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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
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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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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 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 auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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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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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Articles
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1) Springsteen Releases ‘Streets of Minneapolis,’ a Song Protesting ICE
The lyrics criticize President Trump and include references to Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who were fatally shot by federal agents this month.
By Michaela Towfighi, Published Jan. 28, 2026, Updated Jan. 29, 2026
Bruce Springsteen said he wrote the song on Saturday, the same day that Alex Pretti was killed by immigration agents. Credit...Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Bruce Springsteen released a new song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” on Wednesday in response to two fatal shootings by federal immigration enforcement agents in the city this month.
Mr. Springsteen dedicated the song to “the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.” He said he wrote it on Saturday, the same day immigration agents killed Mr. Pretti, a 37-year-old I.C.U. nurse, during a confrontation. Ms. Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was killed by an ICE agent on Jan. 7.
The lyrics describe the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, where a surge of federal agents has led to widespread protests, with people like Mr. Pretti recording confrontations with their cellphones and blowing whistles to alert others to the presence of immigration agents.
“Their claim was self-defense, sir,” Springsteen sings of the Trump administration’s justification for the shootings. “Just don’t believe your eyes / It’s our blood and bones / And these whistles and phones / Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies.”
Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, described Mr. Pretti as an “assassin,” and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said Ms. Good had engaged in “domestic terrorism.”
Video analysis by The New York Times has contradicted these descriptions. While Mr. Pretti was legally carrying a holstered gun, he never reached for the weapon and had been disarmed by agents before they shot him. Ms. Good had parked a vehicle in the street and was beginning to drive away when an agent standing near one of the front wheels shot her.
In the song, Mr. Springsteen also calls Mr. Trump a “king” with a “private army.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that “the Trump administration is focused on encouraging state and local Democrats to work with federal law enforcement officers on removing dangerous criminal illegal aliens from their communities — not random songs with irrelevant opinions and inaccurate information.”
Mr. Springsteen has used his lyrics and shows to make political statements for decades. In 2000, he released “American Skin (41 Shots)” about the killing of Amadou Diallo by four New York City police officers. This month, Mr. Springsteen dedicated a performance of his song “The Promised Land,” a working-class anthem, to Ms. Good. At that performance, he likened the administration’s actions in Minneapolis to “Gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens.”
Mr. Springsteen has been a vocal critic of Mr. Trump across his two terms, calling him the “most dangerous candidate for president in my lifetime” in an endorsement video for former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign in 2024.
Last year, the singer released a six-track EP of songs and political commentary from performances in Manchester, England. That release begins with remarks that the United States is “in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”
In response, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that Mr. Springsteen “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT” and called for a “major investigation” into the artist.
Other musicians have joined Mr. Springsteen in speaking out against ICE. After Ms. Good was killed, the singer Billie Eilish reposted a graphic online that called the agency a “federally funded and supported terrorist group,” and after Mr. Pretti’s killing, she goaded her fellow celebrities, “u gonna speak up?” The singer Olivia Rodrigo called ICE’s actions “unconscionable” in a social media post.
Tom Morello, the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, announced he would hold a concert in Minneapolis on Friday, saying that the proceeds would be donated to Ms. Good’s and Mr. Pretti’s families.
Last year, the rapper Bad Bunny, who is from Puerto Rico, refused to perform in the mainland United States, saying he feared that ICE would target his concerts for immigration raids. Ms. Noem has said that immigration agents will be “all over” the Super Bowl in California next month, when Bad Bunny is set to perform the halftime show.
In October, when the country star Zach Bryan released new lyrics warning that ICE agents would “come bust down your door,” Ms. Noem said the song “attacks individuals who are just trying to make our streets safe.” Mr. Bryan later said the lyrics had been “misconstrued.”
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Streets of Minneapolis
Bruce Springsteen
Producers: Ron Aniello & Bruce Springsteen
Jan. 28, 2026
[Verse 1]
Through the winter's ice and cold
Down Nicollet Avenue
A city aflame fought fire and ice
'Neath an occupier's boots
King Trump's private army from the DHS
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes
[Verse 2]
Against smoke and rubber bullets
In the dawn's early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringing through the night
And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead, left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renee Good
[Chorus]
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We'll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of '26
We'll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
[Verse 3]
Trump's federal thugs beat up on
His face and his chest
Then we heard the gunshots
And Alex Pretti lay in the snow dead
Their claim was self-defense, sir
Just don't believe your eyes
It's our blood and bones
And these whistles and phones
Against Miller and Noem's dirty lies
[Chorus]
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Crying through the bloody mist
We'll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
[Bridge]
Now they say they're here to uphold the law
But they trample on our rights
If your skin is black or brown, my friend
You can be questioned or deported on sight
In our chants of "ICE out now"
Our city's heart and soul persists
Through broken glass and bloody tears
On the streets of Minneapolis
[Chorus]
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of '26
We'll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We'll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
We'll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
[Outro]
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out (ICE out)
ICE out
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2) Justice Dept. Playbook in Minnesota: Investigate Foes, Protect Allies
The Trump Justice Department has often cast aside normal procedures intended to seek accountability in favor of pushing prosecutors and the F.B.I. to focus on critics of the immigration crackdown.
By Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush, Jan. 29, 2026
For nearly a year, Justice Department leaders have adopted President Trump’s strong-arm approach to the law, punishing his enemies, protecting his friends and attacking the credibility of judges, prosecutors and even the victims of law-enforcement violence.
But playing to an audience of one inside the White House has its limits, especially when an audience of millions is watching.
The two fatal shootings in Minnesota this month, captured on video, have shocked the country and spurred a backlash from Mr. Trump’s habitually acquiescent allies in Congress.
So far, however, the department has largely stuck to the playbook it has learned from the president, eschewing procedures embraced by recent administrations that are intended to foster accountability in favor of the tactical bellicosity pressed by Mr. Trump and his top aide, Stephen Miller, the architect of his hard-line immigration policy.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and her chief deputy, Todd Blanche, have resisted calls to authorize civil rights investigations into the immigration agent who killed Renee Good, a mother of three shot in early January behind the wheel of her car.
They have yet to make any final determination about whether prosecutors will investigate the killing of Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse who died on Saturday in a hail of bullets as he came to the aid of a fellow protester. They are awaiting the result of two internal inquiries by homeland security investigators with the F.B.I., according to senior federal law enforcement officials.
In the interim, Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche have tried to refocus public attention on the aggressive tactics of demonstrators. They have also pushed prosecutors and the F.B.I. to turn up the heat on critics of the immigration crackdown: politicians, protesters, even relatives of the victims.
This strategy has left the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis, one of the most respected in the nation, in crisis. On Tuesday, prosecutors in the office’s criminal division confronted the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, Daniel Rosen, and an aide to Mr. Blanche, over concerns that they were being asked to execute orders that went against the department’s mission and best practices, according to four people briefed on the exchange.
Some of the prosecutors suggested they were considering resigning in protest, those people said, days after six others had quit over similar concerns. Their departures would exacerbate a staffing shortfall that has already forced the department to shift prosecutors from other jurisdictions to bolster the depleted ranks in Minnesota.
On Tuesday, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, announced one of the most aggressive actions to date, saying that the bureau would investigate an encrypted Signal chat used by local activists to monitor immigration raids. The move was immediately denounced by free-speech groups, including the libertarian Cato Institute, as unlawful and contrary to the constitutional protections afforded to political groups.
In the days after Ms. Good’s killing, federal prosecutors and agents in Minneapolis were inclined to proceed as they had under the Biden administration. They began to open a civil rights investigation into Jonathan Ross, the agent who had shot Ms. Good, taking steps like obtaining a warrant on that basis to examine the car at the center of the incident, according to people familiar with the matter.
But the department’s leadership interrupted that effort, demanding that the U.S. attorney’s office abandon its inquiry into Mr. Ross and focus instead on ties between Ms. Good’s partner, Becca Good, and local activists. The warrant issued to search Renee Good’s car for evidence of use of excessive force was scrapped and a new one was obtained to seek evidence of a potential assault on Mr. Ross.
They also put a halt to plans by prosecutors and agents to work with their local counterparts, taking the highly unusual step of retracting an evidence-sharing agreement with local authorities, claiming that leaders were too biased to conduct a fair inquiry, according to federal and state officials.
At the same time, the department opened a separate inquiry targeting elected Democrats in the state, including Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, examining whether they had taken actions to impede immigration agents.
They also moved aggressively to charge the journalist Don Lemon in connection with a demonstration at a church in St. Paul, even though a federal judge later determined there was no evidence he had committed any crimes.
Few, if any, of these actions have been taken without the knowledge of the White House. Trump aides participated in the drafting of a threatening letter that Ms. Bondi sent to local officials last week saying the administration would wind down its immigration enforcement efforts but only in exchange for concessions — including the handing over of state voter information, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Ms. Bondi also met earlier this month with Mr. Rosen, pushing him to take a more aggressive approach, according to an official with knowledge of her actions.
The attorney general has focused much of her attention on a protest at the church service in St. Paul this month, which Mr. Lemon and his producer documented. The Justice Department has brought charges against three of the demonstrators but failed to get warrants to arrest five more, including Mr. Lemon, a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s ire.
The case has badly soured relations between the department and the chief federal judge in Minnesota, Patrick J. Schiltz, a staunch Republican who once clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia. In an extraordinary rebuke last week, Judge Schiltz fought back as the department sought to force him to issue arrest warrants for Mr. Lemon and his producer, calling the effort “frivolous” and rejecting the idea that either one had committed crimes.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the department’s civil rights division and a former Trump election lawyer, has also weighed in on the church case, despite saying little about the killings of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti, incidents her unit would typically investigate.
“We’re going to pursue this to the ends of the earth,” she said in an interview with the podcaster Megyn Kelly. In her remarks, Ms. Dhillon also went after the federal judge who first refused to issue an arrest warrant for Mr. Lemon, noting he was married to someone who works for Keith Ellison, the Democratic state attorney general under scrutiny in a different department inquiry.
Ms. Bondi was back in Minnesota on Wednesday to oversee the filing of charges against 16 protesters accused of interfering with law enforcement officers, even as Mr. Rosen grappled with a potential staff revolt. She celebrated the move on social media by posting photos of the defendants.
At a hearing that same day, a federal judge said he was “deeply disturbed” by the post, reminding the attorney general that the defendants were presumed to be innocent.
The killing of Mr. Pretti, who was shot several times even though videos show he did not pose a threat to officers, appears to have profoundly shifted the public mood, and prompted a shake-up at the Homeland Security Department. But it has not had a major impact on the Justice Department, at least not yet.
Mr. Blanche, a former Trump defense lawyer who has an open line of communication with the president, quickly ruled out opening an investigation by Ms. Dhillon’s civil rights division into the Good shooting.
He did not rule one out after the Pretti shooting, but he also did not greenlight a civil rights inquiry and adopted what one aide called a wait-and-see approach. The department is deferring his decision until a narrow “use of force” review that homeland security investigators seem poised to conduct, meant to establish whether government employees had violated training standards, is completed.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said it did not automatically open civil rights investigations into law enforcement-involved shootings, as critics have claimed.
Shootings by federal agents are treated like every other case, the spokeswoman said, adding that further along the line, the department might opt to “investigate for civil rights violations if the evidence presents itself.”
But some career prosecutors believe the department is prioritizing politics over fairness. Two weeks ago, six top prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis quit their jobs after facing pressure from department leaders to close the investigation into Mr. Ross. Their departures were quickly followed by the news that Tracee Mergen, a respected F.B.I. supervisor who had opened the inquiry, had resigned for similar reasons.
Last weekend, state investigators, concerned that the Trump administration might destroy evidence of Mr. Pretti’s killing, obtained an extraordinary court order forcing federal officials to preserve the scene of Mr. Pretti’s death.
At the same time, the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association called for a meeting with the White House in a statement saying that “communities across our state are experiencing heightened stress and uncertainty,” and that officers were “facing growing challenges.”
But there was no sign that the department planned to pull back on its aggressive approach, even as Mr. Trump floated the idea of de-escalating immigration enforcement in the state.
An aide to Mr. Blanche, Colin McDonald, has emerged as a central player in the department’s counterattack against Minnesota officials and protesters.
Mr. McDonald, who is close to Mr. Miller, has taken on a supervisory role, coordinating with top officials at the F.B.I. and the Homeland Security Department’s investigative arm to streamline and speed up prosecutions of protesters, current and former officials said.
(On Wednesday, Mr. Trump tapped him to run a White House-controlled investigation into Minnesota day care facilities.)
He has worked closely with Aakash Singh, who oversees the operations of U.S. attorney’s offices across the country, to find evidence sufficient to justify issuing grand jury subpoenas this month to Mr. Walz, Mr. Frey, Mr. Ellison and other local officials, according to people familiar the situation.
While the department’s aggressive actions have been hailed by Trump supporters, it has done little to quell growing furor over the violence on the streets of Minneapolis.
And in some instances, officials at the department and the F.B.I. have made things worse.
On the day of Mr. Pretti’s death, Bill Essayli, the top Trump-appointed prosecutor in Los Angeles, suggested that the victim’s legal possession of a handgun at the time of his killing was improper. The statement stood at odds with a pillar of Trump-era Republican orthodoxy.
“If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don’t do it!” he wrote on social media.
Mr. Patel and others followed suit, drawing a rare rebuke from gun rights groups, including the National Rifle Association.
If their statements flopped badly with a broad audience, it appeared to pass muster with the man to whom both Mr. Essayli and Mr. Patel owe their jobs.
“You can’t have guns,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Tuesday as he walked to Marine One whirring on the South Lawn. “You can’t walk in with guns.”
Emily Bazelon and Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
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3) Videos Show Alex Pretti in Confrontation With Agents 11 Days Before His Death
More than a week before federal agents killed Mr. Pretti, a Minneapolis nurse, different agents pushed him to the ground after he spit at them and broke a taillight on their S.U.V.
By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Reporting from Minneapolis, Published Jan. 28, 2026, Updated Jan. 29, 2026
"As Mr. Pretti gets back to his feet, what appears to be a gun is seen tucked into the back waistband of his pants. During the later confrontation with agents in which Mr. Pretti was killed, he had a gun holstered on his hip. One agent grabbed the gun from Mr. Pretti’s holster moments before two other agents shot at Mr. Pretti."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/us/alex-pretti-kicking-ice-vehicle-video.html
The nurse who was fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday was pushed to the ground by different agents at a protest 11 days before he was killed, according to newly unearthed videos that show him spitting and cursing at them and kicking a taillight on one of their S.U.V.s.
The footage adds to what is known about the 37-year-old nurse, Alex Pretti, who was killed by federal agents on Saturday morning after they pepper sprayed him and pushed him and a woman to the ground, a killing that set off protests in the Twin Cities and across the country.
In the earlier incident, on Jan. 13, Mr. Pretti — wearing some of the same clothing as when he was killed — can be seen running toward a street corner in the South Minneapolis neighborhood of Powderhorn where a crowd of protesters have gathered and are jeering at federal agents.
“What are you doing here?” he shouts at agents who are standing next to two of their S.U.V.s. He repeatedly curses at them and spits at one agent as the agent is getting into a vehicle. When the agents begin to drive away, Mr. Pretti kicks twice at one of the vehicle’s taillights, breaking it. That seems to prompt the agents to get back out of the vehicle and push him to the ground.
The agents, at least some of whom are with Homeland Security Investigations, a division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, hold Mr. Pretti on the ground for about 20 seconds before letting him go and driving off.
As Mr. Pretti gets back to his feet, what appears to be a gun is seen tucked into the back waistband of his pants. During the later confrontation with agents in which Mr. Pretti was killed, he had a gun holstered on his hip. One agent grabbed the gun from Mr. Pretti’s holster moments before two other agents shot at Mr. Pretti.
Both of the officers who fired — one with Border Patrol and another with its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection — have been put on leave as part of the agency’s protocol for when agents are involved in shootings. Neither has been identified.
At least two videos showing Mr. Pretti’s earlier encounter with federal agents had been online for about two weeks. But it wasn’t until Wednesday, when a news outlet called The News Movement published another video of the confrontation and identified Mr. Pretti in the footage, that the encounter attracted attention. A representative for Mr. Pretti’s family confirmed that it was him in the video published by the news outlet.
“A week before Alex was gunned down in the street — despite posing no threat to anyone — he was violently assaulted” by federal agents, a lawyer for Mr. Pretti’s family, Steve Schleicher, said in a statement. “Nothing that happened a full week before could possibly have justified Alex’s killing.”
Mr. Pretti’s parents and sister have denounced lies that they say Trump administration officials have perpetuated about Mr. Pretti, and have described him as a good man who helped treat sick patients at Minneapolis’s Veterans Affairs hospital.
Reporting was contributed by Hamed Aleaziz, Robin Stein and Haley Willis.
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4) Haitians Are Vital to U.S. Health Care. Many Are About to Lose Their Right to Work.
Haitians are a vital source of employees for health care providers in many communities. The Trump administration is removing legal status next month for 330,000 of them.
By Miriam Jordan, Jan. 29, 2026
Miriam Jordan is a national immigration correspondent.
Vilbrun Dorsainvil said he fled Haiti in 2021 after he was threatened for speaking out about the government. He settled in Springfield, Ohio, which is home to a growing Haitian community. Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Vilbrun Dorsainvil was a physician in his native Haiti, but after fleeing his troubled country he couldn’t practice when he arrived in the United States. Determined to stay in medicine, he retrained as a registered nurse and now works in the cardiac unit of the only hospital in Springfield, Ohio, a city grappling with a shortage of health care workers.
He monitors patients after procedures, administers medication and comforts families during difficult moments. “Being in health care was my dream,” said Mr. Dorsainvil, 35, who came to the United States five years ago. “It hurt a little not to practice as a physician, but I was blessed that I could stay in health care.”
That blessing has an expiration date. On Feb. 3, Mr. Dorsainvil and more than 330,000 other Haitians in the United States could lose their right to work here, potentially destabilizing the health care industry in places like Springfield, where a large influx of Haitian immigrants has settled in recent years and helped fill critical health care roles.
Mr. Dorsainvil lives in the United States under a legal designation called Temporary Protected Status, which can be provided by the U.S. government to people from countries experiencing armed conflict or natural disasters. The protection allows those already in the United States to remain for a specific period of time, and it can be renewed if the U.S. government considers conditions in the country unsafe for people to return.
Haitians have been eligible for T.P.S. since an earthquake devastated the country in 2010, and the protection has been renewed because of other crises. But the Trump administration announced last year that it was terminating the status for several countries, including Afghanistan, Venezuela and Haiti.
By seeking to end T.P.S. for Haitians and many other foreign nationals, the Department of Homeland Security is vastly expanding the number of people who could be expelled from the country as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. Officials have argued that T.P.S. was intended to offer only temporary relief but has become an indefinite benefit for tens of thousands of people.
Mr. Dorsainvil is one of several health care workers named as plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to preserve the protected status for Haitians.
Rulings are expected in a matter of days in two lawsuits, including Mr. Dorsainvil’s, contesting the termination of T.P.S. for Haitians. Yet, even a favorable decision may offer little relief; the Trump administration is expected to appeal immediately, prolonging the uncertainty for both Haitian workers and their employers.
At least 50,000 migrants with protected status work in health care, an industry struggling to fill positions in small cities and rural areas as an aging America requires more long-term care. The industry also continues to recover from the strains created by the coronavirus pandemic, when nursing homes and senior residential facilities shed more than 400,000 employees.
People from Haiti are a particularly familiar presence in hospitals, clinics and nursing homes in states with large Haitian communities, including Florida, New York and Massachusetts. Haitians filled about 111,000 health care positions in the United States in 2023, according to an analysis of census data by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
“In a health care system facing so many disruptions, it’s shortsighted to make such policy changes” that further erode care, said Leah Masselink, an associate professor of health policy management at George Washington University. “These immigrants are highly qualified, and in positions that are hard to fill.”
Rachel Blumberg, who runs a senior care center in Boca Raton, Fla., said she was bracing for the loss of 30 Haitian employees with Temporary Protected Status who would have to be let go and could be immediately deported.
“These are individuals who have been with us five, six, seven, 10 years,” said Ms. Blumberg, chief executive of Toby & Leon Cooperman Mount Sinai Residences. “They do work that many Americans won’t do.”
“I can’t replace the relationship they have with our residents,” she added.
Asked about the health care industry’s fears of worker shortages, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, dismissed the concerns. Vice President JD Vance and Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policy, have said that foreign workers displace Americans and undercut their wages, which has been contested by economists whose research shows that in many industries, immigrants fill labor gaps.
In Springfield, a city of about 58,000 between Dayton and Columbus, the stakes are high.
Over the last several years, more than 10,000 Haitians have settled there, drawn by jobs in warehouses, auto-parts factories and the health care sector. They work at the hospital and the community clinic and as caregivers for seniors in a county that has been consistently rated as underserved by the federal government.
“These folks are filling jobs that are some of the hardest for us to keep staffed,” said Chris Cook, the health commissioner for Clark County, which includes Springfield.
Mr. Dorsainvil entered the United States with a tourist visa in early 2021 and settled in Springfield. When the Biden administration granted Temporary Protected Status to Haitians in May of that year, the status allowed him to enroll in a local college to pursue a nursing degree. While studying, he worked weekend shifts at an Amazon warehouse and part time as a nursing assistant at the Springfield Regional Medical Center.
Since earning his degree last year, he has worked 13-hour shifts at the hospital, where he cares for up to 50 patients a week. Last year, he bought a duplex that he shares with his brother and two cousins, all from Haiti.
Thomas Hupman, who was born and raised in Springfield, helped train Mr. Dorsainvil and said it would be a “tremendous loss” for the hospital if he had to go. “Vilbrun has knowledge and compassion, and no task is beneath him,” said Mr. Hupman, 31, who is also a registered nurse. “He is there for the patients.”
Successive administrations have granted protected status to Haitians since the 2010 earthquake, which was estimated to have killed some 300,000 people. More recently, tens of thousands fled the Caribbean nation after the 2021 assassination of the last elected president. The ensuing crisis has fueled widespread gang violence, forced residents from their homes and led to hunger.
Mr. Dorsainvil said he never planned to stay in the United States forever. He has a daughter back home who was born shortly after he fled and is now 5. “Leaving Haiti was the hardest decision,” he said. “I told myself it’s not going to be for long.”
He said he was followed by armed men and repeatedly threatened because of his family’s political opposition and his own vocal criticism of mismanagement within Haiti’s health care system. In a written declaration filed as part of his lawsuit over T.P.S., he said that several of his brothers had gone into hiding or fled Haiti after being attacked and imprisoned.
“If my country is safe enough,” he said, “with a president in office doing the right thing, I will go back.”
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5) Twix Is OK but Granola Isn’t as States Deploy New Food Stamp Rules
A dizzying array of rules govern what can be bought with SNAP dollars, confusing grocery stores and consumers.
By Julie Creswell and Linda Qiu, Jan. 29, 2026
In Iowa, food stamps can be used to purchase ice cream at a convenience store, but not a fruit cup with a fork attached. Next month, consumers in Idaho will be able to use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to buy a Twix candy bar, but not a flourless granola bar with chocolate chips.
And in April, government assistance can be used in Virginia to pay for sweetened iced tea and lemonade, but not some brands of sparkling, sweetened fruit juice. The opposite will be true in Texas.
The Agriculture Department, which administers SNAP benefits, is rapidly approving waivers for states to ban the purchase of soda, energy drinks and, in some states, candy or prepared desserts using food stamps. It’s part of the Make America Healthy Again push by the Trump administration, spearheaded by the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The first restrictions took effect on Jan. 1 in five states: Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah and West Virginia. At least 13 more states will follow suit in the coming months.
The patchwork of restrictions among states is also creating a bit of a logistical nightmare for grocers — particularly small ones — that have to customize their payment systems in each state. And there’s confusion among consumers left wondering whether the foods and treats they usually purchase with SNAP dollars will remain eligible.
Supporters hail the removal of “junk food” from the program, noting its links to obesity and chronic diseases like diabetes. But others view the changes as an attack on lower-income individuals.
“By placing restrictions on what items disabled and low-income Iowans can buy with SNAP, they are declaring that they don’t trust their constituencies to make decisions around their own health,” said Sarah Jean Ashby, a 33-year-old in Altoona with multiple chronic illnesses that have left her unable to work. She relies solely on the $217 she receives each month from SNAP to buy her groceries. “They’re saying poor children don’t deserve fruit snacks or chocolate on their birthdays.”
The ripple effect from the restrictions will also have financial implications for food and beverage manufacturers, which have experienced a decline in product demand for nearly two years.
The state SNAP restrictions are “another headwind for the industry,” said Spencer Hanus, an analyst at Wolfe Research. He noted that beverage makers had slightly more exposure to SNAP benefits, pointing to a summary from 2016 — the latest figures available — by the U.S.D.A. that showed the second-highest expenditure of recipients was for sweetened beverages, including soda.
Early in the new year, when Iowa’s new restrictions went into effect, Tiffany Carpenter strolled into a Sam’s Club near her home in Cedar Rapids to shop for groceries, nervous about what she could and couldn’t purchase with SNAP funds.
Pop-Tarts? Yes. Scooby-Doo graham crackers? Yes. But Welch’s fruit snacks? No. “These are snacks normal people buy their children,” said Ms. Carpenter, 37, who began receiving SNAP benefits two years ago when she left her job as a Starbucks barista to care full time for her autistic son and two other children. “I fear it’s a slippery slope to them banning a lot in the future.”
For retailers, the new restrictions require them to go into their point-of-sale systems and remove items that are no longer eligible for SNAP spending. Stores must also educate customers and train employees on how to delicately inform shoppers that certain items in their carts may no longer be allowed.
“It’s not the governor who is going to be standing behind the counter explaining the changes. It’s going to be an 18- or 19-year-old employee explaining complex changes to this system,” said Margaret Hardin Mannion, the director of government relations for the National Association of Convenience Stores.
Iowa’s rules are considered the most restrictive, allowing the use of SNAP benefits to purchase only food and beverages not subject to the state’s sales tax, resulting in a byzantine list of prohibited and exempted foods.
Under that definition, benefits can be used to purchase most Nature Valley granola bars because they contain flour, but not the Nature Valley protein bars that don’t. Snickers are not allowed as a candy bar, but are permitted in ice cream form because those are refrigerated and contain milk. Kettle corn can be purchased only if unpopped.
Dion Pitt, the owner of Logan Super Foods, a family-owned grocery store that serves the 1,400 people who live in Logan, Iowa, said it had taken his wife about three days walking the store’s aisles with her laptop to change the codes on hundreds of items that were no longer SNAP eligible in the store’s payment system. Despite the extra hours, he supports the state’s move to restrict some items.
“Pop, candy, that kind of stuff — it should have never been included all along,” Mr. Pitt said. “But the juices and the granola bars, I kind of wish they had left that stuff alone.”
Still, because the definition of “soft drink” or “candy” varies from state to state, the list of prohibited items will, too. While many states prohibit sugary drinks altogether, Texas and Hawaii have specific caps on the amount of sugar or sweeteners. Some states exempt 100 percent fruit juice drinks, but others allow beverages with just 50 percent juice. Hydration drinks, like some forms of Gatorade, are allowed in some states and not in others because of high sugar levels.
Candy or flavored drinks?
Some states ban the purchase of Twix bars with SNAP dollars, while others won’t allow consumers to buy Gatorade with their benefits.
“This is causing massive confusion within the retailer community, because there’s limited consistency among states’ waivers,” said Stewart Fried, a principal at Olsson Frank Weeda Terman Matz, a law firm that represents retailers on SNAP and other nutrition policy issues.
Previously, retailers could mark entire categories of products — like alcohol, tobacco and prepared hot foods — as ineligible for SNAP purchases. But now, they must determine if individual items qualify under the new restrictions.
Agencies administering SNAP in Texas and Indiana said they had launched outreach campaigns to inform retailers and SNAP participants about the new restrictions, including sending postcards and emails, conducting conference calls and hosting question-and-answer forums.
But some retailers and anti-hunger groups say states have not done enough to prepare consumers and stores for the changes. Only two — Nebraska and Oklahoma — have circulated lists of specific product codes so far, Mr. Fried said.
Indiana opted to not share product codes given the difficulty of ensuring accuracy, a spokesman for the state’s Family and Social Services Administration said.
Acknowledging “significant challenges” with implementation, the Agriculture Department said in a memo in late December that retailers would have 90 days to comply with the new restrictions. But the agency warned that two violations of the new restrictions could result in consequences, including removal from the SNAP program.
Mike Wilson, the chief operating officer of Cubby’s, a family-owned chain of 41 convenience stores and supermarkets in Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota, said it had taken about 500 hours to manually compare the affected products and make the changes to the stores’ payment systems. But it’s inevitable that something is going to be missed, he said.
“Nebraska gave us a list with 6,000 items on it, and right away we found a Monster energy drink that wasn’t on it,” he said. Mr. Wilson removed the product from the stores’ payment system, fearing it would be flagged as a failure in an inspection.
The risk of being removed from the program for repeated failures makes Mr. Wilson nervous. In some rural areas, Cubby’s has an expanded store model; in Shelby, Neb., for instance, it is the only grocery store for the community of about 700 people.
“If we make a mistake and don’t flag something that is now ineligible for SNAP funds and they take away our license, it’s not going to hurt Cubby’s. It’s a small part of our sales,” Mr. Wilson said. “It’s going to hurt the people in that community who are poor or have food insecurity. To me, that’s not fair.”
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6) In Honduras, the American Right Is Piloting Our Future
By Jean Guerrero, Jan. 29, 2026
Ms. Guerrero, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and author.
Kimberly Elliott
This week, Honduras inaugurated a new president, Nasry Asfura, a construction magnate backed by seemingly strange bedfellows: members of the notorious MS-13 gang and President Trump. Mr. Trump had urged Hondurans to vote for Mr. Asfura days before MS-13 gang members posing as election observers threatened to kill anyone who didn’t vote for that candidate. Amid weeks of election uncertainty and protests, Mr. Trump warned Hondurans of “hell to pay” if they chose a different outcome. Mr. Asfura’s victory marks the success of Mr. Trump’s campaign to resuscitate a political party tainted by its widely known ties to cartels.
The story of how Mr. Trump came to intervene in Honduran politics and align himself with a foreign terrorist organization is essential for understanding the world he is trying to build. He has been meddling in multiple elections in Latin America, and recently captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a military operation to have him face federal drug trafficking charges here. He’s now threatening to arrest the president of Colombia on suspicion of drug trafficking and to bomb cartels in Mexico. His actions may seem contradictory. But there is a coherent logic to them: They expand territorial power for a class of transnational elites who believe they’re above the law.
Last month, Mr. Trump pardoned one of the country’s best-known convicted drug traffickers: Juan Orlando Hernández. Mr. Hernández was the president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022; in that time, there was a steep surge in migration from that country to the United States as families fled his narco-state. In 2024, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for his role in what the U.S. Department of Justice called “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.” He was convicted of conspiring to distribute hundreds of tons of cocaine, reportedly boasting of plans to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” In explaining his pardon, Mr. Trump relied on a conspiracy theory circulating in conservative circles: that Mr. Hernández was a political prisoner of former President Joe Biden’s. It was, in Mr. Trump’s words, a “witch hunt.”
But Mr. Trump’s real motivations are hidden in plain sight. Not long after his second inauguration, the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank in California, published a call for him to pardon Mr. Hernández. So did Mr. Trump’s longtime friend and fellow felon Roger Stone in a blog post, written with Shane Trejo. Both argued that the pardon would hurt President Xiomara Castro, a democratically elected progressive and the first woman to be president of Honduras. They wrote that it would re-empower the right-wing party, presumably by rehabilitating it.
The goal, Mr. Stone wrote, was to save Próspera, a semiautonomous city on the Honduran island of Roatán. Próspera was backed by Mr. Hernández and Trump-aligned tech moguls such as Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen; corporations there pay incredibly low taxes to Honduras. It was built in a “special economic zone,” a rapidly multiplying form of territory with its own business-friendly laws, like looser environmental regulations and labor standards. (It’s what the Trump administration brokered for Gaza in its cease-fire with Israel.)
Special economic zones were pioneered in Puerto Rico, where in the mid-1900s the entire archipelago was transformed into such a zone and much of the native-born population — including most of my maternal relatives — subsequently left amid widespread unemployment. Proponents of the zones claim that they create prosperity for domestic populations. Patrick Neveling, a political economist, calls this an excuse “used to funnel a lot of state money into private hands.” In the case of Puerto Rico, its taxpayers paid for the infrastructure for transnational corporations to conduct tax- and customs-free manufacturing there, and for government-backed loans for foreign investors.
Globally, more than 5,400 special economic zones have become home to dozens of start-up cities like Próspera, corporate-led jurisdictions with their own laws. In “The Network State,” a 2022 book that was influential in Silicon Valley, the tech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, a leading proponent of start-up cities, fantasizes that these territories will not only compete with nation-states but someday replace them.
Many Hondurans, including Ms. Castro, opposed Próspera as an affront to national sovereignty. Not long after Ms. Castro’s inauguration, the Honduran Congress repealed the law, passed by the country’s right wing, that had opened Honduras to start-up cities. This was unacceptable to the pillaging class. As Mr. Stone wrote on his blog, “May the Próspera experiment prevail, the common good be saved, and global leftism be damned by the benevolent hand of President Trump!”
The people behind start-up cities like Próspera have long been whispering in Mr. Trump’s ear about bringing their neocolonial experiments to the United States, branded as “freedom cities.” Mr. Trump has publicly advocated them. For all his rhetoric about putting America first and making America great, Mr. Trump isn’t a nationalist. He’s in league with transnational elites who lack allegiance to this or any country. While distracting voters with anti-immigrant rhetoric, he is laying the groundwork for the disenfranchisement of working people across the Americas.
MAGA Republicans often complain that the United States is turning into the “third world” because of immigration. But it’s Mr. Trump who has remade the United States in the image of the Latin America that our government and chief executives helped create with foreign interference: a place where masked men routinely leap out of unmarked vans to snatch citizens, where people are disappeared and human rights activists publicly killed, where soldiers patrol cities to crush dissent, and where organized crime and the state blend into a single machinery of power that protects the interests of the oligarchs.
At first glance, it may seem like karma: The terror that the United States wrought for generations in Latin America has come home. But the victims are not the transnational elites who have long colluded with corrupt officials to take vulnerable people’s territories and feast on their oil, fruit and precious metals. The victims are the displaced migrants forced to leave their homelands and the American workers who have to compete with their criminalized labor. This isn’t an accident. It seems to be the goal: to entrench a permanent underclass across the Americas. Mr. Trump claims that his goal is to remove immigrants from this country, but in fact he is expanding the pool of vulnerable labor for transnational elites. By stripping millions of people of legal status in the United States, Mr. Trump likely created more undocumented people than he removed last year.
In many liberal circles, it is treated as an article of faith that immigration is nothing but positive for the economy. The silence about how criminalized labor depresses wages is born out of both ignorance and fear of fueling anti-immigrant hatreds. But that silence allows people like Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser Stephen Miller to caricature liberals as elites who want a cheap labor force. The American left needs to break its silence on this issue and articulate a politics that connects labor and immigrant rights.
Elites in both parties have long benefited from a manufactured underclass. The right-wing party in Honduras came to power in a 2009 military coup, after which the Obama administration briefly cut off aid to the country, then resumed it, including tens of millions of dollars for the military and police. In 2015, after tens of thousands of Hondurans marched against the narco-state, the U.S. ambassador, James Nealon, claimed that relations between the two countries were “perhaps the best in history.”
In the mid-2010s, protesters of the corporation- and cartel-friendly regime were kidnapped, raped and killed. This oppression and instability were partially responsible for the surge in migration from Central America which President Barack Obama confronted. But in the administration’s discussions about the “root causes” of the exodus, there was no reckoning with the role of the U.S. government or American investors.
During the Biden administration, Próspera’s backers sued Honduras for nearly $11 billion under an international tribunal governed by investor-state dispute settlement rules, in response to the country’s efforts to reclaim its sovereignty. In 2024, dozens of Democratic lawmakers asked Mr. Biden to remove liability from the corporate-friendly rules from trade agreements for Central America and the Caribbean, to protect vulnerable economies from litigious elites. But Mr. Biden failed to act. The ongoing lawsuit and similar ones threaten to bankrupt Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere.
Human rights activists in Roatán have been fighting for years to protect their ancestral lands and resources from Próspera. But many are now afraid for their lives; at least one prominent activist recently fled the community in fear, two members of the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization told me. Everyone there knows what tends to happen to people who resist the pillaging classes in Central America: They’re killed, even the activists with international reputations such as the Honduran land defender Berta Cáceres, whose assassination in 2016 was ordered by the U.S.-military-trained president of an internationally financed hydroelectric company she was protesting.
The start-up city Próspera’s billionaire architects insist that the project creates jobs for Hondurans and boosts economic development. Some clearly believe that. They’re so sure of the backwardness of the population, they can’t help but see themselves as saviors. It’s the same attitude that Democratic elites have toward rural Americans. The truth is that the fates of working-class Americans and Hondurans are entwined.
With the return of the right-wing party to Honduras, calls for oversight are likely to be ignored. The right-wing party, an ally of Próspera, governed its citizens the way Mr. Trump and his allies envision governing Americans: through violent dispossession and exploitation. In the United States, a mirror world has already begun to form with the unleashing of multiple federal police forces that have already killed at least three citizens and a number of immigrants. These police forces do not protect the body politic; they protect the bottom line of transnational corporations that surveil and jail us for profit.
We don’t stand a chance against them until we bridge the engineered divide between America’s native-born working classes and the rural poor of Latin America, including those who are now undocumented workers in the United States.
Politicians who care to restrain the expansion of transnational corporate power need, first of all, to abandon their cowardice on amnesty. A pathway to citizenship for longtime undocumented people with no criminal records would open the door for millions of disenfranchised people in this country, many of them Mexican, to start organizing with working-class Americans. Only by expanding who counts as an American can we rebuild the solidarity necessary to confront the elites who profit from our precarity.
That doesn’t mean embracing an open-border policy that favors mass migration. What is missing from the immigration debate is a complete moral framework. This framework has to recognize not only the right to migrate but also what Miriam Miranda, a Honduran activist for the Afro-Indigenous Garífuna, calls “the right to stay.” A politics that celebrates movement while ignoring displacement serves capital, not people. Its logical endpoint is a world where we all become migrants — where communities everywhere are hollowed out again and again so that extraction can continue uninterrupted.
What Mr. Trump is doing in Latin America is not an aberration. The pardon, the blessing of a former — and likely future — narco-state in service of private power, the military strikes: This is the governing model that he and his allies are trying to globalize. A world where national sovereignty is dead, the rule of law is nonexistent for corporations, and convicted felons like Mr. Trump and Mr. Hernández run the world for the pillaging classes. MAGA was never a revolt against elites. It was the elites’ most effective instrument.
Mr. Trump’s meddling reveals what his movement is for — not borders, nations or workers but a cross-continental free-for-all where people are uprooted so profits can move freely.
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7) The Border Patrol Is the Problem. It Always Has Been.
By Reece Jones, Jan. 29, 2026
Mr. Jones is the author of “Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States.”
Bettmann/Getty Images
The violence, racial profiling and disregard for the Constitution that has burst into public view in Minneapolis is not new or unusual for the Border Patrol. This is how the agency has operated since it was created, though for decades those activities have been hidden in the remote borderlands. If you are uncomfortable with what the Border Patrol is doing in Minneapolis, you are uncomfortable with the Border Patrol, full stop.
While Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become the umbrella term for all immigration agents, the Border Patrol is the larger force with a longer history. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations agents have the job of finding, detaining and deporting people. Border Patrol agents police areas in between ports of entry. Alex Pretti was shot by the Border Patrol; Renee Good was shot by ICE.
The Trump administration’s decision this week to replace the Border Patrol commander in Minneapolis, Gregory Bovino, suggested the problem was limited to leadership mistakes. But this move, and other possible solutions offered by the Trump administration and Democrats alike, does not adequately address the depth of the problem.
The tactics in Minneapolis have been used both on the border and beyond — to immigrants and citizens alike — during the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden presidencies.
Today, there are about 20,000 Border Patrol agents, compared to some 1,500 agents in the 1970s. As the agency grew, it began to extend its policing methods far from the border itself. Some 50 million vehicles are screened every year at internal Border Patrol checkpoints miles from a border. From 2016 to 2020, 91 percent of drug seizures at interior checkpoints involved only American citizens. Americans have accused officers of assaulting and racially profiling them, even before Minneapolis. The Border Patrol has also raided religious and humanitarian organizations that provide aid to immigrants.
The Southern Border Communities Coalition counted 364 fatal encounters with Customs and Border Protection agents since 2010. Border Patrol agents have killed Mexican teenagers on the Mexican side of the border. In April, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found that the U.S. government was responsible for torturing, killing and covering up the death of Anastasio Hernández Rojas while he was in Border Patrol custody.
How the Border Patrol operates can be traced back to the agency’s origins in Wild West frontier policing. The United States Border Patrol was established in May 1924, days after the signing of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which set very small quotas for immigrants from most of the world except Northern Europe. According to the Times headline at the time, the law was meant “to preserve racial type as it exists here today.”
Senator David Reed, a Pennsylvania Republican who sponsored the immigration act, explained in a 1925 Senate debate: “They have no right to go into an interior city and pick up aliens in the street and arrest them, but it is just at the border where they are patrolling that we want them to have this authority.” He reassured his concerned colleagues, “We are all on the alert against granting too much power to these officials to act without warrant.”
His promises proved empty. The first agents were hired from frontier law enforcement and brought with them a frontier ethos. One agent bragged in his memoir that he had killed 27 people, but that was just whites; he didn’t bother to count Black and brown people. Another agent, angered when a smuggler shot his partner, went to the Rio Grande and indiscriminately shot at every Mexican he could see on the other side of the river.
In the mid-20th century, Congress revisited the Border Patrol’s authorization, allowing agents to operate within “a reasonable distance” of external boundaries but leaving it up to the agency’s leadership to decide what a reasonable distance was. “Reasonable distance” was later interpreted to mean 100 miles from borders and coastlines, a decision that has remained unchanged since.
Still, at the time, the Border Patrol remained a relatively small group focused on racial policing near the Mexican border. The agency’s most high-profile moment was Operation Wetback, which ejected approximately a million people in the mid-1950s.
A decade later, the 1965 Immigration Act removed the racial national origins quotas but added new restrictions to Mexicans’ entry to the United States. The number of Border Patrol apprehensions soon increased. Moreover, the courts have allowed race and appearance to justify stops by immigration agents as long as they were paired with at least one other factor. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s 2025 concurrence in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo confirmed again that immigration agents can use apparent race and ethnicity as a “relevant factor” to profile people far from the border itself.
The Border Patrol’s funding expanded as immigration and drugs became national issues. From 1994 to 2000, the number of agents more than doubled. Then it exploded. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Border Patrol repositioned itself as the front line against terrorist infiltrations, even though none of the hijackers had crossed irregularly at a land border.
Founded to enforce a racist law, the Border Patrol has long held extraordinary powers to stop and interrogate citizens and immigrants alike in vast stretches of the country. The Border Patrol was not the creation of Gregory Bovino, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller or even Donald Trump. All the Trump administration has done is draw attention to what always existed. Once the Border Patrol operated primarily in the shadows of the borderlands. Perhaps before it was possible to not really know what the Border Patrol was doing, but after watching neighbors tear gassed, pepper-sprayed and beaten while exercising their right to observe police activity, it is impossible to look away.
While we grieve the killing of Alex Pretti, we must also vow to rein in the Border Patrol. That means banning the use of race in the agency’s policing, getting its agents out of American cities and sending them back to the border — and shrinking the border zone substantially.
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8) Don Lemon Is Among Several More Arrested Over Church Protest
The former CNN anchor and three others were arrested on charges related to a protest this month in St. Paul, Minn., Attorney General Pam Bondi said. Protests were beginning in Minneapolis against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
By Mitch Smith, Sonia A. Rao, Dan Watson and Hamed Aleaziz, January 30, 2026
Journalist Don Lemon reporting in Illinois in October. Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Federal agents arrested the former CNN anchor Don Lemon late Thursday on charges that he violated federal law during a Jan. 18 protest in St. Paul, Minn., against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, his lawyer said. The case had been rejected last week by a magistrate judge.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said that she had ordered the arrests of Mr. Lemon and three others in connection with the demonstration at a church: Georgia Fort, an independent journalist; and Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy, both activists. The announcement came as new protests began in downtown Minneapolis over the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown, and as organizers and student groups called for demonstrations from coast to coast.
The backlash against the administration has intensified since the killings of two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis this month. Tom Homan, sent by President Trump to oversee the operation in Minnesota, acknowledged on Thursday that it needed to be “fixed” and that not “everything that has been done here has been perfect.”
Mr. Lemon, who was scheduled to appear in federal court in Los Angeles on Friday morning to contest the charges, has said he was reporting as a journalist when he entered Cities Church in St. Paul to observe a demonstration against the immigration crackdown. Ms. Fort also said she was documenting the protest as a journalist and called the case against her a violation of her constitutional rights.
Protesters interrupted the service this month at Cities Church, where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official serves as a pastor, and chanted “ICE out.” Afterward, the Trump administration sought to charge eight people over the episode, citing a law that protects people seeking to participate in a service in a house of worship.
A magistrate judge who reviewed the evidence last week approved charges against only three of the eight, rejecting the evidence against Mr. Lemon and the others as insufficient. The Justice Department then petitioned a federal appeals court to force the judge to issue the additional warrants, only to be denied.
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9) How ICE Already Knows Who Minneapolis Protesters Are
Agents use facial recognition, social media monitoring and other tech tools not only to identify undocumented immigrants but also to track protesters, current and former officials said.
By Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik, Jan. 30, 2026
Sheera Frenkel reports on defense technology and Silicon Valley. Aaron Krolik reports on data and technology.
On the morning of Jan. 10, Nicole Cleland was in her car trailing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent through Richfield, Minn., her hometown.
Suddenly, the agent turned into a series of one-way streets and stopped, getting out of his white Dodge Ram, said Ms. Cleland, who volunteers with a local watchdog group that observes the activity of immigration officers. The agent then walked over to Ms. Cleland’s car and surprised her by addressing her as Nicole.
“He said he had facial recognition and that his body camera was on,” said Ms. Cleland, 56, who had not met the agent before.
Ms. Cleland was one of at least seven American citizens told by ICE agents this month that they were being recorded with facial recognition technology in and around Minneapolis, according to local activists and videos posted to social media, which were verified by The New York Times. None had given consent for their faces to be recorded.
Facial recognition is just one technology tool that ICE has deployed in Minneapolis, where thousands of agents are conducting a crackdown. The technologies are being used not only to identify undocumented immigrants but also to track citizens who have protested ICE’s presence, said three current and former officials of the Department of Homeland Security who were not authorized to discuss confidential matters.
ICE is using two facial recognition programs in Minnesota, they said, including one made by the tech company Clearview AI and a newer program, Mobile Fortify. The agency is also using cellphone and social media tools to monitor people’s online activity and potentially hack into phones. And agents are tapping into a database, built by the data analytics company Palantir, that combines government and commercial data to identify real-time locations for individuals they are pursuing, the current and former officials said.
“The technologies are being deployed, or appear to be deployed, in a much more aggressive way than we have seen in the past,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, which has sued the Homeland Security Department over the immigration operation in Minneapolis. “The conglomeration of all these technologies together is giving the government unprecedented abilities.”
The Homeland Security Department has not disclosed which technologies immigration agents are using in Minneapolis. A spokeswoman said the agency would not detail its methods, adding: “For years law enforcement across the nation has leveraged technological innovation to fight crime. ICE is no different.”
The reach of the technologies has raised concerns. In November, Democratic senators including Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Adam B. Schiff of California asked ICE for more information on its facial recognition software, and asked that it suspend use of the technology in U.S. cities.
ICE has vastly expanded its tech tools over the last year after an influx of cash. In July, President Trump signed a bill increasing ICE’s annual budget to roughly $28 billion from $8 billion, making it the most richly funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.
In April, the Homeland Security Department awarded Palantir a nearly $30 million contract to build a system backed by artificial intelligence that would help find and track individuals for deportation. Palantir was due to deliver a prototype by Sept. 25, according to public tenders issued by the agency. The agency has started using the system, two current Homeland Security officials said.
A person familiar with Palantir said the company works with ICE on a database that integrates different information to help agents identify only noncitizens.
In September, the Homeland Security Department also spent nearly $10 million acquiring at least three social media monitoring tools and services that allow it to delve into people’s cellphones, according to procurement records and public contracts for the project.
One of the tools, which was built by Paragon, an Israeli technology company, lets people take control of phones or remotely hack into them to read messages or track locations. The others were built by Penlink, a Nebraska-based software company. They use social media data scraped from the web and information from data brokers to help build dossiers of anyone with a social media account.
Some details of these tools were reported earlier by 404 Media. Paragon and Penlink did not respond to requests for comment.
ICE’s use of facial recognition software was documented in videos and photos from local activist groups in Minnesota this month and reviewed by The Times. Two photos captured fatigue-clad agents using cellphones to scan the faces of protesters in Minneapolis, while in one video, agents could be heard telling people that they were being recorded with facial recognition technology and that their faces would be added to a database.
The technology visible in the photographs was Mobile Fortify. The app was built on technology that had been created for Customs and Border Protection, the current and former Homeland Security officials said.
A department spokeswoman said Mobile Fortify was a “lawful law enforcement tool” and “lawfully used nationwide in accordance with all applicable legal authorities.”
In a 2024 agency report, the Homeland Security Department said it used a facial recognition tool from Clearview AI for child exploitation investigations. But in a $3.75 million contract with the company in September, the agency said the tool would also be used to investigate attacks on law enforcement.
A Clearview AI spokeswoman said the focus of its contract with the department was supporting investigations into child exploitation and cybercrimes.
ICE is continuing to seek more technology. Last week, the agency published a request for information for ways to better acquire and integrate so-called big data and advertising tech into its operations, saying it was “working with increasing volumes of criminal, civil and regulatory administrative documentation from numerous internal and external sources.”
The questionnaire asked vendors to describe the types of data they could provide on “people, businesses, devices, locations, transactions, public records.” It also asked vendors how their systems could help “identify subjects, entities or locations of interest” and whether people could be searched by identifiers including “name, phone, device, account, location.”
Justin Sherman, a distinguished fellow at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, said the request showed ICE was “doubling down” on buying sensitive data.
Ms. Cleland, the Richfield resident, said that three days after the encounter with the ICE agent, she received an email from the Department of Homeland Security saying her Global Entry and Transportation Security Administration travel privileges had been revoked. No explanation was provided.
Ms. Cleland said she had swung from anger to fear. “I don’t know how far-reaching ICE can be,” she said. “I’m struggling to figure out what I can do, without putting myself at greater risk or putting other people at risk.”
Last week, Ms. Cleland signed a declaration joining a lawsuit against the Homeland Security Department in U.S. District Court in Minnesota. The lawsuit challenges ICE’s treatment of observers. In her declaration, Ms. Cleland asked why her traveler status had been revoked.
“I am a totally average American, and I cannot abide by what is happening right now,” she said.
Daniel Wood and Kashmir Hill contributed reporting.
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10) ‘It’s All Just Going Down the Toilet’: Police Chiefs Fume at ICE Tactics
Many police departments adopted major changes after civilian killings. Now, police chiefs worry ICE is ignoring those lessons and setting back efforts to improve public trust.
By Shaila Dewan, Jan. 30, 2026
Federal agents confronted people in Minneapolis on Saturday. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
Five years ago, local police departments faced a tidal wave of criticism over racial profiling and the unnecessary killing of unarmed people. Many citizens looked to the federal government to rein them in.
Now the tables have turned. It’s police officials who are complaining about federal agents, saying they are endangering residents and violating their civil rights.
Police chiefs who have spent half a decade trying to persuade a skeptical public that officers would curb their use of violence are contending with widespread alarm over federal officers ushering an innocent man into the snow in his shorts, arresting a 5-year-old and killing U.S. citizens. While local officials have vowed to hold officers accountable for misconduct, Trump administration officials have been quick to declare that their agents did nothing wrong.
Some chiefs have worried that the fragile trust they have worked toward is coming rapidly undone.
“It’s all just going down the toilet,” said Kelly McCarthy, the police chief in Mendota Heights, a Minneapolis suburb. “We do look good by comparison — but that won’t last because people are really frustrated.”
Trump administration officials have defended their operations and blamed state and local officials in Minnesota for the unrest, saying they have incited insurrection and failed to assist federal agents.
Some local departments have taken steps to distance and differentiate themselves from Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents. The city of St. Paul, Minn., has distributed photos showing what their police, fire and animal services uniforms look like. “St. Paul Police Department does not ask people about their immigration status” and “cannot impede or interfere with federal agents,” one advisory said.
On Jan. 20, top brass from about a dozen Minnesota police departments held a news conference to say that while they had nothing against immigration enforcement, they were receiving “endless complaints” about the behavior of federal officers and that city employees and off-duty officers had been illegally stopped on the basis of their skin color.
“It’s impacting our brand as police officers, our brand of how hard we work to build trust,” said Chief Mark Bruley of Brooklyn Park, another Minneapolis suburb.
The grievances are not limited to the Twin Cities. In Maine, a sheriff complained about “bush-league policing” after one of his correction officers, who he said was authorized to work in the United States, was detained by ICE officers. In Brookfield, Ill., outside Chicago, an ICE officer was charged with misdemeanor battery after a man reported that he had been attacked while trying to film the officer.
The criticism aimed at federal agencies is tinged with the irony that for years, the federal government was the nation’s policing watchdog. But under President Trump, the Justice Department has walked away from efforts to force deeply troubled departments to improve — efforts that some chiefs had called intrusive and heavy handed.
The Justice Department announced plans to drop federal oversight of the Minneapolis and Louisville Police Departments last year, within days of the fifth anniversary of the very episode that triggered so much soul-searching over American policing: the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by Minneapolis officers.
State and local officials have no comparable tool with which to hold federal agencies to account, but elected prosecutors are investigating reports of abuse and conferring on how they might curb warrantless entries and unlawful detentions.
Longtime critics of American policing were quick to say that they remain frustrated with local departments and that people in some predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods still regard the police as an occupying force. DeRay Mckesson, the executive director of Campaign Zero, which seeks to reduce police violence, said he believed the recent violence by federal officers — and the fact that the victims in the two fatal shootings, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were white — could lead more people to demand more accountability from law enforcement.
“ICE has helped people understand that the system is broken, that it’s not just one or two bad officers,” Mr. Mckesson said.
He pointed to Trump administration accounts of the shootings that were contradicted by bystander videos. “People are for the first time are like, ‘OK, the government’s lying to me,’” Mr. McKesson said. “Before, that would have sounded like a conspiracy theory.”
For one former police chief, Brandon del Pozo, the contrast with ICE is an opportunity for local departments to show that they are committed to improving even when no one is compelling them to do so.
“Never before in our lifetime have they had a better foil than they have in ICE,” Mr. del Pozo wrote in Vital City, a Columbia Law School journal that covers urban issues. “The nation’s attention is rightly focused on flagrant abuses at the federal level that constantly dominate the news and provide a clear moral compass for how police shouldn’t behave,” he added.
ICE has not learned the central lesson that the nation’s police departments learned after Mr. Floyd’s death, said Jerry P. Dyer, the Republican mayor and former police chief of Fresno, Calif. “In order for police to be accepted in communities, they have to have permission to police those communities from the people who live there,” he said.
Instead, Mr. Dyer said, federal agents are not using policing techniques that build trust, like de-escalation and the use of body cameras. “They’re not trusted because of the manner in which they operate,” he said.
Mr. Dyer and other police officials said they had no problem with immigration enforcement, done properly. And many Americans support the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Differing views have translated into conflicting requests for local departments, with some residents asking the police to do more to assist federal agents, while others demand that the police block or even arrest them.
Even when local officers are doing neither, their very presence on the scene can be viewed as siding with or protecting federal agents. And while they are taking the heat from the public for not doing more, or less, they are also experiencing treatment not unlike the kind that have long generated civilian complaints against the police.
Chief Bruley described an incident where, he said, an off-duty officer in her car was illegally stopped by federal agents and asked to provide proof of citizenship. When she tried to take a video of the encounter, her phone was knocked out of her hands, he said.
When he tried to get answers, he encountered another chronic problem that some local departments have been pressured to fix — a lack of transparency. “When you call ICE leadership or you call Border Patrol leadership or you call Homeland Security leadership, they’re unable to tell you what their people were doing that day,” the chief said, adding, “They like to give you a website to go file a complaint.”
For her part, Chief McCarthy said that on a recent day when she was off duty, she had gone, out of uniform, to act as a legal observer outside an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting conducted in Spanish near her home. There, she encountered a Border Patrol agent.
“He told me to get a job, and that I was a paid agitator,” she said. “I would have been embarrassed if he had been one of my officers.”
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11) Grief, Whistles and Bad Dreams: Minnesotans Describe 2 Months in an Immigration Crackdown
Federal agents began Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities late last year. After the deaths of two U.S. citizens, many residents say they feel overwhelmed.
By Julie Bosman, Lauren McCarthy, Talya Minsberg and Sheila M. Eldred, Jan. 30, 2026
People gathered around a makeshift memorial after Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Health Care System, was shot and killed by federal agents. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Molly Phipps, a consultant in St. Paul, never considered herself much of a crier.
That was before Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities: before roving federal agents arrested thousands suspected of illegal immigration and killed two U.S. citizens, before the protests, the fear of going out in public, the Signal chats, the cellphone videos and the fweeeeet of the whistles.
“All of a sudden, a thought will come to my head or I’ll see a headline, and I’ll tear up,” said Ms. Phipps, the mother of two children. “Sometimes it’s just because regular people are doing amazing things. Or sometimes it’s because it’s so sad to walk into these once-thriving businesses and see them empty.”
Two months into the crackdown that the Trump administration has called the largest immigration enforcement effort in the agency’s history, residents of the Twin Cities say the constant strain of the operation has become overwhelming, compounded by a lingering uncertainty over when it will end.
This week has brought some hope to Minnesotans who oppose the operation. Those monitoring the news closely have seen small signals that the administration could be wavering in the face of intense public backlash. On Monday, officials said that Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol leader who has directed aggressive operations in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, was leaving Minnesota, along with some Border Patrol agents.
On Wednesday, a Department of Homeland Security official said that two of the agents involved in the shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who was killed after filming federal agents on Saturday, were on leave. Stephen Miller, a top aide to Mr. Trump who initially called Mr. Pretti an “assassin,” suggested on Wednesday that the agents who killed Mr. Pretti after he had been restrained and disarmed “may not have been following” protocol.
Still, with no firm signs of an end to the operation, anxiety in the Twin Cities is unceasing.
Many Latinos and Asian Americans, even those with legal immigration status, are afraid to step outside, keeping their children at home to attend school remotely on video calls. As they have for weeks, volunteers stand guard outside day cares and Mexican supermarkets, ready to alert everyone around if Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are spotted. Bleary-eyed friends swap stories of their vivid nightmares about running, frightened, being chased by ICE agents.
Eduardo A. Colon, 72, a retired psychiatrist and a U.S. citizen, has lived in Minneapolis since 1979, when he moved from Puerto Rico to attend college. His family has been terrified for him to leave the house since the surge of agents started.
He said he feels drained by the hypervigilance of wondering what is going to happen next, and a feeling of rage over the entire crackdown.
“I have immediate fear in terms of safety, and violence we’re surrounded by,” he said, “and being disappointed with the legal pathways and options to try to make it all slow down and stop.”
Groups of residents that formed during the federal surge as “rapid response” networks, crowdsourcing where agents have been spotted, are as active as ever. Sarah Linnes-Robinson, the acting director of the Lyndale Neighborhood Association in Minneapolis, is a member of 14 separate Signal chats for rapid response groups, monitoring sightings of ICE agents making arrests and requests for help among neighbors.
There has been an outpouring of generosity from neighbors, but she worries that eventually the mutual aid will run dry. How much longer, she wonders, will people be willing to deliver groceries, donate money and volunteer their time to push back against a crackdown that they see as unjust?
“I feel honestly like I’m living in a video game,” Ms. Linnes-Robinson said. “I keep wondering what ICE agents are talking about when they go home at night. Are they talking about how they’ll level up and change the game, and what tactics they’re going to use?”
Even in the heavily Democratic cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, some conservatives have blamed protesters and activists for raising tensions in the area by pushing back on ICE tactics and trying to stand in the way of federal agents.
But a sense of widespread disapproval of ICE’s tactics has reached across race, class and politics in the Twin Cities. At a walkout at the University of Minnesota this week, one nursing student, Mahmoud Toumeh, 33, described his political views as centrist. He said he had not voted in the last presidential election because he could not decide between Mr. Trump and Kamala Harris, the Democrat.
Mr. Toumeh, who said it had taken 13 years for him to go through the process of becoming a naturalized citizen, said he believed that people who are in the United States illegally and have committed crimes should be deported. But he said he opposed the sweeping tactics of this federal crackdown. Department of Homeland Security officials have described their efforts as targeted and lawful, but Mr. Toumeh said he was disturbed by reports that agents were now questioning people simply because they had accents that sounded foreign.
And he said he has heard from his high school friends from North Dakota, including many who now live in the Twin Cities, who have conservative views on immigration but are still opposed to the tactics of the crackdown.
“This is not really a political issue,” he said. “This is a humanitarian issue. And human decency, at its core.”
Sean vanNatta, a 55-year-old in West St. Paul who described himself as politically moderate, said he had been troubled by the methods the Trump administration was using. One of the players on his pickup soccer game on Saturday mornings has stopped coming, afraid of ICE even though he has legal status.
“I hope that they can stop what they’re doing and go about it in a more peaceful and legal manner,” he said of the administration’s approach.
And for Twin Cities residents who have lived through other traumas, including the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the riots and protests that followed, the impact of the ICE operation has seemed to reach even broader.
“It’s affecting everyone — Black, white, Native, Hispanic — it doesn’t matter,” said Jonquil Broyles, 33, a home health care worker in Roseville, Minn. “In reality, it’s the whole state that’s being affected. It is very heavy.”
Many people in the Twin Cities spoke of a sense of isolation, a feeling that people elsewhere don’t understand the severity of the crisis.
Recently, Sue Morrison, 69, of St. Paul, was chatting on the phone with a friend from California, who asked how she was doing.
“I hope the craziness of Minneapolis isn’t bothering you,” Ms. Morrison recalled her friend as saying.
The question almost shocked her. “And I said, ‘Yes, it’s bothering me,’” she said. “I live here. How can it not bother me?’ If you think it’s somehow isolated to some tiny little pocket, you are badly mistaken, because it’s everywhere.”
By Thursday, Senate Democrats in Washington who had pushed back against the crackdown had struck a deal with President Trump and Republicans that would allow them to negotiate restrictions on the operation. And more Republicans were chiming in with criticism of the Department of Homeland Security and, in particular, Kristi Noem, who heads the department.
That backlash brought some hope to Sun Yung Shin, 51, a writer and teacher in Minneapolis. Her daily life is still fraught, she said, and she carries her passport and copies of immigration papers, just to be safe.
But she has been encouraged by the fact that a few Republicans have rebuked the administration over the operation and the deaths of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti.
“If there’s a tipping point, we might be at it,” she said. “I’m hopeful there will be investigations.”
Around the Twin Cities, many people said they were seesawing between feeling angry and heartened, furious at the violence in their midst while moved by their neighbors’ response to it.
Eric Swanlund, a nurse anesthetist who lives in the suburb of Edina, had worked with Alex Pretti at the Veterans Affairs hospital.
Since Mr. Pretti was shot and killed on Saturday, Mr. Swanlund has been sick with anger, nauseated and grinding his teeth.
On Sunday evening, he and his neighbors held a small vigil at a park, where he felt a sense of solidarity. “A lot of people gave me hugs that have never given me hugs before,” he said. The next day, dozens more in Edina gathered for a weekly protest of ICE.
He held a sign taped to the end of a hockey stick. “Respect Existence or Expect Resistance,” it read.
Mr. Swanlund has imagined what it would be like if ICE were to end its operation in the Twin Cities, but there is little satisfaction to the thought.
“I would love for them to leave, but I feel like a lot of the damage is done,” he said. “And I don’t think the people of Minnesota are going to forget what they’ve done.”
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12) In Minnesota, America’s Federal System Is Coming Apart
The state is in a standoff with the federal government over who has the power to investigate the killing of protesters. It’s not a fair fight.
By Emily Bazelon, Jan. 30, 2026
Federal agents confronting protesters in Minneapolis, where Border Patrol agents killed a protester last week. David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
Since the 1960s, a familiar pattern has unfolded when law-enforcement officers kill or brutalize American civilians. State or local police are accused of excessive force; local residents protest, demanding accountability; the federal government steps in to undertake its own civil rights investigation to provide a measure of justice and restore calm. Think of George Floyd’s murder in 2020; Rodney King’s beating in 1991; the disappearance of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi in 1964.
The killings this month of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration-enforcement officials have turned this dynamic upside down. And the fight over who will investigate these killings — and if anyone will be held accountable — are part of a growing confrontation between federal and state governments. The balance of power between Washington and the states has been one of America’s central political dramas from the nation’s founding. Now, as it has before at certain dim moments in the country’s history, that delicate system is cracking.
Minnesota is trying to assert its prerogatives by taking the Trump administration to court. One suit seeks access to the evidence related to Pretti’s killing, which the administration has barred state investigators and the county prosecutor from reviewing — while opening only narrowly circumscribed inquiries into the agents’ use of force in killing Pretti and Good.
Minnesota officials have reason to fear that if the state cannot do a full and independent investigation, no one will. Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, made the outcome of any investigation sound like a foregone conclusion by accusing Good and Pretti of attacking the agents who killed them — despite all the video evidence to the contrary. Then the Trump administration took the unusual step of putting Noem’s agency in charge of the investigation, asking the public to trust that D.H.S. will oversee itself. The decision to box out state and local officials is “contrary to core principles of federalism embodied in the U.S. Constitution,” the complaint states, relying on the 10th Amendment. Minnesota “has a core sovereign interest in investigating and enforcing its own criminal laws.” Another suit, also citing the 10th Amendment, challenges the federal immigration surge as a violation of state sovereignty.
The 10th Amendment, which reserves to the states or the people the powers that the Constitution does not delegate to the federal government, is the legacy of James Madison. He was the Virginia framer who would worry most after the founding about protecting states from federal overreach. Madison saw the United States as a “compound republic,” ascribing to the national government “few and defined” powers, mostly over war and foreign relations, he wrote in the Federalist Papers in 1788, and reserving “numerous and indefinite” authority over “the lives, liberties and properties for the people” to the states.
When President John Adams expanded federal power a decade after the founding, by backing the Alien and Sedition Acts — which made it a federal crime to criticize the president or Congress — Madison urged states to fulfill the right and duty to protect their citizens against a “dangerous exercise” of unconstitutional federal power.
But then states’ rights became a tool of the antebellum South. In the 1830s, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a former vice president, said the states could “veto” federal tariffs. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, said in the run-up to the Civil War that the 10th Amendment allowed for secession because the states didn’t give the federal government the power to suppress it.
When the war ended, federal authority was necessary to stitch the country back together and, for a brief time, implement Reconstruction. And in response to a wave of terror against Black people that Southern states abetted, Congress made it a federal crime in 1866 for anyone acting “under color of law to willfully deprive another of rights protected by the Constitution.” When Congress and the states ratified the 14th Amendment in 1868, the federal government became the guardian more broadly of civil rights.
The federal government rarely enforced the 1866 law during the era of Jim Crow and has never done so perfectly. But the lesson of Minneapolis in the last few weeks is that trying to resurrect Madison’s construction of state power, as a bulwark against federal abuse, is fraught. That’s not only because states’-rights arguments remain associated with discredited causes like the fight against desegregation. It’s also because in the decades when the federal government was protecting civil rights, it amassed enormous power.
The 10th Amendment isn’t dead. But the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution, which gives primacy to federal law, has gained more sway. Since the New Deal, under which federal agencies expanded, the Supreme Court has ruled that federal laws pre-empt state laws if they conflict.
However unfortunate it would seem to Madison, today there is no easy path for a state to vindicate the rights of its residents when the federal government is accused of trampling them. “Minnesota versus the federal government is a David-versus-Goliath story,” said Jefferson Cowie, a historian at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Freedom’s Dominion.” “Maybe you get a one-off win here or there. But it’s not a long-term strategy.”
Making Up for Lapses in Justice
After Reconstruction, for many decades the federal government did little about state-perpetrated violence. Southern sheriffs, for example, had relative impunity to abet lynchings and beatings of Black Americans. Then in 1957, the Justice Department started a civil rights division. Its first leader, John Doar, lived in a dorm for weeks with James Meredith during his struggle to register for classes in 1962 as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi.
Two years later, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were in Mississippi to register Black voters when they disappeared after a county deputy sheriff, Cecil Price, arrested them for speeding. He later tipped off the Ku Klux Klan to their whereabouts (or handed them over).
When the state failed to investigate, the F.B.I. flooded the area with agents. With the help of an informant, the men’s bodies were found in an earthen dam. The state refused to charge anyone in connection with the murders. Doar conducted a civil rights investigation based on the 1866 law, and seven men were convicted, including Price, who served four and a half years in prison. “That’s how some justice movements started to get recourse from the federal government,” says Joshua Clark Davis, a historian at the University of Baltimore and the author of the new book “Police Against the Movement.” “It was a travesty that the defendants were never charged with murder. But convicting them of civil rights violations was much better than nothing.”
Since then, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department’s civil rights division effectively made up for state lapses in response to a series of law-enforcement shootings that threatened to set communities, or the country, on fire. Democratic presidents tended to be more likely than Republicans to investigate a whole police department for a “pattern or practice” of discrimination, as federal law also allows. But Republican administrations have also been aggressive about pursuing individual police officers in instances of state-based violence. Various officers who committed crimes — the ones who beat Rodney King in 1991, those who shot six unarmed civilians on a New Orleans bridge after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and those who murdered George Floyd in 2020 — received prison sentences based on civil rights investigations opened by the respective Justice Departments of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump in his first term.
At the same time, it’s notable that many federal investigations of shootings by law enforcement conclude without a prosecution. The standard for bringing charges is high: Officers are authorized to use deadly force when they reasonably perceive a serious threat. The law leans in their favor given the split-second decisions they make in the line of duty. “These cases are hard to prosecute,” says Vanita Gupta, a Justice Department official in the Obama and Biden administrations. “I had to close investigations any number of times. But the public could have confidence that the Civil Rights Division had conducted an independent, full, and fair investigation. Until now.”
One difference regarding the deaths of Good and Pretti is that federal agents, not state or local law enforcement, did the killing. In a sense, the 1993 federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, is an antecedent — and though the Davidians were largely blamed for starting the fires and gun battle that ended in mass deaths, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a special counsel to investigate. In the absence of an independent Justice Department investigation, Gupta warned, federal agents “can act with impunity, and that is incredibly dangerous.”
Drew Evans, the superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which usually investigates an officer’s use of deadly force, has vowed the state will continue its inquiry. Mary Moriarty, the local prosecutor, directed people to submit video evidence through an online portal. On Tuesday, following a barrage of bipartisan criticism, Trump promised a “very honorable and honest” inquiry. But the president continued to blame Pretti for legally carrying a gun at a protest, even though one federal officer had already seized it before another opened fire. And there’s no federal civil rights investigation.
The Coming Clashes With the States
The investigations into Good and Pretti’s deaths are the most urgent clash between Minnesota and Washington, but others are building.
From the Trump administration’s point of view, state and local officials are the lawless ones, impeding the federal government from enforcing the nation’s immigration statutes.
The tension stems from the sanctuary cities movement. In December, Minneapolis strengthened the ordinances that restrict cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, barring the use of any city resources or data-sharing. The police aren’t allowed to set up perimeters or control traffic when ICE and border-patrol agents conduct arrests. (The Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government can’t commandeer state officials to perform federal duties.)
More states and cities are considering such laws. A new list of bills would directly challenge federal tactics, for example, by banning the masks that federal agents now commonly use to hide their identities. A group of progressive prosecutors including Mary Moriarity, the county attorney with jurisdiction in Minneapolis, announced this week that they’re banding together to assist in prosecuting federal officers who break state laws. The idea, Moriarty said, is to share knowledge across cities and reduce the sense of isolation that comes with crisis.
Her office would certainly face legal hurdles to prosecuting the officers who killed Good and Pretti. Among other issues, federal officers have some immunity from state prosecution. “But I keep saying it’s not absolute,” Moriarty said. “There has to be some form of accountability. You don’t get deterrence by saying to ICE, ‘No one can touch you.’ ”
It’s telling that after Good’s death, the Trump administration trained its power of criminal investigation on several Minnesota officials, including Gov. Tim Walz, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, state Attorney General Keith Ellison and Moriarty. The F.B.I.’s top public-corruption agent in Minneapolis resigned rather than conduct the inquiry. Six federal prosecutors resigned in mid-January over an order to investigate Renee Good’s widow. A seventh resigned this week, and more are considering doing so.
As the federal and state moves and countermoves multiply, it’s a sign of how the federalist compact is splintering. And yet state and local power are important as a counterweight when the president uses the national government to act like an authoritarian. Madison was right about that.
“We can’t stop what the federal government is doing,” Moriarty said. “Our actions may seem like a small piece. But they are a big piece to people here. They are showing up for each other, and trying to stand up to their own federal government, and they are asking, ‘Who is here to protect us?’ We have a lane here. We are doing our job.”
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13) Justice Dept. Opens Civil Rights Inquiry Into Killing of Alex Pretti
The announcement marked a significant reversal in the department’s approach to Mr. Pretti’s killing.
By Alan Feuer, Jan. 30, 2026
A memorial for Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse who was killed in Minneapolis by federal immigration agents. Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
The Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation into the shooting of Alex Pretti, the intensive care nurse who was killed in Minneapolis last weekend by federal immigration agents, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said on Friday.
The announcement marked a significant reversal in the department’s approach to Mr. Pretti’s killing, suggesting that after a week of lacerating criticism, it had decided to handle the high-profile incident in a manner more in keeping with how investigators have traditionally dealt with fatal shootings by law-enforcement officers.
But even as Mr. Blanche disclosed the existence of the inquiry, he sought to downplay it.
“I don’t want to overstate what is happening,” he said. “I don’t want the takeaway to be there is some massive civil rights investigation. I would describe it as a standard investigation by the F.B.I.”
Still, all of this sounded quite different from the Trump administration’s stance at the beginning of the week.
On Monday, for instance, officials revealed in court papers that the inquiry into the shooting would be led by investigators from the Department of Homeland Security and would focus not on the broad question of whether immigration agents had deprived Mr. Pretti of his civil rights in the incident, but rather on the narrower issue of whether the agents’ use of force had violated internal protocols and training standards.
The court papers also said Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of the Homeland Security Department, would take the lead in the inquiry, assisted by both Customs and Border Protection and the F.B.I.
But on Friday, a Homeland Security spokesperson said that the bureau would now take the lead in the inquiry and H.S.I. would play a secondary role.
Mr. Blanche also asserted that the F.B.I. would be in charge of the investigation, along with lawyers from the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
“We are looking at everything that would shed light on what happened that day,” he said.
Mr. Blanche’s remarks about the investigation came at a news conference where the central topic was the release of millions of pages of files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender.
But facing a series of questions from reporters, he pivoted to the department’s scattershot handling of events in Minnesota. He declined to say much about new federal charges filed on Friday against the independent journalist Don Lemon and several others in connection with a demonstration this month at a church service in St. Paul.
He also brushed aside questions about the Justice Department’s refusal to open a civil rights investigation into the fatal shooting of Renee Good while she was behind the wheel of her car in Minneapolis, two weeks before Mr. Pretti was killed.
“Cases are handled differently by this department depending on the circumstances,” Mr. Blanche said.
Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
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14) Trump’s Board of Peace Is Anything But
By Thant Myint-U, Jan. 30, 2026
Dr. Myint-U is a historian and the author of “Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World.”
A United Nations chamber in New York City around 1947. FPG/Getty Images
The most striking thing about President Trump’s proposal for a “Board of Peace,” a new group he has billed as a global conflict-solving body, is not its billion-dollar permanent membership fee or the eccentric list of nations, such as El Salvador, Belarus and Saudia Arabia, that have apparently signed on. It’s that for the first time, the United States — the primary architect of the United Nations — is openly experimenting with a rival body at least nominally aimed at peacemaking. “I’m a big fan of the U.N.’s potential,” Mr. Trump said last week, “but it has never lived up to its potential.”
This move is best understood, though, not as a sudden break between the United States and the U.N., but as an accelerant. It is the latest chapter in a much longer history of America’s estrangement from its own creation, made possible by a global forgetting, often willful, of how war was once restrained.
For much of the postwar period, the United Nations helped prevent crises from spiraling into wider war, acting as a firewall when bilateral diplomacy failed. As much of that history has faded from view, political leaders from around the world have come to think of the U.N. as an obsolete talking shop of empty words. This amnesia has narrowed the horizons of those shaping foreign policy, leaving them unable to envision a security framework that isn’t a zero-sum game of rival blocs. If we continue to let ourselves forget the lessons of the mid-20th century, when the U.N. was a successful bulwark against conflict escalation, we will find ourselves unable to imagine the kind of international cooperation needed to prevent future catastrophes.
Just over 80 years ago, the United Nations was established by men and women who had lived through the deaths of tens of millions across two world wars. It was not a utopian project but a practical effort by battle-hardened founders alarmed by the destructive potential of the atomic age to permanently remove war as a tool of international relations. They believed a new kind of politics was possible, and sought to create a body that could impose discipline on the use of force, institutionalize multilateral diplomacy, safeguard state sovereignty and foster the economic conditions essential for stability.
Much of the world signed on. In its first few decades, dozens of newly independent states from Asia and Africa that had been shaped by decades of anticolonial struggle joined the United Nations, transforming it into humanity’s first near-universal body. Although the Security Council, with China, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union as veto-wielding permanent members, was often deadlocked by the politics of the Cold War, a surge of ambition from the new so-called Third World energized the U.N., turning its secretaries general into the world’s pre-eminent peacemakers.
For a time, they were remarkably effective. In 1956, Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold helped prevent the Suez crisis from intensifying into a great-power war by deploying the U.N.’s first peacekeeping operation. In 1962, his successor, U Thant (my grandfather) proved indispensable in de-escalating the Cuban missile crisis, mediating between John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro — a part of the story that has been almost entirely erased from popular memory. A year later, in Congo, an Indian-commanded U.N. force under Thant’s authority routed a Belgian-backed secessionist army buttressed by white-supremacist mercenaries, protecting the newly independent state from dismemberment. Over the following years, Thant and his deputy, Ralph Bunche, helped end or contain half a dozen conflicts, from Cyprus to Kashmir.
Throughout this period, the United Nations enjoyed overwhelming support among American political leaders and the U.S. public. Washington was comfortable with an organization that seemed broadly aligned with, or at least did not obstruct, its own desires to strengthen American military and economic primacy around the world.
Eventually, though, the U.N. started to become unfashionable in Washington — not because it was ineffective, but because it began to take opposing positions on what were seen as core American interests. The first decisive break came in the mid-1960s over Vietnam, when Thant publicly challenged the war, questioned its strategic assumptions and pressed for a negotiated settlement, provoking the ire of President Lyndon B. Johnson and hawks on Capitol Hill. The 1967 Arab-Israeli war marked another turning point. In its aftermath, the U.N.’s push for a Middle East accord that included a full Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories fueled a growing belief among many Americans that the organization was institutionally biased against the Jewish state.
In the 1970s, efforts among developing nations within the U.N. to fashion a fairer global economy through commodity agreements, technology sharing and development financing were judged inimical to the globalization of U.S.-anchored free markets. Tensions also emerged in the body over Washington’s opposition to action against apartheid South Africa throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s, when the United States favored more conciliatory policies over the sweeping sanctions that the U.N. General Assembly demanded.
Throughout the 1980s, even as Washington’s focus pivoted further away from the global body, Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and his team of veteran mediators quietly unlocked peace accords in conflicts in Central America, Southern Africa and Cambodia. In the process, they ensured that the proxy wars unfolding in these countries would not continue to poison superpower relations, setting the stage for an end to the Cold War.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in an era of American global supremacy. But the triumph of this U.S.-led so-called liberal international order also required that the achievements of an earlier, more internationalist order centered explicitly on the United Nations be quietly slipped down the memory hole. As the U.N. was increasingly retooled by the United States and other Western countries as a technocratic mechanism for managing faraway civil wars, largely through humanitarian aid and peacekeeping operations, its previous role as a mediator between states withered from view. What emerged was an institution deeply enmeshed in the U.S.-led order but peripheral to the strategic thinking of policy elites in capitals everywhere.
War and instability are once again on the rise, as is the risk of nuclear confrontation. We’ve suffered periods of intensified conflict and great-power rivalry many times since 1945. But for the first time since the Second World War, we are confronting these crises amid the near-complete erosion of the U.N. norms, institutions, and practices that, however imperfectly, constrained escalation and identified pathways to negotiated resolution. Only reinvestment in a radically remade U.N. — not Mr. Trump’s Board of Peace, whatever its ultimate remit — can fill that void.
Peace cannot be improvised. It needs to be designed, carefully and deliberately. An international politics unmoored from the core U.N. principles of universality, sovereign equality and clear limits on the use of force, combined with a collective amnesia about how wars were once prevented, can lead only to our sleepwalking back into the cataclysmic bloodshed of the early 20th century.
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