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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) White House Eyes Overhaul of Federal Housing Aid to the Poor
The Trump administration has considered sharply curtailing vouchers as part of its budget for the 2026 fiscal year.
By Tony Romm, Reporting from Washington, April 17, 2025
"Years after leaving government, though, Mr. Vought specifically proposed a full end to the Section 8 voucher program. At his conservative nonprofit, the Center for Renewing America, Mr. Vought in 2022 called vouchers supplied to low-income tenants a “hook for implementing the left’s fair housing agenda,” faulting the government for focusing on racial equity."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/us/politics/housing-aid-hud-federal-budget.html
The expected cuts to rental assistance reflect President Trump’s broader desire to shrink the footprint of government and its reach into Americans’ lives. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
The White House is considering deep cuts to federal housing programs, including a sweeping overhaul of aid to low-income families, in a reconfiguration that could jeopardize millions of Americans’ continued access to rental assistance funds.
The potential changes primarily concern federal housing vouchers, including those more commonly known as Section 8. The aid generally helps the poorest tenants cover the monthly costs of apartments, town homes and single-family residences.
Administration officials recently discussed cutting or canceling out the vouchers and other rental assistance programs and potentially replacing them with a more limited system of housing grants, perhaps sent to states, according to three people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the confidential discussions. The overhaul would be included in President Trump’s new budget, which is expected to be sent to Capitol Hill in the coming weeks.
The exact design and cost of the retooled program is unclear, and any such change is likely to require approval from Congress, as White House budgets on their own do not carry the force of law.
But people familiar with the administration’s thinking said the expected overhaul would most likely amount to more than just a technical change, resulting in fewer federal dollars for low-income families on top of additional cuts planned for the rest of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. On Thursday, the Trump administration took the first steps toward potentially selling the agency’s headquarters in Washington.
Federal voucher programs currently provide assistance to about 2.3 million low-income families, according to the government’s estimates, who enroll through their local public-housing authorities. The aid is part of a broader universe of rental assistance programs that are set to exceed $54 billion this fiscal year. But the annual demand for these subsidies is far greater than the available funds, creating a sizable wait list as rents are rising nationally.
“If there were a cut to the voucher program, essentially, you would see a decrease to the number of families that are served by the program,” said Eric Oberdorfer, the director of policy and legislative affairs at the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, an advocacy group.
At the moment, he added, only one in four families eligible for vouchers are able to obtain them because of funding constraints. A federal cut would put public-housing agencies in a position in which “they would need to make difficult decisions” and in some cases stop providing benefits, Mr. Oberdorfer said.
Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for the White House budget office, said in a statement that “no final funding decisions have been made.”
Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, previously endorsed an end to the federal voucher program. He wrote in 2022 that the Section 8 program in particular “brings with it crime, decreased property values, and results in dependency and subsidized irresponsibility.”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to comment on the budget. Appearing on Capitol Hill earlier this year, Scott Turner, the housing secretary, told senators that he believed the goal of the voucher program was to “get people into self sustainability,” not “a lifetime on subsidies.”
The expected cuts to rental assistance reflect Mr. Trump’s broader desire to shrink the footprint of government and its reach into Americans’ lives, a project that includes sharp reductions to federal antipoverty programs viewed as too generous or wasteful.
The aggressive campaign has already resulted in the president and his top aides — including the tech billionaire Elon Musk — shuttering entire agencies, freezing billions of dollars and dismissing thousands of civil employees, moves that have enraged Democrats and led to a series of court challenges.
The full scope of Mr. Trump’s vision stands to become clearer once he submits his budget to Congress this spring, reflecting his priorities for the 2026 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. The proposal is expected to guide Republican lawmakers as they look for ways to pay for the party’s costly ambitions to reduce taxes on people and corporations.
Many agencies, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development, could lose funds ranging into the billions of dollars, according to those familiar with the White House blueprint, who cautioned that it remained unfinished.
The cuts to housing programs come in addition to an exodus of the agency’s work force. As of last week, about 2,300 employees opted to accept an offer for “deferred resignation” and leave their jobs, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Agency workers had until Friday to decide whether to take the offer, the second they have received, rather than risk being fired by the Trump administration. The department later confirmed the details of the departures, cautioning that they had not been finalized.
The White House also plans to dismantle a key office in the housing agency that helps communities recover from deadly natural disasters, a move that could slow much-needed emergency aid. Separately, Mr. Trump issued an executive order last month eliminating a decades-old, governmentwide commission meant to coordinate the federal response to homelessness.
A potential overhaul of the housing agency comes on the heels of a congressional deal to fund the government through September that increased some housing spending yet did not keep pace with rising rents and the growing demand for federal aid. The funding gap could result in about 32,000 voucher recipients soon losing access to federal housing aid, according to Democrats’ estimates, on top of additional cuts once funding runs out in a pandemic-era program that expanded voucher availability.
Many of the foundational changes the White House contemplates for the housing department are consistent with cuts that the president and Mr. Vought, his returning budget chief, previously endorsed. In the final budget of Mr. Trump’s first term, the two men proposed a roughly $8.6 billion reduction at the housing agency, though they did not propose to eliminate vouchers entirely.
Years after leaving government, though, Mr. Vought specifically proposed a full end to the Section 8 voucher program. At his conservative nonprofit, the Center for Renewing America, Mr. Vought in 2022 called vouchers supplied to low-income tenants a “hook for implementing the left’s fair housing agenda,” faulting the government for focusing on racial equity.
Mr. Vought previously served as a key author of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the Trump presidency, which similarly endorsed a sweeping overhaul to federal housing spending. Ben Carson, who led the Department of Housing and Urban Development during Mr. Trump’s first term, wrote in a chapter about the agency that it needed to explore significant reforms to the voucher program, such as work requirements on recipients and limits to how long they could collect housing aid.
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2) He Wanted Peace in the Middle East. ICE Wants to Deport Him.
Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested at a citizenship interview in Vermont. He had spent a decade trying to understand the conflict that shaped his life, his supporters say.
By Ana Ley, Sharon Otterman and Anvee Bhutani, Published April 16, 2025, Updated April 17, 2025
“'Palestine will be free for everybody,' he said, through a megaphone to applause, 'For Jews, for Christians, for Muslims. No more apartheid, no more genocide.'”
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, addressed pro-Palestinian demonstrators in November 2023. Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times
As Columbia University’s student protest movement careened toward the center of the nation’s political discourse last year, one of its most ardent leaders suddenly fell quiet.
Mohsen Mahdawi had been a key organizer of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, but he said he walked away from that role in March 2024 — well before the rallies reached a fever pitch as students set up encampments and broke into a campus building.
A fissure had been growing. By the fall of 2024 it had widened: Parts of the movement were becoming more radical, and some students were distributing fliers during a campus demonstration glorifying violent resistance. Mr. Mahdawi, meanwhile, was approaching Israeli students, hoping to find middle ground in the divisive Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, for decades, had unleashed horrors on both sides and in his own life.
He told friends that he was being sidelined in part because he wanted to engage in dialogue with supporters of Israel, a stance many pro-Palestinian activists reject.
His calls for compassion did not protect him from President Trump’s widening dragnet against pro-Palestinian student organizers on campus.
At an appointment to obtain U.S. citizenship on Monday in Vermont, Mr. Mahdawi, who is expected to graduate next month from Columbia, was taken into custody by immigration police.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, asserted in a memo justifying Mr. Mahdawi’s arrest that his activism “could undermine the Middle East peace process by reinforcing antisemitic sentiment.”
Growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, Mr. Mahdawi, 34, witnessed violence that included seeing his best friend killed by an Israeli soldier. But rather than calling for vengeance, since immigrating to the United States in 2014, he has delivered more than 100 lectures at churches, synagogues and colleges extolling empathy as the key to a resolution in the Middle East. He is a practicing Buddhist, he said.
“The human being is not an enemy,” a slide from one of his presentations reads. “The enemy is fear, segregation and ignorance.”
This portrait of Mr. Mahdawi and his journey from the West Bank to New England — and then to the center stage of demonstrations after the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s war on Gaza — is based on interviews with more than a dozen friends, professors and mentors. It also draws from lectures he has given that are posted online and earlier interviews with The New York Times.
Representatives for Columbia declined to comment, citing federal student privacy regulations. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security referred questions to the State Department, whose officials declined to comment.
David Myers, a professor of Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles, met Mr. Mahdawi at a retreat last summer that brought together activists and scholars trying to achieve a new approach to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They stayed in touch.
“This is a person who stands for precisely the values we want to raise up at this moment of such starkness and such blindness and such division and polarization,” said Mr. Myers, who formerly led the New Israel Fund, a philanthropic organization for progressive Jewish people. “This person constitutes a bridge, and we’ve torn that bridge down instead of embracing it.”
An evolution begins
Mr. Mahdawi’s great-grandparents lived near the Mediterranean Sea on land that is now in Israel. Along with thousands of other Palestinians, they fled the area in advance of Jewish forces, ending up in the Al-Far’a refugee camp in the West Bank, he explained in a March 2024 lecture he delivered to a class in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Three generations later, Mr. Mahdawi was born there in September 1990.
He often felt “at the mercy of 18-year-old Israeli soldiers about whether you can leave or not,” Mr. Mahdawi told the Valley News in Vermont, in one of several local newspaper features that have been written about his life.
After he turned 7, his life became a mounting series of traumas. His mother left that year, and his father remarried. A year later, his younger brother died after suffering from paralysis related to an untreated fever as a toddler.
After the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, Mr. Mahdawi and his best friend, Hemida, decided they would try to throw rocks at Israeli tanks in their camp, as other Palestinian boys were doing. An Israeli soldier shot at them, fatally striking Hemida, about 12, in the chest, he said.
One day, as he sought solace from the chaos of war, Mr. Mahdawi sat with his favorite uncle under an olive tree that shaded the graves of his younger brother and best friend.
While many young men were turning to militancy, his only escape would be through an education, his uncle told him.
“Hope is your only way moving forward,” he recalled his uncle saying in the 2024 Santa Barbara lecture.
Mr. Mahdawi followed the advice. He had always done well in school, but after his uncle was also killed in the Intifada, he deepened his resolve to excel academically.
At 18, he enrolled at Birzeit University in the West Bank, two hours from the camp, to study computer science and engineering. He became active in campus politics and was elected to the student council.
One day outside class, Mr. Mahdawi met the woman who would become his wife — an American student named Meagan Dechen. (Attempts to reach her were unsuccessful.) They fell in love while he gave her lessons in Arabic. When she returned home, he took dramatic steps to get a visa to join her, including sneaking over the barrier wall built to separate the West Bank from Israel to get to the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, he said.
Peace through understanding
Mr. Mahdawi made it to America in 2014, and the two settled in Vermont’s Upper Valley, near Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where his wife was a medical student. They married, but two years later, they divorced. He got his green card in 2015 and took a variety of jobs, including as a bank teller. Then, in 2018, he enrolled at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania to study computer science, while organizing events on subjects like storytelling to inspire peace, the local paper reported.
He transferred three years later to Columbia, where he began to study philosophy on a full scholarship, family friends said, with the goal of going on to a graduate degree in law or diplomacy.
In the fall of 2023, wanting to give voice to Palestinians on campus in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, he became a leader of the pro-Palestinian student movement on Columbia’s campus. He founded a Palestinian student union with Mahmoud Khalil, a fellow demonstrator who has also been detained by immigration officials and accused of undermining the U.S. foreign policy goal of halting antisemitism.
The demonstrations he helped lead brought together a wide spectrum of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Some Jewish students complained that they felt threatened by the slogans that were chanted, including “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” which they saw as a call to genocide. Mr. Mahdawi tried to explain what the slogan meant to him.
“Palestine will be free for everybody,” he said, through a megaphone to applause, “For Jews, for Christians, for Muslims. No more apartheid, no more genocide.”
When a demonstrator cursed Jewish people, amid a heated atmosphere of protesters and counterprotesters accusing each other of supporting genocide, Mr. Mahdawi reacted strongly.
“I said to him, shame on you,” he recounted in December 2023 in an interview with The New York Times. “And about 400 students who were present, they repeated after me. ‘Shame on him, shame on him three times.’ So it was a clear statement that we do not tolerate antisemitism.”
Aharon Dardik, 24, an Israeli American junior at Columbia double-majoring in philosophy and computer science, said that he and Mr. Mahdawi collaborated on a proposal more than 65 pages long that they felt would promote Israeli-Palestinian peace.
“Mohsen spoke of a future where Jews and Palestinians alike were able to live freely and equally,” said Mr. Dardik, who considers Mr. Mahdawi a good friend, and who earlier this month was part of a group of Jewish students who chained themselves to a Columbia gate to protest Mr. Khalil’s detention.
Caught in the middle
Like Mr. Khalil, Mr. Mahdawi was always unmasked at protests, and his openness made him a target. Vans circled the campus with Mr. Mahdawi’s face plastered on LED screens, labeling him an antisemite.
The Canary Mission, a hard-line pro-Israel group, compiled an exhaustive online dossier cataloging his activism, with screenshots of his social media pages and selective quotes from his speeches on campus and media interviews. They cite one in which he says, “We were accused by the administration that we are calling for genocide, while the administration itself is ignoring the current genocide that is taking place in Gaza. Shame on you, Columbia!” In another example taken from a newspaper interview, they quote him saying, “Hamas is a product of the Israeli occupation.”
The group claims that he wrote a poem in 2013 praising a Palestinian terrorist, Dalal Mughrabi, who committed a 1978 attack in Israel. They also cite a mournful social media post in 2024 he wrote about one of his cousins, whom they called a Hamas fighter killed by Israel. Mostly, though, they condemned him for supporting divestment from Israel and what they called the “pro-Hamas” protest movement more generally.
Mr. Mahdawi empathized with Hamas as well as Israelis. This left him criticized by both sides. “To empathize is to understand the root cause and to not look at any event or situation in a vacuum,” he said in a 60 Minutes interview. “This is for me the path moving forward.”
Professor Myers praised Mr. Mahdawi as a “person of dignity, integrity and courage” and criticized the effort of right-wing Jewish groups to attack him and get him deported.
“If you want to find a way to not only dislike someone, but brand them an antisemite, I’m sure there’s always some way you can do so, but what you’re doing is engaging in an act of moral blindness,” Professor Myers said.
Over the past year, Mr. Mahdawi stepped back from leadership of the pro-Palestinian movement he helped found on campus, which had become increasingly hard-line in its rhetoric.
David Bisno, a friend in Vermont who talked to Mr. Mahdawi every few days, confirmed that he quit showing up. “He said, ‘I can’t have anything more to do with this,’” Mr. Bisno said.
But he supported the encampment that formed last April, praising it as a peaceful effort in media interviews. He continued calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.
As protests and counterprotests caused chaos on campus, he worked with Professor Jean E. Krasno, Mr. Dardik and other students on a project they called “the Peace Initiative for Israel/Palestine.” Their goal was to work out how this idealistic vision they had for the region might actually function in practice.
“When he’s on campus, he meets with Jewish students, Israeli students and other international students to build a kind of consensus, to share ideas,” Dr. Krasno, a lecturer in the political science department, said. “He is working on a peace process. That is what is so ironic about it. It is just the complete opposite of what the government is painting him as.”
Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian student who has been involved in the protest movement, said that she was frustrated by the Trump administration’s targeting of Mr. Mahdawi. “There is no perfect Palestinian to people who do not see us as human in the first place,” she said.
In recent weeks, Mr. Mahdawi had been in hiding, worried about being picked up by immigration police after Mr. Khalil’s detention. He reached out to Columbia for help, asking to be moved to on-campus housing, which he thought would be safer. It didn’t happen. An extreme pro-Israel group, Betar, warned on social media that he was next.
But he was determined to go to his citizenship appointment in Vermont, even though he feared it was a trap. He alerted Vermont’s senators and representative in case things went wrong, and before the appointment, gathered in a nearby hotel breakfast room with a few friends, his lawyer, and a state lawmaker, Becca White.
They quizzed him on the Constitution, prepping him for the test they were hoping would be real. They also hugged him, just in case.
Don Foster, a retired foreign service officer who has been friends with Mr. Mahdawi for a decade, said the mood was subdued.
“One thing that gave me hope in that meeting Monday morning with him was I heard him tell Becca not to worry,” he said. “Because since he had been studying meditation, he was going to use his time in prison to meditate and make heaven for himself there.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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3) Israel Strikes Area With Tent Camps for Displaced Gazans
The attack on the Mawasi area of southern Gaza killed at least a dozen people, according to the emergency rescue service in the territory. Israel did not confirm the location of the attack.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 17, 2025
Inspecting damage at the site of an Israeli strike in an area of tent camps for displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza on Thursday. Credit...Hatem Khaled/Reuters
Israel bombarded an area in southern Gaza with large tent encampments for Palestinians displaced by the war and killed at least a dozen people, including children, the Civil Defense emergency rescue service in the territory said on Thursday.
The strike was part of the latest round of attacks on Gaza that killed more than 20 people overnight between Wednesday and Thursday, according to Palestinian officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants in death tolls.
One of the strikes hit the coastal area of Mawasi near the city of Khan Younis, an area largely designated by the Israeli military as a “humanitarian zone” where tens of thousands of displaced people have been sheltering in tents.
In video distributed by wire agencies, the strike appeared to ignite a fire that burned some tents and rescue workers attempted to douse the flames in the wake of the strike on Mawasi before driving off with the dead and wounded.
Atef al-Hout, the director of the Nasser hospital, said in a telephone interview that the bodies of at least 14 people had arrived at the medical facility overnight on Thursday, including seven children. Most were believed to have been killed in the strike on Mawasi, he said.
Four other people with serious shrapnel injuries arrived at a separate medical facility, the Kuwaiti field hospital near Khan Younis, shortly after midnight on Thursday following the bombardment, said Suhaib al-Hamss, the facility’s director.
Since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel ignited the war in October 2023, Israel has repeatedly ordered Gazans to head for Mawasi, creating sprawling tent encampments. While many Gazans hoped they would be safe in the Israeli-designated humanitarian zone, Israel has occasionally struck there, citing activity by militants.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Mawasi attack and did not confirm the location of the strike.
Mustafa Abutaha, an English teacher sheltering in Mawasi, said he hoped Hamas reached a deal with Israel as soon as possible to end the war. Otherwise, he said, he feared Israel would fully take over Gaza.
“Every day there’s bombardment, nonstop,” said Mr. Abutaha, reached by phone. “We live in terrible conditions, and the saddest thing is that people have almost gotten used to it.”
Israel has vowed to intensify its attacks in Gaza in an effort to force Hamas to lay down its weapons and to release the hostages seized by the armed group in the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on southern Israel, which killed 1,200 people, saw about 250 taken hostage and touched off the war.
In January, Israel and Hamas signed a cease-fire that mediators hoped would lead to an end to the war. Thirty hostages and about 1,500 Palestinian prisoners were freed before Israel ended the truce in mid-March with a renewed military assault in Gaza, citing a deadlock in talks to secure the next steps of the deal.
The Israeli offensive came as Palestinians face what the United Nations has said could be the worst humanitarian crisis since the war began. More than 400,000 people have been displaced by the renewed fighting, many after returning to their homes for the first time in months.
Since early March, Israel has blocked the entry of humanitarian aid into the Palestinian enclave, barring shipments of medicine and food. Israeli officials have argued they allowed in sufficient supplies during the cease-fire but that Hamas has diverted some of the aid for its own purposes.
Many Israelis remain deeply anxious over the fate of the dozens of hostages still held by Hamas and allied groups. About 59 of the captives seized in the Oct. 7 attack are still in the enclave, more than half of them now presumed dead.
Israeli leaders have vowed to destroy Hamas in addition to freeing the hostages. But many Israelis say their government cannot do both at once and should agree to terms to free the captives — even if it means ending the war with Hamas’s rule intact.
International mediators — including from the Trump administration — have sought to broker a new deal between Israel and Hamas to restore the cease-fire and free the remaining hostages. But neither side has yet to compromise on their seemingly irreconcilable demands.
Hamas has blamed Israel for the ongoing war, arguing that the group is ready to free all the hostages as part of a deal to end it. But ordinary Gazans are increasingly denouncing the armed group for refusing to compromise to end the fighting.
Thousands of Palestinians have joined protests against Hamas’s control over the past few weeks, calling for the group to leave power and for an end to the war. Public expressions of dissent under Hamas’s repressive rule have been rare because of the high price of speaking out in Gaza, where rights groups say opponents have been regularly jailed and tortured.
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4) A Maryland senator met with the wrongly deported man in El Salvador.
By Robert Jimison, who covers Congress, traveled with Senator Chris Van Hollen to El Salvador, April 17, 2025
Senator Chris Van Hollen said on Thursday night that he had met in San Salvador with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whose wrongful deportation to El Salvador last month has become a flashpoint in the immigration debate and fueled a standoff between the Trump administration and the courts.
Mr. Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, shared a photo of the two men speaking on Thursday evening, hours after the senator had been denied entry to the prison where Mr. Abrego Garcia was being held.
The unexpected meeting took place at a hotel in San Salvador, according to photos shared by the senator’s office late Thursday. In the images, Mr. Abrego Garcia was dressed in plainclothes and sat for a conversation with Mr. Van Hollen. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said on social media that Mr. Abrego Garcia would remain in his country’s custody.
The photos shared by Mr. Van Hollen and others posted by Mr. Bukele were the first public glimpses of Mr. Abrego Garcia since his deportation in March, which the Trump administration admitted in court was an error. The Supreme Court has ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return, but a federal judge overseeing the case has scolded the government for doing “nothing” to comply.
“Our purpose today was very straightforward,” Mr. Van Hollen said in an interview on Thursday, before the meeting with Mr. Abrego Garcia. “It was simply to be able to go see if Kilmar Abrego Garcia is doing OK. I mean, nobody has heard anything about his condition since he was illegally abducted from the United States. He is totally beyond reach.”
Mr. Van Hollen had initially been stopped by the Salvadoran military officials when he tried to visit Mr. Abrego Garcia, and described the encounter as a blockade intended to thwart his visit to the prison. Human rights advocates have documented overcrowding in El Salvador’s prisons and reports of torture.
“This was a very sort of simple humanitarian request,” Mr. Van Hollen said soon after the stop.
The photos of Mr. Van Hollen’s meeting with Mr. Abrego Garcia conveyed a very different atmosphere from scenes of the crowded prison, with the two sitting together at a table in a dining area near lush greenery and greeting each other on the polished floor of the hotel lobby.
Mr. Bukele, in a social media post, even crowed that “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture,’” was “now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” But according to a person familiar with the situation, a Bukele aide placed the two glasses with cherries and salted rims on the table in front of Mr. Van Hollen and Mr. Abrego Garcia in the middle of their meeting in an attempt to stage the photo.
In his post, Mr. Van Hollen said he had called Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife, who has publicly pleaded for his return, after the meeting “to pass along his message of love.”
Mr. Van Hollen’s visit underscored a broader Democratic effort to spotlight the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, placing his detention at the center of their efforts to challenge the Trump administration’s approach. News of Mr. Van Hollen’s meeting Thursday evening had not deterred other Democratic lawmakers who had said they, too, intended to travel to the country to advocate for his release.
“This is an example of the much bigger challenge, no doubt about it,” Mr. Van Hollen said of the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, who had been living in Maryland under an immigration judge’s order that granted him protections from deportation. “Because my view is when you start picking on the most vulnerable people, and you push and push and push, and you get away with it, then you take the next bite.”
In exchange for El Salvador’s detention of the deported immigrants, Mr. Bukele has said he is being paid $6 million by the U.S. government.
In a social media post on Thursday after Mr. Van Hollen’s visit with Mr. Abrego Garcia, Mr. Bukele said that “now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”
A spokeswoman for the presidency of El Salvador, Wendy Ramos, did not respond to requests for comment.
At the White House on Thursday afternoon, when asked by a reporter whether he would move to return Mr. Abrego Garcia to the United States, Mr. Trump said, “Well, I’m not involved.”
“You’ll have to speak to the lawyers, the D.O.J.,” he said, referring to the Justice Department.
Beyond seeking assurances of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s safety, Mr. Van Hollen’s trip has brought additional attention to the case. Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation and imprisonment have become the most prominent example for both advocates and critics of the Trump administration’s stance on immigration.
For many Democrats, Mr. Van Hollen’s stand represented a defense of human rights and legal access. For conservatives, it was a misguided gesture of sympathy for a man who, as the White House has repeatedly noted, had entered the U.S. illegally.
“It’s appalling and sad that Senator Van Hollen and the Democrats applauding his trip to El Salvador today are incapable of having any shred of common sense or empathy for their own constituents,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said at a briefing on Wednesday afternoon.
She was joined in the briefing room by Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a Maryland resident who was brutally murdered in 2023 by an immigrant from El Salvador. The administration has pointed to Ms. Morin’s death as an example to justify its stance on immigration, though statistics show immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born citizens to commit crimes.
Mr. Van Hollen acknowledged Ms. Morin’s tragic death and reaffirmed his commitment to combating gang violence, which he said was a rare point of agreement with Salvadoran officials during his meetings this week. But he rejected the equivalence implied by Trump officials.
“My argument here all along in this is that he just requires due process,” Mr. Van Hollen said of Mr. Abrego Garcia. “My argument is not that I claim to know all the facts here. My whole argument is we have a court where the whole purpose of having a hearing was for people to present their evidence.”
Annie Correal contributed reporting.
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5) Trump Opens a Huge Marine Protected Zone to Commercial Fishing
The president said the move was aimed at making the United States the world’s “dominant seafood leader.”
By Rebecca Dzombak and Lisa Friedman, April 17, 2025
Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, about halfway between Hawaii and American Samoa, part of a national monument. Credit...Ian Shive/United States Fish and Wildlife Service
President Trump on Thursday said he was allowing commercial fishing in one of the world’s largest ocean reserves, introducing industrial operations for the first time in more than a decade to a vast area of the Pacific dotted with coral atolls and populated by endangered sea turtles and whales.
Mr. Trump issued an executive order opening up the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, which lies some 750 miles west of Hawaii. President George W. Bush established the monument in 2009 and President Barack Obama expanded it in 2014 to its current area of nearly 500,000 square miles.
A second executive order directed the Commerce Department to loosen regulations that “overly burden America’s commercial fishing, aquaculture, and fish processing industries.” It also asks the Interior Department to conduct a review of all marine monuments and issue recommendations about any that should be opened to commercial fishing.
“The United States should be the world’s dominant seafood leader,” Mr. Trump wrote.
The marine monument, a chain of islands and atolls amid more than 160 seamounts, is a trove of marine biodiversity. Environmentalists said opening the area to commercial fishing would pose a serious threat to the area’s fragile ecosystems.
Mr. Trump, accompanied in the Oval Office by a fisherman from American Samoa and Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen, the territory’s delegate to the House of Representatives, said his predecessors had deprived Pacific island communities of “fertile grounds.”
“It’s so horrible and so stupid,” Mr. Trump said. “You’re talking about a massive ocean and they’re forced to go and travel four to seven days to go and fish in an area that’s not as good.” He was referring to the time it takes fishermen to travel from their home islands to fishing grounds outside the protected area.
“Thank you, President Trump,” Ms. Radewagen, a Republican, said in a statement on Thursday. “This sensible proclamation is important to the stability and future of American Samoa’s economy, but it also is fantastic news for U.S. food security.”
Ms. Radewagen in January sent a letter to Mr. Trump calling for fishing to be reopened around the monument. The economy of American Samoa depends heavily on fishing, particularly tuna.
Other Republicans said the orders allowed for responsible commercial fishing that would be an economic boon for Americans in Hawaii and the Pacific territories.
“Our fellow Americans in the Indo-Pacific region rely on commercial fishing for their economic stability and their future,” said Representative Bruce Westerman, the Arkansas Republican who leads of the House Committee on Natural Resources.
He said greater access to fishing grounds would be a “monumental new economic opportunity.”
The executive order on the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument said that existing measures, such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, would sufficiently protect the area’s resources, species and habitats.
Environmental activists said the Trump administration’s claims that those laws were sufficient to protect marine life were false. They questioned the legality of Mr. Trump’s proclamation opening the monument and said they intended to sue to stop it.
“This is a gift to industrial fishing fleets and a slap in the face to science and the generations of Pacific Islanders who have long called for greater protection of these sacred waters,” said Maxx Phillips, director for Hawaii and Pacific Islands at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit organization.
Angelo Villagomez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a research organization, said opening marine monuments to industrial fishing “sets a dangerous precedent that our public lands and waters are for sale to the highest bidder.”
Mr. Villagomez noted that the United States controlled nearly five million square miles of ocean and said, “there is room for us to have the world’s best managed fisheries and networks of marine protection, safeguarding the most threatened, iconic and special places in our ocean.”
Robert H. Richmond, a marine ecologist at the University of Hawaii, pushed back on the idea that opening the monument would help the fishing industry and said there was strong data showing that large protected areas actually enhanced fishing. That’s because they provide a safe area free from vessels where fish can accumulate, grow and be in higher density where spawning is more successful.
“What they are really are bank accounts where fish are the principal,” Dr. Richmond said, “and their reproductive output is the interest.”
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6 U.S. Strikes on Yemeni Port Kill Dozens, Houthis Say
President Trump has vowed that the Iran-backed Houthi militia will be “completely annihilated.” But forceful American strikes do not seem to have deterred the Yemeni fighters.
By Aaron Boxerman and Vivian Nereim, April 18, 2025
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, and Vivian Nereim from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The latest round of U.S. airstrikes against the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen has killed dozens of people in bombardments targeting a port in the country’s northwest, the Houthis said on Friday.
The strikes late on Thursday were part of an escalating campaign by the Trump administration against the Yemeni militia. The Houthis have been attacking ships in the nearby Red Sea, and firing rockets and drones at Israel in a campaign that it says is in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.
The American bombardment targeted the port of Ras Isa, a major fuel depot in the Houthi-controlled province of Hudaydah. At least 74 people were killed and more than 100 others wounded, said Anees al-Asbahi, spokesman for the Houthi-run health ministry. The toll could not be independently verified.
President Trump has expanded efforts by the Biden administration to degrade the Houthis, vowing that they will be “completely annihilated.” Since entering office, Mr. Trump has also tightened U.S. sanctions against the group and re-designated the militia as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
But the increasingly forceful American strikes on the Houthis have yet to deter them from carrying out further attacks. Instead, the Houthis have said that they would welcome a conflict with the United States, their declared enemy.
Experts have also warned that attacking ports like Ras Isa could worsen the already dire conditions in Yemen. The United Nations has described the humanitarian crisis in the country as the world’s largest, with about 80 percent of the population in need of essential aid.
The Houthis began their attacks on Israel and on ships in the Red Sea after the war in Gaza began in October 2023, ignited by the Hamas-led attack on Israel. Most of the Houthi projectiles have been intercepted by Israeli air defenses, though a drone attack in July killed a man in Tel Aviv.
The militia briefly stopped firing rockets at Israel during a two-month cease-fire between Israel and Hamas this year. But after Israel ended the truce in mid-March with a renewed offensive in Gaza, the Houthis resumed firing ballistic missiles at Israeli territory.
Just a few hours after the American strikes, early on Friday morning, Houthi militants fired another ballistic missile at Israel. Air-raid sirens blared across the country’s heartland, instructing many Israelis to head to bomb shelters. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
But the increasingly forceful American strikes on the Houthis have yet to deter them from carrying out further attacks. Instead, the Houthis have said that they would welcome a conflict with the United States, their declared enemy.
Experts have also warned that attacking ports like Ras Isa could worsen the already dire conditions in Yemen. The United Nations has described the humanitarian crisis in the country as the world’s largest, with about 80 percent of the population in need of essential aid.
The Houthis began their attacks on Israel and on ships in the Red Sea after the war in Gaza began in October 2023, ignited by the Hamas-led attack on Israel. Most of the Houthi projectiles have been intercepted by Israeli air defenses, though a drone attack in July killed a man in Tel Aviv.
The militia briefly stopped firing rockets at Israel during a two-month cease-fire between Israel and Hamas this year. But after Israel ended the truce in mid-March with a renewed offensive in Gaza, the Houthis resumed firing ballistic missiles at Israeli territory.
Just a few hours after the American strikes, early on Friday morning, Houthi militants fired another ballistic missile at Israel. Air-raid sirens blared across the country’s heartland, instructing many Israelis to head to bomb shelters. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The American military said that it had targeted Ras Isa because shipments of fuel were still flowing into the port in defiance of American sanctions, allowing funds to flow into the Houthi coffers.
“U.S. forces took action to eliminate this source of fuel for the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists and deprive them of illegal revenue,” the American military’s Central Command said. “This strike was not intended to harm the people of Yemen, who rightly want to throw off the yoke of Houthi subjugation and live peacefully.”
Hudaydah’s ports are also the main conduit by which fuel, food and aid enter impoverished northern Yemen, where more than 20 million people live.
In the past, the United Nations and humanitarian groups have condemned the targeting of the port as damaging vital civilian infrastructure.
Saudi Arabia and its allies similarly cited the need to degrade the Houthis when the militia tried to take over Hudaydah during their nearly decade-long war against the group.
Back then, the United States and other countries pressed the Saudis to stop, fearing a humanitarian disaster. A United Nations-mediated agreement halted the fighting around the city in 2018.
Israeli fighter jets have also bombed Yemen multiple times since the Houthis began attacking Israel in late 2023, at times flying over 1,000 miles to strike ports and power stations in Houthi-controlled territory.
The Houthis have vowed to continue attacking until Israel ends its military offensive in Gaza.
Saeed Al-Batati contributed reporting from Al Mukalla, Yemen.
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7) Columbia Activists Are Being Detained. Protesters Demand Answers.
Demonstrators rallied on Columbia’s campus and marched in Manhattan, three days after Mohsen Mahdawi was detained by immigration officials after arriving for a U.S. citizenship appointment.
By Anvee Bhutani and Kaja Andric, April 17, 2025
Protesters at Columbia University on Thursday called for answers about the detention of two organizers of pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Credit...Marco Postigo Storel for The New York Times
ers took to the streets of New York City and to the campus of Columbia University on Thursday to protest the federal detention of organizers of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and what they regard as an assault on higher education.
The protesters demanded answers about the fate of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, Palestinians who had been involved in campus demonstrations over the war in Gaza.
Mr. Khalil, a Columbia graduate and legal permanent resident, was detained on March 8 at his New York City apartment, was sent briefly to a New Jersey detention center and has since been held at a facility in Jena, La. Mr. Mahdawi, who is finishing his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Columbia’s School of General Studies, 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.
Thursday’s protest at Columbia, with about 300 demonstrators, rang with chants of “Free Mohsen, free them all — every fascist state will fall,” accompanied by the beat of drums. Organizers handed out medical masks to help students shield their identities, along with fliers promoting a planned student strike.
Demonstrators criticized Columbia’s leadership for failing to more aggressively challenge demands by the Trump administration over what the White House described as the school’s failure to protect Jewish students from harassment. The federal government last month cut about $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia.
Faculty members turned out in solidarity, condemning what they said was a growing authoritarian crackdown on universities by the Trump administration.
Joseph Howley, a professor in Columbia’s classics department and an outspoken critic of the detentions by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, wore a red shirt that read, “Jews say ICE off our campus.”
Nearby, Kathryn Pope, a Columbia librarian, wore a “Hands Off Our Students” pin affixed to her jacket.
“I’m here for the students, especially our international students,” she said. “Columbia shouldn’t give in to the Trump administration. It should fight back.”
The university this week appeared to be adopting a tougher tone, with a note from the acting president pledging that the school would not allow the federal government to “require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy.”
Columbia’s philosophy department registered its “horror and dismay” over the detention of Mr. Mahdawi, a green card holder for the past 10 years, in a statement on its website. The department emphasized that Mr. Mahdawi had been “accused of no crime” and called on the university “to assist by all means, including through the provision of material and legal resources, any Columbia student targeted or detained — and seemingly only for having exercised their right to the free and peaceful expression of political opinion.”
After the midday rally at Columbia, some demonstrators headed south, where other protesters convened at Washington Square Park before marching to Foley Square in Lower Manhattan.
At Washington Square, Amelia Moranska, an international student studying forensic psychology at John Jay College, said she showed up because “we heard that they were actually going to stand up for international students.”
Ms. Moranska, who comes from Malta, said the events of recent weeks had left her feeling unsafe.
“It’s suffocating being here right now, as an international student,” she said, turning around and staring at the Washington Arch.
Ms. Moranska said she had wanted to stay in the United States but had decided to pursue a master’s degree in Athens at Mediterranean College.
Irena Grudzinska Gross, who has taught history and literature at Princeton University, said she came to the United States after participating in student protests in Poland in 1968.
“I was persecuted, in that I was kicked out of university,” she said. “I didn’t see the future for myself.”
Even though hundreds of people were at the protest, she thought there should be more.
“When I hear the call, I’m marching,” Ms. Grudzinska Gross said.
Many of the marchers were professors who stopped walking at each red light, waiting until the light turned green to continue. They kept mostly to the sidewalks and chanted: “Higher education under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back.”
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8) In an emergency filing, lawyers had asked the justices to stop the deportations.
By Alan Feuer, Hamed Aleaziz and Abbie VanSickle, April 19, 2025
The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration early Saturday from deporting another group of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members under the expansive powers of a rarely invoked wartime law.
“The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court,” the court said in a brief, unsigned order that gave no reasoning, as is typical in emergency cases.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented. The White House did not issue any immediate response.
More than 50 Venezuelans were scheduled to be flown out of the country — presumably to El Salvador — from an immigration detention center in Anson, Texas, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. The A.C.L.U. in recent days had already secured court orders barring similar deportations under the law, the Alien Enemies Act, in other places including New York, Denver and Brownsville, Texas.
The situation in Anson was urgent enough that A.C.L.U. lawyers mounted challenges in three different courts within five hours on Friday.
The lawyers started with an emergency filing in Federal District Court in Abilene, Texas, in which they claimed that officers at the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson had started distributing notices to Venezuelan immigrants informing them that they could face deportation as soon as Friday night.
They asked Judge James Wesley Hendrix, who is overseeing the case, to issue an immediate order protecting all migrants in the Northern District of Texas who might face deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. When Judge Hendrix did not grant their request quickly — and later rejected it entirely — the lawyers filed a similar request to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.
The lawyers then filed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to step in and issue an immediate pause on any deportations because many of the Venezuelan men had “already been loaded on to buses, presumably headed to the airport.”
Immigration lawyers have been playing a high-stakes game of cat and mouse with the federal government since President Trump issued a proclamation last month invoking the Alien Enemies Act as a way to deport immigrants he claims are members of Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan street gang. The law, which was passed in 1798, has been used only three times before in U.S. history, during periods of declared war.
The efforts by groups like the A.C.L.U. to stop deportations under the act were complicated this month by a Supreme Court ruling that found that anyone subject to the statute needed to be given the opportunity to challenge their removal, but only in the places where they were being detained.
The decision by the justices set off a hunt for anyone who might fall under the authority of Mr. Trump’s proclamation. The A.C.L.U., hoping to come up with a system for determining where those people might be, has asked a federal judge in Washington to issue a nationwide order forcing the government to provide 30 days’ notice to anyone in the country before officials seek to remove them under the Alien Enemies Act.
During a hearing on Friday evening in front of the judge in Washington, James E. Boasberg, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U., Lee Gelernt, said that he was prepared to file what amounted to pre-emptive lawsuits in all of the more than 90 federal judicial districts across the country in an effort to ensure that no Venezuelan migrants were deported without hearings under the act.
Drew C. Ensign, a lawyer for the Justice Department, gave his word that no flights were scheduled to depart from the Bluebonnet center on Friday night or Saturday morning, adding that the migrants there would be given at least 24 hours’ notice before they were deported.
But Judge Boasberg was somewhat skeptical of Mr. Ensign’s assertion, pointing out that the notice forms the government had given to the Venezuelan men did not contain an explicit statement that they were able to challenge their deportations.
There is a history here: In mid-March, during the first hearing to consider the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, Judge Boasberg ordered Trump officials to pause all of the deportation flights it had sent out under the act. But despite his instructions, two planes left Texas and landed in El Salvador. A third plane from Texas holding people whose deportations were not under the act also arrived in El Salvador. In all, more than 200 deportees were stranded in prison there.
Judge Boasberg is now considering opening a contempt investigation into whether the administration violated his order, although an appeals court temporarily put that plan on hold on Friday night. Still, he declined on Friday night to issue a new order stopping deportation flights from northern Texas in part because of jurisdictional concerns that other courts were already mulling the same question.
This latest iteration of the fight over the use of the Alien Enemies Act began on Wednesday when the A.C.L.U. filed suit in Abilene on behalf of two Venezuelan migrants being held at the Bluebonnet facility, asking Judge Hendrix to shield them against deportation. But the judge denied the request, largely because lawyers for the Justice Department told him that the men — known only by their initials, A.A.R.P. and W.M.M. — had not yet been scheduled for removal from the country.
But then on Friday, other Venezuelan migrants at the detention center were informed that they were facing imminent deportation, court papers say. One of them, known as F.G.M., was instructed to sign a removal waiver in English, even though he speaks only Spanish, the papers say.
When he refused to sign, immigration officers told him the waiver was “coming from the president,” according to court papers, “and that he will be deported even if he did not sign it.”
Among those at the Bluebonnet detention center that the A.C.L.U. is seeking to protect from deportation is a 19-year-old known as Y.S.M.
Y.S.M., court papers say, was arrested by immigration agents on March 14 and was sent to the Bluebonnet facility this week. When the agents initially questioned him, court papers say, they told him that a photograph on Facebook showing him in the presence of another person holding a gun proved he was a member of Tren de Aragua.
But according to his lawyer, Y.S.M. informed the agents that what they believed to be a gun was actually a water pistol.
A spokeswoman for the president of El Salvador, Wendy Ramos, did not respond to a request for confirmation of an upcoming flight.
Since March 15, the Trump administration has sent five flights carrying deportees to El Salvador under a deal with its president, Nayib Bukele, to hold detainees deemed by U.S. authorities to be part of criminal gangs in his country’s prison system, for a fee.
Annie Correal, Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
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9) A lawsuit aims to broadly halt deportations of foreign students.
By Zach Montague, Reporting from Washington, April 19, 2025
A lawsuit filed in New Hampshire late Friday aims to present a sweeping legal challenge to the Trump administration’s campaign targeting international students and academics.
Lawyers asked a federal judge to certify a lawsuit brought by foreign students whose visas were canceled as a class action.
Cases of international students being detained by masked immigration agents over violations cited by the Trump administration that many individual rights groups have described as protected speech have sparked widespread outrage. But most have been challenged in individual lawsuits.
The lawsuit filed in New Hampshire casts a wider net, intending to to stop similar detentions and deportation efforts for students in New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico. It also asks the court to reinstate the student visas that have been terminated.
In recent weeks, immigration agencies have rapidly stepped up efforts to punish international students studying in the United States, in many cases because of their involvement in pro-Palestinian protests related to the war in Gaza. In some instances, the lawyers of detained students have described the use of aggressive tactics and students being moved hundreds of miles to detention facilities in Louisiana.
Hundreds of students have been swept up in the deportation campaign. Among those whose cases have drawn national attention are Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University; Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the United States who studied at Columbia University; and Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian Ph.D. student at Cornell University. Their cases have also prompted pushback from legal groups over what they say is a threat to campus speech.
The new lawsuit challenges those arrests as an arbitrary overreach by immigration officials and a violation of students’ due process rights.
In moving to deport the students, the Trump administration has used charged rhetoric. In several cases it has argued that by expressing support for pro-Palestinian demonstrations — sometimes only indirectly — the students’ presence in the United States amounted to a national security threat. Officials have routinely referred to student visas as a privilege that can be revoked at any time and have characterized the students as supporters of “pro-jihadist protests” and terrorism.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of five students from China and India. It did not specify what rationale was given for their visas being terminated.
“These terminations — across the board — flout the applicable regulations governing student status termination and the regulations governing failure to maintain student status,” it said.
The lawsuit lists an array of harms facing students studying on a visa, including imminent detention and deportation, and loss of their progress toward a degree or graduate research. It noted that as of a week ago, the four states involved and Puerto Rico have collectively seen at least 112 people whose student statuses were terminated.
It asked a federal judge to issue a ruling to block the Trump administration from carrying out future detentions and deportations of any student across the nearly 200 accredited colleges and universities in the states involved.
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10) What Is Lost When We Scare Away Foreign Students
By Rachel Riedl and Stephen Yale-Loehr, April 19, 2025
Dr. Riedl is a professor of government and at the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell. Mr. Yale-Loehr is a retired professor of practice at Cornell Law School.
Rachel Stern for The New York Times
International students are a vital and enriching presence on any campus. They are drawn to the United States for our academic excellence and free exchange of ideas. But over the past few months, current and prospective international students — as well as university faculty members — have felt increasingly unwelcome in this country, as over 1,000 students have had their visas revoked or their immigration statuses terminated.
Fear and anxiety have begun to alter campus life. At risk are the very concept of a university as a meeting point for intellectual thought from around the world and U.S. global leadership in higher education.
Since President Trump took office on Jan. 20, immigration agents have detained university students around the country. Minor infractions, including traffic violations, which typically did not endanger one’s visa status under other administrations, have become cause for status termination or visa revocation. Participation in any form of protest against the war in Gaza has become cause for visa review. In early March, Axios reported that the State Department planned to use artificial intelligence to help review the social media posts of tens of thousands of student visa holders. This was said to be part of an effort to identify and remove students who purportedly expressed support for Hamas or other designated terrorist groups. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is also reviewing students’ social media posts as possible grounds for denying applications and other requests submitted to the agency.
The numbers rise by the day: So far, more than 240 colleges and universities have identified over 1,500 students and recent graduates who have had their visas revoked or their legal status changed, according to Inside Higher Ed. There is no clear justification for many of these cases. In the past, universities worked with immigration authorities and students to address changes in visa status; now universities often are among the last to know when students’ visas have been revoked.
The government retains the right to remove foreign nationals who violate the requirements of their visa or who are perceived as threats to national security, foreign policy or public safety. The question is: Who determines if they pose a threat? The Trump administration is undermining constitutional rights to due process and free speech accorded to visitors and citizens alike in its deployment of a sweeping interpretation of “threat,” and under immigration law there is little room for courts to intervene.
Foreign nationals who are legally in the United States on temporary visas and green cards are panicking. They are finding guardians for their children in case of emergency, deleting even benign social media posts and moving to secure apps like Signal to communicate. Many are afraid to leave campus or to attend academic seminars abroad for fear of rough treatment at the border or detention.
Some of the international scholars facing threat in their home countries, to whom American universities have long offered safe harbor, will be unable to enter or return to the United States if the administration’s proposed travel ban is put in place. Often, these foreign students have made enormous sacrifices to be eligible for one of the few slots available for international students. For the 2023-24 academic year, international students contributed an estimated $44 billion to the U.S. economy and supported over 378,000 jobs.
These circumstances have created a wave of fear that reaches outward to America’s students, university staff members and international research partners. On campuses nationwide, it seems almost everyone knows someone who has left the country, been subjected to extreme harassment at the border or had an international research program gutted. The Trump administration’s actions feel increasingly random, such that simply following the law no longer makes people feel safe.
Funding has been cut for longstanding area studies programs that foster international research and collaboration. Programs such as the Fulbright scholarship and Title VI language and area or international studies programs, established by the U.S. government in the 20th century as vehicles for understanding the world around us, are now deemed potentially subversive.
When governments around the world began similar attacks on universities, such moves were part of a broader autocratic playbook. The First Amendment protects vigorous political debate in this country, but as the trajectories of Turkey and Hungary demonstrate, democracies can slide backward.
In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s attack on universities began subtly, cracking down on speech that criticized the government. Later he began to reduce the autonomy of universities and increase police presence on campuses. In response to mounting pressure from society and military leaders, he purged academia of critics, accusing them of links to terrorist organizations. He also tightened his control by replacing elected university leaders with loyal, government-appointed ones.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary has targeted academic institutions that challenged his ethnonationalist agenda. In 2018, Central European University announced that his government was forcing the school out of the country. He then restructured public universities, transferring their control to government-aligned foundations, allowing only those friendly to the government to dominate decision making and funding. Academic programs were banned, and university curriculums were reshaped to fit a nationalist and conservative ideology. The global standing and quality of Hungarian research and science was degraded, and the nation’s academic community was diminished.
In the United States we have long celebrated the freedom of thought and expression to challenge authority, conventional wisdom and earlier research. The ability to voice or dispute contentious political or scientific ideas has made U.S. universities engines of innovation and creativity.
We run the risk of jeopardizing our future as global leaders, as creators, as critical thinkers and as a free society. If we threaten our international community and take rights away from individuals who say things the government doesn’t like, we all lose. What begins with international students will not end with them.
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11) The Trump Billionaires Who Run the Economy and the Things They Say
“You have to laugh to keep from crying,” one Republican pollster said about recent comments by the billionaires on the stock market, retirement funds and Social Security.
By Elisabeth Bumiller, Reporting from Washington, April 19, 2025
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, left, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, right, in the Oval Office with President Trump this month. The three men are each worth billions of dollars. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
Sometimes the billionaires running the federal government sound like they’re talking to other billionaires.
“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” President Trump wrote on social media last week, offering a stock tip that appeared aimed at the investor class rather than ordinary Americans watching their plummeting 401(k)s.
Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, has said his mother-in-law wouldn’t be worried if she didn’t get her monthly Social Security check. Elon Musk, who is slashing the Social Security Administration’s staff, has called it a “Ponzi scheme.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has asserted that Americans aren’t looking at the “day-to-day fluctuations” in their retirement savings.
And if automakers raise their prices because of Mr. Trump’s tariffs? “I couldn’t care less,” the president told Kristen Welker of NBC.
Democrats say the comments show how clueless Mr. Trump and his friends are about the lives of most Americans, and that this is what happens when billionaires run the economy. Republicans counter that highlighting the quotes is unfair cherry picking, and that in the long run everyone will benefit from their policies, even if there’s pain now. Psychologists say that extreme wealth does change people and their views of those who have less.
Whoever is right, it is safe to say that almost no one thinks the comments have been politically helpful for Mr. Trump, or calming for Americans.
“You have to laugh to keep from crying,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “What did they say about the old New York Mets? ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’” (Mr. Ayres was referring to what the manager Casey Stengel once said about his hapless 1962 Mets, and the subsequent title of a book by Jimmy Breslin.)
For the record, Forbes put Mr. Trump’s net worth at $4.2 billion on April 8, down $500 million from April 2, the day the president rolled out his tariffs. Forbes estimated the net worth of Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, as $364 billion on April 17 and Mr. Lutnick’s as $3 billion the same day. Mr. Bessent, formerly the top investor for the billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros, listed assets in excess of $700 million on his financial disclosure form this year but is thought to be worth much more.
The opposition has swiftly pounced on their comments. Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and minority leader, said that Mr. Trump and his rich friends live in a “billionaires’ bubble,” while Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, called out Mr. Lutnick on social media.
“Maybe your mother-in-law wouldn’t complain if she didn’t get her Social Security check, but tens of millions of seniors struggling to survive would,” Mr. Sanders wrote. “How out of touch are you, not to realize that?”
A lot, at least according to pollsters.
“If someone is concerned about their financial well-being, take them at their word,” said Frank Luntz, a longtime focus group leader, pollster and consultant, speaking about the widespread fears of rising prices and falling stocks brought on by Mr. Trump’s tariffs. He said the president understood voters’ anxieties during the 2024 campaign, when he repeatedly promised to bring down grocery prices, but seems to have forgotten them now.
“If you knew they were struggling in October, why do you dismiss their struggling in April?” Mr. Luntz asked. He added that “the word that is missing in all of this, from Elon and the president, is empathy.”
Paul K. Piff, an associate professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, has studied the psychology of the rich for nearly two decades. He said that research shows that as a person’s wealth increases, more often than not empathy and compassion for others decreases. Professor Piff cautioned that there are exceptions, and that he was not speaking specifically about the billionaires in the Trump administration.
But he said excessive wealth has profound effects on a person’s character. “You certainly have more power and more influence over people in your life,” he said. Money, he added, “buys you space and distance from people, and alongside that comes this increased focus on your own self. It’s not a difficult stretch to say that you lose touch for what it’s like for lots and lots of people.”
Susan Pinker, a Canadian psychologist who was a writer for The Wall Street Journal’s Mind & Matter column about human behavior and earlier wrote The Business Brain column for The Globe and Mail, said the rich live in their own world.
“The reason why the super wealthy at the helm of government can’t imagine how people might be distressed by some of their policies is that they don’t really see them that clearly,” she said. “We’re not really built from an evolutionary perspective to feel like we’re at home with everybody. The stronger our in-group, the more likely we are to exclude others.”
Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who is Ms. Pinker’s brother, said he was not convinced that the billionaires’ comments were because of their wealth. “A more immediate cause may be cognitive dissonance,” he said, referring to the psychological state that can occur when people’s actions don’t align with their beliefs.
“In the case of the Trump administration,” Professor Pinker said, “they have little choice but to twist themselves into artisanal pretzels in order to defend the indefensible.”
A White House spokesman, Kush Desai, said in response to the criticism of Mr. Trump’s remarks about the stock market and potentially higher prices that “the only special interest guiding President Trump’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people — such as addressing the national emergency posed by our country running chronic trade deficits.” White House officials also point out that Mr. Trump has vowed not to cut Social Security benefits.
Recent polls show that Mr. Trump’s approval rating has declined since his inauguration, including a Quinnipiac survey conducted in early April that found that 53 percent disapproved of Mr. Trump and 41 percent approved. It was a significant shift from a Quinnipiac poll at the start of the administration, when 43 percent disapproved and 46 percent approved.
Although Mr. Trump’s drop in recent polls is similar to those of Presidents Joseph R. Biden Jr., Barack Obama and Bill Clinton at this point in their terms, he has had a sharp decrease in support among independents. In the recent Quinnipiac poll, 58 percent of independents disapproved of Mr. Trump and 36 percent approved, compared to 46 percent who disapproved of him in January and 41 percent who approved.
The polls do not show how much the recent turmoil over tariffs and the stock market has affected voters’ views of Mr. Trump. But the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said most current surveys give Mr. Trump negative marks on his handling of the economy, a source of his strength against Mr. Biden during the 2024 campaign.
In her view, the remarks of the Trump billionaires show how much they talk among themselves.
“They play golf with billionaires, they have dinner with billionaires, they go to Mar-a-Lago,” she said. “When was the last time any of them bought a dozen eggs or a quart of milk?”
Or as Mr. Trump said when he kicked off a Mar-a-Lago dinner with friends after his tax cuts became law in December 2017, “You all just got a lot richer.”
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12) Israeli Attacks Kill Dozens in Gaza, Health Ministry Says
Israel was keeping up its intense bombing campaign in the enclave, which has exacted a heavy price on civilians struggling to find safe places to shelter.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 19, 2025
The latest round of Israeli attacks in a renewed military offensive in Gaza has killed dozens of Palestinians, the territory’s health ministry said on Saturday.
The ministry said that 92 dead and 219 wounded people had arrived at hospitals over the past 48 hours. Gaza health officials do not differentiate between civilians and combatants in casualty counts.
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 that the military is targeting militants and weapons infrastructure in a bid to compel Hamas to release more hostages held in the enclave.
More than 1,700 people have been killed in Gaza since the cease-fire fell apart, and more than 51,000 people have been killed since the war began in October 2023, according to the health ministry.
Israel’s renewed offensive has exacted a heavy price on civilians struggling to find places to shelter and reinforced a feeling among Palestinians in Gaza that nowhere is safe.
On Friday, the Israeli military told The New York Times that Mawasi, a narrow strip of coastal land in southern Gaza, was no longer considered a “humanitarian zone.” Earlier in the war, the Israeli military repeatedly instructed Palestinians to go to Mawasi, which it had described at the time as a “humanitarian zone.”
Large numbers of Palestinians are still living in the Mawasi area in tent encampments.
Since the cease-fire broke down, Avichay Adraee, an Arabic-language spokesman for the military, has instructed some Palestinians to go to shelters in Mawasi without describing the area as a “humanitarian zone.”
While many Palestinians in Gaza were still under the impression that the area held a special status, it is not clear whether the Israeli military ever informed them that it was no longer designated a “humanitarian zone.”
The health ministry’s statement on Saturday did not clarify where the people were killed in the latest round of bombings. But the Palestinian Civil Defense, an arm of the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, said it had recovered bodies in northern and southern Gaza over the past two days.
Securing food and water in Gaza has become an increasingly difficult task as Israel continues to block the entry of aid supplies and commercial goods and as humanitarian groups struggle to guarantee the safety of their workers.
On Tuesday, the results of a survey of 43 aid groups showed that almost all had either suspended or reduced their operations in Gaza since Israel resumed its offensive in March.
“Survival itself is now slipping out of reach and the humanitarian system is at breaking point,” the leaders of 12 humanitarian groups said in a joint statement, adding that they were demanding that “all parties” ensure the safety of aid workers and permit “unfettered access of aid into and across Gaza.”
“Let us do our jobs,” they said.
On Thursday, UNRWA, a United Nations agency that aids Palestinians, said that the latest effort to vaccinate against polio in Gaza had been “postponed until further notice,” citing both Israeli airstrikes and evacuation orders.
Hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza have received shots since 2024, according to UNRWA.
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13) Israel’s Military Cites ‘Professional Failures’ in Killings of Gaza Medics
In a statement summarizing its investigation into the deadly episode, the military said a deputy commander would be dismissed.
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...via Associated Press
The Israeli military said Sunday that an investigation into its soldiers’ deadly attack on medics in Gaza last month had identified “several professional failures” and that a commander would be dismissed.
The military had previously acknowledged carrying out the attack in Rafah, southern Gaza, that killed 14 rescue workers and a United Nations employee who drove by after the others were shot. But it had offered shifting explanations for why its troops fired on the emergency vehicles and said it was investigating the episode, one that prompted international condemnation and that experts described as a war crime.
On Sunday — nearly a month after the attack — the military released a statement summarizing its investigation.
“The examination identified several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident,” it said.
The deadly shootings of the rescue workers resulted from “an operational misunderstanding” by troops on the ground “who believed they faced a tangible threat from enemy forces.” Firing on a U.N. vehicle, the statement added, involved “a breach of orders” in a combat setting.
Israeli troops fired on ambulances and a fire truck sent by the Palestine Red Crescent Society and the Civil Defense, as well as the United Nations vehicle that passed by separately, according to witness accounts, video and audio of the attack.
The military said on Sunday that “due to poor night visibility,” the deputy commander on the ground “did not initially recognize the vehicles as ambulances.”
Two weeks ago, the Israeli military acknowledged that some of its early assertions, based on accounts from troops involved in the killing, were partly mistaken.
Military officials had initially asserted, repeatedly and erroneously, that the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” toward the troops “without headlights or emergency signals.”
The military backtracked on that assertion a day after The New York Times published a video, discovered on the cellphone of one of the dead paramedics, that showed the clearly marked vehicles flashing their lights and coming to a halt before the attack.
Israeli soldiers later buried most of the bodies in a mass grave, crushed the ambulances, fire truck and a U.N. vehicle, and buried those as well.
In the statement on Sunday, the Israeli military said that “removing the bodies was reasonable under the circumstances, but the decision to crush the vehicles was wrong.”
The commander of the brigade involved will receive a reprimand “for his overall responsibility for the incident,” it said, while the battalion’s deputy commander will be dismissed because of his responsibilities “and for providing an incomplete and inaccurate report during the debrief.”
Bilal Shbair contributed reporting from Gaza, and Vivian Yee from Cairo.
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14) Bukele Proposes Deal That Would Free Deported Venezuelans
President Nayib Bukele said he would free the Venezuelans that the Trump administration deported to El Salvador if Venezuela released the same number of prisoners, including members of the opposition.
By Annie Correal and Julie Turkewitz, Published April 20, 2025, Updated April 21, 2025
Annie Correal reported from San Salvador, El Salvador.
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador at the White House in Washington, D.C., last week. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
El Salvador’s president proposed on Sunday repatriating Venezuelan detainees sent to his country from the United States in exchange for the release of prisoners by Venezuela, including key figures in the Venezuelan opposition.
“I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that includes the repatriation of 100 percent of the 252 Venezuelans who were deported, in exchange for the release and surrender of an identical number (252) of the thousands of political prisoners you hold,” President Nayib Bukele wrote in an X post directed at President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
Since March, the U.S. government has sent Venezuelans and Salvadorans accused of being affiliated with the Tren de Aragua and MS-13 gangs to El Salvador, where Mr. Bukele agreed to hold convicted criminals for the United States, for a fee.
Venezuela’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab, demanded the immediate release of the Venezuelans held in El Salvador late Sunday in a statement responding to Mr. Bukele. Mr. Saab didn’t say whether the Venezuelan government would consider the proposal.
The first flights to arrive in El Salvador carried 238 Venezuelans, many of whom were found not to have criminal records. Mr. Maduro responded explosively to the detention of Venezuelans by El Salvador’s government, telling Mr. Bukele not to be “an accomplice in this kidnapping.”
Among the political prisoners in Venezuela named in Mr. Bukele’s post were several people detained by the Maduro government in a crackdown last year.
He also said that as part of the swap, he would require Mr. Maduro to release “nearly 50 detained citizens of other nationalities,” including Americans.
As of last month, at least 68 foreign passport holders were wrongfully imprisoned in Venezuela, according to a Venezuelan watchdog group, Foro Penal. They are detained alongside roughly 900 Venezuelan political prisoners. The United Nations and independent watchdog groups have documented a pattern of human rights abuses by the Venezuelan government.
The detention of critics and other politically useful figures comes as Mr. Maduro has lost support at home and abroad and has sought new forms of leverage. His goals include pushing the United States to renegotiate sanctions on his government.
“Unlike you, who holds political prisoners,” Mr. Bukele wrote, “we do not have political prisoners. All the Venezuelans we have in custody were detained as part of an operation against gangs like Tren de Aragua in the United States.”
Despite Mr. Bukele’s assertion, his government has arrested and imprisoned current and former politicians from both opposition and governing parties, according to a 2023 State Department report. Media outlets have challenged the legitimacy of these detentions, but the Bukele administration insists the charges are valid.
Mr. Bukele said his government would send “the formal correspondence” and ended his message saying, “God bless the people of Venezuela.”
Mr. Saab said that the Venezuelan government would be pressing El Salvador’s attorney general and Supreme Court for a list of the names of those who were detained, along with “proof of life and a medical report for each one.”
Isayen Herrera contributed reporting from Caracas, Venezuela.
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15) Israeli Minister Says Freeing Hostages Not ‘Most Important’ Aim of the War
The far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said the more crucial goal was ensuring that Hamas no longer ruled the Gaza Strip.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 21, 2025
Protesters in Tel Aviv demanding the immediate release on Saturday of hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Credit...Ariel Schalit/Associated Press
A far-right Israeli politician said on Monday that saving the hostages in Gaza was not Israel’s “most important goal” in its war with Hamas, further stoking the debate in Israel over its objectives for the war.
Bezalel Smotrich, the country’s powerful finance minister, suggested in a radio interview that ensuring that Hamas no longer ruled the Gaza Strip after its deadly 2023 attack in southern Israel was a higher priority.
“We have promised the Israeli people that at the end of the war, Gaza will no longer be a threat to Israel,” said Mr. Smotrich, who has called for building Jewish settlements in the Palestinian enclave. “We need to eliminate the problem of Gaza.”
Israel launched the war in Gaza after the Hamas-led attack with at least two aims: One was to destroy Hamas and restore Israelis’ sense of safety after roughly 1,200 people were killed in the surprise attack. Another was to bring back the more than 250 people captured in the assault.
Both goals have proved elusive despite the devastating Israeli campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 50,000 people, according to Palestinian health officials, who have not said how many of the dead were combatants.
Hamas is demanding a permanent cease-fire in exchange for the release of any more of the remaining hostages. Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have insisted they will not end the war before Hamas surrenders.
Mr. Smotrich has expressed a similar sentiment before, but the timing of his remarks on an already sensitive subject touched a nerve in Israel, where a no-one-left-behind ethos has long prompted the country to make difficult deals in exchange for the release of captive Israelis.
The Hostages Families Forum, an advocacy group, denounced Mr. Smotrich, saying the Israeli government had “consciously decided to give up on the hostages” in favor of the war effort.
In January, Israel agreed to a cease-fire with Hamas, during which more than 1,500 Palestinian prisoners were exchanged for 25 Israeli hostages and the bodies of eight more. Hamas also released five Thai captives during the truce.
Mediators, including the Trump administration, had hoped the initial truce would pave the way for a comprehensive end to the war and the release of the remaining hostages.
About two dozen living hostages and the bodies of more than 30 others are believed to still be in Gaza, according to Israeli officials.
But Israel ended the truce in mid-March with a bombardment that killed hundreds of people and sent ground troops to seize swaths of the enclave. Israeli leaders, backed by the United States, blamed Hamas.
Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly pledged to achieve “ultimate victory” in the struggle against Hamas. The families of the remaining Israeli hostages fear that the pursuit of that goal will cost their loved ones their lives; they have increasingly demanded an end to the war in the hopes that it will lead to freedom for the captives.
More than 36 hostages have died during the 18-month war in the Gaza Strip, some of them in Israeli airstrikes. Hamas has continued to fight a dogged insurgency against Israel for well over a year despite heavy losses, leaving critics skeptical that the group can be destroyed completely.
Speaking on Saturday night, Mr. Netanyahu hit back at his critics, saying those calling for an end to the war as a way to bring back the hostages were “echoing Hamas propaganda word for word.”
The hard-right Israeli government hopes that the Trump administration will allow them a freer hand in Gaza than the Biden administration, and Mr. Smotrich’s remarks coincided with the official start on Monday of Mike Huckabee’s tenure as ambassador to Israel. He presented his credentials to Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, at a ceremony in Jerusalem.
Mr. Huckabee — one of the United States’ most prominent evangelical leaders — was formerly governor of Arkansas and a Republican presidential hopeful.
A trained Baptist minister, he is also a staunch supporter of the Israeli movement to settle and ultimately annex the West Bank, where millions of Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation.
Mr. Huckabee has said his support for Israel is rooted in his belief that God made a covenant with the Jews in the Old Testament. During his 2008 presidential campaign, Mr. Huckabee said in video published by BuzzFeed that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”
During his confirmation hearings, Mr. Huckabee sought to avoid discussing his previous public positions, saying that he was there to faithfully represent and execute Mr. Trump’s policies.
Settlers nonetheless hope that he will be a voice urging the United States to fully back their hopes to annex the West Bank, which critics say would be a death knell for the internationally backed Palestinian aspiration for statehood.
Ephrat Livni contributed reporting.
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