Surviving State Violence:
The Case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui
and Incarceration in Women’s Prisons
Monday March 24, 2025
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM EDT
Online, YouTube
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Stagnant waters and poverty can be found all around in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.
Haiti Action Committee Condemns Trump’s Decision to End Temporary Protected Status for Haitians
Haiti Action Committee denounces the latest white supremacist attack by the Trump Administration directed at Haitians living in the US. The announcement that the US will end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians puts a target on the back of over 500,000 Haitians.
It is, quite simply, a plan for ethnic cleansing – and it must be opposed.
The US government has granted 17 countries Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which allows undocumented people from those countries to work and live legally in this country, but does not provide a pathway to permanent residency or citizenship. A country is designated for TPS when conditions there are so bad that it’s not safe or economically viable for people to return, for instance in case of hurricanes and other natural disasters or war and political instability. Haiti was granted TPS status after the horrific earthquake of 2010 that killed more than 300,000 people. This was followed by Hurricane Matthew that devastated Haiti’s southern peninsula in 2016 and the disastrous 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in August 2021. By July of 2024, over 520,000 Haitians had been granted TPS, and they are now in the crosshairs of ICE and Homeland Security.
Many of the Haitians who are impacted by this inhumane ruling have been in the United States for years and have families with children who are US citizens. They own homes and businesses, and pay taxes. Deportations will break up families with the US-born children having the option to remain in the country (assuming birthright citizenship is not overturned), and their undocumented parents forced to return to a country called a “living hell” by those who live there.
The current conditions in Haiti are exactly what TPS was set up to address, and it’s unconscionable for the Trump administration to pretend otherwise. There are now no elected officials in Haiti, the result of years of rule by decree by imposed and illegitimate governments, installed by the US and its so-called Core Group of foreign occupiers in the wake of the coup d’etat that overthrew Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, in 2004. In the last year alone, over 5000 Haitians have been killed by paramilitary death squads, armed with weapons that enter the country illegally, mainly from the US. Over one million Haitians have had to flee their homes. Nearly half the population is facing acute hunger, as roads are blocked and markets attacked. Tens of thousands of children have been unable to attend schools. Gang rapes have become the norm as paramilitaries aligned with government and business elites escalate their attacks on opposition communities. The despised Haitian Army, disbanded by President Aristide in 1995, has been reconstituted, readying itself to commit yet more human rights violations.
Already there are lawsuits and protests to prevent mass deportations of Haitians. Haiti Action Committee will be doing all we can to advocate for ongoing TPS protection for Haitians in this country and for an end to the death squad terror in Haiti that has fueled Haitian migration. Please join us in this fight.
To contact us, please go to: action.haiti@gmail.com
For more information, please go to www.haitisolidarity.net or our facebook page athttps://www.facebook.com/HaitiActionCommittee
To support the vital work of Haiti’s grassroots movement, please donate to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund at www.haitiemergencyrelief.org--Haiti Action CommitteePO Box 2040Berkeley,CA 9470233 years of solidarity with the grassroots struggle for dignity, democracy and self-determination of the Haitian people! We Will Not Forget the Achievements of Lavalas in HaitiPlease donate to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund www.haitiemergencyrelief.org - all donations are tax-deductible and support Haiti's grassroots struggle for democracy
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URGENT STEP ONE:
Demand EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER & TREATMENT
FOR IMAM JAMIL
The Bureau of Prisons is denying medical treatment to Imam
Jamil Al-Amin, 81 years old, formerly known as H. Rap Brown.
He has a potentially life-threatening growth on his face, on
top of his multiple myeloma (cancer) & other significant
medical issues.
A civil and human rights leader, wrongfully imprisoned for
the past 24 years, he needs Your Help to avoid his
Death By Medical Neglect
CALL TUCSON COMPLEX 520-663-5000
EMAIL WARDEN Mark Gutierrez, mggutierrez@bop.gov
Give Name & Inmate Number: Jamil Al-Amin, #99974-555
Demand they grant Imam Jamil an EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER from United States Penitentiary (USP) Tucson to Federal Medical Center (FMC) Butner for his Immediate Medical Treatment NOW!!
***Deputy Director of BOP [Bureau of Prisons], (202) 307-3198
URGENT STEP TWO:
Tell his Congressional Delegation of his condition, Urge them to use their offices to inquire the BOP & demand that their constituent (Imam Jamil, West End Community Masjid, 547 West End Pl., SW, Atlanta) receive the emergency medical transfer, diagnosis & treatment.
- 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
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) More Universities Are Choosing to Stay Neutral on the Biggest Issues
Instead of speaking out on the hot-button debates of the day, more schools are making it a policy to stay silent as political pressure mounts against higher education.
By Vimal Patel, March 11, 2025
The University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor last year. The school adopted an institutional neutrality policy in October. Credit...Nic Antaya for The New York Times
Just a few years ago, university statements on the day’s social and political issues abounded.
When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, Harvard’s president at the time called it “senseless” and “deplorable,” and flew the invaded country’s flag in Harvard Yard. After George Floyd died under the knee of a white police officer, Cornell’s president said she was “sickened.” The University of Michigan’s president described the Oct. 7, 2023, violence against Israel as a “horrific attack by Hamas terrorists.”
But over the last year, each of those universities has adopted policies that limit official statements on current issues.
According to a new report released on Tuesday from the Heterodox Academy, a group that has been critical of progressive orthodoxy on college campuses, 148 colleges had adopted “institutional neutrality” policies by the end of 2024, a trend that underscores the scorching political scrutiny they are under. All but eight of those policies were adopted after the Hamas attack.
“We must open the way for our individual faculty’s expertise, intelligence, scholarship and wisdom to inform our state and society in their own voice, free from institutional interference,” said Mark Bernstein, a regent at Michigan, after adopting the policy in October.
He said the university had historically refrained from issuing statements on momentous events, like the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy or during the two world wars.
“So institutional statements are a modern phenomenon and a misguided venture that betrays our public mission,” he said.
The universities are adopting such policies at a time when the Trump administration has moved aggressively to punish them for not doing enough to crack down on antisemitism and for embracing diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
On Friday, the administration announced that it was pulling $400 million from Columbia, a move that sent shock waves across higher education. The administration has already said it is looking to target other universities.
Universities ramped up issuing statements on hot-button issues about a decade ago, after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the police shootings of Black people in places like Ferguson, Mo., said Alex Arnold, director of research at the Heterodox Academy.
Some conservatives had long lamented such statements and believed they veered too leftward. Speech groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression worried that they discouraged dissent. For a while, the statements were hardly the subject of widespread controversy.
The Hamas attack and the war that followed changed the equation.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always split the left, but the attack on Oct. 7 and the war that followed sharpened those divisions. The statements that universities issued on the attack and Israel’s bombing of Gaza came under scrutiny, and were often criticized for being too late, too weak, too biased — or all three.
University leaders, under pressure from donors, lawmakers and the public, began to ask: Why put out statements at all?
About four out of five colleges that adopted neutrality policies are public and face scrutiny from state lawmakers. Several states, including Texas and Utah and North Carolina, forced their public universities to adopt such policies. Others, like Tennessee, are considering it.
Most of the new policies apply to senior administrators, like college presidents and provosts. Others also encompass units like academic departments. And many apply to faculty members when they are speaking in an official capacity, but often make clear that faculty are free to express personal views, according to the Heterodox Academy.
“The whole experience of coping with the campus controversy triggered by the Hamas attack has really gotten institutional leaders to think carefully and to reflect on what the function of our institutions of higher education is,” Mr. Arnold said. “I do think this is probably going to be a pretty durable change.”
Critics of the neutrality trend have argued that administrators are merely sidestepping difficult debates on the Middle East conflict, and scared of angering donors and lawmakers.
After Clark University, in Massachusetts, said it would shy away from taking positions, the school newspaper’s opinion editor called the move a “fake policy” designed to curb discussion of the conflict.
But even universities that adopted such a policy have not gone totally silent on contested political issues.
At an Anti-Defamation League event in New York City last week, Michigan’s president, Santa Ono, called the effort to boycott, divest and sanction Israel antisemitic, and said his response had been to invest even more in those partnerships.
In an email, the university said the new neutrality policy adopted a “heavy presumption” against issuing statements “not directly connected to internal university functions.”
“Combating antisemitism and making sure we have an environment where all students can thrive and succeed is part of our moral and legal obligation, and absolutely connected to our internal functions as an institution of higher education,” said Colleen Mastony, a Michigan spokeswoman.
Presidents are often stumbling over their new policies. During an October interview with the school newspaper, Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, called a statement by pro-Palestinian students “offensive,” prompting the editorial board to tell him to “follow your own policy.”
Last month, the American Association of University Professors, a faculty rights group, issued a statement on neutrality that was, more or less, neutral. It stated that the idea “is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it.”
The re-election of Donald Trump is now testing those policies.
As the new administration, which has described universities as “the enemy,” ratchets up its attack on higher education, colleges are under greater pressure to be voices of resistance.
But many college presidents have been spooked into silence, said Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, a small Catholic institution three miles from the White House.
“They look at what happened to Claudine Gay, and some of the other presidents,” she said, referring to the former Harvard president who resigned last year after a congressional hearing on antisemitism. “And they’re like: ‘I don’t want that to happen to me. So I’ll just shut up and hunker down, and hope this cloud passes.’”
No university is more associated with neutrality than the University of Chicago, where incoming students are furnished with the Kalven Report, the 1967 document that made the case for neutrality. The report, penned as violence upended college campuses during the Vietnam War, said the university “is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”
Tom Ginsburg, director of the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression at Chicago, says adopting neutrality signals to lawmakers that colleges are committed to welcoming diverse viewpoints.
“Because the statements tended to reflect the majority views on campuses, which are overwhelmingly left-leaning,” he said, “you can see how adopting it would be a way of saying to lawmakers: ‘This isn’t who we really are. We’re not indoctrinating people with contested positions.’”
But even the Kalven Report included a caveat that doesn’t settle precisely when universities should issue statements. Neutrality, the report says, still allows colleges to speak out when “the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry” are threatened.
That moment is now, said Ms. McGuire of Trinity Washington University. “The erosion of knowledge and expertise that this administration has embraced is very, very scary,” she said, “and higher ed should be calling it out at every turn.”
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2) Among American Jews, a Schism Over ICE Arrest of Columbia Activist
Some organizations applauded the move. But the raid chilled other American Jews, even some who consider themselves supporters of Israel.
By Marc Tracy and Eliza Shapiro, March 11, 2025
Protesters gathered outside the Jacob Javits Federal Building in Manhattan after immigration authorities detained Mahmoud Khalil, who has been active in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian movement. Credit...Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times.
The arrest of a former Columbia University graduate student who gained prominence amid that campus’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations has divided the American Jewish community, which finds itself trying to reconcile a longstanding focus on Jewish safety and support for Israel with a historical commitment to civil liberties.
Immigration authorities’ detention of the activist, Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident, has satisfied some American Jews who had wished for blunt action from Columbia in recent months as protest groups praised Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in which the group killed about 1,200 people and abducted 250, and as masked protesters disrupted classes and occupied university buildings.
A few hours after news broke on Sunday of the arrest of Mr. Khalil, who has not been accused of having contact with Hamas, the Anti-Defamation League, a century-old organization committed to fighting antisemitism, released a statement applauding the “swift and severe consequences for those who provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations.”
But the raid chilled other American Jews — among them ones who consider themselves supporters of Israel and ones troubled primarily by Israel’s military response, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, including many women and children. They see their security as inextricably bound up with that of other minority groups.
“Any Jew who thinks this is going to start and stop with a few Palestinian activists is fooling themselves,” Amy Spitalnick, who runs the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and identifies as a progressive Zionist, said on social media on Monday morning. “Our community should not be used as an excuse to upend democracy & the rule of law.”
Mr. Khalil, who is married to an American citizen, was detained on Saturday by federal immigration officers, in a striking escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on what it sees as a scourge of antisemitism on college campuses. He is being detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana. A federal judge in Manhattan on Monday ordered the government not to deport Mr. Khalil while the judge reviewed legal filings challenging his detention.
Mr. Khalil’s arrest sparked alarm among immigration advocates and lawyers about how the Trump administration will justify revoking his green card, an unusual step that, in a vast majority of cases, follows a criminal conviction.
On Monday, President Trump said on social media that the detention represented “the first arrest of many to come.” He called Mr. Khalil “a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student.” The White House’s X account wrote, “SHALOM, MAHMOUD,” using the Hebrew word for “goodbye” as well as “hello” and “peace.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on social media after the arrest that he planned to revoke “the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” Mr. Khalil’s precise orientation with the group Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which has spoken approvingly of Hamas’s attack, is unclear. He has described his role to reporters as a negotiator and spokesman.
If the Trump administration and its partisans were united in supporting the raid, the American Jewish community, in whose name Mr. Trump appeared to say he was acting, was notably divided.
On one side were some Jewish groups like the A.D.L., which saw Hamas’s attack on Israel as inaugurating a new era of heightened antisemitism that required “bold, brave” responses.
Rabbi Moshe Hauer, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, favorably contrasted the arrest in a statement with previous “drawn-out bureaucratic processes” that he said failed to address campus antisemitism. “New, aggressive, and legal tactics are clearly needed,” he said.
Ari Shrage, the co-founder of the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association, said the group’s criticism of campus protests and its praise of Mr. Khalil’s arrest should not be mistaken for a desire to crack down on speech.
“We have a problem with students taking over buildings, which prevents students from going to class, and distributing pro-Hamas materials which advocate for violence against Jews,” he said.
But for several left-wing Jewish groups, the arrest signaled creeping authoritarianism.
“It is utterly despicable that they are carrying out this authoritarian lurch under the guise of fighting for Jewish safety,” Eva Borgwardt, the national spokesperson for IfNotNow, a Jewish group that is often critical of Israel, said of the Trump administration.
Sophie Ellman-Golan, the director of strategic communications for Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, added, “Jews, regardless of where they stand on political activism and organizing, feel in their bones how deeply dangerous this is.”
That sentiment was echoed during a news conference near Columbia on Monday evening by several Jewish professors and activists who accused the Trump administration of using legitimate antisemitism as a pretext to further its goals of deportation and limiting free speech.
“What’s happening on this campus — or to this campus — is not about protecting Jews,” said Marianne Hirsch, a retired English professor and Holocaust scholar whose parents were Holocaust survivors. “Pro-Palestinian speech and activism does not mean a lack of safety for Jews,” she added.
Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia who has supported the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, said in an interview that Mr. Khalil, whom he knows, is “dedicated to negotiation, mediation and finding peaceful agreements to conflicts.”
Professor Howley also noted that Mr. Khalil did not obscure his identity. Opponents of the protests, including the A.D.L., have blamed some protesters for wearing masks to hide their faces. Several faculty members even proposed a universitywide ban on face coverings at classes and other events.
But Mr. Khalil’s is a familiar face to critics and supporters alike. Over the past week, Mr. Khalil has been singled out on social media by critics of the protests.
The dispute among Jewish organizations represents more than just the general polarization of American life. Mr. Khalil’s case highlights fundamental tensions in the American Jewish community’s sense of how best to ensure its own security.
The American Jewish establishment has long defended civil liberties and the rule of law, seeing them as crucial bulwarks against the kinds of threats that many Jews fled Europe and elsewhere to escape. But American Jews are also vigilant against antisemitism, and for many people, supporting Israel has long been central and viewed as part of that vigilance.
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City, said that defending Jews from supporters of Hamas — designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government, he noted — is of paramount concern.
At the same time, he argued for protecting civil liberties. “What I believe,” he said, “is what the mainstream of the American Jewish community believes. We have always been at the vanguard of free speech.”
Jonathan Jacoby, the national director of the Nexus Project, a progressive Jewish group, expressed concern that the arrest and promised crackdown would widen divides between Jews and other minority groups.
“There has never been a safer and more flourishing experience than the American Jewish experience, living as a free people in an open society,” he said. “Anything that endangers that, or our relationships with other Americans — those are all Jewish concerns.”
Columbia became the epicenter of university protests against the war in Gaza last year when students set up a tent city on a campus lawn.
Some Jewish students joined the protests, but others said the encampments made them question their safety and sense of belonging on campus. A scathing report on antisemitism at Columbia found that some Jewish students, particularly more religious ones who wore visible markers of their faith like head coverings, had been intimidated, harassed and physically attacked by protesters.
“Particular aspersions cast upon Jewish and Israeli students resonate with the history of antisemitism and, given what we know about the past, such representations can lead to further acts of aggression and exclusion,” the report’s authors wrote last summer.
Nor did the confrontational protests end last school year. In January, four masked protesters entered a class on the history of Israel taught by an Israeli professor. They accused Columbia of “normalizing genocide” and handed out antisemitic fliers.
Two of those students were expelled in February, touching off another round of protests at Barnard College, the affiliated women’s college across the street from Columbia’s main campus. Videos of an unmasked Mr. Khalil at the sit-in were soon circulated on social media among critics of Columbia’s protest movement, with some calling for him to be deported.
Shayla Colon and Sharla Steinman contributed reporting.
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3) The U.S. Is Trying to Deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Legal Resident. Here’s What to Know.
Mr. Khalil, who helped lead protests at Columbia University against high civilian casualties in Gaza, was arrested by immigration officers and sent to a detention center in Louisiana.
By Minho Kim, Reporting from Washington, Published March 10, 2025, Updated March 11, 2025
Protesters in Manhattan on Monday. Credit...Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times
The Trump administration invoked an obscure statute over the weekend in moving to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent legal resident of the United States who recently graduated from Columbia University, where he helped lead campus protests against high civilian casualties in Gaza during Israel’s campaign against Hamas.
Mr. Khalil was arrested by immigration officers on Saturday and then sent to a detention center in Louisiana. On Monday, a federal judge in New York, Jesse M. Furman, ordered the federal government not to deport Mr. Khalil while he reviewed a petition challenging the legality of the detention.
Here’s what to know about the administration’s attempt to deport Mr. Khalil.
Who is the Columbia graduate?
Mr. Khalil, 30, earned a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December. He has Palestinian heritage and is married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant.
At Columbia last spring, Mr. Khalil assumed a major role in student-led protests on campus against Israel’s war efforts in Gaza. He described his position as a negotiator and spokesman for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-Palestinian group.
What’s the legal basis for his arrest?
The Trump administration did not publicly lay out the legal authority for the arrest. But two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio relied on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that gives him sweeping power to expel foreigners.
The provision says that any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”
What is Mr. Khalil being accused of?
That is not very clear.
Mr. Rubio reposted a Homeland Security Department statement that accused Mr. Khalil of having “led activities aligned to Hamas.” But officials have not accused him of having any contact with the terrorist group, taking direction from it or providing material support to it.
Rather, the administration’s rationale is that the protests that Mr. Khalil played a key part in were antisemitic and created a hostile environment for Jewish students at Columbia, the people with knowledge of the matter said. Mr. Rubio’s argument, they said, is that the United States’ foreign policy includes combating antisemitism across the globe and that Mr. Khali’s residency in the nation undermines that policy objective.
Could this happen to more visa or green card holders?
President Trump said Mr. Khalil’s case was “the first arrest of many to come.”
But a lawful permanent resident, or green card holder, is protected by the Constitution, which includes First Amendment free-speech rights and Fifth Amendment due-process rights. The Trump administration’s efforts to deport Mr. Khalil under the I.N.A. provision are likely to face a constitutional challenge, several legal experts said.
What happens next?
There is little precedent for deporting a legal permanent resident based on the provision of the 1952 law that gives the State Secretary a broad power to do so on foreign-policy grounds.
A lawyer for Mr. Khalil, Amy Greer, said her client would “vigorously” challenge the Trump administration’s actions in court. On Monday, Judge Furman, of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, scheduled a hearing for two days later after barring the Trump administration from deporting Mr. Khalil “to preserve the court’s jurisdiction.”
What has President Trump said about pro-Palestinian protesters?
Since 2023, Mr. Trump has repeatedly vowed to revoke visas of international students who participate in pro-Palestinian protests and criticize Israel’s war efforts.
At a rally in Iowa on Oct. 16, 2023, Mr. Trump declared that “in the wake of the attacks on Israel, Americans have been disgusted to see the open support for terrorists among the legions of foreign nationals on college campuses. They’re teaching your children hate.”
He added: “Under the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical, anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges and universities, and we will send them straight back home.”
At a speech in Las Vegas on Oct. 28 of that year, Mr. Trump said that “we’ll terminate the visas of all of those Hamas sympathizers, and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country.” And at a Nov. 8, 2023, campaign stop in Florida, he said he would “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism.”
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4) Despair Haunts Ramadan for Palestinians Displaced in West Bank
An Israeli military operation has uprooted tens of thousands of Palestinians who can’t break their fast in their own homes and don’t know when, or if, they will ever return.
By Fatima AbdulKarim, Reporting from Jenin in the West Bank, March 11, 2025
The bustle of Ramadan markets has been reduced to a trickle of somber shoppers. A heavy silence has replaced lively chatter. No lanterns glow in windows, and the strings of lights that crisscrossed alleyways, flickering above children playing in the streets, have gone dark.
“Ramadan used to shine,” said Mahmoud Sukkar, a father of four in the West Bank. “Now, it’s just darkness.”
The holy month has long been commemorated in Palestinian cities by traditions deeply rooted in fasting, community and spiritual devotion. Families gathered in the evenings around tables laden with traditional dishes for iftar — fast-breaking meals. Neighbors shared food and other offerings, and nights were illuminated by crescent-shape lights.
But this year is different.
In the West Bank cities of Jenin and Tulkarm, especially the sprawling refugee camps in the Israeli-occupied territory, the streets that once glowed and reverberated with the laughter of children are shrouded in grief. An Israeli military operation that began in January led 40,000 Palestinians to flee their homes, what historians have called the biggest displacement of civilians in the West Bank since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.
For the first time in decades, Israeli forces sent tanks into Jenin and established a military post in Tulkarm. Nearly 50 people have been killed since the incursion began, according to Palestinian officials. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said the operation aimed to eradicate “terrorism.”
Before Israel’s operation began, the Palestinian Authority had been carrying out an extensive security operation in Jenin, which had become a haven for Iran-backed armed fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
A year ago, multiple officials told The New York Times that Iran was operating a clandestine smuggling route to delivering weapons to Palestinians in the West Bank.
While nearly 3,000 Palestinians have returned home since the start of Israel’s military operation, most remain displaced.
Mr. Sukkar, 40, and his wife, Na’ila, 34, fled Jenin with their children and his mother on the third day of the Israeli operation. They left with only the clothes they were wearing — no heirlooms, no keepsakes, none of the decorations they used to commemorate Ramadan.
Their displacement fragmented the family, with Mr. Sukkar and their 9-year-old son moving to a friend’s home, and his wife, her mother-in-law and three younger children staying with relatives. But as Ramadan approached, they sought to reunite.
“We couldn’t stay apart,” Mr. Sukkar said. “Ramadan means we have to be together. And we don’t want to remain a burden on others.”
Mr. Sukkar worked in Israel before the war with Hamas erupted in Gaza in October 2023, but he has been mostly unemployed since. With no stable income, the family eventually found rent-free housing in dorms at Arab American University in Jenin, an initiative funded by the government. They moved in one day before Ramadan, relieved to have a space of their own.
But the struggles of displacement persist.
“We left with nothing,” Mr. Sukkar said. “Now, we don’t know where we belong.”
Palestinians in Jenin long not just for safety, but also for the sights, sounds and tastes that make Ramadan a time of joy and reflection. With tens of thousands displaced, many families can’t break their fast in their own homes.
In the central market in Jenin city, street vendors stand by with racks of seasoned greens and plastic gallons of lemonade and carob juice. But instead of seeing excited shoppers hurrying to prepare for iftar, they face people moving quietly, their faces heavy with exhaustion and worry, navigating the sidewalks rather than the crowded stalls.
In previous years, families would stroll together after breaking their fast, visiting relatives or buying knafeh, a sweet made of dough and white cheese. Now, the streets remain mostly empty.
The musaharati, the traditional night caller who used to walk through neighborhoods beating a drum to wake people for suhoor — the predawn meal before fasting — no longer makes his rounds. For generations, he would stop by doorsteps to collect small donations in exchange for his Ramadan blessings.
“He won’t knock on our door this year,” Ms. Sukkar said. “We don’t have a door to knock on.”
In Tulkarm, Ramadan is overshadowed by a sense of uncertainty, residents say. The presence of the Israeli military not only instills fear, but it also disrupts the very rhythm of daily life.
Intisar Nafe’, an activist displaced from the Tulkarm camp, said she had taken pride in cooking for her community. Her small kitchen had been a refuge, her meals a gesture of care. Her iftar table would have been filled with musakhan, a fragrant chicken dish, or maftoul, hand-rolled couscous.
“Nothing is like Ramadan this year,” she said in a phone interview. “I used to cook for others, help in Ramadan kitchens. Now, I’m waiting for someone to feed me.”
Ms. Nafe’ was displaced with her sister and nieces when her home was destroyed in a military operation, she said. She first moved into a mosque with them while the rest of her family scattered. She, her sister and nieces later rented a small apartment in Tulkarem city.
“Ramadan is about family,” she said. “It’s about breaking bread together, sharing meals, visiting one another. Without that, what is left?”
She misses watching Ramadan-themed Arab and Turkish soap operas and the traditions surrounding Ramadan meals.
“My mother, now 88, learned these dishes from my grandmother, who was a Nakba survivor,” she said, referring to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948. “Our kitchen was a continuation of the homes we lost.”
Ramadan’s meal structure — breaking the fast with water and dates, followed by soup, salad and a main course — is now a privilege that few displaced Palestinians can afford. For many in Jenin, iftar is a boxed meal delivered by volunteers. Every evening around 5 o’clock, people rush outside to receive the donations. The meals often arrive cold.
“We do what we can to make it feel like home,” Ms. Sukkar said. “I pour water into plastic cups. I lay out what little we have. But it’s not the same.”
A nostalgic smile flickered across her face. “My iftar table in Ramadan used to be the most beautiful thing,” she continued. “Maybe our house in the camp was small and crowded, but with time, neighbors became family. It was our little paradise, our safety.”
Many displaced families are uncertain when, or if, they will ever return home. Israel has given no sign of ending its operation soon.
“Ramadan is supposed to be a time of renewal,” Ms. Nafe’ said, “but in Tulkarm, it is a month of waiting — waiting for news, waiting for a sign that life might return to what it once was.”
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5) Education Department Fires 1,300 Workers, Gutting Its Staff
The layoffs mean that the department will now have a work force of about half the size it did when President Trump took office.
By Michael C. Bender and Dana Goldstein, Reporting from Washington, Published March 11, 2025, Updated March 12, 2025
Demonstrators protested cuts to the Education Department in Washington on Tuesday. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
The Education Department announced on Tuesday that it was firing more than 1,300 workers, effectively gutting the agency that manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools.
The layoffs mean that the department, which started the year with 4,133 employees, will now have a work force of about half that size after less than two months with President Trump in office. In addition to the 1,315 workers who were fired on Tuesday, 572 employees accepted separation packages offered in recent weeks and 63 probationary workers were terminated last month.
The cuts could portend an additional move by Mr. Trump to essentially dismantle the department, as he has said he wants to do, even though it cannot be closed without the approval of Congress.
Linda McMahon, the education secretary, described the layoffs as part of an effort to deliver services more efficiently and said the changes would not affect student loans, Pell Grants, funding for special needs students or competitive grant making.
“Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents and teachers,” Ms. McMahon said in a statement.
Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, wrote on social media that he had spoken with Ms. McMahon and received assurance that cuts would not affect the department’s “ability to carry out its statutory obligations.”
Sheria Smith, the president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents more than 2,800 workers at the Education Department, said the Trump administration had “no respect for the thousands of workers who have dedicated their careers to serve their fellow Americans” and vowed to fight the cuts.
The department’s Office of Civil Rights had particularly steep cuts, with regional centers shuttered or reduced to a skeleton crew, including those in New York, San Francisco and Boston. The office, already understaffed, regularly struggled to work through lengthy civil rights investigations. It had accumulated a heavy backlog of cases under the Biden administration after protests roiled campuses across the country last year.
“We will not stand idly by while this regime pulls the wool over the eyes of the American people,” Ms. Smith said.
Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, said the changes would drain job training programs and increase costs of higher education.
“The real victims will be our most vulnerable students,” Ms. Pringle said.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly said he wants to close the Education Department and instead rely on states and local school districts to fully oversee America’s education system. The president adopted the stringent position during the 2024 campaign to align himself with the parents’ rights movement that grew out of the backlash to school shutdowns and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic.
That movement gained steam by organizing around opposition to left-leaning ideas in the curriculum, especially on L.G.B.T.Q. issues and race. Activists contended that those priorities undermined parental rights and values.
An executive order to dismantle the department would challenge the authority of Congress, which created the department by statute and legally must sign off on any move to close it. In a closely divided Senate, it is unlikely the administration could find enough support to do so, particularly as public opinion polls during the past two months have consistently shown roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose closing the department.
But Mr. Trump may be forging ahead anyway. He has talked about moving some of the agency’s work with student loans to the Treasury Department. Education Department officials visited the Treasury Department on Monday to prepare for the shift, said one person familiar with the planning.
In her confirmation hearing last month, Ms. McMahon discussed moving civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department and services for disabled students to the Health and Human Services Department.
Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the second Trump term, also laid out a detailed plan for eliminating the department. The proposal envisioned moving much of agency’s work to other arms of the federal government. Student aid, for example, would be handled by the Treasury Department; vocational education by the Labor Department; and disability education by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Rumors about potential layoffs began circulating around the Education Department after workers received an email around 2 p.m. announcing that the agency’s offices in the Washington area would be closed on Wednesday and reopen on Thursday. The email did not provide a reason for the closure, but the administration gave similarly cryptic notices about temporarily closing offices before severe cuts last month at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Department officials later told reporters that the building closure was related to the layoffs, and was done out of an abundance of caution to protect the safety of workers keeping their jobs.
Workers who lost their jobs were informed in emails sent after 6 p.m. on Tuesday, after they had left for the day. They will remain on the payroll for 90 days, receiving full pay and benefits, and be given one week of pay for each of their first 10 years of service and two weeks’ pay for every year of service beyond 10 years.
They will also be given time in the coming weeks to return to the department and collect their belongings, agency officials said.
About 75 former agency workers had gathered outside the department’s headquarters in Washington on Tuesday morning to rally opposition to the cuts pushed by the administration.
At the end of the rally, Dorie Turner Nolt, one of the organizers, urged the crowd members to face the building and cheer their former colleagues inside who, she said, were doing their best to uphold democracy. Several workers inside the building pressed up against the windows, waving their hands and flashing a thumbs-up amid the ovation.
Later that evening, a woman left the building carrying a stack of government laptops to a group of colleagues waiting at the curb so they could check their emails to see if they were let go. The woman, who declined to give her name out of fear of retribution, said she had worked for years at the agency overseeing payments from the department.
Mr. Trump has radically upended federal agencies at the start of his second term by relying on a team overseen by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to shrink and disrupt the federal government. Mr. Musk’s team has taken aim at more than 20 agencies while gaining access to sensitive government data systems.
Ms. McMahon told Fox last week that she had held regular meetings with Mr. Musk’s team. “I’ve been very appreciative of the things they’ve shown us, some of the waste, and we’re reacting to that,” she said.
Brent McDonald, Zach Montague and Erica L. Green contributed reporting.
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6) E.P.A. Plans to Close All Environmental Justice Offices
An internal memo directs the closure of offices designed to ease the heavy pollution faced by poor and minority communities.
By Lisa Friedman, Published March 11, 2025, Updated March 12, 2025
The decision comes after the E.P.A.’s administrator, Lee Zeldin (center), canceled hundreds of grants this week, many of them designated for environmental justice. Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
The Trump administration intends to eliminate Environmental Protection Agency offices responsible for addressing the disproportionately high levels of pollution facing poor communities, according to a memo from Lee Zeldin, the agency administrator.
In the internal memo, viewed by The New York Times, Mr. Zeldin informed agency leaders that he was directing “the reorganization and elimination” of the offices of environmental justice at all 10 E.P.A. regional offices as well as the one in Washington.
Mr. Zeldin’s move effectively ends three decades of work at the E.P.A. to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities, which are frequently located near highways, power plants, industrial plants and other polluting facilities. Studies have shown that people who live in those communities have higher rates of asthma, heart disease and other health problems, compared with the national average.
“If anybody needed a clearer sign that this administration gives not a single damn for the people of the United States, this is it,” said Matthew Tejada, a former E.P.A. official who is now a senior vice president for environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit organization.
Molly Vaseliou, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, described the moves as “organizational improvements” that align with President Trump’s orders to end wasteful spending and diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
In a statement, Mr. Zeldin suggested that environmental justice — which the agency defined in 2013 as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income” with respect to environmental laws — was tantamount to discrimination.
“President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people,” Mr. Zeldin said. “Part of this mandate includes the elimination of forced discrimination programs.”
The decision comes after Mr. Zeldin canceled hundreds of grants this week, many of them designated for environmental justice.
Last month, Mr. Zeldin placed 168 employees who work on environmental justice on leave, but this week a federal judge forced him to rehire dozens of them after finding that the action had no legal basis. Several E.P.A. employees said they were bracing for many of those people to again be eliminated, as the agency and others prepared for widespread reductions in force.
Last week, the E.P.A. and the Justice Department dropped a lawsuit against a petrochemical plant by the Biden administration, which had argued that the plant increased the cancer risk in a predominantly Black community in Louisiana.
The lawsuit was one of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s most visible efforts to try to improve conditions in an area that is known as “Cancer Alley” because of its history with toxic pollution.
The E.P.A. withdrew its referral of the case for prosecution “to align with Administrator Lee Zeldin’s pledge to end the use of ‘environmental justice’ as a tool for advancing ideological priorities,” the Justice Department said in a news release.
As president, Mr. Biden emphasized the need to address the unequal burden that people of color carry from exposure to environmental hazards. He created the White House Office of Environmental Justice and directed federal agencies to deliver 40 percent of the benefits of environmental programs to marginalized communities that face a disproportionate amount of pollution. The E.P.A.’s Office of Environmental Justice, which was created by the Clinton administration, significantly expanded under Mr. Biden.
The Trump administration has now erased all of that.
“This doesn’t make America healthier or greater,” Mr. Tejada said. “It makes us sicker, smaller and uglier than we have been in at least a generation.”
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7) Republican Refers to Transgender Member as a Man, Cutting Short a House Hearing
Representative Keith Self of Texas insisted on calling Representative Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress, “Mr. McBride,” and adjourned the session when challenged about it.
By Annie Karni, Reporting from the Capitol, Published March 11, 2025, Updated March 12, 2025
After the Republican lawmaker misgendered Representative Sarah McBride of Delaware (first from the right), the ranking Democrat in the subcommittee spoke up in her defense. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times; Kenny Holston/The New York Times
A Republican lawmaker abruptly adjourned a congressional hearing on Tuesday after being challenged for referring to Representative Sarah McBride, Democrat of Delaware and the first openly transgender lawmaker in Congress, as a man.
The Europe Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs panel was in the middle of a hearing on arms control and U.S. assistance to Europe when its chairman, Representative Keith Self of Texas, introduced his colleague by calling her “Mr. McBride.”
Ms. McBride, who entered Congress knowing she would present a unique target for Republicans who have politicized and attacked transgender people, has generally chosen to let such moments slide. On Tuesday, she briefly registered her displeasure by returning Mr. Self’s slight, responding, “Thank you, Madam Chair,” before proceeding with her remarks.
But Representative William Keating of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, was not willing to move on. He interrupted to request that Mr. Self repeat his introduction, which he did, again referring to the Delaware Democrat as “Mr. McBride.”
“Mr. Chairman, you are out of order,” Mr. Keating fired back. “Mr. Chairman, have you no decency? I mean, I’ve come to know you a little bit. But this is not decent.”
Mr. Self said it was time to continue the hearing. But Mr. Keating refused to let go.
“You will not continue it with me unless you introduce a duly elected representative the right way,” he said.
With that, Mr. Self adjourned the session.
On social media, Mr. Self later explained himself, writing that, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.” One of President Trump’s early moves of his second term was to sign an executive order that the federal government would only recognize two sexes and that they were not changeable.
House Republicans moved last year to bar transgender women from Capitol Hill women’s restrooms. And during his testy exchange with Mr. Keating, Mr. Self suggested that his refusal to refer to Ms. McBride as a woman was in line with a “standard” that had been set on the House floor.
“What is that standard, Mr. Chairman?” Mr. Keating fired back.
Mr. Self did not elaborate. But House Republicans appear to have established a practice of not referring to Ms. McBride as a woman in official proceedings. In February, when Ms. McBride rose to deliver her maiden floor speech, Representative Mary Miller, Republican of Illinois, referred to her as the “gentleman from Delaware.” Ms. McBride said nothing.
On other occasions, Republicans presiding on the floor and in hearings have tried to steer clear of the issue, recognizing her as “the member from Delaware,” even though the custom is to refer to lawmakers as “gentleman” or “gentlewoman.” In those instances, Ms. McBride has simply proceeded with her remarks.
That approach is in keeping with how she conducted herself on her campaign and in her first months in Congress: She prefers to talk about economic issues and rarely discusses or calls attention to her identity. And she generally gives her G.O.P. colleagues the benefit of the doubt when it comes to dealing with her.
“Honestly, every Republican I’ve interacted with has been warm and welcoming, save for a couple,” Ms. McBride said in an interview in January.
But some who have attacked her have only doubled down. After the contentious moment at the hearing on Tuesday, Ms. Miller threw herself back into the fight with a post on social media.
“Tim ‘Sarah’ McBride is a biological man and always will be,” she wrote, using the Democrat's birth name along with a photograph of Ms. McBride from before she transitioned. Transgender people and their allies consider it offensive to refer to them by their legal name at birth, known as their deadname, without permission.
Ms. McBride made no public comment about being misgendered during the hearing, but hours after the incident and Ms. Miller’s post, she addressed the issue obliquely in her own statement on social media.
“No matter how I’m treated by some colleagues, nothing diminishes my awe and gratitude at getting to represent Delaware in Congress,” she wrote, adding, “I simply want to serve and to try to make this world a better place.”
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8) Judge to Consider Free Speech Issues in Columbia Activist’s Arrest
The government is trying to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident and defender of the Palestinian cause, accusing him of siding with terrorists.
By Jonah E. Bromwich, Published March 11, 2025, Updated March 12, 2025
Lawyers for Mahmoud Khalil have asked a judge to return their client to New York and reunite him with his wife, an American citizen who is expected to give birth next month. Credit...Marco Postigo Storel for The New York Times
A judge on Wednesday is expected to scrutinize the constitutional issues at play in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and permanent legal resident who was arrested over the weekend and taken to a Louisiana detention center.
The judge, Jesse Furman, has ordered the government not to remove Mr. Khalil from the United States while his case is pending.
Mr. Khalil, who has Palestinian heritage, was a leader of demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza, which rocked Columbia’s campus last year. Mr. Khalil has not been accused of any crime and his swift arrest and transfer have raised alarms about free speech protections as President Trump promises to crack down on protests at colleges.
Judge Furman has the power to order Mr. Khalil’s release, but it is unclear whether he might do so as early as the conference, on Wednesday morning at 11:30. The conference, however, could provide more information about the circumstances that led to the arrest and the government’s justification for Mr. Khalil’s continuing detention.
The future of Mr. Khalil’s immigration status will be decided in a separate process. That matter will be presided over by an immigration judge, who could determine whether to revoke Mr. Khalil’s green card.
Lawyers for Mr. Khalil have asked Judge Furman to return their client to New York and reunite him with his wife, an American citizen who is expected to give birth next month. At the Wednesday conference, the lawyers are expected to argue that his detention is a clear-cut retaliation for constitutionally protected speech on behalf of Palestinian people.
“Because Mahmoud has been so prominent, active and outspoken in support of Palestinian rights, he’s been marked as a target,” said one of his lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, a co-director of CLEAR, a legal clinic at the City University of New York. “What’s being done to him is unconstitutional, it is unlawful, and we intend to do everything in our power to ensure the Trump administration will not get away with it in court.”
The government will initially be represented by lawyers from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. A spokesman for the office declined to comment on how it might address the questions raised by Mr. Khalil’s arrest.
The accusations against Mr. Khalil were not initially clear. On Sunday evening, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that he had been arrested in connection with activities he led that were “aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” The statement was reposted by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said at a press briefing on Tuesday that Mr. Rubio was relying on the Immigration and Nationality Act, which gave him broad authority to revoke a green card or a visa from anyone “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” of the United States.
“Mahmoud Khalil was an individual who was given the privilege of coming to this country to study at one of our nation’s finest universities and colleges,” Ms. Leavitt said. “And he took advantage of that opportunity, of that privilege by siding with terrorists.”
She claimed that, at the protests Mr. Khalil had led at Columbia, “pro-Hamas propaganda fliers” stamped with the organization’s logo were distributed. She declined to share the fliers with reporters, saying that doing so would corrupt the dignity of the White House briefing room.
It was not clear whether Ms. Leavitt was accusing Mr. Khalil personally of distributing the fliers, and she did not respond to an email requesting clarification.
Mr. Khalil was one of the student leaders of the demonstrations at Columbia, which set off fierce conflict. On one side were critics of Israel’s deadly war in Gaza, where tens of thousands have been killed, and on the other those who argued that the protests were antisemitic, threatening the safety of Jews on campus.
According to a declaration filed in federal court by one of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers, Amy Greer, Mr. Khalil on Friday alerted the Columbia administration about threats against him by online critics calling for his deportation. The following evening, he called Ms. Greer and told her he was surrounded by agents from the Department of Homeland Security.
Ms. Greer said that the agents told her they had a warrant to revoke a student visa. When she informed them that Mr. Khalil did not have a visa, given that he was a permanent resident, he said that the department had revoked the green card.
Ms. Greer filed the petition questioning Mr. Khalil’s detention early Sunday morning. By Sunday afternoon, she was informed that he was being transferred to Louisiana, known for what Elora Mukherjee, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, characterized as “atrocious detention conditions.”
Ms. Leavitt in her press briefing echoed a warning from President Trump this week, saying that Mr. Khalil was only the first to be targeted. She said that Columbia had the names of others who had “engaged in pro-Hamas activity” and that the school was “refusing to help” the Homeland Security Department identify them.
Mr. Trump, she said, “is not going to tolerate that and we expect all America’s colleges and universities to comply with this administration’s policy.”
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9) In Duterte’s Arrest, Shifting Political Winds Deliver a Chance for Justice
Running parallel to Rodrigo Duterte’s transfer to the International Court of Justice in The Hague is a monthslong feud with the Philippines’ current president.
By Sui-Lee Wee, March 12, 2025
The arrest warrant was delivered to President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. of the Philippines in Manila at 3 a.m. Monday. The person named on it: his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, the firebrand whose war on drugs left thousands of people dead.
But acting on the warrant from the International Criminal Court was not straightforward, since the Philippines is not a member of the court. So at 6:30 a.m., Mr. Marcos’s government received another warrant for Mr. Duterte, this time from Interpol, which was acting on the court’s behalf and of which the Philippines is a member.
Mr. Marcos recalled his next step in an address to the nation on Tuesday. “OK, we’ll put all our plans into place, and let’s proceed as we had discussed,” he relayed having told the head of his justice department.
Just over 24 hours later, Mr. Duterte — who long seemed above the law — was arrested in Manila. By the end of Tuesday, he had been put on a plane bound for The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity.
It was a swift coda to a long chapter of impunity in the Philippines. Only a handful of people have been convicted in connection with the killings in Mr. Duterte’s drug war, in which as many as 30,000 are estimated to have died. Now, the man who publicly took credit for the carnage was being sent to a court of law to face justice, in part because of a shift in political winds.
Mr. Marcos, the son of the dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, rose to power after forming an alliance with Sara Duterte, a daughter of Mr. Duterte’s. Running on a platform of national unity, they won the presidency and vice presidency in 2022. But their marriage of convenience started unraveling quickly, driven by mistrust.
Ms. Duterte, who is leading in the polls to succeed Mr. Marcos, has railed against him, saying that she wanted to cut his head off and threatening to dig up his father’s body and throw it into the ocean. Her own father called the younger Mr. Marcos a “drug addict” and a “weak leader.”
Mr. Marcos mostly brushed off the comments and said little in public. But his allies impeached Ms. Duterte last month, imperiling her political career.
Then came the arrest of her father, which she and her allies denounced as political oppression, although Mr. Marcos said he had simply been following international convention in complying with the Interpol warrant.
“This was justice, regardless of how we got here,” said Maria Ressa, the Nobel Prize-winning journalist who has long been a target of Mr. Duterte because her news website, Rappler, has investigated the drug war.
“Now, is there politics involved? There is always politics involved,” she added. “But it’s a reminder to the rest of the world that accountability comes for you sooner or later and that impunity doesn’t last forever.”
It was still hard for some Filipinos to believe that such a moment had arrived.
Florecita Perez and Joemarie Claverio’s son, Jenel Claverio, 27, was killed by masked men in Navotas in December 2019. This week, Ms. Perez said in an interview, she pumped her first in the air when she heard about Mr. Duterte’s arrest, but waited until nighttime to tell her partner, because she thought the news would make him cry.
As they were about to sleep, she hugged him from behind. “I said, ‘Hon, Duterte has been arrested.’ He turned to me and said, ‘Oh? Won’t he be able to get away?’”
Mr. Duterte landed in the Netherlands on Wednesday evening, and he was to be taken to The Hague, where both the I.C.C. and its detention facilities are based. A court official said that Mr. Duterte would not be expected to appear in court on Wednesday, but he would likely be arraigned before a three-judge panel in the next few days.
The I.C.C. typically has lengthy pretrial proceedings, and a planned trial is not expected to start for months.
Ms. Duterte was also on her way to The Hague, to help organize her father’s legal team. Another daughter of the former leader’s, Veronica Duterte, posted screen grabs of video calls with their father while he was on the plane. In one Instagram post, she wrote: “A flight lasting more than eight hours but left with just a sandwich to eat???”
But thousands of people rejoiced when the chartered flight carrying Mr. Duterte took off from an air base in Manila. To some, it was reminiscent of when Mr. Marcos’s father was ousted nearly four decades ago and fled to the United States.
“It’s not quite what it must have been like for my parents on Feb. 25 with those headlines in the newspaper, saying: ‘It’s all over, Marcos leaves,’ but it felt pretty close,” said Sol Iglesias, an assistant professor of political science at the University of the Philippines. (Critics accuse the younger Mr. Marcos of trying to whitewash history by not properly recognizing the significance of that day in 1986.)
Ms. Iglesias said it was clear that the current president had given clearance for the broad campaign to curtail the Dutertes’ power in recent months.
“None of these would have been possible without his assent,” she said.
Despite having once pledged not to cooperate with the I.C.C., Mr. Marcos told reporters in November that he would not block the court and that it had obligations with Interpol.
Mr. Duterte left office with one of the highest approval ratings in Philippine history, and Ms. Duterte is still leading polls for the presidency in 2028, but the arrest now leaves her in a highly vulnerable position. And in recent months, the Dutertes have not been able to galvanize large crowds for their protests.
In approving Mr. Duterte’s arrest, Mr. Marcos is gambling that he can eliminate the Dutertes as a political force without any major backlash. The issue is now likely to be front and center during the midterm elections, seen as a proxy battle between the Marcoses and the Dutertes, in May.
Two Duterte allies — his former aide, Christopher “Bong” Go; and a former police chief, Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa, the architect of Mr. Duterte’s drug war — are seeking re-election to the Senate. Later this year, Philippine senators will decide whether to convict Ms. Duterte over her impeachment. A ruling against her would all but put her out of the running for the top job.
So far, public sentiment seems to be behind Mr. Marcos. A March 2024 survey of more than 1,700 Filipinos showed that nearly three in five approved of the I.C.C. investigation.
On Wednesday night, in the city of Cotobato, a stronghold of Mr. Duterte, residents held banners and lit-up cellphones in protest of his arrest. A few hundred people turned up, but the demonstration soon petered out.
Marlise Simons contributed reporting from Paris, and Aie Balagtas See and Camille Elemia from Manila.
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10) DOGE Makes Its Latest Errors Harder to Find
Elon Musk’s group obscured the details of some new claims on its website, despite promises of transparency. But The Times was still able to detect another batch of mistakes.
By David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine, March 13, 2025
The reporters examined details of about 3,500 grants from the Department of Government Efficiency’s website and fact-checked them by reaching out to more than a dozen nonprofits whose grants were listed as terminated.
Elon Musk’s group continues to publish incorrect details to its website. Credit...Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has repeatedly posted error-filled data that inflated its success at saving taxpayer money. But after a series of news reports called out those mistakes, the group changed its tactics.
It began making its new mistakes harder to find, leaving its already secretive activities even less transparent than before.
Mr. Musk’s group posted a new set of claims to its website on March 2, saying it had saved taxpayers $10 billion by terminating 3,489 federal grants.
Previously when it posted new claims, DOGE, Mr. Musk’s government-restructuring effort, had included identifying details about the cuts it took credit for. That allowed the public to fact-check its work by comparing its figures with federal spending databases and talking to the groups whose funding had been cut.
This time, it did not include those details. A White House official said that was done for security purposes.
The result was that the group’s new claims appeared impossible to check.
The New York Times, at first, found a way around the group’s obfuscation. That is because Mr. Musk’s group had briefly embedded the federal identification numbers of these grants in the publicly available source code. The Times used those numbers to match DOGE’s claims with reality, and to discover that they contained the same kind of errors that it had made in the past.
Mr. Musk’s group later removed those identifiers from the code, and posted more batches of claims that could not be verified at all.
That shift was a major step back from one of Mr. Musk’s core promises about his group: that it would be “maximally transparent.”
The website is the only place where this very powerful group has given a public accounting of its work. That accounting is still incomplete: It itemizes only a fraction of the money that the group claims to have saved, $115 billion as of Wednesday. But it is extremely valuable, providing a window into the group’s priorities, and revealing its struggles with the machinery and terminology of government.
If the group is now going to fill its site with uncheckable claims, then it loses its value.
Noah Bookbinder, president of the left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the removed information appeared to be a reaction to reports about DOGE’s errors.
“They responded by giving less information publicly, so that it’s harder to question them,” Mr. Bookbinder said, “without doing anything to suggest that they’re actually correcting the mistakes, or learning from them.”
Mr. Musk’s group began releasing its data on what it called its “wall of receipts” in mid-February, and started by detailing the savings it had achieved by canceling federal contracts. Those posts contained mistakes that seemed to indicate a lack of familiarity with the government that the group is trying to overhaul.
The group posted a claim that confused billions with millions, triple-counted the savings from a single contract and claimed credit for canceling contracts that had ended under President George W. Bush.
DOGE deleted some of its largest claims about the savings from canceled contracts after news reports pointed out that they were wrong.
Nonetheless, that list of canceled contracts still contains errors. On Wednesday, the group was still claiming credit for saving $1.9 billion by canceling an Internal Revenue Service contract for tech help. But that contract was canceled under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The website posted it, deleted it, then restored it. The group has not responded to questions about why either time.
The new, harder-to-trace set of claims deal with another kind of federal spending: not contracts, but grant payments. Those disbursements are often made for services performed by a nonprofit or nongovernmental organization, such as those affiliated with the United Nations.
The public-facing website displayed only a few details about each grant, including the name of the agency that gave out the grant and the dollar amount saved after cancellation. That is not enough to identify which grants it was referring to. However, the website’s source code listed identifiers for each of the terminated grants.
The group deleted this identifying information from the code later in the week. But The Times had previously downloaded the code before that change was made, and used the identifiers to match the group’s claims with real grants.
At least five of the 20 largest “savings” appeared to be exaggerated, according to federal data and interviews with the nonprofits whose grants were on the list.
The largest item on the list was savings of $1.75 billion, which the group said it achieved by cutting a U.S. Agency for International Development grant. But the organization that got the grant — a public-health nonprofit called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — said that information was wrong twice over.
For one, the grant had not been terminated. Second, the government had already paid out all the money it owed. So even if the grant had been terminated, the savings would have been $0.
In other cases, Mr. Musk’s group seemed to misunderstand a key figure in U.S.A.I.D. grants.
Nonprofits said these grants often contain a ceiling value — an upper limit on what the government might pay. But the groups said that this top amount is not always guaranteed. In some cases, the actual payments are worked out separately, they said, and often total far less.
“It’s not a promise, in any sense,” said Traci Baird, the chief executive of a nonprofit called EngenderHealth.
In her group’s case, DOGE said it had saved $83.6 million by terminating EngenderHealth’s grant to fund family-planning work in the developing world. Ms. Baird said that Mr. Musk’s group seemed to have wrongly treated the grant’s $89.8 million ceiling as an I.O.U.
In reality, she said, the government had promised her group $1.2 million in funding, of which her group had already been paid $500,000. So the real savings of terminating her group’s grant was about $700,000.
The White House official said that it was still important that Mr. Musk’s group terminated these contracts because they might have resulted in more spending beyond what had already been promised.
“It is important to highlight contracts are cancelled to save money in future fiscals,” the White House official wrote in an email, meaning fiscal years. The official asked not to be named, to discuss the details of DOGE’s work.
But Ms. Baird and other nonprofit executives said it was incorrect to say that DOGE had saved money that the government had not yet agreed to spend.
“It could have been savings, but only if it could have been spent,” she said. “We had no promise of it.
The wall of receipts’ list of canceled grants has now grown beyond the initial set that The Times was able to fact-check.
At the same time that the group removed the grant identifiers, it added another 2,800 entries.
“Descriptions are forthcoming,” the group’s website said.
On Wednesday, a week later, the descriptions were still not there, but the group published another update, which brought the total number of terminated grants listed to 7,488, totaling $17 billion in claimed savings.
“There is no reason that they should not be putting out the specifics and details behind what they’re cutting,” said Gary Kalman, executive director of the anti-corruption nonprofit Transparency International U.S. “They are saying that they are doing things that are long overdue and wildly supported by the public. If that’s true, then wouldn’t you want to make sure that you’re touting the cuts that you make?”
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11) Israel-Hamas Talks Deadlocked as Trump Envoy Turns to Ukraine
The two sides are supposed to negotiate a second phase of the cease-fire agreement that would end the war, but they remain far apart on how to move forward.
By Aaron Boxerman, March 13, 2025
A soup kitchen in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza this week. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The Israel-Hamas negotiations to extend the cease-fire in Gaza were in limbo on Thursday as the Trump administration turned its attention to talks with Russian officials in Moscow over the Ukraine war.
Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, was expected to leave the latest round of Gaza talks in the Gulf emirate of Qatar for Russia on Thursday. Mr. Trump has effectively charged Mr. Witkoff with working to resolve two of the world’s most fraught conflicts — the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
The latest round of indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas in the Qatari capital of Doha this week have borne little fruit amid entrenched disagreements over the deal’s next steps, according to an Israeli official familiar with the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
In mid-January, the two sides agreed to a multiphase truce that would ultimately end Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza and free the Israeli and foreign hostages held by Palestinian militants there. The cease-fire began with a six-week pause in the fighting, during which Hamas released more than 30 hostages in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
During the initial phase of the truce, Israel and Hamas were meant to negotiate a second phase that envisioned an end to the war, the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and the release of all of the surviving hostages still held in the territory.
But the two sides remain far apart on how to move ahead. Israel is still vowing to destroy Hamas and is insisting demilitarization of Gaza. Hamas has largely refused to disband its armed battalions or send its Gaza leaders.
The 42-day first phase elapsed in early March without a deal on the second phase but the fragile truce has held up so far even without it.
Critics in Israel have accused Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, of dragging his feet on an agreement for fear it would loosen his grip on power. His far-right allies in the governing coalition are pressing to go on with the war against Hamas despite concerns from the families of the remaining hostages that their loved ones will not survive.
Up to 24 living hostages are still being held in Gaza along with the remains of more than 30 others who were taken captive, according to the Israeli government. Hamas seized about 250 people in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel and ignited the devastating 15-month-war in Gaza.
Earlier this month, Israel imposed harsh restrictions on humanitarian aid entering Gaza, barring the entry of food and other much-needed goods. The Israeli authorities later cut off electricity to a wastewater treatment center in Gaza.
That has prompted fears of a resurgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The widespread wartime deprivation had eased somewhat since the cease-fire and trucks of aid had begun to enter freely.
Qatar, which has been brokering the truce alongside Egypt and the United States, has criticized the Israeli decision to close crossings to aid as a violation of the cease-fire agreement.
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12) Syrians Want to Go Home, but Many No Longer Have One to Return To
Syria’s interim president has said that millions would return after President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster, but many houses and other buildings were destroyed in 13 years of civil war.
By Raja Abdulrahim, Photographs and Video by Laura Boushnak, Reporting from Damascus, Syria, March 13, 2025
The Yarmouk Camp neighborhood of Damascus is largely destroyed after 13 years of civil war.
Lubna Labaad walked among a flattened wasteland that was once her neighbors’ homes.
The only building left standing was a mosque, a years-old message scrawled on its outer wall from when rebels surrendered control of the area to the Syrian regime during the country’s brutal civil war: “Forgive us, oh martyrs.”
Now, many former residents of the Qaboun neighborhood in the capital, Damascus — like Ms. Labaad, her husband, Da’aas, and their 8-year-old son — are trying to come back. After the 13-year war ended suddenly with the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad in December, the frozen front lines dividing the country melted away overnight.
“We were waiting for that very moment to return,” said Ms. Labaad, 26.
Their home is still standing but was stripped of pipes, sinks and even electrical outlets by a soldier who neighbors said had squatted there for years with his family. Still, the Labaads are luckier than many others who have returned to find nothing but rubble.
Syria’s conflict forced more than 13 million people to flee, in what the United Nations called one of the largest displacement crises in the world. More than six million Syrians left the country and some seven million have been displaced inside Syria, including Ms. Labaad and her family.
In an interview in January, Syria’s interim president, Ahmed Al-Shara, said he was confident that within two years millions of Syrians would come back from abroad. But the war went on for so long that people had established new lives away from their hometowns.
It is not clear exactly how many people have returned so far. Many have come back to see what happened with homes and hometowns, but the decision to return permanently is not an easy one, especially if there is nothing to come back to. Many others have opted to stay put for the time being, including in camps in Turkey and Jordan that have yet to empty out, as they watch what happens in Syria.
An estimated 328,000 homes in Syria have either been destroyed or severely damaged, according to a 2022 U.N. report, and between 600,000 and one million homes are either moderately or lightly damaged. The analysis was done before a devastating earthquake hit parts of northwestern Syria in 2023 that caused the collapse of still more buildings and damage to others.
The government’s housing ministry did not respond to questions about whether or how it planned to help in the country’s reconstruction. The government is grappling with a host of challenges after Mr. al-Assad’s downfall, from a security vacuum to an economy in chaos to Israel’s incursion into parts of southern Syria.
And recent unrest that has left hundreds dead in the country’s coastal region — many of them civilians killed by forces aligned with the government, according to a war monitor — is raising the specter of spiraling sectarian violence.
Even for those who have returned home, the joy has been dulled by the damage already done. People are having to search to find their long tucked-away house keys “and are coming back and not finding their homes,” said Mr. Labaad, 33.
The day after Mr. al-Assad was ousted in early December, the Labaads wasted no time catching a ride with friends from Idlib, in Syria’s northwest, back to the neighborhood they had fled in 2017. But more than three months later they are still not settled.
On a recent day, Mr. Labaad installed a lock on the front door of the family’s home, which for weeks had been secured with a long metal wire through the keyhole. The soldier who had been living in their apartment stripped everything from the third-floor apartment except for sparkly blue lettering on the wall, reading “Ahmad.” The Labaads think it may be the name of the soldier’s son.
“If we had money we could fix it right away,” Ms. Labaad said. “But we don’t.”
Mr. Labaad used to work day jobs when they lived in Idlib. Back in their hometown, he has started working in security with the new government. But he and his fellow security officers have not received salaries yet.
On a nearby street, Khulood al-Sagheer, 50, had come back with her daughter and granddaughter to see the state of their house. They found only one wall left standing.
“I will put up a tent and sleep here,” Ms. al-Sagheer said, vowing to rebuild. “The important thing is that I return to my home.”
Others have also chosen to live in their homes, no matter how damaged. For months, Samir Jaloot, 54, has been sleeping on a thin mattress and two blankets in the corner of the only intact room of what was his late brother’s apartment in the Yarmouk Camp neighborhood of Damascus. Next to his makeshift bed sits a small wood stove and gas kettle.
The window is still broken, but he has repaired two gaping holes in the wall, most likely caused by tank shells, he said. The walls are pockmarked with bullet holes. He has slowly been making repairs, clearing out the rubble and debris and trying to erect new walls so that his wife and five children can join him.
The partially destroyed apartment sits on the second floor of his family’s four-story building in Yarmouk Camp, named because it began as a camp for Palestinian refugees who fled their homes during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s establishment. The Syrian war reduced the building to just a floor and a half.
Around the neighborhood is a sea of gray buildings with missing floors, roofs and walls. Most homes were looted long ago, and the only thing seemingly left in every exposed room is more gray rubble.
“This is the house I got married in; my kids were born here,” Mr. Jaloot said of the building, his clothing covered in dust and splotches of cement. “I have good memories here. My dad lived with me; my mother lived with me.”
Standing nearby was his cousin, Aghyad Jaloot, 41, an aeronautical engineer with a trim salt and pepper beard who had just days earlier come to visit from Sweden, where he and his family had resettled. He craned his neck toward the sky. “This sun is worth all of Europe,” he said.
His former neighbor now living in Canada called him recently and told him he planned to return. So did two other neighbors, one who fled to Lebanon and another within Syria.
Now, Mr. Jaloot wants to come back, too.
“If I don’t return and others don’t return, who’s going to rebuild this country?” he asked.
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13) Columbia Activist Has Not Been Allowed to Speak Privately With Lawyers
Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident who the Trump administration has claimed is a national security threat, is in immigration detention in Louisiana.
By Jonah E. Bromwich and Anusha Bayya, March 12, 2025
Lawyers for Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate detained by the Trump administration last weekend, have not been able to hold a private conversation with their client since his arrest.
That revelation came during a hearing in Manhattan federal court Wednesday, as lawyers for Mr. Khalil and the government appeared in front of a judge, Jesse Furman, to discuss Mr. Khalil’s detention, which has raised concerns about free speech protections amid President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Mr. Khalil, a prominent figure in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Columbia campus, was arrested by federal immigration agents in New York on Saturday and is being held at a facility in Louisiana.
He has not been charged with any crime. But the Trump administration has accused him of siding with terrorists, and justified his detention by citing a little-used statute that grants the secretary of state the power to initiate deportation proceedings against anyone whose presence in the United States is “adversarial” to the country’s foreign policy and national security interests.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking to reporters during a stop in Ireland on Wednesday, accused Mr. Khalil of participating in antisemitic activities, including protests that Mr. Rubio said had expressed support for Hamas. Mr. Rubio said that anyone who did so would be removed from the United States.
“This is not about free speech,” he said. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”
Lawyers for Mr. Khalil, a legal permanent resident, will attempt to fight the government as it seeks to deport their client, but is it not clear in which court that fight will take place. Judge Furman has ordered the government not to deport Mr. Khalil while his case is pending. But the Wednesday hearing related to the circumstances of Mr. Khalil’s detention, not his legal residency.
Early Sunday morning, lawyers for Mr. Khalil filed a petition asking Judge Furman to release their client. They have also asked that the judge order the government to return Mr. Khalil to New York. At the hearing Wednesday morning, one of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, said that the distance was hindering his access to his client.
Mr. Kassem said that Mr. Khalil’s legal team had requested a private call with their client to discuss his case, and that the earliest appointment the lawyers were offered was on March 20, nearly two weeks after it was requested.
Judge Furman ordered the government to let Mr. Khalil’s lawyers speak with him Wednesday and Thursday as they prepare a new filing calling for his release. He also set a schedule for the lawyers to file arguments as to where the case should be heard.
It is not clear whether the issue will ultimately be decided in New York. At the conference, a lawyer for the government, Brandon Waterman, said that Mr. Khalil had been transferred to New Jersey by the time his lawyers filed their initial petition in Manhattan court.
Mr. Khalil was arrested on Saturday evening and the petition was filed at 4:40 a.m. Sunday. Amy Greer, one of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers, has said she believed that Mr. Khalil was in New York at the time. But Mr. Waterman said that Mr. Khalil was in New Jersey no later than 3:20 a.m. Sunday.
Mr. Waterman added that the government would prefer that any further scrutiny of Mr. Khalil’s detention take place outside New York, either in New Jersey or Louisiana.
Judge Furman did not make any immediate decision about where the matter would be heard. But he told Mr. Waterman to be prepared to address a 2004 Supreme Court opinion that could bode well for Mr. Khalil’s lawyers as they fight to keep his case in New York, where Mr. Khalil lives with his pregnant wife, an American citizen.
In the concurring opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy laid out circumstances in which a detainee’s case should be heard in the place from which he was removed. The circumstances included the government’s transportation of a prisoner for the purpose of complicating lawyers’ efforts to seek his release in the appropriate court, and the government’s refusal to communicate where the detainee was being held.
Mr. Khalil’s wife attended the Wednesday conference, sitting in the front row and facing straight ahead. Before the judge entered, she whispered with a lawyer seated beside her, her expression worried and occasionally grim.
A park outside the courthouse was flooded with hundreds of protesters, some wearing kaffiyehs and black masks and waving posters, banners and signs reading “Free Mahmoud.” They were joined by the actor Susan Sarandon, wearing a black beret and leather jacket.
Speaking to the camera crews gathered outside the courthouse, Mr. Kassem said that his client had been “disappeared by U.S. government agents” after criticizing the American and Israeli governments. “That’s not just un-American, it’s also unacceptable,” he added.
Another lawyer read a statement from Mr. Khalil’s wife, who declined to be named for fear of reprisal from online critics or the government. She is expected to give birth next month.
In her statement, she said that Mr. Khalil had been kidnapped from their home, and called his continued detention shameful. She demanded his immediate release and return, saying that his disappearance had been devastating and that every day without him was filled with uncertainty.
President Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, said on Wednesday that the administration considered Mr. Khalil “a national security threat.” As Mr. Homan answered reporters’ questions in Albany, he accused Mr. Khalil of handing out leaflets “inciting violence on campus.”
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Tuesday that Mr. Khalil had sided with terrorists and accused him of participating in protests at which pro-Hamas fliers were handed out. She did not respond to an email requesting clarification as to whether Mr. Khalil passed out the fliers himself.
The White House has said that Mr. Khalil is only the first of many whom it plans to detain and deport.
Edward Wong and Benjamin Oreskes contributed reporting.
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14) Starvation Is Not a Negotiating Tactic
By Megan K. Stack, March 13, 2025
Ms. Stack is a contributing Opinion writer who reported in the Middle East for years.
"...to starve Gaza in order to force Hamas to release the hostages is, of course, to starve the hostages, too."
Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
“You do whatever you want,” President Trump said he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
Mr. Netanyahu, it seems, took Mr. Trump at his word.
Israel has clamped Gaza back under near-total siege, barring desperately needed humanitarian aid and other goods from entering the hungry and bomb-decimated enclave. Food, medicine, tents, fuel — for the past week and a half, supplies have not been permitted into Gaza, where some two million Palestinians are trying to survive in the wreckage. And Mr. Netanyahu keeps tightening the screws: On Sunday, Israel cut off the last trickle of electricity into Gaza, forcing a key desalination plant that provides drinking water to slow operations. With hunger setting in, people reduced to living in tents or in the precarious shelter of half-crushed buildings, and clean water and fuel in vanishing supply, it feels too generous to say that Gaza is on the brink of collapse; in many respects, Gaza has already collapsed.
Israeli officials are essentially starving Gaza as a negotiation tactic. Rather than proceed on the agreed-upon schedule to the second phase of the cease-fire, Mr. Netanyahu is now demanding a seven-week extension of the preliminary stage.
This makes sense, of course, for Mr. Netanyahu — the first stage is the simplest, allowing for more hostages to be released without grappling with the thornier (and for Mr. Netanyahu, politically radioactive) elements contained in the second phase, including withdrawing troops from Gaza and making concrete plans to end the war. But so far, Hamas has refused to go along, pointing out that Israel is unilaterally veering away from its obligations under the agreement.
And so, consistent with the cruel corporeality of this conflict, Israel has locked the people of Gaza back into an impregnable box, with little access to food or supplies, and warned that if Hamas doesn’t quickly agree to release more hostages, all-out war could resume.
“The Gaza gates will be locked, and the gates of hell will open” if Hamas doesn’t release more hostages, the Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, said last week.
Mr. Trump appears to be on board with this disgraceful tactic. As the cease-fire hangs on the edge of failure and negotiations grind along, the exhausted people of Gaza endure a macabre and dehumanizing test of wills.
“Any amount of aid that is prevented from Gaza is a death sentence,” said Majed Jaber, an emergency room doctor who spoke with me from Gaza. His home smashed by bombs, Dr. Jaber sleeps in a drafty tent that floods in the winter rains. Before the cease-fire, he said, food had become so scarce that he’d lost 40 pounds, even as he witnessed some of his patients die of complications from malnutrition.
“I personally was starving,” he said. “Do I believe that may happen again? I do.”
Shortly after speaking with Dr. Jaber, I read an Israeli news story reporting that the recently freed hostages suffered extreme weight loss, dental problems and health issues from drinking dirty water. It was identical to what I’d been hearing from Palestinians in Gaza. Which is not surprising, but highlights the madness of Israel’s approach: to starve Gaza in order to force Hamas to release the hostages is, of course, to starve the hostages, too.
Lately it feels as if the human beings in Gaza are increasingly lost from our understanding. The physicality of their plight fades into the background, then creeps back. Hamas will cling to these 59 human beings it dragged from their home as bargaining chips, dead or alive — its only leverage. And the people of Gaza have themselves been caught for decades in that claustrophobic run of land.
It may be futile to point this out during a war so thick with atrocities, but the deliberate starvation of civilians is a war crime, and so, too, is the taking of civilian hostages. Israeli leaders surely know these laws. It was, after all, the near-total blockade of Gaza just after the Hamas-led massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, that went into evidence at The Hague, helping cement the International Criminal Court’s outstanding arrest warrants against Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
When warnings of famine first started to trickle out of Gaza, Israeli officials furiously denied the assessments of aid organizations, and even some U.S. politicians, that Israel was blocking aid, insisting the hunger in Gaza was the United Nations’ fault, Hamas’s fault, and so on. Under Mr. Trump, it seems, protestations of innocence are no longer required. Since Oct. 7, emboldened Israeli soldiers and settlers are also punishing Palestinians in the West Bank, killing hundreds and displacing tens of thousands while openly discussing annexation. Meanwhile, with Mr. Trump’s evangelical backers pushing for Israel to seize the entire West Bank, the current administration has lifted sanctions against extremist settlers.
I asked the Gazan author Yousri Alghoul whether the people around him were afraid of a return to bombardment. His answer was crushing — grieving and preoccupied with trying to secure basic daily necessities, he said, people hardly have any “interaction with the situation” of geopolitics and negotiations.
“They do not care whether the war is coming again or not, because they feel that they lost everything,” he said. “They lost their houses, they lost their families, children, women, wives, husbands. So people are saying, ‘OK, whatever.’ If it comes back, if it kills us.”
“We’re not living a suitable life,” he added. “It’s like a hell.”
I can’t shake the disconcerting sense that Gaza is already disappearing. The buildings knocked down, the dead scattered in the wreckage, and every time another Gaza journalist is killed, it closes another eye that we used to look through.
And suddenly here comes Mr. Trump with his plan to “own” Gaza, with beach resorts built on boneyards, ethnically cleansing his way to a paradise — for whom?
“The people of the world,” Mr. Trump said.
But not, it seems, for the people of Gaza.
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