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Beloved tenured History professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on September 10th by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position.
President Damphousse fired Dr. Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme rightwing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist, who tries to monetize exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people ‘chose to die in the Holocaust’, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite.
After the fascist’s ‘exposure video’ reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr. Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy which requires a formal due process procedure.
Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favor of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organizing politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views reflect those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40% favor socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive, they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists, and capitalists.
It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer Texas State University that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom– a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors.
We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr. Tom Alter to his teaching position.
The termination of Dr. Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in-line with that of Donald Trump who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents.
Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left.
It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Color, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole . It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war while a handful accumulates ever growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us.
Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr. Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe.
His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”.
We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle.
The attacks on Dr. Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom, and equality. We will also continue building the organization that it will take to win it.
Dr. Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organizations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as Associate Professor of History.
Socialist Horizon also calls on all organizations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defense of free speech and against fascism.
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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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”
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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) How Right-Wing Influencers Are Shaping the Guard Fight in Portland
President Trump and his administration are amplifying the voices of pro-White House podcasters and streamers eager to ratify the president’s description of Oregon’s largest city as a “hellscape.”
By Anna Griffin and Aaron West, Reporting from Portland, Ore., Oct. 10, 2025
In the fight over deploying National Guard troops to Portland, Ore., Democratic leaders in the city and state have pleaded with President Trump and the courts to trust law enforcement records, both local and federal, that describe the demonstrations as small and comparatively calm.
But in the bifurcated media world of 2025, one side’s comparative calm is the other’s “hellscape” — as the White House described Portland on Wednesday — and the narrative that the Trump administration has wanted has been supplied by a coterie of right-wing influencers elevated by Mr. Trump himself.
On Thursday, the repercussions of those dueling versions of reality became clear as judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit questioned a district court’s finding that the protests in Portland were likely too minor to justify the National Guard deployment. The appeals court judges instead cited federal reports of demonstrators spitting on federal officers and shining flashlights in their eyes, behavior that has been captured, amplified and sometimes even prompted by pro-Trump personalities eager to counter local police.
“The Portland Police Chief did an interview today attacking independent journalists for exposing the violent terrorists that he allows to run the city,” Benny Johnson, a popular pro-Trump podcaster, wrote Tuesday on social media after accompanying Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, in Oregon. “He’s humiliated and knows Portland is under siege.”
To some extent, the right’s assertions of chaos in Oregon have been self-fulfilling. The administration’s close ties to a small but well-followed group of influencers and conspiracy theorists has amplified their voices, and they in turn have encouraged administration efforts to crack down on demonstrators. The portrayals of a city on fire have angered protesters.
And sometimes, left-wing activists have risen to the bait, leading to scuffles and injuries conservative streamers then promote on the internet. One right-wing commentator, Katie Daviscourt, said she received a black eye when a demonstrator hit her with a flag pole.
“Certainly over the last 10 days, the energy level has gone up, the amount of conflicting points of view have increased greatly,” Chief Bob Day of the Portland Police Bureau said at a news media briefing Tuesday. “And this has created an environment that’s equally, if not more, challenging for us.”
Pro-Trump provocateurs have gotten more open about their efforts as the stakes in the battle over how to police protests grow. Ms. Noem has threatened to quadruple the number of federal law enforcement agents in Portland if she is not satisfied with the city’s crowd-control efforts. Troops from the Oregon and California National Guards are awaiting deployment. Another group of guardsmen from Texas could be summoned at the president’s request.
Meantime, influencers are seeking to raise the tension. Matt Tardio, a right-wing streamer who was broadcasting to an online audience of 10,000 or so from the ICE building in Portland on Wednesday night, conceded that other streamers were trying to stir up trouble so they could capture it on video.
“They were handing out flags and trying to get antifa folks to burn them, and then claimed that they were going to do physical harm to them if they burned the American flag,” he said. All the while, a videographer was capturing the action.
Mr. Tardio, 41, said he was not sure which side the people involved were supporting.
“In the beginning it looked like people on the right are the ones instigating, but in the following evenings it looked like people on the left,” he said. “People are absorbing information on social media quicker than reality.” Nobody can keep up, he added.
Political messages don’t seem to be the point for some on either side, said Sgt. Daniel DiMatteo while patrolling near the protest Wednesday night.
“It’s a lot more of the, ‘I’m going to get in your face and say something controversial to try to get a response out of you,’” he said.
There are, to be sure, streamers and podcasters on the left who are commenting on the standoff, but conservative provocateurs hold more influence because of their connections to the administration. Ms. Noem did not have any news briefings or public appearances during her trip to Portland this week. Instead, she brought her own media entourage, which chronicled her every move through the prism of their support.
“BREAKING,” Bo Loudon, a 19-year-old influencer and friend of Mr. Trump’s youngest son, Barron, wrote on social media. Ms. Noem “just stared down violently Antifa rioters on the roof of a Portland ICE facility,” he wrote.
The video attached showed Ms. Noem on the roof of the building looking down at a small clutch of protesters far away, one of them in a chicken suit.
The man in the chicken suit, Jack Dickinson, 26, who had been coming to the ICE building to protest federal immigration policies for months, said he was struck by the disconnect. Mr. Dickinson said he watched one of the pro-Trump influencers, Nick Sortor, film outside the ICE building, then heard the narration.
“He was talking about this looking like a third-world country,” Mr. Dickinson said as he surveyed a riverfront neighborhood of apartment buildings, coffee shops and an Italian restaurant popular for holiday meals and graduation parties. “It’s just clearly not.”
The influencers with Ms. Noem included major conservative celebrities such as Mr. Johnson, whose YouTube posts regularly draw hundreds of thousands of views, and younger conservative journalists such as David Medina, who lives in Oregon, and Mr. Sortor, who has been producing a steady stream of content this week based on his Oct. 2 arrest at the ICE demonstrations.
Mr. Sortor was initially charged with second-degree disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor in Oregon, after he took a burning American flag from a left-wing demonstrator and a fight ensued. The response from Washington, D.C., was intense and immediate. Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded an investigation into the Portland Police Bureau, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Mr. Sortor had been “ambushed by antifa.”
For his efforts, Mr. Sortor found himself at the White House on Wednesday, as the president praised the actions of right-wing activists and pledged to dismantle antifa, a loose-knit group of anarchists whose presence in Portland has long angered Mr. Trump.
Mr. Sortor had been “assaulted in Portland by a flag-burning mob,” the president declared.
Mr. Sortor responded, “The Portland politicians literally are willing to sacrifice their own citizens just to appease these antifa terrorists.”
Nathan Vasquez, the district attorney of Multnomah County, which includes parts of Portland, dropped the charges against Mr. Sortor but planned to take two left-wing demonstrators he scuffled with to trial. Mr. Vasquez said police did have probable cause to arrest Mr. Sortor.
The influencer was engaged in “what I think most people would consider antagonistic behavior,” Mr. Vasquez said. “The hard part is that obnoxious behavior doesn’t amount to you getting to punch him in the face.”
After Ms. Noem’s visit to Portland, Mr. Johnson appeared live on Newsmax from inside the cordoned-off ICE building. He described the building as being in downtown Portland and said that the windows were blacked out and covered with tarps because “Democrats keep shooting sniper rounds into ICE facilities.”
Police have not reported any incidents of sniper fire, and the ICE building sits about two miles from downtown Portland.
Along with a video of Ms. Noem praying before a fast-food meal with federal workers, Mr. Johnson posted on social media his own photo of her on the roof of the ICE building.
“She stood at the edge and stared down Antifa and a dude in a chicken suit,” Mr. Johnson wrote. “Straight savage.”
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2) Marc Benioff Says Trump Should Send Guard Troops to San Francisco
Mr. Benioff, the Salesforce C.E.O. and owner of Time magazine, once supported Hillary Clinton and a business tax for homeless services. Now he’s fully behind Donald Trump.
By Heather Knight, Reporting from San Francisco, Oct. 10, 2025
For years, San Franciscans considered him their benevolent, big-hearted billionaire.
While other tech titans built private rocket ships and scooped up super yachts, the Salesforce founder and chief executive Marc Benioff was known for spreading large sums of money around San Francisco, his hometown. He tended toward the liberal side of Silicon Valley politics. He lectured other business leaders about the importance of helping homeless people instead of complaining about them.
But 2025 seems to have ushered in Benioff 2.0.
The benevolence remains, but the liberal leanings do not. In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Benioff said this week that he avidly supported President Trump and thought National Guard troops should be deployed to San Francisco — an action that city leaders would consider beyond the pale.
Mr. Benioff’s shift serves as another example of a prominent Bay Area tech executive acceding to the Republican president’s view of the world. Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, gave Mr. Trump a 24-karat gold gift and heaped praise upon the president in an August visit to the Oval Office. Last month, at a White House dinner for tech barons, the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told Mr. Trump he was “a very refreshing change.”
To many Silicon Valley observers, such attempts to accommodate Mr. Trump are simply a matter of protecting tech businesses, especially after watching Mr. Trump threaten companies, individuals and institutions that have run afoul of him. And Salesforce has hundreds of software contracts with the federal government.
Nearly nine months into Mr. Trump’s second term, San Francisco has avoided the heavy federal incursions seen in Los Angeles, Washington and Chicago. The most palpable action in the city has involved agents arresting immigrants at the federal courthouse, sometimes in aggressive ways.
But the president, in an Oval Office gathering in August, mentioned that he was considering sending federal troops into San Francisco as he ticked off a list of other Democratic-led cities. He said that Democrats had “destroyed” San Francisco and that he would “clean that one up, too.”
Mr. Benioff said he liked that idea and thought that Guard soldiers could help reduce crime in the city.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” he said.
Mr. Benioff spoke as his annual Dreamforce conference is set to begin Tuesday in downtown San Francisco, bringing 50,000 visitors to the city. He is scheduled to deliver a keynote address about the benefits of “agentic enterprise,” a business model in which humans and artificial intelligence bots work together.
Speaking by telephone from his private plane en route to San Francisco, he lamented that he has to pay for hundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers to help patrol the convention area and said that San Francisco needed to “re-fund” the police.
The city never actually “defunded” its police force, and San Francisco’s violent crime rates are below those in many other U.S. cities.
But San Francisco has struggled to recruit and keep officers, and it still has problems with lower-level crimes and open-air drug use, especially in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin near City Hall. It has about 1,500 police officers, and Mr. Benioff says it needs another thousand.
“You’ll see. When you walk through San Francisco next week, there will be cops on every corner,” he continued. “That’s how it used to be.”
Mr. Benioff’s team wanted him to highlight his latest round of philanthropy, which includes another personal donation of $100 million to the University of California, San Francisco children’s hospitals named after him, as well as a $39 million company gift to schools and children’s causes. His family and company have given more than $1 billion to Bay Area causes over the past 26 years.
“I don’t think anyone has hired more people or given more money or supported San Francisco more than I have,” Mr. Benioff said.
Since the pandemic, he has mostly lived on the Big Island of Hawaii, where he has bought up numerous parcels of land. He said that he wasn’t sure how many days he spends each year in San Francisco, but that he is never in one place for more than a day or two.
Mayor Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat who avoids discussing national politics or even saying the president’s name, did not address Mr. Benioff’s view that Mr. Trump should send the National Guard to San Francisco. In a statement, his spokesman highlighted the city’s falling crime rates and increased hiring of law enforcement officers.
Other San Francisco politicians rebuked Mr. Benioff.
“You can’t support San Francisco and want to see us invaded,” said Assemblyman Matt Haney, a Democrat. “It’s one thing to wrongly support Trump’s misguided economic policies. It’s quite another to support a direct assault and occupation of our city.”
Brooke Jenkins, the San Francisco district attorney, was livid that Mr. Benioff wanted the National Guard in the city. She would seek to prosecute anyone, including federal agents, who becomes violent or harasses residents, she said.
“San Franciscans right now sit scared that we are next in line for what Trump is delivering to other cities across this nation,” Ms. Jenkins said. “I’m disappointed that anyone would want to invite that chaos into our city.”
Rafael Mandelman, the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said he agreed that the city needs more police officers, but said there was no need to send federal troops. He said he understood why so many tech leaders were turned off by the swing further left in the city five years ago, but said that they were moving too far to the right.
“I really don’t think Trump is the answer,” he said.
Though San Francisco and other Bay Area cities have elected more moderate leaders in recent years, they remain staunchly Democratic and oppose Mr. Trump. A Public Policy Institute of California poll in June found that 77 percent of likely voters in the Bay Area disapproved of Mr. Trump, the highest share for any region in the state.
But over the course of a 50-minute conversation, Mr. Benioff did not have a negative word to say about Mr. Trump or his policies.
“I fully support the president,” he said. “I think he’s doing a great job.”
During the interview, Mr. Trump’s voice could be heard in the background. Mr. Benioff was watching a YouTube video about the Israeli hostage release deal, for which he praised the president.
Mr. Benioff is close enough to Mr. Trump to have been invited last month to a state dinner that was hosted by King Charles for the president at Windsor Castle in England. Mr. Benioff said that he was incredibly honored to be seated directly across the table from Mr. Trump and spent the dinner telling him “how grateful I am for everything he’s doing,” he recounted.
Mr. Benioff, who also owns Time magazine, said he had not closely followed the news about the immigration raids, Mr. Trump’s call to gerrymander congressional districts before the midterm elections, the government shutdown or the Trump administration’s attacks on the media. He said Time, which named Mr. Trump its “Person of the Year” last year, had faced no pressure from the White House.
“We haven’t been under attack,” he said. “We provide accurate, balanced journalism.”
He praised Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative to slash federal spending, texting a recent photo of himself hanging out with Mr. Musk and a Tesla robot. He likewise praised David Sacks, another San Francisco tech billionaire and the chairman of Mr. Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
It all seemed to be a major political shift for Mr. Benioff. In 2016, he hosted a large fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate who lost to Mr. Trump, at his $31 million mansion on the edge of the Presidio in San Francisco.
In 2018, Mr. Benioff personally funded a city ballot measure campaign to tax businesses, including his own, for services for those who are homeless.
When he cut the ribbon that same year to open Salesforce Tower, a rocket-shaped building that consumed the city skyline, he asked the head of a local meditation center to lead the crowd in chanting “Om, shanti,” a Sanskrit call for peace, and called on his fellow tech leaders do more to combat poverty.
Myrna Melgar, a San Francisco supervisor, said that Mr. Benioff’s comments about the National Guard and Mr. Trump “threw me for a loop.” She speculated that his political shift might be for self-serving business reasons.
“From the railroad barons until now, that’s nothing new,” she said. “But with Marc Benioff, it’s particularly disappointing. It’s definitely out of step and out of touch with what most San Franciscans would want.”
On Thursday, Mr. Benioff said he had never been progressive even if many San Franciscans thought he was. He said he was a longtime Republican before switching to become an independent voter.
At the end of the interview, he turned to a public relations executive. He could be heard asking why her mouth was wide open and if he had said anything he shouldn’t have.
“What about the political questions?” he asked. “Too spicy?”
Then he hung up.
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3) Judge Signals She Is Likely to Order Abrego Garcia’s Release Soon
The judge expressed frequent frustrations with the Trump administration, saying it had presented a “totally inconsistent” case to keep the Maryland man in immigration detention.
By Minho Kim, Reporting from Greenbelt, Md., Oct. 10, 2025
If Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is released, it would be his first time walking free since August. Credit...Stephanie Scarbrough/Associated Press
A federal judge on Friday expressed strong doubt that the Trump administration had legal authority to continue detaining Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man now in immigration custody after Trump officials wrongfully deported him and then brought him back.
Judge Paula Xinis of the U.S. District Court in Maryland had called the hearing to give the Trump administration a chance to demonstrate evidence of lawful plans to deport Mr. Abrego Garcia soon, without which she said she was inclined to release him. But instead, she said, the government seems to be switching arguments at will to try to lengthen his detainment, resulting in a “totally inconsistent” case.
“You’re not even close,” the judge told administration lawyers at one point during the six-hour session. “We’re getting to ‘three strikes and you’re out.’”
If Judge Xinis orders Mr. Abrego Garcia released, it would be his first time walking free since he was briefly released for three days in August, after two judges ruled against Mr. Abrego Garcia’s continued detention for criminal charges the administration is separately pursuing against him. The release would also amount to the latest judicial rebuke of the Trump administration in a long and twisting case that began with what officials admitted was an “administrative error” that led to Mr. Abrego Garcia’s detention in a Salvadoran prison.
The administration has vowed that Mr. Abrego Garcia would “never go free on American soil.”
Central to the argument on Friday was whether administration officials had found a country where to take Mr. Abrego Garcia, who has been barred from deportation to his native El Salvador because he fears his life would be in danger there.
The Trump administration had previously floated Uganda and Eswatini as the primary options. But the government’s key witness, John Schultz, a deputy assistant director overseeing deportation operations at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, said no African countries to which the government intended to deport Mr. Abrego Garcia had agreed to take him.
For weeks, Mr. Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who is married to a U.S. citizen, has made clear that he would not challenge his deportation if he were sent to Costa Rica, which has promised him legal residency and guaranteed that he would not be sent back to El Salvador.
But the Trump administration has refused to deport him to Costa Rica, and in an earlier hearing this week, Judge Xinis pressed the administration to consider the option or clarify why it was unacceptable.
She did not get the clarity she was seeking. Mr. Schultz not only could not explain why the administration had refused to consider Costa Rica but also said he had been unaware that Costa Rica had provided such assurances to Mr. Abrego Garcia.
“You came here today with a witness who knows nothing about Costa Rica, I mean, less than nothing,” Judge Xinis told a government lawyer, referring to Mr. Schultz. “Help yourself dig out of this hole.”
“This is a joke for anyone who’s listening,” she added.
Mr. Schultz’s testimony often seemed to undermine the government’s contention that it had concrete plans to deport Mr. Abrego Garcia in the weeks to come.
Government officials had presented Eswatini, a tiny nation in southern Africa, as the leading option for Mr. Abrego Garcia at a hearing on Monday. But Mr. Schultz said the State Department requested that Eswatini take Mr. Abrego Garcia on Wednesday, two days later. Mr. Schultz learned a few hours before the hearing on Friday that Eswatini had refused, he said.
There was also discussion of Ghana at the hearing, but Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Ghana’s foreign minister, said on social media on Friday that the country was “not accepting Abrego Garcia,” a position that he said the Ghanian government “directly and unambiguously conveyed to U.S. authorities.” Mr. Abrego Garcia objected to being deported to Uganda, expressing fear for his safety in the country, an argument that Trump officials have yet to challenge.
Mr. Abrego Garcia had been living illegally in the United States but was protected from deportation to El Salvador under a 2019 immigration court ruling. Then the Trump administration mistakenly deported him to the country anyway. He spent months in prisons there before returning to the United States in June, weeks after the Supreme Court ordered Trump officials to facilitate his return.
Soon after his return, the administration brought criminal charges against him, claiming that Mr. Abrego Garcia had smuggled undocumented immigrants across the United States, an accusation that a federal judge in Nashville found likely to have stemmed from a vindictive prosecution.
According to court filings, Mr. Abrego Garcia is currently a legal resident of the United States, as the Trump administration paroled him into the country until June 2026 to bring criminal charges against him.
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4) Thousands Return to Northern Gaza, Hopeful, but Faced With Devastation
With the cease-fire holding overnight, many Palestinians continued to travel toward Gaza City on Saturday to learn what remained of their lives and homes.
By Liam Stack, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Oct. 11, 2025
Palestinians in Gaza made their way north toward Gaza City on Saturday, after the announcement of a cease-fire the day before. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Thousands of people continued to travel by foot toward Gaza City on Saturday as a cease-fire held overnight, but early accounts described devastation across the area.
“The scale of destruction is really staggering,” said Olga Cherevko, a spokeswoman for the United Nations’ humanitarian office, who visited the city this past week. “We have a lot of people moving north to Gaza City and arriving to find the ruins where their homes used to be, so there is a lot of conflicted emotion.”
Mediators hope the cease-fire, which began at noon Friday, will lead to the end of two years of war.
In Gaza, joy at the pause in fighting has been tempered by the scale of destruction that many face as they return to the north. Hundreds of thousands of people fled Gaza City last month as Israel began a ground offensive there.
Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defense emergency rescue service, said on Saturday that 63 bodies had been recovered in the streets of Gaza City since the cease-fire began. He said he believed dozens more were probably under the rubble.
The director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, said the health care system would face “severe shortages” and “immense” challenges as people returned to the city. “We’ve finished one war and entered another,” he said.
Gaza is in a deep humanitarian crisis, with widespread hunger, vast destruction of property and most of its two million people displaced repeatedly in two years of war. The territory was impoverished before the war, and food supplies and other aid have been sharply curtailed since the conflict began, making circumstances much worse.
The agreement reached on Thursday between Israel and Hamas contains stipulations for an increase of aid into the enclave.
Israel will allow the United Nations to deliver larger amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza starting on Sunday, according to a senior U.N. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans.
The United Nations has said about 170,000 metric tons of food, medicine and other supplies are staged and ready to be transported.
According to the agreement, Hamas would release the remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, and Israeli troops would withdraw to new deployment lines inside the territory.
The deal is based on a 20-point plan announced last month by President Trump. Though the truce reached this past week does not address some of the plan’s key stipulations, including whether Hamas will agree to disarm, Mr. Trump has celebrated it as a victory.
“I’ve never seen happier people than many of these places, not just Israel, many of these places. They’re all dancing in the streets,” Mr. Trump said at a White House event on Friday. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
He told reporters that he believed there was “consensus on most” of the plan and that the hostages would be released on Monday. “They’re getting them now,” he said. “They’re in some pretty rough places. Only a few people know where they are in some cases.”
For many of those walking the coastal road from southern to northern Gaza, the pause in fighting offered a chance to return home and to learn what remained of their lives there.
Mona Mortaja, 27, an accounting student, was returning to a city she thought she might never see again. “Our goodbye to Gaza felt like the last one,” she said on Friday.
Nearby, Ahmed Jabr, 37, was walking with his wife and seven children. They fled Gaza City last month and also feared they might never return.
“Now, I’m back,” he said. “There are no bombardments, no airstrikes, no fear. I finally feel safe, and my children do, too.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel.
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5) ‘Over the Clouds’: Families of Palestinian Prisoners Await Their Release
Israel agreed to free 250 Palestinians serving life sentences, many of whom will be sent into exile. For their families, it brought joy. But for those whose relatives were excluded, it was a crushing blow.
By Fatima AbdulKarim, Reporting from Ramallah, West Bank, Oct. 11, 2025
Palestinians celebrated with prisoners released in January by Israel. Credit...Afif Amireh for The New York Times
Fuad Kamamji described the moment he saw his son’s name on a list of Palestinian prisoners to be released by Israel as one of “rare happiness.”
“We have been accepting God’s fate in the worst conditions,” Mr. Kamamji said. “We were content with all the difficult things that came our way. But now, we are feeling a joy we haven’t known in a long time.”
His son, Eham Kamamji, 39, was arrested in 2006 and has been serving a life sentence since his conviction for the kidnapping and murder of an Israeli settler, Eliyahu Asheri. He has been in solitary confinement since 2021, when he was among six Palestinians who temporarily escaped from Israel’s Gilboa Prison in what Israeli officials said was the largest Palestinian jailbreak in more than two decades.
On Friday, Israel released a list of prisoners to be freed as part of the cease-fire deal that it reached with Hamas. Under the agreement, the Palestinian militant group will free the remaining 48 hostages it holds, of which Israel believes 20 are still alive.
Israel will release about 250 Palestinian prisoners, most of whom are serving life sentences, and 1,700 Gazans who were detained during the war and were not involved in the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, according to a government resolution released on Friday. Most of those who are serving life sentences did not deny the accusations when they were convicted, and said they were acting as resistance fighters.
While Eham Kamamji was on the list of prisoners set to be freed, it indicated that he would be sent into exile, rather than being permitted to return home to Jenin, in the West Bank.
Fuad Kamamji said he was holding off from celebrating because his son had been mentioned in prior swap deals that never materialized. “But what I’m feeling now is a strong sense of relief and peace,” he said. “I believe my son will be out, whether among us or in exile. The important thing is that he’ll be free.”
Across the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians with imprisoned relatives have been absorbing the news of who would be released, who would be exiled, and who would remain behind bars — namely, prisoners whose release Israel sees as intolerable.
One of those Israel has refused to free is Hassan Salama, 54, a senior Hamas figure. He was sentenced to more than 40 life terms in prison for orchestrating suicide bombings in 1996 that killed dozens of Israelis and wounded hundreds, after Israel’s assassination of the militant group’s well-known bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash.
Ghufran Zamel, 42, became engaged to Mr. Salama 16 years ago, when he was already behind bars. Last year, she emigrated to Turkey. Ms. Zamel said she feared that Hamas’s release of all the Israeli hostages, ending any leverage it holds, “would mean a death sentence” to any Palestinian prisoner not on Israel’s release list.
For many of the families of the Israeli victims of the attacks, however, the news that the perpetrators would be freed stirred complicated emotions.
Renana Meir, whose mother, Dafna, was stabbed to death outside her home in the West Bank settlement of Otniel in 2016, wrote in an Israeli newspaper on Friday that the imminent release of her mother’s killer would pose a threat to Israelis everywhere.
Still, she believed that her mother would have been in favor of their release in exchange for the return of Israeli hostages. “I know you would have done this without thinking twice, if it were up to you,” she wrote.
More than half of the prisoners to be released by Israel are to be sent into exile, according to the list, but it was unclear where they would be sent. That includes Basem Khandaqji, a Palestinian writer who was sentenced to three life terms for his involvement in the Carmel Market suicide bombing in 2004, which killed three Israelis and wounded dozens more.
While in prison, Mr. Khandaqji has published poetry collections and several novels, including the acclaimed “A Mask, the Color of the Sky,” which won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2024.
His sister, Amani Khandaqji, said she felt “over the clouds” about his possible release. “He could be deported,” she said, “but at least he will be free.”
Sara Salem, a resident of Jericho, in the West Bank, was waiting for the release of her husband, Ahmad Kaabnah, a veteran Fatah member, who has been behind bars for 28 of his 54 years, after being convicted of killing two Israeli settlers.
She said she had barely slept since the deal was announced. “I couldn’t even open the TV to see if the cease-fire had come into effect or not because it was all eating me up inside,” she said.
Ms. Salem was pregnant with their second child when Mr. Kaabnah was arrested. They had a third later through in vitro fertilization, with sperm smuggled out of prison. Today, Mr. Kaabnah has five grandchildren, with a sixth on the way. He has not been allowed to meet with anyone, including his family, since before the war in Gaza, Ms. Salem said.
She said she hoped Mr. Kaabnah “would return to us,” but he, too, is slated for exile once he is freed.
Still, his potential release has her racked with tension, Ms. Salem said. “We are sitting like on fire,” she said, “and waiting for the news to tell us our Ahmad will be free.”
Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.
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6) This Isn’t Crisis Response, It’s Crisis Construction
By Jason P. Houser, Oct. 11, 2025
Mr. Houser is a former chief of staff at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Kenn Cook Jr. for The New York Times
Nearly nine months into President Trump’s second term, immigration enforcement has become the administration’s primary political weapon — not to solve problems, but to manufacture fear, provoke outrage and stage an illusion of control. This isn’t a crisis response. It’s crisis construction.
The president’s team vowed to target gang members, murderers and rapists, but we’re not just rounding up violent offenders. We’re arresting working parents, students, asylum seekers and even U.S. citizens, to create made-for-TV crackdowns.
I served as chief of staff at Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Joe Biden and spent over a decade working in homeland security. I knew that national security requires focusing on threats — not turning law enforcement into a spectacle. Despite President Trump’s promises to go after the “worst of the worst,” in the past few months the administration has deported a preschooler who is a U.S. citizen and who has stage 4 kidney cancer and his family. A raid on a Hyundai plant where South Korean nationals were rounded up triggered an international incident and threatened future investment in Georgia. Those scenes appear to be part of a deliberate strategy of political theater.
Over the next three years, detention space will be multiplied. Due process will likely be further sidelined. The broken legal immigration system won’t be fixed — it will be abandoned.
The One Big Beautiful Bill signed in July will inject agencies at every level — federal, state and local — with funding for immigration enforcement. That will entrench removal as the singular goal of our law enforcement at every level of government, while focusing away from terrorism, transnational crime, cyberattacks and foreign adversaries.
Federal, state and local law enforcement are already being deputized to support ICE endeavors.
Nearly 14,500 law enforcement agents have been pulled off their investigations to do civil immigration work, including agents taken off the border. Nearly 3,000 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were reassigned to civil immigration enforcement, instead of focusing on their mission of national security and public safety. This is allowing fentanyl traffickers, child predators and foreign intelligence threats to operate with less scrutiny. Federal prosecutions for drug violations have dropped significantly.
In Chicago, a recent federal raid turned an apartment complex into a battlefield. A helicopter hovered overhead as agents stormed in, zip tying American children and parading them, in pajamas and crying, into the street. The result of that raid? Another neighborhood terrorized — another community pushed farther from trusting law enforcement. No cartel leader was arrested. No terrorist cell was disrupted.
When immigration enforcement is conducted this way it has consequences for all of law enforcement, and in turn, all public safety. This is where our national security dollars are going. This is how we’re choosing to spend our limited operational bandwidth. How does this make us safer?
Under President Trump, every raid, every news conference, every viral image is part of a larger operation — not of enforcement, but manipulation. The resistance these tactics create are useful for the administration and help justify escalation.
Federal agents, many of whom signed up to protect the nation, are essentially being used as props, and I worry that, as the political tides turn, political appointees will be able to scapegoat them and then discard them. The proud men and women who enforce our immigration laws saw this during the previous Trump administration — the posturing, the betrayal, the blame dumped on officers who were directed to carry out operations (like family separation) in a way that instills distrust in law enforcement.
We need immigration enforcement — but it must be humane, targeted and precise. This country deserves an approach that prioritizes national security, protects communities and upholds due process. ICE officers are capable of that mission. Placing the formidable power of ICE — with its vast authority and reach — in the hands of political opportunists who neither fully comprehend nor respect that its mission is a volatile and dangerous combination, turning a critical national security tool into a blunt political weapon.
When law enforcement is forced into partisan roles, it stops serving the public. And when the public loses trust in law enforcement, the whole system begins to fail. The blueprint is: Create chaos. Blame the chaos. Then offer yourself as the cure.
This plan is already underway. The question now is if the rest of us will keep pretending this is law and order.
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7) These Students Are Scared. Friends and Teachers Are Their Protectors.
Sometimes, they offer a place to stay to immigrant children. Other times, they provide help navigating the legal system. They have become part of the resistance.
By Ana Ley, Oct. 11, 2025
Joel Camas, 16, and his mother, Elvia Chafla, came to the United States from Ecuador as undocumented immigrants. Joel’s school has provided a crucial lifeline. Diana Cervantes for The New York Times
Joel Camas, 16, and his mother, Elvia Chafla, came to the United States from Ecuador as undocumented immigrants. Joel’s school has provided a crucial lifeline.Diana Cervantes for The New York Times
Hope was scarce for Joel Camas, 16, last winter. His mother had spent $11,000 on lawyers — nearly all of her money — but mother and son remained on a trajectory toward deportation back to Ecuador, and Joel’s life in New York City seemed to be unraveling.
In the Bronx, his high school was a lifeline. Against a drumbeat of immigration arrests, teachers offered comfort and helped him plan for the future he dreamed of as an auto mechanic or Army soldier. In his spare time, he liked hanging out with classmates to play soccer and eat pepperoni pizza.
And, crucially, school staff members and friends worked with a pro bono lawyer to try to persuade immigration officials to let Joel, who is undocumented, stay in America.
As President Trump’s immigration crackdown has begun to target more underage migrants, New York schools have become a quiet locus of resistance, with teachers, classmates and neighbors banding together in their defense. At least five migrant students have been detained or deported since January in New York City.
In interviews, more than a dozen people connected to school-age migrants said they were dismayed by what they described as the federal government’s intimidation of children. They have built an informal network of allies and shelters to cocoon the city’s students, in some cases offering lodging or escorting them to and from school so that their parents avoid interactions with law enforcement. There have been no reported cases of federal agents detaining children at school in New York or elsewhere.
Because their efforts risk drawing the attention of administration officials who have sometimes exacted retribution against those who impede their clampdown, many advocates and educators have acted in secret.
“That’s what New Yorkers are best at: being able to come together in a crisis,” said Norma Vega, the principal of Ellis Preparatory Academy, whose student Dylan Lopez Contreras was detained by immigration officials earlier this year. She added: “There’s a lot more good than there is bad.”
Mr. Lopez Contreras, 20, was the first public school student in the city to be arrested during Mr. Trump’s second term. Ms. Vega said that the city’s outpouring of support for him and other young migrants reminded her of the kindness that strangers extended to her mother after she survived the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In the case of another student — Mamadou Mouctar Diallo, 20, who attended Brooklyn Frontiers High School — teachers rallied on the steps of the city Department of Education’s headquarters after he was detained in August by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during a routine court appearance at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. That building, and the immigration courtrooms inside, have become the epicenter of detentions in New York City.
Mr. Diallo, 20, is an asylum seeker from Guinea who entered the country last year. He remains in confinement in Lords Valley, Pa.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in an email that ICE does not target schools or children.
“The media is sadly attempting to create a climate of fear and smear law enforcement,” Ms. McLaughlin said. She added: “ICE is not conducting enforcement operations at, or ‘raiding,’ schools.”
Sometimes, help comes from beyond the walls of the classroom.
On a blistering June afternoon before classes broke for the summer, an alliance of a half-dozen panicked neighbors gathered a few blocks from P.S. 015 in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook. Someone at the elementary school had called a mother who lived nearby amid whispers that ICE agents were waiting for her outside the campus. The neighbors debated what to do.
What if ICE agents were also lurking near the family’s home? Should someone stay with the mother? Was the Police Department in on it?
A few minutes later, they instructed the woman to barricade herself inside, and together they marched to the school and delivered the child home. ICE never showed up.
Elsewhere in New York this year, a principal and a teacher’s mother attended two students’ deportation hearings. Upstate, a teacher gave refuge to a family that was too afraid to go home after being detained and released by immigration officials.
With the backing of the teacher’s union in New York City, the United Federation of Teachers, schools have trained educators and parents to distribute red cards — documents that assert people’s constitutional rights, regardless of immigration status.
Educators have also helped students understand how to avoid interactions with immigration officials as part of a broader plan to help families seeking asylum in the United States. A New York City public school program devotes resources for migrant students, including transportation to school and English-language lessons.
The New York City schools chancellor, Melissa Aviles-Ramos, has denounced the detention of students, vowing to keep them safe and to defend their rights. Educators have expressed concern that many undocumented kids are not showing up to school because of increased immigration enforcement.
“Public schools are the bedrock of democracy, so I’m glad to see certain public schools standing up,” Sari Beth Rosenberg, a teacher at a New York City public high school and a co-founder of the nonprofit Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence, said. “I think if we can use the public schools to educate and empower young people, I hope they can come home and educate their family members who are very frightened right now.”
Schools that are bracing for potential activity have been offered support by the staff of City Councilman Lincoln Restler and State Senator Andrew Gounardes, both Democrats who represent districts where residents have gathered to help undocumented students. Many schools have developed guidelines for children and parents during pick-up and drop-off, as well as for principals to share news about ICE sightings.
Between classes, school-age migrants swap information among one another about community organizations that can help tether them to New York.
Joel, the teenager from the Bronx, met his attorney, Beth Baltimore, through a youth social services center called the Door, which offers 12- to 24-year-olds essential services such as health care, mental counseling and legal assistance.
“Someone will become a member of the Door, and suddenly, the next week, all of their friends become members of the Door, too,” Ms. Baltimore said. “If you’re in high school, there’s just kind of immediate access to other people who are similarly situated. And I think people don’t feel like, ‘I was alone with nowhere to go,’ because of that.”
Thousands of underage migrants arrive in New York each year without their parents, often fleeing poverty or violence in their native countries. Many have formed deep bonds with Americans who do not want them to go.
In some cases, the bonds nurtured during high school extend after graduation.
Gerson Josué Santamaría Turcios, a 23-year-old recent graduate from Rhinebeck High School in New York’s Hudson Valley, arrived in the United States from Honduras almost six years ago. After high school, he built a landscaping business in the idyllic New York countryside, where neighbors treated him like family.
Mr. Turcios, who is undocumented, was detained after cutting the yard of resident Jenny Friedberg, who sounded the alarm for their friends to spring to action. Within days, a fund-raiser had amassed more than $100,000, including donations from Paul Rudd, the actor, and Andrew Jarecki, the filmmaker.
Soon thereafter, a charter bus and caravan of supporters traveled more than two hours to Manhattan in hopes a judge would keep Mr. Turcios from being transferred out of the city and into a Republican stronghold where he was more likely to be deported. Mr. Turcios has since been moved among several ICE detention centers, including two in Louisiana.
Outside the courtroom, his best friend, Brendan Dougherty, 20, said that he felt disappointed by his country.
“When I told him ICE was in Rhinebeck, I told him he could seek refuge at my house,” Mr. Dougherty said. “This kid had spent the past six years building a life here. I should be deported over him.”
For Joel Camas, the teenager from Ecuador, the future remains uncertain, his immigration case unresolved. His mother has returned to their homeland, deciding to leave rather than waiting to be deported by authorities. Joel remains in New York, still going to school.
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8) Among Portland Protests, It’s Frogs and Sharks and Bears, Oh My!
Images of anarchists clad in black gave the city a bad name in 2020. Now, demonstrators in Portland are poking fun at President Trump’s apocalyptic talk with colorful animal suits.
By Anna Griffin and Aaron West, Reporting from Portland, Ore., Oct. 11, 2025
President Trump's depiction of Portland as a "hellscape" has inspired demonstrators in the city to challenge his portrayal with street theater and silliness. Jordan Gale for The New York Times
Animal costumes are the new black.
Exceedingly aware that the black garb worn by demonstrators in 2020 informed President Trump’s apocalyptic view of Portland, Ore., protesters this year have gone to the frogs — and unicorns, raccoons, sharks, bears, dinosaurs and the hot animal of this particular pop culture moment, a capybara.
“It was just to contrast the narrative that we are violent extremists,” said Seth Todd, 24, whose appearance at Portland’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility early in the summer as a bulbous green frog started the trend. “The best way to show that for me is being in a frog costume.”
Portland has long been a little bit different in how residents protest. Outside the ICE building, demonstrators against the Trump administration’s immigration policies have blown bubbles at ICE agents, formed a flash mob to dance the “Cha-Cha Slide,” held formal afternoon tea services and gone “ICE fishing” — tying doughnuts to poles and pretending to lure federal officers with the pastries. Cyclists are planning a special edition of Portland’s famed “naked bike ride” past the ICE facility on Sunday.
“Portland has a long heritage of ‘keep Portland weird,’” Steven Schroedl, 60, a retiree whose inflatable costume made it look as if he were riding an ostrich, said on Friday. “It’s something we didn’t necessarily cultivate. It’s just fundamentally who we are.”
But the arrival and proliferation of inflatable costumes at the ICE facility in South Portland has taken the city’s penchant for irreverence to new, surreal heights and eased some of the tension, at least as both sides wait for a court to decide whether President Trump can bring in the National Guard.
After dark this week, a growing menagerie danced and bounced in the streets as federal officers looked on, a jiggling embodiment of the message city and state leaders have been sending for two weeks in news media briefings and court filings: Though there have been arrests, the majority of protesters in Portland are peaceful — and perhaps a little weird.
“The juxtaposition of this moment is what’s resonating,” said Whitney Phillips, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication whose academic research has focused on political narratives and symbols. “This moment is dangerous. It’s violent. It’s also absurd.”
Mr. Trump and members of his administration have described the demonstrators in Portland as cruel, violent extremists bent on overthrowing the government. Since early June, a small but persistent subset of demonstrators has attempted to disrupt the work inside the ICE building by blocking cars from entering and exiting.
The animal army — a technical term for a collection of frogs in this case — might have started as one man’s whim, but it has grown into a more intentional campaign, with protest organizers accepting and encouraging donations of costumes. It hasn’t precluded shoving matches between people on the left and right, nor federal officials from arresting demonstrators or firing pepper balls into the crowd to clear the building’s driveway.
“It just makes it seem sillier when they come after us,” said Jack Dickinson, 26, who shows up most days to protest wearing a chicken onesie with an American flag as a cape. “There’s a whimsy to Portland, I think, that’s meeting this moment. You see it with me, you see it with the frog.”
Mr. Todd, the frog, said he had been detained by federal officers and cited for failing to follow instructions three times since early summer, and video of federal officers pepper-spraying him through the air vent in his costume drew widespread attention this week.
“It tasted like peppermint,” he said.
The scenes of colorful, oversize animals dancing to pop music under the stern gaze of federal agents in riot gear has altered the national conversation about the protests, prompting internet memes and segments on late-night shows, even as the Trump administration and right-wing influencers doubled down on their descriptions of Portland as a city in flames during a White House “round table on antifa” Wednesday.
On Friday evening, the ICE building unwittingly played host to the wedding of a unicorn and Kenny from the TV show “South Park.” The happy couple then walked down a red carpet under a wave of bubbles to the tune of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” The officiant, Dave Marvin, 68, wore a pinstriped suit and a rabbit head. He described the wedding as “a very civil union.”
“We’re trying to emphasize and reiterate what peaceful and joyous protests we have in ‘war-ravaged’ Portland,” Mr. Marvin said.
In the case of Mr. Todd and the frogs that joined him this week, there’s also unintended symbolism: White nationalists embraced the cartoon character Pepe the Frog, first drawn in an independent and politically agnostic comic, with such enthusiasm that the Anti-Defamation League included Pepe in its collection of hate symbols and worked with its creator on a social media campaign to “save Pepe.”
Mr. Todd said he did not intend to take back the frog as a political symbol when he bought his $30 costume on Amazon several weeks into the Portland protests. He said he was just hoping to “make the president and the feds look dumb.”
“There was no higher point beyond that,” he said, “other than I just really like frogs.”
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9) World Cup Qualifiers Become a Venue for European Protests of Israel
Israeli soccer officials expected the demonstrations to persist even after a cease-fire took hold in Gaza.
By Tariq Panja, Reporting from Oslo and Rome, Oct. 12, 2025
Fans displayed both Palestinian and Norwegian flags during a World Cup qualifier match between Norway and Israel on Saturday in Oslo. Mateusz Slodkowski/Getty Images
The giant flags, unfurled about five minutes before kickoff, had nothing to do with the two teams about to play in a match that would help determine qualification for next year’s World Cup, global soccer’s biggest event.
As the national teams from Norway and Israel prepared to take the field on Saturday night, Norwegian fans raised a Palestinian tricolor flag and a banner that read “Let Children Live.” Moments later, as Israel’s players lined up and their national anthem played, some in the home crowd booed and whistled.
The scene and a pregame protest march by about 1,500 people were examples of how the world’s most popular sport has become a venue for demonstrations against Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza. They are likely to persist even after a cease-fire took hold that mediators hoped would lead to the end of the two-year war. Israeli soccer officials expected more protests at the team’s next World Cup qualifier in Udine, in northern Italy, on Tuesday.
“It is our reality today,” Israel’s goalkeeper Daniel Peretz said after conceding all the goals in a chastening 5-0 defeat for his team.
From a soccer standpoint, the match was high-profile. It was billed as one of the most important in Norway’s soccer history, putting the country one victory away from returning to the men’s World Cup after nearly 30 years.
However, many Norwegian soccer officials and fans have long been outspoken about Israeli participation in the World Cup and viewed the match as an opportunity to highlight their message. Norway’s soccer federation announced months earlier that it would donate the proceeds from Saturday’s match to Doctors Without Borders for humanitarian work in Gaza. A team sponsor said it would also donate 300,000 euros, or about $350,000.
In a corner of Andy’s Pub, a soccer-themed bar in Oslo, about a half dozen men from Tromso, a city close to the Arctic Circle, were downing beers before the match and dressed in Norwegian jerseys from the 1990s, when the team last played in the World Cup. But they were missing one of their regulars. Ronny Jordness, 55, said his brother Kurt was boycotting the game.
“I tried to convince him that all the money goes to Gaza so he should come, but I was still not able to,” Mr. Jordness said.
Israeli officials were frustrated that the Norwegians had singled out the game for the charity donation, and reporters traveling with the team aggressively questioned Lise Klaveness, Norway soccer’s president, about it and other issues in a feisty news conference the day before the game.
Ms. Klaveness has been a focus of Israeli anger. She has said Israel should be barred from global soccer, as Russia has been since it began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. She has accused Israel of breaching the rules of FIFA, the sport’s governing body, including with teams in its professional soccer league that play from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and she has criticized FIFA for taking nearly two years to investigate the issue.
The donation, Ms. Klaveness said in an interview at her office on Saturday, was made in part to convince Norwegians that it was acceptable to support their team. “We knew that it will be a very political backdrop to the game and people will find it very difficult in Norway to come to the game and support Norway,” she said.
Outside in Oslo, organizers of a pro-Palestinian protest held a rally to kick off a 90-minute march through the city to the stadium. They attracted support from passers-by who cheered from apartment windows and vehicles that had stopped to let them pass.
The organizers said that the cease-fire deal in Gaza didn’t go far enough. Under the plan, Hamas agreed to release the remaining hostages it took during its Oct. 7, 2023, attack in exchange for the return of Palestinian prisoners and the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops.
“It’s not the end of the occupation,” said Line Khateeb, one of the protest’s organizers. “It doesn’t mean the West Bank is free. It doesn’t mean Palestine is free. We need to keep pushing and putting sanctions on Israel to hold them accountable in order to have a proper free Palestine.”
The security operation for the game, which included a no-fly zone over the stadium and road closures, was the biggest for any sporting event in Norway since it hosted the Winter Olympics in 1994. Israel’s 60-person traveling contingent included 16 security agents. Outside, the police arrested more than 20 protesters.
The emotions of the moment are a constant accompaniment to Israel’s national team.
Coach Ran Ben-Shimon theatrically pulled a light blue kipa out of his pocket halfway through a news conference before the match, placed it on his head and said a prayer in Hebrew for the return of the remaining hostages and soldiers in Gaza.
“I feel like here, I am a politician from the government of Israel rather than a footballer who is supposed to play tomorrow against Norway,” the team’s captain, Eli Dasa, said at one point, growing frustrated at the line of questioning. Before a game two years ago, he displayed what he said was a soccer shoe that belonged to an Israeli child kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7.
Other Israeli teams have also faced antisemitic attacks since the war began. Dozens of people were arrested in Amsterdam last November over what officials described as antisemitic attacks on fans of the Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv, as well as over vandalism and inflammatory behavior on both sides at a European club match, including anti-Arab chants.
While Norway soccer officials had long called for barring Israel from competition, other countries moved in that direction more recently as opinion in Europe over the conflict in Gaza began to shift more decisively against Israel.
In recent weeks, reports had begun to emerge that European soccer leaders were moving to bar Israeli teams from competition. Israeli teams have traditionally played against European national and club organizations. Talk of a meeting to decide on a possible ban began to intensify, Ms. Klaveness said.
Then, President Trump announced a comprehensive peace plan alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and pressed Hamas to agree to it. In addition to the major diplomatic implications, the plan eased the intensifying discussions to bar Israel’s soccer team.
“It was a real movement to have a meeting,” Ms. Klaveness said. “But then the peace talks started, and then everything cooled down.”
Soccer officials, too, have been affected. Protesters appeared outside the homes of the Italian soccer president, Gabriele Gravina, and the national team coach, Gennaro Gattuso. Mr. Gattuso said last week that he expected more demonstrators outside Stadio Friuli in Udine than fans inside for Tuesday’s qualifying match between Israel and Italy.
FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, an ally of Mr. Trump’s, sought last week to calm fan opposition to Israel.
“Now there is a cease-fire; everyone should be happy about that,” Mr. Infantino said on the sidelines of a meeting of European soccer executives in Rome. “Everyone should support that process.”
As the game in Oslo approached its end, with Norwegian fans jubilant and on the cusp of returning to the World Cup, a megaphone that had been used to start chants for Norway was handed to a man in a kaffiyeh, a symbol of the Palestinian resistance movement. Moments later, the words “Free, free Palestine” rang out.
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10) Black Unemployment Is Surging Again. This Time Is Different.
Federal layoffs and an end to diversity initiatives have weakened a historically strong labor market for Black workers.
By Lydia DePillis, Reporting from New York, Oct. 12, 2025
Sherri Marshall, who graduated from college a few years ago with a degree in psychology and lives in Los Angeles, is still looking for a position that would allow her to use her education. Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York Times
Joblessness for Black workers is rising again, two years after reaching a record low. It’s a troubling indicator: Joblessness often spikes higher for historically marginalized groups during economic downturns, and takes longer to fall.
This time, the Trump administration’s assault on diversity programs and cuts to the federal work force could make it even more difficult for Black workers to recover when conditions improve.
The African American unemployment rate has surged over the past four months, from 6 to 7.5 percent, while the rate for white people ticked down slightly to 3.7 percent. On top of a slowing economy, the White House’s actions have disproportionately harmed Black workers, economists said.
“I think the speed at which things have changed, in such a dramatic fashion, is out of the ordinary,” said Valerie Wilson, who directs the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “There’s been such a rapid shift in policy, rather than something cyclical or structural about the economy.”
At least since the 1970s, when the federal government started tracking unemployment by race, the rate for Black people has run about twice the rate for white people. Because of inferior educational opportunities, the legacy of mass incarceration and discrimination over generations, Black people confront greater challenges in the job market.
A strong economy during President Trump’s first term created more jobs for Black workers, but many of them were lost when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in-person employment particularly hard. Generous public subsidies, though, cushioned the blow, and hiring rebounded quickly.
Black Unemployment Has Surged in Recent Months
It’s always higher than average, but it jumped even as the rate for other demographics remained level.
In 2023, conditions for Black workers looked as healthy as ever. Unemployment reached a low of 4.8 percent. Wages rose at their fastest pace since data collection began in the 1990s, and median Black household wealth reached the highest level on record.
Conditions started to deteriorate in 2024 after pandemic-era subsidies expired. Hiring slowed, and high prices weighed heavily on low-income earners. Black households were the only racial group last year in which median income fell and the poverty rate rose, according to the Census Bureau.
“I was hoping that the commitment to investing in America, so that a broader set of Americans were actually receiving benefits in terms of low unemployment and higher wages, would continue,” said Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank focused on issues affecting Black Americans. He said he was particularly disappointed in large businesses that said they would support Black workers in response to protests for racial justice in 2020, only to pull back.
Job losses are concentrated among Black women working in professional services such as human resources, according to Ms. Wilson’s analysis of federal data. A hiring freeze and mass layoffs in the federal work force, which have continued during the government shutdown and now exceed 200,000, have also fallen disproportionately on Black workers.
The hiring freeze is an impediment to young workers trying to get their foot in the door, too.
“The federal government is one of those places people are able to get an entry-level job,” said Gbenga Ajilore, the chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which researches the social safety net. “That’s a whole industry that’s closed to new hires.”
State and local governments have picked up some of the slack from federal agencies. But competition for those jobs has gotten tougher with more laid-off public-sector workers looking for positions.
Sherri Marshall, 26, who graduated from the University of California, Davis, a few years ago with a degree in psychology, has worked in Los Angeles for a rental car company and a homeless shelter. But both let her go, and she is still looking for a position that would put her education to use.
“It’s always like high-labor, low-paying jobs, nothing sustainable,” said Ms. Marshall, who works at a farmers’ market on the weekends and is building up a freelance social media marketing portfolio between filling out applications. “It’s harder for me to get more technical and higher-skilled jobs, despite being qualified.”
Ms. Marshall recited her qualifications in a 30-second pitch during a job fair with city agencies last week at the Los Angeles Black Worker Center, where she also volunteers. The nonprofit has pushed local governments to hire more Black workers because unionized public-sector jobs have historically provided an on-ramp to stable employment.
The federal backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion practices may be making it more difficult for Black workers to get hired in the private sector, too. Some of the strongest evidence for the efficacy of these practices, such as making sure to interview nonwhite candidates or reaching out to Black and Hispanic students, come from federal contractors. In one of its first actions, the Trump administration ordered that group not to pursue racial equity anymore.
Janel Belovette Jenkins, co-executive director of the Los Angeles Black Worker Center, tries to build relationships with employers who say they are swamped with applicants.
“A lot of people get their jobs through networking,” Mx. Jenkins said. “Part of our role is to create the programs that will create the network that connects highly skilled, qualified workers to employers who might not have initially seen them.”
Lower interest rates could offer some relief. Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote to Jerome H. Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, in early September demanding that the central bank take stronger action to support full employment for Black workers. Fed officials lowered rates later in the month for the first time this year and suggested that more cuts were likely.
But Trump administration actions beyond work-force cuts and anti-D.E.I. policies could create additional hurdles for Black workers. The Department of Labor’s proposed rollback of minimum-wage and overtime protections for domestic workers, for example, would hurt their incomes. Home care aides for the elderly are overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic women.
And despite Mr. Trump’s claim on the campaign trail that immigrants take jobs from Black people, rising joblessness among Black workers suggests that mass deportations of migrants haven’t arrested the trend.
Brittany Alston, director of the Philly Black Worker Project, said expelling immigrants harmed the local economy in ways that hurt Black workers, too.
“We know that an injury to one deeply is an injury to all,” Ms. Alston said.
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11) Trump Is Blowing Up Boats Off Venezuela. Could Mexico’s Cartels Be Next?
U.S. strikes on boats that President Trump says are drug smugglers have unsettled America’s biggest trading partner, where powerful criminal groups produce and smuggle drugs.
By Paulina Villegas and Jack Nicas, Oct. 12, 2025
Paulina Villegas reported from Culiacán, Mexico. Jack Nicas reported from Mexico City.
A cargo plane in Puerto Rico last month, part of a U.S. military buildup. Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/Getty Images
As President Trump has blown up one boat after another off Venezuela’s coast and declared an “armed conflict” against drug cartels, a question with stark consequences has arisen much closer to the United States.
Could Mexico, where far more drugs are made by some of the world’s most powerful criminal groups, be next?
“I would be honored to go in and do it,” Mr. Trump said in May, about using U.S. forces to hunt cartel members. “The cartels are trying to destroy our country. They’re evil.”
Yet three senior Mexican officials said in interviews that, although they are watching the U.S. military action with caution, Mexico is not worried — for now.
That is because, they said, the cooperation between the countries has become simply too robust and yielded too many results on migration and drugs for them to imagine the Trump administration jeopardizing it by conducting unilateral military strikes. Their assessments were reinforced by two Trump administration officials who emphasized collaboration between the countries.
But perhaps more surprisingly, these views were shared by several members of a top cartel who said they were unafraid of American intervention. They were more focused on an ongoing conflict within their ranks, they said.
So far, the U.S. government says it has targeted only boats leaving Venezuela, a country ruled by an autocratic government that Washington has long wanted gone.
Mexico, the largest U.S. trading partner, presents a far different case. Any U.S. intervention would have major diplomatic, economic and political consequences, given Mexico’s red line over impeding on its sovereignty.
The Mexican officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss delicate diplomacy, have top jobs in areas spanning foreign affairs and security. They said that they have gotten little sense from their U.S. counterparts that Mexico is in the cross hairs.
Still, that experts are asking the question at all says much about how far the Trump administration has shifted U.S. relations with Latin America.
And many American and Mexican political and security analysts cautioned that Mexico was hardly out of the woods, given Mr. Trump’s approach to the cartels as targets of war and the reality that the biggest and most powerful cartels are just south of the border.
One of the Mexican officials stressed that while the government did not see unilateral American strikes inside Mexico as an immediate threat, the U.S. strikes in the Caribbean posed a long-term concern.
In Washington, American officials have sounded similar notes about prioritizing collaboration. Two Trump administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said that because of the two nations’ increased cooperation, the United States is focused on working with Mexico rather than making unilateral strikes on criminals.
The Trump administration believes its threats against Mexico have caused it to step up against cartels, one official said, eliminating the need for U.S. forces to get involved, at least for now. Another official said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to Mexico last month reaffirmed the sense that the countries were aligned on security.
Mr. Rubio met with President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico on Sept. 3, the day after Mr. Trump first announced that U.S. forces had struck a boat in the Caribbean. In comments to reporters, Mr. Rubio had harsh words about smugglers from Venezuela.
“We’re not going to sit back anymore and watch these people sail up and down the Caribbean like a cruise ship,” he said. Stopping boats and seizing cargo does not stop smugglers, he added. “What will stop them is when you blow them up.”
But on Mexico, he mostly offered praise. “It is the closest security cooperation we have ever had,” he said.
After the meeting, the two nations put out a joint statement about security cooperation, noting it was based on “respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity,” as well as “mutual trust.”
At the top of the Mexican government, Ms. Sheinbaum has repeatedly drawn a line in the sand over U.S. military intervention.
“Under no circumstances will the people of Mexico accept interventions that violate our territory,” she said at a rally in Mexico City on Sunday. “Whether by land, water, sea or air.”
Strikingly, Ms. Sheinbaum’s firm public stance against U.S. interventions has reassured one of the very criminal networks she and Mr. Trump have vowed to dismantle: the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the world’s most notorious criminal organizations and potentially a larger supplier of drugs than all Venezuelan smugglers combined.
In interviews, five cartel operatives dismissed the idea that the U.S. military could strike within Mexico next. Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, they said their more pressing concern was the relentless fighting among rival criminal factions. Most were only vaguely aware of the recent American attacks in the Caribbean.
One cartel member, a 39-year-old midlevel operative who oversees security operations in Culiacán, the group’s stronghold, said that he had little fear of U.S. intervention because he believed Ms. Sheinbaum would not allow it. “It will never happen,” he said. “He can’t do that,” he added of Mr. Trump.
Even if the United States did strike their smugglers at sea, he said, disruption would be minimal. “We don’t only have maritime routes, we have land and air as well,” he said. “There is always a way.”
In addition to fighting each other, Mexico’s criminal groups are also under heightened pressure from the Mexican government. Its forces have arrested thousands of cartel members, sent 55 high-level operatives to the United States, and destroyed hundreds of fentanyl labs. Together, the actions have helped lead to a sharp decline in the number of fentanyl seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border, Mexican officials say.
The Mexican government has also increased efforts on migration, helping to bring illegal border crossings to their lowest level in years.
One of the senior Mexican officials said that there is daily cooperation between U.S. and Mexican authorities on cartels, including regular U.S. surveillance flights over Mexican territory. But U.S. authorities do not — and will not — use force in Mexico, in part because the Mexican Constitution bans it, the official said.
There is another, nearly $1 trillion reason why many believe the United States will not strike Mexico: The nations are deeply interdependent, with about $950 billion in goods and services flowing between them each year.
Disrupting such trade could potentially cause economic devastation in border states of both countries, and drive migrants to seek work inside the United States.
At the same time, analysts warned that Mexico may be placing too much faith in diplomacy with a notoriously mercurial U.S. president.
“Sheinbaum acts, delivers and gives, but it’s never enough for the U.S.,” said David Mora, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group. “The problem is the volatility and unpredictability of the Trump administration.”
On the ground, attitudes are more complex. At least three national surveys this year have found that more than 60 percent of Mexicans opposed the idea of the U.S. conducting military operations in Mexico. One poll also showed that 31 percent of Mexicans welcomed the idea.
In parts of Sinaloa, where bloodshed has become part of daily life, some conservative and business groups would embrace U.S. strikes, said Adrián López, editor of El Noroeste, the state’s largest newspaper. Businesses there have suffered enormous losses because of the cartel wars, and many Mexicans perceive the United States as more effective in combating organized crime, he said, making “the logic of U.S. intervention is appealing.”
“People here say, ‘If that makes the violence stop,’” he said. “‘Where do I sign?’”
“But,” he added, “we should be careful what we wish for.”
Annie Correal, Miriam Castillo and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico City. Maria Abi-Habib and Edward Wong contributed reporting from Washington.
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12) Trump Is Pitting Us Against One Another in Chicago
By Vic Mensa, Oct. 12, 2025
Mr. Mensa is a musician and actor. He reported from Chicago.
Protesters at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, on Friday, Oct. 10, 2025. Kenn Cook Jr. for The New York Times
The fragrant steam rose from the plates of pasta like mist from a hot spring as the famished Venezuelan newcomers lined up to eat on a frozen Chicago November afternoon in 2023. Many arrived in shorts and flip-flops.
I had partnered with local restaurateur Eldridge Williams to help feed and clothe the group, who had been bused up to my hometown along with other “sanctuary cities” run by Democrats by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas as part of an inhumane political stunt. Chicagoans stepped up to aid these people in need.
It was a strain, as Mr. Abbott knew it would be. The newly elected mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, had to reallocate already tight resources to help. Much of the responsibility of providing for the Venezuelans ended up being shouldered by Chicago’s Black community: Shelters were placed in our neighborhoods, and services were diverted away from our most vulnerable.
Having to take care of the needs of the new arrivals would quickly stir up resentment in a population that was already hurting. Just as Mr. Abbott had hoped, many Chicagoans wondered why the migrants’ plight had to be our problem to solve.
The apparent chaos of these arrivals, hyped by the right-wing media, helped re-elect Donald Trump. And it led directly to what happened this past week, when the federal government began treating my city like enemy territory. Rappelling out of helicopters like in a scene from “Black Hawk Down,” federal agents raided an apartment building in the predominantly Black community of South Shore, knocking down doors, separating children from their zip-tied parents and detaining people barely clothed.
Many people in Chicago assumed the targets of this action would be limited to immigrants, some of whom were, according to Trump administration officials, engaged in criminal activity. But the effects rained down on Black citizens who were caught up in the raid, too. Some Black Chicagoans expressed indignation and disbelief at seeing us be brutalized by Mr. Trump’s deployments, with one young brother exclaiming as he watched federal agents appear to choke a Black man on the street, “Ya’ll supposed to be choking Mexicans.”
At its heart, his comment speaks to Mr. Trump’s success in dividing us from one another and our humanity: a nagging devil on the shoulder of struggling Americans barely scraping together the rent and telling them someone else is to blame. It also reflects the divisions within the African diaspora, where it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that—like my own father—many Black people are also immigrants, experiencing their own traumas at the sight of these cruelties.
I visited the apartment complex on 75th Street and South Shore Drive after the raid. A friend of mine who is a journalist, Maira Khwaja of the Invisible Institute, had been one of the first on the ground and warned me of the wreckage that had been left behind by the mayhem, but seeing it in person was shocking. Tension loomed in the air even days later. A child’s soiled pink unicorn toy seemed to cry out for help beneath a broken headboard and an uprooted mattress. My heart breaks for the lessons of worthlessness being taught to these children.
Conversations with the victims of ICE’s South Shore raid reveal a people divided. One man expressed love for his new Venezuelan neighbors, one of whom helped him fix his car. Others burn with contempt, like a hot coal in weathered hands. These are hands that all too often can’t find work and are perfectly primed for pointing the finger. “I don’t agree with how they did it, but they needed to get them out,” said one disgruntled neighborhood resident.
And I get it: Not long ago, I welcomed a friend home from prison with the help of Gov. JB Pritzker. I was hopeful he’d be eligible for subsidized housing through the state’s re-entry programs, only to find that many of the opportunities had been siphoned off to the Venezuelan immigrants, and nothing was available. A crisis of conservative design, this desperate scramble for scarce resources is a rife breeding ground for ethnic animosity.
The reality of the Black American experience is that being at the heel of a racially unjust society means that the oppression of anyone invariably affects us.
Chicago has real problems and festering resentments. As industrial jobs shriveled up in the 1970s and redlining created hypersegregated neighborhoods, poverty was highly concentrated into Black communities on the South and West Sides, and along with it all of the symptoms of unemployment. Huge public housing projects were built, neglected, then torn down. Some criminal activity that had been concentrated in the projects became more dispersed. Meanwhile, the police weren’t always exactly there to protect and serve.
Extralegal detention and law enforcement terrorism are as native to Chicago as deep-dish pizza and ketchup-free hot dogs. This is the city of the disgraced detective Jon Burge, who, after leaving the military police, joined the Chicago Police Department and deployed what have been likened to military black sites to torture what has been estimated to be over 100 Black men in the 1970s to early ’90s, causing the city to pay out over $100 million in settlements. After Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke in 2014, protests erupted downtown over his death. Then, after George Floyd, as in other cities full of people fed up with police brutality, many of us took to the streets. Some protesters vandalized property in that heated moment.
The question now is: How will Chicago’s residents respond? The protests started small, but as the stakes of the federal incursion ramp up, with Mr. Trump ordering Department of Homeland Security agents in and attempting to deploy the National Guard as well (which has been blocked, for now, by the courts), the crowds have gotten bigger and the mood more defiant. The tactics that the federal agents have used against the crowds have been so aggressive that another judge temporarily blocked the use of tear gas and pepper balls. All of this could eventually provoke peaceful demonstrators into revolt, which would also turn Chicago into the “war zone” Mr. Trump and his administration keep saying our city is, as a justification for his sending in his forces in the first place.
In Season 7 of Showtime’s “The Chi,” a show on which I appear as the character Jamal, there’s a moment when he’s shot in an attack meant for someone else and he has to wrestle with how to respond. In my creative exploration for the role, I contemplated the enormous weight of forgiveness and restraint. I sat in silence with Jamal’s gnawing, burning urge for revenge. I thought of the damage and the destruction it would do to his family, to his younger sister, who was left abandoned during Jamal’s previous incarceration. And ultimately, for the greater good of himself, and his loved ones, my character decided against it.
“The Chi” is fiction. In no way am I asking the people of Chicago to forgive the thuggish tactics of the Trump administration and other Republicans, but perhaps to consider, in our response, the damage that can be done to ourselves by a lack of organization, unity and intention in our action. If anything positive is to come from this moment, I hope it can be a reminder that we must stand up for the human rights of everyone if we expect to continue to have those rights ourselves.
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