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Following FBI Raid in San Jose, We Say Anti-War Activism Is Not a Crime! Sign Onto the Call Now
>>> Sign onto the statement here: tinyurl.com/handsoffantiwar
In April 2025, San Jose anti-war activist Alex Dillard was subjected to the execution of a federal search warrant. FBI agents raided his home and seized his personal electronic devices, seeking evidence of alleged ties to Russia and implying that he may have been acting as a foreign agent.
We, as the broad progressive people's movements in the U.S. and around the world, as well as members of the San Jose community, stand in solidarity with Alex against these attacks. We assert that these accusations are entirely baseless. They constitute a clear act of political retaliation against Alex's First Amendment-protected beliefs, activities, and associations.
This incident is not isolated. It reflects a broader pattern of repression by federal agencies against activists, journalists, and organizers who speak out against U.S. imperialism, war, and systemic injustice. From the surveillance and harassment of the Black liberation movement to the targeting of Palestinian solidarity organizers, the U.S. government has repeatedly sought to silence dissent through intimidation and legal persecution.
We condemn this latest act of FBI repression in the strongest terms. Such tactics are designed to instill fear, disrupt organizing efforts, and criminalize activism. But we refuse to be intimidated. Our community stands united in defense of the right to dissent and to challenge U.S. militarism, corporate greed, and state violence—no matter how aggressively the government attempts to suppress these voices.
We call on all allies, activists, and organizations committed to justice to sign onto this solidarity statement and to remain vigilant and to push back against these escalating attacks. The government’s efforts to conflate activism with "foreign influence" are a transparent attempt to justify repression—but we will not allow these tactics to silence us. We will continue to speak out, organize, and resist. Solidarity, not silence, is our answer to repression.
Activism is not a crime. Opposing war and genocide is not a crime. Hands off our movements!
Sign onto the statement here: tinyurl.com/handsoffantiwar
Copyright © 2025 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
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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) Cities Nationwide Brace for Day of Protests
Los Angeles said it was preparing for a turnout that “may be unprecedented” after days of sustained protests against the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.
By Mike Baker, Sean Keenan and Rick Rojas, June 14, 2025
Federal law enforcement agents outside the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday. Protests in the city were expected to be the largest since demonstrations started over a week ago. Mark Abramson for The New York Times
Protesters began filling plazas and streets in cities across the country on Saturday morning, mobilizing for mass demonstrations to counter the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, cuts to federal services and a large military parade in Washington that coincides with the president’s 79th birthday.
In Atlanta, thousands of people packed into Liberty Plaza, carrying signs that included the message “Stop Trump’s Terrorism” and singing a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” adjusted with the words “Take Trump out of the White House.” In Nashville, where more than 1,000 people gathered near the Tennessee State Capitol, a cheering crowd recited the Pledge of Allegiance.
The authorities in Los Angeles, which has emerged as the epicenter of anxiety over immigration enforcement and seen days of sustained protests, said they were bracing for the possibility of crowd sizes that could be “unprecedented.”
The collective action on Saturday — called “No Kings” demonstrations by organizers — encompasses some 2,000 planned events spread through all 50 states, from big cities to small towns. Those protests come amid building outrage over raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Los Angeles that led to mass demonstrations and conflicts with law enforcement. The Trump administration has now shifted the focus of its mass deportation campaign, telling immigration officials to largely pause raids and arrests in hotels, restaurants and the agricultural industry.
The protest organizers avoided calling for demonstrations in Washington, where the military parade is set to go on despite a forecast of possibly severe storms. Mr. Trump warned that anyone seeking to protest at the parade would be met with “very big force.”
Elected leaders and law enforcement officials in California and across the country encouraged protesters to remain peaceful, and organizers of the “No Kings” demonstrations called on participants to focus on “nonviolent action.” Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles warned that demonstrations that turned destructive would only feed into an unfounded portrayal of Los Angeles as gripped by unrest.
“We want to make sure that everybody understands that Los Angeles is united,” Ms. Bass, a Democrat, said at a news conference on Friday night.
Here’s what else to know:
Detained by Marines: Marcos Leao, a 27-year-old Army veteran, was briefly held by U.S. Marines outside of a federal building in Los Angeles. The move was noteworthy because federal troops are rarely seen detaining U.S. civilians, even temporarily. Read more ›
Congressional inquiry: The House Oversight Committee said it was opening an investigation into the Los Angeles protests, including communications between Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass. Mr. Newsom responded that the records would include “some highly unusual communications from the White House.”
Orlando Mayorquin
June 14, 2025, 11:14 a.m. ET12 minutes ago
As an overnight curfew lifts in downtown Los Angeles, the streets remain quiet. Police are stationed near locations where protesters are expected later today.
Maria Jimenez Moya
June 14, 2025, 11:10 a.m. ET16 minutes ago
Maria Jimenez Moya
Reporting from Houston
The Houston protest is kicking off. Thousands of people of all ages surround City Hall, U.S. and Latin American flags are waving and Latin music is playing.
Taylor Robinson
June 14, 2025, 10:58 a.m. ET28 minutes ago
Taylor Robinson
Reporting from Newark, N.J.
A crowd of protesters is braving the rain in Newark, N.J., gathering in front of the Essex County Courthouse. In front of a statue of Abraham Lincoln, Larry Hamm, a community organizer, is leading the poncho-clad protesters in chants of “Trump must go” and “down with dictatorship.” The protest will officially begin at 11 a.m.
Sean Keenan
June 14, 2025, 10:30 a.m. ET56 minutes ago
Anti-Trump demonstrators booed as a small group of Proud Boys weaved through the crowd outside the Georgia statehouse.
June 14, 2025, 10:20 a.m. ET1 hour ago
The Atlanta protest launched with a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” its lyrics swapped to demand an end to Trump’s presidency. Organizers held up placards with the new words that the crowds sang: “Take Trump out of the White House/Lock him up in the jail.”
Sean Keenan
June 14, 2025, 9:59 a.m. ET1 hour ago
Thousands have already funneled into Liberty Plaza, a park in the shadow of Georgia’s statehouse in Atlanta. The sardine-packed crowd is quiet, awaiting the 10 a.m. kickoff of speeches and chants.
Kevin Williams
June 14, 2025, 9:51 a.m. ET2 hours ago
Kevin Williams
Reporting from Cincinnati
Protesters began an early morning march on the University of Cincinnati campus. The university announced that all five of the university’s public parking garages would be closed today because of the protests.
Michael Gold
June 14, 2025, 9:14 a.m. ET2 hours ago
All 45 Senate Democrats and two independent senators sent a letter on Friday to President Trump urging him “to immediately withdraw all military personnel that have been deployed to Los Angeles.” The letter, led by Senator Alex Padilla of California, said the senators feared the precedent the deployment of troops to L.A. set for other cities and states and that the Trump administration’s decision undermined the “constitutional balance of power between the federal government and the states.”
Supporters of President Trump in Republican strongholds across the country are preparing to celebrate his birthday and the 250th anniversary of the Army on Saturday, the same day thousands of protesters will demonstrate against what they see as authoritarian actions by the president’s administration.
The striking juxtaposition follows several days of protests against federal immigration raids in major cities, including Los Angeles, where Mr. Trump’s deployment of the California National Guard and the Marines fueled further civil unrest and a legal battle between a Democratic governor and the president.
At least 60 protesters were arrested on Thursday night in demonstrations against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, raising the number of arrests to more than 1,200 nationwide since the protests erupted last week in Los Angeles.
Roughly 2,000 other protests against the Trump administration were expected across the country on Saturday, when a military parade is planned by the White House in Washington.
An “unprecedented” number of people are expected to attend protests in Los Angeles on Saturday against President Trump and his administration immigration crackdown, the Los Angeles police chief said.
The surge in demonstrators was expected on the same day as a planned military parade in Washington in honor of the Army’s 250th anniversary, which also coincides with Mr. Trump’s 79th birthday.
Fact Check
The protests in Los Angeles, entering their eighth day on Friday, have spurred President Trump to deploy National Guard troops to the city, an extraordinary move that he has justified with a number of dubious claims.
The demonstrations against the president’s widening crackdown on immigration have led to clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement. But many of Mr. Trump’s claims follow a yearslong pattern of expressing skepticism and contempt toward protesters and are not rooted in fact. They seek to portray the protests as fraudulent, the deployment of troops as lauded and the city in need of liberation.
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2) Inside the Tumult That Led 4 Men to Escape from a Migrant Facility
Conditions had been deteriorating at Delaney Hall in Newark for days. Detainees complained about erratic meals and crowded conditions. Then their frustrations boiled over.
By Tracey Tully, Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Raúl Vilchis, June 14, 2025
Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark, where four detainees escaped on Thursday. Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times
Conditions had been disintegrating for days inside a massive immigration detention center in an industrial corner of Newark.
Meals had been erratic at the privately run facility that last month began holding migrants facing deportation. Some detainees were sleeping on floors. And the water available from faucets was sometimes scalding or foul tasting.
Several dozen men in Unit 5, on an upper floor of the jailhouse known as Delaney Hall, had grown frustrated. And after returning Thursday afternoon from a first-floor cafeteria, where they said they had been given slices of bread in place of a meal, they began covering security cameras and smashing at walls and windows.
Two security guards stationed in the unit retreated, and some of the detainees pushed the door closed.
By the time the disruption was over, four men had escaped.
This account of events before and after the escape is based on interviews with several immigration lawyers who spoke to clients at Delaney Hall during the melee and more than a dozen people who had conversations with loved ones who called from inside the jail, pleading for help. On Friday, Senator Andy Kim and Representative Rob Menendez, both Democrats from New Jersey, offered additional details after touring the facility and speaking with federal officials and representatives from GEO Group, the private company that runs the 1,000-bed jail.
The tumult raised urgent questions about the living conditions inside the detention facility and others like it across the country as President Trump ramps up immigration arrests, filling to capacity many detention centers that, together, are holding about 51,000 migrants nationwide.
The breakout also prompted scrutiny of GEO Group and the measures it took as it converted a facility that had been dormant for about a year into a detention center after winning a 15-year, $1 billion contract from the Trump administration in February. Local officials have for months raised concerns that Delaney Hall had not been properly inspected, leading the mayor of Newark, Ras J. Baraka, to sue GEO Group as he sought to force the company to reapply for a new certificate of occupancy.
The men who escaped had punched a hole through an exterior wall of the jail that Mr. Kim described as crude — “essentially just drywall with some mesh inside.”
“It shows just how shoddy construction was,” he said, and highlights what can happen when for-profit prisons “try to pocket” as much money as possible.
On Friday afternoon, representatives from GEO Group pushed back on that claim, noting all the services offered to the detainees, including medical care, family visitations and opportunities to exercise religious faiths.
“Contrary to current reporting, there has been no widespread unrest at the facility,” Christopher Ferreira, a GEO Group spokesman, said in an email.
Still, on Friday night, guards began loading migrants into large white vans and appeared to be evacuating at least part of the facility, as officials from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, rushed to contain the fallout.
Trouble had been brewing at Delaney Hall for days.
Detainees had complained to their lawyers and to relatives about increasingly crammed quarters and paltry meals served at irregular hours.
The cafeteria was being used to accommodate migrants who had been moved out of other parts of the facility to address crowding, Mr. Kim said. That disrupted the delivery of the already small portions of food, he said.
At about 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, the tension hit a tipping point.
“Guards — they lost control,” said Mustafa Cetin, a New Jersey immigration lawyer who spent 11 minutes on the phone Thursday night with a Turkish client who huddled during the chaos with others in Unit 5.
The Turkish man, a father of three who lives in South Jersey, told Mr. Cetin that after a hole was punched through the wall, the men who escaped used bedsheets to lower themselves to the ground.
Mr. Kim said that the fleeing men wound up in an adjacent parking lot, and then climbed a fence behind the facility to escape.
A woman whose brother, José, was being held at the facility, said she got a call from him at 5:44 p.m. Thursday. A Salvadoran construction worker in New Jersey, he had been there for several weeks after being detained when he showed up for a court hearing.
“He told me he was scared and didn’t know what would happen to him,” said the woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Cecilia, because she fears retaliation. “People were desperate, breaking doors, banging on walls.”
The unit was also very hot, she said, with air conditioning that was either broken or not working well. Temperatures on Thursday in Newark were unseasonably high, hitting 91 degrees in the late afternoon.
At around the same time, another detainee called a staffer at DIRE, an emergency immigration hotline in New Jersey.
“We could hear screaming and yelling in the background,” said Ellen Whitt, a volunteer who works at DIRE.
People who had been scheduled to visit detainees on Thursday afternoon were turned away. Many were still gathered outside when a fire truck showed up, followed by squad cars from the Newark Police Department and the Essex County Sheriffs Department.
Soon after, vans filled with masked federal agents wearing vests labeled ICE and ERO, an ICE division known as the Enforcement Removal Operation, began arriving and entered through the locked gated perimeter of the facility, according to several videos taken by immigrant rights activists and relatives of detainees.
One van that entered held two gray vats of material labeled “toxic” and “flammable,” according to photos taken by a witness and shared with The New York Times.
As guards attempted to restore order, a pungent odor filled Unit 5, Mr. Cetin said, and his client doused fabric with water and placed it under a door in a dormitory-style room to try to keep a strong smell of gas from seeping in.
Over on Unit 4 a guard entered and asked a Mexican detainee if the “gas” that had been fired to quell unrest in another part of the building had reached his dormitory, according to Rosalinda Ortega, 35, the detainee’s wife.
“He’s the only one who speaks English in his room, and he told me that an official asked him if they were fine, because they had thrown gas to control the other people and they wanted to check because the windows were sealed,” Ms. Ortega said, relaying a phone conversation she had with her husband on Friday.
Delaney Hall has for weeks been the site of protests against the Trump administration’s immigration arrests. As news of the disturbance began to spread Thursday night, so did the size of the crowd outside.
At nightfall, a K-9 unit and agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrived.
A New Jersey law enforcement official who was briefed on the details of the escape said that the number of people who were believed to be missing fluctuated throughout the night, from five to nine and then to four.
Federal authorities continued to search late Friday for the missing men, who, according to the Department of Homeland Security, were from Colombia and Honduras and all had criminal records. The men had crossed the border illegally in recent years or had overstayed their visas, the agency said. They had all been arrested in New Jersey or New York for crimes that included weapons possession, burglary, aggravated assault and terroristic threats.
Officials announced a $10,000 reward for information about their whereabouts.
Worried families showed up at Delaney Hall early on Friday, hoping to get a glimpse of their loved ones.
Ms. Ortega, the wife of the Mexican detainee, said she drove 13 hours from Gainesville, Ga., with her three young daughters, hoping to pick up her husband, who had been scheduled to be released on Friday.
She worried that the breakout would delay or derail their reunion.
She and her daughters watched Friday evening as van after van filled with migrants exited the facility, wondering aloud if their husband and father was inside one of them, and where he might be going next.
Mark Bonamo contributed reporting.
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3) Protest Is Underrated
By David Wallace-Wells, Opinion Writer, June 14, 2025
The first thing to know is that it was all basically willed into being — not by “paid protesters” or the Mexican government or socialists or union leaders, but by Stephen Miller, the architect of President Trump’s xenophobic immigration plan and his deputy chief of staff. In a May meeting at ICE headquarters, Miller reportedly demanded that field agents forget about targeting only those undocumented immigrants with criminal records and instead stage purposefully cruel, attention-getting sweeps in places like the parking lot of a Home Depot. That is precisely where, last Friday, those raids began.
The second thing to know is that the unrest was really quite limited: a roughly five-block stretch downtown, in a city of nearly four million people spread over almost 500 square miles; several driverless Waymo robot taxis, lined up on one street and set ablaze. There was some more serious violence, too: some journalists were shot with rubber bullets and other less-lethal munitions, a few cop cars were pelted with rocks, and at least one was set on fire, but no serious law-enforcement injuries were reported. But this was not 1965, with widespread arson and 34 deaths, or 1992, with disorder spreading through whole neighborhoods and more than 60 people killed.
None of that means that what began last Friday in Los Angeles — a series of spectacular ICE raids, a direct-action response to block them, large-scale peaceful protests punctuated in places by bursts of familiar violence — is insignificant. To the contrary: Hundreds of migrants and protesters have been arrested over the last week, with many of the raids conducted by ICE officers in the now-familiar uniform of masked anonymity. The National Guard was mobilized over the objection of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and without the support of the Los Angeles Police Department’s leadership, with hundreds of Marines on active duty mobilized to join them in a rare deployment of military personnel to a site of domestic unrest.
On Tuesday, Trump disparaged Los Angeles as a “trash heap” in an incendiary speech that was met with horrifying applause from assembled loyalists in the Army, and on Thursday, Senator Alex Padilla was hauled out of a local news conference being held by the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem. When the senator was wrestled to the floor, the secretary had just declared “we are not going away,” but would instead stay in L.A. to “liberate the city” from “socialists” and its democratically elected local government.
The political scientists I spoke to throughout the week used phrases like “competitive authoritarianism,” “acute democratic backsliding” and “autocratic power grab.”
But the political theater of the last week also seemed strangely distorted, as though we were watching it transpire through the wrong end of a telescope. If the decade of protest that encircled the world from Tahrir Square to Hong Kong in the 2010s was a result of social media, which made it much easier to amass enormous rallies on the streets without much real organization or commitment among those joining the march, we seem to have entered a new phase, in which the relationship between real-world protest and the debate stage of our phones has been somewhat inverted.
Social media is still useful in drawing crowds pretty spontaneously into the streets. But it is now also functioning as its own theater, where the real world serves as fodder for endless argumentation, exasperation, outrage, and hand-wringing. “The agenda gets set through virality,” says the Berkeley political scientist Jake Grumbach. As does responsibility, he says — which, “in an era of social media, it’s incredibly hard to manage.”
“I am struck, in some ways, by the scriptedness of it all,” says another Berkeley political scientist, Omar Wasow, who studies activism and backlash. “Protests are an act of storytelling, at their most powerful when they draw on mythology in our culture, and what happens on the ground matters in shifting politics,” he goes on. “But there’s also a template now: outrage and calls for law and order on the right, and a kind of rallying behind the righteousness of the cause on the left. There is media coverage that just hyper-fixates on there’s a fire!” And, of course, a know-it-all impulse to proclaim, too, when we first see such images, that their effect on public opinion is obvious.
Grumbach calls this “pundit brain” — the impulse to immediately digest political news primarily through debates over strategy. Was it good to burn a Waymo, effective to block a highway, productive to wave a Mexican flag, all in the name of raising salience? Or would it all backfire, giving Trump and Miller exactly what they wanted, as so many pundits immediately warned.
Within just a few days, attention had turned away from those images and the A.I. slop each inspired, and toward the Trump administration’s eager escalation. But public opinion was scattered enough that it was pretty foolish to presume any coherent strategic lesson from it. One poll says Americans largely support the use of the military “to bring order to the streets” in the event of violence; another says they oppose even the use of the National Guard. Overall polling suggests that while Americans may disapprove of the protests, they also disapprove of Trump’s response. One poll says immigration is Trump’s best issue; another has support turning sharply downward in recent days.
And, of course, over time opinion is volatile, too, and getting more so in an age of thermostatic whiplash. Just five years ago, for the first time in the Gallup survey’s history, more Americans were telling pollsters that they wanted higher rates of immigration rather than less, and not long before that those who believed immigrants were on net contributing positively to the country outnumbered those who thought they were a burden — 62 percent to 28 percent.
There are enduring lessons from political science about what works, but despite what we are often told, those lessons are not exactly that the public will never support disruptive action or even that some amount of violent protest is always counterproductive. These questions are the core focus of the research of Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, who finds that nonviolence is generally less politically risky, but also thinks questions about specific tactics are less important than the basic playbook for success: mass mobilization focused on cultivating noncooperation like boycotts and strikes among institutions and business elites, and designed above all to invite public defections from the other side.
In that sense, it is encouraging to see veterans and members of the military speaking out, and several Republican members of Congress appearing to criticize the president’s actions — and indeed to see the president himself somewhat backing down, suggesting that ICE should deploy more common sense in targeting farm and hotel workers, for instance. (Of course, we’ll see if that holds.)
But as Hahrie Han of Johns Hopkins pointed out to me, it’s always critical to build alliances between protesters and other leaders — as Senator Padilla seemed to be when he disrupted that D.H.S. news conference. But in the present environment that is becoming harder to do, given greater government surveillance and far more aggressive policing of dissent and political speech. (It’s no mistake, after all, that this administration’s first high-profile ICE detentions were not of violent criminals or even people in the country illegally but of activists here on green cards and student visas.)
This was one major shortcoming of the large-scale global protests of the 2010s, Vincent Bevins argued in his book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution,” when millions took to the streets across Cairo, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro and Hong Kong, successively shocking the world with the sheer volume of widespread indignation — only to watch as the spontaneous-seeming protest energy quickly dissipated. In so many cases, something like the status quo, and often worse, returned.
By this standard, you might judge a whole generation of mass American protest to be a failure, too. The anti-globalization drive centered in Seattle in 1999, the antiwar protests in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 — all sputtered out without notching obvious policy victories or reversing the patterns of history each hoped to thwart. But sometimes, the victories are simply more diffuse than we might expect — as, in truth, were the demands of protesters. Occupy Wall Street, for instance, didn’t lead to a huge wealth tax, but it did introduce income inequality as a new center of political gravity for the country. Over the same period, the country simultaneously grew considerably more isolationist and, in recent years, anti-free trade.
The legacy of more recent mass protests is complicated, too, partly because we so rush to adjudicate each episode immediately that we miss what protest is really meant to do, which is to bring change over time. Do you measure the balance of progress and backlash on Day 3, Month 3, Year 3, or even later? Do you look to public opinion, or policy, or who’s in the White House or the statehouse or the mayor’s office?
The climate protests, which surged in 2019, did ultimately result in concrete policy: the Inflation Reduction Act and the European Green Deal. But the first is now on the MAGA chopping block and the second has been put on the back burner, amid a broader cultural retreat from climate alarm. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were enormously popular, meaningfully elevating national concern for racial justice and benefiting Democratic candidates that fall, though they are often remembered as progressive excess feeding of what looks like the country’s present reactionary turn. And activism against Israel’s war on Gaza, centered on college campuses, has ignited a war on elite higher education and is these days routinely derided as cartoonish political grandiosity from privileged 20-year-olds — but American sympathy for Israel has recently reached an all-time low. Exactly what is cause and what is effect, in each of these, is not so clear — it rarely is, in real time, and it isn’t always so clear in retrospect, either.
And then there is what you might call the most significant of all recent political unrest — the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In the weeks and months that followed, Trump’s political standing seemed to collapse — including among electorally critical moderates and many prominent Republicans, who took the opportunity to publicly and unequivocally defect from and denounce the Trump coalition.
But that backlash didn’t exactly sink Trump’s political future, and while it’s hard to say for sure whether he might have won in 2024 without it, his coalition was ultimately hardened by the experience. This is one reason the country is where it is today, in a battle between humanitarian progressivism and an emboldened right-wing authoritarian faction. History is complicated.
Over the last week, that battle has unfolded in a kind of social-media diorama of Los Angeles. This weekend, it spreads across the country through nationwide “No Kings” marches. What follows may be what Wasow calls a “long hot summer” of violence and escalation, as the Trump administration has already hinted it is planning. Or it might yield to a merciful de-escalation, with the violence of protesters already somewhat circumscribed and the violence of the state already blunted by public outrage.
Whatever comes, let’s not pretend we know the ultimate meaning of each episode because we caught a glimpse of the Fox News chyron or saw someone denouncing protest tactics on X. Better to try and see those protests and federal crackdowns against them each for what they are — a renewed resistance and the eager use of force to snuff it out.
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4) Israel Launches New Strikes on Tehran
The rare daytime assault came as Iran and Israel were still assessing the damage from deadly overnight attacks. The nature of the strikes by both Iran and Israel signified an escalation in the conflict.
By Natan Odenheimer, Farnaz Fassihi and Aaron Boxerman, June 15, 2025
Israel bombarded the Iranian capital with a new wave of strikes on Sunday afternoon, as both sides warned of more to come in a conflict that is rapidly expanding in scope and intensity.
The rare daytime assault came as Iran and Israel were still assessing the damage from deadly overnight attacks that left many fearful and sleepless. The strikes have been some of the fiercest and most prolonged in the history of the decades-long enmity between Israel and Iran, raising fears of a wider war that could draw in the United States and other powers.
As Iranian state news media outlets shared photographs and videos of damaged residential buildings and smoke billowing from the center of the capital, Tehran, Israel’s military refused to comment on what it described as “potential ongoing operations.”
Overnight, Israeli fighter jets overnight bombarded Tehran, setting the sky ablaze with flames from burning fuel reservoirs from the country’s vital energy industry, while Iran launched volleys of ballistic missiles at Israel, some of which eluded the country’s air defenses.
Iranians and Israelis have been bracing for further violence, with both sides warning of a protracted fight and dismissing international calls to de-escalate the conflict. On Sunday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps warned that it would escalate its attacks if Israel continued carrying out strikes on Iran, according to state news media.
Not long after, Israel’s military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, said Israel was not ceasing its attacks on Iran “for a moment.”
“At this hour, too, we continue to strike dozens of additional targets in Tehran. We are deepening the damage to Iran’s nuclear program and its military capabilities,” he said in a televised address, without elaborating.
The path to diplomacy appears limited after officials called off talks set for Sunday between Tehran and Washington on the future of Iran’s nuclear program.
The fighting began Friday in a surprise Israeli attack that took aim at the Iranian regime, targeting Tehran’s nuclear program and killing top military officials. Since then, Israel has struck more than 250 targets in Iran, and Iranian forces have fired more than 200 ballistic missiles at Israeli territory, in addition to scores of drones, according to the Israeli military.
The strikes have killed more than 70 people in Iran, including six top Iranian security chiefs.
Iran has countered with a barrage of missiles trying to overwhelm Israel’s sophisticated aerial defenses. Just south of the coastal city of Tel Aviv, a missile tore up much of a multistory residential building.
At least 10 people were killed during the Iranian barrages beginning overnight on Saturday. Scores more were injured, some seriously. In all, at least 13 people, identified as civilians, have been killed in Israel since Friday.
Here’s what else to know:
· Expanding scope of attacks: Israeli strikes, initially focused on nuclear sites, air defenses and military targets, are also now targeting the energy industry that underpins much of Iran’s economy. The Israeli military’s chief spokesman said its forces had achieved “freedom of action” in the skies over Tehran, indicating they could strike targets without expecting major interference.
· Israeli attack on the Houthis: In an apparent bid to cripple one of Iran’s strongest remaining proxy forces in the region, Israel targeted a meeting of Houthi leadership in Yemen on Saturday night. An Israeli military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with army rules, said the airstrike targeted Mohamed Al-Ghamari, the Houthi military’s chief of staff.
· Nuclear talks scuttled: The salvos of missiles scuttled talks between the United States and Iran on the future of Iran’s nuclear program. The talks had been scheduled to resume on Sunday in Oman, but American and Omani officials said they had been canceled. Read more ›
· Washington’s view: The United States’ possible role in the spiraling conflict remains unclear. While Israeli officials had hoped the Trump administration would participate in a joint attack, Secretary of State Marco Rubio denied American involvement in the strikes. But President Trump also did not call for Israel to rein in its assault.
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5) As Trump Celebrates Army’s Founding, His Critics Take to the Streets
President Trump held a military parade the same day that hundreds of protests took place, in what amounted to a split-screen show of force.
By David E. Sanger, Published June 14, 2025, Updated June 15, 2025
David E. Sanger has covered six American presidencies in four decades as a Times reporter in Washington and abroad.
Demonstrators at a “No Kings” protest on Saturday in Atlanta, one of hundreds such protests planned across the country. Credit...Dustin Chambers for The New York Times
President Trump presided over a show of American military might in the nation’s capital on Saturday evening, a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States Army that became a test of wills and competing imagery, with demonstrators around the country decrying his expansion of executive power.
Mr. Trump sat in a reviewing stand on Constitution Avenue as armored vehicles dating from two World Wars and overflights of 80-year old bombers and modern helicopters shook downtown Washington. The city was locked down, divided by a wall of tall, black crowd-control fences designed to assure that the parade, the first of its kind since American troops returned from the Gulf War in 1991, was an uninterrupted demonstration of history and American power.
It went off without a hitch, but also without even a nod to the current moment. When Mr. Trump left his seat between his wife, Melania Trump, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, it was to swear in new soldiers — “Have a great life,” he told them after the brief ceremony — and then, at sundown, to recall the Army’s greatest moments.
He invoked George Washington and recalled Gettysburg. Yet he spoke more to the Army’s power than to its purpose. “Time and again, America’s enemies have learned that you threaten the American people, soldiers are coming for you. Your defeat will be certain, your demise will be final, and your downfall will be total and complete.”
Hours before he left the White House, the day had already encapsulated the sharpness of America’s divide over immigration, free speech and Mr. Trump’s determination to reshape the government, universities and cultural institutions to adopt his worldview.
By design, military parades are part national celebration and part international intimidation, and Mr. Trump has wanted one in Washington since he attended a Bastille Day parade in Paris in 2017. Formally, the parade celebrates the decision by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1775, to raise a unified, lightly armed force of colonialists after the shock of the battles with British forces at Lexington and Concord. That army, which George Washington took command of a month later, ultimately expelled the far larger, better armed colonial force.
But no celebration of history takes place in a political vacuum. And protesters in large cities and small towns from Seattle to Key West showed up in overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against how Mr. Trump was making use of the modern force. His decisions over the past week to federalize the National Guard and call the Marines into the streets of Los Angeles, in support of his immigration roundups, has supercharged a debate about whether he is abusing the powers of the commander in chief.
It was a split-screen show of force. Roughly 2,000 protests, under the slogan “No Kings,” pushed back against what the crowds decried as authoritarian overreach. While the big-city rallies attracted the attention and the cameras, smaller events were organized in rural areas, including three dozen in Indiana, a state Mr. Trump won last November by 19 points.
In Dallas, another stronghold of Mr. Trump’s support, crowds of protesters stretched across a wide street for at least five blocks. The Houston protest looked more like a block party, with dances to Mexican music and cool-offs in a fountain.
But in Los Angeles, which has seen a week of demonstrations, car-burnings and episodic violence, a large crowd gathered downtown, spreading over several city blocks. As the evening wore on and an 8 p.m. curfew approached, tensions rose, with the police using chemical irritants in an attempt to disperse some protesters from a complex of federal buildings and officers on horseback charging toward groups of others and swinging their batons to break them up.
Back in Washington, the organizers of the America250 events, for which this is the first big production, sold a “dedicated V.I.P. experience” to large donors, and red MAGA hats to the president’s supporters. It is also Mr. Trump’s 79th birthday, though he has insisted the celebration is about the army, not him. Organizers expected veterans of the Korea and Vietnam conflicts to turn out along with those who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, two wars that Mr. Trump — and many Democrats — have declared were wastes of lives and money.
Mr. Trump has defended the spending of as much as $45 million — including the cost of repairing Washington’s streets from the damage expected from rolling 60-ton tanks down Constitution Avenue — as a small price to pay to stoke national pride and to remind the world of America’s hard power. He told an interviewer on NBC last month that the price tag was “peanuts compared to the value of doing it.”
“We have the greatest missiles in the world,” he continued. “We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest Army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we’re going to celebrate it.”
To some of Mr. Trump’s critics, it was conduct unbecoming a superpower. In the first Trump term, that view was shared by military leaders who dissuaded him from replicating the French show of force. They have since been ousted, replaced by true believers like Mr. Hegseth.
Every minute was broadcast on Fox News and other conservative networks and streaming services, while the legacy cable networks kept to their ordinary programming. One Fox broadcaster declared the parade showed that “America means business,” and another argued that the show of force rolling alongside the Mall would provide “succor to our allies” and “strike a little bit of fear and a little bit of deterrence” into American enemies.
But in the run-up to the parade, Mr. Trump’s critics argued that such a display could do just the opposite, making the country look as if it were yearning for past glories while ignoring the risks of treating allies as if they are a burden.
Mr. Trump’s political advisers bet that half the country or more would enjoy watching the display of Army history, from the World War I tanks to the twin-prop B-25 Mitchells that swept over neighborhoods in northwest Washington on their way to the flyover, as much as Mr. Trump’s ever-evolving definition of what “America First” means to his presidency. Parades are pure showmanship, and Mr. Trump is the master showman.
Yet a military parade is also an unvarnished celebration of America’s hard power, even if this one was dominated by huge equipment, like the M-1 Abrams tank, that seems antiquated in an age of drones and cyberweapons. (Of the 31 Abrams tanks given to Ukraine over the past two years, only a handful remain operational; most were taken out by the Russians or sidelined by breakdowns.)
And it comes at a moment the administration has been ridiculing as wasteful such efforts as providing global aid, battling H.I.V. or backing basic research at universities that Mr. Trump has gone to war against. The parade’s estimated cost will amount to about a fifth of the annual budget of the Voice of America, which had millions of listeners around the world until Mr. Trump took it off the air this spring.
The protests, which organizers deliberately kept outside Washington to avoid focusing more attention on the military celebration, had been planned for many weeks, as opposition to the administration’s efforts to dismiss expert opinion, oust the “deep state” and silence critics has mounted.
Mr. Trump’s decision to move 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines into Los Angeles asserted a role for the military at home, which was exactly what had given the Continental Congress pause about creating a colonial army at all. That same concern, 250 years later, was expected to give the weekend protests mass and weight. They were further fueled by Mr. Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg in North Carolina last week, when he lumped in peaceful protesters with “troublemakers, agitators, insurrectionists,” and later said anyone protesting in Washington would be met with “very big force.”
In the run-up to the parade, those differences broke out on Capitol Hill, when Mr. Hegseth defended the use of troops at home and suggested preparations were underway “if there are other riots, in places where law enforcement officers are threatened,” so that “we would have the capability to surge National Guard there.”
Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington State, lashed out at him. “You are deploying the American military to police the American people; you are sending the National Guard into California without the governor’s request, sending the Marines not after foreign threats, but after American protesters; and now President Trump is promising heavy force against peaceful protesters at his D.C. military parade.”
“Threatening to use our own troops on our own citizens at such scale is unprecedented, it is unconstitutional, and it is downright un-American,” she concluded.
The organizers of the protest marches ranged from the American Civil Liberties Union to abortion rights and gun violence groups, but also included the “Hands Off!” protesters who argue Mr. Trump has threatened Social Security, Medicaid and education budgets.
They folded together, though, under the “No Kings” group, which called for a “day of defiance” on Saturday. “We want to create contrast,” said Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of a group called Indivisible that is organizing the protest in Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress met to create that first army force. “Not conflict.”
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6) Trump Wants You to Get Used to This
By Ruth Ben-Ghiat, June 15, 2025
Dr. Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.”
Mark Peterson for The New York Times
President Trump, a former reality television star whose administration includes several former Fox News personalities, knows a good image can go far.
In the space of a week, the American public has been treated to two highly unusual sights: first, federalized National Guard members and active-duty Marines dressed for combat on the streets of Los Angeles, ready to stand opposite civilians protesting ICE roundups; then an extravagant military parade in Washington on the 250th anniversary of the Army’s founding — and on Mr. Trump’s birthday — generating footage of tanks massed on the streets in numbers more often seen in countries where a coup is underway.
Mr. Trump appears eager to create optics that support his claim that public dissent constitutes an existential threat to the nation. He also apparently seeks to get the American public used to seeing our armed forces in a new light. In the president’s version of America, the military should be seen less as an apolitical body loyal to the Constitution. Rather, it should be viewed as an institution that serves at the behest of a leader and his ideological and political agendas, regardless of how much these depart from democratic understandings of the military’s role.
Security forces have often been the public face of the violence and moral collapse that can pervade societies when strongmen come to power. Armed enforcers can play fateful roles, both in ending a weakened regime, as Syrian soldiers did by deserting in the twilight of Bashar al-Assad’s rule, and in speeding up autocratic consolidation by complying with a leader who wants to use them against his own citizens, as in Chile during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.
Whether the United States will ever stand as an example of the latter phenomenon is an open question. On Thursday, a judge blocked the Trump administration’s mobilization of the National Guard, ordering the return of authority over the Guard to California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, but an appeals court put that ruling on hold a few hours later.
The scale of the mobilization in Los Angeles throws the Trump administration’s strategies into stark relief. The Los Angeles Police Department, the third largest force in the country, clearly stated it could handle the protests. A localized response by the L.A.P.D. would generate only a spate of familiar images, however; it could never capture the drama of a foreign invasion, or the history-making moment when Los Angeles became “occupied territory,” as the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller wrote on X after protests began.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former Fox weekend host, also depicted the L.A. protests as a collusion between an external enemy and the “violent mob” of protesters supporting this “dangerous invasion.” To show the public that order was being restored, Mr. Hegseth turned to a Marine infantry division that served in Iraq and Afghanistan, rendering Los Angeles into an open-air studio for the production of a show of force.
The Trump administration is now using the second-largest city in the country as a backdrop for its efforts to create the perception of a national crisis. Doing so could allow it to justify measures that would empower the government to act against its own citizens.
This is concerning enough. Even more worrying is what history shows us: that all too often, such crises become semi-permanent — “not the exception but the rule,” as the anti-Nazi philosopher Walter Benjamin once observed.
There is perhaps no clearer example of this trajectory than in Chile after 1973, the year Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government in a U.S.-backed coup and initiated a nearly 17-year military dictatorship. The previously trusted military quickly became key to the use of violence to achieve the regime’s goal of bringing about “a profound change in the mentality of the country,” in the words of one Chilean official. It eventually became a symbol of the Chilean reign of terror, and torture by military officials became state practice.
The junta also fell back on the evergreen authoritarian narrative of invasion to justify the repression to the public and the international community; the specter of foreign criminals flooding into the country proved useful to Pinochet, as it does to Mr. Trump, who positioned himself during the election campaign as the savior of a “very, very sick country.”
America in 2025 is not Chile in 1973. Mr. Trump returned to power in a free and fair election, not a coup. He made no secret during his campaign of his desire to carry out mass deportations and willingness to involve the military on domestic soil in the project.
Nevertheless, what Chileans endured is a cautionary tale for Americans today. When the rule of law is replaced with normalized lawlessness, security forces and the military can all too easily become hollowed out. Codes of military conduct and ideals such as duty and valor can disappear into the void as the military becomes a tool of the quest for absolute power. The Chilean military, which enjoyed so much respect before the coup, left the dictatorship in 1990 stripped of its integrity.
The current administration is charging ahead with its attempt to empower the executive branch to impose Mr. Trump’s will in ways that track with the history of authoritarianism. Flooding our screens with images that habituate us to a new reality of federalized state militia members standing opposite civilian protesters is part of it. So is mobilizing our armed forces for a parade staged on Mr. Trump’s birthday.
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7) Weapons and War or Food and Healthcare
By Lindsay Koshgarian
—CounterPunch, June 13, 2025
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
For weeks, Congress has been wrapped up in passing President Trump’s big, brutal budget — the one that pays for tax cuts for the wealthy and a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget by taking food stamps and Medicaid away from people struggling to get by.
The GOP-controlled House of Representatives just barely passed this bill — it squeaked through by a single vote. Now the Senate is considering it.
Alongside trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy, the bill also gives big handouts to the Pentagon and the president’s plans to separate immigrant families. It would result in the country’s first-ever trillion-dollar Pentagon budget — and triple annual spending on the mass detention of immigrants.
There’s an army of contractors ready to profit — from the wasteful military contractors who vacuum up more than half the Pentagon budget to the private prison companies that warehouse soccer moms, pediatric cancer patients, and other immigrants caught up in the administration’s dragnet.
To fund those cruel contractors, the president’s big brutal bill cuts Medicaid and food stamps, among other programs that benefit regular people.
The human costs could be staggering. Researchers have found that the cuts to Medicaid and other health programs could lead to 51,000 preventable deaths a year. And millions of Americans who rely on food stamps could go hungry, including four million children.
None of this needs to happen.
I recently co-authored a report looking at what we could fund instead with that extra money for the Pentagon and this anti-immigrant agenda. If lawmakers just rolled back those increases alone, we could more than cover the annual cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and the Child Tax Credit combined.
In other words, by just letting the Pentagon and deportation budgets stay where they are now, we can save all of those programs — and potentially save lives.
Nationally, we found that these massive increases would be more than enough to cover the 13.7 million people at risk of losing health care — and the 11 million people at risk of losing food stamps.
That report also looked at what the bill does in every state and congressional district. In Maine, for example, the first year of additional spending on the Pentagon and deportations could keep 107,000 people on Medicaid. In Alaska, 87,000 people could stay on food stamps.
In Arizona’s 5th Congressional District, the increase just for the President’s dream of a “Golden Dome” missile shield could keep 7,500 people on Medicaid. In Kentucky’s 4th district, 6,200 people could stay on Medicaid.
Experts have said that the president’s promises for the system are too good to be true. That’s not worth risking lives by cutting medical benefits in any congressional district.
Then there’s the billions set aside for “killer robots,” drones that can use AI to target and kill people — a nightmare that could lead to more deaths in war and kill more civilians.
In California’s 5th district, the money for these dangerous weapons could instead keep more than 13,600 people on food stamps for a year. In Ohio’s 8th district, more than 11,300 people could keep their SNAP benefits.
This is truly a situation of trading life for death: we can feed hungry people, or we can create new dystopian weapons.
There’s an exceedingly simple solution to all of this: drop the extra money for the Pentagon and attacking immigrants — and keep Medicaid and food stamps available to as many people who need them as possible.
In 2024, the average U.S. taxpayer paid $3,804 for the Pentagon and war, deportations, and border militarization — an already astounding figure. We shouldn’t ask people to pay any more to line the pockets of military contractors and private prison CEOs while Americans go hungry and without health care.
Lindsay Koshgarian directs the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She’s the lead author of the new report State of Insecurity: The Cost of Militarization Since 9/11.
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8) Immigration Raids Add to Absence Crisis for Schools
New research shows that after recent deportation sweeps, parents kept their children home — with big impacts on how all students learn.
By Dana Goldstein and Irene Casado Sanchez, Photographs by Mark Abramson, June 16, 2025
As President Trump promised mass deportations, educators sounded alarms that the actions could scare families away from school, affecting both immigrant and nonimmigrant students.
Now, new research provides evidence that immigration raids did appear to lower school attendance. A Stanford University study found that parents kept their children out of school more often after raids swept California’s Central Valley this winter.
The findings suggest raids can harm student achievement and disrupt how schools function, even when they do not occur on or near school grounds. The study, by Thomas S. Dee, a professor of education at Stanford University, found that daily absences jumped 22 percent around the time raids occurred.
This week, the administration deployed troops to Los Angeles in response to protests against deportations. Absences went up, even though the district tried to reassure families that schools were safe.
The new paper looked at attendance data from five school districts in the southern part of the Central Valley, serving a total of over 100,000 children. Public schools do not track immigration status. But a majority of students in the region are Latino, many the children of farm workers with uncertain legal status. Those workers help produce about a quarter of the nation’s food — fruits, vegetables, grains and nuts.
Professor Dee examined three years of attendance data. He found an unusual spike in absences this past January and February following “Operation Return to Sender,” a series of immigration sweeps conducted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Dozens of day laborers and field workers were arrested at a Home Depot, in parking lots and at gas stations.
The operation took place in the final days of President Biden’s term. But it was seen as a sign of the immigration enforcement agency’s enthusiasm for President Trump’s agenda. Since then, immigration sweeps in California and across the country have been sporadic, though highly publicized.
And on Friday, immigration officials paused raids targeting farmworkers, among others, after the president acknowledged earlier in the week that the raids were hurting the agricultural industry.
In the Central Valley, immigrant parents said that after the January raids, they feared being arrested while their children were at school and being deported without them. Rather than risk separation, some parents kept children home.
The spike in absences is equivalent to the average student missing about 15 days of school each year, up from 12 days, according to Professor Dee’s paper.
He called the findings “a canary in the coal mine” for public education. If absences continue to be elevated, they could threaten student learning and children’s mental health.
Funding is also at risk, since schools in California are paid according to student attendance.
Teachers may have to adjust the curriculum to meet the needs of students who have fallen behind after missing class. School counselors and social workers are already devoting more of their hours to tracking down missing children and to treating their anxiety about deportation, according to educators in the region.
The new paper echoes past research that found that under Presidents Trump, Biden and Obama, immigration raids led to decreases in student attendance at nearby schools.
Many immigrants in the Central Valley said that while fears of deportation had always hung over them, anxiety has never been higher. It is fueled by Mr. Trump’s aggressive agenda and rhetoric, and by stories of family separation and children placed in foster care, often shared via social media.
One Mexican father of two schoolchildren in Fresno, ages 14 and 6, said that deportation alongside his wife and children would mean losing possessions, wealth and his work as a mechanic. In California, he and his wife, a farmworker, had carefully built a life.
But while losing that life would be difficult, deportation without their children, he said, was simply unthinkable.
Like other migrant parents, the man asked to remain unnamed because of his uncertain legal status.
He has cut out many of his family’s nonessential trips outside their home but has continued to send his children to school.
Many others have not.
A Fresno mother, also from Mexico, was so fearful of being deported if she left her home that she paid someone else to drive her daughter to school. She also asked that her name not be used.
She eventually resumed drop-offs, which is when she noticed a change at the school’s doors. There were fewer children waiting in line to file into the building. Half a dozen families she used to see at drop-off were no longer there.
In a written statement responding to the research findings, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said, “Illegal immigration is incredibly disruptive to all Americans, including families, students and teachers. The Trump administration won’t apologize for enforcing the law and restoring order to American communities.”
The spike in missed learning is occurring as educators continue to address a pre-existing crisis of chronic absence, caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
In Fresno Unified, the region’s largest school district, Superintendent Misty Her makes several home visits per week, seeking to speak with families whose children have stopped coming to school.
Her goal is not to shame them, she said, but to understand why and to offer help.
In the past, she said, many seasonal farm workers would relocate to work in the fields during harvests and leave their children in the city with family members or friends, so that the children could continue to attend school.
Now, she said, parents are bringing their young children with them, because they are fearful of being deported without them.
While she tries to convince parents to send their children back to the classroom, she also offers the option of enrolling students in the school district’s virtual academy.
“We get them their laptop and a hot spot so they can continue online,” she said, noting that for some students, that routine worked well during pandemic school closures.
Ms. Her said she and her staff had carefully tracked the increase in absences reported in Professor Dee’s study. Younger children have been more likely to miss school than older ones, according to the paper, which fits a pattern in which undocumented parents keep their most vulnerable children home out of fear of separation.
Before January’s immigration raids, school attendance in the Central Valley had been improving, according to Professor Dee’s analysis. But anxiety over deportation returned some immigrant families to a cloistered, pandemic-like existence.
Immigration sweeps “can essentially create what we found from Covid — this generation of students who have a patently different experience with schooling,” said Jacob Kirksey, a professor of education at Texas Tech University who has studied how immigration arrests increase absences and lower student achievement.
But he argued that policymakers should be cautious about directing fearful families toward virtual learning.
“Kids learn better in person,” he said, warning about a further loosening of the expectation that students show up for school, day in and day out.
Professor Kirksey said Professor Dee’s study was methodologically strong. He also suggested it could encourage policy change.
Since immigration enforcement lies outside the control of school systems, states could consider limiting the practice of tying school funding to attendance, he said, and could see raids as events more like natural disasters, which prompt extra funding and support.
Some of the absent children may never come back to school, because their families may have left the country voluntarily — the stated intention of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda.
Nereida Galvez works at a Fresno nonprofit that supports immigrants from Indigenous Mexican communities. She was in contact with one family that decided to leave the United States.
“They were afraid that their children would be left alone,” she said, “so they decided to take their children with them.”
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9) Will Trump End the First Federal Heat Protections for Workers?
As workplace deaths from heat increase, OSHA will debate the future of the first federal rules to protect workers from extreme heat.
By Claire Brown, June 16, 2025
Construction in triple-degree-heat in San Antonio last month. Credit...Eric Gay/Associated Press
Last August, nine workers across the United States, ages 19 to 71, died of heat-related causes while working jobs that involved things like cutting the grass, unloading trucks, repairing farm equipment or doing construction, according to federal workplace data. Because heat-related deaths are difficult to track, that number is likely an undercount.
Starting Monday, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will hold public hearings on a proposed rule to prevent heat-related illnesses and deaths at work, which is the first federal rule of its kind. Put forward last summer by the Biden administration, the regulation would require employers to provide water and rest breaks when temperatures surpass certain levels.
The Trump administration did not respond to request for comment on its plan for the standards, and it is not legally obligated to implement them. President Trump has pursued a broad deregulatory agenda, pushing to roll back environmental and safety regulations, and the rule as written has faced opposition from businesses and Republicans.
Deaths and illnesses related to heat exposure have increased sharply in recent years as climate change pushes temperatures higher. Last summer was the hottest on record, in the hottest year on record, and on average heat kills more people each year than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined, according to the National Weather Service.
“All heat-related deaths are preventable because they all result from an overexposure that can be prevented,” said Dr. John Balbus, who co-chaired a government working group to address heat during the Biden administration.
Mr. Trump’s pick to lead OSHA, David Keeling has also raised concerns among some workers’ health advocates. Mr. Keeling is a former health and safety executive at UPS and Amazon, and both companies have been fined for workplace safety citations, including for heat-related illnesses.
Some of the rule’s critics have indicated they would support a different version of a heat safety standard. Health advocates saw the Trump administration’s decision to move forward with public hearings as a potentially positive sign, though they feared the federal government would push through a weak rule that would prevent certain state and local governments from passing stricter measures.
Heat puts stress on the body, which cools itself by increasing blood flow and sweating. The cooling process makes the heart work harder. Heat stress can increase the risk of other cardiovascular issues like heart attacks, which is part of the reason heat-related deaths are so difficult to count.
Prevention of heat-related illnesses can be straightforward: People generally need shade, rest and water, Dr. Balbus said.
The proposed OSHA rule establishes heat thresholds that trigger specific employer responsibilities. At a heat index of 80 degrees, companies must provide water and break areas. At 90 degrees, they must offer 15-minute breaks once every two hours, in addition to other measures. The heat index combines air temperature with humidity to measure how hot the air feels to a human body.
These thresholds are based on scientific research. A 2020 study by researchers at OSHA identified a “heat death line,” a temperature below which few heat deaths occur. Based on an examination of 570 heat-related deaths, they put the figure at 80 degrees and determined that 96 percent of deaths happened at temperatures above the line, though many heat-related illnesses began in cooler weather.
In public comments submitted to the agency, the Chamber of Commerce pushed back on national thresholds, arguing that workers in places like the Southwest are better acclimated to working in hot conditions.
At a Congressional hearing last month, Republican Mary Miller, a representative of Illinois, said the rules would “wreak havoc on businesses and communities across the country” and were “a mandate designed to appease climate change activists.”
Mr. Keeling could not be reached for comment about whether he supports the heat rules. UPS said in a statement that it was always looking for ways to improve safety. Amazon said that safety was its top priority.
Seven states have adopted their own workplace heat rules, and others are considering similar measures. “I think there’s more active campaigns right now for state and local standards than I’ve seen in the entire time I’ve been working on this,” said Juanita Constible, a senior environmental health advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has been tracking the issue since 2018.
State legislatures in Florida and Texas have passed laws that prevent local governments from establishing their own workplace heat standards.
An OSHA rule with no specific break requirements would override some state and local measures, said David Michaels, a professor at George Washington University who was the assistant secretary of labor during the Obama administration. For example, he said, Colorado has a rule guaranteeing farm workers 10-minute breaks every two hours when temperatures exceed 95 degrees.
Mr. Michaels said he thought OSHA would ultimately implement a watered-down rule that effectively cancels out standards like Colorado’s. “The idea that they will put out a strong worker protection standard seems pretty unlikely to me,” he said.
Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting.
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10) With No Clear Off-Ramp, Israel’s War With Iran May Last Weeks, Not Days
Israel and Iran both have little incentive to stop and no obvious route to outright victory. Much depends on President Trump.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, June 16, 2025
Damage from an Iranian missile attack in Rehovot, Israel, on Sunday morning. Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
short and contained bursts that usually ended within hours, and both sides looked for off-ramps that allowed tensions to ebb.
Since Israel started a new round of fighting on Friday, the two countries have said they will continue for as long as necessary, broadening the scope of their attacks and leading to much higher casualty counts in both countries. This time, the conflict appears set to last for at least a week, with both Israel and Iran ignoring routes toward de-confliction.
Israel seems motivated to continue until the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, either by force or renewed negotiations. Yet Iran has shown no sign of voluntarily ending enrichment, a process crucial to building a nuclear bomb, and Israel has no known ability to destroy a pivotal enrichment site that is buried deep underground.
“We’re weeks rather than days away from this ending,” said Daniel B. Shapiro, who oversaw Middle Eastern affairs at the Pentagon until January.
“Israel will keep going until, one way or another, Iran no longer retains an enrichment capability,” added Mr. Shapiro, now a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research group. “It’s now clear that if Israel leaves this unaddressed, its campaign will have failed.”
While Israel has easily struck Iran’s main enrichment site at Natanz, central Iran, it lacks the American-made “bunker-buster” bombs needed to destroy a smaller subterranean site dug deep into a mountain near Fordo, northern Iran. Israeli officials hope that their strikes on other targets — including Iran’s top military commanders, nuclear scientists and its energy industry — will inflict enough pain to encourage Iran to willingly end operations at Fordo.
For now, Iran seems far from such a capitulation, even if Israel has shown increasing dominance in Iranian airspace, according to Sanam Vakil, who leads analysis of the Middle East at Chatham House, a London-based research group. Though Israel hopes to prompt its collapse, the Iranian government remains in full control of Iran and still has substantial stocks of ballistic missiles, even if Israel has limited its ability to fire some of them.
“I don’t see any surrender coming from Tehran right now — there are no white flags being waved,” said Dr. Vakil. “It’s very hard to see Iran walking back its enrichment rights while Iran’s program still looks operational and Iran is intact as a state,” she added. “Their goal is to survive, to inflict damage and show their resilience.”
Much depends on how President Trump reacts. Unlike Israel, the United States has the munitions and the aircraft to destroy Fordo. Analysts like Mr. Shapiro say that Mr. Trump could consider such an approach if Iran chooses to accelerate its efforts to build a nuclear bomb instead of reaching a compromise.
“That will create a critical decision point for Trump, about whether the United States should intervene,” Mr. Shapiro said.
It may also now be easier for Mr. Trump to intervene without serious security consequences, given that Israel’s attacks have already degraded Iran’s defensive abilities.
Others say that Mr. Trump is likelier to avoid direct confrontation with Iran unless the Iranian military shifts its attacks from Israel to U.S. interests and personnel in the Middle East, narrowing Mr. Trump’s room for maneuver. Since Friday, Iran has avoided providing such a pretext for U.S. involvement, and has also avoided attacks on the U.S.’s other allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The president’s statements since Friday indicate that his current preference is to use Israel’s military gains as leverage for renewed talks with Tehran.
For months, Mr. Trump has overseen negotiations with Iran, hoping that Tehran would agree to end its enrichment program without Israel’s military intervention.
Those talks stumbled after Iran refused to back down. In comments over the weekend, Mr. Trump suggested that Iran, chastened by Israel’s attacks, might finally make compromises that it had not previously considered. As a result, some analysts say that Mr. Trump could press Israel to end its attacks — when and if he judges that Iran has become more malleable.
“This will end when Trump decides to end it, which will probably happen when he thinks Iran is ready to compromise,” said Yoel Guzansky, an expert on Iran at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
Such a U-turn has historical precedent, even if it feels unlikely for now, experts said. The Iranian leadership made a similarly unexpected compromise at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, according to Meir Javedanfar, who teaches Iranian studies at Reichman University in Israel. After rejecting numerous offers to end the war, Ayatollah Khomeini eventually agreed to a deal after the costs of the war became too great, Dr. Javedanfar said.
“Khomeini made a 180-degree change,” he said. “This is again what Israel is hoping for.”
But history also suggests this may take time. The deal that ended the Iran-Iraq war took eight years to reach.
Gabby Sobelman in Rehovot, Israel; Myra Noveck in Jerusalem and Johnatan Reiss in Tel Aviv contributed reporting.
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11) When Rights Erode for Some of Us, Something Corrodes in All of Us
By Dara Lind, June 16, 2025
Ms. Lind is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
Jay Lynn Gomez, "Subcontracted Janitor" (2019) / Charlie James Gallery; photograph by Michael Underwood
The Trump administration is often most shocking when it disregards rights many Americans have blithely assumed to be universal. Of course you can’t be punished for writing an opinion essay, because the United States has freedom of speech — except the Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested by masked agents in broad daylight after adding her name to an opinion essay for the student paper. Of course you can’t be imprisoned indefinitely or banished without trial, because the United States guarantees due process of law — except that the administration did just that to more than 200 Venezuelan men this spring.
Of course law enforcement can’t tear-gas you for protesting an immigration operation. Of course the military and the National Guard can’t be deployed to your street when your local authorities say the situation is under control.
It’s not a coincidence that all of these shocks to the conscience are tied to President Trump’s efforts to carry out a mass deportation immigration agenda. Almost five months into his term, the administration has struggled to make good on the “mass” part, but we are now getting a glimpse into how it might do so. It was never going to be possible to deport millions of people, as he promised, without stomping through American communities. This remains both the administration’s signature political issue and the lens through which Trump officials appear to see the world: rights for some and a show of force for others.
The rights to free speech, due process, habeas corpus — these have never been as robust for noncitizens as they have been for citizens, and it has long been disputed exactly how far they extend. The administration has taken advantage of that vagueness, advancing the radical notion that noncitizens simply do not have these rights at all.
The executive branch does not get to impose its will on the law by fiat, and the courts have attempted to hold it in check and, in some cases, have succeeded in doing so. But the administration’s reaction to any setback has been to impugn the idea that it can be challenged at all — by courts, by elected officials, by ordinary citizens assembling in protest.
All this adds up to an insistence not only that noncitizens do not count as “persons” with the rights the Constitution guarantees but also that no one can hold the government accountable for what it does to noncitizens.
The administration’s actions last week, calling the National Guard and Marines into Los Angeles to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from overwhelmingly nonviolent protests, are the culmination of months of efforts to deny that immigration enforcement can be criticized or even scrutinized. The confrontation with Americans exercising their First Amendment rights was inevitable. It is impossible to act as if immigrants have no rights without, eventually, infringing on citizens’ rights to stand up for them.
To demand both absolute power and absolute impunity is the demand of a tyrant.
It has long been easy for citizens to ignore the ins and outs of immigration policy when they are not personally affected by it. That ignorance was cushioned by the unspoken assurance that the people running America believed in the myth many of us were taught in school: that there was something aspirational about being an American, a country founded on universal rights, and that America had drawn generations of immigrants to its shores. If America is both a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws, as we’ve so often been told, the government could be trusted to respect both.
But this administration doesn’t believe in our nation-of-immigrants identity. And it turns out that a government with that predilection has a lot of tools at its disposal as it tries to curb the rights of noncitizens. Take the invocation of Title 42, a public health emergency measure passed in 1944, which was imposed in 2020 by the first Trump administration and continued for some time under President Joe Biden to keep out asylum seekers during the Covid pandemic. More recently, the Trump administration has attempted to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 (last used in 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor) to justify expelling people accused of being gang members and sending them to Venezuela.
Much of modern immigration law was written during the Cold War. The Cold War ended, but the government’s power to exclude persists — partly in the form of a provision that allows the secretary of state to unilaterally strip a visitor’s legal status if that person might endanger the United States’ foreign policy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked this phrase punitively against both student-visa holders like Ms. Ozturk and permanent residents who have criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza, including Mahmoud Khalil.
For nearly 60 years, since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Miranda v. Arizona, the Sixth Amendment guarantee to the right to counsel has been interpreted as the right to a government-appointed lawyer. But because immigration proceedings are civil rather than criminal, noncitizens facing deportation have never had the assurance that a lawyer would be found for them if they could not afford one. Hundreds of thousands of people are deported each year from the United States, and many face their case without counsel. This has begun to raise concerns among progressive Supreme Court justices, but it remains the standard.
Since January, administration lawyers have spent week after week in court arguing, not always successfully, that there is no obligation for the government to correct an erroneous deportation or even to tell judges when flights departed or might depart for other countries. Federal judges have repeatedly had to order the administration not to hold or transfer detainees because the government is violating its obligation to honor writs of habeas corpus — that is, the right to be brought before a court to challenge one’s detention. In response, administration officials have threatened to suspend the writ of habeas corpus entirely.
Immigration hearings are generally open to the public, but ICE agents have begun to deny admission to anyone who lacks an appointment and to arrest advocates reportedly attempting to exercise their rights to observe court proceedings. When staff members for Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, met activists in his district office after observing officers detain migrants in the building, federal agents handcuffed one of his aides, accusing the office of harboring rioters — as if monitoring the government’s compliance with the law were something only the lawless would do.
The president of the Service Employees International Union of California, David Huerta, was federally charged with conspiracy to impede an officer, accused of blocking a gate at a protest. And Representative LaMonica McIver, Democrat of New Jersey, was federally charged for “forcibly impeding and interfering with federal officers” during an altercation in her state outside an ICE detention facility, where members of Congress are supposed to be given free entry to monitor detention conditions. Members of Congress were blocked from entering buildings in Los Angeles and New York this month while attempting to do the same.
And in a dramatic scene last week, federal agents forcibly removed and handcuffed Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, from a news conference where Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, was discussing the troops that were sent in to L.A. The senator had introduced himself and was trying to ask the secretary a question when he was shoved out of the room.
The federal response in Los Angeles is not merely a Trump administration provocation. It is consistent with the administration’s insistence that for citizens to oppose the government’s actions toward noncitizens is to threaten the safety of government agents and perhaps amount to insurrection against the government.
You can see why people have taken to the streets; this is not the America many of us believe in. We believe in an America founded on the guarantee of inalienable rights that cannot be given or taken away. In that America, the government cannot use unaccountable force — that means insisting that ICE agents be identifiable when conducting public arrests and disciplined when they act abusively.
It is an injury for a U.S. citizen to watch what is being done to noncitizens in the name of the United States. It is an additional injury to be rebuked by our government when we attempt to do something about it.
I will not be arrested and deported for writing this essay. In that respect, the legal value of my citizenship remains secure. But what that citizenship is worth, on a deeper level, feels imperiled.
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12) As World Turns Focus to Iran, Lethal Violence Flares at Gaza Aid Sites
The ongoing bloodshed in Gaza is drawing less attention with the international community distracted by the new regional conflict between Israel and Iran.
By Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Abu Bakr Bashir, June 17, 2025
Dozens of Palestinians have been killed this week near aid distribution sites in the Gaza Strip, according to the territory’s health ministry. But the bloodshed has drawn less international attention as the world’s focus shifts to a new regional conflict between Israel and Iran.
Many of the details surrounding the killings on Monday and Tuesday were not immediately clear. But in recent weeks, Israeli forces have repeatedly used lethal force against hungry and desperate Palestinian civilians to control crowds on the approaches to new aid sites, forcing many to choose between food and the risk of getting shot.
The aid sites began operating a few weeks ago under a new Israeli-backed system run by an American-led company, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It replaces a system overseen by the United Nations and aims to provide food to civilians without the supplies falling into the hands of Hamas.
The United Nations and other international groups have condemned the new initiative, however, partly because civilians must pass Israeli soldiers to reach the sites, putting them in greater danger. They have also said the amount of aid getting through is woefully inadequate for the population’s needs.
“The danger is too high for me to go to these centers,” Awni Abu Hassira, 38, from Gaza City, said in a phone interview. “I don’t want to face death this way.”
The Gaza Health Ministry said that at least 20 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and more than 200 wounded early Monday when a crowd gathered near an aid distribution site in southern Gaza. Israel said it was still looking into the reports.
The ministry reported a similar event on Tuesday morning that it said had resulted in more than 50 deaths. On both days, the victims were taken to a hospital in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.
Thanos Gargavanis, a World Health Organization emergency officer and trauma surgeon, told reporters in a briefing from Gaza that the violent episodes this week were “again the result of another food distribution initiative by a non-U.N. actor,” an apparent reference to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Asked for comment on Tuesday’s violence, the Israeli military said that “a gathering was identified adjacent to an aid distribution truck that got stuck in the area of Khan Younis” near Israeli forces operating in the area. The statement, using the abbreviation for the Israel Defense Forces, added that it was “aware of reports regarding a number of injured individuals from I.D.F. fire following the crowd’s approach” and was reviewing the matter.
It said the military “regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals.”
Israel also said that two of its soldiers had been killed in combat in southern Gaza in recent days.
Videos shared on social media and verified by The New York Times showed the aftermath of deadly violence on Tuesday in Khan Younis, where crowds of people had gathered around a traffic circle to wait for aid early in the day.
In one video filmed by a local photographer, at least 20 bodies are visible on darkened ground where blood is pooling, and many are bleeding. Two of the bodies are severely mangled, and two other people have bleeding head wounds.
Other footage circulating on social media and reviewed by The Times shows people screaming and yelling as crowds run through the area.
On Monday, Naseem Hassan, a medic at a hospital in Khan Younis, described the difficulty of aiding people who were shot as they tried to collect food from a nearby aid distribution point. He said scores of Palestinian victims had been rushed to his hospital.
“People who are injured have to crawl or be carried for over a kilometer to reach us,” said Mr. Hassan, who works at Nasser Hospital. “We couldn’t reach the aid centers, ambulances can’t get there,” he added.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Monday that one of its field hospitals had treated more than 200 people after the shootings near the aid site.
“Due to the ongoing restrictions of humanitarian assistance, people are struggling to access basic goods, including fuel,” the Red Cross said in a statement.
The United Nations has warned that Gaza’s population is on the brink of famine, with thousands of children already severely malnourished.
“The facts speak for themselves,” said Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. Speaking in Geneva on Monday, he called Israel’s military campaign in Gaza a source of “horrifying, unconscionable suffering” and urged governments to “wake up” and pay attention.
“All those with influence must exert maximum pressure on Israel and Hamas to put an end to this unbearable suffering,” he said.
Ameera Harouda, Nick Cumming-Bruce and Sanjana Varghese contributed reporting.
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13) ‘Project Runway’ Designer Is Fatally Shot During Utah ‘No Kings’ Protest
Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, 39, a Samoan-born fashion designer, was participating in an anti-Trump protest in Salt Lake City on Saturday when he was shot by a man working security, the police said.
By Alexandra E. Petri and Neil Vigdor, June 15, 2025
A fashion designer who competed on “Project Runway” and who helped style celebrities for the red carpet was shot to death on Saturday during a “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration in Salt Lake City, the police said.
The authorities identified the designer, Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, 39, as a bystander who was killed during a confrontation between two armed volunteers who were assisting with crowd control at the protest and a man who was carrying an AR-15-style rifle and was dressed in all black.
The volunteers drew their guns after the armed man removed the rifle from his backpack and began running toward the crowd, holding his weapon in a “firing position,” the police said.
One of them fired three times, wounding the gunman and also striking Mr. Ah Loo, who was pronounced dead at a hospital.
Tributes to Mr. Ah Loo, who appeared on Season 17 of “Project Runway” in 2019 and who lived in Utah with his wife and two children, poured in after the shooting.
Auli’i Cravalho, a native Hawaiian, who was the voice of the heroine in the Walt Disney animated film “Moana,” noted that she wore Mr. Ah Loo’s custom designs to the world premiere of “Moana 2” in 2024.
“There are no words to hold the grief of losing @afa.ahloo,” she wrote on Instagram of Mr. Ah Loo, who was born in Samoa and was known as Afa. “Afa’s creations,” she added, “are and remain thoughtful, elegant and powerful portrayals of Pacific culture.”
Mr. Ah Loo was 32 when he appeared on “Project Runway,” in which he celebrated his Pacific Islander heritage.
“Who would have thought that this island boy, growing up in Samoa in a hut, would design something that was in L.A, Fashion Week, Australian Fashion Week and in Buckingham Palace?” Mr. Ah Loo said in that season’s first episode.
That episode featured a dress Mr. Ah Loo designed for the Commonwealth Fashion Exchange in 2018 that was on display at Buckingham Palace. Mr. Ah Loo, who was representing Samoa, appeared on four episodes that season but did not win.
According to an affidavit, the police responded to reports of gunfire at the protest just before 8 p.m. local time. Officers found Mr. Ah Loo with a gunshot wound, and emergency medical workers administered aid.
The police arrested the man with the rifle, who was identified as Arturo Gamboa, 24, and charged him with murder, Chief Brian Redd of the Salt Lake City Police Department said at a news conference on Sunday.
Chief Redd called the shooting “sudden and alarming.”
“No one should fear coming to a peaceful and lawful demonstration in our city,” he said.
The police also detained two other people, who were wearing “high-visibility neon vests” and who were “possibly part of the event’s peacekeeping team,” Chief Redd said.
They were not publicly identified and it was not clear whether either would face charges. Chief Redd said that the one who fired the shots was cooperating with investigators.
The security volunteers told the police that they monitored Mr. Gamboa after he moved away from the crowd and ducked behind a wall. One of them said he saw Mr. Gamboa take the rifle out of his backpack and “begin to manipulate it,” according to the affidavit.
The security workers took out their guns and yelled to Mr. Gamboa to drop his weapon. Witnesses told the police that Mr. Gamboa ran toward the crowd of demonstrators, according to the affidavit.
Mr. Gamboa “did not fire a shot,” Chief Redd said at the news conference. According to the affidavit, he acted in a manner that showed “a depraved indifference to human life,” and knowingly engaged in conduct that created “a grave risk of death” to Mr. Ah Loo, and thereby caused Mr. Ah Loo’s death.
In addition to the rifle, the police recovered a gas mask and a backpack, according to the affidavit.
Chief Redd said that Mr. Gamboa, who wore a black mask to the protest, had no criminal history. It was not clear if he had a lawyer.
Sarah Parker, a national coordinator with the 50501 Movement, described the event’s “peacekeepers” as volunteers who helped direct the march and were responsible for keeping attendees safe. (The group’s name reflects its goal of holding at least 50 protests against the Trump administration in 50 states, united under one movement.)
There were an estimated 15 to 20 such volunteers at the protest in Salt Lake City, Ms. Parker said. It was not clear whether all of them were armed.
Eunic Epstein-Ortiz, a national spokeswoman for “No Kings,” the name of the nationwide protests against the Trump administration, condemned the violence in Salt Lake City.
“This movement is rooted in nonviolence, dignity and justice — and we grieve any loss of life or injury,” Ms. Epstein-Ortiz said.
Utah does not regulate how guns are carried in public, according to research from Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group.
Chief Redd said the police were investigating the training and preparation standards that were required of people who were working at the event.
In a statement on Monday, the Salt Lake City Police Department appeared to distance itself from the “peacekeepers” description that organizers used to describe those helping with crowd control.
There was nothing in the permit for the event indicating that armed security would be present, according to the department, which said that neither of the two men who engaged the gunman were current or former law enforcement officers.
The Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office did not respond to requests for comment on Sunday.
Detectives are still investigating “why Gamboa pulled out his rifle and began to manipulate it” and “why he ran from the peacekeepers when they confronted him,” the police said in a statement.
Chief Redd described the protest on Saturday in Salt Lake City as peaceful. “This came out of nowhere,” he said of the shooting.
The “No Kings” rallies were planned to coincide with a military parade in Washington, D.C., celebrating the Army’s 250th anniversary on Saturday, which was also President Trump’s 79th birthday.
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14) Appeals Court to Consider if Trump Can Control National Guard in L.A.
A three-judge panel will determine whether National Guard troops can remain under President Trump’s command in Los Angeles as protests against immigration raids continue.
By Charlie Savage, Laurel Rosenhall and Richard Fausset, June 17, 2025
A three-judge panel will consider whether the Trump administration can continue directing National Guard troops in California. Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
A federal appeals court will hear arguments Tuesday to determine whether President Trump, against the wishes of Gov. Gavin Newsom, can keep using California’s National Guard to protect immigration enforcement agents and quell protesters in Los Angeles.
The hearing, convened by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, comes at a time when local organizers have vowed to continue protesting against immigration raids, though demonstrations in downtown Los Angeles have quieted since the weekend.
A district court judge, Charles Breyer, determined last week that Mr. Trump’s use of the National Guard was illegal and temporarily ordered the president to return control of the forces to Mr. Newsom.
But the Trump administration immediately appealed the ruling, and the Ninth Circuit panel stayed the lower court decision while it considers the matter. The panel consists of two appointees of Mr. Trump and one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
It may ultimately be up to the Supreme Court whether a president can bypass governors to deploy the National Guard in states under the law Mr. Trump invoked. The outcome of the case could carry significant implications for limits on the use of the military force on domestic soil.
The three-judge panel on Tuesday will consider the narrow, but consequential, matter of whether Mr. Trump can keep controlling the troops for now while the legal fight continues to play out.
Protests erupted earlier this month after Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out workplace raids in Los Angeles as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Democratic leaders and activists have criticized ICE for raiding Southern California workplaces and carrying out indiscriminate sweeps in heavily Latino neighborhoods rather than focusing on people with serious criminal histories.
In response to the backlash, Mr. Trump invoked a rarely used statute to take federal control of the National Guard in the name of guarding immigration agents and facilities against protesters. Governor Newsom objected to that step, saying that it was needlessly inflammatory and that local and state law enforcement agencies could handle unruly elements within the larger group of protesters. Some demonstrations included a segment of people who vandalized property, threw objects and started fires, but most protesters were peaceful.
In downtown Los Angeles on Monday, things had returned to close to the normal state of semi-bustle two days after the “No Kings” rally drew tens of thousands of protesters angered by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns. Evidence of a week of protest was everywhere, with anti-ICE graffiti on buildings and anti-Trump signs scattered around.
Many storefronts in Little Tokyo, which was hit hard last week by vandalism, remained boarded up. But packs of Japanese tourists in matching Shohei Ohtani baseball jerseys were milling around, taking pictures under a looming mural of the star before he made his Dodgers pitching debut on Monday night.
Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles announced on Monday that she was loosening the downtown curfew so that it would begin two hours later, at 10 p.m. rather than 8 p.m. It would still last until 6 a.m.
“The curfew, coupled with ongoing crime prevention efforts, have been largely successful in protecting stores, restaurants, businesses and residential communities from bad actors who do not care about the immigrant community,” Ms. Bass said in a statement.
The city seemed to be taking a breath. Police officers were no longer stationed in significant numbers outside Los Angeles City Hall. Many of the places where federal troops had been positioned last week were no longer under guard.
One exception was a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs ambulatory care center, east of City Hall. A dozen Marines were stationed there on Monday in full battle gear, rifles close at hand. Last week, National Guard troops, protecting the same spot, had attracted hundreds of angry protesters. Now there were four or five of them. One woman, dressed in traditional Aztec garb, burned incense and occasionally blew out a call of defiance on a shell.
The mobilization last week was the first time the federal government had deployed troops under federal control in a state over the clear objections of its governor since 1963, when President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard to carry out the court-ordered desegregation of the University of Alabama, which that state’s governor, George Wallace, was resisting.
(President Lyndon B. Johnson also federalized the state’s National Guard to protect civil rights marchers in 1965 without a formal request from Governor Wallace, but the governor did not object in that instance.)
But Mr. Kennedy used the Insurrection Act. Mr. Trump invoked a different statute as authority for his move, a rarely used law that allows a president to take federal control of a state’s National Guard under certain conditions — like when there is a rebellion against federal authority or the government is unable to enforce federal law through normal forces — and says such mobilization orders must go “through” governors.
Judge Charles Breyer, of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, ruled last week that the move was illegal. He said that the conditions in Los Angeles fell short of a “rebellion” and that immigration enforcement agents were still able to detain undocumented migrants despite encountering protesters during raids.
“While ICE was not able to detain as many people as defendants believe it could have, ICE was nonetheless able to execute the federal immigration laws,” he wrote. “Indeed, ICE continues to carry out enforcement actions, executing those laws.”
The judge also ruled that the administration failed to comply with the statute’s procedural requirement because in following through on Mr. Trump’s order, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, sent a directive taking control of California’s militia to the general who oversees it — bypassing Mr. Newsom.
The Trump administration has argued that it was up to the president to decide whether the conditions laid out in the statute were met and that courts could not second-guess Mr. Trump’s determination. It also argued that Mr. Hegseth satisfied the procedural requirement because the general acts on behalf of the governor in commanding the National Guard.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have separately activated about 700 active-duty Marines to assist in protecting immigration enforcement activities. The state had asked Judge Breyer to limit them to protecting federal buildings and to ban them from going out in the field to accompany ICE agents on raids, citing a 19th-century law that generally bars using the military for law enforcement unless the Insurrection Act is invoked.
But because the Marines had not yet been deployed into the city at the time of Thursday’s hearing, Judge Breyer said it would be premature for him to issue any such order. The Marines have since gone into Los Angeles and were videotaped detaining a man who was trying to enter a federal building. It turned out he was trying to run an errand at the Veterans Affairs office.
“The deployment of armed military personnel, skilled in warfare against external enemies, on domestic soil” has inflamed tensions and fear in Los Angeles, city officials argued in a friend of the court brief supporting the district court’s decision to grant Mr. Newsom’s request for a restraining order.
Officials from dozens of other cities across the nation signed onto a similar brief arguing that local police departments have long-established protocols for handling unrest and that the presence of military forces who are not coordinating with them heightens the risk of danger to officers and the public.
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15) Supreme Court Upholds State Ban on Transgender Care for Minors
The justices ruled that Tennessee’s law, which prohibited some medical treatments for transgender youths, did not violate equal protection principles.
By Adam Liptak, June 18, 2025
The Tennessee law was enacted in 2023, amid a sweeping national pushback to expanding rights for transgender people. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
Here’s the latest on the decision.
The conservative majority on the Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a state ban prohibiting some medical treatments for transgender youths, shielding similar laws in more than 20 other states.
The vote in the case was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. acknowledged the “fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field.” But he wrote in the majority opinion that these questions should be resolved by “the people, their elected representatives and the democratic process.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench. She spoke of the potential harms of the court’s decision for transgender youth and their families. She closed her reading with this: “In sadness, I dissent.”
Here’s what else to know about the case, United States v. Skrmetti:
· The treatments: The law prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, offering hormone therapy or performing surgery to treat the psychological distress caused by incongruence between experienced gender and that assigned at birth.
· Transgender rights: The Tennessee law was enacted in 2023, amid a sweeping national pushback to expanding rights for transgender people. Since then, controversies about military service, athletes, bathrooms and pronouns have played a role in President Trump’s second-term agenda.
· The case: The doctor and three families who sued to challenge the Tennessee law said it discriminated based on both sex and transgender status, violating the Constitution’s equal protection clause. They noted that the law specified that those prohibited treatments were allowed when undertaken for reasons other than gender transition care.
· U.S. politics: In a measure of the shifting politics around transgender issues, the Biden administration intervened on those fighting the ban. After Mr. Trump took office, he issued an executive order directing agencies to take steps to curtail surgeries, hormone therapy and other gender transition care for youths under 19. And in February, his administration formally reversed the government’s position in the case and urged the justices to uphold the law.
· Arguments: The law’s challengers stressed that the major American medical associations support the prohibited treatments as crucial for alleviating the psychological distress of many transgender youths. Tennessee’s brief countered that scientific uncertainty meant that legislatures rather than courts should decide what treatments are available to minors.
· Reaction: The Tennessee Equality Project, among the L.G.B.T.Q. organizations that argued against the law, said on social media that “the consequences of this devastating decision will be felt by anyone who needs gender-affirming care.” Jonathan Skrmetti, the Tennessee attorney general whose office defended the state law, called it a common-sense victory, saying in a statement that the decision “recognizes that the Constitution lets us fulfill society’s highest calling — protecting our kids.”
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16) Iran War Reflects a Changed Middle East and a New Israeli Military Doctrine
For years, Israel contained its conflicts with Tehran, Hamas and Hezbollah. The broad assault on Iran highlights a shift in strategy.
By Patrick Kingsley, June 18, 2025
Patrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief, has covered the Middle East for more than a decade.
For nearly two decades, Israel avoided all-out war with its biggest enemies.
It fought contained conflicts with Hamas, but ultimately allowed the group to retain power in Gaza. It maintained an uneasy calm with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, even as its fighters entrenched themselves in southern Lebanon. And despite planning a major assault on Iran, it limited its attacks to smaller, clandestine operations.
Israel’s massive, ongoing assault on Iran highlights an extraordinary shift in Israeli military doctrine since Hamas, Iran’s Palestinian ally, attacked the country in October 2023. It is a change that has redrawn the power dynamics in the Middle East, unraveled Iran’s regional alliance and enshrined Israel as the dominant military force in the region.
Having given Hamas years to prepare for the Oct. 7 attack, Israel reversed course afterward to unleash one of the most destructive campaigns in recent warfare. It then assassinated most of Hezbollah’s leadership and decimated large parts of southern Lebanon. Now, in Iran, it is carrying out the kind of broad and brazen attack that it long threatened but never dared to enact.
“We are changing the face of the Middle East,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel during a press briefing on Monday. “And this could lead to far-reaching changes within Iran itself,” he added.
For now, that second claim remains unproven. The Israeli military campaign has weakened Iran, but it has not yet destroyed the country’s nuclear program or collapsed its government, and it may still fall short of both. The war could also devolve into an intractable quagmire with no exit strategy or offramp.
Mr. Netanyahu’s broader point is harder to contradict. Hamas is no longer a threat to Israel. Hezbollah’s influence over Lebanon — let alone the danger it poses to Israelis — is much diminished. The government in Syria, a pillar of Iran’s regional alliance, was overthrown last December, in part because Hezbollah could no longer come to its aid.
These tectonic shifts also speak to a vast change within the Israeli psyche and strategic outlook since Hamas’s attack in October 2023.
For Israel’s critics, the attack was the inevitable consequence of the country’s blockade of Gaza, occupation of the West Bank, and failure to resolve the Palestinian conflict through diplomatic concessions. Many Israelis have drawn the opposite conclusion: They believe that the October attack — the deadliest in Israeli history — stemmed from Israel’s failure to pre-emptively and decisively defeat its enemies.
“In the 20 years before Oct. 7, we allowed threats to develop beyond our borders, trusting that our intelligence would give us prior warnings of any attack,” said Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence.
“The trauma of Oct. 7 completely changed that mind-set and made us willing to take risks that we didn’t take in the past,” General Yadlin said. “We will no longer wait to be attacked, and we will not wait to be surprised.”
The approach echoes Israel’s strategic outlook in the early decades of its existence, when it often acted more swiftly and decisively to remove threats on its borders, General Yadlin said. The clearest example was in June 1967, when Israel pre-emptively attacked Egypt after the Egyptian military moved troops toward the Israeli border.
“As Egypt massed troops on our southern border, we did not wait to be surprised,” General Yadlin said. “Now, we are reviving that doctrine.”
Israel’s new approach is the culmination of months of re-evaluation, during which the military’s confidence — crushed by the failures of Oct. 7 — was gradually restored.
While Israel’s approach to Hamas was immediately wrathful, the country was initially wary of taking on Hezbollah and Iran. Mr. Netanyahu called off a pre-emptive attack on Hezbollah in the first week of the war in 2023, amid fears that Israel would struggle to maintain a multi-front war against the Iran-led alliance.
For nearly a year, Israel fought only a low-level border conflict with Hezbollah. Despite increasing clashes with Tehran in 2024, Israel limited its strikes on Iran to avoid an all-out conflict.
Israel’s approach began to change last September, when a sequence of unexpected moves allowed Israel to decimate much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership.
That increased Israel’s confidence and prompted its leaders to order a more decisive assault on the group. Troops invaded southern Lebanon and the air force killed Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah.
Israel then severely weakened Iran’s air defense systems and successfully repelled massive barrages of Iranian missiles, giving Israel greater confidence in its offensive and defensive abilities. More than a year after Oct. 7, Israeli leaders finally concluded that they had a rare window of opportunity to mount a decisive blow against Iran’s nuclear program.
Though Israel’s new approach has undercut Iran’s regional influence, it has done little to resolve Israel’s oldest and most intractable problem: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In Gaza, Israel’s retaliation has led to widespread destruction and bloodshed, reinstating a fearsome sense of Israeli might and reducing Hamas’s threat for a generation.
But the conflict has provided no clear long-term trajectory for either Gaza or the wider Palestinian question. Mr. Netanyahu has consistently ignored opportunities to end the war, balking at the idea of either leaving Hamas’s remnants in charge or allowing other Palestinian groups to take over.
“Instead, we are left with only bad options,” said Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli foreign minister. “Either occupation or chaos, rather than a diplomatic process involving moderate regional and Palestinian stakeholders that could change the reality on the ground for both Palestinians and Israelis.”
A similarly aimless dynamic could yet emerge in Iran, analysts said, if the Israeli leadership fails to clearly define its goals there and set an exit strategy.
For now, Israeli officials hope the United States will join the attack and help Israel destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. If the United States stays away, and if Iran refuses to stop the enrichment by choice, it is unclear whether Israel’s forceful new doctrine will achieve the kind of game-changing outcomes that many Israelis desire.
“One wonders whether effective military performance is matched by a sober political vision,” said Nimrod Novik, a former senior Israeli official and a fellow at Israel Policy Forum, a research group in New York. “Or, like in Gaza, we are left without an endgame. Time will tell.”
Johnatan Reiss and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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17) Trump’s Conflicting Messages on Workplace Raids Leave Businesses Reeling
Trump officials insist the president is fully committed to mass deportation. But they have been careful not to directly contradict the president’s attempt to offer a reprieve to certain businesses.
By Tyler Pager, Miriam Jordan, Hamed Aleaziz and Emmett Lindner, Published June 17, 2025, Updated June 18, 2025
Tyler Pager and Hamed Aleaziz reported from Washington, Miriam Jordan from Los Angeles, and Emmett Lindner from New York.
An immigration agent making an arrest last month in Miami. Lack of clarity over the Trump administration’s deportation agenda is dividing Republicans. Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times
President Trump is sending conflicting messages about his immigration crackdown, promising a reprieve for certain industries that rely on immigrant labor while doubling down on his promise to arrest and deport anyone who is living in the United States illegally.
The situation has left business owners unclear on exactly what the Trump policy is, just days after the president said “changes are coming” to help those in the farming and hospitality industries whose employees are too scared to show up for work.
“One minute you have a message saying they won’t go after agriculture, the next something else,” said Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the Nisei Farmers League, a growers organization in the Central Valley of California.
Mr. Cunha said it was causing “tremendous havoc” in the country’s largest agricultural region.
“First thing this morning I got calls from my growers asking, ‘Does this mean they are going to come after the workers in the fields?’” Mr. Cunha said.
The muddled messages coming out of the White House and from Trump officials suggest the president is caught between competing factions on an issue that has come to define his political identity and that he credited for his victory last year.
Last week, Mr. Trump drew immediate backlash from even his most fervent supporters after he acknowledged that his hard-line policies were hurting certain industries that rely on immigrant labor, like farming, hotels and restaurants.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials then issued a directive pausing most raids on those work sites to align with Mr. Trump’s position, frustrating many people inside the White House who have pressed for a more aggressive approach.
In the days since that ICE directive went out, Trump administration officials have scrambled to contain the fallout — insisting that the president is fully committed to deporting millions of people. But they have also been careful not to directly contradict Mr. Trump’s attempt to give a respite to business leaders in key industries.
“The president has been incredibly clear,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement. “There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE’s efforts.”
But it was the president who emphasized in a social media post last week the need to protect “very good, long time workers” in the farming and hospitality industries. That message came after a lobbying campaign from Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture, and business leaders who warned about the impacts of the immigration crackdown on key industries.
A few days later, amid the backlash from some of Mr. Trump’s own staff and loyal allies, the president posted again, exhorting ICE officials to intensify their efforts. He called for a focus on the country’s largest cities, specifically calling out Los Angeles, Chicago and New York — and made no mention of workplace raids.
But ICE had already scaled up its operations in New York City since Mr. Trump took office. While the workplace raids that touched off protests in Los Angeles have not been as common in New York, the agency has deployed its agents to conduct home raids across the city and, in recent weeks, has arrested more and more immigrants showing up for routine court hearings in Manhattan.
Over the weekend, Kristi Noem, the secretary of Department of Homeland Security, sent a letter to ICE officials instructing them to be aggressive in their deportation efforts.
“We promised the largest deportation operation in history and that is exactly what we will do,” she wrote in a letter obtained by The Times. “Your performance will be judged every day by how many arrests you, your teammates and your office are able to effectuate. Failure is not an option.”
Ms. Noem said that “worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts,” but she added an important caveat. She said that any “large-scale worksite actions” must be “properly coordinated through leadership.”
The lack of clarity over how the Trump administration is carrying out the deportation agenda continues to divide the Republican Party. Many Trump officials and allies want to see enforcement operations expanded. They see any industry carve-outs as undermining the president’s promise to deport all undocumented immigrants.
“We should not declare any industry or any worksite that uses large numbers of illegal immigrants off-limits for enforcement of federal law,” Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, said on Sunday on CBS.
But other allies of the president continue to stress the importance of immigrant workers, maintaining that they are essential to many industries and that there are not Americans willing to fill the gap if they are deported.
Representative Andy Harris, Republican of Maryland and the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, joined industry leaders to make that case on Tuesday. Mr. Harris said that the president “realizes that, running in parallel with their deportation of criminals and other people here illegally, there has to be an effort to figure out how to make sure that we have the work force we need.”
“With an unemployment rate of 4 percent, you’re not going to find American workers for a lot of these tasks,” Mr. Harris said during a news conference held by the American Business Immigration Coalition, which represents 1,700 employers. “You haven’t found them even when the unemployment rate was higher. And again, to get the economic boost going that the president talked about, I think it’s a great sign the administration finally realized there is a need for foreign workers.”
Rebecca Shi, the chief executive of the coalition, said businesses could not make a plan without clear guidance. But she said the debate had left her with a glimmer of optimism.
“What these last few days of this back and forth has shown,” she said, “is at least there is a willingness to have a debate about this.”
Immigrant communities have been accompanying the twists and turns of the administration on Spanish-language TV and social media.
“Folks were expressing hope that there would be less enforcement on farm workers and hotel workers, and then we hear that the administration is going ahead with enforcement,” said Eduardo Delgado, an official with Migrant Equity Southeast, an advocacy group in Georgia.
“Immigrant families have been on an emotional roller coaster,” he said. “Every day, they have to wake up to news that directly impacts them and still have to go to work to provide for their families while wondering if they will come home to their children.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting from Calgary, Alberta, and Luis Ferré-Sadurní from New York.
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18) Humanitarian Aid Trickles Into Northern Gaza
A convoy of trucks brought food parcels into the territory, where civilians are at risk of starvation and have been suffering worsening conditions, with such aid shipments rare in recent weeks.
Visuals by Saher Alghorra, Text by Saher Alghorra and Neil Vigdor, June 17, 2025
Palestinian citizens headed to an area in the northwest of Gaza City, after aid trucks loaded with food parcels entered, on Monday.
For one of the few times in recent months, humanitarian aid trickled on Monday into northern Gaza, where a convoy of trucks carrying food was greeted by masses of civilians desperate for food.
Thousands of Palestinian men, women and children rushed to the distribution point in the northwest part of Gaza City, where they received food aid in cardboard boxes from the U.N. World Food Program that they then lugged home through the rubble and sand of the war-ravaged territory.
“I just want to feed my children — they haven’t eaten in two days,” a thin man carrying an aid box said.
The food shipments went through inspections by Israeli authorities before being allowed to cross into Gaza, a process that has become increasingly contentious after Israel blocked humanitarian aid for more than two months.
Humanitarian groups have warned that the vast majority of the 2.2 million people who live in Gaza are at risk of starving unless the shipments, now at a trickle, are ramped up.
Israeli officials have expressed mistrust in the United Nations, suggesting that it has an anti-Israel bias. The country has also accused Hamas of diverting aid under a previous distribution system managed by the United Nations.
People hoisted the boxes on their shoulders and heads and stuffed supplies into their clothes or bags that they had brought with them. They scooped up items that had fallen onto the ground.
The procession of people, filing along the beachhead past makeshift tents and the ruins of buildings, kicked up clouds of dust.
The distribution centers have been fraught with chaos and danger for the territory’s civilian population. In the southern part of the territory, more than 70 Palestinians have been killed near aid distribution sites in the past two days, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which blamed Israeli forces for the violence.
In northern Gaza, some families were waiting at their doorsteps for their sons to return. One woman saw her son coming back with supplies, and she expressed her joy with a celebratory ululation.
Humanitarian groups say that the current level of aid represents a mere fraction of the shipments that they had been making during a temporary cease-fire that had lasted from January to March.
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