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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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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.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) What to Know About Ceuta
The peninsula on Morocco’s northern coast that Spain has governed for centuries has been a frequent site of mass migrant crossings and political tensions.
By Pranav Baskar and Isabella Kwai, Published July 30, 2026, Updated July 31, 2026
People gathered on the Morocco-Spain border near Ceuta and the Moroccan town of Fnideq on Thursday. Abdelmajid Bziouat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Tens of thousands of migrants in recent days have crossed onto a tiny peninsula on Morocco’s coast governed by Spain, aggravating tensions over a border that has long troubled the relationship between the governments of Madrid and Rabat.
At least 34 people died trying to enter Ceuta, the head of the city’s local government said on Friday.
The peninsula, Ceuta, is one of only two cities on the African mainland that are officially part of Europe. In search of better economic prospects, thousands of migrants over the years have scaled a 20-foot-high border fence into Ceuta or entered the territory by sea in mass crossing episodes.
But so many migrants made the passage on Thursday that it prompted Spain to mobilize its military and ignited backlash from the country’s right-wing opposition. That faction has accused the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of being lax on border control.
Here’s what to know about the surge.
Why is Ceuta a crossing hot spot?
A six-mile-long peninsula on Morocco’s northern coast, Ceuta is a Spanish exclave fortified by a double fence and a Spanish police and paramilitary presence.
The city, which has been governed by Spain for centuries, along with Melilla, another autonomous Spanish city further east along the same coast, have the European Union’s only land borders with Africa.
That means migrants seeking better livelihoods, many of them from Morocco, frequently try to cross there into Europe.
In 2021, more than 10,000 people came over the border into Ceuta over two days. A year later, at least 23 migrants died in a stampede during an attempted mass crossing in Melilla. Many others have died at sea.
Some migrants swim around the fence. Others take short, illicit boat trips to Ceuta from Morocco. But mostly, they run and climb the fence, or use bolt-cutters to cut through it, and are often spotted by motion detectors and guards in observation towers in the process.
What happened there this week?
An estimated 60,000 migrants have crossed into Ceuta since Thursday, said Juan Jesús Vivas, the head of its government. Spain’s interior ministry cited a lower estimate of 50,000 migrants.
The influx of migrants in recent days is far higher than it was in equivalent periods, even during the peak of the European migration crisis in 2015.
Spain’s government said in a statement that it was dispatching military platoons to enforce border security, increasing air and naval support and sending diving teams to patrol the waters. The European Union offered to send Spain support from Frontex, its border and Coast Guard agency, to reestablish order.
Mr. Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, said from the border on Friday that his government was doing everything possible to repatriate the migrants who had entered the country “irregularly.” About 25,000 migrants have already returned home, Spain’s interior ministry said.
Still, hundreds if not thousands of young men were lingering on the beach in Ceuta on Friday. Some slept on the streets and in city parks.
The Moroccan government has yet to officially respond to the surge. Moroccan police and security forces were deployed near Fnideq, a town close to the border with Ceuta, where clashes erupted on Friday.
Why does this mass crossing matter?
The African mainland border has been a major source of domestic political tension for the left-wing government of Mr. Sánchez and a diplomatic pain point between Morocco and Spain.
Domestically, Mr. Sánchez has sought to project an image of Spain as the West’s new melting pot. He has embraced immigrants, especially Latin Americans, who speak Spanish.
But on Ceuta, Mr. Sánchez has drawn criticism from anti-immigrant and conservative political opponents, who accuse him of being lax on border control — as well as pro-immigrant advocates who criticize the government for harsh immigration enforcement tactics.
Right-wing critics seized on the moment Thursday, blaming Spain’s new plan to give undocumented migrants already in the country a path to legal status for attracting illegal arrivals.
“This is an invasion,” said Santiago Abascal, the leader of the far-right party Vox, who accused Mr. Sánchez’s government of purposefully inviting in the migrants, who he suggested, without evidence, were criminals, rapists and potential left-wing voters.
The government, however, has said that the high volume of illegal crossings was not part of its vision.
Spain is eager to keep up good relations with Morocco, in part to maintain its cooperation in deterring migrant arrivals. After the major crossing episode in 2021, Spanish government officials said that Morocco saw the migrants as a kind of currency, leveraging control over their movement across the border to extract financial and political prizes from Spain.
Hours after the migrants began pouring into Ceuta that year, Spain approved 30 million euros, about $37 million, in aid to Morocco for border policing.
It was unclear early Friday what had prompted the latest amassing of people in Ceuta. Several migrants told The New York Times on Friday that they were encouraged to cross into Ceuta by the Moroccan authorities. Mr. Sánchez said that the Moroccan authorities were willing to help repatriate the migrants.
Analysts said it was too soon to draw conclusions but that Morocco may have been upset about Spain’s recent effort to deepen ties with Algeria.
Jason Horowitz, Carlos Barragán, Ségolène Le Stradic and Monika Cvorak contributed reporting.
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2) Justice Dept.’s Case Against Minnesota Protesters Hits Hurdles as Missteps Mount
The problems plaguing the case have not only hurt the government’s chances, lawyers say, but have also undermined the bonds of trust that prosecutors have traditionally enjoyed in court.
By Alan Feuer and Ernesto Londoño, July 31, 2026
Nekima Levy Armstrong, center, a local civil rights lawyer, is a lead defendant in the Justice Department’s case against a group of activists and journalists who were arrested over a demonstration at a St. Paul, Minn., church. Credit...Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
The Trump administration came out swinging in January after a group of activists in Minnesota, accompanied by camera-toting journalists, held a demonstration at a St. Paul church to protest President Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown in the state.
Officials cast the incident as part of a larger narrative of left-wing protesters being out of control at a fraught political moment — just days after a Minneapolis woman, Renee Good, had been killed in her car by an immigration agent. The authorities moved swiftly, arresting several people who had been inside the church. Among them was Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor who had long run afoul of Mr. Trump.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division, which helped to bring the charges, set the tone for the administration’s moves by trumpeting the case with a brash remark. “We’re going to pursue this to the ends of the earth,” she said.
Six months later, however, the case, which is unfolding in Federal District Court in St. Paul, has been plagued by an array of prosecutorial missteps. Defense lawyers have accused the government of rushing to bring headline-grabbing charges, and the judges overseeing the proceeding have, from its outset, been voicing their concerns.
In May, for instance, it was revealed that one judge undertook the highly unusual step of rejecting a raft of search warrants after finding they would be unlikely to turn up evidence that crimes had been committed. Last week, another judge made an even more unusual move: He demanded to see some grand jury transcripts in an effort to determine whether prosecutors had acted improperly when securing the indictment.
At the same time, the defense has said investigators botched their efforts to search Mr. Lemon’s cellphone, issuing a warrant in Minnesota even though the phone was seized in California. Lawyers have also accused the prosecution of bypassing its problems with securing warrants by issuing administrative subpoenas typically used in customs enforcement cases, not criminal proceedings, to obtain information from some of the defendants.
All of this, the lawyers claim, has damaged the government’s case and had a broader impact, undermining the bonds of trust — known in legal circles as the presumption of regularity — that prosecutors have traditionally enjoyed in court.
“It is clear to me that in this case, the government in many respects, candidly, has gone off the rails,” Matthew Ebert, a defense lawyer who served as a federal prosecutor until late last year, told a judge last week.
“We’re talking about a growing confluence of conduct,” Mr. Ebert added, “which ultimately, Your Honor, I think goes to the fact that the presumption of regularity has eroded, if not evaporated.”
Prosecutors have adamantly denied such accusations, claiming that whatever errors they have made — and they have admitted making some — were purely accidental. A Justice Department official played down the troubles, saying that the case was moving forward in a normal way with the defendants challenging the charges.
Still, in a signal that prosecutors are somewhat concerned about bringing the case to trial, they have offered plea deals to 29 of the nearly 40 people facing indictment. Under the proposed agreement, defendants would plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge and avoid any prison time, according to a draft shared with The New York Times.
So far, however, none of the defendants have agreed to take the deal, according to defense lawyers.
The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on the plea deals.
The case in St. Paul is only the latest prosecution arising from Mr. Trump’s nationwide immigration sweeps to face significant problems. Over and over, in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, the Justice Department has followed the same pattern: It has loudly announced indictments, often tarring defendants as radicals or terrorists, then watched as cases have run aground because of a lack of evidence or prosecutorial errors.
An investigation by The Times found that hundreds of officer assault cases stemming from immigration raids have unraveled as juries have acquitted, judges have thrown out charges or prosecutors have themselves withdrawn indictments.
From the start, the case against Mr. Lemon and his co-defendants struggled to get off the ground, not least because of the uncomfortable way in which it lumped together activists engaged in political protest and journalists who covered them. Three sets of judges — including some on a federal appeals court — refused to go along with the government’s initial attempt to seek criminal complaints against Mr. Lemon and other journalists — including the reporter, Georgia Fort — after finding there was simply no evidence they had committed crimes.
Some career federal prosecutors in Minnesota were alarmed by the anomalous investigative steps that set the case in motion and by the pointed remarks administration officials made about the defendants. The protest happened days after several experienced prosecutors resigned over the Justice Department’s handling of Ms. Good’s shooting.
Lauren Roso, a career prosecutor assigned to work on the case in its early days, said it led her to quit what had been a dream job.
“The Cities Church protest case gave me significant pause,” Ms. Roso said, disclosing for the first time the reason she resigned. “I was uncomfortable with the pace and manner in which the case was proceeding, and those concerns played a role in my decision to leave the U.S. attorney’s office.”
In the end, prosecutors persuaded grand jurors in St. Paul to return an indictment charging the two journalists and seven other people with a conspiracy to violate the Face Act, a law that forbids using threats of force to intimidate or interfere with people seeking reproductive health services or trying to participate in a service at a house of worship. A subsequent indictment expanded the case to include another 30 people, most of them demonstrators who joined the protest at Cities Church on Jan. 18.
But the case ran into trouble almost immediately as the White House posted a digitally altered image of the lead defendant — Nekima Levy Armstrong, a local civil rights lawyer — appearing to sob as she was being arrested. Weeks later, prosecutors dropped the charges against one of the new defendants, Heather Danae Lewis, in what appeared to be a case of mistaken identity.
Overall, prosecutors have vigorously defended their indictment. In recent court papers, they said they intended to prove the charges by showing, among other things, that Mr. Lemon and Ms. Fort attended a meeting where activists organized the protest at the church where one of the pastors also works as a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The prosecutors also say that they have a large amount of video footage of the “disruptive protest operation” and that one churchgoer injured her elbow when she fled from the building. Moreover, another of the church’s pastors, Jonathan Parnell, has testified to the grand jury that he felt “threatened and crowded” by both the activists and the journalists.
Lawyers for Mr. Lemon and Ms. Fort have scoffed at such assertions, arguing that their clients, unlike the actual protesters, never shouted anti-ICE slogans during the demonstration and got close to Mr. Parnell and his congregants only to do their jobs.
At the court hearing last week, most of the discussion focused on Ms. Fort, a St. Paul native who has covered the extensive protests against ICE in Minnesota as well as the killings of Ms. Good and another demonstrator, Alex Pretti. The government has already acknowledged that in some of the rejected search warrants, investigators falsely claimed that Ms. Fort shouted things like “ICE Out!” during the church protest and used her camera as a “weapon to intimidate, threaten and scare the congregants.”
Her lawyer, Mr. Ebert, asked Magistrate Judge Douglas L. Micko to scrutinize the grand jury proceedings to be certain that the same false statements had not been used to secure the indictment against her. By the end of the hearing, Judge Micko agreed to do so, saying there was some evidence that prosecutors may have “misinstructed” the panel.
Typically, a case like this would be overseen by prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, but as with other politically sensitive cases, the proceeding in St. Paul has largely been run by lawyers based in Washington. One of them was new enough to the case — and to Minnesota — that during last week’s hearing he mispronounced the name of a veteran judge in the district, Patrick J. Schiltz.
In a sign of local discomfort with the case, three defense lawyers formerly served in the office that is prosecuting the defendants. At the hearing, one of them, Mr. Ebert, immediately accused the prosecution of unfairly going after his client, Ms. Fort, and her co-defendants.
“We have a situation where the government unfortunately charged the case first and then tried to investigate it later,” he told Judge Micko. “And the consequences of that are playing out in unfortunate real time.”
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3) Concerns Remain About Eagerness of Israel and Hamas to Fulfill Gaza Deal
The Israeli government has not issued an official statement. Hamas has underlined that Israel must make concessions before disarmament can proceed.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Tel Aviv, July 31, 2026
Palestinians inspecting the site of a strike in Gaza City on Thursday. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
President Trump’s Board of Peace published on Friday what officials described as the text of a 15-point Gaza deal calling for Hamas and other Palestinian factions to give up their weapons and Israel to withdraw its troops from the territory.
The text says the parties have two weeks to determine a schedule, which an international verification committee can extend.
In its initial response, Hamas said on Friday that the “first step” would be for Israel to commit to ending attacks, and linked the turnover of what the group called “heavy weapons” to a list of other conditions.
In underlining that Israel must first make concessions for the disarmament deal to move ahead, Hamas highlighted how challenging it will be to carry out the new agreement, which caught many by surprise when President Trump announced it on Thursday.
Experts and officials have raised questions about whether Hamas and Israel will follow through in implementing the agreement.
Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s high representative for Gaza, wrote on social media that “implementation and verification have to be real.”
“Withdrawal must move in lock step with decommissioning,” he wrote, referring to the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and the disarmament of Palestinian armed groups.
The Israeli government still has not issued a formal statement on Mr. Trump’s announcement. On Thursday evening, the government, citing an anonymous “diplomatic official,” said Israel had conveyed reservations to Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who serves as a top official on the Board of Peace, the international organization that has been negotiating with Hamas and Israel on Gaza’s future.
Hamas’s weapons have been a key sticking point over months of talks in Egypt, one of the main mediating countries. The Board of Peace has demanded that the group gradually give up all of its arsenal — a position that Israeli officials have contended Hamas will not accept.
Armed struggle against Israel has long been central to Hamas’s ideology and a means to stay in power. Many members of the group view any deal in which they would give up their weapons as tantamount to surrender.
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting to this article.
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4) What Is the Board of Peace?
President Trump created the international organization, aimed at resolving the long-running war in Gaza and other conflicts.
By Chris Cameron, Reporting from Washington, Published July 30, 2026, Updated July 31, 2026
"Under the organization’s charter, Mr. Trump is the board’s chairman, and could play a central role in the board even after leaving the presidency. Mr. Trump can hold the chairmanship “until he resigns it,” a U.S. official said."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/us/politics/what-is-the-board-of-peace.html
President Trump at a signing ceremony for the founding charter of the Board of Peace at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January. Doug Mills/The New York Times
Earlier this year, President Trump created the Board of Peace, an international organization that was initially aimed at resolving the long-running war in Gaza.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump said on social media that the organization had reached an agreement for Hamas to begin disarming in the Gaza Strip. Details of the plan he announced were released by the Board of Peace in a series of social media posts on Friday, and disarmament would be a monumental undertaking. Hamas, which specializes in insurgent tactics, has long regarded giving up its weapons as tantamount to surrender.
The Board of Peace was central to Mr. Trump’s plan for peace in Gaza. After brokering a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas last year, the board was established, backed by a U.N. mandate, to oversee the reconstruction effort in Gaza.
Much of that effort hinged on the disarmament of Hamas. Board officials drafted a plan for the demilitarization of Gaza, and Mr. Trump chose a U.S. general to lead the military force that would be deployed to Gaza to disarm Hamas and occupy the Palestinian enclave during the yearslong campaign to rebuild it.
Under a previous draft plan, Hamas would be required to surrender its weapons capable of striking Israel, while allowing the group to retain some small arms, at least initially. Officials at the time cautioned that details of the plan could change.
Mr. Trump has moved to broadly expand the scope of the Board of Peace to include other diplomatic efforts led by the Trump administration in what appeared to be an effort to build an alternative to the United Nations that places him in charge. Under the organization’s charter, Mr. Trump is the board’s chairman, and could play a central role in the board even after leaving the presidency. Mr. Trump can hold the chairmanship “until he resigns it,” a U.S. official said.
Countries must contribute more than $1 billion to become permanent board members, but can join without cost for at least the first three years.
The more than 20 founding members of the organization, in addition to the United States, include Argentina, Hungary, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
Several longtime European allies of the United States, such as France and Spain, have said that they would not join the board at this time, saying that its charter raised serious questions about international law and respect for the U.N.
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5) Hegseth Wants a ‘High-T’ Military. Could That Pose Risks to Soldiers, or Society?
A new policy raises questions about testosterone’s effect on aggression in some men.
By Azeen Ghorayshi, Published July 30, 2026, Updated July 31, 2026
Azeen has interviewed nearly two dozen men and their family members about their experiences with testosterone replacement therapy.
Van O’Neill, of Gainesville, Ga., has been taking testosterone on and off for 20 years. “You’ve got to be careful with this stuff,” he said.Audra Melton for The New York Times
Van O’Neill started taking testosterone 20 years ago, after struggling with chronic fatigue and undergoing tests that revealed that he had low levels of the hormone in his blood. While testosterone therapy gave him an immediate boost in energy and drive, he said, “it came at a cost.”
“I felt like I had a coiled spring in my body that was wound real tight,” Mr. O’Neill, 67, said.
It didn’t take much to make him snap. Mr. O’Neill, who is in recovery for alcoholism, recalled an incident at a 12-step meeting where a member jokingly rubbed his shaved head. Mr. O’Neill jumped up and yelled, “Don’t ever put your hands on me!” He didn’t hit the man but was shocked at how close he came.
Since then, Mr. O’Neill has gone off and on the medication, trying to balance its benefits with the fact that testosterone seems to increase his reactivity to even the slightest aggravations. He worries that his bipolar disorder and generally impulsive personality may make him more sensitive to the hormone’s effects.
His takeaway: “You’ve got to be careful with this stuff.”
In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new policy mandating that all military service members over the age of 30 have their testosterone levels screened as part of an effort to create what he called a “High-T Department of War.”
“Warfighters” who qualify for treatment, he said, would be given the option to undergo testosterone replacement therapy, or T.R.T., to keep them “on the leading edge of lethality.”
Experts are divided on the new policy. Though rigorous studies have shown that T.R.T. can benefit men with testosterone deficiency, no medical groups recommend universal screening, which experts fear could lead to overtreatment and negative outcomes. (Though the military’s screening policy will also apply to women, it’s unclear what treatment might be offered. In women, small doses of testosterone are typically used to treat menopause.)
Studies are clear on T.R.T.’s risks. Testosterone can cause a dangerous thickening of the blood, a side effect that needs to be closely monitored, even on the battlefield. And the hormone shuts down sperm production, which could harm fertility in men of reproductive age.
But few studies have examined one of the treatment’s hardest to define and most contentious effects: its impact on aggression.
Many doctors argue that testosterone, when medically needed and prescribed at an appropriate dose, can positively affect mood. Much of the cultural association between testosterone and aggression is a holdover from publicized incidents of “roid rage” in bodybuilders, Dr. Abraham Morgentaler, a urologist at Harvard Medical School, argued.
“The data that we have do not support that there is a general trend toward aggressiveness on testosterone,” Dr. Morgentaler said. “That’s a stereotype that I think is incorrect.”
Studies confirm that T.R.T. does not increase hostile behavior on average across men. However, researchers say that the hormone does seem to drive increased aggression in a smaller subset — those who are already prone to aggression, or who have a lower threshold for irritability or perceived threats — in response to provocation. Interviews with nine men who have taken T.R.T. and their family members also suggest that, as testosterone has grown more popular, more people have struggled with these behavioral consequences.
“People who are already aggressive are likely to become more aggressive,” said Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist and primatologist at Stanford University. “It’s not going to make someone more likely to fight ferociously and defend their band of brothers in the middle of battle. I think it’s just as likely that they’ll get into a fist fight with someone in their barracks.”
Given the threatening situations military service members routinely face on the job, some clinicians are calling for more research on T.R.T.’s behavioral effects before the hormone is prescribed so broadly.
“If I were a general, or if I were in some version of command where I knew the people underneath me had been altering their testosterone levels, I would want to know: How does that affect their decision making?” said Dr. Tom Hildebrandt, a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai in New York. “We should understand what it is we’re doing.”
A spokesman for the Department of Defense declined to comment on the possible behavioral impacts that increased use of T.R.T. might have on troops.
The new testosterone screening policy comes as T.R.T. use is surging in the United States, growing to nearly 12 million prescriptions in 2025, from fewer than one million in 2000. Testosterone deficiency most often affects older men whose hormone levels have declined with age. Even so, T.R.T. use is rising most quickly among younger men, fueled by online platforms selling the hormone and a growing obsession with testosterone among influencers in the so-called manosphere.
Under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spoken publicly about his own use of T.R.T., the Food and Drug Administration has changed the hormone’s warning labels and made the treatment available to many more men. Mr. Kennedy has pointed to studies finding that testosterone levels are lower among younger generations than historical averages, calling declining testosterone an “existential” threat. Researchers have argued that the trend is driven by rising obesity and increasingly sedentary lifestyles.
Military doctors have started to identify a condition called “operator syndrome,” in which troops who have served long stretches in special operations units — where they experience chronic stress, irregular sleep and poor diet — are more likely to report medical problems, including decreased testosterone.
Many direct-to-consumer testosterone clinics explicitly market T.R.T. to military servicemen and police officers, promising improved physical performance and endurance. A growing number of servicemen are seeking out T.R.T. from such clinics or illicit sources instead of from their military doctors, Dr. Theodore Crisostomo-Wynne, a urologist at the Madigan Army Medical Center, said at an F.D.A. panel in December.
But even those who see increased aggression as a potential military advantage may not fully understand the nuances of the relationship between testosterone and behavior, researchers say.
Studies in animals clearly point to testosterone’s role in aggression. Male rats that are given the hormone will mark a much larger territory with their urine. Male birds given testosterone will stop tending to their nests, spending more time singing to attract mates, sometimes abandoning their chicks to die.
But the hormone’s behavioral effects in humans are far more complex.
Early studies comparing testosterone in violent and nonviolent criminals found that, on average, violent criminals had higher levels of the hormone. Other studies found that the hormone naturally fluctuates within individuals in response to their environment, spiking during sports competitions, for example, and falling after having a baby. But it’s more likely that those behaviors and social settings cause testosterone levels to fluctuate, not the other way around, said Dr. Sapolsky, the Stanford neuroscientist.
Knowing that a man has significantly higher testosterone than another, Dr. Sapolsky said, “gives you zero predictability that they’re going to be more aggressive.”
Only about a dozen studies have tried to examine what happens when you give men testosterone, an approach that can more clearly point to cause and effect. While some studies administering high doses of testosterone — many times higher than what men get on T.R.T. — show a resulting increase in aggression, the hormone does not broadly appear to have that effect at standard medical doses. But a link emerges when you look at the individual differences between men.
“When you look at T with someone’s predisposition to engage in aggression, that’s where it becomes more clear,” said Justin Carré, a psychologist at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario.
In blinded studies conducted by his research group, hundreds of men were randomly given testosterone — equivalent to a single dose of T.R.T. — or a placebo, and then instructed to play a computer game against a fictitious opponent. In the game, they could either hit a button to score points or push a button to attack their opponent.
If their opponent provoked them by stealing a point, men with underlying dominant or impulsive personality types who had been given testosterone were more likely to become preoccupied with attacking them back instead of scoring. (This aggressive response was not seen in non-dominant men given testosterone or in dominant men given the placebo.) Dr. Carré said that while more research was needed to understand the effects of ongoing T.R.T. use, the studies raise questions for the military.
“Testosterone makes aggression more rewarding, whether or not it’s productive,” Dr. Carré said. “If aggression is the main outcome that you’re trying to impact, then maybe that’s a good thing. But if it creates tunnel vision, that can be negative.”
Though many men who undergo testosterone treatment may not experience behavioral changes, interviews with men who have used T.R.T. and their family members show that some have struggled with heightened aggression. Many said they had struggled with volatility even before starting on testosterone, which seemed to both amplify their outbursts and lower the threshold for what would set them off.
Others, like Richard, a physician in New York who asked to be identified by his first name to protect his privacy, seemed sensitive to dosages that were even slightly too high.
Richard has been on testosterone therapy for 17 years. The treatment “changed my life,” he said, helping to address the erectile dysfunction, depression and obesity he experienced after testicular cancer destroyed his body’s ability to make the hormone on its own.
But when he first started on T.R.T., his wife pointed out that he was snapping at her more than usual. He began to notice that he was more reactive in ways that often felt out of his control.
“I wasn’t in the ‘roid rage’ category,” he said. “I just had a shorter trigger.”
Over the years, Richard has learned to calibrate his dosage with his doctor to better manage his irritability. But he questioned how the military would be able to monitor such behavioral changes, especially if the treatment is rolled out to thousands of men facing frequent threats, real or perceived.
“Subtle effects, on that kind of scale, can be really serious,” he said.
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6) Trump Administration Plans to Upend Head Start by Deregulating It
The White House tried but failed to block funding for preschool for poor children. Instead, it will seek to strip away standards on health, literacy — and brushing teeth.
By Coral Davenport, July 31, 2026
The Trump administration is preparing a major rollback of federal requirements for Head Start, a change that supporters of the child care program fear could gut its longstanding antipoverty mission.
The proposed changes would remove most of Head Start’s 133 pages of requirements for math and literacy curriculums, class sizes, medical screenings, home visits and even a requirement that children brush their teeth after meals, according to three people with knowledge of the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
Administration officials say the changes will streamline a heavily regulated program while giving states and cities more control over how it is run.
But Head Start advocates say that erasing regulations serves as a backdoor way to dismantle a program the administration does not like. The White House last year called Head Start “radical” and tried but failed to freeze spending on it.
While Head Start facilities will still be required to comply with state rules, there are almost no comparable state-level programs with similar requirements. And even though the federal rules would not prohibit centers from providing traditional antipoverty services, some fear that the lack of any requirements means that many are likely to stop doing so.
The changes, previously reported by The Nation, are expected to be formally introduced as early as next week and could be finalized by year’s end.
They would remake a program that has served over 30 million children since it was created in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Head Start was intended to be a federally funded and regulated early education and antipoverty program, with hundreds of standards to support that mission, making it far more comprehensive than any other child care programs.
A White House official, who declined to be identified, wrote in an email that the administration is supporting Head Start by keeping its federal funding in place and supporting efforts the official said would reduce administrative burdens.
A spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department’s Administration for Children and Families, which oversees Head Start and drafted the changes, did not respond to a request for comment.
But Ruth Friedman, a child care policy expert who worked as a congressional aide to create a bipartisan 2007 law updating Head Start, called the proposed changes a “massive gutting” of the program.
“Eliminating Head Start’s performance standards guts the science-backed standards that ensure our youngest learners get what they need to arrive at kindergarten ready to succeed,” she said.
The program, which today serves about 700,000 children under 6, has for decades attracted bipartisan support. President Ronald Reagan expanded Head Start’s budget to over $1 billion, and President George W. Bush signed a bipartisan law to update and modernize the program. Even President Trump in his first term increased the program’s budget by $900 million.
That has now changed dramatically.
Project 2025, the policy blueprint by the conservative Heritage Foundation, called for the elimination of Head Start. “The program should function to protect and educate minors,” the document says. “Sadly, it has done exactly the opposite.”
A draft White House budget document reviewed by The New York Times last year proposed zeroing out spending on Head Start, saying that doing so would help end the “radical indoctrination of our children.”
The document said the program is “riddled with social-emotional learning” and diversity, equity and inclusion programming, and gives preference to undocumented immigrants. It singled out the use of a “Sesame Street” webinar on racial justice, and the use of picture books for toddlers that are intended to “create an early childhood setting that is welcoming” for families of different sexual orientations.
The White House’s final budget plan kept the money in.
But at the same time the White House also withheld some Head Start spending that Congress had already appropriated. A congressional watchdog found that it had done so illegally, and the money was eventually released.
Then during last year’s government shutdown, the White House stopped Head Start funding, forcing programs in 17 states to temporarily close.
But some Republican lawmakers — notably Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi — have remained firm in their support of the program. For now, its annual $12 billion budget remains in place.
So proponents of upending the program tried a new approach. In June, the Heritage Foundation issued a report calling on the administration to “sunset Head Start and deregulate the program until officials end it.”
“Head Start is the most heavily regulated of the child care programs,” said Jonathan Butcher, an author of the report, “but it was not being successful with basic things.”
Mr. Butcher pointed to a 2022 report by the health department’s inspector general that found that one in four Head Start grant recipients had incidents of child abuse, lack of supervision or unauthorized release of children. The report called on the Administration for Children and Families to increase its oversight of the program.
Alex Adams, the head of the Administration for Children and Families, has sought to cut regulations on all child care programs, saying that federal child care rules should “fit on an index card in my back pocket.” In spring, The Times reported that he was starting an overhaul of Head Start, though he has expressed support for the program.
During his Senate confirmation hearing last year, Mr. Adams noted that his wife’s grandmother ran a Head Start program in Blackfoot, Idaho, in the late 1960s. He said that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “wants to make Head Start better and brighter by the end of this term and I share that commitment.”
Among the most significant of the proposed new changes expected to be released next week is the removal of federal limits on Head Start class sizes. Instead, they will now align with a patchwork of state standards.
For example, under current Head Start rules, one teacher is required to supervise four 2-year-olds. But in Idaho, one teacher can supervise nine 2-year-olds. In Ohio, the rule is one teacher per eight 2-year-olds.
Mr. Adams and other conservatives have promoted the change as a way to give more children access to the program, although many early education policy experts say that the larger class sizes will relax standards of care.
The changes would also delete requirements that Head Start employees perform vision and hearing screenings on children, and ensure that children receive medical and dental checkups. That could mean helping parents schedule appointments, fill out Medicaid forms and arrange transportation.
The proposed changes would also remove requirements that staff members visit families at home to help navigate problems like shut-off utilities.
They would eliminate teaching standards for math, literacy, and social and emotional development — such as self-regulating and responding to emotions, making friends and interacting appropriately with adults.
Some requirements providing access for children with disabilities would go away, as well.
And the changes would erase requirements for program duration. Typically, Head Start programs run six hours a day, but could instead run for just three hours a day.
The administration is also adding some new rules, according to the people familiar with the plan: one requiring that student instruction take place only in English, and another requiring at least 30 minutes of physical activity per day.
Leslie Andrews, who has worked as a Head Start teacher in Redmond, Wash., for 25 years, said she worries especially about deleting the requirements to help children get access to health and dental care.
“I think at first some experienced teachers might continue to help connect kids to doctors and dentists, but over time that will fade,” she said. “It won’t be done.”
“No child is going to do well in school if they don’t have this basic care,” she said, adding, “Removing the tooth-brushing requirement — just why?”
Leah Bolden, a mother in Farmingdale, Maine, said that when her 3-year-old son began Head Start last year, the staff noticed he might have A.D.H.D. and arranged for him to see a developmental psychologist.
“The staff was involved in every meeting,” she said. Without the current standards, that might have never happened, she said.
Mr. Butcher, who wrote the Heritage Foundation report, said deleting standards does not forbid teachers to follow them — it just means they don’t have to.
“If you remove a requirement that asks kids to brush their teeth,” he said, “that doesn’t mean you can’t still do it.”
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7) Justice Dept. Subpoenas Times Freelancer in Effort to Identify Sources
A previously undisclosed subpoena, involving reporting on a failed SEAL Team 6 mission in North Korea, reflects the government’s expanding campaign to investigate leaks of secrets.
By Devlin Barrett, Reporting from Washington, Aug. 1, 2026
A SEAL Team 6 mission conducted in 2019 in North Korea was detailed in a New York Times article last year. Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A freelance reporter has been fighting a subpoena from the Trump administration seeking to force him to reveal his sources for a New York Times article about a failed top secret mission in North Korea, according to people familiar with the matter.
The subpoena, which has not been previously disclosed, reflects the administration’s intensifying campaign to investigate leaks of government secrets by pressuring reporters to divulge their sources. Until President Trump began his second term, federal subpoenas to reporters were exceedingly rare.
In February, F.B.I. agents showed up at the New York home of the reporter, Matthew Cole, to deliver the grand jury subpoena, which was issued by prosecutors in Newport News, Va., according to the people familiar with the matter, who described the private conversations on the condition of anonymity.
The investigators are seeking his testimony about two years’ worth of information about Mr. Cole’s contacts and conversations, as they try to identify his sources for the article about the operation in North Korea, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear if the administration has also sought Mr. Cole’s phone and email data, as it has done in other cases.
Mr. Cole’s lawyer, David A. O’Neil, who has also represented The Times in a separate fight with the administration over subpoenas about its coverage of Air Force One, said in a statement that Mr. Cole “has dedicated his professional life to bringing official misconduct to light and informing the public about the workings of its government.” His client, he added, “will not be intimidated from continuing that important work. He will defend press freedom and the First Amendment from this administration’s brazen attacks on journalists, and he will honor his commitment to his sources.”
The Times is providing a legal defense to Mr. Cole.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the specific investigation, but said in a statement that it would use all available legal tools to “uncover those who unlawfully disclose national defense information.”
In the months since Mr. Cole’s subpoena, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post have faced similar subpoenas seeking information about their reporting. The news organizations have resisted, and judges have voiced skepticism about the government’s efforts, prompting the administration to back down in those cases.
However, the Justice Department has so far refused to withdraw its subpoena of Mr. Cole, despite his efforts to challenge it.
Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for The Times, said in a statement that the subpoena to Mr. Cole was “part of the government’s escalating attacks on journalists, which should concern all Americans.” He added that the demand to disclose Mr. Cole’s sources “is another brazen and illegal attack from the administration designed to deny the public information of vital importance.”
Last fall, Mr. Cole, along with a staff reporter for The Times, Dave Philipps, revealed the details of a Navy SEAL Team 6 mission in 2019 that went awry. The article described how the SEAL members killed two or three unarmed North Koreans who appeared to have stumbled upon the mission, a classified operation to plant a secret eavesdropping device near the country’s coastline. The Times’s account, published in September, drew on interviews with two dozen people.
The Justice Department has not subpoenaed Mr. Philipps, according to people familiar with the matter. He declined to comment.
Mr. Cole disclosed more details of his reporting on his Substack newsletter, stating that despite learning about the mission in 2023, he waited for months before making calls to find out more given the sensitive nature of the reporting.
Mr. Cole is also the author of “Princes and Thieves,” a coming book about the finances and global entanglements of President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and “Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six,” a 2022 book about the elite Navy unit.
When F.B.I. agents tried to serve Mr. Cole with a subpoena at his New York City apartment in February, he was not home at the time, according to the people familiar with the matter. The subpoena was eventually delivered to his lawyer.
The Justice Department’s policies on leak investigations can change between administrations, and in 2025, it loosened restraints on such inquiries. The new guidance, however, still labels subpoenas to reporters a “last resort.” But in Mr. Trump’s second term, the department has rushed to issue such demands, sometimes just days after the articles in question were published.
In March, the Trump administration demanded records from reporters at The Wall Street Journal, seeking to identify their sources for an article published Feb. 23 that described internal discussions in the administration about the risks of a war with Iran.
The Justice Department also subpoenaed a Washington Post reporter over coverage of U.S. military operations in Venezuela, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Post and Journal challenged the subpoenas under seal, leading to monthslong court battles in Virginia. In June, the administration withdrew the subpoenas after the federal judge overseeing the dispute indicated she was likely to quash them, according to people familiar with the matter.
In January, federal agents executed a search warrant at the home of another Post reporter, seizing her phone, computers and a smartwatch, as part of a separate, continuing leak investigation and prosecution.
In early July, the administration sought to determine the sources behind The Times’s reporting about the new Air Force One, a 747 jet that was a gift from Qatar.
Two days after The Times reported that Mr. Trump did not fly out of Turkey on the plane as a security precaution and that it did not have all the features of the older jet, F.B.I. agents delivered subpoenas to three of the reporters who wrote the articles.
The administration also demanded phone companies turn over the reporters’ phone records, as well as the phone records of two of the reporters’ wives and of one reporter’s mother.
The Times sought to quash the subpoenas, arguing that they were a dangerous attack on press freedom.
At a hearing last week in federal court in Manhattan, a judge sharply criticized prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office for apparently failing to follow the law and the department’s internal rules for conducting leak investigations.
Prosecutors denied intentionally flouting the law or regulations, but admitted making mistakes, which they attributed to not knowing the relevant case law before they demanded the reporters’ data. The judge in that case, Arun Subramanian, has ordered the Justice Department to turn over internal emails leading up to those actions.
Under pressure from the judge, the Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas of the Times journalists involved in the Air Force One reporting, but said it would continue to investigate, leaving open the possibility that it might revisit the subpoenas.
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8) Trump Administration Is Undoing Plans to Boost Workplace Heat Protections
The Biden administration took steps to shield workers from extreme temperatures. The Trump administration is taking a gentler approach with employers.
By Scott Dance, Reporting from Washington, Aug. 1, 2026
Republicans in Washington are taking steps to roll back federal workplace heat protections as summer temperatures surge.
The Trump administration is moving to rewrite Biden-era rules that would mandate breaks and access to water and shade for workers, in a step businesses lauded but that labor groups said could weaken already limited federal protections. Congress is considering legislation that would go a step further, prohibiting the Labor Department from adopting the Biden-era heat plan or similar rules.
At the same time, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is curtailing workplace inspections that President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s appointees had increased to raise awareness of heat-related illnesses.
OSHA officials did not respond to questions about enforcement activity.
The details of the proposed changes might not be known for months. Still the efforts highlight the divide between labor and industry about what steps to take as the dangers from rising temperatures become more apparent.
The proposed revisions would also reverse momentum toward codifying extreme heat as a workplace hazard. Stretches of record heat have persisted across the country this summer, punctuating decades of steadily climbing summer temperature highs and more frequent spells of dangerously hot conditions. Another “heat dome” is bringing extreme temperatures to the South and Midwest this week.
OSHA officials did not respond to questions about enforcing the mandate.
Business groups welcomed most of those steps, saying employers are already safeguarding workers from heat. But labor organizations say they fear job sites are becoming more dangerous as oversight declines and immigration enforcement creates an atmosphere of fear in the fields and warehouses where heat is most extreme, which could discourage some employees from raising alarm over conditions.
“They’re bringing the work force back to the 1800s,” said Trina David, a crew chief at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport who oversees baggage handling and other activity while planes are parked at gates. The temperature in the city often hits triple digits in the summer, and it can be even hotter on the tarmac.
Heat is linked to hundreds of workplace deaths each year, but labor groups say the true toll is unknown because heat-related illnesses are not properly tracked or reported. In 2024, the death toll was at least 530, according to data compiled by the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
On-the-job injuries and deaths typically trigger federal or state workplace safety investigations. But OSHA doesn’t have any rules specific to extreme heat, which can make holding employers accountable for dangerously hot working conditions difficult, former agency officials said.
OSHA oversees workplace safety in about half of states; in the others, it delegates those duties to state agencies under plans federal regulators approve. Some states and cities have their own workplace heat protections in place, including California, Oregon and Maryland.
But gaps in worker protections and rising global temperatures driven by climate change prompted the Biden administration to increase federal oversight of workplaces where extreme heat is common. In 2022, OSHA started a program that aimed to double inspections.
From April 2022 to December 2024, the agency conducted about 7,000 workplace inspections related to extreme heat, including 147 investigations into potentially heat-related deaths, according to the agency. OSHA sent nearly 1,400 warning letters to employers and issued 60 citations in that span. It was a significant step up: The agency reported about 200 heat-related inspections a year from 2015 through 2020.
As Mr. Biden’s term waned in the summer of 2024, OSHA proposed rules that would require employers to develop heat plans and provide rest areas and water any time the heat index reaches 80 degrees or higher. The Biden administration estimated the rules would cover about 35 million workers.
Many labor and business groups expected that proposal to disappear once President Trump returned to the White House. But the Trump administration carried out a scheduled public hearing on the Biden heat rule proposal in June 2025.
This month, the administration published plans to continue that rule-making process — but with significant revisions planned for release by the end of this year. The measure could become final in 2027.
Employers had raised concerns that the Biden proposal would disrupt their operations, potentially blocking them from designing more effective and tailored heat relief plans.
“The fact that they have something on the agenda is encouraging,” said Marc Freedman, vice president of workplace policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
But labor groups say an employer-friendly federal rule could not only endanger workers in the states OSHA directly oversees, but also weaken protections in the other states. That could prompt business groups to pressure regulators to scale back or rescind any stronger rules in place at the state or local level, said Debbie Berkowitz, who served as senior policy adviser at OSHA under President Barack Obama.
Separately, the Trump administration has also shifted the approach of the OSHA inspection program started under Mr. Biden. In April, OSHA renewed the initiative, but it stripped away any targets around inspection activity.
That was a significant change, Ms. Berkowitz said, because the program relied on the inspections and potential enforcement to keep employers accountable. And it was designed to provide a key legal framework for OSHA to target heat hazards in specific industries and workplaces, she added.
It is not clear how the change may be affecting OSHA inspection activity; the agency has not made any recent statistics public. But data released in February by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, showed a 20 percent decline in OSHA inspections over a six-month period last year, compared with the same period in 2024. (The government has not publicly released data for the number of inspections for the entire 2025 fiscal year.)
OSHA has long been stretched thin, said Dennis Spencer, a Philadelphia-based airline worker who serves as a director of safety for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Under the Trump administration, its availability has not improved, he said.
“If you don’t call OSHA, they’re not coming in and just looking around,” Mr. Spencer said. “I haven’t gotten calls where they say, ‘OSHA’s here looking at the heat standard or the hydration plan.’ I don’t think they’re making random stops.”
That means workers have to carry much of the burden of flagging heat dangers, said Oscar Londoño, co-executive director of WeCount!, a human rights organization in South Florida focused on immigrant workers. Doing so is often risky because of fears of retaliation, and it’s especially fraught in agriculture and sectors where heat is most intense and where fears of deportation are highest, he said.
“In the industries where workers are getting sick or dying on the job due to extreme heat, these are largely low-wage immigrant workers,” Mr. Londoño said.
Business groups including the U.S. Chamber and Associated Builders and Contractors have said a vast majority of employers already monitor heat hazards and take steps to protect workers. The Biden administration’s proposal ignores that, Mr. Freedman said.
“There’s room for a sensible standard here, but not the one the Biden administration proposed,” he said.
Still, Mr. Freedman said even he had qualms about legislation that would block the Biden workplace heat proposal “or any substantially similar standard.” Mr. Freedman called the bill, which is awaiting a House floor vote, “well-intentioned” but said he thought it went “just one step too far.”
Labor groups say a strict workplace heat standard is needed to reflect the underappreciated and rising threat that heat poses.
Ms. David, the Phoenix airport worker, said that heat always posed some challenges in her 19-year career. But when she started working at Sky Harbor, the worst summer heat would last three months. In 2024, temperatures hit triple digits on a record 113 consecutive days — and were 20 to 40 degrees higher on the tarmac.
“I get that we signed up for this, but we didn’t sign up for the heat to become as severe as it is,” she said.
“Everyone’s asking workers to adapt to the heat,” she added. “Your organs can’t adapt that fast. The conditions changed.”
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9) Israel Bombards Gaza, Days After Trump Announced Deal to Advance Cease-fire
Palestinian officials said at least two people were killed. The deal announced by President Trump calls in part for Hamas to give up its weapons and Israel to stop its attacks in Gaza.
By Aaron Boxerman, Aug. 1, 2026
Palestinians inspecting the aftermath of a strike near Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, on Saturday. Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press
Israeli strikes in Gaza on Saturday killed at least two people and damaged warehouses for medical supplies, Palestinian officials said, despite a recent deal between President Trump’s Board of Peace and Hamas to advance the Gaza cease-fire.
One of the strikes destroyed and damaged the warehouses at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza before dawn on Saturday, said Khalil Dagran, a hospital spokesman. The outpatient clinic was also damaged, he added, though there were no reports of casualties.
The Israeli military said it had bombarded the warehouses because Hamas was storing weapons there and using the facility as a hide-out. Mr. Dagran disputed the Israeli allegation, adding that Israeli forces had warned Palestinians to flee ahead of the bombing.
A second Israeli strike on Saturday, in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, killed two Palestinians, according to local health officials. The Israel military confirmed the attack but declined to provide details about why the two were targeted.
The strikes came days after Mr. Trump announced that Hamas had agreed to give up its weapons during negotiations with his Board of Peace, a body that he formed last year to oversee a truce between Israel and Hamas. Hamas’s disarmament had become a monthslong sticking point in moving forward from that initial cease-fire.
On Friday, after the deal was announced, Hamas said that the “first step” would be for Israel to commit to ending attacks and linked the turnover of what the group called “heavy weapons” to a list of other conditions.
It is unclear whether Israel has agreed to the proposal. The road map stipulates a gradual withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, as well as a “cessation of military operations,” as some of the conditions for Hamas to “decommission and store” weapons.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has yet to comment on the deal, which emerged on Thursday night. The Israeli government, in a written statement circulated on Friday, said the Israeli military would not withdraw from its “current” lines in Gaza without “genuine” disarmament by Hamas, attributing the comments to an unnamed diplomatic official.
Israel has long demanded that Hamas disarm so as to prevent the Palestinian militant group from ever carrying out another assault similar to the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the Gaza war. But Mr. Netanyahu, who faces an uphill re-election battle later this year, could balk at anything that voters might view as a concession to Hamas.
U.S. officials hope the proposal will pave the way for an end to the nearly three-year crisis in the Gaza Strip, which began with the October 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and saw around 250 taken hostage.
The subsequent two-year Israeli military campaign against Hamas laid waste to the Palestinian enclave, killing more than 70,000 people, according to local health officials. Their tally does not specify how many were combatants, but it includes thousands of children.
A cease-fire last October, brokered by the Trump administration, was supposed to end the fighting. While the deal offered Gaza’s two million Palestinians a reprieve from full-blown war, it has looked nothing like peace.
Israel has continued to bomb Gaza on a near-daily basis, saying that Hamas was seeking to rearm and that it was targeting the group’s militants. More than 1,000 people have been killed since the truce, according to local officials, including young children.
While Israeli forces initially withdrew to an agreed-upon “yellow line” as part of the cease-fire, they have since steadily advanced. They now control more than 60 percent of the Gaza Strip, hemming the majority of its Palestinian residents into a shrinking area near the coast.
Both the United States and Israel said they would not allow Gaza to be rebuilt as long as Hamas ruled Gaza and kept its battalions of armed fighters.
Armed struggle against Israel has long been central to Hamas’s ideology and a means to stay in power. Many members of the group view any deal in which they would give up their weapons as tantamount to surrender.
Many of the details still need to be hammered out, and analysts question whether Israel and Hamas intend to see the process through. The deal does not yet include a firm a timeline for Hamas to give up its heavy weapons, or for Israeli forces to gradually withdraw from Gaza.
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10) Meet the Americans Who Can’t Afford Hair Cuts or Toilet Paper
By Nicholas Kristof, Aug. 1, 2026
Opinion columnist, reporting from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky
Tamara Reynolds for The New York Times
After a 1,000-mile road trip across a swath of America, I can’t get one person out of my mind: Trinity Goodman, a cheerful, chatty woman in Oklahoma City who had a bandage on her arm.
The reason for the bandage? Goodman, 44, survives by selling blood plasma twice a week. She had $3.78 in her checking account, one cent in her savings account to keep it open, and six pennies in her piggy bank.
“That’s my full assets,” she said, smiling in mockery of her own poverty.
“Barely making it,” she added. “It’s really hard and it’s miserable.”
She dwells in an America that many of us might have trouble imagining. For five years she staved off homelessness only by staying in the home of a man who was not a romantic partner but who took advantage of her vulnerability, she said, by regularly demanding sex. A heroic local nonprofit, Hope Community Services, helped her get low-income housing for $50 a month, she said; otherwise she would still have to choose between unwanted sex and homelessness.
Food stamps, $298 a month, sustain her, but they can’t be used for toilet paper or feminine hygiene products. So she searches for them at church-run pantries — lifelines in much of America.
Haircuts are likewise unaffordable. “I’ve never been to a barber or any of those places,” she said. “Never. I don’t have that luxury.”
Many sectors of America — and many Americans — are thriving. Yet my sense is that many of us are blind to how many people have been left far behind. So far behind that they scarcely inhabit the same country as the rest of us. And this pain across America is now magnified by President Trump’s cuts in food stamps, Medicaid, mental health funding for children, pregnancy prevention initiatives and other social programs, as well as by rising gas and food prices. Republicans are also imposing tougher work requirements for benefits; this is reasonable in theory, but in practice such requirements have proved costly to administer and end up mostly just driving people deeper into poverty.
On this trip, I talked to so many people who are losing food stamps and other benefits and increasingly desperate — and resentful, understandably, of elites who seem indifferent to their struggles. A recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that two-thirds of Americans consider groceries unaffordable.
Goodman is among those feeling the squeeze, and there appears to be some risk that she will lose her food stamps — and in that case she doesn’t know how she would get by.
I’m on my annual win-a-trip journey, which I started 20 years ago to take a university student on a reporting trip to cover neglected issues. Usually we travel abroad, often in Africa, but this time we explored poverty, addiction and human trafficking in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kentucky.
My student winner this year is Brunella Tipismana, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Lima, Peru, and just graduated from Yale University. One thing we saw repeatedly on this road trip is that poverty in America is not just about a lack of money, but is often multigenerational and self-replicating.
Goodman, for example, says she grew up steeped in trauma, in a toxic family that often abused drugs. She told us that she was raped and sexually abused beginning at the age of 6 or 7. She was 9 when her mother killed herself; afterward, Goodman was raised by other family members, she said. All the trauma left a mark: She says she was clinically diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder that has left her unable to work. She has applied for disability benefits, and says she was denied, but is now appealing.
I asked Goodman what message she would have for Trump as the cuts and work requirements he ordered ripple across the land.
“You do not know what you’re doing to people who are struggling to live,” she said. “You got money in the bank. You don’t know how it feels to struggle. Live in my shoes for one day. You wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
In Pine Bluff, Ark., a largely Black city that is struggling economically, racked by crime and losing population, I visited the home of Latoya Foster, 31, a single mother with six children who has lost food stamps and as a result is behind in rent.
Foster works as a shift manager at Taco Bell, earning $13.40 an hour. She relied on $1,172 in food stamps per month — but they were abruptly cut off in May, apparently because of suspicions that two of her children were collecting improper benefits in other states. She denies that and says there was some kind of mistake in the system.
Nationwide, some 1.5 million children have lost food stamps under Trump’s crackdown over the last year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It notes, and superb reporting by my Times colleague Jason DeParle underscores, that pressure on states to cut costs and reduce error rates may lead to wrongful denials of benefits. In addition, some three million Americans have lost Obamacare health insurance since the beginning of this year, after Republicans cut subsidies to help pay for insurance.
Without food stamps, Foster now is behind in her rent — $650 a month for a three-bedroom home in a crime-ridden neighborhood — and accumulating a $25-a-day late fee on top of the rent owed.
“I hit rock bottom daily,” she told me. “The more I work, the harder stuff gets.”
And then she broke down and wept.
The push to cut benefits for struggling Americans is partly rooted in a desire to trim federal spending, but that’s hard to square with the expense of the Iran war, as well as subsidies for private planes and tax cuts for the wealthiest. It’s also based on a perception that the “undeserving poor” are exploiting the system, but I think we exaggerate the degree to which it is the poor rather than the rich who get away with manipulations. As of 2019, according to ProPublica, the place in America with the highest percentage of tax audits was not a haven of billionaires but rather Humphreys County, Miss., with a majority Black population and a median household income then of roughly $26,000.
In any case, the age group most likely to live in poverty — by far — is children, particularly children 2 years old and under, and they can’t be accused of fraud, laziness or personal irresponsibility. Yes, many end up making bad choices, but we fail them before they fail us.
Trump initially proposed eliminating Head Start, the federal program with bipartisan support that serves those vulnerable children in poverty. He later backed off that idea, but congressional investigators found that his administration illegally withheld $12 billion from the program for several months, causing great hardship.
But while it’s easy to focus on Trump and Republicans cutting Medicaid, food stamps and other benefits, it’s not just the Trump administration that seems to have a myopia about Americans falling behind.
Democrats talk a good game about housing being a human right, but the three states with the highest rates of unsheltered homelessness right now are blue ones: California, Oregon and Hawaii. Liberals rightly protest Trump’s plans to abolish the Department of Education, but it is a handful of red states — especially Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi — that have shown astonishing progress and now may represent the best hope for American education.
A Black fourth-grader in Mississippi is now two and a half times as likely to test proficient in reading as a Black fourth-grader in California. Democrats have every right to call out Trump, but they should also look in the mirror at their own failures to help those left behind.
When the problems are structural, we tend to ignore them. Palo Alto, Calif., is full of well-meaning liberals — four-fifths of voters supported Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in 2024 — and it makes its outstanding public schools available to children of all colors and classes … as long as their families can afford an average home price of $3.6 million.
It’s understandable that many working-class Americans feel betrayed. As I see it, politicians of all parties have been far too complacent about Americans being left behind, even as 1.3 million Americans have died of overdoses since 2000. That’s roughly the number of American service members who have died from all the wars in American history.
One reason for the complacency is that the problems, at least in their complexity, are often invisible. Americans may see a homeless person shooting drugs, but they won’t see the arc of hopelessness that began with, say, foster care — which at its worst is a government system of child abuse.
Courtney Williams, 31, endured that broken foster care system. I met her in Oklahoma City, where she is caring for a new baby and hoping her $298 a month in food stamps won’t be taken away.
We taxpayers paid for Williams to be incarcerated — three times — but we never provided her the protection and opportunities she needed, especially when she was young and most needed help. And when we don’t invest in the front end, we end up paying at the back end.
Some of Williams’s earliest memories are of men sexually assaulting her, perhaps when she was 3 or 4. Her mother was a prostitute with addictions, she said, and at age 6 she saw her younger sister killed and was then put in foster care.
From there she bounced around foster homes in seven states, carrying her life belongings with her in a trash bag. When she was 11, one foster home put padlocks on the refrigerator, freezer and food cabinets, keeping her and other foster children hungry, she said.
Williams first tried meth at age 12 and at 14 became pregnant by a man in his late 20s who, she later found out, was a convicted sex offender. She put the baby up for adoption and dropped out of school in 10th grade.
Not every foster family was abusive or hosting her for the money, she said; she recalls that one was wonderful and wanted to adopt her. But Williams, by now deeply suspicious of human kindness and full of self-doubt, asked for a different placement.
When Williams was 17, her foster mother stopped getting checks for her — she’s not sure why, but perhaps some snafu in the system — and kicked her out. After that, Williams spent a decade largely homeless, wrestling with drugs, washing up in Dunkin’ Donuts restrooms and periodically getting locked up. Finally a new boyfriend, now husband, who didn’t use drugs helped her rebuild her life, and she says she hasn’t used drugs since last September, when she discovered that she was pregnant.
Conservatives often emphasize the importance of “personal responsibility,” and they have a point. Self-destructive behaviors are real. Scholars have said that of millennials who follow the “success sequence” (finish high school, get a full-time job and have children only after marriage), 97 percent avoid poverty by their late 20s.
Yet if we want to talk about lack of personal responsibility, we also have to have a conversation about our collective lack of responsibility, about the way we treat some kids as throwaways — or the way we’re now taking food stamps from 1.5 million children.
In Pine Bluff, I spoke to several elderly Black residents who said that in some ways life was actually better in the Jim Crow era. Black people can vote now, of course, and some have thrived.
But these seniors lamented that the quality of life for the Black population had not progressed as they had imagined. Costs have soared, crime is a threat, obesity is common and ailments like diabetes and hypertension are widespread, taking a toll on well-being. Life expectancy in the county is shorter than in Iran or Bangladesh. Schools are still de facto segregated and lagging; the Pine Bluff school district gets an F from the state.
“Civil rights were probably better back then,” grumbled Barbara Ollison, 76. I don’t know that she was really arguing that there had been no progress at all, but she’s right that Black children in places like Pine Bluff still struggle to find opportunity in 2026.
“You had enough back then to make it,” she told me. “And right now it’s terrible.”
One of the few institutions that did not utterly fail places like Pine Bluff was the U.S. military. It offered a path upward and outward, along with skills training, discipline and respect. But some people here see Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, ousting Black senior officers and no longer perceive the armed forces as a path of opportunity for people of color.
“The military is out,” said Glayton Johnson, a retired Army veteran who pointed to Hegseth’s impact on the military’s reputation. “No, we’re not going there.”
One of the people I most wanted to see on this trip was Emanuel Laster, whom I met a decade ago in Pine Bluff when he was a sweet, smart 13-year-old boy — at risk of joining a gang. You sensed that he could go either way: Maybe he would thrive and go to college, or maybe he would succumb to the gravity of his crime-ridden neighborhood. Emanuel’s bedroom was a portrait of dysfunctional America: It had three televisions, but electricity was supposed to be cut off the day I arrived for nonpayment (his mom had stationed a pit bull to deter the man from the power company from getting near enough to accomplish this).
What had become of Laster? It turned out that he never finished high school, had tangles with the law and is now in jail, awaiting trial this month on federal gun charges for possessing a handgun that had been converted into an automatic weapon. Visits in the jail weren’t permitted, but I spoke to him by phone. I asked him what had gone wrong, and he said, “I hung out with the wrong crowd.” His mother, when I visited her, said the same thing.
Laster told me that he had two boys, ages 4 and 6, with a former girlfriend, so I located them and their mother, Autumn Holman. She and her sons had been evicted and were homeless, couch surfing temporarily in a crowded apartment with a cousin and trying desperately to find a place to live.
Holman works in the kitchen of a nursing home, but her car isn’t working, so commuting is a daily crisis. She’s trying to get food stamps and thought they would begin in July, but they haven’t materialized.
She said that she loved Laster, her high school sweetheart, but that they had quarreled because he was an irresponsible parent. “He got mad because I had to ask him for money for his kids,” she said, adding that she simply wanted him to pay for little things like the boys’ haircuts.
“He knows for a fact that I’m going to be on his tail like I’m his mama,” she added. “Who else is going to do it? ‘You got kids,’ I tell him, ‘and I didn’t have them by myself.’”
Laster’s sons are beautiful children full of potential, but they are now growing up without a dad, just as Laster himself did. Visiting that crowded home, I kept thinking back to Emanuel a decade ago as an equally sweet child, about the obstacle course of life that Black boys face in Pine Bluff, and I wondered if his children were on a trajectory to replicate his path.
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