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A Trial Date Is Set on August 26 for Alejandro Orellana, Join the Call for National Protests to Drop the Charges!
https://stopfbi.org/news/a-trial-date-is-set-on-august-26-for-alejandro-orellana-join-the-call-for-national-protests-to-drop-the-charges/
A trial date of August 26 was set for immigrant rights activist Alejandro Orellana at his July 3 court appearance in front of a room packed with supporters. Orellana was arrested by the FBI on June 12 for protesting against ICE in Los Angeles. He faces up to 5 years in prison for two bogus federal charges: conspiracy to commit civil disorder, and aiding and abetting civil disorder.
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression is calling for a national day of protests on the first day of Orellana's trial, August 26th, to demand that the charges be dropped. To everyone who believes in the right to free speech, to protest ICE, and to say no to deportations, we urge you to organize a local protest on that day at the nearest federal courthouse.
Orellana has spent much of his adult life fighting for justice for Chicanos, Latinos, and many others. He has opposed the killings of Chicanos and Latinos by the LAPD, such as 14-year-old Jesse Romero, stood against US wars, protested in defense of others targeted by political repression, and has been a longtime member of the activist group, Centro CSO, based out of East LA. His life is full of examples of courage, integrity, and a dedication to justice.
In contrast, the US Attorney who charged him, Bilal Essayli, believes in Trump's racist MAGA vision and does a lot to carry it out. He defended Trump's decision to defy the state of California and deploy the California National Guard to put down anti-ICE protests. Essayli has charged other protesters, including David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union California, who was held on a $50,000 bond.
Another Centro CSO immigrants rights activist, Verita Topete, was ambushed by the FBI on June 26. They served her a warrant and seized her phone. Orellana and his fellow organizers like Topete stand for the community that protested Trump last month. Essayli represents Trump’s attempts to crush that movement.
This case against Orellana is political repression, meant to stop the growth of the national immigrants rights movement. The basis for his arrest was the claim that he drove a truck carrying face shields for protesters, as police geared up to put down protests with rubber bullets. People of conscience are standing with Orellana. because nothing he did or is accused of doing is wrong. There is no crime in protesting Trump, deportations, and ICE. To protest is his - and our - First Amendment right. It’s up to us to make sure that Essayli and Trump fail to repress this movement and silence Orellana's supporters.
Just as he stood up for immigrants last month, we call on everyone to stand up for Orellana on August 26 and demand the charges be dropped. On the June 27 National Day of Action for Alejandro Orellana, at least 16 cities held protests or press conferences in front of their federal courthouses. We’ll make sure there are even more on August 26. In addition to planning local protests, we ask that organizations submit statements of support and to join in the call to drop the charges.
You can find protest organizing materials on our website, stopfbi.org. Please send information about your local protests and any statements of support to stopfbi@gmail.com. We will see you in the streets!
On August 26, Protest at Your Federal Courthouse for Alejandro Orellana!
Drop the Charges Now!
Protesting ICE Is Not a Crime!
Copyright © 2025 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
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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) Federal Agents Clash With Protesters During Immigration Raid at California Farm
Officers appeared to use crowd control munitions and tear gas against protesters. The F.B.I. said it was searching for a person who appeared to fire a pistol at officers.
By Livia Albeck-Ripka, July 11, 2025
Federal agents deployed tear gas to disperse protesters near a raid on an agricultural facility in Camarillo, Calif. Michael Owen Baker/Associated Press
Federal agents raided a large cannabis farm in Southern California on Thursday, clashing with protesters and arresting multiple people, the latest confrontation in a state that has become a flashpoint for President Trump’s immigration agenda.
Footage taken by local news media from helicopters showed the agents firing tear gas and crowd control munitions during the operation in Camarillo, Calif. The agents were “executing criminal search warrants,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said on social media.
Rodney Scott, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said on social media that “10 juveniles,” eight of them unaccompanied, were found at one of the facilities raided on Thursday, and that all of them were in the country illegally.
The federal operation on Thursday was the latest in a series of immigration raids that have triggered demonstrations and caused panic in Latino communities across California, and prompted a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration to stop them. Some Republican lawmakers have also pleaded with President Trump to focus enforcement efforts on immigrants with criminal backgrounds.
Federal agents went to multiple cannabis cultivation facilities owned by Glass House Farms on Thursday. In addition to the facility in Camarillo, which is spread across 5.5 million square feet in Ventura County, there was also a raid around 35 miles away at the company’s farm in Carpinteria, Calif., local media and immigrant rights groups said.
The company said on social media that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials came to its facilities and that it complied with the search warrants. It is legal for licensed companies to grow cannabis in California.
It was not immediately clear how many federal agencies were involved in the operation, and if they were assisted by National Guard troops. Some footage aired by local media showed armored military-style vehicles at the farms. The Ventura County Fire Department said it deployed to the Camarillo area only to provide medical aid and was not involved in any immigration action.
During the clash near Camarillo, a person appeared to fire a pistol at law enforcement officers, the F.B.I. said, offering a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to that individual’s conviction.
Bill Essayli, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said that multiple individuals were arrested for “impeding” the operation, warning in a social media post that those interfering would be arrested and charged with a federal offense.
ICE and the Homeland Security Department did not immediately respond to requests for information made outside business hours.
Thursday’s raids were sharply criticized by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, as well as Representative Salud Carbajal, a Democrat, who said that he tried to enter the area in Carpinteria where ICE was operating but was denied entry.
“This was completely unacceptable,” Mr. Carbajal said in a statement, criticizing what he described as a “troubling lack of transparency.”
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2) Trump’s Purge of Foreign Workers Arrives at Amazon’s Warehouses
The tech giant has quietly shed warehouse employees whose work authorizations were revoked after the Trump administration ended a Biden-era immigration program.
By Miriam Jordan and Karen Weise, July 11, 2025
Miriam Jordan reports on immigration, and Karen Weise covers Amazon.
Amazon’s warehouse in West Jefferson, Ohio, where hundreds of workers were recently dismissed. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Frantzdy Jerome, a Haitian immigrant in central Ohio, received shout-out after shout-out for his work at an Amazon warehouse he joined last year.
In March, his manager commended him in a message for his “reliability, hard work and dedication to our team.”
“Thank you for your flexibility and picking up the extra shifts,” read another message, on June 7.
Two weeks later, Mr. Jerome, 35, lost his job. His work authorization was revoked in late June after the Trump administration ended a Biden-era program that allowed him to live and work legally in the United States. Hundreds of others at the same Amazon building in West Jefferson, which employs more than 3,700 people, also lost their jobs.
They are among thousands of foreign workers across the country who have been swept up in a quiet purge, pushed out of jobs in places where their labor was in high demand and at times won high praise. While raids to nab undocumented workers in fields and Home Depot parking lots have grabbed attention, the job dismissals at the Amazon warehouse are part of the Trump administration’s effort to thin the ranks of immigrants who had legal authorization to work.
“This is not unique to Amazon,” said Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian community leader in nearby Springfield. He is aware of more than 100 Haitians with work authorizations who are now out of work in the area, he said, with the terminations reducing work forces in warehouses, auto-parts plants and stores.
Such dismissals are happening at many of Amazon’s more than 1,000 facilities around the country, including in Massachusetts and the warehouse in Staten Island that fills orders for millions of New Yorkers. At one fulfillment center in Florida, hundreds were let go, a person familiar with the site said.
The timing of the dismissals is tricky for Amazon, just before its Prime Day deals, an event that now stretches over four days in July. The deals typically drive a spike in customer orders — and overtime demands — rivaled only by the holiday shopping season.
During that rush before Christmas, Haitians would emerge in threes and fours from cars that filed into the huge lot outside the West Jefferson fulfillment center to start their shifts. But “if you go to the parking lot now,” said Sadrac Delva, a Haitian asylum seeker who continues to work at the center, “you will notice a huge difference.”
Amazon said it had prepared for the policy change, adjusting staffing plans and awaiting formal guidance from the government, which finally came last month.
“We’re supporting employees impacted by the government’s recent changes in immigration policy,” Richard Rocha, an Amazon spokesman, said in a statement. The company has pointed workers to various resources, including outside free or low-cost legal services.
Amazon opened the West Jefferson facility in early 2020, just before the pandemic supercharged demand for deliveries and sent the company on a hiring spree with little precedent. To fuel its march to becoming the country’s second-largest private employer, behind Walmart, Amazon tapped into the family and cultural networks of immigrant communities. In some warehouses, it provides information in multiple languages, including Spanish, Vietnamese and Haitian Creole.
In Madison County, Ohio, where the hulking West Jefferson warehouse sits, the unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent for much of the past decade. David Kell, the county’s director of economic development, said in an interview last year that companies once starved of workers had come to rely on Haitians and other foreigners.
Refugees from Afghanistan, Bhutan and Somalia who have been resettled in the area also work at the warehouse. But Haitians are the biggest share of foreign workers, and possibly outnumber Americans, according to workers and local officials.
The dismissals came with remarkable speed. On May 30, the Supreme Court granted temporary approval for the Trump administration to revoke a program known as “humanitarian parole,” which had allowed more than 500,000 migrants feeling political turmoil in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to quickly get work permits if they had a fiscal sponsor.
The move to terminate the parole status was part of the Trump administration’s effort to roll back discretionary immigration programs established by the Biden administration and to fulfill Mr. Trump’s aim of mass deportations.
On June 12, the Department of Homeland Security said it had begun notifying enrollees that the program was ending, saying the immigrants had been poorly vetted and undercut American workers.
Ending the program “will be a necessary return to common-sense policies, a return to public safety and a return to America First,” a department spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said in statement announcing the change.
On June 22, Amazon told managers around the country in an email, which was obtained by The New York Times, that it had “received the first list from D.H.S. identifying impacted Amazon employees” from the parole program, as well as “some employees outside of this specific program whose work authorization is similarly affected.”
Amazon let the managers know that the next day, the affected workers would receive push notifications in the employee app about the change. Unless the workers could provide alternate work authorization documents in the next five days, they would be suspended without pay and ultimately dismissed.
The notification began popping up on the mobile phones of employees, including Mr. Jerome. “The Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) has informed us that the work authorization that you had submitted is no longer valid,” it read.
Workers began posting questions on social media and internal message boards at Amazon warehouses across the country.
“Change is never easy, and I know this news may be difficult for many of you,” Amazon’s internal talking points advised managers to tell their workers at the start of the next shifts.
This result is precisely what Mr. Jerome had feared. He came to the United States with his partner and young daughter last year, and quickly obtained a work permit. He told The Times in December that he had sleepless nights worrying what the new administration would bring.
The family had made its way to Ohio, drawn by plentiful jobs and affordable living. In recent years, thousands of Haitians had settled in towns like Springfield, filling openings that helped boost the local economy.
Amazon has been a life raft for many immigrants with work authorization. It hires regularly, in part to replenish its ranks because of high turnover. It has solid benefits, and the pay — about $22 an hour in West Jefferson — is promising for migrants with limited English.
Within weeks of arriving in Ohio, Mr. Jerome was hired at Amazon, packing and stowing boxes on the overnight shift. His partner eventually began working days there. Their combined income covered the $953 in monthly rent, plus bills and food — and left enough to send money to family in Haiti.
Mr. Jerome took every overtime shift he could get, even when it was not mandatory, to make extra money.
“My manager liked me because I am a fast, good worker,” he said.
He said he felt fortunate to work at Amazon and had learned new skills. Three months ago, he started repairing robots. He planned to take advantage of a program that covers tuition for employees in good standing, training as an electrician at a vocational school.
Mr. Jerome had hoped to be spared from being cut, since he has applied for asylum. Under current rules, those with an active claim are eligible for a work permit 150 days after filing. He is about to hit the 150-day mark, but is unclear whether he will receive one, given that the Trump administration has slowed down issuing the permits.
“I am very, very worried,” said Mr. Jerome, who supports 10 people, including parents, siblings and nephews in Haiti. “This morning my dad told me they don’t have enough to eat.”
His partner remains employed by Amazon, thanks to a different program known as Temporary Protected Status. But the Trump administration has announced that it will end that program for Haitians, too, though a federal court has temporarily blocked the move.
“We don’t know what awaits us,” Mr. Jerome said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
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3) Netanyahu Ends Washington Trip Without a Gaza Truce
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, met several times with President Trump, amid rising hopes of a cease-fire in Gaza, but there are still obstacles to a truce with Hamas.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 11, 2025
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to Israel on Friday without finalizing a truce with Hamas in Gaza, after days of talks in Washington with American officials, including President Trump, left key issues unresolved.
The fate of the war in the Gaza Strip now hangs in the balance, with mediators from the United States, Egypt and Qatar yet to find compromises on the length of a truce, the extent of any Israeli withdrawal from occupied areas of Gaza, and how aid will be distributed in the territory during a cease-fire.
Before flying home, Mr. Netanyahu released a statement saying that he was working toward a two-month truce in which Hamas would release half of the roughly 50 hostages still held in Gaza — both those who are still alive and the bodies of those who have died. But his statement also highlighted how key obstacles to an agreement remain in place.
He refused to promise that a temporary truce would evolve into a permanent arrangement, one of Hamas’s longstanding demands. He said that Hamas must give up its weapons before Israel enters into discussions over ending the war.
Any end-of-war negotiations must be contingent, Mr. Netanyahu said, on “the minimal conditions that we’ve set: Hamas lays down its arms, Gaza is demilitarized, there are no longer any governing or military capabilities of Hamas. These are our fundamental conditions.”
Hamas officials swiftly rejected the premise, leaving the future of the talks in the balance. Disarmament would “never” be part of the negotiations, Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, said in a text message.
Another obstacle concerns whether and how far Israeli soldiers deployed in Gaza would retreat during any truce. Hamas has publicly said Israel must withdraw entirely from the territory, but Israel wants to retain control of key areas.
Local media reports this week said Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, briefed Israeli reporters on a plan to keep troops in a large chunk of southern Gaza, turning it into a de facto displacement camp for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forced from their homes elsewhere in the territory.
Israeli and Western officials said that they had also been briefed on the idea, but that there were no signs of its implementation.
Reports in the Israeli news media described the zone as a “humanitarian city.” Israeli critics portrayed it as a modern-day “concentration camp” because, according to the reports, its residents would not be able to return north. A spokesman for Mr. Katz declined to comment.
While the negotiations ground on without resolution, there was new violence in Gaza on Friday.
Fares Afaneh, a rescue official in northern Gaza, said in a text message on Friday that an Israeli strike had hit a former school in Jabaliya, northern Gaza, that is now used as a shelter for displaced people. The Gaza health ministry did not release a death toll, but Gaza’s Civil Defense authority, the territory’s main emergency service, said nine people were killed.
The Israeli military said the strike targeted a “key” Hamas militant at a Hamas command center inside the shelter. The military has often justified such strikes by saying that Hamas militants use shelters and civilians as cover for their activities.
The Gaza ministry of health said in a statement that the territory’s remaining hospitals were running out of fuel, forcing them to halt some services, including kidney dialysis treatment.
Abu Bakr Bashir in London, Ameera Harouda in Doha, Qatar, and Lia Lapidot in Tel Aviv contributed reporting.
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4) ICE Raids Scare Off L.A. Workers Rebuilding Fire-Torn Areas
Immigrant workers are central to recovery efforts in neighborhoods burned in the January wildfires, but recent raids have led some to stay home.
By Livia Albeck-Ripka and Orlando Mayorquín, July 12, 2025
Livia Albeck-Ripka reported from Los Angeles, and Orlando Mayorquín from Altadena, Calif.
Some construction workers say they are afraid to rebuild fire-torn areas after recent ICE raids targeted laborers in Southern California. Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
For months, the day laborers had decontaminated homes that survived the Los Angeles wildfires. Sweating in masks and protective suits, they vacuumed toxic soot and ash, wiped down books and framed photos, and disposed of clothes and furniture that could not be salvaged.
One morning last month, they crammed into a small job center in Pasadena, Calif., ready for more work. But on this day, the situation felt too dangerous.
It wasn’t the contaminants or toxic fumes. Outside the Winchell’s Donut House just blocks away, federal immigration agents had detained six people.
The day laborers went home instead of heading to their job sites.
“They’re living in fear,” said Jose Madera, the director of the Pasadena Community Job Center, which earlier this year helped train about 40 immigrant workers in fire cleanup. “They don’t know what can happen if they go to work — are they going to come back?”
Immigrant workers are playing a crucial role in the recovery of Pasadena, Altadena and Pacific Palisades after the devastating fires in January. They have hauled debris, cleaned smoke-affected homes and in some cases begun reconstruction in the months since the Eaton and Palisades fires burned more than 16,000 buildings in the region.
But raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have plunged workers in various occupations into a state of panic, leading many of them — regardless of immigration status — to stay home. And residents worry that the raids have already hurt recovery efforts in fire-torn neighborhoods.
In two dozen interviews, residents, officials, real estate agents, contractors, community organizers and workers described ways in which the Trump administration’s raids have affected the rebuilding process in Southern California. Many of those involved agreed to speak only if they could remain anonymous because they feared retaliation from the federal government.
“At a time when our communities need help healing from a natural disaster, the Trump administration is manufacturing a man-made one,” said Lindsey Horvath, who serves on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
Undocumented immigrants, who make up a sizable share of construction workers in California, have the most acute concerns about the potential for raids. But even Latino workers with legal residency or American citizenship are worried about confrontations with federal agents.
The reconstruction of fire-torn communities has been a priority for President Trump, and the threat of a slowdown has revealed a potential seam in his immigration crackdown. A Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman made a point of saying that agents had not targeted construction sites in Pacific Palisades or Altadena.
Still, there are growing signs of frustration in California over the raids across Southern California and their chilling effect on labor in the state. Videos that appear to show arrests at work sites have circulated across social media, giving the impression that federal agents have tried to detain anyone they think looks like an undocumented immigrant.
California Democrats have criticized President Trump for months. In late June, six Republican state lawmakers also pleaded with him to focus enforcement efforts on immigrants with criminal backgrounds.
“The recent ICE workplace raids on farms, at construction sites, and in restaurants and hotels have led to unintended consequences that are harming the communities we represent and the businesses that employ our constituents,” the Republicans wrote, noting that the resulting fear was making the state’s affordability crisis worse.
Though federal agencies were largely responsible for the initial stages of the cleanup, contractors play a significant role in rebuilding efforts. About 75 percent of construction laborers in Los Angeles County are immigrants, and nearly half of those are undocumented, according to a recent analysis conducted for the Bay Area Council, a California business group.
It is not clear how much cleanup and construction efforts in Southern California have been affected by fears of ICE enforcement. But as the raids have intensified, residents and community organizers say construction crews have thinned out. In one case, workers vanished when they were halfway through a job. Others have packed their tools into passenger cars instead of construction vehicles, as well as staggered their work shifts to avoid drawing attention.
Last month, at least 11 people were detained during three separate raids in Pasadena. The city borders Altadena, where the fire incinerated thousands of homes and left others uninhabitable. One video of the arrests outside the doughnut shop showed an agent detaining two men, who the Pasadena’s mayor said were on their way to work on fire recovery efforts.
In a separate episode, federal agents questioned workers at a construction site in the Altadena fire-rebuilding zone, said Brock Harris, a Los Angeles real estate agent who works with the developer involved in the project. No one was arrested, Mr. Harris said, but “the next day, half the workers didn’t come to work.”
Pablo Alvarado, the co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said ICE agents showed up on a street in Altadena where construction crews were repairing two roofs damaged by the fire. The workers fled, Mr. Alvarado said, leaving their tools behind. “As long as they are around,” he added, referring to the federal agents, “workers are going to stay inside.”
But federal officials said that agents with ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have not gone after workers in the fire recovery zones.
“ICE and CBP have NOT targeted any construction sites in Altadena and the Palisades,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, wrote in an email, adding that “we will continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets.”
The dread is palpable among workers. On a recent afternoon, three men in white protective suits who were clearing weeds and other debris at a fire-damaged property in Altadena said that they had stayed home for a couple of weeks when raids intensified in Los Angeles in June.
Sergio, a traffic controller who immigrated from Mexico as a child and has been working in Altadena for months, said that the rebuilding process had already seemed to be “falling behind.”
He said that he was in the country lawfully, having arrived through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but he feared reprisal from immigration officials and asked to be identified only by first name. He has been afraid of being profiled on the street by federal agents, and his boss has told him he could miss work if he needed to. He said that he felt that anyone who looked like they were an immigrant laborer could be detained by ICE agents.
In the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles where thousands of buildings burned in January, there have not been any raids, according to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, which has been tracking enforcement efforts. But contractors there said that deportation anxiety was still shrinking the work force.
The owner of a contracting firm with rebuilding projects in the Palisades said many workers and subcontractors — regardless of their legal status — have opted to stay home on many days since the sweeps began. The owner, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of drawing the attention of immigration officials, said other contractors have experienced the same.
It has become increasingly complicated to make construction plans ever since the raids ramped up last month. Workers have texted on some mornings to say they don’t feel safe showing up. The owner has empathized with them but said that the missed days will eventually delay construction.
Oscar Mondragón, the director of a day labor center in Malibu, said that in the past couple of weeks, only about half of the 40 workers contracted each morning by the center were showing up. Some of those workers, he added, were removing smoke-related hazards in homes that were polluted in the Palisades fire.
“All they want is to work, not to do any harm to anybody else, just to work for their families and their own good,” Mr. Mondragón said.
Marco, an immigrant from Mexico who asked to be identified only by his first name because of deportation concerns, said that the raids had forced him to weigh economic survival against the fear of being arrested by immigration officials.
He worked on debris removal in Pacific Palisades shortly after the fire, and he said he has stayed home many days since the workplace raids began.
But doing so had become unsustainable. He had no choice, he said, but to risk an immigration raid in order to survive.
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5) Two Palestinians Killed in West Bank Clash With Israeli Settlers
Palestinian authorities and family members said Israeli settlers beat and killed a Palestinian-American man. Israel said the violence began when Palestinians threw stones at Israeli civilians.
By Aaron Boxerman and Fatima AbdulKarim, July 12, 2025
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem and Fatima AbdulKarim from Ramallah, West Bank.
Israeli soldiers holding back Palestinians trying to get to injured Palestinians after clashes with Israeli settlers in Sinjil in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Friday. Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
Israeli settlers beat and killed a 20-year-old Palestinian-American man during a confrontation in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and a second Palestinian was fatally shot, according to Palestinian authorities and the families of both men.
The Israeli military did not confirm or deny the deaths, but said there had been a violent exchange on Friday between Palestinians and Israeli civilians near the West Bank town of Sinjil, where the two deaths were reported. The Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, and the Israeli police were looking into the reported deaths, the military said.
The U.S. embassy in Jerusalem confirmed the death of the man with American citizenship, identifying him as Sayfollah Musallet, but did not address the circumstances. U.S. officials have asked Israel for further details, the embassy said.
Mr. Musallet, 20, was born in Florida and returned to the West Bank last month to visit family, his cousin, Diana Halum, told The New York Times in an interview on Saturday. Ms. Hallum and other family members live in Mazraa al-Sharqiya, a nearby Palestinian town.
Mohammad Shalabi, 23, was shot and killed during the clashes, according to Palestinian health officials. It was not immediately clear who shot him: Both armed settlers and Israeli forces were on the scene.
Violence has soared in the West Bank since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. The Israeli military occupies the territory, where roughly 2.7 million Palestinians live alongside about 500,000 Israeli settlers.
The United Nations says that more than 850 Palestinians and 40 Israelis have been killed in the West Bank since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which ignited the Gaza war. The semiautonomous Palestinian government in parts of the West Bank is controlled by Hamas’s rivals, the Palestinian Authority.
Israeli forces killed most of the Palestinians during crackdowns on militants, while attacks by extremist Jewish settlers on Palestinian towns accounted for some of the killings. Human rights groups say Israelis who attack Palestinians — whether soldiers or civilians — are rarely prosecuted, creating a culture of impunity that facilities further assaults.
The full chain of events leading to the killings of Mr. Musallet and Mr. Shalabi on Friday night was not immediately clear. The violence unfolded near Sinjil, about 15 miles north of Jerusalem, according to Palestinian officials.
The Palestinian Authority Health Ministry said in a statement that Mr. Musallet died after he was “severely beaten” all over his body by Jewish settlers.
Friday’s killings followed weeks of tensions in the area between settlers and Palestinians. Israeli settlers have ensconced themselves on hilltops overlooking Sinjil — land claimed by local Palestinians — and clashed with residents, according to Mohammad Zaban, the mayor of nearby Mazraa al-Sharqiya.
Mr. Musallet’s cousin, Ms. Halum, said one of his brothers saw him being beaten by Israeli settlers. Another sibling and a friend later reached him, badly wounded but still alive, she added, saying he died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.
“His body showed signs of strangulation, a large bruise on his back that looked like it came from a rock, and dirt was found in his mouth,” said Ms. Hallum, who said she saw Mr. Musallet’s body at a nearby hospital.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the violence began on Friday when Palestinians hurled stones at Israeli civilians, lightly injuring two of them.
“Shortly after, a violent confrontation developed in the area involving Palestinians and Israeli civilians, which included vandalism of Palestinian property, arson, physical clashes, and rock throwing,” the military said.
Mr. Shalabi, the Palestinian man who was shot and killed in the clashes, was missing for hours after the violence, according to his uncle, Samer Shalabi. At first, his family believed he had been arrested by Israeli forces, his uncle told The Times on Saturday.
The Israeli authorities later said that he was not in their custody, leading villagers to launch a search. They found his body around 10 p.m. Friday night with a gunshot wound and bruising, his uncle said.
Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli left-wing activist who was at the scene of the violent confrontations near Sinjil on Friday afternoon, said he and another Palestinian activist were carrying a wounded Palestinian man away from the site of the clashes Friday when a group of extremist Israeli settlers wielding what looked like police batons set upon them.
Mr. Pollak said he sustained a black eye, while his Palestinian colleague was badly beaten. Israeli forces who arrived on the scene detained both of them, but let their assailants go, he said. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment.
“They detained us, took the settlers down the road,” said Mr. Pollak. “And then at some point, we saw the settlers getting into their cars and moving toward the village.”
Over the past two years, the European Union, the United Kingdom and the Biden administration have all imposed sanctions on settler figures and organizations believed to have been involved in violence against Palestinians.
But President Trump quickly revoked the U.S. sanctions shortly after his return to office in January, canceling a Biden-era executive order targeting those who undermined “peace, security and stability in the West Bank.”
Yesh Din, an Israeli rights group that examined more than 1,600 cases of Jewish extremist violence in the West Bank between 2005 and 2023, found that just 3 percent ended in a conviction.
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6) They Fled War in Ethiopia. Then American Bombs Found Them.
In April, U.S.-made bombs destroyed a detention facility that held Ethiopian migrants in Yemen, crushing bodies and shredding limbs. Amid official silence, the survivors are left wondering why.
By Shuaib Almosawa and Vivian Nereim, July 12, 2025
Shuaib Almosawa reported from Saada, Yemen, and Vivian Nereim from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
A protest in May in Sana, Yemen’s capital, blamed a U.S. airstrike for killing African migrants who were being held in a detention center in Saada. Credit...Mohammed Huwais/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The men awoke in the middle of the night to the roar of warplanes.
Fear was nothing new to Fanta Ali Ahmed, who was trapped with more than 100 migrants in a rickety prison. After civil war reached his home region of Tigray in Ethiopia in 2020, he had fled along one of the world’s most dangerous smuggling routes.
He had hoped to reach Saudi Arabia, across the Red Sea. Instead, as he passed through Yemeni territory ruled by the Houthi militia, he was arrested and sent to a migrant detention center in northern Yemen.
For weeks in March and April of this year, he heard American airstrikes nearby, targeting Yemen in a campaign against the Houthis, who are backed by Iran. But this was the closest the planes had ever come.
When multiple 250-pound bombs hit the prison on April 28, tearing through the roof, Mr. Fanta fell to the ground, he recalled. At first, he thought he was the only one hurt. He later realized that he was one of the luckier ones. Ten people close to him were killed, while others were left with limbs hanging by shredded skin, he said.
“The place and everyone in it were mangled,” said Mr. Fanta, 32, who survived with two broken legs and a broken arm. “I don’t know why America bombed us.”
More than two months after the attack, which killed at least 60 people and injured 65 more, according to health authorities in the Houthi-led government, few answers have emerged. The Houthis blamed the United States, and an investigation by The New York Times found that at least three U.S.-made GBU-39 bombs — relatively small, guided munitions that are typically intended to reduce collateral damage — had been used, suggesting that the United States was likely to have carried out the bombing.
U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the region, has not claimed responsibility, saying only that officials were “aware of the claims of civilian casualties related to the U.S. strikes in Yemen” and were conducting an inquiry.
A reporter for The Times visited survivors of the strike and what remained of the prison in May. In order to gain access to the restricted sites, he was escorted by an official from the Houthi-led government. The Houthi authorities did not impose restrictions on The Times’s coverage or review it before publication.
To the men who survived the attack, there was little doubt who was behind it.
“What are we supposed to say to America?” Mr. Fanta said, his body shaking with laughter as he lay on a hospital bed in the Yemeni city of Saada. “Can I respond to America? Threaten America, for example?”
Binyam Aksa, 26, a day laborer from Tigray whose leg was broken in the bombing, said he could not fathom why they had been struck.
“I just want to know why we were targeted,” he said. “What did we do to them to be punished like this?”
The road to Saada from the Yemeni capital, Sana, is filled with groups of African migrants. From Saada — in the northernmost region of Yemen, a Houthi stronghold — it takes about a day to walk to the border of Saudi Arabia, their destination.
On a recent afternoon, a Times reporter saw a red truck halt just before a security checkpoint. Dozens of migrants climbed out, scattering across the roadside as they tried to avoid detection.
A few months ago, Mr. Fanta was in their place. In Tigray, he had worked as a farmer and sometimes a guard. “War was breaking out everywhere,” he said, so he decided to head for Saudi Arabia, leaving behind his wife and two children. He wanted to find a job on a farm or herding sheep.
He rode a smugglers’ boat across the strait separating Africa from the Arabian Peninsula. From the southern Yemeni city of Aden, he made a long trek north on foot, pushing through hunger and thirst to reach the Saudi border, he said.
This journey, called the Eastern Route, is one of the “busiest and riskiest migration routes in the world,” according to the International Organization for Migration. Tens of thousands of people attempted the trip last year, fleeing conflict, poverty, drought and political repression in countries including Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia.
To reach Saudi Arabia — where they hope to disappear into a vast informal economy — they must first traverse Yemen.
Yemen has been torn apart by its own war since 2014, when the Houthis ousted the internationally recognized government from Sana. A Saudi-led military coalition — backed by American military assistance and weaponry — embarked on a bombing campaign to rout the militia from power. Hundreds of thousands of people died from violence, disease and starvation. The coalition eventually pulled back, leaving the Houthis entrenched in power in northwestern Yemen, where they rule with an iron fist.
Mr. Fanta’s journey was stalled when Saudi border guards shot at migrants trying to cross, he said. Border guards in Saudi Arabia regularly open fire on migrants trying to cross from Houthi territory, according to Human Rights Watch and doctors at hospitals nearby. The Saudi government has dismissed those allegations as unfounded.
Then, before Mr. Fanta was able to cross, he was arrested for consuming alcohol, he said. In prison, the migrants heard airstrikes nearby and nervously watched television broadcasts about the American bombing campaign, he said.
When the U.S. strikes started in 2024, under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., officials said their goal was to deter the Houthis from firing missiles and drones at Israel and attacking ships in the Red Sea. Houthi leaders say their operations are an attempt to pressure Israel to stop bombarding Gaza and increase the flow of humanitarian aid.
The Trump administration began its own bombing campaign in March.
The Pentagon said it had struck more than 1,000 targets in Yemen, destroying “multiple command-and-control facilities, air defense systems, advanced weapons manufacturing facilities, and advanced weapons storage locations.” It is unclear why the prison might have been a target. Officials have been opaque about individual strikes. In a statement on April 27, Central Command said that, to preserve operational security, it “will not reveal specifics about what we’ve done or what we will do.”
One day later, the prison was struck. More than 100 Ethiopian migrants and one Eritrean migrant were inside, said Maj. Ahmed Ali al-Kharasi, the prison director.
The detainees were accused of a variety of criminal offenses, like hashish smuggling, alcohol consumption and murder, and were meant to serve their sentences before deportation, he said.
“Everyone knows this place has been a prison since 2019,” he said. “Why are they being targeted?”
Outside what remained of the prison, on white tarps, local authorities laid out shards of the bombs that had struck the facility.
The building had collapsed during the attack, scattering twisted metal and cinder blocks amid scraps of the migrants’ lives: plastic bottles, abandoned shoes, a crumpled pair of jeans.
The site was once a military barracks. In 2022, it was targeted by the Saudi-led coalition with airstrikes that killed dozens of people, and Saudi officials said that the location was a Houthi “special security camp.”
When United Nations representatives visited the site in January 2022, they “saw no signs” that it still served a military function, Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said at the time.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, an aid organization, had just visited the prison a few days before the recent attack, Major al-Kharasi said.
Mr. Binyam, the day laborer from Tigray, said that 20 of his friends had been killed, and that many had been injured.
“Some had their hands amputated, others lost their arms,” he said. “Some had their faces disfigured, others lost their eyes.”
Birhane Kassa Kahsay, from Tigray, described realizing that the walls had fallen, and that he was underneath.
“I was dug out from the ruins and brought here,” he said.
Survivors began arriving at the Republican Hospital in Saada around 4 a.m., said Mujahed Ahmed Shawqi, a doctor at the hospital. More than 40 men had critical injuries, including spinal fractures and chest trauma, he said.
“I couldn’t sleep for two consecutive days from the horror of the scene,” he said.
Amnesty International has called for an independent investigation into the attack.
“The major loss of civilian life in this attack raises serious concerns about whether the U.S. complied with its obligations under international humanitarian law,” Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said in a statement.
Israel also has GBU-39s. The Israeli military, responding to a request for comment from The Times, said that it did not strike Yemen at all in April.
The American airstrikes in Yemen have halted — President Trump declared an abrupt cease-fire on May 6. Israeli attacks in Yemen continue, as do Houthi attacks in Israel. Last week, the Houthis also resumed attacks on ships in the Red Sea, which Mr. Trump had said the truce would halt.
As he waited to recover, Mr. Fanta said he did not know where he would go. He might stay in Yemen or return to Ethiopia. But he will not resort to paying smugglers to reach Saudi Arabia again, he said.
“I’m fleeing death in the first place,” he said, “only to find death waiting for me here.”
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7) Tariffs on Brazil Could Leave Coffee Drinkers With a Headache
Trump’s pledge to place a 50 percent tariff on all imports from the South American nation will drive up the prices of coffee — and orange juice.
By Emmett Lindner, Julie Creswell and Kevin Draper, July 13, 2025
Tariffs would put more pressure on the coffee industry as prices have already risen this year. Credit...Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times
Getting a daily caffeine fix could become more expensive.
President Trump’s plan to impose a 50 percent tariff on all imports from Brazil starting next month would drive up the price of coffee, whether it’s served in cafes or brewed in the kitchen.
Such a tariff would put more pressure on the coffee industry as prices have peaked globally this year. Droughts in Brazil and Vietnam, two of the biggest coffee exporters to the United States, have resulted in smaller harvests in recent seasons, driving up prices.
Consumers are already paying more at the grocery store. At the end of May, the average price of one pound of ground roast coffee in the U.S. was $7.93, up from $5.99 at the same time last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Mr. Trump’s pledge to place tariffs on Brazil’s imports is partly in retaliation for what he considers a “witch hunt” against his political ally, the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who is facing trial for attempting a coup.
More than 99 percent of the coffee Americans consume is imported from South America, Africa and Asia. Last year, the United States imported 1.6 million metric tons of both unroasted and roasted coffee, according to the Agriculture Department.
Brazil accounted last year for more than 8.1 million bags, each with 60 kilograms of coffee, that came into the United States. Any sudden shift would be a “lose-lose situation,” said Guilherme Morya, a coffee analyst for Rabobank based in São Paulo.
Brazilian suppliers, he said, are holding tight and waiting to see if any negotiations will save them from needing to find buyers in other countries.
Should the new 50 percent tariffs take effect, “we’re going to see a reshape in the coffee flow in the world,” Mr. Morya said. “Especially Brazil to other regions.”
If wholesale costs — what restaurant chains or grocery stores pay — for coffee rise by 10 percent, that could increase the cost of a cup of coffee up by about 25 cents, said Ryan Cummings, the chief of staff for the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
It would take about three months after the tariff goes into effect for consumers to see higher prices at stores, he said.
Large coffee buyers, like Starbucks, source their coffee from all over the world, and often sign contracts months or years in advance for beans, somewhat insulating them from immediate price shocks. Still, some analysts said, there could be a scramble as some customers try to shift their supply chains to avoid the tariffs on coffee from Brazil.
“With Trump doing this Whac-a-Mole tariff strategy, it’s going to cause you, as a coffee manufacturer, a lot of uncertainty,” Mr. Cummings said.
But even changing suppliers comes with issues. Should manufacturers pivot more of their buying to Vietnam, another large coffee producer, they would be reliant on a smaller output.
And in addition to a possible disruption in quantity, the quality of the coffee coming into the United States could change. Much of the coffee produced in Brazil is Arabica, a higher quality than the more bitter robusta mostly produced in Vietnam and the rest of Asia.
Other suppliers would be unlikely to match Brazil’s robust output, including Vietnam, which has seen a recent decline in its coffee production. The country would not be able, in the short- or medium term, “to stem the flow,” said David Gantz, an economist at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
In Brazil, “some of the exports will probably cease entirely,” Mr. Gantz added. “Others will continue, but the consumer will end up paying a higher price.”
Coffee must be grown under the right conditions. It grows best at higher altitudes, in places with tropical temperatures and heavy rainfall. In the United States and its territories, that’s limited to Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
The United States last year produced a small fraction of the coffee consumed by Americans — 11,462 metric tons — and nearly all of it in Hawaii. Hawaii’s coffee is mostly a specialty product, and costs two or three times more than even high quality imported beans.
Labor costs are much higher in Hawaii, as are commodities like water and energy, so there is little chance the state can meaningfully produce more coffee for the American market, even if tariffs drive up the costs of its competitors.
“We can’t grow enough coffee,” said Shawn Steiman, the owner of Coffea Consulting in Honolulu. “The Hawaiian coffee market isn’t tied to the global industry.”
Some consumers — especially those who view coffee not as a luxury but a daily necessity — may just pay a higher price, while others may trade down to cheaper coffee products or to other caffeine products like tea or energy drinks.
Consumers do notice when the price of coffee drinks rises. Starbucks recently began charging a flat fee of 80 cents if customers added one or more pumps of flavored syrups to their beverages. Starbucks played down the change, saying it was done simply to standardize pricing across its stores and on its app.
“They sure did raise prices,” said Brandon Taylor, a video producer in Orlando, Fla., who was unhappy when his regular order of a tall iced coffee with cream and caramel syrup jumped to $5.35 because of the new 80-cent charge for the syrup. He canceled his order. “I don’t plan on going back.”
The tariffs could also threaten another morning staple. About 90 percent of the fresh orange juice and 55 percent of the frozen orange juice the United States imports comes from Brazil, according to Agriculture Department data.
Brazil also exports large quantities of concentrated orange pulp, what is then turned into orange juice. And Florida, a major domestic producer of the fruit, has faced recent growing difficulties partly because of a citrus disease.
“There would be a huge impact on people who drink orange juice because Florida can’t possibly make up the slack,” Mr. Gantz said.
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8) Trump Is Gutting Weather Science and Reducing Disaster Response
As a warming planet delivers more extreme weather, experts warn that the Trump administration is dismantling the government’s disaster capabilities.
By Lisa Friedman, Maxine Joselow, Coral Davenport and Megan Mineiro, July 13, 2025
In an effort to shrink the federal government, President Trump and congressional Republicans have taken steps that are diluting the country’s ability to anticipate, prepare for and respond to catastrophic flooding and other extreme weather events, disaster experts say.
Staff reductions, budget cuts and other changes made by the administration since January have already created holes at the National Weather Service, which forecasts and warns of dangerous weather.
Mr. Trump’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year would close 10 laboratories run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that research the ways a warming planet is changing weather, among other things. That work is essential to more accurately predicting life-threatening hazards. Among the shuttered labs would be one in Miami that sends teams of “hurricane hunters” to fly into storms to collect critical data. The proposed budget would also make major cuts to a federal program that uses river gauges to predict floods.
The president is also envisioning a dramatically scaled-down Federal Emergency Management Agency that would shift the costs of disaster response and recovery from the federal government to the states. The administration has already revoked $3.6 billion in grants from FEMA to hundreds of communities around the country, which were to be used to help these areas protect against hurricanes, wildfires and other catastrophes. About 10 percent of the agency’s staff members have left since January, including senior leaders with decades of experience, and another 20 percent are expected to be gone by the end of this year.
The White House and agency leaders say they are making much-needed changes to bloated bureaucracies that no longer serve the American public well.
FEMA, for one, “has been slow to respond at the federal level. It’s even been slower to get the resources to Americans in crisis,” Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said last week at a meeting convened by the president to recommend changes to the agency. “That is why this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today and remade into a responsive agency. We owe it to all the American people to deliver the most efficient and the most effective disaster response.”
National security and disaster management experts agreed that FEMA — or any federal agency — could be improved but they said the chaotic changes the Trump administration is making to FEMA, as well as other parts of the government, are harmful.
The federal government’s retrenchment arrives at a time when climate change is making extreme weather more frequent and severe. Last year, the United States experienced 27 disasters that cost more than $1 billion each.
“The Trump administration is leaving communities naked, without the necessary tools that could help them assess risks or reduce those risks,” said Alice C. Hill, who worked on climate resilience and security issues for the National Security Council during the Obama administration and who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“We know preparedness saves lives,” Ms. Hill said. “When you make cuts to the Weather Service, that is undermining forecasts. When you cut the collection of data, satellites, all of that will degrade the accuracy of forecasts. And even with a strong forecast, it’s meaningless unless the people who need to hear it, hear it.”
A ‘Generational Loss’ for Forecasting
For months, experts have warned that cuts to the National Weather Service, part of NOAA, could endanger local communities. Those fears have grown since the deadly flash floods in Central Texas earlier this month.
By all accounts, the Weather Service issued the appropriate warnings for the region that was inundated by the Guadalupe River on July 4.
But the agency had to move employees from other offices to temporarily staff the San Antonio office that handled the flood warnings, and the office lacked a warning coordination meteorologist, whose job it is to communicate with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn residents and help them evacuate. The office’s warning coordination meteorologist had left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration has offered to reduce the number of federal employees.
Since Mr. Trump took office, the Weather Service has shed about 600 jobs from its work force of roughly 4,200 people. They are part of a greater exodus of nearly 2,000 employees from NOAA. Nearly half of the Weather Service’s 122 forecast offices had lost at least 20 percent of their staff as of April. Thirty offices were lacking their most experienced official, known as the meteorologist-in-charge, as of May.
“When that position is vacant, it does have consequences because that is the primary person who is briefing elected officials and emergency managers,” said Brian LaMarre, who retired at the end of April as the meteorologist-in-charge of the Weather Service forecast office in Tampa, Fla.
Some forecast offices are no longer staffed overnight, and others have been launching fewer weather balloons, which send data to feed forecasts. The Weather Service has said it is preparing for “degraded operations.”
The president is preparing to deal another blow to weather forecasting in his spending plan for next year, which would cut funding for NOAA by another $2 billion, or 27 percent. On the chopping block would be the agency’s entire scientific research division, one of the world’s premier weather and climate research centers, preventing the creation of new weather forecasting technologies.
Ten laboratories across the country are also slated to be closed, including the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla. Founded in 1964, the lab created a tool to improve the accuracy of flash flood forecasts across the country — the same tool that correctly predicted the Guadalupe River’s rise after the floods hit Central Texas.
Mr. Trump also wants to shutter the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami, which deploys “hurricane hunters,” or specialized aircraft and crew members who fly directly into storms to collect critical data like wind speed, temperature and humidity. Forecasters use this data to predict a storm’s intensity and where it is likely to make landfall.
“The proposed NOAA cuts would mean a generational loss in hurricane forecasting,” said Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist and meteorologist for WPLG Local 10 News in Miami.
Mr. Trump’s sweeping domestic policy and tax law, which Congress passed this month, also rescinds about $60 million in unspent funds at NOAA for atmospheric, climate and weather research. That money had been part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate law.
That cut was inserted into the legislation by the Senate Commerce Committee, chaired by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas.
Macarena Martinez, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz, said that the rescinded money had “nothing to do with weather forecasting.” Instead, she said the funds were supposed to be used “for ‘heat awareness’ campaigns, ‘green collar’ jobs” and other programs.
At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Mr. Trump wants to halve funding for earth science and terminate satellites that have been collecting data on the atmosphere, ocean, land and ice for more than two decades.
These cuts could bring about a “train wreck” for weather forecasting, said William B. Gail, a former president of the American Meteorological Society.
Reducing the Ability to Monitor Floods
The United States Geological Survey operates about 8,000 gauges in rivers, streams and other bodies of water, gathering data from across the country to help communities monitor and plan for floods.
The gauges automatically transmit information every 15 minutes by satellite, sending real-time data that forms the basis for flood alerts that are sent to phones, as well as forecasts made by the National Weather Service. The gauges showed the 28-foot surge in floodwater on Texas’ Guadalupe River early on the morning of July 5.
Mr. Trump’s 2026 budget proposal would cut 22 percent from the U.S.G.S. water resources program that includes the network of gauges. It argues that the plan “maintains support for stream gauges” but would increase the use of artificial intelligence to analyze the data.
The administration is already planning to cancel the leases for 25 of the roughly 100 water science research facilities, according to documents viewed by The New York Times.
In an emailed statement, the U.S.G.S. said: “These initiatives demonstrate our broader commitment to streamlining government operations while ensuring that our scientific efforts remain robust, effective, and impactful, supporting the unique field-based operations essential to the U.S.G.S. mission.”
Experts say the cuts will leave Americans less informed.
“There will be less data and fewer people to read it. If anyone wants the data, states, municipalities and private companies will have to pay for it. Otherwise, it’s going away. But flooding’s not going away,” said Keith Robinson, a former director of the U.S.G.S. New England Water Science Center.
The ‘Demolition’ of Disaster Response?
FEMA is the backbone of the nation’s emergency response resources, but disaster experts have for many years said the agency needs to be streamlined to deliver help to survivors more efficiently. Mr. Trump has said he wants to “phase out” FEMA and shift more responsibility — and costs — to the states.
The Trump administration has already begun significantly scaling back the agency, eliminating billions of dollars in grants that help communities prepare for extreme weather.
In addition to freezing $3.6 billion of unspent funds that had been approved for states, the administration stopped approving new grants that since the 1980s have been used to elevate or demolish flood-prone homes and strengthen buildings in hurricane zones.
The president’s proposed 2026 budget eliminates about $882 million in the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, which helped support resources like flood control systems, wildfire prevention and storm water management upgrades. The Trump administration called the program “wasteful and ineffective.”
FEMA has lost about a quarter of its full-time staff in the past six months, including 20 percent of the coordinating officers at the agency, who manage responses to major disasters, as well as the head of FEMA’s disaster command center. Also gone: the deputy regional administrator in the agency’s Region 6 office in Texas.
David Richardson, FEMA’s acting head, has no emergency management experience.
“We are not witnessing a reimagining of federal disaster response — we are watching its demolition,” Mary Ann Tierney, who resigned recently as the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in an interview. “With each policy rollback and staffing cut, the federal disaster management function is being hollowed out, leaving states and survivors to face storms, fires and floods with less.”
Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, said he agreed that FEMA was too slow to help communities rebuild after disasters. The way FEMA is organized makes it “harder, not easier, and more expensive,” to rebuild after disaster strikes, said Mr. Welch, whose state was inundated by floods in 2023 and 2024.
Communities are forced to borrow the money to repair infrastructure like roads and bridges, not knowing whether they will be reimbursed, “even though it’s for a repair that is clearly covered under FEMA guidelines,” Mr. Welch said. He argued that the slowdown in federal funds means banks “are getting more and more resistant” to issuing loans.
Mr. Welch has introduced legislation to shift more power to state and local officials in the rebuilding process, and to help them better navigate the red tape that slows down federal disaster assistance. Other legislation introduced in the House seeks to streamline the federal government’s disaster response and to restore FEMA as a Cabinet-level agency reporting directly to the president rather than the Department of Homeland Security.
Judson Jones contributed reporting from Atlanta. Raymond Zhong contributed from London.
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9) Trump Administration Poised to Ramp Up Deportations to Distant Countries
Eight men sent by the United States to South Sudan could presage a new approach to Trump-era deportations, even as critics say the practice could amount to “enforced disappearance.”
By Mattathias Schwartz, Mattathias Schwartz covers federal courts, July 13, 2025
“The United States is not a party to the treaty that makes enforced disappearances a crime, and in some cases a crime against humanity, under international law.”
Downtown Juba, South Sudan, last year. Third-country deportations could accelerate under new internal guidance issued by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
Eight days after U.S. authorities deported eight migrants to war-torn South Sudan, ending a monthslong legal struggle, their fate remains unclear. The Trump administration, which called the men “the worst of the worst,” says it is no longer responsible for the group.
The government of South Sudan said in a statement that the men, all of whom had been convicted of crimes in the United States, were “under the care of the relevant authorities,” but said nothing about their whereabouts or their futures. None of their family members have heard from them since they landed just before midnight on July 4, according to their legal team.
Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that the South Sudan deportations pass legal muster, immigration experts say it is likely that the Trump administration will expand the use of so-called “third-country” deportations, an aggressive tactic in which migrants are sent to countries other than their home nations.
Citing the ruling, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Wednesday issued new internal guidance that could help accelerate third-country deportations. According to the guidance, when a country has provided “credible diplomatic assurances” that deportees will not be subjected to torture or persecution, deportations can proceed without delay.
When the United States has not received those guarantees, the guidance calls for ICE to inform migrants that they are being sent to a specific country. But it does not require the agency to ask if the migrant fears deportation to that country. The new agency rules appear to allow deportations in as few as six hours, provided the migrant does not raise objections beforehand.
“Because the Supreme Court let them do this, I think they’re now feeling emboldened to do it on a more widespread scale,” said Trina Realmuto, a lawyer representing the migrants sent to South Sudan. The lack of information about the eight men, she added, “creates fear” and puts their family members “in an untenable position.”
Ms. Realmuto called the new guidance “unlawful,” noting that her team had already pushed back against an earlier version in court.
The men sent to South Sudan hailed from six countries; only one came from South Sudan. A New York Times investigation found that administration officials have approached more than 50 countries about accepting deportees from the United States.
As President Trump builds the infrastructure to carry out mass deportations, with domestic military deployments and $165 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, third-country agreements could offer a path to swiftly move large numbers of detainees out of U.S. custody with little due process.
ICE has long reported difficulty in getting countries to accept their own nationals, because of a lack of diplomatic relations, an inability to get travel documents quickly enough, or, in some cases, because the migrants had been convicted of crimes. Migrants from these countries have been detained for long periods of time or released into the United States.
But the approach still faces some obstacles. Federal judges continue to grapple with the question of whether the agreements with third countries mean the United States still has “constructive custody” of migrants deported under those deals, and some ongoing legal responsibility for their treatment.
And the lack of information about detainees sent to South Sudan and El Salvador has drawn charges from a group of independent experts appointed by the United Nations that the United States may be engaging in “enforced disappearance,” state-sponsored abductions that are banned under international law.
In April, the U.N. experts issued a statement that U.S. deportations of Venezuelans to El Salvador “appeared to involve enforced disappearances.” Last Tuesday, days after the Supreme Court ruled that the flight to South Sudan could move forward, the experts broadened their concerns to include the Trump administration’s deportation policies more generally.
Gabriella Citroni, an international law expert who chairs the U.N. group, said U.S. officials had “not been cooperative” in response to their questions, adding that as recently as a year ago, the United States was “very responsive.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman declined to comment.
The United States is not a party to the treaty that makes enforced disappearances a crime, and in some cases a crime against humanity, under international law. The term is often associated with Latin American military dictatorships from the Cold War era that abducted their own citizens. The Biden administration called them “an egregious human rights violation” and criticized authoritarian adversaries like Russia and China for inflicting them on dissidents and ethnic minorities.
In September, the U.N. experts will deliver a formal update on their consideration of the deportations as part of their annual report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, which the Trump administration withdrew from in February. They will present again at the New York meeting of the U.N. General Assembly later in the fall.
The investigation is already having direct consequences in U.S. courts. A report from Ms. Citroni’s group was filed as evidence by lawyers representing a group of Venezuelan men in federal court last week. It appeared to show contradictions in how the United States and El Salvador had described the legal status of migrants who were deported to El Salvador and detained in a high-security prison.
In those documents, the government of El Salvador told the U.N. group that detaining deportees from the United States was “within the scope of the justice system and law enforcement” of “that other state,” referring to the United States. That contradicted statements made in court by U.S. officials that the United States did not have “constructive custody” of Venezuelans held in El Salvador, and that they were now beyond U.S. control.
The Trump administration has responded to criticism by U.N. officials in other contexts with indifference and occasional hostility. But if the charges of enforced disappearance gather momentum, that could mean further withering of the postwar image of the United States as a champion of freedom and democracy.
“This is really detrimental to U.S. standing in the international community,” said Natalie Cadwalader-Schultheis, an immigration attorney who alerted U.S. border practices to the U.N. “There will be consequences with other countries who are alarmed over this erosion of human rights.”
Legal experts also fear the Trump administration could seek to expand aggressive deportation measures even more, perhaps to U.S. citizens, as Mr. Trump has suggested.
“Homegrowns are next,” he said after an April White House meeting with Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president. “You got to build about five more places.”
That scenario isn’t as far-fetched as it might sound, according to a former official who served in the Biden administration. “If we’re grabbing people off the street — which we are — what makes us have any confidence that arbitrary detentions won’t extend further?” asked Ambassador Michèle Taylor, who represented the United States at the U.N. Human Rights Council until earlier this year, and who supported Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 presidential campaign. “Especially from an administration that has indicated they will go after their political enemies. Where does it end?”
The willingness of the Trump administration to send migrants to countries like Libya and South Sudan, critics have noted, represents a reversal of a longstanding U.S. policy against sending migrants to places where they might be at risk of torture or persecution. Known as “non-refoulement,” that principle is woven through U.S. immigration laws governing asylum, as well as the Convention Against Torture, another international treaty, provisions of which the United States ratified in 1994.
The lack of information about the South Sudan deportees is troubling, said John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser during his first term.
A longtime critic of the U.N., Mr. Bolton said domestic politics, not international law, was the right forum to debate the deportations. But, he added: “The purpose of deportations is to remove illegal aliens, particularly aliens who have committed crimes in the U.S. Why harm that effort by making moves that could hurt us politically or legally elsewhere? It’s a self-inflicted wound.”
The administration has emphasized that all the men sent to South Sudan had been convicted of violent crimes, though many had either completed or were nearing the end of their sentences. The men were held in shackles for weeks inside an air-conditioned shipping container at Camp Lemonnier, a U.S. military base in Djibouti. A federal judge in Boston had paused their deportations on due-process grounds, ruling that they could not be sent to South Sudan without first having the opportunity to voice a reasonable fear of torture. The government appealed the judge’s order to the Supreme Court and won.
The administration has told the court that South Sudan has given it diplomatic assurances the men will not face torture. In its statement last week, South Sudan’s government said it would “adhere to the rule of law, international obligations and norms.”
For now, the location of the men is unknown. In an interview with Politico published on Friday, Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, said he did not know if the eight men were still being detained in South Sudan, or where they would ultimately wind up.
“There’s like a hundred different endings to this,” he said. “I do not know.”
Hamed Aleaziz and Maura Ajak contributed reporting.
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10) Trump threatens to strip Rosie O’Donnell of U.S. citizenship.
By Ashley Ahn, Shawn McCreesh and Hamed Aleaziz, July 12, 2025
Rosie O’Donnell in Dublin. Credit...Ellius Grace for The New York Times
President Trump said he was weighing using the power of the government against one of his longtime entertainment world nemeses, the comedian and actress Rosie O’Donnell, threatening to revoke her citizenship.
Shortly before 10 a.m. on Saturday, Mr. Trump said on Truth Social, “Because of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.”
The president called Ms. O’Donnell a “threat to humanity” and said she should stay in Ireland, where she moved to in January after Mr. Trump won a second term.
Mr. Trump’s headline-grabbing provocation about Ms. O’Donnell comes at a moment in which his administration is contending with criticism on many fronts: His top law enforcement officials are bitterly feuding over the Jeffrey Epstein saga; there remain unanswered questions about the decision to halt munitions to Ukraine and who authorized it; the homeland security chief is facing intense scrutiny over FEMA’s response in Texas; and so on.
Ms. O’Donnell snapped back at Mr. Trump with her own barrage of insults on Instagram.
“The president of the USA has always hated the fact that I see him for who he is — a criminal con man sexual abusing liar out to harm our nation to serve himself,” she said. “This is why I moved to Ireland.”
She further taunted the president in a subsequent post showing a photo of Mr. Trump with Jeffrey Epstein, taken in 1997 in Palm Beach, Fla.
“You want to revoke my citizenship? Go ahead and try, King Joffrey with a tangerine spray tan,” she said, referring to the sadistic child-king in “Game of Thrones.”
Experts said the president does not have the power to take away the citizenship of a U.S.-born citizen.
Julia Gelatt, associate director of the immigration program at the Migration Policy Institute, said: “U.S. citizens can relinquish their citizenship voluntarily, and federal courts can strip naturalized citizens of their citizenship if there is proven fraud or misrepresentation or other major cause. But U.S.-born citizens cannot have their citizenship taken away.”
Amanda Frost, an expert on citizenship law at the University of Virginia School of Law, cited Supreme Court precedent.
“In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Afroyim v. Rusk that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment bars the government from stripping citizenship, stating: ‘In our country the people are sovereign and the government cannot sever its relationship to the people by taking away their citizenship,’” she said in an email.
Mr. Trump’s feud with Ms. O’Donnell dates back to 2006, when she mocked the president on “The View” for defending a Miss USA contestant roiled in a controversy. She questioned his own moral compass and role as a businessman. Mr. Trump, who at the time was best known for his show, “The Apprentice,” threatened to sue “The View” over her comments.
Soon after, Mr. Trump began hurling insults at Ms. O’Donnell, calling her “fat” and “wacko.” In a 2015 G.O.P. debate on Fox News, one of the moderators said, “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.” Mr. Trump interjected: “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”
Mr. Trump’s threat to revoke Ms. O’Donnell’s citizenship is the latest in a series of statements he has made about political adversaries and celebrities who have criticized him.
After the billionaire Elon Musk and Mr. Trump fought publicly over the president’s sprawling domestic policy bill, the president suggested he might be interested in deporting Mr. Musk.
When asked by a reporter if he would deport Mr. Musk, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in South Africa, Mr. Trump responded, “I don’t know. We’ll have to take a look.”
Mr. Trump has repeated baseless claims that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, is an illegal immigrant. Mr. Trump has threatened to arrest him if he interfered with the federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants. He’s also called for “major investigations” into celebrities like Bruce Springsteen and Beyoncé, calling their endorsements of Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election “corrupt and unlawful.”
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11) Children Among at Least 10 Killed in Israeli Strike in Central Gaza, Officials Say
Israel’s military said a “technical error” had caused munition to land dozens of meters from its target. The victims were gathered near a water distribution point, health workers said.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 13, 2025
Palestinians mourning a relative killed on Sunday in an Israeli strike in Gaza City. Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At least 10 people, including children, were killed on Sunday morning near a water distribution point in central Gaza, according to health officials in the enclave, as Israel pressed on with its military campaign there despite U.S.-led efforts to broker a truce.
Dr. Marwan Abu Nasser, the director of Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat, said that the victims’ bodies and more than a dozen wounded people were taken to the hospital after the strike took place roughly a half-mile away.
People have frequently gathered each morning at the water point, according to Rami Al-Shrafi, another doctor at Al-Awda Hospital, because many Palestinians in the area are displaced and lack access to running water or plumbing.
“It seems the shell landed there and struck them directly,” Dr. Shrafi said.
When asked about the strike in Nuseirat, the Israeli military said that a “technical error” had caused an Israeli munition — intended for an Islamic Jihad militant — to land dozens of meters from its target. The military said in a statement that it was aware that casualties were reported as a result, adding that “the incident is under review.”
Hours later, in northern Gaza, a separate strike on a crowded junction in Gaza City killed at least 11 people and wounded dozens more, according to Gaza’s Civil Defense, an emergency rescue group under the Hamas-run Interior Ministry.
Fadel Naim, a doctor at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, said that the medical center had received a number of casualties from that attack. He added that Ahmad Qandil, also a doctor at the hospital, was among the dead.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the reports of the strike in Gaza City. In a separate statement on Sunday, the military said that its air force had attacked more than 150 targets across Gaza over the past 24 hours, including weapons storage facilities and sniper posts.
The deadly strikes came as recent efforts to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas have yet to yield results.
Israeli officials and President Trump had projected high optimism for an agreement ahead of a visit last week by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to Washington. But the talks appear to have stalled for the time being amid gaps between the two sides.
In the meantime, Israeli forces have continued to attack in Gaza, part of a 21-month war that began after the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed around 1,200 people and saw roughly 250 people taken to Gaza as hostages.
Since then, more than 58,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the health ministry there. The ministry’s casualty lists do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but they include thousands of children.
Over the past month, more than 20 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza, according to the Israeli military, including five who were killed in a roadside ambush last week.
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12) Plan to Indefinitely Displace Palestinians Threatens to Derail Gaza Truce
An Israeli proposal to force much of Gaza’s population into a small enclave is now overshadowing negotiations over a truce.
By Patrick Kingsley and Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 14, 2025
A tent camp housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah, southern Gaza, last year. Credit...Hatem Ali/Associated Press
Israel’s defense ministry has promoted a plan to force much of Gaza’s population into a small and largely devastated zone in the territory’s south, a proposal that threatens to derail the latest efforts to forge a truce between Israel and Hamas.
In recent weeks, Israeli officials have briefed journalists and foreign counterparts on a loose plan to force hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians into an area controlled by Israel’s military close to the Gaza-Egypt border. Legal experts have warned that the plan would violate international law because the civilians would be barred indefinitely from returning to their homes in other parts of Gaza, a restriction that would constitute a form of ethnic cleansing.
While the Israeli government has yet to formally announce or comment on the plan, the idea of a new encampment in southern Gaza was first proposed last week by Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister. He discussed it at a briefing with Israeli correspondents who focus on military affairs, and The New York Times reviewed readouts of the briefing written by its attendees. Several attendees also wrote articles that attracted widespread attention among both Israelis and Palestinians.
A spokesman for Mr. Katz declined to comment on the reports, as did the office of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister.
Now, Hamas has cited Mr. Katz’s proposal as one of the latest obstacles to a new truce. During a cease-fire, in exchange for releasing roughly 25 hostages, Hamas wants Israeli troops to withdraw from much of Gaza. The new Israeli plan makes such an outcome far less likely, since it would ensure that Israeli troops remained in charge of a large area over which Hamas seeks to reestablish control.
Husam Badran, a senior member of Hamas, described the establishment of the encampment as a “deliberately obstructive demand” that would complicate the fraught negotiations.
“This would be an isolated city that resembles a ghetto,” Mr. Badran said on Monday in a text message. “This is utterly unacceptable, and no Palestinian would agree to this.”
Hopes for an imminent truce rose last week after Mr. Netanyahu went to Washington for meetings with President Trump that many expected would result in an Israeli compromise. Instead, Mr. Netanyahu — who has previously slow-walked negotiations for personal and political reasons — returned to Israel without a breakthrough.
The negotiations remain stuck on issues including the permanence of any truce: Israel wants to be able to return to war, while Hamas wants guarantees that any cease-fire would evolve into a full cessation of hostilities. Israel also wants Hamas to commit to disarmament, an idea that the militant group has rejected. There are also disagreements over how aid will be delivered during a truce.
According to some of the readouts of the briefing by Mr. Katz, the defense minister described the proposed new encampment as a “humanitarian city” that would, at first, house at least 600,000 Palestinians. Mr. Katz said it would later hold the entire population of Gaza, or roughly 2 million people, according to the readouts and reports. Israeli critics likened it to a modern-day “concentration camp” because its residents would not be allowed to leave the area’s northern perimeter in order to return home.
That could constitute “forcible transfer,” a crime under international law, according to a group of Israeli international law experts who wrote an open letter on the matter to Mr. Katz and the head of Israel’s military, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir.
If implemented,“the plan would constitute a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and under certain conditions, could amount to the crime of genocide,” the letter said.
Israel’s military declined to comment on whether it had been ordered to implement the plan.
Because the plan has yet to be formally detailed or announced, some Israelis have speculated that it is mainly a negotiating tactic aimed at either persuading Hamas to make more concessions in truce talks, or at convincing Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition allies to support a cease-fire.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right minister who supports the depopulation of Gaza and opposes a permanent truce with Hamas, said in a statement that the displacement plan was unlikely to be enacted and had simply been publicized by his colleagues to make it easier for him to stomach a cease-fire deal.
“The debate around establishing a humanitarian city is basically spin aimed at hiding the deal being cooked up,” Mr. Ben-Gvir said. “Spin is not a substitute for absolute victory,” he added.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel.
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13) Nothing Good Happens When People Become ‘the Other’
By Linda Greenhouse, July 14, 2025
Ms. Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008.
Etienne Laurent/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Fifteen years ago, when Arizona enacted a notorious anti-immigrant “show me your papers” law, I wrote an essay in The Times that began, “I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon. Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.”
The essay provoked a variety of reactions, most supportive but some vituperatively negative. One angry reader, noting that the newspaper identified me as teaching at Yale Law School, wrote to the school’s dean to demand that he fire me. The dean and I had a good laugh over that letter. But rather than dismiss it as the product of an eccentric crank, I realize now that I should have understood the letter as a window on the toxic brew of anti-immigrant sentiment that led a state to pass such a law.
The Obama administration challenged Arizona’s law, and after the Supreme Court invalidated most of it in 2012, the harsh anti-immigrant wave subsided. But now my letter writer and like-minded people have a friend in the White House. Or friends, actually — among them, Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, appears to be giving President Trump his marching orders for the arrests and deportations now shredding the civic fabric of communities across the country.
I have a home in the Los Angeles area, and my recent weeks there encompassed the deployment of the Marines and the federalization of California’s National Guard. I steeled myself every morning to read the granular reporting in The Los Angeles Times of scenes that I could never have imagined just months ago: people snatched up while waiting at a bus stop in peaceful Pasadena; the undocumented father of three Marines taken at his landscaping job, pinned down and punched by masked federal agents before being thrown into detention. People whose quiet presence among us was tolerated for decades as they paid their taxes and raised their American children are now hunted down like animals, so fearful of even going grocery shopping that Los Angeles nonprofits have mobilized to deliver food to their doors.
I was taking an early-morning walk in my neighborhood when a black SUV with tinted windows slowed to a stop a half block ahead. I considered: If this is ICE coming to take someone, should I intervene? Start filming? Make sure the victims know their rights? Or just keep walking, secure in the knowledge that no one was coming for me? The car turned out to be an airport limo picking up a passenger, and I was left to ponder how bizarre it was to feel obliged to run through such a mental triage on a summer morning on an American city street.
Something beyond the raw politics of immigration lies behind the venomous cruelty on display, and I think it is this: To everyone involved, from the policymakers in Washington to the masked agents on the street, undocumented individuals are “the other,” people who not only lack legal rights as a formal matter but who stand outside the web of connection that defines human society. Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, refers to undocumented immigrants as “the gotaways,” the ones we didn’t catch.
In a lecture at Loyola University Chicago in April, Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso observed that the current immigration crisis “is driven by the deeper crisis of public and social life.” He continued: “On a fundamental level, these are signs that we are losing the story of who we are as a country. This is a crisis of narrative. Are we no longer a country of immigrants? Are we no longer a country that values the dignity of the human person, individual liberties, and with a healthy regard for checks and balances?”
An adaptation of Bishop Seitz’s powerful lecture was published by the Catholic magazine Commonweal, which is where I read it. (Another bishop, Alberto Rojas of San Bernardino, Calif., 60 miles east of Los Angeles, took the rare step of telling the 1.6 million worshipers in the diocese by letter last week that they were excused from attending Mass if they were afraid of immigration enforcement if they came to church.) The Catholic Church has distinguished itself by the moral clarity of its critique of the president’s deportation obsession.
I wish I saw the same powerful advocacy from major Jewish organizations, which I’d argue have a particular responsibility and interest in addressing this issue. Aren’t antisemitism and anti-immigrant cruelty two sides of the same coin? Both spring from viewing members of a group as “the other.” The focus of these organizations, naturally enough, is antisemitism, and the Trump administration’s exploitation of the real problem of antisemitism for its own purposes seems to have thrown some of them off-kilter.
I’ve been wondering when the moment will come when ICE will go far enough to persuade more people outside Los Angeles that it must be reined in. Maybe it will look something like the military invasion of the city’s MacArthur Park the other day, when soldiers and federal agents on horseback and in armored vehicles swept in for no obvious purpose other than to sow terror. “It’s the way a city looks before a coup,” Mayor Karen Bass, who rushed to the park, said later.
Can New Yorkers envision such a scene in Central Park? Is anywhere safe now for someone who can’t show the right papers?
People of a certain age might remember the songwriter Jimmy Webb’s weirdly compelling “MacArthur Park,” with its refrain that begins, “MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark.” Growing up in the east, I had never heard of MacArthur Park when the song hit the charts in 1968, and I wasn’t sure it was a real place. All these years later, something real is melting for sure. It is the glue that holds civil society together.
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14) For Big Banks, the Trump Era Is Proving Profitable Thus Far
JPMorgan’s chief, Jamie Dimon, lauded the “resilient” U.S. economy as his bank reported bumper quarterly earnings.
“JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the country, exceeded forecasters’ expectations for the second quarter, earning about $15 billion. … JPMorgan’s stock has gained about 20 percent this year, far outperforming the S&P 500, which has risen 6.5 percent. Citi and Wells Fargo also reported earnings on Tuesday [July 15, 2025]. Wells Fargo announced a profit of $5.5 billion, up 12 percent from a year ago. …The bank intends to increase its dividend by 12.5 percent next quarter.”
By Rob Copeland and Stacy Cowley, July 15, 2025
JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, suggested a greater degree of optimism in his prepared remarks accompanying the bank’s latest earnings. Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times
For years, Wall Street’s top bankers have watched with a mix of envy and exhaustion as power, profits and the popular imagination shifted westward to Silicon Valley.
Being out of the spotlight, however, is proving profitable in the second Trump era. While many industries have been upended by the president’s topsy-turvy trade and immigration policies, Wall Street is quietly humming along just fine.
Some of the biggest lenders in America reported strong quarterly earnings on Tuesday along with increasing — if tentative — optimism that the U.S. economy has more room to run. The reports were a reminder that in the world of high finance, uncertainty is often a chance to make money.
JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the country, exceeded forecasters’ expectations for the second quarter, earning about $15 billion. Importantly, its haul from advising on corporate deal making rose, defying expectations for a decline amid uncertainty over global trade. The bank credited a shift in momentum as the most extreme of President Trump’s tariffs were repeatedly delayed, as well as the extension of corporate tax breaks.
JPMorgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, whose words are carefully parsed on Wall Street, suggested a greater degree of optimism in his prepared remarks. While his remarks in the first quarter called out “considerable turbulence (including geopolitics)” in the economy, he flipped on Tuesday, saying that the economy was “resilient” and that “the finalization of tax reform and potential deregulation are positive for the economic outlook.”
The bank’s chief financial officer, Jeremy Barnum, summed up the mood among the bank’s clients on a call with reporters: “The corporate community has sort of accepted that they just have to get through this.”
JPMorgan’s stock has gained about 20 percent this year, far outperforming the S&P 500, which has risen 6.5 percent.
Citi and Wells Fargo also reported earnings on Tuesday. Wells Fargo announced a profit of $5.5 billion, up 12 percent from a year ago. Last month, the Federal Reserve freed Wells Fargo from the asset cap that had constrained it for seven years — a penalty regulators imposed in response to the bank’s sham accounts scandal and other misdeeds.
Wells Fargo’s chief executive, Charles W. Scharf, forecast good conditions ahead for the bank. After a brief nod toward economic risks, he said customers were staying active and keeping up with their debts. The bank intends to increase its dividend by 12.5 percent next quarter.
Asked on a call whether tariffs were affecting Wells Fargo’s customers, Mike Santomassimo, the bank’s finance chief, said it was too early to judge. “I think it’s causing some clients to be a little cautious about borrowing or big investments they may want to make,” he said.
Big banks’ results are closely followed by investors, both because they traditionally kick off the quarterly earnings season as well as provide a window into consumer spending. That data was a mixed bag on Tuesday: Citi, which beat profit expectations, flagged a worsening macroeconomic environment compared with a year ago, but JPMorgan said it no longer believed it needed to set aside as much money to cushion against future loan losses.
“Frankly,” said Mark Mason, Citi’s chief financial officer, “the impact of tariffs and how that might show up in inflation and what some of the other unintended consequences might be is still unknown.”
More lenders, including the investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, are expected to report earnings on Wednesday and anticipated to shed further light on the status of mergers and acquisitions, among other corporate activities.
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15) Another Casualty in the Tariff Wars: The Always-in-Season Tomato
The Trump administration is adding a 17 percent tariff to a year-round grocery store staple, while funneling more business to domestic tomato growers, largely in Florida.
By Ana Swanson, July 14, 2025
“The tariffs will add to the price of a year-round grocery store staple for many Americans, while funneling more business to domestic tomato growers, largely in Florida. The levies stem from a nearly 30-year-old trade case that found Mexican tomato growers to be selling their products in the United States at unfairly low prices. The U.S. tomato industry brought a case against their Mexican competitors in 1996, arguing that Mexican tomatoes dumped into the United States were injuring American growers. A U.S. trade court agreed with them, and ordered tariffs to be imposed. But on five occasions since then — in 1996, 2002, 2008, 2013 and 2019 — the United States agreed to suspend the tariffs, as long as Mexican growers would keep their prices above a certain minimum level. … Robert Guenther, the executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Exchange, said that the previous five agreements with Mexico had failed, and that strong enforcement of U.S. trade laws was needed to protect ‘the stability [high-price stability] of our food supply chain.’”
Ana Swanson covers international trade and reports from Washington.
The levies stem from a nearly 30-year-old trade case that found Mexican tomato growers to be selling their products in the United States at unfairly low prices. Credit...Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The Trump administration announced Monday that it would impose a 17 percent tariff on most imports of tomatoes from Mexico, as it withdrew from a decades-old trade agreement that had prevented those levies from snapping into place.
The tariffs will add to the price of a year-round grocery store staple for many Americans, while funneling more business to domestic tomato growers, largely in Florida.
The levies stem from a nearly 30-year-old trade case that found Mexican tomato growers to be selling their products in the United States at unfairly low prices. The U.S. tomato industry brought a case against their Mexican competitors in 1996, arguing that Mexican tomatoes dumped into the United States were injuring American growers. A U.S. trade court agreed with them, and ordered tariffs to be imposed.
But on five occasions since then — in 1996, 2002, 2008, 2013 and 2019 — the United States agreed to suspend the tariffs, as long as Mexican growers would keep their prices above a certain minimum level. The United States and Mexico had been in recent talks about entering into a new agreement.
“Mexico remains one of our greatest allies, but for far too long our farmers have been crushed by unfair trade practices that undercut pricing on produce like tomatoes,” Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, said in a statement. “That ends today. This rule change is in line with President Trump’s trade policies and approach with Mexico.”
The 17 percent duty is calculated to measure the percentage by which Mexican tomatoes have been sold in the United States at unfair prices, the Commerce Department said. The United States imported $2.8 billion of tomatoes from Mexico in 2023, according to data from the World Bank, representing more than 85 percent of American imports.
The Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, which represents companies that import and sell produce and flowers, said it was “disappointed” in the decision. It said that its members distributed vine-ripened, greenhouse-grown tomatoes from Mexico that are not replaceable by tomatoes grown in Florida and the Southeast, most of which are grown in an open field, picked green and gassed to induce a color change.
“As an industry, we are saddened that American consumers will have to pay a tomato tax, or duty, for a reduced selection of the tomatoes they prefer,” the group said.
Robert Guenther, the executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Exchange, said that the previous five agreements with Mexico had failed, and that strong enforcement of U.S. trade laws was needed to protect “the stability of our food supply chain.”
“This decision will protect hardworking American tomato growers from unfair Mexican trading practices and send a strong signal that the Trump administration is committed to ensuring fair markets for American agriculture,” he said.
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16) Israel and Iran Usher In New Era of Psychological Warfare
The 12-day conflict was marked by a flurry of propaganda, disinformation and covert operations aided by artificial intelligence and spread by social media.
By Steven Lee Myers, Natan Odenheimer and Erika Solomon, July 15, 2025
One fabricated video showed devastation at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel that had not occurred.
In the hours before Israeli forces bombed Evin prison in Iran’s capital on June 23, posts appeared on social media in Persian, foreshadowing the attack and urging Iranians to come free the prisoners.
Moments after the bombs struck, a video appeared on X and Telegram, purporting to show a blast at an entrance to the prison, which is notorious for holding political prisoners. One post on X included a hashtag, in Persian: “#freeevin.”
The attack on the prison was real, but the posts and video were not what they seemed. They were part of an Israeli ruse, according to researchers who tracked the effort.
It was not the only trickery during the conflict. Over 12 days of attacks, Israel and Iran turned social media into a digital battlefield, using deception and falsehoods to try to sway the outcome even as they traded kinetic missile strikes that killed hundreds and roiled an already turbulent Middle East. The posts, researchers said, represented a greater intensity of information warfare, by beginning before the strikes, employing artificial intelligence and spreading widely so quickly.
Information warfare, often called psychological operations, or psyops, is as old as war itself. But experts say the effort between Israel and Iran was more intense and more targeted than anything that had come before, and seen by millions of people scrolling on their phones for updates even as bombs fell.
The reason is that today’s technology — the ubiquity of social media and the advent of generative A.I. — has transformed the ability of countries to respond to events and to speak directly to citizens and others in real time in ways that are more believable than ever before.
Iran, for example, sent alerts in Hebrew to thousands of Israeli mobile phones warning recipients to avoid bomb shelters because militants planned to infiltrate them and attack those inside, according to researchers and official statements. A network of accounts on X attributed to Israel spread messages in Persian trying to erode confidence in Iran’s government, including ones narrated by an A.I.-generated woman.
Video messages in Persian, delivered by an A.I.-generated woman, have been attributed to Israel as part of a plot to erode confidence in Tehran’s government. She falsely portrayed things in Tehran as normal, with people going about their lives. In truth, the the city was mostly evacuated at the time.
“It’s certainly a new era of influence warfare,” said James J.F. Forest, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who has written extensively on the subject. “There’s never really been a previous corollary in history where you had the ability to go to scale with this kind of propaganda.”
The Israeli Defense Forces declined to respond to questions about psychological operations. So did an official from the Iranian delegation to the United Nations in New York.
The torrent of propaganda and deception offers a preview of what the United States or other nations would almost certainly face if war erupted. False images of destroyed B-2 bombers appeared online when President Trump ordered strikes on Iran’s deeply buried nuclear sites.
Some question how prepared the United States is, especially with Mr. Trump’s administration cutting efforts to combat foreign influence operations. American military strategy embraces information operations — which have been known in the Pentagon since 2010 as Military Information Support Operations — but they have often been treated as little more than a supporting role.
Russia, followed by China, is regarded as the most assertive adversary when it comes to influence campaigns. It has waged a furious information war against Ukraine and its allies since launching a full invasion of the country in 2022. By some accounts, it has undercut support in some countries, including the United States.
“I think what most people would say is that we are not prepared in the military for the kind of information operations or psychological operations that might become mainstream in this century,” said David Millar, a former intelligence officer who until recently taught at the Foreign Service Institute, the State Department’s diplomatic training academy.
Israel and Iran both followed Russia’s playbook, trying to shape public opinion at home and abroad, but with the added ability to integrate widely available A.I. tools into their campaigns.
“If you go back to the early days of Ukraine, we saw disinformation campaigns from Russia, but they were pretty primitive as compared to what we saw in the early days of Gaza,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a co-founder of GetReal Security, a company that first flagged the manipulated video of Evin prison. “That’s nothing,” he added, “compared to what we’re seeing in Iran.”
Actors on both sides of that conflict flooded the internet with manipulated or fabricated photographs and videos, seeking to demoralize and demonize the other.
The content included images from previous conflicts and obvious fabrications of Iran’s supreme leader and Israel’s prime minister. More subtle ones, like the video at Evin, were initially reported on as real by some news organizations, including The New York Times.
Mr. Farid contrasted today’s information warfare with efforts in World War II, when warring nations communicated with leaflets dropped from airplanes or by radio.
“With radio you had one message and you sent it out,” he said. “Now you have a million messages that you send out to a million individuals. That is obviously very, very different.”
The effect in the current conflict can be hard to measure with certainty. Citizens often rally behind their leaders when at war, viewing obvious propaganda with skepticism or derision. Even if psychological warfare does not change the course of a conflict, analysts say, it can shape public perceptions of it.
“There are certainly people who believe that it’s the narrative win that carries the day,” Mr. Millar said.
Iran’s efforts appeared aimed at a domestic and regional audience as much as Israel itself, said Ari Ben-Am, a co-founder of Telemetry Data Labs, a digital analytics company in Tel Aviv. That reflected “their desire to maintain a regional reputation,” he added.
One fabricated video showed devastation at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel that had not occurred. Photographs and video of wreckage of Israeli — and later American — aircraft appeared on accounts that researchers traced to Iran and its state media.
Iran claimed to have downed at least three Israeli F-35s, though. Israel’s military officials denied that it had lost any aircraft in the fighting, and no evidence has emerged to suggest otherwise. One image showed an implausible afterburner in the exhaust of one wrecked plane.
Iranian media even claimed to have captured an Israeli pilot, identified as Sarah Ahronot, but NewsGuard, a company that monitors disinformation in media, traced the photograph to one of a Chilean Navy lieutenant taken in 2011.
NewsGuard documented 28 false claims by Iran, which relied “on a mix of official state media sources, anonymous websites and accounts, and proxy influencers to distribute propaganda” on YouTube, Facebook, X, Telegram and TikTok.
Although often debunked, the images and videos have been viewed millions of times, and many remain online. A.I. can now not only generate translated content, but do so with nuance. “The fake profiles are more convincing,” said Achiya Schatz, referring to Iran’s efforts. He is the executive director of FakeReporter, an organization in Israel that tracks disinformation campaigns.
“The Hebrew is more persuasive, and the content is more professionally tailored to target audiences,” Mr. Schatz said. “The volume of material — texts, images, videos — is unprecedented.”
Israel’s campaign against Iran focused on the damage it inflicted as much as the potential political dissent it stirred.
A report by Horizon Intelligence, a threat assessment company in Brussels, cited social media accounts linked to Israel showing old footage of protests to suggest unrest against the government. A new video generated by A.I. purported to show Iranians chanting, “We love Israel.”
Darren L. Linvill, a co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, said the video purporting to show a blast at Evin prison appeared almost immediately on accounts on X and Telegram and then spread on a coordinated network of inauthentic accounts that pushed anti-Iranian content, reaching millions of people. He called it a striking example of “the coordination between kinetic and psychological warfare.”
The psychological war continued even after the bombings stopped on June 24. The day after the two countries agreed to a truce, a new account appeared on X claiming to be the Persian-language spokesman for Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. Posts on the account offered financial and medical assistance to Iranians who revolted.
The account includes video messages from Menashe Amir, an octogenarian Israeli Iranian journalist, well known as a Persian-language broadcaster for Israeli media.
Mr. Amir confirmed to The Times that he had been called by a group of people he did not know, who later came to his house with filming equipment and provided him with a series of Hebrew messages they wanted him to read on camera in Persian.
He was convinced the visitors were from the Mossad, which declined to respond to questions about the account. Iran’s health ministry took the account seriously enough that it put out a warning to Iranians to ignore Mossad’s offers of assistance, according to a report by the official state news agency.
The account weighs in on debates or memes spreading on Iranian or Israeli social media, such as a sly response to a video, called “Our Man in Tehran,” that spread widely online during the conflict.
The video portrays Brig. Gen. Esmail Ghaani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Army’s Quds Forces, as a Mossad agent at the heart of several covert Israeli operations. The music playing in the background of the video comes from the theme song of an Israeli television series called “Tehran,” about a Mossad agent operating inside Iran.
An Israeli filmmaker, Evyatar Rosenberg, later appeared on Israeli media to say he had used artificial intelligence to create the clip.
Not long after the video spread, the account on X claiming to be the Mossad responded. It posted that, in fact, “Ghaani is not ours.”
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17) Israel Targets Syria and Lebanon in Wave of Airstrikes
In Syria, Israel launched rare attacks on forces of the new government, while in Lebanon it took aim at the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.
By Euan Ward, Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, July 15, 2025
Military forces with their guns in the air enter a city in the beds of pickup trucks, with smoke in the background.
The Israeli military carried out a wave of airstrikes on Tuesday that targeted government forces in Syria and the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, escalating what it said were efforts to secure Israel’s northern border.
The strikes in Syria were a rare attack on forces of the new government, which is led by Islamist former rebels who toppled the dictator Bashar al-Assad in December. Israel intervened after days of deadly sectarian clashes in the southern region of Sweida, which began with fighting between Bedouin groups and militias from the Druse minority.
The Syrian government said it had sent forces to try to calm the violence in Sweida, the heartland of Syria’s Druse minority. But those forces became embroiled in clashes with local Druse fighters, leading Israel to respond with two consecutive days of airstrikes on government fighters.
Israel’s government has close ties with the country’s own Druse minority, and it has pledged to protect Druse people in nearby Syria.
The clashes, which left dozens dead, were the latest flare-up of sectarian violence to hit Syria, where tensions linger from a nearly 14-year-civil war.
The government and local Druse figures reached an agreement on Tuesday to quell the violence.
But an influential Druse leader, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, accused Syrian government forces of bombarding the city of Sweida, the provincial capital. He called on local fighters to confront the government security forces.
Syria’s defense minister, Murhaf Abu Qasra, later declared that a full cease-fire was now in place.
Since the Assad regime fell seven months ago, Israel has staged hundreds of airstrikes on Syria and has captured Syrian territory in ground operations, saying it wants to prevent any hostile forces from entrenching near its borders.
The Syrian government recently opened diplomatic contacts with Israel aimed at curbing tensions and attacks with the help of U.S. mediation.
In Lebanon, Israel’s wave of airstrikes targeted what it said were Hezbollah positions in the Bekaa Valley, a bastion of support for the Iran-backed group. They were the latest in a series of intensifying assaults against the group in what Lebanese officials and diplomats say is an attempt to pressure it to disarm.
Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said in a statement on Tuesday that the attacks were “a clear message” to both Hezbollah and the Lebanese government that Israel would respond with “maximum force” to any attempt by the group to restore its military capabilities.
Hezbollah is facing mounting U.S. and Israeli pressure to disarm — a core requirement of an increasingly fragile cease-fire agreement signed in November that ended Lebanon’s deadliest and most destructive war in decades.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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18) College Hearing Live Updates: 3 University Leaders Face Questions About Antisemitism
The heads of Georgetown, the City University of New York and the University of California, Berkeley, were immediately pressed to define antisemitism.
By Vimal Patel, July 15, 2025
Here’s the latest.
The heads of three universities are testifying in Congress, the latest batch of leaders Republicans have called to Washington over allegations of campus antisemitism.
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce called the leaders — from the City University of New York, Georgetown University and the University of California, Berkeley — to Washington to speak about “the role of faculty, funding and ideology” in antisemitism.
The Republican-led hearings on Tuesday are the latest in a series that began before the second Trump administration, months after the start of a brutal war in Gaza set off by a deadly Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Earlier hearings with Ivy League university leaders, turned into a disastrous spectacle for the educators.
Since then, Republicans have widened their lens to other kinds of institutions, which they say also failed to keep Jewish students safe when pro-Palestinian protests swept campuses around the country.
Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican and the committee’s chair, blamed campus antisemitism on series of factors Republicans have long railed against, including Middle East studies centers, faculty unions, foreign funding and diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
“The D.E.I. ideology embraced by so many university bureaucrats categorizes Jews as white oppressors and therefore, excuses, or even justifies, antisemitic harassment,” he said.
The committee’s ranking member, Representative Robert C. Scott, a Virginia Democrat, rejected that analysis. “Since this committee’s first antisemitism hearing on December 2023,” he said, “we’ve not held a single hearing addressing racism, xenophobia, sexism, Islamophobia or other challenges affecting other student groups on American college campuses.”
Mr. Walberg’s comments echoed those of President Trump, who campaigned on punishing universities that he said had not done enough to curb antisemitism. The Trump administration has taken away major sums of money — billions in Harvard’s case — from top universities. A federal task force on antisemitism has singled out many institutions for investigation, and federal agents have detained international students who were involved in pro-Palestinian activism.
Critics of the Republican efforts say the hearings are not sincere efforts to protect Jewish students, but are instead designed to silence speech that supporters of Israel do not like.
The three universities at Tuesday’s hearing have all seen pro-Palestinian activism on their campuses.
· University of California, Berkeley: Students for Justice in Palestine, a student activist group, was founded at the university in the early 1990s. In 2024, pro-Palestinian demonstrators erected scores of tents on the campus and occupied a building, and an event featuring an Israeli speaker was canceled after protesters smashed doors. The chancellor at the time called it “an attack on the fundamental values of the university.”
· CUNY: At the City University of New York, one of the nation’s largest public university systems, the law school is particularly known for outspoken pro-Palestinian activists among its graduates. Protests at CUNY campuses in 2024 led to mass arrests. After an investigation, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights said last year that the university had mishandled a number of complaints of antisemitism and other forms of bias since 2019.
· Georgetown: The university, in Washington, D.C., has vocally opposed the Trump administration’s moves against colleges. In March, the U.S. attorney for the district threatened to bar Georgetown graduates from federal jobs because of the university’s diversity programming. The law school dean, in a strongly worded response, called the threat unconstitutional.
Sharon Otterman and Alan Blinder contributed reporting.
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19) Blazes in Northern Ireland Recall an Old Message: You Are Not Welcome Here
A bonfire topped with an effigy of a migrant boat. Homes set alight. During the Troubles, similar tactics were used to target Irish Catholics in the territory.
By Ali Watkins, July 15, 2025
Ali Watkins reported from Ballymena, Belfast and Portadown in Northern Ireland. She has written a book, “The Next One Is for You,” about the decades-long sectarian conflict known as the Troubles.
A bonfire with an effigy of migrants in a boat before it was set on fire this month in Moygashel, Northern Ireland. A tide of anti-immigrant sentiment in the territory has evoked darker moments in Northern Irish history. Credit...Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
An effigy of a boat filled with migrants, placed on top of a bonfire and set alight. Homes set on fire during a spasm of riots. Displaced families fleeing as angry mobs hurled Molotov cocktails.
This drumbeat of anti-immigrant episodes has taken place over the last five weeks in Northern Ireland. But the images have also brought to mind darker moments in the history of the territory, where fire was long used to intimidate and force out people seen by some as outsiders.
The target of this most recent wave of violence is different from those of the sectarian attacks that defined this land during the Troubles. That decades-long conflict was between the region’s hard-line Protestant Loyalists, who believed Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom, and Irish Catholic nationalists, who wanted the territory to become part of the Republic of Ireland.
But the violence shares a common message: You are not welcome here. If you won’t leave, we may make you.
“Territorialism in Northern Ireland is still embedded — and not only embedded, it’s being patrolled by armed groups,” said Duncan Morrow, a politics professor at Ulster University in Belfast. “Northern Ireland as a society escalates extremely rapidly, because so much of this is already in the whole way society’s organized.”
The town of Ballymena, about 30 miles from Belfast, is sometimes called the “buckle” of Northern Ireland’s Protestant Bible Belt. The most recent violence erupted there after two 14-year-old boys were charged with the attempted oral rape of a local girl on June 7. The two boys, who the BBC reported spoke in court through a Romanian translator, denied the charges.
The night after the boys appeared in court, a peaceful vigil for the girl in Ballymena spiraled into a riot, targeted at members of the Roma community in the Clonavon Terrace area. For six consecutive nights, more violence broke out across the region.
Rioters in Ballymena burned several homes, many of them belonging to immigrant families. Masked gangs in Larne, about 20 miles east, set fire to a leisure center that had been temporarily used as a shelter for those who had been displaced. And angry mobs bore down on immigrant housing in Portadown in County Armagh, where landlords urged residents to temporarily relocate until the threat had quieted.
Since then, 21 families have been placed in temporary housing for shelter and safety as a result of the attacks, according to the Northern Ireland Housing Executive.
A vast majority of those who live in Northern Ireland do not endorse violence. Still, last month’s harrowing scenes were a reminder that the area’s embers of riot and tribalism are still flammable.
Not far from the facades of charred homes in Ballymena is the former site of a Catholic primary school, which was set alight in a 2005 attack that the police described as sectarian. Nearby, Our Lady of Harryville Catholic Church, since demolished, was a lightning rod for arson attacks both before and after the Good Friday Agreement, the 1998 peace deal that largely ended the Troubles.
In recent years, a relatively modest trickle of immigrants has become the subject of hostility both in the Irish Republic and in Northern Ireland, which remains the least diverse area of the United Kingdom by a significant margin. On an island that was defined for centuries by outward emigration, the demographic shift has been highly visible, especially in poorer, working-class communities where many immigrant families land.
“The geography of it is, if you like, a little bit more like 1969 when you had odd Catholics living on the streets,” said Dominic Bryan, a professor at Queens University in Belfast who studies conflict.
In August 1969, Loyalist mobs attacked and burned Catholic homes in Belfast and Derry, forcing thousands of families to flee. Today, Professor Bryan said, immigrant families are obvious minority targets on the otherwise largely homogeneous streets of the North.
“They’ve become very exposed,” he said.
Further agitating the scene are various criminal and paramilitary elements on its periphery. Ballymena remains a locus for dissident, Loyalist paramilitaries, some of whom have regrouped as criminal syndicates. Court cases indicate the town is also believed by the police to have been used as a base for a Romanian organized crime gang, which traffics in drugs and prostitution.
The police have long accused Loyalist paramilitary groups of fomenting unrest. Last summer, officials in Northern Ireland and the Republic blamed those actors for facilitating widespread anti-immigrant violence in Dublin, as well as in Belfast and other parts of Northern Ireland.
Officials have not pinned the arson attacks in June on Loyalist gangs, but they said they were probing possible connections. Experts say much of the recent disorder was organized online, where some Loyalist factions have adopted far-right, anti-immigrant language in recent years.
Last Thursday, overlapping ideologies were visible in the effigy of the migrant boat set alight on top of a celebratory bonfire for the Twelfth of July, an annual Unionist commemoration of a Protestant king’s military victory over a Catholic king. Banners on the bonfire read “Stop the boats” and “Veterans before refugees.”
This kind of nativist sentiment has historically found fertile ground in Ballymena, the land of Ian Paisley, the firebrand Protestant preacher who shaped the hard-line politics of contemporary Unionism, the movement to remain part of the United Kingdom. As paramilitary groups have retreated into more entrenched, isolated corners, they have maintained a cultural and social hold, particularly on disenfranchised youth.
“Soft-power paramilitarism is huge in these areas,” Professor Morrow said. “Most of the time they operate through their more nebulous social control, with young people and the whole cultural thing. That’s why it becomes so difficult to pinpoint.”
To walk the streets last month around Clonavon Terrace in Ballymena — an interface between what were the traditionally Protestant and Catholic areas of the town — was to rewind Northern Ireland’s clock. Union Jacks and red-and-white Ulster flags were ubiquitous, plastered against doors, flying out of windows or draped as garden ornaments.
When a photographer and I stopped outside a home, draped in British and Ulster memorabilia, a young man stuck his head out of a window, demanding to know who we were, what we were doing and why. Further down the block, I glanced back and saw that the man had stepped outside into his garden and was silently watching us until we turned the corner.
The suspicion toward outsiders was palpable at riots in Ballymena on June 11 and on the following day in Portadown, where protesters demanded the identification cards of journalists and confronted strangers about their politics. In Portadown, a peaceful protest slowly dispersed, but spectators lingered, expecting violence. Sure enough, small groups of masked youth began lobbing bricks at the many police officers on site.
Earlier, a man in a neatly pressed shirt and dark trench coat had watched the crowd. “There’s serious concerns around uncontrolled immigration and indeed illegal immigration,” said the man, Jonathan Buckley, an assemblyman with the Democratic Unionist Party from Portadown. But, he added, “violence is completely intolerable.”
Intolerable, perhaps — but also a shared spectacle. Across Northern Ireland’s tumult, from the Ballymena riots to the burning of migrant effigies and bonfires last week, one constant was the throngs of onlookers. Tucked behind and among police lines, they came with beer cans and with their children, eager for nightfall.
In Ballymena last month, a group pointed out cues, as if watching a stage play they had seen before. The police would charge here; the crowd would move here; the unmarked van would move here; the Molotov cocktails would come from here.
The night progressed accordingly. As the sun began to set over the Harryville Bridge, the pregnant tension exploded with a single bottle, hurtling across the sky and smacking against a police riot shield.
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20) Defining Antisemitism Is the Subject of Bitter Debate
There’s no consensus about what, precisely, constitutes antisemitism.
By Vimal Patel, July 15, 2025
A discussion at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in February of last year. Credit...Nic Antaya for The New York Times
Many donors, politicians and Jewish students have pressured their colleges to confront antisemitism more forcefully. But one challenge can make the exercise feel like quicksilver.
There’s no consensus about what, precisely, constitutes antisemitism.
University administrators and federal officials alike have considered one contentious definition that has gained traction in recent years, put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
The definition itself is not the source of controversy. It states that antisemitism is a “certain perception of Jews that may be expressed as hatred” toward them. But the alliance also includes with the definition a series of examples that alarm many supporters of free expression.
They include holding Israel to a “double standard” and claiming Israel’s existence is a “racist endeavor.” Supporters of the Palestinian cause say those examples conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism and are intended to protect Israel from criticism.
Supporters of the alliance’s definition say that it helps press colleges to stop tolerating behavior against Jews that would be unacceptable if it were directed at racial minority groups or L.G.B.T.Q. students.
Debates over how to define antisemitism have intensified on college campuses since the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 and Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza. The definition has been invoked in debates over whether to cancel controversial speakers, events and panels on the ground that they are antisemitic.
Donald Trump campaigned on punishing universities that did not do enough to curb antisemitism. His administration has threatened significant amounts of funding to institutions like Harvard, saying they did not do enough to keep Jewish students safe.
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