May 25th
TO MARK THE 5th ANNIVERSARY OF GEORGE FLOYD'S MURDER & OPPOSE TRUMP'S ANTI-GEORGE FLOYD ACT EXECUTIVE ORDER
On April 28th, 2025, Donald Trump signed the so-called “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens” Executive Order (EO) into law, signifying a continued push towards the expansion of the police and prison state. This EO is the Trump administration’s attempt to undo any and all restraints put on police departments after the George Floyd rebellion. It is the Anti-George Floyd Policing Act. The EO gives police carte blanche to double down on their crimes against the people along with expanding prisons. We knew Trump’s return to office would embolden racist and repressive policing. This EO makes it plain.
George Floyd was murdered by racist killer cop Derek Chauvin on May 25th, 2020. Following his murder, the Minneapolis community, including our National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR) branch, the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice, quickly mobilized and sparked a fire that led to millions hitting the streets worldwide to fight for justice for George Floyd and all victims of police terror. NAARPR played a conscious role in all cities where we have branches and affiliate organizations present in advancing the struggle on the streets. Five years later, we have experienced the failures of the previous presidential administration in passing any substantial police accountability measures. Now under Trump and his new EO, we see the forces of police terror seeking to advance their agenda at the expense of the voice of the people.
We call on all NAARPR branches, affiliate organizations to take action and unite with as many forces as possible on the 5 year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder to fight back against Trump’s anti-George Floyd executive order. We call on all strains of the people’s movement to unite and fight against Trump’s police and prison state agenda along with the local struggles with the families of police crime victims. Only through uniting with all who can be united, can we build a united front to win community control of the police and make advancements towards ending police terror.
All out for May 25th!
Justice for George Floyd and all victims of police terror!
Rescind Trump’s police and prison state Executive Order!
Pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act!
Community Control of the police now!
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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) Aid Deliveries Begin to Reach Gazans After Days of Delays
The U.N. said about 90 truckloads of supplies had begun to arrive at warehouses and other sites in the devastated territory. It was the first significant influx after a two-month Israeli blockade.
By Aaron Boxerman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Reporting from Jerusalem and Haifa, Israel, May 22, 2025
“In a televised news conference on Wednesday night, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, vowed once again to escalate the war imminently unless Hamas agreed to Israel’s conditions for a cease-fire. Palestinians would be evacuated to a ‘sterile zone’ that would be ‘Hamas free’ in southern Gaza, where humanitarian aid would be provided, he said. ‘At the end of the effort, all areas of the Gaza Strip will be under Israel’s security control — and Hamas will be totally defeated,’ Mr. Netanyahu said. In northern Gaza, attacks by Israeli ground forces damaged Al-Awda Hospital, according to the hospital director, Dr. Mohammad Salha. He said the facility had come under repeated attacks by Israeli tank fire and gunfire since Wednesday [May 21, 2025] without prior warning or coordination. A fire engulfed the central warehouse for medical supplies and spread to outpatient tents run by international humanitarian organizations. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the hospital. The facility has been struck more than 20 times during the war. It has now run out of supplies and cannot admit new patients, the director said.”
Employees working inside a bakery in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip after Israel allowed limited humanitarian aid to enter the Palestinian territory on Thursday. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
About 90 truckloads of aid had entered Gaza by Thursday, according to the United Nations, the first major influx of food that Israel has allowed in after a two-month blockade that deepened the humanitarian crisis in the territory.
The U.N. humanitarian affairs office and the Israeli military both confirmed that the aid deliveries were reaching warehouses and other points inside Gaza after days of delays. But aid officials said the shipment was a tiny fraction of what was needed.
“Desperately needed aid is finally trickling in — but the pace is far too slow. We need more aid trucks coming in daily,” the World Food Program, one of the main U.N. agencies operating in Gaza, wrote on social media.
Israel’s two-month ban on the entry of food and fuel led to widespread hunger in the enclave, which has been devastated by more than a year of war against the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Israel justified the ban as an attempt to force Hamas to surrender and release the remaining hostages. Israeli officials have asserted that Hamas has largely diverted or made money off aid deliveries, a claim disputed by international aid groups.
Israel conditioned the resumption of assistance on the United Nations signing off on a new mechanism in which they would distribute relief in areas under Israeli security control. The U.N. and many other aid nonprofits refused, saying it would fundamentally compromise their work.
After weeks of rising international pressure, Israel announced on Sunday that it would let U.N. agencies send small amounts of food into the enclave under the old system. But wrangling between Israel and the United Nations further delayed the provision of aid for days.
OCHA, the U.N. agency that coordinates humanitarian relief, said Israel had stipulated that their trucks take an extremely perilous route through Gaza. U.N. officials believed that unless the plans were changed, looting was “highly likely” to ensue, the agency said.
A spokesman for the Israeli military agency that works with the aid agencies — known as COGAT — did not respond to a request for comment.
During the aid blockade, local bakeries supported by the World Food Program had been forced to shut down. On Thursday, some bakeries in central and southern Gaza resumed production for the first time since April 2, according to Abed Alnasser al-Ajrami, head of the Gaza Bakers Association.
The bread in these areas is now being distributed for free by the World Food Program and other U.N. agencies, Mr. al-Ajrami said. But in the Nuseirat area of central Gaza, there were large crowds rushing to collect the bread, raising safety concerns for the bakery workers, he added.
Israeli officials have said they hope to set up the new aid system in Gaza, bypassing the United Nations, in the coming days.
In a televised news conference on Wednesday night, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, vowed once again to escalate the war imminently unless Hamas agreed to Israel’s conditions for a cease-fire.
Palestinians would be evacuated to a “sterile zone” that would be “Hamas free” in southern Gaza, where humanitarian aid would be provided, he said.
“At the end of the effort, all areas of the Gaza Strip will be under Israel’s security control — and Hamas will be totally defeated,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
In northern Gaza, attacks by Israeli ground forces damaged Al-Awda Hospital, according to the hospital director, Dr. Mohammad Salha.
He said the facility had come under repeated attacks by Israeli tank fire and gunfire since Wednesday without prior warning or coordination. A fire engulfed the central warehouse for medical supplies and spread to outpatient tents run by international humanitarian organizations.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the hospital.
The facility has been struck more than 20 times during the war. It has now run out of supplies and cannot admit new patients, the director said.
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2) A Revealing Joke in the Oval Office About Getting in Trump’s Good Graces
The president of South Africa’s wisecrack about a free plane spoke volumes.
By Shawn McCreesh, Shawn McCreesh covers the White House, May 22, 2025
Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, brought to his meeting with President Trump a 30-pound book with pictures of South African golf courses. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
It has been said that the best jokes are dangerous because they are in some way truthful.
On Wednesday, a dangerous joke was told in the Oval Office. The South African president turned to the American president and said: “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.”
There was a lot packed into this one little aperçu. Nothing has so succinctly summed up the way the rest of the world feels it must now approach America as these 10 words.
I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.
The context was lost on no one. Earlier that day, the U.S. government had, under President Trump’s directive, finally and officially accepted the free jumbo jet from Qatar that had become the object of so much controversy and intrigue. Now it had also become a punchline.
Mr. Trump, for his part, took it mostly in stride. “I wish you did” have a plane to offer up, he said with a touch of insouciance. “I’d take it. If your country offered the U.S. Air Force a plane, I would take it.”
Yes, the man who sits in the gold-colored office likes his golden gifts. It is not as though South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, failed to understand this. He didn’t show up with a 747 jetliner, but he did bring a 30-pound book with pictures of South African golf courses. (“I brought you a really fantastic golf book.”) He also brought along a billionaire South African businessman and a few golfers as guests, to appeal to Mr. Trump’s sensibilities.
No plane? No matter. There are many ways to cultivate favor with this billionaire president.
One could always purchase a membership to one of Mr. Trump’s private clubs. The cost to join has never been higher. The initiation fee for Mar-a-Lago is $1 million, double what it was when Mr. Trump was last in office, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. Republican officials now hold more events at Mr. Trump’s clubs than ever before.
And thousands of people have bought up Mr. Trump’s cryptocurrency token. If someone looking for access to the president had purchased enough to become one of the top 25 holders of Mr. Trump’s memecoin, he or she could have even been invited to Thursday night’s V.I.P. reception for top Trump memecoin holders. It’s being held at another one of the president’s private clubs. (Another option would be to invest in some of the first lady’s cryptocurrency token.)
There are other ways to ensure V.I.P. treatment in our nation’s capital these days. One could donate to America250, the committee that’s helping plan the celebrations around the country’s 250th anniversary. Mr. Trump has a military parade in Washington planned. (It happens to fall on the same day as his birthday, June 14.) And the newly Trumpified Kennedy Center is always prospecting for new donors.
Visiting dignitaries no longer have the option of playing or staying at one of the president’s hotels when in Washington, since Mr. Trump offloaded the one he was operating out of the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue. But there is the new social club in Georgetown that his son, Donald Trump Jr., is opening. It costs half a million to join up.
Many nations seem eager to do business with the president’s sons. The Qataris, the Saudis and the Serbs have all gone into big business with them, to name just a few.
Mr. Ramaphosa’s joke about the airplane broke the tension in the room after Mr. Trump a moment earlier erupted at an NBC reporter for daring to ask about the Qatari jet. The president’s defense was to say that the plane was not a gift for him but for the United States.
But many of the gifts he is presented with these days have nothing to do with the country.
The White House’s defense of the president’s memecoin sweepstakes private access dinner at his club on Thursday is to say that he is doing it on his “personal time.” Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, was pressed about this on Thursday.
“It’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency,” she said.
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3) Harvard Sues Trump Administration Over Move to Bar International Students
Less than 24 hours earlier, the Trump administration had said it would block current and future international students from attending the university.
By Stephanie Saul, May 23, 2025
The Trump administration has targeted Harvard University with multiple investigations and attempts to freeze its federal funding. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
Harvard University sued the Trump administration on Friday, less than 24 hours after the Department of Homeland Security said it would block international students from attending the nation’s oldest university and one of its most prestigious.
The administration action, and Harvard’s response, signified a dramatic escalation of the battle between the administration and Harvard. And the university’s forceful and almost immediate response served as evidence that stopping the flow of international students to Harvard, which draws some of the world’s top scholars, would destabilize Harvard’s very existence.
In a letter to the Harvard community delivered Friday morning, Dr. Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, wrote, “We condemn this unlawful and unwarranted action,” adding that it “imperils the futures of thousands of students and scholars across Harvard and serves as a warning to countless others at colleges and universities throughout the country who have come to America to pursue their education and fulfill their dreams.”
The lawsuit, which accused the Trump administration of a “campaign of retribution” against the university followed an announcement on Thursday that Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification had been revoked, halting the university’s ability to enroll international students.
Later Friday morning, the university also filed a request for a temporary restraining order asking a judge to immediately block implementation of the administration action.
The lawsuit was the second time in a matter of weeks the university had sued the federal government.
In the new lawsuit, the university accused the Trump administration of exerting “clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.”
“With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the university and its mission,” the lawsuit said. “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard.”
The administration said Harvard had not complied with a list of demands sent on April 16 that contained records of protest activity dating back five years, including videotapes of misconduct and records of disciplinary actions involving international students.
Harvard’s lawsuit also said that the university had been working to comply with the April 16 request, along with a letter attacking the university for failure to condemn antisemitism.
Despite the “unprecedented nature and scope” of the demands, calling for information on each student visa holder, about 7,000 students across Harvard’s 13 schools, within 10 business days, Harvard had submitted the required information on April 30, the lawsuit said, and also complied with a follow-up request.
“Yet on May 22, D.H.S. deemed Harvard’s response ‘insufficient,’ without explaining why or citing any regulation with which Harvard failed to comply,” the lawsuit said. It references President Trump’s posts on Truth Social, his social media site, as evidence of his vendetta against Harvard.
A White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, responded to the lawsuit with a statement.
“If only Harvard cared this much about ending the scourge of anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist agitators on their campus they wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with. Harvard should spend their time and resources on creating a safe campus environment instead of filing frivolous lawsuits,” the statement said.
The Trump administration has explained its attacks on Harvard and other top private universities as an effort to combat antisemitism and confront liberal biases on campus. During his campaign, Mr. Trump invoked the term “Marxist maniacs” to refer to the Ivy League.
After he was inaugurated, Mr. Trump’s administration has sought to use nearly every lever the federal government has at its disposal to force schools, Harvard especially, to bend to its will. There are now at least eight investigations into Harvard spanning at least six federal agencies.
Separately, the Trump administration had sought to use the federal government’s international student system as a way to remove foreign nationals from the country. Immigration officials targeted a handful of pro-Palestinian student activists, but also ended the legal status of hundreds of students, creating a general anxiety among international students at colleges and universities nationwide. (Most of those students have had their status restored, but a few high-profile cases are being argued in the courts.)
At Harvard, a conflict had been building for weeks, as the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism criticized the university for anti-Israel bias. On April 11, the task force sent a letter demanding that Harvard comply with a list of demands that ranged from hiring an outside monitor to police the ideology of professors and students to barring international students “hostile to American values.”
Dr. Garber responded on April 15 with Harvard’s first lawsuit, in which arguments are set for July.
And despite statements from both sides indicating a willingness to compromise, the attacks on Harvard have continued, emanating from a variety of federal agencies, with the administration freezing nearly $3 billion in contracts and research funding.
At the same time, a proposal making its way through Congress that would increase taxes on university endowments could cost Harvard an estimated $850 million a year.
The wider academic community was shocked at Thursday’s move by the Trump Administration. In a statement, Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called it a “grave moment.”
“I write to you in profound disbelief,” she wrote in a community email late Thursday. “The action the federal government took today to bar Harvard from having international students is devastating for American excellence, openness, and ingenuity.”
Harvard enrolls about 6,800 international students, or about 27 percent of its student body, and the administration edict could ultimately affect both existing students, who would need to find other schools to attend, and newly admitted Harvard students headed for the United States in the fall.
The administration’s announcement on Thursday potentially upends students’ lives, and would also be a major financial blow to Harvard. With many of Harvard’s international students enrolled in high-cost graduate programs, the tuition generated by foreign students likely generates several hundred million a year for the university.
In an interview on Thursday, a Harvard student from Ukraine, who asked not to be identified, said she feared losing her visa not only because it will disrupt her education but because returning home, amid the war with Russia, is not an option. She is considering going to live with relatives elsewhere in Europe.
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4) How to Understand Trump’s Latest Deportation Tactics
This week saw a dramatic court showdown and a mysterious flight to Djibouti.
By Amanda Taub, May 23, 2025
Juba international airport in South Sudan, last year. Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
It can be difficult to keep track of the Trump administration’s deportation policies, and the many legal challenges against them. But a dramatic showdown in a federal courtroom this week is worth a closer look.
Lawyers were challenging a contentious Trump administration tactic: Sending deportees to countries they are not from, with little or no opportunity to raise objections.
In April, Judge Brian E. Murphy of the Federal District Court in Boston ordered the government to give deportees at least 15 days notice before sending them to a third country, and to provide them a chance to tell a court whether they feared persecution or torture at their destinations.
On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security ignored that order, and deported a group of men to a third country with only a day’s notice. Which country? It’s not entirely clear.
The eight men — from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Burma, Vietnam and other countries — were first told they were heading for the war-torn nation of South Sudan; their plane landed instead in Djibouti, in eastern Africa. The government has not said where it intends to take them next.
Judge Murphy was irate. “The department’s actions in this case are unquestionably violative of this court’s order,” he wrote, warning that the administration officials who enabled the deportations could potentially face criminal penalties.
‘They might be killed’
“This case presents a simple question,” Judge Murphy wrote in the April order. “Before the United States forcibly sends someone to a country other than their country of origin, must that person be told where they are going and be given a chance to tell the United States that they might be killed if sent there?”
To understand exactly what’s going on here, it’s important to understand the laws that dictate these cases.
U.S. federal law specifically prohibits the government from deporting people to countries where their life or freedom would be threatened because of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, or where it is “more likely than not” that they would face torture.
Those rules were passed by Congress, but the U.S. is also obligated to follow them under international law, specifically The Convention Against Torture, a treaty that the United States ratified in 1994; and the Refugee Convention, which the United States joined in 1968.
Separately, the Trump administration has also invoked a rarely used wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to send a group of Venezuelan men to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador, a policy that is being challenged via separate litigation.
But the case of the eight men sent to Djibouti is different. Until the very end, their cases were governed by normal immigration laws and processes. The Trump administration could have continued following the applicable laws, either sending them back to their home countries if that was possible and would not pose a risk of persecution or torture, or going through the legal process required for third-country deportations.
Instead, the Department of Homeland Security simply put them on a plane, with the final destination as yet unknown. That deliberate rupture could test the entire immigration system and the laws that govern it.
The need for due process
The Supreme Court has ruled that the due process clauses of the U.S. Constitution require, at a minimum, “notice and opportunity” — not just for U.S. citizens, but for everyone in the country. That means the government must notify individuals about what it plans to do and give them a chance to challenge that decision.
In deportation cases, the government must tell people what country they will be sent to. Ordinarily, the government sends deportees back to their home countries. If that’s not possible, the law allows the government to designate a different destination instead.
The person then gets an opportunity to claim in court they would face torture or persecution there.
The lawyers who appeared in federal court in Boston this week have filed a class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration. The suit argues that the government has failed to provide adequate due process to an entire class of plaintiffs, who have gone through deportation proceedings in immigration court but were never notified they could be sent to third countries.
The deportation on Tuesday was the fourth time that lawyers have accused the Trump administration of skirting, if not outright violating, Judge Murphy’s April order.
The others involved a Guatemalan man who was sent to Mexico, the Venezuelans who were sent to El Salvador, and a plan several weeks ago to send a group of men to Libya. The U.S. State Department advises Americans not to travel either to Libya or to South Sudan, citing the threat of crime, armed conflict, kidnapping and other dangers.
The flights to Libya never took off, but the some of that same group may have been sent to Djibouti this week.
In many ways, this seems puzzling. The administration could have avoided legal challenges by providing basic due process and choosing relatively safe third-country destinations like Costa Rica, which has already agreed to accept some deportees from the United States. Instead, it appears to be courting conflict with the judge, and perhaps even risking punishment for criminal contempt.
Baiting the courts
The administration may simply believe deportations will have more deterrent value if migrants are sent to countries that are obviously dangerous or violent. But another possibility is that the administration is following the pattern of leaders around the world who specifically set up fights with the courts that they think the public will support.
In Mexico and Turkey, for example, leaders engineered clashes with courts over issues popular with voters, then used the resulting public backlash to push through overhauls that radically undermined the courts’ power.
Engineering legal fights over popular issues can also pressure the courts to issue only narrow rulings that have the effect of weakening checks and balances, said Andrew O’Donohue, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He studies clashes between courts and elected leaders around the world, and calls this strategy “court baiting.”
“The president himself is a very instinctual politician, but there are other advisers within his orbit like Stephen Miller who have a much broader strategy, a much more deliberate strategy for thinking about how to drive a wedge between voters and the courts,” Mr. O’Donohue said.
Mr. Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff and a longtime immigration hard-liner, has said that he thinks border security is a “90-10 issue,” meaning that the overwhelming majority of Americans will support the president’s position.
In fact, polls show that support for the Trump administration’s immigration policies has fallen in recent months, with more than half of respondents to an April CNN poll saying that the president had gone too far. But there may be more support for removing individuals who have committed particularly violent crimes.
The group of men sent to Djibouti may have been selected on that basis. This week, the Trump administration released documents showing that the eight deportees had been convicted of crimes that include murder, sexual assault and robbery.
“A Federal Judge in Boston, who knew absolutely nothing about the situation, or anything else, has ordered that EIGHT of the most violent criminals on Earth curtail their journey to South Sudan, and instead remain in Djibouti,” the president said on the social media site Truth Social on Wednesday. “He would not allow these monsters to proceed to their final destination.”
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5) Pro-Palestinian Movement Faces an Uncertain Path After D.C. Attack
The slaying of two Israeli Embassy workers cast a harsh spotlight on pro-Palestinian groups in the United States. Activists, who were already being scrutinized, could face further pushback.
By Sharon Otterman, May 23, 2025
The suspect in the killings of two Israeli Embassy workers in Washington on Wednesday shouted “Free, free Palestine” as he was arrested, chanting the same slogan, in the same cadence, that has rung out in pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses and on American streets for years.
But the ties of Elias Rodriguez, the suspect, to the wider pro-Palestinian movement remain unclear. Was he a vigilante, upset at the deaths of civilians in Gaza, who decided on his own that violence was the only way forward? Or was he influenced by more extreme pro-Palestinian organizations that reach Americans online and that glorify the actions of Hamas and other armed resistance groups?
In either case, the killings of the Israeli embassy workers, Yaron Lischinsky, 30, who grew up in Israel and Germany, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, who was from Kansas, cast a harsh spotlight on the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States and the impact even peaceful protests might be having on attitudes against people connected to Israel.
The killings also risked painting all pro-Palestinian activists, the vast majority of whom do not engage in violence, with the same brush, which could lead to further repression of their movement. The tragedy occurred just as the movement has been trying to sustain attention in the United States on a blockade by Israel that has put Gaza residents at risk of widespread starvation.
Oren Segal, senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence at the Anti-Defamation League, said that while attending a rally or being a member of pro-Palestinian groups does not predict violence, the broader ecosystem being created, particularly online, by groups strongly opposed to Israel, “created an environment that made the tragedy last night more likely.”
“What people are hearing is a regular drumbeat: Israel is evil, supporters of Israel are evil, and we need to do anything by any means to fight back,” he said. “And many of them are conflating Jews with the policies of Israel, too.”
But the pro-Palestinian movement has asserted that it can criticize Israel and the war in Gaza without being antisemitic, and multiple organizations rushed to condemn the killings on Thursday.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, called the violence “completely unacceptable” and said that it does not represent the millions of Americans peacefully supporting an end to U.S. support for the Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Such violence only undermines the pursuit of justice,” the organization said in a statement. “Peaceful protest, civil disobedience and political engagement are the only appropriate and acceptable tools” to achieve that change.
Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group that regularly protests against the war in Gaza, also condemned the killings. “We are grounded first and foremost in the belief that all human life is precious, which is precisely why we are struggling for a world in which all people can live in safety and dignity,” it wrote in a statement.
The pro-Palestinian movement that burst into the public consciousness after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 has deep roots and has gone through multiple transformations. But it has long included a wide spectrum of activists, with a variety of views on the role violent resistance should play in achieving a Palestinian state.
In the United States, protesters who chant “Free, free Palestine” are almost always using tactics of nonviolent resistance. But the groups that organize behind Free Palestine banners also vary in their philosophies. Some advocate complete nonviolence in their broader approach, akin to antiwar protesters. Others back the right of Palestinians to engage in armed resistance against Israel, which they consider a right under international law, because they consider Israel the occupier of Palestinian lands.
Such groups frequently quote a 1990 U.N. resolution that recognizes the right of occupied people to fight against “colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”
Even among groups that back the right of Palestinians to resist with force, however, there are variations. Some chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, for example, the most organized pro-Palestinian group on many college campuses, have embraced the Thawabit, a set of principles written by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1977 that is considered central to the Palestinian national cause. Among them is the right of resistance, including through armed struggle.
But Students for Justice in Palestine does not support of the use of violence in the United States, and instead focuses on civil disobedience and nonviolent tactics, like the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, to pressure Israel.
Other groups push the line further, openly glorifying armed resistance by organizations that the United States considers terrorist organizations. As repression of protests on college campuses grew last year, a smaller group of students adopted some of the rhetoric of the hard-line groups, while more moderate students peeled away.
Among at least some of those hard-line groups, there was some hint of acceptance about the Israeli embassy killings on Thursday, even as Mr. Rodriguez was being charged with first-degree murder and other crimes.
Charlotte Kates, the international coordinator of the Samidoun Network, which the U.S. Treasury Department last year designated a sham charity that serves as an international fund-raiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist organization, wrote on Telegram that in the face of the stifling of nonviolent protest, it is only to be expected that some people will escalate in an attempt to stop the deaths in Gaza.
Unity of Fields, a far left pro-Palestinian group that describes itself as an “anti-imperalist propaganda front for the international popular cradle of resistance,” posted a video of Mr. Rodriguez’s arrest on its Telegram account on Thursday.
It compared the killings Mr. Rodriguez is charged with the actions of Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, and who has been lionized by some.
“How can people embrace, celebrate and support Luigi’s political violence (which was also a good thing) but not support Elias Rodriguez, whose action is far more politically salient?” Unity of Fields asked.
The contradiction inherent in a nonviolent protest movement that sometimes backs armed struggle for Palestinian freedom has long vexed public safety authorities and college administration officials, who are responsible for handling pro-Palestinian protesters.
Many Jews, particularly those who consider Israel a core part of Jewish identity, accuse pro-Palestinian protesters of being broadly antisemitic and dangerous in their rhetoric. They see any language that backs armed resistance against the Jewish state as threatening and supportive of terrorism.
Many in the pro-Palestinian movement, however, insist that while they are anti-Zionist, or against the state of Israel, they are not against Jews. Instead, they say they are fighting against the killing of Palestinians and for the establishment of a free, flourishing Palestinian state.
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6) Five Years After Floyd
We look at what has changed since George Floyd’s murder.
By German Lopez, May 23, 2025
“…killings by police officers rose from just over 1,000 in 2019 to around 1,200 in 2024. Officers killed Black Americans at nearly three times the rate that they killed white Americans, roughly the same proportion as before. And the number of prosecutions for police shootings has not changed since Floyd’s death, said Philip Stinson, a criminologist who tracks such cases. In 2015, prosecutors charged 18 officers with murder or manslaughter after an on-duty shooting. Last year, they charged 16 officers. In both years, less than 2 percent of fatal police shootings led to indictments.”
The site where George Floyd was murdered. Credit...Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times
Five years ago this Sunday, Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd. His murder set off protests and riots across the country. Demonstrators called for sweeping changes to policing and remedies for what they described as systemic racism in law enforcement.
How much has changed? Nationwide, surprisingly little. States and cities enacted new policies aimed at improving policing, but the data suggests that these changes have had little impact on accountability or the number of killings by police officers.
The changes
After Floyd’s murder, states and police departments banned chokeholds and no-knock warrants. They mandated body cameras. They rewrote guidelines about how to de-escalate a confrontation with a suspect. They educated officers about racial profiling. And more. The changes weren’t universal, and some places did more than others. But every state passed at least some changes.
In a few cities, the federal government intervened. It investigated and publicized police abuses, pressuring local governments into court-enforced consent decrees. These pacts forced police departments to make specific changes and let federal officials and court monitors track how the policies worked over time. Freddie Gray died in 2015 after a “rough ride” while in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department; a consent decree mandated that the city’s police drivers follow the speed limit and provide functioning seatbelts when transporting detainees.
At least, that’s how consent decrees used to function. This week, the Trump administration dropped efforts to investigate or oversee nearly two dozen police departments.
Meanwhile, killings by police officers rose from just over 1,000 in 2019 to around 1,200 in 2024.
Officers killed Black Americans at nearly three times the rate that they killed white Americans, roughly the same proportion as before.
And the number of prosecutions for police shootings has not changed since Floyd’s death, said Philip Stinson, a criminologist who tracks such cases. In 2015, prosecutors charged 18 officers with murder or manslaughter after an on-duty shooting. Last year, they charged 16 officers. In both years, less than 2 percent of fatal police shootings led to indictments.
Waning interest
So why didn’t much change? Experts cite two reasons.
First, lawmakers did not embrace all the proposed changes. Ohio, Minnesota and Missouri, for example, rejected more than 98 percent of the proposals that came before their legislatures, according to the Brookings Institution. A bipartisan effort in Congress also collapsed. Second, to the extent lawmakers acted, the changes didn’t go far enough to transform the nature of American policing.
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7) A judge orders Trump officials to seek the return of a Guatemalan man to the U.S.
Mattathias Schwartz, Mattathias Schwartz reports on the federal judiciary, May 24, 2025
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration late Friday night to facilitate the return of a Guatemalan man who had been deported to Mexico, despite fearing persecution and having told U.S. authorities about the violence he had experienced there.
The man, known by the initials O.C.G., is gay and is now living in hiding in Guatemala, “in constant panic and constant fear,” according to a sworn declaration. “I can’t be gay here, which means I cannot be myself.”
The ruling, by Judge Brian E. Murphy of the U.S. District Court in Boston, criticized the government for first claiming that O.C.G. had said he was not afraid of being sent to Mexico, where he said he was raped and held captive, but later admitting that it was “unable to identify” the officials to whom he had supposedly made that statement.
Judge Murphy also found that O.C.G. was likely to “succeed in showing that his removal lacked any semblance of due process.”
The decision added another flashpoint to the high-stakes battle over President Trump’s deportation policies playing out across the federal courts. A string of judges has faulted the administration for a lack of adequate due process or otherwise carrying out deportations in ways that exceed the president’s authority. Mr. Trump and his aides, in turn, have questioned the authority of courts to hear such cases and even called for the impeachment of judges who rule against them.
Perhaps the case closest to O.C.G.’s is that of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a mistakenly deported Maryland man. It raises questions about the likelihood of O.C.G.’s return to the United States, despite Judge Murphy’s order. In both cases, a federal judge has instructed the Trump administration to correct its own admitted mistake and seek the men’s return. Mr. Abrego Garcia remains in a prison in El Salvador.
In Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s order for the government to “facilitate” his return but stopped short of endorsing the judge’s call to “effectuate” it. The government has seized on that distinction, saying it lacks the authority to return Mr. Abrego Garcia because El Salvador maintains custody over him. Mr. Trump himself has said he “could” arrange his release with a phone call.
Judge Murphy took pains to acknowledge this distinction and the constitutional limitations on the judiciary’s ability to direct the conduct of the executive branch overseas. But the word “facilitate,” he wrote, “should carry less baggage” in O.C.G.’s case because he “is not held by any foreign government.”
The judge also ordered the government to investigate and report in more detail on how it had come to claim that O.C.G. did not fear being deported to Mexico, after a Department of Homeland Security official said the statement was based on data from a software tool called the ENFORCE Alien Removal Module. “It really is a big deal to lie to a court under oath,” Judge Murphy said at a hearing on Wednesday.
The claim that O.C.G. did not fear deportation was not the government’s only mistake in the case. Another government filing, which was quickly retracted, mistakenly revealed O.C.G.’s full name, which “further exacerbates the risk of persecution,” his lawyers asserted to the court. Judge Murphy called that error a “bell that perhaps cannot be unrung given the permanent nature of the internet.”
In his declarations, O.C.G. recounted leaving Guatemala for the United States in March 2024, being arrested and sent back, and then trying again. The second time, he said, he was kidnapped and raped by a group of men who released him only after his sister sent them money.
After he reached the United States in May 2024, an immigration judge assured him that he would not be sent back to Mexico without additional due process. Nevertheless, Judge Murphy found, U.S. immigration authorities put O.C.G. on a bus to Mexico, where he was given a choice to be detained for months or return to Guatemala. He chose to go to his home country.
He lives alone, in a house owned by his sister. He avoids going outside and rarely sees his family members. “Anything could happen to me in the street,” he told the court. “I am constantly afraid.”
O.C.G. is one of four pseudonymous plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit that seeks to limit the Trump administration’s ability to deport immigrants without giving them an opportunity to contest their removal on the grounds that they might be at risk of persecution or torture. That opportunity is required by an international treaty to which the United States is a party.
Lawyers for the class are also seeking the return of eight men, all convicted of serious crimes in the United States, who apparently arrived at an American base in Djibouti on Wednesday and are believed to have been held there since. The administration had sought to deport them to South Sudan, which is on the brink of civil war, but Judge Murphy ordered the U.S. government to retain custody of them for now. Little is known about the conditions that the men are being held in.
The White House has called the men “monsters” and Judge Murphy, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year, a “far-left activist judge.”
On Wednesday afternoon, after a chaotic remote hearing and after a daylong proceeding in court, Judge Murphy ordered the government to make arrangements for the men to be able to contact their lawyers by phone.
As of Friday evening, that had not happened, according to Trina Realmuto, one of the lawyers who brought the suit. The government did file a new declaration late Friday, from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, acknowledging that the flight carrying the eight men had used facilities at “the only U.S. base on the African continent.”
Mr. Rubio expressed concerns that Judge Murphy’s orders could strain diplomatic relations with both Libya and Djibouti, as well as his desire to “maintain effective foreign policy engagements in the region without judicial interference.”
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8) The E.P.A. wants to lift all pollution controls on power plants, documents show.
By Lisa Friedman, May 24, 2025
The Environmental Protection Agency has drafted a plan to eliminate all limits on greenhouse gases from coal and gas-fired power plants in the United States, according to internal agency documents reviewed by The New York Times.
In its proposed regulation, the agency argued that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from power plants that burn fossil fuels “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” or to climate change because they are a small and declining share of global emissions. Eliminating those emissions would have no meaningful effect on public health and welfare, the agency said.
But in the United States, the power sector was the second biggest source of greenhouse gases, behind transportation, according to the most recent data available on the E.P.A. website. And globally, power plants account for about 30 percent of the pollution that is driving climate change.
The E.P.A. sent the draft to the White House for review on May 2. It could undergo changes before it is formally released and the public is given the opportunity to offer comments, likely in June.
The proposed regulation is part of a broader attack by the Trump administration on the established science that greenhouse gases threaten human health and the environment. Scientists have overwhelmingly concluded that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases from the burning of oil, gas and coal are dangerously heating the planet.
“Fossil fuel power plants are the single largest industrial source of climate destabilizing carbon dioxide in the United States, and emit pollution levels that exceed the vast majority of countries in the world,” said Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental group.
She called the proposed regulation “an abuse of the E.P.A.’s responsibility under the law” and added, “It flies in the face of common sense and puts millions of people in harms way to say the single largest industrial source of carbon dioxide in the United States is not significant.”
The draft reviewed by The New York Times said the agency “is proposing to repeal all greenhouse gas emissions standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants.” That would include Biden-era requirements that existing coal-fired units capture carbon pollution before it leaves the smokestack and store it, and that require some new gas plants use technologies that pollute less.
“We are seeking to ensure that the agency follows the rule of law while providing all Americans with access to reliable and affordable energy,” Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a statement.
Mr. Zeldin’s spokeswoman, Molly Vaseliou, declined to offer more information about the plan other than to say “the proposal will be published once it has completed interagency review and been signed by the administrator.”
The Trump administration is methodically uprooting policies aimed at curbing climate change, and the E.P.A. is at the epicenter of that effort. In recent weeks, Mr. Zeldin has shuttered offices responsible for regulating climate and air pollution, and has launched the repeal of more than two dozen regulations and policies.
The agency is feeling pressure from the White House to finalize its deregulations by December, according to two people briefed on internal discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to describe them. That would be an extraordinarily fast pace. Rewriting regulations can typically take more than a year.
One target is a 2009 E.P.A. finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health. That determination underpins most federal climate regulations, and repealing it would erase the agency’s legal authority to regulate carbon pollution from power plants, vehicles, oil and gas infrastructure and other sources.
Mr. Zeldin said deregulation would drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
In proposing to lift regulations on power plants, the E.P.A. points to the fact that the U.S. share of global power sector emissions represented about 3 percent of worldwide greenhouse gases in 2022, down from 5.5 percent in 2005. So, it argued, even if American power plants erased all their greenhouse gases from the power sector, the risk to public health would not be “meaningfully” improved.
But in the U.S., power plants were responsible for about 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in 2022. They emitted about 1.5 billion metric tons of emissions in 2023, which is more than the total greenhouse gas emissions produced by most countries.
Just a year ago, when the Biden administration announced tough new limits on pollution from existing coal-fired power plants as well as some new gas-burning plants, the E.P.A. said the restrictions would mean that by 2035 the nation would annually avoid up to 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital visits, 1,900 cases of asthma, 48,000 school absences and 57,000 lost work days.
Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, noted that solving climate change means undertaking a large number of seemingly small measures, like curbing emissions from automobiles, oil and gas wells, air travel, landfills, buildings and more.
“Just because there are multiple contributors to a problem doesn’t mean we should excuse all but the top one,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “Just because a polluter’s emissions are decreasing doesn’t mean that aren’t still far too high.”
Attorneys who represent utility companies said they agree that the sector is a small part of the global climate problem. “The argument is a solid argument,” said Jeffrey R. Holmstead, who served in the E.P.A. during both Bush administrations and now represents utility companies as a lawyer for the firm Bracewell.
But he wondered if it would hold up under a legal challenge. “I just don’t know if you’re contributing 3 percent of greenhouse gas emissions the court will say ‘that's not significant’ when there’s hardly anybody that contributes more than that.”
Only China releases more pollution from its power plants than the United States.
The E.P.A. plan is likely to face lawsuits once it is finalized. If it survives, it could block future administrations from regulating carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, eliminating a tool that Democratic administrations have relied on to tackle climate change. It also could make it easier to unravel other climate regulations, some experts said.
“If the administration is going to do this, it is the strategically smartest way,” said Jonathan Adler, a conservative law professor at Case Western University. “If they’re successful with regard to power plants, they’re pretty much going to be successful with everything else,” he said.
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9) Trump Seeks Extensive Student Data in Pressure Campaign to Control Harvard
Harvard and the federal government are locked in a battle that boils down to turning over records on international students. But Harvard says it is also about the First Amendment.
By Michael C. Bender, Published May 23, 2025, Updated May 24, 2025
Expansive requests for data have become a regular tactic of the Trump administration’s moves against Harvard. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
The latest confrontation between Harvard University and the Trump administration began last month with a far-reaching demand for data on international students.
Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, sent a letter to Harvard requesting, among other things, coursework for every international student and information on any student visa holder involved in misconduct or illegal activity.
Harvard rebuffed parts of the request, and the Trump administration retaliated on Thursday. In one of its most aggressive moves so far against the university, the government said Harvard could no longer enroll any international students, who account for about one-fourth of enrollment.
Ms. Noem also expanded her request for records to include any videos of international students, on campus or off, involved in protests or illegal or dangerous activity.
The conflict has only further raised the stakes over the future of America’s oldest and most powerful university.
The administration’s attempt to vacuum up vast amounts of private student data opens a new front in Mr. Trump’s crackdown on dissent from his political agenda. The strategy is aimed at realigning a higher education system the president sees as hostile to conservatives by stamping out what he says is antisemitism on campus and the transgender and diversity policies it says are rooted in “woke” ideology.
Harvard counters that it has provided all the data that is legally required and that the administration’s unrelenting pressure campaign — including the termination of billions in federal research grants — amounts to an attempted takeover of the institution, bullying the university into changing what it can teach and whom it can hire.
Harvard said the government’s latest action “is the culmination of an unprecedented and retaliatory attack” on the school’s freedom of speech.
The university sued on Friday, arguing that the government had violated its First Amendment rights and had used unfairly broad data requests to justify illegal interference into foundational principles of the university.
“Both Harvard and the Trump administration see this as an all-or-nothing fight,” said David Super, a professor at Georgetown Law School. “Either Harvard will be brought to its knees or the administration will be fully rebuffed.”
The new requests for protest footage also touched on questions about protected speech. Trump officials have argued that the government has the right to expel from the country disruptive foreign students. In its lawsuit, the university said the government had not cited any specific authority to request protest footage.
Harvard’s lawyers argue that colleges and universities have a “constitutionally protected right to manage an academic community and evaluate teaching and scholarship free from governmental interference.” They pointed to case law that protects “not only students and teachers, but their host institutions as well.”
Adam Goldstein, director of strategic initiatives at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free-speech group, said Harvard appeared to have complied with federal law, but he noted the university’s dilemma.
“If Harvard doesn’t send the records, it loses visas,” Mr. Goldstein said. But if it did send them, he added, it might be violating federal privacy law and could lose federal funding.
The Trump administration’s hunt for data has become a signature tactic in several investigations into Harvard and other elite universities. But Harvard’s second lawsuit against the Trump administration in two months argues that the administration is not ultimately interested in student data.
Harvard has pointed to Mr. Trump’s own words and posts on Truth Social as proof that retribution is the goal.
Mr. Trump told reporters on Friday at the White House that his administration was considering stopping other universities from enrolling international students, in addition to Harvard.
He also criticized Harvard, once again, for maintaining a $53 billion endowment even as some students took out loans for annual tuition approaching $60,000. (Harvard students from families earning less than $200,000 will not pay tuition starting this fall.)
“Harvard is going to have to change its ways,” Mr. Trump said.
Similar to Ms. Noem’s request for records, Harvard is also facing investigations opened in recent weeks by the Departments of Justice and Education that seek a trove of documents and data.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department invoked its power under the False Claims Act, a law designed to punish those who swindle the government. The agency demanded records, written statements and sworn testimony from Harvard about its admissions policies.
Without making a specific accusation of wrongdoing, the Justice Department also requested all documents and communications related to the university’s evaluation of undergraduate applicants. The agency also asked for all internal deliberations about the Supreme Court decision that struck down affirmative action and all records related to the university’s compliance with that ruling.
The department also told Harvard to produce all texts, emails, Signal chats and other correspondence from current or former employees discussing Mr. Trump’s executive orders earlier this year that revoked policies to support minorities and ended the government’s support of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
That exhaustive request came 10 days after the Education Department had asked for access to data and personnel related to Harvard’s admission policies. A second Education Department investigation, opened on April 17, included a records request that is three pages long — but no specific allegation of misconduct other than a broad mention of “incomplete and inaccurate” disclosures of foreign funding. The university has said its disclosures of foreign funding comply with reporting requirements.
Harvard is also facing investigations by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the administration’s task force on antisemitism. All have been opened since Mr. Trump returned to the White House.
Those inquiries are ongoing. But Homeland Security officials decided on Thursday that their pursuit of student data had all but run its course when they said the department would block Harvard from enrolling international students. The move was the “unfortunate result,” Ms. Noem wrote in a letter to the university, “of Harvard’s failure to comply with simple reporting requirements.”
Ms. Noem’s letter did not cite any specific reporting requirements that Harvard had skirted. She wrote that her agency had not received any information it requested about misconduct involving international students.
But court documents show that Harvard provided some information — even as the university’s lawyers asserted that other parts of her request went beyond the rules of the student visa program.
On April 16, Ms. Noem sent her first letter to Harvard demanding student records that met one of eight criteria.
Harvard responded by providing records on thousands of international students, which the university said was legally required.
The department’s general counsel, Joseph N. Mazzara, responded seven days later, saying the data “does not completely address the secretary’s request.” He then repeated Ms. Noem’s request for information about any international students who had been involved in illegal or dangerous activity, who had threatened other students or faculty members or who had been engaged in the “deprivation of rights” of others on campus.
Steve Bunnell, a lawyer for Harvard who was previously general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security and served as chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, emailed Mr. Mazzara on May 13 to ask which regulation he was citing — in the 200 pages of federal code outlining immigration rules — that compelled the university to hand over disciplinary records.
“We are requesting records pursuant to all our authorities,” Mr. Mazzara replied the next day. “Thank you.”
The federal visa program requires universities to disclose changes in a student’s status or disciplinary action related to a criminal conviction. Privacy experts said federal law generally prohibits releasing student information without a subpoena, although international students waive some of their rights.
On May 14, Harvard sent D.H.S. information on several students’ disciplinary records.
One international student had withdrawn from the university. Two others had been placed on probation in April for “inappropriate social behavior involving alcohol.” The university suggested that drunken behavior might not be very interesting to the government but offered to be more helpful if needed.
Harvard also asked for additional clarification on “deprivation of rights.”
The response came from Ms. Noem. She did not answer the question and instead booted Harvard from the student visa program — and expanded her request for records.
Miriam Jordan and Stephanie Saul contributed reporting.
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10) As Trumps Monetize Presidency, Profits Outstrip Protests
The president and his family have monetized the White House more than any other occupant, normalizing activities that once would have provoked heavy blowback and official investigations.
By Peter Baker, May 25, 2025
Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, is covering his sixth presidency. He reported from Washington.
When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furor erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review.
Thirty-one years later, after dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket — 280 times the Clinton lucre and in this case from a person with a vested interest in policies set by her husband’s government. Scandal? Furor? Washington moved on while barely taking notice.
The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.
Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Mr. Trump’s use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued the plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million, more than all of the foreign gifts bestowed on all previous American presidents combined.
And Mr. Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his Virginia club for 220 investors in the $TRUMP cryptocurrency that he started days before taking office in January. Access was openly sold based on how much money they chipped in — not to a campaign account but to a business that benefits Mr. Trump personally.
By conventional Washington standards, according to students of official graft, the still-young Trump administration is a candidate for the most brazen use of government office in American history, perhaps eclipsing even Teapot Dome, Watergate and other famous scandals.
“I’ve been watching and writing about corruption for 50 years, and my head is still spinning,” said Michael Johnston, a professor emeritus at Colgate University and author of multiple books on corruption in the United States.
Yet a mark of how much Mr. Trump has transformed Washington since his return to power is the normalization of moneymaking schemes that once would have generated endless political blowback, televised hearings, official investigations and damage control. The death of outrage in the Trump era, or at least the dearth of outrage, exemplifies how far the president has moved the lines of accepted behavior in Washington.
Mr. Trump, the first convicted felon elected president, has erased ethical boundaries and dismantled the instruments of accountability that constrained his predecessors. There will be no official investigations because Mr. Trump has made sure of it. He has fired government inspectors general and ethics watchdogs, installed partisan loyalists to run the Justice Department, F.B.I. and regulatory agencies and dominated a Republican-controlled Congress unwilling to hold hearings.
As a result, while Democrats and other critics of Mr. Trump are increasingly trying to focus attention on the president’s activities, they have had a hard time gaining any traction without the usual mechanisms of official review. And at a time when Mr. Trump provokes a major news story every day or even every hour — more tariffs on allies, more retribution against enemies, more defiance of court orders — rarely does a single action stay in the headlines long enough to shape the national conversation.
Paul Rosenzweig, who was a senior counsel to Ken Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton and later served in the George W. Bush administration, said the lack of uproar over Mr. Trump’s ethical norm-busting has made him wonder whether longstanding assumptions about public desire for honest government were wrong all along.
“Either the general public never cared about this,” he said, or “the public did care about it but no longer does.” He concluded that the answer is that “80 percent, the public never cared” and “20 percent, we are overwhelmed and exhausted.”
“Outrage hasn’t died,” Mr. Rosenzweig added. “It was always just a figment of elite imagination.”
The White House has defended Mr. Trump’s actions, brushing off questions about ethical considerations by saying that he was so rich that he did not need more money.
“The president is abiding by all conflict of interest laws that are applicable to the president,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. “The American public believes it is absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency. This president was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country publicly.”
But saying that he is abiding by all conflict of interest laws that are applicable to the president is meaningless since, as Mr. Trump himself has long noted, conflict of interest laws are not applicable to the president.
Moreover, he has not given it all up; in fact, he is still making money from his private business interests run by his sons, and independent estimates indicate that he has hardly sacrificed financially by entering politics. Forbes estimated Mr. Trump’s net worth at $5.1 billion in March, a full $1.2 billion higher than the year before and the highest it has ever been in the magazine’s rankings.
The president’s sons scoff at the idea that they should limit their business activities, which directly benefit their father. Donald Trump Jr. has said that the family restrained itself during his father’s first term only to be criticized anyway, so it made no sense to hold back anymore. “They’re going to hit you no matter what,” he said last week at a business forum in Qatar. “So we’re just going to play the game.”
There have been some burgeoning signs of public pushback in recent days. The gift of the Qatar plane seemed to break through to the general audience in a way that other episodes have not. A Harvard/CAPS Harris poll released last week found that 62 percent of Americans thought the gift “raises ethical concerns about corruption,” and even some prominent right-wing Trump supporters like Ben Shapiro and Laura Loomer voiced objections.
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who campaigned with Mr. Trump last year, expressed misgivings this week during a podcast with Shawn Ryan, a right-wing influencer, who mentioned all of the Trump family business deals that seemed to coincide with the president’s recent trip to the Middle East.
“That stuff kind of worries me,” Mr. Ryan said.
“Well, it seems like corruption, yeah,” Mr. Carlson agreed.
But while several dozen demonstrators protested outside Mr. Trump’s golf club the other night, Democrats are split about how much to focus on Trump’s profitmaking, with some preferring to concentrate on economic issues. Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, has been leading the charge the other direction, making floor speeches and leading news conference denouncing what he calls “brazen corruption.”
“It is unlikely he is going to be held accountable through traditional means,” Mr. Murphy said in an interview. “There are going to be no special counsels; there’s going to be no D.O.J. action. And so it’s really just about public mobilization and politics. If Republicans keep paying a price for the corruption by losing special elections throughout the next year, maybe that causes them to rethink their complicity.”
Mr. Trump had long promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington after years of corruption by other politicians. When he first ran for president in 2016, he excoriated the Clintons for taking money from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East monarchies with an obvious interest in currying favor in case Hillary Clinton won the presidency. But that money went to the Clinton Foundation for philanthropic purposes. The money Mr. Trump’s family is now bringing in from the Middle East is going into their personal accounts through a variety of ventures that The New York Times has documented.
Mr. Johnston, the corruption scholar, said the Trumps represent “an absolute outlier case, not just in monetary terms” but also “in terms of their brazen disregard” for past standards. “While we might disagree as to the merits of policy, the president and figures in the executive branch are expected to serve the public good, not themselves,” he said.
Mr. Trump made a nod at those standards in his first term by saying he would restrict his family business from doing deals overseas.
But since then, he has been convicted of 34 felony counts for falsifying business records and held liable in civil court for fraud while the Supreme Court has conferred immunity on him for official acts. In his second term, Mr. Trump has dispensed with self-imposed ethical limits.
“He’s not trying to give the appearance that he’s doing the right thing anymore,” said Fred Wertheimer, founder of Democracy 21 and a longtime advocate for government ethics. “There’s nothing in the history of America that approaches the use of the presidency for massive personal gain. Nothing.”
Congressional Republicans spent years investigating Hunter Biden, the son of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., for trading on his family name to make millions of dollars, even labeling the clan the “Biden Crime Family.” But while Hunter Biden’s cash flow was a tiny fraction of that of Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Jared Kushner, Republicans have shown no appetite for looking into the current presidential family’s finances.
“The American public has had to inure itself to the corruption of Donald Trump and his presidency because the president and his Republican Party have given the American public no choice in the matter,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former appeals court judge who has become a critic of Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump evinces no concern that people funneling money into his family coffers have interests in government policies. Some of the crypto investors who attended his dinner on Thursday night acknowledged that they were using the opportunity to press him on regulation of the industry. According to a video obtained by The Times, he reciprocated by promising guests that he would not be as hard on them as the Biden administration was.
One guest at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., that night was Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who became one of the largest holders of the $TRUMP memecoin after buying more than $40 million, earning him a spot in an even more exclusive private VIP reception with the president before the dinner. The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023 accused Mr. Sun of fraud, but after Mr. Trump took over the agency put its lawsuit on hold even as it dropped other crypto investigations.
As for Mr. Bezos and Qatar, each has reason to get on Mr. Trump’s good side. In his first term, Mr. Trump, peeved at coverage in The Washington Post, which is owned by Mr. Bezos, repeatedly pushed aides to punish his main firm, Amazon, by drastically increasing its U.S. Postal Service shipping rates and denying it a multibillion-dollar Pentagon contract. Mr. Trump denounced Qatar as a “funder of terrorism” and isolated it diplomatically. He has not targeted either Mr. Bezos or Qatar in his second term.
The president has not hesitated either to install allies with conflict issues in positions of power. He tapped a close associate of Elon Musk as the administrator of NASA, which provides Mr. Musk’s SpaceX with billions of dollars in contracts. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who previously worked as a lobbyist for Qatar, signed off on the legality of Qatar’s airplane gift.
Zach Witkoff, a founder of the Trump family crypto firm World Liberty Financial, and son of Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, announced a $2 billion deal in the United Arab Emirates, just a couple of weeks before his father and Mr. Trump traveled there for a presidential visit.
Mr. Wertheimer said the accumulation of so many conflicts puts Mr. Trump on the all-time list of presidential graft. “He’s got the first 10 places on that,” he said. “He’s in the hall of fame of ripping off the presidency for personal gain.” But he said the public would eventually grow upset. “I think that’s going to catch up with him. It’s going to take some time, but it’s going to catch up with him.”
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11) Why Vietnam Ignored Its Own Laws to Fast-Track a Trump Family Golf Complex
As President Trump blurs the lines between politics and business — and threatens steep tariffs on trade partners — governments feel compelled to favor Trump-related projects.
By Damien Cave, Photographs by Linh Pham, May 25, 2025
Reporting from Hung Yen Province, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Among those who attended a groundbreaking ceremony on Wednesday for a Trump golf project in Vietnam were Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, second from left, the businessman Dang Thanh Tam, third from left, and Eric Trump and Lara Trump, center.
When officials in the home province of Vietnam’s top leader went door to door recently, pressing residents to sign letters agreeing to the Trump Organization’s plans for a new golf community, Le Van Truong wanted to refuse.
Planning documents promised a “new benchmark in luxury, recreation and business.” Mr. Truong, 54, pictured something else: the uprooting of a cemetery with five generations of his ancestors and the loss of rich farmland that has sustained local families for centuries.
Yet he signed anyway, because, as he put it, “there’s nothing I can do.”
“Trump says it’s separate — the presidency and his business,” Mr. Truong said. “But he has the power to do whatever he wants.”
This $1.5 billion golf complex outside the capital, Hanoi, as well as plans for a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City, are the Trump family’s first projects in Vietnam — part of a global moneymaking enterprise that no family of a sitting American president has ever attempted on this scale. And as that blitz makes the Trumps richer, it is distorting how countries interact with the United States.
To fast-track the Trump development, Vietnam has ignored its own laws, legal experts said, granting concessions more generous than what even the most connected locals receive. Vietnamese officials, in a letter obtained by The New York Times, explicitly stated that the project required special support from the top ranks of the Vietnamese government because it was “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump personally.”
And Vietnamese officials have waved the development along in a moment of high-stakes diplomacy. They face intense pressure to strike a trade deal that would head off President Trump’s threat of steep tariffs, which would hit about 30 percent of Vietnam’s exports.
Eric Trump, the president’s second son, stands at the center of the drama. Mr. Trump was in Vietnam to break ground for the golf project on Wednesday, less than a year after meeting a local building partner, Dang Thanh Tam. Inside a tent with a gold facade, Mr. Trump told guests, including the country’s prime minister, that “the Trump family is going to make you very, very proud.”
The White House said, in an emailed statement, “All of the president’s trade discussions are totally unrelated to the Trump Organization.” It argued that there are no ethical issues as the president’s family develops about 20 Trump-branded properties worldwide, because the president’s sons run the businesses. President Trump’s financial disclosure report, however, shows that he still personally benefits financially from most of these ventures.
Eric Trump, who did not respond to interview requests, has insisted that he is just doing his job, developing properties. Vietnamese officials say that prioritizing Trump projects assists the country’s economic rise.
But as the deal-making accelerates and collides with U.S. threats to free trade, the line between Trump the president and Trump the tycoon is now seen by diplomats, trade officials and corporations worldwide as so obviously blurred that governments feel more compelled than ever to favor anything Trump-related.
While other Trump deals are happening in Serbia, Indonesia and the Middle East, Vietnam has become a case study for how the Trump brand wields influence and gains advantage, challenging local norms and encouraging leaders to rush approvals, to please the Trump family.
With trade negotiations intensifying, Vietnamese officials have allowed the Trump project to break ground without completing at least a half-dozen legally required steps, from securing all the land and financing to conducting environmental reviews.
The process usually takes two to four years. But records show that initial planning documents were filed only three months before Wednesday’s event, which was held on newly leveled land under an archway announcing “THE GROUNDBREAKING CEREMONY OF TRUMP INTERNATIONAL, HUNG YEN.”
Vietnam’s foreign ministry did not respond to questions about the legality of the project.
Residents, who gathered outside the development site to watch the groundbreaking, were held at a distance by the police. Many worry that their livelihoods and land will soon be taken. Fifty years after the end of a brutal war with the United States, they say they fear becoming collateral damage as the new move-fast-and-defy-the-rules approach of Trumpism marches on.
Taking Land for Villas
In Vietnam’s communist system, all land is owned by the people and managed or leased out by the state. Most of the property for the golf project is still controlled by families with long-term rights of use. In the Khoai Chau district of Hung Yen province — where the Trump project will take up nearly four square miles along the Red River — a sense of betrayal has been rumbling.
At town-hall meetings in early April, officials told hundreds of residents that the best they could expect was about half of what their land would have sold for even before the golf project was announced in October.
Amid a chorus of outrage at one meeting, nearly everyone stormed out. Word of the offered rate spread through streets and into the fields. Opposition has hardened as farmers fear losing investments in saplings that take years to mature, and the security that the land has provided for generations.
“They’re not listening to us,” Le Thi Thanh, 57, said on a recent fever-hot afternoon, squatting to graft young custard apple trees. “They just come here and impose their will.”
Vietnam’s construction approval process is supposed to begin with independent scrutiny in the public interest at the district and provincial level. In reality, as interviews and government documents show, little of that happened and planning laws have been shoved aside.
After the March 20 letter from provincial officials that said the project needed special treatment, the government cut short public comment and did not follow the usual rules on using public funds for preliminary research, documents show. Legal experts said the project was in conflict with the province’s housing master plan. The entire complex, with Trump-designed villas and 36 holes of golf in one of four development zones, would add 35,000 residents, theme parks and an urban commercial district.
On top of that, the project is planned in a riverfront area that flooded during a typhoon last year, and the province is dotted with unexploded ordnance from the Vietnam War. A 200-pound bomb was discovered six months ago.
Nonetheless, on May 15, just over three months after the first official filing, Vietnam’s central government ended the planning process early, to allow for investment and a groundbreaking event that would — as the letter in March had requested — align with Eric Trump’s availability and avoid “missing the window to capitalize on the support of the Donald Trump administration.”
That same day, residents rushed to the site of the groundbreaking, only to find that some construction had already begun. A black Rolls-Royce Phantom (valued at about $500,000, belonging to the Trump partner, Mr. Tam) sat near excavators, photographs showed, 100 yards from Mr. Truong’s family cemetery and families working the land.
At the groundbreaking, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh seemed sensitive to the possibility of public backlash in a country where, despite the power of a one-party state, people are not afraid to protest over being forced from where they live and work.
Raising his voice to a crowd of bankers, generals and Trump invitees in suits or shimmering stilettos, Mr. Chinh instructed the provincial authorities to ensure that those who sacrificed property would “have a new livelihood and new home better than their old ones.”
He also said the project would “receive maximum support” to “further strengthen the relationship between Vietnam and the U.S.” He promised that it would be completed in 2027.
Several lawyers and developers said that while Vietnam’s bureaucracy can be slow, the Trump project’s pace was unprecedented, illegal and unfair to other investors.
Residents said their needs were being tossed aside to please the already rich.
“They’ll have hotels, golf courses and swimming pools,” Mr. Truong said. “We’ll have nothing.”
The American Connection
The first Trump project in Vietnam got its start with the previously undisclosed efforts of two former Marine Corps platoon commanders with post-combat idealism in mind.
Billy Birdzell, 45, grew up in Larchmont, N.Y. David Lewis, 47, comes from an oil and gas family in Texas. The Iraq war welded them together forever after Aug. 5, 2004, when a rocket skipped off Mr. Lewis’s helmet and then exploded during a brutal battle in Najaf.
“He got very badly injured,” Mr. Birdzell said. “My guys, we evacuated him.”
They stayed in touch, as veterans do, and each separately developed a connection to Vietnam.
Mr. Birdzell visited in 2007, trekking to Khe Sanh and other Marine Corps landmarks before starting an investment banking firm, Horatius Group, and moving to California. In 2015, Mr. Lewis started Energy Capital Vietnam, which develops natural gas power projects.
In January 2024, they were at the Melia hotel in Hanoi, on a joint business trip, when Mr. Birdzell came down to breakfast and explained that he had been texting “a friend” who was interested in real estate in Vietnam.
“That was Eric,” Mr. Birdzell said.
In an interview, he would not say how they had met. They share a passion for guns and hunting. Mr. Birdzell is also married to a niece of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services.
Mr. Lewis, with a decade of work and connections in Vietnam, said he saw in Eric Trump a chance to bring the United States and Vietnam closer together. So, right after he heard of his interest, he reached out to Mr. Tam, the founder of the industrial construction firm Kinh Bac City, who embraced the idea immediately.
Mr. Birdzell and Mr. Lewis said that if the new development succeeded, it might be a catalyst for fostering deals and updating American perceptions about Vietnam after the war.
“It’s to elevate the Vietnamese people,” Mr. Birdzell said, “and to elevate Vietnam.”
Mr. Birdzell added that he had mainly been an intermediary, though he hoped for a role in raising capital. Mr. Lewis said he had stepped back and had no financial stake in the project.
But they have watched it advance. They attended the first meeting at Trump Tower between Mr. Tam and Eric Trump in July. They were there again on Sept. 24 to witness the signing of initial documents for the deal.
That day, the Trump family’s personal-political blend was on full display. Surrounded by Vietnamese business leaders and officials, Donald J. Trump took a break from his campaigning — just weeks before the U.S. presidential election — to play a leading role.
In a promotional photo from that day, Eric Trump sits on one side, Mr. Tam on the other. The past and future president occupies the center, smiling in front of two American flags.
Risks for U.S.-Vietnam Relations
Like those two former Marines, who saw the Trump golf course as a potential extension of America itself and this White House, Vietnam’s government sees Mr. Trump’s administration and the Trump Organization as one.
“When he wants to build a project in Vietnam, it’s under his personal brand name, and Vietnam wants to show off that connection,” said Dang Hung Vo, a former deputy minister of natural resources and environment who helped write some of the country’s land laws.
Part of the draw is national pride: Only some countries have Trump developments, and Vietnam would like to join that club. Many Vietnamese also admire Mr. Trump for his riches and resistance to China.
China is central to the U.S.-Vietnam relationship — and its current tensions.
In late April and early May, according to U.S. officials, Washington warned Vietnam that its hopes for lower tariffs were at risk because of the American perception that too many Chinese companies have been setting up in Vietnam and using the country to avoid tariffs on China.
Vietnamese officials say, in public and in private, that they hope the Trump golf project will serve as a good-will token, and further intertwine the U.S. and Vietnam.
The groundbreaking occurred just a few days after the Trump administration’s trade negotiator, Jamieson Greer, met with Vietnam’s trade minister, Nguyen Hong Dien, in South Korea. It was their first in-person meeting since Mr. Trump imposed (then paused) 46 percent tariffs on Vietnam, which sends more of its exports to the United States than anywhere else.
But as economists note, big development projects driven by political favors or optics, rather than by traditional investment calculations, often lose focus. By elevating patronage over merit, they can erode public trust.
The Trump project, initially announced as a golf community, now includes a lot more, and residents who had gathered near the groundbreaking demanded greater transparency about what it entails and how it will affect them.
Many analysts say that providing special treatment for the Trump family business undermines the efforts of To Lam, Vietnam’s top leader, to create a modern, evenhanded business environment with less corruption.
“This pushes Vietnam in the direction of more personalistic business transactions, rather than those more invested in markets, transparency and uniformity,” said Ja-Ian Chong, a political science professor at the National University of Singapore who studies Southeast Asia.
The faster things go, he added, the greater the risk of major problems. In Indonesia, the authorities halted construction on another Trump golf project this year because of water mismanagement. Mr. Tam, the Trumps’ local building partner in Vietnam, promised at the groundbreaking to continue working quickly before handing over the private golf project to the Trump Organization to operate.
For the people wondering about their land, the pace of change makes trouble look inevitable and close at hand.
“In just five days, they filled up all that farm’s land and put up that tent for the ceremony,” said Do Thi Suat, 63, watching the groundbreaking from a row of saplings. “Why are they moving so fast?”
“They will take our land away,” she said. “Then what will we do with our lives?”
Tung Ngo contributed reporting from Hanoi, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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12) Five Years After George Floyd’s Murder, the Backlash Takes Hold
The Black Lives Matter movement, kicked into high gear after Mr. Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, has given way to the politics of “white grievance” championed by President Trump.
By Clyde McGrady, May 25, 2025
Clyde McGrady covers race from Washington, D.C.
Black Lives Matter Plaza is gone from Washington, D.C. The bold yellow letters that once protested police violence are now paved over, though police killings nationally are actually up.
The Justice Department has abandoned oversight agreements for police forces accused of racial bias, even as it begins an investigation of Chicago after the city’s Black mayor praised the number of Black people in top city jobs. The U.S. refugee resettlement program is effectively shut down, but white South Africans have been granted an exception.
Sunday is the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, a searing moment of brutality that ignited what may have been the largest social movement in U.S. history. Five years later, the movement that his death helped begin may feel like it’s in reverse.
There has always been a rhythm to American social movements: forward momentum followed by backlash. Abolitionism’s triumph gave way to the Ku Klux Klan and the end of Reconstruction. Civil rights marches dissipated, as Richard M. Nixon and his “silent majority” rose to power.
But even by historical standards, the current retrenchment feels swift and stark. Five years ago, Republicans and Democrats shared the nation’s streets to denounce police violence and proclaim that Black lives matter. Now, Donald J. Trump, a president who has long championed white grievance, is setting the tone of racial discourse.
To conservatives, the shift is a necessary course correction away from violence in the streets and crippling mandates that overburden police departments.
“President Trump is tirelessly enacting policies to ensure America’s safety, prosperity, and success for all Americans,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman. “The Trump Administration is committed to stopping crime, upholding justice, protecting communities, and empowering federal, state, and local law enforcement.”
But Manisha Sinha, who teaches American history at the University of Connecticut, sees the resurgence of old power structures as intentional though not inescapable.
“I don’t think that there’s something inevitable or cyclical about it,” Dr. Sinha said. “As historians, we know that things just don’t happen on their own.”
The Black Lives Matter movement well predated Mr. Floyd’s death, emerging from the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2013 and the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York, both of which happened at the hands of the police.
But it exploded after the killing of Mr. Floyd. A half million people turned out in nearly 550 communities across the United States on a single day, June 6, 2020. Between 15 million and 26 million people participated in demonstrations or showed their support in the weeks after May 25, 2020, including Republican mainstays such as Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, and Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations.
Much has changed since then. Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Americans say “the increased focus on race and racial inequality after Floyd’s killing did not lead to changes that improved the lives of Black people.” The popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement has dipped 15 percentage points from its June 2020 peak, though a slight majority of the public still voiced support.
The toll can be personal. Selwyn Jones, 59, still speaks out about the death of his nephew, Mr. Floyd, under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. But as one of a handful of Black people in his small South Dakota town, Mr. Jones said his activism had alienated some people he once considered close.
“Those people that I thought were my friends, that I’ve known for 20 plus years, I haven’t talked to any of them in about five years,” Mr. Jones said.
Ibram X. Kendi, a professorial proponent of “antiracism,” has seen his academic star dim since 2020, when he founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University with $55 million in donations. But in an interview, he said he still was taking the long view. The “antiracist revolution” has slowed, he conceded, but it was never going to ascend unimpeded.
“I know it became particularly popular in recent decades that there’s this singular arc of racial progress,” said Dr. Kendi, who will lead the Institute for Advanced Study at Howard University. “It’s political rhetoric, but it’s actually not historical reality.”
Still, it is difficult to ignore the headwinds facing racial justice activists, especially when those gusts seem to be blowing hardest from the highest levels of American power.
Mr. Trump may have vowed in his second inaugural address to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” but the president’s belief that “anti-white” discrimination has tilted society in favor of African Americans remains a driver of administration policy. Those policies include the dismantlement of “diversity, equity and inclusion” in government, the targeting of perceived racial preferences in academia and the private sector and the rooting out of what Mr. Trump called “improper ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution.
As far back as 1989, Mr. Trump said, “if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated Black, because I really believe they do have an actual advantage.” In the 1990s, Mr. Trump expressed concern that white people losing majority status would lead to a revolution.
In an Oval Office exchange on Wednesday with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, Mr. Trump accused the leader of not doing enough to protect the white South Africans who he said were “being executed.” He also has falsely claimed a genocide against white people was taking place. During the meeting Mr. Trump referred repeatedly to “dead white people.”
For some who achieved a new level of fame after Mr. Floyd’s death, to only later receive recriminations and scorn, the last five years have been disorienting.
“I’ve tried not to take it personally,” said Dr. Kendi, whose scholarship has been impugned by Mr. Trump’s supporters and whose tenure at Boston University included charges of mismanagement that were later dismissed. “I know it has less to do with me and more to do with this attempt to make people like me, or the people who are doing the type of work that I’m doing, into these scary, harmful characters.”
But Dr. Kendi has also faced criticism from his ostensible allies that his framework for antiracist activism is unworkable and counterproductive. Dr. Kendi has said that most of his critics “either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.”
In the wake of Mr. Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter Foundation Inc. raised a staggering $79.6 million in fiscal year 2021. The next year, that figure was down to almost $8.5 million. By 2023, it was about $4.7 million, with expenses of $10.8 million, according to records tracked by the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica. Allegations of mismanagement have ricocheted between the foundation and its funders, which harmed the reputation of the movement’s leaders.
Historians note that even when social movements are met with backlash, change is never fully rolled back. Despite the violence and terror used by southern states to suppress full Black citizenship in the post-Reconstruction era, slavery was not reinstituted.
And Black activism is American activism, said Dr. Steven Hahn, a professor at New York University, even if some of the white allies who once stood shoulder to shoulder with Black protesters have turned away,
“You wouldn’t have democracy in this country, or at least a sense of a robust democracy without Black people and their own struggles,” he said. “They were the most committed to real democracy that was not bound by exceptions and exclusions.”
But Professor Hahn expressed real worry.
“People get silenced, and then before you know it,” he said, “we’re really back at a really bad square one.”
The police reform movement that was sparked by Mr. Floyd’s murder has had lasting impacts. Many police departments still require officers to wear body cameras. No-knock warrants are banned in some areas. Data collection on police brutality has been enhanced.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to eradicate D.E.I., which critics say has become a catchall term to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male, is beginning to meet grass roots resistance. On Wednesday, the big-box retailer Target reported a drop in foot traffic and sales, a response in part to its retreat from diversity policies, in part to tariff anxiety. The company’s sales fell 3.8 percent last quartered compared with the same quarter a year ago.
On the flip side of that is Michael Green, who like many was moved by the protests of 2020. A self-described “flag nerd,” Mr. Green thought marchers should have proper banners that could match the iconography of Mr. Trump’s movement, so he started Flags for Good, which makes signage for progressive causes, including Black Lives Matter.
A company once run out of a spare bedroom has now become a career. Items in the Black Lives Matter section in particular have seen a huge leap in sales that, he said, was driven by Mr. Trump’s re-election.
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13) Trump Showed Images of ‘Genocide’ in South Africa. One Was From the War in Congo.
During a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, President Trump presented images, videos and news clippings that he said were evidence of genocide in South Africa. Fact-checking debunks the claims.
By Lynsey Chutel and Monika Cvorak, May 23, 2025
President Cyril Ramaphosa and other South Africans met with President Trump at the Oval Office on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
In his meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa on Wednesday, President Trump claimed white South African farmers were victims of genocide and, to support that assertion, he held up an image that he said was from South Africa and which he claimed showed some of those victims being buried. The Reuters news agency said Friday that the photos were actually of the conflict in eastern Congo. That was not the only false claim he made.
Here’s a look at some of the most glaring misinformation from the contentious meeting.
A Misrepresented Image
During the encounter, Mr. Trump presented a stack of articles and blog posts as evidence of the persecution of white farmers in South Africa. He shuffled through them as Mr. Ramaphosa squinted at the pages, trying to see what they said. One of the images Mr. Trump held up showed medical workers in white protective clothing lifting body bags.
“Look, here’s burial sites all over the place,” Mr. Trump said, grasping up a copy of the blog post. “These are white farmers that are being buried.”
The Reuters news agency said on Friday that the image was taken from its recent exclusive video report documenting the aftermath of fighting between Congolese troops and fighters from the M23 rebel group in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The image was later published on the website of American Thinker, a conservative online magazine, with an article that captioned it only as a “YouTube screen grab.”
The White House did not respond to a query from Reuters about the image.
A Controversial Chant
Mr. Trump had aides dim the lights in the Oval Office and showed a video during the meeting that featured the booming voice of a rabble-rousing South African opposition politician known for controversial comments, Julius Malema.
Along with a montage collected from years of interviews, the video also showed Mr. Malema, who is Black, shouting an apartheid-era chant — “Kill the Boer!” “Kill the farmer!” — at a packed stadium rally for his party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, adding a sound meant to imitate a gun.
Mr. Malema has used the song repeatedly to rile up his audiences and roil his political enemies. The Boers in the chant refer to Afrikaners, the descendants of the European settlers, mostly Dutch, German and French, who arrived in South Africa during colonialism. The chant was born at a time when Black South Africans were fighting the country’s violent, racist apartheid government. After the end of apartheid in 1994, the African National Congress transitioned from a liberation movement to South Africa’s governing party, and it distanced itself from the song.
Mr. Malema, however, has held on to it as part of his arsenal of incendiary comments to portray himself and his party as radical revolutionaries.
AfriForum, a group that represents the interests of Afrikaners, took Mr. Malema to court in 2011 and 2022 seeking to block him from singing the song. Initially, a judge ruled that the song was hate speech, but Mr. Malema continued.
Then in 2022, a judge ruled that AfriForum had “failed to show that the lyrics in the songs could reasonably be construed to demonstrate a clear intention to harm or incite to harm and propagate hatred.”
Groups that claim Afrikaners are the victims of violent persecution in South Africa have seized on Mr. Malema’s comments and songs, even as his own party’s popularity dims.
In South Africa, the English-language outlet News 24 traced the video Mr. Trump played to a social media account known for spreading misinformation. The investigative report found that Elon Musk had reposted the same video at least twice on X, the social media platform he owns.
A Misconstrued Memorial
In the video Mr. Trump played, an aerial shot shows dozens of cars driving slowly on a rural road lined on both sides with white crosses.
Mr. Trump described the convoy of cars as people coming to pay respects to their dead loved ones. “It’s a terrible sight,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Those people were all killed.”
“Have they told you where that is, Mr. President?” Mr. Ramaphosa asks, exchanging bewildered looks with other members of the South African delegation. “I’d like to know where that is because this I’ve never seen.”
“I mean, it’s in South Africa,” Mr. Trump responded.
A New York Times analysis found that the footage showed a memorial procession for a white couple who had been killed on their farm that was held on Sept. 5, 2020, near the town of Newcastle, in South Africa’s eastern KwaZulu-Natal province. And the white crosses were installed as symbols and removed after the procession. They are frequently used by demonstrators who are often, but not always, farmers protesting what they say is police inaction around murders and crime in rural areas.
These protests have, at times, been hijacked by groups peddling the idea that white farmers are the victims of targeted killings that they describe as a “white genocide” in South Africa.
Despite statistics debunking this myth, the idea has taken root among conspiratorial far right groups on the internet. It has also made its way to the White House, where it has shaped foreign policy and upended refugee norms after Mr. Trump offered expedited asylum to white Afrikaners.
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14) Israeli Airstrike Kills at Least 7 of a Doctor’s Children, Gaza Officials Say
Two more children were missing, while her husband and one other child were injured in the strike on Friday, the officials said. Israel said it was checking if it had harmed “uninvolved civilians.”
By Aaron Boxerman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, May 25, 2025
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel
The children’s father, Hamdi al-Najjar, suffered burns and shrapnel wounds and was being treated at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza on Saturday. Credit...Hussam Al-Masri/Reuters
It began on Friday afternoon with an immense boom that residents say reverberated throughout the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.
Alaa al-Najjar, a pediatric physician, was at work at the city’s Nasser Hospital when she heard her neighborhood south of the city had been hit in an Israeli airstrike. By the time she arrived, emergency workers were pulling out the bodies of her children, said Ali al-Najjar, her brother-in-law, who had also rushed to the scene.
“We had pulled out three charred bodies and were pulling out the fourth,” said Mr. al-Najjar. “She recognized them immediately.”
At least seven of the Najjar family’s 10 children were killed, according to Gaza health officials and the family. Two remain missing, presumed dead under the rubble of their home, according to Ali al-Najjar and Mohammad al-Najjar, the nephew of Dr. Najjar’s husband.
The building next door had been storing car tires, said Ali al-Najjar, and they went up in flames in the blast. The fire quickly spread to the Najjars’ home, he said.
They were the latest casualties in a renewed round of fighting between Israel and Hamas after more than a year and a half of full-blown war. The Israeli military has escalated its airstrikes across the enclave in recent weeks and threatened a major ground assault.
The New York Times provided the approximate time and coordinates of the strike to the Israeli military. In response, the military said it had “struck a number of suspects” in a structure near Israeli forces in Khan Younis but was still checking if “uninvolved civilians were harmed.”
There were believed to be only two survivors, the Gaza officials said. Hamdi al-Najjar, the doctor’s husband, remains in critical condition with severe brain injuries, while one of their children, Adam, was in moderate condition, said Ahmed al-Farra, the head of the pediatric care ward at Nasser Hospital. Dr. al-Farra backed the family’s account of the deaths of the children in the strike.
The deadliest war in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel’s battle against Hamas has killed more than 50,000 people in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but its published casualty lists include thousands of children.
Hamas began the war on Oct. 7, 2023, with a surprise attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and saw roughly 250 others taken back to Gaza as hostages. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has vowed that the latest offensive will finally lead to the defeat of Hamas, the militant group that has long run Gaza.
But critics — including many in Israel — say the war appears set to drag on with no clear end in sight. In the meantime, the already immense civilian toll in Gaza is rising.
An investigation by The New York Times published last year found that Israel changed its rules of engagement at the start of the war, raising the number of civilians it deemed permissible to endanger in strikes on military targets.
The Israeli military has ordered many Palestinians living near Khan Younis to flee their homes or face potentially deadly Israeli attacks. Israeli officials say the measures show how committed they are to protecting Gaza’s civilians in a complex war.
The evacuation orders included the neighborhood of Qizan al-Najjar — a southern suburb of Khan Younis — where the Najjar family lived.
“The Khan Younis area is a dangerous war zone. Before beginning operations there, the I.D.F. evacuated civilians from this area for their own safety,” the Israeli military said in a written response to a request by The New York Times for confirmation of the strike Friday, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.
But the Najjars had stayed in their home nonetheless, feeling that they could not move their 10 children — including a baby — into a crowded tent camp without any services, said Ali al-Najjar.
Nor were they convinced that anywhere else in Khan Younis would be safer, he added. The Israeli military has occasionally struck areas designated as humanitarian zones, arguing that Palestinian militants were operating from within. Hamas fighters have also hidden under residential neighborhoods in Gaza, storing their weapons in tunnels, houses, mosques and other places.
“At home, they had water, they had solar panels with electricity,” Mr. al-Najjar said.
Alaa al-Najjar had worked at Nasser Hospital for about a decade as a pediatrician, said Dr. al-Farra, who oversaw her work in the ward. He described her as a “kind person” who “treated the children with a blend of maternal care and professional expertise.”
Her husband is also a doctor. He occasionally wrote social media posts in which he appeared to praise Hamas and the Oct. 7 attacks. His family denied that he had any formal connection to the armed group.
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15) New Gaza Aid Plan, Bypassing U.N. and Billed as Neutral, Originated in Israel
Foreign contractors are set to carry out a contentious new food aid system in Gaza, displacing experienced aid agencies like the United Nations. It was conceived and largely developed by Israelis as a way to undermine Hamas.
By Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman and Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, May 24, 2025
“Group members promoted the idea of distributing aid from pockets of territory occupied by the Israeli military and out of Hamas’s reach. The Israelis wanted to circumvent the United Nations, but did not want Israel to take on the responsibility of caring for Gaza’s roughly two million residents. As time went on, they settled on the idea of private contractors managing food distribution, the people familiar with the meetings said. Writing in a journal published by the Israeli military last July, Mr. HaCohen proposed a version of the plan now set to be implemented. ‘To meet the war’s goals over the long term, Israel needs to develop tools that will pull the rug out from under the Hamas movement and not just (temporarily) dismantle the Hamas government,’ Mr. HaCohen wrote. ‘Pulling the rug out will come once Israel begins to work directly with the civilian population, manages the distribution of aid itself, and begins to take responsibility for building the ‘day-after.’”
Displaced people at a charity food kitchen in Gaza City on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Throughout the war in Gaza, U.N. agencies and experienced aid groups have overseen the distribution of food aid in the territory. Now, Israel is set to transfer that responsibility to a handful of newly formed private organizations with obscure histories and unknown financial backers.
Supporters of the project describe it as an independent and neutral initiative run mainly by American contractors. The main group providing security is run by Philip F. Reilly, a former senior C.I.A. officer, and a fund-raising group is headed by Jake Wood, a former U.S. Marine, who said in an interview that the system would be phased in soon.
Announcing the arrangement in early May, Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said it was “wholly inaccurate” to call it “an Israeli plan.”
But the project is an Israeli brainchild, first proposed by Israeli officials in the earliest weeks of the war, according to Israeli officials, people involved in the initiative and others familiar with its conception, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak more freely of the initiative.
The New York Times found that the broad contours of the plan were first discussed in late 2023, at private meetings of like-minded officials, military officers and business people with close ties to the Israeli government.
The group called itself the Mikveh Yisrael Forum, after a college where members convened in December 2023. Its leading figures gradually settled on the idea of hiring private contractors to distribute food in Gaza, circumventing the United Nations. Throughout 2024, they then fostered support among Israel’s political leaders and some military commanders, and began to develop it with foreign contractors, principally Mr. Reilly.
The plan was designed to undermine Hamas’s control of Gaza, prevent food from falling into militants’ hands or the black market, and bypass the United Nations, which Israeli officials do not trust and have accused of anti-Israeli bias. Israeli officials argued, too, that their plan would move distribution out of chaotic and lawless areas into zones under Israeli military control.
U.N. officials pushed back, contending that the plan would restrict food aid to limited parts of Gaza, and warning that it could endanger civilians by forcing them to walk for miles, across Israeli military lines, to reach food. The U.N. also warns that the system could facilitate an Israeli plan to displace civilians out of northern Gaza, since the initial distribution sites would only be in the south.
Under the new plan, Mr. Reilly’s group, Safe Reach Solutions, and other security firms would initially secure four distribution sites in parts of southern Gaza under Israeli military control, Mr. Wood said. His nonprofit, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, will finance the arrangement, which would gradually replace a U.N.-run system in which civilians collect food from hundreds of places across Gaza.
Mr. Wood, the foundation’s executive director, said in an interview that the system is “imperfect,” but added, “The reality is, any food that is getting into Gaza today is more food than got into Gaza yesterday.”
He said his foundation had been endowed with “the necessary autonomy to operate independently,” and that it had no funding from Israel. As an example, he said he had pushed for new sites to be built in the north, and added, “I would participate in no plan in any capacity if it was an extension of an I.D.F. plan or an Israeli government plan to forcibly dislocate people anywhere within Gaza.”
The project’s genesis was in the chaotic aftermath of Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, when hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians rejoined the military as reservists, many of them reaching positions of influence.
That process created a huge cohort of Israelis with one foot in the military and another in civilian life, blurring the boundary between the two worlds. It fostered unlikely connections and conversations between career officers and influential part-timers, as well as their business associates.
An informal network formed among like-minded officials, officers, reservists and business people who believed the Israeli military and government lacked a strategy for the future of Gaza — and set out to develop one themselves.
That group, some of the people interviewed for this article said, included Yotam HaCohen, a strategic consultant who joined COGAT, the military department that oversees aid delivery to Gaza; Liran Tancman, a well-connected tech investor who also joined COGAT; and Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli-American venture capitalist who remained outside the military.
Mr. HaCohen soon became an assistant to Brig. Gen. Roman Goffman, a senior COGAT commander who is now the prime minister’s military adviser.
In December 2023, Mr. HaCohen, Mr. Tancman and Mr. Eisenberg helped lead a brainstorming session with both officials and influential civilians at the college near Tel Aviv, according to people with knowledge of it. Its members would later meet in other venues, including Mr. Eisenberg’s Jerusalem home.
Mr. Eisenberg confirmed he had joined meetings about these ideas with both Israeli officials and private individuals but said in a statement that so many people, including U.S. officials, had been involved that “it is hard to know exactly how this all emerged.” A representative for Mr. HaCohen’s and Mr. Tancman’s group declined to comment.
At the meetings, people familiar with them said, the group discussed how difficult it would be to defeat Hamas through military force alone, and sought ways of undermining Hamas’s control of Gaza’s civilians, including through aid.
Group members promoted the idea of distributing aid from pockets of territory occupied by the Israeli military and out of Hamas’s reach. The Israelis wanted to circumvent the United Nations, but did not want Israel to take on the responsibility of caring for Gaza’s roughly two million residents. As time went on, they settled on the idea of private contractors managing food distribution, the people familiar with the meetings said.
Writing in a journal published by the Israeli military last July, Mr. HaCohen proposed a version of the plan now set to be implemented.
“To meet the war’s goals over the long term, Israel needs to develop tools that will pull the rug out from under the Hamas movement and not just (temporarily) dismantle the Hamas government,” Mr. HaCohen wrote. “Pulling the rug out will come once Israel begins to work directly with the civilian population, manages the distribution of aid itself, and begins to take responsibility for building the ‘day-after.’”
Lamenting how Israel was “at the mercy” of traditional aid agencies, Mr. HaCohen said that “non-state contractor companies must be employed” to enact the plan, including private, non-Israeli contractors “in the areas of security, aid and services.” He added that he had developed these ideas while serving as General Goffman’s assistant, and thanked Mr. Tancman and the Mikveh Yisrael Forum for their help.
By this time, Israeli officials, including Mr. HaCohen and Mr. Tancman, had begun meeting with Mr. Reilly and promoting him to Israel’s military and political leadership, some of the people familiar with the meetings said. Other private contractors pitched their services, but the former C.I.A. officer gradually emerged as Israel’s preferred partner.
In a brief interview, Mr. Reilly said he began to discuss Gaza aid with Israeli civilians in early 2024, and confirmed meeting Mr. Eisenberg and Mr. Tancman later in the year.
As a young C.I.A. operative in the 1980s, Mr. Reilly had helped to train the Contras, right-wing militias fighting Nicaragua’s Marxist government, according to a 2022 podcast interview. Two decades later, he was one of the first U.S. agents to land in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the interview. He became the C.I.A. station chief in Kabul, then left to work as a private security expert for groups including Orbis, a Virginia-based consulting firm.
It was in this capacity that Mr. Reilly liaised with Israeli military and intelligence officials to develop new models for food distribution in Gaza, according to a document produced by Orbis. In late 2024, while working for Orbis, Mr. Reilly worked on a study that outlined a more detailed version of the plan to outsource food aid delivery to private companies and foundations, according to the document.
Last November, Mr. Reilly’s representatives registered two such entities in the United States, S.R.S. and G.H.F., according to two people familiar with the move.
S.R.S. began to operate in Gaza in January 2025, with Mr. Reilly as chief executive. During a cease-fire that ran from January until March, the firm’s contractors staffed a central Gaza checkpoint that screened Palestinian cars for weapons. In a statement, S.R.S. said it had no Israeli shareholders or interests. Still, the effort was seen in Israel as a small-scale trial for a future security model that could be rolled out more widely.
Mr. Wood said S.R.S. is now the main security company chosen to secure the food distribution sites in southern Gaza, essentially implementing the ideas articulated by Mr. HaCohen and Mr. Reilly.
Mr. Wood said the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a nonprofit organization that will hire S.R.S. and raise the money to pay for its operations.
The foundation now operates at “arm’s length” from S.R.S., said Mr. Wood. But one lawyer, James H. Cundiff, registered both organizations in the United States, and until this month the two groups shared the same spokeswoman. Mr. Cundiff did not reply to requests for comment.
At least two other groups named the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation have been registered, one in the United States and another in Switzerland. A spokesman for Mr. Wood’s foundation said that one established in February in Delaware was his.
It is unclear who is financing the foundation’s enormous aid operation, which aims to pay for food for roughly 1 million people, roughly half of Gaza’s population. It would also involve roughly one thousand armed security guards, according to the Orbis document.
Mr. Wood said that the foundation had received a small amount of seed funding from non-Israeli businessmen, but declined to name them or the people had appointed him.
Later, the foundation said in a statement that a Western European country had donated over $100 million for its future operations, but declined to name the country.
Johnatan Reiss and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting. Jack Begg contributed research.
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