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National Mass Mobilization to Fight Back Against Trump & Musk
Hands Off!
San Francisco Fights Back!
Saturday, April 5, 2025
1:00 P.M. - 3:00 P.M.
Civic Center Plaza
335 McAllister Street
San Francisco, CA, 94102
Join INDIVISIBLE SF, our friends at 50501, and many other organizations for a national Mass Mobilization on April 5.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. San Francisco is fighting back!
They're taking everything they can get their hands on—our health care, our data, our jobs, our services—and daring the world to stop them. This is a crisis, and the time to act is now.
On Saturday, April 5th, we're taking to the streets to fight back with a clear message: Hands off!
This mass mobilization day is our message to the world that we do not consent to the destruction of our government and our economy for the benefit of Trump and his billionaire allies. Alongside Americans across the country, we are marching, rallying, and protesting to demand a stop the chaos and build an opposition movement against the looting of our country.
A core principle behind all Hands Off! events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values.
Check out handsoff2025.com for more information.
HandsOff Mobilize link here:
https://www.mobilize.us/handsoff/event/764837/
Indivisible Mobilize link here:
https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/event/764736/
Source:: https://www.mobilize.us/handsoff/event/764837/
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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) Trump Threatens to Jail Tesla Vandals in El Salvador Prisons
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador had previously offered to imprison convicted criminals from the United States in his country’s notorious prison facilities, for a fee.
By Chris Cameron, Reporting from Washington, March 21, 2025
Investigators at a Tesla Collision Center after a person set fire to several vehicles on Tuesday in Las Vegas. Credit...Ethan Miller/Getty Images
President Trump escalated his threats against people who vandalize Tesla cars, musing in a social media post on Friday that those convicted of damaging or destroying the vehicles — including U.S. citizens — could be sent to notorious prison complexes in El Salvador.
“I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20-year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”
In recent weeks, vandals in several cities have defaced or destroyed Tesla vehicles and dealerships in apparent protest of Mr. Musk’s efforts to drastically reshape the federal government and fire much of the federal work force. No serious injuries have been reported.
Last month, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador offered to imprison convicted criminals from the United States in his country’s massive prison facilities.
Then this month, the United States deported Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members to El Salvador. The deportation flights landed in El Salvador despite a federal judge ordering that the planes reverse course and return the detainees to the United States. The judge has vowed to continue investigating the flights and has said the Trump administration has not been cooperative.
Human rights groups say that the crowded Salvadoran prisons are holding pens for tens of thousands of people rounded up in arrests that have ensnared innocent people. The Terrorism Confinement Center is a hulking centerpiece of the system that is big enough to hold up to 40,000 inmates, some as young as 12.
Analysts say it is unlikely that a plan to detain U.S. citizens overseas would hold up in court.
Mr. Trump, who pardoned hundreds of people convicted in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, has recently become fixated on delivering outsized punishments to the Tesla vandals after a journalist told the president at an event promoting Tesla on the White House lawn that “some say they should be labeled domestic terrorists.”
“I will do that,” Mr. Trump replied. “I’ll do that. I’m going to stop them."
No immediate action was taken, but a week later, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, made good on the promise and labeled the attacks as acts of “domestic terrorism.”
Then, on Thursday, Ms. Bondi highlighted weeks-old arrests of individuals charged in some of the arson attacks and suggested that they were tied to a larger plot by people “operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.” Earlier this week, Mr. Trump had suggested, without evidence, in a Fox interview that the vandalism was paid for “by people very highly political on the left” — echoing his claims about other protest movements like Black Lives Matter and the pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses.
Ms. Bondi, who developed a close relationship with Mr. Trump during her two terms as Florida’s attorney general, supported Mr. Trump’s pardon of Jan. 6 rioters, including people who had been convicted of violent crimes and weapons charges. The F.B.I. described those involved in the planning and perpetration of that attack as “domestic violent extremists.”
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2) Why Did Elon Musk Go After Bunkers Full of Seeds?
By Iago Hale and Michael Kantar, March 22, 2025
Dr. Hale is a professor of specialty crop improvement at the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Kantar is an associate professor of plant genetics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Ohni Lisle
In a climate-controlled bunker in an unremarkable building in rural Aberdeen, Idaho, there are shelves upon shelves of meticulously labeled boxes of seed. This vault is home to many of the United States’ more than 62,000 genetically unique lines of wheat, collected over the past 127 years from around the world.
Though dormant, these seeds are alive. But unless they are continually cared for and periodically replanted, the lines will die, along with the millenniums of evolutionary history that they embody.
Since its establishment in 1898, the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Plant Germplasm System and the scientists who support it have systematically gathered and maintained the agricultural plant species that undergird our food system in vast collections such as the one in Aberdeen. The collections represent a towering achievement of foresight that food security depends on the availability of diverse plant genetic resources.
In mid-February, Trump administration officials at what has been labeled the Department of Government Efficiency fired some of the highly trained people who do this work. A court order has reinstated them, but it’s unclear when they will be allowed to resume their work. In the meantime, uncertainty around additional staffing and budget cuts, as well as the future of the collections themselves, reigns.
This should unnerve every American who eats. Our food system is only as safe as our ability to respond to the next plant disease or other emergent threat, and a strong N.P.G.S. is central to our preparedness.
Across its 22 stations nationwide, approximately 300 N.P.G.S. scientists maintain more than 600,000 genetic lines of more than 200 crop species. The collections of some crops, like wheat, are in the form of seeds. But others, like apples (2,664 lines), must be maintained as living plants in the open field. The scientists who care for them must follow strict requirements for sustaining genetic purity so they can provide healthy viable seeds or plants to the tens of thousands of researchers and others who request them each year.
But isn’t it overkill to maintain more than 62,000 different varieties of wheat? The thing is, the N.P.G.S. collection of plant genetic diversity is not just a snapshot of what is currently grown to meet today’s demands. It is more like a survivalist cache: our nation’s safeguard against all future challenges to growing the food we need.
For example, when a newly evolved form of stem rust — a devastating fungal disease infecting wheat — emerged in East African fields in 1999, an international group of plant breeders turned to the N.P.G.S. collection for help. There, among the tens of thousands of patiently maintained lines, they discovered previously unknown genetic sources of resistance to the disease. Those genes now protect wheat varieties around the world, silencing for the moment the alarm of a feared global pandemic. (Just like human diseases, plant diseases do not respect borders.)
Such stories are common. In the 1980s, scientists at a gene bank in Geneva, N.Y., helped identify genetic traits that made apples resistant to several destructive diseases, including deadly fire blight. Those traits have since been deployed in the rootstocks of over 100 million apple trees worldwide, not only generating more than $91 million annually in tree sales, but also directly supporting the nearly $23 billion American apple industry.
This is how the system is designed to function. Whatever your diet, from chicken nuggets to organic tofu, the food you consume is the result of generations of work by agricultural scientists and plant breeders to meet the ever-changing needs of farmers and consumers. This work is only possible because of the availability of the N.P.G.S.’s extensive collections of plant genetic resources. Such collections are the raw materials for plant breeders’ craft, and therefore of agriculture itself. They exist thanks to federal support stretching back generations.
The future will certainly bring new crop diseases and pests, as well as greater environmental stresses on our crops from heat, drought and flooding. In the face of such uncertainty, it is wise to gather and maintain as much genetic diversity as possible so that we’ll have the resources to sustain the food system most of us take for granted.
Even in the best of times, the N.P.G.S. budget is shoestring and its staffing minimal, given the magnitude of its mandate. And yet, with a trivial investment of 0.000008 percent of the federal budget, N.P.G.S. scientists quietly enable and safeguard our food system, worth around $1.5 trillion. Talk about return on investment.
Moving fast and breaking things may work in some sectors. But the disruptions underway threaten irreversible losses of crop genetic diversity. Such losses directly undermine the United States’ ability to ensure continued food security and dietary diversity amid challenges to our agricultural systems.
For the sake of all Americans, we denounce any attempts to weaken the N.P.G.S. The generations before us understood that it is the minimum function of a responsible government to invest in the long-term ability to feed its citizens.
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3) ICE Tells a Cornell Student Activist to Turn Himself In
The student, who is from Gambia and was involved in pro-Palestinian activism on campus, was told to report to the immigration agency’s offices.
By Stephanie Saul, March 21, 2025
Momodou Taal was among a group of pro-Palestinian activists who shut down a career fair on the Cornell campus last year. Credit...Seth Wenig/Associated Press
The Trump administration moved early Friday to detain an international student at Cornell University who has led protests on its Ithaca, N.Y., campus, in what appeared to be the latest effort to kick pro-Palestinian activists out of the United States.
A lawyer for Momodou Taal, a doctoral student in Africana studies, said in court papers that he had been notified by email early Friday morning that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was seeking Mr. Taal’s surrender.
Last year, Mr. Taal was among a group of pro-Palestinian activists who shut down a career fair on the Cornell campus that featured weapons manufacturers. As a result, the university had ordered him to study remotely for the spring semester.
Mr. Taal, a great-grandson of Gambia’s first president, Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara, is a citizen of both Gambia and the United Kingdom. According to court documents, Mr. Taal, who is here on a visa, said he feared deportation in part because his name had been circulated on social media and in media reports as a potential ICE target.
The move to detain Mr. Taal comes as the Trump administration tries to deport other pro-Palestinian students and academics.
About two weeks ago, Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident of Palestinian descent who recently obtained a master’s degree from Columbia University, was detained in New York. On Monday, the government detained Badar Kahn Suri, an Indian citizen who was studying and teaching at Georgetown University, claiming he had violated terms of his academic visa. Other students have also been targeted.
ICE did not immediately return a request for comment.
Last weekend, Mr. Taal filed a pre-emptive lawsuit to block possible action against him. A hearing had been scheduled in that case for Tuesday in Syracuse, N.Y. A lawyer for Mr. Taal, Eric T. Lee, argued in the lawsuit that his client was exercising his right to free speech and that there were no legitimate grounds for his deportation.
The lawsuit also challenged the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order to “combat antisemitism” that instructed federal agencies to deport immigrants whose actions could be regarded as “antisemitic or supportive of terrorism.”
Earlier this week, neighbors saw law enforcement agents near Mr. Taal’s apartment building by Cornell’s campus, according to affidavits filed in the lawsuit in the Northern District of New York.
“This does not happen in a democracy. We are outraged, and every American should be too,” Mr. Lee said in a statement.
Lawyers for Mr. Taal are asking the court to delay his surrender to ICE, pending the outcome of the litigation. On Thursday, hundreds of Cornell students and supporters held a rally in support of Mr. Taal, who is also the host of a podcast called “The Malcolm Effect.”
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4) Rockets Fired From Lebanon Prompt Israeli Strikes
The volley broke months of relative quiet in northern Israel after a U.S.-backed truce. Israel retaliated by attacking sites it said were linked to Hezbollah.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, March 22, 2025
Smoke rising above a village in southern Lebanon on Saturday. Credit...Karamallah Daher/Reuters
Rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel for the first time in months on Saturday, prompting Israeli forces to strike back hours later at sites in southern Lebanon it said were linked to the militant group Hezbollah.
The attacks were the latest example of how the renewed Israeli offensive in Gaza was rippling across the Middle East. They disrupted months of relative calm in northern Israel, where residents displaced by more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah have begun returning home lately.
The Israeli military said that it had shot down three rockets from Lebanon with no reports of casualties. The volley was the first of its kind since late last year, when Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire brokered by the United States and France.
Hezbollah denied involvement in the rocket fire, which followed Israel’s resumed offensive in Gaza this week against the Lebanese group’s Palestinian ally Hamas. Those Israeli attacks have already killed more than 600 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
After the Hamas-led assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the Gaza war, the militant group’s allies across the Middle East began attacking Israel in solidarity. Last year, that escalated into a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah, in which Israel assassinated Hezbollah’s leadership and launched a ground invasion into southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold.
The truce went into effect in late November and has largely held. Under the terms of the cease-fire, the Lebanese government is supposed to prevent armed groups like Hezbollah from attacking Israel from Lebanese territory.
Lebanese leaders appeared eager to head off any new escalation with Israel. The Israel-Hezbollah war killed about 4,000 people in Lebanon and more than a million people fled their homes, according to the country’s authorities.
After the rocket fire on Saturday, Joseph Aoun, the Lebanese president, condemned what he called “attempts to drag Lebanon back into a cycle of violence.” He called on the committee charged with overseeing the cease-fire — including representatives from the United States and France — to prevent any violations that could threaten Lebanon.
The Lebanese Army said on Saturday that it had located and dismantled rocket launchers in southern Lebanon. The national military is a distinct force from Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia which has long wielded enormous political and military influence in Lebanon.
“Military units are continuing to take the necessary measures to control the situation in the south,” the Lebanese military said.
Israeli officials have expressed skepticism over whether the Lebanese military is up to the task of preventing attacks. And Israel has continued to bombard Lebanon despite the truce, arguing that it is cracking down on militants violating the cease-fire.
While the cease-fire initially stipulated a full Israeli withdrawal by late January, Israeli forces still control five points inside Lebanese territory. Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, said Israeli troops would remain there indefinitely to protect Israeli towns near the Lebanese border.
The truce requires the Lebanese government’s security forces to be the sole armed presence in southern Lebanon, but it is unclear to what extent Hezbollah has actually withdrawn its fighters and weaponry.
The resumed strikes in Gaza this week have brought attacks on Israel from at least one other Hamas ally.
That ally, the Houthi militia in Yemen — which, like Hamas and Hezbollah, is backed by Iran — has resumed firing ballistic missiles at Israel, sending hundreds of thousands of Israelis rushing for fortified bomb shelters. Israel’s aerial defense systems have intercepted the missiles.
Israeli leaders, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have said that they launched the renewed attack in Gaza in part to pressure Hamas to free more of the dozens of remaining Israeli and foreign hostages in the enclave. Hamas has argued that Israel is tearing up the cease-fire deal.
Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s Mideast envoy, said that Israel and Hamas were “talking again” to try and solve the impasse in the negotiations. He made the remarks during an extended interview on Friday with the right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson.
The United States is now discussing how to demilitarize Hamas as part of a postwar settlement for Gaza, Mr. Witkoff said, adding, “That’s the big thing.”
“They need to demilitarize. Then maybe they could stay there a little bit, right? Be involved politically,” he said. “We can’t have a terrorist organization running Gaza.”
Mr. Witkoff said he believed that by resuming the fight against Hamas, Mr. Netanyahu was going “up against public opinion” in Israel — which Mr. Witkoff said broadly backed a deal to free the hostages.
Many relatives of the remaining Israeli hostages and their supporters have been demonstrating regularly to press their government for an immediate cease-fire and hostage-release agreement with Hamas.
Euan Ward and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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5) America Last: Why Shoppers Abroad Are Boycotting U.S. Goods
A growing number of Europeans and citizens of other countries are choosing not to buy American products to demonstrate their anger at President Trump’s policies.
By Jenny Gross, Reporting from London, March 21, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/world/europe/europe-boycott-american-products-trump.html
Some Danish grocery stores added stars to the price tags of European goods to help customers identify local products. Credit...Sergei Gapon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Bo Albertus, a school principal in Denmark, finds the Spanish raisins he now snacks on less tasty than his favorite Sun-Maid ones from California. There is no perfect substitute for Heinz tomato soup, a staple in his pantry. And he misses Pepsi Max.
But as long as President Trump pursues policies that Mr. Albertus, 57, believes put Europe’s economy and security at risk, he will boycott these and other U.S. products. He is one of a growing number of Europeans, Canadians and others who are forgoing American goods to show their anguish and dismay at Mr. Trump’s treatment of longtime allies.
“I felt a sense of powerlessness,” said Mr. Albertus, who is an administrator of a Danish Facebook group dedicated to boycotting American goods that has 90,000 members. “We all feel that we are doing something,” he added. “We are acting on our frustration.”
The strongest momentum behind such consumer action appears to be in countries that Mr. Trump has directly antagonized, like Denmark, whose territory of Greenland he has threatened to take, and Canada, which he has repeatedly said should become America’s 51st state.
But as Mr. Trump embraces President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and imposes tariffs on European goods, groups dedicated to boycotting U.S. goods and swapping tips on local alternatives have popped up in several European countries.
In a Swedish Facebook group with over 80,000 members, users ask for tips on buying non-American laptops, dog food and toothpaste. Members of a French group sing the praises of European laundry detergents and smartphone apps, and debate whether Cognac or Scotch whisky is the better alternative to bourbon.
There are also detailed discussion threads about what exactly constitutes an “American” product — does Coca-Cola manufactured in Europe count, or ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s, now owned by the British company Unilever? — that illustrate how boycotts in an era of globalized commerce are far from straightforward. But the groups are mostly a place for anxious Europeans and others to share stories and vent about their opposition to U.S. policies.
Majken Jensen, 49, a coordinator for a government agency in Copenhagen, acknowledged that many millions of people buy U.S. products worldwide, and boycotts by some consumers in a few countries may not make a huge difference, at first. Still, she has stopped buying Oreos and Heinz ketchup, and has swapped Estée Lauder night serum for a local brand, Beauté Pacifique.
“I’m not even a drop in the ocean,” she said. “But that’s my little way to protest.”
Ms. Jensen emphasized that her decision to stop buying U.S. goods was in opposition to the Trump administration, not the American people. “We want our friends back,” she said.
The backlash has led some stores to implement changes that make it easier for customers to identify local products. Canada’s largest grocery chain, Loblaw, is using a “T” symbol to denote U.S.-made products that are more expensive because of retaliatory tariffs Canada recently put in place. In Denmark, the grocery store chains Netto, Bilka and Fotex added stars to the price tags of European goods after customers requested clearer labeling, their parent company said.
Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said that social media and the interconnected global economy gave consumers more of a voice than ever before.
“America has done many questionable things over the years,” she said, “but I don’t think even the Vietnam War could have triggered a campaign like this, simply because social media was not available.”
Business leaders are aware of the potential costs. Beyond Meat, the plant-based food company with headquarters in California, warned in its latest financial report that it could lose customers internationally because of “anti-American sentiment.”
Michael Medline, the chief executive of Canada’s second-biggest supermarket company, Empire, said this month that the company’s sales of U.S. products were “rapidly dropping” because of a growing demand for non-American products. That decline will continue as the company sources more products from countries other than the United States, the company said, as Canada’s retaliatory tariffs make U.S. goods more expensive to import.
The Swiss chocolate maker, Lindt, said this month that in Canada, it would start selling chocolate made in Europe rather than the United States, both to avoid tariffs and to reduce the risk of a consumer backlash.
One of the hardest-hit American brands abroad may be the electric carmaker Tesla, whose chief executive, Elon Musk, has become a key figure in Mr. Trump’s administration. He has also promoted far-right parties in Europe on X, the social media platform he owns. In Germany, Europe’s largest market for electric vehicles, sales of Tesla cars fell 76 percent in February compared with a year earlier, according to the German Association of the Automotive Industry.
Boycotts have hit the digital world, too, with consumers saying they have canceled subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and other streaming services — even though substitutes with similar offerings were not easy to find. Mr. Albertus subscribed to Viaplay, a Swedish streaming service, where he recently started watching “Monk.” “It’s an American series, but life isn’t perfect,” he said.
Mads Mouritzen, who began the Danish Facebook group, said he had deleted his accounts on Airbnb and Hotels.com, and had stopped using Google and Microsoft Office. (He justified his use of Facebook, based in California, as a platform for the group because it was the easiest way to reach the most people.)
“It’s very important to say we still like the Americans, we still like the country,” he said. “There’s a current situation that we don’t like, and there’s a current administration we don’t like.”
Mr. Mouritzen, a 57-year-old janitor, said he hoped relations between the United States and Europe would eventually get back to where they were. But if that takes time, Mr. Mouritzen is prepared: He has a stockpile of 12 bottles of American-made Tabasco hot sauce, the one thing he can’t live without, purchased just before he started the boycott.
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6) Columbia Agrees to Trump’s Demands After Federal Funds Are Stripped
The administration has moved to cut $400 million in federal funding to the university without changes to its policies and rules.
By Troy Closson, Published March 21, 2025, Updated March 22, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/nyregion/columbia-response-trump-demands.html
Columbia University was accused by the Trump administration of a systemic failure to protect students and faculty members “from antisemitic violence and harassment.” Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times
Columbia University agreed on Friday to overhaul its protest policies, security practices and Middle Eastern studies department in a remarkable concession to the Trump administration, which has refused to consider restoring $400 million in federal funds without major changes.
The agreement, which stunned and dismayed many members of the faculty, could signal a new stage in the administration’s escalating clash with elite colleges and universities. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and dozens of other schools face federal inquiries and fear similar penalties, and college administrators have said Columbia’s response to the White House’s demands may set a dangerous precedent.
This week, the University of Pennsylvania was also explicitly targeted by the Trump administration, which said it would cancel $175 million in federal funding, at least partly because the university had let a transgender woman participate on a women’s swim team.
Columbia, facing the loss of government grants and contracts over what the administration said was a systemic failure to protect students and faculty members “from antisemitic violence and harassment,” opted to yield to many of the administration’s most substantial demands.
The university said it had agreed to hire a new internal security force of 36 “special officers” who will be empowered to remove people from campus or arrest them. The wearing of face masks on campus will also be banned for the purpose of concealing identity during disruptions, with exceptions for religious and health reasons.
Columbia will also adopt a formal definition of antisemitism, something many universities have shied away from even as they, like Columbia, faced pressure to do so amid protests on their campuses over the war in Gaza. Under the working definition, antisemitism could include “targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them” or “certain double standards applied to Israel,” among other issues.
Taken together, the administration’s plan — issued in an unsigned, four-page letter — reflected a stunning level of deference to the Trump administration from a top private research university.
Columbia’s interim president, Katrina A. Armstrong, said in a separate letter that the university’s actions were part of its effort to “make every student, faculty and staff member safe and welcome on our campus.”
“The way Columbia and Columbians have been portrayed is hard to reckon with,” Dr. Armstrong said. “We have challenges, yes, but they do not define us.”
She added: “At all times, we are guided by our values, putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make.”
The Trump administration demanded each of the changes in a letter to Columbia officials on March 13. It was not immediately clear whether the university’s actions would be sufficient to reclaim the $400 million in federal money. A spokeswoman for the Education Department, one of three federal agencies named in the letter, did not immediately respond on Friday to a request for comment, including to questions about the potential restoration of federal funding.
In perhaps the most contentious move, Columbia said it would appoint a senior vice provost to oversee the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department. The White House had demanded that the department be placed under academic receivership, a rare federal intervention in an internal process that is typically reserved as a last resort in response to extended periods of dysfunction.
Columbia did not refer to the move related to the Middle Eastern studies department as receivership, but several faculty members said that it appeared to resemble that measure.
Legal scholars and advocates for academic freedom expressed alarm on Friday over what they described as Columbia’s dangerous surrender to President Trump at a perilous moment for higher education. Some critics of the university’s response said they feared the White House could target any recipient of federal funds, including K-12 public schools, hospitals, nursing homes and business initiatives.
Sheldon Pollock, a retired former chair of the university’s Middle Eastern studies department, said in a text message that “Columbia faculty are utterly shocked and profoundly disappointed by the trustees’ capitulation to the extortionate behavior of the federal government.”
“This is a shameful day in the history of Columbia,” Dr. Pollock said, adding that it would “endanger academic freedom, faculty governance and the excellence of the American university system.”
The moves by Columbia were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The school’s response to the administration’s demands was the latest turn in a turbulent phase that began 17 months ago, when pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students organized competing protests in the days after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Since then, the Manhattan campus has experienced a rare summoning of the police to quell protests, the president’s resignation and the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate, by federal immigration officials.
The extraordinary cancellation of funding for the university escalated the crisis, imperiling research that includes dozens of medical and scientific studies. (The university did not mention the loss of funds in outlining the steps it was taking.)
On social media, Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, called it “a sad day for Columbia and for our democracy.”
Others said that a wholesale overhaul was appropriate in light of the conflict and tension on campus in recent semesters.
Ester R. Fuchs, who co-chairs the university’s antisemitism task force, said that many of the administration’s changes appeared to be issues that the group had previously highlighted.
“What’s fascinating to me is a lot of these are things we needed to get done and were getting done, but now we’ve gotten done more quickly,” said Dr. Fuchs, who is also a professor of international and public affairs and political science.
She added: “We are completely supportive of principles of academic freedom.”
Among other changes, the university also said that the administration would work to adopt a universitywide “position of institutional neutrality.” It said that it would move an independent panel of faculty, students and staff members who handle disciplinary procedures under the provost’s office — and that members would be “restricted to faculty and administrators only.”
The school also agreed to review its admissions policies for potential bias after it “identified a recent downturn in both Jewish and African American enrollment,” and last week announced a range of disciplinary actions against an undisclosed number of students.
Despite the overhaul, the current fraught chapter in Columbia’s 270-year history may not be over. The Trump administration has told the university that meeting its demands was “a precondition for formal negotiations” over a continued financial relationship and that the White House may call for other “immediate and long-term structural reforms.”
Columbia’s changes are notable for their scope and for how quickly they were made. But it is not the only institution to make concessions as the White House indicates that its campaign against elite universities and colleges will not end at the Morningside Heights campus.
Federal money is the lifeblood of major research universities, and some have begun to keep quiet on hot-button issues in hopes of escaping the administration’s ire. Many, including the University of California this week, have retreated from diversity-related efforts.
Many of the changes Columbia agreed to make involve issues that have been points of contention on campus for some time.
Face masks, for example, emerged as a source of conflict last year amid the Gaza protests, with demonstrators saying they should be able to conceal their identities to avoid being doxxed, and others arguing that mask-wearing makes it harder to hold protesters accountable if their actions veer into harassment.
The detainment this month of Mr. Khalil, a prominent figure in the protests who stood out because he chose not to wear a mask, cast a spotlight on the issue.
But putting the Middle Eastern studies department, which has long been in a pitched battle over its scholarship and the employment of professors who describe themselves as anti-Zionist, under outside scrutiny provoked unique outrage.
Columbia said that the senior vice provost would review curriculum and hiring in several of the department’s programs, including the Center for Palestine Studies and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. The university said the move was aimed at “promoting excellence in regional studies.”
But Michael Thaddeus, a Columbia math professor who described reading Dr. Armstrong’s letter with “profound disappointment and alarm,” called it “a giant step down a very dangerous road.”
He worried that the Middle Eastern studies department would effectively be run by “a member of Columbia’s thought police” who could interfere with anything from course offerings to faculty appointments. “It strikes at the heart of academic freedom,” Professor Thaddeus said.
“Of all the bad things,” he continued, “this one is really the worst.”
Katherine Rosman contributed reporting.
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7) Bring Back the Boycott
By Esau McCaulley, Contributing Opinion Writer, March 23, 2025
Day Brièrre
For this Lent, the Rev. Jamal Bryant, the pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church near Atlanta, didn’t urge the 10,000 members of his congregation to give up chocolate or coffee. Instead, he called for a 40-day “fast” from shopping at Target because of its decision to pull back on its commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion. Other influential African American congregations across the country followed suit, and now over 150,000 people have signed up to participate. They’ve joined activists who are boycotting a growing list of companies, including Walmart and Starbucks.
We usually think of churches as sources of spiritual guidance. That is true enough; I do need help trying to be a better father, husband and neighbor. I need to know how to love, forgive, overcome trauma and pursue God.
But that pursuit of God happens in the real world of economic exploitation where businesses crush unions, abandon commitments to invest in Black and brown communities and forsake diversity goals.
I didn’t need a pastor to tell me that businesses that made diversity commitments during the troubled summer of 2020 didn’t really care about my Black life, but churches must show what the Christian faith has to say about what’s going on the outside, in the world of flesh and blood. Actions like boycotts are a form of pastoral ministry for those who feel ignored or forgotten. They show that churches care about whole persons and the communities in which we live.
“It is one thing to make Target respect us,” the Rev. Charlie Dates, the pastor of Salem Baptist Church and Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago, told me. “It is another thing altogether to respect ourselves.”
Part of self-respect is remembering one’s own agency. In that sense, it does not matter whether Target accedes to the demands to stay true to its D.E.I. commitments in the short term. It matters that we remember the power of collective action, the sense of self that arises when we act on principle.
We aren’t powerless. No other organization gathers as many Black people weekly as the Black church. Since the boycott began, Target’s share price has declined by 18 percent. The boycott is certainly not the only reason for that or even a major one, given how unsettled the economy is. But it does feel that we are being heard.
This is not the first time the Black church has rallied the economic power of the African American pocketbook. The civil rights movement did not rely on moral persuasion alone: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others lectured the nation about the sin of racism, organized marches and fought for voting access, but that is not the whole story.
Recall that the campaign for civil rights in Montgomery, Ala., included not just a legal challenge to segregation but also a 381-day boycott of the city bus system that started in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and a legion of African Americans refused to ride at all. The 1963 protests in nearby Birmingham — famous for the water hoses and dogs that were turned on marchers — featured a boycott of businesses that refused to integrate.
Like the current boycott, the Birmingham boycott focused on the Easter season. Activists wanted to hit businesses when they earned a big chunk of their profits. According to one account, 85 to 90 percent of the Black population of the city participated, leading to a 12 percent decline in sales during a peak buying season. A key slogan was, “Don’t buy where you can’t be a salesman.”
Dr. Dates explained how a boycott could be a spiritual practice. “Jesus talked about money more in the Gospels than any other subject other than love. Jesus seemed to say to us that the pocketbook is the clearest indication of the health of the soul,” he told me. “We have the opportunity to use the very medium of which Jesus spoke to accomplish the most immediate change our nation needs.”
Dr. Bryant also linked the boycott to spiritual principles. He said: “Justice is biblical. Justice work is faith work because Jesus was often on the side of the marginalized.”
So much of our economy is built on exploitation that it can be difficult to know where to begin. (And we still have to shop somewhere.) That can lead to a certain moral despair where we separate our economics from our ethics.
The clergy members leading this movement want to remind us that it doesn’t have to be this way. The inability to do everything does not mean that we should do nothing. The way companies treat their workers and their customers reveals their values. When they tell you who they are, we must believe them and act accordingly.
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8) Migrants Deported to Panama Ask: ‘Where Am I Going to Go?’
Dozens of stranded migrants sleep on mattresses in a school gymnasium. In interviews, 25 deportees from around the world said they were stuck in limbo.
By Genevieve Glatsky, Farnaz Fassihi and Julie Turkewitz, Photographs by Nathalia Angarita, Genevieve Glatsky reported from Panama City, Farnaz Fassihi from New York and Julie Turkewitz from Bogotá, Colombia., March 23, 2025
Deported migrants leaving a hotel to be transported by bus to a shelter in Panama City.
When the first buses of newly freed migrants arrived this month in Panama City from a detention camp at the edge of a jungle, three people were visibly ill. One needed H.I.V. treatment, a lawyer said, another had run out of insulin and a third was suffering from seizures.
Confusion, chaos and fear reigned. “What am I going to do?” one migrant wondered aloud. “Where am I going to go?”
These are questions being asked by dozens of migrants deported to Panama last month by the Trump administration, part of the president’s sweeping efforts to expel millions of people from the United States.
At first, Panamanian officials had locked the group of about 300 people in a hotel. Then, those who did not accept repatriation to their home countries were sent to a guarded camp at the edge of a jungle. Finally, after a lawsuit and an outcry from human rights groups, the Panamanian authorities released the deportees, busing them back to Panama City.
Now, the remaining migrants — from Iran, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan and elsewhere — are free but stranded in a country that doesn’t want them, many sleeping in a school gymnasium made available by an aid group, with no real sense of what to do next.
Interviews with 25 of the deportees offered a revealing look at who is being pushed out of the United States by the Trump administration, and what happens once they arrive in Central America.
The region has emerged as a key cog in the deportation machinery President Trump is trying to kick into high gear.
But Washington’s decision to send migrants from around the world to Central America has also raised legal questions, tested governments seemingly unprepared to receive migrants and left people marooned in nations where they have no support networks or long-term legal status.
Most of the migrants in Panama said that when they arrived in the United States they told officials they were fearful of returning to their countries, but were never given an opportunity to formally ask for asylum.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said in an email that the migrants had been “properly removed” from the United States. She added that “not a single one of these aliens asserted fear of returning to their home country at any point during processing or custody.”
“The U.S. government coordinated for the welfare of these aliens to also be managed by humanitarian groups in Panama,” she said.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has sent hundreds of migrants from around the world to Panama, Costa Rica and El Salvador, though it is unclear if the U.S. government plans to continue doing so.
“Whether there will be more planes from the United States or not, I honestly don’t know,” Panama’s president, Raúl Mulino, said this month. “I’m not very inclined to do it, because they leave us with the problem.”
Those now stranded in Panama include Hedayatullah Zazai, 34, a man who said he had served as an officer in the Afghan Army, working alongside U.S. Special Forces and American consultants. After the Taliban took over, he fled to Pakistan, he said, then Iran, then flew to Brazil and trekked through South and Central America to get to the U.S. border.
The deportees also include Iranian Christians who said they were under threat at home, and several Afghan women from the Hazara ethnic minority who say they face persecution under the Taliban.
Another deportee is Simegnat, 37, an Amhara woman traveling alone from Ethiopia who said she had been targeted by her government because her ethnicity led the authorities to suspect her of working with a rebel group. She said she fled after her home was set on fire, her father and brother were killed and the police told her she would be next.
“I was not a person who wanted to flee my country,” she said. “I owned a restaurant and I had a good life.”
“We are humans, but we have nowhere to live,” she said of the Amhara people.
She and several of the other migrants, fearing for the safety of relatives back home, asked not to be identified by their full names.
Most of the migrants described crossing the Mexico-U.S. border early this year, being held for about two weeks in detention, then shackled by U.S. officials and put on a plane to an unknown destination. Some said they had been told they were headed from California to Texas; most said they were never given an opportunity to ask formally for asylum.
One 19-year-old woman from Afghanistan said U.S. officials had permitted her parents and five younger siblings to cross the border into the United States. As the only sibling over 18, she was separated from them, detained and flown to Panama, she said.
Some said they owed hundreds or thousands of dollars to people who helped them fund their journeys.
“If I go back to Ethiopia without their money,” Simegnat said, “they would kill me.”
Panama has given the deportees 30-day permits that allow them to stay in the country for the time being and has given them the option of extending their stay to 90 days.
While Panama has an asylum program, migrants have received mixed messages about the likelihood of receiving long-term legal protections in the country, they said.
Another option is for individuals to find another country that will take them. But that would require a case-by-case legal effort, said Silvia Serna, a lawyer who is part of the team that filed a lawsuit that called Panama’s detention of the migrants at the hotel and border camp illegal.
Ms. Serna said she had been interviewing the migrants to see what assistance her team could offer but cautioned that it might be very hard for people to find welcoming countries.
In interviews, three of the Iranian deportees said they planned to turn around and head back to the United States and were already negotiating with a smuggler. A fourth had already left for the U.S. border.
One is Negin, 24, who identified herself as a gay woman from Iran, where openly gay people face government persecution. “At least if I’m lingering idly,” she said, “I’ll be inside an American detention camp and on American soil.”
The smuggler quoted one woman a price of $5,000 to get her across the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana, and $8,000 to secure her a visa and put her on a plane to Canada.
For now, most of the group is staying at a school gymnasium-turned-shelter outside Panama City run by two Christian charities. The migrants sleep on thin mattresses and eat meals from plastic foam containers. A group of them went door to door at various embassies this past week asking for help but said they had been rejected at every one.
Elías Cornejo, who works with one of the aid groups, Fe y Alegría, was unsparing in his criticism of the new U.S. administration.
“We think that the policies of the Trump administration are part of a machine that grinds the migrant like meat,” he said. “And that obviously is a serious problem of inhumanity.”
A smaller group of deportees, mostly families with children, has been staying at a hotel in Panama City paid for by UNICEF. Among them is a married couple, Mohammad and Mona, who are Christian converts from Iran. One night, as their 8-year-old son broke down, both parents leaned over him, stroking his face.
“He doesn’t go to school, and life has become repetitive for him,” Mohammad said.
The couple had considered re-entering the United States illegally, they said, and eventually decided they could not put their child through more suffering. They are holding out hope that a lawyer on Ms. Serna’s team can persuade the Trump administration to grant them entry as persecuted Christians.
If that doesn’t work, Mohammad said, he was considering staying in Panama and was already looking for work.
Not far from the hotel recently, Artemis Ghasemzadeh, 27, another Iranian Christian, entered a white-walled church and knelt in a pew. Ms. Ghasemzadeh became something of a leader of the group after she posted a video online from detention at the Panama City hotel, pleading with the world for help.
She said that a priest had offered the migrants group housing north of Panama City, where they would be welcome to stay as long as they were in the country. The houses have kitchens, and they would have no curfew, she added. She was mulling over the offer.
“I don’t know what will happen next,” Ms. Ghasemzadeh said. “I don’t know my next step. At the moment, we are in God’s hands.”
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9) Israel Expands Gaza Offensive and Issues New Evacuation Orders
The Israeli military took control of more territory and said that operations had moved into additional areas in the north and south of the enclave.
By Isabel Kershner and Hiba Yazbek, Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, and Hiba Yazbek from Nazareth, Israel, March 23, 2025
A camp for displaced Palestinians in Gaza City on Friday. Gaza’s health ministry said on Sunday that the death toll in the enclave since the war started had surpassed 50,000 people. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israeli forces were expanding their offensive in Gaza on Sunday, taking control of more territory and issuing new evacuation orders for residents who had only recently returned to their homes.
The Israeli military renewed its offensive in Gaza this past week after talks to extend a fragile, temporary cease-fire that went into effect in mid-January reached an impasse. On Sunday, it said that those operations had moved into additional areas in the north and south of the enclave.
Israel said that its troops had begun operating in Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza, to expand a buffer zone. The military also said that it had carried out more airstrikes against Hamas targets and infrastructure and that it was allowing people to evacuate.
The military also separately issued an evacuation order for the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood of the southern city of Rafah, telling residents to leave on foot along a specific route and barring the movement of vehicles.
The Rafah municipality said in a statement that thousands of families were being forced to flee on foot under bombardment during the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. That left them homeless amid a severe shortage of basic necessities and tents because of the Israeli government’s closure of the crossings into Gaza, the municipality noted.
“I am hearing lots of gunfire and bombing,” Riham Abu Marzouq, 22, said in a phone call on Sunday afternoon while fleeing her home in Rafah with nine relatives. “We are now walking,” she added, panting and struggling to catch her breath.
Amid the escalation in fighting and evacuation orders, Gaza’s health ministry said on Sunday that the death toll in the enclave since the war started had surpassed 50,000 people — including 39 people killed in Israeli bombardments over the past day. The ministry’s figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Hamas announced that Israel had killed a senior member of its political bureau, Salah al-Bardawil, overnight. The group said that Mr. al-Bardawil, one of the militant group’s prominent spokesmen, had been killed along with his wife in a strike on their tent in Al-Mawasi, an area in southern Gaza that the Israeli military had designated as a humanitarian zone and to which it directed residents of Tal al-Sultan on Sunday.
After noon on Sunday, the military said that its troops had completely encircled Tal al-Sultan, had eliminated several fighters and had raided a site that it said had been used over the past few months as a Hamas command and control center.
Neither claim could be independently verified.
The Palestinian Civil Defense in Gaza warned on Sunday of “imminent danger threatening the lives” of more than 50,000 people in Rafah.
“The situation in Rafah is very difficult,” said Huthayfah Lafi, a resident of the southern city who lives near Tal al-Sultan. He said he had decided not to evacuate the area on Sunday “until the situation becomes more clear” because “we have nowhere else to go.”
And the Palestinian Red Crescent said that it had lost contact with four of its ambulances that it said were trapped in Rafah and had crew members wounded by Israeli gunfire. The Israeli military said that it was looking into the reports but did not immediately provide any further comment.
Mohammed Abu Taha, 42, said his sister Sanaa and her family had been able to return to their home in Rafah only in the past few weeks. Around dawn on Sunday “they were surprised by Israeli tanks advancing toward them,” he said, relaying what his sister had told him over the phone while fleeing on foot to the city of Khan Younis, where he has been sheltering.
“They were only allowed to carry a small bag,” said Mr. Abu Taha.
The Israeli government has said that the renewed offensive — along with blocking the entry of all goods and humanitarian aid into Gaza — is aimed at increasing pressure on Hamas to release hostages still held in the enclave and at destroying the group’s military and governing capabilities.
The hostages were taken to Gaza during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the war. Hamas has so far refused to release significant numbers of hostages unless Israel promises to end the war permanently. Israel has conditioned ending the war on Hamas’s agreeing to give up its arms and power in Gaza.
The resumption of the military campaign in Gaza has not found the same national consensus among Israelis as the war did in the immediate aftermath of the October 2023 assault. Instead, it has increased concerns about the fates of the hostages, up to 24 of whom are believed to still be alive, and it has left many Israelis questioning what could be achieved militarily that was not achieved in the first 15 months of fighting.
Reporting was contributed by Myra Noveck Abu Bakr Bashir, Bilal Shbair and Iyad Abuheweila.
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10) ‘Chaos and Confusion’ at the Crown Jewel of American Science
Senior scientists at the National Institutes of Health fear that research on conditions like obesity, heart disease and cancer will be undermined by President Trump’s policies.
By Gina Kolata, March 24, 2025
Gina Kolata has covered the N.I.H., its scientists and the research it supports for more than three decades
The entrance to the Bethesda, Md., campus of the National Institutes of Health, an agency that towers over the world’s medical research. Credit...Alex Wong/Getty Images
A week after Donald J. Trump was inaugurated, a senior scientist at the National Institutes of Health was preparing to give an invited talk at a scientific meeting when an urgent call came in from an administrative assistant.
There is a total communications ban, the scientist was told, and you cannot give the speech.
As soon as the scientist got back to the office, another ban went into effect — one that prohibited researchers from submitting papers to journals for publication.
Seven senior investigators working in different parts of the National Institutes of Health described rules put in place on orders from the Department of Government Efficiency that risk hampering and undermining American medical science. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared for their jobs for speaking publicly.
One said that DOGE had begun a reign of “chaos and confusion.” The scientists warned that it had the potential to seriously weaken the N.I.H. — the crown jewel of American science, with a vast network of thousands of researchers in 27 centers dedicated to treating disease, improving health and funding medical research.
Rules change seemingly from day to day.
Can scientists order necessary supplies to do their research? Yes. No. Maybe.
Can they travel? A 30-day ban was put in place on Feb. 26. What happens next? No one knows.
“It really is quite chilling,” one of the scientists said. “They are controlling information, causing chaos, disrupting everyone, keeping us off-balance.”
“Whatever people are reading in newspapers, it’s 10 times worse,” the scientist added.
The scientists acknowledge that the N.I.H., like any institution, is not perfect. It has long been criticized for being too cautious, for example by failing to take a chance on high risk, high reward research proposals.
“I would be lining up at the front of the line to help with a rational process to help improve this place,” another of the scientists said.
An N.I.H. spokeswoman said that the agency was complying with an executive order, but that some activities were continuing, including payments for supplies for clinical research studies or ongoing research experiments. And, she added, “travel for the purposes of human safety, human or animal health care, security, biosecurity, biosafety or I.T. security may continue.”
The spokeswoman did not address the purpose of changing so many policies and practices. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who awaits confirmation from the Senate to lead the N.I.H., also did not address these issues at his confirmation hearings this month. But he said in his opening statement that “American biomedical sciences are at a crossroads,” citing Pew survey data that found almost a quarter of Americans had little or no confidence that scientists were acting in the best interests of the American people.
The N.I.H. towers over the world’s medical research.
It is where the human genetic code was deciphered, where hepatitis C was discovered, where the AIDS virus was isolated, where the first drug to treat AIDS was discovered and where basic research that helped lead to the Covid vaccines was done. It funded the work decades ago that led to the creation of Ozempic and other new drugs that cause weight loss.
“It is very hard to cite seminal discoveries that were not in some way underwritten by the N.I.H.,” said Dr. Rudolph Leibel, a professor of medicine at Columbia University who, like most medical researchers in the United States, has received N.I.H. funding.
Dr. Francis Collins, a former director of the N.I.H., said, “If you are taking an F.D.A.-approved drug that is improving the quality or length of your life, there is a 99 percent chance N.I.H. was involved in the pathway to its discovery.”
Part of the Department of Health and Human Services now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the N.I.H. has a main campus with more than 75 buildings spread over 300 acres in Bethesda, Md., where nearly 6,000 scientists work. There are five smaller research centers in other states.
The N.I.H. pays for large clinical trials in fields like cancer, heart disease and diabetes that have changed medical practice and saved lives.
Its researchers are forbidden from being paid consultants for industry. Many say they are driven by a love of science and a thirst to better humanity through their discoveries.
Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, who stepped down in January as the director of the N.I.H., said scientists there “are so dedicated to the mission.”
The agency also supports research by an additional 300,000 scientists at more than 2,500 universities and medical centers — research that is also being threatened.
Hundreds of highly competitive grants that support research at universities and medical schools across the country have been cut. Many of the eliminated grants had descriptions that included terms like “minorities,” “transgender,” “AIDS” and “vaccine hesitancy.” But cuts have also affected research on the chronic diseases that Mr. Kennedy has made his priority; for instance, funding has been cut for a grant to Columbia University for a study that has followed people who have diabetes or are at risk of developing it for more than a quarter-century. (Those funds may be restored, though, as Columbia agreed last week to a list of demands from the Trump administration.)
A program that supported training scientists from minority groups, those who had disabilities and those from disadvantaged backgrounds has also disappeared.
And research grants that helped pay to train doctoral and postdoctoral students have been slashed. Now universities are rescinding offers to young scientists.
Senior scientists within the N.I.H. say their work faces daily disruptions.
Some disruptions are petty: Every N.I.H. employee, no matter how senior, has to send a weekly email to a human resources address with five bullet points stating what was accomplished in the past week. The employees never hear anything back, one senior scientist who has been at the N.I.H. for decades said. But the scientist said that he and other scientists feel a high degree of paranoia about the messages.
Other consequences are more serious: A senior scientist who studies a rare and devastating disorder that affects young children and who is studying a treatment that might help had been invited to consult with doctors caring for such children. At the last minute, he was told he could not go.
“That is completely unacceptable,” that scientist said.
Researchers have also struggled to purchase basic and specialized supplies needed to conduct their work.
One of the senior scientists said that when DOGE recently put a $1 spending limit on government credit cards, it was apparently with no knowledge of how essential the cards were to basic operations. There was no mechanism, for example, to pay for gas for vehicles used to transport patients’ blood samples.
“We had to scramble and beg” to get funds, the scientist said. A few days ago, nonemergency supply orders resumed. But, the scientist said, “now there is a huge backlog.” And the staff that handled orders has been decimated by firings, he added.
“We’ve been told you’d better think weeks ahead about supplies and reagents,” he said.
Other scientists said they had been affected by inconsistent guidelines on purchasing.
“They keep changing the rules,” said the senior scientist who has spent decades at the N.I.H. “Policies change so quickly and frequently that who knows.”
A different N.I.H. senior scientist said a program he used to order supplies for his lab was closed for a month. Then it opened for a day or so. “A few days later it shut down again,” he said. And it has stayed shut.
He needs mice with special genetic traits for his studies.
“We can’t order mice,” he said. As a result, he said, several years’ worth of work is in jeopardy.
Scientists were chilled by the disruptive firing and rehiring of employees.
The Friday before Presidents’ Day weekend in February, a senior physician scientist learned that about 20 technicians had been fired in an N.I.H. blood bank where patient samples are analyzed, part of an order that eliminated probationary workers who had been in their current position for less than two years. The order also led to the firing of probationary workers who prepare transfusions there.
Also on the list to be fired because they were probationary were the fellows who care for sick patients in the Clinical Center — the N.I.H.’s hospital devoted to clinical research on its Bethesda campus. They included the staff of the intensive care unit and members of the code blue team that responds when a patient has a cardiac arrest.
Supervisors were stunned. These patients were ill. Who is going to care for them?
“We would literally have to airlift patients out,” the senior physician scientist said.
The Clinical Center got a last-minute reprieve after the researchers panicked and protested. DOGE stopped the firing of the intensive care doctors and allowed the N.I.H. to rehire the fired laboratory technicians and blood bank workers.
“It was just unbelievably stressful,” the senior physician scientist said.
Other scientists are learning that no job is safe, even ones held by highly regarded people with seniority.
Tenured staff members at the N.I.H. can no longer take for granted the automatic renewal of their contracts, a senior scientist said. Now some scientists are being put on leave without pay when their contracts run out, and then they wait anxiously to learn if they still have a job.
The effects ripple beyond the N.I.H., affecting decisions about what sort of research projects by academic scientists can even be considered for funding.
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes, on the N.I.H.’s Bethesda campus, had been planning to issue grants to academic scientists to study blood- and brain-scan markers of non-Alzheimer’s dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The project’s goal was to diagnose patients earlier and to see whether experimental drugs were helping.
But evaluating these grant proposals requires specialized review at the neurological disorders institute. DOGE’s orders shifted the reviews to another office where reviewers would not have specific expertise.
The result, a senior scientist administrator said, is that “we will not be able to run that kind of program.” Instead, he said, “we will have to do simpler things.”
N.I.H. employees are anxious that they will soon face a mass firing or reduction in force.
No one seems to know who would be fired, what criteria would be used or when it would happen, said the senior scientist who spoke about the problem ordering supplies.
“It’s the not knowing, the chaos” that is torturing people, he said.
“If they said, ‘We are going to RIF administrative senior scientists or anyone over 65 or anyone whose rating was poor,’ it would be much less stressful,” he said, using the acronym for reduction in force.
“But this is like Russian roulette,” he added. “You don’t know what’s coming.”
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11) Israel’s Perfect Storm: Fighting Enemies Abroad and Each Other at Home
For months, Israelis put aside their deep rifts to fight a common enemy. Now, amid a renewed government push for power, they are battling one another.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, March 24, 2025
Eighteen months ago, in the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel, Israelis suspended their internal conflicts to form a united military front against a shared external threat.
Now, that semblance of common cause has been cast aside. Beyond its borders, Israel has resumed fighting on four fronts — in Gaza, Lebanon, the occupied West Bank and Yemen. And internally, Israel’s citizens have returned to the bitter domestic feuds that once again, pose existential questions about their country’s future.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition has revived its contentious efforts, frozen after the attack in 2023, to expand its control over other branches of government. The moves have set off mass protests after the government tried to fire the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence service as well as the attorney general — two powerful gatekeepers who are overseeing investigations into both Mr. Netanyahu and his aides.
This week, Parliament will vote on the government’s plan to give itself greater control over the selection of justices on the Supreme Court, an institution that has long thwarted the ambitions of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultranationalist and religiously conservative allies.
“The foundations of the state are shaking,” Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister, said in an interview. “In Israel, Netanyahu is ready to sacrifice everything for his survival and we are closer to a civil war than people realize. In Gaza, we have returned to fighting — and for what? And overseas, I never remember such hatred, such opposition, to the state of Israel.”
To Mr. Netanyahu and his supporters, the moves are a legitimate effort to rein in unelected bureaucrats and judicial officials who have stymied the will of an elected government. “The leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will,” Mr. Netanyahu wrote on social media last week.
But to his critics, Mr. Netanyahu’s decisions constitute, at best, a huge conflict of interest for a prime minister currently standing trial for corruption. At worst, they are an attempted putsch against the judicial branches of government.
Mr. Netanyahu has further spurred domestic anger by breaking the cease-fire with Hamas in Gaza; the return to war endangers not only Palestinians but up to 60 Israeli hostages still held in the territory. In returning to war, Mr. Netanyahu has also drawn retaliation from Hamas’s allies in Lebanon and Yemen. And he has tested the patience and resolve of tens of thousands of exhausted military reservists who will be required to sustain what was already Israel’s longest war.
The public anger is exacerbated by the impression that Mr. Netanyahu has benefited politically from the return to war, which has helped shore up his fragile coalition government.
A far-right faction, Jewish Power, quit the government at the outset of a cease-fire in January, which raised the possibility that the war might end with Hamas still in charge of Gaza.
Hours after Israel restarted strikes on Gaza last Tuesday, killing hundreds of Palestinians, the party’s leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, praised the move and returned his group to the government, bolstering Mr. Netanyahu's majority in Parliament. That paves the way for the party to vote in favor of a new national budget whose passage by the end of the month is necessary to prevent the government’s collapse.
Mr. Ben-Gvir, who now oversees the police, is also one of the strongest supporters of the move to sack Ronen Bar, the head of the domestic intelligence service, and Gali Baharav-Miara, the attorney general. Both are considered to be significant checks on the far-right leader who was barred from serving in the Israeli military because of his extreme views and who has several convictions for incitement to racism and support for a terrorist group.
Analysts are divided about whether Mr. Netanyahu intends to continue endlessly with his various moves — both on the battlefield in Gaza and against his critics at home.
Some think he could soften some of his stances after the budget votes at the end of March, reducing his reliance on Mr. Ben-Gvir. A major litmus test is expected on April 8, when the Supreme Court is scheduled to rule on the legality of Mr. Bar’s firing. Mr. Netanyahu has hinted that he may ignore the ruling, and his response will indicate how far he is willing to defy the constitutional order.
“I don’t see him saying ‘no’ to the Supreme Court,” said Nadav Shtrauchler, a former adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, adding, “In the vast majority of cases, Netanyahu ends up being conservative.” But even if the Israeli leader steps back from the brink, his critics say that Mr. Netanyahu has already caused irreparable damage by breaking so many norms to reach this point.
Mr. Olmert, the former prime minister, was also investigated for corruption while in office, and was ultimately convicted and jailed. But he resigned his post before the case reached trial, and his government never tried to fire the attorney general who oversaw the investigation.
“What Netanyahu is doing would have been unthinkable,” Mr. Olmert said.
Myra Noveck contributed reporting.
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12) After a Brief Return Home, Palestinians Are Displaced Once Again
The Israeli military’s renewed drive into Gaza has pushed families to flee neighborhoods they had only recently returned to during a cease-fire.
By Hiba Yazbek and Bilal Shbair, Reporting from Jerusalem and Khan Younis, Gaza, March 24, 2025
Palestinians fleeing the north of Gaza Strip with their belongings to the center of Gaza City. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
As the Israeli military has expanded its offensive in the Gaza Strip, taking control of more territory in parts of the south and north and issuing new evacuation orders, many people who had only recently returned to their homes have been forcibly displaced once again.
Israel’s drive into the southern city of Rafah pushed thousands of families from the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood, near the border with Egypt, to flee on foot on Sunday before Israeli troops completely encircled the area by the afternoon.
For many, the new round of mass displacement brought back painful memories of the earlier days of the war in Gaza. Residents of Tal al-Sultan and nearby areas said they had to walk on a specific route amid bombardment, carrying very few belongings, during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast during daytime.
Most of those who fled on Sunday walked several miles north to the city of Khan Younis, where they were left without shelter because of a severe shortage of basic necessities and tents, the Rafah local government, which includes Tal al-Sultan, said in a statement.
The Israeli military renewed its offensive in Gaza last week after an impasse in talks to extend a fragile, temporary cease-fire with Hamas that went into effect in mid-January. That truce was intended to be the first of three phases leading to the end of a war that began with the Hamas-led assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, but the second phrase has been delayed indefinitely.
Gaza’s health ministry said on Monday that 61 people were killed in Israeli bombardments over the past day, a day after it said the death toll in the enclave had surpassed 50,000 since the war began almost 18 months ago. The ministry’s figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The Israeli military said in a statement on Sunday that its troops had killed several fighters in Tal al-Sultan and raided a site it said was used as a Hamas command and control center. It did not provide evidence of its claims, which could not be independently verified.
On Monday, Al Jazeera reported that Hussam Shabat, a journalist who contributed to its coverage of the war, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his car in northern Gaza. At least 208 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, according to the Gaza government press office. The Israeli military said it was looking into the report.
The Palestinian civil defense in Gaza said on Sunday that Israel’s siege of Tal al-Sultan had endangered the lives of nearly 50,000 people living there, with some either unable or unwilling to flee. Some residents, after months of repeated displacement, had only recently been able to return to their homes, or what was left of them, during the short-lived cease-fire.
“We left with the clothes on our backs under fire and bombardment,” said Mustafa Jabr, 36, after walking for nearly six hours along a sandy route with his family from their home in Tal al-Sultan on Sunday morning. “It was a very surprising and intense attack,” he said from a friend’s house in southern Khan Younis, where the family was now sheltering.
Mr. Jabr said that before encircling the neighborhood, Israeli vehicles had been regularly patrolling the area around the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow strip of Gaza along the border with Egypt and one of the main sticking points in the cease-fire talks. But at dawn on Sunday, residents were jolted up by “sudden bombardment,” before fliers ordering people to evacuate along a specified route began raining down, he said.
“So we headed north under a hail of tank shelling and quadcopter fire that wounded dozens,” said Mr. Jabr. “Many old people were abandoned along the route because they were too weak to keep walking on the sand,” he said, adding, “The scenes I saw on the way were horrific, there were so many children and old people and disabled people.”
Mr. Jabr’s family was now among an increasing number of families in Gaza who were once again wondering when they would be able to return to their homes.
Ahmad and Faten al-Sayyed also fled on Sunday, walking with their four children to a relative’s tent in western Khan Younis. They had recently returned to their damaged home in Rafah after nine months of sheltering in a tent in Khan Younis, only to find themselves back in another tent less than a month later.
“I thought the second phase of negotiations would begin while we were back in our home in Rafah,” said Mr. al-Sayyed.
Although occasional gunfire was heard in Rafah in recent days, Mr. al-Sayyed said that he was shocked when Israeli troops advanced into the area. “We never imagined it would escalate into a full siege and military operation,” he said.
As soon as the evacuation orders were issued, Mr. al-Sayyed told his children to pack two outfits each in their school bags.
Some on the route were carrying terrified, crying children, while others clutched whatever belongings they could. Most of the adults, observing Ramadan, neither ate nor drank anything along the way.
The elderly and ill, some in wheelchairs, struggled to keep up as drones “followed us, hovering above, moving right and left, watching every step,” said Mr. al-Sayyed.
The crowd found itself trapped for nearly an hour and a half after Israeli forces blocked the road, while people pleaded with the Red Cross to get them to safety.
“We could hear bulldozers and occasional gunfire,” Mr. al-Sayyed recalled. “Later, I saw how they had cleared paths for people to pass through, built mounds of sand around the area, set up fences and cameras, and positioned soldiers on top of those sand barriers,” he added, referring to Israeli troops.
They were then instructed to continue walking toward a United Nations warehouse, where an Israeli tank stopped them again and troops told everyone to sit on the ground.
“After nearly 20 minutes, the soldiers asked the women and children to sit on the right side of the street, while the men were ordered to sit on the left side,” said Mr. al-Sayyed. “People were terrified and their eyes were filled with fear,” he said, adding: “Mothers were crying for their grown sons, not wanting to be separated from them, fearing that they would be killed or arrested.”
Eventually, it was Mr. al-Sayyed’s turn to be searched by the soldiers. He said he was ordered to strip down and was made to remain seated, blindfolded, for more than an hour. He was then released and caught up with his wife and children.
“All I could hear was crying, and all I could see were scared faces,” said Ms. al-Sayyed.
“My son Mohammed was very terrified when he saw a dead boy,” she added. “He just collapsed onto the sand, screaming in a completely unhinged way, and all I could do was cry along with him.”
Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting from Cairo.
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13) Columbia’s Capitulation Will Hurt Us All
By Jonathan R. Cole, March 24, 2025
Dr. Cole is a professor of the university at Columbia and a former provost and dean of faculties.
Kyle Myles for The New York Times
When most Americans think about our great universities, they probably don’t think about the origins of lasers, FM radio or bar codes; they don’t think about the Google algorithm, the invention of the computer and the iPhone, cures for childhood leukemia, the Pap smear, scientific agriculture or the discovery of mRNA vaccines. They almost certainly don’t think about the CRISPR technology that may lead to cures of many genetic-based diseases. And they definitely don’t think about the electric toothbrush, Gatorade, the Heimlich maneuver or Viagra.
Yet all these discoveries and inventions — and tens of thousands more — have their origins at American public and private research universities. For over a half century, these institutions have housed the best and most innovative sites of learning in the world. During World War II, university researchers, often at government-sponsored laboratories, developed enhanced radar technology, found a way to mass-produce penicillin, developed the jet engine and mastered techniques for blood plasma transfusions. Each of these discoveries helped the Allies defeat authoritarian aggression.
Today, the pre-eminence of the American research university is under severe attack from the federal government. It must be defended.
Again and again, basic research has led to fantastically lucrative private development. Stanford graduates spawned Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Instagram, Netflix and a thousand more businesses. The University of California, Berkeley, produced companies, including many A.I. startups, that are developing better medical treatment for Americans. M.I.T., Harvard, Arizona State, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas, among others, have become the origin for many private enterprises supporting the American economy.
The Trump administration has sought to impose its will on higher education by withdrawing more than a billion dollars of funding from some universities and threatening others with similar punishment. It has sought to deport student protesters who are legal residents. All this represents a fundamental assault on the values and functioning of our university system. Columbia and Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876 and America’s first true research university, may be only the first to feel the effects of this needless use of a sledgehammer.
Columbia’s capitulation last week to the Trump administration, in which it agreed to a number of demands in order to restore federal funding, obliterates its leadership in defending free inquiry. If Columbia allows authoritarian-minded leaders to dictate what we can teach, then the federal government will dictate what we can read, what books we may have in our libraries, what art we can display, what problems scientists can explore. Then, we are no longer a free university.
Most people think of universities in terms of undergraduate and professional education — of teaching and the transmission of knowledge, as well as football and basketball. This makes perfect sense. Teaching is higher education’s first calling, and it occurs at all levels at pre-eminent universities.
What has made our universities the greatest in the world, however, is not just the quality of our undergraduate education, but our ability to fulfill one of the central quests of modern life: the production of new knowledge through discoveries that change the world. The Nobel economist Robert Solow and others have estimated that such university-based discoveries are responsible for a large share of our nation’s productivity growth.
It is the United States — not Europe, Russia or China — that has dominated the last several waves of fundamental discovery, findings that have made us the wealthiest nation in the world. Since their inception, about 40 percent of Nobel Prizes have gone to Americans. And about 35 percent of all American Nobel laureates have been immigrants to the United States. This is but one small indicator of American research accomplishments. This leadership has strengthened our democracy.
The agreement between the federal government and our universities took hold during World War II. In 1944, when it became clear that the Allies would prevail, President Franklin Roosevelt asked his closest science adviser, Vannevar Bush, how the United States could advance its science and technology leadership after the war. It was a time when scientists were exhausted by their wartime work and many wanted to return to quieter lives at universities. But Bush, sharing the dying president’s belief in the need for a manifesto that would articulate both values and policy, set to work on what would become the policy document “Science: The Endless Frontier.”
As developed by Bush, the compact between the American government and the universities created the National Science Foundation and reorganized the National Institutes of Health. The central message of the compact was this: The United States would commit taxpayer dollars to fund research primarily through its universities, not through government-controlled laboratories. The universities would be given intellectual autonomy to conduct research deemed by peer scientists and engineers to be of the highest potential to advance the country. The government would not invade the space of free inquiry and academic freedom, because that would limit the ability of scientists to be fully creative.
By 1950, the model was largely adopted by Congress. Thus began American supremacy in scientific and technological discovery, as well as the economic and military dominance that has lasted for three-quarters of a century.
Recently, Arizona State University’s president, Michael Crow, one of the most innovative leaders in American higher education today, used the iPhone 16 as an example of universities’ unheralded contributions. Almost every part of the device, from the chips used to power it to the glass covering it — the culmination of thousands of discoveries — had their origins at research universities, mostly in the United States. Such contributions represent the invisible hand behind the creation of much American wealth. Now the Trump administration, for vindictive reasons, has placed that superiority and leadership under threat.
If we look over our shoulder, we can see China catching up to our investments in research and development. In the past quarter century, investments by China in higher education have become similar to those in the United States, and it has increased the building of new research-oriented universities to compete with us in STEM fields.
This is hardly the time to cripple our own universities. Apart from the competition with China, we are on the cusp of thousands of transformative discoveries, and each could be hurt by Mr. Trump’s actions. Here are a few competitive battles that we could easily lose: America as leader in the development of quantum computing; America as leader in the development of useful artificial intelligence and hydrogen and fusion power; America as leader in discovering cures for various forms of cancer and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.
Maintaining a laboratory and preparing for discovery is not something you can easily turn on or off. If a lab has its funding suddenly taken away, it will shut down. If you cut off researchers working on a cure for, say, pancreatic cancer, the work that their lab has done may be irreparably damaged and the knowledge lost. Moreover, if young people in the United States or abroad feel great uncertainty in university research here, they are more than likely to turn to other occupations and away from this country.
We tend to think that humans are at the top of the food chain. That is not true. We almost certainly share that position with bacteria and viruses, many of which can cause us great harm. To prevent the next pandemic and a host of other diseases, support of science and engineering at our universities is an imperative.
We should renew and update the terms of the 1945 compact to reinforce the basic principles and values that have served us so well for decades, and could for decades more to come. Academic freedom and free inquiry are the backbone of that compact. Where there are opportunities for reform, it is incumbent for research universities to take on those tasks themselves, without political interference.
I have spent almost 65 years at Columbia. I entered as an undergraduate in 1960, received my doctorate there, and never left. Yes, universities are contentious places, but they are supposed to be places where criticism takes place — whether political, humanistic or scientific disputes. When I became provost and dean of faculties, serving 14 years as Columbia’s chief academic officer, I dealt, alongside my colleagues, with student protests almost every year. When the federal government threatened Columbia with arrests or withdrawal of federal funds after the passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001, we defended academic freedom and free inquiry.
Today, the stakes are higher. We are in a fight for survival and appeasement never works. Despite platitudes to the contrary, Columbia’s leaders have weakened our community and our leadership among the greatest educational institutions in the world. This is not the way to fight Mr. Trump’s efforts at silencing our great American universities. If we don’t resist collectively by all legal means, and by social influence and legislative pressure, we are apt to see the destruction of our most revered institutions and the enormous benefits they accrue to America.
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14) Trump’s Cuts to Columbia Were a ‘Gun to the Head,’ Faculty Lawsuit Says
The Trump administration’s cancellation of $400 million in aid violates the Constitution, a teachers’ union and a faculty group argue in a new suit.
By Alyce McFadden, March 25, 2025
The funding cuts have effectively terminated numerous projects at Columbia, including research into early cancer detection and links between diabetes and dementia. Credit...Marco Postigo Storel for The New York Times
Two groups representing Columbia University faculty members on Tuesday sued the Trump administration over $400 million in federal funding cuts and demands that the school make dramatic changes to student discipline and admissions policies.
The plaintiffs, the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers, asked a Manhattan federal court to restore the funding and argued that the cuts were unconstitutional.
The two groups and Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization representing them, said in a news release that the funding cuts and an accompanying letter demanding changes to Columbia policy violated the First Amendment. The Trump administration’s actions “have created instability and a deep chilling effect on college campuses across the country,” the statement said.
Todd Wolfson, the president of the A.A.U.P., a faculty rights group, said in the statement that the funding cuts were part of a larger effort to target campus free speech, which would have consequences beyond Columbia.
“The Trump administration’s threats and coercion at Columbia are part of a clear authoritarian playbook meant to crush academic freedom and critical research in American higher education,” Mr. Wolfson said.
The funding cuts have imperiled vital scientific and public health research that contributes to the “prosperity of all Americans,” the groups said. The cuts have effectively terminated numerous projects, including research into early cancer detection, the effects of Covid-19 on pregnancy and links between diabetes and dementia.
The lawsuit names as defendants several federal agencies and officials, including the Justice Department, the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services. The funding cuts “represent an existential ‘gun to the head’ for a university,” the complaint said.
On Friday, Columbia capitulated to several of the Trump administration’s demands, pledging that the university would overhaul its campus security protocols, protest policies and Middle Eastern studies department.
The federal government has not agreed to restore Columbia’s funding. Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, which is part of the General Services Administration, one of the agencies calling for changes at the university, said that Columbia’s policy changes were “early steps” and a “positive sign.”
Several of the agencies named in the lawsuit did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday. Spokespeople for two of them, the General Services Administration and the Justice Department, declined to comment.
A number of Columbia professors have opposed the Trump administration’s efforts to punish the university and some students for pro-Palestinian protests. On Monday, at least 50 faculty members gathered outside the university’s gates to protest the cuts and the school’s response. Some held signs proclaiming, “Protect Academic Freedom” and “Columbia Fight Back.”
Reinhold Martin, the president of Columbia’s A.A.U.P. chapter and a professor of architecture, said in the joint statement that faculty members had a responsibility to speak up.
“The integrity of civic discourse and the freedoms that form the basis of a democratic society are under attack,” Mr. Martin said. “We have to stand up.”
The Trump administration faces a slew of lawsuits challenging budget freezes across the federal government. But the actions at issue in this suit are different, according to Orion Danjuma, counsel at Protect Democracy, because the administration’s letter to the university represents a “ransom note” demanding “key changes about the way it operates.”
Mr. Danjuma added that he was not aware of other instances of the government canceling grants to force policy changes at a private institution.
“That is all new, and the damage is quite severe,” he said.
The lawsuit also argues that the administration violated provisions of Title VI, a section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discrimination in institutions that receive federal funding. The administration has cited Title VI as justification for its decision to cut Columbia’s funding, but the suit argues that the administration failed to comply with some of Title VI’s requirements.
Some of the steps the administration failed to follow, the suit asserts, include holding a hearing, providing evidence and giving the university the opportunity to voluntarily comply with the White House’s demands. These requirements were created, the groups argued in the statement, to “prevent the government from exercising too much unfettered control over funding recipients.”
The administration has started to scrutinize dozens of other colleges and universities. Last week, the White House announced that it would suspend $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania because of the school’s policies on transgender students’ participation in sports.
“They have said essentially — sort of said with glee — that they’re planning to bankrupt a host of other universities that they perceive as being enemies to their preferred viewpoint,” Mr. Danjuma said. “So we know that this is not the end, this is the beginning of a broader attack on civil society and higher education.”
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15) Professors Sue Trump Administration Over Arrests of Campus Protesters
The lawsuit says the detention of noncitizen students and faculty members deprives U.S. citizens of their right to engage with foreign-born peers.
By Sharon Otterman, March 25, 2025
Demonstrators have marched to demand that immigration authorities release Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist and former Columbia student who is a legal permanent resident. Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Groups representing university professors sued the Trump administration on Tuesday, alleging that its practice of arresting and threatening noncitizen students and faculty members for protesting on campus deprives U.S. citizens of their right to engage with foreign-born peers and to hear their perspectives.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, takes a broader approach than a flurry of other recent lawsuits challenging the federal government’s deportation policies on college campuses. Those suits, including two involving a Columbia student and a recent graduate who are green card holders, aim to stop individual deportation proceedings.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday challenges the Trump administration’s overall approach to deportation, saying it is unconstitutional.
The decision to target noncitizens who participate in pro-Palestinian protest activity and speech, the lawsuit argues, has created a broadly chilling effect on what can be heard on college campuses.
“Today, the administration is going after pro-Palestinian speech, but tomorrow it can go after speech criticizing fossil fuels, speech promoting D.E.I. or speech defending gender-affirming care,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, which is representing the professors in the lawsuit.
“There’s really no limiting principle to the administration’s theory here, and that’s part of what’s so disturbing,” she said.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the American Association of University Professors, a nonprofit group focused on issues of academic freedom, and three of its chapters, at Harvard, New York University and Rutgers, as well as the nonprofit Middle East Studies Association. The Knight Institute is an independent organization that does not represent the Columbia administration.
The suit hinges on a First Amendment principle that Americans have a right not only to express ideas but also to hear them. This is being violated, it argues, as noncitizens avoid political protests, purge their social media and step back from participation in groups engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy. It is also reflected through self-censoring in the classroom, which is done to avoid attention, the suit says.
“We’ve spoken to faculty that have modified their syllabi or decided against teaching entire courses out of fear that teaching certain material could put a target on their backs,” Ms. Krishnan said.
The lawsuit argues that the deportation policy also violates the Fifth Amendment, which ensures due process, because it fails to give noncitizen students and faculty members “fair warning as to what speech and association the government believes to be grounds for arrest, detention and deportation.”
The defendants named in the lawsuit are President Trump; Marco Rubio, the secretary of state; Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security; and Todd Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The State Department said by email that “as a general matter, we do not comment on ongoing or pending litigation.” The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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16) Israeli Police Release Palestinian Oscar Winner Who Said He Was Assaulted
Hamdan Ballal said he was struck as he guarded his home during an attack by settlers. The Israeli authorities said he had been detained on suspicion of throwing stones, which he denied.
By Natan Odenheimer, Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, March 25, 2025
Hamdan Ballal, center, after winning the Oscar for best documentary feature for “No Other Land” this month. Credit...Nina Westervelt for The New York Times
The Israeli authorities on Tuesday released a Palestinian director of an Oscar-winning documentary who was detained overnight after what he and witnesses said was an attack by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
The police said that the filmmaker, Hamdan Ballal, one of the directors of the documentary, “No Other Land,” was questioned along with two other Palestinians on suspicion of hurling stones, property damage and “endangering regional security.” All three deny the accusations, their lawyer said.
The details of the episode are still not entirely clear, and both sides provided conflicting accounts of the events surrounding Mr. Ballal’s detention. But witnesses said the detention took place as a group of Israeli settlers — some of whom were masked — carried out an assault in the outskirts of Mr. Ballal’s home village of Susya in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
After his release on Tuesday, Mr. Ballal, 37, said he had been guarding his home during the attack, worried that the settlers would try to barge in. Suddenly, a man struck Mr. Ballal on the head while two Israeli soldiers leveled their guns at him, he said.
“I fell to the ground and then the man beat me all over my body,” Mr. Ballal said in a phone interview.
Israeli soldiers later arrested Mr. Ballal and held him overnight. Mr. Ballal said he was blindfolded while soldiers placed different objects on his head and mocked him, saying: “This is the Oscar-winning filmmaker.”
The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Ballal’s account.
One Israeli settler, a minor, was also detained. The Israeli police said he had been released to receive medical treatment and would be questioned later.
The episode drew attention to rising attacks by hard-line Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. During the past year, Jewish extremists have thrown rocks at Palestinians, set cars on fire and defaced homes. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded more than 1,000 incidents of settler violence in 2024.
Human rights groups have long said that Israeli officials rarely crack down on the perpetrators. Despite a handful of high-profile prosecutions, a vast majority of police investigations into attacks by Israelis on Palestinians are closed without charges, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli rights group.
President Trump has taken a softer stance on settler violence, canceling sanctions imposed by the Biden administration against individuals accused of carrying out violent acts against Palestinians. On Tuesday, a confirmation hearing for Mike Huckabee, Mr. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel and an outspoken supporter of settlement building, was underway.
The two sides provided different accounts about the events surrounding Mr. Ballal’s arrest. In a statement, the Israeli military said “several terrorists” had hurled stones at Israeli vehicles, igniting a violent confrontation in which Israelis and Palestinians threw rocks at one another.
Nasser Nawaja, a fieldworker for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem who lives in Susya, and other Palestinians said the confrontation began after the town’s residents had sought to drive away Israeli shepherds herding livestock on land claimed by the village.
The group of Israeli assailants, some masked, soon joined the others on the outskirts of the village, where they attacked two Palestinian homes, they said.
Witness videos obtained and reviewed by The New York Times showed part of the assault. In cellphone and dashcam footage, a masked man approaches three activists who had responded to calls from Palestinians for help, pushes them and tries to punch one of them. The three activists retreat to their car as several other masked men run toward it and smash the windshield with a rock.
Basel Adra, another director of the documentary, who was also on the scene, said Israeli soldiers and police officers on the scene did little to stop the masked Israeli assailants, even as they sought to disperse the Palestinians. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the claim.
Mr. Ballal was among four directors — the others were Mr. Adra, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham — in the Palestinian-Israeli film collective that received the Academy Award for best documentary this month. The film documents the demolition of West Bank residents’ homes in or near the villages of Masafer Yatta by Israeli forces claiming the area for a live-fire military training ground.
After repeated attacks, Palestinian residents in the southern West Bank, including from Mr. Hamdan’s village, took their case to the Israeli Supreme Court at the end of 2023, arguing that Israeli security forces were not protecting them from attacks, and that as a result, some villagers had fled their homes.
In a ruling last year, the court expressed concern over Israel’s failure to protect them and said the government — including the Israeli military — must protect Palestinians against future attacks “even in the complicated circumstances of this period.”
Malachy Browne contributed reporting.
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17) They Are America’s Most Powerful Law Firms. Their Silence Is Deafening.
By Deborah Pearlstein, March 25, 2025
Ms. Pearlstein is a visiting professor of law and public affairs at Princeton and the director of its Program in Law and Public Policy.
Larry Fink
In his chaotic attempt to dismantle democratic governance, redefine citizenship and cast aside fundamental rights of speech and due process, President Trump has all but declared war on one of the most effective forces to stand in his way: America’s legal institutions.
He has moved to purge the Department of Justice of all but those he perceives as loyal to him personally, demanded changes to law school curriculums, called with increasing furor for the impeachment of judges with whom he disagrees, attacked by name public-interest attorneys and bar associations that oppose his policies, and inched perilously close to defying court orders outright. In recent weeks Mr. Trump has also gone after the nation’s leading law firms — Covington & Burling; Perkins Coie; Paul, Weiss; and many more — with measures meant to hobble their ability to do business.
Of all of the American legal institutions now facing sustained attack, none would seem better positioned to push back against Mr. Trump’s strongman tactics than this class of wealthy and politically connected firms, known collectively as Big Law. Counsel to the world’s most powerful corporations, they are engaged in every sector of the marketplace and central to ensuring that the United States and global economy continue to spin. Yet where many ordinary judges, law school deans and public interest attorneys of both political parties have found the courage to push back against Mr. Trump’s anti-constitutional histrionics, Big Law has largely stayed silent or worse.
These firms face a classic problem of collective action: Every individual firm has an incentive to keep quiet, but if everyone stays silent, all will lose. The problem is understandable. It is also solvable. It requires firms to find the courage to act together.
Covington & Burling, the white-shoe Washington-based firm, was first to be targeted by the president. Its offense: having provided pro bono legal work for Jack Smith, who led the federal prosecution against Mr. Trump for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. On Feb. 25, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that suspended the security clearances of Covington lawyers who had anything to do with Mr. Smith’s representation and directed federal agencies to end any business with the firm. The firm has had virtually nothing to say in response.
Perkins Coie likewise attracted Mr. Trump’s ire for having represented Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign. He ordered a review for any government contracts with the firm, while also effectively barring its lawyers from federal buildings and stripping them of security clearances — potentially disabling sanctions for a firm whose clients have included major defense contractors like Boeing, Microsoft and Northrop Grumman. To its credit, Perkins Coie decided to mount a defense, and turned to Quinn Emanuel, an equally prestigious Los Angeles-based firm, to lead it. According to a Times report, Quinn Emanuel balked. (The firm Williams & Connolly has taken the case.) Since then, other firms have reportedly declined to sign an amicus brief on Perkins Coie’s behalf.
Most stunning of all, Paul, Weiss, one of the most venerable firms in the world, elected last week to strike a deal with Mr. Trump, agreeing, among other things, to contribute tens of millions of dollars worth of pro bono services to some of the president’s favored causes. The firm’s chair later explained it did so because clients were getting spooked and other firms — rather than rallying to Paul, Weiss’s defense — began “aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.”
The choice by these firms to accommodate Mr. Trump’s attacks, either through action or silence, is deeply wrong. It weakens the rule-of-law system on which all Americans depend — a system in which the rules are publicly known and set in advance, not subject to the whims of arbitrary vendettas. It equally hastens America’s slide from a system of constitutional democracy, in which executive power is constrained by multiple independent institutions, to a regime of fiat akin to those authoritarian governments our country has long stood against.
The choice is misguided as a business strategy, too, compromising attorney ethics, which can expose them to discipline by bar associations and courts, and giving clients ample reason to doubt that the firms will act unflinchingly in their defense. Above all, it is futile, as it will do nothing to protect the firms from the extortion-based governance we now appear to face for at least the next four years.
Mr. Trump’s tactics against Big Law and other legal institutions seem clearly aimed at demonstrating there is no law but whatever deal the president is personally willing to strike, indeed no law but Trump. Such a vision cannot be reconciled with the idea of individual rights nor with the idea that ordered rules, not raw power, constrain the behavior of the people and their governors alike.
More to the present point, it cannot be reconciled with the obligation of contract, the foundation of the global economy. America’s commitment to the rule of law has been the rock on which all of the nation’s business interests depend. Its stability is a central reason investors from around the world long flocked to our shores. If that stability gives way to a system in which it is no longer possible to rely on or even to know the rules of the game, no one stands to lose more than the corporate clients these law firms represent.
It’s not hard to see why these firms may have decided to cede to Mr. Trump’s power grab. Partners have fiduciary obligations to their peers and employees. If the firm can just avoid open antagonism of the governing regime, the thinking may go, then it will survive until the turbulence subsides. Paul, Weiss’s chairman, Brad Karp, has repeatedly tried to assure his firm that the arrangement he struck was consistent with the principles that have guided the firm for its 150-year history.
Yet the deal Mr. Karp described to his colleagues differed markedly from the one the president announced. Mr. Trump’s version has the firm acknowledging both the “wrongdoing” of Mark Pomerantz, a former partner who explored a criminal case against Mr. Trump while working for the Manhattan district attorney, and the “grave dangers of Weaponization, and the vital need to restore our System of Justice” that Mr. Trump has long complained were used against him. Whatever Mr. Karp believes he agreed to, the president plainly does not share his view.
It is wrong to imagine such a deal could safeguard the interests of the commercial clients on which these law firms depend. And it is foolhardy to imagine these clients can go four years without taking any position that rankles this administration.
Take Citigroup, which has been a client of Paul, Weiss. Its subsidiary, Citibank, already finds itself in litigation over the administration’s (almost certainly unlawful) effort to impound spending on Congress’s greenhouse gas reduction initiatives. In service of that impoundment, the Trump administration demanded Citibank freeze billions in funding for nonprofits. If a court orders Citibank to unfreeze the funds, which side will it take, the administration’s or the court’s? Or consider Verizon, a client of Quinn Emanuel. Verizon seems on the verge of being nudged out of its $2.4 billion contract with the Federal Aviation Administration because Elon Musk has reportedly decided that his business, Starlink, is more deserving of the work. Does sound counsel require advising Verizon to just let that one go?
Corporations from Coca-Cola to Ford have been affected by Mr. Trump’s tariffs. They may well hope to negotiate their way out of the worst of the economic damage. But if those negotiations fail, or if the president’s promises prove as erratic as his tariffs, will the storied firms that represent these companies fight hard for their interests? Or will the firms push them to accept a lesser compromise, in the hopes of protecting themselves against presidential wrath?
Big Law’s parallel hope — that the courts will save them from having to take the worst of the administration’s direct heat — has already been proven unavailing. When Mr. Trump issued his extraordinary order blackballing Perkins Coie, a Federal District Court in Washington moved with remarkable efficiency to block key parts of the order from taking effect. But even assuming that the court’s temporary judgment survives the coming appeals — and that the administration complies with it — the damage is already done.
Many of Perkins Coie’s clients jumped ship on the basis of the initial order alone. And the court’s opinion clearly did nothing to slow Mr. Trump down. Just two days after being told that parts of the first order were unlawful, he issued his nearly identical order against Paul, Weiss. Three days after that, Mr. Trump’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced it was now looking into “D.E.I. practices” at 20 more firms, a list no longer limited to those firms with Democratic connections.
Over the weekend, Mr. Trump issued the broadest attack yet, ordering the attorney general to seek punishment for any lawyer or firm that takes a position in litigation the administration deems “unscrupulous.” In the climate of fear reinforced by Paul, Weiss’s actions — and other firms’ silence — threats alone are enough to drive away any firm’s business.
Another excuse circulating among Big Law lawyers is that speaking out won’t make a difference either way. Perkins Coie, after all, won its case without the broad support of its peer institutions.
That argument misses the point. Coming to Perkins Coie’s defense isn’t a decision about litigation strategy. It is about standing up to the administration’s intimidation. Signing on to joint briefs is not the only way to do that. Fellow firms and their clients could contribute to a joint defense fund, to help defray the costs of litigation and lost business for those on the receiving end of Mr. Trump’s score-settling wrath.
The point is for Big Law to do something — anything — as a group to demonstrate that they will continue to place their obligations to their clients and to the law above their fear of the bully. Solidarity can prove that point. And it can shore up the hope we all retain that the world’s strongest economy and oldest democracy will not both, simultaneously, fall.
The excuses made for Big Law’s silence are of course not limited to Big Law. The same collective action problem no doubt informs the discussions taking place inside the corner offices of the firms’ corporate clients, in the boardrooms of major media enterprises, at the gatherings of university trustees. The solutions to such problems are limited. But one tried and true approach remains clear: joining forces to fight back.
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