The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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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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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
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) ‘We’ve Found Our Voice’: Many in Twin Cities Emerge With a Sense of Power
Two months after federal agents began operations in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, residents say they have found strength in uniting as a community.
By Sabrina Tavernise, Reporting from the Twin Cities, Feb. 10, 2026
Dozens of people hold messages for Renee Good on sticks during a public day of memorial and mourning on Saturday in Minneapolis. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
In the month since Renee Good was shot and killed on Portland Avenue, life at the impromptu street-side memorial to her memory has taken on a gentle rhythm. Well-wishers walk quietly around its circumference, reading the signs, looking at the artwork and laying down bouquets. Caretakers come too, chipping away ice with hammers and sweeping up old flowers to make room for the new.
On Saturday, Sandy Zaic, a 59-year-old teacher, came with two friends to pay her respects.
“It’s very overwhelming,” she said, looking at a blue painting of Ms. Good and holding a bouquet of yellow flowers.
In four days of interviews in Minneapolis and St. Paul, people reflected on the two months since the federal immigration operation began. Almost everybody interviewed in the heavily Democratic region opposed the federal presence. Some also worried that protesters would destroy property; many had not attended any of the protests.
But almost all of those interviewed said they had learned a lot about each other in the past two months, as the Twin Cities have been confronted by an immigration sweep that, by the government’s own account, has been the largest in the nation. Along the way, not only was Ms. Good killed, but a nurse, Alex Pretti, was too. Federal agents also arrested a 5-year-old boy, Liam Ramos, whose picture in a bunny hat became a symbol for many of all that had gone wrong.
They learned that they are willing to be outdoors for hours on one of the coldest days of the past 25 years to march in protest. They learned they will deliver food to complete strangers after long days at work, so families who need meals don’t have to risk a trip to the store, where immigration agents may be waiting.
And they learned that these efforts bring a new sense of their own power, that they have come together, made themselves heard and, if they have not prevailed against what they see as unjust federal action in their cities, then at least they have held their ground.
“I’m super proud to be a Minnesotan,” said Ms. Zaic, who lives in the suburbs and delivers food to families in the Columbia Heights school district, where Liam Ramos went to school. “I’m proud to watch all these people stand up for what they know is right.”
Not all Minnesotans disagree with the deportations. Republicans nationally still tell pollsters they support President Trump’s actions on immigration, and Republicans in Minnesota do not appear to be any different. But a small but growing minority of Republicans nationwide say the enforcement tactics have gone too far.
Minnesota has experienced mass protests before, most notably in 2020 when George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer less than a mile from where Ms. Good was shot. But the two situations are not alike, multiple people said in interviews. The Floyd killing was an argument that the state was having with itself over the nature of policing. It divided people, while the killings of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti have had a unifying effect.
“This is something different,” said Craig Wilson, 54, a landscape architect who helped organize a candlelight vigil for Ms. Good on Saturday evening, and was standing in the cold with his two dogs, Harper and Huck, both whippets in jackets. “This is the federal government. This is an invasion.”
He added: “We feel like we have a common purpose.”
The federal sweeps began almost two months ago, but since Mr. Pretti’s death on Jan. 24, the dynamic appears to be shifting.
The Department of Homeland Security has pulled 700 of its 3,000 agents from the streets, and Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, was sent to Minnesota to strike a more conciliatory tone. In an interview on Friday with KSTP, a television station in the Twin Cities, Mr. Homan said one of the first things he did after arriving was to have more oversight of federal agents and “to hold anybody who acts out of policy, hold them accountable.” He said that several agents are under investigation and no longer part of the operation in Minnesota.
Immigration agents have continued to circle neighborhoods, driving their vehicles in the south and the north ends of the city, and residents who have taken it upon themselves to watch them continued to follow them. Photographers from The Times who spent the past week monitoring the streets said they still saw many ICE vehicles, but fewer arrests and confrontations.
“It feels like an ebb, but at any moment someone else could get killed and it will just pick up again,” said Jeremy Stadelman, 42, a local government worker who was out walking his dog on Thursday. “We are on pins and needles. But we are also very resilient people.”
He said the people opposing ICE may have “won the propaganda battle, but the changes are pretty superficial.”
Many people interviewed said they did not believe the government had changed its tactics. But as the government continued to defend its actions in a federal courtroom in Minneapolis on Friday, it found a Trump-appointed judge pushing back.
A legal group called Democracy Forward was arguing that detainees were not given access to lawyers inside the Whipple Federal Building, where many of those arrested are being taken.
“OK, so I weigh this, against this,” said U.S. District Judge Nancy E. Brasel, picking up a stack of papers filed by the plaintiffs and then the slim government response, and looking at the government lawyer. “And that’s a tough sell, right?”
Judge Brasel said she would rule on Thursday.
Saturday marked one month since Ms. Good was killed. Her partner, Becca Good, spoke for the first time, through a spokeswoman, at a memorial that began with a Native American ceremony in snowy Powderhorn Park. A large crowd stood in the cold for several hours, many wearing an item of sparkly clothing as the invitation had instructed. One man wore a crown of green tinsel. A little girl wore a pink armband with sequins.
Some people interviewed compared the last few weeks in the Twin Cities with the first few weeks after 9/11.
“There’s something really heartwarming about looking a complete stranger in the eye and saying, ‘I’m here for you,’” said Nebiyu Meseret, 28, a business administrator.
Lindsey Gruttadaurio, 62, an insurance claims adjuster, had never been to a protest before. A centrist Democrat, she grew up in a military family, and often disagrees with progressives. But watching the ICE raids on the news motivated her, so on Jan. 23, she bundled up and went.
She immediately felt comfortable.
“It’s like a Lutheran potluck — just go and you’ll be fine,” she said.
“It was thrilling. There was a lot of cussing. It was fantastic, actually.”
The thrill, she said, came from being together with all those people and the power in that.
“We’ve found our voice and it’s never going away now.”
Owen Deneen, a nurse who was walking downtown in hospital scrubs at lunchtime on Friday, said it was as if “a natural disaster happened and it’s neighbor helping neighbor.”
He and his wife also went to the Jan. 23 protest, also his first. He said he felt “a mix of anger and resolution” during the demonstration.
When the couple broke away from the crowd to walk back toward their car, he said the temperature felt like it dropped by 15 degrees. They looked at each other and realized that it was because they had left “the closeness” of the crowd.
“It’s much colder when you’re alone,” he said.
David Guttenfelder Jamie Kelter Davis
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2) Trump’s Threats to Cuba’s Oil Suppliers Put Mexico in a Bind
The longstanding alliance between Cuba and Mexico is under mounting pressure from the United States, forcing President Claudia Sheinbaum into a precarious balancing act.
By James Wagner, Reporting from Mexico City, Feb. 10, 2026
President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico now must juggle two competing priorities: honoring long‑standing ties to Havana while navigating an essential but increasingly strained relationship with Washington. Luis Antonio Rojas for The New York Times
When President Trump declared a “national emergency” last month, accusing Cuba of harboring Russian spies and “welcoming” enemies like Iran and Hamas, it came with a warning: Countries that sell or provide oil to the Caribbean nation could be subject to high tariffs.
The threat seemed to be directed at Mexico, one of the few countries still delivering oil to Cuba. Earlier this month, he even said that he had specifically asked President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico to cut off its supply.
Mexico and Cuba’s long alliance — rooted in economic and cultural cooperation and a shared wariness of U.S. intervention — survived and even deepened after the Cuban Revolution, when Mexico preserved ties with Havana even as much of the region aligned with Washington.
Ms. Sheinbaum now faces a fraught balancing act: upholding her country’s historical alliance with Havana, while managing its vital yet increasingly tense relationship with the United States.
The Sheinbaum administration has been careful not to provoke Mr. Trump, who has strained Mexico’s economy with tariffs and threats of military action to stop fentanyl from crossing the border. He has also threatened to withdraw from the free trade deal with Canada and Mexico, the U.S.’s largest trading partner.
Ms. Sheinbaum has largely held to her country’s commitment to Cuba, a Communist country, where people are struggling with surging food costs, constant blackouts, a lack of critical medicine and dwindling fuel. But Mexico has not sent any oil to Cuba since early last month.
“No one can ignore the situation that the Cuban people are currently experiencing because of the sanctions that the United States is imposing in a very unfair manner,” she said during a news conference on Monday. She added that Mexico had deployed two Navy ships carrying more than 814 tons of humanitarian aid — mostly staple foods and hygiene supplies — to Cuba.
Cuba, whose main oil provider was Venezuela, has faced chronic fuel shortages for years, but the situation has become far more severe since last month, when President Trump took control of Venezuela’s oil supply. He halted deliveries to Cuba, which now only has a fraction of the oil it needs.
Mexico had been sending about 22,000 barrels a day, but that figure dropped to about 7,000 toward the end of 2025 — which was still far less than Venezuela was sending, according to Jorge Piñon, a University of Texas oil expert who tracks the shipments closely. The last delivery from Mexico arrived in early January, he said, days after President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela was captured by U.S. forces.
To navigate the crisis, Ms. Sheinbaum has tried to distinguish between commercial contracts between Mexico’s state-owned oil company Pemex and the Cuban government, and humanitarian aid, which she insists must continue. She has also called for a diplomatic talks between Mexico and the United States, and has offered her country as a mediator for discussions between Washington and Havana.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba said on Thursday that his government was open to negotiations with the United States. Mr. Trump has warned that Cuba should strike a deal, which he has not elaborated on, “before it is too late.”
With the taps effectively running dry, Ms. Sheinbaum seems focused on keeping Mexico’s historical loyalty alive.
Hers is the only Latin American country that has consistently opposed the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba since it began more than 60 years ago, even as the tenor of the relationship between Mexico and Cuba has varied under different presidents.
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, two key figures of the Cuban Revolution, first met while in exile in Mexico City in 1955, and began planning a guerrilla war that would sweep the island and change the course of Latin American history. They followed in the footsteps of José Martí, a Cuban national hero who lived in Mexico before returning to his land, where he died in 1895 fighting for independence from Spain.
The Cuban Revolution was also an inspiration for anti-government movements in Mexico in the 1960s, said Rafael Rojas, a Cuban historian at the College of Mexico.
He said that Morena, the leftist governing party of Ms. Sheinbaum, has “a nostalgic, very sentimental view of Cuba.” To a significant part of the party’s leadership and base, he added, “Cuba appears as a victim of the empire and must be helped.”
Mexico has long been a refuge and transit point for Cubans, especially since the United States ended its policy in 2017 of allowing Cubans who arrived without visas to stay, and as the island’s economic crisis has deepened in recent years.
After Cuban leftists planned their revolution in Mexico in the 1950s, Manuel Antonio de Varona, founded an anti-Castro movement in Mexico City in 1960. Generations earlier, during the Mexican Revolution, Mexican figures fled to Cuba.
Since the revolutionaries took control of Cuba in 1959, Mexico has proved useful as a negotiator between the United States and Cuba, said Ricardo Pascoe, the former Mexican ambassador to Cuba under the conservative president Vicente Fox in the early 2000s.
During parts of the Cold War, Mr. Pascoe said, Washington kept tabs on Cubans through intelligence shared by Mexico, but Mexico also was Cuba’s gateway to the rest of the world. And though past right-wing Mexican presidents did not share Cuba’s political or economic policies, Mexico maintained friendly diplomatic ties and trade partnerships.
Under the Morena party — founded by Ms. Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who built closer ties with Mr. Díaz-Canel of Cuba — Mr. Pascoe said that the Mexican government has become more ideologically aligned with Cuba.
“That has placed Mexico and the president of Mexico in a very complicated position,” he said. “Because Mexico’s economy continues to depend on its relationship with the United States yet it wants to have a privileged political relationship with a recognized adversary of the United States.”
Ricardo Monreal, who leads the Morena legislators in the lower house of congress, said there is a conservative sentiment in Mexico that does not agree with the country’s current relationship with Cuba. But he insisted that Mexico “cannot accept” a policy that affects essentials such as food and energy.
“I feel that this is the worst crisis in Cuba’s modern history because of the pressure of the blockade and the strangulation it is suffering at the hands of the United States,” he said. “We cannot assume a position of contempt or indifference toward what Cuba is suffering.”
Miriam Castillo, Frances Robles and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting.
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3) Canadian Airlines Cancel Flights as Cuba Runs Out of Jet Fuel
The Trump administration’s crackdown on oil shipments to Cuba is beginning to wreak havoc on the Caribbean island’s travel industry.
By Frances Robles, Reporting from Florida, Published Feb. 9, 2026, Updated Feb. 10, 2026
Jose Marti International Airport in Havana last year. Yamil Lage/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Disruptions to Cuba’s travel industry began this week after the government notified airlines that it would run out of aviation fuel, part of a crippling energy crisis triggered by the Trump administration’s strict measures, which have largely cut off the communist country’s access to foreign oil.
Air Canada announced that, starting Monday, it had suspended its 16 flights per week to four Cuban cities.
WestJet Group, which operates WestJet, Sunwing Vacations, WestJet Vacations and Vacances WestJet Quebec, said it had begun an “orderly wind down” of its operations in Cuba in order to lessen the strain local resources.
Both airlines said they would send empty jets to Cuba from Montreal and Toronto to bring back roughly 3,000 Canadians currently visiting the island.
Before the pandemic, at least 1 million Canadians visited Cuba each year, according to the Canada foreign ministry.
Canada has been a top source of tourists to Cuba. and the loss of Canadian tourists will be a hard hit to an already struggling industry.
Though Russian airlines said their flights would continue as usual, Interfax, the Russian wire service, said a Rossiya Airlines flight Monday was canceled, but the empty plane was flown to Cuba to pick up Russian tourists.
According to the Association of Tour Operators of Russia, there may currently be between 4,200 and 4,700 tourists traveling on package tours from Russia in Cuba.
The lack of jet fuel was the first major blow to Cuba’s economy since President Trump announced on Jan. 29 that he was taking additional steps to stop the flow of oil to Cuba. Mr. Trump, claiming without providing evidence that Cuba harbored terrorist groups, said he would impose tariffs on any nation that provided Cuba with oil. The move largely affected Mexico, which had been one of the few remaining sources of oil for the island.
Cuba had long relied on Venezuela for a majority of its fuel needs. But after the Jan. 3 U.S. attack on Venezuela that ousted its president, the Trump administration took control over Venezuela’s oil industry and stopped shipments to Cuba.
The measure is widely seen as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to exacerbate Cuba’s economic free fall and prolonged blackouts and force an end to the country’s 66-year-old communist revolution.
Cuba produces about 40 percent of the oil it needs, but experts say that is not enough to keep the country functioning. They predict that Cuba will likely run out of reserves by the end of March.
Cuba does not keep much reserves of jet fuel, so it was not surprising that it ran out of that first, said Jorge Piñón, an expert on Cuba energy issues at the University of Texas.
“This only impacts long-haul flights; the flights from Miami historically come with enough fuel to go back and forth,” Mr. Piñón said. “If we don’t see a smoke stack from an oil tanker arriving somewhere in Cuba during the second half of March, we’re in bad shape.”
Long haul flights to Cuba would probably have to schedule refueling stops in other countries, possibly in the Dominican Republic, he said.
American Airlines, which operates 11 daily flights from Miami to Cuba, said its planes could travel with enough fuel for the return flight.
Air Canada said that the planes bringing back Canadians in the coming days would fly in with extra fuel to Cuba and then make stops as necessary to refuel on the return journey. WestJet said it would fly to Cuba with enough fuel for the return trip.
Other airlines, including Iberia, announced changes to their cancellation policies to allow passengers more flexibility to leave Cuba. Air Europa said it would stop in Santo Domingo to refuel.
News of the jet fuel crisis was first reported by the Spanish news agency EFE, citing a NOTAM notification, a telecommunications message used by aviation authorities to alert pilots and airlines to immediate issues or hazards.
Cuba’s vice prime minister told Cuban state television that fuel resources would be redirected to essential services.
In a news conference last week, Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel insisted that Cuba is not and will not be a failed state.
“I am not an idealist. I know we are going to live through difficult times; we have before,” he said. “But we will overcome them together.”
Local state-run Cuban media outlets published news of a series of austerity measures.
Cimex, Cuba’s state-owned conglomerate, announced Saturday that it had suspended gasoline sales in Cuba’s local currency, as well as diesel sales in U.S. dollars.
Banks will operate on shorter schedules, and some hospitals canceled elective surgeries. Some nurses would be assigned to work near their homes, because they probably would not be able to make it to work because of the fuel shortage, the Tribuna newspaper reported.
Tourists were beginning to be transferred to other hotels so that Cuba would save energy by having fewer partially filled hotels, Canadian media reported.
Fabio Nina, a vice president of Air Century, a Dominican airline that flies to Cuba six times a week, said Cuban aviation authorities told him they could find fuel for his 50-seat jet this week but were less confident about next week.
“Eventually, if they don’t sort things out with Washington, they are going to run out of fuel completely,” Mr. Nina said. “Right now we don’t know what’s going to happen after this week. It’s a crazy, crazy, crazy situation.”
Reporting was contributed by David C. Adams in Miami, Niraj Chokshi in New York and Valerie Hopkins in Berlin.
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4) Donald Trump, Pagan King
By Leighton Woodhouse, Feb. 11, 2026
Mr. Woodhouse is a documentary filmmaker and the author of the newsletter Social Studies.
Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada recently described the world that President Trump is dragging us into with this aphorism: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
The quote comes from Thucydides’ fictionalized account of a negotiation between Athens and the rulers of the island of Melos, in the Peloponnesian War. The Melians, who were no match for the Athenians, wished to remain neutral. They complained that Athens’s demand that they submit to its rule was unjust. The Athenians responded that matters of justice exist only between equals. Between those who are strong and those who are weak there is only force.
The dialogue is famous for its stark portrayal of the dictates of political realism. The world is not guided by ideals and values, it demonstrates. It is brokered only by power.
The Trump administration has adopted this philosophy as its own. In a recent interview with Jake Tapper, Stephen Miller said, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
To sympathetic ears, Mr. Miller sounded refreshingly unsentimental and cleareyed. But the “niceties” he disparaged aren’t just some naïve fantasy. They are the values of Christianity, the faith the Trump administration purports to defend and uphold.
After defeating Melos in a siege, Athens slaughtered the island’s men and enslaved its women and children. Such was the nature of the ancient world, a world that was, to borrow Mr. Miller’s words, devoid of “niceties” and “governed by power.”
In his book “Dominion,” the historian Tom Holland describes how it wasn’t until Christianity came along that Western civilization derived the popular conception that the weak and the vanquished had any inherent moral value at all. Telling an ancient Greek or a pre-Christian Roman that their treatment of slaves was morally wrong would have inspired not argument but bewilderment, as if you had told them they were evil for the way they treated their kitchen utensils. These pagans generally believed that their gods favored the strong and were indifferent to the weak.
Christianity upended these assumptions. Christianity took the Jewish God, who cared for the weak and knew the difference between good and evil, and made his message universal. It taught that all humans are God’s creation. To oppress any person, even a slave, is an offense before him. Even more than that: the weak are closer to God than the rich and the powerful.
This moral instinct is so ubiquitous today that we barely recognize it as Judeo-Christian, or even as religious. Adherents of the world’s other great religions have largely integrated it into their ethical frameworks even if this tenet is not central to their faith. It is the basis for the American Declaration of Independence and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As Mr. Holland noted, even anti-Christian revolutionaries, from the Jacobins to the Communists, owe their secular claims of human equality to Christianity; indeed, they are the most radical expressions of it.
That’s not to pretend that those lofty principles have effectively restrained great powers. Mr. Carney is correct that international law has always been, in part, a lie. International norms haven’t stopped the U.S. military from carrying out atrocities all over the world. Christian morality didn’t prevent medieval kings and the Catholic Church from massacring civilians, persecuting Jews and committing genocides in the New World. The American founders, so proud of their Christian piety, betrayed their religion in the most profound way: many of them owned slaves.
Unlike the pagans of antiquity, however, those rulers had to answer to charges of hypocrisy, which corroded their credibility in a way that the Athenians never had to contend with. Purportedly Christian great powers could do what they wanted to, just as the Athenians declared. But unlike the ancients, they did so at a cost to their political legitimacy.
George W. Bush felt obliged to sell his invasion of Iraq in part on the righteous Christian premise that it would liberate oppressed Iraqis from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the United States cast their mujahedeen adversaries not just as tools for U.S. foreign policy goals but as “freedom fighters.” American leaders, unlike Vikings or Spartans, had to make a moral case for the exercise of our power. It wasn’t enough to simply say that we, as the strong, can do what it is in our interest to do. We had to couch it all, however unconvincingly, in a framework that made it palatable to the Christian conscience. This may not have determined the shape of American foreign and domestic policy, but it was the impossibility of making that case that ultimately contributed to the end of slavery, and of European imperialism and American segregation. The moral framework mattered.
That is the world we are leaving behind. By brazenly jacking Venezuela for its oil and threatening to acquire Greenland against its will, the U.S. is acting as the ancient Greeks, the ancient Persians and the Germanic tribes conducted themselves: brutishly, without shame or apology. And the abdication of Christian values is already shaping the conduct of our government toward its citizens, as in Minneapolis, where immigration agents have killed two protesters. The Trump administration appears unconstrained not only by the limits imposed by the Constitution but by the standards of an average American’s conscience. Federal agents’ treatment of both immigrants and U.S. citizens in Minneapolis is the reflection of a government that has abandoned the moral instinct that it is wrong for the powerful to abuse the weak.
JD Vance never tires of pointing out that America is a philosophically Christian nation, and that Christianity is under attack from his political enemies. Such statements get big applause from the Trump-loving crowds he panders to. But the administration he serves in is doing more than any antifa foot soldier to dismantle that philosophy as the fundamental basis of our government’s political legitimacy. To the people leading this administration, Thucydides’ famous aphorism isn’t just an acknowledgment of reality. It is the image of the world they wish to make.
Leighton Woodhouse is an independent journalist, documentary filmmaker and author of the Substack Social Studies.
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5) We Have to Look Right in the Face of What We Have Become
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, Feb. 11, 2026
Paola Chapdelaine for The New York Times
On Oct. 4, Marimar Martinez, a teacher’s assistant at a Montessori school, was driving in Chicago when she observed federal immigration agents on patrol. She had begun to honk her horn to warn her neighbors about their presence when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Moments later, the agent in the vehicle, Charles Exum, fired multiple shots into Martinez’s car, hitting her again and again. (Later, Exum would brag to colleagues that he had “fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes.”)
Prosecutors for the government charged Martinez with assaulting a federal officer and accused her of trying to ram Exum with her car. The Department of Homeland Security described her actions as domestic terrorism, a charge the agency would repeat after the death of Renee Good in January at the hands of another immigration agent.
The government’s case unraveled, however, when it became clear that its story did not fit the evidence — evidence that officials with Customs and Border Protection tried to hide. The government dropped its case against Martinez a month later, and on Friday a federal judge authorized the release of the body camera footage so that the public could see the incident for itself.
Recently, Martinez joined with other Americans brutalized by federal immigration agents to tell their stories to a forum of congressional Democrats led by Representative Robert Garcia of California and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, the top Democrats on the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Garcia and Blumenthal convened the event to collect testimony on — and highlight — “the violent tactics and disproportionate use of force by agents of the Department of Homeland Security.”
The people who testified spoke to the terror of their confrontations with masked, armed and often trigger-happy federal agents. “I will never forget the fear, and having to quickly duck my head as the shots were fired at the passenger side of the car. Any one of those bullets could have killed me or two people I love,” said Martin Daniel Rascon, who was stopped by agents who broke the windows of the vehicle he was in and began firing when the driver, frightened, tried to escape.
If democracy rests on mutual recognition, on our capacity to see one another as full and equal persons, then the power to speak and be heard lies at the foundation of democratic life. It is when we speak — when we argue, appeal, explain and testify — that we put into practice our belief in the ability of others to understand, reason and empathize. Or as Thomas Jefferson remarked in 1824, “In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.”
Thus far, growing public opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection has been a function of the power of the image — of videos of shootings and abuse — but the testimony of Martinez, Rascon and others should remind us of the power of words and personal experience to also move the public. Crucially, there is the power inherent in giving victims of wrongdoing a chance to tell their stories, not as one perspective among many but as part of the official record.
Two examples of this dynamic stand out in American history.
In 1871, Congress convened the Joint Select Committee to Inquire Into the Conditions of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, better known as the Klan hearings, on account of its focus: vigilante violence against the formerly enslaved. The committee, the historian Kidada E. Williams writes in “I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction,” “traveled to hot spots of southern disorder, where they solicited testimony from officeholders, voters, accused participants and their victims.” Overall, the hearings “yielded 13 volumes of firsthand testimonies, including from Black victims.” Hundreds of Black men and women spoke of terror, intimidation, wanton killings and sexual violence. “African Americans,” Williams writes, “told their stories of world-unraveling violence and asked federal officials and their fellow citizens to respect their rights.”
A little more than a century later, in 1980, Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, an official federal investigation into the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The commission held 20 days of hearings in cities across the country and heard testimony from more than 750 witnesses, many of them on the West Coast, including “evacuees, former government officials, public figures, interested citizens and historians.” The evacuees, or rather victims, spoke in their testimony to deep feelings of injustice and a powerful sense that the federal government had robbed them of their dignity. “We took whatever we could carry,” said one person interned as a child. “So much we left behind, but the most valuable thing I lost was my freedom.” Victims also spoke about conditions in the camps that should sound familiar to anyone who has read recent accounts about ICE detention facilities. “The garbage cans were overflowing, human excreta was found next to the doors of the cabins and the drainage boxes into which dishwater and kitchen waste was to be placed were filthy beyond description.”
The public attention associated with the Klan hearings helped suppress anti-Black vigilante violence in the South, but only for a time. Ultimately, the hearings did not produce the kind of legislation or federal effort that would have secured the promise of equal citizenship for the formerly enslaved. The more recent commission and hearings on Japanese internment, on the other hand, did lead to congressional action, and in 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed a law that acknowledged and apologized for the injustice of internment, which gave reparations to surviving internees or their heirs.
In her book, Williams observes:
Societies experiencing atrocities struggle to put a stop to and then meaningfully address them. Perpetrators want to advance their aims to the end and propagate baseless lies to do it. Victims want violence to stop, and they want justice. A small cadre of observers believes in justice and accountability. The rest, especially those who are safe from being targeted, and atrocities’ passive beneficiaries, simply want to move on and wipe the historical slate clean.
This was true of the violence suffered by Black Americans during Reconstruction. It has been true, in fact, for all manner of violence either committed or sanctioned by the federal government. But while the odds are somewhat against a serious reckoning with the brutality and wrongdoing of Trump’s mass deportation effort, it does not have to be true of the atrocities of ICE and the Border Patrol. If it is, it is because we made it so.
With that in mind, any serious push to account for the actions of this government — to abolish the president’s private army, restructure immigration enforcement and punish anyone responsible for wrongdoing — must include recompense and repair for its victims. And looking ahead to a Democratic-led House, Senate or both, the first step in that journey must be more of the kind of public investigation and testimony we’ve already seen in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago and wherever else the administration has made its mark. The American people need to know the full story of what has been done in our name. And the people we’ve wronged deserve their chance to speak and be heard.
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6) Don Lemon Hires Federal Prosecutor Who Quit Over Immigration Crackdown
Facing charges over his role at a church protest, Mr. Lemon, a journalist, retained a veteran litigator who recently resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota.
By Ernesto Londoño, Reporting from Minneapolis, Published Feb. 10, 2026, Updated Feb. 11, 2026
Journalist Don Lemon outside federal court in Los Angeles last month. Credit...Mario Tama/Getty Images
The federal prosecution of the journalist Don Lemon took an unlikely turn on Tuesday.
Facing charges over his presence at a church protest challenging the immigration crackdown in Minnesota, Mr. Lemon has hired as one of his defense lawyers a veteran criminal litigator who, until just weeks ago, was helping lead the prosecutor’s office that has charged Mr. Lemon with felonies.
Joseph H. Thompson, a former senior federal prosecutor who resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota in mid-January over the Justice Department’s handling of the immigration operation, has joined Mr. Lemon’s defense team, according to a court filing.
Mr. Thompson’s appointment is the latest plot twist in a high-profile case that has been anomalous from the start. By representing the most prominent of nine defendants charged in the church protest case, Mr. Thompson will face off against a department that employed him for nearly 17 years. Mr. Thompson will work alongside Mr. Lemon’s lead defense lawyer, Abbe Lowell.
The government’s investigation began after Mr. Lemon, a former CNN anchor who now works as an independent journalist producing content for a YouTube show, accompanied protesters who disrupted the Sunday morning service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn., on Jan. 18. Demonstrators targeted the church because one of its pastors, David Easterwood, is a senior official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the state. Mr. Easterwood was not at the service.
Mr. Lemon, 59, met with protest organizers at the parking lot of a grocery store, followed them into the church and live streamed as they chanted “ICE out!” and “Hands up, don’t shoot!”
In a video of the protest Mr. Lemon posted on social media, he is seen interviewing worshipers as well as protesters inside the church, at one point saying, “We are not part of the activists, but we’re here reporting on them.”
That night, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, issued a statement calling Mr. Lemon’s role in the protest “pseudojournalism” that was not protected under the First Amendment.
Days later, a federal magistrate judge signed arrest warrants for three of the protesters but declined to sign off on warrants for the arrest of Mr. Lemon and four other people. The chief federal judge in Minnesota, Patrick J. Schiltz, agreed with the magistrate judge, saying the government had not produced evidence that Mr. Lemon had broken the law.
Senior Justice Department officials took the unusual step of appealing Judge Schiltz’s refusal to sign off on Mr. Lemon’s arrest by asking an appeals court to do so, calling the possibility of future protests during church services a “national security emergency.” The appeals court declined that request.
Late last month, a federal grand jury indicted Mr. Lemon along with another independent journalist, Georgia Fort, and seven other individuals who attended the demonstration.
The nine defendants are charged with conspiring to violate religious freedoms at a house of worship, and with injuring, intimidating and interfering with the exercise of religious freedoms at a place of worship. Both charges are felonies under a 1994 law passed mainly to protect abortion clinics from violence.
Attorney General Pam Bondi called Mr. Lemon’s conduct unlawful, referring to the demonstration as a “riot” that terrified congregants. After Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of the protest organizers, was arrested late last month, the White House posted a photo of her arrest that was manipulated to make Ms. Levy Armstrong, who is Black, appear to have darker skin, and to falsely portray her as disheveled and crying.
According to the indictment, Mr. Lemon “stood in close proximity” to a pastor during the protest “in an attempt to oppress and intimidate him.” At one point, it adds, Mr. Lemon “caused the pastor’s hand to graze” his. The indictment says Mr. Lemon and the demonstrators did not immediately leave the church at the request of its leaders.
Mr. Lemon, who has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s deportation push, has called the charges against him “an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and a transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration.”
The aggressiveness with which the Justice Department has pursued the church protest case has unsettled career prosecutors, according to several people familiar with events at the U.S. attorney’s office in recent days. Several of them, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, have noted that the indictment does not include the names of any career prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota as would be common in a civil rights criminal case.
Mr. Thompson, who had been the second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, resigned on Jan. 13 along with several colleagues after clashing with leaders at the Justice Department over its handling of the investigation into the killing of a Minneapolis woman, Renee Good, by an ICE agent.
Mr. Thompson and other career prosecutors sought to investigate the legality of the shooting of Ms. Good. But senior department leaders overruled him and instead sought to investigate Ms. Good’s partner, examining her possible links to groups protesting ICE operations in the state.
Mr. Thompson, who kept a low profile since resigning, this week started a law firm with Harry Jacobs, a fellow former federal prosecutor who also resigned in protest.
Mr. Thompson’s move to represent a defendant prosecuted by his former office reflects the wider tumult at the Justice Department, which has seen an exodus of career prosecutors as they said they found themselves pressured to investigate and prosecute President Trump’s perceived enemies.
Other surprising partnerships have emerged. Last year, Rascoe Dean, the deputy chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville, joined the legal team representing Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who has come to symbolize Mr. Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda.
Alan Feuer and Seamus Hughes contributed reporting.
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7) The Minnesota surge led to thousands of arrests, tense protests and three shootings.
By Ernesto Londoño, Mitch Smith and Pooja Salhotra
The Trump administration said on Thursday that it was ending its deployment of immigration agents to Minnesota, unwinding an aggressive operation that has stretched for more than two months despite loud opposition from residents and local officials.
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said “a significant drawdown has already been underway this week, and will continue to the next week.”
Mr. Homan said he had made arrangements for immigration agents to have more access to undocumented inmates at county jails in Minnesota and had productive conversations with state officials. He did not immediately provide details of agreements reached with Minnesota officials.
“As a result of our efforts here, Minnesota is now less of a sanctuary state for criminals,” Mr. Homan said.
For many Minnesotans who had watched the federal government exert its will on their state — wielding law enforcement power and physical force at a scale that had no modern precedent in the United States — Mr. Homan’s announcement signaled a welcome shift. Still, news of a drawdown was greeted with skepticism.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council.
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who described the operation as “an unprecedented federal invasion in all aspects of life,” said he was “cautiously optimistic” after the announcement by Mr. Homan.
“They left us with deep damage, generational trauma,” he said. “They left us with economic ruin in some cases.”
Since the immigration crackdown began late last year, federal agents have said that they arrested more than 4,000 people in Minnesota and have shot three, including two American citizens who were killed. Protesters have trailed federal officers through the Twin Cities, blowing whistles to alert people to their presence, and immigration agents have often responded with anger and force. The Democrats who run Minnesota have referred to the operation as an illegal occupation, while Republicans in Washington have accused local officials of obstruction and opened criminal investigations.
About 3,000 agents flooded into the state, outnumbering the police forces in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and their fatal shootings of Renee Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, an intensive-care nurse, set off protests across the country. The Trump administration rushed to cast Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti as domestic terrorists, persisting even when their claims were called into question by videos. Also last month, an agent shot and wounded a Venezuelan man who officials said was in the country illegally and had resisted arrest.
Bipartisan concern about the killing of Mr. Pretti, who was shot Jan. 24, led to something of a tone shift. Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who had been leading the crackdown, was removed and Mr. Homan was dispatched to Minnesota, where he struck a conciliatory tone.
On Thursday, Mr. Homan thanked by name some of the Minnesota officials who have been singled out for criticism by others in the Trump administration.
“We’ve seen a big change here in the last couple weeks,” Mr. Homan said. “And it’s all good changes.”
Even as officials began meeting behind closed doors, the Trump administration and Minnesota’s leaders remained at odds over policies that limit cooperation on immigration enforcement. Though Minnesota does not have sweeping statewide “sanctuary” measures for immigrants, federal officials have complained about limited access to immigrants held in county jails and about municipal limits on cooperation in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The Trump administration has repeatedly defended its work in Minnesota as a necessary response to that limited cooperation, as well as to widespread fraud in state welfare programs. State and city leaders filed a lawsuit claiming the operation was an unconstitutional violation of state sovereignty but failed to convince a judge to grant an injunction.
From the beginning of the deployment, residents in the heavily Democratic Twin Cities formed neighborhood chat groups and started informal patrols to monitor and sometimes confront immigration agents. Federal officials said those protesters had often crossed the line into obstruction or violence, and several of them were charged with federal crimes. Activists accused federal officials of systematically using threats, tear gas and physical force against nonviolent protesters and of squelching First Amendment rights. A federal judge briefly imposed restrictions on agents’ actions toward protesters last month, but her ruling was blocked by an appellate court.
The practical effect of Thursday’s announcement remained somewhat unclear. Mr. Homan said last week that he was pulling about 700 agents out of the state. But in the days that followed, many residents and local officials said that immigration agents still seemed to be all around and that the region still seemed to be enmeshed in the crackdown. Mr. Homan said on Thursday that the president had agreed with the decision to wind down the Minnesota operation. Mr. Homan said “a small footprint of personnel” would remain in Minnesota, while most agents would be sent back to their home bases or to other locations.
Mr. Homan claimed that the Minnesota operation had been a success, and that the drawdown should not be seen as a sign of the administration changing its stance on immigration enforcement.
“President Trump made a promise of mass deportation, and that’s what this country is going to get,” Mr. Homan said.
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis celebrated the end of immigration crackdown and praised how residents had responded. He said the immigration operation had been “catastrophic” for Minneapolis families and businesses.
“They thought they could break us, but a love for our neighbors and a resolve to endure can outlast an occupation,” Mr. Frey said in a statement.
The operation in Minnesota followed surges of immigration agents last year to cities including Los Angeles and Chicago, also Democratic-led places whose leaders have been at odds with the president.
Mr. Homan’s announcement on Thursday signaled a shift in strategy and messaging. When federal officials wound down their aggressive operations in Los Angeles and Chicago last year, the administration made no formal announcement that agents were leaving town, leaving local and state officials in the dark about their intentions.
Julie Bosman contributed reporting.
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8) Judge Ends Deportation Case for Mexican Father of 3 U.S. Marines
The arrest of Narciso Barranco, who was detained by federal agents while landscaping outside an IHOP in Southern California last June, garnered national attention.
By Miriam Jordan, Feb. 12, 2026
Miriam Jordan reported on the detention of the Mexican landscaper last year.
Narciso Barranco, center, and his wife, Martha, at a church in Tustin, Calif., in August. Credit...Peyton Fulford for The New York Times
An immigration judge has terminated the deportation case against an undocumented father of three U.S. Marines who was detained by federal agents last year while landscaping in Southern California, paving the way for him to seek legal permanent residency in the United States.
Last June, Narciso Barranco was clearing weeds outside an IHOP restaurant in Santa Ana, Calif., when immigration agents approached him from behind, pinned him to the ground and handcuffed him. Mr. Barranco, a 49-year-old Mexican national who has lived in the United States for three decades, was then transferred to a detention center and placed in deportation proceedings. He was released on a $3,000 bond in mid-July and fitted with an ankle monitor.
At the time, the Department of Homeland Security defended the agents’ aggressive arrest, saying the agents had felt threatened by Mr. Barranco and accusing him of having raised his weed trimmer at them. The D.H.S. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the immigration judge’s ruling
The episode garnered national attention last year, and Mr. Barranco became a symbol of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. The Trump administration had launched a large immigration enforcement operation in the Los Angeles area in June, touching off a wave of intense protests and clashes between residents and federal law enforcement officers.
In her order terminating the deportation case, signed on Jan. 28, Judge Kristin S. Piepmeier said that Mr. Barranco had provided evidence that he was the father of three American sons in the military, rendering him eligible to obtain lawful status. Immigration officers have since removed Mr. Barranco’s ankle monitor, and his check-ins have been discontinued, Mr. Barranco told The New York Times.
“I think the American people would agree that no one like Narciso Barranco, who raised three U.S. citizen Marines and has no criminal record deserved the treatment he received,” Lisa Ramirez, Mr. Barranco’s lawyer, said shortly after the ruling.
Ms. Ramirez has helped him apply for Parole in Place, a program that shields undocumented parents of U.S. military personnel from deportation and provides them an expedited pathway to permanent residency. Once that petition is approved, Mr. Barranco will receive a work permit.
But Mr. Barranco said that he would not feel secure until the approval of his residency status. He said he had been limiting his outings to attending Sunday Mass.
“This was a victory, and I am happy for it,“ Mr. Barranco said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “But I am still afraid that I could be grabbed.”
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9) Columbia Protester in ICE Custody for Nearly a Year Suffers Seizure
Leqaa Kordia, 33, of New Jersey, was hospitalized after hitting her head at a Texas detention center, her lawyer said. She was initially arrested during a 2024 protest at Columbia University.
By Maria Cramer, Feb. 12, 2026
“Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, has accused Ms. Kordia of being a terrorist sympathizer and government lawyers had said they were investigating funds she sent overseas. Her lawyers have countered in immigration hearings and court documents that she sent $1,000 to help her family in Gaza. Ms. Kordia worked as a server before she was detained. After Ms. Kordia’s detention, an official from the Homeland Security Investigations agency in New Jersey asked the New York Police Department for information about her, saying that she was being investigated in connection with money laundering. The Police Department gave U.S. authorities the record of Ms. Kordia’s 2024 arrest. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement on Wednesday that Ms. Kordia had been ‘found to be providing financial support to individuals living in nations hostile to the U.S.’”
Leqaa Kordia has been held at the Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, since March 2025. She has not been charged with any crimes. Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times
A New Jersey woman who was detained by federal immigration agents nearly a year ago suffered a seizure after she fell and hit her head in a Texas detention center, her lawyers and federal officials said on Wednesday.
The woman, Leqaa Kordia, who has been held at the Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, since March 2025, was brought to a hospital last Friday and remained there for 72 hours before being taken back to the detention center, said Sarah Sherman-Stokes, Ms. Kordia’s immigration lawyer.
Ms. Kordia, 33, arrived in the United States from the West Bank in 2016, moving in with her mother in Paterson, N.J. She was arrested in April 2024, when scores of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered at Columbia University to protest the war in Gaza. She was issued a summons, the case was dismissed and her arrest report was sealed.
But federal officials began investigating Ms. Kordia about a year later.
On March 13, 2025, Ms. Kordia went to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Newark, N.J., after she learned that federal investigators wanted to speak with her.
She was then detained for overstaying her visa and put on a plane to Texas, where she has been held ever since, even though a judge has twice ruled that she is not a threat to the United States and could be released on a $20,000 bond, according to court records and Ms. Sherman-Stokes.
In appealing the judge’s decisions, government lawyers have twice filed a rarely used provision known as an “automatic stay,” which keeps a person detained during the appeals process, Ms. Sherman-Stokes said.
Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, has accused Ms. Kordia of being a terrorist sympathizer and government lawyers had said they were investigating funds she sent overseas.
Her lawyers have countered in immigration hearings and court documents that she sent $1,000 to help her family in Gaza. Ms. Kordia worked as a server before she was detained.
After Ms. Kordia’s detention, an official from the Homeland Security Investigations agency in New Jersey asked the New York Police Department for information about her, saying that she was being investigated in connection with money laundering. The Police Department gave U.S. authorities the record of Ms. Kordia’s 2024 arrest.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement on Wednesday that Ms. Kordia had been “found to be providing financial support to individuals living in nations hostile to the U.S.”
Ms. Kordia has not been charged with any crimes.
“The government has absolutely no evidence of why she should be detained except for the fact that she spoke out for Palestinian liberation,” Ms. Sherman-Stokes said.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday called on the Trump administration to release Ms. Kordia, citing her seizure.
“Leqaa Kordia has spent nearly a year in an ICE prison for exercising her First Amendment rights in NYC & speaking out against the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” he said in a social media post, adding, “This is cruel & unnecessary.”
After her seizure, Ms. Kordia was sent to Texas Health Huguley Hospital in Burleson “out of an abundance of caution to ensure her health and safety,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
“ICE will continue to ensure she receives proper medical care,” she added.
Ms. McLaughlin defended the conditions at the Texas detention center, where she said all detainees had “access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care.”
“For many illegal aliens this is the best health care they receive in their entire lives,” she said.
But according to Ms. Kordia’s cousin, Hamzah Abushaban, who visited her two weeks before her hospitalization, Ms. Kordia had lost weight and complained repeatedly of headaches and feeling weak and dizzy.
She had been sleeping poorly in a bunk bed in a large hall with dozens of other detainees and complained that her requests for halal food were being denied, Mr. Abushaban said.
“We’re all sick to our stomachs and extremely worried,” he said.
He said he learned Ms. Kordia had been hospitalized early last Friday after another detainee at the center called him, crying. But Mr. Abushaban said that when he and Ms. Kordia’s lawyers repeatedly called and emailed federal officials, they refused to say which hospital she was in. They ultimately learned of her whereabouts from a reporter, Ms. Sherman-Stokes said.
Ms. Kordia has not been able to see her medical records and does not know what caused the seizure, her lawyer said.
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10) A Very Dangerous Ruling in New Orleans
By David French, Opinion Columnist, Feb. 12, 2026
There are so many twists and turns in the legal battles over immigration and detention that it’s sometimes hard to sort out which rulings are truly significant and which are minor skirmishes in the larger legal battle playing out across the length and breadth of federal courts.
On Friday, however, the stakes were clear. Two judges from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a ruling that, if allowed to stand, could result in the indefinite detention of millions of immigrants in inhumane, overcrowded facilities scattered across the United States.
Even worse, these indefinite detentions are in civil proceedings, not criminal, meaning that the people under lock and key are not serving prison sentences for criminal offenses. It’s as if we’re throwing people into overcrowded jails for the legal equivalent of failing to pay a credit-card bill or losing a lawsuit — immigration detention as the new debtors’ prison.
Even worse still, we are subjecting human beings to extended confinement in detention facilities that — if human rights groups, detainees and whistle-blowers are to be believed — are often not up to the standards of America’s prisons or jails. They aren’t even up to the standards we set in my regiment for detaining suspected insurgents in Iraq.
Here is how this unfolded. Last year, the Trump administration changed roughly 30 years of bipartisan consensus about the interpretation and interaction of two sections of the 1996 amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act. The effect of the change would sharply increase immigrant detentions in the United States.
The first section, 8 U.S.C. Section 1225, says, “In the case of an alien who is an applicant for admission, if the examining immigration officer determines that an alien seeking admission is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted, the alien shall be detained.”
An “applicant for admission” under this section is quite broadly defined as “An alien present in the United States who has not been admitted or who arrives in the United States.” In other words, every undocumented alien in America is conceivably an “applicant for admission.”
Crucially, Section 1225 does not contain a provision for posting a bond. A bond is payment of money in exchange for a release from detention and a binding order to show up for future proceedings. In this context, a bond is very much like posting bail in a criminal case. With no bond available, that means you’re stuck in detention until your case is complete — however long that takes.
But the statute doesn’t require detention of every “applicant for admission.” Instead, it says that an “alien seeking admission” shall be detained. So, what is the difference between an “applicant for admission” and an “alien seeking admission”? Is there one?
The second section in question, 8 U.S.C. Section 1226, provides additional context. It says, “On a warrant issued by the Attorney General, an alien may be arrested and detained pending a decision on whether the alien is to be removed from the United States.” This statute, however, permits the attorney general to release the “alien” on a “bond of at least $1,500,” provided, generally, that they are not criminals or terrorists.
How do you harmonize the two statutes? When is an alien required to be detained and when is a bond acceptable?
For roughly 30 years, Republican and Democratic presidents have been in agreement, including during Trump’s first term. Section 1225 applies to people who have crossed the border and are seeking to enter the country. Section 1226 applies to the aliens who are already here. In other words, if you’re crossing the border, you’re not eligible for a bond. If you’re already here, then you are.
The reason for the different treatment is found in the phrase “alien seeking admission.” Dale Ho, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, put it like this: “Someone who enters a movie theater without purchasing a ticket and then proceeds to sit through the first few minutes of a film would not ordinarily then be described as ‘seeking admission’ to the theater.” They’re not “seeking admission.” They are already in.
Or, as the Supreme Court described it in a 2018 case called Jennings v. Rodriguez, “U. S. immigration law authorizes the Government to detain certain aliens seeking admission into the country under §§1225(b)(1) and (b)(2). It also authorizes the government to detain certain aliens already in the country, pending the outcome of removal proceedings under §§1226(a) and (c).”
This distinction makes a great deal of sense. Aliens (the term used in the statute) who are entering the country can be subject to expedited removal, and it makes little sense to release an alien who is set to be deported in days.
But once you’re in the country, perhaps working at a job or supporting a family, the injustice of prolonged detention is obvious — especially since the removal proceeding itself isn’t criminal.
That’s why Republican and Democratic presidents alike have adopted this interpretation of the law — until President Trump’s second term.
The Trump administration now argues that the terms “applicant for admission” and “alien seeking admission” have the same meaning, and thus any applicant for admission must be detained until their legal proceedings are complete.
U.S. District Courts have rejected this argument en masse. As Politico’s Kyle Cheney reported last week, “At least 360 judges rejected the expanded detention strategy — in more than 3,000 cases — while just 27 backed it in about 130 cases.”
But now a divided Fifth Circuit panel has taken the minority view. Judges Edith Jones and Kyle Duncan adopted the administration’s reasoning and would deny access to bond even for otherwise law-abiding immigrants who’ve been living and working in the United States for years.
In this view, Section 1226 — the section that permits bond — becomes much more narrow, applying to a much smaller slice of the immigrant population. If their view is affirmed, then Americans should prepare for the indefinite, mass detention of immigrants on a scale that we can scarcely comprehend.
Judge Dana Douglas dissented. The Congress that passed the relevant portions of the statute, she wrote, “would be surprised to learn it had also required the detention without bond of two million people.”
That’s roughly the number of people who’d entered without inspection living in the United States in 1996, when the laws were passed. Now the number is much larger. The sheer size and scope of the potential detentions boggle the mind.
The administration, however, seems eager to detain as many people as it can. ICE is spending vast sums of money to purchase “mega warehouses” that it’s transforming into detention centers that could potentially hold thousands more people than the largest federal prisons in the United States.
Sadly, the conditions in these detention facilities can be grim. It’s hard to have a clear picture of the conditions, given the tightly controlled access to Trump’s detention facilities, but even so, there is overwhelming evidence that many immigrants are held in terrible, dangerous conditions.
I’d urge you to read my colleague Jamelle Bouie’s chilling Jan. 24 newsletter describing the extraordinary reports of abusive, unsanitary and dangerous conditions at ICE detention facilities.
To take just one example from Jamelle’s newsletter, the American Civil Liberties Union, along with other human rights groups, wrote that detained immigrants at a camp at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, “are held for weeks at a time with no access to the outdoors in cramped, squalid soft-sided tents with 72 people per unit, where toilets and showers flood eating areas with raw sewage.”
In July, Americans for Immigrant Justice, Human Rights Watch and Sanctuary of the South, an immigrant rights group, released a report on conditions in three Florida detention facilities, which said that immigrants are subject to “conditions that flagrantly violate international human rights standards and the United States government’s own immigration detention standards.”
A viral video from an ICE detention facility in Baltimore showed extreme overcrowding, with detainees lying side-by-side, covered only by foil blankets. A whistle-blower who worked at the facility said he “saw people lying in feces. People throwing up, people lying in urine.”
On Monday, The Irish Times reported on the plight of an Irish man named Seamus Culleton, who has been living in the United States for more than 15 years, has a valid work permit and is applying for a Green Card. He was sent to a facility in El Paso, Texas. He said the place is “like a concentration camp, absolute hell.”
Culleton told The Irish Times that “he has been locked in the same large, cold and damp room for four and a half months with more than 70 men” and that “he has been allowed outside for air and exercise fewer than a dozen times in nearly five months.”
This is a small fraction of the reports of dreadful, abusive conditions at ICE facilities across the country. And the Trump administration wants to flood even more people into an already overcrowded and strained system — leaving them without hope of release until an overloaded legal system is finally able to adjudicate their case.
The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution is one sentence long: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” This single sentence is a pillar of the American constitutional commitment to fundamental human rights.
Tragically, there is now considerable evidence that the administration is violating the Eighth Amendment at scale. We don’t deny bail to criminals who aren’t a flight risk, aren’t missing court dates, or who pose no serious danger to their communities. We let them out while they await trial.
Yet the Trump administration wants to take law-abiding, undocumented immigrants, including immigrant families with young children, and toss them into camps until their cases are complete.
Again, I cannot emphasize enough the fact that these detentions are not criminal. There are thousands upon thousands of immigrants facing brutal conditions who’ve been convicted of no crime and haven’t even been accused of a crime beyond their initial alleged illegal entry.
People who overstay their visas aren’t guilty of any crime at all, since their original entry is lawful. Even if immigrants entered illegally, that’s a misdemeanor for a first offense, and we do not imprison people indefinitely in miserable conditions for committing misdemeanors — or at least we didn’t.
But there is a method to the madness. Mass detention and brutal mistreatment send a message to the rest of the world — this is what happens if you’re in the United States without documentation. Even if you’re seeking asylum. Even if you’ve been here for years as a law-abiding, productive member of your community.
Critics of the administration should be clear, however, that disagreeing with its approach to immigration detention and enforcement does not mean endorsing open borders. It does not mean halting deportations of people unlawfully present in the United States.
Previous presidents, both Republican and Democratic, have deported millions of undocumented immigrants without systematically violating their rights. And in a different timeline, Trump could be riding high simply by securing the border and conducting regular deportation proceedings in a way that respects the human rights and dignity of each and every person within our borders — just as the Constitution requires.
But that is not what the administration is doing. It’s procuring a series of detention facilities that are concentration camps in all but name. And now, thanks to a decision by the Fifth Circuit, it possesses new legal support for a campaign of retribution and punishment that should shock the American conscience.
The Trump administration got the ruling it wanted from the Fifth Circuit. It may not fare so well at the Supreme Court. A series of recent Supreme Court decisions has narrowed the executive branch’s ability to reinterpret federal statutes and gives me some degree of hope.
But the court’s view of executive authority is in flux — for one thing, we are still waiting on the outcome of the tariff case — and we cannot confidently predict the outcome. Whatever happens, we cannot be complacent. Unless and until the Supreme Court takes up and decides the case (and overturns the ruling), thousands upon thousands of people will languish, unjustly, in the squalor and filth that is the product of MAGA’s negligence, incompetence and hate.
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11) ‘I Just Want to Get Out of Here’: ICE Is Detaining Hundreds of Children
The number of children in immigration detention has spiked since last year. Families describe poor conditions and little education.
By Miriam Jordan, Sarah Mervosh and Allison McCann, Feb. 13, 2026
As of mid-January, about 1,400 people were detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, including Edison, a 13-year-old from Chicago. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
A 7-year-old in Oregon was seeking treatment for a nosebleed last month when immigration agents detained her and her parents outside a hospital emergency room. They were taken to a federal detention center in Texas for three weeks.
In Chicago, a 5-year-old was at a laundromat with her mother last fall when they were surrounded by agents and flown to Texas.
And a teenager who had been living in the United States for a decade was getting ready for school one morning last year when the police showed up at his family’s door. He, too, ended up confined in Texas with his mother, even though she had begged for him to be allowed to stay with family members who are American citizens, according to court records.
The number of children in federal custody has climbed sharply since President Trump revived the practice of detaining families last year, as part of his promise to deport immigrants who are in the country illegally. The most prominent example came last month, when 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, still wearing his Spider-Man backpack, was detained along with his father on their way home from school in suburban Minneapolis.
Under the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, hundreds of children have been detained, usually with a parent. Nearly all pass through one place: a sprawling detention center in Dilley, Texas, that is a jumble of trailers and soft-sided tents in a desolate expanse about 70 miles south of San Antonio.
Known as the Dilley Immigration Processing Center — or just Dilley — it has been the main site for family detentions since it was built in 2014 during the Obama administration, which at one point held more than 1,000 children there during a surge of migrants fleeing Central America.
The Biden administration stopped using the facility to detain families in 2021 and closed it in 2024. The Trump administration reopened it last year.
In the past, Dilley was used mainly to hold women and children who had just crossed the border. But now, many of the children sent there had been living in the United States and attending American schools, sometimes for years.
“There are many, many Liams,” said Elora Mukherjee, a professor at Columbia Law School who runs the school’s immigration clinic.
The children who end up at Dilley are generally immigrants themselves, brought to the United States by a parent. It is unclear if any American citizens, such as babies born recently to immigrant parents, have been detained there.
All told, about 3,500 adults and children have passed through Dilley since it reopened, according to lawyers and legal aid organizations that represent families. Some are held for only a few days, others for months. Some are deported, voluntarily or not. Accounts of their stays come from court affidavits written by parents and children, recent interviews with families and reports from lawyers and members of Congress who have spoken with them.
Trump resumes family detention
The Biden administration allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to enter the country seeking asylum. Trump officials have said that migrants took advantage of a system where asylum cases could take years to be decided.
The Trump administration says that migrant families can avoid confinement by voluntarily leaving the country.
“Being in detention is a choice,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, adding that the administration was offering $2,600 and a free flight to people who leave voluntarily.
Many families have refused that offer. They may have pending cases in immigration court, giving them hope that they might be allowed to stay. Some have built lives in the United States, and some fear returning to their home countries.
Federal officials say parents can choose whether to be detained with their children. However, it’s unknown how many parents have been allowed to leave their children with another adult caregiver.
Many families say immigration agents have given them no choice but to bring their children with them.
Until two months ago, Edison, a 13-year-old Guatemalan boy, was a thriving seventh grader in Chicago. He excelled at math, his favorite subject, played on his school’s soccer team and translated for his immigrant parents.
Today, Edison is being held with his mother in Dilley, where his schooling has been reduced to an hour a day.
His father, Ricardo, who spoke on the condition that he and his family be identified only by their first names, said that he came to the United States first, and that Edison and his mother arrived in 2023 and applied for asylum together.
In December, he said, Edison’s mother complied with instructions to visit an ICE office for their case and was told to bring the boy back with her the next day. The two were taken into custody while Ricardo was waiting outside, a moment that has left him in agony, he said.
He said that his wife was not given the option to leave their child behind.
On average, about 175 children a day were held in ICE detention last year, up from about 25 children a day at the end of the Biden administration, according to data from the Deportation Data Project, which is current as of October. (Under President Biden, families taken into custody after entering the United States were sometimes kept temporarily in hold rooms or other facilities for processing.)
As of mid-January, there were about 1,400 people at Dilley, including about 500 children and 450 parents, according to RAICES, a nonprofit organization that provides legal services to families inside Dilley. (About 450 single women are being held there in a separate part of the facility.)
A promotional video by CoreCivic, a private prison company that runs Dilley, depicts a dormlike setting, with bunk beds, an outdoor playground, a volleyball court, a no-frills library and a pantry with animal crackers and other snacks.
Families describe a different reality: inadequate medical care, lights kept on all night, scant drinking water and little education.
The detention center is surrounded by barbed wire, and most families sleep in rooms shared with other families. Children often lose weight and get sick. Recently, there were two confirmed cases of measles. Some children have become suicidal and had panic attacks, families and lawyers say.
“There is a lot of desperation,” said Javier Hidalgo, a legal director with RAICES, who has visited the facility many times.
Christian Rubi, 16, said in a phone interview from Dilley that he has “a lot of anxiety attacks.”
“I start crying, shaking,” said Christian, who arrived in the United States from Mexico when he was 7 and had been living in San Antonio, where he was detained with his mother during a check-in with ICE. They have been held for more than four months. “I just want to get out of here,” he said. “It’s hell.”
A mother seeking asylum from Colombia who spent two months at Dilley this fall wrote that her daughter, 6, had previously been an engaged first grader in New York City. Art was her favorite subject. But she regressed at Dilley.
“She has started to wet her pants again since coming here,” the mother, Kelly Vargas, wrote in an affidavit in October. “She is also asking at night to drink milk from my breasts. She hasn’t had breast milk in four years.”
The Department of Homeland Security said, “Detainees are provided with three meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap and toiletries.”
“Children have access to teachers, classrooms and curriculum booklets for math, reading, and spelling,” the agency added. “All of this is generously funded by the U.S. taxpayer.”
The government has struggled for many years with the question of how to handle children who enter the country unlawfully with their parents. Many of the complaints about conditions, including extended stays and the emotional distress of children in detention, stretch back to the Obama administration.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, his administration separated children from their parents at the southern border as a way to deter unauthorized entries. His administration also kept children, including infants, in fetid, overcrowded Border Patrol facilities for weeks. Border crossings are now low, and the Trump administration has not used such tactics during his second term.
But lawyers for families say that under President Trump, federal agencies are breaking the terms of a 1997 settlement agreement, which requires the government to provide basic care and education to undocumented children in their custody. It requires age-appropriate instruction in subjects like science, math and reading in a classroom setting.
The agreement has its origins in a class-action lawsuit filed in 1985 against the government over its treatment of detained migrant children. The Clinton administration agreed to settle the lawsuit, establishing standards for the detention of minors.
Under the settlement, children are supposed to be transferred out of immigrant detention within about 20 days. The Trump administration is fighting in court to end the settlement, arguing that it incentivizes unlawful border crossings and undermines immigration enforcement.
Another issue raised by the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts is what happens to children left behind when their parents are detained. Many remain with family and friends; some have ended up in state custody.
‘Not Really Education At All’
At Dilley, children of different ages and grades are grouped together for one-hour classes, which often consist of basic work sheets or coloring. After several weeks, the lessons are repeated, according to families and lawyers.
“In high school, I was taking chemistry, geometry, history and English,” said Christian, the 16-year-old who had been living in San Antonio. At Dilley, he said, “they don’t teach you anything.”
Christian said that high school students were handed a sheet to color in the American flag and another to search for the 50 states. He has quit attending class.
Sometimes, children are turned away, because the class size is limited to 12 to 15 students.
Aury, a Venezuelan mother who was detained along with her three children, 10, 8 and 7, during a scheduled ICE check-in in San Antonio in December and held at Dilley until late January, said her children became upset when they were not allowed into the classroom. There was little stimulation otherwise.
She said they repeatedly asked her whether they had done something wrong to be confined.
The government had seemed to be making plans to set up an in-person school at Dilley by hiring Stride Inc., a for-profit company that primarily offers virtual education, according to public records and job postings.
But that did not happen.
In a statement, Stride said “we are not providing education services at this facility.” The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about Stride, or who is currently providing education at Dilley.
Leecia Welch, who is chief legal counsel at Children’s Rights and represents detained children in a class-action legal case, said that the offerings at Dilley were “not really education at all.”
As more children have been detained, their American schools often must piece together where they have gone.
In Columbia Heights, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, several children were taken to Dilley, including 5-year-old Liam, whose release was ordered by a judge. Two brothers were sent there with their mother and later released. While there, school officials said, the brothers recognized another child in the cafeteria: a fifth-grade girl, who had been missing from their school for weeks.
ICE has sporadically released families, sometimes without explanation. In late January, several dozen families were allowed to go free.
Hundreds remain. Edison, the 13-year-old, has now been at Dilley for 58 days. He has been having recurring episodes during which he feels despondent, his father said. He crawls under a bunk bed and weeps uncontrollably.
“You can make all sorts of improvements to Dilley, but it’s still going to be a prison,” said Ms. Welch, the class-action lawyer, who regularly visits Dilley to assess conditions.
“You can improve education, and they should,” she added, but “it will still be a place with sick, sad children.”
Edgar Sandoval, Pooja Salhotra, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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12) Beyond the Big Cities, ICE Is Rattling Small-Town and Exurban America
Far from the national spotlight, towns like Cornelius, Ore., and Coon Rapids, Minn., are dealing with President Trump’s expanding mass deportation effort, and the effects can be acute.
By Anna Griffin and Chelsia Rose Marcius, Feb. 13, 2026
Anna Griffin reported from Cornelius, Ore., Chelsia Rose Marcius from Coon Rapids, Minn.
In Cornelius, Ore., population 14,763, town leaders declared a state of emergency and asked the governor for money to pay for more police to monitor federal agents. Jordan Gale for The New York Times
President Trump may be ending the surge of immigration agents in the Twin Cities, but his mass deportation effort has already extended well past large, liberal cities like Minneapolis, to small communities where the national spotlight does not exist but the impact can be at least as acute.
In places like Cornelius, Ore., Danbury, Conn., Biddeford, Maine, and Coon Rapids, Minn., where moderation, not partisanship, might predominate, the arrival of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and the more aggressive tactics ICE officers often use — have been jarring. In small towns, resources may already stretched, and even a single incident can shatter the tranquillity of neighborhoods unaccustomed to turmoil.
ICE is proud of its reach. The agency is using “data-driven intelligence” to deploy its agents, the agency said in an email, declining to identify a spokesman. It added, “ICE operates everywhere — rural, urban, and suburban.”
In Coon Rapids, an exurb about 15 miles from downtown Minneapolis, Bill Carlson recently watched federal agents as they waited across the street for hours to take away a Vietnamese family he called his neighbors.
“There is a fear here,” he said. “I didn’t think anything like this would happen in America, let alone Coon Rapids.”
Last month, ICE “surge teams” from Philadelphia were sent into West Virginia, hitting the towns of Martinsburg, Moorefield, Morgantown, Beckley, Huntington and Charleston. None of those places have more than 50,000 residents and Moorefield has less than 3,000. Federal officials boasted of arresting more than 650 undocumented immigrants.
At a coffee shop in Hillsboro, Ore., deputies and local police in Washington County responded in October to multiple 911 calls that reported 10 armed men wearing masks who approached a car filled with high school students with weapons drawn in a crowded drive-through lane. Only after a tense encounter — and after the armed men got in their van and left — did the local officers understand they’d been in a standoff with federal immigration agents.
“You’ve got people in that parking lot who want us to arrest the ICE agents,” said Sheriff Caprice Massey, adding that she is worried her deputies could wind up in an accidental gunfight with federal officers. “And you’ve got ICE agents who want us to help them or get out of their way.”
Emergency responders have also fielded a rash of 911 calls about abandoned vehicles. “ICE will just take someone and leave their car, windows smashed, in the middle of the road,” Sheriff Massey said.
ICE officials said they are not responsible for the confusion; federal officers “clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks” and notify local agencies when making arrests, the ICE email said.
As for the 911 calls, he said those are “a direct result of sanctuary policies, activist smear campaigns, and dangerous political rhetoric that encourages reporting or recording ICE activity.”
Regardless of who is to blame, the effects are acute.
In Cornelius, Ore., population 14,763, town leaders in late November declared a state of emergency and asked Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, for money to pay for more police — specifically so they can have officers monitor ICE.
Community activists said Washington County police and prosecutors have told them there’s nothing they can do even when officers are present for immigration enforcement that turns violent.
"We said, ‘But they’re hurting people,’” said Maria Caballero Rubio, executive director of Centro Cultural, a Cornelius nonprofit that supports the Latino community. “People are being thrown to the ground for no reason, and a police officer is just standing by.”
Washington County is Oregon’s second most populous and home to the headquarters of Nike and Intel’s largest domestic manufacturing campus, but that tells only half the story. Away from U.S. Highway 26, the communities become more rural and heavily Latino. The county is about 18 percent Hispanic, higher than the state as a whole. In several small agricultural towns, Hispanics are a majority.
“We’re the town for the farms, the place with the John Deere dealership, the Bobcat store, the U-Haul dealerships,” said Jeffrey Dalin, mayor of Cornelius, where more than half the 15,000 residents identify as Latino.
Coon Rapids, a city of about 64,000 residents, is similarly in the outer orbit of the Twin Cities, two-and-a-half times less dense than Minneapolis.
Last month, the presence of immigration authorities outside of a Mexican restaurant in Coon Rapids alarmed its employees, most of whom have not returned to work, said Dan Carlson, a City Council member who for years has worked closely with immigrant communities. On a recent Friday, as children prepared for school, at least a dozen federal agents roamed the halls of an apartment complex on University Avenue near 92nd Lane North East, according to the property manager, cellphone footage and residents, many of whom are immigrants.
On Jan. 20, about two dozen residents went before Coon Rapids’ mayor, Jerry Koch, and the City Council, worried about immigration agents roaming the streets where their children play.
As they spoke, Mayor Koch grew more and more frustrated.
“We’re not Minneapolis or St Paul; we’re not a sanctuary city; we cooperate,” he said later in an interview.
He also made clear he was frustrated with the reaction of some of his constituents to the growing presence of federal agents.
“I get emails that say, ‘ICE has been spotted three times in town today, here at this house, at this house, that house,’” he said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, come on, get off whatever tracking site you’re on and put the whistles away.’”
There are also questions of shattered trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement, a worry echoed by big-city and small-town mayors across the country.
In Oregon, Sheriff Massey’s office provides police service for Cornelius, and local law enforcement officials said they have worked hard, particularly after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, to build trust with a population that has often felt ignored or outright abused by prosecutors and police.
They have hired Spanish-speaking officers, held forums and town halls, and worked closely with nonprofits and social service agencies that serve immigrant and Latino populations. The Washington County Sheriff’s Office recently began using body-camera technology for real-time translation.
All of that would be for nothing if Hispanic residents stop cooperating out of fear for ICE.
“People who are victims or witnesses of crimes and reluctant to come forward,” said Kevin Barton, the district attorney in Washington County, Ore., seen at top left.Jordan Gale for The New York Times
“Right now we are seeing — not anecdotally, but repeatedly — people who are victims or witnesses of crimes and reluctant to come forward,” said Kevin Barton, Washington County’s district attorney.
That’s bad for everyone, he added.
“If your loved one was a victim of a violent crime and the only witness was undocumented, wouldn’t you want them to call 911?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you want them to come testify in court?”
A town hall late last month hosted by Oregon’s attorney general and several area state legislators turned into an airing of frustration by Latino attendees, many of whom said they were desperate for elected officials to do more to protect them. Latino community leaders said they now have to reassure people that it is safe to call for help if your spouse hits you.
“People are coming to us instead of the police,” said Nansi Lopez, policy director for the advocacy and organizing group Centro Cultural, which is based in Cornelius. “I’m having to tell them, ‘No, really, it’s OK. You can trust them.’”
The sheriff’s office in Washington County has not seen an overall drop in requests for service. But the work of many civil servants has gotten harder. Undercover officers working drug cases have had their cars blocked in parking lots and have been filmed by residents who mistook them for ICE agents.
Mayor Dalin said, “We have teachers walking kids to school because their parents are afraid of getting grabbed off the street.”
The Department of Homeland Security said their enforcement efforts in Washington County had led to the arrests of five men who they say were in the country illegally and had been convicted of violent crimes.
Local leaders still said the immigration surge here has not made their communities safer.
Sheriff Massey said she and other law enforcement leaders have met with regional and national officials from the Department of Homeland Security to ask for what they consider basic changes in how ICE operates — including wearing visible badges identifying themselves as federal officers and notifying local police before making arrests in public places.
“We’ve talked a lot,” she said. “Nothing has changed.”
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13) ‘Worse Than the Pandemic’: Restaurants Say ICE Presence Imperils Business
In several cities where immigrants are being detained, owners say they’re struggling to stay open as fear keeps customers and workers from leaving home.
By Priya Krishna, Feb. 13, 2026
The dining room at Suya Joint, a Nigerian restaurant in Boston, one of many places that say they have lost business since ICE stepped up immigration enforcement. Tony Luong for The New York Times
Even as the Covid pandemic shut down every dining room across the country in April 2020, Americans were still ordering takeout, and millions of restaurant employees were getting paychecks funded by government assistance.
Now, as that same government is rounding up immigrants it believes to be in the country illegally — about 70,000 are currently in detention — Cecelia Lizotte, the owner of two Nigerian restaurants called Suya Joint, in Boston and Providence, R.I., says many of her customers are afraid to come in. She can’t even get people in her neighborhood to pick up free meals.
Several of her employees are nervous about coming to work, though Ms. Lizotte says they are in the country lawfully. Her brother, Paul Dama, a Nigerian immigrant who is the restaurant’s manager and was in the process of applying for asylum, was detained on the way to church by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in June and held for three months at a detention center in New Hampshire.
He has since been granted asylum and returned to work, but the job has changed drastically. Sales are down more than 20 percent at the restaurant’s Boston location since the raids began, and 50 percent in Providence, Ms Lizotte said. The streets of her Boston neighborhood, Roxbury, which has a sizable foreign-born population, are often deserted.
“I wake up every day thinking, ‘Should I just close and wait to see if everything settles down?’” Ms. Lizotte said.
In interviews over the past few weeks, restaurant owners in several cities where ICE agents are out on the streets echoed that sentiment: Their businesses are not only teetering on insolvency, they said, but feel even more vulnerable than during the pandemic.
Some of that plight is the result of other forces that have hit restaurants hard, like rising ingredient prices, the growing cost of food delivery and this winter’s brutal weather. None of these businesses have been raided by ICE agents, who need a judicial warrant to enter private areas of a business, like a kitchen or office.
But most of the owners said that ICE has become a constant and alarming presence in their neighborhoods. The fear of detention among customers and employees — in an industry in which more than one-fifth of the work force nationwide was born abroad — has taken a toll.
That fallout is felt especially in immigrant neighborhoods that have been targeted for ICE enforcement. In the Little Village area of Chicago, known as the “Mexico of the Midwest,” a spokeswoman for the neighborhood Chamber of Commerce estimated that local business sales have fallen 50 to 70 percent since 2024.
“No one is coming out in the daytime because of the continued visuals of seeing the arrests and protesters,” said Christina Gonzalez, who runs Los Comales, a taqueria with 19 locations in the Chicago area, including Little Village, where her business is hardest hit. “We have always had 30 to 40 percent of our sales from foot traffic. We don’t have any foot traffic.”
Asked about the economic effects of ICE’s actions, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson responded in an email: “Our brave law enforcement officers are delivering on President Trump’s and the American people’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens to make America safe. Removing dangerous criminals from our streets makes it safer for everyone — including business owners and their customers.” A White House spokeswoman said this week that while ICE is focused on deporting violent criminals, anyone in the country illegally is eligible for removal.
The restaurant industry continues to rebound from the pandemic; the report released this week by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that full-service restaurants gained about 130,000 jobs in January.
The reverse is happening at Los Comales, whose Little Village location employed 120 people last summer. Now there are just 28, as opening hours have been cut back. The neighborhood’s restaurants depend on outside visitors for business, Ms. Gonzalez said, but the tense atmosphere “may revert our community back to 25 or 30 years ago, when not one English-speaking person would come out of fear of gang violence, or not being attended to by someone who speaks English.”
With so many of her workers afraid to even leave home, she said, “it’s worse than the pandemic.”
Threats and Slurs
Much of the attention paid to the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has centered on Minneapolis, where more than 4,000 people have been arrested by immigration officials since Operation Metro Surge began in December. Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said Thursday that the operation would end, but city officials have estimated the cost to the local economy at $20 million a week.
Manny González, who co-owns Manny’s Tortas in Minneapolis, said his sales have dropped 40 percent since before the surge began, and four of his seven employees have stopped coming to work.
“We are just surviving,” he said, adding, “It’s very scary even for me, and I’m a citizen. I carry my passport.”
But restaurant owners far from the Twin Cities said they’re also grappling with customers’ and workers’ anxieties about leaving home.
Annie Bennett runs Annie’s Cafe, a counter-service restaurant just outside Salt Lake City. Last summer, she said, she received repeated calls from someone claiming to be an ICE agent, threatening to arrest her Latino employees and smash her windows.
Since then, customer traffic has been so slow as ICE enforcement in the area has grown — revenues are down 40 percent since this time last year — that Ms. Bennett worries she may have to close if things don’t turn around in the next few months.
“They put a monitor in my heart because I am so stressed,” she said.
During the pandemic, locals united to help one another. “We are divided now,” she said. “Because I am Latina, I am being targeted as a criminal.”
A Salt Lake City restaurant worker named Montse, who asked that her surname not be published, said her employers now lock all the doors except the main entrance, so they can screen out anyone they suspect might be an ICE agent. Customers, she said, have accosted her with racial slurs and threatened to call ICE on her.
Along Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles’s Koreatown, several restaurants have closed for lack of business since ICE began a series of enforcement sweeps in June, said Maria Morales, an organizer at the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance. Their former employees were already hurting because of the wildfires, she said. Now, “these people cannot afford rent.”
Even more affluent, predominantly white communities have been swept up in the tumult.
In December, residents of Palm Beach, Fla., held vigils and signed petitions to protest the detention of José Gonzalez, a beloved manager at the upscale Bice Ristorante. He was detained at the state-run immigration center in the Everglades known as Alligator Alcatraz before his release just before Christmas.
On a recent Friday evening, though, there was no sign of the trouble. The dining room was full, and Mr. Gonzalez was back at his post, rushing around to greet regulars at the host stand and shake hands at the bar.
Down the street at Pizza Al Fresco, employees are bicycling rather than driving to work because they don’t want to be pulled over and asked for identification, said Javier Gonzalez, a manager and José’s brother.
But they also believe that their regulars are on their side — and possess powerful government connections in the town that President Trump has made his Florida base.
“Everyone is trying to be extremely nice to customers,” Javier Gonzalez said. “They are like, ‘If they can help José, they can help anyone.’”
Restaurants as Refuge
Even some restaurant owners facing rough times feel they are in a position to help. Many restaurants have become refuges, at a time when ICE agents have broad authority to detain people elsewhere — at traffic stops, parks and school parking lots.
“ICE Not Welcome Here” signs hang outside many restaurants. Immigrant-rights training sessions are common at preshift meetings. Whistles are now part of some staff uniforms.
Santos, a restaurant worker in Austin, Texas, who asked that his surname not be published, was detained at a traffic stop on the way to work last March and sent to a detention center near the border. His boss wrote letters of support and served as an obligor, offering to pay his bail if needed.
Santos, who was released last summer, said he planned to go back to the restaurant soon. “I feel most comfortable with these people that I know,” he said in Spanish.
As community hubs, restaurants have the power to mobilize locals in a way few other businesses can, said Diana Dávila, the chef and owner of Mi Tocaya, a Mexican restaurant in Chicago. She helped organize a fund-raiser last month that collected $115,000 to buy groceries for families facing food insecurity because of ICE actions.
“Restaurants put a face to what is happening,” she said.
Just as they rushed to buy gift cards during pandemic lockdowns, many diners are now visiting their favorite restaurants more frequently, out of a worry that they will close.
“It’s the smallest thing we can do,” said Hahn Chang, who was dining with his wife at Manny’s Tortas in Minneapolis. He added, “It’s devastating for Lake Street,” long lined with immigrant-run businesses. “I think this is the best street in the state.”
When Ms. Lizotte, of the Suya Joint restaurants in New England, was struggling to keep business afloat after her brother’s detention, customers volunteered to work free as servers. Hundreds more attended her brother’s court hearing over Zoom to show their support.
“People cried with me, they called me to pray with me,” she said. “They told me to not give up.”
Sheila Eldred contributed reporting from Minneapolis.
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14) Something Surprising Happens When Bus Rides Are Free
By Emily Galvin Almanza, Feb. 13, 2026
Ms. Almanza is the executive director of Partners for Justice, a nonprofit organization that seeks to transform public defense.
Brian Blomerth
Free buses? Really? Of all the promises that Zohran Mamdani made during his New York City mayoral campaign, that one struck some skeptics as the most frivolous leftist fantasy. Unlike housing, groceries and child care, which weigh heavily on New Yorkers’ finances, a bus ride is just a few bucks. Is it really worth the huge effort to spare people that tiny outlay?
It is. Far beyond just saving riders money, free buses deliver a cascade of benefits, from easing traffic to promoting public safety. Just look at Boston; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Richmond, Va.; Kansas City, Mo.; and even New York itself, all of which have tried it to excellent effect. And it doesn’t have to be costly — in fact, it can come out just about even.
As a lawyer, I feel most strongly about the least-discussed benefit: Eliminating bus fares can clear junk cases out of our court system, lowering the crushing caseloads that prevent our judges, prosecutors and public defenders from focusing their attention where it’s most needed.
I was a public defender, and in one of my first cases I was asked to represent a woman who was not a robber or a drug dealer — she was someone who had failed to pay the fare on public transit. Precious resources had been spent arresting, processing, prosecuting and trying her, all for the loss of a few dollars. This is a daily feature of how we criminalize poverty in America.
Unless a person has spent real time in the bowels of a courthouse, it’s hard to imagine how many of the matters clogging criminal courts across the country originate from a lack of transit. Some of those cases result in fines; many result in defendants being ordered to attend community service or further court dates. But if the person can’t afford the fare to get to those appointments and can’t get a ride, their only options — jump a turnstile or flout a judge’s order — expose them to re-arrest. Then they may face jail time, which adds significant pressure to our already overcrowded facilities. Is this really what we want the courts spending time on?
Free buses can unclog our streets, too. In Boston, eliminating the need for riders to pay fares or punch tickets cut boarding time by as much as 23 percent, which made everyone’s trip faster. Better, cheaper, faster bus rides give automobile owners an incentive to leave their cars at home, which makes the journey faster still — for those onboard as well as those who still prefer to drive.
How much should a government be willing to pay to achieve those outcomes? How about nothing? When Washington State’s public transit systems stopped charging riders, in many municipalities the state came out more or less even — because the money lost on fares was balanced out by the enormous savings that ensued.
Fare evasion was one of the factors that prompted Mayor Eric Adams to flood New York City public transit with police officers. New Yorkers went from shelling out $4 million for overtime in 2022 to $155 million in 2024. What did it get them? In September 2024, officers drew their guns to shoot a fare beater — pause for a moment to think about that — and two innocent bystanders ended up with bullet wounds, the kind of accident that’s all but inevitable in such a crowded setting.
New York City tried a free bus pilot program in 2023 and 2024 and, as predicted, ridership increased — by 30 percent on weekdays and 38 percent on weekends, striking figures that could make a meaningful dent in New York’s chronic traffic problem (and, by extension, air and noise pollution). Something else happened that was surprising: Assaults on bus operators dropped 39 percent. Call it the opposite of the Adams strategy: Lowering barriers to access made for fewer tense law enforcement encounters, fewer acts of desperation and a safer city overall.
If free buses strike you as wasteful, you’re not alone. Plenty of the beneficiaries would be people who can afford to pay. Does it make sense to give them a freebie? Yes, if it improves the life of the city, just as free parks, libraries and public schools do. Don’t think of it as a giveaway to the undeserving. Think of it as a gift to all New Yorkers in every community. We deserve it.
Emily Galvin Almanza is a founder and the executive director of Partners for Justice, a nonprofit organization that seeks to transform public defense. She is the author of “The Price of Mercy: Unfair Trials, a Violent System, and a Public Defender’s Search for Justice in America.”
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15) Iran Turns to Digital Surveillance Tools to Track Down Protesters
As Iranian authorities restore some online services after crushing antigovernment demonstrations, they are using a technological dragnet to target attendees of the protests.
By Adam Satariano, Paul Mozur and Farnaz Fassihi, Feb. 13, 2026
Antigovernment protesters blocked a road last month in Tehran. Iran is using facial recognition and phone data to track and detain people involved in political opposition activities. Getty Images
When Iranians began protesting their government in late December, an ominous text message landed in some of their phones.
Their “presence at illegal gatherings” had been noted and they were under “intelligence monitoring,” the Iranian authorities texted them. “It is advised that you refrain from attending such illegal gatherings, which are desired by the enemy.”
Iran’s government most likely tracked the protesters through location data emitting from their phones, researchers later concluded. The move was part of a new phase by the authorities to combat opposition by tapping a vast digital surveillance infrastructure to track down dissenters who participated in the recent antigovernment demonstrations, according to human rights groups, researchers and documents.
Iran, like China, has some of the world’s most expansive known surveillance abilities. Technology to monitor mobile devices, apps and web traffic has been integrated throughout communications and internet networks, along with facial recognition and other tracking methods, according to groups that have studied Iran’s capabilities.
These digital surveillance abilities have received less attention than the internet blackouts that the government imposed during the violent crackdown to end the protests last month. But as authorities slowly restore some online access, they have detained people who were believed to have attended protests and subjected them to hours of interrogation based on facial recognition and phone data, according to accounts from Iranians and a government security official in the country.
Some people who posted on social media about the protests and other political topics have had their phone SIM cards suspended — effectively shutting off access to mobile networks — while others received warning phone calls and faced banking service interruptions, according to a report that was released this week by Holistic Resilience, a digital rights group focused on Iran.
The authorities’ hope was to hunt down the “leaders of the riots” and arrest them, according to the government security official, who declined to be identified.
“They can follow you to the streets,” said Mahdi Saremifar, a researcher with Holistic Resilience. “The government ends up with a long list of names of people. They can visit every single one of those people, maybe a month later or two months later.”
Iran began constructing its digital censorship and surveillance system around 2013. That was when the country’s internet and telecommunications infrastructure, known as the National Information Network, began being developed so that the government could more easily filter the internet and surveil people.
In the years since, censorship tools were used to block information and various online services, while surveillance systems let authorities identify and track opponents, according to researchers at Project Ainita, a group focused on Iran’s digital networks.
For the country’s 90 million people, access to the internet was managed like a drawbridge. While blocks were lifted for some services like Google search, global platforms including Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp and YouTube were banned. In moments of political crisis, the government could also shut down the internet altogether, creating a digital blackout so people could not communicate and spread news of unrest.
Some Iranians have gone to great lengths to sidestep these controls, using services like Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet. But the government moved swiftly to plug holes. Iranians using Starlink now risk imprisonment or even the death penalty, according to rights groups.
Since about 2018, the Iranian government has also added a long menu of surveillance abilities such as “targeted spying, tracking and communication interception,” according to Holistic Resilience.
Spyware can be inserted on phones to record private messages and copy files. Security cameras that were installed across the country, including those owned by private property owners, share a live feed with the government. Other systems to evaluate people’s “lifestyle patterns” were also built.
Around 2019, the government created a centralized digital identity that links a citizen’s personal identity and his or her digital behavior, according to researchers. For access to national mobile networks, people must register their phone and SIM card identification numbers, making it easier to track their movements, connections and apps usage.
Another program, called SIAM, reported earlier by The Intercept, lets authorities log user behavior, track movements and slow down a target’s mobile data connection.
By blocking global services, Iran has funneled people toward domestic services that are more easily monitored. Activity on certain online services, including those for banking and commerce, is tied to a state registry.
“People in Iran know these platforms are used for interception and surveillance, but for some things you don’t have any other choice,” said Mr. Saremifar of Holistic Resilience.
Civil society groups and security researchers have raised alarms about the government’s secretly subverting digital tools that Iranians use to avoid censorship and surveillance.
In 2023, cybersecurity researchers identified fake virtual private networking apps, which disguise a person’s location. These apps contained spyware that could be used to log a person’s keystrokes and gain access to files stored on a device. More recently, apps posing as providers of Starlink internet service were also found to include spyware, according to cybersecurity researchers.
Iranian authorities have collaborated with other authoritarian governments, researchers found.
In 2023, Citizen Lab, a watchdog organization affiliated with the University of Toronto, reported that an Iranian telecom company, Ariantel, had consulted with a Russian tech provider, Protei, about tools for monitoring internet traffic and blocking access to certain websites. Chinese companies including Huawei and ZTE have given material and technical support to Iran since at least 2010 to enhance its surveillance and censorship capabilities, said Article 19, a digital rights group.
Iran’s surveillance techniques are far from perfect. During the recent protests, people in the country described being wrongly identified by facial recognition software and location data.
Iranian authorities have also deployed digital surveillance tools in other instances.
In the city of Isfahan last year, the police used devices known as ISMI catchers that trick phones into transmitting device identification numbers, according to researchers at Miaan, a digital security group focused on Iran. The information, which could be matched against telecom records and state registries, was used to identify and intimidate women who refused to wear a hijab.
Officers stationed around the city also used contactless card readers that could grab identifying data from people’s national ID cards as they walked by. Many women in Isfahan then received threatening text messages from the government about not wearing appropriate clothing, according to Miaan.
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16) Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses
In an internal memo last year, Meta said the political tumult in the United States would distract critics from the feature’s release.
By Kashmir Hill, Kalley Huang and Mike Isaac, Feb. 13, 2026
Kashmir Hill reported from New York, and Kalley Huang and Mike Isaac from San Francisco.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-recognition-smart-glasses.html
The maker of Meta’s smart glasses said it sold more than seven million pairs last year. Lucia Vazquez for The New York Times
Five years ago, Facebook shut down the facial recognition system for tagging people in photos on its social network, saying it wanted to find “the right balance” for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns.
Now it wants to bring facial recognition back.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, plans to add the feature to its smart glasses, which it makes with the owner of Ray-Ban and Oakley, as soon as this year, according to four people involved with the plans who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential discussions. The feature, internally called “Name Tag,” would let wearers of smart glasses identify people and get information about them via Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant.
Meta’s plans could change. The Silicon Valley company has been conferring since early last year about how to release a feature that carries “safety and privacy risks,” according to an internal document viewed by The New York Times. The document, from May, described plans to first release Name Tag to attendees of a conference for the blind, which the company did not do last year, before making it available to the general public.
Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.
“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.
Facial recognition technology has long raised civil liberty and privacy concerns for its potential use by governments to monitor citizens and suppress dissent, by corporations to track unwitting customers or by creeps at bars. Some cities and states have restricted or banned use of the technology by the police over concerns about its accuracy. Democratic lawmakers recently asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stop using facial recognition technology on American streets.
“Face recognition technology on the streets of America poses a uniquely dire threat to the practical anonymity we all rely on,” said Nathan Freed Wessler of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This technology is ripe for abuse.”
Meta considered adding facial recognition to the first version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2021 but pulled back over technical challenges and ethical concerns. It has renewed its efforts as the Trump administration has aligned closely with big tech companies and as Meta’s smart glasses have become an unexpected commercial success.
EssilorLuxottica, which works with Meta to make the glasses, said this week that it sold more than seven million of them last year.
Meta’s smart glasses are expected to face fresh competition from companies, like OpenAI, that have teased their own wearable A.I. devices. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, wants to add facial recognition to differentiate the devices and to make the A.I. assistant in the glasses more useful, three of the people involved with the plans said.
Meta is exploring who should be recognizable through the technology, two of the people said. Possible options include recognizing people a user knows because they are connected on a Meta platform, and identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram.
The feature would not give people the ability to look up anyone they encountered as a universal facial recognition tool, two people familiar with the plans said.
“We’re building products that help millions of people connect and enrich their lives,” Meta said in a statement. “While we frequently hear about the interest in this type of feature — and some products already exist in the market — we’re still thinking through options and will take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out.”
The Information reported last year that Meta had renewed work on facial recognition in its smart glasses.
Meta’s smart glasses have been used to identify people before. In 2024, two Harvard students used Ray-Ban Metas with a commercial facial recognition tool called PimEyes to identify strangers on the subway in Boston, and released a viral video about it. At the time, Meta pointed to the importance of a small white LED light on the top right corner of the frames “that indicates to people that the user is recording.”
Meta’s smart glasses require a wearer to activate them to ask the A.I. assistant a question or to take a photo or video. The company is also working on glasses, internally called “super sensing,” that would continually run cameras and sensors to keep a record of someone’s day, similar to how A.I. note takers summarize video call meetings, three people involved with the plans said.
Facial recognition would be a key feature for “super sensing” glasses so they could, for example, remind wearers of tasks when they saw a colleague. Mr. Zuckerberg has questioned if the glasses should keep their LED light on to show people they are using the “super sensing” feature, or if they should use another signal, one person involved with the plans said.
Meta has worked on facial recognition technology for more than a decade. Mr. Zuckerberg supported the company’s Fundamental A.I. Research lab, or FAIR, in developing ways to use A.I. and facial recognition technology to help people who are blind or have low vision, three people familiar with the work said. That includes working with outside organizations like Be My Eyes, an accessibility technology company.
Mike Buckley, the chief executive of Be My Eyes, said he had talked “for a year” with Meta about face-recognizing glasses for people with low or no vision. “It is so important and powerful for this group of humans,” he said.
Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind, said he was not aware of a specific plan to offer the glasses to attendees at the group’s conference this July but would support it.
Meta has a history of expensive privacy missteps. In recent years, the company paid $2 billion to settle lawsuits in Illinois and Texas that accused it of collecting the facial data of users without their permission for a since-shuttered facial recognition system on Facebook that let users tag their friends in photos more easily. In 2019, Facebook paid $5 billion to the Federal Trade Commission to settle a lawsuit that accused it of violating user privacy, including with its facial recognition software.
As part of the F.T.C. settlement, Meta agreed to review every new or modified product for potential risks to the privacy of the company’s users. In January 2025, Meta relaxed that process for reviewing privacy risks, according to an internal post viewed by The Times. The company’s privacy teams have less influence over product releases, and there are new limits on how long the risk review process takes.
Around that time, employees who worked on risk review questioned whether Meta would still be in compliance with its F.T.C. settlement under the changes. Andie Millan, a director of risk review in Reality Labs, told them that she believed the changes would “push the bounds” of Meta’s agreement with the F.T.C., according to a recording of an internal meeting obtained by The Times.
“Mark wants to push on it a little bit,” Ms. Millan said, referring to Mr. Zuckerberg.
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17) What It Means to Be a White ‘Race Traitor’
From Schwerner and Goodman to Good and Pretti, white people putting themselves in harm’s way has helped galvanize Americans for justice.
By Nikole Hannah-Jones, Feb. 13, 2026
Demonstrators in Greenville, Miss., in 1964 after the disappearance of three civil rights workers, who were later found dead.Tracy Sugarman/Jackson State University, via Getty Images
Following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January, right-wing commentators and administration officials attacked their character. Credit...Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press
In August 1964, the Federal Bureau of Investigation found the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers in an earthen dam on a farm outside Philadelphia, Miss., following their disappearance a month and a half before. The slaying of civil rights activists was not unusual in Mississippi. Its white population had lynched more Black people than any other state. Black activists trying to register Black voters were routinely brutalized and killed. Medgar Evers, the NAACP Mississippi field secretary, was assassinated on his front steps the year before, and no one had been brought to justice.
But this was different. One of the slain civil rights activists, James Chaney, was Black. But the other two, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were white. The national response reflected that. The F.B.I. operated no central office in Mississippi, as it did in many other Southern states, yet more than 150 agents from outside the state swarmed the Delta looking for the missing men. Northern newspapers sent contingents of journalists, and all the major networks covered the story, with Walter Cronkite calling it “the focus of the whole country’s concern.” President Lyndon B. Johnson met with Schwerner’s and Goodman’s parents
The response to the deaths confirmed a cold calculus made by Mississippi’s civil rights strategists when they decided to recruit elite white college students and young professionals to help in the struggle to democratize the state: In America, white lives matter.
But in daring to risk their lives and fight on the side of Black Americans against racial apartheid, Goodman and Schwerner crossed a deadly line. To white supremacists, they were race traitors. And throughout American history, race traitors not only lose the protections of whiteness, but also often become the targets of a particular type of violence, one designed to warn other white people against the costs of fighting — and therefore, delegitimizing — white hegemony.
Last month, Renee Good and Alex Pretti joined this long but seldom spoken-of American tradition when they were killed by federal agents in Minneapolis while standing up for people of color ensnared in the Trump administration’s racialized deportation campaign.
While Trump officials moved to sully their reputations, Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who in 2022 dined with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago, characterized the pair as betraying their whiteness by standing up for immigrants of color. “We are outnumbered by nonwhites,” he said on his livestreaming show. “And you feel bad about this race traitor? That’s what they are. You feel bad about this lesbian poet and Alex Pretti, the male nurse? You feel sorry for these race traitors that laid down their life in defense of this scheme?”
America’s racial caste system, which places white people on top, has existed since before the country was founded. And yet there have always been white people who have worked against and betrayed notions of racial hierarchy, rejecting the fictions that undergird them and the illegitimate power that racial caste justifies. These people are perhaps the most powerful weapon against these systems.
That’s why, like so many of the archetypal race traitors before them, the willingness of Good and Pretti to put themselves in danger for the cause of racial justice proved an unparalleled galvanizing force, one that simultaneously affirms the best about America, and the worst.
The first person to be executed for treason in the United States was not a spy or someone who sold secrets to a foreign government. It was not a Confederate general who took up arms against his government. It was an abolitionist named John Brown.
A religious man, Brown had long opposed slavery on moral grounds, becoming a conductor on the Underground Railroad and training Black communities in free states how to arm themselves against slave catchers. But as slavery continued to expand across the West and with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Brown came to believe that the only way to end slavery was to overthrow it by force.
In October 1859, Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in what was then Virginia, intending to arm enslaved people to rise up against their enslavers. Brown’s group killed several people before he was captured and charged with murder and conspiracy to incite the revolt. The Commonwealth of Virginia considered a white man’s taking up arms to liberate Black people an act of treason, punishable by death.
A true believer, Brown understood the costs. “If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice,” he wrote as he awaited trial, “and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!”
He was convicted by a jury and hanged from the gallows. “To have this white man saying, I will speak truth to power that slavery is fundamentally wrong and it needed to be abolished, and I do not want this racial entitlement because it is based on something as heinous as owning human beings,” says Carol Anderson, a historian in the African American Studies department at Emory University. “Lord have mercy, that is dangerous.”
One hundred and five years later, Schwerner and Goodman joined the realm of martyred race traitors working on behalf of the descendants of people who had been enslaved in John Brown’s time. The following year, weeks apart in 1965, James Reeb, a white father of four and Unitarian minister living in Boston, and Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five from Detroit, were murdered by white supremacists in Selma, Ala. They’d come to support the fight for voting rights after police officers brutally beat Black marchers there in what became known as Bloody Sunday.
As would the deaths of Good and Pretti, the deaths of these white people shocked the conscience of white Americans, drawing national news coverage and widespread condemnation even from many who had been silent. Liuzzo had not been the first mother to die in the civil rights struggle, but after her death, five women’s organizations issued a joint statement saying that Liuzzo’s murder as she sought to help “make the promises of democracy a reality for citizens of all races, was cruel beyond relief.” They urged their members to get involved and assure Liuzzo’s family that “the sacrifice of this mother was not in vain.” A Michigan reverend expressed hope that after her death, more white people would be compelled to act, saying, “Today America hurts.”
Vice President Hubert Humphrey went to pay his respects to Liuzzo’s family, telling them that President Johnson had declared that the “whole country” grieved with them. In a news conference later that day, Humphrey said that a “turning point had been reached in the civil rights struggle” and that voting rights legislation, which countless Black Americans had lost their lives trying to achieve, would most likely pass by May.
The white Southern power structure understood something that research has since supported: Small numbers of mobilized people — perhaps as little as 3.5 percent of the population — can force transformative structural change.
So white Southern officials tried to overcome the spectacle and power of white death by calling the disappearance of Goodman and Schwerner a hoax. After the killings of Liuzzo and Reeb, white officials moved to smear them, claiming they were communists and accusing Liuzzo of being a drug user and sexually promiscuous.
After the killings in Minneapolis, administration officials followed a similar playbook, claiming — without evidence — that Good and Pretti were far-left domestic terrorists whose deaths were justified because they had intentions of harming immigration officials. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Pretti, who had a legal gun on his body but was holding just a cellphone when tackled and shot multiple times, of wanting to “massacre” agents. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, called Pretti a “would-be assassin.” Neither has offered proof of these claims.
Good and Pretti were not the first people to be killed by federal immigration agents since Trump began his deportation dragnet and their shootings were not the first to be caught on camera. According to the Marshall Project, federal officers have shot and killed at least three other people in recent months. The Times found that since September, ICE agents opened fire on at least nine people, killing a Mexican immigrant whose shooting was also caught on video that challenged the official government narrative justifying the agents’ actions. But Pretti and Good were gunned down on crowded streets as fellow protesters were filming. The shocking circumstances of their deaths made them impossible to ignore. As did their whiteness.
And like the slain white activists before them, their deaths provoked a response that other deaths had not. Mass protests swept the nation. Democrats threatened to impeach Noem. The right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan called ICE “the Gestapo.” And the conservative columnist Bill Kristol posted two words that would have been unthinkable, even for many Democrats, just a few weeks before: Abolish ICE.
While white nationalists like Fuentes see race traitors as threats to their agendas, others see them as assets. Noel Ignatiev is a whiteness scholar who studied the way racial identity was constructed to create a hierarchy that privileged white people in our political, social and economic order. He also founded the journal Race Traitor, believing the term was aspirational for white Americans like himself. He encouraged white people to reject power structures that used racial oppression to erode democracy and divide working-class people from one another in ways that hurt not just Black and other racial minorities, but white people themselves.
For activists and organizers and everyday people struggling against this administration’s policies, the race traitor label evokes an inspiring and hopeful lineage: white people who are willing to give up the protection whiteness offers to stand for justice with those who are fewer in number and have far less power.
After the election of 2024, many Black Americans and members of other marginalized groups felt deeply betrayed by a white majority (and a near Latino majority) that sent Trump back to the White House. As Trump has done what they had warned he would do — eviscerate civil rights protections, target L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, round up immigrants, erode democratic institutions — Black activists have largely moved their organizing underground, leaving it to white people to get in the streets this time.
One of those activists is Alicia Garza, who co-founded the Black Lives Matter Global Network in 2013 following the acquittal of the man who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, she watched the movement ascend when for the first time a majority of white Americans supported it. Since then she has seen solidarity and racial justice efforts crushed by the “anti-woke” frenzy that has swept the nation and helped usher in the second Trump administration.
But the response in Minneapolis seems to have shifted something, inciting masses of people to action around the country. After months of silence and capitulation across industries and institutions, Garza said, many white Americans are determining that for all the backlash against diversity efforts and civil rights, they don’t like that their neighbors are being targeted simply for how they look, that they are rejecting the unchecked power they are witnessing even if it is supposed to be to their benefit. They are, she said, realizing that their safety and liberation is tied to the safety and liberation of society’s most marginalized.
Of course, Garza is struck by what it took to push many to decide they must fight back. “I get why people might be mad that it took white people being executed for folks to turn up, I get that, I really do,” Garza told me. “We don’t make the rules of racism, OK? So as long as this country is organized in this way, then there has to be a clear strategy around how to interrupt it, and part of that strategy has to be white people defecting.”
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18) San Francisco Teachers End Strike After 4 Days
Public schools are expected to reopen on Wednesday for 50,000 students in the city. Teachers demanded higher wages and health care benefits.
By Soumya Karlamangla, Reporting from San Francisco, Feb. 13, 2026
San Francisco teachers went on strike for the first time since 1979 in pursuit of higher wages and health care benefits. Carlos Barria/Reuters
San Francisco teachers ended their strike early Friday, allowing all public schools in the city to reopen next week for 50,000 students.
While staff will return to campuses on Friday, classes are not scheduled to resume until Wednesday morning because closures had already been announced for Friday and the district had holidays scheduled on Monday and Tuesday.
The teachers’ union, United Educators of San Francisco, formed picket lines on Monday for its first walkout since 1979 after a lengthy dispute with the San Francisco Unified School District over raises and health care costs. The union represents about 6,000 teachers, librarians, social workers and nurses who work in more than 100 schools in the city.
Unlike some strikes, the teachers’ walkout had no set end date, making parents anxious and frustrated at the prospect of a long shutdown. Teachers said that they understood the hardships that families faced during the closures but felt that they needed to strike in pursuit of higher compensation in one of the world’s most expensive cities.
For four days, teachers donned red attire and rattled tambourines as they marched outside their schools across the city. They demanded that the district fully pay for medical premiums for the union’s members and their dependents, as well as provide a 9 percent raise over two years.
San Francisco Unified teachers earned an average salary of $103,472 in the last school year, and pay ranged from $69,525 to $131,654 based on experience and education, according to state data.
Six-figure schoolteacher salaries might be considered high in other parts of the nation. But the median salary for all workers in San Francisco last year was $186,600, and the state considered anything below $109,700 for a one-person household in the city as “low-income” for the purpose of qualifying for public benefits.
The teachers’ union and the school district announced just before sunrise on Friday that they had reached a tentative agreement. The union said in a statement that the deal included fully funded health care for employees and their families starting in 2027, with “meaningful relief” from health care costs this year.
The union said that it had also secured 5 percent raises over two years for teachers and 8.5 percent raises over two years for the other school workers it represents.
“Our campaign was never just about our contract; it was a battle for the future of public education,” the union said in a statement.
Maria Su, the district superintendent, did not provide details of the agreement on Friday but said that she was “grateful” that a deal had been reached. “This is a new beginning, and I want to celebrate our diverse community of educators, administrators, parents and students as we come together and heal,” she said in a statement.
The district is using Friday as a transition day for staff, and schools will be closed on Monday for Presidents’ Day and on Tuesday for Lunar New Year.
Union officials said that rising health care premiums had driven many employees to leave the school district, California’s sixth largest, resulting in vacancies that hurt student instruction. Dr. Su said that she was trying to balance paying teachers competitively with the district’s ongoing structural deficit.
While the district had completely paid for individual coverage for educators, those with family coverage had been paying about $1,200 a month on average. Union officials said they expected that to increase to $1,500 a month.
The district initially offered to pay about 75 percent of family health care costs for three years, using funds from a local tax. After three years, the district could either stop paying the additional coverage or secure funding to extend it. The union initially rejected that offer.
The union wanted the district to use some of its reserves to pay higher wages and benefits now, which district officials resisted because they said they needed a healthy rainy-day fund in case revenues were to decline.
“We believe today’s dollars are for today’s students,” Cassondra Curiel, the president of the union, said at a rally this week.
Cindy Castillo, an ethnic studies teacher at Mission High School, said she went on strike to improve conditions for teachers so that there would be less turnover and disruption for students.
“I know what stability looks like in our schools, what it looks like for them and what it looks like for us,” Ms. Castillo said.
San Francisco’s closure could be a harbinger in California, as teachers’ unions have made a concerted effort to pressure districts for more compensation in recent months. Besides the walkout in San Francisco, educators in Los Angeles, San Diego and two Sacramento-area school districts have authorized strikes as part of their ongoing contract negotiations.
San Francisco parents said they empathized with teachers struggling to make ends meet in one of the nation’s most expensive cities. But some said the strike brought back memories of closures during the Covid pandemic. San Francisco Unified had one of the nation’s longest shutdowns, and students did not have full in-person instruction for more than an entire school year.
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19) In Blow to Starmer, U.K. Ban on Pro-Palestinian Group Is Ruled Unlawful
The High Court said the ban on Palestine Action as a terrorist group was disproportionate and breached free speech rights. The government said it would appeal, and the ban remained in place for now.
By Lizzie Dearden and Stephen Castle, Reporting from London, Feb. 13, 2026
Supporters of Palestine Action protesting on Friday outside the Royal Court of Justice in London. Kin Cheung/Associated Press
The British government’s decision to ban a pro-Palestinian protest group as a terrorist organization was ruled unlawful on Friday by senior judges, who said the measure was disproportionate and breached fundamental free speech rights.
The decision, by the High Court in London, is a setback for the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which has faced significant criticism over the ban and its implications for free expression and the right to protest.
The court said that the ban would remain in place for now to allow legal arguments from both sides on whether it should still be enforced, given the government’s right to appeal. However, the Metropolitan Police, which is responsible for law enforcement across London, said it would no longer arrest people for expressing support for the group, though it would continue “gathering evidence” for possible enforcement “at a later date.”
The government said it would contest the ruling at the Court of Appeal.
The protest group, Palestine Action, does not promote violence against individuals. But its members have damaged facilities linked to an Israeli weapons manufacturer and last June broke into R.A.F. Brize Norton, Britain’s largest air force base, in Oxfordshire, and vandalized two aircraft.
The government’s ban put Palestine Action on the same legal footing as terrorist organizations including Al Qaeda; Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group; and Hezbollah.
The ban was the first time the British government had used such powers against a group for “serious damage to property,” rather than because of the use or threat of violence, prompting criticism from a broad range of human rights groups and international bodies.
Since the ban took effect in July, at least 2,000 people have been arrested for expressing support for the group, including by holding signs or wearing T-shirts saying “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”
In a statement, Huda Ammori, co-founder of Palestine Action, described the ruling on Friday as “a monumental victory for our fundamental freedoms here in Britain and in the struggle for freedom for the Palestinian people.”
Ms. Ammori called for the ban to be lifted without delay.
In a summary of its ruling, the High Court said that Palestine Action was an organization that promoted its political cause “through criminality and the encouragement of criminality.”
But the court ruled that “even discounting Palestine Action’s non-peaceful activities, the ban did result in a very significant interference with the right to freedom of speech and the right to freedom of assembly.”
That put the ban in conflict with the Human Rights Act of 1998, the judges said — legislation in Britain which protects fundamental rights.
The judges also said that banning Palestine Action was disproportionate because very few of the group’s activities amounted to acts of terrorism as defined by British law.
“The nature and scale of Palestine Action’s activities falling within the definition of terrorism had not yet reached the level, scale and persistence to warrant proscription,” the court summary said, referring to the government ban.
Shabana Mahmood, Britain’s home secretary, said in a statement that the court had acknowledged that Palestine Action had “carried out acts of terrorism.” The group’s actions were not consistent with democratic values and the rule of law, she said.
“For those reasons, I am disappointed by the court’s decision and disagree with the notion that banning this terrorist organization is disproportionate,” she said, adding: “I intend to fight this judgment in the Court of Appeal.”
In its statement, the Metropolitan Police said officers would continue gathering evidence if people expressed support for Palestine Action but “for enforcement at a later date, rather than making arrests at the time.”
The statement added: “This is the most proportionate approach we can take, acknowledging the decision reached by the court while recognizing that proceedings are not yet fully concluded.”
The decision to ban Palestine Action under terrorism legislation was made by Ms. Mahmood’s predecessor, Yvette Cooper. It made it illegal to be a member of the group, raise money for it, organize meetings or express support in any way, whether in person, online or by carrying signs or wearing items of clothing.
At a hearing in November, lawyers representing Ms. Ammori said that many Palestine Action protesters had been prosecuted for crimes committed during protests, such as property damage, before the ban and that activating “draconian” legal powers by declaring the group a terrorist organization was not proportionate or necessary.
An assessment drawn up by a security body led by Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence agency in March last year found that only three out of 385 actions then carried out by Palestine Action met the legal test of “committing acts of terrorism.” All of those involved property damage although the intelligence agencies provided the High Court with further evidence in hearings that were closed to the public and press.
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