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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) 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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2 ‘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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3) 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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4) 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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5) 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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6) 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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7) 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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8) Reading Skills of 12th Graders Hit a New Low
High school seniors had the worst reading scores since 1992 on a national test, a loss probably related to increases in screen time and the pandemic. Their math scores fell as well.
By Dana Goldstein, Sept. 9, 2025
Newly released test results indicate that many high school seniors lack the skills to paraphrase ideas from a political speech or identify a story character’s motives. Credit...Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times
The reading skills of American high school seniors are the worst they have been in three decades, according to new federal testing data, a worrying sign for teenagers as they face an uncertain job market and information landscape challenged by A.I.
In math, 12th graders had the lowest performance since 2005.
The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, long regarded as the nation’s most reliable, gold-standard exam, showed that about a third of the 12th-graders who were tested last year did not have basic reading skills.
It was a sign that, among other skills, they may not be able to determine the purpose of a political speech. In math, nearly half of the test takers scored below the basic level, meaning they may not have mastered skills like using percentages to solve real-world problems.
The test scores are the first of their kind to be released since the Covid-19 pandemic upended education. They are yet another sign that adolescents are struggling in the wake of the virus, when schools were closed for months or more. They also arrive at a time when Americans overall are abandoning printed text for screen time and video-dominated social media, which experts have linked to declining academics.
The NAEP test results indicate “a stark decline” in performance, said Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the arm of the federal Education Department that administers the tests.
Only about a third of 12th graders are leaving high school with the reading and math skills necessary for college-level work, he added.
The findings echo grim statistics on the recent achievement of younger children.
For about 10 years, declines have been most pronounced among low-performing students, indicating that the floor of academic achievement has fallen. NAEP scores among top 12th-graders — those at the 90th percentile or above — have not changed significantly over the decades these exams have been given, in either reading or math.
Test score drops were probably caused in part by the disruptions of the pandemic, including illness, school closures and remote learning. The seniors included in the new federal data were in 8th grade when the virus transformed daily life in March 2020. Millions of teenagers spent a year or more learning online.
Even so, data from previous testing shows that learning declines — especially among struggling students — began several years before the pandemic. Experts have pointed to a wide range of possible explanations.
Over the last decade, both adults and children began to replace reading time with screen time, social media and, increasingly, streaming video. And over the same period, the federal government and many states relaxed policies that were intended to hold schools and teachers accountable for student learning.
Among Republican policymakers, much of the energy in education policy has shifted away from raising test scores, and toward providing parents with private-school vouchers. Many elected Democrats have focused more on social supports for students, like nutrition and mental health counseling, than on academic rigor.
States and school districts have worked to improve early reading instruction and provide broader access to advanced math. But at least so far, those changes have not resulted in national achievement gains.
The new test data also includes 8th-grade science scores. Performance in 2024 declined, with 38 percent of students scoring below the basic level, compared with 33 percent in 2019.
NAEP exams are given to representative samples of students across the country, and are considered more challenging than the state standardized tests that public schools prepare students for.
The NAEP results are widely scrutinized by educators, policymakers and researchers. They provide one of the few nationally comparable snapshots of student performance, in a country where much education policy is set at the local level.
The achievement declines cut across demographic divides of race, class and sex. One of the few brights spots was in science among 8th graders who were not proficient in English. That group’s performance improved between 2019 and 2024.
Some experts said that in response to declining achievement, policymakers should look to a few states that have shown recent improvements in NAEP test scores for younger children. State-by-state results are not available for the 12th-grade level.
“There’s a road map out there from states like Louisiana and Tennessee, focused on high-dosage tutoring, high-quality curriculum and clear information for parents on where their kids stand,” said Marc Porter Magee, chief executive of 50CAN, an education advocacy group. “What’s missing now is the political will to bring it to every state.”
Other experts have urged a top-to-bottom rethinking of how education is delivered.
D. Graham Burnett, a historian of science at Princeton, said that with the ubiquity of screens, it seems inevitable that in the future, fewer people will engage with lengthy texts.
But he argued that the cultural inheritance passed down through the generations in printed books and articles could continue through speech, performance, memorization, recitation and other age-old forms of learning.
“It’s important that we not throw out reading,” he said. “But we have to work with where we are, and people are not going to get dumber. We are going to carry forward the tradition in powerful ways, and we’re going to do it in ways that are unrecognizable to our grandparents. That’s always been the case.”
Still, some worry the NAEP results have implications for American companies as they seek skilled employees, and for American workers as they seek good jobs.
Margaret Spellings, who served as education secretary under President George W. Bush and now leads the Bipartisan Policy Center, said declining achievement was “an economic emergency that threatens our work force and national competitiveness.”
The release of the NAEP test data on Tuesday is the first since President Trump decimated staffing at the Education Department as part of his push to abolish the agency. The National Center for Education Statistics now has only three full-time employees, according to Dr. Soldner; earlier this year there were about 100. The administration fired the agency’s widely respected leader, Peggy Carr.
Before the test scores were released, administration officials sought to project the idea that the agency was running adequately, telling reporters that it was on schedule to deliver NAEP exams in 2026 and 2028 and planned to hire about 10 people to help with the testing program.
In a statement, Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said the latest test scores “confirm a devastating trend.” “The lesson is clear,” she continued. “Success isn’t about how much money we spend, but who controls the money and where that money is invested.”
Ms. Spellings said the test results raised questions about Mr. Trump’s priorities.
“The current conversation in Washington is a distraction from our most urgent priority of better preparing our students,” she said in a statement. “This is not the right moment to talk about closing the Department of Education. When your house is on fire, you don’t talk about making renovations.”
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9) Israeli Strike Targets Hamas Leadership in Qatar, a Gaza War Mediator
Qatar, which has been trying to negotiate a cease-fire, condemned the attack. The Qatari foreign ministry said a residential headquarters where senior Hamas politicians lived was targeted.
By Adam Rasgon, Vivian Nereim and Ronen Bergman, Sept. 9, 2025
A damaged building after an Israeli strike targeted Hamas leadership in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday. Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
An Israeli strike targeted senior members of Hamas’s leadership on Tuesday in the Gulf nation of Qatar, which has been mediating to try to end the Gaza war.
The fate of the officials was not immediately known.
Qatar condemned the attack, which Majed al-Ansari, the spokesman for the Qatari foreign ministry, said in a statement targeted the “residential headquarters” where a number of senior Hamas politicians lived.
Qatar has played a major role as a mediator in talks between Israel and Hamas to end the war in Gaza. The direct attack on Qatari soil risks antagonizing its government and unraveling those diplomatic efforts, particularly because Qatar’s political and economic stability hinges on its reputation as a haven for business and tourism in a volatile region.
Qatar agreed to host an office for Hamas at the request of the United States, Qatari officials have said in the past.
“This criminal assault constitutes a blatant violation of all international laws and norms, and poses a serious threat to the security and safety of Qataris and residents in Qatar,” Mr. al-Ansari said.
An unidentified senior Hamas official told Al Jazeera, the Qatari broadcaster, that the attack happened while a team was discussing President Trump’s proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza.
An Israeli official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said the Hamas leaders were gathering to discuss the U.S. proposal.
Qatar was thought to be neutral ground, in part, because it maintains contacts with the Israeli government. Senior Israeli government officials have traveled many times to Doha to talk to Qatari leaders about securing the release of hostages in Gaza since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that ignited the war in the territory.
But Israeli officials have promised to kill Hamas leaders who were involved in the planning of the October attack on Israel. In May, Israel Katz, Israel’s defense minister, specifically threatened Khalil al-Hayya, the chief Hamas negotiator, who is often in Qatar.
It is unclear whether he was in Qatar at the time of the attack. The head of his office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ismaeel Naar contributed reporting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
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10) Israel Orders Total Evacuation of Gaza City, Threatening Full Invasion
Hundreds of thousands will have to decide whether to risk staying put or fleeing to ruined and overcrowded areas in the south as Israel looks set to launch an operation to take over the entire city.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Sept. 9, 2025
The Israeli military says it controls about 75 percent of Gaza. The coastal strip stretching from Gaza City in the north of the enclave to Khan Younis in the south is the main area that is outside Israeli control. Credit...Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press
The Israeli military issued a sweeping evacuation order for Gaza City on Tuesday, signaling that it was moving ahead with its full-scale invasion of the largest city in northern Gaza.
The order will force hundreds of thousands of people to decide whether to risk staying in the city or to flee south to areas that are already overcrowded. Many of those areas are also in ruins.
Alaa Haddad, 29, a resident of Gaza City, said that he and his family were planning to stay in their home for now because they did not know where to go and they could not afford to pay the hundreds of dollars to transport their belongings.
“Where can we go?” he asked. “Even if there is a place, we don’t want to be displaced again because it is degrading and humiliating.”
For weeks, Israel has been preparing to take over Gaza City, intensifying its military offensive there and calling up an additional 60,000 reservists. Israeli officials say that Gaza City is one of the last remaining Hamas strongholds in Gaza.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has pushed for a wider offensive on Gaza City, even as senior Israeli security officials have expressed reservations about the plans. International aid agencies and some longstanding allies have also condemned them.
The evacuation order on Tuesday came as indirect cease-fire talks between Hamas and Israel remained stalled.
In a post on social media addressed to “all of the residents of Gaza City and everyone in its neighborhoods,” Avichay Adraee, an Arabic-language spokesman for Israel’s military, said its forces were “insistent on finishing Hamas and will act in Gaza City with great force as it has in the different areas of the strip.”
“For your safety, evacuate immediately,” he added.
Mr. Adraee instructed people to go to a “humanitarian area” south of Gaza City, where he had said last week that efforts were being made to deliver aid. Earlier in the war, the Israeli military told Palestinians to go to the same general region and defined it as a “humanitarian area,” but still conducted airstrikes there.
Residents who have fled south of Gaza City over the past week have reported struggling to find a place to rent. They said many owners of the apartments that remain on the market were demanding sums that were well beyond their means.
Mohammad Fares, 24, said that he spent three days last week looking at apartments in central Gaza but struggled to find anything affordable for his family, which includes his parents and two brothers. It was only after some of his friends pressured a landlord in Deir al-Balah on his behalf that he found a one-room apartment for a price he could manage, $500 a month.
“Getting a place at this price point was more the exception than the rule,” he noted.
Others have said that there is insufficient space to accommodate more tents and makeshift shelters for people from Gaza City, and that it was challenging to find new tents anyway.
Last week, an Israeli security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity under military protocol, said that roughly 3,000 tents had entered Gaza recently, adding that the hope was to bring in 100,000 in the coming weeks.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Saturday warned that a further intensification of military operations in Gaza City would cause a “catastrophe” for civilians. It added that the United Nations and its partners would continue operating in the city to provide aid to those who stayed.
On Tuesday, Philippe Lazzarini, head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, said on social media that there was “no safe place in Gaza, let alone a humanitarian zone.”
The Israeli military has said that its operation in Gaza City would prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping and planning future attacks, and that it would extend into parts of the city that Israeli soldiers have not previously attacked or held during the war.
The Israeli military has destroyed several prominent, high-rise buildings in the center of the city in the past number of days and has been operating in the Zeitoun district in the southern part of Gaza City in recent weeks. The military said that the buildings were used by Hamas, without providing evidence.
Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, chief spokesman of the military, said last week that Israeli forces had “operational control” of 40 percent of the city and would “expand and intensify” their offensive in the coming days.
The Gazan health ministry said on Tuesday that the bodies of 83 people had arrived at hospitals over the past 24 hours. Health officials in Gaza do not differentiate between civilians and combatants in casualty counts.
The war in Gaza was ignited by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which, the Israeli authorities said, about 1,200 people were killed and about 250 others abducted. More than 64,000 people in Gaza have been killed in the ensuing war, according to the territory’s health ministry.
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.
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11) Who Are Chicago’s Immigrants?
Almost 40 percent of immigrants living in Chicago are from Mexico. More than 800,000 of the city’s 2.7 million residents identify as Hispanic or Latino.
By Julie Bosman, Reporting from Chicago, Sept. 9, 2025
The “Wings of Mexico” art installation at the Plaza of the Americas in downtown Chicago. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Immigration has always shaped Chicago’s neighborhoods, its expansion and its culture.
Immigrants have stabilized the city’s population, allowing it to maintain slow growth in recent years. Foreign-born workers are integral to the local economy, particularly in the construction, manufacturing and service industries.
Chicago politicians brag about their immigrant backgrounds, as in the Irish American Daleys, and it is not uncommon to see signs in English, Spanish and Polish on downtown buildings.
“Chicago has been very chill about immigration,” said Rob Paral, a demographer at the Great Cities Institute of the University of Illinois Chicago. “It’s not a radioactive issue here.”
As the Trump administration announced this week that it had begun a crackdown on illegal immigration in the city, elected officials and local advocacy groups loudly pushed back, citing Chicago’s history as a city that has welcomed immigrants.
More than half a million Chicagoans were born outside the U.S.
Chicago’s population of 2.7 million is roughly split in thirds among white residents, Black residents and Latino residents, plus a small but growing number of Asian residents.
According to the American Community Survey for 2023, 560,000 of Chicago’s residents are foreign-born, the majority of whom have legal status in the United States. In the city, at least 150,000 people are undocumented, encompassing about 8 percent of Chicago households, according to Mr. Paral’s research.
In the 19th century, immigrants came from Europe to Chicago in waves, seeking work at meatpacking plants, railroads and factories.
The largest group of immigrants in Chicago today are from Mexico, followed by China, India, the Philippines and Poland, according to census data. The 1980s in particular saw a rush of arrivals from Mexico.
Mexican-born Chicagoans have lived and built businesses for generations in neighborhoods including Pilsen and Little Village, and more recently, in Belmont Cragin on the Northwest Side, and Brighton Park and Gage Park on the Southwest Side.
More than 800,000 Chicagoans in the 2020 census identified as Hispanic or Latino.
Asian Americans, a growing population in Chicago, are concentrated in Bridgeport, McKinley Park and Chinatown, as well as the Uptown neighborhood on the North Side.
More than 30,000 Ukrainians have also flooded into Chicago in recent years to escape their war-scarred country, with some families choosing to stay in the city and others eventually moving to nearby suburbs with heavy Eastern European populations.
Chicago has restricted local officials from helping ICE.
Laws in Chicago tend to be protective of immigrants’ rights. Chicago is known as a sanctuary city for its laws that prevent local officials from helping federal immigration agents enforce immigration law.
In 2012, under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago passed a new Welcoming City Ordinance that prevents police officers from detaining people solely on the belief they are illegal immigrants.
Mayor Brandon Johnson has repeatedly affirmed Chicago’s status as a sanctuary city.
A recent surge of migrants strained Chicago.
Occasionally, tensions over immigration have risen in Chicago.
In 2023, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas began sending buses of asylum seekers from Central and South America to Chicago, saying that his own state was unfairly overwhelmed by people crossing the border, Chicago was inundated with people who had nowhere to stay. Hundreds were sleeping in tents on sidewalks in winter and on floors inside police stations, and the cost of the effort to feed and house the migrants strained city resources.
While the buses have long stopped arriving, many Chicagoans, including Latinos, have objected to the sudden influx of migrants and worried that their integration into the city would be difficult.
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