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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) Trump’s draft budget ends a Narcan program and other programs to fight addiction.
By Jan Hoffman, who covers addiction, April 25, 2025
The opioid overdose reversal medication commercially known as Narcan saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year and is routinely praised by public health experts for contributing to the continuing drop in opioid-related deaths. But the Trump administration plans to terminate a $56 million annual grant program that distributes doses and trains emergency responders in communities across the country to administer them, according to a draft budget proposal.
In the document, which outlines details of the drastic reorganization and shrinking planned for the Department of Health and Human Services, the grant is among many addiction prevention and treatment programs to be zeroed out.
States and local governments have other resources for obtaining doses of Narcan, which is also known by its generic name, naloxone. One of the main sources, a program of block grants for states to use to pay for various measures to combat opioid addiction, does not appear to have been cut.
But addiction specialists are worried about the symbolic as well as practical implications of shutting down a federal grant designated specifically for naloxone training and distribution.
“Reducing the funding for naloxone and overdose prevention sends the message that we would rather people who use drugs die than get the support they need and deserve,” said Dr. Melody Glenn, an addiction medicine physician and assistant professor at the University of Arizona, who monitors such programs along the state’s southern border.
Neither the Department of Health and Human Services nor the White House’s drug policy office responded to requests for comment.
Although budget decisions are not finalized and could be adjusted, Dr. Glenn and others see the fact that the Trump administration has not even opened applications for new grants as another indication that the programs may be eliminated.
Other addiction-related grants on the chopping block include those offering treatment for pregnant and postpartum women; peer support programs typically run by people who are in recovery; a program called the “youth prevention and recovery initiative”; and programs that develop pain management protocols for emergency departments in lieu of opioids.
The federal health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long shown a passionate interest in addressing the drug crisis and has been outspoken about his own recovery from heroin addiction. The proposed elimination of addiction programs seems at odds with that goal. Last year, Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign produced a documentary that outlined federally supported pathways out of addiction.
The grants were awarded through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency within the federal health department that would itself be eliminated under the draft budget proposal, though some of its programs would continue under a new entity, the Administration for a Healthy America.
In 2024, recipients of the naloxone grants, including cities, tribes and nonprofit groups, trained 66,000 police officers, fire fighters and emergency medical responders, and distributed over 282,500 naloxone kits, according to a spokesman for the substance abuse agency.
“Narcan has been kind of a godsend as far as opioid epidemics are concerned, and we are certainly are in the middle of one now with fentanyl,” said Donald McNamara, who oversees naloxone procurement and training for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “We need this funding source because it’s saving lives every day.”
Matthew Cushman, a fire department paramedic in Raytown, Mo., said that through the naloxone grant program, he had trained thousands of police officers, firefighters and emergency medical responders throughout Kansas City and western rural areas. The program provides trainees with pouches of naloxone to administer in the field plus “leave behind” kits with information about detox and treatment clinics.
In 2023, federal figures started to show that national opioid deaths were finally declining, progress that many public health experts attribute in some measure to wider availability of the drug, which the Food and Drug Administration approved for over-the-counter sales that year.
Tennessee reports that between 2017 and 2024, 103,000 lives saved were directly attributable to naloxone. In Kentucky, which trains and supplies emergency medical workers in 68 rural communities, a health department spokeswoman noted that in 2023, overdose fatalities dropped by nearly 10 percent.
And though the focus of the Trump administration’s Office of National Drug Control Policy is weighted toward border policing and drug prosecutions, its priorities, released in an official statement this month, include the goal of expanding access to “lifesaving opioid overdose reversal medications like naloxone.”
“They immediately reference how much they want to support first responders and naloxone distribution,” said Rachel Winograd, director of the addiction science team at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, who oversees the state’s federally funded naloxone program. “Juxtaposing those statements of support with the proposed eliminations is extremely confusing.”
Mr. Cushman, the paramedic in Missouri, said that ending the naloxone grant program would not only cut off a source of the medication to emergency responders but would also stop classes that do significantly more than teach how to administer it.
His cited the insights offered by his co-instructor, Ray Rath, who is in recovery from heroin and is a certified peer support counselor. In training sessions, Mr. Rath recounts how, after a nasal spray of Narcan yanked him back from a heroin overdose, he found himself on the ground, looking up at police officers and emergency medical responders. They were snickering.
“Ah this junkie again, he’s just going to kill himself; we’re out here for no reason,” he recalled them saying.
Mr. Rath said he speaks with trainees about how the individuals they revive are “people that have an illness.”
“And once we start treating them like people, they feel like people,” he continued. “They feel cared about, and they want to make a change.”
He estimated that during the years he used opioids, naloxone revived him from overdoses at least 10 times. He has been in recovery for five years, a training instructor for the last three. He also works in homeless encampments in Kansas, offering services to people who use drugs. The back of his T-shirt reads: “Hope Dealer.”
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2) Israel’s A.I. Experiments in Gaza War Raise Ethical Concerns
Israel developed new artificial intelligence tools to gain an advantage in the war. The technologies have sometimes led to fatal consequences.
By Sheera Frenkel and Natan Odenheimer, April 25, 2025
Sheera Frenkel reported from San Francisco and Natan Odenheimer from Jerusalem.
In late 2023, Israel was aiming to assassinate Ibrahim Biari, a top Hamas commander in the northern Gaza Strip who had helped plan the Oct. 7 massacres. But Israeli intelligence could not find Mr. Biari, who they believed was hidden in the network of tunnels underneath Gaza.
So Israeli officers turned to a new military technology infused with artificial intelligence, three Israeli and American officials briefed on the events said. The technology was developed a decade earlier but had not been used in battle. Finding Mr. Biari provided new incentive to improve the tool, so engineers in Israel’s Unit 8200, the country’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, soon integrated A.I. into it, the people said.
Shortly thereafter, Israel listened to Mr. Biari’s calls and tested the A.I. audio tool, which gave an approximate location for where he was making his calls. Using that information, Israel ordered airstrikes to target the area on Oct. 31, 2023, killing Mr. Biari. More than 125 civilians also died in the attack, according to Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor.
The audio tool was just one example of how Israel has used the war in Gaza to rapidly test and deploy A.I.-backed military technologies to a degree that had not been seen before, according to interviews with nine American and Israeli defense officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the work is confidential.
In the past 18 months, Israel has also combined A.I. with facial recognition software to match partly obscured or injured faces to real identities, turned to A.I. to compile potential airstrike targets, and created an Arabic-language A.I. model to power a chatbot that could scan and analyze text messages, social media posts and other Arabic-language data, two people with knowledge of the programs said.
Many of these efforts were a partnership between enlisted soldiers in Unit 8200 and reserve soldiers who work at tech companies such as Google, Microsoft and Meta, three people with knowledge of the technologies said. Unit 8200 set up what became known as “The Studio,” an innovation hub and place to match experts with A.I. projects, the people said.
Yet even as Israel raced to develop the A.I. arsenal, deployment of the technologies sometimes led to mistaken identifications and arrests, as well as civilian deaths, the Israeli and American officials said. Some officials have struggled with the ethical implications of the A.I. tools, which could result in increased surveillance and other civilian killings.
No other nation has been as active as Israel in experimenting with A.I. tools in real-time battles, European and American defense officials said, giving a preview of how such technologies may be used in future wars — and how they might also go awry.
“The urgent need to cope with the crisis accelerated innovation, much of it A.I.-powered,” said Hadas Lorber, the head of the Institute for Applied Research in Responsible A.I. at Israel’s Holon Institute of Technology and a former senior director at the Israeli National Security Council. “It led to game-changing technologies on the battlefield and advantages that proved critical in combat.”
But the technologies “also raise serious ethical questions,” Ms. Lorber said. She warned that A.I. needs checks and balances, adding that humans should make the final decisions.
A spokeswoman for Israel’s military said she could not comment on specific technologies because of their “confidential nature.” Israel “is committed to the lawful and responsible use of data technology tools,” she said, adding that the military was investigating the strike on Mr. Biari and was “unable to provide any further information until the investigation is complete.”
Meta and Microsoft declined to comment. Google said it has “employees who do reserve duty in various countries around the world. The work those employees do as reservists is not connected to Google.”
Israel previously used conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon to experiment with and advance tech tools for its military, such as drones, phone hacking tools and the Iron Dome defense system, which can help intercept short-range ballistic missiles.
After Hamas launched cross-border attacks into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages, A.I. technologies were quickly cleared for deployment, four Israeli officials said. That led to the cooperation between Unit 8200 and reserve soldiers in “The Studio” to swiftly develop new A.I. capabilities, they said.
Avi Hasson, the chief executive of Startup Nation Central, an Israeli nonprofit that connects investors with companies, said reservists from Meta, Google and Microsoft had become crucial in driving innovation in drones and data integration.
“Reservists brought know-how and access to key technologies that weren’t available in the military,” he said.
Israel’s military soon used A.I. to enhance its drone fleet. Aviv Shapira, founder and chief executive of XTEND, a software and drone company that works with the Israeli military, said A.I.-powered algorithms were used to build drones to lock on and track targets from a distance.
“In the past, homing capabilities relied on zeroing in on to an image of the target,” he said. “Now A.I. can recognize and track the object itself — may it be a moving car, or a person — with deadly precision.”
Mr. Shapira said his main clients, the Israeli military and the U.S. Department of Defense, were aware of A.I.’s ethical implications in warfare and discussed responsible use of the technology.
One tool developed by “The Studio” was an Arabic-language A.I. model known as a large language model, three Israeli officers familiar with the program said. (The large language model was earlier reported by Plus 972, an Israeli-Palestinian news site.)
Developers previously struggled to create such a model because of a dearth of Arabic-language data to train the technology. When such data was available, it was mostly in standard written Arabic, which is more formal than the dozens of dialects used in spoken Arabic.
The Israeli military did not have that problem, the three officers said. The country had decades of intercepted text messages, transcribed phone calls and posts scraped from social media in spoken Arabic dialects. So Israeli officers created the large language model in the first few months of the war and built a chatbot to run queries in Arabic. They merged the tool with multimedia databases, allowing analysts to run complex searches across images and videos, four Israeli officials said.
When Israel assassinated the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in September, the chatbot analyzed the responses across the Arabic-speaking world, three Israeli officers said. The technology differentiated among different dialects in Lebanon to gauge public reaction, helping Israel to assess if there was public pressure for a counterstrike.
At times, the chatbot could not identify some modern slang terms and words that were transliterated from English to Arabic, two officers said. That required Israeli intelligence officers with expertise in different dialects to review and correct its work, one of the officers said.
The chatbot also sometimes provided wrong answers — for instance, returning photos of pipes instead of guns — two Israeli intelligence officers said. Even so, the A.I. tool significantly accelerated research and analysis, they said.
At temporary checkpoints set up between the northern and southern Gaza Strip, Israel also began equipping cameras after the Oct. 7 attacks with the ability to scan and send high-resolution images of Palestinians to an A.I.-backed facial recognition program.
This system, too, sometimes had trouble identifying people whose faces were obscured. That led to arrests and interrogations of Palestinians who were mistakenly flagged by the facial recognition system, two Israeli intelligence officers said.
Israel also used A.I. to sift through data amassed by intelligence officials on Hamas members. Before the war, Israel built a machine-learning algorithm — code-named “Lavender” — that could quickly sort data to hunt for low-level militants. It was trained on a database of confirmed Hamas members and meant to predict who else might be part of the group. Though the system’s predictions were imperfect, Israel used it at the start of the war in Gaza to help choose attack targets.
Few goals loomed larger than finding and eliminating Hamas’s senior leadership. Near the top of the list was Mr. Biari, the Hamas commander who Israeli officials believed played a central role in planning the Oct. 7 attacks.
Israel’s military intelligence quickly intercepted Mr. Biari’s calls with other Hamas members but could not pinpoint his location. So they turned to the A.I.-backed audio tool, which analyzed different sounds, such as sonic bombs and airstrikes.
After deducing an approximate location for where Mr. Biari was placing his calls, Israeli military officials were warned that the area, which included several apartment complexes, was densely populated, two intelligence officers said. An airstrike would need to target several buildings to ensure Mr. Biari was assassinated, they said. The operation was greenlit.
Since then, Israeli intelligence has also used the audio tool alongside maps and photos of Gaza’s underground tunnel maze to locate hostages. Over time, the tool was refined to more precisely find individuals, two Israeli officers said.
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3) Israel Acknowledges Second Deadly Attack on Aid Workers in Gaza
In a rare apology to the United Nations, Israel said its forces had struck a U.N. compound in Gaza with tank fire. A Bulgarian aid worker was killed.
By Farnaz Fassihi, April 24, 2025
The impact of a projectile is visible in the wall of the U.N. guesthouse hit by Israeli tank fire on March 19. Credit...Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press
Israel’s military admitted on Thursday that its forces had attacked a United Nations guesthouse in Gaza with tank fire last month, killing a staff member.
The attack in the Deir al Balah area on March 19 killed one U.N. staff member, a Bulgarian, and wounded six others. It prompted Secretary General António Guterres to withdraw a third of the U.N.’s international staff from Gaza out of safety concerns, at a time of dire need for the two million Palestinians living in the enclave.
It was the second time in about a week that Israel has admitted that its forces wrongfully opened fire on aid workers in the Gaza Strip, rare acknowledgments in a conflict that the United Nations says has proved deadlier for its workers than any other in its history.
Israel initially denied any involvement in the March 19 attack. Its mission to the U.N. said an initial investigation had “found no connection to the I.D.F.,” using an abbreviation for the Israel Defense Forces, and accused Hamas members of taking shelter at U.N. compounds.
But in a statement on Thursday, the Israeli military issued an apology to the United Nations.
“The I.D.F. regrets this serious incident and continues to conduct thorough review processes to draw operational lessons and evaluate additional measures to prevent such events in the future,” the statement said.
An Israeli investigation found that the U.N. building was attacked “due to assessed enemy presence and was not identified by the forces as a U.N. facility,” according to the statement. It said that further investigations would be conducted in the coming days.
A U.N. spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said the location of the U.N. compound that was attacked — as well as the locations of all U.N. structures in Gaza — was known to the Israeli military.
“This incident and the investigation — there has been more cooperation and transparency on their side than we’ve had on these types of incidents since the beginning of this conflict,” Mr. Dujarric said. But he said it was not enough.
“We need to have accountability not just for this incident,” he said, “but we need to have accountability and transparency for all of the other times we have seen U.N. colleagues killed in Gaza and U.N. infrastructure attacked.”
The United Nations identified the Bulgarian killed in the attack as Marin Valev Marinov, 51. It described him as a seasoned mariner and vessel master who joined the U.N. in 2016 as a maritime inspector working in Yemen for one year before going to Gaza.
At least 285 U.N. staff members have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, which began with the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The United Nations has said that Israel has repeatedly struck its facilities in Gaza, including schools, shelters and marked vehicles.
In late March, Israeli forces opened fire on a convoy of ambulances and fire trucks traveling with their emergency lights on in the Rafah area of southern Gaza. At least one U.N. vehicle marked with the emblem was also targeted. A video obtained by The New York Times of the incident captured almost five minutes of near-continuous gunfire.
The bodies of 15 humanitarian workers — from the Palestine Red Crescent Society and Palestinian Civil Defense and the U.N. — were discovered in a mass grave together with the crushed ambulances, fire trucks and a U.N. vehicle. An autopsy report showed that most of the victims had been killed by multiple gun shots, some to the head and chest.
Israel initially said its forces had opened fire on the ambulances because their lights were off and they were approaching suspiciously. It has also maintained that there were members of Hamas among the convoy, without providing evidence.
On Sunday, the Israeli military said “several professional failures” had led to attack, and it dismissed a deputy commander for the unit responsible for the killings.
The Geneva Conventions, the laws that govern conduct in conflict zones, protect humanitarian workers and medical workers. The U.N.’s chief human rights director has said that Israel’s killing of the medics raises questions about whether its military committed “war crimes.”
Mr. Dujarric said on Wednesday that once again, the U.N. was calling for all parties in the war “to fully comply with international humanitarian law — and that includes for us the protection, obviously, of civilians, but also the protection of U.N. and humanitarian staff.”
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4) My Oscar for ‘No Other Land’ Didn’t Protect Me From Violence
By Hamdan Ballal, April 25, 2025
Mr. Ballal’s film “No Other Land” won the 2024 Academy Award for best documentary feature.
On March 2, I won an Academy Award for best documentary for a film I co-directed, “No Other Land.” It’s hard to put into words how that moment felt. It was one of the most incredible moments of my life.
Three weeks later, I was brutally attacked in my home and arrested. In an instant, it was as if the Oscars had never happened, as if the award didn’t mean anything.
I come from Susiya, a small village on the southern edge of the West Bank. We are but a few dozen families. Our main livelihood is shepherding. Our life is simple. Our homes are simple. The main thing that steals our time is the near-daily violence and harassment of the settlers and the Israeli Army enforcing the occupation. Los Angeles and the Oscars were of an entirely different world from the one I know: I was struck by the enormous buildings, the rushing cars, the wealth all around me. And suddenly there we were, me and my three other co-directors, on one of the world’s most important stages, accepting the award.
Our stories, our communities and our voices were in the spotlight. Our struggle and our suffering were on display, and the world was watching — and supporting us. For years, we have been desperately trying to make our names and our struggle known. Now we had succeeded beyond anything any of us could have ever imagined.
When they called our names and the name of our movie flashed on the screen, I lost myself. I couldn’t feel my hands. I knew there were people all around me, but I couldn’t see them. I walked to the stage, following my feet, but my mind was completely blank.
We made our movie in order to bring attention to the situation where I live, to try to bring change to our communities, but when I was attacked, I realized that we were still trapped in the same grinding loop of violence and subjugation.
March 24 was a typical Ramadan evening. The sun was setting as my family sat down to break our fast. Then my neighbor called: Settlers were attacking. I ran to document the moment, but when I saw the crowd grow, I worried about my family and quickly returned home. Soon I saw a settler and two soldiers coming down the hill toward me. I shouted to my wife to keep our three young children — 7, 5 and 1½ years old — inside, with the door closed. I told her not to open the door, no matter what she heard.
I recognized the men coming toward us. They met me outside the door of my home and started beating and cursing me, mocking me as the “Oscar-winning filmmaker.” I felt guns bashing my ribs. Someone punched me in the head from behind. I fell to the ground. I was kicked and spat on. I felt immense pain and fear. I could hear my wife and kids screaming and crying, calling for me and telling the men to go away. It was the worst moment of my life. My wife and I both thought I would be killed. We feared what would happen to my family if I died.
It is difficult for me to write about this moment now. After I was beaten, I was handcuffed, blindfolded and thrown into an army jeep. For hours I lay blindfolded on the ground on what I later learned was an army base, fearing that I would be held for a long time and beaten again and again. I was released a day later.
The attack on me and my community was brutal. It received large amounts of press coverage, but it is not unique in any way. Just a few days later, dozens of settlers, many of them masked, attacked Jinba, a village nearby. Five people were hospitalized, and more than 20 were arrested. Later the army raided the village and ransacked homes, the mosque and the school. In Susiya alone, from the beginning of the year to the March 24 attack, local activists recorded more than 45 incidents with settlers or soldiers. Across our region, Masafer Yatta, that number is much higher.
I want you to know our land does not know only violence. There are dozens of small, pastoral Palestinian villages that make up this region. The landscape here is beautiful and wide. Year after year, we plant the land and graze our sheep in the fields. Our mornings start with a cup of tea drunk at sunrise while the flocks enjoy the dew that is still fresh on the grass. The day continues with tending the land, caring for the animals, milking the sheep and goats and preparing the food and goods from our labor. The whole family and the whole village are involved in this daily work together, helping and supporting one another.
But with this near-daily violence, we feel on the precipice of losing everything. When we are unable to shepherd and farm because of constantly encroaching settlements and ever more aggressive settlers and soldiers, we lose our income, our source of food, our traditions and our way of life. Fear is a constant, from morning to night. Our energies are consumed by keeping ourselves and our children safe.
In Masafer Yatta our lives are suffocated by aggression. We all fear that our village is the next to be dismantled, our people expelled.
On the day of the attack, alongside the fear, I felt something else I didn’t expect: heartbreak. My heart was broken from the disappointment. From the sense of failure. From the powerlessness. Three weeks earlier, on the Oscar stage, I had a taste of power and possibility. But even though our movie received global recognition, I felt I had failed — we had failed — in our attempt to make life better here. To convince the world something needed to change. My life is still at the mercy of the settlers and the occupation. My community is still suffering from unending violence. Our movie won an Oscar, but our lives are no better than before.
There is no law to turn to here and no government that will protect us, no international law and no international bodies that are pushing to stop this violence. And yet, in spite of all this and in spite of what I’ve been through and my community has experienced, there are still some bits of hope that remain from what I saw and felt at the Oscars and over the past year presenting our movie around the world.
The press attention that the attack in Susiya received because of our Oscar victory was unlike anything we experienced before. The messages and voices of support around the world have been overwhelming. I know that there are thousands and thousands of people who now know my name and my story, who know my community’s name and our story and who stand with us and support us. Don’t turn away now.
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5) We Visited Rumeysa Ozturk in Detention. What We Saw Was a Warning to Us All.
By Edward J. Markey, Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley, April 25, 2025
Mr. Markey is the junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Mr. McGovern is the representative for Massachusetts’ Second Congressional District. Ms. Pressley is the representative for Massachusetts’ Seventh Congressional District.
Photo illustration by The New York Times
A young woman walked casually down a public street only to find herself suddenly surrounded by masked law enforcement officers in plain clothes. Without explanation — and in the absence of criminal charges and any due process — she was forced into a waiting vehicle and vanished into the labyrinth of the state security system.
Sound familiar? You’d be forgiven for thinking we’re recounting what happened to the Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk in Somerville, Mass., last month. But no: That was the September 2020 abduction of the political activist Maria Kolesnikova in the capital of Belarus, the former Soviet republic that is home to one of the most repressive governments in the world.
Disappearances like Ms. Kolesnikova’s are disturbingly common under authoritarian regimes where dissent is quashed and the rule of law is more fiction than fact. That a similar scene would unfold in Somerville in March 2025 as part of the Trump administration’s revived immigration crackdown should send a chill down the spine of every American.
We visited Ms. Ozturk earlier this week at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Basile, La., operated by the for-profit company Geo Secure Services, contracted by the federal government. It’s part of the network of ICE facilities in Louisiana that the American Civil Liberties Union has described as a “black hole” — hard to reach and isolated, making visits from lawyers and family members prohibitively difficult and expensive.
What we found was not just a young woman locked up without charge but also a democracy being put to the test. Ms. Ozturk is a graduate student, a writer and a community member who is in the United States legally on a student visa, which was revoked without apparent cause. She was walking to an Iftar dinner when federal agents, some of them masked, surrounded her, detained her, refused to explain why and then forcibly removed her to an undisclosed location; it took her family roughly 24 hours to even find out where she was being held.
When we met Ms. Ozturk in Basile, she told us she feared for her life when she was taken off the streets of her neighborhood, not knowing who had grabbed her or where they were taking her. She said that at each step of her transit — from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to Vermont to Louisiana — her repeated requests to contact her lawyer were denied. Inside the detention center, she was inadequately fed, kept in facilities with extremely cold temperatures and denied personal necessities and religious accommodations. She suffered asthma attacks for which she lacked her prescribed medication. Despite all this — and despite being far away from her loved ones — we were struck by her unwavering spirit.
Why did the Trump administration target her? By all accounts, it’s because she was one of the authors of an opinion essay for The Tufts Daily criticizing her university’s response to resolutions that the Tufts student senate passed regarding Israel and Gaza.
This is not immigration enforcement. This is repression. This is authoritarianism.
The Trump administration is working overtime to silence dissent and terrorize immigrant communities. In Ms. Ozturk’s case, it has openly violated the most fundamental protections of our Constitution. Freedom of speech and of the press and the right to due process are not suggestions in this country; they are fundamental rights. They apply to citizens, permanent residents and individuals like Ms. Ozturk, regardless of her political beliefs.
The First Amendment has protected the voices of Frederick Douglass, Alice Paul and Martin Luther King Jr., and it must protect Ms. Ozturk’s, too. Indeed, when dissent becomes a challenge to those in power, it is all the more essential to safeguard. When protected speech becomes a reason for rounding up an international student who came here legally, it’s clear that our immigration laws are being abused.
The United States has long stood on a bedrock of due process — enshrined in the Fifth and 14th Amendments, which guard against exactly this kind of arbitrary state violence. But the Trump administration has acted as if constitutional rights are expendable when the target is an immigrant, a Muslim or someone who dares to criticize the government.
Make no mistake: Ms. Ozturk’s case is not an isolated one. This administration has already overseen a wave of unconstitutional actions: raids without warrants, prolonged detentions without hearings and retaliatory deportations. Each case chips away at the rule of law. Each one makes it easier for the next to go unnoticed. And each one brings us closer to the authoritarianism we once believed could never take root on American soil.
When a government begins to imprison writers for their words, when it abandons legal norms for political convenience, when it cloaks oppression in the language of national security, alarm bells must ring. Loudly.
We call on the Department of Homeland Security to release Ms. Ozturk immediately, drop any proceedings against her and begin an investigation into the appalling conditions at the Basile detention center. We urge our Republican colleagues in Congress to stand up to President Trump’s evident disregard for the rule of law. And we urge every American to understand: This is not someone else’s fight. The Constitution is only as strong as our willingness to defend it.
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6) Two-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Deported ‘With No Meaningful Process,’ Judge Suspects
A federal judge in Louisiana said the deportation of the child to Honduras with her mother, even though her father had filed an emergency petition, appeared to be “illegal and unconstitutional.”
By Alan Feuer, Published April 25, 2025, Updated April 26, 2025
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen after she accompanied her mother and her older sister to an immigration appointment. Credit...Annie Mulligan for The New York Times
A federal judge in Louisiana expressed concern on Friday that the Trump administration had deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras “with no meaningful process” and against the wishes of her father.
In a brief order issued from Federal District Court in the Western District of Louisiana, Judge Terry A. Doughty questioned why the administration had sent the child — known in court papers only as V.M.L. — to Honduras with her mother even though her father had sought in an emergency petition on Thursday to stop the girl from being sent abroad.
“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” wrote Judge Doughty, a conservative Trump appointee. “But the court doesn’t know that.”
Asserting that “it is illegal and unconstitutional to deport” a U.S. citizen, Judge Doughty set a hearing for May 16 to explore his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
The case of V.M.L., which was reported earlier by Politico, is the latest challenge to the legality of several aspects of President Trump’s aggressive deportation efforts.
The administration has already been blocked by seven federal judges in courts across the country from removing Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members to El Salvador under a rarely invoked wartime statute. It has also created an uproar by wrongfully deporting a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador and so far refusing to work to bring him back.
According to court papers, the 2-year-old girl had accompanied her mother, Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela, and her older sister, Valeria, to an immigration appointment in New Orleans on Tuesday when they were taken into custody by officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Ms. Lopez Villela was scheduled for an expedited removal from the country on Friday. And in a filing to Judge Doughty, lawyers for the Justice Department claimed that she “made known to ICE officials that she wanted to retain custody of V.M.L. and for V.M.L. to go” with her to Honduras.
But in a petition filed by the child’s custodian, Trish Mack, on Thursday, her father claimed that when he spoke briefly with Ms. Lopez Villela, he could hear her and the children crying. The father reminded her, the petition said, that “their daughter was a U.S. citizen and could not be deported.”
The father, who was not identified by name in the petition, tried to give Ms. Lopez Villela the phone number for a lawyer, but he claims that officials cut short the call.
The detention of V.M.L. “is without any basis in law and violates her fundamental due process rights,” the petition said. “She seeks this court’s urgent action and asks the court to order her immediate release to her custodian Trish Mack, who is ready and waiting to take her home.”
Judge Doughty said in his order that he tried to investigate what had happened himself by trying to get Ms. Lopez Villela on the phone on Friday shortly after noon to “survey her consent and custodial rights.”
The judge expressed concern that a plane carrying the mother and her daughters was by then already “above the Gulf of America.” His suspicions were confirmed, he wrote, when a lawyer for the Justice Department told him at 1:06 p.m. that day that Ms. Lopez Villela and presumably her children “had just been released in Honduras.”
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
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7) 19 States Sue the Trump Administration Over Its D.E.I. Demand in Schools
The Trump administration threatened to withhold federal funding from states that did not enforce its interpretation of civil rights law.
By Sarah Mervosh, April 25, 2025
Letitia James of New York joined 18 other state attorneys general in suing the Trump administration for threatening to withhold funding for public schools. Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
A coalition of 19 states sued the Trump administration on Friday over its threat to withhold federal funding from states and districts with certain diversity programs in their public schools.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court by the attorneys general in California, New York, Illinois, Minnesota and other Democratic-leaning states, who argue that the Trump administration’s demand is illegal.
The lawsuit centers on an April 3 memo the Trump administration sent to states, requiring them to certify that they do not use certain diversity, equity and inclusion programs that the administration has said are illegal.
States that did not certify risked losing federal funding for low-income students.
Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, said at a news conference on Friday that the Trump administration had distorted federal civil rights law to force states to abandon legal diversity programs.
“California hasn’t and won’t capitulate. Our sister states won’t capitulate,” Mr. Bonta said, adding that the Trump administration’s D.E.I. order was vague and impractical to enforce, and that D.E.I. programs are “entirely legal” under civil rights law.
The Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday evening.
The administration has argued that certain diversity programs in schools violate federal civil rights law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs that receive federal funding.
It has based its argument on the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling ending the use of race in college admissions, arguing that the decision applies to the use of race in education more broadly.
The administration has not offered a specific list of D.E.I. initiatives it deems illegal. But it has suggested that efforts to provide targeted academic support or counseling to specific groups of students amount to illegal segregation. And it has argued that lessons on concepts such as white privilege or structural racism, which posits that racism is embedded in social institutions, are discriminatory.
The lawsuit came a day after the Trump administration was ordered to pause any enforcement of its April 3 memo, in separate federal lawsuits brought by teachers’ unions and the N.A.A.C.P., among others.
Mr. Bonta said that the lawsuit by the 19 states brought forward separate claims and represented the “strong and unique interest” of states to ensure that billions of federal dollars appropriated by Congress reach students.
“We have different claims that we think are very strong claims,” he said.
Loss of federal funding would be catastrophic for students, said Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, an adversary of President Trump who previously won a civil fraud case against him.
She noted that school districts in Buffalo and Rochester rely on federal funds for nearly 20 percent of their revenue and said she was suing to “uphold our nation’s civil rights laws and protect our schools and the students who rely on them.”
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8) Emerging From a Collective Silence, Universities Organize to Fight Trump
A recent group statement showed that the nation’s academic leaders, at first reluctant to oppose the president’s moves, are beginning to unite.
By Stephanie Saul and Alan Blinder, April 27, 2025
The Columbia University campus in Manhattan last month. The school was one of hundreds of institutions to join a statement speaking out against the White House’s actions in higher education. Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
The Trump administration’s swift initial rollout of orders seeking more control over universities left schools thunderstruck. Fearing retribution from a president known to retaliate against his enemies, most leaders in higher education responded in February with silence.
But after weeks of witnessing the administration freeze billions in federal funding, demand changes to policies and begin investigations, a broad coalition of university leaders publicly opposing those moves is taking root. The most visible evidence yet was a statement last week signed by more than 400 campus leaders opposing what they saw as the administration’s assault on academia.
Although organizations of colleges and administrators regularly conduct meetings on a wide range of issues, the statement by the American Association of Colleges and Universities was an unusual show of unity considering the wide cross-section of interests it included: Ivy League institutions and community colleges, public flagship schools and Jesuit universities, regional schools and historically Black colleges.
“We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education,” the statement said.
Although it contained no concrete action, and what’s next was unclear, the collective stance reflected a group more galvanized than ever to resist.
“When we are teaming up with higher ed across the board, it’s more than just about what the elite think,” Richard K. Lyons, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview after the school signed on. “At some level, that really disparate, wide-angle, wonderful group of colleges and universities that signed the message, I find quite heartening.”
Another signatory, Brian Sandoval, president of the University of Nevada, Reno and a former Republican governor of the state, said he was not viewing the statement through a political lens. “I’m concerned about what we’ve seen and what we’re experiencing,” he said.
The joint statement from university leaders, many of them energized by Harvard’s confrontation with the Trump administration, emerged even after higher education associations and a handful of universities filed lawsuits fighting cuts to funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Energy Department. And heads of colleges had been talking and meeting with one another more frequently than they had since the Covid-19 pandemic, with some engaged in discussions in Washington.
The Association of American Universities, an exclusive trade group that counts the nation’s most powerful schools among its 71 members, is meeting there this week, its first gathering since President Trump’s inauguration. The meeting is not open to the public, but it could end up as a strategy session about how to address the administration’s moves, including its investigations of campus antisemitism, diversity programs and admissions practices and its attempts to control what is taught in classrooms.
Those actions stem from the administration’s desire to punish institutions it says have inadequately addressed antisemitism and indoctrinated students with liberal viewpoints.
Boards of major education groups have been speaking more frequently.
“A day doesn’t go by that there’s not an email that goes out,” said Mr. Sandoval, a member of the board of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. “There’s a lot of communication.”
One president of a private university, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy, said on Wednesday that he and other university leaders were on Capitol Hill a lot more than they used to be.
When asked whether additional lawsuits will be filed against the Trump administration, which next week will pass its 100th day, several university presidents contacted by The New York Times declined to make predictions or referred to secret contingency plans.
The group statement grew out of discussions among presidents and other academic leaders, and an urgent concern among many of them that leaders were not speaking out against the White House, said Lynn C. Pasquerella, who heads the group that wrote the statement.
“We decided to see whether there was a will for collective action,” she said.
Dr. Pasquerella, a former president of Mount Holyoke College, added that many leaders were getting pressure from their campuses to say something.
The organization convened two virtual listening sessions, attended by 193 college and university leaders, to gauge the group’s interest.
The statement that was agreed on is far from radical, focusing on opposition to “undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live and work on our campuses,” but it was significant in that it represented an unusually broad consensus among the disparate members.
At first, the statement had only 100 signatures. Support grew as university leaders sensed strength in numbers, Dr. Pasquerella said, adding that one university president signed and then asked to be removed after receiving pushback.
While most of the signers are from blue states, some represent red state colleges, such as Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., and Talladega College in Alabama.
Many other red-state presidents have not joined the effort.
“I saw absolutely no upside — none,” said the leader of a private university in a Republican-led state who also asked to remain anonymous about the private discussions and has, even previously as a faculty member, been skeptical of petition drives.
The official, skeptical that one additional signature would prove decisive, added, “I don’t think a petition is going to change the mind of the president, his administration or anybody in Congress.”
And the official sensed a potential downside: angering the White House.
That fear is real for many schools, said Wesleyan University’s president, Michael S. Roth, who also signed the statement. He has been a vocal critic of the administration’s actions affecting universities and recently participated in a “Hands Off” protest near the school’s campus in Middletown, Conn. He said he was not surprised that some universities had turned down the opportunity to sign.
“This administration is very ready to exact retribution on its foes,” Dr. Roth said. “I asked a lot of people to sign, and many people said: ‘I can’t sign. I’m afraid.’”
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9) Wisconsin Judge Arrest: What We Know
Judge Hannah Dugan is accused of obstructing justice after directing a migrant out of her courtroom as federal agents waited to arrest him. Her arrest has raised several questions.
By Isabelle Taft, Published April 26, 2025, Updated April 27, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/us/wisconsin-judge-hannah-dugan-arrest.html
The arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan quickly drew condemnation from Democratic leaders and prompted protests. Credit...Lee Matz/Milwaukee Independent, via Associated Press
Protesters gathered outside the F.B.I.’s Milwaukee Division office on Saturday in response to Judge Dugan’s arrest. Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
F.B.I. agents arrested on Friday a Milwaukee judge accused of obstructing justice by directing an undocumented immigrant out of her courtroom through a side door while federal immigration agents waited in a hallway to arrest him.
The arrest of the judge, Hannah C. Dugan, quickly drew condemnation from Democratic leaders and prompted protests in the Wisconsin city.
But the U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, defended the move, saying Judge Dugan’s arrest sent a “strong message” to judges that the Trump administration will prosecute them if they obstruct justice by “escorting a criminal defendant out a back door.”
And after the arrest, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, posted a photo of her in handcuffs on X, adding, “No one is above the law.”
The arrest has raised several questions — many of which remain unanswered. Here’s what we know so far.
What happened on the day of Judge Dugan’s arrest?
On April 18, six federal officers arrived at the Milwaukee County Courthouse to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican national who was there for a hearing on battery charges.
Before the hearing, a lawyer told Judge Dugan that agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were outside her courtroom, according to the criminal complaint against her. She called the situation “absurd” and left the bench.
Judge Dugan then spoke with the federal agents, telling them that they needed a judicial warrant and to speak with the chief judge of Milwaukee County.
One of the officers talked to the chief judge, Carl Ashley, who told the officer that there was a policy in the works about where in the courthouse ICE agents could arrest people. But he “emphasized that such actions should not take place in courtrooms or other private locations,” the complaint said. Chief Judge Ashley told the agent that hallways were areas where an arrest could be made.
As Mr. Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer left the courtroom, Judge Dugan told them, “Wait, come with me,” according to a courtroom deputy who overheard the interaction. The deputy saw her usher them through a door that leads to a “nonpublic” area of the courthouse, court records show.
Agents then saw Mr. Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer in a public hallway, and one agent entered an elevator with them and watched them leave the building, but did not immediately make the arrest, the complaint said. Other agents then arrested him on the street after a foot chase.
A week later, F.B.I. agents arrested Judge Dugan at the courthouse. She was charged with obstructing immigration officers and concealing someone to prevent an arrest.
Craig Mastantuono, a lawyer who represented Judge Dugan at her brief court appearance as a defendant on Friday, called her arrest “highly unusual,” noting that federal law enforcement officers could have first contacted her for questioning or asked her to turn herself in.
Who is Judge Dugan?
Judge Dugan, 65, spent much of her career providing legal services for poor people, specializing in housing and public benefits.
In 1995, she represented people who panhandled on downtown sidewalks, arguing that barring them from doing so was unconstitutional. She was elected judge in 2016 and ran unopposed for re-election in 2022. Her current term ends in 2028.
Ann Jacobs, a Milwaukee lawyer who has appeared before the judge in court, described Judge Dugan as a “very by-the-book sort of judge.”
After her court appearance on Friday, Judge Dugan was released on her own recognizance. Her legal team vowed to contest the charges. A preliminary hearing in her case is scheduled for May 15.
Who is Mr. Flores-Ruiz, and what happened in his case?
Mr. Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican national in his early 30s, was at the courthouse on April 18 for a hearing on his three misdemeanor battery charges stemming from an episode in March, according to a criminal complaint against him.
Records show that Mr. Flores-Ruiz got into a fight with his roommate, who had asked him to turn down the music he was playing. The roommate said Mr. Flores-Ruiz struck him about 30 times and also hit the roommate’s girlfriend and her cousin.
But federal officials were looking to arrest Mr. Flores-Ruiz for another reason: He also faces a federal illegal re-entry charge.
Mr. Flores-Ruiz was deported from the United States in January 2013 under an order of expedited removal, which is generally issued to those who cross the border without proper documentation and are quickly detained. Martin Pruhs, his lawyer on his federal charge, said in an interview that Mr. Flores-Ruiz returned to the country soon after he was deported and has been living in Milwaukee and working as a cook for about 12 years.
Mr. Pruhs said he had no criminal record before the misdemeanor charges.
Six federal officers from four agencies — the F.B.I., ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the Drug Enforcement Administration — were involved in his arrest last week. The complaint against Judge Dugan said the agents were in street clothes and planned to arrest Mr. Flores-Ruiz in a “low-key” and safe manner. It also explained that it is common for law enforcement officials to arrest people at a courthouse because they know the person they are seeking would be unarmed.
The number of agents who were present has raised questions, with some people wondering if there were too many to arrest one migrant. But others have said the number may not be highly unusual, especially if the agents were planning on making multiple arrests that day.
Mr. Flores-Ruiz is currently being held in the Ozaukee County jail in Port Washington, Wis.
What are some potential implications of the arrests?
The arrests of Judge Dugan and Mr. Flores-Ruiz have experts wondering how other immigration cases and the court system at large could be affected.
Since federal agents sought to arrest Mr. Flores-Ruiz at a courthouse, Ms. Jacobs, the Milwaukee lawyer, is concerned that undocumented people will be afraid to participate in future cases where their testimonies would be helpful.
Ms. Jacobs, who is also the chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said Judge Dugan’s arrest was so “profound and unheard-of” that it was difficult to foresee how it might affect judges’ behavior. She added that it appeared designed to make judges afraid to take any position out of step with the Trump administration.
Some are worried about what this case could mean for America’s democracy and future. Ann Rohrer, a health care worker from Wauwatosa, Wis., said she thought “our democracy, our country is under attack.”
Ms. Rohrer, 62, was one of hundreds of people protesting Judge Dugan’s arrest on Saturday outside an F.B.I. building in St. Francis, Wis.
“All the things that make America great are being attacked,” she said.
Devlin Barrett, Julie Bosman and Robert Chiarito contributed reporting.
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10) ICE Arrests Nearly 800 in Florida in Operation With Local Officers
The four-day operation came as the Trump administration has sought to enlist local authorities in an immigration crackdown.
By Hamed Aleaziz, Reporting from Washington, April 26, 2025
Law enforcement officers detaining migrants in Coral Gables, Fla., in January. Credit...Pedro Portal/Miami Herald, via Associated Press
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, along with state law enforcement officials, arrested about 780 immigrants in Florida in an operation this week, according to ICE data obtained by The New York Times.
The operation began on Monday and targeted undocumented immigrants with final deportation orders, according to an ICE official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operation. The officers picked up more than 275 migrants with final removal orders, the data showed.
ABC News and Fox News earlier reported news of the arrests, which took place over four days.
It was the latest move by the Trump administration to seek to accelerate deportations of undocumented immigrants, which have so far been well below the administration’s goals.
Since President Trump took office, ICE officials have worked with various federal agencies to conduct raids across the United States. The effort this week in Florida was the first to be conducted as part of a formal arrangement with state law enforcement known as a 287(g) agreement, according to the official.
The Trump administration has sought to recruit local authorities to help in immigration operations in an effort to speed deportations. The administration has resumed collateral arrests during such operations, which allows officers to pick up migrants who were not initially targeted but were around an individual who was sought by ICE.
Generally, people must have received an order of removal from an immigration judge before they are deported, a process that can take weeks or stretch into years. But since the start of 2024, 70 percent of these removal orders were issued to someone who did not attend their hearing before a judge, according to a Times analysis of court records.
“It’s going to break up families,” said Tessa Petit, the executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said of the arrests this week. “And that is not the welcoming state that Florida has been for immigrants for decades.”
Given the scale of the operation, Ms. Petit said, there is a chance that many of those arrested were in the country on some sort of legal status and did not possess criminal records.
The raids represented the biggest escalation of immigration enforcement in Florida since Mr. Trump took office, Ms. Petit said, adding that they were much more reflective of the president’s mass deportation promises.
ICE operations in communities take an extensive amount of research and surveillance. They also require many officers, which is why the Trump administration has pulled in several other law enforcement agencies.
Trump administration officials have increasingly turned to warning undocumented immigrants to leave the country.
“President Trump and I have a clear message to those in our country illegally: LEAVE NOW,” said Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, in a statement on Monday. “If you do not self-deport, we will hunt you down, arrest you and deport you.”
Orlando Mayorquín, Albert Sun and Miriam Jordan contributed reporting.
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11) Two children with U.S. citizenship were sent to Honduras with their undocumented mother.
By Rachel Nostrant, April 27, 2025
A 4-year-old and a 7-year-old with U.S. citizenship were deported alongside their mother to Honduras last week, the family’s lawyer said, adding to the recent string of American citizens caught in the cross hairs of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The children and their mother were put on a flight to Honduras on Friday, the same day another child with U.S. citizenship, a 2-year-old girl, was sent to that country with her undocumented mother.
Lawyers for both families said the mothers were not given an option to leave their children in the United States before they were deported. In the case of the 2-year-old, whose 11-year-old sibling was also sent to Honduras, a federal judge in Louisiana expressed concern that the administration had deported the American child against the wishes of her father, who remained in the country.
But President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, denied that any American child was deported. Speaking about the 2-year-old’s case on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Mr. Homan said that federal immigration agents gave her mother a choice of whether to be deported with or without her child, and that she had left the country with her daughter at her discretion.
The children are from two different families who were living in Louisiana. The mother of the 2-year-old is pregnant, and the 4-year-old, a boy, has a rare form of late-stage cancer, the families’ lawyers said. They said the boy had no access to his medications or his doctors while he was in custody with his 7-year-old sister and mother.
The moves come as the Trump administration has ramped up its immigration enforcement and mass deportation efforts. In Florida last week, nearly 800 immigrants were arrested in an operation involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and state law enforcement officials.
Immigration advocates and the American Civil Liberties Union have condemned the administration’s actions, raising concerns of due process.
Gracie Willis, a lawyer with the National Immigration Project who is involved in the 2-year-old’s case, said, “What we saw from ICE over the last several days is horrifying and baffling,” referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But the administration has stood firm. “Having a U.S. citizen child after you enter this country illegally is not a get-out-of-jail free card,” Mr. Homan said.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said on Sunday that it was common for parents who face deportation to want to be removed with their children, noting that the mother of the 2-year-old had made that choice.
“We take our responsibility to protect children seriously and will continue to work with federal law enforcement to ensure that children are safe and protected,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
Both families were detained earlier last week during routine check-ins with ICE. They were in the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, a probationary program that allows people undergoing immigration proceedings to stay in the country.
The 2-year-old and her mother, along with an 11-year-old sibling who is not an American citizen, were detained April 22. The family with the 4-year-old and 7-year-old was detained Thursday morning, said Erin Hebert, their lawyer.
When they were detained, the families were taken hours away from New Orleans, the site of their appointments, their lawyers said, adding that they were prohibited from communicating with other family members or their lawyers. Lawyers for both families said that they were not able to reach the mothers until after they had arrived in Honduras.
Ms. Hebert said she had attended the appointment with the family she is representing, but the family was quickly taken into custody before she could speak with them. She said that she and her team plan to challenge the family’s deportation but are still evaluating their next steps.
In a brief order issued on Friday from Federal District Court in the Western District of Louisiana, Judge Terry A. Doughty asked why the administration had sent the 2-year-old — identified in court records only as V.M.L. — to Honduras with her mother even though her father had sought, through an emergency petition on Thursday, to stop her from being sent abroad.
Judge Doughty, a Trump appointee, said that he had a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process,” and set a hearing for May 16 to explore the issue.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Ms. Hebert said. “There is just no good-faith interpretation for what happened to these children.”
Alan Feuer, Minho Kim, Hamed Aleaziz and Brandon K. Thorp contributed reporting.
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12) D.E.A. says more than 100 undocumented immigrants were detained in a Colorado raid.
By Eduardo Medina, April 27, 2025
Federal agents raided an underground nightclub in Colorado early Sunday morning and detained more than 100 people who they said were undocumented immigrants, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The raid occurred at a club in Colorado Springs, about 70 miles south of Denver. Federal officials said there were more than 200 people inside the club at the time, including 114 who were in the country illegally. More than a dozen active-duty members of the U.S. military were detained as well, they said.
Officials said agents found weapons and illicit drugs inside the nightclub, including cocaine, methamphetamine and a mixture of powdered drugs known as pink cocaine.
Jonathan C. Pullen, the DEA Rocky Mountain Division special agent in charge, said in a news conference that the club had been under law enforcement surveillance for months and that “drug trafficking, prostitution and crimes of violence” had been taking place inside the club.
Mr. Pullen said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement took custody of the immigrants detained at the club. He said the members of the military were “running security at the club and involved in some of these crimes.”
The service members were handed over to the criminal investigation division of the U.S. Army.
A spokeswoman for Fort Carson, an Army post in Colorado, said in a statement on Sunday night that “there were some Fort Carson service members present at the location during” the raid.
“Each person involved in this incident is presumed innocent until proven guilty. We will look at everyone’s situation on a case-by-case basis,” the spokeswoman said. “Illegal activities of any kind do not represent our military values.”
Mr. Pullen said that during the investigation of the club, law enforcement officers saw members of the Hell’s Angels, MS-13 and Tren de Aragua gangs inside the club.
“I don’t have the information about whether those members were there tonight, but we’re still working through a lot of that, because we have so many people in custody,” Mr. Pullen said.
The D.E.A. and several members of the Trump administration posted videos and photos of the raid on their social media accounts on Sunday.
In one video posted on X by the D.E.A.’s Rocky Mountain Division, agents can be seen breaking through a window as red and blue police lights flash around them. When the agents crack the window, several people run out of the building and raise their hands as law enforcement agents appear to point weapons at them.
Another video showed a line of dozens of people with their arms tied behind their backs.
The agency said that the undocumented immigrants who were detained were placed on buses “for processing and likely eventual deportation.”
Mr. Pullen said there were about 300 law enforcement agents from several agencies who participated in the raid.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi praised the raid in a statement on social media, saying that two people with existing warrants had been arrested.
The raid was the latest display of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration, which appear to be struggling to round up enough people to meet Mr. Trump’s mass deportation goals.
The administration has publicized its raids in big cities and its deportation flights to Latin America, using tactics steeped with showmanship that have profoundly unnerved immigrant communities.
Efforts on Sunday to reach local immigrant advocacy groups for comment were not immediately successful.
President Trump’s administration has been criticized for wrongly deporting people, including U.S. citizens, who have been caught up in the crackdown.
A federal judge said on Friday that the Trump administration had deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras “with no meaningful process” and against the wishes of her father.
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13) Trump Doesn’t Want to Protect All Jewish Students — Just Those on His Team
By Peter Beinart, April 28, 2025
Mr. Beinart is a contributing Opinion writer at The Times. His latest book is “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.”
Bing Guan for The New York Times
On April 29, 2024, Tess Segal, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Florida, joined her fellow activists at a prominent plaza on campus calling on the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and boycott academic institutions in Israel. Some protesters studied or played cards. Later they read obituaries of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip.
Then law enforcement moved in. And although Ms. Segal says she did not resist arrest, she was handcuffed and taken to jail, where she was held overnight.
Ms. Segal was charged with resisting arrest without violence. The state later dismissed her case. The University of Florida, however, had already banned her from campus. University officials had warned protesters that they could be punished if they violated tough new restrictions on protest. Administrators also said that officers had instructed the demonstrators to disperse. Ms. Segal said it was too loud to hear that directive.
Ms. Segal told me that she was barred from taking her final exam of the semester and participating in a school-sponsored summer program to which she had been admitted. A university disciplinary committee ruled that she had not acted in a disruptive manner but deemed her responsible for violating university policy, among other things. They proposed a one-year suspension. The university’s newly installed dean of students went further. In a letter shared by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, he declared that Ms. Segal’s conduct “caused major disruption to the normal functions of the university and prevented law enforcement officers from performing their duties promptly” and boosted her suspension to three years. (The university would not officially confirm or comment on events surrounding Ms. Segal’s suspension, pointing out that it’s protected information under privacy laws.)
The University of Florida requires any student absent for more than three semesters to reapply for admission. Ms. Segal said she had been on a full scholarship. She now works in food service and doesn’t know how or when she’ll return to college.
In an era in which students without U.S. citizenship are snatched off the street by federal agents, Ms. Segal’s punishment may seem comparatively mild. But her case contains a special irony. Ms. Segal is Jewish.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, several prominent Jewish organizations and their political allies have repeatedly demanded that universities protect Jewish students by punishing violations of campus conduct and protest, including with suspension or even expulsion. Ms. Segal is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. She’s an alumna of a Jewish summer camp. Why weren’t Jewish organizations concerned about her? Because over the last few years, mainstream American Jewish leaders — in partnership with sympathetic politicians — have done something extraordinary: They have effectively redefined what it means to be a Jew. To silence condemnation of Israel, they have equated support for the state with Jewishness itself.
Few have articulated that redefinition more baldly than President Trump. Last month, in an apparent reference to the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s allegedly insufficient support for Israel, Mr. Trump announced, “He’s not Jewish anymore.” Mr. Trump is simply making explicit what Jewish leaders have implied for years. In 2023, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, declared that “Zionism is fundamental to Judaism.” In 2021, the influential former Soviet dissident and Israeli cabinet minister Natan Sharansky co-wrote an essay calling Jews who oppose Zionism “un-Jews.”
This redefinition of Jewishness is occurring alongside one of history’s harshest crackdowns on American Jewish activism. Many American Jews, particularly young Jews, hold critical views about Israel. A 2021 poll by the centrist Jewish Electoral Institute, which monitors Jewish voting engagement, found that 38 percent of American Jewish adults under the age of 40 considered Israel an apartheid state, compared with 47 percent who did not. When presented with the accusation that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza in a survey last year, 38 percent of American Jewish adults under the age of 44 agreed.
Given these figures, it’s not surprising that Jews have taken a leading role in the protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Eleven days after Oct. 7, 2023, progressive and anti-Zionist Jewish groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace, gathered roughly 400 protesters, many wearing shirts that said “Not in Our Name,” and occupied a congressional building. Later that month, Jewish Voice for Peace and its allies led a takeover of New York’s Grand Central Terminal. At Brown University, the first sit-in demanding divestment from companies affiliated with Israel comprised solely Jewish students.
Jewish students are not generally as vulnerable as their Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Black and noncitizen counterparts, but it is precisely this assumption of greater safety that may have made them more willing to protest in the first place. And many have paid a price. It’s impossible to know what percentage of the students punished for pro-Palestinian activism have been Jewish, since university disciplinary proceedings are often secret. But anecdotal evidence suggests it is significant. And regardless of one’s views about how universities should treat campus activism, there is something bizarre about repressing it in the name of Jewish safety when a number of the students being repressed are Jews.
Since Oct. 7, at least four universities have temporarily suspended or placed on probation their chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace. In 2023 at BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now protests, 20 members were arrested. (The charges were dropped.) At a pro-Israel event at Rockland Community College at the State University of New York on Oct. 12, 2023, a Jewish student who briefly shouted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Jews for Palestine” was reportedly suspended for the rest of the academic year. In May 2024, a Jewish tenured professor in anthropology at Muhlenberg College said she was fired after she reposted an Instagram post that declared, in part: “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable.” In September, Michigan’s attorney general brought felony charges for resisting or obstructing a police officer, as well as misdemeanor trespassing charges, against three Jewish activists — as well as four others — for offenses related to a Gaza solidarity encampment at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. (They all pleaded not guilty).
Even when protest has taken the form of Jewish religious observance, it often has been shut down. Last fall, when Jewish students opposing the war during the holiday of Sukkot built Gaza solidarity sukkahs, temporary boothlike structures in which Jews eat, learn and sleep during the holiday, at least eight universities forcibly dismantled them, or required the students to do so, or canceled approval for their construction. (The universities said that the groups were not allowed to erect structures on campus.)
Despite this, establishment Jewish pro-Israel organizations have applauded universities that have cracked down on pro-Palestinian protest. When Columbia suspended its branch of Jewish Voice for Peace alongside Students for Justice in Palestine, the A.D.L. congratulated the university for fulfilling its “legal & moral obligations to protect Jewish students.” After New Hampshire police broke up Dartmouth’s Gaza solidarity encampment, the A.D.L. thanked the college’s president for “protecting all students’ right to learn in a safe environment.” But the experience was hardly safe for Annelise Orleck, the former chair of the school’s Jewish studies program, who said she was zip-tied, body-slammed and forcibly dragged by police officers when they moved in. After the state attorney general announced that she would bring charges against demonstrators at the University of Michigan’s encampment who had allegedly violated the law, an official at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor praised her for acting “courageously.” The A.D.L. has since reversed its prior support for the Trump administration’s detention of pro-Palestinian activists. But it still wants universities to impose tough restrictions on campus protest. When I reached out to the organization asking if it had a position on Jewish students getting swept up in campus crackdowns, representatives referred me to Mr. Greenblatt’s recent opinion essays. Each one reiterated the need to fight against what it deems campus antisemitism, but also advocated due process for all those involved.
Nonetheless, Jews keep protesting. In early April, a small group of Jewish students chained themselves to Columbia’s gates to protest the ongoing detention of Mahmoud Khalil, the former graduate student and green card holder who is now being held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Louisiana over his engagement in campus protest. And just before the holiday of Passover more than 130 Jewish students, faculty members and alumni of Georgetown University signed a letter protesting the detention and arrest of Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow accused of spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism.
There is a deep irony in the American Jewish establishment’s apparent questioning of the Jewishness of these young dissenters. Because what distinguishes today’s Jewish student activists from prior generations of American Jewish leftists is precisely their interest in incorporating Jewish ritual itself into their protests. In New York alone, at least 10 non-Zionist or anti-Zionist minyanim, or prayer communities, have sprouted in the last several years. They’re overwhelmingly populated by Jews not much older than Tess Segal.
BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now erected a Gaza solidarity sukkah last fall. One Jewish undergraduate fearful that the sukkah would be vandalized or dismantled began guarding it at night. She even joined other students who slept in the rickety structure, which symbolizes human frailty and divine protection, as Jews have done for millenniums, despite the administration’s prohibition. She escaped disciplinary proceedings without punishment but soon hatched another plan entwining her Judaism with her support for the Palestinian cause: to belatedly become a bat mitzvah, a woman accepting the obligations of Jewish law. This February, she was called to the Torah for the first time, in a ceremony entirely conducted by members of BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now, now called Brown Jews for Palestinian Liberation.
To Mr. Trump and the leaders of the American Jewish establishment, she may not be a real Jew. But like many in her generation, she is angrily and joyfully proving them wrong.
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14) ‘60 Minutes’ Chastises Its Corporate Parent in Unusual On-Air Rebuke
The show’s top producer abruptly said last week he was quitting. “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” the correspondent Scott Pelley told viewers.
By Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, April 27, 2025
In his remarks on Sunday night’s telecast, Scott Pelley presented Bill Owens’s decision to resign as an effort to protect “60 Minutes” from further interference. Credit...John Paul Filo/CBS, via Associated Press
In an extraordinary on-air rebuke, one of the top journalists at “60 Minutes” directly criticized the program’s parent company in the final moments of its Sunday night CBS telecast, its first episode since the program’s executive producer, Bill Owens, announced his intention to resign.
“Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” the correspondent, Scott Pelley, told viewers. “None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”
A spokesman for Paramount had no immediate comment, and has previously declined to comment on Mr. Owens’s departure.
Mr. Owens stunned the show’s staff on Tuesday when he said he would leave the highest-rated program in television news over disagreements with Paramount, CBS’s corporate parent, saying, “It’s clear the company is done with me.”
Mr. Owens’s comments were widely reported in the press last week. The show’s decision to repeat those grievances on-air may have exposed viewers to the serious tensions between “60 Minutes” and its corporate overseers for the first time.
Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Paramount, has been intent on securing approval from the Trump administration for a multibillion-dollar sale of her media company to a studio run by the son of Larry Ellison, the tech billionaire.
President Trump sued CBS last year, claiming $10 billion in damages, in a case stemming from a “60 Minutes” interview with the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, that Mr. Trump said was deceptively edited. Ms. Redstone has expressed her desire to settle Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, although legal experts have called the case far-fetched.
In his remarks on Sunday night’s telecast, Mr. Pelley presented Mr. Owens’s decision to resign as an effort to protect “60 Minutes” from further interference.
“He did it for us and you,” Mr. Pelley told viewers of the show, which began airing in 1968. “Stories we pursued for 57 years are often controversial — lately, the Israel-Gaza War and the Trump administration. Bill made sure they were accurate and fair. He was tough that way. But our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it.”
After “60 Minutes” ran a segment in January about the war between Israel and Hamas, Ms. Redstone complained to CBS executives about what she considered the segment’s unfair slant. A day later, CBS appointed a veteran producer to a new role involving journalistic standards. She reviewed certain “60 Minutes” segments that were deemed sensitive.
Representatives for Mr. Trump and for Paramount are involved in settlement talks, and mediation is expected to start this week.
Mr. Pelley’s on-air monologue on Sunday night evoked a previous moment of public discord between “60 Minutes” and its corporate overseers.
In 1995, also in a closing note to viewers, the correspondent Mike Wallace said on air that the program had chosen not to broadcast an interview with a former tobacco industry executive because managers at CBS News had given in to legal pressure. “60 Minutes” ultimately aired the interview, and the episode was later dramatized in “The Insider,” a 1999 movie starring Al Pacino as Lowell Bergman, a “60 Minutes” producer.
Sunday’s “60 Minutes” episode also featured a segment that examined the Trump administration’s decision to reduce funding to the National Institutes of Health, including an interview with a former director who expressed his concerns about adverse effects on Americans’ health.
Lauren Hirsch contributed reporting.
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15) Albuquerque Has a Crime Problem. Is the National Guard the Answer?
New Mexico’s governor said the troops are needed to help quell violence. But in the deeply blue city, the plan to deploy them has drawn uneasy comparisons to the talk of President Trump.
By Jack Healy, Reporting from Albuquerque, April 28, 2025
National Guard troops in Albuquerque listen to an instructor in preparation of deploying next month to support law enforcement. Credit...Brad Trone for the New York Times
To critics, President Trump’s threat to deploy the military to fight crime and unrest in America’s cities is a nightmare scenario, a pretext for martial law and a potential assault on democracy.
But starting next month, dozens of National Guard troops will be on the streets of a deeply Democratic city, Albuquerque, in a deeply Democratic state, New Mexico. And they are being deployed by the state’s governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat. She said they are needed to help the strained police force confront a crisis of violent crime and fentanyl use.
“The situation in Albuquerque has reached an unacceptable crisis point,” she said. “We simply cannot wait for traditional solutions to take effect.”
Few residents of Albuquerque would deny the scourge of violence in a neighborhood bisected by Route 66 and home to dense blocks of auto shops, immigrant-run businesses and working-class families. Officially, it is the International District. But many call it the War Zone.
The governor’s move to deploy Guard troops more commonly seen at wildfires, hurricanes and tornadoes has divided locals, reflecting the broader civil war within the Democratic Party over crime and disorder. It is already emerging as an issue among the Democrats who seek to succeed her in the governor’s office in Santa Fe.
Some praised the Guard’s arrival, saying extra resources could help to restore order before the 100-year anniversary of Route 66 brings thousands of tourists to Albuquerque next year. Critics called it an invasion of a neglected neighborhood that desperately needs better housing and services.
“What’s the difference between Trump and the governor if they’re both rolling out the military?” asked Enrique Cardiel, a longtime community organizer who helps run a monthly potluck in the neighborhood.
Under the governor’s plan, the Guard troops will deploy across Albuquerque but will focus on the area around Route 66, a strip of fading, neon-lit Americana that is now home to homeless encampments, shuttered motels, people smoking fentanyl on the sidewalks and a corner market where seven murders have occurred since 2020.
The area has grappled with gangs and drug-related violence stretching back decades, residents said, but crime and homelessness have soared since the Covid pandemic. Retailers have fled. People have built steel security fences around their pueblo-style homes.
But debate lingers over whether that calls for military action. The governor and her allies are quick to say there’s plenty of difference between the state’s plan and the deployments Mr. Trump has entertained.
“This isn’t about militarizing our streets,” Ms. Lujan Grisham said in an email, sent while she was traveling in Asia last week. She framed the deployment as “bold, decisive action.”
She said the Guard’s role of supporting law enforcement would be completely different than the domestic uses of the military that Mr. Trump has entertained, such as patrolling the border, quelling protests or fighting crime.
“There’s a clear line between supporting law enforcement with specialized capabilities versus using troops to perform law enforcement functions,” she said. “Our operation is a targeted, strategic deployment requested by local officials who are on the front lines of this crisis.”
Ms. Lujan Grisham, who will complete her second and final term in 2026, has made confronting New Mexico’s high rates of violent crime a central issue in her final years as governor, and the issue is likely to shape the Democratic primary to replace her between Sam Bregman, the district attorney in Albuquerque, and Deb Haaland, the progressive former congresswoman and Interior secretary.
This spring, Ms. Lujan Grisham scolded fellow Democrats in the state Legislature for failing to pass new laws to address a surge in juvenile crime. After three people were killed in a shooting at a park in the border town of Las Cruces last month, she suggested calling lawmakers back for a special session focused on “our ongoing public safety crisis.”
She issued the emergency declaration in response to a request for help from Albuquerque’s police chief, Harold Medina, made in March. City officials say the 950-officer department is chronically understaffed, like many nationwide, and that putting Guard troops into supporting roles would free up more officers to patrol the streets, respond to complaints and investigate violent crimes.
About 60 to 70 National Guard members will deploy to Albuquerque. They will not have the power to arrest people or do any direct police work, officials say, and will not carry guns, be in uniform or roll down Route 66 in Humvees. Instead, they will wear polo shirts and khakis, and carry radios and — maybe — pepper spray, officials said. The effort is expected to cost the state about $750,000 a month.
The Guard troops are likely to transport detainees to jail, direct traffic around accidents or crime scenes, monitor security cameras, or help with airport security, officials say. Some may end up giving aid to fentanyl users, or handing out water to homeless people when the pounding summer temperatures hit 100 or higher.
It is hardly the first time Guard soldiers have been deployed beyond the bounds of a natural disaster. Thousands responded to chaotic protests after George Floyd’s killing in 2020, and Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat, sent hundreds to assist with an influx of migrants two years ago. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, dispatched rifle-carrying Texas National Guard troops as part of a border-security operation.
In New Mexico, Guard troops deployed as substitute teachers during the pandemic, when Covid depleted the ranks of teachers, and responded to record-breaking wildfires. Some Guard members said deploying in Albuquerque was a chance to address a different kind of emergency.
“It’s definitely not an invasion,” said Staff Sgt. Richard Aragon. “The military’s just there to help the police officers and the community.”
But critics say the Guard’s deployment to the streets of Albuquerque puts citizen-soldiers into a fraught role. Should they be required to wear body cameras, as Albuquerque police officers are? What if they get into a physical confrontation while securing the perimeter of a volatile crime scene?
“There is a ton of liability,” Sheriff John Allen of Bernalillo County, which includes Albuquerque, said in a social media post. He said he had declined to deputize any Guard members. “Lines can be skewed. I don’t want people to feel like we’re militarizing our community.”
The complexities of their mission were on display last week, when several dozen Guard troops sat in an auditorium watching a slide presentation about how to transport a prisoner. An instructor from the New Mexico State Police ticked through a minefield of challenges: how to buckle them in safely; how to search for drugs or weapons; how to check the tightness of their handcuffs; how to prevent an escape; the proper holds to use to escort a detainee.
“You guys might have to testify,” the instructor cautioned. “You’re always under the spotlight.”
On the streets of the International District, some residents welcomed the Guard’s upcoming arrival while others dismissed it as the latest in a string of cleanups and crackdowns. Heather Still, 49, a retired nurse, recently called 911 when a woman overdosed behind her apartment building, and said she welcomed any help from anywhere.
“It’s gotten really bad,” she said.
Albuquerque officials say they have been making progress. Property crimes like auto theft, burglary and shoplifting are down by double digits this year compared with 2024, and homicides were about 40 percent below last year’s numbers, the police said. Albuquerque has cleared encampments and opened tiny-home villages. A public-safety campaign led by Mr. Bregman, the Bernalillo County district attorney, the county sheriff and others has resulted in more than 500 arrests and the seizure of 35,000 fentanyl pills and 40 guns, officials said.
Tony Johnson, a deacon at Highland Baptist Church, doubted much would change. People frequently camp and use drugs on church property, he said, and when he asked three men to leave one day last year, one of them struck him with a metal pipe, crushing the bones in one hand. It is still scarred and swollen, and some in his congregation now refuse to leave their homes at night.
“People don’t have any hope,” he said, driving past an apartment building where a 17-year-old would be arrested in a fatal shooting two days later. “Fifteen-year-olds, 16-year-olds, what are they doing with guns? But is that the National Guard’s responsibility, to figure that out?”
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