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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) Parents in Gaza Are Running Out of Ways to Feed Their Children: ‘All We Want Is a Loaf of Bread’
A New York Times article last year described two families struggling to keep their malnourished children alive in Gaza. Now, as Israeli restrictions keep out most aid, that’s even harder.
By Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair, June 7, 2025
Vivian Yee reported from Cairo, and Bilal Shbair from Khan Younis, Gaza.
A food distribution line in Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, in April. The territory is facing a hunger crisis. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
It had made sense to Nour Barda and Heba al-Arqan in November 2023 to try for another baby when a temporary truce had just taken hold in Gaza. Mr. Barda’s father, who had only sons, kept asking when he might have a granddaughter at last. Back then, the war seemed like it might end. Back then, there was food, even if it was not enough.
By the time Ms. al-Arqan found out she was pregnant last year, things in Gaza were much worse. When she gave birth to Shadia this April, there was so little to eat that Ms. al-Arqan, 25, had almost no milk to give. Now she holds Shadia at her breast just to calm her down, Mr. Barda said, knowing that nothing is likely to come.
It had been like this with Jihad, their son, who was born in 2023, two weeks after the war began. Their increasingly desperate efforts to find food when Jihad was six months old were described in a New York Times article about malnourished children in Gaza in April 2024.
But now she and her husband had two babies to keep alive at a time when Israel had blocked almost all aid from entering Gaza for nearly three months — 80 days of total siege beginning in March. Israel began to ease the blockade in May, but only a thin trickle of supplies has arrived.
The traditional United Nations-run system for delivering aid has faltered as looters and fighting have cut off safe routes for aid trucks, and a new, Israeli-backed aid distribution system has descended into controversy, chaos and violence. Though the group behind it says it has delivered nearly nine million meals so far, the United Nations says the assistance falls far short of what is needed for a population of two million people. Security at the new distribution sites is being provided by private American contractors, but the Israeli military is stationing forces nearby, outside the perimeter.
Born 5 pounds, 1 ounce, Shadia was weaker and smaller than her brother and had gained just seven ounces a month later, her parents said. She struggled to suck from the bottle, usually drinking only half of the single bottle of formula that aid groups can offer at a time, they said. Ms. al-Arqan has taken to drinking whatever her daughter does not finish, hoping the nutrients will help her produce milk, she said.
“Her birth brought me more anxiety than joy,” Ms. al-Arqan said. “History is repeating itself, but this time with my little girl.”
When Ms. al-Arqan managed to get some child nutritional supplements from an aid group in mid-May by waiting in line for six hours, aid workers evaluated Shadia by measuring her arm and concluded that the baby had moderate acute malnutrition, she said.
But after nearly 20 months of war, Shadia’s parents have no income or savings left to spend on milk or formula at the market. They survive on one meal a day: either a little lentil soup or rice and beans they get from charity kitchens in northern Gaza, where they have been living in a tent in the street for about six weeks.
Mr. Barda, 26, who worked as a baker at a pastry chain before the war and has not been able to find steady work since, cannot find flour in northern Gaza for less than about $23 a kilogram, he said. That puts bread, the base on which practically every meal in Gaza used to be built, out of reach.
“When we had Jihad, we still had some savings,” Ms. al-Arqan said. “Now we have nothing — no savings, no vegetables in the markets and no affordable flour.” Jihad’s name, after an uncle, means “struggle” or “striving.”
Jihad is no longer a baby. Now he asks constantly for food.
A few days ago, as he was about to go down for a nap, Ms. al-Arqan said she heard him drowsily murmuring: “Mama — dough and bread.”
“Every day, we lose more ways to survive,” she said. “My son is only asking for the bare minimum — a loaf of bread. We’re not asking for proper housing or clothes or even meat. All we want is a loaf of bread to stop the children’s crying. Is that too much to ask?”
Shadia is the apple of her grandfather’s eye; he had always wanted a girl in the family. Sometimes he takes her to sleep with him and his wife on their mattress in their tent, he said, whispering words of hope and affection in his granddaughter’s ears.
The younger Mr. Barda does not see cause for hope. Though he and his wife want more children, as is traditional in Gaza, they know they cannot feed more, he said.
“Our mood is broken,” he said. “We go through the same suffering all over again every day.”
To the south, in the city of Khan Younis, Hanaa al-Najjar has three children to feed, and little but lentils and dried pasta to feed them with.
The Times interviewed Ms. al-Najjar last year for the same article that described Mr. Barda and Ms. al-Arqan’s struggle to feed their baby. Ms. al-Najjar, now 31, had been left to take care of her children on her own after Israeli soldiers detained her husband as the family was evacuating a shelter on the Israeli military’s orders, she said.
After she ran out of formula, she was forced to feed her youngest, Muhanned, bread dipped in canned beans and lentil soup. His appetite suffered, and at less than 2 years old, he weighed half of what he was supposed to. He died in March last year.
Her elder son, Mohammed, now 8, had been hospitalized a few weeks before for fever and dehydration. Though he recovered, he has never been able to put on weight, Ms. al-Najjar said. He weighs a little less than 42 pounds — underweight by World Health Organization standards.
“He never gains any extra weight like other kids,” she said.
Now they live in a tent next to a graveyard in western Khan Younis. Ms. al-Najjar’s husband remains missing in detention.
Without wheat flour, she grinds up dried lentils and pasta to make something resembling bread. Mohammed struggles to digest it, she said, and is always constipated. She has not found any medication to treat his bowel issues.
For more than three months now, he has also had a bacterial infection on his scalp that doctors have been unable to treat, she said. It recently spread to his 10-year-old and 5-year-old sisters.
Mohammed is a cheerful child. But the evidence of his rocky health is right there on the back of his head, even if he wears an orange hoodie to hide it. There, his dark hair has fallen out in patches, leaving nothing but an expanse of seething red skin.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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2) National Guards to Deploy to L.A. as More Protests Are Planned
Protests over immigration raids in the Los Angeles area are set to continue for a third day. Gov. Gavin Newsom said President Trump’s decision to call in National Guards was “purposefully inflammatory.”
By Laurel Rosenhall, Orlando Mayorquín, Mimi Dwyer, Jesus Jiménez and Shawn Hubler, June 8, 2025
![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/06/08/multimedia/08la-immigration-protest-carousel-jmfq/08la-immigration-protest-carousel-jmfq-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
Further protests against immigration raids were scheduled to take place in the Los Angeles area on Sunday, hours after President Trump took the extraordinary action of ordering at least 2,000 National Guard members to assist immigration agents clashing with demonstrators.
The announcement late Saturday by Mr. Trump — who said that any protest or act of violence that impeded officials would be considered a “form of rebellion” — was an escalation that put Los Angeles squarely at the center of tensions over his administration’s immigration crackdown and made rare use of federal powers to bypass the authority of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom.
Mr. Trump praised the National Guard for their work in Los Angeles overnight, but Mayor Karen Bass reminded residents that the troops had not arrived. As of around 7 a.m. on Sunday, the streets were quiet. Protests against immigration raids were expected to continue for a third day, with one event at City Hall set for 2 p.m. local time.
On Saturday, law enforcement officers faced off with hundreds of protesters for a second consecutive day in the Los Angeles area, in some cases using rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades. Mr. Newsom described Mr. Trump’s order as “purposefully inflammatory,” saying that the federal government was mobilizing the National Guard “not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle.”
Bill Essayli, the Trump administration’s top law enforcement official in Southern California, said in an interview on Saturday night that National Guard troops would arrive in Los Angeles County within 24 hours. At least 20 people were arrested on Saturday, mostly in the largely Latino and working-class suburb of Paramount, in addition to the more than 100 people arrested at the protests on Friday, Mr. Essayli said.
Protests had broken out in the L.A. area on Friday and Saturday as federal agents mounted raids on workplaces in search of undocumented immigrants. The Los Angeles Police Department detained a number of protesters near the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, but said demonstrations in the city were peaceful. Some of the protests that broke out in other areas, including Compton and Paramount, south of downtown Los Angeles, were more confrontational.
Demonstrators near a freeway entrance threw fireworks and rocks at police officers, who responded with volleys of rubber projectiles. Some took over an intersection after setting a car ablaze, while others hurled glass bottles filled with a substance that smelled like gasoline at a police line, as fires burned in the street.
Here’s what else to know:
· Workplace raids: The recent raids appeared to be part of a new phase of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, in which officials say they will increasingly focus on workplaces.
· Federal powers: Mr. Trump’s order is the first time since 1965 that a president has activated a state’s National Guard force without a request from that state’s governor, according to Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent law and policy organization.
· Trading blame: Some of California’s Democratic lawmakers blasted Mr. Trump’s decision to send in the National Guard as an inappropriate use of power, while Republicans criticized the state’s political leadership over their handling of the protests.
· Latino communities: Some of the most active protests against immigration raids took place in Paramount, a small city some 25 miles southeast of the Hollywood sign that has for decades attracted Latino immigrants.
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3) Newsom criticizes Hegseth for saying that the Marines could be mobilized.
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg, June 8 2025
“Governors almost always control the deployment of National Guard troops in their states. But the order signed by Mr. Trump on Saturday, June 7, 2025, cites a provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services that allows the federal deployment of National Guard forces if ‘there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.’ Mr. Trump’s directive also authorized the secretary of defense to ‘employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion.’ It is rare for the Marines to be deployed for law enforcement purposes. In 1992, President George Bush, at the request of California’s governor, sent Marines from Camp Pendleton to suppress riots in Los Angeles.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California sharply criticized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said that active duty Marines could be mobilized as part of the federal government’s response to protests against immigration raids in the Los Angeles area.
Mr. Hegseth’s suggestion came on Saturday after President Trump ordered at least 2,000 National Guard members to assist immigration agents following two days of clashes with demonstrators. Some of the demonstrations have been unruly, but local officials had not asked for federal assistance and Mr. Trump issued the order under a rarely used law to bypass Mr. Newsom’s authority.
Mr. Hegseth welcomed the president’s decision as “common sense” and said that Marines at Camp Pendleton, about 100 miles south of Los Angeles, were on high alert. They could be deployed to deal with any violence, he said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Mr. Newsom said in a post on social media overnight that Mr. Hegseth was “threatening deploy active-duty Marines on American soil against its own citizens.” He added, “This is deranged behavior.”
Governors almost always control the deployment of National Guard troops in their states. But the order signed by Mr. Trump on Saturday cites a provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services that allows the federal deployment of National Guard forces if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
Mr. Trump’s directive also authorized the secretary of defense to “employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion.”
It is rare for the Marines to be deployed for law enforcement purposes. In 1992, President George Bush, at the request of California’s governor, sent Marines from Camp Pendleton to suppress riots in Los Angeles.
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4) Trump Targets Workplaces as Immigration Crackdown Widens
Many industries have become dependent on immigrant labor. Some workplace raids have been met with protest.
By Lydia DePillis and Ernesto Londoño, June 7, 2025
“Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security, said 2,000 immigrants per day were arrested over the last week, up from 600 earlier in the administration. It was not clear how many of those arrests were made at raids of work sites. More than 4 percent of the nation’s 170 million person work force was made up of undocumented immigrants in 2023, according to estimates from Goldman Sachs, making job sites a prime setting for agents to find people. The number of immigrants who could be subject to such sweeps increased by at least 500,000 at the end of May, as the Supreme Court allowed the administration to revoke the temporary status that had allowed many Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans to work. … Undocumented immigrants are concentrated in a few American industries, making up 19 percent of landscaping workers, 17 percent of farm workers and 13 percent of construction workers, according to the estimates from Goldman Sachs.”
The chaos that engulfed Los Angeles on Saturday, June 7, 2025, began a day earlier when camouflage-clad federal agents rolled through the garment district in search of workers who they suspected of being undocumented immigrants. They were met with protesters, who chanted and threw eggs before being dispersed with pepper spray and nonlethal bullets.
The enforcement operation turned into one of the most volatile scenes of President Trump’s immigration crackdown so far, but it was not an isolated incident.
Last week, at a student housing complex under construction in Tallahassee, Fla., masked immigration agents loaded dozens of migrants into buses headed to detention centers. In New Orleans, 15 people working on a flood control project were detained. And raids in San Diego and Massachusetts — in Martha’s Vineyard and the Berkshires — led to standoffs in recent days as bystanders angrily confronted federal agents who were taking workers into custody.
The high-profile raids appeared to mark a new phase of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, in which officials say they will increasingly focus on workplaces — taking aim at the reason millions of people have illegally crossed the border for decades. That is an expansion from plans early in the administration to prioritize detaining hardened criminals and later to focus on hundreds of international students.
“You’re going to see more work site enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation,” Thomas D. Homan, the White House border czar told reporters recently. “We’re going to flood the zone.”
It remains to be seen how aggressively Mr. Trump will pursue sectors like construction, food production and hospitality. Raids are sometimes directed based on tips, but otherwise appear to be distributed without a clear pattern, hitting establishments large and small.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to an email seeking details about the government’s plans, including an explanation about why the administration is ramping up work-site arrests now.
Over the past month, though, the White House has pressured immigration officials to increase deportations, which have fallen short of the administration’s goals.
The number of arrests has risen sharply in the past week, according to figures provided by the Department of Homeland Security.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security, said 2,000 immigrants per day were arrested over the last week, up from 600 earlier in the administration. It was not clear how many of those arrests were made at raids of work sites.
More than 4 percent of the nation’s 170 million person work force was made up of undocumented immigrants in 2023, according to estimates from Goldman Sachs, making job sites a prime setting for agents to find people.
The number of immigrants who could be subject to such sweeps increased by at least 500,000 at the end of May, as the Supreme Court allowed the administration to revoke the temporary status that had allowed many Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans to work.
Workplace raids require significant planning, can be costly and draw on large teams of agents, but they can yield more arrests than pursuing individual targets. The raids may have become feasible in recent weeks, experts said, as personnel from the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies have been enlisted on immigration operations.
“Goosing the numbers is a big part of this because it’s so much more efficient in manpower to raid a warehouse and arrest 100 illegal aliens than it is to send five guys after one criminal,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates less immigration.
Workplace raids also send a warning to a far broader group of undocumented people, most of whom have not committed crimes. “If you want to get people packing up and leaving, that isn’t going to happen if you’re just focusing on the criminals,” Mr. Krikorian said.
In interviews, migrants and employers expressed alarm about the toll a sustained crackdown could take on the work force. Undocumented immigrants are concentrated in a few American industries, making up 19 percent of landscaping workers, 17 percent of farm workers and 13 percent of construction workers, according to the estimates from Goldman Sachs.
Gus Hoyas, a Republican who runs a construction firm in Cleveland, said his industry has long leaned heavily on people with valuable skills who are in the country without permission.
“They’re undocumented, but we’ve got to do something, because these people are tradesmen — they’re pros in the field,” said Mr. Hoyas, a naturalized immigrant from Colombia. “You get rid of these folks, and it’s going to kill us in the construction arena.”
During his first term, Mr. Trump — whose own businesses have employed workers without papers — sent mixed messages about his eagerness to crack down on undocumented labor. Early on, his administration carried out several workplace raids, and conducted more audits of worker eligibility paperwork than the Obama administration had.
But Mr. Trump’s Justice Department prosecuted relatively few employers for hiring undocumented workers. And in 2017, the president commuted the sentence of an Iowa meatpacking plant executive convicted in the Obama era after a jury found that he knowingly hired hundreds of undocumented workers and paid for their forged documents.
The Covid-19 pandemic halted efforts to go after undocumented workers. “These were people who were processing our food, making our food, delivering our food so we could all live in the comfort of our Zoom existence,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “That was not lost on people.”
Mr. Biden, who began his presidency facing a beleaguered economy and a severe labor shortage, never prioritized workplace immigration enforcement.
The system that gave rise to this shadow work force dates to 1986, when President Ronald Reagan signed a bill granting amnesty to nearly three million undocumented immigrants, allowing them to pursue citizenship. The bill also criminalized hiring people without legal status and required that employers collect an I-9 form from every new hire, substantiating their work authorization with identification.
In 1996, the Internal Revenue Service created an alternative to a Social Security number that allowed immigrants to file federal tax returns on their earnings. Unauthorized immigrants often do so because it can be beneficial on citizenship applications down the line and also count toward Social Security benefits if they are able to naturalize. Their payments generate tens of billions of dollars in tax revenue each year.
Since then, enforcement of immigration labor laws has varied widely. In the late 1990s, the government prioritized egregious cases of employers who abused workers or who knowingly hired large numbers of undocumented migrants. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, investigators focused on sensitive sites such as airports and military bases.
Over the years, raids at farms, meatpacking plants and construction sites have grabbed headlines, but employers have seldom faced severe consequences. Many subcontract to avoid liability, and managers have long asserted that it is difficult to identify fake documents.
“They have plausible deniability for just about any hires,” said Daniel Costa, an immigration labor expert at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “The system was kind of rigged against workers and in favor of employers from the beginning.”
Immigrant workers tend to be younger, while the U.S.-born population is aging into retirement. Millions of people who arrived between 2022 and 2024, largely from Latin America, Ukraine and Afghanistan, were generally eligible to work, since the Biden administration granted most of them some kind of temporary legal status.
For those reasons, the share of the labor force that is foreign born rose to 19.7 percent in March, the highest on record.
That is why a serious work-site crackdown could severely affect some industries, especially if employers begin preemptively firing people known to be undocumented. Employers also must balance verifying a worker’s status with risking accusations of discrimination on the basis of race and national origin, which is also illegal.
“If you’ve done your due diligence as an employer, your own doubt or suspicion isn’t going to be enough for me to say, ‘Yeah, fire that person,’” said Eric Welsh, an attorney with Reeves Immigration Law Group, which helps both individuals and companies with visa issues. “You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
After Mr. Trump’s election, employers started performing more internal audits to verify employees’ identification documents and work permits, immigration attorneys said.
Chris Thomas, a partner with the firm Holland & Hart in Denver, said his business clients had seen more notices of investigation and letters from the Internal Revenue Service flagging Social Security numbers that don’t match the agency’s records.
The Department of Justice raised the stakes in early February with a memo that directed attorneys to use “all available criminal statutes” to enforce immigration laws.
“If you know you have undocumented workers, and you’re not severing ties with them at this stage, you’re in a position where they’re coming pretty soon,” Mr. Thomas said. “If you wait until they arrive on the scene it’s probably too late.”
Greg Casten, who co-owns several restaurants, a fish wholesaler and a few other hospitality businesses in Washington D.C., has watched the government’s shifting approach to undocumented workers for more than 40 years. Many of his 600 employees are immigrants. He has found Salvadorans in particular, to be skilled at cutting fish.
Every year he gets a list from the I.R.S. of Social Security numbers on his payroll that don’t match official records, and every year he goes through to try to address any gaps. Still, it’s not perfect.
“I do have some people who work for me who can barely speak English, and I find it hard to believe sometimes when they’re giving me paperwork,” Mr. Casten said. But since he puts in the necessary effort, he doesn’t worry much about punishment.
In early May, the Department of Homeland Security served inspection notices to 187 businesses in Washington, though none of Mr. Casten’s.
“Right now, as fragile as this industry is, if they came in and took 20 percent or 10 percent of someone’s work staff, they would be out of business,” he said.
The heightened risk of enforcement has led some employers to preemptively let go of workers they suspect are undocumented.
Miriam, a mother of five in Los Angeles who crossed the border illegally 26 years ago, said the Trump administration’s immigration policies led her boss at a 24-hour laundromat to fire her recently.
“Many people have lost their jobs overnight,” said Miriam, who is 40 and agreed to be identified only by her first name out of concern about drawing the attention of immigration officials. “We’re all afraid.”
Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
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5) We Saw Medicaid Work Requirements Up Close. You Don’t Want This Chaos.
By Kevin De Liban and Trevor Hawkins, June 8, 2025
Mr. De Liban and Mr. Hawkins are lawyers who successfully sued to stop Arkansas’s Medicaid work requirements.
Erik Carter
Many of the Republicans pushing for Medicaid work requirements — permanent program cuts that will strip up to 14 million people of their health care coverage — likely have no idea what it takes to comply with them. We do. As legal aid lawyers, we were on the front lines helping low-income people in Arkansas keep their health care coverage when the state rolled out work requirements in 2018. The policy caused chaos for everyone involved: people receiving Medicaid, hospitals and health clinics, pharmacies, social services organizations and state agency caseworkers. No officials serious about governing should willingly create such problems for their own state.
Over 18,160 people in Arkansas lost coverage in only five months before courts halted the policy. Many were our clients. Adrian McGonigal had chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, for which he received treatment. At the time he held a job working 30 to 40 hours a week at a poultry plant, which paid more than any other job he’d had before and should have satisfied the requirement. But the state’s system for automatically identifying working people was faulty, and Mr. McGonigal struggled to navigate the complex monthly reporting system on his own. Unable to report his work, he lost Medicaid, couldn’t afford his C.O.P.D. medications, wound up in the hospital emergency room several times, lost his job and never fully recovered. For the next several years he struggled in various minimum-wage jobs, earning much less than he had at the poultry plant. Sadly, he died in November.
We saw many working people face similar challenges. Our clients ran the gamut of low-wage work: fast food workers, restaurant dishwashers and servers, construction workers, janitors, landscapers, motel cleaners, gas station clerks and nursing assistants. Many had disabilities, and their ability to continue working depended on getting treatment to manage chronic pain, asthma, injuries, cancer and mental health conditions. Some lost coverage simply because they couldn’t navigate the policy’s complicated requirements and labyrinthine reporting process. Others lost insurance because of the instability of low-wage work: Bosses cut their hours or laid them off without warning, limited public transit narrowed their options or they lived in struggling rural areas where jobs were hard to come by. When the state cut them off, their health worsened and many lost jobs, as well as the ability to work new ones.
Nobody on Medicaid was free from the tumult. Despite outreach from the state, there was widespread panic, as people didn’t know if they had the type of Medicaid that the new requirements applied to. People received confusing 10-page letters from the state Medicaid office, which often contradicted other coverage letters people received around the same time. The website to report compliance shut down every night at 9 p.m., and when it was running, it was so complex that we put together video tutorials to help people navigate it successfully. (Many still couldn’t.) People spent hours on the phone or at agency offices trying to figure out their status or fix errors, often needing a lawyer’s help. In some cases, they had to pester their employers for extra proof of wages or statements that met the state’s requirements. All told, 18,164 people were terminated because of noncompliance with the work requirements, and thousands more people lost coverage because of related paperwork burdens.
What’s more, these penalties operated as a tax on key economic sectors. Hospitals and health clinics, many already barely surviving in rural areas, assumed additional costs to untangle billing nightmares, absorb more uncompensated care and help confused patients document their eligibility for coverage. Local nonprofits, including services for the homeless, domestic violence shelters, food banks, soup kitchens and senior centers, spent their scarce resources trying to help people comply. Pharmacists dealt with the desperation of people learning for the first time that they had lost coverage and would have to pay out of pocket for their prescriptions.
The state Medicaid agency also bent under the weight. Agency management sloughed off the thankless and time-consuming tasks of cleaning up endless system errors, figuring out workarounds and calming frantic people to overburdened caseworkers. At one point, the state’s call centers were so overwhelmed that the agency expanded its hours of operation, which still didn’t prevent lengthy wait times.
These widespread burdens underscore the pointlessness: Ninety-two percent of the targeted Medicaid recipients already work, are in school, have family caregiving responsibilities or have disabilities. When work requirements were imposed in Arkansas, they did not increase employment. In fact, there’s reason to believe that they could counterproductively hurt employment. That’s because when you take away people’s health insurance, their otherwise manageable health conditions turn into unmanageable work barriers.
This kind of disastrous policy doesn’t come cheaply, either. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report estimated that administering work requirements in Arkansas alone cost over $24 million in state and federal funds for less than a year of operation. When four other states sought to implement work requirements, the report estimated the cost at $382 million. A more recent work requirement program in Georgia cost $87 million. The only way to cover these costs is to kick people off Medicaid. The game is rigged.
What happened in Arkansas isn’t an outlier, but an omen. The plan currently under consideration in Congress will be worse and more destructive than what we saw. If passed, it will require states to adopt work requirements, but each state will decide how many months people must demonstrate compliance to get insurance, how often enrollees must verify compliance (with a minimum of twice per year), what exemptions are available and what someone must show to prove compliance or get exemptions.
Hostile states will weaponize these penalties to deny people Medicaid, while states that want to minimize coverage losses will not be able to fully shield their enrollees. We saw similar dynamics at play in 2023-24, when all states had to redetermine the eligibility of their Medicaid recipients after pandemic coverage guarantees lapsed. More than 25 million people lost Medicaid, with termination rates highest in Republican-controlled states, such as Utah, Texas and Oklahoma, and lowest in Democratic-controlled states, such as California, Oregon and Connecticut.
Better technology won’t be enough to stave off harms. The computer systems used to automatically verify compliance can’t obtain or analyze accurate data for all targeted recipients, a point Arkansas now concedes. Rather, these systems threaten Medicaid loss by sending recipients requests for additional information when they detect small, meaningless differences in income reported from different sources. Lost or slow mail, confusion or delayed agency processing can all lead to lost coverage. More advanced technology hasn’t proved to help, either. Attempts by state governments to use algorithms and artificial intelligence — to determine benefits eligibility in Texas and Florida, to decide how much home care disabled people need in Arkansas or to detect unemployment fraud in Michigan — have all failed. Indeed, 50 states implementing 50 sets of penalty rules through 50 different technology systems seems a certain disaster.
No matter where they live, if this bill passes with the work requirements intact, Republican officials will all face years of slogging through the muck they created. They should expect huge coverage losses for constituents, disgruntled employers who can’t depend on a healthy, stable work force, rural hospital and clinic closures, overburdened social services, understaffed government agencies with burned-out caseworkers and endless media reports about the morass. In the end, voters may have to teach them that cruelty is no way to govern.
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6) Tensions Flare Between Protesters and Law Enforcement in L.A.
Federal agents clashed with protesters near a detention center in downtown Los Angeles, as confrontations stretched into a third day. About 300 National Guard troops were deployed across the city.
Livia Albeck-Ripka, Shawn Hubler, Adam Nagourney, Jill Cowan, Laurel Rosenhall and Sarah Mervosh, June 8, 2025
Uniformed authorities fired canisters of tear gas at a group protesting immigration raids in Los Angeles on Sunday, a day after President Trump ordered the National Guard to help quell demonstrations over the objections of California officials.
Video from the scene showed Department of Homeland Security officers and at least three from Immigration and Customs Enforcement also firing other crowd-control munitions outside a detention center in downtown Los Angeles where members of the California National Guard had been deployed. The smoking canisters forced some of the hundreds of protesters to flee, while others helped fellow demonstrators wash their eyes. It was not immediately clear what prompted the escalation.
The confrontation was the latest between government agents and protesters, whose demonstrations have been largely peaceful but nonetheless prompted Mr. Trump to announce the deployment of at least 2,000 members of the National Guard, saying any protest or act of violence that impeded officials would be considered a “form of rebellion.”
Mr. Trump made rare use of federal powers to bypass the authority of Gov. Gavin Newsom in announcing the deployment on Saturday. Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, called the president’s decision “purposefully inflammatory.”
Roughly 300 members of the National Guard had been deployed to the city as of Sunday morning, according to Mr. Newsom’s office. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles called the deployments a “chaotic escalation” on Sunday, adding that the only other time she had seen the National Guard patrolling city streets, besides to help with disaster recovery, was during the 1992 riots, when they were requested by state and local officials. “There’s no reason for them to be on our streets now,” she said.
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7) Trump Jumps at the Chance for a Confrontation in California Over Immigration
The situation has all the elements that the president seeks: a showdown with a top political rival in a deep blue state over an issue core to his agenda.
By Tyler Pager, Reporting from Washington, Published June 8, 2025, Updated June 9, 2025
Law enforcement officers and members of the California National Guard engaged protesters in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday. Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
It is the fight President Trump had been waiting for, a showdown with a top political rival in a deep blue state over an issue core to his political agenda.
In bypassing the authority of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, to call in the National Guard to quell protests in the Los Angeles area over his administration’s efforts to deport more migrants, Mr. Trump is now pushing the boundaries of presidential authority and stoking criticism that he is inflaming the situation for political gain.
Local and state authorities had not sought help in dealing with the scattered protests that erupted after an immigration raid on Friday in the garment district. But Mr. Trump and his top aides leaned into the confrontation with California leaders on Sunday, portraying the demonstrations as an existential threat to the country — setting in motion an aggressive federal response that in turn sparked new protests across the city.
As more demonstrators took to the streets, the president wrote on social media that Los Angeles was being “invaded and occupied” by “violent, insurrectionist mobs,” and directed three of his top cabinet officials to take any actions necessary to “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion.”
“Nobody’s going to spit on our police officers. Nobody’s going to spit on our military,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he headed to Camp David on Sunday, although it was unclear whether any such incidents had occurred. “That happens, they get hit very hard.”
The president declined to say whether he planned to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, which allows for the use of federal troops on domestic soil to quell a rebellion. But either way, he added, “we’re going to have troops everywhere.”
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, posted on social media that “this is a fight to save civilization.”
Mr. Trump’s decision to deploy at least 2,000 members of the California National Guard is the latest example of his willingness and, at times, an eagerness to shatter norms to pursue his political goals and bypass limits on presidential power. The last president to send in the National Guard for a domestic operation without a request from the state’s governor, Lyndon B. Johnson, did so in 1965, to protect civil rights demonstrators in Alabama.
But aides and allies of the president say the events unfolding in Los Angeles provide an almost perfect distillation of why Mr. Trump was elected in November.
“It could not be clearer,” said Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker and ally of the president who noted that Mr. Trump had been focused on immigration enforcement since 2015. “One side is for enforcing the law and protecting Americans, and the other side is for defending illegals and being on the side of the people who break the law.”
Why is this story labeled ‘News Analysis’? In this format, reporters with deep experience in the subject draw on their expertise to help you better understand an event. They step back from the breaking news to evaluate its significance and possible ramifications, but they may not inject their personal opinions.
Sporadic protests have occurred across the country in recent days as federal agents have descended on Los Angeles and other cities searching workplaces for undocumented immigrants, part of an expanded effort by the administration to ramp up the number of daily deportations.
On social media, Mr. Trump, his aides and allies have sought to frame the demonstrations against immigration officials on their own terms. They have shared images and videos of the most violent episodes — focusing particularly on examples of protesters lashing out at federal agents — even as many remained peaceful. Officials also zeroed in on demonstrators waving flags of other countries, including Mexico and El Salvador, as evidence of a foreign invasion.
“Illegal criminal aliens and violent mobs have been committing arson, throwing rocks at vehicles, and attacking federal law enforcement for days,” wrote Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary.
Mr. Newsom, whom the president refers to as “Newscum,” has long been a foil for Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly targeted California and its leader as emblematic of failures of the Democratic Party.
“We expected this, we prepared for this,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement to The New York Times. “This is not surprising — for them to succeed, California must fail, and so they’re going to try everything in their tired playbook despite the evidence against them.”
On Sunday, the governor sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth formally requesting that Mr. Trump rescind the call-up of the National Guard, saying federal actions were inflaming the situation.
He was echoed by other Democratic officials, who said the mounting demonstrations were the result of Mr. Trump’s own actions.
The president and his aides “are masters of misinformation and disinformation,” Senator Alex Padilla of California, a Democrat, said in an interview. “They create a crisis of their own making and come in with all the theatrics and cruelty of immigration enforcement. They should not be surprised in a community like Los Angeles they will be met by demonstrators who are very passionate about standing up for fundamental rights and due process.”
Republicans defended Mr. Trump’s moves, saying he was rightfully exercising his power to protect public safety.
“The president is extremely concerned about the safety of federal officials in L.A. right now who have been subject to acts of violence and harassment and obstruction,” Representative Kevin Kiley, Republican of California, said in an interview.
He added: “We are in this moment because of a series of reckless decisions by California’s political leaders, the aiding and abetting the open-border policies of President Biden.”
Trump officials said on Sunday that they were ready to escalate their response even more, if necessary. Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, suggested in an interview with NBC News that the administration would arrest anyone, including public officials, who interfered with immigration enforcement activities, which he said would continue in California and across the country.
Mr. Trump appears to be deploying against California a similar playbook that he has used to punish universities, law firms and other institutions and individuals that he views as political adversaries.
Last month, he threatened to strip “large scale” federal funding from California “maybe permanently” over the inclusion of transgender athletes in women’s sports. And in recent days, his administration said it would pull roughly $4 billion in federal funding for California’s high-speed train, which would further delay a project that has long been plagued by delays and funding shortages.
“Everything he’s done to attack California or anybody he fears isn’t supportive of him is going to continue to be an obsession of his,” Mr. Padilla said. “He may think it plays smart for his base, but it’s actually been bad for the country.”
White House officials said there was a different common denominator that explains Mr. Trump’s actions both against institutions like Harvard and immigration protests in Los Angeles.
“For years Democrat-run cities and institutions have failed the American people, by both choice and incompetence,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.
“In each instance,” she added, “the president took necessary action to protect Americans when Democrats refused.”
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8) California Will Sue Trump Over National Guard Deployment, Newsom Says
California leaders demanded that President Trump withdraw troops from Los Angeles, after police scuffled with crowds protesting the administration’s immigration crackdown.
By Rick Rojas, Livia Albeck-Ripka, Shawn Hubler, Jesus Jiménez and Yan Zhuang, June 9, 2025
![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/06/08/multimedia/08immigration-protests-zzzz-lmtf/08immigration-protests-zzzz-lmtf-threeByTwoMediumAt2X.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
Los Angeles, Sunday, June 8, 2025
The state of California will file a lawsuit on Monday challenging President Trump’s order federalizing its National Guard forces, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on social media, as the city of Los Angeles braced for a fourth consecutive day of clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement officials over the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Protests were expected in more than a dozen cities nationwide, including Sacramento, where the Service Employees International Union of California said it would demonstrate outside the state capitol after a prominent labor leader was arrested on Friday in Los Angeles.
About 150 arrests have occurred since Friday in Los Angeles, officials said, where officers fired gas and other munitions during confrontations, and demonstrators tossed scooters and aimed fireworks and stones at police vehicles.
The demonstrations have only escalated in intensity in recent days, turning the city into a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Over the weekend President Trump took extraordinary action on by calling up 2,000 National Guard troops to quell immigration protests, making rare use of federal powers and bypassing the authority of Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, who has struck a defiant tone.
“Tough guy,” Mr. Newsom told MSNBC Sunday about a question that Thomas Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, said he had not ruled out arresting public officials who interfere with the federal operations. “But you know what? Let your hands off 4-year-old girls that are trying to get educated. Let your hands off these poor people just trying to get live their lives, man.”
As state officials urged protesters to be peaceful, videos taken Sunday so far have shown that the National Guard troops have largelyavoided clashing with demonstrators, and most of the sprawling city kept to its usual sunlit rhythms.
Here’s what else to know:
· Normal life: Most of Los Angeles operated as usual on Sunday. There was a Pride parade and music at the Hollywood Bowl, along with traffic jams and swim meets. Read more ›
· Trump doubles down: In a series of social media posts around midnight, Mr. Trump defended his decision to send in the National Guard, saying it was “looking really bad in L.A.” He and his F.B.I. director showed no sign of easing the administration’s aggressive response, even as California leaders accused Mr. Trump of attempting to inflame the situation for political gain. Read more ›
· Marching in solidarity: Some of the people demonstrating in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday said they were first- or second-generation immigrants showing solidarity with their neighbors or family members. Read more ›
· Mexican flags: Latin American flags emerged as emblems in the weekend protests. Trump officials have cast flag wavers as insurrectionists and seemed to assume that they are not U.S. citizens. But for many protesters who are American citizens, the flag signifies pride in their roots. Read more ›
· A rare decision: One expert said Mr. Trump’s order for the troops was the first time since 1965 that a president had activated a state’s National Guard force for a domestic operation without a state governor’s request for the purposes of quelling unrest or enforcing the law. That year, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators. Read more ›
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9) Deportee’s Lawyers Push for Contempt Proceedings Despite His Return
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s lawyers accused the Trump administration of spending months “engaged in an elaborate, all-of-government effort to defy court orders.”
By Alan Feuer, June 8, 2025
The entrance of the prison in Santa Ana, El Salvador, where Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was held. Credit...Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
Just because Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is back on U.S. soil to face criminal charges after being wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador does not mean that the Trump administration’s troubles in the monthslong civil case have come to an end.
On Sunday, lawyers for Mr. Abrego Garcia in the civil case filed blistering court papers arguing that even though the White House had finally complied with an order to return their client, the judge overseeing the case should still pursue contempt proceedings against Trump officials. The administration, the lawyers wrote, had spent much of the past three months “engaged in an elaborate, all-of-government effort to defy court orders.”
The papers, filed in Federal District Court in Maryland, where Mr. Abrego Garcia’s family first filed suit in March to force the government to bring him back, had equally fiery words for the federal criminal indictment that was filed against him in Nashville on Friday. The indictment accused Mr. Abrego Garcia of taking part in a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle thousands of undocumented immigrants across the United States as a member of the violent street gang MS-13.
In their court papers on Sunday, his lawyers in the civil case said that the White House’s evident ability to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States to face criminal charges put the lie to repeated claims by administration officials that they were unable to get him out of El Salvador at all. The lawyers also framed the indictment itself as the administration’s “latest act of contempt,” accusing the Justice Department of starting to work on it only while the department was “under threat of sanctions” for having violated orders from Judge Paula Xinis, who has been handling the civil case from the start.
“Two things are now crystal clear,” the lawyers wrote. “First, the government has always had the ability to return Abrego Garcia, but it has simply refused to do so. Second, the government has conducted a determined stalling campaign to stave off contempt sanctions long enough to concoct a politically face-saving exit from its own predicament.”
The filing came in response to a request to Judge Xinis from the Justice Department to pause all of the proceedings in the civil case as department lawyers prepared a motion to dismiss it altogether.
That request was made on Friday evening, shortly after Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the indictment at a news conference. At the conference, her top deputy, Todd Blanche, said that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return to face the criminal charges should render moot the civil case that had as its central goal bringing him back to U.S. soil.
But Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers in the civil case argued that regardless of what happened in the criminal case, Judge Xinis still had the authority to punish the administration for its recalcitrant behavior in the past few months.
“Until the government is held accountable for its blatant, willful and persistent violations of court orders at excruciating cost to Abrego Garcia and his family, this case is not over,” the lawyers wrote. “The executive branch’s wanton disregard for the judicial branch has left a stain on the Constitution. If there is to be any hope of removing that stain, it must start by shining a light on the improper actions of the government in this tragic affair and imposing meaningful remedies.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers in the civil case are particularly eager for it to continue because just last week, Judge Xinis gave them the go-ahead to file a formal request for sanctions against the administration. That request is, for now, scheduled to be submitted on Wednesday.
While it remains unclear for the moment how Judge Xinis will proceed, a road map of sorts was recently laid out for her by another federal judge handling a different case arising from President Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda.
In April, that judge, James E. Boasberg, issued a ruling in Federal District Court in Washington threatening to open contempt proceedings against the administration for having violated his order to turn around two planes carrying a group of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador. Judge Boasberg said that he had the authority to begin the high-stakes contempt investigation even though the Supreme Court had struck down the initial order that he determined had been violated.
He wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision “does not excuse the government’s violation,” adding, “It is a foundational legal precept that every judicial order ‘must be obeyed’ — no matter how ‘erroneous’ it ‘may be’ — until a court reverses it.”
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10) More Chaos Plagues New Gaza Aid System
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said that Hamas had threatened its workers, a claim the militant group denied, as the United Nations warned that Gazans were far from getting the food they need.
By Erika Solomon and Abu Bakr Bashir, June 9, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/world/middleeast/chaos-gaza-aid.html
Gazans carrying relief supplies distributed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation on Sunday. Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The distribution centers of the much-criticized new aid system for Gaza were mired in new chaos on Monday, amid conflicting reports over the weekend that Hamas had threatened to attack workers for the Israeli-backed group handing out food supplies.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group set up to bypass traditional aid distribution, said on Saturday that some of its workers had been threatened by Hamas, the militant group that led the Oct. 7 attack on Israel in 2023 and controls the Gaza Strip.
On Monday, Hamas denied the accusations and accused the aid group of lacking neutrality.
Shootings near aid distribution centers have killed nearly 50 people and wounded some 300 since the foundation began operations at the end of May. The Israeli military has acknowledged firing near people who had deviated from “designated access routes” and who did not respond to verbal warnings. Gaza health officials say dozens of Palestinians have been killed trying to get aid.
Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has razed huge urban areas and forced almost all the enclave’s two million residents to flee their homes at least once. Israel cut off deliveries of food, fuel and other essential goods to Gaza in March as a way to pressure Hamas, a blockade that ended in mid-May after almost 80 days. Aid groups and some Israeli military officers have warned that the restrictions have pushed Gazans to the bring of starvation.
Israel has accused Hamas of diverting aid from humanitarian groups under the previous distribution system, which was managed by the United Nations across hundreds of distribution sites. The United Nations has said there was no evidence that the militants systematically diverted aid.
Israel agreed to allow some aid into Gaza last month. Most has come through the foundation, which has four distribution sites that are operated by private American security contractors in coordination with the Israeli military. The United Nations and other aid groups have boycotted this system, and have accused Israel of using aid as a part of its military strategy.
On Saturday, the foundation said it was “impossible to proceed” with aid distribution because Hamas had threatened its staff.
In its response on Monday, Hamas said the foundation “continues to spread canned lies” and called it “nothing more than a propaganda front for the Israeli occupation army.”
Yet even beyond the dispute over security threats and earlier attacks on civilians, the foundation’s distribution work remained mired in chaos.
After announcing the opening of one center on Monday through its Facebook page, the foundation posted less than 20 minutes later that distributions were completed and it had closed. The comment section filled with angry reactions to the short notice and opening period.
A second post said that the foundation had closed another center “because of the chaos of surrounding crowds, which prevented the safe delivery of aid.”
The foundation then closed comments on its posts.
Despite the reopening of some aid deliveries, international aid groups warn that Gazans are still at serious risk of malnutrition. The distribution sites remain hard to reach for many Gazans, particularly those in the north.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said on Monday that the average Gazan was getting only about two-thirds of the necessary daily caloric intake. It added that continuing to impede aid flows could be classified as a war crime.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting
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11) Israel Intercepts Gaza-Bound Aid Ship With Greta Thunberg Aboard
Israel had vowed to prevent the vessel from reaching Gaza, saying its military would use “any means necessary” to stop it from breaching a naval blockade.
By Isabel Kershner and Ephrat Livni, Published June 8, 2025, Updated June 9, 2025
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem and Ephrat Livni from Washington, D.C.
“'We are doing this because, no matter what odds we are against, we have to keep trying,' Ms. Thunberg said last week. 'Because the moment we stop trying is when we lose our humanity. And no matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s not even near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the live-streamed genocide.'”
Greta Thunberg and members of the crew of the Madleen in Catania, Italy, ahead of their departure. Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images
The Israeli Foreign Ministry said early on Monday morning that a Gaza-bound ship carrying a dozen pro-Palestinian activists and some aid had been diverted toward Israeli shores and that its passengers were expected to return to their home countries.
Israel had vowed on Sunday to prevent the ship from reaching Gaza, saying its military would use “any means necessary” to stop it from breaching an Israeli naval blockade of the enclave.
The civilian ship, called the Madleen, has been operating under the auspices of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, an international grass-roots campaign that opposes the nearly two-decade-old blockade of Gaza. The ship set sail from Sicily on June 1. The passengers included the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament.
“The ‘selfie yacht’ of the ‘celebrities’ is safely making its way to the shores of Israel,” the Israeli foreign ministry wrote on social media on Monday. It accused “Greta and others” of attempting “to stage a media provocation whose sole purpose was to gain publicity.” The ministry later posted video of what it said were the passengers, who were wearing life jackets and being offered sandwiches and water.
The posts came soon after the Freedom Flotilla Coalition announced that alarms had sounded and drones were over the ship, then said it had lost contact with the Madleen. The group said the activists had been “kidnapped” by the Israeli military
Surveillance footage recorded early Monday aboard the Madleen shows people in the cockpit wearing orange life vests as the bright lights of another vessel approach. People can then be seen boarding the Madleen.
Israel imposed its blockade on Gaza, with Egypt’s help, after Hamas, the Islamic militant group, took over the coastal strip in 2007. Israeli officials have said the blockade is necessary to prevent weapons from being smuggled into the enclave.
Conditions in Gaza have worsened dramatically in the 20 months of war since the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023. Israel recently barred the entry of humanitarian aid into the territory for 80 days, bringing the population to the brink of famine, according to international aid organizations. It has since supported an aid delivery system that has been marred by violence and shunned by humanitarian groups.
The Madleen was carrying only a symbolic amount of humanitarian assistance — an amount the Israeli foreign ministry dismissed as “tiny” in its statement, and “less than a single truckload of aid.”
The coalition had said in a statement that it was bringing urgently needed goods, including baby formula, flour, rice, diapers, medical supplies and children’s prosthetics.
Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said on Sunday that he had instructed the country’s military to prevent the vessel from reaching Gaza.
In a blunt statement, he said, “To Greta the antisemite and her friends, propagandists for Hamas — I say clearly: You would do well to turn back, because you won’t get to Gaza. Israel will act against any attempt to breach the blockade or aid terrorist organizations by sea, air or land.”
Ms. Thunberg has been an outspoken opponent of Israel’s blockade and its conduct of the war.
“We are doing this because, no matter what odds we are against, we have to keep trying,” Ms. Thunberg said last week. “Because the moment we stop trying is when we lose our humanity. And no matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s not even near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the live-streamed genocide.”
Israel’s military has blocked past attempts by pro-Palestinian activists to bring aid to Gaza by sea, including by force. In 2010, nine passengers aboard the Mavi Marmara, part of a flotilla carrying aid from Turkey to Gaza, were killed in an Israeli commando raid, stirring international outrage and damaging Turkish-Israeli relations. A 10th passenger died from his wounds years later.
Israel said at the time that its soldiers, some of whom had rappelled onto the ship from helicopters, came under ambush and were attacked with clubs, metal rods and knives.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition has described the interception of the Mavi Marmara as “an unlawful and deadly attack” and said the Madleen’s mission was “a continuation of that legacy — a refusal to surrender to silence, fear, or complicity” in the face of the siege of Gaza.
Another recent attempt by the coalition to challenge the blockade was also thwarted. A ship called Conscience left Tunisia in late April carrying human rights activists and aid and was scheduled to stop in Malta to pick up more people, including Ms. Thunberg. But the ship was rocked by explosions off the coast of Malta, setting it on fire.
The passengers and crew were not harmed, but the mission was abandoned.
In recent weeks, Israel has backed a new aid delivery system that it says is aimed at getting help to Palestinians without Hamas being able to divert or benefit from it.
The effort got off to a troubled start as Israeli forces fired at hungry and desperate Palestinians on their way to collect boxes of food at a distribution site in southern Gaza, killing and wounding scores of them.
The distribution sites are being operated by American security contractors under the auspices of a new organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The effort has been boycotted by the United Nations and other prominent aid groups, which accuse Israel of using aid as a weapon.
The foundation said it had distributed more than 1.1 million meals on Sunday across three distribution sites. In addition, the group said it had delivered 11 truckloads of food directly to community leaders through local merchants as part of a pilot project aimed at easing crowding at the existing distribution points.
On Saturday, the foundation said it was “impossible to proceed” with the distribution of aid that day, accusing Hamas of threatening its operations. A group spokesman on Sunday shared a written warning he said local staff members had received threatening them with “serious consequences” if they continued working for the program.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel, and Jiawei Wang from Seoul.
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12) The Tunnel That Leads Underneath a Hospital in Southern Gaza
To Israelis, the location of an underground passageway highlights Hamas’s abuse of civilians. To Palestinians, Israel’s decision to target it highlights Israel’s own disregard for civilian life.
By Patrick Kingsley, June 8, 2025
Patrick Kingsley joined a group of journalists brought by the Israeli military to the hospital on Sunday. As a condition for joining the controlled tour, The New York Times agreed not to photograph most soldiers’ faces or publish geographic details that would put them in immediate physical danger.
The room in which Muhammad Sinwar and four other militants are said to have died. Patrick Kingsley/The New York Times
Patrick Kingsley joined a group of journalists brought by the Israeli military to the hospital on Sunday. As a condition for joining the controlled tour, The New York Times agreed not to photograph most soldiers’ faces or publish geographic details that would put them in immediate physical danger.
Two feet wide and less than six feet tall, the tunnel led deep beneath a major hospital in southern Gaza.
The underground air bore the stench of what smelled like human remains. After walking some 40 yards along the tunnel, we found the likely cause.
In a tiny room that the tunnel led to, the floor was stained with blood. It was here, according to the Israeli military, that Muhammad Sinwar — one of Hamas’s top militant commanders — was killed last month after a nearby barrage of Israeli strikes.
What we saw in that dark and narrow tunnel is one of the war’s biggest Rorschach tests, the embodiment of a broader narrative battle between Israelis and Palestinians over how the conflict should be portrayed.
The military escorted a reporter from The New York Times to the tunnel on Sunday afternoon, as part of a brief and controlled visit for international journalists that the Israelis hoped would prove that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure as a shield for militant activity.
To Palestinians, Israel’s attack on, and subsequent capture of, the hospital compound highlighted its own disregard for civilian activity.
Last month, the military ordered the hospital’s staff and patients to leave the compound, along with the residents of the surrounding neighborhoods. Then, officials said, they bored a huge hole, some 10 yards deep, in a courtyard within the hospital grounds. Soldiers used that hole to gain access to the tunnel and retrieve Mr. Sinwar’s body, and they later escorted journalists there so we could see what they called his final hiding place.
There are no known entrances to the tunnel within the hospital itself, so we lowered ourselves into the Israeli-made cavity using a rope. To join this controlled tour, The Times agreed not to photograph most soldiers’ faces or publish geographic details that would put them in immediate physical danger.
To the Israelis who brought us there, this hiding place — directly underneath the emergency department of the European Gaza Hospital — is emblematic of how Hamas has consistently endangered civilians, and broken international law, by directing its military operations from the cover of hospitals and schools. Hamas has also dug tunnels underneath Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City and a United Nations complex elsewhere in that city.
“We were dragged by Hamas to this point,” Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, the chief Israeli military spokesman, said at the hospital on Sunday afternoon. “If they weren’t building their infrastructure under the hospitals, we wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t attack this hospital.”
General Defrin said that Israel had tried to minimize damage to the hospital by striking the area around its buildings, without a direct hit on the medical facilities themselves. “The aim was not to damage the hospital and, as much as we could, to avoid collateral damage,” he said.
To the Palestinians who were forced from here, the Israeli attack on Mr. Sinwar embodied Israel’s willingness to prioritize the destruction of Hamas over the protection of civilian life and infrastructure, particularly the health system.
According to the World Health Organization, Israel has conducted at least 686 attacks on health facilities in Gaza since the start of the war, damaging at least 33 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals. Many, like the European Gaza Hospital, are now out of service, fueling accusations from rights groups and foreign governments — strongly denied by the Israelis — that Israel is engaged in genocide, in part by wrecking the Palestinian health system.
“It’s morally and legally unacceptable, but Israel thinks it is above the law,” Dr. Salah al-Hams, the hospital spokesman, said in a phone interview from another part of southern Gaza.
Though Israel targeted the periphery of the hospital site, leaving the hospital buildings standing, Dr. al-Hams said the strikes had wounded 10 people within the compound, damaged its water and sewage systems and dislodged part of its roof. It killed 23 people in buildings beyond its perimeter, he said, 17 more than were reported the day of the attack.
The tremors caused by the strikes were like an “earthquake,” Dr. al-Hams said.
Dr. al-Hams said he had been unaware of any tunnels beneath the hospital. Even if they were there, he said: “This does not justify the attack. Israel should have found other ways to eliminate any wanted commander. There were a thousand other ways to do it.”
Our journey to the hospital revealed much about the current dynamics of the war in Gaza.
In a roughly 20-minute ride from the Israeli border, we saw no Palestinians — the result of Israel’s decision to order the residents of southern Gaza to abandon their homes and head west to the sea. Many buildings were simply piles of rubble, destroyed either by Israeli strikes and demolitions or Hamas’s booby-traps. Here and there, some buildings survived, more or less intact; on one balcony, someone had left a tidy line of potted cactuses.
We drove in open-top jeeps, a sign that across this swath of southeastern Gaza, the Israeli military no longer fears being ambushed by Hamas fighters. Until at least the Salah al-Din highway, the territory’s main north-south artery, the Israeli military seemed to be in complete command after the expansion of its ground campaign in March.
The European Gaza Hospital and the tunnel beneath it are among the places that now appear to be exclusively under Israeli control.
Under the laws of war, a medical facility is considered a protected site that can be attacked only in very rare cases. If one side uses the site for military purposes, that may make it a legitimate target, but only if the risk to civilians is proportional to the military advantage created by the attack.
The Israeli military said it had tried to limit harm to civilians by striking only around the edges of the hospital compound. But international legal experts said that any assessment of the strike’s legality needed also to take into account its effect on the wider health system in southern Gaza.
In a territory where many hospitals are already not operational, experts said, it is harder to find legal justification for strikes that put the remaining hospitals out of service, even if militants hide beneath them.
When we entered the tunnel on Sunday, we found it almost entirely intact. The crammed room where Mr. Sinwar and four fellow militants were said to have died was stained with blood, but its walls appeared undamaged. The mattresses, clothes and bedsheets did not appear to have been dislodged by the explosions, and an Israeli rifle — stolen earlier in the war, the soldiers said — dangled from a hook in the corner
It was not immediately clear how Mr. Sinwar was killed, and General Defrin said he could not provide a definitive answer. He suggested that Mr. Sinwar and his allies may have suffocated in the aftermath of the strikes or been knocked over by a shock wave unleashed by explosions.
If Mr. Sinwar was intentionally poisoned by gases released by such explosions, it would raise legal questions, experts on international law said.
“It would be an unlawful use of a conventional bomb — a generally lawful weapon — if the intent is to kill with the asphyxiating gases released by that bomb,” said Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the U.S. Defense Department and an analyst at the International Crisis Group.
General Defrin denied any such intent. “This is something that I have to emphasize here, as a Jew first and then as a human being: We don’t use gas as weapons,” he said.
In other tunnels discovered by the Israeli military, soldiers have used Palestinians as human shields, sending them on ahead to scour for traps.
The general denied the practice. The tunnel was excavated by Israelis, he said.
Reporting was contributed by Iyad Abuheweila from Istanbul; Ameera Harouda from Doha, Qatar; Natan Odenheimer from Jerusalem and Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot, Israel.
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13) It May Feel Like the 1960s. But It’s Worse.
By Serge Schmemann, June 9, 2025
Mr. Schmemann, an Opinion writer, is a former Moscow bureau chief of The Times.
Students protest Columbia University’s policy of “racism and support for imperialism” in New York, 1968. Credit...The Associated Press
Many of us who lived through the 1960s are tempted to seek similarities between then and now. We see the acute polarization of the nation, the warring ideologies, the presidents who abuse power, the sense of America losing its bearing. Where President Richard Nixon’s silent majority battled flower power and “commies,” President Trump’s MAGA assails wokeness and the radical left. Where students closed down campuses over Vietnam, students now — or at least a year ago — rose up over Gaza.
The list could go on. But it soon becomes evident that there are numerous differences. Some are obvious: the revolutionary advances over the past six decades in technology and communication, especially the prevalence of social media and smartphones; the absence of a Cold War to clearly define global relationships and a draft to threaten young people with death in a distant jungle.
For me, though, the big difference is in the spirit of the times, the sense back then that change was possible, and today that doors are being closed.
For all their passion and violence, the 1960s were an eruption of idealism, a youth-led rebellion against a misguided war and the racism and misogyny lurking in the placid suburbs and Made in the U.S.A. prosperity of the ’50s. There was a conviction in the songs, love-ins, protests and even mind-bending drugs that the world could be made better. “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” sang Bob Dylan in the hymn of that era, while John Lennon pictured its utopia: “Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too.”
The student protests in the spring of 2024 against the carnage in Gaza, by contrast, never ignited a broader movement and petered out, mired in accusations of antisemitism and the humiliation of university leaders. The momentum was with Mr. Trump and his MAGA campaign, and its goal was in effect to reverse the ’60s gains — to undo the civil rights, sexual tolerance, environmental protection, campus activism and all the other themes and values clustered under the banner of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Mr. Trump’s appeal to a broad swath of America is more complex than that, of course. D.E.I. sometimes deserved the criticism; people who voted for Mr. Trump had some valid grievances, and many of them do not necessarily support his angry, personal and often potentially illegal assaults on varying targets, including immigrants and Harvard. But the unmistakable message in “Make America Great Again” is that the forces of change unleashed in the ’60s are anti-American and needed to be expunged in order to restore the “real” America — one of Christian values, respectful students, public order and blinders on racial discrimination, inequality and other blemishes.
That rosy past may be just as illusory as “all the people livin’ life in peace,” as imagined by Mr. Lennon. But if dreams shape a generation, then those of almost half a million of my contemporaries (but not me, alas) who gathered for the legendary Woodstock rock festival in August 1969 for three days of peace and music are far more inspiring than a longing to return to Pleasantville.
The search for parallels between then and now often includes the juxtaposition of Mr. Trump and Mr. Nixon, the president often relegated in popular memory — unfairly, I believe — to a symbol of what the ’60s rose up against. There are tempting similarities. Scandal followed Mr. Nixon throughout his career, as it has Mr. Trump. Both scrambled back to the forefront of politics — Mr. Nixon until he was felled by Watergate. (“He left. I don’t leave. A big difference,” is Mr. Trump’s take.) Both positioned themselves as victims of liberal elites and champions of a silent majority; both maintained an enemies list of people and institutions they wanted to punish.
Curiously, the two men even had more than a decade-long correspondence in the 1980s and early ’90s, when both were in New York, Mr. Nixon in retirement and Mr. Trump a real estate developer on the rise. Exhibited at Mr. Nixon’s presidential library, the letters include one in which Mr. Trump writes that he believes Mr. Nixon to be “one of this country’s great men”; in another, the older man commiserates with a “massive media attack” on the younger one’s business problems.
But the differences are far greater than the similarities. Mr. Nixon entered the fray only at the tail end of the ’60s — he was inaugurated in January 1969. His predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, were far more responsible for the upheavals of that time. The idealism of “ask not what your country can do for you” and the Great Society was on their watch, as was the tragedy of the Vietnam War.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, defines what is happening today. The troubles of the country and world, whether the Gaza protests, the war in Ukraine or unchecked immigration, may predate his second term, but the way he has incorporated them into his broad assault on American institutions and values stamps this era with his brand.
Mr. Nixon never came close to anything of the sort. He was a lifelong politician, a skillful lawyer and a masterful player on the geopolitical chess board. I was fortunate to meet him in Moscow, when I was the Times bureau chief and he an elder statesman invited to address Russian students, and I remember how impressed I was by the depth and sophistication of his understanding of Russian history and politics. Tom Wicker, a Times columnist in the Nixon era, wrote in a study of the Nixon presidency that Watergate obscured “the achievements of a president who often responded to the pressures of his time with knowledge and skill and sometimes even with courage — qualities the American people apparently don’t find in most of their leaders today.”
The same cannot be said of Mr. Trump, a wheeler-dealer with seemingly little understanding of government and the Constitution who values instinct above expertise, doesn’t know shame or embarrassment, views foreign affairs as a zero-sum game in which America is the dunce, and values sycophancy over competence. The Trump era is still upon us, of course, so any comparison with eras past must be conditional.
Any search for lost time, whether the ’60s, ’50s or any other era, is of dubious value. Every age has its own array of peculiarities, conditions and fashions, and memory is too apt to idealize the good or expunge the bad to be a reliable judge. Maybe what I’ve written above is a good example of that. But if there is any value to identifying the disruptive actions of the Trump administration as the antithesis of the movement for change six decades ago, it is in asking which of the two really tried to make America great.
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