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Bay Area: All Out for Nakba 77 - The People Stand with Palestine
Saturday, May 17th, 2:30 pm
16th and Valencia Streets
Join the JVP-Bay Area contingent at 2:15 pm at 17th and Valencia. Look for the banner that says “Jews Say Stop Arming Israel”.
For 77 years, the Palestinian people have been subjected to occupation, forced displacement and ethnic cleansing under Israeli settler colonialism. Israel, with the support of the United States, is committing genocide in Gaza, using starvation as a weapon in addition to brutal military force. No humanitarian aid has been allowed into Gaza since March 2, 2025. Israel is also escalating its repression and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
Despite this, the Palestinian people continue to resist all attempts to displace them and insist on the right to their land, their liberation and their return.
It is more important than ever that on this 77th anniversary of the ongoing Nakba, all those with a conscience make it a priority to say loudly and clearly: THE PEOPLE STAND WITH PALESTINE, and to lift up these demands:Rallies will be taking place throughout the world.
- An end to the genocide in Gaza;
- A full and immediate two-way arms embargo on Israel;
- The release of all Palestinian political prisoners;
- Immediate humanitarian aid and reconstruction for Gaza;
- An end to the Zionist occupation of all Palestinian land.
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FWD from Leslie London (professor of public health at University of Cape Town):
Dear friends and colleagues
We write as academics, scientists and researchers in the health sector who have experienced the shutting down of our efforts to address the genocide in Gaza by our own professional organisations.
Many of you will have similar experiences of being blocked when trying to get your professional organisations to respond appropriately to the decimation in Gaza and the complete abnegation of professional solidarity in the face of the destruction of the Gazan health system and attacks on health workers.
We felt that one thing we could do is get together with like minded defenders of human rights to share experiences and explore across organisations what strategies could be useful to help stop the genocide and protect the people, the environment and what is left of the health care system in Gaza.
We are not organising this in the name of any organisation but rather as a loose network of individuals who have tried hard in our own organisation, without evident success, and we now feel that learning, sharing and building solidarity with others in similar situations might be the strongest strategy now.
We are therefore inviting you to a Webinar we will be hosting on the 19th at 5pm CET to explore how health professional organisations’ responses have failed Gaza and what can be done when your organisation turns a blind eye to Injustice.
Please circulate to those you feel would value such a discussion.
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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 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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2) 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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3) 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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4) 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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5) Not Just More Babies: These Republicans Want More Parents at Home
As the Trump administration shrinks federal child care programs, Republicans are backing policies they hope will allow more parents to scale back at work.
By Caroline Kitchener, May 12, 2025
Caroline Kitchener covers the American family.
"As Republicans in Congress work to pass a tax bill this month, some would like to dismantle the tax credit reserved for day care, which they see as discriminatory toward stay-at-home parents. Representative Blake Moore of Utah has proposed a bill to eliminate that provision, and give more money to all parents, regardless of what they do for child care."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/us/politics/republicans-parents-babies-home.html
A few months before he began his 2022 Senate campaign, JD Vance reached out to a conservative family policy group with an idea for an opinion essay. He wanted to write about why government-subsidized day care was bad — and why most young children do better when one parent stays home.
Mr. Vance’s article was published less than two weeks later in The Wall Street Journal, declaring, “Young children are clearly happier and healthier when they spend the day at home with a parent.”
As the Trump administration meets with advocates who want to reverse declining birthrates — a cause that Mr. Vance has embraced — proposals for more robust, federally funded child care have been noticeably absent from the discussions.
Instead, the White House has pursued reductions. The Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, eliminated many positions in offices that help fund day care for low-income families, including at Head Start — part of broader cost cutting efforts led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
But while critics say it is hypocritical for the government to cut child care support as it pushes for more babies, the conservative politicians and advocates leading the movement do not see a contradiction. They do not just want more children, but a stronger family unit. And stronger families are formed, they say, when a parent stays home.
White House aides have discussed a variety of ideas in recent weeks intended to allow, and in some cases encourage, parents to spend more time at home with their children, according to three people who have been part of the conversations. Ideas under discussion include giving more money to families for each child they have, eliminating federal tax credits for day care and opening up federal lands for the construction of affordable single-family homes. If families can spend less on housing, advocates reason, then more families will be able to survive on only one income.
The approach is reflected in legislation recently filed by Republicans in Congress. Senator Jim Banks of Indiana introduced a bill that would effectively pay stay-at-home parents for their labor. Other Republicans want to expand the child tax credit, an annual credit of $2,000 per child, in part by dismantling additional tax breaks reserved for working parents to use on day care.
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has proposed expanding the child tax credit to $5,000 per child, hopes the extra money would allow more parents to scale back at work.
“It gives them that opportunity to say, ‘Oh my gosh, we can actually raise our kids,’” Mr. Hawley said of the proposal. Mr. Vance backed a $5,000 child tax credit during the 2024 presidential campaign — an approach that has garnered bipartisan support, though most Democrats also back day care subsidies.
The effort is part of a broader social agenda being pursued by the Trump administration and its allies to promote a very specific idea of what constitutes a family — with a married mother and father who have as many children as possible, a concept that leaves out many families that do not conform to traditional structures or gender roles.
Studies are inconclusive on whether children do better when they spend most days with a parent, rather than a paid professional. Results are largely dependent on the relative quality of the care the child receives at a day care center, and the care the child receives at home.
Regardless, many American families rely on two incomes to make ends meet. Almost 65 percent of mothers in two-parent households with at least one child under 18 work outside of the home, a number that has risen dramatically over the last 50 years. At the same time, the cost of child care has skyrocketed, averaging over $11,000 per child a year, as of 2023, with families in many major cities paying more than double that amount.
Conservative politicians and advocates say that they are not pushing moms out of the work force, but rather giving them the choice to step back from work if they want to. They point to research: According to a March Gallup survey, 60 percent of U.S. women say they would prefer staying at home or working part time as opposed to full time — compared to just 37 percent of men. Moreover, some conservatives say American parents have become too focused on their careers, often to the detriment of their children.
White House officials say they want to give more parents the flexibility to stay at home, but are also exploring ways to roll back restrictions on child care centers. While critics warn that deregulation could lower the quality of child care, the White House says that approach is necessary to make child care more affordable.
“President Trump believes parents know how to best raise their children, and this administration is pursuing policies that empower parents with the flexibility to make the best choices for their kids while lowering child care costs,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman.
Mr. Vance — who has three young children — declined a request for comment. Mr. Vance’s wife, Usha, left her job at a law firm when her husband was named to the Republican ticket last summer. A spokesman for Mr. Vance did not respond to a question about how the couple has handled child care.
Conservative advocates and politicians, when discussing the issue, generally do not specify which parent could choose to stay home with the children. But more than 80 percent of stay-at-home parents are women — and some advocates are open about the fact that they see benefits to a mother filling that role.
“We cannot get away from the fact that a child is hard-wired to bond with mom,” said Jenet Erickson, a co-writer of Mr. Vance’s 2021 essay and a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative policy group that advocates for raising the birthrate. “They know her smell, they know her heartbeat, they know her voice. I just think, why should we deny that?”
Leading child care advocacy groups have criticized the proposals circulating in the White House about how to encourage women to have more babies, saying they fail to address the true costs of having children.
“If you’re serious about birthrates you have to start with affordability,” said Reshma Saujani, the chief executive of Moms First, a national child care advocacy organization. “No medals, no P.R. stunts,” she added, referring to proposals for raising the birthrate that have been pitched to the Trump administration. “People need child care and paid leave.”
Activists who want to raise the birthrate do not see subsidized child care or better parental leave as effective ways to persuade people to have more children. They point to northern European countries, like Norway and Finland, where birthrates have continued to fall despite some of the world’s most generous government paid leave and child care policies.
How an increase in stay-at-home parenthood would affect birthrates is less clear. There are no definitive studies on whether having more parents at home would lead to more babies.
But some conservatives in Congress and the administration say their interest in these issues goes far beyond the birthrate.
“It’s not just about increasing the total number of children,” Mr. Hawley said. “It is increasing the number of families, mothers and fathers, and the ability of the family to spend time together.”
Many conservatives draw a distinction between what they call a “work-focused” approach to family policy — which includes ideas like subsidized day care and paid family leave — and a “family-focused” approach.
“A work-ist approach to family policy makes it easier to do more work,” said Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia and the co-founder of the Institute for Family Studies. “But we are more about policies that make it easier for parents to invest in time with kids, and not privileging a model where both parents are working outside of the home.”
In addition to the current $2,000 child tax credit, the tax code includes a separate credit of up to $1,050 per child for families to use on child care, a provision that has existed for almost 50 years. That money is reserved for families in which all parents, including single parents, are working, looking for work, or in school — leaving out families in which one parent stays home.
As Republicans in Congress work to pass a tax bill this month, some would like to dismantle the tax credit reserved for day care, which they see as discriminatory toward stay-at-home parents. Representative Blake Moore of Utah has proposed a bill to eliminate that provision, and give more money to all parents, regardless of what they do for child care.
“I just want to give women more money in their own pockets to decide what they want to do,” said Rachel Wagley, Mr. Moore’s chief of staff, who helped design his bill.
“Our message for women is, ‘Look, having kids is a challenge, and it does take sacrifice,’” said Ms. Wagley, who is pregnant with her fifth child. She added: “‘You’re going to adapt to your new reality, and that could look really different than what you thought it would look like five years ago.’”
The legislation from Mr. Banks, the Indiana senator, goes one step further by including a provision to pay stay-at-home parents for the care they provide. That concept, while controversial, has bipartisan roots. President Bill Clinton in 1999 proposed a tax break for both stay-at-home parents and for parents using day care programs.
Mr. Banks in a statement accused Democrats of “blocking the child care options many families prefer, like using a church-run day care center or having a parent or grandparent care for their children.”
While versions of child tax credit legislation have been proposed on both sides of the aisle, many Democrats in Congress bristle at the way some Republicans frame the proposals — and at their resistance to other policies that make it easier for mothers to work.
“I think it is bogus,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who has long worked on child tax credit legislation. “You want to help families? How about paid family and medical leave?”
An expanded child tax credit on its own also fails to address the critical day care shortage across the country, said Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University who writes about parenting. Child care programs, which operate on an extremely thin profit margin, need government subsidies to survive and provide high-quality care, Ms. Oster said.
By failing to subsidize day care, and by just giving more cash to families, she added, “we’re just giving people money without thinking about the supply side.”
“There are not enough slots,” she said.
Parents emphasize that even the proposals with the largest child tax credits do not come close to the amount of money needed to allow one parent to stay home. Some say they would much rather have subsidized day care and paid family leave.
“It’s not based in the experience of families who have to work,” said Katie Holler, a 27-year-old mother from Ohio with two young children. “It’s pennies when you need dollars.”
Ms. Holler traveled to Washington in 2023 to push for better child care with a grass-roots organization where she now works as a field organizer. She ran into one of her senators in the halls of the Capitol.
“If you can relieve the financial burden of child care,” Ms. Holler recalled saying to Mr. Vance, “someone might be more inclined to have a baby.”
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6) Tufts Student Returns to Massachusetts After 6 Weeks in Immigration Detention
Freed after her painful ordeal in a federal facility, Rumeysa Ozturk expressed joy, gratitude and continued faith in American democracy.
By Vimal PatelAnemona Hartocollis and Maya Shwayder, May 10, 2025
Vimal Patel and Anemona Hartocollis reported from New York, and Maya Shwayder from Boston.
People rallied in support of Ms. Ozturk this month in front of a federal courthouse in New York. Credit...Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images
Rumeysa Ozturk returned to Massachusetts on Saturday evening, eyes welling with joy and gratitude at the end of her six-week odyssey in federal custody, a case that stirred outrage over President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
A flight carrying Ms. Ozturk, a Turkish citizen studying at Tufts University on a student visa, touched down at Boston Logan International Airport one day after a federal judge in Vermont ordered that she be immediately released from a detention facility in Louisiana.
Speaking in a room at the airport, she flashed smiles and looked happy and relaxed, but also became visibly emotional at times. Ms. Ozturk thanked supporters for their kindness and expressed love for the country that imprisoned her and is still trying to deport her.
“America is the greatest democracy in the world,” she said, adding, “I have faith in the American system of justice.”
Ms. Ozturk, a fifth-year doctoral student, was among more than a thousand international students whose visas were canceled by the federal government and who have faced deportation. The moves came as the Trump administration escalated its attack on higher education, saying its goal was to root out antisemitism.
Ms. Ozturk had written an opinion piece in the student newspaper criticizing the university’s response to pro-Palestinian demands. Her supporters denied that she was antisemitic, and said that she was detained in retaliation for her speech in violation of the First Amendment.
On Saturday, her friends and former professors bounced between elation at her release and pain that Ms. Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar who specializes in children’s media and who is known as a studious rule follower, was detained in the first place.
Gulay Kaplan, who has known Ms. Ozturk for a decade, drove 11 hours to see her at the airport, and was excited and emotional. When she finally saw her, she said all she could do was cry.
Ms. Kaplan said she was shocked at what Ms. Ozturk had to endure, describing her friend as kind and softhearted, adding, “She doesn’t have the bone to hate anyone.” Ms. Kaplan said it had left her and her other friends scared. If this could happen to Ms. Ozturk, she said, “this could happen to any one of us for saying anything.”
On Friday, Judge William K. Sessions III of the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont said Ms. Ozturk’s detention would potentially chill “the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.” Judge Sessions, an appointee of former President Clinton, also said the government, which has accused Ms. Ozturk of engaging “in activities in support of Hamas,” had not introduced any evidence other than the pro-Palestinian opinion essay that Ms. Ozturk co-authored.
A message left for the Department of Homeland Security was not immediately returned. In response to an earlier development in Ms. Ozturk’s case this week, a spokeswoman said that “a visa is a privilege, not a right” and that the department would “continue to fight for the arrest, detention and removal of aliens who have no right to be in this country.”
In late April, the Trump administration abruptly restored the ability of thousands of international students to study in the country legally, though it maintained that their legal status could still be terminated in the future. Despite that decision, Ms. Ozturk had remained in custody until Friday.
“Rumeysa, my sister — our sister — we welcome you home with open arms,” said Representative Ayanna Pressley at the airport. She was joined by Senator Edward J. Markey in greeting Ms. Ozturk. “We never forgot about you. You are loved, you are seen, and we will not rest until you are fully exonerated, your visa is restored and you are free to continue your studies and your service to our community.”
The arrest of Ms. Ozturk in March was captured on surveillance footage and drew condemnation from students, college leaders and immigration advocates nationwide. She was walking down a sidewalk in Somerville, Mass., when she was surrounded by armed immigration agents and whisked into a van. She was driven to New Hampshire, and then to Vermont, and then flown to a federal detention facility in Louisiana.
While being detained, Ms. Ozturk testified that she experienced increasingly severe asthma attacks, the first being on the plane to Louisiana. When she sought treatment, she said, the detention center’s medical staff responded condescendingly. She said she had been confined with 23 other women in a space meant for 14 people.
On Saturday, Ms. Ozturk thanked friends who helped her through the experience. Some read books to her over the phone and sent many letters of support. She said an adviser sent Ms. Ozturk’s dissertation proposal to the detention facility.
“So much love,” Ms. Ozturk said.
She also expressed concern for those immigrants who are still held at the facility. “Please don’t forget about all the wonderful women” there, she said.
Reyyan Bilge, a psychology professor at Northeastern, knew Ms. Ozturk when she was an undergraduate in Turkey, and described an emotional roller coaster over the last six weeks, starting with her disbelief that her former student had been arrested. She said Ms. Ozturk was “one of the best students I’ve ever had.” Dr. Bilge followed every development in the case, logging into each court hearing, and received another shock, this time joyful, at Friday’s hearing.
“You hear the words that you’ve been waiting to hear for a really long time,” she said in a phone interview. “But at the same time, you really want to pinch yourself. Is it real? Are they going to allow her to leave?”
Ms. Ozturk’s release was in fact delayed when the government sought to make her wear an ankle monitor, prompting Judge Sessions to issue a second order on Friday for her to be released without it.
Even though Ms. Ozturk was freed, a government lawyer on Friday said a deportation proceeding against her would continue in immigration court. But her long-term outlook is believed to be more favorable for her now than it was before the federal court released her, experts said.
Whatever comes next, and despite the experience of the past six weeks, Ms. Ozturk appeared hopeful on Saturday.
“I still believe in the values we share,” she said.
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7) Hamas Says It Will Release Its Last American Hostage
The announcement, which did not say when the hostage, Edan Alexander, would be set free, came as President Trump planned to visit the region.
By Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 11, 2025
A photo of Edan Alexander at his parent’s home in Tenafly, N.J., last year. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Hamas, the Palestinian armed group, said on Sunday night that it would free the last living American citizen held captive in Gaza, just days before President Trump is expected to arrive in the region for the first major foreign tour of his second term.
Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s lead negotiator, said in a statement that Hamas had agreed to free the hostage, Edan Alexander, 21, after talks with the United States. He did not say when Mr. Alexander would be released or what Hamas expected to receive in exchange.
Raised in Tenafly, N.J., Mr. Alexander, an Israeli American dual citizen, moved to Israel to serve in the military after high school. During the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, Palestinian militants abducted him from the military post where he was stationed.
The announcement comes at a pivotal moment in the Middle East, where Mr. Trump is scheduled to land on Tuesday for a round of diplomacy. Mr. Trump is expected to visit Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in the wake of disagreements with Israel over talks with Iran on its nuclear program.
The war in Gaza will hang heavy over Mr. Trump’s visit, even though he is not visiting Israel. The Israeli government is threatening a major military offensive that would displace most people in Gaza unless Hamas surrenders and turns over its remaining hostages. Israel has already been blocking food and other aid to Gaza for more than two months, deepening the enclave’s humanitarian crisis.
Hamas has broadly refused to free more captives, saying that Israel must first commit to a path to ending the war. But in a possible effort to gain favor with Mr. Trump, Hamas agreed to free Mr. Alexander as a gesture of good will, according to the U.S. official and another diplomat briefed on the talks, who spoke anonymously to discuss the sensitive negotiations.
The exact timing and mechanism of Mr. Alexander’s release were still unclear. The Trump administration hoped that he would be freed as soon as Monday, the U.S. official said. Mahmoud Mardawi, a Hamas official, said the release would take place in the next day or two.
During the talks, the United States pledged to undertake “great efforts” to end the war in Gaza, Mr. Mardawi said.
“We were asked to release Alexander and we complied with the request,” he said in a phone interview. The Americans, he said, had conveyed to Hamas that “the war ran its course” and “no longer had any justification.”
Mr. Alexander was one of about 250 people taken hostage during the Oct. 7 attack, which ignited the war in Gaza. The hostages were taken to Gaza for use as bargaining chips in future negotiations with Israel. More than 18 months later, 59 of them remain in the enclave. Dozens of them, including four U.S. citizens, are presumed by the Israeli authorities to be dead.
Mr. Alexander’s parents, Adi and Yael Alexander, have campaigned tirelessly for his release, meeting with officials and speaking at rallies. “We are living this day over and over,” Adi Alexander said in a February interview, referring to the Oct. 7 attacks.
Mr. and Ms. Alexander were traveling to Israel on Sunday night with Adam Boehler, Mr. Trump’s special envoy for hostage response, Mr. Boehler said in a phone call. Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were instrumental in securing Mr. Alexander's release, he said.
Mr. Alexander’s family, in a statement, called his return “the greatest gift imaginable” and urged the Israeli government to negotiate the release of the remaining captives. “No hostage should be left behind,” they said.
Mr. Trump called news of Mr. Alexander’s impending release “a step taken in good faith towards the United States” and said, “Hopefully this is the first of those final steps necessary to end this brutal conflict.”
This year, the Trump administration broke with a longstanding American policy of boycotting Hamas, which the United States has designated as a terrorist group. Mr. Boehler held direct talks with Hamas leaders in Doha, Qatar, in an attempt to secure Mr. Alexander’s freedom, as well as the bodies of the four dead Americans. But they foundered amid Israeli objections.
In previous rounds of negotiations, Hamas set a clear price for freeing more hostages: Israel must agree to ultimately end the war, withdraw its forces from the Gaza Strip and release large numbers of Palestinian prisoners.
During the two-month cease-fire that began in January, Hamas handed over 30 hostages and the bodies of eight others, while Israel freed more than 1,500 Palestinians being held in its prisons. Israel ended the truce in mid-March, saying talks to secure the next steps in the agreement were deadlocked.
On Sunday night, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Washington had formally notified Israel that Mr. Alexander’s release would be a “gesture to the Americans” without any “compensations or conditions.” The U.S. official and the diplomat said Hamas had agreed to release Mr. Alexander without specific demands in exchange.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office suggested, however, that Mr. Alexander’s release would not lead Israel to pause its military campaign in Gaza, at least for the time being. “Under Israeli policy, negotiations will take place as fighting continues,” his office said.
The announcement that the United States had secured a promise of freedom for Mr. Alexander prompted hope in Israel. But it also led some Israelis to voice frustration with their own government, which has failed to gain the freedom of the remaining hostages.
Critics of Mr. Netanyahu have called on him to agree to an immediate agreement to end the war with Hamas and free the rest of the hostages. Mr. Netanyahu has held out, arguing that saving the captives is less important than “victory over our enemies.”
“The responsibility lies with the Israeli government,” said the Hostage Families’ Forum, an advocacy group which calls for an agreement with Hamas. “No one should be left behind.”
Isabel Kershner and Fatima AbdulKarim contributed reporting.
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8) Newsom Asks Cities to Ban Homeless Encampments, Escalating Crackdown
“There are no more excuses,” the California governor said in pushing for municipalities to address one of the most visible byproducts of homelessness.
By Shawn Hubler, Reporting from Los Angeles, May 12, 2025
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has raised and spent tens of billions of dollars on programs to bring homeless people into housing and to emphasize treatment. Credit...Andri Tambunan for The New York Times
Gov. Gavin Newsom escalated California’s push to eradicate homeless encampments on Monday, calling on hundreds of cities, towns and counties to effectively ban tent camps on sidewalks, bike paths, parklands and other types of public property.
Mr. Newsom’s administration has raised and spent tens of billions of dollars on programs to bring homeless people into housing and to emphasize treatment. But his move on Monday marks a tougher approach to one of the more visible aspects of the homelessness crisis. The governor has created a template for a local ordinance that municipalities can adopt to outlaw encampments and clear existing ones.
California is home to about half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless population, a visible byproduct of the temperate climate and the state’s brutal housing crisis. Last year, a record 187,000 people were homeless in the state, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Two-thirds were living unsheltered in tents, cars or outdoors.
Mr. Newsom cannot force cities to pass his model ban, but its issuance coincides with the release of more than $3 billion in state-controlled housing funds that local officials can use to put his template in place. And though it’s not a mandate, the call to outlaw encampments statewide by one of the best-known Democrats in the country suggests a shift in the party’s approach to homelessness.
Once a combative champion of liberal policies and a vocal Trump administration critic, Mr. Newsom has been stress-testing his party’s positions, to the point of elevating the ideas of Trump supporters on his podcast. The liberal approach to encampments has traditionally emphasized government-funded housing and treatment, and frowned on what some call criminalizing homelessness.
The model ordinance Mr. Newsom wants local officials to adopt does not specify criminal penalties, but outlawing homeless encampments on public property makes them a crime by definition. Cities would decide on their own how tough the penalties should be, including arrests or citations to those who violate the ban. The template’s state-issued guidance says that no one “should face criminal punishment for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go.”
Frustration with the persistence of homelessness has been rising, both within the Newsom administration and among many Californians.
Although California’s homeless population — like its overall population — remains the nation’s largest, federal data released in January showed an increase in 2024 of 3 percent in the state’s homeless numbers, compared with a rise of more than 18 percent across the United States. And the number of homeless veterans and chronically homeless people declined.
But encampments, which proliferated during the coronavirus pandemic as social distancing emptied public spaces, have remained a widespread problem in Southern California, the Central Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Sacramento region. And an apparent disconnect has emerged between many of California’s elected officials and the state’s fed-up residents.
Nearly 40 percent of the state’s Democrat-dominated electorate said they were so weary of squalid settlements overtaking parks and blocking sidewalks that they supported the arrest of homeless campers if they refused shelter, according to a poll last month by Politico and the Jack Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of California, Berkeley. At the same time, a companion survey in the Democrat-led state showed that nearly half of California’s policy leaders and elected officials opposed addressing encampments with law enforcement.
Previously, federal courts had ruled that punishing people for sleeping on public property was “cruel and unusual,” and therefore unconstitutional. That legal landscape changed last year after a Supreme Court decision empowered governments to penalize people for sleeping in parks, on sidewalks and in other public areas.
The Newsom administration seized on the Supreme Court ruling swiftly, ordering state agencies to begin humanely clearing encampments from state parks and freeway underpasses, and urging cities to do the same in local jurisdictions.
Some did, addressing encampments with varying degrees of compassion and aggression.
Long Beach began clearing camps within weeks, urging homeless people to accept shelter and treatment but also threatening to cite and arrest occupants of recurrent encampments. Fresno made it a misdemeanor to sit, lie, sleep or camp in public places. The San Jose City Council is weighing a proposal by its Democratic mayor, Matt Mahan, to arrest homeless people if they refuse shelter three times.
But many California politicians have balked. Some worry about further traumatizing homeless people with citations, arrests and jail time. Some fear that a wrong word in a local law will still invite advocates for homeless people to sue them.
Some say a hard line is unnecessary. The Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, has pointed out that her signature program to move people voluntarily out of tent camps and into motel rooms and interim shelters has helped log the first double-digit drop in street homelessness in the city in nearly a decade.
Still, other policymakers — in Los Angeles County, for instance — note both the shortage of safe shelter spaces and the complexity of ramping up new programs. They contend that the state needs to fund even more housing and treatment than Mr. Newsom has pushed for. Until that happens, they say, arresting, citing and rousting people in tent camps only torments vulnerable people and moves the problem around.
Despite public pressure to address camps from San Diego to Eureka — and billions of dollars in state funding to do so — only about a tenth of the state’s 500 or so cities and counties have enacted new camping restrictions, according to data from the National Homelessness Law Center in Washington. And many municipalities have resisted adding shelter space.
The state funding the governor has released along with his initiative amounts to $3.3 billion in state-controlled money to expand local housing and treatment for homeless people with serious mental and behavioral health problems. The money, from a $6.4 billion state bond, was approved by voters last year.
“There are no more excuses,” Governor Newsom said in a statement accompanying the ordinance. “Local leaders asked for resources — we delivered the largest state investment in history. They asked for legal clarity — the courts delivered. Now, we’re giving them a model they can put to work immediately, with urgency and humanity, to resolve encampments and connect people to shelter, housing and care.”
The governor’s municipal template is based on the state’s protocol for deterring homeless encampments on state land and roadways. It would explicitly make it illegal “to construct, place or maintain on public property any semi-permanent structure.”
It also would outlaw camping on public property for more than three consecutive days or nights within 200 feet of a single location. And it would make it illegal “to sit, sleep, lie or camp on any public street, road or bike path, or on any sidewalk in a manner that impedes passage.”
The model ordinance requires cities to “make every reasonable effort” to offer shelter or housing and give homeless people at least 48 hours’ notice before clearing an encampment and to properly store any belongings that are moved.
Administration officials have said the California Highway Patrol, which enforces the state’s encampment cleanups, has rarely had to arrest recalcitrant campers. When it has, they said, it has generally been for an assortment of misdemeanor charges such as trespassing or obstructing or delaying peace officers who are performing official duties. The ordinance specifies that officers may also enforce other city or state laws, including laws governing the use of controlled substances or weapons, fire codes and public nuisance laws.
The accompanying state-issued guidance calls the ordinance “a starting point that jurisdictions may build from” and points out that it draws from an approach the state has used since July 2021. That approach, state officials said, has cleared more than 16,000 encampments and over 311,873 cubic yards of debris from freeway underpasses and other state property.
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9) I Came to Study Aging. Now I’m Trapped in ICE Detention.
By Kseniia Petrova, May 13, 2025
Ms. Petrova is a Russian scientist who works in a lab at Harvard Medical School. She told her story through a Times Opinion editor, Alex Ellerbeck, over multiple calls from an ICE detention center.
In rat testis a complex structure of the spermatozoa tails nest in a central spiral. NoRI’s findings about the testes may one day help us treat testicular cancer.
When I moved to America from Russia to join a biology lab at Harvard Medical School in 2023, it felt as if I found my dream job. America was a paradise for science. Everything was flourishing. There was freedom of discourse; conferences, seminars. It was nothing like the environment I had left behind in Russia, where international sanctions meant there weren’t enough supplies to do experiments and I once declined a job offer that was contingent on me no longer protesting the war in Ukraine. After I was arrested for taking part in a protest, I fled the country, knowing that I could not continue to live or work as a scientist there.
My background is in bioinformatics, a field that uses computational tools to understand biology. In my lab at Harvard, I worked with a microscope that we called NoRI (short for Normalized Raman Imaging). This microscope, which was created in our lab, is the only one like it in the world. What makes it unique is its ability to measure the chemical makeup of cells to an astonishing and novel degree of precision, offering new insights into disease and aging that could one day pave the way for healthier life spans and treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer.
There is so much beauty in what we can learn through science, in how complicated life is, and in trying to understand how it works. It’s what motivates me to wake up every morning.
I haven’t been in my lab or worked with my microscope since February, when I was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as I was returning to Boston from a vacation in France. At Logan International Airport, I did not complete a customs declaration for frog embryos (for use in our lab’s research) in my luggage. I’m told this would normally result in a warning or a fine. Instead, my visa was revoked and I was sent to a detention center in Louisiana, where I have spent the past three months with roughly 100 other women. We share one room with dormitory-style beds.
I’m used to spending up to 12 hours a day in the lab, talking with colleagues about tricky scientific questions and fine-tuning the algorithms used for NoRI. At the detention center, there is no access to computers and six phones are shared among all of us. The calls cost $5 for 15 minutes, at which point they cut off. It’s constantly noisy and cold. Fortunately, my beautiful colleagues have mailed me academic articles and books (I’m reading a wonderful one now about biochemistry called “Transformer” that I recommend to everyone).
I’ve asked a colleague to share some of the images from NoRI with The Times. Maybe if people see them, they will understand why I want to get back to work. Until now, no one outside our lab has seen these images, which are of tissue samples taken from mice and rats that we hope will provide greater understanding of how organs age and diseases develop in the body.
A traditional light microscope, like one you might find in a high school biology class, works by shining light through lenses to magnify a sample.
Our microscope is different. It takes advantage of the fact that each type of molecule has its own unique frequency of vibration. If we pass a specialized laser through a sample, we can measure how it interacts with these vibrations and generate a detailed image that shows the kinds of molecules inside.
When I moved to America from Russia to join a biology lab at Harvard Medical School in 2023, it felt as if I found my dream job. America was a paradise for science. Everything was flourishing. There was freedom of discourse; conferences, seminars. It was nothing like the environment I had left behind in Russia, where international sanctions meant there weren’t enough supplies to do experiments and I once declined a job offer that was contingent on me no longer protesting the war in Ukraine. After I was arrested for taking part in a protest, I fled the country, knowing that I could not continue to live or work as a scientist there.
My background is in bioinformatics, a field that uses computational tools to understand biology. In my lab at Harvard, I worked with a microscope that we called NoRI (short for Normalized Raman Imaging). This microscope, which was created in our lab, is the only one like it in the world. What makes it unique is its ability to measure the chemical makeup of cells to an astonishing and novel degree of precision, offering new insights into disease and aging that could one day pave the way for healthier life spans and treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer.
There is so much beauty in what we can learn through science, in how complicated life is, and in trying to understand how it works. It’s what motivates me to wake up every morning.
I haven’t been in my lab or worked with my microscope since February, when I was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as I was returning to Boston from a vacation in France. At Logan International Airport, I did not complete a customs declaration for frog embryos (for use in our lab’s research) in my luggage. I’m told this would normally result in a warning or a fine. Instead, my visa was revoked and I was sent to a detention center in Louisiana, where I have spent the past three months with roughly 100 other women. We share one room with dormitory-style beds.
I’m used to spending up to 12 hours a day in the lab, talking with colleagues about tricky scientific questions and fine-tuning the algorithms used for NoRI. At the detention center, there is no access to computers and six phones are shared among all of us. The calls cost $5 for 15 minutes, at which point they cut off. It’s constantly noisy and cold. Fortunately, my beautiful colleagues have mailed me academic articles and books (I’m reading a wonderful one now about biochemistry called “Transformer” that I recommend to everyone).
I’ve asked a colleague to share some of the images from NoRI with The Times. Maybe if people see them, they will understand why I want to get back to work. Until now, no one outside our lab has seen these images, which are of tissue samples taken from mice and rats that we hope will provide greater understanding of how organs age and diseases develop in the body.
A traditional light microscope, like one you might find in a high school biology class, works by shining light through lenses to magnify a sample.
Our microscope is different. It takes advantage of the fact that each type of molecule has its own unique frequency of vibration. If we pass a specialized laser through a sample, we can measure how it interacts with these vibrations and generate a detailed image that shows the kinds of molecules inside.
Because of the way our microscope works, we don’t have to use dyes that can make samples more visible but commonly damage them. That may seem like a minor point, but it’s utterly revolutionary. Take lipids, types of fat in the body. It’s almost impossible to study lipids through traditional microscopes because they are so easily destroyed while preparing the sample.
The accumulation of fat in tissues plays a crucial role in diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease and cancers. The fact that scientists haven’t been able to measure lipids accurately before now has made it harder to understand these diseases. With NoRI, our lab is uncovering new hallmarks of diseases, learning about the role of lipids and cholesterol in cancer development and gaining new knowledge about cells in the brain and the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
Our next project with NoRI — which we started just before I was detained — is to use the microscope to produce what we are calling an “atlas of aging.” Everyone takes aging for granted and knows the signs of it, but no one really understands why it happens. At our Harvard lab, we plan to analyze many different samples of organs at different ages to understand how each organ changes over time. Images of kidneys from young and old rats have revealed new features of how kidneys age. The goal is to use these discoveries to improve the quality of life of older people.
My colleagues tell me that since my detention, the work with NoRI has ground to a halt. Without me there to help, the lab has been unable to analyze the image data that the microscope generates.
The political environment in Russia made it hard to do science because everything was unpredictable. The war in Ukraine affected scientists’ ability to get funding and materials; we worried that our male colleagues might be conscripted. That type of uncertainty is incompatible with science, which requires the ability to plan what type of experiments and research you will do a year into the future. I fear that if I return to Russia I will be arrested.
I am hesitant to comment broadly on what it’s like for scientists now in America because I have only limited information about what is going on outside of this detention center. What I do know is that my colleagues, many of whom are, like me, foreign scientists, are terrified of being detained or having their visa status revoked.
On Wednesday a federal judge in Vermont will hear a petition challenging my detention. I am not able to attend the hearing, but my lawyer, as well as colleagues and friends, will be there.
During my time in detention I have been learning about immigration in America. I’m meeting all sorts of people with unique stories. One young woman here in ICE detention has been in the United States for more than a dozen years; her fiancée is an American citizen, but her next court date, in which she could finally be released on parole, is not until October. Another woman, who was seeking political asylum, was just deported; her daughter has legal status in America, and they don’t know when or if they’ll meet again. The people I’ve spent time with are not dangerous criminals. They are friendly, kind people.
I hope that the judge rules Wednesday that I can be released, so I can return to my lab. There is a data set that I’m halfway finished analyzing. I want to go home and finish it.
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10) Hamas Frees American Held in Gaza in Deal That Largely Circumvents Israel
Edan Alexander, a dual Israeli American national, was released following pressure from President Trump, who is set to travel to the region.
By Patrick Kingsley, Johnatan Reiss and Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, May 12, 2025
Watching a video of Mr. Alexander’s release at the square in Tel Aviv. Unlike most other hostages, he was freed without a formal cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Credit...Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Hamas released Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage it held in Gaza, on Monday evening, after mediators brokered a deal between the group and the United States that largely circumvented the Israeli government.
Mr. Alexander’s release came on the eve of a visit by President Trump to the Middle East, and was portrayed by Hamas officials as an attempt to secure U.S. support for a wider deal to end the war.
Mr. Alexander, 21, was among roughly 250 people seized and taken to Gaza during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that ignited the war in Gaza. A dual Israeli American national serving in the Israeli Army, he was captured from a military post that morning. He grew up in New Jersey and moved to Israel after high school to join the military.
In images and video that the Israeli authorities shared on Monday following his release, Mr. Alexander, looking pale but smiling, enthusiastically greeted his family with hugs and exclamations of joy. According to reports in Israeli news media, the released captive said that he had been held in a cage in a Hamas underground tunnel with his hands and feet bound and ate little.
Unlike most other hostages, Mr. Alexander was released without a formally announced cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, highlighting the failure of efforts to secure a broader truce between the two sides. Hamas still holds at least 20 living hostages — along with some 40 dead bodies, including those of several Americans — but it is reluctant to release more of them unless Israel agrees to hold negotiations to end the war. Israel wants the right to continue the war after any future truce, leading to an impasse in the talks.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said in a statement on Monday that Mr. Alexander’s release showed the benefits of placing Hamas under greater military pressure. In March, Mr. Netanyahu ordered the Israeli military to break an earlier cease-fire, saying it would force the group to release more hostages and lead to its total military defeat.
But critics of Mr. Netanyahu’s strategy have said Mr. Alexander’s release instead highlighted the failure of such an approach, since he was being released mainly because of U.S. pressure rather than Israeli action. Growing numbers of Israelis support securing a deal to free all hostages, even if such a truce would require Mr. Netanyahu to compromise, end the war, and allow Hamas to survive. Mr. Netanyahu announced on Monday that he would send a delegation to join negotiations for a temporary cease-fire, disappointing those who want him to agree to a permanent truce in order to free all the hostages.
As a result, the relatives of hostages still in Gaza said they had mixed feelings about Mr. Alexander’s release. Many gathered in Tel Aviv on Monday to call for a broader deal.
Yehuda Cohen, whose son Nimrod is still held in Gaza, said he was happy for Mr. Alexander but frustrated that he was being released “only because he’s an American citizen.”
Still, Mr. Cohen saw hope in how Mr. Trump was willing to work around Mr. Netanyahu. “He’s losing patience,” Mr. Cohen said of Mr. Trump. “We hope that it’s a new start of a new hostage deal, forcing Netanyahu to end the war, get all the hostages.”
Mr. Trump helped to fuel such hopes by announcing on social media on Sunday that Mr. Alexander’s release could be “the first of those final steps necessary to end this brutal conflict.”
U.S. officials met in person with Hamas leaders this year, before breaking off contact following complaints from Israel. It is unclear if direct contact was resumed to broker Mr. Alexander’s release.
Adam Boehler, one of the U.S. officials who met with Hamas this year, posted a photograph of himself with Mr. Alexander’s mother, Yael, as they took the same plane from the United States to Israel to greet Mr. Alexander upon his release.
With no end to the war in sight, aid agencies have warned of a growing risk of starvation in Gaza. A United Nations-backed initiative that monitors malnutrition, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, said on Monday that Israel risked causing a famine if it proceeded in the coming weeks with a planned military advance. In such a situation, the initiative said in a new report, “The vast majority of people in the Gaza Strip would not have access to food, water, shelter, and medicine.”
Since March, Israel has blocked all food and fuel supplies to the territory, much of which is occupied by Israeli troops, saying that it wanted to stop any supplies and profits from reaching Hamas.
Civilians have borne the brunt of Israel’s restrictions. The fuel embargo has made it almost impossible to distribute food to certain parts of Gaza, and the lack of new food deliveries has caused existing stocks to dwindle. In late April, the World Food Program announced that its food supplies in the territory had run out, while the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said it had no more stocks of flour.
Gabby Sobelman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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11) White South Africans Granted Refugee Status by Trump: What We Know
The first group of Afrikaners have arrived in the United States, claiming they were victims of persecution or had reason to fear persecution in their home country.
By The New York Times, May 13, 2025
"'Farmers are being killed,' he told reporters. 'They happen to be white. Whether they are white or Black makes no difference to me. White farmers are being brutally killed and the land is being confiscated in South Africa.' Police data do not support that narrative, showing that killings on farms are rare and that the victims are mostly Black."
https://www.nytimes.com/article/afrikaner-refugees-trump-south-africa.html
Newly arrived South Africans listen to Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar deliver welcome statements, near Washington Dulles International Airport, on Monday. Credit...Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
President Trump signed an executive order in February establishing refugee status for Afrikaners, the white ethnic minority in South Africa that created and led the brutal system of apartheid.
As part of the executive order, the Trump administration created an expedited path for Afrikaners to resettle in the United States, even as the administration has barred most refugees from countries afflicted by war and famine.
While waiting at the airport in Johannesburg, the passengers said the U.S. Embassy had instructed them not to speak with the news media. The first group of Afrikaners arrived in the United States on May 12.
Who are the Afrikaners?
The Afrikaners who arrived in the United States on Monday are the descendants of the European colonizers who came to South Africa approximately four centuries ago. They later created the brutal system of apartheid in 1948.
Decades after the end of apartheid, some Afrikaners now say they are being denied jobs and have been targeted by violence because of their race.
“No white person in their right mind would stay in this country,” said Jaco van der Merwe, 52, an Afrikaner living in Johannesburg. “I believe South Africa is finished.”
Forty-nine Afrikaners — including parents and children — boarded a flight in Johannesburg to the United States on Sunday night, according to a spokesman for South Africa’s airport authority.
The U.S. State Department said in March that it had received 8,000 inquiries from people seeking information about the refugee program. It is unclear if the U.S. government will admit more families.
Organizations such as the Amerikaners have been set up to help “support disenfranchised South Africans seeking a new future in the United States.” Some leading Afrikaner activists say they would prefer Mr. Trump help their cause at home rather than offer refugee status in the United States.
What does land have to do with it?
Much of the discontent among Afrikaners centers on their experience in rural communities and frustration over land ownership.
Many Afrikaners farm to make a living. During apartheid, the government denied Black South Africans the right to own prime agricultural land. That meant that almost all of the country’s large-scale commercial farms were white-owned enterprises. This remains true today.
Although white South Africans make up only 7 percent of the population, they own farmland that covers about half the country. The South African government has tried to address this inequality with various land reform programs, including the recent Expropriation Act, which allows the government to acquire privately owned land in the public interest without providing compensation to the owner.
When Mr. Trump signed the executive order announcing his plans to resettle “Afrikaner refugees,” he said it was because the South African government had created a system that “racially disfavored landowners.”
Why are Afrikaners being granted refugee status?
Refugees can often wait years before they are processed and approved to travel to the United States. The Afrikaners who arrived on Monday had to wait no more than three months.
The president has equated efforts by the South African government to undo racial inequalities to anti-white discrimination. He said on Monday that the Afrikaners were victims of a “genocide.”
“Farmers are being killed,” he told reporters. “They happen to be white. Whether they are white or Black makes no difference to me. White farmers are being brutally killed and the land is being confiscated in South Africa.”
Police data do not support that narrative, showing that killings on farms are rare and that the victims are mostly Black.
South African officials have described the administration’s moves as politically motivated. Mr. Trump has criticized the South African government for its ties to Iran and for bringing a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice over the war in Gaza.
“It is most regrettable that it appears that the resettlement of South Africans to the United States under the guise of being ‘refugees’ is entirely politically motivated and designed to question South Africa’s constitutional democracy,” Chrispin Phiri, a spokesman for the South African government, said in a statement.
How will they be resettled in the United States?
Mr. Trump said on Monday the United States would grant citizenship to the Afrikaners.
The administration plans to rely on a refugee office in the Department of Health and Human Services to assist with resettlement. The office has reached out to refugee organizations in recent days to prepare for the arrival of the Afrikaners, according to a department memo obtained by The New York Times.
According to the memo, the administration will help the Afrikaners find “temporary or longer-term housing” and “basic home furnishings, essential household items and cleaning supplies.”
The administration is also planning to help the Afrikaners secure “groceries, weather-appropriate clothing, diapers, formula, hygiene products and prepaid phones that support the day-to-day well-being of households,” the memo said.
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