2/19/2025

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, February 19, 2025

 



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URGENT STEP ONE:

Demand EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER & TREATMENT

FOR IMAM JAMIL


The Bureau of Prisons is denying medical treatment to Imam

Jamil Al-Amin, 81 years old, formerly known as H. Rap Brown.

He has a potentially life-threatening growth on his face, on

top of his multiple myeloma (cancer) & other significant

medical issues.


A civil and human rights leader, wrongfully imprisoned for

the past 24 years, he needs Your Help to avoid his

Death By Medical Neglect


CALL TUCSON COMPLEX 520-663-5000

EMAIL WARDEN Mark Gutierrez, mggutierrez@bop.gov

Give Name & Inmate Number: Jamil Al-Amin, #99974-555

Demand they grant Imam Jamil an EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER from United States Penitentiary (USP) Tucson to Federal Medical Center (FMC) Butner for his Immediate Medical Treatment NOW!!

***Deputy Director of BOP [Bureau of Prisons], (202) 307-3198


URGENT STEP TWO:

Tell his Congressional Delegation of his condition, Urge them to use their offices to inquire the BOP & demand that their constituent (Imam Jamil, West End Community Masjid, 547 West End Pl., SW, Atlanta) receive the emergency medical transfer, diagnosis & treatment.

This is most urgent step before Step Three: campaigning for Medical Reprieve by the GA Bd. Of pardons & Parole, THE entity standing in the way of freeing Imam from his unjust conviction by granting a Medical Reprieve. 



IMAM JAMIL ACTION NETWORK.ORG


216.296.4617

NATIONAL


347.731.1886

MEDIA


252.907.4443

SOUTHERN


347.731.1886

NJ/NY


202.520.9997

WASH., DC


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FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA PALESTINE WILL BE 
FREE!
END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
FOR A DEMOCRATIC, SECULAR PALESTINE!

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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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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky 

By Monica Hill

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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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

Prison Radio is a project of the Redwood Justice Fund (RJF), which is a California 501c3 (Tax ID no. 680334309) not-for-profit foundation dedicated to the defense of the environment and of civil and human rights secured by law.  Prison Radio/Redwood Justice Fund PO Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94141


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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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Articles

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1) C.I.A. Expands Secret Drone Flights Over Mexico

The covert program, begun during the Biden administration and stepped up by President Trump, is hunting for the location of fentanyl labs.

By Julian E. Barnes, Maria Abi-Habib, Edward Wong and Eric Schmitt, Feb. 18, 2025

Julian Barnes, Edward Wong and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Maria Abi-Habib from Mexico City.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/us/politics/cia-drone-flights-mexico.html

Members of the Mexican National Guard and the Army standing guard at Paso del Norte International Bridge in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, this month. Such checkpoints have been deployed at international bridges for the detection of fentanyl. Credit...Luis Torres/EPA, via Shutterstock


The United States has stepped up secret drone flights over Mexico to hunt for fentanyl labs, part of the Trump administration’s more aggressive campaign against drug cartels, according to U.S. officials.

 

The covert drone program, which has not been previously disclosed, began under the Biden administration, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the program.

 

But President Trump and his C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, have repeatedly promised more intense action against Mexican drug cartels. Increasing the drone flights was a quick initial step.

 

The C.I.A. has not been authorized to use the drones to take lethal action, the officials said, adding that they do not envision using the drones to conduct airstrikes. For now, C.I.A. officers in Mexico pass information collected by the drones to Mexican officials.

 

The flights go “well into sovereign Mexico,” one U.S. official said.

 

The Mexican government has taken steps to address the Trump administration’s concerns about fentanyl, deploying 10,000 troops to the border this month to thwart smuggling. But the Trump administration wants Mexico to do more to destroy or dismantle fentanyl labs and to seize more of the drug.

 

The drones have proved adept at identifying labs, according to people with knowledge of the program. Fentanyl labs emit chemicals that make them easy to find from the air.

 

However, during the Biden administration, the Mexican government was slow to take action against labs identified by the Americans, although it did use the information to make arrests, according to two of the officials.

 

The officials all spoke on the condition their names not be used so they could discuss a classified intelligence program and sensitive diplomacy between Mexico and the United States.

 

The surveillance flights have already caused consternation in Mexico, which has long been wary of its northern neighbor after multiple U.S. invasions and land grabs.

 

In addition to the C.I.A.’s efforts, the U.S. military’s Northern Command is also expanding its surveillance of the border. But the U.S. military, unlike the spy agency, is not entering Mexican airspace.

 

So far, Northern Command has conducted more than two dozen surveillance flights over the southern border using a variety of surveillance aircraft including U-2s, RC-135 Rivet Joints, P-8s and drones, said a senior U.S. military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

 

The military has also created a special intelligence task force of 140 analysts, located near the border, to analyze the information being collected by the surveillance flights and other sources, Northern Command said in a statement this month.

 

Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, the head of the Northern Command, told the Senate last week that analysts are providing intelligence that “gets after the cartel networks that drive the production and distribution of fentanyl and pushes it across the border.”

 

In response to questions from lawmakers, General Guillot said the intelligence was shared with Mexican officials to help them “address the cartel violence in terms of sending more troops.” General Guillot said his command had increased intelligence collection in order to make “rapid progress against this threat.”

 

Asked about General Guillot’s comments, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said that Mexican sovereignty was “not negotiable, and we will always coordinate without subordinating.”

 

Officials from the White House, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon all declined to comment on the secret intelligence program.

 

Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 calling for a crackdown on major cartels. This week, his administration plans to designate a half-dozen cartels and criminal groups in Mexico as foreign terrorist organizations.

 

The designation gives the U.S. government broad powers to impose economic sanctions on groups and entities linked to them. But the cartels are already under heavy sanctions by the U.S. government, and a foreign terrorist designation would provide no significant new tools to block their financial maneuvering, according to former American officials who have worked on these issues.

 

While the sanctions are not necessary for the stepped-up intelligence collection by the C.I.A., several former officials said the designation was an important symbolic step that could, eventually, be followed by expanded operations by the U.S. military or intelligence agencies.

 

The U.S. military’s Seventh Special Forces Group began a training exercise in Mexico this month. Maj. Russell Gordon, a spokesman for First Special Forces Command, said the training with the Mexican Marine Infantry was preplanned and part of “longstanding U.S.-Mexico defense cooperation.”

 

Still, former officials say they believe that the U.S. military and intelligence agencies are likely to increase training with Mexican authorities in the coming months.

 

Conducting an airstrike on fentanyl labs would probably cause catastrophic fatalities, as they are often inside homes in urban areas, a person familiar with the program said, most likely contributing to the reluctance to authorize lethal force.

 

The possibility for violence also exists if the Mexican military or police move against the lab.

 

But the purpose of providing the intelligence to Mexican authorities is not to kill cartel members, but instead to disable the labs, according to American officials briefed on the program.

 

If the cooperation and intelligence sharing do not lead to the destruction of the labs, the Trump administration has signaled it is considering alternative moves.

 

In a visit to the southwestern border this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not rule out conducting cross-border raids to pursue cartels inside Mexico.

 

“All options are on the table,” Mr. Hegseth told reporters.

 

In the transition to the new Trump administration, a former senior U.S. official said incoming aides had made clear that they planned to use the full American counterterrorism apparatus — surveillance aircraft and satellites, intelligence analysts, as well as American personnel or military contractors — to go after the cartels inside Mexico.

 

Ms. Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, has been grilled by reporters about the expanded military flights on the border, after they were detected on Jan. 31.

 

Last week Mexico’s defense secretary, Gen. Ricardo Trevilla Trejo, told reporters that the military had not received any request from the United States to fly in Mexican airspace and insisted that the surveillance flights had not violated international law as they flew above international waters.

 

Days later, as more surveillance flights were detected along the border, Ms. Sheinbaum said that the flights were not new, suggesting that they took place under Mr. Biden, but did not elaborate. She said the flights were “part of the dialogue, the coordination, that we have.”

 

Mr. Trump has announced a former C.I.A. paramilitary officer, Ronald Johnson, as his choice to serve as ambassador to Mexico. Former officials said they believed Mr. Johnson was tapped because of his experience working with both the spy agency and military Special Operations forces.

 

The president also announced this month that he would appoint Joe Kent, a former Army Green Beret and C.I.A. paramilitary officer, as director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

 

Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington, and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega from Mexico City.


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2) South Africa Is a Warning

By Lydia Polgreen, Opinion Columnist, Feb. 18, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/opinion/south-africa-migration.html

An illustration of a small shop in the middle distance. The building’s lights are on, and there’s a small figure in blue looking out from it.

Kyutae Lee


This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today.

 

When people in the rich world imagine a migrant from the poor world, I suspect the image conjured is that of a desperately impoverished person with no marketable skills who will travel any distance and brave any risk to grab an unearned fistful of Western wealth.

 

But the truth is that a migrant is much more likely to look like a man I met last year named Fikre Gebrie Orebo. Growing up in a fertile but deeply impoverished southern region of Ethiopia, he had dreamed of attending university to become an engineer. But he was the firstborn son, and his family depended on him to start working immediately. And so he hit the road, leaving his hometown and heading to the capital, Addis Ababa. He found work as a laborer, digging foundations by hand and moving stones on construction sites.

 

It didn’t take long for him to realize he’d need to keep moving. The brutal work paid little, and there were few opportunities for young men like him. The government was dominated by a northern ethnic elite that shunned his southern tribe. The last straw came when the government started rounding up young men to send them to fight an ill-advised war with Eritrea. Orebo feared that southerners like him would be used as cannon fodder in a pointless conflict.

 

But when he finally set off on his cross-border journey, he didn’t head north, toward Europe, or try to somehow get to the distant, prosperous lands of North America, where hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians have settled. He set his sights on Kenya, his country’s neighbor to the south, where he found a job in a cafe, then farther south still, to South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest economy, where he had heard that an enterprising young person could make a prosperous life.

 

There, he told me, he was granted asylum as a member of a persecuted minority, and he ultimately settled in Heidelberg, a town about an hour’s drive southeast of Johannesburg. Finally, his dreams came to life. He built a successful business, a pair of convenience stores, known locally as spaza shops, in the nearby Black township of Ratanda. He married a young South African woman, and they are raising their children in a comfortable, suburban-style home. He has long sent money home to Ethiopia, supporting his siblings while they were in school and helping to build a house for his father, who had been a farmer, to enjoy a comfortable retirement.

 

Orebo’s story illustrates an important but often occluded fact in this age of migration. Despite the panic in rich countries over the arrival of people fleeing poor, war-tossed nations, most people from the global south who migrate don’t head north. The majority who flee in haste end up quite near where they came from, hoping to go home as soon as possible. And even those who migrate farther afield — searching for work, fleeing political persecution or simply wanting a new life — tend to remain in their own region or continent. In our hyperconnected, jet-powered age, the median distance traveled by modern migrants is less than 400 miles.

 

This pattern has been repeated across the globe in the biggest crises of our time. The 2015 surge of Syrian refugees that remade European politics was a small fraction of the total number of Syrians forced to flee; a vast majority ended up in neighboring countries, with Turkey alone playing uncomfortable host to some three million people, roughly three times that of the entire European Union.

 

More than seven million Venezuelans have fled their country’s long-running political and economic crisis. President Trump’s recent spat with the president of Colombia over deporting Colombian migrants looks quite different when you consider that Colombia, a country of some 50 million people, with a per capita G.D.P. of less than a tenth that of the United States, has taken in about four times as many Venezuelans as America. Indeed, 85 percent of Venezuelan refugees and migrants have remained in Latin America and the Caribbean.

 

Perhaps the most urgent refugee crisis in the world right now, one of the largest since the partition of India in 1947, was set off by the civil war in Sudan, which has forced some 14 million people to flee their homes. Most of Sudan’s refugees have fled into often troubled bordering nations: Chad, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Egypt, Libya and Ethiopia. Vanishingly few have managed to reach Europe or North America.

 

Sudan is just the latest of the many long-simmering refugee crises on the continent. Decades of turmoil in Somalia, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe and more have produced floods of refugees. Sub-Saharan Africa leads the world in the number of forcibly displaced people, with some 45 million on the move, more than doubling since 2017. But an estimated 96 percent of those people remain within the continent.

 

While governments across the global north panic over a relative trickle of migrants, a very real migration crisis is unfolding in the global south. And as wealthy countries in the global north raise their fences ever higher and outsource their border control to countries beyond their frontiers while slashing development aid to the poorest nations, the pressure on migrant destinations in the global south is ratcheting up — sparking violence, xenophobia and instability. By closing their borders to the relatively small numbers of migrants who make the crossing, rich countries risk destabilizing some of the most important nations for regional stability across the globe.

 

That danger is abundantly clear in South Africa, where a country long home to migrants has now turned against them, with devastating effect. For other magnet countries in the global south facing great flows of migrants fleeing war, poverty and the degradation of their land by climate change, South Africa is a potent cautionary tale. And for the rest of the world, it’s a warning.

 

When I went to South Africa on the eve of its national elections last May, I found unease. The vote came 30 years after the end of apartheid, but the mood was anything but celebratory. Bitter and disappointed by the failure to achieve broad prosperity for Black citizens, political opportunists have redirected resentment from white residents, who still hold much of the country’s land and wealth, and refashioned it into an often violent antipathy toward African migrants who have flocked to South Africa, the continent’s wealthiest nation.

 

Xenophobia in South Africa is not new, but the issue gained political significance in last year’s elections. Since 1994, the African National Congress has held large majorities, a virtual hammerlock on electoral politics with a broad-church approach that papered over many of the cleavages within the country’s diverse population. But its support has been steadily slipping, and the fault lines within its coalition have taken on predictable if tragic forms: stoking ethnic divisions and scapegoating of foreigners.

 

“Dissenting politics, arising from the sort of poverty, unemployment and deep problems that we have in our society, will not necessarily produce progressive politics,” Noor Nieftagodien, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, told me. “Xenophobia is an important expression of the kind of regressive politics that can be produced under those circumstances.”

 

To understand how those politics were playing out ahead of the vote, I went to Ratanda, where Orebo had made his modest fortune. He had been living in South Africa for about 18 years. From the moment he arrived, he felt a sense of optimism and possibility, completely different from the torpor and political conflict gripping his homeland. He quickly found work, selling goods in a market in the center of Johannesburg, then saving up enough money to start a shop of his own in Ratanda.

 

He told me that he had a great life in South Africa, even if there were problems along the way. Running a cash business in a poor township wasn’t easy. He had been robbed at gunpoint a number of times, but he took these incidents in stride.

 

“In South Africa, this robbery thing is normal,” he told me. “We don’t mind once the robbery comes. You only take what we sell on that day. But the following day, we will start again. So it was not a problem.”

 

Orebo arrived in South Africa in 2006, a time when the economy was in the midst of a postapartheid boom and the governing African National Congress saw the country as a beacon for Africa, opening its doors to people across the continent who sought safety and opportunity. “South Africa belongs to all who live in it,” the preamble to South Africa’s Constitution boldly declares, while avoiding the word “citizens.”

 

The A.N.C. had long embraced a Pan-African ethos, advocating much freer movement across the continent, arguing that antiquated barriers to trade and migration were a colonial hangover. “South Africa cannot be an island of prosperity in a sea of poverty” was a popular refrain in the party, often attributed to Nelson Mandela. Why, the party asked, should the most talented Africans go to Europe or America when there was so much potential waiting to be tapped so much closer to home?

 

South Africa certainly had abundance. There were seemingly endless tracts of fertile farmland; rich seams of precious gold, diamonds and platinum; gorgeous landscapes to draw tourists from across the globe; and high-quality infrastructure to move people and goods easily within the country and beyond its borders.

 

But the terms of the settlement that ended apartheid sowed the seeds of xenophobia in ways that, looking back, are painfully obvious. Black South Africans gained political power and freedom of movement. But despite the American right-wing fantasies fueled by Trump and Elon Musk of a persecuted white minority being chased off their land and stripped of their wealth, most of the country’s riches remained stubbornly held by the white minority.

 

This was the price of a peaceful transition: an agreement to transfer political power without broadly redistributing wealth. A handful of politically connected Black elites, people like the country’s current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who had played a critical role in ending apartheid as the leader of a mineworkers’ union, had been dealt into the upper reaches of the economy, becoming fabulously wealthy.

 

Just about everyone else was left behind. When the World Inequality Lab examined South Africa’s economy in 2021, it found that despite the country’s political transformation, “there is no evidence that wealth inequality has decreased since the end of apartheid.” The wealthiest 10 percent own more than 85 percent of the country’s household wealth, it found. About a third of the work force is unemployed.

 

South Africa had long been a magnet for workers across southern Africa when Robert Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned farms plunged Zimbabwe into free fall, sending more than a million people across the border not long before the postapartheid boom started to fade. Horrific acts of violence targeting African migrants became commonplace, with widespread riots breaking out in 2008 and 2015.

 

The mobs would sometimes interrogate suspected foreigners, asking if they knew the isiZulu word for “elbow.” Spaza shop owners, in particular, were frequent targets, including those from Somalia. Many had very dark skin and striking aquiline features that made it impossible to pass for locals, and their work in townships made them sitting ducks for xenophobic violence.

 

Maybe he was just lucky, but Orebo told me he had not faced such prejudice. There was some rioting in Ratanda 2012, when he and other foreign shopkeepers were looted and closed their shops for a few days, but otherwise he felt welcome in the community. He married a local woman, and their three children were South African citizens. His business thrived, and he told me with pride that at one point he had three cars.

 

Spaza shops, where locals buy small daily household items like food, toiletries and cigarettes, have long been a battleground in the wars between South Africans and outsiders. Migrant groups, especially those from Somalia and Ethiopia, have thrived in this niche, giving rise to resentment from locals. After years of dodging such violence, Orebo ran out of luck in the fall of 2023.

 

A mob of anti-migrant activists — including, I was told, supporters of a group known as Operation Dudula — swarmed the township, blocking streets with flaming tires. They burned and looted shops owned by foreigners, including Orebo’s. He went to the township later that night to survey the damage and salvage what he could but was confronted by armed men.

 

“They came with a gun, and they shot at me,” Orebo told me. “But God saved me.”

 

Orebo is merely the latest in a centuries-long line of migrants who have made the country we now know as South Africa, which has seen wave upon wave of migration, with each shaping its culture, politics and language in profound ways. About 1,700 years ago, Bantu people from West and Central Africa migrated south, bringing farming and other innovations to lands that had been home to the nomadic Khoekhoe and San communities. Explorers from Europe arrived in the 15th century, followed by waves of white settlers, mostly from the Netherlands, France, Germany and Britain. Thousands of enslaved people, stolen from East Africa and Asia, were forced to labor there.

 

The discovery of diamonds and gold in the 19th century transformed South Africa into a powerful magnet, drawing fortune hunters from Europe, the United States and Australia. The mines created many dangerous and difficult jobs that needed filling, and decades before the formal imposition of apartheid, the government of South Africa created a complex system of recruitment and exploitation of Black African workers from across southern Africa. Unlike white migrants, who were permitted to settle permanently in South Africa, Black Africans who worked in mines could stay only as long as their employers permitted.

 

Later, it became the explicit policy of the apartheid state to rely on foreign workers from around the region rather than Black South Africans, who were denied full citizenship rights, forced off their land and herded into areas that white people didn’t want, so-called homelands based on tribal and linguistic identities. The prime land freed up by this forced migration of millions of people was sold cheaply to white settlers — a source of profound economic inequality that has endured.

 

The end of apartheid was supposed to lift Black South Africans and give them a share of the country’s bounty. But when that failed to happen, migrants offered an easy scapegoat.

 

“There is a long history of the South African elite, largely the white elite, using immigrant labor as a way of undermining Black South African power,” Loren Landau, a leading scholar of migration in South Africa, told me. If antimigrant populists in rich countries are promising a return to a supposedly better past, South Africa’s populists are playing a different game. Agitation against migrants, he said, was a misplaced attempt “to find a way of reclaiming this promised future” of a postapartheid South Africa that never materialized.

 

In Ratanda these politics were playing out with deadly and mysterious violence. I visited the family of Veli Ntombela, a supporter of Operation Dudula who had opened his own spaza shop after many of the migrant shop owners were pushed out of the township. A few weeks earlier, someone approached the small store attached to Ntombela’s tidy concrete block house and asked to buy cigarettes.

 

He was running low, so he asked his partner, Sibongile Miya, to go back into the house to fetch some more. Moments later, she heard a series of sharp cracks, at first not recognizing the sound as gunfire. She raced back into the shop, where she found Ntombela lying there, bleeding. She fell to the ground in shock. Later that evening he was declared dead from his wounds.

 

Ntombela’s was the latest in a series of unsolved killings involving South Africans who had set up spaza shops after the expulsion of foreigners. Ratanda was abuzz with theories about the shootings. The foreign shopkeepers, I was told, were migrants from Pakistan and members of Islamic extremist groups, to boot. No, others said, they came from Somalia and were affiliated with Al Shabab, a militant group. Some thought that foreigners had hired hit men from neighboring Lesotho to kill upstart shopkeepers like Ntombela in the hopes of reclaiming their businesses.

 

As these rumors circulated, Election Day was fast approaching. Utility poles were festooned with signs from Operation Dudula, which had transformed itself into an upstart regional political party. “Mass deportation of all illegal immigrants,” one read, featuring a picture of the party’s leader in camouflage fatigues. “Our economy. Our heritage.”

 

The party traces its origins to a vigilante group formed in 2021 in Soweto, the fabled township at the heart of the struggle against apartheid. Dudula is an isiZulu word that means to “force out” or “knock down,” and the group has repeatedly been accused of targeting and harassing foreigners.

 

Ntombela, who was 39, was a prominent supporter of the party. Tall with a chiseled physique, he had worked on the fringes of South Africa’s movie industry as a stuntman and actor. His relatives proudly showed me a photograph of him, smiling and shirtless, wearing a loincloth on the set of a 2013 film based on Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” starring Idris Elba.

 

Ntombela’s family, like a lot of Black South Africans, had been supporters of the A.N.C., but worries about crime and migration pulled them away from the party in recent years — first toward a party linked to messianic churches that promised to restore the death penalty and restrict foreign ownership of businesses and ultimately to the even more hard-line Operation Dudula.

 

As a new party, Operation Dudula didn’t get very far in the elections, winning less than one-tenth of a percent of the vote. But xenophobia was a crucial wedge issue driving voters from the A.N.C. to political parties like the breakaway uMkhonto weSizwe and the Patriotic Alliance, both of which promised harsh border controls. Their success underscored the country’s hardened attitude to migrants and outsiders.

 

Orebo, for his part, was forgiving. He said he understood why South Africans might resent foreigners who find success in the country, given how many young people struggle to eke out a living. “To be honest, South Africans, they’re very good people,” he said. “South Africans, they have a right to cry, because they overloaded this country. Every border gate is open.”

 

He has sent word back to Ethiopia, though, warning young people tempted to make the dangerous overland journey that it isn’t worth it. Better to set your sights elsewhere, he advises any young person who asks. Since the attack on his shops, he has not been able to reopen and has been surviving by selling off what he can — the three cars are long gone — and doing odd jobs.

 

“I’m really struggling,” he told me. For the first time since he went to South Africa, he’s been thinking he may need to migrate once again, perhaps to Canada or the United States. “Really, I give up,” he said. “If I get any chance to go from this country, wherever I can go. Because here, now, I’m hopeless.”


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3) Hamas Says Remains of Israeli Captives, Including Bibas Family, Will Be Handed Over on Thursday

The militant group’s chief negotiator also said Hamas would increase the number of living hostages it would release on Saturday to six from three.

By Adam Rasgon and Fatima AbdulKarim, Feb. 18, 2025

Adam Rasgon reported from Jerusalem and Fatima AbdulKarim reported from Ramallah

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/world/middleeast/hamas-hostages-remains.html
People stand outside at a rally, holding signs.
A rally calling for the release of the remaining hostages, in Tel Aviv earlier this month. Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times


Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s chief negotiator, said in a speech on Tuesday that militants intend to hand over the remains of four Israeli hostages to Israel on Thursday in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners.

 

Mr. Hayya said that members of the Bibas family — some of the most well-known hostages worldwide — would be among the four bodies handed over to Israel on Thursday, without saying how many. The three remaining members of the Bibas family in Gaza are Shiri Bibas and her two children.

 

The Israeli prime minister’s office confirmed that the bodies of four Israelis would be returned on Thursday, but officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment about whether the Bibas family would be among them. The Israeli military had said until recently that there were grave concerns for the lives of Ms. Bibas and her children, though it had not confirmed their deaths.

 

For many Israelis, the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack: Shiri Bibas was corralled by gunmen and taken to Gaza with her two red-haired children, Ariel, 4, and the baby Kfir, who was just short of 9 months old at the time. Yarden Bibas, Shiri’s husband and the children’s father, was also abducted, bleeding heavily after an assailant struck his head with a hammer, relatives said. Mr. Bibas was released from captivity earlier in February.

 

Mr. Hayya and the Israeli prime minister’s office also said the number of living hostages scheduled to be released on Saturday will be increased to six from three. Mr. Hayya said Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, Israeli citizens who have been held in Gaza for roughly a decade, were among the six. It was not immediately clear why Hamas had decided to increase the number of living hostages to be released on Saturday. The original agreement had called for Hamas to release three hostages this Saturday in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.

 

The release of the living and dead hostages this week would indicate that the implementation of the initial, six-week cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas was progressing despite concerns about its fragility. Negotiations over the second phase of the deal, which calls for a permanent end to the fighting, a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the release of more hostages and prisoners, appear less solid.

 

The two sides were to start talks over details on the next phase two weeks ago, but Qatar, a key mediating country, said the talks had yet to begin.

 

Hamas has accused Israel of delaying the start of the phase two discussions, while Israel still hasn’t announced publicly when it would send officials to participate in them.

 

As part of the first phase of the deal, Hamas is supposed to release 33 Israeli hostages, including eight whom Israeli authorities believe are dead. As of Tuesday, Hamas had freed 19 Israelis.


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4) Native American Activist Leonard Peltier Released From Prison

Mr. Peltier was convicted in the killing of two F.B.I. agents. An order from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will allow him to serve his remaining time under home confinement.

By Shaila Dewan, Feb. 18, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/us/leonard-peltier-released-prison.html
A group of people stand outside the White House fence carrying signs that call for freeing Leonard Peltier.
Leonard Peltier was given two life sentences for his role in a shootout between activists and F.B.I. agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. Credit...Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images


Leonard Peltier, a Native American rights activist held for nearly half a century for the killing of two F.B.I. agents, was released from a federal prison in Central Florida on Tuesday morning.

 

Mr. Peltier, 80, will serve the remainder of his two life sentences in home confinement in North Dakota, where he is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.

 

The commutation of Mr. Peltier’s sentence was one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s final acts before leaving office. Those urging clemency for Mr. Peltier, who is in poor health and partially blind, included Nobel Peace laureates, former law enforcement officials including one of the lead prosecutors on the case, human rights organizations and celebrities like Steven Van Zandt, the guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.

 

F.B.I. agents including Christopher Wray, the former director of the agency, strongly opposed clemency for Mr. Peltier, saying that it was a betrayal of the fallen agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams. Mr. Wray called Mr. Peltier “a remorseless killer.”

 

He was convicted for his role in a shootout between activists and F.B.I. agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975 that left two agents and an activist dead. Prosecutors said the agents were shot at point-blank range.

 

Mr. Peltier has admitted to firing his gun from a distance, but insisted that he acted in self-defense and did not kill the agents.

 

Of the more than 30 people who were present during the shootout, Mr. Peltier was the only one to be convicted of a crime. Two other Native American activists were tried for murder, but were acquitted. Exculpatory evidence admitted in their trials, including ballistic evidence, was excluded from Mr. Peltier’s, which his supporters argue was one of the ways his trial was unfair.

 

An appeals court found in 1986 that the government had deliberately withheld evidence, but said that evidence would most likely not have changed the verdict.

 

Mr. Peltier was set to undergo a medical examination on Tuesday before traveling to North Dakota.


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5) Elon Musk Is Leading a ‘Hostile Takeover of the Federal Government’

By Thomas B. Edsall, Feb. 18, 2025

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/opinion/musk-trump-doge-tech.html
Elon Musk’s face, seen from various angles, is also reflected against a black surface.
Ioulex for The New York Times

President Trump has empowered Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, to fire government employees, eliminate federal agencies and run roughshod over both federal law and the Constitution.

 

In an unparalleled delegation of executive branch authority, Trump has chosen Musk — who is at once an entrepreneur whose companies have won billions of dollars in federal contracts and an open supporter of far-right political parties in Europe — to conduct a radical reconfiguration of the American government in conformity with the ideological agendas of both Trump and Musk.

 

The two men have at least one thing in common. Both grew up in white enclaves during periods when racial strife was emerging — Trump was born in 1946 and grew up in the affluent Queens neighborhood of Jamaica Estates in New York City; Musk was born in 1971 and grew up in the suburbs of Johannesburg and Durban, in South Africa, at a time when whites still ruled the country under apartheid.

 

The elevation of Musk marks a major reversal of Trump ideology from the angry working class, anti-elitism of his first winning campaign, in 2016, under the guidance of Steve Bannon, to the explicit privileging, this time around, of elite tech oligarchs — rich beyond the imagination of ordinary people — to guide government policies.

It is no easy task to grasp the scale and magnitude of Trump’s appointment of Musk to run the Department of Government Efficiency, better known by its acronym, DOGE. Musk’s declared goal is to cut federal spending by $2 trillion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, government expenditures totaled $6.75 trillion in 2024.

 

“I can think of no precedent in American history of such enormous power being entrusted to a private citizen,” Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, wrote by email in reply to my inquiry:

 

To say that this delegation of unsupervised authority by President Trump to Elon Musk is an unprecedented violation of the Appointments Clause of Article II of the Constitution, which at a minimum would demand the Senate’s advice and consent to the appointment of anyone exercising the kind of power, would be an understatement.

 

Our Constitution rebels against the idea of empowering any individual, neither elected nor officially appointed pursuant to law, with the sweeping power to control the expenditure of public funds, the hiring and firing of public officials, the deployment of public force, and the organization of public agencies. This is brute dictatorship of the worst kind.

Musk and others in the Trump administration have a very different view. Musk considers what he is doing to be the embodiment of democracy in action.

 

At a White House briefing on Feb. 12, Musk argued that “a significant part of this presidency is to restore democracy.”

 

Musk asked, “What is the goal of DOGE?” and answered himself: “If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected officials in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.”

 

Without radical intervention, Musk continued, “we have this unelected, fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy, which has, in a lot of ways, currently more power than any elected official. This is not something that people want, and it does not match the will of the people.”

 

How, then, does granting one man, a very rich man, unchecked power to reconfigure the federal government from the ground up get to be described as democratic?

 

Musk’s answer:

 

The public voted. We have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump. We won the House, we won the Senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. The president spoke about that at every rally.

 

The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get. They’re going to get what they voted for. And a lot of times people that don’t get what they voted for, but in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for. And that’s what democracy is all about.

 

Musk is the latest iteration in a long line of powerful presidential advisers, some in the private sector, others in government jobs. That characterization, however, fails to convey the wide latitude Trump has given Musk to disrupt the executive branch.

 

The influence of Mark Hanna during the William McKinley administration, Thomas G. “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran and James Farley during the F.D.R. years and Karl Rove, who served as political consigliere to George W. Bush, pales in comparison to Musk’s — so much so that it can be hard to tell whether Trump or Musk or both are calling the shots.

 

Michael Dorf, a constitutional scholar who is a professor of law at Cornell, noted that the delegation of policy-making roles to unelected officials has provoked sharp controversies in the recent past.

 

The mandate given to Musk “truly is unprecedented in U.S. history,” Dorf wrote by email:

 

By way of comparison, opposition parties have occasionally raised substantial objections when even a small amount of power was given to persons who held no official office: think about the Republican reaction to the essentially advisory role that Hillary Clinton had in the formulation of health care reform in her husband’s administration.

 

Or consider the concerns raised by many Democrats when Dick Cheney (who was the elected VP at the time) was meeting with private industry leaders to help formulate energy policy during the George W. Bush administration. Yet Hillary Clinton and the industry captains with whom Cheney met held only advisory power. By contrast, Musk appears to be formulating and executing policies.

 

Even apart from the many conflicts of interest, lack of transparency, and Musk’s increasingly far-right authoritarian views, this development is truly extraordinary and alarming.

 

In the first month of Trump’s second term, Musk and DOGE have created a climate of trepidation among the three million men and women who work for the federal government.

 

Many of Musk’s attempts to cut back the size of the federal bureaucracy are tied up in court cases, with some already blocked by temporary restraining orders.

 

His goal is to force budget cuts and reductions in force in virtually every part of the executive branch. Musk has tried, for example, with some initial success, to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the major source of nonmilitary foreign aid; to gain access to U.S. Treasury expenditure data; he led the charge to close down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, posting on X, which, of course, he owns: “CFPB RIP.” But these examples only touch the surface of Musk’s agenda.

 

The Supreme Court, which is controlled by a six-member conservative majority, including three justices appointed by Trump, may prove to be the ultimate arbiter of the success or failure of the Trump-Musk assault on the federal work force and on federal spending.

 

Trump has let it be known that he always abides by the courts, a claim he reiterated on Feb. 11, although other Trump Administration officials have signaled that he may not abide by adverse court rulings.

 

On Feb. 9, Vice President JD Vance posted on X: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

 

After a series of adverse court rulings, Musk posted on X, on Feb. 12, notably the day after Trump’s latest comment on the subject: “There needs to be an immediate wave of judicial impeachments, not just one.”

 

Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focuses on the Constitution, replied to my inquiries about Trump and Musk by email, describing the mandate Trump has given Musk as “indeed extraordinary, unprecedented in U.S. history.”

 

Smith continued:

 

It violates the Appointments clause in Article 2, section 2 of the Constitution, which requires that all principal officers of the United States be appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate. The power over every federal agency and employee that Trump has given to Musk clearly makes Musk a principal officer, without Senate approval.

 

If Trump tries to pretend Musk is merely a consultant, then Musk is the beneficiary of excessive delegation of government power to a private individual, which is also unconstitutional.

 

In addition, Smith argued, “the Trump administration is ignoring lower court decisions and taking actions it knows to be illegal under existing doctrines in the hopes that it will be largely sustained by the Supreme Court, relying on unitary executive theory’s incredibly expansive view of presidential power.”

 

“It is hard to see how the administration could win a challenge to Musk’s appointment without Senate approval,” Smith continued, but if the Court “rules for Trump or stands aside, or if Trump ignores it, constitutional democracy in America will be in serious, perhaps fatal jeopardy.”

 

There may be other motives behind Trump’s empowerment of Musk.

 

Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, noted in an email that Trump may be granting such powers to Musk “either in gratitude for the enormous sum of money that Musk spent on Trump’s election or perhaps for future financial assistance with Trump’s legal difficulties.”

 

Another possibility, Cain suggested, is that

 

having Musk do the dirty work gives Trump the option to come in at the end and bargain away some of the more drastic cuts when it comes to the upcoming reconciliation negotiations. Trump in his first term tended to play both bad cop and good cop. Now he has some even badder cops in Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance.

 

This is happening, Cain continued, “in the context of the urgency of cutting government spending to make way for the tax cuts President Trump promised to donors and voters during the election. This explains the ‘cut first and ask questions later approach’ that Musk is taking.”

 

Even before he was formally appointed to run DOGE, Musk has been at loggerheads with Bannon, formerly Trump’s chief strategist and a leading figure in the powerful populist wing of the MAGA movement.

 

Bannon views Musk’s support of H-1B visas for skilled immigrants as a fundamental violation of MAGA’s anti-immigrant agenda.

 

In a Jan. 13 interview with the leading Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, Bannon described Musk as “a truly evil person. Stopping him has become a personal issue for me.”

 

Bannon declared, “I will get Elon Musk kicked out by the time Trump is inaugurated,” a boast Bannon could not make good on. “He won’t have a blue pass with full access to the White House. He’ll be like everyone else.”

 

More recently, on Feb. 13, Bannon warned Musk to be very cautious in planning cuts to Medicaid, a program DOGE is virtually certain to pinpoint for major spending reductions in order to meet Musk’s $2 trillion target.

 

“You’ve got to be careful because a lot of MAGA is on Medicaid,” Bannon continued on his podcast, “War Room.” “If you don’t think so, you are dead wrong.”

 

So far, however, Trump has persisted in backing Musk.

 

Trump has also supported Musk on another front, discounting the glaring conflicts of interest posed by Musk’s work at DOGE and his multibillion dollar companies, including Tesla, SpaceX including its subsidiary Starlink, XAI, an artificial intelligence start-up; the Boring Company, a tunneling venture; and Neuralink, which is seeking to “create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical need,” and X.

 

On Feb. 11, my Times colleagues Eric Lipton and Kirsten Grind described the scope of these conflicts in detail. In “Elon Musk’s Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up,” Lipton and Grind report that there are “at least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by those moves” — meaning the Trump Administration’s attacks on the size and scope of the federal government — and that these agencies have “more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies.”

 

In addition, the federal government has awarded contracts with a total value of $13 billion over the past five years to Musk companies, Lipton and Grind found, most of which went to SpaceX, making it “one of the biggest government contractors.”

 

Musk disputes the claim that his work heading DOGE conflicts with his private holdings, contending at the Feb. 12 White House briefing that “we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible.”

 

A reporter then asked:

 

You’ve received billions of dollars in federal contracts when it comes to the Pentagon, for instance, which the president, I know, has directed you to look into. Are you policing yourself on that?

 

Musk replied:

 

Well, all of our actions are fully public. So if you see anything, you say, “Wait a second. Hey, that seems like maybe there’s a conflict there.” I don’t feel like people are going to be shy about saying that. They’ll say it immediately.

Then Trump interjected:

 

We would not let him do that segment or look in that area if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest We watch that also. He’s a big businessman. He’s a successful guy. That’s why we want him doing this. We don’t want an unsuccessful guy doing this.

 

The exchange is particularly revealing in what is says about Trump’s moral reasoning and its similarity to Musk’s thinking.

 

The fact is that Musk’s conflicts of interest heading DOGE have been repeatedly pointed out, not only by the reporting in this newspaper but elsewhere, from USA Today to Fortune and by Democrats in the House and Senate.

 

These claims of transparency, which have also been challenged, are deemed by Trump and Musk to be adequate to protect against abuse, even when the potential for abuse is glaringly obvious.

 

Brooke Harrington, a sociologist at Dartmouth, has been studying wealth, power and the rise of oligarchs since the turn of the century. In a phone interview, Harrington contended that what she calls a “tech broligarchy has effectively bought the presidency. Trump gets to be chairman of the board, cut the ribbons in day-to-day ceremonies, while control of the structure of government is left to them (the broligarchy) in what amounts to a hostile takeover of the federal government.”

 

Harrington was even more direct in an appearance with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show the night after Trump was inaugurated, when she compared the relationship between Vladimir Putin and his rich supporters to Trump’s relationship to the wealthy men who backed his 2024 campaign:

 

At least Putin has a red line with his oligarchs. The grand bargain was that he was going to let them get rich on condition that they kept their noses out of his political business. At most they would be his errand boys.

 

What Trump has done is so extraordinary. He doesn’t have that bright line with the new oligarchs of America at all. He basically said “you bought it, do what you want.”

 

Musk, in fact, has begun to spread his wings well beyond American borders and has become a major player in far right, anti-immigrant parties in Europe, including Reform U.K. in England and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

 

In the case of Reform U.K., Musk has tried to push the party farther to the right, demanding that it support the release from prison of the extremist agitator who goes by the name Tommy Robinson.

 

Nigel Farage, leader of Reform U.K., has rejected Musk’s demands, saying of Robinson:

 

I know a lot of Americans see him as a great champion of free speech, but I just don’t see him as suitable for our party. And I’m not someone that budges very easily.

 

Musk, in a videotaped speech to a Jan. 25 AfD rally in Halle, told party loyalists “I think you really are the best hope for Germany.”

 

Musk told the crowd, “It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” adding that there has been “too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.”

 

My Times colleague Jim Tankersley wrote on Feb. 15, that the AfD

 

is sitting second in the polls for next Sunday’s parliamentary elections, with about 20 percent of the public saying they support it. But no other German party is willing to govern with it. That’s because the AfD has at times downplayed Hitler’s atrocities. Some party members have reveled in Nazi slogans.

 

Musk’s engagement with these parties suggests, in turn, that his agenda at DOGE is as much — or more — partisan and radically conservative than it is about cutting spending or increasing efficiency. His targets, so far, have been liberals in the federal work force, particularly those involved in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, and such federal programs as consumer protection and foreign aid that draw workers, in the main, with liberal views.

 

Musk, then, is in charge of a campaign to purge left-leaning or liberal government initiatives, with little or no regard to legal or constitutional constraint.

 

Musk has the full backing of President Trump and the strongest imaginable ally in Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

 

The three men will inflict severe and lasting damage. The next three years and eleven months — at least — are going to be a living hell for one half of the nation. And perhaps much more than one half.


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6) Courts Force a Window Into Musk’s Secretive Unit

Elon Musk has described his operation, tasked with a drastic government overhaul, as “maximally transparent.” But legal filings have shown an effort to wall him off from scrutiny by downplaying his role.

By Zach Montague, Reporting from Washington, Feb. 18, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/us/politics/doge-lawsuits-elon-musk.html

A protest against Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Anxious career employees have received little direct information about the effort, leaving them reliant on office rumors and news reports for updates. Credit...Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times


When President Trump signed an order imbuing the so-called Department of Government Efficiency with even more power over the federal work force, Elon Musk was there, championing the work as an exercise in transparency.

 

“All of our actions are maximally transparent,” Mr. Musk said last week, standing in the Oval Office. “In fact, I don’t think there’s been — I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization.”

 

But in case after case, federal judges have begged to differ.

 

The work of Mr. Musk, who Mr. Trump has said is the leader of the operation tasked with making “large scale” reductions across every department, has been largely shrouded in secrecy. Team members have spent weeks burrowing into multiple federal agencies, demanding access to data for undisclosed purposes.

 

Anxious career employees have received little direct information, leaving them reliant on office rumors and news reports for updates. The identities of the members of Mr. Musk’s team, too, have been closely held.

 

Court filings in the torrent of lawsuits challenging the incursions have offered a crucial, though limited, window. As some of the only firsthand accounts of what Mr. Musk’s associates are doing across a number of departments, they paint a picture of a tightly managed process in which small groups of government employees have swept in and out of agencies, grabbing up data in apparent pursuit of larger political projects.

 

The filings have also offered revelations about what information security and ethics trainings those employees have undergone. But many questions remain, frustrating the judges trying the cases.

 

In at least one filing, the government has shown an effort to wall off Mr. Musk, in particular, from scrutiny by asserting that he is not, in fact, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency nor an employee of the office.

 

Lawyers defending the Trump administration in lawsuits have sought to document the efforts by Mr. Musk’s team as routine. The government has repeatedly filed affidavits by the civil servants working with Mr. Musk’s associates stating that everyone from the Musk unit has been given appropriate training and agreed to security measures meant to prevent illegal disclosures of privileged data. (In a case involving the Musk team’s work at the Education Department, however, an employee acknowledged that another operative had not completed trainings as of last Sunday.)

 

And like Mr. Musk, lawyers representing the government have repeatedly asserted that all efforts associated with the operation are aimed at auditing government books for signs of “waste, fraud and abuse.” The office did not respond to a message seeking comment.

 

In case after case, judges have strained to establish even basic facts about the staff members who have descended on federal agencies. Attempts to press for specifics, such as how many associates of Mr. Musk have been detailed to specific agencies, whether they have arrived as employees of those agencies or as representatives from the White House, and what grounds they have for demanding entry into agencies’ systems, have been largely unsuccessful.

 

In a lawsuit brought against the Education Department that challenges the Musk team’s review of sensitive student data, like tax information and Social Security numbers, a government employee named Adam Ramada identified himself as a member of Mr. Musk’s team. Mr. Ramada said he had been detailed to the department to audit its federal student loan portfolio starting on Jan. 28. He did not respond to a message seeking comment.

 

Reporting by The New York Times and other outlets has suggested that more than a dozen people associated with Mr. Musk have been added to the department’s employee directory and have pursued a variety of projects, including building A.I. tools to replace older customer care platforms the government previously paid contractors to manage.

 

But in a sworn declaration, Mr. Ramada stated that he was working with two unnamed government employees from other agencies as part of a six-person team. He said those six people had not yet examined any tax data but planned to scrutinize the costs of “student loan repayment plans, awards or debt discharges.” Student debt forgiveness was one of the main priorities of the Education Department under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

 

In an earlier case, Mr. Ramada had said in a filing that he was also detailed to the Labor Department, where he was part of a three-person team focused on “obtaining accurate and complete data to inform policy decisions.”

 

Additionally, it was only through court filings that the Treasury Department acknowledged that another associate of Mr. Musk, Marko Elez, had briefly been provided direct access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems and source code.

 

And, in an extraordinary declaration in a separate case on Monday, the director of the White House Office of Administration stated that Mr. Musk was in fact neither the legal head of the Department of Government Efficiency nor an employee. The statement, made by Joshua Fisher, drew a technical distinction aimed at insulating Mr. Musk from some legal challenges even as Mr. Musk has both publicly and privately asserted himself as the clear leader of the effort.

 

While the deluge of lawsuits challenging Mr. Musk’s authority has at times provided some clarity, many of the filings appear to obfuscate basic details about the larger goals at play and the people responsible for carrying them out. Most members of the small task forces described in the filings as being in place at various agencies remain anonymous.

 

For example, a filing by an official describing the Musk team’s presence at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau stated that only one unnamed person from the operation had been detailed to the bureau as part of a “core team” of six people to help with the general tech modernization goals laid out in Mr. Trump’s executive order establishing the office.

 

But days earlier, Adam Martinez, who made that declaration, appeared to have told employees in an email that at least three Musk team members were already on site at the bureau and required prompt access to data, including human resources and financial systems, according to reporting by Wired.

 

On Monday, while considering whether to temporarily block Mr. Musk’s team from embedding in more than half a dozen federal agencies for two weeks, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan asked government lawyers directly whether the Musk-led operation had recommended layoffs at those agencies in the weeks ahead.

 

“DOGE’s actions in this case — in this arena — have been very unpredictable and scattershot, and I have no idea whether that is by design or simply by virtue of the scope of their remit,” Judge Chutkan said. “But that’s why I’m asking you: Have there been terminations, will there be terminations, when are they going to be and where are they going to be?”

 

A lawyer representing the government responded, “Obviously, I can’t commit to ‘no one will get fired the next few weeks’ if someone assaults their co-workers tomorrow.”

 

Judge Chutkan declined on Tuesday to issue an emergency restraining order in that case, finding that it was too unclear what role Mr. Musk’s operatives had played and what downstream effects their work so far could have on the coalition of states that sued.

 

The presence of Mr. Musk’s teams at different agencies has often been a precursor to major cuts and staff reductions that appear to be informed more by Mr. Trump’s political agenda than by conventional definitions of “fraud” or “waste.” Those have included a wide variety of humanitarian aid programs, grants for institutions conducting medical research across the United States and a spate of haphazard layoffs.

 

In court, government lawyers have described personnel moves as a part of the natural turnover when the government changes hands.

 

“My head is not buried in the sand,” Simon Jerome, a lawyer from the Justice Department, told the judge in the education case. “I understand sort of the tenor of the conversations and the disruption — and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way — I just mean that there’s certainly been a lot of turmoil. But I would resist the idea that the degree of public hubbub around the change in presidential administrations, or decisions that a new administration makes, makes it unusual.”


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7) Alarmed by Trump’s Gaza Plan, Arab Leaders Brainstorm on Their Own

Since President Trump suggested depopulating Gaza, Arab officials have suggested other ideas for reconstruction. But the emerging consensus repackages old plans as new ones.

By Patrick Kingsley and Vivian Yee, Feb. 19, 2025

The journalists, reporting from Jerusalem and Cairo, spoke with diplomats, politicians and analysts briefed on the Arab initiative.


“‘The biggest challenge that the Arab leaders face is to present a realistic plan that can be imposed on the Palestinian factions as well as also being acceptable to both the U.S. and Israel,’ said Ibrahim Dalalsha, director of the Horizon Center, a political research group in Ramallah, West Bank. ‘It’s going to be a very complicated process.’”


https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/world/middleeast/gaza-reconstruction-alternatives.html

People walk down an uneven dirt path through the rubble of destroyed buildings.

Much of Gaza has been destroyed in 500 days of fighting between Hamas and Israel. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times


After President Trump shocked the Arab world last month by suggesting the entire population of Gaza be expelled from the territory, his aides reframed the idea as an invitation to the leaders of the Middle East: Come up with a better plan, or do it our way.

 

“All these countries say how much they care about the Palestinians,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week. “If the Arab countries have a better plan, then that’s great,” Mr. Rubio added.

 

Now, the governments of several Arab states are attempting to do exactly that. Representatives of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are quietly coordinating to form an alternative vision for Gaza in which Arab countries would help fund and oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, while keeping its residents in place and preserving the possibility of a Palestinian state, according to diplomats and officials briefed on the endeavor.

 

Envoys from all five countries are set to flesh out the details on Friday in Saudi Arabia, and then again at a bigger summit on March 4 in Cairo. At those meetings, Egypt will likely propose forming a committee of Palestinian technocrats and community leaders, all unaffiliated with Hamas, who could run Gaza after the war, according to two Arab diplomats, a senior Western official and Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland. Mr. Van Hollen said he spoke over the last week with the Egyptian, Saudi and Jordanian foreign ministers about the evolving proposal.

 

“A lot of the focus will be to demonstrate to Trump and others that, ‘Yes, there is a viable plan to rebuild, we will invest the resources there,’” Mr. Van Hollen said.

 

“Their view is that Trump’s a real estate guy, he talked about redeveloping Gaza, they want to put together a viable plan that shows Trump that you can rebuild Gaza and provide a future for two million Palestinians” without forcing them to leave the territory, Mr. Van Hollen added.

 

While the ideas might be presented as a fresh alternative, they are hardly new. For months, Egypt has promoted the idea of a technocratic committee and has hosted Palestinian leaders in Cairo to discuss the idea. For decades, Arab leaders have called for the establishment of a Palestinian state that includes Gaza. Even the Israeli government has privately signaled for more than a year that it is open to Arab leaders playing an oversight role in postwar Gaza.

 

The challenge is that the obstacles to these ideas are as old as the ideas themselves.

 

Israeli leaders oppose postwar plans that would pave the way to Palestinian sovereignty. But Arab leaders will only support a framework that at least nominally forges a path toward Palestinian statehood.

 

They also want the blessing of the Palestinian Authority, the internationally recognized body that administered Gaza until Hamas wrested control of the territory nearly two decades ago. But the authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, has appeared wary of a postwar governance structure that does not unequivocally give him full control of the territory — a position that puts him at odds with a technocratic committee. Hamas officials have said they would be willing to cede control over civil affairs to such a body. But they have refused to disband their military wing, an unacceptable position for both Israel and Mr. Trump, who seek Hamas’s complete disarmament.

 

“The biggest challenge that the Arab leaders face is to present a realistic plan that can be imposed on the Palestinian factions as well as also being acceptable to both the U.S. and Israel,” said Ibrahim Dalalsha, director of the Horizon Center, a political research group in Ramallah, West Bank. “It’s going to be a very complicated process.”

 

Among the uncertainties is whom the Arab leaders would entrust to secure Gaza and prevent Hamas from attacking Israel. Israeli officials also want the Israeli military to have operational freedom in Gaza for the long term, but that arrangement would be hard for the Arab leadership to publicly support.

 

Some hope that Egypt and the Gulf countries would provide their own troops. Last month, Egypt allowed a private Egyptian security firm to help staff a checkpoint inside Gaza — an arrangement that some diplomats and analysts viewed as a prototype for a broader operation. But it is unclear whether Arab leaders would be prepared to send a larger force to secure a wider territory. And it is unlikely that Hamas would accept that intervention.

 

“Whoever wants to take Israel’s place will be treated just like Israel,” Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official, said during a conference in Qatar last weekend.

 

The firmest element of the Egyptian plan centers on rebuilding Gaza while keeping Palestinians inside the enclave instead of forcing them out to Egypt and Jordan, as Mr. Trump has suggested.

 

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt outlined the proposal in broad strokes in meetings on Sunday with Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, and Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan. Mr. el-Sisi discussed with the Jordanian prince “the necessity of immediately starting the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, without displacing the Palestinians from their land,” according to a statement from Egypt’s presidency.

 

But the details of the plan remain unclear.

 

Samir Farag, a retired Egyptian military general, said in an interview that Egypt would call on an array of companies, both domestic and international, to reconstruct Gaza over the next three to five years. A first phase of increasing humanitarian aid to Gaza and clearing rubble would be followed by building hospitals, schools and other infrastructure, said Mr. Farag, who is close to Egyptian officials.

 

The question of who will pay for it remains unanswered.

 

Egypt will call on other Arab countries to contribute reconstruction funds at an upcoming conference, Mr. Farag said.

 

But even the timing of such summits has been the subject of confusion. Egypt originally invited Arab leaders to an “emergency” summit on Feb. 27.

 

Then it was delayed by a week.

 

Rania Khaled contributed reporting from Cairo and Ismaeel Naar from Riyadh.


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8) Struggle Over Americans’ Personal Data Plays Out Across the Government

Employees from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are gaining access to vast amounts of information held by federal agencies, even as lawsuits try to stop them.

By Andrew Duehren and Cecilia Kang, Reporting from Washington, Feb. 19, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/elon-musk-doge-personal-data.html
Elon Musk, wearing a dark coat, holds the brim of his black cap with his right hand.
Requests from Elon Musk’s team have alarmed career civil servants used to guarding data whose improper disclosure can in some cases violate federal law. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

Last week, Michelle King, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, sought to reassure Democrats on Capitol Hill about the presence of two of Elon Musk’s allies at her agency.

 

The Social Security Administration keeps medical information, bank account numbers and other sensitive personal data about the roughly 70 million Americans it provides with more than $1 trillion in benefits annually. In the Feb. 11 letter to Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, Ms. King said that the two representatives, from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, had not yet seen personal information — and said any disclosures would follow established procedures.

 

“I share your commitment to protecting sensitive personal and financial information from improper disclosure and misuse,” she wrote in the letter, which was viewed by The New York Times. “We follow all relevant laws and regulations when granting access to S.S.A. systems.”

 

Days later, Mr. Musk's team sought access to the agency’s data. Ms. King resisted the request, and by Monday night she and her chief of staff, Tiffany Flick, were out of their jobs, according to three people familiar with their departures. The Trump administration elevated Leland Dudek, a relatively low-level staff member who had previously collaborated with DOGE, to temporarily lead the agency.

 

The episode at the Social Security Administration, which did not respond to requests for comment, has played out repeatedly across the federal government. In its stated quest to root out fraudulent government spending, Mr. Musk’s team of software engineers has repeatedly sought unfettered access to the wide range of personal information the U.S. government collects about its residents. The requests have often alarmed career civil servants used to guarding data whose improper disclosure can in some cases violate federal law.

 

At the Internal Revenue Service, Mr. Musk’s team is seeking to give at least one of its members, a software engineer named Gavin Kliger, broad access to the data included in the roughly 270 million tax returns that American individuals, businesses and nonprofits file each year.

 

Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, said that allowing DOGE into the taxpayer systems was necessary to prevent improper payments. “We are talking about performing a basic anti-fraud review to ensure that people are not engaging in a large-scale theft of federal taxpayer benefits,” he said in an interview on Fox News on Monday.

 

I.R.S. officials have questioned how much information Mr. Kliger and other DOGE staff would need to accomplish that, according to three people familiar with the matter, given that unmitigated access could allow Mr. Kliger the ability to view details about Americans’ work, investments and families. The I.R.S. has been crafting a memorandum of understanding that would establish parameters around Mr. Kliger’s duties at the tax agency, where he is expected to be detailed from the Office of Personnel Management. An I.R.S. spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

 

“If you’re interested in whether the I.R.S. program and computer systems are efficient, you don’t need taxpayer information to make that determination,” said Nina E. Olson, the executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, a group that sued the I.R.S. over the issue of DOGE access on Tuesday. “You can use anonymized data to do that.”

 

Labor unions and state governments have filed a series of lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s ability to give political appointees the ability to view and potentially alter sensitive government databases. In some cases, including one focused on access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, federal judges have temporarily blocked Mr. Musk’s team from accessing sensitive data. Other federal judges have declined to do so in cases involving other agencies.

 

At stake in the struggle between Mr. Musk and the career civil servants is the security of data that is routinely targeted by hackers and scammers hoping to exploit Americans, former government officials and experts say. Quick changes to the often old, intricate technology systems that house the data could also inadvertently break them, leading to cascading technology problems across the government.

 

“They could inadvertently make the system less secure and it would be a scammer’s dream,” said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, a group that promotes the expansion of Social Security. “It would be a treasure trove because of all the information you’d have your hands on.”

 

Among the records the federal government keeps at the I.R.S. and elsewhere is corporate information, including about companies that Mr. Musk competes with. Earlier this month, Russell T. Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, instructed staff members at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to turn over all unclassified information to DOGE workers, according to two people familiar with the request.

 

It is unclear what the DOGE officials at the bureau have actually viewed. But the agency has a vast amount of data from e-payments firms like Zelle, Venmo, Apple Pay and Google Pay, all of which would compete directly with X Money Account, a payment system under development by Mr. Musk’s social media site, X.

 

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is meant to protect consumers from unfair and deceptive financial practices, has opened several investigations of e-payments systems. The data collected in its investigations includes correspondence between executives, secret business plans and market analysis, according to one of the people.

 

Last week, the agency canceled several tech contracts that maintain an audit log system to track who has gained access to data, the employees said.

 

While many civil servants have been alarmed by the DOGE quest to look into sensitive government systems, some have been enthusiastic about it. Mr. Dudek, now the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, made posts on LinkedIn supporting Mr. Musk’s team.

 

In one post from last week viewed by The Times, Mr. Dudek, who did not respond to requests for comment, wrote that the Social Security Administration was investigating him for working with Mr. Musk’s team. He has since deleted his LinkedIn account.

 

“I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done,” he wrote. “Everything I have ever done is in service to our country, our beneficiaries, and our agency.”

 

Mr. Trump has nominated Frank Bisignano, a payment processing executive, to lead the Social Security Administration, though he is awaiting Senate confirmation.

 

Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.


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9) Inside the Oscar-Nominated Film That No Studio Will Touch

“No Other Land,” about the destruction of a village in the occupied West Bank, is one of the year’s most acclaimed films. Still, U.S. studios are unwilling to distribute it.

By Kyle Buchanan, Feb. 19, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/movies/no-other-land-oscars.html

A man in a blue coat stands at a microphone. Another man, holding an award, stands next to him, wearing a blue blazer and brown turtleneck.

Yuval Abraham, left, and Basel Adra accept their award at the Berlin Film Festival last February. Credit...Markus Schreiber/Associated Press


No documentary this season has been more talked about or acclaimed than “No Other Land,” which chronicles the besieged community of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank as Israeli forces demolish residents’ homes and expel families from the land they have lived in for generations, claiming the area is needed for a military training ground.

 

Directed by the Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal alongside the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, “No Other Land” has received critical acclaim and collected many honors on the festival circuit. After winning the best documentary award at its Berlin International Film Festival premiere last February, the film also earned the same prize at the Gotham Awards and from major critics’ groups in New York and Los Angeles. Just weeks ago, it received an Oscar nomination.

 

Still, no American studio has been willing to pick up this hot-button film, even though distributors typically spend this time of year eagerly boasting about their Oscar-nomination tallies.

 

“I still think it’s possible, but we’ll have to see,” Abraham told me last week. “It’s clear that there are political reasons at play here that are affecting it. I’m hoping that at a certain point the demand for the film will become so clear and indisputable that there will be a distributor with the kind of courage to take it on and show it to the audience.”

 

In the meantime, the directors have embarked on a self-distribution plan that has put “No Other Land” into 23 U.S. theaters; on the back of strong box office, it will continue to roll out into additional cities over the coming weeks.

 

Adra and Abraham are not just part of the film’s directing team, but its two primary subjects. The 28-year-old Adra was raised in Masafer Yatta and has been documenting the forced expulsion since he was a teenager. Over the course of the film, he builds a strong but tense bond with Abraham, who lives in Jerusalem but travels frequently to Masafer Yatta to write about the situation there for an Israeli audience.

 

The two men spoke to me last week on a video call as they gathered at Adra’s house in Masafer Yatta. “I really want to say something very personal because even with the success of ‘No Other Land,’ things have kept getting very bad,” said Adra, who detailed how his village was once again attacked by armed settlers in the weeks before the Oscar nominations were announced.

 

The filmmakers hope that if anything can come of this awards campaign, it’s an increased global awareness of the fraught situation in Masafer Yatta. To that end, they still dream of a U.S. distributor that will help “No Other Land” reach an even bigger audience.

 

“We worked five years on this and Basel risked his life — I saw him almost get shot two times or three times,” said Abraham. “It’s just a minimal amount of courage to give it the stage that we believe it deserves, that the people of Masafer Yatta deserve. But we still hope that it’ll change.”

 

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

 

You made this film with the intention of inspiring change in Masafer Yatta. How do you fight the feeling of discouragement when it feels as though things are getting worse?

 

BASEL ADRA When I reach a moment where I’m disappointed and hopeless, the people around me and especially those people who kept losing their homes [keep me going]. For example, one of the people who lost their home, this is the sixth time since 2018 his house has been demolished and he rebuilt it, and this gives me some strength. Why would I give up while people want to stay in the land and fight?

 

And the other thing is I honestly believe this injustice can’t last forever. Whatever power is against us, at the end of the day if it’s oppressing us in an immoral way, it can’t last. I don’t know what would be the end of this or how it can be, but I have faith that this can’t continue forever, so for that, we have to keep fighting.

 

YUVAL ABRAHAM There is obviously a strong feeling of discouragement, but I look at Basel who’s living a much more difficult life than myself and as long as he’s continuing, I feel like I also have to continue. Even if the reality is only changing for the worse, it’s not as if we know what would happen if there is no documentation — I think it’s fair to assume that it would be even more horrible than it is. So, I feel like this task of documenting continues to be very pressing.

 

When the two of you first met, how long did it take to sense that this was someone you could trust and collaborate with?

 

ABRAHAM We realized quickly that we share similar values politically. Of course, there are immense differences. I am under civilian law and Basel is under military law, which means he’s blacklisted. He cannot enter Jerusalem and visit me there, I always have to come to him. This structural inequality affects us in the most personal way: It affected how we made the film, it affects how we can travel abroad, how we would go to the Oscars, even. It’s everywhere.

 

Laws are made that he cannot affect. He’s never voted in his life and it’s such a stark difference: Essentially, I vote for the government that at the end of the day is not only controlling Basel’s life, but destroying it.

 

What was the hardest thing about the years you spent making the film?

 

ABRAHAM The hardest thing was really terror and fear. You are filming situations where at any point someone can be shot, executed. A settler can come down from the outpost, for example, and we show this at the end of our film: The settler just shoots Basel’s cousin in the stomach from point-blank range while a soldier is looking and then he walks slowly — casually, almost — back to the outpost. And that person is still free. He’s maybe 100 meters away from us, and he can come back down to the village and do it again.

 

ADRA For me, there was a very terrifying moment when I was filming nearby and a group of soldiers came to destroy [the house of] our neighbor. I tried to document that in video and I was dragged and beaten up furiously by soldiers for half an hour or more, and they were trying to take me to their car. There was the feeling that this was for revenge, not arrest or interrogation, because there was nothing even according to all their racist laws to charge me with.

 

Also, I was once filming a huge number of masked settlers — between 60 to 80 — who were vandalizing one of the small villages nearby here. They were moving from one home to another, smashing windows and cars and even individuals. I managed to film a few minutes of this attack before they recognized that I’m filming them, and between 10 to 15 of these settlers started to run after me. That was also a really, really hard moment, but luckily I was able to be faster than them and escape.

 

ABRAHAM Basel runs really quickly.

 

The film was largely finished before the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023. How did that impact your work?

 

ABRAHAM It made me feel a sense of urgency for what we are doing, because we’ve been working for years before Oct. 7. A big part of our work was to tell the world and especially the United States that the situation on the ground is not sustainable. And I think today when you hear [President] Trump openly talking about ethnic cleansing, when you see how the Gaza Strip was annihilated with U.S. weapons, when I look at how much we lack a constructive and pragmatic political solution that can take us out of this place that we are in, I feel it’s more urgent than it has ever been before.

 

Talk to me about the path that led to self-distribution. What were you hearing from the studios that were unwilling to acquire the film?

 

ABRAHAM Our sales agents were touch with them all the time, and the general impression we got is that people say it’s a great film and it’s well-crafted, but the decision to acquire it doesn’t happen. We were always optimistic that each time the film’s profile becomes higher and it’s clearer that there is a big demand for the film, that it would happen. But after Berlin it didn’t happen. Then we began winning awards and getting distribution everywhere else in the world, and it didn’t happen. And then, the Oscar nomination, and it still didn’t happen.

 

Eventually, we said, “OK, we can’t just continue to wait indefinitely.” In the U.S., so many people are writing us, “How can we watch it?” So we decided to do the theatrical release independently, and it’s now going to show in about 100 theaters in the U.S. For me, the Oscar is mainly an opportunity to even raise the film’s profile more. And I do not lose hope that there will be some distributor who will take it on.

 

How did you learn of the Oscar nomination?

 

ADRA The four of us were here in the same room, and we came together to watch it live on YouTube. They said “No Other Land” and everybody jumped from the chair. It’s something we didn’t think about. I never imagined, “We’ll be nominated for the Oscar.”

 

ABRAHAM It was nice to have a moment of happiness because the reality on the ground is only becoming worse. Hamdan’s house can be basically destroyed at any moment. It has a demolition order on it, so it’s not connected to the electricity line or the water line, and now he’s trying to get a visa to go to the United States and to come to the Oscars as a nominee.

 

Just to apply for the visa, he has to travel to another country, in Jordan, because the U.S. has no way for Palestinians who are living under occupation in the West Bank to apply. It’s like two weeks left and we don’t know will he even be able to travel. And if he travels to this amazing event, it is such a huge opportunity on the one hand, but then on the other hand, returning to the reality here on the ground is so different. There is such a dissonance.

 

You’ve continued filming since the release of “No Other Land.” Do you feel there may be another documentary in you about this?

 

ADRA I don’t know, to be honest, because this took so long and wasn’t easy to work on. But we are not just filming for moviemaking but also to document the actions, the attacks, the violations around us. I use some of this for social media, for human rights organizations, sometimes for the occupation courts. My father faced false claims by settlers and I had videos of that specific incident where they claimed that he throws stones, but my footage showed the opposite and I had to show it to the judge.

 

ABRAHAM We’re continuing to do our work together, and we’re still working as journalists as well. But for now, we’re focused on trying to make the most of this moment with this film.

 

Basel, you’ve married since you worked on the film, right?

 

ADRA Yes. Since one year now.

 

In the movie, you describe how your parents taught you about activism and the importance of documenting the situation in your homeland. As you start a family, do you think that is something you will impart to your own children?

 

ADRA I hope I will not need to do that and the situation will change and we’ll have a different life. I have a daughter now also, she’s just one month old, and I really hope that she and the generation that comes don’t need to do this and they will have better a better future. But if it continues to be the same way, I don’t know. I don’t have the answer.


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