Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
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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November 15, 2025, 11:00 A.M. - 3:00 P.M.
Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Church
1924 Cedar Street at Bonita
Berkeley, California
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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.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
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) Trump Turns to Affordability Message Amid Economic Frustration
The Trump administration is facing backlash from American consumers as higher costs from tariffs blunt wage gains.
By Alan Rappeport, Reporting from Washington, Nov. 14, 2025
With the prices of essential products such as groceries still rising and the cost of certain imports inflated because of President Trump’s tariffs, the White House faces a predicament. Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Lower prices for coffee and fruit. A 50-year mortgage to reduce monthly home payments. Direct checks of $2,000 to many Americans. And a new willingness to welcome skilled foreign labor into the United States.
The Trump administration has begun floating a series of ideas over the past several weeks as it confronts the cold reality that its economic policies are not helping many Americans who continue to struggle with elevated prices and a sense of economic pessimism.
Last week’s elections made clear that affordability was top of mind for many Americans. Voters in New York propelled Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist with an ambitious agenda to lower the cost of living, to victory in the mayoral race. Democratic wins in New Jersey and Virginia were built on promises to address the high cost of living in those states.
Only 30 percent of voters believe President Trump has lived up to their expectations for tackling inflation and the cost of living, according to a recent NBC News poll. That was his lowest mark for any issue respondents were asked about. And a meager 27 percent of voters in a CNN poll in late October said Mr. Trump’s policies had improved the country’s economic conditions — less than half of those who thought he had made matters worse.
In the wake of those results, the administration has begun rolling out new policies and recasting its economic messaging to try to show they are serious about combating the nation’s affordability crisis.
That includes a watering-down of some policies, such as tariffs, that the Trump administration insisted for months were not causing prices to rise for American consumers. The president is also planning to travel around the country to try to explain more clearly how his policies are helping Americans.
“We understand that people understand, as people look at their pocketbooks to go to the grocery store, that there’s still work to do,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, said outside the White House on Thursday. He said that providing consumers with more purchasing power is “something that we’re going to fix, and we’re going to fix it right away.”
The new urgency over affordability comes ahead of looming midterm elections that could alter the course of Mr. Trump’s presidency if Democrats retake control of one or both chambers of Congress.
The Trump administration contends that its policies have curbed inflation and boosted wages. However, the sticker shock from tariffs combined with high mortgage rates that have made homes more expensive have made consumers generally skittish. A survey of consumer sentiment published by the University of Michigan last month showed growing gloominess about personal finances and business conditions.
This week, Mr. Trump said that he “doesn’t want to hear about affordability” because the U.S. economy is so strong.
But in an acknowledgment that Americans are frustrated with high food prices, he said in an interview with Fox News that aired this week that he expected to lower tariffs on coffee and fruit. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed on Wednesday that relief would be coming in the form of “substantial announcements” that would lower prices for food that the United States does not widely produce.
Critics of the Trump administration noted that Mr. Trump appeared to be solving a problem that he had created through his policies.
“They have pursued an anti-affordability agenda for their time in office,” said Bharat Ramamurti, a deputy director of the National Economic Council in the Biden administration, who pointed to Mr. Trump’s policies on tariffs and immigration restrictions. “If they reverse some of that, maybe costs will come down.”
Wage increases have been outpacing inflation in the United States this year, but not significantly enough for people to feel like they are better off. And a protracted government shutdown sowed panic among lower-income Americans whose food stamps became a political pawn in the standoff. Food banks across the United States reported a surge in customers, with local and national media outlets showing long lines of people waiting for groceries to feed their families.
In emphasizing affordability, the White House is grappling with the fact that its policies cannot please everyone. Last month, Mr. Trump suggested that the United States would begin importing more beef from Argentina in an attempt to bring down prices. That led to swift backlash from American cattle ranchers who said that such a move would undercut their profits.
Some Republicans expressed disappointment this week after Mr. Trump told Laura Ingraham of Fox News that he would support allowing more skilled foreign labor into the United States to train Americans to make high-tech products at new factories.
White House officials have also struggled to explain how they can claim that tariffs are not imposing additional costs on consumers but that removing or lowering them will lower costs.
The Trump administration is preparing to issue broad exemptions to certain tariffs to ease food prices, according to people briefed on the plans. The exemptions are expected to apply to the global tariffs Mr. Trump announced in April, including on products coming from countries that have not yet struck trade deals with the United States.
The Trump administration is promoting affordability on several other fronts. In a speech in New York this week, Mr. Bessent argued that curtailing federal spending was helping to keep borrowing costs lower for bank loans and home mortgages.
“Maintaining a robust Treasury market — and strengthening it even further — is essential to making America affordable again,” Mr. Bessent said. “The work we do here directly impacts affordability and quality of life out there.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Bessent have also been pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to support the housing market. The Treasury secretary said last week that some sectors of the economy were already in a recession as he called on the central bank to cut rates more quickly.
With the housing market weighing heavily on the economy, Mr. Trump and his aides have been contemplating more creative ideas to lower monthly home expenses.
The president this week suggested that he was considering an expansion of the traditional 30-year mortgage to allow borrowers to take out home loans that could be repaid over 50 years. However, the idea was criticized because it would saddle consumers with more debt and interest costs.
William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said this week that his agency was “actively evaluating portable mortgages,” which would allow mortgage holders to purchase new homes at their existing interest rates. Although loans of shorter durations in other countries are portable, such a policy could be complicated in the United States because of the way home loans are bundled and sold as investments.
The White House is also focusing on ways to make Americans feel wealthier. Mr. Trump has pitched offering $2,000 checks to Americans that would be funded by tariff revenue — if Congress approved such a plan — and Mr. Bessent predicted this week that taxpayers would start to see benefits early next year from the tax cuts that Republicans passed over the summer.
But most of the policies that Mr. Trump’s team is considering would require cooperation from Congress or a broad reversal of his trade agenda. Analysts are skeptical that minor adjustments to his economic plan will have a meaningful impact on affordability.
“The Trump administration’s plans to lower tariffs on some high-profile consumer goods are important symbolic steps to address the affordability issue that voters are frustrated by,” said Owen Tedford, an analyst at Beacon Policy Advisers. “Still, it is uncertain how much they will actually affect voters’ pocketbooks and satisfy their desire for the president to do more about high prices.”
In the meantime, the Trump administration appears poised to continue its strategy of blaming the problems in the economy on the policies of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Cleaning up Joe Biden’s inflation and economic disaster has been a top focus for President Trump since Day 1, when he signed an array of executive orders to unleash American energy and slash costly regulations,” said Kush Desai, a White House spokesman. “The Trump administration will continue to implement and emphasize these and other economic policies that are cutting costs, raising real wages, and securing trillions in investments to make and hire in America.”
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2) A Bloody Month in the West Bank Olive Harvest Leads to the Death of a Boy
Palestinians see the violence, and its tolerance by right-wing Israeli officialdom, as part of a broader campaign to harass them and make life so unbearable that they will abandon their villages.
By David M. Halbfinger, Reporting from Beita in the West Bank, Nov. 14, 2025
Ayssam Ma’ala, a happy-go-lucky eighth grader, had just laid down tarps to gather ripe olives in the West Bank town of Beita. It was Oct. 11, the first Saturday of the harvest, traditionally a high point of the year.
The day before, his family had been driven from another grove by extremist settlers who attacked them, witnesses said, in what has become a common occurrence in the West Bank. So on Saturday, they chose what seemed a safer spot. No settlers were in sight. Ayssam, 13, told his mother to rest in the shade, that “he’d take care of everything.”
Israeli soldiers soon emerged from an army vehicle a few hundred yards away and began firing tear gas, witnesses said. Caught in a cloud of gas from three canisters, and unable to breathe, Ayssam collapsed.
After four weeks in a coma, Ayssam died on Tuesday. He became the first fatality in what has been a particularly violent olive harvest. Palestinians and activists — Palestinian, Israeli and Western — say bands of masked settlers have routinely assailed Palestinian villagers, activists lending their support and journalists there to bear witness. The attackers, they say, are emboldened by permissive law enforcement and by troops who seldom intervene to stop Jewish extremists.
The olive harvest has been central to the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians for generations. A good crop can keep a family afloat financially for a year, and bringing it in once meant picnics, togetherness and cookouts among the trees.
The Israeli military insists that its soldiers are under orders to allow the harvest, but activists say that the military often sides with the settlers or even tries to disrupt the harvest itself. Israeli military leaders have come under heightened pressure to crack down on settler violence, with some commanders saying they need the government to authorize harsher measures.
In Beita, members of Ayssam’s family speculated that the violence of the day before had prompted soldiers to disperse them pre-emptively. A military spokeswoman said that the incident was under review.
Palestinians see the violence, and its tolerance by right-wing Israeli officialdom, as part of a broader campaign to harass them and make life so unbearable that they will eventually abandon their villages.
At the same time, Israeli settlements have cropped up at record speed on hilltops encroaching on villages across the West Bank.
The violence and land grabbing in the West Bank have only intensified since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, which set off the war in Gaza.
Settler violence reached an all-time high in October, with 264 attacks, or about eight a day, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Palestinian Affairs, which began keeping records in 2006.
The office has counted 167 attacks on olive harvesters since Oct. 1, in which 151 Palestinians were injured, 83 of them by Israeli settlers and the rest by soldiers. It said the violence has affected more communities — and also more olive trees — than in the past six years.
In an attack caught on video and published in Israeli media, a woman harvesting olives in Turmus Aya, Afaf Abu Alia, 53, was beaten unconscious on Oct. 19 by a masked Israeli man wielding a club. On Sunday, the police arrested a suspect. Israeli media identified him as a 21-year-old resident of a nearby outpost.
A man trying to harvest olives in Kufr Qaddum, Hekmat Shtewei, 51, was chased to his car by settlers on Oct. 28, according to his brother-in-law, Abd Al-Rahman Shtewei, who said he found him bleeding in his car. He was beaten so badly that he suffered multiple fractures to his skull, jaw, ribs, arms and legs, and slipped into a coma, according to a hospital report. He awoke only on Tuesday, his brother-in-law said.
“What’s happening in the West Bank is a disgrace to humanity,” Abd Al-Rahman Shtewei said in an interview. “People here will not feel safe except in their graves.” The Israeli military did not respond to requests for comment.
He lamented, too, that Palestinians could not fight back in defending themselves. “Legally, we would be the ones charged,” he said. “All we can do is keep showing up on our land.”
sraeli and Western activists who join the olive harvest and journalists who are there to document the attacks have also been assaulted.
Last weekend, Israeli activists joined villagers trying to harvest olives on a terraced hillside in Beita, when settlers began throwing rocks at them and beating some people with sticks. The injured included a Reuters photographer and her security adviser.
Oded Yedaya, 76, a photographer who runs an art school in Tel Aviv, was also wounded. He said he ran off to the side hoping to take pictures of the attackers but was chased down a steep hill by two of them and struck with at least two stones.
The first one hit him in the lower back. “I turned my head and yelled, ‘Criminals, leave me alone,’” he said in an interview.
The second stone knocked him out. He awoke covered in blood, his camera gone. He had a two-inch gash on his temple and a broken cheekbone.
Mr. Yedaya has attended olive harvests and political protests for many years and has been injured a few times. “This is the worst,” he said.
The Israeli military did not respond to requests for comment.
Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli organizer of Zeitoun 2025, a coalition of groups supporting the olive harvest, said the Oct. 7 attacks and the Gaza war had fueled hatred and fear of the Palestinians on the part of many Israelis, distracted international attention from the West Bank and created among extremist settlers “a sense of entitlement, and of seizing the moment.”
“There’s a very, very strong sense of impunity, and lack of accountability,” Mr. Pollak said.
This year’s olive crop was already anemic, a result of drought last year, a spring heat wave and strong winds that blew many buds from the trees — reducing the economic incentive for people to go through with the harvest.
Some Palestinians tried to persist. But they say many of them have been prevented from getting to their trees, whether by armed settlers who menace them or by soldiers deployed to protect the settlers.
The military says its soldiers are under orders to ensure the harvest’s continuation without interference. It acknowledges that in some areas of conflict, access to groves is restricted to landowners only, “to prevent friction.”
But Palestinians and activists say that soldiers in the field routinely declare whole swaths of land, well outside the designated areas, as “closed military zones” — which makes entering them a crime — for no other purpose than stopping villagers from getting to their trees.
And getting to those trees is vital: Under Israeli law, farmlands that go uncultivated for several years can be seized permanently by the state, and often are.
Among the groups expressing solidarity with Palestinians trying to harvest olives is Rabbis for Human Rights, a liberal Jewish group that has sent volunteers to the West Bank dozens of times this fall.
On Oct. 28, two American women who tried to join up with the group in the West Bank village of Burin were arrested after soldiers said they had entered a closed military zone.
Leila Stillman-Utterback, 18, who was in Israel on a gap year after graduating from high school in Vermont, said she and the other American — both in Israel on tourist visas — were deported three days later and barred from returning to Israel for 10 years. In an interview, she said she felt a “sense of betrayal” but was fighting the ban in court because she felt “an imperative to be there.”
In Beita, Ayssam and his family had tried to harvest olives on the first Friday of the season, Oct. 10, his relatives — including his mother, brothers, and uncles — said. They were driven off by the attacking settlers from a new outpost called Mevaser Shalom — Hebrew for “harbinger of peace.”
The next day, Ayssam woke up saying he wanted to go olive picking again, his mother, Ghuroub Hamayel, said in an interview. An older brother argued against it, worried about another attack, but Ayssam insisted.
They chose an olive grove farther away from the outpost, hoping to be left alone, Ms. Hamayel said.
Eran Maoz, an Israeli activist who arrived with another group of olive pickers on the same hillside earlier that morning, said soldiers drove by a few times and observed the activity but took no action. He said the harvesters assumed they had permission to be where they were.
The family had barely arrived and gotten started when the soldiers returned. This time, they got out of their vehicle.
“We started packing up our stuff,” Ms. Hamayel said. “But that’s when they started shooting the gas.”
In a video recorded by Mr. Maoz that he shared with The New York Times, one of the villagers responded by yelling at the soldiers, “Don’t fire tear gas! You’re killing us here!”
A soldier answered over a bullhorn: “We don’t want to use tear gas. Go, get out of here, beat it.” But the soldiers continued to fire tear gas, Mr. Maoz said, and one of those volleys overcame Ayssam.
A hospital report obtained by The Times said that inhaling tear gas caused his heart to stop for several minutes and that he suffered from severe oxygen deficiency, requiring the use of a ventilator.
He was buried within hours of his death Tuesday night in a family plot not far from his home. The next morning, as other relatives remembered his smile, or his love of video games, or the way he once stared down Israeli soldiers who harassed him, his mother instead recalled her youngest child’s sweetness.
“He used to ask me, ‘Mom, do you love me like I love you?’” Ms. Hamayel said. “And I’d say yes.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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3) What ‘The American Revolution’ Says About Our Cultural Battles
In Ken Burns’s newest documentary, the war for independence was also a civil war. Amid a bitter fight over history, its timing feels urgent.
By James Poniewozik, Nov. 14, 2025
James Poniewozik, the chief television critic for The New York Times, has been writing about the connections between TV and politics since the 1990s. He last wrote about Ken Burns with the 2021 documentary “Hemingway.”
In the absence of available photography, “The American Revolution” uses art works like “The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777,” by John Trumbull, as visual elements. Alamy, via American Revolution Film Project/Florentine Films
In 1990, Ken Burns established his reputation with an enormous PBS documentary about a civil war. Thirty-five years later, with “The American Revolution,” he’s made another one.
We may not be used to thinking of the fight for independence from Britain that way. But this sweeping and sneakily provocative six-part series, which begins on PBS on Nov. 16, says that we should.
“The greatest misconception about the American Revolution is that it was something that unified Americans,” the historian Alan Taylor says in the second episode. “It leaves out the reality that it was a civil war among Americans.”
Part of that division involved the bitter and often savage recriminations between pro-independence Americans and those loyal to Britain. But those were not the only Americans at battle. As “The American Revolution” emphasizes, the war was also often a struggle between American colonizers and Native Americans, between enslavers and the enslaved. Some Americans won their sovereignty and freedom. Others — particularly non-European Americans — lost it.
“The American Revolution” is not Burns’s most innovative film; its techniques and rhythms are familiar from “The Civil War” and its successors. It is not his most moving; that title likely goes to his 18-hour heartbreaker, “The Vietnam War.” But it is perhaps his best-timed, and not only because the country’s 250th anniversary is coming next year but also because Americans are again passionately and even violently divided, over matters including history itself.
It arrives as public broadcasting, along with its mission to speak to every part of America, has been perhaps mortally wounded. It comes in an era of political violence and cultural war over American history, with deeply divided camps claiming the mantle of 1776.
And it is dedicated to a belief that seems increasingly old-fashioned: that we share a common story and that people are willing to hear it, both the good and the bad. There was a time when Burns’s expansive tales of the past could draw a broad audience of Americans, whatever their differences in the present. Perhaps that too is now history.
ON THE SURFACE, “The American Revolution” — directed by Burns with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt and written by his longtime collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward — is exactly what Burns’s past documentaries and your memories of grade-school history class would lead you to expect.
Peter Coyote’s familiar, soothing narration tells of a rebellion that was not guaranteed to succeed. It lays out the Enlightenment ideals that inspired America’s fledgling democracy. It builds tension through the patriots’ early military disasters, illustrating battles with red and blue arrows snaking across parchment-hued maps, from land to sea, city to frontier, Lexington to Yorktown.
As in “The Civil War,” Burns and company create the kinetic illusion of war footage, cutting between artworks and re-enactment images to the sound effects of cannon. There are long, ugly descriptions of bayonet warfare. The war it depicts is not the jolly enterprise of fifes and drums and men in powdered wigs but savage, sweaty butchery, often among neighbors.
Also as in “The Civil War,” Burns enlists a troupe of celebrities to voice historical figures and common people. George Washington (Josh Brolin) emerges as a complicated hero, a field general who made numerous tactical mistakes but who also had the singular personal magnetism and character to hold together exhausted troops and squabbling politicians.
So far, so History 101. But the film also makes clear quickly that there is more to this story. The introduction shifts from Thomas Paine (Matthew Rhys) urging resistance against tyranny to a description of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a Native American democracy that long preceded the United States. It weaves in the voices of enslaved Black Americans, who fought on both sides of the war. (Washington, the historian Christopher Leslie Brown says, worried that having them fight alongside white soldiers would undermine the institution of slavery.)
Over its 12 hours, “The American Revolution” takes two parallel tracks: the stories of white leaders who would eventually appear on dollar bills and in portrait galleries, and those of Americans of color, who were often used as pawns or had to choose which side of the war offered them the best chance at autonomy.
These multiple tracks, in the film’s telling, are part of the same larger story. The revolution was part of a worldwide war involving British colonies stretching to the Caribbean and Asia. And a big motive of the colonists, the film argues, was westward expansion into Native American lands beyond the Appalachians, which the British had forbidden (and in which Washington, among others, had financial interests).
The result is neither a glorification of the revolution nor a condemnation of the founding fathers. It’s just an attempt to bring in as many affected voices as possible, to situate “the most consequential revolution in history” in a global context, to make America’s founding story even bigger than you were originally taught.
THIS SHOULDN’T BE CONTROVERSIAL. It is simply history for grown-ups, which assumes that people can accept both that the revolution was a triumph for the idea of liberty and that the revolutionaries who fought it didn’t live up entirely to their beautiful words.
It is also the kind of story Burns has been telling for decades. “The Civil War” established an aesthetic style — the pans across old photos, the plangent fiddle music — as well as a people’s history approach that put the stories of foot soldiers and civilians on the same level as those of presidents and generals. The series drew some criticism, including that it was too sympathetic to Southern rationalizations for the war, but around 40 million Americans tuned in for a long-form history lesson whose most whiz-bang special effects were tintype photographs.
Burns’s approach hasn’t really changed much. There are some new tools, like 3D graphics, and some nods to the times. (“The Civil War” referred to “slaves”; “The American Revolution” talks about “enslaved people,” the preferred term among those who argue that it is dehumanizing to define people by their status as property.) You could imagine a timeline when “The American Revolution” would seem nothing more than an earnest, slightly dull prequel to “The Civil War.” But in our actual timeline, America, with a landmark birthday approaching, is in the midst of a pitched war over its own past. In this timeline, “The American Revolution” feels urgent, necessary and maybe even risky.
The second Trump administration has been purging cultural institutions of the barest whispers suggesting that the country’s history was anything but glorious triumph. The president has criticized the Smithsonian Institution for focusing on “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was” and had its museums scrutinized for their “alignment with American ideals.”
His administration has ordered the renaming or review of military ships named for civil rights leaders and the restoration of military base names that honored Confederate generals. It has thrown out symbols of diversity and social progress in favor of celebrations of tradition and dominance. And the military parade that President Trump threw on his birthday, under the banner of the America250 semiquincentennial celebration, suggests he may cast next year’s anniversary in his own aggressive image.
When you control how people discuss the past, you control how they see the present and imagine the future. No wonder the country’s political movements have also fought to claim the legacy of ’76, from the Obama-era Tea Party to the current “No Kings” protests, whose anti-royalist branding is straight out of “Schoolhouse Rock.” The president has joined the war of symbolism too. On the day of massive demonstrations in October, the president shared a fake video of himself flying a military jet, wearing a golden crown and dumping excrement on the marchers.
“THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION” COULD be a teaching moment right now, a chance to find common ground, a reminder and warning about a volatile time when neighbors sought retribution against neighbors.
Though the film was in production for over eight years (around as long as the war for independence took to fight), it feels pointedly current. Sometimes the parallels are subtle. The film notes that Washington mandated smallpox inoculations for soldiers, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone in the editing room was unaware of the Covid vaccine battles. The resentments of frontier settlers over limits on expansion recall the grievances of modern rural politics.
Other similarities hit, as history often does, square on the nose. As the current administration sends the National Guard into cities over the objections of local officials, the film describes the British alienating Bostonians by sending an army — citing security concerns — to occupy the city. “Good God,” says the Rev. Andrew Eliot (voiced by Tom Hanks), “what can be worse to a people who have tasted the sweets of liberty?”
And as the film describes the draft constitution’s balance of powers, the choice of emphasis is hard to ignore. “They feared that a demagogue might incite citizens into betraying the American experiment,” Coyote says. “Alexander Hamilton was concerned that an ‘unprincipled’ man would ‘mount the hobby horse of popularity’ and ‘throw things into confusion.’” The script names no current names, but critics of President Trump have cited this quote for years.
Meanwhile, the return of Burns, one of PBS’s biggest non-Muppet stars, is a meta-testament to another current story — the war on public broadcasting. The funding credits of “The American Revolution” note that it was “made possible, in part, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” That organization announced plans to shut down next year, after Congress clawed back $1.1 billion in funding.
Burns has called the cuts “short sighted” but said he will personally be able to continue his work. He’s in the position to do that because of the support public TV provided him from early on. But Burns is 72. Who will support his successors? In a media environment that rewards flash, conflict and catering to ideological bubbles, what other network will tell Americans, all Americans, that they share a common set of facts, a common history and common challenges?
Of course “The American Revolution” does not address the public-broadcasting controversy or the continuing fights over public history in museums and universities, but it is an implicit part of those arguments. The series makes its case the way Burns’s whole body of work has: by trying to tell a full story and trusting, maybe with quaint optimism, that all kinds of Americans will want to hear it.
The series might well draw controversy pointing out the founders’ contradictions. But “The American Revolution” is also deeply patriotic. It gushes with love for America’s natural beauty, for its democracy and for its professed, if not always realized, ideals.
In its telling, the American story is one of always striving to get closer to those ideals — not of being perfect but of becoming more perfect. Its closing words are “The revolution is not over.” You can take that as a tribute to how the spirit of democracy endures. But watching the series in these times, I also hear an echo of the end of “The Civil War,” in which the historian Barbara Fields says: “The Civil War is still going on. It’s still to be fought. And regrettably, it can still be lost.”
As the historian Vincent Brown says in “The American Revolution,” you can admire how Thomas Jefferson articulated the cause of human freedom and recognize that he denied freedom to the humans he owned. “I think it’s incumbent on all of us to take those words from Jefferson and make them real in our own lives,” he says, “even if they weren’t real in his.”
Patriotism, “The American Revolution” argues by example, is not about hiding the stains of the past behind pretty oil paintings. It means loving your country enough to tell its whole story. Once upon a time, that mission might have seemed middlebrow and dull. Today, for better or worse, it is positively revolutionary.
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4) She Was Deported in Error. Her Child Was Left Behind.
Maribel Lopez was hastily deported to Guatemala despite a pending asylum appeal, leaving behind a toddler. Her case highlights a growing pattern of speedy deportations.
By Miriam Jordan, Photographs by Todd Heisler, Nov. 14, 2025
Miriam Jordan and Todd Heisler traveled to Fulton, Cato and Syracuse, N.Y. to tell this story.
On a recent evening in Fulton, N.Y., an industrial town that straddles the Oswego River, Maribel Lopez’s three children huddled around a cellphone glowing on the kitchen table. She smiled at them from thousands of miles away, wiping away tears.
“Chito, Chito, you cutie,” Ms. Lopez called softly to her youngest, Jorge, 2, who was propped on the lap of his brother, Milton, 23.
The toddler didn’t respond to his nickname, and gave the screen displaying his mother’s image only a fleeting glance.
“Say ‘hola, mami,’” pleaded his sister, Anallely, 21.
Ms. Lopez has been separated from her children since early September, when federal agents raided the nutrition-bar factory where she worked in Central New York. Ms. Lopez was detained and deported to Guatemala, leaving behind her 2-year-old son.
It shouldn’t have happened.
Ms. Lopez was supposed to be protected from deportation because she had a pending asylum case on appeal, after fleeing years of abuse in her home country.
With immigration agents under intense pressure to deport thousands of people each day, Ms. Lopez was pushed through the system swiftly and was deported within four days of the factory raid.
As a result, Jorge is now cared for by two siblings who are barely adults themselves.
The government returned Ms. Lopez to the United States late on Thursday because of the mistake. But she is still apart from him, held in a detention center while her asylum appeal works its way through the courts.
The case is one of a growing number of family separations that, to some, recall the policies of the first Trump administration, when children were pried from their parents’ arms soon after they crossed the southern border into the United States.
These cases, though, target immigrants who are already living in the United States.
Immigration officials say parents who are being deported are given the option of bringing their U.S. born children with them as they are removed from the country.
But Ms. Lopez said she was offered no such choice.
Rather, her deportation was an error, email communications between her lawyers and Immigration and Customs Enforcement indicate, and the speed at which it took place appears to have separated her from her son.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said that ICE, which carries out deportations, “does not separate families.”
“Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children, or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates,” she said. “This is consistent with past administrations’ immigration enforcement.”
But immigration lawyers and advocacy groups say the speed and scale at which federal agents are effecting deportations is leading to family separations.
“We are seeing a disturbing rise in cases where mothers and families are deported without their children,” said Kelly Kribs, an immigration lawyer at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.
It is unclear exactly how many parents have been deported without their children, or how many were given a choice to be deported together. Advocates say there is no national data, and the Homeland Security Department did not respond to a request for figures.
Deportations involving a parent of a U.S.-born child are challenging, often forcing families to make a wrenching decision to stay together or leave their children behind, either with a family guardian or in the foster care system.
“The government’s actions are creating an atmosphere where families feel they have to choose between their due process rights to protections under immigration law and the security of staying together despite not knowing if they will be safe wherever they are returned to,” said Nan Schivone, legal director of Justice in Motion, a nonprofit that has been serving families deported to Central America.
In the raid that scooped up Ms. Lopez at Nutrition Bar Confectioners in Cato, N.Y., 57 people were detained, and 17 of them were parents, who collectively had more than 20 children, according to the Workers’ Center of Central New York, a nonprofit that advocates for low-wage workers. At least seven of the parents have already been deported, and more are expected to be expelled.
An Inadvertent Deportation
In communications reviewed by The New York Times, ICE acknowledged that Ms. Lopez was “inadvertently” removed from the United States. Ms. Lopez had the right to remain in the country because she had an active asylum appeal.
Her lawyer, Elizabeth Brundige, a professor at Cornell Law School, said the removal of Ms. Lopez to Guatemala was “a clear violation of U.S. and international law.”
Ms. McLaughlin, the DHS spokeswoman, contended that Ms. Lopez had “received due process” and added that “Ms. Lopez had a removal order issued by an immigration judge in 2019.”
However, that order was stayed when Ms. Lopez filed an appeal. That is why ICE attorneys characterized Ms. Lopez’s deportation as erroneous.
Officers under pressure to boost deportation numbers are processing detainees hastily and putting them on planes without always asking parents whether they wish to take their children with them, according to lawyers who handle immigration cases.
“There is complete disregard for the sanctity of family,” said Ruby Powers, an immigration lawyer in Houston.
ICE is not required to reunite families before deporting a parent. An agency directive dated July 2 instructs officers to help the parent arrange care for minor children, but only “to the extent operationally feasible.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions seeking clarification about how and when that would be done.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, his “zero-tolerance” policy took thousands of migrant children away from their parents at the border. After drawing national outrage, the policy was rescinded.
Now, when parents are separated from their children by immigration authorities, it is happening quickly and quietly.
“These new separations are a response to the enormous pressure to deliver unrealistic deportation numbers — far from the public eye,” said Mary Giovagnoli, an immigration lawyer and policy expert.
A Raid in Rural New York
Ms. Lopez was halfway through her 4 a.m.-to-12:30 p.m. shift at the nutrition-bar plant on Sept. 4 when a command crackled over the building’s public address system: “All workers report to the lunchroom.”
Ms. Lopez, 41, complied, still wearing her white lab coat, hairnet and face mask.
Inside her purse, she said, were her work permit, Social Security card and a letter from her lawyer on Cornell Law School stationery stating that Ms. Lopez had a pending asylum appeal and was “lawfully in the United States and cannot be removed.”
Moments later, armed agents began separating the workers into two groups — U.S. citizens and immigrants. Ms. Lopez showed an agent her valid work permit, and was initially placed with the citizens. But another agent ordered her to join the other group.
She called her children and her lawyer, Ms. Brundige, who recalled telling her, “Make sure and give them all your documents, and see if they will talk to me.”
Instead, an agent seized her phone and switched it to airplane mode, Ms. Lopez said. Her wrists were bound, she said, and she was loaded into a van with other women.
At a Border Patrol station in nearby Oswego, N.Y., officers tapped each worker’s name into a computer. Ms. Lopez saw her entire immigration history pop up, and she handed over her documents, including the Cornell letter.
Ms. Lopez also produced her toddler’s Social Security card.
“He’s two years old,” she said she told the officer. “He needs me.”
By the next morning, Ms. Lopez was in Texas. Two days later, she was on a plane to Guatemala.
Back home, her son, Jorge, cried for her, “Mami, Mami,” said his sister.
A Fresh Start After Years of Abuse
Ms. Lopez was referred to Cornell’s legal clinic in 2018, shortly after she arrived in New York with her two older children.
“From the start, we could tell she had a very strong case for asylum, based on the horrendous abuse she experienced, which constituted persecution,” Ms. Brundige said. And under the Convention Against Torture, people cannot legally be returned to a country where they face the risk of torture, she said.
Medical and police reports, as well as testimonials from family members that are attached to Ms. Lopez’s 44-page asylum court filing detail how she endured brutal, unrelenting abuse for years from her partner, the father of her two older children. He lashed her with belts, hurled glass at her and threatened to stab her, the documents say; he once hacked through a door with a machete, and then choked and struck her.
She filed police report after police report, to no avail. Restraining orders she was granted were not enforced.
Even her religious faith provoked her partner’s rage, the documents say. Attending mass earned her beatings. So did voting in local elections.
Fearing for their lives, Ms. Lopez fled with her children and surrendered to American authorities at the U.S.-Mexican border in Texas in March 2018. A few weeks later, they were released with a notice to appear in court, and headed to rural New York, where a friend had told Ms. Lopez there was work.
She got a job at a dairy farm near Rome, attended church and enrolled in English classes.
“I lived well with my children,” she said in an interview from Guatemala, while in hiding at the home of a relative. In the United States, she said, “I felt safe. I wasn’t afraid of anything.”
At Cornell, law students and professors began building her case.
In January 2019, the team filed her application for asylum.
At a hearing in November 2019, Ms. Lopez testified before an immigration judge for four hours, recounting years of assault, beatings and other violence.
During cross-examination, a government lawyer pressed Ms. Lopez on the timing and sequence of events and her interactions with law enforcement, questions that were challenging for both the court-appointed interpreter and Ms. Lopez to follow, her lawyer said.
The judge denied her asylum claim on credibility grounds, citing inconsistencies in her account. Her lawyers appealed, and her case remains pending.
By 2021, Ms. Lopez had moved to Fulton, 30 minutes from Syracuse, where she worked on the wrapping line at the nutrition-bar factory.
In early 2023, Ms. Lopez discovered that she had an unplanned pregnancy. The father, who was undocumented, soon moved away and could not help raise the child. Ms. Lopez, with the support of her older children, chose to keep the baby.
Jorge was born on Sept. 3, 2023. “He’s a blessing,” she said.
The day after his second birthday, agents raided her workplace.
“Our expectation was that once she was able to explain her situation, immigration authorities would understand and release her,” Ms. Brundige said.
Instead,Ms. Lopez found herself calling her children from a border facility in McAllen, Texas.
Shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, Ms. Lopez was put on a plane in the early hours of Tuesday, Sept. 7.
“I was crying for my children, praying that God would protect them,” Ms. Lopez said.
The next time she spoke to her children, she was in Guatemala.
Ms. Lopez’s Cornell lawyers fired off emails to ICE lawyers in Buffalo. On Sept. 8, the ICE lawyers responded that they had no record of her removal, according to correspondence reviewed by The Times.
The admission came a week later: A Sept. 15 email said Ms. Lopez had been arrested by Customs and Border Protection on Sept. 3 and “inadvertently removed” four days later.
An ICE field office director said in an email on Sept. 22 that he would start the process to allow Ms. Lopez to return to the United States.
On Wednesday, Ms. Lopez received an unexpected call from an official at the American embassy in Guatemala City, informing her that she would be flown back to the United States the next day.
She will remain detained until her immigration case is decided.
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5) I Am a Drug Historian. Trump Is Wrong About Fentanyl in Almost Every Way.
By David Herzberg, Nov. 15, 2025
Dr. Herzberg is professor of history and director of the drugs, health and society program at the University at Buffalo.
Illustration by Mark Harris
It’s one of President Trump’s favorite stories: The Democrats weakened the borders, allowing Mexican drug cartels to smuggle fentanyl into the United States, where it devastated white suburban and rural communities. To stop this “evil scourge,” he has imposed tariffs on China for its role in fentanyl production. His administration is reportedly considering military strikes in Latin America. And Mr. Trump has built up the U.S. military presence in the Caribbean. “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country,” he told reporters of his campaign of deadly strikes.
The killing has already started. Since September, the military has carried out 20 strikes on boats supposedly smuggling drugs in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, killing at least 80 people. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth celebrates these “lethal kinetic strikes” by posting aerial footage of the explosions on social media. Mr. Trump falsely boasts that each destroyed boat saves the lives of 25,000 Americans.
The brazenness is shocking. There is apparently no time to nitpick about imposing the death penalty on civilians never formally accused of a crime or to consider the destructive precedents of extending U.S. military force into the Americas.
The fentanyl story is based on an argument about history: The United States went from greatness to crisis because open-border Democrats betrayed the honest, hardworking people of America by exporting jobs and allowing in foreign drugs. Stopping the drugs, Mr. Trump wants us to believe, will let the wholesome, traditional American culture that he idealizes to flourish again. As a historian of drugs, I can tell you that this argument is wrong in almost every way.
There is no wholesome, traditional drug-free America that we can return to. Americans have always used a lot of drugs — even in the white suburbs and rural areas that Mr. Trump’s supporters call the “real America.”
The first drug crisis came in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. In the unregulated, buyer-beware markets of that era, sales of pharmaceutical morphine, cocaine and heroin rose precipitously. Addiction rates skyrocketed, mostly among the white, propertied class of Americans who had ready access to a doctor.
New medical guidelines and federal laws curtailed the runaway opioid markets by the 1920s, but drug crises remained a persistent feature of American life. A combination of booming global trade, capital flight (“white flight”) and racial segregation led to repeated waves of heroin addiction in major cities from the 1950s to the 1970s. This “junkie” menace dominated the headlines, but non-urban America experienced even larger drug crises during the same period.
That’s because after pharmaceutical heroin and cocaine were reined in, their makers flooded markets with new drugs that did not face the same regulatory constraints. The first out of the gate were barbiturates, introduced in 1903, provoking warnings of “promiscuous use” by 1937 and contributing to the nation’s biggest wave yet of addiction and overdose by the 1950s. As barbiturates faded, they were replaced by “minor tranquilizers” such as Miltown, Valium and eventually Quaalude, which were among the best-selling medicines and the most common substances found in emergency room overdose victims of the 1960s and 1970s.
Meanwhile, after widespread military use in World War II, amphetamine burst onto the scene in the 1950s and 1960s as a popular energizer, antidepressant and diet pill, increasing the extent of addiction and related harms even further.
By 1967, an estimated 31 percent of women and 15 percent of men had used a sedative or a stimulant in the past year, with use most common among white and middle-class people.
A more complex story was unfolding with opioids. Many Americans had developed addiction before freewheeling markets were regulated in the early 20th century. But punitive narcotics enforcement focused on the urban working classes, leaving wiggle room for physicians practicing in rural regions. At least through the 1950s, my research suggests, an outright majority of Americans with addiction may have been rural and small-town residents quietly maintained on morphine by sympathetic physicians. One of the few major studies of nonurban opioid use during this period suggests that Kentucky had among the highest per capita rates of opioid addiction into the early 1960s.
In other words, “real America” is no stranger to drug crises, especially the areas served by what I call “white markets.” White markets are the familiar ones that sell the prescription psychoactive drugs in your medicine cabinet — that is, legal sales by pharmacists of drugs designated as medicines to the relatively privileged consumers designated as patients.
Unlike fully illegal “prohibition markets” where “drug dealers” sell very similar drugs, white markets are regulated for consumer safety. The Food and Drug Administration ensures quality ingredients and accurate labels, and physicians provide expert guidance on when and how to use. But white markets are in a dynamic, long-term game of cat-and-mouse between drug companies and drug regulators and, at times, these regulations are too weak to prevent sales booms and addiction crises.
The recent fentanyl crisis is just the latest and worst of this long history of American drug crises. It was initially caused by shifts in domestic white markets. Those shifts began in the 1990s and 2000s, when the U.S. opioid industry burst free of longstanding regulatory restraints and began to market powerful opioids like OxyContin as a mostly nonaddictive solution for an expanding range of painful conditions.
The United States truly did need new approaches to widespread undertreated pain, and unleashing the private sector to offer them had strong political appeal in the anti-regulatory zeal of the Reagan era. Moreover, the scare over crack cocaine in the 1980s had associated addiction with urban racial minorities. Opioid marketers targeted white parts of the country, benefiting from the widespread stereotype that good heartland consumers (“patients”) were unlikely to become addicted.
Of course, race has no impact on someone’s risk of addiction. Trauma does, though. Research suggests that experiences of significant trauma increase the chance that a person will develop an addiction after using drugs. In the 1990s, as opioid sales boomed, rural and small-town white areas were suffering from unemployment, population decline and the erosion of social institutions such as labor unions and churches. The huge industry-driven expansion of opioid white markets in these already struggling communities led to a similarly huge rise in addiction.
When the authorities moved to address the crisis in the mid-2000s, opioid industry lobbyists told them that the problem wasn’t the drugs, but the “abusers” — that is, the people with addiction. Governments took steps to prevent those people from buying in white markets. They set up prescription drug monitoring programs, for example, to prevent doctor shopping and early prescription refills, and clamped down on so-called pill mills.
People with addiction are strongly motivated to continue using drugs, however. Increasingly unable to buy in white markets, they formed a large potential consumer base for illicit opioids. In the 2010s, new suppliers emerged to meet the demand.
This moment of market disruption in the flow of opioids led to innovations that echoed the 21st century’s e-commerce revolution. Old supply chains moved heroin from poppy fields to central markets in major U.S. cities; traffickers in the 2010s built new supply chains bringing synthetic products such as fentanyl sourced with chemicals from China to American consumers wherever they lived — including the rural areas and small towns struck by the opioid crisis.
Which is to say: Fentanyl traffickers were responding to consumer demand. They did not create it. The opioid crisis initially struck white areas not because of a conspiracy to destroy heartland America. Rather, it was a devastatingly ironic result of white Americans’ privileged access to the medical system. Physicians’ willingness to recognize and treat their pain opened their communities to pharmaceutical companies’ flood of opioids. The drugs’ ubiquity meant that they were easy to get whether one had a prescription for them or not.
Three decades in, the opioid crisis is no longer mostly white. In recent years, overdose rates have been going up fastest among some racial minorities. They are now highest among Native Americans and in some of the poorest Black urban neighborhoods. This is in part because fentanyl outcompeted heroin everywhere, including the segregated, economically struggling urban neighborhoods where heroin’s prohibition markets had been quarantined by municipal authorities.
The people in these neighborhoods had weathered repeated waves of addiction in the 20th century, but they had no familiarity with fentanyl and few tools to prevent the crisis of fatal overdose it brought.
Since traffickers were not the root of the problem, shutting them down won’t solve it. As far as we know, most of the chemicals and equipment used to make the fentanyl sold in this country come from Mexico and China. But even if the United States were to choke off this supply chain, history strongly suggests that it would just be replaced by newer, possibly even more dangerous supply chains. There is no shortage of global pharmaceutical production capacity. And in a world where people and goods circulate freely, there will always be ways for a tiny powder to travel with them.
Drug war critics call efforts to shut down supply chains a futile game of Whac-a-Mole. If supply is disrupted without decreasing demand, prices go up. Because addicted people are so motivated to buy, they make for an “inelastic” demand — it stays strong even when the supply shrinks. The mismatch between supply and demand raises prices. Once the prices get high enough, they attract new suppliers willing to take risks. The market disruption created by toppling existing dominant players unleashes a Darwinian competition favoring the most effective newcomers, who are often the most ruthless.
Fentanyl displacing heroin in the 2000s is not the first devastating “innovation” caused by prohibition. When nonmedical opioids were criminalized in the early 20th century, the newly illegal markets switched from bulky and foul-smelling smoking opium to an odorless and potent miracle drug: a recent discovery by the pharmaceutical company Bayer trade-named Heroin. In the second half of the 20th century, efforts to quash cocaine trafficking from South America created opportunities for modernizers such as Pablo Escobar to consolidate new, larger and increasingly violent supply chains. Once the demand for a drug has become entrenched, the efforts to eliminate the supply of the drug do not solve anything.
If President Trump’s story is so wrong, why does it have such political power? Because it dramatizes the overarching narrative of the MAGA movement: that globalist elites betrayed the heartland by inviting in foreign threats and the cultural corruption that comes with them.
It’s easy to see why this is so politically compelling. It acknowledges the very real problems caused by fentanyl and empathizes with the pain of so many Americans who have lost loved ones. And by identifying the villains responsible, it promises a clear and emotionally cathartic way forward.
The trouble is, there is no drug-free utopia to return to. Efforts to achieve this impossible goal will only mire us in wars and encourage the drug trafficker “innovations” that intensify violence, contribute to destabilizing our neighbors and favor increasingly dangerous drugs.
Luckily, history offers more than a depressing parade of failure. There have been significant stretches of time between drug crises in the United States. Something worked during those times. What was it?
The biggest white market drug crises have been brought under control by a prosaic mixture of consumer protection policies. On the one hand, this involves limiting the risk of new addictions by, for example, sharply curbing or even eliminating drug marketing, favoring sales of the safest drugs in a class (Valium, say, instead of short-acting barbiturates). It also involves providing consumers with accurate information about how to use a drug safely, and introducing practical barriers — market friction such as limits on prescription refills — so that a deliberate, determined decision must be made to shift from occasional to long-term use.
On the other hand, consumer protection also means robust support for people with addiction. Effective policies have invested heavily in various forms of addiction treatment, most importantly including regulated, low-barrier access to the safest versions of a person’s drug of choice. In the United States, this has meant providing cheap long-acting opioids such as oral methadone or buprenorphine to replace expensive, short-acting heroin or fentanyl for injection.
These successful policies all do one thing: They make drugs boring again. Drugs are not magic, they are not demonic, they are not fundamentally different from all the other problems society faces. They are highly desirable and highly dangerous consumer goods. They are not unique in that regard.
Nor are the people who sell them uniquely evil. They are capitalists trying to make money, and they mostly behave in predictable, comprehensible ways.
We’ve been at this capitalism game for centuries. We have developed tools to incentivize sellers to prioritize consumer safety. This is true even for potentially dangerous goods: think airbags and anti-lock brakes for automobiles. But we have chosen not to apply these tools to drug markets. Instead, we govern them by brute prohibition — a war on drugs.
This is a catastrophic narrowing of policy imagination. We need to explore adapting white market regulations and incentives to help us prevent the flooding of all drug markets. For example, we could require accurate labeling, consumer education, waiting periods or other kinds of friction to slow down or prevent impulsive or risky purchases in what are now unregulated prohibition markets. We also need to build tailored, low-barrier, quality-controlled markets for those who become addicted despite protections. The goal is to reduce, not eliminate, drug use and to minimize the chances that a consumer who does drugs will experience addiction, overdose or other unwanted outcomes.
Already studies suggest that the vast majority of nonmedical opioid use does not lead to addiction or problematic outcomes, but would you want to drive a car whose brakes work only most of the time? Again, drug dealers are capitalists out to make money; we have had success getting capitalists to accept burdensome regulations as the price for access to profitable U.S. markets.
Some drug scholars and policy analysts work on these approaches. Perhaps because these ideas cut against a century of drug war politics, however, we are not paying enough attention to them. Instead, we remain committed to wars against foreign traffickers — a strategy that has been tested again and again with persistently destructive consequences.
The only place we can see real policy creativity in action is in ad hoc innovations by drug consumers themselves and the pragmatic harm reductionists who know and care about them. Drug testing kits, needle exchanges, over-the-counter nasal-spray naloxone to reverse opioid overdoses, housing-first programs for people with addiction: These and other solutions were pioneered not by our political leadership but in spite of it, by people with virtually no resources working under enormous duress.
To move these street-level policy experiments to the next level, we need to take a hardheaded, realistic view of fentanyl. Why is it so much worse than the heroin crises of yesteryear, and what can we do about it?
It’s not that foreign traffickers have become more devilish. The biggest problem is that fentanyl is so potent that it’s difficult to manufacture a product that is safe for consumer use. Fentanyl products must be mixed very carefully, and contamination of other drugs with fentanyl must be prevented. This calls for finicky, high-tech, quality-controlled production. While white market vendors are required to take such extra costly steps for consumer protection, illicit supply chains have no incentive to do so. It is just as illegal for them to sell high-quality, properly labeled fentanyl as it is to sell poorly mixed, inaccurately labeled fentanyl.
Fentanyl’s flaws as a consumer item have also led to dangerous creativity. It came to dominate the market because of its suitability for smuggling, not because consumers particularly wanted it. Many people who used heroin reported disliking fentanyl’s shorter duration of action and sleepier high when it first appeared in the United States. But because the crackdown on drug-supply routes created a favorable environment for an ultrapotent, synthetic and thus easy to smuggle drug like fentanyl, consumers didn’t have much of a choice. What they could do, however, is buy fentanyl mixed with other drugs such as the veterinary sedative xylazine to lengthen the effects. This has introduced significant health risks such as skin infections or passing out cold.
In short, prohibition has actively made drugs more dangerous. This was not a grand drama of good and evil, but a predictable result of bad policy. It won’t be easy, but we can do the same in reverse: We can adopt policies that incentivize less dangerous products, sold in ways that are less likely to lead to addiction and overdose.
This does not mean blanket legalization. As the opioid crisis (and arguably the cannabis boom) shows, free or unregulated markets are like prohibition markets in that they are not oriented for consumer protection. We need to rethink supply-side drug policies to fill in the vast space between prohibition and free markets. Luckily, we already have a sophisticated set of effective market regulatory tools.
This isn’t glamorous or heroic work. There is no “one weird trick.” It’s more like housework that must be constantly attended to than a once-and-for-all climactic victory. And just as there are still car accidents despite all the safety features, there will always be some harms related to opioids. But, without a doubt, we can use drug policy to deliver significantly safer drug markets.
Understandably, American politicians have long been drawn to more emotionally satisfying stories like the ones where foreign traffickers are to blame for the decline of rural and small-town America. Again, drugs are not unique: The MAGA movement has many other such morally simplifying stories, about Big Pharma’s vaccines as the cause of chronic disorders or about tariffs as a magical solution to unemployment. These stories may serve the needs of politicians, but they can’t fix the actual problems.
To reduce the overdose crisis, we need to stop exploiting drug tragedies to serve other geopolitical agendas. It wasn’t started by villainous foreign traffickers, and there is no drug-free utopia waiting for us if we shut off one illicit supply chain.
We can save a lot of lives, and support a lot of struggling communities, by aiming for the “least worst” solutions. Fentanyl is a hard problem that has cost a lot of lives. Let’s stop being distracted by foreign boogeymen and do something about it.
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6) Displaced Gazans Face More Misery as Torrential Rain Lashes Enclave
Heavy rainfall and chilling winds have added to the challenges facing people still forced to live in tents in the devastated territory.
By Bilal Shbair, Abu Bakr Bashir and Aaron Boxerman, Nov. 15, 2025
Bilal Shbair reported from Deir al-Balah, Gaza, and Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem.
A flooded tent in Gaza City on Friday. After more than two years of war, many Palestinians are still living in camps without access to running water or electricity. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Hussein Owada has spent much of the past two days in a failing battle to prevent his tattered tent in southern Gaza from flooding as heavy rainfall pummeled the devastated enclave.
“The rain was heavy, and the holes were too many. Our mattresses and blankets were flooded,” said Mr. Owada, 23, who lives in the tent with his parents and three younger siblings.
“I have no plan, I gave up planning long time ago. With zero resources, planning is meaningless,” he added. “We are just trying to survive here.”
The punishing rain and chilling winds that have swept through Gaza since Friday are a bitter reminder that despite a cease-fire that went into effect last month, life remains far from normal for the enclave’s two million people.
After more than two years of war, many are still displaced and living in tent camps without access to running water or electricity. The Israeli military campaign razed huge swathes of Gaza, leaving many homeless.
The United Nations has estimated that rebuilding Gaza will cost more than $70 billion, and there are major political obstacles to overcome before that can even begin. The Trump administration has said no funding for reconstruction will flow to the half of the Gaza Strip controlled by Hamas.
As the rains began beating down on Friday, some tents and other makeshift shelters were quickly flooded, according to the United Nations’ Office of Humanitarian Affairs and Gazans interviewed by the New York Times.
Under the terms of the cease-fire, Israel is obligated to allow in hundreds of trucks of supplies, including food, aid and materials used for shelter, into Gaza every day. That has helped blunt the hunger crisis that hit much of the enclave during the war, driving down prices of essential goods like flour and sugar.
The Israeli military agency that regulates humanitarian aid to Gaza, known as COGAT, said this week that it had allowed in more than 90,000 tarps and tents over the past few months. Israel is working on a “catered humanitarian response” for the coming winter, COGAT added.
But aid agencies say Israel has not let in enough shelter and heating supplies to allow the people living in tents to prepare. Some equipment is unavailable, like tools to drain water away and to clear solid waste and rubble, according to the United Nations.
In Al-Zawayda, in central Gaza, some displaced families are huddled in fragile, improvised tents pulled together from sheets of tarp and worn blankets.
Aisha al-Qudeiry, 35, said a hush descended across the camp when the first dark clouds appeared on the horizon this week. Many feared the wave of cold and wind that would soon batter them. Originally from Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City, which was largely destroyed in the war, she now lives in the tent camp with her young son and daughter.
Without access to electricity, Ms. al-Qudeiry, like many in Gaza, must cook over an open fire. The torrential rain has made that even more difficult, she said.
“How can we live like this? It is another kind of suffering that no one seems to care about,” Ms. al-Qudeiry said. “We have endured more than enough.”
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7) What ‘A House of Dynamite’ Didn’t Show
By Spencer Cohen, Nov. 15, 2025
Mr. Cohen is an editorial assistant in Opinion.
A mother and child in Hiroshima a few months after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945. Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
President Vladimir Putin of Russia has the dangerous habit of threatening the rest of the world with nuclear war when he isn’t getting the geopolitical respect he thinks he deserves. This keeps happening as he drags on the war in Ukraine.
The threats began as soon as the invasion started. It was Feb. 24, 2022, and Mr. Putin sent his troops into Ukraine, warning the West that a response would face consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history” — an opaque nuclear threat. His repeated nuclear blackmail over the coming days, months and now years has helped raise the risk of nuclear war to the highest in decades.
If he acted, even if he lobbed a single tactical warhead into Ukraine, the effects would be catastrophic: Tens of thousands of people, if not far more, would die. The global economy could tank. And the nuclear taboo, which has held tenuously since 1945, would end. The use of nuclear weapons could mean, as Mr. Putin said himself, “the destruction of our civilization.”
That all sounds bad. But can we really imagine what that would be like?
Against this backdrop, I can’t stop thinking about a scene in the new film “A House of Dynamite.” A clean-cut U.S. Navy officer sits in a limousine with the American president as a missile of unknown origin streaks toward the United States. The military, the officer says after pulling a binder from the nuclear football at his feet, “requests authority to initiate a counterstrike.” (Mild spoilers below.)
His delivery — mechanical, matter-of-act — masks the gravity of the moment: The binder is filled with potential targets on the other side of the globe for U.S. nuclear-tipped missiles. But the viewer never knows with certainty, not really, if the missile hits its mark in the United States or if the president responded in kind. The film is talked about as a warning, billed as a flashing red light of the rising danger, but in the end, it turns away. What might have been intended as an artful rejection of spectacle, perhaps an avoidance of lurid computer-generated imagery disaster movie thrills, is, I would argue, instead a dereliction of moral duty, a failure to vividly depict the aftermath of nuclear annihilation.
Ever since the end of the Cold War, filmmakers in Hollywood have mostly averted their gaze from the gruesome reality of nuclear devastation. The stuff that makes you squirm in your seat and sends you marching into the streets yelling, “No nukes,” has often happened just off screen, beyond our gaze. This might seem surprising given how eagerly filmmakers are willing to blow up the landmarks of New York City for a super hero war, or for an alien invasion, or even a zombie apocalypse.
Yet our task and perhaps our only hope to not destroy ourselves is “imagining the real,” that is, to confront the grotesque reality of nuclear death head on. That’s what the psychiatrist Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, who died recently, argued in the 1980s, when U.S. and Soviet arsenals reached astronomical heights, an incomprehensible abstraction that turned us numb. “Awareness, then, involves the full work and play of the imagination,” he wrote. “It means imagining danger that is real, but also imagining possibilities beyond that danger.”
“Oppenheimer,” the other serious recent movie billed as the calling card of our nuclear doom, wasn’t much better in showing us the human toll. By my count, the film clocks the effects of the weapons in Japan only twice: Through the face of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the bomb’s creator, and his compatriots, as they see images from Japan, where America dropped two A-bombs. And through his hallucination, when he imagines the skin of a woman peeling off and a charred body on the ground, as he gives a speech to rousing cheers for the bomb’s success. Perhaps the director, Christopher Nolan, thought that a more complete showing of the aftermath wasn’t needed.
Last year, the United Kingdom rejected the creation of a U.N. panel to study the effects of nuclear weapons, saying that they were already well known. But outside of a relatively small cadre of experts, the reality of nuclear weapons and their devastation is not well understood, apparently even at the highest levels of American government. Just last month, President Trump confusingly called for a restart in nuclear testing to match that of China and Russia. The only problem? Neither country explosively tests nuclear weapons, nor have they for three decades, same as the United States. Perhaps he was thinking about recent Russian tests of a nuclear-powered cruise missile and underwater drone, neither of which involved actually blowing up a nuclear device. (The Department of Energy has since tried to walk back Mr. Trump’s comment.)
The last time the possibility of nuclear annihilation visibly hung over humanity, during the Cold War, films like “Testament,” “Threads” and “The Day After” put the feared devastation onscreen and helped move the public needle against growing stockpiles. “The Day After,” a made-for-television movie from 1983, depicted Soviet warheads turning Kansas towns and farmland into a hellscape of rubble and death. “I’m glad I watched, because now I understand more about nuclear war,” a seventh grader named Matt told The Times soon after it aired on ABC. “I think I’d want to die instantly.” In the weeks after watching the broadcast, people were more likely to say they’d join the antinuclear movement than they had been before seeing it, according to a study from 1989.
The real-life effects of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have mostly remained undepicted in American film. “Bombshell,” a new documentary about the early attempt by the United States to control the story of those weapons, shows how the first major Hollywood film about the bomb, a docudrama from 1947 called “The Beginning or the End,” was largely a work of propaganda. The White House apparently pushed changes, as the Truman administration sought to cement the story of the A-bomb’s wartime use as necessary and downplay reports of illness in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes,” a 1990 made-for-television movie about the dropping of the bomb, and “White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima And Nagasaki,” Steven Okazaki’s 2007 HBO documentary, are two that had the courage to show what happened. But efforts to depict the aftermath of those American bombs — notably by the Smithsonian with an exhibition planned for 1995 — have at times triggered criticism that doing so is somehow unpatriotic. In the United States, World War II remains the “good war,” though recent polling has shown that Americans have a mixed view of the bombing. (One can devote a whole library to American films giving a bird’s-eye view of the strikes, and another to Japanese movies depicting the human toll on the ground.)
There is the fear that to depict horrors will inure us to brutality on the screen, especially in our viral age, where we face a steady stream of war footage and clips of assassinations on social media. The gruesome can become banal. It also risks downplaying just how bad it would actually be. Even “The Day After” ended with a title card that said the events depicted were “in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States.”
In a conversation with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Kathryn Bigelow, the director of “A House of Dynamite,” explained that for artistic reasons her film ended without depicting a nuclear weapon going off. “With an explosion at the end,” she said, “it would have been kind of all wrapped up neat, and you could point your finger — ‘It’s bad that happened.’” She let the viewers fill in the blank themselves. But it also meant she could avoid confronting viewers with traumatic violence.
Now, the director James Cameron, of “Titanic” and “Avatar” fame, is set to make a film adapted from the books “Ghosts of Hiroshima” and “The Last Train from Hiroshima,” about Tsutomu Yamaguchi, an unlucky soul who survived the American bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It could break what has seemingly become Hollywood’s unconscious censorship against grappling with the gruesome aftermath in the two cities.
Yet even Mr. Cameron has said that he is still figuring out how to “shield people from the horror, but still be honest.” The sad truth about Hiroshima and Nagasaki — as I’ve learned in numerous discussions with survivors — is that the most honest depiction would be uncomfortable. That confrontation with reality is what we need to prevent the past from turning into our future.
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8) U.S. Border Patrol Launches Operation in Charlotte
It is unclear how long the operation will last in North Carolina’s largest city, which has a growing immigrant population.
By Eduardo Medina and Bernard Mokam, Eduardo Medina reported from Charlotte, Nov. 15, 2025
Protesters march through downtown Charlotte in response to immigration enforcement activity by ICE agents. Credit...Jesse Barber for The New York Times
Federal agents began fanning out across immigrant enclaves in Charlotte, N.C., on Saturday and arresting people, expanding the Trump administration’s crackdown to another Democrat-led city.
Charlotte, the state’s largest city that has rapidly grown and diversified in the last decade, had been bracing all week for the arrival of U.S. Border Patrol, led by Gregory Bovino, a senior Border Patrol official who was in charge of similar operations in Chicago and Los Angeles earlier this year that drew significant criticism over their aggressive tactics.
On Saturday, Charlotte’s immigrant hubs were largely deserted as word spread that federal agents were in town.
El Salvadoran restaurants were closed. Street vendors who usually sell mangos on weekends were absent. And residents shared videos of masked Border Patrol agents arriving at small businesses and Home Depots across the city, searching for people.
It was not immediately clear how many undocumented immigrants had been detained as of early Saturday afternoon, but the reach of the operation, dubbed “Charlotte’s Web” by the agency, appeared to be spreading.
At about 12:40 p.m., Mr. Bovino, flanked by more than a dozen agents, was seen walking through a Home Depot parking lot on North Wendover Road. Many residents took out their phone and began recording. One woman asked what they were doing in Charlotte, in a store where people were simply shopping. An agent, who was masked, replied that they were searching for criminals. They were at the store for about five minutes and then drove off.
The Border Patrol’s presence in Charlotte, a relatively moderate Democrat-led city more than a thousand miles away from the Mexican border, has confounded many residents and local officials, who say they were blindsided by reports of their arrival.
In a joint statement, local officials, including Mayor Vi Lyles and Mark Jerrell, the chair of the Mecklenburg County commissioners, said that the operation was “causing unnecessary fear and uncertainty in our community as recent operations in other cities have resulted in people without criminal records being detained and violent protests being the result of unwarranted actions.”
Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, said in a statement that residents should remain peaceful in their protests, including one on Saturday afternoon that drew hundreds of people wrapped in Mexican flags.
“Public safety is the top priority for all of us in government — and that means fighting crime, not stoking fear or causing division,” Mr. Stein said. “We should all focus on arresting violent criminals and drug traffickers. Unfortunately, that’s not always what we have seen with ICE and Border Patrol Agents in Chicago and elsewhere around the country.”
Kyle Kirby, the chair of the Mecklenburg County Republican Party, said in a statement that “instead of supporting federal law enforcement efforts that keep our community safe,” Democratic officials had “chosen to inflame fear and spread misinformation.”
“They are demonizing the brave men and women of federal law enforcement for doing their jobs,” Mr. Kirby said. “Vilifying officers who risk their lives to enforce our nation’s laws erodes public trust and puts those serving on the front lines in greater danger.”
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg region, which has a bustling banking economy and a booming construction industry, has become one of the fastest growing areas in the country, and much of that has been driven by international migration, especially from Latin America. More than 50,000 immigrants have moved to the county since 2020. There are about 190,000 foreign-born residents in Mecklenburg County. The Hispanic population in the region has increased 22 percent since 2020.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement that agents were pursuing criminals to protect public safety.
“Americans should be able to live without fear of violent criminal illegal aliens hurting them, their families, or their neighbors,” the statement read. “We are surging DHS law enforcement to Charlotte to ensure Americans are safe and public safety threats are removed.”
Willy Aceituno, 46, said in an interview that he was heading to breakfast Saturday morning, before driving to a construction job, when agents approached him in a parking lot. They asked him if he was a United States citizen, he said. Mr. Aceituno, who has lived in Charlotte for 24 years and became a citizen around six years ago, engaged in a playful back-and-forth with the agents, in an effort to provide cover for migrants in the area who may not have had documentation.
“You want to take breakfast with me, I’ll pay,” said he told one agent. After 15 minutes of stalling, Mr. Aceituno, who is originally from Honduras, confirmed he was a citizen. The agents let him go. As he settled into his vehicle, another group of Border Patrol agents approached. They banged on his window, he said, demanding he provide documentation.
“I got papers,” he said.
Then, Mr. Aceituno said an agent broke the driver’s side window of his red Ford pickup and removed him from the truck. He was placed in handcuffs and put inside of a vehicle, where he was detained for about 20 minutes before agents let him go, he said.
“It’s terrible,” Mr. Aceituno said.
It remains unclear how long the operation in Charlotte will last. The federal agents are expected to head to New Orleans next. In Asheville, Mayor Esther Manheimer said on Friday that the city may also be a target in the future.
Rheba Hamilton, 73, said she tried to dissuade her landscaper, who she knew was undocumented, from hanging Christmas decorations at her home this weekend. But he agreed to the job, understanding the risks. “We will keep our fingers crossed,” Ms. Hamilton told him.
He arrived at her home just before 9 a.m. on Saturday. Within minutes, Border Patrol agents did, too.
“The pit of my stomach fell out,” Ms. Hamilton said.
She began to record the agents as they spoke to the landscaper in Spanish. After the agents noticed her phone, they got back in their vehicles and drove away, Ms. Hamilton said.
The landscaper then left his ladders and drove home. But soon, Ms. Hamilton said she heard that he went off to another job. He still needed to work.
Dave Philipps and Miriam Jordan contributed reporting.
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9) What’s More Dangerous Than India’s Frequent Heat Waves? Heat Stress.
Women who face long-term heat exposure in workplaces and homes are finding it takes a heavy toll on their health and income.
By Anupreeta Das, Visuals by Anindito Mukherjee, Nov. 16, 2025
Anupreeta Das spoke to farm workers, waste collectors and garment stitchers in Ahmedabad and rural Bihar, India, as well as scientists and doctors.
Nilam Kumari, 29, harvests rice on an October morning in the village of Sirkharia, Bihar. During the summer she tends to her crops early in the day, before the heat intensifies.
Every summer morning, Kantaben Kishen Parmar, a 45-year-old vegetable seller in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, settles onto a patch of ground the size of a large rug, sandwiched between the warming asphalt and a simmering sky, to sell peppers and tomatoes. She doesn’t get back home until 10 p.m.
Over the decades, summers have gotten longer and hotter — average temperatures can hover around 105 degrees Fahrenheit, or 40 Celsius, between March and June — but Ms. Parmar’s hours have remained the same. The toll on her health is growing.
Three years ago, she collapsed during an especially scorching April day and was rushed to a hospital, where she was treated for severe dehydration. Ms. Parmar, who is diabetic, has suffered from urinary tract infections, dizzy spells and heavy bleeding during her period, conditions that medical experts often attribute to heat stress.
“It’s hot from above, it’s hot from the pavement,” said Ms. Parmar as she deftly tossed green peppers onto a weighing scale with her right hand, which bears the tattoo of a heart pierced by an arrow encasing the letters “KK.” The other “K” stands for Kishen, her husband and partner in the business.
“Where are we poor folks going to go?” Ms. Parmar said. “We have no option but to sit here.”
More than a billion Indians face heat waves every year. Hundreds of millions of them work in the informal sector, toiling outdoors or doing piecework in a stifling factory, and are especially at risk as intense bouts of scorching weather become more frequent and higher temperatures stick around for longer.
The Indian government has started campaigns to raise public awareness, urging people to alter their work hours to escape the worst of the heat, drink plenty of water and electrolytes, seek shade and take frequent breaks. Cities and districts have adopted heat action plans to deal with heat waves.
But a far more threatening future looms, scientists and public health experts say: Prolonged exposure to hot weather, especially when combined with humidity, can hinder the ability of people to lead healthy, safe and productive lives. The physiological stress can lead to chronic illnesses and increase people’s chances of dying.
“That is much more of a public emergency than a heat wave,” said Satchit Balsari, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School. “In mission mode, you can take care of people,” he said, referring to the specific goals of heat action plans. But studying morbidity — how the quality of life can deteriorate under extreme heat — is essential to avert a long-term crisis, he said.
Adapting to climate change by addressing livelihoods, built environments and societies, and making them more resilient, is a central theme at COP 30, the ongoing U.N. Climate Change Conference in Belém, Brazil. In late October, Bill Gates shifted his stance on climate change, writing in a memo that rather than focus on reducing emissions, it would make more sense to put resources into improving the welfare of people facing the harshest effects of climate change.
Grasping India’s Challenges
The summer of 2024 was India’s hottest on record. This year, a heat wave enveloped parts of the country in April, surprising people with its early arrival and intensity. Temperatures hovered around 120 degrees in some places.
Highly developed countries like Japan have instituted new labor laws requiring employers to introduce cooling measures when temperatures cross a certain threshold. But India, which faces a much bigger challenge, has been slower to react.
Public health experts estimate that many more people die of heat-related causes in India than are reported by government agencies. While deaths can be recorded as heat-related when the causes are immediately identifiable, such as a heat stroke or a cardiac arrest on a very hot day, overworked doctors are not sufficiently trained to look for longer-term effects of heat stress.
“It’s like an iceberg,” said Dileep Mavalankar, head of the Indian Institute of Public Health Gandhinagar. “What you see is one-10th of the problem.”
Researchers have urged India to build a single database and uniform standards to determine what constitutes a heat-related death, and to develop plans to adapt to hotter and longer summers. Many also say it is necessary to incorporate more granular data so that people who work in hotter parts of a city — a tightly packed neighborhood or business district, for example — have information specific to them and can take precautions accordingly.
Capturing the impact of heat in a highly unequal society like India’s is the real challenge, Dr. Balsari said. “The street vendor’s experience is very different from the air-conditioned sari shop just behind her.”
Women Bear the Brunt
More than 90 percent of working women in India are in the informal sector. Some can lose as much as 60 percent of their income during the brutal summer months because their working hours are reduced by almost half, or they have to abandon their work, said Reema Nanavaty, who heads the Self-Employed Women’s Association, a labor union with more than 3 million members.
A day’s lost wages could mean one less meal — or no meal — that day, with cascading consequences, Ms. Nanavaty said. A worker might have to borrow money at high rates, or be unable to pay her rent. “Or they can’t afford to pay electricity bills, so when you really need fans for cooling down, your electricity supply is gone,” she said.
Hansaben Veijay Aahir, a waste collector, has become the primary breadwinner in her family of five since her husband lost his factory job. Ms. Aahir, 50, usually sets out from her house at 5:30 a.m., looking for discarded plastic bottles, newspapers and other flotsam that gets dumped overnight on the streets of Ahmedabad, one of India’s largest cities.
Because it can take her hours to find enough trash to sort and sell, she tried minimizing her heat exposure by starting before dawn. “But it’s hard to find trash in the dark and stray dogs have attacked,” she said.
Summers have gotten so much worse in the past five years that Ms. Aahir said she ends up losing a week’s worth of work each month because of dehydration and vomiting. Her already unstable income — she makes 200 rupees (just over $2) on a good day — dries up.
“If I earn daily, I eat daily, but if I miss a day’s work then I have to borrow money,” said Ms. Aahir, one of roughly 36,000 garbage collectors SEWA works with. She borrows from the association rather than go to moneylenders, who charge high interest rates.
Ms. Parmar, the vegetable vendor, also said her monthly income falls, to 10,000 rupees from 15,000 rupees, during summer. Asphalt road surface temperatures can reach 140 degrees or more in extreme heat. “Both me and my vegetables suffer,” she said.
Like many outdoor women workers, she has gotten U.T.I.s, which occur when dehydration along with undergarments and synthetic clothing that traps heat, allow bacteria to thrive. Ms. Parmar said she now uses a low wooden stool to avoid direct heat from the asphalt and wears cotton when she can.
Women in both rural and urban settings tend to hold their urine or drink less water when they are working because they lose less work time by minimizing bathroom breaks. Also, public facilities are not always accessible. Ms. Parmar said the toilet closest to her is about a half mile away, so she doesn’t go often.
No Respite Indoors
Since 2024, researchers at Harvard have been following the lives of nearly 300 informal women workers, mainly in Ahmedabad. The women agreed to wear Fitbits for the duration of the study, being conducted with SEWA, and have heat sensors installed in their homes. The Fitbits, along with smartphones given to the participants, track heart rates, sleep patterns and other data.
A counterintuitive finding was that between 6 p.m. and 10 a.m., when homes are expected to cool down, they are hotter than the outdoors. That creates a vicious cycle of poor sleep compounding fatigue for people laboring in very hot weather for months.
In September, Lucy Siers, a labor rights researcher at the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, visited nine garment factories across India that employed nearly 9,000 workers to study their working conditions. Ms. Siers found that hot conditions can be amplified in indoor manufacturing facilities because of such things as poor ventilation, heat-emitting machinery like dryers or irons, or workers packed too tightly on a factory floor.
“It’s a common misconception that indoor workers are protected from exposure to extreme stress because of heat,” Ms. Siers said.
Manufacturers are aware of the toll on their workers, but some are loath to make even basic fixes like adding natural ventilation, Ms. Siers said. Open windows could mean that dust and other debris could attach to the glue used to fuse fabrics, slowing the process.
Global fashion brands that buy the garments are not thinking about the impact of extreme heat on workers and whether supply chain modifications are required, Ms. Siers said. “It’s complete lack of awareness.”
‘You Have to Learn’
In Sirkharia, a village in Bihar — one of India’s hottest and poorest states — many people dread the onslaught of summer. Average temperatures in the region have inched upward in the last four decades, according to a recent study.
Lalita Devi, 60, said there have been more instances of fainting, dizziness and fatigue in the community starting around a decade ago, usually when people were out tending to their crops.
“The ground water becomes hot, and for that reason, I don’t want to go to the fields,” Ms. Devi said.
With their husbands away in search of work, many women are left to juggle farming, cooking for extended families and raising children.
Meena Kumari, a 28-year-old mother of four, said she finds herself yelling at the ceiling fan on hot nights. They bring some respite, but “after a point it doesn’t matter,” Ms. Kumari said. “The fan is just circulating hot air.”
Mohammad Sadullah, who works for the Rural Development Trust, a nonprofit that works with more than 5,000 households in the area, said there are long stretches during summer when the daytime temperature is at least 104 degrees. But initially, many farm workers did not understand the concept of dehydration or that it was linked to their dizzy spells and fatigue.
After he explained that it was essential to drink water, more women now carry plastic bottles of water to work, wrapping them in cloth and tucking them in the shade of plants. The farm workers also learned to make electrolytes using a mixture of water, sugar, salt, lemon and “muri,” or puffed rice, a cheap source of carbohydrates.
“The weather isn’t going to understand that you need to rehydrate,” Mr. Sadullah said he tells them. “So you have to learn.”
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10) In a Brutal Mississippi Jail, Inmates Say They Were Enlisted as Enforcers
High-ranking inmates known as trusties were ordered to do guards’ bidding, former inmates and guards said, and the culture of violence in the jail went straight to the top.
By Brian Howey, Mukta Joshi and Nate Rosenfield, Photographs by Rory Doyle, Published Nov. 14, 2025, Updated Nov. 16, 2025
This article was reported in collaboration with Mississippi Today and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting as part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship. To listen to an audio version of this investigation, visit the Reveal website.
The Rankin County Adult Detention Center in Brandon, Miss. Rory Doyle for The New York Times
For years, guards in a jail outside Jackson, Miss., terrorized those in their care, according to dozens of people who say they endured, witnessed or participated in violent assaults.
Guards dragged inmates into blind corners, where cameras couldn’t capture acts of violence. They beat people behind closed doors. And they encouraged favored inmates to join in on the brutality.
Former inmates and guards said the violence at the Rankin County jail created a culture of fear and was widely accepted by officials as a way of keeping order, an investigation by The New York Times and Mississippi Today has found.
More than a dozen former inmates recounted being beaten for nonviolent infractions, like talking back to guards or getting caught with contraband. Many said a special group of inmates, known as trusties, helped guards beat troublemakers, lending fists whenever needed. Sometimes, the jail’s highest-ranking officials instigated the punishments or handed them down themselves, according to former guards and inmates.
The Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, which runs the jail, has a documented history of brazen violence. Last year, the Justice Department began investigating the agency for potential civil rights violations after The Times and Mississippi Today revealed that a group of detectives and patrol deputies, some of whom called themselves the “Goon Squad,” had been torturing suspected drug users for nearly 20 years.
This portrait of life inside the Rankin County jail is drawn from interviews with more than 70 former inmates. Many of their descriptions of widespread violence are supported by medical records and photographs, as well as incident reports written by guards and a video that shows guards shocking a man with an electrified vest.
Four former guards, three of whom asked to remain anonymous, also said they had witnessed unjustified beatings by other guards and trusties. Most described the violence as a weekly occurrence.
In a statement, the department’s attorney, Jason Dare, called the reporting “baseless.” The Rankin County jail, he wrote, “is one of the cleanest and best-run jails in Mississippi, with jailers never having been found to use excessive force in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
After reviewing the findings, Sean Tindell, the commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, said on Wednesday that agents from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation had been assigned to investigate the allegations.
Since 2013, at least 11 inmates from the jail have sued the department, alleging that they had been assaulted by guards or trusties. The vast majority represented themselves, and most of the lawsuits were dismissed because of missed deadlines and court fees, or other technicalities.
The attacks, described in the lawsuits and in interviews with former guards and inmates, ranged in severity from slaps and whippings to brutal beatings that left inmates with bloody wounds and broken bones. Three guards and nearly two dozen former inmates said that trusties and guards would purposefully drag inmates into areas with no surveillance cameras before beating them.
Morgan Curtis, a former trusty who has been in and out of the jail since 2015, said the way guards would order trusties to attack inmates was “like a command to a pack of dogs.”
In interviews, nine former trusties, most of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation, admitted to helping guards beat inmates. They said the highest-ranking trusties were expected to back up guards during volatile situations or attack inmates so that guards would not have to do so themselves.
This group of trusties, recognizable by their blue jumpsuits, earned a nickname: the Blue Wave.
One former trusty described an incident from 2020. He said that on the orders of guards, he beat an inmate who had flooded his cell, kicking him repeatedly.
The following year, the jail’s top administrator, Barry Vaughn, confronted an inmate who had failed a drug test. Mr. Vaughn punched him so hard, the inmate said, that it broke his nose and knocked out two dental crowns.
Christian Dedmon, one of five former Rankin County deputies who was sentenced to federal prison for torturing two Black men in 2024, said that while he was working at the department he had watched Mr. Vaughn beat inmates in his office. A former guard described seeing several similar beatings. Mr. Vaughn declined to comment on the allegations.
In 2019, a man who briefly escaped the jail was lifted into the air by his throat and choked by a sheriff’s deputy, several inmates and a guard said. Bryan Bailey, the sheriff of the department, later bragged about the incident, according to Mr. Dedmon.
Mr. Dedmon has sent hundreds of emails from a federal prison in New Jersey, describing how his willingness to partake in violence helped him rise through the ranks. He has said that he wanted it known that the brutalities he committed were part of a deeply ingrained culture at the department.
He previously shared information about the use of taxpayer-funded equipment at Sheriff Bailey’s family farm, allegations that led to an investigation by the state auditor.
“They made me powerful and respected, made me actually feel like somebody, like I had done a good job,” Mr. Dedmon wrote. “It’s OK to beat drug addicts, it’s OK to take from the taxpayer, so why would I not mirror them?”
Beatings behind closed doors
The Rankin County Adult Detention Center is tucked behind the courthouse on the main drag of Brandon, a town of about 25,000 people with one of the lowest crime rates in the state.
Several hundred inmates, many of them accused of drug crimes and other nonviolent offenses, live in rows of beige cells stacked two stories high. Many have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting their day in court.
Over ten months, reporters examined 69 alleged incidents of violence against inmates at the jail that occurred from 2012 to 2024.
They included 21 encounters in which guards documented that they had used force against inmates, and why, in incident reports. These reports are routinely filed whenever guards encounter issues. Their descriptions of violence differed greatly from what inmates said had happened.
But in a number of cases, reporters were able to interview eyewitnesses who supported the accounts of the victims. In several cases, medical records corroborated the injuries that inmates described.
In the case of Larry Buckhalter, the violence was filmed — by a guard.
In 2018, Mr. Buckhalter began a one-year sentence for possessing a small amount of cocaine. He was intellectually disabled, his family said, and people often took advantage of him.
According to three former guards who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Mr. Buckhalter was nicknamed “Crying Larry” by guards and other inmates because he had a habit of pestering jail staff with small requests.
One day, he asked for a Coca-Cola. A cellphone video obtained by The Times and Mississippi Today shows Mr. Buckhalter sitting quietly in a chair, strapped into a stun vest that is typically used to control violent inmates during court hearings.
Off camera, a man jokes that Mr. Buckhalter is going to bite off his tongue. A woman, who is also off camera, tells Mr. Buckhalter to give his consent.
Mr. Buckhalter takes a deep breath. “My name Larry and I volunteer to this,” he says.
The vest is activated. Mr. Buckhalter screams as his body convulses.
“Now you get a Coke,” the woman says. “It’s all over! I’m so proud of you, Larry!”
In his statement, Mr. Dare, the department attorney, did not address the guards’ actions. He criticized the reporting as “alleged rumors by unnamed sources who have no personal, first-hand knowledge of events,” and pointed out that reporters had not spoken to Mr. Buckhalter, who died in 2021.
Mr. Tindell, Mississippi’s public safety commissioner, called the video “appalling and utterly unacceptable.”
David Fathi, the director of the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that using force can be justified in certain circumstances, like if an inmate poses a threat; but doing so without cause or as punishment, he said, is “categorically inappropriate.” Corporal punishment in U.S. jails and prisons was deemed unconstitutional in the 1960s.
Mr. Fathi reviewed several incident reports filed by guards. He said the reasons they cited for using force were so vague that they should have raised red flags to supervisors, and that the justifications fell far short of the typical threshold followed by jails and prisons.
In one such report, a guard wrote that he had struck an inmate, Dustin Rives, in the face because Mr. Rives had verbally threatened another guard. The blow broke Mr. Rives’s jaw, medical records show. Another report stated that guards struck Carvis Johnson and threw him to the floor in 2020 because he yelled threats and turned toward them after being ordered to face a wall.
For years, the man in charge of monitoring the jail was Mr. Vaughn, a captain who was recently promoted to undersheriff, making him second-in-command of the sheriff’s department.
According to a former deputy, a former guard and 14 former inmates, Mr. Vaughn often beat inmates who broke the rules, slapping and whipping them during interrogations in his office.
“ When you walked through his door, he had a shelf. And on the side of the shelf, he had like a wooden stick, a wooden baseball bat, two or three antennas,” said Cameron Kennedy, a former inmate who said Mr. Vaughn had questioned him on several occasions.
In June 2021, Mr. Vaughn called Mr. Kennedy and several other trusties who had failed drug tests into his office, one by one.
When Mr. Kennedy refused to explain where they had gotten the drugs, he said, Mr. Vaughn slapped him hard enough to give him a black eye.
Three of the other men who had failed drug tests said Mr. Vaughn had punched or whipped them with a car antenna. One of the men was Woodrow Lamont Lewis, the trusty who said Mr. Vaughn had knocked out his dental crowns that day. The men said they also saw other inmates return bloodied and bruised from Mr. Vaughn’s office.
A few months after the failed drug test, Mr. Kennedy was caught with a cellphone, an incident report shows. Mr. Vaughn handcuffed him to a chair and struck his shins and thighs with a car antenna, he said.
“He never did stop,” said Mr. Kennedy. “I’m talking about, like, 10 or 15 minutes, rapping me with it.”
Mr. Dedmon, the former deputy who is in prison, wrote in an email that he once saw Mr. Vaughn repeatedly punch an inmate who had smuggled drugs into the jail.
Mr. Vaughn directed reporters to speak with the department’s attorney, who denied the allegations.
Cigarettes and ‘free world’ chicken
Some of the country’s first trusty programs began in the early 1900s in Mississippi prisons.
Places like Parchman, a notorious prison in the Mississippi Delta, were known to select trusties from among their most violent inmates. The trusties, armed with guns and whips, were tasked with disciplining other inmates or forcing them to perform backbreaking work in cotton fields.
A federal court ruling in 1972 deemed trusty-on-prisoner violence unconstitutional, leading to the widespread dismantling of the programs in prisons across the nation.
Today, modern versions of trusty programs are common in county jails, though participants are generally banned from using physical force. These programs put nonviolent offenders to work, helping them learn job skills.
In Rankin County, many former trusties spoke glowingly about the program, crediting it with turning their lives around.
“It was the biggest blessing in my life,” said Cameron McKenzie, a former trusty. “I’ve been out now 20 months. I’m married, got full custody of both my kids, just bought a house, good job, you name it.”
Many inmates in the county jail are there only for short periods, while they await sentencing, but trusties usually serve their entire sentence in the facility, rising through the ranks over months or even years.
The most senior trusties — those who earn blue suits — have far better living conditions than other inmates. Former trusties said they slept in their own cellblock, in unlocked cells, and sometimes got passes to visit their families.
Many could roam the facility freely, play video games and work outside the jail. One former trusty, Cameron McCaskill, said he was allowed to keep a pet dog and order pizza.
“A blue suit is unrestricted,” Sheriff Bailey said during a 2020 interview with a Mississippi lobbying group. “Once they get a blue suit status, that is almost like being an employee here.”
Mr. Dare said trusties were not allowed to use force.
“ I do not believe that is specifically spelled out in a policy,” he said in an interview. “I do know it is a practice that trusties do not go hands-on.”
But several former guards and participants of the program said that the jail staff expected some trusties to provide extra muscle in exchange for their privileges.
“ If something is going on with the officer and they need assistance, you need to be there,” said Mr. Lewis, the former trusty. “If you ain’t there to help them, whether they are winning or losing, then you already know you’re next.”
Three others said trusties were rewarded, sometimes with “free world” food, for joining the violence.
“People would do just about anything for a cigarette, or a box of Church’s chicken with a honey biscuit,” said Phillip Smith, a former trusty. “That was the motivation of the Blue Wave.”
Dozens of former inmates, including many who participated in the program, said they had witnessed trusties hitting or kicking other inmates, or holding them down while guards beat them.
Of the 11 inmates who have sued the sheriff’s department since 2013, five said in their lawsuits that trusties attacked them with guards. All but one had their lawsuits dismissed.
Carvis Johnson, an inmate who had a long history of disciplinary infractions, claimed in a 2020 lawsuit that he had been beaten by guards and trusties. Court records show that Mr. Johnson settled his lawsuit, but the department declined to provide further details about the settlement.
Incident reports show that a confrontation began after Mr. Johnson shoved feces under his cell door and broke a sprinkler, flooding his cell. Trusties were brought in to clean up the mess. Guards led Mr. Johnson out of his cell and knocked him to the floor after he verbally threatened them, the reports show.
In an interview, Brock Reed, a former trusty, said a guard told a group of trusties to give Mr. Johnson “a sample” and that they should beat him because they would be the ones stuck cleaning up his mess.
Mr. Reed said the guards led Mr. Johnson to a corner widely known for being a camera blind spot. A supervisor’s routine review of the incident confirmed that there was no security camera footage of what happened, in part because “hallway camera does not show where inmate was in the hall.”
When Mr. Johnson hit the floor, Mr. Reed kicked him in the hip and lower back, he said.
“I wasn’t going to be the one trusty to tell the police, ‘No, I’m not doing this,’” he said. “I know how they look at you for that.”
Christopher Mack, a former inmate, sued the department last year, claiming that trusties and guards beat him in 2021. When he made bail and left the jail with twin black eyes the next day, Mr. Mack said, Sheriff Bailey approached him and asked who had caused his injuries.
“ I looked at him and said, ‘Mr. Bailey, you know who did this to me, your officers and trusties did this to me,’” Mr. Mack said.
The sheriff cursed under his breath, Mr. Mack said, and stormed off.
A battered escapee and a bragging sheriff
In September 2019, William Keith Richards found out what could happen to trusties who took advantage of their freedom.
Mr. Richards, a blue-suit, had nearly completed his sentence when he walked out of the jail one Friday. Officials did not notice he was gone until he missed church that Sunday, an incident report shows.
When Mr. Richards was caught, other blue-suit trusties were ordered to gather at a garage entrance of the jail, where Sheriff Bailey berated them for not informing guards of the escape, four former trusties said in interviews.
Sheriff Bailey told the trusties that they should take a good look at Mr. Richards, because he was the reason they were about to lose their special privileges, two of them said.
Mr. Richards was escorted back to the jail by Deputy Wes Shivers, a 6-foot-8 former U.F.C. fighter. After they arrived, Mr. Shivers lifted the inmate into the air by his throat and choked him, said two former trusties and a former guard. In an interview, Mr. Shivers confirmed that he had returned Mr. Richards to the jail but denied choking him.
It is unclear whether Sheriff Bailey saw the incident or when he left the room. Mr. Shivers said he could not recall whether the sheriff was nearby when he arrived with Mr. Richards.
A group of guards and trusties dragged Mr. Richards into the jail’s dressing room, which was known to not have cameras, and beat him, according to four former inmates familiar with the incident.
They saw Mr. Richards in the days following, and said his face was swollen and his neck was ringed with bruises.
“They did a number on him,” Mr. Reed said.
Mr. Richards declined to comment for this article, citing fears for his safety. Mr. Bailey declined a request to comment, deferring to the department’s attorney. In a statement, Mr. Dare, who called the reporting “baseless,” did not address whether Mr. Bailey was present during the incident.
The department did not produce reports detailing Mr. Richards’s capture despite repeated requests.
During email exchanges with reporters, Mr. Dedmon recounted the sheriff bragging to him and others about how Mr. Shivers had choked an inmate who had escaped.
“Bailey used to talk about it,” Mr. Dedmon wrote. “I can just remember Bailey saying, ‘Wes held him up against the wall with one hand.’”
A ‘satisfactory response’
The Times and Mississippi Today obtained formal grievance documents from lawyers who sued the department, providing a rare window into how jail officials handled inmate complaints. From 2018 to 2022, eight inmates filed grievances that described assaults by guards or trusties.
In 2022, Mr. Rives, the inmate whose jaw was broken by a guard, filed a grievance. Jail incident reports show that after Mr. Rives was struck, guards strapped him into a restraint chair overnight and then locked him in an isolation cell for 25 days. It was there where he filed his grievance, saying he had not been taken to the hospital. His jaw was infected by the time he was hospitalized and required surgery, according to medical records.
“ It never healed,” he said. “ If I take a bite out of a hamburger, it’ll lock up and pop and grind like you wouldn’t believe.”
A report from Mr. Rives’s grievance file shows that a supervisor closed his complaint three days after it had been filed, saying the department had documented the incident and provided a “satisfactory response,” which included scheduling a hospital visit for Mr. Rives and informing him that he could not press criminal charges against the guard while incarcerated.
Mr. Rives said the department did not contact him again.
The report does not indicate whether the guard who broke Mr. Rives’s jaw, Jordan McQueary, was disciplined or questioned about the incident. Mr. Rives is among at least nine inmates who have filed complaints or federal lawsuits claiming they were assaulted by Mr. McQueary, who still works at the department.
Last year, the department honored Mr. McQueary for his “outstanding” work.
He did not respond to requests for comment.
At least six other grievances were closed under similar circumstances, with no indication that the guards or trusties accused of violence were interviewed or disciplined.
Supervisors also listed “satisfactory response” as the reason for closing three other complaints. The forms do not define the term, and department representatives did not respond to requests for clarification.
Defending the trusty program
Two former trusties who spoke to The Times and Mississippi Today about their experiences said they have since been confronted by jail officials about their interviews.
John Phillips, a former trusty who said he witnessed and participated in violence between 2017 and 2021, was brought back to the Rankin County jail in August to face new criminal charges.
While there, he was taken to Mr. Vaughn’s office, where Mr. Vaughn and Mr. Dare questioned him about what he had told the publications.
Mr. Phillips then wrote and signed a statement contradicting the comments he had made to reporters. His lawyer was not present during the meeting, Mr. Phillips and Mr. Dare said.
“I never seen anything that the news reporters are talking about when spoken about inmates on inmates or the Blue Wave,” the statement reads, according to a copy provided by Mr. Dare. “There is no wrong doing at the Rankin jail or in the program.”
In a later interview, Mr. Phillips stressed that his statements to reporters had been true, and that he had felt pressured by the officials to write the letter. Mr. Dare said he had not pressured Mr. Phillips. He provided a recording of a portion of the August interaction in which Mr. Phillips says he is giving his statement voluntarily.
Mr. Dare said that he had collected similar statements from several other former trusties, but he declined to share their names.
“I sit down and try to meet with folks, figure out what they know,” he said in an interview last month. “I’m trying to defend the trusty program, that’s all.”
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