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) Judge Permanently Blocks National Guard Deployments to Portland for ICE Protests
With her temporary block expiring, Judge Karin Immergut said the Trump administration had failed to prove that protesters were hampering President Trump’s policies.
By Anna Griffin, Reporting from Portland, Ore., Nov. 7, 2025
Law enforcement officers guarding a federal immigration center in Portland, Ore., during protests last month. Jordan Gale for The New York Times
President Trump overstepped his authority when he sought to deploy National Guard troops to Portland, Ore., to protect the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office there, a federal judge ruled on Friday, issuing a permanent block on troop deployments to the city in response to anti-ICE demonstrations.
Judge Karin J. Immergut of U.S. District Court, who was nominated to the bench by Mr. Trump, had previously issued a preliminary injunction blocking the president’s order federalizing National Guard soldiers in Oregon in a lawsuit that was brought by the States of Oregon and California and the City of Portland.
In her final 106-page ruling, Judge Immergut rejected arguments from government lawyers that protests at the ICE building made it impossible for federal officers to carry out immigration enforcement, represented a rebellion or raised the threat of rebellion. She also found that the attempt to use National Guard soldiers in Oregon had violated the U.S. Constitution’s 10th Amendment, which gives states any powers not expressly assigned to the federal government.
“The evidence demonstrates that these deployments, which were objected to by Oregon’s governor and not requested by the federal officials in charge of protection of the ICE building, exceeded the president’s authority,” she wrote.
Judge Immergut also disputed the president’s claim that antifa, at least in Portland, is an organized and cohesive group working against the federal government. She said testimony from the regional director for ICE about the level of damage at the Oregon facility or how disruptive the protests were was not believable, noting that demonstrators had “minimally impeded” federal workers. She added that her ruling does not preclude future efforts by the president to deploy the National Guard to Oregon.
Federal lawyers indicated at a three-day trial last week that if Judge Immergut ruled against them, they intended to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. With the legal battle expected to continue, Judge Immergut stayed the portion of her ruling that would have reverted control of federalized guard soldiers back to Oregon’s governor for 14 days, essentially maintaining the status quo. A similar case involving the use of National Guard troops in Illinois is currently before the Supreme Court.
Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon, a Democrat, praised the ruling, saying it “validates the facts on the ground.”
“Oregon does not want or need military intervention, and President Trump’s attempts to federalize the guard is a gross abuse of power,” she said in a statement.
But the Department of Homeland Security objected to the judge’s characterization of the protests in Portland.
“President Trump is using his lawful authority to direct the National Guard to protect federal assets and personnel in Portland following months of violent riots where officers have been assaulted and doxxed by left-wing rioters,” Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary with the department, said in a statement. “The president’s lawful actions will make Portland safer.”
Daily demonstrations began outside Portland’s ICE building in early June, after the Trump administration ramped up immigration enforcement. The crowds have generally been small — usually fewer than a few dozen people — and peaceful, but protesters have occasionally blocked the building’s driveway. They typically dispersed when federal officers in riot gear appeared.
A few confrontations, however, have turned violent, with federal officers using tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper-spray balls. The protests, now into their fifth month, have strained the Federal Protective Service, the agency charged with guarding U.S. government buildings.
On Sept. 27, Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social that he planned to use “full force” to protect “war-ravaged Portland.” Later that day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked Governor Kotek to activate 200 National Guard troops to help federal officers at the ICE building. Ms. Kotek refused, and the Trump administration responded by federalizing the soldiers and preparing to send them into Portland.
The lawsuit argued that the president had failed to demonstrate that the deployment was justified. Under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, a president may use the National Guard on U.S. soil in only three circumstances: a foreign invasion; a rebellion, or threat of a rebellion; or if the laws of the nation cannot be enforced with existing resources.
During the trial last week, administration lawyers argued that the last two conditions applied in Oregon.
In her final ruling, Judge Immergut disagreed on both counts and said the demonstrations, with a few notable exceptions, were largely peaceful and not as disruptive nor as dangerous as federal officials suggested.
The judge also wrote that she had been “deeply troubled” to discover that a small squad of Oregon National Guard troops were deployed at the ICE building after she had temporarily blocked their arrival in October.
At trial, federal lawyers acknowledged that a group of nine Guard soldiers had worked a shift at the facility on Oct. 4 starting in the late morning and stretching into late evening — after the judge had issued a temporary restraining order at 3:40 p.m. A few hours after the order, the administration flew 200 California National Guard troops to Oregon, apparently to replace the Oregon soldiers who had been barred from the ICE building.
“In other words,” she wrote, “defendants had time to order and coordinate the transport of federalized California National Guardsmen from Los Angeles to Portland but needed more time to communicate with the Oregon National Guardsmen at the Portland ICE facility.”
Judge Immergut wrote that while she was not citing the federal government for contempt of court, “this court expects defendants will provide further explanation when ordered to do so.”
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2) How the Trump Administration Is Giving Even More Tax Breaks to the Wealthy
The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service are issuing rules that provide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax relief to big companies and the ultrarich.
By Jesse Drucker, Nov. 8, 2025
Jesse Drucker has been investigating the tax strategies of large companies and the ultrawealthy for nearly 20 years. He reported from New York City.
“The administration is rapidly gutting a 2022 law intended to ensure that a sliver of the country’s most profitable corporations pay at least some federal income tax. …It was projected to raise $222 billion over a decade. But the succession of notices the Treasury and I.R.S. have issued beginning this summer means the tax could bring in a fraction of that. These breaks come in addition to the roughly $4 trillion package of tax cuts that President Trump signed into law in July. The legislation, passed entirely by Republicans, heavily benefits businesses and the ultrawealthy. It is projected to add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit and came with steep cuts to health care for the elderly and food stamps for the poorest Americans.”
Congressional Republicans celebrated the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July. The legislation provided roughly $4 trillion in tax cuts. Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times
With little public scrutiny, the Trump administration is handing out hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to some of the country’s most profitable companies and wealthiest investors.
The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, through a series of new notices and proposed regulations, are giving breaks to giant private equity firms, crypto companies, foreign real estate investors, insurance providers and a variety of multinational corporations.
The primary target: The administration is rapidly gutting a 2022 law intended to ensure that a sliver of the country’s most profitable corporations pay at least some federal income tax. The provision, the corporate alternative minimum tax, was passed by Democrats and signed into law by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. It sought to stop corporations like Microsoft, Amazon and Johnson & Johnson from being able to report big profits to shareholders yet low tax liabilities to the federal government. It was projected to raise $222 billion over a decade.
But the succession of notices the Treasury and I.R.S. have issued beginning this summer means the tax could bring in a fraction of that.
These breaks come in addition to the roughly $4 trillion package of tax cuts that President Trump signed into law in July. The legislation, passed entirely by Republicans, heavily benefits businesses and the ultrawealthy. It is projected to add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit and came with steep cuts to health care for the elderly and food stamps for the poorest Americans.
With its various tax relief provisions, the administration is now effectively adding hundreds of billions of dollars in new breaks for big businesses and investors. The Treasury is empowered to write rules to help the I.R.S. carry out tax laws passed by Congress. But the aggressive actions of the Trump administration raise questions about whether it is exceeding its legal authority.
Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans have attacked federal workers as instruments of the “deep state,” exercising power beyond anything authorized by the law. Now the administration is doing the same thing, several tax experts said, undermining laws that hit the ultrawealthy and big companies.
“Treasury has clearly been enacting unlegislated tax cuts,” said Kyle Pomerleau, a tax economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “Congress determines tax law. Treasury undermines this constitutional principle when it asserts more authority over the structure of the tax code than Congress provides it.”
The alternative minimum tax isn’t the administration’s only effort to roll back taxes on large businesses and wealthy individuals. Last month, the Treasury and I.R.S. granted new tax relief to foreign investors in U.S. real estate. In August, they withdrew regulations to prevent multinationals from avoiding taxes by claiming duplicate losses in multiple countries at once. And, as The New York Times previously reported, the Treasury and I.R.S. have rolled back a crackdown on an aggressive tax shelter used by big companies, including Occidental Petroleum and AT&T. That amounts to another $100 billion in cuts — and likely far more, according to tax advisers.
Changes like these are not widely publicized by the Treasury, but are closely followed by tax planners for the country’s biggest corporations — who are applauding the new guidelines. In notes to clients, advisers at KPMG celebrated the new “array of choices” available for investors seeking to avoid the corporate alternative minimum tax. They noted that the Treasury’s moves provided “significant flexibility” for clients to trim their bills, allowing them to “cherry-pick” the rules that best suit their needs.
A Treasury spokesman said the new moves were “a practical approach that supports American investment and competitiveness” and were meant to replace the Biden administration’s “compliance maze that would have buried taxpayers in red tape.” The spokesman did not address the issue of whether the Treasury was exceeding its legal authority.
The Treasury’s actions are probably contributing hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal deficit, tax experts said. That is on top of the trillions that the legislation signed by Mr. Trump in July is already adding to the deficit. Yet unlike laws passed by Congress, Treasury is under no obligation to publicly account for revenue lost by its actions — such as cutting spending to offset the money no longer being collected.
Doing it through the Treasury means “you can just give away the goodies to one group, without having to take back anything from another,” said Daniel Hemel, a law professor at New York University. This loophole, he said, is one “that previous administrations have exploited and which the Trump administration is exploiting more aggressively.”
The actions by Treasury over the past few months are an accelerated version of what the agency did during the first Trump administration: Regulators killed off efforts to crack down on a lucrative estate tax avoidance strategy, and watered down new taxes on multinational companies in the 2017 Republican tax package.
Big companies effectively keep two sets of books — one for investors and another for the I.R.S. The profits they report to the I.R.S. permit various deductions that can bring a firm’s tax rate far below the 21 percent corporate tax rate.
A holy grail of tax planning is figuring out a deduction that businesses can claim on their tax return — but one that they don’t report to investors, which would dent their profits, potentially hurt their stock price and thus depress compensation paid to executives. In 2021, the Biden administration was unable to get Congress to sign on to an international plan to tax multinational corporations. So the Democratic-led Congress revived an old idea to potentially achieve similar results by imposing a tax on the same profits that corporations report to their investors.
That alternative minimum tax was part of a 2022 domestic policy law called the Inflation Reduction Act. The new tax would apply to big corporations with an effective tax rate below 15 percent.
Not everyone viewed the new tax positively. “But it’s a thing that they were able to do at that moment in time,” said Kimberly Clausing, a top Biden administration Treasury tax official, and now a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The original proposal was relatively simple. Limited to a tiny group of corporations averaging profits of more than $1 billion a year, it would require I.R.S. auditors to look at the income reported to shareholders. If the companies paid taxes at a rate of less than 15 percent on those earnings, the new tax would kick in. It would hit as few as 80 corporations, according to one study.
Industry lobbyists swung into action, and Democrats in Congress began carving out enormous exceptions, permitting deductions for, say, businesses investing in heavy machinery and wireless spectrum used by the likes of T-Mobile and Verizon.
As a result of changes like these, the new tax’s projected revenue dropped to $222 billion from $319 billion, according to congressional estimates.
The amount of revenue is expected to shrink even more, in part because of the Treasury’s actions.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that Mr. Trump signed into law in July provided well over $1 trillion in relief for big companies when they calculate their income tax bills. But those breaks didn’t extend to the separate calculation that corporations must make for their alternative minimum tax bill. As a result, the regular tax bills of many businesses promise to drop so sharply — below 15 percent — that they could be newly subject to the alternative minimum tax.
The new law could have swept in two of the biggest crypto firms, Coinbase and Strategy. In response, they sought rule changes for calculating the minimum tax. Three high-powered legal advisers — Michael Desmond, who served as the I.R.S. chief counsel in the first Trump administration; Andrew Strelka, formerly senior tax counsel in the Biden administration; and Eugene Scalia, the labor secretary in the first Trump administration — pushed to exempt “mark to market” gains reported to investors. Those gains reflect the increase in value of the investments held by companies that haven’t been sold yet.
On Sept. 30, the I.R.S. granted their request, explicitly citing “digital assets.” Big crypto companies “have been granted a reprieve,” lawyers at Vedder Price wrote.
Strategy declared within hours that it “no longer expects to become subject to” the minimum tax, after previously disclosing a potential multibillion-dollar bill under the new tax.
Coinbase said in a statement that it supported the Trump administration’s approach to the regulations for administering the minimum tax. Strategy did not respond to a request for comment.
The crypto companies “owe tax and they’re not happy about it, so they’re going to the Trump administration for a special carve-out,” complained Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee.
Some energy firms are already benefiting, too. Cheniere Energy, the giant natural gas exporter, disclosed in a securities filing last month that, thanks to the most recent Treasury notice, it was entitled to a refund of $380 million of previously paid alternative minimum tax.
Private equity firms are yet another beneficiary. Beginning in early 2023, the industry giant Blackstone pressed for a number of provisions to be included in the regulations to administer the minimum tax.
This summer, Blackstone succeeded. Much of the recent guidance grants Blackstone’s requests, giving private equity firms enormous flexibility to calculate their bills.
A Blackstone spokeswoman declined to comment.
The regulations also provide new flexibility for insurance companies in using so-called tax losses. For one, the new rules permit some insurers to use those losses to reduce their bills under the minimum tax — even for prior years.
“They’re effectively repealing the statute,” said Monte Jackel, a tax lawyer and former I.R.S. official, referring to the minimum tax law.
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3) Trump’s Vision of a Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac Upends an American Ideal
President Trump’s demolish first, ask-questions-later approach highlights a tension involved in a bipartisan desire to streamline the building process.
By Michael Kimmelman, Nov. 8, 2025
Demolition work at the East Wing of the White House in October. Doug Mills/The New York Times
President Trump is gunning to be the nation’s redecorator-in-chief.
He gilded the Oval Office, paved the Rose Garden and held up a grapefruit-size model of an “Arc de Trump” to face the Jefferson Memorial. In October, he issued “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” an executive order reviving a first Trump term initiative.
Even as Trump tried to cut food assistance during the shutdown, he showed off the new marble bathroom he designed for the Lincoln bedroom the other day.
But his biggest move, provoking bipartisan shock, was unleashing the wrecking balls without warning on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to make room for a behemoth ballroom.
Republicans and Democrats don’t see eye-to-eye about much today. But they seem to agree on the nation’s need to build things again by cutting through the mountains of red tape that federal, state and local governments have accrued to offset unchecked, top-down authority figures from bygone days, like Robert Moses, New York City’s omnipotent planning czar.
Moses’s imperial excesses and ruthlessness contributed to a cultural shift in America during the 1970s. The pendulum swung from the Powers That Be toward People Power.
Now President Trump’s demolish first, ask-questions-later approach to the East Wing highlights the unresolved tension involved in any push to get stuff done by streamlining checks and balances: How can this be accomplished without nudging the pendulum too far back in the other direction?
First saying the ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building,” Mr. Trump in October suddenly razed the White House East Wing, recalling an incident from his “Bonfire of the Vanities” days in New York.
In 1979, Bonwit Teller, the Fifth Avenue department store, was hemorrhaging cash. It put up for sale its midrise limestone and granite home designed by Warren & Wetmore, the same architects who gave the city Grand Central Terminal.
Mr. Trump, a 33-year-old real estate developer at the time, bought the building for $15 million. His plan was to tear it down and erect Trump Tower. Mr. Trump promised he would save and donate some prized limestone friezes on the facade that the Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted, if the works could be safely removed at a reasonable cost.
Then the jackhammers arrived, unannounced, pulverizing the decorative friezes along with some intricate Art Deco grillwork and provoking an avalanche of headlines. Mr. Trump dismissed the criticism, insisting the friezes were worthless, despite what the Met’s art experts said, and proclaimed the blowback a “fantastic promotion” for his glassy, gaudy apartment tower.
There was a footnote to the story. Mr. Trump’s demolition crew, a mix of Polish Americans and undocumented immigrants, filed suit because of “horrid and terrible” working conditions. After 15 years of litigation, Mr. Trump paid to settle the case.
Today, he has yet to lay out a clear design plan for the capital. He’s tinkering and trolling. The other day, he instructed federal workers to paint the Kennedy Center’s gold columns white. That particular shade of gold, Mr. Trump explained to followers on Truth Social, was “fake looking.” He called the new color he selected a “luxuriant white enamel.”
A paint job can always be undone, unlike the East Wing demolition, which upset preservationists and architectural historians less because the beloved architecture it destroyed was exceptional — the wing wasn’t Jefferson’s Monticello — than because it underscored the president’s contempt for precedent and guardrails.
In response, Mr. Trump fired members of an independent commission established by Congress in 1910 to review architectural changes in the capital.
But polls indicate he may have overstepped.
Americans, millions of whom harbor fond memories of entering the People’s House on public tours that started at the East Wing, say they’re unhappy with the demolition. That includes a majority of independents and many Republicans, according to an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll at the end of October, echoing earlier surveys. It showed 56 percent of Americans oppose the demolition. Only 28 percent support it.
Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, F.D.R., Kennedy, the list goes on: Many presidents have taken turns remodeling one or another part of the presidential grounds, often inciting political backlash. President Harry S. Truman gutted and rebuilt much of the White House interior during the 1950s.
Today the White House may well need a larger ballroom for state dinners. Mr. Trump is within his rights to replace the East Wing with one, although whether demolition was required we may never know, because we now have only the word of Mr. Trump, who called in the bulldozers before independent reviewers could evaluate the scene.
His administration has yet to release details for the ballroom. Its rising price tag has now reached $300 million. The New York Times reported this week that Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut is looking into undisclosed donations after the Trump administration had promised transparency.
As for the design, we’ll see if it’s as banal as vague renderings suggest. But to judge from a model of the proposed White House that the president displayed in the Oval Office, the project would upend history, giving the lie to an architectural metaphor that Americans have humble-bragged about for more than 200 years.
It’s part of American lore that George Washington rebuffed proposals for a presidential palace. He believed a fledgling democracy shouldn’t emulate Versailles. America is not an imperial power like Britain. The White House is a representation in sandstone and brick of an Everyman’s American dream.
Trading Washington’s idealism for a Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac makes plain that we are no longer that America — and that we haven’t been for a long time. Staging state dinners in pop-up tents with portable heaters on the South Lawn, as presidents have been doing for decades absent a bigger ballroom, played into an architectural paradigm of a nation of equals.
But who was it still fooling?
An immense ballroom will tip the balanced, Neoclassical scales of the White House toward architectural inequality and gilt. During Mr. Trump’s first term I wrote about his earlier executive order, from 2020, which demanded more traditional, classical styles of architecture for federal buildings.
It suggested that acanthus leaves and Ionic columns on courthouses and embassies would better represent the popular taste and will of the American people. But classicism is, at heart, about compositional poise, rationalism and proportion, not columns.
For decades, the United States has exercised its soft power around the world by constructing diverse works of architecture, modernist and otherwise, which, good and bad, told the world that America remains committed to innovation and freedom.
The Washington that Mr. Trump envisions leaving behind, with its luxuriant white columns, marbled bathrooms, triumphal arch and giant gilded White House ballroom, will tell another story about us.
In many ways, it is who we already are.
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4) Inside Trump’s Deportation of Venezuelans: Four Months in a Salvadoran Prison
‘You Are All Terrorists’: Four Months in a Salvadoran Prison
By Julie Turkewitz, Tibisay Romero, Sheyla Urdaneta and Isayen Herrera, Photographs by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez, Nov. 8, 2025
The reporters have covered Venezuela for years.
In March, the U.S. government sent more than 200 Venezuelan men to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
It was part of a larger strategy by the Trump administration to ship migrants to third countries — and deter others from coming.
We interviewed 40 of the men who were imprisoned: They described being beaten, sexually assaulted by guards and driven to the brink of suicide.
A team of independent forensic analysts examined their testimony. The experts called it consistent and credible, saying most of the acts described met the United Nations’ definition of torture.
They said they were punished in a dark room called the island, where they were trampled, kicked and forced to kneel for hours.
One man said officers thrust his head into a tank of water to simulate drowning. Another said he was forced to perform oral sex on guards wearing hoods.
They said they were told by officials that they would die in the Salvadoran prison, that the world had forgotten them.
When they could no longer take it, they said, they cut themselves, writing protest messages on sheets in blood.
“‘You are all terrorists,’” Edwin Meléndez, 30, recalled being told by officers who added: “‘Terrorists must be treated like this.’”
From the moment he took office, President Trump has seized on what he calls the threat posed by Venezuela and its autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, accusing the government and Venezuelan gangs of orchestrating an “invasion” of the United States.
In March and April, the Trump administration made the extraordinary decision to send 252 Venezuelan men to a notorious prison in El Salvador known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, saying they had infiltrated the United States in a form of “irregular warfare.”
Mr. Trump accused the men of being members of a dangerous gang, Tren de Aragua, working in lock step with the Venezuelan government. It was an early salvo in the administration’s standoff with Mr. Maduro, which has only intensified since then, with U.S. warships blowing up Venezuelan boats and Mr. Trump warning of potential military strikes on Venezuelan soil.
But the men received little to no due process before being expelled to the terrorism prison in El Salvador, and they were abruptly released in July, part of a larger diplomatic deal that included the release of 10 Americans and U.S. residents held in Venezuela.
Mr. Trump, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in September, praised Salvadoran officials for “the successful and professional job they’ve done in receiving and jailing so many criminals that entered our country.”
In interviews, however, the men sent to the prison described frequent, intense physical and psychological abuse. Beyond the beatings, tear gas and trips to the isolation room, the men said they were mocked or ignored by medical personnel, forced to spend 24 hours a day under harsh lights and made to drink from wells of fetid water.
The New York Times interviewed 40 of the former prisoners, many at their homes in cities and towns across Venezuela. We then asked a group of independent forensic experts who help investigate torture allegations to assess the credibility of the men’s testimony.
Several doctors from that team, known as the Independent Forensic Expert Group, said the men’s testimonies, along with photographs of what they described as their injuries, were consistent and credible, providing “compelling evidence” to support accusations of torture. The group’s assessments in other cases have been used in courts around the world.
Luis Chacón, 26, from the Venezuelan state of Táchira, was one of several men who said the constant abuse at the prison led him to contemplate suicide. A father of three, he said he had been working as a driver for Uber Eats in Milwaukee before being detained and expelled to the prison. His low point there came in June, he said, on the day of his oldest child’s seventh birthday.
“We had heard that if there was a person who died among us that they would let us all go,” he said. He thought maybe he should be that person: He climbed on a bunk bed, he said, and tried to hang himself with a sheet.
The other men, he said, pulled him down.
The forensic experts said that they were struck by how similar the men’s allegations were. The former prisoners, each interviewed separately, described the same timeline and methods of abuse, with many of the same details.
When such “identical methods of abuse” are described by multiple people, the experts wrote in their assessment, it “often indicates the existence of an institutional policy and practice of torture.”
Presented with the men’s accusations and the experts’ findings, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said: “President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people by removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens who pose a threat to the American public.”
Ms. Jackson added that reporters should focus on American children who “have tragically been murdered by vicious illegal aliens,” without providing details.
Representatives for President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador did not respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration never released a complete list of the 252 Venezuelan men imprisoned in El Salvador or the crimes it claimed they had committed.
Using a leaked list of the names, The Times found that a relatively small share of the men — about 13 percent — seemed to have a serious criminal accusation or conviction in some part of the world. (The Times searched multiple public records databases, but the American government may have more information that it has not released.)
Of the 40 men interviewed for this article, The Times found criminal accusations, beyond immigration and traffic offenses, against three of them.
Victor Ortega, 25, who said he was shot in the head with a rubber bullet while in the Salvadoran prison, has “pending charges for discharge of a firearm and theft,” according to the Trump administration.
A second man we interviewed, Neiyerver Leon, 27, had a misdemeanor charge for possession of drug paraphernalia and was fined.
In addition, public records in the United States indicate that Mr. Chacón, the man who said he had contemplated suicide in prison, had been arrested in 2024 on a domestic violence charge, and was accused this year of retail theft at a Walmart. (The domestic violence case was dismissed, according to public records, and Mr. Chacón was sent to El Salvador before the theft case could play out.)
Many of the men say they still don’t know why they were put in a prison for terrorists.
“I migrated so that I could buy a house, give my daughter a better education, the one I didn’t have,” said Mervin Yamarte, 29. “And it all went wrong.”
‘Welcome to Hell’
A swarm of helicopters surrounded the airport. It was just after midnight on March 16, 2025. As the aircraft descended, the Venezuelan men said they saw a phalanx of officers in riot gear awaiting them.
A sign identified their landing place as El Salvador.
At detention facilities in the United States, U.S. officials had told them they were being deported back to Venezuela, the detainees recalled. On a stopover in Honduras, they had been given pizza. Now, a Salvadoran official was boarding the plane.
“You’re staying here,” Ysqueibel Peñaloza, 25, recalled the official saying.
Panic swept down the aisles, he said. The men tightened their seatbelts, Mr. Peñaloza said, in a feeble attempt to prevent removal. The harsh tactics of El Salvador’s president were well known. Some men began to shout, he recalled, demanding to see a U.N. representative, a lawyer or a diplomat from their country.
Then Salvadoran officials, in body armor and carrying batons, boarded the plane, several men recalled, and began to remove the group by force.
“They started hitting us all,” said Andry Hernández, 32, a makeup artist who had been in U.S. detention since crossing into the United States in 2024. “If you raised your head even a little they would knock it down with a blow. Many of our companions had broken noses, split lips, bruises on their bodies.”
Officers bent the handcuffed men at the waist, dragging them off the plane and pushing them onto buses, they said. Cameras rolled. Hours later, Mr. Bukele posted a video of the arrival, packaged with music and drone shots like an action film. Within three days it had been viewed nearly 39 million times.
“We continue advancing in the fight against organized crime,” Mr. Bukele wrote on X, when he posted the video. “But this time, we are also helping our allies.”
Inside the prison, the men said, they were told they were members of Tren de Aragua.
“‘Welcome to hell,’” Anyelo Sarabia, 20, recalled being told upon arrival. “‘From here you’ll leave only in a body bag.’”
To send the men to prison in El Salvador, Mr. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a sweeping, rarely used 18th-century law that allows for the expulsion of people from an invading nation.
It wasn’t entirely clear at the time, but it was a first step in a larger case the Trump administration has been making: that Mr. Maduro, Venezuela’s president, poses a major security threat to the United States by flooding it with migrants, crime and drugs.
Many of the men held in the Salvadoran prison said that, far from working with Mr. Maduro, they had been fleeing his government when they migrated north.
The autocrat has overseen a devastating economic crisis and held on for over a decade through brutal repression and vote rigging. His government retains its own torture centers, according to the United Nations and others, and often seeks to discredit political enemies by branding them as “terrorists.”
In fact, some of the men shipped to El Salvador had sought political asylum in the United States, claiming they would be persecuted for taking part in protests against Mr. Maduro, according to applications reviewed by The Times.
Life on the Inside
Cut off from the world, the men began to adjust to their new lives. Officials divided them into cells, usually 10 people in each, they said. Meals, three times a day, consisted mostly of rice, beans, spaghetti and tortillas.
They said they occasionally received special treatment, like better food and brief moments outdoors, but only when they had rare, official visitors, including Kristi Noem, head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The prisoners said they were never allowed visits from lawyers or relatives.
In one cell, they used soap to etch a calendar into a metal bed frame, recalled Carlos Cañizalez, 25. Some of the men began saving their tortillas and molding them into dominoes, playing games to distract themselves.
Desperation grew, they said. Tito Martínez, 26, began to feel sick and weak, until he could not get out of bed and other men had to feed him, several recalled. Eventually, Mr. Martínez was taken to an infirmary, where he said he was beaten in front of medical personnel.
There, he said, a woman who identified herself as a doctor told him: “‘Resign yourself. It’s time for you to die.’”
When he arrived at the prison, Aldo Colmenarez, a 41-year-old diabetic, according to a Venezuelan doctor’s report, asked officials for insulin, he said. It was five days before they gave it to him, he explained. After that, dosage and application were erratic, said several of the men, leading to episodes of hypoglycemia that left Mr. Colmenarez cold, sweaty and unconscious.
Punishment often felt random and disproportionate, the men said. Bathing was allowed only at 4 a.m. Men who splashed water on themselves to stay cool at other times were sent to the island, the former prisoners said, recounting a dark isolation room with just a pinhole of light in the ceiling, where they were beaten by several guards at a time.
Many of the men described being placed in a “crane” position, in which guards made them kneel with their hands cuffed behind their backs, then lifted them by the arms.
Tensions grew in April. After a few men asked one of the guards, an officer who used the alias Satan, to stop banging cell bars at night, the guards dragged them into a central area and released tear gas in their faces, said two men who were in a nearby cell, Andy Perozo, 30, and Maikel Moreno, 20.
Another of the inmates, Andrys Cedeño, 23, began to convulse.
“Boss,” he said he cried, “I’m asthmatic.”
What the guard did, he said, “was laugh.”
Mr. Cedeño then grew limp and unresponsive. The men who could see the attack said they thought that he had died.
Scared and angry, the prisoners threw soap bars and cups of water, they recalled. The next day, they resolved to stop eating, demanding better treatment.
Then they began to slice their bodies with the rough edges of metal bed ladders and plastic pipes, said several men, using blood to write messages on sheets they hung from the plumbing.
“We’re not criminals, we’re migrants,” said one message, according to several of the men, including Edicson Quintero, 28, who said he cut his abdomen to draw blood for a protest sign.
The hunger strike lasted four days, the men said. Afterward, Andry Hernández, the makeup artist, said officers sent him to the isolation room. There, guards in hoods forced him to crouch and perform oral sex, he said.
“They passed the baton over my parts,” he recalled, “they put the baton through my legs and raised it, they groped me, they touched me, and I just screamed.”
He later described the experience to several cellmates.
In May, a guard search of one of the cells turned violent, many of the prisoners recalled, and some of the men, enraged and desperate, began dislodging metal parts from their beds and using them to break the locks on cell doors.
Briefly, gates swung open.
Officers responded with guns and what the prisoners described as rubber bullets.
“When the first guy was hit we ran back into the cell,” recalled Edwuar Hernández, 23. “They began to shoot at us point blank, from the bars toward the inside.”
Mr. Ortega said he was hit with a projectile that ricocheted off his forehead, making him bleed profusely. Luis Rodríguez, 26, said a shot tore into his hand. José Carmona, 28, was hit in the thigh, he said.
After this attempt at a rebellion, officials forced many of the men to the island, including Mr. Chacón.
There, he said, “they put our heads inside a tank as if to drown us, and they took our heads out again and hit us on the ribs, on the legs, with whatever they could find.”
A Secret Deal
Far from the prison, diplomats from the United States and Venezuela were hashing out a deal that would determine the prisoners’ fates.
Mr. Maduro had spent the last year imprisoning U.S. citizens and permanent residents in an effort to gain leverage over Washington. In July, he agreed to release 10 of them, along with 80 Venezuelan political prisoners, in exchange for the 252 men imprisoned in El Salvador.
In the weeks before the release, the men said, some of the abuse subsided. Eventually, guards arrived with Head & Shoulders shampoo, Speed Stick deodorant and Colgate toothpaste, the men recalled, and they were shaved and their hair was cut.
Then the prison director appeared.
“You have 20 minutes to bathe,” he told them, according to Jerce Reyes, 36.
“We all started screaming and crying,” he said, “because we knew we were leaving.”
Mr. Maduro, who many Venezuelans blamed for their exile, now had the opportunity to portray himself as a champion for migrants rejected by Mr. Trump.
When they touched down in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, the men were met by the country’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, who had become the face of the country’s surveillance and repression apparatus. They were held for several days, made to tell their stories on state television, and then sent home.
In some cases, officials from the country’s feared intelligence service escorted them to their doorsteps.
Of the 252 men, seven had serious criminal histories in Venezuela, Mr. Cabello claimed on television, saying his government had detained 20 who were “wanted” by the government, without explaining further.
In September, a U.S. federal appeals court blocked the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants. But the ruling does not prevent the government from using other lawful means to remove people from the United States, meaning Mr. Trump could send more people to prison in El Salvador.
In the interviews, the freed prisoners reported ongoing physical and mental health problems, which they attributed to the beatings and other abuse: blurred vision; recurring migraines; trouble breathing; shoulder, back and knee pain some linked to the “crane” position; nightmares; insomnia. Some have seen doctors, but many said they could not afford to.
Mr. Cedeño, 23, the man with asthma, has been hospitalized twice since returning to Venezuela, he said, once after an asthma attack left him unconscious, and another after a heart attack, according to an October doctor’s report.
At night, he doesn’t sleep, he said, haunted by the rattle of handcuffs, the voices of Salvadoran officials and the clang of cell doors.
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5) Immigration Agents Arrest Man in L.A. Raid and Drive Off With His Toddler
The child was later reunited with her grandmother, but the episode alarmed immigrant rights groups. The father, a U.S. citizen, faces a gun possession charge.
By Jill Cowan and Mimi Dwyer, Reporting from Los Angeles, Published Nov. 7, 2025, Updated Nov. 8, 2025
Agents arrested a U.S. citizen they said had attacked them, and then they drove off with the man’s toddler. The arrest occurred during an immigration enforcement operation at a Home Depot in the Cypress Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.
At first, the encounter seemed typical of the kinds of immigration raids that have roiled the nation’s biggest cities. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents descended on a Home Depot parking lot in Los Angeles this week and detained a Latino man. They secured his hands behind his back, and the man, later identified as Dennis Quiñonez, leaned against his Chevy hatchback.
Immigrant rights activists stood nearby, taking video and shouting at the agents, who were masked and heavily armed.
But the situation, on Tuesday, soon took an unusual turn, according to interviews with four witnesses and footage shared with The New York Times by an immigrant rights group with permission from the person who took it.
Mr. Quiñonez was taken away to another vehicle. An armed agent slid into the driver’s seat of his Chevy.
“There’s a baby in the back!” an onlooker shouted. Minutes later, someone cried out, “They’re about to drive!”
Another agent, wearing body armor and carrying a rifle, got into the passenger seat.
Mr. Quiñonez’s daughter — who relatives said later is a few months shy of her second birthday — looked on, wide-eyed from her car seat. Then the driver reversed the car and drove away.
The girl was reunited with her grandmother later in the day. But immigrant rights groups say the episode underscores how federal agents across the country have pushed legal boundaries, sometimes in the presence of children, as they carry out the Trump administration’s agenda to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
In September, an immigration agent shoved a distraught woman to the ground at a New York courthouse as her two young children cried and tried to help her. The agent was later “relieved of his duties,” pending an investigation, but it was unclear if he was fired or disciplined.
This week in Chicago, where federal agents’ tactics have come under legal scrutiny, parents said their children were traumatized as they watched agents detain their teacher at their day care center during drop-off.
It is not clear whether Customs and Border Protection has a policy on how to handle minor children at the scene of an arrest or detention. But agents for ICE, a separate Homeland Security agency, are not supposed to drive off with the child of a detainee, according to ICE policy. Local law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County have similar policies requiring officers to call for a social worker.
Terrie Samundra, a mother of two who witnessed the agents in Los Angeles leave with Mr. Quiñonez’s daughter in his car, was shocked by what she saw.
“It felt unbelievable that I was witnessing this,” she said. “And I’ve witnessed a lot of things.” Ms. Samundra is part of a local activist collective that patrols the parking lot of the Home Depot, in the Cypress Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, to document immigration raids.
On Thursday, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in an email that Mr. Quiñonez was to blame for what his daughter experienced because he brought her to a location where “violence against law enforcement” took place. The agency said in a statement on Wednesday that he assaulted agents by wielding a hammer and throwing objects, although he was never charged with assault, and that a gun was found in his car.
“It is a shame the father put the child in that environment and then left the child alone in a car,” Ms. McLaughlin wrote.
According to an affidavit by federal authorities, Mr. Quiñonez, a 32-year-old U.S. citizen, was charged with illegally possessing a firearm and ammunition as someone who had previously been convicted of domestic violence. He was convicted of a misdemeanor for injuring a spouse or cohabitant in 2014, the affidavit said.
Mr. Quiñonez was held at a federal detention center in downtown Los Angeles until Thursday afternoon, when he was released on $10,000 bond. He is set to be arraigned on Dec. 1.
Tuesday’s events began when Customs and Border Protection agents arrested five undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Federal authorities said in the affidavit that Mr. Quiñonez got out of his car while holding a hammer “in a threatening manner” about 100 feet away from them. As agents started to drive away, they said they saw Mr. Quiñonez throw two “rock-like” objects at the vehicle before getting back into his own car. After a team of agents boxed in Mr. Quiñonez’s car, he got out and approached agents, who said they believed he had tried to assault them.
Mr. Quiñonez’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
Ms. McLaughlin did not respond to questions about the agents driving away in Mr. Quiñonez’s car with the child inside. Nor did she respond to questions about how the child was cared for while she was in the custody of federal agents, including where she was kept and whether she was fed, given water or had her diaper changed.
Mr. Quiñonez did not want to be separated from his daughter, and he initially gave agents permission to drive his car with both of them to another location, away from a growing crowd, according to federal authorities. But after they found a gun on the floor of the passenger’s side, they decided to transport Mr. Quiñonez in a C.B.P. vehicle.
About half an hour after Mr. Quiñonez was arrested, his mother received a call from an unknown number, she told reporters on Wednesday. Federal authorities told her to pick up her granddaughter outside the federal detention center.
She said she was allowed to see her granddaughter there, but she was not allowed to leave with the girl until about 1 p.m., after she showed authorities the child’s birth certificate.
Mr. Quiñonez’s mother, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Maria, because she was afraid of retribution against her family, said through tears that her son is a loving father. She said that he had taken his daughter to Home Depot on his day off from work in the restaurant industry, and that she didn’t know what led to his arrest.
Maria said her granddaughter seemed to be healthy and behaving normally after the encounter. She is too young to speak, the grandmother said, but the toddler had been asking for her “dada.”
The Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration in Southern California is a multiagency operation that includes agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with C.B.P.
According to the ICE policy, agents must try to let an adult detainee make alternative care arrangements for any child in their custody. If that’s not possible, the agents must stay at the location of the arrest until representatives of a local child welfare or law enforcement agency arrive to take custody of the child.
“Unless ICE is effectuating an enforcement action against the minor child(ren), ICE personnel should not, under any circumstances, take custody of or transport the minor child(ren),” the policy says.
Ms. McLaughlin, the D.H.S. spokeswoman, did not respond to questions about whether C.B.P. policy differs, or whether the agents involved in the arrest on Tuesday followed their own policies.
John Sandweg, a former Department of Homeland Security official during the Obama administration, said the agency’s actions in Mr. Quiñonez’s case seem to “violate common sense.”
Mr. Sandweg emphasized that he didn’t know the full facts of the case, but said that transporting a child in a detainee’s car would open the agency to potential liability.
Once a detainee is secured and officers are not under threat, “there’s no urgency to booking them,” he said. Agents could wait for as long as it might take to reach another guardian or other authorities better equipped to care for a child.
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6) Families in Limbo After Supreme Court Order Interrupts Food Stamp Payments
The fate of SNAP was once again in question on Saturday after the Supreme Court temporarily agreed to allow the Trump administration to withhold full aid under the program.
By Tony Romm, Reporting from Washington, Nov. 8, 2025
Volunteers preparing to distribute groceries at the St. Peter’s Church food pantry in New York last week. Credit...Marco Postigo Storel for The New York Times
Millions of low-income families began Saturday with little clarity over the fate of their food stamp benefits, after a late-night Supreme Court order allowed the Trump administration to continue withholding some funding for the nation’s largest anti-hunger program.
Only one day earlier, states including Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Oregon had started sending full benefits to the roughly one in eight Americans who receive aid each month, putting an end to weeks of delay that had threatened many of the poorest Americans with severe financial hardship.
But the process appeared to grind to halt starting Friday night. The Supreme Court granted an emergency request by the Trump administration to pause an order issued by a federal judge, who had required the White House to fully fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
The late-night order was the latest turn in a weekslong battle waged by states and nonprofits seeking to ensure that the poorest Americans do not lose their ability to buy food during the federal shutdown. Throughout the closure, now the longest in history, the White House has refused to tap an ample store of leftover money that would prevent severe interruptions to the nutrition program.
While the Supreme Court order was only temporary, it appeared to freeze in place some of the work to restart food stamps, particularly in states that had not yet made full payments to all of their residents. Practically, that meant some of the families that had already gone days without aid might have to endure an even longer wait.
In Ohio, state leaders initially told local families on SNAP that they could receive full food stamps by next week, only to have to announce that benefits had been “delayed” shortly after the Supreme Court order.
Officials in Massachusetts were able to disburse full food stamps to residents who were owed a payment by Friday. But it remained uncertain when benefits would reach low-income families who are scheduled to receive aid next week.
“President Trump needs to stop trying to force Americans to go hungry and pay full SNAP benefits for everyone,” said Gov. Maura T. Healey, a Democrat, who said Massachusetts was assessing the implications of the court’s actions.
Many states had published no updated information at all about what would happen with their programs now. In Texas, officials said they were following the latest guidance from the Agriculture Department, though they did not explain what that entailed. In Louisiana, the state’s health department said Friday it was delivering only partial benefits, as it awaited clearer federal instructions.
Spokespeople in both states did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Agriculture Department also did not immediately respond to a request.
By its own admission, the Trump administration can access tens of billions in leftover funds to finance full SNAP benefits in November. But Mr. Trump has declined to use the money, and his aides have claimed they cannot help, despite the fact that they have reworked other parts of the federal budget to sustain their priorities during the shutdown — including to pay officers conducting mass deportations.
The legal wrangling over SNAP began on Thursday, after a federal court in Rhode Island ordered the White House to tap two accounts at the Agriculture Department to fund SNAP benefits in full. Absent that order, the second issued by that judge, the government would have provided just partial benefits — with some families receiving nothing this month, and perhaps not for several more weeks.
The Justice Department immediately challenged that ruling, but the appeals court declined on Friday to block the judge’s order from taking immediate effect. The Trump administration then turned to the Supreme Court, where Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson granted a temporary pause, known as an administrative stay.
The justice, who handles emergency applications from courts in that part of the country, essentially left it to the appeals court to decide what to do. That means the panel of judges must determine whether to halt or preserve the original order requiring the White House to fund SNAP benefits in full this month. A decision is expected quickly, perhaps as soon as Saturday.
But the result, in the meantime, was legal whiplash for the families who rely on the food stamp program, particularly after some states had announced they would begin funding benefits in full. Those also include California, Michigan, New Jersey and Wisconsin, where it remained unclear by Saturday how the Supreme Court decision might affect residents.
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7) The Trump Administration demands that states ‘undo’ work to send full food stamps to low-income families.
By Tony Romm, Reporting from Washington, Nov. 9, 2025
The Trump administration told states that they must “immediately undo” any actions to provide full food stamp benefits to low-income families, in a move that added to the chaos and uncertainty surrounding the nation’s largest anti-hunger program during the government shutdown.
The Agriculture Department issued the command in a late-night Saturday memo, viewed later by The New York Times. That guidance threatened to impose financial penalties on states that did not “comply” quickly with the government’s new orders.
By Sunday morning, officials in several states said they were unsure how the latest directive from the Trump administration would affect the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP. The program, which serves one in eight Americans, has already faced staggering disruptions in recent days, as President Trump and his top aides have refused to fund it fully while the government remains closed.
Some of the roughly 42 million families enrolled in SNAP began to receive their full benefits on Friday, after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to fully fund the program this month amid the shutdown. States like New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin raced to release the aid to residents, some of whom had been without nutrition assistance for days.
Soon after, though, the Supreme Court temporarily paused the judge’s order so that an appeals court could further review it, leaving the entire program in legal limbo. That review remains underway, and the decision could force the government to tap an ample store of reserves — totaling into the tens of billions of dollars — to preserve full SNAP benefits.
The Agriculture Department did not respond to a request for comment. The White House budget office also did not respond.
Representative Angie Craig of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, said in a statement that she believed the Trump administration was “demanding that food assistance be taken away from the households that have already received it.”
“They would rather go door to door, taking away people’s food, than do the right thing and fully fund SNAP for November so that struggling veterans, seniors, and children can keep food on the table,” she said.
The food stamp program is funded by the federal government but largely managed by states. To provide benefits, states send files to processors, which manage the electronic benefit transfer system, known as E.B.T. These vendors then make the funds available on E.B.T. cards, which are the primary way that SNAP recipients purchase groceries.
In its guidance, the Agriculture Department said states may not send E.B.T. processors the files that would be required to provide full benefits. Rather, the agency said states must only send files for “partial” benefits, meaning that food stamp recipients would see their payments substantially cut.
“To the extent states sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized,” wrote Patrick A. Penn, a top official at the Agriculture Department. “Accordingly, states must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025.”
David A. Super, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said it would not be “legal” for the government to claw back benefits that it had already provisioned without affording people due process.
But, Mr. Super added, the federal government could halt work that some states had started, but not finished, to release full allotments to families this month. He said the memo could serve to “scare states partway along the process, and it’s telling the states to turn back.”
The Agriculture Department also said in its memo that states could lose access to some federal money to manage the SNAP program if they failed to comply, and may be “liable” for funding full benefits that the federal government did not authorize.
The threat arrived one day after about two dozen states asked a federal judge in Massachusetts to shield them from any federal punishment over their handling of the SNAP program. The states sued the Trump administration earlier this month in a bid to force the release of food stamp funding.
In their filing, state leaders said they should not be held financially responsible for a series of conflicting instructions issued by the Agriculture Department, which at one point had signaled that it was preparing to release the funds for full food stamp payments. But lawyers for the Justice Department strongly opposed the states’ request in a formal reply to the court, submitted late Saturday.
“The cruelty is the point,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, who leads her party on the chamber’s top agriculture committee. In a post on Sunday on social media, she added: “It is their choice to do this.”
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8) Israeli Academics Find Themselves Isolated Despite Gaza Cease-Fire
Boycotts of Israeli universities, largely imposed in Europe, have multiplied since the start of the war and reflect Israel’s international isolation over its conduct in Gaza.
By Elisabeth Bumiller, Reporting from Washington and Jerusalem, Nov. 9, 2025
A protest in May 2024 calling for the University of Amsterdam to cut ties with Israeli institutions. Ramon Van Flymen/EPA, via Shutterstock
The emails arrived a week before the conference, informing 23 Israeli academics that they were welcome to participate in a virtual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists — but only if they hid their professional identities. “Any mention of affiliation to an Israeli institution or funding agency must be avoided,” the message from the association’s board instructed.
The decision, part of a suspension of the association’s ties with Israel because of the war in Gaza, stunned Guy D. Stiebel, the chairman of the Israel Archaeological Council and longtime director of an expedition excavating the ancient fortress of Masada.
“You have whitewashed your hands, soothed your conscience, and may now look in the mirror with the impression that you have done something,” Dr. Stiebel, a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University, shot back in an angry letter to the board. “Did you stop to ask yourselves what change your decision has truly achieved?”
The board, under pressure from Israel, ended up reversing its action as “rushed and misjudged” the day before the conference began, in September. But its initial response reflected widespread boycotts against Israeli universities and academics, mostly by European institutions, that grew sharply during the two-year war in Gaza and are continuing after a shaky cease-fire reached last month.
No one expects the boycotts to end anytime soon.
“They may subside, they may be of a lesser amplitude, but they will continue to subsist one way or another,” said Emmanuel Nahshon, the head of a task force fighting against the boycotts for Israel’s eight universities. The agenda, he said, “is really to delegitimize Israel.”
Officials at European universities say the boycotts are justified because of accusations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza made by a United Nations commission and many human rights groups. Israel denies those accusations. The European officials also say Israeli universities collaborate with the country’s defense industry.
Technology from Israel’s universities “was going to be used in order to kill Palestinian people,” said Raúl Ramos, the vice rector of the University of Barcelona, explaining why his institution announced a boycott of Israeli universities and other institutions last year. He said, however, that the university would continue relationships with individual Israeli students and researchers.
Israeli university officials counter that many academic institutions have been highly critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war. They say the boycotts amount to an effort to silence dissent.
They also point out that universities in Europe and the United States collaborate with their nations’ defense industries and that Israel is being held to a different standard.
“By singling out Israel, it’s ridiculous,” said Prof. Daniel Chamovitz, the president of Ben Gurion University of the Negev.
“Our government sees us as the enemy,” added Professor Chamovitz, who in August called for a stop to the war and a return of the hostages at a rally in Tel Aviv.
The month before, the presidents of five Israeli universities — including Hebrew University, and the Weizmann Institute of Science — sent an open letter to Mr. Netanyahu calling on him to stop the hunger crisis in Gaza.
“Israeli universities are independent,” said Uri Sivan, the president of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the engine behind Israel’s high tech boom and a crucial partner in its defense industry, who also signed the letter. “We’re not government universities.”
The boycotts are an example of how Israel has become increasingly isolated internationally over its conduct in the war in Gaza, which was ignited by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. That attack killed nearly 1,200 people, with roughly 250 people taken hostage. The resulting war, including Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, local health authorities say. The numbers do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Outrage over Gaza has led to calls from Israel’s allies for a Palestinian state, a seismic drop in support for Israel among Americans and myriad cultural boycotts, including of Israel’s entertainment industry by some Hollywood filmmakers and actors.
Mr. Nahshon, a former Israeli diplomat, said some 50 universities, institutions and academic groups in Europe ended cooperation with Israeli universities either fully or partly during the war. In a report to the Israeli Parliament in May, his task force said it had compiled more than 700 instances of academic boycotts, including total cutoffs of university-to-university collaborations, the end of student exchange programs and refusals to award Israeli academics research grants. He estimated there were now more than 1,000 such cases.
The institutionwide boycotts, he said, are largely among universities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain.
Ghent University in Belgium, considered a leader of the movement, is continuing its boycott of all Israeli universities after the Oct. 10 cease-fire. The University of Amsterdam, which suspended a student exchange program with Hebrew University in March, called the cease-fire “a glimmer of hope” but said “peace and justice cannot be achieved with a single agreement.” On Oct. 15, it announced that it would enter into no new collaborations with Israeli academic institutions.
“Independent international bodies have determined that genocide is taking place,” Bob Munten, a spokesman for the University of Amsterdam, said in an email. “Furthermore, there is broad consensus within our community and beyond that inaction is untenable.” But he said his university, like Barcelona, would maintain relationships with individual Israeli students and researchers.
Israeli academics said they were worried about other measures beyond boycotts. There are demands from some countries to remove Israel from Horizon Europe, the European Union’s major research funding program, which over the past decade has sent billions of euros to Israel.
In the United States, there are no similar universitywide boycotts against Israel, although anti-Israel demonstrations erupted on American college campuses in 2024. Since then, President Trump’s pressure campaign on American universities to stamp out campus antisemitism has had what Prof. Milette Shamir, the vice president of Tel Aviv University, called “a huge healing effect.”
But many protesters say their criticism of Israel’s war effort is not to be confused with antisemitism. And critics of the Trump administration say it is using antisemitism in part as an excuse to crack down on what it sees as the left-wing ideology of American elite academia.
Harvard, which is in talks with the White House trying to preserve billions of dollars in federal funding, in July announced a new study abroad program with Ben Gurion University and a postdoctoral fellowship for Israeli researchers at Harvard Medical School.
The announcement was made a month after the Trump administration said Harvard had violated federal civil rights law by failing to address the harassment of Jewish students and had “enabled antisemitism to fester” on campus.
In Europe, Israeli academics say the boycotts, which have roots from two decades ago with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, are also punishing Arabs because some 19 percent of university students in Israel are Israeli Arabs, who make up roughly 21 percent of the general population.
Professor Chamovitz of Ben Gurion University said the boycotts were particularly painful because they felt like punishment for Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks.
His university is 25 miles from the Gaza border and on the day of the attacks, when the school was on break for the Sukkot holiday, 75 students, professors and others in the university’s community were killed. “At first I said I was going to go to every funeral,” he told The New York Times days after the attacks. “Then I found out how many.”
Professor Shamir of Tel Aviv University, who spoke by phone from Berlin, said she was meeting there with some of the university’s German academic partners to see if she could start more projects. Collaboration between Israeli and German academics began after World War II, when German scientists from the Max Planck Society, named for the German theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, went on a 1959 exploratory trip to the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel.
The goals were partnership and innovation but also to see if science could help heal relations after the Holocaust. Decades of scientific exchanges between the two countries soon began.
Professor Shamir said that today her university has more collaborations with Germany than any other country beyond the United States.
“Germany has really been the exception in Europe,” she said.
Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting from Tel Aviv, José Bautista from Madrid and Koba Ryckewaert from Brussels.
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9) U.S. Military Kills 6 in Strikes on Suspected Drug Boats, Hegseth Says
The latest strikes raised the death toll in the campaign to 76 people in 19 attacks in the Pacific and the Caribbean Sea since early September.
By Eric Schmitt, Reporting from Washington, Nov. 10, 2025
The Gerald R. Ford, the United States’ largest and newest aircraft carrier, anchored in the Bay of Palma in Spain last month. It is set to arrive in the Caribbean as soon as this week. Credit...Jaime Reina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The U.S. military killed six people on Sunday in two more strikes on boats suspected of smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Monday.
The latest strikes raised the death toll in the campaign to 76 people in 19 attacks in the Pacific and the Caribbean Sea since early September.
In a post on social media, Mr. Hegseth cited “intelligence” and included two short video clips of the bombings of two separate boats that he said were traveling “along a known narco-trafficking transit route in the Eastern Pacific.”
One of the boats appeared to be at a full stop with two visible passengers and possibly with an outboard motor raised out of the water. The other was moving at high speed. But in neither case did Mr. Hegseth provide evidence for his claim that the three men aboard each of the two boats were smuggling narcotics. He said the attacks took place in international waters.
A wide range of specialists in laws governing the use of force have denounced the killings as illegal because the U.S. military is not allowed to intentionally target civilians who pose no threat of imminent violence, even those suspected of being criminals. The Trump administration says the strikes are lawful because President Trump has “determined” that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels.
Mr. Trump has falsely asserted that each destroyed boat saves 25,000 American lives. In reality, as many as 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses, but most of those deaths are a result of fentanyl, which comes from labs in Mexico. South America produces cocaine.
The strikes on Sunday came as the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean was expected to grow sharply with the arrival as soon as this week of the Gerald R. Ford, the United States’ largest and newest aircraft carrier, and three destroyers. The Ford carries about 5,000 sailors and has more than 75 attack, surveillance and support aircraft, including F/A-18 fighters.
The Pentagon currently has about 10,000 U.S. troops divided roughly evenly between eight warships in the region and on bases in Puerto Rico.
Carol Rosenberg contributed reporting.
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10) Supreme Court Denies Request to Revisit Same-Sex Marriage Decision
Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses, had asked the court to reconsider its landmark 2015 opinion.
By Ann E. Marimow, Reporting from Washington, Nov. 10, 2025
Outside the Supreme Court in June 2015. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a request that it consider overturning its landmark decision to legalize same-sex marriage a decade ago.
The court, without comment, declined the petition, filed by Kim Davis, a former Kentucky county clerk who gained national attention in 2015 when she defied a court order and refused to issue same-sex licenses because of her religious beliefs.
She had asked the Supreme Court to reverse an order that required her to pay more than $300,000 to a couple denied a marriage license — and to overturn the same-sex marriage ruling from 2015.
At least four of the nine justices would have needed to vote to hear Ms. Davis’s case and revisit the marriage precedent, a major step that many legal experts had said they were not expecting the court to take.
Still, the justices’ consideration of Ms. Davis’s petition had set off alarms among gay Americans, who were already reeling from the Trump administration’s targeting of programs and funding that benefit L.G.B.T.Q. individuals.
Gay Americans and their allies had been on alert since the Supreme Court’s conservative majority eliminated the nationwide right to abortion after 50 years, showing a willingness to undo longstanding legal precedent. In that decision, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to urge reconsideration of the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, which recognized gay marriage nationwide.
Polls show that same-sex marriage now has broad public support. More than three dozen House Republicans helped pass legislation in 2022 that required states and the federal government to recognize the validity of same-sex marriages.
Mary Bonauto, the lawyer who argued the Obergefell case before the Supreme Court, praised the court’s action. “Today, millions of Americans can breathe a sigh of relief for their families, current or hoped for, because all families deserve equal rights under the law,” she said in a statement.
Ms. Davis became a symbol of religious opposition to same-sex marriage after the Supreme Court’s decision in 2015. She spent five nights in jail after she was found in contempt of court for defying a federal order to issue licenses to same-sex couples.
David Ermold and David Moore, a Kentucky couple, sued Ms. Davis after they had been refused a license and prevailed at trial in 2023. Ms. Davis was ordered to pay the couple $360,000 in damages and lawyers’ fees.
She appealed the judgment, claiming First Amendment protection from liability and asserted that the court had wrongly recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage and should reverse its decision in Obergefell.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled against Ms. Davis in March, citing a recent Supreme Court decision that found public officials acting in their official capacity are not protected by the First Amendment.
Public officials cannot “wield the authority of the state to violate the constitutional rights of citizens if the official believes she is ‘follow[ing] her conscience,’” wrote Judge Helene N. White, a nominee of President George W. Bush.
In a concurring opinion, Judge Chad Readler, a nominee of President Trump, quoted an earlier ruling that said Ms. Davis had taken “the law into her own hands.”
Mathew Staver, a lawyer for Ms. Davis, asserted that the Obergefell opinion was “egregiously wrong from the start” and said his organization, Liberty Counsel, would continue to work to reverse it.
“It is not a matter of if, but when the Supreme Court will overturn Obergefell,” he said in a statement.
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11) In Padma Lakshmi’s Kitchen, the Key Ingredient Is Immigration
The TV chef discusses her new cookbook, “Padma’s All American,” which sees immigrants at the heart of the nation’s cuisine.
By Julia Moskin, Nov. 10, 2025
Padma Lakshmi has broken out of the model-and-TV-host box, becoming a writer and advocate on food and immigration. Credit...Ye Fan for The New York Times
Being something of an outsider has been part of Padma Lakshmi’s identity for as long as she can remember.
Born in Chennai, India, in 1970, she is the only child of a courageous mother who left an arranged marriage and moved to New York City, supporting them both as an oncology nurse at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. In the 1980s and ’90s, Ms. Lakshmi stuck out in Roman Catholic school in Queens, in high school in suburban Los Angeles and as the first supermodel of South Asian descent.
Long before she hosted “Top Chef,” she found belonging in the kitchen. During summers in India, she followed her grandmother and aunties around and learned to make dosas and idli. As a (bored) working model, she cooked for colleagues on sets and shoots around the world, and published her first cookbook, “Easy Exotic,” at age 27.
She has lived in the United States for 50 of her 55 years, and is a naturalized citizen. But during the first Trump administration, she suddenly felt like an outsider again. In 2017, she began working with the American Civil Liberties Union as an advocate for immigrants’ rights. She resigned from “Top Chef” in 2023.
Her new book, “Padma’s All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes From Taste the Nation and Beyond,” was published last week. It began life as a cookbook proposal and became the scaffolding for the Hulu show “Taste the Nation,” for which she received an Emmy nomination in 2023. Through food, each episode tells the story of a specific American immigrant community, like the Thai war brides who moved to Las Vegas in the 1970s and the Cambodian refugees who have revitalized the abandoned downtown of Lowell, Mass. Those stories and dishes are remixed with recipes from Ms. Lakshmi’s home kitchen, so that green papaya salad sits near plum chaat, and Nigerian goat shares a page with Cantonese fried dumplings.
In an interview, which has been edited for length, she spoke about how food and advocacy have combined in her recent work:
How did you manage to go from hosting a reality competition to writing and producing a documentary series?
I was looking for something to do in my creative life that would incorporate the crash education I had gotten from immigrants in different parts of our country. I didn’t want to do a lifestyle show, which is what all the networks wanted. I wasn’t interested in trying to make something that’s fuzzy at the edges. I want it to be real, I want to dress like I really dress and talk like I really talk. Why is it that male chefs get to be swashbuckling on TV, and I have to be at home in the kitchen?
Is there any difference between “immigrant food” and “American food”?
If we just ate what was native to the United States, we’d be living on desert packrat and ramps. I’ve eaten those things, and they’re delicious, but we wouldn’t last 15 minutes if that was our only option. Even apple pie isn’t American: not the crust, not the filling, not the spices. American food has always stretched to make room for new foods, and we have to hold onto that. I hope that people will be curious enough about the book to open it and cook from it. And maybe if the food entices them, they may have more empathy and curiosity for the people making it.
What are your thoughts about the tension between adapting recipes to local tastes and ingredients (which immigrants have always done) and preserving the authenticity of food traditions?
Fusion food got a bad name from things like California Pizza Kitchen. Their tandoori chicken pizza is atrocious. But I’ve also had bulgogi pizza that was delicious. All these dishes I’m presenting are third-culture food, the result of the meeting of Indian and American, or Chinese and Nigerian, in a new place. Some of them are pretty similar to what you would get in those countries of origin. And some of them are different, like the Nigerian jollof rice made by my friend Precious — she grew up in Ohio, and puts dashi and sun-dried tomatoes in. It increases the umami! It’s delicious! But that’s not my culture, so I would try that in my own kitchen, but I wouldn’t put it in print.
Immigration has become an even more controversial issue than it was when you started this project during the first Trump administration. How does that land for you?
You know, my publishers didn’t want me to be so political, but that ship has sailed. It goes with having the title of “Padma’s All American.” Because I am American. I can’t believe that’s become a political statement, but I am. I love this country for what it gave me and my mom. But if you take away the immigrants, the country — the food system, the tech arena, Wall Street and medicine — will all come to a standstill. I’m floored, and I’m frightened for the first time. Will ICE come for naturalized citizens next? It no longer seems impossible.
Why are you producing another culinary competition show, “America’s Culinary Cup,” airing on CBS next year?
Because I got to be in charge, and I had a crew of 350 people, and I made it about the principles of good cooking, not about challenges. All the chefs are professionals, and they are teaching real restaurant skills, in a serious kitchen that looks like a three-Michelin-star kitchen. And we are giving away a million dollars. People come out of the woodwork to get a chance at that!
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