Urgent medical alert – Free Mumia
Mumia’s eyesight endangered
Mumia’s eyesight is deteriorating at an alarming rate.
An independent expert ophthalmologist has confirmed the progression of his eye disease by analyzing Mumia’s most recent eye exams. She reports that he needs surgery and medically necessary treatment “immediately” or faces the possibility of “permanent blindness.”
Mumia’s vision has plummeted from 20/30 with glasses in 2024 (near normal) to 20/200 today—legally blind—because the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PA DOC) failed to adequately monitor his vision and delayed his urgently necessary medical treatment and surgery. The PA DOC has known since at least March of 2025 that Mumia needed eye surgery. Exams from 2024 – 2025 showed a sharp deterioration, demanding immediate intervention. Despite knowing the urgency, they waited until July to act and then pushed surgery off to an unspecified date in September.
Mumia believes he now suffers from “diabetic retinopathy” stemming from a diabetic coma that he endured after being given an improper and unmonitored dose of steroids for a skin disease in 2015. Mumia asserts that the PA DOC is “slow-walking [him] to blindness” in 2025 – another egregious case of the prison’s medical neglect, medical harm, and inability to treat Mumia’s medical needs.
Court records already document this pattern: (a) negligence in monitoring lab reports that led to the diabetic coma, and (b) deliberate denial and delay of his hepatitis C treatment that left him with cirrhosis.
OUR DEMANDS:
· Release Mumia now – unconditionally – into the care of his own doctors, family, and friends. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) has, once again, shown it cannot monitor or provide the timely, corrective care he urgently needs.
· Schedule Mumia’s eye surgery and medically necessary treatment immediately, under the supervision of his independent ophthalmologist, and have it performed by the nearest outside provider approved by that physician.
· Provide Dr. Ricardo Alvarez, Mumia’s chosen physician, with all the medical reports from the prison and any other outside examiners who have seen him in 2025.
RELEASE AGING PRISONERS:
The following report by Dr. Ricardo Alvarez details a more complete picture of the history of elder abuse by the Prison Industrial Complex – the New Jim Crow – and with particular regard to Mumia Abu-Jamal and other political prisoners:
Parole Elder Abuse article on Mumia Abu-Jamal :
https://paroleelderabuse.org/mumia-institutional-elder-abuse-reports/
What you can do immediately to help:
Call the prison and demand that Mumia immediately receives local expert treatment
Sample script:
“My name is ________and I am calling from ________
I am calling with regard to Mumia Abu-Jamal, also known as Wesley Cook AM8335.
He is suffering from dire vision loss that can be easily treated—or else he will lose his eyesight entirely.
I DEMAND THAT THIS TREATMENT HAPPEN IMMEDIATELY.”
Primary targets:
Bernadette Mason
Superintendent, SCI Mahanoy
Call 570-773-2158
Laurel Hardy
Secretary, PA DOC
Call 717-728-2573
ra-crpadocsecretary@pa.gov
Central Office, PA DOC
ra-contactdoc@pa.gov
Upcoming Press Conference, Rallies and Marches are being planned so please stay tuned!!
Questions and comments may be sent to: info@freedomarchives.org
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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  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 KagarlitskyWe, 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 Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe 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) Deportations Reach New High After Summer Surge in Immigration Arrests
By Albert Sun, Aug. 21, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/08/21/us/trump-deportations-summer-data-immigration-arrests.html
Federal agents at an ICE facility, Delaney Hall, in Newark in July, 2025. Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
President Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations may be coming closer to reality. Until June, deportations had lagged behind immigration arrests and detentions. By the first week of August, deportations reached nearly 1,500 people per day, according to the latest data, a pace not seen since the Obama administration.
With an infusion of cash from Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill signed in July — an extra $76 billion that Immigration and Customs Enforcement can spend over a little more than four years — the agency appears poised to scale its operations even further.
At least 180,000 people have been deported by ICE under Mr. Trump so far. At the current higher pace, the agency is on track to deport more than 400,000 people in his first year in office, well more than the 271,000 people ICE removed in the year ending last September but still short of the administration’s stated goal of one million deportations a year.
(The Department of Homeland Security says the total number of deportations so far under Mr. Trump is much higher — at 332,000. That figure includes people who are turned around or quickly deported at U.S. borders by Customs and Border Protection.)
ICE now uses about a dozen charter planes every day to conduct deportations and move detainees around the country, almost twice as many as in January, according to data collected by Tom Cartwright, an immigration advocate who tracks ICE flights. In May, ICE modified its contract with CSI Aviation, its primary air charter company, to increase the number of flights per week. It has also resumed using a limited number of military planes.
ICE’s expanded operations have drawn nationwide protests, fierce backlash and an endless series of legal challenges. But officials have pressed forward with aggressive tactics anyway.
Not just criminals
Mr. Trump may be catching up to President Barack Obama, whom immigrant advocates called the “deporter in chief,” but the nature of his immigration enforcement has been very different. The hundreds of thousands of people removed under Mr. Obama were mostly recent border-crossers, and ICE focused its arrests in the interior of the country on criminals.
In late May, Stephen Miller, a White House immigration policy adviser, ordered ICE leaders to escalate arrests across the board, even if it meant broadening its focus beyond immigrants with a criminal record.
Since then, almost all of the increase in arrests has been of people without any prior criminal convictions. Immigration arrests of people with a past violent criminal conviction increased to about 1,900 in June from about 1,100 in December. At the same time, arrests overall tripled to more than 28,000 and arrests of people with no past conviction or charges increased by almost 20 times.
But the summer surge experienced in much of the country did not last. Arrests peaked at an average of almost 1,200 per day in early June, but the pace has since fallen back to levels seen in April.
It’s unclear why arrests dropped, but in Los Angeles, high-profile street arrests and raids triggered a backlash that led to protests and the deployment of the National Guard and the Marines.
In response to a lawsuit accusing ICE of illegal racial profiling, a federal court issued a temporary restraining order blocking the government from arresting someone based on their race or ethnicity and presence at a certain location. The Trump administration has appealed the order.
Between the start of the surge and the court order, ICE arrested more than 2,000 immigrants in the Los Angeles area who had no criminal records. A majority were from Mexico or Guatemala.
New York City also saw a spike in arrests of non-criminals this summer, many at immigration court and ICE check-ins, tactics which prompted their own backlash and lawsuit.
New detention centers
With 60,000 people now in custody, the Trump administration has stretched the capacity of the immigrant detention system, arresting more people and releasing far fewer on bond, parole or supervised release.
That’s a deliberate tactic to boost deportations, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, because people held in detention are more likely to have their cases end with a removal order and are also more likely to abandon their cases and agree to be deported.
The Laken Riley Act also expanded the types of unauthorized immigrants whom ICE is required to keep in detention to include many who have been accused of low-level crimes, like shoplifting.
To hold them all, ICE has had to seek more and more detention space. In addition to holding more people at existing facilities, ICE has added at least 50 new detention centers since Mr. Trump took office. At the end of July, these facilities held more than 6,000 people.
Among the detention centers are Delaney Hall, a private facility run by the Geo Group in Newark; a tent facility in El Paso that was formerly used by the U.S. Border Patrol; the Guantanamo Bay naval base; a reopened family detention center in Dilley, Texas; federal prisons in Atlanta, Brooklyn, Miami, and Philadelphia, and a large number of state and local jails and prisons.
More money for enforcement
Because deporting people who are in the country unlawfully is logistically challenging, to reach its goal of speeding deportations, ICE will likely need to hire more agents not only to arrest people but also to ensure due process, said Blas Nuñez-Neto, who was a homeland security adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The agency will also need to procure more detention space to hold people for several weeks while their removal is arranged, he said, and contract for more aircraft for removal flights.
Flush with new money on top of its 2025 budget of $10 billion, ICE is preparing to spend to address each of those chokepoints. Tricia McLaughlin, a D.H.S. spokeswoman, said the new funding would go toward hiring 10,000 ICE agents and adding 80,000 new detention beds. Some $45 billion is designated for expanding detention, and $14 billion is set aside for transporting people out of the country.
ICE also intends to expand detention partnerships with state and local governments, like the one for the facility Florida has named “Alligator Alcatraz,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
More money for enforcement
Because deporting people who are in the country unlawfully is logistically challenging, to reach its goal of speeding deportations, ICE will likely need to hire more agents not only to arrest people but also to ensure due process, said Blas Nuñez-Neto, who was a homeland security adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The agency will also need to procure more detention space to hold people for several weeks while their removal is arranged, he said, and contract for more aircraft for removal flights.
Flush with new money on top of its 2025 budget of $10 billion, ICE is preparing to spend to address each of those chokepoints. Tricia McLaughlin, a D.H.S. spokeswoman, said the new funding would go toward hiring 10,000 ICE agents and adding 80,000 new detention beds. Some $45 billion is designated for expanding detention, and $14 billion is set aside for transporting people out of the country.
ICE also intends to expand detention partnerships with state and local governments, like the one for the facility Florida has named “Alligator Alcatraz,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
About the data
Data comes from Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports and data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the Deportation Data Project, a repository of immigration enforcement data at the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
Arrests shown in charts are administrative arrests — arrests in which ICE is seeking to deport rather than criminally prosecute the arrestees — that were conducted by the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division and that led to a book-in to detention. The charts do not include criminal arrests, arrests by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division or arrests by Customs and Border Protection.
Deportations are removals and enforcement returns conducted by ICE.
For the chart of arrests by field office, the Los Angeles field office covers Los Angeles County and surrounding counties from San Luis Obispo to Riverside Counties. The New York City field office covers the five boroughs, Long Island and the Hudson Valley. The Boston field office covers all six New England states. The Miami field office covers Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Chicago field office covers Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas and Wisconsin. The San Antonio field office covers Central Texas spanning from near Del Rio to Austin.
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2) Federal Agents Detain Dozens of Workers in Raid at New Jersey Warehouse
It appeared to be among the largest federal raids in the state since President Trump took office.
By Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Mark Bonamo, Publishe, Aug. 20, 2025, Updated Aug. 21, 2025
Federal officers detained dozens of immigrant workers at a warehouse in Edison, N.J., on Wednesday in what appeared to be among the largest federal raids in the state since President Trump took office.
The hourslong operation was conducted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, whose officers arrived at the warehouse along a busy stretch of shipping facilities west of New York City about 9 a.m.
The federal officers arrested 29 people, according to the Edison mayor’s office, which said that the township’s Police Department had been notified that the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the customs agency, would be in the area on Wednesday.
The purpose of the operation remained unclear on Wednesday night, and it was unclear if other federal agencies had been involved. The Department of Homeland Security and the Customs and Border Protection agency did not reply to requests for comment.
A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told Univision that the agency had carried out “a surprise inspection” of the warehouse. The agency also told Univision that the operation was part of routine customs enforcement efforts, not specifically immigration-related, but that officers had checked the immigration status of workers.
The warehouse — where packages were stacked high in a space about the size of a professional football field — handles shipping for major online retailers, distributing packages across the Northeast, three workers told The New York Times.
The facility is a bonded warehouse, a facility where importers can store foreign goods still in transit without immediately paying import duties and that is under the supervision of the Customs and Border Protection agency, one worker said. The agency has said that it is authorized to conduct unannounced inspections at bonded warehouses to ensure that facilities are adhering to “protocols for the importation of cargo entering the United States.”
Workplace immigration raids have been uncommon in the New York City area, where most arrests have unfolded inside immigration offices and courthouses. Wednesday’s warehouse raid appeared to be at least the second this summer in Edison, a township and commercial hub of about 100,000 people that is about a one-hour drive from New York City.
On July 8, the immigration authorities raided a wine and liquor warehouse in Edison during a “worksite compliance inspection,” arresting 20 workers, mostly from South and Central America, who officials said were undocumented.
Many of the workers detained on Wednesday hailed from Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and elsewhere, workers and activists said.
Workers who were interviewed Wednesday night described a chaotic scene of fear and confusion that began when about 20 federal agents stormed through the front door, while another group emerged from vehicles outside, blocking potential points of escape.
Inside, workers ran, yelling, “La migra,” which is Spanish shorthand for the federal immigration authorities, according to the workers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and activists who were outside and spoke with some employees as they were released. Some workers were injured during the scramble, workers and activists said, and a video showed at least one ambulance arriving on the scene.
Some workers hid from the officers in the warehouse’s towering rafters, remaining there for hours even after officers flew a drone inside the warehouse to try to find them, the people said in interviews. Some texted relatives from their hiding spots.
The agents did not state the purpose of their visit, according to some workers, and told those present to gather in a corner where workers were taken into a meeting room to be interrogated one by one.
Officers spent hours checking the workers’ immigration status, placing yellow wristbands on those whom they determined to have legal status and leading others away in zip ties, employees said. Agents searched the warehouse and trucks to make sure no workers were hiding.
Amanda Dominguez, a community organizer at New Labor, an advocacy group that represents low-wage immigrant workers, said that the warehouse workers had been hired by a staffing agency, calling the raid “an attack on working-class people.”
Outside, activists and relatives of the workers gathered throughout the day, searching for answers and waiting anxiously to see if their relatives had been detained or let go.
“People were very upset and crying and angry, completely understandably,” said Ellen Whitt, who works at DIRE, a New Jersey hotline that responds to calls about raids and from relatives of immigrants who have been detained. “One girl’s father was taken. She was very, very upset.”
The facility was largely desolate on Wednesday evening, its forklifts mainly quiet as supervisors called temporary employment agencies to help replace the detained workers.
Tracey Tully contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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3) He Was the Face and Voice of Gaza. Israel Assassinated Him.
By Lydia Polgreen, Opinion Columnist, Aug. 21, 2025
Anas al-Sharif reporting in Gaza City last year. Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters
Eleven days ago, Israel assassinated a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist, a young man who had suddenly become the face and voice of the desperate people of his homeland, Gaza.
In gripping dispatches on Al Jazeera and his social media feeds, Anas al-Sharif documented the relentless Israeli assault on civilians, breaking down on camera as he reported on the gathering famine. He was 28 years old, a husband and the father of two young children. He, four of his colleagues from Al Jazeera and at least one freelance journalist were killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a press tent outside a hospital in Gaza City.
The Israeli military made no attempt to obscure this brazen strike on civilians, which is a war crime. Instead, it argued that al-Sharif was not a civilian at all. It claimed with no credible evidence that he was the commander of a Hamas cell and that his journalism was merely a cover for that clandestine role. Those killed alongside him — Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Moamen Aliwa and Mohammad al-Khaldi — were presumably acceptable collateral damage in pursuit of this target.
Since the gruesome Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 Israelis, Israel has waged a pitiless war in Gaza. More than 62,000 people have been killed, including some 18,500 children, according to local health authorities in what is considered by many experts to be an undercount. Most of the tiny enclave is now rubble; almost all of Gaza’s two million people have been forced to flee their homes, many repeatedly. Since Israel ended the latest cease-fire in March, it has sharply curtailed the amount of humanitarian aid reaching Gaza. Most of its population, according to the United Nations, is experiencing or staring down starvation.
Amid so much suffering, the targeting of a single journalist may seem like an individual tragedy. But coming as Israel begins an all-out assault to capture Gaza City and as Benjamin Netanyahu has said he intends to occupy all of Gaza in the face of growing global condemnation, the killing of al-Sharif, like the killing in March of his fellow Al Jazeera correspondent Hossam Shabat, marks an ominous new phase in the war.
To justify its pitiless pulverizing of Gaza, Israel has endlessly invoked the threat of Hamas, supposedly lurking in schools, hospitals, homes and mosques. Now it has begun not only accusing individual journalists of being Hamas fighters but also openly admitting to killing them in targeted attacks, based on purported evidence that is all but impossible to verify.
With Gaza closed to international journalists, this new campaign has created a pretext to eliminate the remaining journalists with the platform to bear witness and terrify anyone brave enough to attempt to take the place of the fallen. It has also exposed the cruel logic at the heart of Israel’s prosecution of the war: If Hamas is everywhere, then every Gazan is Hamas. This is truly a war with no limits, and soon there may be no journalists left to document its horror.
I have long been awed by the work of journalists who find their own homeland under attack. I spent years in war zones as a foreign correspondent, working alongside some of the bravest and finest journalists I’ve ever encountered. We were engaged in the same work, fundamentally: trying to help the world understand seemingly incomprehensible suffering. As an American employed by an American news organization, I stood on the same front lines in Congo, in Darfur, in Kashmir and elsewhere. But I would fly home to safety, while they would remain, struggling along with everyone else to survive.
We differed in another important way as well. I chose and pursued a career in journalism. For many reporters from war zones, the profession chose them. This was the story of Mohammed Mhawish, a young man from Gaza City. When Hamas attacked Israel, he was dreaming of a career in the arts. He had graduated from the Islamic University in Gaza, where he studied English and creative writing, and hoped to write literature and poetry. Instead, he found himself working as a journalist for Al Jazeera’s English-language service.
“It was a feeling of obligation to my people and a responsibility to my hometown that was being destroyed in real time,” he told me. “I never imagined myself being given the responsibility or assigned the responsibility to be writing through destruction and death and loss and tragedy.” Gaza City is a small place, so he got to know al-Sharif as they both struggled to cover the catastrophe unfolding around them.
“He was this really brave young person,” Mhawish told me. Before the war, his work had focused on culture and ordinary life. “He reported on families having hope, families getting married, people celebrating life accomplishments, people just enjoying life on a daily basis. He never wanted or aspired to be a correspondent carrying a responsibility for his entire people.”
The work took a toll on al-Sharif. “I remember many times where he was in public and sometimes personally with other colleagues of his in Gaza, just saying how hungry he was,” Mhawish said. “How tired, how exhausted, how terrified and how scared — he was really scared all the time. He was feeling that he was being watched and he’s being hunted and he’s being targeted.”
Under international law, journalists are considered civilians. But since the beginning of the war in Gaza, at least 192 journalists have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (I’m on the organization’s board). “At some point, I had to abandon my press vest because it no longer provided me with the protection that I was seeking,” Mhawish told me. “In fact, it functioned as a target on my back.”
Mhawish left Gaza last year. Al-Sharif’s death, coming after so many threats from Israeli military officials, was an especially devastating blow. “At the end of the day, he chose to give the sacrifice of his life,” Mhawish said. “I am really, really tired of grieving my friends and colleagues.”
When the Saudi government murdered Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident columnist who wrote for The Washington Post, inside its consulate in Turkey, it created a global outcry. Russia’s detention and killing of journalists have likewise provoked outpourings of support. If the governments bother to concoct accusations — of espionage and other crimes — to justify these heinous acts against working journalists, they are usually dismissed out of hand as the ravings of autocratic regimes bent on destroying free speech.
The response to al-Sharif’s killing, like that of scores of other Palestinian journalists, has been different — more muted, more likely to give equal weight to Israeli accusations despite the lack of verifiable evidence. Mhawish told me he was dismayed to see so many news organizations around the world parrot Israeli claims that his friend was killed because he was a Hamas militant. “What’s heartbreaking about this is that it tells me that there are journalists in the world who are justifying the killing of other journalists,” he said.
This is another respect in which I, as a foreign journalist, was always perceived differently from the local journalists who worked alongside me in war zones. They knew far more than I did about events unfolding in their homeland. They understood how to move safely through dangerous territory and possessed essential contacts and expertise that helped enrich my coverage.
Ideally, this leads to mutually beneficial and symbiotic relationships between local journalists and their international counterparts, who often hire locals to improve their coverage. But in some places, what might be seen as expertise comes to be viewed as something darker. As a foreigner, I tend to be seen as a neutral outside observer. A local reporter, embedded in her community and enduring the same hardships as her fellow citizens, comes under more scrutiny. She cannot help being blinkered, the thinking goes, by her own suffering and root for one side in the conflict she is covering. She is, surely, a partisan.
In the remarkable new documentary “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” a pair of Ukrainian journalists accompany a group of Ukrainian soldiers through a narrow band of forest as they seek to recapture a village from Russian forces. It is a claustrophobic, harrowing film, unfolding in bunkers and foxholes. At one point the film’s director, the Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov, notes the parallel between himself, the journalist, and the young officer he is interviewing.
The soldier, Chernov says, picked up a rifle, while he picked up a camera. Through different means, each man sought to stand up for the dignity and sovereignty of Ukraine’s people. Were Chernov, who works for The Associated Press, to be targeted or smeared by the Russian state, journalists the world over would not hesitate to rally to his side and dismiss any allegations against him as propaganda. I would be among the first to join any crusade on his behalf.
It is in this context that we must consider Israel’s contention that al-Sharif was a Hamas militant. The evidence offered to the public is weak, consisting of screenshots of spreadsheets, purported service numbers and old payments that have not been independently verified.
“The Israeli military seems to be making accusations without any substantive evidence as a license to kill journalists,” said Irene Khan, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, when a different Israeli airstrike killed another Al Jazeera journalist and his cameraman last year. Al-Sharif reported on their deaths.
In interviews before his own death, al-Sharif pleaded for help and safety. “All of this is happening because my coverage of the crimes of the Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip harms them and damages their image in the world,” he told the Committee to Protect Journalists. “They accuse me of being a terrorist because the occupation wants to assassinate me morally.”
Even if one takes Israel’s allegations at face value — which I absolutely do not, given Israel’s track record — and entertain the idea that in 2013, at the age of 17, al-Sharif joined Hamas in some form, what are we to make of that choice? Hamas at that time had been the governing authority of his homeland since 2006. It ran the entire state apparatus of a tiny enclave. “It is a movement with a vast social infrastructure,” Tareq Baconi, the author of a book about Hamas, has written, “connected to many Palestinians who are unaffiliated with either the movement’s political or military platforms.”
Take it further and contemplate, based on Israel’s supposed evidence, that al-Sharif had played some military role before becoming a journalist. The history of war correspondence is replete with examples of fighters turned reporters — indeed perhaps the most famous among them, George Orwell, recorded soldiers’ lives while fighting in the Spanish Civil War and became a war correspondent.
These days, having served in the military is widely seen as an asset among American war reporters. Far from seeing those who served as hopelessly biased, editors rightly value the expertise and perspective these reporters bring from their experiences and trust them to prioritize their new role as journalistic observers. In Israel most young people are required to serve in the military, so military experience is common among journalists.
Many will protest that Hamas is different from the military of a state. This is true. Long before its gruesome attack on Israel on Oct. 7, it engaged in horrifying terror tactics like suicide bombings that targeted civilians. Many countries, including the United States, consider it a terrorist organization. But it was the accepted authority in Gaza.
Indeed, the uncomfortable truth is that Hamas owes much of its strength to Netanyahu’s cynical policies, which, as The Times reported in 2023, included tacit support designed to prop up Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority. As late as September of that year, the month before Hamas attacked Israel, his government welcomed the flow of millions of dollars to Hamas via Qatar.
“Even as the Israeli military obtained battle plans for a Hamas invasion and analysts observed significant terrorism exercises just over the border in Gaza, the payments continued,” my newsroom colleagues wrote. “For years, Israeli intelligence officers even escorted a Qatari official into Gaza, where he doled out money from suitcases filled with millions of dollars.”
Freud theorized that hysterics were an extreme version of ordinary people experiencing outsize distress in exceptional circumstances. In this way, journalists are an extreme version of the curious person who lingers and tries to figure out what’s going on when everyone else, sensing danger, has packed up their curiosity and gone home.
What are journalists but unusual people who decide on society’s behalf to witness the unbearable? They set aside their personal safety, and perhaps find strange thrills in the horrors of the work they do and the things that they witness. There can be a kind of moral deformity in this, to be sure, but it’s an important and socially recognized role. Someone’s got to send word back into history.
In this regard, journalists are actually not that different from soldiers. Soldiers, after all, are ordinary people given minimal training, mostly how to use their equipment and the tactical ways that one does the job. And then they set off to do a monstrous task on behalf of the rest of us, something most of us cannot possibly imagine doing.
This strange and seldom acknowledged kinship is what permits a pall of suspicion to fall over the work of journalists in war zones, especially local ones, who cannot help being caught up in the events unfolding around them. Using their chosen instruments and medium, they are engaged in a struggle to protect their home and their people. It is easy to see how the other side will seek to cast them as combatants, even if they carry no weapons. But that does not mean we should believe them.
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4) Israel’s Operation to Take Control of Gaza City Looms. Where Does It Stand?
The Israeli government is expanding its operation in Gaza, despite its generals’ advice and as it deliberates on a new cease-fire proposal.
Published Aug. 8, 2025, Updated Aug. 21, 2025
Southern Gaza, as seen from a Jordanian Air Force plane delivering humanitarian aid in July. Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
The Israeli military is widening its offensive in the Gaza Strip, even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu weighs a new cease-fire proposal that would bring it to a halt.
Israeli officials say that ground forces are already operating in Zeitoun, a neighborhood in the southern part of the city. The possibility of Israeli soldiers moving into other neighborhoods in Gaza City has raised alarm among Palestinians who have been repeatedly displaced since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that ignited the war.
Some people have said they would follow Israeli evacuation orders, while others have said they will remain in their homes, even if doing so would risk their lives. On Thursday, scores of Palestinians participated in a protest in Gaza City, demanding an end to the war.
The decision to move forward with the operation was approved by Mr. Netanyahu’s government in early August against the advice of the military’s high command, which has expressed concern about the exhaustion of reservist soldiers and the possibility of endangering hostages still held in Gaza.
Why does Israel want to control Gaza City?
Mr. Netanyahu said in interviews earlier this month that an expanded operation would ensure Israel’s security, drive Hamas from power and enable the return of hostages.
His office said that the security cabinet had adopted “five principles for concluding the war,” including disarming Hamas, bringing back the hostages, demilitarizing Gaza, establishing Israeli security control over the enclave and setting up “an alternative civilian administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority.”
The announcement by his office seemed to stop short of saying Israel would take full control of the Gaza Strip, which Mr. Netanyahu earlier said was his plan, at least temporarily.
Where is Israel’s military now?
After nearly two years of war, the Israeli military says it controls about 75 percent of Gaza.
The main part outside its control is a coastal strip stretching from Gaza City in the north to Khan Younis in the south. Many of the two million Palestinians in Gaza have squeezed into tents, makeshift shelters and apartments in that stretch of land.
In recent days, Israeli troops began operating in the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza City, while other forces were active on the outskirts of the city, according to the Israeli military.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office has said the military would prepare to take control of Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the fighting zones.
What would it mean for civilians?
For civilians in Gaza, the possibility of an escalated operation has raised fears that many more of them could be killed and that living conditionscould get even worse.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is devastating, with many people struggling to find food, clean water, and electricity. Many Gazans have been displaced more than once since the war began, and more than 60,000 have been killed, according to the local health authorities, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Some Palestinians in Gaza City have said they refuse to be displaced again.
“We’ve had enough, we’re not going anywhere,” said Hassan Shehada, a 62-year-old textile factory owner. “We’re so tired and we can’t take it anymore.”
How long would it take?
Even though Israeli troops are already operating in Zeitoun, it could be weeks before the military launches a broader assault.
To take over Gaza City, the military needs more soldiers. On Wednesday, it called up 60,000 reservists and announced plans to extend the duty of 20,000 others.
Yet the additional reservists were set to report for duty only in September, according to two Israeli military officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational plans. On Wednesday, however, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister had ordered the military to shorten its timeline.
The military believes it could seize the remaining parts of Gaza within months.
Who would govern?
Mr. Netanyahu said earlier this month that Israel did not want permanent authority over Gaza. “We don’t want to keep it,” he said. “We don’t want to be there as a governing body. We want to hand it over to Arab forces.”
Arab states could agree to participate in an international force, possibly handling security and administration, perhaps with foreign peacekeepers or contractors. But they would most likely want approval from, and a role for, the Palestinian Authority, which currently administers part of the West Bank and governed in parts of Gaza before Hamas came to power in 2007.
Israel’s security cabinet has insisted that the Palestinian Authority be excluded from any civilian government.
What will Hamas do?
After Israel announced its decision to take over Gaza City earlier this month, Hamas said that occupying the city and evacuating its residents would constitute “a new war crime.”
The militant group did not say in detail how it would respond. But Hamas has resisted calls to surrender throughout the war, and despite heavy losses among its leadership, it has continued to recruit new fighters.
Who has objected?
The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, is among those who have pushed back against Mr. Netanyahu’s plan, according to Israeli security officials. He expressed concern that expanded operations would further endanger the remaining hostages in Gaza, about 20 of whom are believed to still be alive, that it would put more strain on already-exhausted resources and troops, and make the armed forces responsible for governing two million Palestinians, the officials said.
At a U.N. Security Council meeting earlier this month, Miroslav Jenca, the U.N.’s assistant secretary-general for Europe, Central Asia and the Americas, said expanded military operations “would risk catastrophic consequences for millions of Palestinians and could further endanger the lives of the remaining hostages.”
Natan Odenheimer and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.
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5) ‘We Can’t Take It Anymore’: Gazans Fear Looming Israeli Operation
Israel’s plan to invade Gaza City, the most populous city in the northern Gaza Strip, has forced many families to consider uprooting themselves.
By Adam Rasgon and Iyad Abuheweila
Adam Rasgon reported from Tel Aviv and Iyad Abuheweila from Istanbul, Published Aug. 20, 2025, Updated Aug. 21, 2025
An Israeli strike hits a building on Wednesday in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When Israel announced its plan to invade Gaza City in early August, Hassan Shehada scrambled to find an apartment in towns south of the city.
For a week, Mr. Shehada, a 62-year-old textile factory owner, made calls to friends and colleagues in Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat and al-Zawayda, asking for help in securing a place for him and his family. Since the start of the war, he had been displaced six times, and each time he had managed to find an apartment to house his family. This time, however, his efforts failed.
“We’ve had enough, we’re not going anywhere,” Mr. Shehada said. “We’re so tired and we can’t take it anymore.”
The Israeli military said on Wednesday that it is moving ahead with its preparations to invade Gaza City, calling up an additional 60,000 reservists and announcing plans to extend the duty of 20,000 others. Troops will conduct a “gradual, precise and targeted” operation in and around the city, an Israeli military official said, requesting anonymity to comply with military protocol.
The offensive, the official said, is intended to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping and planning future attacks, and it would extend into parts of Gaza City that Israeli soldiers have not previously attacked or held during the war. In early phases of the war, Israeli soldiers have carried out operations in Gaza City, including at Al-Shifa Hospital, before withdrawing.
Israel’s plan to invade Gaza City, the most populous city in northern Gaza, has forced hundreds of thousands of residents like Mr. Shehada to consider uprooting themselves to the central and southern parts of the territory, away from the planned operation.
While some people in Gaza City have said they will abide by Israel’s evacuation orders, others have said they will remain at home, even if it means risking their lives.
The war in Gaza was ignited when Hamas led attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage. Since then, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the enclave, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Eli Cohen, a minister in Israel’s high-level security cabinet, has said the operation should transform Gaza City into a wasteland. “Gaza City itself should be exactly like Rafah, which we turned into a city of ruins,” he told Channel 14, a right-wing television station, on Saturday.
On Monday, Hamas agreed to a new proposal for a cease-fire with Israel, which would enable the exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
The Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has not said whether it would accept the cease-fire proposal. Mr. Netanyahu has come under pressure from some far-right members of his coalition to press ahead with military operations against Hamas.
The Israeli official said the military was already operating in Zeitoun, a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Residents there say people were being ordered to evacuate.
Hamdi Sweisi, 38, a longtime resident of the neighborhood, said he relocated last week to another part of the city with his wife and three children, and on Tuesday he learned that his family’s multistory building in Zeitoun had been blown up.
“The building was standing for 50 years,” he said. “Everything we owned was wiped out in a second.”
Mr. Sweisi said he had no idea what his family would do if Israel invades the entire city.
Asked about the bombing of the building in Zeitoun, the Israeli military requested more information but did not provide an immediate comment. The military has said that its strikes in Gaza target militants and their weapons caches and has stressed that Hamas fighters have embedded themselves in civilian spaces.
Khalil el-Halabi, 71, a former U.N. official from Gaza City, said he would move to central or southern Gaza if he was left with no other choice, but he dreaded the prospect of living in a tent again. He and his family lived in a tent for more than a year in 2023 and 2024. They returned to Gaza City during the cease-fire between January and March.
Mr. el-Halabi said that he and his wife and children would struggle on foot to carry their belongings, which include blankets, clothing and an oxygen cylinder.
“Why should we be displaced again?” he said. “We’re totally against what happened on October 7. We had nothing to do with it.”
Despite the Israeli military’s preparations, Mr. el-Halabi remained optimistic that Israel and Hamas could reach a cease-fire, preventing Israeli soldiers from taking over the city.
“I’m hopeful there will be a truce,” he said. “We need one more than anything else.”
Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting to this article.
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6) Brazil Wanted America’s Help Mining Rare Earths. Then Came Tariffs.
Tensions between President Trump and Brazil’s leader could derail a promising alliance to unlock the world’s second largest reserve of the minerals.
By Ana Ionova, Aug. 21, 2025
Ana Ionova spoke to mining experts, companies, diplomats and officials in Brazil, the United States and Australia. She reported from Brasília and Rio de Janeiro.
A mine in Minaçu, Goias state, Brazil, that produces rare earth elements, including neodymium, praseodymium, terbium and dysprosium. Eraldo Peres/Associated Press
Tucked under layers of clay and rock, Brazil has a bounty that much of the world covets: millions of tons of rare earth minerals needed to build drones and robots, electric cars and guided missiles.
For years Brazil and the United States have quietly discussed how American investment and assistance could help the South American country unlock these vast reserves of rare earths, the world’s second largest.
But now, the diplomatic crisis between the Western Hemisphere’s two largest nations risks derailing years of U.S. efforts to secure access to Brazilian rare earths.
By loosening China’s grip on strategic minerals crucial to the economies and battlefields of the future, both nations stood to gain from such an alliance, according to current Brazilian and former U.S. officials.
American support could help Brazil become a global powerhouse in the extraction and processing of rare earths. And Brazilian rare earths could reduce American dependence on China, which controls about 90 percent of world supplies — and has shown itself willing to withhold them.
The talks about this alliance, which have not been previously reported, were at an early stage. Then, Brazil’s rare earths were suddenly thrust into the bitter trade dispute between the two countries that erupted last month.
Ties between Brazil and the United States frayed when President Trump targeted the country with 50 percent tariffs to help his political ally, Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president, who is facing criminal charges for plotting a coup.
Just before tariffs were imposed on Brazil, the United States signaled that access to Brazil’s strategic minerals should be part of trade talks. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva snapped back, accusing the United States of threatening his nation’s sovereignty.
“No one lays a hand,” Mr. Lula said last month, referring to Brazil’s critical minerals. “This country belongs to the Brazilian people.” Brazilian officials also made clear that they will now seek to explore tapping its rare earth deposits with other allies, like India.
“With Brazil, we were pushing an open door,” said José Fernandez, a former top official at the State Department. “I don’t know if this will backfire, but it certainly will not help.”
Brazil is believed to hold between 19 and 23 percent of global reserves of rare earths, a group of 17 elements needed to make powerful magnets used in a range of products, from electric cars and wind turbines to missiles and fighter jets.
For decades, China, home to 40 percent of rare earth deposits, has dominated global supply chains of the minerals, which are plentiful in the earth’s crust but difficult to extract and separate. The West has mostly left to China the hard work of mining, processing and refining rare earths into magnets imported by the United States and other countries. For some rare earths, China is virtually the only country able to separate and process them.
But other countries have grown wary of China’s chokehold. Beijing cut off supplies to Japan in 2010 and is now withholding some critical minerals and magnets from the United States in response to tariffs. To reduce its reliance on China, the Pentagon has poured millions into a Las Vegas-based mining company, MP Materials, becoming its largest shareholder.
Brazil has emerged as perhaps the most promising challenger to China’s monopoly. It has reserves of about 21 million tons, though it may be years away from producing significant amounts of the minerals.
“There is still a lot to be explored, to be studied,” said Inácio Melo, director-president of the Brazilian Geological Survey. “Brazil has enormous potential.”
For now, just one Brazilian mine, partially backed by American investors, is churning out small quantities of minerals, which still have to be shipped to China for processing. But Brazil has ambitious plans to build a domestic supply chain spanning mines, processing plants and magnet factories.
Our economics reporters — based in New York, London, Brussels, Berlin, Hong Kong and Seoul — are digging into every aspect of the tariffs causing global turmoil. They are joined by dozens of reporters writing about the effects on everyday people.
Until recently, the United States had been helping Brazil inch closer to its goals. Biden administration officials made at least five visits to the country between 2022 and 2024, according to Mr. Fernandez, who participated in some of the meetings.
Brazil’s main focus in these discussions was securing technical assistance and American investment, Mr. Fernandez said. “Brazil was a very willing partner,” he added.
During a State Department visit last year, U.S. officials appeared interested in Brazil’s first laboratory where rare earths will be made into magnets and its capacity to eventually supply the Pentagon, according to Eduardo Neves, a researcher at the facility who participated in the meeting.
“They wanted information from us about whether we are already selling magnets, how long it will take to produce,” he said. “They seemed very interested.”
Last year, American and British investors poured $150 million into Brazil’s first rare earths mine, Serra Verde, as part of an initiative backed by the U.S. government.
In the months after Mr. Trump took office, the top U.S. diplomat in Brazil, chargé d’affaires Gabriel Escobar, met with Brazil’s mining association to discuss a possible partnership on rare earth minerals, according to Raul Jungmann, the group's president.
Then, in July, two weeks after Mr. Trump threatened Brazil with high tariffs, Mr. Escobar requested another meeting, according to Mr. Jungmann.
“The first time, he was more concerned with partnerships,” Mr. Jungmann said. The second time, the tone was more insistent, he added. “He made the United States’ interest in strategic critical minerals very clear, very explicit.”
In Brazil, a country sensitive to foreign involvement in its resources, after decades of booms and busts in commodities like rubber and sugar, U.S. interest in rare earths made headlines and triggered anger and suspicion.
Then, after the tariffs took effect and negotiations over a trade deal hit a stalemate, some Brazilian officials struck a more conciliatory tone, signaling they were open to putting rare earths on the negotiating table.
Trade talks between Brazil and the United States have since stalled, with Brazil accusing Mr. Trump of ignoring its attempts to negotiate and Mr. Trump insisting the country drop its case against Mr. Bolsonaro, which many in Brazil see as central to safeguarding the nation’s democracy.
Last week, tensions escalated when Mr. Trump accused Brazil of being a “horrible trading partner.” Mr. Lula shot back, pointing out that his nation runs a trade deficit with the United States. “We’re still willing to negotiate, but Brazil won’t kneel before the United States.”
Brazil now appears to be forging ahead largely without the United States. It is studying its deposits with the help of a Spanish mapping firm and working toward improving its processing abilities through a public-private partnership backed by more than two dozen companies and research groups from around the world.
“Establishing a supply chain outside of China is quite important for most Western nations right now,” said John Prineas, executive chairman of Australia-based St. George Mining, which is developing a rare earths project in Brazil’s Araxá region. “Brazil has a potentially big role to play there. And we’re happy to be a part of it.”
The tariffs on Brazil were softened by hundreds of exceptions, but rare earths were notably absent from the list.
That would make American firms reluctant to invest in the country’s rare earths, according to Sergio Fontanez, a former national security adviser to the chair of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, a government export credit agency.
“There’s an opportunity there for us,” Mr. Fontanez said. “But what you’re essentially creating now,” he added, “is an embargo for U.S. companies.”
Janaína Camelo and Lis Moriconi contributed research.
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7) Gaza City and Surrounding Areas Are Officially Under Famine, Monitors Say
At least half a million people in the enclave were facing the most severe conditions measured by U.N.-backed international experts: starvation, acute malnutrition and death.
By Vivian Yee, Aug. 22, 2025
Palestinians jostling for food outside a charity kitchen in western Gaza City on Friday. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Gaza City and the surrounding territory are officially suffering from famine, a global group of experts announced on Friday, nearly two years into an unrelenting war in which Israel has blocked most food and other aid from entering the Gaza Strip.
The group, which the United Nations and aid agencies rely on to monitor and classify global hunger crises, said that at least half a million people in Gaza Governorate were facing the most severe conditions it measures: starvation, acute malnutrition and death.
With rare exceptions, the rest of Gaza’s total population of two million people was also struggling with severe hunger, according to the group, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which is made up of food insecurity experts who monitor world hunger.
For many of those people, the group said, conditions were likely to worsen, sending two additional governorates farther south — Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis — into an official famine by the end of September.
The group said in a report published on Friday that a combination of several factors had tipped Gaza from a hunger crisis into famine: the intensifying conflict, stringent Israeli restrictions on aid, the collapse of health care, water and sanitation systems, the destruction of local agriculture and the growing number of times people had been forced to flee for new shelters.
It said that conditions in the northernmost part of Gaza were likely to be as severe, or worse, than in Gaza City, but that it had not had enough data to judge whether famine was occurring there. And it said it did not analyze Rafah, the southernmost part of Gaza, because most people there had been forced to leave.
The report said that famine in Gaza could be “halted and reversed” because it was “entirely man-made.”
“The time for debate and hesitation has passed,” it added. “Starvation is present and is rapidly spreading.”
Even a short delay in flooding Gaza with aid would “exponentially” increase preventable deaths, it said.
Throughout the war, Israeli officials have consistently downplayed or denied the severity of hunger in Gaza. On Friday, the Israeli security agency that oversees aid deliveries to the enclave rejected the group’s findings, saying that the experts had disregarded Israeli data on aid deliveries and overlooked Israel’s efforts over the last few weeks to bring more food into the territory, which it said had improved the situation.
Aid officials, however, say those measures fall short of what is needed after months of scarcity. The experts’ report, which used data from Gaza collected through Aug. 15, said it had taken into account recent Israeli moves to loosen restrictions, which began July 27, but said they were “insufficient.”
The top U.N. humanitarian official, Tom Fletcher, told journalists in Geneva that the famine was one “we could have prevented if we had been allowed. Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel.”
Calling for a cease-fire to allow for a flood of aid into Gaza, he added: “It is a famine openly promoted by some Israeli leaders as a weapon of war.”
The Israeli agency, known as COGAT, criticized the expert group, which is known as the I.P.C., for relying on what it called speculation and methodology it called questionable.
“The I.P.C. report is based on partial and unreliable sources,” Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, the agency’s head, said in a statement, adding that it “blatantly ignores the facts and the extensive humanitarian efforts” led by Israel.
Deaths from hunger-related causes had already accelerated rapidly in Gaza this summer, the report said, well before the announcement on Friday.
But for the monitoring group to reach the conclusion that a famine is happening, it had to determine that Gaza meets three conditions: at least one in five households facing an extreme food shortage; a certain proportion of children acutely malnourished; and at least two adults or four children out of every 10,000 people dying each day, either from outright starvation or a combination of disease and malnutrition.
The group said that the proportion of Gaza households reporting very severe hunger had doubled from May to July. It had more than tripled in Gaza City, where famine was confirmed, but Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah had also passed the famine threshold on that count, the group said.
Across Gaza, the number of acutely malnourished children has risen exponentially over the last three months, the group said. There are about 1.1 million children in the territory, according to the United Nations.
A determination of famine from the hunger monitoring group is rare. Since its founding in 2004, the group has confirmed only three other famines: in Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and war-torn Sudan last year. More than 100,000 people died in Somalia before the official declaration of famine arrived.
In those cases, announcing a famine helped focus global attention on the crisis and galvanized donors.
There is already deep international outrage over starvation in Gaza. Images of hungry children, reports of aid workers, medical workers and journalists being too weak to do their jobs and increasingly urgent warnings from aid groups have shocked consciences worldwide.
Gaza also does not lack for donations. Aid agencies say they have enough supplies stockpiled just beyond the territory’s borders to feed its entire population for at least three months. What Gaza does not have, they say, are the permissions or the conditions required for aid groups to distribute those supplies inside the territory.
“We are not facing a logistics, capacity or resource problem,” Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, the head of Mercy Corps, an aid group operating in Gaza, said in a statement after the announcement on Friday. “What’s missing is not the ability to respond, but the political will to allow it. Failure to do so will cost countless additional lives.”
Israel says that the level of hunger in the enclave has been exaggerated, and that it is doing its best to lessen it. Israel’s military spokesman previously said there was no starvation in Gaza.
Israel’s foreign ministry lashed out at the report on Friday, denying that there was a famine in Gaza and saying the I.P.C. experts had changed their standards to fabricate a famine assessment. It said the experts did so “solely to serve Hamas’s fake campaign.”
The ministry accused the experts of lowering the threshold for one of the three criteria required for a famine determination — the proportion of acutely malnourished children — to 15 percent from 30 percent.
The report offered a technical explanation. To determine famine conditions “with reasonable evidence,” it said, experts could by longstanding protocol apply two methods for measuring child malnutrition. One uses a child’s height and weight; the other, the circumference of a child’s upper arm. For an area to be experiencing famine, at least 30 percent of children under 5 must be considered acutely malnourished by height and weight measures. Under the arm circumference method used in Gaza, it said, the accepted threshold dropped to 15 percent.
The group said that it had used arm circumference data in Gaza because height and weight data was not available. It said it had often employed this method in famine determinations, including in South Sudan in 2020 and in Sudan last year, and that it had consistently applied it in Gaza throughout the war.
Israel’s foreign ministry also said, without explaining how, that the group was “ignoring” a second standard criterion, the death rate. The experts said that while they had been unable to obtain a full count of hunger-related deaths in Gaza because the health care system and other monitoring mechanisms had been severely damaged, the evidence made them confident that the number had crossed the famine threshold.
If anything, the report said, they believed the true hunger-related death toll was “significantly higher” than Gaza officials had reported. The report said they had based the assessment on several sources, including figures from Gaza’s health ministry, World Health Organization nutrition centers, a Doctors Without Borders survey and phone surveys.
“The absence of data should not be interpreted as an absence of mortality,” the report said.
Israel first cut off aid to Gaza in retaliation for the October 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 were taken hostage. Limited aid deliveries then resumed under a United Nations-run system.
Under global pressure, Israel has made concessions on its aid blockade, allowing in more food, water, medicine and other supplies. It has blamed the United Nations for not bringing in more food. But the organization and other aid groups say that Israel frequently denies or delays U.N. requests to pick up the supplies waiting at the border and move them into Gaza safely, among other challenges.
Another major obstacle, they say, is that people in Gaza are so desperate to eat that they routinely wait along the aid convoys’ routes to grab whatever they can from the trucks. Most of the aid is taken this way, depriving people who cannot physically seek food from the trucks — including women, children, older people and the sick.
In March, Israel imposed another total siege in an effort to pressure Hamas into releasing hostages still in Gaza.
In May, Israel largely replaced the U.N. aid system by backing a new and much-criticized operation run mainly by American contractors. Israeli officials said it was the only way to ensure food did not fall into Hamas’s hands.
Since the new group began distributing food in late May, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed near its sites, according to Gazan officials and the U.N. human rights office. The Israeli military has said its troops have fired “warning shots” toward surging crowds and that it is investigating the episodes.
The New York Times reported in July that the Israeli military had never found proof that Hamas systematically stole aid from the United Nations — a claim that Israel had frequently made to justify sidelining the U.N. aid system. Israeli officials said there was evidence that Hamas did take aid from other aid groups.
The hunger monitoring group has been warning for much of the war that Gaza was at high risk of famine. Aid officials have said that without a cease-fire allowing relief agencies to deliver large amounts of aid throughout Gaza safely and speedily, hunger and its complications will kill many more people there.
While Hamas has agreed to a new cease-fire proposal from mediators, Israeli forces are gearing up for a new offensive to take over Gaza City, the territory’s largest city and the heart of the area where famine was confirmed on Friday.
Troops were already massing on the city’s outskirts on Thursday, while Israeli officials were preparing to forcibly displace people to southern Gaza for what they said was their safety.
The displacement plans have drawn accusations from Palestinians and rights groups that Israel is pushing people from Gaza into something akin to a concentration camp.
Adam Rasgon and Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting.
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8) Global Monitors Confirm Famine in Part of Gaza. What Does That Mean?
A panel of food security experts have determined that part of Gaza is suffering from famine, and that it could spread to the rest of the enclave within weeks.
By Ephrat Livni, Aug. 22, 2025
“Are any other countries experiencing famine? In June, the I.P.C. said that parts of Sudan were experiencing famine and that the crisis could spread. Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen were among the countries facing high levels of acute food insecurity, according to the 2025 Global Report on Food Crisis published by the European Union-funded Food Security Information Network, based on data from the previous year. The I.P.C. has classified famine in Somalia in 2011; in South Sudan in 2017; and in Sudan in 2024, which is ongoing.”
A charity kitchen distributing food in Gaza City on Friday. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Food security experts, who have been warning for 22 months of dire food shortages and malnutrition in the Gaza Strip, on Friday confirmed that one part of the enclave is suffering from famine and that it is threatening to spread to others within weeks.
The confirmation of famine came from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, known as the I.P.C., a group of international organizations that collects and analyzes data about food security, to ensure that consistent criteria are used to assess food supplies and the conditions affecting them in different countries.
In July, experts warned of looming famine across Gaza. Israel restricted aid soon after the war began almost two years ago, but the situation was made significantly worse by a total Israeli blockade on food supplies for roughly 80 days between March and May.
On Friday, the I.P.C. confirmed famine in the Gaza Governorate, which includes Gaza City and the surrounding area. It projected that famine could spread to south and central Gaza by the end of September.
The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, an Israeli agency responsible for managing the entry of aid into Gaza, rejected the I.P.C.’s findings.
“The I.P.C. report is based on partial and unreliable sources, many of them affiliated with Hamas, and blatantly ignores the facts and the extensive humanitarian efforts led by the State of Israel and its international partners,” said Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, the head of the agency.
Here’s what to know about the I.P.C.’s report on famine in parts of Gaza.
How do experts define famine?
The I.P.C. classifies famine in an area when at least one in five households face an extreme lack of food, a certain percentage of children are acutely malnourished, and two adults or four children for every 10,000 are dying each day “due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease.” According to the I.P.C., over half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing “catastrophic conditions,” classified at famine level and characterized by “starvation, destitution and death.” Twice as many, or about half of Gaza’s population, are facing a state of emergency, the report said.
How is a famine officially declared?
The I.P.C. collects data from aid groups and others on the ground and analyzes it to reach its conclusions, and the Famine Review Committee, an international panel of up to seven independent food security experts, reviews the findings.
But even if the I.P.C. determines that a famine is unfolding, it cannot make an official declaration on its own.
According to the I.P.C., its analyses allow governments, international and regional organizations, and humanitarian agencies to issue declarations of famine.
In 2022, Somalia’s president expressed reluctance to declare a famine during a severe hunger crisis brought on by a drought. And in 2021, Ethiopia blocked a classification of famine in the Tigray region through heavy lobbying, according to a top U.N. official. In 2017, South Sudan officially declared a famine in parts of the nation.
It is unclear exactly what authority could or would declare a famine in Gaza. Hamas has long accused Israel of starving Gazans. Israel denies that there is starvation in the enclave. The I.P.C.’s role is solely to analyze and classify data, not to decide who would issue a declaration.
Aid groups have long believed that an official declaration of famine can lead to more international attention, assistance and support, but some experts say there is little evidence for that claim.
What does the report say is causing famine in Gaza?
The I.P.C. said several factors had tipped Gaza’s hunger crisis into famine: the intensifying conflict, strict Israeli restrictions on aid and frequent displacement of people. The cumulative effect “has pushed Gaza into an unprecedented catastrophe,” it said.
Nearly a third of Gaza’s population is not eating for multiple days in a row, the U.N. World Food Program said in July, linking the extreme hunger to the blockade on food supplies Israel imposed this spring.
Israel has accused Hamas of looting aid. But the United Nations and some Israeli military officials have disputed the claim that U.N. aid was being systematically diverted by Hamas. Before March, food was distributed from hundreds of places across Gaza in a system facilitated by the United Nations. In May, Israel partly lifted its blockade and set up a system run by American contractors and backed by the United States, saying it would ensure that aid goes to civilians.
But there are few locations and Palestinians must walk for miles to reach distribution spots near which Israeli soldiers stand watch. The U.N. human rights office has said hundreds of people have been killed, mostly by the Israeli military, in areas surrounding the distribution sites.
Under intense international pressure, Israel has allowed more aid to enter in recent weeks. Israeli officials have said roughly 300 trucks of relief supplies and commercial goods have been entering Gaza daily. And the cost of some food items in markets has fallen significantly, although they remain well above prewar prices.
But United Nations officials said many trucks were still being intercepted by desperate people and gunmen before reaching their destination.
Are any other countries experiencing famine?
In June, the I.P.C. said that parts of Sudan were experiencing famine and that the crisis could spread.
Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen were among the countries facing high levels of acute food insecurity, according to the 2025 Global Report on Food Crisis published by the European Union-funded Food Security Information Network, based on data from the previous year.
The I.P.C. has classified famine in Somalia in 2011; in South Sudan in 2017; and in Sudan in 2024, which is ongoing.
Vivian Yee Adam Rasgon and Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.
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9) In Trump’s Second Term, Far-Right Agenda Enters the Mainstream
President Trump has embraced an array of far-right views and talking points in ways that have delighted many right-wing activists who have long supported those ideas.
By Alan Feuer, Aug. 23, 2025
Hundreds, including Enrique Tarrio, at a Proud Boys rally in Portland, Ore., in 2020. Mr. Tarrio and his compatriots have generally given up on such set-piece demonstrations. “Honestly, what do we have to complain about these days?” he said. Mason Trinca for The New York Times
Hundreds, including Enrique Tarrio, at a Proud Boys rally in Portland, Ore., in 2020. Mr. Tarrio and his compatriots have generally given up on such set-piece demonstrations. “Honestly, what do we have to complain about these days?” he said.Mason Trinca for The New York Times
During President Trump’s first turn in the White House, right-wing extremists like the Proud Boys were on the streets, weekend after weekend, raising their voices — and oftentimes their fists — about issues such as immigration, the squelching of conservative speech and the removal of Confederate-era statues.
But in the first seven months of Mr. Trump’s second term, there has been a conspicuous absence of far-right demonstrations. And that, some leaders of the movement say, is because the president has effectively adopted their agenda.
“Things we were doing and talking about in 2017 that were taboo, they’re no longer taboo — they’re mainstream now,” said Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys, who took part in many of those early far-right rallies. “Honestly, what do we have to complain about these days?”
Whether it is dismantling diversity programs, complaining about anti-white bias in museums or simply promoting an aura of authoritarian nationalism, Mr. Trump has embraced an array of far-right views and talking points in ways that have delighted many right-wing activists who have long supported those ideas.
His administration has also hired several people with a history of making racist or antisemitic remarks or who have looked favorably on the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Far-right figures have been particularly thrilled by Mr. Trump’s aggressive crackdown on undocumented immigrants, praising not only the ubiquitous images of masked federal agents raiding farms and factories, but also the ideology that has fueled those moves: a belief that migration to the United States is all but synonymous with a military invasion.
Last week, in fact, on the eighth anniversary of the violent far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., where neo-Nazis marched by torchlight chanting about immigrants and Jews, Augustus Sol Invictus, a Florida lawyer who helped organize the event, marveled at how thoroughly the Trump administration had adopted a position that had once been on the fringes of political discourse.
“Eight years ago you were an extremist if you protested being replaced by immigrants,” Mr. Invictus wrote on social media. “Your life was over if you talked about stopping or reversing it. Now it is official @WhiteHouse policy.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, offered a vocal defense of Mr. Trump. “President Trump is a voice for millions of forgotten men and women who support the widely popular policies he is enacting,” she said.
During the Biden administration, far-right organizations like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers were severely hobbled, largely by the criminal prosecutions of dozens of their members who took part in the Capitol attack.
The Oath Keepers, a militia-style group of current and former military and law enforcement personnel, barely exists anymore. Its founder, Stewart Rhodes, no longer appears in public as often as he once did at far-right demonstrations or standoffs with the government.
As for Mr. Tarrio, he and his compatriots have generally given up on the set-piece demonstrations that they took part in for years in cities like New York; Berkeley, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Los Angeles; New Orleans; and Charlottesville. These days, he mostly hosts podcasts and promotes a blockchain-powered app called “ICERAID” that pays people in cryptocurrency for reporting undocumented immigrants.
While some far-right groups, like the fascist organization Patriot Front, have continued to stage public demonstrations, researchers at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a nonprofit organization that tracks political violence, have found far fewer right-wing protests this year compared with recent years.
In addition to the disruptions stemming from the Jan. 6 criminal prosecutions, some experts in far-right extremism say that the relative quiet of extremists is because the Trump administration has enacted much of their agenda.
“The rise of alt-right a decade ago was a backlash against the first Black president and ideas of progress in race and immigration,” said Amy Spitalnick, the chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “Now, a decade later, we’ve seen the opposite of those ideas normalized in the highest levels of power, including at the White House.”
Echoing Mr. Tarrio, she added, “Why do you need to protest when the White House is basically doing what you want?”
Mr. Trump’s first term and the four-year interim when he was out of power were often characterized by flirtations with the far right — albeit conducted at a deniable distance.
In 2017, after a neo-Nazi activist drove into a crowd of leftist protesters in Charlottesville, killing a woman named Heather Heyer, Mr. Trump criticized the white nationalists who planned the demonstration. But in almost the same breath, he asserted that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the conflict.
During a presidential debate in 2020, he called out to the Proud Boys, telling the extremist group to “stand back and stand by.” But within a day, he walked his comments back, saying he had no idea who the Proud Boys were.
He did much the same in November 2022, after having dinner with the infamous white nationalist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, quickly issuing a statement that he knew nothing about his houseguest or his views.
But this time around, Mr. Trump and his administration seem less interested in distance or denial.
On his first day back in the White House, he issued a remarkably sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 rioters who took part in the Capitol attack, including those who assaulted the police and were convicted — like Mr. Tarrio — of sedition.
He also issued two executive orders: “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion” and “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” Both drew on language and ideas about immigrants that echoed statements made by violent extremists who attacked Hispanics in El Paso, the Black community in Buffalo and Jews in Pittsburgh.
The next month, Mr. Trump issued an executive order halting foreign aid to South Africa and allowing members of the country’s white minority to settle in the United States through a refugee program.
In the order, he said that American officials should do everything possible to help “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.” The view effectively amounted to a government endorsement of long-held far-right theories about mistreatment of white South Africans in the post-apartheid era.
At the same time, his aides and allies, when confronted by racist or far-right views in those around them, have often chosen to ignore the situation or gone on the attack.
This winter, for example, a young employee of Elon Musk’s job-slashing agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, quit the government after it was revealed that he had posted racist comments online, including one that read, “Normalize Indian hate.”
But instead of letting the man go, Mr. Musk and Vice President JD Vance began a campaign to bring him back, breezily suggesting that his offensive remarks were merely indiscretions disclosed to the public by journalists who were out to destroy his life.
Around the same time, the State Department hired a man named Darren Beattie to serve as the acting under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. Mr. Beattie was brought into the government even though he had already been fired from an earlier job as a speechwriter in the first Trump administration for appearing at a conference attended by white nationalists.
Just months before his new appointment, Mr. Beattie was still posting racist messages online.
“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” he wrote on social media in October. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
(In July, Mr. Beattie’s portfolio expanded when he was named to run the U.S. Institute of Peace, which leads “public diplomacy outreach” at the State Department. A department spokesman, Tommy Pigott, defended the hire. “Darren Beattie has been an invaluable member of the Trump administration’s team at the State Department in implementing the president’s America First foreign policy,” he said.)
Mr. Trump’s Defense Department has hired Kingsley Wilson, the daughter of the conservative commentator Steve Cortes, to serve as deputy press secretary, despite her history of making extremist comments on social media.
Last year, Ms. Wilson posted a message evincing support for the so-called great replacement theory, a far-right idea holding that liberals have purposefully sought to replace the white population of the United States with foreigners and immigrants.
In 2023, she posted another message questioning the facts behind the death of Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched by an antisemitic mob in Georgia in 1915. The consensus among legal scholars is that Mr. Frank was falsely convicted of raping and murdering a 13-year-old girl, but Ms. Wilson’s post put the blame on Mr. Frank himself.
In a statement, Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said that Ms. Wilson “has been doing a fantastic job” and that “left-wing groups have erroneously attacked” her character because she is “a fighter for President Trump.”
The Office of Special Counsel, an independent watchdog agency, is now being led by Paul Ingrassia, despite his history of making racist comments and supporting white nationalists like Mr. Fuentes.
In April 2023, Mr. Ingrassia wrote a Substack post calling on X to reinstate Mr. Fuentes’s account on First Amendment grounds. Eight months later, he posted a message on X saying, “Exceptional white men are not only the builders of Western civilization but are the ones most capable of appreciating the fruits of our heritage.”
All of these developments have taken place as the official X account for Mr. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has posted some messages with thinly veiled white nationalist content.
Last week, for instance, the account, seeking new recruits for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, posted an image of Uncle Sam under a slogan reading, “America Needs You/Join ICE Now.” Above the image was a question: “Which way, American man?”
That appeared to be a reference to the 1978 book “Which Way, Western Man?” written by the white supremacist William Gayley Simpson and published by the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization. The book claims that there is a Jewish plot against white people in the Western world and calls for violence against Jews.
Asked by reporters about the post last week, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for D.H.S., called the question “embarrassing” and said, “Where are we quoting a white supremacist?”
A few days after Mr. Trump won re-election, William Teer, the leader of the Texas Three Percenters, a local far-right militia group, wrote to him with an offer: His organization wanted to help the White House carry out its plan to deport millions of immigrants.
While there is no evidence that the administration accepted Mr. Teer’s proposal, it arguably did not need to. Homeland security officials, flush with billions of dollars from Mr. Trump’s recent budget bill, have been hiring new immigration agents and cracking down with new initiatives like encouraging officers to search the social media accounts of immigrants seeking to enter the country for anti-American sentiments.
That last measure appeared to enchant Kevin DeAnna, an early alt-right leader who often writes for a white nationalist website under the name of James Kirkpatrick. On Tuesday, Mr. DeAnna posted on social media about an article quoting a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services saying, “America’s benefits should not be given to those who despise the country and promote anti-American ideologies.”
“Got a little more of what I voted for again,” Mr. DeAnna wrote.
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10) Insurance Companies Send Chilling Letters Just Before Surgery. But Why?
They often deny coverage via snail mail. Here’s what happened when my family got a note like that 36 hours before cancer surgery.
By Ron Lieber, Published Aug. 22, 2025, Updated Aug. 23, 2025
Robert Neubecker
Disease doesn’t ask permission before invading a body, but the diseased must often seek permission before trying to remove it.
Unwelcome to the strange, infuriating world of prior authorization, where doctors must get approval from health insurance companies before performing big procedures or prescribing certain medications.
About half of Americans with insurance have needed their insurer’s blessing for services or treatments in the last two years, according to a poll from KFF, a health research group. Among that group, 34 percent said it was somewhat difficult to navigate the process while 13 percent said it was very difficult.
If you know, you know. And if you don’t, you should. You don’t want to be learning about prior authorization as you’re coming to grips with a bad diagnosis, as my family just did.
On Dec. 9, my wife had a mastectomy for breast cancer plus reconstructive surgery. The night of Dec. 7, a Saturday, we found a letter in the mailbox from UnitedHealthcare stating that prior authorization for the operation was partially denied.
Our minds raced: If the denial stood, the cost could upend our financial lives and years of careful planning. Good luck to us, trying to sort this out on Sunday before we were supposed to show up at the hospital in the predawn hours on Monday. Should we even show up at all?
We did, without incident, though it took several months to solve and settle the prior authorization issue and pay the resulting bill in full.
All the while, I did not identify myself as a journalist, or my wife (Jodi Kantor, who is also a New York Times reporter), to the insurance company, in part because I did not want to receive special treatment. If UnitedHealthcare was trying to provide it anyway — because insurers know where you work if you get your coverage from an employer — it sure had a strange way of doing so, making us sweat the whole thing out like this.
Throughout the prolonged process, one question lingered: Why didn’t UnitedHealthcare find a way to tell us about the problem sooner, so my wife didn’t have to get rolled into the operating room wondering just how partial its denial really was?
The insurance industry defends prior authorizations as a step to keep people safe — say, by preventing unnecessary procedures — and make sure they are getting cost-effective care.
Industry executives also know that doctors and patients despise the system and the sometimes life-threatening delays in treatment it can cause. On occasion, people show up for surgery to find that turning around and going home is the only financially prudent action, given uncertainty around their prior authorizations.
This year, insurers published a six-point plan and pledged to improve the process. Their customers are skeptical. In the KFF poll, 61 percent said they believed it was “not too likely” or “not at all likely” that the companies would follow through meaningfully.
Meanwhile, what few, if any, of the big players seem to have done so far is figure out how to systematically inform all patients in real time when there is a prior authorization problem.
We were lucky. The surgery was a success. My wife is cured and needed no radiation or chemotherapy.
When she woke up, she wanted to know what she had missed. I told her that no matter what UnitedHealthcare’s letter had said, we were probably not on the hook for some extraordinary sum. During the surgery, I had found a billing specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the site of the operation, and she told me a few things.
Turns out MSK had known about the prior authorization problem about a week earlier, when UnitedHealthcare rendered its judgment. So the insurance company told MSK immediately — but not us.
The billing specialist told me that the partial denial was related to some minor procedure codes, not the most important ones. If big money trouble had been brewing, she said, someone would have told my wife not to come that day. Moreover, MSK would have eaten any out-of-pocket charges related to the prior authorization issue if it couldn’t get the insurance company to back off. After all, it had greenlit the surgery that day knowing that there was a lingering insurance issue.
Still, why didn’t the hospital warn us that we would probably get a terrifying letter?
“MSK does not communicate secondary denials to patients because they are often resolved the day of or postsurgery,” said Robyn Walsh, MSK’s vice president of patient financial services, in an emailed statement. “MSK is committed to ensuring we are only communicating clinically necessary information to a patient prior to their procedure.”
This is a pretty clinical definition of clinical. Given that presurgery mental health is surely part of the institution’s concern, it could have sent out a note saying: “Hey, you’re about to get a scarygram. Don’t worry, we’ve got you. Here’s why.”
That said, MSK, like my wife and me, was downstream of UnitedHealthcare’s prior authorization system. The insurance company was the decider here, which puts the responsibility for quick and clear communication primarily on UnitedHealthcare.
So why didn’t it do the following, in addition to sending the paper letter? Simultaneously text, email and call us to say: “Hey, it’s your friends at UnitedHealthcare with an urgent message. You may think this is spam, but it isn’t. Call the number on the back of your insurance card as soon as possible, and we’ll explain.” What laws or regulations could something like that violate?
In a statement it attributed to its chief medical officer, Dr. Anne Docimo, UnitedHealthcare said it was glad that my wife’s surgery had proceeded as scheduled and been successful. “We know more needs to be done, and that’s why we recently joined other health plans to reform the prior authorization process,” the statement said, referring to that six-point plan.
“We continue to make our own changes to help members navigate through these types of situations, including by offering opt-in paperless communications,” it added.
Indeed, we learned last month that if my wife had done the opt-in, she would have received an email notice to log in and see the partial denial before the paper letter arrived. She had no idea about any of that. I’m the household insurance coordinator, and I didn’t know, either.
At least you know to do that now.
As for me, I’ll continue to take the “if you assume the worst, you’ll never be disappointed” approach to complex systems involving expensive products and services and download any app that can send up flares. UnitedHealthcare’s can do that now in situations like ours, though it couldn’t last year. (I also asked UnitedHealthcare not to mark my account with any kind of priority status. I asked the company to explain what happened to help you, not myself.)
As for the doctors, ask them a number of questions: Will there be a need for prior authorization for this procedure? How quickly are you requesting it, so there isn’t any last-minute scramble or fear? Will you or your institution call me immediately if the insurance company informs you of any trouble? If that’s not your normal practice, how about changing that? And if you won’t change your policy, will you please just do it for me? Who in your office should I call or email if I hear about a problem?
But for all of the opt-ins, app notifications and checklists, there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping all insurance companies from doing the simple and obvious thing right now: If there’s a problem, just alert everyone, always — as many ways as you can and as quickly as possible.
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11) After Gaza Famine Report, U.S. Is Mostly Silent and Israel Is Defiant
The White House has not commented on a report finding famine in Gaza. Analysts say that absent U.S. pressure, Israel is unlikely to change course.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Aug. 23, 2025
A charity kitchen distributing food in Gaza City on Friday. A new U.N.-backed report found that the city and surrounding areas were experiencing famine. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
A report by a panel of food security experts that found famine in parts of Gaza prompted outrage from many European countries, but not from the United States, Israel’s main backer.
The White House has yet to comment on the report, which was released on Friday to international dismay. Compiled by a group of United Nations-backed experts, the report said stringent Israeli restrictions on aid, among other factors, were responsible for the famine.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Friday criticized the report in posts on social media, saying Hamas was to blame for any hunger in Gaza. Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, echoed his posts.
“Tons of food has gone into Gaza but Hamas savages stole it, ate lots of it to become corpulent,” Mr. Huckabee wrote on X.
The release of the report capped a week in which the Trump administration backed Mr. Netanyahu ’s government on several issues, or mostly stayed silent, even as many of Israel’s allies condemned its actions in increasingly harsh terms.
Over the past week, the Israeli government approved a settlement project in the central West Bank, which the country’s finance minister said “buries the idea of a Palestinian state.” And defying international calls to end the war, Mr. Netanyahu’s government is pressing ahead with a plan to invade Gaza City, where hundreds of thousands of people are sheltering.
American pressure is one of the few levers left that could convince Mr. Netanyahu to change Israel’s conduct in the nearly two-year war against Hamas in Gaza, according to analysts.
Mr. Netanyahu is “clearly more comfortable with the fact that Donald Trump is not going to impose costs or consequences that would constitute real pressure,” said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat who joined negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians during the 1990s.
At times, Mr. Trump has appeared willing to break with Mr. Netanyahu, cutting a deal with Iranian-backed Houthis to stop attacks on ships and negotiating directly with Hamas for the return of American hostages. In late July, he publicly said he believed that there was starvation in Gaza.
But the two leaders are now increasingly aligned on Gaza, Mr. Miller said, while Mr. Trump’s attention is focused on efforts to end the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Seven months into Mr. Trump’s administration, ordinary Gazans are facing one of their toughest moments since the war began in October 2023, after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. Severe hunger is increasingly widespread, according to aid agencies.
“This is not a crisis of a few isolated children; every child is at risk,” said Tess Ingram, a spokeswoman for UNICEF, the United Nation’s children’s organization.
After months of warnings, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a panel of food security experts backed by the United Nations, said Friday that it had found that Gaza City and its surrounding areas were suffering from famine. The report warned that central and southern Gaza also could also face famine by September.
Israel said it was doing everything possible to deliver food to Gaza, noting that prices in local markets had dropped since Israeli officials began funneling more aid into the enclave in late July. Israeli officials broadly dispute that there is famine in Gaza.
In a statement, Mr. Netanyahu acknowledged that there had been some “temporary shortages” but said they had been swiftly remedied.
Israel and the United States have also backed their own, much-criticized aid initiative in Gaza, in which American security contractors oversee the distribution of boxes of food at sites behind Israeli military lines. Hundreds of people have been killed near the sites, according to Gaza health officials.
Many of Israel’s other traditional allies, including Britain, were skeptical of Israel’s response to the report.
“The Israeli government’s refusal to allow sufficient aid into Gaza has caused this man-made catastrophe,” David Lammy, the British foreign minister, said in a statement on Friday. “This is a moral outrage.”
At the same time, Israel is preparing for a full-scale assault on Gaza City, where the committee said it had found evidence of famine. Aid agencies have warned that the attack could force hundreds of thousands of people to flee, precipitating an even deeper humanitarian crisis.
Mr. Netanyahu argues that the operation is necessary to rout Hamas, which has fought a guerrilla insurgency against Israeli forces. But the Israeli public is divided, with many calling for an immediate cease-fire with Hamas that would free the hostages still held in Gaza.
While U.S. negotiators seek to revive the moribund negotiations for a truce between the two sides, Mr. Trump appeared this week to back Israel’s planned assault in Gaza.
“We will only see the return of the remaining hostages when Hamas is confronted and destroyed!!!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “The sooner this takes place, the better the chances of success will be.”
This week, Israeli authorities also approved the contentious E1 settlement project, which would involve the construction of about 3,400 new housing units in the central West Bank. Roughly 500,000 Israeli settlers live among three million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territory.
The E1 project had been delayed for about two decades under U.S. pressure. Critics say it would bisect the West Bank, posing a major challenge for the contiguity of any future Palestinian state.
France, Britain, Australia and more than a dozen other countries immediately denounced the plan as illegal and a violation of international law. The Trump administration, however, stayed largely silent. Mr. Huckabee told Israeli radio that the move was fundamentally Israel’s decision.
Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.
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12) A Muted Homecoming for Kilmar Abrego Garcia
Mr. Abrego Garcia, who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador, is keeping a low profile as his lawyers prepare to fight the Trump administration’s proposal to deport him to Uganda.
By Jazmine Ulloa, Published Aug. 23, 2025, Updated Aug. 24, 2025
Jazmine Ulloa reported from Prince George’s County in Maryland. She has been reporting on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s life and the impact of his case on his community since he was deported in March.
When Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia returned home late Friday, he was greeted with flowers, metallic streamers and cheers. In videos circulated by immigrant rights groups, he shared long, tearful embraces with his wife, children and other family members. He expressed his gratitude to the people who had not abandoned him.
“Thank you for everything,” Mr. Abrego Garcia told his older brother, Cesar, as he wept in his arms.
But the celebration of his homecoming has been muted. For Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 30-year-old immigrant who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March and returned to the United States in June, the odyssey is not over: The federal government has threatened to deport him to Uganda, his lawyers said. So for now, he and his family are keeping a low profile, with Mr. Abrego Garcia required to use an ankle monitor and largely staying out of the limelight.
Mr. Abrego Garcia, who entered the United States without permission, became a defining face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration when he was deported, prompting outrage from immigrant rights advocates and heightening fear and anxiety among other immigrants in the country.
A sheet metal worker, Mr. Abrego Garcia had been living for years in Prince George’s County in Maryland when he was sent to El Salvador, alongside more than 260 detainees, with no due process. He was sent back in June to face human smuggling charges in Tennessee, where he was held in jail until Friday. His lawyers said the Trump administration’s threat to deport him to Uganda was an attempt to “coerce” him into a guilty plea in the smuggling case.
It was not immediately clear exactly why the Trump administration chose Uganda as the place to potentially send Mr. Abrego Garcia. Initially, federal prosecutors had said that if Mr. Abrego Garcia pleaded guilty to his charges and agreed to stay in custody until Monday, they would send him to Costa Rica, where they said he could live safely, after whatever sentence he is given in that case. But after his lawyers did not agree to keeping him in jail beyond Friday, the administration said if he does not accept their plea deal by Monday, they would start the process to deport him to Uganda.
In a statement on his release, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, called him a “monster” — rhetoric the Trump administration has been pushing as it continues to accuse him of being a member of the MS-13 gang. “We will not stop fighting till this Salvadoran man faces justice and is out of our country,” she said.
On Saturday afternoon, his relatives declined multiple interview requests from reporters who arrived at their door in Prince George’s County. Inside, some of them were huddled with members of his legal team, as Mr. Abrego Garcia is expected at an early check-in with immigration authorities on Monday.
Speaking from their front yard later, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of the lawyers, said federal officials were targeting his client because he had spoken out against his unlawful deportation and had said he had been tortured at the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in El Salvador.
“The government has decided to use the immigration system to punish him,” Mr. Sandoval-Moshenberg said, adding, “He and his family have suffered enough.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation and dramatic legal fight with the Trump administration has been closely followed in Prince George’s County, which has a big Latino immigrant population.
Since his release, local elected officials, union leaders and immigrant rights activists have continued to rally behind his case, saying Mr. Abrego Garcia’s plight has been but one example of the Trump administration’s constitutional overreach.
“This is a matter that’s greater than just this one case or one man,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat. “If one person’s rights are denied, then the rights of all of us are at risk.” Mr. Van Hollen helped provide the first public glimpses of Mr. Abrego Garcia since his detainment when he met with him in San Salvador in April.
The case has resonated with Latino residents in the area. Some said on Saturday that their anxiety has grown in recent weeks as National Guard troops and agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies combed the streets of Washington, where many of them work.
Near Mr. Abrego Garcia’s home, Ana Ventura, 64, an El Salvador native and naturalized U.S. citizen who has lived in the area for 30 years, said she was shocked when he was picked up in March because he had appeared to work hard and keep to himself. She said that even if the criminal charges against him were serious, he should have been given a chance to defend himself before he was sent away.
Her eyes widened when she learned he might now be deported to Uganda. “That does not seem fair to me,” she said.
Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
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13) The War in Israel Over Serving in War
Ultra-Orthodox Israelis, exempt for decades from military service, are now being drafted. Their rage is dividing Israel and threatening Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition.
By Elisabeth Bumiller, Natan Odenheimer and Johnatan Reiss, Aug. 24, 2025
The journalists reported from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Bat Yam, Israel.
An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man being carried by Israeli security forces during a protest against conscription last week in Kfar Yona. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
It was 11 p.m. in Jerusalem, and one of the city’s most insular ultra-Orthodox communities was in a furor.
Hundreds of men in black suits and black hats of the Edah Haredit sect grew agitated as a top rabbi, shouting in Yiddish from a balcony, denounced the Israeli government for drafting the ultra-Orthodox. They had been exempt from military service to focus on religious study since the founding of Israel, but now they were needed for the war in Gaza.
A large fire blazed in the street, set by ultra-Orthodox protesters who had ignited a dumpster. Police officers on horseback tried to keep order as water cannons on trucks sprayed “skunk water,” a vile-smelling liquid, to disperse the crowd.
Outside the nearby Mir Yeshiva, one of the largest and most prestigious religious schools in the country, Haim Bamberger, 23, said he was studying the Torah, as, he said, God wanted. It was Mr. Bamberger’s way of defending Israel, rather than through military service. “When we do what he wants, he protects us,” he said.
The Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed nearly 1,200 people and led to the taking of roughly 250 hostages, Mr. Bamberger said, “was partly because many people in this country are not doing what God wants.”
Mr. Bamberger said he had been drafted but was ignoring his notice and risking jail. He grew more animated as he spoke. “In this country I’m considered a criminal,” he said, “because I want to study Torah.”
Days later, the Israeli military police began arresting ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers. Only a few have been detained so far, according to multiple Israeli news reports, but on Aug. 14, hundreds of ultra-Orthodox protested and clashed with the police outside a prison where the Ynet Hebrew news site reported that seven were held.
For now, at a time of rage among the ultra-Orthodox and building tension between the military and the government over Gaza, the military is holding off on mass arrests.
A Political Crisis
Military service is compulsory for most Jewish Israelis, both men and women. The exemption for the ultra-Orthodox, known in Hebrew as Haredim, has long been resented by the rest of the Jewish population. But the nearly two-year war in Gaza has turned an irritant into a political crisis that is deepening divisions in Israeli society and imperiling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fragile coalition.
Last month, two ultra-Orthodox parties crucial to Mr. Netanyahu’s majority in Parliament withdrew from the government after it did not pass legislation exempting the ultra-Orthodox from the draft. Their move could lead to the collapse of the prime minister’s coalition and early elections, although Mr. Netanyahu has survived far worse political threats.
“The war has pushed everything to an extreme,” said Nechumi Yaffe, a professor of public policy at Tel Aviv University who is ultra-Orthodox. Secular Israelis are asking, she said, “Why should our children die and your children are just sitting drinking coffee and learning?”
Professor Yaffe said she had polling that showed 25 percent of Haredi men would enlist if they were not ostracized by their communities for doing so, as many are, and another 25 percent would enlist with some encouragement. She said attitudes were softening within less extreme ultra-Orthodox sects, although many rabbis are resisting change.
“The rabbis are feeling like they’re losing control,” she said.
The policy dates to Israel’s beginnings in 1948, when David Ben-Gurion, the nation’s founding prime minister, granted the exemption to the 400 yeshiva students in the country at the time. Ben-Gurion envisioned their Torah study — which they believed would safeguard Israel from its enemies — as part of a revitalization of Jewish religious scholarship lost in the Holocaust.
But as the ultra-Orthodox population grew, the policy was extended, setting off backlash and legal challenges over many years. It did not help that the most extreme ultra-Orthodox sects were anti-Zionists who do not recognize the state of Israel because, they say, it was founded by secular Jews and not for a divine purpose.
In June 2024, the Israeli Supreme Court finally ruled in a landmark decision that without a formal law there was no legal basis for the exemption, and ordered the military to begin drafting ultra-Orthodox men.
The military says it urgently needs 12,000 new recruits for a force exhausted by Gaza. More than 450 Israeli soldiers have died in the enclave, suicides are on the rise and fewer Israeli reservists, the bulk of the fighters, are reporting for duty. Many have spent more than 400 days in service since the war began.
Others are questioning the government’s goals in a campaign that has killed more than 60,000 people in Gaza, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. A group of experts who monitor food security declared on Friday that Gaza City and the surrounding territory are suffering from famine, a situation that has drawn global condemnation. The Israeli security agency that oversees aid deliveries in the enclave rejected the finding.
Mr. Netanyahu, at odds with top generals, is now moving forward with plans to take over Gaza City.
The Israeli military announced Aug. 20 that 60,000 new reservists would be called to duty and that 20,000 would have their orders extended, bringing the total number of reservists to serve across all fronts in Israel to roughly 120,000, according to a senior military official who requested anonymity under military ground rules.
The Israeli military says that 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men between the ages of 18 and 24 are eligible for service and that almost all were sent draft notices in the past year. So far, only 2,940 have enlisted, although there is time for others to sign up before a series of deadlines. Most of the 2,940 will not be ready to go to war now, but will be able to do so after the Israeli military’s six months of training.
Their number is still far off the military’s target of 4,800 ultra-Orthodox enlistees for the year, “and even further from the army’s needs,” Brig. Gen. Shay Tayeb, who is in charge of military personnel, told a committee in Parliament on Aug. 12.
The future promises more strains. The number of ultra-Orthodox in Israel has exploded to about one million today — roughly 13 percent of the population — from 40,000 in 1948. Some 22 percent of 6-year-olds were Haredi in 2024. By 2035, their numbers are projected to reach 30 percent.
Any exemption for them is seen as unsustainable. “This is the math talking,” said Inbar Harush Gity, the Defense Ministry’s former head of recruitment of the ultra-Orthodox into the Israeli military.
The ultra-Orthodox are unmoved.
“It may be that the circumstances have changed and the times have changed,” Motti Babchik, the powerful political adviser to one of the ultra-Orthodox parties that left the government, said in an interview. “But the basic agreement between the Haredis and the state of Israel remains the same.”
‘Is Their Blood More Red?’
Rabbi Tamir Granot’s son Capt. Amitai Granot, 24, was killed by a Hezbollah missile on the border with Lebanon in October 2023, eight days after the Hamas-led attack on Israel. The following March, Rabbi Granot delivered an impassioned speech, widely shared on YouTube, calling on the ultra-Orthodox to serve and share in the pain.
“Was Amitai wrong?” his father asked. “Is it for naught that he now lies under clumps of earth beneath Mount Herzl, he and all his comrades who lie there with him, and other cemeteries around Israel? Should they have stayed in yeshiva and left the army and self-sacrifice to secularists only?”
Rabbi Granot is part of a different stream of Orthodox Judaism, religious Zionism, which is an integral part of Israeli society and sends large numbers of its yeshiva students to the military. In an interview at his Tel Aviv yeshiva, Rabbi Granot recounted how he went to the homes of ultra-Orthodox religious leaders after his son’s death and tried to reason with them. He told them, he said, that he had students in his yeshiva — he called them his children — and, like his son, they knew they had to serve.
He posed a question to the Haredi leaders: “So why are your children better than them? Is their blood more red than our blood?”
Some leaders agreed that the ultra-Orthodox should serve, he said, but none would say so publicly. “One of the biggest told me, ‘I can’t do it.’ I asked him why. He told me, ‘If I will do it, I will not exist.’”
In other words, Rabbi Granot said, “he will lose his status in society and everyone else from the leadership would say he’s not a rabbi.”
The issue has only intensified since then. Last month, in a video made public of an emergency meeting about the Haredi draft, Hillel Hirsch, a leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi, unequivocally told a small group of colleagues that most Haredi yeshiva students do not want to serve. “They never dreamed of it; they don’t dream of it now,” he said.
Another rabbi, Yoel Shapira, spoke up and offered a reality check. “But this is becoming a conversation everywhere,” he said. “In all the yeshivas it’s becoming a topic.” In one of the most important yeshivas, he said, referring to a military intelligence corps, “boys are saying that so-and-so has a brother in Unit 8200 and he doesn’t feel uncomfortable that he has such a brother.”
Many young Haredim use “kosher phones” similar to the old flip-tops, but some also secretly keep smartphones, which have given them access to the outside world and, particularly, to secular Israel, where service in the Israeli military is seen as an entry into adulthood and the collective defense of the nation.
“Living in Israel, not being in the army, it’s a situation that you’re always going to be apologizing for,” said Nechemia Steinberger, a Haredi lecturer and rabbi in Jerusalem who enlisted in the military in 2021 at 37. “I felt, even though it’s a later stage in life, ‘I’ve got to do it.’”
‘Brother, We’re the Same People’
Rabbi Arie Amit, a member of the Chabad Lubavitch sect, which is more inclined than other ultra-Orthodox groups to engage with the outside world, was among the first Haredim in Israel to enlist. It was 2001, he was soon to be 18, and the second intifada, a mass uprising of Palestinians against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, had started the year before.
“I saw in the newspapers that people were blowing up in the streets, and I didn’t see myself studying Torah all day,” he said in an interview in a cafe in the city of Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv. “So I thought I could contribute to my people much better in the military.”
He now handles logistics at a temporary base just inside the Gaza border, and said he understood why so many Israelis were upset with the ultra-Orthodox.
“People are being killed, or people are serving many, many months,” he said. “It’s like: Brother, we’re the same people. Why aren’t you contributing to the burden that we’re carrying?”
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14) In Washington Crackdown, Making a Federal Case Out of Low-Level Arrests
A single afternoon in court illustrated the new ways in which laws are being enforced after President Trump’s takeover of the city’s police.
By Devlin Barrett, Reporting from Washington, Aug. 24, 2025
As President Trump posed triumphantly for photos with police officers, government agents and members of the National Guard in Southeast Washington last week, lawyers across town in federal court grappled with his new brand of justice.
The stream of defendants who shuffled through a federal courtroom on Thursday afternoon illustrated the new ways in which laws are being enforced in the nation’s capital after the president’s takeover of the city’s police. They were appearing before a magistrate judge on charges that would typically be handled at the local court level, if they were filed at all.
One man had been arrested over an open container of alcohol. Another had been charged with threatening the president after delivering a drunken outburst following his arrest on vandalism. And one defendant’s gun case so alarmed prosecutors that they intend to drop the case.
Mr. Trump has cast his crackdown on crime as a success, and suggested on Friday that it was a blueprint he would seek to apply to other cities, including Chicago. To defense lawyers and even some prosecutors, though, many of the cases that have landed in court have raised concerns that the takeover seems intended to artificially inflate its effect because government lawyers have been instructed to file the most serious federal charges, no matter how minor the incident.
One of the recipients of Mr. Trump’s show of force was Mark Bigelow, 28, a part-time delivery driver for Amazon.
After midnight on Aug. 19, Mr. Bigelow was sitting in the middle row of a van parked on a street in Northeast Washington with its doors open, according to court papers. Two other men were in the front when a full complement of law enforcement officials — from the Metropolitan Police Department, the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service — stopped and saw what appeared to be an open container of alcohol in the front seat.
As law enforcement questioned and searched the two other passengers, Mr. Bigelow left the van and started to walk away, until other agents stopped him, according to the charging document. Peering into the van, an officer spotted “a second cup containing an alcoholic beverage in the middle row seat,” at which point Mr. Bigelow was arrested on charges of possession of an open container, a misdemeanor.
As he was placed in a vehicle, the handcuffed Mr. Bigelow became belligerent, twisting his body and yelling, “Get off me! Y’all too little, bro!” at an ICE agent, according to a court filing, which described how Mr. Bigelow made “physical contact” by kicking an agent in the hand and another in the leg.
As a result, Mr. Bigelow was charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer, an offense that carries a maximum sentence of eight years in prison.
The charges follow a directive by the U.S. attorney, Jeanine Pirro, to prosecutors to charge the most serious crimes possible in each case and to do so in federal court, where sentences tend to run much longer.
A federal public defender representing Mr. Bigelow, Elizabeth Mullin, told the U.S. magistrate judge, Moxila A. Upadhyaya, that he would never have been arrested, let alone charged with a federal felony, but for the president’s crackdown. “He was caught up in this federal occupation of D.C.,” she said. “This was a case created by federal law enforcement.”
Next up was Torez Riley, 37, who was arrested at a Trader Joe’s grocery store for what the police said was possession of two handguns in his bag.
Mr. Riley’s case has been a point of contention inside the U.S. attorney’s office, where a number of prosecutors concluded that officers unlawfully searched Mr. Riley when they stopped him, violating the Fourth Amendment, according to people familiar with the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Before Mr. Trump’s crackdown, prosecutors in Ms. Pirro’s office would have been likely to dismiss a case like Mr. Riley’s after an initial review of the facts of the arrest, according to the people, who were familiar with the instructions.
Those people said that after Mr. Riley’s arrest, Ms. Pirro pushed her subordinates to charge the case despite those concerns. One person familiar with the matter disputed that characterization, saying that the prosecutors handling the case did not have a full command of the facts, and that when she saw the police body camera footage of the arrest on Friday, she ordered them to dismiss the gun charges against Mr. Riley. A detention hearing in the case is scheduled for Monday.
In a statement, Ms. Pirro said: “My job is to prosecute crime in what was one of the most violent cities in the world. In so doing, I will always act with integrity and responsibility. Under my watch prosecutors will be aggressive in getting guns off the street and arguing cases to judges, who make final determinations, but they will do so consistent with the law and the facts.”
The argument for dropping such a case is not simply a question of being tough or soft on crime, or constitutional rights. Prosecutors have to worry, particularly in Washington, that an appeals court could, in throwing out a case like Mr. Riley’s, issue a decision that makes it harder for officers to search people on the street. Such an adverse ruling, they reasoned, could hamper crime-fighting efforts for years to come.
That was the primary concern of the prosecutors who argued against pursuing the Riley case, these people said.
Mr. Riley made his first appearance in court on Thursday about the same time that Ms. Pirro stood in the sun with Mr. Trump in Southeast Washington.
“I am making sure that we back the blue to the hilt,” she told officers and agents crowded around the president. “Every arrest you make, we’re going the longest way to make sure that we charge in those cases.”
The next defendant was Edward Dana, 30, who is accused of threatening the president’s life, which carries a potential five-year prison sentence.
Mr. Dana, who has a history of mental illness and arrests, was stopped around 10 p.m. on Aug. 17, after the police received complaints that he had damaged a light outside a restaurant in Northwest Washington.
A group of police officers and federal agents arrested him for property destruction. As he settled into the back of a police car, he asserted that he was drunk after having consumed seven drinks. An officer’s body camera captured his comments. He became irate, yelling at the officer driving the vehicle that he would return to the restaurant and beat up someone.
“I’m not going to tolerate fascism,” he declared, vowing to “protect the Constitution by any means necessary. And that means killing you, Officer, killing the president, killing anyone who stands in the way of our Constitution.”
The officer immediately radioed his dispatcher to “notify Secret Service — he just made threats to kill the president.”
Not long afterward, Mr. Dana began to sing. A Secret Service agent reviewed the video of his comments and filed a charging affidavit against him.
“He is not a danger,” his lawyer, Ms. Mullin, told the judge. “The danger here is having federal agents roaming the streets.”
Judge Upadhyaya urged the two sides to reach an agreement on conditions for his release, but as the hearing wore on, she began to lose patience with the prosecutor, Conor Mulroe. Mr. Dana was a menace, he argued, insisting that his mental health problems should not be an excuse to allow him to keep harassing people and businesses.
Mr. Mulroe added that given Mr. Dana’s long history of “quite erratic behavior,” he should remain in jail while awaiting trial.
As the hearing continued, Judge Upadhyaya became exasperated with Mr. Mulroe.
“I know what you’re doing and I just have no tolerance for it,” she snapped. “There has to be a common-sense application of the law.”
Her last case of the day involved a man who had been arrested in Washington based on a warrant in nearby Virginia. Finding no one else able to transport him at night from one jail to another, she persuaded Ms. Mullin, the defense lawyer, to do it.
“The time and resources of the court are stretched beyond belief,” the judge said. “It’s been like this all week.”
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
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15) National Guard patrols begin carrying weapons in D.C.
By Bernard Mokam and Helene Cooper, Bernard Mokam reported from Washington. Helene Cooper covers the Pentagon, Aug. 24, 2025
National Guard troops on duty in President Trump’s crackdown in Washington, D.C., began carrying weapons in the capital Sunday evening, according to a spokesman for the National Guard task force.
Several members of the Guard from South Carolina were seen late Sunday outside Washington’s Union Station with firearms holstered to their hips.
In a statement, Maj. Michael A. Maxwell said that the change was directed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. On Friday, officials said Mr. Hegseth authorized Guard members to carry their weapons, though without giving specifics on how often members would be armed as they walked through the city.
Major Maxwell emphasized that service members would operate under established rules for the use of force, employing it “only as a last resort and solely in response to an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm.”
He said that more than 2,200 Guard troops were deployed in Washington as of Sunday, including about 900 D.C. members and others from Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia.
Mr. Trump ordered the deployment of troops in Washington two weeks ago, saying that they would help an array of federal agents crack down on crime in the city. But their mission remains vague, and much of the overall federal law enforcement effort has focused on low-level crimes and detention of undocumented immigrants.
Major Maxwell said Guard members would assist in surveying for “community restoration” projects and aid the D.C. police in staffing at public transit stops as the school year began.
Outside Union Station, as travelers waited quietly with their luggage to be picked up, several protesters jeered the half-dozen armed Guard members patrolling the area. One demonstrator, Nadine Seiler, heckled the troops while carrying a sign reading “Free D.C. Release the Epstein Files”; her partner in an orange vest banged a cowbell.
Ms. Seiler, 60, who is from Trinidad and Tobago, called the rollout of the troops in Washington a “manufactured crisis” by Mr. Trump.
She added, “As somebody who bought into American ideals and America’s vaunted Constitution, I can’t articulate how disappointed I am in lawmakers and the American people,” who she said were idle in a time of crisis.
Abbey Schneider, 51, a former Washington resident who was in town visiting family, said near the station that Sunday was the first time she and her daughter had seen Guard members armed after spotting them while out at night last week. “I have a visceral reaction to it,” Ms. Schneider said. “I feel it is unnecessary and a little bit scary. It feels like an escalation.”
Greg Jaffe contributed reporting.
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16) Kilmar Abrego Garcia is detained again, three days after being freed from custody.
By Alan Feuer, Jazmine Ulloa and Chris Cameron, August 25, 2025
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant who was wrongfully expelled to El Salvador in March and then brought back to face criminal charges, was detained again on Monday after the administration indicated that it planned to re-deport him to Uganda, his lawyer said.
The detention unfolded after Mr. Abrego Garcia arrived at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Baltimore and came only three days after he was freed from custody in the criminal case that was filed against him in Federal District Court in Nashville.
Outside the office, a lawyer for Mr. Abrego Garcia, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, said that the stated intention of the meeting with ICE was for an interview. “Clearly, that was false,” he said, adding that the immigration authorities did not say why Mr. Abrego Garcia was being detained or even where he would be taken.
The crowd of supporters descended into chants of “boos” and “shame” to the news, and immigrant rights volunteers in yellow vests shielded Mr. Abrego Garcia’s family members as they left the building.
Shortly after, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers filed a legal action known as a habeas petition in Federal District Court in Maryland seeking to stop his removal to Uganda. The petition claimed that the Trump administration had re-arrested him without first giving him the opportunity to express “fears of persecution and torture in that country.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia should have a grace period of two business days from being deported again under a standing order issued in May by the chief federal judge in Maryland. The order automatically stopped the government from following through on expulsions of immigrants for 48 hours after they filed habeas petitions.
Over the weekend, his lawyers had accused the Trump administration of seeking to “coerce” a guilty plea from him on the charges of human smuggling that were brought against him in an indictment in June.
The lawyers said the administration had promised to send Mr. Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica, where he could live freely as a legal resident, if he pleaded to the charges and agreed to serve whatever prison sentence he eventually received. Otherwise, the lawyers said, Trump officials said they would deport Mr. Abrego Garcia “halfway across the world” to Uganda, where, the lawyers said, “his safety and liberty would be under threat.”
“The government now seeks to deport Mr. Abrego to Uganda as punishment, notwithstanding that Costa Rica is willing to take him in as a refugee,” one of the lawyers, Sean Hecker, said after the detention. “The government’s campaign of retribution continues because Mr. Abrego refuses to be coerced into pleading guilty to a case that should never have been brought.”
The arrest in Baltimore was the latest twist in a long-running saga that began this spring, when the Trump administration removed Mr. Abrego Garcia to a notorious terrorism prison in El Salvador, despite a court order that expressly barred him from being sent to the country. Then, after weeks of complaining that they were powerless to bring him back to U.S. soil, Trump officials did exactly that — not merely to correct their own mistake but to file criminal charges against him.
As he arrived for his immigration check-in, Mr. Abrego Garcia was greeted by the cheers of dozens of supporters. His wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, and his brother, Cesar, were by his side. Speaking to the crowd, he thanked the people who had stood with him and delivered an emotional plea to immigrants and the immigrant rights community to keep up the fight and not lose hope.
“Brothers and sisters, my name is Kilmar Abrego Garcia,” he said. “And I always want you to remember that today, I can say with pride, that I am free and have been reunited with my family.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia, dressed in jeans, sneakers and a black, gray and white polo, appeared nervous when he first arrived. His eyes shifted from reporters to rally goers, and he took a deep breath. His voice broke as he spoke about how the memories of his family and playing with his children on a trampoline had sustained him while he was detained at the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.
But he held back his tears and finished his statement with resolve. He said those moments would continue to fuel him as he continued his legal battles and reminded the audience that his case was not about one immigrant family but the many targeted under the Trump administration’s crackdown.
“To all of the families who have also suffered separations or who live under the constant threat of being separated,” he said, “I want to tell you that even though this injustice is hurting us hard, we must not lose hope.”
He continued: “God is with us, and God will never leave us. God will bring justice to all of the injustice.”
As he climbed the steps to the federal building, with immigration agents around, the scene turned chaotic. Mr. Abrego Garcia bowed his head as he slowly walked into the building. The crowd chanted “ICE go home” and “Si se puede,” or “yes you can” in Spanish.
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17) Tiny Patch of West Bank Land Fuels Dreams of Greater Israel
Israel’s approval of a settlement project delayed for decades shows how far Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone in dashing Palestinian aspirations.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, Aug. 25, 2025
A view of the E1 area near an Israeli settlement, Maale Adumim, on Friday. Amir Levy/Getty Images
A wall separating an Arab neighborhood from E1. Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press
The plans for Israeli settlement construction in an area known as E1, a small but strategic patch of land in the occupied West Bank, were laid before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu first came to power nearly three decades ago.
Actually breaking ground there was long taboo, since the land is considered critical to any future Palestinian state, but building may now begin soon.
Israel’s final approval for the settlement project, granted last week, shows how far Mr. Netanyahu and his hard-right government have gone in bucking the internationally accepted parameters for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Since the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that ignited the devastating war in Gaza, Mr. Netanyahu, with the apparent backing of President Trump and his administration, seems to have dropped any semblance of accepting a form of Palestinian statehood, however limited, in favor of a greater Israel — one that extends beyond the boundaries of the original Jewish state founded in 1948.
Experts say Mr. Netanyahu also appears to have given up on his vision of forging relations with an outer circle of moderate Arab states, which he used to argue would help squeeze the Palestinians into territorial compromise.
Instead, he is etching the contours of indefinite dominance over the lands Israel conquered in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, including the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, dismantling the scaffolding of a future Palestinian state.
On a recent visit to Ofra, a West Bank settlement, for the 50th anniversary of its establishment, Mr. Netanyahu remarked, “I stood here half a century ago and said that we would do everything to ensure our continued hold on the land of Israel, that we would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and that we would thwart all attempts to uproot us from here.”
Over the years, Mr. Netanyahu has paid lip service to the idea of the two-state solution, but on that visit to Ofra, he declared, “Thank God we kept our promise.”
In an interview this month with a right-leaning Israeli news channel, Mr. Netanyahu said that he was on a “historic and spiritual mission” and that he identified with the interviewer’s vision of the “whole land of Israel.”
The establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is widely viewed as the only practical possible solution to the century-old conflict, and foreign and domestic peace builders have long held that building in E1 would complicate the prospects of a viable, contiguous Palestinian heartland.
Until now, every American administration had vehemently opposed Israeli housing construction there to preserve the option of a negotiated peace agreement, and the approval granted last week prompted strong international condemnation from many of Israel’s traditional allies.
Support for a two-state solution dwindled among the Israeli public after a spate of deadly Palestinian suicide bombings in the early 2000s and even more so since the Oct. 7 attack. Even left-leaning Israeli politicians avoid mentioning the old land-for-peace formula, speaking only of leaving open a pathway for a future separation from the Palestinians.
The prospects of a two-state solution have also receded as West Bank land has been eaten away by the settlement expansion championed by the far-right coalition partners Mr. Netanyahu relies on to stay in power, among them Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister.
About 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank, amid about three million Palestinians. Most of the world considers Israeli settlements there to be a violation of international law.
“It’s Smotrich’s government now,” said Daniel B. Shapiro, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, and former American ambassador to Israel. He said, “Netanyahu can’t resist him, and Trump shows no appetite to push back.”
Mike Huckabee, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel, said in a radio interview that large-scale development in E1 was “a decision for the government of Israel to make, and so we would not try to evaluate the good or the bad of that.”
For Mr. Smotrich, precluding any possibility of a future Palestinian state is precisely the point. He has described each new settlement and housing unit as “a nail in the coffin of that dangerous idea.”
Much of E1 consists of steep inclines and deep ravines that make construction difficult, but about 3,400 housing units are planned to go up on two plateaus.
“Construction in E1 may or may not block a future Palestinian state; there are conceivable workarounds,” Mr. Shapiro said. But what it will do, he said, is end any near-term prospect of formal diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region and increase Israel’s international isolation, coming as the Israeli government plans to expand its military occupation of Gaza.
Location of the Proposed Israeli Settlement in the West Bank
An abbreviation of East 1 (as it was marked on old maps), E1 sits on roughly 4.6 square miles of rugged desert terrain at the cinched waist of the kidney-shaped West Bank, connecting the northern and southern halves of the territory. It is one of the last open areas for development between the West Bank and predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem.
Israeli settlement there would reduce the link between the two halves of the West Bank to a series of roads and bridges, and to a narrow land corridor farther east, in the direction of the Jordanian border.
Successive Israeli governments have coveted E1 — if quietly — to create a different kind of contiguity, one that would connect Jerusalem and the large Israeli urban settlement of Maale Adumim, just east of E1, and to seal Israel’s control of the high ground around its contested capital.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin formally included E1 within the jurisdiction of Maale Adumim in 1994, a year before he was assassinated by a Jewish extremist, but with the first of the Israeli-Palestinian agreements known as the Oslo Accords in play, he did not promote building there.
The series of prime ministers who followed him, Mr. Netanyahu included, tried to advance construction plans but bowed to American objections. Other than roads and basic infrastructure, the only building there is an Israeli police station that went up about two decades ago and could be easily removed, unlike a populated neighborhood.
Around that time, Mr. Netanyahu, who was out of office, went to E1 to kick off a campaign to regain leadership of the Likud party.
When he once again won the premiership in 2009, he delivered a landmark speech, under international pressure, essentially endorsing the two-state solution. He pledged to work for peace and laid out terms for “a demilitarized Palestinian state” alongside the Jewish state of Israel.
He has since suggested that Israel should maintain security control over all the West Bank and has spoken of a Palestinian “state minus” with limited powers.
Even during Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Netanyahu held off approving construction in E1 as the administration in Washington worked on an ultimately unsuccessful Middle East peace plan.
But the region looks very different now. The West Bank is undergoing transformation, and the future of the Gaza Strip is in limbo. Israel has recently fought wars with Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and has been fighting in Syria, too.
The significance of E1 appears to have shrunk to a tiny, beige square on the map.
“If you look at the grand picture, E1 is a very minor detail, hardly worth looking at,” said Zakaria al-Qaq, a Palestinian expert in national security and resident of East Jerusalem. Mr. Netanyahu, he said, is on a mission “to re-engineer and redesign the geography, demography, history and ideology of the entire region.”
Still, it remains unclear whether the E1 decision truly buries the two-state solution or whether the idea might still be salvageable.
Shaul Arieli, head of the T-Politography research group, which provides data to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said it would take months for building to start.
The approval came ahead of elections scheduled for next year, he noted, adding that the outcome of the elections would determine the results on the ground.
Mr. Arieli, a map expert who helped prepare Israel’s official negotiating teams in the past, believes that it is still feasible to create a Palestinian state and redraw the borders, with land swaps, in a way that would allow 80 percent of the Israeli settlers to live under Israeli sovereignty.
Construction in E1 would make things more difficult, he acknowledged, but he said that every peace proposal up until now called for Israel to give up on dozens of settlements.
“It could always evacuate that one,” he said.
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18) Five Journalists Among Those Killed in Israeli Strikes on Gaza Hospital
The five Gaza-based reporters had worked for various international media outlets, their employers said. The Israeli military confirmed its forces had struck the hospital area, without saying why.
By Isabel Kershner, Aaron Boxerman and Ameera Harouda, Aug. 25, 2025
Isabel Kershner and Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem and Ameera Harouda from Doha, Qatar.
Palestinian medics helping an injured man at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Monday. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Two Israeli strikes hit a hospital in southern Gaza on Monday, killing five Palestinian journalists and at least 15 more people, according to local health officials, in one of the deadliest attacks for journalists covering the nearly two-year war in the enclave.
The Gaza health ministry put the death toll at 20, also including medical staff, rescue workers and patients, and said dozens more had been injured. The five journalists had worked for media outlets including Reuters, The Associated Press and Al Jazeera, according to their employers.
The Israeli military said it had carried out a strike in the area of Nasser Hospital, without saying what the target was. The statement said the military regretted “any harm to uninvolved individuals,” adding that its chief of staff had ordered an immediate inquiry.
The war in Gaza that began nearly two years ago has been one of the deadliest conflicts anywhere for journalists, with at least 192 killed since the start, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The Israeli government has barred international journalists from entering Gaza to freely report throughout the war. That has left much of the world relying on Palestinian journalists — reporting amid bombardment and hunger — to understand the situation in Gaza.
The Gaza health ministry and hospital officials said that the first Israeli strike hit the fourth floor of Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis. It was followed by a second attack as ambulance crews arrived to retrieve the dead and wounded, the ministry said in a statement.
A live video feed from Al-Ghad TV, a pan-Arab broadcaster based in Cairo,captured the aftermath of a blast on the southeastern facade of Nasser hospital. The video, which was verified by The New York Times, showed emergency responders and others moving a white body bag on a staircase. Shortly after, a second strike is captured live on camera, leaving a cloud of dust and smoke.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to questions as to whether its forces had conducted a “double tap” strike, meaning a double strike at the same location. Rights groups have deplored such attacks, which can put rescue workers and other civilians gathering to help the wounded in danger.
Another video shared by a witness on social media shows about a dozen bodies, covered in dust and blood and apparently lifeless, piled along a staircase between the third and fourth floors of Nasser Hospital. The footage, verified by The Times, also shows men in civilian clothes inspecting the bodies after the second strike.
Gaza’s Civil Defense rescue service said one of its crew had been killed and seven other crew members were injured.
Hamas, the Palestinian group which seized full control of Gaza in 2007, named the five killed journalists as Hussam al-Masri, Mohammed Salama, Mariam Dagga, Moaz Abu Taha and Ahmad Abu Aziz.
The Reuters news agency confirmed that Mr. al-Masri was a contractor for Reuters and said a second contractor, photographer Hatem Khaled, had been injured in the attack.
Reuters added in a statement that Mr. Abu Taha was a freelance journalist whose work had been occasionally published by the agency. Reuters said it was “devastated” to learn of the losses, adding that it was “seeking more information from Israeli authorities about these latest strikes.”
Al Jazeera said that Mr. Salama, a cameraman, was one of its journalists. The Qatari-owned channel, which has frequently clashed with Israel, accused the Israeli military of killing its reporters as part of a “systematic campaign to silence the truth.”
The online outlet Middle East Eye identified Mr. Abu Aziz as a contributor to “dozens of reports” since the Gaza war began in late 2023.
The Israeli military said in its statement that it “does not target journalists as such.”
The Associated Press said that Ms. Dagga, 33, was a visual-media journalist who had freelanced for the agency, as well as other news outlets, throughout the war in Gaza, which was set off by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The agency said it was “shocked and saddened to learn” of her death, along with several other journalists, and added that her 12-year-old son had been evacuated from Gaza earlier in the war.
The Associated Press added that Ms. Dagga “frequently based herself at Nasser Hospital, most recently reporting on doctors struggling to save children with no prior health issues who were wasting away from starvation.”
The Foreign Press Association in Israel, which represents journalists working for the international media in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, said the strikes hit an exterior staircase of the hospital where journalists frequently stationed themselves with their cameras, and that the strikes came with no warning. The association said in a statement that it was “outraged and in shock.”
Israel has argued in the past that it struck medical facilities and hospital compounds in Gaza because Hamas routinely uses them for military purposes. Hamas has denied these claims.
Mohammad Saqer, a Gaza health official at Nasser Hospital, said the first of the two strikes hit the fourth floor of a hospital building, prompting first-responders and medical workers to rush to the scene. The second strike came several minutes later, killing and wounding some of them, he said.
“We are trying to preserve this hospital,” Mr. Saqer said. “If the Israelis think there’s been any violation here, they should talk to us, and we can solve the problem,” he said.
“Instead, they’re bombing,” he added.
Ayat Al-Haj, the hospital’s public relations coordinator, described a scene of choking smoke and dust. “We couldn’t see anything,” she said in trembling voice, speaking by phone from her office after the strikes. “All we could hear were screams.”
Aritz Parra, Abu Bakr Bashir and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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