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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) Elon Musk Could Become First Trillionaire Under New Tesla Pay Plan
Tesla’s board unveiled a compensation package for the chief executive that could be worth $900 billion if he meets ambitious targets.
By Jack Ewing and Peter Eavis, Sept. 5, 2025
Tesla’s board on Friday proposed a pay package that could make its chief executive, Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire as long as he meets a series of very ambitious corporate goals.
Mr. Musk, already the world’s richest person, would have to increase Tesla’s stock market value eightfold over the next decade to collect the full value of the package, according to a securities filing.
All the compensation would be in the form of Tesla shares. The package, which must be approved by the company’s shareholders, is expected to be put to a vote at an annual meeting on Nov. 6.
Mr. Musk has a net worth of more than $400 billion, according to Forbes. The new pay could add around $900 billion to that fortune if he succeeds in raising Tesla’s stock market value to $8.5 trillion from about $1.1 trillion today. It would be by far the richest compensation of any executive in corporate history. And it could leave him owning nearly 29 percent of Tesla, an extraordinary level of control for a chief executive.
Mr. Musk would have to remain at Tesla for at least seven and a half years to cash in any of the shares, and 10 years to earn the full amount. He would also have to meet various very ambitious operational milestones, including overseeing the commercial deployment of one million autonomous taxis, one million robots and a more than 24-fold increase in profit.
Hitting many of those targets could be extremely hard. Many other companies around the world are racing to perfect self-driving cars and robots.
“Retaining and incentivizing Elon is fundamental to Tesla achieving these goals and becoming the most valuable company in history,” Robyn Denholm, chair of the Tesla board, and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson, a director on the board, said in a letter to shareholders.
The lavish pay plan will almost surely be criticized by some shareholders for excessively rewarding Mr. Musk. Some investors have said the chief executive has performed poorly in recent years and engaged in behavior that has damaged the company. The package will increase the already intense scrutiny of Mr. Musk, who is regarded as a genius by his acolytes and a dangerous oligarch by his critics.Tesla’s sales and profit have slumped over the last year as Mr. Musk has become immersed in right-wing politics. He worked for several months in the Trump administration, offending many liberal electric-vehicle buyers.
While exercising significant control over Tesla, Mr. Musk spends a lot of time overseeing other business interests. Among them are SpaceX, a rocket company, and xAI, an artificial intelligence venture that owns the social media site X.
The plan announced Friday does not place restrictions on how much time he spends on other ventures or his political activities.
The compensation plan mirrors one from 2018 that awarded Mr. Musk millions of Tesla shares if he met goals that seemed far-fetched at the time. He achieved the milestones, but a Delaware judge struck down that pay package after shareholders claimed that it was excessive and contended that the company’s board had not properly informed investors about the package. Tesla has appealed to the state’s Supreme Court.
The documents that Tesla filed Friday contain measures that would replace Mr. Musk’s compensation from the 2018 plan if the company’s appeal of the Delaware case is unsuccessful. Tesla said Friday awarding that compensation package would require it to record an expense of at least $56 billion on its financial statements based on the recent share price.
If shareholders approve the latest pay package, dissident investors would have more difficulty challenging it. This year, Tesla moved its corporate domicile from Delaware to Texas, where state law makes it harder for shareholders to sue companies in which they have only a small stake.
Tesla pioneered the market for electric cars, but has fallen behind the Chinese carmakers BYD and Geely in the number of cars sold globally, and is in danger of being overtaken by Volkswagen, according to figures compiled by SNE Research, a South Korean firm.
Some analysts blame Mr. Musk for the decline, saying he squandered resources developing the Cybertruck pickup, which has sold poorly, rather than new models with broader appeal. Chinese carmakers and established manufacturers like General Motors and Hyundai have introduced dozens of electric cars that increasingly make Tesla’s main products, the Model 3 sedan and Model Y sport utility vehicle, look dated.
Mr. Musk has played down the importance of car sales, saying Tesla’s future is in artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and humanoid robots. The compensation plan calls for Tesla to have sold a total of 20 million cars by 2035, from eight million today. That implies the company would need to sell only 1.2 million a year, far fewer than it sold last year.
On Monday, the company unveiled what it called its Master Plan IV, which said the company would be at the forefront of an age of “sustainable abundance” when power will come from the sun, people will travel in self-driving cars and robots will take over menial tasks.
“Today we are on the cusp of a revolutionary period primed for unprecedented growth,” the plan, published on X, said.
In their letter to shareholders, Ms. Denholm and Ms. Wilson-Thompson said, “Elon’s singular vision is vital to navigating this critical inflection point.”
But they also hinted at a future without Mr. Musk, saying he would work with the board on “development of a framework for long-term C.E.O. succession.” And the filing said Mr. Musk had to develop a succession “framework” to earn a portion of the new stock award.
According to the compensation plan, Mr. Musk would be eligible to receive 35 million shares if Tesla’s Wall Street value hit $2 trillion. He would receive additional shares if Tesla’s value increased until it reached $8.5 trillion. The plan is structured so that Mr. Musk would profit from gains in the share price only from $334, the closing price on Wednesday.
For Mr. Musk to collect the full award, Tesla’s operating profit will have to rise to $400 billion, from $17 billion last year.
Although Mr. Musk would not be allowed to sell any of the shares for years, he will immediately be able to exercise their votes in shareholder meetings, increasing his control of the company. If he collects all the shares, and does not sell any, his stake in Tesla would rise from 13 percent now to about 29 percent. Taxes could reduce that amount.
Mr. Musk had threatened to leave the company if he didn’t get a much bigger share of the company. He “raised the possibility that he may pursue other interests that may afford him greater influence,” the board said.
There is a little doubt that the goals are ambitious. Tesla would have to become twice as valuable as Nvidia, the maker of chips for artificial intelligence and currently the world’s most valuable public company.
Mr. Musk and his brother, Kimbal Musk, who is a member of the Tesla board, recused themselves from the decision on whether to approve the pay package, Ms. Denholm and Ms. Wilson-Thompson said. But Tesla said in its regulatory filing Friday that Texas law and stock market rules allowed both Musks to vote on the compensation package during the November shareholder vote.
Boards typically determine executive compensation by comparing pay of other corporate leaders in similar industries. Benchmarking in Mr. Musk’s case would be “irrelevant,” Tesla’s board said.
“Chief executive officers at other comparably large companies are not being presented with performance goals comparable in scope, degree or complexity to those being asked of Mr. Musk,” the board said.
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2) Why Hamas Refuses to Give Up
Analysts say that despite its vast losses in Gaza, Hamas believes it can hold out for a deal that ensures its survival.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Sept. 5, 2025
Israel has killed thousands of Hamas’s fighters, taken out most of its senior military command and destroyed much of its arsenal and underground tunnel network.
The country’s relentless military campaign has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, cities have been reduced to rubble, and people have struggled daily to find enough food, water and electricity.
And yet Hamas has refused to surrender. The group wants to secure its future in Gaza, but its unwillingness to give up to Israel and disarm is also rooted in its ideology.
Since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the war in Gaza, the group’s leaders have acknowledged that the resulting Israeli counterattack has caused enormous destruction. But they have said it is a “price” Palestinians must pay for their ultimate freedom.
In interviews, some Hamas leaders have said that the group’s calculation was less about defeating Israel on the battlefield, and more about drawing the government into an intractable conflict, one that isolates it diplomatically and undermines its international support. Eventually, they say, Israel will be compelled to realize that its policies toward Palestinians are not sustainable.
“Surrender, as Israel and America are calling for it, is not in Hamas’s dictionary,” said Khaled al-Hroub, a professor at Northwestern University in Qatar who has written books about the group.
Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the leader of Hamas’s military wing, said recently that if he cannot get what he described as an honorable deal to end the war with Israel, then the conflict would become a war of liberation or the group would face “martyrdom,” according to a senior Middle Eastern intelligence official familiar with Mr. al-Haddad’s thinking.
What Hamas considers to be an “honorable deal” is an agreement that could lead to the end of the war and enable the group to continue wielding power in Gaza.
Hamas has previously agreed to temporary cease-fires with Israel in part to provide relief to people in Gaza. But it has firmly rejected ending the war on terms set by Israel, which has demanded the group disarm and send its leaders into exile, and has shown a willingness to tolerate the ongoing suffering of civilians in pursuit of the deal that it wants.
There are no suggestions that Hamas’s position is shifting. This week, it released a statement reiterating that it was ready to accept a deal that would see the release of all remaining hostages held in Gaza in exchange for a number of Palestinian prisoners, an end to the war and a withdrawal of Israeli forces.
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas by force or dismantle it through negotiation, and has rebuffed any deal on the end of the conflict that would leave the group intact.
Civilians in Gaza have paid the highest price for the continuation of the war.
“Have Hamas’s weapons stopped Israel from killing us?” said Abdullah Shehab, 32, who has been staying at his sister’s home in Gaza City since he was forced to leave his hometown, Jabaliya, at the end of May. “Have they stopped Israel from invading our cities? The only thing Hamas’s weapons have done is given Israel a justification to continue the massacres.”
During the October attack, some 1,200 people were killed and about 250 others were abducted, according to Israeli authorities. While Hamas has celebrated the attack, more than 60,000 people in Gaza have been killed in the ensuing war, said the local health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The seemingly irreconcilable positions of Hamas and Israel on how to end the war suggest that the fighting will continue until one side is forced to compromise.
And Hamas believes that Israel will eventually come to terms with an agreement that does not require the group to give in, Palestinian political analysts say.
“They know that the continuation of the war is very costly, but they’re hopeful that they’ll get a deal they can live with, if they remain patient and steadfast,” said Esmat Mansour, a Palestinian analyst who spent years in Israeli prisons with several top Hamas leaders.
“They see the internal and external pressure on Israel to end the war and they know that Israel can’t free the captives without them,” he added. “So they’re saying to themselves, ‘Why should we surrender when we can get something better?’”
Still, Mr. Mansour said, Hamas may conclude that to maintain some power it needs to make difficult concessions, like suspending military recruitment and training and putting its weapons in storage, potentially overseen by a third party.
Ibrahim Madhoun, a Palestinian analyst close to Hamas, said the group needed “an exit” from the war. “The problem is Israel has closed all the exits,” he said.
Hamas, at least publicly, has refused to entertain discussions about abandoning its weapons or sending its commanders into exile. Husam Badran, a senior Hamas official, framed the group’s refusal to surrender as safeguarding Palestinians.
“We’re dealing with an extremist government that carried out massacres at the expense of our people and that is still plotting the killing, slaughter and expulsion of our people,” he said in a text message. “We can’t stop defending ourselves and our people in light of the impotence of the international community and the clear American complicity.”
“Without a clear political agreement that protects the Palestinian people and its land, the resistance will continue its fight,” Mr. Badran added.
Another Hamas official, Taher El-Nounou, recently suggested that the war could ultimately turn in Hamas’s favor, a result that appears unlikely given Israel’s military advantage. Asked on Russia Today’s Arabic-language channel whether carrying out the 2023 attack had been the right decision, he said nobody could judge the results of the war while it was still ongoing.
“Before the Normandy landing, Germany was occupying almost all of Europe,” he said, referring to a costly but decisive battle during World War II. “After that landing, the situation changed.”
Residents of Gaza are facing the reality that the war could drag on into a third year. Though outraged by Israel’s continued bombing campaign, many are also frustrated with Hamas.
Conceding defeat, Mr. Shehab, the displaced man in Gaza City, said, would be the least Hamas could do to take responsibility for “the catastrophic error” of the October 2023 attack — one that “caused plunder greater than the Nakba of 1948,” the dispossession and displacement of Palestinians after Israel’s founding.
But he had little hope Hamas would agree to step aside. “We’re trapped,” he said. “Honestly, the only real difference between Palestinian civilians and Israeli hostages is we’re above ground and they’re below.”
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3) Israel Steps Up Attacks on Gaza City Ahead of a Planned Wider Offensive
The Israeli military destroyed a landmark building after saying it had taken control of almost half of the city, where hundreds of thousands of civilians are sheltering amid a worsening humanitarian crisis.
By Liam Stack, Photographs by Saher Alghorra, Sept. 5, 2025, Liam Stack reported from Tel Aviv and Saher Alghorra reported from Gaza City
An Israeli strike hit the Mushtaha Tower in Gaza City on Friday. The Israeli military said Hamas used the building for intelligence-gathering, but Hamas denied the accusation.
Israel expanded its preparations for a full-scale assault on Gaza City on Friday and targeted a prominent local landmark, a day after a military spokesman said it was in control of almost half the city.
A broad evacuation order has yet to be issued for the city, where hundreds of thousands of people are believed to be sheltering in ruined buildings and tents.
But on Friday, Israel warned people to leave a high-rise building in Gaza City shortly before it destroyed it in a military strike. It was unclear how many people had been killed or injured.
Announcing the evacuation order on social media, Israel Katz, Israel’s defense minister, said: “The gates of Hell are being unlocked in Gaza City.” After the strike, Mr. Katz posted a video of the tower collapsing along with the words: “We started.”
Israel said the building had been used by Hamas for military and intelligence-gathering activities.
Hamas denied the accusation and said Israel had targeted “residential towers densely populated by displaced persons.”
Last month, Israel announced that it planned to expand its military offensive in Gaza City, which Israeli officials have portrayed as one of Hamas’s last strongholds in Gaza.
Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, a military spokesman, said on Thursday that Israeli forces had taken control of 40 percent of the city and were active in the neighborhoods of Zeitoun, Sheikh Radwan and Shuja’iyya.
The military has already carried out widespread destruction in parts of Gaza City in recent weeks. Israeli forces have turned large parts of Zeitoun, a once bustling urban neighborhood, into a barren wasteland, according to satellite images reviewed by The New York Times.
On Friday, the strike on the Gaza City high-rise caused the building to collapse in a pillar of dark smoke, according to a video from the scene published by Reuters. The video also showed a large tent encampment around the tall tower.
In recent days, residents of Gaza City have described nights punctuated by Israeli airstrikes and shelling. Large crowds of people have been fleeing to what they hope are safer neighborhoods.
The prospect of a full-scale offensive on the city would likely exacerbate a humanitarian crisis for the hundreds of thousands of civilians sheltering there. Many of them have fled Israeli bombardment in other parts of Gaza multiple times since the war began 22 months ago, crisscrossing territory to escape attacks, and are now struggling to find food and clean water.
The war began after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel, in which roughly 1,200 were killed and 250 more taken hostage. Since then, the Israeli military response has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. More than half of those killed have been women, children and the elderly, according to local health officials.
The war has destroyed most of Gaza’s infrastructure and parts of the territory are suffering from famine, according to a U.N.-backed group of food experts.
Elham Shamali, 47, who taught at Al-Azhar University before the war, said she fled Gaza City’s Senaa neighborhood with her family two weeks ago when Israeli strikes and shelling came close to their home.
Since then, Ms. Shamali said, they have been staying in Sheikh Radwan, where their neighbor’s home was hit by an airstrike a few days ago. “The building was badly damaged and seven were killed,” she said. “I saw the dead bodies and knew the people, they were our neighbors.”
Ms. Shamali said she and her family planned to flee again, this time to the Tal Al Hawa neighborhood in the west of the city.
Israel’s planned take over of Gaza City has been criticized by the families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, who say any large-scale operation could imperil their loved ones further. Those concerns were renewed on Friday when Hamas released a video of two hostages, Guy Gilboa-Dalal and Alon Ohel.
Mr. Gilboa-Dalal said in the video that it was filmed on Aug. 28 and that he and other hostages were being held in Gaza City. Israeli officials have said they believe roughly 20 living hostages are still being held in Gaza.
Rights groups and international law experts say that hostage videos are made under duress, and that the statements in them are usually coerced.
In a post on social media, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, called the release of the video “psychological terrorism intended to stop us from pursuing the action in Gaza.”
Abu Bakr Bashir and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.
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4) ICE Agents Are Wearing Masks. Is That Un-American?
The long, strange story of masking and law enforcement.
By Sabrina Tavernise, Sept. 5, 2025
Photo illustration by Alex Merto
One of the defining images of President Trump’s second term so far has been security officers in masks. Whether detaining a Turkish student on the street in Boston, raiding Home Depot parking lots in Los Angeles or, now, arresting immigrants on the streets of the capital, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in tactical gear and with their faces obscured have become a strange new national pageant.
The Homeland Security Department says that in an era of extreme polarization and rising political violence, masks are necessary. “ICE officers wear a mask because they’ve been doxxed by the thousands,” Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, told my colleagues at “The Daily.” “Their families have been doxxed. ICE officers’ pictures show up on trees and telephone poles. Death threats are sky-high.” Masking, the argument goes, is simply the practical response.
Lawmakers in liberal states say the practice should be banned, and this summer, Democratic elected officials in California, New York and Pennsylvania proposed laws to do just that. At the end of July, Virginia’s Democratic senators introduced a bill to ban the use of masks nationally. The issue also got the attention of a federal judge, who, in a ruling on Tuesday against Mr. Trump’s use of the military in Los Angeles, noted disapprovingly that the armed forces’ identity “was often obscured by protective armor.”
As I watched all of this, I found myself wondering about masking by law enforcement and whether it has a history in the United States. Something about it seemed at once familiar and foreign. That’s because I associate the practice with Russia.
In the summer of 2000, when President Vladimir Putin had just taken office, I was living in Moscow and working as a reporter. At the time, the first battle lines were being drawn between the new president and the powerful oligarchs he hoped to tame. Russians began to see raids by government forces on oligarchs and their properties. Men in masks conducted them. They became so ubiquitous that people began referring to them sardonically as Maski Show, or mask shows, after a popular television show involving mask-wearing clowns.
The United States is not Russia. But as I search for ways to understand what is happening in my country today, I am looking to the places I’ve been before. In Russia in the 2000s, I thought of masking as a peculiar feature of a wobbly post-Soviet state. Over time it became clear that it was a harbinger of a new era.
The Power and the Danger
Masks became a feature of America’s fiercely polarized political life during the Covid pandemic. Mask requirements enraged conservatives, who saw them as an effort by the government to boss them around on flimsy science. Concerns about the virus’s spread subsided, but the debate seemed to have unlocked something in the American psyche about the power — and danger — of masks.
Over the past several years, states and counties began passing laws against masking that applied to protesters in demonstrations, reasoning that they would be more likely to do something illegal if law enforcement couldn’t see their faces.
Some of those laws echoed statutes passed in the 1940s and 1950s by states and cities that were trying to control the Ku Klux Klan, said Robert Mickey, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. Even though Klan chapters were often “shot through with members of the police,” Mr. Mickey said, those officers, who showed their faces during the day, wore masks when doing the work of the Klan at night.
There are good reasons vigilantes wear masks and police officers don’t. Policing experts argue that masking by law enforcement is wrong because officers are public servants and are supposed to be accountable to the public. Hiding behind a mask makes that harder. Yes, officers’ jobs can be dangerous, but being publicly identifiable goes along with having the right to wield a deadly weapon on behalf of the state.
In recent years in the United States, trends in law enforcement were moving in the opposite direction. Many police departments now use body cameras and require that the officer’s badge, with name and number, be visible.
Michael German, a retired F.B.I. agent who is now a fellow in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, said that even when he worked undercover, “the period of secrecy ended when charges were brought and I had to defend what I had done in that undercover capacity.”
Masking provides leeway for abuse, he said. People tend to be more scrupulous and vigilant when they can be personally held accountable for their actions. A mask allows more latitude for sloppiness or shortcuts — a punch or a kick, for example.
No one I interviewed could think of an example of American law enforcement masking. Jules Epstein, a law professor at Temple University who worked for decades as a criminal defense lawyer and death penalty litigator, said that in his more than 45 years of practice, he had never seen the police wear masks, including in high-profile gang cases.
‘Without Question a Bad Sign’
Outside the United States, masking by law enforcement has a long history. When it happens, it tends to be in countries with weak central governments, sometimes ones that are fighting insurgencies or drug cartels or, for that matter, political opponents.
In Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s, the government worked with paramilitary groups — forces on the side of the government but not directly employed by it — that often wore masks. They operated at the margins of the law, according to Adam Isacson, a security expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, and over time, courts and special tribunals have documented abuses they perpetrated. In Colombia, the state was up against a well-equipped and deadly foe: drug cartels. Anyone obstructing them had reason to fear for their lives. Judges wore masks to avoid reprisal killings, a practice that became known as “judges without faces.”
Law enforcement officers in Mexico sometimes mask, too, Mr. Isacson said, in areas where drug cartels have a strong presence.
In Peru, government forces often wore masks in their war against Shining Path guerrillas in the 1980s and 1990s, said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist who has studied Latin America and written about democratic decline. In areas where Shining Path was strongest, police officers were afraid of reprisals by the guerrillas but also of becoming pariahs in their own communities for abuses they themselves committed, he said.
More recently, Human Rights Watch has documented cases of government forces using masks in Venezuela during the repression that followed the country’s tainted presidential election last year. And in the Philippines, victims of Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal antidrug campaign report that the people doing the killing were sometimes masked.
“The use of masks,” Mr. Levitsky said, “is without question a bad sign.”
And it is extremely rare in functional democracies. “I cannot think of a democratic country with a reliable rule of law where security forces mask themselves,” Mr. Levitsky said. “It just doesn’t happen.”
Stronger, more confident regimes rarely mask. Totalitarian states that have established control over their populations tend to avoid moves that would stir dissent. Masking can draw attention to the fact that the government is up to something it wants to hide, or that it is not powerful enough to protect its own forces. In short, it’s a bad look.
In China, the security forces do not wear masks, said Lynette Ong, a China scholar and professor at the University of Toronto. But something else happens. In her book, “Outsourcing Repression,” Ms. Ong explains that China’s everyday security policing force draws from ordinary people mobilized from the street and paid a daily rate or hired on a contract. The state does not formally employ them, and when they are caught harming someone, the government can plausibly say it was not responsible. China may be authoritarian, she said, but public officials can be held accountable for abuse. They can be fired, for example, if their forces are caught on camera beating people up.
Masks are rare in Iran, too, though they are occasionally used in drug and organized crime operations, said Omid Memarian, an Iranian journalist who is now an Iran expert at DAWN, a Washington-based organization focused on U.S. policy in the Middle East. He said that when he was arrested in 2005, no one, not even his interrogators, wore masks.
“The people who interrogated me, they wanted me to see their faces,” Mr. Memarian said.
The reason was that the government wanted to show that what it was doing was legitimate. They also arrested him discreetly, “without a splash,” Mr. Memarian said. A number of armed men came to his building, but his neighbors had no idea it was happening. They kept it low-key so as not to draw the attention of regime critics.
“Once a mask is involved,” he said, “people understand it as a sign of weakness, that the government has something to hide.”
The Show
In Russia in the early 2000s, Mr. Putin wasn’t trying to hide anything. On the contrary: He was putting on a show that he wanted everyone to see. Russia’s central government had been plagued by weakness throughout the 1990s, with the oligarchs running official agencies and having their way with the state. The Maski Shows were efforts by this new leader to turn the tables.
One of the most famous episodes took place a few days after Mr. Putin was inaugurated in May 2000. Armed men in military fatigues and masks showed up at one of the offices that belonged to the oligarch who had founded the first independent television network, NTV.
Yevgeny Kiselyov, then the director of the channel and its main anchor, remembers being struck by the over-the-top nature of the force. “They were carrying out their operation as if this building was full of heavily armed terrorists,” he said in an interview. In reality, it was middle-aged women working in accounting.
The television station was eventually taken over by the state, and Mr. Kiselyov now lives outside Russia. He said the meaning of the raid was clear even then. It was a public message, not just to that station and its owner, but to anyone who opposed Mr. Putin. “It was an act of intimidation,” he said. “It was saying, ‘We are now in power, and we are going after you.’”
The Trump administration seems to be sending the same message with ICE, except in this case, the targets are not oligarchs, but immigrants and the businesses who employ them.
But there are other audiences. Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, who helped oversee border security in the George W. Bush administration, said he believes the performance is aimed at would-be migrants around the world. Former President Joe Biden, “no matter what he did, could not change the view of the world that the border was open,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “I knew it was going to take someone who was going to create some heartache, and that they’d have to be very tough and create some fear to change the circumstances.”
And then there’s the domestic audience. Polling suggests that many Americans don’t like Mr. Trump’s tactics around deportations, at least when it comes to immigrants who have not committed violent crimes. But some Americans do approve of it, perhaps drawn to its dark spectacle. The immigrant detention center in Florida known as Alligator Alcatraz, which is now tied up in court battles, has its own merch. Americans pose for selfies by the center’s new highway sign and post them on social media. In early August, Indiana announced a partnership with the Homeland Security Department to build the “Speedway Slammer,” its answer to Alligator Alcatraz. A few weeks later, Nebraska announced plans for the “Cornhusker Clink.”
Mr. Levitsky called the highly visible, almost ostentatious use of masks “a performance but with real-world consequences.” “MAGA seems to get something out of playing authoritarian,” he said. “There’s an element of cosplay to it.”
Perhaps the most important audience of all is the agency itself — and its potential recruits. ICE says it wants to hire 10,000 new agents at a time when hiring law enforcement officers has been hard. It got a multibillion-dollar cash infusion from Congress in July. Masking could serve to reassure reluctant applicants, who are worried for their safety or about being judged by people they know, but also to attract more exuberant ones, who see masking as subversive and fun.
In August, the Homeland Security Department posted on social media an image in the style of the TV show “South Park” that showed a caravan of cartoon figures riding in ICE cars. Their faces were all covered from the nose down. At the top of the post was a link: JOIN.ICE.GOV.
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5) South Koreans Swept Up in Immigration Raid at Hyundai E.V. Plant in Georgia
They were among nearly 500 workers apprehended at a construction site for a South Korean battery maker, officials said. The episode prompted diplomatic concern in Seoul.
By John Yoon and Jenny Gross, John Yoon reported from Seoul, Sept. 5, 2025
The Hyundai plant in Ellabell, Ga., in March. Credit...Mike Stewart/Associated Press
Immigration authorities arrested hundreds of workers for a major South Korean battery maker at a Hyundai plant in Georgia, U.S. officials said Friday, calling it the largest ever Homeland Security enforcement operation at a single location.
Agents on Thursday arrested 475 people, most of whom are South Korean citizens, at a construction site for an electric vehicle battery plant in Ellabell, Ga., near Savannah, Steven Schrank, a special agent in charge of Homeland Security investigations for Georgia, said at a news conference.
He said that the workers arrested were in the United States illegally or were working unlawfully. No criminal charges would be announced on Friday, he said, adding that investigators were still determining employment details for those arrested, some of whom worked for subcontractors.
“This operation underscores our commitment to protecting jobs for Georgians and Americans, ensuring a level playing field for businesses that comply with the law, safeguarding the integrity of our economy and protecting workers from exploitation,” Mr. Schrank said.
Most of those arrested were held at the Folkston detention facility on Thursday night and would be moved based on their individual circumstances, he said. One person arrested was treated at the scene for overheating, and one agent suffered a “minor laceration,” but there were no major injuries, he added.
The battery manufacturer, LG Energy Solution, which co-owns the plant with Hyundai Motor Group, said in a statement that employees of both companies, including executives, had been taken into custody.
Hyundai said in a statement that none of those detained were Hyundai employees, as far as the company was aware.
“We are closely monitoring the situation and working to understand the specific circumstances,” Hyundai said on Friday.
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry confirmed on Friday that South Koreans were among those in custody, without saying how many. Mr. Schrank told reporters at the plant on Thursday that some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents had been detained initially and were being released.
The agencies involved in the operation included the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the F.B.I., according to the Atlanta division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which also participated.
The operation, part of President Trump’s crackdown on immigration, caused diplomatic alarm in South Korea. Just over a week earlier, Mr. Trump hosted President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea at the White House, where the South Korean leader pledged to invest an additional $150 billion in the United States, including in battery manufacturing.
The lithium-ion battery plant, which predated Mr. Lee’s pledge, was expected to start operating next year. It is the kind of large-scale, job-creating investment that the United States has pushed for from South Korea and other nations.
The Ellabell site is part of one of Georgia’s largest manufacturing plants. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, has promoted the $7.6 billion Hyundai E.V. factory there as the largest economic development project in state history.
The immigration operation brought construction to a halt at the battery plant, known as HL-GA Battery Company. A spokeswoman, Mary Beth Kennedy, said in a statement that the plant was cooperating with the authorities.
South Korean Embassy and consular officials were sent to the site from Washington and Atlanta, Lee Jaewoong, a spokesman for South Korea’s Foreign Ministry, said at a news conference earlier on Friday. He expressed concern that South Koreans had been detained.
“The economic activities of our investment companies and the rights and interests of our citizens must not be unjustly violated during U.S. law enforcement proceedings,” he said.
LG Energy Solution said that it was working with the South Korean government to get its employees, as well as Hyundai’s, released.
Neal E. Boudette contributed reporting from Detroit.
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6) Chicago Could Be a Powder Keg
By Robert A. Pape, Sept. 5, 2025
Dr. Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who has studied political violence for 30 years.
With Department of Homeland Security agents preparing to assemble in Chicago for an expected crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the Trump administration is starting down a dangerous road. Its incursion into Chicago may begin with pursuing undocumented immigrants, but with its threat to also deploy National Guard troops or active-duty military to combat crime more broadly in the city — over the objections of Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois — the administration risks provoking large-scale civil unrest.
I have studied democracies’ military occupations of regions within their national borders, focusing on cases that existed in or started after 1980: Britain and Northern Ireland, Spain and the Basques and others. These occupations occurred for a range of reasons, and often started out suppressing violence, but they ended up provoking or exacerbating widespread civil unrest, political violence and terrorism.
There are, of course, many ways in which a de facto military occupation of Chicago would differ from these cases, but the general lessons I’ve learned remain applicable: Occupying forces rarely, if ever, call their activities an occupation, but they are widely perceived as such by the local population. Occupation often lasts longer than expected and leads to involvement beyond its original stated purpose. Protests happen. Suppression of protests happens. The occupying forces must withdraw in disgrace or double down in hopes of pacifying the uprising. Things usually escalate.
This kind of exercise of military force, regardless of the legitimacy of its aims, inevitably intrudes on the political rights and economic livelihoods of ordinary people. Even if an occupation starts out with apparent success, it typically leads to chaos and generates defiance in the local community.
There is reason to worry that Chicago is poised to head down a broadly similar path.
For one thing, many of its residents oppose the presence of federal forces. In June and July my research center, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, conducted a representative survey of more than 1,100 residents of Chicago to gauge their attitudes on federal military deployment to U.S. cities. Sixty percent said they did not “approve of the way President Trump is handling immigration enforcement, including deportations.” Twenty-eight percent said they “would attend a protest against the Trump administration’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants, even if it became violent.” Thirty percent agreed that “immigrants targeted by the Trump administration for deportation are justified in using force to defend themselves.” Thirty-seven percent agreed that “the use of force is justified to remove Donald Trump from the presidency.”
In a city that has more than 2.5 million residents, those percentages represent significant numbers of people willing to endorse or participate in violent resistance.
In addition, to achieve the administration’s stated objective of drastically and lastingly reducing illegal immigration and other crime, a deployment of federal forces would have to be very large and last many months. Consider that there are, by some estimates, nearly 200,000 undocumented immigrants in Chicago. It takes time and effort to deport people: Across the United States, by August, federal forces were deporting not even 1,500 undocumented immigrants a day. So removing just the 71,000 people with pending cases in immigration court who reside in Cook County (for which Chicago is the county seat) would be an enormous undertaking, requiring many thousands of agents and taking many months — and involving invasive operations throughout the city.
Suppressing crime more broadly in a lasting way would, of course, require even more resources and time and be similarly invasive. The longer federal forces stay and the more expansive their operations, the more the local community will perceive a loss of political power to determine its future. This perception would be exacerbated in Chicago because of the approaching state elections in 2026, which many perceive Mr. Trump as trying to influence through these actions. Note, for example, that Mr. Trump spoke of the need to “liberate” Chicago in a fund-raising email on Wednesday.
This is a Chicago story, but it is also a national story. If the administration proceeds as expected, Chicago will be the third major American city governed by members of Mr. Trump’s political opposition to be subjected this year to the presence of military force, after Los Angeles in June and Washington last month. Other blue cities and states may reasonably fear that they will be next. Mr. Trump is threatening to radicalize our nation’s politics in a way not seen in our lifetimes.
It is not too late. The federal government can still reverse course, limiting its policing efforts in Chicago to illegal immigration, limiting its deportations to convicted criminals and working with — not independently of — local law enforcement. I fervently hope Mr. Trump reconsiders.
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7) What I Got Wrong About D.E.I.
By Eugenia Cheng, Sept. 5, 2025
Dr. Cheng is the scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
enigmatriz
As a woman in the male-dominated field of mathematics, I once opposed targeted efforts to help women succeed — what we now call diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which are currently facing fierce backlash. I wanted to be judged on the merit of my mathematics alone.
When I was admitted to the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate in math in 1994, I felt that I was a part of a clear minority. I struggled to keep up with some of the men in my class, many of whom had gone to elite boys’ schools where they had intense preparation. Yet I would progress to a Ph.D. and a career as a research mathematician.
As my career has advanced, what I’ve learned is that D.E.I. initiatives helped others see value in my abilities and experience that would have been missed otherwise. And it was through the lens of math that I came to understand this.
Math is not just a way of calculating numerical answers; it is a way of thinking, using clear definitions for concepts and rigorous logic to organize our thoughts and back up our assertions. Numbers can tell us about representation, but they often don’t tell the full story. The percentage of female math graduates in the United States has improved to around 42 percent; however, still less than 18 percent of university professors in mathematics are women. A 50-50 gender split might seem like equality, but not if it was achieved by lowering standards to let more women in. We need to be more careful than that. The nuance found in mathematics can show us a clearer understanding of how to think about equality.
Math is famous for its equations, but equations are more subtle than they first appear. A simple equation like 4 + 1 = 1 + 4 shows not just that two values are equal but also that there are two subtly different ways of adding the same numbers to produce the same result. A similar approach applies to more advanced and complicated forms of math, such as the study of shapes or paths through space. We make choices about how to determine equality.
This is relevant to how we evaluate what people have achieved and make predictions about how well they will do. We can get some insight into how we should make these evaluations from a mathematical field called metric spaces.
A metric is a way of measuring the distance between two points but not necessarily physical distance; it could be how much time it takes with traffic as a factor or how much energy will be expended, depending on whether you’re going uphill or downhill. A distance cannot be measured based on the position of a single point. It requires the effort of measuring the distance between two points. This may sound redundant, but it’s an important clarification: Metrics can be measured only by taking into account the starting point and ending point, as well as relevant features of the journey — the whole story.
When we evaluate people, we could do the same. Instead of looking at just what they have achieved, we could also look at where they started and be clearer about how we are measuring the metaphorical distance they have come and whether we are taking into account the support they had or the obstructions they faced.
If we are selecting sprinters for a track team, we might look at their best times for the 100-meter dash. But if someone had, for some reason, only ever run races uphill or against the wind, it would make sense to take that into account and not compare that runner’s times to others’ directly. We would be treating those people differently but only because their paths were different; really we’d be evaluating their paths fairly relative to their contexts.
Other forms of achievement are not as straightforward to measure, but the idea is analogous. If someone achieved a certain SAT score after months of tutoring and someone else earned the same score having never seen an SAT before, it would be reasonable to be more impressed with the latter result and think that the second test taker has more potential. We should think of D.E.I. efforts as the best versions of this and aim to design systems that can measure the fuller picture of someone’s professional journey, not just the current result.
It took me a long time to realize that when I began my career, I had probably worked much harder than I might have if I had had a different identity. I had to work against people telling me I would never be able to succeed. When I attended conferences, I dealt with inappropriate behavior from men senior to me. I had to find my way in my career having no mentors who looked at all like me. I am grateful for the support of some senior mathematicians, and I now realize that it wasn’t extra help because I was a woman; it was help in overcoming the extra obstructions I faced as a woman.
It shouldn’t be called sexist to help people overcome sexism, and it shouldn’t be called racist to help people overcome racism, but if we give this help too crudely, then we leave ourselves open to these criticisms. Math teaches us that D.E.I. initiatives should be about carefully defining the metrics we use to measure how far people have come and thus how far they have the potential to go. They should be about uncovering when some people are constantly running uphill or against the wind, which can inform us how to give everyone an equal tailwind and an equal opportunity to succeed.
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8) What to Know About a Rapid U.S. Military Buildup in the Caribbean
The United States has deployed eight warships, several surveillance planes and one attack submarine to the region as tensions with Venezuela grow.
By Eric Schmitt, Reporting from Washington, Published Sept. 5, 2025, Updated Sept. 6, 2025
The Navy warship U.S.S. Sampson docked at the Amador International Cruise Terminal in Panama City last month. Credit...Martin Bernetti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The rapid U.S. military buildup in the southern Caribbean Sea culminated this week with a deadly strike against a drug vessel that the Trump administration said had departed from Venezuela.
U.S. officials said the attack on a speedboat on Tuesday killed 11 drug traffickers. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both said the military would carry out more strikes in the coming weeks as part of a counternarcotics and counterterrorism campaign.
But on Thursday, two armed Venezuelan F-16 fighter jets buzzed a Navy guided-missile destroyer in the region in a show of force, dialing up tensions between Washington and the government of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
In response, the Pentagon dispatched 10 F-35 stealth fighters to Puerto Rico on Friday to deter more Venezuelan flyovers and to be positioned should Mr. Trump order airstrikes against targets in Venezuela itself.
Here is a look at how the United States and Venezuela got to this point, and what military action might come next.
Why is the U.S. sending warships and surveillance planes to the Caribbean?
President Trump signed a still-secret directive in July ordering the Pentagon to use military force against some Latin American drug cartels that his administration has labeled “terrorist” organizations.
Around the same time, the administration declared that a Venezuelan criminal group was a terrorist organization and that Mr. Maduro was its leader.
Soon after, the Pentagon began amassing a small armada of ships and planes to monitor the supposed drug traffickers and to pick targets to attack.
The U.S. Navy has long intercepted and boarded ships suspected of smuggling drugs in international waters, typically assigning a Coast Guard officer temporarily in charge to invoke law enforcement authority. Tuesday’s direct attack in the Caribbean was a marked departure from that decades-long approach.
How much military force has the Pentagon assembled in the region?
The military so far has deployed eight warships, several Navy P-8 surveillance planes and one attack submarine to the region. The Pentagon has offered few details on the force’s objectives and locations.
The Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group — including the U.S.S. San Antonio, the U.S.S. Iwo Jima and the U.S.S. Fort Lauderdale, carrying 4,500 sailors —was steaming near Puerto Rico on Friday, Defense Department officials said. So was the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, with 2,200 Marines. The Iwo Jima is equipped with AV-8B Harrier attack aircraft.
Two Navy guided-missile destroyers — the U.S.S. Jason Dunham and the U.S.S. Gravely — are operating in the southern Caribbean. Both warships had recently joined the campaign against the Houthi militia in the Red Sea. A third destroyer, the U.S.S. Sampson, now in the eastern Pacific, may soon join, one Navy official said.
These warships are Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, equipped with more than 90 missiles, including surface-to-air missiles. They can conduct antiaircraft and anti-submarine warfare, and shoot down ballistic missiles.
In addition, the guided-missile cruiser U.S.S. Lake Erie and the littoral combat ship Minneapolis-St. Paul are also operating in the Caribbean.
How has Venezuela responded?
Mr. Maduro has warned that he would respond to any U.S. military action with an “armed fight,” and claimed that Mr. Rubio was trying to draw Mr. Trump into a war in the Caribbean that would taint his reputation.
“Mr. President, Donald Trump,” the Venezuelan leader said earlier this week, “watch out, because Mr. Rubio wants to stain your hands with blood.”
Mr. Maduro called the naval buildup “the greatest threat that has been seen on our continent in the last 100 years,” in the form of “eight military ships with 1,200 missiles” targeting Venezuela.
The Venezuelan leader also announced that he was deploying 4.5 million militiamen around his country, and vowed to “defend our seas, our skies and our lands” from any incursions.
What other military action might the U.S. take?
The size of the military buildup has led to speculation over whether Mr. Trump’s real goal is to oust Mr. Maduro, through military action or other pressure.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, was asked recently about the troop movements and whether the administration was considering putting forces on the ground in Venezuela. She responded by calling Mr. Maduro illegitimate and invoking his indictment, late in the first Trump administration, on U.S. drug trafficking charges.
Mr. Trump, she said, was “prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice. The Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela. It is a narco-terror cartel.”
Military historians point to other provocative conditions that preceded important American military episodes in the second half of the 20th century.
In December 1989, the administration of President George H.W. Bush sent more than 20,000 American troops to invade Panama and arrest its strongman leader, Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges. Mr. Noriega was convicted in 1992 and died in Panama City in 2017.
The U.S. force now in the Caribbean is too small to conduct a land invasion of Venezuela, military officials said. But Special Operations commanders say commandos could launch targeted raids or capture-or-kill missions from the Navy ships.
Mr. Maduro has threatened to respond to an armed attack in Venezuela with “maximum rebellion.”
After the Venezuelan fighter flyover on Thursday, the Trump administration issued a veiled threat of more attacks to come.
“The cartel running Venezuela is strongly advised not to pursue any further effort to obstruct, deter or interfere with counternarcotics and counterterrorism operations carried out by the U.S. military,” the Pentagon said in a statement.
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9) Israel Targets More Buildings in Gaza City and Warns Residents to Flee
The Israeli military issued evacuation orders for residents in the high-rise towers and urged Palestinians to move to the south of Gaza, as it intensifies its offensive on the city.
By Liam Stack, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Sept. 6, 2025
The Israeli military on Saturday issued evacuation orders in Gaza City, and urged Palestinian civilians to move to the south of the Gaza Strip, where it said it was designating a humanitarian area. Aid organizations said such an exodus could worsen the humanitarian crisis in the territory.
The Israeli military warned that it planned to strike two high-rise buildings in Gaza City and ordered people inside them and in nearby tents to leave. A short time later, it said it had attacked one of the towers.
A military spokesman said the buildings were targets because of Hamas activity inside or near them. Hamas denied those accusations and said both buildings had been residential towers. It was unclear whether people had been killed or injured in the strike.
The evacuation orders came a day after the military destroyed a high-rise tower in Gaza City, also saying Hamas operated from it, which Hamas denied.
The military said the humanitarian area it designated on Saturday was in Al-Mawasi and Khan Younis. The military urged Gazans to move to those areas, saying it would work to provide “field hospitals, water pipelines, and desalination facilities, along with the continued supply of food, tents, medicines, and medical equipment.”
In a statement, the Israeli military agency that manages humanitarian affairs in Gaza, known as COGAT, said the facilities were operational.
That statement could not be independently verified. Both Al-Mawasi and Khan Younis have been heavily damaged during the war, and it was not clear what humanitarian assistance was available.
Hamas called on Gazans to remain in their “residential areas” and said there were no safe zones in southern Gaza.
Israel announced in August that it planned to take over Gaza City, which Israeli officials have portrayed as one of Hamas’s last strongholds in Gaza. This week, the military said it was in control of almost half of the city.
The U.N.’s humanitarian affairs office warned on Saturday that further intensification of military operations in Gaza City would cause “catastrophe” for civilians, and said it would continue operating in the city to provide aid to those who stay.
The war in Gaza was ignited by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in which roughly 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage. Since then, the Israeli military response has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. More than half of those killed have been women, children and older adults, according to local health officials.
The war has destroyed most of Gaza’s infrastructure and parts of the territory are suffering from famine, according to a U.N.-backed group of food experts.
Gaza City is home to hundreds of thousands of people who have sought shelter in ruined buildings and tent encampments.
Many of those people have been displaced multiple times by Israeli military operations, crisscrossing Gaza as they have fled offensive after offensive.
Israel has directed Gazans to humanitarian zones multiple times during the war, but has sometimes continued to strike those areas. In Sept. 2024, an Israeli military strike in Al-Mawasi killed at least 19 people. It also struck Al-Mawasi two months before that attack.
In both strikes, the military said the targets were Hamas fighters.
Israel has been preparing to take over Gaza City for weeks. But humanitarian groups have warned that forcing such a large number of people to flee, especially at this stage of the war, would exacerbate a dire humanitarian crisis.
Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in a statement in August that no part of Gaza could absorb a huge influx of people, given the destruction to civilian infrastructure and lack of food, shelter and medical care.
“It is impossible that a mass evacuation of Gaza City could ever be done in a way that is safe and dignified under the current conditions,” she said.
Abu Bakr Bashir and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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10) Federal Report on Drinking Is Withdrawn
The upcoming U.S. Dietary Guidelines will instead be influenced by a competing study, favored by industry, which found that moderate alcohol consumption was healthy.
By Roni Caryn Rabin, Sept. 5, 2025
The report that has been sidelined is one of several that have upended a long-dominant narrative about alcohol that suggested that moderate drinking was not harmful and might even have health benefits. Credit...Colin Clark for The New York Times
The Department of Health and Human Services has pulled back a government report warning of a link between cancer and drinking even small amounts of alcohol, according to the authors of the research.
Their report, the Alcohol Intake and Health Study, warned that even one drink a day raises the risk of liver cirrhosis, oral and esophageal cancer, and injuries. The scientists who wrote it were told that the final version would not be submitted to Congress, as had been planned.
The report is one of two assessments that were to be used to shape the new U.S. Dietary Guidelines’ recommendations on alcohol consumption. Its early findings were reported by The New York Times in January; a full draft remained on the H.H.S. website as of Friday afternoon.
A competing report, written by a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine panel, came to a conclusion long supported by the industry: that moderate drinking is healthier than not drinking. Some panelists came under criticism for financial ties to alcohol makers.
The academies report was requested by Congress in 2022, after the scientific review for the last version of the dietary guidelines in 2020 stated that health risks associated with low consumption might have been underestimated. The alcohol industry has strongly criticized such findings and opposed efforts to tighten drinking recommendations.
H.H.S. did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did representatives of the alcohol industry.
Mike Marshall, chief executive of the U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance, a nonprofit that aims to reduce the harms of alcohol, said H.H.S. was “doing the work of the alcohol industry.”
“They’re burying the report so the information about the health consequences is not widely known,” Mr. Marshall said.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has decried a “chronic disease epidemic” sweeping the country. But he has said little about alcohol’s impact on American health since taking office.
Consumption of both alcohol and tobacco was absent from the first Make America Healthy Again report released in May. Mr. Kennedy (like his boss, President Trump) has said he does not drink.
In public comments on the Alcohol Intake and Health Study, wine and beer vendors and representatives of the alcohol industry urged federal officials to rely only on the competing academies report supporting moderate drinking. They called the alcohol intake study “alarming and misguided.”
The decision not to publish that study was first reported by Vox. In June, Reuters reported that the upcoming Dietary Guidelines would scrap the longstanding recommendation: that women have no more than one drink a day, and men no more than two.
Instead, the guidelines would include a brief statement that people should drink in moderation, Reuters said.
“What people need to know is that the risk of serious morbidities and mortality, and chronic disease, increases as alcohol consumption increases, and it even increases at low levels of consumption,” said Katherine M. Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was one of the report’s authors.
Dr. Keyes said the alcohol intake study did not make recommendations and noted that people do many things that carry risks, like driving cars.
But, she added, “The American public deserves to know what they’re putting in their body and what kind of health outcomes they can cause.”
The authors now plan to submit their analysis for publication in a peer-reviewed medical journal, she said.
The Alcohol Intake and Health Study was one of several to have upended the long-dominant narrative that moderate drinking was not harmful and might have health benefits, particularly for the heart.
Newer studies have questioned the methodology used in older studies, and researchers have increasingly focused on alcohol’s contribution to cancer.
In January, Dr. Vivek Murthy, then the surgeon general, called for putting labels on alcoholic beverages to warn consumers that drinking increases the risk of breast cancer, colon cancer and at least five other malignancies.
He said that drinking directly contributed to 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 related deaths each year.
Americans are getting the message. A Gallup poll in August found drinking at an all-time low in the United States, with only 54 percent of adults saying they consumed alcohol. A majority said they believed that even one to two drinks a day was harmful to health. Sales of wine and spirits have dipped.
The academies report concluded that moderate drinking was linked to fewer heart attack and stroke deaths and fewer deaths overall, compared to not drinking. It acknowledged that moderate drinking was linked to a small but significant increase in breast cancer in women, but said that there wasn’t enough evidence to link moderate consumption to other cancers.
The National Cancer Institute, among other medical organizations, disagreed.
The alcohol intake study assessed relationships between different levels of average alcohol consumption and the risk of dying from health conditions that can be caused by drinking.
The research found some benefits for those having one drink a day: a lower risk of diabetes for women, and a lowered risk of ischemic stroke among both men and women.
But even at that modest level, women were more likely to develop liver cancer. And just occasional heavy drinking nullified the protection against stroke.
“The key message is that drinking two drinks a day may be moderate from a social perspective, but when it comes to health, it’s a pretty risky amount,” said Dr. Timothy Naimi, director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research and one of the authors.
“A man who drinks two drinks every day on average has a one in 25 chance of dying prematurely from alcohol.”
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11) South Korea Negotiates Release of Korean Workers Detained in Georgia Raid
The South Korean government said on Sunday that it would send a charter plane to the United States to retrieve hundreds of workers detained in an immigration raid.
By Choe Sang-Hun, Reporting from Seoul, Sept. 7, 2025
Heavy machinery at a standstill at the site of an electric vehicle battery plant co-owned by Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution, in Ellabell, Ga., on Friday. Credit...Russ Bynum/Associated Press
South Korea reached a deal with the United States to free hundreds of South Korean workers arrested when U.S. immigration authorities raided the construction site of a battery plant in Georgia, the country’s presidential office said on Sunday.
“There are some administrative procedures left, but once they are cleared, we will send a chartered plane to bring our people home,” Kang Hoon-sik, the chief of staff for President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea, told a meeting of senior officials from the administration and the governing Democratic Party on Sunday.
Mr. Kang provided no further details, including when South Korea expected to send the plane. But his remarks provided the first strong indication that South Korea and the United States were working out a diplomatic solution after days of tensions between the allies.
U.S. immigration officials stormed the construction site of a major Hyundai-LG electric vehicle battery plant in Ellabell, Ga., on Thursday, arresting 475 people. Of them, about 300 were South Korean citizens, the South Korean foreign minister’s office said.
The raid unsettled South Korea, a crucial U.S. ally that has been asked to invest billions of dollars in the United States to build new factories and create jobs. It was part of the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on immigration, and U.S. officials said those arrested were in the United States illegally or working unlawfully.
“We will not let our guard down until we have our people safely back home,” Mr. Kang said. “We will also review and improve the visa system for those who go to the United States on business trips related to investment projects so that similar incidents won’t be repeated.”
The raid brought construction to a halt at the Georgia factory. Mr. Kang confirmed on Sunday that South Korea was still committed to finishing the project.
The Trump administration has encouraged South Korean industrial giants like Hyundai, Samsung and LG to invest in the United States. But the administration has also drastically tightened visa allocations, making it harder and more expensive for them to bring in skilled workers to build their factories.
Speaking Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” the White House border czar, Tom Homan, defended the raid on the battery plant and said the administration planned to continue such large-scale raids, adding that it is a crime to work and live illegally in the United States.
Those arrested included dozens of LG workers who were on business trips with various visas or under a visa waiver program to provide technical guidance for building the battery factory, according to industry officials familiar with the project. Other detained South Korean workers had been hired by construction subcontractors working for Hyundai and LG, they said.
U.S. immigration officials accused the South Korean companies of discriminating against American workers by hiring unauthorized workers from abroad.
Erica L. Green contributed reporting.
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12 ‘If I Live to 25, I’ve Lived a Good Life’
He started fighting wildfires as a teenager. After inhaling smoke on the front lines for six seasons, he faced an impossible choice.
By Hannah Dreier, Sept. 7, 2025
Joel had his blood tested at a cancer-treatment center in Medford, Ore. Loren Elliott for The New York Times
Joel Eisiminger was racing to save homes in Northern California from a fast-spreading wildfire when a crewmate noticed that one side of his face was suddenly drooping so much that his mouth hung open.
In his six years fighting fires, Joel had tumbled down burning hills, endured full-body rashes from poison oak and inhaled plumes of smoke that left him gasping for weeks. But he had never felt as bad as he did on this morning in July 2024. He didn’t want to let down his crew, so he kept working deep in the forest until a medic told him to get to a hospital. He might have had a stroke.
As the doctors ran tests, Joel grew sicker. Within days, he was too exhausted to walk. On the eve of his 25th birthday, he received a diagnosis: acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive, often fatal blood cancer that usually strikes people more than twice his age. Joel told the doctors he was not a regular smoker and had no family history of blood cancers. But he did have one risk factor: his job.
For decades, wildfire fighters have been sent to work in toxic smoke without masks or warnings about long-term health risks, The New York Times has reported. They inhale poisons that are linked to more than a dozen kinds of cancer, including leukemia. Many are falling gravely ill, and some are dying at young ages.
But when these firefighters get sick, they don’t all receive the same help.
About two-thirds of the country’s 40,000 wildland firefighters work for state and federal agencies. By law, many of their cancers are assumed to be job-related, and their workers’ compensation benefits are automatically approved.
The other firefighters — about 14,000 — are like Joel. They work for private companies that the government hires to shore up its ranks against a growing wildfire threat. Reliance on these contract crews has more than doubled since 2019, as climate change drives more extreme fire seasons. They have fought alongside federal workers in every major fire of the last decade.
On the front line, all crews take orders from the same command structure and breathe the same smoke. But the laws that cover government workers do not extend to contractors. To get benefits when they fall ill, contract firefighters must prove that smoke exposure caused their cancer — an all but impossible task.
Some go without needed chemotherapy and radiation. Others take on so much debt their families become homeless. Some return to fighting wildfires even while sick.
At the hospital, Joel asked if he would be able to go back to work. The doctors tried to help him understand how urgent his situation was. Just in the days since he had arrived, the malignant cells had gone from undetectable levels to overwhelming. Without treatment, he would soon die. Even with medical interventions, only about half of patients survive a year.
Joel needed immediate chemotherapy and blood transfusions. He would have to commute to a specialized hospital five hours away. He would get much sicker before he had a chance of getting better. Because the fire season had just started, the only money he had to fund any of it was from the paycheck he had just earned.
During his first night on the cancer ward, he opened an online message board popular with contract firefighters and posted a photograph of himself at the hospital, his boyish face partly hidden by the beard he had been growing out. “This is my 6th season fighting wildfires,” he wrote. “I start chemotherapy tonight at 9 p.m.” He asked for positive thoughts and urged others to stay vigilant about their health.
Responses came in from strangers around the country: “Your army is behind you!” “We are all standing with you!” “Get back to the line quickly, my man.”
But when the screen went dark, he was by himself again. This first round of treatment alone would cost tens of thousands of dollars, and like most contract firefighters, he had no health insurance. There would be no guarantee of help from his company or the government that had sent him into smoke each year since he was a teenager. He watched his IV drip in the dim room, bracing for what came next.
Joel fell in love with firefighting after just managing to graduate from high school, where he had often struggled to concentrate. He was working at Taco Bell. One night, his father turned on a movie called “Only the Brave.” It dramatized a real-life disaster that had killed 19 members of an elite wildfire crew in Arizona. Joel was struck by the bonds between the men as they faced death together.
A shy teenager whose family had moved around a lot, Joel loved the idea of an instant band of brothers. The next morning, he went to Pacific Oasis, one of the country’s largest private firefighting companies. Its president, Steve Dodds, took one look at the excited, solidly built 18-year-old and sent him straight to training.
Joel was signing up for grueling work. Wildland firefighters hike into the backcountry in 20-person crews, cut down flaming trees and shrubs, then dig an unburnable moat of bare earth around the fire. Afterward, they wade through fine ash they call moon dust, extinguishing embers to stop new flare-ups.
This work was once done almost exclusively by government crews, but in the 1990s, after a series of staffing cutbacks, the U.S. Forest Service turned to logging and forestry companies for help. The contracts were so lucrative they launched a new industry. Hundreds of companies — including Pacific Oasis — refashioned themselves into wildfire operations. A political backlash against the practice of sending inmates to fight wildfires for dollars a day has further accelerated this trend in places like California, where the use of contract crews has tripled in recent years.
In the heavily forested strip of southern Oregon where Joel lived, fighting wildfires had become some of the best-paying work available to a person without a college degree.
After a week of training, Joel began going out as a member of the crew. He was making a base rate of about $12 an hour, but the real money came from overtime during deployments that could last for weeks. A busy fire season could bring in $30,000 for five months of work.
First-time firefighters generally either drop out quickly or become hooked. Joel was hooked. He had grown up pushing his limits hiking and mountain-biking with his father. In high school, he had played lacrosse and earned the nickname Battering Ram. Now he drew on that well of endurance to support his crewmates, many of whom soon became his best friends.
Joel began keeping his fire bag packed and ready by the door. Before firefighting, he had often felt anxious and adrift. When he was deployed, he felt exhilarated, marching deep into the woods with 50 pounds on his back and a chain saw on his shoulder. Sometimes, he worked 24-hour shifts amid flames as high as his head.
“It didn’t feel like a job,” he said. “It’s like being in fairyland.”
Back home, he would meet up with other firefighters to play pool at the Wild Goose Cafe and Bar. Locals would thank them and buy them beers. Joel used some of his earnings to help his parents put a down payment on a house. Then he bought a motorcycle and spent the winter months between fire seasons souping it up.
His employee file at Pacific Oasis was stacked with praise from the Forest Service for his crew’s “great attitude,” their “exceptional” work in 108-degree heat, their “huge role in catching this fire.”
After sending Joel across five states, Pacific Oasis tapped him in 2019 to lead a small squad. He took care to teach new recruits about wearing hard hats and goggles. He didn’t give much guidance about respiratory protection, though, because there was little protocol for that. There had been nothing in his training about the long-term health risks of smoke inhalation.
Like most wildland firefighters, Joel had been taught to wear a bandanna in bad air. This has been standard practice for years, even though bandannas offer no barrier against carcinogens.
He bought one decorated with an American flag, and it appeared in all the photos he sent back to his parents, its white stripes turning gray with ash. He told his squad to get their own. He never saw anyone wear a mask.
Joel noticed right away that inhaling so much smoke came with consequences.
Firefighters talk about “camp crud,” an amalgam of respiratory ailments that set in early during fire season. Pacific Oasis workers said that morning meetings sounded like an emphysema clinic. Joel began to cough, and his mucus turned black. Sometimes the smoke made him so dizzy he could barely stand.
Many countries now routinely offer wildfire crews half-face respirator masks. But in the United States, the Forest Service tells its workers not to wear masks on the fire line. The agency says firefighters could overheat. Current and former officials have told The Times that the agency doesn’t want to risk admitting how dangerous smoke really is.
Firefighters themselves often see masks as a sign of weakness. “I would have gotten laughed at,” Joel said. Instead, crewmates traded recommendations for pills and teas that might help their lung issues.
Joel often worked alongside unionized government employees who had better protection against smoke exposure. California’s wildfire agency provides clean-air rest in hotels or trailers and 24 hours off between shifts. Unlike contract crews, Forest Service workers sometimes let ashes smolder instead of “mopping up” every ember.
At Pacific Oasis, bosses talked about the inevitability of “eating smoke” and the need to “suffer and execute.”
Joel occasionally thought about trying to work directly for the government, but his career as a contractor seemed to be taking off. Early last year, his boss, Steve, invited him to train as a crew leader who would oversee an entire 20-person team. It was one of the proudest moments Joel could remember, and he began to imagine spending his life working for the company.
His mother, a care coordinator for veterans with cancer, struggled to understand how he could be out in all that smoke without a mask. Joel told her not to worry. “I guess I thought I was invincible,” he said.
The World Health Organization now says that firefighting can cause cancer. But many company owners remain dismissive about the long-term dangers of wildfire smoke. “I’m very skeptical,” said Lee Miller, whose Miller Timber Services is among the largest U.S. firefighting companies.
Meranda Warren, vice president of the Northern Rockies Wildfire Contractors Association, said some in the industry were aware that smoke exposure can lead to illness. But, she said, “people are afraid to speak up because of fear of losing our contracts.”
For Joel, the risks started becoming clear in the days after his first chemotherapy session last summer. He kept checking the replies to his post on the message board and was surprised to see that in addition to the notes of support, dozens of firefighters were sharing their own stories.
“I got diagnosed with cancer last October. Take care of yourself first, the fires will always be there,” wrote a 36-year-old in Nevada.
“I’m almost at my four-year Cancerversary,” wrote a firefighter in New York. “You’ve got this!”
Another, in California, shared his diagnosis and wrote: “After you are in remission please consider positions where you won’t be on the line. It will be better for your health.”
Joel had known he was taking some chances by becoming a firefighter, but had always felt like he was safe once he made it back to the Wild Goose with no injuries. Now he wondered if his illness was not random bad luck but an almost inevitable consequence of decisions he had made when he was 18 years old.
As Joel grew sicker, the bills started arriving: $880 for a blood test, $15,030 for an overnight stay. He hoped workers’ compensation might cover some expenses.
The government paid Pacific Oasis about $60 an hour for each firefighter. Some of that funded workers’ compensation insurance, which covers medical bills and lost wages when workers are injured or fall ill because of their jobs.
He went to Pacific Oasis headquarters to ask about filing a claim. He was too weak to drive, so his father, Matt, took him. They both remember Steve’s response the same way: “There’s no way that you can prove this is work-related.”
On the car ride home, Joel broke down. His father struggled to contain his outrage at Steve. “I couldn’t believe he’d spent thousands of hours working with Joel, but at the first sign of trouble, he changed completely,” Matt remembered.
Steve, 67, had his own frustrations. He sympathized with Joel’s plight and later said he was just trying to warn him that his claim was unlikely to succeed. A self-described hippie when he founded Pacific Oasis as a forestry company, he had only recently stopped leading fire crews himself and still believed strongly in universal health care.
But he felt no responsibility for Joel’s illness. He doubted that wildfire smoke exposure caused cancer, especially in someone who had spent so few years in the job. Steve was focused more on immediate dangers, like falling trees or chain saw injuries. “Cancer doesn’t even make my top-10 list of worries,” he said.
He also had the concerns of a business owner. Joel’s case might raise his insurance rates, already his largest expense behind payroll. Those who worked with him knew to expect both sides of his personality: He could be a paternal mentor who trained them and gave them second chances, but also a demanding boss who watched out for the bottom line.
Still, Joel decided to pursue the benefits and, as required by law, began getting a portion of his lost wages while the insurer considered his case. It was enough to pay for his parents to stay at a nearby motel during his weekslong treatments.
Joel was one of the youngest patients on the cancer ward and was determined to stay strong. He walked laps with his IV pole, logging miles each day. The nurses cheered him on, but they knew what was coming. By his second stay, in late August 2024, he could barely leave his bed.
One night he looked up the survival rate for acute myeloid leukemia: 70 percent of patients died within five years of diagnosis. For him, that would mean dying before he was 30.
Wildfire smoke contains benzene, a known cause of acute myeloid leukemia, and studies have shown that firefighters die of blood cancers at higher rates. Joel’s oncologist, Dr. Curtis Lachowiez, said he tried to discourage firefighters in remission from going back to that work. “Inhaling all those chemicals is not good for them,” he said.
Joel reluctantly decided to follow his doctor’s advice. He applied for a scholarship through a leukemia foundation to become an arborist. “Having cancer has quickly taught me how precious life is, and reminded me that every living thing can be lost if not cared for,” he wrote.
He spent September in and out of the emergency room with infections. His bones ached, and he was taking 15 pills a day to manage side effects from chemotherapy. One day, a letter came from the insurer. “Your work is not the major contributing cause of your claimed disease,” it read.
Joel was stunned. No more payments were coming. He had no savings left, and months of treatment ahead.
His family cut back on groceries and maxed out their credit cards. His mother started picking up overtime shifts.
With no money for his parents to stay nearby, Joel passed the time in the hospital playing online video games with friends from his crew. They teased him about losing his mountain-man beard and called him their little bald baby.
The treatment was working, but it left him depleted. At home, he crawled the steps to his attic bedroom on his hands and knees. Hospitals were sending second and third notices of unpaid bills.
As the fall passed, he sometimes thought about how different it could have been if he had worked directly for the Forest Service. A 2022 federal law had given those firefighters automatic workers’ comp benefits for many illnesses, including 14 cancers, that Congress determined were linked to their smoke exposure. Similar legislation in Canada had included contract crews, but that didn’t happen in the United States.
Joel could have appealed his insurance denial. But it is rarely possible to prove the cause of cancer. Other contractors and their families have tried. After two years in court, a firefighter in Ohio with testicular cancer is still appealing. The widow and children of a crew member in California who died of esophageal cancer lost their home while fighting for coverage.
In December, after Joel’s final round of chemotherapy, an envelope arrived from Pacific Oasis. Inside was a year-end bonus check for a few hundred dollars and a note: “I hope this reaches you in good health.”
Joel was relieved to be able to cover a bill or two. As the family sank into debt, he had begun to imagine earning overtime again on the fire line. Hiring for the year usually began when the snow melted, and involved a 45-minute hiking endurance test. He wondered if he could get strong enough to pass.
Joel tried to hike again soon after the new year. At first, he took faltering steps and struggled to walk more than a few yards. But by the spring, he could make it to the ridge above town.
His oncologist had told him he was in remission. But if the cancer came back, he would need a bone-marrow transplant. He felt like he had only a brief window. “I’m dying anyway, so I might as well live,” he told a contract firefighter friend who had just returned from the Los Angeles fires.
In March, his scholarship application to study to become an arborist was rejected. There were too many other qualified candidates, the letter said.
A few weeks later, Joel and Matt went on a long uphill hike. Joel told his father what he now felt he had known all along: He was going back to firefighting. His father hesitated, but finally said, “I know you love it.”
“I guess I never realized how much I did,” Joel said. “At the end of the day, if I live to 25, I’ve lived a good life.”
He thought someone from Pacific Oasis might reach out about coming back, but no one did. He couldn’t bring himself to get in touch.
By July, a year after his diagnosis, he was looking farther afield. There were Forest Service jobs in Alaska, where more wildfires were burning than in the rest of the country combined. Soon, that became the plan. His parents bought a $600 plane ticket, paying $50 extra to make it refundable, just in case.
Four days before the flight, Joel drove to Pacific Oasis one last time. He needed his employment records to take to Alaska. But he also hoped that Steve might see him and decide to take him back.
In the office, Joel breathed in the familiar smell of wood chips and made a final appeal. “I’ve been broke from the cancer,” he said. “I don’t have five dollars.”
Steve said he was sorry but Joel’s health problems meant the job wasn’t a good fit anymore. “It’s just life,” he said.
Joel put his motorcycle in storage, packed his fire bag just as he always had, and spent his last day in Oregon trout fishing with Matt. His fingers were stiff, a lingering effect of his illness, so his father tied the bait.
The next morning, he turned 26. His grandmother called to wish him a happy birthday. She didn’t know he was about to catch a flight, and she asked if he had any fun plans.
Joel’s voice broke as he started to answer. It felt like everything — his broken body, the debt, the uncertainty ahead — was landing on him at once. He stared for a while at the door, then pulled on his sunglasses and walked out to the truck.
His father followed behind. “Let’s go, buddy,” he said softly.
Outside, Joel could see smoke rising from the hills behind town. Dozens of large fires were burning across the country.
Soon, he hoped, he would be out on one of them.
Steven Rich contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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13) Homeless and Hungry, Gazans Fear a Repeat of 1948 History
Israel’s war in Gaza has displaced most of the 2.2 million Palestinian residents from their homes. Many of them fear it will be permanent, a reprise of the Nakba.
By Raja Abdulrahim, Reporting from Jerusalem and Cairo Sept. 7, 2025
Abdallah Abu Samra in front of the tent where he lives in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza, in February. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The night was warm and lovely as the Abu Samra family gathered outside their home in northern Gaza in September 2023, the smell of mint from the garden filling the air.
As always, the family patriarch recounted how, as a 10-year-old in 1948, he was forced from his village in what is now Israel, one of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced in what they call the Nakba — “the catastrophe.”
The patriarch, Abdallah Abu Samra, had told the story often, each time focusing on different details to ensure his family would remember them. One day, he hoped, they would all return.
Within weeks, that prospect seemed more distant than ever.
Hamas waged its surprise attack on Israel, storming across the border on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people — most of them civilians, according to the Israeli government — and seizing about 250 others as hostages. Israel then launched its war in Gaza, killing tens of thousands and leaving generations of Palestinians to experience displacement and hunger, and the fear that they would never see their homes again.
The Abu Samra family and many other Gazans say they have always lived in the shadow of the Nakba. And from the first moments of the war, as Israeli warplanes started dropping bombs and fliers ordering mass evacuations, their worries of another Nakba rose.
Since then, nearly 2 million people — about 90 percent of the population — have been driven from their homes and displaced within Gaza, many of them repeatedly, according to the United Nations.
In recent weeks, Israel’s defense ministry has promoted a plan to force much of Gaza’s population into an area near the Gaza-Egypt border, which legal experts warn would violate international law by displacing hundreds of thousands of people indefinitely. Palestinians in northern Gaza now face that prospect again as the Israeli military plans a full assault on Gaza City.
“We are in a bigger Nakba now,” said Mr. Abu Samra, a retired teacher.
Israelis have long objected to the characterization of the 1948 conflict as a catastrophe. For them, it was a war of survival. A little more than two years ago, when the United Nations held a commemoration for the mass displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s formation, Israel’s U.N. ambassador denounced the event as “shameful” for “adopting the Palestinian narrative calling the establishment of the state of Israel a disaster.”
The mass displacement nearly 80 years ago — and the rival narratives about it — are among the most intractable issues in the long conflict between the two sides, with Palestinians and their descendants demanding, and Israel rejecting, the right to return to the land they fled in 1948.
In the current war in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government says that because Hamas has burrowed deep into — and under — Gaza’s neighborhoods and infrastructure, residents must leave civilian areas. It has said that its displacement orders are temporary, to get civilians out of harm’s way and mitigate casualties.
The Palestinians haven’t been driven out of Gaza itself. But Israel’s displacement of civilians and destruction of neighborhoods “appears to be a push for a permanent demographic shift in Gaza that is in defiance of international law and is tantamount to ethnic cleansing,” said the U.N.’s human rights chief, Volker Türk.
Israel is also encouraging what it calls “voluntary” emigration for people to leave Gaza entirely but has not found countries willing to take in large numbers. Human rights experts say that any mass, so-called voluntary emigration would also constitute a kind of ethnic cleansing because conditions in Gaza have become so unlivable that many Gazans will have no real choice but to leave.
The language used by some members of Mr. Netanyahu’s government has added to Palestinian fears. Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said that Israel forces were “destroying everything that’s left of the Gaza Strip” and were “conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed.”
The Abu Samra family, about 20 in all, said they began fleeing on the first day of the war, when Israeli bombs struck so close to their home that the walls shook. It was the start of a cycle of displacements, until they eventually split up to find shelter. Some relatives died in Israeli strikes, the family said. Others fled to neighboring Egypt and now wonder if they will ever return home, or if there will be anything left to return to.
Mr. Abu Samra, now 87 and frail, has been stuck in southern Gaza, in a tent of tarps, a curtain and blankets. Once again, he is scared, hungry and separated from most of his family, just as he was as a boy.
“I always think, talk, and dream” of going home, he said.
For a brief window this year, a cease-fire allowed some Gazans to go back to their neighborhoods. Many found only rubble. Nearly 80 percent of buildings have been damaged or destroyed, with more being cleared as Israel now expands its military campaign. The World Bank estimated that it could take 80 years to rebuild the homes that have been destroyed.
“With the news and what is happening, we are losing hope that we’ll ever be able to return,” said Ghada Abu Samra, 25, Mr. Abu Samra’s granddaughter, who managed to flee to Egypt.
For many Palestinians, the Nakba is not only a traumatic memory but also a matter of identity. About 1.7 million of the 2.2 million people in Gaza are either refugees from the war surrounding the establishment of Israel in 1948 or their descendants, according to the U.N. And while most have never lived outside Gaza, many consider themselves refugees from the lands their families fled — including villages nearly wiped off the map.
Survivors of the 1948 war say that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were told at the time that they would be allowed to return to their villages in what is now Israel after a few days or weeks. Many just took a few belongings and the keys to their front doors.
They were not allowed back.
The key to a house, often called the key of return, is such a powerful symbol for Palestinians that many families hold onto theirs, even for homes inside Israel that no longer exist.
In the current war in Gaza, incendiary comments by Israeli leaders raised Palestinian fears that history was about to repeat itself.
“We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” the Israeli agriculture minister, Avi Dichter, said a few weeks into the war. “Gaza Nakba 2023.”
Israel says it opened humanitarian corridors to allow people to find safety, and that it communicated its evacuation orders in fliers, text messages and phone calls.
Human rights groups counter that the war has rendered so much of Gaza uninhabitable that it is leading to permanent displacement, a potential war crime.
Some, like Human Rights Watch, call the displacement an intentional part of Israeli policy that amounts to a crime against humanity. Two prominent Israeli groups have joined some other international organizations in accusing the government of committing genocide for killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, razing huge areas, displacing nearly all of Gaza’s population and restricting food.
Israel has rejected the accusations as deliberate misrepresentations.
“It is misguided and deeply misleading to portray the I.D.F.’s extensive efforts to minimize civilian harm as tools for forcible displacement,” it said.
In January, when Israel and Hamas struck a brief cease-fire deal, members of the Abu Samra family cried tears of joy, thinking it might offer a chance to go back home.
They had grown up on Mr. Abu Samra’s stories of displacement in 1948, and before the current war, some had even felt a twinge of resentment at the older generation for leaving what is now Israel and winding up in Gaza.
Mr. Abu Samra had spent his early childhood living off about 100 acres his father owned in the farming village of Iraq Suwaydan — about 15 miles north of the present-day Gaza border — harvesting grains and picking figs.
In 1948, Mr. Abu Samra said that he and an older brother had gone to the edge of the village to grind wheat, when hundreds of residents, including his family, suddenly had to flee. He and his brother walked east while their family walked south.
People left with very few belongings — some clothes, blankets and a bit of food — believing they would return within days, he said.
“The most important thing is the key to the house,” he recalled. “Everyone locked their door and took the key in the hopes that they would be gone only a short period.”
Days turned into weeks, then into long, hungry months. Finally, in 1949, Mr. Abu Samra and his brother reunited with their family in a refugee camp in Gaza.
That was the story he recounted on that September night in 2023, as he had so many nights before.
“I wanted to plant in the minds of my descendants who didn’t live the Nakba,” he explained.
His daughter, Abeer Abu Samra, said she never fully understood the stories until Israeli bombs began falling near the family home in Gaza after the attack on Oct. 7, shaking the walls, followed by the Israeli orders to leave.
“We always used to say ‘Why did they leave? Why did they leave their homes?’ but then,” said Ms. Abu Samra, 52, trailing off for a moment. “Then we went through the same trial.”
Like those who fled in 1948, family members thought they would leave their homes for just a few days. Many took only a few changes of clothes. And their keys.
It was the start of nearly two years of repeated displacements. The family — grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, children — took to the road.
Ghada Abu Samra and about a dozen other relatives found shelter in a one-room house in central Gaza, sharing eight thin mattresses, they said. The women and girls slept inside, while the men and boys slept on the terrace.
Most days they shared a single meal, they said, often stale bread and lentils. It reminded Ms. Abu Samra of the meal that her grandfather survived on in 1948 — stale bread and tea.
Soon, they fled again, south to the city of Rafah.
“As we kept getting displaced further south, I kept losing faith that I would ever go back,” Ghada Abu Samra said.
“Some people say, ‘I wish I had been crushed along with my house,’” she added. “Sometimes I feel that way too.”
Everywhere she goes, she still carries with her the key to her home in northern Gaza, which has long since been reduced to rubble, she said.
“It’s my only reminder of home,” she said of the key.
Her aunt, Abeer Abu Samra, carries the key to her home as well.
“It often occurs to me, will these keys become like the 1948 keys of return?” she said.
“I don’t expect to return,” she started, then stopped herself. “No, we’ll return, we’ll return,” trying to convince herself.
As life in Gaza became unbearable, some members of the Abu Samra family left the enclave entirely, paying more than $5,000 each to get to Egypt, having organized several GoFundMe campaigns to raise money.
But Mr. Abu Samra refused to leave Gaza. “I’ve had enough of being uprooted,” he would say.
Only when most of his family members were trying to leave did he finally relent, but then was denied Israeli permission to leave Gaza. The family said they were told that he had a “security block,” with no further explanation. Israeli officials declined to comment about Mr. Abu Samra’s case for this article.
Much of Mr. Abu Samra’s family has left, settling in Egypt for now. Mr. Abu Samra remained in Gaza, moving frequently to escape the Israeli military invasion and bombardment, going from shelters to friend’s homes to tents.
Around him in the crowded encampment where he and his wife are now, people have grown thin and frail as hunger has grown more severe. In some parts of Gaza, conditions are so dire that international monitors have officially declared a famine. Mr. Abu Samra survives on money his family from abroad sends him.
He thinks less about ever returning to his childhood village in present-day Israel. Even getting back to northern Gaza seems unlikely. But he dreams of it anyway — to erect a tent next to the rubble that was his home.
“I’m not leaving Gaza for anything,” he said from his flimsy shelter of tin sheets and tarps. “I have had enough of being displaced since I was a child.”
Reporting was contributed by Bilal Shbair, Natan Odenheimer, Isabel Kershner and Tamir Kalifa.
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14) Egypt-Israel Tensions Rise Over Attack on Gaza City
A large-scale Israeli assault on the city in northern Gaza could push hundreds of thousands of Palestinians southward toward Egypt’s border.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Sept. 7, 2025
Tents housing displaced Palestinians in Gaza City earlier this week. Israel is preparing for a major attack on Gaza City, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are living. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israel’s plan to force Palestinians to flee to southern Gaza ahead of a full-scale offensive in the northern part of the enclave has raised tensions with neighboring Egypt, which is concerned that Israel will try to push Gazans into its territory.
Egyptian and Israeli officials have traded criticisms over the past few days about Israel’s preparations for a major attack on Gaza City, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are living.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel says the city, in northern Gaza, is one of the last strongholds of Hamas, which led the 2023 attack on Israel that set off the war.
On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said that 100,000 Palestinians had already fled the city after Israeli orders to leave. Hundreds of thousands more remain.
Ahead of a large-scale assault, Israel has also been bombing high-rise buildings in Gaza City that it says were used by Hamas, accusations which the group denies. The Israeli military said it had attacked another high-rise building in the city on Sunday evening after ordering people to flee. It was not immediately clear whether there were any casualties.
Mr. Netanyahu has called on Egypt to accept more Palestinian refugees from Gaza, without saying whether Israel would allow them to return after the war. He argued that Israel would not forcibly expel them, but rather wanted to allow whoever wanted to leave Gaza to do so.
“The Egyptian foreign ministry prefers to imprison residents in Gaza who would prefer to leave the war zone,” Mr. Netanyahu said on Friday.
Egyptian officials reject that argument, saying it is Israel that needs to end the war in Gaza. The Israeli government says it is willing to end the assault, but only if Hamas meets its conditions for doing so, which include disarming.
Egypt also fears that a large influx of Palestinians could threaten its domestic security. Cairo has long worried that, if allowed into Egypt, Palestinians could launch attacks on Israel from Egyptian soil, drawing Israeli retaliation.
Israeli officials have said in the past that Gazans should be permitted to “voluntarily migrate” from the enclave after nearly two years of war, hunger and fear. But leaving is not an option for many at this point, and many Gazans fear that Israel would never allow them to come back if they do find a way to depart.
The Israeli military has ordered Palestinians remaining in Gaza City, many of whom have already been displaced multiple times during the war, to flee to a designated “humanitarian area” of southern Gaza closer to the enclave’s border with Egypt.
On Saturday, Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty of Egypt criticized Israel, saying it aimed “to push the residents out of their land.”
“It is absurd to call this voluntary migration,” he said at a news conference in Cyprus.
Aid groups say Gaza has been so battered by the war that there is nowhere safe for residents to shelter. And some Palestinians fear that Israel is seeking to make life in Gaza so miserable that people agree to leave in any possible way.
At peace for decades, Israel and Egypt are strategic allies who coordinate closely on security. But they have sparred diplomatically over the Gaza war and particularly over any suggestion that Gazans should be displaced to Egyptian territory.
In the early weeks of the war, Israel quietly urged its allies to pressure Egypt to take in Gazans en masse — raising fears that their expulsion would quickly become permanent. Egypt protested and the Biden administration ultimately quashed the proposal.
For the first several months of the war, Egypt allowed tens of thousands of Palestinians to leave for Egyptian territory through a southern border crossing. But that ended after Israel invaded the southern Gazan city of Rafah, leading Egypt to shut down its side of the border in protest.
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15) The Clue to Unlocking Parkinson’s May Be All Around Us
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, Sept. 8, 2025
Glorianna Ximendaz for The New York Times
It was back in 1958 that a chemical company first discovered that its new weed killer appeared toxic to humans, “mainly by affecting the central nervous system,” as one company scientist documented at the time.
The company kept its concerns to itself — as well as its later research indicating that large doses caused tremors in mice and rats. That’s because the herbicide, paraquat, was sublime at wiping out weeds. And profitable. Over the decades it became, an executive proudly declared, a “blockbuster.” By 2018, some 17 million pounds of it were used across the United States, double the figure for six years earlier.
As industry has boomed and agricultural and industrial toxins like paraquat have proliferated in the postwar period, so has something else: Parkinson’s disease. Once almost unknown, the ailment was first identified in 1817 when Dr. James Parkinson described a handful of elderly people with what he called “the shaking palsy.” That was in polluted London, and it’s now understood that air pollution is a risk factor for the disease.
Some 90,000 cases of Parkinson’s are now diagnosed each year in the United States, about one every six minutes on average. It is the world’s fastest-growing neurodegenerative disease, causing tremors, stiffness and balance problems. It is also the 13th-leading cause of death in the United States. One factor in its increase may be the way we have come to live, for there’s growing evidence linking it to a range of pesticides and industrial chemicals, including paraquat and substances used in dry cleaning.
“Chemicals in our food, water and air have created this largely man-made disease,” two Parkinson’s experts, Dr. Ray Dorsey and Dr. Michael S. Okun, write in a new book, “The Parkinson’s Plan.” “These chemicals are all around us, and none are necessary.”
Dorsey and Okun, who between them have published more than 1,000 papers and cared for more than 10,000 people with Parkinson’s, describe the disease as a pandemic, but one caused not by a virus but by “a new class of ‘vectors,’ including pesticides in our food, industrial solvents in our water and pollution in our air.”
Michael J. Fox, the actor who developed Parkinson’s and then started a foundation to tackle the disease, believes that’s how he most likely got the disease — an exposure to “some kind of chemical,” he said.
Yet for Fox and most others with the disease, causation remains murky and the mechanisms not fully understood. Genetics appear to play a role in only a small percentage of cases, while environmental factors appear dominant. Researchers and regulators dispute the degree to which pesticides bear responsibility, and the Environmental Protection Agency continues to allow paraquat to be used in the United States — even as dozens of other countries have banned it.
In that respect, paraquat symbolizes the challenges of environmental health and chemical regulation. Evidence accumulates, but invariably there are gaps and contradictions. Companies, following the tobacco playbook, hire lobbyists and highlight the uncertainties. And often the regulatory process drags on as companies make money and people get sick.
Meanwhile, there is a growing mountain of imperfect but troubling evidence. Just this year, a study found that living within a mile of a golf course more than doubles a person’s odds of developing Parkinson’s. One theory is that it is because golf courses use pesticides.
So how do we protect ourselves and our children? How do we avoid following in the footsteps of Steve Phillips, a successful leadership consultant who at age 56 was hosting a banquet for corporate executives when he noticed that his left hand wasn’t working properly? He thought it might be fatigue. But then he noticed that his left foot sometimes seemed stuck. Eventually, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
“It pretty much ended my career,” Phillips, now 73, told me. “And I would say that it basically destroyed my marriage.” He initially didn’t know how he could have contracted the disease, and then he read the scientific research tying the disease to paraquat.
For two summers, when he was 16 and 17, Phillips had worked on a farm, spraying fields with paraquat. “I was a naïve teenager,” he recalled. “I had my sunglasses on and a bandanna around my face, and I thought that was all the protection I needed.”
So does Phillips know that it was the paraquat that caused his Parkinson’s? “Am I absolutely certain? No, I can’t be,” he told me. “But that’s the only thing I can really point to.”
Phillips is one of more than 6,000 people with Parkinson’s who have sued manufacturers of paraquat, particularly Syngenta, a Swiss business that is the heir of the company that invented paraquat and that conducted the studies beginning in the 1950s that in some cases pointed to health concerns with the substance.
In 2022 The Guardian and The New Lede, an environmental publication, obtained a landmark trove of these internal Syngenta documents about paraquat. The documents, which had been furnished as discovery in a lawsuit against the company, are now available online as the Paraquat Papers.
The documents showed that even as the industry scoffed at health concerns publicly, it fretted about paraquat and risks of legal liability. As early as 1975, a company scientist described the legal risks as “a quite terrible problem.”
But a 2003 strategy document hailed paraquat as a big seller that Syngenta must “vigorously defend.” And it did so. The documents also showed that the company worked hard to disparage a pesticide expert, Deborah Cory-Slechta, who was being considered for a position on an E.P.A. advisory panel. She did not get the post.
I called Saswato Das, a spokesman for Syngenta, and he argued that there has been a rush to judgment against paraquat. Das noted, correctly, that some large studies have not tied paraquat to Parkinson’s and that some experts are skeptical of a direct causal connection.
A careful review last year by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, for example, concluded that paraquat may have a role in Parkinson’s in conjunction with other factors (such as certain genes, other pesticides or head injuries). But it concluded that “there is currently insufficient evidence to demonstrate a direct causal association with paraquat exposure and the increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.”
Hmm. It’s true that direct causation is complex and difficult to prove beyond all doubt. We can’t expose children to paraquat in a lab, lock them up for 50 years and then compare their Parkinson’s rates to those of a control group exposed to something else.
What we can do is weigh the many observational studies linking pesticide exposure and Parkinson’s, add in the experiments showing that very high doses of paraquat produce Parkinson’s-like features in lab mice and also consider the evidence of a dose-response relationship in which higher exposures seem linked to more cases of Parkinson’s. This accumulated evidence is sobering, if imperfect — and I think most of us would conclude that what’s important is not absolute proof but keeping our children safe.
Other risks are also associated with Parkinson’s. There’s evidence linking the disease to other pesticides; to head trauma; to air pollution; and especially to two chemicals that have been used in traditional dry cleaning, trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene, also known as TCE and PCE.
If you’re a basketball fan, you may remember Brian Grant, a power forward in the N.B.A. for 12 seasons, with Sacramento; Portland, Ore.; Miami; Los Angeles; and Phoenix. Grant, now 53 and retired, had a dad who was a Marine, so at ages 2 and 3, he lived on Camp Lejeune, a military base in North Carolina.
Decades later, at the end of his career as a professional basketball player, Grant found his body wasn’t always responsive. “I was feeling uncoordinated,” he told me. Then he began having trouble jumping off his left leg, and he developed a twitch. He retired from basketball in 2006. “There was no way I could play,” he told me, and he then tumbled into despair. “I got into some deep, dark depression,” he recalled. “I was very angry and upset and wasn’t the type of person you wanted to be around.”
Eventually Grant saw a neurologist who diagnosed him with Parkinson’s. He had no idea how he could have contracted the disease, but then a Parkinson’s expert read his memoir, “Rebound.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, “you were at Camp Lejeune!”
For much of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, including when Grant was a little boy, the water supply at Camp Lejeune was severely contaminated with PCE and TCE, in large part from chemical spills at a dry cleaner near the base.
Decades later, a follow-up study found that Camp Lejeune veterans had a 70 percent greater chance of developing Parkinson’s than those who served at another Marine base, Camp Pendleton. So Grant can’t be sure, but he suspects that living on Camp Lejeune may be responsible for his Parkinson’s.
Now living in Portland, Ore., Grant started the Brian Grant Foundation in 2010 to support people with the disease. And he worries that unnecessary exposures like the one he suffered as a toddler are still happening. “We know what the chemicals can do to us,” he said. “Yet we still allow them to be used.”
That’s more true of America than of other countries. Scrutinizing the same evidence, regulators in other countries have often acted more vigorously to protect public health. So while the E.P.A. continues to allow paraquat to be used on fields in America (although not on golf courses anymore), regulators have banned it in the European Union, China, Brazil and dozens of other countries (although this is often to prevent suicide by drinking it, rather than to reduce the risk of Parkinson’s).
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined the Trump administration, some activists thought he might be tougher on chemical companies. But that has not happened; Kennedy seems more inclined to persecute lifesaving vaccines.
Paradoxically, most of the paraquat used in the United States is manufactured in Britain and China — where it cannot legally be used. But it’s fine to produce it there and sell it to America, where regulation is more lax.
It wasn’t always this way. The United States was once a model of health regulation in the context of uncertainty. In 1960 a brave scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, stood fast in the face of industry pressure and refused to approve thalidomide in the United States, even as Canada and Europe allowed it as a sleeping pill for pregnant women. Kelsey acted not on absolute proof that thalidomide was harmful, but on the weight of imperfect evidence.
As a result, America was spared a wave of horrific birth defects seen in other countries from thalidomide. So in 1962 President John F. Kennedy gave Kelsey an award for her “exceptional judgment.”
Yet in recent decades, American regulators have grown timid and have often deferred to industries making unhealthy products, more so than abroad. Europe mostly curbed the use of lead paint well before America (France began to act in 1909!), and Europeans moved more aggressively than the United States in limiting endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as flame retardants, phthalates and PFAS — forever chemicals. Europe also restricts many food additives and cosmetic ingredients that are still used in the United States.
Essentially, Europe bans substances it harbors doubts about, while the United States tends to allow substances unless there is solid evidence of harm. That may have something to do with the millions that companies spend lobbying ($77 million last year by the chemical industry alone) and donating to political candidates.
The cigarette, lead paint, asbestos, prescription painkiller and chemical industries repeatedly staved off regulators by insisting that it would be premature to act. Instead of debating laws and regulations, companies hired armies of mercenary Ph.D.s to haggle over the science, leaving policymakers too bewildered to regulate.
In 1969, the American Tobacco Company published an ad, “Why We’re Dropping The New York Times,” in which it denounced “anticigarette crusaders” at The Times. The ad declared: “Sure, there are statistics associating lung cancer and cigarettes. There are statistics associating lung cancer with divorce, and even with lack of sleep. But no scientist has produced clinical or biological proof that cigarettes cause the diseases they are accused of causing.”
“We believe the anticigarette theory is a bum rap,” the company declared. That sounds like the Syngenta defense of paraquat today. Syngenta rejects the negative findings, pointing instead to those that are favorable. It dismisses the animal experiments that critics point to, noting that they involved injecting large quantities of paraquat into animals — not something likely to happen to a human. And above all, it insists that there is no proof of causation.
“Syngenta rejects the claims of a causal link between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease because it is not supported by scientific evidence,” the company says. “Despite decades of investigation and more than 1,200 epidemiological and laboratory studies of paraquat, no scientist or doctor has ever concluded in a peer-reviewed scientific analysis that paraquat causes Parkinson’s disease.”
In a narrow sense this may be true. But, as Dr. Caroline Tanner, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, who has conducted important research on paraquat and Parkinson’s, put it, “They’re playing word games.”
Scientists are careful and incremental. No single observational study is going to prove causation. But put together the mountain of human and animal studies that have accumulated, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that you would not want your child to be regularly exposed to pesticides. Granting a measure of uncertainty, it’s not obvious to me why public policy should give chemicals the benefit of the doubt over children’s health.
In fairness, though, we should acknowledge that regulating environmental health carries trade-offs. Banning paraquat might reduce agricultural yields or make fruits and vegetables more expensive (just as organic foods are more expensive). And Syngenta says that paraquat binds with clay particles, so that there is less runoff into waterways than with other herbicides.
It’s also true that while environmental health activists have an excellent record, there have been missteps. I think we were right to ban DDT in the United States but too quick to oppose low-level usages in impoverished countries abroad where it was a tool to reduce malaria deaths. Malaria then rebounded, with the estimated death toll surging to a peak of some 917,000 in 2004 from 638,000 in 1980. I fear hundreds of thousands of people in poor countries may have died because of our well-intentioned activism.
Still, that just goes to show that policy is challenging. It’s certainly not an argument for demanding absolute proof of causation before acting to protect ourselves.
I asked Syngenta if the company uses paraquat on its own grounds — but then I realized that it can’t, because its headquarters are in Switzerland, which bans the chemical; its paraquat manufacturing base is in Britain, which also bans its use; and its ultimate owner is a company in China, where paraquat is likewise banned.
After reading “The Parkinson’s Plan,” I took some precautions myself. I purchased fruit and vegetable wash, which helps remove pesticide residues. (I already buy organic.) And I’ll take the counsel of Dr. Okun, one of the authors, to try to use green dry cleaners and to remove plastic wrappings from clothes and air them out before wearing them.
Is this necessary? I don’t know. But Parkinson’s is becoming much more common, and I don’t want it to afflict me or my loved ones.
Environmental health is hard. It requires juggling trade-offs and making complex choices with insufficient knowledge. Yet because of profit incentives, we work much harder at spewing toxins into our ecosystem than at shielding ourselves from them. Unfortunately, the United States government — more so than other governments — is more inclined to keep chemical companies safe than to protect our families.
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16) Trump Wades Into Gaza Diplomacy as Israeli Military Moves on Gaza City
The American president gave Hamas what sounded like an ultimatum, demanding that the militant group agree to a new truce proposal or face full-scale Israeli assault on Gaza City.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, Sept. 8, 2025
President Trump, returning from the U.S. Open on Sunday, told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland that “I think we’re going to have a deal on Gaza very soon.” Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
President Trump’s latest foray into Middle East peacemaking presented Hamas with what sounded like an ultimatum. He pressed the Palestinian militant group to either accept a new American cease-fire proposal or face the full wrath of Israel’s military advance into Gaza City.
“The Israelis have accepted my Terms. It is time for Hamas to accept as well,” Mr. Trump posted on social media on Sunday, hinting at a new American proposal to exchange all the remaining hostages for Palestinian prisoners and end the nearly two-year-old Gaza war.
“I have warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting. This is my last warning, there will not be another one!” Mr. Trump said.
It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump’s brinkmanship could stop the invasion of Gaza City, the main urban center of the Palestinian territory. Alternatively, if Hamas balks, it could allow Israel and the United States to argue that they had tried everything and the group was bringing disaster upon itself.
The intervention did succeed in adding to the uncertainties surrounding Israel’s impending ground assault on the heart of Gaza City in the north of the territory. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian residents, many of them already displaced at least once by the war, are now torn between fleeing to the overcrowded south or taking the risk of staying put.
Speaking to reporters later on Sunday at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, Mr. Trump said: “I think we’re going to have a deal on Gaza very soon.” Mr. Trump has made similar predictions in the past that never came to pass.
On Monday, Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, issued an ominous warning of his own to Hamas, which led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza.
“Today a tremendous hurricane will hit the skies of Gaza City,” he wrote on X. “Release the hostages and put down your weapons — or Gaza will be ruined and you will be destroyed.”
Mr. Trump did not elaborate on the terms of any new proposal and the Israelis did not publicly confirm their acceptance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office sent a message to a number of reporters on Sunday night saying Israel was “giving very serious consideration to President Trump’s proposal,” adding, “Hamas will likely persist in its intransigence.”
Hamas issued a statement saying it had “received, through mediators, some ideas from the American side to reach a cease-fire agreement” and affirmed its readiness to enter immediately into talks.
At the same time, Israel was pressing ahead with the assault on Gaza City, which officials have described as one of the last Hamas strongholds in Gaza.
After operating in some of Gaza City’s outlying neighborhoods in recent weeks, Israel was intensifying airstrikes on targets in the core of the city during the past few days.
The military has brought down several high-rise buildings that it says were used by Hamas, without providing evidence. It was a display of force apparently intended to pressure residents to flee and to prepare for a ground invasion.
Mr. Netanyahu said on Sunday that about 100,000 residents had already left the city, heeding Israel’s warnings to head south. But hundreds of thousands remain in Gaza City and its environs, and the military’s evacuation notices have mostly been issued without any clear deadlines.
The Israeli government approved the operation a month ago. The military said it would take time to call up tens of thousands of reserve soldiers, train forces, prepare equipment and move the population out of Gaza City. It added that it intended to move cautiously in the complex urban environment, particularly given the belief that some hostages may be held there.
Israelis are divided over this new phase of the war. Many are concerned that the advance could endanger the lives of any hostages who might be held in Gaza City. And splits over the government’s war strategy have opened up between top political and security officials.
The military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, had favored going for an immediate, even partial Gaza truce deal to release at least some of the hostages rather than proceeding with the offensive. He is concerned that a conquest of Gaza City will lead to the military becoming solely responsible for the roughly 2 million Palestinians throughout the entire Gaza Strip, according to officials.
For some Israelis who want to see Hamas gone as soon as possible, progress in the war has been too hesitant.
Prof. Gabi Siboni, an Israeli colonel in the reserves and an analyst at the conservative-leaning Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, is among those advocating a controversial policy of imposing a full siege on Gaza City. He says the military, if it acts decisively, could defeat Hamas there within eight weeks or so.
The way the military is operating now in Gaza City “does not show great determination,” he said. “The action on the ground is very slow.”
Other analysts say they are skeptical that Israel can attain the total victory over Hamas that Mr. Netanyahu has promised but not achieved in 23 months of war.
For the Palestinians, fleeing Gaza City in the north means heading to central or southern parts of the enclave that are now largely in ruins or already overcrowded with displaced people, and not knowing when, or if, they will ever be able to return to their homes.
Last week Mr. Katz, the defense minister, warned Hamas that if it did not surrender, Gaza City would “become like Rafah and Beit Hanoun,” two Gazan cities reduced to rubble by the Israeli military.
“People think that if they leave this time they won’t be able to go back, ever,” said Prof. Mkhaimar Abusada, a Palestinian political analyst from Gaza City who was displaced from his home during the war and now lives in Cairo.
Professor Abusada noted that Israeli forces had been in Gaza City before, during the early months of the war. His neighborhood was bulldozed at that time, he said.
“This time it’s going to be different,” he said, predicting that the destruction would be much more widespread.
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17) Local Sheriffs Are Turning Their Jails Into ICE Detention Centers
By Allison McCann, Sept. 8, 2025
The reporter interviewed eight sheriffs from seven states and visited the Butler County Jail in Ohio.
Richard K. Jones, the Butler County sheriff, displays an altered photograph of President Trump made to be shown brandishing a handgun, in his office. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Vans carrying immigrants arrive at Ohio’s Butler County Jail, about an hour north of Cincinnati, throughout the day and night. They come from across the state, from Illinois, Michigan and even Arizona. Some detainees will spend a few nights here, others weeks, as they wait to be deported.
Immigrant detainees are not new to Butler County. Except for a hiatus during the Biden years, the sheriff has held a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use space in his jail for nearly two decades. But now they fill nearly half the jail’s 860 beds.
Butler is among the largest of a growing number of county jails and other local facilities that now house a sizable chunk of ICE detainees, many of whom have never been charged with a crime. The agency’s use of these facilities has more than doubled since President Trump took office, and jails held about 10 percent of all detainees, or 7,100 people, on average, each day in July.
With detention numbers at a record high, jails have proven to be a quick and convenient way for ICE to expand its detention capacity beyond existing federal and private facilities. Many sheriffs are eager to assist in Mr. Trump’s mass deportation plans — and to shore up their budgets — by offering up their beds.
“We’re essential,” said Jonathan Thompson, the executive director and chief executive of the National Sheriffs’ Association. “ICE can’t do what they need to do under the current circumstances without sheriffs and our jails.”
Jails are often the first stop on the way to somewhere else in ICE’s vast detention network, and they fill a geographic hole for ICE in the Midwest in particular, where there are few detention centers.
At most jails, ICE can easily spin up a contract through existing partnerships to hold federal inmates with the U.S. Marshals Service, reducing the time it takes to approve a new facility. County jails do not have to provide immigrants the same level of legal and medical services as those offered in dedicated ICE facilities, and the bed space is usually less expensive, too.
This year, the agency has inked new detention contracts with jails in both rural counties and urban areas. Most of the sheriffs signing up are in red states or from Republican-led areas of blue states, like Nassau County in New York. But the agency also holds large contracts for detention space at jails in Democratic-led states, including Massachusetts, Minnesota and Vermont.
Norman Chaffins, the sheriff in Grayson County, Ky., visited the White House during the first Trump administration to hear from leaders at ICE and Border Patrol. “That’s where I first understood that even though we’re not a border state, we’re still feeling the effects of illegal immigrants right here in our county,” he said. The jail now holds about 150 people each day for ICE.
Legal groups and immigrant advocates say local jails are ill-equipped to house immigrants, whose needs for legal, language and medical services are often different from those of other inmates. Inspections at some local facilities have turned up violations of ICE standards — water leaking from ceilings into beds, no daily change of clean socks and underwear — though conditions at county jails can vary widely.
During the Biden administration, ICE went as far as ending one jail contract in Alabama and pausing another in Florida, citing “serious deficiencies” and concerns about medical care. Under Mr. Trump, both facilities are once again holding hundreds of immigrants.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said that both facilities were recently inspected.
“If county jails are good enough to hold U.S. citizens, then they are sure good enough to hold illegal aliens,” Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement.
Reviving an old model
Jails have been part of the ICE detention system since the agency’s creation. During the George W. Bush administration, ICE had contracts with around 350 jails, and about half of all immigrant detainees were held in local facilities. The detention model, at the time, was to seek out contracts with lots of jails for little bits of use — five, 10, 20 beds.
At the start of the Obama administration, the Department of Homeland Security overhauled its approach to detention and began to contract with dedicated facilities designed specifically for ICE, mostly by private prison operators.
“At the county jails, oversight was complicated, and there were concerns about mixing civil immigration detainees with criminal inmates, and bad things were happening,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official who served in Republican and Democratic administrations. “The thinking was: Let’s reduce the number of county jails and focus on building civil detention.”
Under Mr. Trump, ICE is seeking both new and old ways to find space for the tens of thousands of people in its custody. The administration has reopened several private facilities that sat dormant, and it has struck deals in Indiana and Nebraska to use beds in their state prisons. And it has turned back to the county jails.
“All you sheriffs in the room, we need your bed space,” Tom Homan, the so-called border czar, said at a National Sheriffs’ Association’s conference in February.
A single county jail provides ICE with at most 500 beds a day, though many operate above their contracted capacity. In July, there were about 163 local facilities being used by ICE, and, on average, they each held about 44 people a day.
“ICE doesn’t have the capacity for what they’re doing,” said Bob Gualtieri, the sheriff in Pinellas County, Fla. He said that ICE needs more beds for longer stays — 60 to 90 days — which some jails can provide. “You can deputize tons of local cops, but if the system doesn’t have enough room, what are you doing?”
In many cases, the size of the jail is less important to ICE’s strategy than its location. People arrested in nearly any state can be held locally until ICE can find space in one of its large, private detention facilities clustered in the South. Since the start of Mr. Trump’s crackdown, more than a third of all people arrested by ICE have been held in a local facility at some point.
“We have the largest jail infrastructure in the world, and it’s an easy thing for ICE to fall back on,” said Silky Shah, the executive director of the Detention Watch Network, an advocacy group that opposes immigrant detention. “The jail is a really central component of the deportation machine.”
Political and other benefits
Many sheriffs see the decision to partner with ICE as good policy — most support tougher immigration restrictions, according to a 2022 survey — and good politics. Often, their constituents do too.
“There’s an ideological role that’s played where sheriffs are excited about participating in the deportation process and supporting President Trump’s agenda,” said Mirya Holman, a professor of public policy at the University of Houston who studies the role of the sheriff’s office.
Inside Butler County Jail, Sheriff Richard K. Jones’s office displays several photographs of Mr. Trump, including one of both men thumbs-upping together after a campaign rally in Cincinnati in 2016 where the sheriff took the stage.
Mr. Jones first signed on to accept ICE detainees in 2008 but canceled the jail’s contract under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in part because he didn’t like the administration’s immigration policies. (The jail was also facing a lawsuit brought by two immigrants who alleged they were beaten by guards.)
Mr. Jones said he got interested in helping ICE 20 years ago after an undocumented immigrant released from his jail went on to rape a 9-year-old girl. He feels his motivations line up with the administration’s enforcement priorities, even as they have expanded to include people without a criminal record.
His corrections staff members, he said, prefer to work in the cellblocks housing immigrants.
“They don’t cause any trouble. They stay to themselves. They have tables they can play cards on,” he said. “My local homegrown prisoners want to fight all the time.”
ICE typically pays jails $70 to $110 per day per detainee, usually more than counties budget for local inmates. For some counties, that is a small but significant — and reliable — source of revenue. In Butler County, the total budget for the sheriff’s office this year is $49 million, and the county expects to earn about $4 million from ICE.
But at least some sheriffs say it’s not worth it.
“We were making $1 million a year holding federal inmates,” Joe Kennedy, the sheriff in Dubuque County, Iowa, said about an earlier contract with the federal government. He declined an invitation from ICE to offer detention space in his jail this year.
“The problem was, logistically, it was very difficult. You’re responsible for moving the inmates, getting them to court hearings — we were running people all over,” he said. “We’re not interested in putting our staff through that again.”
‘Carceral, punitive places’
One of the chief criticisms of ICE’s jail partnerships is that jails are meant for criminal, not civil, detention. Most immigration violations are a civil offense, and about a third of people arrested by ICE this year had no criminal history.
“People hate private detention because they hate the profit motive, but the local jails are jail — they are carceral, punitive places,” said Royce Murray, who was a senior D.H.S. official in the Biden administration.
In interviews, immigrants who spent time detained at county jails in Florida, Indiana and Kentucky described what they said was cruel and unfair treatment by corrections staff, including taking away their mattresses and bedding, or refusing to provide basic necessities like cups and spoons. One detainee said he would rinse out old potato chip bags in order to have something to drink water from.
Unlike local inmates arrested on charges like drunk driving or drug possession, immigrant detainees are rarely given the option to bond out of jail. While most are transferred to bigger ICE facilities after 72 hours, in some cases, they have spent weeks or months inside jails not designed for long-term stays.
There was once an effort to make the rules governing ICE facilities consistent — provisions like no less than five hours per week of access to law libraries for detainees, and at least one hour per day of outdoor physical exercise — but the agency has loosened those requirements for some facilities over the years, including many jails.
This year, there have been reports of overcrowded, unsanitary and inhumane conditions at some of the local facilities ICE uses. Detainees at a state corrections facility in Anchorage said they had been pepper sprayed and denied access to their lawyers. At the Phelps County Jail in Rolla, Mo., — which signed its first ICE detention contract this year — a 27-year-old Colombian man died by suicide in April. (As of this month, the jail will no longer accept new ICE detainees and will transfer existing ones, citing cost concerns.)
Federal officials declined to answer specific questions about these cases and said all jails used by ICE meet federal detention standards. “Routine inspections are one component of ICE’s multilayered inspections and oversight process that ensures transparency in how facilities meet the threshold of care outlined in contracts with facilities, as well as ICE’s national detention standards,” Ms. McLaughlin, the D.H.S. spokeswoman, said.
On a visit in July, the Butler County Jail appeared clean and organized. It was not crowded. The jail holds about 90 people per cellblock, or “pod,” with two people per cell. Male ICE detainees were held in a separate area of the jail from regular inmates, but the few women were mixed with the local population. Small televisions showing Bounce TV played in the cells.
But there was no library, no internet access or computers. In the pod reporters visited in July, there was one cart of about two dozen books. The pods at the jail each have their own recreation area: a concrete basketball half-court with a single window. Detainees are not allowed outside.
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