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Israel’s Genocide Day 408: U.S. envoy to visit Lebanon and Israel to discuss ceasefire deal as confrontations heat up
The US and Israel say ceasefire negotiations with Lebanon are progressing, but Lebanon says negotiations still have a long way to go. Meanwhile, Israeli strikes intensify in Gaza, killing 111 Palestinians in a single day in the northern Gaza Strip.
Casualties
· 43,736 + killed* and at least 103,370 wounded in the Gaza Strip, including 59% women, children and elderly, as of October 21, 2024.*
· 783+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
· 3,386 Lebanese killed and more than 14,417 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,189.
· The Israeli army recognizes the death of 890 Israeli soldiers and the injury of at least 5,065 others since October 7.****
* Gaza’s branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report, published through its WhatsApp channel on November 14, 2024. Rights groups and public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher.
** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. This is the latest figure according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as of November 13, 2024.
*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on November 14, 2024. The counting is based on the Lebanese official date for the beginning of “the Israeli aggression on Lebanon,” when Israel began airstrikes on Lebanese territory after the beginning of Hezbollah’s “support front” for Gaza.
**** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7 and as of June 18.
Source: mondoweiss.net
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It’s Movement Time
It’s movement time.
As the Trump presidency take shape, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Disbelief meshes with despair, and some are quite frankly desolate.
Dry your tears, blow your noses, and join movements of resistance to this madness. Blacks in America have never known a time when resistance wasn’t necessary, including life under a Black president.
For centuries for generations, people have had to struggle for freedom, for respect, for justice. Why should this time be any different?
The ancestors, like the revered Frederick Douglass, lambasted Abraham Lincoln as a fool or coward who wouldn’t fight the civil war with thousands of willing Black troops. Said Douglass, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Said Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without demand.”
So let us struggle. Let us build movements that lift our hearts. Let us remake our history with the brick and mortar of struggle.
—Prison Radio, November 21, 2016
https://www.prisonradio.org/commentary/it-is-movement-time/
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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On this Wrongful Conviction Day, Leonard Peltier, the longest-serving Indigenous political prisoner, is incarcerated in lockdown-modified operations conditions at USP Coleman I, operated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).
Yet, in this moment of silence, Leonard speaks.
To honor his birthday and all those who are unjustly convicted and incarcerated, the Leonard Peltier Official Ad Hoc Committee has released a video of Leonard Peltier that is going viral. Narrated by renowned scholar Ward Churchill and set to a video created by award-winning filmmaker Suzie Baer, the film most importantly centers Leonard’s personal reflection on his 80th year.
Jenipher Jones, Mr. Peltier's lead counsel, commented, "This powerfully moving film captures the essence of who I know Leonard to be. I am grateful to Professor Churchill and Suzie Baer for their work and longstanding advocacy of Leonard. As the recent execution of Marcellus Williams-Imam Khaliifah Williams shows us, we as a society bear a responsibility to uplift the cases of all those who are wrongfully convicted and also hold the government accountable to do that for which it professes to exist. We must challenge our impulses of blind blood-thirst for guilt and the use of our legal systems to carry out this malignant pathology. There is absolutely no lawful justification for Leonard's incarceration."
“Leonard Peltier is Native elder whose wrongful incarceration is shameful. His continued imprisonment exemplifies the historical cruelty of the US Government toward Native people. The US BOP's treatment of Leonard Peltier is unlawful, and he deserves his freedom.” —Suzie Baer
Leonard's Statement: Peltier 80th Statement.pdf:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ABHSRNdyB8SKn0I&id=DFF2DD874157D44A%21118178&cid=DFF2DD874157D44A&parId=root&parQt=sharedby&o=OneUp
To view the film, please visit:
https://tinyurl.com/Peltier80thPresentation
We hope to have additional updates on Leonard soon. In the meantime, please engage our calls to action or donate to his defense efforts.
Miigwech.
Donate/ActNow:
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier:
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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Beneath The Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader (City Lights, 2024) is a collection of revolutionary essays, written by those who have been detained inside prison walls. Composed by the most structurally dispossessed people on earth, the prisoner class, these words illuminate the steps towards freedom.
Beneath the Mountain documents the struggle — beginning with slavery, genocide, and colonization up to our present day — and imagines a collective, anti-carceral future. These essays were handwritten first on scraps of paper, magazine covers, envelopes, toilet paper, or pages of bibles, scratched down with contraband pencils or the stubby cartridge of a ball-point pen; kites, careworn, copied and shared across tiers and now preserved in this collection for this and future generations. If they were dropped in the prison-controlled mail they were cloaked in prayers, navigating censorship and dustbins. They were very often smuggled out. These words mark resistance, fierce clarity, and speak to the hope of building the world we all deserve to live in.
"Beneath the Mountain reminds us that ancestors and rebels have resisted conquest and enslavement, building marronage against colonialism and genocide."
—Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency
Who stands beneath the mountain but prisoners of war? Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black have assembled a book of fire, each voice a flame in captivity...Whether writing from a place of fugivity, the prison camp, the city jail, the modern gulag or death row, these are our revolutionary thinkers, our critics and dreamers, our people. The people who move mountains. —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people’s understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography
These are the words each writer dreamed as they sought freedom and they need to be studied by people inside and read in every control unit/hole in every prison in America. We can send this book for you to anyone who you know who is currently living, struggling, and fighting
Who better to tell these stories than those who have lived them? Don’t be surprised with what you find within these pages: hope, solidarity, full faith towards the future, and most importantly, love.
Excerpt from the book:
"Revolutionary love speaks to the ways we protect, respect, and empower each other while standing up to state terror. Its presence is affirmed through these texts as a necessary component to help chase away fear and to encourage the solidarity and unity essential for organizing in dangerous times and places. Its absence portends tragedy. Revolutionary love does not stop the state from wanting to kill us, nor is it effective without strategy and tactics, but it is the might that fuels us to stand shoulder to shoulder with others regardless. Perhaps it can move mountains." —Jennifer Black & Mumia Abu-Jamal from the introduction to Beneath The Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader
Get the book at:
https://www.prisonradiostore.com/shop-2/beneath-the-mountain-an-anti-prison-reader-edited-by-mumia-abu-jamal-jennifer-black-city-lights-2024
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, 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 authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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*Major Announcement*
Claudia De la Cruz wins
Peace and Freedom Party primary in California!
We have an exciting announcement. The votes are still being counted in California, but the Claudia-Karina “Vote Socialist” campaign has achieved a clear and irreversible lead in the Peace and Freedom Party primary. Based on the current count, Claudia has 46% of the vote compared to 40% for Cornel West. A significant majority of PFP’s newly elected Central Committee, which will formally choose the nominee at its August convention, have also pledged their support to the Claudia-Karina campaign.
We are excited to campaign in California now and expect Claudia De la Cruz to be the candidate on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party in November.
We achieved another big accomplishment this week - we’re officially on the ballot in Hawai’i! This comes after also petitioning to successfully gain ballot access in Utah. We are already petitioning in many other states. Each of these achievements is powered by the tremendous effort of our volunteers and grassroots organizers across the country. When we’re organized, people power can move mountains!
We need your help to keep the momentum going. Building a campaign like this takes time, energy, and money. We know that our class enemies — the billionaires, bankers, and CEO’s — put huge sums toward loyal politicians and other henchmen who defend their interests. They will use all the money and power at their disposal to stop movements like ours. As an independent, socialist party, our campaign is relying on contributions from the working class and people like you.
We call on each and every one of our supporters to set up a monthly or one-time donation to support this campaign to help it keep growing and reaching more people. A new socialist movement, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, is being built but it will only happen when we all pitch in.
The Claudia-Karina campaign calls to end all U.S. aid to Israel. End this government’s endless wars. We want jobs for all, with union representation and wages that let us live with dignity. Housing, healthcare, and education for all - without the lifelong debt. End the ruthless attacks on women, Black people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. These are just some of the demands that are resonating across the country. Help us take the next step:
Volunteer: https://votesocialist2024.com/volunteer
Donate: https://votesocialist2024.com/donate
See you in the streets,
Claudia & Karina
Don't Forget! Join our telegram channel for regular updates: https://t.me/+KtYBAKgX51JhNjMx
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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.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
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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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
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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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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1) Trump Immigration Targets: Ukrainians, Venezuelans, Haitians
The president-elect has vowed to end a program that allows thousands of people from troubled nations to stay in the United States.
By Miriam Jordan, Nov. 15, 2024
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said he would order mass deportations. It is one of many threats that have stirred concerns among immigrants and prompted protests like this one last Saturday in Manhattan. Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed a crackdown on immigration like never before.
While his hard-line rhetoric about illegal immigration harks back to his first campaign, one of the president-elect’s targets this time is a decades-old program providing temporary legal status to about one million immigrants from dangerous and deeply troubled countries such as Haiti and Venezuela.
Known as Temporary Protected Status, the program was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush to help people already in the United States who cannot return safely and immediately to their country because of a natural disaster or an armed conflict.
But for some immigrants, the program, which allows them to work legally, has become all but permanent, a reflection of how troubled many corners of the world are and how little Congress has done to adapt the U.S. immigration system to the realities of global migration in the 21st century.
About 200,000 people with T.P.S. are from Haiti, a long-troubled island nation where the assassination of the president in 2021 led to the collapse of the government and the killings of thousands of people by gangs that now control much of the country. Haitians have emerged as the focus of Mr. Trump’s threats to effectively end the program after he and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, spread false rumors that Haitians who have settled in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating pets.
Thousands of Haitians have settled in the city, and the majority of them have lawful status, often through the program. That has made them attractive to local industries in need of workers. But the influx has strained resources and caused friction among some residents, and Mr. Trump seized on those tensions, vilifying the Haitians who have made Springfield home and threatening to effectively end the program for them and hundreds of thousands of other immigrants.
“Absolutely I’d revoke it,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with News Nation last month, adding that he would send the immigrants back to their country.
Mr. Vance, for his part, has repeatedly characterized Haitians in Springfield and other T.P.S. holders as “illegal aliens” granted “amnesty” by the Biden administration at the wave of a “magic government wand.”
“We’re going to stop doing mass grants of Temporary Protected Status,” Mr. Vance said at a campaign event last month.
The biggest group of people granted protection under the program — about 350,000 — comes from Venezuela, where political repression and economic collapse under the Maduro regime have led millions to leave in recent years.
Immigrants from some countries, including El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, have been eligible for the protection for more than two decades. Other countries, including Ethiopia, Lebanon and Ukraine, were added more recently.
Proponents of limiting immigration have been critical of the program, which they say allows people who receive the designation to ultimately stay in the United States indefinitely.
Mr. Trump’s advisers have made clear that his administration will reverse course on T.P.S., and his early choices for key immigration roles include notable hard-liners.
Late Sunday, the president-elect announced that Thomas Homan, who led the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency during Mr. Trump’s first term, would manage border policy for the White House. On Tuesday, he selected Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a key ally, to run the Homeland Security Department. And the president-elect is expected to name Stephen Miller, who was instrumental in the crackdown during Mr. Trump’s first term, as the White House deputy chief of staff.
The secretary of homeland security decides whether conditions in a given country merit granting its nationals protected status. The status lasts six to 18 months at a time and can be renewed indefinitely, so long as conditions warrant. Immigrants in the United States, whether they entered legally or not, are eligible for the status, which does not place them on a path to permanent legal residency, or green cards.
The Biden administration has renewed, reinstated or added protections for 16 countries.
Ending the program could uproot people who have been in the United States for years. Many would have to quit their jobs and return to troubled countries, and some families with U.S.-born children could end up separated, with parents forced to leave the United States while their sons and daughters remain.
The Obama administration offered the special status to Haitians in the United States in 2010, after a cataclysmic earthquake devastated the capital and killed at least 250,000 people. At the time, the homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, noted that the program would allow Haitians to work legally and send money home to family members, which she called an indirect form of aid.
Since the assassination of the country’s last president in 2021, Haiti has plunged into political chaos and been plagued by gang violence that killed thousands of people and made water, food and health care far harder to obtain.
On Monday, a Spirit Airlines flight from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was struck by gunfire while trying to land in the capital, Port-au-Prince. It was one of three international aircraft hit by gunfire in recent days, which led the F.A.A. to ban U.S. carriers from flying to Haiti for 30 days.
Lesly Joseph, a Haitian dentist, and his wife, flew to the United States in 2021 on tourist visas after being threatened at gunpoint by gangs. The couple felt fortunate, he said, when the Biden administration designated Temporary Protected Status for nationals of Haiti, based on the spiraling violence within a day of their arrival.
“T.P.S. offered me sanctuary to live here and protect my family from harm,” said Dr. Joseph, who lives in Boston and has a 3-year-old American daughter.
Dr. Joseph was hired as a researcher at Boston University and is working toward obtaining a license to practice dentistry in the United States.
If the temporary status gets stripped away, he would immediately lose his job. “I can’t even think of it,” he said.
Returning to Haiti would be akin to a death sentence, Dr. Joseph said, noting that a physician friend had been murdered by gangs this week.
The Trump administration tried to scrap the program in 2017 and 2018 for El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan, and was sued in federal court. The administration argued that the program had turned into a quasi-permanent benefit for hundreds of thousands of people.
The American Civil Liberties Union won a preliminary injunction to keep the program in place, and the Trump administration appealed the decision. The case was still before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit when Mr. Trump left office in 2021, but it became moot after the Biden administration signaled its support for the program.
Now, with three of Mr. Trump’s nominees part of a conservative super majority on the Supreme Court and many more elsewhere in the federal judiciary, a renewed effort to end T.P.S. could fare better in the courts.
“This time around, the Trump administration is likely to be more sophisticated in documenting its policy rationale for why Temporary Protected Status is no longer justified,” said Lenni Benson, a professor at New York Law School.
President Biden has used Temporary Protected Status for “more foreigners from more countries than any previous administration,” said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that sees legal immigration as essential to a healthy economy.
He said that the president had “appropriately” responded to the increase in the number of countries in turmoil.
The designation helped relieve pressure on Democrat–led cities, like New York, Chicago and Denver, struggling to assist tens of thousands of migrant arrivals. The mayors of those cities urged the administration to allow the migrants to work so that they could achieve self-sufficiency more quickly, and Temporary Protected Status was the answer.
Ahilan Arulanantham, who was lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the case that in 2020 reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, said that he was prepared for another court battle to defend the program.
“The statute requires that the government undertake an objective assessment of the conditions for each country to decide whether that country is safe for the return of nationals,” said Mr. Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the U.C.L.A. School of Law.
“Haiti, which has been the subject of intense political controversy, is obviously very unsafe at the moment,” he said.
Lindsay Aimé, a Haitian community leader in Springfield, said that if Mr. Trump revokes T.P.S., he will cause grave harm to Haitians who have found refuge and stability in the United States.
“Without T.P.S., you can’t work, you can’t drive, and you won’t be able to pay your bills,” he said. But even so, the Haitians who are here already would be unlikely to leave, he said.
“We will try to live peacefully and stay alive here.”
Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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2) Young Gazans Reach Global Audiences with Videos of Everyday Life in War
Displaced young Palestinians are chronicling their wartime routines on TikTok and Instagram, allowing their followers abroad to see a more personal side of the conflict.
By Isabella Kwai and Bilal Shbair, Nov. 16, 2024
Bilal Shbair reported from southern Gaza, where he interviewed Gazans sharing their lives online.
Images from the daily lives of @Omarherzshow, @Gym_rat_in-Gaza and @medo_halimy, who have chronicled their experiences in war-torn Gaza in social media videos.
Seven months into the war in Gaza, Mohammed Said al-Halimy began documenting his daily routine in earnest.
Mr. al-Halimy, known by his friends and online as Medo, already had a teenager’s knack for capturing sunsets, songs and life’s milestones in short video snippets. That life was fractured after Israeli bombs fell on Gaza in response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack, destroying his university and forcing him into a makeshift beach campsite.
As months of fighting ground into the summer, and his displacement became more entrenched, Mr. al-Halimy turned his phone camera to the surreal experience of everyday reality in dystopian circumstances.
“I wanted to show something positive, some resilience despite the daily suffering,” Mr. al-Halimy, 19, said in a July interview, adding that he hoped to capture an “unseen side of our lifestyle.”
Palestinians trapped in Gaza have been recording the war since it began, in often harrowing videos that have given a close-up view of the Israeli bombardment to millions of people worldwide. Many of their posts — raw, personal and at times graphic — went viral early in the conflict as traditional news media outlets struggled to get reporters into the blockaded enclave.
Now, young Gazans are sharing a different window into their lives: their routines amid a year-old war with seemingly no end in sight.
Mr. al-Halimy began posting about the hourslong wait to fill containers with drinking water, about concocting recipes with limited food supplies, and about a new garden plot he created in the soil beside the tent encampment that had for months been his family’s shelter. Showing his new baby mint plant to his Instagram followers, he asked, “Tell me in the comments, what should I name her?”
More than 6,000 miles away in central Florida, Sierra Taft, 36, was watching, checking Mr. al-Halimy’s accounts regularly for updates and worrying about his well-being.
“He felt like somebody that if I had met face to face, I could be best friends with,” she said.
Life in Gaza Through Instagram
Some Palestinians in Gaza document how they cook meals over open fires, using whatever few ingredients are available. Others unpack aid boxes or share exercise routines where doorways double as pull-up bars. And some show how friendly football and chess games are squeezed between piles of rubble and long lines for water.
With a command of English and growing followings, these Palestinian creators share their perspectives and appeal for help using the language of online influencers around the world who have amassed vast audiences by filming the minutiae of their lives.
So when Palestinian creators like Mr. al-Halimy portray normal activities like exercising or cooking against the backdrop of war, it is “a language that reaches,” said Laura Cervi, an associate professor in journalism at the Autonomous University of Barcelona who has studied Palestinian activism online.
“It’s not a number. It’s not like the complex journalistic vernacular,” she said, adding that from the perspective of viewers, “It’s a guy like me that is telling me that he exists — in the way I exist.”
Before the war, Mohammed Faris said his favorite place was the gym. Mr. Faris, a Khan Younis resident, had just started his first year at Al-Aqsa University when the war broke out. His parents, employees of UNRWA, the main United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, encouraged him to start documenting his life. Since April, he has been sharing his diet and exercise routines under the account “Gymrat in Gaza,” which has gained more than 180,000 followers.
“Why not grab this opportunity to talk to the world?” he said in a recent interview from Khan Younis while refilling his supply of water. Mr. Faris said he had raised nearly $13,000 online since he started posting videos, and hoped to eventually evacuate his family from Gaza. He said his audience enjoyed it when he incorporated memes and jokes. “I like to add this touch of sense of humor,” he said.
But he struggles with the instability of being displaced from his home and the scarcity of healthy foods, he said. Finding stable internet connections can be a challenge, and he sometimes waits hours for a video to upload.
“What I want people to receive from my vlogs is that we are trying to cope with the situation,” he said.
The fighting has pushed most Gazans into shrinking areas designated by Israel as “humanitarian zones,” though U.N. officials and aid groups have said that no place in Gaza is safe and they fear famine.
Some viewers have criticized Mr. al-Halimy and others like him, accusing them of sharing misinformation, or questioning their struggle given their lighthearted messaging.
“I’m just showing you the 1 percent of my life — the 1 percent that I’m trying to have fun,” he said in a video posted in May. He added: “We’ve been through hell.”
A Global Reach
Even before the war, young Palestinians were adopting the lighter tone of online social media to conduct what Dr. Cervi calls “playful activism,” pointing to TikTok trends that incorporate humor to make political points.
The insistence on sharing everyday routines or incorporating a lighter tone into material about the war, she added, is its own form of defiance.
“It’s very political because they’re saying, ‘We’re surviving and we will keep on,’” she said. Framing these videos as lifestyle content, she said, makes it more likely that social media algorithms will share them with a broader audience.
Activists elsewhere have used playfully framed videos on social media platforms to share messaging about other causes, Dr. Cervi said, such as the struggle to combat the killing of women in Latin America.
Researchers say that social media postings not only can elevate causes, but also tend to simplify them by removing nuance and centering each creator’s perspective. What seem like candid moments can actually be carefully chosen and edited for effect.
Mr. al-Halimy said creating videos helped him endure his everyday hardships.
“I do my best to set up new, bright sides of my tent life and make it a day to remember,” he said in an interview in the summer. “A moment of pain, to a moment of hope.”
A graduate of a high school for gifted students, Mr. al-Halimy had studied in Texas under a State Department program. He said in July that his family had decided to stay together in Gaza, instead of being separated. His online following was growing fast, and he hoped to raise enough money for them all to leave.
On Aug. 25, he shared his final video on Instagram. The next afternoon, according to a friend who was with him, Mr. al-Halimy was at a makeshift cafe in Khan Younis when he was struck in the head by shrapnel from an Israeli airstrike. His brother, Zeid al-Halimy, said that he died at a Khan Younis hospital.
The Israeli military said it was not aware of an airstrike in the area that day.
In the months since Mr. al-Halimy’s death, his followers have been rewatching his videos and have left dozens of tributes in the comments. Some vowed to plant mint in their own gardens to remember him, and a fund-raising effort for his family has surged to more than $137,000.
Weeks after his death, Ms. Taft, who had never met Mr. al-Halimy in person, said she still thought about him every day. She compared losing him to another recent blow, the death of a close school friend.
“It’s the same feeling of loss,” she said.
Other Palestinians she followed online are never far from her mind.
“I’m wondering who the next one is going to be,” she said.
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3) Israel Strikes Near Beirut as Two Medics Killed in South Lebanon
Israel’s bombing campaign has complicated U.S. diplomacy to stop the Israel-Hezbollah war.
By Liam Stack, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Nov. 16, 2024
Smoke billowing south of Beirut after an Israeli strike on Saturday. Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
The Israeli military pressed on Saturday with its days-long bombing campaign targeting an area near Beirut dominated by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia, while in the country’s south, Israeli airstrikes killed two paramedics, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
There were multiple waves of attacks throughout the day on the Dahiya, a predominantly Shiite area south of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway. After sundown, powerful blasts were felt and heard in the Beirut city center. Israel, which issued a new flurry of evacuation warnings to local residents, has said these strikes are targeting facilities used by Hezbollah and has accused the group of hiding “terrorist infrastructure” in residential areas.
The past few days have seen one of the heaviest waves of Israeli bombardments on the southern outskirts of Beirut since the beginning of the war. There was no immediate word on casualties from the Saturday attacks.
At the same time, there was growing anger within Lebanon over the mounting numbers of rescue workers killed by Israel in recent weeks. On Saturday, Lebanon’s health ministry condemned the killings of rescue workers as “barbaric attacks” and urged the international community to “ensure respect for international humanitarian laws.”
Israeli strikes have killed almost two dozen rescuers in the past week, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. And more than 145 health care workers in Lebanon have been killed while on duty since the war began in mid-September, according to the World Health Organization.
One of the paramedics was killed on Saturday in the southern Lebanese town of Kfar Tibnit, according to the health ministry, which said that two more paramedics in the same town were missing and unaccounted for. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the deaths.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, also denounced the killings of at least a dozen paramedics this week in a single airstrike on a building used by emergency workers in the village of Douris, in the Baalbek region of northeastern Lebanon.
“We deplore the attack on the Lebanese Civil Defense center in Douris village,” he said in a statement on Friday. “The center has been massively damaged. Attacks on health care are becoming the new normal in conflicts. This must stop — everywhere!”
In Israel, air raid sirens sounded across the country’s north on Saturday as Hezbollah launched new drone and rocket attacks over the border. Israel’s military said the munitions either fell in areas that caused little damage or were intercepted by its air defense systems, creating thundering midair explosions that could be heard in the major northern city of Haifa.
Hezbollah began near daily rocket attacks on Israel last October in solidarity with its ally, Hamas, in Gaza. The conflict intensified in mid-September when Israel stepped up attacks on Hezbollah, culminating in a ground invasion of Lebanon on Oct. 1.
The war has driven roughly one million Lebanese from their homes, and Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on the north of Israel have displaced tens of thousands of Israelis.
The days-long bombing campaign in the neighborhoods south of Beirut has complicated U.S. diplomatic efforts for a truce. The Biden administration has recently renewed its efforts to broker a cease-fire. But there has so far been no public indication that Hezbollah or its patron, Iran, are willing to accept Israel’s demands, which include the withdrawal of Hezbollah from the Israel-Lebanon border.
Israel also wants any cease-fire deal to stipulate that it has the right to attack Hezbollah if the group violates the agreement, a demand rejected by both the armed group and the Lebanese government, which is not a party to the conflict.
A prominent Iranian official, Ali Larijani, met on Friday with Lebanese officials in Beirut to discuss the cease-fire efforts, the Iranian Embassy in Lebanon said. Mr. Larijani, a senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, passed messages to Hezbollah from Mr. Khamenei that said he supported ending the war with Israel, according to two Iranians affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The messages also assured Hezbollah that Iran would continue its support and help the group rebuild its forces and recover from the war, they said.
The Iranians, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the supreme leader had also told Hezbollah to accept the terms of a cease-fire deal demanding it move its forces north, in accordance with U.N. Security Council resolution 1701, which ended a past round of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
Nabil Berri, a veteran Lebanese politician and the speaker of parliament, was quoted on Saturday in Al Joumhouria, a Lebanese newspaper, expressing cautious optimism about a potential deal. But he said a recently presented American proposal contained elements that Lebanon’s government considered unacceptable.
He told the newspaper it would be “impossible for us to accept” an agreement that included a stipulation that permitted Israel to attack Lebanese territory again in the future.
“Anything that would affect our sovereignty, even discussing it is rejected,” he said.
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4) Liberal Berkeley’s Toughened Stance on Homeless Camps Is a Bellwether
The progressive stronghold in California plans to target large encampments, relying on a Supreme Court decision handed down by a conservative majority.
By Shawn Hubler, Reporting from Berkeley, Calif., Nov. 16, 2024
Homeless encampments in Berkeley, Calif., have frustrated neighboring residents and businesses. Credit...Rachel Bujalski for The New York Times
Berkeley, Calif., long associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, has a reputation for erring on the side of compassion when it comes to addressing drug use and homelessness. The city is such a liberal outlier that Vice President Kamala Harris downplayed her origins there as she tried to appeal to moderate American voters this year.
So it came as a shock to Californians when Berkeley joined the scores of cities that have decided to tighten enforcement on homeless camps this year. In the coming weeks, Berkeley authorities plan to target two sprawling encampments that for years have generated waves of rats, fires, complaints and police calls.
“People are frustrated — even in this very progressive city that cares deeply about addressing homelessness,” Jesse ArreguÃn, the mayor of Berkeley, said this week.
Berkeley is among more than 75 cities nationwide that have imposed new restrictions on homeless encampments since the Supreme Court decided in June to allow state and local governments to prohibit outdoor sleeping, said Eric Tars, the legal director of the National Homelessness Law Center in Washington, D.C., which has been tracking the legislation.
About a third of the measures have been enacted in California, which is the nation’s most populous state and has a disproportionately large number of homeless residents. Other restrictions have been passed in the Midwest and South, as well as in Washington, Montana and other Western states covered by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which had previously banned governments from punishing people for establishing homeless camps.
A handful of cities have made a point of rejecting a hard-line approach, calling it counterproductive. Leaders in Los Angeles, for instance, have said that clearing tents alone will not solve homelessness and that cities need to provide housing, mental health care and employment options to tackle the problem.
But Mr. Tars was struck by how quickly liberal enclaves like Santa Monica or blue-dot college towns like Morgantown, W.Va., have moved in on homeless encampments.
“In almost every one of these communities, the news story about it will say the debate at the City Council went on for like five hours, and lots of people spoke passionately, and a lot of them emphasized that criminalizing homelessness will only make it worse, not better,” Mr. Tars said. “But then they criminalize homelessness anyway.”
Homelessness surged to record proportions in the past several years, particularly in California, where contributing factors such as mental illness and drug addiction have been compounded by soaring housing costs.
After 2018, when the Ninth Circuit ruled that it was unconstitutionally cruel and unusual to punish people for sleeping outside if they had no other option, the number of encampments exploded. As the public grew weary, politicians in California and elsewhere in the West increasingly blamed the Ninth Circuit for the proliferation of homelessness that was visible in communities.
Without enforcement powers, state and local governments spent heavily on homeless services and affordable housing, a strategy that did ease homelessness in some cities. But most communities still have critical shortages of long-term housing, services and shelter beds.
So when the Supreme Court issued its decision this summer, local and state leaders in both parties seized on opportunities to shut down the most persistent encampments.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom urged city and county leaders to quickly and humanely remove homeless camps. To make a point, he showed up himself at freeway underpasses to clear out encampments, carrying garbage bags and debris from sites.
Mr. Newsom accurately read the electorate. In California, voters last week overwhelmingly passed an initiative to impose tougher punishments on theft and drug use, a measure that harnessed the frustrations that residents had about crime and homelessness in the state. The governor did not support the proposition, but it was popular among Democrats and Republicans alike.
“This is an issue that almost seems to transcend politics now,” said Eve Garrow, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “There is just more pressure to make houselessness invisible again.”
Ms. Garrow said she was alarmed by the willingness of more liberal areas to strengthen enforcement. She was particularly concerned because the attitudes coincide with a push by Republican activists to roll back federal housing programs for homeless people, as described in Project 2025, a policy blueprint for a conservative presidential administration.
Republican-led states like Florida and Tennessee have already instituted policies that were influenced by the Cicero Institute, a conservative Texas think tank that pushes to ban unauthorized camping and defund homeless programs that prioritize housing. The institute was founded by Joe Lonsdale, a tech investor who is close to Elon Musk and who has advised the transition team for President-elect Donald J. Trump.
“Unhoused people are some of the most politically powerless folks in society,” Ms. Garrow said. “How do we stem the tide of cruelty against them if even ostensibly progressive cities like Berkeley are not on our side?”
Berkeley officials said the situation is more nuanced than civil rights advocates recognize. Mr. ArreguÃn said that his city would try to humanely close down encampments.
“We’re not going to arrest people. We’re going to be thoughtful, we’re going to offer alternatives — but we’re going to be firm,” he said.
The city’s new approach, codified in a September resolution, will apply only to encampments that pose documented and narrowly defined fire hazards, or threaten health and public safety, officials said. The resolution specifies that the city’s first priority will continue to be coaxing homeless campers into housing.
“It’s a hard thing to say that one agrees with this conservative Supreme Court, but a course correction was needed,” said Rashi Kesarwani, the Berkeley councilwoman who was the author of the resolution.
Since 2018, Berkeley has opened an emergency shelter and helped fund two additional housing projects with services for homeless people, relying on a real estate tax increase. On Election Day, voters agreed to raise that tax even higher for homeless services.
Between 2022 and 2024, the number of homeless people living without shelter, such as on the streets or in cars, fell 45 percent in Berkeley, Ms. Kesarwani wrote in a September report to the Council. Still, according to the last federal count, nearly 850 people were estimated to be homeless in the city, with about half of them unsheltered and living in her district.
Most problematic, she said, were two persistent encampments in an industrial area in West Berkeley, where some people repeatedly refused to move, even when offered housing. When the city opened motel rooms for 52 people at one encampment last June, 18 refused, while others swiftly moved into the tents that were vacated by the 34 who accepted shelter, according to Ms. Kesarwani’s report.
“What they’re offering is the exact same circumstances you have if you’re in jail or prison,” said Erin Spencer, 44, a homeless veteran who clambered out of a dumpster at an encampment on Harrison Street, in reference to the motel rooms. “No visitors. Can’t bring your stuff in from outside.”
Mr. Spencer pointed to a row of tents and tarps where he said he had lived for about three years with his dog, Bastet. Mr. Spencer called the city’s offers “a trap” and said that if authorities dismantled his camp, he would “go watch them bulldoze it all and then come back and start rebuilding.”
After civil rights groups cited his situation in their Supreme Court argument to protect public encampments, Mr. Spencer was quoted by name in the scathing dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who argued that rousting encampments only traumatized unstable people and deterred them from accepting help.
Across the street from Mr. Spencer, a fellow camper groused that the city also prohibited smoking in its motel rooms. Nearby, a bearded compatriot said that he did not need shelter because he could make a living selling firewood. As he spoke, he poured gasoline from a can into a whiskey bottle, and from the whiskey bottle into a tank of a battered chain saw that he was tinkering with on the curb.
City records over the past year showed that police officers have been called to the West Berkeley sites every day and a half, on average, and that the Fire Department has been summoned about every four and a half days. Complaints from surrounding businesses — automotive shops, artisan bagel bakeries, makers of A.I.-powered robotics — included reports of dumpster fires, bottles of urine tossed at delivery drivers and rodents chewing through the wiring of parked cars.
One group of businesses, including a craft brewery and a firm that builds movie sets, has claimed in a lawsuit that the city’s tolerance for the camps has created a public nuisance.
“Our view is that in a civilized society, you don’t get to just pitch a tent and a barbecue outside someone’s home or business,” said Ilan Wurman, a Minnesota-based lawyer who brought similar litigation in Phoenix, where business owners waged a long and contentious battle against a sprawling homeless encampment known as The Zone.
Still, Cecilia Lunaparra, the youngest member of the Berkeley City Council at age 22, said she had assumed that America’s best-known progressive stronghold would take “a more compassionate approach” than most cities.
Her Council district includes People’s Park, a hallowed ground for liberal activists that served as a homeless refuge until the University of California, Berkeley, launched plans to build student housing and units for homeless people there.
Ms. Lunaparra had urged the City Council to ignore the Supreme Court decision, and to continue treating encampments as if nothing had changed. She said the complaints around the encampments only underscored the need for Berkeley to stay the course with more programs and more housing.
“The fundamental issue here is: What is the actual solution to homelessness?” she said. “I think the actual solution to homelessness is housing.”
Ms. Kesarwani said she agreed — but that Berkeley also had a broader responsibility to the neighborhoods affected by encampments.
“This is us in an impossible situation, trying to be balanced and reasonable,” she said. “This is not the Bay Area swinging to the right.”
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5) Biden’s Policies Offer a Starting Point for Trump’s Border Crackdown
Mr. Trump has criticized the Biden administration for what he calls its lax handling of the border — but it has left him with tools he can use to shut down the border.
By Hamed Aleaziz, Reporting from Washington, Nov. 16, 2024
A U.S. National Guardsman looking out across the Rio Grande into Mexico in Eagle Pass, Texas, in March. Credit...Cheney Orr for The New York Times
President-elect Donald Trump has spent the last year railing against the Biden administration’s immigration policies, saying they left the border wide open and risked American security.
But actions taken by President Biden in the past year, including a sweeping asylum ban and more streamlined deportation procedures, may make it easier for Mr. Trump to fulfill his promise to shut down the border and turn back migrants as quickly as possible.
To be sure, Mr. Biden’s vision for immigration is different from Mr. Trump’s. While the White House has enacted stricter regulations at the border, it has also emphasized legal pathways to enter the country and offered temporary legal status to migrants from certain troubled countries.
After promising a more humane immigration policy when he took office in 2021, Mr. Biden was confronted with a worldwide surge in migration that put pressure on the southern U.S. border. By his second year in office, annual border arrests topped 2 million.
As chaotic scenes emerged of migrants crowding at the border, Republicans like Mr. Trump argued that the Democrats were unable to govern and protect American cities, and they urged a crackdown on immigration. Republican governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida sent thousands of migrants by bus and plane to Democratic northern cities to highlight the border crisis.
Under relentless political pressure, Mr. Biden eventually took several steps that marked a radical shift in U.S. immigration policy.
In an executive order in June, Mr. Biden blocked migrants from seeking asylum at the border, the most restrictive border policy enacted by any modern Democratic president.
A key feature of the new policy is that migrants being screened at the border are no longer routinely asked whether they fear return. If they do not express fear on their own, they are quickly processed for deportation. Migrant activists say far too many people who would be eligible for asylum are being summarily rejected.
The U.S. also ramped up deportations to countries other than Mexico to record levels, built more space to hold migrants near the border and began removing people more quickly by deporting asylum seekers directly from Border Patrol custody.
Those actions dropped border numbers to lows not seen in several years.
“All of these tools will be in effect when Trump takes office,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
Adam Isacson, who focuses on border security at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization, said that nearly 45,000 of the 54,000 migrants who crossed in September had been deported or detained.
“That certainly lays the groundwork for Trump,” he said, noting that only 9,145 people had been released into the country in September, pending an immigration court hearing.
He added: “So it won’t be too much work for Trump to get it down close to zero. Especially if they find a way to detain people from distant and hard-to-deport countries.”
Mr. Trump has promised to close the border immediately upon taking office. He has committed to a return to a policy known as “Remain in Mexico,” which forces migrants to stay in Mexico until their U.S. cases are resolved. That would be one of his main solutions to shutting down the border, but that policy would likely take time and negotiations to put into place.
In the meantime, he can make use of the infrastructure that the Biden administration has developed.
The administration also announced in July a plan to help Panama deport migrants who cross its borders illegally as a way to cut down on migration targeting the U.S. border.
“This assistance seeks to reduce unprecedented irregular migration through the Darien region, through which over 520,000 migrants transited in 2023,” the State Department said in a statement at the time.
The Biden administration also plans to issue a regulation to make it easier for asylum officers to spot those ineligible for protection, like migrants with serious criminal records, and to quickly remove them from the country.
To increase opportunities for legal immigration, the administration is encouraging migrants to use a mobile app to apply for appointments with Border Patrol and to make a case for asylum. It also has created a program that allows people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter the U.S. and stay for two years if they have a financial sponsor.
Those programs have been key targets of Mr. Trump, who has promised to undo them immediately.
“All of the Biden administration restrictions give them a starting point far beyond what they had in 2016,” said Stephanie Leutert, the director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin and a former State Department official in the Biden administration.
Ms. Leutert explained that, unlike in 2017, there are more single adults and families arriving from across the globe.
“So, in a sense, there may be more that the Trump administration will want to immediately undo (the legal pathways) and more that they may want to work with (the restrictions),” she wrote in a text message.
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6) The Hidden Truth Linking the Broken Border to Your Online Shopping Cart
The incoming Trump administration promises an immigration crackdown. But for years, the on-demand economy has been fueled by unscrupulous staffing agencies exploiting migrant workers.
By Steve Eder, Danielle Ivory and Marcela Valdes, Nov. 17, 2024
During the depths of the pandemic, sales at Alo Yoga surged as its popularity exploded on social media. Kendall Jenner appeared on Instagram wearing the brand’s high-waist leggings. Alessandra Ambrosio and Jennifer Lopez were seen in Alo gear, too. In just one year, business reportedly almost doubled, surpassing $1 billion.
Alo’s sister company, Bella+Canvas, a wholesaler of basic apparel, also reached a milestone, selling directly to consumers through its website. To keep up, the two companies turned to a vast new distribution warehouse in Nevada.
Finding workers for such facilities is no small task, but corporate America often looks to a time-tested strategy: contracting with staffing agencies that temporarily employ migrants, including some who enter the country illegally and are desperate for jobs.
This year, America’s southern border was once again a flashpoint in a presidential election, with President-elect Donald J. Trump pledging to deport millions of people who he said were “poisoning the blood” of the country. Within days of his re-election, he announced his intention to appoint hard-liners on immigration.
But despite the tough talk, the broken border has been a lifeline for America’s on-demand economy under both Democratic and Republican administrations, including Mr. Trump’s first term, an investigation by The New York Times found. Thousands of companies have exploited its porousness by plucking workers from the ranks of unauthorized migrants, sometimes with impunity.
Hidden from public view is the middleman role often played by staffing agencies. They recruit workers for warehouses, factories and distribution centers that serve up billions of dollars in goods for brand-name companies.
One of the most notorious agencies, BaronHR, worked with Alo Yoga and Bella+Canvas for years, including at the Nevada warehouse. The reporting shows that the agency’s founder, Luis E. Perez, cast himself as a benefactor for immigrant workers, but in many cases his firms cheated them out of wages and stole their tax payments.
While BaronHR provided jobs to migrants — and employees to companies — it was also an active player on the darker side of the immigration economy. Until the firm collapsed early this year, it was an agent for the exploitation of laborers who were often underpaid and working in unsafe conditions, all while shielding brands from direct responsibility.
To examine this secretive world, The Times scoured thousands of pages of court records, internal corporate documents and regulatory filings, and interviewed 100 migrant employees, as well as regulators and industry experts.
Mr. Perez is now in jail awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to federal tax crimes involving nearly $60 million. But since 2018, while his case went unresolved, records indicate that BaronHR and affiliated firms entered into contracts and collected more than $750 million from corporate partners, including Alo Yoga and Bella+Canvas. Much of the business occurred even as Mr. Trump cracked down on illegal immigration.
The privately held clothing retailers did not respond to repeated requests for comment, including a detailed list of findings addressed to their founders and hand-delivered to their Beverly Hills headquarters. A representative for Ms. Jenner, Ms. Ambrosio and Ms. Lopez declined to comment.
In a statement from jail in Santa Ana, Calif., Mr. Perez said, “There are significant limitations on my ability to meaningfully engage with you,” because of his legal situation and what he characterized as serious health problems.
He said BaronHR was often an employer “in name only” because “clients dictated the employment terms and conditions” and that since 2018 he had had “restricted involvement.” Some of his detractors, he said, were “former disgruntled employees, competitors and less-than-ideal clients.”
On any given day, Mr. Perez’s agencies had upward of 8,000 workers at partner locations, according to a 2021 deposition by a former top executive. Over more than a decade, they provided staffing for at least 800 companies large and small, publicly traded and privately held, client lists and other records obtained by The Times show. In addition to Alo Yoga and Bella+Canvas, the companies included well-known giants like TJX — the parent of T.J. Maxx, HomeGoods and Marshalls — and Keurig Dr Pepper, the beverage maker.
Those records do not identify the workers’ legal status, but a former BaronHR manager, Stacy Mohler, said some companies were adamant about vetting workers, while others just wanted “a warm body.” Another former manager said word spreads quickly about staffing firms that “hire anyone.”
Staffing agencies were among the top employers of unauthorized workers at sites inspected for immigration violations over the past decade, according to data collected by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The records indicate that at least 160 staffing firms, most of them identified during the Trump administration, employed people with suspicious documents or no evidence of authorization.
Immigration experts say this pattern of hiring reflects a far broader phenomenon tracked in the Biden and Obama administrations as well, but staffing agencies contacted by The Times disputed the accuracy of the data or suggested that workers had misrepresented their status.
The industry group representing staffing firms says partners sometimes use them as scapegoats.
“Clients are constantly trying to shift responsibility to us,” said Ed Lenz, senior counsel of the American Staffing Association. (BaronHR was not a member.) “And it’s a chronic longstanding tussle that we have with clients because they’re trying to relieve themselves of as much responsibility as possible.”
Dozens of staffing agencies have been accused of violations at their partner companies’ work sites, including sexual harassment, racial discrimination, wage theft or safety lapses that resulted in amputations, crushed body parts and death.
Federal, state and local regulators have pursued at least 80 investigations of agencies over possible violations involving immigrants, including many who are in the United States illegally, according to records from the Department of Homeland Security obtained through public records requests. They were compiled during the Biden administration but document accusations stretching back at least as far as the Trump era. They do not indicate the status of the investigations, and a department spokesperson did not provide more information.
Three staffing firms, for example, are under investigation by the Illinois Labor Department for concerns related to improper training at Ferrara Candy, the maker of SweeTarts and Jelly Belly jelly beans.
The candy company is also under investigation, records show. In a statement, it described the investigation as “frivolous” and said “all temporary and full-time workers understand the hazards and appropriate safety measures of their assigned role.”
Interviews and regulatory records show that BaronHR and its affiliates have been the subject of at least three investigations involving discrimination or failure to pay workers assigned to dozens of job sites, including at TJX.
In a statement, TJX said it requires staffing partners to provide authorized workers. “As these individuals are Baron employees,” the company said, “it would be inappropriate for us to comment on BaronHR’s business practices.”
Mr. Perez, the BaronHR founder, described “the vast majority” of its workers as “rollover” employees who had been hired by another agency or already worked for the partner company.
Across the country, BaronHR became known for issuing paychecks that shortchanged wages or bounced because of insufficient funds. The Times obtained BaronHR emails, interviewed employees and reviewed lawsuits describing more than a decade of payment problems.
A worker from Colombia said even check-cashing operations that were popular among undocumented immigrants often turned him away. “It was always a headache,” said the man, who worked at the Alo Yoga and Bella+Canvas warehouse in Nevada.
The retailers were among many companies that enlisted Mr. Perez’s services after he and his firms endured government raids, arrests, bankruptcies, indictments and lawsuits, according to interviews, BaronHR client records and court filings.
The relationships are a case study in how companies can benefit from illegal immigration — and can sidestep responsibility as workers are exploited.
In a sworn statement in May, the warehouse operations and safety manager for the two retailers said they had moved the BaronHR workers in California and Nevada to new staffing agencies and had paid missing wages. The intervention came after a work stoppage at the Nevada warehouse in January.
A ‘Game of Whac-a-Mole’
Last year about 13 million people worked in temporary jobs, more than a third of which were in warehouses, distribution centers and other industrial settings, according to the American Staffing Association.
For many unauthorized migrants, staffing firms offer a way to get their footing. In interviews, some recounted that their first job at BaronHR felt like a godsend.
One man from El Salvador had earned $40 a day selling oranges in Los Angeles. When he later made his way to Nevada, BaronHR sent him to the Alo Yoga and Bella+Canvas warehouse for $17 an hour.
A woman who had fled violence in South America worked for two staffing agencies in New Jersey before BaronHR sent her to Pennsylvania. There, she said, she unloaded mannequins, clothes and store decorations for a center owned by TJX for $18 an hour.
Elizeth Peláez, a migrant from Mexico, earned $400 a week as a domestic employee in Florida, before landing work with BaronHR in Nevada. At first, she packed potato chips and vitamins for $10 an hour, and welded wires for casino machines for $11. Eventually, she said, she drove a forklift for $18 an hour.
But her BaronHR paychecks bounced so often, she couldn’t reliably make rent. She slept in an office at a building she cleaned on the side.
“You have to do what they ask,” she explained, “or you’re left with nothing.”
To find such compliant workers, BaronHR relied on social media platforms, like LinkedIn, and word of mouth. It posted fliers in laundromats and stores, and opened offices in immigrant neighborhoods.
For years, Mr. Perez also leveraged his cultural connections.
Born in Mexico and raised in Orange County, Calif., he focused recruitment on Southern California’s Hispanic population. In his statement, he emphasized his humble origins. “I am very familiar with the experience of immigrants struggling to make ends meet,” he said, “because I was one.”
By 2003, his first firm, then called Checkmate Staffing, had hundreds of millions of dollars a year in business, Mr. Perez told government investigators, according to court records. Other disclosures showed that Checkmate workers were deployed to more than 1,200 companies.
Staffing agencies make money by charging companies a “markup” on hourly wages. Some find underhanded ways to gain a competitive edge. Mr. Perez could afford slim markups because he cut corners on required expenses such as workers’ compensation payments and payroll taxes, according to interviews and two decades of criminal cases against him.
Without providing details, Mr. Perez said in his statement that BaronHR relied on third-party contractors that “misled” the staffing agency about workers’ compensation coverage or withheld wages when “clients didn’t pay on time.”
David Weil, former administrator of the U.S. Labor Department’s wage and hour division, said operators like Mr. Perez go “in and out of business under multiple names,” skirting responsibility by creating a “game of Whac-a-Mole.”
He added, “If you create an environment where essentially you’re allowing some businesses to compete on the basis of wage theft, it starts pulling down the standards.”
Mr. Lenz, of the Staffing Association, said that law-abiding firms feel “deeply frustrated” because “they’re being hammered in the marketplace.”
BaronHR and its affiliates flourished, eventually expanding into about 15 states. “We were making hundreds of placements every hour,” said Becky Romero, a former BaronHR executive vice president who has a pending sexual harassment and wrongful termination suit against the company.
‘Nothing Is Getting Fixed’
BaronHR’s practices were hardly an industry secret.
Beginning over a decade ago, there were lawsuits, civil rights complaints and other public actions against the firm. And on multiple occasions, executives at a rival staffing agency emailed BaronHR clients about the problems. A person familiar with the emails said they went to more than 120 undisclosed partner companies.
One executive with the competitor, Partners Personnel, wrote in March 2021 that Mr. Perez’s run-ins with the law had the “potential to significantly disrupt your operations” and put “an unfortunate stain on the staffing industry.”
Some BaronHR clients backed away as the agency’s troubles became more widely known, but hundreds remained steadfast.
When Keurig Dr Pepper signed a new contract with BaronHR in 2019 to staff a facility in California, Mr. Perez and two of his executives were facing state charges for tax and workers’ compensation premium fraud.
Later that year, as federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging Mr. Perez with not paying millions in payroll taxes, Keurig Dr Pepper expanded the partnership to include more warehouses.
The partners then deepened their relationship with a national contract, according to a wrongful termination lawsuit by a former BaronHR employee.
Agency records show that workers were sent to Keurig Dr Pepper locations across the country, including manufacturing and warehouse sites in Florida and Illinois. Like the other BaronHR records reviewed by The Times, these do not indicate workers’ immigration status.
In a statement, Keurig Dr Pepper did not comment on the contract extensions but said it had later terminated its relationship with BaronHR because the firm was “not able to meet the standards expected in our internal vendor processes.”
The company added that it requires all suppliers to comply with the law and its ethical standards, including screening applicants for immigration status. It also said that it “did not observe any conduct” that ran counter to its standards.
Similarly, food affiliates of CJ Group maintained a relationship with BaronHR while they and the staffing firm faced worker lawsuits, records show.
The Times reached out to Schwan’s, which last year merged with the food affiliates and produces products under Red Baron, Bibigo and other brand names. In a statement, a Schwan’s spokesman acknowledged there had been “a handful of situations” when “BaronHR failed to pay workers,” but said “we always paid BaronHR for the work performed,” and “we expect the companies we work with to abide by all laws.”
In interviews, several former employees at BaronHR offices described workers from a variety of sites, including Alo Yoga and Bella+Canvas, complaining about missing wages and bounced paychecks. In some cases, they responded to calls from partner companies about why the workers were not getting paid.
Often, they said, they offered empty promises. But one recalled telling companies, “Nothing is getting fixed.”
In his statement, Mr. Perez said he accepted “ultimate responsibility” for his tax problems, while spreading blame to others.
“My downfall was hiring people with limited training and experience to run the business,” he said, “and retaining professionals who gave me very bad advice.”
‘U.S.A. Strong’
Alo Yoga and Bella+Canvas — which markets itself as “U.S.A. Strong” for creating American jobs — were consistent partners of BaronHR. They are owned by Color Image Apparel, a privately held company based in Beverly Hills, founded by Danny Harris and Marco DeGeorge.
The relationship with BaronHR dates back roughly a decade, when the staffing firm began supplying them workers in suburban Los Angeles, records and interviews show. They also indicate that BaronHR and the retailers were in close communication when problems arose in the Nevada warehouse. BaronHR and other firms providing staffing had representatives stationed in the lunchroom, according to workers and BaronHR corporate employees.
In September 2022, a new contract between Bella+Canvas and BaronHR laid out the agency’s responsibility for screening, hiring and paying workers. Over the previous three years, at least four workers had sued both BaronHR and Bella+Canvas over pay and other claims. Three settled and one, who also filed a discrimination complaint to California’s civil rights agency, has a lawsuit still pending.
The Times interviewed more than 20 people whom BaronHR had hired to work for Alo Yoga, Bella+Canvas, Color Image or their contractors. All of them were undocumented during their employment, and some shared texts, emails, pay stubs and other documents.
Many of the workers described banks rejecting their paychecks for insufficient funds. By last fall, they said, BaronHR often directed them to specific check-cashing businesses that charged high fees.
“The company should not be telling me what to do with my money,” said one worker, Eduardo Olmos.
The designated businesses changed regularly, and by late in the day they sometimes turned people away. Some workers clocked out mid-shift to get paid. In such a rush, Maria Acuña, a former supervisor in Nevada, said she and some co-workers once narrowly avoided a car accident.
“We got out of the car, running,” she said.
Another worker was once stationed in a “V.I.P. section,” packing Alo Yoga items for celebrities and social media influencers. A single mother who was undocumented, she said she fell behind on rent because of bounced paychecks and worried about feeding and clothing her children.
Some said they complained to managers employed by Alo Yoga and Bella+Canvas. Emails document some of the exchanges.
In one of them, a worker complained to a Bella+Canvas manager last year that her bank repeatedly rejected her checks. Their email exchange dragged out over three months and looped in the staffing agency.
While workers struggled to get paid, Alo Yoga promoted steep holiday discounts and, on Instagram, free fast shipping on “party looks” and “winter wish lists.”
Many workers who spoke to The Times had committed to working six-day weeks to meet the demand. In return, BaronHR promised bonuses, but many of those checks bounced too.
After struggling to get paid during the holidays, workers in Nevada occupied the cafeteria and refused to work. Within days, Alo Yoga and Bella+Canvas switched BaronHR workers to other agencies staffing their warehouses.
In May, Delfino Barragan, the warehouse operations and safety manager for the clothing brands, acknowledged in a court filing that, for four weeks beginning last December, BaronHR was “failing to pay its staff.”
He said the brands had paid about $425,000 to the other agencies to cover “labor costs that BaronHR failed to pay,” and blamed the staffing firm’s “breaches” for other potential costs.
Some workers were still reckoning their losses months later. When the Salvadoran man who once sold oranges tried to file his taxes this year, he learned that BaronHR had not reported his income, even though it had deducted federal taxes from his paychecks, he said in interview. In fact, he said, the Internal Revenue Service told him it had no record of his employment at the Nevada warehouse.
‘People Needed This Work’
Employing undocumented immigrants was central to BaronHR’s business.
One company that partnered with the firm determined that two-thirds of its workers from the staffing agency were undocumented, according to a 2019 lawsuit by a former BaronHR executive.
The executive, Michael Morris, who also served on the corporate board, urged Mr. Perez to fire managers “who hired undocumented employees because that practice is unethical and illegal,” the suit said, and raised concerns that workers “were being exploited by BaronHR and its clients.”
Mr. Morris was soon demoted, the lawsuit says, and later fired. Court records show that BaronHR agreed to pay him $250,000 in a settlement that included a nondisclosure clause.
Early this year, when the three federal and state labor agencies notified the Homeland Security Department that BaronHR was being investigated, the workplace violations involved unauthorized workers deployed to dozens of companies, according to interviews and financial documents.
These include a snack company owned at the time by Utz, the Las Vegas hotel Circus Circus, and Alo Yoga and Bella+Canvas. None of them responded to requests for comment.
Several former corporate employees of BaronHR said the firm targeted undocumented immigrants because they were less likely to quit or speak up if mistreated.
“These people needed this work,” said Yesenia Murillo, a sales representative in BaronHR’s Chula Vista, Calif., office in 2017 and 2018, adding that the agency and its clients had leveraged workers' desperation to place them in “dangerous, hazardous, inhumane” jobs.
In 2017, when the Trump administration ratcheted up work-site inspections for undocumented workers, staffing agencies across the country received notices that federal agents would visit.
Around that time, a BaronHR branch manager in Chula Vista ordered employees to throw away hundreds of employment verification documents known as I-9s, according to lawsuits filed by Ms. Murillo and two other former employees.
The next year, employees at the same office were instructed by a compliance auditor to white out portions of I-9s, make faded copies of altered forms, shred forms and forge signatures on unsigned forms, the lawsuits said. The complaints cited an email from Joseph Martinez, BaronHR’s head of sales and operations, expressing frustration at the company’s repeated flouting of the law.
“Clearly there is fraud taking place,” he wrote, adding, “We cannot be falsifying government documents.” According to the employees’ lawyer, Josh Gruenberg, the lawsuits were all settled.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement later inspected the Chula Vista paperwork and issued a warning notice, records show, meaning it found violations that needed to be fixed.
BaronHR was not fined, according to the records. But it was reported to the Homeland Security Department under a Biden administration program that offers some protections for unauthorized workers and temporarily authorized workers who report labor violations.
So far, at least 75 other staffing agencies in 17 states have been investigated, documents show. The Homeland Security Department would not clarify the status of the investigations.
One worker center alone, Arriba Las Vegas, has collected evidence of mistreatment from more than 1,000 people who worked for BaronHR or its affiliates in California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Texas or Nevada, said Bliss Requa-Trautz, the group’s executive director. Almost all of them had been unauthorized to work in the United States, and some had worked for BaronHR stretching back to the Trump and Obama administrations.
‘Scared to Speak Out’
When José Tapia ripped the tendons in his shoulder in 2017 at a warehouse in Carson, Calif., he was rushed not to a hospital but to BaronHR’s branch office to be grilled by a lawyer, according to interviews and allegations in a lawsuit.
Mr. Tapia still has not had the surgery recommended by his doctor, he said, because the staffing agency did not carry the state-mandated insurance that covers such treatment, and he can’t afford to pay for it himself. His case settled, his lawyer said, but he is still awaiting payment.
Over the past 15 years, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspected BaronHR’s work sites roughly 65 times, tallying nearly 100 violations with fines totaling at least $335,000, according to federal data. In most of the incidents, BaronHR’s partner companies were also cited.
Some workers have said in lawsuits and civil rights complaints that they were terminated or stopped receiving assignments after suffering an injury or reporting other health concerns. Others did not receive workers’ compensation payments, records and interviews suggest. Recent bankruptcy filings listed about 300 such unresolved cases, with well over $2 million owed to injured workers, medical providers and others.
The workers’ complaints extended beyond health and safety issues. According to allegations in interviews, lawsuits and regulatory actions, BaronHR also created a permissive environment for discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation and pregnancy.
Mr. Martinez, the former BaronHR executive who raised concerns about falsifying employment documents, filed a discrimination and harassment lawsuit, in which he accused the staffing firm of having kept coded logs that allowed partners to choose workers based on race and other factors.
An internal document, the suit said, referred to Black applicants as “friendlys,” women as “lights” and men as “heavys.”
This year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission settled a discrimination lawsuit against BaronHR and Radiant Services, a commercial laundry company, that raised similar issues involving gender and race. BaronHR agreed to pay $2.2 million, and Radiant $1.1 million.
‘He Wanted Those Things Again’
For more than two decades, state and federal investigators targeted Mr. Perez, the BaronHR founder, for labor and tax violations. He kept slipping away and starting anew.
In the early years, his riches attracted outsize attention and brought coverage in financial and entertainment publications, where he bragged about owning several homes in Southern California and a fleet of luxury cars including a Lamborghini and a Bentley. He talked of sitting courtside at Lakers and Clippers games, partnering with the actor Mario Lopez on a production company, and rubbing elbows with Andy Garcia and other Hollywood celebrities. His company at the time, Checkmate, made Hispanic Magazine’s “Entrepreneur 100” list.
Contacted by The Times, a spokeswoman for Mr. Garcia said the two men met “briefly at a golf tournament” but had no further association. A spokeswoman for Mr. Lopez said Mr. Perez “was barely an acquaintance” and described the partnership as “a complete fabrication.”
In the fall of 2003, Mr. Perez’s fortunes took a turn when investigators raided Checkmate’s offices. Bankruptcy followed, revealing that Checkmate had debts topping $50 million, including $15 million owed to the I.R.S. Soon Mr. Perez and several of his deputies were charged in California with defrauding insurers of nearly $40 million in premiums.
In a personal bankruptcy filing in 2010, he claimed that he had only $17 in his checking account and owed $8 million in taxes. He also listed a $300 stake in a new agency: BaronHR.
In 2011, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office dropped the criminal case against Mr. Perez after a victim, the State Compensation Insurance Fund, told prosecutors that it would disavow its own audits of the alleged fraud, records show. The supervising prosecutor on the case, now retired, told The Times that it was a highly unusual change of position, and could offer no explanation.
At the time, Mr. Perez announced in a news release that he had been “exonerated.” A number of his Checkmate clients followed him to BaronHR.
His phoenixlike return was emblematic of the “Wild West” nature of the staffing world, said Pollie Pent, a former detective with the California Department of Insurance’s fraud division who now works in the insurance industry. “There is very little oversight.”
In 2017, Mr. Perez was in trouble again and spent two mornings at the U.S. attorney’s office in Santa Ana, Calif., trying to cut a deal. Notes from the meetings reveal a rare unvarnished view of the business.
In Mr. Perez’s telling, the staffing industry was filled with people who used prison inmates’ social security numbers to help staff their work sites. He said the constant opening and closing of companies by the same owners signaled that they were evading taxes.
Agencies that skipped paying employment taxes could underbid the competition, said Mr. Perez, who offered to name firms that were “underpricing and skimming.” He also offered to identify partner companies that got their hands dirty by demanding kickbacks.
When it came to his own problems, he deflected many transgressions onto underlings and accountants, but admitted that he had bought cars, a boat and a plane while owing millions of dollars to the I.R.S. — and then hid assets so they would not be seized.
“Perez had a lot of possessions when he was operating Checkmate, and he wanted those things again,” an agent in the U.S. attorney’s office wrote in the notes.
In March 2018, Mr. Perez agreed to a secret plea deal that entailed admitting to tax evasion and cooperating on a broader industry investigation.
But separately, that August, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office charged him and two of his executives with tax and workers’ compensation insurance fraud.
Mr. Perez hardly missed a beat.
That December, he held a glittering gala at the Beverly Hilton Hotel to celebrate a charity he had created and recognize BaronHR’s success. The party featured live music, awards for top salespeople and the announcement of a goal to double the business within five years.
“Working together,” said Mr. Perez in a white tuxedo, “we can do amazing things.”
Within months of the gala, he retracted his secret plea. A federal grand jury indicted him. Even while free on bail for six years, he was “fundamentally unwilling to comply” with the law, prosecutors said.
This spring, as his trial neared, they denounced him as “a serial tax cheat who has built his staffing empire around the chronic failure of his companies to pay applicable federal payroll taxes.”
By then, he and his associates had already reinvented themselves, this time as StaffLab L.L.C. In September, a client list shows, the new firm had already signed up partner companies.
Today, the firm’s website is a blank page.
“My involvement in the staffing industry gave me a piece of the American dream,” Mr. Perez said in his statement from jail, “and then turned into my worst nightmare.”
Reporting was contributed by Churchill Ndonwie, Natasha Rodriguez, Carson Kessler, Angélica Castro-Reyes, Robert Gebeloff and Orlando MayorquÃn. Julie Tate and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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7) Over 30 People Killed in Israeli Strikes in Central and Northern Gaza
As Israel’s military wages a renewed offensive in the northern part of the enclave, Al Bureij and Nuseirat in central Gaza came under attack.
By Hiba Yazbek, Reporting from Nazareth, Israel, Nov. 17, 2024
Outside a hospital in central Gaza on Sunday, a woman mourned victims of an Israeli airstrike. Credit...Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press
Israeli airstrikes pummeled two areas in central Gaza and a town in the north of the enclave on Sunday morning, killing more than 30 people and wounding several others, according to local rescue and emergency services.
In central Gaza, a strike on a home in Nuseirat killed four people, the Palestinian Civil Defense said in a statement. Strikes in nearby Al Bureij killed 13 people, according to Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for the Civil Defense, an emergency rescue group. He said that several others were wounded and that rescuers were still searching for people under the rubble.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the strikes in central Gaza, which came as it is waging a renewed offensive in the northern part of the enclave. In an effort to stamp out what the military has called a Hamas resurgence, Israeli troops, tanks and armed drones have bombarded northern Gaza almost daily.
On Sunday, the town of Beit Lahia again came under attack. Mr. Basal said that an Israeli strike on a house there killed 15 people, and that another strike hit a residential building where dozens of people were sheltering. Information on casualties from the strike on the residential building was not immediately available because rescue teams were unable to reach the area, he added.
When asked about Beit Lahia, the Israeli military said that it had carried out several strikes on “terrorist targets” in the town overnight and that there had been continuous efforts to evacuate the civilian population from northern Gaza, where its forces have been operating for over a month.
Gaza’s Civil Defense said it was forced to cease rescue operations in the north late last month because of attacks by the Israeli military on its members and destruction of its equipment.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel.
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8) Coffee, Juice, Shawarma: Tiny Traces of Normal Life in a Ruined Gaza
Most people in the enclave are struggling just to survive Israel’s assault on Hamas, and experts say famine is imminent. Yet a few pockets of ordinary life have bloomed in defiance of the war.
By Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair, Nov. 18, 2024
Bilal Shbair interviewed displaced people and business owners in the Gaza city of Deir al Balah for this story. Vivian Yee reported from Cairo.
A street flooded with sewage water in Deir al Balah, Gaza, in July. The city was once known for its restful olive and date palm groves. Now, bombing can shatter the calm in a second. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At long last, something to celebrate: People were saying that the Chef Warif restaurant, whose Syrian-style shawarma sandwiches were famous in Gaza City before the war, had reopened. Not in the city itself, which the war had reduced largely to rubble. And not the same quality of meat, which the restaurant’s owner now had to buy frozen and at steep prices from traders importing it to the Gaza Strip.
But it was shawarma, shawarma from home. Long lines formed this July as workers sawed the first slices of roasting beef or chicken off the spit and bundled it in flatbread with the restaurant’s signature garlic sauce.
Many of those in line were longtime customers who had fled Gaza City, in the north, for Deir al Balah, the city in central Gaza where Chef Warif had reopened. Living in tents or crammed shelters under smoky skies, their ears painfully accustomed to the thunder of Israeli airstrikes, they had been desperate for this — a normal moment.
“When I heard about Chef Warif, I jumped for joy,” said Naela al-Danaf, 40, a secretary at a local clinic who escaped Gaza City early in the war. It was a relief to see the owner standing there, she said, dishing out lunch like everything was fine.
In parts of Deir al Balah, once known for its restful olive and date palm groves, the trees are gone or have turned gray with ash and dirt, and the ground is slick with sewage. People look away from the rotting carcasses of horses and dogs. Once familiar buildings are piles of debris. Bombing can shatter the calm in a second. Though municipal trash pickup has started again in places, it often smells like a dumpster.
But in the center of town, people relax under shady trees, chatting with friends over coffee, freshly squeezed mango juice or avocado smoothies. Families crowd around Zain’s dessert stand or wait for juices from Karameesh, where fresh fruit dangles from the ceiling. Others head to the beach, a chance to watch the waves and get their children out of cramped shelters.
An olive press has been turning this season’s harvest — far smaller than usual, and picked as drones buzzed overhead — into golden-green oil. On Deir al Balah’s outskirts, a farmer has been planting his field with cabbage and winter greens. The grumbling of his tractor is a strange echo of what life was like before the war; strange, but welcome.
Every conflict has its pockets of ordinariness, places where life ticks on away from the bombs and the headlines. Israeli officials have been quick to highlight such scenes, posting photographs of well-stocked markets to suggest reports of shortages were overblown.
But not many wars are squeezed into a Las Vegas-size strip of land that has been bombed almost everywhere yet is almost impossible to flee. In a Gaza starving under a near-total Israeli siege, which has blocked all but a dribble of aid and commercial supplies, residents and aid workers say the little food for sale is hopelessly expensive.
Everyone seems to know someone who has been killed. Most of the survivors are living in miserable squalor. It is hard to imagine any escape.
And there isn’t, not in any sure sense. An airstrike could rip things apart at any time, or Israel’s military could order families to evacuate yet again before it starts another operation against Hamas, as it did in Deir al Balah in August.
But compared to the rest of Gaza, Deir al Balah has gone relatively unscathed, allowing the United Nations and aid groups to set up central offices there. A cautious rhythm has returned to the streets. Lunch, coffee, a stop for dessert: the more mundane, Gazans say, the more precious it seems.
Martyrs’ Street, the city’s longest thoroughfare, is lined with cafes, ice cream shops and eateries. Many are familiar to residents displaced from Gaza City, where the same business names once meant pleasure, a weekend treat or just a stop after work.
Their reappearance has been bittersweet. The more Gaza City stores open in Deir al Balah, the more permanent the displacement seems.
One of them is Shawarma Moaz, a Gaza City spot that reopened on Martyrs’ Street in March. Its manager, Aaed Abu Karsh, 35, said that customers have been joking to him, “Since you’re here, seems like all of us will be away from home even longer.”
Few can afford to go out. Most Gazans have no savings and little, if any, income. On Martyrs’ Street, a smoothie can cost $4 (twice the prewar price), a shawarma sandwich about $11 (nearly three times what it used to). A customer protest over the high price of meat shut down some restaurants for two days this month.
But some without the means to buy come by just to say hello, happy to see the street abuzz, business owners say.
At one cafe, Ayah Jweifel, 19, a second-year multimedia major at Al Aqsa University, was laughing and gossiping one recent afternoon with her sister, Shahd, 17. They were talking about plans, talking about anything but the fighting.
“I just have one goal, to forget that there are things like war, bombing and killing,” Ayah Jweifel said. “Seeing people around me who are laughing, smiling and having fun — it gives me hope that we can get our lives before Oct. 7 back.”
That day last year, Hamas, the armed group that controls Gaza, led raids on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. Israel counterattacked, killing more than 40,000 people, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The war seemed distant at the cafe. The inside was spick-and-span, with a counter and floor of faux marble and a glass display case for pastries; outside, waiters served cappuccinos, dessert and water pipes to customers sitting around wooden tables. Lights were twirled around the trunks of olive and palm trees.
The contrast with the rest of Gaza, even with other parts of the city, could be called surreal. But what people really found surreal was the war itself. Meeting friends, drinking coffee — that was real life, they said, or what real life was supposed to be.
“We have to adapt to the situation,” Shahd Jweifel said. It had been her idea to get her sister and friends to meet up there once a week. “Here we feel like we’re just like everyone else in the rest of the world.”
Except they weren’t. In one corner of the cafe’s garden hung a whiteboard that aid workers had been using to train people to avoid the unexploded ordnance littering Gaza.
The Jweifel sisters had promised their family that they would leave for home before sunset, they said, since public order broke down months ago and it was safer not to move in the dark.
Carving out minutes of normalcy also means willfully forgetting what is happening elsewhere in Gaza.
“It’s like we’re lying to ourselves,” said Ms. al-Danaf, the clinic secretary from Gaza City. “We’re in a good place, but our hearts and minds are following the bad news from the north.”
Whenever she called Dareen, her daughter in northern Gaza, Ms. al-Danaf said, Dareen would ask, “What are you having for lunch today?” It was a lacerating, if unintended, reminder: While Ms. al-Danaf could get shawarma, she said, Dareen had almost nothing. Amid a new attack on northern Gaza beginning last month, Israel had restricted supplies there even further.
Feeling guilty, Ms. al-Danaf said that she sometimes lied, telling her daughter she was having potatoes or lentils.
After Shawarma Moaz’s team fled Gaza City, it took months to accept that they would not be returning anytime soon, and months more to scrape together enough to start over, the manager, Mr. Abu Karsh, said.
Nothing was easy. Equipment and a storefront took some creativity to find; they bought some items from people they thought had probably stolen things from destroyed restaurants, he said. A nearby airstrike damaged the solar panels they used for power.
For every business on Martyrs’ Street, covering costs is a struggle.
Chef Warif recently announced it was closing temporarily because frozen meat prices were so exorbitant.
But at least, Mr. Abu Karsh said, they had gotten part of their lives back.
“We’re not sitting in our tents,” he said, “mourning everything we lost.”
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9) Texas Education Board to Vote on Bible-Infused Lessons in Public Schools
A new curriculum would focus on Christianity more than other religions. A kindergarten lesson on the Golden Rule, for example, would teach about Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount.
By Troy Closson, Nov. 18, 2024
Texas education officials are expected to vote on Monday on whether to approve a new elementary-school curriculum that infuses teachings on the Bible into reading and language arts lessons.
The optional curriculum, one of most sweeping efforts in recent years to bring a Christian perspective to more students, would test the limits of religious instruction in public education.
It could also become a model for other states and for the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has promised to champion the conservative Christian movement in his second presidential term.
In the ascendant but highly contested push to expand the role of religion in public life, Texas has emerged as a leader. It was the first state to allow public schools to hire religious chaplains as school counselors, and the Republican-controlled legislature is expected to renew its attempts to require public-school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments.
The new curriculum, which covers kindergarten through fifth grade, would be optional, although school districts would receive a financial incentive to adopt it. The Texas State Board of Education sets standards for what students must be taught and approves a selection of curriculums, and individual schools and school districts choose which ones they will teach.
Texas has about 2.3 million public-school students in kindergarten through fifth grade who could be taught the new curriculum.
Religion makes up a relatively small portion of the overall content. But the lessons delve into Christianity far more often and in depth than they do into other faiths, religious scholars say and a review of the materials by The New York Times found.
In kindergarten, for example, children would be taught that many religions value the Golden Rule, but the lessons would be focused on the Christian version, and introduce students to Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount.
In a fifth-grade lesson on Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” students would be taught an account of the final meal shared by Jesus and his 12 disciples, and would read several verses from the Gospel of Matthew.
The Bible has often appeared in American schools throughout the nation’s history, and schools are free to teach from religious texts. Even so, the proposed curriculum has ignited an uproar, with parents and teachers — including some Christian Texans — expressing worry that the lessons blur the line between instruction and evangelizing, and present scripture and tenets of the Christian faith as factual truths to young children.
Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, and other supporters of the new program say that the Bible is a fundamental text in American history, and argue that students’ knowledge of the world would be incomplete without a classical education and robust understanding of Bible stories.
The Texas Education Agency, which oversees public education in the state, released the new curriculum in the spring after the state enacted a law directing the agency to develop its own free textbooks. The law was aimed at providing high-quality teaching materials to educators who often spend long hours searching for them, lawmakers said.
The move provoked immediate controversy. A top curriculum publisher took issue with a state request to add more biblical content to its materials, the education news outlet The 74 reported.
When a panel was convened to vet the new curriculum for bias, opponents argued that the state included several people o the panel who were known for religious advocacy, including Ben Carson, the former federal housing secretary, to rubber-stamp the lessons.
“They’re using Texas as a testing ground for these extreme ideas,” said State Representative James Talarico, a Christian and a Democrat who is also a student at a Presbyterian seminary in Austin.
Similar clashes are erupting in other states, like Oklahoma and Louisiana, where conservative Christian leaders have taken steps to expand the role of religion in public schools. Proponents say Christian themes are pervasive in American culture and that exposing students to them is crucial to their academic development.
“Our language is redolent with concepts, phrases and allusions drawn directly from the Bible and other touchstones of Western thought and culture,” Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a recent column.
“Without complete command of these references, students — particularly poor, minority and immigrant students — will struggle to fully comprehend what they read,” Mr. Pondiscio, a former teacher, wrote.
The new curriculum has provoked the anger of Texans of other faiths, who say the lessons lack balance and in some places are even offensive.
Some Jewish families were outraged, for example, over an activity included in a second-grade lesson on the Old Testament story of Esther. In the biblical account, a high-ranking official in the Persian Empire cast lots to decide when all Jews in the land would be killed, and Esther stopped the planned attack.
The lesson included a game in which teachers would ask students to choose a number and then roll a die to see if their number was called.
“This is shocking, offensive and just plain wrong,” Sharyn Vane, a Jewish parent of two Texas public school graduates, said at a public hearing on the curriculum in September, where the majority of speakers criticized the potential lessons.
“Do we ask elementary students to pretend to be Hitler?” Ms. Vane asked, calling the curriculum “wildly problematic in its depictions of Jews.”
The curriculum developers removed the dice rolling game and made other changes after the hearing.
Thomas K. Lindsay, the higher education policy director at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative group, said that he was “frustrated and very saddened” that critics of the curriculum were focused on its religious content. He argued that the lessons do not proselytize to children.
The Texas Education Agency has said that the proposed curriculum was developed using cognitive science research to improve student outcomes, and Mr. Lindsay said that critics were ignoring its potential to help close reading gaps for children who are behind.
“I understand we’re a polarized country,” said Mr. Lindsay, a member of the state’s curriculum advisory board. “But we’ve got a chance to do something good for the kids who need it most.”
Some critics of the new curriculum say that besides a lack of balance, some of its lessons simply are not very good.
Mark A. Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University near Dallas, said that the material includes apparent errors. He said the lessons were also often “not age appropriate,” he added, noting that a lesson that describes Genesis to kindergartners could lead them to believe it was fact that God created the world in six days.
David R. Brockman, a Christian theologian and religious studies scholar who reviewed the curriculum, said he has “long been an advocate of teaching about religion in public schools.” But lessons must be balanced, accurate and not promote one religion over others, he said.
The Texas curriculum, he said, does not clear the bar.
In a fifth-grade unit on racial justice, students would be taught that Abraham Lincoln and abolitionists relied in part “on a deep Christian faith” to “guide their certainty of the injustice of slavery.” But they would not be taught that other Christians leaned on the same religion to defend slavery and segregation.
It was one example, Mr. Brockman said, of what he called a “whitewashing of the negative details of Christian history” that “helps to promote Christianity as an inherently ‘good' religion.”
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10) For Minority Working-Class Voters, Dismay in Democrats Led to Distrust
In scores of interviews throughout 2024, Latino, Black and Asian American voters, many of whom voted for Donald Trump, said they no longer trusted Democrats to improve the economy.
By Jennifer Medina, Nov. 19, 2024
Jennifer Medina has covered the last two presidential campaigns by focusing on voters, particularly Latinos. She interviewed hundreds of working-class voters of color across the country in 2024.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/us/politics/trump-working-class-voters.html
The working-class voters Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign needed were not moved by talk of joy. They were too angry about feeling broke.
For decades, Democrats had been the party of labor and of the working class, the choice for voters who looked to government to increase the minimum wage or provide a safety net for the poor, the old and the sick. But this year’s election results show how thoroughly that idea has collapsed even among Latino, Black and Asian American voters who had stuck by the party through Donald J. Trump’s first term.
Latinos had signaled what was coming: They drifted away from Democrats and toward Mr. Trump in 2020, before defecting in greater numbers this year. But working-class Black and Asian American voters have also now broken ranks in startling numbers.
The losses up and down the ballot leave Democrats in crisis. Voters without a college degree make up a solid majority of the electorate. Without them, the White House could be out of reach. And for a party that stands for and takes pride in its diversity, the erosion of support from voters of color calls its identity into question.
Yet interviews over the past year with hundreds of working-class minority voters revealed the challenges confronting Democrats as both clear and daunting. For many, hope had already hardened into cynicism. Promises about affordable housing fell flat and promoting accomplishments on insulin prices failed to break through. Simply put, their trust in the Democratic Party was gone.
“Democrats flipped,” said Daniel Trujillo, who owns a barbershop in East Las Vegas and watched many of his customers shift from supporting Barack Obama to favoring Mr. Trump. “They went from being for the working class to, if you’re not college-educated and have money, you’re not worthy.” He said he had watched with delight as his customers increasingly warmed toward Mr. Trump.
“The right turned blue-collar and went full border-control, strong-economy and law-and-order,” Mr. Trujillo added. “Who doesn’t want that?”
In Milwaukee, Phoenix and Atlanta; in swap meets and strip malls; on the sidelines of soccer and baseball fields; and at community centers in big cities and diverse suburbs, voters sounded similar refrains. The system wasn’t working for them.
Many said Democrats’ dire warnings about threats to democracy felt far less compelling compared with the urgency of their own struggles to pay the rent.
Black voters, on the whole, still voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, as did a narrower majority of Latinos and Asian Americans. But Republicans made gains in big cities and diverse suburbs. Hispanic-majority counties shifted to the right by 13 percentage points, preliminary results showed, as did counties with large numbers of Asian American voters; Black-majority counties shifted to the G.O.P. by about three points.
Though Republicans were quick to celebrate a long-sought political realignment, interviews this year with working-class voters suggest that the shifts may not prove so enduring. For many, their choices were as much a message-sending rejection of Democrats as an embrace of Mr. Trump, his policies and his party.
“A deep reckoning is needed among Democrats and other leaders who claim to represent working Latinos,” said Carlos Odio, a director at Equis, a Democratic-leaning research group that focuses on Latino voters. “What happened in this election does not come to pass without years of neglect that finally came to a head.”
David Paiz, 52, works in maintenance for the city of Las Vegas, where he moved during the pandemic, frustrated with the cost of living in California. He was thrilled when he and his wife could wear “Thug Life” T-shirts emblazoned with Mr. Trump’s face and not elicit nasty remarks from neighbors or friends.
“There’s a lot of things that I want to do, that we want to do for our sons, for their future, to prepare them for success,” Mr. Paiz said. “But with the current administration, I didn’t see that happening. Now that Trump’s going to be our new president, I see a lot more opportunities.”
For months, Democratic operatives suggested that voters like Mr. Paiz were merely “Trump-curious” and that most would eventually be repelled by Mr. Trump’s coarseness or his hard-line immigration proposals.
But nine years after he disparaged Mexicans in his first campaign, and nine days after a comedian at Mr. Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally made an obscene joke about Latinos making babies, he appeared to win a bigger share of the Latino and Black votes than any Republican presidential candidate since the civil-rights era.
Inflation and inequality had taken their toll.
Two-thirds of Trump voters said they had to cut back on groceries this year, compared with only a third of Harris voters, a New York Times/Siena College poll found in October.
These voters were not necessarily poor: Many said they could afford groceries, but that higher prices left them with far less disposable income. Voters earning $20 an hour complained bitterly about being unable to take their families to the movies or on carefree outings at the mall.
A week before the election, Walter Mendoza, 30, a financial adviser who lives with his mother in Allentown, Pa., was frustrated they had just enough to buy chicken and instant mashed potatoes for that night’s dinner. “People can’t afford nothing,” he said. “So I’m voting for somebody who could more manage the country better.” He said he hoped that with Mr. Trump in charge, “most of us can get a couple nice things.”
Others who said they felt held back by rising rents and by housing prices that put a home of their own out of reach described becoming convinced that Mr. Trump would improve their buying power.
Even as they held onto their faith in the American dream, many nonwhite working-class voters said they had come to see the Democratic Party as condescending, overly focused on issues irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. They bristled over social issues like the concerns of transgender children or the party’s focus on abortion rights. They felt scolded by liberals on Covid precautions — and crushed by the pandemic’s economic fallout.
Some sounded every bit as aggrieved as the white working-class voters who first fueled Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement, voicing similar complaints about migrants being given easier access to housing and food than homeless veterans living on the streets. Others said they believed that Mr. Trump — whom they viewed as particularly effective in working with foreign dictators — could bring the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to a quick end.
“He’s a businessman, and you’ve got to run a country like business — you can’t be based off of feelings,” said Juan Sosa, a 34-year-old immigrant from Cuba who owns three small businesses in Las Vegas. “I feel like right now we’re the laughingstock of the world. Like, there’s no assertiveness in our lives and how we come across to the rest of the world.”
Another pattern emerged in scores of interviews over the past year: Working-class voters of color often chose the same things to disbelieve, downplay or dismiss.
Latino voters, in particular, discounted Mr. Trump’s draconian promise to round up and deport millions of people in the country illegally.
“Me, worried about deportations? No, not one worry,” said Angela De Los Santos, a 54-year-old immigrant from the Dominican Republic who owns a Dominican-Oaxacan restaurant in Hazleton, Pa. “Trump knows he needs immigrants to work. Us, we’re here to work, we commit no crimes, we will not have any problem with that.”
When Mr. Trump spoke of immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” critics cried fascism and xenophobia. But many naturalized citizens, and children and grandchildren of immigrants, said they heard a leader promising to protect his own. Far from feeling threatened by such rhetoric, they said they felt affirmed in their identity as Americans.
For years, Romeo Kintanar, 76, waited in the Philippines for a visa to come to the United States. Now a retired caregiver and self-described independent, he said he saw the Biden administration’s missteps at the border as an affront.
“Here the borders are just wide open for anybody to come in without proper scrutiny,” said Mr. Kintanar, who said he became a naturalized citizen in 2015 and voted for Mr. Trump. “To me, that’s really a failure.”
Mr. Trump’s racist remarks and anti-immigrant hostility, too, were often set aside as bluster.
“I know for a fact, as a Trump supporter, he doesn’t support racism — I don’t think he’s that kind of guy,” said Gardner Mojica, a 45-year-old first time voter from Reading, Pa., who spent several months selling MAGA merchandise at Trump rallies. “He likes family values. He’s a father. He’s a grandfather.”
Like many first-time Trump voters, Mr. Mojica is not particularly ideological or partisan. According to a Times/Siena poll of the Hispanic electorate in October, about one-third of Latino Trump voters identified as moderate and 13 percent identified as liberal. While half of Latino Trump supporters called themselves conservative, that figure was far less than Trump voters as a whole.
The Trump campaign reached nonwhite working-class voters in both unconventional and familiar ways.
It worked with rap artists, podcasters popular on YouTube, Ultimate Fighting Championship stars and evangelical pastors. And in the campaign’s final days, Mr. Trump held rallies in heavily Hispanic cities.
At one in Allentown a week before Election Day, a heavily Latino crowd signaled the strength of Mr. Trump’s gains, but there were glimpses, too, of an even broader coalition potentially in the making: a red-white-and-blue kaffiyeh worn in solidarity with Palestinians. Korean and Japanese flags held aloft.
And everyone chanting: “Trump, Trump, Trump.”
Ruth Igielnik, Carlos Prieto and Amy Qin contributed reporting.
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11) Dozens of Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Leaders Jailed Up to 10 Years in Mass Trial
The 45 defendants, including Joshua Wong, were at the forefront of the opposition movement crushed by Beijing. Many had already been in jail for years.
By Tiffany May, Reporting from Hong Kong, Published Nov. 18, 2024, Updated Nov. 19, 2024
People leaving the court following the sentencing. Credit...Chan Long Hei/Associated Press
Anywhere else, it wouldn’t have been controversial: a public vote by pro-democracy activists trying to strengthen their hand in legislative elections, to decide who should run. More than 600,000 people took part in the peaceful, unofficial poll.
But this was Hong Kong, just after the imposition of a national security law by Beijing, and officials had warned that even a straw poll would be taken as defiance.
On Tuesday, the price of defying Beijing was made clear. Forty-five former politicians and activists who had organized or taken part in the 2020 primary by the opposition camp were sentenced by a Hong Kong court to prison, including for as long as 10 years.
The sentences were the final step in a crackdown that cut the heart out of the city’s democracy movement, turning its leaders into a generation of political prisoners. Among them were veteran politicians, former journalists and younger activists who had called for self-determination for Hong Kong.
In a courtroom that had to be created just to accommodate them, the 45 defendants sat shoulder to shoulder on Tuesday on long benches, behind a glass partition and flanked by police officers. A judge read their sentences aloud, referring to them not by their names but by their numbers on a list. The hearing was over in half an hour.
It was the most forceful demonstration of the power of a national security law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in response to months of large protests against Chinese rule in 2019.
The court sentenced Benny Tai, 60, a legal scholar and opposition strategist, to 10 years in prison. Twenty opposition politicians and activists were given terms ranging from five to nearly eight years. Joshua Wong, 28, a prominent pro-democracy activist, was among 24 others whose sentences ranged from just over four to just under five years.
Gwyneth Ho, 32, a former journalist who was known for covering a mob attack on antigovernment demonstrators trapped in a subway station, was sentenced to seven years for running as a candidate. She had refused to plead guilty.
“Our true crime for Beijing is that we were not content with playing along in manipulated elections,” said a statement posted on Ms. Ho’s Facebook account, apparently by her supporters, on Tuesday after the sentencing. “We dared to confront the regime with the question: will democracy ever be possible within such a structure? The answer was a complete crackdown on all fronts of society.”
The trial made clear that any form of dissent or criticism, however moderate, carried significant risk, analysts said. “If you are being critical of the authorities both in Hong Kong and in China, then it’s open season,” said Steve Tsang, a Hong Kong-born political scientist and director of the SOAS China Institute in London.
The ruling Communist Party in China says the law is needed to purge threats to Beijing’s sovereignty, but human rights activists, scholars and Western governments have said that it has eroded Hong Kong’s once-vaunted judicial independence.
Even before their sentences were handed down, many of the defendants, who were arrested in early 2021, had already been in jail for nearly four years, as they awaited and then stood trial. That was because the law has made it harder for defendants to be released on bail, which in most nonviolent cases is routinely granted.
Instead of a jury, the case was heard by three judges handpicked by the city’s Beijing-backed leader, as allowed by the law.
“The authorities wanted to show the public that they have the power to bring a big group of people to trial all at once,” said Patrick Poon, a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo who studies freedom of expression in Hong Kong and China. “They want to show residents that anyone who tries to protest like this group of people will receive their same fate.”
Prosecutors accused the defendants of “conspiracy to commit subversion,” a national security offense, arguing that the objective of the election primary was to “undermine, destroy or overthrow the existing political system and structure of Hong Kong.”
The outcome of the primary made clear that the residents who voted favored candidates who were prominent supporters of the 2019 antigovernment demonstrations. The pro-democracy camp argued that the primary vote was little different from others held in democracies around the world. The hope was to maximize the camp’s chances of gaining more seats in a legislative chamber that already heavily favors the Beijing-backed establishment.
But they never had a chance to test the plan: The election was postponed, and most of the candidates were arrested.
Mr. Tai, the legal scholar who was sentenced to 10 years, had designed the electoral strategy, and prosecutors deemed him a mastermind. Mr. Tai had long been involved in efforts to persuade China to live up to a promise that has been central to Hong Kong since its 1997 return to Chinese control: that its residents would someday get to choose their own leaders. In 2014, he was one of the leaders of the Occupy Central movement that brought the city’s central business district to a halt in a peaceful call for freer elections.
Other defendants included Leung Kwok-hung, a 68-year-old activist known as Long Hair for his unkempt mane, who was sentenced to six years and nine months; Claudia Mo, 67, a veteran former lawmaker, sentenced to four years and two months; and Lam Cheuk-ting, 47, a former anti-corruption investigator, sentenced to six years and nine months.
Mr. Tai and 30 other defendants had pleaded guilty. The court convicted 14 of them in May and acquitted two others.
Outside, hundreds of people waited in line to enter the gallery, braving a downpour and a heavy security presence around the courthouse, including an armored vehicle, police cars and barricades. Several dozen police officers were stationed on every street corner along the whole block.
As she left the courthouse, Elsa Wu, the mother of Hendrick Lui, one of the defendants, unfurled a poster in protest of the sentencing. Several police officers led her away into a police van and tried to slide the door shut.
“Tell me, why does he have to go to prison?” she called out, beating her fist. Mr. Lui was sentenced to more than four years in prison. “He is a political prisoner. He shouldn’t be in prison. He is a good person. Why does he have to be in prison?” she said.
Thomas Kellogg, the executive director of the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, said he thought the case would be seen by many in the international community as the “final nail in the coffin for the rule of law in Hong Kong.”
Despite the prospect of more prison time, some defendants were simply anxious for the trial that had left their lives in limbo to come to a conclusion, according to friends who had visited them.
Emilia Wong, a gender rights activist, said in an interview ahead of the sentencing that her boyfriend, Ventus Lau, an organizer of the 2019 antigovernment protests, had been studying toward a degree in translation. She said she had been regularly visiting him in detention for the past three years, but it was clear the isolation was taking a toll on him.
“The scary thing about prison is not being locked up in one place. It is the loss of connection with people and society that is scary. To him, it was painful,” she said.
David Pierson and Berry Wang contributed reporting.
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12) Robots Struggle to Match Warehouse Workers on ‘Really Hard’ Jobs
The machines can load and unload trucks, move goods and do other repetitive tasks but are stymied by some, like picking items from a pile.
By Peter Eavis, Reporting from Nashville and Columbus, Ohio, Nov. 19, 2024
Loading packages at the warehouse near Nashville. Amazon’s overall human work force outnumbers its robots by two to one. Credit...Stacy Kranitz for The New York Times
In the outbound dock of an Amazon warehouse near Nashville, a robotic arm named Cardinal on a recent day stacked packages, Tetris-style, into six-and-a-half-foot-high carts. Then Proteus, an autonomous platform, moved the carts to the loading bay, flashing electronic eyes designed to make the robot more appealing to human colleagues.
As robots become more capable, they are performing an increasing number of tasks in warehouses and delivery centers with varying degrees of aptitude and speed. Machines can load and unload trucks. They can place goods on pallets and take them off. Robots can shift items around in inventory, pick up packages and move goods on warehouse floors. And they can do all this without a human minder guiding their every move.
Yet, even though robots are starting to take over some repetitive and cumbersome jobs, there are still many tasks they are not good at, making it difficult to know when or if robots will be able to fully automate this industry.
Despite the rise in automation, warehouses remain big employers of humans. Federal data show that nearly 1.8 million people work in this corner of the supply chain. While that number is down 9 percent from its peak in 2022, when logistics companies went on a hiring spree to handle the pandemic e-commerce boom, it is still up more than 30 percent since early 2020.
There are many crucial, simple tasks that humans are far better at. They can reach into a container of many items and move some out the way to extract the piece they want, a task industry officials refer to as picking. Robotics engineers struggle to say when their creations will be able to do that fast enough to be viable replacements for human workers.
Artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI have served up impressive services that can quickly produce writing, images and videos that can seem to be the work of skilled professionals. But in warehouses brimming with the wares of the modern economy, advances in automation have been slower. There, robots often struggle to master skills most humans can do without much trouble.
Sparrow, one of Amazon’s most advanced robotic arms, performs “top-picking,” taking the item at or near the top of a container. Amazon says that Sparrow can manipulate over 200 million items of different sizes and weights, but that it is not adept at “targeted picking” — rummaging around many items to get one that might be buried or obscured.
“That’s a really hard job,” said Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics. “I’m not saying it’s impossible. That’s kind of the next frontier.”
There are “more that we have not adopted than ones that we have,” said Sally Miller, the global chief information officer at DHL Supply Chain, referring to robots. The DHL division she works for operates warehouses for other companies and has deployed 7,000 robots globally.
Among the rejected: an autonomous forklift capable of stacking boxes at heights that DHL, which is based in Bonn, Germany, decided was too slow.
Ms. Miller said she was frustrated to see venture capital recently rushing into robots that resemble people, a category of machines known as humanoids. Such machines have long been the robotic holy grail in science fiction and in the visions of some technology executives. But to Ms. Miller, they aren’t ready for warehouse work, and she would prefer that engineers develop devices that can handle specific tasks well, quickly and affordably.
One big motivation to automate is the high turnover of warehouse employees. The work is often physically demanding and pays modest wages. Less-skilled warehouse workers earn around $16 to $17 an hour. Among the lower-paid jobs are truck unloaders, who grab boxes and move them onto conveyor systems.
That job can now be done with a robotic arm called Stretch, developed by Boston Dynamics, an automation company.
A Stretch working at an inbound dock of a DHL-run facility in Columbus, Ohio, recently reached deep into the back of a tightly packed truck and steadily removed boxes filled with apparel. A warehouse employee who oversees Stretch referred to it as “he” and spoke fondly of his ability to pick up dropped packages.
Ms. Miller said Stretch can unload roughly twice as many boxes per hour as humans.
She declined to say how much Stretch cost, but said: “It doesn’t call in sick, and it can work for several hours. It’s a great solution.”
Stretch can do the work of four to six workers over two shifts, DHL said, and the company has moved workers whose tasks are now being done by the robot to other jobs in different parts of the warehouse.
Some executives said their aim was to have robots do all the monotonous tasks.
“Menial, mundane, repetitive tasks will be replaced by automation,” Mr. Brady of Amazon said. “That may freak people out, but it’s going to allow people to focus more on what matters.”
Amazon has over 750,000 robots in its operations. While it does not disclose a specific number for warehouse employees, the company had 1.55 million employees at the end of September, up from 800,000 in 2019. Many work in fulfillment centers.
In the outbound dock in Nashville where Cardinal and Proteus operate, there were still scores of employees at work. But Amazon did not say how many people worked in the bay before the introduction of the two robots and how many work there today.
Amazon says deploying robots creates new jobs that involve overseeing and maintaining the machines. But the number of such workers does not appear to be large. On a recent tour of the company’s Nashville facility, a manager said there were around 100 such jobs, out of 2,500 people at the center. An Amazon spokesman said such facilities typically had 200 robot maintenance employees.
Amazon’s robots do seem to be helping it process more parcels with fewer employees.
Mr. Brady said a new Amazon warehouse in Shreveport, La., using its latest technology, including an automated inventory management system called Sequoia, appeared capable of processing packages 25 percent faster and 25 percent more cheaply than the one in Nashville. Like Nashville, Shreveport will have 2,500 employees.
The structured, predictable environment of a warehouse makes it easier for robots to operate. Devising a robot that can find its own way around a warehouse at relatively slow speeds is easier than building autonomous cars that have to navigate ever-changing city streets.
At DHL’s delivery center in Columbus, bin-carrying robots called Locus had no trouble sidling up to human pickers, who handed pieces of apparel to the machines, which transported them to the packaging station. Ms. Miller said Locus and similar devices were designed to reduce the amount of walking pickers do.
Robotics engineers say A.I. technologies have helped them make progress.
Marc Segura, president of the robotics division at the Swiss company ABB, said a client wanted to enable a goods-sorting robot to identify and avoid bulky items. Using A.I., the machine taught itself what such items looked like and now avoids them, he said.
Sometimes the advances don’t rely on cutting-edge technologies.
Fox Robotics makes autonomous forklifts that can unload pallets from trucks and place them on the loading dock floor.
Customers wanted the forklifts to be able to place pallets on rolling conveyors so they could be moved more quickly to their destination. But the pallet created a blind spot that prevented the forklift from seeing whether a conveyor had enough open space. On its latest machines, the company overcame that problem by adding more sensors, effectively expanding the forklift’s vision.
“Once we had those sensors, doing the actual placing on conveyor was trivial,” said Peter Anderson-Sprecher, chief technology officer and a co-founder of Fox Robotics.
Karen Weise contributed reporting from Nashville.
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13) Where Glaciers Melt, the Rivers Run Red
As the glaciers of South America retreat, the supply of freshwater is dwindling and its quality is getting worse.
By Mitra Taj, Photographs and Video by Marco Garro, Nov. 19, 2024
Reported from the Cordillera Blanca in Peru, with support from the Pulitzer Center.
Alicia Leyva draws water from the Rio Negro, another contaminated river in the Andes, in Canrey Chico.
Dionisia Moreno, a 70-year-old Indigenous farmer, still remembers when Shallap River, nearly 13,000 feet up in the Cordillera Blanca, brought crystal clear water brimming with trout to her village, Jancu. “People and animals alike could drink the water without suffering,” she said. “Now the water is red. No one can drink it.”
At a glance the river looks like a casualty of mining pollution; Peru is a major producer of copper, silver and gold, and the waters near abandoned mines often run a shade of rust. But the culprit is climate change. The Cordillera Blanca mountain range harbors the world’s largest concentration of tropical glaciers, which are particularly sensitive to rising temperatures and are a major source of freshwater in Peru.
For thousands of years, the glaciers were replenished with ice in the winter. But they have shrunk by more than 40 percent since 1968, uncovering rocks that, when exposed to the elements, can trigger chemical reactions that leach toxic metals into the water and turn it acidic.
The process, known as acid rock drainage, “creates a cascade reaction that pollutes water sources,” said Raúl Loayza, a biologist at Peru’s Cayetano Heredia University who researches water quality in the Andes. “It’s a big problem and is getting worse and worse.”
Deglaciation above Lake Shallap, the headwaters of Shallap River, has exposed more than 380 acres of the Chicama Formation, which is rich in pyrite, an iron sulfide. As meltwater trickles across the rocks, the pyrite transforms into iron hydroxide and sulfuric acid, a corrosive chemical that releases heavy metals from the rock into the meltwater, Dr. Loayza said.
Pure water has a neutral pH of 7; Lake Shallap now has a pH of less than 4, nearly as acidic as vinegar. It also contains lead, manganese, iron and zinc at levels that surpass environmental quality standards, according to Peru’s National Institute of Glacier and Mountain Ecosystem Research, or Inaigem.
Health authorities have declared Shallap River and several other acidified streams off-limits for human consumption. But most villages continue to use it for crops, even though it does not meet water quality standards for agriculture. Farmers say it can cause some plants to wither.
Acid rock drainage can degrade ecosystems and corrode infrastructure. Juan Celestino, 75, the husband of Ms. Moreno, said that when the trout first disappeared from Shallap River, villagers thought that someone had dumped pollution into it. “We didn’t think that it was the river itself,” he said. That the problem stemmed from shrinking glaciers was not reassuring. “What can we do?” he added. “Who can help us?”
To identify hot spots, Dr. Loayza and other scientists used satellite images to analyze the spectrum of sunlight reflected by glacial lakes. Their model has identified 60 lakes in the Cordillera Blanca that are highly acidic. Inaigem has confirmed acid rock drainage in five of the eight glacial gorges it has tested so far. “There are areas we’re aware of that are very affected and others where the process is just beginning,” said Yeidy Montano, a scientist with the institute.
Meltwaters are most acidified, and most laden with heavy metals, in the high Andes, where the glaciers are actively melting. Indigenous villages at these elevations are the most vulnerable, and, being small, tend to lack influence with authorities who might help secure access to cleaner alternatives.
“These places in the Cordillera Blanca are a time bomb for highland people, for their way of life, for ecosystems,” Dr. Loayza said.
With help from a local nonprofit, the village of Canrey Chico, which sits on the Rio Negro, another rust-red river, built a system of ponds and canals planted with native reeds to raise pH levels and reduce heavy metals in water drawn from the river. But provincial government officials abandoned an effort to expand it.
Vicente Salvador, the farmer who had promoted the effort, died of gastric cancer in 2021. “His main source of drinking water came from the river,” his son, Joel Salvador, 45, said. “On our land, we don’t have access to spring water.”
Springs have long been seen as cleaner sources of water than rivers in the Andes, but some are drying up, and others now contain heavy metals. “We suspect that groundwater will also be affected in the long term by acid rock drainage,” said Francisco Medina, a research director with Inaigem.
Sixto León, 59, a farmer from the village Cacapaqui, said that in the past year the spring water that his family consumed started to taste sour. “A lot of us have been having stomachaches,” he said.
At first, the melting of the glaciers brought an abundance of water. But research has shown that watersheds in the Cordillera Blanca have since passed “peak water,” meaning that less water is now trickling down in the dry season.
The quality of the water that remains is increasingly threatened by acid rock drainage. In recent years, leaching has been detected on the rocks above Lake Palcacocha, the headwaters of the watershed that supplies drinking water for Huaraz, the regional capital. The lake has maintained an alkaline pH of around 7.5, but scientists say it will probably turn acidic as the glaciers above it continue to retreat.
The two other watersheds that flow into the city were already turning acidic. EPS Chavin, the utility company that provides water for Huaraz, stopped drawing on one of them in 2006 after manganese, a metal that can be toxic to the nervous system, was detected. But with water in shorter supply, the company plans to build a $10 million treatment plant to process acidified waters with heavy metals.
“It’s more complicated to treat, and more expensive,” said MarÃa Marchena, a manager at the company. “But the situation is very critical and will become more so every year.”
By 2030, Inaigem anticipates that glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca below 16,000 feet will have disappeared. “That is going to leave a large surface of minerals exposed,” Ms. Montano said.
One peak, Pastoruri, has already shed so much of its ice that it no longer qualifies as a glacier. Tourists once flocked to the mountain to ski, camp and climb its slopes. Today, meltwater gathers there in reddish pools that resemble open wounds.
Ms. Moreno said she longed for the abundance of her youth, when trout could be plucked from the river, thick snow and ice covered the peaks, springs gushed from the mountainside and grasses for grazing livestock grew waist-high.
Sometimes, she said, she thinks that the evangelical Christians who have spoken to her about the end of the world may be right. “They say the glaciers will disappear, and the rivers will run red,” she said. “That’s coming true.”
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