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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How Trump Got Rich
It had nothing to do with brains!
Some excerpts from Wikipedia:
Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, at Jamaica Hospital in the New York City borough of Queens, the fourth child of Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. He is of German and Scottish descent. He grew up with his older siblings, Maryanne, Fred Jr., and Elizabeth, and his younger brother, Robert, in a mansion in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. Fred Trump paid his children each about $20,000 a year, equivalent to $265,000 a year in 2024. Trump was a millionaire at age eight by contemporary standards. Trump attended the private Kew-Forest School through seventh grade.
He was a difficult child and showed an early interest in his father’s business. His father enrolled him in New York Military Academy, a private boarding school, to complete secondary school. Trump considered a show business career but instead in 1964 enrolled at Fordham University. Two years later, he transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics.
He was exempted from the draft during the Vietnam War due to a claim of bone spurs in his heels. …Starting in 1968, Trump was employed at his father’s real estate company, Trump Management, which owned racially segregated middle-class rental housing in New York City’s outer boroughs.
In 1971, his father made him president of the company and he began using the Trump Organization as an umbrella brand. Roy Cohn was Trump’s fixer, lawyer, and mentor for 13 years in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1973, Cohn helped Trump countersue the U.S. government for $100 million (equivalent to $708 million in 2024) over its charges that Trump’s properties had racially discriminatory practices. Trump’s counterclaims were dismissed, and the government’s case was settled with the Trumps signing a consent decree agreeing to desegregate; four years later, Trumps again faced the courts when they were found in contempt of the decree.
Before age thirty, he showed his propensity for litigation, no matter the outcome and cost; even when he lost, he described the case as a win. Helping Trump projects, Cohn was a consigliere whose Mafia connections controlled construction unions. Cohn introduced political consultant Roger Stone to Trump, who enlisted Stone’s services to deal with the federal government.
Between 1991 and 2009, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six of his businesses: the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, the casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts company.
In 1992, Trump, his siblings Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert, and his cousin John W. Walter, each with a 20 percent share, formed All County Building Supply & Maintenance Corp. The company had no offices and is alleged to have been a shell company for paying the vendors providing services and supplies for Trump’s rental units, then billing those services and supplies to Trump Management with markups of 20–50 percent and more.
The owners shared the proceeds generated by the markups. The increased costs were used to get state approval for increasing the rents of his rent-stabilized units. …Trump has said he began his career with “a small loan of a million dollars” from his father and that he had to pay it back with interest.
He borrowed at least $60 million from his father, largely did not repay the loans, and received another $413 million (2018 equivalent, adjusted for inflation) from his father’s company.
Posing as a Trump Organization official named “John Barron,” Trump called journalist Jonathan Greenberg in 1984, trying to get a higher ranking on the Forbes 400 list of wealthy Americans. Trump self-reported his net worth over a wide range: from a low of minus $900 million in 1990, to a high of $10 billion in 2015. In 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at $2.3 billion and ranked him the 1,438th wealthiest person in the world.
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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) Texas Arrests Midwife and Associate on Charges of Providing Abortions
The two arrests in greater Houston appear to be the first time health care providers have been charged with violating abortion bans in their state since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.
By J. David Goodman, Reporting from Houston, Published March 17, 2025, Updated March 18, 2025
Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement that a midwife had been “charged with the illegal performance of an abortion, a second-degree felony, as well as practicing medicine without a license.” Credit...Anna Watts for The New York Times
A midwife and an associate have been arrested and charged with illegally performing abortions in greater Houston, according to court records and the Texas attorney general, apparently the first criminal arrests of abortion providers since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Ken Paxton, the attorney general in Texas, said in a statement that the midwife, Maria Margarita Rojas, operated clinics in several towns around Houston, including two in Harris County, the state’s most populous county, and one in Waller County, a more rural and conservative jurisdiction where the charges were brought.
The statement said that she had been “charged with the illegal performance of an abortion,” which has been a second-degree felony since the state’s near-total abortion ban took effect in 2022. She was also charged with practicing medicine without a license.
Court records released late Monday indicated that a person who worked with Ms. Rojas, Jose Ley, 29, was also arrested and charged with the same offenses. The records showed Ms. Rojas and Mr. Ley were being held on $500,000 bond in Waller County, west of Houston, where the charges were brought.
Lawyers for Ms. Rojas and Mr. Ley could not immediately be reached. But a friend said that Ms. Rojas had been arrested earlier this month while driving to one of her clinics.
“She was on her way to the clinic and got pulled over by the police at gunpoint and handcuffed,” said the friend, a fellow midwife, Holly Shearman, who said she had spoken with Ms. Rojas by phone last week. “She said they wouldn’t tell her what was happening. She said they took her to Austin.”
Ms. Shearman recalled that Ms. Rojas had told her that others from the clinic, possibly someone who worked at the front desk, had also been arrested.
The bans on abortions around the country have largely relied on the threat of prosecution, with few instances in which criminal cases have actually been filed. Abortion providers in Texas and other states with abortion bans ceased operations after the decision. Women seeking abortions have instead traveled to states where the procedure remains legal or have received abortion medication through the mail.
“This is, as far as I know, the first allegation that someone in a ban state is providing an abortion in direct violation of abortion laws,” said Marc Hearron of the Center for Reproductive Rights, referring to the period since the right to an abortion was overturned.
In a handful of cases, charges have been brought against people who provided abortion pills to relatives, either with their knowledge or without.
The state of Louisiana indicted a New York doctor on criminal charges earlier this year for mailing abortion medications to a Louisiana woman in violation of the state’s ban. New York has resisted requests to extradite the doctor under the state’s shield law, which protects providers from prosecution in states with abortion bans.
Texas brought a civil case against the same doctor, Margaret Carpenter, for sending pills to Texas residents. She did not defend herself in that case, and a judge last month ordered her to pay more than $100,000.
But the arrest of the midwife in the Houston area went further.
“In Texas, life is sacred,” Mr. Paxton said in a statement. “I will always do everything in my power to protect the unborn, defend our state’s pro-life laws and work to ensure that unlicensed individuals endangering the lives of women by performing illegal abortions are fully prosecuted.”
Ms. Shearman said Ms. Rojas had been held overnight and then released after her initial arrest. Court records in Waller County, where the charges were filed, indicate she was held in early March on the charge of practicing without a license.
The county’s records did not show any new charges for performing an abortion as of late Monday, and the district clerk’s office said it had not yet received any updated records in the case. A deputy at the Waller County sheriff’s office said Ms. Rojas had been brought to the jail on Monday.
After her arrest on felony charges of practicing medicine without a license, she was held on a $10,000 bond. The new charges of providing abortions were added on Monday.
But Ms. Rojas was not charged with the highest degree of the charge, which occurs when the abortion results in termination of the pregnancy. It was not clear why she had been charged that way. A spokesman for Mr. Paxton did not respond to requests for comment.
But in court documents, Ms. Rojas was accused of having “attempted an abortion on” a woman identified as E.G. on two separate occasions in March and that she was “known by law enforcement to have performed an abortion” on another individual earlier this year.
Mr. Paxton said his office had also filed for a temporary restraining order to shut down Ms. Rojas’s network of clinics “to prevent further illegal activity.”
The latest case, in the Houston area, originated with an investigation conducted in Mr. Paxton’s office, according to the Waller County district attorney, Sean Whittmore, who formerly worked in Mr. Paxton’s office.
The attorney general does not have the power to enforce criminal laws on his own but can do so at the request of local district attorneys, essentially becoming a partner to them in a case. That’s what took place here, Mr. Whittmore said.
According to the website for one of her clinics, Ms. Rojas, 49, was born in Peru, has been a certified midwife in Texas since 2018 and has “attended over 700 births in community based and hospital settings.”
Court records indicate that Ms. Rojas is a U.S. citizen but that Mr. Ley, who was also arrested, was a citizen of Cuba.
Ms. Shearman said that Ms. Rojas had been an obstetrician in Peru before moving the United States. She had been shocked to hear the allegation that Ms. Rojas had performed illegal abortions.
“They’re saying that she did abortions or something?” said Ms. Shearman, who described herself as conservative. “She never ever talked about anything like that, and she’s very Catholic. I just don’t believe the charges.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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2) What Is This Continued Carnage in Gaza Achieving?
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, March 18, 2025
For now, at least, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has returned to war in Gaza. Massive Israeli airstrikes across Gaza have claimed more than 400 lives, including those of children, according to Gaza’s health authorities, and it seems more clear than ever that Netanyahu doesn’t have a plausible day-after plan for Gaza.
The cease-fire between Israel and Hamas was already on life support, and I’m afraid we’re now tumbling back into the savagery of a particularly brutal war that has left Gaza with the highest population of child amputees per capita in the world.
Negotiations on continuing the cease-fire were stalled, and Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, said that his country had “no alternative but to give the order to reopen fire.” But of course Israel had alternatives, as the main advocacy group for family members of Israeli hostages in Gaza noted, albeit alternatives that were not particularly palatable to Israel’s leaders. The hostage families group denounced the airstrikes, saying, “We are shocked, outraged and deeply concerned by the deliberate destruction of the process to bring back our loved ones.”
Ever since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, Netanyahu has brilliantly advanced his own interests while proceeding without any obvious strategy that would advantage Israel. At this point, Israel has leveled much of Gaza, killing some 47,000 Palestinians, including 13,000 children, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Some think those numbers are inflated, others an undercount: The medical journal The Lancet estimated 64,000 dead.
What has all this carnage achieved? Hamas’s fighting capacity is badly degraded, the planners of the Oct. 7 attacks have been killed and Israel has reestablished a measure of deterrence: One senior Hamas official said recently that he would have opposed the attack if he had known of the consequences for the territory. On the other hand, neither of Israel’s two fundamental aims of the war — freeing all its hostages and destroying Hamas — has been achieved.
The United States has assessed that Hamas has recruited almost as many militants as it has lost, and the group remains in control of Gaza and appears more popular in the West Bank and around the world. Meanwhile, much of global opinion that was sympathetic to Israel in 2023 has turned decisively against it, and fairly or not, the word “genocide” is often associated with it. And the lives of the remaining Israeli hostages are again in peril.
The United States bears special responsibility for the tragedy unfolding in Gaza, because it is American 2,000-pound bombs that have destroyed entire neighborhoods; such monstrous munitions cannot distinguish between militants and infants. President Joe Biden refused to use his leverage to press for an end to the war during his term, and President Trump has already shipped another 1,800 of the 2,000-pound bombs to Israel and blithely proposed clearing Gaza of Gazans in what would amount to ethnic cleansing.
With Netanyahu concerned only with his own career, with the United States adding fuel to the fire, with neither Washington nor Jerusalem showing much concern for what civilians are enduring in Gaza, I’m afraid we should brace ourselves for continued bloodshed and suffering that serves no strategic purpose.
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3) Judge Says Khalil’s Deportation Case Can Be Heard in New Jersey
The Trump administration has sought to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, though he is a legal permanent resident and has not been charged with a crime.
By Jonah E. Bromwich, March 19, 2025
Mahmoud Khalil speaking at Columbia University last spring. Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times
A New York federal judge on Wednesday transferred the case of a Columbia University graduate detained by the Trump administration this month to New Jersey, where his lawyers will continue their efforts to seek his release.
The order will not have any immediate effect on the detention status of the Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestinian protests on the university’s campus, who after his arrest was swiftly transferred from Manhattan to New Jersey and then to Louisiana. The Trump administration has sought to deport him, though he is a legal permanent resident who has not been accused of a crime.
The White House has said that Mr. Khalil spread antisemitism and promoted literature associated with Hamas terrorists. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers deny that he has done so and say he is being retaliated against for promoting Palestinian rights and criticizing Israel, views that the Trump administration disagrees with.
Mr. Khalil’s legal team had been trying to move his case out of Louisiana since he was transferred there. Had his case been heard there, a conservative appeals court in New Orleans could have set a broad precedent for deportations.
The New York judge, Jesse Furman, ordered federal authorities not to remove Mr. Khalil from the country. On Wednesday, in moving the case to New Jersey, he left that order in place.
Mr. Khalil himself is expected to remain in Louisiana until a new judge weighs in.
Judge Furman noted that Mr. Khalil’s lawyers had accused the government of punishing him for participation in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and that his First and Fifth Amendment rights had been violated.
“These are serious allegations and arguments that, no doubt, warrant careful review by a court of law,” he wrote. “The fundamental constitutional principle that all persons in the United States are entitled to due process of law demands no less.”
But the judge found that he did not have jurisdiction to decide those issues. The case, he wrote, belonged in New Jersey, where Mr. Khalil was in detention when his lawyers first filed their petition for his release.
Mr. Khalil’s lawyers, whose already-filed arguments accusing the government of retaliating against their client will now be heard across the Hudson River, greeted Judge Furman’s decision as a partial victory.
“Now that we have ensured Mahmoud’s federal case remains in the New York City area, the next step is to bring Mahmoud home,” said one of his lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, a co-director of CLEAR, a legal clinic at the City University of New York.
A spokesman for the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, whose lawyers had been arguing the government’s case, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has cited a little-used law to justify Mr. Khalil’s detention. The measure says that Secretary Rubio can initiate deportation proceedings against any noncitizen whose presence in the United States he can reasonably deem a threat to the country’s foreign policy aims. Secretary Rubio has said that it is a policy of the United States to restrict the spread of antisemitism.
Mr. Khalil, who lives in New York with his wife, an American citizen, was arrested on the evening of March 8. The agents who detained him told his wife and one of his lawyers, Amy Greer, that he was being taken to New York’s downtown immigration court.
At 4:40 a.m. the next day, Ms. Greer filed a petition seeking Mr. Khalil’s release in New York federal court, where an online locator said Mr. Khalil was still being held. But by that point, he had already been transferred to New Jersey.
Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have since argued that the government blocked his efforts to seek his release in the proper court. But Judge Furman wrote that noncitizens arrested in New York City were frequently transferred to New Jersey for detention.
“The court cannot conclude that the government’s transfer of Khalil from New York to New Jersey was done to prevent his lawyer from promptly challenging his detention in federal court,” he wrote.
However, Judge Furman, who said that it was “imperative” that the case be resolved quickly, also concluded that it would be inappropriate for Mr. Khalil’s case to be transferred to Louisiana as the government had requested. He said that the Supreme Court had rejected a similar argument in a different case.
Requiring Mr. Khalil to seek his release anew in Louisiana, he wrote, “would also mean litigating far from his lawyers, from his eight-months-pregnant wife and from the location where most (if not all) of the events relevant to his petition took place.”
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4) Food Safety Jeopardized by Onslaught of Funding and Staff Cuts
The Trump administration halted some food testing and shut down a committee studying bacteria in infant formula. Earlier funding cutbacks under the Biden administration now threaten state labs and inspectors.
By Christina Jewett, March 19, 2025
A customer shopping in a grocery store last year amid the listeria outbreak. Budget cuts could weaken monitoring and removal of contaminated foods. Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images
In the last few years, foodborne pathogens have had devastating consequences that alarmed the public. Bacteria in infant formula sickened babies. Deli meat ridden with listeria killed 10 people and led to 60 hospitalizations in 19 states. Lead-laden applesauce pouches poisoned young children.
In each outbreak, state and federal officials connected the dots from each sick person to a tainted product and ensured the recalled food was pulled off the shelves.
Some of those employees and their specific roles in ending outbreaks are now threatened by Trump administration measures to increase government efficiency, which come on top of cuts already being made by the Food and Drug Administration’s chronically underfunded food division.
Like the food safety system itself, the cutbacks and new administrative hurdles are spread across an array of federal and state agencies.
At the Food and Drug Administration, freezes on government credit card spending ordered by the Trump administration have impeded staff members from buying food to perform routine tests for deadly bacteria. In states, a $34 million cut by the F.D.A. could reduce the number of employees who ensure that tainted products — like tin pouches of lead-laden applesauce sold in 2023 — are tested in labs and taken off store shelves. F.D.A. staff members are also bracing for further Trump administration personnel reductions.
And at the Agriculture Department, a committee studying deadly bacteria was recently disbanded, even as it was developing advice on how to better target pathogens that can shut down the kidneys. Committee members were also devising an education plan for new parents on bacteria that can live in powdered infant formula. “Further work on your report and recommendations will be prohibited,” read a Trump administration email to the committee members.
Taken together, there is concern in the food safety field that the number of outbreaks could grow or evade detection. By limiting resources, the cutbacks pare back work meant to prevent problems and to focus efforts on cases in which someone was already hurt or killed, Darin Detwiler, a food safety consultant and associate professor at Northeastern University, said. His toddler son died in an E. coli outbreak in 1993.
“It’s as if someone, without enough information, has said, What’s a good way to save money on our automobiles?” he asked. “Let’s just take out the seatbelts and airbags, because do we really need them?”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, has a keen interest in food. He has already pledged to get color additives out of food and started an effort called “Operation Stork Speed” to examine the nutritional content and potential toxins in infant formula. Yet some of the most dangerous food problems in recent years have been from pathogens.
Last year, nearly 500 people were hospitalized and 19 died from foodborne illnesses with a known cause, double or more than in the year before, according to the U.S. P.I.R.G. Education Fund, an advocacy group. (Most food poisoning is never reported or traced back to a particular food.)
Government cutbacks affect a number of areas that officials were shoring up to prevent repeats of recent outbreaks. Here are the details of some of the changes:
Key committees shut down
Often in response to a deadly outbreak, a joint F.D.A. and Agriculture Department committee dived into the details to seek ways to improve detection and to limit illness and death. The committee has also examined how to deploy rapidly changing technology — including artificial intelligence and genome sequencing — to protect public health.
The Trump administration abruptly shut down the committee earlier this month, citing the executive order on reducing government bureaucracy. It demanded that work stop for the panel called the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods and also for the National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection.
The microbial committee was studying how to more accurately identify infants who would be most at risk from cronobacter sakazakii, the deadly bacteria that contributed to the decision to temporarily shut down an Abbott Nutrition infant formula plant in Michigan in 2022. The committee planned to then provide advice to caregivers who should use sterile liquid formula instead of powdered formula, which is not sterile.
Abby Snyder, a Cornell University food scientist and co-chair of a subcommittee on infant formula, said she was disappointed by the decision to discontinue the committee’s work. “Safety of powdered formula for infants is of critical importance and I think important to most people,” Dr. Snyder said.
The F.D.A. did not respond to a question about whether Kyle Diamantas, its food division chief, was involved in the decision to axe the committee. A former corporate lawyer, Mr. Diamantas worked on cases defending Abbott over claims of harm related to infant formula.
Michael Hansen, a scientist and member of the committee from Consumer Reports, an advocacy group, said his team on the committee was trying to pinpoint certain types of E. coli that were most likely to cause bloody diarrhea and kidney failure, among other efforts.
He said the decision to end the committee was a shock and destroyed almost two years of work on harnessing genomic sequencing — technology that is now widely available and affordable — to limit outbreaks. The team leveraged hours of volunteer work from the top experts in the field, he said.
“It makes no sense that they were getting rid of this committee,” Dr. Hansen said, “because if you want to do a full cost-benefit analysis, all the work that we were doing was actually free of charge.”
Spending freezes
Scientists at the F.D.A.’s product and food testing labs said they were barred from some routine use of their government credit cards because of an executive order backing the efforts of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
An exception has been made for “critical activities,” an F.D.A. spokeswoman said.
That has slowed or stopped some testing of grocery items for hazardous bacteria and monitoring of shellfish and food packaging for PFAS, chemicals linked to cancer and reproductive harm.
Credit cards can be used in an investigation of listeria in frozen supplemental shakes dispensed in elder care homes that have been linked to a dozen deaths. For other work, staff members have encountered red tape, agency scientists said.
“Even hours can matter in an outbreak,” said Susan Mayne, an adjunct professor at Yale School of Public Health and a former F.D.A. food official who had heard from current employees about the situation. “Any delay is unacceptable when you’re dealing with a product that can kill someone.”
Food safety inspections
In a recent letter to lawmakers, F.D.A. officials said that the agency employed about 443 food safety inspectors — far fewer than the agency needed to inspect every food processing facility at the pace Congress mandated. The agency estimated that it would need about 1,500 more workers to inspect 36,600 food facilities, foreign and domestic, once every five years or once every three years for high-risk producers.
At this time, those inspectors are largely exempted from losing their jobs.
However, one team of outbreak investigators is vulnerable, according to Jim Jones, the agency’s food division chief in the latter part of the Biden administration. This team, known as CORE, coordinates with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to link a cluster of sick people to a specific food plant or farmer’s field. The team tracks inspections and efforts to ensure that tainted food is removed from store shelves.
Mr. Jones said the team was recently built up as a fully remote operation that would most likely be affected when orders to return to work at federal offices were put in place this month. Workers who live more than 50 miles from an F.D.A. office have until late April to begin working at a federal site.
“So their choices will be you either move so that you can go to a federal facility, or you leave,” Mr. Jones said. “There’s nothing strategic about who gets caught in that pickle.”
Across the F.D.A., inspections plummeted during the pandemic and have not returned to the higher levels before 2020. At the same time, the amount of imported food has risen, including clams that have repeatedly found to be contaminated with PFAS.
Cutbacks to States
Once the F.D.A. identifies a factory that was the source of contamination, it often relies on state inspectors to investigate on site. In criticizing the reductions, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, pointed out that state inspectors performed about half of the inspections at food processing facilities, 90 percent of the produce safety inspections and all of the retail store visits.
The F.D.A. also turns to state and local public health officials to pluck potentially tainted foods from grocery store shelves and test them at a network of 55 public health labs throughout the United States. If a product is recalled, the state officials also audit grocery stores to be sure the food has been removed.
A move late in the Biden era sharply limited the funding that the F.D.A. sends to states and to the labs that do critical work. The latest $34 million funding reduction applies to states and to those public health labs. The agency said in a letter to Mr. Blumenthal that the cuts were being made because the food division had a flat budget and costs were increasing because of inflation.
Thom Petersen, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, said F.D.A. food safety funding had fallen steadily since 2019, with the latest cut striking deeper and possibly leading to layoffs. He said the funding loss could slow the important work of taking bad food out of stores.
That work proved particularly important after officials discovered extremely high levels of lead in cinnamon in applesauce pouch snacks for children. The F.D.A. ended up sending a warning letter to Dollar Tree over its failure to quickly pull the pouches.
“Timing is the important piece,” Mr. Petersen said. “We want to take care of those and work on that.“
The public health labs reported that the money amounted to about 30 percent of their funding, which helps them respond to outbreaks more quickly than the F.D.A.
In the Boar’s Head listeria outbreak, for instance, lab officials in Maryland and New York bought liverwurst at stores that tested positive for the same strain that sickened people. A trade group for the labs predicted that the budget cuts could delay responses — and lead to more people getting sick.
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5) Israelis Take to Streets Day After Strikes on Gaza
Israeli protests are converging over national security and domestic politics amid concerns about the government’s renewed push to reduce the power of state watchdogs.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, March 19, 2025
Israelis marched into Jerusalem during a demonstration against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday. Credit...Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israelis were gathering on Wednesday outside the Parliament building in Jerusalem to protest moves by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that they say undermine the country’s democracy and to call for a renewed cease-fire deal for Gaza to bring the remaining hostages there home.
The convergence of popular anger over both domestic and national security issues comes after Israel carried out deadly aerial attacks across the Gaza Strip early Tuesday, ending a temporary truce with Hamas that began in January.
The broad sense of national solidarity that had surrounded the war in Gaza, set off on Oct. 7, 2023, by the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, now appears to be fraying.
There are growing accusations in Israel that Mr. Netanyahu’s priorities are his political survival and of bolstering his right-wing government ahead of a crucial budget vote later this month.
Protesters closed down the main highway into Jerusalem during the morning hours as they marched into the city in scenes reminiscent of the social and political upheaval that roiled the country in the months before the war over government plans to curb the powers of the judiciary.
At the time, Israeli security chiefs and experts said the internal strife had contributed to Israel’s vulnerability and encouraged its enemies.
Protests were initially called for Wednesday after Mr. Netanyahu announced that he was moving to dismiss the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, citing a lack of personal trust between them.
That has raised public concerns about the government’s renewed push to reduce the power of state watchdogs and make appointments that critics say are based on loyalty.
The centrist leader of Israel’s parliamentary opposition, Yair Lapid, called on people to join the protests in a social media post on Wednesday morning.
“This government does not stop at red,” he wrote. “The only solution is unity, not silent, submissive, or fake unity, but the unity of an entire nation coming together and saying: Enough!” He added, “This is our moment, our future, our country. Take to the streets!”
Mr. Netanyahu said that the surprise attack on Gaza on Tuesday was the opening salvo in a campaign to pressure Hamas into releasing more hostages after weeks of fruitless negotiations via mediators.
From now on, he said, Israel would increase its military action against Hamas and negotiations would take place “only under fire.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel.
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6) How Trump’s Hostility to Canada Is Inflicting Pain on N.Y.C. Tourism
Among international tourists, only the British visit New York City more than Canadians, who spent $600 million there last year.
By Matthew Haag and David Andreatta, March 19, 2025
New York City’s proximity to Toronto and Montreal has made it a popular destination for quick getaways. But bookings have recently dried up. Credit...Janice Chung for The New York Times
More than one million Canadians visited New York City last year, injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into the local economy. Now, they are canceling trips in droves.
School groups have called off end-of-semester trips. So have busloads of retirees, as well as newlyweds planning honeymoons, friends celebrating birthdays and a family from Quebec that had planned to visit twice this year.
Often, the reason cited is President Trump’s escalating hostility toward Canada and repeated threats to make it the 51st state, which has stirred sweeping pledges to boycott American goods and abandon over-the-border vacations to the United States.
The cancellations could inflict damage on the economy in the city, where Canadians spent an estimated $600 million in 2024, and hinder the tourism industry’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
The havoc could also extend statewide. Cities and towns along the border with Canada, for instance, rely on tourism from their northern neighbors who often make same-day shopping trips. Nearly four million Canadians visited New York State in 2023, according to the most recent data available from the state, and spent more than $1.7 billion.
“When you piss off a country and threaten to annex them, they are not going to want to travel here,” said Matt Levy, the owner of the New York City tour guide company, Spread Love Tours, whose business with Canadian groups is on pace to decline 50 percent this year.
More than a dozen high schools from Canada recently informed him that they were canceling their annual trips to the city, he said.
A tour operator in Ottawa, Travac Tours, expected to send 16 coach buses to New York City this year. But none of its customers — mostly retirees who tend to spend generously on restaurants, shopping and Broadway shows — have booked a seat since Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on Canada this month, and the company expects to cancel every trip.
“We love the American people, but we are so anti-America when it comes to finances,” Cindy Tobin, a manager at the company, said her clients have told her. “We are just not going to give them any money.”
Without a quick, amicable resolution, she said, the tourism boycott could extend into next year because many customers will soon start booking their vacations for 2026.
Since taking office in January, Mr. Trump has levied tariffs against Canada — long considered America’s closest ally — and described their shared border as an “artificial line.” Canadian leaders and citizens across the political spectrum have taken his remarks deadly seriously and used them as a rallying call.
Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explicitly urged Canadians to reconsider international trips. “Now is also the time to choose Canada,” he said.
Even though international tourists made up a small chunk of the estimated 64.3 million people who came to New York City in 2024 — there were 51.3 million domestic visitors — international visitors tend to outspend domestic ones. And among international tourists, only the British visit the city more than Canadians.
Last year, while international tourism to New York City had not yet returned to prepandemic levels, Canadian travelers had: About 16,000 more Canadians visited the city in 2024 than in 2019, despite a weak Canadian dollar.
But last month, compared with the same period in 2024, the number of Canadians flying into the three airports in and around the city fell 11 percent, according to airline passenger data collected by the federal government. Overall, the amount of monthly international air travelers to the area was the lowest since February 2023.
Vehicle traffic over the four international bridges that span the Niagara River near Buffalo and Niagara Falls fell nearly 14 percent in February, compared with the previous year, according to the agencies that operate them. To the east, traffic on the Thousand Islands Bridge dropped 19 percent in February.
The travel agency Flight Centre Travel Group Canada reported a 40 percent decline in leisure travel bookings to the United States in February, compared with the same month last year, as well as an increase in cancellations on previously booked trips.
In recent weeks, Canadians have been noticeably absent from the Ontario Bar, a Brooklyn dive devoted to all things Canada. Labatt Blue is on draft, Moosehead Canadian Lager is available in bottles and a selection of rye whiskies is behind the bar. The mood inside has been somber, said Andrew Benedict, a co-owner.
“They always ask for ketchup chips or comment on the Canadian beers,” he said, “and there’s less of that.”
Ben Renaud, who lives in Quebec, said that his family had planned to make two trips to New York City this year. One would have been this month to celebrate his mother’s 66th birthday, followed by another with his extended family this summer. Not now.
“I have a lot of nice memories in New York and wanted to share that with her,” said Mr. Renaud, 45, who now plans to visit other Canadian provinces and maybe Europe. But, he added, “the word in the country is that the U.S. cannot be treated as an ally and cannot be trusted.”
For New York City, its proximity to major Canadian cities like Toronto and Montreal has made it a popular destination for quick getaways, especially for bus tours. Operators have historically sent multiple buses to New York every week. But bookings have dried up.
In previous years, the operator Comfort Tour Canada drove buses with up to 150 people to the city for spring break. The cost of hotel rooms alone could reach $30,000 for the multiple-day trip. This year, one bus made the journey for spring break, with just 24 passengers.
“Our bookings have gone to zero or one a day,” said Al Qanun, the company’s owner. “It will hurt us, and it will hurt those hotels.”
Businesses and tourism officials in western New York are especially worried. The economies of cities and towns along the border with Ontario and Quebec are particularly integrated with Canada. Up to 20 percent of the tourists to Rochester are Canadian.
Many Canadians drive over the bridges connecting the two countries on day trips for shopping, dining and entertainment. On a recent weekend at the Fashion Outlets of Niagara Falls mall, Nancy Driscoll placed a shopping bag of new clothes into her car with Ontario plates.
She and her partner, Matthew Elliott, said they only drove into New York State, with a stop at the mall, to watch his son’s collegiate hockey game at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the Finger Lakes region.
Mr. Elliott said that some of the other Canadian parents who had planned to travel to watch their children play had canceled their trips.
“The boycott is real, and it doesn’t matter what happens with tariffs now, it’s not going to be repaired,” Mr. Elliott said, adding: “He pushed too far.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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7) Mahmoud Khalil Releases Statement from Louisiana ICE Detention Center
By Mahmoud Khalil / Intro by ScheerPost Staff
—SheerPost, March 18, 2025
https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/18/palestinian-political-prisoner-mahmoud-khalil-releases-statement-from-louisiana-ice-detention-center/
Protests in Thomas Paine Park against the detention of Palestinian activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. Photo from Wikimedia Commons registered under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder with permanent residency, has released his first public statement since his arrest on March 8. He was taken into custody by plainclothes Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers in the lobby of his Columbia University apartment complex due to his alleged connection to Hamas. His statement, released Tuesday, was dictated by phone to family members from an ICE center in Louisiana.
Khalil, who has not yet been charged with a crime, said he is a “political prisoner” and expressed concern with the political and social climate in the United States that led to his arrest. He and his lawyers argue that his arrest and detainment violate his constitutional rights to free speech and due process.
Khalil’s wife, who was present at the time of his arrest, is eight months pregnant and unsure if he will be present for the birth of their child.
His full unedited statement reads as follows:
My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.
Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.
Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.
On March 8, I was taken by DHS agents who refused to provide a warrant and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours—I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request.
My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.
I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba. I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention—imprisonment without trial or charge—to strip Palestinians of their rights.
I think of our friend Omar Khatib, who was incarcerated without charge or trial by Israel as he returned home from travel. I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.
I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted.
While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University. Presidents Shafik, Armstrong, and Dean Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns—based on racism and disinformation—to go unchecked.
Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticizing Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration’s latest threats. My arrest, the expulsion or suspension of at least 22 Columbia students—some stripped of their B.A. degrees just weeks before graduation—and the expulsion of SWC (Student Workers of Columbia) President Grant Miner on the eve of contract negotiations, are clear examples.
If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. Students have long been at the forefront of change—leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice.
The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.
Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.
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8) Trump’s Battles With Colleges Could Change American Culture for a Generation
Many in higher education worry Trump’s efforts to bend academia to his will could end American leadership in research and science. Universities are not finding many allies to defend them.
By Alan Blinder, March 20, 2025
Major universities have made it their mission to embrace diversity and expand their reach in the world. The Trump administration would like them to do the opposite. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
In October 2023, three days before Hamas fighters attacked Israel, Columbia University’s new president stood outside Low Library and posed a foundational question.
“What,” she asked, “does the world need from a great university in the 21st century?”
The president, Nemat Shafik, argued that the world required much. Rigorous thinkers who were grounded in the age’s great debates. Researchers whose breakthroughs could transform societies. Universities that extended their missions far beyond their gates.
Seventeen months later, Dr. Shafik is gone and the Trump administration is offering a far different answer. The ideal Dr. Shafik described, much of it historically bankrolled by American taxpayers, is under siege, as President Trump ties public money to his government’s vision for higher education.
That vision is a narrower one. Teach what you must, defend “the American tradition and Western civilization,” prepare people for the work force, and limit protests and research.
“I have not experienced, across 46 years of higher education, a period where there’s been this much distance” between the agendas of university leaders and Washington, said Robert J. Jones, the chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The outcome of this clash over the purpose of higher education stands to shape American culture for a generation or more. If the president realizes his ambitions, many American universities — public and private, in conservative states and liberal ones — could be hollowed out, imperiling the backbone of the nation’s research endeavors.
Two months into Mr. Trump’s term, universities are laying off workers, imposing hiring freezes, shutting down laboratories and facing federal investigations. After the administration sent Columbia a list of demands and canceled $400 million in grants and contracts, university leaders across the country fear how the government might wield its financial might to influence curriculums, staffing and admissions.
“Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hard-working taxpayers,” Mr. Trump said in a campaign video. “And now we are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all. We are going to have real education in America.” The goal, Mr. Trump declared, is to reclaim “our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.”
Other Republicans have spoken, often in more measured language, about their own frustrations with higher education. Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, bluntly complained during a hearing last month that colleges were “not preparing students to succeed in the modern work force.”
With presidential power magnified by a largely genuflecting Congress, Mr. Trump’s challenges to academic freedom and First Amendment protections have not provoked broad and visible public outrage. The sobering reality for university leaders is that Mr. Trump has the administrative upper hand, and academia has startlingly few vocal allies.
The fusillade against higher education led by Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance — men with Ivy League degrees — is more furious than past conservative crusades against the country’s elite academic institutions. The administration, though, is capitalizing on imperfections that have been tearing at the system’s stature for years.
“His genius was in understanding and then exploiting the resentments, the anxieties, and the vulnerabilities of” voters who already had “critical sentiments” toward higher education, Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, wrote of Mr. Trump in his 2021 book, “What Universities Owe Democracy.”
Private polling conducted for universities shows that many people believe that these nonprofit institutions are anything but — one consequence of high tuition costs. Even though a college education almost always provides graduates with higher lifetime incomes, rising debt has made the value of a degree a matter of debate. Politicians have eagerly caricatured colleges as sanctuaries of intolerance and “wokeism” where admissions processes have sometimes considered race or favored the well-connected.
For all of their grand talk — “For Humanity” is the name of Yale University’s $7 billion fund-raising campaign — administrators and professors often acknowledge that they have not mustered easy-to-digest responses against even routine criticisms.
Universities strained to be more accessible, building up more diverse classes and handing out more financial aid. But Chancellor Jones, who will become the University of Washington’s president this summer, nevertheless described higher education’s public relations strategy as “a work in progress.”
Many leaders concede that while the role of the university in American life is clear to them, it has grown muddled to many.
“Higher education has always been able to stand up and invoke its moral authority,” said Roger L. Geiger, a distinguished professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and a leading authority on the history of American colleges. “What’s happened is they’ve simply lost that moral authority.”
The Pew Research Center found in 2012 that 26 percent of Americans believed that colleges and universities were negatively affecting the United States. Last year, even before the campus demonstrations that led to thousands of arrests, Pew reported that figure had increased to 45 percent.
Much of Mr. Trump’s higher education agenda during his first term empowered for-profit colleges. Now, though, Mr. Trump is taking clearer aim at the cultures and missions of major nonprofit universities. His tactics, university officials and researchers believe, could throw American higher education toward an earlier time — closer to when, as Dr. Shafik put it, universities “were kept separate from the world around them.”
American higher education predates the republic itself. Harvard, for example, was established in the colonial period to educate clergymen. George Washington’s idea for a national university was never realized, but Abraham Lincoln found more success pursuing the idea that higher education was entwined with American ambition when he signed the measure that led to publicly funded land-grant institutions.
Research became a focus of universities late in the 19th century. The nation’s reliance on universities greatly accelerated during and after World War II, as the United States began to lean on academia more than most other countries.
Essential to the system was Washington’s new willingness to underwrite overhead costs of expensive research projects. By 1995, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that universities were “the core strength” of the American research-and-development apparatus. Universities also assumed part of the United States’ soft-power strategy, working on foreign aid projects that spanned the globe.
That symbiotic arrangement is now in jeopardy. The administration has framed its proposed cuts to overhead expenses, for instance, as a way “to ensure that as many funds as possible go toward direct scientific research costs.” But administration officials have also depicted the longstanding framework in harsh terms, including the assertion that it created a “slush fund” for liberal university administrators.
As Dr. Geiger put it, the Trump administration’s approach represented “a new era.” Besides upending individual studies, cuts to federal money could unleash dramatic consequences for the structures and objectives of universities.
“No one can assume, for example, that biochemistry is going to have a sustained future of generous funding,” said John Thelin, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and a former president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
He could think of no president, provost or medical school dean who had, in recent years, appeared particularly nervous about an evaporation of funding. These days, it is hard to find a president, provost or medical school dean who is not anxious about something.
At Illinois, the federally funded Soybean Innovation Lab will close next month. Dr. Jones fears that research on everything from insulin production to artificial intelligence could ultimately wither, undermining the university’s ability to advance what he called “the public good.”
“Before, we were just trying to tell our story to improve the value proposition in the eyes of the public, but now it becomes a bigger, much larger issue than that,” said Dr. Jones, one of the few top university chiefs who have been willing to be interviewed on the record since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
The threat is also acute at private institutions, even those with the biggest war chests. Johns Hopkins said last week that it would eliminate more than 2,000 jobs in the United States and overseas, the largest round of layoffs in its history. The University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump’s alma mater, is among the universities with new hiring freezes. (It announced that step before the Trump administration said on Wednesday that it would pause about $175 million in funding for Penn because it had allowed a transgender woman to compete on its women’s swim team.)
In recent weeks, presidents at public and private universities alike have weighed how long any institutional lifelines could last. But professors doubt that a major university can meet its modern ambitions without a relatively open spigot of federal support.
“Ultimately, the university cannot exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of biological sciences at Columbia. “It would be really, really more akin to a high school or a local community college where you’re just teaching some classes without world-class researchers bringing the frontier of knowledge into the classroom.”
So far, Mr. Trump has not signaled any interest in retreat. That has left academic leaders searching urgently for how to save an ideal they insist is imperative.
Asked whether he feared a wholesale remaking of the American university, Dr. Jones replied that he did not like to use the word “fear.” But, he added, “it is a concern — I can’t say that it is not one of those things that a lot of us are concerned about.”
Sharon Otterman contributed reporting.
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9) Trump plans to sign an executive order aimed at dismantling the Education Department.
By Michael C. Bender, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Zach Montague, March 20, 2025
President Trump plans to sign an executive order on Thursday instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin dismantling the agency, according to two White House officials.
The department cannot be closed without the approval of Congress, which created it. But the Trump administration has already taken steps to narrow the agency’s authority and significantly cut its work force while also telegraphing plans to try and shutter it.
The White House officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans, said the order instructed Ms. McMahon to return authority over education to the states.
USA Today was first to report Mr. Trump’s intent to sign the order on Thursday.
Republican attempts to shutter the agency date back to the 1980s. But the push gained steam in recent years after a parents’ rights movement grew out of a backlash to school policies and shutdowns during the coronavirus pandemic.
That movement, which includes key pro-Trump, grass-roots activists, expanded around opposition to progressive agendas that promoted mandating certain education standards and inclusive policies for L.G.B.T.Q. students. Activists contended that these policies undermined parental rights and values.
But the hyper-partisanship around education issues has been present for decades, from progressive-leaning teachers’ unions who organized against President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policies to conservative Republican presidential candidates in 2016 who ran against the Common Core standards elevated by President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” program.
Caught in the middle are the nation’s 50 million public school pupils, 15 percent of whom have disabilities. Also watching the debate are undergraduate students who receive Pell Grants because they qualify as low-income (nearly one-third of all college students) and those who receive federal student loans (about 28 percent).
Public schools are mostly funded by taxes collected by states and municipalities that, by definition, already have control over that money. The federal government accounts for about 10 percent of total school funding, but that is distributed by the Education Department largely according to federal law — not the discretion of the president.
That balance of power in Washington explains, at least in part, why no modern president has ever tried to unilaterally shut down a federal department. The Education Department was created by an act of Congress in 1979, and federal lawmakers would have to approve of eliminating it.
Shuttering the Education Department is broadly unpopular, public opinion surveys show. Multiple polls in the past month have shown that roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea.
Mr. Trump’s order is expected to spark another legal fight for the administration, which is already embroiled in multiple lawsuits.
No modern president has ever tried to unilaterally shut down a federal department. Other agencies, such as the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Civil Aeronautics Board, were phased out under Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, but with the support of Congress through legislation.
Additionally, no cabinet-level department has been abolished outright since the U.S. Postal Service replaced the Post Office Department more than half a century ago, and many of the programs the Education Department administers provide a lifeline to schools and students that most lawmakers have been hesitant to jeopardize in the past.
Still, Republican lawmakers have already shown unusual deference to Mr. Trump, even as he has taken steps to challenge Congress’s authority in several areas while flexing his own. Notably, he directed agencies not to spend funds already authorized by Congress on programs he dislikes, a move that is banned under current law and may be unconstitutional.
Closing the department would not by itself revoke the various laws that established federal funding for public schools and underserved school districts or for specific student populations, including those with disabilities. Furthermore, many education policies are controlled by other agencies, and the department does not oversee schools on military bases or in Native American territories.
The Education Department has already reoriented itself to pick up many of Mr. Trump’s goals by winding down investigations started under the previous administration; starting new ones reflecting its own priorities; rolling back protections for transgender students; and cracking down on diversity programs.
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10) University of California Will Stop Requiring Diversity Statements in Hiring
The statements had risen in popularity as colleges sought to improve campus culture, but they drew criticism from conservatives who argued they were a political test.
By Vimal Patel, March 20, 2025
The campus of the University of California, Riverside. Credit...Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times
The University of California said on Wednesday that it would stop requiring the use of diversity statements in hiring, a practice praised by some who said it made campuses more inclusive but criticized by others who said it did the opposite.
Diversity statements typically ask job applicants to describe in a page or so how they would contribute to campus diversity. The move away from them, by one of the biggest higher education systems in the United States, comes as the Trump administration escalates an attack on higher education over diversity programming.
For a decade, the 10-campus system was a national leader in using such statements, as universities increasingly came under pressure from those who wanted more diverse student bodies and faculties.
“Our values and commitment to our mission have not changed,” Janet Reilly, the chair of the system’s Board of Regents, said in a statement late Wednesday. “We will continue to embrace and celebrate Californians from a variety of life experiences, backgrounds and points of view.”
The announcement came as universities have faced a number of direct challenges from the new Trump administration.
Two weeks ago, the administration announced that it would end $400 million in research grants with Columbia University over criticism that the institution had not done enough to crack down on antisemitism. The Education Department sent letters last week to 60 colleges warning of “potential enforcement actions” if they didn’t protect Jewish students. Four of the University of California system’s 10 campuses — Berkeley, Davis, San Diego and Santa Barbara — received the letters.
And last month, the Education Department issued guidance that interpreted the 2023 Supreme Court ruling striking down race-conscious admissions practices far more expansively to include any “race-based decision-making.”
The University of California system’s president, Michael Drake, did not address diversity statements during his opening remarks at a meeting of the Regents on Wednesday. But he painted a bleak picture about the university’s finances.
The system is bracing for a state budget cut of 8 percent and is concerned about threats from the federal government to curb funding. Like several other universities in recent days, Dr. Drake announced a systemwide hiring freeze.
In a letter to the system’s leaders on Wednesday, the university’s provost, Katherine S. Newman, said the Regents had directed Dr. Drake to eliminate diversity statements for all new hires.
“The requirement to submit a diversity statement may lead applicants to focus on an aspect of their candidacy that is outside their expertise or prior experience,” she wrote. She added, “We can continue to effectively serve our communities from a variety of life experiences, backgrounds and points of view without requiring diversity statements.”
Even before Mr. Trump took office, diversity statements had become a lightning rod.
Conservative critics describe them as “loyalty oaths” that limit diversity of thought in academia. Others saw them as another tool that savvy applicants could use to hit the right buzzwords and gain an edge in hiring.
Some states, including North Dakota, Florida and Texas, have barred requiring them or stopped them altogether. Amid the pressure, several colleges, including Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan, recently said they would stop requiring them in faculty hiring.
“They encouraged a performativity,” said Steven Brint, a professor at the University of California, Riverside. “People knew the right thing to say.”
The University of California was sued over diversity statements, but the federal suit was ultimately tossed out because a judge said the plaintiffs lacked standing.
But to their supporters, the statements were a test of how comfortable applicants were navigating increasingly diverse student bodies. Diversity statements do not gauge beliefs, but actions, said Brian Soucek, a law professor at the University of California, Davis.
Professor Soucek said the university was backing away from one of its core values and capitulating to the Trump administration in a futile attempt to avoid the president’s wrath.
“Attempts to appease those who have been explicit about their intent to destroy higher education as we currently know it are politically naïve,” Professor Soucek wrote this week in a letter to faculty leaders.
In an interview, he added, “Show me how that worked out for Columbia.”
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11) Hamas Fires Rockets at Tel Aviv as Israel Expands Gaza Ground Operations
A two-month cease-fire in Gaza collapsed this week amid a renewed Israeli bombardment. The fighting now looks like it is escalating back to full-scale war.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, March 20, 2025
Palestinians standing on Thursday near the bodies of relatives killed in an overnight Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza. A two-month cease-fire collapsed this week with an Israeli aerial bombardment of Gaza that the military said had targeted Hamas. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Hamas fired its first barrage of rockets in months into Israeli territory on Thursday as Israeli troops expanded their ground raids in northern Gaza in what looked increasingly like a slide back into full-scale war.
There were no reports of casualties from the rockets, which were fired at Tel Aviv. The Israeli military said they were either intercepted or fell in open areas. But the barrage served as a show of resilience from the Palestinian armed group despite more than a year of war with Israel.
A two-month cease-fire collapsed this week with an Israeli aerial bombardment of Gaza, which the military said had targeted Hamas. Israel argued that the truce could not continue unless Hamas released more hostages, while Hamas accused Israel of violating the cease-fire agreement.
Israel’s renewed assault has killed more than 500 people in Gaza in three days, including scores of children, the Gaza health ministry said on Thursday. Those figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Earlier on Thursday, the Israeli military said its forces had begun conducting “ground activity” near Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza. That came less than a day after Israel announced that it had recaptured part of the Netzarim corridor in central Gaza, which divides the north of the territory from the south. Israel had withdrawn from the corridor as part of the truce.
Hamas said at least five of its top leaders in Gaza were among about 400 people killed by Israel on Tuesday in a heavy bombardment, according to Gaza officials. Hamas rarely provides information as to whether those killed in Israeli attacks were members of the armed group.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has vowed to step up pressure on Hamas until the group capitulates and releases the dozens of Israeli and foreign hostages still being held in Gaza.
Hamas officials say Israel will not gain more favorable terms for a cease-fire by resuming the war.
The first phase of the January cease-fire ended in early March. Mediators like the United States were trying to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas on the next steps in the truce, including a permanent end to the war and the release of the remaining living hostages in Gaza.
But Israel has been unwilling to end the conflict permanently as long as Hamas remains in power in Gaza. Hamas is refusing to disband its armed battalions, send its leaders in Gaza into exile or release many more hostages unless Israel commits to a permanent end to the war.
About 24 living Israeli and foreign hostages — as well as the remains of more than 30 others — are believed to still be in Gaza, according to the Israeli government.
Hamas and its allies abducted about 250 people during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that ignited the war.
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12) Trump Wants to Take Over Ukraine’s Nuclear Plants. What Would That Mean?
The White House said taking ownership of Ukrainian plants would give them the “best protection.” The idea faces legal hurdles and operational challenges, and it’s unclear if Ukraine would agree to it.
By Constant Méheut, Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine, March 20, 2025
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in 2022. Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
During a call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine this week, President Trump floated a highly unusual idea: The United States could take control of Ukrainian nuclear power plants.
“The United States could be very helpful in running those plants with its electricity and utility expertise,” the White House said in a statement after the call on Wednesday. “American ownership of those plants would be the best protection for that infrastructure and support for Ukrainian energy infrastructure.”
The idea surprised officials and energy experts in Kyiv, and it was not clear whether Mr. Zelensky would agree to such a plan. Ukraine owns four nuclear power plants, and it also appears that the two sides do not agree on how many facilities the idea concerns.
Mr. Zelensky suggested at a news conference that the idea was limited to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which is now under Russian control.
The Ukrainian leader described his discussions with Mr. Trump about the plant as “positive steps,” but added, “I’m not sure we will get a result quickly.”
The White House statement echoed a familiar argument from Mr. Trump: that U.S. economic involvement in Ukraine serves as its best security guarantee, because Russia would be less likely to target a country where America has economic interests. Mr. Trump has also applied such reasoning to a potential deal on access to Ukrainian critical minerals.
So what could the United States’ interests be in Ukraine’s nuclear sector, and what challenges might it face?
U.S. Economic Interests
Ukraine’s Soviet-era nuclear power plants have been the backbone of its energy network during the war, supplying up to two-thirds of the country’s electricity. While Moscow has relentlessly attacked Ukraine’s thermal and hydroelectric power plants in an effort to cripple its grid, it has avoided striking nuclear facilities, which could trigger a radiological disaster.
Against that background, the Ukrainian government has initiated plans to build more nuclear reactors, arguing that it is the only viable solution to ensuring long-term energy security.
This is where America’s business interests could come into play.
Shortly before the war, Westinghouse, an American nuclear technology company, signed a deal with Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear company, to build five reactors. After Russia attacked, the number was increased to nine and the two companies agreed to further cooperate to deploy smaller plants in Ukraine.
For Westinghouse, it was a breakthrough after years of struggling to enter a Ukrainian nuclear market long dominated by Rosatom, the Russian nuclear power giant.
Westinghouse has a special interest in the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Russia captured the plant in March 2022, and it no longer supplies electricity to the Ukrainian grid. But before the war, it used fuel and technology from Westinghouse.
Olga Kosharna, a Ukrainian nuclear safety expert, said that Russia’s capture of the Zaporizhzhia plant had raised concerns at Westinghouse about the potential theft of its intellectual property. In 2023, the U.S. Energy Department warned in a letter to Rosatom that the company could face prosecution under U.S. law if it used Westinghouse technology at the plant.
Andrian Prokip, an energy expert with the Kennan Institute in Washington, said that Westinghouse would “definitely benefit” from a return of the plant to Ukrainian hands, as it would expand its market.
It is unclear whether Mr. Trump discussed the fate of the Zaporizhzhia plant with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in a call on Tuesday as he had vowed to.
Westinghouse did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A current Ukrainian official and a former one, both with knowledge of the talks between the United States and Ukraine, also said Kyiv had emphasized to Mr. Trump that if the United States wanted access to Ukrainian minerals, it would require the Zaporizhzhia plant’s power-generating capacity, because mineral extraction and processing is energy intensive.
Possible Challenges
For one thing, all of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants are owned by Energoatom, and Ukrainian law prohibits their privatization.
Amending Ukraine’s laws to allow for U.S. ownership would be politically sensitive in a post-Soviet country where many key industries remain state-owned.
Ukraine has engaged in a wave of privatization during the war. But privatizing Energoatom — the state-owned company that generates the most revenue — would likely be a sticking point.
“I expect there would be great resistance to this idea in Ukraine,” said Victoria Voytsitska, a former Ukrainian lawmaker and senior member of Parliament’s energy committee. “From both sides of the political spectrum.”
Mr. Zelensky alluded to the issue in his news conference after his call with Mr. Trump. If Russia returned the Zaporizhzhia plant to Ukraine — a prospect that many in Ukraine deem unlikely — “simply handing over the plant” to the United States would not be possible, Mr. Zelensky said, because “it’s ours and it’s our land.”
Making plants operational again after three years of war would also pose a considerable challenge. Mr. Zelensky cited a period of up to two and a half years to get the degraded Zaporizhzhia plant running again.
Further, although all six Zaporizhzhia reactors have been shut down, they still require energy to power critical safety systems and water to circulate in their cores to prevent a meltdown.
But the power lines providing power to the plant have been cut on several occasions in the war, and the destruction of a nearby dam, possibly at Russia’s direction, has reduced access to cooling water, raising the risks of a nuclear accident.
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13) Jury Orders Greenpeace to Pay Pipeline Company More Than $660 Million
The environmental group had said the lawsuit, over its role in a protest movement, could mean an end to its operations in the United States.
By Karen Zraick, Reporting from Mandan, N.D., March 19, 2025
Demonstrators against the Dakota Access Pipeline near Cannon Ball, N.D., in 2016. Credit...Andrew Cullen/Reuters
A North Dakota jury on Wednesday awarded damages totaling more than $660 million to the Texas-based pipeline company Energy Transfer, which had sued Greenpeace over its role in protests nearly a decade ago against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The verdict was a major blow to the environmental organization. Greenpeace had said that Energy Transfer’s claimed damages, in the range of $300 million, would be enough to put the group out of business in the United States. The jury on Wednesday awarded far more than that.
Greenpeace said it would appeal. The group has maintained that it played only a minor part in demonstrations led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. It has portrayed the lawsuit as an attempt to stifle oil-industry critics.
The nine-person jury in the Morton County courthouse in Mandan, N.D., about 45 minutes north of where the protests took place, returned the verdict after roughly two days of deliberations.
It took about a half-hour simply to read out the long list of questions posed to the jurors, such as whether they found that Greenpeace had committed trespass, defamation and conspiracy, among other violations, and how much money they would award for each offense.
Afterward, outside the courthouse in Mandan, both sides invoked the right to free speech, but in very different ways.
“We should all be concerned about the attacks on our First Amendment, and lawsuits like this that really threaten our rights to peaceful protest and free speech,” said Deepa Padmanabha, a senior legal adviser for Greenpeace USA.
Just moments before, Trey Cox of the firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, the lead lawyer for Energy Transfer, had called the verdict “a powerful affirmation" of the First Amendment. “Peaceful protest is an inherent American right,” he said. “However, violent and destructive protest is unlawful and unacceptable.”
Earlier in the week, during closing arguments on Monday, Energy Transfer’s co-founder and board chairman, Kelcy Warren, an ally and donor to President Trump, had the last word for the plaintiffs when his lawyers played a recording of comments he made in a video deposition for the jurors. “We’ve got to stand up for ourselves,” Mr. Warren said, arguing that protesters had created “a total false narrative” about his company. “It was time to fight back.”
Energy Transfer is one of the largest pipeline companies in the country. The protests over its construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline drew national attention and thousands of people to monthslong encampments in 2016 and 2017.
The demonstrators gathered on and around the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, arguing that the pipeline cut through sacred land and could endanger the local water supply. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe sued to stop the project, and members of other tribes, environmentalists and celebrities were among the many who flocked to the rural area, including two figures who are now members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
But the protests erupted into acts of vandalism and violence at times, alienating people in the surrounding community in the Bismarck-Mandan area.
Greenpeace has long argued that the lawsuit was a threat to First Amendment rights, brought by a deep-pocketed plaintiff and carrying dangerous implications for organizations that speak out about a broad range of issues. Greenpeace has called the lawsuit a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP suit, the term for cases meant to hinder free speech by raising the risk of expensive legal battles. Many states have laws that make it difficult to pursue such cases, though not North Dakota.
Mr. Cox laced into Greenpeace during closing arguments on Monday. The company accused Greenpeace of funding and supporting attacks and protests that delayed the pipeline’s construction, raised costs and harmed Energy Transfer’s reputation.
Jurors, Mr. Cox said, would have the “privilege” of telling the group that its actions were “unacceptable to the American way.” He laid out costs incurred that tallied up to about $340 million and asked for punitive damages on top of that.
“Greenpeace took a small, disorganized, local issue and exploited it to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline and promote its own selfish agenda,” he said. “They thought they’d never get caught.”
The 1,172-mile underground pipeline has been operating since 2017 but is awaiting final permits for a small section where it crosses federal territory underneath Lake Oahe on the Missouri River, near Standing Rock. The tribe is still trying to shut down the pipeline in a different lawsuit.
Lawyers for Greenpeace called the case against the group a “ridiculous” attempt to pin blame on it for everything that happened during months of raucous protests, including federal-government delays in issuing permits.
Three Greenpeace entities were named in the lawsuit: Greenpeace Inc., Greenpeace Fund and Greenpeace International. Greenpeace Inc. is the arm of the group that organizes public campaigns and protests. It is based in Washington, as is Greenpeace Fund, which raises money and awards grants.
The third entity named in the lawsuit, Greenpeace International, based in Amsterdam, is the coordinating body for 25 independent Greenpeace groups around the world.
It was principally the actions of Greenpeace Inc. that were at the heart of the trial, which began Feb. 24. They included training people in protest tactics, dispatching its “rolling sunlight” solar-panel truck to provide power, and offering funds and other supplies. Greenpeace International maintained that its only involvement was signing a letter to banks expressing opposition to the pipeline, a document that was signed by hundreds and that had been drafted by a Dutch organization. Greenpeace Fund said it had no involvement.
On Wednesday, the jurors found Greenpeace Inc. liable for the vast majority of the damages awarded, which came to more than $660 million, according to representatives for both Greenpeace and Energy Transfer. The damages cover dozens of figures that were read out in court for each defendant on each claim.
Separately, Greenpeace International this year had countersued Energy Transfer in the Netherlands, invoking a new European Union directive against SLAPP suits as well as Dutch law.
During closing arguments on Monday in North Dakota, Everett Jack Jr. of the firm Davis Wright Tremaine, the lead lawyer for the Greenpeace Inc., was a study in contrast with Mr. Cox. Both men wore dark suits and red ties to make their final arguments before the jury. But their demeanors were polar opposites.
Mr. Cox was energetic, indignant, even wheeling out a cart stacked with boxes of evidence during his rebuttal to argue that he had proved his case. Mr. Jack was calm and measured, recounting the chronology of how the protests developed to make the case that they had swelled well before Greenpeace got involved.
Given the months of disruptions caused locally by the protests, the jury pool in the area was widely expected to favor Energy Transfer.
Among the observers in the courtroom were a group of lawyers calling themselves the Trial Monitoring Committee who criticized the court for denying a Greenpeace petition to move the trial to the bigger city of Fargo, which was not as affected by the protests. The group included Martin Garbus, a prominent First Amendment lawyer, and Steven Donziger, who is well-known for his yearslong legal battle with Chevron over pollution in Ecuador.
After the verdict, Mr. Garbus called it “the worst First Amendment case decision I have ever seen” and expressed concern that an appeal that reached the Supreme Court could be used to overturn decades of precedent around free-speech protections.
The group also took issue with the number of jurors with ties to the oil industry or who had expressed negative views of protests during jury selection. But Suja A. Thomas, a law professor at the University of Illinois and an expert on juries, said the precedent in North Dakota courts was not to use “blanket disqualifications of jurors just because they might have some kind of interest,” whether it’s financial or based on experience or opinion.
Rather, the judge has to determine whether each individual juror can be impartial. “There can be interest; they have to determine whether the interest is significant enough such that the person cannot be fair,” Ms. Thomas said.
Natali Segovia is the executive director of Water Protector Legal Collective, an Indigenous-led legal and advocacy nonprofit group that grew out of the Standing Rock protests. Ms. Segovia, who is also a member of the trial monitoring group, said her organization was involved with about 800 criminal cases that resulted from the protests. The vast majority have been dismissed, she said.
What had gotten lost during the Greenpeace trial, she said, was the concern about water that had spurred so much protest. She said she saw a larger dynamic at play. “At its core, it’s a proxy war against Indigenous sovereignty using an international environmental organization,” she said.
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