The Bay Area Demo Legal Collab and friends are hosting a Grand Jury education and training event. Join us for a political history of how Grand Juries are used for political repression, hear from Grand Jury resisters and learn how to plan for repression for yourself and your community.
In the Bay Area there have been recent FBI visits, Grand Jury subpoenas and investigations into our political movements. If you are contacted by the feds or other law enforcement agencies you should exercise your rights and reach out to legal support:
· You do not have to open your door or let FBI or other agents into your home without a warrant.
· You have the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney: you do not have to talk to FBI or other agents or answer their questions. It can be dangerous to do so. Say, "I do not want to answer questions without my lawyer. Please slip your card under the door and my lawyer will call you."
· For legal help, call the Bay Area Federal Defense Line, 415-285-1041 and someone will return your call within 48 hours.
The Bay Area Federal Defense line can help connect you to a lawyer if you are contacted by agents related to progressive political activism. It is sponsored by the Bay Area Demo Legal Support Collaborative- a joint effort of Legal Solidarity Bay Area, NLG-SF, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, Anti-Repression Committee, and Oaklaw.
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We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here. |
| World Federation of Trade Unions |
We Support Dockworkers Blocking Weapons on October 30, 2026
Unions representing workers at 40 ports in Europe and the Mediterranean are calling for an international day of action on October 30. Read more here.
Statement from the World Federation of Trade Unions:
Ports For Peace – Jobs With Dignity
Following the Third International Meeting of Mediterranean and European Dockworkers’ and Port Workers’ Unions, held in Istanbul in May 2026, the participating unions have launched a common international day of action on 30 October 2026.
The meeting focused on the struggle against wars, genocide and military aggression, while also addressing the challenges facing dockworkers and port workers, including wages, working conditions, automation projects, and occupational health and safety.
The participating organizations, CGT Ports and Docks (France), ENEDEP (Greece), LAB (Basque Country), Liman-İş (Turkey), ODT (Morocco), and USB (Italy), representing workers in more than 40 Mediterranean and European ports, are calling on dockworkers and port workers to mobilize together on 30 October 2026.
This mobilization is based on the Istanbul Declaration, adopted unanimously by the participating organizations and now fully endorsed by ORSA Porti of Gioia Tauro (Italy), which has joined our international network.
The declaration sets out the following demands:
· An immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognized by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital.
· An end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the West Asia and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan, alongside support for the right of all peoples to resist occupation and to self-determination.
· Ports must not be used for the transport of arms, ammunition, military equipment or troops destined for war zones.
· They must not become military bases for NATO, the United States or the European Union, nor serve as tools for shipowners and monopoly groups.
· No to the war economy, government rearmament plans, and the project of militarization of ports and strategic infrastructure from EU. Public resources must be used to meet people’s social needs, not to finance war.
· Collective agreements must guarantee real wage increases, secure employment, reduced working hours, and fair pension provisions.
· Technological progress, mechanization, automation and artificial intelligence must not be used to eliminate jobs or undermine workers’ rights. Dockworkers and port workers say NO to automation.
On October 30, all actions will be united as part of a common international struggle to stop wars, genocide and the militarization of ports at a very critical moment in history, while defending workers’ rights and better working conditions. Each union will decide the most appropriate form of mobilization according to its national circumstances, starting from strike action and from a shared commitment to prevent the loading of death and destruction.
The signatory trade unions of the Istanbul Declaration call on ALL dockworkers’ and port workers’ unions to join this international mobilization. We are ready to meet with organized groups of dockworkers and port workers from any other ports interested in becoming part of this common struggle.
CGT FNPD France – ENEDEP Greece – LAB Basque Country – LIMAN-IS Turkey – ODT Maroc – ORSA Porti Italy – USB Italy
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NOVEMBER 1-7
WEEK of GLOBAL RESISTANCE
to STOP U.S. IMPERIALISM & GENOCIDE
This year SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE (SDDW) Fall Actions will be a "Kick Off for A New Campaign": We want to help build a stronger network of global communities working in coordination to STOP U.S Imperialism & Genocide. Several other national organizations are already co-sponsors. (see below) This global call to action in the fall is only the beginning. We invite national and international organizations to sign on as sponsors/endorsers of the week and to plan simultaneous actions at U.S. Bases, Weapons Industries and AI Data Centers around the world. Organize actions for one day, or numerous days during or near the Week of Global Resistance. We recommend planning actions during weekday commute hours, if possible, when personnel are going into and out of military bases, weapons industry workplaces, AI Data Centers, etc. Educate, educate, educate and encourage resistance from within. Please spread the word: Help us get more sponsors & endorsers! More details to come soon.
"Week of Global Resistance" Co-sponsors: ShutDownDroneWarfare.org, BanKillerDrones.org, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, and Witness Against Empire.
Will your organization sponsor or endorse? Please contact: toby4peace@sonic.net
The above global call to action is part of SDDW Fall Action Week:
SHUT DOWN DRONE WARFARE! (SDDW)
ShutDownDroneWarfare.org
SDDW Fall Action Week:
NEW: Simultaneous Actions at both Creech AFB & Holloman AFB!
November 1-7, 2026
Nov.1-7, Creech AFB Fall Action, Indian Springs, NV
Nov. 4-6, Holloman AFB Fall Action, Alamogordo, NM
17 years of persistent resistance! Come for all or part of Fall Actions!
Shut Down Drone Warfare (SDDW) Campaign is Co-Sponsored by Veterans For Peace, Ban Killer Drones & CODEPINK
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
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. Alter Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Why Are Colleges Giving Financial Aid to Rich Kids?
By Angel B. Pérez, Aug. 21, 2026
Mr. Pérez is chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the author of “The Hottest Seat on Campus: A Roadmap for Mastering Leadership in College Admission.”
Amani Willett for The New York Times
Millions of students will soon arrive on college campuses, full of excitement and trepidation about what’s to come. Some will have received a special gift: a grant, known as merit aid. That’s different from the financial aid that goes to students who can’t afford the sticker price. Merit aid is in effect a signing bonus, a cash incentive to attract the most desirable students.
So who counts as desirable? These bonuses were originally intended for students with exceptional academic achievement, people who could contribute to the campus environment and who have many admissions offers to choose from. Today, however, colleges and universities are increasingly using these grants for a very different purpose: to lure wealthy students, the ones who need the money least. And these institutions are drawing the merit aid from their limited financial aid budgets, leaving less money for students who need it most.
Two recent analyses — from the Brookings Institution and the organization I lead, the National Association for College Admission Counseling — show that in the past 20 years this trend has accelerated, while need-based financial aid has dwindled. Money that could be used to expand educational opportunity is increasingly being used to further entrench financial privilege.
As a former dean of admissions, I know this strategy well. For years, I awarded millions of dollars to wealthy students. I didn’t do it because I cared less about low- and middle-income students, but because of the brutal math of modern higher education in the United States.
Consider two students applying to a college that costs $80,000 a year. One comes from a high-income family and receives a $20,000 merit scholarship. If the student enrolls, the institution nets $60,000. The other student is from a low-income family and needs $70,000 in aid to enroll, leaving the institution with only $10,000 in revenue. Which student do you think I incentivized?
As crazy as that might seem, merit aid is just a symptom of a bigger problem: While other nations are investing aggressively in higher education, the United States starves it. Our colleges and universities, long recognized as a hallmark of our excellence, have been steadily defunded over recent decades.
The Pell Grant — our nation’s best tool for supporting low-income college-bound students — is facing an $11.5 billion shortfall. Federal and state funding has been gutted. Millions of research dollars that once flowed into institutions have been slashed, as have loans for graduate school tuition. Colleges are facing a shrinking pipeline of high school seniors, and shifting federal policies are making it more difficult to enroll international students.
This July, the Department of Homeland Security announced that international students can study in America for only four years. That will make it harder for U.S. colleges to attract them — a loss for many reasons, including the fact that international students typically pay full fare to study here. That revenue has helped keep our institutions afloat and subsidized the cost for American students.
Now many colleges are scrambling to keep the lights on. Using merit aid to attract students who can pay at least a significant part of the sticker price is one way these colleges live to teach another year.
To be clear, colleges have not been innocent bystanders in their decline. With the cost of attendance at some institutions now approaching or even surpassing $100,000 a year, it’s no surprise Americans have lost trust in higher education. Raising prices and using opaque discounting strategies won’t bring students in the door. To survive, American higher education must demonstrate it is willing to reinvent itself, not simply defend the same broken system.
We should all want it to succeed. Higher education is one of the most powerful engines of economic mobility. Research shows that 10 years after enrollment, students who attended college generated an estimated $73.4 billion in additional annual earnings compared with high school graduates. The fewer people we educate, the fewer workers we have in high-paying sectors — a risk we cannot afford as we face a declining birthrate that threatens labor shortages. High wages lead to more tax revenue.
So this should be a priority for voters and lawmakers. It should also be a priority for the millions of Americans who once relied on financial aid to attend college. Far too many — more and more each year — turn away when their alma maters ask them to help the next generation. Donations alone won’t solve the problem, but if higher education opened doors for you, stop looking the other way. Pay it forward.
Back in my admissions director days, when people objected to the use of merit aid, I often responded with a simple truth: We need the money. It was unavoidable. Yet that didn’t make it right. Bidding wars for wealthy students are inherently distasteful. In a healthier system, they would be unnecessary — or even illegal.
If we are to find a way out of this cynical calculus, America has to make a choice. We can continue starving higher education and accept a future where opportunity belongs to those who can afford it. Or, we can recommit to public investment and philanthropy, to building institutions that are within reach for the average American, and to the belief that it’s talent and tenacity, not family income, that should lead young people to opportunity.
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2) Palestinian Teenager Killed After Israeli Settlers Enter West Bank Village
Palestinian and Israeli authorities offered divergent accounts of the incident, which came as settler violence has surged across the Israeli-occupied territory.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting form Tel Aviv, Aug. 21, 2026
A Palestinian teenager was killed on Friday after Israeli settlers entered a village near the West Bank city of Hebron, local officials said, the latest in a surge of violence in the territory that has drawn international condemnation.
The rising settler violence against Palestinians in recent weeks has presented a mounting challenge for Israel’s military. It is responsible for maintaining law and order in the territory but has been hesitant to take forceful action against settlers.
The health ministry of the Palestinian Authority identified the victim as 17-year-old Kareem Shlaldeh. Palestinian and Israeli authorities offered differing accounts of events on Friday.
Saad Shlaldeh, the mayor of the village, called Sair, said a large group of settlers had attacked the village around 10 a.m., killing one person and setting fire to property.
“These people are thugs and more,” he said in a phone interview, adding that his account was based on conversations with witnesses.
The Israeli military said soldiers were sent to the area of Sair following a report of Palestinians throwing rocks at Israeli civilians. The military added that the Israelis “were present in the area without advanced authorization.”
The statement said a “security official” had opened fire, causing “Palestinian casualties,” without clarifying whether the shooter was a soldier. Israeli civilians were also wounded in the incident, the statement added.
The events that led up to the settlers entering the village also remain unclear. Mr. Shlaldeh said he had no knowledge of Palestinians throwing rocks when asked about the Israeli military’s account.
Nabil Tharawa, 61, a resident of the area, said a second Palestinian was wounded and transferred to a hospital in Hebron. Khalid al-Sharif, an official at Ahli Hospital in Hebron, said a wounded person from Sair was brought to the emergency room.
The violence on Friday came as tensions in the West Bank were running high after the Israeli government published a tender for the construction of houses in a West Bank settlement near Jerusalem. The project is referred to as E1.
Over the past day, 11 nations, including France, Canada and Britain, issued a joined statement condemning Israel for the move. They said it “will undermine the prospect of the two-state solution by driving a wedge through the West Bank and harming the territorial contiguity of the Palestinian Territories.”
Much of the international community regards the West Bank as being a core part of any future Palestinian state.
For roughly two decades, the E1 plan wound its way through a bureaucratic Israeli zoning process. But intense international opposition, including from the Obama and Biden administrations, had mostly kept the project dormant.
That changed under the current Israeli government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history.
Ed Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, said the publication of the tender was “unacceptable and destructive” in a post on social media.
Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, fired back at Mr. Miliband, asserting that “the Jewish people have the right to live throughout the Land of Israel,” an apparent reference to all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
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3) U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk
Samuel Tunick, who faces a felony charge for deleting his phone’s data during an airport customs search, called the government’s peering into people’s private lives “creepy.”
By Adeel Hassan, Aug. 21, 2026
Samuel Tunick faces a felony charge for deleting his phone’s data during an airport customs search last year. Samuel Tunick
Samuel Tunick was returning to the United States in January 2025 from a vacation in the Dominican Republic when he was pulled aside during a customs search at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Customs and Border Protection officers wanted to search his phone. After questioning, he eventually turned it over but gave officers a passcode that then erased the contents of his Google Pixel phone.
As result, federal prosecutors in Atlanta have charged him with obstruction.
The case of Mr. Tunick, 30, became widely known last month after news reports of his federal court hearing in Atlanta. Mr. Tunick, a musician who has taught at a Jewish day school and tutored students, is also a left-wing activist and a graduate student in geography at Georgia State University.
He said that he has been ensnared by National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, a sweeping directive issued by President Trump last September that expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include crimes like getting in the way of immigration enforcement.
His prosecution is one of the earliest known instances of the federal authorities charging a person with destroying evidence using a program designed to wipe a device clean after a specific code is entered.
“Obstructing federal law enforcement is a serious matter that has serious repercussions,” Theodore Hertzberg, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement. “Individuals who destroy or attempt to destroy property, including data, to prevent lawful search and seizure should expect to face prosecution and punishment for their actions.”
A spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the agency had the authority to search the electronic devices of anyone entering or leaving the United States, regardless of citizenship, to enforce laws addressing terrorism, child exploitation, drug- and human-smuggling, visa fraud and national security threats.
“The border search will only include an examination of information that is present on the device at the time it is presented for inspection,” the spokeswoman said, adding that it searched the electronic devices of fewer than 0.01 percent of all arriving international travelers in the last fiscal year.
In an interview, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, Mr. Tunick explained how he ended up in this situation.
Why did you decide to replace your phone’s default software with Graphene OS, which can delete the phone’s contents?
Knowing the kind of surveillance that activists have been subjected to, it just seems like a good idea to protect my private data that I don’t necessarily want corporations or governments to have access to, just out of the principle of privacy.
Some people think that if you have that software, you’re trying to hide something.
If someone you don’t know, who’s actively hostile to you, is trying to access your private data, your pictures, your messages or notes to self, that may be not something that you’d like.
Your lawyers have said that the government was investigating you over your association with the movement against “Cop City,” a planned police and fire training center in Atlanta. What are your views?
I was a participant, along with hundreds of thousands of other people in the movement.
I heard that people were trying to fight it, and I have a background in environmental studies. That’s what I got my bachelor’s degree in. I’m about to go back to school for geography, so the environmental justice issue struck a chord for me, but especially so when it was combined with this concerning trend that we’ve seen over the last several years of expanding and militarizing the police at the exact time when tens of millions of Americans are demanding the exact opposite.
How do you view the federal government’s approach to investigating this movement?
We don’t know for sure, but it’s interesting to me that my charges and the other federal charges come on the heels of NSPM-7, which is the Trump administration’s mandate to attack left-wing movements under the bogus pretense of domestic terrorism. I think we should just call that what it is, which is a direct attack on our First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly.
During these proceedings, it was revealed that the federal authorities had secretly placed you on a watch list. What was your reaction to learning you had been flagged as a suspected terrorist?
Initially, I was surprised and upset, but this was also after 40 or so Stop Cop City protesters and several dozen attendees of a music festival had been charged with domestic terrorism. So I was able to understand it in that context.
However, it’s not a pleasant experience to find out that you’ve just been placed on a watch list without any input from a judge, from a jury. They can justify all of this warrantless surveillance. Or they try to justify it, at least.
How has it affected your life?
It’s stressful to have potentially up to five years in prison looming over my head. I’m a musician. I tour occasionally. I have to get a judge’s approval anytime I want to leave the Northern District of Georgia.
All of my family lives on the West Coast, so I have to get a judge’s approval to visit them as well. I was forced to surrender my passport.
Just the knowledge that the government is peering into your private life in this way, trying to dig up dirt on you, even though it’s unsuccessful, is creepy.
Cybersecurity experts have expressed concern that your prosecution sends a message that using privacy tools like Graphene OS to delete your phone’s contents is criminal by default. So what message do you hope your defense sends?
I just hope to send the message that the government doesn’t own our data. The government doesn’t own our communications, our relationships, as hard as they might try to. We have to defend our fundamental right to privacy; otherwise we can’t say that we really live in a democracy.
Not mentioned, is that Tunick likely had not technically entered the US yet-- he was in customs before entry authorization. This may be an interesting gray area, in that claiming "you (Tunick) have not entered yet so we (immigration) can do anything we want with you and your data" also means "immigration doesn't have US law coverage for the (Tunick's) data because US law perhaps doesn't even apply in this meta state of 'you are not in the US yet' so what law applies to Tunick deleting his own data?". People think because you are standing in Atlanta/Hartsfield you are in the US, but that isn't really true until you are admitted although it is fairly dense shade of gray legally (notwithstanding trump government opinions always being read in the trump government's favor).
Adeel Hassan
Breaking news reporter
W
Winston Smith
Cambridge MA
Most americans seem to be unaware that in the "border zone", the rights you take for granted evaporate. I am astounded that Mr Tunick, given his activities, took his personal phone with him on an overseas journey, giving the government an opportunity to attempt seizing his private data. Immigration attorneys travel with burners and are starting to recommend to legal non-citizen residents to use a "travel phone" if they want to preserve their privacy.
Adeel Hassan
Breaking news reporter
Adeel Hassan, a New York-based reporter for The Times, covers breaking news and other topics.
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4) England’s Ancient Trees Are Dying in the Heat
Extreme temperatures and drought are adding to the stress on oak trees that have lived for hundreds of years and play a key role in the national imagination.
By Claire Moses, Reporting from London, Aug. 21, 2026
The Major Oak at Sherwood Forest Nature Reserve in Nottinghamshire, England, in May. Credit...Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, via Associated Press
When Sally Kellard moved in 2018 to her home in Shropshire, in the English countryside, the old oak tree near her front door had a vibrant canopy of leaves.
In the eight years since, the tree — the Crow Leasow Oak, estimated to be about 1,000 years old — has withered nearly to death, with only a single living bough remaining, Ms. Kellard said.
“To be living next to such an iconic tree is a real honor,” said Ms. Kellard, who runs a bed-and-breakfast. “To think we’d see his final demise is heartbreaking.”
The tree is thought to be one of up to 3,500 ancient oaks in England that are more than 600 years old. Many of these trees, which hold a significant place in English history, culture and imagination, have been suffering in sweltering temperatures and consecutive years of drought, according to Ed Pyne, a conservation adviser at the nonprofit Woodland Trust.
The threat was underscored in June when the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, perhaps the most famous tree in the country, estimated at 800 to 1,200 years old, died. Conservationists cited a combination of factors, including climate change and over-tourism.
Dr. Pyne said that the demise of the Major Oak was not unique: England is losing one or two such trees a year.
“Losing trees of that caliber is something that’s just going to increase and increase as we go on,” he said.
England is at the tail end of one of its hottest summers on record, and the warming climate adds to the stress on trees, Dr. Pyne said. This month, a wildfire at the New Forest, a national park in England, destroyed a “significant number of ancient beech and oak trees which have been standing at this site for hundreds of years,” according to Forestry England, a government agency.
Ancient trees are less resilient than younger ones. They often suffer from compaction around their roots because humans and animals have walked around them for hundreds of years, making it harder for the roots to absorb water. And the dry conditions mean there is less water in the ground anyway, said Jon Stokes, the director of tree science and research at the Tree Council, a nonprofit in London.
“If you’re an already stressed old tree and then you get a soil moisture deficit drought as well, it’s not going to do you any huge favors,” he said.
The loss of ancient trees reverberates far beyond their surroundings because they house multiple species, said Dr. Pyne, who described a tree as “its own ecosystem.”
“It’s truly irreplaceable,” Dr. Pyne said. “We know that we don’t have the next generation of trees to replace these trees.”
Here are a few of England’s oldest and most noteworthy trees that experts say are in critical condition.
This oak, one of the oldest trees in England, stands near the town of Ludlow, whose recorded history goes back to the 11th century, according to the local government. (The nearby Ludlow Castle is where Henry VIII’s older brother died, which led to Henry VIII becoming king.)
Ms. Kellard, who owns the 400-year-old house beside it, said local folklore holds that proposing under an ancient oak bodes well for a marriage.
Old Knobbley Oak
This 800-year-old tree in Essex, northeast of London, potentially tells a lurid story.
The area was home to Matthew Hopkins, who styled himself a witch hunter in the 17th century. Locals say that the tree was used as a hiding place by women he accused of being witches.
King John’s Oak
King John’s Oak is estimated to be over 800 years old and has a circumference of nearly 33 feet. It grew in a medieval deer park in Devon, in southwestern England, and is named after King John, who ruled England in the early 13th century.
According to folklore, the monarch hunted in the surrounding area of the tree.
Tea Party Oak
This more than 700-year-old tree is in Ickworth Park in Suffolk, in eastern England.
The tree takes its name from a gathering that the 4th Marquess and Marchioness of Bristol hosted beneath its branches in the early 20th century. The event became a tradition for children from a nearby village, according to the National Trust.
The tree is home to more than 300 species, including bats, birds and small mammals, according to the National Trust.
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5) How a Billionaire Shaped Trump’s Homelessness Policy
As Republicans have embraced tough measures to clear the streets, no group has led the way more than the Cicero Institute, founded by the venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale.
By Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle, Aug. 22, 2026
Ellen Barry writes about mental health. Jason DeParle covers anti-poverty policy.
“A pugnacious presence on social media — he recently called for public hangings of repeat violent offenders — Mr. Lonsdale said he is fighting in part to defend ‘capitalist society.’ He argues that a corrupt ‘homelessness industrial complex’ dominated by liberal social service groups wants to increase homelessness to discredit society. ‘Some of them are cynical Marxists who clearly want mayhem and want to show that our civilization is broken,’ he said.”
A homeless encampment on the south side of Indianapolis in January. The Cicero Institute targeted Indiana to push a bill to make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the street. Credit...Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar, via USA Today Network — Reuters
A team from the Cicero Institute, an upstart think tank, flew to Indiana this year to help make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the street.
It was their third attempt. Even in the conservative state, previous efforts to ban street camping had failed. Catholic leaders said the measure would hurt the poor, and sheriffs had warned that arrests would crowd the jails. “We’re Hoosiers — we’re better than that,” a Republican state senator, Ron Alting, said last year, urging a more caring approach.
But much had changed since the group, founded by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire ally of President Trump’s, had made its initial efforts. Mr. Trump had issued an executive order on homelessness that so fully reflected Cicero’s agenda it was hard to tell where the group stopped and White House policy began. The sponsor of the Indiana law was fresh from a Cicero conference, Cicero lobbyists worked the bill, and three Cicero analysts testified that the threat of arrests would push homeless people into treatment for mental illness or addiction.
The ban passed just before the legislature adjourned.
With homelessness near record levels, Republicans have embraced tough measures to clear the streets, and no group has led the way more than the Cicero Institute. Mr. Lonsdale formed the institute eight years ago with vague goals — to promote “liberty, accountability, and transparency” — and no mention of homelessness. Now it has commandeered Republican homelessness policy, upending debate over an intractable problem with life-and-death stakes and showing how rich donors can shape the safety net.
Twenty-one states have considered camping bans or other Cicero-backed homelessness laws in recent years, and 16 have passed them. But the group’s sway goes further: It is working with the Trump administration to transform federal homelessness aid away from housing subsidies and toward the forced treatment of substance abuse or mental disorders.
Echoing Cicero’s thoughts and at times its very words, the administration says federal policy, called Housing First, neglects the root causes of homelessness by providing rental subsidies but leaving treatment optional. Opponents of Mr. Trump’s plan, which is blocked in court, say that forced treatment fails and housing aid gets people off the street.
Substantial evidence shows that Housing First succeeds in getting the chronically homeless housed, at least in the short term. But it is expensive, and the evidence also shows it has not consistently improved mental or physical health or lowered death rates. The treatment-first approach that Cicero favors has not been rigorously studied.
For many years, Housing First enjoyed bipartisan consensus; the first Trump administration took office embracing it. Cicero has helped make it a conservative epithet. “Obviously, our work has been one of the main influences” in shaping administration views, Mr. Lonsdale said in an interview.
The White House and the Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to comment on Cicero’s influence.
A co-founder of Palantir, the data-mining firm, Mr. Lonsdale, 43, is an unlikely force in homelessness policy. He brings to it vast wealth but no experience with homeless services and a distrust of conventional expertise. He argues that his outsider’s perspective gives him and the young generalists he hires a fresh view.
A pugnacious presence on social media — he recently called for public hangings of repeat violent offenders — Mr. Lonsdale said he is fighting in part to defend “capitalist society.” He argues that a corrupt “homelessness industrial complex” dominated by liberal social service groups wants to increase homelessness to discredit society.
With homelessness near record levels, Republicans have embraced tough measures to clear the streets, and no group has led the way more than the Cicero Institute. Mr. Lonsdale formed the institute eight years ago with vague goals — to promote “liberty, accountability, and transparency” — and no mention of homelessness. Now it has commandeered Republican homelessness policy, upending debate over an intractable problem with life-and-death stakes and showing how rich donors can shape the safety net.
Twenty-one states have considered camping bans or other Cicero-backed homelessness laws in recent years, and 16 have passed them. But the group’s sway goes further: It is working with the Trump administration to transform federal homelessness aid away from housing subsidies and toward the forced treatment of substance abuse or mental disorders.
Echoing Cicero’s thoughts and at times its very words, the administration says federal policy, called Housing First, neglects the root causes of homelessness by providing rental subsidies but leaving treatment optional. Opponents of Mr. Trump’s plan, which is blocked in court, say that forced treatment fails and housing aid gets people off the street.
Substantial evidence shows that Housing First succeeds in getting the chronically homeless housed, at least in the short term. But it is expensive, and the evidence also shows it has not consistently improved mental or physical health or lowered death rates. The treatment-first approach that Cicero favors has not been rigorously studied.
For many years, Housing First enjoyed bipartisan consensus; the first Trump administration took office embracing it. Cicero has helped make it a conservative epithet. “Obviously, our work has been one of the main influences” in shaping administration views, Mr. Lonsdale said in an interview.
The White House and the Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to comment on Cicero’s influence.
A co-founder of Palantir, the data-mining firm, Mr. Lonsdale, 43, is an unlikely force in homelessness policy. He brings to it vast wealth but no experience with homeless services and a distrust of conventional expertise. He argues that his outsider’s perspective gives him and the young generalists he hires a fresh view.
A pugnacious presence on social media — he recently called for public hangings of repeat violent offenders — Mr. Lonsdale said he is fighting in part to defend “capitalist society.” He argues that a corrupt “homelessness industrial complex” dominated by liberal social service groups wants to increase homelessness to discredit society.
“Some of them are cynical Marxists who clearly want mayhem and want to show that our civilization is broken,” he said.
Many on the left return the scorn, calling Mr. Lonsdale an emblem of the inequality that creates homelessness — a billionaire fighting a reverse class war to preserve an unjust order.
“He’s using the homelessness crisis to deflect attention from the broken economic system that both causes homelessness and enables people like him to become billionaires in the first place,” said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center, a progressive advocacy group.
As Mr. Lonsdale taps his fortune to shape views, it is easy to see a story of money and politics. But it is also a story of public fatigue. With unsheltered homelessness up more than half in a decade to about 266,000 people, Cicero succeeded in part by putting the status quo on trial.
A signature Cicero line is that there is “nothing compassionate” about leaving people on the street. Echoed by Mr. Trump, it may send an army of marginalized people down an untested path.
Banning Public Sleeping, State by State
Asked why he focused on homelessness, Mr. Lonsdale often begins by saying that a homeless person harassed his wife as she pushed their child in a stroller in San Francisco. “She just got screamed at, multiple times, and threatened by someone who has clearly lost their mind,” he said in an interview.
But Mr. Lonsdale’s conservatism took root much earlier. He cites Ayn Rand and Austrian free-market economists as teenage influences and used his perch as editor of The Stanford Review, a conservative publication, to assail “political correctness.” He blasted a student movement to raise custodians’ pay, warning it “destroys incentive for them to improve themselves.”
The magazine’s alumni include Peter Thiel, the libertarian investor who helped start PayPal, where Mr. Lonsdale landed an internship and found a mentor. They helped start Palantir in 2003 when Mr. Lonsdale was 21. He left after six years and became a tech investor. Forbes now estimates his fortune at $3.5 billion.
The subject of homelessness never arose in 2019 when Mr. Lonsdale hired Cicero’s first analyst, Judge Glock, who tackled technocratic topics like zoning laws and published into a vacuum.
Then Mr. Glock turned to encampments and interest surged. “The one thing that took off was homelessness,” he said.
Mr. Lonsdale left San Francisco for Austin in 2020, but encountered another homelessness crisis. The City Council had lifted a camping ban, encampments were growing, and Mr. Lonsdale gave $40,000 to a ballot measure drive to bring the ban back. Even in liberal Austin, the measure passed easily.
With few rival groups working on homelessness, the institute had its lane. After Texas passed a statewide camping ban in 2021, Cicero made it into a model bill to take to other states.
Cicero was too small to matter in Washington, but about two dozen states had Republican control of the legislature and governorship. For harried legislators frustrated by encampments, Cicero’s bill offered a stance. And with no housing or services included, it required no spending.
“In most states, state legislators don’t even have policy staff,” explained Jared Meyer, an early Cicero recruit, on Mr. Lonsdale’s podcast. “The best thing you can do is be an outsourced staff.”
Cicero first found success in Missouri, where a measure to create a camping ban succeeded as part of an unrelated bill the governor signed.
“We did it,” Mr. Lonsdale wrote.
A win in one state — any state — built momentum. By the time Missouri’s supreme court reversed the law on procedural grounds the following year, Cicero was on its way. Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah were among the states where camping bans followed.
Success flowed in part from Mr. Lonsdale’s wealth. Together with a nonprofit lobbying arm, Cicero Action, the institute hired lobbyists, commissioned polls, made political donations and invited lawmakers to study tours. Mr. Lonsdale’s personal company gave $1 million in 2024 to a PAC that supported Mr. Trump.
Declining to say how much he spends on Cicero, Mr. Lonsdale called it “well less” than $15 million a year and called the sum “very small” for the clout it brings.
But Cicero’s influence also grew because the problem got worse. In Kentucky, where Republicans passed a Cicero bill in 2024 over a Democratic governor’s veto, unsheltered homelessness had more than doubled in five years.
The head of the group’s homelessness work, Devon Kurtz, is a 28-year-old Quaker with a background in prison ministry and often appears as earnest as Mr. Lonsdale can be caustic. His claim that camping bans save lives by encouraging treatment has drawn retorts from many in the field, who say that there is no evidence to support it and that treatment is in short supply.
“It’s frankly absurd,” said Dr. Margot Kushel, a physician who directs the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco. “People are desperate for treatment and can’t get it.”
Since Mr. Trump cut Medicaid, which helps finance treatment, “it’s hard not to see the cynicism in this,” she added.
But Mr. Kurtz says many homeless people need the push that the threat of fines or arrest can provide. “They need that accountability; they need that supervision,” he said.
Finding Sway in Trump’s Washington
Though Cicero rose by focusing on states, Mr. Trump’s re-election expanded opportunity: Most homelessness policy and money come from Washington.
By congressional design, most of the $4 billion a year that the government spends goes to Housing First — long-term rental aid with voluntary treatment. Cicero wanted the opposite, temporary “transitional housing” (capped at two years) with treatment mandates.
During the campaign, Mr. Trump had released a seething video that pitted “dangerously deranged” people who “squat and do drugs” against “hard-working, law-abiding citizens.” Still, new policy was slow to emerge. Scott Centorino, who worked on homelessness issues at the White House Domestic Policy Council, later offered an explanation: The council wanted guidance from groups “in the trenches” like Cicero.
“We didn’t know what to do about it from a federal level,” he said at a closed-door Cicero conference in June, which an attendee taped. “We didn’t have somebody in our team, and I’ll include myself in this, who had a really strong grasp of what the federal authorities were in this space.”
In helping draft the executive order, he consulted with Cicero “to kind of bring you a sense of what the solutions might be.”
Asked about the comment, Mr. Centorino — who is now a Cicero Institute fellow — said in an email he also consulted with federal homelessness officials and other outside groups.
If there was doubt of Cicero’s influence, Mr. Trump’s order dispelled it. Cicero rejected Housing First. The order pledged to end it. Cicero wanted camping bans. The order vowed to enforce them. Cicero wanted more civil commitments of people with mental illnesses. The order endorsed the idea seven times. A few years earlier, Mr. Lonsdale expressed regret that people hesitated to call the homeless “vagrants and bums.” Mr. Trump directed his order at “fighting vagrancy.”
Ann Oliva, the chief executive of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, an advocacy group, called the order “the most harmful policy proposal on homelessness in my career.”
A few months after the executive order, HUD issued an annual document called a Notice of Funding Opportunity. It had long been the lifeblood of Housing First, directing about 90 percent of homelessness aid to long-term housing. Following the principles in Mr. Trump’s order, HUD sought to move two-thirds of the money to time-limited programs with work rules or treatment mandates.
Mr. Lonsdale exulted.
“A lot of the permanent bureaucracy is in the hard left,” he said in an interview soon after. “We’re stopping them from doing it their way and forcing them to do it a different way.”
Opponents sued, arguing that only Congress could alter the program so profoundly and warning that as many as 170,000 formerly homeless people could lose housing. A federal judge blocked the initial plan and a revised version (which cited Cicero four times), both times on procedural grounds. HUD is appealing. In the meantime, the money has been dispensed under pre-Trump rules.
“Housing First has fueled a self-serving homeless industrial complex,” and “enabled dangerous encampments and addiction,” Scott Turner, the HUD secretary, said in a statement.
Dennis Culhane, a homelessness scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, contends the opposite, saying the problem is a shortage of Housing First funds.
Examining a year of national shelter data, he found that only 13 percent of the chronically homeless got housing aid. By contrast, 48 percent of veterans got housing, due to a veterans program with much greater funding that operates on Housing First principles. Veterans homelessness has dropped by more than half since 2010.
“If Housing First didn’t work, we wouldn’t have seen that success,” Professor Culhane said. “But outside of veterans, we’re greatly underfunded.”
Mr. Kurtz sees little need for rental subsidies, arguing “most people can pay their bills.” Professor Culhane said the idea that homeless people do not need housing aid was “a radical assertion that runs contrary to experience and common sense.”
Holdouts Give Way
When Mr. Kurtz returned to Indiana in January for a third effort to ban sleeping in public, the arguments were the same, but the politics had changed: Mr. Trump’s order had labeled the issue a presidential priority. The governor, Mike Braun, backed the ban. Resistance would be noticed.
The Senate sponsor, Cyndi Carrasco, had recently returned from a Cicero conference and presented the bill in Cicero terms. “It is not compassionate to allow our neighbors to die on the street,” she said. (She declined an interview request.) Mr. Centorino, now with Cicero Action, told lawmakers the bill was a “compassionate step.”
Still, the bill would not have cleared the Senate if a handful of Republicans had not changed their minds.
The most surprising was Mr. Alting, the senator who had told colleagues the previous year that a camping ban would pass “over my dead body” and that “Indiana was better than that.”
Mr. Alting declined interview requests. In the Senate, he said that the governor had pledged funding if mental health needs grew in jails. Mr. Alting called the promise a “game changer.”
Mr. Kurtz found the victory especially satisfying. Not long ago, he noted, Republicans had little to say about homelessness policy. Now they had detailed plans, an effective message, and an ally in Mr. Trump.
He credited his boss, the founder of the Cicero Institute.
“If we were to think about the conservative position on homelessness even in the first Trump administration, it’s quite unclear,” Mr. Kurtz said. “Joe Lonsdale articulated the conservative position on homelessness.”
Georgia Gee and Ryan Mac contributed reporting.
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6) Ankle Monitors Leave Haitians in Ohio Feeling Shaken and Shackled
The devices, which will make it easier for authorities to locate immigrants in Springfield if large-scale deportations begin, have intensified a sense of dread.
By Miriam Jordan, Aug. 22, 2026
Miriam Jordan reported from Springfield, a city between Dayton and Columbus, transformed by Haitians who have arrived there in recent years.
Before dawn on Wednesday, Jonas Julien waited in the darkness of his Springfield, Ohio, home for his ride to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office about an hour away.
The 35-year-old Haitian immigrant had completed another grueling 12-hour shift at 3:30 a.m. After a quick bite and shower, he had stretched on the couch to avoid waking his wife and their 2-month-old daughter. But sleep never came.
“I don’t know what awaits me, and I am just exhausted from the worry,” Mr. Julien said after climbing into the back seat of a Toyota Corolla, clutching a folder of immigration documents that included an active asylum petition and a work permit valid until 2029.
By the time he returned to his wife and daughter about 10 hours later, a clunky black band with a blinking light would be clamped around his left ankle. He would have an order to report back to ICE in a few weeks. And he would be afraid for their future.
Mr. Julien is among hundreds of Haitians in Springfield who have been summoned to ICE offices, according to the Haitian Support Center, a local organization. The group estimates that more than 100 people have been fitted with ankle monitors.
A city of 60,000 between Dayton and Columbus, Springfield emerged in recent years as hub of Haitian immigration and its newcomers a target of attacks from President Trump.
Following the termination of a legal protection called Temporary Protected Status that allowed 330,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States, his administration has launched an aggressive electronic monitoring campaign centered on the small city.
Springfield, home to between 10,000 and 15,000 Haitians, has also seen a robust ICE presence and more than 20 arrests since last week.
Fitting ankle monitors on noncitizens without a criminal history who remain in compliance with their immigration cases has little precedent. The Department of Homeland Security has provided no official rationale for the electronic surveillance, which lawyers say the Trump administration had previously reserved mainly for immigrants released from detention.
The ankle monitors will make it far easier for federal authorities to locate the immigrants if full-scale deportations begin. In Springfield’s Haitian communities, there is widespread fear that the monitors are a precursor to detention and forced return to Haiti, where the economy is in ruins and returnees are prime targets for extortion and kidnapping by armed gangs.
For now, removal flights to Haiti have occurred only once a month this year. The first since T.P.S. ended last month landed on Thursday in the northern city of Cap-Haitien with 170 people, according to the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a national advocacy organization, and the plane carried some former T.P.S. recipients.
In Springfield, the sense of dread has intensified since last week, when federal agents began detaining Haitians during daily roving patrols. On Thursday morning, a Haitian pastor was arrested at a gas station with two other people, according to local leaders, who said they might not be aware of all the detentions. More were detained on Friday.
The spate of arrests has prompted many Haitians to stay home, and even those who still have valid employment authorization tied to asylum cases are missing work.
“People are in extreme mental distress,” said Rose Thamar-Joseph, operations chief at the Haitian Support Center. “We are going to need professional help, social workers.”
In response to questions about the ankle monitors and ICE presence in Springfield, a DHS statement said that the agency does not discuss ongoing or future operations.
“What we would say now is, it’s closing time, which means you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,” the statement said.
During Mr. Julien’s ride to the ICE office, Benjamin Louis, the driver, told him that he had been escorting Haitians to appointments in Cincinnati or Columbus since T.P.S. was rescinded.
Mr. Julien was likely to be presented with two options, Mr. Louis told him: Agree to a government payment of $2,600 per family member to voluntarily leave the United States, or wear an ankle monitor to track his movements. If he chose the monitor, he would be told that he must stay within a 75-mile radius of his home.
Mr. Julien replied that returning to Haiti was not an option.
He was the sole provider for his family in Springfield and relatives in his homeland, he said. His wife had left her job at an Amazon warehouse near the city to care for their newborn, and his uncle, who also lives in Springfield, had lost his job when T.P.S. was revoked.
After that exchange with Mr. Louis, Mr. Julien grew somber.
His face lit up only when asked if he had pictures of his little girl, which he proudly pulled up on his phone.
About 10:30 a.m., Mr. Julien and Mr. Louis entered a nondescript building, devoid of federal insignia, in an industrial park across from an assisted-living facility in Blue Ash, outside Cincinnati.
About 90 minutes later, Mr. Julien emerged visibly shaken, a monitor hugging his left ankle and a plastic bag containing a charger and power cables in his hand. It was past noon, but he said he had no appetite for lunch.
On the way back to Springfield, Mr. Julien gazed out the window, pensive beneath his leather cap. He rested his head in his hands and tried to nod off, to no avail.
“It’s so humiliating,” he said softly. “I feel just awful.”
“I haven’t committed any crime,” he continued. “I have complied with the terms of my immigration case. I’ve worked hard.”
At a practical level, Mr. Julien worried whether the bulky device would fit into his work boots, mandatory on the job at a vehicle-parts manufacturer.
Once back in Springfield, Mr. Louis, a certified Haitian-Creole interpreter, drove directly to the Haitian Support Center, where he knew American volunteers were filling out requests for immigration judges to authorize the removal of ankle monitors from people with medical conditions and other issues.
“These things are huge,” said Betsy Director, a volunteer who was assisting Mr. Julien. She described them as, “not bracelets, more like shackles.”
“It’s difficult for people to put on their work gear,” she said. “They’re slapping them on the elderly. Yesterday I saw a grandma.”
On the digital form, she typed that Mr. Julien had been an upstanding member of the Springfield community for three years and five months. He had a stable home, steady employment and a young family.
By the time he finally walked through the front door at home again, he had been awake for more than 24 hours.
He scooped up his baby girl and held her tight. A smile spread across his face. The aroma of beans and rice on the stove wafted from the kitchen.
For now, he could eat and rest.
His next ICE appointment is Sept. 18.
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7) Companies Shouldn’t Set Prices One Customer at a Time
By Stephanie T. Nguyen, Aug. 22, 2026
Ms. Nguyen was the chief technologist of the Federal Trade Commission from 2022 to 2025.
The discounts, promotions and offers you receive from businesses from Starbucks to Kroger to Target to Home Depot are all too often targeted calculations about what to charge you, built from data including your location, browsing history and social media activities. This information can be used to build hidden profiles of customers’ intelligence, abilities and preferences, which can signal how much you are willing to pay for any given item or service. When you are presented with a deal, you may not have realized that algorithms have already invisibly sized you up with the goal of squeezing your wallet.
This is a part of the commercial surveillance business model. Over the past decade, companies built up infrastructure to harness vast amounts of consumer data, using it to target individuals with unfair price hikes. Now, the concept of a price is itself degraded. Left in its place are numbers engineered for individual consumers, based not on market conditions but on the weaponization of your personal data. Policymakers should mandate that companies offer a real price — one that must be simple, public, accessible and consistent in a given market, with rules on discounts and loyalty programs to promote fairness and protect consumers and competition. No more targeted price adjustments based on surveillance. No more hidden costs or fees. No more prices that change on the fly.
Some argue that targeting and personalization are simply how modern discounts work, a natural evolution of coupons. But there is a meaningful difference between a public offer and a surveillance-driven one. The Sunday circular goes to everyone in the neighborhood: The terms are visible, the discount is available to anyone who clips it, and consumers know what they’re signing up for. Surveillance pricing works in reverse. Companies collect data, infer your willingness to pay and set a price, without you ever knowing your neighbor was charged less for the same thing. One rewards a consumer’s action; the other exploits a consumer’s profile.
In 2022, Target settled a case brought by multiple California counties accusing the company of advertising one price on the website or app outside of the store and then changing the price once customers were in the store. When a traveler is looking for flights or accommodations, sites can show different prices based on the customer’s location — higher for those searching from, say, the San Francisco Bay Area, lower for Phoenix or Kansas City. Last year, when a former Washington Post reporter requested data Starbucks held about him, he noticed that the more he visited the coffee company, the fewer discounts he received. But The Post may have a similar problem. One recent class-action suit alleged that The Washington Post used readers’ demographic and user data to build detailed profiles, charging more for its most loyal customers. (The Post has not publicly responded to the suit.)
Should governments choose to use them, regulators already have some tools to address nefarious pricing practices. Existing consumer protection and privacy laws have a role to play, and anti-competitive practices — like dominant online marketplaces favoring their own products, price fixing by algorithms and manipulating search results — can be addressed through antitrust enforcement. Yet existing laws will take us only so far, and disclosure alone won’t fix the harms. As a former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, I’ve worked on enforcing laws against companies that build their success on skulduggery. Our work targeting surveillance pricing and bringing cases against numerous data brokers for predatory collection and data abuses, while helpful, could not end these practices alone. A real price law would help.
Lawmakers can ensure that the genuine base price is a ceiling, not a prohibition on discounts offered to all customers or loyalty programs that do not exploit customers’ data. Real pricing would target loyalty programs that have all too often become data-extraction mechanisms, where companies take vast quantities of personal information and give consumers benefits that may or may not be genuine. Advertised as money savers, these programs can actually lead to higher fees, reduced benefits, coercive upselling and barriers to exit.
Critics will say similar pricing laws will kill discounts, loyalty programs and happy hours. They won’t. A law protecting standardized pricing would prohibit charging anyone above the genuine base price, and would not prohibit discounts below it. It would ensure that true discounts and loyalty programs are protected — and not undermined by programs that take advantage of consumers. An effective law would also preserve transparent exceptions for discounts aimed at groups like veterans, seniors, students and teachers, allowing special pricing for those who depend on discounts, without permitting legislative loopholes for predatory pricing.
Colorado has shown how state regulators could act by clarifying relevant state privacy laws with loyalty provisions to ensure they benefit consumers. Lawmakers should also ban the sale and sharing of certain sensitive consumer data and prohibit its use to build profiles that determine prices. Federal policy should address the full surveillance data supply chain, from retailers to data brokers, and hold each player accountable when those practices harm consumers. The last vital step is creating private rights of action. When consumers are harmed by corporate wrongdoing — whether through hidden fees, breaches of privacy or discriminatory pricing — they should be able to sue, and not be confined to arbitration agreements that benefit companies. That would create a distributed enforcement network that could help professional regulators crack down on malefactors.
Mandating a real price will ultimately also help companies become healthier. Smaller companies cannot compete on a level playing field when billion-dollar tech companies can build surveillance systems that raise barriers to entry and make it harder for new competitors to enter the market. Forcing companies to drop the surveillance and focus on making good products that people want to buy and selling them for fair, honest prices is not a punishment. Regulation is not a distortion of the free market. It is a way to make it fairer.
Fortunately, surveillance pricing is drawing criticism from both sides of the aisle. “We need national safeguards,” Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a Democrat, said at a hearing he and a Republican colleague, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, recently held on surveillance pricing. “It’s working people who are going to be paying more,” Mr. Hawley noted, “because the whole point here is to maximize the profit of these already wildly profitable corporations.”
The search for a good deal has become a digital slot machine consumers can’t walk away from. Policymakers owe American consumers better. Establishing a real price law and regulating surveillance pricing and discounts would restore basic principles of the marketplace — where consumers can see the real price, reasonably compare their options and know when a “deal” is really a deal.
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8) Frank Smith, Who Served 70 Years for Murder, Dies at 101
One of the longest-serving prisoners in American history, he was sent to death row in 1950 before his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
By Richard Sandomir, Aug. 22, 2026
On June 7, 1954, two hours before Mr. Smith was to be executed, Connecticut’s Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted his death sentence. Jared Charney for The Boston Globe
Frank Smith, who served 70 years in prison — one of the longest known terms of incarceration in American history — for fatally shooting a Connecticut yacht club’s night watchman during a robbery in 1949, died on June 25 in Rocky Hill, Conn. He was 101.
His death, at a nursing home to which he had been paroled, was confirmed by the Connecticut Department of Correction and was previously reported by The Boston Globe and Greenwich Time.
In 1950, Mr. Smith was convicted of the first-degree murder of the watchman, 68-year-old Grover Hart, and sentenced to death. Mr. Smith, who insisted on his innocence, eventually received eight reprieves from the electric chair in Wethersfield, Conn.
His case attracted the attention of Aaron Cohen, a realtor in West Hartford and a member of the American League to Abolish the Death Penalty. Mr. Cohen visited Mr. Smith and orchestrated a telegram- and letter-writing campaign to stop the execution.
“I did not believe all Smith told me at first, and it took me time to believe him,” Mr. Cohen told The Hartford Courant in 1951, adding: “I am convinced that an innocent man is going to his death. He has already died too many times in his cell.”
In 1954, on the eve of Mr. Smith’s last scheduled execution, a Courant reporter wrote that he “spends most of his time trying to figure out how he was convicted. He discusses his case with anyone who’ll listen.”
The article described how, before a planned execution a year earlier, a chaplain had visited Mr. Smith in his cell. “All he wanted to talk about was his trial,” the chaplain recalled.
On June 7, 1954, two hours before he was to be strapped into the chair, the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted his death sentence.
“Thanks be to God!” Mr. Smith said in the hearing room, where his parents, three sisters and two brothers were watching.
Seven decades later, he remained haunted by the electric chair — “still an object of primal, almost talismanic fear,” Annalisa Quinn wrote in a 2023 profile in The Boston Globe Magazine. “‘It cooks you,’ he would repeat, folding into himself. ‘It cooks you.’”
In 2012, Connecticut outlawed the death penalty.
Except for a brief escape attempt in 1967 and nearly 10 months on parole (which he violated) in 1975, Mr. Smith remained in prison until 2020. The state then paroled him to 60 West, a private facility that helps the state care for formerly incarcerated people who are difficult to place in traditional nursing homes. There, he lived in a secure unit.
A spokesman for the correction department said Mr. Smith’s six years at 60 West meant that he had served 76 years of his life sentence.
It is not known if that is officially America’s longest imprisonment. “Seventy years is a long time,” Paul Wright, the editor of Prison Legal News, wrote in an email, “but I think there are probably some more out there just because the U.S. locks up so many people and also locks them up for such long periods of time.”
Francis Clifford Smith was born on Sept. 1, 1924, in Stamford, Conn., and at some point moved to the Noroton neighborhood of nearby Darien. His mother was Doris (Curtis) Smith, and his father, also named Francis, was a roofer, according to The Globe, which reported that Frank was sent to a reform school when he was 10 or 11.
He then served time as a teenager in a reformatory for young men and, after escaping and assaulting a guard with a deadly weapon, was sent to a state prison for four years. He later worked as a messenger for a numbers racketeer.
On the night of July 23, 1949, two men broke into and burglarized the Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich. By some accounts, Mr. Hart surprised them, and one or both of the robbers shot him.
Before he died, Mr. Hart told police that one of the men wore a bandanna; Mr. Smith was known to police for wearing one. After a manhunt, he was arrested in the woods in Wilton, Conn. George Lowden, his accused accomplice, was also arrested.
Mr. Lowden struck a plea deal for second-degree murder, and he implicated Mr. Smith. During the trial, Mr. Smith denied his involvement in the crime, and his father testified that he found his son asleep in his car on the night of the shooting.
The jury’s verdict against Mr. Smith was clouded by several factors, including Mr. Lowden’s refusal to testify at the trial. Then, two years after the trial, a witness recanted testimony that had suggested Mr. Smith’s culpability.
In 1953, David Blumetti, an armed robber from Stamford who was imprisoned in Alabama, confessed to the murder and said that he and Mr. Lowden had been partners in the crime.
Mr. Blumetti said that he knew Mr. Smith from a previous prison stint. He said that the two men met earlier on the day of the robbery and murder, drove around in Mr. Smith’s gray Cadillac and discussed places they could rob. By Mr. Blumetti’s account, Mr. Smith decided against the robbery, and Mr. Blumetti said that he borrowed Mr. Smith’s car, picked up Mr. Lowden and, with Mr. Lowden, fired at Mr. Hart.
“They’ll be executing the wrong man,” Mr. Blumetti told The Connecticut Post in the days before the state pardons board met to commute Mr. Smith’s death sentence.
At that hearing, Leo F. Carroll, the state police major who had interrogated Mr. Smith after his arrest, told the panel that he believed Mr. Blumetti’s confession and that Mr. Smith was innocent.
“I’m positive he didn’t kill Grover Hart,” Mr. Carroll said. “I’m not even sure he was present at the murder.” Pleading for Mr. Smith’s life, Mr. Carroll said, “In the name of Him who we must all someday ask for mercy, I beg each of you to have mercy in this case and permit Frank Smith to live.”
Mr. Smith never got a new trial, and he was never exonerated. In 1964, he sought his freedom when he filed a 259-page petition for a writ of habeas corpus — a legal challenge of improper detention — that contained 221 instances of what he said were his constitutional rights having been violated. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected it.
In 1967, Mr. Smith was being held in the minimum-security division of a state prison in Enfield, Conn., and working as an auto mechanic when he stole a truck and escaped for 12 days. After a manhunt, he was arrested in Winthrop, Mass.
He was paroled in early 1975 but returned to prison late that year after being arrested for larceny and possession of dangerous weapons.
Not much was heard from him after that. He was in his late 90s by the time Ms. Quinn of The Globe, who was interested in how decades of incarceration affect people, began visiting him in the nursing home in 2022. She wrote that he was so small that she could have easily picked him up.
“Even now, Smith seems to live perpetually in the time of his trial,” she wrote. “He has mild dementia, and doesn’t always recall what he did a day ago. But he remembers his public defenders, members of the jury, who said what and when. He can’t stop replaying these details for anyone who will listen.”
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9) Police Chief in Mississippi Regularly Used Racist Slurs, Private Text Messages Reveal
Text exchanges obtained by reporters show troubling messages sent by the chief of a Mississippi police department facing an uproar over the fatal shooting of a 1-year-old boy in June.
By Mukta Joshi and Joseph Cranney, Aug. 22, 2026
Mukta Joshi is a reporter at Mississippi Today. She is spending a year as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow. Joseph Cranney is a reporter at Verite News.
The fatal police shooting of a 1-year-old Black toddler in June became a flashpoint in Senatobia, Miss., a small city about 40 miles south of Memphis, after years of complaints from residents about discriminatory and overzealous policing.
The toddler, Kohen Wiley, was killed when police officers shot at a vehicle he was in after they responded to a shoplifting call at a local Walmart store.
Last year, the city’s elected aldermen had forced out its previous police chief after a string of controversies, including an incident in which one of his officers had arrested a 10-year-old Black boy who had urinated in public. But the new police chief, brought in last fall for his “firm, fair and focused” leadership style, routinely used racist slurs in private text conversations with a colleague even after he was appointed, reporters for Mississippi Today, Verite News and The New York Times have learned.
In one text message, the chief, Harold Vanderford, described having a “racist moment.” In another, he wrote that he “almost beat a nigger and white woman’s ass a few minutes ago.”
Chief Vanderford used the racist slur, spelled various ways, more than a dozen times in a series of 10 text conversations dating back to last summer and continuing after he became chief. The texts were provided to reporters by the person who had received them, who said they came from Chief Vanderford. Three other acquaintances confirmed that the phone number associated with the messages belonged to the chief.
Three months before the Walmart shooting, Chief Vanderford texted a colleague to lament Mississippi State University’s performance in a college sporting event, referring to a player using a racist slur.
In at least two instances in April, Chief Vanderford used the slur to refer to himself or his white friend, text messages show. On another occasion, he texted that he was drunk and that he had “screamed” the slur 15 times, loud enough in hopes that his neighbors would hear.
On Thanksgiving Day, the chief texted that he “just had a racist moment on Goodman Road,” a street in Southaven.
Chief Vanderford did not respond to phone and email messages left by reporters, or notes left at his home and the police station. The mayor of Senatobia, Greg Graves, did not respond to a request for comment.
“It is completely unacceptable for any law enforcement in Mississippi to use racial slurs, whether in private or in public, because no official can protect and serve a community while harboring hatred toward its people,” said Charles Taylor, the executive director of the Mississippi chapter of the N.A.A.C.P.
When he took over the department, Chief Vanderford, a 60-year-old native of Greenville and 29-year veteran of law enforcement, vowed his tenure would focus on “re-establishing and solidifying trust” with the community.
Then, in June, his officers confronted Vellesiya Wiley and Latoya Ferrell after they were accused by people in a Walmart of stealing baby clothes and a pack of diapers. The pair got into a vehicle and officers surrounded them with raised guns.
Ms. Wiley, who was in the passenger seat holding her son, said that as they drove away, she lifted up the boy in an effort to make sure officers saw him. Then she heard three or four shots.
According to a statement released the day of the incident by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which is investigating the shooting, officers had attempted to stop the car, but “the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one.”
State and local law enforcement officials said they would not answer questions or release body-worn camera or surveillance footage of the incident until their investigation was complete. On Monday, the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus demanded updates on the state’s investigation from the attorney general.
The Wiley family hired Ben Crump, the civil rights lawyer, who presented forensic evidence suggesting that the police had fired from the side of the vehicle, which, he said, indicated that the officer had not been in harm’s way.
In documents released “in error,” state law enforcement officials identified Sgt. Hunter Foster as the subject of their investigation. In the months leading up to the shooting, Officer Foster had directed racist remarks at two of his co-workers, according to internal complaints obtained by Mississippi Today.
In July, Mississippi Today reported that two days before the Walmart shooting, Officer Foster had directed a racially offensive remark toward a Black co-worker, according to an internal complaint. Six months before the shooting, Officer Foster was also accused of making derogatory remarks toward a fellow officer who is white and has a daughter with his Black partner, according to an internal complaint. The officer, Joshua Griffin, now a deputy with the Tate County Sheriff’s Office, declined a request for comment.
According to the written complaint, Officer Foster told Officer Griffin, “you need to get your people” in relation to a foot chase involving Black people. A week later, Officer Foster made a second remark using a crude sexist epithet, saying that the owner of a suspicious vehicle was Officer Griffin’s “type,” which Officer Griffin took to mean a Black woman, the complaint said.
Officer Foster remained on patrol. In June, two days before the Walmart shooting, he referred to a Black officer in the department using a racist expletive, according to the internal complaint. That officer, Dexter Smith, filed the complaint the day after the shooting.
A lawyer representing Foster, Martin Zummach, hasn’t addressed Officer Foster’s comments, but wrote in an emailed statement that he was “very convinced” that his client would be cleared of allegations of wrongdoing.
Chief Vanderford hasn’t publicly addressed the shooting. The Wiley family said he had not offered condolences.
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