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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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) Trump Tries to Use White South Africans as Cautionary Tale
The president and his allies accuse South Africa of discriminating against and killing white people, and warn that it could happen in America if attempts to promote diversity aren’t stopped.
By John Eligon, Reporting from Johannesburg, March 15, 2025
“Although white people make up 7 percent of the country’s population, they own at least half of South Africa’s land. Police statistics do not show that they are any more vulnerable to violent crime than other people. And white South Africans are far better off than Black people on virtually every marker of the economic scale. … Many South African voters, regardless of their race, agree that the African National Congress has created a country plagued by corruption, poor infrastructure, high crime and inequality, with persistent poverty among Black people. In the last election, the party lost its outright majority in Parliament for the first time since the end of apartheid. Analysts note that the party went to great lengths to embrace market-oriented policies that allowed white South Africans to maintain their economic power. In fact, many South Africans criticize Mr. Mandela for not requiring a more aggressive redistribution of white-owned land to Black South Africans, whose families had been forced off of it during apartheid and colonial times.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/world/africa/south-africa-whites-trump.html
White South Africans rallying in support of President Trump outside the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, last month. Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
To hear President Trump and some of his closest supporters tell it, South Africa is a terrible place for white people. They face discrimination, are sidelined from jobs and live under the constant threat of violence or having their land stolen by a corrupt, Black-led government that has left the country in disarray.
The data tell a different story. Although white people make up 7 percent of the country’s population, they own at least half of South Africa’s land. Police statistics do not show that they are any more vulnerable to violent crime than other people. And white South Africans are far better off than Black people on virtually every marker of the economic scale.
Yet Mr. Trump and his allies have pushed their own narrative of South Africa to press an argument at home: If the United States doesn’t clamp down on attempts to promote diversity, America will become a hotbed of dysfunction and anti-white discrimination.
“It plays into the fears of white people in America and elsewhere: ‘We whites are threatened,’” Max du Preez, a white South African writer and historian, said of Mr. Trump’s description of his country.
But, Mr. du Preez added, white people have flourished since the end of apartheid in 1994.
The parallels between South Africa’s attempts to undo the injustices of apartheid and the long struggle in the United States to address slavery, Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination have become a common refrain among some Trump supporters.
Ernst Roets, a white activist and author in South Africa, said that when he spoke to like-minded conservatives in the United States, they often told him, “Oh, yes, we need to look at South Africa, because that’s what’s in store for us if we’re not cautious.”
After apartheid fell three decades ago, South Africa’s democratic government rose to power on a promise to undo the inequities of a system that had left much of the country’s Black majority in squalor. Yet President Nelson Mandela largely allowed white South Africans to keep their wealth, in an effort to maintain a peaceful transition to democracy.
His party, the African National Congress, has passed laws to try to close the gap for Black people. Most recently, South Africa enacted one that allows the government to take private land in the public interest, sometimes without providing compensation.
The law has not yet been used, but some white South Africans — and Mr. Trump — say it unfairly targets the country’s landowners and commercial farmers, who remain mostly white despite decades of anti-apartheid policies.
Mr. Trump has built his political identity in part as a protector of white America. He has fought to save symbols of the Confederacy in the South, blasted racial sensitivity training as “un-American propaganda” and publicly defended white supremacists.
Cutting off aid to most of Africa while championing Afrikaners — the white ethnic minority in South Africa that led the apartheid government — appears to be the latest illustration of Mr. Trump’s commitment to white interests.
Last month, the president signed an executive order granting refugee status to Afrikaners and suspending all aid to South Africa, partly in response to its land-reform law. He said on social media last week that the United States would offer a rapid pathway to citizenship to South African farmers, many of whom are Afrikaner. Then on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool, “a race-baiting politician who hates America” and expelled him.
“Trump is signaling to white people everywhere that he will use his power to protect and advance their interests, no matter the facts,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University.
Some Afrikaners have welcomed Mr. Trump’s embrace. Activists traveled to Washington last month to lobby his administration for more support. A White House official described the Afrikaner delegation as “civil rights leaders.”
Many of Mr. Trump’s allies have long spotlighted the grievances of Afrikaners. Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa but is not of Afrikaner descent, has accused the country’s government of promoting racist laws, and falsely claimed that white farmers in South Africa were being killed every day.
After Mr. Roets appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in 2018, Mr. Carlson posted on social media that “White farmers are being brutally murdered in South Africa for their land.”
Mr. Carlson later ran a segment describing land seizures and homicides. Mr. Trump, who was in his first term at the time, then tagged Mr. Carlson in a social media post in which he said he was ordering an investigation into farm seizures “and the large scale killing of farmers” in South Africa, though to this day no farms have been seized by the government.
In Mr. Trump’s orbit, these themes are now being recirculated as warning signs for the United States.
Mr. Roets said in an interview that he had become close to Jack Posobiec, the American far-right influencer who recently accompanied Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on a trip to Europe.
During an earlier conversation with Charlie Kirk, an influential Trump ally, Mr. Posobiec said that South Africa was in shambles because of its laws meant to produce racial equity. He added that the United States was headed down the same path by hiring “on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation.”
Many South African voters, regardless of their race, agree that the African National Congress has created a country plagued by corruption, poor infrastructure, high crime and inequality, with persistent poverty among Black people. In the last election, the party lost its outright majority in Parliament for the first time since the end of apartheid.
Analysts note that the party went to great lengths to embrace market-oriented policies that allowed white South Africans to maintain their economic power. In fact, many South Africans criticize Mr. Mandela for not requiring a more aggressive redistribution of white-owned land to Black South Africans, whose families had been forced off of it during apartheid and colonial times.
Supporters of the new land law hope that it will speed up the long-held goal of giving back more land to Black South Africans.
But to Mr. Trump, it is Afrikaners who are the “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” as he said in his executive order signed last month.
Descended primarily from Dutch colonizers who arrived in southern Africa in 1652, Afrikaner people became international darlings in the early 1900s as a small tribe that stood up to the mighty British Empire in battles over territory (though they ultimately lost the war). The ruling British then looked down on Afrikaners as uncouth, and those fights sowed bitter divisions between South Africa’s two largest white populations that exist to this day.
While the president has generally tried to prohibit refugees or asylum seekers from entering the United States, he has carved out a special avenue for some white Africans to come into the country.
That has not necessarily lined up with the wishes of his target audience. Many Afrikaners have said that while they appreciate Mr. Trump supporting their claims of persecution, they would rather stay in South Africa, which they consider their rightful home.
Willem Petzer, an Afrikaner online influencer whose social media posts have been shared by Trump supporters, said he was considering Mr. Trump’s offer. But he said he hoped more than anything that South Africa’s government would end what he called its racism toward people who look like him.
“By the time I was a conscious human being, apartheid had been long gone,” Mr. Petzer, 28, said. “All I have ever known is discrimination against white people.”
That sort of rebranding of Afrikaners as victims has great resonance among the American far-right, said Mr. du Preez, the Afrikaner writer and historian, who founded the first anti-apartheid newspaper in Afrikaans.
“They’re playing on the thing of the white Christian civilization being threatened,” he said. “And that has a lot of appeal among the evangelicals and others in the United States.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting from Washington.
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2) Does Trump Want America to Look More Like Saudi Arabia?
By Quinn Slobodian, March 15, 2025
Mr. Slobodian is the author of the forthcoming book “Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right.”
Nada Hayek
What kind of oil-drunk capitalist pushes their chips onto ultra-prime real estate, tech moonshots and prestige sporting events while covering every surface in gold leaf?
The standard comparisons and analogies don’t quite capture President Trump’s particular economic vision. It is not really an extension of the Gilded Age robber barons, nor — despite his critics’ claims — is it akin to the fascist economic models of 1930s Germany or Italy.
There is another way of thinking about his brand of political economy, and a potential model for it. We might think of the autocratic, oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf. Specifically, we might think of Mr. Trump’s vision as an attempt to transplant the political economy of Saudi Arabia onto the United States.
The relationship between Mr. Trump, his family and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia runs deep. His hotel business dealings in the region have grown since his previous term in the Oval Office, and his ties to Saudi Arabia now extend to golf, a sport the kingdom has aggressively expanded into. One of its tournaments has been hosted by Mr. Trump’s signature course in Miami, and the president made time recently to assist in talks to broker a deal between LIV Golf, which is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and the PGA Tour.
Soon after the election, Mr. Trump attended an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Madison Square Garden with Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and a lesser-known figure: Yasir al-Rumayyan, the head of the Saudi sovereign fund. The kingdom’s sovereign fund bankrolls both stable assets and high-risk prospects. This week, the U.F.C. chief executive, Dana White, a Trump ally, announced the start of a new boxing league in Saudi Arabia to make the sport “great again.”
Sure, one way to interpret this alliance is as purely transactional — a business executive cozying up to a rich country. But a closer look suggests that this is not merely about a series of real estate and entertainment deals.
Saudi Arabia’s economic power rests on its vast oil reserves, and Mr. Trump has embraced a parallel approach — championing “drill, baby, drill,” rolling back environmental restrictions and prioritizing energy expansion.
Last month, Mr. Trump shared on his social media platform an A.I.-generated video of the demolished Gaza Strip reborn as a “Trump Gaza” of casinos, poolside drinks and a massive idol of the developer-president-sovereign himself. That is the embodiment of the shared Gulf state dream: autocratic technocapitalism in glitz and glass.
For at least a decade, Saudi Arabia has sought to move beyond oil. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 plan aims to diversify the kingdom’s economy, imitating the economic models of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. In recent years, the Saudis have expanded into entertainment, luxury architecture and cutting-edge infrastructure, investing in desalination, green hydrogen and major tech ventures. Among those was a $3.5 billion investment in Uber and nearly $2 billion to help Elon Musk purchase Twitter. Most large-scale investments are funneled through the sovereign fund.
Mr. Trump’s own plans increasingly mirror this model. Some fear he could sell off federally owned lands to create a sovereign wealth fund. At a recent event in Miami for Saudi investors, he spoke about the interaction of artificial intelligence and energy consumption. “The world runs on low-cost energy, and energy-producing nations like us have nothing to apologize for,” he said.
In late January, Mr. Trump hosted Sam Altman and Larry Ellison in the White House for the announcement of the $500 billion Stargate infrastructure investment project. Joining them was Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, another major beneficiary of Saudi investment in recent years.
Saudi Arabia and its Emirati neighbors are the global bank where everyone eventually comes knocking, hat in hand.
The kingdom’s political model is also relevant. Mr. Trump raised eyebrows when he posted an image of himself wearing a crown, captioned “Long live the king.” Saudi Arabia’s centralized control mirrors the male-dominated family dynasty Mr. Trump has been cultivating within his own political empire.
His son Eric Trump oversees real estate and resorts, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner operates in adjacent financial spheres. Another son, Donald Trump Jr., serves as a roving scout for new political talent — what he calls a “MAGA bench for the future,” which brought him into contact with JD Vance — and new investments, most recently exploring ventures in Greenland.
The kingdom’s patriarchal governance also aligns with the social vision of Mr. Trump’s allies. The Saudi government enforces strict gender norms and a prohibition on pornography that seems to mirror the rhetoric and demands of the Project 2025 platform written in part by leading members of Mr. Trump’s administration. And Mr. Vance has advocated a rollback of rights for same-sex couples and transgender Americans. Saudi Arabia’s laws, far more extreme than Mr. Vance’s proposals, include strict bans on gender nonconformity and the potential use of the death penalty for homosexual relations.
The Trump administration’s growing hostility toward independent journalism — increasingly selecting allies for press access and triggering investigations into critics of the president — echoes Saudi Arabia’s own disregard for press freedom. The World Press Freedom index ranks the kingdom 166 out of 180 countries.
Still, Saudi Arabia is embraced by elites worldwide — not because of shared values, but because in a time of high interest rates, petro-states are among the few entities with surplus capital to invest.
Mr. Trump’s model of autocratic capitalism relies on the same logic. Like Saudi Arabia, the United States is an indispensable nation — whether for defense, energy or investment.
The Trumpist project is not about “Making America Great Again” in any traditional sense; rather, it is about reshaping America at least in part in the image of a modern petrostate — one that leverages energy wealth, luxury development and financial capital to exert influence on the global stage.
The future of this model of political economy is in flux. Saudi Arabia has begun work on flamboyant megaprojects like a golden cube in Riyadh large enough to hold the Empire State Building and a would-be city in the desert comprising two continuous 100-mile-long mirrored skyscrapers. But oil prices need to stay high for the kingdom’s checks to clear — and the costs are not only monetary. ITV reported that data suggest over 21,000 workers have died since Vision 2030 began in 2016. The shimmering sci-fi city of the promotional videos and prospectuses has so far yielded only a single unfinished seaside resort three times over budget, for a total cost of $4 billion. The techno kingdom’s future vision looks ever more like what The Wall Street Journal called a “dance of mutual delusion” with consultants and starchitects dazzling the monarch just enough to keep extending their contracts.
Mr. Trump’s “everything everywhere all at once” strategy of deregulation and extraction, combined with inflated promises and incoherent trade policy, suggests a similar sense that time is of the essence — and could work against him. Drill too much and oil prices start to fall. Act too erratically and global investors start to flee tech stocks that prop up the whole market. Partner with a chief executive who throws “Roman salutes” and people stop buying his cars. Treat tariffs like tweets and supply chains start to crack. Even the value of the $TRUMP cryptocurrency meme coin has fallen well over 80 percent since its launch just before the inauguration.
This week’s volatile stock markets, with “recession warnings blaring,” might be one of the sharper reminders about the autocratic technocapitalism model: Not all that glitters is gold.
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3) Bread Lines and Salty Drinking Water: Israeli Aid Block Sets Gaza Back Again
Shipments surged into Gaza after Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire, even if they weren’t enough. Then Israel blocked the border again to pressure Hamas in truce talks.
By Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair, Photographs and Video by Saher Alghorra, March 15, 2025
Vivian Yee reported from Cairo, and Bilal Shbair from Deir al-Balah, Gaza, where he interviewed vegetable sellers, police officers and ordinary people searching for food. Saher Alghorra reported from northern and central Gaza.
A family preparing food to break the daytime fast for the holy month of Ramadan in the rubble of their destroyed home in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, this month.
Outside the Zadna Bakery in central Gaza one recent afternoon, the long lines of people waiting for bread were threatening to dissolve into chaos at any minute.
A security guard shouted at the crowds that pushed toward the bakery door to wait their turn. But no one was listening.
Just a few steps away, scalpers were hawking loaves they had gotten earlier that day for three times the original price. The sunset meal that breaks Muslims’ daylong fast during the holy month of Ramadan was approaching and across Gaza, bread, water, cooking gas and other basics were hard to come by — once again.
Lines had not been this desperate, nor markets this empty, since before the Israel-Hamas cease-fire took hold on Jan. 19. The truce had allowed aid to surge into Gaza for the first time after 15 months of conflict during which residents received only a trickle of supplies.
But no aid has gotten in since March 2. That was the day Israel blocked all goods in a bid to pressure Hamas into accepting an extension of the current cease-fire stage and releasing more hostages sooner, instead of moving to the next phase, which would involve more challenging negotiations to permanently end to the war.
Now, the aid cutoff, exacerbated by panic buying and unscrupulous traders who gouge prices, is driving prices to levels that few can afford. Shortages of fresh vegetables and fruit and rising prices are forcing people to once again fall back on canned food such as beans.
Though the canned food provides calories, experts say, people — and children in particular — need a diverse diet that includes fresh foods to stave off malnutrition.
For the first six weeks of the cease-fire, aid workers and traders delivered food for Gazans, many still weak from months of malnutrition. Medical supplies for bombed-out hospitals, plastic pipes to restore water supplies and fuel to power everything also began to flow in.
Data from aid groups and the United Nations showed that children, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers were eating better. And more centers started offering treatment for malnutrition, the United Nations said.
These were only small steps toward relieving the devastation wrought by the war, which destroyed more than half of Gaza’s buildings and put many of its two million residents at risk of famine.
Even with the sharp increase in aid after the truce began, Gaza health officials reported that at least six newborn babies had died from hypothermia in February for lack of warm clothes, blankets, shelter or medical care, a figure cited by the United Nations. The reports could not be independently verified.
Most hospitals remain only partly operational, if at all.
Aid groups, the United Nations and several Western governments have urged Israel to allow shipments to resume, criticizing its use of humanitarian relief as a bargaining chip in negotiations and, in some cases, saying that the cutoff violates international law.
Last Sunday, it severed electricity supplies to the territory — a move that shuttered most operations at a water desalination plant and deprived about 600,000 people in central Gaza of clean drinking water, according to the United Nations.
The Israeli energy minister has hinted that a water cutoff might be next. Some wells are still functioning in central Gaza, aid officials say, but they supply only brackish water, which poses long-term health risks to those who drink it.
Israel had already closed off all other sources of electricity that it used to provide for Gaza, a measure that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel that began the war. That left essential services to run on solar panels or generators, if power was available at all.
Now there is no fuel coming in for anything, including generators, ambulances or cars.
Israel argues that about 25,000 truckloads of aid that Gaza has received in recent weeks have given people sufficient food.
“There is no shortage of essential products in the strip whatsoever,” the Foreign Ministry said last week. It repeated assertions that Hamas is taking over the aid entering Gaza and that half the group’s budget in Gaza comes from exploiting aid trucks.
Hamas has called the aid and electricity cutoffs “cheap and unacceptable blackmail.”
Gaza residents say that, for the moment, at least, they do have food, though often not enough.
But supplies that humanitarian groups amassed in the first six weeks of the cease-fire are already dwindling, aid officials warn. That has already forced six bakeries in Gaza to close and aid groups and community kitchens to reduce the food rations they hand out.
The order to block aid also cut off Gaza’s access to commercial goods imported by traders.
In the city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, a street market was quiet this week as the vendors’ stocks of fruits, vegetables, oil, sugar and flour ran low. Vegetable sellers said the price of onions and carrots had doubled, zucchini had nearly quadrupled and lemons cost nearly 10 times as much. Eggplants were hard to find and potatoes impossible.
As a result, the sellers said, the few customers who still came bought only a couple of vegetables, not by the kilogram as many once did. Others had not had the means to buy anything for months.
Many Gazans lost their jobs and spent their savings to survive the war. When prices skyrocketed, they were left almost completely reliant on aid.
Yasmin al-Attar, 38, and her husband, a driver, wandered from stall to stall in the Deir al-Balah market, looking for the cheapest prices on a recent day. They have seven children, a disabled sister and two aging parents to support.
It had been hard enough to afford the bare minimum of ingredients for iftar, the meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan, Ms. al-Attar said. But with fuel blocked, it was also getting tough to find fuel for her husband’s car and for cooking.
“Just three days ago, I felt a little relief because prices seemed reasonable,” she said. Now, the same money would only be enough for a much smaller quantity of vegetables.
“How can this possibly be enough for my big family?” she said.
That night, she said, they would probably make do with lentil soup, with no vegetables. And after that? Maybe more canned food.
Stall owners and shoppers alike blamed large-scale traders for the shortages, at least in part, saying they were hoarding supplies to push up prices and maximize their profits. Any vegetables available at reasonable prices were being snapped up and resold for much more, said Eissa Fayyad, 32, a vegetable seller in Deir al-Balah.
It did not help that people rushed out to buy more than they needed as soon as they heard about the Israeli decision to blockade aid again, said Khalil Reziq, 38, a police officer in the city of Khan Younis in central Gaza whose division oversees markets and shops.
Hamas police officers have warned businesses against price-gouging, vendors and shoppers said. In some cases, Mr. Reziq said, his unit had confiscated vendors’ goods and sold them for cheaper on the spot.
But such measures have done little to solve the underlying supply problem.
Beyond the immediate challenge of supplying food, water, medical supplies and tents to Gazans — many thousands of them still displaced — aid officials said their inability to bring in supplies had set back longer-term recovery efforts.
Some had been distributing vegetable seeds and animal feed to farmers so Gaza could start raising more of its own food, while others had been working on rebuilding the water infrastructure and clearing debris and unexploded ordnance.
None of it was easy, aid officials said, because Israel had restricted or barred items including the heavy machinery required to repair infrastructure, generators and more. Israel maintains that Palestinian militants could use these items for military purposes.
For many Gazans now, the focus is back on survival.
“There’s no bombing at the moment, but I still feel like I’m living in a war with everything I’m going through,” said Nevine Siam, 38, who is sheltering at her brother’s house with 30 other people.
She said her sister’s entire family had been killed during the fighting. Her children ask her to make Ramadan meals like the ones they remember from before the war. But without an income, she can get nothing but canned food in aid packages.
Where she is, she said, there are no celebrations and no festive decorations for the holy month.
“It feels as if the joy has been extinguished,” she said.
Erika Solomon, Ameera Harouda and Rania Khaled contributed reporting.
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4) U.S. Arrests 2nd Person Tied to Pro-Palestinian Protests at Columbia
The action came less than a week after Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate and a prominent figure in campus demonstrations, was arrested.
By Troy Closson, March 14, 2025
“In a separate action on Thursday, Columbia announced a range of disciplinary actions against students who occupied a campus building last spring, including expulsions and suspensions, among the steps that Trump administration officials had called for in their letter. The punishments included ‘multiyear suspensions, temporary degree revocations and expulsions,’ the university said in a statement. It was unclear how many students had been punished. Among those expelled was Grant Miner, a Jewish graduate student who was part of a student coalition that has called for Columbia to divest from companies connected to Israel, according to the student workers’ union at the university, which Mr. Miner leads.”
Demonstrators rallied outside Columbia University’s main gates on Friday to demand the release of a pro-Palestinian activist who has been detained by the immigration authorities. Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
A second person who took part in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University has been arrested by U.S. immigration agents, after overstaying a student visa, federal officials said on Friday, the latest turn in the crisis engulfing the Ivy League institution.
The person, identified by the authorities as Leqaa Kordia, is Palestinian and from the West Bank. She was arrested in Newark on Thursday, officials said. Her student visa was terminated in January 2022, and she was arrested by the New York City police last April for her role in a campus demonstration, the Homeland Security Department said in a statement.
The agency also released a video on Friday that it said showed a Columbia student, identified as Ranjani Srinivasan, preparing to enter Canada after her student visa was revoked.
The announcements, by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, reflected an escalation of the Trump administration’s focus on Columbia, where protests over the war in Gaza last year ignited a national debate over free speech and antisemitism, and prompted similar demonstrations at dozens of other campuses.
The actions came during a tumultuous week at the university, which has experienced a series of escalating controversies since the arrest by federal immigration agents last weekend of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate and prominent figure in pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations.
On Friday, more than 200 students gathered outside Columbia’s main campus gates to protest the university’s handling of Mr. Khalil’s arrest. Demonstrators wore kaffiyehs, waved Palestinian flags and carried banners with slogans like “Free Mahmoud,” “I.C.E. off our campuses” and “Columbia You Can’t Hide.”
The protest unfolded less than 24 hours after homeland security agents entered the campus with federal warrants and searched two dorm rooms. No one was detained and nothing was taken, according to the university’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong.
Social media posts by Ms. Noem on Friday appeared to signal that Columbia continued to be a subject of Trump administration scrutiny.
Ms. Noem posted a video on the social media platform X that appeared to show a woman walking through LaGuardia Airport with a small suitcase. Ms. Noem identified the woman as Ms. Srinivasan and said she had used a U.S. Customs and Border Protection app to notify the government of her intention to self-deport. Ms. Srinivasan’s dorm room was one of those searched, according to her lawyer and roommate.
“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America,” Ms. Noem said in a statement.
Nathan Yaffe, a member of Ms. Srinivasan’s legal team, confirmed in a statement that federal agents had entered her dorm room on Thursday in an effort to detain her or seek information about her whereabouts. A lawyer for Ms. Kordia could not be immediately identified.
The past week has been fraught with crisis on Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. The Trump administration demanded on Thursday that the university make far-reaching changes to its student discipline and admissions policies before any negotiations regarding the cancellation of $400 million in government grants and contracts could begin.
Federal officials wrote in a letter that the university had a week to formalize its definition of antisemitism, ban the wearing of masks “intended to conceal identity or intimidate” and put the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department under “academic receivership.”
The government said the moves were necessary because of what they described as Columbia’s failure to protect Jewish students from harassment. Officials from three government agencies wrote that Columbia “has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment.”
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said during a speech at the Justice Department on Friday that the administration was investigating whether incidents on campus have violated civil rights protections or federal terrorism laws.
“This is long overdue,” Mr. Blanche said.
But civil liberties advocates argued that the government’s demands would not only erode free speech and academic freedom at Columbia but would have a chilling effect on universities across the country. Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, said in a statement that the “subjugation of universities to official power is a hallmark of autocracy.”
Others were particularly concerned by the demand that the university adopt a definition of antisemitism that could penalize those who are critical of Israel.
Tyler Coward, the lead counsel for government affairs at the free speech and legal defense group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, called the letter “a blueprint to supercharge censorship at America’s colleges and universities.”
“Colleges across the country are likely reading this letter this morning and thinking they better censor speech — or they’re next,” Mr. Coward said in a statement.
A university spokeswoman said Thursday evening that Columbia was “reviewing the letter” from the government agencies. “We are committed at all times to advancing our mission, supporting our students, and addressing all forms of discrimination and hatred on our campus,” she said.
After the dorm search, Ms. Armstrong said in a note to students and staff members late Thursday that she was “heartbroken” over the development, and that Columbia was making every effort to ensure the safety of its students, faculty and staff.
In a separate action on Thursday, Columbia announced a range of disciplinary actions against students who occupied a campus building last spring, including expulsions and suspensions, among the steps that Trump administration officials had called for in their letter.
The punishments included “multiyear suspensions, temporary degree revocations and expulsions,” the university said in a statement. It was unclear how many students had been punished.
Among those expelled was Grant Miner, a Jewish graduate student who was part of a student coalition that has called for Columbia to divest from companies connected to Israel, according to the student workers’ union at the university, which Mr. Miner leads.
The union has accused the university of targeting its members. A Columbia spokeswoman said Friday evening that it was “unfortunate” that the group was trying to “conflate student discipline with employment matters,” and that the accusation was false.
Mr. Miner, a doctoral student in the English and comparative literature department, said in a statement that “this is an egregious attempt to break the union and squash the movement against genocide in Palestine.”
“We will not be intimidated on either front,” he said.
Anvee Bhutani, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Hamed Aleaziz, Sharla Steinman and Katherine Rosman contributed reporting.
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5) ‘Extermination Camp’ Found in Mexico, Group Searching for the Missing Says
The authorities are investigating the discovery of cremation ovens, human remains, piles of shoes and other personal effects at an abandoned ranch outside Guadalajara.
By Paulina Villegas, Reporting from Mexico City, Published March 14, 2025, Updated March 15, 2025
A group of volunteers searching for their missing relatives first received a tip last week about a mass grave hidden in western Mexico.
When they arrived at an abandoned ranch outside La Estanzuela, a small rural village outside Guadalajara in Jalisco state, they discovered three underground cremation ovens, burned human remains, hundreds of bone shards and discarded personal items, along with figurines of Santa Muerte — the Holy Death.
The Mexican authorities, who were notified of the grisly discovery, said in several statements that they later found 96 shell casings of various calibers and metal gripping rings at the ranch. By last Friday, the discovery was dominating local newspapers and TV reports, and the search group was referring to the site as an “extermination camp.”
It is unclear how many people died on the site, and none of the remains have been identified. The authorities have yet to say who operated the camp, what crimes were committed there and for how long. But this week, the State Attorney General’s Office took over the investigation at the request of President Claudia Sheinbaum.
Photos taken by the authorities and by the volunteer group, Searching Warriors of Jalisco, at the abandoned ranch showed more than 200 shoes piled together and heaps of other personal items: a blue summer dress, a small pink backpack, notebooks, pieces of underwear. The more than 700 personal items were a chilling hint at the number of people who may have died there.
In a country seemingly inured to episodes of brutal violence from drug cartels, where clandestine graves emerge every month, the images shocked Mexicans and prompted outraged human rights groups to demand that the government put an end to the violence that has ravaged the nation for years.
“The number of the victims that presumably could have been buried there is enormous,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a security analyst based in Mexico City. “And it resurfaced the nightmarish reminder that Mexico is plagued with mass graves.”
More than 120,000 people have been forcibly disappeared in Mexico since such record-keeping began in 1962, according to official data. Human rights groups and collectives of volunteers searching for their missing relatives have warned that the number could be higher.
The discovery at the ranch site comes at a time where Ms. Sheinbaum faces intense pressure from President Trump to crack down on organized crime in order to avoid tariffs on exports to the United States and even possible U.S. military intervention to hunt down cartel members.
Partly because of Mr. Trump’s threats, Ms. Sheinbaum has shifted security issues back to center stage on her agenda and has taken a more aggressive approach to fighting crime than her predecessor, experts and analysts say. But her government faces significant challenges as she tackles the powerful criminal groups that control large areas of the country.
One of the most violent criminal organizations in Mexico, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which emerged in the early 2010s, is now a major producer and trafficker of synthetic drugs, particularly fentanyl and methamphetamine. The group, which operates in the state of Jalisco and across the country, has diversified into other criminal activities like illegal logging, human trafficking and extortion.
The authorities have said that the ranch could have been operated by the Jalisco cartel. The group’s dominance and its rapid expansion in recent years have coincided with a growing number of homicides, forced disappearances and discoveries of mass graves in Jalisco state.
Indira Navarro, leader of Searching Warriors of Jalisco, which found the site, said in interviews with local news media this week that several people had contacted the group to say that they had been recruited and trained at the site in the use of weapons and torture techniques. But the ranch, they said, was also used as a killing site where criminals routinely disposed of their victims.
Ms. Navarro, who could not be reached for comment, told the news outlets that, according to the testimonies, young people from other states were recruited through false job offers posted on social media. Once they accepted the jobs, she said, they were summoned to a bus station in Guadalajara, the state capital, and from there taken to the ranch.
Ms. Navarro recounted how one young man had told her that the young recruits were at times forced to burn their victims as part of their training. If they objected to the orders of their trainers, the recruits were sometimes fed to wild animals, like lions, she said.
“This is not a horror film; this is our reality, and people should know about it,” Ms. Navarro, whose brother went missing nine years ago, said in an interview with a national radio show.
The New York Times could not independently verify the accounts.
The local authorities were familiar with the ranch, first locating it last September and finding weapons, shell casings and bone fragments there, according to official reports, but further investigations were stopped for reasons that are unclear. During the same inspection, officials found and rescued two people who had been kidnapped and held at the ranch, and also discovered a body wrapped in plastic.
Why the authorities did not discover the pile of shoes, clothes and burned remains then is unclear.
The state attorney general, Salvador González, has since told local news media that it had not been possible to search the entire ranch back in September “because there are a lot of hectares in the area.”
Ms. Sheinbaum suggested during a news conference this week that the local authorities might have been omissive in their initial investigation.
The attorney general “is correct in stating it is not credible that a situation of this nature would not have been known to the authorities of that municipality and the state,” she said. “But the first thing we have to do is investigate.”
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6) After $30 Million in U.S. Aid, Haiti’s Biggest Hospital Goes Up in Smoke
A fire set by gangs at the country’s largest public hospital underscores long-simmering problems in Haiti, which is heavily dependent on international aid.
By David C. Adams and Frances Robles, Reporting from Florida, March 15, 2025
"Asked about the hospital’s status, the U.S. State Department, which has assumed control of the aid agency, said it would conduct a review with the goal of 'restructuring assistance to serve U.S. interests.'”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/us/haiti-hospital-fire-usaid.html
Two days before last Christmas, Dr. Pierre S. Prince took an exciting new job as director of Haiti’s largest public hospital, which the United States spent tens of millions of dollars renovating and is so deep in gang territory that it has been closed for a year.
Dr. Prince, a 57-year-old thoracic surgeon, looked forward to returning to the State University Hospital of Haiti, which had been ravaged by the 2010 earthquake that decimated the country’s capital.
He did his residency there and was going to oversee a new wing, a 500-bed facility with nearly $100 million in renovations and a range of services, including operating rooms, orthopedics and a maternity and neonatal unit.
On Christmas Eve, as he headed to work, gangs attacked a news conference scheduled to announce the hospital’s partial reopening, killing a police officer and two reporters, and seriously injuring seven other journalists. The reopening never happened.
The situation worsened last month: Videos that circulated on social media and were verified by The New York Times showed an older building at the general hospital, as it is commonly known, engulfed in flames. Gang members had apparently set it on fire.
“The doctors are scared, and our residents and interns are depressed,” Dr. Prince said. “Some of them have left. The morale is very low.”
The hospital’s fate underscores the increasingly desperate conditions facing Haiti and its international donors as they try to rescue Port-au-Prince from the control of armed gangs, which have targeted foreign-financed health facilities.
Haiti, where the United Nations says about 20 percent of its 10 million people is enduring acute levels of hunger and 1 million have fled their homes because of violence, is particularly dependent on foreign aid and had been receiving up to $400 million a year from the United States alone.
But as Elon Musk takes an ax to American foreign aid around the world, and dismantles the U.S. Agency for International Development, programs like the continued renovation of the general hospital in Port-au-Prince are in the cross hairs.
The hospital’s new wing, which U.S. A.I.D. helped pay for, was already plagued by large cost overruns and a decade of construction delays. Now it is being battered by repeated assaults from criminal groups as Haiti’s capital has become a lawless quagmire despite billions of dollars in international aid.
“The general hospital is sort of like a case study on how it goes wrong,” said Jake Johnston, a researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy and Research who wrote “Aid State,” a blistering account of how billions in international aid failed to bolster Haiti’s public institutions. “And they never finished the work, and the general hospital is closed for all these other reasons.”
Haiti’s general hospital was built next to the presidential palace in downtown Port-au-Prince by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during the American occupation of Haiti, from 1915 to 1934.
For years, many patients were gunshot and torture victims. In a country where politicians and wealthy elites travel to the Dominican Republic or Miami for health care, the general hospital served the overwhelmingly poor masses.
“It housed the only dialysis machines in the country,” said David Ellis, an American who runs a medical helicopter service in Port-au-Prince. “It was, when open, the most comprehensive surgical center in the country.”
It was so badly damaged in the 2010 earthquake that no one was able to treat the hundreds of severely injured people gathered outside, their bloody mangled limbs exposed to the dusty air.
Renovating the hospital was one of the first projects approved by an international reconstruction committee formed to rebuild Haiti after the earthquake. France committed $40 million, the United States $25 million.
After a series of delays and contract disputes, it was slated for completion in June 2023 — nine years later than originally planned.
At the same time, the political situation in Haiti deteriorated precipitously. The president was assassinated in 2021, and kidnappings and killings soared.
In July 2022, U.S. A.I.D. increased its contribution by $10 million because the Haitian government could not pay its share, according to a 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog agency.
The hospital was just one of several projects the G.A.O. examined that ended up over budget. The United States spent $2.3 billion to support Haiti’s reconstruction in the decade after the quake, and only half of the eight major projects G.A.O. reviewed were completed.
While a key power plant and roughly 900 homes were built in Port-au-Prince, two projects, including building a new port, were scrapped when costs soared and two others — including the general hospital — were still ongoing.
Technical and political disputes caused significant delays and cost overruns at the hospital, the G.A.O. said.
But the hospital limped along, half-open, while work on the new wing stalled.
Then a year ago, a coalition of gangs banded together to attack police stations, prisons, hospitals and communities. Gangs set homes on fire, and entire neighborhoods — including the downtown area that is home to the hospital — cleared out.
The former prime minister had to dodge gunfire during an official visit to the general hospital last year and was whisked away by his security detail while CNN cameras rolled.
With the area too perilous, the more than 800 people who work at the hospital, including doctors and nurses, have been paid to stay home for nearly a year.
“It seems that there is an intense desire to make us waste time,” said Dr. Stevens Gabriel, a resident surgeon who complained of not being reassigned to another facility to continue advancing his skills and training.
Even though police barracks are nearby, gangs plundered the general hospital. The governments of the United States, France and Haiti had already spent about $90 million on it. Electrical wiring, plumbing and equipment were stolen, though much of the new medical equipment had not yet been installed, Dr. Prince said.
The damage was estimated at $3 million to $4 million and could set the project back another two years — if the security situation ever improves enough for the hospital to reopen, he said. Now Dr. Prince says they are scouting for a new temporary place to work.
Eleonore Caroit, the French member of Parliament for citizens living overseas in Latin America and the Caribbean, who sits on the board of the development agency that helped finance the project, said drone footage was being used to assess damage from the recent fire.
“France is willing to do what it can to help,’’ she said, “but the situation is very complicated. My constituents tell me it’s never been this bad.”
Satellite imagery captured eight days after the fire by the commercial satellite company Planet Labs shows one older building charred and at least two others damaged.
Dr. Barth Green, the chairman of Project Medishare for Haiti, a Miami-based charity and a major supporter of health services in the country, said the attack was particularly dispiriting because the general hospital was where generations of nurses and doctors trained.
“That’s the national university hospital,” he said, “And so, by destroying this, it’s a symbol.”
The issue is critical: Only one of three major hospitals in the capital area is open. Of the 92 health facilities in the metropolitan area, only 39 are operational, according to the Pan American Health Organization.
Under the Trump administration’s new push to eradicate foreign aid, funds for most projects financed by U.S.A.I.D. were frozen, although a judge recently ruled that the agency had to fulfill past contracts.
Asked about the hospital’s status, the U.S. State Department, which has assumed control of the aid agency, said it would conduct a review with the goal of “restructuring assistance to serve U.S. interests.”
“Programs that serve our nation’s interests will continue,” the State Department said in a statement. “However, programs that aren’t aligned with our national interest will not.”
The Haitian Ministry of Health did not respond to requests for comment.
Responding to a post on X criticizing the billions spent in Haiti after the earthquake, Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé agreed that much of the American assistance had been squandered.
“You’re right!!” he wrote in a message directed at Mr. Musk, “USAID spent billion (sic) on Haiti with no accountability. Haiti needs economic development and security, not corruption and cronyism.”
He added that he looked forward to working with President Trump to achieve economic prosperity for Haiti.
Devon Lum contributed reporting. Dmitriy Khavin contributed video editing.
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7) Trade War Retaliation Will Hit Trump Voters Hardest
By Lazaro Gamio and Ana Swanson, March 15, 2025
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As President Trump imposes tariffs on products from countries around the world, foreign governments are answering back with tariffs of their own.
China has targeted corn farmers and carmakers. Canada has put tariffs on poultry plants and air-conditioning manufacturers, while Europe will hit American steel mills and slaughter houses.
Since Mr. Trump ordered steep levies on some of America’s largest trading partners in February and March, other countries have begun imposing their own tariffs on American exports in an attempt to put pressure on the president to relent.
The retaliatory tariffs have been carefully designed to hit Mr. Trump where it hurts: Nearly 8 million Americans work in industries targeted by the levies and the majority are Trump voters, a New York Times analysis shows.
The figures underscore the dramatic impact that a trade war could have on American workers, potentially causing Mr. Trump’s economic strategy to backfire. Mr. Trump has argued that tariffs will help boost American jobs. But economists say that retaliatory tariffs can cancel out that effect.
The countermeasures are aimed at industries that employ roughly 7.75 million people across the United States. The bulk of those — 4.48 million — are in counties that voted for Mr. Trump in the last election, compared with 3.26 million jobs in counties that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to a calculation by The Times that included examining retaliatory tariffs on more than 4,000 product categories.
These totals are the number of jobs in industries that foreign countries have targeted with their tariffs — not the number of jobs that will actually be lost because of tariffs, which is likely to be significantly lower. But industries hit by retaliatory tariffs are likely to sell fewer goods on foreign markets, which may mean lower profits and job losses.
The jobs that could be hit by retaliation are especially concentrated in pockets of the upper Midwest, South and Southeast, including many rural parts of the country that are responsible for producing agricultural goods. It also includes areas that produce coal, oil, car parts and other manufactured products.
Robert Maxim, a fellow at the Brookings Metro, a Washington think tank that has done similar analysis, said that other countries had particularly targeted Trump-supporting regions and places where “Trump would like to fashion himself as revitalizing the U.S.” That includes smaller manufacturing communities in states like Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, as well as southern states like Kentucky and Georgia, he said.
The message foreign countries are trying to send, he said, is, “You think you can bully us, well, we can hurt you too. And by the way, we know where it really matters.”
Retaliation may also mean concentrated pain for some industries, like farming. In Mr. Trump’s first term, American farmers – a strong voting bloc for the president – were targeted by China and other governments, which caused U.S. exports of soybeans and other crops to plummet.
Chinese buyers shifted to purchasing more agricultural goods from nations like Argentina and Brazil instead, and U.S. farmers had a difficult time winning back those contracts in subsequent years. Mr. Trump tried to offset those losses by giving farmers more than $20 billion in payments to compensate for the pain of the trade war.
One analysis published last year by economists at M.I.T., the World Bank and elsewhere found that retaliatory tariffs imposed on the United States during Mr. Trump’s first term had a negative effect on U.S. jobs, outweighing any benefit to employment from Mr. Trump’s tariffs on foreign goods or from the subsidies Mr. Trump provided to those hurt by his trade policies.
The net effect on American employment of U.S. tariffs, foreign tariffs and subsidies “was at best a wash, and it may have been mildly negative,” the economists concluded.
Rural parts of the country are once again at risk from retaliation. Agriculture is a major U.S. export and farmers are politically important to Mr. Trump. And rural counties may have one major employer — like a poultry processing plant — that provides a big share of the county’s jobs, compared with urban or suburban areas that are more diversified.
The retaliatory tariffs target industries employing 9.5 percent of people in Wisconsin, 8.5 percent of people in Indiana and 8.4 percent of people in Iowa. The shares are also relatively high in Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky and Kansas.
In an address to Congress earlier this month, Mr. Trump implied that farmers could be hit again, saying there may be “an adjustment period” as he put tariffs in place on foreign products. There may be “a little disturbance,” he said. “We are OK with that. It won’t be much.”
Mr. Trump said he had told farmers in his first term to “‘Just bear with me,’ and they did. They did. Probably have to bear with me again,” he said.
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, said that many of the counties affected by retaliation were rural, and “hard red territory.” The geography of Mr. Trump’s political support, he said, was “no secret to our trade partners.”
“They’re very cognizant of these industries, the geography of these industries, and how American politics work,” he added.
Methodology
The analysis was based on an analytical technique used by the Brookings Institution to examine the first round of Chinese retaliatory tariffs.
To expand on the analysis, The Times collected the lists of U.S. products targeted for retaliatory tariffs by China, Canada and the European Union as of March 14. In total, the six published lists contain more than 4,000 individual product categories, many of which were targeted by more than one country. The tariffs from China and Canada are currently in force. One set of tariffs from the European Union is scheduled to go into effect April 1, while the other set is preliminary, and is subject to change until its implementation in mid-April.
After collecting the list of products, The Times used a concordance table from the Census Bureau, which provides a way to tie a given product category to the general industry which produces it.
To tally the number of jobs, The Times used data from Lightcast, a labor market analytics company. Lightcast provided The Times with industry-level employment data based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. The quarterly census suppresses employment data for industries at the county level to protect the privacy of employers when there are only a handful of establishments. Lightcast uses a proprietary algorithm that draws from a number of related datasets to estimate the employment level for fields that are suppressed in the census.
County election results are from The Associated Press.
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8) How a Columbia Student Fled to Canada After ICE Came Looking for Her
Ranjani Srinivasan’s student visa was revoked by U.S. immigration authorities. That was just the start of her odyssey.
By Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Hamed Aleaziz, March 15, 2025
The first knock at the door came eight days ago, on a Friday morning.
Three federal immigration agents showed up at a Columbia University apartment searching for Ranjani Srinivasan, who had recently learned her student visa had been revoked. Ms. Srinivasan, an international student from India, did not open the door.
She was not home when the agents showed up again the next night, just hours before a former Columbia student living in campus housing, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained, roiling the university. Ms. Srinivasan packed a few belongings, left her cat behind with a friend and jumped on a flight to Canada at LaGuardia Airport.
When the agents returned a third time, this past Thursday night, and entered her apartment with a judicial warrant, she was gone.
“The atmosphere seemed so volatile and dangerous,” Ms. Srinivasan, 37, said on Friday in an interview with The New York Times, her first public remarks since leaving. “So I just made a quick decision.”
Ms. Srinivasan, a Fulbright recipient who was pursuing a doctoral degree in urban planning, was caught in the dragnet of President Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators through the use of federal immigration powers. She is one of a handful of noncitizens that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has targeted at Columbia in recent days.
In the week since that first knock at the door, Ms. Srinivasan says she has struggled to understand why the State Department abruptly revoked her student visa without explanation, leading Columbia to withdraw her enrollment from the university because her legal status had been terminated.
On Friday, while considering her future in Canada, she received some answers.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement that characterized Ms. Srinivasan as a terrorist sympathizer and accused her of advocating violence and being “involved in activities supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization.” The department did not provide any evidence for its allegations.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, posted surveillance footage on social media that showed Ms. Srinivasan lugging a suitcase at LaGuardia as she fled to Canada. Secretary Noem celebrated Ms. Srinivasan’s departure as a “self-deportation.”
“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live & study in the United States of America,” Secretary Noem wrote on X. “When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country.”
Ms. Srinivasan’s lawyers have vehemently denied those allegations and have accused the Trump administration of revoking her visa for engaging in “protected political speech,” saying she was denied “any meaningful form of due process” to challenge the visa revocation.
“Secretary Noem’s tweet is not only factually wrong but fundamentally un-American,” Naz Ahmad, one of Ms. Srinivasan’s lawyers, said in a statement, adding: “For at least a week, D.H.S. has made clear its intent to punish her for her speech, and they have failed in their efforts.”
In response to questions, officials with the Homeland Security Department said that when Ms. Srinivasan renewed her visa last year, she failed to disclose two court summonses related to protests on Columbia’s campus. The department did not say how the summonses made her a terrorist sympathizer.
“I’m fearful that even the most low-level political speech or just doing what we all do — like shout into the abyss that is social media — can turn into this dystopian nightmare where somebody is calling you a terrorist sympathizer and making you, literally, fear for your life and your safety,” Ms. Srinivasan said in the interview on Friday.
Ms. Srinivasan’s current situation can be traced back to last year, when she was arrested at an entrance to Columbia’s campus the same day that pro-Palestinian protesters occupied Hamilton Hall, a university building. She said she had not been a part of the break-in but was returning to her apartment that evening after a picnic with friends, wading through a churning crowd of protesters and barricades on West 116th Street, when the police pushed her and arrested her.
She was briefly detained and received two summonses, one for obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic and another for refusing to disperse. Her case was quickly dismissed and did not result in a criminal record, according to her lawyers and court documents. Ms. Srinivasan said that she never faced disciplinary action from the university and was in good academic standing.
“She was taken in with roughly 100 other people after being blocked from returning to her apartment and getting stuck in the street,” said Nathan Yaffe, one of her lawyers. “The court recognized this when it dismissed her case as having no merit. Ranjani was just trying to walk home.”
Ms. Srinivasan said she did not disclose the summonses in the visa renewal form later in the year because her case had been dismissed in May and she did not have a conviction.
“Because I had not and the charges were dismissed, I sort of marked it as ‘no,’” she said. “But maybe that was my mistake. I would have been happy to disclose that, but just the way they had questioned us was sort of assuming that you had a conviction.”
The State Department has broad discretion to revoke student visas, which it typically does if someone overstays or the government discovers fraud; convictions and arrests can also lead to revocations. Immigration lawyers said it was highly unusual for ICE to descend on college campuses searching for students with recently revoked visas as the agency has the past few days at Columbia, rattling many students.
“It is more rare for the government to act the way it has, such as in the cases in Columbia University, where they’re going on campus and conducting an operation to apprehend somebody,” said Greg Chen, a lawyer at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
The Trump administration’s targeting of students with visas at a university enveloped in a cultural firestorm opened a new front in the president’s attempts to ramp up deportations and tamp down pro-Palestinian views. The president canceled $400 million in grants to the university after accusing it of failing to protect Jewish students. The arrests and attempted detentions of the Columbia students has led to an uproar among Democrats and civil rights groups.
Jason Houser, a senior ICE official during the Biden administration, said that “criminalizing free speech through radicalized immigration enforcement is a direct attack on our democracy.”
Last week, ICE arrested Mr. Khalil, a green card holder who had become a leading face of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia. Mr. Trump hailed the arrest as “the first of many to come.” On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it had arrested Leqaa Kordia, who had been involved in the protests at Columbia. Federal officials said she had overstayed her visa and had previously been arrested at a Columbia protest in April.
Unlike Mr. Khalil, Ms. Srinivasan said she was not an activist or a member of any group that organized demonstrations on campus.
Ms. Srinivasan said she was an architect who came to the United States from India as part of the Fulbright program in 2016 and that she enrolled at Columbia in 2020. She said she was in the fifth year of an urban planning doctoral program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and was supposed to graduate in May.
She said that her activity on social media had been mostly limited to liking or sharing posts that highlighted “human rights violations” in the war in Gaza. And she said that she had signed several open letters related to the war, including one by architecture scholars that called for “Palestinian liberation.”
“I’m just surprised that I’m a person of interest,” she said. “I’m kind of a rando, like, absolute rando,” she said, using slang for random.
It was March 5 when she received an email from the U.S. Consulate in Chennai, India, indicating that her visa had been revoked. The notice did not provide a reason, saying only that “information has come to light” that may make her ineligible for a visa.
Confused, she emailed Columbia’s office for international students the following day seeking guidance. An official informed her that the revocation would take effect only if she left the country and that she could remain in the United States to pursue her studies for the time being, according to emails reviewed by The Times.
The next morning, on March 7, Ms. Srinivasan was on a call with an official from the international student office when the federal agents first knocked on the door of her apartment, which is off campus but operated by Columbia. The official told Ms. Srinivasan to call campus security, while her roommate engaged with the agents from behind the closed apartment door.
In an interview, her roommate said that the agents had initially identified themselves as “police,” declined to provide their badge numbers, saying they feared they would be doxxed, and stood to the side of the door so that they were not visible through the peep hole. The roommate, a fellow Columbia student who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for her safety, said that the building’s doorman, who is an immigrant, later told her that he had let the three agents into the building because he was frightened.
Ms. Srinivasan abandoned the apartment that night, so she was not there when officials returned the following evening. Her roommate once again refused to open the door to let them in and recorded audio of the interaction, which she shared with The Times.
“We were here yesterday,” one of the officials says, believing he was talking to Ms. Srinivasan because the roommate had not identified herself. “We’re here today. We’re here tonight. Tomorrow. You’re probably scared. If you are, I get it. The reality is, your visa was revoked. You are now amenable to removal proceedings.”
The official stressed that he and his colleagues were not trying to break the law, that she would have the right to go before an immigration judge and left a phone number for the Homeland Security Department that she could call if she had “a change of heart.”
“That’s the easiest and fastest way to do this, as opposed to you being in your apartment and us knocking on your door every day, which is just silly,” he said. “You’re a very smart person. It’s just not — it’s not worth it.”
The next day, Ms. Srinivasan received an email from Columbia saying that homeland security had alerted the university that her visa had been revoked and her legal status in the country had been terminated. Because she had to immediately leave the United States, the email said, her enrollment at Columbia had been withdrawn and she had to vacate student housing.
The email, signed by the university’s international student office, said that, in compliance with its legal obligations, Columbia was asking her to meet with the homeland security agents. The university declined to comment on Ms. Srinivasan’s case.
On Thursday night, three federal agents returned to Ms. Srinivasan’s apartment with a search warrant signed by a judge and went inside to search for her, according to her roommate and lawyers.
By then, Ms. Srinivasan was already in Canada.
Edward Wong contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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9) How a Columbia Student Activist Landed in Federal Detention
Mahmoud Khalil never shielded his face with a mask the way some protesters did. That made him a target when President Trump decided to move aggressively against campus activists.
By Michael Wilson, Michael Rothfeld and Ana Ley, March 16, 2025
Mahmoud Khalil at a news conference last spring. Unlike some international students at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, he never wore a mask. Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times
Crowds of masked student protesters raging against the war in Gaza filled the Columbia University lawns last spring, while counterprotesters and journalists surrounded the tent city that had been erected there.
One man stood out.
He was Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student in his 20s, older than most of the students around him. Mr. Khalil, a Syrian immigrant of Palestinian descent, quickly emerged as a vocal and measured leader during rallies and sit-ins, doing on-camera interviews with the media in a zip-up sweater.
And he was unmasked. Many other international students wore masks and kept to the background of the protests, for fear of being singled out and losing their visas.
His wife worried. “We’ve talked about the mask thing,” Noor Abdalla, a 28-year-old dentist from the Midwest, said in an interview last week. “He always tells me, ‘What I am doing wrong that I need to be covering my face for?’”
Mr. Khalil was a negotiator on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the main coalition of protesting student groups, and one with its own spectrum of attitudes toward violence and dark rhetoric.
His decision to quite literally be the face of a deeply divisive movement would have huge consequences for Mr. Khalil. He was called out by critics by name on social media, and on March 8, seven weeks after the inauguration of Donald Trump, federal agents arrived at his door. He was swiftly taken to a detention center in Louisiana, where he is still being held for what officials have described, without providing details, as leading activities aligned with Hamas, an allegation he has denied.
Mr. Khalil’s friends and family have expressed outrage at his detention and possible deportation. But they also say they are not surprised by his activism in a movement that he was born into, nor his relatively calm presence amid a swarm of noise.
As he moved through the world, Mr. Khalil could often come across as the adult in the room. And to one who had known him as an office mate in an earlier time, his role in front of microphones and wielding a bullhorn came unexpected.
“He’s very sort of mild mannered,” said Andrew Waller, a former colleague who worked with Mr. Khalil in Beirut at the British diplomatic office for Syria. “Seeing him in more of a sort of leadership or spokesperson role, I guess was a surprise.”
Fleeing home
Mr. Khalil arrived at Columbia University at the end of a long and winding journey. His Palestinian origin story was written and ended before he was born.
His grandparents were from a village near Tiberias, a city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee in Palestine before it became part of the state of Israel. They were forced to flee in 1948 during the wars preceding Israel’s establishment, Mr. Khalil has said, settling with other members of their large family in southern Damascus in Syria, in a Palestinian refugee enclave. It was there that Mr. Khalil was born in 1995.
In the early 2010s, he fled the Syrian conflict to Lebanon, where he arrived alone and broke. He worked in construction to make enough money to pursue an education, according to his friend Ahmad Berro, who met Mr. Khalil while the two were studying at Lebanese American University. Mr. Khalil graduated in 2018 with a degree in computer science.
While in Lebanon, Mr. Khalil worked with Jusoor, a Syrian American educational nonprofit. There, in 2016, he met the woman who would become his wife, a U.S. citizen of Syrian descent.
In 2018, he began working on programs related to Syria for the British diplomatic office in Beirut. He eventually oversaw a scholarship program for foreign students to study in Britain. His work was informed by his personal experiences of fleeing Syria and his opposition to the government there, Mr. Waller, his former colleague, said.
After about four years, Mr. Khalil set his sights on the United States and applied to a few graduate schools. He hoped to be accepted at one in particular, Columbia University and its School of International and Public Affairs.
He was accepted and enrolled in January 2023.
He saw it as a huge win, not only for himself, but for his fellow refugees, said Lauren Bohn, a journalist who met Mr. Khalil in Beirut and spent time with him after his admission to Columbia. “He said, ‘This will really help me serve all the others who aren’t going to be able to get this chance.’”
He had been at the university for some nine months when everything changed on Oct. 7, 2023.
A campus in turmoil
Students at Columbia turned out for protests immediately after Hamas’s attacks on Israel. Some were quiet calls for peace, others more raucous. Pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel chants rang through the campus, rattling many Jewish students.
Mr. Khalil was on the front lines with Palestinian activists, bracing for a counterattack from Israel that was imminent. In a video from Oct. 12, five days after the attacks, he is seen atop another person’s shoulders, shouting “Free Palestine!” into a bullhorn.
Months of protests followed. Then, in April 2024, pro-Palestinian students established an encampment at the center of campus. They demanded that the university divest from what they called “all economic and academic stakes in Israel,” including Columbia’s dual-degree partnership with Tel Aviv University.
The rows of tents pitched on Columbia’s iconic, grassy lawns inspired similar protests at universities across the United States. They became a flashpoint after Columbia’s president called the New York City police to campus, leading to the arrests of more than 100 people. As the protests intensified, some Jewish students complained about feeling unsafe. Some heard anti-Zionist chants as threatening to them personally. Those accounts reached Congress, where Republicans derided the protests as antisemitic and Columbia as out of control.
When negotiations began between the protesters and the university, Mr. Khalil emerged as a lead spokesman for the students. The two sides met day and night. A Columbia administrator who negotiated with him described Mr. Khalil as thoughtful, passionate and principled, sometimes to the point of rigidity. He got his back up when he felt he wasn’t being taken seriously. Mr. Khalil was also a face of the protesters for the news media, where he was sharply critical of the university, stepping confidently up to banks of microphones where reporters from CNN, Spectrum News NY1, The Associated Press and The New York Times and elsewhere recorded him confronting the school that had brought him to New York.
“It’s very clear the university does not want to criticize Israel in any way,” Mr. Khalil told a gaggle of journalists gathered near the encampment last spring.
On another occasion, at a discussion sponsored by the coalition of student protesters, he remarked that whether Palestinian resistance was peaceful or armed, “Israel and their propaganda always find something to attack.” He added, “They — we — have tried armed resistance, which is, again, legitimate under international law.” But Israel calls it terrorism, he said.
Those comments were highlighted as justifying terrorism by pro-Israel activists on a webpage about Mr. Khalil that had been compiled by Canary Mission, a group that says it fights hatred of Jews on college campuses and that pro-Palestinian protesters say has doxxed them.
Still, Mr. Khalil repeatedly told friends, as he had his wife, that he saw no reason to wear a mask. What were they going to do to me? he asked.
Once, when the number of tents rose to more than 100, including on a second lawn near the School of Journalism, administrators turned to Mr. Khalil. They made him an offer: Remove about 20 tents, they said, and we’ll ensure that the university’s trustees continue to discuss your demands.
Mr. Khalil countered, agreeing to remove a few less than the administrators wanted, according to one administrator present at those talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private university negotiations.
Within minutes, 17 tents vanished and the second lawn was emptied. This response burnished Mr. Khalil’s reputation as a good-faith, if demanding, negotiator.
Other times, he stood fast. Late in the protests, when the university offered concessions and the threat of the police arriving to clear out demonstrators was looming, Mr. Khalil pushed back. We don’t want your concessions. The police? Let them come.
Then they did.
New protests, new president
After a faction of protesters took over Hamilton Hall, a campus building, on April 30, barricading doors and trapping custodians inside, scores of police officers descended on the university. They arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators and cleared the hall.
Mr. Khalil was not accused of being in the hall. He had been suspended by the university just before the building takeover, accused of refusing to leave the encampment, along with many other pro-Palestinian activists, and then was quickly reinstated. But there were no more negotiations, and the protests ended for a time.
Columbia slowly ceased being the global flashpoint for campus unrest. Mr. Khalil focused on finishing his courses and looking for work after graduation.
He and Ms. Abdalla married, and he obtained a green card, giving him permanent residency in the United States.
Last summer, the couple learned that they were having a baby. Mr. Khalil was excited, his friends said, getting their apartment ready even as the couple looked ahead toward moving after he earned his degree.
“He did everything, basically,” Ms. Abdalla, now eight months pregnant, said. “He did all the cooking, he did all the cleaning. He did the laundry. He wouldn’t let me touch anything.”
He finished his coursework for his master’s degree from the School of International and Public Affairs in December. But he remained aware of protests still bubbling up at Columbia and at Barnard College, across Broadway.
In January, protesters stormed into a Columbia classroom, and two Barnard students were later expelled that month for their roles that day. It was a flashback to the turmoil of the previous spring. While Mr. Khalil was not present, he was soon drawn back in.
Days later, President Trump, newly inaugurated, issued an executive order promising to combat antisemitism and prosecute or “remove” perpetrators of such views.
The same night, an X account of a Zionist group singled out Mr. Khalil. It accused him, without evidence, of saying that “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and said that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had his home address. “He’s on our deport list,” the post said.
It included a video of Mr. Khalil speaking in a CNN interview, during which he made no such statement. Mr. Khalil has said he had “unequivocally” never spoken those words — another student had, and was expelled.
Mr. Khalil saw himself and other student protesters as victims of doxxing, finding their personal information spread on social media. On Jan. 31, he emailed Columbia administrators asking for protection for international students, such as himself, who he said were facing “severe and pervasive doxxing, discriminatory harassment and very possibly deportation.” A Columbia spokeswoman declined to comment on communications from Mr. Khalil.
Jasmine Sarryeh, a close friend, tried to allay his concerns and told him he would never be deported. Now she feels like she let him down.
“I didn’t think to expect that this would happen,” she said in a recent interview.
‘Suspected Foreign National’
On March 5, in response to the expulsion of the Barnard students in January, protesters dressed in kaffiyehs and wearing masks descended upon the college’s library. It was a Wednesday, and Mr. Khalil turned from his baby preparations and attended as well, maskless again.
It was the beginning of a four-day stretch that would end with Mr. Khalil in federal detention.
Videos on social media depict him at the library holding a megaphone — and, at one point, using it to amplify the Barnard president, who is speaking over a cellphone. When the protesters are asked if they want to speak with the president, Laura Rosenbury, Mr. Khalil gives them an encouraging thumbs up. They respond in unison: “Yes!”
Critics of the protests immediately began posting videos and images of Mr. Khalil on X, calling him out by name.
One post included an image of his face circled in red with the label “Suspected Foreign National.”
Then, Shai Davidai, an Israeli Jew and Columbia professor banned from campus in October after he was accused of harassing employees, reposted that image and tagged another X account. It belonged to Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, who had just posted a threat to deport Hamas supporters.
“Illegally taking over a college in which you are not even enrolled and distributing terrorist propaganda should be a deportable offense, no?” Mr. Davidai wrote. Shirion Collective, a group that says it exposes antisemitism, has said that it also earlier sent the Department of Homeland Security a legal memorandum advising the “detention and removal” of Mr. Khalil.
Mr. Khalil saw some of the posts online and panicked. He was being singled out for deportation directly to the very official with the power to set that process in motion.
On Friday, March 7, he again wrote to Columbia administrators and described a “vicious, coordinated and dehumanizing doxxing campaign” against him.
“I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home,” he wrote.
That fear would be realized the next day.
‘Let’s bring him in.’
Mr. Khalil and his wife were out with friends on Saturday night, March 8. When they returned to their Columbia apartment, a man in plain clothes pushed into the lobby behind them. Ms. Abdalla felt her husband tense.
“He knew something was wrong,” she said.
I’m with the police, the man said. You have to come with us. More officers arrived in the lobby. Ms. Abdalla hurried up to their apartment to get her husband’s green card. She reminded the officers that he was a permanent citizen.
“‘This guy has a green card,’” she heard the officer say on his phone. “And then the guy on the phone with him told him, ‘Let’s bring him in anyway.’”
In a video recording of the arrest, she is heard asking the officers repeatedly to identify themselves and to specify what charges her husband was facing. She rushes after the officers into the street as they ignore her questions.
It remains unclear what exactly Mr. Khalil is believed to have done. He is accused by the White House and others of organizing protests, such as the one in the Barnard library, where participants distributed fliers promoting Hamas. A flier that was shown in online postings from the library said it had been produced by the “Hamas Media Office.” It was titled “Our Narrative” and listed Hamas’s code name for the Oct. 7 attacks, with an image of fighters standing on a tank. It is unclear whether Mr. Khalil knew the fliers were there.
“I can wholeheartedly say that I know that he did not touch those fliers,” said Mr. Khalil’s friend, Maryam Alwan. “But just because he had his face out, people are trying to pin everything on him.”
His lawyers also denied that he had distributed the fliers at Barnard.
Mr. Waller, his former colleague in Lebanon, said the depictions of Mr. Khalil that he had seen in the news media did not line up with the friend he knew.
“The idea that he’s somehow a political extremist or a sympathizer with terrorist groups or whatever just sounds totally outlandish,” he said. “If you know him and you know his character, it just feels like a sort of obvious smear.”
There are circumstances in which permanent residency status in the United States can be revoked — if, for example, the resident is convicted of a crime. But Mr. Khalil has not been accused of any crime. Instead, Secretary Rubio has cited a little-used statute as the rationale for Mr. Khalil’s detention. The law says that the government can initiate deportation proceedings against anyone whose presence in the country is deemed adversarial to the United States’ foreign policy interests.
Mr. Davidai, the professor who tweeted the photo at Secretary Rubio, said in an interview that he believed Mr. Khalil was entitled to due process under the law. But, he added, it does not so much matter whether Mr. Khalil personally handled fliers promoting terrorists, if the group he represented did.
“When you lead an organization, you are accountable for your organization’s actions,” Mr. Davidai said. “When you lead an organization that openly and proudly supports a U.S. designated terrorist organization, you are accountable to the spreading of propaganda.”
Mr. Khalil has said he was never the planner and leader of the pro-Palestinian protests; he has consistently described himself as a spokesman and negotiator for a coalition of student groups.
Resolving this was not the job of the agents who came to his lobby that Saturday night. They handcuffed Mr. Khalil, led him to a car waiting outside and drove him away.
Katherine Rosman, Sharon Otterman, Jonah E. Bromwich and Michael LaForgia contributed reporting. Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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10) Israel’s Newest Army Recruits: the Ultra-Orthodox
Photographs by Sergey Ponomarev, Text by Jack Nicas and Adam Sella, March 16, 2025
The journalists spent six months following the journeys of three ultra-Orthodox men who had been drafted.
At Israel’s founding in 1948, the new nation’s leaders agreed that ultra-Orthodox men — known as the Haredim, or God-fearing, in Hebrew — would be spared from mandatory military service. In exchange, Haredi leaders lent their support for the largely secular state.
The arrangement held for Israel’s first 75 years, until the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
The resulting war in Gaza pulled hundreds of thousands of Israelis into battle — but hardly any ultra-Orthodox. The dynamic exacerbated tensions that had been simmering for years.
The Haredim, who average more than six children per family, now make up 14 percent of the nation, up from 5 percent in 1948. In 40 years, they are on track to account for half of all Israeli children.
As the numbers of Haredim have grown, many Israelis have become frustrated that their own sons and daughters are sent to fight while the Haredim receive government subsidies to study the Torah.
Last summer, the tensions broke open. Under pressure, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that ultra-Orthodox men were no longer exempt from service. The military has since sent draft orders to 10,000 Haredi men. Just 338 have shown up for duty.
Israel is now confronting one of its messiest and most fundamental dilemmas: Its fastest growing sect won’t serve in the military.
After the Supreme Court decision, The New York Times began following three Haredi teenagers who represent the divergent paths for the Haredim and Israel.
Chaim Krausz, 19, studies the Torah for 14 hours a day, just like his father before him. He has protested the Supreme Court decision and believes armed service is not only a sin, but also a threat to ultra-Orthodox traditions.
Itamar Greenberg, 18, a former ultra-Orthodox seminary student, has also protested against the Israeli state, but his reasons are not religious. “They’ve been committing a massacre in Gaza,” he said.
Yechiel Wais, 19, also once studied in a seminary, but had dreams of a life outside his strict ultra-Orthodox community and left for the work force. Then his draft orders arrived.
“It’s not an entry ticket to Israeli society,” Mr. Wais said of a position in the Israeli military. “But it’s the minimum requirement.”
The soldier
Growing up, Mr. Wais wore a black-and-white suit. Like most ultra-Orthodox males, it was practically his only outfit.
But one year for Purim, a Jewish holiday when many children wear costumes, he dressed up as an Israeli soldier. He lived near an Israeli Air Force base and loved watching the F-16 fighter jets from behind a fence.
The idea of him, a Haredi boy, growing up to be a soldier felt impossible. “I didn’t even fantasize about it,” he said.
Ultra-Orthodox men are supposed to devote themselves to a life of study and prayer. For many, that includes isolation from the outside, secular world: no internet, no television and no radio.
At Mr. Wais’s home, even the CD player was “kosher” — its radio antenna removed. One day, when Mr. Wais was listening to music, he suddenly heard a voice through static. His headphones had unwittingly picked up a radio signal. After that, he spent hours surreptitiously listening to the radio, discovering a very different world.
It was the beginning of his exit from a strict ultra-Orthodox life. When he turned 17 in 2022, he told his parents he wanted to leave the yeshiva to work. They were stunned, but acquiesced. They took him to a mall to shop for clothes for his new life.
He found a job outside Tel Aviv. Then, when he heard about the Supreme Court decision, he found a new path, fighting for his country.
The student
Mr. Krausz has no interest in secular Israeli society.
He spends most of his time under the tutelage of rabbis who warn against a long list of sins, including any contact with women outside his family before marriage. He hardly leaves his densely packed ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, where signs — including above his family home — warn passers-by to dress modestly so as not to offend residents.
It is how he wants to live.
Thousands of Haredi men in Israel receive government subsidies to study the Torah, while their wives often work. In Israel, 53 percent of Haredi men are employed, versus 80 percent of Haredi women. For Israelis who are not ultra-Orthodox, employment rates exceed 80 percent.
The Haredi population is also soaring — from 40,000 in 1948 to 1.3 million today.
Mr. Krausz is one of 18 children. In his four-room house, people sleep around the dining room table. He wants the same big family. “The more the better,” he said. His parents are searching for a wife for him.
The government had long funded at least a fifth of yeshivas’ budgets; donors cover the rest. Then earlier this year, an Israeli court halted public funding to yeshivas that teach military-age men, part of the push to get more Haredim into the military.
The decision doesn’t bother Mr. Krausz. One of the reasons he resists military service is that he opposes the concept of the Israeli state.
Mr. Krausz’s sect, Yahadut Haharedi, says there should not be a Jewish state until the messiah arrives.
The activist
In the weeks before his new life in the military, Mr. Wais headed out for a night out with friends. Sliding into the car, Mr. Wais wrinkled his nose and said, “The lefty sitting next to me is sweaty.”
That “lefty” he referred to was his friend, Mr. Greenberg, who was indeed far to the left ideologically — and sweaty. He had come directly from an antiwar demonstration and had stickers on his shirt to show for it.
The two had met on social media months earlier and formed a friendship as young Haredi men trying to fit into broader society.
At age 12, Mr. Greenberg began questioning his faith with a censored version of the internet as a guide, dreaming of life outside his community. “The only way to become a part of Israeli society is to get drafted,” he recalled thinking. “That was one of the most accurate realizations I had in my life.”
By 16, his views had evolved further — and to the left. He became a vegan, stopped believing in God and developed a fierce opposition to the Israeli occupation.
He also opposes the drafting of the ultra-Orthodox, but for different reasons than most. “It’s important to integrate the ultra-Orthodox people into Israeli society,” he said. “And to work for equality. But I don’t care about equality in killing and oppression.”
In the car to Jerusalem, Mr. Wais and Mr. Greenberg jokingly exchanged digs. They drank colorful cocktails at a friend’s apartment and then headed to a Haredi haunt that served traditional Jewish foods like chopped liver and cholent, a slow-cooked stew. Eventually the conversation turned to politics.
“I’m not willing to take part in a system that commits such crimes,” Mr. Greenberg said to Mr. Wais in the car.
“Which crimes?” Mr. Wais responded.
“Do you want a list?” Mr. Greenberg said.
It would be their last night out together. Both had been drafted. While Mr. Wais was preparing for basic training, Mr. Greenberg was preparing to report to a military prison as a conscientious objector. His ultra-Orthodox family reluctantly accepted his new views, including his father, a rare Haredi man who serves in the Army reserves.
He was not accepted by his bunk mates. Once in prison, Mr. Greenberg realized that his fellow inmates were not activists like him, but soldiers accused of crimes. They taunted and threatened him, he said, and guards sometimes put him in solitary confinement for his own protection. “They hate the army,” he said of the other prisoners, “but they hate me more.”
Last month, after 197 days incarcerated across five separate prison stints, Mr. Greenberg walked out of the prison for what he hoped was the final time. “The army’s decided to release me,” he said, dressed in a green sweatshirt with smiley faces.
“But the broader goal was to build a better future, for everyone from Jordan to the sea,” he added. “I’m not done with that yet.”
An ultra-Orthodox platoon
Over the past several decades, hundreds of Haredi men had defied their community and volunteered for military service, but most had been kept away from combat. Mr. Wais wanted to be different: He wanted to fight.
“I don’t like war,” he said. “But I like action in the street — the soldiers and rockets.”
Yet after a medical exam revealed he needed ear surgery, military officials told him he was not cut out for combat. Instead, he would maintain aircraft.
In August, he arrived at an air force base in Israel’s north and was assigned to a unit with two dozen other Haredi soldiers. They shed their traditional black-and-white garb for mechanics’ jumpsuits, but kept their kipas, or traditional skullcaps. Many also still wore payot, or side curls, common among the ultra-Orthodox. Mr. Wais had shaved his years earlier.
Their barracks and lunch tables were separated from other soldiers to avoid mixing with women, which could violate Haredi principles. Their food was cooked to even stricter kosher standards. They prayed and studied religious texts for two to three hours a day — the most Mr. Wais said he had studied since leaving the seminary.
“There isn’t a soldier here who could complain how we’re being treated with regard to religious issues,” he said.
On a recent day, Mr. Wais and two fellow Haredi soldiers went through final training on maintenance for an F-16 fighter jet. They were the same jets he used to watch as a child.
Afterward, the soldiers gathered for a sermon from a Haredi rabbi. They were set to graduate from training the next day.
“We are in the middle of the biggest war of all,” the rabbi, David Viseman, told the teenagers.
“You have to prepare your souls to cling to goodness in the world,” he added. “To erase evil.”
Now he is working as an aircraft technician in a special ultra-Orthodox unit of the Israeli Air Force’s 105th Scorpion Squadron.
“We are the new pioneers,” he said. “We are marching at the head of a movement.”
An ultra-Orthodox protest
To Mr. Krausz, the evil are the Haredim in the military.
“It’s the way I look at any Jew who breaks the Shabbat,” he said, referring to the Jewish day of rest. “It’s forbidden to love them.”
He was more forgiving of secular soldiers. “Of course they don’t know better,” he said, puffing on a strawberry-kiwi-flavored vape at his dining room table, shelves of religious texts behind him.
His biggest fear is that the ultra-Orthodox faith won’t survive if Haredi men must fight.
After the Supreme Court decision, Mr. Krausz joined thousands of other Haredi men in the streets. They crowded around an enlistment office and harassed the Haredi draftees going in.
The Israeli Army said in a statement that Haredi men who ignore draft orders “may face criminal sanctions.”
Yet unlike Mr. Greenberg, who turned himself in to the authorities, Mr. Krausz and his peers have largely avoided consequences.
Any effort to force them to serve, Mr. Krausz warned, would not be taken lightly.
“We are willing to die to not go to the army,” he said.
Myra Noveck contributed reporting from Jerusalem and Haifa, Israel.
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11) Houthis Vow Retaliation Against U.S., Saying Yemen Strikes Killed at Least 31
The Iran-backed rebels, who have targeted Israel and shipping in the Red Sea, said children were among those killed in the strikes ordered by President Trump.
By Ismaeel Naar and Saeed Al-Batati, March 16, 2025
Ismaeel Naar reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Saeed Al-Batati from Al Mukalla, Yemen.
A damaged building in Saada, Yemen, on Sunday after U.S. strikes. Credit...Naif Rahma/Reuters
The Houthi militia in Yemen has vowed to retaliate after President Trump ordered large-scale military strikes on targets controlled by the group that it says killed at least 31 people.
The group, which is backed by Iran, said that women and children were among those killed in the strikes on Saturday, the most significant U.S. military action in the Middle East since Mr. Trump took office in January.
For more than a year, the Houthis have launched attacks against Israel and threatened commercial shipping in the Red Sea in solidarity with their ally Hamas, which led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza. The Houthis suspended the campaign in January after a cease-fire was reached in Gaza, but have vowed to step up attacks again after Israel instituted a blockade on aid to the enclave this month.
The U.S. airstrikes targeted Houthi-controlled areas across Yemen, including the capital, Sana, as well as Saada, al-Bayda, Hajjah and Dhamar Provinces, according to reports from Houthi-run media channels. The strikes killed at least 31 people and wounded 101, “most of whom were children and women,” Anis al-Asbahi, a spokesman for the Houthi-run health ministry, said late Saturday.
The casualty figures could not be independently verified, and the United States has not given any estimates for the number of people killed or wounded in the strikes.
On Sunday, Michael Waltz, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, described the U.S. weekend attacks on Yemen as both successful and effective. “We hit the Houthi leadership, killing several of their key leaders last night, their infrastructure, the missiles,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” He cast the Houthis as “essentially Al Qaeda with sophisticated Iranian-backed air defenses and anti-ship cruise missiles and drones” that have attacked the entire global economy.
The U.S. Central Command, which posted a video of a bomb leveling a building compound in Yemen, said that Washington had employed precision strikes to “defend American interests, deter enemies and restore freedom of navigation.”
U.S. airstrikes also targeted a power facility in the northwestern town of Dahyan, causing a nightlong electricity blackout, residents said.
The Houthi-run Al-Masirah television channel reported that 13 people were killed and nine others wounded in airstrikes on al-Jeraf, a district in Sana that is considered a stronghold of the group. In Saada Province, in the northwest, 10 people, including four children, were killed when airstrikes hit two buildings, the report said.
Residents in Sana shared images and videos on social media showing shattered windows and fireballs rising from sites that were struck. Others posted anguished messages as the airstrikes hit.
Abdul Rahman al-Nuerah, a resident of Sana, said the blasts had shattered the windows of his home and terrified his four children. “I instantly embraced and comforted them,” Mr. al-Nuerah said by telephone. “Children and mothers are afraid and still in shock.”
Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior Houthi leader, vowed retaliation against the United States, calling the strikes unjustified. “We shall respond to the escalation by escalating,” he wrote on X.
The Houthi rebels, who control most of northern Yemen, had temporarily halted attacks in the Red Sea when a cease-fire took effect in Gaza in January. But last week, they said they would target any Israeli ships violating their ban on Israeli vessels passing through the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, the Bab el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden.
The Bab el-Mandeb is a strait between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, which opens into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.
Mr. Trump said in a statement on his Truth Social platform that the strikes were also intended as a warning to Iran, the Houthis’ main backer.
“Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY!” he wrote. He also warned Iran against threatening the United States, saying, “America will hold you fully accountable, and we won’t be nice about it!”
Some military analysts and former American commanders said on Sunday that a more aggressive campaign against the Houthis, particularly against Houthi leadership, was necessary to degrade the group’s ability to threaten international shipping. “This is long, long overdue,” Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., a retired head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, said in a telephone interview on Sunday.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Sunday that the United States would conduct an “unrelenting” campaign of strikes against the Houthis until the militant group ceased its actions in the Red Sea.
“This isn’t a one-night thing. This will continue until you say, ‘We’re done shooting at ships. We’re done shooting at assets,’” Mr. Hegseth told Fox News on Sunday. “This campaign is about freedom of navigation and restoring deterrence.”
Iran strongly condemned the strikes.
Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, called them a violation of international law regarding the use of force and respect for national sovereignty.
And Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards force, denied on Sunday that his country was making policy decisions for the rebels in Yemen. The Houthi militia “makes its own strategic decisions” and Tehran plays “no role in setting the national or operational policies” of the group, he was quoted as saying by Iranian state news agencies.
Days after taking office, Mr. Trump issued an executive order to redesignate the Houthis a “foreign terrorist organization,” calling the group a threat to regional security.
The order restored a designation given to the group late in the first Trump administration. The Biden administration lifted the designation shortly after taking office, partly to facilitate peace talks in Yemen’s civil war.
Last year, the Biden administration labeled the Houthis a “specially designated global terrorist” group — a less severe category — in response to attacks against vessels in the Red Sea.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, on Saturday told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that all sides should cease from the “use of force” in Yemen and enter a “political dialogue,” according to the Russian foreign ministry. Moscow has condemned past U.S. and British strikes on Yemen.
Hezbollah, another armed proxy for Iran in the region, voiced its condemnation of the U.S. strikes on Yemen and described it as a “war crime,” according to a statement on Sunday.
Carol Rosenberg, Eric Schmitt and Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.
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12) Black Lives Matter Plaza Is Gone. Its Erasure Feels Symbolic.
The movement that prompted “Black Lives Matter” to be painted in bold yellow near the White House is in retreat. Its leaders are asking what comes next for social justice.
By Clyde McGrady and Tim Arango, March 16, 2025
Reporting from Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles
This week, government workers near the White House, on two blocks lined with luxury hotels and union headquarters, used a jackhammer and a pickax to tear up a mural that read “Black Lives Matter,” painted on the road during the long hot summer of 2020.
The symbolism was potent.
The erasure of the bold yellow letters of Black Lives Matter Plaza, installed on 16th Street after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, was a concession from Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, who faced threats from congressional Republicans to cut off federal funds to the capital city if the words were not removed. But to Black Americans grappling with a fierce resurgence of forces that they believe are beating back the causes of social justice and civil rights, it felt like much more.
That plaza was “spiritual,” said Selwyn Jones, an uncle of Mr. Floyd. “But them taking the time to destroy it, that’s making a statement, man. That’s making a statement, like we don’t care.”
Even those who did not put much faith in the mural to begin with were taken aback.
“Bowser caving immediately to the faintest hint of pressure on the name of the plaza is somehow even more cynical than the move to name it Black Lives Matter Plaza in the first place,” said Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, a Black associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown.
A movement that once crested with a former Republican senator, Mitt Romney, marching in the streets has now waned. After a brief window of conversation about the ways racism had impeded the progress of Black citizens, the country in November chose to return President Trump to the White House, after he called the words “Black Lives Matter” a “symbol of hate” and Black-centered history “toxic propaganda” at the end of his first term.
“We saw the largest protest movement in our nation’s history, a unique and powerful moment where it seemed anything was possible, and you had the numbers to do anything,” lamented Samuel Sinyangwe, executive director of the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence, without exaggeration.
The millions of dollars that flowed to groups with “Black Lives Matter” in their titles have slowed to a trickle, forcing some to retrench, others to close shop. The Black Lives Matter Foundation Inc., for instance, raised a staggering $79.6 million in fiscal year 2021. The next year, that figure was down to almost $8.5 million. By 2023, it was about $4.7 million, with expenses of $10.8 million, according to records tracked by the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica.
As it recedes, Mr. Trump has sought to bury it. In two short months, his administration has moved to end diversity, equity and inclusion as goals of the federal government and pressured private industry to do the same. It shut down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which tracked the misconduct records of federal law enforcement officers.
Words with even a hint of racial, ethnic or gender sensitivities are being struck from federal websites and documents. Just this week, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to eliminate offices responsible for addressing the disproportionately high levels of pollution facing poor communities, often with predominantly minority residents.
The billionaire White House adviser Elon Musk has even said pardoning George Floyd’s killer was “something to think about.”
Beyond Washington, journalists and academics who vaulted to stardom a half decade ago on their reinterpretations of history, their views on racism and their valorizing of the African American experience find themselves sometimes marginalized, and often under attack.
“I feel we are going backwards,” Mr. Jones said.
Given the swift change of circumstances, some in the Black Lives Matter movement say they must answer an existential question: How do they pursue racial justice amid so fierce a backlash?
Veterans of the movement say they must broaden the activist coalition to be more multiracial, working class, economic and inclusive in its messaging. Although Mr. Trump made gains among voters of color in November, even bragging that he had support of some in the Black Lives Matter movement, they insist his base of support still stems from bigotry.
“Folks got sold a bag of goods under this idea of racism and xenophobia,” said Addys Castillo, a social justice organizer and law student in Connecticut.
But, she said, the administration’s policies will hurt all those who aren’t wealthy, “so if there was ever a time to have a multiracial, cross cultural movement, this would be the time.”
James Forman Jr., a former public defender, an author and a fierce critic of the criminal justice system and its effects on people of color, said persuading all Americans that a system that has harmed Black Americans has harmed them too is difficult — but crucial.
“It’s always been hard to be able to get people to see two things at the same time: the ways in which these institutions disproportionately harm Black people, and the way that these institutions harm all people,” he said.
Ms. Bowser, who is Black, told laid-off federal workers earlier this month that the mural was a significant part of the city’s history, but circumstances have changed. “Now our focus is on making sure our residents and our economy survive,” she said.
Observers say the racial justice movement that crescendoed after Mr. Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 had some successes, at least in raising public awareness about structural racism and police violence.
Protesters and Black activists pressed people to evolve from support for civil rights as “mere etiquette” to “an understanding that actual institutions, political institutions, criminal justice institutions had to be challenged to work differently,” Mr. Táíwò said.
But the movement must mature, said Representative Wesley Bell, a Missouri Democrat who rose to prominence after the police shooting of a Black teenager, Michael Brown, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. Mr. Bell, who is Black, defeated one of the most demonstrative Black progressives in the House, Cori Bush, in a heated primary last year, promising voters to bring Greater St. Louis a more sober, effective leadership.
“Some folks think it’s just about getting out and protesting,” said Mr. Bell, who advocates moving the social justice cause from the streets to the corridors of power. “The best protesters do not make the best politicians, and the best politicians don’t make the best protesters.”
Black Lives Matter began as an online hashtag after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager. But the phrase coalesced into a movement after the killing of Michael Brown the following year.
From the beginning the phrase drew attacks.
“When you say ‘Black lives matter,’ that’s inherently racist,” the former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said in 2016. “Black lives matter. White lives matter. Asian lives matter. Hispanic lives matter.”
Four years later, as he campaigned unsuccessfully for re-election, Mr. Trump accused supporters of Black Lives Matter of “spreading violence in our cities” and “hurting the Black community.”
But in the summer of 2020, millions of Americans took to the streets from all walks of life. Conservative voices, like the president of the Heritage Foundation and Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, lamented Mr. Floyd’s murder.
Some of the protests turned violent. A Minneapolis police station was burned to the ground. The calls for incremental police reform became drowned by the rallying cry, “defund the police.”
And that gave Mr. Trump his most potent line of attack against the movement. He reframed a cause that hoped to protect Black lives as a lawless assault on police officers. In his telling, the leaders of the movement were avatars for every left-wing cause in his sights.
Because of the Black Lives Matter movement’s decentralized structure, many groups were lumped together and faced intense scrutiny, often with negative consequences for the movement as a whole.
“Any strategic or tactical misstep for the movement is going to produce more severe and swift negative consequences,” Mr. Forman said.
The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, for instance, faced criticism that it misused funds, including the purchase of a $6 million California home.
“I’m not particularly happy with the organization Black Lives Matter, because of their shenanigans,” said Mr. Jones.
“Black Lives Matter, they are not a perfect organization,” said Angela Harrison, an aunt of Mr. Floyd. “They probably made mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. But their intention was for the good.”
But mistakes added up. The movement to examine historical ways racism has shaped current disparities in areas such as housing and wealth creation gave way to the opposite. Conservative activists successfully pushed state governments to ban teachings that they said made people feel inherently responsible for actions committed in the past.
Corporations that once made a show of racial, ethnic and gender sensitivities have begun rolling back their diversity initiatives, seemingly more afraid of the conservative activists fighting them than the social justice activists who had supported them, said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
That, he said, “could certainly suggest that maybe the belief isn’t strongly held, but also more of a sense of resignation.”
Mr. Sinyangwe is taking a long view and sees parallels and patterns with many historical movements for social justice.
“This movement has followed the trajectory that freedom struggles in the United States have always tended to follow,” he said.
A marginalized community pushes back against injustice. Some of its demands are met, but others don’t materialize. So they push for more transformative changes only to be met with backlash. “And that’s sort of how America does business,” he said. “That’s not the fault of anyone’s slogan.”
In June 2020, after Mr. Trump marshaled federal law enforcement and the military to violently confront protesters outside the White House, Ms. Bowser announced that she was renaming a street just off the protest site “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” complete with 48-foot letters on the pavement.
The mayor’s decision to remove the letters with Mr. Trump’s return to power has been met with ambivalence. Some agree that Ms. Bowser has more pressing concerns, such as budget cuts and the slashing of the federal work force in her city.
“The painting ain’t saving any of us,” said Ms. Castillo.
Others are gearing up for a fight that will outlive any one presidency.
“I don’t believe we’ll ever be in a place where there won’t be a fight,” Mr. Bell said. “But I will say this — I don’t think that President Trump can stop progress either.”
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13) Social Security Employees Warn of Damage From DOGE
Current and former employees, both Republican and Democratic, are raising alarms about the damage cost-cutting efforts could do to the agency’s ability to serve the public.
By Tara Siegel Bernard, March 17, 2025
When Eleanor H., 66, called the Social Security Administration last month seeking details about her retirement benefits, she didn’t expect to comfort the representative who answered. The woman started sobbing.
“I asked her what was wrong, and she said she and her co-workers were informed by email to accept a taxable $20,000 payout or risk termination,” said Eleanor, who lives in New Jersey (she asked to use only her first name out of privacy concerns).
The rep still answered all of Eleanor’s questions. “Through her tears she said, ‘What am I going to do?’”
The Social Security Administration, which sends retirement, survivor and disability payments to 73 million people each month, has long been called the “third rail” of politics — largely untouchable given its widespread popularity and role as one of the country’s remaining safety nets.
But in recent weeks, the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk’s crew of cost cutters at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has taken its chain saw to the agency’s operations. The agency has announced plans to cut up to 12 percent of its work force, at a time its staffing is at a 50-year low. It has also offered early retirement and other incentives, including payments up to $25,000, to the entire staff.
Many current and former Social Security officials fear the cuts could create gaping holes in the agency’s infrastructure, destabilizing the program, which keeps millions of people out of poverty and large percentages of retirees rely on for the bulk of their income.
The actions have caused Social Security employees and former commissioners and executives of both parties to sound alarm bells, saying it would be difficult to repair the damage, which could threaten access to benefits.
“Everything they have done so far is breaking the agency’s ability to serve the public,” said Martin O’Malley, the most recent former Social Security commissioner under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. He said he feared that Mr. Musk’s team had taken most of the actions necessary to create a total system collapse, whether in skyrocketing wait times for customer service, system interruptions or a timely payment of benefits.
In a statement to The New York Times, the Social Security Administration said that it was “identifying efficiencies and reducing costs, with a renewed focus on mission critical work,” including streamlining redundant layers of management, and is “committed to ensuring Americans get the help they need.”
Social Security benefits cannot be changed without legislation passed by Congress. But the delivery of those paychecks — and enabling new people to enroll or make changes — rests upon a complex set of systems that are powered using programming languages developed in the 1970s.
The people who can most deftly operate the agency’s old systems are, perhaps not surprisingly, nearing or already eligible for retirement. At least 30 percent of the technical staff in the office of the chief information officer fits in those categories, former executives estimated.
“We are looking at a degradation of the system as a whole because we have a whole line of expertise walking out the door,” said Shelley Washington, executive vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1923, a unit of the federal workers’ union. “They are firing first and aiming later.”
He said the delivery of checks for people already enrolled in the system shouldn’t be affected, for now — but it’s becoming increasingly uncertain who will be around to quickly fix issues when they arise.
Michael Astrue, a former agency commissioner appointed by President George W. Bush, said it appeared that Mr. Musk has imported the strategy he used when he bought Twitter, “where you go into some place established, level it and then figure you’re going to improvise your way out,” he said, speaking at a briefing on Thursday held by the National Academy of Social Insurance. “It’s extremely destructive.”
Jason Fichtner, who held several positions at the agency, including deputy commissioner and chief economist, put it even more bluntly at the briefing. “It’s more like a drunk operating a wrecking ball,” he said.
The White House issued a statement on Tuesday, reiterating that President Trump would not cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits.
Few dispute that the aging technology needs a reboot. The system hasn’t undergone a major overhaul because Congress hasn’t allocated money for it. It’s also an enormous undertaking, and a lack of continuity in leadership makes it difficult to carry out, current and former technology staff and executives said. It would take an estimated five to seven years and cost more than $2 billion, according to one former technology executive, who didn’t want to be named because the analysis had not been completed.
Though experts familiar with the agency’s operations acknowledged there was room to improve efficiency, they said it was already run leanly. The agency functions on a budget of less than 1 percent of its annual benefit payments, which provide retirement, survivor and disability payments.
“This is extremely low,” Mr. O’Malley said, noting that it’s far lower than the administrative costs of private insurers.
Confidentiality concerns
That hasn’t stopped Mr. Musk’s team. Even without a permanent commissioner, the agency is making big decisions: It has already said it would eliminate 7,000 of its 57,000-person work force, and will close six of its 10 regional offices, which coordinate and provide support to employees.
Of its 1,200 field offices that directly serve the public, more than 40 are to be closed, according to Social Security Works, an advocacy group. The group is trying to track the changes, but said that its data was based on an unreliable list released by DOGE. (The Social Security headquarters itself was also on a closings list, then later dropped.)
Two dozen senior staff members have announced their departures, including the agency’s top three cybersecurity executives, according to a memo issued on Feb. 28 from Leland C. Dudek, the Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner. He took the reins when Michelle King, the previous acting commissioner, left abruptly after refusing to give DOGE representatives access to private data.
Tiffany Flick, the agency’s former acting chief of staff with 30 years of service at Social Security, recently recounted the events around that episode, which also led to her retirement. She expressed deep concerns about the safety of the confidential data and the program overall, according to her sworn testimony on March 6 in a federal lawsuit. The data, she said, has already been misinterpreted and used to spread misinformation.
Mike Russo, the new chief information officer, “seemed completely focused on questions from DOGE officials based on the general myth of supposed widespread Social Security fraud, rather than facts,” Ms. Flick said.
The “disregard for critical processes” and the “significant loss of expertise” have left her seriously concerned the programs will not continue to operate without disruption.
“That could result in benefit payments not being paid out or delays in payments,” she said.
Angela Digeronimo, a claims specialist and a union leader in New Jersey who has been with Social Security for 28 years, said she believed she was witnessing a dismantling of the agency.
“It will affect the public in a very tangible way,” she said, speaking in her capacity as a union official, noting that it already takes about eight months for applicants to the disability program to learn if they’re eligible. “I hate to say this, but more and more people will die while waiting for a medical determination on their disability claim.”
Customer service concerns
Nicole Francis, a financial planner in New York, called the agency last month on behalf of a 100-year-old client who wanted to change the bank into which her benefits were deposited. Ms. Francis knew there would be a wait, but she didn’t expect it to be more than two hours.
Instead of holding, she visited her client at home and helped her make the change with a new online account.
“Not all senior Americans have a trusted representative and should have the option of telephone customer service,” she said.
Last week, in an effort to combat fraud, the agency said it would no longer allow beneficiaries to change bank information over the phone — only online or in person.
Mr. Musk has said that he wants to cut waste, fraud and abuse at the agency, but he and President Trump have continued to repeat false claims that millions of dead people are collecting benefits.
In fact, the Social Security Office of the Inspector General, which is charged with uncovering fraud and inefficiencies, published a report in 2023 that explains why these people don’t have recorded deaths, but also do not collect checks.
“Both Musk and Trump are grossly mischaracterizing the death data,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and a former agency adviser. (Mr. Trump also fired the acting inspector general.)
Last week, Mr. Musk, who has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, claimed that programs like it are used to attract illegal immigrants. The agency has said it collects more than $20 billion in payroll taxes annually from unauthorized workers, most of whom never collect benefits.
“Mixing up these allegations of fraud with these partisan attacks, I think, kind of confuses the public,” said Jack Smalligan, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a former deputy associate director at the Office of Management and Budget.
The administration’s aggressive cost-cutting has begun to worry retirees like Eleanor H., who reached the distressed Social Security representative.
She said she won’t be able to survive in retirement without her Social Security check, but has become so concerned about the administration’s actions that she called to see how much she would receive if she filed for benefits early, a few months before her full retirement age. Healthy retirees are often advised against claiming early because waiting longer locks in a higher benefit.
The representative assured Eleanor that she thought her retirement benefits would be safe.
“They will be busy coming for us,” she told her.
Susan C. Beachy and Jack Begg contributed research.
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14) DOGE Cuts Reach Key Nuclear Scientists, Bomb Engineers and Safety Experts
Firings and buyouts hit the top-secret National Nuclear Security Administration amid a major effort to upgrade America’s nuclear arsenal. Critics say it shows the consequences of heedlessly cutting the federal work force.
By Sharon LaFraniere, Minho Kim and Julie Tate, March 17, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/us/politics/federal-job-cuts-nuclear-bomb-engineers-scientists.html
Workers at the Los Alamos nuclear site preparing to clean up a demolished building in 2009. Credit...Mark Holm for The New York Times
They handled the secure transport of nuclear materials — dangerous, demanding work that requires rigorous training. Four of them took the Trump administration’s offer of a buyout and left the National Nuclear Security Administration.
A half-dozen staff members left a unit in the agency that builds reactors for nuclear submarines.
And a biochemist and engineer who had recently joined the agency as head of the team that enforces safety and environmental standards at a Texas plant that assembles nuclear warheads was fired.
In the past six weeks, the agency, just one relatively small outpost in a federal work force that President Trump and his top adviser Elon Musk aim to drastically pare down, has lost a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants and lawyers — all in the midst of its most ambitious endeavors in a generation.
The nuclear agency, chronically understaffed but critically important, is the busiest it has been since the Cold War. It not only manages the nation’s 3,748 nuclear bombs and warheads, it is modernizing that arsenal — a $20-billion-a-year effort that will arm a new fleet of nuclear submarines, bomber jets and land-based missiles.
Since the last year of the first Trump administration, the agency has been desperately trying to build up its staff to handle the added workload. Though it was still hundreds of employees short of what it had said it needed, it had edged up to about 2,000 workers by January.
Now, with the Trump administration’s buyouts and firings, the agency’s trajectory has gone from one of painstaking growth to retraction.
More than 130 employees took the government’s offer of a payout to resign, according to internal agency documents obtained by The New York Times that have not previously been reported. Those departures, together with those of about 27 workers who were caught up in a mass firing and not rehired, wiped out most of the recent staffing gains.
Engaged in top-secret work, tucked away in the Energy Department, the agency typically stays below the public radar. But it has emerged as a headline example of how the Trump administration’s cuts, touted as a cure-all for supposed government extravagance and corruption, are threatening the muscle and bone of operations that involve national security or other missions at the very heart of the federal government’s responsibilities.
Risking Taxpayer Dollars
The exodus “is going to make the job more difficult because what you lost were some of your most valuable leaders,” said Scott Roecker, the vice president of the nuclear materials security program at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit organization. “These were very accomplished, very successful, very well-trained people who were performing complex, niche jobs.”
Among the departures: At least 27 engineers, 13 program or project analysts, 12 program or project managers, six budget analysts or accountants, five physicists or scientists, as well as attorneys, compliance officers and technologists, according to internal lists.
The agency lost not only officials deeply steeped in the weapons modernization program, but also a noted arms control expert at a time when President Trump has said he hopes to restart talks with Russia and China about limiting nuclear arsenals.
“Here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons, “ Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office last month. “We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things.”
Ben Dietderich, the Department of Energy’s chief spokesman said, “Contrary to news reports, the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons production plants and nuclear laboratories are operated by federal contractors and have been exempt” from cuts.
But multiple current and former officials of the agency said the loss of staff would hobble the agency’s ability to monitor the more than 60,000 contract employees who carry out much of the agency’s work. That could encourage fraud or misuse of taxpayer dollars, rather than limit it, as Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have vowed the new Department of Government Efficiency initiative will do.
“The federal oversight is vital,” said Corey Hinderstein, the agency’s deputy administrator for nonproliferation under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “Do you have any construction projects at your house? You wouldn’t just say to the contractor: ‘I want something like this room. Have fun.’”
Andrea Woods, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department said in a statement, “N.N.S.A is committed to continuing its critical national security mission through the development, modernization and stewardship of America’s nuclear deterrent and nonproliferation and counterterrorism efforts.”
The department has said that most of the fired employees handled administrative and clerical tasks that were not critical to the agency’s operation. But an analysis of the internal documents by The Times, coupled with interviews with 18 current and former agency officials, shows that is not true for the bulk of people who took the buyout.
Many who left held a top-secret security clearance, called Q, that gave them access to information about how nuclear weapons are designed, produced and used, officials said. The offer allowed them to go on administrative leave with pay through September, then resign.
An Exodus of ‘Star Performers’
Governmentwide, a disproportionate number of the roughly 75,000 federal workers who have taken the buyouts so far are those whose skills are in demand in the private sector and will be hard to replace, according to Max Stier, the president and chief executive of Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies governance.
Ernest J. Moniz, who served as energy secretary under President Barack Obama, said, “It’s going to be the star performers who have the best opportunity to leave and go to the private sector.”
The agency’s office of defense programs, which is in charge of the modernization effort, lost Ian Dinesen, its chief of staff. He took the buyout. So did Charles P. Kosak, a senior adviser who had served as deputy assistant secretary at both the Defense and Energy Departments.
Kyle Fowler, director of the program to enrich uranium, which is used in nuclear warheads and reactors on naval submarines, took a job with NATO. Also gone is Linda Cordero, a director with the program to modernize production of spheres of radioactive plutonium, called pits, that are fitted into warheads.
The field office that oversees the agency’s laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., where plutonium pits are made, lost nine staff members, according to the documents reviewed by The Times. Budgeted for 97 employees in the fiscal year ending last September, it is now operating with 76. Among those who left was the deputy facility operations manager, a top job.
Terry C. Wallace Jr., who ran the laboratory in 2018, said that it carried out some of the agency’s most high-risk operations. The government is ultimately responsible both for ensuring the public’s safety and for authorizing work to proceed, he said. He is “quite certain” that fewer government staff members “will have a negative impact on the operation,” he added.
Y-12, a plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where the uranium for the next generation of nuclear weapons will be processed, is undergoing a huge overhaul that is already $4 billion over budget. That field office lost four employees, and now operates with 84 of the 92 staff members it was budgeted for.
Another five staff members left the agency field office in Las Vegas that oversees a site nearly as large as Rhode Island where scientists conduct nuclear experiments that help determine the safety and viability of what’s in the nuclear stockpile, among other matters. One held the senior role of facility representative for 14 years, according to his LinkedIn profile. Budgeted for 82 staff members, the field office now has 67.
“Those are such hard jobs to fill, because people could make as much or more money working for the plant or laboratory itself,” said Jill Hruby, who led the National Nuclear Security Administration during the Biden administration.
Hurried Firings
Agency officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of job repercussions, say even if they could find the right people for the vacancies, they don’t expect to be allowed to hire them.
And more cuts could be coming. Government agencies were ordered to come up with a plan for further reductions in force and submit it to the Office of Personnel Management by last Thursday.
Some of the agency’s workers who left were on the verge of retirement anyway. But because the offer to leave came so suddenly, several former officials said, those employees did not get the chance to properly prepare their replacements. Even a junior employee at the agency can take a year to train, officials said.
“Who’s going to teach those new people?” said one senior official who took the buyout and spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing the departure agreement. “Who’s going to mentor them, and who’s going to bring them up to speed?”
The situation could have been worse.
In mid-February, more than 300 probationary employees at the agency were informed that they would be fired — about one-seventh of the staff. After members of Congress complained to Chris Wright, the new energy secretary, all but about 27 of those firings were rescinded.
Among those who protested were Senator Deb Fischer, Republican of Nebraska, and Senator Angus King, Independent of Maine, according to Trump administration officials. Both serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Mr. King, who discussed the firings with Mr. Wright repeatedly, said he questioned how much Mr. Wright was even involved in the firing decision. Mr. Wright has said he moved too quickly in authorizing the firings.
“This whole process of trying to downsize the government is being handled in the sloppiest, most irresponsible kind of way that one could imagine,” Mr. King said.
Officials had initially expected that the nuclear agency’s national security mission would protect it from layoffs. More than 100,000 federal employees have been fired or accepted buyouts so far, but a majority of cuts have been at agencies that are not directly tied to national security.
The nuclear agency has struggled for years with understaffing, according to the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency. In a 2022 report, the nuclear agency said it faced “tremendous work-force attraction and retention problems.” One problem is that the agency is competing with the private sector over workers, including the agency’s own contractors. Another is finding people for such highly specialized work.
Officials were so worried about the loss of employees who transport nuclear materials that they denied the buyout to more than half of workers who signed up for it, according to agency documents.
“We were already understaffed there,” said Ms. Hinderstein, the agency’s former deputy. “Because how do you get people with extremely advanced security skills to be able to defend a nuclear weapon on the road and are willing to be long-haul truckers?”
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15) Trump Administration Revives Detention of Immigrant Families
Two facilities in South Texas are being readied for undocumented parents and their children. One site began receiving them earlier this month.
By Jazmine Ulloa and Miriam Jordan, March 17, 2025
Jazmine Ulloa reported from Washington, and Miriam Jordan reported from Los Angeles.
A facility in Dilley, Texas, shown in 2019, is one of two sites where U.S. immigration authorities will be detaining undocumented immigrant families. Credit...Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
For decades, detaining undocumented immigrant families has been a contentious enforcement tactic. Critics of “family detention” have said young children suffer in confinement. Proponents say that locking families up while they await likely deportation sends a stark message about the consequences of entering the United States illegally.
Now, after falling out of use under the Biden administration, family detention is being resurrected by President Trump, as his administration marches forward on its promise to crackdown on immigrants.
Families have begun to arrive in recent days at a detention facility in South Texas, and immigration lawyers are expecting more to be brought in the coming days. A second detention center, also in South Texas, is being readied for families.
Each of the facilities is being set up to hold thousands of people. At one site, lawyers say, multiple families are being detained in rooms with four to eight bunk beds and shared bathroom facilities.
Family detention was used during the previous Trump administration and during the Obama administration, and children were provided some medical care and some educational instruction. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the same services would be offered at the reopened facilities.
Most of those families previously detained were Central Americans who had recently crossed the southern border, and many were expected to be swiftly deported, unless they sought asylum and expressed credible fear of returning to their home countries.
With the border now quiet and illegal crossings notably low, immigration enforcement has shifted to the interior of the country to make good on the Trump administration’s pledge to carry out mass deportations.
That has led to arrests of people with established ties to communities, who had been working or going to school before their families were taken into federal custody. And some of them are bound for the newly reopened detention center in Karnes, Texas, and the soon-to-be-reopened detention center in Dilley, Texas, both south of San Antonio.
Families crossing illegally into the United States with young children have long presented particularly thorny legal and political challenges for the White House and the federal government because minors are guaranteed special protections.
When he first took office in 2017, Mr. Trump moved quickly and aggressively to try to curb border crossings, and many arrivals were families. But after his administration began separating migrant children from their parents, the public outcry was so loud that the White House ultimately halted the practice.
Now, back for another term, Mr. Trump and his advisers have made clear that they plan to make family migration a key target, and resuming detentions is an effort to discourage families from seeking to enter the United States.
Thomas D. Homan, the border czar, has said that family detention must be reinstated. He has also indicated that the administration would go to court to challenge a longstanding accord that limits how long migrant children can be detained.
Asked if she was personally comfortable with the practice of family detention, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, suggested families had the option to return home to their countries if they did not want to be detained. “We’ve set up a system and a website where people who are here illegally right now can register, and they can choose to go home on their own and keep their families united,” she told CBS News this month.
Many human rights organizations and religious groups see family detention as inhumane and ineffective. Immigration lawyers point to a lengthy history of litigation over due process violations, insufficient medical care and sexual abuse allegations at the facilities. Officials have said that in many cases families were detained for less than two weeks at the facilities when they were last open; immigration lawyers say the lengths of detention varied, and some families were held for months.
Leecia Welch, a children’s rights lawyer, has visited detention centers for years to ensure that the government is complying with its legal obligation to properly care for children.
“I have talked to hundreds of children in detention, and their stories still haunt me,” said Ms. Welch. “They have shared that they rarely go outside and see the sun, that they’re cold, don’t have toys and are left in filthy clothing.”
The two family detention centers in Texas are being run by private prison companies that contracted with U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement. The site in Dilley, which is operated by CoreCivic, can hold up 2,400 people. The other, a 1,328-bed facility in Karnes, is managed by the GEO Group.
The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, or Raices, an organization based in Texas, said its lawyers found more than a dozen families at the Karnes facility, including both recent border crossers and people swept up in enforcement operations in U.S. cities. The immigrants had been in the United States anywhere from three weeks to 10 years and were from several countries, including Angola, Brazil, Colombia, Iran, Romania and Russia, according to Raices.
A Venezuelan family with two children, 6 and 8, were among the first sent to Karnes after it opened earlier this month. After living in Ohio for nearly two years, they had decided to emigrate to Canada when Mr. Trump returned to office, said their lawyer, Laura Flores-Dixit, managing attorney at American Gateways, a legal advocacy group.
On crossing the northern border, the family was intercepted by Canadian officials and returned to the United States. They were held for 20 days at a border facility in Buffalo, she said, before being transferred to the detention center in Texas.
Ms. Flores-Dixit said that it was unconscionable that a family trying to leave the United States was being subjected to lengthy detention with young children. “Detaining children is never a humane solution,” she said.
Family detention has faced legal obstacles under both Republican and Democratic administrations. The University of Texas at Austin School of Law and the American Civil Liberties Union filed some of the earliest lawsuits against the practice after former President George W. Bush, a Republican, in 2006 opened a family detention center in Hutto, Texas, northeast of Austin.
Former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, then restarted the practice in the fall of 2014 on a much larger scale, amid a surge in families crossing the border after fleeing gang violence. He opened the facilities in Karnes and Dilley and another in Artesia, N.M. Within months, as a result of widespread backlash and criticism over due process delays, federal immigration officials closed the facility in Artesia. All three were used under the Trump administration, though legal challenges limited the time that families were confined.
After President Biden took office in 2021, promising a humane approach to immigration, his administration began releasing families from detention facilities. But as officials grappled with a rise in migrant families fleeing authoritarian governments and poverty, the Biden administration weighed reinstating the practice in 2023. That drew sharp criticism and was ultimately not carried out.
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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16) Brown University Professor Is Deported Despite a Judge’s Order
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and Brown University professor who had a valid visa, was expelled in apparent defiance of a court order.
By Dana Goldstein, March 16, 2025
The Brown University campus in Providence, R.I. Credit...Ian MacLellan for The New York Times
A kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University’s medical school has been deported from the United States, even though she had a valid visa and a court order temporarily blocking her expulsion, according to her lawyer and court papers.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 34, is a Lebanese citizen who had traveled to her home country last month to visit relatives. She was detained on Thursday when she returned from that trip to the United States, according to a court complaint filed by her cousin Yara Chehab.
Judge Leo T. Sorokin of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts ordered the government on Friday evening to provide the court with 48 hours’ notice before deporting Dr. Alawieh. But she was put on a flight to Paris, presumably on her way to Lebanon.
In a second order filed Sunday morning, the judge said there was reason to believe U.S. Customs and Border Protection had willfully disobeyed his previous order to give the court notice before expelling the doctor. He said he had followed “common practice in this district as it has been for years,” and ordered the federal agency to respond to what he called “serious allegations.”
Customs and Border Protection did not respond on Sunday to questions from The New York Times about why Dr. Alawieh had been detained and deported. Lebanon is not included on a draft list of nations from which the Trump administration is considering banning entry to the United States.
A hearing in Dr. Alawieh’s case is scheduled for Monday.
Court documents related to the case were provided to The New York Times by Clare Saunders, a member of the legal team representing Ms. Chehab, who filed petitions to prevent her cousin’s deportation, and then to request that her cousin be allowed to return to the United States.
Ms. Chehab’s petitions name several members of the Trump administration as defendants, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Peter Flores.
Thomas Brown, a lawyer representing Dr. Alawieh and her employer, Brown Medicine, said that while the doctor was in Lebanon, the U.S. Consulate issued her an H-1B visa, which allows highly skilled foreign citizens to live and work in the United States. Brown Medicine, a nonprofit medical practice, had sponsored her application for the visa.
According to Ms. Chehab’s complaint, when Dr. Alawieh landed at Boston Logan International Airport on Thursday, she was detained by Customs and Border Protection officers and held at the airport for 36 hours, for reasons that are unclear.
Ms. Saunders, the lawyer, said in an affidavit that she went to the airport Friday and notified Customs and Border Protection officials there — before the flight to Paris was scheduled to depart — that there was a court order barring the doctor’s expulsion. She said that the officers took no action and gave her no information until after the plane had taken off.
Dr. Alawieh graduated from the American University of Beirut in 2015. Three years later, she came to the United States, where she held medical fellowships at the Ohio State University and the University of Washington, and then worked as a resident at Yale.
Before the new visa was issued, she held a J-1 visa, a type commonly used by foreign students.
There is a shortage of American doctors working in Dr. Alawieh’s area of specialty, transplant nephrology. Foreign-born physicians play an important role in the field, according to experts.
Fear over immigration status could “harm the pipeline even more,” said Dr. George Bayliss, who works in the Brown Medicine kidney transplant program with Dr. Alawieh.
Her patients included individuals awaiting transplants and those dealing with the complex conditions that can occur after a transplant, Dr. Bayliss said. He called Dr. Alawieh “a very talented, very thoughtful physician.”
“We are all outraged,” he added, “and none of us know why this happened.”
In a Sunday letter to members of the university community, Brown’s administration advised foreign students, ahead of spring break, to “consider postponing or delaying personal travel outside the United States until more information is available from the U.S. Department of State.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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17) Harvard Will Make Tuition Free for More Students
Harvard is the latest elite school to announce that families with incomes of $200,000 and under will not pay tuition as a way to bolster diversity.
By Stephanie Saul, March 17, 2025
Harvard University previously offered free tuition to students from families with incomes under $85,000. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
Harvard announced on Monday that it plans to offer free tuition for students whose families earn $200,000 and below, making it the latest elite school to expand financial aid after the Supreme Court banned the use of racial preferences in college admissions.
The plan with the new income cap will take effect starting this fall. Previously at Harvard, only families with incomes under $85,000 were offered free tuition. The median household income in the United States is about $80,000.
In addition to boosting diversity, the move could serve to improve the school’s image as higher education is under assault by the Trump administration and growing unpopular with Americans who have lost confidence in education.
The University of Pennsylvania announced last November that it would offer free tuition for students from families making under $200,000. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology also announced a $200,000 cutoff then, similar to a plan offered by Caltech. Other universities have also increased their financial aid limits in the past year, including Dartmouth, the University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina.
The Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action led to declines in the number of Black and Hispanic students at many schools, including Harvard. Last fall, the proportion of Black first-year students enrolled at Harvard declined to 14 percent from 18 percent the previous year, while Hispanic students’ enrollment increased slightly.
The ruling has posed a dilemma for schools that have argued that diversity is important, but that are now under intense scrutiny from the Trump administration, which is seeking to eliminate diversity efforts.
Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, said that improving financial aid packages makes sense for colleges that are looking to attract more Black and Hispanic students, since race and income are often intertwined.
“Now that universities can no longer employ racial preferences, if they want racial diversity, the best path forward is to boost the chances of admissions of nonwealthy and working-class students, a disproportionate share of whom are Black and Hispanic,” Dr. Kahlenberg said in an email. “To get such students to apply, and then to enroll, requires generous financial aid.”
In making the financial aid announcement, Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, mentioned neither the Supreme Court decision nor the White House’s ongoing assault on elite universities, which has resulted in dramatic funding cuts at many schools that receive federal dollars.
But he referred to the value of bringing a cross-section of people together.
“Putting Harvard within financial reach for more individuals widens the array of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives that all of our students encounter, fostering their intellectual and personal growth,” Dr. Garber said in the announcement. “By bringing people of outstanding promise together to learn with and from one another, we truly realize the tremendous potential of the university.”
The annual cost of attending Harvard, including tuition and housing, was almost $83,000 this school year. In addition to offering free tuition to students with family incomes up to $200,000, Harvard said that students from families that make under $100,000 will pay for practically nothing.
For those students, Harvard will cover tuition, fees, food, housing, travel costs between campus and home, event fees and activities, and health insurance, if needed. The university will also pay for “winter gear” to help students brace against harsh winters on Harvard’s Cambridge, Mass., campus, along with a $2,000 “start-up” grant.
Harvard’s announcement said that in addition to tuition, students from families making up to $200,000 could be eligible for extra financial aid, depending on their circumstances. The university also said that some students from families making more than $200,000 could be eligible for some forms of financial aid, depending on their family’s situation.
Harvard said it spent $275 million on financial aid this year, but did not have an estimate of how much its new plan will cost. Just over half of Harvard’s undergraduates received financial aid, the school said.
The push to expand financial aid as schools compete for students comes at a precarious time in higher education. Harvard’s announcement comes within days of the school saying that it would freeze hiring to gird against White House threats of funding cuts and tax increases.
Major cuts in international health and agricultural programs funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development have led to hundreds of layoffs at universities around the country, most notably Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Wealthy universities are also wary of various proposals by congressional Republicans to increase the endowment tax on Harvard and other schools. Some have said that could hurt their efforts to offer financial aid.
Currently, the annual investment income earned by the endowment is taxed at 1.4 percent. Vice President JD Vance has proposed raising it to as much as 35 percent. (Mr. Vance himself received a generous financial aid package to attend Yale Law School.)
The Trump administration also moved to cap overhead reimbursements on National Institutes of Health grants to 15 percent, which could cut hundreds of millions of dollars that schools have come to rely on to cover facilities and staff. That proposal is being challenged in courts.
The overhead rates normally vary depending on the grant recipients, but in some cases, they provide up to 60 percent of the grant in additional reimbursements.
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18) Legal Experts Question Trump’s Authority to Cancel Columbia’s Funding
The government has demanded drastic changes to the university before it will consider reinstating $400 million. Lee C. Bollinger, the school’s former president, calls it an “existential threat.”
By Katherine Rosman, March 17, 2025
When President Trump issued an ultimatum to Columbia University — canceling $400 million in funding and demanding an overhaul of its admissions and disciplinary rules — it launched the institution into an extraordinary crisis.
According to legal scholars, it may have also violated the law and the Constitution.
“Never has the government brought such leverage against an institution of higher education,” said Lee C. Bollinger, the former president of Columbia University, who stepped down in 2023 after a 21-year tenure. “The university is in an incredibly unprecedented and dangerous situation. It is an existential threat.”
The Trump administration has accused Columbia of failing to protect students and faculty from “antisemitic violence and harassment,” particularly in the months since the war in Gaza ignited a pro-Palestinian protest movement on campus, which then spread across the country. The government has said its demands are intended to protect Jewish students from discrimination.
Columbia thus far has publicly responded with caution and deference. The university is “committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns,” Columbia’s interim president, Dr. Katrina Armstrong, wrote in a letter to the university community.
The response has concerned some legal scholars because they believe the government has drastically overstepped its authority.
“It is puzzling that they have not filed a lawsuit that they would be extremely likely to prevail in,” said Leah Litman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School.
Genevieve Lakier, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, said Columbia might be worried about escalating a battle with the Trump administration. “The institution is staffed with very intelligent lawyers,” she said. “I have to assume that they are concerned that the other shoes that could drop are worse.”
Some free expression experts said that the administration’s tactics violate the protections of the First Amendment. “The Supreme Court has imposed a very high burden on the government if it seeks to intrude into the core decisions of academic freedom,” Professor Bollinger said.
Other legal scholars said that the government is not adhering to the procedure and restrictions explicitly laid out in the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was written with safeguards to prevent governments from leveraging federal funds in a malicious manner.
In a statement Sunday evening, the Trump administration said it had acted properly. The government “followed all applicable law in holding Columbia University to account for the lawless antisemitism that it allowed to occur on its campus,” said Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education.
The government’s threat is just one front in an ongoing crisis at Columbia stemming from pro-Palestinian protests. Two demonstrators were arrested by U.S. immigration officials this month. And Dr. Armstrong confirmed last week that Homeland Security agents had entered the campus with federal warrants and searched two dorm rooms.
It is also part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration targeting institutions of higher education. Shortly after taking office, Mr. Trump announced the creation of a federal task force to combat antisemitism, particularly on college campuses. And after announcing its plan to cancel grants and contracts with Columbia, the government warned 59 other universities that a similar fate could await them. Among the schools listed were Harvard, Cornell and Johns Hopkins, as well as state schools including Arizona State University and the University of Tennessee.
To some students, parents and faculty, Columbia University has often failed to find a balance between respecting the rights of protesters and providing a sense of safety to Jewish people.
Last spring, protesters encamped on a lawn at the center of campus, using language that some characterized as critical of the Israeli government and that others believe was antisemitic. Some Jewish students described feeling afraid to walk freely on campus. After nearly two weeks, protesters seized control of an academic building before the university called in the city’s Police Department, which arrested more than 100 people.
Since President Trump’s return to office, the unrest has escalated after a period of relative quiet. A day after his inauguration, student protesters disrupted an Israeli history class and distributed fliers with incendiary messages. Two students at Barnard College, affiliated with Columbia, were expelled. In February, students protested the expulsions.
Then, earlier this month, the Trump administration announced that it was considering stop-work orders for $51.4 million in contracts between Columbia and the federal government.
“Antisemitism — like racism — is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, said in the administration’s announcement. “In recent years, the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence.”
The government’s antisemitism task force would also conduct a “comprehensive review” of substantial federal grant commitments to Columbia University to ensure the university was complying with “its civil rights responsibilities,” the announcement said.
The scrutiny intensified quickly. Just four days later, the administration announced the “immediate cancellation” of approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia.
And a few days after that, the government sent a far-reaching list of demands that it said Columbia must meet before it would consider negotiating for the reinstatement of the money. It called for the university to formalize its definition of antisemitism, to ban the wearing of masks “intended to conceal identity or intimidate” and to place the school’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “academic receivership.”
The Trump administration has specifically cited provisions of the civil rights act in criticizing Columbia. The relevant section of the law, Title VI, prohibits discrimination by institutions that receive public money and requires federal agencies that believe an institution to be in violation to work with it before seeking to remove funding.
But some experts believe the Trump administration has skipped the onerous process civil rights law mandates must take place before funds can be revoked.
If the government wants to claim an institution has not complied with anti-discrimination law — after exhausting all attempts to obtain voluntary compliance — it must call a hearing and provide evidence, according to federal statute. Then it is tasked with alerting relevant congressional committees that it is about to terminate funds, allowing legislators 30 days to intervene and seek a remedy.
Then, only funds that can be cut are those directly connected to the source of the civil rights violation.
“All of these things recognized how drastic these funding issues are and how much they can affect a university,” said Professor Litman. “The process creates opportunities to bring the school into compliance.”
Usually, “it takes years to get any recognition or resolution of a complaint,” said Janel George, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s law school.
The speed with which the Columbia situation has been handled, and the outcome, is surprising, Professor George said, adding that the process is designed deliberately to be slow because the goal is not to punish, but to bring an organization into compliance. “Termination of funds is considered a very last resort,” she said. “It is very, very rare.”
On Sunday, the Department of Education spokeswoman did not respond to a question about whether the government had specifically followed that process.
Additionally, the remedies demanded by the Trump administration appear to go far beyond what the law allows, said Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. He cited putting an academic department in receivership and demanding changes to the process of student discipline. “There is no question but that this goes far beyond of the scope of the law,” he said. The internal workings of an academic institution are “not something that should be within the government’s control.”
Though the Trump administration specifically cites Title VI in its news announcements, it has not stated definitely that it is terminating funds under that law, resulting in a lack of clarity among legal scholars. “It feels so lawless,” said Professor Lakier, “and it makes it worse that the administration won’t clearly state what law it is relying on.”
She said that, in any case, she believes the government’s actions violate the First Amendment.
For Professor Bollinger — who dedicated his academic career to championing the First Amendment, and his administrative career to furthering the reach of Columbia University — the Trump administrations’s actions are deeply troubling.
“Anyone who cares about universities should be shocked by the seemingly obvious effort of the government to intrude into academic decision-making,” he said.
“There are moments when the rights we value only survive if everyone joins the effort to save them,” Professor Bollinger added. “This is not just about Columbia, and Columbia can’t do this on its own.”
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19) Netanyahu’s Move to Fire Shin Bet Chief Reflects Wider Push for Control
The effort is part of a dispute between Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing alliance and its opponents about the nature and future of the Israeli state.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, March 17, 2025
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s effort to remove Israel’s domestic intelligence is raising concerns about whether he was seeking to undermine the agency’s independence. Credit...Pool photo by Yair Sagi
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sudden attempt to remove the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency is the latest salvo in a two-year campaign by the Israeli government to exert more control over different branches of the state.
The move prompted calls on Monday for mass protests and led to criticism from business leaders and the attorney general, summoning memories of the social upheaval in 2023 that was set off by an earlier push to reduce the power of state watchdogs.
Mr. Netanyahu’s plan to hold a cabinet vote on the future of Ronen Bar, the head of the agency known as the Shin Bet, was announced less than a month after his government announced a similar intention to dismiss Gali Baharav-Miara, the Israeli attorney general. It also came amid a renewed push in Parliament by Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition to give politicians greater control over the selection of Supreme Court justices.
These moves mark a return to Mr. Netanyahu’s failed efforts in 2023 to reduce the power of institutions that had acted as a check on his government’s power, including the Supreme Court and the attorney general.
That program — often described as a judicial overhaul — proved deeply divisive, setting off months of mass protests and widening rifts in Israeli society. The campaign was suspended only after the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023 revived a sense of national unity.
Now, amid a shaky cease-fire in Gaza, the easing of tension appears to have ended.
“The removal of the head of the Shin Bet should not be seen in isolation,” said Amichai Cohen, a law professor and fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based research group. “It’s part of the general trend of taking on these independent agencies and increasing the power of the executive.”
“The judicial overhaul is back,” Professor Cohen added.
The attempt to fire Mr. Bar prompted calls on Monday from opposition leaders and grass-roots activists for Israelis to demonstrate outside the government headquarters in Jerusalem on Wednesday, when the cabinet is set to vote on Mr. Bar’s future. A coalition of 300 major business leaders also issued a rare statement, criticizing Mr. Bar’s dismissal.
Ms. Baharav-Miara, the attorney general, issued a statement saying that Mr. Netanyahu could not begin the process of firing Mr. Bar until it was determined whether it would be lawful to do so. She said there were concerns that it would be a conflict of interest for Mr. Netanyahu — raising the prospect of a constitutional crisis if the prime minister ignored her warning.
Those developments evoked similar moves in 2023, when hundreds of thousands held weekly protests against the overhaul and the business leaders joined labor unions to hold a national strike.
The immediate context to the attempt to fire Mr. Bar was a personal dispute between the security chief and the prime minister. For months, Mr. Bar had angered Mr. Netanyahu by investigating officials in the prime minister’s office over claims that they had leaked secret documents and also worked for people connected to Qatar, an Arab state close to Hamas. Mr. Netanyahu has denied wrongdoing; the Qatari government did not respond to requests for comment.
The final straw for Mr. Netanyahu, analysts said, was most likely a rare public intervention last week from Mr. Bar’s predecessor, Nadav Argaman. In a television interview, Mr. Argaman said he might reveal further accusations of wrongdoing by the prime minister if he believed that Mr. Netanyahu was about to break the law.
Such comments from a close ally of Mr. Bar were “too much” for Mr. Netanyahu, said Nadav Shtrauchler, a former adviser to the prime minister. “He saw it as a direct threat,” Mr. Shtrauchler said. “In his eyes, he didn’t have a choice.”
But the broader context, analysts said, is a much wider dispute between Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing alliance and its opponents about the nature and future of the Israeli state.
Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition is formed from parties that variously represent ultrareligious Jews seeking to preserve their privileges; and settler activists aiming to deepen Israel’s control over the West Bank and further curb Palestinian rights.
For years, these groups have resented the independence of watchdogs like the judiciary, the attorney general and the security services, which have variously moved to limit some privileges for the ultra-Orthodox; block certain moves by the settler movement; and prosecute Mr. Netanyahu for corruption. He is standing trial on charges that he denies.
The government and its supporters say that reining in the judiciary and other gatekeepers like the Shin Bet actually enhances democracy by making lawmakers freer to enact what voters elected them to do. They also say that Mr. Bar should resign for failing to prevent the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the war in Gaza.
The Shin Bet has “poked their noses into matters of governance, control, values, social cohesion and, of course, democracy,” Eithan Orkibi wrote in column on Monday for Israel Hayom, a right-wing daily newspaper. After Mr. Bar’s dismissal, Mr. Orkibi continued, the Shin Bet will “slowly be returned to their natural professional territory.”
But the opposition says such moves would damage democracy by removing a key check on government overreach, allowing Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition — the most conservative and nationalist in Israel’s history — to create a less pluralist and more authoritarian society. The opposition argues that Mr. Netanyahu should also take responsibility for the Oct. 7 attack, not just Mr. Bar.
“With a submissive coalition of yes men, Netanyahu is on his way to dismantling all of Israel’s gatekeepers,” Barak Seri wrote in a column for Maariv, a center-right daily. “To dismantling everything that is protecting Israel as we have known it since its establishment.”
In a separate development, the Israeli military said it had conducted strikes in central and southern Gaza against people trying to bury explosives in the ground. While Israel and Hamas are formally observing a cease-fire, negotiations to formalize the truce have stalled and Israel is conducting regular strikes on what it says are militant targets. Hamas has said the strikes have killed more than 150 people, some of them civilians. It did not immediately comment on the Monday strikes.
Myra Noveck contributed reporting.
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