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How Trump Got Rich
It had nothing to do with brains!
President Trump’s executive order sent a signal to Republicans that the administration was serious about winding down the Education Department. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesSome 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) How This Trade War Is Different From All Other Trade Wars
By acting on his own, President Trump has broken with more than 200 years of U.S. history in which Congress set the direction of trade policy.
By Jeff Sommer, April 11, 2025
Jeff Sommer writes Strategies, a weekly column on markets, finance and the economy.
If the on-again, off-again tariff announcements by President Trump have struck you as unusual, that’s for good reason. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
That’s the estimation of Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth economic historian whose 2017 book, “Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy,” is the leading work on the subject. I called him for perspective. He told me that what we were experiencing was way outside the historical norm. One man alone has risked the first global trade war since the 1930s by raising tariffs to levels unseen for more than a century. The president’s actions, he said, represent a “big break with history.”
Even if Mr. Trump removes the tariffs — he announced a 90-day pause for some of the highest ones on Wednesday, while keeping a 10 percent base line for virtually all imports from around the world — his go-it-alone stance is a major departure. However the trade saga develops from here, the first skirmishes in a trade war, a dreaded relic of the Great Depression, have begun in the 21st century.
The consequences are still unfurling, but the stakes are high. They include the possibility of a global recession and geopolitical shifts that may not be in the interests of the United States — all occurring because of the swiftly shifting decisions by the president of the United States.
Until now, it had always taken decades of consensus building to bend the trajectory of trade policy, Professor Irwin said. When the country changed course in earlier times, Congress played the dominant role. Even when it began delegating authority to negotiate trade deals to the president in the 1930s, Congress set the direction of U.S. tariffs: downward.
Now, it’s unquestionably the president who has taken the United States on a new and hazardous path. “This is of historical significance,” Professor Irwin said.
In the past, wars provided the impetus for change. The Civil War and World War I led to higher tariffs enacted by Congress after lengthy discussion, and those were “big breaks” with history, Professor Irwin said. Tariffs began falling in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and with some exceptions, including the Biden and first Trump administrations, they remained fairly low.
“But here we are, in a peacetime economy,” Professor Irwin said. “We’re basically at full employment, 4 percent. There’s no societal consensus that there’s a big problem with trade, and yet we have one person, the president, radically changing the direction of U.S. trade policy.”
The Fallout
Stock markets have been swirling — falling for days, then leaping in delight on Wednesday at news that some of the U.S. tariffs had been delayed. It was the biggest one-day gain since the financial crisis of 2008, with the benchmark S&P 500 stock index rising 9.5 percent and erasing some of the losses that investors have had to endure this year. By Thursday, though, the enthusiasm had ebbed. The S&P 500 fell 3.5 percent for the day.
Whether the markets keep rallying, or sink back into a maelstrom of worry, is likely to depend on what Mr. Trump does about the direction of tariff policy, which economists view, in an overwhelming consensus, as wrongheaded and profoundly dangerous.
Until Wednesday, the president’s series of tariff announcements had set off expectations of sharply rising prices for households and businesses alike, raising a strong possibility that a spreading global trade war could send the U.S. economy spiraling into a recession and cause vast human hardship.
After the president said he was delaying some tariffs, Goldman Sachs abruptly dropped its forecast that a recession was likely. Even so, the Goldman prognosis was bleak: “We are reverting to our previous non-recession base-line forecast with G.D.P. growth of 0.5 percent and a 45 percent probability of recession.”
China has retaliated with tariffs of its own. By Thursday, U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods had reached 145 percent; China reciprocated with tariffs on U.S. products, raising them on Friday to 125 percent. Negotiations were underway with many countries — but not China — the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said. “Do not retaliate,” he said, “and you will be rewarded.” The European Union said it would delay its plans for retaliation for 90 days.
Congressional resistance to the Trump trade policy has begun, with a mainly Democratic effort in the Senate to end the “national emergency” that the president declared as the legal justification for his tariffs. But as my colleague Ana Swanson wrote, the odds against such an effort’s succeeding quickly are high. Even if it passed in the Senate, it’s not clear that a resolution to roll back the tariffs would ever reach the House floor. If it did, and passed there, Mr. Trump could veto it, and overriding a veto with a two-thirds vote isn’t likely in the current political firmament.
The Sweep of History
As unusual as the Trump administration’s swerves on tariffs have been, they are possible only because Congress has been delegating authority on trade policy to the president in stages, starting in 1934.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution expressly reserves for Congress the power to impose tariffs.
Congressional dominance over trade policy shifted substantially after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 ushered in the catastrophic global trade war and worsened the Great Depression. Then, as now, economists overwhelmingly opposed a tariff increase, imploring President Herbert Hoover not to sign the bill into law, but he did anyway.
That disastrous legislation was a product of what historians call congressional “logrolling” — the trading of votes by legislators to secure favorable action on projects of interest to each one — that had largely determined trade policy. U.S. tariffs in the 1930s increased for domestic reasons — largely, to protect local industry — without much advance thought about the global consequences.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s evident that the tariffs were major factors in a dire turn in world history, said Dale Copeland, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. In the 1930s, Britain and France turned inward and focused their commerce within their imperial empires, while the United States, a nascent power, had a sphere of influence of its own, Professor Copeland said.
Japan did not yet have such an empire. It set about acquiring one in China and in Southeast Asia, at least in part, because within a year of the enactment of Smoot-Hawley, Japan had “lost most of its trade” and decided that it needed “other ways to get supplies of raw materials and oil and other important things,” Professor Copeland said. Tariff barriers created enormous international tensions and perverse incentives, lessons that “the world has already learned, and may need to relearn now,” he said.
Ed Clissold, senior U.S. strategist at Ned Davis Research, an independent financial research firm, said the geopolitical implications of rising tariffs needed to be studied closely. “If we cut off trade with China and raise tariffs on other countries in the region, China’s going to focus even more heavily in Southeast Asia,” he said.
Emily Bowersock Hill, chief executive of Bowersock Capital Partners, a wealth management firm in Lawrence, Kan., said that without checks on his behavior, Mr. Trump was making erratic geopolitical moves.
“It’s taken decades to establish the reputation of the United States around the world,” she said. “Our reputation, our alliances, our brand were a primary advantage. It wouldn’t take much to lose all of that.”
The U.S. presidency has always been powerful, but in the past, presidents were hemmed in by law, custom and politics. As the wild swings of recent days show, however, Mr. Trump is unaffected by most of those restraints. More than in the past, the direction of the markets and the global economy depends on the mood of the president.
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2) Supreme Court Sides With Wrongly Deported Migrant
A trial judge had ordered the Trump administration to take steps to return the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from a notorious prison in El Salvador.
By Adam Liptak, Reporting from Washington, April 10, 2025
Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, second from right, during a demonstration in support of her husband, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, in Greenbelt, Md., last week. Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have called his deportation “a Kafka-esque mistake.” Credit...Rod Lamkey Jr. for The New York Times
The Supreme Court on Thursday instructed the government to take steps to return a Salvadoran migrant it had wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
In an unsigned order, the court stopped short of ordering the return of the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, indicating that courts may not have the power to require the executive branch to do so.
But the court endorsed part of a trial judge’s order that had required the government to “facilitate and effectuate the return” of Mr. Abrego Garcia.
“The order properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” the Supreme Court’s ruling said. “The intended scope of the term ‘effectuate’ in the district court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the district court’s authority.”
The case will now return to the trial court, and it is not clear whether and when Mr. Abrego Garcia will be returned to the United States.
“The district court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs,” the Supreme Court’s ruling said. “For its part, the government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”
The ruling appeared to be unanimous. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, issued a statement that was harshly critical of the government’s conduct and said she would have upheld every part of the trial judge’s order.
“To this day,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “the government has cited no basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison. Nor could it.”
Justice Sotomayor urged the trial judge, Paula Xinis of the Federal District Court in Maryland, to “continue to ensure that the government lives up to its obligations to follow the law.”
A Justice Department spokesman responded to the order by focusing on its reference to the executive branch.
“As the Supreme Court correctly recognized, it is the exclusive prerogative of the president to conduct foreign affairs,” the spokesman said. “By directly noting the deference owed to the executive branch, this ruling once again illustrates that activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy.”
Andrew J. Rossman, one of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, expressed satisfaction with the Supreme Court’s action.
“The rule of law won today,” he said. “Time to bring him home.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife described the effect the case has had on their family and said she would keep pursuing his return to the United States.
“This continues to be an emotional roller coaster for my children, Kilmar’s mother, his brother and siblings,” Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, his wife, said on Thursday, adding that “I will continue fighting until my husband is home.”
Judge Xinis had said the Trump administration committed a “grievous error” that “shocks the conscience” by sending Mr. Abrego Garcia to El Salvador despite a 2019 ruling from an immigration judge. The immigration judge granted him a special status known as “withholding from removal,” finding that he might face violence or torture if sent to El Salvador.
The administration contends that Mr. Abrego Garcia, 29, is a member of a violent transnational street gang, MS-13, which officials recently designated as a terrorist organization.
Judge Xinis, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said those claims were based on “a singular unsubstantiated allegation.”
“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” she wrote, “and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived.”
In the administration’s emergency application seeking to block Judge Xinis’s order, D. John Sauer, the U.S. solicitor general, said she had exceeded her authority by engaging in “district-court diplomacy,” because it would require working with the government of El Salvador to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release.
“If this precedent stands,” he wrote, “other district courts could order the United States to successfully negotiate the return of other removed aliens anywhere in the world by close of business,” he wrote. “Under that logic, district courts would effectively have extraterritorial jurisdiction over the United States’ diplomatic relations with the whole world.”
In a response to the court, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said their client “sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafka-esque mistake.”
They added: “The district court’s order instructing the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return is routine. It does not implicate foreign policy or even domestic immigration policy in any case.”
Mr. Sauer said it did not matter that an immigration judge had previously prohibited Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador.
“While the United States concedes that removal to El Salvador was an administrative error,” Mr. Sauer wrote, “that does not license district courts to seize control over foreign relations, treat the executive branch as a subordinate diplomat and demand that the United States let a member of a foreign terrorist organization into America tonight.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said there was no evidence that he posed a risk.
“Abrego Garcia has lived freely in the United States for years, yet has never been charged for a crime,” they wrote. “The government’s contention that he has suddenly morphed into a dangerous threat to the republic is not credible.”
Mr. Sauer said Judge Xinis’s order was one in a series of rulings from courts exceeding their constitutional authority.
“It is the latest in a litany of injunctions or temporary restraining orders from the same handful of district courts that demand immediate or near-immediate compliance, on absurdly short deadlines,” he wrote.
In her statement on Thursday, Justice Sotomayor wrote that it would be shameful “to leave Abrego Garcia, a husband and father without a criminal record, in a Salvadoran prison for no reason recognized by the law.”
She added that the government’s position “implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
“That view,” the justice wrote, “refutes itself.”
Alan Feuer, Aishvarya Kavi and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
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3) Stay or Go? Israel’s Evacuation Orders Leave Gazans Facing an Excruciating Choice.
A new declaration targeted eastern Gaza City, including several areas that had been declared evacuation zones. The United Nations said 390,000 people had been displaced in recent weeks.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 11, 2025
Palestinians in the Shajaiye neighborhood of Gaza City last week after an evacuation order. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The Israeli military issued new evacuation orders for neighborhoods in Gaza City on Friday as it pressed forward with its offensive in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, once again delivering a painful choice to Palestinians about whether to stay or go.
The orders targeted eastern Gaza City, including several parts that the military had declared evacuation zones last week. The move suggested that some people had remained in their homes even after the Israeli military had urged them to leave.
Since the two-month cease-fire between Israel and Hamas collapsed in March, Israel has issued a succession of orders across Gaza, covering roughly half of the territory. The orders have left Palestinians in the north, many of whom returned home when the truce came into effect, debating whether to stay in their neighborhoods despite the danger or to leave and yet again face the miserable conditions of displacement.
While the United Nations has said that over 390,000 people have been displaced in recent weeks, the exact number of people remaining in evacuation zones was unclear.
“We don’t want to leave,” said Ahmad al-Masri, 26, a resident of Beit Lahia in northern Gaza who has spurned evacuation orders for his town. “Where will we go? It’s so very tiring.”
In some parts of Gaza, the military has called for people to leave and later invaded by ground. In other areas, it has put out evacuation orders, but has not sent in infantry. At least some Palestinians who have disregarded evacuation orders said they would leave if Israeli tanks move into their neighborhoods.
“I’m dealing with the reality on the ground,” Mr. al-Masri said.
Since the cease-fire broke down, the Israeli military has embarked on a major bombing campaign and seized territory in a tactic that Israeli officials have said was intended to compel Hamas to release more hostages.
Adding to the uncertainty, Arab mediators and the United States have struggled to bridge gaps between Hamas and Israel to restore the cease-fire and to bring about exchanges of hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
Over the course of the war, Palestinians have endured a marathon of hope and heartbreak as mediators have expressed optimism about talks only for a deal to remain elusive, or fall apart completely.
On Thursday, President Trump suggested that a new agreement could be in the offing. “We’re getting close to getting them back,” Mr. Trump told reporters at a meeting of his cabinet, referring to hostages.
The American president did not offer specific details, and representatives for Hamas and the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel did not immediately return requests for comment.
The military said its recent campaign had dismantled weapons infrastructure and killed militants. On Thursday, the Israeli military said that a day earlier in Gaza City’s Shajaiye neighborhood it had killed a Hamas commander who had participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Hamas did not comment on the claim.
The Palestinian Civil Defense, an emergency rescue service under the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, said that 23 people had been killed in strikes in Shajaiye on Wednesday, without distinguishing between civilians and combatants. Israel has said that Hamas embeds in civilian areas, though legal experts say that it still has an obligation to protect civilians.
“The Israel Defense Forces is acting with great force in your areas to destroy the terrorist infrastructure,” Avichay Adraee, the Arabic-language spokesman for the military, said on Friday, announcing the evacuation orders for eastern Gaza City.
The Israeli offensive has included evacuation orders encompassing roughly half of the territory, according to a New York Times analysis of Israeli military maps. Satellite imagery also shows that the Israeli military is taking over Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, with forces closing in from two directions.
More than 1,500 people in Gaza have been killed since the cease-fire fell apart and more than 50,000 people have been killed since the start of the war, according to the Gaza health ministry. The ministry also does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its casualty counts. Doctors at hospitals have said many of those wounded and killed in recent weeks have been children.
The United Nations said Friday that Israel’s actions in Gaza increasingly threatened the ability of Palestinians to continue living in the territory. Since mid-March, Israel has issued 21 evacuation orders to Palestinians in Gaza and launched some 224 attacks on Gaza residential buildings and tents, Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights chief, Volker Türk, told reporters on Friday.
“The death, the destruction, the displacement, the denial of access to basic necessities within Gaza and the repeated suggestion that Gazans should leave the territory entirely raise real concerns as to the future viability of Palestinians as a group in Gaza,” she said.
Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting.
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4) She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her
President Trump’s immigration crackdown ensnared Kseniia Petrova, a scientist who fled Russia after protesting its invasion of Ukraine. She fears arrest if she is deported there.
By Ellen Barry, April 11, 2025
Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard scientist, in 2021. She has been in a Louisiana prison since Feb. 16. Credit...Polina Pugacheva
A barracks-style detention center in Louisiana is jammed with around 90 immigrant women, mostly undocumented workers from central and South America, sharing five toilets and following orders shouted by guards.
There is also, among them, a Russian scientist.
She is 30 years old, shy and prone to nervous laughter. She cannot work, because her laptop was confiscated. She plays chess with other women when the guards allow it. Otherwise, she passes the time reading books about evolution and cell development.
For nearly eight weeks, Kseniia Petrova has been captive to the hard-line immigration policies of the Trump administration. A graduate of a renowned Russian physics and technology institute, Ms. Petrova was recruited to work at a laboratory at Harvard Medical School. She was part of a team investigating how cells can rejuvenate themselves, with the goal of fending off the damage of aging.
On Feb. 16, customs officials detained her at Logan International Airport in Boston for failing to declare samples of frog embryos she had carried from France at the request of her boss at Harvard.
Such an infraction is normally considered minor, punishable with a fine of up to $500. Instead, the customs official canceled Ms. Petrova’s visa on the spot and began deportation proceedings. Then Ms. Petrova told her that she had fled Russia for political reasons and faced arrest if she returned there.
This is how she wound up at the Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, La., waiting for the U.S. government to decide what to do with her.
Ms. Petrova’s case is being watched by thousands of young, highly educated Russians who, like her, fled the country after Russia invaded Ukraine. It has also caught the attention of prominent figures in Russia’s political opposition who warn that, for the United States, delivering a dissident scientist to President Vladimir V. Putin would be crossing an especially foreboding line.
For her part, Ms. Petrova is seeing the United States from a new and unsettling vantage point. “I feel like something is happening generally in America,” she said, in an interview over a video link. “Something bad is happening. I don’t think everybody understands.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has twice refused her lawyer’s petition for parole, contending that she is a flight risk and a threat to U.S. security. Ms. Petrova sometimes mentally rehearses what she would do if she were, in fact, deported to Russia. She cannot say for sure when or if she would be arrested, she said, but the threat of political repression would always be present.
“This is the problem of this kind of autocratic regime — the people who stay there are kind of hostages,” she said. “That is the fear of being there. You don’t know what will happen. You don’t know if they will come for you or they won’t.”
Harvard has made little comment about Ms. Petrova’s detention. A spokeswoman said this week that the university “is closely following the rapidly shifting immigration policy landscape and the implications for its international scholars and students,” and is “engaged with Ms. Petrova’s attorney on this matter.”
Many in the research community there only learned about it two weeks ago, when Ms. Petrova’s co-workers started a GoFundMe appeal to help pay her legal expenses. The news sent shudders through a sprawling community of scientists who immigrated to the United States for careers in research. It comes amid deep cuts in federal funding for science that, to many, signal that a period of openness and progress may be ending.
Ms. Petrova is not giving up on her work. As she awaits her hearing, she is studying meiosis, a type of cell division that allows egg and sperm cells to reset epigenetic marks, pointing the way to possible strategies to stop aging. All she can think of is getting back to her laboratory.
“I was in paradise,” she said. “I would very much like to stay in paradise.”
A ‘supernerd’
Ms. Petrova had just finished her master’s degree when Konstantin Severinov, a prominent molecular biologist, recruited her for an ambitious, high-profile project in Moscow.
Dr. Severinov, who leads a laboratory at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, had been asked to design a Russian genome-sequencing center, backed with $250 million in funding from Rosneft, the state-owned oil company. He was assembling a team to help build a database structure and write code.
He described Ms. Petrova as a “supernerd,” the product of especially intense, competitive scientific training. Her skills, which combined computer science and biology, were “very, very marketable,” he said in an interview, in demand at genomics centers all over the world.
Dr. Severinov wanted her on the team, he said. The job was interesting scientifically and “highly advantageous financially.” But it required passing a security clearance, he said, and Ms. Petrova would not promise to stop supporting Russia’s political opposition.
He ended up hiring her as an outside consultant. “She turned out to be a principled person who just would not bow,” he said. He was, at times, frustrated by her impracticality — “you can call it childish, you can call it principled, you can call it different ways,” he said.
“I would say, among many young scientists, there are some which are very, very career-oriented — in a good way,” he said. “They know what needs to be done to promote themselves. She is not of that kind. She is, in a way, like a daydreamer. She is different.”
She was raised by two engineers — her mother a specialist in radio communications and her father a computer programmer, said Vladimir Mazin, a close family friend. He described Ms. Petrova as a “passionate scientist” who, on vacation in the countryside, carried her laptop with her to breakfast and dinner so she could continue training neural networks, a type of machine learning.
“Kseniia is one of those people who are truly interested in obtaining new knowledge, in finding out something that hasn’t been known before,” he said. “That’s what she is interested in. Everything else is secondary.”
In her late teens, she supported the opposition-minded Russians who took to the streets to oppose Mr. Putin’s return to the presidency. Then she began joining them. Ms. Petrova made no secret of her views; she recalled being asked, in the job interview for the genomics center, to promise she would not post criticism of Mr. Putin on social media. She refused.
“I think in each country, scientists are opposed to autocratic government,” she said.
On Feb. 24, 2022, when Mr. Putin sent columns of Russian tanks across the border into Ukraine, she joined protests that surged through Moscow’s streets. On March 2, she was arrested, charged with an administrative violation, fined about $200 and released.
It was clear that things were changing quickly, Ms. Petrova said. The handful of news sources she relied on for objective information “closed immediately,” she said. Ms. Petrova feared the border would close as well. She left the country two days later.
She said that after this, it became “really obvious” that if she wanted to be a scientist, she had to leave: “I changed my decision from ‘I will never leave Russia’ to ‘I am leaving Russia immediately.’”
Many of her classmates left at the same time. Some found lucrative jobs writing code for banks or private companies. Ms. Petrova had an offer from a lab in Britain. But she was looking for something particular — “the kind of science,” as she put it, “that I would call beautiful.”
Welcome to the frog palace
Leon Peshkin, a principal research scientist in Harvard’s department of systems biology, had been looking to hire someone for a year.
The Kirschner Lab, where Dr. Peshkin works, is investigating the earliest stages of cell division. These changes are easy to observe in the eggs of the xenopus frog, which are large and hardy. To lure Marc W. Kirschner to Harvard, the university constructed a vast aquarium where females bob in circulating water, known internally as the “frog palace.”
Dr. Peshkin’s team is interested in sperm and egg cells, and how they repair damage as an embryo develops. They needed someone equally fluent in machine learning and cell biology, Dr. Peshkin explained in a post on Kaggle, an online community for data scientists. Ms. Petrova reached out.
When she arrived in Boston in May 2023, Dr. Peshkin was shocked to discover that she had not brought a suitcase; she carried a backpack. It became clear, he said, that she was “extremely ascetic,” entirely wrapped up in her research.
“I thought the Russia of my childhood was gone, the Russia of this crazy, dedicated, ascetic scientist is gone,” he said. Over the months that followed, Dr. Peshkin watched her focus intensely for many hours; he saw what she could pull off in a few days of coding. “She is probably strongest I’ve seen,” he said. “I am at Harvard for 20 years.”
Ms. Petrova found ways to speed up everyone’s work. In a dark, enclosed room with a laser-based Raman microscope, William Trim, a postdoctoral fellow, spent his days examining the migration of lipids through tissue.
He painstakingly noted his findings by hand, a task that could take up to two hours each day. “You don’t need to do that,” he said Ms. Petrova told him. She wrote him a script that did the job in seconds. “Any problem I have with data, she has a solution,” Dr. Trim said. They became close friends, and he eventually offered her a room in his apartment.
“All she did was science,” he said. “She would be coming home at 1 a.m. sometimes, because she just spent all day — 14, 15 hours — tweaking the flow rates of five tubes that all coalesce into one place to get this cell into a droplet.”
Dr. Peshkin worried she would burn out. He was relieved when she told him she was taking a vacation to France, where the pianist Andras Schiff was giving a concert. She bought theater tickets and planned trips to see friends from Moscow, now scattered across Europe.
She would also make time for work. Dr. Peshkin collaborates with a laboratory in Paris, where one of the scientists had figured out how to slice superfine sections of a frog embryo.
No one at Harvard knew how to do it; high-quality samples would substantially speed up their work. A few times, their French colleagues had tried to mail the embryo samples, but they thawed in transit and arrived too damaged to use.
“I said, ‘Well, you’re there,’” Dr. Peshkin said. “Why don’t you get this package?”
A shift in the atmosphere
Ms. Petrova’s return flight from Paris landed in Boston on the evening of Feb. 16. As the plane sat on the tarmac, she texted back and forth with Dr. Peshkin, trying to confirm how she should handle the package in customs. But by then, the passengers were already filing off the plane, he said, and Ms. Petrova cut short the conversation.
At first, Ms. Petrova said, her re-entry felt normal. At passport control, an officer examined the J-1 visa that Harvard had sponsored, identifying her as a biomedical researcher. The officer stamped her passport, admitting her to the country.
Then, as she headed toward the baggage claim, a Border Patrol officer approached her and asked to search her suitcase. All she could think was that the embryo samples inside would be ruined; RNA degrades easily. She explained that she didn’t know the rules. The officer was polite, she recalled, and told her she would be allowed to leave.
Then a different officer came into the room, and the tone of the conversation changed, Ms. Petrova said. This officer asked detailed questions about the samples, Ms. Petrova’s work history and her travel in Europe. The official then informed Ms. Petrova that she was canceling her visa and asked her whether she was afraid to be deported to Russia.
“Yes, I am scared to go back to Russia,” she said, according to a Department of Homeland Security transcript provided by her lawyer. “I am afraid the Russian Federation will kill me for protesting against them.”
Ms. Petrova’s attorney, Greg Romanovsky, said that Customs and Border Protection had overreached its authority by canceling her visa. He acknowledged that she had violated customs regulations but said it was a minor offense, punishable by forfeiture and a fine.
To cancel her visa, Mr. Romanovsky said, the agents needed to identify grounds for excluding her. “There are many, many grounds of inadmissibility, but violating a customs rule is certainly not one of them,” he said.
Lucas Guttentag, a professor at Stanford Law School, reviewed documents in the case and agreed. He said that Ms. Petrova had been legally admitted to the United States, and then “the government itself created the alleged improper immigration status that is now the basis for her detention.”
“Subjecting anyone to this process is wrong, and this case is both shocking and revealing,” said Mr. Guttentag, who served as a senior Justice Department advisor under President Biden and senior advisor to the D.H.S. during the Obama administration.
A spokesperson for the D.H.S., asked why Ms. Petrova’s visa had been canceled, said that a canine inspection found petri dishes and vials of embryonic stem cells in her luggage without proper permits.
“The individual was lawfully detained after lying to federal officers about carrying biological substances into the country,” the spokesperson said. “Messages on her phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them. She knowingly broke the law and took deliberate steps to evade it.”
When the border patrol agent canceled Ms. Petrova’s visa, she became an undocumented immigrant, among the thousands detained since Mr. Trump took office. She was sent to the Richwood Detention Center to await a hearing in which she will present her case for asylum to an immigration judge.
“If she wins, she will not be deported,” Mr. Romanovsky said. “If she loses, she will be deported to Russia.”
He has also filed a petition for her release in federal court, and pressed ICE to release her on parole. “I am basically pleading for mercy,” he said. “In a different environment, I think she would have been out a long time ago.”
Ms. Petrova has spent the last month in a dormitory lined with rows of bunk beds. It is cold, and at night, the women sometimes shiver under thin blankets. Once a day, they are allowed an hour outside. Breakfast comes at different times, sometimes as early as 3:30 a.m. The hardest thing, she said, is the constant noise. The facility’s psychiatrist gave her earplugs to help her sleep.
Unable to work, she observes the women around her. Around half are Latin Americans in their 30s and 40s who crossed the border for economic reasons, she said. A second group is made up of Asians and citizens of former Soviet states, who crossed the border legally, seeking political asylum.
None of them deserve to be held under these conditions, she said. “I thought this was impossible, to be in this situation,” she said. “Even immigrants here, they have to have some rights. But it seems that nobody really cares about our rights here.”
It has challenged the view of America that she formed in Russia. “This is not the kind of America I used to know,” she said.
An empty bench
Ms. Petrova’s things are still scattered around the laboratory at Harvard — a flower garland, a sleeping bag, a guitar. Before she went on vacation, she programmed a drip irrigator to water the plants on her window sill, and once a day, for five minutes, it whirs into action.
Her colleagues are distracted and anxious; work in the laboratory has stalled. When Dr. Peshkin made the rounds of Harvard laboratories, asking colleagues to send letters of support for her to ICE, many of them confessed that they were afraid to put their names on paper — because they were in the country on temporary visas as well.
“Something has happened to the fabric of society,” he said. “Something is happening.”
Worry about her case has also radiated across networks of Russian émigrés and scientists.
“She is an indicator that the world is becoming almost evil and dangerous for people who are homeless and mean no harm to anyone,” said Dr. Severinov, the biologist who recruited Ms. Petrova in Russia. “It is an irony that this is becoming so on both sides of the pond.”
Marina Sakharov-Liberman, the granddaughter of the Soviet physicist and dissident Andrey Sakharov, has been following the case from her home in London. She said it was “extraordinary” that Harvard had not more publicly protested Ms. Petrova’s detention and demanded her release.
“That is something that I would expect in Russia,” she said. “Everyone would be afraid. If someone was ‘disappeared,’ the institutions would be silent. Very few people would raise their voices and risk their positions.”
No one at Harvard feels worse than Dr. Peshkin. Again and again, he has asked himself why he allowed Ms. Petrova to take the risk of carrying the samples. He rereads the text exchange he had with Ms. Petrova while she was sitting on the plane.
“I mean, anybody in my place would say, ‘Please don’t take the box,’” he said.
Ms. Petrova does not blame Dr. Peshkin. She does not even complain much about life in detention. If she had access to a laptop, and could analyze data from her laboratory at Harvard, “it would be good enough,” she said.
But she worries that, when this is all over, she will no longer be able to work at the same level. “Even if I am released, I will feel myself much less safe,” she said. “Of course it will affect my efficiency. I will be very afraid. What if I get rearrested?”
Alina Lobzina and Kate Selig contributed reporting.
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5) Trump issues a directive calling to turn border land into a ‘military installation.’
By Maggie Haberman, Eric Schmitt and Hamed Aleaziz, April 11, 2025
President Trump announced a plan on Friday to turn a narrow strip along the Mexican border in California, Arizona and New Mexico into a military installation as part of his effort to curtail illegal crossings.
The plan, set out in a White House memorandum, calls for transferring authority over the 60-foot-wide strip of federal border land known as the Roosevelt Reservation from other cabinet agencies to the Defense Department. Military forces patrolling that area could then temporarily detain migrants passing through for trespassing on a military reservation, said a U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
The directive expands a military presence that has increased steadily along the southern border, even as crossings have already dropped precipitously during the Trump administration. The ordering of troops to the border has already put the military in politically charged territory, and, depending on the details of the effort, the plan could run afoul of laws that limit the use of regular federal troops for domestic law enforcement.
The directive says that the border strip will become a “military installation under the jurisdiction of” the Pentagon. Military members would be able to stop anyone crossing into the “military installation” but would not have the power to make immigration arrests, according to the military official. Border Patrol agents could then be summoned to arrest the migrants.
The memorandum formalizes a plan that the administration had been considering for weeks. The Washington Post had reported on the plan earlier.
A White House spokesman did not respond to questions seeking clarity as to what U.S. forces operating in the strip of border land would be able to do. A Defense Department spokesman also did not respond to questions seeking clarity.
Military officials are still working out how to execute the plan, including how long troops could detain migrants before turning them over to Border Patrol agents, and what type of “no trespassing” signs needed to be installed along the border, warning migrants they were about to enter a U.S. military reservation.
Then there are other logistics that would have to be hammered out, such as the languages the signs are written in, and how far apart they are posted. There is also the question of where to position military patrols along hundreds of miles of rugged land along the border, and what additional training those troops might need.
Adam Isacson, who focuses on border security and human rights at the Washington Office on Latin America, said the memorandum appeared to create a path for using quasi-military personnel to detain migrants.
A section of the memorandum calls for the authorization of state National Guard members to work on the military-controlled strip. If those working at the installation hold migrants until Customs and Border Protection officials pick them up, their use “comes very close to military personnel detaining migrants,” Mr. Isacson said.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
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6) Five more big law firms reach deals with Trump to do free legal work.
By Matthew Goldstein, April 11, 2025
Five more prominent law firms facing potential punitive action by President Trump reached deals on Friday with the White House to provide a total of $600 million in free legal services to causes supported by the president.
Four of the firms — Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, A&O Shearman and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett — each agreed to provide $125 million in pro bono or free legal work, according to Mr. Trump. A fifth firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, agreed to provide at least $100 million in pro bono work.
With the latest round of deals, some of the biggest firms in the legal profession have agreed over the past month to provide a combined $940 million in free legal services to causes favored by the Trump administration, including ones with “conservative ideals.”
Mr. Trump announced the agreements between his administration and the law firms on Friday on Truth Social, the platform owned by his social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group.
Top lawyers from each firm provided a statement to the White House, which was included in the social media posts. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported on negotiations with four of the firms.
The deals were announced during a week in which Mr. Trump talked openly in the Oval Office about using the firms he has struck deals with to help negotiate trade agreements with other countries and even work on coal leasing deals.
Mr. Trump did not specifically mention potential work on trade deals or coal leasing agreements in his social media posts. Rather, the posts said the firms would devote free legal work to things like fighting antisemitism, helping Gold Star families, assisting law enforcement and “ensuring fairness in our justice system.”
The terms are similar to ones Mr. Trump previously announced with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; Willkie Farr & Gallagher; and Milbank.
Law firms are settling with the Trump administration to head off executive orders that would make it difficult for them to represent clients with federal contracts or seek government regulatory approvals.But a few firms are fighting Mr. Trump’s executive orders in federal court, claiming the orders are unconstitutional and a form of retaliation for taking positions he doesn’t like. Judges have temporarily stayed the orders against Perkins Coie, WilmerHale and Jenner & Block from going into effect.
A fourth firm, Susman Godfrey, was hit with an executive order this week and became the latest firm to take on the Trump administration. Late Friday the firm filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington seeking to block the order from taking effect.
Lawyers from Munger, Tolles & Olson are representing Susman in the litigation. Munger is the same firm that helped organize an amicus brief filed by more than 500 law firms in support of Perkins Coie. But only a few large law firms signed on that legal filing.
Susman represented Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machine manufacturer, in a major defamation case against Fox News. The conservative cable news channel agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion to resolve the lawsuit. Dominion filed the lawsuit over misinformation the cable network spread about its role in the 2020 election, which Mr. Trump has repeatedly said was stolen from him.
“If President Trump’s Executive Orders are allowed to stand, future presidents will face no constraint when they seek to retaliate against a different set of perceived foes,” Susman’s 66-page complaint begins. “What for two centuries has been beyond the pale will become the new normal. Put simply, this could be any of us.”
Mr. Trump is going after law firms that have hired attorneys he perceives as his political enemies, represented causes he has opposed or refused to represent people because of their conservative and right-wing political beliefs. Some firms are also being targeted for their hiring practices that advance the principle of having a diverse work force.
The president has said repeatedly that diversity, equity and inclusion policies in hiring are illegal and discriminatory and that he intends to get rid of them. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in what has been seen as a related move, sent letters to 20 law firms last month requesting information about their D.E.I. practices.
Four of the firms that reached deals with Mr. Trump — Kirkland, Latham, Shearman and Simpson Thacher — had each received one of those letters. In settling, Mr. Trump said the E.E.O.C. had agreed not to pursue claims against those four firms. Later in the day, the E.E.O.C. announced a separate settlement with the four firms.
Law professors and others in the legal industry have praised the firms that are fighting the administration while criticizing those that have settled. The critics say the law firms that settle have succumbed to pressure tactics by the administration. And each new settlement only encourages Mr. Trump to become even more emboldened in his demands for free legal work.
The Trump administration seems to believe it is “developing a war chest of legal enlistees or conscripts” to do work for it, said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, who was an author on a recently published paper that called the executive orders unconstitutional retaliatory measures.
“Every kid learns, on the schoolyard, if you cave to a bully they will come back to bully you some more,” said Mr. Koh.
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7) Children Seeking Cholera Care Die After U.S. Cuts Aid, Charity Says
The victims died on a grueling three-hour walk in scorching heat as they tried to reach the nearest remaining health facility, officials of Save the Children said.
By Eve Sampson, April 11, 2025
A delivery of aid in South Sudan in 2023. The country is dependent on foreign aid, and its people face the compounding tragedies of war and malnutrition, making recent cholera outbreaks even more deadly. Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
At least five children and three adults with cholera died as they went in search of treatment in South Sudan after aid cuts by the Trump administration shuttered local health clinics during the country’s worst cholera outbreak in decades, the international charity Save the Children reported this week.
The victims, all from the country’s east, died on a grueling three-hour walk in scorching heat as they tried to reach the nearest remaining health facility, the agency said in a statement.
The American aid cuts, put into effect by the Trump administration in January, forced 7 of 27 health facilities supported by Save the Children across Akobo County to close and 20 others to partly cease operations, the charity said in a statement. Some clinics are now run only by volunteers, and they no longer have the means to transport sick patients to hospitals.
In an interview on Thursday, Christopher Nyamandi, Save the Children’s country director for South Sudan, said he had visited a health clinic in Akobo County that was providing nutrition assistance and helping with the cholera response shortly after the cuts were announced. The scene he described was dire.
Tents that were supposed to hold 25 people were crammed with hundreds, he said. People were sleeping outside, facing exposure to mosquitoes and withering heat while they tried recovering from cholera.
Mr. Nyamandi said health care workers on the scene described “how difficult it is to manage the situation where people are just out there. And when somebody dies,” he added, the workers can only “try to protect the children from seeing that scene.”
Cholera is caused by the ingestion of contaminated food or water and is often prevalent in areas where people are living in cramped conditions and amid poor sanitation. The disease can cause death by dehydration but is easily treated with medication that costs pennies.
South Sudan is in the midst of its worst cholera outbreak in two decades, the United Nation’s Children’s Fund said in a March statement. More than 47,000 suspected and confirmed cases have been reported there since September 2024, according to data from the World Health Organization.
The United States spent $760 million on aid for South Sudan in 2023, and the Trump administration’s aid cuts have worsened an already bleak humanitarian situation in a young nation teetering on the brink of war.
The Department of Government Efficiency, headed by the South Africa-born billionaire Elon Musk, has gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has been Washington’s primary distributor of foreign aid for decades. The State Department has been charged with taking over U.S.A.I.D.’s remaining responsibilities by mid-August.
U.S.A.I.D. and the State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
South Sudan has been dependent on foreign aid since its independence in 2011, and people there face the compounding tragedies of war and malnutrition, making cholera outbreaks even more deadly.
With the country plagued by widespread instability and lack of infrastructure, Mr. Nyamandi said he believes the number of cholera deaths are being underreported and are likely to rise with the aid cuts.
“The sudden withdrawal of funding that was the key to the survival of vulnerable families and children is going to result in more deaths,” he said.
Abdi Latif Dahir contributed reporting.
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8) Fear Shadows Many Children in Immigrant Families
Heightened immigration enforcement is stirring anxiety among children whose parents are vulnerable to deportation. “Every day I worry they could take my mom.”
By Miriam Jordan, April 12, 2025
Aianna and her siblings were born in the U.S., but both of their parents immigrated to the country. Credit...Jimena Peck for The New York Times
During President Trump’s first term in the White House, Nadene Casteel’s students at an elementary school near Houston lamented that his border wall, as they understood it, would prevent them from seeing their grandmothers and other relatives in Mexico.
These days, she said, they are terrified that immigration agents will take away their parents.
“I have had kids coming to school saying, ‘Daddy’s gone — Daddy can’t come home,’” she said.
Mr. Trump focused his immigration crackdown on the southern border during his first term. His administration separated thousands of migrant children from their parents after they had crossed into the United States. The policy was intended to discourage family migration, and it set off public outrage as images surfaced of weeping toddlers pulled from their mothers’ arms.
This time, Mr. Trump has shifted his attention to the interior of the country, as he seeks to fulfill his pledge to carry out mass deportations — a goal that has drawn relatively broad support. And teachers, parents and other caregivers say the very public detention and deportation effort is taking a particularly heavy toll on young people in immigrant families.
“Every day I worry they could take my mom,” Ximena, 11 — who was born in California and whose Mexican mother has lived in the United States for decades — said before breaking into tears.
Nine million children, 17 percent of all 5- to 17-year-olds, live in a U.S. household with at least one noncitizen adult who could be affected by immigration enforcement, according to a report released this month by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The share is one in three children in California and about one in four in Nevada, New Jersey and Texas.
Within hours of his inauguration, Mr. Trump’s administration rescinded a longstanding policy that had generally barred immigration agents from entering schools, houses of worship and other “sensitive” locations.
“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” said a statement issued by the Homeland Security Department that ricocheted across social media and news outlets.
There have been no reports of ICE actions inside schools. But rumors and, in some cases, sightings of agents around schools have stirred anxiety among parents and children.
“You say my child can be safe with you,” read a text from a parent to Ms. Casteel that she shared with The Times, “but the problem will be for us to go drop him off and pick him up later.”
As Times reporters have been interviewing people across the country about the impact of the crackdown, the effect on school-age children has emerged as a recurrent concern among psychologists, teachers and parents. They said many students were having trouble concentrating. Some were more fidgety. Others had become disruptive. And still others were notably subdued.
In interviews in Colorado, Ohio and Texas, young people talked about the impact on their lives.
Parents agreed to allow their children to speak to the Times on condition that only first names be published.
Manou, a Haitian girl in Columbus, Ohio, summed up her life in recent months like this: “We just go to school and back, school and home.”
Her family trekked to the southern border two years ago and found their way to Columbus, where they felt safe and settled.
They qualified for Temporary Protected Status, a U.S. program that shields people from deportation when they have come from countries in upheaval. Manou’s mother and father got jobs at FedEx.
But their routine has been upended by Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, she said.
Her parents kept Manou, who is a senior, and her two younger siblings home from school for a week after Mr. Trump was sworn in. Her 9-year-old sister still refuses to go to school many days, fearing ICE could separate her family.
Manou, who is 17, is not allowed to go to the gym or take her siblings to the public library.
Gone are outings with friends and trips to visit relatives in other states.
“We would go to the park, do barbecue with friends,” Manou said. “Now we can’t do anything.”
The Trump administration recently announced that it was terminating Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. While that decision is facing court challenges, her family worries that they would be forced to leave the country if they were stripped of the status.
Returning to Haiti, where much of the capital and some other parts of the country are no longer under government control, and violence is rampant, is an impossibility, she said.
“It’s so hard for us,” Manou said, fighting tears. “We are so tired. We are scared here. We are scared to go back to our country.”
But she has not lost hope. She has been accepted into a U.S. college and continues to nurture her dream of working for the F.B.I. or C.I.A.
Until this year, Aianna, the daughter of undocumented Mexicans, was a carefree 10-year-old girl whose biggest concern was making sure her pets — a bunny named Chopper, three cats and a dog — were happy and healthy.
Aianna’s family lives comfortably in Denver. Her father has a house-painting business. Like Aianna, her two siblings are also U.S.-born, including a sister who is in the Navy.
Aianna’s parents, who crossed the border three decades ago, tried to avoid discussing immigration issues in front of their fourth grader. But at school, children began talking about ICE.
One of her classmates, Jesus, shared that agents had come to his neighborhood.
She began fretting that they could take away her best friend, a Venezuelan girl in her class, with whom she spends lunch and recess. Aianna trusts her with secrets.
“I don’t want” the friend “to have to go back to Venezuela just because of the new ‘law,’” Aianna explained, saying that, as she understood it, “people can’t live here if they aren’t U.S. citizens.”
Amid intensified enforcement, Aianna’s mother decided to sit her daughter down to explain that a relative would come forward to care for her should ICE detain them. She reassured her that they would not be separated forever.
Aianna said that she couldn’t help but think about it.
“Sometimes, at night, it’s hard to fall asleep.”
In class, she said, “I worry and just zoom out.”
Anderson arrived in the United States two years ago from El Salvador, after his father, who had crossed the border a few years earlier, opened a car-repair shop in Columbus.
Anderson quickly mastered English.
A history buff, he often texts his teacher to ask for extra material — about the Marshall Plan, the Constitution, she said — and Anderson aspires to be a social studies teacher.
But Anderson and his father are in the country unlawfully.
Whenever there are rumors of ICE operations, or unfamiliar vehicles in their neighborhood, Anderson’s father urges him to stay home from school.
“I don’t want to do that, because the reason I go to school every day is because I want to be successful,” said Anderson, who is in 11th grade. “And, also, in my school I have a lot of teachers who help me and who protect me.”
So he goes to school every day but has scrapped soccer, bowling and baseball.
If he could, Anderson said, he would ask Mr. Trump to give him and other undocumented people the chance to stay and prove their worth.
“We are not criminals,” he said. “We are just trying to work hard.”
He added: “I’m scared, but I’m focused on my goals. That’s the only thing I try to think about.”
Melinda, 17, entered the country legally and has a pending application for a green card as a dependent of her mother, a refugee from Rwanda.
But each time that she and her mother leave their apartment in Columbus, they carry documents to prove that they are lawfully in the United States, just in case they are stopped by immigration agents or police officers.
Melinda is especially anxious for her friends who are undocumented, or who have undocumented parents.
“The president should deport criminals,” she said. “He should forgive people who work hard for this country and pay taxes.”
An honor roll student, she said that their plight had motivated her to become a lawyer.
Pabi, 17, will be the first in her family to attend college when she enrolls at the University of Colorado Boulder next fall.
But these days, she can’t help but wonder whether her parents and brother will still be in the United States when she graduates. They are undocumented.
“It’s that constant fear, like any moment in time your family could be stripped away,” she said, sitting on the steps of the State Capitol after participating an immigration rally in Denver last month.
Her parents sneaked across the border 25 years ago from Mexico. Since then, she said, they have consistently filed their tax returns, hoping that Congress would eventually pass immigration reform to adjust their status and that of others. However, the chance that that will happen has only grown slimmer, while the threat of deportation looms larger.
Her brother, 26, is a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era program that has protected from deportation hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants brought to the country as children. But DACA has been entangled in legal battles since Mr. Trump tried to end it during his first term, and its survival remains at risk.
On a recent evening, Pabi’s mother arrived home from her construction job in paint-splattered and dusty work clothes, washed up and helped her daughter slip into a gold, shimmery gown for senior prom.
She marveled at her daughter — all grown up, she said, ready to take part in a quintessential American ritual.
“See, this country is where we belong,” said Pabi, ‘‘where we celebrate special moments together and make happy memories.”
Then, on further reflection, she said, “It could start out as a good day, but we can’t be sure anymore that it will end that way.”
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9) Jewish Groups and Synagogues Defend Students Detained by ICE
More than two dozen are joining a legal effort to free a Tufts University student the Trump administration is trying to deport because of her pro-Palestinian views.
By Anemona Hartocollis, April 12, 2025
A flier calling for the release of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University graduate student, and Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
They are a group of progressive Jewish organizations and congregations, and they are coming to the defense of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Muslim graduate student at Tufts, who faces deportation after she helped write an essay critical of Israel.
The coalition includes synagogues in places like West Newton, Mass., San Francisco and the Upper West Side of New York, along with J-Street, a pro-Israel advocacy group. On Thursday, they filed a brief in federal court in Burlington, Vt., objecting to the tactics the government was using against Ms. Ozturk in the name of combating antisemitism.
In the brief, the groups argued she should be released from the Louisiana immigration detention center where she has been held for over two weeks, after masked immigration agents surrounded and arrested her on a street near her home in Somerville, Mass.
“Jewish people came to America to escape generations of similar predations,” the brief says. “Yet the images of Ozturk’s arrest in twenty-first century Massachusetts evoke the oppressive tactics employed by the authoritarian regimes that many ancestors of amici’s members left behind in Odessa, Kishinev, and Warsaw.”
There have been reports of almost 1,000 international students and scholars at universities across the country who have lost their legal status since mid-March, according to the Association of International Educators.
Anecdotally, the visas have typically been revoked with little or no notice and without telling the students what they might have done wrong. In some cases, students have committed legal infractions, like speeding or driving while drunk, according to universities and lawyers that are monitoring the revocations. But some have not. If the students do not leave voluntarily, they face deportation.
The Trump administration has defended the campaign, saying it is revoking the visas of students who have broken the law, who have engaged in antisemitic harassment and violence, who pose a threat to the foreign policy interests of the United States, or who are terrorist sympathizers. A few Jewish activists have applauded the effort, echoing the Trump administration’s mantra that “a visa is a privilege, not a right.”
But mainstream Jewish groups have expressed qualms about the crackdown, even while approving of the Trump administration’s focus on antisemitism.
As the number of students the Trump administration is targeting has grown, Jewish groups have said that while they may not like the views of pro-Palestinian students, they cannot condone students’ being swept up for vague reasons, without formal charges against them.
Ms. Ozturk’s detention followed the arrest two weeks earlier of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate who was a spokesman for pro-Palestinian protesters.
An immigration judge in Louisiana found on Friday that the Trump administration could deport Mr. Khalil. But he is still challenging the case in a separate court. In response to his case, the Boston chapter of Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff wrote an open letter, titled “Not in Our Name,” that has been signed by nearly 3,000 faculty and staff members and students at universities across the United States.
“We are united in denouncing, without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name — and cynical claims of antisemitism — to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities,” the letter reads.
Sara Coodin, the director of academic affairs for the American Jewish Committee, said some federal interventions, including congressional investigations of antisemitism on campus, had been “transformative” in forcing universities to confront problems on their campuses.
But she said Ms. Ozturk’s case appeared to be “a clear disregard on the part of the federal government for the rights of people on U.S. soil to speak their minds.”
The only evidence that has surfaced against her is an opinion essay she co-wrote that was critical of Israel.
“The idea that someone can be pulled off the street for something they wrote, something they think, really affects as all, and we all need to fight back against that,” said Elaine Landes, a member of Congregation Dorshei Tzedek, a Reconstructionist synagogue in West Newton, Mass., that is one of the parties to the court brief.
“The whole push to fight antisemitism, to me, feels like we’re being used for another agenda, and that is not going to keep our community safe,” she said. “We need to look out for others.”
Ryan Bauer, senior rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco, another signatory, said he supported Ms. Ozturk even though he disagreed with her essay. In it, she pushed for Tufts to end financial ties with Israel and to recognize Israeli conduct in Gaza as a genocide.
“I don’t like her statements — I think they’re wrong,” Rabbi Bauer said. But, he added, he believes in free speech, and “the beauty of America is that we don’t all agree with each other.”
He said he felt so strongly that Ms. Ozturk’s detention violated Jewish values that he talked about it in a recent sermon.
“When you see the floor fall out from under her, it’s naïve to think that those cracks won’t eventually reach our feet,” he said.
A federal judge in Vermont, where Ms. Ozturk spent a night in custody before being sent to Louisiana, is scheduled to hear her habeas corpus petition for release from detention on Monday.
Dana Goldstein and Vimal Patel contributed reporting.
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10) Stock Ownership Is What Really Divides Americans
By Matthew Walther, April 12, 2025
Mr. Walther is the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, and a contributing Opinion writer.
Adam Powell for The New York Times
In a pamphlet published in 1711, Jonathan Swift lamented the “folly” of those who “mistake the echo of a London coffeehouse for the voice of the kingdom.” Those informal salons were, he wrote, frequented by people whose wealth depended on their shares in the Bank of England or the East India Company or “some other stock.” If the responses to the Trump administration’s tariff policies have shown us anything, it is that, like most of the ills against which Swift railed, this unfortunate tendency to conflate stockholders with the nation remains very much with us.
The greatest division in American life is not between so-called red and blue states, or between urban and rural citizens, but instead between those who own stock and those who do not. For those who do, economic security can be measured in portfolio statements; the rest — roughly 40 percent of Americans — must make do with such antiquated metrics as the cost of housing or even the price of eggs.
This division is not merely economic; it is also ideological. Though many Americans own at least some stock, 10 percent of Americans own 93 percent of it. Yet the elite stock-owning class has convinced itself that what is good for the S&P 500 is good for America. Worse, many Americans who own stock through retirement plans or pension plans have been convinced to believe this, too, even though their interests tend not to align neatly with those of multimillionaires.
The result is a kind of ideological capture in which any policy that does not serve the immediate interests of shareholders is dismissed as reckless, radical or economically illiterate. The common good, insofar as it is considered at all, must first be translated into the language of market returns. Can anything be good if it does not make the line go up? The question (we are told) answers itself.
Like awed visitors to the oracle at Delphi, we consult the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 with solemn credulity, and their half-random fluctuations are taken as portents of divine favor, or else as intimations of the coming wrath of heaven’s gracious ones. All presidents — including Donald Trump — genuflect before this altar, and most of us implicitly regard any policy that displeases the great god Wall Street as a kind of sacrilege. We treat the stock market as the final arbiter of our collective well-being.
But the stock market is not synonymous with the health of the United States. It is not always even a particularly valuable reflection of the state of the economy. Treating it as such not only blinds us to the reality of material conditions; it has also made us incapable of distinguishing between broad-based prosperity and a top-heavy consolidation of wealth. In April 1990, the Dow Jones industrial average stood at 2,710. Despite the no doubt harrowing events of the last week and a half, it is currently at 40,200. Does anyone really believe that Americans are roughly 15 times as wealthy as they were 35 years ago? Even gross domestic product — another debatable metric — is only five times what it was 35 years ago.
Consider a series of alternative measures. In 1970, the median household income was less than $9,000. A new car cost about $3,400 and the average house $26,000. Today, median household incomes have risen to $80,000, but a new vehicle is somewhere in the neighborhood of $49,000, and the average home more than $400,000.
Even these figures do not tell the whole story. The median income half a century ago generally represented the work of a single wage earner, and the prices of automobiles reflected the costs of paying good wages to unionized employees. Today, dual-income households are the norm, and a significant number of cars and trucks are made by nonunion employees, most of them abroad.
These sorts of examples should be considered alongside social pathologies that are not always as easily quantifiable: the proliferation of gig work; the transformation of housing into a speculative asset class; the rise of a quasi-legal cannabis industry, payday lending and online gambling; the decline of reading; the atrophying of attention spans as virtually all facets of modern life are subsumed into digital communications technology. All of these things have, in a sense, been “good for the market.”
In the post-Cold War era, Americans have convinced themselves that economic decision making does not involve value judgments. When policies benefit the stock market, we imagine that they do so in accordance with an unassailable law of nature. But increasing shareholder value is just one possible goal. Another is increasing domestic steel production. Another is shifting the lower middle class away from aspirational “laptop” jobs to skilled trades. These are all political choices, no less than the decision to regulate or to privatize.
A bull market is not evidence of prosperity when real wages stagnate, housing becomes unaffordable, infrastructure crumbles. This is why we should be skeptical when the usual suspects — financial analysts, think-tank denizens, the perpetually aggrieved opponents of Mr. Trump — wring their hands over the supposed damage to “the economy.” What, exactly, is being lamented?
There are any number of possible criticisms — many of them warranted — of Mr. Trump’s erratic tariff policy. But our having spasmodic muscular contractions in the general direction of Wall Street is not one of them. If nothing else good comes from the chaos, the articulation of an overarching national goal that is not simply “making the number go up” would be a small step in the direction of something better.
When John F. Kennedy told the American people that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” one assumes that he did not envision a handful of yachts drifting off into the sunset while an entire fleet of rowboats capsized. That tide has certainly risen.
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11) Palm Sunday Was a Protest, Not a Procession
By Andrew Thayer, Mr. Thayer is an Episcopal priest, April 13, 2025
“We, too, live in the shadow of empire. Ours doesn’t speak Latin or wear togas, but its logic is familiar. Our economy prioritizes the 1 percent and puts corporate profits over worker dignity. Our laws enforce inequality in the criminal justice system, education and health care. Our military-industrial complex would be the envy of Rome. We extract, exploit, incarcerate, and we call it ‘law and order.’”
Ricardo Tomás
On Sunday, in cities around the world, Christians begin Holy Week by celebrating Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem for the final time before his death and resurrection. To mark the day, Christians recreate Jesus’ procession, often starting outside churches and winding down sidewalks and city streets waving palm branches.
Celebrations like this often miss an uncomfortable truth about Jesus’ procession: At the time, it was a deliberate act of theological and political confrontation. It wasn’t just pageantry; it was protest.
On that first Palm Sunday, there was another procession entering Jerusalem. From the west came Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, riding a warhorse and flanked by armed soldiers bedecked in the full pageantry of an oppressive empire. Every year during Passover, a Jewish festival celebrating liberation from Egyptian oppression and slavery, Pilate entered Jerusalem to suppress any unrest set off by that memory.
His arrival wasn’t ceremonial; it was tactical — a calculated show of force, what the Pentagon might now call “shock and awe.” It displayed not only Rome’s power but also Rome’s theology. Caesar was not just the emperor; he was deified and called “Son of a God” on coins and inscriptions. His rule was absolute, and the peace it promised came through coercion, domination and the threat of violence.
From the opposite direction, both literally and figuratively, came Jesus’ procession.
Jesus entered the city not on a warhorse but on a donkey, not with battalions but with beggars. His followers were peasants, fishermen, women and children — people without standing or status. They waved palm branches — symbols of Jewish resistance to occupation since the Maccabean revolt — and cried out “Hosanna!” which means “Save us.” Save us from a system of oppression disguised as order. Save us from those who tacitly endorse greed with pious language and prayers.
Jesus’ procession should be seen as a parody of imperial power: a deliberate mockery of Roman spectacle and a prophetic enactment of a kingdom not built on violence but on justice.
The next day, Jesus walked into the Temple, the heart of Jerusalem’s religious and economic life, and flipped the tables in the marketplace, which he described as “a den of robbers.” The Temple wasn’t just a house of prayer. It was a financial engine, operated by complicit leaders under the constraints and demands of the occupying empire. Jesus shuts it down. This is what gets him killed.
Jesus wasn’t killed for preaching love, or healing the sick, or discussing theology routinely debated in the Temple’s courtyards, or blasphemy (the punishment for which was stoning). Rome didn’t crucify philosophers or miracle workers. Rome crucified insurrectionists. The sign nailed above his head — “King of the Jews” — was a political indictment and public warning. Like with the killing of the prophets before him, the message sent with Jesus’s death was that those who demand justice will inevitably find themselves crushed.
Sound familiar?
We, too, live in the shadow of empire. Ours doesn’t speak Latin or wear togas, but its logic is familiar. Our economy prioritizes the 1 percent and puts corporate profits over worker dignity. Our laws enforce inequality in the criminal justice system, education and health care. Our military-industrial complex would be the envy of Rome. We extract, exploit, incarcerate, and we call it “law and order.”
And just like in Jesus’ day, political leaders defend this arrangement while religious leaders bless it. As the French writer Frédéric Bastiat warned, “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” That was true in first-century Jerusalem. It remains true today.
Since the 1980s, movements like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, and more recently, the New Apostolic Reformation, have not challenged the empire but rather sought to commandeer it. The Seven Mountain Mandate urges Christians to seize control of key sectors of society, including government, business, education and media. This is not a movement seeking to interrogate or challenge the injustice of empire. Quite the opposite. It is an ideology — a hunger for power and dominion — cloaked in pious language and baptized in the logic of empire. This is Christian nationalism in a nutshell.
Remember, Rome did not begin as an empire; it began as a republic. But over time, it ceded power to the few, tolerating cruelty, corruption and the consolidation of control, so long as it came wrapped in the promise of peace and prosperity. The emperor became both ruler and redeemer, venerated not for moral clarity but for the illusion of restored national greatness.
The false promise offered to both Romans and the people they conquered was that Caesar was divine — a chosen one, a lord. Today, Donald Trump is often cast in eerily similar terms by Christian nationalists: not as a moral leader, but as a figure who will deliver prosperity, protection, and cultural dominance, at least for a select few. To defy him, in this worldview, is not just to reject a man, but to reject a kind of sacred order. That impulse is not new. It is as old as Pilate’s procession.
But Jesus never sought to replace Caesar with a Christian Caesar. He came to dismantle the very logic of Caesar: the belief that might makes right, peace comes through violence and politics is best wielded through fear, coercion and control. Instead, he inaugurated a counter-kingdom that aspires to loving kindness, radical welcome, mercy and justice — a kingdom where the vulnerable and the poor are lifted up, and the idols of empire are exposed as frauds.
Waving palms on Palm Sunday connects us to justice, public life, discourse and action. We cannot remain silent on behalf of those who genuinely cry out “Hosanna … Save us.” At some point, we have to make a choice about the Jesus we claim to follow. Either he didn’t care about the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed — in which case we’ve built our religion on a hollow figure. Or he did care, deeply, and we’ve chosen to ignore that part because it challenges our comfort, our politics and our priorities.
Scripture’s power isn’t in magic or miracle, but in its witness, of people who loved boldly, acted justly, spoke truth to power, resisted empire and hoped defiantly in the face of despair. It is deeply relevant to modern life. The Resurrection, which Christians celebrate one week from Sunday, is not the reversal of Christ’s crucifixion. It is its vindication. It declares that even when the empire kills truth, truth still rises. That even when justice is crucified, it does not stay buried. The Caesars among us don’t get the final word.
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12) Israel Strikes Hospital in Gaza’s North and Captures Key Part of South
No one was killed but the attack hit the Ahli Arab Hospital, a mainstay of Gaza’s decimated health care system. Separately, Israel said its troops had expanded their occupation of southern Gaza.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 13, 2025
The Israeli military struck and destroyed part of a hospital in northern Gaza early on Sunday morning, shortly after telling patients and staff to evacuate the site. The attack came hours after the Israeli government announced that its troops fighting elsewhere in the territory had expanded their occupation of the southern Gaza Strip, severing links between two strategically located Palestinian cities.
No one was killed in the attack on the Ahli Arab Hospital, but a child being treated for a head injury died because of the rushed evacuation, according to a statement released by the Anglican Church in Jerusalem, which oversees the medical center. The strike destroyed a laboratory and damaged a pharmacy, the emergency department and a church at the hospital compound in Zeitoun, the statement added.
The hospital had become one of the last mainstays of the health care system in Gaza, where medical centers have been frequently damaged and besieged during the war that began with the Hamas-led October 2023 attack on Israel. The World Health Organization reported last month that 33 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals had been damaged during the war, and only 21 remained partly functional. The W.H.O. also warned on Saturday that hospitals in Gaza face a looming medicine shortage because Israel has blocked aid deliveries for six weeks.
The Ahli Arab hospital compound was first hit less than two weeks into the war, when a missile hit a parking lot on the site where dozens of displaced families were sheltering. Hamas blamed the strike on Israel, before Israel said it was caused by an errant rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group allied with Hamas. U.S. intelligence officials later said they had “high confidence” in the Israeli account.
The Israeli military acknowledged responsibility on Sunday for the latest strike on the hospital, saying without offering evidence that the site had housed a Hamas command center. Both the military and the Anglican Church said that Israeli soldiers had called the hospital to order its evacuation before the strike. Neither the hospital authorities nor Hamas responded to questions about whether the hospital had been used by Hamas fighters.
In a separate development, the Israeli defense minister announced on Saturday the capture of a strategic east-west thoroughfare in southern Gaza. That severs links between Rafah and Khan Younis, the two major cities in southern Gaza — and expands Israel’s occupation in that part of the enclave.
Israel calls thoroughfare the “Morag Corridor,” after a Jewish settlement in the area that was disbanded when Israeli troops evacuated Gaza in 2005.
The defense minister, Israel Katz, said that Israel had placed the entire region between the corridor and the Gaza-Egypt border — an area of some 25 square miles — within “Israel’s security zone.” The military said it had encircled the city of Rafah but had yet to establish operational control of every neighborhood.
Before breaking the cease-fire with Hamas in March, Israeli troops controlled only a sliver of land in southern Gaza along the territory’s borders with Egypt and Israel. But they began to expand their control in early April in what Israeli leaders said was a bid to pressure Hamas into releasing roughly 60 hostages — some believed to be dead — still held in the enclave.
Ameera Harouda contributed reporting from Doha, Qatar.
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13) Medic Missing After Gaza Attack Is in Israeli Custody, Aid Groups Say
Asaad al-Nasasra has not been heard from since the March 23 ambush by Israeli forces, which left 15 aid workers dead and drew international condemnation.
By Vivian Yee, Reporting from Cairo, April 13, 2025
A still image from a cellphone video taken by a paramedic and released by the Palestinian Red Crescent showed the moments before he and other rescue workers were killed by Israelis in Gaza on March 23. Credit...Palestinian Red Crescent Society, via Associated Press
A Gaza paramedic for the Palestine Red Crescent Society who has been missing since Israeli forces ambushed a group of ambulances and other aid vehicles in late March is in Israeli custody, the Red Crescent and the International Committee of the Red Cross said on Sunday.
Israeli forces killed 15 other rescue and aid workers in the same attack, buried their bodies in a mass grave and crushed their ambulances, their fire truck and a United Nations vehicle — actions that have drawn international condemnation and scrutiny.
Witnesses have said that Asaad al-Nasasra, 47, the paramedic who disappeared after the March 23 attack, survived but was detained and taken away by Israeli soldiers. But there had been no official word of his whereabouts until Sunday, when the Red Crescent said the I.C.R.C. had notified it that he was being held by Israel.
The Red Cross said in a statement that it had received information that Mr. al-Nasasra was being held “in an Israeli place of detention.”
Asked for comment, the Israeli military replied with a statement that it had released last week saying that it was still investigating the attack. It has said it will not comment further until the investigation is complete.
The Israeli military has offered changing explanations for why its troops fired on the emergency vehicles, first saying that they had been “advancing suspiciously” without their lights on until a video of the attack contradicted that account. It initially said nine of those killed had been operatives from Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group, before saying, without providing evidence, that six operatives were killed in the attack.
Nebal Farsakh, a Red Crescent spokeswoman, said the organization had been given no other information about Mr. al-Nasasra’s condition or why he remained in detention.
Mr. al-Nasasra, who has worked for the Red Crescent for almost 16 years, is married with six children, she said. He is from Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, but was living in a tent with his family after being displaced during the war, she said.
Mr. al-Nasasra was part of a convoy of emergency crews sent by the Red Crescent and Gaza’s Civil Defense, another rescue service, to search for a Red Crescent ambulance that had disappeared earlier in the morning of March 23. Israeli forces had opened fire on that first ambulance, killing two members of its crew and detaining the third, Munther Abed, according to both the Israeli military and Mr. Abed, who was later released.
When the rescue convoy arrived on the scene and paramedics got out to look at the first ambulance, Israeli soldiers began shooting again in a barrage that lasted about five minutes, according to the video of the attack, which was discovered on the cellphone of one of the paramedics who was killed, published by The New York Times and later released by the Red Crescent.
Soldiers found Mr. al-Nasasra alive after firing on the convoy and detained him alongside Mr. Abed, the survivor from the first ambulance, Mr. Abed told The Times in an interview. Two other witnesses who were held with the paramedics — Saeed al-Bardawil, a doctor, and his 12-year-old son, Mohammed, who had been detained as they headed to the beach to fish — confirmed Mr. Abed’s account.
Mr. al-Nasasra was stripped, handcuffed and blindfolded, Mr. Abed and Dr. al-Bardawil recalled.
The two paramedics spoke in whispers about the fate of their colleagues, Mr. Abed said. The Israeli soldiers detaining them later questioned the paramedics, asking them for their names, ages and ID card numbers, and appeared to scan their faces with a device Mr. Abed did not recognize, Mr. Abed said.
At some point, Mr. Abed and Dr. al-Bardawil recalled, Mr. al-Nasasra was taken elsewhere and they had no more contact with him.
In all, Israeli troops killed eight Red Crescent paramedics, six other emergency responders from the Civil Defense, and a United Nations worker who happened to drive by later that morning, according to the Red Crescent and the Civil Defense. Their bodies were not found for days.
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