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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) 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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2) 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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3) 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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4) DOGE Goons Physically Drag Social Security Worker From Desk
By Liam Archacki, News Reporter, Updated Apr. 13, 2025
Photo Illustration by Eric Faison/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
A senior executive at the Social Security Administration was physically dragged from his office this week after clashing with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), according to The Washington Post.
Greg Pearre, a career civil servant who led an IT team working on the agency’s data systems, was removed over his opposition to a DOGE plan to cut off immigrants from key financial services, three people told the Post.
The scheme cooked up by Elon Musk’s DOGE squad falsely lists thousands of migrants as dead in a Social Security database known as the “death master file.”
Being entered into the death database cuts a person off from crucial financial services, like the ability to receive government benefits and access a bank account or credit card. The goal was to push migrants who were granted a temporary legal status under former President Joe Biden to “self deport.”
Jim Francis, a consumer law lawyer who is suing Social Security for wrongly entering a Maryland woman into the file, cast the repercussions in dire terms.
“It’s the source of that data that the whole world uses, which is why, if it’s inaccurate, it has such devastating impacts on people,” he told the Post. “Overnight, you literally become financially paralyzed.”
Tom Kind, a 90-year-old retiree in Colorado, told the Post that he had experienced being listed as dead, calling it a “nightmare.” In addition to losing benefits and health coverage, he faced a challenge convincing the agency that he was still alive. After jumping through a number of bureaucratic hoops, he had to show up to an office in person for an interview, proving he was alive.
“That’s not any fun,” he said.
DOGE had been working on a strategy to push out immigrants since February. A group of about a dozen civil servants from Social Security were assigned to help Musk’s goons—and agents from the Department of Homeland Security—with the plot. Many career staff were worried that the project was wrong or illegal, a former senior official told the Post.
Leland Dudek, Social Security’s acting commissioner, who has signaled his willingness to carry out DOGE’s plans previously, worried that this scheme might be illegal, insiders told the Post.
Nevertheless, under pressure from President Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, he acquiesced, signing two memorandums on Monday that allowed the database change. More than 6,000 migrants were listed as dead despite being alive.
Pearre, the civil servant who had pushed back against the action, was removed two days later. He declined to comment to the Post, as did Dudek.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the paper that the death file move was justified and downplayed the internal opposition.
“The Trump Administration is protecting lawful American citizens and their hard-earned Social Security benefits, and ensuring illegal immigrants will no longer receive such economic entitlements,” she said. “Anyone who disagrees with the common sense policies of this Administration can find a new job.”
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5) Trump will meet the leader of El Salvador, where deported migrants face prison.
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Reporting from Washington, April 14, 2025
President Trump will meet with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador at the White House on Monday as the administration ramps up its use of a notorious Salvadoran prison for holding migrants deported by the United States.
In Mr. Bukele, who has referred to himself as the world’s “coolest dictator,” Mr. Trump has found a willing partner in a plan for deportations with little or no due process. The removal of the migrants to the prison, known as CECOT, has become a flashpoint in the administration’s attempt to skirt normal immigration practice and the role of the courts in reviewing Mr. Trump’s executive power.
Just a day before the meeting between the two leaders, the Trump administration once again tried to resist a federal judge’s order to bring back a Maryland man who was unlawfully deported to the prison. In a legal filing on Sunday, the Justice Department argued that the courts lacked the ability to dictate steps the White House should take to return the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, because only the president had the power to handle U.S. foreign policy.
The Trump administration has fought against returning Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three, despite admitting in court that his removal was an “administrative error.” In 2019, an immigration judge had barred the United States from deporting the man by finding that he might face violence or torture if sent to El Salvador. That did not stop the United States from deporting him and scores of other migrants to El Salvador last month.
The Trump administration has justified its use of a wartime authority to deport the migrants to El Salvador by alleging that they are members of violent gangs like MS-13, which originated in the United States and operates in South America, and the Venezuelan criminal group Tren de Aragua.
While some of the deportees had criminal convictions, court papers have shown that the evidence the government has relied on to label some of them as gang members was often little more than whether they had tattoos or had worn clothing associated with a criminal organization.
The Trump administration doubled down on its incarceration agreement with Mr. Bukele on Sunday when it announced that it had sent 10 more people alleged to be members of the two gangs to El Salvador over the weekend.
In announcing those deportations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the alliance between Mr. Trump and Mr. Bukele had “become an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere.”
Mr. Bukele has also found an opening on the global stage in opening the doors of his prison system to Mr. Trump.
While the Biden administration accused Mr. Bukele and the Salvadoran government of secretly negotiating a pact with certain gang leaders, the Trump administration has fully embraced his tough-on-crime persona.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Bukele have paired their aggressive enforcement tactics with a highly sensationalized public relations campaign on social media. Both leaders have faced accusations of undermining democratic institutions.
After a surge of gang violence in El Salvador, Mr. Bukele imposed a state of emergency that has yet to be lifted, in addition to directing police and the military forces to carry out mass arrests. Many of the 85,000 Salvadorans who were arrested disappeared into the prison system without trial and without their families knowing whether they were alive.
“Human rights, democratic norms and the rule of law have all but disappeared in El Salvador,” said Amanda Strayer, senior counsel for accountability at the advocacy group Human Rights First. “The United States should be holding Bukele’s government accountable for these serious violations, but instead the Trump administration is cozying up to and copying Bukele’s authoritarian playbook — rounding up people with no evidence, denying them any due process and disappearing them in abusive Salvadoran prisons indefinitely.”
Still, Mr. Bukele’s popularity has soared, and he was re-elected in a landslide last year. The Trump administration just last week changed a travel advisory for El Salvador, grouping it with some of the least dangerous countries for Americans to visit.
Mr. Bukele described the decision on social media as akin to receiving a “gold star.”
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6) Lawyers for Venezuelan immigrants mount a challenge in Colorado over the Alien Enemies Act.
By Alan Feuer, Feuer covers legal action surrounding President Trump’s deportation plans, April 14, 2025
The American Civil Liberties Union filed another lawsuit on Monday seeking to stop the Trump administration from using a powerful wartime statute to deport to El Salvador immigrants from Venezuela who have been accused of being violent gang members.
The lawsuit, brought in Federal District Court in Colorado, was the third of its kind filed in recent days, joining similar legal challenges that were filed last week in Texas and New York.
Lawyers for the A.C.L.U. brought the suit on behalf of two men — known in court papers only by the their initials, D.B.U. and R.M.M. The men claim they have been wrongly accused by the administration of being members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.
Court papers say that D.B.U., 32, was arrested on Jan. 26 at a gathering that federal drug and immigration agents have repeatedly described as a Tren de Aragua party. After his arrest, the papers say, he denied being a member of the gang and has not been charged with any crime.
Federal agents arrested R.M.M., 25, last month after they saw him standing with three other Hispanic men near their vehicles outside a residence in Colorado that was under surveillance as part of an investigation into Tren de Aragua, court papers said.
R.M.M. has claimed that he had nothing to do with the gang and had gone to the location with friends “to meet a prospective buyer for his vehicle at a public meeting,” the papers said.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport scores of Venezuelan immigrants have set off one of the most contentious legal battles of his second term. It began last month, after the president invoked the act, which has been used only three times since it was passed in 1798, to authorize the deportation of people he claimed were members of Tren de Aragua.
The A.C.L.U. immediately began fighting Mr. Trump’s use of the act, which the administration has already employed to deport more than 100 Venezuelan immigrants to the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador, known for its human rights violations.
The initial challenge by the A.C.L.U. was brought in Washington, where a federal judge, James E. Boasberg, issued an order to temporarily stop the deportation flights to El Salvador. Judge Boasberg expressed concern that the immigrants who fell subject to Mr. Trump’s proclamation had no way to contest whether they were gang members in the first place.
A federal appeals court in Washington subsequently agreed with him, finding that, at this early stage, it appeared unlikely that the Alien Enemies Act could be applied as Mr. Trump was trying to use it.
Then last week, the Supreme Court weighed in, ruling that immigrants subject to deportation under the act needed to be given notice before being removed from the country so that they could challenge the process in court. But those challenges, the justices said, were required to be made in the places where the immigrants were being held.
That prompted the A.C.L.U. to scramble to locate any Venezuelans who might be subject to Mr. Trump’s proclamation. They have so far located immigrants in Texas, New York and Colorado and the lawsuits filed on their behalf were temporary measures meant to keep them in the country until the underlying legal questions involving the administrations use of the Alien Enemies Act were resolved.
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7) Harvard’s Decision to Resist Trump Is ‘of Momentous Significance’
But a fight with the nation’s oldest, richest and most elite university is a battle that President Trump and his powerful aide, Stephen Miller, want to have.
By Elisabeth Bumiller, Reporting from Washington, Published April 14, 2025, Updated April 15, 2025
"In the administration’s effort to break what it sees as liberalism’s hold on higher education, Harvard is big game. A high-profile court battle would give the White House a platform to continue arguing that the left has become synonymous with antisemitism, elitism and suppression of free speech."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/harvard-trump.html
Harvard University is 140 years older than the United States, has an endowment greater than the G.D.P. of nearly 100 countries and has educated eight American presidents. So if an institution was going to stand up to the Trump administration’s war on academia, Harvard would be at the top of the list.
Harvard did that forcefully on Monday in a way that injected energy into other universities across the country fearful of the president’s wrath, rejecting the Trump administration’s demands on hiring, admissions and curriculum. Some commentators went so far as to say that Harvard’s decision would empower law firms, the courts, the media and other targets of the White House to push back as well.
“This is of momentous, momentous significance,” said J. Michael Luttig, a prominent former federal appeals court judge revered by many conservatives. “This should be the turning point in the president’s rampage against American institutions.”
Michael S. Roth, who is the president of Wesleyan University and a rare critic of the White House among university administrators, welcomed Harvard’s decision. “What happens when institutions overreach is that they change course when they meet resistance,” he said. “It’s like when a bully is stopped in his tracks.”
Within hours of Harvard’s decision, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the university, along with a $60 million contract.
That is a fraction of the $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives, with $7 billion going to the university’s 11 affiliated hospitals in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including Massachusetts General, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The remaining $2 billion goes to research grants directly for Harvard, including for space exploration, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and tuberculosis.
It was not immediately clear what programs the funding freeze would affect.
Harvard, the nation’s richest as well as oldest university, is the most prominent object of the administration’s campaign to purge “woke” ideology from America’s college campuses. The administration’s demands include sharing its hiring data with the government and bringing in an outside party to ensure that each academic department is “viewpoint diverse.”
Columbia University, which faced a loss of $400 million in federal funding, last month agreed to major concessions the government demanded, including that it install new oversight of its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department.
In a letter on Monday, Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, refused to stand down. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” he wrote.
The administration’s fight with Harvard, which had an endowment of $53.2 billion in 2024, is one that President Trump and Stephen Miller, a powerful White House aide, want to have. In the administration’s effort to break what it sees as liberalism’s hold on higher education, Harvard is big game. A high-profile court battle would give the White House a platform to continue arguing that the left has become synonymous with antisemitism, elitism and suppression of free speech.
Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard psychologist who is also a president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, said on Monday that it was “truly Orwellian” and self-contradictory to have the government force viewpoint diversity on the university. He said it would also lead to absurdities.
“Will this government force the economics department to hire Marxists or the psychology department to hire Jungians or, for that matter, for the medical school to hire homeopaths or Native American healers?” he said.
Harvard has not escaped the problems that roiled campuses nationwide after the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. In his letter, Dr. Garber said the university had taken steps to address antisemitism, support diverse viewpoints and protect free speech and dissent.
Those same points were made in a letter to the administration from two lawyers representing Harvard, William A. Burck and Robert K. Hur.
Mr. Burck is also an outside ethics adviser to the Trump Organization and represented the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in the deal it recently reached with the Trump administration.
Mr. Hur, who worked in the Justice Department in Mr. Trump’s first term, was the special counsel who investigated President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s handling of classified documents and termed him “an elderly man with a poor memory,” enraging Mr. Biden.
Both lawyers understand the legal workings of the current administration, an expertise of benefit to Harvard.
“Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community,” Mr. Burck and Mr. Hur wrote in the letter, addressed to the acting general counsels of the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services and to a commissioner within the General Services Administration. “But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”
Representative Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican who held hearings last year investigating antisemitism on college campuses, including at Harvard, was withering in a social media post.
“Harvard University has rightfully earned its place as the epitome of the moral and academic rot in higher education,” Ms. Stefanik, a Harvard graduate, wrote. She added that “it is time to totally cut off U.S. taxpayer funding to this institution that has failed to live up to its founding motto Veritas. Defund Harvard.”
It is unclear what other measure the Trump administration could take against Harvard for its resistance, although potential actions could include an investigation of its nonprofit status and further cancellations of the visas of international students.
The president of the American Council of Education, Ted Mitchell, said that Harvard’s action was essential.
“If Harvard had not taken this stand,” he said, “it would have been nearly impossible for other institutions to do so.”
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8) Columbia Activist Arrested by ICE at His Appointment for Citizenship
Mohsen Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident, has lived in the United States for 10 years and was arrested in Vermont. He has not been charged with a crime.
By Sharon Otterman and Ana Ley, April 14, 2025
A demonstration organized by Jewish Voice for Peace outside the Manhattan offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement called for the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student who is facing deportation. Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times
Mohsen Mahdawi, an organizer of pro-Palestinian demonstrations last year at Columbia University, was detained by immigration officials on Monday after arriving for an appointment in Vermont that he thought was a step toward becoming a U.S. citizen, his lawyers said.
Hours later, Mr. Mahdawi’s mother, older sister and lawyers were scrambling to find him after his abrupt detention at an immigration center in Colchester, Vt. His lawyers requested a temporary restraining order to prevent federal officials from transferring him to a more conservative jurisdiction — a tactic used in the detention and attempted deportation of at least four other college demonstrators.
A Vermont federal judge, William K. Sessions III, swiftly granted that request, ordering that Mr. Mahdawi, an outspoken critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, not be removed from the United States or transferred out of Vermont until he orders otherwise. His lawyers said that as of Monday afternoon, they had confirmed that he was still in Vermont.
“This is their M.O.,” Mr. Mahdawi’s lawyer, Luna Droubi, said. “They just continue to hide the individual to the point where their attorneys can’t quite understand or identify where to file. And so, you know, we’re operating blind, and they have all the information, and yet we’re tasked with attempting to file in the right jurisdiction.”
A green card holder for the past 10 years, Mr. Mahdawi is the latest Palestinian student to be caught in the Trump administration dragnet that has been targeting foreign students involved in pro-Palestinian organizing on U.S. college campuses.
Mr. Mahdawi was born and raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank, where he lived until he moved to the United States in 2014, according to a petition filed by his lawyers on Monday demanding his immediate release. His arrest was first reported by The Intercept.
He is finishing his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Columbia’s School of General Studies and was planning to enroll as a master’s degree student at its international affairs school in the fall.
Representatives for Columbia declined to comment, citing federal student privacy regulations.
Mr. Mahdawi has not been accused of a crime. According to his lawyers, the Trump administration appears to be seeking his removal from the country under the same legal provision that it is using to detain another recent Columbia student and Palestinian, Mahmoud Khalil, contending that his presence is a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States. Immigration officials have argued that pro-Palestinian demonstrators have enabled the spread of antisemitism, but they have not offered evidence to substantiate the claim.
After the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Mr. Mahdawi, who is in his mid-30s, co-founded Dar: the Palestinian Student Society at Columbia University, with Mr. Khalil, to “celebrate Palestinian culture, history and identity,” according to his lawyers’ petition. He also helped found Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a broader coalition that went on to lead many pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus, pushing the university to divest from Israel.
But Mr. Mahdawi took a step back from student organizing in March 2024, before the establishment of encampments on campus and the takeover of a campus building, Hamilton Hall. In interviews at the time, he said this was driven in part by his immigration status and his beliefs as a practicing Buddhist. For two years, he was the president of the Columbia University Buddhist Association.
He spoke publicly about his experience as a child seeing his best friend killed by an Israeli soldier, mentioning it during a “60 Minutes” interview in December 2023. But he also said he wanted a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“My motivation comes out of love now, not out of anger, not out of hate,” he said in an interview.
As with Mr. Khalil, several hard-line pro-Israel groups have been agitating online for Mr. Mahdawi’s detention and deportation since President Trump’s return to the White House.
Betar USA, one of those groups, posted on X on Jan. 30 that “visa holder Mohsen Mahdawi is on our deport list.” In March, they repeated that, posting “Mohsen Mahdawi is next and also on the deport list.”
He was also profiled by Canary Mission, another group naming students and calling for action to be taken against those they assert are pro-Hamas.
On Monday morning, Mr. Mahdawi turned up for an interview he had been told was related to his naturalization. Instead, immigration officers, some with their faces covered, placed Mr. Mahdawi in handcuffs and arrested him, according to a statement Monday from Vermont’s two senators, Bernie Sanders, an Independent, and Peter Welch, a Democrat, and Representative Becca Balint, a Democrat.
Mr. Mahdawi, whose permanent address is in White River Junction, Vt., had sought help from the lawmakers before his appointment, fearing the worst.
They denounced his arrest and demanded his release.
“This is immoral, inhumane, and illegal,” the three lawmakers said in a statement. “Mr. Mahdawi, a legal resident of the United States, must be afforded due process under the law and immediately released from detention.”
Mr. Mahdawi’s friend Mikey Baratz described him as deeply empathetic and said that, at his core, Mr. Mahdawi believed that all humans deserved to be treated with dignity. Mr. Mahdawi reached out to Mr. Baratz about six months ago because he wanted to meet Israeli students at Columbia — Mr. Baratz is Jewish and was born and raised in Israel until he left at the age of 12.
They would spend hours talking about their lives and found surprising common ground. Mr. Baratz, who graduated from Columbia in December with a master’s degree in international security policy, recently applied for a job at The New York Times.
“This is a Palestinian. I’m an Israeli. Our people are at war,” Mr. Baratz, 31, said. “And his willingness to actually hear and actively learn and understand the Israeli experience — I mean, I’ve never met anyone who so quickly was willing to take feedback.”
Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.
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9) Harvard’s Strength and How Far We’ve Fallen So Quickly
By M. Gessen, Opinion Columnist, April 14, 2025
Harvard’s response was a significant shift in tone for the nation’s most influential university. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
The world’s most famous university has done the right thing, and this is major news. It shouldn’t be. But less than three months into the second Trump administration, we are surprised by simple dignity. Capitulation would have garnered smaller headlines.
On Friday, the Trump administration sent a five-page letter to Harvard accusing the university of failing “to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.” The letter demanded that the university change its governance structure; overhaul its admissions policies; submit to an external audit of the medical school, the School of Public Health, the Divinity School and several other programs that the letter claimed have “egregious records of antisemitism or other bias”; revamp student-discipline procedures; “end support” and withdraw university recognition of several pro-Palestinian student groups and the National Lawyers Guild; and commit to a process of reform running “at least until the end of 2028,” during which the university would submit quarterly reports on its compliance with the government’s demands. In the manner of a racketeer, the letter implied, without quite spelling it out, that if the university failed to comply, it would lose its federal funding.
The letter came from the Education Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration. These are all agencies that can have a role in overseeing the university. Laws and rules exist for such oversight. They involve negotiations, investigations and, when it comes to federal funding, congressional procedures, complete with periods of public notice. This process is complicated by design — a design intended to protect universities from capricious, politically motivated meddling and to make the withdrawal of federal funding an option of last resort.
But the Trump administration pulls funds first and negotiates second, dispensing with the rest of the process. Its first target was Columbia University. When that school acceded to the administration’s demands, it didn’t get its funding back. Instead, the administration is reportedly considering demanding that Columbia agree to direct government oversight — effectively, a takeover of the university.
Harvard chose a different response from Columbia’s. On Monday, its lawyers sent a letter to the administration pointing out that the administration was in violation of the law. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” the letter said. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms.”
No other response should have been possible by the logic of the law — or the logic of academic freedom or the logic of democracy. And yet, the Harvard lawyers’ letter sent waves of excitement through academic circles. This is a measure of how low, and how fast, our expectations have fallen.
One of the people who seemed surprised was Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican and the self-appointed gendarme of higher education who issued a statement declaring Harvard the “epitome of the moral and academic rot in higher education.”
Trump administration officials, on Monday evening, promptly announced what they had suggested: that they will freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants.
Still, one hopes that other universities that find themselves in the administration’s cross-hairs — and there are many of them now — follow Harvard’s example and make self-respect, and respect for the law, unsurprising again.
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10) Director of Field Hospital in Southern Gaza Says Israeli Strike Killed a Guard
Israel’s military did not immediately comment on the report, which came two days after it attacked the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 15, 2025
Palestinians inspect the damage after Israel’s attack on the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on Sunday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
An Israeli strike killed a security guard and wounded 10 patients at a field hospital in southern Gaza on Tuesday, according to the director of the medical facility.
The deadly attack on the grounds of the Kuwait Specialty Field Hospital in Khan Younis came two days after an Israeli strike hit one of the enclave’s last functioning medical centers: the Ahli Arab Hospital compound in Gaza City. The strikes highlighted the precarious state of Gaza’s health care sector, which has been decimated by the war.
Israel’s military — which has said the strike on Ahli Arab hospital targeted a Hamas command center, without providing evidence — said it was looking into the reports about an attack on the Kuwait Specialty Field Hospital.
Dr. Suhaib al-Hamss, the field hospital’s director, said that the guard was killed protecting the entrance to the facility. Four of the wounded suffered serious injuries, he added, noting the attack hit the edge of the hospital grounds.
“It was a powerful strike,” Dr. al-Hamss, 37, said in a phone interview. “Everything fell over.”
Others at the hospital said the strike prompted patients to flee the hospital.
“It was a terrifying moment,” said Mohammed Abu Ghali, a field coordinator for HEAL Palestine, an American nongovernmental organization that funds the field hospital.
Israel’s military offensive has caused immense damage to hospitals and the health care system in the enclave. The World Health Organization reported last month that 33 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals had been damaged and that only 21 remained partly functional. On Saturday it warned that hospitals in Gaza face a looming medicine shortage because Israel has blocked aid deliveries for six weeks.
Israeli officials say that medical centers have been targeted because Hamas fighters embed themselves within and under the facilities, and that it is the only way to root out the armed group. Hamas and medical workers have denied this accusation.
Evidence examined by The New York Times suggests that Hamas has used Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City — which the Israeli military has raided — for cover and stored weapons inside it. The Israeli military has not presented similarly expansive evidence about most of the other health care centers it has attacked.
Dr. al-Hamss said that the Kuwait Specialty Field Hospital’s location was known to the Israeli authorities as it had been shared through intermediaries before the attack. He added that staff were vetted and that Hamas government offices were not hosted at the medical facility.
“We’re not doing anything other than medicine,” he said.
The Kuwait Specialty Field Hospital was treating a minimum of 3,500 patients every day, according to Dr. al-Hamss.
“The hospital,” he said, “is providing a solution to the people in light of the collapse of the heath sector in Gaza.”
Since the collapse last month of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, Israel’s military has embarked on a major bombing campaign and seized territory in Gaza. Israeli officials have said the offensive is a bid to compel Hamas to release more hostages held in the enclave.
More than 1,600 people have been killed in Gaza since the cease-fire fell apart — among the more than 51,000 killed since the start of the war, according to figures from the Gaza health ministry. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its casualty counts.
Doctors at hospitals in Gaza have said that many of those wounded and killed in recent weeks have been children. On April 3, more than a dozen wounded children were seen in the emergency room of the Ahli Arab Hospital following Israeli strikes on a nearby school turned shelter. The Israeli military — which has also accused Hamas of embedding in schools — later said those strikes were targeting well-known militants in a Hamas command center, without naming them.
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting to this article.
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11) A judge demands that the government provide details of its effort to return a wrongly deported man.
By Alan Feuer reporting from the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Md., April 16, 2025
A federal judge scolded the Trump administration on Tuesday for dragging its feet in complying with a Supreme Court order that directed the White House to “facilitate” the release of a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to a prison in El Salvador last month.
“To date nothing has been done,” the judge, Paula Xinis, told a lawyer for the Justice Department. “Nothing.”
The stern words came during a hearing in Federal District Court in Maryland, where Judge Xinis said that she intended to force Trump officials to answer questions — both in writing and in depositions — about what they had done so far to get the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, out of the prison.
Noting that every passing day was another that Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three, suffered harm in Salvadoran custody, the judge set up a fast schedule for officials to provide documents and sit for depositions.
“We’re going to move,” she said. “There will be no tolerance for gamesmanship or grandstanding.”
The hearing came only one day after President Trump said at an Oval Office news conference that he was powerless in seeking Mr. Abrego Garcia’s freedom. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, sitting beside Mr. Trump, said he had no intention of releasing the man.
The case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, a sheet metal worker the Trump administration accused of being a member of the violent street gang MS-13, has emerged in recent days as yet another flashpoint in Mr. Trump’s aggressive plans to deport immigrants the government has deemed to be criminals, even if there is little evidence to support its claims.
It has also become the latest test of the White House’s willingness to defy court orders and potentially shatter the traditional, but increasingly fragile, balance of power between the executive and judicial branches.
Three courts, including the Supreme Court, have now ruled that the White House is required to take at least some steps toward freeing Mr. Abrego Garcia from a notorious Salvadoran prison, known as CECOT, where he was sent with scores of other migrants on March 15.
Until this week, the Trump administration had acknowledged that he had been inadvertently deported in violation of a previous court order that prohibited him from being sent to El Salvador. On Tuesday, however, top officials, including Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s chief domestic policy adviser, changed course, suddenly declaring that the deportation had been purposeful and legal.
During the hearing, Judge Xinis, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, clearly signaled that she wanted to get to the bottom of the administration’s obfuscations and delays. She couched her decision to compel Trump officials to reveal what they had done behind the scenes as a first step toward figuring out if the administration had been acting in bad faith and ignoring court orders.
In her initial order directing the White House to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador, Judge Xinis found that the Trump administration had flown him out of the country “without notice, legal justification or due process.”
Moreover, she chided government officials for having made “a grievous error” by deporting him, adding that the White House, by then refusing to retrieve him from one of the most “inhumane and dangerous prisons in the world,” had exposed him to harm that “shocks the conscience.”
Days later, a federal appeals court agreed with her, likening Mr. Abrego Garcia’s removal from the United States to an official kidnapping and expressing outrage that the Trump administration appeared to have simply abdicated any responsibility to rescue him.
“The facts of this case thus present the potential for a disturbing loophole: namely that the government could whisk individuals to foreign prisons in violation of court orders and then contend, invoking its Article II powers, that it is no longer their custodian, and there is nothing that can be done,” a member of the three-judge panel wrote. “It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone.”
When the Supreme Court weighed in, its decision was nuanced and somewhat ambiguous.
The justices endorsed Judge Xinis’s view that the administration needed to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return, but they stopped short of actually ordering it, indicating that even federal courts may not have the authority to require the executive branch to do such an action.
At one point in Tuesday’s hearing, Drew Ensign, a lawyer for the Justice Department, said that the administration agreed that it had to facilitate Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release. But Mr. Ensign advanced a narrow definition of the word, suggesting that the White House could take an entirely passive posture in the matter.
“If Abrego Garcia presents himself at a port of entry,” Mr. Ensign told Judge Xinis, “we will facilitate his entry to the United States.”
Judge Xinis appeared to be skeptical that the White House could simply sit back and wait for someone else to free Mr. Abrego Garcia, pointing out that the word “facilitate” required a more proactive stance.
“Defendants therefore remain obligated, at a minimum, to take the steps available to them toward aiding, assisting, or making easier Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador,” she wrote in an order filed shortly after the hearing ended.
A Salvadoran citizen, Mr. Abrego Garcia was thrust into the national spotlight last month when his family sued the government, claiming he had been wrongfully deported to El Salvador on March 15 along with scores of other Salvadoran men and Venezuelans.
He came to the United States illegally in 2011 and eight years later was arrested while looking for work at a Home Depot in Maryland. An immigration judge initially ordered his deportation, but ultimately determined that he should not be sent back to his homeland because he might face persecution there.
The ruling, known as a “withholding from removal” order, meant that he could stay in the United States with a measure of legal protection.
Last month, however, Mr. Abrego Garcia was suddenly pulled over by federal immigration agents who accused him of being a member of MS-13 and inaccurately told him that his protected status had changed. Within three days, he was on a plane with other migrants to CECOT, which is known for its human rights violations.
In her written order, Judge Xinis said that she would allow Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to make 15 requests for documents and depose as many as six administration officials.
She also said that the lawyers were “entitled to explore the lawful basis — if any — for Abrego Garcia’s continued detention in CECOT, including who authorized his initial placement there and who presently authorizes his continued confinement.”
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12) Trump Threatens Harvard’s Tax Status, Escalating Billion-Dollar Pressure Campaign
Harvard has rejected an effort by the White House to exert more control over its programs. Federal law prohibits the president from telling the I.R.S. to conduct specific tax investigations.
By Tyler Pager, Andrew Duehren, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Reporting from Washington, April 15, 2025
A dispute between Harvard University and President Trump has put billions of dollars in grants at stake. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
President Trump threatened Harvard University’s tax-exempt status on Tuesday after the school rebuffed his administration’s demands for a series of policy changes, a dramatic escalation in the feud between the president and the nation’s richest and oldest university.
The threat came a day after the Trump administration halted more than $2 billion in federal funding for Harvard because the university rejected changes to its hiring and admissions practices and curriculum. Mr. Trump decided to ratchet up his pressure campaign after watching news coverage of Harvard’s resistance on Monday night, according to a person with knowledge of the president’s deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday morning. “Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”
White House officials said Tuesday that the Internal Revenue Service would make its decision about Harvard’s tax-exempt status independently, but the president has made clear in private that he has no intention of backing down from the fight with the university.
Losing its tax-exempt status could over time cost Harvard billions of dollars.
It’s the latest turn in a battle between Mr. Trump and academia more broadly, in which the Trump administration threatened to withhold billions in federal funding from various colleges and universities, ostensibly as a way to purge “woke” ideology from America’s college campuses. Trump officials have suggested that schools like Harvard have been hotbeds of antisemitism, elitism and suppression of free speech.
Federal law prohibits the president from “directly or indirectly” telling the I.R.S. to conduct specific tax investigations, and it is unclear whether the agency would actually move forward with an investigation. A spokeswoman for the I.R.S. declined to comment.
“Selective persecution of your political adversaries through the tax system is the stuff of dictatorship,” said Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and former president of Harvard. “This is unconscionable and wrong but a continuation of trends we have seen in President Trump’s approach both to universities and to tax enforcement.”
Officials at Harvard did not respond to a request for comment.
Organizations have to apply to become tax-exempt. The I.R.S. will conduct audits and in some cases revoke an organization’s tax-exempt status if, for example, the I.R.S. finds that the group is engaging in too much political or commercial activity. Entities can appeal such a decision in court or enter into a settlement to try to preserve their status, former I.R.S. officials said.
John Koskinen, a former I.R.S. commissioner, said that it was unlikely that the I.R.S. could successfully revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, given its array of research and teaching functions. Still, having to litigate the question in court could be its own form of intimidation for Harvard.
“The chances of getting the I.R.S. to actually revoke the 501(c)(3) status of a major university is almost nonexistent,” Mr. Koskinen said, referring to a tax-exempt category of organizations. “The problem is you’re causing people to spend a lot of time and money responding and defending their actions.”
Because of its exempt status, Harvard for the most part does not have to pay taxes, though Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax bill instituted a tax on large university endowments that Republicans now want to substantially increase.
Moreover, donations to the research university are tax deductible. That helps draw gigantic donations from ultrawealthy donors who want to choose how to spend their earnings rather than give their money to the federal government. Some prominent Republican donors, like the billionaires John Paulson and Ken Griffin, have given hundreds of millions of dollars to Harvard.
Tax-exempt organizations have long been a political minefield for the I.R.S. During the Obama administration, Republican lawmakers accused the agency of unfairly targeting conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status, though a watchdog later concluded that the agency had improperly scrutinized both conservative and liberal organizations.
“Economists have extensively studied and documented that tax deductible charitable contributions have a massive effect on support for universities,” Mr. Summers said. “Removal of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) status, which won’t happen because we are a nation of laws, would, if it did happen, devastate progress in medical and scientific research, maintenance of American and Western values, opportunity for the next generation of Americans and an important magnet for the United States in the world.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to turn the I.R.S. into a political tool, upending longstanding protections of sensitive taxpayer information by pushing the I.R.S. to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement deport undocumented immigrants.
Administration officials have also dramatically cut the I.R.S. work force and moved to install Billy Long, a former Republican congressman with little background in tax, beyond promoting a fraud-ridden tax credit, to lead the historically apolitical agency. Nonprofit groups aligned with Democrats and liberal causes are bracing for the I.R.S. to scrutinize their tax-exempt status under the Trump administration.
Last week, Trump officials sent Harvard a letter demanding changes at the university and routine progress reports on how they were being put in place, in order to continue to “maintain” the financial relationship with the government. Harvard rejected the demand.
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, said in a statement to the university on Monday.
The Trump administration responded by instituting a funding freeze of more than $2 billion, though details of the funds were unclear. Harvard receives some $9 billion in federal funding, with $7 billion going to the university’s 11 affiliated hospitals in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The remaining $2 billion goes to research grants directly for Harvard, including for space exploration, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and tuberculosis.
Harvard is uniquely positioned to withstand the funding loss, with an endowment of more than $50 billion. By contrast, Columbia University, which has a far smaller endowment, settled with the Trump administration when it was pressed to make changes to its policies and programs.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, deferred questions about Harvard’s tax-exempt status to the I.R.S.
“All the president is asking: Don’t break federal law, and then you can have your federal funding,” Ms. Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday. “I think the president is also begging a good question. More than $2 billion out the door to Harvard when they have a more than $50 billion endowment: Why are the American taxpayers subsidizing a university that has billions of dollars in the bank already? And we certainly should not be funding a place where such grave antisemitism exists.”
Anemona Hartocollis contributed reporting
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13) Columbia Vows to Reject Any Trump Deal That Erodes Its Independence
A message from the university’s acting president said that talks with the Trump administration were continuing as the White House is seeking to place the school under judicial oversight.
By Troy Closson, April 15, 2025
Claire Shipman, Columbia’s acting president, issued a statement late Monday, hours after the president of Harvard offered a defiant response to demands from the Trump administration. Credit...Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The New York Times
Columbia University, which has faced criticism for not striking a more defiant stand against efforts by the Trump administration to set its agenda, showed signs late Monday of adopting a tougher tone. In a note sent to the campus, the acting president pledged that the school would not allow the federal government to “require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy.”
The message came less than 12 hours after Harvard became the first university to refuse to comply with the administration’s demands, prompting federal officials to freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the school. The letter was sent to students and faculty members as Columbia has endured intense fire for what critics regard as White House appeasement.
Until now, Columbia had largely avoided public criticism of the administration and its campaign against universities. In her first public statement, in March, Claire Shipman, Columbia’s new acting president, acknowledged that the university faced “a precarious moment,” but she did not directly mention federal officials or their cancellation of about $400 million in grants and contracts to the school.
And when Ms. Shipman’s predecessor, Katrina Armstrong, revealed an agreement regarding major demands from the government — including placing the university’s Middle Eastern studies department under new oversight and creating a security force empowered to make arrests — she did not critique the administration’s interference in higher education.
Addressing the prevalent anxiety among international students — hundreds of whom across the United States have been abruptly stripped of their ability to stay in the country — Ms. Shipman wrote that she was following the government’s actions “with great concern” and directed foreign students to a new need-based hardship fund.
Columbia’s response came as the Trump administration has discussed seeking a consent decree in which a federal judge would enforce any deal reached with the university. Ms. Shipman did not explicitly address the possibility of such a measure but said that no agreement had been reached with the federal government and that discussions were ongoing, including over how to address concerns about discrimination and harassment on campus and how to restore a federal partnership that “supports our vital research mission.”
“Some of the government’s requests have aligned with policies and practices that we believe are important to advancing our mission,” said Ms. Shipman, who was a co-chair of the university’s board of trustees before being appointed acting president last month.
Still, she added: “Other ideas, including overly prescriptive requests about our governance, how we conduct our presidential search process and how specifically to address viewpoint diversity issues are not subject to negotiation.”
A spokeswoman for the federal Education Department, whose officials have been involved in negotiations with Columbia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the last three months, the Trump administration has taken aim at some of the nation’s most prominent schools as it moves to eradicate what it says is rampant antisemitism on campuses, including Columbia’s, along with what it calls unfair diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across higher education.
Federal agencies have suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in funds for research at several universities, including Columbia, Brown, Cornell and Northwestern. Some Columbia faculty members have argued that the school’s response to the government’s demands has undermined its central principles and academic freedom.
The federal government demanded an extraordinary set of changes at Harvard in a letter last week, including that the university share all its hiring data with the Trump administration, place certain departments under an external audit and immediately shut down any programming related to D.E.I.
As Harvard’s president rejected the administration’s ultimatum, Ms. Shipman told her campus that “our institution may decide at any point, on its own, to make difficult decisions that are in Columbia’s best interests.”
Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, said that he appreciated that Ms. Shipman’s letter seemed to include a “commitment to some principles that I think we are all glad to hear are in fact principles.”
But to him, “the main thing that stood out” was that school leaders were “clearly affirming how much time they’re talking to Donald Trump’s federal government when they don’t seem to be spending very much time talking to their own faculty.”
“That was a problem all of last year,” he said. “And it doesn’t get us anywhere good.”
Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, where at least $210 million in federal grants and contracts are at risk, acknowledged in a recent interview with The New York Times that some universities might have to concede “in order to protect people.”
But he added that they also needed “to speak up under those circumstances,” even if to express regret over a compromise.
“I do wish I had heard that from Columbia,” Mr. Eisgruber said. “You may say, ‘Look, I wish I could take a stand on principle, but given what’s at stake, I can’t.’ But then you need to say that. You need to admit and you need to say to your community and to Americans, ‘Hey, there’s something really fundamental that has been lost here.’”
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14) Autopsies of Gaza Medics Killed by Israeli Troops Show Some Were Shot in the Head
The New York Times obtained autopsy reports for 14 of the 15 people killed in a March 23 attack on an ambulance and fire truck.
By Vivian Yee, Bilal Shbair and Christoph Koettl, April 15, 2025
Vivian Yee reported from Cairo, and Bilal Shbair from Deir al-Balah, Gaza.
Members of the Palestine Red Crescent and other emergency services carrying the bodies of fellow rescuers killed by Israeli forces in March. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The paramedics and rescue workers killed in an Israeli shooting in Gaza last month died mainly from gunshots to the head or chest, while others had shrapnel injuries or other wounds, according to autopsy reports obtained by The New York Times.
Israeli troops had fired on ambulances and a fire truck sent by the Palestine Red Crescent Society and the Civil Defense, according to witness accounts, video and audio of the March 23 attack.
Israel acknowledged carrying out the attack, which killed 15 men: 14 rescue workers and a United Nations employee who drove by after the others were shot. Israeli soldiers buried most of the bodies in a mass grave, crushed the ambulances, fire truck and a U.N. vehicle, and buried those as well.
The Israeli military has offered shifting explanations for why its troops fired on the emergency vehicles and said, without providing evidence, that some of the dead men had been Hamas operatives. Israel’s military said it was investigating the killing.
The episode drew international condemnation, and experts described it as a war crime.
The autopsies were carried out between April 1 and April 5, according to the reports, after a team of aid workers recovered the men’s bodies from southern Gaza. The Times reviewed autopsy results for all the men except the U.N. employee. They were performed by Dr. Ahmad Dhair, the head of the Gazan health ministry’s forensic medicine unit.
Dr. Arne Stray-Pedersen, a forensic pathologist at Oslo University Hospital in Norway, who had been in Gaza earlier in March to train doctors in forensic medicine, reviewed photos of the autopsies and consulted with Dr. Dhair to write a summary report.
The 14 men were wearing either their Red Crescent or Civil Defense uniforms, in part or in whole, at the time of death, the autopsy reports said. Video of part of the attack shows that when Israeli troops began shooting at them, a few of the paramedics had exited their vehicles and were clearly visible in their uniforms, with reflective bands across the back, arms and legs that shone brightly in the lights of the ambulances.
The autopsy reports said 11 of the men had gunshot wounds, including at least six who were shot in their chests or backs and four who were shot in the head. Most had been shot multiple times.
One man had several shrapnel wounds in his chest and abdomen; two others had injuries that the autopsy reports said were “consistent” with shrapnel, possibly related to an explosion. While sustained gunfire can be heard on the video and in audio recordings of part of the attack, it is unclear whether there was an additional blast that might have caused such injuries.
Several of the bodies were missing limbs or other body parts, the reports said. One man’s body was severed from the pelvis down, his autopsy report said.
The bodies were all partly or severely decomposed, according to the autopsy reports and photos. That made it challenging to draw additional conclusions, including whether the men had been shot at close range or from farther away, Dr. Stray-Pedersen said in an interview.
After examining the first few bodies in late March, Dr. Dhair had told The Times and other news outlets that one victim had marks and bruises on his wrists suggesting that his hands had been tied. Dr. Dhair cautioned that further investigation was needed to determine whether that was the case.
The autopsy reports do not mention whether any of the men had been tied up.
A Red Crescent spokeswoman, Nebal Farsakh, had also said that one paramedic was found with his hands and feet tied. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Dr. Stray-Pedersen began consulting on the autopsies after the Gazan health ministry sought help from NORWAC, a Norwegian aid group, a draft of the summary report says. He said in an interview that he and Dr. Dhair will continue to analyze the results before issuing a final report.
“I am specifically looking at any possible patterns, if all of them were killed in the same manner or if some have any additional wounds,” Dr. Stray-Pedersen said.
In its initial statement after the attack, the Israeli military said that the men had been “advancing suspiciously” without their lights. It backtracked on that assertion after the release of the video, which showed the clearly marked vehicles flashing their lights and coming to a halt before the attack.
The Israeli military’s first account also said that nine of those killed had been operatives for Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group. It later revised that count, saying that six of them were Hamas operatives.
It has said it will not comment further until its investigation is complete.
Abubakr Abdelbagi and Naziha Baassiri contributed reporting.
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15) Maryland Senator Heads to El Salvador to Check on Man Deported From His State
Senator Chris Van Hollen said he would press for the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration and imprisoned.
By Robert Jimison, April 16, 2025
Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said he was traveling to El Salvador in response to President Nayib Bukele’s decision to not return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, is on his way to El Salvador on Wednesday to press for the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant and Maryland resident who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration and remains imprisoned in his native country despite a federal court order calling for his return to the United States.
Mr. Abrego Garcia was removed from the United States last month in what immigration officials have since acknowledged was an error. Although the Supreme Court has instructed the government to facilitate his return, both U.S. and Salvadoran authorities have so far refused to comply.
Mr. Van Hollen said he hoped to visit Mr. Abrego Garcia at the maximum security prison where he is being held, known as CECOT, about an hour outside the country’s capital. The senator also said he hoped to talk to Salvadoran officials about securing Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release.
“Following his abduction and unlawful deportation, U.S. federal courts have ordered the safe return of my constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States,” Mr. Van Hollen said in a statement before his departure. “It should be a priority of the U.S. government to secure his safe release.”
The trip comes shortly after President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador traveled to Washington, D.C., this week for a meeting with Mr. Trump. Mr. Van Hollen had requested a meeting with Mr. Bukele during the visit, but received no response.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Bukele had appeared side-by-side in the Oval Office, with Mr. Bukele saying he had no intention of releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia and Mr. Trump saying he was powerless to seek his return.
Mr. Van Hollen said he was disturbed by those remarks and decided to travel to El Salvador himself.
“The goal of this mission is to let the Trump administration and the government of El Salvador know that we are going to keep fighting to bring Abrego Garcia home,” he said in a video posted to social media before boarding his flight.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration stuck to its position, continuing to defy a court order that American officials “facilitate” his return. Asked about the case, Attorney General Pam Bondi declared Mr. Abrego Garcia would not be repatriated unless the president of El Salvador decided to return him. Even if that happened, she said, the U.S. would immediately deport him again to another country.
“President Bukele said he was not sending him back,” Bondi said. “That’s the end of the story.” She added Mr. Abrego Garcia is “from El Salvador, he’s in El Salvador and that’s where the president plans on keeping him.”
With Congress in a two-week recess, Representatives Maxwell Alejandro Frost of Florida and Robert Garcia of California also planned to make a visit to El Salvador, according to two people familiar with their plans who discussed them on the condition of anonymity because they were not yet final.
The two wrote on Tuesday to Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky and the chairman of the Oversight Committee, requesting an official congressional delegation be sent to the nation to conduct a “welfare check” on Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Mr. Frost and Mr. Garcia also said more oversight was needed given Mr. Trump’s remarks this week that he wanted to send “homegrown criminals” including American citizens to the prison where he is being held, which is known for human rights violations.
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16) Two Protesters at Marjorie Taylor Greene Town Hall Are Subdued With Stun Guns
Three people, including the two who were subdued with stun guns, were arrested.
By Maya C. Miller, Reporting from Acworth, Ga., Published April 15, 2025, Updated April 16, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/us/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-protesters.html
Protesters booed and shouted at the Georgia representative, prompting police to forcibly remove several people. Three were arrested, two of whom were subdued with stun guns. Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times
A town hall for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia outside of Atlanta on Tuesday quickly deteriorated into chaos, as police officers forcibly removed several protesters.
Ms. Greene, a Republican firebrand and loyal ally of President Trump, had barely reached the podium to speak when a man in the crowd at the Acworth Community Center stood up and started yelling, booing and jeering at her. As her supporters stood and clapped, several police officers grabbed the man, later identified by the police as Andrew Russell Nelms of Atlanta, and dragged him out of the room.
“I can’t breathe!” Mr. Nelms shouted, interjecting with expletives as he was told to put his arms behind his back. The police then used a stun gun on him twice.
Back inside the room, Ms. Greene was unfazed as she greeted attendees at the event, in Acworth, Ga., northwest of Atlanta. She thanked the officers, drawing applause from the crowd of about 150 people.
“If you want to shout and chant, we will have you removed just like that man was thrown out,” she said. “We will not tolerate it!”
Minutes later, as Ms. Greene started to play a video of former President Barack Obama discussing the national debt, police forcibly removed and used a stun gun on a second man, identified later as Johnny Keith Williams of Dallas, Ga., who had stood up and started to heckle.
Over the next hour, as Ms. Greene trumpeted the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the government and played clips of herself railing against witnesses in committee hearings, police officers escorted at least six people from the room, according to a spokesman for the Acworth Police Department. Three people, including the two who were subdued with stun guns, were arrested.
In between disruptions at the event, Ms. Greene applauded the Trump administration’s deportation efforts and praised Congress for passing the Laken Riley Act, a measure that requires the detention of undocumented immigrants accused of certain crimes. Ms. Greene crowed about the DOGE team’s push to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development. Instead of taking questions directly from the audience, she read and answered prescreened questions from a slide deck.
“Why is M.T.G. supporting Musk and DOGE and the slashing of Medicaid, Social Security offices, libraries and more?” read one question from a person identified only as Sarah. “This is outrageous.”
“Well, Sarah, unfortunately, you’re being brainwashed by the news that you’re watching,” Ms. Greene replied, to whoops and cheers from the crowd.
Mike Binns, a constituent who was escorted from the room after he yelled at Ms. Greene, said the event felt more like a “political rally” than a town hall.
Outside, several hundred protesters lined the street, waving signs that bore phrases such as “Pro America, Anti Trump” and “Resist!”
Asked if she thought using stun guns on protesters at the event was an appropriate response, Ms. Greene reiterated her praise for the law enforcement officials.
“You know who was out of line? The protesters,” Ms. Greene said. “There was a place designated outside for the protesters because we support their First Amendment rights.”
Sean Keenan contributed reporting.
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17) America, This Is an Old and Brutal Tyranny
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, April 16, 2025
Eric Lee/The New York Times
The Trump administration believes it can send anyone it wants, without due process or future legal recourse, to rot in a foreign prison.
It has argued as much in court. Lawyers for the Justice Department have asserted the president’s supposedly “inherent” authority to remove foreign nationals from the United States, and the White House is openly defying a court order to facilitate the return of an immigrant living in Maryland and sent, accidentally, to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
The immigrant in question, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, is Salvadoran, has lived in the United States since 2011 and was granted protected status by an immigration judge in 2019. He was detained last month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, accused of membership in MS-13 — a Salvadoran gang — and in short order was removed to El Salvador without so much as a hearing.
His family sued the government and, soon after, a Federal District Court judge ordered the administration to return Abrego Garcia to American shores. The Supreme Court upheld that decision in a unanimous ruling that also affirmed the Constitution’s clear guarantees of due process of law.
But the Trump administration won’t budge. Justice Department lawyers deny that the government has any responsibility to get Abrego Garcia home and insist that his removal wasn’t a mistake, although they won’t share the information that might support this claim on the grounds that it is sensitive and thus classified.
The White House has also taken this position outside of the courtroom. On Monday, during a state visit by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele — the administration’s enthusiastic partner in the rendition of immigrants abroad — Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that “no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States,” a tacit assertion that President Trump can ignore court orders requiring Abrego Garcia’s release. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that it was “not up to us” whether Abrego Garcia was returned, and Bukele himself said that “I’m not going to do it,” after incredulously asking how he was supposed to “smuggle” a “terrorist” back into the United States. For his part, Trump rejected calls to bring Abrego Garcia home and raised the possibility of sending “homegrown criminals” to El Salvador, even urging Bukele to construct new prisons for the people Trump hopes to exile there.
More than a constitutional crisis, this is a fundamentally tyrannical assertion of illegitimate power. To claim the authority to remand any American, citizen or otherwise, to a distant prison beyond the reach of any legal remedy is to violate centuries of Anglo-American legal tradition and shatter the very foundations of constitutional government in the United States. It is to reduce the citizens of a republic to the subjects of a king. It is, in the language of the American revolutionaries, to enslave the people to a singular, arbitrary will. It is not for nothing that among the accusations listed in the Declaration of Independence is the charge that the king is guilty of “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences.”
The president’s rendition program constitutes a profound assault on American freedom as understood for the whole of this nation’s history. At the same time, while contemplating these removals, I am struck by the degree to which they aren’t completely foreign to the American experience.
Here, I’m thinking of the fraught legal status of free Black Americans in the antebellum United States. “The possibility of being kidnapped and sold into slavery was shared by the entire American free Black community, whether young or old, freeborn or freed slave, Northerner or Southerner,” explains the historian Carol Wilson in “Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780-1865.”
Kidnapping of this sort was illegal in most of the states where it took place, but as Wilson notes it was still pervasive, “partly because of the potential for great profits from a successful kidnapping and sale of a free Black into slavery” and in part because “the racism of the majority of American whites rendered it unlikely that kidnappers would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
We see both dynamics in the most famous kidnapping case of the era, that of Solomon Northup — dramatized in the 2013 film version of his book, “12 Years a Slave” — a free Black New York man who was seized under false pretenses, drugged and sold south to Louisiana, where he labored as a slave for more than a decade before he could secure the assistance necessary to win his freedom.
It goes almost without saying that it was slavery that made free Black people so vulnerable to kidnapping. As one abolitionist newspaper, The African Observer, noted in 1827, “Where a traffic in slaves is thus actively carried on, and sanctioned by existing laws, those colored persons who are legally free must necessarily hold their freedom by very precarious tenure.” The racial nature of slavery in the United States tied bondage and servitude to skin color. To be Black meant that you could be a slave regardless of whether you were.
It did not help the situation that ceaseless industrial demand for cotton made enslaved people extremely valuable. “By the 1850s,” writes Wilson, “slave prices had soared, with good field hands usually bringing at least a thousand dollars, and some artisans selling for more than twice that amount.”
“As long as slaves brought a good price on the market,” she continues, “there would be people unscrupulous enough to make money in this manner.”
It was not just the market but the lack of full legal status in many of the states where they lived that made Black Americans vulnerable to kidnappers. As the historian Kate Masur shows in “Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction,” a number of Northern states adopted laws restricting civil and legal rights for their Black citizens. In 1807, for example, Ohio adopted laws that required free Black settlers to register in county courts (for a fee, of course) and obtain a guarantee of good behavior from at least two white landowners. The same laws also forbade them from testifying in cases, civil or criminal, in which one party was white, severely limiting their ability to defend their most basic rights, as Masur writes, “to enforce contracts, secure wages, or obtain justice in criminal cases.” This, too, was tied to slavery and to what it seemed to imply about anyone of African descent.
What does the antebellum kidnapping and sale of free Black Americans to slavery mean for us in the present? How does it relate to the president’s seizure and rendition of immigrants — and soon, perhaps, citizens — to a brutal foreign prison from which Trump has all but said they will not emerge?
Beyond the obvious parallels and similarities, the example of free Black Americans illustrates an important principle of political life. The question of who has rights — and of whose rights are to be respected — is inseparable from our treatment of those on the margins of political life. The mere existence of a group of nonpersons threatens the freedom of those who live within the scope of concern, however far from the center they might be.
Free Black people could not escape slavery. Nor, for that matter, could whites, whose rights to speak freely and gather as they pleased were threatened by the political power of slave owners, who had grown accustomed to dominating others as a way of life. The status of all Americans was, in truth, threatened by the existence of a class of people whose rights could be arbitrarily stripped from them, if they even had rights to begin with.
You cannot restrict unfreedom to a particular class of people. It will metastasize to consume the entire society. This was true of the slave system, where the large majority of people lived in conditions of servitude; it was true of the Jim Crow South, where economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement were the rule for Black and white Americans; and it will be true of our time for as long as we continue on the current path.
As of this writing, a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s overall job performance, but about half approve of his handling of immigration and support his program of deportations. It is hard to know exactly what this means. Americans might believe the White House when it says that the only people affected by the immigration crackdown are people who have broken the law in one way or another — criminals who don’t deserve our sympathy. Americans might be unmoved by the fact that unauthorized entry is only a civil offense, or that most of the people renditioned by the administration have not been convicted of any crime.
Any American who looks at the president’s actions and nods his head in approval is sacrificing his freedom whether he realizes it or not. To allow Trump the authority to seize and disappear immigrants at will is to close the curtain on democracy for citizens, too. You cannot have despotism for some and freedom for others.
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18) Israel Threatens Further Escalation in Gaza War
The United Nations warned that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was likely at its worst since the conflict began and that the population was again on the brink of famine.
By Lara Jakes, April 16, 2025
Lara Jakes writes frequently about Israel’s war against Hamas.
Inspecting the site of a strike in Jabaliya in northern Gaza on Wednesday. Credit...Mahmoud Issa/Reuters
Israel’s defense minister warned on Wednesday that the war in Gaza would soon escalate with “tremendous force” and an extended humanitarian blockade if Hamas did not quickly release hostages amid stalled cease-fire negotiations.
The blunt and detailed statement by the minister, Israel Katz, came as a growing list of former Israeli security officials accused the government of prolonging the war at the expense of the surviving hostages who remain in Gaza.
At the same time, the United Nations warned that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was likely at its worst since the conflict began in October 2023, and that the population was once again on the brink of famine.
Mr. Katz said Israeli troops would remain in the territory in Gaza that the military had seized last month after the collapse of a six-week cease-fire. During the truce, Hamas freed about 30 living hostages and returned the bodies of eight others.
He said the Israeli military would use “tremendous force, from the air, land and sea” to destroy Hamas bunkers both above and below ground, and keep up the evacuations of Gazans who again are being forced to leave their homes to escape the strikes. Already, hundreds of thousands of Gaza residents have been displaced.
These measures aim to “bring about the release of all the hostages,” Mr. Katz said, while carving out a path to defeat Hamas later.
“If Hamas persists in its refusal, the activity will expand and move to the next stages,” Mr. Katz said.
An American proposal, introduced last month by the Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff, would require Hamas to release some living hostages without guarantees from Israel that it would permanently end the war — something Hamas has been demanding.
Hamas has rejected the U.S. plan as well as demands that it disarm as part of an eventual settlement.
Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, said on Wednesday that the group was ready to negotiate a settlement that would lead to the end of the war and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.
“Whatever illusions Netanyahu promotes to his people to prolong the war are paid for by everyone, especially their prisoners,” Mr. Naim wrote on social media, referring to the hostages held by the armed group.
But frustration is mounting against Hamas in Gaza, where Palestinians have increasingly taken to the streets to demand that the group give up control of the enclave so the war can end. Such protests were once rare, as they risked violent retribution by Hamas.
On Wednesday, crowds of Palestinians gathered in the city of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, chanting anti-Hamas slogans and calling for an end to the war.
Israelis are also increasingly arguing that their leaders should reach a deal with Hamas to bring home the remaining hostages — even if that means ending the war. Critics of the government say the ramped-up war is putting the remaining hostages in greater peril.
On Wednesday, hundreds of former senior Israeli police officials joined a group of nearly 1,000 active-duty and reserve forces who had earlier called for a negotiated agreement to free the hostages immediately.
And U.N. officials said time was running out for the nearly two million Gazans who depend on foreign aid for survival.
The aid that was delivered to Gaza during the cease-fire that ended last month has “practically run out,” said John Whyte, the acting deputy director of the Gaza operations for UNRWA, the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians.
“We are facing once again the prospect of famine,” Mr. Whyte warned on Tuesday.
Separately, the main U.N. agency for humanitarian affairs said that Israel’s intensified military operations, aid blockade, evacuation orders and disruption of health care “are driving what is likely the worst humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip since October 2023.” It cited vast food and water insecurity and attacks on hospitals that have disrupted “an already decimated health system.”
Mr. Katz said that while the Israeli military would continue to block humanitarian aid to Gaza, he also called for “creating an infrastructure for distribution through civil society later on.”
That prompted an immediate backlash from rival officials in Israel’s government who accused him of giving into Hamas, which has some control of how food is distributed in the territory.
“Cutting off aid is one of the main levers of pressure on Hamas, and returning it before Hamas gets on its knees and releases all of our hostages would be a historic mistake,” Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, said on social media.
Mr. Katz said his comments were being distorted by “those who try to mislead.”
“Israel’s policy is clear and no humanitarian aid is about to enter Gaza," he said in a follow-up statement.
Gabby Sobelman, Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.
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