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.
- Email GA Cong. Nikema Williams PressGA05@mail.house.gov
- Email US Sen. Rafael Warnock press@warnock.senate.gov
- Email US Sen. Jon Ossoff press@ossoff.senate.gov
- Email Atlanta City Councilman Jason Dozier jdozier@atlantaga.gov
- Email GA State Rep Park Cannon park.cannon@house.ga.gov
- Email GA State Sen. Sonya Halpern sonya.halpern@senate.ga.gov
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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)
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
1) Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World
By Lydia Polgreen, Opinion Columnist, Jan. 31, 2025
Illustration by Kyutae Lee
We are living in an age of mass migration.
Millions of people from the poor world are trying to cross seas, forests, valleys and rivers, in search of safety, work and some kind of better future. About 281 million people now live outside the country in which they were born, a new peak of 3.6 percent of the global population according to the International Organization for Migration, and the number of people forced to leave their country because of conflict and disaster is at about 50 million — an all-time high. In the past decade alone, the number of refugees has tripled and the number of asylum seekers has more than quadrupled. Taken together, it is an extraordinary tide of human movement.
The surge of people trying to reach Europe, the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia has set off a broad panic, reshaping the political landscape. All across the rich world, citizens have concluded — with no small prompting by right-wing populists — that there is too much immigration. Migration has become the critical fault line of politics. Donald Trump owes his triumphant return to the White House in no small part to persuading Americans, whose country was built on migration, that migrants are now the prime source of its ills.
But these vituperative responses reveal a paradox at the heart of our era: The countries that malign migrants are, whether they recognize it or not, in quite serious need of new people. Country after country in the wealthy world is facing a top-heavy future, with millions of retirees and far too few workers to keep their economies and societies afloat. In the not-so-distant future, many countries will have too few people to sustain their current standard of living.
The right’s response to this problem is fantastical: expel the migrants and reproduce the natives. Any short-term economic pain, they contend, must be borne for the sake of safeguarding national identity in the face of the oncoming horde — a version of the racist “great replacement” theory that was once beyond the pale but has become commonplace. But we can see how this approach is playing out, in a laboratory favored by Trump and his ilk.
In Hungary, object of much right-wing admiration, the government of Viktor Orban’s twin obsessions are excluding migrants and raising the country’s anemic birthrate. But reality has proved to be stubborn. Hungary has made almost no progress on the latter, and on the former, the government has been courting guest workers in the face of a chronic labor crisis. That’s despite Orban having declared, in the teeth of the Syrian migrant crisis in 2016, that “Hungary does not need a single migrant for the economy to work or the population to sustain itself or for the country to have a future.”
Hungarians, especially young, skilled and ambitious ones, disagree — and are voting with their feet by themselves becoming migrants. Faced with a weak economy, 57 percent of young Hungarians said in a recent survey that they planned to seek work abroad in the next decade; just 6 percent said they definitely planned to stay in Hungary. One-third of those who leave the country have a college degree, another survey found, and nearly 80 percent are below 40 years old. The government has spent millions to try to lure young Hungarians back home, with little to show so far. Demographers say that the population could drop to 8.5 million by 2050, a loss of about a million people.
Orban’s Hungary should be a cautionary tale for other nations, not a model. But its trajectory tells us a lot. Change is always hard, and the more rapid and unexpected the change, the more difficult it is to accept. We are lousy at predicting how many humans there should be and where they should live; the timing and geography of demographic shifts is often off kilter to human needs. Migration messily brings both difficulties to the fore, offering both a challenge and an opportunity. It also eludes easy fixes and lazy characterizations.
Yet despite migration’s centrality to our politics and our world, nobody really understands it.
Political debate about migration today appears to be dominated by a set of assumptions: that migration will be from the global south to the global north; that the richer countries will always control the terms on which that happens; and that rich countries will always be able to pick and choose among the most talented people and turn away the rest.
But what if it doesn’t work out that way? There are plenty of reasons to believe that over time these assumptions will founder in the face of a vast reordering of the map of opportunity across the globe, set in motion by the political ferment and economic torpor besetting wealthy democracies.
Already we see the young people of many European countries leaving their homelands in search of opportunity — many to other wealthy countries in the West but also to the rapidly growing economies in the Gulf States and Asia. As European economies struggle to grow and more people leave the work force, these trends are likely to accelerate. Trump, now the leader of the world’s most sought-after migrant destination, has proposed policies that could lead the United States down a similar path.
What leaders and policymakers in the rich world don’t seem to grasp is that the roster of countries that will need more people is growing fast, as birthrates plummet much faster than anyone expected in countries that have long been a source of migrants. Our politics revolve around the idea that scarce resources mean keeping people out. We are utterly unprepared for a world in which perhaps the scarcest resource will be people.
“In this hyperpolarized environment and debate, many people have missed the big picture,” said Marco Tabellini, an economist who studies migration and political change at Harvard University. “Countries in the global north will have to really compete for migrants.”
If you think that sounds preposterous, it is worth considering that this competition is already happening and has been for some time. After the toppling of the cruel Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, governments across Europe wasted no time announcing that they would pause asylum applications from Syrians, clearly eager to see the back of the Syrians who fled the country’s gruesome civil war. But in Germany, health officials fretted that amid a broad shortage of medical workers, losing thousands of Syrian doctors would be a heavy blow to the country’s already overmatched health system.
But it is not just doctors whom countries in the rich world lack. Canada, amid an excruciating housing shortage, needs skilled construction workers. Italy needs welders and pastry cooks. Sweden needs plumbers and forestry workers. As for the United States, it is hard to imagine how profoundly people’s lives will change as Trump attempts to carry out his promised mass deportation program. What Americans eat, how they care for their children and elders, how many homes get built — all will be transformed with powerful effects not just for the economy but also for how people organize their lives, on where they set their sights and ambitions.
The right has no real answer to this problem and continues to argue for harsher restrictions. Centrists the world over have broadly capitulated to the right’s framework, turning away from the postwar commitments to asylum and promoting technocratic solutions like skilled migration, arguing that the rich world will be able to sluice through the rivers of humanity, discarding the pebbles and selecting the nubs of gold.
But they do so at their peril. Restrictive policies, once imposed, tend to last a very long time and have far-reaching, unforeseen consequences. People turned away from one country or offered a place on unattractive terms in an unwelcoming environment will find a way to build lives elsewhere, bringing their ideas, talents and drive to other places. That’s because of a powerful and often ignored force: the agency of migrants.
The pull of remaining in the place of your birth is one of the most powerful and enduring human impulses. It is easy to forget that even in this age of mass movement of people, where vast distances can be crossed more quickly than ever before, more than 96 percent of the world’s people live in the countries in which they were born. Most who flee disaster don’t go very far, traveling to relative safety within their own country or one next door, hoping to return home as soon as the catastrophe has passed.
Migration to another country, especially one a fair distance away, isn’t undertaken by people who are truly destitute or who lack ambition. It requires resources, documents, connections. Having the will to leave, to seek out something new and leave everything and everyone you know behind, is a profound act of self-creation.
The panic about migration, it strikes me, is really a panic about the future — and about progress. Migrants are individuals making a profound, risky bet that by undertaking the rare and difficult decision to leave home, they can build something new. Behind opposition to migration is often the reverse: a belief that the only way to protect the future is to make it more like the mythic past, to build something old. But this approach, as we will see, has never been a formula for human flourishing.
At the end of World War II, the victorious powers in Europe decided that ensuring peace on the continent required moving large numbers of people into more broadly homogeneous states. One of the biggest and most pressing orders of business was to uproot millions of ethnic Germans who had long lived in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and beyond and force them to move within Germany’s new border.
This was a pitiless, brutal process. Writing in this newspaper in 1946, the journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick described her reaction to witnessing the forced resettlement of Germans: “No one seeing its horrors firsthand can doubt that it is a crime against humanity for which history will exact a terrible retribution.” This quote appears early in Tony Judt’s masterwork, “Postwar,” and Judt delivers a typically pitiless assessment of it: “History has exacted no such retribution.”
These events are largely forgotten today. But this period of score-settling remade the demographic map. Many Ukrainians wanted to be rid of Poles, and many Poles wanted to be rid of Ukrainians. Hungarians were expelled from Czech territory. Astonishingly, 4,000 Jews in Central and Eastern Europe were among those forced from their homes as part of this postwar upheaval.
At the time, all the uprooting seemed to make a certain kind of sense. At the end of the war, even though so many had died, there was a concern that Europe had too many of the wrong people living in the wrong places and that this was part of the problem that led to war. When closing some of the last of the lingering camps for those displaced by the war, one top official called those forced to flee “an excess of people in Europe whose very presence constitutes a threat to political and economic stability.”
And yet almost immediately, the vision of largely homogeneous states ran up against the reality that the relatively free movement of people would be required to rebuild the shattered countries in the aftermath of the war. Amid the sudden prosperity of the postwar economic boom, a great voluntary uprooting began, sending Europeans across borders in search of work. Countries also looked farther afield — Germany to Turkey, France and Britain to their former colonies in Africa and Asia and so on. Indeed, over time the benefits of diversity and ease of movement of people and goods led to the creation of the European Union.
“It is often said by opponents of migration that ‘Europe is full,’ as if a continent or a country is a fragile vessel at risk of capsizing under the weight of migrants,” the British historian Peter Gatrell wrote in his magisterial history of this migration, “The Unsettling of Europe.” “The metaphor is a powerful one. But it can be turned on its head. Migrants have made all kinds of contributions to Europe. Indeed, they helped to build the boat.”
For the United States, founded by European settlers on the premise that outsiders were essential to the nation’s prosperity, the problem for much of its early history was a scarcity of people. Its settlers acquired vast stretches of land through genocide and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous inhabitants, then populated and worked that land with migrants, indentured servants and enslaved people. For a century, almost any free person who could manage to reach the United States could stay there.
But gradually attitudes turned against migration. Some of the earliest federal policies of restriction targeted Chinese immigrants, beginning in the 1880s, and the 1924 Immigration Act was designed to discourage unskilled workers from countries in Southern and Eastern Europe and bar almost all immigrants from Asia. These laws were driven by racist ideas in vogue at the time, notions that suggested only white, Protestant Europeans and their descendants represented true American identity and that other groups, such as Catholics and Jews, could not be counted on to integrate and contribute to American society.
In recent years, scholars have used data from that era of restriction to try to understand how these laws affected American prosperity. One Harvard study found that Chinese exclusion depressed economic growth in the western United States, where a vast majority of Chinese immigrants lived, and had negative consequences for most workers. The effects lasted until just before the United States’ entry into World War II.
Another piece of research demonstrated how strict quotas on immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe hampered American innovation — characterized by a significant drop in the number of patents issued to American scientists in certain fields. What is most striking about this study is that the quotas on Southern and Eastern Europeans did not apply to students and professors. But the quotas had a strong effect on dissuading academic scientists from these regions anyway, one of the paper’s authors, Petra Moser, a professor at New York University, told me.
“If I face a country that doesn’t want other people of my nationality, I may just not want to come,” she said. Her paper describes the loss to American science during this period as “equivalent to eliminating the entire physics department of a major university each year between 1925 and 1955.”
These findings are especially poignant when you think about who was excluded. The United States maintained its strict quota system despite the desperate plight of European Jews trying to flee the Nazis. Astonishingly few German Jews managed to get visas to emigrate under the quota system. Eastern European Jews, citizens of countries explicitly discouraged under the law, had almost no chance at all. Millions of them would perish in the Holocaust.
These horrors led directly to the creation of international laws governing the rights of refugees and of the responsibility to provide asylum to those in need of safety. It is also part of the reason so many Syrian refugees are in Germany today. In 2015, when Europe faced record-high numbers of asylum seekers, most of them from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, made her famous declaration: “We can manage.”
In retrospect, it is hard not to see that moment as a hinge of history. Almost immediately, public opinion turned against Merkel, and right-wing, anti-immigrant politics surged across Europe. Less than a year later, Britain voted to leave the European Union, with many leave voters citing immigration as their top concern. And not long after that, Trump rode fears about migrants massing at the southern border to the presidency, promising to build a wall and bar Muslims from entering the country. Across the developed world, far-right parties gained support and started taking power.
This anti-migration rightward march has continued. A decade after Merkel’s stirring pro-refugee declaration, the far-right Alternative for Germany party is consistently polling in second place, with a fifth of the vote, going into elections in February. The global consensus that we have an obligation to protect the most vulnerable has all but collapsed, like so many other pillars undergirding the world order since World War II.
I have come to wonder if the political response to anti-migrant sentiment — the steady erosion of principles of free movement and refuge that were the bedrock of the postwar era — might in time look like a terrible failure of imagination on a civilization-altering scale. Governments shut themselves off from migrants at their peril.
There’s also no guarantee it will actually work. Harsh attempts to control the size and movement of a population often have unanticipated consequences. Just look, for an inexact but apt analogy, to China’s one-child policy. Nearly five decades ago the edict that most couples should have only one child might have seemed a necessary step for dragging China out of poverty, even if it required brutal enforcement in the face of a strong preference for larger families.
But it seems that even Maoist revolutionaries struggled to imagine how quickly the world can change. Perhaps China’s leaders thought this policy would be required indefinitely and assured themselves that if the spigot needed to be reopened, the assumedly natural impulse to have more children would hardly require encouragement. Having bent human will before, why would they not believe they could do it again?
It has not worked out that way, and underpopulation is now a major challenge for China’s prospects. In the mid-2010s, China had roughly seven workers for every retiree. In 2050 there may be only two. It will almost certainly be among the nations competing with the West for migrants in the decades ahead.
Throughout history, generally speaking, migration tends to produce two seemingly contradictory results: sharp but short-term backlash among those who already live in the migrants’ destination, followed in the medium to long term by greater abundance and prosperity. Whatever nightmare pressed people to leave home — war, famine, natural disaster — their arrival unleashes torrents of human dynamism. The movement of people, even or especially under duress, is inextricably tied with human progress.
Partly, that’s economic. The relationship between human talent and economic growth is extremely clear, and history is replete with examples of liberal migration policies leading to broad prosperity. As we’ve seen, periods of strict immigration restriction have often had surprising and, in retrospect, unwanted results: less innovation and more stagnation.
But I would argue that economic growth is actually downstream from something more important yet intangible: the human desire for flourishing and to set one’s own path in life. People have moved for many reasons, but always because they sought something they wanted that they could not get at home. It’s an act of faith, fundamentally, kindled by the fire of human aspiration. It can never fully be snuffed out.
In our vastly more interconnected world, hard borders and iron-fisted control is a fantasy. Migration has always involved great sacrifice, especially for those who leave home. But it also requires the people in the places migrants alight to see beyond the immediate shock of living alongside new people from different places and conceive the long-term possibilities such arrivals always bring.
Right now, with Trump seizing the levers of power in Washington and promising to send migrants to Guantánamo Bay, that might seem extremely unlikely. But the long history of migration, and its unknowable future, suggests the wisdom in trying. In any case, the West may not like migrants — but like aging German patients in search of the healing hand of a doctor, it is sure to miss them when they are gone.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
2) How the World Is Reeling From Trump’s Aid Freeze
President Trump’s order to halt most foreign aid has intensified humanitarian crises and raised questions about the United States’ reliability as a global leader.
By Sui-Lee Wee, Declan Walsh and Farnaz Fassihi, Jan. 31, 2025
Sui-Lee Wee reported from Bangkok, Declan Walsh from Nairobi and Farnaz Fassihi from New York.
In famine-stricken Sudan, soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in a war zone have shut down.
In Thailand, war refugees with life-threatening diseases have been turned away by hospitals and carted off on makeshift stretchers.
In Ukraine, residents on the frontline of the war with Russia may be going without firewood in the middle of winter.
Some of the world’s most vulnerable populations are already feeling President Trump’s sudden cutoff of billions of dollars in American aid that helps fend off starvation, treats diseases and provides shelter for the displaced.
In a matter of days, Mr. Trump’s order to freeze nearly all U.S. foreign aid has intensified humanitarian crises and raised profound questions about America’s reliability and global standing.
“Everyone is freaking out,” Atif Mukhtar of the Emergency Response Rooms, a local volunteer group in the besieged Sudanese capital, Khartoum, said of the aid freeze.
Soon after announcing the cutoff, the Trump administration abruptly switched gears. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that “life-saving humanitarian assistance” could continue, offering a respite for what he called “core” efforts to provide food, medicine, shelter and other emergency needs.
But he stressed that the reprieve was “temporary in nature,” with limited exceptions. Beyond that, hundreds of senior officials and workers who help distribute American aid had already been fired or put on leave, and many aid efforts remain paralyzed around the world.
Most of the soup kitchens in Khartoum, the battle-torn capital of Sudan, have shut down. Until last week, the United States was the largest source of money for the volunteer-run kitchens that fed 816,000 people there.
“For most people, it’s the only meal they get,” said Hajooj Kuka, a spokesman for the Emergency Response Rooms, describing Khartoum as a city “on the edge of starvation.”
After the American money was frozen last week, some of the aid groups that channel those funds to the food kitchens said they were unsure if they were allowed to continue. Others cut off the money completely. Now, 434 of the 634 volunteer kitchens in the capital have shut down, Mr. Kuka said.
“And more are going out of service every day,” he added.
Many of the aid workers, doctors and people in need who rely on American aid are now reckoning with their relationship with the United States and the message the Trump administration is sending: America is focusing on itself.
“It feels like one easy decision by the U.S. president is quietly killing so many lives,” said Saw Nah Pha, a tuberculosis patient who said he was told to leave a U.S.-funded hospital in the Mae La refugee camp, the largest refugee camp on the Thai-Myanmar border.
Mr. Nah Pha, who fled Myanmar in 2007 to escape the fighting there, said the staff gave him a week’s supply of medicine and told him that was all they could provide. “Once my medicine runs out, I have nowhere else to get it,” he added.
The public health implications of the aid freeze are broad, health workers say. In Cambodia, which had been on the cusp of eradicating malaria with the help of the United States, officials now worry that a halt in funding will set them back. In Nepal, a $72 million program to reduce malnutrition has been suspended. In South Africa and Haiti, officials and aid workers worry that hundreds of thousands of people could die if the Trump administration withdraws support for a signature American program to fight H.I.V. and AIDS.
Some programs that don’t fit the category of lifesaving aid remain frozen, while others are explicitly barred because they fall outside of the administration’s ideological bounds, including any help with abortions, gender or diversity issues.
The United Nations Population Fund, the U.N.’s sexual and reproductive health agency, said that because of the funding freeze, maternal and mental health services to millions of women in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gaza, Ukraine, and other places had been disrupted or eliminated. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban has banned women from working, 1,700 Afghan women who worked for the agency would no longer be employed.
At stake is not just the good will that the United States has built internationally, but also its work to promote America’s security interests. In Ivory Coast, an American-sponsored program collecting sensitive intelligence on Al Qaeda-related incidents has been interrupted.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, some of the funding to United Nations agencies supporting more than 4.5 million people displaced by a rapidly growing conflict in the country’s east has been frozen, according to a U.S. humanitarian official on the continent.
Even with Mr. Rubio’s announcements that lifesaving efforts could resume, much of the American aid system in Africa remained paralyzed by the confusion and disruptions, including in conflict-hit areas where every day counts.
“When they issue these broad orders, they don’t seem to understand what exactly they are turning off,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior U.S.A.I.D. official under the Biden administration who is now the president of Refugees International. “They’re pulling levers without knowing what’s on the other end.”
Some of the roughly $70 billion in annual foreign aid approved by Congress has been directed at supporting civil society in countries with authoritarian regimes, especially in places where the United States sees democratic gains as furthering American security or diplomatic interests.
In Iran, where the work of documenting detentions, executions and women’s rights abuses is done by outside entities funded by the United States, activists say the U.S. pullback now means that there will be few entities holding the Iranian government accountable.
A Persian-language media outlet funded by the U.S. government said their employees were working on a voluntary basis to keep the website going for now, but they had fired all their freelancers. Without money, they said they could not keep going.
“While Trump campaigned on a promise of maximum pressure on the Iranian government, his decision to cut funding for dozens of U.S.-supported pro-democracy and human rights initiatives does the opposite — it applies maximum pressure on the regime’s opponents,” said Omid Memarian, an expert on Iran’s human rights issues at DAWN, a Washington-based group focused on American foreign policy.
In Cambodia, Pa Tongchen, 25, was relying on American funding for journalism in a country where nearly all independent media has been crushed. He was scheduled to start work on Feb. 3 as a staff reporter at a media outlet run by a nonprofit that was set up with U.S. support.
Mr. Pa said he had hoped to shine a light on corruption through his work. “I want to help people who are vulnerable in our society,” he said. “They are ignored if no journalists report about them.”
In Egypt, where the United States funds scholarships for more than 1,000 undergraduate students at private and public universities, students were left in limbo.
“I was in real shock, and I didn’t know what to do, especially since they told us to leave the dorm immediately,” said Ahmed Mahmoud, 18, a student who was about to start classes next semester at the American University but instead had to throw all his belongings into five boxes.
The fallout from the aid freeze is likely to reverberate geopolitically, giving American rivals, like China, a window of opportunity to present itself as a reliable partner.
“That will set China apart from the U.S. to win the hearts and minds of many of the global south countries,” said Jingdong Yuan, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s China and Asia Security program.
In Africa, America’s well-run aid machinery was one of the factors that differentiated the United States from China and Russia. While Moscow deploys mercenaries and Beijing mines for rare minerals, Washington has reached across the continent with aid programs worth billions of dollars that not only save lives, but also provide a powerful form of diplomatic soft power.
Now much of that is in doubt. In Africa’s war zones, some are already regretful of their dependence on American aid.
“It was our fault to rely so heavily on one donor,” said Mr. Atif, of the Emergency Response Rooms in Sudan. “But this has really shocked us. You can’t take food off people who are starving. That’s just insane.”
On the border of Thailand and Myanmar, the implications of Mr. Trump’s decision were stark. There, a four-year civil war and decades of fighting between Myanmar’s military junta and ethnic armies have pushed thousands of refugees into Thailand.
Saw Tha Ker, the camp leader for the Mae La camp, said he was told on Friday by the International Rescue Committee, a group that receives U.S. funding, that it would stop supporting medical care, water and waste management for all of the seven refugee hospitals managed by his camp.
“The first thought that came to my mind was that whoever made this decision has no compassion at all,” said Mr. Tha Ker.
Mr. Tha Ker said he and his staff had to tell 60 patients in one hospital that they had to go home. Videos posted on social media showed men carrying patients on makeshift stretchers through unpaved streets.
“We explained to them that the hospital itself is like a person struggling to breathe through someone else’s nose,” he added. “Now that the support has stopped, it feels like we are just waiting for the end.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
3) Hamas Names 3 Hostages It Says Will Be Freed This Weekend
Keith Siegel, an American-Israeli, will be released along with Yarden Bibas and Ofer Kalderon in exchange for about 90 Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons, the group said.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 31, 2025
Aviva Siegel, a former hostage, with a photograph of her husband, Keith Siegel, who is set to be released by Hamas this weekend. Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Hamas on Friday announced the names of three hostages — including an American citizen — whom it said it would release this weekend as part of its cease-fire with Israel to end the war in Gaza, an agreement that has now held for nearly two weeks.
Abu Obeida, the spokesman for the group’s armed wing, named the three as Yarden Bibas, 35, Ofer Kalderon, 54, and Keith Siegel, 65, an American-Israeli. Israel is slated to release about 90 Palestinian prisoners this weekend in exchange for the three men, according to a Hamas-linked prisoners’ information center.
The three were abducted during the Oct. 7, 2023, surprise attack on Israel when Hamas and its allies killed roughly 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 hostage, according to the Israeli authorities, setting off the war in Gaza. Israel’s subsequent military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has lasted for over a year and killed more than 45,000 people, according to local health officials.
In a multiphase cease-fire deal that Israel and Hamas agreed to this month, Hamas pledged to free at least 33 of the 97 remaining hostages over the first six weeks in exchange for over 1,500 Palestinians jailed by Israel.
About 10 Israeli captives have been freed so far, in addition to five Thai workers who were taken hostage in the October 2023 attack while working in Israeli villages near the Gaza border. Israel has released more than 300 Palestinian prisoners, including many who were serving life sentences for involvement in deadly attacks against Israelis.
For many Israelis, the abduction of Mr. Bibas’s family has become emblematic of the cruelty of the Hamas-led attack. Militants also abducted his wife, Shiri Bibas, and their two children, Ariel, who was 4, and Kfir, who was 9 months old.
Hamas later said that Ms. Bibas and the two children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Israeli officials have not publicly confirmed that assertion, but have said that they are gravely concerned for the fate of the three captives.
Mr. Siegel was taken hostage from his home in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz close to the Gaza border. His wife, Aviva Siegel, was held captive with him until late November 2023, when she was one of about 105 hostages released as part of a weeklong cease-fire deal.
Shir Siegel, his daughter, shared a video on Instagram showing her embracing her mother after receiving the news on Friday. “Dad’s coming back, Dad’s on the list,” Aviva Siegel says, choking up.
Mr. Kalderon, a French-Israeli dual citizen, was taken captive when Palestinian militants raided his hometown, Nir Oz. His two children, Erez and Sahar, were freed in the November 2023 truce.
Shortly after her release, Sahar described being afraid of her Hamas captors — and also of being killed in Israel’s relentless aerial bombardment of Gaza. She was 16 at the time.
“What about my father, who has been left behind?” she told The New York Times. “I ask of everyone who sees this: Please, stop this war; get all the hostages out.”
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
4) Arab nations reject Trump’s suggestion to ‘clean out’ Gaza.
By Matt Surman and Aaron Boxerman, Feb. 1, 2025
A broad group of Arab nations on Saturday rejected an idea floated by President Trump for Gazans to be moved to Egypt and Jordan, saying in a joint statement that such a plan risked further expanding the conflict in the Middle East.
The statement, signed by Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, did not refer to Mr. Trump’s comments explicitly but warned that any plan that encouraged the “transfer or uprooting of Palestinians from their land” would threaten stability in the region and “undermine the chances of peace and coexistence among its people.”
In recent days, Mr. Trump has suggested on multiple occasions that more Gazans should be evacuated from the enclave and taken in by Jordan and Egypt.
The far right in Israel has made similar calls for Palestinians to leave the territory.
“You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Mr. Trump said of Gaza last weekend. “I don’t know. Something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now.”
He said Palestinians could be in Jordan and Egypt “temporarily, or could be long-term.” It was unclear from Mr. Trump’s comments whether he was suggesting that the entire population of Gaza — more than two million people — should leave.
For Palestinians, even the suggestion of such a mass exile evokes painful historical memories: Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced to neighboring countries during the war surrounding Israel’s 1948 establishment. After they left, Israel did not allow them to return and many are still formally considered refugees.
Egypt and Jordan immediately spurned Mr. Trump’s call. Both countries have longstanding peace treaties with Israel and support a Palestinian state but also fear that a large influx of Palestinians who would remain indefinitely could stir domestic upheaval.
The statement on Saturday was a notable show of unity from across the Arab world. The United Arab Emirates, Qatar, the Palestinian Authority and the secretary general of the Arab League also signed onto the statement, which came after a meeting of foreign ministers in Cairo.
The statement said that the countries looked forward to working with the Trump administration “to achieve a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East, in accordance with the two-state solution.”
During his previous administration, Mr. Trump submitted a plan that Palestinians said fell far short of giving them a truly independent state. It is still unclear what he may seek to advance during his current term and what his long-term visions for Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank are.
The Trump administration has appeared eager to engage with the Gulf powerhouses of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates after the president enjoyed mostly friendly relations with both in his first term.
But Mr. Trump’s stance on Gaza could complicate those efforts.
His administration seeks to broker a wider Middle East peace agreement that would include normalizing diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a deal that Mr. Trump sought during his first term.
But the war in Gaza, in response to the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023, has prompted major shifts in the region.
Widespread anger over the war, which has killed tens of thousands of people and wreaked vast destruction and displacement of the population, has renewed attention on the issue of Palestinian statehood.
Saudi Arabia’s leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has said his country will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without a Palestinian state.
Millions of Palestinian refugees are already living in camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon while others are living in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Egypt has also allowed more than 100,000 Gazans to cross into its territory since the war began in October 2023.
On Friday, a small group of Egyptians demonstrated on their side of the Rafah border crossing with Gaza as part of a protest against Palestinian displacement from Gaza. Rallies in autocratic Egypt are almost always staged or sponsored by the authorities.
Egypt and Jordan are both significant U.S. partners in the Middle East, and the U.S. government has typically seen their stability as key to the wider region. They both receive considerable U.S. funding. Egypt is the second-largest recipient of foreign aid after Israel.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
5) Our Health in the Hands of a Man Who’d Make Us Sick
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, Feb. 1, 2025

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used to impress me. In the early 2000s, he did excellent work as an environmental lawyer taking on industrial hog farms that were fouling creeks and rivers, and we talked about making a visit together to North Carolina to document the pollution.
But then Kennedy began to urge me to write about childhood vaccines, citing discredited arguments that they caused autism. I had read the vaccine research and considered his views uninformed, conspiratorial and dangerous, and his dogmatism soured me on his judgment in general. I decided it would be inappropriate to quote someone with such a mind-set.
And if a person isn’t qualified to be quoted in a column, he probably isn’t the best choice to run America’s health programs.
That’s particularly true because one of the biggest potential threats to this country — albeit one difficult to gauge — is an avian flu pandemic, for bird flu is mutating and spreading to cows and other mammals. If there is a pandemic, then vaccines will be essential. Perhaps the single best thing that President Trump did in his first term was to start Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership that accelerated the development of Covid-19 vaccines and saved many lives.
What would happen if there were a need for another Operation Warp Speed, but this time the point man on health was suspicious of vaccines — including those that arrested the last pandemic?
The coronavirus vaccine is “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” Kennedy falsely claimed, and in May 2021 he petitioned the government to revoke authorization for it — even though by then the vaccine already had saved 140,000 lives, one study found.
Kennedy has also claimed that the polio vaccine — one of the great triumphs of the 20th century — may have caused cancers “that killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” The Times has reported that a lawyer close to Kennedy, Aaron Siri, who is helping him pick health officials for the Trump administration, has petitioned the government to revoke approval for the polio vaccine.
Siri has also petitioned the government to revoke approval for the hepatitis B vaccine and a pause in the distribution of about a dozen other vaccines.
Kennedy’s take? “I love Aaron Siri,” Kennedy has said.
Kennedy now insists to senators that he is not “anti-vaccine” and would not discourage their use. Really? In 2021 he said on a podcast that he actively discouraged parents from vaccinating children and urged others to do the same.
“Our job is to resist and to talk about it to everybody,” he said. “If you’re walking down the street — and I do this now myself, which is, you know, I don’t want to do — I’m not a busybody. I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’”
“Don’t keep your mouth shut anymore,” he advised. “Confront everybody on it.”
Kennedy has said that doctors “butchered all these children” by vaccinating them. The nonprofit that he founded, Children’s Health Defense, sells baby onesies with messages such as “No Vax No Problem.”
Even now that he is under great pressure, as he bobs and weaves in hopes of getting confirmed, Kennedy won’t renounce the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism.
The idea of Kennedy’s running health programs is particularly worrisome because the administration may not have much medical guidance. The White House science adviser isn’t actually a scientist. Trump is pulling out of the World Health Organization, whose global flu surveillance network helps develop flu vaccines, and the administration even directed employees from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention not to email contacts at the World Health Organization.
Kennedy has good ideas about promoting healthy school lunches and discouraging ultraprocessed foods. He’s right to ask questions about why there are increases in obesity, diabetes and autism (many scientists suspect that one factor may be environmental toxins such as endocrine disruptors). But Kennedy’s passion for many years has been hostility to vaccines, bundled in certitude and nastiness.
This is not simply a quest for vaccine safety, as Kennedy tries to suggest. It is a misguided and dangerous campaign to undermine confidence in vaccines. A woman dies every two hours in the United States from cervical cancer, which is almost entirely preventable with HPV vaccinations — yet Kennedy has backed a lawsuit against the maker of the vaccine.
The problems go beyond vaccines, of course. Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist who says he doesn’t “take sides” in the “debates” about who was behind 9/11, who argues that AIDS may not be caused by H.I.V., who suggested darkly that Covid-19 was engineered to spare Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews, who claimed that Lyme disease is likely a military bioweapon. Some of this is bigotry; all of it is nonsense.
On top of his ideological excesses, Kennedy doesn’t understand our health care system. In his hearings, he muddled Medicare and Medicaid. He represents the apotheosis of the politicization of science; he is our own Lysenko.
I hope senators will protect American kids from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
6) Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Access to Treasury’s Payments System
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Mr. Musk’s representatives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
By Andrew Duehren, Maggie Haberman, Theodore Schleifer and Alan Rappeport, Feb. 1, 2025
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted a handful of members affiliated with the Department of Government Efficiency access to the federal payment system late on Friday. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to the federal payment system late on Friday, according to five people familiar with the change, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
The new authority follows a standoff this week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Mr. Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.
The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks.
Mr. Musk, who has been given wide latitude by President Trump to find ways to slash government spending, has recently fixated on Treasury’s payment processes, criticizing the department in a social media post on Saturday for not rejecting more payments as fraudulent or improper.
The Musk allies who have been granted access to the payment system were made Treasury employees, passed government background checks and obtained the necessary security clearances, according to two people familiar with the situation, who requested anonymity to discuss internal arrangements. While their access was approved, the Musk representatives have yet to gain operational capabilities and no government payments have been blocked, the people said.
Mr. Musk’s initiative is intended to be part of a broader review of the payments system to allow improper payments to be scrutinized and is not an effort to arbitrarily block individual payments, the people familiar with the matter said. Career Treasury Department attorneys signed off on granting the access, they added, and any changes to the system would go through a review process and testing.
The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is not a government department, but a team within the administration. It was put together at Mr. Trump’s direction by Mr. Musk to fan out across federal agencies seeking ways to cut spending, reduce the size of the federal work force and bring more efficiency to the bureaucracy. Most of those working on the initiative were recruited by Mr. Musk and his aides.
Similar DOGE teams have begun demanding access to data and systems at other federal agencies, but none of those agencies control the flow of money in the way the Treasury Department does.
One of the people affiliated with DOGE who now has access to the payment system is Tom Krause, the chief executive of a Silicon Valley company, Cloud Software Group, according to one of the people familiar with the situation.
Last weekend, Mr. Krause had pushed Mr. Lebryk for entry into the system. Mr. Lebryk refused and then was subsequently put on administrative leave, according to people familiar with the matter.
A Treasury Department spokesman, a spokeswoman for DOGE and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
In a process typically run by civil servants, the Treasury Department carries out payments submitted by agencies across the government, disbursing more than $5 trillion in fiscal year 2023. Access to the system has historically been closely held because it includes sensitive personal information about the millions of Americans who receive Social Security checks, tax refunds and other payments from the federal government.
Former officials said the onus was on individual agencies to ensure their payments are proper, not the relatively small staff at the Treasury Department, which is responsible for making more than one billion payments per year.
Mr. Lebryk, the career Treasury official who retired on Friday, had resisted requests from members of Mr. Trump’s transition team for access to the data last month. After Mr. Trump took office, the White House indicated that he should be removed from the job and, according to a person familiar with the matter, Mr. Bessent suggested putting him on leave.
Democrats raised alarm this week that the Trump administration and Mr. Bessent, who was just confirmed by the Senate this week, were compromising the federal government’s payments system.
“To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote in a letter to Mr. Bessent on Friday. “I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”
On Saturday, Mr. Wyden expressed concern that access to the payment system had been granted and pointed out Mr. Musk — a billionaire with a vast portfolio — has potential conflicts of interest.
“Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All of it,” he wrote on social media.
During the transition, Mr. Musk vocally opposed Mr. Bessent being picked as Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary. Mr. Musk, then just an empowered adviser to Mr. Trump, went public with his opinion that he preferred Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive, for the role because Mr. Bessent was “a business-as-usual choice.” Mr. Lutnick became Mr. Trump’s choice for Commerce secretary.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
7) Education Officials Placed on Leave in Trump’s Sprawling Effort to Curb D.E.I.
Some of those put on leave said they had only a minimal connection to diversity or equity efforts.
By Erica L. Green and Zach Montague, Reporting from Washington, Published Feb. 1, 2025, Updated Feb. 2, 2025
The Education Department placed dozens of employees across several of its offices on administrative leave on Friday. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
The Education Department placed a number of employees across its offices on administrative leave on Friday, part of a wave of what staff members and union representatives say are dozens of suspensions at the agency in the Trump administration’s purge of diversity efforts.
In letters obtained by The New York Times, the department notified affected employees that they would lose access to their email accounts, but would continue to receive pay for an indefinite period.
The department cited guidance from the Office of Personnel Management, which had directed agencies to submit plans for shedding staff associated with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts by the end of the day on Friday.
Brittany Holder, a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Government Employees, said the union estimated that at least 50 department employees had been suspended.
The range of people affected led several of those who had been placed on leave to conclude that they had been ensnared in a governmentwide effort to stamp out diversity initiatives, despite what they described as little more than superficial contact with mentors offering general coaching on workplace inclusivity.
The move was an early indication that Trump officials had begun looking to root out any D.E.I. efforts believed to be conducted “in disguise” after they had already moved to shutter offices explicitly focused on those efforts earlier in the week. It came as dozens of agencies raced to comply with an order issued by President Trump on his first day in office directing them to dismantle diversity offices and remove staff affiliated with them.
But according to interviews with those placed on leave and people familiar with the notifications, the department appeared to have cast a wide net, suspending people whose job titles and official duties had no connection to D.E.I., and whose only apparent exposure to D.E.I. initiatives came in the form of trainings encouraged by their managers. One of the training workshops that employees speculated may have led to their being flagged took place more than nine years ago.
It was not immediately clear what criteria the department used to identify those placed on leave, or which of those employees’ activities might fall under the broad order issued by Mr. Trump to roll back D.E.I. initiatives across the federal government. The Office of Personnel Management memo laying out the purge of diversity programs last month called on employees to report any efforts to “disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.”
A spokesman for the department did not respond to requests for comment.
Subodh Chandra, a civil rights lawyer who is representing one of the staff members placed on leave in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, said his client was “utterly baffled” by the move. The staff member, a West Point graduate and an army veteran, was appointed to the employment, engagement and diversity and inclusion council formed under Mr. Trump’s previous administration by his political appointees, Kimberly Richey and Kenneth Marcus. A former prosecutor, he has received “perfect” ratings in the last three evaluations, Mr. Chandra said, in his role overseeing a two-state regional office.
The committee continued under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., but it has not met since December, Mr. Chandra said, and certainly not since Mr. Trump took office.
“My client served his country with distinction in the U.S. Army during and after 9/11,” Mr. Chandra said. “He happens to be a white male, although that shouldn’t make any difference, whether he or anyone else is a victim of a McCarthyist witch hunt. He should not be a victim of retaliation for opposing discrimination against anyone. And I hope the administration will stop misguided persecution of those serving our country faithfully. We are contemplating all of our legal remedies.”
Another staff member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of their tenuous position, said that diversity trainings were seen as routine around the department, with one two-day session having drawn around 300 people over several years.
Several staff members said that Denise L. Carter, who was named acting education secretary until Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the department is confirmed, had urged colleagues to attend sessions, offering them at no cost to participants as recently as last year.
The recipients of the letters giving notice of suspensions included staff members who worked in the department’s Federal Student Aid office and others in the civil rights office. The department also notified all employees in the civil rights office who had joined recently and were still in a probationary period that their positions would be reviewed to determine their necessity.
The letters told employees that the decision to place them on leave was “not being done for any disciplinary purpose,” and was “pursuant to the president’s executive order.” But they did not specify how long the leave would last, or why those employees had been identified for suspension.
Through its first two weeks, the Trump administration has repeatedly said it would temporarily pause certain programs and sideline some federal workers while it conducts more comprehensive reviews that could inform staff reductions and bureaucratic changes. But it has done so haphazardly, leading to unintended disruptions and stoking anxiety among many federal workers.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
8) Many Americans Say the Democratic Party Does Not Share Their Priorities
A poll from The New York Times and Ipsos found that Americans believe abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. issues and climate change concern Democrats more than the cost of living.
By Jeremy W. Peters, Ruth Igielnik and Lisa Lerer, Feb. 2, 2025
In a broad sense, the poll, found that Americans think the Republican Party is more in sync with the mood of the country. Credit...Martina Tuaty for The New York Times
Many Americans say they do not believe the Democratic Party is focused on the economic issues that matter most to them and is instead placing too much emphasis on social issues that they consider less urgent.
Asked to identify the Democratic Party’s most important priorities, Americans most often listed abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and climate change, according to a poll from The New York Times and Ipsos conducted from Jan. 2 to 10.
The issues that people cited as most important to them personally were the economy and inflation, health care and immigration, the poll found. The kinds of social causes that progressive activists have championed in recent years ranked much lower.
As Democrats gather in Washington this weekend to elect the next chairman of their party, and debate how to most effectively counter the Trump administration, the latest public opinion surveys contain worrisome signs for them.
The country remains deeply divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership, with roughly equal shares of people saying that his second term is cause for celebration or concern.
But the poll suggests that people do not view the Democratic Party as an appealing alternative.
In a broad sense, the poll, which surveyed a representative sample of 2,128 adults nationwide, found that Americans think the Republican Party is more in sync with the mood of the country. The issues that people said mattered most to Republicans were also, for the most part, the issues that mattered to them: immigration, the economy, inflation and taxes.
Overall, voters view the Democratic Party more negatively than the Republican Party, according to a Quinnipiac University poll conducted the week after Mr. Trump took office. The 57 percent unfavorable rating for Democrats is the highest Quinnipiac has recorded for the party since it first started asking the question in 2008.
The results underscore the challenge facing Democrats as they attempt to rebuild their party after losing the White House and control of both chambers of Congress. Since the election, Democrats have been unable to agree even on the reasons behind their defeat.
While party officials broadly agree that Democrats should place greater emphasis on economic policy, there’s less consensus on how — or even whether — to address issues like transgender rights.
Views of both parties could shift as Mr. Trump moves forward with his agenda. Some of his administration’s highest profile actions do not have widespread support, such as eliminating diversity requirements in government and lashing out at Mr. Trump’s political opponents.
People who responded to the poll — including those who said they did not vote for Mr. Trump and do not consider themselves Republicans — described themselves in interviews as feeling alienated from Democrats.
Silver Arenas, a 27-year-old living in Mount Vernon, Wash., said he thinks that while many Americans are worried about the cost of living and the scarcity of affordable housing, the Democrats highlight policies that do not seem relevant.
A lot of the time, he said, Republicans seem to support policies that hurt people. When Democrats have bad ideas, as he sees it, “They’re not trying to hurt people, they’re just stupid.”
Mr. Arenas said he voted for Ms. Harris but would consider not voting at all if he doesn’t like the Democratic ticket in the future. “Democrats should have paid a lot more attention to the cost of living,” he added.
Muhammad Khan, 30, an accountant from Philadelphia, voted for Mr. Trump last year. He explained that as a Muslim, it was difficult to support the Democrats because of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas.
“They take people for granted,” he said of Democrats, “that they would vote for them no matter what.”
Mr. Khan remains optimistic about Mr. Trump and trusts Republicans more on the economy.
And while he said he believes Democrats are usually kinder than Republicans to marginalized groups, he thinks they have gone too far lately.
“Gender equality, gender pay, L.G.B.T. rights,” Mr. Khan said, ticking off the issues he thinks preoccupy Democrats. “I think it’s valuable,” he added, “but it’s too much.”
On lesbian, gay and transgender rights, people perceive the Democratic Party’s priorities as particularly misaligned with their own. Just 4 percent of Americans listed L.G.B.T.Q. issues as very important to them personally. But 31 percent said they were a Democratic Party priority.
The same percentage of people cited abortion as a top issue for the party, while 13 percent identified it as one of the top three concerns to them personally. Americans also identified climate change (25 percent) and the state of democracy (20 percent) as issues most important to Democrats.
Even self-identified Democrats were only somewhat more likely than other Americans to mention abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. issues as important to them personally. Democrats did not rank either among their top five concerns.
Most Democratic candidates, however, did not run campaigns in 2024 that were as focused on social issues as Americans seem to believe.
For the most part, Democrats, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, did not discuss gender identity. That came from Republicans, who fanned fears about transgender women playing on female sports teams and minors receiving transgender medical treatment.
But Democrats did not agree on a cohesive or effective way to respond.
“Politics is about perception,” said Adam Jentleson, a Democratic strategist who has urged his party to rethink how much influence it allows activist groups to have over its agenda. “And people perceive Democrats as being focused on the demands of activists instead of kitchen table issues.”
The question, he said, “is what do we do about it?”
“We can either whine about media coverage and complain that life isn’t fair,” Mr. Jentleson added. “Or we can get real about the realities of politics and actually fix the problem.”
Abortion stands out as an issue that Americans largely associate with the Democratic Party but that also has broad public support. Roughly two-thirds of American support some form of legal abortion access, according to Pew Research Center.
Economy and inflation were, by far, the issues that mattered most to Americans, the poll found. That was consistent across every demographic group.
“Democrats did not talk about inflation nearly enough” ahead of the election, said Dustin Johnson, 30, a software engineer in Elk River, Minn. And when they did talk about it, he added, Democrats made technical arguments about the slowing rate of inflation.
“Inflation is lower,” he said. “But what people are seeing with inflation is not the rate of increase, it’s where the inflation went.”
Mr. Johnson — who said that he voted for Ms. Harris and had previously supported Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang — hopes the Democratic losses in November will push the party to focus on middle-income and working-class Americans.
For now, he said he fears that the party has become “an insiders club” that mostly ignores those voters. “So maybe I don’t want to identify as a Democrat,” he added. “Now I feel like more of an independent.”
Christine Zhang contributed.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
9) Netanyahu Heads to Washington at Critical Juncture for Mideast
Israel’s prime minister is expected to meet with President Trump this week to discuss the future of Gaza and broader regional issues.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 2, 2025
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was traveling to Washington on Sunday for meetings this week with President Trump and senior administration officials at a pivotal moment for the Middle East.
Mr. Trump has made it clear that he wants the wars in the Middle East to end after the October 2023 Hamas-led assault on Israel set off 15 months of devastating conflict in Gaza that also spread to Lebanon. Before boarding his plane on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu made several references to “peace.”
“The decisions we made in the war have already changed the face of the Middle East,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “I believe that we can strengthen security, broaden the circle of peace and achieve a remarkable era of peace through strength,” he added.
Mr. Netanyahu is expected to be the first foreign leader to meet with Mr. Trump since his inauguration last month. The Israeli leader is expected to hold formative discussions with the Trump administration about several crucial regional issues.
Negotiations are supposed to start on Monday for the second phase of the cease-fire deal for Gaza that would turn the temporary truce that came into effect on Jan. 19 into a more permanent cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hamas and see the release of all the remaining hostages being held there.
Attesting to the fragility of the situation on the ground, an Israeli aircraft on Sunday fired toward a vehicle in Gaza that the military said was advancing north along an unauthorized route instead of the agreed inspection route, breaking days of calm in the Palestinian enclave. Gaza’s Ministry of Health did not immediately report any fatalities.
In addition, the trial stage of a U.S.-brokered cease-fire for Lebanon is set to expire on Feb. 18, by which time both the Israeli military and Hezbollah are meant to have vacated the southern part of that country.
Overarching issues for the future of the Middle East also remain on the agenda. Those include curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions and support for armed proxies on Israel’s borders, as well as the possibility of a grand bargain involving formal ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a major regional player.
Mr. Netanyahu said from the tarmac on Sunday that the issues to be discussed with Mr. Trump include “victory over Hamas, achieving the release of all our hostages and dealing with the Iranian terror axis in all its components.”
His office said that Mr. Netanyahu is expected to meet with Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, on Monday and with Mr. Trump on Tuesday.
Mr. Netanyahu spoke by phone with Mr. Witkoff on Saturday and the two men agreed to start the negotiations for the second phase of the Gaza deal in their meeting on Monday, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement, suggesting that Mr. Witkoff will play a major role in shuttle diplomacy.
There was no immediate comment from the White House or Mr. Witkoff, who played an important role in brokering the initial, six-week phase of the cease-fire deal for Gaza. In the days before Mr. Trump took office, he worked in coordination with officials from the Biden administration, as well as Qatar and Egypt — the two main countries mediating between Israel and Hamas.
On Sunday, the prime minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, told a news conference in Doha that his government would “continue to work in cooperation with our partners in the Arab Republic of Egypt and the United States to ensure the full implementation of this agreement.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s visit to Washington comes amid a more hopeful atmosphere in Israel and Gaza over the first phase of the cease-fire. That has seen the release over the past two weeks of 13 Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and detainees. One of the hostages released on Saturday was Keith Siegal, 65, a dual American-Israeli citizen.
Many of the families of released hostages have thanked Mr. Trump and his team for getting the long-awaited deal over the finish line after months of efforts by the Biden administration.
But questions surrounding the next phase remain unresolved. Mr. Netanyahu had vowed publicly and repeatedly to destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities and to preserve the option of going back to fighting after the initial phase of the deal, if necessary.
The images of gun-toting Hamas militants organizing the handover ceremonies of hostages to the Red Cross have underscored the degree to which the group remains in control in Gaza.
Mr. Witkoff made a rare visit to the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, according to a White House official, aiming to reinforce the cease-fire that has also allowed tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians to return to their homes. Mr. Witkoff had also visited Saudi Arabia before meeting Mr. Netanyahu in Israel last week.
Mr. Trump has raised the idea on several occasions that Gazans should be moved en masse to Egypt and Jordan. His suggestion echoes an idea floated in Israel early in the war and the wishes of the Israeli far right that Palestinians be encouraged to leave Gaza.
But on Saturday Egypt and Jordan — along with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries — warned in a joint statement that any plan that encouraged the “transfer or uprooting of Palestinians from their land” would threaten regional stability and “undermine the chances of peace and coexistence among its people.”
Gabby Sobelman and Myra Noveck contributed reporting from Israel, and Ismaeel Naar from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
10) As Trump Attacks Diversity, a Racist Undercurrent Surfaces
President Trump has promised a “colorblind and merit-based” society, while also equating diversity with incompetence.
By Erica L. Green, Feb. 3, 2025
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent. She reported from Washington.
The issue of diversity plays into deep tensions among Americans about the role of race in society and helped supercharge President Trump’s political comeback. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
As Navy divers searched the Potomac River for bodies from the worst air crash in the United States in 20 years, President Trump zeroed in on what he saw as the cause: hiring programs that promote diversity.
The meaning behind his words was clear, that diversity equals incompetence. And for many historians, civil rights leaders, scholars and citizens, it was an unmistakable message of racism in plain sight at the highest levels of American government.
“His attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion aren’t about a particular program or some acronym — they’re just a sanitized substitute for the racist comments that can no longer be spoken openly,” Margaret Huang, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s president and chief executive, said during a call with civil rights leaders after Mr. Trump’s remarks. “But the message is the same, that women, Black and brown communities are inherently less capable, and if they hold positions of power or authority in government or business, it must be because the standards were lowered.”
In the weeks since he took office, Mr. Trump has made a point of purging the federal government of D.E.I. initiatives in order to usher in what he called a “colorblind and merit-based” society. He even said his executive order eliminating the programs was “the most important federal civil rights measure in decades.”
In his actions, Mr. Trump has aligned himself with those who are brandishing the term D.E.I. as a catchall for discrimination against white people, and using it as a pejorative to attack nonwhite and female leaders as unqualified for their positions. After some of Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress disparagingly referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “D.E.I. hire” during the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump refused to disavow the remarks.
The issue plays into deep tensions among Americans about the role of race in society and helped supercharge Mr. Trump’s political comeback. Many voters, conservative and not, hoped to see a correction to what they saw as progressive politics gone too far.
D.E.I., in effect, became an all-purpose target for society’s ills.
“It’s the latest term that serves as a proxy for race, and it’s used as a politically expedient slur, as a way to stoke white grievances and to give a convenient scapegoat to whatever ails our nation,” said Timothy Welbeck, the director of Temple University’s Center for Anti-Racism.
A Pew Research Center survey published in November found that the percentage of American workers who viewed D.E.I. programs negatively was on the rise, though a majority of workers still believed that it was a good thing for their employers to focus on.
A White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, said Democrats’ focus on D.E.I. undermined “decades of progress toward true equality.”
“The Trump administration rejects this backward thinking and will pursue an agenda that lifts everyone up with the chance to achieve the American dream,” he said in a statement.
In Mr. Trump’s remarks last week on the plane crash, he cited no evidence that diversity programs had anything to do with the fatal accident. When asked how he could say that diversity hiring was to blame, he said, “I have common sense.”
In a misleading claim, Mr. Trump insinuated that the administration of President Barack Obama — the first Black president — had stocked the Federal Aviation Administration with people who could not do their jobs.
“They actually came out with a directive: ‘too white,’” Mr. Trump said. His administration will be different, he went on. “We want the people that are competent.”
(Asked for details on the “too white” claim, the White House cited a lawsuit filed in 2015 by a conservative legal organization accusing the Obama administration of hiring practices that were “engineered to favor racial minorities.” That lawsuit is pending in court.)
‘The best and the brightest’
The concept behind the federal government’s diversity programs is not new; it developed as a result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The goal is to remove discriminatory barriers for women, minority groups and people with disabilities from jobs. The earliest beneficiaries were white women, white people in rural areas and disabled veterans, Mr. Welbeck said.
The idea was that qualified people were being overlooked.
“It wasn’t discriminatory, because it was always about offering qualified people an opportunity to have a seat at the table,” Mr. Welbeck said. “They weren’t supplanting people, it was more so an opportunity for access.”
Critics of D.E.I. say an emphasis on diversity means that hiring standards are compromised and that the focus on race and gender is a distraction from more urgent goals and the overall mission. “When you don’t focus on safety and you focus on social justice or the environment, bad things happen,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on CNN on Sunday, speaking about the Washington plane crash.
The Trump administration, Mr. Duffy said, wants “the best and the brightest.”
But in the F.A.A. and elsewhere, officials say, the programs follow the same aptitude, medical and security standards for all hires.
Melik Abdul, a Republican strategist who was a part of the group Black Americans for Trump during the 2024 campaign, said the president’s stated commitment to merit was contradicted by some of his actions. He noted that Mr. Trump’s cabinet, which is predominantly white and male, is packed with loyalists.
“If it was all about merit, then we wouldn’t have Pete Hegseth,” said Mr. Abdul, referring to Mr. Trump’s defense secretary. Mr. Hegseth, a veteran and former Fox News host, took over the job of overseeing the Defense Department and its three million employees with little management experience beyond running veterans groups that he was accused of mismanaging.
“You can’t argue merit and say that is our most merit-based hire,” said Mr. Abdul, who has not broken with the president over the D.E.I. issue but says he is frustrated by Mr. Trump’s “obsession” with it.
For many, Mr. Trump’s attacks on D.E.I. point to his long history of inflaming racial tensions using dog whistles — from a campaign dating back to the 1980s against five Black men who were wrongfully convicted and ultimately exonerated of assaulting and raping a white woman, to his attempt to paint the first Black president as a noncitizen.
But now, they say, the dog whistle is a bullhorn.
Conservative backlash
The attacks on D.E.I. are part of a broad backlash against policies that Republicans denounce as left-wing politics run amok. One of Mr. Trump’s most aired ads about Ms. Harris during the presidential race ended with a tagline that took direct aim at transgender people: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Conservatives seized on what they describe as “woke” policies taking over American culture, particularly after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, 46-year-old Black man, by a Minneapolis police officer. The killing spurred schools, institutions and companies to adopt policies and training that sought to acknowledge and reverse systemic inequities.
In the process, they alienated some people.
“The oppressiveness of D.E.I. in the common culture, workplaces and in schools started to sink in,” said Dan Lennington, deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which has sought to wipe out diversity programs. “People being told they have white privilege and they ought to read a book about it is not the way to make friends and have influence.”
The uproar over D.E.I. is similar to the one over critical race theory a few years ago, in which conservative activists alleged that schools were indoctrinating students to become radical race warriors, and shaming students by teaching them about the history of slavery.
Critical race theory, a graduate-level concept that explores systemic racism in America, was rarely taught in K-12 schools. But some of its conceptual underpinnings, including that racism is embedded in societal systems like courts and schools, were a part of discussions on race more broadly.
The architect of the movement to turn critical race theory into a Republican rallying cry, Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, laid out a blueprint for Mr. Trump in December to eliminate “left-wing racialism” from the federal government.
In a post he called the “Counterrevolution Blueprint,” he wrote: “Trump can end these programs under his executive authority and replace D.E.I. with a policy of strict colorblind equality. This action would deliver an immediate shock to the bureaucracy.”
In an emailed response to an inquiry from The New York Times last week, Mr. Rufo said that he had been in touch with members of the Trump policy team since the summer of 2020, when the fight against critical race theory began. He said Mr. Trump’s D.E.I. fight had been years in the making by several conservative groups whose staff members have now joined the administration. He called the administration’s execution of their plans “phenomenal.”
“For an activist, there is no greater thrill than seeing a blueprint turn into reality,” he wrote. “It’s a new day in America.”
Civil rights groups say that it may be a new day, but that the themes have clear echoes, including the years after Reconstruction, which were marked by a violent backlash against Black people, and the tenure of President Woodrow Wilson, who resegregated the federal work force.
Samuel Spital, the associate director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, said Mr. Trump’s dismantling of D.E.I. was an attempt to “remake our society.”
It is an effort, he said, to “collectively gaslight the American people” about the real victims of discrimination in the United States.
Linda Qiu contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
11) Guantánamo Bay Prepares for President Trump’s Migrant Surge
About 200 Marines and soldiers arrived over the weekend as the base faces its most drastic changes since the Pentagon opened a prison there after the Sept. 11 attacks.
By Carol Rosenberg and Eric Schmitt, Feb. 3, 2025
Reporting from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Washington
The small base in southeast Cuba is on the verge of undergoing its most drastic change since the Pentagon opened its wartime prison there after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
About 200 Marines and soldiers landed at Guantánamo Bay over the weekend to provide security and begin setting up at a new tent city for migrants, as officials comply with President Trump’s order to prepare the Navy base for as many as 30,000 deportees.
The small base in southeast Cuba is on the verge of undergoing its most drastic change since the Pentagon opened its wartime prison there after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The operation will require a surge of staff and goods to the isolated base, which is behind a Cuban minefield and is entirely dependent on air and sea supply missions from the United States.
Everything from pallets of bottled water and frozen food for the commissary to school supplies and government vehicles come twice a month on a barge. Fresh fruits and vegetables for the 4,200 residents come on a weekly refrigerator flight.
Fulfilling the president’s order could grow the population there tenfold because of the staff it would take to operate the encampment, which is on a unpopulated corner of the base, far from the prison as well as the commissary, school and suburban-style neighborhoods for service members and their families.
In response to Mr. Trump’s order, U.S. forces have already put up 50 Army green tents inside a chain-link-fence enclosure, adjacent to a barracks-style building called the Migrant Operations Center.
The first wave of about 50 Marines arrived Saturday night from Camp Lejeune, N.C. The next 50 arrived on Sunday.
The military declined to comment on its current capacity to receive the migrants or on what other provisions were inbound. The Southern Command, which has oversight of the troops assigned to the prison and the migration plan, would not say who is in charge of the operation or discuss a plan from 2017, obtained by The New York Times, for detaining the first 11,000 migrants there.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that dangerous deportees might be put in detention facilities that currently hold 15 prisoners from the war on terrorism, among them five men who are accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks.
The 15 prisoners have been held in two prison buildings with about 275 cells. Detaining migrants at that site would presumably require moving those 15 prisoners into one of the two buildings.
But no decision has been made on whether some migrants would be housed at the wartime prison, a Defense Department official said Saturday. Separately, two people with knowledge of detention operations said the consolidation had already happened this weekend. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security arrangements involving the prison, which are sometimes classified.
In his remarks last week, Mr. Hegseth also mentioned that about 6,000 deportees could be housed “on the golf course,” which is near the base’s McDonald’s, Irish pub and family housing.
In any case, carrying out Mr. Trump’s order would require a huge undertaking, said retired Maj. Gen. Michael R. Lehnert, a Marine who opened the prison in 2002.
General Lehnert, whose expertise as a Marine was in engineering, also managed security for the migrant arrivals at Guantánamo in the 1990s, when tens of thousands of Cubans and Haitians lived in tent cities around the base.
At its peak, he said, in May 1995, the camps held 25,000 migrants, mostly Cubans.
The base was so overwhelmed that a tent camp was even, briefly, put on the golf course. The operation was set up hastily, and it had portable latrines. As the numbers rose, the Navy closed the school and evacuated the families of service members to the mainland for seven months.
The base makes its own water for everything except drinking purposes and, as it did then, would need to make much more.
The two main sites that were used back then — a vast bluff overlooking the ocean and an abandoned airfield — now have new purposes. One is a closed military zone, with the prison buildings and staff. The other has the courthouse facility called Camp Justice.
President Trump’s order called for expanding the Migrant Operations Center to accommodate 30,000 people. It is currently a 120-bed former barracks that in recent years housed Cubans, sometimes families, whom the U.S. Coast Guard found at sea trying to reach Florida. They were housed there until a third country agreed to receive them.
The 2017 plan, reflected in a diagram of preparations for area surrounding the Migrant Operations Center, shows six designated tent camps for more than 11,000 migrants, and a nearby spot to house 3,640 “blue forces,” a military term for forces that are friendly to the U.S. military. The largest camp could house more than 3,000 migrants.
By 2017 contractors had already built crude summer-camp-style showers and toilet houses in cinder-block buildings on the site.
In the 1990s, General Lehnert said, each tent encampment contained 1,500 migrants and was guarded by 200 troops, either soldiers or Marines. And that was just for basic security. The 1990s operation, known as Sea Signal, also had medical, logistics and other support troops as well as a separate “rapid reaction force” in the event of unrest.
It was not known whether the Department of Homeland Security or the U.S. military would handle processing, or what role, if any, would be assigned to the International Organization for Migration, which has an office on the base. Nor was it clear how it would be funded.
Guantánamo is an expensive place to live and work. In 2019, the commander of detention operations estimated it cost more than $100,000 for each guard’s nine-month deployment to the facility. Those troops are provided with housing, clothing, food, health care, entertainment and transportation.
Those living at Guantánamo today, in addition to sailors and their families, include schoolteachers, Filipino and Jamaican guest workers, and the prison guard force of mostly individual soldiers serving on nine-month tours.
Mr. Hegseth did one of those tours, from June 2004 to April 2005. He was the platoon leader of 40 or so men from the New Jersey National Guard who provided perimeter security for the detention center.
But it is a much smaller operation today. Mr. Hegseth was part of a nearly 2,600-member military force that was assigned to the detention operation, which held 600 detainees on the former site of migrant camps. The airstrip was a busy place then, with resupply missions, troops, reporters, and members of Congress and the intelligence community flying in frequently.
Now the prison has a staff of 800 military and civilian contractors and no longer has a media operation.
An additional 111 military police from the New York National Guard were undergoing three weeks of training at Fort Bliss, Texas, before heading to a nine-month security mission at Guantánamo Bay.
The situation was changing so quickly that when the unit departed last month, the Army said it would provide security for the detention facility. But the Pentagon said in a statement released on Thursday that the unit would secure the Migrant Operations Center.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
12) Who Will Govern Postwar Gaza? Four Competing Models Are Emerging.
Hamas still controls most of the enclave, but Israel holds some key areas. International oversight could also be expanded, while the Palestinian Authority has presented itself as another alternative.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 3, 2025
Hamas militants handing over the Israeli hostages Ofer Kalderon and Yarden Bibas in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Saturday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Through nearly 16 months of war in Gaza, politicians and analysts debated competing proposals for the territory’s postwar governance, but no clear direction emerged while the fighting continued.
Now, as a fragile cease-fire holds and as Israel and Hamas prepare for negotiations to extend the truce, four rival models for Gaza’s future have begun to take shape.
Hamas, weakened but unbowed, still controls most of the territory and is trying to entrench that authority. Under the terms of the cease-fire, Israel is meant to withdraw gradually from Gaza, but its troops still occupy key parts of it. Right-wing Israeli leaders want their forces to expand that control, even if it means restarting the war.
A group of foreign security contractors offers another model. At Israel’s invitation, they are running a checkpoint on a crucial thoroughfare in northern Gaza, screening vehicles for weapons. Some Israeli officials say that activity could develop into international stewardship of a much wider area, involving Arab states instead of private contractors.
And in the south, representatives of the Palestinian Authority began over the weekend to staff a border crossing with Egypt, working with European security officials. The authority, which lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007, hopes that it could, in time, replicate those efforts across the entire territory.
For now, it’s unclear which template will emerge as the dominant model. The outcome will likely depend in large part on President Trump, who is set to discuss Gaza’s future on Tuesday in Washington with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. And Saudi Arabia could tilt the scales if it agrees for the first time to forge formal ties with Israel — in exchange for a particular governance structure in Gaza.
Here’s what the models entail and how likely they are to succeed.
Hamas rule
When releasing hostages in recent weeks, Hamas has made a point of showing that it remains the dominant Palestinian force on the ground. Hundreds of masked Hamas militants have assembled at each release point, projecting the sense that the group, though battered by 16 months of war, is still in charge.
Hamas security officials have also re-emerged to assert a semblance of order across the territory, stopping and screening vehicles and trying to defuse unexploded ordnance. Municipal officials have also started shifting rubble.
For most Israelis, Hamas’s long-term presence is unpalatable. Some might accept it if Hamas agreed to release all the remaining hostages held in Gaza. Others, particularly on the Israeli right, want to resume the war, even if it costs the lives of some of those captives, to force Hamas out.
If Hamas does stay in power, it will be hard for the group to rebuild Gaza without foreign support. Because many foreign donors will most likely be wary of helping unless Hamas steps down, it is possible that the group might willingly cede power to an alternative Palestinian leadership, instead of continuing to preside over an ungovernable wasteland. In talks mediated by Egypt, Hamas’s envoys have said they could hand over administrative responsibilities to a committee of Palestinian technocrats, but it’s unlikely that the group would willingly disband its armed wing even if it stopped running Gaza’s civilian affairs.
Israeli occupation
When the cease-fire began last month, Israel retained control of a buffer zone along Gaza’s borders that is several hundred yards wide. To end the war and secure the release of all the hostages in Gaza, Israel eventually needs to evacuate this territory. But that is unthinkable to important members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, meaning that he may extend Israel’s occupation, or even expand it, to avoid the collapse of his government.
To do that, however, Mr. Netanyahu would probably need the support of the Trump administration, which has signaled that it wants to see the cease-fire extended to allow for the release of every hostage. Returning to war would also scupper any short-term chance of a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia — a major international achievement that Mr. Netanyahu has long coveted.
An international force
When Israeli troops withdrew last week from much of the Netzarim Corridor, a strategic area that connects northern and southern Gaza, they allowed a cohort of foreign security contractors to fill the void. Led by Egyptian security guards, the contractors screen northbound traffic for weapons, hoping to slow Hamas’s efforts to rearm its militants in northern Gaza. Two U.S. companies are involved in the process, but it is unclear what role they play on the ground.
For now, the process is a small-scale trial that lacks the formal involvement of Arab countries other than Egypt and Qatar, the two states mediating between Israel and Hamas. But some Israeli officials say that it could be expanded — both in terms of geography and responsibility — to encompass administrative roles across a wider area, backed publicly and financially by leading Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Neither is likely to seek a formal role without the blessing of the Palestinian Authority.
The authority, which Hamas forced from Gaza in 2007, still runs part of the West Bank and is considered the only serious Palestinian alternative to Hamas. But Israeli leaders see the authority as corrupt and incompetent and have dismissed the idea of giving it a major role in Gaza, at least for now. The Israeli right also opposes empowering the authority, lest it emerge as a credible state-in-waiting.
The Palestinian Authority
That said, the authority’s representatives quietly began working in another part of Gaza over the weekend, suggesting that parts of the Israeli leadership may in practice be more flexible about the authority’s involvement.
Israel allowed officials from both the European Union and the Palestinian Authority to restart operations at the Rafah crossing — a checkpoint on the border between Gaza and Egypt. The crossing had been closed since Israel invaded the Rafah area last May.
Publicly, the Israeli government downplayed the authority’s involvement at the checkpoint, partly to avoid angering members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition.
But the operations at Rafah have fueled speculation that Mr. Netanyahu, under pressure from Mr. Trump and Arab leaders in the Gulf, might grudgingly tolerate a wider role for the authority, perhaps in partnership with foreign peacekeepers or contractors.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
13) It’s 89 Seconds Until Doomsday and Her First Day on the Job
Alexandra Bell is bringing more than a decade of experience in nuclear policy to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the organization that sets the Doomsday Clock.
By Katrina Miller, Feb. 3, 2025
At the end of January, the keepers of the Doomsday Clock announced that the world was 89 seconds to midnight, a metaphor for our proximity to extinction. That’s one second closer than we were for the past two years, and the nearest the clock has ever inched to global destruction by way of human-made risks, including nuclear weapons, climate change and new technologies like artificial intelligence.
The iconic clock is set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organization founded by American physicists at the dawn of the nuclear age, months after the United States detonated atomic bombs in Japan. On Monday, the Bulletin named Alexandra Bell, a nuclear affairs expert, as its new president and chief executive. She replaces Rachel Bronson, who served in the role for a decade.
Ms. Bell worked on arms control and nonproliferation issues in the U.S. State Department starting in the Obama administration, where she was involved in securing ratification of New START, the nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. She returned to the department as a deputy assistant secretary in 2021, promoting dialogue on nuclear issues with nations around the world. During the last two years of the Biden administration, she led the U.S. delegation of the P5 Process, currently the only forum where the United States, China and Russia discuss nuclear risk reduction.
In an interview last week, Ms. Bell discussed the ever-evolving threats of the day and the role she wants the Bulletin to play in preventing worldwide disaster. “It’s important to listen to the echoes of history,” she said, to be “informed by the past, but not shackled to it.”
The following conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How does an 80-year-old organization like the Bulletin stay relevant in an ever-changing world?
When I entered the field, the Doomsday Clock was at five minutes to midnight. I remember being struck by the symbolism. The clock being at its closest point to midnight now is really a warning that we are running out of time. The fact that it ticked one second closer is an indication that every second counts.
We are living through an overload of crisis with a compounding nature of threats. The key is to understand those threats and make sure that we’re transitioning to solutions. It will take work and patience and persistence, and a broad demand from the public, to address these concerns.
Hopefully, the Doomsday Clock pulls people in to help them understand the urgency of the moment. There’s no single, neat solution. But there are things we can do to pull ourselves away from the edge.
How does this era of nuclear risk differ from the past?
Nuclear threats are on vivid display for the first time, really, since we pulled ourselves away from the edge of catastrophe in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The United States and Russia are not in a sustained dialogue about how to stabilize nuclear risk. China has embarked on an unprecedented expansion of their nuclear forces. Iran has the potential to create nuclear weapons, and North Korea continues to flout international law, threaten its neighbors and grow its nuclear arsenal.
We also have structures that we’ve spent the last 50 years building now crumbling under us. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which has held back the tide of nuclear chaos, is under duress. The next steps that we were supposed to take in reducing nuclear threat, like the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, haven’t come to pass yet.
I’m sure people living through the height of the Cold War would not have thought it was uncomplicated. But looking back, that was a bipolar conflict — it was the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Now, it’s more complex.
There are no quick fixes here. This time, it won’t just be the nuclear experts alone who come up with solutions. We have to be talking with experts in A.I., quantum, biotechnology and climate change. These risk areas are overlapping and require coordination we haven’t quite mastered yet. But that cross-pollination of expertise will be key to how we manage these threats.
The looming threat for most people these days seems to be climate change, rather than nuclear weapons.
You’re right, younger generations don’t think about nuclear threat as much. We did a good job of reducing that threat, but it never went away. In some ways, it’s become worse. It’s more complex, more diffuse, and there’s not as much attention on it.
The nuclear issue is a matter of minutes. Intercontinental ballistic missiles in the United States or Russia can reach anywhere in the world in about 33 minutes. If we get the nuclear problem wrong, nothing else matters.
Climate change is a longer-term problem. And the potential conflicts that could arise from it, like mass migration, can increase tension. More nuclear-armed states with climate-related conflicts means the likelihood of nuclear war increases. These threats are tied together. All the more reason to be thinking about both at the same time.
What are your thoughts so far on the direction of the new presidential administration?
I was pleased to see President Trump’s comments in Davos about reducing nuclear threats. That was encouraging. But he is also withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. That is a step in the wrong direction.
Hopefully, the administration will see that there are economic and security benefits to the U.S. pursuing a move to greener technology.
I hope there is an acknowledgment that climate change isn’t a matter of belief. This is happening. You can choose not to believe in it, but I guarantee that your insurance company believes in it. When that starts financially impacting people across the country, they will be looking to their leaders to do something about it.
In what ways do you hope to shape the work of the Bulletin in the years ahead?
The Bulletin is trying to facilitate a public reckoning with human-made existential risk. It’s been an increasingly exclusive conversation, and I don’t want it to be that. I want people anywhere to understand why this is so important, and why they have a part in it.
I am from Tuxedo, N.C. — a place with no stoplights. My folks’ house got 40 inches of rain in two days from Hurricane Helene. The havoc caused by a changing climate has now happened in a place like my hometown. How do we connect those people into the conversation about preventing this? It’s our job to make sure they are a part of it just as much as people in the Beltway are.
It can be easy to look at these challenges and go to a dark place. The harder thing is to let those challenges drive you. My mother is from Finland, and we always talk about this Finnish ethos of “sisu” — unstoppable grit in the face of extreme adversity. We need more sisu in this field. We’ve inherited a mess, and we have to work together to clean it up.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
14) Restored Anti-Fascism Mural by Philip Guston Unveiled in Mexico
In 1934, two young artists drove from Los Angeles in a beat-up car to Mexico, to create a powerful artwork about repression. It was concealed — and then forgotten.
By Victoria Burnett, Published Feb. 1, 2025, Updated Feb. 2, 2025
When an Argentine architect, Luis Laplace, saw a neglected mural by the North American artists Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish at the Regional Museum of Michoacán, in the Mexican city of Morelia, seven years ago, he resolved immediately to try to save it.
“What struck me was the scale of it, the beauty, the history,” he said of the mural, titled “The Struggle Against Terrorism.” It is a kaleidoscope of persecution and resistance made in 1934-1935, when the artists were barely in their 20s.
Painted on a wall in a colonial palace in the heart of Morelia, the pink-stoned capital of Michoacán State, the surreal, Renaissance-influenced composition of broken bodies, ominous hooded figures and tools of cruelty was crumbling and faded. Whole sections of the piece were missing. The patio was being used to store chairs.
“I was quite astonished,” said Laplace, who is based in Paris but at the time was working on a project in Morelia.
On Friday, the 1,000-square-foot mural was unveiled anew in Mexico following a six-month restoration that has re-created missing sections and returned its original vibrancy. It is being inaugurated at a moment of heightened tensions between Mexico and the United States over the steep tariffs President Trump is moving to impose.
As well as a team of conservators and contractors, the effort involved the Guston Foundation, which paid around $150,000 for the project; several Mexican cultural institutions; a local grandee; and a lot of diplomacy, Laplace said. He joked that the people of Morelia had never “seen so many people interested in a single mural.”
Guston (who at the time still went by his birthname, Goldstein) and Kadish were commissioned by the museum to paint the fresco at the recommendation of the renowned Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, whom they had met in Los Angeles in the early 1930s while Siqueiros was working there. They are among a handful of American muralists who produced work in Mexico in the 1930s; a mural by Grace Greenwood, a Brooklyn artist, covers a wall in a different area of the Morelia museum.
The Americans drove some 1,700 miles to Morelia from Los Angeles in a beat-up car in the fall of 1934 and spent six months there, working feverishly with help from Jules Langsner, a friend and future art critic. After the piece was unveiled in early 1935, Time magazine described black-clad civil servants and farmers in straw hats gazing at the mural in “open-mouthed wonder.”
The wonder didn’t last, however. By the mid-1940s, the mural, with its inverted crucifixes and naked bodies, was deemed so offensive to clerics that the museum agreed to conceal it behind a huge canvas screen, said Jaime Reyes Monroy, the musuem’s director. His predecessor, Eugenio Mercado López, said he had been told angry locals had damaged the mural in some way and that the canvas was intended, in part at least, to protect it.
In exchange for obscuring the mural, the church gave the museum an 18th-century oil painting known as “The Transfer of the Dominican Nuns to a New Convent,” which still hangs there.
The mural languished, hidden, until 1973, when it was uncovered during repairs to the patio, Reyes said. Over the next 50 years, there were sporadic efforts to patch up the work, but they were overwhelmed by the strong sun and relentless humidity.
“It had been covered for so long,” said Reyes, “people had honestly forgotten about it.”
It wasn’t only Morelians who overlooked the mural. Ellen G. Landau, an art historian and author of a book about the impact of Mexico on American modernism, said the art world and even Guston and Kadish diminished the importance of the Morelia fresco, which she believes reverberated through their careers.
Mexico gave the artists latitude to explore their preoccupations, Landau said. This was a contrast to the prescriptions of the Works Progress Administration in the United States, for which both artists also produced murals.
“When the W.P.A. wanted a mural for a post office, they wanted a certain topic,” said Sally Radic, executive director of the Guston Foundation. In Mexico, she said, “they just did what they wanted and that’s why it was so universal.”
With that freedom, Guston and Kadish created a work where the horrors of the Inquisition intersected with those of the Ku Klux Klan and the Gestapo, said Landau. The mural includes a swastika and three hooded figures perched on ladders and a scaffold above scenes of torture — images that would recur in Guston’s later work. To the left is a cartoonlike depiction of people being burned alive that Landau identified as a rendition of a 15th-century woodcut showing the slaughter of Jews at Trent.
The references to repression in the mural were personal as well as historical and global, Landau and Radic said. Guston and Kadish had experienced right-wing thuggery in 1933, when members of the Los Angeles Police Department’s so-called Red Squad destroyed portable murals that the artists had helped produce for the Communist-affiliated John Reed Clubs. Kadish’s family’s apartment was ransacked by the police a few years earlier, according to an essay by Landau, and he witnessed a cross burning on the lawn of a Jewish home.
For Mercado, the former museum director, the mural holds an urgent message for Michoacán, a lush, beautiful state that is plagued by brutal drug-related violence.
“It’s agonizing,” he said. “It’s a call to the local community that we can’t be indifferent to suffering.”
Radic said the mural’s resonance made saving it a “pet project.” She and Laplace spent years trying to navigate Mexican bureaucracy before Alejandro Ramírez, a Morelian resident and chief executive of the movie theater chain Cinépolis, helped them find “the right door to knock on,” Laplace said.
Before restoration began, engineers used ground penetrating radar technology to identify the source of humidity that had caused the mural to fade and crumble. They moved downspouts that were causing damp in the wall and used infrared lights and fans to dry it out.
“Humidity is like an illness for frescos,” said David Oviedo Jiménez, a mural conservator at the Mexican Institute of Fine Arts and Literature who was part of a four-person team that just finished restoring the work. When the team started work, the fresco “was in a terrible state,” he added.
Starting in September, Oviedo and his team stabilized the surface with sealant and repaired blank areas with a mixture of slaked lime and marble sand. They used photographs and traced the original outlines of the painting to re-create missing sections. They painted these with vertical brush strokes, a technique called rigatino that is used in fresco restoration so that people looking at the work can distinguish the new paintwork from the original.
Radic, who saw the restored mural for the first time this week, said the transformation was “beautiful.” Speaking from Morelia by phone on Thursday, she said that the greater vibrancy intensified the sense that the colossal figures in the work are descending upon you, adding, “They did an amazing job.”
Laplace, the architect, who has yet to see the restored fresco, predicts that the restoration will rekindle interest in the work among fans of Guston and Kadish but also among Morelians.
“Now that we have created awareness, people will take care of it,” he said. “They know that they have something precious.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*