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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) In Israel’s Demolition Path, West Bank Residents Pack Up Their Lives
A monthslong Israeli military operation in the northern West Bank has displaced tens of thousands of people. Some are now learning they may not return.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 8, 2025
Nasser Nasser/Associated Press
An Israeli bulldozer tearing down a home in Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm on Monday.
When Israel informed the Palestinian Authority that it planned to demolish dozens of buildings in crowded parts of a border city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the notification set off a panic.
Hundreds of Palestinians in the border city, Tulkarm, learned that they would likely not be returning to their homes at the end of a sweeping Israeli offensive in the northern West Bank.
“They’re causing a disaster,” said Nihad al-Shawish, the head of the services committee in the Nur Shams camp in Tulkarm.
Since January, the Israeli military has conducted a large-scale military operation in three camps in the northern West Bank, displacing tens of thousands of people and causing widespread destruction. Israeli officials, who say the purpose of the campaign is to target militants and their weapons, have said the military should be prepared to remain in the camps for a year.
The military has said the latest demolition of homes in Tulkarm was meant to make the city’s two camps, Tulkarm and Nur Shams, more accessible to Israeli forces and to prevent militants from regrouping there.
Many Palestinians believe Israel is seeking to transform the camps, which have housed refugees and their descendants, into neighborhoods like the rest of Tulkarm.
In recent days, Israel has allowed some residents of the camps to return to their homes to gather their belongings.
Nasr al-Jundi, 45, a resident of Nur Shams, said he only had time to grab only some of his belongings on Tuesday, including clothing, a television, a fan, a microwave and a sauté pan.
“They’re taking away my dreams,” he said.
Later, residents of the camp assembled on a nearby hill, watching a bulldozer knock down homes.
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2) New Film Names Soldier in Palestinian American Journalist’s Shooting
After Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in the West Bank in 2022, the Israeli military never revealed the identity of the soldier who fired at her. A documentary said it had confirmed his name.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 8, 2025
The site of Shireen Abu Akleh’s fatal shooting in Jenin, the West Bank, in 2022. The killing of the U.S. citizen prompted the Biden administration to push Israel to more rigorously investigate her death. Credit...Samar Hazboun for The New York Times
When Shireen Abu Akleh, a renowned Palestinian American broadcaster, was shot and killed in 2022 in the northern West Bank, Israeli officials initially suggested that she may have been hit by a Palestinian militant. Months later, the military changed its account, acknowledging that she most likely was shot by an Israeli soldier — whom it declined to identify.
Three years later, a new documentary has identified and named an Israeli soldier as the shooter, apparently solving a mystery that was a major focus at the time of the incident.
Zeteo News, a left-leaning online news outlet, named the shooter as Capt. Alon Scagio, then a 20-year-old marksman in an elite commando unit, citing another soldier in his squad.
Two Israeli military officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, confirmed the documentary’s conclusions to The New York Times. Asked by The Times to confirm the identity of the soldier, the Israeli military said it had made “no definitive determination regarding the identity of the individual responsible for the shooting.” At the same time, it passed along a message from the Scagio family requesting that journalists avoid publishing the captain’s name.
Ms. Abu Akleh, a veteran reporter for Al Jazeera, was a household name in the Middle East. Her death set off mourning across the region and prompted greater global scrutiny of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Her U.S. citizenship also prompted unusual concern from the Biden administration, leading to friction between the American and Israeli governments.
According to a biography posted on the Israeli Defense Ministry’s website, Captain Scagio was a career soldier who trained as an elite sniper and fought in the West Bank for eight months in 2022. Later, he served in Gaza, following Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023, before being transferred back to the West Bank, the biography said.
Captain Scagio was killed in the West Bank city of Jenin last June, age 22, after his convoy was hit by a roadside explosive, the biography said.
Zeteo’s documentary concluded that Captain Scagio had fired on Ms. Abu Akleh in the same city more than two years earlier. She had been covering an Israeli military raid and clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants. The Zeteo team was led by a former Wall Street Journal correspondent, Dion Nissenbaum, and included a regular freelance contributor to The New York Times, Fatima AbdulKarim.
Wearing protective gear marked with the word “press,” Ms. Abu Akleh was hit while walking with a group of similarly dressed journalists toward a small convoy of Israeli military jeeps. An investigation by The Times in 2022 found that the bullet that killed Ms. Abu Akleh was fired from the approximate location of the Israeli military convoy, most likely by a soldier from an elite unit.
The evidence reviewed by The Times showed that there were no armed Palestinians near her when she was shot. It contradicted Israeli claims that, if a soldier had mistakenly killed her, it was because he had been shooting at a Palestinian gunman.
As an American citizen, Ms. Abu Akleh’s killing prompted the Biden administration to push Israel to more rigorously investigate her death. Later, the Biden administration was itself accused of downplaying Israeli culpability, a charge dismissed by the State Department, which concluded that while Israeli soldiers may have killed the journalist, they did not target her intentionally.
The Zeteo documentary, citing an anonymous source, said that U.S. officials had initially decided after a site visit that Ms. Abu Akleh had been deliberately targeted, before changing their conclusions in the final version of the report to avoid upsetting Israel.
A senior U.S. official familiar with the report said its conclusions were never altered and no draft version had ever concluded that Ms. Abu Akleh had been intentionally killed. The official also said that the American officers who visited the site of the shooting were unable to reach a definitive conclusion on the soldier’s exact line of sight, let alone the shooter’s intention, because the Americans did not assess the site from within an Israeli military vehicle.
The Times investigation was also unable to determine the shooter’s exact field of vision or intention.
The Office of the Security Coordinator — the unit of the State Department that investigated the incident — declined to comment.
Ms. Abu Akleh’s funeral attracted global outcry after Israeli police officers assaulted mourners carrying her coffin, causing them to drop it.
Natan Odenheimer and Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.
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3) Trump Has Made Claims About Abrego Garcia’s Tattoos. Here’s a Closer Look.
Gang experts say the tattoos on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s knuckles are unlikely to signify gang membership. The president says otherwise.
By Juliet Macur, May 8, 2025
President Trump has claimed that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March, is a member of MS-13, the Salvadoran-American criminal gang, and that the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s knuckles prove it.
In a post nearly three weeks ago on Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media platform, he gave his version of a primer on those tattoos, showing a photo of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s hand, with one small tattoo on each finger: a marijuana leaf, a smiley face with X’s for eyes, a cross and a skull.
Above each of those black tattoos was a letter or a number — M, S, 1 and 3 — in a sans-serif font that clearly had been superimposed onto the photo. “He’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles,” the president wrote in his post.
In other photos, however, including ones shared by Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the letters and numbers do not appear on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s knuckles.
Each of the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s knuckles is extremely common, but even combined, they are unremarkable, several tattoo experts said.
And according to experts on gang membership, the tattoos that usually signify MS-13 membership are often much clearer in their association with the gang. Many times, they actually say MS-13, those experts said.
“I can tell you, MS-13 does not equivocate; they don’t leave any ambiguity when it comes to their tattoos,” said Jorja Leap, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been working with and studying MS-13 members for more than two decades.
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s tattoos leave room for interpretation, Ms. Leap said, which does not align with the bold way MS-13 operates. The gang, she said, is proud of the reputation that it is violent and lethal, and members often showcase their association through their tattoos.
Sometimes, Ms. Leap said, the gang’s full name, Mara Salvatrucha, is tattooed in large letters on the chests of its members, or featured across their backs and down their arms. It also is not uncommon for the gang’s members to have MS-13 tattooed onto their cheeks and necks, she said, or to have tattoos of a devil-horns hand gesture — index and pinkie fingers up, everything else closed in a fist — because it’s the gang’s symbol.
“They are very clear, again, about their brand, and they espouse pride in it,” she said.
José Miguel Cruz, an expert in transnational gangs who has interviewed more than 2,000 members of Central American gangs, including members of MS-13, said nothing about Mr. Abrego Garcia’s tattoos signals MS-13 membership.
Mr. Cruz has seen MS-13 members with many versions of elaborate tattoos: full-face ones of MS-13 and also ones like 666 or a beast that represents Satan. But he said he has never seen the combination of tattoos that are on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s knuckles.
“The basic message here is that we cannot infer that he’s MS-13 just because of those tattoos,” said Mr. Cruz, an associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida International University.
Paul Bradley, the owner of Titan Ink, a tattoo shop in suburban Washington, where Mr. Abrego Garcia lived, has worked as a tattoo artist for 20 years. Referring to the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s knuckles, he said he has tattooed each of those images on people countless times.
“I’ve pretty much done those tattoos on almost every spectrum of person: man, woman, young, old,” Mr. Bradley said. They are “just symbols that people like for one reason or another.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s tattoos helped his wife, Ms. Vasquez Sura, to recognize him in photos posted online of men at a prison in El Salvador, where migrants were sent after being deported from the United States.
Since Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation, the Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his release. The president has dug in, calling him a dangerous gang member who should not be let back into the United States.
Law enforcement officials say the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s hands do not qualify as singular and definitive evidence of membership in MS-13. While many police departments consider tattoos when trying to determine whether someone is a member of a gang, they also weigh other factors, including the use of hand signs or symbols linked to gangs and known association with gang members.
David C. Pyrooz, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder and an expert on gangs and criminal networks, said even a blatant MS-13 tattoo on someone’s neck or face would not guarantee active gang membership because that membership doesn’t last forever and tattoos are hard to remove. It might have been a tattoo that they had inked 10-15 years ago, long before they dropped out of a gang to get a job or start a family, as many gang members do, he said.
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4) About 80 Pro-Palestinian Activists Arrested in Columbia Library Takeover
The protesters had appeared to be attempting to rekindle the movement that swept the campus last spring.
By Sharon Otterman, Published May 7, 2025, Updated May 8, 2025
About 80 pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested on Wednesday evening after occupying part of the main library on Columbia University’s campus in an attempt to rekindle the protest movement that swept the campus last spring, the police said Thursday morning.
The protesters, wearing masks and kaffiyehs, had burst through a security gate shortly after 3 p.m. and hung banners in the soaring main room of Butler Library’s second floor, renaming the space “the Basel Al-Araj Popular University,” according to the demonstrators and witnesses at the library.
Columbia security guards blocked them from leaving unless they showed their identification, causing an hourslong standoff. Outside the library, crowds gathered, leading to a chaotic scene. By about 7 p.m., Columbia administrators had called the New York City police back to campus for the first time since the occupation of Hamilton Hall, another campus building, in April 2024.
“Requesting the presence of the N.Y.P.D. is not the outcome we wanted, but it was absolutely necessary to secure the safety of our community,” Claire Shipman, the acting president of the university, wrote in a statement.
Ms. Shipman said that two public safety officers had been injured during a crowd surge outside the library, when some people had tried to force their way in. Several protesters also appeared to have been injured.
The protest comes as the Trump administration has been cracking down on Columbia over what it calls its failure to protect Jewish students from harassment, cutting more than $400 million in federal research funding to the school. The university has been under enormous pressure to stem disruptive pro-Palestinian protests, particularly those that call for an end to the state of Israel.
The tense situation that unfolded around the library over several hours on Wednesday threatened to complicate ongoing negotiations between the Trump administration and Columbia officials seeking the restoration of federal funding.
“While Columbia students try to study for finals, they’re being bombarded with chants for a ‘global intifada,’” Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican lawmaker pushing for universities to do more to protect Jewish students, posted on social media. “Not a single taxpayer dollar should go to a university that allows chaos, antisemitism, and civil rights violations on its campus.”
The demonstrators had pushed past a library security guard, carrying tote bags and backpacks, before heading up the stairs to the main reading room, video posted on social media showed. After chanting pro-Palestinian slogans for about an hour, some of the protesters tried to leave but were prevented by the row of Columbia public safety officers, who held them in the room until they identified themselves.
The disruption was limited to a single reading room, a university spokeswoman said. A statement from Columbia said that the protesters would face consequences.
“It is completely unacceptable that some individuals are choosing to disrupt academic activities as our students are studying and preparing for final exams,” the statement said.
Public security officers evacuated students not involved in the disruption from the library, which was filled with people studying. Hundreds of onlookers gathered outside the library, and some protesters tried to push their way in through the main doors.
Just before 5:20 p.m., a group of seven people was released through the back exit of the library on 114th Street. They were free to go, presumably after having their identification checked. A few minutes later, a protester was brought out in handcuffs by the university’s public safety department, which now employs several dozen peace officers who are empowered to make arrests.
The scene became increasingly tumultuous. A building fire alarm began sounding at 5:35 p.m. before going quiet a few minutes later. Some protesters still in the library shouted through megaphones to the crowd outside. There appeared to be at least one injury, with a protester taken out on a stretcher through the back entrance of the library. The person was covered with a white sheet to conceal their identity and had an ice pack held up to their arm.
As 6 p.m. approached, a demonstration in support of the protesters began gathering nearby at Broadway and 114th Street. Police officers assembled metal barricades. The protesters inside the university gates and outside at 114th Street chanted in unison: “No cops, no K.K.K., no fascist U.S.A.”
After Ms. Shipman authorized the police to enter the private campus, events unfolded quickly. At 7:25 p.m., about 30 protesters were escorted out of the building and loaded into police buses by officers in riot gear. The crowd chanted, “Free, free Palestine.” More demonstrators were escorted out, their hands restrained behind them with zip ties.
Inside the library, dozens of demonstrators linked arms as police officers arrived and took them into custody, video showed. The police said that they had responded to a trespassing situation at Columbia and that charges for about 80 people were pending as of Thursday morning.
Columbia has taken many steps to try keep demonstrations under control this academic year, including closing the gates to the main campus to anyone unaffiliated with the university and threatening serious discipline for those who break rules. In part for that reason, the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia has splintered.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the group that organized the occupation of the library, once attracted a wide array of antiwar protesters, but has become smaller and more extreme in its rhetoric. Its leaders, who do not publicize their identities, now publish manifestoes supporting armed resistance by members of groups that United States authorities consider terrorist organizations.
The person for whom demonstrators renamed the library on Wednesday is a Palestinian revolutionary icon who was accused by Israel of planning a large-scale attack and was killed by Israeli forces in 2017. Part of the statement that demonstrators published on Wednesday called on students “to propagate the successes of the heroic Palestinian armed resistance in weakening Israel and U.S. imperialism and inspiring anti-imperialist struggles around the world.”
Anvee Bhutani, Chelsia Rose Marcius, Wesley Parnell and Sharla Steinman contributed reporting.
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5) Trump Seeks to Strip Away Legal Tool Key to Civil Rights Enforcement
President Trump has ordered federal agencies to halt their use of “disparate-impact liability,” which has been used to assess whether policies discriminate against different groups.
By Erica L. Green, Reporting from Washington, May 9, 2025
President Trump has ordered federal agencies to abandon the use of a longstanding legal tool used to root out discrimination against minorities, a move that could defang the nation’s bedrock civil rights law.
In an expansive executive order, Mr. Trump directed the federal government to curtail the use of “disparate-impact liability,” a core tenet used for decades to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by determining whether policies disproportionately disadvantage certain groups.
The little-noticed order, issued last month with a spate of others targeting equity policies, was the latest effort in Mr. Trump’s aggressive push to purge the consideration of diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., from the federal government and every facet of American life.
The directive underscores how Mr. Trump’s crusade to stamp out D.E.I. — a catchall term increasingly used to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male — is now focused not just on targeting programs and policies that may assist historically marginalized groups, but also on the very law created to protect them.
“This order aims to destroy the foundation of civil rights protections in this country, and it will have a devastating effect on equity for Black people and other communities of color,” said Dariely Rodriguez, the acting co-chief counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocacy group.
The disparate-impact test has been crucial to enforcing key portions of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. For decades, it has been relied upon by the government and attorneys to root out discrimination in areas of employment, housing, policing, education and more.
Civil rights prosecutors say the disparate-impact test is one of their most important tools for uncovering discrimination because it shows how a seemingly neutral policy or law has different outcomes for different demographic groups, revealing inequities.
Lawyers say the test has been crucial in showing how criminal background and credit checks affect employment of Black people, how physical capacity tests inhibit employment opportunities for women, how zoning regulations could violate fair housing laws, and how schools have meted out overly harsh discipline to minority students and children with disabilities.
Over the last decade, major businesses and organizations have settled cases in which the disparate-impact test was applied, resulting in significant policy changes.
One of the largest settlements involved Walmart, which in 2020 agreed to a $20 million settlement in a case brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that claimed the company’s practice of giving physical ability tests to applicants for certain grocery warehouse jobs made it more difficult for women to get the positions.
The use of the disparate-impact rule, however, has also long been a target of conservatives who say that employers and other entities should not be scrutinized and penalized for the mere implication of discrimination, based largely on statistics. Instead, they argue that such scrutiny should be directed at the explicit and intentional discrimination prohibited by the Civil Rights Act.
Opponents say that that disparate-impact rule has been used to unfairly discriminate against white people. In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who claimed reverse discrimination when the city threw out a promotional examination on which they had scored better than Black firefighters.
Mr. Trump’s order resurrects a last-ditch effort made in the final days of his first term to repeal disparate-impact regulations through a formal rule-making process, which was nixed by the Biden administration when he left office.
The new order, titled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” echoes arguments that Mr. Trump has adopted from far-right conservatives, who say that the country has become too focused on its racist history, and that protections from the civil rights era have led to reverse racism against nonminority groups.
Disparate-impact liability is part of “a pernicious movement” that seeks to “transform America’s promise of equal opportunity into a divisive pursuit of results preordained by irrelevant immutable characteristics, regardless of individual strengths, effort or achievement,” the order stated.
The president ordered federal agencies to “eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible,” under the law and Constitution, and required that agencies “deprioritize enforcement of all statutes and regulations to the extent they include disparate-impact liability.”
That means that no new cases are likely to rely on the theory in civil rights enforcement — and existing ones will not be enforced.
His order also instructs agencies to evaluate existing consent judgments and permanent injunctions that rely on the legal theory, which means that cases and agreements in which discrimination has been proved could be abandoned.
The order takes aim directly at the use of the test in enforcing the Civil Rights Act, requiring Attorney General Pam Bondi to begin repealing and amending any regulations that apply disparate-impact liability to implement the 1964 law.
One of the most glaring examples in history of how seemingly race-neutral policies could disenfranchise certain groups are Jim Crow-era literacy tests, which some states set as a condition to vote after Black people secured rights during Reconstruction.
The literacy tests did not ask about race, but were highly subjective in how they were written and administered by white proctors. They disproportionately prevented Black people from casting ballots, including many who had received an inferior education in segregated schools, and were eventually outlawed with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In 1971, the Supreme Court established the disparate-impact test in a case that centered on a North Carolina power plant that required job applicants to have a high school diploma and pass an intelligence test to be hired or transferred to a higher-paying department. The court ruled unanimously that the company’s requirements violated the Civil Rights Act because they limited the promotion of minorities and did not measure job capabilities.
Mr. Trump’s executive order, which is likely to face legal challenges, falsely claimed that the disparate-impact test was “unlawful” and violated the Constitution. In fact, the measure was codified by Congress in 1991, upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 2015 as a vital tool in the work of protecting civil rights, and cited in a December 2024 dissent by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the disparate impact theory “wrongly equates unequal outcomes with discrimination and actually requires discrimination to rebalance outcomes.”
”The Trump administration is dedicated to advancing equality, combating discrimination and promoting merit-based decisions, upholding the rule of law as outlined in the U.S. Constitution,” Mr. Fields said.
GianCarlo Canaparo, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has argued that eliminating disparate impact would be the final blow to D.E.I., noted that Mr. Trump would need the help of Congress to fully eradicate the rule.
But he said the president’s order would still have a “salutary” impact on the American public by helping people understand that racial animus and disparate outcomes “are not the same things, and they shouldn’t be treated the same way in law.”
“These claims that racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country is just empirically false,” Mr. Canaparo said. “The problem with disparate-impact liability is that it presumes that falsehood is true, and accordingly distorts civil rights.”
Mr. Trump’s order contends that businesses and employers face an “insurmountable” task of proving they did not intend to discriminate when there are different outcomes for different groups, and that disparate impact forced them to ”engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability.”
Catherine E. Lhamon, who served as the head of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights under Presidents Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., disputed that. Her office conducted several disparate-impact investigations that found no intentional wrongdoing, she said.
“It’s a rigorous test,” Ms. Lhamon said, “and sometimes it proves discrimination and sometimes it doesn’t.”
The order’s impact will be particularly felt at the Education Department, where the Office for Civil Rights has heavily relied on data showing disparate outcomes when investigating complaints of discrimination in schools.
In one case, the office examined large disparities in the rates of Native American students being disciplined, particularly for truancy, compared with their white peers in the Rapid City Area Schools in South Dakota. In the course of the investigation, the school superintendent attributed the tardiness of Native American students to “Indian Time,” the Education Department report stated. The superintendent later apologized and was fired.
Last year, the school district agreed to make changes to its practices as part of a voluntary resolution agreement with the Education Department. The Trump administration abruptly ended that agreement in April, citing the president’s directives to eliminate race-conscious policies.
The Justice Department has also long relied on the theory to identify patterns of police misconduct and other discrimination pervasive in communities of color. In 2018, the department helped secure a settlement and a consent decree with the City of Jacksonville and the Jacksonville Fire Department after finding that Black firefighters were blocked from promotions because of a test that did not prove necessary for the fire department’s operations.
Now the Justice Department’s embattled civil rights division has halted the use of disparate-impact investigations altogether, officials said.
In an interview last month, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, praised the executive order for rolling back what she called “a very discredited” theory that “should be overruled.”
“We’re not in that business anymore, pursuant to the executive order,” she told the conservative podcast host Glenn Beck.
She went on to suggest that the level of discrimination that spurred civil rights laws no longer existed. “It’s 2025, today,” she said, “and the idea that some police department or some big employer can be sued because of statistics, which can be manipulated, is ludicrous and it is unfair.”
Civil rights advocates say Mr. Trump is trying to effectively gut anti-discrimination laws by fiat.
Ms. Rodriguez, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said disparate impact had become a crucial guardrail for “ensuring that there are no artificial barriers that are limiting equal access to economic opportunity in every facet of our daily life.” The test helps root out discrimination that many people may not realize is constraining their opportunities, she added.
“The impact of this,” Ms. Rodriguez said of Mr. Trump’s order, “cannot be overstated.”
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6) Trump Declares High-Speed Internet Program ‘Racist’ and ‘Unconstitutional’
President Trump denounced the Biden-era Digital Equity Act as “woke handouts based on race,” raging in a social media post against a broad effort to improve high-speed internet access.
By Chris Cameron, Reporting from Washington, May 8, 2025
Early in his presidency, Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed a law aimed at expanding access to high-speed internet, which President Trump said on Thursday that he would end. Credit...Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
President Trump on Thursday attacked a law signed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. aimed at expanding high-speed internet access, calling the effort “racist” and “totally unconstitutional” and threatening to end it “immediately.”
Mr. Trump’s statement was one of the starkest examples yet of his slash-and-burn approach to dismantling the legacy of his immediate predecessor in this term in office. The Digital Equity Act, a little-known effort to improve high-speed internet access in communities with poor access, was tucked into the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Mr. Biden signed into law early in his presidency.
The act was written to help many different groups, including veterans, older people and disabled and rural communities. But Mr. Trump, using the incendiary language that has been a trademark of his political career, denounced the law on Thursday for also seeking to improve internet access for ethnic and racial minorities, raging in a social media post that it amounted to providing “woke handouts based on race.”
In reality, the law barely mentions race at all, only stating that racial minorities could be covered by the program while including a nondiscrimination clause that says that individuals could not be excluded from the program “on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or disability” — language taken from the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Digital Equity Act, drafted by Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, provides $60 million in grants to states and territories to help them come up with plans to make internet access more equal, as well as $2.5 billion in grants to help put those plans into effect. Some of that funding has already been disbursed to states with approved plans — including red, rural states like Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa and Kansas. Hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding were approved by the Biden administration in the weeks before Mr. Trump took office, but have not yet been distributed.
It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump had carried out his threat to end the grants, which were appropriated through Congress. The agencies that oversee the internet initiative, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Department of Commerce, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The cancellation of grants to states would almost certainly be challenged in the courts, where the Trump administration has had some success in blocking, at least temporarily, challenges to its suspension of grants related to equity and diversity programs. However, in late March, the administration failed to ward off a block on its sweeping freeze of federal funds to states.
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7) Police and Brooklyn College Protesters Clash After Pro-Palestinian Rally
The police moved in to make arrests after demonstrators left the college grounds and gathered outside. Officers punched some students and slammed others to the ground.
By Wesley Parnell and Ed Shanahan, Published May 8, 2025, Updated May 9, 2025
Screenshot
A pro-Palestinian rally at Brooklyn College erupted in chaos on Thursday, with demonstrators and the police engaging in physical altercations, several people being arrested and one officer firing a Taser to subdue a man in the crowd.
The unruly scene followed the arrests of 80 people on Wednesday after pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupied part of Columbia University’s main library, prompting university officials to quickly call in the police.
The swift moves to crack down on the two protests reflect the enormous pressure that colleges across the United States feel from the Trump administration to quell pro-Palestinian campus unrest.
The disorder at Brooklyn College began around 6 p.m., as dozens of students and faculty members who had gathered to chant slogans and condemn Israel’s actions in the war in Gaza exited the college’s wrought-iron gates.
They had been on campus for several hours by then. Although tensions had grown through the afternoon, as college officials and security guards threatened to have the demonstrators arrested, the rally appeared to be ending peacefully. Two of the four tents someone had set up had been removed at the college’s request.
There were some small skirmishes as people went through the gates, and officers made a few arrests. The crowd walked on before pausing in front of the college’s Tanger Hillel House, where someone in the group gave a speech denouncing the building as a “Zionist institution.” Others held signs that said: “Israel has no right to exist” and “save Gaza.”
A few minutes later, officers stepped into the crowd to make more arrests, taking some people into custody after punching, kicking or slamming them to the ground. It was unclear what prompted the officers to move in aggressively.
One man was quickly surrounded by several officers and put to the ground. One of the officers pulled out a Taser and pointed it in the man’s direction. A popping sound could be heard, and wires dangled from his pants as officers led him away. Several ambulances arrived.
College officials requested that officers come to the campus shortly before 5 p.m. and they arrested seven people, a police spokesman said Friday morning. It was not clear what charges they faced.
A spokesman for Brooklyn College said in a statement that demonstrators had violated college policy by putting up the tents. When the tents were not taken down after repeated warnings, City University of New York security officers and the New York City police removed them and “dispersed the crowd,” according to the spokesman, Richard Pietras.
“The safety of our campus community will always be paramount, and Brooklyn College respects the right to protest while also adhering to strict rules meant to ensure the safe operation of our university,” he added.
In an email sent to students at around 7:30 p.m., a college official said the campus was closed for the day, that anyone who left would not be able to return on Thursday and that classes that evening might need to be moved online or canceled.
Emma Grillo contributed reporting.
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8) After the Blast
By Saher Alghorra, May 9, 2025
Before the war, this restaurant in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City served Thai food — back when one could still find the ingredients for it in northern Gaza.
On Wednesday, a bloody day in the Gaza Strip, with multiple strikes, the restaurant was the site of the deadliest.
Thirty-three people were killed there and 155 wounded, according to the local health ministry.
I was just across the street when the strike happened, drinking coffee and using the internet at another cafe. When I made my way through the noise, smoke and dust to take photographs, I came upon a scene of the dead and the dying.
Those who had survived were trying to aid one another as best they could. The wounded woman seen in this photograph was carried away to a hospital moments later.
But at least one hospital was unable to accommodate the high number of casualties on Wednesday, according to the health ministry, which put the day’s death toll across the enclave at 59. Its casualty figures do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Asked about the target of the attack, the Israeli military said in a statement on Thursday that its forces had “struck two key Hamas terrorists” in the Gaza City area.
“Prior to the strike,” it said, “numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming uninvolved civilians, including the use of a precise munition, aerial surveillance and additional intelligence.”
Israel was “aware,” the statement said, “of the claim of casualties.”
The strikes followed the collapse in March of a cease-fire between the Israelis and Hamas, which set off the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The Israeli military says it is expanding its operations in Gaza to force Hamas to release the remaining hostages seized in that attack.
Outside the cafe on Wednesday, Gazans despaired at the return of war.
“Enough, enough of the bloodshed happening,” said one witness, Ahmed al-Saoudi.
Written by Peter Robins. Reporting was contributed by Johnatan Reiss, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Lara Jakes and Aaron Boxerman.
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9) Judge Orders Release of Tufts Student Detained by ICE
The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was being detained in Louisiana. A federal judge said her detention threatened to chill the speech of millions of noncitizens.
By Anemona Hartocollis and Jonah E. Bromwich, May 9, 2025
People rallied in support of Rumeysa Ozturk in April in front of a federal courthouse in Boston. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
A federal judge in Vermont ordered the Trump administration on Friday to release Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student whose sudden arrest in March led to a public outcry.
The judge, William K. Sessions III, said Ms. Ozturk should be freed immediately. “Her continued detention cannot stand,” Judge Sessions said, adding that her continued detention “potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of people in this country who are not citizens.”
Ms. Ozturk, a former Fulbright scholar, has been in detention since March 25, when she was surrounded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in masks and plainclothes outside her home in Somerville, Mass. The agents handcuffed and hustled her into an unmarked car, and then drove her through New Hampshire to Vermont, where she was put on a plane to a detention center in Louisiana.
In seeking her release, her lawyers have accused the government of detaining her in unconstitutional retaliation for protected speech. The main evidence against her appears to be an essay critical of Israel that she helped to write in a Tufts student newspaper last year.
Government lawyers in a hearing earlier this week declined to discuss questions about speech raised by an appeals court judge. But Judge Sessions did not mince words on Friday, suggesting the government was trying to deport Ms. Ozturk based on the slenderest of evidence that she had posed a threat to American foreign policy interests.
“There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the Op-Ed,” he said in granting her release.
Video footage of Ms. Ozturk’s detention went viral, leading to public outrage at her treatment and criticism that the government is abusing the immigration system to deport international students.
Ms. Ozturk has spent six weeks in detention in Louisiana and has endured unsanitary conditions that have triggered increasingly severe asthma attacks, her lawyers said in court documents.
Earlier this week, a federal appeals court ordered that she be transferred to Vermont by next week to attend a bail hearing. But Judge Sessions decided to hold the hearing with Ms. Ozturk still in Louisiana and ordered her release.
Before her detention, the Department of Homeland Security concluded that Ms. Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”
Following her arrest, Secretary of State Marco Rubio commented on Ms. Ozturk’s detention at a news conference, saying that she not been given a visa to “become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.”
During the hearing Friday, the government’s lawyer, Michael Drescher, called no witnesses and hardly spoke. When he did speak, it was mainly to raise technical issues about the conditions of her bail.
Ms. Ozturk’s friends said she had been quiet and studious, devoted to her study.
“Had this occurred in any other country, Americans would shudder at the thought and thank the founders for drafting the Constitution,” Ms. Ozturk’s lawyers wrote in a court brief late last month.
Judge Session said Ms. Ozturk is free to return home. “She’s also free to travel to Massachusetts and Vermont as she sees fit,” he added.
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10) Newark’s Mayor Arrested at Protest Outside ICE Detention Center
Ras J. Baraka and city officials have said that the lockup is operating without a valid certificate of occupancy. Three members of Congress from New Jersey were with Mr. Baraka when he was arrested.
By Tracey Tully, Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Alyce McFadden, May 9, 2025
Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark spoke after he was released from Homeland Security custody on Friday. Credit...Dakota Santiago for The New York Times
Federal officials on Friday arrested Ras J. Baraka, the mayor of Newark, after a confrontation that also involved three members of Congress at a new immigration detention facility that is expected to play a central role in President Trump’s mass deportation effort.
Mr. Baraka, a Democrat who is running for governor of New Jersey, was taken to a separate federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Newark and charged with trespassing. He was released roughly five hours later and was greeted by a crowd that had grown throughout the afternoon to more than 200 supporters and included candidates for New York City mayor and prominent labor leaders.
Alina Habba, a lawyer for Mr. Trump who is now New Jersey’s interim U.S. attorney, said that Mr. Baraka had been arrested because he had “ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself,” and had chosen “to disregard the law.”
Videos taken by protesters show Mr. Baraka being taken into custody in a public area outside the front entrance gates of the facility, which is known as Delaney Hall and is expected to hold up to 1,000 migrants at a time.
Three members of New Jersey’s Democratic congressional delegation — Representatives Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver — were at the building on Friday for what they said was an oversight visit, and were allowed to enter. Federal officials described the lawmakers’ presence as a “stunt.”
Mr. Baraka was allowed past the front gate but was not allowed to accompany the members of Congress inside, according to a video taken by Viri Martinez, an immigration activist who witnessed the arrest.
“Congressmen are different, congresswomen are different,” a Homeland Security Investigations agent told the mayor, the video shows. The agent added: “That is the last warning. You will be placed under arrest.”
After leaving the facility, the members of Congress joined Mr. Baraka in an area inside the front gate, according to the video.
Ms. McIver said that Mr. Baraka then went to a public area where other protesters were gathered. “He walked himself out,” she said.
Mr. Menendez can be heard on video telling Mr. Baraka: “They’re talking about coming back to arrest you.”
The mayor replied: “I’m not on their property. They can’t come out on the street and arrest me.”
Mr. Baraka, 55, was taken into custody by a team of masked federal agents wearing military fatigues while outside the gates in a driveway swarming with protesters and reporters.
Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, called the episode a “bizarre political stunt” in a social media post. She said Ms. Watson Coleman and Mr. Menendez, along with “multiple protesters,” had “holed up in a guard shack.”
Ms. McLaughlin shared a video of the mayor’s arrest that she said showed a “mob” assaulting ICE agents outside the gates.
“This illegal breaking and entering of a detention facility puts the safety of our law enforcement agents and the detainees at risk,” Ms. McLaughlin said, despite there being no evidence that the lawmakers had entered the building illegally.
Mr. Menendez said ICE agents had “put their hands on” Ms. Watson Coleman and Ms. McIver.
“They feel no restraint on what they should be doing, and that was shown in broad daylight today,” Mr. Menendez said at a news conference shortly after Mr. Baraka’s arrest.
Newark officials had argued for weeks in federal court that the center’s owner, GEO Group, was violating city laws because it had failed to obtain required permits or a valid certificate of occupancy.
On Tuesday, Mr. Baraka showed up at the facility with city inspectors at dawn seeking entry. He returned on Wednesday.
Federal officials and a spokesman for GEO Group, one of the country’s largest private prison companies, said the mayor had ignored established processes for requesting entry. They also said the facility has all the required permits.
“The mayor has been informed that he is more than welcome to enter the facility, as long as he follows security protocols like everyone else,” Ms. McLaughlin said on Tuesday after Mr. Baraka had been denied entry.
In February, the Trump administration entered into a 15-year, $1 billion contract with GEO Group to turn Delaney Hall into a large detention center as ICE rushed to expand its detention capacity nationwide to meet the president’s mass deportation goals.
Because the facility is close to major airports, it is expected to play a central role in the agency’s efforts to increase deportation flights from the Northeast. But the building, which received its first detainees last week, quickly drew opposition from Democrats and local activists. They argued that its location near immigrant hubs in New Jersey and New York City would help accelerate the administration’s deportation pipeline.
In a social media post, Ms. Watson Coleman, wrote that the facility had opened without permission from the city.
“We’ve heard stories of what it’s like in other ICE prisons,” she wrote. “We’re exercising our oversight authority to see for ourselves.”
In an emailed statement, Ms. McLaughlin argued that the facility had proper permits and she provided a list of five immigrants she said were being detained at Delaney Hall and had been accused of serious crimes, including murder and drug trafficking.
Ms. McIver said Mr. Baraka had done nothing wrong before his arrest.
“What we see here is despicable, and we should all be angry,” she said.
Mr. Menendez described Mr. Baraka’s arrest as “an act of intimidation.”
Ms. Watson Coleman said she had been “manhandled” and she described the events as “an abuse of power.”
Other New Jersey Democrats used social media on Friday to criticize the ICE response. Gov. Philip D. Murphy described Mr. Baraka’s arrest as “unjust” and called for his immediate release in a statement.
“Mayor Baraka is an exemplary public servant who has always stood up for our most vulnerable neighbors,” Mr. Murphy wrote.
Senator Andy Kim described the arrest as “shocking” and said that he was in touch with ICE leaders and Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary. Senator Cory Booker wrote that ICE officers should have de-escalated what he called a “disturbing, unnecessary” confrontation.
Late Friday, people waiting in a steady rain outside the ICE office in Newark for Mr. Baraka to be released chanted, “Let him out.”
After his release, Mr. Baraka said he had done nothing wrong.
“What’s happening now in this country, everybody should be scared of,” he said, adding: “They’re using the courts. They’re using everything else to justify what they’re doing.”
Mark Bonamo and Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.
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11) Trump Officials Consider Suspending Habeas Corpus for Detained Migrants
Stephen Miller, a top aide, repeated a justification used in the immigration crackdown: that the country is fighting an invasion. But it is unclear if the president has the power to take such a step.
By Karoun Demirjian, Reporting from Washington, Published May 9, 2025, Updated May 10, 2025
"'The Constitution is clear,' he told reporters outside the White House, arguing that the right, known as a writ of habeas corpus, 'could be suspended in time of invasion.'”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/us/trump-habeas-corpus.html
Suspending habeas corpus is “an option we’re actively looking at,” Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, told reporters on Friday, adding, “A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.” Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who orchestrated President Trump’s crackdown on immigration, said on Friday that the administration was considering suspending immigrants’ right to challenge their detention in court before being deported.
“The Constitution is clear,” he told reporters outside the White House, arguing that the right, known as a writ of habeas corpus, “could be suspended in time of invasion.”
“That’s an option we’re actively looking at,” he said, adding, “A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”
Such a move would represent a dramatic escalation in the Trump administration’s battles with the courts over his efforts to carry out mass deportations. And it would be yet another sweeping assertion of executive authority, one in tension with a right generally guaranteed in the Constitution.
As with many of Mr. Trump’s assertions of power, it was unclear whether he could lawfully do it.
Article I of the Constitution says writs of habeas corpus are a privilege that “shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” That direction “is almost universally understood to authorize only Congress to suspend habeas corpus,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University.
“The only reason why they would do this is because they’re losing” in court, he added.
Habeas corpus has been suspended four times in the history of the United States, most recently in Hawaii after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Each time, authorities cited specific congressional statutes to justify the move, with the exception of one president: Abraham Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, while Congress was not in session. His move was challenged, and in 1863, Congress passed a law giving him the explicit right to suspend habeas corpus for the duration of the hostilities.
Mr. Trump and his deputies have repeatedly tried to liken their crackdown on illegal immigration to a war or repelling an invasion. He has referred in speeches to waves of migrants entering the United States as invasions, and in March invoked the Alien Enemies Act — another wartime authority — to accelerate the deportations of Venezuelans accused of being members of the gang Tren de Aragua.
But deportations carried out under that law have been challenged in court, and the Supreme Court has blocked any further deportations under that law for now. In addition, three federal judges have in recent weeks issued rulings rejecting the argument that the wave of immigration constitutes an invasion, as Mr. Miller maintained.
Still, the administration has insisted that the courts cannot overrule the president’s decisions regarding how, where and when immigrants are deported.
Mr. Miller echoed that sentiment in his comments to reporters outside the White House on Friday, arguing that because Congress put the immigration courts under the executive branch, and not the judicial branch, Mr. Trump’s decisions could not be blocked by the courts.
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12) Pentagon Furthers Crackdown on Diversity Policies With Fresh Order for Review of Library Books
The move is the latest denunciation by the Trump administration against anything related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
By Helene Cooper, May 9, 2025
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Friday that there will be “no consideration for race, ethnicity or sex” in admissions to U.S. military academies, which, he said, will focus “exclusively on merit.” Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times
The Pentagon continued its purge of anything related to diversity, equity and inclusion on Friday, ordering all military leaders, commands and academies to review all of the books in their libraries that address racism and sexism.
A memo issued Friday appeared to be Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s latest broadside against diversity and equity programs and materials. The memo was signed by Tim Dill, performing the duties of defense under secretary for personnel.
The memo said books about diversity were “promoting divisive concepts and gender ideology” that “are incompatible with the Department’s core mission.” It requires all department leaders to identify books that fall into that category and remove them from military library shelves by May 21.
At that point, the memo says, there will be further instructions on which books will be permanently removed.
This expands a similar purge recently at the Naval Academy library, in Maryland. Last month, civilian Navy officials, following orders originating from Mr. Hegseth, pulled from shelves books including one that critiqued “The Bell Curve,” a 1994 text that argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people. But the academy kept “The Bell Curve” itself on its shelves.
In a separate memo Friday, Mr. Hegseth also said that there would be “no consideration for race, ethnicity or sex” in admissions to U.S. military academies, which, he said, will focus admissions “exclusively on merit.” He ordered the service academies to rank candidates with “merit-based scores.” It was unclear what exactly that meant, but Mr. Hegseth added that “merit-based scores may give weight to unique athletic talent or other experiences such as prior military service.”
Mr. Hegseth did not say what he planned to do about the longstanding practice of United States senators recommending people for admission to military academies.
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13) Once in Sync, Trump and Netanyahu Now Show Signs of Division
Both men are politically divisive, fiercely combative and have outsize egos. But as Mr. Trump arrives in the Middle East next week, the fate of the region could hinge on their relationship.
By Michael D. Shear, May 11, 2025
Michael Shear has written about the relationships between Benjamin Netanyahu and the last three American presidents.
As Mr. Trump heads this week to the Middle East for his first major foreign trip, the president has, for now, rejected Mr. Netanyahu’s desire for joint military action to take out Tehran’s nuclear abilities. Instead, Mr. Trump has begun talks with Iran, leaving Mr. Netanyahu to warn that “a bad deal is worse than no deal.”
This past week, Mr. Trump announced an agreement with the Iranian-backed Houthi militias in Yemen to halt U.S. airstrikes against the militants, who agreed to cease attacks against American vessels in the Red Sea. The news from Mr. Trump, which Israeli officials said was a surprise to Mr. Netanyahu, came only days after a Houthi missile struck Israel’s main airport in Tel Aviv, prompted an Israeli response.
In a video posted on X, Mr. Netanyahu responded to Mr. Trump’s announcement by saying: “Israel will defend itself by itself. If others would join us, our American friends, very well. If they don’t, we will defend ourselves.”
Mike Huckabee, the United States ambassador to Israel, said in an Israeli television interview on Friday that “the United States isn’t required to get permission from Israel.”
And there is even some evidence of a divide on Gaza. Mr. Trump’s emissaries are still trying to get a deal to stop the war, even though he has largely supported the prime minister’s conduct of the conflict and has offered almost no public criticism of Israel’s increased bombardment and blockade of food, fuel and medicine since a cease-fire collapsed two months ago.
On Monday, the prime minister announced plans to intensify the war even as the president’s envoys continued to seek a new diplomatic path to end the conflict. But Mr. Trump has not wagged his finger at Mr. Netanyahu the way President Joseph R. Biden Jr. did throughout the first year of the war in Gaza, which began after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Now, this moment is testing the relationship of the two men, both of whom are politically divisive, fiercely combative and have outsize egos. At stake is the short- and long-term security in a region that has long been wracked by war. Analysts in the Middle East and the United States say that changing the arc of history there in part hinges on how Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu bridge their differences during a time of major geopolitical shifts.
“Trump is ‘what you see is what you get’ and rarely hides things. His default is to say what he thinks,” said Eli Groner, who served for more than three years as the director general in the prime minister’s office. “Netanyahu’s default is to keep things extraordinarily close to his chest.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu have for years publicly cited a warm and close relationship as evidence of their own political prowess and have flattered each other repeatedly. People close to the two leaders say they are in some ways kindred spirits who respect each other for the political and personal attacks they have endured during their careers.
Mr. Trump has accused liberals in his government, judges and intelligence officials of conspiring against him. Mr. Netanyahu has blamed courts in his country from blocking necessary policies and he says his political rivals orchestrated his trials on charges of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes.
“The DNA of both of them is very similar,” said Mike Evans, an evangelical Christian who founded the Friends of Zion museum in Israel and is a longtime supporter of both the president and the prime minister. “They both have gone through similar experiences — Bibi with the deep state in Israel and Donald Trump with the deep state in America.”
John Bolton, who served as the national security adviser in the White House from 2018 to 2019, said Mr. Trump always viewed the relationship with Mr. Netanyahu as critical to his own political support in the United States, especially among evangelical voters.
“They both saw it to their political advantage to be friendly,” he said of the two leaders. “That was certainly Trump’s calculation.”
But behind closed doors, there have been disagreements and some clashes, with implications for the situation now facing them.
Mr. Trump has long harbored anger about Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to congratulate Mr. Biden on his 2020 election victory. The president claimed — falsely — that the prime minister was the first world leader to do so. At the end of 2021, Mr. Trump used an expletive while recalling the snub in an interview with a book author.
For his part, Mr. Netanyahu has privately expressed frustration with some of Mr. Trump’s policies, particularly over the president’s desire to reach a deal with Iran. A right-wing newspaper usually aligned with the prime minister wrote this month that Mr. Netanyahu thought Mr. Trump “says all the right things” but does not deliver.
When it comes to Iran, Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump may be operating on different timelines. The president appears willing to let diplomats work on a deal that might restrict Tehran’s ability to enrich uranium and slow its progress toward a bomb. Mr. Netanyahu is eager to move against Iran militarily, before it is too late to stop its progress.
“Netanyahu thinks the timeline is pretty short to make a decision,” said Mr. Bolton, who is an advocate of taking military action. In an interview with Time magazine in April, Mr. Trump said that he had argued against Mr. Netanyahu’s proposal to launch a joint attack to set back Iran’s nuclear program.
“I didn’t stop them. But I didn’t make it comfortable for them because I think we can make a deal without the attack,” Mr. Trump said in the interview.
The White House has said that Mr. Trump does not have plans to visit Israel on his trip to the region this week, though Mr. Huckabee said the president would visit the country by the end of the year. That is a change from the president’s first term, when his first foreign trip included Israel along with stops in Saudi Arabia and parts of Europe.
It remains unclear how extensively Mr. Trump will confront the war in Gaza while he is in the Middle East.
Mr. Trump came into office vowing to end the war between Israel and Hamas, end Palestinian suffering, and return the hostages whom the militant group seized in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. (Always on his mind, according to those close to him: the prospect of being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. A spokesman for Mr. Trump said in March that the prize was illegitimate until Mr. Trump, “the ultimate peace president,” was honored for his accomplishments.)
More than 50,000 Palestinians have died, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. About 130 hostages have been released, and the Israeli military has retrieved the bodies of at least 40 others. As many as 24 hostages are thought to still be alive, according to the Israeli government.
Some families of the Israeli and American hostages still held in Gaza are working quietly to urge Mr. Trump to use his trip to the Middle East as an opportunity to put pressure on Mr. Netanyahu, according to people familiar with the diplomatic lobbying effort.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has seemed less engaged in trying to resolve the conflict after bragging in February about his grand vision of creating a “Gaza Riviera” once the Palestinians had all been relocated to other countries.
When Mr. Netanyahu visited the White House in April, some in Israel viewed the scene as embarrassing for the prime minister.
Mr. Evans, who has known Mr. Netanyahu since he was a young man, said the prime minister would not relent, even if Mr. Trump did push him to end the war before the Israeli military had destroyed Hamas and returned all of the hostages.
“Does Netanyahu believe that Hamas is going to give him all the hostages if they pull out of Gaza?” Mr. Evans said. “I don’t think he believes it for a moment.”
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14) In Trump’s America, Every Parent and Child for Themselves
By Pepper Stetler, May 11, 2025
Ms. Stetler is the author of “A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother’s Reckoning With the I.Q. Test.”
Juan Bernabeu
Last week, President Trump introduced the Special Education Simplified Funding Program as part of his 2026 budget proposal. The president’s budget isn’t binding, but it suggests that the way the administration proposes to allocate funds to the states could have an impact on the education of students with disabilities, both in classroom instruction and enforcement of minimum standards.
For almost 50 years, parents of students with disabilities have relied on federal oversight to ensure that their children receive a fair education. But under the proposed budget, money earmarked for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) comes with a promise to limit the federal government’s role in education and provide states with greater flexibility, which could mean drastically reducing oversight of how states will use that money.
To me and many other parents of the 7.5 million public school students in the country served by IDEA, Mr. Trump’s efforts to eliminate the Department of Education and potentially just give IDEA funding directly to the states is our worst nightmare.
Last spring, a group of parents in Oklahoma filed a complaint with the State Department of Education against the Bixby School District, stating that the district had placed their children in segregated classrooms, and that it did not try instead to use supplementary aides and support services, thereby violating the law under IDEA. When students with disabilities are educated primarily in such segregated classrooms, they are often denied the full breadth of learning opportunities and interactions. Most significantly, they learn they do not belong among their peers.
Nick and Kristen Whitmer chose to live in Bixby, a suburb of Tulsa, because of the school district’s reputation for inclusive special education. This was what they wanted for their daughter, Adaline, who is 8 years old and has Down syndrome. But her experience last fall hadn’t been what they hoped. Adaline spent less than half of her time at school in a general education classroom. She started her day there with a morning meeting with the other children. But after 10 minutes, a teacher guided her down the hall to the special education room. She rejoined other first graders for recess and lunch, but spent little time in an academic classroom with nondisabled peers. It was hard for Adaline to make friends with classmates. “Adaline is not viewed as a member of the community,” Ms. Whitmer told me. “She is a guest.”
In preschool, Adaline had been placed in the Oklahoma Alternative Assessment Program, which is reserved for “students with the most significant cognitive disabilities.” That meant that Bixby district administrators determined Adaline would not be given the opportunity to earn a high school diploma. Ms. Whitmer said that she pleaded with district representatives to put her daughter on the diploma track, but that they initially refused and began bringing a lawyer to meetings.
After the state weighed in, and after intense advocacy, as of today Adaline is no longer in the alternative diploma track and is spending more time in a general education classroom in the morning.
But all that could change. “Is it the same for you?” Ms. Whitmer asked me. No, it’s not. Like Adaline, my daughter has Down syndrome. Yet their educational trajectories couldn’t have been more different. The discrepancies offer a glimpse of what is likely to become more common now that Mr. Trump has gutted the Department of Education and pledged to give full control to the states.
My daughter, Louisa, goes to school in a rural college town in southwest Ohio. We have our share of challenges. But I never had to face a teacher or school administrator who openly resisted her inclusion in a classroom with nondisabled peers. Unlike in Oklahoma, removing students from a curriculum that would prepare them to earn a high school diploma requires written parental consent in Ohio. A bill to make it a parental decision in Oklahoma was recently signed by the governor.
Before 1979, when the education of disabled children was in the hands of the states, many chose to not educate children with disabilities at all. A congressional investigation from 1972 found that 1.75 million children nationwide were turned away from public schools. Nineteen states provided a public education to less than a third of children with disabilities, and many had statutes that exempted such children from compulsory attendance laws.
Congress implemented IDEA, then called the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, in 1975 to guarantee that every child with a disability received a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment. The Department of Education requires states to monitor how districts use the funding for disability-related services like specialized instruction, teacher training, speech and physical therapy, communication devices and classroom support staff. Oversight of a program as complicated as IDEA is challenging, but it has aimed to ensure that states are doing the right thing by providing the most inclusive education possible.
To receive this funding, states are required to submit annual performance reports. The U.S. Department of Education uses 18 indicators to assess each state’s compliance with IDEA, including graduation and dropout rates, post-school outcomes, parent involvement and the percentage of time students spend in a classroom with nondisabled peers. Based on those metrics, the Office of Special Education Programs (O.S.E.P.) evaluated whether states were meeting IDEA’s requirements.
But the 2026 budget proposes consolidating seven IDEA programs and using a “simplified funding program,” which, while vague, suggests that the administration might be aiming to send the money to the states as block grants. This would likely allow school districts to use that money at their discretion. Acting on such changes to IDEA funding would require Congress to amend the law. The proposed restructuring could also reduce the federal government’s power to intervene when states do not fulfill their responsibility under the law. Without more robust federal oversight, enforcement on the local level would continue to be uneven.
Without a fully functioning Department of Education, states will not be held accountable for meeting even the minimum requirements of IDEA, and this landmark piece of legislation risks becoming essentially toothless, save for civil litigation. We will see an erosion of the promise of a free and appropriate public education for students with disabilities and fewer ways for parents and advocates to do anything about it.
After what I have learned from the Whitmers and other parents around the country, I’m not sure why my family has been so lucky. But I do know that Louisa spends most of her time in classes with her peers, because of the creative thinking and support of compassionate educators. I also know that learning with her peers has had an astounding impact on her social and intellectual development. Louisa reads fantasy novels in her spare time. She is excited by the periodic table and the lab experiments she completes in small groups in her science class. She has sleepovers with friends. None of this would be possible if she was forced to learn in a segregated classroom.
The significant disparities in Adaline’s and Louisa’s educations run counter to federal law. IDEA and several Supreme Court decisions have established a mandate for the education of students with disabilities — even those with the highest support needs. But states have been slow to end the practice of placing students in separate classrooms, even when parents like the Whitmers advocate for more time in a mainstream academic setting. As recently as 2022, the latest year for which data is available, only 67 percent of students with disabilities were spending at least 80 percent of their school day in a general education classroom.
States have had 50 years to meet the standards of education promised in IDEA and its predecessor, yet those standards have never been universally met. In 2024, 24 states (including Oklahoma), six territories and Washington, D.C. were labeled “needing assistance” for two or more consecutive years. States in that category are directed to use IDEA funds specifically for areas where they are not meeting requirements. Now that the Department of Education has lost nearly half of its staff members, too few are left to ensure that states meet their responsibilities to students with disabilities. If the Whitmers and other parents choose to file a due process claim with the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education, there is most likely not enough staff left to investigate.
IDEA has never been widely followed, and the Department of Education’s bureaucracy wasn’t perfect. But the lack of federal oversight will only worsen existing problems. It will make it even easier for states to interpret the law as they see fit. Those disparities could mean that many students with disabilities will lose the right to a free and appropriate education and their parents will lose the power to force change.
Some parents who participated in the complaint against Bixby Public Schools told me that not enough has changed, and the cost to those parents, including for time off work and lawyers’ fees, have been significant. As Ms. Whitmer put it, “We’ve burned every bridge with everyone in the district.” But she pledges to keep on fighting. The alternative would be to acquiesce to the district’s dim vision of her daughter’s capabilities and her future.
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