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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) Israel Intercepts Gaza-Bound Aid Ship With Greta Thunberg Aboard
Israel had vowed to prevent the vessel from reaching Gaza, saying its military would use “any means necessary” to stop it from breaching a naval blockade.
By Isabel Kershner and Ephrat Livni, Published June 8, 2025, Updated June 9, 2025
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem and Ephrat Livni from Washington, D.C.
“'We are doing this because, no matter what odds we are against, we have to keep trying,' Ms. Thunberg said last week. 'Because the moment we stop trying is when we lose our humanity. And no matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s not even near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the live-streamed genocide.'”
Greta Thunberg and members of the crew of the Madleen in Catania, Italy, ahead of their departure. Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images
The Israeli Foreign Ministry said early on Monday morning that a Gaza-bound ship carrying a dozen pro-Palestinian activists and some aid had been diverted toward Israeli shores and that its passengers were expected to return to their home countries.
Israel had vowed on Sunday to prevent the ship from reaching Gaza, saying its military would use “any means necessary” to stop it from breaching an Israeli naval blockade of the enclave.
The civilian ship, called the Madleen, has been operating under the auspices of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, an international grass-roots campaign that opposes the nearly two-decade-old blockade of Gaza. The ship set sail from Sicily on June 1. The passengers included the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament.
“The ‘selfie yacht’ of the ‘celebrities’ is safely making its way to the shores of Israel,” the Israeli foreign ministry wrote on social media on Monday. It accused “Greta and others” of attempting “to stage a media provocation whose sole purpose was to gain publicity.” The ministry later posted video of what it said were the passengers, who were wearing life jackets and being offered sandwiches and water.
The posts came soon after the Freedom Flotilla Coalition announced that alarms had sounded and drones were over the ship, then said it had lost contact with the Madleen. The group said the activists had been “kidnapped” by the Israeli military
Surveillance footage recorded early Monday aboard the Madleen shows people in the cockpit wearing orange life vests as the bright lights of another vessel approach. People can then be seen boarding the Madleen.
Israel imposed its blockade on Gaza, with Egypt’s help, after Hamas, the Islamic militant group, took over the coastal strip in 2007. Israeli officials have said the blockade is necessary to prevent weapons from being smuggled into the enclave.
Conditions in Gaza have worsened dramatically in the 20 months of war since the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023. Israel recently barred the entry of humanitarian aid into the territory for 80 days, bringing the population to the brink of famine, according to international aid organizations. It has since supported an aid delivery system that has been marred by violence and shunned by humanitarian groups.
The Madleen was carrying only a symbolic amount of humanitarian assistance — an amount the Israeli foreign ministry dismissed as “tiny” in its statement, and “less than a single truckload of aid.”
The coalition had said in a statement that it was bringing urgently needed goods, including baby formula, flour, rice, diapers, medical supplies and children’s prosthetics.
Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said on Sunday that he had instructed the country’s military to prevent the vessel from reaching Gaza.
In a blunt statement, he said, “To Greta the antisemite and her friends, propagandists for Hamas — I say clearly: You would do well to turn back, because you won’t get to Gaza. Israel will act against any attempt to breach the blockade or aid terrorist organizations by sea, air or land.”
Ms. Thunberg has been an outspoken opponent of Israel’s blockade and its conduct of the war.
“We are doing this because, no matter what odds we are against, we have to keep trying,” Ms. Thunberg said last week. “Because the moment we stop trying is when we lose our humanity. And no matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s not even near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the live-streamed genocide.”
Israel’s military has blocked past attempts by pro-Palestinian activists to bring aid to Gaza by sea, including by force. In 2010, nine passengers aboard the Mavi Marmara, part of a flotilla carrying aid from Turkey to Gaza, were killed in an Israeli commando raid, stirring international outrage and damaging Turkish-Israeli relations. A 10th passenger died from his wounds years later.
Israel said at the time that its soldiers, some of whom had rappelled onto the ship from helicopters, came under ambush and were attacked with clubs, metal rods and knives.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition has described the interception of the Mavi Marmara as “an unlawful and deadly attack” and said the Madleen’s mission was “a continuation of that legacy — a refusal to surrender to silence, fear, or complicity” in the face of the siege of Gaza.
Another recent attempt by the coalition to challenge the blockade was also thwarted. A ship called Conscience left Tunisia in late April carrying human rights activists and aid and was scheduled to stop in Malta to pick up more people, including Ms. Thunberg. But the ship was rocked by explosions off the coast of Malta, setting it on fire.
The passengers and crew were not harmed, but the mission was abandoned.
In recent weeks, Israel has backed a new aid delivery system that it says is aimed at getting help to Palestinians without Hamas being able to divert or benefit from it.
The effort got off to a troubled start as Israeli forces fired at hungry and desperate Palestinians on their way to collect boxes of food at a distribution site in southern Gaza, killing and wounding scores of them.
The distribution sites are being operated by American security contractors under the auspices of a new organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The effort has been boycotted by the United Nations and other prominent aid groups, which accuse Israel of using aid as a weapon.
The foundation said it had distributed more than 1.1 million meals on Sunday across three distribution sites. In addition, the group said it had delivered 11 truckloads of food directly to community leaders through local merchants as part of a pilot project aimed at easing crowding at the existing distribution points.
On Saturday, the foundation said it was “impossible to proceed” with the distribution of aid that day, accusing Hamas of threatening its operations. A group spokesman on Sunday shared a written warning he said local staff members had received threatening them with “serious consequences” if they continued working for the program.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel, and Jiawei Wang from Seoul.
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2) The Tunnel That Leads Underneath a Hospital in Southern Gaza
To Israelis, the location of an underground passageway highlights Hamas’s abuse of civilians. To Palestinians, Israel’s decision to target it highlights Israel’s own disregard for civilian life.
By Patrick Kingsley, June 8, 2025
Patrick Kingsley joined a group of journalists brought by the Israeli military to the hospital on Sunday. As a condition for joining the controlled tour, The New York Times agreed not to photograph most soldiers’ faces or publish geographic details that would put them in immediate physical danger.
The room in which Muhammad Sinwar and four other militants are said to have died. Patrick Kingsley/The New York Times
Patrick Kingsley joined a group of journalists brought by the Israeli military to the hospital on Sunday. As a condition for joining the controlled tour, The New York Times agreed not to photograph most soldiers’ faces or publish geographic details that would put them in immediate physical danger.
Two feet wide and less than six feet tall, the tunnel led deep beneath a major hospital in southern Gaza.
The underground air bore the stench of what smelled like human remains. After walking some 40 yards along the tunnel, we found the likely cause.
In a tiny room that the tunnel led to, the floor was stained with blood. It was here, according to the Israeli military, that Muhammad Sinwar — one of Hamas’s top militant commanders — was killed last month after a nearby barrage of Israeli strikes.
What we saw in that dark and narrow tunnel is one of the war’s biggest Rorschach tests, the embodiment of a broader narrative battle between Israelis and Palestinians over how the conflict should be portrayed.
The military escorted a reporter from The New York Times to the tunnel on Sunday afternoon, as part of a brief and controlled visit for international journalists that the Israelis hoped would prove that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure as a shield for militant activity.
To Palestinians, Israel’s attack on, and subsequent capture of, the hospital compound highlighted its own disregard for civilian activity.
Last month, the military ordered the hospital’s staff and patients to leave the compound, along with the residents of the surrounding neighborhoods. Then, officials said, they bored a huge hole, some 10 yards deep, in a courtyard within the hospital grounds. Soldiers used that hole to gain access to the tunnel and retrieve Mr. Sinwar’s body, and they later escorted journalists there so we could see what they called his final hiding place.
There are no known entrances to the tunnel within the hospital itself, so we lowered ourselves into the Israeli-made cavity using a rope. To join this controlled tour, The Times agreed not to photograph most soldiers’ faces or publish geographic details that would put them in immediate physical danger.
To the Israelis who brought us there, this hiding place — directly underneath the emergency department of the European Gaza Hospital — is emblematic of how Hamas has consistently endangered civilians, and broken international law, by directing its military operations from the cover of hospitals and schools. Hamas has also dug tunnels underneath Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City and a United Nations complex elsewhere in that city.
“We were dragged by Hamas to this point,” Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, the chief Israeli military spokesman, said at the hospital on Sunday afternoon. “If they weren’t building their infrastructure under the hospitals, we wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t attack this hospital.”
General Defrin said that Israel had tried to minimize damage to the hospital by striking the area around its buildings, without a direct hit on the medical facilities themselves. “The aim was not to damage the hospital and, as much as we could, to avoid collateral damage,” he said.
To the Palestinians who were forced from here, the Israeli attack on Mr. Sinwar embodied Israel’s willingness to prioritize the destruction of Hamas over the protection of civilian life and infrastructure, particularly the health system.
According to the World Health Organization, Israel has conducted at least 686 attacks on health facilities in Gaza since the start of the war, damaging at least 33 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals. Many, like the European Gaza Hospital, are now out of service, fueling accusations from rights groups and foreign governments — strongly denied by the Israelis — that Israel is engaged in genocide, in part by wrecking the Palestinian health system.
“It’s morally and legally unacceptable, but Israel thinks it is above the law,” Dr. Salah al-Hams, the hospital spokesman, said in a phone interview from another part of southern Gaza.
Though Israel targeted the periphery of the hospital site, leaving the hospital buildings standing, Dr. al-Hams said the strikes had wounded 10 people within the compound, damaged its water and sewage systems and dislodged part of its roof. It killed 23 people in buildings beyond its perimeter, he said, 17 more than were reported the day of the attack.
The tremors caused by the strikes were like an “earthquake,” Dr. al-Hams said.
Dr. al-Hams said he had been unaware of any tunnels beneath the hospital. Even if they were there, he said: “This does not justify the attack. Israel should have found other ways to eliminate any wanted commander. There were a thousand other ways to do it.”
Our journey to the hospital revealed much about the current dynamics of the war in Gaza.
In a roughly 20-minute ride from the Israeli border, we saw no Palestinians — the result of Israel’s decision to order the residents of southern Gaza to abandon their homes and head west to the sea. Many buildings were simply piles of rubble, destroyed either by Israeli strikes and demolitions or Hamas’s booby-traps. Here and there, some buildings survived, more or less intact; on one balcony, someone had left a tidy line of potted cactuses.
We drove in open-top jeeps, a sign that across this swath of southeastern Gaza, the Israeli military no longer fears being ambushed by Hamas fighters. Until at least the Salah al-Din highway, the territory’s main north-south artery, the Israeli military seemed to be in complete command after the expansion of its ground campaign in March.
The European Gaza Hospital and the tunnel beneath it are among the places that now appear to be exclusively under Israeli control.
Under the laws of war, a medical facility is considered a protected site that can be attacked only in very rare cases. If one side uses the site for military purposes, that may make it a legitimate target, but only if the risk to civilians is proportional to the military advantage created by the attack.
The Israeli military said it had tried to limit harm to civilians by striking only around the edges of the hospital compound. But international legal experts said that any assessment of the strike’s legality needed also to take into account its effect on the wider health system in southern Gaza.
In a territory where many hospitals are already not operational, experts said, it is harder to find legal justification for strikes that put the remaining hospitals out of service, even if militants hide beneath them.
When we entered the tunnel on Sunday, we found it almost entirely intact. The crammed room where Mr. Sinwar and four fellow militants were said to have died was stained with blood, but its walls appeared undamaged. The mattresses, clothes and bedsheets did not appear to have been dislodged by the explosions, and an Israeli rifle — stolen earlier in the war, the soldiers said — dangled from a hook in the corner
It was not immediately clear how Mr. Sinwar was killed, and General Defrin said he could not provide a definitive answer. He suggested that Mr. Sinwar and his allies may have suffocated in the aftermath of the strikes or been knocked over by a shock wave unleashed by explosions.
If Mr. Sinwar was intentionally poisoned by gases released by such explosions, it would raise legal questions, experts on international law said.
“It would be an unlawful use of a conventional bomb — a generally lawful weapon — if the intent is to kill with the asphyxiating gases released by that bomb,” said Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the U.S. Defense Department and an analyst at the International Crisis Group.
General Defrin denied any such intent. “This is something that I have to emphasize here, as a Jew first and then as a human being: We don’t use gas as weapons,” he said.
In other tunnels discovered by the Israeli military, soldiers have used Palestinians as human shields, sending them on ahead to scour for traps.
The general denied the practice. The tunnel was excavated by Israelis, he said.
Reporting was contributed by Iyad Abuheweila from Istanbul; Ameera Harouda from Doha, Qatar; Natan Odenheimer from Jerusalem and Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot, Israel.
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3) It May Feel Like the 1960s. But It’s Worse.
By Serge Schmemann, June 9, 2025
Mr. Schmemann, an Opinion writer, is a former Moscow bureau chief of The Times.
Students protest Columbia University’s policy of “racism and support for imperialism” in New York, 1968. Credit...The Associated Press
Many of us who lived through the 1960s are tempted to seek similarities between then and now. We see the acute polarization of the nation, the warring ideologies, the presidents who abuse power, the sense of America losing its bearing. Where President Richard Nixon’s silent majority battled flower power and “commies,” President Trump’s MAGA assails wokeness and the radical left. Where students closed down campuses over Vietnam, students now — or at least a year ago — rose up over Gaza.
The list could go on. But it soon becomes evident that there are numerous differences. Some are obvious: the revolutionary advances over the past six decades in technology and communication, especially the prevalence of social media and smartphones; the absence of a Cold War to clearly define global relationships and a draft to threaten young people with death in a distant jungle.
For me, though, the big difference is in the spirit of the times, the sense back then that change was possible, and today that doors are being closed.
For all their passion and violence, the 1960s were an eruption of idealism, a youth-led rebellion against a misguided war and the racism and misogyny lurking in the placid suburbs and Made in the U.S.A. prosperity of the ’50s. There was a conviction in the songs, love-ins, protests and even mind-bending drugs that the world could be made better. “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” sang Bob Dylan in the hymn of that era, while John Lennon pictured its utopia: “Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too.”
The student protests in the spring of 2024 against the carnage in Gaza, by contrast, never ignited a broader movement and petered out, mired in accusations of antisemitism and the humiliation of university leaders. The momentum was with Mr. Trump and his MAGA campaign, and its goal was in effect to reverse the ’60s gains — to undo the civil rights, sexual tolerance, environmental protection, campus activism and all the other themes and values clustered under the banner of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Mr. Trump’s appeal to a broad swath of America is more complex than that, of course. D.E.I. sometimes deserved the criticism; people who voted for Mr. Trump had some valid grievances, and many of them do not necessarily support his angry, personal and often potentially illegal assaults on varying targets, including immigrants and Harvard. But the unmistakable message in “Make America Great Again” is that the forces of change unleashed in the ’60s are anti-American and needed to be expunged in order to restore the “real” America — one of Christian values, respectful students, public order and blinders on racial discrimination, inequality and other blemishes.
That rosy past may be just as illusory as “all the people livin’ life in peace,” as imagined by Mr. Lennon. But if dreams shape a generation, then those of almost half a million of my contemporaries (but not me, alas) who gathered for the legendary Woodstock rock festival in August 1969 for three days of peace and music are far more inspiring than a longing to return to Pleasantville.
The search for parallels between then and now often includes the juxtaposition of Mr. Trump and Mr. Nixon, the president often relegated in popular memory — unfairly, I believe — to a symbol of what the ’60s rose up against. There are tempting similarities. Scandal followed Mr. Nixon throughout his career, as it has Mr. Trump. Both scrambled back to the forefront of politics — Mr. Nixon until he was felled by Watergate. (“He left. I don’t leave. A big difference,” is Mr. Trump’s take.) Both positioned themselves as victims of liberal elites and champions of a silent majority; both maintained an enemies list of people and institutions they wanted to punish.
Curiously, the two men even had more than a decade-long correspondence in the 1980s and early ’90s, when both were in New York, Mr. Nixon in retirement and Mr. Trump a real estate developer on the rise. Exhibited at Mr. Nixon’s presidential library, the letters include one in which Mr. Trump writes that he believes Mr. Nixon to be “one of this country’s great men”; in another, the older man commiserates with a “massive media attack” on the younger one’s business problems.
But the differences are far greater than the similarities. Mr. Nixon entered the fray only at the tail end of the ’60s — he was inaugurated in January 1969. His predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, were far more responsible for the upheavals of that time. The idealism of “ask not what your country can do for you” and the Great Society was on their watch, as was the tragedy of the Vietnam War.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, defines what is happening today. The troubles of the country and world, whether the Gaza protests, the war in Ukraine or unchecked immigration, may predate his second term, but the way he has incorporated them into his broad assault on American institutions and values stamps this era with his brand.
Mr. Nixon never came close to anything of the sort. He was a lifelong politician, a skillful lawyer and a masterful player on the geopolitical chess board. I was fortunate to meet him in Moscow, when I was the Times bureau chief and he an elder statesman invited to address Russian students, and I remember how impressed I was by the depth and sophistication of his understanding of Russian history and politics. Tom Wicker, a Times columnist in the Nixon era, wrote in a study of the Nixon presidency that Watergate obscured “the achievements of a president who often responded to the pressures of his time with knowledge and skill and sometimes even with courage — qualities the American people apparently don’t find in most of their leaders today.”
The same cannot be said of Mr. Trump, a wheeler-dealer with seemingly little understanding of government and the Constitution who values instinct above expertise, doesn’t know shame or embarrassment, views foreign affairs as a zero-sum game in which America is the dunce, and values sycophancy over competence. The Trump era is still upon us, of course, so any comparison with eras past must be conditional.
Any search for lost time, whether the ’60s, ’50s or any other era, is of dubious value. Every age has its own array of peculiarities, conditions and fashions, and memory is too apt to idealize the good or expunge the bad to be a reliable judge. Maybe what I’ve written above is a good example of that. But if there is any value to identifying the disruptive actions of the Trump administration as the antithesis of the movement for change six decades ago, it is in asking which of the two really tried to make America great.
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4) Marines Deployed to L.A. After Night of Muted Protests
President Trump ordered 700 Marines to Los Angeles as demonstrations against his immigration crackdown took place there and in other U.S. cities. California’s governor called the deployment “a blatant abuse of power.”
By Jesus Jiménez, Orlando Mayorquín, Mimi Dwyer, Francesca Regalado and John Yoon, June 10, 2025
![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/06/10/multimedia/10immigration-protests-pinned-tflv/10immigration-protests-pinned-tflv-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
Monday, June 9, 2025
Scattered protests in cities around the country against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown led to arrests overnight, but were relatively small and mostly peaceful, as hundreds of Marines were expected to take up positions in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
The Trump administration was planning to deploy 700 Marines to the Los Angeles area alongside about 4,000 National Guard troops, moves that have enraged Democratic leaders in California. Local leaders say city and state law enforcement departments have been able to handle the unrest, which has resulted in some property damage and injuries.
On Tuesday morning, streets in downtown Los Angeles were quiet. Some of the protests in Los Angeles over the last four days, including a rally on Monday afternoon, centered on a group of federal buildings downtown. National Guard troops have been stationed there but have largely stayed in the background of the protests.
The Marines would protect federal law enforcement officers and property in greater Los Angeles, the U.S. military’s Northern Command said in a statement.
The use of military force on domestic soil is rare and is usually reserved for the most extreme situations. The state of California sued to block the use of National Guard troops on Monday. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said that he would sue to prevent the Marine deployment.
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5) Protests spring up around the U.S. in solidarity with those in L.A.
By Yan Zhuang, June 10, 2025
The protests against the Trump administration’s immigration policies that started in Los Angeles have spread to at least two dozen cities, including San Francisco, Dallas, Austin and New York City.
These solidarity demonstrations on Monday were largely contained and peaceful, although some skirmishes broke out between protesters and law enforcement officers as night fell.
In San Francisco, where more than 150 people had been arrested in a demonstration on Sunday, thousands of protesters took to the streets for a second consecutive day and encountered police in riot gear. The demonstration on Monday was calm except for small groups that broke off and committed vandalism at night, the police said, adding that several arrests were made.
A protest in Santa Ana, Calif., in response to federal immigration raids, turned violent, city officials said. Protesters in the city, about 30 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, threw rocks, bottles and fireworks, and were met by federal agents using tear gas, pepper balls and rubber bullets, the officials said. Bill Essayli, the Trump administration’s top law enforcement official in Southern California, requested help from the Santa Ana Police Department “because federal agents were being overrun,” the city said in a statement on social media.
In New York City, a peaceful sit-in on Monday at Trump Tower resulted in 24 arrests, the police said. Mayor Eric Adams said that the police would not tolerate the kind of clashes that have broken out in Los Angeles.
In downtown Austin, Texas, hundreds of demonstrators marched to the Capitol building, waving signs and flags and chanting “No more ICE,” according to video footage published by local news media. Later, law enforcement used tear gas and pepper spray to disperse protesters, The Austin American-Statesman reported. The Austin Police Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In Dallas, about 400 protesters gathered on the edge of downtown, The Dallas Morning News reported. The demonstration began peacefully but brief skirmishes later occurred between protesters and the police. The Dallas Police Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Protests also took place in Seattle; Boston; Chicago; Atlanta; Santa Fe, N.M.; Pittsburgh; Minneapolis; Las Vegas; and Tampa, Fla.
At some of the protests, demonstrators also expressed support for David Huerta, the prominent California union leader who was arrested in Los Angeles on Friday while protesting an immigration raid. Mr. Huerta was released but is still facing charges.
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6) Fake images and conspiracy theories swirl around the L.A. protests.
By Steven Lee Myers, June 10, 2025
Misleading photographs, videos and text have spread widely on social media as protests against immigrant raids have unfolded in Los Angeles, rehashing old conspiracy theories and expressing support for President Trump’s actions.
The flood of falsehoods online appeared intended to stoke outrage toward immigrants and political leaders, principally Democrats.
They also added to the confusion over what exactly was happening on the streets, which was portrayed in digital and social media through starkly divergent ideological lenses. Many posts created the false impression that the entire city was engulfed in violence, when the clashes were limited to only a small part.
There were numerous scenes of protesters throwing rocks or other objects at law enforcement officers and setting cars ablaze, including a number of self-driving Waymo taxis. At the same time, false images spread to revive old conspiracies that the protests were a planned provocation, not a spontaneous response to the immigration raids.
The confrontation escalated on Monday as new protests occurred and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced — on X — that he was mobilizing 700 Marines from a base near Los Angeles to guard federal buildings. They are expected to join 2,000 members of the California National Guard whom Mr. Trump ordered deployed without the authorization of the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who normally has command of the troops.
The latest deployments prompted a new wave of misleading images to spread — some purporting to show Marines and the military service’s weapons in action. One was a still from “Blue Thunder,” a 1983 action-thriller about a conspiracy to deprive residents of Los Angeles of their civil rights. It features a climatic dogfight over the city’s downtown.
Darren L. Linvill, a researcher at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, said conservatives online were “building up the riots in a performative way” to help bolster Mr. Trump’s claims that Los Angeles had been taken over by “violent, insurrectionist mobs.”
Dr. Linvill said the posts were also “a bit self-fulfilling.” “As they direct attention to it,” he said, “more protesters will show up.”
James Woods, the actor who has become known for spreading conspiracy theories, used his account on X to rail against the state’s elected officials, especially Mr. Newsom, a Democrat. He also reposted a fabricated quote, attributed to former President Barack Obama, discussing a secret plot to impose socialism on the country, as well as a video of burning police cars that was from 2020.
An innocuous photograph of a pallet of bricks, actually posted on the website of a building materials wholesaler in Malaysia, was cited as proof that the protests were organized by nonprofit organizations supported by George Soros, the financier who, to the feverishly conspiratorial right, has become a mastermind of global disorder.
“It’s Civil War!!” an account on X wrote on Saturday, claiming that the bricks had been placed near the offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for “Democrat militants.”
X posted a Community Note pointing out that the photograph had nothing to do with the protests, but it still was seen more than 800,000 times. It was also widely reposted, including by several seemingly inauthentic accounts in Chinese.
The online trope dates at least to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. It reappeared in 2022 after a conspiratorial post by Representative Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican who suggested that bricks for a paving project near Capitol Hill were intended for violent protests after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
“These days, it feels like every time there’s a protest, the old clickbaity ‘pallets of bricks’ hoax shows up right on cue,” the Social Media Lab, a research center at the Toronto Metropolitan University, wrote on Bluesky. “You know the one, photos or videos of bricks supposedly left out to encourage rioting. It’s catnip for right-wing agitators and grifters.”
It also fits into the narrative that protests against government policies are somehow inauthentic. On his own platform, Truth Social, Mr. Trump also suggested that the protesters were “Paid Insurrectionists!”
Numerous posts echoed unsubstantiated claims that the protests were the work of Mr. Soros as well as local nongovernment organizations or Democratic elected officials, including the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass. Some posts disparaging the protests were shared by accounts with deceptive handles that closely resembled those of official government sources or news organizations.
Mike Benz, a conspiracy-minded influencer on X who last year claimed that the Pentagon used the pop star Taylor Swift as part of a psychological operation to undercut Mr. Trump, advanced an outlandish theory that the mayor had links to the Central Intelligence Agency and had helped start riots in the city where she lives.
He based that simply on Ms. Bass’s role as a board member for the National Endowment for Democracy, the congressionally mandated organization formed during the Reagan administration to promote democratic governance around the world.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the theme was echoed by accounts across social media linked to Russia, which often amplifies content that discredits the United States. The Kremlin and its supporters have long accused Mr. Soros or the United States government of covertly sponsoring “color revolutions” to overthrow governments — from the Arab Spring countries swept up by mass street protests in 2011 to Ukraine.
“It is nationwide conspiracy of liberals against not only Trump but against American people in general,” Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent nationalist in Russia, wrote on X on Sunday.
Disinformation in situations like these spreads so quickly and widely that efforts to verify facts cannot keep up, said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy organization that studies the intersection of media, technology and the law. She described it as part of “a much longer effort to delegitimize peaceful resistance movements.”
“Information warfare is always a symptom of conflict, stoked often by those in power to fuel their own illiberal goals,” she said. “It confuses audiences, scares people who might otherwise have empathy for the cause and divides us when we need solidarity most.”
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7) Israel Says Gaza Aid Boat Passengers Are Being Deported
Greta Thunberg and three other activists who were on the intercepted ship were taken to an airport to be flown home, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.
By John Yoon and Isabel Kershner, June 10, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/world/middleeast/israel-greta-thunberg-deport-gaza-flotilla.html
Greta Thunberg, third from left, and members of the crew of the Madleen last week in Catania, Italy, before the ship’s departure for Gaza. Israel intercepted it on Monday. Credit...Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images
The Israeli Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that it had taken passengers who were detained aboard a Gaza-bound aid ship, including the activist Greta Thunberg, to an airport in Tel Aviv for deportation.
Israeli forces intercepted the boat, operated by a pro-Palestinian activist group called the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, on Monday. Some of its passengers were expected to leave the airport, Ben Gurion, for their home countries within hours, the ministry said in a statement posted on social media early Tuesday.
Any passengers from the ship, called the Madleen, who refused to leave Israel could be brought before a judicial authority to carry out their deportation, the ministry said.
Adalah, an Israeli human rights group and legal center that focuses on Palestinian rights, said that four of the activists had agreed to leave Israel but that eight were still being detained and would contest their deportation on Tuesday morning. They included Rima Hassan, a French member of the European Parliament.
The group added that its lawyers were traveling to Givon Prison in Ramleh, near Ben Gurion Airport, where the eight volunteers were being held, to represent them at the hearings.
A spokeswoman for Israel’s immigration authority, Sabin Hadad, confirmed that four of the activists had waived their right to a hearing and said that the other eight had been transferred to Givon Prison for up to 96 hours.
Ms. Thunberg was among the four who left voluntarily.
The Foreign Ministry later said that Ms. Thunberg was leaving Israel on a flight to France and posted photographs on social media that appeared to show her on a plane. The ministry later clarified that Sweden, Ms. Thunberg’s home country, was her final destination.
A spokeswoman for the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, Ann Wright, confirmed that Ms. Thunberg was on a plane to Paris and then to Stockholm.
The coalition “generally encourages high-profile volunteers to leave as soon as possible to be able to speak directly to the media about their experiences to counter what the Israeli government may be saying,” Ms. Wright said. She added that Ms. Thunberg was expected to land in Sweden about 12 hours after departing Israel.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition leads an international grass-roots campaign that opposes Israel’s longstanding naval blockade of Gaza by sending ships carrying humanitarian aid to the enclave. The Madleen set sail from Sicily this month.
Israel vowed to prevent the ship from reaching Gaza, saying that its military would use any means to stop it from breaching the blockade.
The Foreign Ministry said on Monday that the Madleen had been diverted toward Israeli shores. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition said that its activists had been “kidnapped” by the Israeli military.
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8) Filmmakers make their films about Palestine available for free in response to Israel’s Gaza flotilla abduction
By SKWAWKBOX (SW), June 9, 2025
In response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its illegal chemical weapons assault on and seizure of the Madleen Gaza Freedom Flotilla humanitarian vessel and its crew in the early hours of this morning, the current events in Palestine, dozens of filmmakers have made their films about Palestine available online for everyone to watch, free of charge. Israel’s attempt to prevent the Madleen from reaching Gaza and raising awareness of Israel’s genocide, starvation blockaded and other crimes has quickly backfired.
A list of the films and links to them
A collection of documentaries published by Al Jazeera Documentary:
https://bit.ly/3yp2nBI
https://bit.ly/2SSpMeC
https://bit.ly/3f0KK3P
“Keeper of Memory” documentary:
https://youtu.be/eywuYeflWzg
“Empty Seat” documentary:
https://youtu.be/an4hRFWOSQQ
“Resistance Pilot” documentary:
https://youtu.be/wqSmdZy-Xcg
“Jenin” documentary:
https://vimeo.com/499672067
“The Olive Tree” documentary:
https://vimeo.com/432062498
“Scenes from the Occupation in Gaza” (1973) documentary:
https://youtu.be/1JlIwmnYnlE
“Gaza Fights For Freedom” documentary:
https://youtu.be/HnZSaKYmP2s
“Arna’s Children” documentary:
https://youtu.be/cQZiHgbBBcI
Short Film “Strawberry”:
https://vimeo.com/209189656/e5510a6064
Short Film “The Place”:
https://youtu.be/fgcIVhNvsII
“The Mayor” documentary:
https://youtu.be/aDvOnhssTcc
“The Creation and the Nakba 1948” documentary:
https://youtu.be/Bwy-Rf15UIs
“Occupation 101” documentary:
https://youtu.be/C56QcWOGSKk
“The Shadow of Absence” documentary:
https://vimeo.com/220119035
“The Don’t Exist” documentary:
https://youtu.be/2WZ_7Z6vbsg
“As The Poet Said” documentary:
https://vimeo.com/220116068
“Five Broken Cameras” documentary:
https://youtu.be/TZU9hYIgXZw
“Paradise Now” feature film:
https://vimeo.com/510883804
“Abnadam” short film:
https://youtu.be/I–r85cOoXM
“Wedding of Galilee” feature film:
https://youtu.be/dYMQw7hQI1U
“Keffiyeh” feature film:
https://vimeo.com/780695653
“Slingshot Hip Hop” documentary:
https://youtu.be/hHFlWE3N9Ik
“Tall al-Zaatar” documentary:
https://youtu.be/Ma8H3sEbqtI
“Tall al-Zaatar – The Secrets of the Battle” documentary:
https://youtu.be/Ma8H3sEbqtI
“In the Grip of the Resistance” documentary:
https://youtu.be/htJ10ACWQJM
“Swings” documentary:
https://youtu.be/gMk-Zi9vTGs
“Naji al-Ali: An Artist with Vision” documentary:
https://youtu.be/Y31yUi4WVsU
“The Upper Gate” documentary:
https://vimeo.com/433362585
“In Search of Palestine” documentary:
https://vimeo.com/184213685?1
“Salt of this Sea” feature film:
https://bit.ly/3c10G3Z
“Speak, Bird” documentary:
https://youtu.be/wdkoxBjKM1Q
“The Palestinian Exodus” series:
https://bit.ly/3bXNAVp
“I Am Jerusalem” series:
https://bit.ly/3hG8sDV
Keir Starmer remains silent, despite the Madleen being registered as a UK vessel, which obliges the UK to protect it under international law – and bans Israel from any attack on it unless it is engaged in piracy, which it self-evidently is not:
Vessels are free to navigate the High Seas within the laws of their Flag State, and only a warship of their own nation has the right to intercept them unless they are committing an international crime such as piracy.
However, a Downing Street spokesperson has just put out the following, weasel-worded statement that does nothing to intervene and comes days too late:
The government wants Israel to resolve the situation around the ship heading for Gaza safely, with restraint, in line with international law.
Israel has already breached international law. Starmer is useless for the UK and the world and collaborating with a hostile, terrorist state again.
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9) Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence
Rebecca Solnit, June 9, 2025
It is beautiful solidarity seeing non-immigrants and non-targeted people standing up for and with those being targeted, attacked, denied their rights, imprisoned, and threatened with deportation or deported. And it's happening all over the country, but L.A. is the center now.
I think maybe it's begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration which is itself a violent backlash against every good thing that's happened over the past several decades – the advance of rights for nature, women, children, indigenous peoples, BIPOC and immigrants/refugees, queer people, trans people, people with disabilities, workers, the right of us all to be free from being poisoned by food, water, air. It's begun in Los Angeles, the city of angels, a city of almost four million people, almost half of them Latino, in a region of almost twelve million that two thousand California National Guards cannot and will not subjugate. All they can do is punish and incite, and I hope that some of the protesters are telling them they're violating their mission and maybe the law. In the nonwhite-majority state of California, which recently advanced to become the fourth largest economy in the world.
We are escalating because they are escalating. But as a smart guy on BlueSky noted, he's "seeing a massive divide online between Angelenos of all political stripes who understand that the protests in LA yesterday were mostly peaceful and any violence was ICE-initiated and East Coast establishment liberals lecturing 'the left' on how riots just amplify right wing talking points." This is familiar ground, the idea that no matter what the right does, however much the systematic violence harms us, however horrible a police murder or another violation of human rights such as ICE's grabbing people off the street, we have the responsibility to remain not just peaceful but peaceful in a way that pleases our enemies. It becomes collective responsibility and collective guilt because even if a few people in a few places torch something or break something it's supposed to indict the whole movement, and has often been used to justify more institutional violence.
Here it's also useful to make a distinction between property damage (which protesters in the USA in our era have done from time to time) and harming living beings (which is largely something done by law enforcement in these demonstrations). Property destruction can be dramatic theater (suffragists in early twentieth-century London broke all the plate glass windows on a stretch of shopping street; no living beings were at risk), can be actual protection (the firefighters taking an axe to the door to rescue the people from the blaze), or acts of intimidation (the husband breaking the furniture to convey to his wife he can break her too). All I've read about so far in L.A. is property damage by protesters, while we've seen many kinds of violence and intimidation from the heavily armored and armed thugs serving the Trump Administration's war on immigrants.
One thing to remember is that they'll claim we're violent no matter what; the justification for this ongoing attack on immigrants and people who resemble immigrants in being brown is the idea that America is suffering an invasion and in essence only a certain kind of white person belongs here in this place that was never all white, and here in California which was and is first and last indigenous and then inhabited by Mexicans before the US seized this territory hitherto claimed by Mexico through its 1846-48 war of aggression.
During the first Trump term the fact that a few people chose to literally punch Nazis led to the term Antifa, as in anti-fascist, and then a long pretense that Antifa was an organized criminal syndicate--the right even blamed their own January 6, 2021, rampage on Antifa for a while. But Antifa as an organized national whatever was as mythical as unicorns and dragons, and as ever the mainstream media did little to nothing to push back at the fairytales. Also, when did being an anti-fascist become a bad thing? I mean I know it's bad if you're a fascist, but how did the mainstream get on board?
After the very successful mass protests and blockades at the Seattle World Trade Organization ministerial in Seattle in late 1999, that media perpetuated a myth that the activists were violent, repeating specific lies the police told and making charges that were absolutely and utterly factually untrue. In its coverage of the 2004 Republican convention, the New York Times declared on its front page, "“five years ago in Seattle, for example, there was widespread arson.” There wasn't, and the literal dumpster fire there might've been started by a police tear-gas canister (I spent months, kind of as an experiment, trying to get them to publish a retraction and wrote about the process here).
But there was epic police violence against protesters and others just walking down the street in Seattle in 1999, resulting in hospitalizations and payouts by the city of Seattle (I wish that the stingy right would recognize how expensive police brutality is for cities; NYC alone spent more than $200 million in 2024 on this). Remember that in the huge protests over the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, police partially blinded eight people in a single day with their "sublethal" bullets, right-wingers repeatedly drove cars into the crowds, a right-wing teenager shot two protesters with a semi-automatic weapon and was lionized for it, and a member of the Boogaloo Bois murdered a federal guard in Oakland near a Black Lives Matter protest with the intention of "fomenting another civil war."
I believe ardently that nonviolent resistance is in the big picture and the long term the most effective strategy, but that doesn't mean it must be polite, placid, or please our opponents, not least because nothing ever will and they'll lie and distort no matter what. The very idea that we should endeavor to please them and meet their ever-shifting rules of engagement--well I wrote the "She Made Him Do It Theory of Everything" here a while back: "In mainstream discourse, it's become standard to blame the excesses of the right on liberals, the left, feminists, Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, environmental protection, and BIPOC and LGBTQ people. It's a way that the right is granted masculine prerogatives and the left feminine responsibilities for the right's behavior. It's also routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages."
This is a moment when solidarity is essential, and we weaken our cause with internal squabbling about tactics, the necessity or inadequacy of nonviolent strategies, and the rest. Keep your eyes on the enemy and the big picture. I also believe that those of us who are older, whiter, safer from the threats of state violence do not have the moral ground to lecture the younger, browner and blacker, more directly impacted on what they should and should not do. As Martin Luther King, Jr., our great prophet of nonviolence, said: "In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear?” They'll hear it now, if they listen to the people directly, or pick media sources that are not corrupted by deference to police and Trumpist versions when those versions are lies. Because lies are also a kind of violence, violence against the truth, against the compact we have that words describe realities, and we live in a shared reality. Lies are also thefts of our right to know what the speaker knows, sabotage of that shared reality, of meaning itself.
And there are so many other kinds of violence at work in this country, old and new. This nation was founded on two epic forms of violence, the enslavement of Black people and their kidnapping from Africa for this purpose, and the genocide against Native Americans to seize their lands and destroy their cultures and sovereignty, and a third should always be included: the normalized denial of almost all rights to any and all women, including economic, social, educational, and political equality and participation, the rights to bodily autonomy, to dignity, and to protection under the law from male violence.
The Trump Administration is a huge surge of almost every kind of violence: Trump is an adjudicated rapist who put a man in charge of the military who himself paid a settlement to a woman who charged him, credibly, with rape; Trump has pardoned the ultra-violent January 6th rioters (if you want to call anything a riot or an attack on police, start there), has routinely threatened violence against his rivals, his enemies, and the press, has turned the federal government into his own personal vendetta machine, and arguably is making his second term a revenge tour against America for rejecting him in 2020.
The violence against the environment being wrought with direct attacks on climate legislation and action, including fuel efficiency standards, protection of nature, national parks, public lands, forests, clean water, food safety standards, and public health will have a profound impact. The ongoing right-wing attack against reproductive rights is resulting in terror, oppression, criminalization, lack of access to appropriate medical care, and too many near-deaths and actual deaths of pregnant women. The dismantling of USAID has already, by one count, led to a third of a million deaths overseas, 103 per hour. It's shocking how little attention that's getting.
It is also an attack on the Constitution, the rule of law, the separation of powers, the judiciary branch, and the functionality of the federal government as well as the benefits due to veterans, collectors of social security. It's another kind of attack on truth, fact, history, and science, which authoritarians tend to see (correctly) as rival systems of power, and which are democratic in their essence. For example, measles is a dangerous highly contagious disease that vaccination can largely prevent, and that's true whether you're an epidemiologist or a crank; that fact does not yield to agendas. Immigrants are not just a net benefit to this nation's economy but an absolute necessity to the function of many parts of it, and that too is a demonstrable fact. The Trump Administration is waging war against First Amendment guarantees of a free press, freedom of speech (with the imprisonment of immigrant students for voicing their opinions, shakedowns of networks, and pursuit of journalists who voiced their opinions), and freedom of assembly. It's a war against you, me, us, what this country is supposed to be as established in the Constitution, and against nature.
As Heather Cox Richardson put it in her latest newsletter, "Flatbed train cars carrying thousands of tanks rolled into Washington, D.C., yesterday in preparation for the military parade planned for June 14. On the other side of the country, protesters near Los Angeles filmed officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) throwing flash-bang grenades into a crowd of protesters. The two images make a disturbing portrait of the United States of America under the Donald J. Trump regime as Trump tries to use the issue of immigration to establish a police state." It is up to us to defeat that agenda, and up to all of us who are not those under attack by this administration to stand with them and for them. At its heart the Trump Administration is violently divisive, isolationist, and segregationist, and solidarity is our first duty and most profound rejection of that agenda.
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10) Exclusive: UK believes Trump may sanction Amal Clooney over ICC Palestine role
Prominent British lawyer and wife of Hollywood star George Clooney advised ICC prosecutor on Netanyahu arrest warrant
By Imran Mulla, Published date: 4 June 2025
The Clooneys arrive for 'The Albies' at the New York Public Library in New York, 26 September 2024 (AFP)
The British government believes the US could sanction prominent human rights lawyer Amal Clooney over her role advising the ICC chief prosecutor on arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, Middle East Eye can reveal.
In April it emerged that the British Foreign Office had warned senior British lawyers involved in the ICC’s war crimes case against two senior Israeli leaders that they are at risk of US sanctions.
This came after the Trump administration imposed financial and visa sanctions on Karim Khan, the court’s British chief prosecutor, in February.
Last November the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Trump’s executive order, a response to the arrest warrants, warned further measures could follow “on those responsible for those transgressions”.
Multiple sources within the British government told MEE that last week the Foreign Office's legal directorate listed Amal Clooney and Lord Justice Adrian Fulford as being potentially at risk of US sanctions.
Clooney, a prominent British barrister of Lebanese and Palestinian descent, is the wife of Hollywood actor George Clooney.
But she is not an American citizen and could be barred from entering the US if she is sanctioned.
'I believe in the rule of law'
Both lawyers served early last year on an independent panel of legal advisors convened by the ICC prosecutor.
The panel expressed their support for Khan’s decision to seek arrest warrants for senior Israeli and Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and ICC judges granted his application in November.
In a statement published on the Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ) website last May, Clooney said she served on the panel “because I believe in the rule of law and the need to protect civilian lives".
“As a human rights lawyer, I will never accept that one child’s life has less value than another’s,” she added.
Adam Keith, a director at Human Rights First, told MEE: "The Trump administration's sanctions programme targeting the ICC is so sweeping that just providing legal advice or input regarding the court’s Palestine investigation appears to be sanctionable.
"This means it could get any non-American placed on the Treasury Department’s financial blacklist and barred from entering the United States."
Keith described the programme as "an outrageous misuse of sanctions, and a direct attack on an accountability body that survivors and advocates around the world rely on for justice".
The British Foreign Office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The CFJ was co-founded by the Clooneys in 2016.
In 2024 Amal won the Legal 500 Award for international lawyer of the year.
And just last week she was photographed backstage at her husband’s Broadway play Good Night, and Good Luck with senior Democrats Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi.
Trump’s order gave the US Treasury and State Department a 60-day deadline to provide recommendations on who else besides Khan should be sanctioned.
No further sanctions have been announced, although they may not have been made public.
Fulford, named alongside by Clooney by the British Foreign Office’s legal directorate, is a former judge of the ICC and former vice-president of the Court of Appeal.
In December 2024 he said it was “vital” that ICC member states should act on the warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest.
MEE contacted Fulford and the Clooney Foundation for Justice for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
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11) Cities Across U.S. Brace for Fresh Protests as Marines Prepare to Deploy in L.A.
California’s governor condemned President Trump for a “brazen abuse of power” in sending military forces. Protests over federal immigration raids spread to cities across the country, and more are expected on Wednesday.
By Francesca Regalado, John Yoon, Julie Bosman, Eric Schmitt and Sean Keenan, June 11, 2025
A protest against the detention of migrants by federal law enforcement in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday. Philip Cheung for The New York Times
Cities across the United States were bracing for a new round of immigration protests on Wednesday after the Los Angeles mayor imposed an overnight curfew downtown and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California blamed President Trump for unrest that began with deportation raids last week.
The curfew brought quiet to downtown Los Angeles, where five days of protests over the federal immigration raids have occasionally turned violent, but tensions remained high after the U.S. military announced that 700 Marines would join National Guard troops in the city on Wednesday. A spokeswoman for the U.S. military’s Northern Command said that the Marines would help protect federal property and personnel, including immigration enforcement agents.
Even as his administration escalated the military response — an exceedingly rare use of active-duty troops on domestic soil — President Trump suggested on Tuesday that the protests in Los Angeles were petering out, and gave himself credit. “By doing what I did, I stopped the violence in L.A.,” he said in the Oval Office.
The California governor hit back in a nationally televised address that appeared intended to be heard far beyond the state. Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, warned that Mr. Trump’s deployment of nearly 5,000 National Guard and Marine troops to Los Angeles against state officials’ advice was a “brazen abuse of power,” and he warned of a “perilous moment” for American democracy.
“California may be first, but it clearly won’t end here,” Mr. Newsom said. “Other states are next. Democracy is next.”
On Tuesday, the fifth day of unrest over the immigration raids, protests that began in Los Angeles grew in size and intensity across the country. Some demonstrators in downtown Chicago threw water bottles at police officers and vandalized at least two vehicles. In New York, officers made dozens of arrests near federal buildings in Lower Manhattan, the police said. In Atlanta, they used chemical agents and physical force to drive a few dozen protesters from their foothold on a highway.
More protests were planned in several cities on Wednesday, including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, San Antonio and Seattle. Some organizers said that local demonstrations this week were a prelude to nationwide ones planned for Saturday against President Trump and an unusual military parade in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Trump warned on Tuesday that any demonstrators who assembled during the parade would “be met with very big force,” without elaborating. A U.S. official later told The New York Times that discussions were taking place inside the Trump administration, including at the Pentagon, about deploying National Guard or active-duty troops to cities beyond Los Angeles.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said late Tuesday that he would deploy National Guard troops across the state to maintain order, becoming the first U.S. governor to do so since the unrest began.
Here’s what else to know:
· Arrests: Since protests began last Friday in response to federal immigration raids in Los Angeles’s garment district, hundreds of people have been arrested in several cities, including more than 330 in Los Angeles, more than 240 in San Francisco and a dozen in Austin, Texas, officials said. The encounters have turned tense at times, but the protests have remained largely confined to small sections of cities.
· L.A. curfew: In Los Angeles, the downtown curfew imposed by Mayor Karen Bass lifted at 6 a.m. local time. It covers a complex of downtown federal buildings where protesters have clashed with police, and was expected to last for several days. Read more ›
· Newsom’s speech: The governor used one of the highest-profile moments of his political career to lay out what he argued was the threat that Mr. Trump poses to democracy. Read the full transcript of his speech ›
· Immigration raids: Armed National Guard troops accompanied federal immigration enforcement officers on raids in Los Angeles on Tuesday, a move that the state of California has called unlawful and inflammatory. Read more ›
· Court hearing: A federal judge in California has set a hearing for Thursday on the state’s request to limit Marines and National Guard troops to guarding federal buildings.
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12) Military Parade Marches Into Political Maelstrom as Troops Deploy to L.A.
President Trump’s decision to send troops into an American city comes just days before a rare military display in the nation’s capital.
By Helene Cooper, Reporting from Washington, June 10, 2025
This is not the image Army officials had wanted.
While tanks, armored troop carriers and artillery systems pour into Washington for the Army’s 250th birthday celebration, National Guard troops from the Army’s 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, supplemented by active-duty Marines, have been deployed to the streets of Los Angeles.
It is a juxtaposition that has military officials and experts concerned.
Several current and former Army officials said the military parade and other festivities on Saturday — which is also President Trump’s 79th birthday — could make it appear as if the military is celebrating a crackdown on Americans.
“The unfortunate coincidence of the parade and federalizing the California National Guard will feel ominous,” said Kori Schake, a former defense official in the George W. Bush administration who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Dr. Schake initially did not consider the parade much of a problem but is now concerned about “the rapid escalation by the administration” in Los Angeles.
The two scenes combined “erode trust in the military at a time when the military should be a symbol of national unity,” said Max Rose, a former Democratic congressman and an Army veteran.
“They are deploying the National Guard in direct contradiction to what state and local authorities requested, and at the same time there’s this massive parade with a display more fitting for Russia and North Korea,” he said.
Some veterans groups soured on the parade well before the latest deployments in Los Angeles. The Army recently asked the Vietnam Veterans of America chapter in Northern Virginia if it would provide 25 veterans to sit in the official reviewing stand. The group said no.
“If it were just a matter of celebrating the Army’s 250th birthday, there’d be no question,” said Jay Kalner, the chapter’s president and a retired C.I.A. analyst. “But we felt it was being conflated with Trump’s birthday, and we didn’t want to be a prop for that.”
It was unclear exactly what grounds Mr. Trump and the Defense Department are using to deploy active-duty Marines to an American city. The Posse Comitatus Act generally prohibits active-duty forces from providing domestic law enforcement unless the president invokes the little-used Insurrection Act.
But in his order federalizing California’s National Guard, Mr. Trump cited Title 10 of the United States Code, which lays out the legal basis for the use of U.S. military forces.
Mr. Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act to use active-duty military troops against Black Lives Matter protesters during his first term. But his defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, both opposed the move, and Mr. Trump held back.
The moment proved to be a breaking point between Mr. Trump and the Pentagon. The president eventually fired Mr. Esper, and he has suggested General Milley should be executed.
This time, Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has cheered him on.
Within minutes of Mr. Trump’s order on Sunday deploying the first 2,000 National Guard troops to join the scattered immigration protests in Los Angeles, Mr. Hegseth threatened to deploy active-duty Marines from, he said, Camp Pendleton. (The Marines who deployed on Monday night were from Twentynine Palms, a base about 150 miles east of Los Angeles, but Mr. Hegseth continued to say Camp Pendleton, which is about 100 miles south of the city).
By Monday night, 700 Marines and another 2,000 National Guard troops had been activated for largely peaceful protests that have, so far, done relatively little damage to buildings or businesses. And on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said that anybody protesting the parade in Washington would “be met with very big force.”
Mr. Hegseth defended the deployments in congressional testimony on Tuesday, saying, “We ought to be able to enforce immigration law in this country.”
Mr. Hegseth’s term has been defined by his amplification of the president. He has enthusiastically backed the Army’s plans to hold a rare military parade, in which 150 military vehicles, including 28 tanks and 28 heavy armored troop carriers, will roll down the streets of the capital, granting Mr. Trump the celebration he has wanted for years.
Democratic lawmakers and some military veterans expressed fear that Mr. Hegseth, himself a National Guard veteran who was deployed against Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, was taking the military where it has traditionally least wanted to be: into the middle of a political battle.
“The president’s decision to call the National Guard troops to Los Angeles was premature, and the decision to deploy active-duty Marines as well is downright escalatory,” Representative Betty McCollum, Democrat of Minnesota, said at a House committee hearing on Tuesday as lawmakers grilled Mr. Hegseth. “Active-duty military has absolutely no role in domestic law enforcement, and they are not trained for those missions.”
One defense official said that Pentagon lawyers believe they have found some leeway in the Title 10 provision that Mr. Trump used to order National Guard troops to Los Angeles against the wishes of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom.
The Marines will help protect federal property and federal agents in Los Angeles, the U.S. military’s Northern Command said in a statement.
But unlike law enforcement officers or even National Guard troops, who practice controlling crowds during protests, active-duty troops are trained to respond to threats quickly and with lethal force.
“I do not take the position that invoking the Insurrection Act is necessary at this point; the facts on the ground don’t justify it,” said Daniel Maurer, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served as a judge advocate general. “It’s almost like a show of force to the MAGA base, if you will.” Mr. Maurer is now a law professor at Ohio Northern University.
Concerns about the parade surfaced even before the Trump administration deployed troops to Los Angeles.
“The challenge of the parade all along has been how to celebrate the military’s 250-year contribution to the Republic while avoiding the politicization that comes from our current polarized partisan environment,” said Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University who has studied the military for decades. “That challenge is considerably harder when some units are seen parading at the same time other units are seen policing a public protest.”
One Army official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating Mr. Trump, said she would be leaving town during the events.
Janessa Goldbeck, a Marine Corps veteran who is now a senior adviser at the veterans advocacy group VoteVets, said she was worried that the Marines and the National Guard were being led into a political maelstrom that could damage their relations with the American public.
“Young men and women who sign up to serve, to volunteer in their communities, to respond to wildfires and other natural disasters,” she said, “are now being put in this very dicey position politically.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
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13) Under Pressure From the White House, ICE Seeks New Ways to Ramp Up Arrests
Former officials said the Trump administration’s push for the agency to detain record numbers of undocumented immigrants increases the chances of mistakes.
By Hamed Aleaziz, Photographs by Todd Heisler, Reporting from Washington and Miami, June 11, 2025
“Since Jan. 21, ICE has arrested more than 100,000 people suspected of being in the country illegally, according to data obtained by The Times.”
Demands from the White House for a drastic increase in arrests of people who have entered the country illegally have pushed immigration officials into overdrive to fulfill President Trump’s pledge of mass deportations.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is carrying out workplace raids across the country like the one in the garment district of Los Angeles last week that kicked off protests and a vast federal response. The agency is staggering shifts so agents are available seven days a week to try to meet arrest goals and asking criminal investigators who usually focus on issues like human trafficking to help identify targets. It is also asking the public to call in tips to report illegal immigration.
ICE’s work is being aided by a new mapping app that locates people with deportation orders who can be swiftly expelled, drawn from data housed in agencies across the government, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
“I said it from Day 1, if you’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table,” Thomas D. Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, said in an interview. “So, we’re opening that aperture up.”
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has been deeply engaged in the effort behind the scenes, meeting with top ICE officials in recent weeks and scrutinizing the numbers, according to people familiar with his involvement.
The intense pressure by top administration officials creates an atmosphere that elevates the potential for mistakes at a time when officers and agents are being pushed to make consequential decisions, former officials said.
“You’re going to have people who are being pushed to the limit, who in a rush may not get things right, including information on a person’s status,” said Sarah Saldaña, who served as ICE’s director during the Obama administration. “All of that takes time and effort, and this push on numbers — exclusive of whether or not the job is being done right — is very concerning.”
White House officials say the measures the administration is taking are necessary.
“Keeping President Trump’s promise to deport illegal aliens is something the administration takes seriously,” Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman, said in a statement. “The violent riots in Los Angeles, including attacks on federal law enforcement agents carrying out basic deportation operations, underscore why removing illegal aliens is so important.”
The political stakes are high: Mr. Trump was swept into office for a second time on a platform built around his pledge to crack down on illegal immigration and promises of mass deportations as soon as he took office.
Since Mr. Trump returned to office, more than 200,000 people in the United States without authorization have been sent back to their home country or a third country, a fraction of the 1.4 million people who faced deportation orders by the end of last year, according to internal government data obtained by The Times.
Mr. Miller, a staunch advocate of tightening America’s borders, said on Fox News in late May that ICE would set a goal of a “minimum” of 3,000 arrests a day, figures never before seen and 10 times the daily arrests during the Biden administration. Since Jan. 21, ICE has arrested more than 100,000 people suspected of being in the country illegally, according to data obtained by The Times.
During a meeting with agency leaders late last month at ICE’s headquarters, Mr. Miller reviewed the agency’s arrest rate and discussed ways to ratchet it up. At one point, he encouraged ICE leaders to target apparent gang members with noticeable tattoos, according to people familiar with his comments.
“He wasn’t putting a specific quota on us but just going over the numbers and making sure that we’re utilizing all of our resources to make the arrests out there,” said Garrett Ripa, the head of the Miami ICE office, who at the time was a top official overseeing the agency’s deportation operations. ICE officials asked Mr. Miller for more resources, such as extra transportation help, to help meet the ambitious goals, he said.
Another official with direct knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the discussion, said that Mr. Miller asked those in the room if they thought they could hit one million deportations this year.
Former and current agency officials say that the high expectations have sapped morale in some quarters — and created a pressure keg.
“There is a constant state of anxiety,” said Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff during the Biden administration. “They understand they are playing Stephen Miller’s game. This isn’t about public safety or national security; this is about hitting a quota number. That’s it.”
Some ICE officers, however, said they welcomed the intense focus on their work.
“It’s something that I’m invested in, so I don’t feel like it’s a bad thing,” said Carlos Nuñez, a supervising deportation officer in Florida, adding that he finally felt he could do his job the way it was meant to be done.
“We just have so much work that there’s not enough hours in the day, to be honest with you, just to get it done,” he said. “My teams, all these guys you see here, they’re working seven days a week, working around the clock. I haven’t had a day off in several months already.”
Mr. Ripa said many agents are working staggered shifts to assure the entire week is covered. (A Homeland Security official said the use of staggered shifts is not new.)
The Times recently accompanied Mr. Nuñez and other ICE officials in Miami as they conducted a series of arrests. Over the course of several hours, a group of more than 10 officers — which at certain points included F.B.I. agents and an official from the State Department — tracked down and detained a total of three migrants.
In one case, a Honduran man who was the brother of an ICE target was arrested when he happened to show up to drive him to work — an example of how the agency is making collateral arrests to increase its numbers.
That is the mandate right now, Mr. Homan said.
“If they’re out there looking for a target and they find the target and he is with other people in the country illegally, they need to be taken into custody,” he said. “We’re not walking away from the illegal alien.”
The Miami arrests underscored one of the main challenges ICE faces in boosting its arrests: It is often painstaking, low-yield work. Officers spend extensive time doing surveillance, sending multiple officers to stake out a location for hours. Sometimes, an address is old or incorrect.
So in recent weeks, ICE has begun to hit workplaces such as clubs, restaurants and factories across the country, executing raids aimed at netting larger numbers. Officers have descended upon immigration courthouses, in coordination with prosecutors, to arrest migrants who show up for scheduled court dates.
The agency is also asking the public to use a tip line to report illegal immigration. In May, officers arrested five men in a Baltimore parking lot based on a phone tip. Video of the arrest was posted online by ICE with the caption, “When you call our Tip Line, we listen!”
Mr. Homan said such arrests were allowed if there was “reasonable suspicion” that someone was in the country illegally.
In some offices, investigators who usually focus on issues like human trafficking have been asked to help drive up the arrest numbers. One Homeland Security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal tactics, said that some undercover special agents responsible for investigating online sex trafficking have begun setting up in-person meetings with people suspected of prostitution to potentially arrest them on immigration charges.
The agency has also turned to higher-tech solutions. A new mapping app allows agents and officers to see areas around the country with large numbers of people under deportation orders, according to Mr. Ripa and documents obtained by The Times. An early version of the app was dubbed Alien Tracker, or Atrac.
The project was launched with help from members of the Department of Government Efficiency, which was led by the billionaire Elon Musk until he left his government role last month, according to Mr. Ripa. “I know in the infancy stages of Atrac, they were an integral part of it,” Mr. Ripa said. The White House declined to comment on the app.
The software, which is accessible on mobile phones, maps the location of migrants with deportation orders across the country, and even allows officers to zero in on those with certain criminal convictions, he said.
“The heat map shows where there are executable final orders of removal around the nation. And that officer then can just zoom in on those areas,” said Mr. Ripa.
The app contains information about more than 700,000 people, drawn from data not just at ICE, but agencies across the government. That includes the F.B.I.; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the U.S. Marshals Service; and the Social Security Administration, according to the documents obtained by The Times.
The app will “eventually allow for the centralized management of all interior enforcement priorities,” the documents say. That would include data from the Housing and Urban Development Department, the Labor Department, the Health and Human Services Department and the Internal Revenue Service, according to the documents.
The consolidation of government data to track migrants through the app comes after Musk aides moved aggressively to try to tap into streams of information held by different agencies. Career officials raised objections to the efforts, which they said violated privacy and security protocols, and labor unions and watchdog groups sued to halt the efforts.
Information about each immigrant in the app is available on a baseball-card-style format, according to the documents. Officers are required to log the outcome of each encounter they have with a target.
Despite the tech wizardry, some ICE agents have found the addresses in the map are erroneous or out of date, according to a Homeland Security official.
The agency faces other challenges in communities like Los Angeles, where a court order issued in 2024 blocks officers from knocking on doors with the intent to arrest people. An expert for the groups suing the government over the practice found that such arrests, in which ICE knocks on a door with the intent to arrest the person inside the home, accounted for more than a quarter of all residential arrests made by ICE.
In late May, Bill Essayli, the acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, directed Justice Department law enforcement agents to take over the door-knocking tasks, according to a document obtained by The Times. A spokesperson for Mr. Essayli confirmed the initiative.
There have been some signs that ICE’s push is yielding results. The Homeland Security Department said in a statement over the weekend that ICE had “arrested 2,000 aliens a day” last week. Trump administration officials pointed to the figures as a sign that their crackdown was working.
But in recent days, the numbers fell off again, according to data obtained by The Times. On Thursday, ICE arrested around 1,400 people. Friday, the total fell to over 1,200. On Saturday, the number dropped even further, to about 700.
Mr. Homan has remained undeterred, even amid the protests in Los Angeles.
“We will do this immigration operation,” he said on a show hosted by the right-wing activist Laura Loomer. “We’re going to do it every single day across this country, including L.A. You’re not going to stop us, so I guess this is game on.”
Michael H. Keller, Albert Sun, Allison McCann and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
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14) L.A. Protests Prompt Calls for Police Restraint After Journalist Injuries
The L.A.P.D. and L.A. County Sheriff said they were reviewing incidents in which journalists have been struck by projectiles fired by the police.
By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, June 10, 2025
Demonstrators helping Nick Stern, a photojournalist, after he said he was hit by a projectile shot by a law-enforcement officer during a protest in Los Angeles County on Saturday. Credit...Ethan Swope/Associated Press
Nick Stern had moved into position to take a photograph of a group of people waving Mexican flags near a line of police officers in the Los Angeles area on Saturday when he felt a sharp pain in his right thigh.
Before long, Mr. Stern, a seasoned photojournalist who works mostly with British news outlets, had passed out. Then he was in surgery.
A deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had shot Mr. Stern with some kind of projectile, Mr. Stern said, the munition lodging in his thigh and putting him on a weekslong path to recovery.
Over the last few days, several journalists have been injured by law enforcement officers during the protests that have played out in parts of downtown Los Angeles and led to an escalating battle between California and the Trump administration.
Mr. Stern, 60, has covered protests for decades, and said he always keeps either his press badge or camera visible, to indicate he is a journalist. He said he wasn’t sure if the police targeted him or if the deputy who fired on him was just “a bad shot.”
Still, press freedom groups have condemned law enforcement for injuring journalists over the last few days, noting several instances of law enforcement officers firing projectiles at journalists.
In one instance, a police officer on Sunday turned in the direction of an Australian reporter during a broadcast and shot her with a projectile. That reporter, Lauren Tomasi, said the officers were with the Los Angeles Police Department. An L.A.P.D. spokesman, Drake Madison, said the department was investigating the deployment of “less lethal” projectiles during the protests, but he did not respond to questions about the incident with Ms. Tomasi.
The National Press Club, a professional organization for journalists, said reporters had been singled out, and also called on the L.A.P.D.’s police chief to make sure journalists could “safely observe and report” on the protests.
“Police cannot pick and choose when the First Amendment applies,” the group’s president, Mike Balsamo, said in a statement. “Journalists in Los Angeles were not caught in the crossfire — they were targeted.”
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said it was “reviewing video footage related” to Mr. Stern’s injury and was not able to confirm whether it was a sheriff’s deputy who had fired the shot. “We are committed to maintaining an open and transparent relationship with the media and ensuring that journalists can safely perform their duties, especially during protests, acts of civil disobedience, and public gatherings,” the department said.
Journalists have also reported being injured by California Highway Patrol officers and by agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Among several instances compiled by reporters and press freedom groups, a reporter said a Homeland Security agent had shot her with a projectile, and another said he may have been struck with a tear-gas canister fired by a line of Homeland Security agents. The department did not respond to an inquiry.
A collection of press freedom groups wrote a letter on Monday to Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, saying that, in some instances, it appeared federal officers had “deliberately targeted journalists.” The groups urged the department to refrain from unlawful force against reporters, “who are merely covering events of public concern in the Los Angeles area.”
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15) The Military May Find Itself in an Impossible Situation
By Joshua Braver, June 11, 2025
Dr. Braver is an assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies civil-military relations.
President Trump at Fort Bragg on Tuesday. Credit...Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Would a military officer disobey a lawful but unethical order — unethical in the sense that it violates the officer’s professional code? We may be on the verge of finding out.
The Trump administration has sent Marines to the Los Angeles area to join the National Guard troops already there. At the moment, the Marines have been deployed to help protect “federal functions and property,” as President Trump’s memorandum specifies — not to engage in broader domestic policing. But that could quickly change.
As a general matter, if the president were to order members of the military to engage in domestic policing, the order would almost certainly be legal. Not only does the president have constitutional authority to protect federal property and functions, but the Insurrection Act of 1807 also sets a very low bar for deploying the military for domestic law enforcement. Furthermore, military ethics dictate that officers must obey lawful orders. All this suggests that officers should comply if they are ordered to engage in domestic policing.
If the president were to order officers to engage in domestic policing that was unnecessary (because it could be adequately handled by local law enforcement), politically partisan or reckless, the order would still almost certainly be legal — but according to the officers’ professional code, it would also be unethical. And military ethics dictate that officers should reject unethical orders.
Military officers in such a situation would be mired in a contradiction: Their professional duty would compel both compliance and defiance.
Military professional ethics require nonpartisanship, so that the military does not become a political tool and jeopardize its aim of serving the national interest. Those same ethics also strive to keep the military’s conduct limited to its area of expertise — namely, warfighting. The military’s core competence is defeating enemies in mortal combat; for soldiers, Marines and sailors, a kill is often a victory. The same cannot be said for domestic policing, where the hope is to minimize the use of lethal force.
Because their expertise is limited in this way, the armed forces have “carefully delimited roles in law enforcement,” as explained in an open letter in 2022 signed by a bipartisan group of former secretaries of defense and chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Using active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should be done only “as a matter of last resort,” as Mark Esper, defense secretary late in the first Trump administration, explained at a news conference announcing his opposition to domestically deploying military forces during the civil disturbances in the United States in 2020. (Mr. Trump later fired him.)
What, then, are military officers supposed to do if lawfully ordered to violate their professional ethic? Within the armed services, the Army’s doctrine most comprehensively addresses the problem, and it offers little help. It reads: “We serve honorably — according to the Army ethic — under civilian authority while obeying the laws of the nation and all legal orders; further, we reject and report illegal, unethical or immoral orders or actions.”
The passage simultaneously commands obedience and disobedience to lawful but unethical orders, leaving officers without a clear answer on how to proceed.
Scholars of civil-military relations have engaged in long-running debate on this issue. Those who side with obedience emphasize the importance of civilian control of the military. Proponents of disobedience respond that the Army ethic protects not just civilian control of the military but also against the civilian misuse of the military. The foremost scholar of civil-military relations, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, suggested that the dilemma was irresolvable.
In recent years, when the dilemma threatened to rupture civil-military relations, high-ranking authorities stepped in to defuse the crisis — as when Mr. Esper publicly invoked the military’s ethical principles to oppose domestically deploying the military in 2020. Mr. Esper may have narrowly saved service members from having to decide whether to disobey a direct order.
In his second term Mr. Trump has been more careful to place loyalists in positions of authority. This means that the question of ethical resistance may fall on officers in the field. They may be forced to choose between professional obedience and professional integrity, between their duty to the commander in chief and to the American people. It is a tragic bind — for them, for the military and for American democracy.
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16) U.S. Ambassador to Israel Questions Policy on Palestinian State
The envoy, Mike Huckabee, said in media interviews that “Muslim countries” should build a Palestinian state on their territory, which would be a sharp departure from decades of U.S. foreign policy.
By Lara Jakes, June 11, 2025
Lara Jakes has covered Middle East diplomacy for more than a decade.
Ambassador Mike Huckabee speaking with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv in May. Credit...Pool photo by Alex Brandon
The American ambassador to Israel has said that it should be up to “Muslim countries” to build a Palestinian state on their territory instead of in the areas that much of the world recognizes as Palestinian lands.
If the statements by Ambassador Mike Huckabee are confirmed as representing the U.S. administration’s position, it would be a sharp shift away from decades of American foreign policy on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. A State Department spokeswoman downplayed his remarks.
“Muslim countries have 644 times the amount of land that are controlled by Israel,” Mr. Huckabee said in an videotaped interview with the BBC. “So maybe, if there is such a desire for the Palestinian state, there would be someone who would say we’d like to host it, we’d like to create it.”
The United States has long supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would give Palestinians sovereignty in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza. That has been American policy since the United States helped broker the Oslo Accords in 1993, which were widely expected to lead to statehood for the Palestinians, and, for Israel, realization of the long-held goal of land for peace.
Mr. Huckabee said in a separate interview with Bloomberg News that it would be a “problem” if someone wanted to declare those exact territories a future Palestinian state. Bloomberg quoted him as saying in off-camera remarks “I don’t think so” when asked whether the Trump administration supported a two-state solution as ongoing American policy.
“I know that many American administrations and other European countries have pushed for it. But the question is: Where should that be?” he told the BBC. Both interviews were published on Tuesday but it was not clear precisely when they had taken place.
Asked about Mr. Huckabee’s remarks, a State Department spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, told reporters, “I think he certainly speaks for himself,” and added: “When it comes to American policy and certainly where the president stands, I’d suggest you call the White House.”
At least 146 of the world’s 193 countries, plus the Holy See, support statehood for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Although none of the so-called Group of 7 industrialized countries currently recognize a Palestinian state, France and Britain have recently been discussing steps toward doing so.
Next week, President Emmanuel Macron of France will jointly chair a U.N. conference in New York with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia to explore the creation of a Palestinian state.
Before he became ambassador this year, Mr. Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas and Southern Baptist minister, had said that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian” and argued that all of the occupied West Bank belonged to Israel.
But last fall, Mr. Huckabee said he would “carry out the policy of the president” while serving as the top American diplomat to Israel.
“I won’t make the policy,” he said in November.
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17) Yosemite Bans Large Flags From El Capitan, Criminalizing Protests
Violators could face up to six months in jail under the new rule, which appears to have been formalized last month.
By Neil Vigdor, June 10, 2025
Climbers who hang large flags or banners from El Capitan could face up to six months in jail under a crackdown on political displays by the Trump administration. A group of climbers unfurled a trans pride flag in May. Credit...Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated Press
It is one of America’s most majestic and recognizable landmarks, having beckoned Teddy Roosevelt, Ansel Adams and, more recently, protesters.
From the granite walls of El Capitan in California’s Yosemite National Park, demonstrators have draped large flags and banners several times in the past year in protest of a number of issues, including the Israel-Hamas war and various Trump administration policies.
There was one symbolizing transgender pride, another saying “Stop the Genocide” and an upside-down American flag, which represents distress.
Now, the federal government seemingly wants to keep the famous rock formation a blank slate. It has outlawed large flags, banners and signs from El Capitan and most of the park altogether.
The ban appears to have been formalized last month by Yosemite’s acting superintendent, Raymond McPadden, in a Park Service compendium of regulations dated May 20.
The rule tracks with a series of punitive actions by the Trump administration against some critics of its immigration policies and Palestinian sympathizers.
Violators could face up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $5,000 for individuals and $10,000 for groups — penalties already in place for various offenses in the park.
“This restriction is necessary to preserve the values of wilderness character in accordance with the Wilderness Act, provide for an unimpaired visitor experience, protect natural and cultural resources in designated Wilderness and Potential Wilderness Addition portions of the park,” Mr. McPadden wrote.
Parks officials also cast the display of large flags — those greater than 3 feet by 5 feet — on any of the cliffs or mountains in Yosemite as a potential safety hazard that they said could interfere with climbing activity. Flags larger than that size would require a permit.
The Park Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday about the new rule, which was reported earlier by Climbing magazine and SFGate.com. Nor did the White House.
Miranda Oakley, 40, one of four climbers who unfurled a 25-by-10-foot banner last June with the colors of the Palestinian flag saying “Stop the Genocide,” said in an interview on Tuesday that the Trump administration was further trying to suppress voices of dissent.
“To me, it still seems like they want to control what we’re saying,” said Ms. Oakley, who is part of the group Climbers for Palestine.
Ms. Oakley wondered what would happen to people who don’t cooperate with the new rule.
“Are they going to detain them indefinitely, as they have for some international students that have spoken out for Palestine?” she asked.
In February, a small group of protesters hung an inverted American flag — a signal for distress that began with sailors — off the side of El Capitan to protest the Trump administration’s cuts to the Park Service.
Plenty of eyes were already fixated on El Capitan for the annual phenomenon known as firefall, when the light from the setting sun causes a seasonal waterfall to glow orange.
The display occurred shortly after at least 1,000 Park Service employees were abruptly dismissed from their jobs, part of a sweeping federal work force downsizing initiative that was once overseen by President Trump’s now-estranged ally, Elon Musk.
An additional 3,000 people were fired from the U.S. Forest Service, which plays a significant supporting role with the parks.
In May, a group of climbers unfurled a transgender pride flag in the middle of El Capitan to criticize the Trump administration’s rollback of protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people, including its elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.
On the same day last month that the compendium was issued, Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, whose agency oversees the Park Service, asked the public to take note of any signs at parks or on public lands that “are negative about either past or living Americans.” In a directive, Mr. Burgum said that he was carrying out the provisions of an executive order signed by President Trump for “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
El Capitan had a starring role in “Free Solo,” the Oscar-winning 2018 documentary about the climber Alex Honnold’s quest to reach the top of the landmark without a rope.
Ms. Oakley, who estimated that she had climbed El Capitan more than 20 times, said the cliff is a statement in its own right, especially when driving into Yosemite Valley.
“It is right smack dab in your face,” she said.
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