, most of them children.
The war, she said, is “part of a domestic political climate that includes the erosion of democratic institutions, democratic guardrails and unaccountable violence.”
Lynsey Chutel, Sean Keenan, Wesley Parnell, Mark Bonamo, Nate Schweber, Neelam Bohra, Robert Chiarito, Miles G. Cohen, Aaron West, Ramón Ramirez, Tricia Fulks Kelley, Robb Murray, Sheila M. Eldred, Julia O’Malley, Rachel Parsons, Heather Casey, Vi Nguyen, Allison McCann, James Thomas, Gray Beltran and Matthew Bloch contributed reporting, editing and production.
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7) Five Takeaways From the ‘No Kings’ Rallies as the Midterms Heat Up
The war in Iran was a galvanizing force, but plenty of protesters focused on President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Senate candidates in several key races joined the crowds.
By Tim Balk, March 29, 2026
Thousands of demonstrations against the Trump administration unfolded across the country on Saturday, the third round in a nationwide series of loosely coordinated “No Kings” rallies.
The day of protest, the first since October, came as the midterm election season takes shape, and as Democrats work to capitalize politically on the unpopular war with Iran.
Exactly a month earlier, President Trump ordered the first U.S. strikes against Iran, setting off a conflict that has sent gasoline prices soaring and rattled Republicans.
The war was a central animating force in the Saturday rallies, which were attended by roughly eight million people, according to “No Kings” organizers, though their estimates in some cities were higher than those of local public safety officials. But the fighting in the Middle East was hardly the only issue on the minds of frustrated Democrats.
Here are five takeaways.
The war seemed to galvanize younger voters.
Many protesters said that the war had brought them out on Saturday. And at least in some places, the conflict appeared to be motivating younger people.
One large rally was held across the street from the University of Iowa, where the youth outreach group Voters of Tomorrow signed students up to join its organizing efforts.
Katy Gates, 22, an organizer, said the crowd was “a lot younger, more diverse and more energetic” than those at previous “No Kings” demonstrations. She attributed the change, in part, to the war.
“Our generation has grown up with this idea of endless war in the Middle East,” Ms. Gates said. “And the idea of getting into yet another is something that people are rightfully really angry about.”
Among those at the protest was Zach Wahls, 34, a state lawmaker running in Iowa’s competitive Democratic primary race for Senate. “I have not yet met somebody who is interested in another endless war in the Middle East,” he said.
Trump’s immigration crackdown remains a focus.
Even with the war in Iran dominating the national conversation, opposition to Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown and Immigration and Customs Enforcement remained a rallying cry on Saturday.
The sprawling, flagship “No Kings” protest was held in Minnesota, where two U.S. citizens were killed by federal agents this winter as part of unrest over the Trump administration’s immigration operation there. (The administration last month ended its surge of federal agents in Minnesota, responding to mounting public criticism.)
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive Vermont independent, spoke at the protest, which was held at the State Capitol building in St. Paul. Bruce Springsteen sang a song about the two citizens who died.
“This is still America,” Mr. Springsteen said. “And this reactionary nightmare and these invasions of American cities will not stand.”
In Minnesota, there were also loud chants of “end this war” and plenty of signs objecting to the conflict.
Dana R. Fisher, a professor at American University who studies civic engagement and surveyed protesters in Washington, said the share who described war and peace as their main motivator jumped drastically on Saturday compared with previous protests. But it was comparable to the share who cited concern about the administration’s handling of immigration, she said.
Dueling protests unfolded near Mar-a-Lago.
Thousands of protesters gathered on a grassy public space by a Target about a 15-minute drive from Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach County, Fla., participants said. One demonstrator carried a sign that said “Grab ’em by the midterms,” playing on the vulgar, caught-on-tape comment Mr. Trump made about women in 2005.
The crowd included Emily Gregory, a Democrat and first-time candidate who won an upset victory this past week in a Florida state legislative race to represent the area.
After prevailing in a district that Mr. Trump carried by 11 percentage points in 2024, she was greeted like a celebrity on Saturday.
“There were people that were asking us if that was really her,” said Lacy Larson, 47, an organizer.
The rally’s atmosphere was mostly celebratory, and a D.J. played music by Mr. Springsteen, Bob Marley and Tracy Chapman. “Some fine protest jams,” Ms. Gregory said in an interview.
But counterprotesters gathered to stand up for the county’s most famous resident. They unfurled a large pro-Trump flag, and the two sides chanted at each other.
The White House itself had mocked the nationwide protests. Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman, said on Thursday that “the only people who care about these Trump derangement therapy sessions are the reporters who are paid to cover them.”
Midterm candidates came out in force.
From sunny Southern California to the unseasonably frigid northern reaches of New England, Democratic candidates in the midterm elections took to the streets to vent with voters about the Trump administration.
Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, a Democrat who is running for Senate in one of this year’s most-watched races, attended three “No Kings” protests in and around Portland, the state’s largest city and a Democratic stronghold. Her Democratic rival, Graham Platner, an oyster farmer running as a political outsider, spoke at a protest in Aroostook County, the state’s northernmost county, where Mr. Trump won by 26 points in 2024.
Ms. Mills and Mr. Platner are battling for the chance to take on Senator Susan Collins, a Republican seen as one of her party’s most vulnerable incumbents.
In Michigan, Mallory McMorrow, a state lawmaker who is in another closely watched Democratic primary for Senate, attended a rally in the Detroit suburbs. One of her leading rivals, Representative Haley Stevens, joined one in downtown Detroit.
And Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who is seeking to fend off a Democratic primary challenge from Representative Seth Moulton, joined protests in Boston and its suburbs. Mr. Moulton attended a rally near Boston.
Some Democrats seen as potential 2028 presidential contenders got in on the action, too. Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary and 2020 presidential candidate, attended a rally in Traverse City, Mich., where he lives. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who also ran in 2020, joined a protest in St. Louis. (He was in the city as part of a book tour.)
Democrats found fresh fuel for their ‘No Kings’ slogan.
Two days before the protests, the Treasury Department said that it would begin printing dollars with Mr. Trump’s signature on them, a first for a sitting U.S. president.
The move continued a trend for Mr. Trump, whose allies have sought to put his name on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the U.S. Institute of Peace, among other institutions and landmarks. The efforts have enraged many of his critics, who cast him as an aspiring monarch.
In a nod to the protests, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, the chair of Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, said on Saturday that she planned to introduce a bill to bar presidents from putting their name, likeness or signature on federal property or money.
“In America,” Ms. Gillibrand said in a statement, “we do not bow to kings.”
Wesley Parnell contributed reporting from New York, and Sheila M. Eldred from Minneapolis.
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8) Deaths in ICE Custody Are Growing. ‘They Let Him Rot in There.’
As immigrant detainee deaths have increased, conditions in detention facilities nationwide are coming under more scrutiny.
By Jazmine Ulloa, Allison McCann and Emiliano RodrÃguez Mega, March 29, 2026
Jazmine Ulloa and Allison McCann reported from New York. Emiliano RodrÃguez Mega reported from Mexico City and San José, Costa Rica.
The death of Emmanuel Damas, 56, has galvanized opposition to collaboration between ICE and local and state authorities in Boston. Sophie Park for The New York Times
It started with sharp pain in a tooth. For about a week, Emmanuel Damas sought treatment while he was being held at an Arizona immigration detention center, several detainees later told his family. But Mr. Damas, who had migrated from Haiti in 2024 under what was then a lawful U.S. program, was given only Ibuprofen, the detainees said.
Soon, one of his brothers received a call that Mr. Damas was in a hospital intensive care unit. By the time his relatives were allowed to visit him nine days later, Mr. Damas, 56, was on life support, unable to move or speak but still shackled to a hospital bed. An infection had spread throughout his body, and Mr. Damas had most likely gone into septic shock, according to federal officials and interviews with his relatives.
“He could not even blink his eyes,” one of his brothers, Presly Nelson, said in an interview. “There was nothing there.”
He died on March 2 — one of 13 people who have died in federal immigration custody in the first three months of this year, and one of 46 who have died since President Trump took office last year and began his mass deportation campaign, according to death reports and news releases made public by ICE.
The Department of Homeland Security and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which have been leading the deportation effort, have faced growing scrutiny over agents’ aggressive, militarized tactics on American streets. And the killing of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota this year helped lead to the ouster of Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary.
But as her successor, Markwayne Mullin, takes over, the number of people who have died in immigration detention has been drawing more attention. The number of immigrants in ICE custody has nearly doubled in the last 14 months, and the detention centers have been strained by the surge.
A spokesman for CoreCivic, which operates the Arizona detention center where Mr. Damas fell ill, said only that the company takes “very seriously” the death of anyone in its care. “The safety, health and well-being of the people in our facilities is our top priority,” the spokesman, Brian Todd, said.
The Department of Homeland Security maintains that detainees are receiving adequate care. In a statement, Lauren Bis, an agency spokeswoman, said Mr. Damas was sent to the hospital on Feb. 19 immediately after he reported shortness of breath and that ICE had “higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons.” American prisons have long had deficiencies of their own in the medical care provided to inmates.
Many ICE detention facilities are run by large private companies, such as CoreCivic and the GEO Group, that also operate many prisons. The companies say that they provide round-the-clock medical care and proper diets and that they are subject to government oversight.
But a federal lawsuit and more than two dozen interviews with lawyers, detainees and their family members and elected officials depict acute deficiencies that they believe contributed to the deaths. They describe some of the country’s largest immigrant detention facilities as places where disease and illness are rampant and detainees are often denied sufficient food, clean drinking water, medications and medical care.
Mr. Damas’s death has galvanized opposition to collaboration between ICE and local and state authorities in Boston, home to the nation’s third largest Haitian population. “It is reprehensible,” said Ruthzee Louijeune, a Boston city councilor who has helped the Damas family obtain records, plan Mr. Damas’s funeral and cope with the fallout from his death. “It is unforgivable that in the United States a man in detention should die from a toothache.”
The 33 deaths in 2025 were the most in a single year on record since the Department of Homeland Security started operating in March 2003 and took charge of the nation’s immigration and border security agencies. During the four years of the Biden administration, deaths in custody ranged from a high of 11 to a low of three, averaging about seven a year. During the eight years of the Obama administration, an average of eight deaths a year occurred.
Even at 33 deaths last year, the death rate since Mr. Trump took office is still below historic peaks given the record number of people in ICE detention overall. At the start of this year, around 70,000 people were detained, though that figure had fallen slightly as of early February. (ICE has not released updated figures during the ongoing partial government shutdown.)
The annual death rate has fluctuated over the years and was at its highest recorded level in 2004, as ICE’s first leaders were developing detention standards and oversight, , said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official who worked on the standards. The annual rate of deaths had been steadily declining over the past two decades, but spiked in 2020 when many detainees died of Covid-19.
The vast majority of deaths occurred in ICE’s network of nearly 200 detention facilities, though five deaths occurred outside a detention center. An ICE agent shot and killed Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez in Chicago as he tried to evade arrest in his car. Two detainees were shot and killed by a gunman who opened fire at an ICE field office in Dallas. One person was fatally struck by a truck while fleeing; and another died at a hospital after being arrested. (All were recorded as deaths in ICE custody.)
In Congress, the debate has been over reining in ICE’s tactics on the streets. Democrats have held up funding for D.H.S. in an effort to secure reforms, like barring agents from wearing masks and requiring them to obtain judicial warrants.
The deaths in detention have prompted calls for congressional investigations, condemnation from leaders of some immigrants’ home countries and at least six lawsuits. And a federal judge has allowed members of Congress to continue to make unannounced inspections of detention sites, over the objections of the Trump administration.
Officials critical of the detention practices say ensuring oversight over quality of care will become more urgent as nation’s detention system expands. Congress has allocated $45 billion for immigrant detention facilities, more than 10 times the previous budget.
In Southern California, a coalition of legal groups has filed a class-action lawsuit against homeland security officials over conditions at the Adelanto detention center. The facility, in the Mojave Desert, went from holding three detainees to nearly 2,000 in the past year, according to the lawsuit.
In more than two dozen declarations filed with the lawsuit, former and current detainees describe constantly feeling hungry, delirious and ill from rotten food, and lacking access to medication and medical care. The documents also include letters from doctors and lawyers detailing unsanitary conditions and the deteriorating mental and physical health of their clients.
Among the families represented are those of Ismael Ayala-Uribe, 39, and Gabriel Garcia-Aviles, 56, who died within weeks of each other in the fall. In interviews, their relatives said they were frustrated that their loved ones were already in grave condition by the time the authorities had contacted them.
Mr. Garcia-Aviles, a Mexican day laborer who had lived in the country for about 30 years, was picked up in Orange County, Calif., in October. When family members next saw him, he had been hospitalized for more than week. In an interview, Mariel Garcia and Gabriel Garcia Jr. said their father had bruises, broken teeth and dried blood on his mouth and forehead.
In a statement, the Homeland Security Department said Mr. Ayala-Uribe had not been denied medical care, and that, according to an autopsy, he had died after complaining of rectal pain for three weeks. A coroner’s report listed the cause of death as complications from a pelvic abscess, according to his lawyer.
The agency said that Mr. Garcia-Aviles suffered cardiac arrest tied to alcohol withdrawal syndrome, and his lawyer said a government autopsy is pending. The families said they have also sought independent autopsies and are waiting for results.
“I can tell you that the same questions you have, we have,” Ms. Garcia said, describing her father as a hard-working man who had sacrificed for his family and had no serious criminal history. D.H.S. said he had unlawfully entered the country in 2007 and 2008, and court records show he had six minor offenses related to drinking in public or “performing excretory function in public.” His lawyer said he had been in the process of applying for an immigrant visa at the time of his arrest and had obtained a work permit.
At the western tip of Texas, three men have died in a sprawling El Paso tent camp holding an average of almost 3,000 detainees. In interviews, undocumented immigrants at the camp reported poor drinking water, medical neglect and restrooms so soiled that detainees asked for disinfectant so they could clean them on their own. The facility has also been wracked by measles outbreaks.
Homeland Security Department officials this month said they were replacing the private contractor running the camp.
The family of Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, of Cuba, is considering legal action, their lawyer, Chris Benoit, said. Homeland security officials have classified his death as a suicide, but the El Paso County medical examiner ruled it a homicide, and the autopsy and detainee witnesses suggest that guards choked him.
In Massachusetts, Mr. Damas had reunited with relatives in Boston. He had legally entered the United States in 2024 under a Biden-era humanitarian program, and worked for his brothers’ transportation company, they said. But his status had been revoked when the Trump administration canceled the program last year, a development his family said he wasn’t aware of until his detention in Arizona.
Mr. Damas, a father of two, was a fan of Haitian kompa music and enjoyed a good party. That was also what landed him in trouble with the authorities, his brothers said. After a family gathering, Mr. Damas was intoxicated and asleep when a neighbor called the police to check on his then 12-year-old son, who had been playing outside alone. Though that issue was quickly resolved, Mr. Damas became agitated with his son and tried to hit him, Mr. Nelson said. Officers arrested Mr. Damas, who had no prior criminal record, according to court records, and charged him with domestic violence.
After one of his brothers posted bail, Mr. Damas was taken into immigration custody and shuffled through facilities from New York to Arizona, his relatives said. His brothers said they knew something was wrong when he stopped calling home from the detention center to check in.
When his mother last spoke to Mr. Damas, in mid-February, he was in so much pain that he could barely talk, Mr. Nelson said. After Mr. Damas was hospitalized, his brothers spent days trying to obtain permission from ICE to visit him. Like the Garcias and Ayalas, the family has paid for an independent autopsy in hopes of piecing together what happened.
“They let him rot in there and die like he had no family,” Mr. Nelson said.
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9) Is It 1914 in America?
By Yonatan Touval, March 29, 2026
Mr. Touval is a foreign-policy analyst and writer based in Tel Aviv.
Samin Ahmadzadeh
Four weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, one conclusion is already difficult to avoid. Our leaders preside over an extraordinary machinery of destruction, but they remain strikingly obtuse about human beings — about their pride, shame, convictions and historical memory.
The war’s architects appear to have assumed that killing a nation’s leaders, dominating airspace and destroying infrastructure would produce regime collapse in Tehran and strategic clarity in Washington and Jerusalem. Instead, Iran, though badly weakened, has managed to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, drastically widen the war’s economic radius and force Washington into the old, unglamorous business of soliciting allied help after entering a war confident that it would be swift and decisive.
It is tempting to describe this as a failure of intelligence. Technically, it is not. The spycraft kind of intelligence behind the war planning and execution is extensive. Recent reporting suggests that Israeli intelligence spent years penetrating Tehran’s traffic cameras and communications networks and built what one unnamed Israeli source described to CNN as an A.I.-powered “target-production machine” capable of turning enormous volumes of visual, human and signals intelligence into precise strike coordinates. That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting.
Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.
This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war. But war is never merely a technical contest. It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.
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So the familiar errors appear. The war planners imagine that a regime can be decapitated into collapse, whereas external attack often does the opposite — binding a battered state more tightly to a society newly united by injury, humiliation and rage. They imagine that destroying conventional assets would settle the matter, as if legitimacy, wounded sovereignty and collective anger were secondary rather than the war’s actual terrain. Planners who took their adversary’s self-understanding seriously — rather than discounting it as propaganda — might have anticipated that an attack would not weaken the regime’s narrative but instead fulfill it. They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them.
The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz long ago recognized the delusion of reducing war to a kind of algebra. War, as he understood it, is never merely calculation. It is saturated with passion, uncertainty and political purpose. The algebra has grown more sophisticated. But the delusion is just as dangerous today as it was in the 19th century.
What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.
Cultural knowledge, of course, rarely prevents the catastrophes of war.
Athens at the height of its golden age sailed for Syracuse and lost an empire. Thucydides spent the rest of his life explaining why. The generals of 1914 were cultivated, well-read men, but those qualities did not save Europe. What has changed is not that culture once prevented blindness and no longer does. It is that culture has increasingly ceded authority to systems that mistake information for understanding and speed for judgment.
Shakespeare understood this blindness better than our strategists. “Macbeth” is not merely a play about ambition. It is about a man who catches sight of a possible future and mistakes that glimpse for a license to force events to conform to his interpretation — and then watches that interpretation devour him. Soon he ceases even to pretend that action should wait on understanding. There are things in his head, he tells his wife, that “must be acted ere they may be scanned” — done before they can be thought through.
Modern targeting systems promise the same fantasy in technological form: to collapse the interval between seeing and striking, to eliminate the pause in which judgment might still enter. Macbeth acts not after deliberation but instead of it. That is the pattern one can glimpse in this new war, and it is precisely the pattern that literary and historical imagination exists to counter.
Tolstoy traced the same pattern from the other side. In “War and Peace,” he depicted Napoleon — nourished on Plutarch’s “Lives” and its portraits of greatness — who marched through Borodino to Moscow and still could not fathom a people who would let their city burn rather than submit. His error was not tactical. It was imaginative: He could not credit the Russians with a logic that was not his own. That is the mistake the architects of this campaign are repeating. A leadership that has spent decades framing resistance to American and Israeli power as a religious obligation will experience military pressure not as a reason to capitulate but more probably as a reason to endure.
The more technologically sophisticated war becomes, the more dangerous it is to place it in the hands of people untrained in irony, contingency and the darker constants of human nature. Such leaders will speak fluently of capabilities, timelines and kill chains. They will have no language for resentment, dishonor, loyalty or grief — and they will discover, too late, that wars are made of these as much as of steel and fire. That is the illiteracy of this war. The algebra of the war makers will have been flawless. But what they cannot read, they will not have reckoned with.
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10) Goodbye, ‘Queer Eye.’ Goodbye, Queer Acceptance.
By Rosa Rankin-Gee, March 29, 2026
Ms. Rankin-Gee is a novelist. Her forthcoming novel, “My Only Boy,” is about a lesbian and a gay man who fall in love.
Doris Liou
When the final season of “Queer Eye” dropped this year, it did so with too little fanfare: a scant five episodes and a late, fleeting appearance on the Netflix home page for someone who had faithfully cried over all previous episodes — me. The show’s low-key farewell could be down to well-documented intracast disputes or air dissipating from a franchise that has run for nearly a decade. But the end of “Queer Eye” also dovetails with a second story: the beginning of a precipitous fall in the acceptance of gayness in mainstream American culture. It’s a particularly bitter aftertaste for a show that placed the pursuit of acceptance at its heart.
I am a lesbian in my late 30s, around the same age as the “Queer Eye” cast. Many of our microgeneration missed the almost universal brutality that our gay predecessors endured — criminalization, forced sterilization, the AIDS crisis. But we did encounter that era’s stinging tail: “don’t say gay” laws, conversion therapy and casual conversations that now sound archaic. When I was at university, a fellow student asked, “Would you prefer for your son to be born gay or have no legs?” and people around me responded, “No legs.” This was in 2010. But in the years after we graduated, in a new post-marriage-equality lull, many corporations sponsored Pride. There was a certain cachet in being gay, and then labels seemed on course to become irrelevant altogether.
Now we are caught up in an era of backlash-whiplash, when the gains of the past few decades seem to be at increasing risk of slipping away.
“Queer Eye” is a reboot of the original franchise, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” which ran from 2003 to 2007, battleground years for gay rights. The premise: Five gay men perform a makeover on someone whose cobwebs could do with a dusting. The first version was criticized for sanitizing gayness for straight audiences and leaning into limiting stereotypes — gay guy as hairdresser, interior designer, sidekick. But through television screens, it got gay people into homes they might not have otherwise entered, just as the national fight for gay marriage started to ramp up.
When the show was reimagined with a new cast in 2018, liberated from its “for the Straight Guy” shackles, the hosts reflected a more expansive expression of queerness — less white, more gender diverse — and many of the heroes, as the makeover subjects are known, were from red states. It was an exercise in bridge building that wasn’t shy about its ambition: “The original show was fighting for tolerance,” Tan France, the fashion expert, says in the first episode. “Our fight is for acceptance.”
The first stop for “Queer Eye,” filmed after President Trump’s first election, was in Dallas, Ga. The show’s first hero, Tom Jackson, describes himself as a “dumb old country boy from Kentucky”: He drinks margaritas from liter tankards, keeps barbecue tongs by his bed and has a giddy crush on his ex-wife. When the Fab Five flamboyantly ambush him in a diner, cameras capture restaurantwide looks of surprise and delight. There are jokes about douching, and Jonathan Van Ness (grooming) covers the hero’s ears: “Don’t scare her. We just got here.” When the hero asks Bobby Berk (design) about his marriage, “Are you the husband or the wife?” he’s gently re-educated. By the end, the hero, beard marshaled and socks pulled up, says, “I’ve never hung with gay guys before, and they were great.” It was indicative of the period’s prevailing hope that familiarity would lead to acceptance.
Eight years later, however, anti-queer bias is in ascent. Transgender people’s rights are being upended in states across the country. Even marriage equality no longer feels indelible. The current 47-point gap between Republicans and Democrats on gay marriage is the largest since Gallup began tracking the measure three decades ago. Research from psychologists at Harvard and Northwestern suggests that acceptance of gay people peaked in 2020 and, instead of plateauing, fell sharply. Strikingly, that reversal is most robust among people under 25. In America, Gen Z is more likely to identify as queer than any previous generation. But globally, the younger generation is also more traditionalist: Gen Z men around the world are more than twice as likely as boomers to think that wives should obey husbands.
Popular culture is sending warning signals, too. Pixar’s chief creative officer recently revealed that the company ordered the removal of gay content from the 2025 film “Elio” because “we’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy.” Netflix has canceled highly acclaimed adult shows with gay representation, like “Boots,” a show that inspired the Pentagon to call Netflix’s programming “woke garbage.” In the months after Elon Musk acquired X, homophobic, transphobic and racist hate speech on the platform soared by 50 percent, and engagement on posts with hate speech doubled.
And yet in New York City, where I live, we are still in a formerly unimaginable utopia. There it feels as if every second person is gay. I just had a child with my wife, and even though I’ll have to adopt my own daughter in order to ensure that I’m legally protected as her mother, the experience was relatively easy. We see the rabid response to “Heated Rivalry” and think: Maybe it can all flip yet again. Cycles of backlash have become shorter and shorter. We tell ourselves it’s a pendulum that will swing back. I wish I felt more confident.
Fifteen years ago, I could feel nervous about holding my first girlfriend’s hand because of looks that seemed to say, “You are doing something kids shouldn’t see.” Over the past decade, those looks — or the worry that made me watch for them — faded. Now they’re back.
There is a theory that gay acceptance became swept up in a wave of rejection, by the right, of liberal elites telling people what to think. It is possible to see “Queer Eye” as an emblem of this — polished urbanites coming to backwaters with improvements to make — but for me, the show felt different. Some of the hosts were from small towns themselves, and they were seemingly beloved by heroes and viewers alike. A makeover show alone was never going to change culture, but it did reflect a hopeful cultural landscape. Today, however, even tolerance is in doubt.
And so this goodbye from “Queer Eye” feels apologetic, even if the hosts are apologizing for something far outside their control. For the finale, the Fab Five take on Washington, D.C. “The eye of the storm,” Mx. Van Ness calls it. Against this backdrop, the hosts grasp for their trademark optimism: “This is not the end,” Mr. France tells the camera. “We were just starting off a movement.” “Now it’s your turn,” Karamo Brown (culture) says. “It’s your turn,” Mx. Van Ness echoes. Jeremiah Brent (design, a newer addition) says nothing. He appears to be on the verge of tears.
In these final episodes, when the hosts video-call their husbands and children, it reads as one last request for acceptance: We are just like you. Please let us keep this.
I hold my daughter in my arms, too. She is 5 months old. I know how lucky I am. It’s so much better than it was. You don’t know how good you have it. But we do. That’s the point.
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